"Ben-Hur" - Film Review

The subtitle to Ben-Hur is “A Tale of the Christ”. It’s somewhat of an unusual subheading because Ben-Hur isn’t really at all a story about Jesus Christ. It’s a tale about a man, Juda Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), who is enslaved, freed, takes vengeance on the man who wronged him and then finds redemption for his vengeance. I once read a television guide description for the film that described it as a film about a man who rides in a chariot race and runs into Jesus. These are certainly the two best remembered (and most memorable) moments in the film, but they’re actually rather small parts.   

The story is at times an alternate history that inserts Juda occasionally into big historical-religious moments, but the story of Jesus largely plays out in the background of the film, at least until its final moments when Juda witnesses Christ die on the cross. The more overtly religious moments aren’t the films strongest elements. It’s entertaining to see Juda barely miss hearing the Sermon on the Mount, but the film is too heavy handedly delivering its messages (At times, it feels like a Bible school lesson). 

The film is at its best when it’s combining the melodrama of Juda’s quest to get back at Messala (Stephen Boyd) with the spectacle of its epic narrative. The chariot race is the best example of this, and is the film’s most memorable scene. The greatness of the scene is how all of it features real people, real horses, and real chariots. This isn’t the special effects of modern filmmaking, and it’s a scene that’s not only rather impressive but also thrilling and exciting. This isn’t the only great action sequence. Earlier in the film, Juda finds himself a slave in a ship’s galley. The ship heads into battle against another fleet of ships. The ship is rammed, split open, and set ablaze. 

Juda barely escapes. He jumps ship and rescues the ship’s captain. The man is so grateful that in time he takes him in as his son. With new found fortune and freedom, Juda heads back to his home of Judea to confront Messala for his betrayal. 

Messala is a little too one-dimensional (as are most of the characters). He’s completely driven by power and greed. But being a friend with Juda who then turns on him gives the story an effective motivating drive. It’s simple, clear, direct. The film works as well as it does because of how direct it is. It’s not a complicated or hard to follow story. There’s far too much of a good and evil split taking place, and Juda is just a little too noble to be believable. But the movie situates itself in a comfortable realm of black and white. 

The most complicated thing the film does is to lead Juda to believe his mother and sister are dead upon his arrival home. He holds Messala responsible. But he has been lied to by his former slave and love interest Esther (Haya Harareet), who has lied to protect him from the truth that they are now lepers. Juda is so infuriated that his anger at Messala sets him on a course to see the man die. Later he discovers that he’s been lied to and it’s the darkest material the film gets into. Though the film quickly falls into sentimentality and glosses over the troubling nature of the discovery. 

Ben-Hur functions at its best as an old fashioned, sandal-and-swords epic. The production design lends itself to a grand scope that the film takes advantage of (The film had the largest budget for a film up to that point). A lot of the emotional material feels a little too pat and easy at times, but the film also does a credible job of establishing relationships so that it’s all easy to understand and follow. The chariot race represents the film at its most compelling. Ben-Hur is essentially a revenge narrative, and it’s one that the film plays out with predictable, but occasionally surprisingly engaging, storytelling. The ending is a little overlong, the film in general really is. But it’s a film of excess. One of big emotions, big action, and big messages. When it finds the right mix of this, it still manages to draw us in. It's uneven and at times boring, but at its best, its epic spectacle still entertains.    

Grade: B+

"A Hard Day's Night" - Film Review

Considering it’s on one level just a long ad for The Beatles’ latest album, A Hard Day’s Night is a surprisingly fun movie. This is a film with remove from its release that could feel very dated and artifactual. And to an extent it is that (We get a glimpse into that cultural milieu and the phenomenon of the band). But it’s also a film that stands on its own unexpectedly well.

The film has a number of slighter elements. This is best represented by Wilfred Brambell as Paul’s grandfather. Brambell seems to revel in having the old man do things that seem a little naughty for a man of his age and disposition.

The film is essentially about the bands journey to a studio to film and record a concert. Along the way shenanigans ensue. The band trades some memorable quips in between sets. The film is really cheeky and therefore really funny (There’s some humor here that is very much British from its delivery to its content). The band is having fun at the expense of everyone around them who expects them to be dumb because they’re young and rock stars. In one memorable scene, reporters interview the band mates and they proceed to take the questions incredibly literally to the consternation of their interviewers.    

