“Here’s to the fools who dream”

Wasn’t it fitting that La La Land‘s journey at the Oscars should conclude with a dream-like moment in which the whole cast and crew imagine winning the best picture, only to have reality overtake their fairy tale ending?

There and Back Again: Triangulating the relevance of the third Hobbit film

The third hobbit film may be the most politically relevant film of this decade.

Don’t worry. I’m not crazy. The past few weeks haven’t gotten the best of me.
While the film was clearly released well before the past election cycle, what else can be deduced from a film that focuses on a gold-crazed tyrant, obsessed with loyalty while accusing even his kin of betrayal and dishonesty, resolved only to belligerence and war, standing atop a barricade hurling epithets at a beleaguered crowd of blue collar workers and their families after originally promising them salvation? His fellow cadre of white dwarves look on glumly as their once great king descends into childish opprobrium. They too, at their dear leader’s request, eschew diplomacy for the building of walls and the pursuit of isolationism.

Aside from the film’s haruspicious quality, contemporaneous metaphors abound.
There are the immolated townsfolk of Lake Town to consider, unwittingly consumed in the fires of a conflict they neither invited nor deserved. While these uncanny refugees seek the safety of a new city, faraway factions engage in injurious gerrymandering and fractious politics. One accuses the other of sedition, both incessantly squabble over wealth. They never do get around to resolving their differences, and all the while oblivious to the more pressing needs of the starving masses and especially the greater danger of an army of ideological zealots “bred for war” amassing at their borders, even when incontrovertible proofs are brought before each.

Or what about that flamboyant, Aryan elf tyrant, obsessed with cultural trinkets of his past, or that mindless army of trolls (and orcs), lorded over by a repulsive, white abomination, hell-bent only upon the destruction of all that is good, green and virtuous?

What else to make of a film that includes a dizzying array of villains, traitors, factions and alliances all seeking to claim Erebor–that once proud city on a hill, overtaken by a gold-hoarding dragon and polluted with its “sickness”–all envious of the land’s power and covetous of its strategic position and resources?

The inevitability of their conflict is promised by the film’s very title, and the film itself never bothers to suggest any alternative to war.

The battle itself is an incessant bevy of artificial trickery and computer manipulated artifice; a dazzling array of actions that defy all known facts of science, physics especially. The result: a logic defying marathon serving as a potent pharmacological opium of media effects to overwhelm and incapacitate the mind. Resistance to the manufactured image is futile. A potent analogue to this effect recurs in the figure of blind troll soldier, prompted to action by the ocular manipulations of its puppeteer, who controls its every move by pulling the chains tethered to its eyes. Move right, swing left. Obey. When the troll is ultimately co-opted by one of the dwarves to assault its own orc troops, culminating in an absurd rockem-sockem fight against another troll, the fantastical parody turns ironic: thank goodness this troll was never able to really open its eyes to the world around it or else that dwarf would’ve had some explaining to do.

The film is at its most bitingly satirical when its conclusion reminds us that this whole narrative of morbid excess was the confused reminiscences of a geriatric hobbit, pathetically grasping the treasured memento of his vainglorious youth and dragging the audience unwittingly along in his nostalgia. Is the murky picture becoming clear? As if to help us out, the film literally ends by drawing us a map.

Perhaps adding true sting to its allegorical charges is the lame fact that a two page non-sequitur in a children’s fairy story published 80 years ago, that battle of the five armies which lends the film its name, serves as the template for a shambolic, bloated, meandering conclusion to a series of absurd events stretched well beyond its prime and tenure. It bears repeating and remembering that Trump’s bid to run for president began as a lame joke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, for to alternatively quote a fine old dame, “much that was once forgotten is now lost, for none now care who remember”.

The film is perhaps the most effective of the trilogy if only because there are no longer any real human actors left to bore us, no dialogue with which to engage, no ideas of consequence to debate; like the real world, there remains only a brute war of unbearable attrition against everyone.

Mulholland Drive Podcast

Jason takes Judy for a stroll down the hallucinogenic and circuitous Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s masterpiece. Judy parses her second first impressions, Jason chimes in with some yay’s or nay’s, and the discussion explores the characters, the twisting story, and the countless symbols in the movie.

Jupiter Ascending Podcast

For what it’s worth, we love Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, and Eddie Redmayne. We’ve even been known to enjoy the output from the Wachowskis’. Who would’ve thought we’d be so frustrated with their collaboration in Jupiter Ascending. Join Judy and Jason as they laugh about the plot, the characters, the action scenes, the bizarre use (and misuse) of bees, and the strange way in which a film called Jupiter Ascending features so many moments of Jupiter falling.

