This is the song of angry (rich) men

In 2007 I lived in a suburb of Phoenix, way out in the far West Valley where homes sprung up like weeds in the desert sand. Mortgage brokers couldn’t give homes away. Bad job? Poor credit? No savings? Here’s a house. It was harder to stand on a busy street corner and give out $10 bills. And then one day it all ended. 

The newspaper I was with at the time covered those terrible years, back when people used air quotes around the word “recession” and then when they dropped the air quotes entirely as they drove off in a moving van, their belongings hanging out the back like the Beverly Hillbillies. The sub-prime mortgages, the interest-only loans, the house flippers who extended themselves one house too many. It was like a huge game of musical chairs, but instead of 100 people and 99 chairs, it was 100 people and one chair — lots of people had nothing when the music stopped.

The Big Short is the story of how and why the recession happened. How American banks were dragged to their knees by hubris, and why they sold the American people down the river to save their own skins. It’s a powerful indictment of greed, capitalism, and the “American way,” which in this context is golden parachutes, profit and satisfying shareholders. If this film doesn’t make you frothing mad, then you’re still not paying attention.

The movie, directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman) and based on a book by Michael Lewis, begins with Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an eccentric trader who stares at market prices the way Rain Man counts toothpicks. From amid vast spreadsheets of information he notices a pattern in how mortgage defaults are creeping upward. Never one to miss an opportunity, he bets against the house market — he shorts it — something that is never done, because the housing market is a constant, it’s like betting against gravity. When he shows up at all the investment banks to place these bets, they almost feel sorry taking his money.

It’s abundantly clear very early that McKay is going to work with all the market jargon and banking terms, and do so with reckless abandon. So he enlists help, including Margot Robbie, playing herself naked in a bathtub with bubbles up to her chin. She lifts a champagne flute and promises to teach us about collateralized debt obligation, credit default swaps and “shorting” the market. It’s sexy and effective, and I promise it actually teaches you about CDOs and the other dirty bombs that sunk the housing market. In other sequences characters address the camera directly and explain to the audience what’s happening and why it’s important. Anthony Bourdain teaches us about junk bonds and how they’re rated while filleting fish, and Selena Gomez explains betting against the market at a Vegas blackjack table. It’s the best economics class you’ll ever take. 

Meanwhile, we also drop in on money manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell), hedge fund manager Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and on two young up-and-coming analysts who want a seat at the big boy table. All of these characters eventually find what Burry finds, what is essentially a doomsday machine built into the housing market. And one by one, they all start to plot how to make money on what they know. 

Now, I don’t know if these men (and their composites) are villains in this story, but The Big Short portrays them as innocent financial geeks who discover the terrible secret of the economy and do what they can to profit off it. They don’t keep it a secret, in fact several of them had shared their bets with other bankers, who promptly laughed at them for their faulty investments. Carell’s character is especially convincing as he wanders back and forth between the people who rate bonds, Goldman Sachs (never forget the Rolling Stone line about the company: “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”) and the mortgage brokers on the ground in places like Florida, Arizona and Nevada. One government oversight worker is so negligent to what’s happening under her nose, she is quite literally blind. As the chips stack up against the housing market, these men watch in horror as their bank accounts grow off the failure of the American economy, and although they are rich, their souls will never recover. If that makes you mad, then what happens to the banks will send you ballistic.

McKay dissects the collapse with the precision of a surgeon, but the wit of a comedian. The movie is funny, often hilarious, especially as character narrate their own stories or address the camera to wink and smile and tell us “this sounds crazy, but this actually happened.” One of those instances comes when the Bear Stearns CEO sits in front of analysts telling them the company’s stock is rebounding, even as members of the audience are watching it freefall. The best parts are the characters and how they balance each other out: Bale is the anti-social genius, Carell is the moral overseer one step behind the market, and Gosling is the crude stock-bro playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the American economy. They couldn't be any more different, except they all have a keen sense for money and its hidden value in places only bankers have access.

This is a movie we need right now. The recession is over. The Fed is hiking the interest rate back up. Jobs are returning. Wages are stagnant, but all signs are pointing to eventual increases. And just few a years out, it’s already forgotten. Banks are still pushing their way around with no consequences, and they have still not been held responsible for the swindling of the American economy. The Big Short holds their feet to the fire, and it arms the public with their best weapon — information.

A space saga reawakened

It’s strange how a song, some yellow text and a movie logo just makes everything seem alright in the galaxy. It just feels like home, a warm hearth to lean against in the cold void of space. 

J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, is not the end-all/be-all, the alpha and omega, of cinema history the way the fanboys have been saying. But it is an utterly magnificent retooling of George Lucas’ floundering mega-saga. When Lucas turned his nuts-and-bolts space opera into a toothless CGI-painted joke, the franchise marched toward its own doom, one Hayden Christensen line after another. But Abrams has imbued the first chapter of a new trilogy with a newfound sense of wonder with a convincing cast, a snappy and electric story, and minimal CGI. It’s a coup for the franchise, a drastic course correction, a clean slate, a Mulligan in hyperspace. It’s also a action-packed thrill ride, one of the purest joys of the year.

The tone is set in the first seconds, in the first line of the famous scroll during John Williams’ iconic score: “Luke Skywalker has disappeared,” it says. The resistance, the side of our heroes, wants Luke to guide them forward. The First Order, the villains, wants to kill him and destroy the last links to The Force, a spiritual power that would likely die with Luke. The resistance has a map that leads to Luke’s last location, but the First Order, the last remnants of the Galactic Empire, attempts to capture it, thus starting the conflict of the current film.

