Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

During the Christmas season, we tend to see an uptick in New Testament movies, largely focused around the birth of Christ.  Early this year, we saw the Old Testament get a little representation with Noah, and now we’re turning to the second book with Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. But where I appreciated Noah’s steps away from the source material (odd though the rock monsters may have been), Exodus turns out to be too devoted to the text without taking advantage of the technical and narrative innovations the film teases.

Christian Bale stars as Moses on the eve of his step-brother Ramses’s (Joel Edgerton) ascension to the throne of Egypt.  After the revelation that Moses was born a Hebrew slave leads to his exile, a visitation from God (“I Am,” in the persona of a small boy) compels Moses to return to free his people, with ten plague-shaped assists from the heavens.

The first thing about Exodus is that it’s very competent. Scott’s direction of the action scenes recalls his good work on Gladiator, and the plague scenes are terrifying for their computer-generated precision.  And of course Bale is doing his usual top-quality work in a performance as Moses that sees him undergo at least two distinct physical changes, two major philosophical paradigm shifts, and frequent conversations with thin air that lack no conviction.

Edgerton is a great Ramses, as well, and the scenes leading up to the plague of the first-born are highly effective.  It’s a shame, though, that some of the editing in the film turns his public executions into punchlines, compromising a more nuanced performance by equating it with mustache-twirling villainy.  Exodus recovers with a strong supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and John Turturro as Seti I.

These are all great performers, but they’re not given terribly much to do.  Kingsley is basically shorthand for gravitas, meant to lend weight quickly to the Hebrew elders, and he manages to check off another ethnicity on his career’s bingo card without having much to do outside of two or three scenes.  Ditto for Paul, whose role as Joshua should have been the Robin to Bale’s Batman, so to speak, but he’s mostly set dressing with an unconvincing accent.  Weaver and Turturro are out of the movie in about twenty minutes; a subplot in which Weaver wants Moses dead peters out rather quickly.

The idea that Ramses’s mother is plotting behind his back to assassinate her stepson is a fascinating one, but the film doesn’t know what to do with it.  This is actually a major problem with Exodus because it has so many opportunities to make an original stamp on the Moses story, but it never commits to any of those.  The apparent emphasis on the brother relationship between Moses and Ramses seems like the centerpiece of the film, but it too fades away, never really delivering on even the basic comparison of the two men as leaders of opposing armies (teased by an opening shot of a priestesses reading offal).  Even the idea of God appearing as a small boy is a neat riff, but it’s never more than set dressing when it could have been the defining element of the film (similar to how Noah replaced God for a more sci-fi being called The Creator).

The most interesting subtext in the film is a broader allusion to the history of the Jewish people.  In one scene, assassinated Hebrew slaves are burned en masse, while elsewhere slaves are forced to hide under their homes to evade Egyptian search parties. In these moments, it seems Scott is building an analogy to the Holocaust, and the film’s conclusion, gesturing toward nation-building, seems to weigh heavily on the side of the Israelis in the contemporary conflict over the Holy Land.  A film more dedicated to this analogy would have been an amazing inflection of the story we all know so well, but three scenes in 150 minutes isn’t enough on which to hang a comprehensive interpretation.

Exodus: Gods and Kings isn’t a bad film (a tremendous improvement from the last Scott film I saw, the dismal Prometheus), but it is disappointing for how little it pushes the story beyond what we already know. For anyone who knows the story, even in its broadest strokes, the film won’t hold much suspense or even any emotion beyond a feeling of obligation as events proceed unremarkably.  For all the technical skill at work in rendering lifelike plague sequences, what’s missing is a sense of spectacle, something we saw quite successfully in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  Despite the dated Technicolor and the mild doses of camp, DeMille’s original epic had a scope and a pervading attitude of wonder that Exodus is sadly lacking. Exodus isn’t a big-budget remake of The Ten Commandments, just a more precise, condensed, and slightly better-acted version of the same story without the grandeur the narrative demands.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is rated PG-13 for “violence including battle sequences and intense images.”  The standard bevy of plagues is seen here, with boils and insects being particularly grotesque; some combat scenes feature violence without any blood.

Trailer Park: Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Let's face it - you either love Michael Bay movies or, like the song goes in Team America: World Police, you wonder why he gets to keep making them.

Like most male moviegoers, I'm in the former category. Michael Bay movies contain three of my favorite things in the world: a nice hybrid of comedy and action, gorgeous women, and things blowing up. Honestly, I don't need much more in a movie, so it's a good thing that Michael Bay seldom goes above and beyond my expectations.

