The Math Solves All The Problems in Formulaic "Safe Haven"

I watched this movie on the 9-hour plane ride from London to Minneapolis.  In my state of time confusion, "The Place Beyond the Pines" was a little too intense and deep, I'd already seen "Gatsby", and "Oblivion" didn't catch my interest.  So I tried out "Safe Haven", which I'd seen trailers for and thought "I could like this for an hour and a half."

It tells the story of Katie, a girl who flees home because of a danger we don't understand and settles in a tiny North Carolina town.  There, she makes the acquaintance of Alex, a cheery widower who runs a little shop for people taking the bus through town.  He's got two children--adorable gap-toothed Lexie and disobedient, stern Josh who misses his mom.  I bet you have no idea where this is going.  If you really don't, I'll give you a clue.




Yeah, let's just say surprise is not really a part of the story.  She ends up with the guy, big surprise, he helps her solve her problems.

The first line that stuck out to me was a transaction.  She comes to his little store after escaping scary-man-Dan, and she buys something, and he says "That'll be 97 cents." I wonder what on earth these days costs 97 cents!  Did he not make her pay taxes?  The reason it stuck out to me is, because, like the rest of the movie, it was too easy.  The math works out.  You only have to pay three cents in change.  I was struck by this when she came again to get groceries, and he said "That'll be 18 even.  Out of 20?" Once again, two bucks change.  Let alone the romance, I just can't believe that all that food is this cheap.

"Safe Haven" falls into a genre of movies where unchallenged audience members watch people in an almost-perfect situation find their way into a basically-perfect situation.  What self-respecting girl doesn't want to come out of a bad breakup with the wrong guy and immediately encounter a selfless, gentle, normal guy who will take care of her come hell or high water?  And what self-respecting small-town convenience store widower doesn't want some humble, beautiful girl to come along, revitalize your life with a jolt of love, and become best friends with your kids who you feel you can't raise by yourself?  There's a soothing quality to watching things work out okay.  Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel have a nice chemistry, she appears to be able to speak English and look like an absolute bombshell all the time, and he actually acts most of the time, and it's nice.



The North Carolina setting is charming and underused, and the little girl is adorable even if she is so unrealistic and perfect as to be ridiculous.  The villain is only useful for making Judd Fry jokes.  It's a shame that it's so predictable, as I found myself pausing the movie and wondering how they intended to fill in another hour and a half of it.  Luckily I had a book with me to read during the boring parts.

Still, there's something to be said for a world in which such movies exist.  Besides the mathematics of love, which abound here, another idea surfaces, that of Tribe Dynamics.  Not only is Man lacking one (1) female, Woman needs one (1) protector, and both children need one (1) mother.  The real satisfaction of this film actually doesn't come from seeing beautiful people fall in love and vicariously enjoy their emotional and physical pleasures.  It comes from watching roles be filled and a narrative of happiness take place.  That's why it's a Tribe movie--not only does Katie come to love Alex, she comes to love the city and to be a part of it in a special way.  She fills a role, many roles, and I realized watching the movie that transcending non-entity status to become something is, for many, the great relief of life.

Literary folk and critics gawk at such a base display in a film (you know, such an elevated medium with its long history of not-shallowness) and thus give it a probably deserving 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.




Still, I think it's fascinating that humans find Love to be such a big deal, as it is such an everyday feeling.  The welcome arms of acceptance and the thrill of being able to make someone else happy drive us to complete the tasks that civilization lays upon us like bricks on Egyptian slaves.  And "Safe Haven" shows a sort of naive view of how it could work, a fantasy of seeing things work out okay, and only costing 97 cents.  I guess that's the part that's naive and predictable.

You probably don't have to watch "Safe Haven".  You could watch the trailer and get most of what I got out of it.  That is, if you're human.  If you're an alien, this is a great anthropological study about some pretty basic human ideas.  And it's got pop music in the credits, if you need incentive.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" Is Gaiman's Anchor Work

The teeny little book that a friend gave me as I visited home, a thin hardcover that seemed bite-sized compared to the last four books I'd read, proclaimed itself A Novel under its big title and beautiful cover art.  I gave a knowing little hm.  Neil Gaiman was selling this book differently.  I wondered why, a little, and then forwent the thinking about it and just read the darn thing.



Neil Gaiman gets by on many things, but the key is charisma.  Tall, curly-haired, with a sort of knowing glint in his eyes, he draws an audience like a flea draws varmints--in multitudes, apparently.  He is the Joss Whedon of fantasy writing, and it's little wonder.

