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Drive

drive

Grade: A

Violence is used in many different ways in film. Sometimes it’s a metaphor, sometimes it’s for shock-value, hell, sometimes it’s even used for laughs. In Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn uses violence to suggest it’s an ingrained, and inescapable, part of human nature. Nobody in the movie seems particularly fond of hurting and killing, yet all ready to jump into it without a moment’s hesitation. The lead, aptly named Driver, played by Ryan Gosling, is a quiet, slow-moving, and deliberate man. That he works as a getaway driver for heists and a stunt driver for movies seems somewhat contradictory to his nature, until we realize it’s a cover for the rage monster that is constantly held at bay. When the situation calls for it, he explodes into a fury of violence, destroying anyone in his way. To say it’s a bad temper is to cheapen the frightening menace that is his true self.

The plot’s not new: a man with a questionable and checkered background meets a girl Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her son, who melt his icy heart and teach him about the value of human connection and all that. Matters get complicated when we learn Irene’s husband is getting out of jail and is coming home. When her husband needs his help to get out of debt from dangerous men, Driver agrees out of some stoic sense of honor and obligation. Things go wrong, and Driver channels his rage into revenge and protection mode and, needless to say, he kills fucking everyone. I trust that’s not a spoiler. If you’ve seen a noir film, you know that everybody dies. That’s not what important here. What is important is that all the players in this film know that they’re in a situation where everybody needs to die, there’s no other way out. They live in a bleak and hopeless world, and violence and death is really the only thing they’re capable of controlling.

The performances are what stand out in this movie. Gosling has made the stoic, silent, and dangerous character sort of his staple at this point. He doesn’t bring anything new to this role, but he does it well. Mulligan doesn’t do anything particularly special either, she just plays the scared and sad, two-note female that’s pretty much expected in this kind of movie. Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman both have a lot of fun with their characters, a hard luck car guru and a criminal boss who loves being a criminal boss respectively. The most enjoyable far and away in this movie, though, is Albert Brooks. He plays Perlman’s crime partner, and a man who knows the requirements of his business but does not enjoy the things he has to do. Other than Driver, he’s the most dangerous character in the film, and it’s because, like Driver, he gets no joy from the violence. It’s simply something that’s ingrained inside him, a part of his world as necessary as anything else. Brooks is crass, yet tragic, and utterly dominates any room he finds himself in.

If there’s something in this film that doesn’t work very well, it’s the idea that any girl would be charmed by Ryan Gosling’s absence of personality. I get that he’s very good looking, but at some point responding with one word answers and unemotional smiles is simply not going to make you very many friends. It’s a small complaint, but one that enough movies make where I feel it’s acceptable to bring it up.

Drive uses stylized, hyper-violence to accentuate the absence of morality in its world. The fleeting glimpses of goodness we get are held onto so tightly that it becomes necessary to protect it by the most extreme measures. Driver is willing to destroy the world, and himself, if it means Irene and her son can live a relatively peaceful life. We never learn the origin of his violent ways, and the film is better for it. The only thing we need to know is that violence begets violence, until the world simply eats itself, and hopefully those left standing will know some small level of hope.

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American Boy by Larry Watson

american boy

Grade: B

Simple, small town American stories are going out of style. Modern audiences, even the “literary” among us, want more, a bigger vision and preferably something quirky somewhere in the story. This isn’t really a bad thing as writers should continue to push the envelope, and after all, what more can really be said about small town life? But sometimes it’s nice to be reminded why a trope worked so well for so long. In the novel American Boy, Larry Watson tells a simple story, set in the early 1960’s in Willow Falls, Minnesota, that succeeds as both an ode to a small town and a coming of age tale, even when it comes up a little short in other areas.

The story follows Matthew Garth, a poor kid with a dead father who has more or less been adopted by his friend Johnny’s family, the Dunbars. The father, a doctor, teaches the boys medicine and is more or less grooming them to be doctors themselves one day. The novel opens with a gunshot victim, Louisa Lindahl, being brought in during Thanksgiving. After a glimpse of her wounded, naked body, Matt becomes infatuated with her. He attempts to court her in ways that only an unsophisticated, seventeen year old boy can think of, and naturally comes up short. His pursuit, and obsession, of her unveils Dunbar family secrets that could threaten the model of perfection. Until a disappointing ending, which I’ll get to in a minute, American Boy is very much about the power the successful have over the poor.

