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Jewish Horror

Dybbuks, shedim, and old neighbors who want to know what you’ve been doing since they last saw you: these are the great horrors of Jewish life. It’s nothing new to use the genre of horror to explore Jewish themes — the past decade or so has seen Possession, The Unborn, and Jeruzalem, while films like The Golem and The Dybbuk have been around since the early 20th century — but Jewish horror movies are rare enough that their mere existence often begs recognition. 2021 sees the release of two Jewish horror films, The Vigil and (hot take) Shiva Baby.

A more straightforward horror film, The Vigil spends the night with Yakov (Dave Davis), a young man who recently left the fold of Hasidism (ultra-Orthodox Judaism). He returns to that world when he’s hired by a rabbi (Menashe’s Menashe Lustig, introduced like Robert Mitchum’s menacing preacher of The Night of the Hunter) to be a shomer(guard who watches over a corpse before it is buried), and encounters a force of spiritual malice inspired by real Jewish lore. He spends a night facing terrors, losing his sense of reality, and reckoning with guilt from his past.

Shiva Baby isn’t billed as a horror, but it sure plays like one. From the first plucks of Ariel Marx’s pizzicato score through the blood-curdling close-up images of old Jews eating fish in slow-motion, the film amps up the emotional tension and threatens to burst at any moment. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is back in her hometown for a shiva (gathering of mourning), surrounded by nosy former neighbors in what director Emma Seligmancalls “a symphony of all her deepest insecurities.” Struggling with her path in life, Danielle finds power in getting herself a sugar daddy (Danny Deferrari). But things fall apart when he shows up at the very same shiva with his wife and baby, of whose existence Danielle was unaware.

The great horror Jews must often reckon with in movies is that of the Holocaust (remember that we suffered), and occasionally of other historical threats to our very existence. But there’s more to being afraid and Jewish than the existential threat of genocide. Since the Exodus, the Jewish identity has been defined by a fear of not living up to the expectations set for us, especially when rebellion and doubt can be met with a harsh response. It is traditionally considered virtuous to fear sin. And it’s hard not to feel something like dread at the annual reading of our liturgy, “Who shall live and who shall die?”

These fears get passed down from generation to generation as we’re forced to explain to friends, loved ones, neighbors, and all those people we don’t care about: What is it that we’re doing in life? What is your purpose for existence? In Shiva Baby, Danielle is asked about the three key areas of life: school, dating, and whether she has an eating disorder. There’s an underlying terror in knowing that the moment you turn your back, people you hardly know might judge your life choices — all while ostensibly comforting the bereaved for the loss of their loved ones.

Under Seligman’s direction and through Sennott’s acting, these fears transcend discomfort. With tight framing, overlapping audio, loud noises, a neverending sense of nervousness and disorientation, and that score that just keeps plucking, prodding, pushing, Shiva Baby becomes a horror of banalities. And it’s all rooted in the authentic Jewish experience of being embarrassed by parents who want to find you dates, interviews, or something else they can just help with. Of being belittled because you’re young and “why don’t you just” listen, behave, etc.? Of feeling trapped because every time you try to leave, it takes at least half an hour for everybody to say goodbye to the right people, or be ready to get in the same car, or find their phone, or finish the new conversation they got caught up in that’s preventing them from helping you escape.

The horrors of Judaism extend beyond the realm of man. Aggadic teachings in the Talmud (a broad category that tends to encompass all but the strictly legal) abound with places and practices to avoid when trying to stay safe from mazikim (harmful spirits). Judaic texts offer a wellspring of rituals and stories that make for interesting opportunities to find horror. The Vigil takes inspiration from almost the same bit of demon lore as the fascinating prologue to the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man: What happens to a Jewish corpse that is left unattended, even momentarily?

As a mazik toys with the mind of Yakov, the protagonist of The Vigil, the film delivers some truly unsettling moments. There is the cliché horror of unexpected blood, insects, and sudden noise, but there’s also the unsettling amount of crunches and cracks coming from all sorts of bodies. Yakov’s psychiatrist (a bit role played by Fred Melamed, always wonderful, who also co-stars in Shiva Baby and A Serious Man) calls to check in, but Yakov has to put him on hold to answer another call. He answers and it’s the same psychiatrist, talking as if he’s only just gotten the chance to call — reality has fractured.

The most Jewish moment in The Vigil, a movie that includes Hasidim, Holocaust flashbacks, and a man dressed in tefillin fighting off an ancient demon? It’s when Yakov, after facing terror after terror, first notices that the dead body he was supposed to be watching has vanished, as if it walked off on its own. He laughs. And he says, “Of course.” Because if you’re Jewish and you’re already suffering, you aren’t surprised when Hashem tosses you one more trouble, just for fun. That’s life!

It’s not a chiddush (novelty) to say that authentic, lived-in representation is a value. The Jewish experience — the one that’s more than just klezmer music and random menorahs in the set dressing — isn’t seen very often, and even less in the form of genre storytelling. But especially when it comes to horror, there’s plenty of Jewishness to choose from, from the personal to the purely elemental. Though The Vigil and Shiva Baby are not the first Jewish horror movies, they’re the most recent reminders of what Judaism has to offer to horror stories and genre storytelling. Keith Thomas, director of The Vigil, said in an interview that he’s interested in making more Jewish horror. Nu, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Originally published on Alma

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Autonomies (2018)

Shtisel is back. The third season of the popular TV series about Haredi Jews is coming to Netflix on March 25, after airing on Israeli television earlier this year. But if you just can’t wait for more nuanced, thoughtful depictions of Orthodox Judaism on screen and need your next fix, you should hear about the limited series Autonomies, created by the team that brought you Shtisel, Yehonatan Indursky and Ori Elon. Even if you’ve never seen Shtisel, but you care about interesting stories that center the Jewish experience, you should probably hear about Autonomies, too.

In the dystopian world of Autonomies, a fictional Israel is still reckoning with the aftermath of a civil war, as the country is split between the Hilonim (secular Jews) in Tel Aviv and a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) autonomy under strict religious law in Jerusalem (a Palestinian autonomy is named, though never a focus). But the cracks are showing. Members of the Hevra Kadisha (Jews who handle the responsibilities of the deceased) use coffins to smuggle porn, pork, and other non-kosher contraband into the Haredi autonomy. Rumors abound on the possibility of unification with the rest of Israel. And one girl — born from one world, raised in the other — becomes the symbol of the country’s precariousness when the identity of her birth mother is revealed.

At the 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival, Indursky said that he was inspired by his own upbringing when co-creating this show. The writer and director grew up Haredi and studied in the Yeshiva Ponevezh in Bnei Brak before leaving that world. You can feel the lived-in quality of his writing in the mumbled brachas (blessings) over food, the way a jazz song can become a niggun (traditional melody), and the natural way details of Jewish tradition are woven into the fabric of the story. You can also feel his sense of perspective, as he navigates the story from the dual perspectives of insider and one beyond.

Haredi life is nuanced, presented with flaws and favor alike. The rebbe of the autonomy (Shuli Rand) is an inspirational figure to many, but in his amber-hued study, he reigns like Don Corleone over his council. There is beauty in ritual, but trouble brews as characters push back against the stringencies enforced by the Shomrim (Haredi police). In the heightened reality of a dystopia, Autonomies raises the stakes of tensions and temptations without declaring an explicit bad guy. The clearest stance the show takes is an opposition to walls that keep some people in and others out.

A great piece of genre storytelling will often reveal truths about the ordinary world. Autonomies is a bit of Job, a bit of Jonah — the main character, Yonah Broide (Assi Cohen), retells the latter’s story when he’s inside his own belly of the beast — and it’s also a whole lot of the sentiment of Jewish suffering expressed over and over in Tisha B’Av kinnot (elegies): “אוֹי מֶה הָיָה לָנו” (oy, what has happened to us). Following in the tradition of Fiddler on the Roof and A Serious Man, Autonomies presents Broide wondering: Why does Hashem have to do this to me?

Of course, Broide’s not the only one suffering. The women of Autonomies, particularly Elka (Tali Sharon) and Batia (Dana Ivgy), reckon with the ways they are seen and ignored, as they struggle over the fate of a daughter who was switched at birth. Lawyers, husbands, police, and a rebbe push them to give up, to fight, or to endure, as they hope to hold onto a daughter thought dead by one and raised by the other. Even the girl, Goni (Nir Di-Nur), becomes seen more as a symbol of political strife than as an individual.

It’s been three years since Autonomies’ release in Israel, and it still hasn’t made much of a cultural splash in the U.S., where the show is only available on the streaming service Topic (which does offer a seven-day free trial, perfect for bingeing a three-and-a-half-hour Israeli limited series), and at the occasional film festival. I have not stopped thinking about Autonomies (no, really) since I first saw the show in 2019. Like Shtisel, it grounds its story in a reality of customs, restrictions, expectations, and self-doubt.

Watch it before you watch season 3 of Shtisel. Watch it after. Watch it and discuss it enough for the distributor, Keshet International, to make the show more widely available (is it too much to ask for an Autonomies Blu-Ray release?). Appreciate how great it is that we can have a Jewish work that is also a piece of powerful genre storytelling about division, personal struggle, and identity. And then, when you hear somebody tell you how excited they are to watch the new season of Shtisel, let them know: They need to hear about Autonomies, too.

Originally published on Alma

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One Nostalgia Later

Zero barely talks about his great lost love. As the “aged proprietor” of an “enchanted old ruin” known as the Grand Budapest Hotel, he tells his life story by skipping around her presence, touching on the existence of his “darling Agatha,” but avoiding falling into the pit of despair. Beautiful things don’t get to be completed in his world, where poems are always cut off, nice sentiments are interrupted, and the dark specter of war and disease cuts short any hope of living long, living with love. The man who “struck one as being, deeply and truly, lonely” knows what it is to lose.

For a brief time, Zero and Agatha shared a love. They were outcasts, ignored, working in service jobs that required self-abnegation—he as a hotel lobby boy; she, the pastry girl at a bakery. We see them in their bedrooms; it’s not much. “We did not have 50 Klubecks between the two of us,” recalls the older Zero. They worked long, demanding hours and had few moments to spare. Zero’s meals were held with the rest of the hotel staff. Agatha suffered the overbearing, watchful eye of her boss at the bakery, Herr Mendl. Being together was difficult, but the few moments they shared were rapturous. Their courtship felt like young love feels: furtive, secretive, and bursting with flushed emotion.

That young love never gets to mature. Agatha dies too early. “An absurd little disease,” the older Zero says parenthetically of the cause of death. So, every moment is preserved in amber, but never lingered on for too long. “She is a nearly absent presence in the story, by Zero’s choice: a narrative door marked ‘Do Not Enter,’” writes Matt Zoller Seitz, in his book about the movie. “He won’t speak of her. It’s too painful, and he’s too private.” But the aged Zero can’t tell his story without including her, try as he might. And we get glimpses.

On one good day, Zero and Agatha go to a carousel. They’re accompanied by Herr Mendl, but they barely notice. Zero gives his love a gift. He’s so anxious for her to like it, he can’t even wait for her to open the wrapping before he bursts out with what it is. He can’t contain his love in the inscription, either: “For my dearest, darling, treasured, cherished Agatha, whom I worship. With respect, adoration, admiration, kisses, gratitude, best wishes, and love.”

