Delayed Reaction: Fahrenheit 451

The Pitch: Adapting the classic book for a Black Mirror world.

In a dystopian world where books are illegal, a lead book burning enforcement officer starts to question why he does what he does.

Let's talk about dystopias for a minute. As always, I'm going to really focus on movies, but I'll be dipping my toes into book discussion as well. I've considered myself a fan of dystopias for many years. I read several of them, mostly in college. I've seen plenty of dystopian movies. I like the thought experiment of them: If <hypothetical situation>, then what would that look like? They are a simple way to give a concrete interpretation of an abstract idea. However, the more I think about it, dystopias are a dead end. They can only go so far. They are training wheels for critical thinking.

This shouldn't be a shocking revelation. The latest wave of dystopias have almost all been from Young Adult series. A lot of the classics are high school or college staples. That's because they are simple ways to get into discussions about larger ideas. Divergent is a warning about sorting people by basic traits. The Hunger Games uses games to distract the masses from the unfair class imbalances. Fahrenheit 451 is about controlling thought by limiting access to it. That's where dystopias can run into problems. After they make their point, what else is left? Dystopia's are remembered for their first act more often than not. That's due to an inherent problem: it's hard to build a world to prove a point.

It hard to build any new world. There's a lot of history to think through and a lot of cause and effect to consider. Dystopias have the added difficulty of starting with the end result in mind. Middle Earth is just a world that J.R.R. Tolkien created. Bilbo can have a ring in it in one story, then that ring can be the ultimate evil in another. He can make it up as he goes along and change the world as needed. Something like Divergent starts with the idea of sorting people a certain way then  has to reverse engineer how that could work. The answer almost always leads back to "it just does" at some point. This kind of plot-driven thinking comes at the expense of the characters. And that's where things start falling apart for me.

I haven't read Fahrenheit 451. I only know the basics of it. Immediately however, I realize that it can't be properly adapted and updated without abandoning virtually the entire premise. Think about the last 10 things (not just books) you read. How many of them didn't involve a screen? In the 1950s, there wasn't the internet or Kindles to consider. Now, the idea of making ink and paper books the enemy is pretty quaint. The idea is more symbolic now, but the film treats books like they are a present danger to the society. I get that the government probably controls the internet too. I suppose that's assumed if not outright stated in the film. Where it gets silly for me is the idea that different people have to memorize books. There's a simpler and more reliable solution. It's called a thumb drive. There's no need to code all this into bird DNA or whatever (I lost interest in the explanation about what exactly the OMNIS was). Thumb drives take up very little physical space, can be hidden literally anywhere, and can hold a shit ton (approximately) of books on them. I really try not to rewrite a movie as I'm watching it, but the threat in this movie felt really hollow.

Michael B. Jordan is good in a very difficult role. Guy Montag is a tough character. One of the main questions I ask when watching a movie is if a character could exist off the screen. Can I believe the the character that I'm seeing could've gotten to that point with those characteristics before the movie began? In the case of Guy, I don't believe it for a second. He's smart and curious from the very beginning. His job, which he's risen in the ranks of quickly, requires him to be an unquestioning zealot. That doesn't appear to be his nature and I wasn't convinced by his moment(s) of discovery that led to his shift. It was too easy. The Guy who would be swayed this easily wouldn't look like the Guy the film introduces us too in the beginning. Without someone as good and engaging as Michael B. Jordan in the role, he wouldn't work at all.

Michael Shannon is a bit easier to buy into. Captain Beatty is a true believer. He knows about what the books contain and rejects them. There is no wool over his eyes. He understands books and thinks they are a problem. Granted, Shannon doesn't have to go through any change in the movie, so it's a much easier part than Jordan's. Sofia Boutella is fine. She's there to explain a bunch of stuff. There are better uses for her, but there's worse ones too.

The movie looks good for an HBO movie. It's a glossier Black Mirror kind of world. I like the scope and the ambition of the movie. This is certainly better than all their biopics about complicated men (and occasionally women). I respect the idea of updating the source material, but I simply don't think it can be done. Not like this.

Oh. I didn't know where else to put this. When I mentally check out of a movie as quickly as I did with this, that leaves me way to much time to get fixated on  plot inconsistencies. One that drove me insane was how conveniently famous Guy was. At times, he's the face of the government. At other times, he's riding on a train and no one seems to notice him. For a society as strictly monitored as this, he sure seems to move around unnoticed with ease.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Spy Who Dumped Me

Formula: Spy ^ Life Partners

It's nice when I can go to the movie theater and the exact movie that I'm in the mood for is the movie being released that week. 