Our players here are Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a resistance fighter and ace pilot; Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper with an awakened conscience; Rey (Daisey Ridley), a metal scavenger with a connection to The Force; and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a practitioner of the Dark Side who has started a one-person death cult that worships the defeated Darth Vader. These characters frequently cross paths in Lawrence Kasden, Michael Arndt and Abrams’ mostly competent, at times clunky, script that includes a crash course on Star Wars lore, complete with shout-outs to holographic chess, 12-parsec space runs and lightsaber genealogy. The film goes to great lengths to establish meta and spiritual connections to the original franchise, and its does so with complete care.

Early sequences revolve mostly around BB-8, a ball-shaped droid that is carrying the secret map to Skywalker’s location. The famous R2-D2 shows up later, but BB, with his cute hiccups and bloops, cements his place in the Star Wars canon long before then. Other franchise staples show up, including Princess Leia, now General Leia (Carrie Fisher); the still-dashing space smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford); Han’s walking carpet sidekick Chewbacca; and gold-plated C-3PO, human cyborg relations. Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon makes a triumphant return in a scene of pure exhilaration as Rey, Finn and BB-8 outrun TIE fighters in a desert wasteland filled with the relics of war from the original trilogy. 

Abrams’ world is populated by a huge variety of alien creatures, from snorting elephant-pigs and googly-eyed club owners to noodly space pirates and tin-headed bounty hunters. Many of the characters are made from physical special effects, silicone and moldable foam, and not computer animation. Even the sets are real, which was a big gripe about Lucas’ last movies: they were clinical and lifeless, projections designed, executed and presented from within a matrix of computer programs. Here, though, the world feels real and livable, and it’s populated by characters with souls. 

I hate to beat up on Lucas, but Force Awakens improves on every aspect of the prequel trilogy: from the special effects and sets to the acting and dialogue. Those films lost their way very early on, but this one steps forward with sure footing and a nostalgia for the original films. Abrams’ story could use some tweaking, particularly in some areas involving yet another Death Star, the dramatic reappearance of a “sleeping” character, and the state of the galaxy, which is never really explained how or why the First Order maintains so much power in a post-Return of the Jedi universe.

But these minor annoyances are made up for with great characters, lots of them, and all of them wonderfully constructed by the actors who play them. Boyega and Ridley are charmingly well equipped for this franchise, and bring to it a sense of adventure and heroism. And Driver’s Kylo Ren is a terrifying misfit who wields incredible power. He frequently hides behind a Vader-ish mask that gives him a Bane-like chamber for his voice to bounce around in with an eerie bass-rattle. Ford, playing the Star Wars veteran in more ways than one, helps hold all this together with a keen sense of humor; in fact, there are many jokes here, some in very unlikely, yet warranted, places. 

The best part of this new chapter is how it contributes to the myth of the Star Wars universe, The Force, and characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker. “It’s true, all of it … the force, the Jedi … all of it is true,” Han Solo tells our reluctant heroes who only know of the events from episodes four through six as bedtime stories and forgotten lore that has been passed down two and three generations. The Force Awakens not only brings Star Wars back for the characters, but for the audience as well. And never before has this franchise felt so alive.

Like a bridge over troubled water

In the 1950s Americans lost their collective minds looking for communists. Many innocent people were caught up in the “red scare” and Joseph McCarthy’s televised witch hunt. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is not about one of the innocent victims of the era, but an actual communist, a spy sent from the Soviet Union to steal American secrets in the event of — gulp — nuclear armageddon.

The Cold War does not have the sweeping appeal of World War II, with its tanks and soldiers blasting away at each other on panoramic battlefields, but it’s stories are just as revealing about the soaring heights (and plunging depths) of humanity, and the morality of a silent warfare that turned American against American.

In 1957, the United States government reached out to attorney James Donovan (Tom Hanks), an insurance lawyer in Brooklyn. They asked him to take the case of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a KGB infiltrator caught spying for the Soviets. They have Abel dead to rights, but they need a talented lawyer to defend him rigorously to keep up appearances that, indeed, America is a bastion of democratic, constitutionally sound values and principles. Donovan agrees and is quickly stonewalled by a biased judges, a kangaroo court, an overzealous prosecuting attorney and a pitchfork-wielding public that sees commies in its soup.

Presented as a legal procedural, the early segments of Bridge of Spies are expertly choreographed and fascinatingly presented. Here’s Donovan, doing Uncle Sam a favor, being spied on by Uncle Sam. Hanks, at his most feisty, has a great sequence with a CIA agent, who asks Donovan to violate attorney-client privilege by revealing what Abel actually did for the Soviets. The lawyer bristles at the request, and pounces. “Don’t nod at me and smile you son of a bitch,” Donovan tells the American spy. It’s wickedly fun, and Hanks hits all the right notes to get the audience on Donovan’s side, regardless of what his client has been accused.

In a concurrent sequence of events, four young pilots are being briefed on a new mission, one that will take them 70,000 feet up over Soviet Russia in a U2 spy plane. Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is one of the pilots, and on his first flight encounters the loving embrace of Mother Russia. Powers and Abel quickly find themselves as pawns in a political game of chess that has global stakes. The players in the game are proxies, stand-ins who don’t have official status: for the Soviets it’s several communist-friendly power players, and for the Americans it’s Donovan, a pudgy Brooklyn insurance attorney whose wife thinks he’s fishing in England.

