The Curiograph - Art, Politics, Craft Beer - A Compendium of Worldly Facts

Art, Film, Literature. Politics and History. And most Importantly: Beer. Paul Deines informs and opines on Marvel and Pasolini, Obama and Edmund Burke, Coors Light and Westvleteren 12. A top to bottom exploration of all that is necessary in life. A Compendium of Worldly Facts

SHUTTERSPEED - 12 Things about Logan

July 6, 2017

by Paul Deines

Last weekend I caught up with James Mangold’s Logan. It was definitely a fresh take, but I did not swoon the way the movie-going public-at-large has. My mind is still trying to process the film days later, which probably indicates that it accomplished something.

Anyway, here are 12 things about the film that need to be addressed. (SPOILERS FOLLOW)

1. The advance press on this picture is that Hugh Jackman took a pay cut to calm producers about its hard-R rating. All well and good, but does anyone else feel like the script was written for a PG-13 film, and then someone penciled in, like, 200 fucks? Seriously, the profanity in this picture is unbelievably distracting.

2. Getting into plot holes in a comic book picture is a fool’s errand, but come on: Logan is hiding a mentally-deteriorating Professor X from American intelligence officials. He kills six guys in the opening scene. Why is he dedicating so much energy to legally securing funds to buy a boat? What ethical compunction is stopping him from stealing one?

3. Boyd Holbrook is easier to take when he’s not delivering painfully extraneous narration, á la Narcos.

4. I thought we were past the time when directors showed characters watching fully edited film like it is raw video. The video Logan finds on Gabriella’s (Elizabeth Rodriguez) phone involves months of documentary footage edited together with voiceover. Did she have Final Cut Pro on that iPhone?

5. If it serves no other purpose, at least Logan provided a reference for Senator Kamala Harris when she discussed the existential threat that automation poses to blue collar jobs. Like her, I was impressed by the low-key dystopian vision of an American highway filled with menacing autonomous big rigs. Another interesting, if undercooked, idea is having a multinational conglomerate buy up most of the US farmland to grow corn for their syrup-based narcotic beverages. Both futuristic concepts are remarkably grounded for a superhero picture.

6. This is purely a hunch, but I wonder if X-24 was included in the script so that Hugh Jackman could still be shredded for part of the movie. Otherwise, it would be 100% puffy, wheezing Jackman.

7. My wife disliked this film quite a bit, and I think her most salient point was that the Wolverine/Laura/X-24 fights were essentially the Too Many Spidermen musical in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

8. I would say that pretty much every death in this film could have been prevented if Logan just drove straight through without stopping. Google Maps tells me that Oklahoma City to the Canadian border is a 16 hour drive. Even Logan had held firm on the no-stopping, they’d have been in Canada in a single day.

9. Despite my reservations, I understand why Logan was met with such rapturous praise. For people who grew up reading X-Men comics in the in 80s and 90s, Wolverine was the definitive Gen X superhero, just a Superman was in the mid-century. These fans have never seen the comic-book Wolverine on film. The problem has never been Jackman, who was born for the role: the problem was that a studio never let Wolverine go full berserker until this film.

10. Here’s the thing, though. Logan suffers from the same problem that all serious superhero pictures do. Supposedly socially relevant comic book stories generally take on themes of bloodshed and tyranny: the immutable cycle of violence, the cost of total security, the moral limits of unlimited power. But the nature of the medium requires that the narrative end with a massive action set piece. So, when you have a film adaptation that’s willing to incorporate realistic violence and pitch itself to an adult audience, you’re left with a gigantic thematic contradiction. In Logan, we have three characters contending with the violence they have perpetrated and the violence done too them. They try to justify their killing by saying it is self-defense or the killing will prevent suffering on a much more consequential scale. But the narrative furnishes us with a monstrous antagonistic group (as always in X-Men pictures, a military-industrial cohort bent on destroying/weaponizing mutants), thus justifying its violent ending. And it is the violence we the audience enjoy most. I mean, Laura (Dafne Keen) taking out a bunch of man-bunned mercenaries will never get old. And as mentioned above, Wolverine comic fans were dying to see a real berserker rage. And how wonderful was it to see the test-tube mutant children finally take their collective revenge on Holbrook? But what are we left with? A two-hour-plus treatise against violence ending with an orgy of righteous killing. At best, that is sloppy. At worst, insidious.