The film is at its best when it’s playing up the personas of the band members. The band plays themselves and make fun of themselves and perceived conceptions of themselves. The film’s best sequences involve the band getting chased by screaming fans and by beleaguered police officers. 

The film is pretty much an extended music video. The movie plays the songs from the then upcoming album of the same name (a set list of one great song after another). There are a number of points where songs play over scenes or the band plays song, occasionally spontaneously. The film is considered to have widely influenced film musicals and even modern music videos. 

What is perhaps most striking is how young John, Paul, George, and Ringo seem. They’re old enough to be off at college, and as they goof around there’s an easy, youthful, bro-mantic banter to it all. The film works as well as it does because of their youth. There’s physicality to some of this and there’s also a sense of youthful abandon. 

The film has an energy to it, in line with the youthful character. Director Dick Lester appears to have taken cues from the French New Wave, then in full force. There’s a free form, loose quality to the way the film is shot. And this style suits the band’s music and the film’s cheekier sensibility.   

Through the film, The Beatles were trying to reach out to their fanbase and win a greater connection (Not that they needed any more. This was at the height of Beatlemania). Here we see them being down-to-earth, affable, charming and mildly rebellious. They're still rather winning, even if it isn't 1964 anymore. 

Grade: A

"Man of Steel" - Film Review

There’s a series of sequences in the last third of Man of Steel that all sort of blend together. They are a number of action sequences and after while they’re indistinguishable from one another. It’s as if the editor didn’t realize he had about at least thirty minutes of screen time that was absolutely unnecessary to telling the story. And in the middle of this constant, ceaseless action, you could be forgiven if you started to zone out here or there. You could probably fall asleep and wake up some time later and have missed rather little and still manage to follow the plot.

After a while this starts to become draining. This isn’t storytelling. This is CGI gone awry. This is someone yelling, “Hey! Isn’t this cool!”  

There are a lot of other things that take place in Man of Steel but that third act is so frustrating and poorly done that it becomes exemplary of the things that the film gets wrong.  

Man of Steel doesn’t really feel like it’s a Superman movie. There’s rather little that ties it to the comics or the older films. The infamous superhero outfit doesn’t get broken out until rather late in the film and Superman doesn’t work at the Daily Planet disguised as Clark Kent until there's five minutes left. 

The film keeps asking us to accept thing at face value simply because it’s asking it of us. Character’s motivations are rarely explained, and things just seem to happen for the sake of the plot. Take the film’s villain General Zod (Michael Shannon). He tries to destroy Earth to create a new Krypton. That’s his goal … but his reasoning is vague at best. We spend a fair amount of time with the character and yet it only becomes more convoluted as the story advances; the answer seems to be, “Because it must be done!” 

The film has a disjointed quality. It keeps jumping around its narrative but this detracts from its clarity and its pacing. After an unnecessarily lengthy opening sequence where we watch Superman’s father (Russell Crowe) send his son off to Earth and battle for excessive lengths, the film jumps ahead to when Clark is in his thirties, disillusioned and aimless. It’s never entirely explained how Clark got to this point. We get flashbacks to his childhood, but the film does more telling than showing here. We see Clark get bullied, but it’s never entirely clear why except for plot convenience. And the explanations by Clark’s adoptive father (Kevin Costner – in one of the more memorable parts of the film) always come off as didactic. 

The flashbacks are bad storytelling. It’s putting the cart before the horse, giving us questions than answering them after the fact (which wouldn’t be a problem except for these questions aren’t really a mystery so much as defining character traits of the protagonist). But since we don’t see Clark grow up in real time, the film treats his childhood as a less important part of the story despite the fact it holds the very answers to why we should be invested in his character. It doesn’t help that Clark in the present day (Henry Cavill) is a barely audible, gloomy and lurking figure. He’s more of a hovering presence than an actual person.

I said earlier that this film almost could act largely as a film that isn’t a Superman movie. In fact, it often comes off as a science fiction film done by someone who wasn’t aware that they were making a science fiction movie. An alien comes to Earth, befriends humans and defends them against other aliens. That’s science fiction (without the comic book origin story stuff happening elsewhere).  But instead of treating the film like sci-fi, the film treats the story like it’s an action movie. The action sequences feel like something out of a big action film. There’s a scope to it all, and there’s many, many explosions. But it also feels like a disaster movie. Countless people die and the destruction waged upon the planet is devastating. Superman weirdly enough seems to take little interest in how much destruction he and Zod wrack up in the course of their fighting. But the film has got none of the careful visual composition of the best science fiction or action movies. The special effects in these scenes are less about being part of the overall story but rather exist as attention grabbing sights. It keeps returning to these visuals but they’re not all that interesting to watch, especially since they’re so poorly edited (jumping around shakily a lot). And there’s simply not enough stakes behind what is taking place to care. We don’t know enough about either Superman or Zod’s motivations to be all that interested in what they’re doing or the property damage they’re accumulating.    