If you know history, you know what happens next, and it’s fascinating stuff, particularly when Donovan heads to East Germany to negotiate with his counterparts on the other side of the still-forming Berlin Wall. These scenes on the other side of the Iron Curtain are photographed in gloom, with cold colors and chilly concrete. The setting must have felt hopeless for Donovan, who’s robbed by a street gang, jailed by border guards and tactically outmaneuvered by an array of communist bureaucrats with conflicting of agendas.

Spielberg is known for his big movies — Raiders, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan — but I would argue that his smaller character-driven pictures show just as much mastery of the medium as the blockbusters. Here he tells a story about a man fighting for American ideals that America itself doesn't want to be bothered with. Hanks is terrific — when is he not? Rylance as the Soviet spy Abel is especially electric. He has a refrain that appears frequently, “Will that help?” You don’t seem worried about the death penalty, Donovan tells him in court. “Will that help?” Abel is a curious character, one that Rylance wraps in mystery and self sacrifice. Few actors can keep pace with Hanks, but Rylance does, and with apparent ease.

Mostly, though, Bridge of Spies is a collection of tiny victories: the lighting is nuanced and effective, the camera work is modestly unassuming, the sets and locations invoke the paranoia of the time and place, and the small details of East German life, such as an indoor hallway for bicycle messengers, gives the film its unique cinematic identity.

Spielberg makes too few movies, and it’s movies like Bridge of Spies that makes me yearn for more.

"Apollo 13 ain't got nothin' on me"

Ask a man to run a 5K. Snap a picture of the reaction on his face. When he’s done with that, ask him to run a 10K. Snap a picture. Half marathon. Snap. Marathon. Snap. Triathlon. Snap. Ultra marathon. Snap. Now you have a series of pictures, a flipbook version of Ridley Scott’s grueling new sci-fi juggernaut The Martian, a movie about one man’s epic endurance battle with science, space and the limitations of duct tape. 

Matt Damon is the Martian, and he’s stranded on the Red Planet after a violent dust storm has swept him away from his NASA team as they are aborting their 30-day mission a dozen or so days early. They rocket away thinking he’s dead, but the next day he claws from the soil very much alive and very much screwed. “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” he says in an instantly iconic line that will be on every Matt Damon clip reel from here on out.

What a fascinating time to be making science fiction films. Gravity and Interstellar were terrific warm-ups to this, and the three films make an amazing trilogy about discovery and survival in the endless vastness that is our universe. Scott’s an old pro at this, having already made Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus, each with their own distinct visions of the future. Here, though, he sticks closer to the “science” versus the “fiction” and the story thrives because of it. 

The film presents Damon’s astronaut Mark Watney — and by extension us — with a never-ending string of problems. The Mars base was designed for 31 sols, or Martian days, and now must last upwards of 800 to sustain its solitary inhabitant. Food is in short supply. Plants have never been grown in Martian soil. Water is running low. The communication system is broken. The rover has limited range and abilities. On and on the list goes, each new item more challenging than the one before it. Each problem has its own gratifying solution that seems either based on actual science or at the very least plausible. 

The Martian finds its footing almost instantly by starting on Mars a dozen or so days into the mission. It doesn’t waste time introducing an endless stream of supporting characters, because Watney’s ordeal allows that to happen naturally. It drops all the setup and goes right to the meat: Mark is struggling to stay alive, the crew is questioning their decision to leave what they presumed was a dead astronaut back on the Mars, and NASA engineers back on earth begin assessing what went wrong. It feels very procedural, and that’s part of the charm because it allows the snappy editing and concise presentation to build the story from the ground up. 

The film has also found the right cast, especially with Damon as the resourceful botanist. He’s likeable and genuine, and he does things that we can relate to, like when he mouths a great big “WTF” in the initial days after he’s marooned. Damon also works because he’s believable as an inventive science geek. It wasn’t a stretch when he was a genius mathematician in Good Will Hunting, and it’s not a stretch here to see him as a NASA wiz-kid. You’ll cheer him on when he creates an ASCII-to-hexadecimal code board, or he tears through poop pouches to get fertilizer, or he rigs up an explosive hydrogen tent to create water. There is so much to see, and so much for Damon to do, that there is never a dull moment, even when the film is in its most reflective, existential state. 

Now, to be sure, this is a terrifying ordeal. And The Martian spends a lot of it kicking its hero when he’s down. Your heart just aches for him with every setback, and there are many. Drew Goddard’s script, from an Andy Weir novel, has this devilish ability to prepare you for the worst over and over again. So many awful events happen to Mark Watney that you start planning for them, assembling them into the plot even where their not needed. At one point when he was driving the rover through the rocky landscape, he starts rubbing his eyes and yawning, and my first thought was he was going to fall asleep at the wheel and roll the vehicle over. The movie had conditioned me for disaster, and I was ready for it, whether it was coming or not. 

Led by a strong team of actors — including Damon, Jessica Chastain as the mission commander, Jeff Daniels as the NASA director, Sean Bean as a flight specialist with a classic Lord of the Rings zinger, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as mission lead — The Martian takes a captivating tale of survival and gives it an immediate presence with strong writing and expert execution. It’s photographed gorgeously, with a fun mixture of documentary-like POV shots, found footage and epic Martian panoramas, and edited so precisely that you would be hard pressed to find a single frame that’s been wasted. I simply can’t say a bad thing about it because it’s one of the most entertaining movies of the year.

The broken brilliance of being young

It’s entirely possible that the world’s most brilliant mind is in the body of a child. And also imprisoned behind a veil of paralyzing awkwardness. 

