In The Future Past

I could, in actual fact, not have been anymore excited for X-Men: Days of Future Past than I was. It could have been fucking killer. I don't care for the X-Men films as entertainment or art. No one should. They're neither. We all know what we go to those movies for. Names. Endless slews of the silliest names ever written down delivered with gravitas usually reserved for announcing the death toll following a natural disaster. "There's a very powerful mutant named Erik Lensherr, known as Magneto." "This is Doctor Jean Grey." "Logan!" "Scott, don't." "Jean" "Logan, meet Hank McCoy." "Jean?" "Jean." Can't get enough names. For years now I've cracked up in public at the mere thought of Patrick Stewart looking into a camera and saying "Dr. Jean Grey."  No one says "Dr. Jean Grey" better than Patrick Stewart. Sadly he doesn't say it in Days of Future Past. No one does. That's problem number one. There are a bunch more. The biggest issue I have with the X-Men movies is that they want to be taken seriously. What's that they say about people who are always quick to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust? Well Bryan Singer does it right out of the gate in the first X-Men, announcing to everyone that Marvel Movies were serious art and needed to be considered so. And they're called Graphic Novels! While he was doing this he was also evidently molesting teenage boys on an island. I believe the victims who've come forward and said this. Why? Because the man who made X-Men: Days of Future Past quite plainly suffers from arrested development of the sort that cop shows always tell me is endemic to child rapists. In fairness I might wake up tomorrow and find that Singer's innocent, but he'll still be a terrible director. He'll always be a terrible director. I used to think his success was harmless enough. Those days are over. You might say they're in the future past, if you were a stupid asshole. 

It bears repeating that this movie is called Days of Future Past. Adults, many of them, said, "yeah, great." In college my friend and Apocalypse Now's TV critic Tucker Johnson made a short movie called Time Cops. It's still on youtube if you're curious. In that dumb fucking bullshit, I say the words "Future Past" in a voice strongly redolent of Roger Rabbit's cousin from the Bronx. Let's call him Salvatore Rabbit. That, like "Future Past" was a bad joke. One that I came up with as soon as Tucker said "I'm rolling." The whole film took five minutes to write and shoot. What excuse do the makers of this movie have? I'd like to know. And can we talk about Dawn of Justice? But seriously folks. I had a fine enough time giggling like a dickhead at the first twenty-five minutes of dumb shit and there are good performances buried in here, but let's not lose sight of what a fundamentally lazy and awful movie this is. 

Open on characters wearing fetish gear with painted faces. Capes are used a lot. Some of them are half-capes. You know, like in Schindler's List. They run around and get properly murdered and then we're reintroduced to characters we all know because we're sitting in the audience. We've seen the X-Men movies because we can't get enough of the rapid fire name-dropping of fictional characters. That was established above but I'm restating it for you in case you skipped to this paragraph. The same way Singer assumes at random that we don't know what the fuck is going on. Rather than explain his rip-off apocalypse, the one he stole from the even more boring Matrix movies, right down to the name of his evil drones, he proceeds to tell us a lot of stuff we already know. 

"The apocalypse starts in 1973. 1973. You've got to go back to 1973." says Patrick Stewart. Then he says it again. Then again. And once more. And then again. It's no "This is Doctor Jean Gray," but I still laughed like an idiot everytime he said it. "Hi, I'm Wolverine, you might not know this but I regenerate after being wounded." He doesn't say this to us, which, might have actually been helpful to newbie audience members, he says this to the people he's spent every day of the last ten years with. That's just smart writing. These mutants, who were ok the last time we saw them, are now being hunted by drones who were never a thing before now. Why? Because Singer's liberal enough to invoke the holocaust, piss on Obama's leg about drones, and then sexually assault young men. Don't get me wrong, every filmmaker who's made a movie about the evils of drones was right to do so. Where were y'all during the Bush administration? If you're Bryan Singer I guess you were sexually assaulting young men on your private island and making holocaust movies starring Tom Cruise. And how dare this guy make movies whose message is: "it's ok to be different" when you were ensuring that kids had to walk around with secrets like one of your mutants. For a culture that treats women like an afterthought most of the time, we still made a huge deal out of Woody Allen's rape scandal. As we should have. Why aren't we making a bigger deal out of Singer's? Because this country has even less time for gay men than it does women? Great. 

