Tag Archives: All Is Lost

PK’s 2013 top 10. And bottom 10

[An earlier version appeared on Artsfuse.org]

Ten Best

1.Her – Any film that includes the disembodied mind of Alan Watts deserves top billing. Spike Jonze engages in a visually stunning, superbly acted, disturbing and profound exploration of the frightening future of love and identity in a digital universe.

2. Inside Llewyn Davis – A naysayer asked me why I liked this film so much and, at a loss, I blurted out, “I am Llewyn Davis.” A long, embarrassing silence followed and I added, “And I liked the cat.”

3. Wadjda – Not only is this the first film made by a woman in Saudi Arabia (or by anyone in that country apparently), but it also rivals the early masterpieces of Abbas Kiarostami in its charming, tragic, achingly authentic depiction of what it means to be a smart kid growing up among dumb adults. Subtly, beautifully shot, with a terrific performance by Waad Mohammed in the title role.

4. Upstream Color – Still have no idea what Shane Carruth’s ecstatic narrative and visual assault means. Still am staying up nights trying to figure it out. Puts the trance back in transcendental.

5. Fill the Void – First-time director Rama Burshtein’s radiant recreation of a subculture – the orthodox Haredi Jewish community of Tel Aviv – and the exquisite performances elevate this tale of loss, loyalty, and independence into a universal tragedy.

6. In the House – I like self-reflexive movies that are about movies, and about narrative in general. And I like puzzles and clever dialogue delivered with sparkling grace by attractive actors. François Ozon accomplishes all this and more with wicked wit and panache.

7. Caesar Must Die – A deceptively simple and deeply moving recreation of a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar put on by inmates of a maximum security prison in Rome. The Taviani Brothers interweave the drama of the production, the interactions of the performers with their troubled histories, and the play itself into a deeply moving, illuminating fugue.

8. Our Children – Ignored by everyone, Émilie Dequenne put in one of the best performances of the year as a mother pressured slowly, insidiously, and inexorably into a shocking act of rebellion.

9. Computer Chess – Along with Her and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (which didn’t make the cut), Andrew Bujalski’s sui generis absurdist comedy presents the humble origins of our current digital gotterdammerung. It also stars my choice for the year’s Best Supporting Actor, my former Boston Phoenix colleague and friend, Gerald Peary.

10. All Is Lost – Just got to love a film where the sole line of dialogue is “fuck!” An allegory about individual and environmental decline that is as upbeat as the title suggests. I’m still scratching my head wondering why no one is noticing that this is Robert Redford’s best performance ever.

Whoops, inexplicably overlooked: Leviathan, The Act of Killing, Berberian Sound Studio. And others that will undoubtedly occur to me long after this year is gone and forgotten.

Ten worst.
There were far, far worse movies released this year – Grown Ups 2, A Madea Christmas, etc. But I’m thinking of movies that had pretensions of artistry, or a potential for greatness, or phony films that have inexplicably been revered by just about everybody but me. What’s wrong with me? Help me.

So with all due respect:

1. 12 Years a Slave
2. Blue is the Warmest Color
3. The Great Beauty
4. Before Midnight
5. Frances Ha
6. The Conjuring
7. The Butler
8. Short Term
And, what the heck, they were so bad they deserve to make the list:
9. A Madea Christmas
10. Grown Ups 2

Children’s crusades

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After grown-ups have proven inadequate in dealing with the life-or-death crises of the day in films such as “Gravity,” “All Is Lost,” and “Captain Phillips,” perhaps it’s time that a child came to show the way. Not that the children in recent films such as “Ender’s Game,” “City of Bones,” and most recently, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” (opened November 22) – have had much choice in the matter. Instead, hapless adults have shoved their children into the lurch when all else fails. They commit them to messianic quests and suicide missions in order to end an evil reign and save the world.
It’s not a new story. Kids have been called in to bail out adults before, not only in films but in books, many of which that have been made into movies. Dickens could claim a whole shelf of such adaptations if there were any more video stores with shelves to put them on. Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, and numerous fairy tales, going back at least to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But in those stories the child hero has only his or her own fate at stake, or that of a loved one or two, or at times, such as with Theseus, a thriving city-state. These days, though, the survival of whole human race, more or less, rests on some poor kid’s shoulders.
Blame, in part, the YA fantasy book industry, and its seemingly inexhaustible goldmine of franchises pushing that theme, with more than a dozen such YA adaptations planned for production by the studios in the coming months and years.
Though hugely popular now, stories about child heroes are not a new phenomenon. C.S. Lewis and his seven volume “Chronicles of Narnia” (published between 1949-1954) might have been the first to come up with the notion of having adolescents or children engaged in apocalyptic battles with superhuman adversaries in quasi-messianic allegories. His sometimes heavy-handed Christian subtext might have had something to do with the books’ late appearance on the screen and their comparatively poor showing at the box office. Though the Narnia series started out strong with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2005), both critically and financially, it met with diminishing returns with “Prince Caspian” (2008) and “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” (2010) and it doesn’t look like we’ll be hearing much more from bossy Christ stand-in, Aslan the Lion, any time soon.
Another prototype of this formula from around the same time, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”