In A Brilliant Young Mind we’re introduced to a number of worthy candidates, all of whom are trying to out-awkward each other with cold facts, debilitating shyness and enough social tics they could be charted into “trigonometric identities,” or whatever that is. 

Nathan (Asa Butterfield) is one of these young people. The British lad sees the world in geometry, algebra and calculus. He’s by all estimates a genius, yet he can barely function in the real world. When his mother orders take-out if the fish sticks and chips aren’t positioned symmetrically and in prime numbers then he flips out.

He’s guided by teacher Martin Humphreys (Rafe Spall, son of Timothy), who suggests he participate in a mathematics olympiad for the most brilliant young pupils. Nathan takes the test, passes and soon finds himself in Taiwan studying with other mathletes his age. He gets a crude wake-up when his fried prawns are delivered in an eight-count container … so close to a prime number, but yet not.

The film dips into darker territory as the characters open up and reveal their even more fragile cores. One boy, Luke, is likely autistic, which leads to bullying even in these nerdy circles. A Chinese student that Nathan is paired with is harassed because her uncle is the director of the team. Nathan’s issue is just communicating on a basic level. He mumbles, recoils at the lightest touch and his eyes reveal sparkles of brilliant pain. This wounded kid is thrown into a new culture and he remarkably thrives, which breaks the heart of his mother (Sally Hawkins), who can’t seem to understand why he’ll open up to everyone but her. 

Of course, the film all boils down to the math olympiad, but then it’s not that simple. It’s written with care and truth, and no “big game” sports climax will ever solve all the issues swirling around in this layered and pristinely textured script by James Graham. There is some stale cliche, including a “surprise car crash” still in the clamshell packaging and a race to the train station to get the girl, but even those conventions are given new spins, fresh perspectives.

The math is dense and confusing, and is barely explained outside of one sequence in which Nathan turns a card trick into a binary matrix. In other scenes the equations are just glossed over in broad strokes. I knew it was complex stuff, though, because the math problems had more letters than numbers, and brackets within brackets within brackets. “If truth is beauty and beauty is truth, then surely mathematics is the most beautiful thing in the world,” says an olympiad leader played by the great Eddie Marsan. I’ll take your word for it. 

Although the surface of this coming-of-age story is rather blandly paced and acted, there are deeper currents of emotional agony that are running through this film. Scratch but a tiny bit down and it opens some terrifying places related to love, family, success and acceptance. But in the end, like math, it has an inherent beauty to all of it.

Stunning climbing movie opens 1996 wounds

Nothing in the world feels as helpless as watching people suffer within an arm’s reach of safety. You can see them, you can hear them, you can almost reach out and touch them, but they might as well be on the moon. Help will not come. Only death.

Everest does not sugar-coat this cold — bone-rattlingly cold — reality, but it does dress it up a bit with adrenaline-fueled adventure that comes with climbing to the highest point in the world. Mount Everest, at 29,029 feet high, is the gold standard for pushing the human body to its most extreme potential. The summit is so high it shares an altitude with a cruising 747 jet. The air is so thin that the human body slowly fails as it gasps for oxygen. The edges are steep enough that one false step and a climber will never be seen again, their bodies are consumed by the mountain and its icy pores.

Why go then? That’s what reporter and author Jon Krakauer asks a group of climbers who’ve paid five figures to joust with nature on Everest’s slopes. “Because it’s there,” they all laugh, stealing George Mallory’s famous line about the deadly peak, a peak that killed many climbers, including George Mallory. Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest features Krakauer, author of the book Into Thin Air, but largely focuses on Rob Hall, a dedicated and skilled climber who guides “climbing tourists” up Everest during the month or so of good weather that creates a window of opportunity through a collapsing glacier field, over a rocky plain, across a knife’s edge, up a vertical step of rock and onto the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

It’s no easy feat. The cold is relentless, the air is dangerously thin, the physical stamina required is second to none, and the weather is violent and unpredictable. All totaled up, everything is deadly, but nothing more than a climber’s own body, which slowly betrays its own muscles and nerves with every failed, agonizing breath. Humans weren’t made for these conditions, so it’s Rob Hall’s job to guide everyone up and down the mountain before their bodies collapse. And they pay him $65,000 for the privilege. 

Hall, here played with a gentle warmth and crucial demeanor by Jason Clarke, is the star of this ensemble mountaineering adventure and he’s joined by his clients Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin) and Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), his base camp leader Helen Wilton (Emily Watson), Krakauer (Michael Kelly) and a colleague with another company, Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), as well as many other characters all portraying actual climbers and sherpas.

The film does not skimp on details, and routinely shows climbing in an authentic light, from the slow acclimatization process that is required for climbers to maximize the thin air on Everest, to the tediously slow pace the climbers take as they lumber up the mountain. This is not Cliffhanger, or even that mixed cheese plate Vertical Limit. Everest, using much of Krakauer’s fact-checked text, and his personal observations, treats the events of the 1996 climbing season with delicate reverence. 

As Hall and his company, Adventure Consultants, creep up the mountain, everything seems to be going well. The Everest newbies are struggling, but not dangerously so. As they prepare for a big ascent day, the day is almost perfect until a rapidly moving storm sweeps up and over the mountain essentially stopping the expedition in its tracks after a successful summit attempt. The serenity of the snow and the mountains is suddenly gone, and the climbers are left stranded in deadly conditions. Hall and Hansen are highest up, and have a long way down with little oxygen left. Below them Fischer, Weathers and others claw through the white-out conditions.

