Monday, February 26, 2018

"Helplessly Hoping" - Annihilation

In one of "Annihilation's" early scenes, Natalie Portman is painting the bedroom where she and her husband Kane slept.  It's been established that he has been missing for a year, and that her character - Lena, a Johns Hopkins biologist and Army veteran - remains in his absence a shell of her former self.  On the soundtrack, Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Helplessly Hoping" plays, a song that perfectly sets the tone that director Alex Garland seeks to establish in the early portions of his film.  It's one of the best uses of music in a film in recent memory.

Lena turns around and, miraculously,  Kane (Oscar Isaac) stands there, but it quickly becomes apparent that something is amiss.  He begins to shudder, and while en route to the hospital the ambulance transporting him and Lena is overtaken by a military force.  Lena is sedated, and when she awakens she finds herself in a mysterious compound, with her husband in a coma and suffering from organ failure.  She is questioned by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist.  She learns that the compound has been established just on the outside of a phenomenon that has come to be known as the "Shimmer."  In an earlier scene, we saw a meteor strike a lighthouse; the Shimmer has grown from that.  Only one person has returned from previous expeditions into the Shimmer - Lena's husband Kane.  No one knows exactly what is happening inside the Shimmer; they only know that it is expanding.  They suspect this is not a good thing.



Lena meets three women at the compound - a physicist (Josie), a paramedic (Anya), and a geologist (Cass). She learns that they, along with Dr. Ventress, are to be the next expedition into the Shimmer.  Lena joins them, and together the five women venture into the unknown.  What they find is that within the Shimmer, no life is the same as it was before.  Plant life is different, animal life is different (some animals are benevolent and even beautiful, others are vicious and life threatening), and there is life that doesn't look like anything that anyone has seen before. 



Within a short period of time, the women realize that they are changing as well. In one sense, the trek through the Shimmer is a journey into the heart of darkness.  In another sense, it is a journey of discovery.  Not all of the discoveries are pleasant, and some are quite horrible.  Left open to interpretation are some pretty fundamental questions that linger with the viewer after the end of the movie:

* Have these five women somehow been "chosen" for the journey?

* We learn through the story that each of them is damaged in some way - does that impact their fate within the Shimmer?

* What exactly is the ultimate fate of Lena and Kane?  Are the life forms that we see at movie's end actually Lena and Kane?

* Is the film as a whole a commentary on disease?  On what humans are doing to the planet we live on?  On what humans do to themselves in their most self-destructive moments?

The great thing about great science fiction is that the stories can be read as an open book, by which I mean that they're like those old assignments when the teacher would read a story and then you were tasked with writing (or talking about) the ending that you thought made the most sense.  "Annihilation" is clearly not for everyone, and at some points (especially the part that takes place within the lighthouse) I'm not sure I ever understood everything that was going on.

Kudos to director Alex Garland for his steady and confident hand, kudos to producer Scott Rudin for supporting his director and insisting that Paramount release the movie as Garland had intended it to be seen, and kudos to the five actresses who give the story its heart and soul: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny.

Monday, February 19, 2018

The Books of 2017

And last but not least, a list that will hopefully be longer this year - the books I read in 2017:

  • Altamont - Joel Selvin
  • The Power of the Dog - Don Winslow
  • Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World - Rob Sheffield
  • Before the Fall - Noah Hawley
  • Home - Harlan Coben
  • Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
  • The Wrong Side of Goodbye - Michael Connelly

The Movies of 2017

Housekeeping post #2 - the movies I saw in the theater in 2017:

  • Thor: Ragnarok
  • The Shape of Water
  • Star Wars - The Last Jedi
  • The Florida Project
  • Blade Runner 2049
  • It
  • Mother!
  • Good Time
  • Logan Lucky
  • Wind River
  • Dunkirk
  • Atomic Blonde
  • Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
  • Wonder Woman
  • War for the Planet of the Apes
  • Spider Man: Homecoming
  • Baby Driver
  • Alien: Covenant
  • Free Fire
  • Life
  • The Fate of the Furious
  • T2 Trainspotting
  • Logan
  • Get Out
  • La La Land
  • Silence

The Albums of 2017

This is strictly a housekeeping post, but I like to memorialize for the record the music, films and books that I've enjoyed in the course of a year.  So without further ado, the albums of 2017:

  • From A Room, Vol. 2 - Chris Stapleton
  • Songs of Experience - U2
  • Carry Fire - Robert Plant
  • Masseduction - St. Vincent
  • Turn Out the Lights - Julien Baker
  • Lotta Sea Lice - Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile
  • Colors - Beck
  • A Deeper Understanding - The War on Drugs
  • Way Out West - Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives
  • Hitchhiker - Neil Young
  • Science Fiction - Brand New
  • Sleep Well Beast - The National
  • A Black Mile to the Surface - Manchester Orchestra
  • Everything Now - Arcade Fire
  • Out in the Storm - Waxahatchee
  • Something to Tell You - Haim
  • 4:44 - Jay-Z
  • The Nashville Sound - Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
  • Crack Up - Fleet Foxes
  • Close Ties - Rodney Crowell
  • Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie
  • Triplicate - Bob Dylan
  • Be Myself - Sheryl Crow
  • DAMN. - Kendrick Lamar
  • From A Room, Vol. 1 - Chris Stapleton
  • Sad Clowns & Hillbillies - John Mellencamp
  • Wrangled - Angaleena Presley
  • Love and War - Brad Paisley
  • Whiteout Conditions - The New Pornographers
  • Teens of Denial - Car Seat Headrest
  • Americana - Ray Davies
  • Graveyard Whistling - Old 97's
  • Pure Comedy - Father John Misty
  • Trophy - Sunny Sweeney
  • Freedom Highway - Rhiannon Giddens
  • Windy City - Alison Krauss
  • Prisoner - Ryan Adams
  • We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service - A Tribe Called Quest
  • Darkness and Light - John Legend

Monday, February 12, 2018

Belated Super Bowl Thoughts

As far as Super Bowls go: it was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

The best of times:

Were you not entertained?  It's hard to imagine a more engaging game, from start to finish.  I was wrung out by the end, and my team wasn't anywhere near Minneapolis.  The Eagles put everything on the table, including the legendary call shown on the SI cover at left.  And no one who watched last year's game thought it was over until they saw for certain that the ball made contact with the ground on the Hail Mary.  We had three generations watching together, and I'm pretty sure that until it was proven otherwise, we thought that New England would figure out some way to pull it out at the end.

A Cinderella story for the ages.  The Nick Foles story is why people watch sports in the first place.  As recently as Christmas night, he just plain stunk up the joint, and one reason I can say that with authority is that his poor play cost my fantasy team a championship.  But why would anyone have expected anything more?  I felt good for him after the divisional round victory, just because then he could point to something positive heading towards the future.  But not for one second did I think it was possible for him to perform the way he did in the NFC Championship game and the Super Bowl.  Even under the worst case scenario, in which he accomplishes nothing notable for the remainder of his career, he merits a paragraph (heck, maybe even a chapter) in the NFL History Book.

Tom Brady.  Yeah, I'm tired of him too.  But no one has ever played at a level like this, at an age like this.  It really is quite remarkable.

The worst of times:

The NFL cannot win the battle against brain injuries.  That was illustrated quite well by the play that sent Brandin Cooks packing (warning - not for the faint of heart).



What's scary about this play is that there is absolutely nothing the NFL can do to prevent it, outside of a change to the game so fundamental that it won't be American Football anymore.

As Rodger Sherman noted in The Ringer:

"Cooks spent several minutes motionless on the ground and was almost immediately ruled out for the rest of the game with a head injury.  But Jenkins's hit wasn't dirty: he wasn't head-hunting, and he didn't aim to make contact high on Cooks's body.  Yet he still hit the living hell out of him, and I can't imagine any rule that would make Jenkins's hit illegal that wouldn't essentially outlaw tacking.  The hit on Cooks and his subsequent injury served as a remind that perfectly legal hits can cause the types of terrifying injuries that the NFL claims it can eliminate from the game, and it happened with the largest audience of the year watching."

Malcolm Gladwell is already on record as stating his belief that professional football as we have known it will end at some point during his lifetime.  A few years ago, that seemed like a preposterous statement.  Not so much anymore.

Defense, where art thou?  The statistics all showed that New England's defense wasn't very good, but come on - more yards were gained in this game than ANY GAME IN NFL HISTORY.  I have an old book about the early years of the Super Bowl, and there's a part in it that takes place right before Super Bowl III where some elitist NFL nabob is watching the AFL Championship game with some cronies, and makes the comment, "Gentleman, what we are watching here is Mickey Mouse football."  Well, in that famous game, Joe Namath and Daryl Lamonica threw 96 passes, and the two teams gained a total of 843 yards.  In Super Bowl LII, Tom Brady and Nick Foles threw 91 passes, and the two teams gained a total of 1,151 yards.  Reach your own conclusions.

Cris Collinsworth.  I'm not even sure why, but boy did I find him annoying.

There's probably an entire post in the issue of what the NFL can do to get past the "kneeling before the flag" issues, so we'll save that for another day.

Sunday, February 04, 2018

The Song of 2017: "Hope the High Road," Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit

Almost forgot to close this thing out! 

Aside from King Kendrick, Jason Isbell made my favorite album of 2017, the first time to these ears that he's been able to sustain over the course of an entire album the greatness of the songs he contributed to Drive-By Truckers.

A decade later, married, sober and father of a little girl, there seem to be no limits to what Isbell can achieve in the years to come.

"Hope the High Road" was the perfect illustration of 2017 - hopeful, against the background of a year that was probably the biggest shit show of my life.  Sometimes you just gotta forget all that, and focus on the good stuff.

And this is the good stuff.



"Hope the High Road," Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit