Defeating Boredom

In Streaming Choices, I take a quick glance at the world of cinema available on Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Rating: Three and a half stars (out of five)

Our families sometimes make us become people we aren’t proud of.  Lifelong disagreements, misunderstandings, and ideological clashing can have that effect.  When estranged brothers Mark (Steve Zissis) and Jeremy (Mark Kelly) meet each other for the first time in years for Mark’s birthday party at their mother’s house, they succumb to their worst urges.  Mark gets tunnel vision, obsessed over his white whale, defeating his brother at their made-up athletic competition of the film’s title.

Mark is overweight, balding, and dealing with the “burden” of a calm, helpful wife who just wants the best for him at all times and a son who’s less ungrateful than he is desirous of meaningful conversation with his dull father.  Mark’s in therapy for his stress and general malaise of life.  Jeremy is a professional poker player — you can tell this was shot in 2008, as the online and ESPN-hyped poker boom was receding — who doesn’t care about what he does and doesn’t know what else he can do with his life.

So they meet and beat up on each other in feats of strength, athleticism, and underwater breath holding.  The 25 “events” in their Olympic-style tournament are each hilarious, and perfectly designed to bring out the pettiness in grown men who have been at this since the dawn of their existence.  They finish marathon ping pong sessions drenched in sweat, neither willing to give in.  They obsess over keeping a level playing field.  Mark says, “Are you wearing shoes?  I’m not.  Take them off,” during the arm wrestling bit, after they have wrapped their hands together in a bandanna and agreed to not grab the table for leverage.

The movie grows more poignant as it continues, with Mark grappling with his compulsive nature and Jeremy admitting his hip life doesn’t make him happy.  It finishes in a satisfying manner, like a 76-minute stage play.

And therein lies the problem.  Mark and Jay Duplass, the film’s directors, are among the most successful members of the mumblecore filmmaking movement, known for its documentary-style, immediate camerawork and attention to small stakes in the grand scheme of things; no world destroying monsters rampage through their movies.  But for as great as docu-realism and intimate stories are, movies are a visceral, visual medium.  There is no pure cinema on display in The Do-Deca-Pentathlon.

Let’s start with the camerawork.  It’s jittery to a fault.  The movie was shot digitally, with seemingly outdated equipment for even six years ago, which makes a later viewing like mine appear even more dated.  When the camera moves, there’s a faint ghost trail of colors and characters’ faces.  And the camera moves far too much.  There is nary a tripod in use.  Owing to mumblecore’s improvisatory nature, the camera operators are not able to plan specifically what to do.  Actors don’t have exact marks to hit, and the camera operators struggle to keep them in frame, jutting back and forth, sometimes seemingly on the verge of falling over during the quickest pans.

The editing is a little on the eccentric side, too.  This is likely a product of the improv, too.  The Duplasses probably did not get a lot of coverage during shooting because of the different lines for every take.  This leads the editors to piece things together in a hodgepodge of quickly cut moments.  This makes small conversations take on the visual language of modern action scenes, and it does not cohere properly.  These scenes should be more intimate.  The actors and directors do an admirable job of trying to overcome the obstacle, but they don’t quite get there.  The filmmaking does not properly function for the story being told, and this is a problem for the movie’s overall quality.

But that does not mean the movie is not worth discussion.  The acting, particularly the brothers and Mark’s wife, Stephanie (Jennifer Lafleur), do phenomenal work.  Their relationships are lived-in.  Love exists but it’s strained, just like a real family.  The Duplasses overcome a lot of limitations in what is available to them in order to tell a compelling, affecting story, aided by their troupe.  But again, it’s probably best suited to be performed on stage than, as currently constructed, a film.

The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is currently available on Netflix Instant.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is running an exhibit called Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives until May 4.  I recently visited it and enjoyed the experience a great deal.  It featured hundreds of trinkets, pictures, costumes, handwritten notes from children and presidents alike, but what interested me most were the early short animations Disney made in the 1920s with and his friend and collaborator, Ub Iwerks.

