"X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014)

X-Men: Days of Future Past takes a chapter right out of the Marvel Studio book by re-writing the narrative of all the X-Men films to date so that they all fits neatly into one coherent box. Days of Future Past is littered with callbacks that stretch back to the first of the X-Men films, now over a decade old. Not all of this works and in a few too many instances the web of byzantine mythology is likely hard to parse out or remember for even the most devout comic fans. But it also plays to what gave X-Men: First Class, in part, its strength. By leaning on our memory of and affection for the old trilogy (perhaps minus Last Stand), the film can use that foreknowledge to more greatly create a potential impact. 

Days of Future Past starts in the distant future where a government scientific program gone awry has led to the destruction of not just most mutants but humanity more generally. The ragtag survivors come up with a plan to send Wolverine’s (Hugh Jackman) consciousness back into his body in 1973 prior to the events that caused this apocalyptic nightmare. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart in the future and James McAvvoy in the past) pinpoints the moment things went wrong to the time where his estranged adoptive sister Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) assassinated the creator (Peter Dinklage) of the Sentinels, giant robots that hunt down mutants. Before Wolverine can prevent this event, though, he has to save Professor X and Magneto (Ian McKellen in the future and Michael Fassbender in the past) from a metaphorical and literal prison, respectively, and get them to overcome significant differences and views on the future for their kind. 

It’s every bit as unwieldy as it sounds and the film is far less deft than its predecessor at keeping up with blockbuster demands while telling an increasingly (and unnecessarily) complicated story. Days of Future Past also gets far less opportunities to rely on soaking up the charm of being a breezy period piece, partly because 1973 was a far more troubled time than First Class’s 1962 and partly because there’s too many flaming hoops of plot contortions to leap through. The film finds its greatest strength when it relies on interesting, sharp character dynamics and a deep bench of talented performers who help manage to ground it all. But it still too often feels like Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn's script has bitten off more than it can chew. 

Having Wolverine as the character sent back makes a fair amount of sense; considering the amount of films he’s starred in, the character has essentially become the very embodiment of the franchise. Jackman’s presence, like Stewart and McKellen’s, brings weight in places that might not necessarily have enough pathos or the intended, overreaching, gravitas. Much of this should have come a few years earlier when the older films were still fresh in the public’s mind; the remove only serves to harm the film and the meanings it hopes to create. 

Still, much like First Class, Days of Future Past has a lot of solid popcorn entertainment, and its story, based on one of the most famous story arcs in the history of the comic book series, is a nifty bit of sci-fi playfulness. 

Grade: B-

"A Field in England" (2013)

The field appears to stretch on forever, like a cartoon background endlessly on loop. It seems to have no beginning and no end; it feels more like a metaphor than a location the characters of A Field in England pass through. It could be any field and yet it is also an ideal. A place between what has come before us and what lies ahead. 

The film is set during the English Civil War. The characters dress in ragged, dirty period-appropriate 17^th century garb and their hair is loose and in need of washing. Their appearances make them feel like they’ve been situated outside of time itself when they wander through the field. We never see the five main characters interact with anyone else; it’s like they’re part of a droll, avant-garde short play. 

Most of them have deserted the army after a nasty skirmish. One claims there’s a nearby alehouse, though it never appears; it’s a mirage or a desperate hope for relief that will never come. Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) is an apprentice of an alchemist. He seeks out O’Neill (Michael Smiley), a man who has robbed his master; this task has been made difficult by the death of Trower (Julian Barratt), a mercenary hired to help take in O’Neill. 

Whitehead keeps pontificating in florid language about God and faith, and his digressions suggest that the situation the men find themselves in is one foisted upon them by God. Much of the situation feels like an existential nightmare made real. Director Ben Wheatley and director of photography Laurie Rose shoot the film in lush black and white that serve to accentuate the dry, philosophical quality of the film (hints of Jim Jarmusch).  

This contemplative side is not A Field in England’s only mode though. Amy Jump’s pithy script is filled with hilarious, witty lines as it observes characters from a distance, pointing to their obliviously overlooked flaws and shortcomings. Whitehead wants to see himself as better than his lowly, uneducated traveling companions, but he proves himself just as incompetent and uncertain. 