Harry Potter Years 1-3 Podcast

https://soundcloud.com/user-466726816/harry-potter-years-1-3-once-overed

In our second podcast, we reflect on the first three Harry Potter films: Harry Potter & the Whimsical Misappropriation of Turbans, Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secretions and Inferences, and Harry Potter & the Expectant Patronus. We reflect on the style of the first two compared to the third, the development of the actors, the refinements in the series, and spend way too much time laughing at our attempt to figure out the logic of the second film.

Check back for two more podcasts giving our once-over to the rest of the Harry Potter series.

Inaugural podcast: Alien (1979)

After a rather lengthy hiatus, I’m back talking about film, and this time I’ve brought some help.

I think this is the format my future discussions about film will probably take for the foreseeable future, if only for convenience and simplicity. (I’ve been hard-pressed to find the time to write about film, especially at the expense of my dissertation.)

As our first podcast, our format undoubtedly has room for improvement. I’m eager to learn what others think of the style and content and what changes you’d like to hear.

We’ve already recorded a three-part podcast series giving a once-over to the Harry Potter franchise, and plans for many more conversations to come. Be sure to leave comments and if you like what you’re hearing, offer suggestions about other films you’d like for us to cover, and subscribe to our channel on SoundCloud.

Invasion Narratives and Spielberg’s Warring Worlds

“But who shall dwell in these Worlds if they be inhabited? Are we or they Lords of the World? And how are all things made for man?”

–Johannes Kepler, quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), used as the epigraph on H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds

Though anything more than a decade old ought to be fair game, be warned that this analysis contains multiple references to the film’s plot, including its ending. Be ye thus warned, spoilers may lie ahead.

If it is discussed at all, Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is usually written off as a curiosity deeply influenced by the attacks and ensuing panic of 9/11. I’m not looking to dispute its meager legacy, only to suggest that the film is more than a romp through America’s shattered psyche. The film is also about invasions in general, no matter how sudden or prolonged. In this regard, Spielberg honours the source material, which Wells wrote in 1898 as a thinly veiled allegory about colonial decline, ostensibly mapped onto the waning British empire, while also offering some interesting questions about whether to be dominant necessarily requires domination.

The film starts with the main character, Ray, returning home and finding his ex-wife waiting with their two children and her new husband. The children are introduced like an invasive presence in his life. He has no milk in the fridge, he can’t be bothered to make dinner. His son steals his car while he’s sleeping. Ray’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to be a father to his children, of whom he is at best desultory ignorant (forgetting his daughter’s peanut allergy, or his total lack of any appropriate bedtime songs) or at worst aggressively intolerant (using a game of catch to indirectly assault his son). And yet, Ray’s dawning appreciation for his situation is juxtaposed by the utter failure of the aliens to come to terms with theirs. As Ray’s relationship grows healthier with his daughter, the aliens become sicker. These two themes overlap as Ray bonds with his daughter through his repeated attempts to shield her from the horrors of the alien invasion. In this way, the progress of Ray’s character subtly inverts that of the aliens’: his character becomes defined through his efforts to negate the alien presence–to keep, in a sense, his daughter’s mind from being invaded and overtaken.

The connection between the aliens as vectors of memetic transmission and infection is further suggested in the montage of rumours that proliferate amongst the refugees about the alien invasion, as it is in the film’s chilling use of the Red Weed. The shot of a dead cow on a dead farm, both strangled by a tangle of thick red veins, harkens to Wells’ reference of Tasmanian wildlife blighted by British colonisation. The imagery also invokes the modern ecological devastation wrought by factory farms, and the almost total conversion of American farmlands to chemically treated, nutrient-depleting crops to feed increasingly confined livestock. (As it happens, wheat itself is something of an alien occupier on American soil, having been imported from Europe in the 17th century). Moreover, the botanical elements allude to the invasive status of the aliens themselves, for what is a weed if not an aggressive occupier?

Our attention is first drawn to this theme when we are informed that Ray’s son, Robbie, has a paper due on the French Occupation of Algeria. The reference harkens back to Wells’ own novel, which early on reminds the reader of the total extinction of Tasmanian natives within 50 years of European contact in the 19th century. Wells’ sentiment expressed in the novel might well do with repeating: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

While occupations are doomed to failure, as a character later rants in the film, colonisation typically is not, since its success comes through the extinction of the previous inhabitants. In rare cases, the colonized survive as a subjugated people. War of the Worlds concretizes this idea of a hostile colonization with the aliens keeping some humans as cattle to feed their tripods.

