"Jesus, Mary Oliver!..." *sigh* (Can You See it? Can You See It?)
On her 60th birthday, Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is in a funk. She doesn't want a party—she gets one, anyway, by her friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). It's been awhile since she was famed for her marathon swimming. For 30 years she's been working for ABC Sports and she's left with the feeling of "where's the excellence?" She has finally gone through her mother's things, collected after her death, and found a book of poetry that she starts obsessing over. She does that...obsessing.
One of the things that she obsesses over is one thing she didn't do in her life—swim the 103 miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. Her attempts in the 1970's were unsuccessful given currents and unfavorable conditions; they made all of her efforts time-consuming and energy-wasting, and success is measured by strokes and calories, wasting any of them you increase the number of miles and the time needed to do it so that the goal becomes increasingly out of reach. Now, she's determined to do it...by any means necessary.
Despite being over 60 years old.
Nyad, on Netflix, tells the story of how that obsession takes over the thoughts and life of the swimmer, and, in turns spills over into the lives of her crew assisting in the effort. It may look like a solo effort, but that it's to be done in open ocean complicates matters. Sailors on perfectly fine boats have sunk, gotten lost, or merely disappeared without a trace in the area, and she's just one person, one tiny speck, in a big ocean. Without supervision, navigation, occasional nourishment, one person is sure to be swamped by time and tide—not to mention the predators that share the space and care more about feeding that making records. That crew needs to observe and document, as well, or the achievement won't be recognized. Going solo? That's not a goal; it's a death wish.
So, Nyad trains, day and night. At the same time, Stoll assists in looking for funding, sponsorship, and a crew, taking into account all the factors that presented Nyad from accomplishing the goal previously. Before, she'd done it swimming in a moving shark-tank. She puts the nix on that immediately. Also, the navigation she'd relied on had her swimming off-course, so she finds a local navigator/boat-runner John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) who knows the waters between Cuba and Key West so well as to be an irritant—he's not going to make a mistake and will err on the side of caution, rather than blindly plunge forward (something Nyad would do, even if not hampered by stress-induced poor judgment).
And for her coach, it's Stoll. No one else. Not so much for expertise on sports medicine—she can hire people for that...and does—but because she knows Nyad so well, the bad and the good. Friends for 30 years, and having dated ("for like 30 seconds") back in the past, she knows Nyad's strengths...and weaknesses—it's why they're merely devoted friends—and knows what the swimmer is capable of—endurance, obstinance, and mania—and can negotiate the rocky shoals of Nyad's narcissism and insufferability to see the right thing and do the right thing when Nyad's tunnel-vision can't. It will test their friendship, despite their long history, to the breaking point, just as Nyad's tenacity is capable of breaking her own endurance.
Which is where the actresses playing the leads come in. Both Benning and Foster are acknowledged as being legendary thespians, but their work here, separately and together, is a notch above what you already expect. Foster, for her part, plays Stoll as a long-suffering aide-de-camp, team-player and punching bag, not afraid to call out magical thinking and just BS, but manages to do it in such a breezy and utilitarian way that one can't begrudge her. One sees the paradox etched into Foster's face as she uses facial muscles that she hasn't flexed in a lifetime of performances. And her bantering with Benning perpetually feels like she's making it up on the spot. It hardly feels like a performance, practiced and perfected, as it does a free-wheeling dance of improvisation. There isn't any past fall-backs here; Foster is exploring new ground.
And Benning? You always knew she was "that" good. But, here she commits to the physical demands and the sheer blinkerdliness of Nyad's obsession. She understands that Nyad's devotion to her own physical perfection to be ready for such a feat makes her such a creature of the internal that the outside world is a bit of an irrelevance and frequently merely a road-block. She spends so much time in her own head that empathy could be a symptom of weakness and her own care-and-feeding of her ego and importance becomes a side-effect of her strenuous preparation.
