Crimson Peak

I felt sorry for the actors. Guillermo del Toro's mashup of every gothic storyline known to man is only terrifying in its cheesiness. I have never been a fan of Del Toro's excessively corny fantasies, and this one takes the cake. A goulash with chunks of plots from Cinderella, Jane Eyre, vampire stuff, ghost stories and heavy borrowing from movies like The Shining, Crimson Peak is heavy-handed and overstuffed.
Where to begin? Young Edith Cushing (as in Peter Cushing, one supposes) consorts with ghosts. The ghost of her dead mother appears to her with a warning about bewaring of Crimson Peak, whatever that means. Edith (Mia Wasikowska, a good actress that seems to be stuck forever in the 19th century), soon falls in love with the dashing and charming Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston, valiantly giving it his all). He has a somber sister, Lucille, (Jessica Chastain, who smartly understands that the only way to go is camp) who is suspiciously jealous of Edith. They live in a remote and ghastly house somewhere in England, where they manufacture red clay or red pigment that comes from clay, the color of blood. I won't go into the intricacies of a plot that Del Toro doesn't bother clarifying. All I can say is that one look at that dilapidated mansion out of the Chapultepec amusement park, and Edith should have either redecorated or run for her life. That she does neither is a sign that the director has no sense of humor, or of human nature.
The movie is a hodgepodge of ideas that he didn't really think through. I was convinced, for instance, that this was a solidly PG-13 movie until a ridiculous sex scene and then a plot about incest that seems to have sprung from the feverish imagination of a 14-year old. The motivations of the Sharpes are unclear: do they need money to keep the family business going, or they need blood because they are evil? Beats me. I defy anyone to recount the plot of this movie coherently.
Del Toro's ghosts look like the kind of Halloween decorations you buy at J.C. Penney's. They are too cheesy to be really scary. I pined for movies like The Innocents or even The Sixth Sense, in which the apparitions are deceptively real and truly spooky, not ghoulish puppets that are ridiculous rather than scary. Apparitions that are manipulated with clanging sound effects are not honest scares, and this is the cardinal sin of this movie. A horror movie may be cheesy and improbable and stupid, but if it manages to scare us, it has done its job. That is not the case here. If people jump, it is not because Del Toro knows how to stage a scary scene, it's because he uses loud sound effects instead.
The production design is meaninglessly cluttered, the costume design is an exaggerated parody of Victorian dress; even the nightgowns have puffed sleeves. The wigs are outrageously phony, the lighting makes everything look like a garish disco in the 1980's.  The somber elegance of real Victorian gothic, the perverse stylishness of an Edward Gorey are absent here.
I was reminded of Mexican telenovelas. Chastain, in particular, seems to be channeling the evil villainess Catalina Creel in Cuna De Lobos (Cradle of Wolves, a fabulously campy Mexican soap from the 80s). I also thought of cheesy Mexican horror films like El Santo Vs The Zombies. It is not inconceivable that these are some of Del Toro's influences. The question is whether he knows this. He seems to take his own cheesiness too seriously.

The Martian

Lovingly polished to within an inch of its life, this sophomoric outer space busyness by Ridley Scott, based on the novel by Andy Weir, is not only an extended commercial for NASA (not that there's anything wrong with that), but as the Magnificent Arepa memorably put it, it most resembles a reality cooking show -- in space.
The film makes an impassioned case about "sciencing the shit out of" everything, and this is a worthy message in these obscurantist times, in which millions of Americans think the world was created in seven days and women are a figment of Adam's rib. However, cheerleading for science does not a good movie make.
The premise is promising enough: a guy is left for dead in Mars. He is all alone in the red planet and needs to survive for as long as he can with what's left in the spaceship. But because he happens to be an American with an extreme case of gung-hoitis, there is not one pause in this film for poetry, or self-reflection, or awe, or a personal reckoning with the universe. This Mark Watney is a doer, a hero with a capital H, and he has no time to ponder. What he has plenty of time for is cracking wise and complaining about disco music. There is nothing wrong with humor, and we were not expecting Tarkovski, but the character is insufferable. Matt Damon, a damn fine actor, does what he can to make Watney likable and human, but the character, as written by Drew Goddard with teenagers in mind, is an alpha-male jock with a soft spot for plants. I liked that he was smart and solved problems, but I hated his self-congratulation, his smugness, and his competitiveness with no one around. Wouldn't it be more exciting to cast perhaps a more fragile nerd, so that the odds would seem more insurmountable? One look at Damon's abs and his superior blondness, and we know that there is no way that this enterprising bro won't make it.
One goes to the desert here on Earth and is quickly brought down to size by our sudden awareness of our insignificance in the grand scheme of things. This guy is all alone in Mars and he acts like a sitcom character. He has no time for vulnerability. There is shit to do. When alone in space and about to die, one is cocky. These are the values Hollywood exports: only the individual is heroic, he works solo and his is all the glory. They don't bother giving him an Achilles heel. He doesn't have hubris. He's the perfect guy for the job. Even with a team of equally insufferable heroic characters on Earth trying to help him, each one trying to be his own little hero, there is no sense of something bigger than the individual. Republicans who extoll the virtues of bootstrapping must love this crap. I wonder if the rest of the world is not fed up already with this relentless hero worship. It can't be the only game on Earth.
I do not understand why this movie is in 3D. The opening sequence in which a tornado hits and Watney is left for dead is visually incomprehensible. The photography by Dariusz Wolski is spectacular, and so is the production design by Arthur Max, but everything is busy with endeavor, and Ridley Scott gets lyrical only with a few lovely scenes of the crew members cavorting in zero gravity. The rest is scientific exposition that no one understands, or endless repetition of the same tired clichés. How many times can you see people clapping and cheering in control rooms, here or in China? How many times is the hero going to bitch about disco music? Do we need a character who announces that something might go wrong and then cut right to everything going wrong? There is no sense of wonder, let alone surprise. The movie, which involves cooperation with the Chinese space program in order to sell billions of tickets in China, pretends to be clever, but it is written for dumb appeal.
As incomprehensible as the opening sequence is the scientific mumbo jumbo the poor actors have to spout while pretending they understand any of it. I resent movies where they throw technical jargon at us. They make the audience think it's smart for paying attention. Who knows what any of it means? Who cares? Are you going to go check your equations to see if it pans out?
Worse, I never really understood why they couldn't send the crew back to retrieve Watney. The obstacles seem invented out of thin air only to create fake moral dilemmas. Which is why I find movies like The Martian morally bankrupt. They squander the opportunity to say something true about being human and instead they sound like the Koch Brothers, if only they liked plants.

