February 15: John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017 – Chad Stahelski)

★★★

Chapter 2 of John Wick spins in place rather than move the saga forward.  But if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one.

It has the same cool, choreographed, over-the-top violence that the first one had, and director Chad Stahelski again throws everything at the screen to keep us looking.  We get some pretty images of Italy, but it’s the sequence at a huge dance party on the edge of catacombs that’s the money moment as John fights not only through the strobes of the party but also the spotlit catacombs themselves.  The sequence echoes that at the Red Circle nightclub in the first John Wick, but the editing and action isn’t quite as crisp here.  The hall of mirrors sequence also keeps us attentive as John battles through a reflective environment that is someplace between Bruce Lee and the Lady from Shanghai.  In addition to the stylized gun-fu, some visuals are just arresting in themselves.  The office that processes bounty contracts is sepia-toned and populated by women dressed in pencil skirts and sleeveless blouses.  They're wearing their hair in a bun, and they’re tattooed. Their office is old-style operator switchboards, but vacuum tubes get paper notes from one office to the next while old computer displays distribute the messages widely.  It’s a fascinating, steampunk set.  Stahelski also keeps us attentive because we never sure who will be the next person to attack John Wick.  In keeping with the film’s exaggeration aesthetic, it begins to seem that everyone in NYC is a bounty hunter.

But there are differences here that make this John Wick slightly less compelling that the first.  While the fan service here is generally integrated well into film, writer Derek Kolstad opts for lots more exposition in the first part of this film than he did in the last.  Not only does this leave Keanu Reeves to try to hit a sweet spot of acting that explains information but maintains his artificial reticence, but this choice also diminishes the stylization that made the first outing such unique fun.  There was nothing of reality in John’s character in the first installment, but the script moves Reeves close to that at places here.  The cinematography, too, is weaker here than before.  Dan Laustsen’s  lighting is more garish and edgy than Jonathan Sela’s rich screen was, and the camera here is less fluid than in the first.

For all this, John Wick: Chapter 2 has some outrageously fun sequences, and this sequel largely avoids the sophomore slump.  Here’s hoping that the hinted-at third installment doesn’t see the series falter and ossify into a formula.

February 14: John Wick (2014 – Chad Stahelski [& David Leitch])

★★★

John Wick starts like Sunset Boulevard – a beat-up John tumbles out of a car and looks at cellphone image of his wife.  Flashback, we’re at his house. Flashback further, he’s in a hospital with her ill.  Flashback further, she admires an anniversary bracelet.  Within seconds, the film has taken us into four different times and told us where it’s going.  This fast information dump pulls us into the film and has us quickly engaged in puzzling out the links between all these facts.   The rapid opening also points to the film’s major goal, keeping the audience engaged.

It’s a smart move to use a narrative device in the opening because the film is all engagement through visuals and action from this point forward.  John Woo is much in the background, from direct references like a canted, low-angle shot looking up the barrel of Wick’s pistol to the exaggerated violence, which is excessive, stylized and choreographed until it's no longer violence but elegant performance.  The cinematography keeps our eyes busy, too.  The camera glides through long action sequences that can occur in neo-noir exteriors or in interiors filled with reflecting or opaque surfaces that distort what we see.  As dies the heavily-tinted lighting.  In one tour de force segment, Wick goes to a dance club to kill Iosef Tarasov, and the body count mounts as Wick and his enemies pirouette though the fight, shooting and hitting each other to the rhythm of the music.  It’s a bravura moment of film-making.

John Wick keeps us off-balance in several ways, too, which also holds our attention.  The violence here can be sudden and intense, like the fight that includes a puppy being killed, and we stay riven lest we miss something that might come at us suddenly.  There’s harsh, bloody one-one-violence, sudden fights, and a bit of suspense as we try to figure out Marcus’ role.  Stahelski varies the pace of the film, too, which breaks us out of the complacency of our expectations and makes us watch what’s going on.  After the several long action sequences that precede it, we expect Wick’s final attack on Iosef’s safe house to follow the same pattern.  Instead, Stahelski edits the entire sequence into a matter of seconds, and we see Wick’s quick revenge from long distance.

As is typical of this type of film, the hyper-stylization and focus on surface doesn’t allow for heart. Any psychology here is decoration, and John Wick presents its characters as figures for the action. The performances in the film create ironic distance with actors delivering their stilted lines in a deadpan manner.  In a conversation at the funeral for Wick’s wife, for example, the newly-widowed husband talks briefly with his friend Marcus in several short lines delivered in a monotone.  Even the humor, like Avi’s constantly asking his clients to speak English, is mostly ironic and distances the viewer.

John Wick is indeed all flash and no soul, but its flash is terrifically engaging.  This is a fun film to spend time with and marvel at the art and creativity behind its dazzling surface.