Those caught up in the dank labyrinth of Game of Thrones love George R.R. Martin, but the enormously-bearded man is not a peerlike, inquisitive sage, but instead a crafty, devious storyteller who has it in for everyone in his stories--the bloodier, the better, especially if they get naked a few times beforehand.  Supporters of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan are more like archaeologists than bookworms, and Brandon Sanderson lovers "really dig" the dude who writes such "awesome" stuff.

Fantasy writing has its nuances, just as any genre, and Neil Gaiman avoids a certain camp: the camp of making-up-your-own-names, inventing crazy new species, making a storyworld you could play D&D in.  Gaiman pulls out of mythology, folklore, and the urban obscure.  Besides Stardust, his major works are universally set in the modern day, with protagonists living normal lives presented with the delirium, confusion, and beauty of the Other world.  And this is where he finds his niche, his charisma, and his magnetic draw:

Whereas other writers spin fantasies out of their dreams to amuse, startle, and teach, Gaiman always seems, just a little bit, to believe.  His fiction shows the reader a world that lurks beneath their apartment building, or at the other end of the pond behind their house, and instead of a neat moral to tie things up, the final temptation always asks "Why don't you take a look?"



Considering this introduction, it's important to point out that The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, essentially, a Neil Gaiman novel.  It follows his patterns, reads in his understated, clearly enunciated voice, and charms and enraptures as he knows so well how to do.

But The Ocean at the End of the Lane is more.

The book tells the story of an Englishman coming home for a family member's funeral and, by a sort of driving autopilot coincidence, visiting the backyard of an old neighbor.  Behind their house at the end of a long lane sits a pond.  The neighbor in question, the long gone-away-to-Australia Lettie Hempstock, called their pond an ocean, and this memory triggers a leap back into the man's memories as a seven-year-old.  His memories are the substance of the story.

The story of a young boy and his relationship with a family who turn out to be much, much more than they seem follows the same path as many fantasies.  There are dark things at work in his town.  One feels ripples in the water--ripples coming from Coraline, MirrorMask, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, an ebb pushing from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and a deep undercurrent from the tradition of English fairy folklore and other myths.

The story itself is a precious, well-hewn tale that walks down familiar paths with all the fear, wonder, and depth that we felt before, but where Neil Gaiman has spent his career as a jazz musician of folkore, improvising and riffing on what has already been told, Ocean draws it together.  It connects all of the stories of its kind ever told, and what's more, it tries to explain them to us, through the eyes of a seven-year-old.  For the first time, or at least in a new way as fresh as a homegrown tomato, Neil Gaiman hands his audience his heart and the reason that he tells the stories he does.

When facing off against a frightening aberration that is tormenting his family and now threatening to destroy him, our protagonist observes: "It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh.  She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win."

Ocean is so obsessed with children & adults that at first I worried for its well-being.  So many of those stories simply stop at "children are better than adults, they have that intuition thing" and it seems like a cop out to be escapist and displeased with growing up.

But that is not what the book is trying to do.  Like a young religious seeker, Gaiman dives into a secretive world trying to find answers.  Though seven-year-old eyes see the story, the man remembering them is middle-aged.  He is trying to come to grips with a past that he only somewhat understands and remembers.

The beauty of The Ocean at the End of the Lane is how many answers he finds.  This seven-year-old sees "the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty", and though he dreams of escaping to the world in Lettie's "ocean", what he eventually discovers is much deeper, much more real, and ultimately, amazing.

Note: (Added August 4th, 2014) Gaiman's book is not perfect; few are, and even perfectly-engineered books can seem silly.  But the book has grown on me.  There are passages here as powerful and mysterious as the Gospel of John, and just as the fourth gospel brings purpose to the story of Christ as the others cannot, so Ocean, I think, is telling the story of what nerds and geeks and dorks are really after.  Less mature, emotional works can celebrate the educated elite that make up those demographics, showing the innovation and smarts and community grown out of it.  But Gaiman looks past these things to the childlike sense that there are things beyond reality:

"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.” There is fear and terror here.  But beyond it there is purpose.  When presented with a beautiful possibility of knowledge without hurt, a young witch tells the protagonist boy that knowing everything is no fun, because it means you can't play. "Play at what?" he responds.

This is the real quest of the nerd kingdom, whether they seek after it or not.  And though it may perhaps sink into obscurity, Gaiman's work may become the Gospel of John of the Bible of Geekdom, and hopefully, of all those who choose to imagine.

I recommend The Ocean at The End of the Lane without reservation to any human being, fairy, hobgoblin, kobold, spirit, selkie, or shadow creature that might come across it, or that uses currency to purchase books.  And more especially to those who do not read fantasy, I implore you:  Read this book.  Step into this ocean and see things a little differently.  Or maybe a lot.

