Arrival

Director Denis Villeneuve’s new science fiction film Arrival bears minor resemblance to other alien invasion movies – smart ones like District 9, dumb ones like Independence Day and its sequel, and even cheesy ones like great 80s TV miniseries V. Like all of those, Arrival begins with massive alien space craft appearing suddenly over seemingly random spots all across the earth. The shell-shaped ships loom there in the sky as earthlings collectively work themselves into cosmic-sized fit of losing their junk.

However, giant ships ominously hanging in the air above terrified human kind is pretty much where the comparisons between Arrival and other aliens-come-to-earth movies end. Rather than a big, dumb collection of explosions and slobbery monsters piloting flying saucers, Arrival is an extraordinarily quiet, contemplative meditation on the haziness of language and the excruciating balance in life between joy and pain. This was not directed by Michael Bay and does not star Will Smith, friends.

Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a brilliant linguist, called upon to help the military communicate with the aliens in the ship that hangs over a wide, startlingly picturesque valley in Montana. Along with Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist played by Jeremy Renner, Banks regularly ascends into the 1500 foot tall craft to have one-on-one chat sessions with a pair of giant aliens they nickname Abbot and Costello who resemble a cross between a whale, an elephant, a squid, and my freaking nightmares. The aliens stay behind a glass partition and are largely swathed in the gray, smoky clouds of their atmosphere. They fade in and out of sight, becoming unclear as Banks and Donnelly try to find a common linguistic ground to somehow make their intentions more clear.

Clouds and mist and fog are recurring visual themes throughout the movie and serve as a symbol for how difficult it is to be really clear about what we mean when we speak. The script of the film highlights the cloudiness of human language and points out how confused aliens might be if we tried to explain the difference between say, a tool and a weapon. As Banks and Donnelly try to build common ground inside the ship, the echo chamber of the 24 hour news cycle in the outside world stokes fear and panic as people wonder week after week, what are the aliens in these giant ships going to do? Why are they here? The two scientists work desperately to communicate as world militaries begin to gather and get antsy.

While there are very superficial similarities to movies like Independence Day and of course, any film featuring towering black structures from space also references 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film Arrival most resembles is 1986’s The Sacrifice, the last film of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Like Arrival, The Sacrifice features a protagonist who knows what’s coming in the future, knows that there’s pain ahead, but chooses that path anyway.  In its stillness, how it portrays people reacting to what they think is an apocalyptic situation, and in how the main character makes a choice to sacrifice something in exchange for the greater good, I can’t help but think that director Villeneuve had to have watched Tarkovsky’s final masterpiece in prepping for Arrival.

Adams and Renner are both fine actors, and I appreciate that the script doesn’t succumb to the cliché of having the gruff military leaders berate the egghead scientists only to be proven wrong in the end. The scientists’ military contact is played by Forrest Whittaker who always brings a dignity and seriousness to his roles. In fact, Arrival doesn’t fall victim to many clichés at all. With a complicated but ultimately rewarding script, understated and believable performances, and cinematography that is as lovely and carefully thought-out as anything I’ve seen on a movie screen in a long while, it takes what could be very familiar territory and makes something thought-provoking and worthwhile.

Doctor Strange

Dr. Strange was created in 1963 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, the same creative team that came up with Spiderman. It was a move away from traditional tights-and-flights superheroes and was an embrace of America’s burgeoning interest in magic, expanded consciousness, and psychedelia in the 1960s. Instead of a plucky teenager dressed as a spider fighting crime or a playboy millionaire in a suit of iron righting wrongs, Dr. Stephen Strange was a sorcerer, a magician who traversed mysterious dimensions and dealt with cosmic forces. He brought mysticism to Marvel comics’ universe of irradiated, angsty teens, mutants, and scientist industrialists. 

