First Man: A Review

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An unorthodox take on a “space movie” that I found to be ultimately satisfying and moving…but your mileage may vary.

First Man, written by Josh Singer and directed by Damien Chazelle, is the story of Neil Armstrong and his long march to the moon. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, with supporting turns from Claire Foy, Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler.

First Man is a film that, for good or for ill, defies expectations. One would expect a film about Neil Armstrong and NASA to be a “space” movie in the vein of the expansive The Right Stuff or Apollo 13, but First Man is not a conventional space movie but rather a painstakingly intimate movie that uses space as metaphor.

What makes Neil Armstrong such a compelling character not only in this film but in our culture, is that he was an exceedingly “normal” person. Armstrong was the everyman of the space program which turned him into a sort of empty vessel which the public could project upon whatever traits they wished. Armstrong was portrayed in the media as smart, strong, honorable, noble and patriotic, but what Chazelle does in First Man is make Armstrong less heroic and more human by showing him to be wounded.

Armstrong’s wound is so palpable and catastrophic that he must risk life and limb and travel 238,900 miles in an attempt to soothe it. Ultimately, Armstrong’s journey to the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, isn’t a running away from his wound, but a solemn yet desperate pilgrimage to it.

The moon in First Man is not a destination or ambition but a ghost, haunting Armstrong at every turn as he tries to take one small step for man through the fog of mourning in an attempt to regain his balance and find some semblance of normalcy once again.

By flouting “space movie” expectations, First Man can be a bit frustrating, but once you accept the premise and go along the dramatic journey, it becomes a remarkably satisfying and deeply moving experience. I readily admit that my own personal life experience made the film resonate with me and that others with a different life experience may not find it so worthwhile.

Emotional pull aside, director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) shows a deft and skilled hand at the helm of First Man. Chazelle’s film wonderfully mirrors Armstrong the man and the character in that it is strictly compartmentalized. Armstrong walls off his emotions and contains his pain and Chazelle uses magnificent framing to express this dramatic reality.

Chazelle also pulls off shooting in very tight spaces, like in the cockpit of a space capsule, by embracing rather than shunning the claustrophobia of those places. Chazelle recreates the physically and emotionally suffocating experience of being compartmentalized to such a degree that you can’t even turn your head to look at the exit, never mind walk through it. Chazelle’s embrace of dramatic claustrophobia also pays off when the cinematic expanse of the moon is finally reached.

Ryan Gosling’s work as Neil Armstrong is spot on, as he keeps with the theme of the film by keeping Armstrong entirely contained. The pain pulsating through Gosling’s Armstrong is tangible, but he keeps it tightly controlled, never letting the wound gush, only fester. The final scene of the film beautifully illustrates Armstrong’s dilemma, he is walled off and isolated, if not quarantined, from the world, and even from his wife, and he is at a loss for words, but still has the desperate human need to connect, even if he is unable to.

The long journey of Armstrong to Lunar catharsis is so potent because it is so deftly and subtly portrayed by Gosling, who with First Man proves once again that he is more an actor than a movie star.

Claire Foy’s work as Janet, Armstrong’s wife, is equally compelling. Foy’s Janet is much more combustible than Neil, but that just means it takes more effort for her to keep herself together. Foy and Chazelle imbue Janet with a percolating dynamism through a focused intensity and a mildly floating hand-held camera that gives Janet the feel of being ever so slightly unbalanced and teetering out of control, like a satellite knocked off its orbit. Janet has a volcanic magnetism that is a testament to Foy’s making the most out of what, in lesser hands, would have been just another astronaut wife character, at best an adoring moon, but Foy’s Janet is a planet unto herself, spinning in a wilder orbit around a dying Sun.

The rest of the supporting cast, which includes Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll and Ciaran Hinds among many others, all do solid work in mostly underwritten roles. The supporting cast are most definitely very small pieces around the sun that is Ryan Gosling, who, along with Claire Foy, carry the emotional and dramatic weight of the picture.

First Man is really a story about alchemy through fire and ice (recurring themes throughout the film) and the psychological transformation and evolution that comes about through the alchemical Grail quest. Neil Armstrong’s connection to the cause of his existential anguish gets further and further away with every passing second, and he single-mindedly chases it through the fire of earth and its atmosphere all the way to the cold silence of the moon to catch up to it one last time.