Pretty much the day that spy movies became a thing, spy movie spoofs have been around. The first Casino Royale movie in 1967 was a comedy, after all. There are several varieties. Some are about a loved one having a secret life (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Killers). Others feature a regular person unwittingly tagging along with a spy (Knight & Day, Central Intelligence). The most recent trend has been making a spy comedy while still being a spy movie - having your cake and eating it too (Spy, Kingsman: The Secret Service). There really aren't any new angles to try. The best anyone can do is try to execute it all a little differently, which is what The Spy Who Dumped Me does.

The story, as I mentioned, is pretty familiar: Audrey (Mila Kunis) is a slacker who is getting over her boyfriend dumping her via text. Her lifelong best friend, Morgan (Kate McKinnon) wants to cheer her up. After being ghosted for a week, Audrey's boyfriend (Justin Theroux) contacts her, telling her not to burn the things he left in her apartment. The next day, Audrey gets contacted by CIA agents who tell her that her ex-boyfriend is a spy. Soon after that, some assassins go after Audrey and Morgan, which sets off an international chase as they try to get some important McGuffin into the right hands. It's a bit of a mix of all the types of spy comedy.

What differentiates The Spy Who Dumped Me is that it's a buddy movie with two regular people. I'm sure other movies have done this, but I can't think of another movie like that, that's just two friends with agency in the spy world. Normally it's one person alone or someone paired with an agent. And the duo is this movie's greatest strength. Director Susanna Fogel's only other feature film was the small indie movie Life Partners from 2014. I liked that movie more than I expected. It too was about two lifelong friends and  its best moment were seeing the two leads just interacting as friends. The same is true about The Spy Who Dumped Me. Kunis and McKinnon are at their best when they are performing for each other. They actually make each other laugh in the movie. That's surprisingly rare. There's this unwritten rule in a lot of comedies that the characters can't know how funny they are. That is ignored in this movie and it's my favorite thing about it. I'm watching a movie about these two friends hanging out. It just happens to be in the middle of spy movie. 

Tied to that, something else that's interesting is that the movie isn't concerned with commenting on the spy movie genre. Most spy comedies are very meta. They play on your expectations of the spy movie genre. The jokes come from how things contrast with a normal spy movie. There's some of that in this movie. Much more of it is buddy comedy stuff. Kunis and McKinnon crack jokes like any friends would to cut the tension of a difficult situation. They aren't trying to deflate the movie. They are just responding to the world around them.

Kunis and McKinnon make a deceptively strong duo. Kunis is the straight man (or straight woman - I never know if that needs to be adapted for genders) and McKinnon goes for the jokes. It's a great balance. McKinnon never moves into the Melissa McCarthy (at her worst) territory of taking over the movie. She's hilarious and knows how to deploy it. Kunis doesn't try to insert herself into the jokes too much. She also doesn't do that thing where the straight man tries to counter the other person in equal measure by being overly buttoned up or fussy. I believe these two are best friends. Audrey enjoys having Morgan around to entertain her, and Morgan appreciates that Audrey "gets" her. The friendship comes from a Sundance dramedy place even if it's surrounded by a silly action movie.

And let me be clear: this is a very silly movie. It's a delightfully silly movie. It's the kind of movie where a former Olympic gymnast turned supermodel turns out to be an assassin and leaves in the middle of a show in a chrome sports car when she gets an assignment (Note: Ivanna Sakhno is bizarrely good in this). I giggled as much as I laughed. Fogel also co-wrote the movie in addition to directing it. As far as I can tell, she didn't cut her teeth writing for sitcoms or working in other comedy films and it shows (co-writer David Iserson does have that background though). The humor is a little off. This doesn't feel like it came from the same school of comedy that so many other films do. While I enjoy movies like Tag or Game Night, they do have a "house style" that makes them hard to stand out. I can see the subtle differences* in The Spy Who Dumped Me turning people off. I haven't checked, but I assume I liked this movie much more than aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.  

*Before you think I'm suggesting that I'm smarter than people and saw things that other people won't, I want to make it clear: I'm not sure what these "subtle differences" are. I'm still trying to figure them out. I could just tell that something was off (not in a bad way).

