The Odyssey

For many viewers, The Odyssey is likely a familiar story. After all, Christopher Nolan’s latest great film is adapted from a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, one often taught in school curricula, and which has been adapted into different versions many times over, perhaps the most recent straightforward adaptation being the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante. This familiarity lends extra weight to Nolan’s filmmaking and storytelling choices, allowing us to better see them as choices, and to understand how he’s imbued the epic with his own viewpoint. This viewpoint comes through most clearly in his rendition of Odysseus. Like many Nolan protagonists, his Odysseus is a man plagued by a guilty conscience, here courtesy of the death and destruction he enabled Agamemnon and the Greeks to unleash on Troy through the ruse of the Trojan horse. One of the more unique features of Nolan’s adaptation – and what really makes the film come alive – is the slow revelation of this guilty conscience. Along the way, the film also addresses larger themes about the consequences of violating the sanctity of home and basic human decency, perhaps speaking to our contemporary cultural/political moment as well.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

I enjoyed Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi for bringing new things to Star Wars, and for having something interesting to say about how to negotiate the relationship between present and past. While not everything in The Last Jedi worked (particularly the Poe and Finn plots), it excelled in paralleling Rey and Ben, and created an interesting conflict by allowing them to understand each other’s perspectives, which led them to feel a complicated mix of sympathy and antipathy for one another. I left The Last Jedi excited to see how the next film in the series would build off of their conflict.

J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker capitalizes on some of this potential, but unfortunately, it does so through a hefty dose of retroactive continuity that often undermines what made The Last Jedi so compelling. It also repeats and magnifies some of The Last Jedi’s faults, along with some of the nagging annoyances of The Force Awakens, particularly that entry’s penchant for rehashing elements of the earlier films. There are still some good things in The Rise of Skywalker, and on the whole the good outweighs the bad, but by a much smaller margin than in the two preceding films. After the highs of The Last Jedi, the lows of The Rise of Skywalker are resoundingly disappointing.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

After the misfires that were the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films, and two out of three varyingly disappointing Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films, what a treat it has been to see two films within a year and a half that perfectly capture much of what’s great about Spider-Man. These two films are of course Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and this year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (with special mention going to the 2004 Spider-Man 2, which is a superb overall film, if an inferior representation of the character).

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

One of the criticisms lobbed against The Force Awakens was that it was derivative of the original Star Wars trilogy, repeating many of the plot points and character types from the first film and some of the second. I still enjoyed it because it remixed those elements enough that it felt fresh, and because it was fun to experience a competently written and directed Star Wars film again after the letdown of the prequels. But one of my questions surrounding The Last Jedi concerned whether it too would be a derivative remixing of the original trilogy, or whether it would take Star Wars in new and interesting directions. The answer seems to be both yes and no.

Like The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi repeats many elements from the original trilogy, particularly The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The film begins like Empire, with the villains catching the heroes in the middle of an escape attempt; also like Empire, a pupil seeks out training from a Jedi master, has a reflective experience in an enclosure laden with the dark side of the force, and abandons their training to confront a villain. Like both Empire and Return of the Jedi, villains and heroes attempt to turn one another to their causes, and a villain is betrayed by his apprentice, among many other similarities.

Yet even more than The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi spins this material in new directions, remixing it until it resembles the original trilogy only in passing. The rebels' escape attempt, for instance, is drawn out into an ancillary plot that lasts the length of the film, and the equivalent of the battle for Hoth is moved from the beginning of the film to the end. More than this, however, The Last Jedi goes far beyond The Force Awakens in introducing new and exciting narrative elements. The result is a film that most certainly feels like Star Wars, but one that also revitalizes the series, yielding a largely stellar -- although not unflawed -- entry in the saga.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (VS Spider-Man 2)

Spider-Man: Homecoming easily rivals and in some ways even surpasses Spider-Man 2 as the best Spider-Man movie to date, which in my book automatically puts it in the running for one of the best contemporary superhero movies (a crown shared by The Dark Knight and *maybe* X-Men 2). Put another way, this is the best film representation yet of Spider-Man the character, if not the best Spider-Man movie overall.