In conclusion, First Man is not what you’d expect it to be, but it is all the better for it. I definitely recommend you spend your hard earned dollars to see it in the theatre (IMAX if possible). Director Damien Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling create a worthwhile and serious film of dramatic heft that turns the gigantic evolutionary moment of a human expedition to the moon into an intense and intimate evolutionary moment for a single man. When Neil Armstrong said it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, he would’ve been more accurate to say that it was “one small step for mankind, and one giant leap for his humanity”.

©2018

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

On Grief and Acting: Revelations From Hamlet in the April of My Discontent

Actors are often called upon to portray grief, but what should the actor do when they are actually grieving and being called upon to act?  Anyone who has suffered through the death of a loved one knows that it is a devastating and disorienting experience.  It can be even more difficult for the actor who must be able to access their emotions in order to do their job.  So let's take a look at how the actor can try and work through, or at least survive, their grief.

Grieving is an entirely individual experience, no two people go through it in exactly the same way.  That being said, there is one statement that rings true for all people who grieve...'you will never be the same' or, said another way, 'you will never come out of it the way you went in'.  As much as we'd like to return to normal, we won't.  We may return to "a" normal, but it will be a new normal.  The world will never be quite the same as it was before death came knocking because you won't be the same.

Life has an energy to it, it vibrates at a certain frequency.  We are totally unaware of this in our everyday lives.  We wake up, have breakfast, go to work, talk to people, go through our day and don't think twice about any of it because we are in the flow of life.  When someone we love dies, that all changes.  We are knocked out of kilter with the universe.  The world seems a foreign and sometimes foreboding place.​  We see people going through their day to day existence and want to shake them, to wake them up from their obliviousness.  Don't they know the world has ended?  Life goes on around us, yet it has stopped for us.  This life swirling around us only accentuates the lifelessness of our deceased loved one.  

A good example of this is Hamlet.  Everyone thinks Hamlet is insane, he acts so bizarrely and is so out of the flow of the everyday existence of those around him.  Hamlet is not crazy.  He is grieving.  Grieving can look crazy to those not doing it, but it seems perfectly rational and normal to those in it's grips.  For instance, if you are grieving, you may be riding the subway and thinking about your dead loved one and crying for your loss, and then a moment later laughing when you recall a joyous or funny moment together with them when they were alive.  Your erratic emotions and actions will most assuredly make your fellow train riders think your insane, but your not, you are grieving.  

Grief dramatically alters your perspective on your surroundings and life and sets you adrift away from the current of normalcy.  Hamlet cannot shake his grief for his dead father, the king, and is angry at the ease with which others have shaken theirs, namely his mother.  He ponders suicide to end his life, "to be or not to be", but ends up contemplating the deeper meaning of death and the afterlife, "Ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come", a common topic that continually haunts the grieving.  When he sits poised ready to murder his praying uncle who has murdered Hamlet's father the king, Hamlet hesitates because he thinks of his uncle's eternal soul and that it would go to heaven due to his being killed during prayer.  Hamlet's insight into the afterlife overrides his thirst for noble vengeance.  This seems crazy to 'normal' people, but quite rational to those in the throes of grief.  Hamlet is in tune with death, the afterlife and grieving, but out of tune with the rationality and normalcy of the rest of the world.  So it is for those in grief.

The stages of grief that I have observed are this:  first, we think about and mourn the physical pain and suffering that our loved one has gone through in their death.​  Our grief is a form of empathy, we imagine what our loved one was thinking and feeling when death came, and we hope they weren't afraid or that they didn't suffer. 

After that, the second stage of grief I've observed comes upon us.  This is where we mourn for ourselves, for what we have lost.  In short, during the first stage we are thinking about them and during the second stage we are thinking about us without them.  In this second stage we focus on the empty hole in our lives where the loved one used to reside.  We mourn the time we won't have with them, the conversations lost, the dreams never realized.  I have found that this stage can take many forms, such as regret over things not said or of things said, or it can take a form of denial, where the survivor fully expects the deceased to knock upon their door in the form of a visitation.  In this stage, the deceased still seems somehow alive, even if only in the thoughts, dreams, memories and feelings of the person who mourns.  In this stage some people can have an overwhelming need to talk about their feelings and experiences with others, while other people may go inward and be incapable of talking about their pain.  There is no right or wrong way to go through this stage, only the way that is comfortable for the aggrieved.  This stage has no set time table, it can go on for weeks, months, years or in some circumstances, even a lifetime.