The exhibit spurred me to seek more early Disney work, much of which is available on YouTube.  A handful of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — done for Universal before Disney and Iwerks struck out on their own — and Mickey Mouse adventures have struck me with their irreverence, hints of lasciviousness, and general prankishness.  Disney, the consummate wholesome family entertainer, had an anarchic spirit before he had to navigate the Hays Code and the expectations of upholding a family friendly brand.

For instance, see this Oswald short, Sky Scrappers.

Oswald’s world is wholly different from, say, Snow White’s.  This is partially owed to the limitations of animation techniques available to Disney and Iwerks in 1928 — the timing is a bit off, characters move stiffly and unnaturally, etc. — but the goals they sought were also different.  Whereas Disney’s later features tended to endorse a set of chivalric values, Sky Scrappers gets comparatively filthy.  Ortensia, Oswald’s girlfriend, arrives to his construction worksite to share lunch with him.  Oswald’s coworker sees her, operates a crane to lift her skirt, and pulls her up the iron frame of the building to steal her from Oswald.  She falls out of her underwear and scrambles to get back into them.  The rival, who resembles Disney’s later Mickey Mouse antagonist/A Goofy Movie lovable crank, Pete the Cat, laughs his head off at the notion that Ortensia would even try to resist him.  There’s a real sense of sexual malice in this exchange, and Oswald’s rival is a threat unlike anything in later works; he is effectively a rapist.

Beyond the sexual elements, the early Disney-Iwerks shorts depict a world that is, for lack of a better word, mushy.  Instead of the features’ aching beauty of the painted backdrops, Oswald’s and early Mickey’s landscapes are malleable.  The Oswald cartoon, Trolley Troubles, from 1927 shows this well.

Animate and inanimate objects alike — trains and railroads here, but also hot dogs, cows, and a number of other things — bend and twist to what Oswald — and by extension, Disney and Iwerks — want them to be.  Unobstructed creativity runs throughout all these shorts, and they are free of the stricter visual rules of many of the features.

Disney and Iwerks shape the world to fit their vision, and play with what it means to tell a visual story, often with darker connotations than perhaps they intended when trying to make people laugh.  By forcing a hot dog to lather itself in mustard as a death ritual, they hint at our world being a place of “compromise” with more powerful entities, much like their dealings with Universal that eventually led to losing the rights to Oswald.  In their animated world, though, they are in charge.  They manipulate objects and creatures to an almost surreal extent, warping their meaning from utilitarian things and beasts of burden to extensions of our drive, creativity, but more often, futility.  Ropes attach to nothing but air and characters realize much too late before falling to injury, annoyed.

Disney and Iwerks’s early shorts are snapshots of artists struggling with freedom, succeeding on a technical level but restricted and frustrated by what their bosses wanted.  Their characters constantly fall into traps set by the world, but through creativity they pull through.  They always pull one over on the world, usually through manipulating it beyond what reality would allow, much like hired artists at the helm often must sneak their true intentions into their work subversively.

In Streaming Choices, I take a quick glance at the world of cinema available on Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Rating: Two and a half stars (out of five)

Leftwing writer, professor, and activist Howard Zinn led an eventful, opinionated life.  He grew up in poverty and never had a book in his house until he found a frayed paperback on the street.  He ran bomber missions in World War II.  He led a group of his students at black college at numerous civil rights protests.  He and a few other activists negotiated with the North Vietnamese to release American pilots when the U.S. government wouldn’t.  And that’s the problem with Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.  It’s all recounting the man’s activities, one after the other, without truly getting to the heart of what they mean, or where they come from.