La La Land

La La Land has a lot going for it: catchy songs, winning performances, intricate staging and framing, and complex, nuanced storytelling about the compromise that comes with striving for your dreams. It’s also one of the few films I’ve seen that’s moved me to tears.

Arrival

Arrival is the rare science fiction film that manages to execute a nifty science fiction conceit while also telling a gripping character story on a human scale, as well as commenting broadly on the state of humankind. The film does an excellent job of cycling through sequences of curiosity, suspense, and poignancy throughout its length, while at the same time dropping hints about the nature of its time travel conceit. Moreover, it also gracefully weaves its science fiction premise – aliens give humanity the gift of a language which unlocks time once you learn it – into the emotional development of the characters, providing a touching emotional cocktail at the film’s conclusion.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I'm in awe over how much I enjoyed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I feel awe not because my expectations were low given how bad the three prequels were, and not because I hold the original trilogy in particularly high esteem (I don’t). No, my awe is a product of how impressed I am that the new film managed to be so enjoyable while also being so derivative. The Force Awakens contains so many references, parallels, callbacks, rehashes, and remixes of the first film in the series, and to a lesser extent the second, that it’s not a stretch to say that the plot of The Force Awakens is essentially a (superior) repetition of the plot of A New Hope, but with some of the pieces rearranged, with greater immediate emotional investment courtesy of familiar returning characters, and with some of the best bits of The Empire Strikes Back thrown in for good measure. Yet for all of its repetition, it's still a fun film nonetheless, more so than A New Hope, which has long seemed to me like a rickety bucket of bolts.

Spring Breakers

Some brief thoughts on the fascinating Spring Breakers:

The way the film dealt with imagery was pretty incredible. For lack of a better word, I’d describe the film’s visual track as “fractured,” organized loosely by the dialogue accompanying it. In other words, the dialogue acts as a through-line around which the images are organized, but only vaguely, like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope. The visuals skip short distances forward and backward through time, illustrating and orbiting around the dialogue or evoking the setting’s atmosphere, sometimes repeating moments for emphasis. Accordingly, very rarely are the characters actually shown speaking their dialogue; instead, a wide array of images show the speakers or their subject(s) engaged in various, emblematic actions. This visual looseness allows for a fair degree audio freedom; in fact, quite often individual lines of dialogue or brief exchanges are repeated with variations, such as different intonations, or different accompanying imagery. At least once the characters are actually shown having the same exchange twice, but with different staging (as in the exchange near the end of the film about whether or not the characters fear their upcoming assault on a gangster’s mansion). These aesthetic choices result the film being shot through with a quasi-dream-like, free-floating looseness.

This stylistic looseness matches the looseness of the plot. The four female protagonists have only the most minimal of goals – get to Florida for spring break – which are quickly met. The film meanders from there through a loose string of coincidences and entirely new conflicts and characters, fitting for a film committed to indulging the hedonistic, consequence-free worldview of its characters.

Also remarkable are the characters, simply because they are almost non-existent (James Franco's "Alien" excluded). Of the four female protagonists, only one, Faith, receives strong distinguishing traits (she’s the religious “good” girl), and she leaves halfway through the film. The other three are practically ciphers; one (Cotty) is distinguished by her pink hair, but she also leaves two-thirds of the way through the film, and is given a nearly identical sendoff as Faith (right down to the staging and framing). The two that remain to the end (Brit and Candy) are practically indistinguishable from one another (I even had to look up Brit's name after seeing the film). However, despite their nearly complete lack of individualistic character traits, these two are in many respects the most interesting, since the collectively, the traits they do display are so refreshing. All four love to party, get drunk, do drugs, flirt with (and presumably screw) guys, but Brit and Candy have a particularly empowered attitude toward their affairs. They are the two who do the violent and scary work of stealing money from a restaurant in order to enable their spring break bacchanal in the first place. As interesting as the scene of their theft is (we see it play out twice, once from outside the restaurant, and one form inside - the second is far more brutal), their empowerment shines most clearly in one of the scenes they share with Alien.

