The family that fights mercenaries and fascists together stays together

Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Part of why people loved Guardians of the Galaxy so much when it came out in 2014 was how surprised they were: The Guardians are not well-known characters outside of diehard Marvel Comics fans; no (at-the-time) major starred in the movie and few knew of writer-director James Gunn beyond his screenplay for Scooby Doo.

There was not much to expect. But Guardians of the Galaxy was a massive hit because it was thrilling, funny, nerdy and it featured Chris Pratt’s arrival as a major star. It’s considered by many to be the best or at least one of the best Marvel movies. So, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 had a lot to live up to. And while I couldn’t be pleasantly amazed again, I was still impressed by how much fun I had. The movie does all the things tent-poll comic book movies are supposed to do while doing something very few of them manage: be completely character driven.

The Guardians are comprised of their wise-cracking, Earth-born captain Peter Quill, or Star-Lord (Pratt), green-skinned and humorless warrior Gamora (Zoe Saldana), rascally racoon-looking Rocket (voice by Bradley Cooper), oafish strongman Drax (Dave Bautista) and the tiny, talking tree toddler known as Groot, whose only words are “I am Groot.” (The phrase can mean anything and only Rocket knows how to interpret it.) The film begins with the Guardians killing a space monster for a gold-skinned race of fascist humanoids called the Sovereign in return for a prisoner of theirs: Nebula (Karen Gillan), the angry, blue-skinned sister of Gamora .

But as the Guardians leave the planet, the Sovereign attack; they are enraged when they discover Rocket has stolen a few of the Sovereign’s super-powered batteries. The Guardians escape but only because a mysterious, absurdly powerful man named Ego (Kurt Russell) incinerates the Sovereign ships. It turns out Ego is Peter’s long-lost father – who is also a millions-of-years-old god-like being called a Celestial. As Peter bonds with his dad, Gamora and Nebula fight, Drax has hilariously deep conversations with Ego’s empath companion Mantis (Pom Klementieff), while Rocket and Groot deal with the bounty-hunters and pirates called the Ravagers and their erstwhile leader and Peter’s former guardian Yondu (Michael Rooker).

There are a lot of characters and a lot of plot threads, and Gunn handles them expertly. He develops each character, giving them motivation, conflicts and almost complex emotions. The plots are created by the characters working to resolve these emotionally oriented problems, almost all of which revolve around how they create and sustain their families. In each case, these tough and rough heroes are resisting the connections right in front of them and seeking out the wrong goal, and they confront this error when they must fight a bunch of bad guys all at once. It’s a surprising moving and surprisingly sweet plot for a movie full of space explosions and weird-looking aliens.

The soundtrack is full of hits of the 1970s (ostensibly all found on Peter’s cassette tape Awesome Mix Vol. 2), and they are not used as ironic background noise but as commentary on the action: from “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass to “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, from “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison to “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. “Brandy” is used particularly powerfully, with Ego explaining that he is like the sailor in the song: “But he made it clear he couldn’t stay / No harbor was his home.” It’s a romantic notion, but it’s also a sad one.

By the end, Peter realizes that nothing can replace the loss of his father, not even a God. But a family of space swashbucklers might come close.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
Written and Directed by James Gunn
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Kurt Russell
Rated PG-13

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|        

Refusing a genre, ‘Colossal’ is a revelation

The strongest of my genre expectations is that every film will exist in some sort of genre. And then, I expect that the conventions of that genre will convene, maybe with a few slips or surprises, but nothing more. When a film like Colossal comes along – a film that defies, ignores, mashes up and spits on multiple genres – I couldn’t help but be confused. Through half of it, I watched with my head tilted as if I were a puppy watching his owner practice yoga. It’s a talky indie comedy, a Korean monster movie, a feminist suspense film and an addiction parable; it’s funny, creepy, shocking and weird as hell. Clearly, the studio didn’t know what to do with it, because the trailer makes it seem like a slapstick rom com star vehicle for Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis. It’s not.

Hathaway plays Gloria, an out-of-work New York writer who is drinking away her sorrows, her anxiety and her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens). When he kicks her out after one-too-many all-night binges, she lands in the empty house where she grew up in Maidenhead, New Jersey. While walking home with her new inflatable bed, her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) drives by. He now owns his father’s bar, and they rekindle their friendship while drinking till dawn with his friends Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim Blake Nelson). Oscar eventually offers a bartending job to Gloria; he clearly has a crush on her, but she seems more interested, at least while drunk, in Joel.