February 10: I Am Not Your Negro (2016 – Raoul Peck)

★★★

Raoul Peck has a great idea for I Am Not Your Negro.  He takes a largely unfinished, late manuscript by James Baldwin, Remember This House, and uses it to structure the film.  To flesh out the structure, he uses Baldwin’s own language from writings and TV appearances, having Samuel Jackson read from Baldwin’s works.  The film is therefore Baldwin’s ideas and Baldwin’s expression.  I Am Not Your Negro also shows how relevant many of Baldwin’s concerns are even today.  To Baldwin’s comments on the violence and fear that an African -American faces, Peck intercuts images of racial violence from the 60s with contemporary images of similar violence.  And Peck dwells on Baldwin’s analysis of the role of American cinema in creating black stereotypes.  “Because Uncle Tom refuses to take vengeance in his own hands,” we hear Jackson read, “he was not a hero for me.  Heroes, as far as I could see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.”  The film clips Peck shows us of the portrayals of African Americans are compelling.

But the problems in I Am Not Your Negro are already present in this initial conception.  Peck adopts a chronological structure here based on Baldwin’s intention to progressively discuss the assassinations of Medgar Evans, Malcolm X and then Martin Luther King in his manuscript.  In the film, however, this chronological structure leaves us with a choppy discussion of Baldwin’s ideas.  We get one idea, then another idea, and then another idea, but the chronological structure doesn’t give the filmmaker the opportunity to draw Baldwin's ideas into a cohesive pattern.  The viewer finishes the film understanding several of Baldwin’s notions but not having a sense of his vision.  And Peck doesn’t go into depth on some of Baldwin’s most incisive ideas, like the destructive nature of whites’ construct of African-Americans.

Another problem that starts from Peck’s earliest decisions is his exclusive use of Baldwin’s writings.  Baldwin was an elegant, articulate writer, and his sentences are filled with parallels, qualifiers and extensive digressive phrases.  The language is beautiful and powerful to read, but it does not communicate well in speech.  Jackson delivers Baldwin’s sentences as clearly as they could be read, but the language doesn’t work well in a film that has viewers simultaneously trying to understand the complex sentences, put together Baldwin’s thoughts and integrate the film’s images to the words.  We lose a great deal because of this directorial decision.

A last issue with the film is why Peck decided to suppress the homosexuality of one of America’s most prominent gay authors.  Baldwin was open about his sexual orientation and his Giovanni’s Room is a critically important work in gay fiction, but Peck leaves it to an FBI comment and a very indirect mention later in the film to even hint at Baldwin’s being gay.  That omission diminishes the achievement of the feisty Baldwin, who not only had to deal with racial discrimination but discrimination against homosexuals.   And it puts Peck in the role of creating an identity for Baldwin rather than seeing the man’s own reality, the same gesture that Baldwin condemns whites for doing to blacks. 

I Am Not Your Negro brings to light many of the parts of Baldwin’s incisive analysis and condemnation of race relations in the US.  For that, the film is worthwhile.  In his concept of the film, though, some of Peck’s decisions weaken its effectiveness.  We’re still waiting for a film that can successfully communicate the intelligence, complexity and passion of Baldwin’s thought, but this one is a good enough start in that direction.  

January 31: Moonlight (2016 – Barry Jenkins)

★★★★★

Director Barry Jenkins accomplishes an unusual feat in Moonlight.  He’s created a film whose every frame highlights form and reminds us that we’re watching a movie and not a realistic presentation of life.  But at the same time, Moonlight hits us in the gut with such heart and honesty that we’re left deeply moved by the experience of watching it.  It’s a rare combination of two elements that often work at cross purposes.

From the opening sequence of the film, we’re struck by the artifice.  As the drug dealer Juan walks from his car to one of his sellers, the camera swirls quickly around him, the background almost blurring and calling attention to the camera and its movement.  This same motion continues as the seller talks with a customer.  The effect of this intrusion of artifice is not only one of striking beauty, but the gesture also signals us early that we’re watching a work of contrivance and not a documentary-style reportage.  The focus on form continues throughout.  Jenkins uses a lot of handheld camera, often with excessive motion.  In one of the film’s most effective scenes, the camera rolls with the ocean, occasionally submerging and resurfacing as Juan teaches Little how to swim.  This technique foregrounds the camera in a way that also complements the action.  A similar foregrounding occurs in the lighting.  Each of the three parts of Moonlight has its own distinct tonal palette, veering from greens and blues to browns and reds.  And the dialog here, while using a lot of the vocabulary and syntax of normal speech, also swings toward the theatrical at times.  In part two, for example, the two teenagers Kevin and Chiron sit by the ocean and talk about how a cool breeze from the sea can cause everyone in their neighborhood to pause from their hard lives for just a moment in order to experience it.  That’s a poetic thought and expression for a couple of teens smoking weed on a beach.   

