Mid-January Media: Movies
Jan. 21st, 2018 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironic
My Own Private Idaho
First of all, I'd been mixing this up with Stand By Me, another River Phoenix movie I've never seen. Second, I couldn't remember why I'd bumped this up in my Netflix DVD queue until halfway through, when Udo Kier danced with a table lamp while lip-synching. (I'd seen the scene on YouTube.)
THIRD, I had no idea this story about street hustlers in Seattle and Portland was also a loose, modern adaptation of Henry IV??? It was hard to tell what was going on at first, since the opening 20+ minutes were about River Phoenix's narcolepsy, search for his long-lost mother, and crush on Keanu Reeves, while director Gus van Sant made a series of oddball style choices, from affected line delivery to diner monologues about side characters' bad experiences with clients to a conversation held among the hustlers while they appeared as cover models on skin mags on a shop rack. Then this vaunted character Bob appeared, and suddenly people were speaking in verse? And then not? And then doing it again? And drinking Falstaff-brand beer? And it became clear that Keanu, also cast two years later in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, was Prince Hal, bumming around with the street kids before going straight and inheriting his father's corporate fortune, while Bob served as Sir John? And Keanu and River robbed the robbers and laughed as Bob's recap got ever wilder? And not-Mistress Quickly wore motley, as did Bob once or twice under his trench coat? And Keanu spurned Bob at a classy bar after he took the "crown"? And more? And in between, all the Shakespeare faded away as we returned to River's story and took a side trip to Rome.
What a wacky mashup. It shouldn't have worked, this three- or four-time code switching—unsurprising to read that van Sant smushed together two projects—and yet the whole movie was so strange, it did. For me, anyway. It also reminded me a little of Lars von Trier, or a less nihilistic Lars von Trier, if that's possible, in, for example, its ironic use of American folk music and its one-two concluding slaps of "people will hurt you" and "people might help you, but does it matter when your heart's been broken?"
Life (2017)
I'd been interested in this movie since hearing a NASA staffer speak at a conference about real-life development of quarantine protocols for when scientists want to study an extraterrestrial sample without contaminating Earth or contaminating the object with Earth—for instance, if there's a possibility the sample contains life. One strategy would be to bring it aboard the International Space Station and examine it there, and this became the premise of Life. The speaker had either consulted on this (then-forthcoming) movie or knew the person who'd done so. So it was fun to get my hands on the DVD and see what the Hollywood machine did with—or to—the science.
Plot summary: Semi-diverse ISS crew takes aboard a Martian sample containing what looks like a single-celled organism; life is confirmed; the thing grows and evolves and instigates a series of cascading quarantine failures; and then we've got a space monster movie as the characters die one by one while making bad choices, including, of course, all the non-white and non-British/American ones, most notably Ariyon Bakare after an injury that was hard to watch. Similar structure to Sunshine, but not as good. Eventually, Earth's fate lies in the hands of Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson, who have overlooked a whopping big problem with their last-ditch effort to preserve the quarantine. Ryan Reynolds was also there. Verdict: three stars out of five, including one for effort.
Passengers
A.k.a. the one everyone was irritated about because misogyny.
IIRC, this movie was marketed as a science fiction romance where two characters accidentally wake up a lifetime too early on a generation ship headed to a colony planet—except moviegoers were in an uproar because in fact Chris Pratt was the only one whose hibernation pod malfunctioned, and he grew so lonely that he decided to destroy sexy stranger Jennifer Lawrence's pod so she could keep him company.
So, yeah. That's bad. I decided to try the movie anyway to see if the criticism was justified, and it was. But it also could have been worse? But it also could have been better. Ugh.
The Forbes article covers it well, but here is a pro-con list of my viewing experience anyway:
(+) Most of the movie turned out to be about the decision and its ramifications.
(+) Chris Pratt agonized over whether waking someone else could ever be justified.
(-) He fetishized this stranger in a pod, read her personal records and envisioned an ideal version of her who would of course fall in love with him.
