Friday, April 26, 2013

Disconnect and Oblivion


             “She said ‘There is no reason
          and the truth is plain to see’”


                                     Review by Ken Burke             Disconnect


A complex interweaving of several stories, all involved in some manner with cyber technology and its potential to ruin lives, especially those already in some type of crisis.


                                                                                                           Oblivion
   
       
Tom Cruise, futuristic sci-fi, and stunning images all work to this movie’s advantage although its plot elements are a bit too reminiscent of a lot of familiar predecessors.

     
Henry Alex Rubin’s Disconnect actually has a lot of connections in it but they’re between characters in various parallel plots that otherwise don’t have a lot to do with each other.  Within each of those plotlines and the characters who inhabit them, though, we have plenty of disconnections which in all cases are further connected to problems with the oversaturation of computer-based technology in our culture and its inadvertent but destructive potential for shattering what should be otherwise normal, stable lives.  To try to keep up with all the players you definitely need a scorecard here, so I’ll provide one based on the order in which we first meet all of these troubled souls trapped in techno-hell.   We begin (above) with local news reporter (from a not-so-thriving station) Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough) searching Internet porn sites until she pays for a session with underage-but-not-admitting-it Kyle (Max Thierot) but all she wants to do is talk instead of watching his usual masturbation routine (he seems a bit disappointed but as best I remember those hormone-driven days of yore he could probably have relieved that disappointment in about 5 min. after finishing up his conversation with Nina and still been ready for his next client).  This leads to her trying to do a story on youth exploitation in these online brothels (which we see doesn’t even look as good as a regular whorehouse [Where do I get all of this background knowledge, you ask?] except for the tight computer camera shots onto bodies sitting on beds, not allowing us to see the squalor that these exploited “sex cam performers” live in under the stern, monetary-focused eye of sleazy Harvey [Marc Jacobs]), which helps her career as CNN picks it up but so does the FBI so soon the kids are on the run, Nina’s career is in jeopardy because she paid to connect with Kyle and then connected with him at a motel in an even less professional manner (he calls her a “puma,” a woman older than him but not yet at the “cougar” stage).  In that story the Internet is just an enabler of detestable decisions but in the next one a young couple, Derek (Alexander Skarsgård) and Cindy Hull (Paula Patton), already troubled by the recent death of their baby which has caused an estrangement between them, are put into tragic financial trouble because his depression over the lost child, combined with PTSD problems from Mideast military service and a bit of an Internet gambling addiction, runs head-on into a credit card and banking crisis because their identities have been stolen, seemly by a guy, Stephen Schumacher (Michael Nyqvist)—with the text “handle” of Fear and Loathing, which would seem to further indict him—that Cindy’s been chatting with in an online support group (nice use of display of their text chats on screen to substitute for dialogue), but even when they desperately go to hunt him down they find that there are further complications in their debt-ridden lives.

On we go next to another type of computer-enhanced tragedy as nice-but-shy kid Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) gets punked by a couple of jerks at his high school, Jason Dixon (Colin Ford) and Frye (Avaid Bernstein)—stupidly vicious enough to do tricks such as peeing into a sports beverage bottle, slipping it onto a convenience store shelf, then waiting to see the disgusted face of the guy that unknowingly takes a gulp of their bodily residue—who set up a scam of a fake girl, “Jessica Rhony,” seemingly intrigued with Ben, leaving him increasingly sexualized messages that result in a fake nude crotch-focused photo that encourages Ben to reply in kind, resulting in his humiliation throughout the school.  To complete these interlocking circles we find that Ben’s dad, Rich Boyd (Jason Bateman), is a lawyer for the larger corporation that owns Nina’s TV station so he comes down hard on her for not cooperating when the FBI wants to bust the operation that houses Kyle and his underage buddies; he also comes down hard on Jason’s father when he uncovers the bullying scam, but when he goes to settle the score with the kid he runs into the ex-cop brick wall that is Jason’s father, Mike (Frank Grillo), a widowed guy who physically defends his son against the attempted assault of Rich even though he has a strained relationship with Jason and has just found out himself the truth about Ben’s attempted suicide, leaving him simultaneously outraged with and protective of his son—and, in case you thought this couldn’t get any more complicated, Mike is also the Internet fraud investigator trying to help Derek and Cindy verify their thief so that legal action can be taken, a process too slow and unhelpful to keep them from setting out on their own vigilante mission when the probe points to Schumacher.

As you can see from all of the complex plot recitation above, computers and smart phones are instruments of evil that touch all of these characters, some more directly than others, but while the warnings about the corrupt use of machines is a clear theme here (although it’s more a collection of angst-drive stories about how people’s lives are ruined by devious assholes who now have more effective weapons at their disposal than just crude pistols and knives than it is a condemnation of the technology itself—these devices [desktops, laptops, smart phones] aren’t really implied as proto-villains that will eventually lead us to the horrors of the renegade technology of the Matrix films [sibling directors Andy and (formerly Larry, now) Lana Wachowski; 1999, 2003]).  The promos for and some reviews of Disconnect imply an anti-technology diatribe, but while this film clearly shows the unjust horrors that can ruin the lives of innocent people, such as Cindy and Derek (above)—or in the case of Kyle’s transients, wanderers caught up in a lifestyle not so much by choice but situational seduction (based on the reality that the runaway kids in Harvey’s grubby house aren’t professional sex workers so much as they are wayward youngsters who can’t resist easy money for the natural drive of pleasuring themselves—so why not do it on camera as a means of further arousal?—at a point in their lives where they don’t really have a clue what else they might be doing anyway)—it’s really about how lost, lonely, and crass our society has become where you can make a dishonest fortune with the proper keyboard strokes, you can viciously extend the normal teenage urge to torment the weaker members of the herd in order to hide your own insecurities (Jason/”Jessica” actually finds some meaningful dialogue in his exchanges with Ben, as both of them feel abandoned by their fathers, the later because his career interferes too much with his family life and the former because his disciplinarian Dad just doesn’t know how to raise a teenager without the help of his lost mate) or just enjoy the fleeting sense of domination in a social structure constantly shifting its priorities (so that even Ben’s slightly older sister, Abby [Haley Ramm], tries to avoid him at school so as not to be embarrassed in front of her higher-pecking-order giggly friends), make a fortune off the financial misfortunes of strangers that you don’t even have know the true existence of (we eventually find out that Schumacher is just another lonely soul like Cindy, that it’s not even his computer account that’s directly responsible for the Hulls' harassment but that he’s just an ignorant conduit for the real hustler in yet another state), and that maybe the worst crimes of all here aren’t so much legal as ethical ones, as the only responses to any of this overwhelming destruction of the lives involved is just wait for the under-enabled law enforcement to finally take action against cyber-thieves rather than provide better protection for those whose finances are being drained (the only advice Mike can offer to the Hulls), protect cyber-bullying adolescent perpetrators as just kids who need better parenting (as ex-cop Mike destroys the evidence that could convict his son), and see society’s exploitation of those too helpless to protect themselves as the opportunity for coverage leading to career advancement rather than trying to help the victims escape from their situations (Nina’s quite willing to allow her improper attraction to Kyle to temporarily ease her guilt over getting the glory for his story without trying to do anything to help him until her job is on the line; even then she’s more concerned with just trying to spring him from Harvey’s hold than help the rest of his colleagues be freed from their semi-sex-slave situation).

