"Room"

 4 / 5 

An unexpected grace and dignity infuse Room, a movie in which two people have to make the most of what very, very little they have.

One of them, known mostly as "Ma" in the movie but actually named Joy Newsome, was kidnapped when she was 17 and held captive by a man called "Old Nick," who locked her in a storage shed sealed by an impenetrable door, only one skylight high above her to remind her of the world from which she was separated.

The other is Jack, and he is her son.  When the movie begins, he's just about to turn 5.  Joy is 24 now, and if her world seems bleak, consider that she spent two years on her own before Jack came along.  Somehow, she has managed to raise him to speak, read, think, function.

"Room" is all Jack knows, and up until now, Ma has never told him that there is anything else.  He has taken what little he has seen of the world -- on television, in children's books -- and processed it through the brain of a boy who has never even considered that there could be life beyond these four walls, or that there is anyone else in the world except Ma and, once in a while, Old Nick, from whom he must avert his eyes.

Room begins with a situation that is hopeless, despairing and claustrophobic, and thanks largely to the luminous work of its two leading actors -- Brie Larson as Ma and Jacob Tremblay as Jack -- manages to contain love and warmth, even as the creeping dread of futility sets in.

About an hour in to Room, in a scene filled with anxiety and tension, Ma and Jack manage to escape.  That leads into the film's second half, which is slightly less focused, at least at first.  Ma and Jack are reunited with her parents (Joan Allen and William H. Macy), but it turns out much has changed over the past seven years.  How, or even if, Ma and Jack can adjust to freedom drives much of the film's plot -- but just simmering under that plot is an even more intriguing theme: Was life in "Room" as bleak as it seemed?

Of course it was.  Held against her will, repeatedly raped, living in squalor and filth, "Room" held nothing for either of them.  Yet, it was the totality of Jack's life and, as he says at one point, "Ma was always there."

Room deconstructs the gothic fairy-tale gloom of the sequestered, neglected Rapunzel, splitting a single character into both the innocent child in the tower who doesn't know the world exists so can't miss it (Jack even has extra-long hair), and the young woman who must escape.

For a while, Room is much like Ma/Joy herself, who has trouble finding her own way through life once she's released.  The film's middle third is a little meandering, a little too unsure of how it feels about what has happened.  Yet, the two main actors are so compelling and have created such fully realized characters that as long as one or the other of them are on screen, Room remains captivating.  (Larson has deservedly been nominated for an Oscar; how Tremblay was overlooked, given the Academy's penchant to recognize young performers in "adult" categories, is a head-scratcher; his is a truly extraordinary performance.)

Room is at its surest when it explores how deep the bond is between mother and son, and how these two people have made a world out of just each other.  Its final moments reinforce that connection in a scene that resonates with the profound sense of love and equally profound sense of loss that permeate Room.



Viewed Jan. 16, 2016 -- DVD

Catching Up: "Steve Jobs"

 2.5 / 5 

To publish this review, my fingers slid and danced across the sleek aluminum surface of my MacBook Pro.  I tapped, pinched, swiped and dragged my hands, and to someone dropped into this century from the middle of the last one, it might have appeared I was practicing some new art form, a combination of typing and magic.

For those of us who knew an entire life without computers, it can still feel a little like an illusion, all the things we can do with our MacBooks and our iPhones and iPads and everything else Steve Jobs had a hand in creating.  Could one man really have been responsible for all this, for this shift in the way we do almost everything?

Well, no.  Steve Jobs (played in the film by Michael Fassbender) was many things, no doubt, but he was not a computer engineer or a mathematician or a designer or a marketer or a coder or an architect.  He knew how they worked, though, and how to put them together. He had people who worked for him who did all those things, who made them all happen, and based on the evidence presented in Danny Boyle's film Steve Jobs, he had nothing but disdain and contempt for those people, while they, in turn, sometimes idolized him, sometimes respected him, sometimes feared him, sometimes hated him -- but couldn't help but want to please him.

Everyone needed to make Jobs happy, and for their trouble, Jobs made the lion's share of the money and got almost all of the fame and glory because ... well, because he could.  Jobs was the salesman.  He didn't create the thing, he didn't design the brochure, he didn't build the showroom, but, boy, could he sell it.  Even when the results were disastrous, you couldn't fault the showmanship.