The film is also often just interested in experience. The journey itself is about inevitability and watching to see the details of human shortsightedness unfold. But Wheatley also takes time out for bizarre, overwhelming experimental sequences, notably a late film sequence where hallucinogenic drugs are consumed. 

That final sequence suggests that there’s a stoner-based cult audience just waiting to embrace A Field in England, much like, say, El Topo. The point of watching it isn’t necessarily to understand what it all means but rather to tune in, drop out, and embrace the strange, fascinating ride. 

Grade: B-

"Blue Ruin" (2014)

Movies that deal with vengeance have a complicated relationship with their audience. Most try incredibly hard to justify the destructive retribution by crafting moral high grounds for protagonists to mete justice down from. The scripts, and when lucky the direction as well, are self-conscious of the fact that really none of the call-and-response violence is truly warranted except in so far as it satiates our desires in thrilling fashion. 

Blue Ruin has no interest in creating the typical first part of the vengeance equation. The terrible things that drive Dwight (Macon Blair) to kill the Cleland family are mentioned but we never get to see them. The film is thus all rotten tension and violence with almost no release. While director Jeremy Saulnier shoots the action sequences so they ache with an unrelenting intensity, the film is less of a thriller than a morality play. Saulnier (who also wrote the script) is more interested in the nature of vengeance, what drives people towards it and how the obsession with it ultimately eats away at them. 

There is a restraint to much of what Saulnier does here. Large stretches of the film are devoid of dialogue and Saulnier conveys a tremendous amount through small visual tells. 

We first see Dwight living out of a broken down blue Chevy, a beat-up hunk of metal in as equally bad shape as Dwight. He’s grown ragged, unkempt; he sports a massive tangle of a beard and he sneaks to a nearby boardwalk to steal small bits of food and cash. The car is a symbol (admittedly not a very subtle one) for Dwight, an outward manifestation of his eroded inner self. One of the most telling signs of his unstable inner life involves Dwight’s speech patterns. He talks in clipped statements because he has rarely spoken to anyone in the intervening years of his hermitage. 

The film’s action picks up when Dwight learns that Wade Cleland, Jr., the man sent away for murdering his parents, is about the be released from prison. Dwight makes it his mission to end Wade’s life. Then the equally bloody fallout arrives. Wade’s family pursues Dwight, putting his estranged sister and her children at risk. 

Saulnier’s script is filled with little bits of cosmic, black irony. For instance, Dwight forgets his car keys at the scene of the crime and has to drive off in a limo that he moments earlier stabbed out. 

This violence and masculine rage are treated so that they are as ugly and hard to bear as possible. Dwight could be an anti-hero in the vein of Walter White; he’s doughy and a little pathetic and his quest never feels like it’s as fully earned in practice as in theory. The blood keeps staining, literally and figuratively, the supposed nobility of the acts at hand. 

Saulnier sets the majority of the story in the most insular parts of Virginia. Like the rural community of Winter’s Bone or Justified, it’s a place where family and bloodlines define everything. When Dwight has lunch with his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) to tell her about his actions, she doesn’t get sickened or upset. Rather, she’s a little pleased. The Clelands are a backwoods family that has gained power through localized criminal activity far removed from the eyes of government or law.

Saulnier also acted as his own cinematographer. He forms some wonderful compositions. Much of the film is set in and around untamed wilderness and Saulnier shoots it to maximize its beauty; this seems to be all too lovely to be despoiled. Saulnier switches between moments of stark darkness and serene contemplation. It often feels as though these characters have fall into a world without humans, beyond civilization; Dwight moves closer and closer to his primordial id against a backdrop of untamed wilderness, a frequent signifier of man’s inner, savage self. 

Blue Ruin asks: is it worth ruining others who've wronged you if it will ultimately ruin yourself?

