Good Astra

A review of AD ASTRA (2019)

Directed by James Gray
Written by James Gray and Ethan Gross
Cineamatography by Hoyte van Hoytema
Score by Max Richter and Lorne Balfe

Staring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, and Liv Tyler

I wish that I had seen Ad Astra in the theaters, because it might be my favorite film of 2019 (just barely knocking out another Brad Pitt picture). I also wish that more people had seen it, because not only it is exactly my sort of film, it's the sort of daring genre picture that cinema needs more of. It's a beautiful, well-made, well-acted, and, well, rad as hell. Ad Astra is a classic adventure story masquerading as an arthouse film. It’s Treasure Island as much as it is 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

It ultimately is a transfixing meditation on the failures of masculinity, the limits of obsession, and what you do with your life when you realize how much of your life has been working towards a lie. It also has some of the raddest splashes of action that I’ve seen since the last Brad Pitt movie I saw.

This is all to say: As Astra is a film that is extremely my shit. It's a genre movie that's pulled off with the weight and seriousness that it deserves. It is as much a technical achievement as it is one of good, old-fashioned storytelling. As far as projects that are directly aimed at me, it’s nice when that happens and it actually turns out to be a good movie.

It's also nice to be able to recommend this sort of film. It's nice when I don't have to have caveats or say it with some level of embarrassment. It's just a good film and it's a good film that adheres to my weird set of interests.

Then again, considering size of certain other space-based adventure films, maybe I’m just hungry for something else.

Maybe.

One of the big reasons that I love Ad Astra is that I’m a sucker for the NASA aesthetic. The helmets, the rovers, the jetpacks, the rockets, the color scheme—even zero G toilets! Ad Astra uses all of the wonderful iconography of NASA, but then pushes it further into the future, filling the movie full of the raddest speculative articles from Popular Mechanics. But, beyond having an incredibly good-looking and well-realized art direction, Ad Astra weaves all of those visuals and all of those ideas into a broader picture. It introduces ideas and visuals that expand the story, rather than show it off. It’s a neat little trick and, again, it’s nice to see that big, thrilling science fiction films don’t have to sacrifice story for spectacle.

Beyond the solid supporting cast (hello to Ruth Negga), we have the man: Brad fucking Pitt.

Pitt, at his best, has always played slightly unhinged characters. Men with affectations who maybe aren’t 100% trustworthy and who have very specific physical traits (teeth or hair or no shirt, etc). In Ad Astra he plays very much against type. Roy McBride is a calm, collected, and man who had purposely isolated himself from the world and compartmentalized his emotions. He’s a great astronaut who, like his father, fails at being a good man. It’s a quiet role and it’s one that requires more than just charisma to get through it. It’s a

Pitt is fantastic in this movie. He takes what could have very well been a boring role or one that could have been saved with some histrionics and instead crafts a real human being worthy of empathy.

So, yeah, Brad Pitt is great.

It’s also a lot of fun to see one of America’s most important male icons take on a movie about failure and emotional development. It’s an interesting flip on what most adventure movies are about and it’s made more interesting by the fact that Brad Pitt isn’t just an actor, he’s Brad freaking Pitt. The same goes for Tommy Lee Jones, one of America’s foremost (space) cowboy grandpas, play his wayward father. Again, maybe it’s just me, but in 2020, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more relevant message than “Watch this old man fail and ruin everything.”

Probably just me. . .

Ad Astra is a hell of a ride. While it does very specifically cater to my weird needs, it's still a spectacular-looking adventure story that manages to also be a powerful meditation on family, failure, and the future. Go check it out. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but this time I know it's true: Cinema needs more films like Ad Astra.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Forever Star Wars

FOREVER STAR WARS
Or Space, Magic, Memory, and the Quest for More Money

Movies are a magic trick.

Orson Welles knew this. Even if his movies-- even if his best ones-- are imperfect, he knew that much. Cinema shares more in common with a magic trick than it does with plays or books (and maybe even TV). It's an agreed upon dream. It's a lie that you know is a lie, but you believe anyways.