The script for Steve Jobs rather too neatly divides itself into thirds, each one set on the day of a major product launch: the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh, the 1988 unveiling of the NeXT computer, the 1998 debut of the iMac.  (Two of them were spectacular failures.)

It's a highly theatrical setup that makes Steve Jobs feel almost like a filmed play, and that sharply limits its ability to explore Jobs's emotions (if he had any) and internal motivations (which he most certainly did) without resorting to words.

They're Sorkin's words, which means they're the best, most well-chosen words money can buy -- but they are words, not actions, and time after time, Steve Jobs violates the old chestnut of a rule that has guided moviemaking for so long: show, don't tell.  Steve Jobs has to tell just about everything, facts and emotions alike, but it doesn't actually convey much.  Audiences who walk in knowing nothing about Jobs or Apple will likely end up confused and frustrated, because amid all those words there is little room for explanation.

Each third contains almost the same characters and same setup, so Steve Jobs feels a little like a real-life Groundhog Day as Jobs' head of marketing Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his former partner Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his sometime boss and mentor John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), his estranged girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and their daughter Lisa (played by a trio of young actresses) appears in every iteration, along with various put-upon, abused members of Jobs's team.

Twenty minutes before each product launch, Jobs's personal life comes crashing down and barging in, mixing and matching with what he's supposed to be rehearsing for.  Jobs could have opened his own nightclub in Casablanca, because everybody comes to Steve's, invited or not.  The setup feels contrived, at best, and though it's a sort of neat idea that the film is going for, it feels claustrophobic and confining, and to provide any sort of perspective at all, the movie has to resort to a number of flashbacks at key moments.

It's also got a huge liability in the way it portrays Jobs as a merciless, humorless tyrant whose relentless attention to business detail may make him fascinating on the page, but don't translate into an effective character.  He's angry, hostile, belittling, demeaning and humiliating -- and those are the good qualities.  It's thoroughly unpleasant to watch him harass and debase everyone around him, and when the film tries, in its last few minutes, to find his humanity, it's too little and too late.

That said, Steve Jobs is well-performed by everyone, it's beautifully shot in three different formats (a technique completely lost on the TV screen), and it manages wonderfully to depict three very different eras, even though we're basically only seeing the inside of buildings.

Technically, Steve Jobs gets everything right.  But movies aren't computers, and in the case of Steve Jobs, technical mastery just isn't enough.



Viewed Jan. 11, 2016 -- DVD

"The Revenant"

 3 / 5 

The Revenant creates a new category of cinema: movies as extreme endurance sport. The film is grueling to watch.  The question, I suppose, is whether the superlative filmmaking skill on display helps make the experience of watching The Revenant any easier, and for me the answer was no -- its unending pain and violence leads to no catharsis, just a sense of forlorn despondency.

The Revenant makes Mel Gibson's ultra-violent movies The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto look like fun family films.  If the film has a specific philosophical point it's trying to make, it seems to boil down to: Life is hard, then you die, except when you don't, and that's even worse.

It takes place, to be fair, in a bleak time -- the early 1800s, not too long after Lewis and Clark journeyed across America.  Back when our elementary school teachers taught us about those two explorers, we imagined that their journey was difficult and fraught with peril, but pictured them as proud, intrepid men.  If we imagined their experiences to be anything like what happens in The Revenant, third graders everywhere would throw their history books down screaming and go cower in the corner.  The Revenant is not kids' stuff; I'm not even sure it's adult stuff.

The movie proposes that the only worthwhile measure of a man is his ability to withstand physical pain and mental anguish.  It's a macho movie, for macho men who think Bear Grylls is a wimp.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, an early American fur hunter who's on an expedition through the country's vast, untamed wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase when his party is attacked by Native Americans.  Most of them die, shot through the neck and head with arrows, hacked to death, trampled, beaten, left for dead bleeding in the frozen river.  This is the easy part of The Revenant.