Meanwhile, a several-story-tall monster is randomly appearing in Seoul for a minute at a time and causing mass destruction. Not surprisingly, everyone is horrified and mystified, and Oscar’s bar does good business because of it. But then Gloria notices that the monster has the exact same body language she does, particularly at 8:05am when she’s walking home drunk through a nearby playground. Somehow, she is that monster – for a minute a day, from 7,000 miles away, and only in that little playground. She’s confused and feels horribly guilty for being responsible for the deaths of so many (nameless, faceless) Koreans. One morning, drunk as usual, she reveals her bizarre secret to her new friends, who are flabbergasted. And then it turns out that she’s not alone in her violent out of body transnational gigantism.

Gloria’s plight veers from ridiculous to pathetic to horrifying to hilarious, with the film starting as a comedy and ending in some sort of cathartic tragedy. The tone shifts make narrative and artistic sense, but they are certainly disconcerting, especially when you realize you’re watching comedic drunkenness that is killing hundreds of people on the other side of the planet. Writer-director Nacho Vigalondo doesn’t clearly signal to the audience how they’re supposed to feel about that or about Gloria’s emotional messiness in general, aside from bemused pity and confusion. But then the awkward love square created by Gloria’s flirtation with Joel, Oscar’s crush on Gloria and Tim and Gloria’s unresolved issues mashes up against the mysterious monster embodiment. Who’s good and who’s bad and what’s right and wrong becomes clear. And by the end it should be clear to most that the whole thing is a metaphor for the struggle with alcoholism.

Hathaway has done drunk well before, earning a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married. Gloria isn’t as well written a role, but Hathaway’s ability to seamlessly transition from broad comedy to dramatic grit is perfectly utilized. Except for Sudeikis, the rest of the cast mostly exist as plot devices, which is a shame considering the skills of Stevens and Nelson. Sudeikis, however, matches Hathaway’s skills in his portrayal of a not-so-secretly despondent drunk who is the life of the party one second and its destroyer the next. Oscar’s first appearance sets him up as the lead of a rom com, but then he becomes something much less safe and much more sinister, like the film as a while. Both are a revelation.

Colossal
Written and Directed by Nacho Vigalondo
Starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis and Dan Stevens
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|       

Do we really want to go back?

Trainspotting is the great film of the 1990s counterculture, its decade’s Easy Rider or Rebel Without a Cause. The tone poem about heroin addiction, friendship and the idiocy of youth among the Scottish working class arrived in the United States in the summer of 1996 laden by the weight of a Miramax publicity juggernaut, the massive popularity of Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name and a burgeoning moral panic. Mothers and politicians were ringing their hands over a new heroin epidemic that had either been presaged or revealed by the heroin chic of Kate Moss and James King.

Opportunistic pundits argued that Trainspotting glamourized heroin, while people who had actually seen the film argued that it did just the opposite by providing us with some of the most indelible images of drugged degradation and sorrow in Western culture. The film catapulted to fame its stars Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Kelly McDonald and especially Ewan McGregor while announcing Danny Boyle as one of the great directors of the era. The film is a wildly imaginative kaleidoscope of music cues, tableaus and postmodern pastiche; it’s beautiful, horrifying, hilarious and deeply sad.

Why on earth would you make a sequel? It would seem like a bad idea: the first film was too iconic, the stakes would be too high. Welsh wrote a sequel called Porno and Boyle and Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodges almost made it in the mid-2000s, but Boyle has said, rather bluntly, that “it felt really not-good-enough, so we abandoned it.” Welsh’s story was an uninspired caper, and Boyle felt they were only making it for the money. After ten years pondering, Hodges and Boyle came up with something that was neither silly nor cynical. T2 Trainspotting is an inspired meditation on the very personal experiences of guilt and nostalgia and the culturohistorical problems of alienation and the ravages of capitalism.

Twenty years after the end of Trainspotting, after he stole the proceeds of a heroin deal from two of his friends, Renton (McGregor) returns to Edinburgh. He’s there to reconnect with his family and Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Simon, also known as Sick Boy (Miller). Renton had secretly given Spud his fair share of £4,000 (which Spud promptly shot up his arm), but he’d stiffed both Simon and their sociopathic compatriot Begbie (Carlyle). Renton arrives just in time to stop a despondent Spud from committing suicide, and when he finds Simon, who has traded heroin for cocaine, the two have a vicious, but slapstick, barroom brawl, and Renton gives him the money he’d stolen.

