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There’s a lot to be said about Looper, but perhaps the most important thing speaks less to the successes of the film than to the dreary state of the pseudo-genre “time travel” movie and the larger science fiction genre as a whole. Simply put, time travel in film is usually a gimmick, an attempt to superficially make movies with otherwise little box office potential seem more falsely intellectual to audiences. Most science fiction movies that rely on the trope, along with a bevy of other themes such as cloning and space travel, are not interested in exploring the intellectual, emotional, or ethical quandaries presented by these subjects, but instead pay lip service to complicated themes so that they can move on to blowing up stuff and hoping the 30 year old white male budding action hero lead actor will land a role as the lead in a superhero movie next and boost DVD sales of the film. Thus is life. Continue reading
It’s a funny thing that three years ago everyone thought the new Planet of the Apes movie, released at the tail end of summer as if to indicate the producers’ lack of assurance about its prospects, was going to suck. The original series, excepting perhaps the original feature, was never very good and is best left to the dustbins of history. Flash-forward to 2014 and it’s now fairly set as a new tent-pole franchise worthy of not only populist blockbuster status but the time and money of discerning film-goers looking for craft and character to go with their explosions. Rise turned out to be better than good and an unexpected year surprise, a rare thing in big budget filmmaking these days. Dawn faces bigger expectations coming into its release, the kind which could sink a would-be summer blockbuster. Thankfully, the film is too confident to fail, boasting a simple, elegant, if familiar, story that’s done up well with pure filmmaking prowess and solid, dependable characters. It’s hard to say which of the two films is superior, but then again we don’t need to. Both are sufficiently different (they really went out on a limb setting this film ten years later than the first and with not one returning human character) and they each work in their own way. This isn’t a game-changing film, but it’s very strong and a surprisingly sturdy second entry to a franchise everyone was surprised to realize they’d missed. 
Inception, as of 2014 still one of the most advertised and anticipated before release movies of the 2010s thus far, wants to be a lot of things: a dramatic thriller, a cautionary tale, something that pokes and prods around without knowing what it’s looking for, an action movie, a head-trip, and, of course, a dark science fiction film. If that all seems like more of a daring work of danger than the film actually is, you’re excused. Inception is somewhat self-consciously confusing, but more to the point, it’s actually not nearly as complicated as it wants to be. Maybe that’s for the best. What we’re left with is a relatively straightforward (good)action movie with science fiction trappings that mostly uses its hook as a way to mess around with the audience and to convey that puzzle-box intellect-before-emotion mood today’s audiences lap up, especially when the box comes with a little warranty sticker on the back that tells you to ship it back to Christopher Nolan Inc. if you think it’s broken.
Midnight in Paris feels like it was released forty years ago, when Woody Allen was still finding his way and knew what themes he wanted to address in his films, but hadn’t found a compelling way to address them. Released in 2011, it’s unfortunately more of a reminder that Allen has lost his touch for humanism. This is a guy, for all his nervousness and cynicism, who has made several of the most endearing, empowering humanist visions of the cinema, someone who seems to put on the airs of mockery to satirize a world he’s truly in love with. Or maybe, it’s the other way around. Maybe he is truly cynical and hopeless but remains in love with the idea of humanity and romanticism, feeling the need to put them in all his films even when he finds them dishonest. After all, many of his films are subtle fantasies about love and longing that match bitter, insightful truth with genuine pathos and effervescence pointed strictly at the human race. This is a man who understands the joys and sorrows of life and society, and puts them at work in his films like they are his playthings, all the while feigning a cute passivity and weakness, like he’s both confused and amused at the world and doesn’t want to get away. Perhaps in his old age he’s just given up on society and enjoys the act of getting together with actors in a nice vacation-land for a few months and ordering fine food and wine with a film, his in the making, on the side. 
Was there ever a better cinematic pairing than Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog? Well, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, but here I sense a second coming. The H-man was always obsessed with something, anything, even obsession, and Cage also plays his roles with an unhinged, wild-man version of obsession, even if recently it’s been obsession for paychecks so he can go trampoline in a castle somewhere. And here they’ve produced the kind of film that wouldn’t be more appropriate anywhere than on a screen in front of said trampoline, ready to give you a splitting headache or cast you into the stratosphere. I’m not sure which.
Note: This is an essay I submitted for a class entitled “Conceptualizing White Identity in the United States” in the fall of 2011. It is somewhat altered and extended but still mostly a product of three years ago. Because it was written for a sociology, and not a film, course, it primarily focuses on broader racial themes rather than explicit filmic analysis of the film’s storytelling methods and visual composition. Put another way, the film’s story lacks nuance, mostly boiling down to it’s attempt to be cringe-inducingly cutesy and fuzzy, and it is told un-originally and with little film-making investment or passion to boot, and it is thus a badly made film. But this essay is less interested in exploring the “how” of the way the film tells it story, the staple of most film reviews, than in the literal morality of the “what” of the story it is telling. Thus, this is less a film review than a piece on the implications of the film. And it is less interested in exploring how this is a bad film, which it is, than in how it is also a vile and contemptible one. 
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The Long Take 