The film offers more invasions than the ecological, and often aggressively coopts the familiar for the horrific. Technologies of human progress and ingenuity are chillingly annexed and redeployed as images of apocalyptic destruction. A downed airliner in an upscale suburban burrow unmistakably recalls the terrible results achieved just four years prior with two feats of engineering: the air plane and the skyscraper. Some of it is modestly pitched apocalyptic imagery–a devastated church, a flaming locomotive–but there are other instances where Spielberg ignites explicit references–the walls of the missing and the dust clouds raised by the alien weapons. In the latter reference, Ray returns to his family covered in the ash of the first assault, recalling the hellish cloud of dust, debris and human ash from the immolated World Trade Center as well as the scenes of holocaust from another Spielberg film, Schindler’s List.

Other appropriations include Ray’s entrance onto the Martian-redecorated Earth like a nightmarish entrance into a red-weeded Oz. The most sustained cinematic allusion concerns a protracted (albeit veiled) tribute to 1954’s Godzilla. The first sighting of the titular creature is mirrored in the Tripod’s arrival into the ferry town, with the ensuing ferry destruction echoing Godzilla’s first prey, an ill-fated fishing trawler.

The associations go beyond the cinematic however. The fishing trawler was itself based on a similar instance of American hegemony, in 1954, when the crew of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru ventured too near a Japanese atoll that had been irradiated by American H-bomb testing and was showered with radioactive ash. The fallout was, in every sense, an unfortunate consequence of a Nuclear Age inaugurated by the destruction of Hiroshima, an event of foreign aggression that is itself used in the film to describe the devastating power of the alien attack. The nuclear devastation of Hiroshima is thus annexed from its national and historical connotations and converted, along with the 9/11 imagery, into a measure of inter-species genocide.

Another historical allusion probably more palpable to American audiences is the film’s climax in a war-torn Boston, the site of another insurrection against foreign occupiers and the inception of a similar war (if only between nations rather than worlds) nearly 250 years earlier.

And, in a stunning bout of prescience that probably amounts to luck more than precognition, the aliens first invade Ukraine, a country that would find a considerable portion of its southern territory annexed by Russia within the decade.

The film also juxtaposes the clash of empires with subtle oppositions in colonial ideology, ironically espoused by three members of the same family. Seeing his daughter bothered by a splinter, Ray’s immediate reaction is to forcibly remove the occupying debris immediately. His daughter, however, advises patience: “When it’s ready, my body will just push it out”. This Zen-like tolerance is contrasted with the chauvinist militarism espoused by her brother; “If we had any balls we’d go back and fight one of those things”, Robbie remarks as they flee their immolated homestead, the result of an alien presumably having a similar idea and following through.

These opposing views to occupation, between expulsion and cohabitation, reach some measure of resolution in the film’s penultimate shot. The reunion between Ray and his son, though undiminished in its power to draw groans from audiences to this day for showing the family improbably restored, nonetheless suggests a peaceful cohabitation–if only between humans. The conclusion at least resolves the family turmoil which opened the film, which has Ray’s children decidedly more affectionate towards Tim, the new husband, whom we are told is even subsidizing their education—colonizing Ray’s family to the extreme. This information is delivered as an especially venomous retort from Ray’s son during a heated game of catch. That scene foreshadows the jarring imagery in the conclusion, in that an otherwise familiar space—the family backyard in the opening, Boston in the finale–is coopted into a battleground, albeit of vastly dissimilar proportions. In an abstract way, the conflict between Ray and his children manifests as a literal war between worlds, which perhaps explains their otherwise improbably corresponding resolutions.

The ending also has the added benefit of reversing the callous paternal abandonment of Richard Dreyfus’ character, Roy, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind–an ending Spielberg later claimed he could not condone after he himself became a father. Indeed, War of the Worlds offers an almost parodic inversion of that film’s benevolent (if benign) alien contact, featuring instead ancestral forebears (in this case, entombed, ruthless aliens) that simply refuse to leave even after the kids have long since grown up and wished they would.

These associations notwithstanding, there are still several niggling issues with the film, which builds on some promising scenes and themes but which fail to achieve much of anything substantial. And everyone who is not Tom Cruise acts with the distracting hyperbolic awareness that they’ve been given the good fortune of appearing in a Spielberg film. The distraction is increased by the shots designed to imply without revealing the titular war. The equally implausible though nonetheless real scene of cataclysmic destruction four years earlier probably tempered enthusiasm to see it all depicted again as entertainment this time. But scenes in which the war is fought just on the other side of a conveniently located hill, or when Ray and his daughter hide in the basement of a dilapidated farm, one can never quite shake the feeling that there’s a more interesting (if generically traditional) story to be told on the other side.