What drives this novel more than anything is the voice. It is told in first person from Matt’s perspective. Matt’s worldview, and therefore our worldview, is limited by his age, his lack of experience, and his lack of access to anything bigger than himself. This voice feels amazingly authentic, and has the power to make us feel every bit as frustrated as the protagonist when he fails or is withheld information. We only get to know the other characters from his view, so they are always seen through a filter and never fully realized as human beings. This isn’t a complaint, but rather an observation that the Dunbar family and Louisa only exist as ideas in Garth’s mind, so naturally we’re only going to get these glimpses of them. Sometimes the writing isn’t quite as sharp though, like when Watson constantly insists on deviating from the action to let Matt reminisce about something that’s clearly a metaphor for what’s currently happening. It would’ve been wiser to just stay focused on the moment and let it speak for itself. Don’t telegraph the meaning for us, we’ll figure it out.

Okay, about that ending. The whole novel lets itself unravel slowly and naturally. The tension builds and builds, and we figure out certain things long before Matt does, until it hits a boiling point at a small motel in Bellamy. The class commentary is in full force at this point, when during a fight, Matt observes “Father and son kept me down long enough for me to be reminded again as to who possessed power and weight in the world.” Up until, and including, this point, the book was engaging and heart-wrenching, but then the last few chapters speed up and rush to an ending that is fairly unsatisfying. We get another chapter in the present, then a fast forward into the near future, where we discover that Matt did just fine on his own. This ending robs of us two things: the first being a satisfying resolution to the actual story line. The second is a bit more abstract. The novel, working as a haves versus have-nots feels authentic and poignant, until it seems to cop out at the end. Having Matt be successful in life, and not just successful but successful because of what Doctor Dunbar taught him, feels like a cheat. The message seems to be that the rich can do whatever they want, but pay attention to what they have to teach and you’ll do just fine.

This is still a worthwhile read, and a reminder that Larry Watson is one of our great contemporary novelists. It may be far from perfect, but it’s refreshing to read a simple story that, for the most part, stays simple and true and moving. Every once in a while, something that’s old-fashioned and out of style can feel fresh and exciting when done well.


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The Wolverine

thewolverine

Grade: B+

Superhero movies are at an interesting crossroad. The sheer novelty of seeing our favorite heroes on screen, in live-action, has worn off. The days where the joy and exhilaration of just seeing them fly through the sky, swing above buildings, or materialize from the shadows are over with. Film makers seem conflicted about how to handle this problem. For the most part, their answer is more, more, more. There must always be a global catastrophe looming, and the fate of every human being must be in peril. This is a pretty easy way to up the stakes without really trying too hard. Human annihilation not enough for you? Then they’ll give you more superheroes, more villains. Just keep stacking more of them on a single screen and the fan boys will be appeased. The fan boys must be appeased. The other, smarter, solution is to scale things down and just tell a good story in what is already a rich and entertaining universe. Luckily, The Wolverine does just this, cutting the mutant total down and not threatening genocide (An interesting note on that is the movie starts with the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, which is the single greatest threat of genocide in the real world, but little more than a flash in the pan in a world with god-like beings constantly at war with one another). What we get instead is a more personal story about the indestructible clawed man with the bad temper, a simple save the girl and revenge kind of tale with fun twists and turns, which is exactly what we want from Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman resumes his now iconic role, though the character is a little different from the last time we saw him. This movie takes place sometime after the events of X-Men 3, and Logan, no longer acknowledging The Wolverine side of him, has retreated into a self-imposed exile. He dreams of Jean Grey, the girl he loved and killed to stop her from destroying the world, every night and is riddled with too much guilt to face his past. An invitation to say goodbye to an old friend on his death bed brings him to Japan where, naturally, nothing is as it seems. He encounters a bitter power struggle over Asia’s largest corporation, beautiful women, and ninja assassins. Through a suppression of his powers, Logan must face his own mortality, something he’s never had to do before. Setting up the scenario where Wolverine could actually die, even if we never believe it will actually happen, is a fun and welcome change from previous installments where he is absolutely indestructible and his only weakness is his super grumpiness. Needless to say, the conspiracy is unveiled and Logan must once again find the inner Wolverine in him to save the day and rescue the girl.

