Film: The Place Beyond the Pines

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Genre: Drama
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Island Cinemas
Grade:A-

If there's one thing this movie proves to me, it's how much better Ryan Gosling is than Bradley Cooper as an actor. It's not that Bradley Cooper is bad. In fact, he's actually quite good at this. It's just that the whole time he was on screen (only about a third of the movie, but I'll get to that in a moment) I was thinking, "Hey, Bradley Cooper's pretty good at playing a cop." Whereas the whole time Gosling was on screen--even after I got used to his terrible tattoos--I was drawn into his character's trials and psyche. It's the difference between a star and an actor. Cooper is probably the bigger star, but Gosling is the real actor.

The Place Beyond the Pines almost feels like an anthology film, in that there are really three distinct stories that happen to overlap characters. The first third is Gosling's, the second third Cooper's, and the final section is Chronicle star Dane DeHaan's. It's a testament to director Cianfrance that each story feels pretty well-contained, cohesive, and fleshed out even in its limited run time. Of course, one of the film's themes is the way in which we impact the lives of others, and so several threads--some thin, most blatant--connect the separate stories together. But they blend well together, and though I was sad to leave characters behind as the film moved forward, Cianfrance does a nice job showing how actions ripple forward through time, like a stone dropped in the ocean. There are moments that rely a little heavily on the tropes of indie films (long handheld shots, etc.), but overall I found both the story and the artistic weight of the film to stay with me long after I'd walked out of the theater. And if Cianfrance does get a little Sundance-heavy, he also has a surprising gift for invigorating action. The scenes of Gosling driving through the streets and woods on his motorcycle are some of the most intense I've seen in some time.

It's little touches like that that help the film stand above the fray. It's not the best film I've seen this year, but there's a chance it could make my top ten list.

Alternate Film Title: "Only Ryan Gosling Can Look This Stupid and Get Away With It"

Film: The Thin Blue Line

Director: Errol Morris
Genre: Documentary
Source: USA (1988)
Rating: NR
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade:C

The Thin Blue Line is one of those films that occasionally makes its way onto "Great Films" lists (or at least "Great Documentaries" lists), in part for the way it advanced the art of nonfiction film. Unfortunately, I watched this film in the complete wrong setting, so I will have to take a major portion of the blame for the fact that I was never fully drawn into the story. I know there's a lot of fascinating information here--perjury, racial bias, police misbehavior, legal loopholes, and so on and so forth--but somehow when I split my focus between the film and work/gym time, I just couldn't get enthralled enough to remember much about it. It may  also be the case that the film's style, complete with crime scene recreations totally reminiscent of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries from 1988 (the year of the film's release), threw me off a little. Again, that's my fault, but it is what it is. I loved that should when I was younger.

That said, there is a lot fascinating here, in part due to the after-effects of the film. The apparently-wrongfully-convicted Randall Adams had his case re-examined and overturned. He was freed from prison about a year later. So I guess documentary films do have the power to change the world at times. 

Alternate Film Title: "Hitchhiking: Still a Bad Idea"

Film: Oz the Great and Powerful

Director: Sam Raimi 
Genre: Fantasy
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: PG
Location/Format: AMC Orange Park
Grade:D+

So after seeing Oblivion in IMAX, we decided to make a day of it and turn our movie outing into a double feature. Unfortunately, we chose Oz the Great and Powerful as our second film, and this movie is not very good.

Sam Raimi. Really hit and miss for me.

This prequel to the Wizard of Oz has a few great things going for it: Raimi has fun playing with the 3D and the visuals, the China Girl is a pretty good little character, and Mila Kunis is still pretty good looking. Unfortunately, the story and writing are uninspired (a particular problem with prequels? We know how this ends!), most of the characters are uninteresting, and Mila Kunis is completely miscast. At least Rachel Weisz is there to make this world look like somebody belongs in it. 

Maybe the film is just pitched at an audience 25-30 years younger than I am, but I found myself incredibly bored, annoyed by bad jokes, and shocked by how bad I thought Mila Kunis's makeup was. Fortunately, the film's climactic siege of the Emerald City (including the incorporation of scarecrows and the world's greatest smoke machine) salvaged a little of the movie, but not enough to turn the tide for me. I'm glad I had already seen the far more interesting Oblivion, because at least I felt my time at the movies had not been a complete waste.

