July 12: The Great Gatsby (2013 -- Baz Luhrmann)

★★★★
Count this movie among those of the summer that don’t disappoint.  It’s another big, splashy, digital sfx-travaganza, but unlike the last couple of Baz Luhrmann outings, Gatsby works.

Few directors can outdo Luhrmann when it comes to over-the-top surface excess, and he sets his sights on the perfect target when he swoops, cuts, choreographs and digitizes his way through his fantasy of the Roaring 20s.  Emphatically anachronistic music pulses, people jitter, fireworks explode and the viewer is absorbed into the glorious artifice of a film setting with no limit in reality.  These parts of the film that celebrate cinema’s inauthenticity are among the most mesmerizing, and they’re a true delight in 3D.

Other parts of Great Gatsby are calmer but just as artificial and just as interesting.  There’s the over-the-top lyrical beauty of Gatsby’s mansion as he shows it to Daisy and the flower-stuffed cottage that Nick loans Gatsby to facilitate meeting Daisy.  Then there’s the bleak foreboding of the wasteland between Long Island and New York City whose visuals suggest a period etching.  In every setting of the film, Luhrmann wrings out realism in favor of cinematic construct that is both self-referential but also answers to the needs of the story and characters.

Such artifice in Luhrmann has been there since his earliest work, but it doesn't always carry his films to the Gatsby.  The 2008 Australia uses the same mannerist cinema style, but the film’s artificiality keeps the viewer out rather than bringing us into what is happening onscreen as we experience in Gatsby.  A major factor in the different responses to the two films is the way Luhrmann uses his actors.  In Australia, Luhrmann has Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman act as artificial as the sets and pixels they are surrounded by, with the result that the audience has nothing to relate to in the film and remains disengaged.  Gatsby is an altogether different experience because Luhrmann has Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton bring nuance and depth to their characters.  DiCaprio’s Gatsby is deeply, obsessively in love; Mulligan’s Daisy is indecisive and conflicted; and Edgerton’s Tom is presumptuous, arrogant and threatened.  We see these qualities in the actors’ faces and gestures, and it’s the combination of these plausible characters and dramatic situations with Luhrmann’s impossibly baroque settings that gives Gatsby it’s uniquely cinematic aspect.  This intersection of the real and the irreal is the pleasure point of this film.
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Some viewers will be put off by the over-the-top digital work, the music-video camera and the theatrical staging of The Great Gatsby.  But this film is a rare treat for those who can embrace the artifice of cinema and still respond to a human heart beating at its center.

July 11: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013 -- J.J. Abrams)

★★★
Here’s a fun summer movie that’s capable and engaging.  JJ Abrams likes and respects the things that have made Star Trek one of the most enduring franchises.  Into Darkness has the dependable characters acting out their dependable tags as they deal with situations before them.  And the film has the little moral messages we all like such as the endurance of friendship and the importance of the heart.  There’s even a trip down to a planet with a remarkably stagy look.  For us fans, what’s not to like?

And Into Darkness even brings a bit of innovation.  For one, the film uses the very timely element of
terrorism, and it does so without trivializing it.  The terrorist attack here is real and important and not some gratuitous plot element.  The story has a bit of originality, too, despite its neatness, which almost signals what is going to happen.  But with so much of what you expect, it’s the visuals which often carry the film.  In

screen-packing Imax 3D, the faces of Abrams’ actors fill up the frame during the many unexpected close-ups, and the complex CGI effects resonate with a special force.  This is a visual film that calls for 3D.

The many distinctive elements in Into Darkness also contribute to experience of the film.  There are Abrams’ own 80s-inspired blue lens flares to touch the nostalgia base while giving a sense of immediacy, and we have to wonder if all the alien creatures in the Federation are partly practice for future Star Wars features we’ll see from Abrams.  There’s even decent acting, especially on the part of Chris Pine, who sells Kirk.

So this is a fun movie that actually has a little more takeaway than much of the other summer fare.