Moonlight also has entire sequences that depart from a representational aesthetic.  Some of Juan’s scenes with Little work in an artful realm.  The bulked-up drug dealer holds Little and says to trust him during their swimming lesson, and he tells Little to feel the freedom that the water will give him.  This abstract vocabulary points eloquently to one of the central concerns of the film, individual autonomy.  And as Little begins to swim on his own, it feels like the boy’s taking control in the water also has a larger significance than his simply learning how to swim.  This entire stylized sequence works outside conventions of realistic storytelling.  And not only do sequences take on a poetic quality, but a network of imagery informs the film.  The color blue permeates Moonlight, for example, and water has a particular resilience in all three parts of the movie.  Such artifice is an important part of the aesthetic of the film.

Despite the distancing that could occur with so much attention to artifice, Moonlight touches the heart of viewers in a powerful way.  The film presents us with a series of dramatic scenes that resonate with an audience in a very human way.  It’s sad to see thin Little bullied at school and screamed at when home, and there’s a painful innocence when he asks Juan what a faggot is and whether the man is a drug dealer, a raw moment of self-acknowledgement for the older man.  It’s just as sad when Chiron, who has let his guard down with Kevin, experiences his friend turning on him for the approval of his peers and when we realize that Chiron sees only one way out of his situation.  Even when we meet Black, the bulked-up adult, we can see that his muscle, car and grillz are defenses, and we follow him though some very emotional conversations, first with his mother and later with Kevin, that are deeply moving despite their artifice.  The script here identifies emotional touchstone moments and presents them to us honestly that pushes the film’s self-awareness into the background.

The casting and acting add to the emotional effect.  Alex Hibbert is a thin, stooped-shouldered Little whose big eyes only occasionally turn up, and the lanky Ashton Sanders looks like an uncertain teenager susceptible to bullying.  His generally limited range of body language gives us an emotionally repressed kid, which makes the times he must be expressive all the more powerful.  Finally, Trevante Rhodes’ body tells us more about the character of Black than pages of dialog would.  His jacked build and tough accessories say this is a mean guy not to be messed with, but like his earlier mentor, Black has a deep vulnerability inside.  Locked into his intimidating body, Rhodes communicates his uncertainty and love through his eyes.  When this big actor lets a tear go, it’s deeply moving.

Barry Jenkin’s skill in Moonlight is to have rejected the realist aesthetic but simultaneously created characters whose emotions are human and genuine.  Watching this film is an exceptional experience of the power of cinematic art.

January 29: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016 – Gareth Edwards)

★★★★★

When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they talked about doing some movies that were sidelines to the main Star Wars story, portraying events and characters that weren’t part of the core storyline.  They also said that these extra films would be open to more experimentation than the main Star Wars films would.

If Rogue One is an indication, this idea has promise.  The film is tightly linked to the Star Wars universe.  Its story is background to the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV, which opens with Darth Vader’s attack on Princess Leia’s ship in search of the plans for the Death Star.  Rogue One tells us how the Rebels got the plans and ends at this attack; we see the moment that Leia is handed the Death Star plans which we know she’ll soon be hiding in R2D2.  And along the way to this ending, Rogue One nods to the world of Star Wars in ways too numerous to list.  In an early example, we see that Jyn, like Luke, is raised on a technology-assisted farm, though it’s a wet planet in her case rather than a dry one.  Jyn’s mother even prepares the same blue milk that we watch Luke’s mother prepare.  Throughout Rogue One, we see characters and technology that we know from the main series.  Most conspicuously, a digital version of Peter Cushing appears as Tarkin, and a digital Carrie Fischer plays as Leia briefly, but the weapons, aircraft and settings all call back to the original series.  Some shots even look familiar, like those of the Rebel pilots in their cockpits and the sentries stationed at the Rebels’ tropical base.  For fans, all this seems wonderfully familiar yet new as we see the familiar in new settings.

Gareth Edwards also brings strong cinematic competency to Rogue One.  Although we change locations often, it’s not hard to know where we are at each point and why we’re there.  Likewise, we know who everyone is and why they’re involved in each scene despite the large cast of characters.  And the final sequence, the battle of Scarif, is a tour de force from Edwards.  The portrayal of this battle fractures into several lines, and Edwards edits them together so each one maintains its suspense independently while contributing to an effective collective suspense for the battle at large.  Edwards fuses this suspense with marvelous CGI work in the air war above the planet, too.  Rogue One works well cinematically.

