In Which We Have Finished With Steven Spielberg

Expressionless

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Bridge of Spies
dir. Steven Spielberg
141 minutes

"Do you never worry?" Joseph Donovan (Tom Hanks) whines to his client Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) as they prepare an attempt at exonerating him of charges that he was a KGB spy working out of a Brooklyn apartment. Bridge of Spies is mostly about Donovan and how it was so important that he defend a guilty man. 

Rylance barely gets any screen time at all outside of an early sequence where he is captured by one of the racist cops from The Wire. It is his story, and the story of the actual Russian agents who escalated the development of the atomic bomb, which serves as the only captivating thing in this tedious script by Matt Charman and the Coen Brothers, but director Steven Spielberg is more interested in a kind of silly individual who puts principle above truth.

Hanks' insurance lawyer is one such person. Even after his client receives a modest sentence of 30 years in jail, he still wants to appeal Abel's sentence on the basis of an unlawful search. Bridge of Spies even features a scene in the Supreme Court, one that is so boring Spielberg crosscuts with scenes of fighter jets ascending into the air.

Hanks deals with the venom spouted by the police department and general public at his person for defending an English national who transmitted documents from Brooklyn to Moscow. His wife (Amy Ryan) naturally does not support him at all, and the law firm he works at wonders why he is so invested in this grubby, misguided little man.

Rylance is somewhat fun to watch in his rare scenes, but he speaks so langorously that Spielberg has to speed up everything around him just to turn Bridge of Spies into a composition of contrasts in style. He is arguing, here at length and for no discernible reason, that was all the Cold War was.

In reality, Abel was a terrible agent for the KGB and he was a disappointment in managing his major subordinate, an alcoholic who was eventually turned by the FBI. Bridge of Spies is not terribly concerned with the truth of that story, either. Hanks gets all the screen time, and I have to admit he looks fantastic for his age. Bridge of Spies never shows him outside of his suit, for obvious reasons.

The fighter jet that takes off unceremoniously crashes to Earth about an hour into Bridge of Spies. The pilot ejects long before that, and Spielberg takes us to Abel painting in prison. (The entire point of the subplot is to explain why we gave Abel back to the Soviets in a prisoner exchange.) While he was in an Atlanta prison, Abel mostly did portraits and still lifes; he hated expressionism. Watching Abel meticulously go over his own face is about as exciting as Bridge of Spies gets.

The rest of this sludge is not only incredibly inert, the sheer number of old white people in it truly dulls the mind. Spielberg's historical forays are now routinely disasters, as his Lincoln was one of the worst movies of that year. He seems to think it is reasonable to make an entire movie based off one idea, no matter how slight, which has garnered his momentary interest. The idea that anyone should pay to see Bridge of Spies is an insult far worse than any managed by the KGB in its history.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Into the Garden" - Parquet Courts (mp3)

In Which We're Really Down On Optimus Prime

Falling From A Great Height

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
dir. Michael Bay
684 minutes

Are you constitutionally unable to tell Josh Duhamel and Johnny Knoxville apart? If Chris Evans were also put in that room and had not shaved for a week or more, would he blend in as seamlessly as the wallpaper? Is Frances McDormand's agent suffering a foreclosure on her home?

Does anyone else get the sense that if Shia LaBoeuf were four inches taller, he would have made a great Boromir?

this happened to barbara hershey a lot in those days

I'm working on a John Malkovich oral history. (It will be done after I give Agatha Christie the Roald Dahl treatment.) Don't you want to go back to those halcyon days? Let's all find out what it was really like to be on the set with Liam Neeson during The Man in the Iron Mask. Whoever greenlit A Portrait of a Lady deserves something; perhaps a nice home in the suburbs?