Mercy is the Mark: Morality, Murder, and More in "Dishonored"

WARNING: This review contains what might be considered emotional spoilers.  No plot points or characters are revealed, but important events are discussed.

One reason I think I like to write reviews is because I like to read reviews.  I try not to watch R-rated movies unless I have some idea what's made them rated that way, and the MPAA is less than helpful, so I find myself reading three or four reviews of a movie before I watch it.

I was even more stringent when I was considering buying Dishonored.  The 2012 stealth/action game was praised for its setting in the deep, dark city of Dunwall, its exhilarating, creative gameplay, and some gorgeous art design.  Powered on whale oil and choking on a rat-borne plague, I breathed in Dunwall like secondhand smoke, crawling around on rooftops among smoke-belching chimneys and sneaking through houses where plague-ridden wackos set up shrines to the mysterious, malicious Outsider.

The game puts the player behind the eyes of Corvo Attano, the Lord Protector of Dunwall, who returns from a voyage just in time to witness the assassination of his close friend Empress Jessamine and the kidnapping of her daughter Emily.  Guards accuse him of the murder, and Corvo is sent off to prison and condemned to be executed.  Through some fortuitous circumstances, he escapes and meets up with an undercover team of dissenters trying to take back power from the people who stole it from Corvo.

A video game attempt at "The Count of Monte Cristo" ensues, but instead of wealth, intrigue, and betrayal, Corvo gains supernatural powers from the Outsider, wears a frightening mask, and sets out to eliminate the people who killed the Empress and blamed him for it.

This is where the morality comes in.  Early in Dishonored's creation, developers revealed that part of the design of the game was to allow players to win the game without killing anyone.  Corvo's targets can all be killed with a flick of the knife (or, more often, a gruesome, bloody shoving match) but every mission rather clearly presents a possibility to stop them from doing evil while still leaving them alive.  A religious character can be branded with a mark that makes him excommunicated for life, leaving him living but friendless.  Corvo has the opportunity to find a hidden voice recording of a high-ranking official, which, if played over public loudspeakers, is the equivalent of political suicide, rendering him imprisoned but unharmed.

In simpler situations, Corvo sneaks around guards and plague-wild Weepers instead of fighting them, or creeps up behind and knocks them out.  Their snores assure the player that the person they've taken out isn't dead, and will wake in the morning with a sore neck but little else.

This idea fascinated me, and motivated me to buy the game even if the trailers looked like a messy, blood-gluttonous massacre.  That option exists, and I won't talk about it much because I didn't experience it.  I did fight a few times, and it was fun.  Once I accidentally lopped a guy's head off and gasped so loudly that my roommate thought I was having a heart attack.  It seems fun but way too gory for me, and (important and cool) the game changes depending on how you choose to play, as well as the ending.  So I decided not to have that experience, and was interested in what emotional journey the game would take me on.

For much of the game, my choice disappointed me.  The Outsider as a deity is pretty shifty, and blesses Corvo with an array of gruesome abilities, such as sending forth a gust of wind to blow enemies off ledges and Splat-style deaths or summoning a horde of vicious, bloodthirsty rats to rip your enemies to shreds.  Using a short-range teleportation spell called Blink, the rather-awesome Possession, and the obligatory Night Vision, I felt limited.  Weapons, as well, seemed useless, though I did use a couple of incendiary bolts from a crossbow to draw the attention of guards before I sneaked up on them from behind and knocked em out.

Still, this was actually a small issue for me.  I am just as satisfied to explore a gorgeously designed world (which it is) and meet interesting characters and discover a deep, three-dimensional world as I am to use an array of weapons to destroy my enemies.

But here's the problem: The world isn't three-dimensional.  When Corvo stepped out of prison into the Hound Pits Pub, it was clear from the first look that the men and women enlisting him to help were not motivated by noble ideals.  Seeing echoes of City 17 and Half-Life 2 (carried over with the handiwork of art director and conceptual artist Viktor Antonov) I expected a world like that--dark, frightening, but filled with people to whom I could relate.  

The world of Dishonored, instead, is filled with people I didn't care about, and who in many ways I abhorred.  Their dialogue has no hope, no connection to other people in their lives.  I read a few books that detailed bizarre rituals or showed perverted sexual plots from plays.  I asked myself for the first several levels: "Why, if Corvo is a deeply moral man who cared about the Empress and Emily, does he agree to join Havelock and the rest?  They offered him revenge, but what does he care about that?  Why, if I refuse to kill, do my missions revolve around getting rid of people?" I failed to see a motivation for Corvo, and without that the story fell flat.  Part of this came from the choice for Corvo to be a silent protagonist.  I finished Bioshock Infinite a few months ago, and understanding Booker's amoral, hardened background, I had very little difficult roleplaying in his persona.  Violence was normal to Booker, and his motivation was strong--"Give us the girl and wipe away the debt."  Even if I didn't agree with him, I was able to learn from being in his shoes for a few hours.

