Robert Eggar's THE LIGHTHOUSE

Brian Tallerico October 18, 2019 

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-lighthouse-movie-review-2019 

 Waves crash, birds scream, and rain pounds. Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” wants to drive you a little mad. It’s not just a film about two people on the edge of sanity, it uses sound design and filmmaking tools to push you there too. It has the feel of watching someone else’s nightmare, and it’s not one that’s going to end well. While it’s ultimately a bit too self-conscious to provoke the existential dread and true terror of the best films like it, it’s still an impressive accomplishment thanks to Eggers’ fearlessness and a pair of completely committed performances.

Life is bleak for Thomas and Ephraim from the first gloomy frame of “The Lighthouse.” And I mean gloomy. This is a movie that will be listed as “black and white” but would more accurately be called “gray.” There are few distinct blacks or whites in a film that looks like an overcast evening even during the day. It opens with the two men, played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, arriving to work a shift at a lighthouse on the edge of the world. Thomas, played by Dafoe, is the older one and the boss of the operation. He orders around Pattinson’s Ephraim, making sure he takes care of all of the daily duties like cleaning and repairing but always reminding him who’s in charge. Thomas refers to Ephraim in diminutive terms like “lad” and orders him around when he’s not telling a long-winded story, or farting.

Ephraim toils and troubles all day, develops a rivalry with a seagull, and is forced to listen to Thomas’ tall tales over dinner before his boss heads up to the light that Ephraim has been denied. Not only does he start to become obsessed with what exactly happens at the top of the lighthouse, but he has increasingly terrifying visions between bouts of self-gratification and back-breaking labor. A film that is already in experimental territory from its opening scene gets more and more surreal, allowing us to question which one of these guys will go crazy first and what the repercussions will be. “The Lighthouse” takes on the tenor of a slow-motion car crash, from which you know there will be no survivors. This is not a buddy movie, but one that reminds us that nothing may be scarier than being stuck with someone you can’t stand.  

Dafoe does what sometimes feels like a salty dog caricature—if they ever do a live-action “Simpsons” movie, he’s the man for the Sea Captain—but it’s a captivating performance. As the old-timer of the two, Dafoe’s Thomas gets to remain tantalizingly vague for a while in that we’re not sure if he’s just a jerk or someone actively trying to destroy the person making him beans. He's hysterical and annoying in equal measure.

And Pattinson is even better. In a long line of daring performances recently (“The Lost City of Z,” “High Life”), this may be his best work. He imbues Ephraim with desperation, the reasons for which are revealed later, that makes his plight more tragic. He doesn’t just need to survive, he needs this job to climb out of the hole of life. He needs the light. He needs success. Pattinson throws himself entirely into the role and it’s fun to watch.

Pattinson, Dafoe, and an angry seagull may be the stars of “The Lighthouse” but this is a film that’s constantly calling attention to the choices of its director and creative team. From the decision to shoot it in gray 4:3 ratio to heighten the claustrophobia to the non-stop cacophony of noise—it feels like if they don’t kill each other, the waves or storm will—“The Lighthouse” is a sensory assault. It’s an easy film to admire with both in its ambition and execution, but there’s a creeping sense that it doesn’t really add up to much more than a bit of a self-aware poke in the eye, and the film doesn't quite stick the landing to make that feeling go away. Sure, that kind of experimental provocation is fun in its own twisted way, but it feels like a missed opportunity to be more than just "fun." With its incredible level of detail, “The Witch” transported us back to its era and made its horror tangible. There’s nothing tangible here. If you try to put your hands on “The Lighthouse,” it slips through your fingers.  

Although maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is just Eggers’ existential version of a salty dog tale told on the high seas—the urban legend of a couple of guys stuck on a lighthouse who drove each other insane. Anyone searching for more than that does so at their own peril. Be careful not to crash on the rocks. 

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 6th.

 

The 3 Types of Animated Films

 Handout/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

by David Nusair

Updated March 30, 2019 

Animation has certainly come a long way in the decades since its debut in the early 1900s. The techniques used by animators to bring characters and stories to life have improved immeasurably over the years, yet there remains only three primary types of animation: traditional, stop-motion, and computer. Descriptions of and the significant differences between the three major forms of animation are described below. 

Traditional Animation

Arriving on the scene at roughly the same time as its live-action counterparts, traditionally animated films have certainly come a long way since the early days of crude drawings and experimental narratives. Traditional animation made its debut in 1906's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a short film featuring different facial expressions.

