Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER Is Kind Of A Big Deal

Opening tomorrow at a multiplex near us all:

OPPENHEIMER (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2023)

While there is visual splendor aplenty in this epic biopic of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, played perfectly by a rail thin Cillian Murphy, the bulk of it concerns the 1954 security hearing, in which the scientist was grilled by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) over his communist leanings. But the good news is all that talk, largely in stark, but pleasingly sharp black and white, is just as compelling as the sequences involving the Manhattan Project, especially the recreation of the Trinity test, the first nuclear weapon detonation, in New Mexico.

 

Simply put, Nolan’s 12th film, and second to be based on real events after DUNKIRK, is a masterwork, a rich powerful portrait that somehow makes science exciting, and justifies every second of its three-hour running time. It doesn’t matter that a lot of its dialogue, that has our hero brainstorming with his colleagues, will go over the heads of many movie-goers because the urgency and flow of the film, aided by composer Ludwig Göransson’s striking score will still hold audiences in its grasp. 

Told largely in flashbacks that are conjured by the panel hearing, the film illustrates how during World War II, Oppenheimer was appointed scientific director of the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos by General Leslie Groves (a great, gruff Matt Damon) as part of the arms race against the Nazi regime. After the war, and the devastating bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, a guilt-ridden Oppenheimer went against the thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb), and campaigned for international control of these weapons.

One of the key figures in this story is AEC Chairman, Lewis Strauss, who suspected that the scientist was a Soviet spy, and was among those behind the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Strauss is portrayed, in heavy aging make-up, by Robert Downey Jr. in a career best performance. 

The actor shakes off his Marvel armor to deliver an impassioned, and at times desperate performance that is sure to be noticed by the Academy. At the film’s UK premiere, Downey Jr. said that, “This is the best film I’ve ever been in,” and I highly agree.

 

The rest of the film’s cast is as impressive as the effects, which Nolan claims contain no CGI, including an emotional Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s communist wife Katherine (“Kitty”), a long-suffering alcoholic, who was such because of her husband’s affair with psychiatrist, and another communist, Jean Tatlock, who is played by Florence Pugh initially as a sexy shrink (not that I’m complaining). 

 

Well placed in the roles of celebrated scientist colleagues are Kenneth Branaugh (in his third film with Nolan) as Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Josh Harnett as nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence, and David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi, another Noble Prize-winning physicist, who has a stirring scene that enhances the film’s conscience.

 

In less lofty, yet still crucial, parts are Casey Affleck as snooping intelligence officer Boris Pash, and Rami Malek as David Hill, an experimental physicist, who doesn’t make much of an impression at first, but is vital by the end.

 

But it’s the centerpiece of OPPENHEIMER, The Trinity Test sequence, that might be the film’s biggest star. Director of Photography, and frequent Nolan collaborator, Hoyte Van Hoytema’s incredible IMAX cinematography gives us the world’s first-ever successful atomic bomb detonation in all of its scary glory, and it’s as stunning as it is profoundly unsettling.

 

In his telling of the story of the man credited as “the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Nolan working from the 2005 bio American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, employs Oliver Stone-style cutting, and ominous framing to take us into Oppenheimer’s politically paranoid world, while switching back and forth from crisp color to start black and white throughout (so much you forget about it).

All of these strong elements – its narrative arc via its layered, engaging screenplay; its excellent cast headed by a dead-on, invested Murphy whose towering, tortured close-ups are really cool looking in IMAX; its practical effects adding up to modern movie magic in our current CGI oversaturated superhero era; Göransson’s tension-filled soundtrack (the only negative there is that it overwhelms the dialogue at times); and its emotional sense of both fear and amazement that science could cause the end of the world – all combine to make the first great movie of 2023, and an absolute must see on the biggest screen you can find.

 

I first questioned why Universal would release OPPENHEIMER in the middle of the summer, going up against BARBIE, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, and INDIANA JONES, when it seems more like a better fit for the prestige Oscar season in December, but with all its explosive power it more than deserves a place among those blockbusters (or flopbusters), and I’m betting it be far from forgotten at the end of the year.

More later...

Christopher Nolan’s Mind-Baffling TENET

I originally wanted to see this film on the big screen months ago, but, you know, with the pandemic and all, I chickened out more than once. With its home video release earlier this month, I caught up with it. So let’s get to it:

TENET (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

Christopher Nolan’s 11th film was an unfortunate victim of bad timing as it was scheduled for release in July, one of the worst months of the pandemic. TENET was delayed three times until its release in September when it was declared a flop. Although it definitely underperformed, largely due to its ginormous budget, the movie did make enough to make the top #4 on the top grossing films of 2020 worldwide, but of course, that’s because of its lack of competition.