After Patrick Stewart narrates us into the future, the film picks up a lot of stupid momentum and never lets go. This is good because it gets us away from Bryan Singer painting the faces of young people so they look like anime characters and giving everyone a cape. It also gets us to the real acting. Ellen Page is fine, nothing bad to say about her. There was once a time when Halle Berry was above this. Not anymore. She fits the milieu perfectly. Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen look shockingly like two men waiting to get back to the Cort and finish their run of Waiting For Godot. Hugh Jackman, wisely realizing that after The Wolverine he was never going to be in a better movie about this character, has thrown in the towel. He can't stop smirking at everything, he doesn't scowl anymore, he seems to have bought into the premise so deeply that he's currently in the mind of his younger self on a beach spending all that sweet, sweet X-Men money. Good for him. He just happens to look like a terrible actor because he's caught between James MacAvoy and Michael Fassbender, both of them GOING FOR IT. Like Oliver Reed before them, neither man knows the meaning of phoning it in. McAvoy is all wet earnestness and Fassbender is absolutely terrifying as a man who knows he's capable of getting what he wants. Good on Matthew Vaughn for casting them. Singer gets no credit because he squeezes them into a film so fucking goofy it couldn't begin to earn them. The only thing I'm willing to give Singer credit for is a half-great sequence where silver-haired Whiplash or whatever his name is goes around a wet room changing minute details, set to Jim Croce. The problem with that is he's listening to the song on...what? A portable 8 track? I heard the word "1973" fifty eight hundred times before anyone went back in time, so how could you, the director, have possibly forgotten when your goddamn movie is set? And besides it's too shiny and plastic and safe, like the rest of the movie. Jennifer Lawrence is largely pretty awful, for which there's no excuse as she's a great actress. Singer didn't direct her performance, just her tits and ass in that blue body suit. Like any adult might. Who needs to make sure his lead actress doesn't look ridiculous when he can ensure that she looks like a perverse fanboy wetdream. It's Amy Adams in American Hustle all over again. At a certain point it's not filmmaking, it's just pointing a camera at a prop and fuck you. Also, she's the film's only female character other than Ellen Page, who gets maybe ten minutes of screentime. Awesome. 

How do you fall asleep at the wheel when your car cost a half a billion dollars? It's not just careless, it's fucking rude. McAvoy's young Professor X reads the thoughts of people gathered for fat, melty-faced president Nixon's address. One young woman's thoughts: "I'm Pregnant." To quote every critic on twitter: Are you? Are you pregnant? When the drones are revealed some marines salute them, including a headband wearing hippie who could be Ron Kovic. Fuck off. The drones themselves look like child-friendly versions of something out of Trigun, and in no way resemble anything from before 1985. They also see in MS-DOS. What year is it supposed to be again? I forget. He quotes Apocalypse Now (the gall), he rips off Terminator 2, he claims JFK's a mutant, he pays backhanded compliments to Nixon, he lets Fassbender exit by floating away and lifting his arms as if to say "I don't know anymore." Me fucking neither. 

I never liked Singer. I hate The Usual Suspects, which is approximately weird men in well-lit rooms talking up a plot that never shows. Forgettable doesn't even begin to cover the likes of Valkyrie and Superman Returns. Did anyone like Jack The Giant Killer? I guess someone must, right? One thing is clear throughout his work, the fetishization of handsome supermen. He was never good but he's been getting worse ever since X-Men, which truly does look like Schindler's List next to The Usual Suspects and Days of Future Past. The strongest scenes in Days that don't involve McAvoy and Fassbender involve well-dressed men standing in small groups. Not much to hang a film on. Singer is a man obsessed by a fantasy world he refuses to leave, both on and off screen. It just so happens that all this time his ineffable mediocrity was the least of his crimes. I'm sure those box office figures are going to seem like a comfort so allow me to be the first to say: You're not an artist, you deserve to go to jail, and your boring, sloppy movies will be forgotten long before your sexual assault charges. 

Ramblin' 'bout Amblin: Schindler's List

The list is an absolute good. The list is life.

Steven Spielberg did not want to direct this film. The filmmaker doubted his maturity level and saw the film as too important for him to leave his mark on. He tried to pass the project onto a number of other filmmakers including Roman Polanski who's mother was killed at Auschwitz, as well as Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese. Scorsese was actually attached to direct the film for some time before Spielberg's conscience got the better of him. Spielberg believed he'd "given away a chance to do something for my children and family about the Holocaust" and using Cape Fear as a bargaining chip, was able to re-establish his place at the film's helm. His final push to direct came from the rise of neo-Nazism after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the growing numbe of Holocaust deniers. Already having gotten more in touch with his faith while raising his children, Schindler's List may have actually come at the perfect time for Spielberg. He pushed Jurassic Park to the top of his priority list knowing he wouldn't be able to move to a new project for a long time once Schindler was completed.