A Most Violent Year

This film by J.C. Chandor is all about the gray areas, something quite uncommon in American movies.  It is also most uncommon for American movies to have a Latino protagonist (played by an actual Latino actor who speaks Spanish perfectly), but that doesn't make a big deal about him being Latino (no piñatas, no mariachis, no extended family, just a guy who is integrating to the American Way Of Life). This may seem like a small thing, but it isn't. More movies like this need to be made.
The great Oscar Isaac plays Abel Morales (Abel, like the guy in the Bible, with a very moral last name), an ambitious businessman who owns a heating gas company in New York in the 80s.
He is expanding his business, buying some dilapidated docks in Brooklyn from Orthodox Jews that will give him a huge advantage over his competitors. Meanwhile, his drivers endure violent attacks: someone is stealing his trucks. The world of gas peddlers is apparently not very genteel. They try to screw one another by hook or by crook. Abel refuses to play dirty or even arm his drivers so they can defend themselves. He refuses to touch a gun. Meanwhile, the deed to the new property comes with a deadline. He needs to get the money to pay for it within 30 days, and the pressures mount.
Abel is married to Anna (Jessica Chastain), whose father, we learn, is a mafioso from Brooklyn.
Abel seems all rectitude, even with his camel hair coats and a junior pompadour a la John Gotti. Anna is more of a moll and more of a loose cannon. I was happy to see Chastain playing a vamp. She also wears a coat like a suit of armor, she chain smokes and is far more volatile than her husband. She keeps the books, and for all of Abel's efforts to remain squeaky clean, she seems to be cooking them. A district attorney (the ubiquitous David Oyelowo) has a bunch of claims of fraud against the Morales. So what gives? Are they kosher or not?
We think we are watching a film about the mafia, but we are watching a film about business, which is like the mafia but more legal. Ruthlessness is built into entrepreneurship; what Abel refuses to be is illegal. We root for him to get what he wants, if anything, because he is so convincing. Isaac plays him with a recognizable nod to Michael Corleone (that is, young Al Pacino), but my filmgoing companion was convinced that Isaac is also channelling Barack Obama. His deliberateness, his calm under pressure, and a certain hauteur convey someone with power; in his case, someone at the cusp of power who knows how it is supposed to walk and talk.
Julian (Elyes Gabel), one of Abel's drivers and a personal protegé, gets roughed up by hoods who steal his truck. Unlike Abel, Julian does not have a spine. He is the weak link in the story, even though he is pivotal to the plot. His storyline feels contrived. He is there to be the foil and opposite of Abel, but the stitching shows. He is the only character who does not have the sangfroid of the brisk business people around him. He freaks out, he sweats, he panics and he screws everything up. Nothing wrong with that, except that Gabel is not at the level of the rest of the otherwise perfect cast; he seems to belong in a more histrionic movie.
Why is it that American movies have such a hard time camouflaging the mechanics of plot and character? Leviathan, a Russian movie and a similar dark tale of ambition, presents characters as people, not as plot devices. A Most Violent Year is a riveting movie, but it falters when it gets schematic. Bradford Young's cinematography is yellowish, opaque, and in many scenes, too dark. It fails to emulate the dramatic chiaroscuro of the Godfather movies as well as the genuine grit of the New York movies of Sidney Lumet, both of which it seems to pay homage to. Bradford Young did a stellar job with Selma, so I think that this is a problem of style getting in the way.
Chandor takes his time to introduce Abel's world, and when the violence of the title comes, it comes in shocking spurts. This is very well done, and a chase scene, reminiscent of The French Connection, is truly ironic and suspenseful.
In the end, Abel learns that trying to keep clean as he rises in stature is going to be a lifelong struggle in a world where no one else seems to mind the dirt. All he can try to do, as he memorably puts it, is to take the path that is the most right.