The survivors begin making their way back to Fort Kiowa in what's now South Dakota when Glass crosses the path of a grizzly bear and her cubs.  In one of the most savage scenes in any big-budget studio film, the bear attacks Glass with unrelenting ferocity.  We watch every rip, every tear, every slice.  When he's finally found, he's so gravely wounded that survival seems impossible, but the expedition leader (Domhnall Gleeson) manages to stitch his wounds.  He orders two members of the remaining unit to stay behind, and Glass's half-Native American son also remains.

But fellow trapper Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) sees no point in trying to keep Glass alive, and when Glass's son objects, Fitzgerald kills him.  He and the frightened, bullied Bridger (Will Poulter) leave Glass for dead in the harsh wilderness.

With grievous wounds, Glass inches his way toward survival -- and revenge.  It's an undeniably gripping story, told with incredible artistry.  The film crew, led by director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, must have suffered for the sake of the movie.  Watching it, I imagined that there might be a story behind the film as great as the legendary history of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

The Revenant is a spectacular film to behold, and also to hear, with an ethereal, not-always-musical score by a number of composers, including Riyuichi Sakamoto, that marries with the stunning images from cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in ways I've never seen happen on film before.

Beyond that, The Revenant is a film that dares you to watch it, and offers no emotional reward if you do.  What happens to Glass at the end of the film, where it all leads, is as grim and hopeless as everything that has come before.  The Revenant is an undeniable accomplishment.  So is sitting through it.

Viewed Dec. 31, 2015 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1545

The Best of 2015

When I was in fifth grade, Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.  It lost to Annie Hall, and I was devastated.  I could not imagine how a movie that made me feel so complete, that brought my little soul to life, could not be the best film of the year -- or of ever.

Now, four decades later, I imagine young souls all throughout the world pondering the question: "Is Star Wars: The Force Awakens the best movie of the year?  Is it, possibly, the best movie ever made?" Endless and breathless media reports tell us multiple times a day that it has grossed more money than any movie ever in the history of movies.  And since it's their favorite movie, might it not be the best movie of 2015?

Well, just as it was in 1977, Star Wars is a fine film -- but it's sharing the year with some truly great ones.  Maybe the hardest thing for a movie lover to do in 2015 has been to narrow the list of "best" movies of the year to just 10.

Since I'm not a professional film writer and, sadly, don't get paid to go to the movies, my moviegoing is limited by time, work, home life and an endless barrage of streaming TV (not to mention those good, old-fashioned things called books).  Nonetheless, in 2015, I managed to see nearly 50 films.  Almost shamefully, Steve Jobs, Crimson Peak, Youth and, most distressingly for me, Straight Outta Compton were not among them.

So what follows is my list of my favorite films of the year, but it isn't a definitive list, by any means. And because 2015 was an exemplary year and I can easily name 10 films as my favorites, it seems unfair not to mention five others I found particularly worthwhile, even if they fall into the "runner up" position.  So, consider as a five-way tie for 11th place (in alphabetical order):

• Cinderella
• Creed
• Goodnight Mommy
• It Follows
• Love and Mercy

(While all are recommended, watching Cinderella on the same evening as either It Follows or Goodnight Mommy is not a trick I would suggest anyone try.)

The remainder of the list, from No. 10 to No. 1:

  #10  
  Spy  

All Spy wants to do is to make you laugh, and if it's judged on that basis alone, it must be one of the most successful movies of the year.  You may try to resist because you've had your share of one-note comedies, but Spy surprises by being an actual movie -- and an uproariously funny one, at that.  Melissa McCarthy has some amazingly robust and willing support from Rose Byrne, Jude Law and Jason Statham, all clearly eager to have some fun.  Plus, its action sequences and glamorous locations are as genuine as those in a Bond film.  Spy was better than Spectre by far, and while it's hardly a highbrow pick as one of the best movies of the year, it's likely the 2015 film I'll return to over and over when I need a good laugh.