published in 1954, adapted into a stark, critically well received film in 1963 by Peter Brook, posited a far less magical scenario than the Lewis books, unless you’re talking about the kind of brute magical thinking explored in James Fraser’s “The Golden Bough.” But both books – one Christian, the other existential, if not nihilistic, one drawing on the desolation of WWII, the other on Cold War angst – don’t have much faith in the adults who are supposedly in control of a chaotic world.
Speaking of the Cold War, I have yet to recover from the terror I experience as a ten-year-old watching “Invaders from Mars” (1953) on the old TV horror movie show “Fantasmic Features.” To this day I have nightmares about drills slowly boring through my skull to insert a crystalline device into my brain.

Needless to say, it has made visits to the dentist problematic.
Like many sci-fi films of that era, the film begins with the landing of alien space craft, which descends into the backyard of 12-year-old David, and burrows into a sandpit.

Who has not felt dread about the sinister sandpit in their backyard?David tells his father, a rocket scientist of some sort, who checks it out, and returns not quite the same affable ’50s dad he was before.

What follows is kind of the kiddie precursor to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956). Deftly shooting from the point of view of view of the young protagonist, the film evokes the trauma experienced by all kids when they realize that their parents, and perhaps all grown-ups, are actually zombies whose bodies have been taken over by malevolent extraterrestrial entities. With none of the adults to be trusted, it looks like David might have to deal with the problem on his own.

I had strong flashbacks to this movie when watching Gavin Hood’s adaptation of James Olson Card’s 1985 (based on a 1977 short story) YA sci-fi novel, “Enders Game.”

The drilled-in-the- base-of-the-skull implant from “Mars” has returned in this film, with a twist (literal and painful, as it turns out). Young Ender, a prime candidate at age 13 to lead an armada of starships against an alien menace, has a similar device inserted into his brain. In this case, though, it’s not a probe designed to control adult humans, but one installed by adults into young folks like Ender to monitor their every experience. This is a superego with a vengeance.
But though the grown-ups are omniscient, they are far from omnipotent. In fact, they’re desperate. The alien hordes have already invaded twice before and each time the planet has come close to annihilation. Determined not to face this prospect again, Earth’s leaders, a consortium of those tyrannies that seem to be the unavoidable destiny of human society, hope to end the threat once and for all with a devastating pre-emptive attack on the enemy’s home planet. Since for some reason only kids have the conceptual skills or hand-to-eye coordination (associated these days with veteran videogame aficionados; Card, his grotesque opinions about gay rights notwithstanding, was prescient about a lot of things)

to handle such a complex mission in the infinity of outer space. Mentored by wily Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), Ender alternates between neediness and resentment when it comes to the adults who have commandeered him. He is especially hostile when his training requires him to draw on his lethal skills to dispatch rival child-warriors during his Spartan-like training period. At one point he confronts Graff with the question – are the aliens the enemy, or you?
That same question arises in “Catching Fire,” the adaptation of the second book in Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” trilogy, and the first directed by Francis Lawrence, who previously put out a surprisingly effective rendition of Richard Matheson’s zombie apocalypse classic “I Am Legend” (2007) . “When you’re in the arena,” says Graff-like mentor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) to “tribute” Katniss Eberdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), “don’t forget who the enemy is.”
At first glance, the enemy’s identity seems obvious. True, Katniss must battle a bunch of other tributes, a repeat of her ordeal in the first movie. But these fellow pawns aren’t the real foe – Haymitch is referring to the whole oppressive system of the dystopic future society of Panem. Here “The Capitol,” an effete, tyrannical aristocracy inhabiting a latter-day Roman Elysium of excess and cruelty, dominates and exploits the 12 districts of the futuristic state of Panem. A revolution against the Capitol 75 years earlier failed, so as punishment each starving district must supply two youthful tributes, aged 12 to 18, to fight to the death in the annual “Hunger Games.” A high-tech kind of “circenses,” as it were, but for the impoverished multitudes, not much in the way of panem.
But, as is the case in “Ender’s Game,” the enemy remains ambiguous, and, by the end, it is unclear who is manipulating whom, especially with Philip Seymour Hoffman in full reptilian mode as the master of the games, Plutarch Heavensbee.
Katniss, however, just wants to be left alone. She thinks about fleeing with her childhood friend Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) to the primal, paradisal outback beyond the electric fences, living off the land, kind of like the two kids in “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012). But she’s compelled by two opposed forces to play the game. First, the diabolical autocrat of the Capitol, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who wants to manipulate her celebrity and that of her co-victor partner Peetah Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) into a gaudy romantic fantasy of true love and self-sacrifice to serve as “a distraction so people forget what their real problems are,” as Haymitch explains to her.

