13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Crimson Peak

I’ve been playing catch-up the last couple of weeks, trying to see films from the last year or so that I meant to catch in the theater but just didn’t. In my personal movie marathon, I watched two films that were both perfect matches between director and subject material. Now, I’m a firm believer in auteur theory, the idea that a director has the ability to put his or her unique stamp on a film. I realize that filmmaking, especially in mainstream Hollywood, is a tremendously collaborative process involving hundreds of people and that it’s probably a little unrealistic to give too much credit to just one person. Nevertheless, in the realm of architecture, we talk about Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision for Fallingwater, the house perched over a waterfall in Pennsylvania, not the two hundred skilled craftsmen who actually built the thing. The director is essentially the architect of a film and what we end up seeing is often the vision that he or she wants more than any other single collaborator.

Anyway, the two film architects who found the perfect match of subject matter are Michael Bay with 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Guillermo Del Toro with Crimson Peak. I know it’s unusual to her the words Michael Bay and “perfect” in the same sentence unless the sentence involves the phrase “perfect piece of garbage,” but bear with me. 

 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is the based-on-real events story of the band of security contractors assigned to a secret CIA installation near the American diplomatic compound that was attacked in Libya on September 11, 2012. The underdefended compound is attacked and set ablaze. The visiting American ambassador, Chris Stevens, gets separated from his security detail and dies of smoke inhalation. Everyone retreats to the CIA installation which then falls under attack too. The battle that lasts the night is chaotic and frightening. Rather than easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, the whole thing is a shifting mess of gunfire, shouting, ambiguous vehicles driving up to the battle and then driving away, and inexplicable lulls in the action. In its lack of elegant staging and comprehensible action, I assume it is probably one of the most authentic depictions of what an actual night battle in a country filled with insurgents might actually be like. This works for Michael Bay because they guy could never film a comprehensible fight scene to save his life. He got his start in music videos and never evolved past his love of image and disinterest in coherent story. In 13 Hours, it works perfectly because the story isn’t meant to make sense. The result is visceral and surprisingly effective. It’s not a partisan film, so don’t watch it expecting a political comment on how the U.S. government did or did not act. But do see it if you want to see the extreme circumstances under which brave, dutiful men and women acted that night. 

 The other perfect pairing was Guillermo Del Toro and the most gothicy gothic ghost story of all time, Crimson Peak. Del Toro is a master visualist who never lost his child-like fascination with ghosts, gore, and haunted houses. Crimson Peak is a supercharged blast of  gothic elements – neglected kids locked in an attic, secret pregnancy, specters and phantoms wandering through shadowy halls, a massive haunted house sinking into blood red earth, weighed down by secret sin. It’s kind of the Swiss Army knife of gothic stories – it’s got everything. Because Del Toro directed it, every visual aspect is refined and beautiful. You’re simultaneously grossed out and mesmerized by his combination of extreme violence and gorgeous production design and cinematography. Del Toro just loves movies, particularly scary ones, and his affection is on full display throughout the gory and definitely not family friendly Crimson Peak. If you like films as beautiful as they are horrifying, this film is the perfect combo. 

Finding Dory

Brothers and sisters in the congregation, I come to you today as a once fiery believer who lost his faith for a time but is now coming back into the fold. I speak, of course, of my faith in Pixar, the once infallible digital animation production company. During their eleven film streak of near perfection, it seemed as though Pixar saw all, knew all, and made all good movies. There was a season for Toy Story and a season for The Incredibles, a season for Ratatouille and a season for Wall-E.  And lo, I was a believer. But then, the company (and therefore its audiences) spent a season wandering in the valley of the shadow of the sequel. Cars 2, Monsters University, and the should-have-been-straight-to-DVD-garbage spinoff Planes shook me. Yea, verily.

But recently it would seem that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Pixar, and digital light once again fills its body. The Good Dinosaur was solidly good. Inside Out, while a little maudlin for much of the film, was touching and brilliantly envisioned. Now comes Finding Dory, what could have been another miserable, slavish money grab but instead is a funny, moving story executed with best-in-the business animation. There is reason to have hope and possibly faith in Pixar once more. 

Finding Dory returns to the characters and setting of Finding Nemo a year after the events of the first film. Nemo is still in school, Marlin is still a worrywart, and Dory is still endearingly, maddeningly forgetful. The film kicks into gear when Dory finally remembers something about her past. She suddenly remembers that she had parents – loving, protective parents who spent their lives trying to compensate for her near total inability to remember – anything. So the film becomes Dory’s quest, assisted by Marlin and Nemo, to return home and find her parents.

