Let's Go Out To The Movies: Foxcatcher (R - Sony Pictures Classics - 2 hrs, 14 mins)

Directed by Bennett Miller
Written by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman

Alo Party Peoples.

The events and people depicted in Foxcatcher are ones that can hardly be believed to be real, considering how much they lend themselves to dark somber drama. In fact, even though both of my parents are old enough for them to be in conscious memory, neither of them have any recollection of ever hearing about them before sitting down to watch the movie. But a true story, it somehow is, and like last year's big serious based on a true story sports movie Rush, it's a pretty excellent showcase of fantastic performances.

In the 1980's, John du Pont, eccentric heir to a massive estate, decided to start up his own amateur wrestling team using part of his fortune, hoping that his Team Foxcatcher would make it into the Olympics for the United States. In 1996, he shot the team's rising star Dave Schultz seemingly out of the blue, and was eventually discovered to have paranoid schizophrenia.

Foxcatcher sets out to explore just what slipped out of place in John's head, but along the way can not help but touch upon the bizarre mix of athletic fanaticism, opulent power highs, actual highs, and almost toxic masculinity that went into du Pont's psyche. Steve Carrel gets the lead role as du Pont himself, Channing Tatum plays the washed up Olympian wrestler Mark Schultz whom du Pont recruits for his crazy idea, and Mark Ruffalo plays a fellow Olympian as Dave, who tries to intervene with his brother but ends up sucked into du Pont's web.

The big story surrounding this movie has been fantastic performances, and they are amazing, I fully expect Carrel and Tatum to be up for Oscar nominations. Through some fantastic physical acting and restraint by Steve Carrel, even if you don't know about the events that inspired Foxcatcher, you can tell that something isn't quite right with John du Pont.  Channing Tatum shows himself to have quite a bit of range playing Mark, portraying the kind of easily moved around emotionally fragile lunkhead that would get sucked into such a crazy thing from such a bizarre man, and Mark Ruffalo is fantastic playing the good man trying to keep his brother from getting involved.

The cast is amazing, and certainly a big draw, but Foxcatcher is also concerned with the American psyche at the time that it depicts. du Pont seems like the kind of man that, having found massive amounts of money by inheritance, and having never had to work for a living at any point in his life, would spend much of that money on sudden special interests and try to turn himself into the ideal of bold masculinity. He loves the Stars and Stripes, muscular guns and actual guns, and speaks quite a bit of turning his wrestling team into an inspiration for American men to the point that he insists people start calling him "the Eagle", but he can't back it up. He's not a pioneer or a captain of industry, or even an especially good wrestling coach, but some rich nut descended from great men with a ridiculously over inflated ego.

Foxcatcher may end up on my best of the year list, and it might not, but it's a fantastic somber drama, an almost guaranteed Oscar frontrunner, and is more than worth seeing. It's currently in a limited release before working up towards a full one in January, but if it's playing near you I recommend checking it out.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (PG-13 - Lionsgate - 2 hrs, 3 mins)

Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by Peter Craig and Danny Strong

Alo Party Peoples.

Here we go again. This has been a year of growth for me as a critic. I've established a solid foundation for myself and my writing style, gotten a better hold of what does and doesn't appeal to me personally, and found that I'm better at writing these when the subject involves the fantastic for reasons that I'm still not entirely sure of.

I've also found that a certain type of film tends to get under my skin. I speak, of course, of the flood of pandering, cheaply produced dystopic SF laser focused on the wallets of the parents of insecure teenagers, the YA "genre" that have been flooding our theaters for the better part of the New Tens, and bookstores since at least the latter half of the Zeroes. The thing that gets at me about the works filling this particular market niche (I don't refer to it as a genre anymore), is the laziness of so many entries.

Sidenote - The only one I can think of that didn't leave a sour aftertaste in my mind was The Fault In Our Stars, and I only consider that a YA movie because John Green writes for teenagers, and that's where a lot of his fanbase lies. Otherwise it has almost nothing to do with most of its peers. -End Sidenote.

One might think that since I have such disdain for the genre, that I would loath The Hunger Games, since it started the current strain of YA movies, but you'd be wrong. I don't hate this series, in fact I kind of have a respect for it. It's just peachy that a generation growing up in the wake of the Digital Revolution is getting into a big multi-media franchise about the importance of media in people's lives, and it's especially good that young female readers have a better role model to look up to than Bella Swan. However, I was never quite sold on the Hunger Games movies as movies. They aren't bad, but they weren't exactly paragons of cinema. The first two movies played to me as serviceable action flicks banking on the popularity of the books, and the decision to split the series' final installment, Mockingjay, into two parts read to me as little more than following the established tradition of splitting up stories to extend the box office lifespan of a franchise.

