Napoleon: A Review - You Can't Always Get What You Want

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The film could have, and should have, been great, but it just never coalesces and much to my chagrin ends up being a rather dull, formulaic and flaccid affair.

Napoleon, the highly-anticipated bio-pic from iconic director Ridley Scott, stars Joaquin Phoenix and dramatizes the rise and fall of France’s famous Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The film, which hit theatres back on November 22nd, is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I finally got a chance to see it.

I admit I was very excited to see Napoleon when it first hit theatres as I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott and consider him one of the master filmmakers of his generation. I also think the film’s star Joaquin Phoenix is the best actor on the planet, and his co-star Vanessa Kirby, is no slouch either. But despite avoiding reading reviews it was readily apparent that the film had garnered no cultural traction upon initial release, so I never put in the effort to see it in the theatre.

Napoleon has long been a tantalizing subject for cinematic exploration. For instance, in the late 1960’s Stanley Kubrick set his sights on the diminutive tyrant and got far along in the pre-production process but due to the high cost of shooting on location the film got scrapped.

I saw a Kubrick exhibit a decade ago in Los Angeles at LACMA which had a plethora of artifacts from his various movie projects. There was a bevy of material from his un-made Napoleon project…and I found it mesmerizing.

Unfortunately for me…and you too, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not a Kubrickian Napoleon. Truth be told it doesn’t really even feel like a Ridley Scott movie. There is no epic feel to the festivities nor is there an intimate one. Filmmaking 101 tells us that you can either be epic or intimate, and on rare occasions both…but you can never be neither.

Napoleon, which runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes, is a dramatically impotent, narratively inert exercise in expensive wheel-spinning.

The film follows a rather tedious and trite bio-pic formula of jumping from one notable event to another, but provides no dramatic or human insight into any of it.

Despite some stunningly gorgeous cinematography from Dariusz Wolski, most notably in the coronation scenes – which are breathtakingly beautiful, the film just never coalesces into anything more than bland background noise.

There is rumor of a four-hour director’s cut of Napoleon that will one-day be available to screen but isn’t yet. I hope that is true because that director’s cut might unlock the dramatic and narrative coherence the theatrical release lacks. This was true with Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a film that failed as a theatrical release but shines in its lengthy director’s cut…one can only hope Napoleon follows the same course.

Joaquin Phoenix is, in my never humble opinion, the best actor in the world, and yet in Napoleon he fails to settle into the role and feels decidedly detached from the character. This just isn’t a solid performance, as it feels scattershot and dramatically random, which is a shocking thing to say about a performance from a titanic acting talent like Joaquin Phoenix.

Vanessa Kirby is, as always, a luminous screen presence but she too is out of rhythm and entirely forgettable as Josephine, Napoleon’s wife. Josephine is quite a character and yet we never see her as an actual human being, only as a sort of conniving figurine…lovely to look at but ultimately empty.

Worse still is that the infamously combustible relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is deprived of any and all life. There is no chemistry or electricity between Phoenix’s Napoleon and Kirby’s Josephine. It is a lifeless and meaningless affair, which renders the rest of the film equally lifeless and meaningless.

The script, written by David Scarpa, is rudimentary, as it avoids getting under the skin of its subjects, and thus removes their motivations and humanity.

Yes, we know that Napoleon was a small man looking for a balcony, but why was he like that? And how did his relationship with Josephine propel that tyrannical instinct? And who was Josephine and what drove her to make the choices she makes? These are important question and none of them are answered or even remotely pondered in Napoleon.

There can be little doubt that Scarpa’s limited script is a large contributor to the less than stellar performances from usually spectacular actors like Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

I really wanted to love Napoleon because I love the talent involved (Ridley Scott, Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby) and the topic explored, but ultimately the movie, at least in its two-hour and thirty-seven-minute form, is a strange one that seems to be devoid of not just artistic and entertainment value, but of purpose and meaning.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon reminded me in some ways of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Both Scott and Scorsese are two of the most iconic filmmakers of their generation, and they both came out with sprawling, lengthy films this year that failed to live up to their prodigious talents and astonishing previous work. If I’m being brutally honest I would say that at least Napoleon looked better than Killers of the Flower Moon…but both fall decidedly flat.

At the previously mentioned Kubrick exhibit at LACMA, as I perused his notes, pre-production materials and photographs of his Napoleon that were on display, it pained me deeply upon seeing those treasures that Kubrick never made the film. I had the same feeling watching Ridley Scott’s version of Napoleon but for different reasons…as Scott’s failure on Napoleon simply taints what should have been a magnificent cinematic story, and leaves it terribly tarnished and unusable for at least another generation – not because its “so bad”, it isn’t, but because it’s just entirely uneventful and forgettable.

Back when Kurbick was contemplating his Napoleon movie, The Rolling Stones sang that “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need”.

Well, the first part is right…but as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon proves, the second sure as shit isn’t as I definitely didn’t need this Napoleon.

Kubrick’s Napoleon is what I wanted…Ridley Scott’s muddled mess of Napoleon is what I got.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Tar: A Review - Beware of Women in Pantsuits Behaving Badly

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: Cate Blanchett gives a phenomenal performance, but it might not be enough to elevate this movie above its massive third act failures.

Lydia, oh Lydia, have you heard about Lydia? Lydia the conductor lady.

The Lydia in question is the self-destructive, megalomaniacal, world-renowned, superstar conductor/composer Lydia Tar, the fictional lead character played by Cate Blanchett in the new movie Tar.

The film chronicles Tar’s balancing act atop the classical music world as she navigates her darker nature as well as cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. That Tar is a lesbian woman in a male-dominated field who abuses her power, is either a clever or cowardly twist on the story…but more on that later.

Tar is the first film for acclaimed director Todd Field in sixteen years, unfortunately, it fails to live up to all of its intriguing and tantalizing possibilities, but it does feature moments of brilliance that are deliriously enticing and highlight the art of cinema at its best.

For example, the very best scene in any movie this year is a ten-minute tour-de-force from early on in Tar. The scene, which has no cuts, revolves around Lydia Tar, one of the greatest living conductor/composers in the world, teaching a conducting class at Julliard. In the class, she interacts with a sheepishly overwhelmed but defiant “pan-gendered, BIPOC” student who mindlessly regurgitates the current cultural buffoonery regarding the “evils” of the canon of white European “cis” males…like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This student doesn’t like Bach because he was a “misogynist” who fathered twenty children, and therefore refuses to study him or examine his work.

Tar tries a variety of tactics to get this young student to abandon their myopic, identity-fueled, anti-intellectual position but to no avail. Then out of frustration, or fury, she drops her considerable intellectual hammer on him and exposes his personal idiocy for all to see. Then, in typical modern fashion, the “pan-gender, BIPOC” student does not engage Tar in debate or defend himself, but just storms off in a huff.

Watching this scene, which features a bravura performance from Blanchett, brilliant writing and deft camera choreography, was pure joy. So much so that I’ve gone back and watched just this single scene more than five times since I finished the film…it’s that good.

Part of what makes that scene so compelling is that Blanchett is simply one of the great actors and she’s on the top of her game in Tar.

Blanchett’s performance is mesmerizing because it’s so complex and layered. Blanchett is performing as Tar, who is someone who is constantly performing. Lydia Tar wears a mask incessantly in order to maintain the cult of artistic greatness she has built up around herself. Blanchett’s ability to maintain Tar’s deception and self-deception, is a testament to her expansive talent and enormous skill.

I’ve no doubt that Blanchett will be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and most likely will win it, and deservedly so, and that single, extended scene of her teaching at Julliard should be required viewing for any actors or actresses or aspiring actors or actresses.

But as glorious as that Julliard scene is, it’s also a sign of how far the film falls in its third act. I won’t give details to avoid spoilers, but this scene is visually referenced later in the movie in such a ham-handed, cheap, ‘Lifetime Movie of the Week’ way that it truly tarnishes and diminishes the entire film.

The first third of Tar is a truly engaging and phenomenal piece of arthouse moviemaking that skillfully pulls you in. But the final third is so rushed, and filled with a bevy of unearned narrative and character developments, that it scuttles the entire venture.

For example, the nadir for Lydia Tar comes in the third act when she humiliates herself in public (once again I won’t give details to avoid spoilers), but this scene is so poorly conceived and executed as to be absurd. It’s the height of unintentional comedy and the depths of cinematic malpractice.

The film’s devolution away from reality into hyper-drama, which includes the previously mentioned exploitation of the Julliard scene, as well as the over-the-top dramedy of Tar’s ultimate breakdown, destroy its cinematic and dramatic credibility. Ultimately, this renders the film an overly long, dramatically inert enterprise that is conspicuously devoid of artistic satisfaction.

One of the more intriguing themes of Tar is the notion of the cult of the great artist. Tar may or may not be supremely talented, but she deftly builds around herself this persona of great artistry and masterfully navigates the political landscape of the music world to make it manifest.

In this way Tar is reminiscent of her creator, writer/director Todd Field. Field was a middling actor before he became a director, and his great claim to fame was playing the supporting role of Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s last movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick died before that movie came out in 1999, but two years later Todd Field’s first feature film, In the Bedroom premiered. The marketing around Field and In the Bedroom dealt a lot with the notion that Field learned filmmaking at the foot of Kubrick, like he was Kubrick’s protégé or something. This narrative was untrue but it was clever, after all Field did act in a Kubrick film and Kubrick was no longer around to refute the notion of being his mentor.

I thought In the Bedroom was massively overrated and it seemed to me that critics, and the Oscars, loved the film and Field because they were, by extension, paying homage to the late, great Kubrick.

By constructing this Kubrick creation myth around his directing career, Field had successfully built a brand critics would support going forward. To be clear, Field is not some fraud, he did get his MFA from AFI after all, which is so small feat. And his movies, both In the Bedroom and Little Children, are not bad movies, but they also aren’t remarkable in any way. The point being that Field and his films simply are not worthy of the critical love they’ve received.

It's this theme of the cult of the great artist that I found to be the most alluring in Tar because it rings the most-true, as I’ve seen it up close and personal in its various stages in London, New York and Hollywood.

