In Which It Would Be Best If We Did Not Speak Of Valerian

No Longer Professional

by ETHAN PETERSON

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
dir. Luc Besson
137 minutes

Laureline (Cara Delevingne) and Valerian (Dane DeHaan) are exactly the same size, with exactly the same lips, with identical throaty timbers to their voices. Watching them kiss is like pressing the heads of two mushrooms together. "Will you marry me?" Valerian asks her as soon as he can – it is quite literally three minutes into the movie that he proposes to her – not super seriously, but more like a flirtation. At the end of the movie he is gobsmacked when she accepts. This is actually far and away the best part of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, although there is no sex and Laureline wears a series of increasingly more conservative outfits throughout the movie.

Usually when a character finds himself, he casts off the various trappings and limitations of his existence for a freer, more carefree life devoid of the anxiety that held them back. Throwing off the Puritan influence is a very American thing to do as you get older, but in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, you begin as a frivolous, sex-crazed tramp and you turn into an overserious family man. In his last, most bizarre monologue, Valerian explains to Laureline that he has a duty to something larger than himself. He states to her without any irony whatsoever, despite the fact that in the previous scene he learned his organization was responsible for genocide. "I work for the government," he states in Mr. Besson's excrecable script. "I have a responsibility." This is like making a Holocaust movie where upon discovering the death camps, the protagonist immediately restarts the trains.

The species that Valerian's people decide to eliminate are a humanoid group of translucent blue bipeds who powered their planet through environmentally sustainable pearls they harvest from the ocean. Well, believe you me, if coal and oil could simply be lifted out of the ocean, we would have almost no problems at all. Is this where the French believe their power comes from? Because the essentials of life come so easily to these azure creatures, they have never evolved past a primitive society and have no knowledge of technology.

After they are almost annihilated by it, they decide they had better learn. Unfortunately, they have no more pearls, and the tiny creatures that multiply these little spheres are nowhere to be found, either. There is one left, though, and when they go to pay a merchant for it, Valerian intervenes and takes it instead. Laureline's job during this important mission is to take the cargo back to the ship.

Once they have the treasure, Valerian and Laureline head to a place called Alpha, where all the denizens of the universe cohabitate together in one metropolis. We only see the wider city when Valerian asks his ship for some images of the place; afterwards, when Valerian and Laureline are on Alpha, it is mostly just grey corridors.

There are some aliens they encounter at this point, all of whom look and sound like Jar Jar Binks. Did Luc Besson rent The Phantom Menace by accident and assume that it was the first Star Wars? The special effects at work here would be a lot more impressive if there was one alien in the bunch who was more than a caricature for Laureline to verbally abuse.

At this point Clive Owen shows up, intent on destroying what remains of his long and industrious career in the cinema. The weird thing about Valerian, besides the many oddities I have detailed against my better wishes, is that Owen's commander character is essentially the only other person in the entire film. I mean, My Dinner with Andre did not have very many characters, either, but there was a pretty good reason for that.

There is one other entity who gets more than two minutes of screen time, although it is not really very much more. Bubble (Rihanna) is a slave whose master (Ethan Hawke, who else) forces her to perform in a number of different guises. Dane is sympathetic to Bubble, so he forces her at gunpoint to ensconce him like a second skin so he can save Cara from a particularly malevolent group of aliens who want to snack on her delicate brains. After Bubble completes this task, she dies from a wound we never see her suffer.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is very boring to sit through, but more than that, it is a nasty, cynical racist piece of trash.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Really Want To Return To England

War of the Ancients

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Dunkirk
dir. Christopher Nolan
106 minutes

Bane (Tom Hardy) is an English fighter pilot during World War II. After a sound thrashing, British and French troops decide to flee back to England instead of mounting a final stand. In contemporary British military history, this is the biggest win Christopher Nolan (The Prestige) has on hand to glorify. Just wait until he finds out about Admiral Nelson.

Nolan's last decent movie was 2010's Inception, although watching it back is something of a chore, especially the last hour. Nolan took Batman very seriously, perhaps even more seriously than Bruce Wayne himself did, but those movies are tough to watch now, too. 2014's Interstellar was an amusing mess, but it posed more questions than it answered. For example, what sort of actor does Nolan work well with other than Tom Hardy? Is it really necessary for Mr. Nolan to keep making movies that barely have women in them? And why does Tom Hardy do the Bane voice in the loud torrent of moviegoing experience that is Dunkirk?

Dunkirk is supposed to be thrilling, if a bit exhausting to experience. Sitting through it feels substantially longer than the stated running time. The first thing it made me think of is the bravura sequence that opens Alejandro Iñárritu's The Revenant, where we are thrust in the naturalistic midst of a battle. At times, when Nolan gives Dunkirk over to some of that inspired chaos, we feel that same sense of immersion. War seems a terrible, random tragedy.

This is a fleeting sensation, however, since Nolan is compelled to give us some semblance of a glimpse, but only that, into the mindset of these men. Their main driving emotion, across the board, is complete and utter fear. The only really determined member of the cast is Dawson (a particularly intolerable and affected Mark Rylance), a civilian slowly traipsing over to France in order to ferry soldiers back to the only island they know.

