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Logan Addendum

I was thinking more about Logan over the weekend and chatting with my teenage daughter about it after she saw it, and something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before. I posted here about how much I liked the film, and my overall opinion of it hasn’t changed, but I did come to realize that they missed an opportunity to plus the drama in a way that would have made it a more complete film.

Briefly, it felt like they could have done more to develop the relationship between Logan and Laura in a way that made us see what each had to gain if they were able to get away and get to Canada. It was only at the end of the film when we finally see Laura refer to Logan as Papa. I believe the film makers did us a disservice by not doing more to show us what might have been had Logan and Laura escaped and been able to live a life as father and daughter.

Personally, I feel that the most dramatic films are those that show us characters that have fatal flaws, but give us an indication of how good their lives will be if they can somehow overcome those flaws. Think about Romeo and Juliet and how even though you know they’re both going to die, we get just enough of seeing how much they love each other and how happy they would be if it only ended with a “happily ever after” instead of the tragic ending we got. I’m in no way saying that Shakespeare should have changed the ending because it ended exactly the way it was supposed to end. In fact, it was so effective precisely because Shakespeare gave us a taste of what Romeo and Juliet’s lives would have bee together.

A more contemporary example can be found in the Harry Potter series after Harry meets Sirius Black and discovers that he’s his godfather. Sirius starts to represent the closest thing to a family that Harry would ever have, and in the books JK Rowling did an outstanding job of allowing us to hope that Sirius could be a surrogate father to Harry. And then Sirius is killed, and that idea is ripped away from not only Harry, but from us as well. It’s a terribly upsetting moment, but it’s also very dramatic because Rowling gave us something to hope for and then took it away.

That is how drama is created, and the ending of Logan is less dramatic because Director James Mangold and screenwriters Scott Frank and Michael Green didn’t do enough to soften Logan to the idea of being more of a father figure to Laura. What’s more, they didn’t give Laura any emotional complexity or desire for a father figure until the movie was almost over, and by then it was too late. If, however, at some point in by the second half of Act II they had started to show more of an emotional connection between the two of them, as well as a desire between the two of them to have that connection and to have a more familial outcome to their adventure, then that would have allowed the audience to be more emotionally connected and allowed us to have a much more visceral and satisfying emotional response to the end of the film.

Logan: The X-Men Go Dark

I saw Logan over the weekend and I was thoroughly impressed. I should start of by saying that I am not a huge fan of the X-Men movies. I loved the animated series in the 90’s and I was also a fan of the comic books, but I found the films to be overly polished and generic. The first X-Men movie came out all the way back in 2000, so the series actually predates the glut of super hero movies that have been awash over us over the past decade and a half. You could argue that the X-Men series started the craze of super hero movies, and specifically the Marvel franchises that have grossed billions of dollars for three different studios.

But Logan is different. After watching it last weekend, I don’t feel like I watched a typical super hero movie. It certainly didn’t feel like a typical X-Men movie. This movie was gritty, it was dark, it was intensely violent. And I’m not talking the typical comic book movie/adventure movie violence with lots of explosions and deaths of faceless and nameless characters. This was a graphically violent film complete with decapitations, engorging and hand-to-hand combat, close up, look you in the eye killing with enough blood to sink a ship. While it pushed the boundary to feeling gratuitous, it never quite got there, but it was close.

Also, Logan gave us the character of Wolverine the way he was meant to be. We never see him in his X-Men leotard, er, uniform,  and I think losing that motif helps take this movie away from the super hero genre and makes it a straight action movie. He is also constantly dropping F-bombs and he has a lot more attitude. Now, the character of Logan/Wolverine always had a lot of attitude in the previous X-Men films and he always walked a very precarious line, and it’s clear that the figurative shackles were off in this film and director James Mangold had the freedom to give us the cold-blooded loner that Logan always should have been, despite the R-rating that it generated. To be honest, in order to do the X-Men right, it needs to be an R-rated property, and Wolverine is the most R-rated of them all. In fact, the reason that The Wolverine failed, in my opinion, is because they had to keep it PG-13 and couldn’t properly unleash the character to be all it needed to be. That was not an issue in Logan.

