thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey (spoilers)

This is less a review than a piece where I try to work through my thoughts on things.

I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey a little over a year ago.  I couldn't get through it (though when I went back and looked at the placement of the bookmark in my copy the other day, I saw that I actually made it through quite a lot of it-- over 400 pages, albeit 400 pages read in short bursts of "I guess I'll try to read that book again" determination to try to finish).  I have friends who legitimately liked it and thought it was really hot.  I have friends who found it laughably bad.  I found it pretty bad; the dialogue in Anastasia Steele's first meeting with Christian Grey is written in such a way that when I tried to tell my friends about it, I said something along the lines of, "Yeah, so she's interviewing him for her college newspaper, and his answers to her questions are basically like, 'I'm an important businessman!  I do important businessman things!'" There was also Anastasia's inner monologue, in which she makes repeated references to her "inner goddess."  Then there was my impatience with the contract.  The contract included a lot of things that very few people would agree to, including restrictions on her diet and exercise habits and the stipulation that she stay with him EVERY weekend.  She wasn't signing the contract and it was pretty clear she wasn't going to; my feeling was that she just needed to say no and move on with her life, rather than what she does, which is try to negotiate, eventually agree to it, and then put him off every time it comes time to actually sign it.

The thing I didn't get until after watching the film, however, is that Ana's hesitation to sign the contract isn't mere indecision.  I saw her as having two choices: live with Mr. Grey on his terms or without Mr. Grey on her own terms.  She wants there to be a third choice: live with him in a relationship in which they discuss things and make compromises and both maybe get some things they want and some things they don't want, but are both happy at the end of the day because they're together.  At the end, however, she realizes that no compromise she could make would ever be enough for him; she's not willing to go to the lengths he wants her to go to. 

Upon discussing it with my friends after leaving the movie, it was mentioned that he was very straightforward about how it was going to be and what he wanted from the very beginning.  Yes, he was...but he also actively pursued a relationship with her knowing that she wasn't "into" the same things he was into.  He showed up at her place of work.  He took her out for coffee.  He sent her an expensive graduation gift.  He showed up and took her back to his hotel with him when she made a drunken phone call to him.  He even showed up at her apartment after she read the contract and told him, by e-mail, that the whole thing was off.  He was ALWAYS the one pursuing her, even at the times in the film when he was telling her that it could never work.  Why keep pursuing her?  Because he wants to be with her and expects that she will "come around" to what he wants.

So what we basically have is a couple in which both members enter the relationship knowing that the other person wants completely different things than they do, but hoping that the other person can and will change.  What's more, because of their power dynamic, and because, with the contract, he HAS set up their relationship in "we'll do this my way or you'll completely lose me" terms while continuing to pursue her, she is actually being pressured to change.  This very well-written article considers it interesting and important that she leaves him at the end of the movie; the article discusses it in terms of rejecting the wealthy but ultimately empty lifestyle he offers.  Looking at it through the frame I've been discussing the movie, the end also suggests that they both accept that neither of them can change, and no "compromise" is going to work for them.  However, this is the first in the trilogy, and we know going in that they'll somehow "work it out."  I'll admit that I'm curious to find out how they do so.  I'm just having trouble imagining how they could ever possibly do so, or that it could possibly be a good thing if they did.

thoughts on Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, who stumbles onto a career as a "nightcrawler," showing up at crime scenes with a video camera to get footage to sell to the local news.  This is more consistently lucrative than what he was doing before, which early scenes establish was mainly stealing things and selling them to pawn shops.  Even at its best, "nightcrawling" is a pretty skeezy profession, as it involves waiting around all night for the police scanner to alert you to crimes and then hauling ass to make it to the scene before your competitors.  However, Louis quickly takes it to the next level.  He moves a dead body before the ambulance gets there to get a better shot.  He blackmails the news director at the TV station he sells footage to (Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo) into sleeping with him.  He cuts the brake lines on his top competitor's van.  Before long, he is basically staging crime scenes-- withholding information from police and revealing it at just such a time that it is likely to erupt in a particularly violent way.  Some of the people at Nina's station think showing some of this footage is unethical, but Nina is desperate for ratings.  The cops are on to Louis, but they can't prove anything.  The worse Louis behaves, the more he is rewarded.