At one point later in the game, everything changed.  A plot turn yanked Corvo from safety to being imprisoned again, and I had to find my way to my captor (a man with great significance from earlier in the game) and take him down.  Suddenly Corvo had motivation--people I cared about were in danger, and time felt short.  I escaped in a hurry and, immersed in the character, I didn't take the time to sneak past the people guarding me.  I dispatched them and hurried to find the man who was responsible for much of this.

The best scene of the game followed, and the conversation and one-on-one fight that follows are well-written and gripping.  I chose to spare his life, to which he replied: "And you choose mercy.  Extraordinary."

Corvo escaped into the dim evening and watched a train dump plague corpses into a trench full of the dead, and overheard a sick man talking to his friends in desperation, still hopeful for his own life.  On a bridge above us, two men talked about how they would escape the plague district, their cluelessness and despair becoming very clear.  

In the course of a view moments, I was transported from a hostile world of sick, unpleasant people who I could only really help by not stabbing in the face.  Instead, I entered a deeply wounded city, where people dreamed of many things that I could not give them, but wanted desperately to.  I snuck by them and hurried through the insanity raging around me, desperately trying to find the one person who still mattered to me.

Because of this experience with its last few levels, Dishonored won me over.  Its message came through for me--that in a world full of evil, it is hard for good to make any difference.  For most of the game, it seemed that no one cared whether I had integrity--whether I cut people to pieces or expended enormous effort to keep everyone alive, people greeted me the same way.  But by the end, it made a difference to me.  I loved the people of Dunwall with their flaws (though I could have loved them sooner if they were written better) and wanted to help them, even if it was harder for me.  It taught me, to some degree, that goodness is not always rewarded by the world, but it is rewarded in small ways.

If we did a do-over, I'd say to the developers: To give more strength to your peaceful-playthrough idea, make the missions about things other than getting rid of the bad guys.  Give us a chance to see what the people of Dunwall need.  Could Corvo get supplies to the flooded district?  Who would he have to convince, or steal from, to do so?  What about his mother?  Does she live in the city?  Wouldn't he want to find her and make sure she's okay?  These kind of missions would be much more engaging, and allow us to care about what we see, grieve for the sadness, and fight for better things.  

Anyway, I don't make video games, but that's what I think.

Small Things Make Big Differences in 'World War Z'

In a troop-carrier plane en route to South Korea, impetuous, passionate Harvard grad Andrew Fassbach (Elyes Gabel) tells bearded U.N. tough fella Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) something about the disease that for an hour of screen time has been ravaging the planet.

"Mother Nature is a serial killer," he says, a lilt of excitement in his voice, "No one's better or more creative...[but] she leaves crumbs.  Now the hard part, why you spend a decade in school, is seeing the crumbs for the clues they are.  Sometimes the things you thought were the most brutal aspect of the virus, turns out to be the chink in its armour...and she loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths."

Fassbach's insight turns out to be invaluable for the people trying to find a cure for a virus that, twelve seconds after infection, transforms people into ravenous, mindless flesh-eaters.  One might say the same of certain movies as he did of Mother Nature--that a film disguises its weak plot with big action, disguises its two-dimensional characters with big plot points or big actors, etc.  That is not the case about with World War Z--in fact, the opposite is true.

'World War Z' thrives on its own imaginative and emotional steam, even if the final product doesn't look quite like the blockbuster some expected.  What some might see as weaknesses are in fact its strengths, and the result is a film that brings to tears more often than it elicits a frightened scream.

The story starts with a montage of news clips, most of it meaningless, some mentioning a particular virus.  Pundits incite worry and other pundits mock the worriers.  Meanwhile, shots of insects are interjected into the slanted opening credits.  Ants devour huge beetles.  Ants eat each other.  It's all a little freaky.

But then we're thrown right into the very human lives of Gerry and Karin Lane (Mireille Enos) and their two daughters, having a normal day in Philadelphia, PA.  Dad is called upon to make pancakes for breakfast, Mom asks the older daughter if she's got her inhaler, little daughter hears some words on TV and asks "Daddy, what's martial law?" He answers cleverly "It's like house rules, but for everybody."




