Sunday, October 8, 2017

"Blade Runner 2049"

                                    ½                                  

As lugubriously paced as your great-grandmother's funeral and about as fun to watch, Blade Runner 2049 at least has the advantage of its rapturous physical design, though even that grows wearying.  This is a ponderous movie, whose appeal is largely based in nostalgia.

Consider for a moment whether Blade Runner 2049 would have any reason to exist other than paying tribute to Ridley Scott's 1982 original, which was only slightly more entertaining, primarily because everything about it was so damned new.

Thirty-five years later, Blade Runner 2049 (set, curiously 30 rather than 35 years after the original) is obsessed with the first movie. To some, this will come across as a fond tribute, but to me it felt like a laborious attempt at re-creation. Its story is another dull "examination" of what it is to be human in an age of robots, a topic that has been so thoroughly examined by movies and TV shows in aftermath of the original that it's starting to feel like so much nonsense.

From Cylons Battlestar Galactica to little David in A.I. to rampaging cowboys in Westworld to the self-aware sexy robot in Ex Machina ... come on, even Number Five was alive in Short Circuit.  It's natural to hope that Blade Runner 2049 will have something new to say; more's the pity to find out it has nothing to say at all, new or otherwise.

There's some hoo-hah about miracles and mechanized disposable workforces and walls and breaking the world, all of which evoke Rutger Hauer's famous, poetic but still vaguely non-sensical speech in the original, but that's the problem with Blade Runner 2049: it's all meant to evoke something else.

The running time of more than two and a half hours wouldn't be the slightest problem at all if it didn't lead to more than a few fidgety moments.  The script by Hampton Fancher, writer of the first film, and Michael Green (of "Heroes" and, ominously, Alien: Covenant) is directed with the same slow, dreamy stylishness that Ridley Scott brought to the first, though this time the filmmaker in charge is Denis Villeneuve, so far removed from the hair-trigger anxiousness he brought to Sicario that even he seems more to be aping rather than building on first Blade Runner.

The first Blade Runner didn't have much of a story to begin with: In a dystopian, overcrowded, over-commercialized future world, a detective called a "blade runner" has to find androids ("replicants") who took part in a violent mutiny and returned to earth.  The trouble is, there's no way to tell them apart from humans.

The story is mostly the same this time around, as Ryan Gosling plays a replicant detective who needs to find the last few remaining rogue robots that ran amok the first time around.  He finds one of them, then finds a mysterious tree that yields a buried treasure of sorts.  He's got to tell his LAPD boss (Robin Wright) about it, and when they discover the contents of the box the story -- in theory, at least -- gets intriguing, because it looks like one of those old-timey replicants might have been pregnant.

Who was the child?  What does this mean for the future?  Gosling's character, named "K" (short for his serial number) goes wandering around looking for some sort of clues.  But whether it goes anywhere is hard to say.  Blade Runner 2049 is not a film eager to get to its plot; the script never met a two-minute scene that couldn't be played in 20 minutes, and is more interested in its visual style.

If Blade Runner 2049 had been the first, its visual sensibilities would have been overwhelming and enough on their own to see it at least once (which, I think, is largely why the original endures), but it isn't the first, and  how many times in the last 35 years have we seen this sort of overstuffed future world?  Everything from the aforementioned A.I. and Battlestar Galatica to the Star Wars prequels to Brazil have shown us this. For crying out loud, head to Tokyo and it's all made real!

So, then, Blade Runner 2049 better wow us with a stunner of a story, but the plot seems to be an afterthought here. Yes, Roger A. Deakins' cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design are genuinely splendid, and the score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Walfisch suitably recalls the synthesized spa music that Vangelis created for the first, but the whole thing leads absolutely nowhere.

A little over an hour in, Harrison Ford finally shows up as Rick Deckard, the character he played in the first, and he lends a whole lot of Harrison Ford-style gruff apathy to the role.  Perhaps that's because Deckard was never a character in the first so much as a recollection himself of hard-boiled film noir detectives from the '40s. Does his character hold a secret to some mystery that will, as Wright's character says, "break the world"? Far be it from me to spoil anything, so let me just say: No, he does not. Nor does he bring any more clarity to the occasional plot. He is in the film for the same questionable reason the film is on the screen: for some people, more Blade Runner seemed like a good idea.

The thing is, the reason we remember 1982's Blade Runner is largely because it fused together a panoply many familiar elements to create a vision no one had seen before.  Blade Runner 2049 takes parts of things we've seen too many times and creates nothing new at all.





Viewed October 18, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1630

Saturday, October 7, 2017

"The Florida Project"

                                 ☆☆☆                              

After the success of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney was discouraged; his company hadn't been able to secure enough financing to buy up as much land in Anaheim as he wanted, and seemingly overnight tacky tourist motels cropped up to cater to eager park visitors.

