What it Means to be a Fucking Human Being at The End of the Tour

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of A24)

It’s ironic that a movie about David Foster Wallace spends most of its reels homing in on the guy interviewing him.

It’s ironic and it’s apt.

Because whether or not you connect with the lionized version of Wallace fashioned in the wake of his 2008 suicide, his writing was always concerned with other people.

Sure, it’s true much of his work showcased a deeply complex, perceptive and flawed psyche, but his goal was always to push readers outward toward ideas of what it means to be alive and why we do the things we do.

This could be said about any writer, by the way, but Wallace’s uncanny ability to write conversationally (esp. in his non-fiction) makes reading him an absurdly personal experience.

His was the last boisterous voice in literature and he was the last rockstar novelist. Our current world is too loud and fractured and options-based for a mere writers’ say to carry much weight among anyone other than readers.

And maybe Wallace wanted it that way. At least that’s partly what one version presented in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour suggests.

As a fan(tod) it’s a hard pill to swallow because anyone who reads Wallace’s work or listens to his interviews knows how privy and opposed he was to the world becoming what it has become: fully corporatized and digitized, and nearly fully desensitized.

Funny how the world he rallied against in much of his writing and thinking was the same world that might’ve allowed him to exist more comfortably since, had he emerged today, he would’ve most likely remained anonymous to a vast majority of people.

And still it’s not that simple. That particularly Gen-X aversion to fame is only one of numerous versions of Wallace Ponsoldt and Jason Segel crafted when bringing David Lipsky’s book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself to the big screen.

One of Wallace’s more skeptical contemporaries, Bret Easton Ellis, recently suggested the Wallace in the film is yet another portrayal in a growing list of “sentimental narratives” (i.e. films that offer up characters with whom audiences can easily identify; e.g. Solomon Northup from 12 Years a Slave).

There exists no challenge in “sentimental narrative” films since they work only to extract sympathy from viewers.

Ellis never bought into the regular-guy persona Wallace swore was his real mid-western self. That in death Wallace has become what Ellis refers to as “Saint David” — that his writings have achieved gospel status in the literary world — only escalates Ellis’s opinion that Wallace’s self-presentation was inauthentic.

“‘The End of the Tour,’ is surprisingly easy to take even though it’s reverential to a fault,” Ellis wrote, and it’s a fair argument.

The film’s trailer, which works to deceive and becomes nauseating upon multiple viewings, has banked on not just a public awareness of Wallace’s likability, but a public acceptance and lauding of that likability. Wallace’s incessant down-playing of his own genius, in essence, was the cleverest (authentic or not) of his career choices because Americans like regular guys. 

But to write the movie off as “an object of hero worship” as Ellis does is unfair, and Ellis — who thanks to his podcast has become one of the best minds discussing film today — forms his opinion of the film with too much distrust of Wallace himself.

Because while The End of the Tour does paint a likable and, yes, sentimental version of Wallace, it stops far short of hero worship to confront Wallace’s seemingly performative approach to not just celebrity but living itself.

In one scene, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lipsky — who accompanied Wallace on the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour for a never-published Rolling Stone article — calls Segel’s Wallace out on his bullshit.

“You don’t crack open a thousand page book because you heard the author is a regular guy,” Lipsky says. “You do it because he’s brilliant.”

The underlying fear for Wallace in the film is that accepting his brilliance will alienate him. It’s a strange fear considering how fearful Wallace was of fame, and the film remains aware of that contradiction throughout; Lipsky never wavers from his suspicions even when it’s clear that he likes, is awestruck by, and yearns to be accepted by Wallace.

But it’s possible to be envious of a person, to like a person, and not-so-secretly wish you were that person even while you’re skeptical of his motives.

To misquote Wallace, that’s what it means “to be a fucking human being.”

So, really, the version of Wallace The End of the Tour presents is not Ellis’ “Saint David.” Sure, he’s likable, but he’s also overly competitive, pompous, childish and terrified. 