I enjoyed the first Transformers picture because it had all of the above and - more importantly - allowed a newbie like myself to get into the world and follow the plotline without all that heavy geekgasm'ing that a different director might have brought in. It looks like the second film is going to be much the same, with returning heroes and villains as well as a heavy load of action sequences that Bay does so well. It's not that his movies are unwatchable - there just isn't a lot of substance beyond the extremely watchable boom-booms.

And what else does one expect for a summer blockbuster? Something that makes the popcorn tastes better. Bingo, Bay. Bingo. See you at the movies!

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen crash-lands on June 24, 2009.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

If you're not familiar with the oeuvre of Tony Scott, he's the guy whose movies always look like they were filmed from a moving train (Domino, Man on Fire, and Déjà Vu, though not so much True Romance). So it's only appropriate that his latest film, both a remake of a 1974 classic and the novel that inspired it, is centered in the New York subway system.


The Taking of Pelham 123 is a fast-paced, near-realtime thriller with a simple core: Walter Garber, a civil servant thrust into the shoes of being a hostage negotiator (Denzel Washington) matches wits with a troubled and somewhat unstable criminal named Ryder (John Travolta) on the other end of the microphone. The demands are simple: $10,000,000 within an hour or hostages start dying. And the supporting cast is fairly simple: an actual hostage negotiator (John Turturro) coaching Garber as the Mayor of New York (James Gandolfini) scrambles to get the ransom money in time amid his own personal scandal.


I can't do much by way of comparison with the original (and a 1998 version starring Edward James Olmos), which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I can't provide the kind of commentary I'm sure some of you are seeking, but on the other hand, I'm free to concentrate on the film that Tony Scott has made without any distractions. As updates go, this one compensates well for technology not extant when the originals came out, but I'm just speculating there. Not knowing anything about the original versions, this one kept me guessing and held my attention during the whole thing, and the 106-minute runtime flew by... well, like a subway train.


Despite being a high-stakes plot with 19 lives in the balance and despite Scott's brutally flashy direction (which is entertaining if a little distracting), there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of urgency behind the film; it's as though at times there aren't lives on the line. But that's all right. The heart and soul of the film is the interaction between Washington's charismatic everyman and Travolta's unhinged hostage-taker. Like Sam Jackson, these two are just plain fun to watch, especially Washington, who disappears behind his klutzy character while bringing us in on every small tic and mini-grin Garber carries with him. Travolta isn't exactly menacing - that is, when he's not brandishing a gun in a hostage's face (there, he's downright spooky) - but he's a great foil for Denzel, and the two are clearly having a great time playing off of each other.


That these two are such magnets for the audience's attention compensates for the fact that no one else really does anything in the movie. Turturro stands over Denzel's shoulder, Mayor Gandolfini squawks his way past a Tony Soprano impression (having learned his lesson, it seems, from Lonely Hearts), and the rest of the terrorists in Ryder's crew pace the length of the car with their guns drawn but never actually have to fire. Even the hostages are fairly cookie-cutter.


But again, none of that really matters. When Garber is on the screen, I couldn't look at anyone else - even though I'm a huge fan of the other major hitters in the cast - because Denzel Washington is just that good. Perhaps I should stop before this turns into an overwrought love letter to one of the best actors of our time... oops, too late. Simply put, this movie is fun, refreshing for its simplicity in spite of its own crafty direction and seemingly involved plot (yes, I learned by the end of the film, it's really that straightforward).

The Taking of Pelham 123 is rated "R for violence and pervasive language." Violence is quick and sprinkled throughout the film, though bloody after-effects linger in the cramped subway car, and the language is standard F-bomb fare dropped casually and occasionally intensely about 50 times.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

To say that I'm a fan of the Coen Brothers is something of an understatement: they're among my favorite filmmakers, abundantly entertaining and deftly profuse. So to say that The Big Lebowski is my favorite Coen flick is probably also an understatement (though Barton Fink kind of muddles that statement).

There are two Jeffrey Lebowskis - The Dude (Jeff Bridges), amiable stoner hero extraordinaire prone to swilling White Russians, and The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a prime mover in the L.A. region. When the two are confused by a pair of nitwit goons - and one micturates on The Dude's rug - looking for The Big Lebowski's wife Bunny (Tara Reid) and the money she owes to one Jackie Treehorn, that's where the trouble begins. It only gets worse when The Dude tells bowling buddies Walter Sobchak (a perfectly over-the-top John Goodman), a Vietnam vet obsessed with his service and his religion ("Shomer Shabbos!"), and Donny (Steve Buscemi), who can't seem to get a word in edgewise, Walter convinces The Dude to petition The Big Lebowski for rug compensation. After all, "that rug really tied the room together."