Other themes, like the cancel culture/#MeToo stuff, actually feel a little too cute by half. What I mean by that is that telling an abuse of power/sexual predation story but putting a lesbian woman as its protagonist is self-defeating and an act of artistic cowardice.

Audiences love Cate Blanchett and are willing to give her character a benefit of the doubt. Certain audiences, like the target audience of coastal elites who will be more likely to see Tar, are reflexively forgiving of “minorities”, like a gay woman in a male dominated field, Like Tar. This makes Lydia Tar, no matter her faults and failings, very redeemable in their eyes.

These audiences in turn would be automatically repulsed by a man who did the same things as Tar, because in their belief system and in our culture’s eyes, men are, simply put, irredeemable.

Because of this, it seems to me the more difficult, but ultimately more worthy and satisfying story to tell, is that of a man abusing his power like Tar, and trying to make that deemed irredeemable, redeemable.

For example, I couldn’t help but think that, as great as she is, if Cate Blanchett’s Tar were a man played by say…Robert Downey Jr., this film would’ve been infinitely more interesting, and much more controversial, which in turn would’ve led it to be at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.

No one is talking about Tar now. Normal people haven’t and won’t see it, and the talk shows and all the rest of the media world aren’t buzzing with debates over its merits or failings, its morality or immorality.

If Robert Downey Jr. was playing Tar, a charming yet arrogant musical genius (is anyone better at being arrogant and charming?) while Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson’s rape trials were on-going, people would have very strong opinions about it and not be afraid to share them.

But instead, we get a sort of soft peddling of a woman abusing her power, which feels like the equivalent of dipping a toe into the swamp that is sexual exploitation, instead of taking a deep dive.

To be clear, there’s a bunch of stuff I liked in Tar. Blanchett’s performance, Florian Hoffmeister’s subtle but powerful cinematography and Hildur Guonadottir’s score are worth the price of admission.

But unfortunately, the movie’s third act failings and its reluctance to get its hands too dirty on the #MeToo manure pile, neuter its artistic and narrative power and render it ultimately a rather unsatisfying and frustrating cinematic experience.

Regular audiences more at home at the cineplex, will be bored to tears by Tar’s deliberate arthouse pacing and its more symbolic storytelling devices.

Afficionados of the arthouse should give Tar a try, but I recommend if they wait until it hits streaming, as shelling out big bucks, either at the theatre or on Video on Demand, will feel like a bad decision in hindsight.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

On this episode, Barry and I don our coat and tails, grab a baton and orchestrate a discussion about Tar, the new Todd Field movie starring Cate Blanchett. Topics discussed include the ghost of Stanley Kubrick, the brilliance of Blanchett, self-marketing and the cult of the great artist, and the pain of a promising start followed by a failed finale. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 56 - Don't Look Up

On this episode, Barry and I brace for impact as we critique Adam McKay's polarizing, darkly comedic, climate change satire Don't Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Topics discussed include the trouble with satirizing the already absurd, the genius of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Barry's continuing obsession with Timothee Chalamet. Make sure to stay tuned for a post-credit nude scene!

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 56 - Don't Look Up

Thanks for listening!

©2021

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming...to Shoot a Movie in Space!

To: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, RAF Exchange Officer

From: Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, U.S. Space Force

CC: Dr. Strangelove – The War Room, General Buck Turgidson – Joints Chiefs of Staff, President Merkin Muffley – President of the United States of America.

Dear Captain Mandrake –

I regret to inform you that the Russians have once again beat us to the punch in the space race, this time by shooting the first feature film in space, and I’m deeply concerned that all American’s precious bodily fluids are now in grave danger.

Let me explain, Mandrake. For my entire life as a proud American, I was dutifully marinated in establishment media propaganda that long ago indoctrinated me with the holy belief that all things Russian are nefarious and evil. It was through this lens of star-spangled truth that I read the news that Russia had successfully sent actress Yulia Peresild (Battle of Sevastopol – 2015) and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station in order to shoot a feature length film in space, something never before accomplished.

What makes this space-based movie shoot for the film Challenge, which tells the tale of an emergency mission to the international space station to tend to an ailing cosmonaut, all the more villainous, is that it beat Hollywood legend Tom Cruise in the moviemaking-space-race, as the Mission Impossible star had hoped to be the first to pull off the stunt with the help of our friends at NASA and SpaceX.

Russians have long been scoring firsts when it comes to the space race against us, Mandrake, as they put the first satellite (Sputnik), first dog (Laika), first person (Yuri Gagarin) and first woman (Valentina Tereshkova) into space and also did the first space-walk (Alexei Leonov), but none of those victories came at the expense of American icon Tom Cruise.

Yes, we did beat those commie bastards (and we all know they’re still commies because a commie leopard can never change its spots!) by having Stanley Kurbick shoot a fake “moon landing” in Burbank…oops…that’s the pure-grain alcohol talking, please disregard that last statement. What I meant to say is that at least we beat those Rooskies to the moon. But still, Mandrake, I can’t help but feel that we’ve taken a hit on this one.

To add to my aggravation the New York Times is reporting that Dmitri Rogozin, head of the Russian state space agency Roscosmos, “hopes the mission will make ‘a truly serious work of art and a whole new develop of the promotion of space technologies’, in order to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.”

A movie as a “serious work of art”? How un-American can you get? Ami right, Mandrake?

Furthering my irritation is that NBC News reports that Rogozin said, “Movies long have become a powerful instrument of propaganda”, and that he hoped this new film would “counter the West’s attempts to ‘humiliate’ the Russian space program.” Can you believe he just openly admitted that this commie Russian movie is propaganda, Mandrake?

Personally, I’m proud to live in a free country that doesn’t manipulate movie audiences with mindless militarism and nationalist narratives meant to propagandize and indoctrinate them. By the way, Mandrake, did I ever tell you that my favorite Tom Cruise movie is Top Gun? I loved it when he slaughtered those MiG flying Soviet sons of bitches at the end.

Mandrake, understand this, as a devoted fan of Rachel Maddow and a devout consumer of American corporate media, I’m smart enough to connect the dots regarding this Russian movie-making space venture and can no longer sit back and remain quiet about the true nature of this devious mission.

I confidently declare to you that this mission is about using a mysterious microwave weapon, the same one used against our noble and loving intelligence agency operatives in Havana and across the globe, to sap and impurify all American’s precious bodily fluids.

Just like the mainstream media, I have no proof or any clear understanding of the plan, or how it works, or if this mysterious microwave weapon that impurifies American’s precious bodily fluids even exists, but that won’t stop me from acting against it.

To counter this cinematic microwave space-attack I believe we need to put into motion Operation Starlet Starship. If you’ll remember, Operation Starlet Starship gathers together every nubile young starlet in Hollywood, along with a select group of government and military leaders, like us, as well as Tom Cruise, and sends us into space so that we can run a breeding program in order to repopulate the U.S. after the microwave weapons attack wipes out all precious bodily fluids of every American.

I believe it was Buck Turgidson who came up with the idea of Operation Starlet Starship, and he recommended a Starlet to Stodgy Old Man ratio of 10-to-1. Wise old bird that General Turgidson.

If we can’t round up the requisite number of starlets, I suppose another option is to just get Tom Cruise up to space immediately and have him shoot an all-American, non-propaganda movie where he kills some evil commie cosmonauts as he dismantles their microwave weapon before it impurifies all our precious and vastly superior bodily fluids.

I’d love to see that movie, Mandrake, almost as much as most Americans would want to see all of Hollywood shot into deep space and never seen again. Hopefully we can get Tom Cruise into space before the Russian’s cinematic space plan gets too far advanced!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Clockwork Orange - Kurbick's Masterpiece Turns 50

‘A Clockwork Orange’ is fifty years old and rings as even more true today than it did in 1971.  

Kubrick’s masterwork of sex and violence is an insightful work of art that is deeply relevant to our depraved modern era.

Fifty-years-ago the Beethoven-loving Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) donned his droog uniform of all white, false eye-lashes (on one eye), a bowler hat and prominent codpiece, and sang and danced into our twisted hearts with his brutally ironic and ironically brutal rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”.

Yes, it’s been fifty years since A Clockwork Orange, director Stanley Kubrick’s controversial masterpiece, was unleashed upon the public. Apparently, time flies when you’re busy doing all that old in-out in-out and ultra-violence.

Kubrick’s highly-stylized, now iconic film, which was chock full of sex and violence and sexual-violence, shocked many, as even esteemed film critic Pauline Kael notoriously lambasted the film and called Kubrick a “pornographer”.

I recently bellied up to the Korova Milk Bar, put my feet up on a distractingly attractive nude mannequin, downed some Moloko-Plus (with drencrom) and re-watched the film and discovered that Kael is still egregiously wrong and that Kubrick’s vision has only gained in strength over the years.

Seeing the movie through the eyes of 2021 is an alarming exercise, not because the film is bad pornography but because the world of A Clockwork Orange bears an uncomfortable resemblance to our own.

The film is set in a dystopia that is both decaying yet decadent, where every relationship and inter-action is clouded by a will to power and will to pleasure that dehumanizes everything it touches. Alex’s universe is authoritarian and cruel on both an individual and institutional level, where everything and everyone is deeply marinated in a corrosive moral and ethical corruption. Sound familiar?

Turn on a television, read a newspaper or wade into the fetid swamp that is social media and you’ll experience the same ghastly, grotesque world Alex inhabited with only minor details being different.

Like violent cops, flag-waving militarists, MAGA members, Black Lives Matter, identity politics adherents, CRT proponents, or cancel culture Twitter mobs, for Alex and his droogs, cruelty isn’t a bug – it’s a feature, as it gets their blood pumping and gives their meaningless lives a momentary purpose.

Another striking similarity between the film’s world and our own is that everything is performative.