  #9  
  Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine  

On the surface, this remarkable documentary might appear to be about the hate crimes that shocked not just the nation but the world in 1998, but that's only the devastating reason for its existence.  What Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine reveals, to much surprise, is that this slight, shy 21-year-old had a full and rich life before he died, scared and alone, on a bleak October day in Wyoming.  His friends and family reveal that he was not the martyr we have come to know him to be, but that he was a complicated, challenging young man whose life had already been filled enough with violence and tragedy.  Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine takes a subject we think we know and reveals layers and emotion we never imagined existed -- the hallmark of a great film.

  #8  
  Ex Machina  

Watch it once, and this ultra-sleek and smooth thriller comes across as icy and aloof, barely raising its pulse even during a climax that put two of its three main characters into mortal peril at the hands of the third.  On that first viewing, its twists seem to come out of left field, and they are indeed surprises. Watch it again, and Ex Machina reveals just how carefully crafted it is, and how much it seems to have thought through what at first glance seems like a major loophole.  (Namely: Didn't you-know-who expect exactly what happens?)  Ex Machina reveals more of itself with subsequent viewings, and it's a movie to lose yourself in.  While it might not be the most touchy-feely movie of the year, it's one of the smartest and most intriguing, and may well be the year's real sci-fi masterpiece.

  #7  
  Anomalisa  

What seems to be a curiosity sits in the brain and refuses to leave, long after seeing it -- it is, to use the wordplay of one of its characters, an anomalovely movie, a gentle but insistent meditation on loneliness, regret and love.  Visually and spiritually, it owes more than a little to Sofia Coppola's low-key classic Lost in Translation, but this stop-motion animated wonder is even sadder and more melancholy.  For lonely Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a business trip leaves him feeling so dislocated that it feels like the world is just him against everyone else.  Literally.  Because "everyone else" is voiced by Tom Noonan and they all have the same face.  (Fittingly, Michael is staying at the Fregoli hotel -- a sure sign that this is a quintessentially Charlie Kaufman film.)  Then he meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), who seems so delicate that she might break at any moment.  And in Anomalisa, stranger things could happen.  It's a movie that takes its time making an impact, but its  dialogue and images linger long past the final, quietly heartbreaking scene.

  #6  
  Spotlight  

A no-frills, straightforward look at journalism in the days before everything fell apart, Spotlight captures both the spirit and intent of newspapering just before newspapers stopped becoming a thing. Spotlight is a potent, engrossing exploration of why print journalism remains vital, and how real journalism works.  The work of four reporters determined to go where the story leads ends up exposing one of the great scandals of our time, the Catholic church's cover-up of decades of child abuse by its priests.  The heroes of Spotlight don't wear capes or tights, they don't have flashy vehicles or super powers -- they just work hard, know how to ask the right questions, don't back down, and are committed to their jobs, and keep a watch out for misdeeds that rivals the work of any fictional hero.  Spotlight honors newspaper reporters with an unsentimental eye, and even offers some tough reminders that if the future newspapers is endangered, it's not as if the journalism industry shouldn't have seen it coming. 

  #5  
  Carol  

When Carol finally sits down with Therese, the woman who's destined to change her life, Carol regards her with a certain wonder: "Strange girl," she observes. "Flung from space."  The movie Carol is equally unexpected and wondrous.  Director Todd Haynes replicates 1952 America with a meticulous eye for detail, but most important is the repression of any sort of sexual expression, which leaves Carol and Therese with virtually no way to communicate their intentions to each other, or even to themselves.  Slowly, Carol and Therese reveal themselves, until Carol builds to an unexpectedly emotional and affecting climax, and the joy of a simple, long-sought-after smile.  Carol makes a story about two women in mid-century America feel entirely contemporary and relatable, and serves as a touching reminder that every relationship is an act of faith and trust.

  #4  
  Brooklyn  

The saga of Eilis Lacey and her journey from Ireland to America begins in 1951 (interestingly, the same year in which Carol is set) and may be about a time that has faded into memory, but Brooklyn couldn't be timelier.  It's a warm-hearted reminder of why the U.S. remains so alluring to so many people around the world: It's a place filled with potential, where the promise that anything is possible still rings true.  As played by Saoirse Ronan, Eilis feels like one of the screen's great female characters, more humble than fellow Irishwoman Scarlett O'Hara but no less determined or conflicted.  When it finally revelas itself, Eilis' central conflict bears the marks of a soap opera, but Brooklyn deftly manages to skirt such melodrama, and manages instead to be a grand and memorable story, told with great style.