But maybe the most compelling obstacle to her escaping her destiny are the oppressed people of Panem themselves, who see her as a symbol of revolution.
Either way, it doesn’t allow Katniss much of a private life. Kind of like Jennifer Lawrence herself, who has established herself as a bigger celebrity in our world of pop culture than her character http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/21/jennifer-lawrence-meltdown-new-york-premiere_n_4315999.html?ir=New+York has in the world of Panem. Watching her appearances on talk shows that are at least as frivolous as her interviews in the film with hyperactive host Caesar Flickman (Stanley Tucci), it seems clear that she’s conscious of the irony of her position.

Like the film, she poses a curious paradox. Though the subtext of “Catching Fire” subverts the Hollywood fantasies and celebrity culture that distract young people from what is really going, at the same time it also profits from it.

Matters of Gravity

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[BEWARE OF SPOILERS]

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but three movies released in the past couple of weeks – all high-profile studio films and so far box office winners and definite Oscar nominees – all seem to be about the same thing. In Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips, J.C. Chandon’s All Is Lost, and Alfonzo Cuarón’s Gravity, someone is cut off from the rest of the world, and takes shelter in a womb-like refuge from hostile elements that strip away all their connections to the outside world. The ordeal forces these characters to draw on their inner strength and rediscover their essence, and in doing so, they are reborn.

Are these films tapping into some current kink in the collective unconscious? Or are they just cashing in on the universal appeal of claustrophobia and motion sickness?

Motion sickness doesn’t figure much in Captain Phillips, a recreation of the real-life 2009 hijacking of a US cargo ship by Somali pirates, though a lot of time is spent bobbing about in high seas. Instead, it exploits our fear of starving, khat-addicted, zombie-like third-worlders with AK-47’s coming to kidnap us and grab their share of the bounty of the West. That’s the situation the captain of the title, a Yankee from Vermont played by Tom Hanks with an erratic accent reminiscent of the Pepperidge Farm man in the TV commercials, will find himself in. He already has a premonition that something bad is going to happen as he drives to the airport to take the flight to Dakar where he’ll assume command of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama.

Meanwhile, an ocean and a continent away in a fishing village in Somalia, a similar situation unfolds. Minions of a local warlord show up and order Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi, who is terrific; Best Supporting Actor nominee maybe?), a scrawny fisherman turned pirate, to get off his ass and snatch another big ship so they can demand millions in ransom. Begrudgingly (Muse probably has a bad feeling about things, too), he enlists a ragtag crew of desperately poor men (watch out for the big mean guy with the scar!) and sets out in a frail skiff to track down and land a 500 foot behemoth and its 3,000 tons of cargo, kind of like an African Ahab after a mechanized Great White Whale.

We all know how this ends, but maybe not what it means – at least according to Greengrass, whose previous films about geopolitical inequity and conflict range from Bloody Sunday (2002) to United 93 (2006),to The Bourne Identity 2004). As might be expected, his new film dutifully critiques the disparity between rich and poor that leads to such tragic confrontations. These pirates may scare the hell out of us, but aren’t they just victims themselves, the road kill of globalism whose only way of living the dream is at the expense of nice guys like Phillips? And Phillips, after all, is not all that different from them, just another working stiff who has to answer to a boss.

So we feel bad for the pirates. Nonetheless, everyone rejoices when Navy Seals show up and blow their brains out. And so I would say that as a political parable, Captain Phillips is kind of ambivalent, with two ideological impulses cancelling each other out.

Instead of being political, then, Captain Phillips, like All Is Lost and Gravity, is existential. All three films tap into the state of mind of felt by people faced with the prospect of catastrophic loss brought about by causes beyond their control. Confronted by this fear, they recover their true selves. But this occurs only after an ordeal that has stripped them of everything that has defined their lives, uncovering the indomitable spirit beneath.

For Captain Phillips, that means he first loses his authority, as Muse climbs on board with his three followers and declares, “I am the Captain.” No longer in command (and it is clear from their interactions before the hijacking that Phillips wasn’t exactly a crew favorite) the deposed Captain must draw on those basic, traditionally masculine virtues of rationality, sang-froid, and self-sacrifice. In short, he becomes the Tom Hanks we all know and love from such roles as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Vulnerable, decent, level-headed, and when it matters most, utterly courageous.