The genre allows for the illusion of animated movement due to the frame-by-frame manipulation of drawings and illustrations. Although computer technology has assisted animators in their efforts over the years, the basic means by which an animated film comes to life has essentially remained the same—by drawing frames one by one.

The popularization of the cel-animation process in the early 1920s proved instrumental in the genre’s meteoric rise to infamy, with the technique ensuring that animators no longer had to draw the same image over and over again—as see-through “cels” containing a character or object in motion could be laid on top of a stationary background. The release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 marked the first time that traditionally animated films began to be taken seriously by the Hollywood community and audiences alike.

In the years since, traditionally animated films have remained popular at cinemas the world over—with the wild success of the genre affording filmmakers the opportunity to break out of the mold from time to time (i.e., 1972’s Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to land an “X” rating). Disney’s domination over the 2D animated realm has ensured that their name has become synonymous with animated films, although it’s certainly worth noting that some of the most popular cartoons from the last few decades have come from other studios (including The Rugrats Movie, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and the Land Before Time series).

However, traditional animated films have become increasingly rare from the major U.S. studios, mostly because they're so expensive and time-consuming to produce. However, independent filmmakers and international animation studios still produce traditional animated movies.However, traditional animated films have become increasingly rare from the major U.S. studios, mostly because they're so expensive and time-consuming to produce. However, independent filmmakers and international animation studios still produce traditional animated movies.

Stop-Motion Animation

Far less common is stop-motion animation. Stop-motion actually predates traditional, hand-drawn animation: The first attempt, The Humpty Dumpty Circus, was released in 1898. Stop-motion animation is shot frame-by-frame as the animators manipulate objects—often made out of clay or similarly flexible material—in order to create the illusion of movement.

There’s little doubt that the biggest hindrance to stop-motion animation’s success is its time-consuming nature, as animators must move an object one frame at a time to mimic movement. Considering movies generally contain 24 frames per second, it can take hours to capture just a few seconds worth of footage.

Although the first full-length stop-motion cartoon was released in 1926 (Germany’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed), the genre’s widest exposure came in the 1950s with the release of the Gumby television series. After that point, stop-motion animation started to be seen less as a gimmicky fad and more as a viable alternative to hand-drawn animation—with 1965’s Willy McBean and his Magic Machine, produced by legendary stop-motion duo Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, the first full-length stop-motion film to be produced within the United States.

The prominence of Rankin/Bass Christmas specials in the ‘60s and ‘70s only added to stop-motion animation’s growing popularity, yet it was the increased use of stop-motion within special effects field that cemented its place as an invaluable resource—with George Lucas’ pioneering work in both the Star Wars films and in his effects company Industrial Light and Magic setting a standard that the rest of the industry struggled to match.

Stop-motion has seen a dip in popularity in the wake of computer animation’s meteoric rise, yet the style has seen something of a resurgence in the past few years—with the popularity of movies like Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox ensuring that stop-motion will likely continue to endure in the years to come. 

Computer Animation

Before it became a pervasive, all-encompassing force within the cinematic community, computer animation was primarily used as a tool by filmmakers to enhance their traditionally-conceived special effects work. As such, computer-generated imagery was used sparingly in the ‘70s and ‘80s—with 1982’s marking the first time it was used on an extensive basis within a full-length feature.

Computer animation received a substantial boost in 1986 with the release of the first short film from Pixar, Luxo Jr., which went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film and proved that computers could provide more than just behind-the-scenes special effects support. The increased sophistication of both hardware and software was reflected in the progressively eye-popping nature of computer-generated imagery, with 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day and 1993’s Jurassic Park standing as landmark examples of what computers were capable of.

It wasn’t until Pixar released the world’s first computer-animated feature in 1995 that audiences and executives alike first saw the possibilities offered by the technology. It wasn’t long before other studios began clamoring to get into the CGI game. The three-dimensional appearance of computer-generated cartoons instantly assured their success over their 2-D counterparts, as viewers found themselves transfixed by the novelty of the lifelike images and jaw-dropping visuals.

Although Pixar (now owned by animation pioneers Disney) remains the undisputed champion of the computer-generated landscape, there have certainly been plenty of equally successful examples of the genre in recent years—with, for instance, the series raking in well over two billion dollars worldwide.

In 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduced the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Since its introduction, most of the winners have been computer-animated films—but the traditional animated Spirited Away won the 2002 award and the stop-motion film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won the 2005 award. In recent years, the Best Animated Short category has continued to see winners in both traditional and computer animated shorts.

 https://www.liveabout.com/different-types-of-animated-films-2420979

How Technicolor changed movies...