Throughout their courtship, the world around Zero and Agatha bursts at the seams with the portents of war, as newspapers tease, armies gather, and the brightly colored, idyllic world of the fictional state of Zubrowka teeters on the brink. The start of the war, after all, sees the appearance of black-clad death squads, and eventually, the draining of color from the film itself. Darkness and death loom quietly, but no matter what’s going on in the world, a first love is a first love. And it’s all encapsulated in a single image.

Agatha’s face takes up the center of the boxy frame—her gaze is transfixing. She stares lovingly, straight through the camera. We’re Zero, locking eyes with her. The colors shift over her face as carousel lights turn behind and around her. She is radiant, then shadowed, then red. She has the slightest hint of a smile, her head tilted, just so. Agatha stares with her deep blue eyes and it’s near-impossible to look away. But who would want to?

In this single moment, the music fades as if it’s playing somewhere else, the lights haze, as the focus can only be directed toward Agatha. Time is frozen, if only for a moment, as we experience the ecstasy of loving and knowing you are loved. Of early love, with its rushed heartbeats, tingling limbs, empty stomachs, stuttering lips, and sweaty brows. We hold onto this eternally familiar moment. As Italo Calvino once wrote, describing a different, frozen moment in time: “The suspicion that has gripped me is precisely this: that I have come to find myself in a space not new to me, that I have returned to a point where we had already passed by.”

* * *

The Grand Budapest Hotel continues a literary tradition that’s stretched from Dante to Moulin Rouge!: women die tragically and their lovers memorialize them in their writings. Agatha is an ideal, an image. Like Madeleine to Scotty in Vertigo (but less creepy), like the woman of an aged Mr. Bernstein’s tale in Citizen Kane (but more meaningful), Agatha exists as a memory or a reference.

With its frames within frames of shifting perspectives and aspect ratios, The Grand Budapest Hotel is distinctly literary. Its opening monologue is lifted nearly verbatim from Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig, an author whose work is credited with inspiring the film, whose mustache seems to appear on more than one character’s face, and whose disappearing world is fictionalized as the setting. Zweig’s non-fiction is a great example of the longing for a lost place; his fiction for lost people. In his novella Journey into the Past, Zweig chronicles the long-awaited reunion of a man and a woman who had once been deeply in love, years ago. “How much time, how much lost time, and yet in the space of a second a single thought took him back to the very beginning.”

Zweig’s stories are often framed as recollections told over, as stories shared with strangers because of their absolute meaningfulness—much like the memorializing by grieving lovers of literary tradition—because these memories needed to be stories, to be remembered by somebody else. Zweig’s framing characters look to create the literature of their own lived stories. Journey into the Past sees two characters, Ludwig and an unnamed woman,  returning to their own story, with one seeking to consummate his unrequited love of nine years’ distance. They had had an emotional affair, tucked into passionate glances and tacit communication, years earlier, while her husband was alive. They kissed where they could, but they had to hide from the servants who always seemed to be around at the least opportune time. Ludwig’s desires were never fully satisfied and he was called away on business so he could build his fortune. And he and his love made a promise to be together once he’d return.

But the trouble with remembering love is that its amber glow sets up dangerous expectations. After being away far longer than he’d have liked to be, Ludwig is greeted fondly by the woman’s staff. He joins his love to the literary tradition and wonders to himself, as Zweig writes, “Odysseus…the household dogs recognize you, will the mistress of the house know you again too?” He’s been away for nine years. He’s gotten married, but he still returns for a rendezvous with the woman he loved and lost, to fulfill a promise she had made him, but which she realizes she cannot keep. Ludwig recalls a couplet from a French poem by Paul Verlaine: “In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast / Two specters walk, still searching for the past.” The poem, which cuts off there in Zweig’s story, imagines a dialogue between lost lovers:

—Does your heart still surge at my very name?

Do you still see my soul when you dream?—No.

—Ah, the beautiful days of inexpressible bliss

When our lips met!—It may have been so.

—How blue the sky, how hopes ran high!

—Hope has fled, vanquished, to the black sky.

Like Jay Gatsby or Mr. Bernstein or Lemony Snicket, wondering what might have been, Ludwig and Verlaine’s narrator and an old Zero romanticize their visions of love as time goes by.

“Any adequate view of nostalgia will acknowledge that it involves a felt difference between past and present: the very irretrievability of the past is salient in the experience,” wrote philosophy professor Scott Alexander Howard. We may seek to stay in the past through memory, Howard tells us, because the present seems worse, because we didn’t realize how good life was, or because we’re spontaneously overtaken by nostalgia. Nostalgia may mean that we see the past as a time that was better, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean that our vision of the past is false, it does mean that things get amplified to a whole other level:

The nostalgist knows the past in question was unpleasant at the time, but in memory it is altered by certain effects: for example, the memory has acquired a gold patina, or it seems to be an uncanny distillation of a whole time period. Neither effect strikes the self-aware nostalgist as true to the quality of one’s experiences at the time when those memories were encoded. Yet they are part of what is targeted by nostalgia. The emotion seems to be directed precisely at the “fictional” features of the memory image—things which one recognizes to be not inside the scene on the other side of the window, but drawn onto the glass.

That amber glow or gold patina grows as we distance ourselves from a disappeared world. Zero’s story, his world, his love are by definition irretrievable.

The carousel (in reality, a wood frame built around a camera setup) is irretrievable. The lights (in reality, constructed to be evocative more than representative) are irretrievable. The shared moment—stolen between long shifts of service as Herr Mendl looks on—is gone, and its memory is a fictionalized, amberized construction of nostalgia and longing.

As the elder Zero looks back, the once garishly pink and red hotel now looks like a holdover from Soviet-era architecture, its colors a drab collection of beiges and oranges. The grand ballroom holds few diners and the place, in general, is empty. Guests push their own elevator buttons, serve themselves from vending machines, and, at times, even retrieve their own keys.

And Agatha. Zero holds onto her memory, but reveals very little of it. She has 15 lines in the film’s screenplay. The first time we hear of Agatha, the older Zero avoids saying much, and talks of her only when he has to. It’s all gone and irretrievable. Sort of.

* * *

One cold November night at Penn Station, the poet Alandra Markman, then going by the pseudonym Allan Andre, wrote a poem for me and a friend (we missed our train, but the delay was worth it). “One nostalgia later” gave a compelling portrait of family meals, “as winter nights dissolve into warm / recollection and company we’re still keeping.” The way the poem goes, we create our nostalgia as we live through moments, readying our stories to be told and remembered some time later on. “Let every glow, mechanical or felt, be one / with the shadows we’re still casting, / and guide our bodies into greater light.”

The story of Zero and Agatha’s love was created on the carousel. In that moment, we see their love blossoming, deepening, exploding with the soft-focus lights of ecstasy. The elder Zero tells us he’s exercising restraint, avoiding talking about Agatha as much as he can, but if he were truly offering a utilitarian telling, there’d be no need to include this gaze frozen in time. In that moment, we never see Zero head-on, never see the reverse shot of adoration. It’s only Agatha and light. And us.

The elder Zero tells the story to a writer, the writer remembers it long enough to write it as an older man, the older man’s book becomes important enough for him to become a beloved national author, and through the eyes of a devotee, we read this book. When Stefan Zweig incorporates listeners into the story, it’s not just for the purpose of framing. The value of a memory is in how it feels to the rememberer, but the value of a story is in how it feels to the one who hears it. It is the storyteller himself who seeks out the opportunity to tell his story—the older Zero needles the writer into admitting his curiosity and offers, of his own volition, to tell it  in full. The telling is not for the benefit of Zero himself; he is giving something to the author, creating an experience for his audience. With its multiple framings, The Grand Budapest Hotel tells us that we are the viewers, the listeners, the readers. We are part of the experience, and we create our nostalgia as we experience it, so we can tell the story later of a place with bright reds, dark blacks, and swirling lights.

I remember The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I remember those swirling lights and the clutched breath and the deep longing. I think about that one frame of Agatha, frozen in time, holding her lover’s gaze—holding our gaze—as the darkness briefly clouds her face. Every time Zero and the writer and Wes Anderson tell me the story, I see that darkness and I face the irretrievability. I don’t feel nostalgia; I feel regret. For Zubrowka and everything it represents. For the grandness of the Grand Budapest. For Agatha.

* * *

When Calvino wrote about his frozen moment, it was in the story “t zero,” in which the narrator, a hunter, faces a lion L, the arrow A just fired from the hunter’s bow at the time tx. The hunter considers the possibility that A will collide with L at point X and he will be saved, or that A will miss the target L, which would then sink its very sharp claws into his chest in the less preferable of situations. It feels familiar, the narrator tells us, though not because of a comparable lion he’s fought or some feeling of ancestral memory lodged in his DNA. “If I say this moment I am living through is not being lived for the first time by me, it’s because the sensation I have of it is one of a slight doubling of images, as if at the same time I were seeing not one lion or one arrow but two or more lions and two or more arrows superimposed with a barely perceptible overlapping, so the sinuous outlines of the lion’s form and the segment of the arrow seem underlined or rather haloed by finer lines and a more delicate color.” He is experiencing a sense of timelessness, as if he’s lived through this moment in time and space, again and again. “What, after all, is the use of continuing if sooner or later we will only find ourselves in this situation again?”

While the elder Zero withholds a lot, rewatching The Grand Budapest Hotel can feel like a slight glimpse into the heart of an old man, thinking about his lost love and the potential of bright colors and bursting emotion that could have continued for the rest of his life (the internet loves a revisionist theory about a movie—what if the Grand Budapest Hotel of the past only looks that way because of how Zero remembers it?). Calvino’s hunter is doubtful. Zero seems assured. He memorializes his beloved with the hotel that stands for their love. With the story he tells of her. And he lets us see a little.

And we see the near-imperceptible smile, the tilt of a head, the unblinking eyes, the brightness and the dark. We see the warm glow of memory that says how great this was and the hint of sorrow asking how great this could have been.

Originally published on Bright Wall/Dark Room

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An Impossible Project (2020)

Dream big or face reality. Hold onto the past or watch it be torn away from you. That’s the narrative of An Impossible Project, a documentary torn between reality and the story it tries to tell.

Directed by Jens Meurer, the film is, more than anything, a love letter to analog, to the technological world of buttons, rotors, and greasy machines, more so than the digital realm of touchscreens, memory, and CDs. It’s about the physical way we interact with an older form of technology and the emotional connection that’s thereby created. “My theory,” says Dr. Florian “Doc” Kaps, “is that the biggest difference between digital and analog is the fact that digital always just tickles two of your senses. It’s always I can see, I can hear it. But it’s always behind the glass screen. I cannot really touch you, I cannot smell it, I cannot lick it… it’s nothing real.” Analog, by extension, is as real as technology gets.

The two subjects of the story are Doc and the Impossible Project, the latter a group of analog enthusiasts who bought the last surviving Polaroid factory in 2008 as the company was about to shut it down. The Impossible Project hoped to revitalize the industry of instant photography. The problems standing in their way were many — as the team’s name implies — including the facts that they didn’t have Polaroid’s instant photograph chemical formula, Doc was running the group without knowing how to run a business, and investors weren’t exactly rushing to pay into an expensive, failing industry with a small niche of enthusiasts.

