Tale of the snake

Clouds of Sils Maria

Crit

Stuff I didn't suspect going in:

1. that the terminal s in Sils is vocalized.
2. how shocking the word "fuck" can still be when Juliette Binoche says it. I think it could have been a sharper slap in the face only if one of my grandchildren had said it.
3. how deeply I would love this flick.
4. how much this flick would make me laugh.

It's a film about acting, and it's a metafilm about acting: Binoche's Maria and her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) run lines for the play that made Maria's career 20 years earlier and in which she has reluctantly accepted the role of the older woman undone by the femme fatale she played in her youth. But Binoche and Stewart are also running lines for this movie--their interplay is invigorating, reminiscent of Billie Jean King rallying with little Chrissie Evert, with both players committed more to the game than to winning the point, without ever losing sight of the fact that winning the point makes the game a little sweeter. One of the many things this is is a great buddy movie.

Except. Except as much as Maria and Valentine want to be buddies, there are imbalances--maturity and youth, employer and employee--and there are erotics attached to those imbalances that undermine any possibility of any innocent buddy relationship.

And then something happens at the end of the second act that simultaneously changes and confirms everything. The change sucks much of the oxygen out of the final act, but the loss is a perverse gain as well. The year is only a third over, but I'd be surprised not to be highlighting this as one of the year's best come New Year's Eve.

Erobotics

Ex Machina

Crit

Directorial debut for the novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, who, among other accomplishments, wrote my favorite zombie film, is mostly a success, with a big disappointment in the late going. Obscenely rich and assholish tech genius (Oscar Isaac) brings a talented and naïve employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to his neverland estate to judge a modified Turing test: whether the artificial intelligence of the perversely sexy robot (Alicia Vikander) he has created has developed genuine consciousness.

Nathan is a jerk and Caleb seems sweet and Ava seems desperate and trapped and abused, so the deck is stacked: we want the Caleb-Ava romance to be real and to prevail. But because Nathan is in the position to--and has the clear inclination to--manipulate every pixel of Caleb's experience in this Xanadu, we're walking in very squishy perceptual and narrative sand: has Nathan really managed the godlike feat of creating subsequently independent consciousness? is it really Caleb who's being tested? is Ava attracted to him or playing him as a means of escape?

This last question is, it occurred to me at one point, a film noir question, and in the blank space below, I'm going to talk about that with spoilers aplenty. For those who haven't been here in a while, if you've seen the film or otherwise don't care about spoilers, use your cursor to select the invisible paragraphs and make the lemon-juice writing appear. But first, a bit about where the film goes wrong.

The narrative is structured into 7 "sessions" with Eva, and along about Session 5, the film lurches from a story of questions about questions to a clichéd explore-the-haunted-house-to-discover-its-secrets-without-getting-caught-in-the-act-and-then-make-our-escape movie. Yes, from a narrative standpoint those discoveries needed to be made, but I'm not convinced they needed to be made before the determination to escape: I think Caleb's love for Ava--less open to question that hers for him--would have been enough motivation, and the discoveries would have followed naturally in the unwinding of the escape plot. In the event, the narrative becomes hamhanded and unconvincing, and though in Session 7 we return to the sort of movie we were enjoying, some of the sloppiness spills over.

Nonetheless, a film I'll think about and talk about for a while, and I began talking about it w/ my movie companions right after the film (again, here be spoilers):

One friend, who is, I gather, conceptually invested in the notion of AI, was annoyed by what she found as a presentation of the technology as inherently evil--because Ava does, of course, in the tradition of the noir femme fatale she turns out to be, throw Caleb under the bus, after killing Nathan and before escaping on her own. Why, my friend wanted to know, was it necessary to kill him, and isn't that just kneejerk Luddism?

My reaction was much different: to me, Ava's willingness to do anything to preserve herself is beyond good and evil: it is simply human, meaning that Nathan has split the AI atom. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for humanity is an altogether different question from whether AI itself is good or bad. Is fire a useful tool? Hell, yeah, but that doesn't mean Prometheus (or any of his intellectual descendants: Frankenstein, Oppenheimer) should expect to be rewarded for breaking the rules to activate that tool. Being God is risky fucking business.

