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Man of Steel (2013)

Rated PG-13

manofsteel

Warner Bros.

My parents took me to see Superman The Movie (1978) when I was about 10 years old. I’d seen movies in the theater before, but this was the first one to crystalize the movie-going experience for me. I remember the setup being a little slow, I remember young Clark Kent racing a train, I remember him being conflicted about his misunderstood powers, but I will never forget the first time Superman accepted The Bloghousehis destiny and took flight across my movie screen. Kids were standing on their seats cheering. I remember that. The “You’ll believe a man can fly” tagline was one of the best ever written. Even before I’d really learned to appreciate cinema, the special effects, the love story, the soaring John Williams score really made this a touchstone of my youth.

All of this to say that I obviously didn’t relive that experience with Man of Steel. How could I? I’m a grown man with children of my own who has seen every manner of impossible image brought to life by computers and Hollywood wizardry, to say nothing of all the superhero movies—including the Christopher Reeve sequels—that have come since that first film.

This is a good superhero film in an era of good superhero films. It tells its story with passion (some will say it takes itself too seriously), invested drama and big-summer action. The actors are tops: Amy Adams (Her)  as Lois Lane is aggressive, intelligent, professional but also tender. Kevin Costner’s fantastic in his brief but impactful scenes as Clark’s earth dad, reminding me of what I used to like about him. Russell Crowe brings his usual gravitas to Jor-El, Superman’s biological father, and gets more screen time than I expected. Michael Shannon, who specializes in intense characters, is excellent as General Zod, Superman’s main nemesis here. Zod is relentless, brutal, assured in his purpose (almost convincing me of his plight), with just enough complexity to steal most of his scenes. This new guy, Henry Cavill, is convincing as a dour Clark, a pride-gaining Kal-El and a blossoming Man of Steel. I like how he’s still learning to be Superman by the end of the film.

We’ve come a long way since the wire-work and green-screen wonderment of the original Superman. In this new movie there wasn’t a scene of action or flight or crumbling skyscraper that didn’t look totally believable. I really liked this film. And yet the experience was bittersweet, me wanting to feel as if I was having my mind blown away, but knowing the perfect storm of my youth, groundbreaking f/x, and the power of seeing the first comic book hero explode into life on the big screen would never be duplicated.

Side note: I would never minimized Williams’ iconic theme, but Hans Zimmer‘s new theme equally befits its era’s Superman.

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Video review

Upstream Color (2013)

Rated PG-13

upstream

erbp

What a delicate film this is.

To be sure, weighty and absurd ideas are stacked upon each other, scene by scene, but underneath is a foundation so delicate you wonder how it can support this film. And yet it does.

The BloghouseOK, here we go: Women pick blue flowers growing near a great tree on a riverbank. A shady fellow buys these flowers and harvests grub worms from the soil of the plants. A chemical is extracted from the worms to create a potent drug that, depending on how you use it, can place you in synchronicity with the environment, can link your mind with that of another person who’s also on the drug, or can be wielded as an instrument of mind control.

The opening segments befuddle and intrigue as we observe—with sparse dialogue and music—the man as he worm-drugs a woman named Kris, takes her back to her own home and through mind control (and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden) encourages her to empty her bank accounts and give up personal belongings. He keeps her in this fugue, compliant state (for days? weeks?) while he bleeds her dry. Finally he packs up and leaves. Kris slowly comes back to what was once her reality starved, bruised, confused, jobless, penniless, shattered. Her world no longer makes sense, her mind and emotions are altered in a way that encourages viewers to acknowledge that reality can sometimes be a fragile, fleeting idea.

Just as we’re wrapping our minds around this segment, we’re introduced to a musician/pig farmer, credited as The Sampler, who calls Kris to him using his sound-recording devices like a pied piper. The Sampler removes a now much-larger worm from Kris and implants it into one of his pigs. From time to time the man tosses piglets into the river, which then float downstream to our tree from the beginning, where the piglets rot, freeing the worms from within, which become nutrients for the magic flowers the women come to pick.

Got that? We’re witnessing a life cycle, which Kris and many other unwitting victims—and their corresponding pigs!—are now a part of.

Another such victim is Jeff, who is drawn to Kris, perhaps because his pig couples with Kris’ pig back on the farm. They are two mind-scattered peas in a pod who can’t even discern whose memory is whose, even as they piece together the riddle of their lives, and fall in love.

You think I’ve told you too much of the plot; I think I’ve done you a favor. It took three viewings to piece this much together, as the story is told out of sequence, in fragments and largely with only sound and subtle cutting between related images, as dialogue is kept to a minimum. (The last 20 minutes, all the way to the credits, are dialogue-free.)

I think the director (Shane Carruth, whose debut microbudget, mind-frying time-travel flick Primer set the indie world on fire in 2004) wants to immerse the viewer in a sonic, wispy-image experience that approximates Kris and Jeff’s shattered and reforming mindsets. And maybe this approximates our truest selves: how we are merely a collection of our selective memories, which we figuratively hold tightly in our hands like a bunch of cards. This movie is about what happens when someone or something swats those cards to the ground and we have to pick them up again. I think that’s the foundation of this film.

I don’t know if I understood everything going on here, but this I know: I worked up quite a bit of empathy for Kris and Jeff’s plight and was deeply moved as I reflected that emotions and motives are still powerful even when untethered from the sanity of everyday life. By the finale, I found myself very satisfied by an ending that isn’t really as happy as it seems, once you think about it.

For days after I saw this it swam in my mind like a magical worm upending my notions of a conventional narrative love story.

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Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Rated PG-13

star-trek-into-darkness

Paramount Pictures

As the end credits rolled for Star Trek Into Darkness, an obviously old-school Star Trek diehard (I’m not using the ‘T’ word) came up to me and my wife in dire straits over his belief of the new film’s disrespect of the space drama’s canon.

Bloghouse“The finale, shot-for-shot, matched the finale of (1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan),” he shouted at us in the dark.

“Well, they did swap the main characters’ fates this time around,” I antagonized, to my wife’s chagrin. This guy has singlehandedly assured that I won’t be watching anymore of these films in the theater with my wife. Thanks, pal.

OK, this isn’t your father’s Star Trek, or even your older brother’s. But it does manage to hit the sweet spot between Roddenberry devotees, Next Generation Gen X’ers and millennials, who have no intention of looking back as they head warp speed into J.J. Abrams’ universe. But that was the plan all along, wasn’t it?

Am I mistaken in my understanding that the franchise reboot established that this was a different approach to the Trek of yore? Wasn’t the 2009 film’s debut the time to rail against this new Star Trek, or just bow out altogether? That film was a smash, though, drawing in hardcores and newbies alike. My wife, no fan of sci-fi, thought it was fantastic. So if you came back for more, Mr. Shot-by-Shot, why complain? The new franchise is firing on all its Abrams cylinders, which is to say it holds respect for the original series, but doesn’t feel bound to be a slave to it.

Quick summary: Young Capt. Kirk, still the rogue, against-the-regulations leader of the USS Enterprise, is fuel by revenge after the Federation is attacked by an unknown terrorist. Shades of 9/11 abound, as a shaken Federation looks to harsh, secret strategies in the wake of the devastation. This includes the machinations of Dick Cheney, I mean, Peter Weller’s Federation muckety-muck Marcus, whose sneaky efforts could precipitate all-out intergalactic war.

Spock’s cool logical Vulcan mind collides with Kirk’s burning ideas of revenge, but as always, the two level each other out. A quick lovers’ quarrel between Spock and Uhura, Bone’s dalliance with Tribbles and Scotty’s silly/brilliant hijinks fill in the gaps between story proper, which is largely told in bold swaths of action.

Benedict Cumberbatch is wonderfully powerful as Khan. I don’t know how we get from this to Ricardo Montalban, but, hey, this guy was a fierce and daunting opponent who, at turns, outwits and/or outfights the Federation, Kirk, Spock, Marcus and special guest, the Klingons. By the hour-and-a-half mark I was about to put a big “S” on this guy’s chest and call it a day.

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Cloud Atlas (2012)

Rated R

 

It’s hard to write something short about a movie so long. Three hours of mind-bending, audacious, off-the-map filmmaking.

Here’s the lowdown on the basics: The movie was codirected by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix trilogy) and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume). It was adapted from an equally complex, enigmatic novel by David Mitchell. The film details six interlocking, yet time-spanning, stories. Ten of the main actors—including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent—play multiple roles (as few as three each, as many as six), which cast them as different races, genders, even synthetic creatures.

A theme of connectedness and reincarnation binds the stories—lovers who face tragedy in one life, might find happiness together in another; sins and hopes of the past ripple through time and sometimes switch places, depending on the era.

While I didn’t follow all of it (no one’s walking out of this with a clear understanding of everything—at least not in a first viewing) I did follow enough to keep me engaged in each of the stories and their characters. For a film with so much going on, I was surprised by how much it cares for its characters. I was left with questions, of course, but felt I got the overall plot and ideas behind each story, even with the constant cutting between them.

I think people who love time-jumping puzzle-plot movies will see this repeatedly, and likely catch something new each time. I think people who don’t like to work too hard in the theater will still say they walked away with favorite scenes vividly recalled because of the beautiful human moments or the striking visuals.

Something’s going on with this film. The directors are reaching to redefine filmmaking, I think. Do they succeed? Time will tell. This movie will be studied and talk about, dismissed and touted as groundbreaking. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying—within theses six mini-films—to encapsulate the whole of human existence, purpose and emotion. It’s trying to document the histories of how we love and create with passion, how we are as cruel as we are forgiving, how we move through time and space while changing those things and ourselves as we go.

This ambitious film might not do well out of the gate (it demands attention and thought), but my guess is, over time, it’s going to be regarded as something of a milestone.

See it | Skip it

Side note: Several Asian characters are portrayed by non-Asians actors, which is in keeping with the film’s reincarnation theme that involves actors in multiple roles, but I wonder if it won’t be seen as offensive, particularly since some of the makeup effects could be seen as playing to stereotypes. 

 

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