In a lot of ways, nostalgia is also a brain poison. It's an idea that pits your idea of the past with reality. With the present. It tells you that the past was this special thing and that it is gone. Nostalgia is not a creative energy. It doesn't spur you on to create new things, because those new things require the destruction or the supplantation of those old things.

Naturally, this brings me to Star Wars.

The Star Wars series, especially the Sequel Trilogy is where these two tenets of art and cinema meet. The magic of buying into a fiction and the fiction that nostalgia sells you.

When The Force Awakens was announced I, like all thinking human beings, was skeptical. At that point Star Wars had been bad for longer than it had been good. The story of the prequels was the story of a man with too much time and money with nobody to tell him no. In hindsight, I think those movies were less about hubris and more about George Lucas being interested in things that no other sane human being would be into. They were bad, as well.

But then the names started coming in. The cast. The director. The producer. These were talented people and they were people who cared about the movies and they talked about it in a way that seemed to want to build on these stories, not bitch and moan about what the prequels should have been (like me and every other asshole on the internet).

And I so I waited. I did so with caution and I did so with the understanding that if it was bad, I wasn't going to get mad or sad. I was just doing to be done. I was going to like those first three movies and always hold those with affection and then just move on. Like an adult. Like a thinking human being.

That was the plan.

That John Williams score kicks in and, man, I'm there again. I believe that it works. I know it doesn't. I know that it's not true. It's an intellectual property managed by studio middle-men and wholly owned by a heartless multinational. It's there to make as much money as it can, while it can. With that, said, when the John William score kicks in, man. . .

The magic was back. The Falcon. The music. The lightsabers. All of that shit. It hit a part of my brain that told me that the magic was back. For all intents and purposes, it was back.

Richard Evans from Red Letter Media said it best when he talked about The Force Awakens, which isn't that it's bad or good to matter. All it had to be was a competent Star Wars movie to matter. That's what it was and that's all it had to be. What he didn't add was that the weight of what Star Wars means carries the product the rest of the way, because that's the magic trick.

Star Wars was good again! Just like you remembered it! And those bad Prequels, they can't hurt you any more!

Hey, remember this? Now imagine it's an entire movie.

But that's nostalgia at work. Star Wars isn't so much a series of movies or stories as it is a feeling. When it's right, you get that Star Wars feeling. And maybe that's why fans are the way they are. Besides people just being jerks, Star Wars is a personal thing. It means different things to different people.

It's the double-edged sword that these movies always have to deal with-- especially with this latest batch.

People have really taken to not liking the Sequel Trilogy, which I guess is their god-given right, but Jesus is it loud out there.

"It's not my Star Wars," well, it's not anybody's Star Wars. Cynical corporate programming aside, Star Wars is an idea. It's a parlor trick. We watch a fun space movie with a great cast and an amazing score and it sticks in your brain. You saw it when you were five-- You saw it when you were the film's target audience. Now you're in your thirties and you've got back pain and your personal relationships didn't shake out the way they intended to and Star Wars is bad now for some reason! Or maybe it's good again, but it's the same exact energy at work.

They were always silly and of varying quality because they were children's films.

THAT'S STAR WARS BABY!

And so when you watch a new Star Wars or an old Star Wars, you aren't watching it as an objective observer. You can't. I know I can't. You are watching it as somebody who is bringing an entire life time of emotional baggage with them and that's what they expect.

That's the magic trick. You know you're being sold a bill of goods and you buy it anyways-- or you get mad because you expected something else-- something that it has never been. You're not being sold a movie, you're being sold a memory. A feeling of a time when everything is nice and nothing hurt. And there's a lot of money in selling that fantasy.

You can't put words to magic, because then it's no longer a magic trick.

(SIDE NOTE: If you don't want to deal with another couple-thousand words of me cranking off about the Star War, read this review from Walter Chaw. It gets to the heart of a lot of what I've been feeling and what I've been trying to say. It also takes the film(s) to task much more severely than do I. It's a really good review and, as I say later, it's stuff like this that makes me excited about movies.)

SOMETHING LIKE AN ACTUAL REVIEW--

The internet is a pressure cooker packed full of dog shit and it's only getting worse. Despite my best efforts to mute everything and anything related to the latest picture, word still filtered out. It's terrible. It's a pile of wet lettuce. It's an abomination. Blah blah blah.

