The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:
I Saw The TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land.
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Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.
Back to Black
Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27.
The Blue Angels
This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.
Flash Gordon
The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.
The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.
The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.
A couple of premieres takes on all comers at the box office this weekend, including interesting holdovers and a couple of notable anniversary re-releases.
Challengers
Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan, a teenage tennis whiz who must rebuild her life after she suffers a career-ending injury. She reinvents herself as a coach and marries Art (Mike Faist), a fellow tennis champion, and coaches him to success in the pros. But when Art’s career takes a turn for the worse, he must face off against his arch rival Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who just so happens to be Tashi’s ex. Fireworks, both personal and professional, ensue.
Boy Kills World
Bill Skarsgård, who you might remember as Pennywise from It, stars as Boy, who is actually a man. The Boy-man’s family is murdered by Famke Janssen, who was the best Jean Gray in any X-Men movie, but I digress. Rendered deaf and mute by the attack, Boy is rescued by a mysterious shaman (revered stuntman Yayan Ruhian) and taught the means for revenge. Bob’s Burgers’ H. Jon Benjamin provides the voice in Boy’s head.
Civil War
Alex Garland’s searing cautionary tale about an America at war with itself is an unexpected hit. Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, a journalist on a mission to get from New York City to Washington, D.C., to interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the White House falls to the Western Forces. In this clip, Lee and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) try to buy some gas in West Virginia.
Alien
Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror film returns to theaters for a victory lap on its 45th anniversary. Sigourney Weaver’s star-making turn as Ripley set the standard for tough-girl protagonists for decades. The alien xenomorphs will be the most terrifying screen monster you’ll see this, or any other, year. Take a look at the original trailer from 1979, which causes 21st century horror trailers to hide behind the couch.
Ridley Scott’s
HOUSE OF GUCCI
A Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film
Lady Gaga stars in House of Gucci as Patrizia Reggiana, the “Black Widow” of Italy, who ordered the assassination of her husband Maurizio Gucci. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer)
Before he became Noted Auteur Ridley Scott, the English director made a big mark in advertising. In the late ’70s, Scott was hired to revamp the visual brand of Chanel No. 5 perfume. The commercial he made in 1979 would go down as an all-time classic: As a model lounges by a pool, the shadow of a private jet briefly darkens the Mediterranean sunlight. “I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever,” intones the husky female voice-over. Then a hunky man magically appears and dives into her pool — no sexual overtones there.
Chanel No. 5 is just a perfume, but Scott’s visual magic is used to associate the brand with an intoxicating mix of power, lust, and wealth. You’ll never be as sexy as Catherine Deneuve, but you can go out on the town smelling like her, and that’s kind of like being made of blue sky and golden light, I guess?
It’s perversely appropriate that one of the people responsible for creating the visual language of luxury brand capitalism helms House of Gucci. “We’re not aristocrats,” says Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). In the late ’70s, the Gucci fortune was only a couple of generations old, but patriarch Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) is instantly contemptuous when he finds out his son’s new girlfriend Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) comes from the petite bourgeois. Maurizio is in law school when he meets Patrizia at a party, and he has no intention of entering the chaotic family business. Rodolfo and his more competent brother Aldo (Al Pacino) believe Maurizio will be the future of the company, mostly because Aldo’s son Paolo (Jared Leto) is an idiot, which is why Rodolfo instantly pegs Patrizia as a gold digger. When he insists on marrying her, the groom’s side of the church is conspicuously empty, and Maurizio is forced to take a job at the Reggiani’s trucking company. (“Trucking? Mafia!” hisses Rodolfo.)
Patrizia’s not a gold digger, in that she sincerely loves Maurizio, but she’s not not a gold digger, either. Once she has the ring on her finger, the steel starts to show behind the velvet. Maurizio would be content with a fairly normal career, but Patrizia pushes him to be more ambitious. When Aldo calls to reconcile the Gucci rift, she’s adamant they return to the fold. Then she promptly starts maneuvering to put Paolo out of the picture.