11. One concrete bonus for Logan’s success: it has probably scrambled the brain of every major studio exec. After Deadpool, they were probably lining up scores of Stewie-Griffin-in-a-cape screenplays. Now they’re all probably trying to figure out how to put Captain America in a decimated post-industrial city.

12. I think we officially have to put Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” in the ironic soundtrack penalty box, alongside “What a Wonderful World” and “Hallelujah.”

SHUTTERSPEED - Review: Green Room

June 13, 2016

by Paul Deines

It has been two years since the wide release of Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, a deceptively spare revenge thriller fretted with escalating dread and subversive plotting. In that film, an itinerant protagonist blunders into a quest for vengeance. Events spiral beyond his control, and amid the maelstrom he finds something like grace. Blue Ruin plays like Greek tragedy. It was my favorite film of 2014.

Now comes Saulnier’s follow up, the bloody backwoods shocker Green Room.

This story centers on the Ain’t Rights, a floundering punk band from DC. When we meet the band members (including Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat), they are stalled in an Oregon cornfield en route to a pathetic gig set up by a gawky thrashcore enthusiast. The organizer, embarrassed by the poor attendance, arranges a second show for them.

Imogen Poots

Turns out this gig is at a skinhead bar teeming with seriously pissed-off neo-Nazis, and things go south when Yelchin inadvertently walks in on a killing. They find themselves trapped in the eponymous room, barricaded with a terrified local (Imogen Poots) and limited resources, and matching wits with the unsettlingly calm proprietor played by Patrick Stewart.

Saulnier, as he did with Blue Ruin, has identified a real-world horror and built around it. In his previous film, it was childhood trauma, and the idea that finding redress might perpetuate and propagate more suffering. In Green Room, it is white nationalism, cloistered in the wilderness and fueled by drugs. That this film premiered in the year of Trump lends it a verity its creator could not have anticipated.

To be sure, these protagonist have no idea what they’re up against. The standoff begins with a locked door, a gun and a hostage, but these desperate kids quickly give up any advantage they had. By the midpoint of Green Room, I felt queasy. A massacre bears down on the characters, and the horror is unbearable. For a moment, I wondered if this filmmaker had abandoned the essential humanism of his previous film and embraced an Eli Roth-style sadist nihilism. Yet he manages, always, to project the tiny flicker of hope that someone might make it out alive. It’s a tightrope walk: it also fantastically entertaining. My audience shrieked, hooted and laughed uproariously.

Macon Blair

Yet Green Room is by no means a perfect film. Indeed, its strengths often undermine some of its less solid intentions.

For one thing, Saulnier – or perhaps the marketing team for this picture – is pitching the film as a punk experience, right down to modeling the poster on the album art of London Calling. Yet Green Room isn’t really a punk film. The Ain’t Rights are presented early on as poseurs (whose self-important dismissal of social media is a large factor in their undoing). The true filth and fury in this story exists in the backwoods venue. But this working-class rage is about race supremacy, not expression. When a particularly loathsome character compliments the Ain’t Rights’ music as “fucking hard,” he’s speaking of it as a soundtrack for violence. This is subversive stuff; I don’t think it’s served by a studio marketing it as a latter-day Repo Man.

I’m also surprised that the marketing for Green Room is so fixated on Stewart’s performance. One trailer would have you think that we’re in store for a villainous turn on par with Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men or Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. Stewart is menacing, though his English accent seems totally out-of-place in this Deliverance on the Pacific. Indeed, the actor’s innate gravitas makes his character’s hateful ideology eerily palatable. Still, he’s overshadowed by the far more palpable terror Saulnier creates with photography, sound and an ensemble of committed extras. The Ain't Rights arrive at the club and are met with throbbing feedback and many tattooed glowers. They open their set with a snarky Dead Kennedys cover, and the entire room begins pulsing towards them. Thoroughly shaken with this collective malevolence, I was less impressed by Stewart. His studied dissembling is far less compelling than the unchecked rage of his acolytes.