  #3  
  Bridge of Spies  

Everything about Bridge of Spies screams "For Your Consideration" in a bid for Oscars -- but this time, the awards-season hype is justified.  The powerhouse combination of director Steven Spielberg, star Tom Hanks and screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen delivers a crafty, absorbing thriller, filled with shadows and mystery.  Hanks is a corporate lawyer who is recruited to defend an accused Russian spy during the height of the Cold War.  When Francis Gary Powers is shot down over the Soviet Union, Hanks's character finds himself at the center of global politics as he tries to negotiate the trade of one spy for another.  Bridge of Spies is based on a true story, but Spielberg never forgets that his first priority is to make an entertaining movie -- and his commitment to doing so results in his best film since at least the early 1990s, better (and more unabashedly entertaining) than even Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan.

  #2  
  Sicario  

Mind-bendingly intense, Sicario opens on a scene of such stark inhumanity that it takes your breath away, then refuses to give it back for the next two hours.  Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent who imagines herself tough enough to handle any assignment.  She doesn't know what she's in store for as she begins the work of trying to bring down a Mexican drug cartel.  The deeper she goes, the more she realizes the futility of her situation.  Don't go in to Sicario expecting it to make sense -- the movie keeps its audiences as much in the dark as Blunt's agent.  It creates a new dilemma, both for its characters and for the audience: It's not sure who the bad guy is, because no one in Sicario is blameless, and the good guys seem as wicked as the villains.  Sicario is impossibly tense, and almost impossibly good.

  #1  
  The Walk  

No film affected me as completely and unexpectedly as Robert Zemeckis's historical fantasia, a retelling of the events depicted in the nearly-as-good documentary Man on Wire, in which tightrope walker Philippe Petit recounted the day in 1974 that he strung a wire between the then-unfinished twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and thrilled the world with his astonishing stunt.  The deservedly acclaimed documentary conveyed the facts of the story, The Walk conveys the emotion.  The Walk is about the evanescence of ... well, of everything.  Its three parts are (in order) bubbly romantic comedy, giddy caper, and stunning recreation of a moment in time that will never happen again.  Each of the three parts has its strengths, and even if the first third, in particular, can seem overly sweet and cloying, the entire film is a monument to the raw, obsessive passion that drove Petit to attempt his impossible stunt.  Throughout 2015, a debate raged about whether digital effects had led films to become sterile and unimaginative.  With The Walk, Zemeckis proved what many had argued: Digital vs. practical is the wrong argument -- what matters is whether there is vision and artistry behind the camera.  The Walk uses every digital trick possible, yet never feels sterile or hollow.  A great deal of its effectiveness will be lost in the transition to the small screen; it's a film that practically begs to be seen in a theater.  Nonetheless, in its tribute to both Petit's accomplishment and to the never-forgotten majesty of those glorious lost towers, The Walk generates an emotion too rarely felt in movies: pure awe.

Catching Up: "Goodnight Mommy"

 4 / 5 

Goodnight Mommy is a nasty, brutal, sadistic, sick little puzzle of a movie that seems, for most of its running time, to be an odd psychological horror movie, then in the last 15 minutes turns so repulsively evil that some critics have labeled it "torture porn."

As someone who's never seen a Saw, Hostel or Human Centipede movie, I don't know if the description is at all accurate, though what happens at the climax of Goodnight Mommy is shocking and sickening -- and presented as such a natural extension of character behavior that even in the fleeting moments that caused me to look away from the screen and shout a rarely used expletive, it all felt like the movie was going exactly where it needed to go.  Do not see this movie if you are not prepared to descend into a pit of bleak despair.

Goodnight Mommy has the enormous redemption, though, of being a very good movie.  It's made by two directors, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who have never made a feature film before, but displays such calm, assured mastery that you'd never know it.  There are echoes of The Shining both in style and in the theme of a parent who seems mysteriously changed.

