December 31: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005 -- George Lucas)

★ ★★ ★ 

December 30: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002 -- George Lucas)

December 29: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999 -- George Lucas)

★★

December 16: In the Heart of the Sea (2015 -- Ron Howard)

★★★★

There are problems with the epic In the Heart of the Sea.  One big drawback is the way Ron Howard uses 3D.  The film is dark and hard to see, and its CGI is often so artificial that we might expect to see Smaug curled around a Nantucket church steeple.  The story also slows overly in the middle, and the script is occasionally too on-the-nose.  “I feel like a speck in the universe,” muses the depressed Owen Chase at one point, for viewers who hadn’t realized that Providence isn’t running things for the better in the world of this film.

But that’s what Moby Dick is all about, and Heart of the Sea is very much an IMAX 3D cinematic gloss on this classic.  Although Howard has ostensibly adapted a different, 2000 book for this film, his Heart of the Sea hews closely to Melville.  Like Moby Dick, it draws from a dark belief that God isn’t in charge of the universe, and an important stylistic element of Howard’s film, wonder at the material objects of the time, echoes Moby Dick’s long passages of such description.  The story in the film is from 2000’s In the Heart of the Sea, but the sensibility is Melville.

From its beginning, one of the attractions of In the Heart of the Sea is the way it lingers on the material aspects of whaling.  The camera gazes at rope and knots, while composition and lighting highlight objects like whaler-carved vignettes in bone and harpoon pins that carry prestige.  The dialog is rich in nautical specifics like types of sails and the time to use them, and there is a raw physicality to whaling as we see it here.  Not only do we experience the butchering and boiling down of a whale, but at one gruesome point, the young Thomas must climb into a whale carcass to the accompaniment of crew reactions to the smell and an evocative soundtrack.  Similarly physical, the scenes of Chase harpooning a whale communicate the whalers’ vulnerability better than most portrayals.  Beyond this, Howard dwells on the commercial side of the industry by giving the merchants’ board a lot of screen time and power, and he underscores the very real way class comes into play in the enterprise, like Melville.  Elements of the cinematography also add to the visceral physicality of the film.  The movie cuts between underwater and surface angles of the same action, and unusual angles create an almost documentary sense of realism.  For example, when the camera speeds at the ship's water line, Heart of the Sea can feels like 2012’s Leviathan with its pedigree from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab.  Howard’s focus on the materiality of whaling is a cinematic echo of Melville’s verbal emphasis.

In the Heart of the Sea is also a surprisingly philosophical film.  From the beginning, its characters express a faith in an ordered, just, moral world, but the character arc of Chase takes him to the opposite.  The merchant’s board is show to be a group of liars, and class trumps skill when Chase is appointed first mate to an unskilled but upper-class captain.  There is no justice in this situation.  And when the Essex crew confronts the great whale, Chase sees death come randomly, to the deserving and the undeserving.  The whale stalks the survivors as they struggle to make landfall, cruelly waiting until land is in sight before attacking them one final time.  This whale shows brutality at nature’s core rather than beneficence, a point pushed home even more graphically when the crew must resort to cannibalism for survival.  Yielding under the relentless pressure of these experiences, Chase’s faith in god, order and justice finally succumbs, so it’s no surprise when the merchants’ board commits yet another injustice and requires him to lie about the whale attack and the consequent events.  Through the film, Chase comes to realize that both nature and society are vicious, and he only recovers himself by falling back on virtues that permeate American cinema – individualism, as he maintains his personal honor by resisting the board’s pressure; and love, as he returns to his waiting wife.  Chase’s way of seeing the world by the end of the film is similar to that so pervasive in Moby Dick.

An annoying paradox of Heart of the Sea is the way it backs away from the very message it carries.  While Moby Dick is “nature red in tooth and claw” in the novel, Howard isn’t willing to let his whale be what the rest of the film characterizes him as.  While sometimes showing the whale as part of vicious nature, Howard also justifies the whale’s action as defending the pod against the whalers and fighting back after being attacked.  One especially saccharine moment has Chase look at the eye of the whale as though the two were communicating and decide not to throw his harpoon.   These moments are contrary to the general direction of the movie and make little sense in a film where the whale later stalks and toys with the sailors.  It's as though Heart of the Sea can’t quite embrace the darkness it unveils.

But flaws aside, In the Heart of the Sea is ambitious, deeply engaging and thought-provoking.  It lingers in the memory and makes us think about how we see the world, even here on land.

