February 19: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

February 16: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

February 15: her (2013 -- Spike Jonze)

★★★★★

February 8: American Hustle (2013 -- David O. Russell)

★★★

At base, this is not a subtle film; the entire movie revolves around Rosalyn’s fingernail polish.  She likes this particular cosmetic because it’s beautiful and smells good, but there’s a hint of dirt and decay you can smell in it, and this corruption is what lends it the allure.  Rosalyn explains this at expositional length during a night on the town in case the viewers might miss the obvious blend in all the characters. Not only is the message itself clear in the film, but the symbolic expression of it is, too.

But if not subtle, American Hustle is very fun and full of likable characters working their way though life with their vices and virtues.  Christian Bale is a terrific middling con artist, very capable at the small-scale cons he aims for.  Balding and beer-bellied in the role, Bale still manages to show us how Irving can have sex appeal for someone as vivacious as Sydney while we see his good, moral side constantly conflict with his con side.  Adams does a similarly convincing job with Sydney.  Beautiful, caught between wanting to trust but lying because she doesn't, Sydney oscillates between Irving and Richie, loving yet manipulating both.  And Cooper renders his FBI agent as likewise flawed, wanting do the ethical thing but thoroughly enjoying taking liberties with the law.  All these characters are the mix of good and the bad which we hear about in Rosalyn’s description of her fingernail polish.  Even Rosalyn herself means well and loves Irving as she frustrates and manipulates him.

The technical elements here also add a lot to American Hustle.  In addition to Bale’s outstanding acting, both Adams and Cooper create complex characters that engage.  The camera work and editing make the film fun, too.  Russell’s camera tracks and stands still during meetings and dialogs, and it swoops and rocks to participate in parties and dancing.  It can subjectively take in a new character “from the feet up,” as Irving says, and it can linger, faintly, on a woman’s breasts before moving to her face.  The camera participates in storytelling at times and, at other times, it just adds humor.  It’s fun to see this story though this lens.  And the soundtrack, too, adds to the pleasure.  The sound is sometimes an ironic commentary on the action, and at other times, it reinforces what’s happening.  Rosalyn’s swinging around the house to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” is a fun moment of thematically-important comic relief and a sly homage to Tom Cruise’s pantomime in Risky Business, while one of the peaks of the film is when the Mexican Arab FBI agent goes to meet the mafia as Rosalyn and Sydney maneuver around each other.  This concentrated intersection of all the film’s characters and storylines reaches its highest intensity to the sound of an Arabic version of "White Rabbit."

American Hustle is a fun Friday night movie.  It doesn't push any boundaries, but with its acting, occasional bravura film-making, fun music and good intentions, this is a good night at the movies.

February 7: Gravity (2013 -- Alfonso Cuarón)

★★★

There’s no doubt that the visuals in this film are something we've never seen in cinema.  Not only is the opening audacious with its 13-minute take, but as we drift with the characters outside the space craft, we feel like we are floating, too.  We participate in the unfamiliar world of weightlessness and lack the sense of direction that gravity induces.  And sudden juxtapositions of speeds startle us as our calm can be shattered by a piece of debris moving at the speed of a rifle bullet or a moving object can strike another far harder than it looked like it was moving.  Gravity also does a tremendous job of keeping us unable to anticipate the effects of movement we would normally expect; characters readily bounce off of surfaces that they would be able to grab onto here on earth.  This film is one of the most visually compelling I've seen.

And with such tremendous technical achievement, it’s incredible that the story and characters are so insipid.  The contrived plot has Ryan moving from one conveniently close spacecraft to another, and the big character reveal is that Ryan is mourning her lost daughter.  Given such a cliché about the female lead of the film, it’s hard not to think of the Hallmark Channel, and the heavy-handedness of a scene like the one with Ryan stripping down and going into a fetal position as she is reborn into her post-mourning state would do little to dissuade you of your error.  After Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men and now Gravity, we begin to see a distinctly maternal theme in Cuarón’s filmography.  Would that he could pair his visual work with a script by a screenwriter of greater depth.

This is a film to be seen in 3D Imax with whatever other projection enhancements are available because Gravity is a movie whose value lies only in its visuals.  But these visuals are truly not to be missed.

December 28: Twelve Years a Slave (2013 -- Steve McQueen)

★★★

It takes some hutzpah for a director with a fine art bent like Steve McQueen to undertake a movie about slavery, and Twelve Years a Slave has a lot of good ideas.  One of McQueen’s best decisions is to show how the institution affected everyone involved with it rather than simply focus on the plight of the slave.   Of course, we repeatedly see how horrible it was to live as a slave; it was a horrible institution.  Love and family are disrupted as we see not only in Solomon’s situation after his enslavement but also in the situation of Eliza, who is stripped of her children in a New Orleans slave sale after having been her previous master’s favorite. We see the horrible beatings that slaves receive when Solomon, and later Patsey, are whipped, and there is even torture when Solomon is left hanging from a tree with his toes barely touching the ground.  Epps’ drunken dragging in of his slaves to dance for a midnight “party” is another form of abuse.

The film's handling of Solomon’s hanging points to another aspect of slavery – its effect inside the slave community.  While Solomon is hanging, struggling to stay alive by dancing on tiptoe, other slaves continue their lives only catching furtive glances of him from the corners of their eyes, and kids play outdoors in plain sight of the torture.  Only one woman risks punishment by bringing Solomon some water.  The level of horrific violence that Solomon experiences is not only familiar to the slave community, but the community knows that resisting it will only bring added pain.  Solomon is told this very clearly on the boat to New Orleans, and he even repeats it in trying to console Eliza after the woman’s separation from her children.

