Whiplash, or Why I'm Glad I Can Only Play the Radio

Andrew is a newly-admitted student to the Schaffer Conservatory, a music school that he hopes will make the most of his drumming skills and open the world of jazz for him so that he can become the star he’s dreamed of being. The best, most selective band is run by Terrence Fletcher, played by J. K. Simmons.

Andrew’s dreams look like they are coming true. He is given the opportunity to be an alternate in the band, and when he shows that he is the better drummer, he becomes a core member. At least that’s what he thinks. He works himself to the bone—this movie takes “blood, sweat and tears” to a new musical level.

Fletcher is a cruel and intimidating taskmaster who plays with his students’ minds and hearts. He uses everything he knows about them to hurt them, with the mantra that he is making them work harder and play better. He pits them against each other and cows them into complete submission.

Whiplash is a powerful film with amazing performances and unusual use of both music and visuals. The tension between the characters, between ambition and madness, between pushing students for greatness and abusing them, are palpable and interesting.

There's good reason that J.K. Simmons was nominated for best actor--he shifts from shadow to shadow effortlessly, so intense, so slippery. Even though we’re pretty sure Fletcher is a horrible man, we still question along with Andrew whether there might be something more important going on.

The meanness, the insults, the language, the physical trauma are punishing to watch at times. But still you want to know what is going to come of all this, and you can’t help but be wrapped up in the tension. At first you see Andrew as the innocent, and he seems like a sympathetic character. With time, however, you realize that he is not as dissimilar from Fletcher as it seemed in the beginning.

My husband pointed out that the hole in the plot is that truly great musicians collaborate and have joy in creating the music together. So the top band in the school, that has made such a name for itself, couldn't possibly be great if everyone was utterly miserable. The writer/director apparently based it on his own Princeton High School Studio Band, which must make his alma mater feel so warm and fuzzy about it all. Makes me a little less sad that the string bass and the violin have been left by the wayside by a couple of my offspring.

See it if you really enjoy great acting performances and if it doesn’t bother you that you don’t like any of the characters all that much. There’s nothing uplifting about it. These are people with a singular obsession that is so self-focused, so much about being the “best,” that I find them very hard to relate to. The strength of the film is that I kind of do.

And, J. K. Simmons. Seriously.

"Citizenfour" and Our Freedom of Expression

Citizenfour is the story of how Edward Snowden became the whistleblower and/or traitor of the NSA. This documentary starts with Snowden contacting reporters anonymously, trying to find someone he could talk to with a safe connection. The first reporter he attempted to contact could not establish a safe enough connection for his requirements, so he moved on to Laura Poitras, the documentary maker.

Laura Poistras had made an earlier documentary about life in Iraq under U.S. occupation, and as she began her second film about the trial of a man held at Guantanamo Bay, she began to be detained when she crossed the U.S. border. She says she moved to Berlin to avoid having her cameras and files seized. Her efforts to document reality and her experience with the Department of Homeland Security led Snowden to believe that she would be willing to listen.

The most interesting aspect of this film is that it shows a sort of history in the making. The then 29-year-old Snowden made big headlines as he leaked the enormity of the NSA’s surveillance of world leaders as well as more average U.S. citizens. Viewers find a likeable enough young man who spends 8 days in a room at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong as reporters ask him questions and verify what he is saying, writing up stories on different aspects of his information as they continue to interview him.

Citizenfour is a very quiet movie, sticking to the hotel room and talking heads for the most part. At times, you see signs of an idealistic young man who is horrified at what his own government is doing under the banner of protecting the homeland and who is worried about the effect this will have on his family. On the other hand, there are times that you wonder whether he has crossed over the line into mental illness, as his paranoia about the reach of surveillance leads him to do things like put a blanket over his head when he types his passcode into the computer.  

 

He certainly seems to enjoy the prospect of being someone who is making a big play; he looks forward to seeing how the world reacts.

I'm not much for conspiracy theories. For the most part though, his story seems very credible, and it is astonishing to think about how much information the US collects, how government officials may have lied under testimony about what they are up to, how much money they spend on facilities to accomplish their surveillance, and how little privacy we have left.

As frightening as it is to think that our own government is spying on us, then comes the news about North Korea’s involvement in getting a big-budget movie scuttled because they were unhappy with the storyline. I might not be the biggest proponent of ridiculous comedy efforts like The Interview, but I am a proponent of free speech and thought. In both the documentary and in the controversy surrounding Sony’s withdrawal of The Interview from theaters, the “chilling effect” of governments acting as thought police comes up again and again.