Their search leads them to the California coast and an aquarium called the Marine Life Institute, which turns out to be Dory’s original home. The team gets split up and a good chunk of the film is spent on Dory attempting a prison-break-like escape from the aquarium while Marlin and Nemo try to break in. 

Ellen Degeneres again voices Dory with her halting, idiosyncratic delivery that conveys a combination of innate goodness and sweet naiveté. Degeneres is hardly the person who’s voice you would think of as evocative and moving, but her performance as Dory is exactly that. It’s sweet without being saccharine and funny without being clownish or ironic. 

The other performance standout is Ed O’Neil as Hank, an octopus that helps Dory escape the acquairum. O’Neil’s voicework is crusty and grumpy but also vulnerable and longing. His voice combined with the ingenious visual depictions of the seven-legged octopus make Hank one of the best, most memorable animated characters to come along in years.

The best Pixar movies are ultimately about family relationships, their necessity and the tensions inherent in them. Finding Dory, like the Toy Story films, A Bug’s Life, and Monster’\s Incorporated, again demonstrates that family is as much something we make and choose as it is something we’re born into.

But specifically, Finding Dory makes a profound statement about parenting. When she’s a child, Dory’s parents lay out paths of shells that all lead back to their home to help her find her way back. When adult Dory returns, she finds a shell house with dozens of paths spread out in every direction, obviously left by her parents in hopes that she would find her way to them. That image and the idea behind it sum up most of what is important (to me at least) about being a parent. It’s lovely and powerful and was enough to make me at least a cautious Pixar believer again.

In Praise of Ferris Bueller and His Perfect Day Off

The 1980s produced a small handful of perfect films. I don’t mean perfectly 80s, not films so hilariously dated that they clearly couldn’t have been made at any other time. I’m not talking about 1984’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

By perfect, I mean the film still effectively does exactly what it’s supposed to do despite the number of years since its original release. A perfect horror movie still creeps you out. A drama still emotionally involves you. And perhaps most difficult of all, a perfect comedy still makes you laugh.

This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but some of the perfect films that come to mind from the 1980s are in no particular order: Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Die Hard, Steven Spielberg’s underappreciated ghost love story Always, and, of course, John Hughes’ 1986 masterpiece Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

 

This month marks the 30^th anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s theatrical release, and more than a generation after it made its debut, it still does everything it’s supposed to do. Ferris, of course, is played by a young Matthew Broderick at the height of his powers as the ultimate avatar of puckish youth. His character is that guy – the mythical golden boy for whom everything works out. He does what he wants, gets away with everything, and yet is so charming and amiable, you can’t resent him for his good luck. 

The movie takes place over the course of one perfect blue sky day in suburban Chicago when Ferris just can’t bring himself to go to school. It’s too nice outside and too close to the end of the school year. So he decides to skip and have an adventure in the city, despite already having missed so much class that technically, he should have to do summer school to make up for it. His bitter, vengeful principal, Mr. Rooney, becomes determined to catch him in his lies about being too sick to attend, and so the film becomes the dual narrative of Ferris’s adventures in Chicago with his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend, Sloan, and Rooney’s efforts to catch them. 

 Hughes knew that contrast is a huge component of humor. Matthew Broderick’s breezy innocence and charm creates a wonderful fizzy friction with the rat-like polyester presence of Jeffrey Jones’s Principal Rooney as well as the sad-sack hypochondria of his friend Cameron. Not to mention what it adds to the most enjoyable conflict of the whole film, Ferris’s battle with his ultra-responsible, schoolmarmish older sister, Jeannie played by Jennifer Grey. I would argue that Jeannie is actually the unsung hero of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She goes through the greatest transformation and is at the center of some of the funniest, most unexpected moments.

As I said, my definition for perfect is that every element of the movie still functions as intended. Thirty years later, Ferris’s fourth-wall breaking addresses to the audience still feel as off the cuff and conspiratorial as ever. The slow motion shot of the parking lot attendants sailing over a jump to the Star Wars theme song in Cameron’s stolen Ferrari is still epic and glorious. The sequence of Ferris and his friends at the Art Institute of the Chicago remains sweet and surprisingly affecting. Of course, the “Twist and Shout” parade sequence is a fantastic combination of image, sound, and editing that builds to to the point of practically being an ecstatic, religious experience. Still.  And Ferris’s race home through backyards and living rooms in an effort to not get caught is still an expertly shot and edited bit of filmmaking.

Yes, each individual component of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off still works, but the film is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a bright, light-on-its-feet hymn to youth and not letting the weight of the world stop you from adventure. It is, in short, perfect.