Adam Membrey

The X-Factor: ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

After X2, the (at-the-time) amazing second entry in Fox’s X-Men movie series, came out in 2003, it raised the bar in such a way from the first film that we could only be tickled with excitement for the third. I dreamed of just how epic and badass it would be. It would become the alpha and the omega, and maybe bring on the end of the world with its cataclysmic awesomeness.

But then something heartbreaking happened. Bryan Singer, the director of the first two films, left to make Superman Returns, which he considered his real passion project. He wanted to make a Superman movie all along, he contended; X-Men was just a stepping stone to that eventual opportunity. So then we, the audience, kinda felt like that jilted girlfriend who watches her boyfriend move on to something he says will be bigger and better. Enter Matthew Vaughn, the British director hot off the buzz from Layer Cake. He seemed like a good, smart fit. And then, feeling constrained by the strict deadline Fox had placed on the movie coming out in less than a year, he left.

What the world then got is X3: The Last Stand, a movie so disappointing and rushed and everything we never expected it to be. I remember having a look of constipation across my face the whole time. This couldn’t be it. This was supposed to be the beginning and end of all superhero movies! Where is the awesomeness? Did it disappear through some kind of studio lot crack?

Fox somehow agreed with us by not making another X-Men movie for 5 years. They knew the last one sucked pretty hard. So they rebooted with a younger class, this time with Matthew Vaughn back at the helm. And the ironic thing: Vaughn had even less time to make this movie than he would have with X3: The Last Stand. How ironic is that? I guess context is everything.

The movie ended up being a huge success, breathing new life into the X-Men series and giving Fox a whole new set of possibilities. So when X-Men: Days of Future Past started to gear up, Vaughn did the same thing Singer had done just 10 years before: he jumped ship to his true passion project. He always wanted to make a James Bond-type of movie, he contended. And then he was gone. Even weirder? Singer came back to the X-Men series, admitting that his Superman affair wasn’t the bigger and better thing he expected it to be. And the X-Men series, as polyamorous as ever, agreed to welcome him back into the fold.

All I have to say is that I’m glad passion ruled the day, because Vaughn has delivered an incredible movie in Kingsman that takes all the spy genre conventions we have grown accustomed to and given them a slight twist. It’s wittier, punchier, and never, ever loses it’s sense of fun.

There’s a moment in this film in which you realize thousands of people’s heads are about to explode. The last time something like this happened, those weird little aliens from Mars Attacks had their heads burst green snot all inside their helmet. We had fun with it. We all laughed. But human heads? That’s going to be bloody. And even in a bigger budget movie like this, with attitude to spare, it seems a bit much. So imagine my surprise when this moment in the movie, primed for a splatterfest, turned into something only the Cheshire Cat could have dreamt. Heads exploded, alright, but only into whirling dervishes of colorful, rainbow-stained smoke. It looked like a celebration far more than anything traumatic. It brought back memories of all those intros to Bond films, full of hues and rhymes far more hypnotic than anything your local psychiatriast could work up.

That’s the kind of film Kingsman is. Just when you expect it to go left, it goes right; when you expect it to zig, it zags. It constantly surprises and upturns expectations, and often to drive a greater truth home: movies don’t have to be gritty borefests – they can be fun.

This is a film that takes great joy in subverting your expectations of actors. Colin Firth gets to kick an unholy amount of ass (the Kentucky church scene is an all-timer for him and for all his fans), Michael Caine finally gets to be a little bit of a jerk, and Mark Strong gets to take a break from all those tough-guy roles to show some aching vulnerability and steely dorkiness. And just like Vaughn did with Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kickass, he gives another newcomer in Taran Egerton a chance to show what will make him a star for years to come (he’s already booked roles alongside the likes of Tom Hardy and Hugh Jackman).

Through every explosion, every one-liner, every kick, punch, and scream for vengeance, you can practically hear Vaughn and Goldman cackling just off to the side. This is a team of artists working with such passion and craft, creating something that wears its influences on its sleeve but never forgets there are times to take the jacket off and just have some good old fun.