Meurer’s film reads as an elegy for the analog, a deeply nostalgic look at something that doesn’t belong in the modern world. He peppers in images of Polaroids taken across many many years, a testament to the legacy of the photographic medium. He doesn’t hide his disdain for smartphones, for digital media in the narration; An Impossible Project even begins with an anti-digital disclaimer.

The argument for analog is not always an easy one to make, nor is the film able to convey it in a significantly compelling manner. Remember how long it took to dial rotary phones? Remember how annoying a key jam is on a typewriter? How expensive a pack of just a handful of Polaroid (or Fujifilm) film was? Doc is called “Doc Quixote” and his impossible dream just seems like a lot of work. The best version of the argument is one offered by an Impossible Project employee: the work is not about proving that analog is better than digital; it’s about giving people a choice, and making sure that choice doesn’t disappear.

Reality is always just around the corner in An Impossible Project, and for that reason, the narrative feels disjointed. (Spoiler alert) Doc gets fired from his own company, and while he continues exploring possibilities of revitalizing analog technology, he never really gets terribly far. He has meetings, talks, even a lavish dinner in an abandoned Grand Hotel, but there’s this nagging feeling that he’s looking for miracles that never fully materialize. Meurer is fascinated by Doc’s story, but still keeps hopping back to check in on the Impossible Project, run by the former intern/son of the main investor who usurped Doc to become CEO.

The documentary meanders a bit and is dry in places. When its subjects get passionate, you can feel that passion.There’s just that question of whether their analog dreams are yours too.

Originally published on Unseen Films

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'Steve Jobs' nailed one crucial detail about how Apple works

Aaron Sorkin may have misunderstood Facebook, rewritten history, and created television moments that welcomed wide derision, but when it comes to Apple, he got it right. Sort of.

Steve Jobs is now five years old, and revisiting it the week after the release of his sophomore directorial effort, The Trial of the Chicago 7, it’s easy to focus on the Sorkinisms — the screenwriter’s oft-mocked, nobody-behaves-like-this quirks — and miss that Sorkin did something remarkable in this movie, because he understood Apple. For the most part.

Before 2017’s Molly’s Game, Sorkin’s scripts were always directed (and edited) by somebody else. Listen to his commentary to Steve Jobs with editor Elliot Graham and you’ll hear Sorkin asking why this scene of his was cut and how about the other one, too? Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle, is a story about fathers — biological, adoptive, figures — failing their children. It’s about righteous indignation and Great Men trying to do Great Things as Ordinary People stand in their way. In other words, it’s a classic Sorkin script.

But then, Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs (in a performance that goes beyond mere impression) says something like “We’re a computer company; we can’t start late,” and despite Sorkin’s repeated career disdain for the internet, there’s something in that moment that really starts to click.

Steve Jobs is at its best when it’s working through the debate that has been posed as Mac vs. PC, iOS vs. Android, design vs. function, luxury vs. price, and probably a number of other ways: who should technology be designed for and how much control should they have? Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and Steve Jobs have the debate in the movie. Woz insists the Apple II should have as many slots as possible, to let each user take their computer and “jack it up.” Jobs argues it only needs two slots — one for a printer, the other for a modem. While Jobs doesn’t articulate his position as the two duke it out in the hallowed garage (what’s a Steve Jobs movie without a garage scene?), it’s pretty clear that it’s a question of form over function. Wozniak insists that the Apple II is a feat of engineering. Jobs says it’s a painting.

Jobs’ position on end-to-end control in every machine he creates repeats itself throughout the movie, as he repeatedly upsets his team with his insane particularities. He introduces two over-designed and overpriced computers: the $2,500 Macintosh that “doesn’t do anything” and the NeXT computer, where all the focus went into the black box’s near-90-degree angles, and all the neglect went into its incomplete OS. His head of marketing, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), snarks at him for designing rectangles with rounded corners. Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), his ex and the mother of his daughter, mocks his NeXT computer for having to be a perfect cube. His daughter, Lisa (played in that scene by Perla Haney-Jardine) yells that the iMac looks like “Judy Jetson’s Easy-Bake Oven.” His friends, family, and coworkers don’t fully understand what he’s trying to achieve (“I don’t get it,” Chrisann says. “I know,” he drily responds.) as the costs keep going up and the timelines keep slowing down while he tries to build his perfect machines.

But he’s not as insane as he’s made out to be, because when the technology works in that perfectly human, easy-to-understand sort of way (cue the ad line), it just works. Jobs insists on switching his shirt because the floppy disk needs to fit in his shirt pocket. Watch the 1984 launch and listen to the reaction that stunt gets, only surpassed by the cheers as the Macintosh introduces itself, using text-to-speech conversion. That’s how so many of us want technology to feel: slick, cool, easy. Text commands get beaten out by point and click because “that’s not how a person’s mind works.”

Then, there’s the other side. The side that wants to put widgets on screens, install their own keyboards and emulators, maybe use a stylus, and fully customize their own tech experience. The people like Raymond Wong turning a LEGO NES into a functional set or Steve Wozniak playing around with a Nixie tube watch. It’s the kind of stuff that can involve soldering, tinkering, pulling tools out on an airplane (“Excuse me, flight attendant? The man next to me would appear to be detonating a bomb.”), but it’s not the “It just works” philosophy. And it’s not fully controlled by the manufacturer.

In this movie’s portrayal, Jobs clearly cares about creating tools that will inspire creativity. The most resonant and most repeated image in the movie is of Jobs’ daughter (then played by Makenzie Moss) discovering MacPaint and drawing an abstract. He offers a five-year-old the mouse, and as easily as the ads make it seem, she figures out how to use the computer to make a work of art, without being prompted to do it at all. The mouse (stolen from Xerox PARC) becomes a natural extension of the hand, much in the way director Danny Boyle frames one shot with the Macintosh replacing Jobs’ head. And it’s a “bicycle for the mind,” encouraging creativity.

If you come into Steve Jobs detesting the Apple philosophy, Sorkin’s dialogue and Fassbender’s performance likely won’t convince you of anything. The biopic depicts a guy who so deeply believes in making things easy in his way, he wants one of two employees to change their name because they both go by Andy. He’s also the guy who says “the very nature of people is something to be overcome.” But he understands something about the nature of humans. And five years later, it’s great to come back to a biopic that doesn’t just tell stories of his life in order; it pretty much gets his whole thing about making tech for humans.

Originally published on Input

[bcwallin]

Vertical Cinema (2020)

Every seismic shift in culture initially faces resistance. Remember that Singin’ in the Rain scene where a group of partygoers scoffs at the idea of talking pictures, as the viewers knowingly laugh? The motion picture had to make its case as an art form, and the talking picture faced similar barriers as a reasonable follow-up to silent films. (In City Lights, Charlie Chaplin mocked the advent of sound, using squawking noises as the soundtrack to a political speech — “What’s the difference?” he was asking.)

Even the seemingly simple question of how filmgoers should see movies has been a contentious debate topic over the past decade, including Sean Parker’s Screening Room, which planned to offer home rentals at $50 apiece for movies still in theaters; Netflix sparking problems at the Cannes Film Festival and among major theater chainsbecause of its theatrical window choices; and Regal warning NBCUniversal about being too quick to take titles out of theaters and make them available on-demand. When popular entertainment finds a new medium, there’s inevitably pushback. How many people mocked TikTok before ironically creating an account, learning the dances, and falling hard for it?

Falling hard is where “The Stunt Double” begins. Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s new short film was shot on an iPhone 11 Pro (with some extra equipment, funding, etc.) for Apple’s ongoing “Shot on iPhone” campaign, under the banner of “Vertical Cinema.” A stuntman runs up a flight of stairs, across a roof, and off the edge of the building, falling without the hope of a parachute. (Yes, it’s reminiscent of The Matrix.) Then the scene changes to a Buster Keaton-style silent comedy, then a treasure-hunt adventure in the mode of Raiders of the Lost Ark (or one of the many early adventure films it was based on). The montage continues through a shot taken from The Searchers and a subsequent cliché Western shootout, a dance with outfits from Singin’ in the Rain’s “Gotta Dance” number, an Alain Delon take-off that turns into a North by Northwest homage, and so on. Chazelle pays tribute to the classics with “a journey through cinema history,” as Apple describes the video. And all of it is shot in the narrow vertical aspect ratio you expect to see from your poor grandparent or uncle who doesn’t know they’re supposed to turn their phone sideways when they’re capturing video.

Even back when most films were shot in the “Academy Ratio,” sometimes described as a square frame, the picture was still wider than it was tall, with an approximate 4:3 ratio. Most movies have been shot in landscape mode (as a photographer would say — a layman might say “sideways”) since the medium began. The boundaries of moviemaking will be tested with higher frame rates, experimental runtimes, and whatever else innovators will rethink, but they’re pretty much always viewed side-to-side, not to top-to-bottom. This isn’t the first foray a tech company has made into a movie in a vertical aspect ratio, but the failings of streaming service Quibi aside, vertical orientation has tended to be a rare exception for filmmakers, not the main idea. It’s a natural choice for a medium that evolved out of horizontally oriented theater: A lot of early silent films look like they were produced on stage.

Chazelle is a brilliant choice to helm a major, nine-minute statement about a new medium for film, based in the narrative language that the old familiar medium produced. The director didn’t take home Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but he garnered significant praisefor the musical La La Land, a nostalgic musical built on references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Rebel Without a Cause, Casablanca, and the filmography of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In La La Land, Chazelle distinctly showed off his love for the golden age of the silver screen. There’s a reason remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels keep getting made, no matter how many people complain about the death of originality — familiarity fills seats.

As a short film, “The Stunt Double” isn’t bad, though it isn’t particularly exceptional storytelling, either. The journey is clearly meant to be a mythologized, easy-to-grasp trip through cinematic nostalgia. Understanding the story shouldn’t get in the way of getting used to a new form. Chazelle’s shots are distinctly designed for a vertical medium, and some moments really benefit from that hyper-focus on space. Generally, there’s something striking about film shots where everything is stationary and a single element moves in contrast to the surrounding stillness. Alfred Hitchcock shot a scene like this in The Birds, where Jessica Tandy’s character drives to a house and discovers a man’s mutilated body, a harbinger of the danger to come. The shocking moment is bookended by shots of a still, serene landscape, where a truck drives from left to right in one shot, and back again in the next. (A similar Hitchcock shot in Strangers on a Train shows the efficacy of the opposite form of contrast — everything aside from a single element is in motion.) In “The Stunt Double,” Chazelle stages similar shots of visual contrast, often replacing side-to-side motion with movement along a vertical axis.

He also innovates in gunfight framings, modifying the classic through-the-legs perspective and holster-side shots so they’re particularly fitting to the frame. Some shots have a lot of space at the top, but feel packed at the bottom. “One of the things that’s really fun about playing with vertical aspect ratio,” Chazelle says in the behind-the-scenes footage, “is how you can play with what the eye sees when, and the way that you can get an audience used to looking up and down rather than left and right, which is what they’re kinda used to.”