But enough about how much money it made, let’s get to the question - is it a worthwile watch? Well, I would say for the most part it is, but parts were confusing as Hell, and many times throughout I was thinking that I didn’t know WTF was going on. On its simplest level, TENET is a sci-fi tinged spy thriller. At its most complex, it’s an overly cerebral action picture that relies on a high falutin concept as a means to an end.

It’s gonna be hard as hell to describe this film, but I’ll try to work it out. The protagonist, a CIA agent strongly portrayed by John David Washington (BLACKKKLANSMAN), is actually credited as “The Protagonist” (that’s right, and people actually address him that way), is recruited by an organization named Tenet to track down where inverted bullets from the future came from so that World War III can be inverted.

“Inverted bullets,” you may ask? Well, the most important word in the movie (even more than its title) is inversion is when the entropy of a person, or item, is reversed so that they move backwards in time. This is explained over and over, but still never seems to grab hold as an accessible concept. 

At one point, our hero asks what’s going on, and someone says “they’re running a temporal pincer movement.” Well, that clears that all up!

Anyway, Washington’s Protagonist is paired with an operative named Neil (a yet again solid Robert Pattinson), who knows more than he’s letting on about their mission. They literally bungee-jump into the world of arms dealing, and forged paintings, and encounter Kenneth Branaugh as Sater, a menacing Russian antagonist (though he’s not named Antogonist), and his abused wife, Kat played by Elizabeth Debicki, who The Protagonist becomes sweet on.

There are several big action sequences in which planes, boats, cars, and explosions run backwards - the best involving a convoy being ambushed in Tallinn, Estonia – but they are stitched together by countless scenes of exposition. One bit was so full of tedious talking bits that I was unsure what was going on in the scene following involving setting up the crash of a 747 aircraft. Why are they doing this again?

One character, a scientist played by Clémence Poésy, even says “Don’t try to understand it,” early on.

Branaugh (in his second Nolan film after DUNKIRK) as Sater is a pretty clichéd sadistic bad guy character with his clichéd Russian accent, yet he has a few moments of effective villainy. Giving a greater sense of gravitas is Hindu star Dimple Kapadia, but she is saddled with perplexingly cryptic dialogue. But then, seemingly everyone else is too. In his eight appearance in a Nolan film, Michael Caine avoids this trap, but that’s probably because he was one scene, which, of course, he nails.

The majority of Nolan’s films have been mind-boggling, but TENET is more mind-baffling. By the end, which involves inverted and non-inverted armies battling each other in the rubble of a destroyed city in Siberia, I think I could follow things better than before, but the inscrutable plot points that got me there were still getting in the way of having fun with this maze-like material.

I would only really recommend this bloated epic (2 and half hours!) to hardcore Christopher Nolan-heads, or folks that love complex sci-fi. Otherwise you may wind up as confused and mind-baffled as I was after a viewing. A repeated line in the film, said by Washington and Pattinson to each other is “What happened, happened.” That’s the only thing I can be sure of - TENET happened.

More later...

Christopher Nolan: The Man and His Motifs Part 2

Preceding my viewing of  TENET for the first time - something I’ve been waiting to do since its release last summer (I chickened out going to the theater), I thought I’d revisit this article I wrote about its Director, Christopher Nolan, for the Chinese magazine Front Vision in 2017. As the magazine is aimed towards young people, my style is a bit different from my usual babble. This is the sequel to Part 1, which you can check out here.

Part 2:

1995’s critically acclaimed BATMAN BEGINS, established Christian Bale as the Dark Knight/Bruce Wayne, with a solid supporting cast that included Michael Caine, who’d go on to work with Nolan in six more movies.

But it was the stunning imagery, via Director of Photography Wally Pfister, that often overshadowed the actors. Garnering a well deserved nomination for Best Cinematography, BATMAN BEGINS not only successfully rebooted the series, it joined Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN series in opening the floodgates for a gigantic wave of comic book based franchises that endures to this day.

Nolan followed up BATMAN BEGINS with another screenplay collaboration with his brother, Jonathan, an adaption of Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel THE PRESTIGE, about rival magicians played by Bale and Hugh Jackman in 1890s London. It was another acclaimed non linear opus, marred only by some glaring convolutions, which received a nomination for Best Cinematography, but didn’t win.

The sequel to BATMAN BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) IS arguably the peak of the filmmaker’s career - had more luck in the Oscar department, as it won for the late Heath Ledger’s tour de force performance as The Joker, and for Sound Editing.

Nolan again wrote his brother, Jonathan, and they capped off the trilogy four years later with the equally acclaimed THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012), but in between these immensely profitable BATMAN adventures, he constructed his most ambitious and surreal cinematic puzzle yet.

Nolan had previously touched upon the fantastical, but INCEPTION (2010) is more mind-blowing than anything he’s attempted before or since.