Patrizia is an infamous figure in Italy, known as “the Black Widow” for ordering a hit on Maurizio in 1995. Lady Gaga plays her with what I can only describe as gusto. She and Scott know this is melodrama of the highest sort. When Patrizia and Maurizio have a tryst in his father’s office, it starts out sexy but devolves into a kind of slapstick ferocity. Driver seems to understand exactly the level of soap opera acting this story needs and delivers it nonchalantly. I suppose it’s hard not to wink into the camera when you’re doing a GQ cover shoot scene. Pacino, Leto, and Irons go full Dark Shadows. I wouldn’t call any of the Italian accents “great,” but they’re at least fun, like when an unrecognizable Leto bleats “She shake-a my hand while she knife-a me in the back!”
It’s corny as all hell, but it’s also pretty entertaining because you can tell these folks are having a good time. Scott’s lighting design is off the charts good, especially in an early Italo-disco sequence where he goes gaga with a light-up dance floor. His foreshadowing of the climactic murder is constant. When Patrizia confronts Maurizio’s mistress at a ski lodge, she barrels into the shot in a blood-red, skin-tight ski suit. Thanks to the ’70s Italian characters smoking like very fashionable chimneys, House of Gucci uses the mister as much as Blade Runner.
Ultimately, House of Gucci falls victim to the same problems Ridley Scott films have been having since Gladiator. There are a lot of good scenes that work on their own, but they never gel together into something greater than their sum. For example, Maurizio doesn’t drift away from Patrizia; he just seems to see another woman he likes and jumps ship. After luxuriating in Italian villas for two hours, the life-or-death drama at the end seems perfunctory. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, Lady Gaga’s portrayal of the antihero Patrizia is so charismatic and seductive that it undermines the film’s supposed deeper themes of the corrupting power of greed. The whole package comes across a little like The Godfather, if everyone involved were just a little stupider. I guess there will always be an appetite for watching awful people behaving awfully.
Sean Young is smoking hot as Rachel in Blade Runner.
Josh Campbell is the host and co-founder of Spillit, the popular Memphis storytelling slam event. He and his son Paul, 16, have a podcast on the OAM Network called “Dad and I.” Since the coronavirus quarantine started, Josh and Paul have been watching classic movies together. I joined in (virtually) to watch a film they’ve never seen, Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: Let’s start with you, Paul. What do you know about Blade Runner?
Paul Campbell: I know there’s a remake.
Chris: It was really a sequel.
Josh Campbell: He’s a Ryan Gosling fan.
Paul: I haven’t seen that one, either. But that’s about all I know about it. I don’t know anything about the original.
Chris: Okay! Josh, what do you know about it?
Josh: It’s funny. I’m a big Harrison Ford fan. I think I’ve seen everything else with Harrison Ford in it. But I think I was six when this movie came out. It’s known as one of those movies that’s made predictions about the future, and it was one of the first science fiction movies to have a gritty view of the future as opposed to sort of the clean look some of the other sci fi movies have. I guess I’ve just avoided it because of the prediction aspect of it. Any time a movie makes predictions of the future, the further you get into the future, it’s kind of tough to go back and look at what the predictions were.
Chris: Well, that’s interesting, because I want you to the notice the opening titles. It says that the film is set in November, 2019. So this film is actually set in the past now.
The opening shot of Blade Runner.
117 minutes later, more or less…
Chris: Josh and Paul, you are now people who’ve seen Blade Runner. What did you think? Paul, go for it.
Paul: It was good. It looked really cool. I was just wondering, why was it so dark the whole time?
Chris: Yeah, I know. And it seemed to rain an awful lot for Los Angeles.
Paul: Why didn’t anyone light their homes?
Edward James Olmos as Gaff enjoying a sunny day in Los Angeles 2019.
Josh: I thought it was definitely like a film noir. It was like there were two movies going at the same time. It was like a 1940s detective movie, and sort of a Frankenstein movie happening, like, side by side.
Chris: Paul, there’s your answer for why is it so dark all the time. Because it was heavily influenced by film noir. You know, like, detective movies. So, tell me about your poster and your movie-watching project that you’ve been doing.
Paul: Yeah, I try to watch a lot of movies. I try to watch all the ones that people say are important or whatever, you know.
Chris: Did Blade Runner feel like one of those?
Paul: Yeah, it felt really advanced for how old it was. ‘Cause you look at a lot of old movies and they don’t feel super futuristic. And while this one still has small TV screens and stuff like that, it still feel really futuristic to me.
