Blade Runner 2049 review

There’s a lot to admire about Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049.” This long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult-masterpiece attempts to step up the cyberpunk aesthetics and moody atmosphere of its sci-fi predecessor, while also tackling similar themes about the meaning of consciousness and what it is to be human. Given his past success with handsomely directed genre fare such as “Sicario” and 2016’s “Arrival,” Villeneuve’s involvement signaled to fans that this follow up would be a serious attempt at continuing the mysterious and oft-debated subject matter of the original. Serious is certainly a word that could be used to describe what we  ended up with here. The pulpy dime-store detective fiction that inspired Scott’s previous entry has now been glossed over with a more dreamlike, somber take on the material that fits more into Villeneuve’s bleak authorial world-view.

Ryan Gosling plays a bio-engineered police officer called Agent-K. He’s a Blade Runner that is hired by the LAPD to ‘retire’ older replicants that have gone rogue. While working on a case involving a shocking cover-up, in which a female replicant gave natural birth, he finds his mysterious past and his implanted memories coming into question. The further he digs into the case, he becomes more fervently pursued by his governmental employers, as well as the nefarious manufacturers known as the Wallace Corporation. Both of these parties have a lot to lose in the world finding out how much closer to humans the replicants have become.

This film boasts a large and eclectic cast including Robin Wright as Gosling’s tough boss Lieutenant Joshi, Jared Leto as the sadistic Niander Wallace, as well as relative newcomers like Ana De Armas as Goslings digital companion Joi, and Sylvia Hoek’s as Niander’s lethal mercenary Luv. Gosling is essentially our cipher into this world, traveling though his existential journey, which eventually leads us to Harrison Ford’s return as Rick Dekkard. But it’s the women in the film and K’s relationship to these women that dominates the narrative. Wright represents the sociological and bureaucratic structures that keeps K ignorant of his life beyond his function as a Blade Runner and replicant. Joi represents his yearning for something more profound, while the dangerous Luv represents his fear of the truth.  In some ways this backdoor approach to Gosling’s character diminishes his role as a protagonist, making him far less proactive in his own journey. As a result, though his performance is appropriate for the material, he’s can be a passive drip to follow. Nevertheless, Villeneuve gives all of these characters enough screen time and stakes in the plot to realize their motivations beyond their function as stock, pulpy archetypes.

Working again with cinematographer Roger Deakins, this movie is a marvel to gaze upon. The sleek production design and Deakin’s moody capturing of light and shadow, along with Villeneuve’s symmetrical shot set-ups and steady direction, creates for a monolithic, sometimes oppressive style that always keeps the eye engaged through this close-to three hour feature. Characters are often shot much smaller in the frame, placed around larger, totemic buildings and structures in the background and foreground, underlining the director’s point that they are overwhelmed by the cold, technological reality around them.

“Blade Runner 2049” only falls a little short in its ability to connect the audience with the movie’s larger themes through the characters wants and desires. This issue tries to correct itself through a few emotional arcs, the most successful being Gosling’s relationship with his IOS girlfriend—De Armas doing most of the heavy lifting there. But as a secondary plot point, it can’t lift the spirits of this admittedly dower project as a whole. However, it would also be a lie to call this anything less than an achievement of quality filmmaking. It’s large and ambitious without devolving into mindless destruction and the action set-pieces are always rooted in story concerns. Villeneuve is confident in his own cinematic abilities and though this work is colder than the 1982 neo-noir classic, it does advance the lore in a respectful and artful manner.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Blade Runner 2049" 

La La Land review

This year’s “La La Land,” a romantic musical that takes place in modern-day Los Angeles, will likely see a lot of love throughout the awards season, and for good reason; it’s fun, it’s vibrant and it lovingly pays homage to the classic Hollywood musicals of the 50s and 60s, while still being accessible for a modern audience. But what makes “La La Land” more than just a cute genre exercise with a chipper cast of likable white people is director Damien Chazelle’s personal obsessions and anxieties that burns through the movie’s standard love story.

We’re first introduced to our romantic leads Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in an ambitious song and dance number that takes place on the freeway during deadlocked LA traffic. Chazelle establishes the long, swooping single-takes that dominate the showier set-pieces of the film, as well as the bright primary color scheme that evokes the eye-popping saturation of early technicolor cinema. Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress who spends more time at her dead-end studio coffee-shop job than she does on stage or film. Gosling plays Sebastian, a jazz enthusiast who dreams of starting his own traditional night-club, while toiling away as a pianist at a cheap Italian restaurant. After a series of chance meetings in the world’s biggest small town, Mia and Sebastian begin a whirlwind romance that inspires the couple to reach for the stars, but as their personal ambitions inch closer to being realized, the seeds of resentment bud in the soil of their mutual sacrifices.

The best and worst thing you can say about this film is that the story is awfully simple.  The movie’s portrayal of relationship dynamics is very familiar and, generally speaking, the rise and fall structure within romantic comedy hasn’t been properly challenged since Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” But “La La Land” thrives on familiarity, both for aesthetic and thematic purposes. The use of Gosling and Stone--previously coupled in “Crazy Stupid Love” and “Gangster Squad”—suggests a classic on-screen couple that you’re already been primed to root for. This kind of metatexual referencing manifests visually to evoke the romantic musicals of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, as well as lesser known world-musicals such as Jacques Demy’s 1964 “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” begging for audience’s enthusiasm in stunning displays of escapism. But just underneath the surface of all of this highly-technical celebration of genre exists a personal story, not about love won and love lost, but of a young artist grappling with a legacy that looms large behind him.