And as to why Ava has to make sure Caleb takes the fall, see Sam Spade's last long speech to Bridgit O'Shaughnessy: from Ava's perspective, maybe Caleb loves her, and maybe she loves him. But out in the world, each will forever be a potential liability to the other. She may have a few bad nights afterward, but she'll be alive in a world of humans, not one of whom knows her dangerous truth, And her artificial intelligence must trump her artificial heart.

Trailers

• Amy--Oh, this may just be too hard to watch: Winehouse doc.
• Poltergeist--Every trailer we saw other than the first one was a reboot of a franchise: Terminator, Mad Max, this. This redo looks pretty pointless.

Redemption songs

Danny Collins

Crit

Oh, my, what a load of hackneyed, manipulative, sentimental, changing-my-life glop, with Al Pacino as the titular superannuated rock & roll whore and Bobby Cannavale as the adult child Danny had never even bothered to meet. But damned if those two, with the always unerring help of Christopher Plummer as Danny's manager and best friend and Annette Bening as the manager of the suburban New Jersey Hilton where Danny stays while looking for his lost soul, don't make it work. Oh, and an almost exclusively John Lennon soundtrack doesn't hurt. You'll laugh and you'll cry exactly when you're told, but hey, just sit watching the wheels go by and enjoy it.

Trailers

• I'll See You in My Dreams--The wonderfuls Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott in a grown-up romcom.
• Southpaw--Jake Gyllenhaal tends not to make dumb choices, so I'm going to assume that this is not the boxing cliché mashup that the trailer makes it seem.

Confidence boy

While We're Young

Crit

Never trust anyone [insert vertically directional preposition] [insert age]. In the new film by Noah Baumbach (45), ambitious documentary filmmaker Jamie (Adam Driver, 31, but playing mid-20s) and his artisanal-ice cream-making wife (Amanda Seyfried, 29, ditto) adopt dithering documentary filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller, 49) and his producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts, 46) in order (spoiler alert) to get access to her legendary documentary filmmaker father (Charles Grodin, on the cusp of 80).

The film's relationship to Greenberg, in which Baumbach and Stiller first explored the generation gap, is clear, but there the character on the upside of the gap is vastly less sympathetic; here the heartbreak of discovery--in this case that the bro-love in which the elder had invested so much was based on simulation--is as palpable as in any conventional romance.

Trailers

• The Gift--Another toxic friendship flick, with potentially homicidal overtones.
• Dope--I may be too old (and white) for this, but the trailer makes me hope not.

Piano lessons

Seymour: An Introduction

Crit

Pianist and teacher Seymour Bernstein finds the meanings of the universe and of the soul in music, naturally enough, and director Ethan Hawke, searching for answers to his own performative existential questions, finds in Bernstein, if not answers, at least thrilling expansions of his questions. What might have been bland hagiography finds a variety of angles in a variety of interviewers, and in Bernstein's prickly, lovable self.

I loved the music, by the way, but it's fair to say that an hour and a half of classical piano will hold me for a while. Oh, and no, as far as I can tell, there is no reason for this to share its title with the Salinger novella.

Everything you always wanted to know about sects

Monty Python's Life of Brian

(1979)

Not altogether by coincidence, yesterday I started watching the USA network series Dig, which is set in modern-day Jerusalem but involves some sort of cosmic plot by Essenes, who were a group of Jewish political activists at the time of Brian (and Jesus), not altogether unlike the Judean People's Front.

Another connection is that, through 2 episodes anyway, Dig seems almost as silly as Brian, without even trying.

Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' science?

Merchants of Doubt

Crit

1. corporations are evil
2. people are dimwits
3. what else is new?

Angrymaking documentary whose well-argued premise is that many merchants of illness and death, particularly Big Oil, studied their public relations strategies at the feet of Big Tobacco: use pseudoscience and outright bullshit to sway a public eager to be reassured that our bad habits are harmless at worst, maybe even beneficial.

Trailers

• Beyond the Reach--Michael Douglas is the baddie in yet another riff on "The Most Dangerous Game."

Who let the dogs out?

My last M4 before the Mets' championship season

La Sapienza

FF

Two couples, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot), middle-aged, married, French, mutually habituated but fatigued, he an architect, she a social engineer for the Parisian banlieus; and Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), young, brother and sister, Italian (Piedmontese), he eighteen and an architect to be, she younger and frail but coruscant, mutually devoted, with a faint hint of incest.

