Asteroid City (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Young achievers are unexpectedly at the heart of an unlikely alien encounter.

the review: So I've really gotten into Wes Anderson, finally, and predictably it's just when critics have gotten over him.  I mean, they've been over him for at least a decade, and I didn't get into him, really, until a few years ago, so it's not that surprising.  Of course I had to see Asteroid City.  Of course it was likely that I would enjoy it.  I expected to like it more, but I definitely liked it.  The appearances of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell actually created a kind of uncanny valley, that breaks the typical mold of total control on Anderson's part.  Most actors who appear in his films fit the mold perfectly; Hanks can't help but be Hanks, and the same is true of Carell.  Everyone else (Owen Wilson is atypically absent, but Jason Schwartzman, another longtime collaborator, is back in a starring role) very much fits in nicely.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."

That's how the movie ends.  This is not a spoiler.  Just as Amsterdam ends with each of the principle characters reciting the eponymous city name to the audience, and Cradle Will Rock builds to the climactic moment from the 1937 play it's built around, Asteroid City concludes with the cast of stage actors reciting this line.  How much you appreciate the movie is likely tied to how much thought you put into it.  The movie preceding it plays out along two separate tracks: one is a presentation of a play, and the other as if the play were happening in reality and not on a stage.  Schwartzman's character pulls himself out of the play when he struggles to understand why his character chooses to burn his hand on a grill, and so clearly Anderson's intent is for his audience to figure out his intent, too.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."  There will be plenty of speculation about it for those interested, and so maybe this review isn't really the place for it, but the story pretty happily busies itself with the story of Schwartzman's character in the story trying to have an honest reckoning with himself and his young family, something he's been avoiding for the past few weeks.  Eventually an alien shows up (an absolutely perfect moment, a perfect marriage of Anderson's best live action and stop-motion instincts).  Around all this, as Anderson movies tend to go, a niche community (well, in this case, two) is explored, although it's not really the point, but how the community(s) reacts to circumstances.  

Me, I'd choose, if forced, to interpret the point of Asteroid City to warn against comforting complacency, that in order to make progress you have to challenge yourself.  But this isn't possible unless you're first willing to admit your complacency.

At any rate, Hanks and Carell are the signifiers that although this acts and behaves like a typical Anderson movie, it really isn't.  He is very obviously trying to make a point.  It's very possible this will raise Asteroid City's value for me, later, when I will have more fully digested the results.  But it's certainly another excellent effort on his part.

The Prestige (2006) Review

rating: *****

the story: Rival magicians can't figure out that they have very different approaches to and goals for their craft.

review: I've reviewed The Prestige before, here, which you can read for yourself. It's one of those movies I'm constantly reevaluating, and it's absolutely worth the effort.  By this point, I'm perfectly willing to call it a classic.

Now, the whole reason I've struggled in this manner is that it's a film by Christopher Nolan, but unlike other film fans, this isn't the result of trying to keep up with Nolan's dizzying stories, but in comparing it to his other films themselves.  For a while, Memento was my favorite movie, having dislodged The Truman Show for that honor.  I value ambition and cleverness, but these are qualities that walk a dangerous line.  I used to view The Prestige as being the result of Nolan desperately trying to live up to the reputation of Memento.  I had a similar problem with Batman Begins, which I thought didn't chase that legacy enough.  The Dark Knight Returns was the point at which I began to realize Nolan himself wasn't that concerned with the need for some gimmick, but appreciating Nolan's abilities as mere storyteller took time.  By Tenet, I saw a director who was trying to make a point, and using all manner of tricks to achieve it.  I adore Interstellar, which hit me in a visceral way that had been absent from his other films.  Inception dazzled me most in its casting.  Dunkirk is a tour de force of tension without letting it ever get in the way, in all respects Nolan having learned his lesson from Memento.  Very early on I also went back and watched his first film, Following, which is all style.  Insomnia might have fallen into such a trap, but it's driven by two great performances, the first time Nolan allows his actors to leap ahead of him.

Integrating all his instincts is really Nolan's defining production technique.  Memento proved he could work with known actors, but it also trapped Guy Pearce into that role, and he's really never recovered since.  He's the Memento guy.  When The Prestige was released, it was most notable as starring Batman and Wolverine, so it was hardly going to suffer from known quantities.  And yet Hugh Jackman was himself in the early process of disentangling himself from one role, and hadn't yet accomplished it, so to view The Prestige, since Jackman is the lead actor, on its own terms, you need to not only separate it from Nolan, but from Wolverine, to let the story settle into itself.  For me, it was a process of letting its conclusions settle.  I always found it easiest to view the lead character as the most sympathetic, so Jackman's concluding thought ("It was the look on their faces.") that always stuck with me, and was the basis for which I would attempt to explain the movie to others, never mind myself.

