Gone Girl

 Director David Fincher traffics in darkness. Whether it’s in his films Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room, or The Social Network, his movies are always interested in what goes on in the shadows both visually and thematically. Visually speaking, Fincher always achieves a hazy, dim look to his films. Whatever light we do see in a scene is usually antiseptic and white or lurid and yellow, like a streetlamp you don’t want to be caught under. As beautifully composed as Fincher’s shots are, they are never warm or welcoming to look at. He manages to make the brightest sunlit scene appear shadowy, as though daylight is fighting a losing battle with the imminent darkness.  

Thematically, Fincher only makes films about the dark corners of the human heart, the depths people sink to in moments of extremity. Extreme greed, violence, lust, obsession, and insanity are engines of the stories he tells. It’s no accident that Fincher’s last film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was marketed as “the feel-bad movie of the year.” He’s not interested in films about redemption.

This brings us to Fincher’s latest film, Gone Girl, the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel. It’s the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a once happy couple that has become spectacularly dysfunctional. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick, played by Ben Affleck, comes home to discover overturned furniture, broken glass, and his wife missing. Police scrutiny quickly turns to him as all signs point to the likelihood that the frustrated, dissatisfied husband killed his wife and tried to make it look like a kidnapping. Affleck plays Dunne with a kind of crumpled arrogance and simmering unhappiness and we’re perfectly willing to buy the possibility that he might just be guilty. 

Amy, as played by British actor Rosamund Pike, is beautiful, brilliant, and unpredictable. We learn (or think we learn) about her courtship and early marriage to Nick through a series of narrated diary entries and flashbacks that contrast with the media firestorm that builds up around Nick as the search for his wife intensifies.

Now, it’s a thriller and there are plenty of plot twists that I’m not going to spoil here. If you’ve read the book, you already know how it ends, and If you haven’t, I’m not going to be the one to ruin it for you.

I will say it is a profoundly dark film. It is the story of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. As I tried to decide what I thought it about it all, I finally figured out a way to interpret the film. Rather than thinking of it simply as a contemporary thriller, I understood it better when I began to think of it as an example of film noir.

 When we think of film noir, we envision black and white movies from the 40s and 50s that featured private eyes in trench coats and fedoras, guns, tough talk, and dangerous beautiful dames. Noirs always had morally ambiguous protagonists. We never know if the hero is actually heroic or just out for himself. They always had a femme fatale – a dangerous, calculating, sexually powerful woman who was willing to do whatever it took to get what she wanted. They were often shocking in their depictions of both overt sexuality and brutal violence. And true noirs never had a happy ending.

Gone Girl fits the bill perfectly. Besides the presence of color, the only non-traditional noir element of the film is the setting – classic noirs are set in the city, their dark, rain slick streets representing the twisty, confusing corners of the human heart. Gone Girl is set almost entirely in the suburbs – and for the 21^st century, that’s probably an appropriate change. I would argue as much alienation, dislocation, and dysfuntion happens in the burbs these days as anywhere else, - maybe more -  and the pleasant clapboard McMansions of the Dunne’s neighborhood can easily be read as symbolic of the pleasant exterior that hides the darkness inside.

Gone Girl is a fantastic example of how these old Hollywood tropes can be updated in ways that are compelling and vital rather than nostalgic and cute. As smart as it is in that way, it’s not a film I’d want to see again. It’s too graphic and rough for a softie like me. I like my films leavened with a little redemption, even if it’s very little.  I can respect Gone Girl for the well-crafted work that it is but not want to stare into that dark room again.

The Boxtrolls

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I have kids that range in age from 14 to 5, so I see more than my fair share of movies directed at the middle school, grade school, preschool set, especially cartoons. You know how Netflix gives you recommendations based on the movies that get watched the most on your account? Well, even though it’s my account, thanks to my kids, almost all the recommendations I receive involve talking animals, pink dream houses, or Powerpuff Girls. Having watched as many kids’ movies as I have, the one thing I know for sure is that, like just about everything else people produce in this world, there’s a wide spectrum of quality available out there.

There are the soaring, life-changing, gut busting pieces of art that send you out of the theater excited and dizzy with beauty and entertainment. (Most of Pixar’s body of work falls under this category along with The Iron Giant, The Triplets of Belleville, The Thief and the Cobbler, and some others.)

