Review: ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ – Infinity Peril and Beyond

by Laremy • May 17, 2013

There’s not much doubt that Star Trek Into Darkness is trying very hard. Everything is bigger, a more epic vibe is apparent throughout, and the hazy nostalgia of Star Trek is left far behind. And really, for the first 80 minutes or so, it mostly works. As in, it plays just as well as the 2009 version, a nice Sci-fi drama with solid action, interesting themes, and colorful alien planets.

And then … well, Bonkersville, Population: Star Trek Into Darkness happens.

Sidenote: Shouldn’t this title come preloaded with a colon? I mean, it really isn’t all one thought now, is it? Unless the action verb is “Trek,” but even then it would probably be Star Trekking Into Darkness because it’s not precisely a command or an active thought either. I suppose it could be like a travel brochure sort of thing. This summer, be sure you Star Trek Into Darkness. Yet another example of marketing folks murdering our language. Ah well.

As I was saying, the last 40 minutes of the film get really sketchy. Having seen the film twice, I can tell you I counted at least 25 times where life and death hung in the balance for someone in the film, which averages out to an action beat every five minutes. That’s simply too much chaos, an overload of tumult, but it’s also exacerbated by the pacing – because at least 12 of those action beats are backloaded into the final third of the film. Now we’re down to DANGER threatening an onscreen life every three minutes. No film could withstand this level of continual crisis! Because, if you threaten a life enough, eventually that tension ceases to exist on any real level. “Ah yes,” you think “that guy is pointing a gun” OR “that guy is hanging off a bridge. Neat.”

I love hot yoga as much as the next guy, but this is getting ridiculous!

And “neat” is not what you want to be thinking about a Star Trek film. You want to be thinking “cool!” or “yeah!” while high-fiving your neighbor, but you’re not capable of that once every three minutes, unless you’re a lunatic adrenaline junkie.

So what’s it all about, where does the foundation for all this DANGER come from? Why is this crew always in big trouble?

“Trouble. Trouble, trouble, trouble.” – Ray LaMontagne

Star Trek Into Darkness (referred to as STID from here on out) commences with our good pal, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine). He’s a rebel, always butting heads with the leadership, his captaincy in doubt based upon his attitude and reckless behavior. Why, he thinks the rules don’t apply to him!

I mean, this guy, what are we gonna do with him?

Then a terrorist strikes and The Federation is scrambling around like a wet ferret. There’s the central premise, can this Kirk fellow get his act together enough to save his crew, his ship, and THE WORLD (hoping they use that as a tagline). Then the USS Enterprise heads out on a mission, a mission of revenge, and bulk of the narrative is mined from this plot point. Along the way they’ll have all sorts of issues, from mechanical to diabolical, and the steady crew must be ready to rock at all times.

Sidenote number two: Why to the enlisted folks of the Star Trek world always take it on the chin? Every movie seems be be made up entirely of the officer corps, but there have to be at least six or seven times that amount of people in the enlisted ranks, just out there doing good work, keeping us safe from interstellar craziness. When the enlisted people are, um, enlisted to do jobs, they almost always get killed, usually immediately. I understand that’s a meme, but what about showing some love for the poor kids who joined Starfleet? Not all parents have the money to send their children to Star Trek University, what with college prices going up all the time. I dream a little dream of a more populist Star Trek.

Okay, so the officer corps is facing down all challenges, doing solid work, melding as a team and whatnot. There is tension, naturally, between Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock, because they have different ideas for the goofy gift grab at the ship Christmas party. No, but seriously, one is a stickler for the rulebook while the other is playing fast and lose. You know who is who, but unfortunately this brings us to issue number two.

This film is sooooo Spock-heavy. As if it were called Star Trek: The Spock Years or perhaps Spock Around the Clock. There is not one scene in the last hour of the film that doesn’t involve Spock (Zachary Quinto) running around, acting all Vulcan, spouting off some nonsense about the Prime Directive.

Real Vulcans don’t look at explosions.

This fellow is getting more screen-time than Radio in Radio. And don’t get me wrong, a little Spock is pretty nice, but he’s the very definition of a one-note character within this universe. And STID suffers when we hear the “danger” note played alongside the “Spock” note, over and over, into infinity.

