Atomic Blonde Review

Walked into Atomic Blonde expecting a mix of John Wick, neon glow, and stylized fight scenes. All this with the added appeal that Charlize Theron has a little more range and charisma compared to the star of John Wick.

What we got was a generally pleasing mixed bag with some great choices and some more puzzling ones sprinkled in. First, looking at the good and the formulaic. The action was fast and very well

shot with some nice camerawork making it feel fresh. The overall style of the movie is high, as the cinematography elevates it from it's B-movie inclinations. Everything drips in graffiti and neon and shadow. Several scenes merely of a character walking into a setting have a definite pull on the audience. The soundtrack is comical occasionally and generally well thought out to add to this whimsical 1980s, in-vogue atmosphere. This was quite surprising from someone who's seen John Wick and movies like Shoot 'Em Up where that sort of thing is low or nowhere on the director's priority list. Here, there is more art than was to be expected from the genre. 

The decision to limit the amount of gunplay went a long way towards making the film's action scenes seem more immediate and engaging. How many more John Woo-style gun battles can American Film have? Atomic Blonde has decided to go with a heavy dose of mixed martial arts fighting mixed with some lamp throwing all the way into a fire hose-whipping good time. Anything is a weapon around the spy that we are following and the visceral nature of ingenuity lends it a freshness in place of cliched genre predictability.

So the fights are great, the cinematography is surprisingly smooth. Where does this caper misstep? Well, it feels like the movie would've ideally been about 30-40 minutes long, but that doesn't make a movie, so what feels like a whole lot of boring, rehashed backroom spy banter gets plopped onto us in 10 minute bursts that has the audience stretching and fighting the urge to check their phones. Pretty much all the scenes with John Goodman pull you out of the intensity and coolness of the film and drop you in a miserable double/triple agent, who-gives-a-damn onslaught of monotony. All of these interrogation room scenes feature a pissed off and bored bad ass lead, who looks just as disinterested in being there as us. The movie would have benefited greatly from throwing these backstory bits into conversations over martinis in a divey, hip spot somewhere nearby. Why not zip the Atomic Blonde on a jet to a nearby country where a whiskey and hefty cigar makes sense over some spy talk. Instead these interrogation-type sscenes sterilize the senses and not in a palate cleansing way either. You've also got your highly cliche, flashback-style storytelling thrown in for good measure.

So that all hurts but it doesn't cost the film it's entire momentum. Just seems like missed opportunities to find more art. Or it seems like the budget ran out half way through and they had to shoot 20 scenes in one terrible studio set. 

But okay, moving on. The whole female spy love fling feels pretty forced and this may be the director's intention. The fact that the film is so over-the-top it may have felt natural. But even so, it may appeal to the basest of John Wick fans but it just feels sort of silly and drifting. On that note, really any love/fake love in the film feels out of place. Charlize's character would have been better being closer to asexual and shutting down all comers until the job was done. Seems odd while on such a specific mission that she would mosey off track. The ending after the ending feels like something thrown in by the propaganda-wielding film boards of the 1950s. And intentional or not, it's not really worth much past a cheap laugh. Felt I could've done without it.

A clear ode to Casablanca.

Now onto some more of the coolness here. The movie winks at many of the action/spy legendary precursors. There's a scene where Charlize is frisking someone she's killed that echos John McCain in Die Hard (the first one, of course). A beautiful scene where she's walking to a plane that oozes Casablanca's beloved runway shot. And the list goes on I'm certain on repeat viewings. This is another nice touch and almost a nod to the audience of the film's gleeful derivative nature. It's a fun touch for the film nut and evocative of something to the viewer just floating through freely.  

End of tale being that the film is evocative and beautiful. The soundtrack masterfully edited to the cinematography and action. It's smooth and easy on the eyes. And it feels big, which is easy to miss for a movie of this type (Wick at times, as the nearest and most recent parallel, felt overly B movie in many instances). It's almost like a beautiful music video in being so snappy and smooth. This may lead to the eventual slowness or feeling of such. But the film will play many times on your home screen, I suspect, without anyone having any objection. A few more careful steps and maybe a few more dollars of budget on a potential sequel (and David Leitch directing again), and you could have something truly special. I'd give this one 7.5 out of 10. And high marks on the repeat viewing potential. Coolest thing you'll sit down to see at the theaters for a bit I suspect. Just bring a flask to join Charlize's character in drinking throughout the interrogation room scenes. 