She's in another world than everybody else. She has to be to endure the tortures and the distractions that will come from the mechanical rigors of moving arms forward and back and kicking for every inch of forward momentum. She may protest that the sea is the perfect place for her to be, but she works and practices and trains as if its her enemy, the more dangerous element of a world that potentially blocks her way. Only in her head is she safe, despite the pain in her muscles, the cramps in her legs, the building weariness and decomposition that she is only too aware of and fights to ignore.
You got to be crazy to do something like that, and Benning leans in to the crazy, quite recklessly, not caring that it might sacrifice audience sympathy (after all, Nyad, herself, wouldn't). It's gutsy and unapologetic and just plain fierce.
The directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, need something like that. This is their first dramatic film—they've only done documentaries before this, one of which was Free Solo, so they know about athletic rigors and the discipline and the potential for mental anarchy that can ensue. Athletes themselves—they're avid rock-climbers as Free Solo demonstrated—they know about risk and discipline and distraction (a good section of Free Solo was the crew discussing how they could make their work not be a distraction for climber Alex Honnold) and they do a good job of creating the painful monotony (without over-doing it for the audience) of such a challenge while imagining the head-space that Nyad must make for herself. It's a nice "all things considered" approach that only raises the stakes and ensures audience involvement. You fret. Which means the filmmakers have done their job.
It's an amazing piece of work and it would be nice ("nice") if there was some recognition for this during awards season. But, one has to admit, that it's likely to be swamped by its considerable competition. You can't train for that.
Well, now Kenneth Branagh follows up his version of Murder on the Orient Expresswith his version ofDeath on the Nile (given this route, can Evil Under the Sun be next?), which fixes some things from the earlier version—mostly performance—adds a little tension with a limited time-frame, as well as giving Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh and his mustache again) more of an emotional reason to solve the murder, rather than merely see justice done and the puzzle solved. It has already been well established in the Branagh version of Christie's world that Poirot prefers a tidier world, but, evidently, that is not enough.
Nor is it enough, apparently, that Poirot has a particularly fussy mustache—more than Ms. Christie implied and it was obsessed over in many reviews of Branagh's Murder—now we must know why it is. Necessary? No. But, at least in the opening black and white sequence which shows a particularly glorious and tragic day in Poirot's WWI service, we get to meet Catherine, whose history was hinted at in the previous Murder... Again, none of this is Christie's creation, but if it keeps Branagh engaged, then scripter Michael Green can play with the elements all he wants.
And play he does. Eliminating book characters, substituting others and swapping attributes from one character to another. The basic mystery is the same—a person is murdered on a closed stage—a ship going down the Nile—and no one goes missing and the obvious person with a motive has an airtight, can't-get-by-it alibi, and Poirot must find the killer before the ship docks and they disembark, the culprit possibly to go loose. The only thing helping in determining "whodunnit" is that two of the suspects are also murdered before the issue is solved. Process of elimination had to occur somewhere.
This is it in very general, non-spoilery turns, because the way Branagh and Green set it up, surprises come early and often, whether you've read the book or seen the earlier versions, and they're done in quite inventive ways that would have put Dame Agatha in a dead faint. It is for sure that she would not have approved of the steamy, sweaty dance sequences that open the film proper, not would she have approved of turning one of the passengers from a gossipy (and drunk) romance novelist to an African-American blues chanteuse* (Sophie Okonedo). The socialist on the boat is no longer a radical, but a member of the upper class (Jennifer Saunders), and there are no kleptomaniacs this time, but there is no longer a jewel thief being pursued by a friend and fellow-passenger of Poirot.
That role gets substituted by Poirot pal Bouc (Tom Bateman), back from the Murder... film, and this time accompanied by his mother Euphemia (Annette Bening), who just happens to be a friend of the family on the celebratory but doomed boat trip; in fact, everybody has some relation with the happy couple—they being Linnett and Simon Doyle (Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer), she being the heiress of the super-rich Ridgeway family.
So, why is Poirot there? Well, that's one of those spoilery secrets unique to this version—although I can say that the happy Doyle's have asked Poirot for his assistance, as they are being stalked by Simon's former fiance Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), who it seems can't let go. They think she's off her nut, and things get dangerous when Simon and Linnett escape being crushed at Abu Simbel. The thing is: "Jackie" hasn't arranged to smuggle herself on the boat yet and crash the party.