Still, Sam Raimi: you need to find your groove again. Because it's not in Oz.

Alternate Film Title: "Oz the Great and Terrible--Because When I Played Oz in My Junior High School Production of The Wizard of Oz, That Was My First Line, Shouted Boldly Through My Barely Pubescent Lungs . . . Good Times."

Film: Oblivion

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Genre: Sci Fi
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: PG 13
Location/Format: AMC Orange Park IMAX
Grade: A-

A friend of mine suggested that Oblivion is a mash-up of sci-fi's greatest hits, and he's not wrong. Within the opening shots of the film, the tone and set-up immediately brought to mind Duncan Jones' Moon. Elsewhere in the film, scenes reminiscent of 2001 (the grand daddy of modern sci-fi films), Solaris, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Wall-E (or Portal, depending on how you first see those drones), Mad Max (or any number of other post-apocalyptic future worlds), District 9, and even Independence Day caught my eye. I'm sure there were more than that--it's been a while since we saw it. But even as I saw and acknowledged all of that, I have to admit that I really enjoyed myself. Did I see plot twists coming a mile a way? Yes. Did I enjoy it anyway? Absolutely.

Some of that is due to the pleasure Joseph Kosinski takes in carefully designing his worlds. The director of Tron: Legacy (another critical flop that I really enjoyed), Kosinski presents an Apple-aesthetic future in which everything is white, glossy, and sterile--while still being really sexy also. The plane/jet/helicopter thing that Tom Cruise flies around this post-apocalyptic world looks like so much fun that I can suspend my disbelief regarding how it actually works. Much like I will accept the idyllic paradise Cruise finds seemingly minutes away from the ruined east coast--a true hidden valley that is both inexplicable and an all-too-obvious contrast to the sterile future Cruise's character Jack normally lives in. The nature versus technology thread is painfully clunky, but it worked well enough. As with Tron: Legacy, I liked exploring this world--both for its visuals as well as for the story behind it--that I was willing to forgive a little obvious metaphor. I particularly enjoyed seeing the film in IMAX, as the scale and clarity of the picture made Kosinski's world even more engrossing.

Here's my question, however (and it may include some spoilers): When the first third of your film hinges on a lone survivor battling a creepy band of aliens, why oh why would your previews include shots of that character getting captured and questioned by Morgan Freeman? Freeman's inclusion in the marketing campaign for this film makes several of the twists the film promises even more predictable and obvious, since we know before sitting down in the theater that the "figures out in the dark" are not alien but human, which should make us question the reliability of the narrator's understanding of the world, which should lead us quickly to where the film ultimately takes us. It's another case of marketing diluting the possible power of the film, and it's disappointing.

Still, I have no problem admitting how much I enjoyed this movie, and while I don't know if I liked it enough to buy it when it comes out, I do know that the visuals of the world are compelling enough to make me interested in a second viewing. For me, it wasn't a bad early kick-off to the summer movie season

Alternate Film Title: "Every So Often You'll Remember How Tiny Tom Cruise Really Is"

Book: Snow Crash

Take three parts digital prophesy, one part religious ur-myth, and a dash of absurdist humor; mix it with capitalism-run-amok, a hacker mentality, and a fondness for samurai swords, half-bake it all for 400 pages, and you've got something approaching the genius mishmash that is Snow Crash. Though for me the story didn't ultimately live up to the ideas, the ideas here are both eerily prescient and beautifully over-the-top, and it leaves me no doubt that I will pick up more Stephenson in the future.

To summarize this story would probably take pages, so here is a cliff-notes story: in a futuristic/parallel America in which corporate entities have redrawn national boundaries and in which much business is done in the virtual reality Internet world known as the Metaverse, a new drug known as--delivered digitally directly to the brain stem and affecting both the online avatar and the physical user--has begun to appear. In investigating the narcotic/virus's roots, its creator, and its purpose, pizza deliveryman, hacker, and self-proclaimed "greatest swordfighter in the world" Hiro Protagonist teams up with fearless skate-boarding deliverygirl Y.T. on an adventure that crosses time, space, and virtual worlds. It's a roller-coaster ride filled with comedy, action, and philosophical musings, and it's a lot of fun to read.

