"The Lego Movie" (2014)

The directing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller have a solid track record for taking seemingly disreputable film properties and turning them into finely tuned pieces of entertainment. With Cloud with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, they proved they could make clever, witty, all-around entertaining films that didn’t insult your intelligence or forget to tell a meaningful story with some thematic resonance. On one level these films worked because they were about films. They were carefully keyed into the pop culture-addled age we reside in: eye-catching, mixed and matched, and weird and absurd yet oddly endearing and warm. But though these films were self-referential, that was always a third or fourth goal. With The Lego Movie, however, they turn up the self-reflexivity up to eleven.

But it is not entirely in a meta-way. Self-aware cultural mash up and deconstruction is the part of the goal here, but it’s also simply to be constantly fun. The Lego Movie isn’t just about films; it’s about culture. The Lego Movie’s defining feature is a child-like love for taking the most fun and memorable elements of the pop culture we adore and putting them side by side as if it’s no big deal. 

The world it is set in is one that embraces the Lego’s quality as a toy. The film’s animation looks like nothing else because it not only models itself after stop motion animation (though it's actually CG animation) but also because it’s a film that seems to love the occasional clunkiness or handmade quality due to the animation featuring Legos. This might sound like something found on Youtube, but the film embraces a sense of depth and scope unimaginable on that homemade scale. One of the Lego Movie’s defining traits is its desire to build up a world and keep inhabiting it with destinations and characters who are interesting, bizarre and lovable. 

Emmett (Chris Pratt, channeling some of his Andy Dwyer goofball charm from TV's Parks and Recreation), a not especially special Lego person, finds himself caught in a grand scheme to overthrow the evil President Business’ (Will Ferrell) autocracy and segregation of the massive Lego Universe. A prophecy, created by a wizard (Morgan Freeman, spoofing himself), has foretold of the Special, a person who will find the “piece of a resistance”, a magical piece that will put an end to President Business’ mass consumer conformity. 

The Lego Movie, despite being technically a giant piece of product placement, is a deeply anti-big business film. At its heart, it’s about the fear of films, and culture more generally, becoming too corporate, cold and calculated. The odd irony here being that despite the Lego Movie being a certain corporate product, it has resisted being a part of the crass mass culture it critiques. It genuinely has an abundance of character and personality. 

The film’s strength lies in relying on what has always made the Legos so beloved: the ability to create worlds, to let your imagination run wild and an infinite sense of wonder and possibility.

Grade: A

"Mon Oncle" (1958)

Jacques Tati loves intricate contraptions that require a lot of set up before having all the gears click and letting his slapstick antics go off like a well-oiled machine. Tati is reaching back to a tradition of comedy more in line with Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton than anything recognizably being made when his films were released. More precisely, in Mon Oncle, Tati’s character of Monsieur Hulot feels like he belongs in a silent movie. He barely has any lines and everything he does is conveyed through actions, gestures, and sound effects. While the modern world wants to suck Hulot into its over-refined ways he’s still stuck up in the clouds, always affably bumbling by. Other characters have lines, notably Hulot’s sister and her husband, who are getting fed up with Hulot’s daydreaming and aimlessness, and they feel like they could possibly belong to the real world. Well, more than Hulot at least; Tati at times seems to be working in caricature, but he really has an affection for the human element underneath his calculated comedic machinations. There is a light bit of satire regarding bourgeoisie pretensions, but Tati intends it as all in good fun. Tati’s larger aim is to capture the rhythms of city life, using his Hulot as a gateway into how work, play and everything in between are gone about. Tati delights in a number of precisely arranged comedy setpiece and he keeps the tone breezy and charming, but he’s reaching for deeper emotions of melancholy and disappointment.

Grade: A

"The Tenant" (1976)

It’s never entirely clear what is occurring in Roman Polanski’s uneven but arresting The Tenant, but it’s always clear why it’s happening. Polanski’s interested in getting at us on a level beyond intellectualism; it’s a purely emotional response built on inhabiting the mind of one person. Polanski plays Trelkovsky a mild-manner, nervous clerk who takes up residence in an apartment where strange things begin to take place. Whether these things are real or not doesn’t really matter, what does is that Trelkovsky does. Like Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, the film is about slowly unraveling the psyche of its protagonist and making us feel his distress and paranoia. We inhabit his headspace and we question along with him the peculiar behavior of his neighbors and the odd circumstances under which the previous resident died. By blurring fact and fiction Polanski heightens the story’s off-kilterness, and it slowly becomes impossible to tell what’s odd yet real and what’s just pure insanity at work. The Tenant takes the outward appearances of a thriller or mystery but it’s more of a character study. Polanski turns the apartment into an outward representation of Trelkovsky’s crumbling mind, utilizing the cramped space to make us feel trapped in his palpable anxiety and psychosis. 