“I knew you were trouble when you walked in.” – Taylor Swift

But what of the good parts of STID? I’m glad you finally asked that, because there are quite a few. The USS Enterprise remains a beautiful, iconic, and lovingly rendered CGI symbol of Sci-fi. When there are ship-to-ship battles, or when warp is enabled, or when Bones is getting flustered and bothered, STID simply sings. The supporting cast is also very competent, with Simon Pegg, Alice Eve, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Zoe Saldana, and Benedict Cumberbatch all perform admirably.

What to you mean Papa John’s doesn’t deliver out here?!

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the steady direction of STID. My feeling is that it was the script that hurt the film, not the execution of the script. Three writers are credited, so who knows what happened, but it feels like a project where the note they received was “punch it up more!” And everyone kept on punching it up until there was only air left out there, wondering why it was still being punched.

“Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” – Paul Simon

Danger, trouble, peril, problems, issues – you name it, STID has them all for you to worry about. Massive amounts of property damage are considered, as is the idea that tertiary characters dying en masse isn’t even a reason to pause in one’s general merriment and wise-cracking. Star Trek Into Darkness is a fun film to watch, a light movie to take in, but there’s a larger, potentially damaging, issue at play here. You see, when the goal is to present maximum carnage with minimum consequences, you ending up making everyone involved small and insignificant. Entertaining sure, but you can only watch the mouse sprint toward the cheese so many times before you’re begging for the cat.

Grade: C+

Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’ – Love is Blindness

by Laremy • May 9, 2013

Note: I think this has thematic spoilers if you’re unfamiliar with the novel. Sorry about that, but there’s not really an entry point into this iconic an adaptation without some basic foundation of what the story is about … and where it’s headed.

The problem with critiquing a film like The Great Gatsby is that it is going to come down completely to how you interpret the characters. Now, sure, every film comes down to your own personal buy-in, and the film’s ability to immerse you into the world it is presenting, but in the case of Gatsby the divide is even more stark. Your enjoyment will come down to one simple bit of mental calculus, and I’m going to clue you into it right off the bat, so you are at least equipped to determine if this film will be to your liking.

Choose your own adventure:

A) If you think of Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) as flesh and blood characters, there’s every chance you’ll hate this film. It will play as sheer melodrama to those looking for development or “real life” behavior, mostly because it is a world set specifically in unreality. The Great Gatsby is no better than The Notebook or Titanic if you ascribe to the notion that this story is real, they are on a boat, and you can’t e’eer forget.

However, if you:

B) Consider the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby to be a clear product of metaphor, well then, you’re likely to have a ball of a time. I don’t have any clue as to how non-readers of F. Scott Fitgerald’s classic will consume this, I only know that the book is just a skosh over 50k words, juxtaposed against something like “The Lord of The Rings” series, coming in at a hefty 450k + count.

Not to get off on a slightly ridiculous Comparative Literature #101 Class tangent here, but my view of the book has always been that it’s facile, thin, and yet still completely profound in its use of hyper-realized archetypes to define an entire era of decadence and depravity.

Conclusion: Anyone looking for a “real” story is going to be chafed. Anyone looking for a broader sketch is going to be pleased. I don’t have any idea where the middle ground in that equation is. I mean, just have a look at this imagery:

The smile of people who know they don’t have to clean up this mess.

If this doesn’t scream “fantasy!” in loud language to you then I would suggest you not see this film. It’s not a love story, it’s not a drama, it’s a sweeping indictment of the era, of rich vs. poor, an exploration of the dual-sided coin of ambition vs. hope.

On that front, a quick digression.

Hope and ambition. Hope is the idea that things will get better, ambition is the pointy end of the spear which sometimes allows things to get better. Passive vs. active, both have huge upside and downside. Hope gone wrong is apathy, waiting for the world to rise up and support you, but hope is needed in the bleakest of situations, to sustain a soul. Ambition gone wrong is a couple of fools crashing the global economy (Hiya, Big Bankers!) but it was also ambition that built the entire notion of the economy.

What does this mean for The Great Gatsby? Well, Gatsby (the person) alternates between hope and ambition as if he were a five-speed transmission, ringing back and forth like a tuning fork. Initially, Gatsby’s hope is to rise above his station, and as such his “get the girl” motivation fuels his massive ambition. Ah, but it is ambition that eventually dooms him, he reaches too far, he flies too close to the sun. Near the end all our hero is left with, once his ambition short-circuits his life, is a last gasp of hope. And the circle is complete.