For the parents that drew the short stick at the mall and had to take everyone else's kids to see this, or anyone else that isn't particularly invested in the series' lore, the franchise is set in the fictional future dystopia of Panem and concerns an ever escalating war between rich and poor classes as symbolized by the easiest possible visual metaphors for rich and poor classes. The evil oppressive Captiol, modeled after King Louis' court and/or Caligula's Rome, and the good Districts modeled on impoverished and downtrodden Great Depression blue collar workers. The Capitol has kept order for close to a century via a televised blood sport called the "Hunger Games" where the districts sent their children to die for the entertainment of their oppressors, but this started to backfire when series' hero Katniss turned the public opinion machine against them. As Mockingjay Part 1 opens, Katniss has discovered that her surprise escape at the end of the last movie was secretly managed by rebels operating out of a secret former District seeking to overthrow the Capitol.

Because there aren't any more games for Katniss to fight in, the conflict here is psychological. Since she was already mentally scarred twice by one propaganda campaign, can she pull it together long enough to do it again when the propagandists are on her side, and does this by letting them mold her into the Mockingjay symbol that has become an emblem of anti-Capitol sentiment in the Districts. They manage to get a good deal of drama out of that, and Jennifer Lawrence is more than game for the role, and having the production work on the rebel's "propos" staged as a funhouse mirror version of the reality TV-esque production work of the Games in the first two movies is one of the more interesting parts of the series so far. We also get to see the home front for once, which lets the mass media culture/Occupy movement/war coverage stuff that was brushed to the sidelines in prior installments come to the forefront here, which is a welcome change of pace.

Unfortunately, those changes are barely felt since the production has been padded out to the horizon in order to justify splitting the final book into two movies. This could have easily been a 90 minute movie or even a 65 minute TV special, but instead we get to see the assembled cast moping around a bunker for great stretches of time in between the good bits. It's the same problem that always accompanies doing so, part one ends up being all about setup for the more interesting stuff consigned to part two. That isn't Suzanne Colin's fault, not by any means, the blame goes to Lionsgate's corporate overlords that wanted to keep their cash cow pumping cheddar for their stock holders at the expense of the film's overall quality.

That being said, I've liked Mockingjay the movie so far. I don't know that I can recommend it to anyone not already invested in the franchise, but it's a solid action movie and the best part of the series so far.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Big Hero 6 (PG - Disney - 1 hr, 45 mins)

Directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams
Written by Don Hall, Daniel Gerson, and Jordan Roberts

Alo Party Peoples.

This weekend has two very different films competing to win the box office, Interstellar, a hard SF epic drama from Christopher Nolan, and Big Hero 6, an animated family movie from Disney that is also a superhero movie. Aesthetically, they couldn't be more different, but thematically they both share an admiration of science and engineering as a force for good. I'm not going to say which is better, honestly that would probably require a bit of hindsight, but both are fine productions and Big Hero 6 is on par with The Incredibles as a good family superhero adventure.

Big Hero 6 is the first, and probably not last, animated production from Disney to be based on a Marvel Comics property, but its source material is so obscure, and the adaptation more or less just took the title and little else, that it doesn't matter, and Disney has downplayed the connection in marketing.

Our story concerns one Hiro Hamada, a teenage robotics enthusiast living in the futuristic mega city of San Fransokyo, which as it's name would suggest, is what it would look like if San Francisco was designed and built in the Far East, who's fast track to early college is interrupted when his older brother Tadashi dies in a fire at a robotics convention. This sends him into a grieving self seclusion that is pretty heavy stuff for a kids movie.

Hiro suspects that the fire wasn't an accident, but was actually part of a sinister plot by a mysterious super-villain using super science nanomachines stolen from him. He decides to track him down, and to do this he conscripts the aid of Baymax, an inflatable healthcare assistant that he retrofits into a combat bot. Baymax goes along with this because it fits in with its programming to "heal the sick and injured", and Hiro claims that getting revenge will help his emotional state. Also helping, connecting with his brother's friends from college Wasabi, GoGo Tamago, Honey Lemon, and Fred while enlisting them to use their various scientific fields to become the Big Hero 6 of the title and take down the bad guy.

The characters are all fantastic and come across as immensely likable, with the obvious standout being Baymax, and the assembled voice cast does a wonderful job. Ryan Potter finds a line between obnoxious and charming as Hiro, T.J Miller is clearly having a good time playing laid back slacker Fred, Jamie Chung brings real energy into GoGo's tomboy routine, Damon Waynes Jr. fills the role of the neurotic, OCD-ish Wasabi really well to great comic effect, Génesis Rodriguez brings real life into Honey's familiar nerd girl performance and stops it from becoming a caricature, but the standout is, of course, Scott Asdit as Baymax.

Baymax, besides being a great character design, is a fantastic depiction of how user friendly AI actually functions. There is never any indication of Baymax gaining a soul or becoming more like a human, instead the reason he is so likable, and will probably sell all of the toys, is that his programming is so responsive that people, including the audience, can project humanity onto him.

