Movie Review: A Most Violent Year

In the latest film by J.C. Chandor—a director now with a collection of three movies and three successes—Abel, a New York businessman in 1981, tries to expand his business. He is an honorable businessman, always obeying the laws, but a company consists of more than one person, and a city consists of more than one company. He struggles to succeed in his industry with everything around him pulling him down: a violent wife, insubordinate workers, gangs, and New York's statistically most dangerous year. Oscar Isaac plays the roll smoothly and believably, paying homage (intentionally, it seems) to leads from other gang-related films, such as Corleone in the Godfather: Part II. And even more on its spectacle, Chandor captures the story with style, the shots always fully depicting and explaining the scenes, everything rendered to perfection, often utilizing color schemes, and just generally seeming like art; nearly every shot could be a winning photograph, with or without the movie. As for the story, A Most Violent Year tells a story of choices, how they affect us, and how a right answer just depends on what we value. Choices might succeed in one area, yet fail in another, and so the best choice is simply whatever works best for each person's own personal value, which are always different from another's. Abel wants a legally successful business, and he doesn't care who he hurts in the way. Other characters want to be safe in New York's crime-crawling environment, and they don't care what laws they may need to break. The two of these constantly juxtapose against each other, nobody finds a healthy medium, and the film takes no bias toward either side. So Chandor constantly creates a tone of hopeless relativism, showing how there is no absolute right. A Most Violent Year guides the viewer through a very philosophical and thought provoking story, and it only enhances its viewing with an emotional, very personal, and always moving story. It always has the next objective in mind, and it never slows down.  However, those wishing for a violent gangster film to match the title and advertisement will be very disappointed, and some might find its dry tone rather dull.

Movie Review: Jurassic World

In 1993 Stephen Spielberg directed Jurassic Park, an instant hit and never-aging classic, based on a novel by Michael Crichton. With all its success, Hollywood asked for sequels (go figure), and then came Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Jurassic Park III, and now Jurassic World. And as sequels trend, each installment gets less about story and increasingly about more dinosaurs, bigger dinosaurs, and cooler scenes. Jurassic World tries hard to revive the series' original theme of man playing God with science, and to bring back a compelling story. And trust me: you can tell. From blatant debates between characters, to forced emotional scenes (never created by characters depth or motivation, but only by relatable moments, dramatic music, and lots of crying), everything is so as obvious a narrator might as well have paused the movie, walked on screen, and said, "Pay attention, now, for this is where we talk about our message," or "Now you are supposed to feel sad." And when I said the sequels are about bigger dinosaurs, I meant that quite literally for this latest installment. This new dinosaur is so big and so scary the writers did not even know what to make it. But thankfully they resolved this by simply making him everything. Every time he does something terrifying, the scientists blame it on some peculiar strand of DNA they put in him. The dinosaur can camouflage, and so they reveal, "We gave him chameleon DNA." He can talk to other dinosaurs, and so they reveal, "We gave him velociraptor DNA." I was waiting for him to jump really high and for the shamed scientists to admit, "We gave him frog DNA..." The acting is equally awful.  But at least it looks pretty?

Book Review: The Big Smoke

If you just take
a prose and break
it up into pieces I
don't think that you
can really call that poetry.

I am getting sick of the abuse of free verse I have observed explosively trending in contemporary poetry. Frankly, I have read many wonderful uses of free verse, and these uses were great partly because they were actually poetry. Poetry has more to it than looking like poetry. If you take a normal sentence and break it up to appear a free-verse poem, that is in no way worthy of the name "poetry," but rather "poorly formatted prose."

The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka is yet another addition to the Jack Johnson collection, which by now could be placed in the mythology section of a bookstore. It is a collection of Johnson-inspired poems that hardly vary in style, tone, or themes. Almost every poem states something about black rights, perseverance, or Johnson's hardships with women, and yet Matejka somehow, in 100 full pages of poems, managed to never deepen the dimensions of these themes.

Now, to the deeper and more controversial issues, for those are truly the reasons I excite about literary criticism. What is the purpose of a poem? It has become commonly agreed that poems share an experience. However, I hardly believe it stops there, and this is where I often ram heads with other theorists. An experience is not worth sharing in a poem unless it unveils an idea worthwhile. Unless a poem adds something important to my life or has the potential to add something important to the life of another, I find it pointless and a waste of good time.

A few poems in this collection handed some interesting ideas for me to sort out, primarily Cannibalism and Battle Royal - the book's first two poems. I spent two hours breaking down the possible implications of these poems and their intricate symbols and challenging ideas. Quickly I swept the book back up, thrilled to rip another bite of its meat. But I found myself highly disappointed starting at poem three and ending at the last. All of the symbols and layers had been dumped out, and Matejka resorted to rapid-firing events, all of them failing with a capital F as stand-alone poems. None carry any meaning other than their face-value, and nary actually gave the world insightful ideas when removed from the collection.

"Belle & I returned after a fine supper
of roasted quail in the Crystal Dining
Room. Hattie was waiting in the mauve
hallway right outside our rooms.
She was angry & rigid like one
of those Buckingham guards when
it's raining. I don't know why she came
to San Francisco, but she wore the black
lace dress I bought for her in London."

¿.....profound stuff.....?

And let's not forget the protagonist of our story, Jack Johnson. Every poem is dedicated to him, and we learn many facts about his life. Matejka clearly did his research on Johnson's life, but he completely forgot to write him as an interesting character. Instead, he leaves the protagonist flat. Apparently when you devote an entire book to one single person, fleshing out his depth is hardly necessary.