Moving into production Spielberg left no stone unturned to make sure audiences felt the personal and political weight the story carried for him. He sought out a number ancestors of the Schindler Jews to play roles in the film. The script itself boasts 126 speaking roles and over the course of shooting over 30,000 extras were hired, many of which were Holocaust survivors themselves. The film's producers were tasked with finding as many of the people portrayed in the film as possible after Spielberg conceived the idea of the film's epilogue.

I realize that's a lot of trivia but I think it's incredibly important to know how personal this film was to Spielberg. Looking back on his career prior to Schindler's List it's hard to believe that he'd even be capable of a film that took on this type of subject matter. Even his most personal films up to this point had been lighthearted if not adventurous. Schindler's List is not only one of the most important American films ever made but also a clear turning point in Spielberg's career. A point where, save for a few films, many of his projects became much darker and more serious in nature. What's amazing though is despite the film's heavy nature it's still incredibly watchable. Spielberg has this incredible ability to make cinematic masterpieces from even the darkest material and never pulling punches. Schindler's List never lacks in its ability to wrench the heart and it does so often.

My favorite thing about this film is the way that Spielberg decided to shoot it. He partnered with Janusz Kaminski (the cinematographer Spielberg now works with exclusively) and told the film's story the way that history does: in black and white images. Like photos from books or a museum, Schindler's List presents a story told in timeless fashion. Using handheld, almost gonzo techniques, the film looks more like a documentary than a prestige picture and because of this doesn't have any kind of time stamp on it. Watching this film with no knowledge of the few famous faces within gives no sign of what year it was created and it makes the material presented all the more powerful. You can't pull out bad CGI from the 90's. You can't pull out that famous single that was all the rage when the producers were trying to figure out how to market the film. Schindler packs so much more of a wallop because of all these choices. I truly feel its one of his most "Spielbergian" films. By that I mean there's nothing diluting his creative process. There are no crane hots. There are no silly action scenes. This film is pure Spielberg and paired with the fact that it's undoubtedly his most personal film, Schindler's List is one of the most important films out there.

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Ramblin' 'bout Amblin: Empire of the Sun

Spielberg's first stab at a World War II drama is an odd duck of a film. Beginning it's production in the same way that Jaws did, Spielberg pushed to direct the film after originally signing on to produce for David Lean. 
So begins a pseudo trilogy of World War II dramas from Spielberg (the others being Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan).

Empire of the Sun is an attempted epic in scope. The story follows a young boy over the course of several years as he goes from living in a wealthy British family in Shanghai to becoming a prisoner of war in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center. Spielberg has actually gone on record to call the film his most profound work on the loss of innocence and though definitely see that that's the film's message it does too much meandering to really drive the point home efficiently.

The film clocks in at 154 minutes. The first act of the film grabs up about 45 of those minutes. In that time Jamie (Christian Bale) loses touch with his family when they're separated in a riot, fends for himself by squatting in the abandoned mansions of family friends and then finally surrenders when starvation seems the only other option. Somehow though the film manages to be completely uninteresting though all of that. The riot sequence has plenty of fire fights, and war machines but it all plays out as very stale. Spielberg hardly captures the horror of a child being separated from his parents. The whole film really does lack for any real emotional attachment. The problem is that outcome would be brilliant if it were intended. If I felt that detached walking out of a story about a boy losing everything including his own sense of humanity and the director was just standing at the theater exit laughing maniacally, I'd adore that film forever. 

Unfortunately thats just not the case with Empire. Late in the film the base is "saved" by a number of US planes. Bale's character (and I'll say now before I forget that Bale does a wonderful job in this film and without his great performance it'd be a total loss) after having been abandoned by everyone in his life, and learning that stealing from the dying to save the living is part of this new existence has a conniption when he actually sees the American fighter planes. He shouts and screams with excitement like only a child can do. Its the most moving moment in the film. The problem is it doesn't work with the story that Spielberg is trying to tell. Bale's character loves planes with all his heart and though I'll never stomp on a child's happiness I really wanted to see him ignore the planes. To see them soar over his head and instead of being happy, he continues about his routine of survival. 

I have to make an aside about John Malkovich in this film. His performance is wonderful as always but in a movie that really defines vanilla his character is one of the grayest complex people I've ever witnessed on film. I really wish the story moved passed Bale's youth and into his adulthood so that we could see more of Malkovich in person and more of him develop in Jamie.

I'm really ripping on the film here but I must reinforce that it's hardly a loss. Spielberg's craft is the best I've seen it so far in this chronological run through his films. He tells a long(winded) story and manages total control over some huge settings and character's. The amateur mistakes of Jaws and the campy nature of the Indiana Jones films have been left by the wayside to make a very professional-looking war epic. The trouble definitely resides in a script that keeps telling the audience it should be feeling but never really works hard enough to illicit that much emotion out of anyone.

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