The Role Movies Play: American Sniper, Selma, and Controversy

A couple of movies and movie-related events have been at the heart of controversy over the last few weeks. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper opened to huge box office, earning 90 million dollars on its first weekend and more than 200 million dollars in less than two weeks. That’s Clint Eastwood’s biggest opening ever and the biggest money making January weekend in history.

As everyone knows by now, the movie is based on the exploits of Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. The movie has led thoughtful, sensitive, balanced intellectuals like Sarah Palin and Michael Moore to debate over social media who is and is not worthy to shine Kyle’s boots. More seriously and more importantly, American Sniper is contributing to conversations on the Internet and over the dinner table about the nature of war, the United States’ role in the Middle East, Islamaphobia, the suffering and treatment of 21^st century veterans, and the concept of truth and factuality in our culture of so-called reality tv and movies that are “inspired by” true events.

The week before American Sniper came out, the Oscar nominations were announced, and Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama, Selma, was shut out of several major categories. It was nominated for Best Picture, for example, but was snubbed for Best Director which is unusual because the two categories are usually seen as companions. Also, a lot of attention has been paid to the fact that there’s not a single person of color nominated in any Oscar acting category, despite several stand-out performances this year. Of course, this brings up conversations about racism, white privilege, entitlement, and again the question of what we expect from stories meant to depict actual people and events.

My intention isn’t to express my opinion on any of these issues – we don’t have that kind of time – but I want to point out one function that movies serve in our culture. Often we think of movies as harmless entertainments that have more to do with marketing campaigns and celebrity than with our lives. And in some ways, that’s true. But to only look at it that way ignores how the movies we watch often reflect the preoccupations of our national consciousness and how they serve as places that bring together disparate views and opinions about foreign policy, race, gender roles, the economy, family relationships, violence, and love. Movies rarely lead national discussions, but they are often interesting, productive participants in them. They give us chances to have conversations we might not otherwise have.

Film can act as a mirror for our cold-sweat fears, our irrational (and sometimes rational) anxieties, our most optimistic ambitions, and our just-under-the-skin resentments. Movies often show us what’s on our collective mind, what we worry about, what we hope for. They give us opportunities to talk about the injustices we see, the things that infuriate us, and the ways in which we want to connect with others.

Like you probably do, I have friends and family members from every political and philosophical point of view imaginable. Almost all of them like to watch movies. It’s one thing we can agree on. So as you go see movies, especially in this upcoming election season, rather than think of them as just this or that piece of propaganda, think of them as opportunities to have smart, thoughtful, respectful conversations with other people, to talk about the ideas and issues raised. Let it lead to conversation rather than controversy. You may not change anyone’s mind or have your mind changed, but at least you have a chance to talk with other instead of at each other. It’s part of what movies are for.


This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1. www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Review: The Skeleton Twins

When I know I’m going to see a movie myself, I stay away from reviews as much as I can. Partly it’s because I don’t want my opinion to be shaded by what someone else says or writes, and partly it’s because I don’t want any surprises given away. If a movie has worked hard enough to do something original or unusual, I want to experience it firsthand.

But some films you can’t escape hearing about before seeing them, and for better or for worse, the things you hear affect what you think when you finally do see it.

The Skeleton Twins is a small, independent film that came out last year. It won Best Screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival and had a limited release in theaters. It’s now on DVD for those of us who don’t live close enough to a theater that would show a small Sundance winner. The movie received a lot of critical praise and ended up on several “best of” lists for 2014. I was excited to finally see if it lived up to all the hype.

It’s impossible for me to tell whether I would have liked it more if I hadn’t heard all the praise. All I know is that when I finally did see it, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Independent films, especially Sundance movies, have a reputation for being sort of the same – a depressed loner from a marginalized group wanders around life wondering why he or she doesn’t fit in with the rest of the vain, vacuous world. There are b-list actors, found sets, divorce, suicide, bad parents, lots of cursing, and usually at least one big cathartic shouting match. Sometimes this formula produces joyful or at least skillful results as in Little Miss Sunshine or Smoke Signals. But sometimes you just get airless, joyless slogs through Life-Suckville.