The film's greatest strength is established in this sequence, and it sustains the whole film: it is people.  Pitt and Enos (a BYU acting alum, at which I shout for joy) try desperately to live normal lives, but it is clear that they have lived difficult things before.  Their performances are grounded and understated, and following them around for the first forty minutes just trying to find somewhere safe makes up the most gripping, moving experience I have had in a theater this summer.

I am tempted to tell the whole story, but it begs being experienced.  My near-nonexistent understanding of Max Brooks' novel is that it attempted to be a what-if-it-really-happened scenario.  It is not supernatural, no aliens are involved.  The characters in it, including high-ranking members of the U.N. and U.S. governments, are clueless, cut off, and trying to figure things out with extremely limited resources.  It is precisely the natural quality of it that makes it stand apart from other zombie movies.

So what are the other little things that make it good?  The zombies do not immediately seem to be that incredible an achievement.  In fact, one on one, they are positively mediocre.  Just make-upped actors twitching around (though the transformation process, making a helpful human friend into a ravenous foe in a few spastic seconds, is chilling) and shuffling in the normal zombie fashion.  Heck, they look like characters out of "Warm Bodies." But it is in groups that they are like insects, swarming in thousands.  Shots from the trailer show thousand of ravenous humans climbing on top of each other, trying to get to the top of a huge wall, and hundreds of people leaping onto a bus, making it so heavy that it falls and crushes their friends.  This careless, insect abandon contrasts sharply with the character's intimate attachment to each other, leading to the next thing that works.




The film is full of tiny roles.  In fact, every role is tiny.  The little girls have a few scenes (and they are wonderful and believeable) and Gerry and Karin anchor the entire thing, but the rest of the film hops around from Philly to the Atlantic Ocean to South Korea to Israel to North England and plenty places else.

I wrote in my review about Man of Steel here that human beings weren't portrayed honestly enough.  They seemed like idealized caricatures, beautiful people who we didn't want to see die just because they were people.  World War Z succeeds brilliantly where Man of Steel failed.  A man who at first terrifies us then makes us cry with gratitude when he gives something invaluable to our protagonist.  A soldier in South Korea (played with integrity by James Badge Dale, who you may recognize from another movie this summer) (first to know it without looking it up gets points) appears to be another Call-of-Duty playing American dude thrown into incredible circumstances.  He's not a terribly honorable man.  He's a jerk.  But he is as real as they come, and that's what we need as an audience.

I could talk about more people--the Tenth Man in Israel, a girl who Gerry saves and who helps him out later, and others.  The film is full of them.  Matthew Fox makes a cameo as a helicopter pilot and I'll be surprised if he says five words or even has a shot of his face in the movie.

While 'World War Z' reminded me and will remind you that people matter most, I was struck by something else watching it.  I am an actor and many of my good friends are actors, and watching this film I saw actors.  But because of the measured reality of the writing and the integrity of the performances, I began to watch people instead.



Film and theater are a shared illusion.  The audience must trust all the artists--actors, writers, directors, designers, technicians--in order to truly experience something that will change them.  The audience themselves must decide to agree to the illusion, and believe it themselves.  It's hard to do that when writers and actors portray life falsely, whether it be through making things too dark or too light, too sexual or too chaste, too complicated or too simple.

It is not easy, and it is not common, but when it happens it affects us.  And it may just be that I've seen too many superhero movies this summer, but because of a lot of little things, that's what happened to me when I watched 'World War Z'.

'Star Trek' Rises Above Mediocrity Thanks To Inspired Source Material

My best friends and roommates love Star Trek.  Hopefully they'll appreciate my thoughts, even though it took me so long to see J.J. Abram's newest installment in the franchise.



I enjoyed the film a great deal.  The first one went completely over my head, as I had never before been introduced to the world of Star Trek, and mostly saw it as Star Wars with much less creative-looking aliens (mostly people with weird makeup) and a lot of dealing with kind of menial problems (let's fix the engine, watch out for the radiation, ya gotta put down your shields before you can beam people out).  Plus some weird-looking, kinda boring outfits.  All of these things are true, but there's some smart stuff behind it.

The film starts with a bang, as a crew of space travelers escape from a really red planet where a bunch of scroll-worshiping aliens are mad at them for taking the Scroll.  In the end, they save these aliens from getting destroyed by a supervolcano, but in the process they get seen, breaking one of the rules of their commanding unit, called Star Fleet.



The Captain of the ship, James Kirk (Chris Pine), is a smart-mouthing, rule-ignoring bro who likes sleeping with hot aliens and doing what he wants.  His sidekick and first officer is the hyperintelligent and unemotional Spock (Zachary Quinto), who is half-human, half-Vulcan.   He reports Kirk's actions, and Kirk gets summarily fired from being a Captain.