Or maybe it’s because what we get instead takes a marginal encounter with a Martian from the book and turns it into an all-too familiar recreation of a scene about raptors in a kitchen from another Spielberg movie. However, the much-derided detour in the basement nonetheless manages to provide the film’s most iconic image when the alien probe comes face to face (so to speak), with its own reflection–Ray, his daughter and Ogilvie barely concealed behind the mirror. What is Spielberg getting at here? Are we meant to draw parallels between the two species–to note the same exaggerated faith in technology and biological superiority? (If so, Morgan Freeman’s narration which bookends the film, largely drawn from the book itself, no longer seems so out of place.) Or perhaps, by turning the alien’s reflection into a protective shield for the characters, does the film mean to suggest an unbreachable divide between the two species? The moment is at least an ironic reversal of the magical energy shield that the aliens use against the human weaponry. But is that all? Could the probe’s failure to see through the mirror be meant to suggest that whatever our failings as a species, we are not like that thing facing us in the mirror? Perhaps we do not war in the same spirit after all, as Wells would have us believe. That’s the hope at least, but not the only source that the film provides. Though it could’ve ended the film on an ambiguous or even nihilistic note, Spielberg leaves no catharsis unfulfilled by the film’s end.

Other curious holdovers from the book are the aliens’ vampiric nature and their radioactive weaponry. Yet the several scenes devoted to their sanguine proclivity seem antithetical to using death rays that reduce everything to atomic ash. Logically, it makes little sense to kill what you need to convert, but then the history of imperialism has always been precisely located in that illogical void. To wit, at the time of the film’s release the US was embroiled in a war with the stated aim of installing democracy. To miss the irony in that is to suggest little hope of catching it in the film.

Even rationalized as a crude borrowing from the book, the aliens’ defeat in this film defies credulity. One would assume that if they weren’t seeking to win the people’s hearts and minds, the aliens would at least account for their basic biology. Though the book was written at a time when germ theory was still incubating, and so an otherwise advanced technological society of the time could be excused for such an omission in their preparations, the film’s ending becomes all the more strange an appropriation since it’s one of the few ideas carried over directly from the book. The defeat also complicates the otherwise clever inversion of invasion narratives in having the aliens already buried in the ground, suggesting that they, and not the humans, are the Earth’s original inhabitants. Or were the pods simply launched aeons before? The film’s exclusive focus on Ray doesn’t offer much room to explore. Or is this yet another instance of Spielberg’s reflection on invasion, offering strained cinematic adaptation as a metonym for colonialization? In that case, the awkward passages heighten rather than foreclose appreciation for what amounts to a more cunning twenty-first century, Hollywood-style appropriation of a Victorian novel than its post 9/11 chronology might suggest.

Mad Max: Fury Road Review

Charlize Theron as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road

Spoiler free!

In my mini review I posted to Twitter the other day I claimed that Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the best action films I’ve ever seen, and, moreover, that director George Miller proves that monuments of cinematic splendor are still possible. This statement involves at least two main suppositions. The first is that few films of late have been spectacular, and second, perhaps the most in need of an explanation, is that this film is spectacular.

As to the first point, I have been worried lately whether I had passed the age of optimistic participation in summer escapist cinema. This summer’s other big blockbuster, Avengers: Age of Ultron, left me decidedly unimpressed, despite its CG-fueled visual spectacle (especially in the way the plot structure borrows liberally from the The Empire Strikes Back, from the downbeat tone, to the continual pursuit of our heroes by a sinister, fascistic overlord, to the none-too-carefully inserted romance–hell, both films even feature a besieged city in the clouds as their climax!). The astounding degree to which I enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road, however, confirms for me that though my standards may be demanding, they are not unreachable. Fury Road is that rare entertainment that excites its audience without pandering to it. Unlike a great many films these days, Fury Road seems directed by an individual vision that is staggering in its scope, rather than the consolidated whims of executive meddling and countless focus tests.

The first clue that the film doesn’t insult the intelligence of its viewer is with the title itself: Fury Road is double-entendre that even a cursory viewing of the film would reveal. The subtitle hints that the film belongs as much to Max as it does to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Perhaps even more so to the latter, since Theron receives a great deal more to do in this film than Hardy’s Max, who isn’t even granted a line until midway into the film, and much of the dramatic heft rests on her more-than-capable shoulders. It is she who often commands both our attention and sympathies in their scenes together. In the process, Theron reminds us of the immeasurable talent that made her such a superstar, and DP John Seale mines her face for all its expressive riches.

