Steve Jobs

Saw Steve Jobs, another rat-a-tat film scripted by Aaron Sorkin.  Due to the writer and subject, I couldn't help but compare this to yesterday's Social Network.  This one is much more dense and less simplistic, I feel, but also somehow a weaker film.  It's very information-dense and wordy (of course) but I found it hard to care very much about the intense family and business struggles of Steve Jobs.  My opinion is colored somewhat since I'm very much outside of Steve's cult of personality (I've never even used a mac for more than a few hours in my life I think) and he struck me as a person who doesn't deserve their accolades (but then, who does?)

Anyway, it also doesn't help that the film constrains itself to three real-time vignettes of backstage drama during three product launches over Steve's career.  Each time, Steve is visited by the three ghosts of business (in the form of long-time Apple CEO John Sculley,) technology (Steve Wozniac,) and family (his daughter, Lisa.)  As with Social Network, the girl is posited as the key to the riddle and while this feels simplistic to me, Steve is a more accessible person than Mark Zuckerberg, so it may be closer to the mark.

The film, to its credit, fully explores each of these angles on the Steve-ian enigma, and each provides some great shouting scenes where the actors can show off their chops.  The film is fairly chilly and kind of claustrophobic.  Because he's having these conversations literally minutes before a product unveiling, when hoards of people are literally baying for his presence, everything seems heightened, dramatic, and tense.  It's tough to tell the jerk side of Jobs from the stage jitters side of Jobs.  It's a small thing.

So, this film was alright.  I feel I was not the target audience and that the target audience was in fact Apple/Jobs fan-boys or folks who are just interested in the glitzy big-business/advertising side of things, but the film delivered histrionics and tense show-downs that require attention and I liked that.  I liked The Social Network a little better, even as I think it's a somewhat sillier film, but this one was a bit too chilly/intellectual.  I would have preferred some more time and some more conventional storytelling.

The Social Network

Saw The Social Network, a slick film about the founding of Facebook and about the founder Mark Zuckerberg.  The film is written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, so the vibe is very nerd-masculine.  Not worshiping physical violence, but loving a clever, quippy sort of sarcasm.  The film is very slick and yet felt sort of glib to me.  The rise of Facebook and the autistic genius of Mark Zuckerberg are fun to watch but ultimately the film reveals that it was all done for very simple emotional reasons and that the Zuck is just a human being after all.  This is annoying to me.

The film is mostly about Mark.  He's played as somewhat neurodivergent (OCD?  Aspergers?) however he's smart enough to pull off this stand-offish misunderstood genius act.  More than that, he realizes that gathering power and money through business is orthogonal to making useful or new things.  He starts out in Harvard where social currency is prized more highly than actual cash.  He starts out wanting to join a frat in spite of being unlikable and generally exhausting to deal with.  He soon realizes after an experimental precursor to Facebook crashes the Harvard network that frats are just a means to networking and that he's capable of just leapfrogging the whole frat system.

I feel the film suggests that he's sort of a normal person in an Asperger-shaped disguise.  He wants acceptance, he wants The Girl, he wants friends but he just somehow can't (how tragic!)  It does nail the way that Silicon Valley (and the world in general) rewards social manipulation, clout, and access to moneyed folk.  There's an investor (Sean Parker who founded Napster) who takes an interest in Facebook and freezes out the previous CFO (Mark's college dorm-mate.)  He's not smarter or objectively better, but he is more experienced and better connected and the first thing he does is isolate Mark as his own privet money-making pet.  This is, ladies and gents, how it works.

I feel this sort of cynicism puts the film in the realm of Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street: dark, miserable films that worship success and excess and which seem to show life as it really is, behind the curtain.  Because this film deals with tech it feels sort of inspiring to me, but it still tastes poisonous.  I did greatly enjoy it however and one man's cynicism is sometimes another man's inspiration, so who knows.  I loved the out-of-nowhere tilt-shifted regatta.  I also enjoyed the seductive revenge of the nerds angle.  Wimpy coders take down buff frat bros (two Adonis-like twins are completely steamrolled by The Zuck in a few satisfying scenes) and pull all the prettiest girls.  Go, nerds.

In the end however, I feel the film is a snarky, grim little thing that sure loves a cutting remark but which feel pat and overly simplistic.  The point is to create a satisfying narrative arc however and so the film must ultimately resolve into broad easy emotions that are relatable.  They may not be true, but they may be close enough to count.  Anyway a good, mean film.

