Wherein I Declare Justice League a Triumph

This post is about Justice League, and I promise that I will get around to talking about the film in a few moments. Before I can do so, however, I feel compelled to contextualize my thoughts about the film by telling you about my favorite radio play Christmas song (I won't bore you with the five categories of Christmas songs in which I keep an ever evolving ranking). The song is called "We Need a Little Christmas," and though it originally came from the Broadway musical Mame where it was performed by Angela Lansbury, my preferred version is the Johnny Mathis cover. I don't particularly care for the music, or even for many of the lyrics, but there are eight lines in the song that so captivate my attention that they echo through my head for hours any time I happen to catch the song on the radio during the holiday season. The first four set up a definite problem of human nature related to time and entropy and age:

                       For I've grown a little leaner,
                       Grown a little colder,
                       Grown a little sadder,
                       Grown a little older,

A problem which is redeemed, a handful of lines later, by the celebrations of the holiday season, a remedy for the ague that is part and parcel of being a human being embedded in time:

                        For we need a little music,
                        Need a little laughter,
                        Need a little singing,
                        Ringing through the rafters,

Because, of course, in some vital sense these are the things that give life meaning. They are also some of the qualities associated with an all but forgotten virtue that faded from conscious awareness, for many of us, with the loss of divine right monarchy and the courtesies of the [literary] chivalric orders: joviality. For most of us, the notion of joviality is hidden behind that falling curtain of lost meanings. The term in modern parlance denotes a friendliness or cheerfulness, a social niceness that makes one easy to get along with. And here, as so often happens, the greater bulk of the concept sinks into the liminal space outside of conscious thought. I've not heard a better description of the fullness of joviality than the one offered by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength. Lewis writes:

     Before the other [gods] a man might sink: before this he might die, but if he lived at all he would         laugh. If you had caught one breath of the air that came from him, you would have felt yourself           taller than before. Though you were a cripple [sic], your walk would have become stately: though       a beggar, you would have worn your rags magnanimously. Kingship and power and festal pomp         and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil. The ringing of bells, the blowing of                 trumpets, the spreading out of banners, are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his             quality. It was like a long sunlit wave, creamy-crested and arched with emerald, that comes on             nine feet tall, with roaring and with terror and unquenchable laughter. It was like the first                     beginning of music in the halls of some King so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor       akin to fear runs through young hearts when they hear it. For this was [the] King of Kings,                   through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of [the Sun]...

Nowhere in contemporary popular culture is this notion more fully encapsulated than it is in the figure of Superman, and it is in this mythic sense that Justice League resonates most powerfully.

Much has been written about the representation of Superman as a Christ figure in the recent run of DCEU films. This is not quite accurate, in each of the three films in which Superman has appeared he is drawn in relation to different mythic figures. In Man of Steel, Superman is represented as Christ; in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the comparison is explicitly made to the Arthur of Nigel Terry's Excalibur; and in Justice League he is Balder the Bright, the son of Odin murdered by Loki (Lex Luthor), whose resurrection recreates the world in the aftermath of Ragnarok (sadly, making Thor: Ragnarok only the second best Ragnarok themed superhero film of November 2017). Which brings us back to Justice League.

The film opens in a decidedly un-jovial place. Superman has died, and been laid to rest. Without him the world has, as several clunky moments of exposition will remind us, lost its sense of hope. Superman was a living myth, the incarnation of joviality (his dour demeanor in the two previous films notwithstanding), and like Balder he has been slain. So, naturally, we've got to get him back. Also there is a villain, who has an agenda, and whatever (it is becoming ever more the case that the value of superhero movies is divorced from the specifics of their plots). Also it is funny/fun/charming/winning, and a good time at the movies, and goes a long way towards retroactively redeeming Dawn of Justice, which I didn't think was possible.