The third stage is the most frustrating, for it is where we mourn the loss of our mourning.  This sneaks up on us.  We realize we are no longer grieving and we yearn for the grief to return.  The grief had in some ways taken the place of the lost loved one.  We felt closer to them in our grief, but when the grief fades, we feel the loved one fading as well.  In many ways, this is the most painful of the stages of grief because it is where we must decide to actually let the loved one go and move back into the world.  It is the last goodbye.  It isn't a 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' and move on type of thing, but rather, it is an admission that life does indeed go on, as well as our submission to it.  It is also the most important stage of grief because it acknowledges life.  Death is a part of life.  We cannot deny it and we cannot ignore it.  Even though our culture certainly bends over backwards to do so.  We must acknowledge it and respect it.  

This brings me back to the actor.  Actors are often taught, or asked to use their personal history in order to tap into emotion.  People have all sorts of opinions on this approach to acting.  I say the same thing I always say, use what works for you.  But I have one caveat to that.  While the death of a loved one will bring forth tidal waves of emotions, from anger to sadness and everything in between, my advice to any actor getting back into the swing of things after grieving is this:  never, ever use the death of a loved one to fuel your performance.  Don't substitute your dead loved one for your scene partner in a death scene.  Don't substitute your dead loved one to invigorate a scene where you get to say all the things you wish you said to them.  Don't do it.  It is disrespectful to the dead, their memory and to your experience and you'll end up regretting it.  It cheapens them and the experience you went through.  The emotions are within you, you have them, you've experienced them, you are alive with them, you are a cauldron of emotion and you don't have to envision the dead or replay a bedside farewell to call up those emotions.  That memory should be sacred to you and you should treat it with the reverence it deserves.  Instead, use your imagination to call up those emotions.  If you must use this substitution technique then use your imagination and substitute someone who is still living.  I only say this because, as much as you may love acting and have dedicated your life to it, you will regret exploiting precious memories of a dead loved one for a scene in a movie, play or tv show.  It is cheap, and it will deaden those emotions and those memories that are so precious to you and you will never be able to get them back.

​​There are countless schools of thought and theories of acting.  As an acting coach, I don't try and impose my approach onto a client.  Instead, I adapt to the client's method in order to facilitate their best performance.  With that said, I would always try and avoid using such a deeply personal experience as grief to elicit an emotional reaction in a scene.  I know that there are many who would disagree with me, but I think the emotions can be called upon without the exploitation of the sacred experience of the actor, simply by using other techniques, such as the use of breath or the actor's imagination rather than their direct experience.

I have seen grief affect different actors in different ways.  I have seen actors walk away from acting because it just seems foolish to play pretend after going through a terrible loss.  I've seen actors ​find direction and focus and rededicate themselves to the craft after losing a loved one.  I've seen actors take years off from acting to try and regain their balance, and I've seen actors dive into working non-stop for years on end without a moment's break.  We all do what we can to get through it, or in some cases, to avoid it.  The truth is you can only delay grief for so long.  It always comes, and often times, the longer we delay it, the harder it hits us.

​In our everyday lives we yearn for deeper meaning, to connect to something beyond ourselves and our mundane lives.  But when grief hits us, we ache for the mundane.  We wish for nothing more than to talk about nonsense, to watch junk tv, to zone out and disconnect from the powerful river of emotion and meaning surging through us.  We desperately want to think of something else, to run from the beast devouring us, but we can't.  The beast is hungry and relentless.  Those of us who have grieved know this.  Those of you who haven't will find out soon enough, for the beast never sleeps.  My only advice to those new to grief is this:  know that life goes on, even when we don't want it to.  Also know that you aren't crazy, but the world is.  And, finally, go and read Hamlet.  You will feel less alone.

©2013