I hate to end up inadvertently echoing the old saw that “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” but clearly the lesson to be learned here is not that we need less obsession with this technology that so now easily ruins people’s lives but that we live with a species—ourselves—that can never be trusted to not do the wrong thing so that we’d better find better safeguards against these contemporary weapons that are capable of slower, more insidious, more lasting trauma than what we’d face from traditional weapons of assault except when mass murderers are on the loose, as with those ideologically-saturated idiots in Boston (although none of these technologies are easy to regulate or control as we’ve just seen in the inability of the Senate to pass gun control legislation favored by a large majority of the population and the contrasting easy ability of a hacker to enter the Associated Press Twitter account and post false news about bombs injuring the President, resulting in a significant Stock Market slide before the hoax was discovered and refuted).

Disconnect is a bit of a balancing act to follow with all of the overlapping but not quite connecting stories—the clearest interaction comes with Rich and Mike not only in actual proximity and interchange but coming to blows over the damage done to Ben by the horrible “prank” orchestrated by Jason and Frye, although we get no resolution at all as to what’s to come of the legal consequences for Jason as the scene cuts to a final hospital family conciliation for the Boyds as bloodied Dad embraces his now-restored unit of wife and daughter as the watch over their coma-quieted son ends the overall narrative with no resolution as to whether Ben will revive from his attempted hanging or not (I know I’ve gotten blasé about spoilers, but honestly the value in this film is not so much in being surprised with how everyone interconnects but more in how these interlocking stories are played out and impact you with their depictions of the many forms of desperation that infect contemporary life—I truly feel that you can approach this film with all of the “what” laid out for you, thereby not having to keep up a scorecard on the large cast, and still much appreciate the “how" of the delivery, especially in a marvelous parallel-action—or, rather, near-suspended animation—intercutting of attack scenes near the end as Rich battles Mike but almost injures Jason in the process, Schumacher pulls a rifle on Derek and Cindy but Derek uses his military training to struggle it from the gunman’s control, and Harvey confronts Nina at a motel during his escape with his wards over the state line resulting in her getting a bloody face just like Rich; it’s a tour de force of slo-mo filmmaking and tension-building editing, showing how all of these lives are constantly on the edge of destruction in various fiscal and physical forms).  Local San Francisco critic Kelly Vance faults Disconnect for its “lack of heart-to-heart talks between family members” (see complete review at http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/disconnect/ Content?oid=3524807), which for me is not the problem with the film, it’s the problem with the characters in the film who are constantly looking at computer and telephone screens but not talking to each other, which is driving the Hulls, the Boyds, and the Dixons further apart in every scene, ultimately leading to the calamities that befall all of these emotional zombies, not so much because they are victims of modern technology but because they simply use it to burrow themselves further from the light of human interaction, accelerated by what transpires on their small screens but not fully caused by the cyberworld that has consumed them.  Disconnect is an active film, with constant intercutting among the various storylines, which adds a level of energy not found in most of the characters who are beaten down by their lives’ circumstances although we still see an active grabbing of possibilities from Kyle until he becomes confused and feels used toward the end, just as the opposite occurs with Rich as unleashed passion pours out in defense of his long-ignored “arty” son, all of this shot in a medium-def video mode so as to underscore the ordinariness of these existences and the insufficient protection any of their family circles or social structures can offer in a society where anyone can hide behind a manufactured Internet identity.

Just to make a transition out of Disconnect in a more harmless manner than the dark aspects of life and the modern devices that allow us to plunge further into darkness as implied by the film, here’s an old Rolling Stones song, “Connection,” that I’ve used before in some review (I forget what and I keep no record of these things; I should use my massive profits from this blog to hire an archivist—just kidding, IRS, now go find a billionaire to bother … oh, wait, that’s right, they don’t pay any taxes, do they?) but I find relevant again here if you’d like to listen at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=t37ppBGJGkM.  (Song credited to Jagger and Richards but conventional wisdom—such as it is—says this is really more Keith’s song so here’s a version with him singing lead from the Martin Scorsese-directed 2008 documentary Shine a Light [with German subtitles for the interview inserts in case you’d like to practice your bilinguality]; the cut is originally from the 1967 Between the Buttons album, but Mick was singing lead on that version.)
       
[Blogspot has decided once again to add to the layout of this review with a big space before the next round of comments, so I suppose you're being told to take a break before flowing on to the analysis of the other movie in consideration this week.  I guess cyber-technology does rule whatever we're trying to do after all (just as in the final posting process each week when the master software suddenly decides to reduce my previous paragraph indents to just one space apiece, despite not doing that in countless prior previews, in case you wondered if that was a stylistic choice of mine—nope, all Blogspot).  Silly me to have doubted the digital overlords in my above attempts to deconstruct Disconnect.  Forgive me, oh Great Binary Executive Editors.]