Ultimately though, at least for me, it is the mythic power of the thing that stands out. I love Superman, not the jingoistic Superman of (among others) the John Byrne Man of Steel run (from which the first Snyder film gets its title), but the Superman of Final Crisis, who sings in the last moments of the universe to drive away the spirituous evil Darkseid, and who offers up the light stored in his cells to power the Miracle Machine that allows him to wish all reality back into existence. I love the Superman of All-Star Superman, of Richard Donner's films, of Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow: "the imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may) of the perfect man who came from the sky and did only good." And because Justice League offered me a glimpse of that Superman, it has earned my love. The second time I went to see it, I wept openly in the theater, overwhelmed by a sense of relief that even in a fictional world it was possible that this Superman could exist.

And that, if for no one else, made this film a triumph for me.

Kubo and the Two Strings is a Damn Masterpiece

I am an emotionally susceptible person. I have been wracked with such loud, echoing sobs during movies, movies like About Time and Finding Dory, that my wife has been deeply embarrassed to be in my company. At About Time I cried so hard that I couldn't get air into my lungs, and a sound came out of me that was like the chuffing cough of a large dog, but with the amp cranked up to 11. This is because I am emotionally susceptible, and it's important that you know this about me before you listen to me talk about Kubo and the Two Strings, the newest product by the folks at the Laika stop motion animation studio. It is important that you know this about me because when I tell you that Kubo and the Two Strings is maybe the best film of the year, a tour de force, and a masterwork of visual storytelling; that its score is intensely moving, that its images inspire wonder and occasionally slack-jawed awe, and that its story pierces to the quick and sensitive parts of your soul, it is important that you know that this is not the attempt of a dispassionate critic to opine on intricate points of technical mastery. It is the opinion of a person who went into a movie theater and was deeply moved.

The Staggering Racism of The Secret Life of Pets

Earlier this year, the Disney brought the world Zootopia, a charming film that is (on the surface) about natural adversaries becoming unlikely allies while solving a mystery. But on a deeper level, however, Zootopia engaged with complex thematic material related to race, the crack epidemic, and the brutalization of the black community by the Reagan era war on drugs. That is engaged with these issues without ever once raising the hackles of political reactionaries in the target audience should give us some sense of the deftness of the filmmakers. Zootopia was a significant cinematic and political accomplishment.

The same can not be said about The Secret Life of Pets. For those interested in seeing the film unspoiled, I would suggest you look away now, because plot details are coming. But check back in after you've seen the film, because the political issues at play are too important to ignore.

Movie Review: The Legend of Tarzan

This movie licked gorilla nuts.

Movie Review: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

So, I've taken a brief hiatus from reviewing the things that I've been watching, reading, and listening to. Given how long it has been I suppose it is odd that I should choose to write for the first time in several months about My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. I have, after all, been to the movies three days in a row, and more than fifty times since my review of Spotlight. On Thursday I saw Batman v. Superman, on Friday I went to 10 Cloverfield Lane, and last night I caught the 9:45 showing of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 at the Celebration on the other end of town.  Of those films, I'm choosing to write about MBFGW2 for a very specific reason.

One of my favorite contemporary theologians, Don Carson (a Johannine scholar), has frequently said that in new works of theology he is looking for one or two sentences that will catch his imagination and intellect, and that this is basically the best he can hope for. This should be a sensation that is familiar to anyone who reads a lot of books, or watches a lot of movies, or listens to a lot of music. Most intellectual or imaginative creation happens at the margins, because most of what goes into writing a novel, or a work of scholarship, or making a film, for that matter, involves working with a set of familiar and established goals to contribute to a larger discussion.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, a lot actually. Because for 80 minutes of its 87 minute run time, I hated MBFGW2. It like watching a low stakes hostage crisis in action, but somehow the principal hostage was also the hostage taker. Nia Vardalos' character, Toula, is caught in a co-dependent nightmare with a family whose antics, demands, and constant presence seem destined to destroy her mental health. If this movie had taken a sudden left and turn into Arkham Asylum, and was revealed to be the backstory of Harley Quinn, the Joker's sidekick, I wouldn't have been shocked. I'd have been surprised...but not shocked. Moreover, the film can't decide if this situation is good or bad, the voiceover narration wobbles between extolling the virtues of "family," and decrying the demands of the monsters who are holding Vardalos hostage. At the end of the day, are we supposed to side with Toula? Pity her? Hate her? Who even knows.