But is it enough? After he loses his ship, he then loses his freedom, and may well lose his life. The pirates drag him from into a lifeboat – an enclosed, womb-like vessel

– and head out to sea. As the situation deteriorates and the pirates get desperate (we warned you about the guy with the scar!) Phillips jots down a farewell note to his family, cutting off the last tie that binds him to the world beyond. But having reached that extremity, he is pulled from the lifeboat covered with blood, courtesy of the miraculous intercession of SEAL Team Six.

Meanwhile, things are not looking so rosy in All Is Lost. “All is lost,” Robert Redford intones at the very beginning of the film, reciting in voiceover a farewell letter he has written, put in a bottle, and thrown into the ocean. Like Captain Phillips when he scribbled a similar note, Redford’s character (referred to in the press notes as “Our Man” – a variation on Everyman?) has reached the end. The film then flashes back to the beginning and retraces the events that led to this situation.

Like Captain Phillips,” All Is Lost also involves cargo ships, except in this case the hero is not on board with these symbols of mass consumption and international capitalism, but is their victim. One of these behemoths has apparently lost a container en-route, and the bus-sized metal box has drifted into Our Man’s yacht, the Virginia Jean, rupturing the hull. A prolonged battle for survival reminiscent of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” follows, as Our Man resourcefully struggles to overcome every new ordeal (rendered in fascinating detail; you keep wondering what life-saving tool the guy will come up with next).

But with each new crisis he also loses more of his possessions – both material items and personal belongings – that preserve his identity and link him with the human world. And as with Phillips, this attrition reduces Our Man to his core being – a beleaguered soul determined to survive.

His initial patching of the hull succeeds at first, but subsequent storms undo his work, forcing Our Man to abandon ship and take refuge in an inflatable life raft – a vessel much like the one in Captain Phillips.

He navigates the tiny craft into the shipping lanes, where, like Muse and his tiny skiff, he tries to waylay passing container ships, the cause of all his problems in the first place. But lacking an attention getting device such as an AK-47 (a flare gun has no effect), he is ignored by the towering hulks, which seem devoid of any human presence. By the end he has lost everything, and sinks into the sea, until he too is rescued by a near miraculous intervention, even if it is only imaginary.

Which brings us to Gravity, number one at the box office for the second week in a row and, perhaps not coincidentally, the least political film in the group (though a stickler might complain about its compliance with gender stereotypes). Once again, our hero gets cut off from the rest of the world, but instead of pirates or cargo ships being to blame, it’s those darn Russians who, for whatever nefarious warmongering reasons, have blown up an old military satellite, setting off a chain reaction of blasted orbiters. The debris storm rips by at mindboggling speed and in utter silence into the path of astronauts Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Kowalski (George Clooney), who are tending to an ailing Hubble telescope. The lethal space junk shreds the shuttle, not to mention their fellow astronauts, and sends Stone adrift, her umbilical cord to the mother ship severed.

And so Stone goes through the now familiar drill of losing touch with all that connects her to her old life (not just Kowalski and Houston but also her grief for a dead child — a perfunctory, button-pushing attempt to establish a backstory) and in so doing discovers her inner resources – the resilient, resourceful, independent identity she didn’t know she had. Well, not entirely independent, as Kowalski

– here the disembodied male superego that grounds Stone’s flighty femaleness – walks her through the various procedures via radio contact. Again, the protagonist is ensconced in a vessel and even assumes a fetal position to make sure everyone gets the point.

And after a stunning last minute reprieve from certain death (ah, the miracle of oxygen deprivation), Stone, too is reborn, and like Phillips and Our Man, emerges from the sea of troubles renewed.

So, once again audiences are taken to the brink, they learn to “let it go” (the phrase repeated in Gravity), learn that “everything is going to be all right,” (the somewhat ironic refrain in Captain Phillips) even though, as in All Is Lost, it looks like all is lost.

And what does this mean? Are people flocking to these films because they are scared, feel cut off from and ignored by those who are controlling their lives, and are looking for either their own resources or some deus ex machina to save them?

Probably. Also, they are really good movies.

Just a couple of closing notes on the many films that Gravity resembles. Two in particular, both of which explore similar themes with darker conclusions: 2001, though with Bullock as the space baby and Clooney as the monolith; and Alien with Bullock as Ripley (there is a scene with Stone in her skivvies manning a spacecraft that must be an allusion)

and Clooney as the alien, but a benevolent one.

And, a final caveat: if someone says they are going to “talk with the elders,” don’t believe them.

Critics A Go-Go

Two Movie Critics, Two Coasts

Tag Archives: All Is Lost

PK’s 2013 top 10. And bottom 10

Children’s crusades

Matters of Gravity

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