Glorious Technicolor was much more than groundbreaking movie technology.

Updated by Phil Edwards - phil.edwards@vox.com Dec 1, 2017, 2:10pm EST

You’ve probably heard about “glorious Technicolor” before. But Technicolor wasn’t just a groundbreaking technology — it was a powerful corporate influence in Hollywood and created an aesthetic that shaped the look of the 20th century.

Technicolor still exists today, but at its zenith, it was an inescapable part of the visual landscape. From Gone With The Wind to The Wizard of Oz, it shaped how our movies look. But, as the above video shows, that influence stretched far beyond technological trends.

If you want to learn more about Technicolor, visit The George Eastman Museum or Barbara Flueckiger’s fascinating website, which catalogs the many competing color technologies that emerged in the 1900s. Technicolor made the greatest impact, thanks to its revolutionary technology, staunch advocates like Technicolor supervisor Natalie Kalmus, and a look that was inimitable for decades.

You can find this video and all of Vox's videos on YouTube.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS - TRAILER

Movie Review: What We Do in the Shadows

• Leo Costello

https://www.etownian.com/campus-life/movie-review-what-we-do-in-the-shadows/

In honor of Taika Waititi’s latest Oscar win, this week’s review will be a throwback review of his and co-writer/director Jemaine Clement’s 2014 horror mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows.”

Both Clement and Waititi have always had a somewhat unconventional sense of humor, if the latest Waititi film “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) is any indication. 

“Shadows” is no different. It takes the genre of horror and flips it, making fun of it in the same way “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) makes fun of the rock music industry — they both use the style of the mockumentary.

“What We Do in the Shadows” follows the daily life of three vampires, two of whom are played by Clement and Waititi, whose lives are interrupted when their oldest flatmate changes a human into a vampire.

The film unfolds in ridiculous humor and a little bit of gore, but that is to be expected in a vampire film.

This film pays homage to many well-known classics such as “Dracula” (1931), “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), and even “Twilight” (2008).

Homage might be too kind a term for what “Shadows” does. If anything, this film is an hour and a half of them endearingly making fun of the vampire horror genre.

Spoofs and parodies are often difficult things to create without becoming incredibly cheesy, like “Scary Movie” (2000). Those films have seemed as though they would never stop being churned out and nearly exhausted the horror spoof genre for me, personally.

“Shadows” doesn’t become cheesy or tiresome with its jokes. In fact, there aren’t any jokes in the film; it is made up entirely of humorous situations, and that is where the difference lies. Comedic things just happen to these characters, rather than them saying something and it needing a punchline.

The dialogue of this film is so well done that I’d be incredibly happy to watch another three hours of these characters bickering.

These vampires aren’t what one would typically imagine when they think of vampires: they don’t live in some large castle, they live in a house in Wellington, New Zealand. They aren’t the graceful, brooding type like Dracula. They are awkward and have no idea what the latest trends are, which is a joke in and of itself.

“What We Do in the Shadows” flips the entire horror genre on its head and answers question like: How do vampires spend their time? What do they do in the shadows?

Overall, what makes this film so funny is that it takes a subject so mundane — the idea of four guys sharing a flat in Wellington, New Zealand — and makes it ridiculous: the four guys are vampires.

If horror is something that would usually spook you, but you enjoy the concept, this film might be for you. It is not scary; however, there are gory moments with a decent amount of blood shown. It is funnier than it is spooky, so if that sounds intriguing, I would absolutely recommend this film.

It is ridiculously hilarious and bound to give you a good time.

Final score: 11/10.

MY LIFE AS A DOG (Mitt Liv som Hund)

 

 

The cinema of Lasse Hallström, always toeing the fragile line between sincere tenderness and full-blown schmaltz, is most affecting when immersed in the complexities of childhood experience. My Life as a Dog remains the best representation of Hallström’s filmmaking prowess, a wondrous children’s story that organically overlaps the magic of youth with the harsh realities of impending adulthood. In the story of Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), an inquisitive young boy forced to spend the summer in the countryside so his sickly mother can recuperate from tuberculosis, Hallström foreshadows the themes of isolation, mortality, and compassion he would further develop in his best American film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Instead of sentimentalizing Ingemar’s emotional highs and lows, My Life as a Dog relishes the ambiguities inherent to his impressionable gaze, the gaps in his memory that seem as natural and cyclical as the changing seasons.