The production is lush, and perhaps too much so. The vista is given the full CGI treatment where everything looks so picture-postcard perfect that it feels like it was photographed in Egypt's uncanny valley—there doesn't even appear to be dust in the air, no grit (unusual in a desert environment), no one even sweats in the heat (certainly as much as they do on the dance floor), and there is a distinct difference between underwater shots of the Nile being dragged for clues, and the shots below the boat suggesting the carnivorous nature of life below the surface—there's plenty to show it on the ship, so the pixelated watery detours are completely unnecessary. And the film has a fetish for the Gilded Age right down to the glistening silverware and the sheen on a champagne bottle, lit as carefully as the stars.
And they're good, by the way. Branagh has some moments to flex his acting muscles with both comedy and tragedy masks. Gadot and Hammer are terrific (rumors to the contrary) and Emma Mackey's jilted fiancee simmers to a broil without the full-on hissy-fits that Mia Farrow brought to the 1978 version. Letitia Wright gets to play some drama, instead of playing "the sprite" (and she's great at it), Okonedo pleasantly threatening, Russell Brand just fine without relying on comedy, Jennifer Saunders delightfully brassy along with Dawn French, and Annette Bening a highlight, probably better than is called for.
Branagh direction is a bit stagey and geometric, keeping in mind a proscenium arch throughout as if the curtain just lifted. And the geometry extends to some almost too-perfect tracking shots that would make you suspect Wes Anderson was directing (if you didn't know any better). That being said, his version of a John WooMexican standoff lacks the tension that one should expect, except to wonder why there are so many guns allowed during international travel. Maybe it's movies like this that convinced the cruise lines to ban them.
In fact, the movie is a bit like a cruise trip—superficially opulent, until you realize you're stuck on a boat with people you don't like, and you swear to never do it again. But, then there's the lure to get away. Death on the Nile gets away with a lot.
* Dame Agatha was never afraid to use the "n-word" and in fact one of her most famous works contained the word in the title, before it was changed to something equally racist (in today's terms) at the hands of the publisher's, lest sales were hurt. (And you thought "cancel culture" was a new thing? It's been around as long as evolution).
DeusExMarvela
or "Trust Me, True Believer" (My Flurken Swallowed My McGuffin)
The first of 2019's "Captain Marvel" movies is here,*and it has a lot of significance for movies, Marvel movies, and Women-in-Films, and as a result it's stirring up "the usual" dust-up's on increasingly unreliable review aggregates and social media. It's like the perfect storm of click-bait, but it has nothing to do with the movie itself. ...Which is good, clever (in the details stream) and provides a great role for the peculiar talents of Brie Larson, who's been a joy to watch in everythingI'veseenherin. It's a good entertainment, but not a great movie. But, worth seeing...if only because you're going to get a hint of how The Marvel Movie-Makers are going to solve the issues caused by the cliffhanger of Avengers: Infinity War—which, in short-hand, is "they're going to cheat" by some story-telling sleight-of-hand while they were distracting you with other stuff. Fair enough.
After an atypical Marvel Studio's logo—the "R.I.P Stan Lee" version—we meet "Vers" (the afore-mentioned Ms. Larson), who is having nightmares and can't sleep. The dreams have something to do with a crashed ship on a blasted landscape, where Vers is bleeding green blood and looking at a woman (Annette Bening) as she's pointing a weapon at an alien form (a Skrull, if you're familiar with Marvel comics) and wakes up. She goes and wakes up Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), her commander in the Starforce, based on the planet Hala of the Kree Empire (yeah, that's a lot of exposition there) is annoyed, but still accedes to her demands for a fight-work-out where he tells her she needs to tamp down her emotions and not rely on her abilities of using force-blasts out of her hands (luckily for him), a gift of the Kree for her abilities (and, of course, if she's not a good little girl-soldier, those powers will be taken away). Face front, soldier.