The fact that “The Stunt Double” was shot on a phone is one of the least surprising parts of it. The behind-the-scenes footage does look a bit weird, as Chazelle intensely tracks in on a shot while holding his phone with two hands. But Steven Soderbergh has already released two feature films that were shot entirely on iPhones, and other filmmakers, like Tangerine’s Sean Baker, paved the way for him. Apple keeps building devices with better cameras, so with the magic of editing, professional lighting, and high-quality practical and digital effects, it’s not hard to see movies shot on iPhone looking good, even if living up to professionally shot demonstration footage is a herculean task. One of the more interesting things about Apple’s September 2019 keynote introducing the iPhone 11 Pro was the presentation of FiLMiC Pro, an app that lets filmmakers shoot with all four of the iPhone’s lenses simultaneously — front-facing lens included. During that keynote, Baker talked about shooting Tangerine on iPhone and about the possibilities for the future: “I’m always excited when I see evolution in filmmaking style and craft.”

But evolution happens slowly. The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first-ever talking picture in the U.S. (no matter how often it’s credited as such), but as an early talkie, it features many silent scenes. “The Stunt Double” similarly feels like a toe dipped in the water, testing out the idea of a new filmmaking mode. It’s about a lonely stuntman pining after his inaccessible co-star. (Tarsem’s The Fall did it better.) It uses the same actors for different stories told across the ages. (The Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas did it better.) Like Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, it’ll likely stand as more of an exhibition for the cinematic possibilities than for its own unique merits. Chazelle copied, clipped, and modified shots from other movies so that even when his compositions are interesting, there’s almost nothing new going on here, even as the crew works within a specific mindset. ”Most of the time, we’re coming from elevation or going to elevation,” says Jesse La Flair, credited as a parkour expert in Apple’s behind-the-scenes video. “So we’re jumping off of something, flipping down from something, twisting down from something. So to have this vertical frame really gives the perspective of what we’re doing.”

It’s easy to predict backlash against the vertical aspect ratio — especially if Apple extends its experiment to the making of a TV show or a feature film. People on the internet routinely express frustration at seeing witnesses to real-world events record them in portrait orientation. Now consider how that resistance will be magnified if it’s applied against the way movies have always been made.

But it’s worth keeping an open mind about innovation, and I take a staunch stance against denouncing new media just because it’s different. In trips to the tech-friendly Tribeca Film Festival in the past, I’ve found extreme joy from discovering new ways of enjoying movies in virtual and augmented reality. One night, I watched a competition between short films made using only Snapchat’s app tools and the camera in its glasses. The standout shorts from the night weren’t far off from what you might be able to find on TikTok — an impression-laden “Owen Wilson Dates Himself” and a face-swapped retelling of The Notebook, “The Notebook Snapstory.” The shorts were jarringly projected in the center of a standard movie screen, but the crowd was still enthusiastic. With the prestige of Tribeca behind it, the shorts program felt like a legitimizing of the format, with potential for further exploration. Fun film concepts can still be fun in a vertical aspect ratio.

That said, the format does feel limited. A vertical frame doesn’t give much room for interaction between characters. It’s better for poses, moments, ideas, and evocations. (Filmmakers like Zach Snyder might thrive in such a composition-driven format.) “The Stunt Double” gets a little boring, and part of that has to do with the mental associations the format carries with it. TikToks cap out at a minute long, and when they start getting dull, the platform encourages users to swipe to the next one. Snapchat’s vertical shows are all equipped with skip functions, which make it easier to jump ahead, chunk by chunk.

And that mental association that pairs vertical frames with online videos and skippability is just one of the barriers Vertical Cinema is facing. Vertical films like Chazelle’s just aren’t made for existing film screens. In a hypothetical world where theaters installed vertical movie screens to accommodate the format, viewers might have to tilt their head or eyes up and down, unable to see the full frame. (Have you ever sat in the front row in an IMAX theater?) In the current world of cinema chains negotiating diminishing theatrical windows and fighting to keep movie theaters safe (a loaded term right now), a popularized vertical frame would be yet another reason to favor streaming.

Bosley Crowther’s 1952 review of This Is Cinerama, a demonstration of the capabilities of super-wide film in response to the popularity of television, noted that it was mostly a combination of images: “the question arose immediately as to what might, indeed, be done with this new panoramic system in the way of developing a dramatic story on the screen.” It’s not hard to imagine a similar quote after demonstrations of Thomas Edison’s early film technology, with shorts like “Kiss” or “Record of a Sneeze.” It’s impossible to know what will be innovated and what mode will stick. (Remember the rise and fall of Smell-O-Vision?)

But Chazelle at least things Vertical Cinema is worth the experiment. “There’s no reason that we can’t be a little more free-thinking about it,” he says, “the same way painters long ago decided that, you know, ‘Well, if I want to paint an image like this, I’ll paint it vertically, this will be horizontal, this’ll be a box, this will be on a wall, this will be on a ceiling, this I want people to look up to, this is what I want people to look down to.’ I was trying to think of any kind of moving image as a little more of a blank page.” The urge to resist innovation and change is almost always the wrong urge. As film fans, we can appreciate the thought and craft that went into experiments like “The Stunt Double,” and we can wait before complaining that our childhoods, the cinema, or something else are under attack.

And we don’t have to wait for more Apple projects to see innovations in a vertical format for storytelling. TikTok has been an incredible platform for inviting users to create new kinds of stories, then riff and build on each other’s creations. Notice how out-of-place TikTok accounts like Will Smith’s or The Washington Post’s look, compared to the genuine earnestness many users offer. When Apple’s Vertical Cinema ads show up in the app’s For You scroll, there are a lot more interesting things going on further down. A phone’s front-facing camera offers intimacy and the opportunity to express vulnerability.

These moments can feel disposable and be soon forgotten, but the fleeting nature of TikTok as content means creators don’t have to take themselves too seriously. They can test the boundaries of the medium, then twist those boundaries further. They can create the cinema of the unsettling within just one minute. Still, the platform also features videos ripped from YouTube, turned sideways, or otherwise created for some other medium. There’s evidence of creators struggling against the boundaries of time limits and phone production. Restlessness breeds creativity. Creativity finds new mediums. We’ll see where this goes.

Originally published on Polygon

[bcwallin]

Just Because It Never Happened Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t True

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen the 2015 movie Steve Jobs. It’s the one that stars Michael Fassbender, not Ashton Kutcher. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to nudge my friends and family toward watching it, too. To them, it’s a movie that was seen and left behind by many in 2015; it’s no big deal. I’ve lost track of how many times my friends said they’d never watch this one pretty well-received, but otherwise, probably unremarkable movie, just because I’d seen it maybe 30 times or more. They’re concerned.

Even if I had the capacity to push them toward trying it (“people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”), my friends, my family, and my exasperated wife would walk away saying “That? That’s the movie you can’t shut up about?” It’s the movie I’ve seen the most under quarantine (including one watch each with the two commentaries that come on the Blu Ray), and possibly the same for the before times. I’ve finished it and started all over again. I’ve played it on the subway, listening only to the audio. I’ve watched or listened to it on more than one continent, up to three times in a day. I read the interviews and watched the New York Film Festival Q&A where Kate Winslet barely gets any questions and I’ve heard Aaron Sorkin’s many different ways of saying he didn’t want a “cradle-to-grave” structure and I’ve read Danny Boyle talking about his reverence for Sorkin. I wasted 2 hours watching the supremely mediocre Jobs, because when you’re stuck in an all-consuming relationship with a movie or a piece of art or a particularly good donut shop, you want to take in every variety and idea that you can. I’m like Agnès Varda and the gleaners in The Gleaners & I; I’m trying to glean. Everything I can.

If I went in order from here, telling how I first saw the movie with my mom, then revisited it 3 years later, then got it stuck in my head like a bad song and then like a really good song, in a beginning-to-end, beat-by-beat telling with all the hit moments along the way, I would’ve learned nothing from Steve Jobs, at least in terms of storytelling. If I kept going on this navel-gazing path of pointedly telling a story in a way that’s not like all those other stories — this story goes to a different school — then I would’ve learned nothing from my feelings toward Aaron Sorkin, whose language I like quite a lot, and who spent a lot of the Blu Ray commentary asking editor Elliot Graham why different bits of his language, which he, too, likes quite a lot, were removed from the movie. My most significant memory of Aaron Sorkin is him saying “Damn it, how could this have happened?” before telling you in his Masterclass ad why you shouldn’t write that. He’s an exacting guy and he probably sees himself in Steve Jobs and Boyle sees himself in Steve Jobs and I don’t see anything of myself in Steve Jobs, but I see some of myself in Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) wearing a loose-fitting t-shirt and tying his shoes onstage while Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) complains about a computer not doing what it’s supposed to do.

It’s so easy to go back to the old favorites. You hold onto what you’ve already got. For so many people, if their parents showed them a movie that came out before 1985 when they were young, it’s enough to make it a classic, but for any other movie from that not-so-distant past or earlier, they’d rather not come to it for the first time. It’s like what I say every so often, which is that I don’t want to be writing; I want to have written. But that’s not really true. Being stuck inside is concerning. The world is concerning right now. If this is being read in the future, the world may be concerning then, and I hope you’re doing alright. If you’re reading this at any time, I hope you’re doing alright. Jobs didn’t care if people were doing alright, if you’d believe the movie. Jobs didn’t care how most people were doing until he’d pushed them to their lowest point, if you’d believe the book it’s based on, Walter Isaacson’s biography.

Let’s talk about the reality of the movie. Steve Jobs is a biopic. Aaron Sorkin would tell you that it’s not a piece of journalism; it’s a piece of storytelling. (What else would he tell you?) I’ve seen the fictional and the real versions of the movie — or, at least, those versions of parts of the movie, because most of it didn’t happen — because old keynotes are available on YouTube. You can watch the movie, then see how it stacks up against reality, then back again. Sorkin’s big idea with this movie is not to use a “cradle-to-grave” structure (he uses this phrase a lot); it takes place in an approximation of real time before three different product launches that the real Steve Jobs was at the center of. If you watch the B-roll, you can see that Boyle recreated the keynote speeches from those launches, at least in part, but you don’t need to watch those bits and pieces to make the comparisons. You get either a bit of rehearsal, a discussion about a detail going into the launch, or something of the like. Sorkin’s works tend to slip in the bits and the pieces that you need to get the gist of what’s going down.

The presentation of the iMac in 1998 — which Boyle, following filming in the Flint Auditorium Center and the San Francisco Opera House in keeping with history, chose a new venue to shoot in — was fascinating, but there are still the hitches of reality. Jobs walks over to the computer and then a beat and then he clicks the mouse and another beat and then the demo. In Steve Jobs, the 2015 movie, Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs in the turtleneck and jeans he wasn’t wearing in 1998 at the launch of the iMac and says “This is the iMac,” and he pulls the cover off in synchronization with the sounds of the lights shutting off and Daniel Pemberton’s electric score takes over the scene, and it’s not just because the exit signs are off (you see? It’s like poetry; it rhymes) that this historical retelling feels so cool. It’s Reality+ and it’s comforting.

The end of the movie is kind of like that, too, but it’s disingenuous. On a rooftop parking lot that’s not actually on the rooftop of the building they shot in, Michael Fassbender, playing Steve Jobs, reconciles with his character’s daughter, Lisa. He brings back the drawing a different actress playing Lisa pretended to draw earlier and he unfolds it from his pocket and she looks at him as the lightbulbs flash and he smiles at her onstage and she loves her dad. It’s probably because the idealized products mimic the feelings we get when we see the unveilings and announcements, unless you’ve pledged yourself to a different phone company, in which case Apple is and always has been a company full of idea hacks and copycats. But people. People are what matter. Unless you’re Steve Jobs.