(-) Why did we have to be in a dude's POV for this whole internal debate? Did I care about his pain? Did I continue to care about his pain when it took the form of obsessing over his mental construct of a woman? Was I supposed to agree his loneliness meant more than the wellbeing of the other 5,000 passengers? He tried to walk out an airlock, but he couldn't go through with it. I wish he'd tried but been stymied by a safety protocol. Would have made him more sympathetic.
(-) When she woke up, Jennifer Lawrence was exactly as he'd imagined.
(-) And she did fall in love with him, instead of (a) being uninterested in romance—either in general, given the circumstances, or with him in particular—or (b) recognizing that he's a stalker who's barely hanging on to his sanity. Or (c) being a bad match.
(+) She FREAKED OUT when she learned the truth.
(-) ...which he did not tell her himself.
(+) She screamed at him, and hid, and pressed a briefly also-awake Laurence Fishburne to agree that what Chris Pratt had done should be considered murder.
(-) Laurence Fishburne is black, so he died.
(-) There commenced an emergency that required self-sacrifice. Whereas Chris Pratt had been unable to take his own life back when he was alone, something something love taught him something something bigger than himself. Jennifer Lawrence, who had until that point been practical and invested in human life, became willing to let the entire population of the ship die so she could go down with him.
(+) You know what would have been better? If she'd been freaking out because she didn't want to be alone, period, so before she let him risk his life she'd made him tell her how to sabotage someone else's pod. It's not you who matters, Chris Pratt, it's having another human being around.
(-) Anyway, of course he lived, and she fell back in love with him because near-death experience I guess, and then she chose to stay in love with him over going back into hibernation even though it meant throwing away her life's work and never being able to see the colony planet. The end.
(-) This is what happens when you have a movie made by a bunch of dudes about a dude. So many dudes in the closing credits.
(+) It was... still... an original SF movie.
(+/-) Michael Sheen was also there, playing a robot. His face had so much makeup, it looked like he was half CGI.
(+) Secondary message of the movie: Capitalism is crappy! Money-grubbing corporations stratify your onboard privileges based on disposable income, cut corners in spaceship construction, and nickel and dime you when you need to send an emergency communication home. Who knows what that company-run colony planet would have been like anyway.
First of all, I'd been mixing this up with Stand By Me, another River Phoenix movie I've never seen. Second, I couldn't remember why I'd bumped this up in my Netflix DVD queue until halfway through, when Udo Kier danced with a table lamp while lip-synching. (I'd seen the scene on YouTube.)
THIRD, I had no idea this story about street hustlers in Seattle and Portland was also a loose, modern adaptation of Henry IV??? It was hard to tell what was going on at first, since the opening 20+ minutes were about River Phoenix's narcolepsy, search for his long-lost mother, and crush on Keanu Reeves, while director Gus van Sant made a series of oddball style choices, from affected line delivery to diner monologues about side characters' bad experiences with clients to a conversation held among the hustlers while they appeared as cover models on skin mags on a shop rack. Then this vaunted character Bob appeared, and suddenly people were speaking in verse? And then not? And then doing it again? And drinking Falstaff-brand beer? And it became clear that Keanu, also cast two years later in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, was Prince Hal, bumming around with the street kids before going straight and inheriting his father's corporate fortune, while Bob served as Sir John? And Keanu and River robbed the robbers and laughed as Bob's recap got ever wilder? And not-Mistress Quickly wore motley, as did Bob once or twice under his trench coat? And Keanu spurned Bob at a classy bar after he took the "crown"? And more? And in between, all the Shakespeare faded away as we returned to River's story and took a side trip to Rome.
What a wacky mashup. It shouldn't have worked, this three- or four-time code switching—unsurprising to read that van Sant smushed together two projects—and yet the whole movie was so strange, it did. For me, anyway. It also reminded me a little of Lars von Trier, or a less nihilistic Lars von Trier, if that's possible, in, for example, its ironic use of American folk music and its one-two concluding slaps of "people will hurt you" and "people might help you, but does it matter when your heart's been broken?"