Ten years later, he swore he wouldn't make the same mistake, and when he announced "The Florida Project," it was massive in scope, swallowing up 43 square miles of Florida swampland.  Life there is perfect.  It's better than perfect.  Tens of millions of people visit to experience the squeaky clean, highly polished world of Disney.

But you can't erase the real world.  Disney's Florida Project tried to shut out problems like slums, squalor, poverty and homelessness. The Florida Project, Sean Baker's languid, meandering but affecting and sometimes beautiful movie, is a powerful reminder that no matter how far Disney pushes the problem out of sight to create a world of make believe, reality has sharp edges that can hurt and cut anyone, especially a child.

The word "Disney" is never spoken in The Florida Project, but from its first moment the forced happiness of the Disney ethic pervades the movie, which mostly takes place in a couple of tacky motels somewhere near the border of Disney's vast Floridian property, primarily the Pepto-Bismol-colored Magic Castle.  From the outside, the Castle and its neighbor Future Land ("Stay in the Future!" its rundown marquee beckons) look like places made for really unlucky tourists or really cheap prostitutes, and both are indeed occasional visitors.

Its tenants, though, are sad, desperate people a quarter-step ahead of homelessness.  They include a far too young mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her 6-year-old daughter Moonee, who is less "played" by than inhabited by an extraordinary, precocious, entirely natural and wonderfully winning actress named Brooklynn Prince, who in some ways is reminiscent of Beasts of the Southern Wild darling Quvenzhané Wallis.  Everything about Moonee is charming, fiercely intelligent and ultimately heartbreaking.

As The Florida Project begins, Moonee is goofing around with some of the other kids from The Magic Castle, getting into the kind of minor trouble that kids have been in since the beginning of the movies, and for a while as the screenplay by Baker and Chris Bergoch, who together also created the shot-on-an-iPhone awards-circuit favorite Tangerine, seems content to just ramble along.  Mooney is the leader of her little group, which sometimes resembles a raunchier Little Rascals.  They vaguely terrorize the manager of the hotel, Bobby, who is played by Willem Dafoe, whose star status never overwhelms the movie; Bobby seems more like a guy who everyone says, "Anyone ever tell you you look like that Willem Dafoe actor?" And as the film slowly gets going, it is clear that neither Bobby nor Moonee nor Halley nor any of the other characters (except maybe Gloria, the drunk old lady who likes to sunbathe in the nude) is going to be a stereotype.

Bobby loves his strange little motel, and with just a nudge, The Florida Project could be a CBS sitcom from the mid-70s, one of those with a little grunge around the edges.  Except The Florida Project avoids that kind of cliché, even when it presents the shows us just how far foul-mouthed, crude but heartfelt Hallee will go to keep a roof over their heads, even if it's a sad and pointless roof.

The Florida Project makes no judgments about its characters, except some surprisingly uplifting ones.  Bobby loves his hotel and the people who live there, and they create a family unit because, in the end, everyone needs a family.

Above all, though, The Florida Project pays tribute to the awesome, overwhelming, sometimes head-scratching resilience of childhood.  Moonee doesn't know what she's missing, even as she dresses in thrift-shop shirts with castles on them and plays with cheap dolls of obscure Disney characters.  It has never crossed her mind that life could be better than it is in The Magic Castle, that everyone doesn't live in a single room with a queen-sized bed co-occupied by a chain-smoking mother.

At one point, Moonee and her best friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) take a walk out to a breathtakingly beautiful break in the forest, just off the main highway, and sit on the branch of a giant tree.  "You know why this is my favorite tree?" Moonee asks. "Because it got knocked down and it's still growing."  Baker pulls his camera back to show the sideways, still-growing behemoth, and the moment is as stunning as anything you'll see in a big-budget blockbuster -- and more affecting.

The Florida Project takes a lot of patience for audiences more used to linear storytelling.  Its last few moments, though, elicit an equal mix of smiles and tears and reveal the brilliance of its leisurely ways: We've seen these people through something real, something life-changing, something that is disturbing and painful to watch but that views the uncomfortable reality of life through the lens of something that Walt Disney understood, then packaged and resold: the innocence of childhood.

In a moment of exquisite beauty, Moonee promises to show Jancey something wonderful -- and she does indeed, a rainbow that appears after a Florida thunderstorm.  The little girls see the wonder, and even as we smile at their joy, The Florida Project dares us to look at the scene and not mourn a little for the pain and the suffering of the future world that awaits the children living on the edges of a dream.



Viewed October 7, 2017 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1930