Whether it be the droogs fight against Billy Boy and his Nazi adorned gang – which is reminiscent of an Antifa v Proud Boys battle where the anti-fascists are just as fascist as the fascists they fight, occurs under a proscenium arch, or his infamous song and dance as he assaults the Alexander couple, or his on-stage humiliation under the spell of the Ludovico technique, or his smiling, steak-eating photo-op with the Minster of the Interior, Alex is always performing. And so it is with our time, where social media has morphed both the mundane and the monstrous and the personal and the political into performance art.

The most intriguing revelation of my re-watch was the realization that Alex’s odyssey down the bloody brick road of A Clockwork Orange is a journey to the most exalted position of power in any decaying and inverted civilization, that of victim.

Alex is a sort of anti-Christ, not in the sense that he is Satan but rather that his suffering ultimately does not bring about any personal or spiritual catharsis, but rather solidifies in him the fallen nature of man.  

Like the apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey who evolve to use bones as weapons, victimhood just becomes another tool for Alex to reap violence. When he is labelled a “victim of the modern age” the wily Alex quickly recognizes that moniker as a powerful new weapon and thoroughly embraces it.

This evolution doesn’t turn Alex from a barbaric beast into a beatified being, but instead makes him an even more monstrous predator able to swim with a higher class of sharks, namely the Minister of the Interior who fills Alex’s gob with filet in front of a mindless press who eats up the story like Alex does his well-served meal.  

In our current age where victimhood reigns supreme, there are hordes of eager new Alex’s yearning for this ultimate superweapon, and none of them even care a lick about Ludwig Van. These self-declared victims know to exploit their stories to gain power, while others emulate that manipulation and conjure victimhood where none exists in order to elevate their social status and bludgeon their enemies. Of course, the establishment media drink up this insidious victimhood narrative like its Moloka Plus with Vellocet.

Re-watching A Clockwork Orange made it abundantly clear that a movie like this, as great as it is, could never be made in a cultural climate like ours.

The film is too bold, too brash, too brazen in its honest yet stylized depiction of the foibles and failures of humanity and our society, and to unflinching in its artistic honesty and insight.

In addition, Kubrick, despite the fact he is one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, would be deemed too ‘problematic’ and his politics too amorphous to pass the cancel culture test of 2021.

The film also features a prodigious amount of nudity and violence which in our oddly and performatively puritanical times would make it a no go for the corporate entities of Hollywood, which is ironic since our country and culture is so steeped in actual pornography and real-life violence.

Thankfully A Clockwork Orange did get made and it was a great film in 1971 and is even greater when seen in the context of 2021. Do yourself a favor and go watch it and see that Kubrick wasn’t just a cinematic genius, he was a prophet.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Pentagon and China's Propaganda Wars (Expanded Edition)

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 14 seconds

The Pentagon and China are waging a propaganda war against their own people, and the greedy globalists of corporate Hollywood are happy to help

Hollywood won’t choose between the totalitarian Sauron of China and the authoritarian Darth Vader of the U.S. military, but instead will support both evils, and the people of the world and the art of cinema will suffer greatly because of it.

There is currently a propaganda war being waged by China and the U.S. military where both want to control Hollywood, and therefore the minds of their citizenry, for their own nefarious means.

Not surprisingly, like whores at a battlefield brothel, the morally ambiguous harlots of Hollywood are trying to profit by servicing both combatants.

PEN America, a group championing free expression, recently released an exhaustive report detailing how China has taken control over Hollywood.

The report states, “The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”

China strictly controls films released in their market, which is soon to become the largest box office in the world, and Hollywood wants in on that lucrative action, so they appease their Chinese overlords by obeying censorial demands, like whitewashing a Tibetan character from Marvel’s Dr. Strange, and strenuously self-censoring, like cancelling a planned sequel to World War Z.

The whitewashing of a Tibetan character from Dr. Strange is particularly interesting as that became the outrage of the moment back in 2016 when the movie was released. Many activists and journalists howled at the inherent racism of casting a white woman (Tilda Swinton) in a role that was an Asian man in the source material. Interestingly enough, Disney (who owns Marvel) stayed entirely silent throughout the controversy. The PEN America report shows that the reason for the whitewashing was that China wouldn’t allow a Tibetan portrayed on screen, so Disney dutifully complied in an attempt to get the film in the Chinese market. Disney also kept its mouth shut as to why it engaged in whitewashing in order to cover up its appeasement to Chinese demands.

Disney genuflecting to China should come as no surprise. In 1998, Disney’s then CEO, Michael Eisner, met with Premier Zhu Rongji to talk about Disney’s desired expansion into China and the 1997 Martin Scorsese biography of the Dalai Lama it produced, Kundun, which infuriated the Chinese government.

The loathsome Eisner said of Kundun, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner then groveled further, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”

In the two decades since then, Chinese power has only grown and Hollywood has only become more and more weak kneed and reflexively compliant.

This Orwellian sentiment of controlled storytelling to fit a government-approved narrative is not limited to the communists of China though. The U.S. military has long had a very fruitful arrangement with Hollywood where they exchange free military equipment, expertise, personnel and locations in exchange for ultimate control over scripts.

Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, sounded like Xi Jinping when he described Pentagon expectations while cooperating with a movie, “We’re not going to support a program that…presents us in a compromising way.”

PEN America notes this Pentagon propaganda program, “…the United States government has benefitted from, encouraged, and at times even directed Hollywood filmmaking as an exercise in soft power.”

But then disingenuously dismisses it, “But this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing’s does.”

That is an absurd contention as the Pentagon picks movies based on a studio’s willingness to conform to its rigidly pro-military narrative standard, which is, in function if not form, just like China picking which Hollywood movies it allows to run in its country based on their adherence to a pro-China criteria.

Regardless, the reality is if Hollywood can financially benefit by acquiescing to the Pentagon and/or China’s demands, it certainly will.

In response to China’s Hollywood propaganda, Sen. Ted Cruz proposed the egregiously titled Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act.

Cruz’s bill aims to kneecap Hollywood studios by withholding access to U.S. government support – the Pentagon propaganda program, if they alter their movies to appease Chinese censors.

Of course, SCRIPT will never go anywhere as the Motion Picture Association of America will aggressively lobby to get the whole thing scuttled to keep both Chinese and Pentagon money flowing to La La Land.

On the bright side, the SCRIPT Act has at least frightened the propagandists in the Pentagon and Hollywood enough that they are now openly touting their shadowy alliance.

For example, The Military Times recently ran a jaw dropping op-ed by Jim Lechner shamelessly espousing Hollywood’s Pentagon propaganda.

Lechner admits, “…limits on the cooperation with skilled storytellers at the American movie companies would significantly degrade the ability of the U.S. government to tell its own story…”

Lechner then boasts, “…over the decades, Hollywood has provided one of the most powerfully positive images of our military. No Pentagon-based press relations operation could come close to what Hollywood has achieved through its films.”

Over the last three decades, the Pentagon-Hollywood alliance has drastically altered American’s perception of the military and successfully neutered filmmakers as artists and truth-tellers.

For example, in the 70’s and 80’s Francis Ford-Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, made great anti-war films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, that explored the dark side of American militarism and empire.

That type of artistic and intellectually challenging anti-war movie went on the endangered species list in 1986 when the Pentagon collaborated on the making of the blockbuster Top Gun, and has since become extinct, which is why we haven’t had any great movies detailing the heinous fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Oliver Stone spoke about how he had wanted for decades to make a movie about the My Lai Massacre but was unable to get a studio on board for funding. Stone did not explicitly state this, but the implication was clear, the Pentagon’s propaganda program not only assists pro-military movies, but intimidates studios into avoiding films that are anti-war or highlight military misdeeds.

Ironically, Top Gun has become not only a symbol of the Pentagon’s propaganda prowess, but of China’s as well. In the poster for the sequel due out this year, Tom Cruise’s Maverick is still wearing his signature leather jacket, but in order to appease Chinese censors, gone from its back are the prominent Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the original.

The modern golden era of Hollywood films exploring the darker side of China peaked in 1997 with Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. China’s swift and severe reaction to those films and the studios and production companies that made them, was extremely effective as it has resulted in studios strangling any truthful artistic exploration of Chinese themes and stories in order to avoid alienating the Chinese Communist Party and potentially missing out on the ever expanding Chinese box office.

As a cinephile and a truth-seeker, I want to see films made by true artists that chronicle the dramatically potent moral and ethical atrocities of both America and China. The plethora of post 9-11 American evils (surveillance, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan) and the brutal Chinese atrocities against the Uighers, Tibetans and members of the Falun Gong, are fertile cinematic ground. But sadly…thanks to Hollywood’s insidious, incessant and insatiable greed, none of those important stories will ever be told on the big screen.

The reality is that the propaganda war is already over and the authoritarian and totalitarian corporatists, globalists and militarists of Hollywood, Washington and Beijing, have handily won…and we the people, and the art of cinema, have lost. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Sam Mendes’ visually stunning new war film may generate Oscar hype, but it is ultimately an underwhelming and totally forgettable cinematic venture.

With the media telling me that the world, or certain parts of it, is once again potentially on the verge of war, I did the brave and noble thing and ventured out to my local movie theatre to see Oscar winning director Sam Mendes’ new World War I film, 1917.

My hope was that 1917, a recent winner of the Golden Globe for Best Picture and Best Director, would be a powerful film that would remind audiences, particularly the more belligerent American ones, of the spiritual, emotional and physical toll of war and the inherent inhumanity, futility and barbarity of waging one. Sadly, 1917 is not up to the task.

The film, which boasts a solid cast that stars George MacKay with supporting turns from Dean Charles-Chapman, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth, is the story of two British soldiers in World War I sent on a dangerous mission to save hundreds of their countrymen from an impending German ambush.

 1917 has all the makings of a great movie as it tells a compelling war story, is beautifully shot and proficiently acted, the problem though is that those ingredients never coalesce into a cohesive cinematic meal that satisfies and viewers are left still feeling hungry after the closing credits roll.