The Skeleton Twins hits somewhere in between those two poles. It’s the story of fraternal twins, Milo and Maggie, who are both lost and struggling with soul-deep depression as they deal with the repercussions of a traumatic childhood. Milo, a failed actor who has just broken up with his boyfriend, starts the movie off cutting his wrists open in a bathtub. His sister Maggie, married to a good man she can’t manage to be faithful to, comes to help her brother even though the two haven’t spoken in ten years. Their father committed suicide by jumping off a bridge when the twins were 14 and their mother emotionally abandoned them from that point forward. As Milo and Maggie try to get some equilibrium, they do damage to each other and those around them. There are plenty of shots of the two of them blankly staring off into the distance, obviously contemplating the hopelessness of their lives. 

 

It’s a pretty standard, bleak “what do I do with my screwed up life” kind of movie. The element that keeps it from being bleak AND boring is the cast. Saturday Night Live veterans Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader play the twins and manage an affecting emotional realism. Their easy chemistry with one another makes them believable siblings whether they are quietly trying to reignite their sputtering friendship after ten years apart or goofing around like adolescents when they both get high on nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office where Maggie works. They’re believable as real people, they just aren’t given much that’s interesting to do. The resolution to their conflict comes too predictably and simply lets them and the viewer of the hook.

 

One stand out performance is given by Luke Wilson who, despite his roles in bigger Hollywood movies, has remained a staple in small films like this. He plays Maggie’s loving, slightly dim husband who just loves her and wants the best for his wife, even if he can’t figure her out. Wilson plays affectionate, befuddled, enthusiastic, and hopeful all at once in a mostly thankless role. 

The Skeleton Twins isn’t bad – it just isn’t as good as I hoped it would be. If you like family dramas with the occasional shot of gallows humor, it might be for you. But otherwise, I wouldn’t believe the hype.

This review originally appeared on Q90.1. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Review: Life Itself

Long before there were movie review aggregator websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic, before there were thousands of bloggers publishing their thoughts on movies each week, before they let everyday schlubs like me spout off about film on the radio, there was Siskel and Ebert and their tv show At the Movies. The tall, balding Gene Siskel and the short, heavier Roger Ebert came to our television every week to review three newly released movies. They popularized the “Thumbs up/thumbs down” method of assessing a film and for decades were the face of popular movie criticism. Siskel passed away in 1999 from complications related to brain cancer, but Ebert continued on for another fourteen years. Ebert himself dealt with cancer of the thyroid and salivary gland, eventually having his entire jaw removed which robbed him of his ability to speak. Despite that, he continued to write movie reviews and even found time to write and publish a funny, candid memoir called Life Itself in 2011.

Filmmaker Steve James uses the memoir as the basis for his documentary about Ebert, also called Life Itself. The film switches back and forth between telling Ebert’s life story and detailing his profound health struggles at the end of his life. James interviews Ebert in a hospital bed in Chicago, with the movie critic using a program on his laptop to speak the words he types. Interspersed with those candid moments are interviews with his wife, Chaz, old journalist friends, and film directors like Martin Scorcese and Werner Herzog, each of them describing the ways Ebert affected their lives. The movie is full of archival photos and footage of Ebert as a young firebrand journalist in college, as an egotistical media figure appearing on talk shows in the 80s, as a doting husband and adoptive grandparent later in life.

While the documentary is definitely affectionate toward Ebert, it also doesn’t shy away from some of man’s warts including his alcoholism, his bad taste in women as a younger man, and his clashes with his partner and rival, Gene Siskel. The funniest moments of the film come from the behind-the-scenes footage of their show At the Movies as they bicker and curse at each other while trying to shoot promos. Siskel insults Ebert’s weight and Ebert lords the fact that he won the Pulitzer Prize over Siskel. As someone who grew up watching their show every chance I got, I was floored and kind of tickled to find out what they were saying to each other during commercial breaks.  

It is fascinating and a little heartbreaking to see Ebert as a younger man full of fire and opinions and himself and then see him as an older man, completely silent and barely able to negotiate a few stairs. Steve James was still actively collaborating on Life Itself with Ebert and his wife when complications finally led to the movie critic’s death. The film ends with moments from the tribute to Ebert held at the Chicago Theater following his death. It was touching to see that large, beautiful theater filled to capacity, the entire crowd silently giving the thumbs up to the memory of Roger Ebert.