It's fine. The Rise of Skywalker is a fun, loud, space laser-based movie that caps off a long series of loud, silly, space-laser-based movies. It's a Star Wars pictures. Unlike the best of the series, it forgoes continuity and character in favor of people running through sets real fast. And unlike the worst of the series, it isn't an eye-watering bore. In short: It's a JJ Abrams film.

(I am also self-aware enough to realize that watching Dune and Legend this year, certain parts of my brain have been liquefied. So, that probably does help the film's case.)

While there's certainly space to make the argument that I suffer from diminished expectations and from the same sort of nostalgic brain poisoning that I described above, it's still a well-crafted action-adventure films. There's a lightsaber fight. There's a John Williams score. There's space British people (as well as space racists) It's Star Wars. I'm hard-pressed to figure out what's got everybody so worked up, but then again, it's the internet. Fuck it. I got mine.

It's also one of the rare few times that I would be willing to indulge an extended cut of a film. Of all of the moves it makes and the places it goes and the things it leaves behind, it's kind of incredible that length isn't one of the sins that it commits.

There is a lot more of Rian Johnson in that movie than a lot of people-- friend or foe-- would like to admit. Abrams, by the very nature of making a follow-up to The Last Jedi is working in the shadow of somebody else's work (who was working in the shadow of somebody else's work who was working in the shadow of somebody else's work who was working in the shadow of Frank Herbert). This is exacerbated by the fact that this entire trilogy seems to be operating under a series of dictates laid out by the shareholders. It's with that in mind that I think these movies being as good as they are is amazing.

Consider how deeply bad some of these board of director driven films get pumped out into the market and at least The Rise of Skywalker is watchable. What's more is can you imagine what this film would have looked like if they let The Book of Henry guy stay on?

The Rise of Skywalker does exactly what it's supposed to do and while it doesn't have the highs of The Last Jedi, nor does it take the risks, it sticks the landing. In any film that's hard to do and that's especially with an installment that concludes a story arc (Mass Effect 3 comes most readily to mind and, after reflection, so does Battlestar Galactica).

I don't know what everyone else was expecting when it came to The Rise of Skywalker. A smartass would say "I was expecting a good movie," but I think they were expecting something that it couldn't be. Due to economics, due to fan demand, due to the competence and interests of the creators, due to whatever, that movie did not get made. People want Star Wars to be something that it's not and never was-- except in their memories.

Lastly, if nothing else, I enjoyed it because I could now be done with Star Wars. That all of this sturm and drang and bitching and moaning about space wizards could finally, once and for all, conclude. I might finally be done with Star Wars and that is exhilarating.

It's a fantasy, but it's my fantasy and, right now, it's one I'm going to indulge in.

THE YELL CHAMBER: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE OPINIONSPHERE

A quick aside: The Discourse. As I alluded to earlier: I hate it.

This is a pretty good artist's concept of the Internet right now

Not just about Star Wars or science fiction, but about movies in general. While the hyperconnected world has brought on plenty of good things, it's also completely exhausting. It's everyone yelling about everything at all times. I mean, I'm sure it was always like this, but the Internet has metastasized a certain impulse among humans.

And I get it, but Christ, is it a bummer. Not because if Star Wars doesn't deserves better, but our culture deserves better.

Star Wars is nonsense, but it's the nonsense that our culture builds itself around. And not just Star Wars, but these other blockbusters. These other films. Small ones too, but especially the big ones. Hundreds of people spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to make this. That's worth having a conversation about. It's also worth spending the time and effort to watch smaller and more meaningful movies. I like a good space laser movie, but, man, have you ever checked out a real movie? They're fucking great!

And if you don't want to deal with any of this, you can always just shut the fuck up. It's a liberating feeling not to have to have an opinion on everything. It's even more liberating not to have to force it out there so everyone knows where you stand. I'm not a "Let people enjoy things" guy-- because that's idiotic-- but it's a very human impulse to regulate how other people feel about things and if they're feeling it in the right way. But, it's a fucking space wizard movie. You're allowed to save your energy on this one.