While death is a constant in My Life as a Dog, it’s never sensationalized as a morbid curiosity or gimmick. Instead, Hallström focuses on the ripples of mortality, how Ingemar connects his personal anguish with experiences of loss from supporting characters. Ingemar spends much of the story observing other people suffer from various ailments, his mother being the obvious example, but also in the case of a bedridden elderly man living with his Uncle Gunnar (Tomas von Brömssen). It’s as if proximity to the process of death is more important than the event itself (we don’t see either character die). Whether Ingemar is bringing his mother breakfast in bed or reading aloud to the decrepit old man from a woman’s underwear catalogue, there’s a focus on the nuances of wrinkled skin, frail hands, or skeletal bone structure, and how Ingemar views these details in from the vantage point of a child.

Despite its contained 1950s rural setting, My Life as a Dog references the world at large through Ingemar’s contemplation of other people’s experiences with tragedy. Random newspaper stories from around the world define his frank voiceover narration, which comes during hypnotic cutaways of the starry night sky. Hallström creates a juxtaposition of separate temporalities and experiences to structure Ingemar’s tangential thought process, a way for both character and audience to make sense of events that often defy expectation. The defining example of this aesthetic trend, a story Ingemar references more than once, is of the Russian space dog Laika sent into orbit as an experimental precursor to manned flights. Ingemar continuously ponders why anyone would let a harmless dog die alone hundreds of thousands of miles away from home, especially after his own dog is taken away to a kennel before his departure for the countryside. Once again, the personal aspects of his consciousness merge with surrounding world.

Still, for every sequence in My Life as a Dog concerned with the subtle and unseen ramifications of death, there’s countless more about the rhythms of life, punctuated by Björn Isfält’s breezy musical score bridging sequences of vibrant movement and discovery. During Ingemar’s extended vacation to Gunnar’s hometown, he meets a wide array of unique characters that expand his physical and emotional world. He plays soccer, learns to box with a tomboy named Saga (Melinda Kinnaman), and helps build a small gazebo with Gunnar. Fields of green grass, crystal clear streams, and dense forests frame these moments, as Ingemar spreads his wings away from the heartache of his mother’s sickness. It’s always clear the adult world and its conflicts are unfolding simultaneously on the fringes of Ingemar’s heightened childhood experience, but whether it’s an argument between his aunt and uncle or a fight between workers at the local glass blowing factory, these are merely momentary distractions to the overall world of play.

Time is never a concern for Ingemar since he has no need for dates, deadlines, or responsibilities, and this might be my favorite aspect of Hallström’s filmmaking. My Life as a Dog is one of the few children’s films that defies this sort of temporal structure, allowing fleeting moments of experience, like an embrace between two friends or naked woman being sketched by the light of a candle, to progress without any constraints beyond the elemental observations of a child’s imagination. In a way, Hallström relinquishes the pace of the film to his child protagonist, and Ingemar’s meandering thoughts often splinter without notice to incorporate whatever his impression of the world becomes at that particular moment. This makes for a beautiful and incomplete vision of one boy’s subjective act of remembrance.

It’s extremely disheartening that Hallström has never been able to recapture the hypnotic and honest feel of My Life as a Dog during his tenure as a Hollywood filmmaker, even though What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? comes close. In fact, his American career reflects an extended 20-year slide downward into the dank realm of melodramatic drivel (Dear John being his worst offense to date). Alas, it wouldn’t be the first time a talented foreign filmmaker was consumed by such Western indulgences. Still, My Life as a Dog and its sublime vision of childhood will always be there to remind us of the filmmaker Hallström once was, and potentially could be again.

Image/Sound

My Life as Dog is often defined by physical surroundings and seasonal imagery, mainly the lush greenery of a countryside summer and the dense snowcaps of a Swedish winter. These elements parallel Ingemar’s experiences with life and death in fascinating ways. Criterion’s strong 1080p high-definition transfer improves on their standard-definition disc in this respect, accentuating the textures of his environment so the viewer can experience them with an added sense of clarity. The color schemes are also superbly realized with this disc, my favorite being a shot of Ingemar and Saga aglow in warm light while resting in hay. The sound design is less impressive, if only because it stems from a compressed monaural track that sometimes lowers and rises mid-scene.

Overall

One of the great films about childhood perception, with atmospheric beauty. 

Cast: Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Melinda Kinnaman, Kicki Rudgren Director: Lasse Hallström Screenwriter: Lasse Hallström, Reidar Jönsson, Brasse Brännström, Per Berglund Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 101 min Rating: - Year: 1985. 