If you’re like me you’ll start getting very anxious in your seat during the second half of this film. These men are in mortal danger, and yet they shamble along with their coats open, their hands ungloved and their feet stumbling over rocks and patches of ice. Some men can’t even stand, and they slump down in their tracks to fall into a numbing sleep. You want to scream at them, “Hurry! Your life depends on it.” The thin air plays tricks on their bodies. Their muscles can only move so fast, and their brains flicker on and off from a severe lack of oxygen. Everest is killing them slowly, and there is nothing they can do except descend, if only they could stand and walk. Some men fall off the mountain, which a non-climber can understand and fear, but this slow death is worse — sinister and cruel.

What’s even worse is the small army of rested climbers who are held at bay by the storm, unable to ascend further than they already have because they lack oxygen, strength or the willpower to sacrifice themselves. In some cases, climbers are left on the mountain to die because they can easily slow down healthy climbers or pull them off the edge. And even when climbers do die, their bodies are left right on the trails, because hauling them down is a risk all by itself. At one point, no one can get to two climbers, and all the base camp can do is put one climber’s wife on the radio to say goodbye as he drifts into eternity. 

The facts of the 1996 climbing disaster on Everest are widely known, and have been documented in a number of ways, including the IMAX movie led by David Breshears, who returns as consultant, second unit director and Everest cinematographer for this film. This is an old story, but it’s given a fresh new examination here with Kormákur’s brilliant filmed movie. It’s well acted, marvelously paced, as accurate as any historical movie can hope to be, and the cinematography is simply gorgeous. Some of the shots look like IMAX stills, with sherpas hauling goods over tiny bridges stretched across valleys, oxen cresting ridges against the backdrop of the Himalayas, and of Everest reaching into the starry heavens.

This is an incredible movie, one about heroism and its devastating limits in a place like Everest. The rules on that rock are absolutely absurd. And failure to comply to them usually results in fatalities. Yet every year people line up to risk everything and make the trek upward. Everest makes the joke that they do it “because it’s there,” but the film also makes a point to address another answer as to why people climb it — “because it’s magnificent.”

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall

Here’s something your college economics book didn’t teach you: Make a great product. Sell it to to kids. Wait until the kids grow up and then start advertising it for you, for free. Marketing department? Who needs one when you have devoted followers. 

The product in this case is LEGO, which is embracing its cultural zenith following last year’s LEGO Movie — an impending sequel is in the works — and now with a tell-all documentary about the Danish toy company. A LEGO Brickumentary, like the LEGO Movie before it, is a cheerful examination of all things LEGO, and it innocently blurs the line between entertainment and commerce. But really, says the film’s subtext, aren’t they one in the same?

It’s narrated by Jason Bateman, who plays a little astronaut minifig, or minifigure, who’s animated into the interludes of the film’s chapters that chronicle LEGO’s formation, its rise to prominence, a sudden downfall and then its eventual rise back up to be a $4-billion empire. Other toy companies, like Mattel and Hasbro, the film says, have different lines of toys, like Barbie and G.I. Joe, but LEGO makes only one line, building blocks. And it makes a lot of them, enough to give 100 bricks to every person on the planet. 

The film spends equal time with LEGO product engineers and with its many fans, young and old. It’s remarkable how much the company stays in contact with its biggest collectors and builders, and even goes as far to employ them in developing new designs and innovations. Many of its designers simply sit in rooms all day and build new sets, tweaking little details to tell stories and then pitch their sets as eventual products.

We learn all kinds of useless LEGO phrases: Clutch Power is the name given to the strength of the interlocking mechanism at LEGO’s core, AFOL is “adult fan of LEGO,” tubes and studs are the names of the major components of an average brick, and Mindstorms is the robotic line that users are hacking for their own purposes. The company found out about the hacking and instead of telling users to cease and desist, they encouraged them to discover and build new creations. Embracing the blocks’ many uses is on of the company’s many triumphant successes.

We meet an artist who uses LEGO bricks in his fine art, a designer who creates a successful architecture line of famous buildings, autistic children who enhance their learning with team-based LEGO projects, a man who creates LEGO guns because the company won’t, and the man who made every LEGO user a potential designer with his CUUSOO crowdsourcing site. One potential designer is an awkward man who creates a model of the Curiosity Mars rover, complete with the cantilever-style suspension of the famous robotic explorer. 

In many scenes, adults are shown to be just as involved as children. These adults found LEGO as kids and never gave it up. They snap bricks together in zen-like states. That reassuring click of the bricks just feels right. I played with LEGOs as a kid, and I could relate to the sensation of snapping those famous bricks into place. NBA star Dwight Howard is a LEGO fan, as is South Park co-creator Matt Stone.

A LEGO Brickumentary rarely strays too far from LEGO’s corporate agenda, one of imagination, design and invention. A movie about Nike, for instance, would almost have to examine its labor practices in poor countries or else it would be seen as pandering to corporate interests. LEGO doesn’t seem to have skeletons like that worth digging up. The film does acknowledge severe corporate and brand negligence during the 1980s and ‘90s, when executives felt the all-powerful brick was obsolete and introduced an array of simpler, streamlined sets that stripped bare the core values of the company. The film doesn’t acknowledge the toymaker’s strong links to big oil — the toys are, after all, made of plastic — although that is something the company has only just begun to address. 

All considering, this is a fair, if altogether toothless, examination of the company’s culture of creativity. If you played with LEGO, or have kids with LEGOs, there’s something for you here in this charming documentary.