I would welcome anyone else's thoughts on the Snowden events and/or the movie. This documentary is an important one as we consider the freedoms that we enjoy and the potential for losing them.

Hospitality and Doing Church in "The Overnighters"

The town of Williston, ND has experienced an influx of new people and new money in the last decade. The fracking industry has turned towns like Williston into boomtowns, while all over the United States people struggle to find work. The result? Migration.

Men from all over migrate to North Dakota in search of work, good wages, or a fresh start. Some have done time in prison and can’t get hired elsewhere; others have been sent out by their families to make a better life for the whole family.

But reality can never live up to the dream. The boom has created massive increases in the cost of living, and housing at any cost is in short supply. One pastor’s response to the need is the subject of the documentary, The Overnighters.

Jay Reinke, the pastor at the Lutheran church in Williston, sees the arrival of strangers in need as an opportunity to practice hospitality and grace. After one person needed a place for the night and stayed at the church, a new ministry began. The church welcomed people to sleep in the church itself or in their vehicles in the church parking lot while they searched for work and housing.

The pastor, who speaks eloquently for the need to help our fellow human beings and to resist the temptation to live in fear, makes some mistakes along the way, mistakes that you may have seen at any given church in any given situation. The program is never formally voted on or created—it just happens. So some people never buy in. He is also not entirely upfront with the elders about some issues because he is concerned that they will throw in the towel.

Most of the film, I sat there astounded at the way the good and the ugly of being part of a church family was so well represented here. I kept thinking “Everyone in every church should see this movie and be part of a discussion group about it.”

But there is a twist close to the end of the movie that could easily change the conversation. It left me dumbfounded that people would choose to have these particular conversations on camera. Still, if you like documentaries that make you think, and particularly if you are in a movie group, I would recommend this fascinating and sad portrait of our times.

Birdman and the Trouble with Recommending Movies

So there’s this thing that happens where critics absolutely love a movie. And then us normal people go see it, because the critics love it. And a portion of the people who go see it love it. A few of that portion love it because they were told they were going to love it. And the rest of the people who go see it come out saying “that was one weird movie.”

I figure I’m somewhere on the spectrum between critic and normal person. I often think critically-acclaimed movies are weird. I also get why critics look at movies differently, because if you see a ton of movies you start to see a lot of the same things over and over, so something unusual really stands out. I think that’s why lots of people read critics like the GR Press’s John Serba and wonder why his opinions seldom mesh with their own.

This is all a very long way of explaining my mixed reactions to movies. A few weeks ago I saw St. Vincent, which had Bill Murray behaving very badly while the neighbor boy saw more in him than anyone else. I enjoyed it very much. As a film, it had some faults—there are some flaws in its sequencing, it is predictable, and it is sentimental. But I laughed a lot, had some surprises along the way, and left with a warm feeling for my fellow human beings. It’s a movie I would recommend to a number of people, in spite of the flaws.

Last week I saw Birdman, which is also about people behaving very badly, and which gives us Michael Keaton in the best performance of his life. He plays an aging actor, Riggan Thomson, who is best known for a superhero role he had in the 90s, Birdman. Sort of like Batman, who Keaton himself played in the 90s.

The movie opens on Riggan, meditating while wearing only his tighty-whities. He is trying to make a name for himself again by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play. He is haunted by a voice that constantly tells him either what a loser he is or that he is way too good for everyone and everything around him.

Emma Stone plays Riggan’s daughter, Sam. She is fresh out of rehab, and he has hired her to be his assistant. Riggan’s been a poor father, and he is trying, pretty unsuccessfully, to make it up to her.

As opening night draws closer, it becomes obvious that the younger actor in the play is not right for the part, and at the last minute Riggan brings in Mike (the also amazing Edward Norton), a big-name actor who will draw a crowd. Mike is very good, at least while he’s in character. As himself, he is on a constant power trip, and he treats the people around him terribly.

The egos and the insecurities are enormous and they make for an incestuous crew as the actors look to each other for validation and support in different, mostly destructive, ways. All of these actors demonstrate that they are, in reality, “a gaping black hole of need” as a writer friend describes her dog. They hurt themselves and those around them in their search for importance and acceptance. At one point, Sam turns to father and tells him "you're scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don't matter!" 