Leo DiCaprio stars as a dream extractor who deals in the manipulation of men’s minds when they are asleep. The film contains endlessly inventive dream inside of a dream scenarios which are spell binding, and genuinely scary at times, with overwhelmingly beautiful and towering worlds of CGI-crafted dream set pieces.

Pfister finally won an Oscar for Best Cinematography for INCEPTION, and the film also won Academy Awards for Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects. These accolades are well deserved, but the film’s theme of choosing life over illusion or vice versa is what’s most impactful. When it ends, one isn’t sure if DiCaprio’s character is in reality or a dream, and the last shot lingers hauntingly – another Nolan trademark. 

2014’s INTERSTELLAR, Nolan’s space epic follow-up after concluding THE DARK KNIGHT trilogy, wasn’t as successful as the former film in the sci-fi department as it tried too hard to be the modern day equivalent to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But the film, which concerns Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut traveling through time and space to save the world, did do good business and won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. For the first time since FOLLOWING, Pfister wasn’t on board, and the film was shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema.

Nolan’s next film, the WW II epic DUNKIRK, arrived during the overstuffed summer of 2017, and held its own at the box office with the help of rave reviews, many of which praised it as being his best film. 

The director’s attention to detail in recreating the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 is immaculate via the usage of restored boats and planes from the actual event, practical effects, and a minimum of CGI. The non linear Nolan is on display in the three intertwined threads involving the soldiers, a rescue boat, and the air force. The vast visuals provided by the returning Hoytema are immersive enough to make one feel like they’re right there in the middle of the action.

As of this writing, Nolan hasn’t announced what his next project will be. After the exhausting, and emotionally draining production of DUNKIRK, it would be understandable that he may take some time off. The abundance of rich imagery contained in his canon makes it hard to believe that he’s only made 10 movies for there’s more visual power in them than in the entire filmographies of many directors. And as Nolan’s not even 50 years of age yet, he’s likely going to contribute a lot more eye-popping movie magic in the decades to come.

More later...

Christopher Nolan: The Man and His Motifs Part 1

As I’m about to watch TENET for the first time - something I’ve been waiting to do since its release last summer (I chickened out going to the theater), I thought I’d revisit this article I wrote about its Director, Christopher Nolan, for the Chinese magazine Front Vision in 2017. As the magazine is aimed towards young people, my style is a bit different from my usual babble. 

Here’s Part 1:

In the nearly two decades since his acclaimed 1998 thriller FOLLOWING, Christopher Nolan has joined the elite club of major filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, and J.J. Abrams, that are household names.

This is largely because of Nolan’s immensely popular DARK KNIGHT trilogy, in which the screenwriter/producer/director re-wrote the rulebook on how a dormant franchise can be rebooted, a beloved character can be revitalized, and a genre can be completely re-imagined.

But to understand why so many critics throw around the words “visionary” and “cinematic genius” when writing about Nolan, and to get a better perspective on the themes and ideas expressed in his work, one must start with his childhood obsession with a low budget science fiction flick that took the world by storm forty years ago.

Nolan was seven years old in 1977 when he first saw George Lucas’ game changing blockbuster STAR WARS (later re-titled STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE), and it no doubt made him realize how powerful and transcendent movies can be.

At the Tribecca Film Festival in 2015, Nolan told the audience that in his youth he’d been “experimenting using Super 8 films and stuff. And then from the second I saw ‘Star Wars’ everything was space ships and science-fiction.”

This led to of one of Nolan’s first amateur films, SPACE WARS, a title obviously inspired by Lucas’ sci-fi epic, which was a stop motion animation short that the British born Nolan made with his buddies in Evanston, Chicago (his family had relocated there from London).

While attending college in Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire, and London, Nolan studied many notable directors including Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma, as well as the old masters including Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles.

These influences can be felt throughout Nolan’s filmography which began in proper in 1989 with a short entitled TARANTELLA. Other shorts followed - LARCENY (1995), and DOODLEBUG (1997) - without much notice, but his first feature length film, 1998’s FOLLOWING, a black and white film made for $6,000, turned a lot of critics’ heads and won awards and Nolan’s career was off and running.

FOLLOWING is an odd, disturbing story about a man (Jeremy Theobald) who follows various strangers around the streets of London until he is called out by one of his subjects (Alex Hall), and the two start a series of robberies together. The narrative is non linear as it cuts back and forth through time with its strands intensely coming together at its conclusion revealing its twist.

This formula was also used in Nolan’s second film, MEMENTO, which had a much bigger budget ($9 million), which meant color film and a shinier polish. But while Nolan directed, wrote, edited, co-produced, and did the cinematography for his first film, his second was a more collaborative effect.

