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20th Century Women (2016)
Subtle and Heartfelt
Depressing but ultimately heartfelt. I came out smiling more than I cringed. I went inward more than I like to while escaping into film, but it made me do so in a way that had me come out feeling better than when I went in.
The story is simple enough. A depression-era mother raises her fifteen year old son in 1979 with the help from house guests that rent rooms out from them. There's a lot about feminism, the world around them, and how each person deals with that in a group and on their own.
The film had a number of deep, well-thought lines of diaglogue that make for great quotes about life. One of the first is when Jamie, the son, asks his mother Dorothea if she is happy. "Wondering if you're happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed."
The second, is when Dorothea is talking to one of the housemates about being with her son at a bar.
"You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will."
This line really gutted me. You think about parents, about how much they love their children and how much they want them to be healthy and happy and grow up to be good people. After all that, they turn into teenagers, rebel against their caretakers, then go off to live life away from them. Parents so rarely get to see the people their children turn out to truly be. To be a fly on the wall. To be embarrassed of them, embarrassed for them. To be proud when they make the right decisions and just get to see them as they are when noone is around. It really is a soul-crushing idea. How dare they make me think about all that. And well done. Excellent writing. You can tell the the director Mike Mills took a lot from life and was able to put it in to meaningful and ponderous dialogue between characters.
The story is done with subtlety that is character driven. Some of it is typical, but much of it will hit everyone at least once. The loneliness of growing into an adult, the isolation of being a parent, and the confusion of older generations seeing how the world is turning out are all areas that will hit close to home emotionally.
All the actors were great, especially Bening, who I could listen to while she reads the back of a paint can and I'd have a smile on my face.
It didn't feel like your typical American drama fare. There was far less screaming, death, and drama that usually goes in to these days. It was quiet, fast-paced, and organized into nice pieces. The drama was in the thoughts it left you with about your own life and the kind of life you want to leave for your children.
How can we put the small amounts of what we know about the world into them without giving them the pieces we are embarrassed about? How can we urge them to find themselves and learn more than we could ever teach them, when we have our own pitfalls that stop us as individuals from becoming who we truly want to be?
Tenet (2020)
A Great Puzzler's Dive
Those who know me know that I am an enigmatology enthusiast. That is, the study of puzzles. I could write an entire review on the use of the word "TENET" for the movie title alone, as the word itself comes with deep meaning in history and in puzzle craft...and I might! Christopher Nolan is of puzzle-mind, has been from his first features, and has carried that love with him through every one of his films. I like Nolan's work a lot because it tickles me in my enigmatism (word coined here).
Nolan uses the famed Sator Square as inspiration for names used throughout the film. Judging the content of the film, I am also guessing he used the Sator Square as a blueprint for the entire plot of the film. A brief explanation of the Sator Square can help with the theme of the movie, even if you don't want (and don't need) to understand the intricate logistics of this film's version of time travel.
The Sator Square is a five-word Latin palindrome, meaning the same backward and forwards. The five words are: SATOR (the name of our main villain), AREPO (the name of an enigmatic art forger), TENET (a password for access to people who know about the inverted objects, and possible name of a secret organization), OPERA (the opening extraction scene by the CIA), and ROTAS (the name of the security company at the Oslo Freeport). The earliest example of the Sator Square comes from the ruins of Pompeii (a location mentioned in the film, and partly taking place nearby in the Amalfi Coast) but has also been unearthed in Rome, England, and Syria to name a few. This square will read the same top-bottom, bottom-top, L-R, R-L. It can also be rotated 180 degrees and still be read in those same ways. The Square's symmetry group is the Klein four-group, which is a group with four elements, in which each element is self-inverse, meaning that the function is its own inverse. One of the photos I'm adding is of the Sator Square so you can see for yourself and see what I mean, why I said it, and how it relates to the film.
In the movie, the "Protagonist" (John David Washington) is a CIA agent that gets caught and tortured during an extraction operation at an opera house. Instead of giving up information to the enemy, he takes a cyanide pill. He doesn't die, and instead wakes on a boat and discovers he has passed a 'test' by taking the pill instead and is now recruited by a secret organization called Tenet. We are pushed through the opening scenes and storyline too quickly in the first ten minutes. It seemed like a race to get to the fun action stuff. I wish they spent a little more time here in the beginning while giving us all this exposition, as understanding what the hell is going to be happening for the next 120 minutes leans greatly on the idea that the watcher can grasp as least a little bit what they are about to be seeing. As we all know, Nolan loves to have loud music, loud sound effects, and almost muted voices amongst all of it. The first twenty minutes are no different for him. I think he must have gotten made fun of so much for it by now that he just does it to mess with us. Hats off for not giving up but his movies now forever will require subtitles so you can hear the very important lines that are being said, even though he clearly doesn't want you to hear them. So, the first ten minutes are like listening to Bane if he was a scientist trying to explain string theory to the hearing impaired.
What we and the Protagonist discover is that there are objects in the world that have inverted entropy and move backward through time! Cool idea, impossible to truly understand as a casual watcher. If you are a casual watcher, don't think too hard about all the action and reverse time travel. It's not worth the headache. Just know that some things move backward in time. To us, the people moving forward through time, it will look like these objects are moving backward, when in fact, they are moving forwards into the past with inverse energy. To them, it looks like we are all moving backward. This creates some very fun things visually in the film.
This idea and the visuals he uses to represent it are where Christopher Nolan truly shines as a filmmaker. This story could not be told in any other medium except cinema. It is an idea that can only be carried through by showing the viewer in moving visuals and sound. He is telling a truly individual and original story made to be told through the art of filmmaking. It's beautiful and loud and visually stunning. The sequences of backward motion vs. forward motion are shown in an interesting way and a way that is purely Nolan. It will remind you a lot of "Inception", especially the hallway fight scene. It's clear he meant to do this, as the rest of the film's color, cinematography, and sound mimic many of the ideas from that movie. A spiritual universe cousin, maybe.
We find out that people or a group of people in the future have created machines that can make this inverse matter, or matter with inverted entropy, and send it back to the past, presumably with the idea to change things. We learn that they messed up somewhere along the way. The future is somehow dim and without more future. Why they decide to come back to the past to "murder the world" is never really made clear, but also, we don't really care, do we? Bad people doing bad things for reasons no one will ever know. It's not that pertinent to the story being told. Just know that they are trying to go back in time and kill their own grandfathers. The big problem is that if too much inverse matter ends up in the past (where we live) and the inverse matter being sent back ends up having more mass in the world than the straightforward matter we have all come to know and love, the world dies. Poof. Boom. Whimper? We're not sure how, but clearly no good.
When something enters these machines, they come out the other side as inverse. This means people, too, so when our Protagonist comes out the other side, he needs to learn backward gravity, inverse motion, and opposite thermodynamics. He can't inhale the air because the air refuses to bond to the sacs in your lungs that are breathing backward compared to the rest of the world. The idea of traveling back in time has an interesting idea (and makes the most sense when it comes to logical time travel. That idea is that if you want to travel back in time, you move backward at the same speed as moving forward. So, if you want to go back a day, it takes a day to go back. If you want to go back ten days, it takes ten moving backward. Once you go through the inverse matter machine, your clock starts, and you move backward as long as you are out on that other side. You must go back to that machine or another machine in the world to get turned back forward, or you will continue going back forever. And you can't breathe the air...sooo, that's gonna be a problem.
Some parts of it are really well thought out and other parts are glossed over...and that's fine. Our brains are still trying to figure out if he picked up the bullet or the bullet jumped into his hand...If he never put his hand over the bullet would it have ever known that it was once dropped out of his hand to know that it could jump back into his hand at the right time? Yeah...that stuff. Don't sit with the specifics too long. Just enjoy the ride there.
And that's the plot! There's some stuff in there with a girl and a bad guy that is helping bring the matter from the future to the past. He has a generic bad guy quality about him and a convenient bout of suicide fancy, so he wants to die and take the whole world with him (including his wife and son). Take out the inverse matter and time travel, and it seems like a straightforward Bond film. It's got the hot girl that changes sides, the spy protagonist who fights better than he dresses and knows how to get what he wants. It's fun. The action sequences are astounding and look practical instead of CGI messes. I thought the overall production quality of the locations was not that exciting. The buildings didn't stand out, the rooms weren't dressed very well. He didn't use much in the way of thematic color palettes or bold choices when it came to fabrics or walls. It probably would have been too distracting or blurry with how fast the movie ran through each spot.
Okay, back to the square now that you know the themes and mechanics of time travel. My favorite part of the movie. He took the idea of the Sator Square, a palindrome of names that goes forward, backward, 180, and inverse. He took that idea of words and turned it into a 3-D world. What happens if you take TIME and make it into a Sator Square palindrome. At the end of the film you see a very cool war scene with two teams, a red team, and a blue time, like laser tag. This felt so much like a little boy getting to make a laser tag war movie it made me giggle, but off-topic. The two teams split up and do what they call a "temporal pincer movement", where non-inverted red team troops and inverted blue team troops make a simultaneous attack. This is mind-boggling, as the inverted team is doing everything backward. That means the red team is going into the war dodging bullets and running away from falling buildings from the aftermath of what the inverted blue team has already done. Walls are unexploding and trapping people behind the walls, buildings are un-collapsing just to be shot and blown up at a different place by the red team. It's all very cool, but also is a great way to show the idea of the Sator Square if it existed in time at coinciding moments. What would happen if you could read every angle of the Sator Square in 3-D space at the same time, be able to see every side of a cube at one single moment in time...what does that do to time, or to us the knower? The idea of the Sator Square made physical in 3-D space is a puzzler's dream and nightmare.
Sleep Dealer (2008)
The best science fiction uses technology as a vehicle to tell human stories.
This low budget mexican sci-fi has, at its core, excellent writing. A human story about a man named Memo struggling to help his family by going to the big city to work for "Sleep Dealers", not-too-distant future imperialist and globalized virtual reality companies handing off robotic work to the less fortunate. Workers never have to cross the border, never have to step foot on American soil. They are taken advantage of and sucked dry (literally) from the comfort of their own country. They can be a taxi driver in London or a corn farmer in Illinois.
12 hour shifts working plugged in, with dangers of being electrocuted, and working too long inside makes them go blind.
He meets with a pretty girl on his journey. A budding writer who uses cyber access to her own memories to tell and sell stories of the people she meets along the way. The story of why she continues to write her story on Memo even after they grow feelings for each other is well told and worth me not giving it all away.
I'm 12 years late watching this film, but nothing has changed. It doesn't take a twist of reality to see this water-wars, where Memo's village is taken hostage by big corporations privatizing their river, building a dam, and charging them for it.
The story is told subtley, without preaching, its very strong social commentary about exploiting human life for personal gain.
The film is low budget, and the effects show that. It does use its special effects and CGI in smart ways to skirt around the need for us to see good graphics. Its beyond secondary to the beautiful and heartfelt story. It appears (and maybe this is just wishful thinking) that they even used their low budget look for some of the TV snippets to resemble another little film I love about war propaganda called "Starship Troopers". If this is the case, genius. And if not, they still worked with what they had in a way that stood out and worked well for me.
The location of the movie, being in a small Mexican village and then on to cyber-Tijuana, worked so well for a gritty futuristic backdrop to the cyberpunk style machinery and 'nodes' on the connected.
They used language that fit seamlessly into their story like 'coyotec', a man who will install the VR nodes on you back alley style, and 'live node girls' (I think you can guess).
The music is intense and the sound editing was notably well done.
No cinematography awards here, but they do some really excellent shots with mirrors that I really enjoyed, especially a scene Memo and the writer Luz share at a bar.
The acting was so-so, especially low on the big emotional scenes, but it doesn't detract from how excellent the storytelling is.