I'm Thinking About Ending Things

Saw I'm Thinking About Ending Things, a complex, ominous film by Charlie Kaufman.  This film is focused on a woman who is thinking of "ending things."  The film implies she's thinking of breaking up with her incel-like boyfriend however, Charlie Kaufman not being one for half-measures, explores the other common use of that phrase: death and suicide.

The film starts with the couple travelling to the guy's family farm.  It's heavily coded as a place of death and entrapment.  The barns are rotting, the screen door is torn.  The girl is dressed in bright reds that fade to pinks and blacks and then to blues the longer she stays.  There is a dog who is only shown in isolation, forever shaking its head - disconcertingly disappearing between cuts.  The film is intentionally dream-like and off-putting.  Netflix bills it as a horror, but it's a creeping, baffling kind of horror, like a David Lynch film.

The ending of the central relationship is linked to the ending of life - a destruction and dissolution, making everyone increasingly confused and foggy before the end arrives.  Then again, of course, being trapped in a bad relationship is another sort of death - a living death of embalmed stasis.  Again and again the girl pleads with the boy to leave the farm house.  She lists many different reasons to leave: she must work on her essay, she has to do research, she has an early shift, but still they linger and linger as the storm gets worse outside and his parents keep aging.

The film also brings up notions of consent and agency.  This girl seems to be kept against her will, imprisoned in the farm house and later in the car.  In a relationship is either party (can either party) be fully aware of what they're consenting to?  And what about the larger, echoed theme?  None of us consented to be born, you know.  The big and small anxieties of life and relationships keep echoing and reflecting each other, making big questions small and small questions big.  Later in the film, a pig explains a little: everything is like everything if you look closely enough.  Pigs are often used as a symbol for death in this film.

The boy in the film is deeply creepy and the source for most of the horror in the film.  When rabies is brought up, we focus on a fleck of foamy spit on his mouth.  He endlessly corrects the girl and pedantically explains references that she makes, coming off like an insecure internet troll, defending a balloon-skin-thin ego and perhaps suffering from some slight autism (he shows and aversion to touch.)  He is grunting, fat, and ogre-ish and sullenly shouts at his fragile mother.  He's pathetic and abominable.  A great villain!

The film was really interesting.  It's kind of dream-like and eerie.  Very evocative and fascinating.  It's not the sort of film you can "solve" exactly so be ware.  You never get the solutions to all of the questions (or at any rate I didn't) and that's OK (like the setting of the film, or the musical they keep referencing: Oklahoma.)  The film is full of interesting twinning and imagery however and is a rich source for speculation.  Are we watching is boy's memories or fantasies about a relationship that never was, or are we seeing an amalgamation of all the previous girls he's known?  I have my theories (see above) but yours will be different.

Crash (1996)

Saw Crash, not the more recent and famous film about race relations but the 1996 one about car crash fetishism.  It's easy to confuse the two, I know.  Anyway this film is a fine, lurid, perverse film by Cronenberg based on a book by J G Ballard who made a career of inventing and pursuing strange obsessions to their insane conclusions.  This film follows a filmmaker named James (named after J G himself) who collides with a woman's car on the highway.  It turns out she is a member of a bizarre group of car-crash fetishists who induct him into their fold.

The film is very over-sexed.  James' girlfriend is constantly nude and gyrating on his lap.  The car crash cult is run by this heavily scarred guy who everyone fantasizes about having sex with (James included.)  There's like 12 sex scenes in this 90 minute long film.  Watch it alone if at all, yeesh!

Anyway, I loved how the insane fetish hung together.  No one has this fetish but car culture permeates American society strongly.  The cult leader is regarded as extremely virile because of his giant car.  He is obsessed with celebrities who died in car accidents and at one point rattles off like six of them.  He recreates the death of James Dean in a car wreck.  No one has this fetish in real life, but it seems almost plausible: a sadomasochistic version of car worship.