If there’s one takeaway from the film it’s that we’re all contradictions and that’s alright. It’s a simple, definitely cliched takeaway, but D.T. Max — who wrote a biography of Wallace — argues that those banal truths were the ones Wallace gravitated to most.

“[H]is mental life had run a huge circuit through the most astonishing complexities to arrive at what many six-year-olds and nearly all churchgoers already understood,” Max wrote.

So it makes sense that (unlike the trailer) the film offers few staggering truth nuggets. Like good fiction it asks more than it answers (Ellis would disagree). But what it’s doing more than anything is offering up one man’s memories.

Nearly every scene in the film is blurred to points of annoyance and malfunction— just like memory. All is seen through Lipsky’s eyes, which are colored with pain, admiration, resentment, a little guilt, and frustration — direct results of the many Wallaces Lipsky met during his extended interview.

And while Segel’s approach to those versions of a man is limited (read: not nuanced) at best, he’s still astonishing as the late author.

Segel seamlessly incorporates Wallace’s signature facial ticks (evident in a Charlie Rose interview) that are born out of a genius’ obvious panic that he’s coming across as way too bookish (i.e. not a regular guy). 

More than that, Segel’s voice is hauntingly similar to Wallace’s. In one scene, during a radio interview, it’s difficult to tell if what’s heard is Segel’s imitation or a recording of Wallace.

Usually biopic acting stifles the actor’s ingenuity because it requires a performance that’s largely impressionistic, but Segel manages to create a Wallace that achieves the rare feat of transcending replication that, in turn, denies distraction.

The End of the Tour is by no means perfect. It stumbles over itself as it attempts to introduce conflict through an all-too-familiar vulturous editor (Ron Livingston) and an all-too-clumsy inclusion of a near-bitter and needless love quadrangle.

Those scenes would’ve been rightly nixed if Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) were more confident in his directing abilities, which are above average.   

And while the film doesn’t play fast and loose with dialogue — most is taken verbatim from Lipsky’s book — it does take liberties with the tone of some of those conversations, which is another attempt to build conflict that may or may not have existed.

Despite its faults, however, we’re still left with a visually nostalgic recreation of a conversation between two guys who’re way too smart for their own good, and it’s fascinating to watch.

It’s a genuine rendering of a man so hellbent on preserving his own genuineness that he becomes disingenuous the more he worries about being anything but genuine.

At one point Wallace asks, “What’s this story about in your mind?” Lipsky responds, “Just what it’s like to be the most talked about writer in the country.”

And The End of the Tour might be the closest we’ll ever come to knowing. 

“When We Have Control Again…”

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)

Like the Indominus Rex, Jurassic World’s latest attraction, Chris Pratt is a hybrid.

He’s part Dr. Alan Grant, part Dr. Ian Malcolm, and part Robert Muldoon. He’s also part Owen Grady, which means he’s not as awestruck as the paleontologist, not as smart as the chaos theorist, and more sympathetic to the preservation and quality of dinosaur life than the game warden. This is a credit to his talent and charm, both of which previously eluded me.

These characteristics turn Pratt into a tidy bundle of signifiers that help discern what Jurassic World is: a competently rendered pastiche that isn’t as awestruck (or awe-inspiring), isn’t as smart, and, oddly, is and is not more sympathetic to the preservation and quality of dinosaur life than Jurassic Park.

The result should be a lousy movie. But Jurassic World’s self-awareness makes it the next best thing to it’s, uh, indomitable predecessor, and as it works tirelessly to undermine its grandeur, it paradoxically becomes more and less successful than both Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park.

It’s one of the more postmodern films of 2015, and the most ambitious in that regard of the major studio releases. It’s also a movie that struggles to justify its own existence and, as a result, attempts suicide at every turn. Eventually, it succeeds.

22 years after Dr. John Hammond’s disastrous experiment on Isla Nublar, Jurassic World is open and doing relatively good business. Somehow control has been regained. Hammond’s InGen Technologies was bought out in 1997 by Simon Masrani (inconsistently portrayed by Irrfan Khan), the CEO of Mascom, a corporation that’s damn near the top of Forbes’ Fortune 500 list.