MEMENTO was based on a pitch by Nolan’s brother, Jonathan. Nolan adapted it into a screenplay, and handed over the cinematography and editing duties to Wally Pfister and Doddy Dorn, and the producing duties to Suzanne Todd, and Jennifer Todd. Nolan’s wife, Emma Thomas, also co-produced as she’s done on all of her husband’s films.

The film concerns an insurance agent (Guy Pearce), who is on the trail of his wife’s murderer, but his anterograde amnesia keeps throwing him off track. MEMENTO put Nolan on the movie map aided by a wave of glowing reviews, including many placings on critics’ lists of the best films of 2000, and two Academy Award nominations (for Best Editing and Best Screenplay). 

The scenes in both FOLLOWING and MEMENTO reward active viewing as they are like puzzle pieces that the audience has to move around in their minds in order to figure out where they fit in the plot. 

For Nolan’s third project, INSOMNIA, the director moved into the realm of adaptation as the film is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg. The screenplay, based on the original by Skjoldbjærg, and Nikolaj Frobenius, was written by Hillary Seitz, with Pfister and Dorn returning to shoot and edit. 

The much less non linear INSOMNIA stars Al Pacino as a homicide detective who works with a local cop (Hillary Swank) in a small Alaskan town to investigate a murder in which Robin Williams plays the prime suspect. It’s the most star power Nolan has worked with than before, and he pulls impressive performances out of his cast. 

After proving that he could handle a remake with great aplomb, Nolan’s next film would find him tackling a much bigger prospect - a reboot of a major series. 

After the critical failure of Joel Schumacher’s BATMAN & ROBIN, considered by many to be the worst entry in the franchise, Warner Brothers hired Nolan to help get Batman back to the basics. Along with co-writer David S. Goyer, Nolan re-invented the character’s origin story, and reclaimed the dark tone that the previous films had turned into a joke.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in which we explore the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, INCEPTION, and DUNKIRK.

More later...

Notes On DUNKIRK (Three Weeks Into Its Run)

It’s been three weeks since I first saw Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic DUNKIRK, but I wasn’t in a good headspace then. My wife and I were having some major work done on our house involving installing hardwood floors so I was exhausted from moving tons of books, CDs, DVDs, records, etc.

I had mixed feelings about the movie, but I recognized some greatness there so I decided to see it a second time. But this time was in the way Nolan intended it to be seen - in IMAX 70 mm. The visuals were indeed impressive and the story threads came together better than my previous viewing, but I still felt a disconnect.

The film, which Nolan wrote and co-produced in addition to directing, follows three narratives – “The Mole,” about the thousands of soldiers stranded on the beach of Dunkirk, France over the course of a week waiting for rescue boats over the course of a week; “The Sea,” concerning a civilian (Mark Rylance) sailing his boat with his son (Tom Glynn-Carney), and his friend (Barry Keoghan) to help with the rescue effort over the course of a day; and “The Air,” which involves three Spitfires piloted by members of the Royal Air Force engaged in dogfights over the course of an hour.

Nolan’s attention to detail in recreating the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 is immaculate via the usage of restored boats and planes from the actual event, practical effects, and a minimum of CGI.

I’ve heard many folks complain that in the “The Mole” storyline the characters are hard to tell apart. Fionn Whitehead as a private named Tommy, who is pretty much the protagonist of the thread, and a fellow soldier played by pop singer Harry Styles do blend in with the masses on the docks, but perhaps that’s the point.

“The Air” narrative which has Tom Hardy, and Jack Lowden on a mission to take down German dive bombers over the infinite ocean may be the most exciting of the three intertwined scenarios, but several times Nolan cuts away right as the scenes are getting the most compelling. Lowden almost drowning because he can’t get his cockpit open after crash landing in the sea deserves to be seen in full, but Nolan can’t help but dive back into another thread, and the momentum gets lost.

The most emotionally grounded storyline is “The Sea” as a stoic Rylance holds steady to his goal to save as many men as possible, even when a shell-shocked soldier played by Cillian Murphy that his boat picks up violently tries to get him to turn his boat around. Murphy, a veteran of a few Nolan films (BATMAN BEGINS, INCEPTION), is only credited as “shivering soldier,” and that about sums up his role.

Kenneth Branagh, as a British Naval Commander, brings a touch of dignified gravitas to his part, but mainly just stands around on the pier watching what’s happening around him.

So basically, don’t go in expecting fully fleshed out characters. There may be precious little dialogue, but there’s plenty of genuine suspense, gripping action, and incredibly vivid cinematography (thanks to Hoyte van Hoytema’s 54-Pound IMAX Camera) to make up for it, and to make up for the failings of Nolan’s previous film, INTERSTELLAR.

DUNKIRK is engaging to a considerable degree, but not as immersive an experience as it could’ve been as its fractured narratives bog it down. Hans Zimmer’s intense score, which at times beautifully blends with the scary sound of attacking dive bombers, does a lot to tie together the three strands, but they still clash in ways that was at times frustrating.