"Ex Machina" and the nature of humanity

 

Review by Matt Zoller Seitz April 09, 2015

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ex-machina-2015

 

Real science fiction is about ideas, which means that real science fiction is rarely seen on movie screens, a commercially minded canvas that's more at ease with sensation and spectacle. What you more often get from movies is something that could be called "science fiction-flavored product"—a work that has a few of the superficial trappings of the genre, such as futuristic production design and somewhat satirical or sociological observations about humanity, but that eventually abandons its pretense for fear of alienating or boring the audience and gives way to more conventional action or horror trappings, forgetting about whatever made it seem unusual to begin with.

 

Ex Machina," the directorial debut by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland ("28 Days Later," "Sunshine"), is a rare and welcome exception to that norm. It starts out as an ominous thriller about a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) orbiting a charismatic Dr. Frankenstein-type (Oscar Isaac) and slowly learning that the scientist's zeal to create artificial intelligence has a troubling, even sickening personal agenda. But even as the revelations pile up and the screws tighten and you start to sense that terror and violence are inevitable, the movie never loses grip on what it's about; this is a rare commercial film in which every scene, sequence, composition and line deepens the screenplay's themes—which means that when the bloody ending arrives, it seems less predictable than inevitable and right, as in myths, legends and Bible stories. 

 

The scientist, Isaac's Nathan, has brought the programmer Caleb (Gleason) to his remote home/laboratory in the forested mountains and assigned Caleb to interact with a prototype of a "female" robot, Ava (Alicia Vikander), to determine if she truly has self-awareness or it's just an incredible simulation. The story is emotionally and geographically intimate, at times suffocating, unfolding in and around 

 

Nathan's stronghold. This modernist bunker with swingin' bachelor trappings is sealed off from the outside world. Many of its rooms are off-limits to Caleb's restricted key card. The story is circumscribed with the same kind of precision. Caleb's conversations with Ava are presented as discrete narrative sections, titled like chapters in a book (though the claustrophobic setting will inevitably remind viewers of another classic of shut-in psychodrama, Stanley Kubrick's film of "The Shining"). These sections are interspersed with scenes between Caleb, Nathan, and Nathan's girlfriend (maybe concubine) Kyoko (Sonoya Mizono), a nearly mute, fragile-seeming woman who hovers near the two men in a ghostly fashion. 

 

 Because the film is full of surprises, most of them character-driven and logical in retrospect, I'll try to describe "Ex Machina" in general terms. Nathan is an almost satirically specific type: a brilliant man who created a revolutionary new programming code at 13 and went on to found a Google-like corporation, then funneled profits into his secret scheme to create a physically and psychologically credible synthetic person, specifically a woman. This is a classic nerd fantasy, and there is a sense in which "Ex Machina" might be described as "Stanley Kubrick's Weird Science."  But despite having made a film in which two of the four main characters are women in subservient roles, and making it clear that Nathan's realism test will include a sexual component, the movie never seems to be exploiting the characters or their situations. The movie maintains a scientific detachment even as it brings us inside the minds and hearts of its people, starting with Caleb (an audience surrogate with real personality), then embracing Ava, then Nathan (who's as screwed-up as he is intimidating), then finally Kyoko, who is not the cipher she initially seems to be.  

 

"Ex Machina" is a beautiful extension of Garland's past concerns as a screenwriter. Starting with Danny Boyle's "The Beach," based on his novel, and continuing through two more collaborations with Boyle, "28 Days Later" and "Sunshine" and the remake of "Judge Dredd," Garland has demonstrated great interest in the organization of society, the tension between the need for rules and the abuse of authority, and the way that gender roles handed down over thousands of years can poison otherwise pure relationships. The final section of "28 Days Later" is set in a makeshift army base where soldiers have taken up arms against hordes of infected citizens. No sooner have they welcomed the heroes into their fold than they reveal themselves as domineering monsters who want to strip the tomboyish women in the group of their autonomy and groom them as concubines and breeders in frilly dresses, in a skewed version of "traditional" society. The soldiers, not the infected, were the true zombies in that zombie film: the movie was a critique of masculinity, especially the toxic kind.

 

 Likewise, "Ex Machina" is very much about men and women, and how their identities are constructed by male dominated society as much as by biology. Nathan actively rebels against the nerd stereotype, carrying on like a frat house alpha dog, working a heavy bag, drinking to excess, disco dancing with his girl in a robotically choreographed routine, addressing the soft-spoken, sensitive Caleb as "dude" and "bro", and reacting with barely disguised contempt when Caleb expresses empathy for Ava. It's bad enough that Nathan wants to play God at all, worse still that he longs to re-create femininity through circuitry and artificial flesh. His vision of women seems shaped by lad magazines, video games aimed at eternal teenagers, and the most juvenile "adult" science fiction and fantasy. 