In a lot of ways Logan feels like The Terminator meets The Hunger Games. It’s essentially a chase movie, and the forces chasing Logan, Charles and the young girl Laura are persistent, powerful and will not stop until they have Laura in their clutches. We also see that they have no qualms about killing people that get in their way, and no amount of collateral damage is too much. Laura, however, is a genetically engineered killing machine, even though she’s just a young girl of 8 or 9-years old. Laura is a ferocious fighter and kills her victims brutally and mercilessly, essentially showing them the same kind of treatment that they’d likely show her.

But this movie is more than just about action and near-gratuitous violence. Believe it or not, this is also a movie about family. We learn early in the movie that Laura was created using Logan’s DNA, which is why she has the wolverine claws and an adamantium skeleton. Even though Logan isn’t her father in the truest sense of the word, his character arc takes him from disinterested mercenary to protective father figure. Likewise, Laura goes from being distant and petulant to being loyal and loving. I feel what Mangold and co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green did really well was taking a character that we’re all familiar with and giving him new limitations to deal with while simultaneously adding a new character that we don’t know and developing her in a way that made us care about her and about the relationship between the two of them.

The story line was also very effectively told. There were definitely three acts in there, and it followed a classic Hero’s Journey. There is a clear Ordinary World that Logan lives in. There is a clear Call to Adventure and Logan Refuses that Call and that is followed by Logan Crossing the Threshold into the Special World. I’m not going to list out all of the Hero’s Journey stages, but suffice it to say that all of the stages are represented in the script. That gives Logan a very engaging story for an action film and Mangold, Frank and Green took some chances and those risks were paid off with a story that has some surprising moments and some surprisingly dramatic moments as well.

When you combine the well-structured story with the depth of the characters and the strength of the development in their relationships, we are left with a very strong script that allowed us to engage with these characters on an emotional level that isn’t common in an action thriller. Logan really is a movie that has it all. It’s a dramatic action film with terrific acting and likable characters that the audience actively roots for. If you’re an aspiring screenwriter who is working on an action script, this is a script that could be instructive for you.

Logan is also a movie that’s worth seeing for its sheer entertainment value. It is a highly entertaining movie that I’ve already heard is getting Oscar love, a la Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s probably worth pumping the breaks on that notion, but I could certainly see this film at least getting some sort of attention, provided people haven’t forgotten about it by the end of the year.

Either way, Logan is a film with great performances by Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Dafnee Keen, as well as the supporting cast. Those performances humanize the characters and make them likable. The action is also top-notch, but seeing this film for the surprising quality of the screenplay is what should drive you to see it if you haven’t already. Be warned that it’s one of the most violent films you’ll ever see, but the violence is necessary to the telling of this particular story, and that’s what keeps it from becoming gratuitous.

All in all, this is a film that is worth seeing. You should go and check it out if you haven’t already. You’ll be glad that you did.

2016 Winner for Best Picture – Moonlight

The Oscar ceremony had one of its most controversial and memorable endings ever when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were given the wrong envelope and erroneously announced that La La Land had won Best Picture, when, in fact, it was Moonlight that had achieved the Academy’s highest honor. Once all of the dust had settled and order had been restored, we all learned that, for once, the Academy chose important and reflective over one that was entertaining and escapist.

Following the Academy for as long as I have, I was certain that La La Land was going to be the winner. It tied a record with 14 nominations, and the other films that achieved that mark (Titanic and All About Eve) both took home the statue for Best Picture on Oscar night. Plus, it also seems that when one particular film receives 10 or more nominations, it generally receives Best Picture.  Plus, La La Land won the Golden Globe Award for Best Musical or Comedy, and it started piling up the big awards as Oscar night went on.  With all of the uproar over reading the wrong name, I think Faye Dunaway can be forgiven for seeing it on the card and presuming it to be the winner.
However, Moonlight also won a top Golden Globe Award for Best Picture, Drama. While it was “only” nominated for 8 Oscars, that’s still a good number of nominations, and it was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year with an astounding 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Moonlight is an important film on a number of levels. Not only was it written and directed by an African-American, but it also has an entirely African-American cast, and it deals with issues of poverty and drugs that have hung over the Africa-American community for decades. Those are the macro-issues of the film. The micro-issues of the film followed the lead character as he tries to come to grips with his sexuality in a largely intolerant community.