Then there are the cynical, rushed, only designed to make a few bucks in the summer, ready-made for McDonald’s happy meal movies that send you out the theater feeling a little ripped off that you will never get that 88 minutes or 9 dollars back. I don’t want to offend anybody by name-checking their kid’s favorite movie, but I know that you know what I’m talking about.

But there’s also the middle ground – animated films that have high quality aspects to them but never really congeal into something great that moves kids and adults alike. It’s this middle category into which this week’s movie, The Boxtrolls, falls.

The movie is a fairy tale about a young boy named Eggs who is raised by the friendly, lumpish trolls who live under the city of Cheesebridge. The Cheesebridgians think the trolls are evil, baby-stealing monsters while in reality they’re harmless trash pickers who just happened to be green and have glowing yellow eyes. Of course, the conflict comes when the above-grounders hire a grotesque exterminator to get rid of the supposed menace below, and young Eggs uses his dual citizenship to try and save the only family he’s ever known.

 The film was produced with stop-motion animation and was made by the same company that made the equally elaborate Coraline and Paranorman. Every set, every stitch of costuming, and every gesture or blink of each character is painstakingly created by hand. Animators spend months and months moving small puppets bit by bit and photographing it as they go. It’s a remarkably labor-intensive way to produce a movie and the filmmaker’s care and attention to design really shows. In fact, it’s in the production design that the movie is strongest – it’s beautiful to look at in an idiosyncratic kind of way. The city of Cheesebridge towers pendulously above the landscape, the troll’s underground cavern is both clever and lovely, and the giant, mechanical troll snatching machine that’s part of the film’s climax is a steampunk fan’s dream.

But the characters, while well-designed and certainly well voiced by actors like Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Nick Frost, and Tracy Morgan, don’t really rise above their generic place-holder status. I was never swept up into the narrative or felt for the characters the way I did in, say Ratatouie or The Incredibles. The filmmakers seem to have paid more attention to the monumental task of creating and animating an entire physical world from scratch than they did to creating characters that go beyond generic expectations.

This is not to say it’s a bad film. It’s not at all. It’s just not a great one. Kids will like it, and as a parent, you probably won’t mind sitting through it too. One warning though, for very young kids, there are a few moments that skirt the edge of a bit too scary. Archibald Snatcher, the head boxtroll exterminator, is extremely allergic to cheese, but because eating cheese is what the upper-class people do – he eats it anyway. His grotesque Jekyll and Hyde reactions to the tiniest taste are hilarious and a marvel of animation but they are also pretty intense for little kids, so beware.

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Hell's Half Mile Music and Film Festival

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As an industry, Hollywood filmmaking is contracting. Fewer movies are being made each year, and the movies that are being produced have higher and higher budgets. All the thoughtful, mid-budget domestic dramas that might have been made twenty years ago are not getting the green light, so that Captain Avengers: Rise of the Winter Mockingjay Part 2 can have an additional 20 million dollars added to its catering budget. 

With 150 to 200 million dollars on the line, movie producers want as much of a slam-dunk guarantee as they can get that they will earn their money back. And so, these few tent-pole movies are crafted, polished, correlated, and focus-grouped within an inch of their lives. They are intended to give audiences maximum easy enjoyment and a minimum of intellectual, emotional challenge. Now, I’m all for escapism. It’s a big part of why I love movies, but if that’s all we have to choose from, we are losing out on a big part of what film can do for us.

This weekend marks the ninth annual Hell’s Half Mile Film and Music Festival in Bay City. Almost a decade ago, a small group of film buffs, programmers, and event planners got together and decided the Great Lakes Bay Region needed a yearly dose of music and movies that aren’t easily corralled, that are a little untamed, maybe even edgy. 

They named the festival after a stretch of road in Bay City that, back in its rough and wild logging town days, was a long strip of bars, brothels, and gambling houses. That part of town is a lot more family friendly now, of course, but the movies the film festival brings still have that spirit of wildness and unpredictability.