Patrick Stewart

Two actors that bring the menace are Eric Edelstein and Macon Blair. Edelstein plays Big Justin, a sullen galoot who may be more frightened than the band he’s barricaded in the green room with. Justin is a vulnerable monster, trapped and dangerous and more than a little bit funny (his response to a warning from a band member drew a peel of cathartic laughter from my audience).

Blair, the star of Blue Ruin, gives the most emotionally resonant performance in Green Room. As Gabe, the new manager of the club, he meets every awful twist in the story with wide eyes and tremulous voice. Gabe is complicit in the carnage but does not have his red laces (a signifier that he has personally spilled blood for the cause). He needs Stewart’s approval but fears he cannot measure up. Gabe’s desire to prove his worth, though, makes him unpredictable and fearsome. The way he shakily informs the band that “we’re not keeping you: you’re just staying” is spine-chilling.

The wavering, uncontrollable threat that Edelstein and Blair represent feels like the white nationalist movement. Stewart, in contrast, feels like a villain written for a thriller.

My last nagging concern involves two revelations in the second half of the film: one in the club basement and one in a car’s trunk. That neither of these becomes a bargaining chip for our heroes might be narratively brave. As with Blue Ruin, much of the tension in this film derives from the fact that our protagonists aren’t thinking clearly. Sometimes this is infuriating, sometimes hilarious, always exhausting. Rarely have I felt such fear for characters, and I was nearly enraged that they frittered away the meagre leverage they had.

In the end, Green Room is not a chess game though. Or perhaps it’s a chess game played badly, in the midst of a monster truck rally. It’s thrilling, and pretty rough.

SHUTTERSPEED - Hollywood Told Me to Like These (2015 Oscar Round-Up)

February 27, 2016

by Paul Deines

We’ve made it in under the wire! The 88th Academy Awards are this weekend, so that means it’s time to discuss the nominated films from 2015. As usual, I could get to nearly all of them. In particular, you’ll probably notice the absence of Brooklyn, Creed, Room, and Straight Outta Compton. Apologies, but please enjoy the capsules below, many of which are expurgated from reviews that appeared on this site or on Letterboxd.

The Big Short – Adam McKay, director of Will Ferrell comedies, finally makes the liberal polemic he’s been teasing for years. I’m amazed that Michael Lewis’s novels – meritocratic celebrations of innovative thinking – have proved reliable for awards film fodder. But McKay makes a bold filmmaking gambit, combining music-video-level kinetic cutting with unblinking dedication to narrative clarity. So, when McKay and screenwriter Charles Randolph need to explain the mechanics of collateralized mortgage debt or credit default swaps, they short subtlety and bet big on lecture. Characters break the fourth wall, and cameo stars explain market concepts directly to us. Blunt but tremendously effective. But all of this would be incidental if the film wasn’t entertaining, and McKay has peopled it with incredibly charismatic men (Marisa Tomei and Melissa Leo appear in small roles, but this is a story dominated by money bros). Each embodies an essential reaction to the coming collapse, whether it be bemusement (Christian Bale), resignation (Brad Pitt), salivation (Ryan Gosling) or waking rage (Steve Carrell). That rage most animates The Big Short, an incredulity that the entire financial sector fostered an increasingly unstable housing boom and then tied countless job and retirement plans to it. There’s a lot of gallows humor in this picture, but it reverently bears witness to an economic cataclysm.