It can be intoxicating listening to “Great Men” even when you know they’re not great men. I’ve watched/listened a lot to Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, a movie about a “Great Man” that was directed by a “Great Man.” It’s a movie about the making of a movie, and both movies have the same name. Whether you watch it from the outside-in (production horrors in trying to get this movie to ever be made) or the inside-out (the psychological and physical torments by a repressed alpha male played by John Huston), you see these “Great Men” put their loved ones and acolytes through their onslaughts and then, you hope, it’ll all turn into something incredible. But The Other Side of the Wind wasn’t finished by J.J. Hannaford and the other The Other Side of the Windwasn’t finished by Orson Welles, and maybe everything Welles put cinematographer Gary Graver through (cf. the making-of documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead) and everything J.J. Hannaford (Welles stand-in-ish) put Brooks Otterlake through (Peter Bogdanovich stand-in) wasn’t really worth the failed end-result. But also I like my iPhone, so I can live with the past, I guess?

One of the pieces of Pemberton’s score for the 2015 movie Steve Jobs that I enjoy the most (and there are a lot of good parts) is what he described as an orchestra tuning up, which turns into a melody. It coalesces. That music plays while Michael Fassbender, playing Steve Jobs, says “I play the orchestra,” which is to say that Steve Jobs was best at getting other people to do things right. He did this by poking and prodding people in his exacting ways, repeating ideas back to people as if they were his, creating dichotomies between “insanely great” and “bullshit.” But was anything great ever made without alienating some people involved? Besides Paddington 2? If anybody walks out of Steve Jobs thinking that the lesson is to push people because that’s how they’ll do the best, it’s not the right lesson, but it’s also not a lesson the movie fully discourages, since everything pretty much works out for Michael Fassbender’s performance of Jobs. Even John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) comes back to give him a Newton (they edit in the words to Daniels’ mouth — if you watch the movie enough times, you pick up that he’s not moving his lips when words come out) because it’s a reconciliation. I also can’t help but love the sentiment of the scene and the way Daniels says “Let’s let it go now,” because even in the less real moments, Steve Jobs is a movie starring people at the top of their game (except in the last scene).

Michael Fassbender doesn’t do an impression of Steve Jobs and he doesn’t try to look like Steve Jobs, and that’s not just because he’s not Ashton Kutcher (who was in the 2013 movie Jobs, a different movie). It’s evocative. None of this happened, Andy Hertzfeld said, according to Aaron Sorkin, as recorded on the Blu Ray commentary. But all of this happened (except for the last scene). It’s art and it’s a masterclass on how to tell a story (a. I’m not really into using that phrase; b. Damn it, how could this have happened?) that doesn’t have to be the story you thought you should tell. And then Michael Fassbender says that line, “It’s like five minutes before every launch, everyone goes to a bar and gets drunk and tells me what they really think.” It’s still not as awkward as the Bob Dylan lyrics projected on the floor and walls (added digitally in post) in the first third of the movie (did you know it’s a three-act structure?), but these are also the thoughts of a person who’s seen the 2015 movie Steve Jobs over 30 times. Boyle likes comparing the story to Shakespeare, so I’ll just say about all this, “Take in what sense thou feel.”

It’s like music. It’s like music that has awkward lines (“I got over the Mac and Woz and Sculley the same way you get over your high school sweetheart; build a new one.”) and that feels like a stage play that had cutaways layered onto it, but not as many cutaways as the 2013 movie Jobs’ incessant need to show people applauding the genius of Jobs, its hero. The more you watch the movie, the more it feels preordained, because that’s how everything is supposed to happen (it doesn’t matter if I come to a satisfied conclusion about why watching Steve Jobs a lot is therapeutic — my wife will still be exasperated). Steve Jobs, the 2015 movie where Kate Winslet takes no prisoners and Michael Stuhlbarg breaks your heart, is my comfort movie, even though it’s an insanely tense movie where your worst nightmares of claustrophobia are filled with quick-paced dialogue and one-upmanship that feels a lot less clever when you start to notice how crafted it feels. But you barely notice it because of how amazing everybody is (except in the last scene — but Fassbender uses his lower teeth like a well-tuned instrument when he says “I’m poorly made”). It’s my comfort movie. I’ve accepted I’m alone in this. For those considering, there are two options the character Steve Jobs offers on one of his computers: “buy it or don’t.” I doubt my disinterested friends are still reading, but I’ll let it go now. Must be time.

Originally published on The Sundae

[bcwallin]

New York Jewish Film Festival Short Films (2020)

Of the eight short films screened during Film at Lincoln Center’s 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival, half were created using pieces of the past. Reckoning with the past has been at the very heart of Judaism since its Biblical origins.

The forming of the nation of Israel in the Torah’s story of Exodus is anchored by the Jewish patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Talmudic discussions point to enactments and decisions throughout the Jewish people’s history where there was a fear of losing the tradition (mesorah, in Hebrew). Popularized in Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish concept of tradition is at the very root of Jewish peoplehood (“3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax — you’re goddamn right I’m living in the f***ing past” - cinematic Judaism’s favorite convert, Walter Sobchak). With their uses of old footage and materials, a number of these shorts, in differing measures, recall, preserve, or resurrect the past. Ron Blau’s “Life Is All There Is” presents visions of the past through 8mm home footage, with the kind of intimate, lively visions that help wipe away the historical distance. Seeing the same faces over and again helps reinforce a connection in a World War II-era story that borders on the fairly mundane. 8mm footage from 20 years later in Rotem Dimand’s “Silhouette of the Braids” has a mother and daughter watching home movies together as the mother retells stories of her life that demonstrate the boundaries between photographs, memories, and reality, with their hazy boundaries and rarely perfect tellings. It’s a moving story, to be certain. Another jump of 20 years takes us to Nili Tal’s 1981 documentary short “Gurit Kadman,” a story about preservation of folk dance and music, a reflection on the ways that Jewish culture has incorporated the cultures of surrounding locations and peoples. Kadman, the film’s subject, is the preservationist herself, learning and teaching the dances and songs of new immigrants to Israel and creating a festival to celebrate that. Think the first 30 or so of Cold War, before the whole romance thing becomes the main story. A wonderful, personal selection. Monica Manganelli’s “Butterflies in Berlin: Diary of a Soul Split in Two” is the most nuanced in its recycled usage of footage, combining modern animation with archival images and footage to create a uniquely textured world. Its non-fictional story of a transgender Jewish woman in Weimar-era Berlin is one that does not get shared often in mainstream accounts of WWII, and along with the creative vision make it worth a view, though it’s hampered by wonky character animations and voice acting. Other shorts, while not explicitly using images created in the past, were inspired by some part of Jewish history or another. Pearl Gluck’s moving “Write Me” uses voiceover of modern poem “After Auschwitz” as a means to convey a visual story of how those with tattoos reckon with their past and move into the future. It’s all pulled together devastatingly by Lynn Cohen’s performance as an elderly woman with numbers on her arm. A more bizarre form of voiceover comes in the way of Danielle Durchslag’s “Eleanor of Illinois,” where audio of Katherine Hepburn and a performance Judy Kuhn combine into a haunting image of a Jewish mother. For more of the bizarre, there’s Oran Zegman’s “Marriage Material,” a musical about women changing themselves to meet the needs of the men they’re being set up with. Satire about society’s expectations of heteronormative relationships or a statement on the shidduch crisis (a lot more nuanced than this, but basically it’s the difficulty of pairing up religious Jewish men and women successfully)? It’s probably just the first, and an interesting way to spend 25 minutes, for sure. The highlight of NYJFF’s shorts is Hila Cohen’s “Maman,” a tender, slow story that gives you the bare minimum of what you need in terms of story and exposition and still feels lived-in and genuine. It’s a story about youth and old age, the promise of the type of people we believe in to make the past worth holding onto.

Originally published on Unseen Films

[bcwallin]

Streaming services need bonus features

The stream of content never ends.

Hulu, like many other services, has autoplay set up so that as soon as I finish one movie, I’ll start whatever’s next. Disney+ won’t start something without a click, but it’ll try to get me to start something else while the credits are rolling. Netflix doesn’t let me have a quiet moment from the second I open it, and at one point or another, it had buttons to encourage skipping the opening credits or rewatching a scene that had just finished in the middle of a movie. I want to be able to sit with the movies and let them soak in, and that’s often not easy to do when I’m being pushed to watch something else and move on – because, to analytics-obsessed streaming services, everything is content and the goal is for me to be yet another number in a streaming quarterly report.

While I crave a moment to process the film or TV show I just enjoyed, I also want other ways to enjoy them. I want to learn more about the creative process behind the piece and engage with the ideas of whatever media I’ve just seen. I want to see alternate takes the filmmakers opted not to use in the final work and hear commentaries from those artists, or the scholars who can teach me more about what I’m watching. I want to explore. I miss special features. I miss the context and bonus content that would come with DVDs, ones that encouraged me to stay with a movie even after watching it. In the age of limitless content and fully customizable menus, this experience is all but dead.

The one streaming service that I’ve found that really, fully does this — where you can generally depend on having more to watch than just the movie — is the Criterion Channel, where much of the library and supplements from the Criterion Collection are available. The first thing I watched on the service when I activated my subscription was a making-of documentary for A Hard Day’s Night. When Criterion’s movies end, they don’t force anything on me. I can explore, understand, go deep. Movies are a whole lot better with context — and a little extra something.

The Criterion Channel treats bonus features like they’re worth watching, and it’s clear when you look at the UI. Movies are treated as films or collections, and when you open them as collections, all the extra shorts, commentaries, interviews, and extras are laid out, easy to see. You can search for bonus features and you can add one of them to your watchlist without adding the movie it’s related to. The first step in offering great bonus features is to make them or at least make them available. The next thing to do is to actually show where they are, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

Sure, Netflix and Hulu have some featurettes or clips hidden with certain releases – the odd podcast or alternate cut. HBO GO sometimes offers extended editions of a movie. Amazon Prime has X-Ray trivia running over their movies, if you want to keep pausing and checking intermittently. And Disney+ has the occasional special feature that’s actually special, like the feature commentary that can play during Avengers: Endgame (if there were better commentaries available, it would be less special, but beggars can’t be disappointed about listening to the Russo brothers explaining time travel, I guess). Yet, seeing these options here and there only makes me crave more. For the vast majority of these streaming platforms’ titles, the best we can expect is an attached trailer.

I want to be able to learn more about a movie, to immerse myself in these stories and the artists who brought them to life. These materials exist and are put out on disc releases, so why can’t I enjoy them on streaming platforms? I’m sure Disney and Netflix and Amazon and AT&T have the cash on hand to clear whatever rights issues might be standing in the way, or to produce original features for content. HBO certainly saw the value when it came to explaining why Game of Thrones’ last season was such a rush job.

Am I going to have a movie night with friends where we watch a feature-length commentary or a recorded Q&A from a festival screening? Probably not. Do I get concerned looks when I complain that a special SteelBook release doesn’t deviate from the already-available bonus features in a standard Blu-ray? That’s not unimaginable. Have I felt alone for so long because these special extras feel like they’re generally only special to me, and I could just mindlessly binge Friends (which is bad) or The Office (which isn’t bad, but I’ve seen it enough) without complaining about this possibly meaningless crusade? Let’s not make this personal.