It's a movie you have to understand in order to appreciate.  Bale's character doesn't have his story spelled out, not even by the ending.  Chronologically, we never really see a starting point.  We have to fill it in for ourselves.  Since the movie ends with Bale theoretically "winning," we are then to assume that maybe he was the good guy all along, and yet he really isn't.  He makes unfathomable sacrifices, and basically the whole point of the story is Jackman trying desperately to understand them, and he never can, even as he subsequently makes even more horrifying ones in order to do so.  In the end, it's because they have very different goals, and their approaches are defined by them.  For Bale, the act is its own reward, the knowledge of a trick well-performed.  For Jackman, the point is to entertain, and in order to derive any pleasure from pursuing such a craft, he needs to see his audience entertained.  It's a post-Gladiator world, folks.

Interpreting any of this through Nolan's need to live up to Memento is, in this context, absurd.  He knew very well what he was doing, and he was certainly not sending his audience any messages.  He was, if anything, telling us that how we interpret his films are as much our business as his in making them.  He knows what goes into them, and he certainly doesn't mind seeing how audiences react (he was to his detriment a proponent to reopening theaters during the pandemic), but regardless he's going to make movies the way he finds interesting, and he's now got a long career to show for it.  Studios might be willing to indulge him in scale, but if he really needed to, he could bring it back to intimate levels.  This is where his skill in casting comes in, his storytelling.  He doesn't need David Bowie (who this time I noticed actually sounds a lot like Pierce Brosnan), but it doesn't hurt to get him, either.  It doesn't hurt to include as subplot the perennially enigmatic Nicola Tesla, when anyone might have expected him to headline a Christopher Nolan film.  For Nolan, expect the unexpected, but don't expect that twist to be necessary.  That would be your mistake.

The result is a film only Nolan could have made (even if it's based on someone else's material).  The Prestige was released the same year as The Illusionist.  It used to be that I allowed this fact to distract from my enjoyment of it.  But I don't revisit Illusionist as obsessively as Prestige.  Sometimes having to work for it works in its favor.

The Prestige (2006) Review

rating: ****

the story: Rival magicians push each other to dangerous limits.

review: I’ve had, of all Christopher Nolan’s films, the most difficulty appreciating The Prestige. For me it’s the most desperate of his efforts.

Which is kind of the point.

Following Memento there was tremendous pressure to follow it up with something equally compelling. With his next two films, actually, next three films, including Batman Begins (but that’s another matter entirely), Nolan adapted the work of others rather than conjure his own magic. Insomnia adapted a Swedish film, The Prestige a book. Insomnia, in hindsight, seems to lack the typical Nolan ambition entirely. It is, rather, “merely” Nolan playing, for the first time, as a member of the Hollywood establishment, giving two well-known actors, Al Pacino and Robin Williams, roles that instantly defined that particular stage of their careers. It was atmospheric, but it was very much an actor’s showcase.

The Prestige is the bridge. It is both an actor’s showcase and an obvious return to Nolan’s own brand of magic. 

And deliberately so. I think he took the course he did to reach this point, and beyond it, quite deliberately. Nolan rose to prominence a few years after M. Night Shyamalan’s own breakthroughs. But Shyamalan was quickly, and all but permanently, dismissed as an obvious act, always, at least perceptually, relying on a twist ending to sell his concepts. Nolan didn’t want to be seen as a gimmick filmmaker. So he first stepped away, and then leaned heavily into it.

That’s the whole point of The Prestige, to put a big emphasis on the popular perception of his work.

The story of the movie revolves around rival magicians who very nearly stop at nothing to achieve their magic. In fact, terrible sacrifice, on both their behalves, are revealed as the story reaches its climax. And again, that’s the whole point, but then it’s also in the manner in which they do it, the lengths, and the contrasts between them, they are willing to go.

Which is to say, Nolan is using this film to convey to the audience that he knows what they expect of him, and he is not going to be what they think he is. At least until Inception, anyway, when he will weave his magic in an entirely different manner.

Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman couldn’t possibly do a better job representing all this. They are a new breed of actor, and this is the moment in which they cast off all doubt. They are surrounded by other remarkable performers: Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, even Andy Serkis, back when he was still best known for motion-capture performances. It takes a bold director to build such a cast, which is itself part of the magic of this movie.

Watching Bale and Jackman duel, learning their awful secrets, Jackman’s final confession (“It was the look on their faces”), emphasizing all over again their contrasts, what motivated them, it’s like another parable, a message well beyond the magic: Is the sacrifice worth it? Or do you become, perhaps, a monster capable of rationalizing anything? 

So when Nolan is ready, four years later, to reveal his own brand of magic again, the stakes have been raised considerably. And he has been working out of that playbook ever since. That’s only possible if he’s willing to sacrifice what came before, that budding artist, the one everyone thought they had figured out. And, well, of course it’s sleight-of-hand.

So yeah, I dig it.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

rating: ****

the story: Tony Stark's afterglow from the big Iron Man reveal is threatened by a business rival.

review.  I hate Iron Man.  I hate the movie responsible for the whole MCU.  I think that if everyone who flocked to see Avengers: Endgame this year actually bothered to rewatch (or surely in some cases, watch) it, they'd hate it, too.  But we have this fiction that the MCU has done no wrong.  Forget that everyone forgets Incredible Hulk is the second MCU movie, or even exists within the MCU, and you get an origin to the whole thing that makes it all the more remarkable that the MCU happened at all.  What saved Iron Man was the fortuitous casting and performance of Robert Downey Jr., and Iron Man 2.