And then there is the theater critic, waiting in the wings to swoop in and either make or break the production. Riggan tells her that while actors and directors pour their lifeblood and energy into a play, all she does is sit back and criticize, risking nothing. Hey, wait a minute, how did I end up paying to have someone attack my little hobby??? There is truth in what he says.

Birdman is a technically brilliant movie. The acting is incredible. The director used a small number of “sets” to give the feeling of watching a stage play, and at the same time the use of tight spaces gives viewers the same claustrophobic feeling that the actors must experience in their tightly circumscribed roles and expectations.

The film is also probably a very sharp skewering of theater life, but I have very little knowledge of theater life. My teens are on the sets and props crew for this fall’s high school version of Oliver! but I don’t think that qualifies me to speak knowledgably on the subject!

The characters are mostly coarse, self-absorbed, and/or mean-spirited people. Sam is the most sympathetic character, and she still seems pretty lost.

So while St. Vincent entertained and left me loving people a little more, Birdman gives me a stark, at times funny, look at the naked need and ambition of less lovable characters. At the same time, St. Vincent is guilty of some sloppy filmmaking, but Birdman is razor sharp. Whether or not you should see either of them all depends on what you are looking for when you go to the movies.

 

 

Middle-Aged White Lady on "Dear White People"

The headline I read that called Dear White People “White Privilege 101” was not far off. This movie, set at a fictional Ivy League institution called Winchester University, explores what it is like to live as the minority in a predominantly white place, where white people have most of the power.

At the start of the movie, you learn that there has been a party where white students came in black-face, and it turned into a protest or a riot, depending on your perspective. Over the course of the film, the events leading up to the party give insight into the problems that have been brewing on the campus, which are numerous.

Sam, a young woman with a campus radio show called “Dear White People,” becomes a figurehead for a group that is trying to create change at the school. As much as she wants change, she chafes under the label of angry young black woman.

Troy Fairbanks, incumbent head of house of the historically black residence, is the son of the black dean at Winchester and is intended to be the poster child for the successful black Winchester student. Troy is dating the white daughter of the university president, who is also the frenemy of Troy’s father. To escape the tension of being who his father wants to be, Troy is getting high in his bathroom.

Lionel, a gay black man with an enormous Afro, is trying to survive his educational experience at a school where he doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. When one student asks him sarcastically “What’s harder, being black enough for the black kids or being black enough for the white ones?” he answers “Being neither.”

And Coco is a young woman from a less financially stable background who wants to fit in. At first, she wants to pretend that all is well racially and just move on already. At the same time, she is wanting to make a name for herself.  

All of these people are struggling with their identity. Who do they want to be? Who do they have to represent? How are they perceived? These are normal questions for young people, but when you add in the social expectations and assumptions that people make about you because of your skin color, it becomes much more difficult to sort out.

As a very heated campus moves closer to the fateful night of the party, everyone’s identity issues come to a head.

There are touches of Do the Right Thing and the old TV shows “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World.” There are also somewhat derisive comments directed at all three of those things.

The big man on campus is Kurt, son of the aforementioned university president. He is white, and for some reason he dresses and talks like he is one of the Jets who just walked off the set of West Side Story. But he does some truly hateful things that I’m sure even the Jets never would have done.

There are some downfalls to the movie. What makes it work is that the film has, for the most part, a sharp, intelligent humor that makes everyone watching it think deeply about who you are and who you expect people to be. And a few photos from real-life college parties like this one are shown during the end credits, which really brought it all home to me.

I think this would be a great movie to see with a group of people interested in having an honest discussion of racism and white privilege. Don’t take the kids just yet—the language and other, um, college activities are not intended for younger eyes.

 

 

Sort of Stellar "Interstellar"

This week my two teens and I went to see an early screening of Interstellar, an epic space movie that has been eagerly awaited by the legion who are fans of director Christopher Nolan. You can count me in that category thanks to Memento and Inception, because I love the puzzle-like qualities of those films.

Interstellar is about a dystopian Earth that has dried up and just suffers one sandstorm after another due to overpopulation and climate change. The only thing they can grow now is corn. Matthew McConaughey used to be an engineer and a NASA test pilot, but now he’s a farmer just like everyone else, trying to grow enough corn to keep the population alive.