Jackman slips into the role easily, and even though this character is far removed from the comic book Wolverine, he has made the movie Wolverine so much his own that it’s hard to complain about it. I don’t think we needed the forced love story between him and Mariko (Tao Okamoto), mostly because Jackman is finally starting to age and the romance comes off a tad creepy, though it doesn’t make a ton of sense from a script standpoint either. For the most part, the rest of the cast are solid in their roles as well. Okamoto brings a stoic vulnerability, while Rila Fukushima gets the most fun role as the bad-ass sidekick Yukio. Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper, though, was not very good. Her villain belonged in another movie, not this one. She was hamming it up a bit too much when everybody else in the movie is more or less playing it straight. This made it a bit distracting whenever she was on screen.

It’s hard to say that this is a small scale movie when the fate of Asia’s largest corporation is at stake, and there is a post credits scene teasing Days of the Future Past, which appears to be insanely grandiose in its scope, but The Wolverine feels very self-contained and not interested in the fate of mutants as a whole. This is quite refreshing and whereas I was skeptical of James Mangold directing (I absolutely hated Walk the Line), he shows skill at keeping the story in focus and creating exciting, and actually believable in their own way, action scenes. Here’s hoping that, going forward, superhero movies understand that the story is more important than the explosions. There were only three mutants in this movie, and I never felt wanting for more.

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Bossypants by Tina Fey

Bossypants_Cover_(Tina_Fey)_-_200px.jpeg

Grade: B

Comedian memoirs are a tricky thing. Often times, the writer will want to broach serious issues and ruin our good time because we just want them to make us laugh, damn it. To be fair, a good amount of the time this is due to poor or manipulative writing and the rejection is well deserved. Very few of these books transcend the genre and become something else, Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up being, arguably, the best example of this. In Bossypants, Tina Fey does occasionally, but not always, achieve this. She has an agenda (Note to my conservative readers: Please don’t read that as “Liberal Agenda” because that’s not what I mean and that word doesn’t always have to have negative connotations), being the general view of female comics and the unreasonable backlash one gets from simply being female in the comedy world, and sticks with it pretty much throughout the book. Fey, being a champion of women in comedy, almost has a responsibility to visit that theme again and again. She does this through the insight of her own experiences, which are obviously extensive and relevant, and light-hearted, self-deprecating humor running throughout.

This is not a straight forward memoir in the sense that there is no obvious through line. She jumps around in time to periods she feels are most relevant to the themes of the book, and there are frequent asides, such as her tribute to the greatness of Amy Poehler, which will be frustrating to readers who would prefer a more traditional biography, but is refreshing to those of us who are tired of traditional biographies. There are topics she avoids, mostly things that would infringe on the privacy of those she cares about. One particular, though, is that she very much does not want to talk about her scar. It’s perfectly understandable that she wouldn’t, and it’s also perfectly understandable that people are curious about it. She gets around this by addressing it almost immediately, giving an absolute barebones detail of the event and giving nothing more. She doesn’t necessarily avoid it as its referenced a few times throughout the book, but by not harping on it or giving it too much weight, she prevents making Bossypants a somber account of her life. This is very much a comedic book with serious elements to it, and by dealing with the elephant in the room immediately and briefly, we’re free to move on to the good stuff.

The best parts of this book, for me, are the behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live. I’m a sucker for these stories since I’ve been watching that show every week since I learned how to wake up in the middle of the night while my parents were sleeping and turn the TV on very quietly. The show has always famously had a reputation as a boy’s club, and there are some great stories in this book concerning that, and offering a different, less jaded, perspective. Since she is possibly the most successful woman to come out of SNL, Fey has a unique opportunity to tackle this issue and show how it’s not something that is set in stone. It’s not all about this issue though, there is plenty of fun to be had as well. She describes her audition process, table reads, and, of course, her run as Sarah Palin. Through her, we get to know Lorne Michaels and Amy Poehler to some degree, but in her effort to not have this book be seen as a tell-all, she keeps everyone else at arm’s length. Instead Fey keeps the focus perpetually on herself, this being her book and all that is understandable. This doesn’t come off as narcissistic, I don’t want to suggest that, but it does come off as a bit overly cautious at times.