The Farewell Party gives reverence to death

There is dignity in death and The Farewell Party searches for it in humorous bursts of empathy. 

It begins with an elderly tinkerer ringing up an older woman. “This is God,” he says, and the woman, senile and confused, believes him. “You are certainly going to heaven, but we have no vacancies, so you must get your treatment.” The woman nods. 

At this point you realize you’re in for for something very unique, and likely heartbreaking. 

The tinkerer is Yehezkel (Ze’ev Recach) and he is watching his best friend suffer in pain in a care facility. His prognosis is terminal. Morphine no longer works, and he’s developing bedsores that are increasingly painful. His wife, at the end of her rope, suggests they end his agony and the gears in Yehezkel’s head begin spinning. 

What happens next is a devastating examination of mercy as Yehezkel and his band of helpers plan, build and implement a euthanasia machine. The device is crude -- it is driven by a small motor and a bicycle chain, and uses drugs intended for animals -- but it is effective at ending the suffering of Yehezkel’s “patients,” who seek him out at great risk for themselves and their loved ones.

The Farewell Party handles all this in a serious way, but you can’t help but smile at its subtle brand of bleak comedy, from the gay man literally trapped in the closet and an overzealous traffic cop repeatedly talked out of writing tickets, to a touching scene with much of the elderly cast nude and high in a greenhouse to cheer up a friend with dementia. The gallows humor manages to give brief reprieves between each heartbreaking death. 

The Israeli film, directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, is beautifully staged and photographed. The camera almost never moves, preferring instead static shots that give the scenes and their terrifying implications reverence. When it does move, in a lovely musical number and later in a tragic moment of realization for Yehezkel, it does so to punctuate the delicate nature of life and death.

It ends precisely where you want it to, but it stings even as it rings true. This is a beautiful film, one that gazes long and hard into the soul of the dying, and those who look over them.

Westerns return to greatness with Slow West

A teenager stumbles into a cluster of trees as he walks his horse through clouds of acrid smoke. He comes into a clearing where he discovers the source, a smoldering Indian encampment. Burned teepees are scorched and ruined, their narrow bones still upright and revealing their triangular corpses. The scene is played in black and grays, with an immense feeling of dread that looms over the wayward boy lost in nature’s wrath. The sequence was likely shot on a soundstage, but it feels like a Caravaggio painting come to life in the West. 

I’ve never quite seen anything like this before, which further proves the resilience of Hollywood’s oldest genre, the western. 

Slow West is an intense burn of a cowboy picture. It comes together like an epic romance: a lovelorn teen, Jay Cavendish (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), journeys to America’s Western frontier to find his sweetheart, Rose. Rooted in romance and the Old West, the film is more an absurdist road adventure and surreal fantasy: In an early scene, Jay looks up over the frontier, aims his revolver at the stars and watches as they light up like a shooting gallery. This scene leads into the burning of the Indian village, which is so hauntingly beautiful that it seems plucked from another movie in another genre.

Jay quickly meets Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), a bounty hunter with a secret in his pocket: a wanted poster with Rose’s picture on it. Silas agrees to help Jay find Rose, even though his intentions are deadly and selfish. What transpires on their journey is a magnificent set of adventures, the likes of which have never before been seen in a western. You’ll know you’re very far away from John Wayne and Clint Eastwood when Jay meets a trio of Congolese singers on the road. Who are these men, and where did they come from? Slow West doesn’t elaborate, just presents images and shambles onward toward Rose’s doom. 

Much of the film can be broken up into episodes, including one where Jay and Silas are stalked by the film’s villain, a fellow bounty hunter. I kept thinking I knew where this scene would go, and Slow West goes far and wide to prove you can’t predict anything in this strange western universe. The confrontation, or lack thereof, ends when the creek they’re camped next to floods, washing their weapons away and leaving them with soaked clothes. They ride away in their longjohns with their clothing tied to clotheslines stretched between their horses.

Another episode takes place with a traveling preacher, who imparts one last piece of advice on a slip of paper that reads “West” with an arrow pointing. If only Jay had picked up the paper before the breeze, which forever scrambles the arrow’s intended direction. In another scene, Jay and Silas are caught up in a store robbery that goes wrong in every conceivable way. And then they step outside and it gets even worse. 

Slow West is written and directed by John Maclean, whose debut here as an innovative force is about as fine as debuts come. Maclean’s biggest film credit before this was in High Fidelity, in which his band at the time, the Beta Band, has a song featured in a key sequence. How he got here to Slow West, and why — and what took so long — are questions almost as fascinating as the film itself. Almost.

It’s written perfectly, with balance for the deceptively complex narrative and the intriguing characters; the performances are spot-on, with Smit-McPhee and Fassbender making an unlikely but likable pairing; and the visuals are poetic and serve the film’s larger theme that man is not nearly as cruel as nature. Consider these three shots: a tree that has fallen on a lumberjack, his axe-wielding skeleton splayed out beneath the trunk. Ants crawling on and in the barrel of a gun. And, in one of the final shots of the film, jump cuts to each and every person killed since the beginning of the movie.

Death comes for everyone, but in Slow West it lingers, and chokes, and it does not come quickly.

Arnold-starring Maggie is a rare zombie movie

The zombie is an ironic metaphor for, of all things, the zombie genre: it shambles forward, meat decaying off its bones, teeth falling from its mouth, unable to die, its only mission to consume. You can shoot it and delay its momentum, but it just keeps coming back for more. 