 No matter how bad things get for the many characters in Disconnect, though, their events aren't nearly as Earth-shaking (literally) as the fate of humankind itself, along with our soon-to-be-abandoned planet, in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, a futuristic sci-fi movie about Earth having been made uninhabitable in 2017 (so if you haven’t taken the kids to Disneyworld yet you’d better start making plans soon or they’ll never forgive you) as the result of our use of necessary-defense-nukes which stopped an alien invasion but not before our own weaponry left us with dangerous radiation zones and the geological turmoil caused by the aliens’ destruction of our moon resulted in a cacophony of natural disasters that have buried our cities (there are some great scenes of the very tops of NYC’s George Washington Bridge and the Empire State Building just barely coming out of the ground that totally rattle your knowledge of these massive structures to realize how much of our former civilization is now completely underground), just as we constantly excavate the ruins of other human civilizations long buried under our “progress” as we have constantly overthrown earlier societies and obliterated their remains in order to rewrite history from the perspective of the latest conquerors.  So, as our story opens we’re in 2077 where most of the remaining humans have moved to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, while skeleton crews remain on Earth to monitor and protect the huge machines that are drawing hydrogen from the planet’s oceans to use for energy in the new Titan colonies.  One pair of the left-behinds, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria/Vica (Andrea Riseborough again, showing her versatility), are assigned to live on the abandoned planet (high above it in a slim tower, actually) to patrol the flying killing machines called drones (they look like volleyballs with machine guns for arms) that protect the energy-processing machines from the destructive remnants of the aliens, the Scavs, until such time in a couple of weeks when they can join the other remaining Earthlings in the floating control spaceship, the Tet, and all head off to Titan.  Despite some minor problems with reactivating fallen droids and staying on the lookout for Scav attacks, zone patroller Jack and his flight control partner, Vica, back at their lofty base above the Earth make an “effective team,” as Vica constantly reports to Mission Commander Sally (Melissa Leo), with her irritatingly-charming Southern manner, up on the Tet.  However, through a series of unanticipated troubles Jack soon finds that all is not as it’s cracked up to be, either in his waking life (where after a hard day on patrol he always has dinner, a marvelous view far above the now-abandoned ground, a lovely swimming pool, and an eager mate in Vica) or in his dreams where he keeps seeing NYC from the observation tower of the Empire State Building (at a time confusingly prior to his birth), where he’s in the company of a mysterious woman who seems to be his consistent lover in this reality of the unconscious.

Serenity for Jack (enhanced by his secret visits to a lake house he goes to in order to connect himself to the lost Earth culture and even play records on a turntable somehow powered seemingly by very mild wind energy) is suddenly thrown askew as signals suddenly emanate from that almost-buried Empire State Building observation platform, then later he sees objects falling from the sky.  Upon investigation he finds a crashed space ship with its crew in suspended-animation “coffins” but before he can make any sense of this drones attack and kill the coma-ed crew except for one that Jack manages to save, whose name is Julia (Olga Kurylenko) and whose appearance is exactly that of the woman in Jack’s dreams.  After revival, and a less-than-welcoming attitude from Vica, Julia convinces Jack to return her to the crash site so that she can retrieve the flight recorder, but while there they are attacked and captured.  As Jack recovers from being knocked out, he finds himself a prisoner but of humans living underground—led by Beech (Morgan Freeman)—not the Scavs he assumed were his enemies.  As it turns out through ongoing exposition throughout the rest of the movie, there are no Scavs at all, just a large group of humans trying to put together enough “liberated” technology to mount an attack on the Tet (if I called it the “Tet offensive” would many of you know that I was making a bit of a pun on a bad [for the U.S.] turning point in the Vietnam War?  If not, you can learn more about that at http://www.history.com/topics/tet-offensive) because there are no humans on it (including “Sally”), but instead the energy-robbing aliens who damaged our moon, killed most of our population, and are consuming our planet’s energy before moving on to their next victim.  To further complicate things, Jack isn’t Jack, or at least not the original one anyway; turns out that actual Jack was on a mission to explore Titan 60 years ago in a spaceship called (appropriately enough) Odyssey but instead encountered the destructive aliens on the Tet.  Jack prime managed to send most of the crew, which included Julia whom he was married to, back toward Earth (where they crashed in the present story) before he and the original Vica (who had the hots for Jack despite Julia’s prior claims) was sucked by a tractor beam into the Tet and used as clone masters for pairs of Jacks and Vicas who first helped eliminate Earth’s population and now are all over the planet providing drone protection from the remaining human rebels (they’ve all been given brain cleansings as well so that they won’t be aware of the actual events that occurred with the original Jack and Vica nor these dominating aliens, although that intention doesn’t play out so well—good thing, though, because we wouldn’t have much of a story here if those sublimated memories didn’t start creeping through in the clones’ consciounesses [My spell check doesn’t care for this word, but it seems an appropriate plural to me; also it’s acceptable in the Yogacara school of Buddhism, which ought to give it some cachet, as George Costanza would say—you don’t have to look up George too, do you? If so, reading my reviews must make you feel like you’ve been through a memory wipe of your own]).  Eventually, our current Jack realizes that he’s just a clone as well, despite the deep feelings that he generates in long-lost Julia, but he’s a clone with stirrings of the real Jack’s memories and passions which is why he feels so connected to this lost planet and doesn’t share Vica’s programmed desire to be with him and go back to the mother ship (given that they’re all just clones with a necessary job to do in guarding the water-processing machines it’s not even clear that they’ll be needed by whatever the life forms are that run the Tet [“Sally” must be another clone or a type of computer-generated hologram because we never actually see any of the aliens, thereby allowing the well-spent visuals budget to go fully into Jack’s flying machine and the gorgeous landscapes that he navigates through]).

Without going into the complexities of how it all happens, Jack flies up to the Tet supposedly carrying real-human Julia to be explored by “Sally” but it’s actually a mortally-wounded Beech carrying a nuclear device that destroys the Tet, along with Beech and Jack.  All’s well that ends well, though, as a few year later Julia, now living at the lake house along with the child fathered by "real" Jack back when all the battles were going on, is found by the remaining humans including another Jack clone—that our protagonist pair encountered and fought with 3 years ago in our main narrative (although by this late into the tale we understand that the Jack we have come to know was a clone also, not the human we assumed)—who has also reconnected with the memories of the actual Jack so that the surviving humans can live and reproduce happily ever after on an Earth that never was harmed by nuclear warfare (the aliens almost annihilated us without much resistance, except for those rebel survivors, so that even those "forbidden zones" were just a ruse to keep the clones confused about the real situation caused by these mysterious invaders).