BUT-- If we are going to keep watching these goof space-laser movies, I'm going to keep writing about them. Which brings me to another crux of my criticism: That we should engage these things with enthusiasm. We should like movies, even the bad ones. Sometimes especially the bad ones. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't ever speak ill of a movie or that we should never critically disect the good ones, but us film dorks-- the serious ones with problems, you know, jerks like me-- should be fans of movies. We should be fans of the medium itself.

Movies are amazing. That any of them exist is wonderful. I watched King of the Monsters this year and it was, on every level, a deeply unlikable movie, but I left it with a kind of spark in my hear, because this meant that I got to go watch some good movies now. I knew that disappointments like that help cast a light on the ones that are truly unique.

Movies are a common language that we all speak. Beyond Star Wars, we all have feelings on The Godfather and Westerns and Musicals and all the rest of it. Even when the movie sucks or we have disagreements, it is something that we can share. That's why it's worth having better language around them and why it's worth giving more thoughts to these things than whether it sucked or was awesome (which they sometimes do and are!).

But, the messiness is a part of the experience. That's what art is and that's where a lot of the fun is. By engaging with sterile or compromised or just plain crappy films, we learn things. We learn about ourselves, about the world around is, and about other movies. And we can do that without actually taking any real risks or suffering any real trauma, because that's art. That's what it's supposed to be (as well as by Kathleen Kennedy a new vacation house).

Or maybe this is all just me hiding my unearned love of the space laser movie behind the language of film criticism.

Who can say?

OTHER THOUGHTS GOOD, BAD, AND OTHERWISE

(And here come the SPOILERS. . .)

* I think the inclusion of the unused Leia footage is needlessly grotesque. When asked about having his appearance projected as a hologram Prince called the idea "demonic." That there's something deeply inhumane and inhuman about playing around with the dead. He says that if it was meant to be, it would have happened that way. I don't completely share Prince's point of view, but there's something deeply unsettling about having a dead woman appear on screen, especially in scenes that you know she didn't film. It's just really, deeply weird and there's nothing in this movie that seems to justify bringing back the dead (also, might be one of the reasons Rose Tico's scenes got cut out: Because Digital Carrie Fisher was creepy and looked bad. You know, supposedly.).

* I love that Kijimi was droid-accessible. It was a town of staircase and, yet, it had a bunch of ramps for our sweet, sweet rolly boys. Even when in a despotic, space-facist past, city centers are handicapped accessible.

* Now that we are through this long, national nightmare, we can all acknowledge that Rogue One was not only the best of the new movie, but is just about the best Star Wars movie ever made. Also, I wrote a bunch about it's themes and design not once, but twice.

* Everything around Kylo Ren/Ben Solo's face turn was well done. Not just for the movie, but any movie. Adam Driver is a hell of an actor and so is Daisy Ridley. They're good together and they're good when they're alone. It's the one part of the movie that I doesn't need a qualification.

* The movie needed more Rose Tico. The current fan theories/glib jokes are that she got cut out because Reddit wouldn't shut it's mouth. I'm skeptical that a multi-billion dollar monopoly like Disney would be influenced by a tightly-knit pact of mega-virgins, but who knows? Disney likes money and it's entirely possible that was the route they saw to making more of it. But, still: The best new character of the second movie was given short shrift. She was a great character that humanized the conflict and connected it to the ground level. What is more is they should have given her more to do just to piss off the internet crowd. Apparently there are scenes that were shot, but Lord knows if we'll ever see them, even as a DVD extra. It is Disney, after all. Hiding shit in vaults is their number one, main thing.

* I like the inclusion of the Emperor. I like it a lot! People complain that it comes out of nowhere, but that's always kind of been the tenor of Star Wars storytelling. These things can pop up out of nowhere. Especially this motherfucker. It gives the final film the weight of a true villain-- something that the last two movies didn't have. The Emperor is gross and evil and seems to have been refugeed from a failed live-action production of a Warhammer 40,000 movie. It's rad. And Ian McDermond is having the time of his fucking life. ALSO: I dig that they answer "Who was Snoke?" by saying "Oh, him? We have a tube for that. Don't worry about it."

* There also should have been more porgs. Which brings me back to Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran. My theory about all of this isn't that Abrams (or Disney) gave a shit about the Internet's tantrums about The Last Jedi, I just don't think he was interested in characters that he didn't have a hand in (which might explain why Rian Johnson dropped the Knights of Ren outright). It doesn't get him off the hook for dropping certain plot lines, but it does soften the movie somewhat. But, yeah, give me more porgs. Tell me that Chewie has a crate for the little guy he kept. Give me some connection to that movie. Anything.

* The Final Order's aesthetic should have been gold and black-- And that's what Kylo Ren's repaired Sith-infused helmet should have been. Like a Kintsugi bowl. Plus, it could have been a call back to Snoke's luxurious smoking jacket in The Last Jedi. It also would have, like, moved things forward out of the same basic aesthetic that the first movie set up. So much of the Sequel Trilogy feels like they've been robbing George Lucas' grave for new material and not in a good way.

* The Final Order is a better name than the First Order, a group of villains that everyone would rather associate with the follow-up to Joy Division. I mean, Jesus, what a terrible name for the bad guys. Just some first-draft-ass names landing inside of a two-hundred million dollar movie.


* Mark Kermode quoted somebody, saying that The Rise of Skywalker felt like the third part of a story without a second part. That's a little unfair, but beyond more of Rose, little touches here and there, The Last Jedi only appears as an echo, an unfinished rhyme. It's a real shame-- and not just because certain actors got the shaft.

Just look at him! So cool!

* Rey should have been in black at some point. Again, if they can't write a story that connect directly to the previous film, some more callbacks would have been nice. Rey wearing black would have visually connected her to Luke's black outfit in Return of the Jedi. Star Wars' language has always been visual. While there are lines here and there that are evocative of a wider world (mentions of "the Clone Wars" etc.), Star Wars has always communicated its ideas through its designs. This would have been an opportunity for that. Rey's journey was about turning away from the dark side. This would tell the audience, hey, maybe she already fell. Also, black outfits are rad. And also--

* She should have had that lightsaber in the beginning of the movie. Again: This would be a callback to Return of the Jedi when Luke appears with his green lightsaber (which was in this movie, I think?). And it would have moved her forward as a character.

* Also, why do the Sequels only have blue and red lightsabers? I mean, I know the reason why: They're the iconic colors of A New Hope and they don't want your mind wandering to the Prequels, because that might cause Unregulated Emotions and Disney can't have that (more on that in a moment). . .

* I like how Oscar Isaac has clearly had movie military training, where as John Boyega has not. Dude can handle a blaster well, what can I say?

* I like how this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of movie and it actually works. King of the Monsters tried to do this and didn't succeed (at least for me). Then again, I also don't think that Mass Effect 3 was as bad as people said it was. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to fuck up one of these movies, fuck it up by overdoing it. It seems that Abrams subscribes to the same theory.

* Poe and Finn are not gay. They are bi. To say otherwise is erasure.

* There should have been Gungans. As with drug-dealing, there should be no half-measures when it comes to fan service. I want a double-barreled blast of that bullshit. Don't hide from the past, from the Prequels, embrace them. Overall it just seems like the Sequel Trilogies were so embarassed by the Prequels that they didn't even want to mention them, even in passing. The impulse to do so with The Force Awakens makes sense, but at this point, it seems indicative of the fact that they were trapped on this rail and couldn't step outside of it. To acknowledge the Prequels is to acknowledge that Star was is messy and imperfect and to do that you have to acknowledge that this is also true of the past and we can't have that. . .


* Last, but not least: Rey being a Palpatine is stupid. I mean, it's great, because it's an incredibly ham-handed device to wedge more operative bullshit into an already overloaded filmic cavity, but, in terms of actual plot and story, it's dumb as all hell. It doesn't add anything to her arc-- she's already conflicted and she already has a preternatural sensitivity to the Force. And on the downside, it undercuts the point of The Last Jedi (and Abrams' own The Force Awakens) which was that a "nobody" could be a hero. It doesn't make her choice to turn away from the Dark Side any more significant. All it does is give her Hero's Journey brand recognition. At best it confuses the plot and at worst it undercuts the idea that this film exists in a series.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will probably still pay to see another one of these fucking movies. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Too Much, Too Late, Too Loud (A Kind of Review)

Some Thoughts on ASSASSINATION NATION (2018)

Written and Directed by Sam Levinson
Cinematography by Marcell Rév
Score by Ian Hultquist
Staring Abra, Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, and Hari Nef 

Assassination Nation is a film that wants to be Persona meets Sasori meets The Conversation. What is more is that it thinks it's all of these movies. If that sounds either intriguing or a mess to you, the answer is: Yes, yes it is.