Masrani, like Hammond, is a populist who found a way to make the theme park affordable for the general population. This was achieved primarily through corporate sponsorship. The main thoroughfare is littered with eateries and gift shops the average viewer will know well. Leasing these establishments must’ve cost the corporations more than a pretty penny, thus allowing a slightly less than astronomical price for admission. It’s plausible, too, that the park simply has a coupon day.

Also littered throughout the park are references to the now laid-to-waste work done by Hammond and his team all those years ago. A tram carries passengers through a familiar gate. There’s a bronze statue of Hammond and holograms of dinosaurs (the poison-spitting Dilophosaurus among them) in the new Visitor Center.

Mr. DNA is present, as is Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong) the InGen geneticist who brought the original dinosaurs to life. Oh, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, like, the same one, is back along with her diet of goat meat.

But attendance is unsteady at Jurassic World after a full decade in operation. People are no longer wowed by the mere presence of Brachiosauri or Triceratopses. According to Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager who shows symptoms of OCD and a Spielbergian loss of childlike wonder, “People want more teeth.”

This is a very meta move by director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed), who was aware that like the park’s attendees, moviegoers, too, would want more teeth.

So Dr. Wu and his colleagues cook up the Indominus Rex, a highly intelligent hybrid that’s got a little bit of the T. Rex, tree frogs, and cuttlefish tossed into its genetic makeup, as well as some secret stuff Dr. Wu refuses to divulge. The result is a camouflaging, bloodthirsty psychopath with the memory of an elephant and a penchant for showcasing its dominance.

Concerned by the I. Rex, Masrani asks Pratt’s Owen, a Velociraptor domesticator, to report on the security of the new animal’s enclosure. Owen is rightfully wary. It’s not long before the modified predator literally tricks the humans into inadvertently setting her free.

At this point the plot of Jurassic World becomes a mirror image of Jurassic Park. There’s the search for lost children, played by angsty Nick Robinson and mop-headed Ty Simpkins, respectively. There’s the ill-fated plan to return the park to working order, and the obligatory banter concerning man’s need to play God with little regard for the consequences.

There’s a love angle that’s in dire need of the two’s company, three’s a crowd tension of the original. And there’s even a scene in which the good ol’ T. Rex is lured by a flare, this time to a showdown with the I. Rex, an unavoidable metaphor for the unavoidable battle that will be waged over the merits of this film versus those of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic.

Spoiler alert: Spielberg wins. With a little help.

Two subplots never bolstered the film’s chances. One involves a divorce. The other involves more pilfering of dinosaur DNA. Both are ridiculously unnecessary.

But there is much to admire, too. The real joy is picking up on the homages not just to Jurassic Park, but to a slew of other movies. Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, The Birds, Birdemic, King Kong, Godzilla, and, lest we forget, two nods to the Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III. Jurassic World knows it’s lineage.

It’s the nods to Jurassic Park, however, that are the most rewarding for audiences and for the film itself. Some are slyly subtle. Others are as subtle as a brisk slap across the face. These references work to remind us just how awesome Jurassic Park was and continues to be. As if we needed reminding. But they also prove that Jurassic World understands this truth and isn’t here to piss off any purists; it just wants to have a good time.

The most nostalgic geeks will appreciate Jake Johnson’s character purchasing an original Jurassic Park t-shirt on eBay for $150 and wearing it to work (a choice that is deemed insensitive by Claire, his boss), the return of Dr. Ian Malcolm in book form, a ritualistic burning of the “WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH” banner, and a Jimmy Buffett cameo, which isn’t nostalgic so much as it’s absurdly hilarious.

What results is a movie that, despite a valiant effort, becomes strangely original in its own campy way and suggests a great deal about the increasingly excessive nature of blockbuster entertainment. At the end of the day, it’s gratifying to watch Jurassic World lovingly wink at as it continually mimics a film and theme park that allowed for its very existence, as well as its inevitable extinction. 