Rogg assigns his Starforce Squad to rescue a Kree spy from captivity, but the mission is a blind, designed to lure the Starforce agents into ambush by a band of Skrull warriors led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn, who we don't get to see enough of). Vers is captured and subjected to a memory scan in which she starts to remember that many years ago, she was a human on Earth, an Air Force pilot, working for a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). Her memories of her past inspire her to escape, she grabs a convenient space-pod, jets out of there and crashes on the most convenient planet nearby, C-53 according to the Kree.
That would be Earth circa 1995.
You can tell. You can just tell. Well, Vers' checks out a couple video's, then tries to find a way to contact Yon-Rogg, which she does by hot-wiring a telephone—in a booth—and telling him that she's on the hunt for Skrulls and don't wait up. Thing is, with Skrulls, they can shape-shift. Makes it easy to detect...except if you start asking them questions because any memory they might have of their shifted shape is only a few seconds old and they're no-good at long term memory.
Meanwhile, Skrulls have chased Vers to Earth where they start doing good human imitations and looking for her. They should just ask around because she's walking around L.A. "dressed like she's ready for laser-tag." That line is from a young agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who with his partner Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), is getting a lot of reports about a woman going around Los Angeles looking a little surly, dressed in rubber armor, and freaking people out, like the Security Guard outside that Blockbuster whom she approached and asks "Do you understand me? Is my Universal Translator working?"
This is where casting is kind of important. A lot of actors would play up the confusion, the fish out of water aspect, but not Larson's Vers. She walks around like she owns the place and doesn't give a rip if people are giving her second and third glances. She's got a job to do and she charges through it, with an attitude like she's dealing with morons—which she might be and probably is, so just go with it—it seems to be working with these monkey-people. No "Prime Directive" issues here. Just go with the "direct" approach.
Meanwhile, Fury has his own encounter with a Skrull, while he's simultaneously doing a "French Connection" style chase with an elevated train with an escalated fight between Vers and one in disguise. Taking the body of Fury's Skrull back to S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury decides to find "Blockbuster Girl" and find out what the hell is going on because he's never encountered anything like this before, and his desk job is getting a little dull.
Turns out they're looking for the same thing—Vers' identity, and between a visit to Project Pegasus, where Dr. Lawson had worked on a top-secret "light-speed engine" and the crystal containing Vers' extracted memories, they discover that Lawson was killed in a mysterious plane crash, where all were lost, including the pilot, a USAF flier named Carol Danvers. That's part of her memory. Afterwards, she was evidently taken straight to Hala...for some mysterious reason, given abilities by the Kree and enrolled in their Starforce. Why?
After pouring over the files from the crash, Fury and Danvers take a flight to Louisiana to talk to a friend of Danvers', a fellow pilot named Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and she is recognized instantly by her and her daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar), and they fill her in on the woman she's forgotten to be. At the same time, Talos appears, with a story of his own, and the adults in the room determine that it's time to do things the right way...for once.
Carol Danvers: [Referring to the front of the baseball cap that Fury has given her ] What is this? Nick Fury: It's a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo. Carol Danvers: Does announcing your identity with branded clothing, help with the covert part of the job? Nick Fury: ...said the space soldier who's wearing a rubber suit.
Okay, there's a lot going on here, as fully 3/4 of the movie is a grand setting up of a story that the last quarter completely subverts. Even stalwarts who've been reading the Marvel "Captain Marvel" stories over the years are going to be a little confused at how the five screenwriters (all but one are women) have turned and spun the "Mar-Vell" stories on the tip of curved blade atop the Starforce's helmets—the film-makers allude to this by making Danver's hair part of that design, which I found very clever. Trust me, there's a lot of back-story to tell, but it managed to be done in 2 hours and squeeze in a lot of credits (with inserts—one is advised to stay to the very end).
What they've done is turn the comics' Carol Danvers from the standard Marvel "girlfriend" who got lucky enough to acquire superpowers, to a person who grew up determined to be the best she could be—who then got lucky enough to acquire superpowers. She already HAS the responsibility before she gets the great powers. It's an improvement, if hewing a bit close to the Lantern Corps story. But, Carol already knows right from wrong and her responsibility before being rewarded by the..."thing"...event...that gave her powers.