I still would recommend Nolan’s work here because there is a lot of power in the imagery and the depiction of touching humanity, which, as I said before, is most present in Rylance’s storyline.

It may fall short of being a masterpiece, but it comes close – especially when seeing it a second time in IMAX 70 mm. Maybe the third time will be the charm?

More later...

INTERSTELLAR: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening Friday, November 7th, at multiplexes from here to beyond the stars...

INTERSTELLAR (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Despite some spectacular set-pieces, Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated outer space epic INTERSTELLAR is a massive misfire. 

It so wants to be for our times the profound experience that 2001: A SPACE ODDYSEY was to the late ‘60s, but with its problematic plotting, pretentious dialogue, and cringe-worthy convolutions of the cosmic variety, it’s more M. Night Shyamalan than Stanley Kubrick.

Set in the near future on a dying, dust stormed-out Earth, an intense Matthew McConaughey, acting like he rehearsed his lofty line readings while being filmed driving his Lincoln to the set every day, stars as a former NASA test pilot, a widowed farmer raising two kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet).

With some cajoling by a ghost who apparently lives in the bookcase in Foy’s bedroom, McConaughey leaves his kids behind to travel on a spacecraft with a small crew (including a short-haired Anne Hathaway as a head strong scientist) to another galaxy to find a new habitable planet for the human race.

Michael Caine, who must really get along with the filmmaker as it’s his sixth role in a Nolan film, again brings his fading yet still stirring gravitas to his part as Professor Brand, the physicist who’s in charge of the secret mission, and is also Hathaway’s father.

By way of a wormhole near Saturn, which is pretty cool if you can rid your mind of the extremely similar scene in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, McConaughey, Hathaway, and fellow explorers David Gyasi and Wes Bentley (and a robot named TARS voiced by Bill Irwin) find a possible candidate planet but there’s a mighty catch in order to check it out. You see, because of it’s a proximity to a black hole, every hour on the planet’s surface will equate to seven years back on Earth.

So while McConaughey and crew battle the ginormous tidal waves of that inhospitable world, his daughter and grow up to be Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck, both bitter at their departed dad in different albeit not very impactful ways.

To go any farther plot-wise would be Spoiler City, and the exposition-filled (and fueled) turns of Nolan’s screenplay (co-written with brother, Jonathan, a frequent collaborator) are too messy and strained to describe. This is especially true pertaining to what I guess is a surprise cameo that McConaughey and Hathaway encounter on a bleak, ice planet in the film’s second half (Nolan really must liked shooting in the snow, see INCEPTION).

Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema captures Nolan’s imagery sweepingly - a large portion of the film was shot with IMAX cameras - and there are moments in which the movie’s ambitious vision comes close to exhilaration, but what should’ve been a spiritual successor to CONTACT unfortunately brings to mind the title of another McConaughey movie: FAILURE TO LAUNCH.

Movie fans can expect to be reminded of many, many other movies while watching INTERSTELLAR, from the aforementioned 2001 to Phillip Kaufman’s THE RIGHT STUFF (a 1983 historical drama about pioneering astronauts, for you young folks) to such sci-fi staples as ALIEN, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, FORBIDDEN PLANET, and everything that’s ever had the word “Star” in its name. However, Nolan’s overwrought opus amore often recalls scores of sci-fi failures such as THE BLACK HOLE, MISSION TO MARS, SIGNS, and, uh, lots of movies that have had “Star” in their titles.

Also, GRAVITY did the ‘let’s see A-list actors struggling for survival in outer space’ scenario way better. On top of that, its colossal lack of emotional pull really hinders its climax which never comes close to making anything near satisfying sense.

I take no pleasure in saying that while INTERSTELLAR is Nolan’s most audacious and certainly his most personal film, it’s easily his worst work, and the biggest cinematic letdown of 2014. Because it’s not without visual power, and some invested acting, many critics will praise it, and it will definitely get some award season action, but me, I’ll be over there, on the side, standing behind BIRDMAN.

More later...

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Directorial Debut Deals With The Porn Addicted DON JON

Opening today at most multiplexes:

DON JON (Dir. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 2013) 

Things have been going good in movieland for Joseph Gordon-Levitt the last several years. Since his breakthrough role in Marc Webb's (500) DAYS OF SUMMER, he's put in solid performances in a stretch of A-list work including being part of high-profile ensembles in Christopher Nolan (INCEPTION, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES), and Steven Spielberg (LINCOLN) films, as well as heading choice action thrillers such as David Koepp's PREMIUM RUSH and LOOPER. Not to forget his touching and funny turn in 50/50. Yup, pretty good indeed.