After every iteration of zombie cross-pollination — zombie comedy (Shaun of the Dead), Zombie rom-com (Warm Bodies), zombie sci-fi (The Last Days on Mars), zombie suburban drama (Fido) — and an increasingly manipulative zombie soap opera on television (The Walking Dead), we must certainly be approaching a zombie zenith. After all, how many zombie movies, shows, comics and video games do we really need?

“One more, please,” begs Henry Hobson’s directorial debut Maggie, a largely unique zombie movie with something to say in an overplayed and babbling genre.

The film plays out in whispers, sighs and reserved mumbles. It’s quiet and contemplative, the kind of movie that doesn’t feel rushed when it looks out a window to wonder. It’s been months, or maybe years, since a zombie uprising has been quelled. Survivors are picking up the pieces and rebuilding, but infected still pop up now and again. They aren’t called zombies — no, they are carriers of a fatal disease called the necroambulist plague — and are treated humanely, more like terminal cancer patients than horror villains. 

The bad ones, the run-of-the-mill walking dead, are killed outright, but the infected who are still conscious and articulate are granted small doses of humanity. They’re allowed to return home, be near their families, eat and drink regular food, and put their affairs in order before the virus’ two-week incubation period gives way to full-blown braaaaaaains cravings. Before patients “turn” they are encouraged to voluntarily enter a quarantine center where they will be housed and later euthanized, or a family member can end it all for them. “I would use that,” the family doctor says, pointing at a shotgun.

This is the world that we enter as we meet Wade, a father of three somewhere in the Midwest. The state of Wade’s world is explained in an overly helpful NPR story — if All Things Considered is still around, then things probably didn’t get that bad. Wade’s teen daughter, Maggie, has been bitten and he’s bringing her home to the family farm. No one is really trying to process Maggie’s fate; it all feels so raw, so they ignore it. They cook and make dinner, she uses a swingset in the yard, she goes to a party … life is mostly normal, except this festering bite and its putrefying aftermath that represents Maggie’s future.

I haven’t yet told you the stars of the movie, and that is intentional. Maggie is played by Abigail Breslin, the young child actress from Little Miss Sunshine and, as luck would have it, Zombieland, who is making waves now as an adult. Wade is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in what might be the most unique role of his career. He holds a gun, but only shoots it offscreen. He’s involved in two fights, and is roundly defeated in one of them. And he doesn’t have a single one-liner. Where other movies are built around this abstract idea of AHNOLD, Maggie casts the former California governor as a regular guy doing mostly regular things. And you know what? It works. By no means is this prestige acting, but it’s a serious role that requires him to act and not stunt. I was continuously surprised by his performance and his pairing with Breslin, who also does a fine job with the minimalist material. 

Maggie is original as a zombie movie and a Schwarzenegger flick, but it occasionally loses its way. There’s a bit with a roaming fox that goes on with little reward, and some of the visual payoffs look like hand-me-downs from The Walking Dead. In one of the film’s only zombie fights, Wade wanders through a deserted gas station, past a bloody mattress, through buzzing flies and into a dark hallway to use the bathroom. Of course there’s a zombie by the toilet that he has to fight off, but why didn’t he read the clues? More importantly, how did he even survive the original zombie plague with instincts like this?

These deficiencies are made up for with Hobson’s careful directing, which (mostly) avoids cheap jump scares and rapid edits for a deliberate, more cerebral story about a father and a daughter as they comprehend the limits of their love. The music is mellow and evocative, the colors are cold and desaturated, the editing is straightforward and direct, and the performances are flat but also realistic — Hobson takes into account what’s already been done in the zombie genre and goes out of his way to tell a different kind of story. And it’s pretty good.

So maybe the genre isn’t altogether dead.

Boxing's soap opera gets a fitting conclusion

Bert Marcus’ boxing documentary Champs has a broad vision of the history of boxing and its cultural presence, but then, like many discussions about boxing, becomes laser-focused on two people and the one event that shaped the sport’s last golden era.

The boxers are, of course, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, and the event is, of course, that one time Iron Mike chomped on Holyfield’s ear. It’s funny how that one nibble is ground zero for so much of boxing’s modern relevance. It just steamrolls everything else in its path; even Muhammad Ali is a footnote. 

This isn’t a criticism of this beautifully shot and carefully written documentary, just an observation of Champs’ meandering from grand history to petty soap opera. What’s even more curious, and this is criticism, is how the film tells the story of a third character, reformed prison boxer Bernard Hopkins, but largely neglects him in favor of the more famous fighters. I found myself wanting to watch an entire movie just on Hopkins, without all of Champs’ rehashing of the Tyson/Holyfield drama. 

The doc begins with an array of talking heads — Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Ron Howard and many others — praising boxing’s philosophical implications: man-versus-man, man-versus-self, a refuge for poor inner-city kids, “an escape from violence through violence,” … on and on with an array of metaphors. They say it’s a perfect sport, which is what the talking heads always say in these kinds of sports documentaries. 

We eventually meet Bernard, who falls in with the wrong people and ends up in prison. He takes up boxing behind bars and before long he’s the best fighter at a string of prisons. Later, after he gets out, he goes on a stunning winning streak and then devotes the rest of his career to responsibly promoting young boxers. These chapters of his life are carved up into the larger narrative of the Tyson and Holyfield fights throughout the ’80s and ’90s. 