Bridge of Spies – it’s so easy to dismiss Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, so wont are both to lean on aw-shucks platitudes. Still, I’m not sure the wholesomeness of this pairing could better be used than in Bridge of Spies. Working from a script by the Coen Brothers, this story of a lawyer’s work to broker a spy trade in 1957 taps into a particular type of patriotism and rides it to maximum effect. It’s Rockwellian, Capra-esque, more than a little libertarian, and not terribly subtle. Indeed, Bridge of Spies often seems comprised only of mirrored shots intended to illustrate how American civil liberties are what make this country exceptional. Whether it’s a child climbing over a fence or a tired prisoner being gently awoken, Spielberg and the Coens want you to remember that respect for the individual is the bedrock of this nation. Mark Rylance has garnered most of the love for his stoic, sensitive Soviet operative, but I’m more moved by Hanks. The way he grumpily battles a cold and his nagging humility is totally winning. You get so invested in his sense of human decency, you could almost forget this is the Jim Crow era.

Carol – It should go without saying that Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt is gorgeous to behold. Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman have worked together since the equally ravishing Far From Heaven, and this story of two women (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) willing themselves to admit their love in 1950s New York is told with a mannerly, economic style. The tension builds shot-by-lush-shot and scene-by-yearning-scene. Blanchett finds a wonderful balance between the Sirk-esque melodrama Haynes is replicating and total emotional truth. And supporting actors Kyle Chandler and Sarah Paulson elevate every scene they’re in. Only Mara disappoints. Her protagonist is interior to the put of enigma, her reserve so complete that it snuffs down more than a couple key emotional beats. Carol is an ode to the romance of 1950s cinema, told through a tale that could not (except under a pseudonym) be told back then. I wish the main actress has tapped in to that melodrama a little bit more.

(Note: the fifties are apparently the it decade for Oscar films this year, between this, Bridge of Spies and Brooklyn)

Ex Machina – it is probably unfair to suggest that this film is essentially a two-hour episode of Black Mirror, but that was what stuck in my mind as I watched. And that is not necessarily a slight. Ex Machina – about a reclusive genius (Oscar Isaac) and one of his employees (Domhnall Gleeson) performing a Turing Test on an artificially-intelligent creation (Alicia Vikander). What makes this picture more than a particularly clever potboiler, though, are the performances. Ex Machina functions as a three-handed acting standoff, and it’s a testament to Alex Garland’s script and direction that no one seems to press too hard for advantage. Vikander and Gleeson’s interrogation scenes are taut, hushed and crisp. Isaac runs away with the picture, though, turning his Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg/Howard Hughes amalgam into a seductive, messy tyrant, sometimes abusive but often just goofy. The sound and production design and visual effects evoke an unsettlingly sterile laboratory prison. If the end is a little disappointing, attribute that to massive expectations of the crackerjack script.

The Hateful Eight – Quentin Tarantino’s bleakest film, weighed down by its immense scope and ambition. The story is simple: two bounty hunters (Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson) and their captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) become stranded in a Wyoming cabin in during a blizzard. There, they find themselves in the company of a group of untrustworthy characters. But The Hateful Eight engages with race and nationalism through the prism of the Civil War. Characters wrestle with their roles in the war and whether they have a place in America in the Reconstruction era. Leigh’s is the standout performance, a creature of true repugnance. Walton Goggins almost matches her as a Confederate nationalist that becomes oddly sympathetic as the blood starts spraying. Jackson and Russell are more measured, both characters getting short shrift from Tarantino’s bloated script. The Hateful Eight, while always beautiful and often thought-provoking, is torpedoed by the director’s worst impulses, particularly a propensity toward violent misogyny. It all culminates in an ending that’s so cruelly glib, it instantly raised my hackles. (Read the full review)

