Arrival

I was bored from minute one. Is this a movie about language and communication, or is this a movie about predicting the future, or is this a movie about China and Russia being mean?
Arrival has some interesting stuff going for it. I liked the alien heptapods, which also look like hands and have elephant skin. Their language blooms like ink on water. They sound like basso profundo whales, slightly sad. I liked the thick, gel-like texture of their atmosphere and I liked Amy Adams, who does way too much with way too little. But the movie made no sense to me.
In science fiction movies the science better be buttoned up and understandable. You can't have characters espousing theories about language and half a second later you are communicating with the aliens without really explaining how. Showing a bunch of complicated graphics doesn't do the trick, and particularly not with language, since as opposed to applied mathematics, musical notation or nuclear physics, plain old language is something we all use.
It makes no sense to me that a linguist would try to communicate through written language with beings who grunt in stereo. First option would be sound, no? Music! Echoing their sounds. And the second would be images. A smiley face? Because that's how we started communicating back in the caves. Written language came much later.
Arrival, like other current pretentious sci-fi movies like Interstellar, suffers from ambitious metaphysics and phony, half-baked science that it cannot explain. It's a problem with the writing. People who write movies like this trust that the audience will not be too demanding and so they futz it up and think no one will care. Now, let me clarify. The science could be completely made up. Bugs Bunny could invent the science. As long as it is clearly established, we buy it, because those are the ground rules. But I never understood how we went to being baffled by the aliens' beautiful inky circles, to the word "weapon". How did that happen? And why that word? Showing people trying to solve problems in their head does not do the trick.
Worse, however, are the ultra-conventional, comic book clichés of the world being hostile and aggressive to these things (reminiscent of A War of The Worlds). Sure their spacecraft is scary, and sure the military should be involved, but I would think that NASA and the scientific community would be more important than some meanie from the CIA, of all places. There is a bad Chinese general and the Russians are dicks, and the Americans are not likable either (perhaps the one realistic touch). So poor Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner are the only two scientists on Earth who can talk to these guys.
Meanwhile, I spent the entire movie thinking that it really works like a very benign metaphor for Donald Trump. If there is a scary alien that threatens to pulverize the world tweet by toxic tweet, he is it. The anxiety this movie creates about our inability to communicate echoes what is happening in the world right now. Sadly, it doesn't focus enough on the miracle of communication, which is what I thought it was about. At some point, it turns out that it is also about the ability to predict the future, and these two ideas are never explained or tied coherently. It feels like watching two different movies.
But my biggest disappointment is that I felt no sense of either suspense, wonder or awe, even if the aliens are conceptually interesting and there are a couple of mildly thrilling moments (one involving Amy Adams' hair). This movie made me pine for Steven Spielberg, who as shlocky as he can be, is truly a master at unleashing a sense of curiosity and wonder. And fun, for crying out loud! This movie is humorless.

