Month of Movies: February 2019

Total Films Watched: 13. Batman Begins, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Vice, High Flying Bird, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Edge of Seventeen, The Favourite, Alita: Battle Angel, Wayne's World, Velvet Buzzsaw, Meru, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Hail, Caesar!

Top Two Films: The Favourite and High Flying Bird. This is only my second-favorite film from Yorgos Lanthimos and it's definitely not my favorite from last year. But The Favourite still comes close to living up to that name. People deeper in the weeds about the Oscars were shocked when the movie got one win, for Olivia Colman, but I'm equally shocked the movie earned 10 total nominations. A decade ago, Lanthimos was making indie darlings in Greece where families brainwashed their children in the most deadpan way possible. His movies still have that same cold aesthetic and focus on twisted plots among subgroups, but along the way he grabbed a murderer's row of Hollywood talent. Colman is great as a queen slowly descending into madness- who may or may not be the lead- while Emma Stone taps into a new element of her star power- and is absolutely the lead of the film.

I was not a high fan of Unsane, Steven Soderbergh's previous film which was shot on an iPhone. There was decent tension and the look of the movie definitely stood out, but it just all felt pretty generic by the end. High Flying Bird feels much more substantial, both in the scope of the story and the on-screen talent. It's structured almost like a heist movie, as Andre Holland's basketball agent plots to resolve a six-month NBA lockout before he gets squeezed out of his job. Give how much I love Ocean's Eleven and other heist-based shows, that made this automatically more up my alley than Unsane, even before factoring in how great Holland, Zazie Beets and the supporting cast is.

The look of the movie seems to be the most divisive aspect of it. That aspect didn't really work for me in Unsane but I think in this movie Soderbergh has locked into something special about shooting on an iPhone. Look at the screenshot I included- the fluorescent light reflected in the windows, the dots on the basketball and the score of the background game are all in focus. Phone cameras are good a capturing that massive, flat field of view but not so good at things like zooms or selective focus. Soderbergh makes up for the limitations of the phone camera but doubling down on those benefits, using the camera placement and framing to draw the viewer's attention.

Movie Death Match: Best movie where Christian Bale builds a shadow empire in the early 2000's through questionably legal means- Batman Begins or Vice?

It should not come as a shock that I, a white guy who loves movies and saw Inception when I was 14, am a big fan of Christopher Nolan. So when I say that Batman Begins is the better of these two movies, you can take that with a grain of salt. The best of his movies balance material that's both very grounded in technical detail and inherently ridiculous. Like a billionaire who learns to be an elite warrior and then dresses up as a bat to fight crime. Batman Begins is a pretty standard superhero origin story- it leans a little more on action than exposition and is very methodical in its pacing, but those don't really change the structure.

Being a full origin story also gives Bale a variety of ages and emotions to work through. His take on Batman seems to be that he's a aggressive but fundamentally decent person, a man who genuinely thinks being a skilled vigilante is the best way to help the city he loves. That humane core comes across whether he's beating up goons in a mask or pulling a charm offensive as Bruce Wayne that feels like a gentler version of Patrick Bateman. It also lets the other actors around him go bigger and more cartoonish without pulling the movie off the ground. I'm mostly thinking about Cillian Murphy's manic super-villain in that regard, though Wilkinson and Neeson have moments in the spotlight too.

Come to think of it, hammy performances from the supporting cast is another link between that movie and Vice. I have a short level of patience when it comes to extended, vaguely-defined metaphors in movies. That's a problem that really limits Vice in my eyes- I kinda get what all the fly-fishing and jarring montages are about but they do not add anything substantial to Dick Cheney's story. The biggest of those, Jesse Plemon's mysterious narrator, is the only one that totally works for me. Those moments are when the film felt most like The Big Short, both in its style and in the sharpness of the portrayal of real events. It feels like McKay and Bale want Cheney's actions to mostly speak for themselves, so they don't have to paint him as too absurdly evil to get those points across. Bale doesn't pull of the age differences as well in this movie, but his performance is still pretty good. He mostly disappears except for the few moments when he cracks a smile- years in the Batman cowl have left him with a very recognizable mouth.

Longer Thoughts About: Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Look at that list of all the movies I saw this month. It's a lot of titles that I saw and enjoyed and probably have enough knowledge to talk about at length. There are indie darlings, fascinating documentaries, even a Coen Brothers film. And yet, the random number generator somehow gave me the one film that will force me to show my ignorance to a classic genre and criticize a 50-year-old movie in the Criterion Collection.

At the most basic level, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a classic in the sub-genre of one-man survival movies. A close call with an asteroid forces two astronauts and their adorable monkey to abandon ship on Mars. The only human who survives for long is Commander Draper, played with classic down-the-middle leading man charm by Paul Mantee. He lives for a long time on his own, burning rocks for oxygen and hunkering down in jewel-encrusted caves, until he rescues Mona the monkey. As far as these one-person films go, Mantee and prolific genre director Byron Haskin know how to keep the movie going along. It's not an accurate portrayal of Mars by any means but it's entertaining for a while. Seeing the astronaut slowly learn about oxygen, food, water and mental health is predictable but that doesn't make the reveals any less fun. Especially since the locations are either elaborate rocky sets or striking desert landscapes, both of which add some technical sparkle that elevates the movie. For that first half, the movie is a version of The Martian, with less scientific rigor but a good dramatic tone.

And then they get to Friday. Oh how this movie did not need to include a version of Friday. Eventually Draper rescues a Martian slave (Victor Lundin) from an alien mining company, run by beings from a third planet, and drags him back to his cave. There he slowly forces the Martian man to learn English and pays no attention to his knowledge of the planet he grew up on. But by the end of the movie they become friends, as being on the run from the slaver species and speaking English keeps them on the same page. Oh, did I mention that Lundin spends the second half of the movie shirtless and is suspiciously darker-skinned than Mantee?

Those racial problems are not the only complaints I has with Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Not that it wouldn't be justified to have that element be a deal-breaker. Even in 1964, having the two sidekicks to the hero be an escaped slave and a monkey should have been considered by someone, at some point. But the movie also gets less interesting when they're on the run from the third species of aliens. Friday has a tracking device on his wrist but they never leave the ships, instead just firing lasers from flying saucers in the same ten-second loop of animation every time. They milk that effect for all it's worth and then several minutes more. Even though the stakes are technically higher, the danger feels much less threatening than just trying to survive on the planet was. The ending is also jarringly fast- in the last minute of the movie the group escapes death, contacts another American ship and is presumably flown to Earth as the credits start rolling. I don't really know if this was the achievement of sci-fi effects and old studio storytelling that the Criterion insert claims it to be. There are impressive elements and I don't hate that I've seen it. It just feels so... generic.