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 We Search Desperately For The Real Villains

Comfortable Men

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Nice Guys
dir. Shane Black
119 minutes  

I started to ask myself: who would I be if I didn't live in a world that hated women? I've been unable to come up with a satisfactory answer, but I did realize I've long been mourning this version of myself that never existed. - Jessica Valenti

Earlier this year an employee was fired at Nintendo of America after a group of misogynist messageboard posters targeted her as a perpetrator in the heady crime of making changes to an American release of a Japanese game. (She wasn't responsible for those alterations, not that it matters.) They started "researching" her past and decided to shame her for various opinions she held in her dissertation about the prosecution of sex crimes. Nintendo responded by digging further into the woman's life, uncovering a job she performed in order to supplement the measly income and health insurance she made working for the company. They fired her for this moonlighting, even though it was explicitly allowed in her contract. It was nothing more than an excuse to side with trolls over a talented member of their own company.

The women-haters who brought this all about seem like the real villains of this story. But there are worse ones: men (and sometimes women) who buy into harassment and support the atmosphere it generates. These good-intentioned people — how often we hear them say they love women — have a distinct point where they completely capitulate to pressure of any kind. They are comfortable with the concept of women as long as the women in question are simultaneously making them comfortable. Enter the nice guys.

It is perhaps natural that fathers today want to protect their daughters more than ever. Star of The Nice Guys Holland March (Ryan Gosling) does not particularly subscribe to this point of view. After the death of his wife, he is raising his daughter Holly (Australian actress Angourie Rice) on the wages of a private eye. During her summer off from school, Holly tries to aid her helpless pop on a case where he attempts to determine the whereabouts of a pornographic actress named Amelia (Margaret Qualley).

Holly is almost shot, murdered with a knife, run over by a car and abducted throughout Shane Black's The Nice Guys. At the end of it you would be hard pressed to say that Holland is any kind of a good parent, but you have to give him credit for allowing his daughter to be her own person, albeit a miniaturized version of himself. "I hate you," she tells her dad during one particularly feisty moment, but the rest of the time she is simply upset whenever she is not included in the excitement of his job. 

The rest of the women in The Nice Guys are either evil beasts doing the bidding of men, or whores. Judith Kutner (Kim Basinger) appears halfway through the film as a cold-blooded concerned mother. In The Nice Guys, Basinger portrays the head of the Justice Department, a lawyer working for the car manufacturers in order to ensure they are not penalized for defying environmental regulations. She hires the nice guys to find her daughter; instead her daughter is murdered and she does not even get a refund.

The joke Black is making is that there are no nice guys. Exhibit A: the closest Black has ever come to writing an effective woman character is a thirteen-year-old virtually identical to Nancy Drew. Still, you have to give him points for effort. Unlike the producers of the new Ghostbusters, he knows his own limitations.

A particularly wretched article appeared in The New York Times recently, announcing that anyone who thought Paul Feig was less than a complete genius (for his patronizing character of a ghettoized black woman?) is a person who clearly hates women.

Paul Feig is another "nice guy," only he isn't very nice and he can't write women for shit either. I guess some credit goes to him for making an action film with an all-woman cast. The fact that is a cynical cash-in on fan nostalgia and the movie looks completely tone-deaf and unfunny, not to mention borderline racist, is besides the point. This particular beacon of feminism is a man drawing a huge paycheck for making a group of talented women the focal point for a hate campaign while he lurks in the shadows.

Feig's last movie was quite financially successful as well. It spent a solid two hours making fat jokes about Melissa McCarthy — but hey, since she was the star, it was a progressive piece of revolutionary feminism. Actually, Spy was mean-spirited and awful, and anyone involved in its production should be pretty ashamed of the Chuck Lorre-esque bigotry the movie espoused. It may have somehow escaped the notice of those determined to justify everything that this nice guy does, but women have — gasp! — been starring as the lead draws in feature films long before Paul Feig was born.

Maybe it is as Jessica Valenti says in her new memoir, and the whole world hates women. This does not mean, prima facie, that this was always so. Women did rule nations, empires. They accomplished a lot before The Nice Guys ever came onto the scene. Given the title Shane Black gives to his movie, you would have thought there was some larger point at work here about men's relationship to women. Instead The Nice Guys becomes turgidly boring after an entertaining first hour, subsisting mostly on Black's back-and-forth banter. The basic overall message of the film is how difficult it is being a good person.

Russell Crowe has no chemistry with Gosling for some reason, which is how The Nice Guys falls apart. The two men have very little in common besides their occupation and their status as bachelors. Despite the insanely long running time of The Nice Guys, neither ever even meets or approaches a woman in a sexual way. It is as if Black believes that treating a woman as a romantic equal is ultimately too much like objectifying her as a sexual object. Except for very young girls who might be their daughters, Gosling and Crowe's characters are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of adult women.

One scene near the end of the film is particularly disturbing in that regard. Gosling and Crowe wait in the lobby of a courthouse after testifying in front of a grand jury about the machinations of Kim Basinger's corrupt lawyer. She goes over to sit by them and explain her actions and sadness at her daughter Amelia's death. Strangely, the two men cannot even bring themselves to look at her face, that of a grieving mother. Instead Gosling speaks in German, comparing this powerful fallen, woman to Adolf Hitler.