I’ll start the closing out of my comments with a shot of the Vica that we came to know in the movie (although we see another one later, as the mate of the second Jack clone that our Jack has a fight with, when he fools her into thinking he’s her Jack in a ruse to get needed medical supplies for a wounded Julia).  The reason this shot is somewhat significant is that it’s the only one I can find for download of either of the three main women in the movie (Vica, Julia, and Sally), even though I searched several websites where I found many variations of images of Tom Cruise but virtually none of the women that together provide a nice emotional range of reactions (Julia’s wild relief at being with Jack again after her decades of deep sleep but then her agony when he sacrifices himself to terminate the aliens; Vica’s programmed cheerfulness which is disrupted when her deep memories of Julia jealousy are aroused; and Sally’s icy command of the whole adventure, along with the usual “join us” offer to Jack before he and Beech activate the Tet-destroying bomb) that far transcend the limited range of cool confidence, confusion when confronted with cognitive dissonance (a fundamental understanding of human psychology; check it out further at http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html), and single-minded heroic determination that are present in Jack’s limited persona.  I could understand this if Cruse himself constructed all of the websites but I doubt that even he has that much control of everything connected to his media presence (in a likewise fashion, it was also a bit strange that in gathering photo considerations for Disconnect I could find no pictures at all of teenage Ben and his antagonist, Jason, as if some misguided publicity hack was trying to protect their identities because of the cyber-bullying situation).  Whatever the PR intentions of just giving us multiple shots of Cruise rather than practically any other images from Oblivion, he’s not an unattractive sight but I just wish that I could show you both more of the other characters in the film (especially Julia) and some of the magnificent scenery, but that would be a reason to see this movie while it’s still on the big screen because it’s a wonder to look at, as awe-inspiring as the best nature documentaries.  Plot-wise you might not be so impressed, though; it seems like the production team assembled these fabulous wide-screen backgrounds and then had to come up with a script to justify putting some action in front of them.  It has the sense of a sci-fi recipe where you take the destruction of Earth from Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), the revelation of forgotten identity from Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990; Len Wiseman, 2012), the army of clones from a single source from Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002), anything to do with the species-absorbing Borg from the Star Trek canon (such as Star Trek: First Contact [Jonathan Frakes, 1996]), the altered landscape of our “big blue marble” from Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), and destructive machines from the Terminator series, put it all in a blender, whip it all into a blend of previously-well-embraced elements and then sit back to watch the cash flow in (which it did, a very fulfilling $37 million in just one weekend’s domestic gross).  

 Its elements are so familiar that it’s hard to not be distracted, yet its astounding visuals, constantly well-choreographed action (there’s a bit of The Empire Strikes Back [Irvin Kerschner, 1980] as well, with airships and drones zipping through crevices like the Millennium Falcon darting through an asteroid field to escape Imperial pursuit), and heroic triumph, even when all previous strategies seemed doomed to failure, add up to an enjoyable if rather mindless experience.  You can try to read deeper implications into it regarding the resilience of identity and the fundamental expression of selfhood, but you’d be better off just going along for the ride.  While you’re riding, here’s a parting tune for you, Jack’s favorite even though it’s one from 50 years before his actual time, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb3iPP-tHdA (from the Procol Harum album, with the original 1967 music video, very tame by contemporary standards).  I’ll see you again next week when “the crowd call[s] out for more.”

       
If you’d like more connection with Disconnect here are some suggested links:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LilhR-WFclc (this is a curiosity item for you: if you have shutter 3D glasses and your screen supports side-by-side 3D you can see how this regular trailer compares to the same imagery in 3D)




If you’re not yet lost in Oblivion but would like to be here are some suggested links:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9m6KzRMWnA (21:00 footage behind the scenes, with lots of clip footage and commentary by actor Tom Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski, production designer Darren Gilford, and other members of the acting and filmmaking team; a great showcase of the movie’s astoundingly beautiful visuals)





We encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  You’ll also see our general Spoiler Alert warning that reminds you we’ll be discussing whatever plot details are needed for our comments so please be aware of this when reading any of our reviews and be aware of our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control.

Please note that to Post a Comment you need to either have a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.

***Google RSS Feed Alert!***  To get notifications about new postings to this blog via RSS feed we encourage you to visit the actual site of the feed (rather than its downloads) located at feed://filmreviewsfromtwoguysinthedark.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default; for us on a Mac this works easily with Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome (those are the only ones we use), but if it doesn’t connect as a direct link for you just copy and paste this site to the URL bar of your web browser and click in.  This copy/paste method also works fine for us in Safari and Firefox (Firefox even automatically allows you to set up a link to the good version of the feed) but seems to be inconsistent via Google Chrome (go figure!).

However, if you attempt to add our blog to an iGoogle site via a gadget for the RSS feed you might find that your headline or “most current post” will be stuck on our 11/9/12 review of Flight and The Sessions despite the many others added since then.  Similarly, if you depend on Google Reader for notifications you’ll probably get most of the recent ones accurately but others might be missing and older ones that we unknowingly posted with much fatter files will be truncated in various ways.

Please work directly with the best version of the feed as indicated above for more accurate information on what we publish on roughly a weekly basis.  Sorry for all of this complexity, but we have little control over the intricacies and craziness of cyberspace.

FINALLY:  If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com.  Thanks.

By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile.    Ken

P.S.  Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

The Place Beyond the Pines and 42

You Talkin' to Me?

Review by Ken Burke         The Place Beyond the Pines

A fascinating character study of two conflicted fathers and their equally troubled sons trying to find stability in situations that push all of them to their emotional limits.
  
      
                                                    42
      

A moving biography of the brave athlete who finally broke the color barrier in Major League baseball despite the vicious racism that he faced in challenging the status quo.


