Water Levels, Nukes, Drones, and the Casual Diplomacy of "Oblivion"

Oblivion

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Three and One Half Stars

Science fiction is less a genre than a society, and to join, one must pay tribute to the council of elders. More than any other genre, fans of science fiction scour their films for references to the titans of its heritage. The allusions are often scattered throughout as deliberate, coy visual cues, not unlike a word search. It is customary, for example, to represent any malicious artificial intelligence with the ominous red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" ("Red Planet", "Moon", "WALL-E"...). But that's just one example, and one of many that Joseph Kosinski conjures in the clever and striking "Oblivion", a science-fiction blockbuster in the classic sense, placing lavish visuals and exciting action in the service of simple and elegant political ideas.

Nothing Behind Us, Everything Before Us, As Always it is On the Road

On the Road

Directed by Walter Salles

Three Stars

Note: This is the first review I've written since the passing of my hero Roger Ebert. I'd like to dedicate this review in his honor.

I've looked forward to reviewing Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's landmark novel, "On the Road", if only because it would afford me the opportunity to write about the book itself, which is among my very favorites. Kerouac had captured, in vibrant color, an entire cultural movement. The Beats, they called themselves, an underground generation of progressive liberation, punctuated by sex, drugs, and jazz, that laid the foundation for the  hippy movement of the late sixties. He told a tale of the last days of an untamed American countryside, as the coasts had just begun to close in on each other, and cries of freedom still disappeared into a sprawling, wild openness, populated sporadically by strange and eclectic characters that seemed as if from another world.

Roger Ebert Remembered

Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

"Thank You." Roger Ebert opened his last blog entry this way, a gesture of gratitude and reflection that hinted ominously at tragedy. Ebert went on to confess that he would be dialing back the near superhuman output of reviews, blogs, and other writings he had maintained for years. He is not as he was, he told us, but he would continue on at a pace more befitting a man of 70 with recurrent cancer. Two days ago he wrote this. And now, today, while at work, a friend of mine texted me the news. Roger Ebert was dead.

The Golden Iris Awards

I confess that my time spent at the movies has dwindled in the last year, the cinema having now to share valuable downtime with an ambitious fiction project. But make it to the movies I did, and though I didn't see enough great films to constitute a top ten list, I'll present a simple top three, in medal form, below.

Bond's Brave New World

Skyfall

Directed by Sam Mendes

Four Stars

If Sam Mendes’ splendid “Skyfall”, the latest installment in the James Bond franchise, reminds us of anything, it is probably that the vast majority of the Bond films we’ve seen through the years just haven’t been very good. Protected by the cloak of a durable formula, iconic score, and the innate magnetism of a transcendent cultural icon, almost always enjoyable, usually clever, though seldom thrilling, the series has existed safely in cruise control for decades. “Skyfall”, however, is thrilling. One would need to go back, way back, back through the Pierce Brosnan years, back through the Timothy Dalton years, back to perhaps Guy Hamilton’s “Live and Let Die” in 1973 to find a Bond film this heedlessly inventive and captivating.

The Wacky Antics of War Heroes

Red Tails

Directed by Anthony Hemingway

Two and One Half Stars

Perhaps a greater rebuke to racism than Anthony Hemingway’s tepid “Red Tails” is the reality that the film got made at all. George Lucas, that most notorious toymaker of the silver screen, purportedly dumped some $53 million of his own money into the film because the studios had trepidations about the marketability of a film with all black actors. I have little doubt the film will do well. That worry seems a miscalculation. But if the film does perform poorly at the box office it won’t be because of the skin color of its leads. It will be because it is a bad film. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the varying success of the effort will either validate the hesitant studios’ prophecies of lingering cultural racism or their own cynicism.

Violence In the Media Reaches its Apex

The Hunger Games

Directed by Gary Ross

Two Stars

I have not read Suzanne Collins’ young adult book series, “The Hunger Games”. Occasionally a film adaptation comes along that demands this information up front from its critics. But the multiple failings of director Gary Ross’s effort are not uniformly cinematic. They begin at the basest levels of the narrative, and indeed the central premise of the film was a pill I simply could not swallow.