After meeting them, Alien eventually takes them back to his oceanside house, and impresses them with all of the things he has (amongst them: knives, drugs, stacks of cash on a bed, shurikens, two different kinds of cologne, and lots and lots of guns). It’s a funny scene – small things become big in a small man’s world – but it becomes magnificent when Brit and Candy, seemingly impressed with Alien’s bravado, seduce him, pick up his guns, and then shove them in his mouth, telling him they don’t need him, and that they can kill him and just take his stuff. Then, in an unexpected turn, Alien shows himself to be a somewhat open-minded gangster: he fellates the guns like they're Brit and Candy’s cocks, and tells them he thinks he’s fallen in love with them right then and there. Apparently, he’s found his soul-mates. They are his kindred spirits, just as gangster as he is, while at the same time just as fem as all of the other hedonistic spring breakers with which they party throughout the film. It's a sea change in the dynamics of their relationship, which is now one of equals, rather than one of a rooster and his hens.

Their new partnership is nicely conveyed in an inspired, slow motion montage sequence of a series of violent heists (accompanied to Britney Spears’s “Evertyime”), but is most marvelously evident in the film’s climax. Alien, Brit, and Candy – the latter two clad in only pink ski masks and string bikinis – assault the mansion of Alien’s

rival, Archie. Alien is shot to death almost immediately, but Brit and Candy aren’t phased. They don’t even look at one another to reconfirm their commitment to the assault, but simply continue on the warpath, decimating Archie’s gang and killing Archie in his bathtub. Only on their way out of the mansion do they pause to bid Alien goodbye, gently kissing him before running off into the night.

Skyfall

Perhaps the best way for Bond films to remain interesting is for their continual reinvention. Skyfall, the latest entry in the franchise, is certainly interesting, and often quite good. It contains most of the trappings of a typical Bond film: classy, gorgeous women; ritzy social milieu (a casino, in this case); a misanthropic, playboy antagonist with a grandiose lair; location shooting; tuxedos; a suspenseful introductory action sequence; espionage; assassinations; chases; mayhem, and so on.

However, it dispenses with most of these conventions within about an hour or so of the film, and then becomes something else entirely. There are many ways in which the film diverges from convention. Early in the film, we see Bond in his off-hours. Apparently he seeks an adrenaline rush in both business and leisure, judging by his new drink of choice: whiskey consumed under threat of scorpion bite. Bond has lost a step, and fails both physical and psychological evaluations. A potential femme fatale figure is introduced, but then removed almost just as quickly – Bond cannot save her. Bond discovers the villain’s lair, but doesn’t destroy it, and then calls for backup. Bond’s only high-tech gadget: a gun locked to his palm print. Later, Bond does not play on offense, but defense, and the action takes place not in an exotic location, but London, and then later Scotland. We learn a smattering of Bond’s history and upbringing, such as his parents’ names and his growing up an orphan. The film’s climax does not involve Bond foiling grandiose, world-changing plans, but stopping an (admittedly elaborate) revenge murder, and is equal parts Bond film, Home Alone, and MacGyver. Finally, Bond simultaneously both succeeds and fails at foiling these plans.

All of these deviation from convention make this the most human Bond has ever seemed (perhaps outside of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and in my opinion, he's better for it.

Other thoughts:

- My god, Roger Deakins is a wizard. Skyfall is resplendent, every image lovingly kissed by his amazing cinematography. Two scenes are particularly breathtaking. The first has Bond sneaking up on an assassin in a Shanghai high-rise at night. Gigantic, neon advertisements dance past the windows and reflect off the glass, silhouetting Bond’s target, and surrounding Bond in a kaleidoscope of liquid-smooth pastels. The second is at the Bond estate in Scotland. The setting begins grayed in fog, but then night falls, explosions ensue, and the rest of the climax is illuminated by the warm yellow-orange glow of a raging fire. White tendrils of breath stream from Bond and company, who are lit as if the fog itself were ablaze.

- Javier Bardem is excellent. His calm, knowing, yet gentle air of superiority is continually refreshing. The only shame is that there isn't more of him.