Along with Simon’s arch, wise-beyond-her years girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), Renton, Spud and Simon revisit their friendship under the backdrop of the collapse of Edinburgh’s council houses and encroaching gentrification. Simon is secretly planning to betray Renton at some point as revenge, but when Begbie shows up, escaped from jail and struggling to connect with his son, he protects his friend with a complicated lie. Eventually, the schemes, lies, drugs and their various levels of competence at dealing with the modern legitimate world collide in a mess that seems quite fitting for our antiheroes.

T2 could not possibly be what Trainspotting was: a revelation, a representation of the zeitgeist. But in jettisoning Welsh’s parochial nihilism, Boyle and Hodges have made a movie about something much bigger than addiction and loyalty. They are bemoaning both the isolation of our hyper-mediated, deeply shallow culture and our nostalgic yearning for a past that never really existed. In giving us more complex versions of these famous characters – even Begbie’s behavior gets sympathetically explained – their plights seem more like our plights and thus more moving and more upsetting.

Renton’s revision of his classic “Choose Life” monologue that opened the previous film is a sublime and devastating ode to the loneliness and hopelessness of late capitalism. In having characters revisit the locations of many of the first film’s scenes while also strolling through the ruins of the British welfare state, the film both embraces and mocks its characters’ nostalgia. The characters do it, too: Simon snidely derides Renton’s too-fond memories of their youth in one of the film’s darkest moments. I felt implicated, too. Hodges and Boyle seem to be criticizing the audience for trying to rekindle its romance with Trainspotting and 1996. Do we really want to go back?

T2 Trainspotting
Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by John Hodge
Starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|           

In all its messy, bloody, thrilling glory

Dafne Keen and Hugh Jackman in LoganI received my first issue of The Uncanny X-Men in my Christmas stocking in 1985. I was 10, and it was the comic that all of my friends were reading. These boys were fixated on Wolverine, the cigar-chomping killing machine with unbreakable bones and long metal claws. He seemed to be half wild animal, half Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

A deeply sensitive and conflict adverse proto-gay, I was unnerved by Wolverine’s violence and unpredictable rage, and I was much more enamored by weather witch Storm and teen genius Kitty Pryde; their stories moved me when Wolverine’s scared me.

But Wolverine was and is the most popular of the X-Men. This isn’t just because the teenage boys who are the majority of comics’ readers love hyper-masculine violence. As the years went by, the writers and artists of the various X-Men titles turned Wolverine into an emotionally complicated, psychologically tortured, and reluctant hero who works in the grayest areas of the moral universe.

I read through many of these stories as a less fearful adult, and it’s this complexity that has made me love the character so much. But when he finally ended up on the big screen in 1999, with Hugh Jackman perfectly cast, the pressures of family-friendly film franchising sanded down Wolverine’s roughest of edges. Or, the edges were there and the films’ mundanity covered them with a polyurethane sheen.

Then comes Logan, the third Wolverine film, ninth appearance of the character on the big screen, and Hugh Jackman’s last time playing the role. Logan is not only one of the best X-Men films – if not the best – but it’s also the best representation of the Wolverine character in all its messy, bloody, thrilling glory.

The new film was inspired by the now classic graphic novel Old Man Logan, but departs from that text in many ways, which will disappoint that title’s ardent fans. It is several decades in the future, mutants have mysteriously stopped being born, and Logan, whose nom de guerre is Wolverine, is grayer, limping and coughing, his mutant healing ability clearly no longer adequate. He is working as a limo driver, trying to save money to buy a boat where he can take a decrepit Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), also known as Professor X, as he dies of something like a cross between Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

Patrick Stewart in Logan

The most powerful telepath alive, Charles’ seizures are like psychic bombs, so Logan and the albino mutant tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant) keep him drugged and hidden away across the border in the Mexican desert, away from innocent bystanders.
One day, a Mexican nurse named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) finds Logan and tries to hire him to take her and a young mutant named Laura (Dafne Keen) to a haven for mutants in North Dakota. Logan is resistant, even though Charles is insistent that they help. When a pack of vicious mercenaries called the Reavers show up and Laura slaughters more than a few with very Wolverine-like abilities, Logan reluctantly agrees.