Sometimes, the special features are what pull me toward one home release over another. I’ve been interested in watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s dialogue-free version of the film (special features also include the documentary The Director and the Jedi, which is a step above standard featurettes), and I’ve sought out releases because they have a sing-a-long version, like a recent Mamma Mia double-feature gift purchase. If I ever buy a copy of Blade Runner, it’s going to be the one with all five cuts available. I want Disney+ to offer the incomplete version of Beauty and the Beast it once screened, which should require minimal effort (especially because they actually packaged and sold the work-in-progress version to the public). I want bonus features, and I’m getting tired of waiting for them.

I get the motivation for us to move from title to title, mindlessly consuming this vague, money-making thing they call content, but that doesn’t mean I understand why they do this. Why does Netflix, self-crowned champion of the independent cinema, not want to encourage viewers to fall in love with film and explore their passion? Does context only belong on its Twitter account (which should really stop pretending it’s a human person) or in podcasts that I wouldn’t have known existed without an oddly insatiable curiosity about The Other Side of the Wind, a not-so-good movie I can’t stop thinking about?

Even when they’re not providing context, bonus features can just be fun. Animated features that have bloopers as if the characters are real actors being filmed? I love it. An in-universe animated series that also features a commentary track by the characters being portrayed in it? Absolutely. How about a series of one-offs that eventually launched a TV series? It can happen. And those are just Disney properties.

I’m tired of the constant, never-ending stream of content, of being told to watch one thing then the other then the other — “Are you still watching?” Netflix asks, then shovels more down your gullet — and I can’t even breathe and contemplate what I just saw. I’m annoyed that Roku’s Apple TV app won’t let me watch a movie with commentaries or that the best Amazon Prime has to offer in terms of context involves disrupted viewing.

Bonus features let us take a moment. They’re the special ingredient that home entertainment gave us. And I want them back.

Originally published on Input

[bcwallin]

The Rabbi Goes West (2019)

Rabbi Chaim Bruk goes from door to door, offering to put up mezuzahs for the Jews living in the community of Bozeman, Montana. “I’m God’s salesman,” the Chabad rabbi proudly states. Rabbi Chaim, as the members of his community and the surrounding Montana areas refer to him, moved to Bozeman with the mission of opening up a Chabad center offering prayer services, holiday events, and scotch and sushi, when the occarion calls for it. He also aimed to put up 2,000 mezuzahs on Jewish doorposts.

The old joke goes something like, “If a Jew washed up on a deserted island, he’d build three shuls (synagogues): the one he attends, the one he doesn’t, and the one he’d never go to.” Jewish history is rife with disagreements, conflicting traditions, and schisms, as the matter of interepreting Jewish laws and scripture came into conflict with the modern problems and personal discomforts, among other reasons. Without unpacking all the branches and sects and differing viewpoints, suffice it to say that Rabbi Chaim was not the first rabbi to Montana, and his efforts are not beloved by all.

The Rabbi Goes West, as described in the project’s Kickstarter, is “a documentary about religious diversity,” giving voices to Conservative, Reform, and retired rabbis of Montana who take issue with Rabbi Chaim’s style. Co-directors Gerald Peary and Amy Geller give each rabbi their platform to speak about their concerns, arguments, and rebuttals. As is often found in Talmudic discourse, there’s no conclusion definitively determined.

Peary and Geller certainly found engaging personalities, a collection of varyingly entertaining rabbis who all have strong opinions they don’t mind being blunt about. Rabbi Chaim won’t attend Jewish coalition events that don’t keep to Jewish traditions — “99% Kosher is 100% not Kosher” — while Conservative Rabbi Ed Stafman doesn’t want his congregants having their mezuzahs put up by Rabbi Chaim.

Tensions flare and every side sets clear cases in the arguments of Judaism’s definition and each rabbi’s role, but while the documentary seems to ratchet up drama, there’s never really a breaking point. While there is a significant episode involving a series of anti-Semitic cyberterrorism and the communal responses that came after, The Rabbi Goes West is a story told in the past tense, offering reflections and post-scripts when its very nature begs the question of what’s going to happen next. For better or worse, the documentary leaves its viewers hoping for more.

Originally published on Unseen Films

[bcwallin]

Kosher Beach (2019)

In Orthodox Jewish circles, the concept of “tzniut” — often translated as modesty — is a contentious one, as much about what may be shown as it is about what may be seen. This translates into the clothing that may be worn, the places to be avoided, and whether to use a filtered internet connection or any at all. As in many other cultures, the clothing is a defining characteristic, where holding onto it may symbolize greater devotion and avoiding can be interpreted as rebellion.

Writer-director-cinematographer-producer Karin Kainer, in her third documentary, turns her camera to a walled-off beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, where the days are men-only and women-only, and Orthodox women — the focus of Kosher Beach’s narrative — have the chance to unwind without concern of being seen by the men of their Chareidi community (referred to by many as ultra-Orthodox Jews). As one woman explains, the Torah teaches “and you shall greatly protect your souls,” which is taken to mean that exercise and recreation are important to living good, Jewish lives. I once heard a rabbi say that if “Kosher entertainment” were not arranged for Jewish communities, they might find other, less savory things to do with their time.

There are three cultural conflicts that infuse Kosher Beach with its story: between the women and their community, the women and their daughters, and the daughters and the Tel Aviv culture, a stand-in for a secular modernity in seeming conflict with a religiously Orthodox life. The lifeguards tend to be on the more Chiloni (secular) side of the Israeli-Jewish spectrum, but they get along well with the women of their beach, who bring them frozen grapes and watermelon, and who make Sundays a holy day for one of the lifeguards with their presence.

It’s a tough thing to exist in a world and to feel out of pace with it. The Chareidi man tends to dress in the same style as European Jews did over a century ago. Clothes, for some, can feel limiting, especially for women who face the expectation that they should cover themselves up so that the men of their community would not see them. A daughter of one beach-goer asks, why don’t they just look away?

Kainer’s documentary shows the beach with a tender eye, highlighting the relationships and moments of happiness that make this place where women have a place to swim and dance in their shvimkleid (modest bathing suits). One lifeguard remarks, “this is a sanctuary.” The camera turns a sympathetic eye to the teenage girls who come to the beach first in their tank tops and shorts, then slim and slimmer bikinis (One woman says, “She should be with non-religious…she’s naked!”). They’re among other women, other Orthodox Jews, trying to stay in the fold and also feel free, but they still face judgement. The adult women are faced with the danger of their beach being closed down — “Who will save our daughters?” one rabbi exhorts.

In Kosher Beach, there is no clear resolution to a problem that’s not really just about a beach and that’s not really just about being able to choose one’s own clothing. Terms like Chareidi and modern Orthodox and Chiloni tend to be limiting to those using them to classify others and to those being classified. They set boundaries of expectation that don’t necessarily allow for an irreligious man to put on a tallit and tefillin (religious articles) and pray or for a strict follower of Judaic law to be able to spend a day at the beach.

In the end, it’s not the teenagers who commit the greatest rebellion of the film, and it’s not the rabbis we see reciting Tehillim (Psalms) as a missile lands within a short distance of the shoreline and nobody is harmed. “On the one hand,” one girl expresses, “I want nothing to do with these annoying ultra-Orthodox. On the other hand, I do want to be…I don’t know what I want to be.” While the figures and characters may create restrictions and expectations for each other, Kainer gives them the room to explore the ambiguity of not always knowing what to want.

Originally published on Unseen Films

[bcwallin]

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum should be a lot better than it is. The latest in a popular action series full of coherently shot and beautifully lit action sequences, with a compelling world of international assassins, Chapter 3 picks up on many of the cues that set its predecessors apart from the traditional fare of action films. The film does so much right; however, its brutality, incompleteness and lack of innovation make Chapter 3 the first misstep in what has been a stellar film series up until this point.

Like John Wick: Chapter 2, Chapter 3 opens with a continuation from where the series last left off and features a shot from a Buster Keaton film projected onto a city building. Both feature action sequences set to a remix of Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Chapter 2 features a climactic sequence in a hall of mirrors, while Chapter 3 does nearly the same with rooms of glass. While Chapter 3 makes use of the familiar, comparisons can often be very specific.

In its follow-up to Chapter 2, the latest John Wick sees the titular assassin, played by Keanu Reeves, in deep trouble for breaking sacrosanct rules — no “business,” or murder, is to be conducted on the grounds of any of John’s secret society’s establishments, each known as the Continental. John Wick, the first film in the series, showed a woman who broke the rule of the Continental was summarily executed. At the end of Chapter 2, John was given an hour to escape from an order on his life. Chapter 3 opens during that hour.

As John literally runs for his life, one of the first things that becomes clear about Chapter 3 is its brutality. The John Wick series has been rife with scenes of violence with a degree of desensitization — in more than one instance, John pins somebody down with his gun, reloads, then kills them, a moment usually played for laughs — but Chapter 3 goes to a whole new level. Bones crunch, hands are stabbed, dismemberment is seen onscreen and the violence gets amped up to discomforting and unpleasant levels.

Part of how the first film found a place in viewers’ hearts was by the motivation that caused its protagonist to go on a revenge quest: John’s dog was killed. In Chapter 3, Halle Berry joins the series as a manager of a Continental branch who uses attack dogs. Viciously, her Malinois  pups leap and tear at chests and limbs, biting attackers and then hanging on for longer than necessary.

It would seem antithetical to the spirit of the John Wick films to call Chapter 3 too violent, but the degree of brutality that the film offers is too much. It’s not that the series is suffering from too much of a good thing, because the action and gore is unpleasant to watch. There are too many moments where a stabbing, shooting, biting, crunching or cracking goes an extra step too far. It’s an excessive movie.

Certainly, there are values to the film, including its neon lighting, Dan Laustsen’s stunning cinematography and its regular moments of humor, but there’s not much that Chapter 3 adds to the series to make it worth seeing over either of the previous John Wick films. Ending on an incomplete note, Chapter 3 promises more to come in the franchise — beyond a forthcoming TV series  set in the same universe — but it’s a step in the wrong direction after two excellent entries.

Originally published in Baruch’s The Ticker

[bcwallin]

Tribeca Film Festival 2019

From the Beacon Theatre down to the Tribeca Film Center on Greenwich Street, the 18th annual Tribeca Film Festival arrived in New York City on April 24, bringing with it two weeks of feature and short film premieres, Tribeca Talk special events, revivals and immersive forms of film experiences.

Award-winning films included Burning Cane for the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, Scheme Birds for Best Documentary Feature and Audience Award winners Plus One and Gay Chorus Deep South. Here are some films The Ticker was able to cover at the 2019 festival:

Framing John DeLorean  directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, has the interesting premise of showing both a documentary about carmaker John DeLorean, with recreations starring Alec Baldwin and Morena Baccarin and interviews with Baldwin discussing the craft behind the recreations. The less interesting part is the execution, as the structure adds little to the movie and feels like an unnecessarily self-referential artifice.

Framing spends too much time telling viewers that DeLorean’s story is thrilling, but there’s not much excitement to it. DeLorean’s car, the DMC-12, became iconic in Back to the Future as the automotive time machine. Maybe DeLorean’s life had a lot going for it, but Argott and Joyce botch the telling of it, dragging out the dull parts more than any moments of intrigue.

Framing John DeLorean will play in select theaters and video on demand on June 7.

