Film Review: Out of the Furnace

This was a film I had been interested in when it was in the theater due to its intense trailer and laundry list of good actors and producers.  With Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio as producers and Casey Affleck, Willem DeFoe, Forest Whitaker, Zoe Saldana, Sam Shepard, Woody Harrelson and Christian Bale as actors, Out of the Furnance may have been one of the most star laden vehicles in recent memory.

One of the greatest things about the film is how each actor subverts their fame in service of the story.  The story itself is what stands as the backbone of the film.  Out of the Furnace is a fairly straightforward tale of one good brother and one questionable brother wherein the questionable brother falls afoul of some bad people thus necessitating the good brother to take revenge and cross over into a grey area of morality.  What makes it more interesting that your standard fair are the interracial triangle between Bale, Whitaker and Saldana's characters, the dark side given to the "good" brother present in his vehicular homicide displayed on screen and the depiction of white poverty present in the Northeastern US.

Directed by Scott Cooper who has studied under Robert Duval and was the filmmaker behind Crazy Heart and the upcoming Whitey Bulger bio Black Mass, the film is easily viewed as a modern Western, with meth, underground fighting, the Iraq War and ruined mill towns taking the place of cattle rustling, card playing, the Civil War and the far West.  Cooper also seems to have taken on producer Scott's penchant for dark  scenes and sharply shot scenery.  Additionally, Cooper paces the film as Scott might, taking the time to tell the story with fleshed out characters and not pushing the action.

With the truly bad characters in the film based upon the "Ramapo Indians" (more white trash than Indians and not a recognized "tribe" by the Feds at this point) living in and around the Ramapough Mountains in Northeastern New Jersey it merely confirms my view of NJ as a thoroughly detestable state--my in-laws not withstanding.

The film itself opened the same weekend as juggernauts Frozen and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and was almost entirely ignored at that time, it doesn't deserve to be.  Those looking for shootouts and John Woo style action will not care for Out of the Furnace but those enjoying quality work and film noir will.

Film Review: Prometheus

As is typical of me, I'm a sucker for a Ridley Scott film.  And a return to the franchise that he began near 40 years ago with one of the best sci-fi/horror films ever done?  Yup, double the sucker...

Its unfortunate then that Prometheus is yet another Scott shortfall.

Prometheus LOOKS like a Scott film--beautifully shot, inky blacks, crisp frames, powerful female characters, etc.  In this case I find less fault with Scott the director than Scott the producer.  Using Damon Lindelof to rewrite a script by Jon Spaits, Scott seemingly failed to actually READ the story before turning it into a film.

PERHAPS someone who hadn't seen the original Alien films would find the material new but anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the Alien canon would find Prometheus shockingly repetitive and derivative.  We return to the same world we've seen in the original Alien and Aliens and where again we watch a diverse crew of mismatched individuals explore with flashlights a dark and slimy interior with evil things moving around in the dark.  We have something bursting from a female character's belly.  We have something jumping on a characters facemask.  We have acidic blood.  We have flamethrowers.  We have an evil corporation behind the mission.  We have an android with questionable motivations.  Really this is an complete retread of the same elements that made up prior Alien films just thrown up in the air and filmed in their new arrangement as they fell to the floor.

There is nothing here worth viewing and trying to integrate into the existing Alien storyline.  In fact it even ruins part of prior Alien films as (spoiler alert!) it reveals that the giant Elephantine pilots from the first film (who were MUCH larger as presented there than they are here) are merely photo-humans wearing elephant-like space suits.

If you are a Scott fan or Alien fan I suppose you must view this film...and unfortunately, seeing as how they are actually making a Prometheus sequel (really??) I'll have to see further deconstruction of a series I once loved...but otherwise, it neither scares nor wows a viewer and isn't worth supporting.

Film Review: The Counselor

Being a Ridley Scott fan I wanted to see this film despite its poor reviews.  Lots of times I disagree with the majority of opinions when it comes to films but not in this case.

Scott is a brilliant filmmaker who has significant ups and down with this one being one of his major downs.  He certainly didn't want for a quality cast here--Fassbender, Pitt, Clooney, Bardem and Cruz are all at least adequate here.  More did he lack for a quality writer with Cormac McCarthy on board for his first screenplay.

The film fails in a number of respects but none so much as Scott's inability to craft a film vs. a series of near incoherent dialogues.  McCarthy might be a great writer and describer of scenes but his written speech is not meant to be cut and pasted to film.  I think Scott got himself in trouble giving McCarthy too much respect (having stated in the past that he is a fan of the writer) and not creating his own work with the film.  The characters are some of the shallowest I've viewed with the motivations of all barely covered with all blathering on and on with philosophical meanderings as if they were McCarthy's tongue themselves rather than actual individuals.

Then we have Cameron Diaz who I'd like to know how on earth she got into this film.  Maybe she has her place in some comedy targeted at adolescents but not here.  She is not pretty, smart or strong here--characteristics her role should have had.  She represents one of the worst miscastings in some time.