This feels especially important since the previous year’s Oscar ceremony was marred by the lack of racial diversity in the nominees. However, the critical acclaim of not only Moonlight, but also other primarily African-American stories like Hidden Figures and Fences showed that these were not just sympathy nominations. These films truly deserved to be recognized among the best films of the year.
Moonlight is told in a unique way. Its running time is just under 2 hours, and it’s told in three separate segments that follow Chiron as he grows from a young boy being bullied through being a pubescent teen being bullied and on into young adulthood as a remade young man who has taken control of his life, albeit in a less than exemplary way. As we follow Chiron through these stages, we see that this is a boy who is being forced to grow up fast. He has a mother who is addicted to drugs. Other kids in the neighborhood mercilessly bully him, and he thinks he might be attracted to Kevin, the one kid who is actually nice to him.

The film opens with Juan (Mahershala Ali in a performance that would net him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), a local drug dealer in Miami who is checking on one of his sellers. As he talks, he sees Chiron run by, being chased by other kids. He tracks Chiron down hiding in an abandoned apartment, and offers him some food and a place to stay until Chiron is ready to talk. Juan takes Chiron home to his sister Teresa (Janelle Monáe) who takes care of him and offers him some food and a bed. Juan takes Chiron home the next day and we meet his mother Paula (Naomie Harris), who we see right away is strung out and clearly on drugs.

We actually learn a lot in the first couple of minutes. We learn that Juan is a drug dealer, but we also see that he has a good heart as he takes Chiron under his wing. In a very touching scene Chiron asks Juan what a faggot is. Juan tells him that it’s a word people use to make gay people feel bad, and then Chiron asks if he is one. Juan tells him that he may be gay, but to never let anyone call him a faggot.  Chiron asks how he’ll know and Teresa tells him that he doesn’t need to know now. He’ll know when he knows.

What makes this excellent filmmaking is that we’re introduced to characters that we should not like. Juan should be especially unlikable, since he’s a drug dealer, and we’ve rightly been conditioned to think of drug dealers as bad people. However, Juan is given depth as a character, because we’re shown that he also has a good heart. He sees that Chiron is in trouble and he goes out of his way to help him. What’s more, as the first act goes on, we see Juan become not only a mentor, but almost a fatherly-like figure for Chiron.

An equally powerful scene happens a couple of minutes later after Juan has caught Paula smoking crack that he sold to her boyfriend. Chiron is over at the house and he asks Juan if he sells drugs. Unable to say yes, Juan only nods. Disappointed, Chiron shakes his head before asking Juan if he knows if his mother does drugs. Ashamed of himself, Juan can only nod again. Chiron gets up and leaves the table, leaving behind Juan, who now has a look of such shame on his face and in his posture, it wouldn’t surprise me if that one moment won Ali the Oscar. His entire performance is amazing, and I’m not taking anything away from his performance as a whole. But that one moment is so heartbreaking and feels so real, it certainly would have been on my mind if I had been filling out an Oscar ballot.

It also helped add to the amazing level of drama in the film. This is nothing less than a total betrayal for Chiron. This man who has taken him under his wing and made his life better is now also responsible for the deterioration of his mother. We see it in Chiron that he feels betrayed, and we see the shame and guilt in Juan for realizing that he’s betrayed this boy. However, his ultimate betrayal is yet to come.

We then move into Chiron’s teenage years, and he’s a skinny kid who can’t defend himself. We’re told that Juan is dead, but he still goes to Teresa’s house in order to escape his mother.  He’s still getting bullied, but now that they’re all bigger, the bullying is decidedly more dangerous. Also, Paula is completely strung out, and practically beats Chiron in order to get more money out of him to buy more drugs. Kevin is still the only kid who’s nice to him, and they happen to meet up at the beach one night, as they both went there looking to escape. Kevin has some pot with him and they share a blunt. The conversation becomes more personal and they begin to kiss.  Kevin then puts his hand down Chiron’s pants and strokes him off.

