Occam's Razor

Jupiter Ascending

The last time I reviewed a Wachowski movie, it was a review of Cloud Atlas, a film with lots of potential. It sadly missed the mark, but was still worth seeing. The Wachowski siblings will probably always be best remembered for The Matrix (1999) and its two sequels.

In my humble opinion, Jupiter Ascending is equally as good as The Matrix, and maybe a little better. Sadly, it’s not doing too well at the box office. I have to attribute this to poor publicity, but it may also be because it is at its root a feminist movie and that will bug some people. The heroine, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) doesn’t take much shit. She spends her days in part getting rid of shit by cleaning toilets. She’s part of a Russian immigrant family living marginally in Chicago. Thieves in Russia killed her father before she was born. Of course Jupiter is drop dead gorgeous, and it’s kind of hard to see her being so devoted to her hardworking extended immigrant family that scrambles together a living cleaning other people’s houses. She naturally resists her 4:45 AM wakeup call to begin another day on her hands and knees. She hates her life, she tells us, but won’t do much to change it.

This is not much of a compelling plot but it quickly gets very weird. Apparently Earth is just one of many planets owned by huge profit-oriented conglomerates controlled by various families. We humans and specifically our DNA are much in demand so that its rulers can maintain effective immortality and maximize their profits. In fact, the likely heir to the earth, Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne) is eager to harvest Earth, but first has to get rid of Jupiter, who has no idea that she owns the planet. It’s Caine’s (Channing Tatum) job to try to protect her, even though he is from a far inferior class (half human, half wolf). He does have a few tricks up his sleeve, including these amazing boots that keep him levitated and effectively make him a skywalker. He also has a terrific if somewhat violent dad, Stinger (Sean Bean) who when he is not beating up his son is busy helping him save Jupiter.

Jupiter’s hard scrapple life though is something of a blessing. It makes her tough, resourceful and someone who won’t take much shit when she learns she actually owns the earth and is something of a queen. It also makes her grounded, and she begins to appreciate her simple family that quickly becomes pawns in a much bigger chessboard of universal intrigue.

So that’s the plot, and it seems more appropriate for a comic book than the screen. What’s amazing is what the Wachowskis manage to do with this story. They breathe real life into it in an amazing directorial tour de force. I generally hate CGI in movies because they tend to overwhelm the story. That’s not the case here. The CGI complements the story, and intelligently so and it is full of neat special effects that I’ve never seen before, including ghostly figures and amazingly detailed extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, the characters (all of them) are quite interesting. There’s a real universe here, full of quirks and complexity and it is amazingly well visualized by the Wachowskis. There are also some very humorous scenes, such as when the new empress has to get certified by its bureaucracy, which is something out of a 19th century Dickens novel. If it seems a little familiar, think Brazil (1985), which was Terry Gilliam’s (of Monty Python) directorial tour de force. Gilliam shows up here as one of the bureaucrats. It’s a minor part but memorable one.

I personally have not had this much fun at the movies since the last Indiana Jones movie. If you liked Guardians of the Galaxy, this is equally as good as that, if not better. It’s just not getting the same traction, for reasons I really don’t understand.

3.4 out of four stars.

[xrr rating=3.4/4]

Birdman

I usually end up seeing Best Picture, for which Birdman took home the Oscar this year. It is usually sometime after it wins the award, and that was the case this year. Birdman is definitely memorable and is a directorial tour de force just like Jupiter Ascending, just on the micro scale. This movie by director Alejandro Iñárritu was made on a shoestring but he managed to assemble a pretty impressive cast anyhow, including Michael Keaton as Riggan (i.e. Birdman), Emma Stone as his borderline dysfunctional daughter Sam, Naomi Watts as his ex-wife Lesley and Edward Norton as the temperamental actor Mike. If you are looking for something you haven’t seen before at the movies, Birdman definitely qualifies. It is mostly a small series of very long takes wherein the camera closely follows Riggan, a washed up actor known for his Birdman superhero movies from twenty years earlier.

The sixty-something Riggan looks pretty awful. (Michael Keaton is not aging well.) This has to do with his life being a complete mess. His daughter Sam is fresh out of rehab and acting as his assistant, and doing a bad job of it. Riggan is out to prove himself, not as Birdman, but as a Broadway actor, and at the St. James Theater of all places. (I saw The Producers there many years ago.) He has sunk what is left of his fortune into this play, but he can’t seem to keep the other male actor. His producer manages to snag Mike at the last moment, but Mike is quirky, temperamental and prone to blowing up. Riggan struggles mightily to keep his play from imploding, which seems impossible, as each preview is rife with major problems. Moreover the characters intersect, mostly disastrously while what feedback Riggan gets is that he is not cut out for the real theater on Broadway.

It’s all this and Riggan seems to have the mystical powers of his Birdman character, including the powers of levitation, moving objects and flying. It’s left unclear how much of this is real or a product of Riggan’s imagination. But it is impressive to be able to pull off these incredibly long and intimate scenes so flawlessly. I am sure it took a lot of rehearsals. It shows what can be done for so little money and in such a short period of time. I am not sure it deserved Best Picture but it’s quite fascinating as a technical achievement, but perhaps a bit longer than needed. Plus you get to see Michael Keaton go around Times Square in his underwear.

3.3 out of four-stars.

[xrr rating=3.3/4]