While he’s been woven throughout the Marvel universe for over fifty years, Dr. Strange is a more obscure character compared to Captain America or X-Men, and perhaps that has something to do with the success of the new film version of his story. Much like Guardians of the Galaxy from a couple of years ago, with lower stakes, the filmmakers are more free to be as faithful or as loose with the original stories as they want. In the case of Dr. Strange, it’s pretty faithful. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Stephen Strange, a brilliant but utterly self-centered surgeon who is in a catastrophic car accident that gives his hands a career-ending tremors. He exhausts all of his resources looking for a cure, and eventually finds himself in Nepal, hoping for a more mystical solution.

Strange studies with a sorcerer called The Ancient One, played by Tilda Swinton. With her, he learns the mystic arts, makes some allies, makes some enemies, and finds enlightenment. Initially, Strange is a reluctant hero who actually only wants to learn enough magic to stop his hand tremors and get his old life back, but eventually, as it often does in movies like this, fate takes him in another direction and he ends up becoming the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth. He battles Kaecilius, a rival former student of the Ancient One. He, like any good comic book movie villain, wants to bring an end to the world by handing it over to a massive, cosmic, evil entity from another dimension called Dormamu.   

If this sounds like even more comic book ridiculousness than usual, maybe it is. But Dr. Strange the movie manages to pull it all off with a good deal of gravity and a straight face while staying lighthearted in the right moments. 

The lynchpins are Cumberbatch’s deft performance; a smart, funny script; and confident, economical direction from Scott Derrickson. Cumberbatch’s success comes from the fact that he’s simply a really good actor. He seems to take the role seriously without taking himself seriously. He effectively conveys Strange as a real character who evolves over the course of the film, but he also doesn’t try to make a movie about sorcerers and other dimensions into Shakespeare. The script is light on its feet and gives nice moments of humanity mixed in with the universe-spanning, special effects packed action sequences. Director Scott Derrickson has apparently been sharpening his skills on the five or six horror films he’s helmed over the last fifteen years or so, and he does a good job of keeping the action moving in its kaleidoscopic fashion without overwhelming the audience. He’s been more or less a B-list guy up to this point, but I anticipate that the success of Dr. Strange will change that. 

 

As a comic nerd from way back, I will say the thing I enjoyed the most about Dr. Strange is how the movie created beautiful, striking, 21^st century representations of Steve Ditko’s original art from the 1960s. You wouldn’t think it translate well to the big screen but clearly Marvel Studios has a ninja strikeforce team of digital technicians and artists who found a way to be faithful to the trippy, sometimes silly looking original art but still make it fit into Marvel’s sleek, glossy, modern universe.

Changes for Take Five on Film

When my friend and former colleague Ryan Wilson started writing and recording Take Five on Film about seven years ago, things were different. The show was actually five minutes long and it played on Saturdays. Ryan would go see a matinee showing of a movie on Friday, write a rough script on Saturday, revise it on Sunday, and record it on Monday. He did all his own recording and production work and by Tuesday morning, he had a well-crafted five minute review of a new movie out on the airwaves. Each show began with the now-very familiar sounds of George Benson’s version of Dave Brubeck’s famous jazz number, "Take Five."

Ryan valiantly carried Take Five on Film on his back for half a decade, and his show was one of the things I was really excited about when I came to Delta College three and a half years ago. I set an alarm on my phone and tried to make sure I was in the car, listening to the radio when it played. I appreciated hearing his insights into new releases as well as more obscure films on disc or streaming. I’m a movie guy, and so really any conversation about movies – even a one-sided one in the car on the way to work – is a good one. 

When Ryan announced that he was leaving Delta, I was sad to lose a mentor and a pal. And I felt a little like Hamlet’s uncle in that I didn’t wait very long for the body to get cold, so to speak, before I moved in and asked if I could continue his show. But he thought that sounded like a fine idea, so in September of 2014, I recorded my first show. The show moved to Friday mornings, so the reviews might help people looking for something to watch over the weekend. And broadcasting majors took over the producing duties of the show, for which I was very grateful.

In the two years since I’ve been doing the show, two other major things have changed. First of all, NPR changed their hourly clock – the amount of time they spend on newsbreaks, station breaks, and the like, and our window of time for the show went from five minutes to four. It wasn’t a big deal. It just meant two or three hundred fewer words for me to write each week.

The other thing that changed is that Q90.1 began making itself available online by offering its locally produced programming as podcasts. You can now hear cool shows like Lifelines, A Moment in Time, and Studio Q anywhere you have wifi. This is a great development for people who want to hear our programming when they’re not near a radio, but it complicates things a little because it would require us to pay for the rights to use our theme music, which, given our operating budget of zero dollars, isn’t going to happen. So our show is no longer five minutes long and we can’t use the theme music called "Take Five."

Consequently, it’s time for a change. After today, your friendly neighborhood radio show about film and film-related events in the Great Lakes Bay region will be known as Moviehouse. I like the old timeyness of the name and how it suggests a big, old fashioned movie theater, but I also like how it acknowledges that these days with laptops and smartphones, the whole world is one big house of movies. 

So there will be a new name and new music and we’ll be available as a podcast, but everything else, for better or for worse, stays the same. To subscribe to the podcast, go to deltabroadcasting.org, find the link for Q90.1 and click on “podcasts.” 

The Magnificent Seven

 After seeing the new Magnificent Seven starring Denzel Washington a few weeks ago, I decided I needed to finally see the original 1960 version starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen. Famously, both films are adapted from the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurasawa, and the often repeated story revolves around a small, peaceful village being terrorized by bandits. The villagers go out and hire one sufficiently dangerous and brave man who then gathers a team of six other deadly fighters, and together, they defend the town against impossible odds. The basic set up has been used by everything from the classic 80s tv show The A-Team to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.

Admittedly, I probably should have seen the 1960 version first before seeing the newest iteration just so I could know how the one evolved from the other. But I didn’t and so now I’m left to make sense of my impressions. 

 First, there are, of course, minor differences, choices made in terms of content and casting that differ between the two. The terrorized Mexican village of farmers in 1960 becomes a terrorized Californian village of miners. The super-WASPy Seven of the title in the earlier film becomes a racially diverse group of steely eyed killers in the later one. The lone female character with a few scarce lines and a role as girlfriend and damsel in distress becomes a strong female co-lead who is a lynchpin of both getting the action started and in the final moment of crisis in the new film.

The other major difference I noted between the two is the good old fashioned 21^st century maximalism of the newer film. In the 1960 version, seven men fought off a gang of 40 over the course of two hours. The odds are steep, but manageable. In the new version, 40 men in a pittance. Director Antoine Fuqua sneezes and 40 men die. 40 men probably died just getting their lunch on break from filming. No, in the new version, the seven have to fight off an army of over 200 men. It’s surprisingly bloodless given how much blood is supposedly spilled in this version, but the body count is very high. At one point the sweaty, villainous, crazy-evil just for the sake of crazy evilness bad guy Bartholomew Bouge brings out a Gatling gun, that nuclear option of the old west days and turns the village into Swiss cheese. I’m sure if the scriptwriter could have justified Bouge calling in an airstrike with some F-16s, he would have done that too. So the newer version is largely about more – more bullets, more bodies, more heroic shots of the stars framed against picturesque western backdrops.

The original was lower to the ground and less bombastic, but it is also a little quaint seeming now. Having Eli Wallach play Calvera, the ruthless Mexican bandit seems silly now and not just a little wrong. The gunfights are much slower paced and far less visceral. As some of the seven fall in battle, their dramatic deaths with admiring villager boys looking on in tears have the faint whiff of cheese to them.

What the two films have in common is that they are both hymns of praise to actorly charisma and laconic, western masculinity. Each cast is filled with so much stereotypical manliness, watching either movie practically makes you sprout chest hair. I mean, the original cast featured Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn. That combination alone probably created a testosterone cloud that’s still floating somewhere over northern Mexico. 

Both films charge forward fueled not necessarily by a great script but by the charisma of the actors who make you want to watch them even if it’s not clear why they’re doing what they do.