Though not an obvious sequel, this film nonetheless continues the themes of myth and legend that had animated the two previous films in the series, and Miller here broadens their scope to a veritable foundation myth of human society, but places the emphasis on the female and the feminine. In so doing, Miller transcends the nihilism of his previous films and dares to hope for a future better the past. The film’s final moments capture Miller’s vision of a true egalitarianism between sexes, creeds, races and class. And yet, because this is Miller telling (and in some ways yelling) the story, he reminds us that this utopia can only be achieved through violent struggle, and through a balance of the masculine and feminine, which are denoted so concisely and repeatedly by Miller through the use of sand and water. In so doing, Miller may have just created the first truly feminist action film.

Perhaps the film’s chief virtue comes from Miller’s singular ability to sustain our attention for chase scenes that extend well past the point of fatigue. That, or the unmistakable fact that it’s all being done for real, in the camera. Don’t let the spectacular CG sandstorm touted so frequently in the trailer mislead you, this film features the most impressive practical stunts of any Mad Max film. (It also even manages to outdo their sustained runtime.) But these films aren’t memorable simply because they have lots of car chases, but rather for way these cars are so uniquely used. In Miller’s films, action is not a mere substitute for dialogue and characterization, it is the skillful deployment of these. In much the same way that a choreographer communicates through dance, Miller speaks through action. Like the Road Warrior, and completely unlike the hyper-edited Furious series, this film features sublimely orchestrated automotive ballet, or, to offer a clunky neologism, automoballet. It’s perhaps ironic that Miller, now pushing 70, seems one of the only directors capable of directing action and editing it together quite so spectacularly, seamlessly, and most important of all, coherently.

But what gives the film its most lasting effect is that Miller goes beyond mere mayhem and uses every texture, object and element of the world to convey multiple layers of meaning. Cars serve as costumes. Costumes serves as identities. A steering wheel is a weapon is a talisman is a relic is a metonym for an entire culture, and all of this conveyed with the simplicity of a dramatic arm raise. More than mere clever prop design, and the desire for a cool but entirely superfluous shot, the raising of the wheel aloft like some mechanic’s Excalibur immediately and unmistakably constructs this world for us within a second of screen time, and the film lasts for thousands. Another instance of this masterful method of world-building again involves a wheel, when Furiosa rubs the steering shaft for axle grease and smears this across her forehead as a tribal marking, or a communicative address, or something else–the two-fingered gesture itself seems symbolic of something richer in meaning and all of which Miller leaves for the audience to deduce.

Miller’s responses in the wonderfully brief pre-screening Q&A I attended perfectly speak to the film’s succinct and evocative construction. After a pitiful attempt from the professional film critic and impromptu questioner to plug his online site and drum up enthusiasm for his credentials, he then tried to corral Miller into answering a few questions. When asked why it had taken thirty years for Max to return, the director only shrugged and said, respectfully and serenely, that he’d been looking for something to say with Max in that time. When asked what that might be, the director only shrugged again and suggested the message was on the screen. “I feel like a kid who’s just finished a drawing, who takes it to his mom and dad and asks them to look at it,” he replied. “Well,” he gestured to the massive AVX screen towering above him about to show his glorious return to the franchise that made him famous, “this is my drawing, I wonder what you think.” The concise response seems fitting for a director whose movie strips itself of language, in which words are irrelevant and, moreover, even what few can be heard are often swallowed up in the clash of metal and the cry of engines and living gods. Mad Max: Fury Road opens May 15, and truly deserves to be remembered for a great while after.

Photo Finish: Brief speculation on what The Order’s new photo editor mode might mean for gaming

Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886 joins the ranks of other PS4 titles like The Last of Us Remastered, Infamous: Second Son, DriveClub to receive a photo mode. The video above offers a succinct, if cursory, overview of the photo editor in this game, which is roughly the same as the other games which feature a photo editor mode. Unlike those games, however, this photo editor mode allows the player to keep the filter options activate during gameplay. Whether players will actually want to play this (albeit brief) game through a knockoff instagram filter is uncertain, but the feature nonetheless points to an interesting future of game design in which the very cinematography of the game will be open to the player’s discretion to an unprecedented degree. Whether most players will approach this feature with the same way say Michelangelo Antonioni approached colour in film (which led Hitchcock to famously remark that Antonioni taught him how to see in colour) remains to be seen.

TV Review: ‘House of Cards,’ Season 3

In lieu of offering my own insights on season three of Netflix’s House of Cards, I shall, perhaps indolently, point the reader to reflections offered by TV Columnist Brian Lowry over at Variety. He sums up the majority of my …