The best thing about 1917 is the exquisite cinematography, as it is beautifully shot by one of the great cinematographers in film history, Roger Deakins, a 14 time Oscar nominee. The film has generated a lot of buzz because it is shot and edited so that it appears as if the entire movie were filmed in one long take. That ‘one long take’ approach could be thought a gimmick in lesser hands, but Deakins uses it to expertly draw the viewer into the narrative and escort them through the film’s journey. Deakins’ ability to use camera movement, framing, light and shadow to propel the story is sublime and visually gorgeous to behold.

No, the problem with 1917 is certainly not the look of the film, but rather the feel of it. As impressive as the movie is visually, it never resonates emotionally and ends up being a rather hollow cinematic experience. The blame for that failure lay squarely at the feet of writer/director Sam Mendes.

Mendes’ shallow script has fundamental structural and dramatic flaws, such as plot points that hit too soon or too late, that keep viewers at arms length from the two main characters, Lance Corporal William Schofield (MacKay) and Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Charles-Chapman). Due to the script’s failures, viewers never really have too much invested in Schofield and Blake as they are whisked along on their perilous odyssey. This emotional detachment reduces the twists and turns of the story into mere storytelling devices without emotional power, and thus the movie often feels reduced to a roller coaster ride or a video game, which can be exciting but predictable and never dramatically profound.

I have long found Mendes to be a middling talent, and a brief perusal of his filmography is a study in underachievement and wasted opportunities. American Beauty (1999) won Mendes his Best Directing Oscar but is a movie that has not stood the test of time and is, in fact, like its star Kevin Spacey, quite embarrassing in retrospect. Other Mendes films, like Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary Road (2008) had fantastic casts and interesting stories but, like 1917, never coalesced into cinematic greatness.

Another issue plaguing 1917 is that as a war movie it will inevitably be measured against other notable films in that genre, and it does not fare well in comparison. For instance, it is not as technically superior, particularly in terms of the sound, or as artistically ambitious as Christopher Nolan’s time and perspective bending WWII tour de force Dunkirk (2017). It lacks the emotional resonance and spiritual profundity of Terrence Malick’s thoughtful The Thin Red Line (1998), and has nowhere near the psychological and political insights of a masterpiece like Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). It also fails to convey the sheer madness and depravity of war like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1978), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).

On the surface, 1917 is somewhat evasive in its political, moral and ethical perspective, and avoids dirtying its hands in the complexity of war. Mendes shows his true bourgeois colors though by choosing to focus the narrative exclusively on the nobility and heroism of the soldiers who fight the war and never even hinting at the malignancy of those in the officer and ruling class who cynically wage it. In Mendes’ hands, World War I is a morally sterile and ethically antiseptic venture that was little more than a stage to showcase the better angels of British soldier’s nature.

Mendes sticks to this painstakingly straight forward and uncomplicated approach in 1917 because he wants the audience, particularly the older, Anglophile viewers who vote for the Academy Awards, to mindlessly gobble up his middle-brow Oscar bait and not get bogged down with too many difficult questions he is ill-equipped to ask, never mind answer.

Sadly, in the hands of the artistically obtuse Sam Mendes, 1917 is incapable of being the great and profound war film the world needs right now, the type that challenges audiences and changes hearts and minds. At its best, 1917 is a stunning piece of technical virtuosity reduced to a mildly entertaining, but ultimately forgettable, film.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

1917: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. this is a good but not great film that never rises to meet its ambitions. If you are a cinephile who loves the great cinematography of Roger Deakins, then see this movie in the theatre, everyone else can wait for it to arrive on Netflix or cable and see it for free.

1917, written and directed by Sam Mendes, is the story of two British soldiers sent on a dangerous and desperate mission to deliver a message warning of an ambush in World War I. The film stars George MacKay and Dean Charles-Chapman, with supporting turns from Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth.

1917 is a cinematically ambitious and athletic film that has all the trappings of a great war movie, and yet, I found the film to be a bit of a hollow, soulless experience. The movie is shot and edited in a way so as to give audiences the impression that it is all done in one long take. This ‘single take’ is an interesting approach, and it does help to draw viewers in and push the pace of the film, but that said, it also feels a little bit like a gimmick (especially since they didn’t really shoot it in one take) most notably because the film lacks specificity and detail in script and character development.

For this reason 1917 reminded me somewhat of Saving Private Ryan, which is much remembered for its very athletic opening D-Day sequence. Beyond that sequence, Saving Private Ryan was a rather pedestrian rehashing of every patriotic war movie trope that had come before it. Similarly, 1917 is very cinematically athletic in its execution with its illusion of one long continuous take, but it is also just as conventional in its narrative structure and theme as Saving Private Ryan.

In 1917, just as in Saving Private Ryan, the protagonists must go from point A to point B through enemy lines on a mission to save someone. That journey, in both films, certainly has its moments, but never breaks any new cinematic or storytelling ground.

The film is also thematically and politically the same as Saving Private Ryan, as it refuses to embrace any skepticism or cynicism in regards to the futility and inhumanity of such a heinous war, and only ends up taking a rather limp-wristed, neo-liberal stance rooted in misplaced patriotism and ham-fisted heroism.

As beautifully as 1917 is shot, and the cinematography of Roger Deakins is unquestioningly exquisite, the film is devoid of emotional resonance. It all feels more like a detached exercise than a drama, as the film fails to generate the requisite emotion needed to propel it to great cinematic heights. Characters are certainly put in peril in 1917 but it all comes across as rather empty and soulless.

I also thought of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which is a war movie unlike any other war movie made, while I watched 1917. In Dunkirk, Nolan messes with time and perspective and puts on such a technical tour de force that his film overwhelms viewers. With 1917, while the ‘one long camera take’ does add to the drama and compel the viewer along the journey, the rest of the filmmaking feels a bit underwhelming…especially in comparison to Dunkirk. For instance, Dunkirk’s music, courtesy of Hans Zimmer, is a ticking time bomb throughout the film, heightening the sense of peril and existential dread. In 1917, Thomas Newman’s music is more conventional and swells used to indicate when viewers should feel emotions the film hasn’t yet earned. In addition, the sound desing and editing in Dunkirk is vastly superior to that of 1917.

As is evident by my review so far, the biggest issue facing 1917 is that it is impossible to see a war film and not compare it to other war films. 1917 is not a bad movie, it just isn’t anywhere near the caliber of film as say Dunkirk, The Thin Red Line or Kubrick’s World War I masterpiece Paths of Glory. Director Sam Mendes has very big shoes to fill in tackling the war film genre, and the unfortunate truth is that his cinematic feet are much too small.

I did like the cast of 1917, and thought the film’s lead George MacKay did excellent work. MacKay has a sort of everyman appeal to him and he embraced the rigors of the movie with aplomb. MacKay carries the weight of the film upon him and endures the slings and arrows of his mission with enough charisma to keep viewers engaged.

The rest of the cast have small roles and tackle them with the usual British professionalism that we’ve come to know and love. Mark Strong is particularly British with his stiff upper lip and all that, and Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch do Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch type of things in small roles.

The cinematography of Roger Deakins is stellar. Deakins camera flows through the movie and feels like a string pulling viewers along. Deakins is one of the great cinematographers of all time and his framing and use of light in 1917, particularly the orange glow of fire during the night time scenes, is sublime.

As previously stated, and much to my chagrin, I found the sound and the music of 1917 to be lacking as they never rose to the level of Deakins photography. The soundtrack in particular felt very forced and lacking in coherence and originality.

Sam Mendes is a celebrated director but he has always seemed like a second rate talent to me. Mendes won a Best Director Oscar for his work in American Beauty back in 1999, but that film and his work on it, have not stood the test of time in the least. Watching Ameican Beauty now is a cringe-worthy experience as the performances, most notably Best Actor winner Kevin Spacey, are so “theatrical” as to be embarrassing, and Mendes’ direction is equally geared toward the overly expressive. Since American Beauty, Mendes has churned out a series of films that always felt like they should be great but just never were. These ambitious but seriously flawed films, such as Jarhead, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road and Away We Go, all suffered under Mendes’ lack of vision, style, specificity and detail. Mendes also made two Bond movies, Skyfall and Spectre, which are certainly fine in terms of Bond films, but are not exactly cinematic masterpieces.

I think the bottom line regarding Sam Mendes is that he is a theatre director at heart and he has never fully been able to shake off the stink of the stage. Mendes does not have the vision of an auteur or strong cinematic instincts and his film’s have suffered greatly because of it. I think 1917 is another example of Mendes simply being a bit out of his natural element.

If you want to see a really great and profound World War I film I highly recommend you check out Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) starring Kirk Douglas, in maybe his greatest role, or check out Lewis Milestone’s 1930 epic, All Quiet on the Western Front. Both films not only do a better job of being emotionally resonant and cinematically engaging than 1917, they also have the artistic courage to make a dramatic statement about the inherent madness of war.

In conclusion, I liked 1917 well enough but did not love it. The film is compelling for what it is but never rises to be anything more than a good war film, not a great one. If you want to be mildly entertained and enjoy Roger Deakins gorgeous cinematography, then I recommend you see 1917 in the theatres, but if you are lukewarm on the subject matter and aren’t a big cinephile, then you should wait until 1917 is on Netflix or cable and see it for free.

©2020

'Patron Saint of Incels'? Woke Outrage over Joker is a Bad Joke

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Critics and woke people are up in arms over Joker because they think “evil” white men will like it and be inspired to kill.

It used to be that it was right-wingers who would get outraged over movies they deemed “dangerous” because they offended their delicate sensibilities, Last Temptation of Christ and Brokeback Mountain being prime examples. Now it is left-wing scolds who reflexively denounce movies they find “problematic”, with the highly anticipated Joker having raised their self-righteous ire.

Joker opens on October 4th and is directed by Todd Phillips and stars Joaquin Phoenix. The highly anticipated movie is inspired by Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and is thought to be a breath of fresh air in the comic book genre and the antithesis of the corporate Marvel movies. Joker tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a disaffected white man who eventually becomes Batman’s nemesis, the super villain Joker.

Fleck being white has ignited a moral panic over Joker, because according to woke twitter, white men are inherently violent, and so Joker is dangerous as it will act as a pied piper leading lonely white men to commit Joker-esque mass shootings.