The ultra-talented 32-year old's winning streak continues with his debut as writer/director: DON JON, about a womanizing New Jersey boy who prefers porn to real sex as we learn by getting the inside beat on his daily routines.

Yup, that's the subject matter Gordon-Levitt chose, but he handles it in an often hilarious and oddly touching manner. It's a comic yet thoughtful examination of an addicted everyman, that most people should relate to, that is, if they're not a prude about porn.

Gordon-Levitt's narration breaks down his character's life from Sunday confessions to family dinners to gym workouts to hitting on women at the bar most weeknights. Being a slick good lookin' guy, he scores often with girls he brags about being high on the 1-10 scale, but at the end of the night, after his newest conquest is passed out in bed, he's back on his computer.

This changes when he meets Scarlet Johansson at a club, who he definitely considers a "10," but she's not as easy as the girls he regularly takes home.

She makes him wait for it; work for it - through weeks of dates seeing movies he couldn't care less about - there's a funny fictitious chick flick they go to see featuring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway going through the predictable rom com storybeats. It reminded me of the fake film in the Coen Brother's BURN AFTER READING, "Coming Up Daisy," with Delmot Mulroney and Claire Danes that Frances McDormand would drag her dates to, but I digress.

Things get edgy when Johansson (with an accent that reminds me of a commercial parody she did on SNL several years ago where she was a Long Island pitch-woman hawking "Marble Columns") catches Gordon-Levitt watching porn, and makes him swear he'll never do it again.

This forces him to catch it when he can on the go on his phone in the car or in night class, a classmate, Julianne Moore, also catches him ("Excuse me, are you watching people fucking on your phone?") but she's so not as judgemental.

Some of the funniest scenes are set around the dinner table with the great casting of Tony Danza and Glenne Headly as Jon's parents (Don is an obvious nickname), and Brie Larson (recently seen in THE SPECTACULAR NOW) as his always texting sister. Though not as one-liner heavy, there's Neil Simon-esque sensibility present.

With her face forever in her phone, Larson is as quiet as Silent Bob throughout the film, but just like that Kevin Smith character, when she speaks it's something that's supposed to be a necessary insight.

The widowed pot-smoking Moore, who obviously has a lot more mileage in the sex/relationship department serves as sort of a Yoda to Gordon-Levitt, helping guide him to a better, less XXX-rated fantasy-filled, level of existence.

Gordon-Levitt's direction is as confident as his character - he gets flawless acting out of his co-stars (Danza is particularly "on"), there are few wasted shots (though some shaky framing), and a pleasing fluidity to the narrative that you know he cribbed from working with Nolan and Johnson (I'm sure Spielberg and rubbed off on him too).

DON JON is no mind-blowing masterpiece, but it's a Hell of a writing/directing debut for Gordon-Levitt. I laughed a lot, and enjoyed spending time with his characters. Its takes major cojones to make one's first film be about a smut addicted chronic masturbator, but it takes something more to be able to make the guy, via such strong charm and wit, somebody to care about as see him find his footing, away from the clutches of internet porn.

More later...

SUPERMAN: The New Nolan-ized Reboot

Now playing at mulitplexes from here to the Phantom Zone:

MAN OF STEEL (Dir. Zack Snyder, 2013)

The time is as good as any for a new take on the most powerful comic book superhero ever, but Zack Snyder’s (300, WATCHMEN, SUCKER PUNCH) reconstruction of the Superman movie mythos is a big bombastic bore.

A great cast has been assembled, including Henry Cavill as the caped crusader, Russell Crowe as Superman’s Kryptonian father, Kevin Costner as his Earth dad, Amy Adams as Daily Planet reporter/love-interest Lois Lane, Lawrence Fishburne as her editor/boss Perry White, Richarh Schiff (The West Wing) as some sort of all-knowing scientist, and, best of all, Michael Shannon as the evil bent-on-revenge General Zod, but Snyder working from a screenplay by DARK KNIGHT co-writer David S. Goyer, overcrowds the storyline with spectacle, repetitive dialogue, and needless convolutions making it difficult to connect with anything on screen.

You know the drill – before Krypton explodes, Papa Crowe (probably the actor who brings the most gravitas to the film) puts his new born baby (touted this time as the planet’s first natural birth in centuries) in a spaceship to Earth, where he’s found by a kindly middle-aged couple (Costner and Diane Lane) living on a farm in Kansas, who name him Clark Kent.

As the boy grows up he recognizes that he has great powers, learns of his origin, and heeding the advice of his step-dad Costner to conceal what he can do, he goes on the road anonymously going from town to town working different jobs until his powers get in the way and he has to move on just like David Banner (Bill Bixby) did on the old Incredible Hulk show.