The movie is by no means perfect. At almost 2 hours, it really drags. Something closer to 90 minutes would've probably played better. The editing isn't great either. I'm not a stickler about visual continuity and all that. So, if I'm noticing issues, that means they must be really bad. Throughout the movie, shots don't match up. Two people will be talking to one another, and when the camera switches from one person to the other, it's clearly from a different take. Mila Kunis will be laughing, then it cuts to a different shot or angle and she'll be stone-faced. I assume it was a decision to use the best take over continuity, but it got distracting. 

Whoever the team was working on the stunts and choreography, they deserves some praise. The action scenes are over the top without showing off. Bits of choreography were more complex than I expected. And, it wasn't shot like Fogel was trying to prove something. It's almost like the action was inconsequential to her, but if she was going to have it, she was going to do it well.

I thought The Spy Who Dumped Me was a blast. I don't know that it's something that I'll be banging the drum for by the end of the year, but it's refreshingly different from most comedies that I see while still being an accessible mainstream comedy. Even more so than Ghostbusters, this confirms to me that Kate McKinnon has a future in movies whenever she leaves SNL. It also reminded me how much I like Mila Kunis. The supporting cast isn't quite as strong, partly due to the film's tendency to kill characters off before you'd expect. This was a good way to start August off.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Stop Making Sense

The Pitch: Everyone should be able to experience a Talking Heads concert.

A Talking Heads concert movie.

Concert movies are tricky to talk about. There's only so much you can do with them. More recent takes have been to make them documentaries about the artist's life and cut that with performances. That runs the risk of the two elements competing with each other. Either I'm annoyed because I want to know more about Katy Perry's story or I'm annoyed because - just get to Firework already! The classic approach is the simplest: record a concert with a few cameras and hope that the show can sustain an audience's interest. The risk of that is that the viewer has to like the music.

So, guess what? If you don't like The Talking Heads, you won't like Stop Making Sense. If you are on the fence about them, this concert movie is a great sales pitch for them. I've always been pretty indifferent about The Talking Heads. I wouldn't chose to ever listen to them, but I wouldn't turn one of their songs off if one started playing. I sure enjoyed Stop Making Sense though. That was a lively show. David Byrne wore me out with his oddball dance moves. I didn't realize how large the group was either. That gave director Jonathan Demme a lot to work with. Demme doesn't get fancy with the camerawork all that often. He only shoots from a few different angles, but he knows went to linger and when to jump between different shots.

In general, I hate listening to live versions of songs. If all I'm doing is listening, I'd rather hear the fully produced work. I don't mind as much when I watching a band play a song live though. I get to see all the parts and people involved in making the sounds. It's easy to get lost in the moment.

For what it is, I liked this movie a lot. More than I expected. The Talking Heads have a familiar catalog of songs. They play them well. This concert gets weirder the longer it goes on. The film is a tight 90 minutes. I have no complaints.

One Final Thought: Am I the only one who thinks young David Byrne has an uncanny resemblance to Cillian Murphy? Maybe with a little Paul Dano in there as well.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend*

*You know, unless you hate The Talking Heads

Delayed Reaction: North by Northwest

The Pitch: The Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.

After being mistaken for the wrong man, Cary Grant is chased across the country by agents of a nefarious organization.

It's funny how being first forgives a lot of other faults. North by Northwest, by today's standard is a pretty standard thriller. The mistaken identity. The shadow agency manipulating everything. I've seen it done a dozen times, whether it's the kitchen sink commitment of The Game or even the extra twist of A History of Violence. North by Northwest was the first movie like it. At least, it set the template that all thrillers of its ilk have followed ever since. Because of that, it's virtually impossible to find an assessment of the film that's negative. I don't veer from that. I did like the movie. At the same time, I couldn't help but think about all the modern critics who would roll their eyes at some of these twists if they were included in a modern movie. Sometimes, when I'm watching these classic movies, I wonder what the response would be if you didn't slap the Hitchcock label on it. Cary Grant is an ideal lead for this. He's versatile enough for all the things he needs to do in this. He can be an everyman and a hero. I buy him as a romantic lead. He can even be silly when needed. I liked how he played drunk. He had fun with it. He has good chemistry with Eva Marie Saint*, who is a nice femme fatale-type.Also, I didn't realize that Martin Landau was ever that young.

*As always, the 20 year age difference was a little distracting, especially because Eva Marie Saint was playing someone who was claiming to be even younger than she was at the time.

NxNW is a really fun thriller. It has a couple of the most iconic scenes in cinema. The most refreshing thing about Hitchcock that people often forget is how much he aimed to entertain with his movies. The artistic merit is almost secondary.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend