February 21: Children of Men (2006 -- Alfonso Cuarón)

★★★

It took Gravity to make me realize that Alfonso Cuarón is simultaneously one of our most gifted directors for visuals and one of our most challenged when it comes to writing or choosing a script.  But that should have been clear from Children of Men.

This film starts with colossally effective visuals, from the tracking shots that follow Theo into and out of a coffee shop to the set décor that shows social order collapsing around him in washed out color tones.  Other tour-de-force camera work includes the ambush on the road as seen from inside the car – where we are inside the car and looking around at everyone else who's there – and the very long tracking shot as Theo runs through a firefight in a Fugee camp to get to Kee.  Long, continuous shots are a fundamental element of the cinematography here, and they’re not only effective story-telling but they bring us into the film in a strong way.

The art décor is likewise powerful.  The film shows us the streets, train stations, advertisements and apartment buildings of our own daily life, but all of these are diluted with filters that flatten the color scheme to cold blues and greens and darkened with smoke scorches, breaks, stains and tears to the sets.  Ruin informs the frame throughout this film.  Even the countryside is littered with burning animal corpses.  Many other elements of Children of Men also start in the world of contemporary life with terrorism, jihad, torture and a banal, lapdog media.  The media promotes escape via painless, drug-induced suicide while the military shoves, herds and beats the population.  And when the military isn't being abusive, paramilitary groups like the Fishes are.  There’s no reprieve in Children of Men from violence, oppression and decay.  It’s Britain “soldiering on.”

Children of Men starts strongly with engaging characters; a fast-paced, unpredictable story; and lots of enigma to be resolved.  Theo is a demoralized, hopeless man walking through the social collapse in a daze.  He begins an arc of change when he reconnects with Julian, his ex-wife, whose faith in and ongoing affection for him kindles some stirrings of hope in him.  His re-awakening continues through her death and his meeting Kee, a woman pregnant with the first human child in a couple of decades.  To this point, Children of Men is a good story told well.

However, after Theo and Kee escape the farm, the story lapses into maudlin cliché and convention, and the air goes out of the story.  We get obvious character gestures (Theo is depressed because he lost his son at a young age, rather like Ryan in Gravity), and the soundtrack starts to carry religion-imbued chant and music.  The first born Son of Man inspires awe and love among the downtrodden in a long, painful apartment building scene where the action stops and everyone reaches out to touch the mother an infant as they slowly progress out of the building.  Once the two leave the building, the war outside stops, too, as Kee carries the miraculously-conceived child past the soldiers and their armor.  The war resumes after the new Prince of Peace passes.  And this new born hope not only assumes the obvious attributes of Christ but is also the catalyst for Theo’s redemption.  Theo dies at the end of the film strong, vital, and committed after his helping to rescue Kee and the baby.  There's hardly anything unexpected or original in the second half of this film.

The visuals in Children of Men are powerful and effective, from the camera work to the scene design, but many of the ideas in the second half of the movie are obvious and trite.  Here’s hoping that Alfonso Cuarón can one day find a script collaborator who can give Cuarón’s characters and story the muscle of his camera.

February 20: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

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.