The Avengers

I also watch movies every now and then. I saw The Avengers yesterday, and had enough thoughts about the film that I decided to put some of them on paper. Overall, although it starts slow, the film’s action set-pieces more than makes up for its initial clunkiness, as do the ever-present Whedonesque touches of cleverness and humor, almost always stemming from the various characters’ personalities and the way in which they engage with one another.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. The first 45 minutes or so are somewhat lumbering, which can be partially blamed on the film’s needing to pick up where all of the major characters’ solo features left off. However, not all of the blame can be placed at the feet of the film’s position in regard to its predecessors. The film’s very first narrative material concerns a deal made between Loki and the (evil) forces dictating the terms of his return to Earth, but it is rushed, and strangely withholds Loki’s identity, a needless restriction since Loki appears just a few minutes later in the film’s next scene. Additionally, much of the action at the soon-to-be-destroyed S.H.E.I.L.D. base is overly concerned with the film’s MacGuffin, a cube of energy called the Tesseract.

While he is menacing, Loki is somewhat of a strange choice for a villain (if one partially determined by the preceding films); despite Whedon’s bona fides concerning supernatural forces, Loki does not connect well to the kind of personal conflict at which Whedon excels, and which gives much of the Marvel universe its tremendous appeal. Marvel heroes have superhero-level problems, of course, but unlike the characters in many DC comics, they also often remain grounded in the problems of everyday life, or are often analogues for how people can feel at different times in their lives (the X-Men and teenagehood, for instance), which is a part of what makes Marvel characters so appealing. The first two Spider-Man films are exemplary; they did a wonderful job of relating the threats represented by their respective super villains to Peter Parker’s struggles as a person and a hero. Aside from some humorous parallels between Tony Stark and Loki, and the familial tension between Loki and Thor, much of that sort of connection between Loki and the heroes is missing from The Avengers. To certain extent, this is somewhat inevitable, given that the Avengers consists of a group of otherwise unrelated heroes who assemble only to take on threats bigger than any single one of them could handle alone, and it is admirable that the film is able to make it personal for as many of them as it does. Nonetheless, for many of the film’s characters, it does not feel like much is at stake in Loki’s particular threat aside from the routine need for good to triumph over evil; any other interpersonal conflicts the film explores (and thankfully, there are many) merely seem to be happenstance. While Loki occasionally has the opportunity to display his particular brand of maliciousness (trickery), his grasp of human psychology seems tenuous at best. His gibberish about humans being made for subjugation is particularly void of merit; super villains are often more compelling when there’s something substantive at the core of the beliefs that motivate them to their heinous acts. However, that’s the last of anything even mildly negative about the film.

Much of what makes the film work so well is the mileage Whedon is able to get out of interpersonal conflict amongst the Avengers themselves, and the friction generated when so many powerful and well-developed characters are put into a room together (a staple of any Marvel super team). In addition to Loki, each of the characters faces more personal struggles stemming from their pasts, their personalities, or their powers. Whdeon seems to have had the most fun writing for Iron Man and Hulk. Tony Stark is the closest equivalent the film has to a quipster (a stock Whedon character), whereas Hulk nicely serves many different dramatic functions (and gets nearly all of the film’s biggest laughs). More than any of the others, Bruce Banner is tortured by his “superpower,” which in itself provides good dramatic material, as does the unease it creates in his allies. As the strongest and wildest character in the Marvel universe, the other characters are rightly afraid of the potential for the Hulk to become unleashed in a contained space, and the film’s lengthy middle, aboard a flying S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft carrier, gains much of its gravitas from the possibility of Banner losing control and Hulking out. This gravitas is paid off nicely when Banner does indeed transform, with only a terrified Black Widow around to serve as the focus for his rage. This is a particularly smart choice; she is the least super-powered of the group, relying on martial artistry, subterfuge, and psychological manipulation to achieve her ends (we see this repeatedly in her interrogation methods), so she has no other recourse but to flee in terror when confronted with an unstoppable, unreasonable, irrational force (and her terror is very well-played by Scar Jo, who shakes visibly after nearly getting destroyed).