The documentary The Quiet One is another chronicle of a life, this one of The Rolling Stones bassist, Bill Wyman. The Quiet One is director Oliver Murray’s first documentary feature and it plods along for all 109 minutes of its runtime. Like Framing, this film is obsessed with its subject’s legend, giving nothing to viewers who aren’t fans of the Stones — and possibly even to the fans, too.

Immersed in dull nostalgia, much of The Quiet One is filmed in Wyman’s storage room, packed to the brim with Stones memorabilia. The history of the Stones feels inevitable, like it was always going to happen as it did.

There’s no sense of drama, nor any doubt about the future of a band claiming to stay away from following trends. There are better ways to remember the past than by scanning wistfully through a storage room, especially when it doesn’t end with a garage sale.

The Quiet One will play in U.S. theaters on June 21 and on video on demand on June 28.

The Gasoline Thieves is flawed, but nonetheless interesting. In Mexico, characters siphon gasoline in a life-and-death game of sneaking, trying to avoid the consequences of being caught and killed.

The Gasoline Thieves is a thriller, powered by Sam Baixauli’s editing and Carlo Ayhllón’s intense score. With a 93-minute runtime, the film could be cut down, but it works more often than it doesn’t work.

The Gasoline Thieves works  because of its humanity. Eduardo Banda plays the 14-year-old Lalo, joining the world of thievery because he’s poor and crushing on a girl who wants a cellphone. Even through Lalo’s repeatedly reckless actions, he exudes an earnestness that gives the film some of its drive. By no means the best Tribeca has to offer, The Gasoline Thieves has a mostly moving story to tell.

The Gasoline Thieves is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Audience award winner Plus One is very obviously a crowd-pleaser. Like a less cynical version of 2018’s small release Destination Wedding, the film has long-time friends Ben and Alice enduring a summer of weddings together, taking each other to their friends’ weddings, trying to avoid the misery that comes with being single and surrounded by love.

Alice, played by Maya Erskine of Hulu’s series PEN15, is the breakout star of the movie with a fun presence and no qualms about cuddling with a friend.

Plus One’s rom-com structure is fairly standard, but the relationship between the main characters gives it life. Directors and writers Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer use wedding toasts to establish time and place, and the choice works.

As Ben and Alice endure badly written clichés and embarrassing speeches, the movie shows some fun innovation that helps make it the kind of film anyone could stumble upon and have a nice time watching.

Originally published in Baruch’s The Ticker

[bcwallin]

One Big Joke

Four years after the end of World War II, there was still rubble on the streets of Vienna. The shockwaves of war were still being felt. Terror was apparent in the understanding of how low man could sink, how evil humans could become. This is the world of noir thrives: one of distrust and darkness. Filmed on the location of the war’s aftermath, The Third Man utilized the time and era to tell a classic noir tale. Director Carol Reed created a nightmarish world where morality is as warped as the shadows and the dark characters who hide therein. Everything in the story is plausible, and yet, there are hints of a shift in reality where black magic alters the Viennese streets and everything above or below.

Reed’s film is almost all a big joke. The beginning unravels with the visual of zither strings below the credits, evoking the ever-present shadows of cell bars in film noir, yet the sensation is immediately dispelled by the cartoonish tones played by Anton Karas. The music is followed by the narration of Reed himself. Title cards are displayed above the strings of a zither that is plucked to play the theme of the movie while the names pass by. The lines of the strings evoke common symbolic imagery in film noir. Resembling the bars of a jail cell, these ever-present shadows are depicted in this film over a cartoonish instrument that plays repeatedly without the accompaniment of other instruments.

As the credits end, the music continues and meets up with a narration spoken by Reed. The director effectually informs the audience that he is going to tell them a story by presenting a dead body floating in a river. “Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs but, well, you know, they can't stay the course like a professional,” he remarks. This dark humor—mixed with the comedic music and the director’s own depiction of this story—apprises the viewer that this is all a joke in more ways than one. Though his voice does not return again in the movie, it sets a darkly comedic tone for the film that can be seen when the narrator suddenly introduces a character: “Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American.” After the introduction, Holly Martins is seen in a train that is moving toward the left side of the screen. This is important to note since, in the classic language of cinema, this indicates a regression—a journey backwards—as the western eye is accustomed to reading from left to right. Martins is then seen heading towards his friend, Harry Lime, but walks under a ladder—a notorious symbol of bad luck. He enters Lime’s home and the person to whom he speaks to can barely speak his language. That person is the porter and he tells Holly, while pointing upwards, that his friend is in hell.

Each of these elements is building the world for Holly Martins to enter. It is a strange world where four different nations live together and struggle to understand each other. It is a place of bad luck for Holly, one where he has regressed backward from the American world of idealism to the cold streets of Austria. Even heaven and hell are confused in this place, as ambiguity clouds judgment and language acts as a barrier.

Holly Martins later walks with Anna, Harry’s lover, to a planned meeting with the porter. At his arrival, he is greeted by a crowd of people and the message conveyed to him in broken English is that the porter “is kaput.” Suddenly a child, the son of the porter, approaches Holly Martins and begins to cry out in German. Everyone—with the exception of Holly—realizes that he is being accused of murder. When Anna informs him, Holly runs away from the crowd with her, followed by the boy, in a demented game of hide-and-go-seek. This game is played out over and over with Martins being chased by racketeers, Limes by Martins, and eventually, Limes by the combined armed forces of Vienna. While a sting is being set up for Harry Limes, an old man tries to sell balloons to Major Calloway. A meeting between Harry and Holly takes place on a Ferris wheel. Shadows are distorted to look like those of giants. Rubble distorts the street itself. Simultaneously, a zither plays along, laughing at the idealist who is laughing at the audience. It keeps on laughing, like the impish smile on Harry Limes’ face when he gets caught in what he sees as just one elaborate prank. It’s a world where “there isn’t enough for two laughs,” and yet, the film itself seems to be laughing anyway. It is a horrifying and carnivalesque sense of humor—one characteristic of film noir.

The hero of the noir film tends to be one that is pessimistic and lacking morals. There is no true hero in noir and the protagonist of this film is one who does not belong in the world of the film or in its genre at all. He is an idealistic author of “cheap paperback novelettes.” He sees himself as a cowboy, and the army, led by Major Calloway, as the sheriff. In this world, which he writes about, there is a simple balance of good and evil how heroes are recognizable by the outfits they wear and everything is solved by the time the final page is turned. Nonetheless, the streets of 1949 Vienna are not suited for Holly Martins; yet he seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize this. Military men attempt to send him on a plane while Anna tries to tell him to return home. Even a crowd of art enthusiasts walk out on him as he fails to properly answer a single question asked of him. As Holly Martins walks the streets of Vienna, he is being watched. The porter’s wife keeps her eyes on him as he goes over the crime scene of Harry’s “death,” while Baron Kurtz observes Limes’ friend at the former’s funeral. The camera repeatedly shows Holly Martins in angular shots, emphasizing how out of place he is and how surreal the world is around him. The film captures the bombarded scenery of the streets of Vienna, which The Third Man develops a language that says: “Go home. You are out of place in this strange, strange world.”

This idealistic man, protecting his friend to the very end comes to learn of the power of corruption when he hears that Major Calloway was trying to catch his friend. Holly asks him why he wasn’t chasing murderers and the Major responds: “Well, you could say that murder was part of his racket.” It is an arrogant response to stand up for his friend, Limes, who he believes was just mixed up in some bad business. Martins tries to hit him, again and again. It is only when he sees the bodies of children harmed by watered-down penicillin is he able to understand the truth and how little he had really known. Then he turns on his friend, waiting to trap him while drinking at a local bar.

Harry Limes is very reminiscent of the character Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He is a racketeer, he calls his friend “old man” repeatedly, and he holds his friend’s fascination. Even his famous grin can remind a viewer of Leonardo DiCaprio’s smile as the titular character in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Yet, once again, the world asserts itself. In the 1920s, a Gatsby figure was the American Dream personified. He could be idealized and appreciated, but in a world of corruption and a lack of morality, the suave and smiling trickster becomes a sociopathic near-murderer trying to make a buck.

Just then, a cowboy enters a town ravaged by war and greed. Riding in on a steel horse, he plans to find a position of import, so he can protect the people and return these shambles to their former glory. The only problem is that the cowboy is not a cowboy, the horse is a train that is taking him the wrong way, the position is nonexistent, and there is no chance to fix the town. Holly Martins is a man out of his element and everybody else knows it. He has come to a world of cruel games—one without heroes or clear villains. This world continues to laugh at him throughout his visit as Carol Reed tells the audience about the “poor chap.” By the time the music winds to an end and the leaves begin to blow away, even the viewers begin to laugh at him, as he foolishly waits on the side of a road for a girl who is not stopping. For a girl who keeps on moving forward into a world that is not meant for him.

Originally published on Refract Magazine

[bcwallin]

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

As the 22nd entry in a series of movies with many larger-than-life superheroes, Avengers: Endgame is a surprisingly small movie, considering its runtime of over three hours and plenty of references, cameos and storylines to tie up including the results of the events from Avengers: Infinity War, spoilers ahead, when half the universe’s population was reduced to dust.

Throughout Endgame, directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely indicate that their priority is a focus on character, not spectacle — a decision that makes Endgame one of the better Marvel movies released.

Certainly, there is plenty of spectacle to go around, but other than in the inevitable, climactic battle, the action is limited when compared to previous Marvel movies.

Endgame has a great collection of strong actors with characters who have been developed to varying degrees over the past decade. Endgame makes use of its pre-established characters and relationships in a dramatic counterpoint to the failings of Infinity War, a movie bogged down in seemingly endless action and missing its mark when it came to its Easter eggs and references.

Like Infinity War, Endgame should not be watched by viewers who haven’t seen previous Marvel films; payoffs and relationships come out of what has been shown before.

It’s the way Endgame pulls upon all these threads that makes the movie so much more valuable for fans familiar with the films.

Scenes wherein the Marvel movies give their heroes room to breathe tend to be the most compelling, more so than any displaysof superpowers could be.

Conversations and quiet moments are the real gems Marvel has to offer. Superheroes argue over lifting a magical hammer  in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Nick Fury plays with a cat in Captain Marvel, Thor and Loki bicker to no end in Thor: The Dark World and Captain America and his best friend, Bucky Barnes, share warm, sidelong glances throughout the movies.

Action, wish-fulfillment and serialized storytelling may be the supposed reasons to go see every new Marvel movie, but the small moments are the lifeblood of the series.

Aside from Endgame’s small moments being fun — Black Widow threatens to throw a peanut butter and jelly at Captain America, Hulk takes a selfie and dabs and Ant-Man loses a taco — they’re part of a story that cares about its characters.

Through lows and highs, Endgame brings a large number of characters through emotional journeys that are based on the characters they’ve been and the narrative arcs they’ve each been working through.

For example, Thor’s journey has been a rocky one. He’s lost his powers and earned them back, thought his brother was dead at least three times, lost every living member of his family and his home world and failed to kill the being that destroyed half the living things in existence.

Endgame lets him feel that pain, wallow in it, and work through his family trauma.

In Infinity War, he got a new weapon because it would be powerful. In Endgame, he retrieves his old weapon via time travel, and it’s proof of his merit; Thor remarks, “I’m still worthy.”