Ex-Machina

A creepy science fiction film by screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex-Machina worries about the terrifying notion of man creating artificial intelligence capable of consciousness. This is a fear as old as time, told by storytellers in tales featuring man-made creatures from The Golem, to Frankenstein, to passive-aggressive Hal 2000.
Now Alicia Vikander plays Ava, a sultry robot who looks half human, half hardware. Oscar Isaac plays Nathan, her creator, an ornery, drunk Silicon Valley grade A asshole whose version of playing God is not only creating consciousness in a robot, but also messing with other people's heads, among other self-involved pursuits we discover later. Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a brilliant nerd employee, is invited to Nathan's secluded compound to perform a test on Ava to determine if she exhibits human consciousness. What follows is a satisfying brain riddle, with Caleb developing a crush on the very lovely, transparently human Ava, and Ava playing games with his poor heart and mind, while an out of control Nathan thinks he controls things.
Luckily, Garland is interested in the sterile yet febrile atmosphere that surrounds Nathan, and in the mind games robots and their makers play. He is interested in the discomfort created by the balance of power of artificial consciousness in interaction with humans, let alone the God complex that comes with it, and if indeed conscious, the almost inevitable rebellion of the created against their creator.
Slowly and delightfully, the movie turns into a quiet horror flick that hints at the disturbing possibilities of a creature like Ava unleashed into the world. She doesn't care about ruling the universe, but she has been created with only self-interest at heart. She is, after all, her father's daughter. Garland's hall of mirrors script and his poise as a director examine our capacity for invention and the uses we put to it with an unsentimental, refreshingly non-preachy eye. He is not an optimist. (I hate optimists).
If creepy sci-fi with a side of sang froid is not your cup of tea, watch this movie for the work of the three wonderful actors, and in particular for a scene where Oscar Isaac gets his groove on. A quietly controlled actor with an angelical face, he tends to play men with a cold, driven side, (A Most Violent Year, The Two Faces Of January) or rueful misanthropes (Inside Llewyn Davis). He is the best thing in the movie, although Vikander does a splendid job of acting like a robot acting like a human, never an easy feat. For a robot passing as human, she is subtly alluring. Her allure is not studied, and hence makes it possible to believe that Caleb, or any other man, would succumb to her unspoiled charms.

P.S: For a comparable acting tour de force, you can endure Ridley Scott's uneven, all over the place Alien prequel, Prometheus, in which an excellent Michael Fassbender portrays a robot who likes to imitate Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

I Origins

Mike Cahill's new movie touches upon several of the themes he explored in Another Earth, a compelling opera prima done on a very low budget. Although it is an uneven movie, at least the first half hour of Another Earth is effectively disquieting and its premise is very intriguing. What if there was another planet just like ours across from us in space? Unfortunately, Cahill chucks the rich possibilities of metaphysical exploration in favor of heavy personal melodrama. Still, Another Earth is a much more accomplished and interesting film than I Origins.
This time, Cahill got more money for camera, casting, locations and lights and the movie looks better, but the content is not.  In both films, Cahill's mishmash of scifi, romance and melodrama doesn't quite gel. Whereas in Another Earth he showed promise, in I Origins Cahill seems way out of his depth.
Michael Penn and Brit Marling play a couple of extremely good looking scientists who are trying to recreate a biological eye in the lab. Even if their scientific jargon is realistic, it sounds like mumbo jumbo. The audience is confused and we swat it away. There is nothing remotely believable in this movie, which is an uneasy mix of romantic fantasy, scientific caper, and sophomoric spiritual philosophizing. It's a problem when a movie about intelligent people is not intelligent enough.
The movie starts as Dr. Ian Gray (Pitt) meets a mysterious, and like many such creatures in film, obnoxious young woman (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), who may or may not be some sort of ancient spirit. She picks a fight with the doctor over his steadfast, and increasingly obtuse refusal to believe even in the existence of the soul. A lot of weird unexplainable things happen to him that he tries to solve through reasoning; the universe is trying to tell him something that he refuses to hear. This happens for way too long, so we lose patience. Then the movie veers into some vague pursuit of the possibility of reincarnation. None of it is compelling, none of it is sufficiently explained, or even convincingly believed by anyone involved. Michael Pitt is lovely to look at, but he seems to be phoning it in, Brit Marling is, as usual intriguingly charismatic, but she plays the same person she always does. The only good things in the movie are a wonderful Archie Panjabi and a soulful Indian girl called Kashish.
I thought of Terence Malick's The Tree Of Life, a tone poem that amazed and exasperated people in equal numbers. Malick, I think, was trying to express, mostly in stunning visuals, that a belief in evolution and faith in divine grace are not mutually exclusive.  Mike Cahill is trying to aim that high, but does not have the poetic gifts of Terence Malick, and he is incapable or reaching anything beyond the obvious.