The documentary gives a kind but honest overview of one man’s life work. Ebert wrote about the movies for close to half a century and did more to popularize movie criticism than almost any other person out there. He was an important guy for people like me, and the film detailing his life, work, and loves is well worth watching.

Review: Into the Woods

So what’s the difference between the recent film version of the musical Annie and the adaptation of the musical Into the Woods? Both are based on longtime Broadway favorites. Both feature Oscar-winning talent. Both were released during the holiday season in hopes of snagging family movie-going dollars. So how are they different? Well, for one thing, my teenagers liked Annie and I loved Into the Woods. You may think this is just a matter for personal preference, but it’s not. Annie was specifically designed to appeal to teens and tweens. The filmmakers took the original source material, a Broadway musical set during the Great Depression that was largely about the need for hope and optimism in trying times, and turned it into a superficial, autotuned, tarted-up pop confection. It’s still fun but ultimately lightweight and forgettable. In the same way my daughters love boy band songs and cheap jewelry from Claire’s, they love Annie.

 

On the other hand, despite its fairy tale appearance and the Disney-sanitizing that happened to certain elements of the original story, Into the Woods is a film for grown-ups. Adapted from the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, the movie takes Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood and weaves their stories into one cohesive narrative in which they all enter the woods looking and longing for something. They come out on the other side (most of them) different people with new perspectives on wishes and desires, on love, marriage and fidelity, and parenthood. In other words, it’s a story about growing up and losing some of the naiveté that films like Annie hold onto for dear life. It is about what happens after Happily Ever After.

The film stays mostly faithful to its source material except for the aforementioned clean-up job Disney did. It tries to downplay the more lecherous undertones of Johnny Depp’s role as the Red Riding Hood-stalking wolf, and it eliminates the less savory song the two princes sing about how badly they’d like to cheat on their wives. But otherwise, director Rob Marshall wisely sticks to the already excellent story, setting, and characters. Marshall also directed the film version of Chicago and, as in that film, he has a strong sense of how to embrace the theatricality of a stage show while still using all the tools available to a filmmaker. His musical numbers have a staged feeling to them – and I mean that in the best possible sense. They feel inventively crafted and choreographed in order to heighten the effect of the song and the story. But his camera is fluid, and he comfortably moves back and forth between the stageyness of theater and the more organic presentation of 21^st century American film. 

 There’s a wealth of talent on display throughout the movie. It’s no great shock that Meryl Streep delivers a funny, menacing performance and manages to sing the film’s most moving song through giant fake teeth, two pounds of makeup, and a fright wig. What is surprising is that Emily Blunt and Chris Pine can handle themselves admirably in the movie musical world. Blunt has a lovely voice and brings a real-world warmth and vulnerability to her role as the baker’s wife. Chris Pine, the new Captain Kirk and the most recent Jack Ryan, hams it up spectacularly as Cinderella’s prince and combines honesty and great comic delivery with the line, “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.” 

 

In the end, the film is terribly bittersweet. Certainly, there is hope, optimism, and love, but there is also death, betrayal, and heartbreak. This is a film for grown-ups because it is about becoming a grown-up, specifically a parent - learning to reconcile the compromises, gray areas, and disappointments of life with the happy-ever-after we hoped for as kids. The film is neither bleak nor naive. Like life, it is alternately hilarious, sad, lovely, and heartbreaking. Your teenagers will probably like it for the handsome princes and catchy songs, but you will like it because of what you know about life that they don't yet.

Revising Annie

I’m an English teacher, so it probably goes without saying that I’m a big fan of revision. I love watching a student’s first draft unfold and develop, becoming something new and unexpected in its second, third, and fourth versions. Even very good writers who write strong first drafts often end up creating something more interesting when they’re willing to write another version.

Because of the pleasure I take in well-done revision, I rarely dismiss a movie remake or reboot out of hand. Even though my faith isn’t always rewarded, hope springs eternal, and I’m usually excited to see what a new creative team might bring to a familiar story or set of characters. For instance, I know a lot of Trekkie purists weren’t impressed with J.J. Abrams take on Star Trek, but I was thrilled by it. (At least the first one.) I enjoyed seeing how Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and especially Karl Urban captured the essence of the original characters while still making them their own and modernizing them. (Karl Urban’s version of the ever-crabby McCoy was pitch perfect.)