December 7: Timbuctu (2014 -- Abderrahmane Sissako)

★★★★★

December 6: The Snowtown Murders (2011 -- Justin Kurzel)

★★★

For all its punchiness, The Snowtown Murders feels derivative.  It shares the grittiness of the previous year’s Animal Kingdom, as well as that film’s setting in a poor, urban community in Australia.  There’s also a similar narrative aesthetic at work in the two films: a dramatic storyline punctuated by bursts of intense violence.  And Snowtown even has the washed-out color palette of the earlier film and its active camera.  Unsurprisingly, Adam Arkapaw is the cinematographer for both movies.

Yet Snowtown isn’t the achievement that Animal Kingdom is.  The fact that we’ve seen most of these elements, and in combination, lessens the effect of this 2011 film, though director Justin Kurzel has perhaps tried to distinguish his film from Animal Kingdom by ratcheting up the violence and mixing more sexual scandal.  However, the success of Animal Kingdom relies less on shock than on David Michôd’s giving us full characters in complex relationships and stressful situations, and Kurzel fails in that important regard.  Both films give us big, silent, passive kids, but Michôd lets us understand and sympathize far more with J than we can with Kurzel’s Jaime here.  And going beyond that, we also understand and sympathize far more with all of J’s brothers in Animal Kingdon than we can with Jaime’s.  Animal Kingdom gives us family of people we understand and engage with, but Snowtown only gives us story elements that move us from one shock to another.

Kurzel effectively appropriates and intensifies many of the elements of Animal Kingdom, but despite all the shock, Snowtown feels more like an exercise than a film with a heart.

December 4: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015 -- Francis Lawrence)

★★★

After the monotony and repetition of Part 1, it's good to see The Hunger Games pull up its pants and move ahead more vigorously to its conclusion in the second part of Mockingjay.  Although the plot here concerns the final assault on the capital by the rebels, the film manages to have some Hunger Games combat because President Snow has ordered his gamemakers to set up booby trap pods to slow the rebel advance.  With that, we get to see some of the trappings we’re used from the earlier films: video reviews of combat, heraldic music announcing combatants’ deaths, and even a short appearance by Caesar Flickerman in all his colored plumage.  It’s good to be back in the Panem war games.

Part 2 also gives us some character elements that move the story along.  One of the biggest questions here is whether Peeta is going to attack Katniss or snap out of his programming.  And on Katniss’ side, the question is whether she is going to finally choose Peeta as her mate or Gale.  This duo of suitors offers an increasingly clear contrast in the concluding episode, too.  There’s a sharp delineation here between the more domestic, artistic male and the pragmatic, harsh, warrior, and in keeping with the way the series challenges social roles, it ultimate not only endorses the milder male but punishes the more aggressive.  Julianne Moore delivers us another interesting character element in her President Coin.  The steely leader of the rebels never becomes the caricature that President Snow is, and while there’s plenty to unsettle us about her, Moore keeps her at the edge of plausibly acceptable.  Maybe that’s why Boggs has to give us such an on-the-nose warning about her.

And since this is the last film of the franchise, Lawrence takes some time to look back at the other films and to give us some time with many of the characters we love who are still around.  There’s mention of characters we’ve lost, like Cinna and Rue, and reminiscence of moments like Peeta burning bread to give it to Katniss, Gale hunting in the woods with Katniss, events in the earlier Games, and the reaping that swept up Katniss.  We also get a satisfying moment with old friends like Effie and Buttercup, making their endearing usual contribution, and we have a few longer moments with people like Joanna, Finnick and Haymitch.  The reach of Part 2 back to the series’ lore makes this part of Mockingjay far more engaging than the Part 1.

The story here, too, is more interesting than in the first part of Mockingjay.  In addition to the tension around Peeta, we wonder throughout how the final showdown between Katniss and Snow will be resolved, and the final showdown itself at the film’s climax has a logical if surprising turn.  The film has a good deal of foreshadowing, too, from the massacre of refugees towards the end to the death of Coin.  The story of Part 2 maintains its suspense nicely, even as it slows down for the team combats.

Until the film’s awkward ending.  After the bleak strife that has characterized the entire franchise, Lawrence gives us a jarring conclusion that looks and feels like nothing that has preceded it in the series.  The script gives us no transition to the brutally clichéd happy ending here, though transitions aren’t the strength of this final installment anyway.  For example, the Gale we watch throughout this episode is a significantly harsher pragmatist than we’ve seen in the previous installments.  Still, the gauzy happiness of the last scene of the film has little relation to the rest of the four-film series.

But despite awkwardness like this, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is genuine entertainment, a final return to what has made this series one to follow for several years