Frankly my dear Daisy, I probably give too much of a damn.

Okay, so we haven’t even mentioned the particulars film, or where I stand on it, and for that I’m apologetic, but I felt it was important to lay the groundwork for why I truly appreciated Baz Lurhmann’s take on The Great Gatsby, and why he ultimately turned out to be the best possible director for a project this big.

Snap verdict: I’ll be damned if this Baz L. fellow didn’t sucker me in completely with the visuals and music, though I’m still unsure if it was a magic trick or something more profound (Ugh, again with the choose your own adventure, get a room already).

Jay Gatsby is a newly-moneyed host of blindingly drunken parties. These are the soirees of the American dream, unattainable and impossible to turn away from, flapper dancers, trays of booze floating around the room, indoor pools used to within an inch of their lives. The Gatsby gatherings are more fun than a Guinness-drinking contest the day after prohibition ended, they are truly the gatherings of gods:

(Warning: Trailer is slightly over-expository after the one-minute mark)

Because of this jabbing and jarring party vibe paired against Gatsby’s desperate longing, the film plays like Eyes Wide Shut meets The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Great Expectations. You’ve got your unrequited love, your unsympathetic husband, your brooding and dark young hero from central casting.

Gatsby wants to pursue Daisy, a fully married woman, and his angle is to go through her cousin, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Carraway has recently taken up residence next to Gatsby’s mansion (a happy coincidence which is never explained). Gatsby invites Carraway to a lavish party, and then works his magic with mutual acquaintance Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), all in an effort to get through to Daisy. Quite the intricate plan, eh? Here it should be noted that the supporting actors in The Great Gatsby are excellent, both in performance and feel.

This is my “come hither” look. Soooo … wanna come hither?

Throughout the wooing of Daisy, the audience is treated to a truly overwhelming cornucopia of music and visuals. The word to describe all this action can only be “relentless” and in many ways this is a mirror onto Gatsby’s soul. His five-year vision quest for Daisy has been intense and all-encompassing, and whether he meant to or not, director Baz Luhrmann has fully infused this frenetic pace.

And he’s not even on the polo field. He’s just like, trotting along in his front lawn.

If I have a quibble, and I don’t know why I’d even bring up the word if I didn’t, it would be the pacing of the middle portion of the film. Once The Great Gatsby has hit you about the neck and head with sound and light, it becomes hard to be “wowed” anew. Yes, sure, parties, we get it, another party, Gatsby wants Daisy, okay okay, party, drinks, and let’s get a move on, shall we? But this quibble is more than equivocated by the beginning and end of the film being so darned good, the metaphor stretching so far as to almost become a worldview.

The “American Dream” – with all its warts and glory – is on full display here. Lurhmann’s pea-cocking can occasionally lead to an overabundance of style over substance, (See: Australia) but in this case it matches the extremities of time period extremely well. Gatbsy is our arrogance, our sadness, our sense of wanting to belong to a club that doesn’t take new applicants. There’s plenty of Meet Joe Black-style scenes here, the idea being that all real problems are those of the heart, and a sense of “oh, all this money doesn’t add up to beans” but I’m a Meet Joe Black apologist, so I found it easy and enjoyable to connect with the material.

The resplendent iron gates to Gatsby’s mansion read “Ad Fidelis Finem,” which translates to “To the end, faithful”. Here lies the clearest indicator of character movement and growth … as in there won’t be any. This isn’t the story of a life in full, it’s the story of one man, an ideal, a movement, attempting to hold all the stitches together at the seams, only white knuckles and bravado at his side. The abyss beckons and subsumes, storms rage, and the utter capriciousness of humanity pummels him with derision, but Gatsby is still out there, waiting for his big break, biding his time, rage and charm forming his tight empty smile.

Grade: A-

Review: ‘Iron Man 3′ Fits the Blueprint

by Laremy • May 3, 2013

There’s this moment in Iron Man 3 where a cute little kid, interacting with Tony Stark, says he didn’t grow up with a father. You’ve seen this scene play out in hundreds of movies before, it’s the one where writers and directors take a moment to humanize their hero, showing off his empathy and care for the common problems of the people.