The next day at school, Chiron sees Kevin sitting alone at lunch, and he’s about to sit with him until one of the bullies does. The bully then challenges Kevin to a game where he’ll pick out a victim and Kevin has to punch him until he won’t get up. Naturally, the bully selects Chiron, who stands defiantly in front of him. Kevin punches Chiron, but he defiantly gets back up. Kevin punches again, and again Chiron stands in front of him. After the third punch, the other three bullies start stomping on Chiron until a security guard runs up and chases them off. The next day, Chiron shows up to school and walks with determination to his classroom and viciously slams a chair into the lead bully and attacks him before being pulled away and led out of the school in handcuffs. Kevin shamefully watches him get led away, and Chiron looks at Kevin with that same look of betrayal that the younger Chiron looked at Juan. The men in Chiron’s life continue to betray him.

Finally, we come to Chiron as a grown man. He’s grown hard. He got out of jail, and he and his mother moved to Atlanta where he could start over. The years have hardened him. He’s now muscular and tough. The weakling is gone, and we see this in his new profession of a drug dealer. Juan’s betrayal is now complete. He was the best man that Chiron ever knew, and he’s following in his footsteps. But he’s still as sensitive as ever. We see this in how he interacts with his mother, who now lives in a rehab facility. She lives the life of regret, as she knows that she didn’t do right by him. She tells him that she understands if he doesn’t love her, but he has to know that she loves him.

Chiron gets a call from Kevin. He’s recently out of jail himself now, and is working as a cook back in Miami. Chiron drives all the way down there, but is betrayed again to find out that Kevin is married and has a young child. Chiron confesses to Kevin that he never let another man touch him like Kevin did. There is a moment of connection between them and the last thing we see is Chiron leaning his head on Kevin’s shoulder.

I think that Moonlight is ultimately a story about love, and how elusive love can be. I’m not even talking about romantic love versus familial love or platonic love, but any kind of love. People need to have love in their lives in order to feel complete. Even the hardest of the hard have something that they love and even if they don’t know it, desire love at a core level. A character like Chiron is someone who spends two thirds of the film trying to find any kind of love that he can because the one person who should be providing it to him, his mother, is unable to do so. The problem for him is that every time he finds love, the love is followed up almost immediately by a betrayal.

Moonlight actually has a very simple concept, but it is executed in a complex way that created a story that is dramatic and compelling. It doesn’t matter to me on way or the other that it has an all African-American cast or that it deals with love from an LGBTQ point of view. This is a well-made film that tells a dramatic and interesting story that is worthy of your time.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes, they did. Moonlight is an exceptional film, but it wasn’t my favorite film of the year. If the award was Most Important Picture, then Moonlight is absolutely your winner, with a nod as well to Hidden Figures. If the award was for Most Entertaining Picture, then I think you’d have to go with La La Land. That wasn’t my favorite film of the year either, but I can see why it got so much love. I can also see why it got so much hate. I personally think it’s a terrific film, but it wasn’t the best film of the year. I actually had three favorites. I loved Arrival, Hell or Highwater and Hacksaw Ridge. I could have voted for any of those 3, and would probably have picked Arrival. I thought that all of those films had the perfect balance of entertainment value, drama and intensity. I also like Fences a lot, but it felt more like a stage play to me than a film. Lion was also very good, but it came up short for me in a couple of key areas.  With all that said, even though it wasn’t my personal favorite film of the year, I do have to say that the Academy did get it right with Moonlight.

Howard Beale and Donald Trump: As Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take it Anymore

I tend to stay away from politics in this blog. I prefer this blog to be a source of entertainment and sometimes education, and politics have become so divisive over the past few years that I would prefer not to alienate readers over potentially controversial political positions. However, it is undeniable that cinema is often a vehicle for politics. Many great filmmakers over the years have used their films to espouse their political points of view, and in fact most films have some general point of view about the state of the world, which inevitably circle back to a political philosophy.

