Steve Jobs

*** out of ****

Steve Jobs is a biopic that makes the tasteful decision to be honest about the fact that it is a dramatization. It revolves entirely around conversations we know could have taken place, but didn’t. The conversations are artfully utilized to illustrate history, as opposed to reenactments of that history.

Aaron Sorkin’s (The Social Network) screenplay is crafted as a three-act film that feels completely compatible with theater. It is only appropriate that each act takes place in the literal backstage area of a major product release that will steer Jobs’ legacy in a new direction. Like last year’s Best Picture winner, Birdman, the high-pressure setting of a large show venue with backrooms and corridors is a great cinematic setting for heated discussions and symbolic of a showman preparing to meet his audience.

The setting gives the dialogue free-reign to show Jobs at his most controlling, lacking emotional consideration for the people who surround him. These people challenge him with advice, which he brushes off as though they all represent doubts working against his ego.

Jobs is played by the great Michael Fassbender, who bears no resemblance to the man, but, like all talented actors, finds the character written on the page and works with it.

There are many archetypical players on this stage, but some get more of Steve’s ear than others. Seth Rogen plays Steve Wosniak (Co-Founder), the alienated friend; Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman (Marketing Director), the influential servant; Jeff Daniels is John Sculley (CEO), the father figure; while Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine take turns playing Lisa Brennan (Daughter), the child in need of a parent.

Sorkin’s dialogue, which takes the highlights of Jobs’ life and career from Walter Isaacson’s book, is inventive and informative. The actors all do wonders with the material too. His collaboration with director Danny Boyle, however, is interesting but problematic. Boyle, a kinetic visionary whom I often admire, has a tendency to impose emotion over scenes that don’t require such heavy-handed manipulations. I imagine Sorkin would have preferred the dialogue to speak for itself. Though he’s written a ludicrous sentimental exchange near the end, which attempts to merge Jobs’ strive for innovation with his repressed fatherly love. It’s a sappy construct that I find hard to believe and, in the scheme of things, feels irrelevant.

I do like Boyle’s continuing fondness for changing mediums within a film and he does it here with the first part being shot on 16mm film, the second on 35mm film and the third with current digital cinematography. In between each act is a montage of TV clips that provide exposition for what will come next.

The movie wisely ends in 1998 with the launch of the iMac, dodging many more obvious products Jobs would unveil before his untimely death. The iMac was a new beginning for Jobs, Apple, and represented a massive shift in the world of personal computing toward Apple’s brilliantly designed, yet proprietary packaging.

Somehow, I still feel as though it’s too soon to make a film about such a big figure. Regardless, Steve Jobs does a good job.

Bridge of Spies

***1/2 out of ****

With Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg is back from the brief hiatus, which followed 2012’s Lincoln, to give us another drama based on a story from the sidelines of history. The famous incident of Gary Powers, a U.S. spy pilot who was shot down over Soviet territory and captured during the cold war, is the mere background for the film’s hero, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks). Donovan was a lawyer, who after risking his reputation in the defense of a convicted Russian spy’s (Mark Rylance) life, was pulled into the tricky world of international negotiation after the C.I.A. recruited him to propose a swap for the safe return of both captured men to their respective countries.

Other than one needless phony special effects action sequence, this movie is the solid rich filmmaking you can expect from Spielberg’s more serious fare. The guy knows how to frame a scene and conduct patient pacing.

As usual, he and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski will continue to shoot on celluloid as long as it is still an option. John Williams, now in his early eighties, probably felt daunted by the task of doing his regular contribution for a Spielberg film (while already busy on a certain space adventure movie) and opted out leaving the excellent Thomas Newman to compose in his stead.

However, I was pleasantly surprised how little of this film uses music, which is rare for Spielberg. The opening sequence is particularly more mysterious and suspenseful for it. 

The screenplay, which had a contribution from the Coen Brothers, cleverly plays with irony and ambiguity as the certainty of the movie’s world becomes increasingly grey. Without any surprise, Spielberg delivers again and I’m glad he’s still going strong.

Watch Paul Thomas Anderson interview Spielberg here!

Crimson Peak

** out of ****

Crimson Peak was on my radar after the first glance of its beautiful poster. The trailer that followed assured me that Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) had a Halloween treat filled with Hammer-horror inspired sweetness for moviegoers this October. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I feel like I trick-or-treated at a house with great decorations but no candy. Trick’s on me, I guess.

The movie is, as promised, gorgeous looking. The great cast, which includes Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain, is fully invested. However, the story to this gothic horror is so unexpectedly weak. The film seems to be establishing a mystery, but by the end the only twist that’s taken place, is that the undertones have become overtones. This movie is quite a disappointing experience - and after Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Chan-wook Park’s Stoker, this is the third time I’ve noticed Wasikowska starring for a celebrated director of dark cinema making one of his worst films. Poor girl.

The Walk

*** out of ****

After Robert Zemekis’ welcome return to live-action filmmaking, with 2012’s Flight, he’s back again with a biopic of Philippe Petit, the man who illegally staged one of the most dangerous stunts ever seen. Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers was beautifully covered in the 2008 Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire.

Petit’s interviews in that original documentary display all the grandiosity he can afford. This film feels like an extension of that excitement with Joseph Gordon-Levitt taking his place with a semi-convincing French accent and not-so-convincing blue contacts. His backstory here feels like the “fairy tale” Petit said it was in those interviews.

Like Hugo and Life of Pi, this movie is one of those 3D experiences that look too beautiful to be real because it is invested in the spectacle of the dreamer protagonist. Even the acting, drama, and dialogue are so high on their fairy tale simplicity that I’d be tempted to dismiss them if it weren’t for my sense that this PG-rated movie is hoping to entertain kids. There’s a lot of eye-rolling to be expected here, but it is a beautiful experience brought to us by a showman who made a cartoon rabbit part of a live action film noir –and took us back to the future a few times too.