Louis is a disgusting character, and it's disturbing to watch him commit more and more heinous atrocities with a calm smile on his face.  He is not charming, exactly, but he can talk his way out of or into almost anything.  Gyllenhaal and Russo both give excellent performances.  It's not an enjoyable movie, exactly; I felt a little like I was going to be sick afterwards.  However, it is somewhat fascinating to see how far he will go and how much he will get away with.

thoughts on Into the Woods

James Corden and Emily Blunt star as the baker and his wife, who learn that the reason that they haven't been able to conceive a child is that a witch (Meryl Streep) has put a curse on their home.  To reverse the curse, they have to go into the woods to get a cow as white as milk; a golden slipper; a red cape; and hair as yellow as straw.  This provides the set-up for a story that weaves together characters and plot details from Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel, ultimately culminating in the main characters trying to save their village from the wife of the giant at the top of the beanstalk.

It's all incredibly well-done, with songs and the baker and his wife providing the connection between the separate stories.  All of the actors give solid performances, with Chris Pine stealing the show as Prince Charming.  It's a well-acted, magical twist on familiar fairy tales.

thoughts on The Words (spoilers)

We open on a renowned writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) giving a reading in a packed auditorium.  He narrates the story of aspiring writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who, as the story begins, is told by his father (J.K. Simmons) that he needs to stop asking him for money all the time and get a real job.  Rory winds up working in publishing and marrying his girlfriend, Dora (Zoe Saldana).  The couple honeymoons in Paris, where Dora buys a beautiful leather satchel for Rory secondhand.  When they return to the United States and Rory opens the satchel, he finds an old manuscript.  He types it up on his computer, not changing a word or even correcting the spelling mistakes.  When Dora uses his computer, she finds it and reads it; she tells Rory that it's beautiful, and so different from his usual writing.  His "usual writing" keeps getting rejected by publishers, but they like this one, so he passes it off as his own, winning major awards and getting other, previously rejected, work published.  Everything is going along well until he meets the actual writer of the book (Jeremy Irons), who tells Rory his story.  And so we have a story...within a story...within a story, with Clay narrating first to his audience, then to a grad student/potential lover played by Olivia Wilde, and the writer narrating to Rory.  The main conflicts of the movie, then, are whether the writer or Rory himself will reveal Rory as a plagiarist; what the consequences will be if the truth is revealed; and whether Clay's story is, in fact, a fictionalized confession of the plagiarism.

Rory isn't a terribly likable character.  In one of his very first scenes, he yells at his dad for not believing in his writing career, then laughs in his face when his father offers him a job.  He also desperately, melodramatically yells at Dora at one point before he has made it big that this wasn't how his life was supposed to turn out; she asks how that's supposed to make her feel.  When he eventually tells her that he didn't write his career-making novel himself, he accuses her of knowing all along and just wanting it to have been written by him.  In other words, he blames everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes and lashes out at people who have, from what we see, been fairly supportive of him.  Because of this, it's hard to care about what happens to him.  The story that Jeremy Irons tells (which we see play out) also isn't terribly compelling, and it starts too late in the film for us to care about the characters in it, either.  Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde have pretty good chemistry, and Clay's narration adds a bit of suspense, but as a whole, the film is kind of a mess, with too many layers and not enough attention paid to any of the characters.

thoughts on Interstellar

In what appears to be the relatively near future, food is scarce, and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) works as a farmer, as, we're told, do most people, though he was educated as an engineer and once worked for NASA.  It's unclear whether corn is the only food available, but everything we see anyone eat is corn-based, and rampant dust storms are a way of life.  Technology appears to have stalled (at one point, Cooper complains that were MRIs still in use, his late wife's cancer might have been detected earlier), and in school, children are taught that the moon landing was faked to bankrupt the Soviets, and that, in fact, space travel of that kind is impossible.  The New York Yankees play in what looks more like a high school stadium, suggesting a lack of people to both participate in and attend games.  Coop's ten-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), thinks that there is a ghost in her room.  Coop doesn't pay much attention to this at first, but when binary code appears in the dust that blows in through an open window, he and Murph follow the coordinates it directs them to and wind up at NASA, which is still operating secretly. 

Soon Coop is recruited to go on a mission to investigate three potential planets that might be hospitable to life.  Plan A is that one of these planets might serve as a new home for those currently living on Earth; Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has been trying to figure out an equation that will apparently make this possible.  Plan B is to populate the new planet using fertilized embryos they are taking along.  Complicating everything is the fact that time will operate differently in space; on the first planet they are to explore, for example, one hour will equal seven years on Earth.