For the better part of a half hour, LaBeouf slides down the side of a Chicago skyscraper while it is coming down, in a cutting edge satire of 9/11. Not a single piece of glass is embedded into anyone's body, in fact it seems to have given them a glossy sheen. You can light a match from the glare off the pearly countenance of the actress who replaced Megan Fox. You don't want to do something after Megan Fox has done it, you want to do it well before or not at all.

it's easy to confuse megatron and ellen pompeo because they have the same wrinkle lines

Optimus Prime gets all of ten lines in this movie, and it has a running time roughly equivalent to The Sorrow and the Pity. I used to watch Transformers, it was my second favorite after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was very into Raphael, I thought he was like a straight Dagny Taggart. I read The Fountainhead when I worked at an aquarium one summer and now whenever I smell penguin feces I feel a stirring call to achievement.

If you openly admit your last movie sucked, why not maybe change it up a little? I want to know what Major William Lennox does when he's off duty. Just hang out? Get his Lexapro prescription from CVS? Duhamel never takes the earpiece off once during the entire running time of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which probably beats the record set by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. The fucking microphone was almost in his mouth at points.

putting michael bay in charge of the space program might be the right move for all concerned

Frances McDormand begins to attain a growing confidence in Sam Witwicky (25-year old Shia LaBoeuf). She praises him constantly, especially when he uncovers a plan that the Decepticons have to transport the planet Cybertron into our solar system. They develop a mother-son esque relationship, because Sam's real mother is something of comedic joke. He dreads his parents' visits and feels discouraged when they mock him for not being employed after his graduation from college.

this exact pose is in every adaptation of a john irving novel

His girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) surprises him at his new job, telling everyone she sees "I'm Sam's girlfriend." She wants him to be happy in his work. When, unexpectedly, he shows up at her job, she's thrown off. Carly's close relationship with her boss Dylan (Patrick Dempsey) is a major red flag for Sam, and he overreacts. Looking to mediate the situation, Dylan gives them both cars. It's a nice gesture, but ill timed. Every five to ten minutes, Carly gets in or out of a car that's transforming into a larger car.

The last sequence in Transformers: Dark of Moon depicts the destruction of Chicago at great length, working in the disintegration of several prominent landmarks. The "heroes" destroy a teleportation machine crafted by the Einstein of autobots that is worth more than their lives. For some reason, the Decepticons spare the entire rest of earth, giving every indication they are not huge fans of Rahm Emanuel (Sacha Baron Cohen).

When one machine touches another machine, there's still two machines.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Super 8. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Why Don't You Call Me?" - James Blake (mp3)

"To Care (Like You)" - James Blake (mp3)

"Give Me My Month" - James Blake (mp3)

In Which The Guy Wanted To Save Felicity

A Sign of Submission

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Super 8
dir. J.J. Abrams
112 minutes

You come down over the trees, you see the stars, and suddenly you think you're in space – wow, you’re not, you're in a forest somewhere. You’re not quite sure where; you might be in a forest on some distant planet. It was Melissa’s idea to use the forest; at first, I thought of having the ship land in a vacant lot. But she said, 'A forest is magical…there are elves in forests.'

- Steven Spielberg

Are you experienced at watching things recede into the distance? Do you start out every single one of your movies by killing off the parents of your protagonist? Are you willing to accept Steven Spielberg's name underneath yours, in settings such as official notifications and company stationary? Do you desperately want to remake The Goonies and have very little self-respect?

When pressed, Abrams could not recall the names of his child actors, preferring to address them using only the tu form. It was not as bad as a Bryan Singer set, but it wasn't great. He channeled this frustration into conceiving an alien that would befriend fictional children and satisfy his master.

Of Elle Fanning, he wrote, Screentested Elle Fanning today. She asked me if she was the only one confused by Lost. I took five minutes to compose myself, and then said, "We're not here to talk Lost, we're hear to talk Super 8." Eating fried rice with her hands, she said, "Did you direct Mission Impossible 3 or did a monkey do it?"

