First Man a stunning trip through space and time

Ryan Gosling in First Man. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The driving force of First Man isn't the figure at the center of the movie. The biography of the first man to step foot on the moon is a justification for the filmmakers to take the audience through a visually stunning journey into space. It's a dream and an example of wish fulfillment, the hope of achieving something beyond the realm of a possibility for eons. That the man who actually took those first steps is otherwise unspectacular proves one of the points of the film; dreams don't belong to the most talented, but to the dreamers with drive and tenacity.

First Man provides a snapshot of the life of Neil Armstrong, the eponymous American astronaut played by Canadian Ryan Gosling. The movie opens with Armstrong working as a test pilot in 1961, living a quiet life with his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and children. After the death of their daughter Karen, Neil applies to work as a pilot on the Gemini program, the precursor to the Apollo missions to reach the moon. The ensuing years up to 1969 are a series of trial and errors for NASA and the multitude of scientists and pilots (played by a collection of character actors like Ciarán Hinds, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Lukas Haas, Jason Clarke, Ethan Embry) who put their lives at risk to get to the moon.

There is a soupcon of jingoism inherent in that description, a sense of American exceptionalism director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer grapple with throughout the film. Some of the issue is just the setting, as it seems highly difficult to make a movie about the 1960s without associating it with some levels of idealism and hope. Chazelle and Singer try to cut through it by tossing references to protests against NASA and the space program on the outskirts, which don't succeed at tempering the accidental patriotism but do add a political action this movie didn't intend to have. To avoid being too dangerously patriotic, the filmmakers teased a part of their history that should have been either directly approached or ignored for the sake of storytelling.

Then again, the film is not really about how man landed on the film. Based on the title, it would appear First Man is about Armstrong and his heroics, about what it takes to launch oneself into orbit. Yet the movie doesn't delve much into Armstrong because Armstrong doesn't really delve into himself. As written by Singer and played by Gosling, Armstrong isn't a traditional square-chinned patriot or some mythical being. Rather, he's stoic and reserved, hiding his true thoughts and concerns inside of himself. Armstrong is taciturn (a trait Gosling has perfected at portraying) whose greatest strength as a pilot and greatest weakness as a human is detachment and an otherworldly cool. The depiction is something of a mixed bag. It keeps Armstrong grounded as a person, evading some ugly hero worshiping that has dinged other biopics and resulting in an interesting character because of the silence. If Armstrong is heroic, it's because of his actions, not his personality. The problem arises because the stoicism reflects against Janet, who is not fleshed out enough as a character to fully combat Armstrong's quiet. Janet instead is something of a trope, the supportive wife who has that one moment of verve before returning to her station, safe in the thought that she at least did something. Chazelle and Singer do offer her a decent amount of solo time, but they don't use it particularly well to build up her character. 

 

This would be more of an issue if First Man was really about Armstrong. It is nominally about the man, but the point is less that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, but there was a person there at all. Armstrong is necessary because he was the first, but Chazelle and Singer are far more interested in bring audiences up to the moon with him. Armstrong himself is effectively a vessel to get to the stars, a justification for Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren to take audiences to space. The trips to space veer wildly from sublime peace to pure horror when the danger lights start up and the sounds of imminent failure start blaring across the rickety hunks of metal thrown into space. But the best moment is the landing on the moon and the first steps on the surface, when the film and the audience are stunned into silence, caught up by the majesty of the moment.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 141 minutes

Genre: Biography

tl;dr

What Worked: Cinematography, Acting, Pacing

What Fell Short: Incomplete characterization for Janet Armstrong, political commentary

What To As Well: From the Earth to the Moon, Apollo 13

La La Land a sweet and sad musical throwback

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle has created something marvelous with La La Land. He's taken the best assets of the traditional musicals – the fantastic dreaminess of the dance sequences, the perfect banter that brought relationships to life – and meshed them with modern sensibilities to create a loving homage without devolving into a cheap rehash. It's a film easy to fall in love with and retains some intellectual challenge and consideration about the complicated nature of relationships and the complications of dreams.