The film isn’t without its flaws, though, and the shallowness of its characters undercuts a couple of its important aspects.   For one, the Rogue One aims to address the legitimacy of doing bad things for a good cause.  We see this moral dilemma highlighted in some of Cassian’s lines and actions, but Galen, Saw, Bodhi and even Jyn confront the question also.  Unfortunately, none of these characters has the depth or psychological presence to make their questioning resonate with the audience.  We don’t know their likes, dislikes, doubts or vulnerabilities s to any real degree, and we have only the most rudimentary understanding of their past.  When such underdeveloped characters try to cope with a complex moral problem like this one, it feels more like posturing than a moral struggle.  It’s laudable that Edwards tries to use the Star Wars universe to deal with such a question, but the effort is undermined by a script that doesn’t provide more psychological complexity.

There is also a bleakness to Rogue One that could have given this film more heft that most of its predecessors.  We flinch as we see main characters perish, culminating in effective freeze-frame ending.  And while we regret the loss of characters that we’d come to like, the demise of each of them would have been even more affective if they’d had more complexity.  The more we understand about cinematic characters, the more invested we are and the more we respond to them.  So although the end of Rogue One is a strong one, but would have been devastating if we’d had more connection to the characters.

Rogue One is a worthy addition to the Star Wars corpus.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a fun experience of that universe, and Edwards’ efforts to go where Star Wars hasn’t gone before inaugurates this group of films with promise.

November 30: Death on the Nile (1978 -- John Guillermin)

★★★

November 14: Being 17/ Quand on a 17 ans (2016 -- André Téchiné)

★★★★

There’s an instability of form that adds a fascinating dimension to André Téchiné’s most recent film.  Being 17 sometimes runs realistic, but then it turns lyric.  The tone is sometimes dramatic, but then it shifts unexpectedly to the melodramatic.  The mashup of these tones reminds us throughout that we’re watching a fiction, but Téchiné’s master stroke is that a touching story emerges anyway.  We’d expect the formal inconsistency of Being 17 to take away from the film’s impact, but the story and Téchiné’s strong visual storytelling leave us moved at the end of the film.

The formal swings here almost disengage us.  Very realistic scenes, like those inside Damien’s middle class house and school, are juxtaposed with poetic imagery of the soaring, mountainous countryside of Hautes-Pyrénées and Tomas stripping off his clothes to skinny dip in a frigid mountain pool.  And like these visuals, the actions of the characters range in tone.  There are dramatic moments that seem like something from a realistic film.  Tomas and Damien get into a fight on the basketball court like we’d expect to see in any high school movie.  But in a flash, we’re watching a scene of Damien and his mother in tears during the drawn-out military funeral of Nathan.   It’s impossible to see Being 17 and maintain the pretense that it’s a realistic film.  Téchiné foregrounds the cinematic throughout with his whiplash shifts of tone and genre.

There is also a looseness that highlights the cinematic art.  The ending jerks from one unlikely cliché to the next to the extent that we lose causality in the last few moments of the film.  And Téchiné inserts on-the-nose exposition at more than one point.  You need to trust more, Marianne tells her son Damien as though telling us the moral center of her son's character arc.  I was scared, Tomas says, to explain to us his violence toward Damien.  On the level of imagery, Tomas is a wild nature boy, but Téchiné develops this identification only to leave it hanging without a payoff.  And even the scene where Tomas can finally feel a part of his adoptive family is borrowed from sentimental literature when Tomas holds the new baby.  It’s as though Being 17 tries to take us out of film by its many self-referential gestures.

Téchiné’s achievement here, though, is that despite the formal self-reflection,  Being 17 is still a deeply touching film with a living human heart.  Both Damien and Tomas are 17 year olds, and both are coming to terms with being gay and experiencing their first loves.  Part of the transcending power of their story comes from a script that distills the drama in the boy’s situation into a few essential coming-of-age moments.  When Damien has Tomas drive him to a tryst he’s set up online, for example, the sequence releases a range of emotions among the characters – vulnerability, fear, anger, disappointment and jealousy – that communicate through the film’s formal expression.   Another strength of the script is its reliance on visuals and movement as opposed to dialog.  Téchiné  and Céline Sciamma tell this story in close-ups and gestures rather than words, which strengthens the impact of what’s happening.  The actors, too, bring home the story's importance with their dedication to their characters.  Whether in a romantic or realistic mode, they maintain their characters appropriately through the tonal shifts.  And these shifts themselves even help us focus on the story since their frequent swings lead us to distill the truth tying these various forms together.

Being 17 is a genuine cinematic achievement with both formal brio and a touching emotional core.  It’s altogether appropriate that the soundtrack for this film of two French kids in the Hautes-Pyrénées   includes a West African song by a musician singing in Dyula and playing an acoustic guitar so it sounds like a kora.  Form doesn’t matter when we can feel hearts connected.