Whether or not there is an active misogyny behind this filmmaking, I don't really know or care. It used to be that Hollywood was where society took steps forward; now film is purely a reactionary medium. Even contrived, white savior stories like Mississippi Burning and Schindler's List did the important work of showing why human beings deserved to be treated as equals. The Nice Guys barely believes that women exist as anything other than children. This horrendous state of affairs really stands out when a B-tier remake of a soulless franchise that was never really much to begin with, directed by a man, becomes a rallying cry. Women actually do make films — it's not just the nice guys.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which It Is A Vicious Cycle Really

Can't Start A Fire Without A Face Tattoo

by SHELBY SHAW 
 
The Place Beyond the Pines  
dir. Derek Cianfrance
140 minutes

The opening scene of The Place Beyond The Pines is a long take travelling from inside a trailer to inside a metal cage of death, three stunt motorcyclists speeding in arcs of physical defiance around one another. This is their job, day in and day out, from city to city. They are entertainers, risk-takers, vagabonds. They thrill to please for a few hours’ time until they make their long-awaited return the next year.

Like clichéd rock stars without any of the status or benefits or names, this is the never-ending cycle – albeit an unpredictable one set amidst a predictable string of domestic cities – in which Luke (Ryan Gosling) thrives.

The traditional tattoos adorning Luke’s blonde and innocently tough demeanor were co-designed by Gosling and Ben Shields, and all of them are fake – but that didn’t stop Gosling from telling director Derek Cianfrance that he felt like the face tattoo he originally insisted on, a small dagger with a drop of blood, was a tad overboard. “That's what happens when you get a face tattoo. You regret it and now you have to regret it for the whole movie,” Cianfrance had replied. And so we have our theme: living in post, dealing with past, coping in the present and seeming fine.

In Schenectady (which translates roughly from Mohawk to “the place beyond the pines”) Romina (Eva Mendes) cares for Luke’s unknown-to-him son, Jason. When Cianfrance reveals this, he lets the camera linger past the moment, Romina's mother Malena (Olga Merediz) eagerly offering Luke to Jason. He gravely cradles the baby, protective and proud and determined; he is quickly becoming a father in the doorway between entering Romina and Jason’s life and the porch that will lead Luke back to the carnival, back to leaving again for at least another year.

Romina is either always crying or trying to be the mature one in control of her conversations with Luke, who doesn’t show so much emotion with his face as with his actions. Could there be ladies like Romina all over the country for this traveling man?

We never find out exactly what happened between Romina and Luke – was it a one-night fling, a week long, a repeat during summers for years, just one day? At first this is frustrating because it could have been a major telling point in how they reacted with each other, or why they didn’t act in certain ways, but then I realized that it doesn’t matter. What matters is everything after he left, which is only coming together because Luke is back for a few hours by fate. The dialogue feels as if it may have been caught candidly on camera and polished up by a colorist. The longer takes let the story unravel as if – for once – we really were there.

Accomplice Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) understands that Luke needs money so he offers a resolution: rob a bank. He’s done it four times twelve years ago and stopped when suspicion started to come his way. He is nonchalant. He is serious. So he teaches the curious Luke how to do it: go for the oldest female bank clerk, then the meekest, don’t take out your gun. “I did four banks with a note,” Robin says.

Luke disregards the advice on his first heist. It’s humorous, but at the same time it’s not for laughing at as we watch the entire process slowly, wincing at how Luke doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yet these people are still scared as he kicks around their desks, shouting hoarsely. I’m surprised that no one really ever reacts during the hold-ups other than to remain calm and obey Luke. Wouldn’t cops start to notice his motorcycle escapes?

After the successful hold-up, he vomits in the back of Robin’s truck. He may be a stuntman by profession, but he isn’t a con artist. They’re about as excited as school boys who scored the hottest dates to the dance. At Robin’s they party to Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a scene that feels almost awkwardly too long to watch, but that’s because it is. This is all these guys have to celebrate.

Luke is only ever dangerous twice: once lashing out on Romina’s boyfriend, Kofi (Mahershala Ali), in an almost expressionless state, and once in a passively aggressive move on Robin to get his money for a new bike. Violence doesn’t seem to be a part of baby-faced Luke, biker outlaw. When he sets out on the most fateful robbery yet, everything goes wrong before he even goes into the bank – you wince with every slip of his plan. 

This time delays allow the cops to catch up to him as he’s leaving, and a long pursuit ensues through the town, the cemetery, side streets. Luke is getting worse and worse at this game as it goes on, the camera transcending the viewer into a virtual reality, Luke getting trapped and banged up until on foot, running into the closest home. Avery (Bradley Cooper) is eager to take down the bad guy and is clearly on edge with Luke trapped on the top floor.