Grade: B+

"The Thing from Another World" (1951)

The cold is almost another character in The Thing from Another World. Set at a cramped science station out at the North Pole, the film is constantly reminding you that damn is it ever cold this far north. The wind howls and the snow blows, and the chill seeps into our bones as much as the characters’. The other key factor that continues to make the film successful is its sense of space, or rather its lack of it. The characters are confined in small buildings, and they feel trapped in, which creates a sense of claustrophobia. When a UFO crash lands, a group of soldiers and scientists extract the frozen corpse of an alien, but the block of ice thaws and soon the creature is on the loose. How director Christian Nyby and cinematographer Russell Harlan choose to shoot the Thing (James Arness) adds to the effect of dread and discomfort. The film shoots the alien at a distance or in shadows, which, coupled with the makeup and special effects design, still serve to disturb. Minimizing the monster’s actual presence leads the film to nicely focus on the conflicting opinions and dynamics of those stuck at the station. Though Howard Hawks was only a producer on the film, his presence can be felt throughout the film. The film seems carefully attuned to Hawks’ directorial mantra: “Three great scenes, no bad ones”. It also features Hawks trademark sense of “macho heroics and succinct wit,” as Nathan Rabin described it. We may no longer be in the Atomic Age, but The Thing from Another World still works as efficient, well-crafted science fiction entertainment regardless of era. 

Grade: A-

"Suzhou River" (2000)

It’s impossible to think of Suzhou River without thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Writer-Director Lou Ye is clearly loosely borrowing the basic narrative and thematic predilections of Vertigo, as well as a handful from Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Low-level gangster Mardar (Jia Hongsheng) falls for Moudan (Zhou Xun), a woman he’s assigned to watch over but ends up falling in love with in the process.  However, things go sour in their relationship and Moudan jumps off a bridge, presumably to her death. But when her body is never found, Mardar presumes that Moudan is still alive and searches for her. When he meets MeiMei, a woman who looks uncannily like his former lover, Mardar assumes that she must be the same woman, or, at least, that he can convince her to adopt the same image. The story is told by MeiMei’s lover, a videographer who seems more infatuated by the images and idea of his girlfriend than the real thing. While Hitchcock’s interest was more in desire and obsession, which is still present here, Ye is more concerned with love. Why do we ask, demand even, so much from our relationships?  Why do we ask people to be something they aren’t?  Ye, like Hitchcock, is interested in surfaces: the ways images manipulate us and how we use appearances to mask our true selves and influence other.  In Suzhou River, love and obsession are a blur, feeding into volatility and passion. Ye forgoes the calculated exterior narrative of Hitchcock to focus on the untapped, raw emotional core interior. It’s ultimately messier but it glimmers with a the riveting force of its character's passions and cinematographer Wang Yu's alluring imagery. 

Grade: B

"The Scent of Green Papaya" (1994)

Notice the houses in The Scent of Green Papaya: huge, sprawling, and yet, deeply, almost uncomfortably, empty. There are people in the two houses where the majority of the film’s narrative occurs, but director Tran Anh Hung frames his actors so the space seems to overwhelm them. It’s constantly confining them. There isn’t a whole lot of plot to the film; it’s sustained more by tone and atmosphere, and it’s partially as compelling as it is due to how Hung shoots the film. But his stylistic choice makes sense: the film is about loss, isolation and muted passions. Set in 1950’s and 60’s Vietnam, the film is really two very different stories, a family drama and a love affair, connected by protagonist Mui, who becomes a servant in a fractured household at the age of ten. The first story dominates the narrative: Mui is not only a servant, and an observer of some tragic and overwhelming drama, but she’s a reminder of the family’s own loss of their daughter. She’s the age that their daughter would have been if she were still alive. This is one of many voids that need filling: the grandmother’s husband has long been dead (and she has an unrequited suitor who she refuses to let into her life), the eldest son is hardly ever around, and the father’s crippling gambling habits make him a flighty presence at best. The film flashes ahead ten years later: the family is still broken, perhaps irreparably, but they’re managing. Mui is hired by a bachelor, a friend of her former employer's eldest son, who’s nearly engaged to a woman, but he appears disinterested and disconnected. The second story turns Mui from an observer and to an agent of her own destiny. She and her employer slowly fall for one another. But this isn’t sordid; it’s flush with real emotion, and it’s the culmination of a lifetime of standing idly by watching the world crush spirits and dreams. 

Grade: B+

"Scandal vs. House of Cards"

Frustrated by consistently hearing people around me talk up House of Cards when it is a glossy but deeply hollow show, and equally frustrated that Scandal has not gotten enough of its fair due as one of the best television series currently airing, I wrote an article for my college's newspaper comparing the two shows. Hopefully I can convince you why one show is much better at telling its story, which are essentially the same story of a broken American political system.