As Ava becomes increasingly central to the story, the movie acquires an undertone of film noir, with Nathan as the abusive husband or father often found in such movies, Caleb as the clueless drifter smitten with her, and Ava as the damsel who is definitely in distress but not as helpless as she first appears (though we are kept guessing as to how capable she is, and whether she has the potential to be a femme fatale). The film's most intense moments are the quiet conversations that occur during power blackouts at the facility, when Ava confesses her terror to Caleb and asks his help against Nathan. We don't know quite how to take her pleas. Despite her limited emotional bandwidth, she seems truly distressed, and yet we are always aware that she is Nathan's creation. Her scenario might be another level in the simulation, or another projection of Nathan's twisted machismo. There is also canny commentary, conveyed entirely through images, which suggests that "traditional" femininity is as artificial and blatantly constructed as any android siren, which makes creatures like Ava seem like horribly logical extensions of a mentality that has always existed. (This movie and "Under the Skin" would make an excellent double feature, though not one that should be watched by anybody prone to depression.)

 

Throughout, Garland builds tension slowly and carefully without ever letting the pace slacken. And he proves to have a precise but bold eye for composition, emphasizing humans and robots as lovely but troubling figures in a cold, sharp mural of technology. The special effects are some of the best ever done in this genre, so convincing that you soon cease marveling at the way Ava's metallic "bones" can be seen through the transparent flesh of her forearms, or the way that her "face" is a fixed to a silver skull.

Garland's screenplay is equally impressive, weaving references to mythology, history, physics, and visual art into casual conversations, in ways that demonstrate that Garland understands what he's talking about while simultaneously going to the trouble to explain more abstract concepts in plain language, to entice rather than alienate casual filmgoers. (Nathan and Caleb's discussion of Jackson Pollock's "automatic painting" is a highlight.) The performances are outstanding. Isaac's in particular has an electrifying star quality, cruelly sneering yet somehow delightful, insinuating and intellectually credible. The ending, when it arrives, is primordially satisfying, spotlighting images whose caveman savagery is emotionally overwhelming yet earned by the story. This is a classic film.

 

 

   

 

Science Fiction as Art: "Arrival"

Arrival is a stunning science fiction movie with deep implications for today

One of the year’s best movies is about linguistics, metaphors, and aliens.

By Alissa Wilkinson@alissamariealissa@vox.com Updated Nov 24, 2016, 10:22am EST  

Science fiction is never really about the future; it’s always about us. And Arrival, set in the barely distant future, feels like a movie tailor-made for 2016, dropping into theaters mere days after the most explosive election in most of the American electorate’s memory.

But the story Arrival is based on — the award-winning novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — was published in 1998, almost two decades ago, which indicates its central themes were brewing long before this year. Arrival is much more concerned with deep truths about language, imagination, and human relationships than any one political moment.

Not only that, but Arrival is one of the best movies of the year, a moving, gripping film with startling twists and imagery. It deserves serious treatment as a work of art. 

Arrival is smart, twisty, and serious

The strains of Max Richter’s "On the Nature of Daylight" play over the opening shots of Arrival, which is the first clue for what’s about to unfold: that particular track is ubiquitous in the movies (I can count at least six or seven films that use it, including Shutter Island and this year’s The Innocents) and is, by my reckoning, the saddest song in the world.

The bittersweet feeling instantly settles over the whole film, like the last hour of twilight. Quickly we learn that Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has suffered an unthinkable loss, and that functions as a prelude to the story: One day, a series of enormous pod-shaped crafts land all over earth, hovering just above the ground in 12 locations around the world. Nobody knows why. And nothing happens.

As world governments struggle to sort out what this means — and as the people of those countries react by looting, joining cults, even conducting mass suicides — Dr. Banks gets a visit from military intelligence, in the form of Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), requesting her assistance as an expert linguist in investigating and attempting to communicate with whatever intelligence is behind the landing. She arrives at the site with Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a leading quantum physicist, to start the mission. With help from a cynical Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), they suit up and enter the craft to see if they can make contact.

It’s best not to say much more about the plot, except that it is pure pleasure to feel it unfold. The most visionary film yet from director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) and scripted by horror screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Lights Out), its pacing is slower than you’d expect from an alien-invasion film, almost sparse. For a movie with so many complicated ideas, it doesn’t waste any more time on exposition than is absolutely necessary. Arrival is serious and smartly crafted, shifting around like a Rubik’s cube in the hand of a savant, nothing quite making sense until all the pieces suddenly come together. I heard gasps in the theater. 