One film that reflects the refreshing, unexpected spirit of the festival is Irish filmmaker Terry McMahon’s movie Patrick’s Day. The film has all the gloss of a Hollywood production – well-lit, thoughtful cinematography, convincing professional performances from the actors, a rousing pop soundtrack. Even the story, on its surface, seems like a pretty standard boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl narrative. Despite all that, Patrick’s Day is not your average multiplex movie. It tells the story of Patrick, a 26 year old Dubliner who suffers from schizophrenia. He lives in a long-term care facility, holds down a job, and gets regular visits from his protective but damaged mother.  Born on Saint Patrick’s Day, the young man and his mom have a regular birthday outing tradition – they go to the parade, eat at the same restaurant, wear silly wigs and glasses. But this time, Patrick gets separated from his mother, and while waiting for her to show up, he meets Karen, an attractive flight attendant who is out for the evening clearly looking for trouble. The two of them hook up and all sorts of complications ensue. 

It has elements of meet-cute romance, a coming of age story, an overcoming-physical affliction narrative, and dark psychological drama – but it doesn’t comfortably fit into any one of these categories.

Because it is an independent film, it doesn’t have to fall into one safe genre designed to appeal to one particular demographic. The film unfolds with a different rhythm than a typical Hollywood film. It ends differently than you expect. The conclusion is redemptive in a way, but it’s certainly not the comfortable, unambiguous happy ending we’ve come to associate with movies as much as popcorn and previews.

The film is about the collision of love and damage, how those two things often come together whether it’s in family relationships or romance, and how they often try to cancel one another out. Patrick’s Day isn’t comfortable, escapist entertainment, but that’s a good thing. It forces us out of our summer-movie Teenage Mutant Ninja X-Men -induced state of escapism and asks us to try something new. It’s something a little different, a little untamed. And who couldn’t use a little unpredictability in their weekend?

Patricks’ Day screens today at 4 p.m. and again on Sunday at 4:30. The Hell’s Half Mile Film and Music Festival runs through this weekend and tickets are still available. 
 

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Jodorowsky's Dune

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Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune is Moby Dick, The Lord of the Rings, and Citizen Kane all wrapped up into one book. It’s one of the great masterpieces of the genre, managing mythology, ecology, and adventure over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages. As vast and
sweeping as the novel is, you would think the story would be unfilmmable. But in reality, there was the bizzarely terrible 1984 David Lynch adaptation that starred a young Kyle MacLachlan and there was also the forgettable, made-for-tv syfy channel miniseries version in 2000 that starred, well, no one. 

But the most famous adaptation of the book is the one that was never made. That is the story told by Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune now available on DVD. In 1973 Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky decided he wanted to film his version of the Moby Dick of sci fi. He had directed two other films already – El Topo and The Holy Mountain. Both were visionary, psychedelic, and stone-cold weird. But they had amassed enough of a following to warrant giving him the reins of a bigger, more ambitious production.

In the documentary, Jodorowsky himself, now in his 80s, tells the entire story of his attempts to make this massive film. At the outset, he explains that his goal for the movie was nothing less than making something that would literally change the consciousness of all its viewers and ultimately lead to world peace.

Jodorowsky is charming and erudite, (shifting back and forth between Spanish and heavily-accented English.) He grins enthusiastically and seems as excited by his plans for the film now as he must have been when he first started making them over forty years ago. As urbane and charismatic as he is, (throughout all the nicely-lit one-on-one interviews with him,) you’re never quite sure whether
or not he’s a little insane.

If he is crazy, we learn it’s a fox-like craziness as he tells stories about convincing Orson Welles to play the evil Baron Harkonnen by offering to hire the actor’s favorite chef from Paris to cater his every meal during production or getting surrealist painter Salvador Dali to play the emperor of the universe by agreeing to pay him a hundred thousand dollars per minute of screen time.

For the most part, Jodorowsky’s zeal is contagious and inspiring. You can see how his team
of producers, designers, and technicians easily felt as evangelical about the project as he did.

The only time the old director’s cheerful demeanor changes in the documentary is when he
describes how, after years of excruciatingly detailed planning and effort the project finally fell apart over commercial filmmaking’s most powerful factor – money. Jodorowsky snarls and curses that his world-changing masterpiece never got made because studios were afraid it wouldn’t make a profit.

The documentary features never before seen production art, designs, and interviews with many of the original participants, including Jodorowsky’s son who trained in martial arts for two years as a teenager in preparation to play the lead role.