Unfortunately, they did such a good job setting up these characters, and devoting time to the same, that the film goes by much too quickly. Blame it on the conception that children won't sit through a movie if it runs longer than an hour and a half. The writers clearly felt that Hiro rising out of his grieving was the heart of the movie, and it is, and since being able to ask his friends for help is a big milestone in doing so, by the time that happens the movie is already halfway over. Meaning that the business of putting the team together, establishing their powers, and going after the bad guy - who at first seems easy to guess the identity of but then things go in an unexpected direction - is delegated to the last forty five minutes, which makes those proceedings feel more than a bit rushed.

They're clearly meaning to start a series, and it's winning the box office which means it will, so we'll probably get more of the team interacting in the sequels, but they did such a good job setting up dynamics between them in this movie that I wanted to see a bit more of that, but what's here is more than satisfactory, and once we do get to the superhero business it's all beautifully animated and filled with creative energy.

Big Hero 6 is a damn good superhero movie, animated or otherwise, a fantastic family movie, and another solid entry in what I am now calling the Second Disney Renaissance.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Interstellar (PG-13 - Warner Bros./Paramount - 2 hrs, 49 mins)

Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Johnathan Nolan

Alo Party Peoples.


This, my readers, is the big one. There were definitely other movies I was looking forward to seeing this year for various reasons. Noah to find out if applying the trappings of mythic fantasy to scripture was a valid approach (kind of, depending on perspective), Lucy to see what a 21st' century take on the ideas and themes of The Matrix would look like (we didn't get that), The Fault In Our Stars to see whether the work of John Green adapted to the silver screen (it does), but no film's marketing campaign attracted my attention quite like that of Interstellar.

It started long before any real footage was available. When I saw that first teaser, the one that was mostly Matthew McCaughnahey giving a speech over stock footage of NASA missions, it stuck in my mind more than anything else I could think of. I still have that speech memorized, and knew that I would have to see this, even before I started taking this site very seriously. I even sought out and purchased tickets to an advance screening on 70 mm film.



It's forty-odd years in the future, an incredibly virulent disease and environmental collapse are killing all of our crops and livestock, creating a worldwide Dust Bowl effect and slowly killing the planet. Our focus is on Matthew McCaughnahey as Cooper, a retired pilot and engineer that deeply resents the steps mankind has taken to make what time we have left livable. Coop, like me, is a bit of a space nut, and he is furious that those aforementioned steps included scrapping any sort of scientific experimentation or exploration, to the point that schools teach children that the Moon landings were faked to fool the Soviets into spending money on "rockets and other useless machines".

One night, during one of the all too frequent storms, Coop discovers mysterious phenomenon occurring in his young daughter Murph's bedroom, which lead him to the remains of NASA, literally forced underground when public opinion turned vehemently against "spending money on space exploration when people are struggling to get food on their plates". They've found a couple of things. 1) the virus killing all our food is making the atmosphere un-breathable,  and 2) a wormhole out near Saturn that could lead to habitable new homes for humanity.

Coop signs up to fly the spaceship, and most of the movie is spent on that journey to see what's on the other side, and that's where Interstellar, well, shines brightest. The creative team, including theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, has done a good job sticking as closely to hard science as a story about rocketing off through mysterious portals to unexplored alien worlds can. Depicting wormholes, black holes, and even higher spatial dimensions as close to what we imagine they would work and look like. He even makes relativity of time into a plot point, setting a scene on a planet where the higher gravity means that hours there are years in Earth time.

They also do a really good job establishing a feeling of scarcity, both on Earth, which drips with constant Depression working class misery, and out in space, where that scarcity is lack of other humans. Matt does a wonderful job expressing that, perfectly encapsulating the feeling of being unimaginably far from everything and everyone that he's ever known or cared about. Of course, it isn't a one man show, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi as fellow astronauts play off each other really well, Bill Irwin as the ship's automated assistant TARS comes off as consistently amusing, and only sometimes feels like a relic of when this was going to be a Steven Spielberg movie.

Unfortunately, that aforementioned feeling of isolation keeps being interrupted when we cut back to Earth during Act 3, where we see Jessica Chastain as a grown up Murph working for the secret NASA enclave. Oh, don't get me wrong, she's great in the part, but if Coop gains audience sympathy because of how alone he feels, and how uncertain he is of whether there are any people left on Earth left to save, that is undermined when we see that there are in fact people left that are still trying to save themselves, and the climax dealing with concepts of love as a quantifiable force that reaches across dimensions, while executed competently, have more than a little dissonance between the script written for master of heart string pulling Spielberg, and Nolan's much more stoic cinematic sensibilities.

That being said, Interstellar is still an impressive feat. An ambitious project in a year full of ambitious projects, it is a compelling hard SF drama paired with a stunning 70 mm IMAX show reel of fantastic cinematography. All paired to a pounding, tension building Hans Zimmer score, although there appear to have been some sound engineering issues since that score occasionally drowns out dialogue. Anyways, I think it's a damn good movie, it's almost certainly ending up on my best of the year list, and I'd recommend seeing it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B