But the breadth of McQueen’s portrayal of the institution of slavery extends beyond those enslaved
to include the enslavers, and what we see is not a monolith of racism.  Solomon’s first master, Ford, tries to buy Eliza’s children when he buys her in order to keep the family together, but he can’t afford them all.  At his estate, Ford shows some respect for Solomon’s opinion over that of a racist craftsman, Tibeats.  And we see that even masters have limits when Ford has to sell Solomon to Epps in order to protect his slave from the anger of Tibeats.  Ford warns Solomon that he can’t protect him alone.

But the most compelling portrayal of a slaveholder is Michael Fassbender’s Epps.  In fact, this character is the fullest, most complex character in the film.  Epps is a powerful man, rigidly beating underperforming slaves and subjecting his slaves to humiliating behavior like rousing them to dance for him when he is drunk late one night.  This dancing scene also shows other aspects of the complex Epps, though.  He drags his slaves in to dance because he lacks friends and companionship on his isolated plantation.  His wife not only hates him, but she berates him and insults his honor in front of the slaves here, showing his own weakness, insecurity and hesitancy in this episode.  And the cause of her behavior is that, although Epps feels that slaves are inferior, he searches for consolation by sexually assaulting Patsey, seeking a  complex solace that involves both power and attraction. The extremes of Epps’ moods and behaviors make him the most complicated and compelling element of Twelve Years a Slave.

Which is the central problem with this film.  The main character, Solomon, lacks complexity and emotional resonance with the audience.  Often, he’s merely a vehicle for showing us what slavery is all about, but even when he’s involved in the action, we don’t see the complexity of motivation in him that we see in Fassbender’s Epps or, for that matter, in Lupita Nyong'o's Patsey, who ranges from despair and submission to defiance.  Twelve Years a Slave initially gives us a formal Solomon who doesn't engage us, and he become even more distant from us when he’s a slave.  You have to think that McQueen has directed Chiwetel Ejiofor to make Solomon reticent; in scenes like Solomon’s pleading his innocence about writing a letter or his resistance to whipping Patsey, we see that Ejiofor can indeed connect with the audience.  But though most of Twelve Years a Slave, the reticence of the main character keeps us from being fully engaged in the film.  Epps is a fully-formed character, Patsy is complex and conflicted, but Solomon is just a means for the movie to make a statement.  The formal disconnect between the cardboard main character and these two dynamically realized ones prevents Twelve Years a Slave from being aesthetically satisfying.

There is a lot in this movie to recommend it.  There are moments of beauty when McQueen is willing to let his camera linger and take in what’s around him.  Images like the swamp sunset with silhouettes of cypresses and moss show the beauty that coexists with the horrible institution of slavery.  Solomon’s letter (and hope) burns slowly, turns into red glow, diminishes and then goes out.  Such measured moments pace the film and offer touches of beauty amid the grimness.  But the decision to prevent us from empathizing with Solomon, coupled with the masterful creation of the complicated, conflicted, insecure, tyrant Epps and his equally complex slave Patsey, creates a weakness at the center of this ambitious work.

December 18: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013 -- Francis Lawrence)

★★★

The Hunger Games is back, and there are compelling elements in Shooting Fire that go beyond taking care of the franchise.  I was a fan of the first Hunger Games, but Francis Lawrence here ups the ante from assembling the now-familiar costumes, characters and decent story to include continuous dramatic tension and very high stakes.  The big achievement here is Katniss because we sympathize with her dilemma, respect her integrity and recognize the difficulty of her decisions.  She grows before our eyes as she works to protect her family, Peeta, and Gale while increasingly wanting to support the rising resistance to the Capital.  And focused tightly on Katniss’ arc, Shooting Fire addresses several ideas.

Of course, the film has an anti-authoritarian element to it.  Donald Sutherland’s cold-blooded, manipulative Shooting Fire goes beyond Snow to make its anti-authoritarianism by sending in Peacekeepers who look like the Storm Troopers of Star Wars to rough up audiences during Katniss’ tour, whip Gale in public and beat Cinna in front of Katniss as she ascends to the Games.  Authority comes off badly in this film.
President Snow could create this idea on his own as he threatens everyone Katniss’ loves and tries to have her killed by changing the rules of the Third Quarter Quell.  But

There’s also a continuation of the media parody from the first film.  And here it’s the same elements.  There are ridiculous public appearances by Katniss and Peeta that are stiff and staged as their erstwhile media manager Effie determinedly ignores reality in favor of her scripts and broadcast times, and Stanley Tucci again chews into the role of host Caesar Flickerman, bringing a perfectly pitched exaggeration of a show host to the screen.  In Catching Fire, however, those opposed to authority and the media that enables it subvert their media appearances and take control long enough to send a message to the rising rebellion.  In a pageant in the Capitol, the clothes of Katniss and Peeta ignite in a fire connoting rebellion, and when Katniss later appears on a broadcast in her wedding dress at the command of Snow, the dress transforms into a Mockingjay, her symbol for the rebellion.  In the 74th Game that ended the first Hunger Games, the grist for the media mill in subverted the media and used it to fight with when Katniss forced the game master to spare both her and Peeta.  That same subversion occurs again at the end of the Third Quarter Quell here when Katniss destroys the game area and is airlifted out of the arena.  The media isn't able to exploit its subjects in the either of these Games.

Catching Fire is a great time spent at the movies.  It has an interesting story with several unexpected turns, it has sustained drama that keeps interest high, and it has visuals that are fun to look at.  Some of Effie’s costumes have so much plumage that they almost look soft focus, and even throwaways like the technologically-advanced train racing too fast through a verdant forest make you look.  Add to this the likeable characters, and Catching Fire is a fine film pleasure.