In watching Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines (a marvelously enigmatic title, given how indirectly it connects with specific events of the film by referring just to the English translation of the Mohawk designation for Schenectady, NY where the action occurs) you might be fascinated with the dual protagonists story that interweaves a lot of fascinating plot points and probes some interesting ethical questions or you might be put off by what could easily be understood as a cluster of artificially-imposed narrative coincidences that make for an artful structure but are too precious in their plotting to not feel distractingly artificial.  (Although, when you think about it, most stories are constructed in an artificial manner in order to bring about necessary dramatic conflict and eventual closure:  How likely is it that a millionaire newspaper publisher would chance upon a poor, fetching (but untalented) songstress just when he needs some spark in his personal life, yet his ego-driven attraction to her will then lead to his personal and political downfall?  But without this needed situation of hubris-gone-too-far-to-control we wouldn’t have the Shakespearian [himself a master of unlikely but tremendously effective plot twists] overtones of Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941], which would just be a long, lonely story of a man never realizing his true potential, even if he had gotten elected Governor of New York.  How likely is it that a major mobster would have a son who rejects the family/”family” business to become a war hero but then to protect his father turns into a more ruthless criminal than his Dad ever was?  Yet, without that tragic dramatic arc you wouldn’t have the power of The Godfather saga [Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974, 1990], just generations of hoods killing each other for territorial control.  How likely is it that a young man vastly undereducated in traditional cultural knowledge would happen onto a series of questions on a televised game show with a huge prize that he would know the answers to only because each one related to a traumatic incident in his life?  Of course, without such a string of lucky connections socially-marginal Jamal’s [Dev Patel] fate in Slumdog Millionaire [Danny Boyle, 2008] would probably have been as humdrum and hopeless as what would happen in independent films about the socially-marginal, yet even there something dramatic usually occurs to entangle the plot, as with the classic version of such situations in Bicycle Thieves [Vittorio De Sica, 1948].)  Assuming that you can accept the unlikely-but-still-dramatically-powerful plot contrivances that drive (so to speak, in a film where motorcycles play an important role) The Place Beyond the Pines I think you’ll find a haunting, satisfying exploration into the lives of two surface-distinct-but-internally-similar men and the families that they pull along into their chaotic rides through life in upper New York state.  To fully appreciate it, though, you need to know that the actual unraveling of the plot results in a different telling than what the previews imply so read no further beyond this SPOILER ALERT (the likelihood of which I hope you’d be aware of from our Two Guys home page ground rules, but in this case I really want to spare you a fundamental revelation about this film if you’d rather wait until you can see it for yourself, although I’ll note that other reviewers have been more cavalier with divulging the plot’s structure so my concerns may be just a case of too little too late, even as I stand by them for the benefit of those who may be intrigued by the possibilities of this film but haven’t read all that much about it yet).  With that in mind for the rest of this portion of the review until you get to the comments on 42, please read on or skip down as you wish.

Assuming you’re still with me, the fundamental revelation of which I speak is that the two primary male characters—motorcycle master and aspiring-but-essentially-unfit father, Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), and cop-turned-District Attorney-turned-seeker-of-higher-office Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper)—don’t interact throughout this film but instead share just one quick scene where Luke is attempting to hide out in a neighborhood house after a botched bank robbery but is confronted by Officer Avery who fires (he claims in self-defense but we’re later given reason to question this) on Luke, resulting in the latter’s death.  So, essentially this is a situation of two almost-separate stories welded together by a single traumatic incident, with each main character given about an hour of the film’s total run time.  That ultimately makes it more intriguing than you might initially expect, but if you’re looking for a latter-day major-male-stars-in-action-film-costarring-roles-experience (as with what you were hyped to see in Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat with cop Al Pacino and crook Robert De Niro) you won’t get what you came for in The Place Beyond the Pines because the two are on screen together for about a minute before wounded Luke falls through a second-story window to his bloody death.  (You don’t get much Italian actor-god togetherness in Heat, either, as those two characters have only one notable scene together, although it’s of much more dramatic depth and significance than the “rapid-fire” encounter between Luke and Avery; if you’d like to watch this 6 min. encounter from Heat, here it is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrDLPuoQSLs where it’s claimed that just as they never had any on-screen connection in The Godfather: Part II [they couldn’t have, as De Niro played the young Vito Corleone, Michael’s father, so that the son was only a young child in any scene in which he appeared with the emerging “boss of bosses”] they weren’t even on the set at the same time for Heat because the entire scene is shot as angle-reverse angle cinematic ping pong so each part could easily have been filmed at separate times.  That wouldn’t explain the two-shot above but it  could have been constructed in post-production as well and I don’t have immediate access to a full version of the scene so I’ll leave that for you to ponder when you’re not contemplating the complex characters that inhabit northern New York in The Place Beyond the Pines).

Even on his own, though, Luke is a very compelling character, a minor-league Evil Knievel whose traveling-carnival motorcycle stunts are emblematic of his roving lifestyle (our introduction to him as he puts his driving clothes over his heavily-tattooed body and then walks through the carny midway with his back to us in a loooong traveling shot is reminiscent of the beginning of Goodfellas [Martin Scorsese, 1990; take a look if you like at a clip from that film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1mHtkpkxiA] as it conveys all we need to know about his sense of self-confident independence) until his troupe returns to Schenectady (a large but not particularly exciting place—sorry, local residents—where the ever-marvelous Nina and I spent a couple of nights at a cheap motel in 2009 when attending Oakland A’s superstar Rickey Henderson’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame [it was a bit of a drive each way but the motel was a lot more affordable than anything close to Cooperstown—Nina and I also wandered over to White Lake/Bethel on that trip to see the site of the original Woodstock Festival, although we got there 40 years too late (I was surprised to see that some of the acts weren’t still waiting to get on stage)]), where he’s surprised to find old-flame Romina (Eva Mendes) is now the mother of his child (“Why didn’t you tell me?” “Why did you leave and never contact me again?”) which stimulates his fatherhood inclinations even though she’s already living with Kofi (Mahershala Ali), a guy who’s not too interested in Luke’s late-awareness paternity passion just as Romina’s not that interested in Luke’s minimal financial state.  Luke’s not to be denied, though, so he quits the carnival to hang around the area, then teams up with Robin (Ben Mendelsohn)—the guy who’s given him a small-time mechanic’s job at an auto repair shop—to rob local banks (“Not since Hall and Oates has there been such a team” says Robin, which, given that duo’s rather short career arc may be more prophetic than intended; at least he was clever enough to realize not to compare them to Batman and Robin).  Athletic Luke (lithe and quick, he could have learned some good base-stealing tactics from Rickey [more baseball and extensive references to another Rickey to come later in the review] just as he learns to be an intimidating, efficient bank robber from Robin [although the first time leaves him nervous enough to puke as he’s leaving the job], pulling daring escapes where he rides his bike into Robin’s panel truck, then they drive off in the other direction from the pursuing police) wins back Romina’s interest with his lavish gifts for the baby and his genuine care for his new family unit.  After Luke and Kofi clash, though, forcing Robin to bail his partner out of jail he decides to put the brakes on Luke’s ambitions (so to speak) by destroying his bike (at one point earlier Robin had warned him, “If you gonna ride like lightning you’re gonna crash like thunder”), but all that does is compel Luke to try another robbery on his own with a clearly inferior motorcycle which leads to getaway problems that finally put him in conflict with Avery, essentially closing Luke’s story and pulling us into Avery’s, a decent guy just trying to be an honest law-enforcer in a corrupt police force, with further trauma from the guilt he’s carrying for killing Luke when he finds out that both of them were parallel dads with very young sons.