Lukas and Elias are twin boys -- played by twin brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz -- who live in the idyllic Austrian countryside.  As the film begins, they are alone, though even their solitude is laced with foreboding: Where are their parents? Why does one of the boys keep disappearing from the other?

A car pulls up to the lakeside villa.  Mother is home.  They greet her in her room, but her face is covered in bandages.  She is recovering from what we can assume to be plastic surgery.  There are a lot of things we can assume in Goodnight Mommy, though the big question is how many of those assumptions are correct.

The boys idolize her with the reverence of, well, their mother, but they can't see her under the bandages, and there seems to be something different about her.  With the bandages on, there's no way to tell if the woman underneath them is really their mother, as she claims, or a sinister imposter.

The boys' paranoia grows.  It's not helped by the weird, pristine shrine to vanity in which they live.  The house is maintained as if it's a showplace, not a home.   All over the walls are enormous pictures of a woman who we assume to be Mother, but her face is blurred.

Mother (Susanne Wuest) is irritable and needs rest.  From the standpoint of an adult, everything she says and does makes complete sense.  From the standpoint of a child, everything she says and does is terrifying and confusing.  Where is their Mama?  What has this broken, sensitive, barely awake woman done to their beloved?

But on the other hand -- why won't they just let her rest?  Why are the boys becoming increasingly unhinged at the ludicrous notion that this is not their mother?

The paranoia grows on both sides.  Then, just about the time that Goodnight Mommy makes it plan that Mommy is the villain, that there's something decidedly wrong with her, it switches gears, and the kids themselves -- these sweet, innocent, rough-and-tumble 9-year-old boys -- become suspect.

Here, then, is an interesting prospect: What happens when no one in a movie is reliable or trustworthy, when every single person on screen is morally questionable?  Goodnight Mommy delights in the result.  It's a movie that would have thrilled Alfred Hitchcock with the way it plays on audience sympathies.  Throughout Goodnight Mommy, it's impossible to know who to trust -- with the exception of some simpleton rubes from the Red Cross who pick a particularly inconvenient moment to come around looking for donations.

Goodnight Mommy had me so intrigued to know where things would go, and so engrossed in its warped story, that I suspect it's a movie that will reward second and third views.  A quick Google search turned up discussions about scenes and images I hadn't considered, particularly a shot toward the very, very end that could be either a mistake on behalf of the filmmakers (which seems unlikely) or a scene that is very different than it appears to be.  But Goodnight Mommy is filled with these visual and narrative puzzlers -- a movie in which there are no simple questions.

While there's a "twist" at the end of Goodnight Mommy, it's exactly the one you suspected was coming all along, and Franz and Fiala seem aware that the audience will be in on the gag -- offering surprising plot points isn't their primary mission, it seems.  Offering a surprising movie is what they're aiming to do, and Goodnight Mommy is definitely that.  True, it's so off-putting and twisted that I would not want to sit through it again, and yet -- I'm almost tempted to re-watch right now, just to see if I can get to the bottom of some of the many mysteries it presents.


Viewed Dec. 27, 2015 -- VOD

Catching Up: "Mad Max: Fury Road"

 3.5 / 5 

Even taking into account the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies and Avatar, there can't be many worlds as distinctly and carefully imagined as the post-apocalyptic wasteland of director George Miller's Mad Max movies.

Even if the specifics of the previous movies are forgotten, surely you remember Tina Turner as Aunty Entity inside the Thunderdome, or Mad Max himself wandering down an endless highway, gun in hand.  The stories took a backseat to the visuals and the pure visceral thrill of filmmaking.

And so it is, 30 years since Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which was rated PG-13 and virtually a family film compared with Miller's fast and furious Mad Max: Fury Road.

The movie contains a story, abut it seems substantially less important to Mad Max: Fury Road than its relentless action.  Miller has crafted a movie that seems to get at the essence of cinema: It's a heady rush of images and sounds, of meticulously crafted action sequences punctuated by a few scenes of expository dialogue.

Tom Hardy takes over for Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, who began this film series in a time only slightly removed from our own, when roads and buildings and towns still existed.  Thirty-six years after the first movie, the setting is utterly different.  Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a completely alien environment, a world re-imagined by some far-off war over oil, and it's every bit as deeply imagined as any of the current "franchise" movies, only fueled by an actual artistic vision rather than a need to protect a corporate investment.  You get the sense in Max Max: Fury Road that Miller values his vision over any other consideration, including financial.