Inside Out - I’m definitely in agreement with the consensus that Inside Out is a return to the wonderful mean at Pixar. That is to say it combines breathtaking, creative visual grammar with a smart, emotionally rich story. It also made me dubious of the Pixar brand. On the one hand, the story is totally original: an 11-year-old girl (Kaitlyn Dias) contends with her a seismic shift in her life, and we experience it through the dueling anthropomorphized emotions controlling her thoughts and actions. Working from a wonderfully open conceit, directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen (and their raft of writers) set rules drawn from the science of memory and imagination. This framework provides the narrative of Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) journey back to the control center of our protagonist’s mind on her first day at a new school. It’s engrossing and surprising, but I question the methodology. Is this a children’s film made exclusively for adults? The exploration – how experience becomes memory, memory becomes personality, and loss becomes growth – was deeply affecting to this 33-year-old, but I cannot imagine showing it to a young child. The film is steeped not only in wonder, but in profound despair. Pixar is often a deliver system for ugly weeping, but mostly this pathos flies past young eyes. Inside Out’s tragedies, conversely, seem pitched at the childhood experience, which left me queasy.

Mad Max: Fury Road - A breathless tumbling-out of highly choreographed action. Scored to Verdi, its sprawling chases are symphonies of carnage. George Miller – he who singularly helmed the whole Mad Max series – took every dime Warner Brothers gave him and created a gloriously rendered world. That world includes a flaming double-guitar war minstrel, a desert fire twister, a neo-Norse warrior code based around steering wheel totems and silver spray paint. And some pretty inhumane solutions to hemophilia. I’m not sure Mad Max: Fury Road is the great feminist rejoinder some have claimed, but its key performances are largely women’s. Charlize Theron has a scary stoicism that anchors the manic proceedings in a place of pain and determination, and she’s flanked by intense actresses of all ages, all kicking a fair amount of ass. Also, there’s Tom Hardy. The standout performance, though, is Nicholas Hoult, as a hapless “war boy” determined to win his place in Valhalla. In essence, this picture is an expertly constructed gee whiz machine with a serious revelry. (Read the Letterboxd review)

The Martian – I can’t imagine anyone actively disliking this charming, modest picture. Based on the beloved Andy Weir novel, this chronicle of a stranded botanist’s struggle to survive on Mars is remarkable for its ability to maintain tension without mayhem. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard manage to keep the specter of death in frame while leaning hard on light comedy. The whole enterprise is powered by Matt Damon, stretching the limits of his considerable likeability. He keeps us hooked throughout, sweating over his potatoes, his rover’s power supply and his lack of decent pop music. There’s so much competence on hand – both in the production and in the narrative – so it’s a shame that The Martian is essentially a trifle. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against it. Still, I feel about this film the way I feel about Malcolm Gladwell and TED Talks. That is to say, I can nod approvingly at the labor of talented people, even as I’m unsure there’s much going on below the surface.

The Revenant – Early in The Revenant, Director Alejandro Iñárritu accomplishes a striking coup de cinema. Following a breakneck raid on a trapping party by Arikaras, the camera pulls back from our retreating protagonist, and into the foreground steps the Arikara chief. After cringing at the unremitting brutality of the raid, we hear the resigned chief’s words: his kidnapped daughter is not here. In that moment, I thrilled to the idea that Iñárritu’s picture would be a roving exploration of the chaos that was Manifest Destiny. Within twenty minutes, though, the film had recalibrated to focus almost exclusively on Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his desperate struggle to survive in the wilds of the Northern Plains. That, too, is compelling, and DiCaprio earns his Oscar nomination with blood and sweat. Tom Hardy, though, steals the movie with his Sling-Blade-by-way-of-Klaus-Kinski antagonist. The Revenant is full of glorious images and expertly staged sequences, but the director leans hard on the meta-spiritual hokum everyone apparently loved in last year’s Birdman. Then, the final minutes become a silly cat-and-mouse game in the snow, sinking the whole enterprise. When DiCaprio looks directly into the camera in the final shot, I imagined him thinking, do you know what just happened? Because I sure as fuck don’t.