Downtown Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982)
Chris: One of the old questions is, did Blade Runner look like the future, or does the future look like Blade Runner? Because all the designers grew up watching this movie, and everybody ripped it off. I think the first movie to really rip it off was Akira, the anime, in 1988.
Paul: We were trying to find that one, but we haven’t found it yet. It’s on the poster.
Neo Tokyo in Akria (1988)
Chris: The weird thing about this movie is that it completely bombed when it originally came out. Apparently, the entire production was a complete nightmare from start to finish. Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford hated each other, and there was a crew rebellion at one point. There was so much smoke. It was everywhere. So the crew was in respirators for six months, and people got lung damage and stuff.
There was a cut of the film that Scott had turned into the studio and was like, okay, well, this is the movie. And then the production company basically fired Ridley Scott. You know the bit with the unicorn?
Never Seen It: Watching Blade Runner with Josh and Paul Campbell (4)
The reason that’s there is because Ridley Scott had kind of given up on this movie.
JC: Yeah! He was doing Legend next.
Chris: The unicorn was a test shot for Legend, but he used Blade Runner money to do it, because he was trying to sell Legend at the time. So he stuck the bit with a unicorn in there because he was just like, “I don’t know, it means something. Who knows?”
The unicorn co-stars with Tom Cruise, and Mia Sara in Legend.
So the production company takes it away from him, and they make Harrison Ford do a voiceover that basically explains everything that’s happening. And they cut a whole bunch of stuff out, too. That was the cut released to theaters, like, two weeks after E.T. And of course, E.T. became the highest grossing movie of all time. So nobody went to see Blade Runner. Everybody kind of forgot about it.
Never Seen It: Watching Blade Runner with Josh and Paul Campbell (3)
Then, in 1990, they were having a 70 millimeter film festival in Los Angeles. Somehow, the print of Blade Runner that they got was the work print. It wasn’t the theatrical cut with the voiceover. So this audience goes in, and they watch the cut without the voiceover on it. And they were like, “Oh my gosh, that was so amazing!” That’s sort of where the legend of Blade Runner started. It was like the Velvet Underground and rock and roll. Ten people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of those people started a band. It became hugely influential.
Josh: In most futuristic movies, they try really hard to make the world look all the same. If you look at some of the apartments they walked into, they look like old, 1940s apartments. Then other apartments look very futuristic. It would be almost like it is today, in 2020. You know, here in Midtown, you go out and find bungalows that were made in the 1920s, and then there’s tall, skinny houses right next to them.
Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, making dinner in his kitchen.
Chris:Blade Runner is based on a book by Philip K, Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was written in the late 1960s, but it was about two things: It was about environmental collapse, and it was also about artificial intelligence. What is the line between what is human and what is not human? How do we even know that we’re human? It’s very philosophical stuff. Dick was … he was just like that. I mean, this is a guy who eventually wrote his longest novel about how an extraterrestrial intelligence had psychically contacted him and given him a new perspective on the New Testament. He was a weird guy.
You know, one thing that’s interesting is that nobody predicted smartphones. There’s still pay phones in Blade Runner. They’re video phones, but they’re pay phones. Nobody got cell phones. Star Trek did, but then nobody else did.
Never Seen It: Watching Blade Runner with Josh and Paul Campbell (5)
Josh: Well, I think again, that’s one of those little beats that were hit for the film noir aspect. It’s like, you know, the detective goes into the phone booth. Like all those things are tropes. Sean Young was perfect as a femme fatale, dressed almost like Joan Crawford. That’s something Paul and I talk about a lot. He was brought up on the Avengers movies. What we talk about is how Marvel movies have become the way to make other movies. And instead of being a genre movie, it’s just a way to do other genres.
Paul: Captain America movies are like Bond movies. Guardians of the Galaxy are like science fiction movies. And Ant Man is a comedy.
Josh: So to me it is interesting, to see a sci fi movie that was trying to be like a genre movie in a different genre.
Chris: And it was, like, reintroducing noir. The big crossover with sci fi has always been westerns. There’s a big Western influence on Star Wars, for example. You know, Han Solo is like a gunslinger. Especially at this stage, putting noir in science fiction was something that just wasn’t done. Paul, have you watched much noir on your quest?