Snowpiercer

The long awaited first foray of director's Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) into big budget filmmaking is here, and it is a rather interesting mixed bag. That Bong is gifted is clearly in evidence in this adaptation of a French graphic novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic Earth where the sole remaining humans are stuck in a very long train that is circling the globe. It is 2031 and because of our plundering of the environment, the Earth has been frozen and nothing can survive outside the train. This train is basically a spot-on metaphor for the difference between coach and first class in current commercial aviation and, more essentially, for the way we live now, with the poors stuck all the way in the back in dire oppression, while the one percent rides in comfort and luxury in the front, controlling everything and sharing nothing. In between, there are cars of armed goons protecting the wealthy from the hoi polloi. There are other fun details in the other cars that I won't disclose here, but as a metaphor, it is perfect for what goes on today. The downtrodden in the back want to get to the front. The one percent in the front will do anything in their power to keep them in the back. Life on Earth.
As fanboy action movies go, this is a darker tale than usual, and there are a couple of twists at the end that are anathema to the heroic tropes that are a staple of the genre. But, and this is a very big but, although the enormous skill and imagination of Bong are in full force, what made him such an exciting writer-director is missing in this film. I remember seeing The Host and being totally exhilarated by his mischievousness. At first it wasn't clear what exactly we were witnessing. A cheesy monster film with a giant fish that looked like a mean version of Charlie the Tuna, The Host was also a hilarious Korean social satire. The protagonists were a bunch of losers, and Bong's balancing act between mischief and real terror was a fresh, original marvel to behold. Mother, a darkly funny, harrowing movie about a monster mom, was also sharply satirical and critical of Korean society, full of mordant detail. This incisive playfulness, his assured handling of several dissonant tones is what makes Bong one of the best directors working today, yet his mischievousness is sadly missing from this film.
It is not altogether gone, harnessed by some mordant visuals, and in particular by  the amazing Tilda Swinton, who plays Mason, the envoy between Mr. Wilford, the owner of the train, and the masses. She is spectacular, and seems to be the only actor who is truly alive for the first half of the film. She brings her considerable chops to portray the sum of all ass-kissing bureaucrats, stern but morally dubious headmasters, the sum of all of those who do the dirty work for the more powerful. She is over the top, and hilarious. At times I thought she was channeling Emma Thompson at her most prissy, at times she reminded me of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, but at the Q&A after the film, Bong revealed that Swinton was channeling Margaret Thatcher. So that's who that was! Tilda Swinton rules, bless her irreverent, mirthful soul.
Because Snowpiercer takes place in a sci-fi world (the production design and special effects are awesome) a lot of the day to day human observation in which Bong excels is sacrificed in the name of keeping the giant machinery of the metaphor rolling. There are enormous holes in the story (screenplay by Bong and Kelly Masterson). A lot of it doesn't make sense. I never understood why the rich needed the poor, and that is just one of many headscratchers. To Bong's credit, I was able to suspend my disbelief because of the forward momentum of the story, and because he unleashes wonderful actors like little bonbons, one after the other.
I suspect that the exigencies of marketing may have played a role in the script. There are some cringe worthy lines from Curtis, the hero (Chris Evans, doing his best and still managing to be uninteresting) about his inability to be a leader. He repeats them over and over, and we finally learn why he thinks he cannot lead (another tired antihero trope that needs to be put out to pasture) in a convoluted speech at the end where he tells us everything that happened to him in the past. I cannot help but think this sounds like something added after focus groups. The result is that we don't care, because we didn't see it. Now, we don't necessarily need to see it, as it is a gruesome tale, but when the biggest twists are in the form of exposition at the end, the revelations sink as we never once saw any tension, or ambiguity at the beginning that may startle us emotionally. Tragic things happen, but they don't really connect, perhaps because the characters exist to service the concept, and as hard as the actors work, it's hard to care for them. Actors like Octavia Spencer and Jamie Bell are excellent, but are swallowed by the enormity of the mayhem and the lack of clarity in the story. Ironically, the giant engine of the plot seems to be as indifferent to the plight and nature of the characters as the giant engine of the train. This movie seems devoid of real emotion.
There are long, sharply staged, extremely violent, cartoonish fight sequences, but I was not truly excited and amazed until the point in which the rebels finally burst into business class, so to speak. That is the really fun part. It is visually stunning and it deploys more of Bong's sense of humor. But in general, the exhilaration comes more from the set decor and the special effects rather than from keenly observed truths. Sadly, many potentially rich nuances of the characters' experience fall by the wayside.
This is a very ambitious movie, and as action movies go, far less inane and hypocritical than average, with a great subversive metaphor and a wonderfully ambivalent ending that somehow manage to survive an ideologically confusing exposition. I'd still rather get my kicks from a cheesy giant fish, a family of losers, a poisonous mother, or a hapless policeman, those fascinating people in Bong's down-to-Earth universe, than from high concept bells and whistles.