The basic plot is very “Just one last job!” but director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line) and co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green use that structure to investigate Logan as a character without much cliché; through crackling dialogue and one exhilarating set-piece after another, we watch Logan wrestle with mortality, guilt, filial piety and his own instinctive brutality. His interactions with the mostly mute Laura are funny, gruff and moving, giving filmgoers the first glimpse of a side of Wolverine so important in the comics and absent from the films: his counter-intuitive mentoring of teenage girls like Kitty Pryde and Jubilee.

The film also showcases extreme, sometimes jaw-dropping violence, earning the film its R-rating by a mile and then some. It makes Deadpool seems like a Tom & Jerry cartoon. But this violence, which is perpetrated not only by Wolverine but also by a pre-teen girl, is what makes Logan’s physical and psychological pain so believable. It is also what makes his redemption so powerful. For the first time in 30 years, an X-Men story earned my tears.

Logan
Directed by James Mangold
Written by Scott Frank, James Mangold and Michael Green
Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Dafne Keen
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|         

The art and irony of The Salesman

Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in The SalesmanOutside of cinephiles who have seen his Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi is not well known among Americans. But his name was thrust into the news over the last few weeks because of President Trump’s executive order banning travel of most anyone, but particularly Muslims, from seven majority Muslim countries. (The list does not include any majority Muslim country where Trump and his family have business dealings. Of course.) Because of the ban, Farhadi, who is from Iran, cannot travel to the United States for the Academy Awards, where his newest film The Salesman is up for Best Foreign Language Film; even if the stay of that order allows his visit, Farhadi is boycotting in protest.

There is a great deal of irony in preventing the director of The Salesman from attending the Oscars. By setting a suspenseful revenge drama among the cast of a Farsi-language production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Farhadi entwines Iranian and American emotional and moral experience. That such a tale comes from Iran, described as part of the Axis of Evil by George W. Bush and repeatedly threatened with destruction by Trump, is situationally ironic in that it is the opposite of what many people expect from our supposed enemy. It’s dramatically ironic in that Trump seems to have no clue whatsoever that Farhadi exists, that our most human complexities are universal or that both Iranians and Muslims are humans. (There are also the weird similarities between Miller’s Willy Loman and Donald Trump, both delusion narcissists, but since Trump doesn’t read, watch anything by Fox News or have the capacity for self-reflection, it’s unlikely he could have made that connection.)

However, even if Farhadi is not attending the Oscars, The Salesman is in theaters across the country. (Trump will probably be unable to ban films made by Muslims, women or scientists, but no one should think he’s not going to try.) Emad (Shahab Hosseini) is a high school teacher and actor who is playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is playing Linda, Willy’s wife. After their apartment building becomes physically unstable and is evacuated, they move into an apartment owned by one of their fellow actors. The owner neglects to tell them that the previous tenant was a prostitute, and shortly after Emad and Rana have set up house, one of her former clients attacks Rana while she is taking a shower and Emad is out buying groceries. At first Emad thinks she had just fallen, and then the neighbors who took her to the hospital tell him she was attacked. It’s implied but never clear that she was raped, and Rana is too ashamed and traumatized to fully explain everything to Emad. All of this weighs on Emad as he seeks out the perpetrator and tries to keep calm while he is portraying Willy Loman each night.

The film is ingenious in its pacing and its use of Arthur Miller. The tension is slowly increased through misdirection, ambiguities and a smart lack of a score that would indicate what emotion we’re supposed to feel or expect. I had no idea what was about to happen at any point in the film, particularly in the last act when Emad seems to have found Rana’s attacker. In an American film, the revenge would be brutal (see: Prisoners, Kill Bill, Enough), but Farhadi flips the genre on its back and makes the emotions, but not the action, violent.

Taraneh Alidoosti in The SalesmanDeath of Salesman seems to have no clear connection to the film’s plot until the last 20 minutes. Then, Miller’s commentary on obligation, illusion, sacrifice and failure are reimagined through Emad and Rana’s acting out of their moral duties as well as an American play. If there is any justice, publicity over Farhadi’s absence from the Academy Awards will lead American audiences to experience his art and his insight into America’s greatest drama.

The Salesman (original title: Forushande)
Written and Directed by Asghar Farhadi
Starring Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti and Babak Karimi
Rated PG-13
In Farsi with subtitles

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|