I don’t think Fey is comfortable going very long without a laugh. As a comedy writer this makes a ton of sense, but it can also cheapen this book at times. Occasionally it gets a little too jokey when it’s not really called for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this book isn’t funny, because it is, but there are moments when it doesn’t feel that the material is being fully trusted, so a self-deprecating anecdote or observation is thrown in at the tail end of a rant, lest we think she’s one of those feminist types. Tina Fey is an extremely funny person, but also a good enough writer to not always have to fall back on humor. All I’m saying is, we already like you, Tina, don’t always try so hard to impress us.


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Not Fade Away

Not_Fade_Away_poster

Directed by David Chase

Starring John Magaro, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini

Grade: B+

Ah, the 1960’s, a decade that promised change, and hope, and the realization of human potential. And rock n’ roll. In fact, rock n’ roll was sort of at the forefront of all this. Well, it didn’t really work out that way and now those years are sadly regulated to a metaphor for the disillusionment of youth. In our naïve, and angsty, years we believe we can change the world but will of course fail. Not Fade Away does not dwell on this, what I’m trying to say is it’s not a particularly grim film, but this idea is always present. Writer and Director David Chase (The Sopranos) has created a love letter to the 60’s and the music that was the soundtrack.

The plot, which takes place over a few years, Douglas (John Magaro) and his friends while they form a band inspired by The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Douglas was a clean-cut, scrawny kid in high school who couldn’t get laid to save his life, so naturally he is drawn to the new rock n’ roll where scrawny dudes seem to get laid all the time. He pines for a Grace (Bella Heathcote), a girl totally out of his league, who will eventually talk him into becoming the lead singer rather than the drummer. As Douglas gets a bit older, goes to college and drops out, and the band becomes a bigger and bigger part of his life, he becomes increasingly a symbol of the 60’s. His hair could be a Bob Dylan wig, and he dresses, as his father Pat (James Gandolfini) would say “Like you just got off the boat.” The band never finds success outside of their small town, but that doesn’t stop it from crumbling from inner turmoil, hurt feelings, and egos just like a real band, and eventually Douglas loses everything he thought he cared about most.

The performances are mostly fine, though Magaro makes Douglas rather tough to like as he becomes increasingly pompous and hypocritical. What I want to talk about though, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t, is the late James Gandolfini. I’m not writing a eulogy here, but the man was a talent and the acting world is going to miss him, is already missing him. As the conservative father In Not Fade Away, Gandolfini brings life and soul to what could otherwise be a very stock character. Pat has anger bubbling under the surface at all times, anger at a world that didn’t work out for him the way it was supposed to, anger at a world that is leaving his ideals behind, and anger at his son for following the world rather than him. But there is also the undeniable goodness in him that makes us root for him, even when he’s being kind of, okay very, racist. I won’t go into specific spoilers here, but Pat’s journey in this film is the most subtle and the most interesting. He represents the death of the “nuclear family,” the old guard. This kind of death is always resisted by rage and violent outbursts. By the end, there is a sort of sad acceptance, and he does what only an American father understands, he tells his son (metaphorically of course, he doesn’t actually say the following words) Go West, Young Man.

This movie definitely falls under the good, but not great umbrella in many ways. Watch it for the details, that turbulent decade comes to life on-screen. The music, the sets, the characters all feel authentic and it’s refreshing that Chase doesn’t idealize too much and doesn’t shy away from complicated race questions. Also, see it for Gandolfini. In fact, see any movie with him in it. The death of idealism is a tough thing to stomach, and in a way this movie works as a metaphor for the teenage and early 20’s years of all of us. There was a time, believe it or not, when we all believed we were capable of changing the world, and that something as pure and untainted as Rock n’ Roll would be that instrument. The fact that we were wrong doesn’t cheapen our efforts.

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