The Future of Cinema is Discovered on Fury Road

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

One of the pleasures provided by the Mad Max sequels are the crudely elaborate structures fashioned out of what little remains after the apocalypse.

In The Road Warrior it was a guzzoline-production compound that had a school bus for a gate and high walls of scrap metal that led to turrets on which football-padded defenders stood guard with flame throwers. In Beyond Thunderdome it was an entire city, Bartertown, where people exchanged what few goods they had for food or water or sex.

That everything is makeshift though means that everything is prone to collapse. The guzzoline compound exploded and Bartertown was destroyed by Max and a gaggle of misfit children whose clothes, mannerisms, weapons, domiciles, and politics were later mooched by Steven Spielberg for the Lost Boys scenes in Hook.   

Sixteen years have now passed since Mad Max creator George Miller knew a fourth film was inevitable. Back then, in 1999, Mel Gibson had already signed on to reprise the titular role. Filming was to begin in 2001, but in an interview with DP/30, Miller explained that “with 9/11, the American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar, the budget ballooned out” and the project was put on hold.

Filming was again postponed in 2012. “It rained [in the Australian Outback] for the first time in fifteen years,” Miller stated, “and what was flat, red wasteland was now a flower garden.” Locals told the crew to wait out the unexpected rebirth of flora, that the water would eventually dry up. They waited a year before relocating the entire shoot to Namibia in southwest Africa.

Now Mad Max: Fury Road has finally been unleashed on the world, and it arrives vengefully intent on reclaiming the action genre for a practical mode of filmmaking CGI crusaders would have you believe is obsolete.

A staple in the series, beginning with a world on the brink of apocalypse in Mad Max, is the perpetual devolution of the landscape into an increasingly unfathomable wasteland of dirt and dust. Fury Road envisions that landscape at its most desolate.

All remnants of a semi-functioning society are gone. Bartertown’s demise has spawned several new anti-cities, the largest of which is The Citadel, ruled by a ruthless warlord named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in Mad Max).

Imortan Joe’s name is somewhat ironic. His failing body demands armor to protect what’s left of his leprous skin and a skull-like oxygen mask allows him to suck clean air out of a saggy bag hanging off the back of his head.

The Citadel functions as Joe’s final attempt at literal survival, as well as the survival of his bloodline. Joe is cognizant of his own mortality, and the legacy of war babies he hopes to leave behind is evidenced in his efforts to knock up his five sex-slave wives. Suggested here is notion that war could cease to be if power hungry psychopaths simply kept their dicks in their pants.

Ever the survivalist himself, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) vows to steer clear of The Citadel (and, thus, the pesky complexities of human interaction that have wreaked havoc on his psyche), but is captured by Joe’s War Boys after a brief high-speed chase that ends with Max crashing his beloved Interceptor. He is soon enslaved and used as a human blood bag to revitalize a sickly War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult).

Health, by the way, is a major concern at The Citadel. Not only are the impoverished in bad shape, but those lucky enough to exist in proximity to Joe’s power also suffer from a wide-ranging array of physical and mental maladies that make the grotesque Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune look like a model of wellness. None seem to care though because Joe has ingrained in his minions a belief that death in his name will result in glorious rebirth in Valhalla.

On the same day Max is enslaved, a convoy is set to embark on a routine mission to retrieve guzzoline from nearby Gas Town. In charge of the convoy is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has long been entrusted with Joe’s war rig. Furiosa has other plans this time though, and veers off-course while en route. It’s her decision, part of a desperate plan to free Joe’s enslaved wives, that sets the movie on its course down the metaphorical Fury Road.

What transpires is what Miller envisioned for his Mad Max universe from the start. The numerous fight and chase sequences consist of highly choreographed set pieces, each one more improbably remarkable than the last.

The world encountered along Fury Road is a larger-than-life replica of Miller’s imagination, and the artistry is like nothing else put on screen. Just as important though are the underlying social issues Miller is able to convey through the action.

