More Than One Lesson

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?…”

This portion of Robert Browning’s poem, “Andrea del Sarto,” directly referenced in the final moments of The Lost City of Z, sums up both the film’s form and its function. For it is James Gray, directing with his usual grace and manners, that leads us by the hand for two and a half hours, imploring us to reach for the ineffable each time Percival Fawcett, the title character upon whose real story this movie is based, does. Like Fawcett, the reach for heaven ultimately fails, but in the way Samuel Beckett (“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”) would approve. It’s the sort of failure one can expect to learn much from.

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There has long been a debate about whether Trekkie or Trekker is the proper name to describe Star Trek fanatics. Whichever one it is, I can’t claim to be one. I’ve always been a casual Star Trek fan. I have seen every movie but only a handful of episodes from the original series and The Next Generation. So it may come as a surprise that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies of all-time.

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It’s Monday night of the 2017 South by Southwest Festival. All of the big premieres—anticipated movies by important directors (Malick, Wright, Franco!)—have come and gone. Yet my three friends and I, the only ones currently in the general admission line, are here for the shoot-‘em-up movie boasting a cast known by face if not by name. This isn’t even a premiere in the pure sense; it’s just the stateside debut. By all the above accounts, Ben Wheatley’s film should be a severely mediocre night at the movies—a merely fine film.

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Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is a mess of mythical proportions, literally and figuratively. A jumbled, uneven blend of sci-fi, historical fantasy, and romance, it was commercially ignored and critically snubbed upon its release in 2006. But since then, it’s gained a cult following. Stylistically, it’s a visual tone poem in the mold of Stanley Kubrick or Terrence Malick, impressively created with mostly practical effects. Like The Tree of Life, it aspires to be a story on a universal scale that remains rooted in the intimately particular sorrows of everyday human existence. This is encapsulated in one of the film’s earliest images, when we are introduced to a futuristic astronaut named Tom. The floating biosphere he inhabits, nearly taken up by an immense tree, seems like it couldn’t be more unmoored from reality. But when he turns, a vision comes to him: a young woman with close-cropped hair, lying asleep on a hospital bed.

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In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Jon Gunn’s The Case for Christ and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:50- Intro, Worth Watching
00:02:40- Logan article, Bob’s baseball article, Thimblerig’s Ark, Digisciple Me
00:08:15- The Case for Christ
00:47:30- 12 Angry Men
01:21:30- Episode wrap-up

James Mangold’s Logan is not the first film to market itself as an “adult” superhero story. It’s just the first to actually tell one. Set aside, for a moment, the slashing (sometimes necessary, sometimes gratuitous) and the swearing (sometimes amusing, sometimes gratuitous). These are secondary to the fact that no superhero film has ever offered such a devastatingly poignant portrayal of what age does to a man’s body and soul.

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In 1996, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s wildly popular novel chronicling the lives of Scottish heroin addicts quickly became one of the highest grossing British films of all-time and an international hit. Trainspotting was accused by many who did not see it of glamorizing drug use. While it was incredibly entertaining and often very funny, its style unflinchingly showed the horrors of heroin addiction without taking a heavy-handed stance about it. If you can watch a character dig into the “worst toilet in Scotland” on his hands and knees, another wake up in a pile of his own excrement, and another dying in squalor of AIDS and come away from that film believing that being a heroin addict is an exciting and glamorous lifestyle then your critical thinking skills are almost certainly broken. While Boyle didn’t back away from the horrors he also didn’t back away from what it is about heroin that creates addicts in the first place. Still, I would imagine that for a teenager, watching Trainspotting would make a far more effective anti-drug teaching tool than anything he or she could learn from D.A.R.E.

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For decades, a notorious film by director Ken Russell provoked debate, controversy, and sometimes disgust in audiences who had the rare privilege to see it. Banned in several countries around the world, and lacking formal distribution in any others, The Devils was one of film connoisseurs’ most heavily sought lost treasures. Warner Brothers began a rocky distribution in the early 2000s, releasing the film in limited printings, with sub-par video quality, on DVD. It appeared on iTunes in 2010, only to be removed again without explanation after only 3 days. Even these few releases removed the more severely controversial moments of the film, and a complete version remains extremely elusive, if not entirely lost.

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On the short list of candidates for the proverbial title of “definitive fairy tale”, you might find Snow White, Cinderella, and – of course – Beauty and the Beast. For countless audiences, both young and old, this “tale as old as time” is framed almost exclusively around the images, the events, and the unforgettable songs of the 1991 Disney animated masterpiece. So, needless to say, a live action reimagining has some immense expectations to meet along with its baked-in good will.

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As film lovers we watch different movies for different reasons. Sometimes we need to laugh, sometimes we want to be challenged intellectually; sometimes we’re looking for something with strong emotional resonance. And sometimes we want to see a gigantic gorilla smash things. If you like movies where gigantic gorillas smash things (and why on earth wouldn’t you?) then Kong: Skull Island delivers what you’re looking for in spades.

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