Now, she just has to decide who's side she's on.
Performances are good, all the way through, with Larson being the stand-out, but a shout-out has to go to Jackson who does his most prolonged...and...best performance as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Especially, as he's got to play a much younger version of the character than he ever has before. Yeah, okay, he's been pixelated to lose a few years in appearance, but, hand it to the guy, he STILL has to play a character 25 years younger, and that takes attitude, bearing, and energy and he's all that here (the actor is 71 years, ladies and gentlemen).
And he's a great match-up with Larson—as they were in Kong: Skull Island, but this time's the roles are reversed (I kept expecting her to say to him: "Bitch, please..."). Fury is looser and more of a smart-ass, while she's regular Army in the uniform of a renegade and their banter may not have the wit, but it has the speed of old Howard Hawks banter, which combined with the duo's abilities to change expression on the thinnest of dimes, well, they're just a fun couple, and Fury's regard for this super-soldier from the sky explains a lot about everything he's done in the Marvel Universe movies.
It's the first time a woman has directed a Marvel movie, or co-directed one, and one wishes that Ann Boden and her co-Ryan Fleck had more of a command on things behind the camera as they do in front of, but it's just not so. They are well-regarded for their indie flicks, but their action scenes will leave you scratching your head about what's going on and who's doing what to whom. It might be they haven't figured out how to separate individuals who are all fighting in same uniforms, or the best way to hide a stunt-double, but the early fight scenes are a mess, and when the action turns cosmic, they shoot from a distance (to save on the rendering, or because we've gotten tired of super-heroics on a Richter scale?). No pun intended, but it gives it less of an impact. And, as we're just a little clueless about what Danvers' powers are, exactly, a little closer demonstration might have been nice—Marvel, whether in comics or movies, tend to be a little vague about power-scales/distributions.
Without going into too much detail (now's my chance to be vague), as much as I enjoyed a lot of Captain Marvel, there's the sense that The Studio was holding this one back (or something else in the "I dunno know what it is, but it sure packs a wallop" side of the Marvel school of cosmic speculature) as its "Ace in the Hole" for writing itself out of the "How are they going to get out of THIS one" dilemma posed by the Thanos-culling of the MCU in Infinity War—and that is by telling you about somebody you didn't know about, with some powers that haven't been figured out yet, but will when it becomes convenient in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. In the meantime, just put in a "TBD" for that power-level and expect it to be risky and that "I've never gone this far before, I don't think I can handle it..." to be uttered at some point. I sure hope not. In the idiom of the internet, that would "suck."
So, the result is a movie with minor joys and good intentions that will eventually be enough to solve the Marvel Saga's immediate problem, and maybe—just maybe—allow the idea of more female-centric superhero movies in the Marvel Universe (how long has Scarlett Johansson been waiting for her "Black Widow" movie? Quite awhile, and enough that you can imagine her studio contract expiring before they get around to it).
Oh, and one other neat little idea in Captain Marvel—Stan Lee's cameo. The movie's setting being 1995, we see him on the elevated train trying to memorize his scene from Kevin Smith's upcoming Mallrats** (which came out about that time), a neat little call-back for his next-to-last cameo in the Marvel movies. As irritating and non-essential as they could be, one already misses the prospect that he won't be around for more of them, and that's a sad thing. Excelsior, true believers. (Just don't say "Shazam!")
*It's a loooong story and since this post is about this current version of the trademark "Captain Marvel" we won't get into it. We will give this one it's due.
Hearts and Minds or "The Situation is Crazy. I Am Not." Stephen King will see this one and slap his forehead for an opportunity missed for a seven hundred page novel. I've known enough authors of fiction that have mentioned a scary thing: they'll start writing, fleshing out the skeleton of an idea, the characters take shape, become three-dimensional, and then suddenly, they live. In fact (and fiction), they become so alive they'll start doing things and going in directions that the author never intended or had even planned for. The figments of the author's imagination take on a life of their own, rebel and...rather than the author changing them, they change the author, or at least his intentions for them. Eerie. And the basis forRuby Sparks, the latest film from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the folks who directed Little Miss Sunshine. That film I wasn't too crazy about, as it seemed to scream "Indie Sensibilities" from every tortured writerly "quirk" that was tossed in. Ruby Sparks, however, is different—a nicely buttoned-up movie that reverberates with all sorts of echoes that ripple through the film and cross over in a concentric series of folded back references, self- and otherwise.