There is a logic in using the bones of the old studio musical and inserting bits of modernity to keep it in touch with a younger audience. The classic boy meets girl story, in this case an aspiring actress who grew up on Bogart and the Hepburns (Emma Stone's Mia) and hopeful jazz pianist in love with Felonious Monk (Ryan Gosling's Sebastian) who meet and fall into a relationship, is difficult to botch wholesale as long as the actors have some spark between them. Fortunately, Stone and Gosling are charming as hell individually and share an incredible rapport that makes their flirting seem realistic and sweet amid the more fantastic elements. They sync together almost perfectly, with a perfect charm and a surprising accessibility for two incredibly good looking people. They just sort of glide together, a trait shared with much of La La Land as a whole, from the plotting and pacing to the musical sequences that ease naturally into the story with minimal to no disruption. The tricky thing with musicals is avoiding cramming songs in for the sake of having them in there, wasting valuable minutes on a point that leads nowhere, an issue Chazelle avoids by limiting the number of musical interludes and staggering them to reflect the moment in Mia's and Sebastian's relationship. The songs are more plentiful and more cheerful in the early stages of the relationship and both diminish and darken as the relationship evolves and the seasons change.

Dreams are the life force for La La Land. The film is an ode to the people who dreamed of making it big, the ones who scratched and clawed their way to success despite one rejection after another and somehow found a way to come out on top. The title itself is a link to a romantic hint at the lives Mia and Sebastian pursue, ones in which the greatest hopes and desires are filled with a little luck and a lot of persistence to make things work. Anything can happen in La La Land; traffic jams can become musical numbers, characters can dance among the stars at a planetarium, people will sing along to the songs you start on a whim. Yet there's an ironic twist to the idea of La La Land akin to Faulkner's short story Golden Land. The titles present a whimsical, playful perception of life in Los Angeles, but lurking just beneath the surface is a little heartbreak and disappointment. La La Land dives in from the get go, its opening song both a revelry of pursuing a life of dreams and a comment on how fleeting those dreams can be; the sun always shines even after the hopefuls pack their bags and abandon the pursuit. The film continues with that concept throughout, showing the need to have large aspirations as a part of the human condition and the ramifications those pursuits can have. Success sometimes means abandoning love when the two conflict and the love isn't strong enough to overcome.

Such dreams are a little wistful by their nature, as is the nostalgia felt for hopes that never panned out and memories that are never quite as perfect as they seem. La La Land loads up on the latter, featuring a pair of characters too young to have lived the pasts they wrap themselves in but still wanting to be part of it. They live for something they can't have, and Chazelle uses their longing as the reason the two would connect in the first place and the root of their eventual troubles. The film uses nostalgia as a selling point and turns it around on the audience, a choice that is a little cruel given how sweet everything appears but more honest than letting the fantasy run amok. Dreams are vital in La La Land, but even in a movie that loves improbable aspiration the sweetest fantasy can’t overcome reality.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 128 minutes

Genre: Musical

Ask Away

Target audience: People missing an old fashioned musical.

Take the whole family?: The F-bomb is dropped once, but the overall content isn't overly problematic for kids. Ages 10 and up is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: It'd make for a great date night film.

How's the soundtrack?: Legitimately great and enjoyable. There's a strong mix of classic musical score, a bit of John Legend influence, and more jazz appropriate tunes, and the two work splendidly together. Plus it is catchy as all heck; I kept whistling one of the main tracks, City of Stars, while walking to the train after the movie.

Watch this as well?: This one is rather similar to the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which stars a very young Catherine Deneuve. While the films differ a bit in presentation – any dialogue in Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung – both deal with the fleeting nature of love and how life moves on even after passion fades. A more familiar friendly pick is one I recommend frequently, Enchanted, which is carried in large part by Amy Adams' terrific performance.

'Nice Guys' in name only

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe star in "The Nice Guys." Image courtesy Warner Bros.

The cruelest part of “The Nice Guys” is, after almost two hours of blood, sex and death, all of the chaos on screen never actually means anything. It's director/co-writer Shane Black's greatest joke in a film loaded with great gallows humor and pain, that the borderline heroics of two schlubs in well over their heads results in no change to the world around them. Their success leads directly to failure and the loss of several lives of varying levels of innocence along the way.