At the heart of the movie are a couple of key issues.  Coop's frustration with most of the people on Earth is that they are so focused on day-to-day survival that they're not looking ahead at all; for instance, we learn at a parent-teacher conference he attends that though universities still exist, only the very best and the brightest students get to attend.  Few people seem to see the point of many people going; they just need farmers.  Few people are interested in exploring new ideas or new technologies; they're just trying to keep people alive in the present, regardless of the quality of life they might have.  At the other extreme is Professor Brand, who eventually tells the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain), by then a NASA scientist, that he has known for years that the equation is unsolvable, and that there is no hope for the current population of Earth to live on one of the planets being explored even if one of them is hospitable.  What's the point, then? Why are Coop and the other astronauts putting their own lives on Earth aside for some theoretical potential future involving people who don't even exist yet?  Why is The Future of the Human Race more important than the actual, living and breathing people trying to survive right now?  Coop hasn't given up on the people of Earth, and neither has Murph, and we are given small hints that things might not be completely hopeless...but things look incredibly bleak for awhile.

A day after seeing the movie, I'm still thinking about and feeling incredibly unsettled by it.  In other words, it's quite thought-provoking.  McConaughey and Chastain give great performances, as well.  One issue that I had was that I wasn't exactly sure what the equation Brand, and later Murph, was trying to solve was going to exactly *do*, or why it was the key to humanity's survival.  It's certainly possible that I just missed or did not understand this.  It's also possible that the filmmakers figured that much of the audience wouldn't be scientists or mathematicians and would be willing to just roll with it.  This bothers me.  Because of this issue, it ultimately winds up being unclear *how* the main characters ultimately accomplish their main objective.  Again, it's possible that I just didn't get it.  It's also possible that it didn't make actual sense.  The film was well-done as a whole; there were just some unclear things that I found troubling.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One

When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) at the end of Catching Fire, she, along with some of the other contestants, had been rescued from the Quarter Quell.  In Mockingjay: Part One, we catch up with her in District Thirteen, where she, along with some of the other Quarter Quell survivors and escapees from the districts, prepare for the revolution.  She has no idea whether fellow District Twelve tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is alive or dead. Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), the president of District Thirteen, and former gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) want her to be the face of the revolution.  She just wanted to save her sister...but Mockingjay: Part One is, more so than the other Hunger Games movies, is about growing up and realizing that the world is bigger than you, your family, your friends, and your concerns, no matter how big or small those concerns might be.  Mockingjay: Part One follows Katniss as she moves from reluctant figurehead of the revolution to actually believing in and fighting for the cause.  Along the way, she gets bits of information about Peeta via interviews from the Capitol where he looks increasingly tortured and beaten.

It's an emotional rollercoaster, to be sure.  It is exciting to see Katniss grow angrier at the Capitol and move beyond concern for her own and her family's safety to seeing the bigger picture.  It's scary to watch Peeta's slow transformation at the hands of the Capitol.  It's interesting to watch both the Capitol and the rebels try to manipulate the media for their own purposes. For as emotional as parts of it are, though, it also felt a little long. It's less action-packed than either The Hunger Games or Catching Fire; a lot of it is preparation for the bigger stuff that we know is coming in Part Two...but there's not enough left to happen that seems to justify a second movie. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed aspects of it A LOT. I just think that if they had left it as one movie, they would have had to tighten it up a little bit.

It does include this song. The song was my favorite part:

thoughts on Laggies (spoilers)

Keira Knightley stars as Megan, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is kind of stuck in a rut.  She has a graduate degree but spends her days spinning a sign out front of her dad's accounting office.  She's also still dating her high school boyfriend and hanging out with her high school friends, which wouldn't necessarily be bad things in and of themselves.  However, she's just sort of, as she herself eventually says, "floating"-- hanging out with the same people and doing the same things because that's what she's always done.  At one point she tells a story about how she and her boyfriend got together; everyone kept telling her that he liked her, and eventually he asked her out in front of everyone, so she said yes, not necessarily because she herself had developed a crush on him and decided that he was who she really wanted to be with, but because that's what everyone was telling her to do, and it was easy.  She realizes that this has become a pattern: just sort of going along with the things everyone else tells her to do rather than actively making her own decisions.