Director Zach Snyder is taking a cue from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (Nolan is a producer of Man of Steel). Nolan’s films brought a gritty, dark take to that franchise, and Snyder is clearly enamored by that approach. But Snyder fails to understand what made those films work. It’s like how so many television series copied the sex and violence of The Sopranos in the wake of its success but failed to understand that there was more to it than these elements. There was good, thoughtful storytelling there as well. Nolan’s films were more about using Batman as a lens for sorting through whatever philosophical and ideological questions were floating around his head. It gave the films a depth that went beyond the blockbuster bluster. Man of Steel is all the sheen and none of the luster of the Batman films.  

Weirdly enough the film I kept coming back to as I watched Man of Steel was 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Not because they have anything remotely in common and not because I wished I was watching it instead (though I did), but because 2001, besides being a great movie and sci-fi, is a film where it’s so easy to see Stanley Kubrick’s vision coming through every single scene, every single shot. You may not like it, you may find it weird or boring, but it’s shot by someone who knows exactly what they want to say and how to say it. Kubrick has such a command of visuals in 2001. Zach Snyder does not in Man of Steel.  

Snyder’s previous efforts show someone who’s more enamored with style than substance. Suckerpunch is a self-indulgent mess of someone letting their obsession with stylistic excess run amuck. 300 is so over-the-top that it almost transcends how dumb and loud it is. There are moments in Man of Steel that feel like someone who watched The Dark Knight or Tarantino movies or European arthouse (or all of those things) and failed to understand all the things that make those types of films work. There are all these little flourishes that seem so unnecessary and they become distracting. And this is made all the more problematic because the film is in a fight between its formalistic touches and the fact it’s a big action movie. It never really reconciles the two. When it does settle for one in its third act, it just becomes messier than ever (make of that what you will).  

By film’s end, we’ve been so heavily pummeled by confusing, repetitive and uninteresting action that it becomes mind-numbing. The film overstays its welcome, and then overstays it ten times over (It's an overlong slog at times). Man of Steel is not enough fun to make up for its poor storytelling and bad characterization.  

Grade: D+

"Gomorrah" - Film Review

The Comorra is one of the world’s largest criminal organizations based in Italy. Based on true events, the film Gomorrah shows the poisonous influence the criminal outfit has on everything around it. An early sequence shows a man distributing money. Every experience in every home he goes into is rather casual. They offer him food and they exchange pleasantries. This is par for the course. Everyone is used to it.

This is why it’s not all that surprising when one the film’s protagonists, a young boy, is drawn into the criminal proceedings. We want to yell out, “Don’t do it!” But he’s participating in initiations rituals before we know it. No one can seem to escape the reach of the Comorra. 

The film is more interested in people on the fringes of the criminal operation. We don’t see the bosses all that much. The film’s interests lie with the little people who get caught up in this. There’s the money distributor. There’s the boy initiated into the Comorra. There are two young men acting as would-be gangster, free agents, who foolishly go up against the Comorra. There's a tailor who attempts to work for a competing garment factory.

Much of the film’s story takes place just off camera. There’s a gang war taking place, but we see little of this. We learn about it mainly from word of mouth. The film rarely wants to shift its perspectives from the characters it has its eye on. There are other scenes that contextualize the messes the many protagonists have gotten themselves into, but they’re the least important parts of the film. 

There’s a sense of inevitable tragedy hanging over the film. We know that bad fates are on the horizon for these characters and the film draws out these fates with an increasingly unsettling feeling of dread. It’s a film interested in how no matter how hard you try or how smart you think you are, you can’t escape the reach of the Comorra. It may not be death that awaits you, but you’re sense of self-worth or your innocence or your control over your own life is in the balance. 

The film has a grittiness to it. This is not a film that attempts to make the gangster lifestyle look pretty or appealing. Many of these people are living in poverty or just above the poverty line. A criminal organization such as Comorra can be as successful as it is because it fills a certain role. People living in Naples and Caserta accept the Comorra’s existence because it’s simply become matter of factly part of life and because many of them also benefit from it.      