There are problems with every level of the film: the performances are static and undifferentiated, the script is slapdash, and the plot is clunky. So why am I writing about it?

Because at about the 80 minute mark, the film did something that I really appreciate. It showed me something that I had never seen before. There is a series of shots of Toula and Ian, the main couple from the original picture, mirroring in the foreground (complete with improvised wedding crowns) the late-in-life wedding of Toula's parents, Gus and Maria. The image was beautiful and perfectly composed, taking full advantage of strong axis symmetry, and was so gentle and lovely that I can still see it when I close my eyes. It is a deep and meaningful meditation on marriage, not as a state that is entered into once, but as a way of life that progresses with you as you age, that draws you out from one stage of life into another, and continues to push you forward and draw you out as you live, what the ancient Greeks that this movie is so proud of would have called eudaimonia--the blossoming, flourishing condition of life well lived. I could barely breathe as I watched it unfold on the screen, and then, just like that, it was gone, and the film lurched into its awkward conclusion.

A week ago, I saw Zootopia, a wonderful animated film that just works. I liked it from beginning to end, found it charming and fun. I would watch it again 20 times before I'd go see MBFGW2 a second time. And yet, Zootopia didn't give me a moment like the one I described above. I don't know what this means in terms of aesthetics, how a sloppy failure can give me something that I am going to remember and take with me, and a well-tuned, perfectly calibrated entertainment can vanish into the well of memory. Who can say, all I know for sure is that I had a moment last night at the movies, and that's pretty good.

Movie Review: Spotlight

On a purely technical level, Spotlight is many things: well directed, perfectly cast, impeccably acted, subtly and sublimely set, costumed, and designed, and is, perhaps, the best edited film I have seen this year. On a purely narrative level, Spotlight is tense, exciting, disturbing, and thought provoking. It is easily one of the five best pictures of the year so far (in the unofficial rankings that I keep in my head I currently have it at number three).

Which Disney Princess Movie is the Best Disney Princess Movie?

So last night I was watching Tangled on the Disney Channel. I really like Tangled. It has lots of my favorite things: Mandy Moore, magic hair, self-sacrifice, Zachary Levi (quite honestly, Zachary Levi is enough to make me love anything, I loved him as Fandral in Thor: the Dark World and he was TERRIBLE in that movie--being Chuck in Chuck wins you a lot of slack with me), and some of the most beautiful animation in any of the Disney Princess movies. Anyway, during the scene when Flynn and Rapunzel are in the boat watching the floating lanterns drift up into the air and singing a song that I used to keep on my standard playlist for many years ("I See the Light" a song that 100% of the time makes me tear up) I started thinking to myself "this movie is amaze-balls." And, because of who I am and how my mind works I immediately asked myself "but how does it stack up against the other amaze-balls Disney Princess movies?" What follows is a short meditation on that question.

Movie Review: Trumbo

Several times throughout Trumbo someone tells Dalton Trumbo, the great screenwriter, that a perspective project is a mess "but there's a great story in there somewhere." To me these lines come off as high irony, because for all of its many virtues this movie suffers from the same problem--there is a good story in there somewhere, but it has been lost in the shuffle.

Top Ten Fictional Worlds

It's been a minute since I've done a top ten list. This time I've decided to focus on something particularly close to my heart as a scholar, fictional worlds. You can find my thoughts on the theory and philosophy of fictional worlds in other venues, but for this blog I am interested in the most basic question of all: which fictional worlds are the best.

Album Review: Adele's 25

It is not, at this moment in time, possible to stream Adele's new album 25, so I went to Target and bought a physical copy. On a CD. It has some liner notes and everything, which is dope.

Movie Review: The Night Before

Let me open this review by way of a confession: I really enjoyed The Night Before.

Billy Zane Got Swoll, and 25 Other Thoughts That I Had While Viewing The Phantom

Hello friends,

I took the month of October off from writing this blog--sometimes you want to watch TV and movies, read books, and listen to music without thinking about what you will write about, but thought that I would inaugurate my return with a set of real time thoughts of a viewing of The Phantom (1996) starring hero of American cinema and Titanic lifeboat seat thief Billy Zane!