Her boyfriend (Anthony, played by Mark Webber) proposes to her at her friend Allison's (Ellie Kemper's) wedding.  Allison interrupts the proposal to ask Megan to go find Allison's mom.  Megan catches her dad (Jeff Garlin) making out with someone (possibly Allison's mom, but definitely not hers).  She freaks out and leaves the reception without saying goodbye to anyone.  She winds up at a grocery store, where some teenagers ask her to buy them beer.  She agrees, and winds up having a great time hanging out with them for a few hours.  When she gets home, her boyfriend is worried and upset that she disappeared from the reception; she makes up an excuse, and they start talking about his proposal.  She actually does want to marry him and is ready to run off to Vegas right away, but he reminds her that they have to go to Allison and her husband's wedding brunch the next day.  She tells him that the day after that, she is going to a weeklong seminar to help her find herself or some such.  Instead, she just sort of starts driving aimlessly, until one of the teens from the other night, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) calls and asks for her help with something.  Megan winds up spending the week with Annika and her single father, Craig (Sam Rockwell), telling them that the lease is up on her apartment and she can't move into her new one for a few days.

The movie is interesting in that, because you can pretty much tell where it's going to go even just from the preview (Megan is going to find what she's looking for with Craig and Annika and help them out with their problems, too), you wind up just focusing on and getting to know the characters, most of whom are interesting, and deciding how you feel about Megan's situation.  Example: Megan is, as previously noted, stuck in a rut as far as her career and romantic relationship goes, and you can kind of see why her mom and friends are exasperated with her.  However...not one person in her life is actually helpful.  Her friends and her mom just want her to move on, get a real job, and marry Anthony because that's what she's "supposed" to do.  Allison catches Megan getting coffee with Annika when she's supposed to be out of town at the seminar, and instead of asking if she's okay or why she would just disappear, she gives her a lecture, basically saying that if she doesn't marry Anthony, she's going to get left behind by the rest of them.  For Megan, the appeal of Craig and Annika is that they like her without really knowing anything about her; they're not pressuring her to do any one certain thing, yet she does seem to grow as a person around them, taking Annika to see her mother, who she is estranged from, and taking the rap for Annika's friend Patrick (Dylan Arnold) when he gets in an accident.  You get to see that she's a good person even if she doesn't exactly have everything figured out yet.  "You've got to let go of this imaginary future you have in your head and just go with your gut," she tells Annika at one point.  That's sort of the thesis of the movie; Megan hasn't moved forward with her life because she doesn't know what she wants, and with Craig and Annika, it's not like she suddenly finds the answers, but things feel right with them in a way that they just don't in her regular life.

I generally enjoyed the movie; I liked Megan, Craig, and Annika, and I thought that all of the actors gave pretty solid performances.  That said, there were a couple of things that bugged me about the story.  One of my least favorite movie tropes is, "Someone has a secret, and everyone's eventually going to find out, and they're going to be really mad for like five minutes, and then everything will be cool."  When Megan explains to Craig how she met Annika and why she wants to stay with them, there is not much of a reason for her to withhold the information that she is engaged and needs some space...but she does, and she makes out with and (presumably) has sex with Craig without telling him, and then Annika finds out by accident, and Megan has to tell Craig, and...yeah.  I guess she doesn't tell them about the engagement initially because she doesn't really feel that great about the whole thing, and I guess she just got swept up in things with Craig and decided to go for it, but the lies just make things so much more uncomfortable than necessary, and add an additional, unnecessary level of drama.  It would be challenging enough for her to try to figure out what she wants and deal with her feelings for Craig without also having to deal with the consequences of lying about the whole thing, and given how nice and understanding that Craig and Annika are, it seems cruel of her to mess with them like that. 

Also...she initially does what she says she was going to do, which is leave Craig and Annika at the end of the week and go off to marry her fiancé in Vegas.  The thing that makes her change her mind is that, though they had said they were going to go off and get married without telling their friends and families, Anthony takes a selfie of them at the airport and immediately sends it to their friends, wanting them to be involved.  This makes Megan feel like he's doing the whole wedding thing for the sake of the group, not for them, and tells him that she's "dropping out of the group." I mean, sure, don't marry him if you're doing it for the wrong reasons and also have feelings for someone else, and sure, distance yourself from your friends if you feel like they're not good for you anymore...but how about explaining what you're doing and what you want? It seems like her pattern has been to go along with whatever everyone else wants, never saying or even really thinking about what she wants, then running away when she realizes she wants something else; isn't "dropping out of the group" sort of the same thing? Why can't she try to explain herself to Allison and the others? I also have my misgivings about her jumping right into a relationship with Craig; presumably, her relationship with Anthony hasn't been good for a long time, but she's been with him for twelve years.  She must at least care about him, right? I think the point is that she didn't know what she wanted until she found it, and now that she's found it she's just going to go for it without a care about what anyone else thinks, which is great, but I think just abandoning her whole life seems a little drastic, as well.

So, bottom line: enjoyable movie, good performances. Misgivings about the story.