The film is also interested in depicting the mundanity of much of this. There are long stretches where people are going about their lives. This also plays to the film’s favor. The film wants to cut through the cliches and lies about the gangster lifestyle. These mundane stretches are often broken unexpectedly by excruciating moments of violence. The violence is bubbling just under the surface. It’s inescapable.  

The destruction by the Comorra isn’t just through violence though. The film spends a large amount of time showing how the Comorra dumps toxic waste that will ruin the environment. They’re literally poisoning what they come into contact with. One man working for the waste management company is so disgusted he quits, but the operation keeps going. 

Gomorrah intertwines the many different stories of its characters to build up a mosaic, bleak portrait of the Comorra and their criminal operations. While its grimness, and scathing realism can be unpleasant to sit through at times, the film's exacting look at the toll of the gangster activities and those caught up in it is powerful. It's often times too slow or too impenetrable or too scattered, but the accumulated effect and end result is something that's hard to argue against.

Grade: A-

"Sleeper" - Film Review

Sleeper is a silly movie, but it’s a movie that knows it’s silly. It feels like a live-action cartoon. Benny Hill-esque music plays at a number of points. Woody Allen comes off as though he’s playing a caricature of himself, as he does in so many of his films.

Part of this silliness comes from the goofy satire of science fiction in the film. It’s not always attacking any given film (though there’s an obvious one directed towards 2001 that’s spot-on, and some vaguely reminsicent tinges of 1984), but the film takes fun in aiming its sights on sci-fi clichés more generally including technology, bureaucracy, cryogenics, and dystopian dictatorships. The humor of this largely stems from how corrupt, inefficient and idiotic so many things have become 200 years into the future. The robot servants are more trouble than they’re worth, and the weapons utilized by the police and military end up doing more harm to themselves than the people they chase.

Allen’s Miles Monroe was cryogenically frozen for what was meant to be a few days and ended up being two centuries. Scientists, part of a resistance movement against the current autocratic government, awake him to use him in part of their scheme to overthrow the government. This quickly goes awry and Myles finds himself on the run. He disguises himself as a robot servant, which leads to him being employed by a ditzy woman Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton – his frequent film collaborator and complicated real life romantic interest). Luna is a great foil to Miles. She, of course, misunderstands all his sarcastic comments.   

So much of what makes the film funny is how understated the humor is. Allen is constantly underselling jokes and never feels the need to explain a joke. Much of the humor is irrelevant to the genre its set its eyes on. Many of the funniest moments are just Allen making a well-timed quip. It’s the exasperated off hand comments as his protagonist Myles traverses an unfamiliar future society that really sell the film. 

The film’s satire isn’t all aimed at sci-fi though. Many of the best moments in the film are satirically pointing their attention at contemporary society. The film keeps returning to mocking how Myles ran a health food store. In one memorable scene, scientists show photos to Myles from contemporary culture and he has fun at the expense of the questioner’s lack of knowledge.  

Myles is assigned by the scientists to meet up with the resistance movement to discover what the government's secret project is. This is the film’s Macguffin. It hardly matters what the project is, and we only learn within the films last twenty minutes or so what it is. The plot is simple and not entirely that interesting. But it doesn’t really matter. Allen is more interested in making us laugh. Myles attempts to escape the government, reveals his identity to Luna, has to deal with her being hysterical, gets caught, has his memory erased, gets rescued, remembers everything, and stops the secret project from succeeding. 

But what you really need to know is there is a point where Myles holds a gun at the disembodied nose of the dictator as if it’s a hostage. Everyone takes this absolutely seriously despite how ridiculous it is. That’s the sort of movie this is. Allen strings the film along through a series of wonderfully executed sight gags and slapstick.

This is all thinly strung together but it’s also so funny, irreverent, and intelligent that it doesn’t matter. There's an absurdity to it, but Allen is aware of the absurdity, constantly acknowledging it through the way scenes are shot or how he undercuts them. It's at once a film that parodies sci-fi and yet embraces the elements inherent to the genre. And it's all filtered through Allen's hilarious and inimitable worldview.

Grade: A-

"Swing Time" - Film Review

I’m not sure how to classify Swing Time. It’s a comedy, a romance, and, most importantly, a musical. It’s one of those Old Hollywood crowd pleasers that throws in many different elements to entertain everyone.