For starters, there’s the gender politics. Furiosa, a one-armed badass, boldly stands against Joe’s belief that women exist merely to breed future generations of warmongers. More than freedom, however, she yearns for peace in the “Green Place” of her youth. At her side are the five wives and a group of longtime female survivors willing to defend Furiosa’s search for peace.

Sexism and ageism are two of the more pressing issues in Hollywood today. The roles these women play only strengthen the debate against both.

Max, meanwhile, is confined to a secondary role. The genius of this decision is that it’s what he’s wanted all along. Never in the previous films was Max in search of heroism; the moments simply found him and he reacted accordingly, if not reluctantly.

In Fury Road you almost forget he’s involved. Hardy fuels this absence with pithy, guttural dialogue. His actions speak slightly louder, but this is a performance of anonymity that paradoxically reveals a great deal about his painful past. 

Also central is the ever-topical inclusion of young men willing to die for a violent religious cause. There aren’t just echoes here of current concerns with militant groups like ISIS or the increasingly-tame-looking-by-comparison Taliban, but of the long and tragic history of bloody conflict carried out in the names of various, suspiciously absent gods.

When Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, an ardent believer in Joe’s Valhalla, realizes that afterlife isn’t nearly as important as life itself, his loss of faith is handled with a rare moment of quiet grace that rebuilds him into a much more complex character. It speaks volumes, then, that his insanity vanishes with the onset of his newfound faithlessness.

There is much to unpack, a rare feat for an action saga. But then, everything Fury Road accomplishes is rare and deserving of high praise. It dismantles the prevailing notion that only computers are capable of creating the next generation of what’s awe-inspiringly cinematic. History will regard it as a miracle of moviemaking and it already stands as the benchmark to which all future action films must aspire. But most of all, it renews a sense of visual wonder essential to this particular art form, and does so through use of the same reliable techniques that made movies uniquely wondrous in the first place.

Amorem Ex Machina

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of A24)

The dominating trend in cinema today is realism. Last year’s Godzilla reboot worked because the monsters were filmed primarily from a distance, at eye level. This effectively forced audiences into the role of first-hand witness.

But while Godzilla is not realistic in premise, it is realistic in style, tone, and depiction. So, if a giant lizard did happen to rise out of the ocean to wreak havoc on downtown San Francisco, Godzilla isn’t what it might look like, it’s what it would look like.

Our current realism kick is a byproduct of 9/11. Previous to that fateful day, that planes would explode into the World Trade Center was as far fetched an idea as monsters slugging it out in the heart of a panicked metropolis.

When the planes dropped from the sky, however, and the ensuing horror of the Twin Towers collapsing was caught on cameras near ground zero, all bets were off because nothing created in the history of film compared to the real thing. 9/11 was traumatizing and tragic. But it was also cinematic.

We’re now in a necessitated moment demanding of realism from every genre. This allows science fiction to enter new, albeit oddly familiar territory. Gone are the days of distant, dangerous futures. The best of today’s sci-fi plays out in the known universe of personal space.

It also acknowledges our proximity to perpetual technological advancement by favoring stories of what’s possible just around the corner as opposed to eons from now. It’s the one genre in which realism is in fact about premise as much as it’s about everything else.

Spike Jonze’s Her, for example, exists in the here and now of obsessive attachment to technology. It’s not that we could fall in love with our operating systems; it’s that loving seems downright inevitable.

The reason sci-fi has become more personal is a result not only of the rapid pace at which technology evolves, but also of how rapidly we adapt to those evolutions. We now have a spaceship primed for a flyby of Pluto before it continues on into our outer solar system. A rover on Mars is taking selfies. Robots are vacuuming our living rooms and giving us directions. Yet the magnitude of all this barely registers.

The rapidity of advancement is another 9/11 byproduct. Present consensus isn’t that technology is dangerous but, rather, that it will save us. The NSA clearly believes this, and our collective apathy toward that agency’s actions means we believe it, too. What was once cautioned against now stands as humanity’s primary hope for survival.