Huh? Wait a second, that’s not really part of the classic Superman story is it? Sure doesn’t feel like it should be here, but whatever. In this version, Lois Lane figures out that Clark Kent has powers before he even puts on the suit; she never knows Clark and Superman as 2 different people. I’m fine with that – it would be too much to ask for an ace investigative reporter (one that’s won the Pulitzer Prize, mind you) to be fooled by a pair of glasses, so they don’t introduce the element of our hero working at the newspaper until the end. Makes me miss the comically over-sized glasses that Christopher Reeve wore as Clark back in the original ‘70s-‘80s SUPERMAN movies, but, oh well.

Also unlike that run of movies, that got progressively worse (the first two were great, the third and fourth ones, not so much), there’s no Fortress of Solitude made out of new age crystals, no Lex Luthor, and barely any humor.

Shannon is perfectly cast as General Zod (stepping into the mighty shoes worn by Terrence Stamp in SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and SUPERMAN II), but it’s an exposition-heavy role, with the actor looking like he’s in a permanent bad mood (resembling grumpy cat at times), but it’s still one of the more successful elements on display in MAN OF STEEL, because of how invested Shannon is in it.

Zod and his minions attack Metropolis, with tons of buildings getting destroyed (we don’t seeing many people dying but from what we see it’s impossible that there wasn’t a large death toll) and start taking over Earth so that they can make it New Krypton or something. The cityscape alien attack sequence was much better done in THE AVENGERS (not to mention SUPERMAN II), and the climatic one-on-one battle between Superman and Zod just has them pummeling each other from one set-piece to another with no excitement (they punch each other through buildings over and over).

Meanwhile Fishburne and a few other Daily Planet folks are running through the rubble, for some reason they’re some of the only survivors of the attack, but the film never took anytime to establish them as characters to care about.

The British-born Cavill makes for a fine Superman aesthetically, and he’s got the American accent down, but his is also a blank slate of a character that I had trouble forming any connection to. The charisma that Reeve had in the iconic role, and that Bryan Singer tried to capture with Reeve clone Brandon Routh in 2006’s SUPERMAN RETURNS is sorely missing, but that fault lies more with the writers/filmmakers than with the man in the cape.

One thread that really didn’t work for me had to do with the scrambled narrative that jumps around, and way too often to flashbacks of Earth dad Costner saying that the world isn’t ready for a man of incredible powers yet. They draw this out too long, when you know that the world is as ready as it’s ever going to be, and Costner’s death in a tornado, which his son could’ve saved him from, doesn’t make any sense.

In SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, Glenn Ford as our hero’s adoptive father died much more poignantly from a heart attack – something Superman could never have saved him from (well, unless he spun the world back in time), and it had a richer meaning to his maturation; here the man’s death doesn’t teach any lesson except that he’s wrong and his son should’ve revealed himself much earlier. I really don’t get what they’re waiting for. The movie doesn’t give any discernible reason except to stretch out Superman’s angsty development and Costner’s part.

The dark gritty approach to the material, which undoubtedly came from Executive Producer Christopher Nolan, who shares a “story by” credit with Goyer, isn’t right for this area of the D.C. Comics universe. I’m not saying Superman should be nothing but sunny warmth, but there’s no triumphant thrill to seeing our hero save the day here – he doesn’t even show concern for the many who undoubtedly died in the huge devastation on Metropolis.

MAN OF STEEL is a by-the-numbers summer blockbuster wannabe that forgot to have any fun with its source material. Ultimately, it's a ginormously fussy film pulled in so many directions that it's un-engaging and dull. 

Technically, with its well chosen cast and vast array of nonstop visual effects, Snyder and crew have made a serviceable popcorn picture, but next time out (and with all the money that it has already made, there certainly will be a next time) I’m hoping they’ll remember to add more heart, humor, and actual heroism to this not quite re-booted franchise.

More later...

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2012)

On the surface, the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is a solid super hero action epic, but underneath there’s a bunch of irksome issues.

The film is most effective in its slow building first half (after a pulse-pounding plane hi-jacking opening sequence, mind you), in which we re-connect to the characters (and meet a few new ones), but the second half is so bloated with bombarding spectacle, and competing storylines that I was more overwhelmed than entertained. The disjointed pacing doesn’t help either.

In the eight years since the events of 2008’s THE DARK KNIGHT, Christian Bales’s Bruce Wayne has retired his caped crusader alter-ego, and is living in self-imposed exile in Wayne Manor. The Commissioner (the grand Gary Oldman) is wracked with quilt over the cover-up that framed Batman and made a hero of the deceased DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart seen in quick-cut flashbacks).

New blood in the form of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an idealistic police officer, and Anne Hathaway as Catwoman (okay, she’s never called that, but c’mon!), Matthew Modine (!) as the conniving Deputy Commissioner and the fetching Marion Cotillard as a Wayne Enterprises board member, are very appealing, but act more as exposition-delivering cogs than credible characters. However, Hathaway slyly steals her early scenes, and Gordon-Levitt’s weighty approach to his role is right in line with the gravitas the film is going for.