Arrival is interested in how language shapes reality

The film’s premise hinges on the idea, shared by many linguists and philosophers of language, that we do not all experience the same reality. The pieces of it are the same — we live on the same planet, breathe the same air — but our perceptions of those pieces shift and change based on the words and grammar we use to describe them to ourselves and each other.

For instance, there is substantial evidence that a person doesn’t really see (or perhaps "perceive") a color until their vocabulary contains a word, attached to meaning, that distinguishes it from other colors. All yellows are not alike, but without the need to distinguish between yellows and the linguistic tools to do so, people just see yellow. A color specialist at a paint manufacturer, however, can distinguish between virtually hundreds of colors of white. (Go check out the paint chip aisle at Home Depot if you’re skeptical.)

Or consider the phenomenon of words in other languages that describe universal feelings, but can only be articulated precisely in some culture. We might intuitively "feel" the emotion, but without the word to describe it we’re inclined to lump the emotion in with another under the same heading. Once we develop the linguistic term for it, though, we can describe it and feel it as distinct from other shades of adjacent emotions.

These are simple examples, and I don’t mean to suggest that the world itself is different for people from different cultures. But I do mean to suggest that reality — what we perceive as comprising the facts of existence — takes on a different shape depending on the linguistic tools we use to describe it.

Adopting this framework doesn’t necessarily mean any of us are more correct than others about the nature of reality (though that certainly may be true). Instead, we are doing our best to describe reality as we see it, as we imagine it to be. This is the challenge of translation, and why literal translations that Google can perform don’t go beyond basic sentences. Learning a new language at first is just about collecting a new vocabulary and an alternate grammar — here is the word for chair, here is the word for love, here’s how to make a sentence — but eventually, as any bilingual person can attest, it becomes about imagining and perceiving the world differently.

This is the basic insight of Arrival: That if we were to encounter a culture so radically different from our own that simple matters we take for granted as part of the world as it is were radically shifted, we could not simply gather data, sort out grammar, and make conclusions. We’d have to either absorb a different way of seeing, despite our fear, or risk everything.

To underline the point, Dr. Banks and the entire operation are constantly experiencing breakdowns in communication within the team and with teams in other parts of the world, who aren’t sure whether the information they glean from their own visits to pods should be kept proprietary or shared. 

Arrival is about more than talking to one another. It’s about the roadmaps we use to navigate the world

It’s not hard to see where this is going, I imagine — something about how if we want to empathize with each other we need to talk to one another, and that’s the way the human race will survive.

And, sure.

But Arrival also layers in some important secondary notes that add nuance to that easy takeaway. Because it’s not just deciphering the words that someone else is saying that’s important: It’s the whole framework that determines how those words are being pinned to meaning. We can technically speak the same language, but functionally be miles apart.

In the film, one character notes that if we were to communicate in the language of chess — which operates in the framework of battles and wars — rather than, say, the language of English, which is bent toward the expression of emotions and ideas, then what we actually say and do would shift significantly. That is, the prevailing metaphor for how beings interact with each other and the world is different. (Some philosophers speak of this as "language games.")

This matters for the film’s plot, but more broadly — since this is sci-fi, and therefore actually about us — it has implications. Language isn’t just about understanding how to say things to someone and ascribe meaning to what comes back. Language has consequences. Embedded in words and grammar is action, because the metaphors that we use as we try to make sense of the world tell us what to do next. They act like little roadmaps.

You have empathized with someone not when you hear the words they’re saying, but when you begin to ascertain what metaphors make them tick, and where that conflicts or agrees with your own. I found myself thinking a lot about this reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land, which is up for a National Book Award this year and describes the overarching metaphors (Hochschild calls them "deep stories") that discrete groups of Americans — in this case, West Coast urban liberals and Louisiana rural Tea Partiers — use to make sense of the world. She isn’t trying to explain anything away. She’s trying to figure out what causes people to walk in such drastically different directions and hold views that befuddle their fellow citizens. 

Arrival suggests that our mental roadmaps need constant adjustment

Part of the challenge of pluralism is that we’re not just walking around with different ideas in our heads, but with entirely different maps for getting from point A to Z, with different roadblocks on them and different recommendations for which road is the best one. Our A's and Z's don’t even match. We don’t even realize that our own maps are missing pieces that others have.