Enter Ex Machina, the latest in an increasing line of coming-very-soon-to-a-reality-near-you sci-fi films. Writer/director Alex Garland has crafted a contained, yet meticulously wondrous world that he believes exists “ten minutes from now”, at a time in which artificial intelligence lives and dies with the same desire as humans: to be free.

Arguably the most implausible element in Ex Machina is the inference that Google has been supplanted by a company called Bluebook. Bluebook’s bearded CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), designed and lives in a remote compound where he conducts research on his most innovative creation, a humanoid robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander).

To test the believability of Ava’s A.I., Nathan holds a coding contest at Bluebook’s headquarters. The winner is Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a gifted programmer whose prize is a boozy meet-and-greet with Nathan, who’s foul-mouthed and seemingly wants nothing more than to shoot the shit.

His act soon fades. Nathan all but demands Caleb perform a weeklong Turing test on Ava. The young programmer already knows Ava is a robot, so, in theory, her chances of convincing him are all the slimmer. But Caleb is mesmerized from the start. After their first session, “She’s fucking awesome!” is all he can muster.

He’s not wrong. Ava is marvelous to behold. She has a beauty only the desperate desire of the male gaze could dream up. She’s also empathetic and curious, and contains an intelligence far beyond that of both men, though neither initially acknowledge this.

As the sessions continue, Caleb inevitably falls for Ava. And why not? She’s a sexual being and, lest we forget, anatomically correct. Everything about her seems human. The cadence of her voice and the movement of her body are affected in such slight ways—a testament to Vikander’s talent—that even we forget she’s a robot.

It’s Caleb’s naiveté, however, that leaves him vulnerable. He decides to help Ava escape the compound after she reveals that Nathan’s plans aren’t in her best interests. This isn’t exactly news. We doubt Nathan’s motives from the start. Revelations involving his delusional attempts at perfection work only to make us all the more circumspect.

But what’s most convincing is how Ex Machina allows the love between Caleb and Ava to build without discretion. As in most cases of intense affection, Caleb becomes incapable of rational thought.

In Her, by contrast, the characters played by Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams kept their love mostly to themselves. They were at least cognizant of how it might be perceived as strange (if not dangerous). That Ava is tangible eliminates the strangeness. Not once does Caleb believe his love to be anything but natural. Even more absurd is his belief in Ava’s ability to naturally reciprocate.   

In that sense, Ex Machina depicts a world that mirrors our own. It’s an earnest examination of how easily we interact with A.I., which is so user-friendly, so lifelike that the novelty of its very existence has worn off. That we adapt to each next big thing without challenge tricks us into believing a need for control is unnecessary. In other words, our defenses aren’t just down, they’ve practically gone extinct by way of robotic acceptance. 

The Lego Movie is So Last Year

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

It took well over a year for me to realize I don’t hate The Lego Movie; hate can’t be reserved for something that so painstakingly shies away from its true self. So, instead, I merely feel sorry for it. Because the whole thing hit uncomfortably close to home, and what I mean by that is the movie made me feel as though I was watching a secretly awkward kid—about 13-years-old—who lies to his peers about what he thinks is cool in order to fit in.

This kid begrudgingly embraces skateboarding, bomber jackets, and wallet chains. He sags his baggy pants and fakes his way through conversations about drug references in Sublime songs (all the while not knowing that “pot” and “weed” are synonymous) out of fear that someone might clue in on his weekend plans, which will include earnestly lip synching R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” in front of a full-body mirror and excitedly driving to the local movie theater later that night to see Gosford Park by himself.

Actually, the Gosford Park viewing didn’t happen until a few years later, but you see what I’m getting at. Rather than tell us what it really enjoys (sitting alone in a basement constructing fake worlds out of colorful pieces of plastic) The Lego Movie feigns coolness by referencing all that is nearly unanimously agreed upon in pop culture in hopes that it will blend into the group, all the while hiding the fact that it’s a nerd in popular kid’s clothing with one simple, vague, frightened, Oscar-nominated statement of knee-jerk agreement: “Everything is awesome!”