The film also does a good job of showing how influential Jodorowsky’s treatment of Dune became in Hollywood. The five-inch thick book that had the entire film storyboarded shot for shot and included all the production designs for sets, costumes, vehicles, and characters circulated around all the major studios for years. Pavich draws direct visual correlations between Jodorowsky’s ideas and
designs and many of the sci fi blockbusters that came out in the decade following the project’s collapse. The documentary explicitly asks how different contemporary filmmaking would be today if Jodorowsky’s trippy, metaphysical, lofty Dune had been the first big commercial sci fi movie made in the 1970s instead of George Lucas’s pulpy blockbuster Star Wars.

The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is a fascinating first hand look at one of the great “What If” stories of modern filmmaking. If you are a fan of behind the scenes stories, sci fi, or madmen chasing after white whales of their own making, you should definitely give it a look. 

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Robin Williams

When actor and comedian Robin Williams passed away in August, I had the same two reactions I imagine most of his other fans had. First, I was taken completely by surprise. Williams was only 63 and he was making just as many new movies and tv shows as he ever did. He was an active athlete and obviously a vibrant, energetic performer. My second reaction was that I was genuinely sad.

In our celebrity-saturated culture, famous people pass away pretty regularly, and I’m not the type to get misty about it. But Robin Williams was different. Mork and Mindy was appointment viewing for my family when I was a kid in the late seventies. As a teenager, I spent many late nights huddled around a stereo in my older brother’s room with the volume turned low as we listened to Williams’ manic, profane, and utterly hilarious comedy albums on cassette. Loving his comedy work as much as I did, I was thrilled when I discovered his roles as a dramatic actor when I was an adult. In short, Williams and his work have been a part of my life for literally as long as I can remember.

In terms of his movie roles, of course everyone knows and loves the big ones – Good Morning Viet Nam, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting – he has been praised extensively for his work in these movies and rightfully so.

But to remember and pay tribute to him, I wanted to recommend a film featuring Robin Williams that maybe you haven’t already seen, something lesser known that still demonstrated his singular talent.

And so I suggest Kenneth Brannagh’s 1991 neo-noir Dead Again. When the film was made, Brannagh was hot off the success of his Oscar-nominated version of Henry V. He was still in his twenties when he adapted, directed, and starred in the film and was being compared to Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles. He could have made any film he wanted to for his next project, and he chose to direct a cinematic love letter to Los Angeles, film noir, Hitchcock, and classical Hollywood. It was an unexpected choice and critics were divided over the movie’s success. Love it or hate it, Dead Again definitely cooled some of the genius talk that had surrounded his career to that point.

The film has Brannagh’s world weary private eye Mike Church investigating the identity of a mystery woman who suffers from violent dreams. The woman, played by Brannagh’s then-wife Emma Thompson may or may not be a reincarnated murder victim from fifty years before. The story shifts back and forth from present day to the 1940s when the murder in question took place, and the flashbacks are shot in rich, nuanced black and white while modern sequences are in color. The film’s plot centers around who the mystery woman really is (or was) and Mike Church’s relationship to her. It’s a Hitchcockian conceit that pays tribute to Vertigo, and other thrillers in which the sanity of one of the main characters is central to the conflict of the story.

 
One brilliant choice Brannagh did make was casting Robin Williams in a small role as Cozy Carlisle, a disgraced psychiatrist who was fired for sleeping with patients and now works in the produce section of a seedy Los Angeles grocery store. Mike Church initially finds Carlisle for a client but eventually goes to back to consult with him over the case of the mystery woman. Williams only has two scenes and spends less than five minutes total onscreen, but those few minutes are spellbinding. Cozy Carlisle is bitter, profane, and occasionally volcanically angry at his self-inflicted fate. His face, his voice, his posture – everything about him conveys his resentment and anger. His twitchy  unpredictability rises off him like heat. People often forget that Williams was a formally trained Julliard graduate, but his brief, powerful cameo in Dead Again reemphasizes that not only was the man titanically funny, but he was a sharp, impactful dramatic actor as well.

The rest of Dead Again is a fun, sometimes uneven grab bag of old Hollywood homage and Shakespearian actors speaking with Los Angeles accents.  The movie is worth a look on its own merits, particularly the lovely black and white cinematography during the 1940s flashback sequences. But if nothing else, see it for Robin Williams’performance, short as it may be. William’s part in the movie, like his role in life, was memorable, unexpected, and unfortunately all too brief.