What does Tony Stark do here?

Says something to the effect of, “Lots of kids grow up without a father kid, deal with it.” Yes, beautifully, Iron Man 3 takes the opportunity to eschew tropes and tradition, and it feels as though director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) is delivering a new type of formula, one where every move a superhero makes isn’t telegraphed from thousands of miles away.

Um, where’s the rest of Tony?

But then?

Ah, but then it’s back to the exact same action playbook we’ve always seen. The hero laid low, the damsel in distress, the villain cackling into the night. And there’s no way Iron Man can escape this peril, right? So what can one make of an Iron Man 3 film that’s half innovative (with levity) and half rote (with action)? I don’t know man, I guess we’ll have to work out it together.

The opening of Iron Man 3 is dedicated to the idea that Pepper Potts and Tony Stark are on the ropes, mainly because he’s a workaholic. Gamely pushing past the idea that Pepper Potts must have known Stark is constantly in motion, as she’s worked side-by-side with him for a decade, we of course must accept the premise, because well, it’s the premise. So, sure, yes, Stark is taking Potts for granted, and Potts wishes her Iron Man had more of a steely determination where it came to spending time with her (I’ll pause while you let that joke wash over you). Enter Guy Pierce, whom the film has set up as the almost anti-Tony Stark. Not suave, not debonair, very un-Iron-like. He’s a scientist at a convention Tony is attending, and Rebecca Hall is also thrown into the mix as one of the numerous flings Stark embarked upon simply because it was there, simply because it was a Tuesday in Bern.

Aside: I love Rebecca Hall, and I can’t really explain why. Is it because she’s risen to prominence as a reluctant love interest (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Town) as juxtaposed against our current female construct of “clueless as to why men would love her,” (Bella from Twilight) ensconced in leather, (Scar-Jo in The Avengers) or a tree (The Lorax, Tree of Life)? Your guess is as good as mine, but I wanted to place my bias for her front and center, all while remarking how pleased I am that she must have received a dynamite paycheck for this role.

Oh Laremy, it would never work out between us.

And so we have bad guys, Iron Man, The Iron Patriot, PepPo, and an initial point of tension – anxiety attacks. Why anyone thought anxiety would play well in a superhero film is beyond me, especially because I was hoping the franchise would eventually go the “drunken” Tony Stark route, Leaving Las Vegas meets ACDC songs. Anxiety attacks on the big screen look like anxiety attacks in real life – mostly internalized. Robert Downey Jr. tries his best with this material, but it’s largely discarded by the third act.

Speaking of that third act, it’s where the slight tidbits of action dynamism do come into play. There’s a scene, not to be spoiled here, where the good guys start rallying, and you won’t be able to suppress a smile or at least a wry grin as to the method of their comeback. But, again, that’s just the thing, where is the tension in a film where you know they won’t be sacrificing anything of value? I realize there’s not a filmmaker in the world brave enough to kill off the protagonist of a billion dollar franchise, but even still I can’t give credit for someone executing the exact same playbook as everyone that came before.

Aside numero dos: this is why “The Death of Robin” would be such a fascinating adaptation. One of the few mainstream comics to actually make a choice over the past two decades, general audiences wouldn’t see any of it coming, the road to true entertainment enlightenment. So too with “Batman: Year One” in which the main character (not Batman) is having an illicit affair. We live in complex times, people, and there’s no reason even our superhero tales shouldn’t reflect that.

Don’t worry, he’s still got the magic in him.

There is an end-credits scene, and though it’s better than a close-up shot of a hammer it’s probably not worth the five minutes it takes to get there other than pure sentimentality. As in, could this be the last time we see Downey Jr.’s T-Stark? You’d have to think, now that he’s banked at least $100 million dollars from the Marvel universe, that he’ll be turning back to the smaller fare that doesn’t require an army of marketers and a year of interviews. I know I would.

All quibbles aside, Iron Man 3 is a must-see, and it ties in nicely with The Avengers in terms of tone. There is a real joy with both films, even if this one stumbles a bit as it tries to shift into darkness. Still, I can’t begrudge anyone for loving this. The playbook is the playbook for a reason, because it usually works.

Grade: B-

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