All I can do now is be thankful that 2014 (and 1997 for that matter) are history. Because in the here and now of 2015, something as uncompromisingly surreal and proudly weird as The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water exists and it doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

Comparing these movies is fairly simple. Both include characters who journey toward discovering their true selves and where they fit in. Both rely heavily, in song and in dialogue, on the importance of teamwork. And, oddly enough, both the Lego universe, the world of Bikini Bottom (SpongeBob’s hometown), and all the characters therein turn out to be constructed by and eventually battle against seemingly higher powers working to stifle their free will.

But how SpongeBob works with these similarities is what sets it apart and above The Lego Movie. For example, it’s Lego’s protagonist, Emmet, who suffers an identity crisis and ultimately struggles to change for the better in order to become “the Special.” SpongeBob, by contrast, is perfectly comfortable in his own absorbent and yellow and porous skin, and he has every right to be because he fully understands both himself and his place in the world. Luckily, screenwriters Glenn Berger and Jonathan Aibel were aware of this, too, and chose instead to center their story around the personal growth of Plankton, Mr. Krabs’s arch nemesis and antagonist of the SpongeBob SquarePants television series.

The plot involves a search for the secret formula Mr. Krabs uses to make his world famous Krabby Patties, which has mysteriously vanished; however, it’s not Plankton, despite his best efforts, who steals the formula (although all of Bikini Bottom, save SpongeBob, refuses to believe this).

The real joys found in Sponge Out of Water lie in the hilarious scenarios SpongeBob and Plankton find themselves in during their search. By far the funniest sequence involves a makeshift time machine they use in an attempt to travel back to moments before the formula disappeared. Naturally, 2001: A Space Odyssey is invoked here, but the creators also animate SpongeBob and Plankton very differently to showcase the possible physical changes that might occur during time travel. It’s an obvious reference to the visual strangeness of SpongeBob predecessors The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko’s Modern Life, and it’s done to perfection.

On top of this is the clever use of N.E.R.D.’s song, “Squeeze Me”. Each time the machine starts up so does the song, including the only discernible lyric, an anticlimactic, “Yeaaaah.” Episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants often incorporate quirky ditties to augment the show’s oddball humor, but “Squeeze Me” is far and away the most effective example of this.

Speaking of music, a duet early on helps to establish another difference between Sponge Out of Water and The Lego Movie. Because whereas the aforementioned “Everything is Awesome” is an over-produced spectacle, SpongeBob and Plankton singing “Teamwork” is nearly forgettable by comparison. You wonder if the writers were swayed by Plankton’s initial refusal to sing and, as a result, crafted the song on such a small scale if only to appease him.

I’m sure that sounds like a dig, but it’s really just another example of how unique this movie is. It doesn’t pander and it doesn’t give in to expectations. Everything is done in service of its bizarre characters (there’s even a godlike dolphin who watches over the universe and shoots lasers out of his blowhole) and their admirable acceptance of one another’s eccentricities that culminates in them transforming into superheroes with powers that range from blowing copious amounts of bubbles to creating sonic booms with a clarinet. Sponge Out of Water is an example of what’s possible when differences are embraced and utilized to make the world a better place. It’s a movie that fears not whether you think it’s an odd duck. It’s the anti-Lego Movie. And everything about it is indeed awesome.

Blackhat Instructs, “We Gotta Grieve Later.” A Tall Task Indeed

by Matthew Cabe

(Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)

It’s hard to tell if Chris Hemsworth’s complete lack of personality in Blackhat is the fault of the actor himself, first-time screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl, director Michael Mann, or if it’s an intentional play on the stereotype that surrounds real computer hackers. If the latter is the case, little effort is made by anyone involved to rectify the situation during the film’s 133 minute runtime.