The criticisms of Joker on twitter are stunning for the shameless level of scorn and hatred brazenly heaped upon white men.

Tweets saying “I don’t want to be around any of the lonely white boys who relate to it”, and “Joker movie is starting to look like a sympathetic tale of a ‘wronged by society’ white dude and their entitlement to violence” and “in a time of increasing violence perpetrated by disaffected white men, is it really the best thing to keep making movies that portray disaffected white men doing violence as sympathetic?”, highlight the racial animus animating the Joker moral panic. It is inconceivable that such venom would be acceptable against any other racial group, such as African-Americans or Muslims.

The Joker panic has spread like a contagion from twitter to the real world, where police have vowed to increase their presence at theatres, and some cinemas are banning ticket holders who wear costumes.

The US Army and the FBI have issued a warning that some “incels” or involuntary celibates, may violently target screenings of Joker.

Family members of victims of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting, have even written a letter to Warner Brothers, conveying their concerns over Joker and imploring the studio to support anti-gun causes. This is puzzling as the Aurora tragedy was during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, which didn’t feature the Joker, and while some early reports claimed the shooter dressed like the Joker and declared,  “I am the Joker”, those reports have been thoroughly debunked. This conflating of Joker with Aurora reveals the vacuity of the frenzy.

The hysteria around Joker has infected American film critics as well. When Joker premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival it received a twenty-minute ovation and won the coveted Golden Lion for best picture. The last two Golden Lion winners, Roma and The Shape of Water, went on to be nominated for twenty-three Oscars combined, winning seven. Joker’s reception at Venice would seem to be indicative of the film’s artistic bona fides, but American critics, who are more interested in pretentious pandering and virtue signaling, strongly disagree.

Stephanie Zacharek of Time, said of Joker, “the aggressive and possibly irresponsible idiocy of Joker is his (director Phillips) alone to answer for”.

Zacharek goes on to state that Arthur Fleck, “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels.”

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker opined, “I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade…”

David Edelstein of Vulture, described the film as “morally blech”, then went full on Godwin’s law in his review when he declared, “As Hannah Arendt saw banality in the supposed evil of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, I see in Joker an attempt to elevate nerdy revenge to the plane of myth.”

Film critics getting the vapors over a movie is nothing new, as cinema history is riddled with fraught hyperbole over “dangerous” movies.

In 1955 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther bemoaned Rebel Without a Cause because “it is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture.”

In 1971 esteemed critic Pauline Kael decried A Clockwork Orange, denouncing the film as “corrupt” and describing director Stanley Kubrick as “a pornographer”.

In 1989, Joe Klein, a critic for New York wrote an infamous piece on Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing. Klein wrote, “If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions…if they react violently – which can’t be ruled out…”

Klein went on to write that the sole message black teens would take from the film was “The police are your enemy” and “White people are your enemy”.

In a great example of the intoxicating power of the Joker moral panic, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr wrote an article about Joker where he references Klein’s historically embarrassing take on Do the Right Thing, but instead of using Klein’s egregiously myopic article as a cautionary tale, Burr instead embraces the reflexive emotionalism of the Joker moral panic.

Burr declares of Joker, ““Is it “reckless”? Honestly, in my opinion, yeah, and if that makes me this year’s Joe Klein, so be it. To release into this America at this time a power fantasy that celebrates — that’s right, Warner Bros., celebrates — a mocked loner turned locked-and-loaded avenging angel is an act of willful corporate naivete at best, complicity at worst, and blindness in the middle”

As Burr concedes in his article, there is no causal link between violent movies or video games and mass shootings, and yet because Burr “feels” uneasy, he deems Joker guilty of being “dangerous”.

The bottom line is this, there have been shootings before Joker, and unfortunately, there will certainly be shootings after Joker, but Joker will not “cause” anyone to kill people. Human beings will be violent not because of movies but because they are human beings. As Kubrick so eloquently showed us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution has not removed our violent impulse, only given us better weapons.

The purpose of art is to, sometimes uncomfortably, examine humanity and reflect the world in which it exists, and by examining and reflecting, hopefully give the audience a deeper insight and understanding of themselves, their fellow humans and the world in which they inhabit. I have not seen Joker, so I don’t know if it does those things well, but from the plethora of negative reviews I’ve read from American critics, their problem with Joker is that it does those things all too well.

These critics, both professional and amateur, prefer not to examine the origins of the isolation, alienation and rage felt by disaffected white working class males who are inundated with messages from the media and the education system that stigmatize and/or criminalize whiteness and traditional masculinity.

They want to ignore or malign these men, particularly those in middle age, even though they are dying from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose or alcoholism) at alarming rates that have more than doubled over the last twenty years.

Joker is not a clarion call to white male violence, it is a desperate attempt at a diagnosis of the pandemic that is killing white men and will eventually kill America.

Joker’s effete and effeminate critics, the eunuchs sprawled on fainting couches at the thought of having to bear a cinematic meditation on the heart of darkness at the center of an iconic super villain, are a bad joke. Their insidiously overwrought outrage and moral panic over Joker exposes their egregious unworthiness as thinkers and critics, and frankly, the vapid unseriousness of our culture.

 A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 1, 2019 AT RT.

© 2019

Ready Player One: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. If you like Spielbergian action movies, see it in the theater. If you are lukewarm or want some deeper meaning, there is no reason to see this movie even for free on cable or Netflix.

Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline (based upon Cline's book of the same name), is the science-fiction adventure story of 17 year-old orphan Wade West, a skilled gamer living in the slums of Columbus, Ohio who takes on a powerful technology company in a virtual reality game titled The Oasis. The film stars Tye Sheridan as Wade along with Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance and TJ Miller in supporting roles. 

I admit that I was less than enthused about going to see Ready Player One because I tend to find Steven Spielberg to be insufferable as a filmmaker. Spielberg's pedophiliac addiction to recreating child like wonder always feels contrived, formulaic and frankly, a bit creepy to me. It hasn't always been thus, as I think both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are utter masterpieces, but as the 1970's receded so did Spielberg's balls along with his artistic and aesthetic originality. 

It was in this rather negative frame of mind that I went to see Ready Player One. When the film opened with the iconic keyboard introduction to Van Halen's 1984 mega-hit "Jump" off of their aptly titled album 1984, I have to admit, it got me. You see, as a teenager in the 80's I was a huge fan of Van Halen (and to be clear I was a fan of Van Halen, NOT Van Hagar…so do NOT bring any of that weak-ass Van Hagar shit in here…DO.NOT.DO IT.), so much so that my best friend Keith would routinely play the opening notes on his keyboard, which was my cue to find the nearest chair, couch or table from which I would do my flying split jumps David Lee Roth style. While this usually happened in the midst of a Jack Daniels induced haze, foggy memories remain and they are among the fondest of my young adulthood. 

The signature sound of Eddie Van Halen's keyboards was a striking synchronicity for me that did not just recall good times though, but also something much more existentially unsettling. The darkness recalled was the fact that this month, April (April 17 to be exact), is the 21st anniversary that my "Jump" playing friend Keith was killed. And so when I heard the start of that classic Van Halen song at the opening of Ready Player One, the overwhelming feeling that surged through me wasn't the giddy pulse of nostalgia that Spielberg anticipated, but a profound melancholy and emotional fragility. 

It is somewhat ironic that I should be triggered to recount the crippling grief of losing a loved one at the beginning of a film where life is entirely disposable and when it is over you just get a to hit a button and start over. The existential questions that boil up to the surface when attempting to contemplate the incomprehensible are ultimately unanswerable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask them. Great artists and great art exists to ask those questions, and to let the silence of the eternal void be their answer. Ready Player One mimes asking big questions, but all it really does is provide easy answers, which renders it a sort of philosophical and artistic fool's gold wrapped in the shallow glitz of pop culture.  

As "Jump" played on, Eddie Van Halen's keyboard is supplemented by David Lee Roth's Spielbergian lyric which perfectly captures the 1980's ethos and quickly becomes the perfect anthem for Wade West, the protagonist of Ready Player One,

"I get up, and nothing gets me down, you've got it tough? I've seen the toughest soul around. And I know, baby just how you feel, you've got to roll with the punches, to get to what's real"

Spielberg's camera follows Wade as he makes his way through "the stacks", a maze of mobile homes piled on top of each other to create a ghetto of makeshift apartment buildings. This opening sequence is not a particularly skilled piece of filmmaking, in fact, it is pretty standard, but it does effectively set the stage for the story, the myth and the subtext that lies ahead. 

The choice of Van Halen's "Jump" is not coincidental, and it reminded me of a quote that Joseph Campbell often used to repeat and which I have often repeated throughout my life. 

A bit of advice, given to a young Native American, at the time of his initiation: "As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think."

The story of Ready Player One is that of Wade West and his Oasis alter ego Parzifal (paging Joseph Campbell and the Holy Grail!), finding the courage to "Jump". Wade West is being initiated from boyhood into manhood and he must pass the tests presented to him…sort of like in a video game…and in the case of Ready Player One…exactly like a video game. 

Ready Player One is also an unabashed tribute mostly to the pop culture of the 80's (although other decades get slight nods as well), hence the use of Van Halen's "Jump", which is the quintessential 80's anthem from the quintessential 80's band. The movie is populated by, and littered with, the pop cultural remnants from that shoulder padded decade that gave us such cinematic signposts as Back to the Future, Ghostbusters and a cornucopia of John Hughes movies. Ready Player One is also Steven Spielberg's tribute to himself, as he was as much a shaper and creator of the pop-culture of the 1980's and beyond as anyone living or dead. 

Of course, Spielberg sees Ready Player One as an homage, but I see it more as an indictment, or to be even darker, a cinematic eulogy. Spielberg's overall impact on popular culture has been detrimental in deeply cataclysmic ways. As Spielberg ushered in the blockbuster era of moviemaking in the 1980's, he struck a death knell for the artistic renaissance of the Easy Rider-Raging Bull era of the 60's and 70's where auteurs flourished and quality cinema thrived. 

