Point-By-Point: Stoker 9/10

I avoided Stoker for a long time (hence its grievous exclusion from my Best of 2013 list) because while I was highly intrigued by the idea of Chan-wook Park directing a gothic, English language thriller, I was also scared. Oldboy has some of the most viscerally disturbing violence and imagery I've ever seen, his piece of the triptych in Three... Extremes grossed me out, and from what I've read/heard of Lady Vengeance (sorry, PCW, I just couldn't bring myself to watch that, however gorgeous the woman's eye makeup may be), the theme would continue. And so I braced myself... then kicked myself -- hard -- for having avoided it.

The Good:
It'd be too lazy to say, in response to this: "everything", but there's a silly little part of me that wants to. I'm rarely jaw-to-floor stunned by a movie -- impressed, gobsmacked, and giddy yes... but not just wholly blown away. Stoker got me good.

Yes, you can criticize it for being style-over-substance, and it is, in many ways (the story is not overly complicated and the characters are those you've probably met before in other movies/books/plays), but it's the ways in which the style enhances the substance that make this fascinating. The colors in this movie are straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, deep and rich but never over-saturated. The palette and texture, then, become an unspoken character in the drama, dark earth tones shot through with poisonous color. It's the color palette in which you read a Flannery o'Connor novel, with all of that terrifying undercurrent of heat and shame.

The Bad:
To be fair, I am the ideal audience for this movie -- I love the attention to detail, I prefer obsessive psychodrama to fast-paced action and noise, I'll pretty much follow Mia Wasikowska anywhere. Stoker isn't for everyone -- it's very R-rated and pervy as hell. As well, as discussed above, it very strongly focuses on images and texture instead of straightforward plot.

This dream-sequence atmosphere can be perhaps the most irritating aspect of Stoker. In a few key scenes, you're truly not sure exactly what happened, or are only able to parse the options later, based on new information as it is revealed. For more from a real reviewer whose opinion runs toward style-chokes substance, see this one, by Mick Lasalle -- he brings up some genuinely good points, especially if you are more easily bored or less enamored of the aesthetic strength of the movie as a whole.

The Ugly:
There's a longer essay to be written on this, I'm sure (and I'm sure someone's written it), but I hate the stylistic choice to to use female masturbation as metonymy for her descent into insanity and/or evil. It's lazy and prudish and awkwardly male-gazey. There are so many better ways to illustrate this (even in this movie, the daddy-long-legs imagery could have been re-used for great effect), that it's endlessly frustrating.

More stylistically satisfying, but far more perverse, is the incestuous sex (masturbation? see what I mean about dream-state narrative style?) scene at a piano. Never has playing a duet generated this many conflicting emotions. It's beautifully shot and compelling, but outrageously disturbing.

Also: any movie that opens with a shot of someone popping a blister sets its bar high for ick-factor.

Points I Pondered:
- Can we bring saddle shoes back as an acceptable style-choice for adults? Please?

Point-By-Point: Inside Llewyn Davis 6/10

I may be in the minority here, but I like the slower, more serious side of the Coen brothers. The Man Who Wasn't There (in many ways), A Serious Man, now Inside Llewyn Davis: they're more difficult, surely, and maybe not even as good in many respects, but they have a personal feel that, for all the power of No Country for Old Men or O Brother, Where Art Thou? don't.

The Good:
I'll be honest: NPR had the soundtrack to this movie on "First Listen" a month or so ago and I wore out the repeat button. Even if you hate the story being told in this movie, if you have a soft spot for folk music, you'll enjoy it. Oscar Isaacs has a beautiful, slightly-imperfect voice with just the right amount of pathos in his intonation to make these songs work. T Bone Burnett previously worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is well-recognized as one of the best country/bluegrass compilations in recent memory, and while I don't think "If I Had Wings" has the same ear worm quality as "Man of Constant Sorrow", the love and care taken with the music in this movie is stunning.

The atmosphere, as a whole, is lovely: all the grays and blues of a New York winter, brown tweed and corduroy. The overall feel is immaculate -- it's a little too clean to ring "authentic", but it's the well-shot nostalgia-veiled version of authenticity (everyone smokes, but you never smell it or feel that grittiness). I'm actually complimenting this slight shininess -- Llewyn is a fairytale, albeit a depressing, frustrating one. Hopeless dreamers don't feel that grit, and they don't remember it, even when it gets all over them. 

The Bad:
I'm so, so frustrated by the construction of this film. In a movie that is explicitly straightforward -- there are no flashbacks, no intercutting of different scenes/people -- WHY is there an out-of-time bookend? It throws off your entire understanding of the story. I'm sure there's an explanation (any movie this carefully constructed doesn't just do something like that without a good reason), but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Really, the central problem in Llewyn is that our eponymous protagonist is kind of a drip. He doesn't act... he is acted upon and the script uses that failing against him to no end, but there's no redemption, no learning. There's a theme running lackadaisically through this movie of the unintentional hero, or the epic-journey-by-necessity (the cat's name is Ulysses, he walks past a movie poster for The Incredible Journey, etc). The implication is that Llewyn's journey is supposed to fall into that same mythic realm, but there's no payoff -- instead of Ulysses, he's Sisyphus, endlessly having that rock roll back down the hill. For more on the mythopoetic aspects of this film, I refer you to this post by Richard Brody who explicates these far better than I could.