There is one film, in particular, that intersects cinema and politics in a way that few films ever have, and that film is Network. This is one of my favorite films and I have always contended that it predicted many of the things that we live with in our lives today. It predicted the advent of reality television. It predicted radical terrorism. It predicted news divisions becoming for profit entities as networks were acquired by corporations. It predicted that multi-national corporations would become de-facto governments (lobbying). And it predicted that the news would start to become more sensational (Fox News, MSNBC) and entertainment-based. A straight line can be drawn from The Howard Beale Show in Network to The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, The Colbert Report, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, and many others.

And now, I daresay that Network has also predicted the rise of Donald Trump. There’s no way that the filmmakers could have known that Trump would be the individual, but they did predict that a charismatic man could grow in power and prominence by taking people’s fears and stirring them into anger. I have posted this clip on the blog before, but it’s worth another look for our purposes.

Last year’s presidential campaign, especially during the Republican primaries, was the most watched in our lifetime, and that had to do with Donald Trump. What’s more, since he started his campaign out by making some very controversial statements, the media, always now in need of high ratings, followed Trump constantly in the hopes that he would continue to do that, which he did in a way that continuously upped the ante. It all became a vicious cycle that ended up providing Trump with millions of dollars’ worth of free airtime. His campaign sucked all of the air out of the room, and none of the other Republican candidates were able to get their messages out.

In fact, more people watched the Republican debates than had ever watched debates before. Do you think that those new viewers were watching because they cared about policy? Of course not. If that had been the case, then the Democrat debates would have had the same numbers for viewership, and they did not. No, people were watching because reality TV had taken over the presidential race. They watched to see what outrageous thing Trump would say next, or what kind of goofy facial expression he’d make, or whether he’d talk about the size of his dick.  And CNN and FOX and ABC and NBC gladly displayed this sideshow for all of the ratings it got them and all of the advertising dollars that followed.

Watch the clip again. Watch what happens after Howard Beale (Peter Finch) starts to go on his rant, specifically right after he intensely looks into the camera and tells the people, “I want you to get mad!” With that, news producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) starts to smile as though sensing an opportunity. Then, by the time Beale has completely broken down and is beseeching his audience to go to their windows and yell outside, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”, and Diana is told that people are doing just that in cities around the country, she exclaims, “We’ve hit the mother load!” Now, most people when they see someone having a breakdown will try and figure out a way to get that person some help. Diana looked at him as a way to improve her ratings.

There was a time when there were three news networks. During that time, anchormen like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow and David Brinkley gave us the news in a straightforward way. They were among the most trusted men in America. What’s more, the networks knew that operating in this way was not profitable, but they were willing to write off the news divisions as long as they were making enough money in other places. They saw presenting the news as their civic responsibility. Over the last 40 years, as Network predicted, as corporate entities gained control over the networks, news divisions were required to become more and more profitable. In order to become profitable, they had to have more viewers, and in order to get more viewers they have to be more and more sensational. Creating that sensationalism has garnered many news organizations much in profit, but they’ve gotten to the point where hardly anything on television news is believed anymore. At this point in time, are there any institutions that are less trusted than television news? I would venture to say that no, there is not.

Donald Trump came along last year and used that notion to his advantage. Again, look at the first 40 seconds of Beale’s rant during the clip. If you close your eyes, you might think that you’re listening to a Trump campaign speech. We live in a time where people have stopped believing that their government and other institutions that run our daily lives have our best interests at heart. In 1976, a fictional Howard Beale told America that, and he became the number one television star in the country.  Exactly forty years later, a real-life Donald Trump told America that and got elected President of the United States.

Therein lies the genius of the film Network. Give it a look if you haven’t seen it recently. Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant screenplay and Sidney Lumet’s equally brilliant direction created a film that is timeless because it is timely. They created a character dubbed “The Mad Prophet”, and he attained a cult-like status. He attained that status because a news media, hungry for prophets, saw him as a useful tool. Until they didn’t to the point where their power brokers had to conceive of a notion that should have been inconceivable in order to get him off the air.

Now we have a man that the media saw as a useful tool, and their insatiable appetite for ratings and profit launched him to heights that the media probably didn’t believe possible. Network predicted that this could happen, and happened it has.