Assassination Nation is a style in search of a story. It's a bold, strange movie that wants to tackle a hundred subjects at once and also wants to be 1980's trash horror movie-- and it wants you to take it seriously. Very seriously. It's admirable for its ambition, it is also maddening because none of it works as well as it needs to.

The gravest sin of Assassination Nation commits, style-wise is how over-written it is. I complained a week* or so ago about The Mule and how the big beats of that movie sound like a formula from Final Draft than they sound like people. Assassination Nation has a different, but related problem. The Mule is trying to write plot into peoples' mouths. This movie is trying to write agenda into peoples' mouths. It wants to shout what the point of all of this is and, oh, man, haven't I got you thinking now?

And I'm sitting there watching it, thinking, no, man, you don't. I'm here for the Female Prisoner #701 homage and you have vastly overestimated how much I care what you have to say, bro. And then it just keeps on going about What It All Means and how Current Events are Effecting The Youth. Perhaps if you don't have Twitter this might have some novelty. As a film it feels like a panicked treatise on everything that is wrong with the internet but also a letter on Sam Levinson's keyboard was broken.

The movie pulses with this sort of energy. There is nothing in this film that is at half-dosage. The acting, the direction, the lighting, the set design, the everything, is going as loud and as extreme as it possibly can. Even the quite moments in this film are a panoply of Final Cut editing tools and film school excess. This has some appeal, because at no point does the movie ever become boring. It’s a rocket exploding on the landing pad. Beautiful and loud and probably not what the builders intended.

And on the other hand, the value of Assassination Nation is that it's a sleazy exploitation movie (or a simulacrum of one, a trust fund baby wearing a Sex Pistol t-shirt), is that it's dealing with the regressive nature of the internet and the toxic personalities that it fosters. We're now living in a post-#MeToo world where the president of the United States, a game show host, won an election by convincing your brain-worm infested mee-maw that El Salvadorians were going to break into her house and make her a drug mule. It's wild out there and beyond The Purge and Riverdale there aren't a whole lot of piece of media that are dealing with this issue directly. That itself is a problem, because it also seems like most of the popular media dealing with these stories also seem to be dumber than shit (but I stand to be corrected).

If there is one redeeming quality in the movie, it's that it takes a very dim view of the internet as it stands. As much as we all love videos of capybaras in hot springs, it's also where budding young psychopaths are radicalized into the next school shooter. The internet is an untended garden and Sam Levinson seems to understand this. The internet in Assassination Nation, as in real life, is a platform in which the worst aspects of human nature are allowed to roam freely.

With that said, taking a stand against nihilism is hardly a brave or interesting point of view. Maybe it's a necessary one, but it doesn't feel like something you can hang a movie on-- or at least it's not something you can hang on this movie.

I mean, for a movie with as many Sarah-Connor-in-T2-ass sounding monologues as this movie has, it sure doesn't seem to actually say very much. Now Sarah Connor, there was a woman who had a problem with technology and could tell you what the solution was.

Assassination Nation is never quite lands. It's a film that has a lot going on, but none of it means much of anything. It's a movie that wraps itself around an issue, but ultimately has very little to say about the issue other than it exists (Hey, were you aware that the interent is a cess-pool? Me too!). It's a confused film that isn't entertaining enough to get away with it. It doesn’t seem so much ambitious as it does pretentious. Like the best internet videos, the most spectacular fails are the ones where they really go for it and I can't say that the cast and crew of this movie weren't going for it.

If only for that, Assassination Nation is a film worth watching. Maybe.