It's a fitting coda to a story based in 1970s Los Angeles yet rooted in detective stories like “The Big Sleep,” in which the plot is as logical as an 8 year old's Hot Wheels track. Nothing is quite as it seems from the get go, starting with the chosen career paths of bruiser Jackson Healy (a very bulky Russell Crowe) and private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling). The former, who proclaims himself to be something of a vagabond searching for meaning in life, has the fists of a fighter but the nose of a gumshoe, while the latter is an alcoholic loser whose source of income entails taking money from elderly women for easily solvable cases. What kind of shenanigans can ensue when these two wacky characters meet for the first time? Technically the first encounter entails a broken arm granted to Gosling's Holland by Crowe's Healy, but the second meeting serves as the start of a very dangerous business relationship complete with goons (Keith David, Matt Bomer and Beau Knapp), a steely government official (Kim Basinger) and her assistant (Yaya DaCosta), and a mysterious girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) at the center of all the mayhem.

It's a very old school approach to a film that very much lives in its setting, coupling the grittiness of the streets with the rise of porn as a legitimate force in the entertainment industry and the slowly but surely declining Detroit automakers. The combination results in a pitch perfect milieu for a good detective film, with the dirt and flash representing the conflict between the lifestyles lived by the investigators and the people they're involved with. “The Nice Guys” doesn't view those as mirror images; instead, they're effectively depicted as forces drawing money in theoretically sinful fashions. In Black's view, it's the porn industry that's noble, or at least the career with the potential to change the world, sharing the spirit for betterment possessed by the film’s twenty somethings. It's that sense of trying to do something that leads Holland and Jackson to enter themselves into the arrangement in the first place. Crowe's Jackson aspires to recapture the feeling he had when he broke up a robbery a few months prior; Gosling's Holland wants some semblance of happiness and to show his daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) he is at least moderately competent at his job.

But good intentions can lead to hellish places, especially with characters like these two who lack the qualifications to make their dreams come true. Jackson's moment in the sun is tainted, unwittingly to him, by an epic bout of vengeance he wrought, whilst Holland is too drunk and too much of a loser to follow his ambitions on his own accord. They might be the titular nice guys, but the title itself is something of a joke too; a label like “nice guy” means very little when its ascribed to people like Holland and Jackson. That's why the heart and soul of “The Nice Guys” belongs to Rice's Holly, who serves as the Penny to the Holland/Jackson Inspector Gadget. She's often the smartest person in the room, a very courageous character who fights with her wits and with a little luck on her side. Neither Jackson nor Holland could fulfill their spiritual quests without her presence; they advance somewhat as people because she's around to take care of them. The concept is a little reductive considering how often such roles are filled by women, yet it is effective in large part because of Rice's performance.

Then again, none of this is shown to matter at the end. Whatever personal improvements the eponymous nice guys make is curbed by a world actively acting against their best intentions. It's a cosmic joke, darker than the rest of the black comedy Black puts on display in the movie. Yet it is necessary though to serve as an exclamation mark for Black's ultimate point with “The Nice Guys”; one's advancement in life is never enough to change the world.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 116 minutes

Genre: Action Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: Audiences down for some retro action and watching a burly Russell Crowe punch people.

Take the whole family?: It has the right mixture of violence, nudity and inappropriate language to deserve the “R” rating.

Theater or Netflix?: It's good enough to merit an excursion, but not vital to see on a big screen.

Do Crowe and Ryan Gosling work as comedic actors?: For two guys without extensive backgrounds in comedic acting, they do pretty well for themselves. Crowe works within his limitations for the most part – effectively punching and acting a little slow and very gruff – but Gosling exhibits a penchant for pulling off a pretty good pratfall.

Watch this as well?: Shane Black dipped into a similar detective story/blend of dark humor with his directorial debut “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Along with Black's material are two films by acclaimed writer/director Martin McDonagh that are dark, violent and very often hilarious: “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths.”

Betting big against America

Steve Carrell and Ryan Gosling star in "The Big Short." Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Every film recapping the market crash from 2008 is brimming with venom. Those films – from fictionalized accounts to documentaries – have a plethora of bad guys to choose, people who can serve as the closest approximation to scapegoats available given the dearth of arrests or justice. (Really, how hard is it to find a villain among a bunch of arrogant, unscrupulous, well-groomed sharks?)