The Walk is no remarkable step for Zemekis, whose best work tends to merge advanced melodrama with high-tech filmmaking. This one reminds me of the motion-capture animated films many film fans were happy he stopped doing, except the players are captured in front of a camera this time.

As I assumed, making a special effects film about such a fantastical real-life event deflates its feeling of legitimacy a little. But my admiration for this film's family movie tone, which is rarely experienced outside of animated films, compels me to recommend it for dreamers young and old, who want a little unchallenging inspiration.   

Sicario

**** out of ****

Like Silence of the Lambs, a heavy thriller has been made about the real horrors of the world through the eyes of a beautiful young woman driven to venture into a man's world of darkness to hunt down monsters until the film knowingly shifts perspectives to allow us to see a monster's point of view. Aside from that cinematic association, I might compare this film with cynical seventies thrillers like The French Connection or other works that demonstrated how frustrating and unresolved most mysteries are when certain stones are turned.

It focuses on a young FBI agent (Emily Blunt), who after raiding a Cartel connected house in a Phoenix suburb, encounters a situation so shocking that she's hardly reluctant when recruited to a special retaliation driven task force, despite its questionable leaders. As she's kept annoyingly in the dark regarding the objective of their missions, her odd superiors discourage her from understanding everything but assure her that it will result in taking down the Cartel leadership, so long as orders are followed. 

Sicario is a strong film filled with the tension and dread that its director Denis Villeneuve stirred in the 2013 film, Prisoners. With a deep booming score by Jóhann Jóhannsson and astounding cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, Sicario captures its desolate border country with awe and horror - and its stellar cast, which includes Daniel Kaluuya, Josh Brolin, Jon Bernthal, and Benicio Del Toro with lengthy shots and cuts respectful of their performances. 

This is the kind of thriller that has built up so much potential energy, that it has no need to indulge in its violence. The trepidation we feel as our heroine continues to learn more disturbing facts, and continue through the movie's metaphorical and literal cave, leaves us fearing the inevitable savagery lurking around every corner. This is one of the 2015's best.   

The Martian

***1/2 out of ****

Through four decades of filmmaking, Ridley Scott has never lost his sense of visual richness, but more often than not, his films suffer due to collaborating with screenwriters who lack imagination or the sense that they're writing for a guy who tends to put atmosphere first and human psychology as an afterthought. His biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings was creative, but at times laughable and the disappointment felt from the gorgeously produced, yet pitifully written return to epic science-fiction (a genre he seriously escalated at the beginning of his career), through Prometheus, still feels fresh. 

It is very fortunate that Scott chose this time to work from a respected novel, The Martian, by Andy Weir adapted into a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who made the inventive comic twist on the horror genre that was Cabin in the Woods - and recently launched the very strong Netflix series, Daredevil.

The story follows an astronaut (Matt Damon) left behind by his crew on Mars when it is assumed that he perished in a deadly storm during evacuation. It is set in the future, but not far enough to make use of unspoken futuristic breakthroughs for plot convenience. Just about every technological aspect of the film deals within the limitations of what we know we can do.

The astronaut (a botanist), has to find solutions to his limited food and life support, while looking for a way to make his survival known to NASA on Earth. When NASA, which is just in the infancy stage of Mars exploration, learns he is alive, they have to make tough decisions. His crew still has months before their ship can complete its return to Earth, and no one on Earth has interplanetary launch shuttles just sitting around.

Jeff Daniels plays the director of NASA, while other members of the missions ground control are played by Kristen Wiig (not a comic role), Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and a fresh-faced young actress named Mackenzie Davis. Donald Glover also pops in as an unwelcome eccentric consultant (comic role) who may have a brilliant plan. 

The shuttle crew is led by Jessica Chastain, with Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, and Michael Peña -because you always need some comic relief actor to tell his fellow scientists to "speak English" when they exercise the natural vocabulary of scientists.

What's refreshing about Scott's choice to give peril-in-space another go, is the light-hearted approach this time. A film that contains the morbid idea of a man marooned on a lifeless planet would normally be accompanied by Scott's signature serious tone. 

For anyone who saw Christopher Nolan's Interstellar last year, it was generally agreed between those who liked it and those who didn't, that Damon's role was a counterproductive distraction to the film's story. How strange it is that shortly after that film, he's accepted the role of an astronaut in similar survival circumstances. Jessica Chastain's participation seems to have a similar effect. The Martian feels like an energetic and optimistic apology from artists and a major Hollywood studio for draining all the fun and optimism out of big movies in recent years.

The special effects and cinematography are just as beautiful as what Prometheus managed to accomplish, but this time, we have a rational problem-solving character to root for, as opposed to the immature unprofessional idiots who caused problems in Prometh- You know, I'll stop talking about that movie and maybe Scott will stop talking about its sequel.

This is a beautiful and smart film that doesn't feel it's two-hour and twenty-minute length thanks to good choices. Damon providing exposition with a lively video diary reminded me of what made Danny Boyle's 127 Hours work. A science fiction film that works with limitations instead of magic solutions also keeps us invested with the relatable high stakes that make us think of real-world problems that need to be solved by strong thinkers. 

There are only a few less-desirable parts that condescend the audience and I was a little distracted that a film so hellbent on being scientifically accurate used sound in outer space during one of its later sequences, even though films like Gravity, and even Serenity seemed to be part of a movement to work without it (keep it in Star Wars, though!).

Along with Harry Gregson Williams' nice score, the movie makes an endearingly cheesy choice to have a seventies disco soundtrack. Not kidding. Not as inventive as Starlord's Awesome Mix cassette, but I dug it.