May 29: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 2 (2012 -- Various)

★★★

This set of Pixar offerings looks like a creative studio becoming more cautious and a little stale.  Among the most cautious and stale are Mater’s tall tale of being a pilot, Air Mater, and his adventure in Time Travel Mater.  From the Cars franchise, neither of these two shorts is interesting or original but instead rely on what are now stock characters doing little unexpected.  Likewise, Hawaiian Vacation and Small Fry have the familiar Toy Story characters acting the same way they do in the three feature-length films and in the other shorts.  There’s not much new or clever here either but rather a remix of elements that fans of the movies already know.

Presto is pretty much a Warner take-off, though it’s so fast and visually witty that it scores a few laughs as a rabbit tries to get a carrot from his magician master.  The funniest film in this collection is the Wall-E spin, Burn-E.  Like Presto, Burn-E isn’t surprisingly original, but it mines the same silent comedy practices as Wall-E, and the laughs can bring tears.

Most of the other offerings here come from previous Pixar work, too.  There’s an overlong animated “documentary,” Your Friend the Rat, that is hosted by Remy and Emile from Ratatouille, but it lacks the snap and clever engagement of the feature.  The two Up spin-offs also lack sparkle .  Dug’s Special Mission has the good natured Golden Retriever creating Roadrunner-like situations for his aggressive pack-mates, and George & A.J. has retirees resorting to fantastic attempts to avoid the nursing home.  This film has a clever premise, but the animators don’t get much beyond silly in their conception. Overall, this entire group of nine short films in the collection imply a stagnation in Pixar's work on animated shorts, a reliance on tried-and-true characters and situations with little of the excitement of innovation that Pixar has brought to the genre in the past.

In fact, only three of the shorts in this collection represent original efforts in new directions, and only two of those have much engaging originality.  In Partly Cloudy, a dark cloud creates the bad babies of the world that a bedraggled stork has to deliver, while bright clouds create the good babies for the happy storks.  This film doesn’t develop anything unexpected.  On the other hand, Day and Night has two transparent characters whose outlines reveal scenes during, respectively, day and night.  Not only is this concept highly original, but the film even develops a story involving the two.  This is a fascinating short film that is simultaneously self-reflexive and traditionally narrative.  It’s one of the most imaginative shorts in either of the two Pixar collections.

La Luna is similarly engaging, though for different reasons.  This coming of age short has a boy caught between his father and his grandfather as he tries to create his own identity.  The film has wonderful imagination, like the way the boat anchors itself to the moon and the task the men have of cleaning the stars from the moon's surface, and it has a simple story that feels like a fairy tale.  An Italian feeling in the work ranges from the characters' hand gestures and speech rhythms to the costumes and the music.  La Luna won the Academy Award for animated short this year, and it deserved it.

May 21: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 (2004 -- Various)

★★★★

This is a fun collection of films from early Pixar.  In the very first short, 1984’s Adventures of Andre and Wally B, there’s a silent film vibe that will become more obvious in later films like Wall-E.  Even more, shorts like For the Birds and Tin Toy rely on the expressive faces of silent film, especially the eyes, that is a Pixar animation trademark.

And many of these films anticipate Pixar projects, too.  Tin Toy and Knick Knack anticipate the Toy Story trilogy, not only with their interest in toys but even with some of the toy characterizations.  The terrible kid of Tin Toy might be a predecessor of the daycare kids of Toy Story 3, and the sleek figures of Knick Knack anticipate Barbie and Ken in tone.  There’s also an interest in an old man character in Geri’s Game that anticipates Up, a film that deals sympathetically with an old curmudgeon but skirts maudlin cliché for the most part. 

This collection also shows the beginning of Pixar producing short film tie-ins to some of its major releases.  is a hilarious slapstick riff on the Mike and Sulley characters from Monster’s, Inc, and Jack-Jack Attack uses classic Warner reality bending to posit what would happen to a babysitter as an Incredibles superbaby begins to use his powers.  Mater and the Ghostlight shows the danger of such an approach becoming stale, though, as this little short overdwells on Cars’ Mater character without using much inventiveness.  It’s to Pixar’s credit that the studio typically avoids such predictable, uninvolving projects.