Here the movie folds into the second third of its triptych setup. By the time we meet Avery I’m surprised to start finding more screen time with the cop and his corrupt co-officers – the film could easily have finished out with Luke and Romina’s story. But Cianfrance keeps Luke in your mind not only because of his history and impact on the rest of the film, but because of what we’ve learned of Luke so far, which is enough to bring us so close we remember him even when he’s gone. Moving into the second part feels almost like a betrayal.

Cianfrance’s story isn’t so much three different stories as it is simply three parts along the timeline of one tale. He brings us into each part deep enough to become invested, and when we move on it’s jarring in an emotional way, missing the characters and stories we had been seeing. We are in the company of wolves with Avery now, and it is only the beginning; he takes an honorable risk to dismantle the corrupt police force and becomes assistant district attorney.

We then resume the story fifteen years later, which seems more like today, which is a beautiful thing Cianfrance has done from the beginning: he doesn’t lay out the opening year for you. Everything seems contemporary but with a strange twist – no smart phones, no hi-tech security in the banks, no fancy Apple computers there either, a disposable camera at the ice cream shop, and clothing that makes you wonder if they’re being hip – but they’re just living in the 90s, with no money, and not concerned over clothing trends. The only concern I have with the jump is the lack of change between Avery and wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne) then, and now. Fifteen years, a divorce and a kid don’t seem to have left any impression.

Avery’s son, AJ, now grown up as a high school senior with slicked hair, exposed chest hair, and a permanent scowl that looks like he could be wearing a mouth guard, moves in with Avery, now a successful man in the DA office, going after politics. We are not surprised to learn, at Avery's father's funeral, that he and Jennifer split up. AJ is careless in regards to school or life. Dad’s got a nice house and that’s all he needs. But he doesn’t have friends in Schenectady – still, it’s hard to feel bad for this kid who clearly just wants to cause moody trouble.

At lunch one day, the familiar cliché of the new kid without a table to sit at, you feel a little pity for AJ. He is a bitter standout among cliques of teens who don’t gel their hair or wear white tank tops. He sits across from a lanky boy, sitting alone, content with eating, looking sly though, a loner but not because he’s a rebel, a loner because he is meek in the company of his peers. He seems a little uncomfortable with AJ – clearly not the type of kid he would take for a friend – but admits he too does drugs, sure, we can leave right now to go smoke. It’s an adventure for them, bonding over whatever they can. As they get high in a tunnel the sound is distorted through marijuana and the façade of thinking they might have just made friends. AJ later has his friend get him ecstasy from a shabby run-down house on a dark town road. Leaving the dealer’s, the cops immediately bust the kids.

Coming to bail out his son, Avery asks about the other boy. His name is Jason Glanton, Luke and Romina’s son. Avery goes into the holding room where AJ tries to apologize, but Avery has him up against the wall, rough, “you can have anything you want but I don’t want you to fucking touch that kid.” AJ has no idea what’s going on, but Avery is terrifying. After AJ questions Jason about Kofi, Jason uncovers suppressed questions regarding his father, getting Kofi to tell him Luke’s name for the first time, which he then takes to Google to find out about Luke the outlaw and Avery the hero who killed him.

After Jason finds out Avery is AJ’s dad, he goes to his dealer’s house that night for a gun, bluntly giving us the foreshadowing for when he shows up in the mirror of AJ’s room the next morning, gun pointed, firing. When Avery comes home, unknowing of any of this, he stops on the stairs, as if suspecting something is wrong with his son – but he then backs down the stairs, Jason pointing the gun at him, giving commands. No word on AJ. Avery drives them into the woods where he and Jason have one of the tensest moments, the camera trailing slowly from the gun down Avery’s back, never knowing when, if it will go off. Jason is not a killer. Neither was his father. But we may have had the least amount of time with this character in this end of the triptych – maybe we don’t know him the way we thought.

The Place Beyond the Pines is not a straightforward narrative about fathers and sons – Cianfrance has made a film worth seeing because it’s more than just a story, it’s a complex layering of affairs, one set in a reality with which we are all familiar. He introduces us to an array of characters who could all be people we know, or ourselves. The cast doesn’t need to convince us of anything – we’re with them all the time, as they morph into dysfunctional families who have found ways of coping and living in routine, and as they deal with the secrets any family has.

Cianfrance’s pacing feels natural in the triptych story, revealing key points embedded in each scene, long and observant on the characters where the emotions are the actions. Sure, there are some thrilling chase scenes, some suspense, but the film isn’t so much about what the characters are doing as much as it is about how the consequences are affecting them; we learn what they do as they do, we put together the pieces as they do, in ways that leave us thinking it over again and again, taking it personally to try to figure out each character.

Cianfrance doesn’t have plot holes in his story, he has room for us to consider these people on levels beyond just script-deep. They aren’t flat at all, they’re fully dimensional like anyone else we know in our lives, neighbors we might see daily or people we share a commute with: we know who they are, what they do, we might know a little about their family or what they like, we might know a secret or two, but we don’t know everything about them. We can try to sympathize, and some of us might empathize, and for that we are brought a little closer to these characters. They move us, more than any other film ensemble of the year.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Post Nostalgia Withdrawal" - Mentalease (mp3)

"False Positive" - Mentalease (mp3)