The plot, as it stands, is so insane that you can't help just go along for the ride. But where Snow Crash really worked for me was in how well, 21 years ago, it seemed to predict today's world. OK, the United States hasn't completely dissolved into corporate nations, but the power of the corporation continues to grow unabated. We now have corporations fighting our wars, deciding our political stances, even enforcing our laws. Are we really that far from a world in which franchise-states separate themselves more completely so as to create their own laws and policies--in which even the mafia can incorporate and go "legit"? I'm not so sure. And what of Stephenson's Metaverse, which though not the current direction of the Internet, can be seen in the gaming worlds of PlayStation Home, Second Life, even World of Warcraft and other MMOs--worlds in which information is interfaced with on a digital level, served up in bite-sized pieces through fiber-optic and wireless connections. Perhaps skateboarding isn't as popular now as it was when the novel was written, but Stephenson gets so much else "right" (as in, it feels like it could still be just around the corner) that I don't even care. Hiro's penchant for sword-fighting even pre-Matrixes The Matrix. And don't even get me started on the ways religion, race, and fears of immigration seem to play into the mix. 

My one disappointment is that after a while the plot gets so silly that the bigger issues the book wants to explore (language and the brain, religion as a virus, the blending of the cyber and the physical) get drowned out in the rollicking action set-pieces. It's fun, but it does dampen the more thought-provoking ideas that seem to drive the book forward. L. Bob Rife, for example, never gets fleshed out as completely as he could and should have been, and so for me some of the driving force of the novel petered out.

Still, whatever else this book may be, and despite being long-winded at times, I couldn't help but enjoy myself and got lost in Stephenson's world of anarchy and chaos, anchored by some really cool cats. Hiro and Y.T. are fun, and so the novel is propelled forward with energy, even when it gets lost in itself.

Grade: B+

Video Game: Bioshock Infinite

I am way behind on my movie and book entries, but I wanted to take a few minutes to write about Bioshock: Infinite while it was still fresh in my mind. It's one of the most compelling games I've played for a while, and since beating it on Friday night (really Saturday morning) at 1 a.m., I haven't stopped thinking about it. So I figured I ought to jot down some thoughts, since it's been on of the more impactful media experiences I've had so far this year 

"Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt," the story begins. You play as Booker DeWitt, a semi-alcoholic Pinkerton detective who is sent to find a young woman named Elizabeth, a Disney princess-esque young woman of indeterminate age who is being held in a tower in the middle of the city. In this case, the city is Columbia, a chain of interlinked flying islands that float above the world. Columbia was launched by the US around the time of the World's Fair of 1893, but by the time the story begins (I think in 1912), it has broken off to become its own independent nation, led by a man named Comstock, the Prophet.

Columbia has a unique and fascinating personality as a setting. It's sci-fi and a throwback to the past all at the same time. The city is torn by internal conflict between those in power--Comstock and others, known generally as the Founders--and the oppressed lower classes, the Vox Populi. Against this civil war, Columbia has plenty of room for fascinating story telling. There is a deep sense of religion--regard for Comstock as a prophet, for the Founding Fathers of the US as demigods, etc. You can only enter the city through baptism, and the religious elements return throughout the story in some really fascinating ways.

One of the ways the city works so well as a compelling setting is because the art is so beautiful. It's an amazing place to walk around, even on my medium-end pc. Light, shadow, fog, cloud, and more all play across the city in beautiful and surprising ways. Unlike the original Bioshock (which is fairly unconnected to this world), Columbia is bright and cheerful, full of sunlight and blue skies. And the music. I don't think I've played a video game before where the ambient sound of the environment was so creative. Rounding a corner to hear a barbershop quartet version of "God Only Knows" (originally by the Beach Boys) is one of the most memorable video game experiences I've ever had. You see Columbia is not just a floating city. It is also a city riddled with "tears" that connect it to alternate worlds and alternate times. Elements of those worlds have seeped through, particularly in the form of music. It creates a unique and fascinating sense of place.