That's all in the first ten or so minutes. The rest is a tangled web of mystery, blackmail, kidnapping, Creedence Clearwater Revival, pornography, deceit, and bowling. Eat your heart out, Raymond Chandler. Speaking of Chandler, this is the best adaptation of The Big Sleep since Bogart and Bacall bantered back in the Forties. It's also the most comprehensible, although I'll admit it took me a second viewing to fully understand just what had happened. This is a top-notch screenplay from the Coens, poetically profane and tantalizingly tangled.

Much as Sweeney Todd was for Tim Burton, this is the movie that the Coens have been aiming to make throughout their whole career. It's got all the Coen staples - both plot points and cast members - and it's their pinnacle film. Nothing before or since - not even No Country for Old Men, Oscar-winner though it may be - has matched The Big Lebowski.

The film takes place in a world populated by classic Coen characters, The Dude and Walter not least among them. There's John Turturro as pederast bowler Jesus Quintana, who talks a big game; Philip Seymour Hoffman as bootlicking sycophant butler Brandt; Julianne Moore as feminist artist Maude, who wants The Dude in more ways than one; Ben Gazzara as mysterious smut peddler Jackie Treehorn; Arthur Digby Sellers, a classic TV writer now confined to an iron lung; his son, a sloppy juvenile delinquent; and Sam Elliott as The Stranger, a narrator soothing enough to give Morgan Freeman a run for his money.

It's difficult to say much more about The Big Lebowski beyond "It must be seen." This is a wholly original movie that really escapes description. Relaxed and entertaining, The Big Lebowski is certainly my favorite Coen Bros. picture - and may even land a spot on my irregular-around-the-margins Best Movies of All Time list.

Barton Fink (1991)

Where do we begin discussion about a film like the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink? Do we examine the allegories to Nazism, the Fight Club syndrome that diagnoses most films as "it's all in his head," my personal theory that the Hotel Earle is really hell, or do we simply ask "What the heck is up with John Turturro's hair?"

After the lackluster Blood Simple., I needed a film that would restore my faith in the filmmaking abilities of Joel and Ethan Coen. It was then that I realized that I was two films shy of seeing the enire Coen canon - Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy. Almost by fate, Fink fell on television yesterday afternoon, so I had to take a powwow for it.

Let me say this about Barton Fink. It is the most fascinating "slow movie" I have ever seen. That is, the pacing of the movie is deliberate and without hurry, but - though little happens on the screen for large portions of time - I could not stop watching. Even as the credits rolled, I remained glued in thought.

After his socially conscious play makes big splashes, quirky playwright Barton Fink (Turturro) lands a gig writing Wallace Beery wrestling flicks for Capitol Pictures. While desperately attempting to dodge deadlines and writer's block, Barton Fink resides at the Hotel Earle, a place where Steve Buscemi valets, strange noises come from the sixth floor, and his boisterous neighbor Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) is a constant visitor - who sometimes steals the glassware. The film is a butterfly collection of the most unique characters the Coens have ever crafted, including angry film moguls Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) and Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub), groveling gopher Lou Breeze (Jon Polito), drunken novelist Bill Mayhew (Frasier's dad John Mahoney), and his jaded sweetheart Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis).

If it sounds like a lot to take in, that's because there are a lot of parentheses in the preceding paragraph. The Coens keep the film moving and create three-dimensional figures that are characteristically Coen in their prolixity and personality overloads. The basic through-line of the film is simple - Barton Fink has writer's block. The rest of the film is a series of character-driven vignettes that give the Coens an opportunity to flex their dialogue muscles and give the actors involved the chance to show us just how believable they can make these ridiculous characters.

The central performance - though all are worthy of commendation - is Turturro's Fink. Fink is restrained, quiet, shy, and nervous; everything Turturro does, from the quiver in his voice to the way he holds his coffee cup, is completely in step with his character. Ditto for Goodman, who's perfectly cast as the jolly world's-worst-neighbor.

An added bonus is the absolutely beautiful set design and direction that make me nostalgic for a 1941 that probably never was. Every set piece contributes to the all out 40s-immersion the film projects, prompting me to say at several points, "Boy, I wish I could live there." Even the decrepit Hotel Earle, with its peeling wallpaper and occasionally igniting walls, generates that nostalgic feeling.

If we are to believe the theory that Barton Fink is a response to/remake of David Lynch's Eraserhead, it's a marked improvement. But I'm inclined to believe that Barton Fink is a wholly original Coen creation, because no one else could have come up with a product as quirky at this one.