Crime and Punishment: Richard and Judith Return
Judith: We haven’t received a text from Binky in the last hour. We should drive up to Dartmouth to see if he’s alright.
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Judith: We haven’t received a text from Binky in the last hour. We should drive up to Dartmouth to see if he’s alright.
Since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, we have entered a post-Jobsian landscape, where films such as “Jobs” (2013) and “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” (2015) are presented like fleurs du mal upon his gravestone, simultaneously tarnishing and mythologizing Jobs’ status in technology. Each director aims his cinematic arrow at Jobs’ Achilles’ heel, his supposed inhuman side, to portray the brute behind the black turtlenecks. Based off Walter Isaacson’s 2011 eponymous biography, Academy-Award winning director Danny Boyle’s 2015 biopic “Steve Jobs” adds yet another conflicted chapter to the Jobs canon, peeking behind the Wizard of Cupertino’s curtain to explore the backstage drama of this luminary in the rimless glasses.
With “Gravity” (2013) and “Interstellar” (2014) firmly dominating the epic extraterrestrial disaster genre, it is a suicide mission to enter their orbit for fear of entering that black hole of comparison. Director Ridley Scott takes on this challenge with his “The Martian” (2015), based on Andy Weir’s eponymous 2011 novel and crafts a light-hearted thrill-ride with enough pace and levity to escape the genre’s event horizon.
With the 2013 arrest and incarceration of Federal Bureau of Investigation fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious crime boss of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, his canonization as a mass criminal and escapee had begun. This story finds its altarpiece in Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass” (2015). Based on the 2001 book “Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob,” the film becomes a hagiography to Bulger and his empire, whose puppet strings stretched over all of South Boston from the 1970s to the 1990s.
*Binky and his parents, Judith and Richard, stand on the front steps of their home. Binky wears a Dartmouth T-shirt and a frame pack. His parents fight back tears.*
“Grandma” (2015) opens on Ellie (Lily Tomlin), a former poet, college professor and widow, bitterly breaking up with Olivia (Judy Greer), her much younger girlfriend of four months. Ellie has been largely forgotten by life beyond a few anthologized poems. Her fiery vigor has been extinguished by the tides of time and loss of Violet, her former partner of 30 years, leaving behind an irascible, icy self. Now she just treads in the narcotic waters of nostalgia, donning her professorial regalia while leafing through old photos. Anonymity becomes her refuge, as she pays off her debts and cuts up her credit cards to turn into a wind chime, as if she is tying up loose ends before the curtains close.
Director Noah Baumbach’s latest feature “Mistress America” (2015) is a screwball comedy about the humor and perils of saying “yes.” Without a voice of reason and the sense that everyone should go with the flow, the viewer gets terrific farce, at the cost of vulnerability and pain. Greta Gerwig, Baumbach’s muse and the film’s co-writer and star, has mastered the effortlessly mercurial stream of consciousness style of Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina — she’s even got the same dance moves — with the quirky modern sensibility of Zooey Deschanel.
“Trainwreck”(2015) wants to make sex unsexy. From one-night stands with a closeted bodybuilder and an Adderall-snorting adolescent to a frumpy housewife discussing her threeway, the film delights in society’s laughably libidinous underbelly. Today’s queen — or perhaps dominatrix — of sex as comedy is Amy Schumer, the writer and star of “Trainwreck,” as well as Comedy Central’s hit show “Inside Amy Schumer.” A modern day Mae West, Schumer is a gauche beauty queen that’ll tell you “my eyes are up here” but lets you keep ogling.
With the "Twilight" saga thoroughly finished and "The Hunger Games" soon coming to a close, audiences clearly need a new heroine torn between gorgeous men. How else are we supposed to live out our romantic fantasies, or wear our Team Edward or Team Jacob T-shirts? Fortunately, Thomas Vinterberg’s “Far from the Madding Crowd” (2015) is here to fill the gaping void in our hearts, bringing Thomas Hardy’s 1874 eponymous novel to life. In the process, we are introduced to the steamy Victorian romance of Bathsheba Everdene — whose surname inspired Katniss Everdeen of “The Hunger Games” — and her three suitors.