Swing Time is best remembered as one of the films that paired together Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This was the sixth film they starred in opposite eachother. There’s a sense of ease between them; they work well with one another and they know how to bring the best out of the other. The chemistry between the two is electrifying, and it carries the film during its more dated moments. 

The dance sequences are the films best, most memorable scenes. Astaire and Rogers are such magnificent dancers that they make the tricky routines feel effortless.  They're complicated acts, but Astaire and Rogers are so graceful, so elegant that it feels spontaneous even though we know it isn't.

There’s also some musical numbers sung by them. The musical numbers aren’t noteworthy but they have their own charm about them, particularly in the hands of these performers. Though the number "Never Gonna Dance" is fairly devastating due to how convincingly the two sell it.  

Much of the film feels hokey and predictable, which gives it a clunky feel at times. But it’s not meant to be logical or tell a fantastic story. It’s clichéd and thinly put together, but sequences taken on their own are such pleasing and fun bits that they make it worth the price of admission. 

The film is still rather funny. Victor Moore especially as the bumbling Pop is fairly amusing. The way Moore mumbles his words and makes him awkward is a great bit of character work. 

The romance is one of such obvious by the numbers that the film is really putting the plausibility on the shoulder of Astaire and Rogers, but they’re absolutely game for it. They meet up by accident, resent one another, grow to have feelings, and then dance around (quite literally) acting upon them. The film throws an interesting wrench into it though. Astaire is engaged to another woman from back home, but he’s split as to whether he wants to still be with her. 

The most dated, and most offensive, part of the film is a blackface routine. It’s a low point for the film and it almost detracts from the goodwill the film has built up elsewhere. The film remains good in spite of this, but it’s a little upsetting to watch.  Though that number "Bojangles of Harlem" has its own impressive dancing.

This is a film largely meant as a showcase for Astaire and Rogers’ talents. They’re great stage performers. The film has a stagey quality. The sets are grand and clearly on a sound stage. They recall the decadence of Old Hollywood. The film is theatrical in the sense that you could imagine this being some sort of play. Everything flows with the logic and timing of a theater performance, and that is part of the film’s effectiveness and charm.

Everything is expressed through song and dance. Astaire and Rogers fall for eachother through the music, through the dancing, and through the beauty of these acts. The dances are virtuoso, and Astaire and Rogers danced like few people have or ever will. There was a spark between them that went beyond dancing well-together. They made the dancing somehow more than just dancing. Something magical.

Grade: A

"Holy Motors" - Film Review

Sacrebleu! 

I have no fucking clue what happens in Holy Motors. I sat there increasingly baffled and, more importantly, delighted by my baffledness. And you know what; I don’t want to know what happened or what it all means. It’s not really one of those movies you comprehend but that you contemplate. And the more you contemplate, the greater the pleasures of its weird mysteries and ambiguousness become.  

The film is about a man Mr. Oscar (Denis Levant) pretending to be (or who actually might be) several other people. He goes around in a limousine, and every so often gets out dressed up as a new person. He has costumes, make up, and disguises in the back of the car. And along the way he becomes more people. Initially it appears as though it might be some strange profession. He keeps calling the jobs as “appointments” that he needs to be at, at precisely the right time. As the film moves along it begins to get weirdly metaphysical, and it feels as though there might be more to these assignments and odd jobs than appears on the surface. It seems to be simultaneously a commentary on the nature of life, the nature of acting, and the nature of films. 

I won’t go into too much detail on the specifics of these people he poses as. It’s far more interesting to go in without much knowledge of what’s to come. It’s just that sort of movie. The different sequences play out like little vignettes. The film lets these various sequences meander around, discovering their own rhythms. The intriguing thing is how everyone in these different sequences buys into the reality of them. In some of them the man has a strong connection with the people he interacts with. At times it’s easy to forget that this is a man in costume and buy into him being the person he claims to be. These sequences are often oddly mesmerizing, occasionally exhilarating, sometimes hilarious (if only due to shock value), and certainly never ever dull.

The film does give glimpses of what’s behind the curtain of the disconcerting logic to its mysteries, and we’re provided just enough to get the gist of it, but the mystery is left unresolved in all the right ways. The film devolves further and further into strangeness and mystery, providing us dozens more questions for every answer it gives us. The strangeness continually ramps up, the weirdness multiplies, and then the film ends.     

This lack of answers might sound frustrating, but it’s all so thoroughly engaging, entertaining, and beautifully shot throughout that it’s a pleasure to simply go along for its odd, twisty ride. 

Grade: A