Movie Review: Sicario

In his last two films Denis Villenueve, the director of Sicario, has developed a fascination with the limits of luminescence. In Prisoners, Villenueve's last film (while Enemy was released after Prisoners it was actually made first), a search party combs the woods at night, looking for two missing girls. Filmed from above the light of their flashlights forms small circles with discrete borders. In Villenueve's world light doesn't taper off into darkness, it slams into it like a brick wall. The search for knowledge in this world is always curtailed by the hard limits of the unknowable.

I Watched All Four Hours of ABC's The Langoliers (1995)

In 1995 the network TV mini-series had already eclipsed its zenith. Six years earlier, CBS aired the 8 hour Lonesome Dove series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall (in perhaps his single greatest performance). Because in the 90s, and, honestly, even in the best of times, ABC has never been the most innovative broadcast network, they were desperate to try to catch lightning in a bottle with a mini-series of their own based on a story by America's most popular writer, Stephen King. The problem with a series like Lonesome Dove, and what ultimately resulted in the production of The Langoliers, is that you need to own the option on the source material, and the production rights to all of King's major works were already owned by film studios. That meant that if you wanted to make a mini-series based on King's work, you would need something...less well known. What ABC ultimately settled on "The Langoliers" a novella from King's abysmal collection Four Past Midnight.

Movie Review: The Intern

Let's imagine, together, the attributes that would make someone a wildly successful high school chemistry teacher. It probably isn't getting kids to learn how to calculate moles by deploying Avogadro's constant, nor does it have anything to do with them figuring out how to plot electron orbits, nor does it likely involve their ability to successfully recreate reactions precisely (all any high school chemistry lab can hope for is not to have a student, like me, who creates huge fireballs--I was a poor practical chemist). None of those pieces of knowledge are particularly important because most people, the vast majority, don't live lives where these factors come up very often. I suppose you could make an argument that a good high school chemistry teacher gets a lot of students to pass the A.P. Exam, but that is cynical and if you think that way you're probably not the kind of person I hope I am talking to anyway. Rather, a good high school chemistry teacher is probably someone who imparts a sense of astonishment at the way that delicate and universal interplay between matter and energy, wonder at the way that transition can be as gradual as the creep of rust or as violent as a supernova, and amazement at the unseen currents of reality that flow like magic beneath the surface of the seen.

Which Actor on The West Wing Gives the Best Performance?

So, I've spent a lot of time recently re-watching episodes of The West Wing and debating with myself about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various actors and actresses who populated the show. So I decided to talk it out in blog post form. Below is my best effort to rank the quality of the performances of the main cast of The West Wing.

When Left to My Own Devices, I Watch Moulin Rouge!

If you know me very well at all, you know that my wife travels a good bit for work and that when she does I tend to descend into a directionless heap of quasi-bachelor decrepitude. On the rare occasions that I go into work while she's gone my friends will say things like "do you feel alright? you look terrible..." It's because I don't sleep, either barely eat or eat total trash, and generally exist in a semi-perpetual fugue state. My wife is traveling right now, and as a way of passing the time I decided to put on a movie that never ceases to captivate my attention: Baz Luhrmann's musical pastiche Moulin Rouge! 

Album Review: The Best of Art Tatum

It is, perhaps, silly to call this a review. This album came out in 1991. We are a little late to be issuing reviews. Instead, I suppose, one might be well served to think of this as thoughts as precursor to an unqualified recommendation, and my encouragement to you to seek out this album (and really any recording featuring Tatum) on your own time.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

There is something wrong with Alex Gibney's new documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It is an vague and almost inexpressible quality that sneaks up on you over the course of the film's runtime, gathering form and substance as it goes until that movie is over and you think to yourself "wait...what?"

Superman Returns was a Better Movie than You Remember

Bryan Singer's Superman Returns was not critically savaged when it came out in 2006. In fact, 78% of critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes, reviewed the film favorably. Nor was it a box office failure. It made nearly $400 million dollars on a $200 million. And yet, because Warner Brothers decided against making a sequel, rebooted the Superman franchise with new actors, a new story, and all the humorless gravity that only Zack Snyder can bring to bear, Superman Returns is now almost universally regarded as a failure.