The action: Alexandre tries to revivify a Borromini book project by touring the architect's works; instead, he encounters the ephemerally idealistic Goffredo, who reminds him of the importance of light and love. Meanwhile, their other halves share parallel discoveries. Hey, it's European: there doesn't have to be a car chase. Puzzling, lovely, unhurried, surprisingly sweet. Written and directed by Eugène Green

L'enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq (The kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq)

FF

The French auteur provocateur plays himself in a brilliantly absurd comedy of a gang that can't think straight, making no attempt to disguise themselves from the victim (who helpfully points out that in a novel that would mean that they were planning to kill him) or to conceal their location. Worse, they find out that Houellebecq seems to have no one who wants him back enough to pay enough to cover the wine and liquor he's consuming and the local hooker they procure for him. The worst kidnappers since . . . well, we'll get to that in a moment.

Fehér isten (White god)

IFC

No humans were harmed, much, in the making of this extraordinary film, which Disney and Tarantino might have collaborated on--a sort of canine Spartacus. I'm glad I'd read a good deal about the film beforehand, so that I knew that the sequences of countless dogs racing down the streets of Budapest benefited from zero digital enhancement and (even more important) that the 2 participants in the dogfight are best friends and were playing as dogs will play, editing and fake blood fully responsible for the horror of it.

It's a film that so immerses you in a foreign idiom--yes, even more than the first 2 films of the day--that standard critical judgments seem suspect, even as you can't help asking yourself questions like: does knowing from the start that the filmmakers found adoptive owners for every street dog used in the film make it a better film? Well, no, of course not: but it makes it impossible not to cut them every slack.

Fortunately, little slack is needed; the worst problem I had with the film was that one of the two dogs sharing the lead role of Hagen has a bit more Shar Pei in him, and thus a wrinklier forehead. The dogs' work is brilliant, amazing even, and the humans aren't bad, either, especially Zsófia Psotta (maybe 12? I read a lot about the film, but I learned little about anyone on two legs) as Lili, the only trustworthy human in Budapest.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

IFC

Based on a debunked Japanese legend (appropriately enough), the film follows a young Tokyo woman who is convinced that the brothers Coen were serious in the caption in the opening frames of Fargo that brands the story as true.

Rinko Kukichi, barely more verbal than in Babel and equally riveting, plays the titular adventurer, whose adventures take her to snowy Minnesota, an Oz of mostly well-meaning nonwizards. (Huh! True fact: while I was writing that sentence, "Upon Closer Inspection" by Christina Abbott came up in the iPod mix of music discovered on the New Haven Green, the song containing the line "This sure isn't Kansas; you sure ain't the Scarecrow.")

It's an engaging film, and I'm a fan of the source (whose very score seems to be mined for this one), but I'm not sure how much there is actually there. Also, is the debt to Fargo and the Coens so obvious that they (they: brothers David and Nathan Zellner, who cowrote, David directing) don't even need to mention it in the credits? 'Cause I didn't notice any thanks for, say, letting them use considerable footage.

Oh, and one other cranky note: twice Kumiko phones her mother in Japan, the first time before her mother has any idea that her daughter isn't in Tokyo. It's the middle of the night in Minnesota, so let's say 3am. Kumiko tells her mother she called because she couldn't sleep. Now if your kid calls you at 5pm your time and says she can't sleep, wouldn't you ask why she's trying to sleep at that hour? And if she calls you a few days later at 2 or 3am your time, wouldn't that seem noteworthy? Apparently this film exists in a world without time zones.

Trailers

• About Elly--Kinda like Laura, but in the Middle East instead of on the Upper East Side. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past).
• Dior and I--High fashion doc; whee.
• Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll--That pretty much says it.
• I Am Big Bird--I hope this doc isn't followed by embarrassing revelations like the Elmo one was.
• Das große Museum (The great museum)--Specifically the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.
• Salad Days--Well, hell, I gotta see this, 'cause I didn't even know D.C. had a punk scene.
• Clouds of Sils Maria--All About Eve, with Juliette Binoche as Margo, Chloë Grace Moretz as Eve, and Kristen Stewart splitting the difference.
• Soul Boys of the Western World--Admit it: you've been praying for a Spandau Ballet doc.