The climactic battle is particularly masterful, pitting the Avengers against an invading army of aliens flowing through a wormhole into the streets and skies of New York. It is worth a detailed discussion, as it is one of the best team-oriented superhero action scenes I’ve seen – much better than anything on offer in the X-Men films, for example. Whedon is able to clearly convey how the team works as a cohesive unit both stylistically and narratively. Captain America serves an important function in this regard. As the battle commences, he takes charge, and dictates to the audience as much as to the other members of the Avengers what role of each of them will play in the following fracas, making the action much more comprehensible, both by making it easy to understand where certain actions are taking place in relation to one another, as well as why the film’s six heroes are able to corral an invading army of soldiers on hover-chariots and giant, flying, armored space worms. Once we know where each of the heroes will be, and what they will be doing, crosscutting back and forth between them is not confusing, nor is the way in which they communicate with each other (although the cohesiveness of the heroes’ plans does not make the invaders’ plan of attack any clearer, beyond “destroy cars and create fireballs”). Additionally, Captain America’s orders have the added bonus of clearly delineating the strengths of each of the superheroes, which in turn further supports the clarity of subsequent action.

Iron Man, the swiftest and most mobile of the bunch, is on perimeter duty, and it’s his job to prevent any enemies he faces from escaping a three-block radius. Thor is charged (nyuk nyuk) with using his command of lightning to bottleneck the wormhole that’s transporting the invaders to New York. Hawkeye is perhaps the most crucial of the bunch, as he takes the high ground and serves as a watchtower, picking off the occasional foe, but mostly alerting the other heroes (and viewers) of the status and whereabouts of clusters of invaders, civilians, and each of the heroes whereabouts in relation to one another. He’s largely the reason that the battle does not become illegible and incredulous – the heroes know where to go and what to do because of his vantage point, and he enables viewers to piece together individual skirmishes into a larger picture of the overall conflict. Black Widow and Captain America hold the center, duking it out with whatever invaders get past Thor, although Black Widow soon takes it upon herself to close the wormhole. And in a funny line, Captain America gives Hulk the only order he can really follow: “Smash.” Effectively, the Hulk functions as a wildcard, running amok throughout the battle, taking out both the human-sized invaders and the giant space worms, and in an extremely crowd-pleasing moment, even giving Loki a brutal thrashing.* Later, he is joined in his rampage by Thor.

However, this battle's impact is not derived solely from our understanding of the role each of these heroes serves; its grace also derives from film style. There are many shots in which we observe one hero battling the invaders, and though camera movement or the use of different spatial planes, another hero enters the frame, either battling their own set of enemies or supporting another hero who is about to be overwhelmed. The most visceral of such shots are those in which the battle is on the move through the air, weaving in, out, and around the buildings of New York. Three of the six characters can more or less fly (Iron Man is a rocket, while Thor and Hulk can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and Black Widow eventually steals a hover-chariot), creating the opportunity for shots in which Hulk or Thor are battling atop the back of a giant space-worm in the middle ground, and where Iron Man swoops into the frame in the foreground, shooting down hover-chariots in pursuit of Black Widow. Combined, all of these factors – our cognizance of the location and role of the heroes, their ability to communicate with and support one another, and the film’s graceful maneuverings between various segments of the action – do an excellent job of conveying the epic scale and scope of this confrontation, and the need for so many heroes of such high caliber to work together to stop it. This battle effective conveys what the Avengers were always meant to do in the comics – meet the challenges any of them would not be able to face alone in their solo titles, while also simultaneously overcoming their own personal shortcomings. As such, it’s a worthy adaptation that far exceeds the quality of any of these heroes’ individual feature films thus far. 

*The film is careful to demonstrate that the Hulk is triggered both by making Banner angry, but also as a sort of autonomic defense system – Banner will transform whenever he is placed in life-threatening situations, even ones of his own devising. However, to put on my nerd glasses for a moment, the film could have been a little clearer in explaining the degree of control to which the Hulk can be subjected. My (somewhat layman) understanding is that he’s like an overpowered toddler: you can give him suggestions and hope the he listens to them (relatively easy to do when his only instruction is to smash things), but that he can also have tantrums and focus his rage on whatever is closest at hand. The former describes the last scene of the film when, he is given free rein to smash, while the latter describes the middle section, where Banner is attacked on board the airship and loses control, and where only Black Widow has the misfortune of being nearby when it happens (fortunately for her, this film also has Thor).