Presumably one of these maps is better than the others, but we haven’t agreed how we would decide. So we just keep smacking into one another going in opposite directions down the same highway.

Arrival takes off from this insight in an undeniably sci-fi direction that is a little brain-bending, improbable in the best way. But it makes a strong case that communication, not battle or combat, is the only way to avoid destroying ourselves. Communication means not just wrapping our heads around terms we use but the actual framework through which we perceive reality.

And that is really hard. I don’t know how to fix it.

In the meantime, though, good movies are somewhere to start. Luckily Arrival is a tremendously well-designed film, with complicated and unpredictable visuals that embody the main point. Nothing flashy or explosive; in some ways, I found myself thinking of 1970s science-fiction films, or the best parts of Danny Boyle’s 2007 Sunshine, which grounded its humanist story in deep quiet.

The movie concludes on a different note from the linguistic one — one much more related to loss and a wistful question about life and risk. This may be Arrival’s biggest weakness; the emotional punch of the ending is lessened a bit because it feels a little rushed.

But even that conclusion loops back to the possibilities of the reshaped human imagination. And this week, especially, you don’t need to talk to an alien to see why that’s something we need.

 https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/11/13587262/arrival-movie-review-amy-adams-denis-villeneuve

Fellini's "Amarcord"

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/18-amarcord

Amarcord presents a scathing satirical critique of Italian provincial life during the 1930s, the height of the fascist period (1922–43). In this era, Mussolini’s dictatorship enjoyed its greatest popular support. While Fellini’s depiction of the provincial world under fascism provides a complex political and cultural interpretation of the period, his portrayal of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of Rimini, Fellini’s birthplace, awarded him international acclaim. The worldwide magnitude of the film derives from its stylistic playfulness and ability to fluctuate between humorous images and serene depictions of human existence. Not only was the film successful at the box office, it received the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Film in 1974.

The inhabitants of Fellini’s imaginary Rimini are not divided into good anti-fascists and evil fascists. Instead, all of the characters are sketched out in masterful caricatures, comic types with antecedents in Fellini’s earlier films. Fellini’s fascists are not sinister, perverted individuals but pathetic clowns, manifestations of the arrested development typical of the entire village. As Fellini himself wrote in an essay-interview entitled “The Fascism Within Us”: “I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams . . .”

Yet the hilarious portrait Fellini draws—of the ridiculous parades, the gymnastic exercises in uniform, and the small daily compromises necessary to live under a dictatorship—speak volumes about what life was like in that era. Through the sequences in which the Amarcordians greet a visiting fascist bigwig, and the scene in which they row out in the sea to catch a glimpse of the passage of the Rex (an enormous ocean liner that was the pride of Mussolini’s regime) coming from America, Fellini reveals the mechanism behind the mimicry of the cinematic image; he discloses film’s function as a mediator of authentic sexual desire. These scenes expose the townspeople as people dominated by false ideals and idiotic dreams of heroic feats and romantic love. Such public behavior has its direct psychological parallel in numerous scenes of daily life at home, in schools, and in church, with the clever comic touch that is Fellini’s trademark.

More than any other Italian film treatment of fascism, Fellini’s Amarcord manages to explain the public lives of its characters by minute details of their private lives. The sense of intimacy and immediacy that the film creates allows the audience to recognize certain aspects of themselves in these characters. One of the most interesting stylistic features of Amarcord is the proliferation of narrative points of view. In the original Italian print, we discover a complex mixture of direct addresses to the camera by various characters, as well as voice-overs providing information or commentary on the film’s action. In a few significant instances, this voice-over presence is provided by Fellini himself, something rendered moot when viewing prints dubbed in English. To define Amarcord as merely another “political” film would fail to do justice to such a poetic work. The film’s title means “I remember” in one of the dialects of Fellini’s native province, but this does not amount to a strictly autobiographical interpretation of work. While Amarcord, as its title suggests, contains a great deal of nostalgia, Fellini’s use of nostalgia as a means of romanticizing the past serves to underline his belief that fascism was based upon false ideals, and also his recognition that regret or nostalgia is as inevitable a sentiment as refusal.

Thus, Fellini offers Amarcord not just as a political explanation for a dark period in Italy’s national life, but as an important clue to the understanding of Italian national character as well. Though the film denounces the state of perpetual adolescence and illustrates Fellini’s belief that refusal of individual responsibility characterizes Italian society, it never degenerates into dogmatic treatise. Instead, Amarcord performs a certain magic that only a master of the cinema could accomplish.

Trailer: Fellini's AMARCORD