  

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• A better version of this "Too much, too now" type of film from 2018 is Sorry to Bother You-- which also happens to be my favorite movie from that year. It's a hell of a ride and, unlike Assassination Nation, all of its extraneous details and asides feel like part of a greater tapestry than stuff Boots Riley wrote into the movie.
• Notably, it objectifies male bodies in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen before in film. Good for them.
• This film stars a trans woman (Hari Nef) and it never goes out of its way to stress that she is trans. She's just one of the girls and that's that. Which is cool and more movies should follow this one's example when it comes to that sort of a thing. Where it gets really cool is that, as much rampant attempted murder as this film features, at no point does feel the need to us the t-word or misgender her-- because this film might be packed with jock douchebags and general-issue psychopaths, but they're not monsters. It's admirable that even a movie that seeks to shock knows that there's a line where it stops being fun.
• This film is directed by Sam Levinson, the son of Barry Levinson, so fuck this guy.
• I can't help but feel-- and I know this is fucked up to say-- that Assassination Nation is the type of movie that Max Landis thinks he's making.
• I was just thinking about Sasori: Female Prisoner #701 and, seriously, just watch that instead and then maybe wash it down with a re-watch of Hackers. Because Sasori and Hackers are ill as fuck. 
• For that matter, also go read Assassin Nation. It's a beaut of a comic. In stores now!

No, seriously, go watch Female Prisoner #701

FOOTNOTES:

* Okay, this took me, like, four months to put out for some reason. Not sure how. Not sure why. But, hey, here we are.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and hasn't had any internet death threats lately. Must be losing his touch. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Some Thoughts on the Latest Space Madness Movie

A kind of review of High Life (2019)
Directed by Claire Denis
Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau
Starring Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Juliette Binoche, and Andre Benjamin

High Life is a dirge. That isn't to say that it's a bad film and it is certainly too rich to throwaway as being "interesting."

I think back to Gravity-- a film only similar on a surface level-- which I wrote with my hands still shaking from the experience and I am writing about High Life only having just walked out of it. In the case of Gravity I hadn't had a chance to come down off of the high of watching that movie. In the case of High Life, it is a movie that I am still digesting. That I'm not sure how I feel about it or that I'll ever really know how I feel about it.

But I doubt confusion bordering on ambivalence is what Claire Denis was going for when she set out to make this movie (a story that she had wanted to tell for going on fifteen years, apparently).

Or maybe not. I can't say that I know too much about Claire Denis (and that's on me).

That it accomplishes a consistent funereal tone might be what makes it worth while and it might be why I'd tell you to miss it entirely. It isn't a whole lot of fun.


That said, it's a film with a few stand out sequences that I probably won't stop thinking about until the day I die. There's a big one towards the beginning of the film (if you've seen it, yes, it's the one you're thinking of), but there are also a lot of little moments. Strange, flitting moments in the memories of these characters that are beautiful and haunting and are as relatable as they are alien. There is a flashback of Monte (Robert Pattinson) walking through the woods with his dog. There is Boyse (Mia Goth) living as a rail-borne tramp back on Earth. There is a completely out-of-the-blue sequence in which a guru (I think?) talks to a French student about the premise of the film. Each of these scenes are so light and so out of the blue that you can't help but feel that they must have meaning. Little brush strokes of color in the middle of all of this gloom that feel like real art. That somebody has something to say. And then you go back to Monte and his crew slowly succumbing to space madness and you know that there is something here, but you just can't say what it is.

This takes two hours. I wish I could be more definitive about how I feel about the movie. It sucked. It rocked. It was a thrill ride. Whatever. But taking something like that-- especially as of this moment-- and distilling it down to five hundred words seems. .  . Vulgar? Low? High Life has too much going on for me to treat it like that.

Like the movie, me feeling on it are a mystery, even to myself. I can't say that it's an entirely enjoyable feeling. What I can say is that it is cinema and looking around at movies these days and at the world in general, I think we could us more things like that.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and has had enough of regular old Earth madness, thank you very much. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Be Careful What You Wish For Lesson #447

A REVIEW OF HOSTILES (2017)

Hostiles is the type of film I wanted to make in college. It’s a harsh, brutalist gaze into the American west that parlays with the complexities of violence, race, and man’s place in the universe. It’s a film that harkens back to the classics of the genre, as well as to the great works of western civilization. It’s a smart, well designed, well shot, and well scored film with some terrific performances. It’s also, ultimately, overlong and careless with its characters and its sharpest scenes are offset by mushy, needless side plots. Hostiles is a bummer, and not for the right reasons.