Under The Skin

Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Sexy Beast) makes films that feel abstract. This one is his most enigmatic to date. Scarlett Johansson stars as a woman who prowls Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside at night looking for men. She gets them into her van and seduces them to go home with her. Then she makes them fall into a black ooze. This is a strange, poetic science fiction film that may test your patience while you wait for the long scenes to unfold or for something to happen. Long periods of her roaming around in the fog are punctuated by bursts of incident so powerful, so devastating, they quietly astound and shock.
Your patience will be amply rewarded by the realization that you are seeing things from the point of view of an alien. She is utterly outside, not only of society, but of human feeling. She also seems to be unaware of our frantic notions of time. She seems to have all the time in the world. Glazer is not interested in cutting to the chase. We are on her time frame. He wants us to see the world from the outside looking in. Under The Skin makes us notice what we all have under the skin and what we take for granted; that is, our humanity. This is not to say this movie is a sappy paean to the good in people, God forbid. It is an elegant observation of what makes us human, in all its banal, noisy, messy, complicated, matter-of-fact reality. Connection, for instance. She always looks for lone men. For some reason, she is not interested in harvesting women. The purpose of her mission is never explained. She trains her almond shaped eyes on the way humans behave, and we see ourselves, observed, doing nothing remarkable. Shopping, crossing the street, talking on the phone, coming back from a soccer game, waiting. To her, we are a noisy, incomprehensible bunch, but she has learned to ape our superficial social chitchat, always asking the men if they live alone and where they are from.
As we fidget at the slowness of the film, Glazer springs on us surprising things. She is suddenly drowned by a wave of excited women going to a disco (portrayed as a techno version of hell). On a terrifying, and quickly becoming legendary, scene with a young family on a beach, there is no suspense. Only the horrific realization that this woman has no human feeling. 
After an encounter with a remarkable man, something changes in her. I did not quite understand why or how things happened in this sequence, but the fact is that she revolts against her mission. Saying more would spoil the mystery.
If you are bored out of your wits, you can allow yourself to float under the spell of La Johansson's otherworldly presence. Dressed cheaply, wearing terrible black bangs, a bit chubby even, with or without makeup, she is a creature. Her face engulfs the screen. It is an inspired piece of casting; female seduction made flesh, and she is a good enough actress to deploy her porous sensuality without exaggeration. The scenes where she traps her prey are both beautiful, darkly funny and fodder for years of psychoanalysis, the men following her like the chant of the sirens, sinking deeper, even shrinking at the opportunity to possess her. But in the moments when she is simply lost amidst the humans she is equally present, slightly befuddled, affectless but not exactly cold. She makes you notice what it is to display the slightest feeling, and how oblivious we are to our own humanity. She seems to absorb everything she sees through her skin. It is a measured and successful performance of an alien trying to pass for human without a shred of cliché.
I loved the creepy, incantatory music by Mica Levi and Glazer's customary elegant simplicity with images. He creates moments of terrifying beauty. Every time I thought the movie was veering towards the pretentious, some astonishing image arrived to haunt me. The film is visceral, minimal, elegant and perhaps (I hope) deliberately fuzzy. It is strangely gorgeous, quietly violent, deeply disturbing, and utterly hypnotic.