Sicario – Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan have created a visceral, nihilistic portrait of America’s drug war. The US-Mexican border of Sicario is a modern Hell with unexplained explosions and hanging bodies. Into this cesspool step three soldiers, played by Emily Blunt (an FBI agent), Josh Brolin (possibly CIA) and Benicio Del Toro (something far more shadowy). The truly unsettling thing about this story is its deliberate, measured pace. Blunt (and her partner, played with punchy concern by Daniel Kaluuya) is abruptly recruited to a shadowy mission in Juarez, yet she (and we) are totally in the dark as to the objective. Her performance is stirring, somehow both emotionally open and totally guarded. She's matched beat-for-beat by Brolin's swaggering operative, who is so comically upbeat throughout that you're certain his intentions are vile. Yet, it's Del Toro who steals the film, with a focused, contained intensity we’ve never seen from him. That he wasn’t nominated is insane. My only qualm is a shoehorned subplot involving a Juarez cop and his family. The inclination to include a plot from that side of the border is a good one, but the scenes appear so infrequently that they seem to interrupt to the main plot rather than augmenting it. And without spoiling anything, the way this character eventually intersects with the other protagonists is so abrupt it hews close to dismissive. (Read the Letterboxd review)

Spotlight – Drawing from great investigation pictures like All the President’s Men, director Tom McCarthy and co-screenwriter Josh Singer have created a quiet but fiery film. Detailing the Boston Globe investigation into the archdiocesan cover up of rampant sexual abuse, Spotlight focuses entirely on procedure, only occasionally finding its way into a room with a victim or abuser. Those scenes are frightening and powerful, but their infrequency and the low pitch with which they are presented only amplifies their power. The entire community has absorbed the fact of child rape into daily life, so when reporters begin to ask questions, all the anger is directed at them. Spotlight’s ensemble is across-the-board strong, each quietly focused, pressing sources and navigating legal and procedural mazes. Rarely does a voice get raised: when righteous points are made, they are done so in a forceful baritone. Only once does the newsroom break into indignant shouting, which feels contrived compared to everything that came before. The direction and production are equally subdued. McCarthy’s camera stays low, ground level. The characters wear Van Heusen shirts and dockers, walk below fluorescent lights, over grey carpets. The message is clear: more often than not, the world is changed by determined people working diligently against injustice.

SHUTTERSPEED - Review: The Force Awakens and The Hateful Eight

February 19, 2016

by Evan Hernandez and Paul Deines

Editor’s note: So, to catch up with two of the most super-hyped films of 2015, I am joined by regular contributor Evan Hernandez to run down two bits of movie-nerd catnip: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens and The Hateful Eight. Since these movies have both been out for several months, we’ll be a little freer with spoilers. Consider yourself warned.

STAR WARS EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS

The Force Awakens is one of the few movies I've seen that required a second viewing in the theater just to soak in all the awesome. The lightsaber battles are perfect; charged with the raw emotion of inexperienced warriors fighting to the death. The X-Wings and TIE Fighters battle wonderfully in 3D. The new leads carried their place at the center of this new Star Wars saga wonderfully, with humor and chemistry. I was carried away!

The film is a relatively simple story about three characters striving after a single goal. That's good movie-making. Put a locked box in the middle of a room and watch three protagonists discover their true strengths and weaknesses as they pit themselves against each other and the lock. It's hard to go wrong there, and writer/director JJ Abrams gives us exactly that in the story of Finn, (John Boyega) Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

But why did I feel so odd at the end of it? Why did I feel a little cheated?

Most people have attributed this nagging doubt about the film to the flimsiness of the political situation in the movie. Who are the First Order? How much of the galaxy do they control? Is the Republic in charge? So many questions left unanswered, but I can't say it bothered me all that much. I think they'll answer many of those things in the coming movies, but more importantly: who cares?

After a little soul searching, I think I have my answer. I felt cheated because this movie essentially throws out the character journeys of the original films.

When we left Han Solo at the end of Return of the Jedi, he was a changed man. No longer a skeptic, he believed in The Force. No longer a loner, he was in love with Leia and devoted to Luke. No longer a smuggler, he was now a general, someone who volunteered for dangerous missions and risked his life for others and for a cause. His character arc over the three original movies was profound.