The Big Smoke is doubtlessly a bunch of broken up prose made to appear like free verse, as well as random events; yet it is hardly poetry.

1 out of 5 stars

Movie Review: The Imitation Game

Nominated for film of the year, many recently-made fans grumbling its failure to win, newspapers and magazines flaring up with endless praise, I’m sure everyone has heard of The Imitation Game. This world war two thriller tells the story of the historical hero, Alan Turing, and it seems about time that he gets the attention he deserves. Stripped from its history and themes, The Imitation Game delights, thrills, and ultimately succeeds to seize the attention of movie-goers. However, as we remember the purpose of historical stories, or stories in general, it loses quite a bit of its value.

Now, I refuse to fling out anything captious towards this film before I crown it with the respect it deserves, for The Imitation Game succeeded in many aspects. Reasonably I can assume that most people have noticed the hideous trap most thrillers fall into of shallow characters, poor acting, cliché plotting, and most other elements, all for the sake of thrills. Imitation Game rises above these failures and demonstrates that films with depth are more memorable. And peeling them back layer by layer, the film truly fleshes out its characters and paints them complicated and believable. The acting is superb, the filming is excellent, and the writers turned up the suspense to a maximum.

However, it does waste some time on backstory. These scenes seem unimportant. We have no need to know the history of why Turing is the way he is, but merely that he is the way he is. In many films, backstory slips smoothly into the plot and serves as another way to provide information about a character. But as we watch Turing try to win the war, the scenes already flesh out all of the necessary information; there is no need to clarify characteristics already made clear, especially when it disrupts the film’s primary plot. Also, in the end, the entire plot shifts from winning a war to overcoming gay-rejection; I have no issue with plot twists, but a plot twist can seem silly when the twisted plot only lasts for the last ten minutes and shares no organic unity with the rest of the film. However, viewers can easily ignore these faults, for the rest of the film is wonderful.

The Imitation game is a true story, and when I watch a true story, I always make sure to read up on the history after my viewing. Everything seemed rather believable in the film, and so I found myself aggravated when I read up on what really occurred in the tale of Alan Turing. The film paints him as an almost Spock-like character, rather clueless of social clues and not very likeable. He seemed like a genius who would much rather save the world on his own than have to work along-side others. After my research, I found out that the real Turing happily and willingly worked with his co-workers, he was a very nice man, and most people loved him. His team was a very tight unit; they worked with Turing because they liked him, not because they were forced to. This means that the film of Turing’s life completely changed his personality, assumedly for the sake of a “quirky” character, as is the trend these days.

Also, the film never clearly states when Turing died, but it informs the audience that Turing died at the age of 41 in direct response to the claims of him struggling to cope with the sex hormones he was taking. However, nobody quite knows how or why Turing died; in fact, many believe that it was an accident, and present a very good argument of why – you can read up on it if you would like to know. Turing did not die until a year after the trial, and so the likelihood of the death responding to the hormones seems low.

One of the most obnoxious mistakes that the film slips into is that it bases one of its most powerful moments, the scene where Turing reveals that he named the machine after his childhood friend, on a myth. Not a shred of evidence exists which records that he named his machine Christopher.

Now, onto the theme of the film, I can easily split it into two distinct categories: the intended theme and the presented theme. The writers clearly tried to write a story about acceptance – made clear from the discussions and questions of what makes minds different, the gay-acceptance plot, the overly-repeated line that “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the thing that no one can imagine,” the co-workers of Turing struggling to accept his differences, and many more scenes. But the presented theme – or, in other words, the theme actually brought forth by the presentation of the film, regardless of the writer’s “intentions” – was a very “man vs. machine” sort of theme. It questions whether at the end of the day logic and mechanical thinking triumphs over human, emotional thinking. The trauma of world war two bears down on the world, and Turing works for an agency that desires to crack a code using humans (keep in mind that even here we have humans fighting a machine, the machine being the code). Turing thinks that they can defeat this code if they instead use a machine of their own, a machine to break a machine, and receives much resistance. This brings our movie to its main premise of the fight between Turing and his authorities, trying to answer the question of whether humans – from the soldiers to the workers already trying to crack the code – or Turing’s machine will win the war. In the end, the machine wins, which contributes to the reoccurring answer that machines triumph.

Turing’s sexuality, a human emotion, leads him nothing to nothing but chaos, for the law forbids homosexuality, and it hurts one of his friends. He loved a friend as a kid, but his friend died, and Turing found his heart broken. A girl loves Turing, but is much wounded when she discovers that he’s gay. The soldiers try their hardest to fight a war, but the tanks, planes, and codes of the enemy trample over them. The agency tries to crack the code using human minds, but they fail, and only Turing’s machine leads them to success.

Alan Turing seems to sum everything up when he asks, “Do you know why people like violence?” and then explains, “Because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes hollow.” This fleshes out Turing’s indicated belief that most emotional actions are hollow, and only have negative results. The movie parallels this.

As much as I would like to believe that the writes purposefully proposed such a thought-provoking debate over man vs. machine, all the material on acceptance points otherwise. It seems they stumbled upon this discussion accidentally. The problem here is the battle between themes. The man vs. machine theme courses throughout the entire film, and thus should have been the primary one, but the acceptance theme, which appears a very minor theme, for it relates nothing the primary plot of winning the war, receives all of the attention. This is very distracting, causes the film to seem uneven, and indicates that the writes had no control over their script.

As a thriller, stripped from its history and conflicting themes, The Imitation Game is a very good film. But it suffers from some major issues, which are far too large to overlook.

I award it three out of five stars.