A few times, Zinn gets a bit introspective about his writings and activism, but these moments are too rare.  Directors Deb Ellis and Dennis Mueller don’t prod him to continue in these times, rather content to fall into hero worship and a pattern of “This happened, then this happened, then this.”  Sometimes Zinn will remark that seeing something (poverty where he grew up, his first activism rally where he was hit by a nightstick, his misgivings about bombing a French town to punish German soldiers after WWII was effectively won) that “affected [him] greatly,” but the film stops there.  How did it affect him?  What specific things pushed him to write about them?  What about the looks on peoples’ faces when police brutality occurs?  But no, it’s just a vague recollection and onto the next bullet point.

Ellis and Mueller fail to negotiate the downsides of activism, too.  They get Zinn to mention how every war is supposed to be the last one, and how it’s like a drug for countries.  But if activism is this enlightened, higher calling to upset people into rethinking their place in the world and changing their behaviors, hasn’t Zinn’s anti-war rhetoric failed on some level?  War still exists, and the latest failed war, Iraq, was in its early days as this documentary was shot.  They don’t ask him about how he’s shifted tactics to convince more people on the need for peace.  It’s all about the so-called world changing, in-your-face attitudes of ’60s-style activism, with no mention of how that movement got jaded and petered out.  Zinn doesn’t say anything about disillusionment with his cause, or the possible boomerang effect of being in everyone’s face can have, but I suspect that’s because he wasn’t asked about it.

Luckily, it’s not entirely dreary.  Zinn himself was a magnetic man (he died in 2010), and one I would like to learn more about from a less hero-worshipping angle (full disclosure: I’ve never read anything by him).  But he was an engaging speaker, charming, and you can tell he genuinely cared about people, the world, and the United States.  He thought they can be better, and that’s an admirable, hopeful quality people respond to.

Unfortunately, this activity checklist of a film fails his messages.  Documentaries do not necessarily need a dramatic structure (“This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens,” and so on), but they shouldn’t be blander than history books, either.  Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train lacks emotional details about why these issues matter to society, and historical details about each event in Zinn’s life.  At an hour and 17 minutes, the film has plenty of room to explore more.  But it always chooses the easy route of, “Look at this Great Man,” when the Great Man probably would have been plenty willing to discuss the less-than-great parts of his life.

Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train is currently available on Netflix Instant.

The media landscape is awash in top 10 lists every December.  Movies, TV episodes, news stories, et al get their due in publications and websites alike.  It’s exhausting, and more than a little too “final” for my taste, and a big part of the reason I don’t usually write them.  This could be wholly due to my bias as a non-professional who is unable to see, hear, read, or generally experience these media in the time they are released.  If I make it to the top of the film criticism mountain, perhaps I’ll one day feel better about choosing what represents the best films of a given year.  But as things stand, I am left every year with a pile of potentially great movies I was unable to see for financial, time, or availability reasons.  It usually takes me until the following summer or later to get a solid understanding of a year’s cinematic slate.  Even then I have plenty of blind spots I wouldn’t if I were, say, Michael Phillips, who sees 400 or more new releases every year.

This is a long way of saying my annual top 10 list is a constant work in progress, even if it ultimately, mostly reflects the general consensus of other lists of its kind released months earlier.  Maybe I’m violating the media rule of timeliness, but I have also had more time to reflect on 2013’s best films than the deadline-focused people I look up to.  I think that reflection has value and gives perspective.

Now, before I get to my constantly shifting, amorphous blob of a top 10 films list, I feel it’s important in the name of full disclosure — as much as I’d like to be, I’m still far from an expert — to list every movie I saw that had some sort of release (theatrical, video on demand, Netflix Instant, film festival, etc.) in 2013, in chronological viewing order.  You’ll note that I am still missing plenty of notable movies, including Short Term 12, Fruitvale Station, The Act of Killing, and many others.