It's exceptionally hard to find a notably well-written scifi movie, and this is one of them.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Endearing and Hilarious
This was another of Taika at his best. Taking him back to his bittersweet indie roots, his storytelling and humanity shows through at every moment. A story of a 10 year old nazi youth in full swing of his country's ideology indoctrination, he starts his journey with his invisible best friend Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi himself) going off to Hitler Youth camp. His mother is a wild and endearing woman with a playful attitude during this horrible time of war. The movie starts off hilariously, but it takes a little bit of time to allow yourself to feel okay laughing at this side of the german war and this little boy who wants nothing more than to do right by his fuhrer. After a terrible (and hilariously acted) accident, and the discovery that his mother is hiding a young Jewish girl in their attic, his ideals are turned upside down to the thoughts on the war he has grown up with. It's a simple message delivered in a way that tells you what you already know. Facism is bad. It's a story that Taika tells us needs to be told over and over again, because people easily turn a blind eye to the horrors of humankind, but heart and love can prevail. Roman Griffin Davis and Thomasin McKenzie are a great pair and carry the film with warmth and wonderful comedic scenes, but it's Scarlett Johansson who leaves us with the memory of what it means to be on the right side of humanity, and to take life as it comes and teach your children what you can, when you can. Even surrounded by well-known and substantial actors, these two children stand out and bring the movie's warm embrace. Taika is never afraid to lead with a joke, but he always takes the time to bring his message of humanity home by hanging on the sad moments of life too, not jumping over life's tragedies to get to the next one-liner. He balances the good with the bad perfectly, leaving you walking away with a warm feeling in your belly.
The Dark Knight (2008)
You get what you expected, and so much more!!
I can't believe I am about to say this about a superhero movie, but this film is an absolute masterpiece. This film had me clenching my fists from beginning to end. I'm sure all the reviews about this movie will be similar, but I just have to vent and babble about it. First of all, the storyline and the writing was fantastic. This is a classic epic superhero/super villain with the battle between right and wrong, anarchy vs. harmony, the structure of communities falling on its head, and the true nature of the human condition for survival. Christian Bale did an excellent job as Batman once again, he performs the battle of himself effortlessly and flawlessly. Aaron Eckhart was a great cast for the role of Harvey Dent/Two Face, and Maggie Gyllenhaal was excellent in the new version of Rachel. But of course, and I hate to seem like I'm jumping on the bandwagon, Heath Ledger absolutely stole the show. Every scene he was in was completely meant for this green earth. The thing that baffles me about his performance is how well he did. In general, Heath Ledger was never someone that inspired anyone with his acting, he was a pretty face and had some cute roles. But to see him play The Joker, it seemed as if he played this role knowing it would be one of his last. The entire time I watched the film I could not tell who the actor was underneath all the vile anger and heinous violence. The insanity that Heath brings to the Joker is a character unlike anything I've ever seen in a film. He has no qualms about what he does or who he hurts. It's such a sad thing to see that he could have had this much potential all along, and never got to continue on to the greatness he could have achieved. The Joker was absolutely terrifying and hilarious in every scene, and the movements and being of The Joker has been changed forever. The cinematography was stunning throughout, with the wide shots of Gotham and of Japan. The views of the city were beautiful but still had the air of fear and crime all throughout. It was shot way different from Batman Begins, this one seemed to have a more real city feel to it with a lot more daylight shots present throughout. Even though the mood of the lighting and city was brighter, the story and feeling was more grim than ever, which is a great thing to achieve. Making things scary in the daylight isn't that simple. The only thing in both Batman Begins and Dark Knight that bother me are Christian Bales 'angry voice'...it ends up comical and pushed most of the time, but it needed to be there to conceal Bruce Wayne's identity so it works. And of course, the brilliance that is shone throughout the entire film is that of Christopher Nolan. His directing capabilities I don't think have ever been in question, everything he does is sharp, blunt, and fantastic. This film definitely shows all that he can achieve. The action sequences are gut wrenching and blunt as hell. And to make all this violence into a PG-13 rating takes some skill. Despite all the violence and terror that goes on throughout, there is no blood or gore. This film does an excellent job of keeping you tense without needed to gross you out. All in all, this film was just an instant classic and can be compared to the best of the Crime sagas, this is an absolute must see, and I know I will be seeing it a dozen more times before I get my fill of the richness and beauty that this film can bring.