That is, until a terrorist blows up an important research lab and kills many leaders of Star Fleet.  We learn later (spoken through a really open mouth) that his name is (seriously, open your mouth wide) KHAN, and he escapes to a far-off world.  The film's plot has Kirk and his ethnically diverse crew of idiosyncratic friends diving into the depths of neutral space trying to find the guy and bring him back to Earth for a fair trial.  In case you're interested, the role is played by the fantastic Benedict Cumberbatch, whose Shakespearean actor voice and presence make us wish for a little more from his character.

Since its first days as a 60's TV show, Star Trek has operated from a moral center.  The Prime Directive, the idea that runs Star Fleet, posits that "observers could have a negative effect on the sociological development of alien cultures, and necessitated that explorers...avoid discovery." It's an anthropological idea that is bold and defended religiously, and Star Trek has always had things to say.  The writers fought against things they thought were wrong and made no quibbles.  There was a moral to take out of most episodes, some of which involved the setting aside of religion and God.  From a science fiction standpoint, the humans in the Star Trek universe had passed beyond the petty dilemmas of our age, eliminating poverty, much corruption, and violence, and have no need of extraterrestrial help--they are the extraterrestrial help.

This gives Star Trek a maturity that almost every summer blockbuster never bothers with.  At an early point, when Kirk and his crew are ordered to kill the terrorist immediately, Spock says that this action may cause war, which is "inherently morally wrong".  Those ideas of right and wrong, though they encounter pushback, are generally not abandoned.  From my place as a moral person, I cheer at this.

In our age of relativism, however, it is clear that the writers fail to take strong stances.  Terrorism, the taking of life, and government corruption raise their bleary, overused heads, but these are easy things to unite against.  The film is clearly a commentary on the September 11th Attacks, and it is actually one of the more respectful and thoughtful ones I've seen, but it is easy to call out "literary cowardice" without reservation.



One thing that fascinates me about Star Trek is that the characters rarely have families.  Captain Picard (of Next Generation, we don't see him here) is even frightened of children.  Star Fleet mostly consists of individuals, united in the cause of exploration, but unattached to family units.

Star Trek: Into Darkness draws an immediate connection between crew and family.  The terrorist Khan spends most of the film trying to preserve and bring back to life his cryogenically frozen buddies, and he asks Kirk: "Is there anything you would not do for your family?"

The great strength of the film is how deeply we care about this family.  Sulu the cool-headed Acting Captain, Bones the colloquial, antiquated Doctor, Scotty the fiery and hilarious Scotsman, all of them have their personalities that we recognize and care about.  More important are Kirk, Spock, and the beautiful, superbly acted Uhura (Zoe Saldana) who spends most of the film in a fight with Spock about his unemotionality in their romantic relationship.  In one scene, they are descending to the surface of a planet before a dangerous situation, and a conversation that lasts almost three minutes of screen time shows them talking about their problems emotionally and resolving them.  It is easily the best part of the film.

Zachary Quinto's Spock is unfaltering, and his moments of emotion are absolutely mesmerizing, Saldana's Uhura teeters on the edge of the teary girlfriend, but eventually falls into the land of three-dimensional characters (a great place for literary real estate, if you're on the lookout), and Pine's Kirk is...well, he's mostly okay, and sometimes pretty good.



Sadly, the film shows more gunfire (laserfire, I can't tell the difference) than these interactions, but they are frequent enough that it hit home far more deeply than most of the films I've seen this summer.  The destruction wrought on the Enterprise was so connected to the people inside it that I felt pain at its hurt.

Watching Star Trek: Into Darkness, I asked myself who my crew is, and what we are fighting for.  Unlike many of the characters, I have a family, but I also have people my own generation, people who are exploring the world and learning about it.  Sometimes we fight against the generations that came before us (in the film, this comes from the lovely Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) who fights against her father, the corrupt politician, supporting the morals of her friends instead) and sometimes we fight against each other.

The great lesson of Star Trek is that in order to succeed and be happy, we cannot only be insular and family-focused.  We are all connected, and live in a universe that is desperately in need of help.  There are always distress calls and challenges to be faced, and if we wish to succeed we must face them together.  At times we will disagree and we will always encounter trials that we fear worse than anything else.  That is when we need each other.

Bushman out.

"Man of Steel" Reaches For Heaven, Misses Earth

In a time of anti-superheroes whose flaws are only outweighed by their exceptional abilities, Zack Snyder and crew want to bring us a little old-fashioned hope.  Their efforts, titled "Man of Steel", follow the tradition of this generation of superhero films with beautiful, unexpected re-imaginings.  Sadly, the young superman's journey to Earth lands him on a planet so bereft of humanity that it leaves us wondering why anyone bothers going to so much trouble to save it.