Sometimes a writer/director will come along and make something greater than the original. Put the 1958 version of The Fly up against David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake, for example, and I know which one will haunt you for weeks to come. If someone had shot down Cronenberg’s film just because it’s a remake, the world would have missed out on one of the most unsettling horror films of the 80s and one of that director’s most mainstream works. The same could be said for Scorcese’s Cape Fear, John Carpenter’s The Thing, or DePalma’s Scarface. So we can’t dismiss remakes and reboots out of hand.

 I tried to approach the remake of the musical Annie with the heart of an English teacher eager for a creative revision rather than with the jaundiced eye of a movie critic who might just see it as a yet another cheap ploy to squeeze more box office out of an already-established property.

The question of revision is always “What is new? What is better?” So what’s new or improved about the new version of Annie? There’s plenty that’s new, not a lot that’s improved. The film leaves its FDR-Great-Depression era setting in favor of the 21^st century. The cast, instead of being entirely white (with the exception of the manservant Punjab) is now more racially diverse. Daddy Warbucks, the wartime profiteer, becomes Will Stacks, the cell phone magnate and mayoral candidate. Annie is now in a foster home rather than an orphanage. The original songs from the Broadway musical have been amped up with base-heavy backbeats and several new songs have been written in order to fit the new narrative. Miss Hannigan, once terrifyingly and hilariously played by Carol Burnett, is now Cameron Diaz as a former back-up singer for C + C Music Factory?? In other words, the new version has been engineered to appeal to pop-loving tweens and their irony and nostalgia-loving parents.

Much of the movie relies on the power of Annie’s charisma. Everyone likes her, everyone does essentially everything she ever asks. As an audience, we’re supposed to be so enchanted with her that we buy that. The new Annie, Quvenzhané Wallis, is not as charming as the movie thinks she is. She’s charismatic to be sure, but not at the level the movie asks her to be. Her persuasiveness is only there because the script says it has to be. Fortunately, her appeal accrues eventually, so by the end of the film, it’s not a total mystery why anyone would be charmed by her. But an entire movie balanced on the specialness of one kid shouldn't make us wait until its final third to actually see that specialness, you know?

Besides Wallis' stiffness, the main problem with the movie is that it wants to have it both ways. It wants to be winking and self-aware but also have you buy into the world in which people spontaneously break into song and dance. At one point, while Bobby Canavale is belting out the “Easy Street’ musical number, Cameron Diaz looks around and says, “Are you singing to me? Why is this happening?” But then in the very next beat, she leaps to her feet and begins crooning back.

 

The movie wants to have big Broadway musical numbers, but without putting too much effort into the choreography. In some kind of effort to seem casual and hip, the dance numbers just look improvised and lazy. In the climactic song and dance number "I Don't Need Anything But You" following (spoiler alert) Annie's rescue from her non-parents, Wallis and Jamie Foxx tromp around a riverside park around as though the director is just off screen yelling directions through a megaphone. "Okay, Jamie! Now jump up on that bench! Now twirl! No, wait. Get down off the bench! Oh, hold on. The bench was good! Get back up on the bench!" The movie clearly spent millions on its sets and production, but not much of it was spent on making it a really good musical.

This contradiction is at the heart of what’s wrong with the new Annie. It wants things both ways – to be classical and hip, to be new and old, to be ironic and sincere at the same time. It never fully commits one way or the other and just ends up not having any real impact either way.

As far as revision goes, sometimes I’ll have a student turn in a new draft that isn’t actually new. He will change the font, print it on colored paper, and hand it in bound in a fancy plastic folder, hoping, I assume, that the outer appearance will distract me from the lack of new ideas or quality execution inside. Unfortunately, that’s what’s going on with this version of Annie. Poppy, autotuned songs and a slick 21^st century setting aren’t enough to cover uninspired writing and direction. Don’t spend your holiday money on it. If you’re a fan of musicals or the original Annie or Cameron Diaz or whatever, your best bet is to wait and watch it at home.