True Detective "Form and Void": High Art on an Ending Spin

The show went back to being high art again tonight. It did all feel a little rushed and plot advancing for the first 30 or 40 minutes, but that left for the surreal scene outside of the hospital with Rust and Marty. It was lit with the feel of being in a Speilberg movie, namely Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Marty was lit by the high light, warm face, speaking to Russ in the darkness. Russ, in a state of extreme fragility, pontificated from there. Philosophy making clear the oddness of our own existence.

Out of the scene, Russ is pushed, trying to find "the light" after having gone through 17 years or more of being forced through darkness, derangement, and degradation. He had to go through all of this because his nature beckoned it. Even when Marty's clearly did not. Out Rust peeks, skin shed, feeling reborn, and absolutely lost. Out back into the dark world where lightness speckles in and out.

This is the best scene in anything done this year. On any screen.

True Detective did lose its way a little here and there as a series, but the sequences like these are without equal. Until Mad Men comes back what can compare to this sort of experimental postmodernism?

It's Spielbergian, Hitchcockian, David Lynchian, yet also so unkempt between these flashes and disintegrations. It goes right back to some unused line of high wire, clinging to it for as long as it will hold.

It's ET for adults. Except there's no foreign oddity. There's these lives. There's this place. There's all that oddness and derangement lurking around. All those doors to all of that. None are ajar. And the meanderings of our current navigations of such a place. The wrong doors making aliens of men.

What have we done to ourselves?



(Cue the T-Bone Burnett soundtrack, please)

HBO's Newsroom "Willie Pete" Episode 3 Examination

Show creator Aaaron Sorkin has decided to hit us over the head with a mallet in this episode. For some reason, in a show about news for news followers, he and his team of writers have decided that they need to spend three-quarters of an episode highlighting for us the redundant and permanently evasive nature of modern day political campaigning.

The character Jim does this ever so eloquently for us by asking the Romney campaign that he's following similarly trapping questions every opportunity. They evade. All of the reporters use the campaign's talking points as "news" at the end of each day on trail. This is a disgusting reality of modern day politicking, yes. And one scene of this would have sufficed. About six repeated scenes of this is merely annoying and redundant itself. Irony isn't effective if it's not funny or insightful. This is neither. It's a storyline that could go on for every stop of everyone's primary campaign everywhere. Where would that take us?

The episode is essentially ruined by this, only not in full. When the show drops out of its high moral crusade gear, it manages to return to its uniquely raw and engaging avenue of humor. It works well from Sloan Sabbith's deadpan to Maggie Jordan's fragility. The show has a certain realistic charm to it. As felt in the scene in which MacKenzie McHale uses a word to Will, stops, and admits to not knowing the "right word" while trying to smile it off in awkward jest. When the writers stop overwriting every bit of snappy jargon they can think of into a scene and simply let the characters breathe, the show embraces something outside of the formulaic box  it too readily occupies. No one wants to hear Will correct his old pal and boss about 25 movie references in 35 seconds. At least I don't. The show needs to take a cue from Will's weekends and find a little room for an elixir.

Speaking of Will's weekends...the show once again ventures into a monotonous love script between Will and MacKenzie. The ever-so-close, oh-I-just-missed it romance is not an enthralling plot line, gang. I think all intelligent viewers, which this show aims at almost exclusively, lost interest in these sorts of ongoing plot lines after, oh maybe, Friends. I was 12 then, I think.

For once, can a show simply allow romance to tumble into a character's existence, as if it could happen by chance? And no, we do not need to know the other character of said romance for 40 episodes prior, I don't think. I feel that an audience is fully comfortable with a small bit of spontaneity as opposed to one of those circling penny pieces of shit that used to be in Big Box stores. What do you know those two pennies that were neck and neck for 80 episodes landed on top of each other? Yay. Cool trick.

Next episode, guess what? Maggie and Jim will have their little to-and-fro. How fascinating.