Ignoring Kansas and the young wunderkind, the film begins with a woman, Lara (Ayulet Zurer) giving birth in a dismal unearthly room, helped only by her husband, Jor-El (Russell Crowe).  Soon the planet Krypton is exploding into near all-out war, as Jor-El pleads with the Jedi Council (or something like it; they wear crazy hats, several of which fall off during the scene) to let him send an escape-pods worth of people from Krypton before its core collapses, killing everyone.

His efforts are thwarted by the extremist General Zod who barges in, kills some people, and declares martial law.  Played shoutily by Michael Shannon, Zod suffers from never being given a single believable line of dialogue.  It's a hard knock life on Krypton.

Using his wits, Russell-Crowe-ness, and a big flying creature from Geonosis, Jor-El infiltrates the underwater chambers of Krypton's most important secrets, steals a vital artifact, and escapes back home in time for him and his wife to send their infant child off in an alien wicker basket to the remote planet called Earth.  "He will be a freak," his mother protests, desperately clinging to her last moments with him, "They will kill him." "How?" Jor-El asks, "He will be a god to them."

The opening sequence is gorgeous and full of pathos--not only that, but it's a reflection on Deity.  Superman has become the essential modernization of the Christ story, and in terms of actors, no one's pulled it off like Henry Cavill, and being with Jor-El and Lara as they send him off allows Christians to imagine the pain that Christ's Father and Mother must have experienced.  The Christ story is admittedly otherworldly, but seeing it this way connects even the distant family of heaven to our world emotionally, morally, and spiritually.

I spend so much time painting this picture because the rest is so full of disappointments.  With a disconnected sense of near-abandon, the film shows a montage of formative events: A beefy sailor incredibly saves a number of men from an exploding Oil Rig and disappears into the ocean.  A young boy is mocked unnecessarily by a boy on the bus, and when a tire pops and it falls off a bridge into the river, the boy is the one to push it out and save the child who bullied him.  The boy's father (played with simple, understand sincerity by Kevin Costner) counsels the boy to not let his fate be known by the people of Earth, lest in their fear of him they reject him.  Even these moments have their fascinations, but they find no root.

The people of Earth in 'Man of Steel' are not only innocuous.  They are downright boring.  Of the three moments of "bad people time" in the film, one is a drunk who grabs a waitresses' butt and two are foul-mouthed children who do not even touch their victims.  Sure, butt-grabbing is pretty bad, but the heroes of the film swear twice as much as the bullies, and are considered good.  Goodness for the film mostly implies a) being a part of the U.S. Military, b) being trapped under something, or c) being good-looking.  Superman's empathy comes across as taking care of pets.



As such, our Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) never seems to really relate to them.  Props to Mr. Cavill for making it clear how much he's feeling underneath--even with the weaknesses of the writing, this Man of Steel has a churning heart.  With his silent demeanor and Christlike turning the other cheek, he is noble and self-sacrificing.  Still, when he walks out of a conversation with a priest before it's even finished, there's a sense of enormous disconnect--there is nothing humans can give to him.  Sadly, Jor-El's beautiful message that "they will stand beside you in the sun" and "with them, you will accomplish wonders" fall flat.

The rest of the film clunks along with the same drama we've always seen.  They're gonna blow up the Earth, superhero does it by himself, but the humans help a little.  The worry that the humans won't accept him is a non-issue--no one ever seems to care.  Sadly, by the end of the movie, neither did I.

It could have worked out differently.  If it was written differently, what would the Earth they sent him to be like?  And how could someone like Superman really help the people of Earth?



Earth, as I know it, is full of people trying to do things right, people who deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.  But it is also full of awful things.  Violence haunts the streets and even more terrible ones happen in private.  Within everyone there are struggles--choices to be angry, choices to hide from other people, choices to destroy other people in ways that can't be undone.  Guilt, fear, and purposelessness run rampant.

As far as I know, being good is not about being from Kansas.  It's not about protecting the way of life we have.  It implies wanting to improve it.  That's what Jor-El foresaw, and Christ too.

'Man of Steel' makes some great efforts, but it ends up having a lot less to say than its source material demands.  Even the best special effects, the craziest fights, and a spot-on cast cannot make up for a badly-written movie.  Somewhere, though, in a better-fleshed-out world, this Superman might just make a difference.