1.  Sun Don’t Shine (dir. Amy Seimetz)

2.  The Playroom (dir. Julia Dyer)

3.  42 (dir. Brian Helgeland)

4.  Oblivion (dir. Joseph Kosinski)

5.  Iron Man 3 (dir. Shane Black)

6.  Before Midnight (dir. Richard Linklater)

7.  Man of Steel (dir. Zack Snyder)

8.  The Bling Ring (dir. Sofia Coppola)

9.  Upstream Color (dir. Shane Carruth)

10.  Pacific Rim (dir. Guillermo del Toro)

11.  Room 237 (dir. Rodney Ascher)

12.  Mud (dir. Jeff Nichols)

13.  John Dies at the End (dir. Don Coscarelli)

14.  Only God Forgives (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

15.  Pain and Gain (dir. Michael Bay)

16.  Drinking Buddies (dir. Joe Swanberg)

17.  Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

18.  Star Trek Into Darkness (dir. J.J. Abrams)

19.  12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen)

20.  This is the End (dir. Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg)

21.  Aziz Ansari: Buried Alive (dir. Will Lovelace, Dylan Southern)

22.  John Hodgman: Ragnarok (dir. Lance Bangs)

23.  Salinger (dir. Shane Salerno)

24.  Mike Birbiglia: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (dir. Seth Barrish)

25.  The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (dir. Francis Lawrence)

26.  Frances Ha (dir. Noah Baumbach)

27.  American Hustle (dir. David O. Russell)

28.  The Heat (dir. Paul Feig)

29.  Red 2 (dir. Dean Parisot)

30.  White House Down (dir. Roland Emmerich)

31.  The World’s End (dir. Edgar Wright)

32.  Stoker (dir. Park Chan-Wook)

33.  The Wolf of Wall Street (dir. Martin Scorsese)

34.  Captain Phillips (dir. Paul Greengrass)

35.  Prince Avalanche (dir. David Gordon Green)

36.  Passion (dir. Brian De Palma)

37.  Her (dir. Spike Jonze)

38.  Thor: The Dark World (dir. Alan Taylor)

39.  Dallas Buyers Club (dir. Jean-Marc Valée)

40.  Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles (dir. Liam Lynch)

41.  Nebraska (dir. Alexander Payne)

42.  Inside Llewyn Davis (dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)

43.  All Is Lost (dir. J.C. Chandor)

 I’m unsure 43 is even a statistically significant number of 2013 releases to have seen to determine the year’s best, but based on this sample, I can say 2013 was one of the finest cinematic years of my life.  Very few of these were even mediocre, and I’d say none of them were true disasters.  Even the worst ones, like Oblivion and Passion, had a lot to offer from visual and thematic standpoints.  That’s a tremendous achievement for an industry perpetually on the media chopping block for “always” catering to the lowest common denominator.  It’s difficult to choose just 10 from this list, and I can only imagine the choice will become more difficult as I continue filling in the gaps throughout the year as more DVDs become available.  That said, here is my for now top 10 list of 2013 films.

10.  Mud (dir. Jeff Nichols)

As will become a theme in this list, Nichols is among a group of wildly exciting young filmmakers — with the semi-arbitrary age cutoff of 45 — who have had just as much impact on my psyche as the industry’s elder statesmen and long deceased masters.  His three films, Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, and now Mud are among their years’ best, with Take Shelter being an all-time classic of paranoia and religious devotion to one’s beliefs.  Mud might not quite reach those heights, but it is a sizable achievement itself.  Nichols internalizes Mark Twain’s greatest works about boys longing for adventure and juxtaposes that desire with Matthew McConaughey’s title character, hiding from both the law and organized crime on a small island near his and the boys’ hometown; he’s the grown-up boy adventurer who never took responsibility.  Regret, disillusion with modern romantic relationships, divorce, and devotion play major parts.  The seemingly anachronistic explosive climax worked for me better than it did most, largely because it is symbolic of Mud’s realization of the reality he lives in.  He takes responsibility and sees his world blow apart in a visceral way.

9.  The World’s End (dir. Edgar Wright)

Wright, another in the under-45 group, has long shown a knack for depicting different stages of friendship onscreen while displaying a kinetic visual style and love of genre conventions.  Shawn of the Dead was about man children finally becoming adults and Hot Fuzz was about men with extremely different (and difficult) personalities coming to appreciate and work well with each other.  His latest with his frequent collaborators, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, grows up without losing the energetic camerawork or genre trappings.  The “robots” these friends fight on their (mostly reluctant) 20-years-in-the-making pub crawl are among the best of the Body Snatcher mold, but the film has more on its mind than simple entertainment.  Pegg’s Gary is a variation on the arrested development character he played in Shawn, but he and Wright take a far darker tack with him.  His alcoholism is a problem for all his lapsed friends, and none want anything to do with him, although he promises a night of fun to escape their equally (though more socially acceptable) dreary adult lives.  The film’s primary choice — forced enlightenment and security versus intellectual, however limited, liberty — is a deep one, and it does not shy away from the downsides of both choices.

8.  All Is Lost (dir. J.C. Chandor)

Director Chandor, on only his second feature, creates something unlike the rest of the current filmic landscape.  All Is Lost is close to being a silent film, but with a modern twist: sound design plays a huge role.  Robert Redford’s sailor may not say more than a couple lines, but the creaking of the boat, the rushing waves, the rubbery stretching of the life raft craft an aural experience which, when paired with the harrowing images, envelopes the audience in the moment.  Small nods to Buster Keaton abound, but Chandor deftly makes these moments horrifying rather than comedic.  He understands how film techniques are elastic and shows a magnificent grasp of how to manipulate them to make them his own.

7.  Only God Forgives (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

Refn might be my favorite director in his prime.  Much like Chandor’s entry on this list, Refn’s film does not place a premium on speaking.  Only God Forgives rather takes stark, archetypal images and pits them against each other in a hyper stylized world that looks rather unlike our own.  Ryan Gosling’s Julian goes on a Freudian quest, at his domineering mother’s (Kristin Scott Thomas) demand, throughout Bangkok’s underground boxing scene to avenge his brother’s (deserved) death.  Psychological horror imagery pervades, hands are lost, karaoke is sung.  It’s a semiotic smorgasbord, one I cannot wait to see again and again.

6.  12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen)

Although it is perhaps the most important — for America’s grasping its brutal history, for the director’s race — film released in 2013, 12 Years a Slave does not prop itself up on its own importance.  It’s a vibrant work that captures the beauty of the American south — the wind going through the weeping willow trees is pure art — and the brutality inflicted on slaves.  It is not a film concerned with entertainment, so much as discussing, in blunt terms, what it means to keep other human beings as property.  Devin Faraci at Badass Digest wrote that 12 Years a Slave is a horror film, and I’m inclined to agree.  Everything that happens to Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is akin to the terror inflicted in slasher movies, but McQueen takes the judgmental distance out of the equation, which is itself remarkable.  McQueen’s images speak for themselves, and he presents them matter-of-factly so as not to editorialize something that is inherently evil about the world.

5.  Before Midnight (dir. Richard Linklater)

Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke continue their saga of Jesse and Celine, nine years after we last saw them in Before Sunset and 18 years after they met in Before Sunrise.  They’re now in their 40s, married by common law but not ceremonially, and they have twin daughters.  They’re bored and struggling with what it means to stay monogamous over a lifetime.  The emerging fight throughout the runtime is shattering, with both sides making great points about sacrifices made for each other, and neither being happy about the tradeoffs they’ve made in life.  Gone is the soaring butterflies of the first two films, replaced with hard reality; it’s the difference between an uplifting campaign and the difficulties of actually governing.  Despite the world-ending rhetoric of their fight, the film’s ending suggests this is another in a series of arguments they’ve had, and they remain a couple, maybe not forever, but for now.  That’s more realistically hopeful than the endings of either previous entry in the series, and I look forward to seeing where Jesse and Celine are as they cross 50.