Elizabeth, the Prophet's daughter, is held against her will in a giant tower because she can control (to a limited degree) these tears in reality, opening and closing them at will. Elizabeth's growing understanding of who she is and why she can do this becomes a major theme throughout the game, as do Booker's own reasons for his quest to protect her. Elizabeth has another protector/captor as well in the Songbird, a huge birdlike creature--somewhere between a living animal and robot--that keeps her in her tower and occasionally appears to hunt her down. The source of this creature is not fully explored (or if it was, I missed it) in this game, and I hope that some of the DLC will deal with the Songbird's origins. I suspect, as with all other elements of this game, that there is more going on than meets the eye.

As a game, Bioshock: Infinite is successful but full of problems. I got tired and bored with examining every trashcan, crate, and bag for items, and after a while I stopped noticing the amazing set design because I was looking for searchable items. I'm not sure if that's my fault or the games, because you do need those items, but the search pulled me out of the game. Similarly, the combat (while fun) does tend to get a little repetitive. Again, that might be a lack of imagination on my part, but even as I got much better, I did not always grow to enjoy it more.

Still, the setting and story--including themes like guilt and innocence, redemption and salvation--all resonate so well it's hard to find fault. The game took me around 19 hours to beat (I'm slow; other websites I've looked at reported doing it in 10 or so), and when I wasn't playing I was thinking about it. Like last year's The Walking Dead, my fascination with the characters and the story really overwhelmed the tediousness of some of the game play--enough so that I'm considering replaying it in 1999 mode (the hardcore mode) just so I can explore the world again. We'll see. I've considered doing that with games before and rarely do so.

What can I say though? I want to go back to Columbia.

Film: eXistenZ

Director: David Cronenberg
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Source: USA (1999)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade: B

It took me a little while to get over the "look" of this film, as the version I saw seemed poorly transferred, like watching an old VHS copy. I'm not sure why that is, other than the movie was not received well enough to get a crisp HD clean-up. And that's a shame, because Cronenberg has created a fascinating world here--or multiple worlds really--in which the nature of reality is in question, but so is the morality of video games and other digital "escapes."

I've seen a lot of websites where this film is compared to The Matrix, and I guess I can see where that's coming from--both films involve jacking in to digital worlds--but they handle it in such diverse ways that any superficial similarities they have seem irrelevant early on. It's a bit like comparing Blazing Saddles to Unforgiven. Yes they're both westerns, but they're aiming at very different purposes.

Cronenberg, for example, seems fascinated with the melding of the biological and the digital, though not at all in the way The Matrix is. Cronenberg's "sci-fi" elements are fleshy, living game consoles, bred by humans and processed. When his characters "jack in" to their games, they meld with these semi-living electronics, holding them on their laps like kittens while their nervous system is activated. It's far from the cold mechanized chairs and the syringes into the skull that The Matrix presents, and the fetishization of technology and the weirdly sexual nature of Cronenberg's digital systems is fascinating.

And as a gamer I think Cronenberg is trying (though at times really heavy-handedly) to explore both the ways in which video games affect our perceptions of reality and existence and the ways in which our ethical frameworks can be skewed, altered, or diminished by video game immersion. The trade in of the real for the digital comes with a cost, he seems to say, whether social, environmental (enjoying the fake trees of Console Shooter 7 rather than the real trees outside), or moral. And he explores all that in a world in which there are almost no computers, electronics, or television screens shown. Pretty impressive.

Plus there are some great scenes in which the conventions of video games (character loops, poorly written "cut scenes," the discrepancy between true freedom and avatar freedom) are satirized in clever ways.

I thought I would really be bored with the movie, but it ended up sucking me in and intriguing me. I think I'd like to see a little more Cronenberg. 

(Side note: the cover/poster art for this movie is truly terrible. I am not sure if the picture I went with here is official or unofficial, but it was the least ugly of the American posters I found.)

Alternate Film Title: "Tooth Gun: 'Nuff Said"