Spielberg's corporatized moviemaking was meant to reinforce the establishment, not rebel against it, as fellow filmmakers of his generation were often trying to do. Spielberg turned from a potential 1970's revolutionary artist to an 1980's establishment Praetorian Guard who churned out pop culture meant to embolden the status quo, appease those in power, anesthetize the masses and fatten his bank account. Spielberg has been a malignant force shaping popular culture for the last forty years, and because of that he is as much to blame as anyone for the artistic, intellectual and cultural decay that is besieging the American soul and which comes to life on screen in Ready Player One. Seen through this perspective, Spielberg's Ready Player One feels like a film about lung cancer made by The Marlboro Man. 

As evidenced by my reaction to "Jump", I found Ready Player One's 80's nostalgia to be very manipulative, but as someone who grew up in that era, I can attest that it is at times very effectively deployed. But again, it is the end to which that nostalgic means is used with which I have an issue. Much like Trump's Make America Great Again was a nostalgic clarion call for the antisepticism of the 1950's, Spielberg's Ready Player One's nostalgia yearns for a decade just as suffocatingly conformist as the 1950's but even more toxic, the 1980's. 

Ready Player One's mythology, like the mythology of Reagan, Oprah and Spielberg's Baby-Boomer Corporate America where all life is commodified solely for profit, is one that contorts the human heart and psyche in order to make avarice and narcissism virtues and not vices. The form of cheap pop culture grace found in Ready Player One is meant to obfuscate our true humanity and maintain our delusional, money and celebrity centered society. 

Interestingly, Spielberg plays Van Halen's "Jump" for its entirety throughout the film's opening, which is rather striking as he is not a filmmaker, like Scorsese, known for utilizing pop or rock music to great effect. Spielberg's use of pop and rock music in Ready Player One though is done very well, and like the recent spate of television shows mining the 80's for music that can manipulate middle aged and younger generations simultaneously, Spielberg is wise to do so. 

As much as watching Ready Player One is like watching someone else play a video game, the cavalcade of pop culture and musical references make it a much more palatable and intriguing experience than I imagined it could be. That is not to say that there aren't downfalls to watching a video game movie, there are, such as the characters looking weird and un-relatable and the action being way over the top. 

Like all Spielberg films, there are certainly moments that are so contrived and hackneyed as to be cringe-worthy. Spielberg has always struggled dealing with grounded, genuine human emotion and interaction, and so it is in Ready Player One, but he is aided in that dilemma by two charismatic and compelling performances from his leading actors, Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke. Both Sheridan and Cooke make lemonade out of the lemon of a script they are given that in the hands of lesser actors would have been disastrous. 

TJ Miller and Mark Rylance both give quirky and interesting performances that I thoroughly enjoyed. Miller is an acquitted taste as an actor but I confess I have acquired it. Rylance is his usual, odd, enigmatic and intriguing self as James Halliday, the creator of The Oasis, and the film is better for it. Both actors are able to elevate the rather mundane material they are given. 

On the down side, Ben Mendelsohn plays corporate bad guy Nolan Sorrento and he never quite musters the focused energy and gravitas needed to play such a pivotal villain. Lena Waithe, Phillip Zhao and Win Morisaki are all pretty underwhelming as well in supporting roles that feel terribly under written and reek of tokenism. 

Another issue I had was that there are some scenes that are "flashbacks" but they use the same actors to play themselves younger and it doesn't work at all. The actors all look like old people dressed differently and pretending to be younger. For a film that is so heavily invested in technology, the inability to perfect the age in flashbacks is embarrassing. I know it is a hard thing to do, but it isn't like Spielberg doesn't have the money to get it right, an example of getting it right being Robert Downey Jr. in the "flashback" sequence in Captain America: Civil War. 

And one final issue I had with the movie was that Spielberg uses a Stanley Kubrick film as a narrative device (So as not to spoil it I won't name which one). This is not a crime in and of itself, but when Spielberg "Spielberg-izes" Kubrick's work, like he did with the irritatingly inept A.I., he always ruins it. Spielberg does the same thing to Kubrick in Ready Player One, where he takes a great idea, tinkers with it, turns it into a theme-park ride, and instead of Kubrickian filet mignon all we are left with is a very fragrant Spielbergian shit sandwich. I found this sequence to be so very frustrating because all of the pieces were in place for a stunning and extremely clever cinematic success if Spielberg hadn't screwed it all up. 

But with all that said, as someone who is generally less than enamored with Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker, to his credit, my very low expectations going in to Ready Player One were exceeded. Ready Player One is not a great movie but it held my attention and entertained me for two hours and twenty minutes, and that ain't nothing.

In conclusion, even though I find the very deep seeded spiritual, political, psychological and mythological message that underlies this entire film (and the majority of Spielberg's work) to be equally vacuous, insidious, nefarious and mendacious, I very tentatively admit that I was mildly entertained by it all. I think if you grew up in the 80's and a vapid, nostalgia laced Spielberg action movie intrigues you, then you should go see Ready Player One in the theaters, as it should be experienced on the big screen.

But be forewarned, as I found out the hard way, a nostalgic "Jump" to the past doesn't just conjure up pleasant memories, but can open old wounds as well. Ready Player One inadvertently opened up an existential wound in me that the movie and its filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, were metaphysically incapable of comprehending, never mind healing. This is why, unlike master filmmakers like Kubrick, Malick, Scorsese, P.T. Anderson and Kurosawa, Spielberg can only ever aspire to be a creature of style over substance and a purveyor of pop culture, as he is wholly incapable of ever being a transcendent artist due to the fact that he makes movies that give easy answers, but that never dare to ask the real question. 

©2018

Bridge of Spies : A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!***

MY RATING : SKIP IT.

Bridge of Spies, written by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen and directed by Steven Spielberg, is the story of James B. Donovan, an American insurance lawyer who must defend Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy arrested in Brooklyn in 1957 at the height of the cold war. Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, struggles to overcome both overt and covert legal, popular and familial hostility in order to give Abel (Mark Rylance) a worthy defense.

The first half of the film is dedicated to Donovan's defense of Abel amid a corrupt legal system. The second half of the film follows Donovan's attempts to facilitate a prisoner swap In East Germany between the Soviets, who want Abel back, and the Americans, who want infamous U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers back. This prisoner swap is made even more complicated as the negotiations are occurring as the Berlin Wall is being built, and an American college student is trapped on the wrong side of the wall.

If you asked most "normal" people, "normal" meaning people smart enough to not work in the film business, who the greatest filmmaker in the world was? Odds are, probably 90 to 95% would say Steven Spielberg. His name is synonymous with modern day filmmaking and enormously successful blockbusters. But I'll let you in on a dirty little secret, if you anonymously asked that same question to people who work in the film business, and they knew their answers would be confidential, the answers would be exactly the opposite. Spielberg would maybe get 5% of the vote. How do I know this? Because I've done it. I talk to people everyday in this business and they tell me all sorts of things you won't hear among 'the normals'.

I'll let you in on another dirty little secret…Steven Spielberg simply lacks the skill as a filmmaker to make a serious film of any notable quality. If you give Spielberg some aliens, dinosaurs or monsters, he'll knock it out of the park nine times out of ten (for instance, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are two popcorn films of unadulterated genius). But give him a true drama with real people, and he fumbles and stumbles his way through it. He can make his serious films appear to be noteworthy to the unsophisticated viewer, with soft lighting and a swelling soundtrack, but anyone with the least bit of artistic sensibility can see that these "serious" films are, like their director, completely devoid of gravitas.

I saw Bridge of Spies a few months ago and have not written about it at all because I found it to be so unremarkable. It is a tepid and flaccid film of no note whatsoever. I was so underwhelmed by it that I basically forgot I saw it and therefore forgot to review it. Then a friend, a famous director whom I will call Director X, emailed me a review of the film with a laughing emoji attached. As a practice I never read reviews prior to seeing a film and almost never after seeing a film. But I read the review my friend sent me and it made me, like the emoji accompanying it, fall out of my chair laughing. The review was glowing and spoke of Spielberg with a reverence usually reserved for saints and martyrs. The thing that made me laugh so hard was the reviewer said that Spielberg made the brilliant decision to "remove all dramatic tension from the film". Think about that sentence for a minute. "Remove all dramatic tension from the film". That is usually something you write about a film when that film is an unmitigated disaster, not when you are praising a director for his brilliance. For instance a reviewer may write, "why on earth would a director REMOVE ALL DRAMATIC TENSION FROM A FILM?" Well…whether St. Spielberg made that decision consciously or unconsciously, I can't say for sure, but he certainly succeeded in "removing all dramatic tension from the film". Spielberg should be charged with dramatic and storytelling misconduct and general directorial malpractice for having "removed all the dramatic tension from the film".

This glowing review was not alone in it's praise of Bridge of Spies, the film is currently at 91% at critic section of the website Rotten Tomatoes. This is less an endorsement of Spielberg's work and more an indictment of the reviewers, in particular, and the business of film criticism in general. Whenever a new Spielberg film comes out you can count on the overwhelming amount of reviews being inordinately positive. Spielberg's power and reach in the film industry is gargantuan, that reviewers are afraid to speak ill of him even when he churns out one of his usual sub-par "serious" films is a testament to his standing in the business and the reviewers cowardice in the face of it. It is amazing that so many reviewers are either that bad at their job and don't know garbage when they see it, or are too afraid to speak truth to the powerful in the industry. Don't believe me? Go read the glowing reviews for the dreadful Amistad, or Saving Private Ryan, which got Spielberg a Best Director Oscar, but which is little more than one great battlefield sequence surrounded by two and a half hours of below standard World War II film tropes. Want more, check out the heavy-handed Munich, or the cloying The Color Purple.