4.  Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

Remarkably similar to All Is Lost, Cuarón’s film is even simpler, possibly the simplest story of everything on this list.  It’s a parable of dealing with and moving on from life’s challenges.  He does not need to imbue it with more to chew on, because that’s as powerful a message as any in human existence.  From the opening calamity to the joyous final shot, Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone only has survival and rebirth on her mind.  If she succumbs to self-doubt, she won’t make it.  If she doesn’t succumb to self-doubt, she still might not make it, but she’ll have her pride intact.  So she tries and she overcomes every mounting problem.  It’s beautiful without considering the technological marvel the film is.  The spectacle of sitting by myself, fully enraptured by the screen, is one of my favorite moviegoing experiences, one I hope to replicate in the years ahead when Gravity becomes a staple of repertory houses.

3.  The Wolf of Wall Street (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Untrammeled, gleeful greed is not something the movies often show onscreen, even if that is the reason behind making most of them.  Usually filmmakers are burdened by trying to give the audience characters to like and root for.  Here, Scorsese is unconcerned, and he weaves a story about the most money-obsessed culture — indeed, that’s their only focus, as they are unconcerned with providing services or products to others — in our society: Wall Street.  Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort builds an empire based on tricking people into thinking they will become rich, and he teaches even the dimmest bulbs in his circle to defraud other human beings.  His system is something anyone who has spent time in sales has experienced, and that bell rings clearly and frighteningly with every immoral transaction Belfort makes.  Scorsese shows how exceedingly fun this lifestyle is, because greed is fundamentally fun, but he never fails to show the emptiness at its heart.  The fact that Belfort and people like him led to the 2008 financial crisis and haven’t received more than a slap on the wrist is unsettling at best, and Scorsese wants us to know that this is not all right.

2.  Inside Llewyn Davis (dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)

This has to be the most serene movie the Coens have made. It’s funny, but not uproarious. It’s unordinary, but not truly absurd. Its protagonist is a misanthrope but not one totally undeserving of sympathy. But despite it not reaching for the extreme, it never fails to be sublime.  Llewyn is a pathologically difficult person, but he comes from a place of uncompromised art, which we of course admire when it’s successful. Orson Welles may have been an unqualified genius, but his dealings with people before the Mercury Theatre must have been insufferable, what with all the eating, drinking, and womanizing. What if he’d stumbled out of the gate instead of lucking into the complete artistic freedom afforded him to make Citizen Kane? I bet he’d have ended up something like Llewyn.  And it’s not like the movie takes place in an ironic universe devoid of hope that one might expect from the Coen brothers. Ulysses the cat finds his way home. Llewyn’s dementia riddled father flashes a moment of recognition that resembles pleasure at hearing his son’s music. The cat he hits on the road might be cut, but it limps away seemingly dazed but otherwise okay. And most of all, the ending should give Llewyn, a man with a morose, but talented, singing voice all the hope in the world: If Bob Dylan’s nasal, wiry voice could make him a superstar, surely the smoother, melancholy Llewyn Davis can scratch out a (somewhat) steady living in the folk environment.

1.  Her (dir. Spike Jonze)

Technology will continue to seamlessly integrate itself into every aspect of human experience.  That’s an important idea to consider, and could be the subject to any number of films going forward.  But it is merely background in Her.  What concerns Spike Jonze, like all great storytellers, is human interaction and possible ways forward when complications arise.  Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is crushed by the baggage of his recent past, and his rut is threatening to derail his life permanently.  Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), his artificially intelligent operating system, is a thinking, learning, growing entity capable of loving him the way he needs.  At least for a time.  What about what she needs?  Is Theodore able, or more importantly, willing, to sacrifice his desires for her?  The give and take between Her‘s principle characters is something every person in a relationship deals with, and the heightened sense of distance between them — they can never truly touch — makes matters worse.  Is physical distance a true killer for a relationship, or can people work through it?  More profound is the way Jonze builds an emotional and psychological distance between the characters, as Samantha’s unique ability to learn creates a zen-like worldview, frustrating to the necessarily more grounded Theodore.  And if things end in a life changing relationship, is that truly a bad thing?  If a lesson is learned and love occurred, Her suggests it’s a rich time in one’s life.