Grade: B+

"Shampoo" (1975)

Something rarely commented upon is how old movies act as cultural artifacts of the time they were made in. But seldom are films actually intended as cultural artifacts as Shampoo is. The film is a cultural artifact about another cultural artifact. Made in 1975 but set in 1968 in the days leading up to and after Richard Nixon’s election, the film is attuned to the jaded, frustrated American zeitgeist of the post-Watergate years, where everyone was deeply disillusioned by their government. 

The film tries to use that foreknowledge of what was to come against its characters, who are blithely oblivious to the devil hiding in plain sight. It is a nice little conceit that Shampoo doesn’t really take full advantage of. The election is background noise for the exceedingly self-involved drama of the characters. But the film’s real flaw is that the deep, dark strand of bitterness doesn’t read as fully as it ought; Shampoo is a silly, loose, farcical comedy, and the darkness just doesn't bleed through that warm, swinging appearances like it ought to. It's all so very miscalculated.

Warren Beatty plays male hair dresser George Roundy, who has chosen his profession to pick up chicks. He is currently in the middle of a byzantine web of affairs, and he is leading on all of them. The naïve, doe-eyed Jill (Goldie Hawn) is his live-in partner but George is disconnected and distant from her. Then there’s Jackie Shawn (Julie Christie) Jill’s close friend who is possibly the person George should be with but he can’t bother to commit. Finally, there is Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant), a wealthy socialite. She convinces her husband Lester (Jack Warden) to pay for George’s new salon business. And as if that weren’t enough wrinkles in the story, Lester is having an affair with Jackie. 

If that feels unnecessarily complicated, well, that’s because it is. Most of this intricate plot is almost an afterthought. Besides George, Jackie is the only character given enough screen-time to feel meaningfully developed. This is a film where (the guise of) sex positivism is filtered through a male point of view and it feels clumsy at times. All of the characters matter only in so far as they relate to George and his growing deceit catching up to him. George, in some ways, stands in for the American government and Nixon’s infidelities. But the pathos of George’s existential, Don Draper-like burden over the hole he is filling never completely registers. The script, written by Beatty and Robert Towne, doesn’t earn the moment and it isn’t tight or savvy enough to take advantage of the underlying cultural and political meanings at work. Shampoo may have been timely in its own time but that has prevented it from being timeless.

Grade: C

Mad Men: "The Strategy"

Spoilers Follow:

Mad Men is the kind of show you contemplate deeply over a glass of scotch and a tome of Nietzsche. It’s chilly and detached and asks you to consider and analyze it seriously and critically.

And yet, it is also a series that is better than just about any other series at creating images and moments that are striking and remarkable and seem to speak for themselves. “The Strategy” features these moments in spades. Don and Peggy dancing. Pete sticking his beer in Trudy’s cake. Don, Peggy and Pete creating an ad-hoc family at Burger Chef. 

These are images that sneak up on you and get stuck in your craw. They cut through the existential chill and burst with intensity of feeling and emotion. 

A lot of this season has felt like it was building to the moment where Don and Peggy reconcile, and it just makes you have all the feels. These are two very fucked up, self-loathing people who forged new identities, and they only find an ease to living life when connecting one-on-one. They find satisfaction in their work and knowing that the other sees them for who they are and still loves and respects them.  And yet they find contentment in almost nothing else and that ruins them time and again; they love the work and they understand one another’s love for the job and their reasons for it. But it somehow is never enough. 

This final season has been plot-heavy, or as plot heavy as such a restrained show as Mad Men can be. Sally discovered Don’s job status in the second episode, Don returned to the agency in the third episode, and now by the sixth, and second-to-last for this first batch of episodes, Don and Peggy seem to have patched things up. 

These were all things that could have played out endlessly on loop but they’ve led to some of Mad Men’s best episodes this season and in some instances the whole run of the series (as I would contend with the excellent “A Day’s Work”). 

Mad Men more than just about any other show has characters who feel all too much like real human beings. Its pace, its tone, how it’s shot, and the way it’s written suggest a verisimilitude or realism. As Matt Zoller Seitz described it: “psychologically well-rounded characters moving through life”. The moments where the show and its characters open up feel so tremendous and potent because they have that quality of those rare instances of connection one experiences in life. 