With his face mainly covered by a mechanical mask, Tom Hardy is the villain Bane, who does a great deal of speechifying about economic collapse (sometimes unintelligibly), as he and his minions go about occupying Gotham City, but as impassioned as he and the movement are, it’s just a lot of hot air.

Bale shaves, dons the costume to take on Hardy’s Bane, but ends up getting his Bat-ass kicked. Then he’s imprisoned in a pit that is impossible to scale (we see flashbacks that show that Bane was the only one who was able to climb out). This is the expected ‘hero gets their mojo back’ part.

Too much of the movie goes through the motions - Michael Caine as Butler Alfred is there to once again be a soft-spoken worrywart, Morgan Freeman smoothly does his “Q” thing providing Batman with the latest in Bat-themed artillery, and Oldman wearily slouches through the proceedings - although Oldman does have an energetic bomb-defusal bit during the cluttered climax.

There’s a ginormous amount of death and destruction on display, and enough tortuous imagery to make this come off as “The Passion of The Batman.” Sure, we know our hero will rise and save the day, but he and we have to take a lot of pummeling to get there. The power of Bale’s incredibly invested performance goes a long way, but there are too many patches of the film that he’s absent from.

The CGI-ed devastation of the city is seriously striking. From the colossal caving in of a football stadium to long shots of bridges being blown up - Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister impressively outdo their wondrous work on INCEPTION, not to mention just about every super hero movie in recent memory (sorry, THE AVENGERS - you were a lot more fun though).

So, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a mixed bag. But even at its overlong length (164 min.), there is enough compelling content to make it worthwhile, if you can overlook all the clunkiness - which I bet most folks can.

More later...

INCEPTION: The Film Babble Blog Review

INCEPTION (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)


The buzz has been building for Christopher Nolan's followup to the THE DARK KNIGHT for some time now, and it's certainly going to get bigger as audiences see for themselves what this incredible mind bender of a movie is all about. What it's all about I'm still working out, but I can say that it's a vivid visual feast that's one of the best films of the year so far. 

It's a difficult film to describe without giving away some of the pure pleasures of the plot so beware of Spoilers! Leo DiCaprio is a dream extractor - an expert in mind manipulation who deals in the underworld thievery of, well, parts of men's minds when they are asleep and dreaming. 

DiCaprio works with a team including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a "point-man" and a dream "architect" played by Lukas Haas. We meet them in the middle of a job inside of the dream state of Saito (Ken Watanabe) - a powerful Japanese business magnate.

Turns out Watanabe is auditioning DiCaprio and his crew for a bigger job involving "inception" -that is the planting of an idea into somebody's head through the dream world. 

For the job they need a new architect so through DiCaprio's professor father (the always welcome Sir Michael Caine) they are joined by a snark-free Ellen Page. DiCaprio also recruits the slick Tom Hardy to act as "forger" for the team. Dileep Rao rounds out the team as their chemist.

The target for their mind crime caper is Cillian Murphy as Watanabe's corporate rival who has the fate of his family's fortune in his hands upon his father's (Pete Postlethwaite) death. Much like in his last film, Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, DiCaprio is haunted by memories of his dead wife (here Marion Cotillard). Unlike SHUTTER ISLAND however here it's impossible to guess where it's all going.

Despite that it's crammed with a lot of action movie clichés - shoot-outs, automobile crashes, explosions, and there's even a sci-chase with machine guns - it never feels contrived. Its endlessly inventive dream inside of a dream inside of a dream scenarios are spell binding, and genuinely scary at times, and the towering worlds of the CGI crafted dream set pieces are overwhelmingly beautiful. Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister really outdid themselves on every frame. Likewise for Hans Zimmer who provides one of his most solid scores, one that swells and swoons at just the right moments.

I'll leave other critics to make comparisons to everything from METROPOLIS to the THE MATRIX because it's obvious that the decade it took to finish the screenplay Nolan has woven many influences and ideas into the framework. What wins out is the film threatens to burst out of the screen into real life - just like the most lucid dreams.

DiCaprio skillfully maneuvers through the action with a layered performance that's nearly as complex as the movie that's surrounding him.. Gordon-Levitt has a lot of screen time in his secondary role and he owns it - especially in the stressful yet seriously fun second half. 

In one of the best bits of acting I've seen from the actress, Page makes us feel the wonder of being able to create an entire world with intricate acrchitecture and the thrill of manipulating it to your own desires. At one point when she is learning how to structure a cityscape with thought, I really thought she was going to say: "Wow! This is awesome!" Because, well, it really is.

More later...