Spielberg's holocaust epic, Schindler's List, is considered to be his greatest film for it won him a Best Picture and Best Director Oscar, but Stanley Kubrick said it best when he said of the film "Think that's (Schindler's List) about the Holocaust? That film was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't. Schindler's List is about success, the Holocaust is about failure." As always, Kubrick is right. Here is a great short video of director Terry Gilliam explaining Spielberg and his success. It is well worth the two minutes it takes to watch. In the video Gilliam explains the difference between the genius of Kubrick, whose films make us question, and that of shills like Spielberg, whose films give us answers, and answers that are always soft and "stupid". Spielberg placates us, Kubrick agitates us. Spielberg tell us what we want to hear, Kubrick tells us the truth.

So it is with Bridge of Spies where Spielberg goes to great lengths to assure us that America is unquestionably the moral and ethical beacon of hope in a cold and dark world. There is the opportunity for Spielberg to leave us with a question as to whether American moral superiority is genuine or simply a facade, but he goes to great lengths to eliminate that question when he adds a dramatically misguided coda to the film. This coda is there for no other reason than to squelch any potential uneasiness or doubt within the viewer as to their own, and America's "goodness".

Prior to Bridge of Spies, Spielberg's last piece of crap "serious" film was Lincoln, and it is a perfect example of what I am talking about in terms of Critic malfeasance. I was listening to a podcast on the now defunct Grantland website where some critics were discussing Lincoln and all of them but one were tripping over themselves to praise the film. The one critic who was a bit apprehensive had to keep assuring the others and the listener, that he was, in fact, NOT A RACIST and was against slavery, but that he thought the film was slightly flawed. Good Lord, it was just the worst sort of pandering imaginable. Lincoln isn't a great film, it isn't even a good film, it is a really really really bad film. It is so structurally flawed that if it were a house it would be condemned. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a dope, a dupe, or both.

There are two things at play here…1. Everyone needs to kiss up to Spielberg and pretend he's some "serious" filmmaker in order to not lose access and get frozen out of the film business where Spielberg is very powerful and has a long memory. and 2. Critics really do not know any better and don't know what the hell they are writing about and just go with the flow of the pandering crowd.

Regardless of why it happens, there is no doubt that it does happen, and that it has happened with Bridge of Spies. Structurally, once again, the film is untenable. Spielberg, just like in Lincoln, adds an unnecessary coda to the film that does nothing more than water down the already thin narrative. 

Just like in Lincoln, in Bridge of Spies, Spielberg adds story lines that do little more than extend the running time and do nothing but muddy the dramatic and narrative cohesion of the story. Just like in Lincoln he has a cloying and candied soundtrack that tells the viewer when and how to feel. Just like in Lincoln, and all his other "serious" films, Spielberg indicates his seriousness with a specific 'soft lighting'.

Steven Spielberg is a huge collector of Norman Rockwell's paintings. This should come as no surprise as he is the Norman Rockwell of filmmaking. Most of Spielberg's 'serious' films are little more than saccharine propaganda espousing America's moral and ethical supremacy. It is sadly ironic that the man who has done so much noble work for holocaust survivors with his Shoah Foundation, has morphed into little more than a modern day American Leni Reifenstahl.

Tom Hanks reprises his role as Spielberg's partner in propaganda crime by starring in Bridge of Spies. Hanks performance is typically Hanks-ian as he does little more than play dignity that often-times veers into arrogant preeminence. Like the film, Hank's performance is of no note whatsoever. It comes and goes without the least bit of notice.

Acting styles and tastes have changed over the years, for instance, go watch Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, a film for which he won his first of back-to-back Best Actor Oscars. Hanks performance, and the film itself, are terribly shallow and vacuous. Watch any Tom Hanks film over his stretch of dominance from 1992 to 2002 and you notice something, Tom Hanks doesn't act, he performs, which is why he is such a match for Spielberg who doesn't create art, but instead makes entertainment. To the uninitiated that sounds like a distinction without a difference, but to those in the know, it is a gigantic difference. There are very rare moments in Hanks career when he stops performing and starts acting (or being), and these moments are glorious, but they are very few and far between.

The first moment of note when Hanks stops performing and starts acting is in Forest Gump when Forest realizes that Jenny has had his child, and then realizes the implications of that and asks Jenny if his child is stupid or not. It is the only real moment in the entire film from Hanks and it is spectacularly human.

Another example is in Captain Phillips, where, after spending the entire film butchering a New England accent...AGAIN (he did the same thing in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can), Hanks pulls out a moment of genuine humanity that is staggering. The moment is near the end, when Phillips sits in an examination room after his rescue a doctor (who is spectacular in the scene) checks him out to make sure he has no injuries. Hanks says little, but his body starts to convulse uncontrollably and he weeps and wails. It is easily the greatest acting Tom Hanks has ever done on screen.

Do these moments override the previous two hours of bad accent in Captain Phillips, or the shticky performing on display in Forest Gump? For me…maybe…but it depends on what day you ask me.

Hanks is like those actors in the Pre-Brando Big Bang era, actors like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. He is more playing himself or playing a version of himself that people identify as the "everyman". What has bubbled to the surface in Hanks "everyman" work in the latter part of his career, is that "everyman" has become "smug and contemptuous". There is a haughtiness that seeps through his pores that I find odd and frankly puzzling. A great example of this is in a scene from Saving Private Ryan where Hanks' character listens to Matt Damon's character do a monologue about he and his brothers growing up.

That same air of superiority, the "my poop don't stink but yours sure does" attitude, is on full display from Hanks in Bridge of Spies as well. How the American everyman came to be so arrogant and high and mighty I have no idea, but in the world of Spielberg and Hanks, he certainly has. 

A few final notes in terms of the acting in Bridge of Spies (which is a horrendous name for a film by the way, no doubt thought up by some marketing genius at a studio). First, Mark Rylance gives an outstanding and meticulous performance as Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Rylance is one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time, and he was the first artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London (1995-2005). Many, many moons ago I had the good fortune to study with him while I was in London. He is a fountain of knowledge regarding acting and Shakespeare, and is a very soft-spoken and genuinely kind person. His work in Bridge of Spies has garnered him a much deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I don't know if he will win, but I will certainly be rooting for him. I also hope he does more film work and a wider audience gets a chance to appreciate his brilliance.

Another actor of note is Eve Hewson, who plays Tom Hanks daughter in the film. Hewson doesn't have too many scenes in the film, but she is captivating whenever she is on screen. There is one scene where she is lying on a couch eating ice cream that in the hands of a lesser actress would have been little more than a throwaway, but Hewson makes it a vibrant sequence worthy of attention. In a strange twist, Eve Hewson is the daughter of Paul Hewson a.k.a. Bono. Bono is, of course, the lead singer of U2, which took its band name from the same plane Francis Gary Powers was flying over the Soviet Union when he was shot down. Spooky coincidence or brilliant subliminal marketing…you decide!!!

In conclusion, Bridge of Spies is another in a long line of Spielberg's uncritical and pandering "serious" films. It is just another one of the Spielberg-Hanks propaganda collaborations that is painstakingly safe and flag-wavingly dull. In fact, I have an admittedly insane theory that both Spielberg and Hanks are contract propaganda agents of the U.S. intelligence community. Obviously I don't have time to share my tinfoil hat wearing madness with you here, but just go look at both of their filmographies and notice a pattern in the themes running through the films of both of them (case in point…notice in the re-release of E.T. Spielberg edited out the government agents guns and replaced them with walkie talkies and flashlights!!). Ok…enough of my rambling, just know that in the final analysis, Bridge of Spies is a film of no consequence that you never need to watch. If it is in the theatre, save your money and skip it, if it is on cable, don't waste your time, just change the channel. 

One final note, thank you for reading, and if you could do me a favor and keep this review between just the two of us, I'd really appreciate it. I don't want Steven Spielberg getting wind of it as I'll never work in this town again if he hears I've bad mouthed one of his movies. Also, I'm pretty sure the notoriously vicious Tom Hanks might murder me with a baseball bat if he found out I said a bad word about his work. I will thank you in advance for your discretion. 

©2016

Steve Jobs - A Review : Steve Jobs, 2001 and The Cult of Personality

***WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!**

MY RATING : SEE IT IN THE THEATRE!!

"THE TWO MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE ALLIES WIN THE WAR, AND THIS. " - STEVE JOBS

As I sit here at my MacBook Pro, with my iPhone by my side, writing a review of Steve Jobs, the film about the late founder of Apple computers, I have to confess that I really didn't know or care very much about the man prior to seeing the film. My ignorance and ambivalence about Jobs, yet my near complete everyday reliance upon his life's work, is a testament to the magnitude of his achievement and an indictment of me and my incuriosity.  Sadly, I am woefully unqualified to comment on the historical accuracy of Steve Jobs, but thankfully, I am moderately qualified to comment on the dramatic and cinematic worth of the movie. 

Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin and adroitly directed by Danny Boyle, is an exquisitely crafted and impeccably acted film. The film stars Michael Fassbender as Jobs, and boasts very impressive supporting turns from Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg and Seth Rogan.

Michael Fassbender gives a fantastically magnetic and dynamic performance as Jobs. Fassbender is one of the best actors working today and his work as Job's is a tribute to his mastery of his craft and his enormous talent. 

Fassbender's performance is an approximation and not an imitation of Jobs, which is always a wise approach. As I am fond of saying, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but the least sincere form of acting"©. Fassbender focuses on the internal emotional reality of Jobs and not on trying to recreate the external appearance of the man. That is not to say that there are no outer manifestations of Fassbender's inner work, there are. For instance, Fassbender alters his voice as he ages Jobs. He hits an oh-so-slightly higher register as a young man and a lower one as an older man, it is done so subtly that it would be nearly imperceptible to anyone not looking for it (or trained in this sort of thing). It isn't a showy thing, but it is an extremely effective one, which is a credit not only to Fassbender's technique but to his artistic integrity.

Fassbender's Jobs is a shark (a symbolic power animal referenced in the film) which is always moving forward and never looking to the past. This manifests literally as Jobs constantly physically walking throughout the story, and figuratively as Jobs frantically running away from his past and his emotional wounds. Stasis is death to Fassbender's Jobs, and when he isn't actively trying to devour his opponents, his enemies or his feelings, he is unwittingly trying to avoid any notions of "regretfulness", a word strikingly evoked in the film by Jobs' daughter. This approach to life leaves Fassbender's Jobs as a single minded business/technological genius, with emotional blind spots the size of his gargantuan ambition. It is not Jobs struggle to conquer history and the tech world that makes the character so imperative, but rather his struggle to understand himself and his existential wounds.