Paul: I don’t think I’ve seen any yet. I’m not really sure though. Well, I guess we watched Seven.
Josh: Yeah. He’s not into the black and whites, so we haven’t gotten into that era very much.
Chris: Paul, let me ask you, why don’t you like black and white?
Paul: I don’t know. It’s just kind of with a lot of action movies, there’s a lot of color happening, and it’s really fun to look at. It’s kind of harder to capture big action happening, and make it look like it’s actually happening, in black and white as it is in color. But when we watched Twelve Angry Men, I really liked that. It was just people sitting in a room talking.
Josh: But we watched Raging Bull, too. What do you think about Raging Bull‘s action?
Paul: It was good, but I also didn’t feel the action naturally. I liked the stuff with his family.
Chris: It’s about the shadows too. A lot of Blade Runner is about where the absence of light is as much as it is about where the light is playing. You know what I mean?
Paul: Yeah. But then the neon in there, so it sticks out so much in that too. When there’s some scenes where it’s black and white, but it’s almost like blue and white or red and white or red and black or blue and black.
Josh: There was this idea in the eighties that Japan was buying up America, and that Japan was going to be the superpower, and that we were going to live in their world. Most people in Los Angeles seem Asian, and all of the signs are in Chinese or Japanese, I think. Was that in the book, or was that the movie coming up with that?
Chris: That wasn’t in the book at all. That all came out in the movie. There’s one way to interpret that, which is, Decker lives in Chinatown, so that’s why you see so much of it. But if you think about it, that is one thing that Blade Runner got close to right. If you think about all the anime that’s huge with people younger than us, Josh. I mean everybody watches anime, right Paul?
Paul: Yeah. I never got into it, because it takes way too much time.
Chris: K-pop is huge too. Here we are in 2020 and Asian popular culture is really huge. So they, they kind of got that right.
Paul: Yeah, at least that part.
Street sushi with Rick and Gaff.
Chris: Josh, you said that this is one of the few Harrison Ford movies you hadn’t seen. So what’d you think about him in this movie?
Josh: The thing that I like about Harrison Ford is when he’s playing a vulnerable hero. I think he’s really good at that. There’s so many times, especially like in the Tom Clancy movies, where he just gets beat up a lot. He, he’s almost like a Humphrey Bogart-type character actor that got pushed into super-big blockbusters by accident. If you take Indiana Jones and Han Solo and Jack Ryan out of it, and you look at movies like Witness or Frantic or any of those movies where he is kind of like an everyman. I think he does really good at that. And his facial expressions, he looks like my dad.
Paul: He looks a little like granddad.
Ladies, Harrison Ford has some questions for you.
Chris: I think that one thing that doesn’t age well about this movie is the interpretation of his relationship with Rachel, with Sean Young. I think it feels really uncomfortable. In the book it’s even weirder, but I think it’s better. In the book, she is the aggressor in the situation. Once she figures out she’s a machine, that she’s a replicant, she wants to go seduce him to prove to him that she’s just like a human. He’s the guy that’s going to go around killing replicants, and she’s trying to convince him that what he’s doing is wrong. But he just thinks of her as a machine.
Josh: Paul, that’s one thing that when we watched all of these movies like from, I would say 2000 back. The sexual politics are always awkward. Sometimes, it’s so casual, I would not even notice it. And Paul will say, ‘Whoa, what’s this guy doing?’
Paul: Right. Yeah.
Josh: We see that a lot. And it’s like, well, that’s how it was. It’s hard to explain that. So when he’s saying like, “Say you want me”? Yeah, that hasn’t aged well, but a lot of that stuff is not age. That’s always a little queasy when you’re looking at that.
Harrison Ford and Sean Young
Josh: I’ve always heard that there is a little bit of, is he a replicant? That was part of the twist or whatever. Cause she says, “Have you ever done that test on yourself?”
Chris: Yeah. And then he goes and looks at his photographs, just like the replicants had.
Josh: So I kept waiting for that big reveal, that maybe he was in danger.
Paul: Well, it never really says, yeah, I didn’t think so.
Josh: But didn’t it come across like that to you, Paul? You didn’t think he was a replicant?