The film is pretty good. There's a ton of sex scenes which must be (for me) endured, however the obsessions of the film are interesting in their connection to real life.  Like the Matrix, there's a suggestion of a shadowy nether world which runs in the shadows of this one.  It's also morbid good fun to see how far the characters take their obsession.  This is such a fascinating, lurid, filthy little film.  I feel some of the sex scenes ideally would be removed, but as it is, they serve to underscore the decadent, pleasure-seeking nature of the main characters.  It got a bit slog-ish at parts, but the concept is so good and so crazy, I feel that I will love it more in retrospect.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Saw Beasts of the Southern Wild, a beautiful, poetic, fable of a film which follows Hushpuppy, a girl living with her father off the grid in the outskirts and wetlands of (I think) Louisiana.  She is taught and minded by a gang of dunks and weirdos who teach her that the icecaps are melting, freeing old extinct monsters that the cave men fought off.  These beasts become associated with water and storms to young Hushpuppy, a fitting nemesis in a post-Katrina New Orleans.

The film is shot sort of magically and sort of realistically.  The girl is abandoned by her father for a while (for example) only for him to show up again in a hospital gown.  When she asks where he went, he just yells at her.  Earlier in the film, she puts her head to a hog's side to listen to its heart beat.  It's a strange mix of touching innocence and harsh reality colliding in this one girl's head.

The image of water is potent as well.  They live in a watery land, but also a land where too much water, thundering down like the hooves of those large beasts, spells doom for the floating community.  Rain is reason to be scared but, during deaths, the community sheds no tears, instead drinking clear, vodka-like spirits.  Water is life but also it is death.

Hushpuppy is made tough by this world and while her toughness is admirable, it's also poignant.  I wish she could have been allowed to grow up in the dry world where she maybe didn't have to be so tough.

This film was very lyrical and interesting.  I enjoyed it even as I felt I didn't fully understand it.

A Few Good Men

Saw A Few Good Men, rounding out this courtroom drama kick I've been on.  This film follows a murder trial where two marines are accused of hazing a fellow marine to death.  Over the course of this trial, the defense shall show that the marines were acting on the explicit orders of their commanders and that, howsoever we desire the truth, yet we cannot handle the truth.  The film was made in 1992 but the central hazing event happened in Guantanamo.  In a wonderful example of life imitating art, this film revolves around the incongruity of American ideals vs the methods used to uphold them - a theme which is now intimately connected with Guantanamo.

The film is fairly taught.  It starts off as a sort of mystery, with the main characters collecting evidence and searching for the cracks which will make the prosecution's case fall apart.  There's character growth as well, but it's very on-the-nose stuff.  We're not meant to discover that this character has grown: we are told it in montage and in that character soulfully gazing out into the ocean.  Like I say, the first half is a mystery that we're uncovering.  The themes of honor and the importance of a moral code are set-dressing to the court case.

Then the court case comes and the formula is reversed.  We have no last-minute surprise evidence or witnesses, just men screaming at each other about ends and means and, yes, that great line "you can't handle the truth!"  The second half works to drive both the thematic and plot elements to a climax in the same scene.  It's some great stuff!

The central philosophical struggle concerns doing what's right vs doing what's expedient.  The truth that we cannot handle is that the front lines of national borders are brutal, dehumanizing places where barbarity quickly sneaks in.  Americans would learn this lesson in real life during the W Bush years when it was revealed that, yes, America tortures its prisoners too and that, no, they're not going to stop.  Although the lawyer wins the battle in this film, they loose the war.  The film however imagines a seductive world where virtue is rewarded and that noble intentions are recognized and rewarded.  Incidentally, this film was inspired by a real-life hazing case in Guantanamo.

The film is good - it has a lot of dynamite performances by an excellent cast.  The script is good and clever, and the plot portrays a seductive world where clever people catch evildoers and put them away for the sake of the greater good.  It deals with complex, real-world issues which indict our existing world.

Q:The Winged Serpent

Saw Q:The Winged Serpent, a film as strange as its title.  It's about a series of mysterious murders in NYC which turn out to be caused by the reincarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who is living in the Chrysler building.  The film is a B-movie romp crossed with a 1970s gritty realism crime thriller.

The film is interesting in its mix of influences.  Made in 1982, it bears the gritty look and naturalistic, semi-improvised performances of the 70s, but the monster is all Jason and the Argonauts-style stop motion and aging green-screen.  I feel this film would have worked better as a book or something.  Almost everything involving the monster is not worth it.

The bits that are worth it are the scenes reveling in the bizarreness of the situation.  Instead of having some audience stand-in character become aware of the monster and get a good look at it, we follow sweaty, pudgy cops who are trying to solve these mysterious beheadings and gruesome disembowelings suddenly plaguing the city.  It's a gritty-realistic-style approach given to an utterly nutty concept.  Very interesting if nothing else.