Where do we find him in The Force Awakens? Sure, he's not a skeptic, but he has completely reverted to the loner, self-serving, double-dealing smuggler he was at the beginning of A New Hope. He's abandoned his family and his cause. They give us a decent explanation for it: his son's betrayal tears him apart and destroys his relationship with Leia. That isn't implausible. It happens. But it's a lame character choice.

As I left the theater I realized I wanted to see Han and Leia bicker with the old familiarity of a long married couple. I wanted to see the old smuggler chafing under the weight of his responsibilities – anxious to roam the galaxy but sacrificing his happiness for the greater good – only to be released into adventure by the arrival of a new crisis. But none of those hopes were fulfilled!

Leia is back to being an unlovable hard case the way she was in A New Hope. Gone is the affection that Han revealed in her as he was lowered into the carbonite chamber. Gone is the sisterly concern for Luke on Endor as he prepared to face his destiny. She has a few kind moments in the closing minutes of the film, but they're fleeting and unsatisfying. For the most part she is just General Organa, humorless hard-ass.

I have high hopes for Mark Hamill's performance in the next film. It could be the movie that defines his career. But for now, I can only lament that I will never see Han and Luke in the same room again, sharing all that history and companionship. The unlikely friendship that gave us the immortal line "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!" is gone, and Luke is, once again, alone on a distant planet.

Another Death Star. Another TIE Fighter/Millennium Falcon battle. Another mysterious Emperor hologram. Another X-Wing trench run to glory... The props and set pieces of The Force Awakens are the thoroughly rehashed props and set pieces of A New Hope, set in a galaxy afflicted with an emotional reset button.

Fortunately, it is clear that the center of this new trilogy is not focused on nostalgia, or the past. Rey and Finn are my new favorite Star Wars characters. Their chemistry is joyous, their presence captivating, their characters wonderful and their origins mysterious. Even their droid friend, BB-8, took over that little shelf in my heart marked "Favorite Star Wars Droid". And Kylo Ren is such an intriguing villain that everyone has a different guess as to what his real motivations are.

So, enjoy The Force Awakens. It won't be hard to do. But if you're like me, what you will really enjoy is the anticipation. The next one will stand on its own, without the need to separate itself from the original trilogy. The starship is packed. Let the real adventure begin. (E.H.)

THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is a picture pulled apart by its ambitions. On the one hand, it’s the director’s most contained film, yet it’s filmed in Ultra Panavision. It takes place over the course of 24 hours, but there’s an overture and an intermission. Its ensemble is comprised almost entirely of villains, but there is no satisfaction when they start bumping each other off. And while all of this filmmaker’s recent pictures have juxtaposed high-minded themes and cartoonish mayhem, this one feels genuinely disjointed.

The story is Tarantino’s simplest since Reservoir Dogs: two bounty hunters (Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson) and their captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) become stranded in a Wyoming cabin in during a blizzard. There, they find themselves in the company of a group of untrustworthy characters, including a Confederate general (Bruce Dern), a newly-appointed sheriff (Walton Goggins), and a hangman (Tim Roth). No one trusts each other – nor should they – and soon the blood is spraying.

The wrinkle is that Eight seriously engages with race and nationalism through the prism of the Civil War. Characters wrestle with their roles in the war and whether they have a place in America in the Reconstruction era.

There’s also an exploration of vigilante justice. Remember how Pulp Fiction famously featured no law enforcement? Well, this story seems to be composed of nothing but lawmen, official and otherwise. One of the film’s earliest scenes is a debate between Jackson and Russell about the efficacy of murdering one’s bounties; Tim Roth gives an impassioned speech about the role of the hangman in ensuring Jeffersonian democracy. High-minded notions like due process and the rights of the accused are maintained only as long as they don’t impede vengeance and financial interest. It’s interesting considering Tarantino’s recent verbal skirmishes with law enforcement.

This is an exciting premise, and much of the execution works.