I recently wrote about Jeff Daniels being mis-cast in a bunch of projects where I thought his work was sub-par, such as in Ridley Scott's The Martian and HBO's The Newsroom. In Steve Jobs, I was very pleased to see Daniels give a nuanced and poignant performance as John Sculley, the CEO of Apple and erstwhile father figure to Jobs.  This character, in the hands of a lesser actor, would have been easily overlooked at best or a two-dimensional disaster at worst. 

Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman, Job's right hand woman and confidante, who is a force to be reckoned with. She gives a powerful performance that is laced with a delicate humanity, which makes her the perfect balance to Fassbender's humanity-challenged Jobs. Winslet is the consummate pro, and here she brings all of her formidable talents to bear in creating a character who is able to platonically and powerfully love Steve Jobs, but never be a victim to him.

Michael Stuhlberg and Seth Rogan also give solid supporting performance as Andy Hertzfeld, member of original Mac team and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, respectively. Although, I nearly fell over when I saw a talking empty-head on one of the cable news shows saying that if Rogan doesn't win an Oscar it would be a travesty. Rogan does a fine yet completely unspectacular job as Wozniak. I think that people often get unduly excited when an actor who has consistently been dreadful simply shows up and isn't as awful as usual. Rewarding mediocrity due to familiarity, or worse, confusing mediocrity with greatness, is often a result of lowered expectations and is sadly, a common occurrence across our culture, one need look no further than our politics with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, or Hollywood with Matthew McConaughey and George Clooney for proof of that.

WALKING, TALKING AND DRUNKEN MONKEYS

I often find writer Aaron Sorkin's style, which I call "walking and talking…quickly", to be off-putting because it can be so mannered, deliberate and disingenuous. Sorkin's writing style is as if David Mamet and a drunken monkey with a political science degree had a baby that wrote a screwball dramedy with all of the fast paced, witty repartee that genre demands. In the hands of lesser directors, such as on Sorkin's HBO show The Newsroom, Sorkin's writing can be unbearable in it's overbearing self consciousness. But in the hands of a true craftsman and artist, like Danny Boyle with Steve Jobs, or David Fincher with The Social Network, Sorkin's style can become captivating, if not down right hypnotic. 

With Steve Jobs, Sorkin's true stroke of genius comes not in his dialogue but rather in how he structures the story. Instead of falling into the usual traps of the bio-pic, basically showing the highlights of the man's life, Sorkin structures the film like a stage play in three acts, where the characters talk about what has happened between acts but what wasn't shown to the viewer. It is all about how people react and feel about events, not about the events themselves. It is a brilliant way to mine the depths of characters and relationships for all of the emotional drama they are worth. It is also a tribute to Sorkin (and director Danny Boyle) that he respects his audience enough to not feel the need to spoon feed them the usual bio-pic nonsense but rather trusts them to be sophisticated enough to understand context without having it shown to them. Turning the story into a stage play for the screen creates a character study and not a bio-pic, and that is what makes it such a compelling and satisfying film.

STEVE JOBS AND 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

There is a little secret hidden in plain sight about where Sorkin gets his inspiration, whether conscious or unconscious, for the structure of the film, and it is pretty brilliant. The opening of the film shows an old black and white industrial-type of film where Arthur C. Clarke, famed science fiction writer and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, stands in a 1960's computer room surrounded by a gigantic computer that nearly fills the entire room and talks with a young man and a little boy about what the future will look like. Clarke talks of a future where people will have small computers in their homes where they can do work and order theatre tickets and the like right from their computer. It is cool to see Clarke accurately predict the future and to see the amazement on the little boys face at the unlimited prospects in his future. That scene tells us all we need to know about the rest of the film, and I was even wondering as the scene played out, if it would be revealed that the little boy was Jobs in his youth.

This opening scene is a clue as to the blueprint for Steve Jobs. Sorkin uses the exact same structure as Arthur Clarke's and Stanley Kurbick's iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that film is subtly referenced throughout Steve Jobs. 

In 2001, mankind's evolution over thousands of years is covered in three acts. In Steve Jobs, Sorkin uses the same three act, evolutionary leaping structure to show the emotional growth of Jobs the man,  and technological growth brought forth by his company. While Jobs personal evolution and his company's technological evolution are only over a two decade span rather than thousands of years, they are still making as gigantic a leap as mankind does in 2001. Seeing Steve Jobs make emotional evolutionary jumps that are the equal to 2001's thousands of years of evolution only becomes believable if we are sub-consciously attuned to the archetype of mankind's overwhelming need to evolve set forth in 2001. 

In 2001's first act, Kubrick shows us primitive man at the moment he discovers, with the aid of a mysterious monolith, his first tool, which he quickly turns into a weapon to kill his rivals. Act One in Steve Jobs opens backstage of an Apple product launch (the new age monolith!!) in 1982 with Jobs not even admitting to the paternity of his daughter, and denying the child and her mother, any financial support even though his worth is over $440 million. Like the ape-man in 2001 who uses the technological advantage of the first tool to bludgeon his defenseless enemies, Jobs uses his technological advantage to gain wealth and power which he uses to emotionally bludgeon his ex-girlfriend and the daughter he denies.

In Kubrick's 2001 we then make a jump of thousands of years into the future into Act Two where man is colonizing and living in space. Act Two ends with man discovering a monolith on the moon, which is really just a stepping stone to the great discovery revealed in Act Three. In Act Two of Steve Jobs, we are once again backstage at another product launch, this time for Job's new company NeXT, which he started after being fired from Apple. This tech company, NeXt, like the monolith on the moon in 2001, is really just a stepping stone. In Job's master plan he intends to use the NeXT launch to get back on top and in control of Apple. In addition, Job's daughter has grown a bit, and while he is beginning to take an interest in her life, he still isn't capable of truly loving her or emotionally understanding himself. In being blind to the inner complexes that drive him, Jobs is just like mankind in Act Two of 2001, which has not yet evolved enough to truly understand the intelligence they are chasing across the solar system, nor do they understand what drives them to chase it. 

In Act Three of 2001, man and machine (the enigmatic computer HAL) travel into space in order to find the origin of this mysterious monolith near Jupiter. Eventually man and machine, in the form of HAL, do battle, with HAL fighting for supremacy and man fighting for survival. Man must overcome technology, his intellect, in order to integrate it and open up his true emotional self. The film ends with man having gone through a dramatic and personally apocalyptic evolutionary transformation and being reborn as the intellectually and emotionally advanced "Star Child".

In the third act of Steve Jobs, we are once again backstage at a product launch, this time for the iMac, which is a spaceship compared to the animal bone of Apple 2 that came twenty years earlier. In this final act of Steve Jobs, Jobs is finally able to overcome his drive for technological and business success and open his heart to his daughter. For the first time in the film he decides he'd rather start the product launch late in order to talk with his daughter, putting her emotional needs before his business needs. This is symbolic of his overcoming his intellect and his business drive and instead opening his previously underused heart/emotional drive. He then integrates his intellect and technology with his heart/emotion when he tells his music loving daughter he will invent a product for her which will carry thousands of songs, what eventually will become the iPod. Directly after that scene with his daughter, Jobs stands on stage at the product launch with lights and flashbulbs popping all around him. As his daughter looks on, Jobs is engulfed in a luminous glow of otherworldly light, symbolic of his final stage of evolution where he becomes the intellectually and emotionally advanced Star Child.

Steve Jobs, like 2001: a Space Odyssey, teaches us about human evolution on both the external/technological level, and the internal/emotional level. The journey at the center of 2001 is that mankind must go forth into deep space, both outer and inner, in order to truly understand our universe and ourselves. The self knowledge acquired on this galactic grail self-quest is what will propel us to through to our next stage of evolution. Steve Jobs teaches us this same lesson wrapped in a different mythology, that we must explore both our external/intellectual drive and our internal/emotional one. One cannot be a truly evolved human being if one doesn't strive to cultivate both outer and inner forms of development and growth.

"MUSICIANS PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENTS. I PLAY THE ORCHESTRA." - STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs is one of those polished and elegantly crafted films that only master artisans could make. Danny Boyle's flawless and vibrant direction is the key to keeping Sorkin's dialogue, which can be unwieldy in lesser directorial hands, emotionally vital and palpable. Boyle's deft touch and meticulous attention to dramatic pacing, both of the actors and of the camera, create a mesmerizing, seductive and deeply gratifying film.

THE CULT OF TECHNOLOGY AND PERSONALITY

An interesting theme that Boyle explores is the idea of the cult of Steve Jobs. Boyle evokes a sense of the sacred and religious being present in each of the product launches. The audience in the auditoriums chant and move in unison, hungry for Jobs, their Pope, prophet and messiah to share with them his new holy revelations, shrouded on the altar of the stage, which will change their lives forever. Boyle also shows Jobs as being a tyrant and control freak who believes his power should always and every time be unquestioned. Boyle's Jobs has a whiff of L. Ron Hubbard about him, and there is a Jim Jones vibe lurking deep in the heart of both Jobs and his desperate collection of followers and fanatics, whose idolatry of Jobs could easily be turned into zealotry. This cult of Steve Jobs, could easily be the cult of any guru, be they business, technology, political or spiritual based. Boyle's glimpse into Steve Jobs, the man behind the myth, is a pulling back of the curtain to reveal the fragility at the heart of the man who yearned for, and was placed upon, the pedestal of genius.

In conclusion, Steve Jobs is a great film and is well worth your time and hard earned money. Go see it in the theatre, if for no other reason than to watch the theatre light up with iPhones coming alive after the film has ended. As enjoyable and well made a film as Steve Jobs is, audience members compulsively re-attaching themselves to Steve Jobs' technology the moment the film ends is more a tribute to the man's life and genius than any film could ever be.

  ©2015