Paul: That he was a replicant, no. But I don’t know. I thought they would answer that eventually, when she brought that up. I don’t really know. I don’t think he is.
Josh: And then the origami thing, when I saw the unicorn in the shot and then I saw the origami unicorn, I thought that was some sort of totem of like, I know his memory. [Gaff] knows his memories, and every time he left something for [Deckard], they were positioning him, in a way.
The infamous origami unicorn.
Chris: I think that’s in there. I think it was left intentionally ambiguous. Part of Phillip K. Dick’s purpose in writing this thing in the first place was to make you question the nature of your own reality. The humans feel like, because they created these replicants, and that they are quote unquote artificial, that they have the power of life and death over them. They can make them slaves, they can make them pleasure units, they can do whatever they want with them.
But they also made these replicants to have humanity, and they’ve realized that they’re developing feelings, too. At what point do you cross the line between, this is a machine, and this is something that’s like me? How much do you know about your own consciousness? You can say, this is machine. It’s just a whole bunch of preprogrammed subroutines that interact together to make it look like it’s a thinking, feeling person. But then, if you think about yourself, maybe that’s all I am, too. Maybe I am just a bunch of separate instincts that interact together and believes it’s a person, believes it’s special, and believes it has the power to do whatever it wants. So I think leaving it vague, as to whether Deckard is a replicant or not, that’s part of the artistry of the thing, you know?
Rutger Hauar in his career-making turn as Roy Batty, the android who wanted more life.
Josh: Talking about the pacing of eighties movies, what was the pacing like for you?
Paul: What do you mean?
Josh: Are you always like, let’s get it going?
Paul: It did take a while to kick in. Yeah. But I think it was really cool to look at, so it didn’t really bother me that much as it usually does. But you know, it also feels like back then dialogue was a lot different in action movies. Dialogue’s always different in action movies. It’s never like just like, “Hey, what’s up? Hey, how you doing?” Everything’s really written out. I liked that. I thought visually, it’s awesome. Some of those shots were really cool. I know how the voiceover would have been to me. I can see why people reacted to it the way they did, because the voiceover would have grabbed you out of it.
Chris: I’ve got all the different versions, and if you watch the theatrical cut, Harrison Ford so clearly phones it in. He’s just like, yeah, whatever, you know, here I am because of my contract. It’s not like Double Indemnity, where the voiceover is so dramatic.
I’m glad that you brought the pacing up because, this is a slow movie. In 1982, this was a slow movie. But I think Paul, it’s really interesting what you said, that it didn’t bother you, because there was so much stuff to look at. It kind of shows you what pacing really is. It’s not even necessarily like how fast the plot is going or, or how fast the cuts are. It’s all about the pace of information that’s reaching you from the screen. And so, even though the cuts are slower, and there’s not as much dialogue, there’s so much stuff to look at that your brain keeps engaged. It pulls you forward and it makes you want to keep watching. I think that skill in modulating that rate of information exchange is the most valuable thing a film director can have. And I think that’s also true for being a writer, too.
So, would you recommend it to other people?
Paul: Yeah, it was OK.
Never Seen It: Watching Blade Runner with Josh and Paul Campbell (2)
“I can’t help thinking it’s a lot like making a sequel to Casablanca,” tweeted author William Gibson while on his way to see Blade Runner 2049. Gibson has the distinction of being one of the first in a long line of creators influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He was about a third of the way through his first draft of Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberpunk and indelibly shaped our conception of the internet age, when he saw the film. Neuromancer and its sequels are set in a decaying urban world that looks a lot like the hellscape Scott created for Blade Runner.
Casablanca has been described as having a screenplay made entirely of cliches — but the reason they’re cliches is because subsequent screenwriters stole them from Casablanca. Something like that happened with Blade Runner visually. “It affected the way people dressed,” Gibson said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.”
Blade Runner was released in the summer of 1982, sci-fi’s cinema’s miracle year, in the company of classics like Poltergeist, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal. But Scott’s groundbreaking visual masterpiece had the misfortune to be released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America, and audiences wanted a feel-good story about a brave, healing alien more than a glimpse into the dystopian future. Even having Harrison Ford as the lead couldn’t put asses in seats, and Blade Runner flopped hard, almost destroying Scott’s career.