Now, conventional wisdom is that it's actually Iron Man 2 that sucks.  Which is nonsense.  Iron Man 2 is the reason the MCU happened.  And it's the reason why anyone thinks the MCU has been so good.  It's the real template.  And it did it better than just about all of the subsequent movies.

Tony Stark is given a real arc.  A real arc.  This is the only movie, in all his appearances, where he is given a real arc.  And a satisfying one, at that.  He seems like a real character.  The charm of the performance matches, for the first time, the charm of the character.  And built all around it is an incredible assembly, the first great assemblage of characters in the MCU.  This is Scarlett Johansson's first appearance as Black Widow.  Arguably it's her best appearance as Black Widow.  Samuel L. Jackson has his first decent-sized appearance as Nick Fury.  Don Cheadle assumes the role of Jim Rhodes.  Garry Shandling is a smarmy senator trying to match wits with Tony Stark.  Gwyneth Paltrow does more of her Pepper Potts (which is basically the same in every appearance).  Director Jon Favreau, in his second and final film at the helm in the MCU, puts in another appearance as Happy Hogan (inexplicably his most enduring contribution to the whole thing).  Mickey Rourke throws away his Hollywood comebackto play Whiplash, with a wicked Russian accent.  Clark Gregg puts in an Agent Coulson appearance.  And...ladies and gentlemen: Sam Rockwell.

Sam Rockwell's whole career is unfathomable.  How does he keep finding roles?  You'd think after The Green Mile he would've been dismissed into an endless stream of tiny creep roles.  But he just keeps finding decent roles, decent-sized roles.  And you can thank appearances like his Justin Hammer for it.  He utterly lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man in this one.  He lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man 2 in this one.  And somehow we never see the dude again.  Absolutely indispensable magic.  But at least they realized instantly how important Loki was (the best thing about Thor by far).

So the whole package is pretty wonderful.  And quite possibly still the best single thing about the whole MCU. 

Isle of Dogs (2018)

rating: *****

the story: A corrupt politician creates a conspiracy to exile all dogs, but his adopted son mounts a campaign to rescue them.

what it's all about: The exact parallels aren't there, and they don't need to be, but Isle of Dogs might be the first great cinematic response to Trump, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.  Its plot can be seen as a response to Trump's immigration policies.  But regardless of all that, it's a great film, the crowning artistic achievement of Wes Anderson's career. 

Anderson has made a career of creating quirky movies.  He's become increasingly ambitious over the years.  2001's The Royal Tenenbaums was his first widely-acknowledged success, but Anderson took a giant leap forward with his follow-up, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which can be interpreted as a modern, absurdist's version of Moby-Dick.  2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stylistic herald to Isle of Dogs, saw Anderson begin to break free entirely of conventions, while 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel saw him emerge on a truly grand scale for the first time. 

Isle of Dogs, no matter how you interpret it, even if it's only to be understood as a generic cautionary tale, is a wholly contained accomplishment, a complete vision capable of being enjoyed on multiple levels.  The title itself is a nod and a wink; you can love it if all you are is a dog lover.  This is an era that relishes simple pleasures, after all.  You can relish it for the rich vocal cast, a true embarrassment of riches that continues Grand Budapest Hotel's most simple pleasure, all those small roles filled by well-known actors.  You have Bryan Cranston, still justifiably riding the wave of his breakthrough performance in Breaking Bad, in the lead role.  You have Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber just below him.  You have Bill Murray, you have Jeff Goldblum, you have Scarlett Johansson, you have Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Harvey Keitel.  You even have Fisher Stevens!  You have Courtney B. Vance as narrator! 

You can appreciate it as a boy's quest movie.  You can appreciate it as the rare movie omitting subtitles despite heavy usage of Japanese characters speaking Japanese.  You can appreciate it for subverting the "white savior" concept, despite criticism that it plays into that concept.  Gerwig voices an American schoolgirl who leads a peoples revolution against the corrupt politician, but in the end it isn't her actions that produce the happy ending, but the adopted son's, who is Japanese, and the dogs, all of whom have plenty of reasons not to work together, but do.  And that's as much the message of the movie as anything else, that idea of putting aside differences that seems to have been utterly lost today. 

The music is intrinsic to all this.  Not just the taiko drumming.  Another criticism of the movie is that it takes a white man's poor understanding of Japanese culture and assumes it's being accurate.  The whole point of omitting subtitles is acknowledging the cultural divides that even the dogs represent, speaking English (dogs don't speak English).  It's metaphor, people.  There's nothing intrinsically Japanese about this movie, it's a creative choice, in a movie brilliantly bursting with them.  Very few directors in history have made as many of them, and as many of them as well, as Wes Anderson has in Isle of Dogs.  The constant drum beats, with or without taiko drums, and the anonymous indy-style songs, are incumbent of a talent who has been synthesizing the castoffs of film history for decades, and come up with a masterpiece from them.

I don't know if this is going to remain my favorite movie of 2018, but it's going to be difficult to beat.