Avery soon finds other problems to confront as his cop buddies (led by Deluca [Ray Liotta, in a brief but effective scumbag role]) raid Romina’s place, certain they’ll find money from one of Luke’s robberies.  They do (it’s concealed poorly, wrapped in aluminum foil and hidden under the mattress in the baby’s crib), but they’re not interested in an arrest, just the cash for themselves and Avery.  Eventually, he gets his moral confusion into enough of a boil to report the miscarriage of justice to his superior but to no avail, as busting his own cops is the last thing Chief Weirzbowski (Robert Clohessy) wants to do.  In desperation, Avery turns to his retired-NY-Supreme-Court-Judge father, Al Cross (Harris Yulin), for advice who helps him set up a sting on his now-dangerous cop colleagues, leading to a newsworthy bust.  15 years later Avery has a law degree, a job as a District Attorney, and a campaign in full swing for state Attorney General.  The only blemishes on his spotless record are a split from his wife and his son’s, A.J. (Emory Cohen), drug problems, so he takes the teenager into his lavish home in Schenectady, but this is where the concocted coincidences really take hold because when A.J. enters the local high school who does he buddy up with but Jason (Dane DeHaan), Luke’s son, who doesn’t know his own heritage but is well-known to Avery, who insists that A.J. steer clear of him.  As with any meaningful exchange between fathers and sons, not only does A.J. quickly become a doping buddy with Jason he also invites him to a wild party at his father’s mansion while Lawman Dad is out on the campaign trail.  Needless to say, things turn hostile when Jason (on the right in the photo below) finally finds out from Kofi what his real leniage is, leading to an assault on A.J. and what starts as a kidnapping prelude to an intended murder of Avery in the woods before Avery offers a remorseful apology to Jason, so he just steals the car and vanishes into thin air.  Avery manages to rise above the minor scandal of the bacchanal that led to the assault on his son, eventually winning the A.G. job as the now-reformed (maybe) A.J. joins him on the victory stage, while far away from this well-lit scene Jason buys a motorcycle and rides west on his road to freedom, as far as possible from this haunted place not very far beyond the surrounding pines.

As I said earlier, you have to be willing to flow with the imposed narrative coincidences in this film because the whole situation of the two teenage boys meeting, leading to the inevitable conflict between Jason and the Cross family, is a far-fetched contrivance that will either take you out of the dramatic possibilities of this tale or will allow you to appreciate the inter-generational conflicts here, as a group of damaged males who are young (Luke and Avery in the first story), then older (Avery dealing with the various difficulties in his life that keep pulling him away from any clean approach to what law enforcement may be all about—especially in scenes with the Internal Affairs investigator Scott [Gabe Fazio] and the police psychologist who seem more concerned with protecting the image of the cops than with true rehabilitation of Avery after the traumatic experience of killing Luke, as well as the later circumstances where a colleague tries to use him to help his own investigation rather than following procedure), then even younger than in the first stories (A.J. and Jason, both estranged from a father’s nurturance as one has been too career-consumed to even understand what’s bothering his son and the other is removed from the reality of the boy’s life, explained as the victim of a car crash with no truth about his criminal career) try desperately to make sense of lives that seem to reject their very existence, no matter the unconventional skills that they may bring to their various challenges.  Gosling, Cooper, Cohen, and DeHaan are all excellent in their performances, with terrific supporting players throughout all aspects of the story, especially Mendes who tries desperately to rise above her attraction to unintentionally-toxic Luke but continues to be beaten down because of it.  In their various ways, all of these characters are beaten down—either because their self-image ultimately exceeds their capacities (Luke), their ideals clash too much with the society they have to navigate through which has little respect for their needs (Avery, Jason, Romina, Kofi), they have no sense of a moral compass (A.J.), or they just have little ambition beyond the easy payday (Robin, Deluca and his fellow cops).  Only the few scorched by the legal system but still determined to have it mean something useful (Judge Al and I.A. hardass Scott) can see any hope for these wanderers, but their screen time and impact on the stories are very limited; most of these characters seem to live more by the philosophy of Detective Visser (M. Emmett Walsh) in Blood Simple (Joel Coen, 1984): “But what I know about is Texas [or in this case, New York], an’ down here … you’re on your own.”  (Having lived that life in the Lone Star State for many a year, I’ve rarely heard a more accurate statement in any form of fictional dialogue.)  Overall, Cianfrance’s film is a sad look at human limitations and miseries, unfolding in a manner that evokes more melodramatic genre works without getting stuck at that level.  As it finishes up, with Jason displaying his genetic heritage by jumping on a motorcycle for seemingly the first time but easily riding away into the wilderness I can’t think of a more appropriate musical metaphor to finish off this part of the review than a classic by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKhwqhbF3tc (recorded live in London in 2009 [maybe I heard echoes of it across “the pond” while I was visiting the Woodstock grounds], with the song originally on the 1975 Born to Run album).