Author Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) is struggling with a follow-up novel after an initial success—struggling for 10 years, in fact. His shrink (Elliott Gould) gives him an assignment to take the pressure off, and Calvin is inspired, writing about an idealized, neurotic woman named Ruby Sparks. But, he's not just inspired, he's energized, so much so he can't wait to get back to his typewriter (it's this old piece of technology before a PC, or what was known in the Pleistocene era as a "word processor") to continue the work, spend more time with her, creating her. So much so that he starts to fear that he's falling in love with her. His brother reads the pages and his criticism is harsh: "You haven't written a person. You've written a girl. Geeky, messy girls are not what people want." He remains undeterred, writing all night and into the morning. Imagine his horror when he wakes up from his QWERTY keyboard, runs downstairs and finds Ruby (Zoe Kazan) in one of his shirts, eating cereal.
He freaks, naturally, much to her consternation, and then is shocked to discover that everybody can see her, too. She's just not a figment of his imagination; his imagination walks amongst us. This is the stuff of male fantasy rom-com's. But, Ruby Sparks takes it into some dark places, ala Hitchcock, in the realms of identity, manipulation, male wish-fulfilments, and the odd idealization and expectations that love creates and blinds us to. We all create an object of affection (on both sides, sending and receiving), but whether that object has anything to do with reality depends on both parties and how much they want to compromise to achieve that...whatever it is..."more perfect union," let's say.
The script (by Kazan herself) explores some uncomfortable territory in that regard and Kazan has a knack for writing dialogue that is spot-on, but containing deep echoes that weight them further. It's one of the better rom-com/fantasy scripts to come along in awhile—at least it has a thought in its head—and the performers, while still showing an abundance of the too-eager "cutes," although, ultimately, its not enough to keep you wondering how it all could end. Yes, the film has its moments of coy cloyingness—for example, when Ruby goes to a family dinner with Calvin's hippy-dippy step-parents (Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas), that amounts to a side-bar, and just lets us know what we already know, that Calvin is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud and a buzz-kill, and (surprise, surprise) less capable of change than his own creation, which, if he wanted to, he could correct with a new sentence, or some Liquid Paper. It doesn't go there (and only for revelation purposes, as if it did any more, it might be a good vehicle for Adam Sandler), nor does it end "Happily Ever After" as rom-com's do (but only because they choose to). Ruby Sparks chooses another way, fully committed to not committing and finding the fine balance of compromise.
Nyad, on Netflix, tells the story of how that obsession takes over the thoughts and life of the swimmer, and, in turns spills over into the lives of her crew assisting in the effort. It may look like a solo effort, but that it's to be done in open ocean complicates matters. Sailors on perfectly fine boats have sunk, gotten lost, or merely disappeared without a trace in the area, and she's just one person, one tiny speck, in a big ocean. Without supervision, navigation, occasional nourishment, one person is sure to be swamped by time and tide—not to mention the predators that share the space and care more about feeding that making records. That crew needs to observe and document, as well, or the achievement won't be recognized. Going solo? That's not a goal; it's a death wish.
So, Nyad trains, day and night. At the same time, Stoll assists in looking for funding, sponsorship, and a crew, taking into account all the factors that presented Nyad from accomplishing the goal previously. Before, she'd done it swimming in a moving shark-tank. She puts the nix on that immediately. Also, the navigation she'd relied on had her swimming off-course, so she finds a local navigator/boat-runner John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) who knows the waters between Cuba and Key West so well as to be an irritant—he's not going to make a mistake and will err on the side of caution, rather than blindly plunge forward (something Nyad would do, even if not hampered by stress-induced poor judgment). 