The line can get a laugh, but it’s also a small, touching reminder of everything Thor’s struggled through.

There are surprising moments, and the narrative itself is not along the beaten path for Marvel films — even as it retreads the steps that previous Marvel films have taken.

Ant-Man was supposedly a heist film, but it mostly stayed within the superhero genre, and Doctor Strange used time travel sparingly, but Endgame offers a “Time Heist” that returns to the times and places of previous Marvel films. It gets weird, but it also works.

The time travel is a solution to the problem of Endgame, a solution in and of itself to the problem of Infinity War.

In Infinity War, half the universe’s population was killed by the snap of the villain’s fingers and the use of six infinity stones.

Logically, all that would be needed to undo the damage would be to snap again, so Thanos, the villain, destroys the stones in Endgame.

The time travel is a somewhat ingenious way of creating a new goal that makes the solution to mass extinction less straightforward and easy — the movie shifts the focus from the snap to the heist and avoids making the viewer feel like any specific ending is a foregone conclusion.

The time travel is impressive, especially in the production team’s coordination of integrating past movies into a 2019 release.

Actors and Hulks look different by now, costumes have changed, and there are off-screen scenes that take place outside of the storytelling of the movie, but still happened. Marvel makes sure that its time travel is convincing and seamless.

Of course, more problems arise from the time travel: Is the future being affected or are alternate timelines being created? Have Marvel movies of the past been canonically changed or did they already contain the changes that were being made?

To think and discuss the logic of Endgame’s time travel requires some circular thinking, which doesn’t always make sense.

One thing abundantly clear in Endgame is that it is out to please the fans.

While Infinity War ended on a cliffhanger, killing off fan favorites and leaving its story incomplete, Endgame gives fans 20 minutes of coda, resolving various plot threads and setting the universe up for its next phases and films.

Endgame has its crowd-pleasing moments and lines, but they sometimes go over the top, to the point of being too self-congratulatory.

Whether it’s the bits of battle with innumerable heroes against a seemingly endless supply of villains or the credits featuring the original Avengers’ signatures over their title cards, the film looks back at times with a sense of nostalgia and self-pride that can take a viewer out of the story.

For some, the moments are worthy of cheers, and, of course it’s fair to enjoy them.

Since Iron Man’s post-credits tease, the Marvel movies have been leaving fans hanging.

Teases and references have continued to point toward some eventual satisfaction, but often, the respective filmmakers chose to leave off from finishing their stories completely.

For the first four years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, fans were waiting for the Avengers to team up.

In the same movie the Avengers teamed up, director Joss Whedon also set up the introduction of Thanos and the next seven years of waiting.

Endgame offers no post-credits or mid-credits scene that the other Marvel movies have been known and expected to have.

There’s more to come from Marvel, certainly — Spider-Man: Far from Home premieres on July 2, less than three months after Endgame’s release — but Endgame brings a 22-movie saga to a satisfying conclusion.

It’s not that the stories have to all be over — conclusions are so often satisfying even when they promise possible future adventures that won’t be filmed — but, for once, there is no plot-line hanging over the Marvel series.

There are still loose ends and plot threads that were set up, including the character Adam Warlock and a Guardians-esque group led by Sylvester Stallone, the rogue sorcerer Mordo from Doctor Strange, Wakanda’s role in the world, Loki’s disappearance and other potential time travel consequences.

There is also the question of what happened to all the Netflix shows within the Marvel universe and what the superheroes’ world will potentially look like after the five-year span of half of Earth’s population being dead.

For a franchise built upon the foundation of teases and setting up eventual payoffs, the situation is not bad.

Endgame is a confusing movie to reckon with, packed as it is with character moments, time travel conundrums and stories to satisfyingly conclude.

It’s not all done right, and it’s sometimes done with a distasteful self-assuredness, but it manages to rectify the disappointments of Infinity War and conclude what Marvel is referring to as the Infinity Saga.

Its purpose is more like that of a TV series finale than of a movie, but it does a good enough job, and offers a fun time to be had. All it really needs is an intermission.

Originally published in Baruch’s The Ticker

[bcwallin]

Small References in Avengers: Endgame

With obligatory cameos and a world of references, Marvel movies are always full of references to the various branches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Endgame is built upon character moments and relationships from previous films, and while there are big, obvious references to Marvel’s other movies, there are also small touches for the watchful eyes of fans paying close attention. Here’s some of the moments viewers could have missed.

Wait, who was that?

Characters aplenty show up in Endgame, including quite a few surprises like Frigga from Thor: The Dark World and Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One from Doctor Strange, but there are also some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos.

           During a scene in the 1970s, Tony Stark meets his father, Howard, and talks about his own impending birth in that time period. John Slattery returns to play Tony’s father and gets a meaningful scene with his character’s son, but, in a much shorter moment, Howard’s butler, Jarvis is seen holding the car door. Jarvis is played by James D’Arcy, the actor who filled the same role for two seasons in Marvel’s TV series Agent Carter. It’s not a big moment, but it is somewhat of an acknowledgement for the show’s existence, which is more than Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage or Iron Fist ever got from the MCU’s movies.

           In the film’s funeral scene, the camera pans past many of the MCU’s characters, but one appearance may not be immediately recognizable; near the rear of the crowd, a blond teenager stands solemnly. Though it’s been six years since he last appeared in a Marvel movie, Ty Simpkins returns as Harley Keener, the child who helped Tony rebuild his suit in Iron Man 3.

The hammer.

Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer, was destroyed in Thor: Ragnarok, but that doesn’t stop it from showing up again in Endgame. It channels lightning, lets its holder fly, comes back to its thrower, and can only be moved by those who are “worthy.” The MCU movies have mined a lot of strategy and jokes from the hammer, and Endgame continues that trend with referential moments.

           When Thor picks up his hammer from the past, he realizes that he’s “still worthy,” a nod to his origin film, Thor, in which his worthiness was brought into question. The issue of worthiness was also raised in Avengers: Age of Ultron, where characters argued over who could lift Mjolnir — Steve Rogers, asking about resting the hammer in an elevator, remarks, “Elevator’s not worthy,” — and one particular scene has them trying to lift it. When Steve grabs Mjolnir, he strains, pulls, and it shifts a little, to Thor’s dismay. As Steve signals that he can’t lift the hammer, Thor breathes a sigh of relief. In Endgame, Thor sees Steve use Mjolnir, and calls out, “I knew it!” It’s a callback to a small moment, which is nice.

The vision.

Early in Endgame, Tony complains that he had warned the team he wanted “a suit of armor around the world,” as a result of a vision he had. In Age of Ultron, Tony sees a vision of his friends dead, a traumatizing moment that fuels quite a few of his following decisions. Among the dead, Steve lies next to his trademark shield, broken in a pattern that looks very similar to the way his shield looks in Endgame after one too many hits.

How do they know each other?

In the climactic battle of Endgame, Black Panther calls Hawkeye by his first name, Clint, a callback to a brief moment in Captain America: Civil War — Hawkeye says, “We haven’t met yet. I’m Clint,” and Black Panther responds, “I don’t care.” Steve only met Spider-Man on one previous occasion — in the same movie — and references that moment by saying, “Hey, Queens.” Hope Van Dyne, the Wasp, calls Steve “Cap,” despite mocking her partner, Scott Lang, for using the same nickname in Ant-Man and the Wasp.

He finally got that dance.

At the end of the film, the music playing is “It’s Been A Long, Long Time” by Harry James, a song previously played in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which also serves other purposes. In a scene that was itself a reference to the movie A Matter of Life and Death, Steve told his love, Peggy Carter, that he owes her a dance. In its name, the song references the time that Steve has waited to follow up on his promise. By the end of Endgame, Steve has lived a long, long time, looking the age that he should probably be, more than seven decades after the end of World War II. It takes him a while, but he finally gets his dance and everything he ever wanted.

Originally published in Baruch’s The Ticker

[bcwallin]

Missing Link (2019)

Laika Entertainment has consistently released excellent works of stop-motion animation since its 2009 feature film debut, Coraline, but its fifth and latest release, Missing Link, doesn’t live up to the studio’s other works. Directed by Chris Butler, Missing Link is the kind of movie that would be fine without a bar set so high for quality storytelling, but with four better movies preceding it, Missing Link’s release shortchanges any viewer who has excitedly waited three years since Laika’s last film for its next great work.

Set during the industrialist era, Missing Link finds intrepid explorer Sir Lionel Frost, voiced by Hugh Jackman, on a quest to find a sasquatch, the evolutionary figure between ape and man. Always on the lookout for mythical creatures, Sir Lionel hopes that his discovery will be the great achievement he needs to join a stodgy, prestigious club of British explorers.

Right from the choice of main character, Missing Link seems at odds with Laika’s body of work. In previous films Coraline, Paranorman, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, the characters are all disadvantaged or downtrodden in some way. Missing Link’s protagonist is a wealthy man, whose only disadvantage is that the technophobic leader of a society of explorers doesn’t like him.

Sir Lionel is confident and uncaring toward others. When he finds the sasquatch — capable of speaking English and voiced by Zach Galifianakis — and when he accidentally recruits a widow named Adelina Fortnight into their exploring group, his only motivation is to look out for himself.

Laika should by no means be held to an expectation of making all of its films similar to each other, but when its previous stories all championed the downtrodden, the newest release raises the question of why it is worth devoting months of careful detail to a story about an overconfident white man upset about not being accepted into a club he wants to be accepted into.

The artistry of Laika’s films is, as always, top notch. The credits include a scene showing time-lapse footage of the stop-motion animation at work, and Missing Link holds up to the artistic bar set by previous films.

Movement is fluid, and the designs take advantage of mixing realism with exaggerated characteristics here and there. The animation is immersive and doesn’t take viewers out of the narrative of the film.

Unfortunately, when it comes to staying within this narrative, the viewer’s journey is not always full of fun. Missing Link is full of jokes that either don’t hit the mark or fall flat.

For example, Galifianakis’ sasquatch, who chooses the name Susan, complains aloud that he’s “literal.” The repeated joke situation is of Sir Lionel using an idiom, only for Susan to misinterpret it, ending up with him cracking open a window by punching through the glass or throwing a grappling hook — rope and all — over a wall. Sometimes, it’s funny, but at other times, it’s a tired repeat of Amelia Bedelia or Guardians of the Galaxy’s Drax.

As a globe-trotting adventure, the film feels unfulfilling from time to time, as the heroes can easily travel from place to place.

Struggle is a fundamental part of exciting adventures, but it’s pretty easy for Sir Lionel to travel across the United States or find mythical beasts. The central struggle of the film feels pointless from the beginning; Sir Lionel could just as easily decide that he doesn’t want to be part of the club that turns him down.

While centering around an overconfident man, Missing Link underserves its female supporting role. Adelina, voiced by Zoe Saldana, comes along for the ride of the adventure, but her character is barely present and underdeveloped. At the conclusion of the film, she teases toward future adventures on her own, which, at the end, seem more appealing than the rest of the film.

With only one new Laika film every two or three years, Missing Link is an unfortunate disappointment. It lacks the depth of its predecessors and doesn’t tell a story that feels necessary or tremendously creative.

When the credits roll, viewers can at least take comfort in Walter Martin’s “Do-Dilly-Do (A Friend Like You),” a jaunty song that’s more enjoyable than the film it’s featured in.

Originally published in Baruch’s The Ticker