Eventually he ends up discovering a scientific team who is working to find another planet that people can inhabit. He gets sent into space to explore some possible planets, which is possible thanks to a mysterious wormhole that has opened up near Saturn (think tesseract like in A Wrinkle in Time). Of course, his children, and his daughter in particular, are not happy that he is going to be shot into another galaxy, because if you had Matthew McConaughey in your family you might want to keep him close too. I enjoyed the warmth and family dynamics of the early portion of the movie.

The space travel that came next felt very real. I say that with all of the space travel knowledge of someone who has both seen all the Star Wars movies AND has been to Epcot. We saw the movie in IMAX which is likely the best (and loudest) way to see this one. I enjoyed the tremendous visuals of the different planets.

There were also lots of stars, by which I mean the people in the movie. But they aren’t all given something interesting to do, which is unfortunate. John Lithgow is such a talented actor, but he’s not given much to work with. I also really enjoy Anne Hathaway sometimes (see Becoming Jane in which she plays a young Jane Austen in a somewhat maudlin yet sighworthy film opposite James McAvoy. Sigh. Wait, what was I saying?). Here her character was never fully developed.

The movie is overlong and too drawn out. There is lots of scientific talk with varying degrees of realness, not that I would know the difference. But I did read an article afterward that told me what was real and what was not. The point isn’t whether it was real or not, but that they talked about it too much.

A big piece of the movie is relativity—particularly in time. Time passes slower on one planet than on another. Let’s just say that at the end of three hours I felt like I’d been on a space journey myself and that I came back a few years older than when I left. Reactions from my teens: the manchild felt satisfied by such an egregious amount of science that he could pick apart and ruminate on. He really liked it. The womanchild looked a bit like she might fall asleep a few times, but at the end she stood up and said “I saw a smart person’s movie. And I think I even understood it.”

So it’s a mixed bag. For a movie that, in part, deals with more dimensions than we currently perceive, it fell a bit flat.

 

 

Saint, Maybe: Bill Murray in "St. Vincent"

Vinnie is no saint. At least, that’s what most people who know him think. He’s a drunk and a gambler who spends time with a, um, “lady of the night.” When his new neighbors move in, a newly-single mother named Maggie and her son Oliver, he isn’t exactly the neighborhood welcome wagon. Maggie has a new job and no one else to turn to, so she asks Vinnie to watch Oliver after school.

Oliver begins attending a Catholic school, where his priest-teacher is a warm and kind person. Unfortunately the kids aren’t so nice, and Oliver is bullied. Vinnie teaches him some self-defense. Vinnie also takes him to the horse track and the local bar. He’s sorely lacking in good judgment as relates to childcare, or to his own life for that matter. On the other hand, Oliver accompanies him to the nursing home, where Vinnie regularly cares for a loved one. Oliver starts to see a different side of Vinnie.

Bill Murray plays this man of no moral standing quite convincingly, though he’s still likeable in some way. It’s possible this movie would be more effective if the neighbor weren’t someone I have always liked. I’m predisposed. I must not be the only one, because this theater was packed. This isn’t the kind of movie that generally packs in a crowd!

Murray’s is not the only strong performance. Melissa McCarthy plays Maggie. I have only ever known McCarthy from her female gross-out roles in things like Bridesmaids and Saturday Night Live skits. About two weeks ago I found a completely new side of her that many already knew about—I started watching the old TV series Gilmore Girls, and McCarthy is the sweet, bumbling cook who is best friends with Lorelai Gilmore. I love her in the show.

St. Vincent gives her something more to do with her acting chops. She definitely draws out some laughs, but Maggie takes a heartbreaking turn when she confesses to Oliver’s teacher the difficulties of her new life and the pain caused by her former husband.

And then there’s the prostitute, a pregnant Russian stripper, played with relish by Naomi Watts. Brian and I both spent some time trying to figure out where we’d seen this Russian actress before, until after the movie when we realized it was the Aussie actress. She brings another dimension to Vinnie’s character.

This movie is sappy and predictable; it’s also warm and full of a weird kind of joy. These people are dealing with the day-to-day dirt of life, and there’s no easy way out for any of them. No one turns into someone completely different; they are who they are. But they are slowly learning more about themselves and the people around them. They are finding the good hidden under the hard edges and the tough words. Although this movie is about a more humanistic variety of saints, we Christians might see it as finding the image of Christ that is in everyone. And that’s what we're supposed to be all about.