The language, the hierarchies, the relationships and the rules of this world are vividly depicted, so carefully and completely thought out but rarely explained that watching Mad Max: Fury Road is sometimes akin to sitting through an ethnographic film, the kind you watched in college that lacked narration and let you draw your own conclusions about what you were seeing.

The production design on this film is staggering.  Every frame is filled with new surprises, and none of it feels recycled, even if it's somehow vaguely familiar, like a nightmare you think you might have had before.  The story is simple but told with intricate complexity, involving Max being kidnapped to serve as a "Blood Bag," a walking IV transfusion for a soldier in the bizarre army of Immortan Joe, who keeps his community in line by withholding little things like water and food.

There's a lot more going on here, so much that it took three screenwriters to flesh it all out, but the story is secondary here.  It involves Max being strapped to the front of a truck by the soldiers who are sent out to find Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is supposed to be going to get "guzzoline" for Immortan Joe but has actually hidden his five wives in a massive big rig and is trying to get them to the safety of a possibly imaginary idyll known as The Green Place.  (Throughout much of Mad Max: Fury Road, I was certain I didn't understand anything that was happening -- imagine my surprise to be able to recount all this now!)

Despite her name, Furiosa is the heroine -- and she's on the run from the bad guys, and of course Max ends up in her big rig and starts fighting alongside her.  And that's the setup for two hours worth of incredible chase scenes and stunts.   Which is what Mad Max: Fury Road is all about.  The story, as detailed as it is, is only an excuse for eye-popping action.  Most of what happens on screen in Mad Max: Fury Road seems like it should be impossible, and the knowledge that the bulk of it was created with minimal use of digital effects makes it all the more astounding.

It is amazing to watch.  And it takes place in a world so elaborate, so terrifically imagined, that it's utterly immersive as a story -- you believe these things are happening in this make-believe world.

Yet as thrilling as that is, Mad Max: Fury Road also left me a little cold.  There's so little room to create characters or set up relationships that watching it is like riding an especially aggressive roller-coaster: It's undeniably entertaining and exhilarating, but also exhausting.  Max Max: Fury Road is a cinematic feat that is impressive to behold but harder to truly enjoy.



 Viewed Dec. 27, 2015 -- VOD

The Worst of 2015

With just five days left to go in the calendar year, I've got a lot of catching up to do before coming up with my list of the 10 best movies I saw in 2015.  It's been a stellar year for movies, and narrowing down the list to just 10 will be more difficult this year than it's been in a long, long time.

But the worst?  That's a different story.  There have been some clunkers, for sure.  Tomorrowland was an intense disappointment, a movie that wandered around within its beautifully rendered world until it finally just shrugged its shoulders and gave up.  Kingsmen: The Secret Service was a weird film.  I hated it.  Except the parts I loved, which made up about 60 percent of the schizophrenic movie. The Peanuts Movie was distressingly, disturbingly depressing in the way it heaved so much ignominy on Charlie Brown, but it wasn't a bad movie.

There were four movies that stood out to me, though, as truly terrible -- three from calendar 2015 and a fourth that merits being on this list by virtue of its tricky release pattern.

They're movies so bad they deserve to be singled out, lest you, one gloomy winter's day, while browsing the on-demand selections, think, "Oh, I never saw that one, I should watch it."  No, please. Don't.  Rarely are films so bad that they need to come with warning labels, but these are.  Looking back, 2015 had more than its share of exemplary films ... and then there were these:

 THE INTERVIEW 

This one makes it on the list by a technicality.  Officially, it was released in the waning days of 2014, but the curious hacking of Sony Pictures, apparently by North Korea, led to the film's release being canceled.  Perhaps that was all just coincidentally timed, but Sony essentially was able to pull the plug on the wide release of one of the worst movies of 2014 and 2015.  The Interview is a moronic, aggressively unfunny comedy that seems to have been made exclusively for the amusement of its own creators, because no one else would get the jokes.  There is not a single laugh in the movie, not even a grin; it's clueless about comedy, and knows even less about politics.  The story of a certifiably moronic talk-show host being granted the world's first interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is spectacularly stupid.  After it was effectively "banned" from theaters, it received a wide release through digital on-demand systems, and millions of people couldn't wait to see what was so incendiary.  Turns out, nothing.  If North Korea was truly so offended by this movie that it wanted to seek revenge on the studio that made it, then North Korean leaders a) are stunningly thin-skinned and b) have remarkably good taste.  Take their word for it: No one should see The Interview.