Mike’s New Car

And this collection also finds Pixar reaching outside Pixar World and stretching its creativity in some unexpected directions.  In some cases, like that of Red’s Dream, this outreach fails.  This little short has a distinctly graphic novel tone that ultimately only feels derivative.  One Man Band is hardly more engaging with its link to European culture, and Boundin’ feels like vintage Disney in the Wild West.  Slightly more fun is the slapstick-in-space Lifted with a young alien fumbling a human abduction under the critical eye of a supervisor.

The best film of the collection, and the one of most importance to Pixar, is the very short Luxo Jr.  This 1986 film not only gives Pixar its desk lamp icon, but it gets at the element in Pixar films that makes them unique and that brings people back to theaters again and again: Pixar films’ focus on an emotional core that evokes a shared human experience.  Here, a child (lamp) breaks his toy and is consoled by the parent before the kid finds a new toy he likes just as enthusiastically.  The bemused parent looks directly at us as we share this human moment we all recognize.   In its two-minute run time, Luxo Jr reveals the crucial element in Pixar’s ongoing success in feature length computer animation.

May 20: and (2008 -- Richard Linklater)

May 19: Macbeth (1948 -- Orson Welles)

★★★
Despite the point that Epstein and Lennon tried to make in The Battle over Citizen Kane, Orson Welles wasn't banned from movies after the Hearst conflict.  Instead, he was part of several bumbled projects and had so much trouble finding directing work afterwards that, in 1948, he ended up working on a project for B-film studio, Republic Pictures.  That’s where he made Macbeth.

This Welles film is an interesting adaptation of the play.  His technique here has some strong echoes of his work in Kane.  There’s the deep focus that Kane is so famous for, and characters’ faces shift in and out of light to reflect their conflicted, changing morality.  And again here, movement attracts attention wherever it is in the frame, even if that’s in the background.  For example, when Macbeth leaves Duncan’s chamber after the murder, it’s a tiny movement in the background, but with the stasis in the rest of the frame, our eye is drawn that way.

Some elements of Welles’ Macbeth also recall Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Pt. 1.  Macbeth unfolds Ivan is infused with a similar setting and mood.  The clunky royal wardrobe and décor in both is similar, especially the tall, slender staffs that characters carry.  There are even overwrought clergymen in both.  And both films hearken back to a theatrical, silent-film ethos of dark expressionism.  The overwrought, twisted atmosphere of paranoia in Ivan, Pt 1 is not far from that in Welles’ Macbeth.

mostly on a soundstage whose lighting and effects create a claustrophobic sense of psychosis and doom, and

But despite Welles’ using such cinematic elements to create an appropriate atmosphere for Macbeth, the movie remains only partly successful.  The staging is full of tension and psychosis, yet the atmosphere leaves us uninvolved because it’s hard to become invested in Macbeth or his Lady.  Many productions highlight the drama and conflict of the couple’s descent, but in this one, it’s hard to care much about the characters or about the state they rule.  Macbeth is an interesting film to watch, but it is far less compelling than many adaptations of the play are.

May 18: RKO 281 (1999 -- Benjamin Ross)

★★

This made-for-TV movie is just awful.  Liev Schreiber can't carry a film at this point in his career, and the script doesn't try to make it easy for him.  There’s no sense of Orson Welles that comes through here.  Welles does one thing and then another, has one opinion and then another, lacks passion, and verbalizes thoughts like “we all love in our own way,” which the film then blithely ignores ignores in terms of character action though repeats verbally.  RKO 281 is a waste of some very good talent.

As part of a series around Welles and Citizen Kane, though, RKO 281 offers a few small rewards.  For one, it's fun to spot Ross' restaging of some of the newsreel footage that's used in The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  And though the picture quality isn't great in the edition of RKO 281 that I saw, the lighting and sets were rich.  Good visuals redeem the movie a little.

But it's disappointing Ross isn't able to pull off a more cohesive portrait of Orson Welles here.  Instead, RKO 281 leaves that task to another project.