Jodorowsky's Dune

This illuminating and entertaining documentary by Frank Pavich centers on the ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune that enfant terrible Alejandro Jodorowsky got close to making but never got off the ground. It is required viewing for anyone who dreams of making a movie, because it is at once tremendously inspiring and heartbreaking. It encompasses the passion, the collaboration, the singular madness, the universal dream that movies are, and the pitfalls of getting them made. In fact, it should be seen by anyone who is working on an artistic project. Jodorowsky has very astute insights on the creative process.
Since we are talking about Jodorowsky and not any run of the mill director, this movie is also about a seemingly insane charismatic leader marshaling forces to create what in his vision was to be the most important movie ever made.
Jodorowsky's deeply idiosyncratic and provocative films became successful in the 70s (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) and he was suddenly in the position to get French financing to make a movie. He chose Dune, which he had not even read yet (a friend told him it was cool). He set out to look for spiritual warriors, as he called them, since he wanted this movie to be a spiritual breakthrough, to give people an LSD trip without the drugs, to open minds. It was to be a movie that would change human consciousness (hey, these were the 70s). 
So he went on his quest to find the perfect team and he assembled a formidable and in some cases, borderline ridiculous group of talents, among them the great artists Moebius and H. R. Giger, who did spectacular designs. For the role of Emperor of the Universe no one but Salvador Dalí would do (makes perfect sense), and for an enormous malevolent character, he thought of Orson Welles, who had ballooned to gigantic proportions. Mick Jagger was to play a part. Some of the music was going to be by Pink Floyd. You don't get the picture.
Jodorowsky, who is more in touch with the symbolic, archetypal, metaphoric, spiritual world than most people, had his own intuitive way of finding good collaborators. By all accounts, he was an impassioned motivator who gave great freedom to his artists. Not a dictator, but a madman with a vision.He storyboarded the entire film with over 3000 frames, mostly by Moebius, and put it all together in a book thicker than the Yellow Pages. Apparently, there are only two copies in the world today. Pavich has animated some of the storyboard sequences and the frames are so dynamic and gorgeous that I would be happy to watch the entire thing this way.
Jodorowsky seems to have been an immensely charming and charismatic cajoler. To get his way, he promised burning giraffes to Dalí (a total diva) and, to a reluctant Welles, the chef of a Parisian five-star restaurant for location catering. But he also had an enormous ego. It is worth pondering the psychological ramifications of casting his own 12 year-old son as a Messiah figure and putting him through a merciless immersion in martial arts training to prepare him for the role. He took enormous liberties with the original story, emphasizing, not surprisingly, a character with an ego so huge, he lives in a palace shaped like himself.
It is folly, but it is organized, crafted and magnificently imagined: transformed into art. Even better, it seems eminently doable. Three fourths of the movie are devoted to Jodorowsky's creative and casting process, and he is a very entertaining raconteur. But at some point one thinks: whence the money?
And here lies the heartbreak. Unfortunately, to make cinematic dreams, you need money, or as Jodorowsky calls it, "this shit". In those days, the only place to go for help was Hollywood. So he and his producer Michel Seydoux pitched it at every major studio. The studios all loved that amazing book; they even thought that the $15 million budget (about $80 million today) was not unreasonable, but none would make it. They wanted it, but without Jodorowsky. They didn't trust him not to go over budget, and as Nicholas Winding Refn intimates in the film, they were afraid of his expanding mind. They knew they could not control him. He was the wrong dog barking at the only tree. Jodorowsky says, "it's my dream and you don't change my dream". And the studios would say, "Well, it's my money, so I can change your dream": History Of The Movies, in a nutshell. You can still feel Jodorowsky's ferocious anger at this epic frustration.
Dune never got made. Well, it got made by David Lynch, or as Jodorowsky generously puts it, by a De Laurentiis producer, into the clumsy movie fit for Mystery Science Theater 3000 that we know today.  One can imagine the producers barking on the phone a la Sam Goldwyn, "get me the American Jodorowsky", and that's how you arrive at David Lynch.
However, there is a coda that took my breath away and which I won't disclose here, but let's say that two of the artists who collaborated on the better Dune went on to create one of the best Sci-Fi movies of all time. Which is a surprising and deeply restorative insight into what may come out of devastating creative frustration. It is obvious that Jodorowsky's Dune made the rounds in the studios and it influenced, whether consciously or not, every subsequent Sci-Fi movie ever made, including Star Wars, which is like a really dumbed down version (and a movie I detest).
Jodorowsky's Dune is an admiring film and it lets you feel in the blanks for some unexplored spaces. If the adults were utterly devastated by the demise of the movie, how did Jodorowsky's teenage son deal with it? What were the consequences to their relationship? An end title reads that Jodorowsky and Seydoux parted ways, one imagines in catastrophic bitterness. The movie doesn't elaborate except to cheer us up by mentioning that they are collaborating again 35 years later.
This could easily have been a cynical movie, but it is a celebration of creative ambition. Jodorowsky's Dune is not only about the clash between dreams, the concrete shape they take as movies and the financial constraints that hamper their creation, but it is about how art, images and movies influence us at the deepest subconscious level and they suffuse far more of our lives, as creators or spectators, than we can ever fathom.