Life (2017)
I'd been interested in this movie since hearing a NASA staffer speak at a conference about real-life development of quarantine protocols for when scientists want to study an extraterrestrial sample without contaminating Earth or contaminating the object with Earth—for instance, if there's a possibility the sample contains life. One strategy would be to bring it aboard the International Space Station and examine it there, and this became the premise of Life. The speaker had either consulted on this (then-forthcoming) movie or knew the person who'd done so. So it was fun to get my hands on the DVD and see what the Hollywood machine did with—or to—the science.
Plot summary: Semi-diverse ISS crew takes aboard a Martian sample containing what looks like a single-celled organism; life is confirmed; the thing grows and evolves and instigates a series of cascading quarantine failures; and then we've got a space monster movie as the characters die one by one while making bad choices, including, of course, all the non-white and non-British/American ones, most notably Ariyon Bakare after an injury that was hard to watch. Similar structure to Sunshine, but not as good. Eventually, Earth's fate lies in the hands of Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson, who have overlooked a whopping big problem with their last-ditch effort to preserve the quarantine. Ryan Reynolds was also there. Verdict: three stars out of five, including one for effort.
Passengers
A.k.a. the one everyone was irritated about because misogyny.
IIRC, this movie was marketed as a science fiction romance where two characters accidentally wake up a lifetime too early on a generation ship headed to a colony planet—except moviegoers were in an uproar because in fact Chris Pratt was the only one whose hibernation pod malfunctioned, and he grew so lonely that he decided to destroy sexy stranger Jennifer Lawrence's pod so she could keep him company.
So, yeah. That's bad. I decided to try the movie anyway to see if the criticism was justified, and it was. But it also could have been worse? But it also could have been better. Ugh.
The Forbes article covers it well, but here is a pro-con list of my viewing experience anyway:
(+) Most of the movie turned out to be about the decision and its ramifications.
(+) Chris Pratt agonized over whether waking someone else could ever be justified.
(-) He fetishized this stranger in a pod, read her personal records and envisioned an ideal version of her who would of course fall in love with him.
(-) Why did we have to be in a dude's POV for this whole internal debate? Did I care about his pain? Did I continue to care about his pain when it took the form of obsessing over his mental construct of a woman? Was I supposed to agree his loneliness meant more than the wellbeing of the other 5,000 passengers? He tried to walk out an airlock, but he couldn't go through with it. I wish he'd tried but been stymied by a safety protocol. Would have made him more sympathetic.
(-) When she woke up, Jennifer Lawrence was exactly as he'd imagined.
(-) And she did fall in love with him, instead of (a) being uninterested in romance—either in general, given the circumstances, or with him in particular—or (b) recognizing that he's a stalker who's barely hanging on to his sanity. Or (c) being a bad match.
(+) She FREAKED OUT when she learned the truth.
(-) ...which he did not tell her himself.
(+) She screamed at him, and hid, and pressed a briefly also-awake Laurence Fishburne to agree that what Chris Pratt had done should be considered murder.
(-) Laurence Fishburne is black, so he died.
(-) There commenced an emergency that required self-sacrifice. Whereas Chris Pratt had been unable to take his own life back when he was alone, something something love taught him something something bigger than himself. Jennifer Lawrence, who had until that point been practical and invested in human life, became willing to let the entire population of the ship die so she could go down with him.
(+) You know what would have been better? If she'd been freaking out because she didn't want to be alone, period, so before she let him risk his life she'd made him tell her how to sabotage someone else's pod. It's not you who matters, Chris Pratt, it's having another human being around.
(-) Anyway, of course he lived, and she fell back in love with him because near-death experience I guess, and then she chose to stay in love with him over going back into hibernation even though it meant throwing away her life's work and never being able to see the colony planet. The end.
(-) This is what happens when you have a movie made by a bunch of dudes about a dude. So many dudes in the closing credits.
(+) It was... still... an original SF movie.
(+/-) Michael Sheen was also there, playing a robot. His face had so much makeup, it looked like he was half CGI.
(+) Secondary message of the movie: Capitalism is crappy! Money-grubbing corporations stratify your onboard privileges based on disposable income, cut corners in spaceship construction, and nickel and dime you when you need to send an emergency communication home. Who knows what that company-run colony planet would have been like anyway.