There are fabulous performances. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the standout (and the sole cast member to get an Oscar nomination) playing Russell’s prisoner, Daisy Domergue. Leigh has constructed a creature of true repugnance, sneering, snorting and spouting grotesque obscenities. Yet, she suffers innumerable torments at the hands of her captors, so out vitriol is curtailed.

Walton Goggins’ Confederate-diehard-turned-provincial-sheriff initially seems like retread of the mouth-breather he played in Django Unchained, but as events transpire, he turns sympathetic through Goggins’ inimitable slack-jawed credulousness that makes him seem both dangerous and vulnerable.

Jackson and Russell are more measured. Jackson is a Tarantino actor, and he’s never better than when he’s sinking his teeth into this writer’s words. His Marquis Warren is a doozy, a crucible-forged ore of pure marginalized rage. Some of Jackson’s finest work happens early in Eight, culminating in a bananas soliloquy that is tragic, terrifying and gloriously ribald. Then Warren is unceremoniously tossed into the maw of this film’s plot, and he becomes an amalgam of Hercule Poirot and Mr. Orange. It’s a disappointing final act. Russell, meanwhile, is introduced as Gary Cooper, a white hat with a moral code, but Tarantino quickly makes clear that he’s little more than an ornery jerk with little if any room to develop.

The maneuverings of nine snowbound characters (it’s an open question who, specifically, the titular Eight are) might seem too contained to justify the director’s lush widescreen format, yet the super-wide focus allows us to take in the shifting physical dynamics of our players. A single room has never looked grander. And anytime the camera exits the cabin into a blizzard, Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson create a vast hellish wasteland of unforgiving white. 70MM also enables Tarantino’s most stark, lovely shot to date: a seemingly endless opening take pulling back from a knot of wood to reveal a crucifix above the driving snow and a horse-drawn cart hustling down the road behind it. Set to Ennio Morricone’s eerie, baroque score, it gives the impression of a gnostic tale, some dread fable passed down through the mouths of hard, fearful men. At least that’s what I got from it.

But Tarantino allows himself a lot of leeway, and it’s apt to test an audience. Even taking into account the filmmaker’s affinity for huge swaths of dialogue, this film could benefit with some trimming. Take, for example, the agonizing sequence in which Russell individually threatens each characters upon entering the cabin, only to then offer a general threat to the room. Or Roth’s proposition that the cabin be divided evenly between Yankees and Confederates, an arrangement that lasts about five minutes.

And the ending is just so cruelly glib, it instantly raised my hackles.

See, Tarantino’s films are pastiches: Shaw Brothers preambles, the kitschy opening titles, textured film stock. When his pictures were crime thrillers, they were transcendent. Starting with Kill Bill, Tarantino’s films have become concerned with social ills. His protagonists now are victimized women, Jews, enslaved blacks. Sometimes he can thread the needle and sometimes he cannot. The difference between success and failure, to my mind is: does his casual cruelty detract from his theme? Assailing the Gone with the Wind romanticism of the Antebellum South is as much fun as its attendant bloodshed in Django Unchained. Conversely, the scene in Kill Bill where a hospital attendant blithely discusses the mechanics of raping the Bride’s comatose body sucks a lot of joy out of the badassery that follows.

The Hateful Eight, by design, is long on cruelty and short on basdassery. I think Tarantino is a genius, but the progression of this story is as enervating as it is energizing. At long last, made a movie without a triumph, taking us instead to the end of justice and leaving us exhausted. It got under my skin in a way none of his other films have. But what are we to make of the fact that the act of great national healing here involves an act of raw savagery against a woman?

So if you’re a Tarantino fan, you should see this.

On the other hand, I have no qualms with the people who’ve checked out on this director. If you cannot condone his liberal use of racial slurs, casual misogyny or his appropriation of historical atrocities for popular entertainment, then stay away. No movie is worth the torture The Hateful Eight will inflict on you. (P.D.)

Evan Hernandez is a writer and photographer based in New York City. His most recent novelette, The Peregrine Falls, is available on the Kindle Bookstore and everywhere ebooks are sold. For his photos and more information, find him on Twitter, @totallyberserk.