If there’s one guy who wasn’t born to run (from trouble, that is, but he was a great sprinter on the base paths) it was legendary Jackie Robinson, now featured on film in Brian Helgeland’s 42, which provides a condensed look at this celebrated athlete and cultural hero (as well as target for the racist scumbags of his time), but only in the 2 years leading up to his Major League rookie season and the 1947 campaign itself which culminated in the National League Championship for his Brooklyn Dodgers, helped greatly by Robinson’s skills.  By chance, Nina and I saw it during the afternoon of April 15, which I had forgotten was Jackie Robinson Day throughout the Majors (I wondered until later why there was such a crowd at the theatre on an early Monday afternoon; then that night we got to watch a televised game of my beloved Oakland A’s beating the Houston Astros, with everyone wearing 42 that night in honor of Robinson, just as his number is now retired on the wall of every major league stadium in the sport.  [How ironic can you get, with the team just 50 miles up Interstate 45 from my childhood/adolescent home in Galveston being walloped 11-2 by the team of my new home in Northern California (Giants? What Giants? Aren’t they still in New York?)]) in celebration of his debut with the Dodgers on that date in 1947 (so he was preparing for his impactful entrance into the previously-Whites-only domain of professional baseball about the time I was getting conceived; I wonder how many degrees of separation that is—well, in actuality, none because he was too faithful to his wife, Rachel [played in the current movie by Nicole Beharie], to have diddled around with my Mama, even if he had had any interest in an interracial fling [which I’m sure he didn’t] and because my DNA tests show only 9% of my heritage being outside of various European aspects [my sliver of diversity is Native American, but, sadly, not enough specifics in the data base to know which tribe], so I’ll just have to respect him for his many triumphs without trying to claim any further connection than irrelevant parallel chronology).

Certainly this movie is essentially about the difficulties and triumphs of Robinson (played here very successfully in both character elaboration and on-field skills by relative newcomer Chadwick Boseman [new to the big screen but he’s got a lot of prior TV work]) in breaking out of the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues (no shame in playing there or implication of lesser talent, just the racist realities of many decades of the “national pastime” not allowing African-American players entrance to the officially-recognized Major Leagues) into the arena that his talents called for (you certainly don’t get to be Rookie of the Year, as Robinson did in 1947, out of public sympathy when your record on the field has to defend your award), but it also devotes a lot of screen time to Dodgers’ President and General Manager Branch Rickey who made the fateful decision, somewhat out of a sense of what he saw as needed social justice and somewhat as a business decision to help improve his team and thereby sell more tickets (as noted in his phrase that’s often used to explain some of the motivation for being more inclusive in a capitalist society, “Every dollar is green.”).  As inhabited by Harrison Ford, Rickey comes across as an exaggerated character, a guy who’s life I know a little bit but not one I’ve ever seen footage of nor read about so whether he really talked in such cartoonish language and projected such a comical personality, I don’t know.  (He reminds me of the old Warner Brothers pompous rooster character, Foghorn Leghorn, except that big bird was a stereotypical Southerner, so if we were going to translate this whole history lesson into old-school animation Foghorn would need to be one of the “good ol’ boys” who didn’t “cotton” to that “colored guy” [not their term at all, but I’ll pass on repeating what is yelled at Robinson constantly by opponents in the movie—reflecting the actual overt attacks, verbal and physical, that he endured as he refused to seek retaliation for such abuse], such as the Dodgers’ “Dixie” Walker [Ryan Merriman] or the St. Louis Cardinals’ Enos “Country” Slaughter [David Thoms, seen briefly here intentionally spiking Jackie in a vicious manner].)  Were this not such a meaningful story for American history—social, cultural, and sporting—I think that such a depiction would be distracting, even if based on an accurate rendering of the man, but the whole experience is so startling today, with the “Whites Only” signs on Southern restrooms and the blatant degradation and segregation shown to Robinson, even in the “brotherly love” city of Philadelphia, that Rickey may come across at times as a vaudeville performer but his outsize personality fits in comfortably with the other absurdities of the day, not all of which have fully receded into the fabled dustbin of history.

While Mr. Rickey, as everyone called him because such was the prestige of a powerful person and personality in that era (much more formal than our casual-Fridays-and-name-familiarity society), was an essential bulwark in Robinson’s professional life his personal strength was constantly reinforced by his assertive-to-the-point-of-defiance wife, Rachel (in fact, her defiance of Florida restroom protocol gets her and Jackie bumped off their airplane to his Spring Training site so they find themselves on an all-night bus trip), because as a 1940s Los Angeles woman and USC student (where she met 4-sport star Jackie) she wasn’t about to accept Jim Crow structures any more than he was, although he agreed in his pro-ball-call-up to endure more crap than any human should have to face so that his entire “race” (a useless word for differentiation where the biology of human beings is concerned, although a understood reference regarding imposed sociological distinctions) wouldn’t be demeaned as aggressive and uncivilized (although that’s exactly what his White detractors proved themselves to be).  Rachel is Jackie’s wife, spirit guide, and occasional hitting coach, played by Beharie with a fine combination of grace, wit, and indignation, as various circumstances require.  The real Rachel continued in public life in nursing and education after her husband’s retirement from baseball (in 1956, only a decade after his start in the Majors because he began as a 28 year-old “rookie”) and his much-too-young death at age 53 in Oct. 1972 (due to health problems and likely the burden of his public tolerance of racist intimidation in pre-Civil-Rights-era America), but here we see her only as a young woman, a new mother, and a fiercely-proud spouse of a man constantly trying to use his natural abilities to shut out the hostile rejection of those who experienced him only as unwanted in a culture built on bigotry, even in Northern cities because so many of the players on his and opposing teams were Southerners who had been raised to reject contact with, if not outright hate the sight of, Blacks in their proximity.