As you might expect, this film is really more strange and outlandish than it is entertaining.  After the premise is revealed, everything else seems sort of plodding and pedestrian in comparison, especially since we're follow a cops-eye view.  I feel like this is the sort of film to watch and react to with friends.  It keeps the weirdness coming at a reasonable pace, the performances are fairly serviceable, and it's relatively short.  Watched alone it's a bit of a slog by the end however.

Legally Blonde

Saw Legally Blonde, a cute, goofy movie about a stereotypical, air-headed sorority girl who gets into law school to impress her ex-boyfriend who dumped her for not being "serious".  It's mostly a fish-out-of-water comedy about this pink-clad, high-heeled blonde woman being perky and bubbly and receiving withering gazes and sneering one-liners from stuffy law profs.  The film is very satisfying however, because you know the pretty girl is going to show them all and the profs' wry smiles will slowly become genuine smiles of quiet approval.

The film is a lot goofier than I expected.  The bassoon is heavy on the soundtrack and all emotions are broadcast loudly.  It's not a "smart dumb" movie, just a dumb-dumb movie.  I was hoping for more nuance and frankly hoped that the film would honor some her of "silly" girl-world problems and skills.  Perhaps there could be a scene showing how keeping a sorority-full of women happy requires some very complex management and diplomacy.  No such luck, alas.

Of course the film isn't just one-note or totally straightforward either.  There's scenes where the main character doubts herself, or where she buckles down and achieves greatness, but often it's in spite of her self that she does this, not because of it.  I wish it were otherwise because as the film is, it reinforces the opinion of the ex-boyfriend: that her life is a frivolous waste of time.  Only something serious like Law is worth spending attention on.  I'm not sure what about Law makes it more important than (say) fashion or public relations, but the law school has some very distinguished professors and some very fancy buildings, so...

The above grousing aside, the film is totally a fun guilty pleasure.  The main character, although dumb, is incredibly hard-working and seems to be a genuinely nice person.  She helps a couple of side-characters and, when a former mean girl tries to make up with her, she quickly forgives and forgets.  Snide law students make fun of her but she is nothing but nice and assertive.  The final court-case show-down is ridiculous and God help her future clients, but she's a fun person to watch for a while and a good person to root for.

Phantasm

Saw Phantasm, an interesting but kind of mixed bag horror film about two brothers and a spooky funeral home director.  The film contains eerie, fascinating scenes that still feel fresh and novel, and also strange, dated scenes that feel moldier than a year-old corpse.  The film is interesting on the whole and goes to some very strange and interesting places, but it's a mixed bag in the end, containing as much bad as good.

The film is apparently based on a dream the director had of a chrome sphere chasing him through marble hallways, intent on drilling into his head.  That sequence exists in this film and is great.  A lot of the horror sequences in the film dip heavily into sci-fi imagery, with chrome and machinery so advanced it is like magic.  All of these scenes are marvelous and feel like something out of Beyond the Black Rainbow or something.  The mixture of dread with high-tech magic is fascinating and ripe for the modern time: there is a toxic ghost in the machine, animating it to terrible ends.

The film does show its age in most other scenes however.  There's a lot of scenes with the younger brother in particular, delivering lines like "You gotta be shittin' me, man! That mother's strong!" in a pipping little-boy voice.  The older brother isn't saddled with such cumbersome lines, but he spends a lot of time playing guitar and driving a muscle car and being a cool dude.

There's some other scenes that are not so much dated as just kind of clumsy.  At one point the younger brother is locked in his room but MacGyver's his way out.  We watch him slowly and thoughtfully assemble the door-unlocking mechanism.  The scene kind of drags.  At other times characters are abruptly introduced only to be killed off-screen shortly after.  Allegedly the original cut of this film was 3 hours long, so perhaps that's to blame here.  Even at its current modest runtime of 90 minutes, it kind of drags at the end.

The film is worth seeing, but set your expectations low.  There's a lot of stale 70s-ness going on, but there's glimmers and flashes a much more interesting, much stranger movie in there.  This film leaves a ton of stuff unexplained or vaguely hinted at, with enough dangling material for several sequels and comic books.  There's a happy lack of zombies and an abundance of strange imagery.  It's worth a look, just be forewarned.