It probably seems like I don't like this show. And yeah, there are times I don't. Like 85% of this episode. But between its doggedness and message-heavy hands and formulaic time consumption, it does offer some truly well caught nets to be laid out upon a fabric that is real. That is recent. That is relevant. Its design allows for so much to be said. I just hope that it finds the right angles of approach. The right tone and right step to set up a grandstand with all the hard to catch together fixings falling one by one. It's just swinging in the wilderness at this juncture.


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Post-Script

Teasing the next conflict however, at show's end, is a direction that seems to have all of the wandering edges that make for a dynamic superimposition over news and the way we were readily able to perceive it such a short reality ago.

In another post script, Will's only moment's on-air during the show were highly effective. Message-driven, but nonetheless far from used up.

Oh and one more thing, this "romance" with the tabloid woman that is happening in this episode does not fall into the spontaneous category I am alluding to above. When you can see something through to the other side, it's not really there.

Mad Men: "The Flood" Retrospective

The show returns to one of its most profound techniques. It puts reality in the background - the place reality always is.

Then it allows the characters to be superimposed over an era. To breathe it into existence within scenes. Not like all the crap we watch where characters are representative of an era. These characters appear to actually exist within it. As motion pictures go by us, so go by the events.

When the news is announced of MLK being assassinated in this episode, Paul Newman is on stage giving a speech to the room full of advertisers. It continues the theme of Don and all those around him having no inkling of celebrity worship. It's another element of a by-gone attitude that contributes to the aura of other-worldliness.

No one approaches Newman. Just as Don didn't care to meet the Rolling Stones in an earlier episode. He merely cared why a girl backstage had become such a devotee of the band. He asked her questions from the angle that he once inherited asking his former lover turned heroin addict why she had taken so strongly to the drug.

Don looks at all things as art or shallow portrayals of such. He takes unto people as he may a series of signs representing different ad slogans to choose amongst.

Want to understand some of the mystery of the main character of this show? Look no further than the fact that he takes his own sensory experience more seriously than any fad or person or passing train. He's a well dressed man in an art gallery.

And here we are, watching, from a society that orbits, as if orbiting were the way to appreciate a thing.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present documentary review

What is the documentary called Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present you ask? Well...

It's a film about an artist. A very different one. She calls herself a performance artist. She does things you'll see in the beginning that may have you ready to turn this film off. Seemingly, she's just seeking attention when you see her desecrating her naked body or running into walls naked. It's disturbing and alarming and not too moving. Well, ignore these things if you must. Remain and watch this martyr turned art world sensation.

The basis and the building leads to something wholly different. This

art show on which the documentary is based illuminates one of those rare instances where art and commerce meet with success. Usually the latter corrupts and buries the former. This experiment of Marina's is a spiral staircase in which the two rely upon each other to get to the proper locale.

The experiment, you ask? Let's see..

Photo courtesy of Andrew Russeth

It's pretentious. It's absurd. It's flamboyant. It's presumptuous. It's so far out of the normal realm that we keep ourselves confined to. It almost begs to be called insane. Yet, it is none of these things in full delivery. It merely broaches them, due to our confines, and moves on. With them, and all of our confinement baggage, in tow, dripping off of it, look by look. One onlooker turned provocateur at a time.

It's overall effect, the "Artist is Present" experiment with all of it's charm and dignity and grace hands us something much more than the painting in the Museum of Modern Art around her could hand us, as Marina had set out hoping. Her gaze upon gaze with regular art gallery goers repeats itself, yet with such stunning grip that it dislodges the viewer from their set-upon spot. It moves the bounds of human exchange, if said human is willing to fully enter that vacuum that she so patiently occupies. It assaults all we've decreed about "knowing someone" or "meeting someone." There's a layer she's found that lies exposed for hours at a time in a gallery of static things. A nerve we don't want touched. A way we've turned away from.

Marina Abramovic is an explorer. a poet. a fake. then naked. turned visionary. turned simpleton. flipped back. beacon. runner. avoider. pontificator. necessity.

Never has a documentary affected me so viciously – in mysterious buildup, to ultimately, a wind tunnel trip to the place she's looking out from. There she stays on this perch that she's found, and brought anyone sensible enough to wander up. Few paintings I know of could accomplish as much. And no documentary I know of could convey art more unavoidably.

I defy anyone to watch it and not come away slightly askew. To not walk away with a different hitch. To not sit, unaware of the depths of a single sitting.

Just sit back, and watch it already.