Robot & Frank

A sweet, thoughtful, original and unlikely comedy about a man with incipient Alzheimer's and the robot that is hired to help him out; this is, once more, an opportunity to witness the greatness that is Frank Langella. He has been nailing every performance in every movie he is in, but this one is a gem. Langella plays Frank, a man who lives alone in a little town in the near future, and who is losing his memory. He happens to be an ex-burglar and he is ornery, proud and in denial. His exasperated son (James Marsden) gets him a robot to keep an eye on him and help whip him into shape. Frank is annoyed and humiliated by the robot (voiced by a suave and solicitous Peter Sarsgaard), but as the robot has been programmed to improve his charge's health, Frank, crafty bastard that he is, realizes he can manipulate the robot to help him plan some heists, which are the only thing that keeps his mind alert and bring him joy. It is a truly original premise and director Jake Schreier strikes the perfect tone. The movie is funny, smart and very touching. Somehow, one believes that a relationship is created between Frank and the fantastic Robot, closer to that which he has with his dutiful but distant children. Langella should be nominated for every prize in the book for this extraordinary performance. He doesn't chew the scenery; he doesn't need to. He completely inhabits Frank. One believes he was once a very good burglar. One believes that he doesn't remember who his children are. One knows when he remembers and when he doesn't, when he is faking dementia. He is so good at faking the faking, he is just astonishing. One can see the regret and the sadness of his current life, his tough side, and the sparkle in his eye when he relives his planning feats. He also has impeccable comic timing. Langella has become one of the greatest American screen actors.
I could watch Susan Sarandon pad around in her pajamas and pay the price of admission. I will endure any movie if she happens to be in it. Here she plays a librarian, something of a species on the verge of extinction, who is very nice to Frank, who flirts with her. Her warmth and intelligence fill up the screen. The long lost Liv Tyler plays Frank's daughter, some sort of ditzy hippy liberal who travels the world and James Marsden as the son has great reserves of contempt for a dad who not only was never there, but who shamed the family for being a crook. Yet the delightful chemistry belongs to Frank and the Robot.
A light comedy, Robot & Frank nevertheless touches upon the very painful theme of aging and  memory loss, of losing touch with life. It also skims through the possibilities of a near future when robots will be our daily companions (we're not that far off, given our exaggerated attachments to iThings).
It could have been a gray dystopian bummer look at the future, as sci fi movies usually are, but the twist here is that it is less a sci fi flick than a comedy in which the near future looks almost identical to the present. This makes us focus on human feelings and memories, more than on man made objects. Robot & Frank has a wistful air of nostalgia for objects who don't talk back, like books, for the human connection we are afraid of losing (if we haven't yet) in this age of constant screens. Robot and Frank likes to think that the human is still in charge. It makes us wonder for how long.