Wall Street

Saw Wall Street, another film about high finance daring-do.  It's very similar to Wolf of Wall Street, however this one sides more a little more clearly with the good guys, despite the bad guy being rich, powerful, and kind of the main character.  The plot is this: a neophyte stock broker is trying to break into the Big Leagues.  He impresses a Big League-er named Gordon Gekko by passing him some inside information.  Impressed with his willingness to bend the rules in the name of making money, Gordon takes this stock-lad under his wing.  Things go well for a while, but then they do not go well.

Finance films seem to follow the same beats as drug films: the beginning is innocent dabbling, followed by induction into the bigger/harder stuff, followed by the bad times as the money runs out, and then the denouement which usually involves prison.  I guess they're supposed to be cautionary tales, warning us not to let addictive substances such as money and power cost us our souls and autonomy.

I think this film's main motive is to agitate.  Gordon Gekko has a lot of pithy one liners that express an extreme self-serving attitude.  Greed is good.  Money is not created, just moved around.  Finance is a zero-sum game.  He's the self-righteous avatar of lawless finances.  We are supposed to despise him and want him to no longer be capable of existing.  Several times he's shot from waist level, towering over the Manhattan skyline.  The implication is that he is crooked, yes, but he runs this town.  What are you going to do?

The film's ending (not to get too spoiler-y) feels a little unearned.  The slide into increasing corruption and increasing success is fun in a wicked way.  The denouement feels disappointing in comparison - a removal of rascally fun and return to moralizing normality.  This kind of undercuts any agitation the film might hope to inspire.  The film is good and enjoyable to watch, but it flirts a lot with the evil it portrays.  An interesting film.

12 Angry Men

Saw 12 Angry Men, a tense and frothy courtroom melodrama which follows the jurors in a murder case as they retire and deliberate.  They start off with a vote and find that they are not unanimous: they find they are 11 for guilty and 1 not guilty.  Alas, the biggest star of the film, Henry Fonda, is the lone hold-out and thus he begins to work on changing the other guys' minds.

The film is fairly fun.  Quickly the guilty-voters are whittled down to a core of folks who think the defendant is guilty and each has his own (fairly ugly) reasons.  One is racist, the other clearly lacks empathy, and a third collapses on the table, sobbing, as he reveals his motivations.  Fun stuff!

The film is very melodramatic, but it mostly feels realistic.  There's a few very telling scenes that reveal actual human frailties and flaws and they're not always the big scenes.  There's two moments where one of the juror's change their minds: one because he wants this to be over and goes with the majority, and the other because he's not certain any more and must admit a reasonable doubt.  Neither can say precisely why they changed their mind but it is clear that one just does not care and that the other cares but has become muddled, confused, perhaps cares all too much.

I also loved a moment in the final scene where, as they're all leaving the jury room, one juror runs up to Henry Fonda, wanting to continue the emotional experience they were on, only to find that the moment has evaporated after they gave their verdict.  He winds up just lamely asking for his name and then they go their separate ways.  It's a little moment that feels very true-to-life and which also reflects our experience as the film ends: we want to go on feeling and reacting, but it's over now.  See you around!

The film is pretty good.  It's a bit frothy but that suits my taste just fine.  I enjoyed it!

My Cousin Vinny

Saw My Cousin Vinny, since it was in the news a lot lately.  It was pretty good.  The plot is that two college-aged dudes are road tripping across the US and are accused of murdering a quickie-mart employee.  It's now up to their cousin Vinny, an outrageous New Yorker who barely passed the bar exam, to get them acquitted.  The film is a comedy and court-room drama.

The film's humor revolves around the fish-out-of-water experience of Vinny showing up in a podunk town with his leather jacket and shades, his girlfriend in a form-fitting spandex dress.  There's a running gag where he tries to find somewhere (anywhere!) to sleep.  Every hotel is right by the train tracks or by a hog farm or has wild screech owls or something.  I was happy how even-handed this was.  Vinny never seemed to sneer at the small town but he is also not shown to be too fussy - just out of his element, that's all.  There's moments of small-town hick-ery, but also Vinny is sometimes shown to be fussy, so I feel it evens out.

Anyway, once the court case starts, the movie shifts into a courtroom drama with witnesses becoming emotional, recanting their testimony and late-breaking facts being uncovered.  It's all fun stuff.  It's consistently fun to see Vinny interact with the incredibly imposing judge.

The film is fun and breezy.  It's satisfying and amusing.  It won't stick with you or stick in your mind too much, but you'll enjoy the time spent with it.  It's not mean and it's not crude, just a light little snack.