The film is bad enough that it doesn't even transmit the darkness at the heart of the story which lies in the "butterfly effect" of The American drug trade.  Mentioned briefly and expounded upon throughout the film (though poorly) is that from the smallest user to the biggest dealer to every lawyer--we are all complicit in the damage that swirls out from  every transaction.  You, experimenting with that single line of coke, you are the killer of children in Ciudad Juarez, you, the smoker of pot grown in California are the facilitator of South American snuff films.  It's a correlation that has always rung true for me and one that only briefly got some play in the few months after 9/11, and it's a shame it's a message that gets such short shrift in this poor film.

Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Truly one of the most difficult novels I've ever read...

It has has been said that Shakespeare could never be just a single person as the sheer number of different words used in his works so vastly surpasses the vocabulary of even the most intelligent and verbose in society, it is just not possible to have that breadth of language housed in one brain.

Now I'm not always the sharpest tack in the room but I would say that I have an above average vocabulary and yet during numerous sections of this work I was sent scrambling for a dictionary half a dozen times or more PER PAGE.  Eventually it became such a task to review the language therein that I gave up and merely used the general context of the sentences to discern what was actually being said.  While frustrating, particularly for a novel written in the past thirty years (I would give some leeway to novels a century or greater ago as then we're talking about a vastly different lexicon from which the writers were pulling) it does not detract from the overall weight of the novel.  I wish McCarthy used more plain and direct language and didn't try to string a dozen or more metaphors together in an attempt to create a mood or describe a scene--it could have been a better and even more striking work for it (don't let anyone tell you this is a "perfect" work...its not.  But it is nearly as good a piece of fiction from the past 50 years that I've read).

The novel itself is based on some historical figures and events in the American Southwest during the late 1840s.  There are two primary characters here represented first by "the kid" whose violent upbringing eventually leads him to join up with the Glanton Gang.  The Glanton Gang itself was a real group of scalphunters lead by John Joel Glanton who was hired initially to exterminate a band of Apaches (bringing back their scalps as evidence) but turned rapidly to killing and scalping virtually everyone in their path in order to drive their income.  The second primary character is "the Judge" who is a character without much of a background but still fully formed.

Judge Holden becomes the driving force and most interesting part of the novel--is he the devil?  is he "the kid"'s alternate personality? what is he after?  why is he hairless?  is it he who keeps abducting and killing the children the group encounters?  McCarthy never gives the reader the answer but certainly provides enough detail for you to make your own conclusions.  The Judge has been rated by some as one of the most memorable characters in literature and I would agree.  While I may forget some of the details of the plot of this book moving forward or how the kid got involved in the first place, once you read Blood Meridian you will never, ever forget the Judge and will constantly circle back to him when you encounter antagonists in other works.

Blood Meridian is certainly not going to be for everyone.  Beyond the difficult language and complete lack of punctuation outside of sentence ending periods, McCarthy infuses the book with more violence than any novel I have ever read.  If you've seen No Country for Old Men or The Road then you may have a sense of McCarthy's violence as these are both based upon his prior works.  Even still, both of these films pale in comparison to the violence contained here.  Ridley Scott (who directed the recent film, The Counselor which was a McCarthy screenplay) has said that if he directed a film version of Blood Meridian that it would be rated NC-17 at the least and may not be filmable at all.  I tend to agree with him as the amount of blood and gore present is beyond what I have ever read before.  Not that it is unrealistic...on the contrary, it is probably VERY realistic given what we are dealing with.  The crushing of a baby's skull, the sodomizing of a injured opponent, the mutilation of a dead body, the scalping of a live body, and on and on and on...its not fun stuff...but if you turn to ask yourself "Is this real?" and you find yourself answering that yes, things likely were (and even more frighteningly, still are) this way.  It is stomach churningly brutal in its depictions.  And no one gets off looking good here.  The Americans, the Mexicans, the Indians, everyone here is capable of such levels of depravity and violence you "think" you are reading of a different world.  An example of such a depiction is here:

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.  There were in camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

Yup, that's what you're in for on a consistent basis.  That and more, over and over.  But that's partly what McCarthy and the Judge are getting at...that humanity has been, is and always will be a violent, ugly, brutal species and those who pretend otherwise are not "true dancers".  Whether that is true or not isn't the point, instead McCarthy is showing us what is often at the human core--what is at your and my core if we're honest and what we'll pass on to the next generation.  In fact McCarthy, in perhaps his most direct message to the reader begins the work with three epigraphs one of which is the following:

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped 

This quotation taken from the Yuma Daily Sun in the early 1900s regarding the discovery of an early hominid skull in Africa that displayed signs of having been scalped itself.  Violence and war of the most horrific sorts has been with us, literally, since the beginning of time.  If you can take it, read this book, it will stay with you till the Judge comes to take you as well.