But the legend grew over the decades, and so Scott, acting as executive producer, tapped Arrival director Denis Villeneuve to helm the long-awaited (or perhaps long-dreaded) sequel, with screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who had adapted Philip K. Dick for the original film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who worked with Villeneuve on Sicario, was chosen to follow up one of the most visually influential films in history.
Blade Runner‘s opening shot identifies the setting as “Los Angles, 2019.” Blade Runner 2049 begins with an echo of those images: An eye, in extreme close up, and a flying car gliding over the ruins of California. In the ensuing three decades, the ecological crisis has only deepened. The only way to grow food is in vast, climate-controlled greenhouses. When the car lands in one lonely agricultural outpost, K (Ryan Gosling) emerges. Like Rick Deckard, he works for the LAPD hunting down artificial humans or replicants, who have gone rogue. Unlike Deckard, he is unambiguously a replicant himself. At the farm, he finds Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an android on the run who berates him for killing “his own kind.” He wouldn’t do that, Sapper says, if he had “seen the miracle.” K kills him anyway, but the words ring in his ears. What miracle?
Those fearing a cookie cutter remake of the original will be pleased to discover that this is not the case. Blade Runner 2049‘s story builds logically on the original — a seemingly impossible task pulled off gracefully by Fancher and co-writer Michael Green. Resonances come not out of slavish fan service, but because both films are essentially noir detective stories. Some elements feel more like a sequel to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Scott’s film, such as K’s relationship with his holographic A.I. Joi (Ana de Armas)—two simulated beings experiencing possibly real emotions. Gosling gives by far the best performance of his career. When his investigation leads him to an aged Deckard living in the irradiated remains of Las Vegas, he goes toe to toe with Ford and a malfunctioning Elvis hologram in a bravado sequence that alone is worth the price of admission.
The only element of 2049 significantly inferior to the original film is the music. Vangelis’ improvisational synth score is as big a part of the Blade Runner mystique as John Williams’ soundtrack is for Star Wars. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch created a conventional, pounding, atonal soundscape that feels much less subtle.
The film’s running time is hefty, but its pleasures are deep and satisfying. Villeneuve’s direction is brilliant, and if Deakins doesn’t win an Oscar for this cinematography, the award has no meaning. See it on the largest screen you can find.
2001: A Space Odyssey regularly jockeys for position with Citizen Kane and Vertigo atop lists of the greatest movies ever made. When Stanley Kubrick set out to create what he called “the proverbial good science-fiction movie”, he tapped Arthur C. Clarke, the super-genius author who came up with the idea for the communications satellite, and the resulting masterpiece explores the space between scientific rigor and religious awe.
But sometimes it seems 2001‘s influence on the genre it sought to perfect has not been universally positive. Consider 1968’s other great sci-fi hit, Planet of the Apes. It, too, concerned itself with humanity’s ultimate fate, but its big ideas are wrapped in a fun package. There should be enough room in sci-fi for both Charlton Heston snarling “You damn dirty apes!” and Keir Dullea staring into psychedelic infinity. But too often, when directors are given free reign, they feel obligated to try to top Kubrick. Consider two recent examples of hundred-million- dollar misfires: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Nolan’s spectacular, 2001-inspired 70-mm photography couldn’t save Interstellar from collapsing into self-important gobbledygook. For Prometheus, Scott disappointed everyone by ditching the pulpy, “haunted-house-in-space” premise that made Alien a classic in favor of wallowing in secondhand Kubrickian mysticism.
Scott learned his lesson with The Martian. The origin and fate of all humanity are not at stake, just the life of one man: NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon). Adapted from a best-selling novel by Andrew Weir, The Martian‘s inspiration comes not from universe-spanning epics, but from the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations,” in which a space pilot and a stowaway must grapple with the fact that they don’t have enough fuel to land safely. Newtonian physics creates the fodder for high drama.