Llewyn's impotence is also illustrated in the picaresque structure of the narrative itself -- when you're not the actor in your own life, events become vignettes of excitement between stretches of nothingness with no true flow between them. This was actually an element of this film that I enjoyed, but my dear viewing companion and most of the reviews I've read choose to disagree (hence its inclusion here, rather than above).

The Ugly:
I wish I hadn't seen the trailer for this before I watched it. Actually, I wish they'd re-cut the trailer to remove certain sequences. More than most movies, the ad for this spoiled the experience -- lines that you recognize from the trailer should have hit like sucker punches, but they're blunted.

Carey Mulligan, Carey Mulligan... what are you doing? It's a tough role, to be fair: the tightly-wound, secretly-desperate friend/lover, but it's played for full harpy effect. On paper, she's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, but her delivery undermines the rapport she could have generated with the audience.

Overall, Inside Llewyn Davis isn't a perfect film by any standards, but if you have any affection for folk music and the dreamers (and potentially losers) who sing it, there's something worthwhile here. Even if I may intellectually have significant qualms with it, this movie worked for me emotionally in a way that I can't entirely validate rationally.

Haiku: Silver Linings Playbook 7/10

Silver Linings Playbook

Sports fanaticism:
mental illness sanctioned by
societal norms.

OR

Bringing crazy home.
Frustrating plot but a great
Oscar vehicle.

Point-By-Point: Her 6/10

It's not often that I don't know how to respond to a movie. Even if it's just a firm "meh", I usually can at least put a finger on what I'm feeling in regard to what I've just seen. It's been a few hours since I walked out of the theatre after having seen Her; I still have no real idea if I liked it or not. I respect it, surely, but liked it? I don't know.

To be fair, I was inordinately intrigued by this movie's premise from the minute I heard about it. My real job involves building natural language models for a company that creates virtual assistants (albeit corporate-focused ones) and I couldn't wait to see what someone's imagined future related to these products looked like. My CEO even got in on the hype surrounding Her and talked to the New Yorker about the human connections that get created by the current generation of interactive virtual assistants. If for no other reason than professional fascination with this type of programming, I was perhaps set up for disappointment in the finished product.

Anyway...

The Good:

Spike Jonze is an immaculate filmmaker. This movie is beautiful: the colors, the soundtrack, the sense of place, all are realized with elegance. As well, Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson both turn in nuanced, confident performances, which can't be easy when most of your lines are delivered while talking to an earbud (the former) and as an entirely voiceover performance (the latter). Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) isn't  a particularly likable character, but he is a recognizable one. The dialogue reflects this -- it's intelligent, with just the right amount of that comfortable smuttiness that friends can generate.

I genuinely liked the world that is set up by Her. It's not particularly original, but it feels very real and like an understandable extension of where we are in 2014. I'm not sure I'm sold on the idea that computers are moving in the direction of wholesale voice-control, but this movie illustrates what it could look like in a very straightforward way.

The Bad:

For a movie ostensibly about the revelatory power of connection and its necessity for full human flourishing, our hero has very little, if no real emotional arc. He's a man-child -- stuck in a (self-acknowledged) world of video games and online porn -- and doesn't seem particularly interested in changing that. You never get a sense that he's learned anything from his experiences with Samantha, but rather that he just used this sentient operating system as, perhaps, the ultimate distraction: a video game that can be made pornographic when it suits. 

One of the movie's conceits is that Theodore writes beautifully sensitive, poetic letters for strangers but can't express his own feelings to the people he cares about. This is not a new theme (think Joseph Gordon-Levitt writing Hallmark cards in 500 Days of Summer or Jack Lemmon's consumption of old movies in The Apartment), but one that could have been used very effectively here. Unfortunately, when that denouement comes, it's unsatisfying and seems to contradict the overall implication drawn by the conceit itself.

The Ugly:

Honestly, one of my favorite little touches is the trousers that all the men in this movie seem to favor: high-waisted, wide-waisted wool slacks with welted pockets. As far as I know, this is not a current style, and it makes for a subtle, interesting futuristic note. They're not pretty, but I like that someone took the time to design them (and evidently, they're real now!)

In more serious criticism, I continue to be frustrated by the message that this movie. It seemed to want to say that relationships are what you make of them, and that emotional connections are more about you than the person to which you feel the connection. Unfortunately, the message that comes across is that the best relationships are those that do not challenge you or your interests. 

Points Pondered:

• Is voice-control really the way that computers are going? Yes, I can now talk to the Xbox and turn it off by saying "Xbox off"... but no keyboards? No touch screens? No phone screens at all? I'm not convinced.
• This movie made me realize how many personal conversations and interactions we have every day in plain sight. We just assume that no one's listening. 
• It seems like a computer with a (very human, thinking/feeling/reactive) personality would be more trouble than benefit. What happens when my OS gets peeved with me and hides email? Or deletes files? How do you reset it? Can you override it? It's all very fluffy and consensual in Her, but I feel like there's a dystopian corollary here that could be interesting to explore.
• For more on this same theme, I highly recommend searching out the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" -- it's a beautiful, heartbreaking meditation on something similar.