The American Dream: The Great Gatsby Review

Cutting to the chase: The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite adaptations of literature to film.  And I was ready to hate it.  I was ready to join in the broiling ranks of intellectuals and former AP English students with baseball bats and brass knuckles, rallied in fury around Baz Luhrmann's house.  The boring vastness of Australia, the purposeless insanity of Moulin Rouge and even the sometimes-overdone-ness of the rather great Romeo + Juliet--all of these prepared me to be disappointed.  But it succeeds because it tells the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, and doesn't have to tell the book.

Just so you know: Nick Carraway (played sufficiently by Tobey Maguire) comes to New York to make it as a stockbroker.  America is the land of immediate opportunity and golden, wine-spouting success.  "The tempo of the city had changed sharply," he tells us, "The buildings were higher, the parties were bigger, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper." Nowhere is this more true than in the Playboy mansion behind Nick's tiny house, owned by the enigmatic, legendary Mr. Gatsby.  For reasons unclear, Mr. Gatsby invites Nick to his house personally and the two become friends, entangling Nick with Mr. Gatsby's uncertain past and his dreams to rekindle his love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin who has long been married to refined, old-money Tom Buchanan.  It gets crazier.  Go see it.



It doesn't try and imitate the pacing of the novel (except in the vital and brilliantly-executed ice block scene) but instead fevers past us like a convertible overflowing with hip-hop drunk white people on the way to get the evening smashed.  It doesn't pretend that it has the time to lazily slip into ambiguous characterizations--Tom Buchanan busts onto screen playing polo and strutting through his East Egg house; (which is as lavishly representative of his character as is Joel Edgerton, whose presence overwhelms and made me wonder "didn't this guy win an Oscar for something?" He hasn't, but the film makes you wonder why.) Daisy is introduced in a flurry of billowing curtains that takes one's breath away as efficiently as Fitzgerald's prose does.  Gatsby's overflowing fireworks introduction is as hilarious as it is majestic, and Myrtle and Catherine steal the show with their five minutes on screen and Nick's first real party.

I did feel babied with the fourth shot of T.J. Eckleburg's godlike glasses, accompanied by a voiceover that "God sees everything".  Still, more than ever, this director, accused of being the most bombastic of our time, delivers a story that appears so clearly to be near his heart.



The green light, only mentioned a few times in the book, dominates Gatsby's vision as well as ours.  The music, a sort of mash-up between Gershwin and Fergie, Jay-Z and Harlem Jazz, instructs us more about the 1920's than any degree of dialogue about it could.  We know what they were like because we know what it is like today.  The characters don't talk about the issues that startle us--the faceless blacks without dialogue or place besides on the stage, the women whose say is trivial to the men--and instead of having to talk about it we see it happen.  Like Nick and Jordan in the hotel scene, we are hapless witnesses to the great crimes of our time.

And crimes there are, in abundance.  Though Tom is the first we hate, for his bigotry, infidelity, and cruelty, he seems so clearly a product of his time that I almost forgave him.  Gatsby's past is not as clean as he at first assures Nick, and for all of his assumed manners, the animal comes out in that great ice-block scene that makes us, like Daisy, shudder and want to turn away.  Leonardo DiCaprio gives Gatsby the shine of the celebrity, the charm of the con, and the pain and hope of the scorned lover. He is just imperfect enough to play Gatsby.



Here--and in the novel--Nick is a stroke of genius because he embodies the audience member.  Like him, we have always been taught to see the best in people.  Like him, we go with the flow, allowing the rhythm to overwhelm us and the current of the times to carry us along.  We seek the prosperity that others think we should, and deify those who achieve it.  When a drunk Nick steps onto the balcony in his underwear and says that he feels connected to everything, "within and without", we point our finger at the screen and say "I know what you mean." But what the novel asks us to consider is if our neutrality has any merit, and if we are really even living our own lives.  In the end, there is no one to side with.

And isn't that a message for our generation?  Our inheritances as a culture and a nation are more sickening than wonderful.  Among the worst is what we mean when we say 'Love'.  A sort of American Nirvana, complete with raucous sexuality, wealth and prosperity, and a fulfillment of all selfish dreams above all else.  Whether you are New Money or Old Money, Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, or Wilson, pursuing that American Dream is destructive.  It is selfish.  It is finally meaningless.



F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel raised a voice of warning, but captured it with charitable neutrality.  The film does the same--it presents the brightness and fun of it all, and even the humor and heart of all its characters.  Life is fun, full of new surprises and beautiful sights.  For me, however, it asks a question: "Where do we go from here?" The past is behind us, freezing solid as we plunge on.  The future is unknowable, unplannable.  But what do we choose to do now?  As a nation, as individuals, as families?

We'll see if I figure it out.  For now, go see the movie.  Think about it.