When an unexpected sandstorm forces the crew of the Ares 3 mission to leave the red planet in a hurry, Watney is hit by flying debris and left for dead. But Watney wakes up and drags himself back to the expedition’s abandoned, but still mostly functional, base, where he performs some gruesome self-surgery and tries to come to grips with the fact that he is more alone than anyone has ever been. The opening sequence, where the crew struggles through the storm and mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) must make the gut-wrenching decision to leave, are some of Scott’s best work since Black Hawk Down. The story then splits into three: the castaway’s uphill battle to survive in Mars’ harsh environment; the NASA ground team discovering they’ve still got a live astronaut on the Martian surface; and the expedition crew flying through the solar system with only enough fuel to return to Earth. Everyone must work together to rescue Watney as the world watches.
The Martian often plays out like a fictionalized, future version of Apollo 13. Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard get all the little details right, like how calling a NASA scientist a “steely-eyed missile man” is the highest compliment, and how “lock the doors” is the worst thing you can hear in mission control. But they never get bogged down in minutiae, thanks largely to Damon’s engaging and vulnerable performance. The cast is huge, and features workmanlike performances from Jeff Daniels as the NASA director, Kristen Wiig as the beleaguered PR specialist, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the mission director, and Sean Bean as the head of the astronaut corps. But even though Scott is excellent at ratcheting up the tension back on Earth, I found myself eager to return to Mars to watch Damon living by his wits while pausing occasionally to take in the otherworldly vistas Scott creates from heavily CGI’d footage of the Jordanian desert.
The Martian is a major return to form for Scott, who seems inspired by NASA’s can-do spirit. The film’s optimism is a far cry from the darkness of Blade Runner, but it has proven to be a big hit with audiences, massively outperforming box-office projections by grossing $55 million in its opening weekend. As this film and Gravity prove, science fiction is sometimes better when it concentrates on the small questions, like how to find your way home.
David Simon, the creative force behind HBO’s The Wire, once wrote a memo to his boss that argued the merits of his show’s deep-focus approach to the problems of drug dealing and law enforcement, claiming that “no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like CSI or NYPD Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows.”
Since Simon wrote this, The Wire has rendered most television crime shows absurdly two-dimensional. But did he ever imagine that his show would cast long, imposing shadows onto the crime movie landscape?
For anyone familiar with The Wire, watching director Ridley Scott’s plodding, generic American Gangster is like perusing a child’s flip book after reading an epic novel. Seen through cinematographer Harris Savides’ grimy, de-saturated urban lens, the film’s simplistic police-procedural details, sophomoric political insights, and facile capitalist ironies are nothing more than a collection of garage-sale leftovers from some low-rent screenwriters swap meet.
American Gangster is based on the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a Harlem thug who, inspired by the rise of the big-box retailers in the late 1960s, decides to cut out the middle man and import heroin from Thailand with a little help from his cousin (a spooky Roger Guenveur Smith). As Frank’s empire grows, he attracts the attention of Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a New Jersey police investigator whose devotion to duty destroys his marriage and draws the concentrated ire of NYPD detective Trupo (Josh Brolin) and his leather gang of Prince of the City goons. These characters sidle around and among each other in a New York/New Jersey crowded with new and leftover consumer goods, garbage, and human casualties from the drug trade.
Aside from implicit storyline comparisons to The Wire, American Gangster has an explicit connection to the show: Former Wire star Idris Elba appears briefly as a rival to Lucas and his expanding empire. Together, Elba and Washington exude gunfighter bravado in a pair of tense street scenes. Yet such pimpalicious behavior is no longer fresh. And is it finally okay to say that Denzel Washington is a tiresome anti-hero? He’s been working his calm charm and devil’s-advocate verve for quite a while now, but he’s one “hooah!” and one more “intense,” nobody’s-home glower away from permanent membership in the Pacino-De Niro Ridiculous Actor Hall of Fame — where he can join Armand Assante, whose buffoonish performance in American Gangster as a skeet-shooting mafia don is what should (but, sadly, won’t) be the movie goombah’s death rattle.
Lucas’ cutthroat business policies are never questioned. His nascent drug empire is justified as vengeance capitalism; he came from hard times, so he’s out to get his, and who’s to blame if most of the damage his business does is equivalent to black-on-black crime? Is the unquestioned law of the expanding corporation so ingrained in our consciousness that even illegal enterprises are glorified if they are effective? Is there no courage left in movies for any critical look at the disastrous effects of free-market madness? Short answer: not during Oscar season, my man.