“Pitch Perfect 2” (2015) opens like a wrecking ball, with Rebel Wilson’s “Fat Amy” accidentally revealing her junk to the president at the Kennedy Center. Deemed an insult to the a cappella world in the aftermath of the incident, the Barden Bellas — three-time collegiate champions since we last saw them in the original “Pitch Perfect” (2012) — are set to be cast out of the aca-community unless they win the international championship. If the Bellas are to be victorious, they must find an entirely new musical sound, take on a new member and face a daunting opponent on the global stage. Yet somehow nothing in the sequel feels fresh. If you haven’t seen the first film, don’t fret — “Pitch Perfect 2” ends up being no more than a remix of the original, only with higher stakes.
Enid: So sweet of you to invite us to grandparents weekend, Eliot. Our little Dartmouth kitten!
Cinematic sequels are notorious for padding their companies’ coffers and their derivative plots. George Miller brings his “Mad Max” franchise of “Mad Max” (1979), “Mad Max 2” (1981) and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”(1985) back from a three-decade drought with “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015). He doesn’t just reboot it, but gives it a paint job, flashy rims and some serious horsepower. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is somewhere between the apocalyptic grandiosity of a John Martin painting and a demolition derby, combining hell and spitfire diesel into a bad-ass rock and roll extravaganza.
In a first for my reviews, let’s begin with a round of “Would You Rather” — would you rather live as Sisyphus, forced to endure eternity rolling a rock endlessly up a hill, or as a wife eternally unable to divorce your abusive and psychologically manipulative husband? “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” (2014) captures what the latter might feel like, with writer, director and star Ronit Elkabetz chaining viewers to a couple enduring a marital hell. In the process, she more than earns the film’s best-picture award from the Israeli Film Academy and Golden Globe nomination, delivering a startlingly intense and moving picture.
Late night,
If you took HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and put him inside the body of the bathroom woman from “The Shining” (1980), you’d get Ava, the sleek, sultry artificial intelligence robot of “Ex Machina” (2015). The film itself lies somewhere between these two Kubrick movies, combining the claustrophobic horrors of the Overlook Hotel with the supercomputing callousness of HAL. Like Siri sexified, Ava epitomizes the male fantasy — an erotic subservient who deifies him — and the consequences of its fulfillment. Think “Her” (2013), but with a Samantha who would kill to be more than just a voice.
Most of us have fond memories of a Blue Steel-miened, vacuously heroic Ben Stiller from “Zoolander” (2001), spraying gasoline and successfully turning left with youthful euphoria, or even the crusty yet playful night watchman in the “Night at the Museum” series. Noah Baumbach’s latest romcom “While We’re Young” (2014), however, captures a verisimilar Stiller, around 50, succumbing to mid-life crises and arthritis, with nostalgic eyes for his past in a present without pity for the aging.
’Twas the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes contagion into the world. No, we are not Prince Hamlet, but his words (and some gentle nudging from our editors) drove us into the Dartmouth College Cemetery like Young Goodman Browns to witness the debauchery of students in this labyrinth of death.
Sequester a group of actors in a small space, point your camera at them and wait an hour. By then, each of them will surely have gone insane. It’s the theory behind Sartre’s “No Exit” (1944) of being locked together in a room for eternity. Claustrophobia is a truly cinematic fear. It requires no sets and no props — it is just the actor’s psyche slowly consuming itself. “The Shining” (1980) should come to mind. Even viewers cramped into small theater seats can relate to its stifling intensity. “The Black Sea” (2014) stuffs 12 men into a dilapidated submarine searching for gold and watches the pot boil. Beyond a couple flare-ups, though, the film can only manage a simmer.
I don’t know what’s scarier — modern horror films themselves or the current state of the horror genre, which has become a factory for lazy and unoriginal pabulum. In most contemporary films, frightening has become a formula — a veritable cinematic slot machine, where audiences pay their money to watch a string of classic icons, like the possessed child, clown or abandoned house. Even worse, many nascent directors have taken to using horror as a springboard for their careers — the films are cheap, don’t require professional actors and just need bad lighting and a broken music box to get the ball rolling. Like visitors to Atlantic City, modern horror audiences are destined not to be satisfied. But luckily, there are exceptions to the rule. “It Follows” (2014) is just that — the rare breed that waits, lurks and lets your mind do the scaring.
Back in 1754, Eleazar Wheelock, a minister and educator in Connecticut, decided to create a college for the ecclesiastical education of Native Americans and English youth. To do so, he needed to create a charter — an official document delineating the motives, organization and rights of the school, which required the approval of New Hampshire’s governor, John Wentworth.