 SAN ANDREAS 

In the laborious San Andreas, it's not enough to destroy San Francisco for the 1,457th time since the advent of digital visual effects technology.  Los Angeles has to get it, too.  The destruction of each looks entirely unconvincing.  But, there might be bright side to the world that San Andreas envisions: With both of these entertainment megalopolises gone, no more movies like San Andreas could ever get made. San Andreas stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a guy.  I don't remember who he is or what he does that makes him special.  He might have been a firefighter or a paramedic or a 911 operator or something along those lines.  And there's a really big earthquake and then a really big tsunami, and I remember Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson being in a boat with his estranged wife as they sailed down the flooded streets of San Francisco looking for his daughter.  That much I remember.  I also remember that the visual effects proved that just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it will look realistic on film.  And I remember thinking that the whole thing would have been a lot better if Victoria Principal showed up in that big Afro wig from Earthquake and found Ava Gardner still wandering around.  That would have been entertaining.  San Andreas is big and loud, but it is not entertaining, it's just really, really bad.


 ALOHA 

Something weird happened while I watched Aloha: I didn't understand what I was experiencing.  The very attractive actors were up there on screen, and they were saying words that sounded like they were being spoken in the English language, but nothing made sense.  Watching Aloha felt as surreal as watching a David Lynch film dubbed into Polish and played backward, except I'm guessing that the backward Polish Lynch film would make some emotional sense and have some pretty amazing images.  Aloha doesn't have any of that.  It doesn't go together.  It's like someone took out every other scene and then put together what remained and hoped audiences might think Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and Emma Stone were so pretty that no one would notice the film stunk.  They were wrong.  In Hawaiian, "aloha" famously has a number of meanings.  It just got a new one: "lousy movie."

Now, all these films were stinkers, but in 2015, one film stood out among the rest as genuinely risible, a movie so awful, so cynical, so rotten in every possible way that it needs to be separated from the rest.  The three movies listed above are bad movies.  They contain nothing to recommend them.  So, imagine a film worse, even, than that.  Imagine a film so bad that it makes you, at least momentarily, feel a sense of despair.  That film is ...

 POLTERGEIST 

The 1982 Poltergeist is a happy ghost story on steroids.  It takes the quintessentially Spielbergian concept of suburban idyll and gleefully tears it apart, until there is nothing left except the most basic unit of happiness: the family.  The 2015 Poltergeist hates the idea of family.  It hates the idea of happiness.  It eschews fun and merriment.  It is a dark, gloomy, lumbering, plodding glop of a film, a movie that does not have a single fresh idea.  It is a filmed deal, a movie designed to ensure the studio keeps the rights to the underlying intellectual property by churning out an execrable movie that is deeply unhappy and cynical.  In this Poltergeist, the family members despise one another, they blame each other for their unhappy lives, and when the mother finally goes after Carole Anne (renamed Maddy here, to no purpose), you almost sense she is heaving a sigh, hoping that maybe the other kids will get eaten up by ghosts, too.  All of the plot points are given away up front, and sweet and daffy Tangina is turned into a money-grubbing reality star.  This Poltergeist hits many of the same plot points as the 1982 movie, replicating them with the faithfulness of a paint-by-numbers version of the Sistine Chapel.  In theory, it looks more or less the same, but in reality it is a disastrous attempt at replicating something that can't be replicated.  It's a dirty, squalid movie.  Fair warning: Once seen, it can't be unseen.  Should you stumble across it sometime while channel flipping, remember the sage advice of Diane Freeling in the original: "Don't go near it!  Don't even look at it!"