In Which Not Even John Legend Is Tall Enough For Her

I Love Jazz

by ETHAN PETERSON

La La Land
dir. Damien Chazelle
128 minutes

Did you have a deep curiosity in your heart as to what white people will be able to rely on emotionally for sustenance in this new and place? Mia (Emma Stone) is at a party and a guy shorter than her makes the mistake of talking to her about "world-building." She is disgusted on three levels:

- he uses words she does not understand
- she looks down on his head
- he seems vaguely ethnic

Ryan Gosling is just slightly taller. He pretends to play the piano in La La Land, which I suppose is meant to make him likable. It does not – he is just as miserable a person as the type of woman he attracts. Then comes the dancing: La La Land opens with a musical number on a Los Angeles freeway, heading to Van Nuys, where people of all different races and colors dance around Mr. Gosling and Ms. Stone, as if to accentuate their whiteness as part of a tapestry.

This holds a dubious moral meaning. The last moment it was so key to be a white anglo saxon protestant was a century ago, when the influx of Italian and Irish immigration made it very important to distinguish one sect from another. A word kept reoccurring to me as I watched the dancing of La La Land, which is not only not terribly exciting at best but actively boring at worst: caste.

Welcome to this awful place of Los Angeles, where a woman who fucks Ryan Gosling and is not overly effective as a barista has the teremity to complain about her existence. Director Damien Chazelle sets a lot of the action on the Warner Brothers lot, which mostly closely resembles Heaven in The Good Place or alternately the most dull aspects of Epcot Center.

Stone spends a series of interludes in auditions for other, better movies. This is a cliche so old that it predates the concept of American cinema itself, and her overly broad performance of a performance is too showy to be either entertaining to humorous. She might as well be loudly shouting, "What an actress I am!" Stone's Mia is intensely conceited, speaking at length of how she used to be a writer and everyone loved what she worked on. This is reminiscent of the early praise given Patty Hearst, and we all know how that went.

Actually, maybe we don't. La La Land pretends that there is no history. Gosling takes Stone to an African-American club where he explains jazz to her. His story of it is completely erroneous, but who cares? Any other culture simply exists to be abrogated into this one, which will be somewhat improved for it. (Naturally, the authenticity and quality of the original will be destroyed completely.) Gosling's dream is to hire a bunch of black musicians for his own club, but in the meantime he takes his new girlfriend to see Rebel Without a Cause, the only older movie he knows.

Eventually, as this film lingered on and on long past its welcome, I wished that I was seeing Rebel Without a Cause so that I could watch something with actual characters. Going back in time is a disturbing feeling. Nostalgia is fine when we decline to omit the more serious, disturbing elements of the past. Instead Gosling dances with an elderly African-American couple on the marina – he has no way of actually talking to anyone outside of his caste, so he is forced to communicate through the medium of dance.

Later Gosling joins John Legend's band, but he is still completely unhappy. Is this really the appropriate moment to play pretend? It takes a good solid hour before anyone even touches Ryan Gosling, and he never shows his penis at all, suggesting that we may not be good enough to see him on display. La La Land is thus a highlight reel of what were are permitted to view of our betters, and what a sickening display it is.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Michael Shannon Cooks An Elaborate Dinner

The Projectors

by ETHAN PETERSON

Frank & Lola
dir. Matthew Ross
88 minutes

There was a Times article a few years ago about the apartment Michael Shannon rented in Red Hook with his wife and daughter. It reminded me of that MTV Cribs episode that visited Redman's home in Staten Island. Not because Shannon lived in any kind of squalor – just that the reporter found a lot more than she bargained for, and did not even know it. Shannon went on for a while about how much he hated claustrophic spaces, and compared himself to the main character in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy. He sounded like a very wild person.

Then again, Michael has the propensity to talk a lot – the actor's bizarre rant against elderly Trump voters was relatively unsurprising. No two people could be more dissimilar than Michael Shannon and Donald Trump. The mercurially talented Shannon is a complete chameleon, whereas the president-elect can only ever be one thing.

Or maybe that is the wrong spirit animal. Recently, as he enters middle age, Shannon has started to look more and more feline. In Frank & Lola, the brilliant directorial debut from Brooklyn resident Matthew Ross, Shannon has no careful costume to obscure the fact that his head is a great deal larger than his torso, an aspect of all large cats. Even though he is not a very large man, Ross is the first director to insist that Shannon loom massively in the frame, like a smudge you cannot wipe off. As Frank, a Las Vegas-based chef, Shannon even throws in a New York accent.

Frank meets Lola (Imogen Poots) and in short order she has his name tattoed just above her waistline. He is intrigued at this level of devotion, but soon it seems like merely a lever on him. Shannon does not have much in the way of chemistry with Poots, but it is sort of the point that these two are not exactly right for each other. Sensing Frank's underlying anger and self-hatred, Lola explains that she was raped by a European man she knew. Upon learning of this tale, Frank barely considers his girlfriend for the rest of the movie except in the context of being a victim.

Normally, this would make for a very dark turn, but Shannon is able to save us from that, too. Ross makes a point of deepening our understanding about Frank through knowledge of what he does for a living. Frank and Lola depicts the confusion some of us have with food: whether it should serve merely as basic nourishment or as a component of some cosmic reassurance depending on how thoroughly we enjoy making or consuming it.