Ultimately, what 42 focuses on is how Robinson’s commendable skills on the field and determination to hold back his anger at the vicious taunts and treatment he received (from his own teammates at times, many of whom signed a petition before the start of the season refusing to be on a team with him—a tactic angrily rejected by manager Leo Durocher [Christopher Meloni]—and especially from Philadelphia Phillies’ manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), as vile a racist as you could ever imagine, spewing disgusting epithets at a public event in full view of everyone on the field and in the stands).  Such castigation of Robinson finally resulted in some of the Dodgers rallying around their teammate in respect for what he had to endure, especially Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black), Eddie Stanky (Jesse Luken), and Ralph Branca (Hamish Linklater), proving that they weren’t totally “Dem Bums” after all.  Durocher would have been an assertive help as well, given that all he wanted to do was win games no matter who was helping him do it (he’s quoted, with the statement included in this movie, as saying in regard to Robinson, “I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a f***in' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded." ["Dixie" Walker did ask for a trade after the 1947 season.]) had he not been suspended during Jackie’s first year as a Dodger for “moral reasons” regarding his fooling around with a Hollywood starlet (although the film clearly implies it was a move by Baseball Commissioner “Happy” Chandler [Peter Mackenzie] to further undermine the stability of the Brooklyn team in an attempt to force Rickey to give up on his racial integration experiment, while other accounts say the formal reason for the suspension was “association with known gamblers”).  So Robinson had to largely do it on his own because, while he could count on Branch and Rachel when they could be available to him, he was in the dugout with the Dodgers and on the field against opponents (in every sense of the word) on a daily basis, having to prove himself as a major leaguer in a sport where a return to the Minors looms over every non-performing Opening Day starter and as a man where he was required to rise above the insanity being constantly hurled at him without going insane himself.  In The Place Beyond the Pines all of the fictional male leads are trying to find the same type of personal stability—Avery and A.J. by embracing a sense of traditional societal normalcy and public acceptance despite their shortcomings (whatever Avery tells himself to maintain his reputation he always lives with the guilt that he shot first at Luke, possibly resulting in an unnecessary death; A.J.’s drug dependency was clearly a call for help from his too-absent father), Luke and Jason by resisting such norms in their quests for self-acceptance in a society unnerved by such individuality.  All of them yearned to not turn into T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men” (you can read the entire haunting 1925 poem at http://allpoetry.com/poem/8453753-The_Hollow_Men-by-T_S__Eliot) but instead, like Tracy Chapman (in “Fast Car,” from her 1988 self-named album and available for a listen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orv_F2HV4gk), to simply “be someone.”  Jackie Robinson yearned to “be someone” also, but—given his unique circumstances—not just for himself; in being placed in the unenviable position of being a hero to countless men, women, and children who savored his every triumph as justification for removing the social barriers that were rotting the souls of their nation and their individual lives, he carried a tremendous burden to be a savior for others but first he needed to save himself from the threat of falling to the level of his detractors, of simply meeting force with force in the subhuman manner that his enemies' antagonism would breed in a weaker man.  He truly did have “the guts to not fight back” in situations that constantly called for such a response, proving himself to “be someone” for the ages through the long, painful process that he endured as he, at first single-handedly, changed a long-standing American institution.


All in all, 42 is a very moving movie, one that gives an exceptional flavor of the time period (including opening newsreel footage of our country in 1945, on the one hand celebrating a victory over barbaric dictators who had used extermination tactics against people they considered “lesser beings,” yet on the other hand continuing to tolerate brutal segregation within our own borders) and allows you to see how dumpy even a revered baseball park such as Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was by our modern standards with no electronic scoreboards, video displays, luxury boxes, garlic fries … or multi-million dollar salaries even for the top players, a much simpler (but overtly racist) world that I still have some childhood memories of that are really brought to life in the staging of this story.  Robinson played himself in a biography movie made during the height of his career (The Jackie Robinson Story, Alfred E. Green, 1950), which I’ve never seen but have read that he comes across as well on the screen as he did on the field; I certainly can’t say, then, that someone else could do a better job of performing the role of Robinson than he did on his own, but Boseman is marvelous here, balancing pride, anger, frustration, and a genuine desire to be respected for his accomplishments, not his groundbreaking social presence.  The baseball scenes play as authentic to my well-experienced eyes as a fan      (I certainly recognize the craziness that Robinson as a base runner causes for opposing pitchers with his nervous energy and tantalizing leads from the safety of a base, just as I saw the wonderful Rickey Henderson do with the A’s in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, a skill surely learned by him from the lessons of Robinson), the triumph of decency over ignorance is easy to appreciate even if it does feel a bit preachy and melodramatic at times, and the genuine love of the sport as shown by both Robinson and Rickey comes across well on screen.  Even if you don’t know a back-door breaking ball from a “slerve” when the announcers are recapping every pitch and obscure statistic (about left-handed middle-relievers in late-June day games) I think you’d have a hard time not enjoying the chronicling of Jackie Robinson’s appropriately-honored triumphs in 42, an effective movie about social transformation and the overdue need for it, even when established mores would seem to dictate that “as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end” … but we don’t always have to shout an “Amen” to that; sometimes the appropriate response is “A Change is Gonna Come” as Sam Cooke reminded us, way back in 1964 and again here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYuhLNwh3A.  (Maybe better gun control will be the next change someday down the road [sorry, Texas homeboys, but my respect for the Second Amendment is decreasing on a daily basis].  What, you say I’m a dreamer?  Well, I’m not the only one, so if you want a finale how about this, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8.  Sweet dreams and harmonies to John, Yoko, and everyone else until next week, y’all.)

If you’d like to explore more of The Place Beyond the Pines here are some suggested links:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V55bE-ikodg (37:35 interview with director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance)




If you’d like to trot home and learn more about 42 here are some suggested links:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjgZOVD_t_s (4:42 interview with actors Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford)





We encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  You’ll also see our general Spoiler Alert warning that reminds you we’ll be discussing whatever plot details are needed for our comments so please be aware of this when reading any of our reviews and be aware of our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control.

Please note that to Post a Comment you need to either have a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.

***Google RSS Feed Alert!***  To get notifications about new postings to this blog via RSS feed we encourage you to visit the actual site of the feed (rather than its downloads) located at feed://filmreviewsfromtwoguysinthedark.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default; for us on a Mac this works easily with Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome (those are the only ones we use), but if it doesn’t connect as a direct link for you just copy and paste this site to the URL bar of your web browser and click in.  This copy/paste method also works fine for us in Safari and Firefox (Firefox even automatically allows you to set up a link to the good version of the feed) but seems to be inconsistent via Google Chrome (go figure!).

However, if you attempt to add our blog to an iGoogle site via a gadget for the RSS feed you might find that your headline or “most current post” will be stuck on our 11/9/12 review of Flight and The Sessions despite the many others added since then.  Similarly, if you depend on Google Reader for notifications you’ll probably get most of the recent ones accurately but others might be missing and older ones that we unknowingly posted with much fatter files will be truncated in various ways.

Please work directly with the best version of the feed as indicated above for more accurate information on what we publish on roughly a weekly basis.  Sorry for all of this complexity, but we have little control over the intricacies and craziness of cyberspace.

FINALLY:  If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com.  Thanks.

By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile.    Ken

P.S.  Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.