Even people who know nothing of boxing know of Tyson and Holyfield. These are old stories, but they are given refreshingly new life in Marcus’ film. Both men are interviewed extensively, and both appear to be wiser than they once were. Tyson, a convicted rapist, even cries, in a scene that is genuinely heartbreaking. Holyfield is much more likable, especially when the film covers his 1984 Olympic controversy, in which a woefully misguided referee disqualifies him as he clobbers his way to gold. He eventually won the bronze, although everyone acknowledges Holyfield as the gold medalist. 

And then there’s the chomp heard ‘round the world. I remember this 1997 fight. I was in high school at the time, and it was endlessly debated who was the stronger fighter, a debate that is still being waged today by many boxing fans. Holyfield would later forgive Tyson, an act that director Spike Lee is still surprised by: “A piece of his ear is gone forever,” he says. 

The stories of Tyson and Holyfield always felt interrupted as they were happening so many years ago. Now that both men are older, and are at peace over their roles in each other’s lives, their respective stories have some closure. And looking at the whole thing from beginning to end, you realize how Dickensian it all is: poor kids rising up amid the struggle of sport and personality, fighting with themselves more than each other, confronting their bad decisions, owning their mistakes and pushing forward past fame. Both men are shown in their prime, in sprawling mansions with Rolls Royces, white tigers and swimming pools as big as lakes. Today they live modest lives in the suburbs with pickup trucks and Ikea furniture. 

Champs has a number of dead-end ideas, including segments about the prevalence of black fighters coming from inner-city ghettos, the role of concussions and repeated brain trauma, the need for federal regulation, the role of money and power. These are interesting ideas with no conclusions. Before the film can say anything relevant about these issues it drops them and switches topics. 

The photography, though, is wonderful. Subtle re-enactments, slow-mo footage of training sessions, examinations of boxing neighborhoods, and lots of historical footage fill the air between the interviewers. 

One scene really stuck out for me: Tyson, in the throes of despair, finally realizes how little and insignificant he is. “The world is bigger than me,” he says, which should be the mantra for every fighter.

Teen and wolves collide in Druid Peak

Wherever Jack London is he is smiling down on Druid Peak, a coming-of-age story about wolves and the rehab center they run called Yellowstone.

Marni Zelnick’s debut feature doesn’t begin with the wolves, but with bad boy high schooler Owen (Unbreakable’s Spencer Treat Clark), who’s such a rotten apple that he even intimidates his merry band of droogs, one of whom is his chemistry teacher’s grandson. When one of Owen’s bullying sessions goes a little too far, he finds himself covered in blood in a ditch, which is the universe sounding a very big alarm in his ear, to which Owen puts on earmuffs. 

His mother, though, is scared for his safety and future, so she ships him off to his father, who’s a park ranger in Yellowstone, where he monitors the wolf population. Owen’s first day in Wyoming doesn’t go so great: he steals a pistol, some ammo and treks off into the great blue yonder. You’ve heard of Rebel Without a Cause, well here’s rebel without a compass. His dad (Andrew Wilson) is mostly unfazed by all this, if only because he’s so much like Owen — he’s living off the reservation because he’s kind of sick of people too. 

It’s only through Owen’s involvement with the park’s wolves — maybe because he’s a lone wolf himself — that this reformed nihilist slowly starts believing in something, anything, that isn’t destruction. I’ve seen many movies like this before: the reformed bad boy finds a hobby and eventually makes good. This one is altogether competent, if not completely predictable. It’s also gorgeous, with filming taking place in aspen-filled forests, beautiful valleys with winding rivers and grassy meadows lined with wildlflowers. It’s like a Bierstadt painting come to life. 

Druid Peak spends a lot of time establishing the procedures and minutiae of observing wolves, which added an interesting level of detail to the science of the park. For instance, Owen begins tracking several key wolves with their radio collars. A lesser film would have given them all GPS locators and called it a day, but Owen has to lug around this big radio antenna and listen for beeps amid the static. And even when he hears something, all that’s telling him is that one of the wolves is within three miles. I appreciated that the film didn’t dumb it down for the audience. Later on the radio collars plays a bigger role as the wolves slowly encroach on nearby ranches and their scrumptious cattle. The science of the wolves and their existence fits within the world of the film’s story. And the wolves look incredible.

I have a low tolerance for teenaged bad boys, and Owen wore me thin at the beginning — I blame last year’s Hellion for that — but he matured fast enough with the plot that his misanthrope phase doesn’t last too long. Clark, a 26-year-old playing a 16-year-old, has these mysterious eyes that can be expressive and bright in the wolf scenes, and then hollow and emotionless in the opening bits. He’s an interesting choice, but a sound one that nudges the movie forward.

Andrew Wilson, sibling to actors Luke and Owen, might be my new favorite Wilson brother. He’s had bit parts in several Wes Anderson movies, but here he’s allowed to linger on the screen long enough to actually get a good glimpse of him. He’s on the screen to mostly play off Clark, but he has one scene that really stood out for me: he’s flipping through materials on his desk and he notices Owen has stolen some money from a box. The film avoids that verbal showdown you feel coming, and instead allows the father a beat or two of disappointment before moving on. It’s a subtle scene, and one of the Druid Peak’s major victories. 

Of course, there is all kinds of wolf drama near the end, and talk about a wolf-hunting season, which promises to show us all the scenes you’d imagine in a movie about a boy who owes everything to his furry new friends. I saw it coming, but that’s not to suggest it doesn’t play out well — it does.

Druid Peak adds some minor, but altogether interesting, twists to the coming-of-age story. I was pleasantly surprised. And I think you will be too.