Back in season two’s “For Those Who Think Young”, Don offered his aspiring protégée Peggy a piece of advice: “You are the product. You feeling something. That's what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can't do what we do and they hate us for it.” Don was referring to the way that the best ads and ad campaigns work, by playing off core, fundamental emotions; the best way to sell this is by having the copy writer place a piece of themselves into the ads. It’s this reason Don’s carousel speech back in “The Wheel” remains so very potent, and why Peggy’s pitch for Burger Chef here is solid but also feels like it’s missing something. The ad becomes superior when Peggy shifts it so it relates to her current experience as a now thirty year old working women who abandoned the potential life of a housewife. 

Back in season four's “The Summer Man” Don wrote into a journal: “We're flawed, because we want so much more. We're ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had.” Peggy is regretting the path she has gone down, or as Frank Sinatra croons the “way” she took. Don similarly regrets his actions and here sets right the ship by starting to fix the one relationship, outside of Sally, that truly matters. Don is staring back on the many lives he has lived, literally with his tendency to swap identities. Don states his bone-deep unhappiness to Peggy, “That I never did anything, and that I don't have anyone.”

At its core, Mad Men is a show about connection. Moreover, it’s about how people desperately desire to make connections with others but either often look for it in the wrong places or find themselves unhappy when they get those connections (It's in this way that I personally find that previous Don quote is literal: we the audience are the product and the show represents these very fundamental and hard to accept "truths" of human nature). Another Summer Man journal gem: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it - because we want them to be who we want them to be.” The sad thing about that series of journal entries back in season four was that it was one of the last instances where Don attempted to be honest with himself and those around him, up until, of course, now. Don would quickly play hobo and marry Megan. That marriage has since crumbled into all but dust. (Another striking image: Megan and Pete’s former beau Bonnie in a plane about to take off towards California and away from shambling relationships). 

Consider how Bob miscalculates what he and Joan both want. Bob is a closeted gay hoping to form an arrangement that will help cover up things for him. With Chevy ditching SC&P, he’s now receiving a job with Buick, but to be a company man will necessarily be helped along with the American ideal of a family; Joan in the process would get a father for her son. Joan denies the offer because she'd rather be unmoored than settle for less than what makes her happy (a very Mad Men thing to yearn for).

Bob’s desire to forge a family, a fake one albeit, ties in with the Burger Chef campaign. The initial ad looked to sell people on a very outdated model of what it meant to have a family, the old, Eisenhower nuclear family. But the sixties have increasingly broken down that ideal standing in as what it means to have a family; the sexual revolution is in swing, the Summer of Love has occurred, divorce rates are on the rise, and feminism has helped break down the way men and women relate. Despite how this family ideal is a lie, (and remember that Don realizing it was a lie back in season four wrecked him, only for him to try and fail to recreate that ideal with Megan), Pete can’t accept Trudy dating other people and wanting to have nothing to do with him, nor his daughter for that matter; that family he once strove for is dead. So is the one Peggy could have had if she kept her child she had with Pete. But she chose a different family.

Now a family can be whoever sits with you at a burger joint. It may be, as Pete notes, more nebulous, but it feels right, and few shows can create moments that feel oh-so-right, so perfect and hauntingly beautiful in their design, like Mad Men; “The Strategy” has countless. 

Game of Thrones: "Mockingbird"

 Spoilers Follow:

I don’t have time to do a full review tonight, but I wanted to put out some preliminary thoughts on the episode “Mockingbird”.

While not nearly as satisfying or fully realized as “First of His Name” or “The Laws of God and Men”, “Mockingbird” moved forward a number of storylines in necessary and meaningful ways. 

The main point of interest involved Tyrion trying to find someone to champion him, and failing to get the two people who still hold any interest in him, Bronn and Jaimie. Eventually Oberyn responds in hopes of killing the Mountain, who he holds partly responsible for the death of his sister and her sons. 

Tyrion is contending, like many people in this episode, with being part of a family that’s more than a little screwed up. Game of Thrones can be multiple things in any given week, a chamber drama, a comedy of manners, an action epic, and this week fell back on that fundamental center of family drama. 