Substantially more charismatic is a British private played by newcomer Fionn Whitehead, who is only intent on getting off the dangerous beach, where 400,000 could have been crushed by Adolf Hitler's slightest impulse. Meanwhile Bane flies a plane intent on providing cover for the evacuation. Tom Hardy does more acting with his eyes during these gorgeous sequences of flight than others do with their entire body.

Nolan's trademark has always been total control of the action and cinematography of his projects, but he works against that tendency in Dunkirk. The issue is that if he turned something necessarily chaotic and random into a smooth interplay of unlike elements, he would be sacrificing the integrity of this recreation. As a result, Dunkirk only intermittedly coheres into moments of pure beauty.

This is not to say that Dunkirk is completely naturalistic. Violence is naturally condemned by not identifying the perpetrators or their motives, since it denies us the chance to empathize with the opposing force. Near the end of Dunkirk, we view a few Nazis for a only moment – just as quickly they are gone. I am not completely sure whether their exclusion is a weird sort of pardon, since the reason Hitler did not slaughter the English at Dunkirk was probably because his closest female friend was from that great country.

The best part of Dunkirk is the time dilation that Nolan thankfully does not overly explain. It means that the narrative jumps around in its chronology, and since there is not a whole lot of caring about the actual characters involved in this escape or a focus on the significance of their deaths, the only thing to do as a viewer is figure out why exactly Nolan opted for this approach. Given time, I couldn't think of a reason other than to make war more compelling through inception.

I saw Dunkirk in 70mm IMAX. The sound was completely overdone — there is such thing as overwhelming the senses, and another thing where you completely decimate the long-term hearing of your audience. Visually, if you compare it to films of ten years ago, Dunkirk looks substantially more lavish than all of them in its loud and oversized playpen. But if you compare it to, say, the preview of Justice League, it appears rather restrained and muted. Christopher Nolan continues to awkwardly straddle the line between action blockbuster and art film. I wish to God he would simply pick one of the two.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Stare Down Alison Brie In The Past

Perils of Adam

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Little Hours
dir. Jeff Baena
90 minutes

You can tell how much writer-director Jeff Baena loves his girlfriend Aubrey Plaza in the opening moments of The Little Hours. Fernanda is a young witch posing as a nun in 15th century, and as she drags a donkey across a landscape that looks suspiciously un-European, the camera can barely hold its attention off of her. Baena writes his life partner into the most objectionable role, but this is a subtle message also esteemed in the source material of The Decameron: the unlikeliest things are also the holiest.

Plaza looks a lot like Alison Brie since for the most part all we see are their full-lipped, pouting faces and icy eyes. Even with her body obscured, there is something indecent about Alison, and no matter how prim she looks, we realize she will be disrobing at some point in every narrative. In The Little Hours, that comes in the garden of a convent, where she pounces on the mute gardener, Massetto (Dave Franco).

Even thought The Little Hours does not focus at all on the beauty of its female leads, it would be a hard thing to obscure it. Baena not only seems devoted to Brie and Plaza, but this is also the best Molly Shannon, also playing a nun, and John C. Reilly, as the local priest, have looked in years. Baena gives all of his actresses and actors a quiet dignity, except for one. 

Dave Franco was maybe not the best actor to begin with, but he is supposed to be the straight man here and in this role he fails miserably. Attempting not to draw undue attention to Franco's physical form, Baena makes a show of his considerable deficiences. First of all, the man's gargantuan adam's apple slides up and down his throat perilously for the entire film. I don't know what everyone involved might have been able to do about this, but preventing Franco from repeatedly swallowing during his scenes would have been a welcome start.

The Little Hours initially focuses on Alison Brie's desire to leave the convent against the wishes of her father Ilario (Paul Reiser) in order to select a husband, but it is quickly distracted by her embroidery. Reiser never appears in the movie again and Brie never does manage to find a husband. Instead of any plot per se, we receive a series of jokes involving the aggressive nature of Ms. Plaza. Some are funny, like when she assaults the convent's handyman and calls him a Jew. Others are not really as enlivening, since they involve her brandishing a knife repeatedly and saying 'fuck' more times than is really entertaining.

Baena's last directorial effort, Joshy, was a clone of The Big Chill that was very serious and depressing. In contrast, The Little Hours is even less significant or thematically memorable than a Mel Brooks movie. It is at least a great deal funnier, which is not actually saying a lot. It is obvious that the film was made on a considerably tiny budget, and it shows. The Little Hours avoids displaying the local town at all – we just see actors going and returning from the place. Even the props and costumes on this production are third or fourth rate.

Late in the film, Fred Armisen shows up as a bishop. His presence adds a striking focus to the proceedings, as if what we really required to enjoy the bad behavior of these purported adherents to the word of the lord was an antagonist who doubted their sincerity. It is a missed opportunity that he only receives a few scenes, and that they are the most amusing in the entire film reminds us that The Little Hours is about as meaningful as a Portlandia sketch.

I don't know what turned Baena off from making serious cinema instead of something this frivolous. He might taken a page out of the comparative success of The Big Sick and made something that comes a little more directly from his heart. He could make a movie about why Aubrey Plaza is interested him. Does he have a large penis or cooking skills that would otherwise explain why she lives in the house?

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.