Hemsworth (better known by his real name, Thor) plays Nick Hathaway, who is the most gifted (and sexiest and most buff and coolest) computer hacker the world has ever seen. Oddly, despite his talents, Nick doesn’t think much of himself. When asked what he’ll do “once this is all over” he responds, “Fix TVs and garage door openers.” And he’s not being coy, by the way; that knack evades him.

The “all this” referred to during the question is Nick’s attempts to thwart further cyber attacks after a fellow hacker introduced malware into the computer system of a nuclear power plant in Hong Kong that overheated the plant’s cooling pumps and resulted in an explosion. Shortly thereafter, the same hacker infiltrates the Mercantile Trade Exchange in Chicago and makes a killing in Soy Futures.

Nick is recruited out of his jail cell not only because he’s the best man for the job, but more importantly because he co-wrote the original code (that was modified and used in both attacks) with his MIT roommate Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang), who is now a Captain in the Chinese Army assigned to the case on their end. The old college chums are reunited upon Nick’s release and share a hearty embrace that’s capped off with Chen affectionately muttering, “So good to see you, bro.”

Their crackpot team is rounded out by Chen’s younger sister, Chen Lien (Wei Tang), the tragically wasted Viola Davis as FBI agent Carol Barrett, and a U.S. Marshal named Jessup (Holt McCallany), who tags along to ensure Nick doesn’t engage in any tomfoolery as they search for the blackhat hacker.

Along the way, Nick’s charmless demeanor wears down the defenses of Chen Lien, and the two begin a clothed and obligatory and emotionless sexual relationship. Lien, also an adept hacker, clearly sees something in Nick that non-hackers aren’t able to detect. She’s drawn to his alluring antisocial behavior, and the two spend a great deal of screen time gazing blankly at one another like cardboard cutout loners behind a high school gymnasium.

That is until Chen finds out about Nick’s trysting with his sister, which leads to a nonsensical conversation in a helicopter and Chen admitting, “I’ve rarely seen her happier.” despite the fact that he was clueless to their relationship, or her happiness, until he walked in on them in bed together just moments before.

But your reviewer digresses. Nick gets his team closer and closer to the blackhat through the bogarting of computers he conveniently finds in apartments and Thai restaurants. When they get too close, a shootout occurs that leaves a Chinese policeman, Alex Trang (Andy On) dead. Risking his own life, Nick leaps through a barrage of gunfire to mourn for Trang as he bleeds out from the neck. It’s an attempt to prove that Nick is, in fact, human, but the moment comes off as pointlessly dangerous and awkward given that he only just met Trang no more than ten minutes earlier.

Also awkward are 1) Numerous shots of actors staring off just beyond the camera for long stretches at images not important enough to reveal. 2) The audible dead air that pervades many scenes as Nick and his cohorts think hard about what to do next. 3) An NSA agent who naively opens a suspicious email and allows Nick to hack into a secret NSA program. 4) A climactic scene that involves a showdown with a “villain” (who resembles Dr. Jacoby of Twin Peaks fame and channels the combat skills of Mother Teresa) during a crowded parade in Jakarta in which several citizens are used as human shields (by our hero) after they fail to run for their lives seemingly because they were incapable of interpreting foreign gunfire into their native tongue.

And finally, your reviewer doesn’t normally delve into discussions involving the technical trifles of moviemaking, but the sound issues in Blackhat are problematic to say the least. There are multiple scenes during which mouths aren’t copacetic with the words they let out. In other scenes, the dialogue of characters who are offscreen is louder than that of their onscreen counterparts. And in yet another scene, Chen Lien’s voice actually gets louder after she turns away from the camera.

This might come across as nitpicky, but in a $70-million-dollar film that made good use of its budget by employing actual hackers to keep the proceedings as authentic as possible, it’s logical to expect something as routine as decent sound synchronization.

With Blackhat though, what’s expected is tossed by the wayside in favor of bland filmmaking about an even blander character. That this lackluster effort comes from Michael Mann (the director behind the stripped-down brilliance of Heat and Collateral) makes the film all the more disappointing. Grieving comes early—long before Nick says, “We gotta grieve later.”