Tyrion has been left out in the cold by his family, seemingly in the twisted name of his family. Tywin has crafted a situation that will supposedly better the Lannister name by placing Jaimie as heir to Tywin. 

Oberyn is obsessed with avenging his family, much like Arya is fixated on vengeance for hers (And it's both frightening and heartwarming to see the Hound and Arya bond over adding and then immediately crossing off a name on her death list). Brienne’s storyline tied in nicely here as she is also seeking justice for the Stark family (And we get a very warm, entertaining return of Hot Pie providing information on Arya’s whereabouts). 

In another branch of the Stark family, the Arryns, up in the Eyrie, Sansa is dealing with her crazed aunt and nephew, as well as the advances of Littlefinger, who has never gotten over his love for Catelynn. In the episode’s shocking conclusion Littlefinger uses Chekhov’s moon door and sends Lyssa plummeting below. 

Even poor Sandor Clegane, aka the Hound, opens up to Arya, in a great monologue for Rory McCann, about old wounds (some quite literal). The Hound has some of his own family baggage (which is a polite way of describing your sibling burning half your face off), which ties into the connection of Cersei using the Hound’s brother Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane as the champion against Tyrion in trial by combat. 

And what is Selyse Baratheon accepting Melisandre as her husband’s mistress amount to? A very misguided, deluded hope for the betterment of her family and family name’s future.  

To paraphrase Jaimie: the things we do for family.

Grade: B+

"Band of Outsiders" (1964)

There is an interesting tension in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Godard intends it to be both hyper-real, true to life, and self-consciously unreal, self-aware it’s a film. At times these two intents overlap nicely; the film’s brilliant central conceit: what if one of those gangster heists films took place in real life with everything drolly ripped from everyday occurrence and concerned with all the mundane details. The gangster cool is stripped back, and what we get are two bumbling best friends who have seen more crimes committed in the movies than they have actually committed themselves. In its own way that ends up becoming its own sort of cool.

The would-be gangsters Franz (Sami Frey)and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) fall for the same girl Odile (Anna Karina, Godard's then-wife, who his obsessively frames and shoots) at an English class taught to French-speaking individuals. Both are also looking to make a big score and assume it will be as easy as in the movies. In an attempt to impress the older men doting on her, Odile offers up her home, stocked with a safe full of her father’s illegally earned cash. 

If the film has a problem, it isn't its commitment to the mundane; indeed, that's often charming. What is the film’s problem, rather, is due to Godard’s predilections: it is a film that, on some level, knows it’s a film, and its characters sort of know they’re fictional characters. Sometimes it feels like Godard has his head up his ass and is circling the rabbit-hole of his obsessions. Godard hadn’t quite hit critical capacity (in a few years’ time he would get firebrand political with his films and they’re often hard to watch). The "film as film" is intellectualized and politicized here, but Godard still lets it go down easy with a tonic of silly coquetry. There’s a deftly whimsical, low-key, screwy infectiousness to the film.

Band of Outsiders plays out in vignettes, and Godard takes time out to riff on expectations and to go on little digressions of fun non-sequiturs. There’s a robbery and a love triangle, but they’re just catalysts for improvisatory flights of fancy. Indeed, when nothing appears to be happening (even literally nothing during a humorous, literally silent minute of film where the characters test their willpower to not speak) that’s when the film is at its most delightful. 

Some of this hasn’t especially aged well. The films Outsiders is in conversation with are referenced with an unapologetic specificity, and the film is so very much of its own time, enamored with how clever it is being by breaking all the rules and getting away with it.

Yet the film’s central charm comes from having characters who wish their lives were more grandiose and epic, and a little less mundane. To say they know they’re film characters is imprecise; rather, they wish they were film characters. They play their part as if being swept along by the plot-that-be, because they imagine that’s they’re role. When things go wrong, it’s ironic, yes, but also tragic and a little pathetic. And yet it remains exceptionally funny because they’re in over their heads and refuse to admit it.

Grade: B+