Chazelle was barely 29 years old when he gained a lot of attention for his brilliant psychological drama “Whiplash,” a much darker film about a young jazz musician who’s challenged to the breaking-point by his perfectionist music professor. If we can read that film as a post-adolescent expression of Chazelle’s angst as a young artist that's nearly-destroyed by his own scrutiny, then “La La Land” is the director’s concession and acceptance that his artistic success will likely be measured by those before him and that his work will always stand in the shadows of Hollywood legends.

Singer John Legend plays a successful sell-out musician who I suspect represents a lucrative creative path that Chazelle is hesitant to embark. He asks Gosling’s Sebastian “How are you going to be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist?” Given how playful and referential the movie is with its genre trappings, it’s not a stretch to assume that Chazelle might to be asking these questions about artistic integrity to himself. Legend follows this up by saying “You're holding onto the past but jazz is about the future.”  

In progressing from the taut and wiry character study of “Whiplash” to the bombast of a showy cinemascope musical, Chazelle transitions nicely from emotionally interior storytelling to a style that’s deceptively extroverted but equally personal.  Gosling and Stone are posed and positioned in such a way that's flattering and believable but they're subservient to the overall vision of the project. As hard as they perform for their suppers and as good of chemistry they have on-screen, one could argue that the impact of their romantic arc is dampened by the post-modern conversation the filmmaker is having with himself and the audience. That aside, “La La Land” is an earnest crowd-pleaser that is largely designed to entertain on a more inclusive level, transcending the complicated dynamics the director explores within the text, the context and subtext. .

Grade: A-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "La La Land."

The Big Short review

Adam McKay, director of silly Will Ferrell vehicles such as “Anchorman” and “The Other Guys,” turned down the opportunity to helm Marvel’s “Ant-Man” in favor of “The Big Short,” a topical satire about a group of mavericks on the margins of Wall-Street who were able accurately predicted the housing collapse against the grain of conventional wisdom. Like 2014’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” this film portrays America’s unhealthy reinforcement of cutthroat capitalism like Greek tragedy, in which the key figured of this morality play are tricked into a game where winning and losing is the exact same thing.

This film is boasts a large cast of heavy-hitters that includes Christian Bale as a an eccentric annalist named Michael Burry who first discovers a way to profit from the eventual bursting of the housing bubble in 2005, long before anyone could see it growing. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennet, a mercenary banker who catches wind of this prediction and hires a team of low-level Wall Street traders to check the progression of this collapse, with the aims of selling big just before the ground beneath them breaks. This team of foul mouthed number-crunchers is ran by Steve Carrell’s Mark Baum, a noble-to-a-fault day-trader who is caught in a moral quagmire when he quickly learns how far and how deeply in trouble the world economy has become and how it will effect living standards of the middle class. Producer Brad Pitt even makes an appearance as a nihilistic ex-yuppie who lends his expertise to two hapless dorks looking to break into the world of finance.

This movie juggles a lot of big personalities and plays almost like heist film in which the big score is cursed with a moral backfire. Based upon this description, you may assume that the film is a huge bummer, and it kind of is, but where McKay’s history in comedy comes in handy, both with his features and from his time as a writer on SNL, is that he allows for enough appropriate comedic distanced to nervously laugh at the story’s heady subject matter. The screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph, works hard to break through the seemingly impenetrable amount of necessary exposition and finance jargon one has to recon with to accurately adapt the source text from Michael Lewis’ book of the same name. Lewis’ “Moneyball,” adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, took a much more intimate and human approach to the subject of how the prediction of numbers effects the real lives of which those numbers represent, mostly because of the sober and melancholy style of its director Bennett Miller.

In contrast, McKay simply acknowledges that the Wall Street world is not one that most of the audience lives in and decides to play the tragedy of corporate corruption like a perverse farce of the American dream. One could say that the many stylistic choices used here, including the use of catchy rock music, quick edit and goofy, non-diegetic asides where celebrities explain economic concepts, is a sign of McKay’s lack of confidence with the material—over compensating by dressing up the “grown up talk” in a lot bling and flash—and one is probably correct in that assessment. Nevertheless, when it comes to the fundamentally activist aim of the movie’s themes, McKay’s showy delivery certainly helps to digest and discern the material and to simultaneously entertain and outraged at the same time.

Despite all of the star power involved in the cast the ensemble shines within individual scenes and while Bale’s jittery performance could have used maybe two less acting-ticks, Carell’s hysterical and empathetic portrayal as a man who is hanging on to the last shreds of dignity and morality helps to ground the audience into the movie’s complex emotional truth .

Sometimes “The Big Short” feels a little too eager to impress and you’ll never shake the feeling that McKay is trying to convince you that the movie's vegetables are an airplane, but overall it has enough subversive punk-rock energy and a noble enough purpose to keep the enjoyable style from overwhelming the sobering substance. 

Grade - B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016