Movie Roundup, 2018

We've watched a few movies recently in different forms and I was compelled to mention them here, but time got away as it tends to. So I'll just dump them all here in order of when we watched them and how they came to be for us to sit and watch, in a shout out to my blogging style from years past. (And here and here and here.)

1. Cloud Atlas (2012)

Status: Having been a fan of the book and of the Wachowski Siblings other film projects, I was excited to check this out. I added it to our Netflix queue a while back, where it sat until we had the three hour commitment carved out.

I was a big fan of the book, and over the course of a decade lent it out to many people, pushing David Mitchell the author onto unsuspecting readers. The "novel", as it's called, is a series of nested storylines, mostly unconnected to each other, that unfold in their own styles and vernacular. It begins in the 1840s as a journal on a whaling vessel in the South Pacific. It ends in midsentence and jumps to inter-war Vienna as the Nazis rise; next to a hard-boiled detective thriller from the '70s; next to the mostly contemporary era and an older man gets wrongfully committed to an institution; then to a future with the stamping down of a possible clone revolt; and finally off to a far future after the fall of civilization and the birth of a religion based around the clone from the interviews in the fifth section.

Each of the first five sections ends in conflict, and the sixth section is double sized and wraps itself up, and then each other storyline wraps up in the reverse order back until the last part, the rediscovery of the whaling tale's other half of the book, and we see that story resolve the conflict in it's own way.

That would have made an interesting film.

What was made into a film was nearly each of those same stories, but the execution of the film was jarring at best. Since we knew beforehand who each of the characters were, Corrie and I were mostly able to follow the quick first 90 seconds of the movie, when we're introduced to each person and their general story arcs in a shotgun blast of information. If a viewer is unfamiliar with the characters and settings, those first 90 seconds will make very little sense.

The Wachowski Siblings came to the story with love and passion, and I appreciate that. I didn't feel like having Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, among a bunch of other actors, play multiple characters in each time line was necessary, or that making the love connection thread throughout each timeline necessary, but that's something I can forgive. Translating novels is always difficult, even when said novel resists the normal trappings of film-able structure.

Having Halle Berry and Korean actress Bae Doona in whiteface at different intervals was one of my favorite things about the movie.

What I found most annoying, and what made the experience of viewing the movie quite exhausting, was the fact that as audiences we never spent more than 300 seconds with any one time line or set of characters, and this bouncing around lasted for the full 170 minute running time. No more than five minutes is barely enough time to build tension or feelings for characters, and many times the cuts are like literally frames long, like one guy is walking with a gun in the '30s, cuts to a scene in the '70s of sneaking around, cuts to the far future in the forest of badguys, and maybe two seconds have transpired.

You need stamina to keep all the threads in your head, but if you do, the entire story conceit is pretty damn cool, but that's if you make it all the way through to the end.

2. Wheelman (2017)

Status: I found this on Netflix a few weeks ago and thought it looked like a car-chase or heist movie, or both, and at barely 80 minutes long, it fit the criteria for a quick first- of a double-feature weekend evening.

I wrote yesterday about something being better than it needed to be, and I surely felt this way about this tiny thriller, Wheelman. The setting is the claustrophobic car that the unnamed Wheelman drives and the main prop is his phone. He fields different calls during his busy evening: one conversation is between a mysterious caller who refuses to identify himself but gives instructions to the driver that run contrary to the evenings plan; one conversation is with his 13 year old daughter; one conversation is with his ex-wife; one conversation is between him and the gangsters he's inadvertently ripped off; and one is between him and his immediate handler.

Each of the conversations unfolds throughout the course of the tight thriller and reveals the structure of the plot, something I refuse to spoil here. Check it out if you like tightly wound yet minimalist heist thrillers. It was probably made for seventy-thousand dollars.

3. Moon (2009)

Status: This came out while we lived in New York and I'd wanted to see it then, only we didn't manage it. Every few months I would search Netflix for it (I'm not joking---I've been looking regularly for seven years by now), and once it appeared, I put it in the queue and we watched it pretty soon after.

Made by Duncan Jones, David Bowie's son, we follow Sam Rockwell as he's finishing a three year stint working alone on the moon. He begins to hallucinate and weird things follow, and a mystery begins to unravel as the plot thickens. It's too easy to spoil, so just watch it. Sam Rockwell is awesome.

On a side note, 2009's "Moon" and 2011's "Source Code" are two vastly underrated and sorely overlooked sci-fi classics, and represent Duncan Jones' first two directorial efforts. Check out Source Code if you haven't seen it as well. Or you can read my brief words about it here, way down at the bottom.

4. Coco (2017)

Status: We watched the Blu-Ray disc that was given to us as a gift (thanks mom!).

Holy cow, I liked this. Like the next one, I'm not sure if enough time has past to let us appreciate it. I'm excited that the pre-Columbus indigenous beliefs of Mexico are getting their due, and in such a colorful masterpiece. The story may not be fully original, but the love and craft are in full display. This is the best Pixar film in years. We don't get out to the movies much anymore, but we will once the Boy gets old enough to understand and pay attention to the action, and I imagine that Pixar and/or Disney animated fare will be featured prominently in our cinema-house trips of the future.

If all the movies are colorful Beetlejuice-inspired death-bureaucracy movies, there'll be hope for us all.

5. Black Panther (2018)

Whoops! I mean:

Status: Cultural phenomenon that we got to see in the theater thanks to spring break and daycare.

White characters that are incidental to the plot? Check. Strong black women in positions of power? Check. An African Kingdom unsullied by colonialism and allowed to thrive for hundreds of year as the most technologically advanced land? Supercheck. A badguy who, like Magneto, is named Eric and has a compelling argument? Check.

Some of the stuff I read about this movie in the past few months called it the first definitive Marvel cinematic universe "masterpiece," and sure, I'll support that. Beyond being populated like The Wire, it's a good action film, maybe even a great action film. I'm glad we saw it in the theater, the first movie we've seen out since Rogue One.

Also, don't believe the chatter about the first black superhero movie: how quick we all forget Blade and its sequels, The Meteor Man, and the Damon Wayans classic Blankman.

Wait, are those all the movies? Really?