The newest look back at last decade’s chaos, “The Big Short,” has more than enough scoundrels to pick from, but, as the film points out, but there weren't exactly a lot of heroes in this situation either. None of the characters in the film (which is based Michael Lewis’ book) do much more than feel some guilt about their actions and put in one token attempt to report the shenanigans to the press. Rather, much like the characters from “Dr. Strangelove,” they seem pretty content to watch the world burn around them. The true anger about the economic destruction belongs to the men behind the camera, who sadly let their ire get the better of them.

“The Big Short” spends most of its time a few years before the crash and splitting time between three sets of investors. Hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an aloof fellow in possession of a brilliant mind and just a hint of an ego (he prefers to be addressed as “Dr. Michael Burry”) is the first to spot a notable weakness in the subprime mortgage market. Realizing the end of the market is near, Bale takes out more than a billion dollars in credit default swaps, effectively betting millions of Americans wouldn't pay their loans. The deal trickles down to oily investor and film narrator Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who wants in on the action but needs money to join in. He eventually stumbles upon cynical hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) and his team (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater) who work under the auspices of Morgan Stanley, and presents an economic opportunity that appears too good to be true. But a little research and a trip to Florida reveals the danger in the market, and provides Carrell and his team ample motivation to invest in credit default swaps. The final side of the triangle consists of aspiring investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who desperately want a seat at the table with the big boys but don't have the experience or the capital to earn it. That is until they catch wind of Gosling’s proposal and recruit retired trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to assist them. All that's left then is for the players to wait and see if their forecasts are correct.

While the film is presented in a linear fashion, the filmmaking is not as straightforward. Characters repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to offer short asides to the audience or redirect viewers to a few celebrities, and several clips of pop culture moments infiltrate the screen to point out how easily distracted the American people were at the time. Director Adam McKay takes an absurd approach to the material, which fits the absurdity of the events that actually occurred. Like its spiritual forefather “Dr. Strangelove,” is organized chaos, and while not all of it succeeds, enough lands to keep the film engaging for more than two hours, and the little tricks showcase McKay's distinct voice and sensibilities, along with a bite he hasn't shown often in his comedic films.

That bite ends up souring the film, especially when McKay's rage starts to boil over. The man is very, very angry about what happened, angry that the people responsible effectively got away with it and have already rebooted the same practices that led to the last collapse. The problems arise when the McKay and his fellow screenwriters begin to let that frustration seep into the filmmaking – a few bits of dialogue have a strong “mad as hell” vibe to them – that diminishes the “Big Short” as a film. It’s why the film suffers, and the reason “Dr. Strangelove” makes for such a strong point of comparison. Both films find humor from humanity's eagerness to destroy itself, but while “Dr. Strangelove” embraces the farce and let’s the insanity speak for itself, “The Big Short” is just pissed off by it and can’t help but rant and rave about the injustice. Even if the anger is justified as it is in this case, it just isn’t a very good means of storytelling; yelling at the audience to wake up is condescending no matter how good the intentions are.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 130 minutes

Genre: Biographical

Ask Away

Target audience: People still peeved at the people who caused the economy to fall asunder and the system that let it happen.

Take the whole family?: A fair amount of cursing and nudity earns this a solid “R” rating. Only bring the kids if you play an extended game of earmuffs and cover their eyes with a free hand.

Theater or Netflix?: You might be better served waiting for the streaming version. Hit up a matinee screening though if you do opt to see it in theaters.

Academy Award chances?: It has a strong shot to get Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominations in the very near future, and Adam McKay might sneak in for Best Director. Any major awards beyond that could be tough, as the Best Supporting Actor field is crazy deep (Christian Bale has a chance per Oscar tracking sites, although it is a volatile category).

Watch this as well?: The documentary “Inside Job” does a terrific job navigating the complexities of the fall while holding a few of the major players accountable for their deeds. Also seek out one of McKay's previous ventures, “The Other Guys,” which touches on the economic collapse, as well as the raucous, insanely funny and dispiriting “The Wolf of Wall Street.”