What best epitomizes satisfying teamwork between two men with the same limited imagination? In Japan two such people would have a designated relationship, kind of like Rafael and Michaelangelo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Scientists that have reason to know examined the two directors and found an almost identical genome. "They're basically clones," admitted Craig Venter as he sucked on the bone marrow of a recently deceased child actor.

Why, J.J. Abrams might wake up one day over some eggs benedict and be reminded of the way his mother cooked them and work in the alien storyline from there! Or not, I mean, it could go in a different direction, as a reading of Abrams' private journals from 1996 will later attest: Today I thought of Felicity while imagining a film about a really stuck-up girl who does Taming of the Shrew with an alien who wants to revisit his homeland.

Both fabulists wish to replace the cynicism of their peers with a childlike innocence. They focus their identical eyeglass prescriptions on creating movies with child protagonists who uncover the same virulent thread. In this case, the monster only takes mercy on guys who are really into moviemaking. Everyone else is dead meat. The point of all this is to rid technology from our lives, to expunge it and re-enter a more innocent time period identical to that of the creators' childhood. Super 8 pretends the 21st century never came about at all.

Where and when does Super 8 take place? The location is not paramount, details aren't important. A vacant lot is as good as a forest.

For a movie that concerns itself with boys who desire to be filmmakers, not a single other movie is ever mentioned in Super 8. The kids watch TV once to see news about a train crash they're involved in, but they don't have posters on their walls or books by Fredric Jameson or Judith Butler. The children of Super 8 are so self-serious that they rarely even make jokes. They love the idea of filmmaking, but aren't interested in films.

On the set of the movie, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) falls in love with the daughter of the man who called in sick the day Joe Lamb's mother suffered a fatal mishap replacing him. "It was an accident," Joe Lamb's father (Kyle Chandler) tells the girl's father, and kisses him on the lips in an intimate manuever. With both their wives out of the picture, the implication is that they will raise the children themselves, and that to conserve costs they will go on double dates with the kids, explaining things later on.

The alien constructs his ship in the town's water tower — perhaps the citizens might have noticed changes in the salinity levels of the local water supply, but they do not. No one knows where this creature is except Joe Lamb. He resembles exactly the childhood representation of Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous. It is scary.

Staring up expectantly at something is what J.J. and Steven want you to do. The thrall of technology invade your senses for the first time is a sacrosanct pleasure to men of a certain generation, and they will not let women embrace or enjoy it except as actresses in a dehumanizing role. The way that technology occupies these particular individuals constitutes a retrograde feeling. It is not like being invaded and then abandoned to yourself, it is more like being conquered, and it is only meaningful the once.

tom cruise and elle fanning, the year 2056

When Joe Lamb saves the girl, whose name is unsurprisingly Alice, she wonders why he even bothered to come and get her. Joe Lamb admits that he wanted to ingratiate himself to her, and this fact unexpectedly pleases her, and him. Joe Lamb speaks to the creature and empathizes with it because he suffered a similar loss - the alien continuous torment from government persecutors, and Joe Lamb the death of his mother.

The creature itself is a work of Spielbergian fascination. He appears to be segmented, he has both bipedal function and a variety of other motions, and his chitinous exoskeleton appears very flexible. His technology has surpassed human invention, so it is unlikely that he was imprisoned against his will. He is intelligent and telepathic, and can take no damage from human weapons. He wants to return home out of frustration or loneliness. To a telepathic organism, humanity must seem like never-ending study hall.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Little Mosque on the Prairie. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"When We Were Young" - Take That (mp3)

"Affirmation" - Take That (mp3)

"Happy Now" - Take That (mp3)

The new EP from Take That, Progressed, came out on June 10th.

Anyway, in my closet, I found this thing on my wall. It's a list of all the people who lived in this room before me - it went back to 1968. Randall Clark... Melissa Stone... Keith Bradshaw... Patty Tagliabue... I mean these names, these people I never heard of... you know, I just started wondering. I wonder where they are today, you know? How much they remember of their freshman year? I wonder if they're all still alive.