Basically, we should all be glad nobody is stupid enough to give me eighty million dollars to write Cormac McCarthy fanfic.

Man. This poster is pretty good.

What Hostiles gets right is a movie that feels like the American west. There’s a frisson to the film that isn't something I think that I’ve ever seen in films before. It's a film that properly understands the scope and scale of the American west, which is a concept that is as hard-boiled and overdone as any location in all of cinema. And yet, in Hostiles, the sheer size of it and how small you feel within that landscape presses down on you for every moment of the film. Hostiles is shot and lit and directed with a skill and a sensitivity to time and space that, even in its most confounding moments, always feels significant.

The main problem with the film is that it’s forty minutes too long. More specifically, it runs out of plot about an hour into the film. Hostiles sets up a scenario in the first half of the film (a man protects Indians from other Indians, with one big complication in the middle. A basic Campbellian set-up) and then, for some reason, discards that premise (off screen, no less) in favor of a completely different story (featuring well-known cowboy actor Ben Foster who I am concerned might be stuck in a time warp of some variety). It’s baffling. And it’s boring. It’s a contrivance that grinds the movie to a halt that it never quite recovers from. As much as we all love revisionist westerns, maybe it’s time to go back and steal one thing from the classic era, which is a run time that makes sense.

On the plus side: The performances are top notch. Christian Bale continues to remind us why we give a fuck about Batman and Rosamund Pike continues to be. . . Rosamund Pike—I mean, filthy and sun-burnt Rosamund Pike, but she can’t fool me.

Then you got Jesse Plemons as a feckless West Point graduate (guess what his story arc is—Close! It’s that exact thing you just thought, but duller). You also got Paul Anderson (as the character he always plays, accent and all), as well a strangely unmalignant Stephen Lang. Rounding out all of these character actors is Peter Mullan, the English Stephen Lang (which means he does more theater and could also actually kill you if he wanted to). And, finally, in a currently-playing-at-the-Laemelle-Playhouse hat trick is Timothee Chalamet [sic], who needs to give his agent a raise.

Man. This poster sucks.

Most importantly, though, Hostiles stars Wes Studi, an actor that I’ve greatly admired for years. Part of that is because, well, he’s talented. Another part of that is I am hard pressed to think of a less thankless career than Wes Studi. He’s played an Indian character in just about every western from Dances with Wolves onward—almost always as the bad guy. And as good as he is, man, that’s gotta be exhausting. Still, it’s a testament to his skill as an actor that even in a movie as unfocused as Hostiles, he still stands out. Even in worse westerns (like Dances with Wolves, one of the most profoundly shitty Best Picture winners ever), Wes Studi is a man that stands out. I mean, just look at him.

(Also, shout-out to Adam Beach. Always good to see him working—even if it’s also doing the same, thankless Indian roles time after time. Then again, what the fuck do I know? Maybe he's got a successful kombucha business and he's just doing these movies for laughs. Anything is possible.)

WAIT—STOP THE PRESSES.

HOLY SHIT.

The bearded sergeant with “melancholia” is the stoner kid from Dazed and Confused! Fuck! Holy shit! Fuck! Wooooooah! That dude is awesome! Movie is still not super great, but man, what if they got all these actors together and made something awesome? Wouldn’t that be great?

Man. . . 

Anyways. . .

Hostiles is a disappointment. As a fan of westerns, of brutal American violence, and of good films in general, Hostiles fails to stand out as any one of those things. While it is not without its moments or its charms, as a film, it is an overlong and overindulgent mess. Despite the performances, the end result is a film that meanders instead of being epic and is less episodic than it is confused. Hostiles could have been great. Hostiles should have been great. That’s the biggest bummer out of all of this. 

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and greatly admires his scalp. You can donate to his Patreon . You can buy the book he edited here (and on eBay). You can also follow him on Twitter. Also, if you well and truly give a shit hmu on my Paypal. Want to buy me a coffee? Get at my Ko-Fi. Happy new year!