As Frank cooks for people he barely likes or respects, Ross weaves a light allegory of writing for more well-known but less talented people than himself. It is sort of shocking how jaded Hollywood has made him at the tender age of forty, and the same is true of Mr. Shannon, who sometimes throws parties for his daughter Sylvia. She and her friends like to watch movies on the projector.

Frank & Lola was originally set in Brooklyn. This makes a lot more sense because both protagonists seem relatively alien to Las Vegas, and we never get a real sense of the city as a place to live in. (The only reason Ross moved the film west was financial.) Frank is way too innocent for Las Vegas, but his basic gullibility is just right for Brooklyn, where a tragic possessiveness is as natural as water. Ultimately I felt Poots was the weak link here, mainly through no fault of her own. In one key scene she appears entirely in reflection, and we get a basic sense of how slight she is. Her meandering, mealy-mouthed way of speaking is right at home in other roles, but it is hard to imagine Frank being captured by it: he craves refinement, both stylistic and physical.

Cannily, Ross displays Poots topless in the first scene of Frank & Lola, as if to give us a basic functioning reason for Frank's desire. He refuses to penetrate her on a first date, so they settle on cunnilingus. She asks him, while he has his mouth on her, to hold her down, and he cannot help but crack some kind of joke about this. The moment quickly gives over to pleasure, and this elasticity of feeling is devastating.

Frank takes a number of trips to Paris where he meets up with Lola's rapist. Ross plays these scenes very carefully, relying on the possibility of violence and rage versus the presence of either. It would be easy and therapeutic to watch Frank enact vengeance, but Ross is telling a much more sensitive story. Denying us catharsis is so risky, especially in a debut, but Ross' devotion to how he sees these characters approaches the devout. He wants to know exactly how they do a thing at the moment they are called to do it.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which We Assert Ourselves As Members Of The Empire

Android Dreams

by ETHAN PETERSON

Rogue One
dir. Gareth Edwards
133 minutes

As the only female character of note in Rogue One, Jyn Urso (Felicity Jones) has neither a girlfriend or a boyfriend. She has no one to call and say when she will be home. She has killed upwards of a hundred people in her short life. Next year, she will be 34. Her clothes are routinely brown and dusty, the better to blend into all non-arboreal climes. As a girl she lived near a beach, and fabrics that dried quickly were preferable. Now she is in space all the time. We attain no indication of her inner purpose; she is merely a specter to guide us to her father Galen (Mads Mikkelsen).

Mikkelsen has dialed back his enunciation and malevolent presence to the cursory role of a mere scientist working on the Death Star. The role of Galen seems a waste for an actor gifted to convey so much with so little. Most of his scenes are played opposite Rogue One's generic villain, Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), and his moments with his own daughter only emphasizes how much of a Mary Sue she is.

The other roles here are similarly broad. Diego Luna plays a pilot in the rebellion who is with Felicity Jones at all times, through the killing of entire legions of stormtroopers. He never touches her or looks her in the eye. Forest Whitaker enters this grim milieu as an amputated father figure for Jyn; even he cannot pretend to be having fun as a crazed rebel with wacky hair. There are so many father figures here it is easy to confuse their smells.

Despite the fact that they already know the Death Star's key weakness, Jyn and her Asian, Arab and European male friends head to talk to her father about the message he risked his life to send. As efforts in counter-intelligence go, this is the dirt-worst, threatening to reveal knowledge of the vulnerability Galen built into the reactor chamber in order to obtain...nothing.

Of particular note is an Imperial defector played by Riz Ahmed, who is quickly establishing himself as one of the most talented performers of his entire generation. His story actually contains some element of interest, so it is quickly cast aside so we can worry about whether or not a white girl can see her dad one more time. No one's mother is of any consequence.

It is unclear why this tale would be of particular interest to anyone, given that the Death Star has been dead and buried since the 1970s. Rogue One is substantially better than The Force Awakens, although that is not saying much since the latter was basically just a remake. Rogue One has too many identical elements to feel truly original: the orphaned protagonist, the tiny pilot, the wisecracking android, those awful disguises. The dream is always the same.

Director Gareth Edwards' main strength is in overcoming a weak script and pacing the action perfectly. This is the best music a Star Wars film has ever had, and the effects and landscapes created are just as compelling as the desiccated world of 2014's Godzilla, which also featured a long, mediocre script that could have made for a real dud. Instead Edwards keeps our interest by never letting up.

It takes about seventy minutes of the film for Darth Vader to make his first entrance, and at this point there is so little steam left in the main narrative that this appearance is not a minute too late. James Earl Jones' voiceover sounds completely ridiculous, like he is doing a parody of the original role. It is a relief when he is gone, like we can finally be told a complete story instead of endless scenes waiting for some cast member from the original trilogy.

At some point someone will have to come up with an actual new story set in this universe, but there seems to be a lot of stalling while J.J. Abrams figures out of what exactly that might consist. The return of the Empire in another guise felt a bit flimsy, and after destroying a few planets, it is hard to imagine how much worse things can get, unless they decide to end the universe entire. I sort of hope it happens.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.