Giants From Another Land: ‘The Other Dream Team’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

Anyone who has used Netflix knows this inherent dilemma: having so many choices and yet not knowing what to pick. But another side effect of having such a deluge of choices is that your brain never quite buys competely in to your choice. Unless it’s 100% what you wanted to be watching – which, frankly, only happens when you’re binge-watching your new favorite show and got to see the next episode – the realization that you can simply stop at any time and make a different choice is always there, just standing by the door, ready for your signal to open it and walk right back outside.

All of this to say that I wanted so badly to bail on The Other Dream Team. We made the choice to watch it based on my cousin’s recommendation, who tried to let us know just how good it is without overselling it. But the opening scenes of the film are almost entirely subtitled. I’m used to watching movies with subtitles, but hearing some of the dialogue that matches the words makes it easier to just flow with it. When they’re talking in a different language and I still have to read in English? It feels more like homework. And no one wants to do homework on a Saturday night.

But sometimes there’s a reward for sticking with things. And, boy, does this movie reward you.

The true story, about Lithunaian basketball – their rise, their struggles, their future NBA stars – is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking. Lithuania had the true misfortune of being stuck between two super powers in Russia and Germany during World War II. This resulted in many fleeing the country, as well as stranding many who were unable to escape. It’s a dark history to start a story with, but it informs the joy and ownership the country takes with basketball. It is their true sport, they remind us, and it is the thing that propels them through the darkness.

Even more interesting is learning about their superstar players who nearly missed their chance to dominate in the NBA. I was familiar with Arvydas Sabonis, mainly because I never understood how someone who looks so slow and unwieldy could be so damn good. He frustrated me in every playoffs I saw as a kid, leaving me uneasy whenever he ran into my Malone-and-Stockton-led Utah Jazz, like a slow-moving buzzsaw you couldn’t retreat from. Even more amazing? Sabonis, due to the draconian rules the USSR held over all their future NBA players, didn’t get to play in the NBA until he was 32 years old. So we missed his prime. And, as you’ll see in this film, we missed something even more incredible.

Even more incredible to me is how Sabonis wasn’t even the best Lithuanian player at the time. That honor belonged to Šarūnas Marčiulionis, who, like Sabonis, joined the NBA late in his career. We didn’t get a chance to see his frightful prime, of which the film gives us short glimpses of.

You will learn some incredible things about Lithuania in this film, such as how you had to pay the government for your new car and wait 10 years for it to arrive. The players describing their first trip to America – where they sat amazed at all the food we could eat, and even tried to make a couple bucks by selling our goods in their home country – will give you some nice perspective.

Perhaps the most incredible part of this whole story is just how a band such as the Grateful Dead became involved. Even on your best Mad Lib days, you would never associate a country like Lithuania with a jam band like The Dead. But understanding how the two became intertwined is one of those great discoveries you make as you don’t allow a heavily-subtitled film to deter you. The rewards are great. Give it a chance.

This movie is no longer streaming on Netflix, but can be rented through Amazon Prime for 99 cents. Here’s the link.

Book Review: ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

I will always appreciate this book for it’s opening chapter. I gave it a shot one night, curious if the large print copy I had found at the local Goodwill would help me read faster. I wanted to start and finish a book at some point, I thought, and why not this?

When I read this quote, it struck me for obvious reasons: not just because I love animals (well, most of them) but because I work with students that often have to use some form of gesture to communicate what they don’t have the vocabulary for. I think we’ve come in contact with someone who feels this way:

“Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.” (1)

I finished that first chapter full of awe and wonder. The story, told from the perspective of the dog at the center, managed to escape that cutesy twee feeling you get from narrative overreaches. I could hear this dog’s voice – and it was far more interesting than any humans’ I had heard in a while. So I told everyone about this book – on the first chapter alone. I knew I was probably overselling it, but I didn’t care. That first chapter. Damn.

But the story continues beautifully until about halfway through the book – that’s where the elegant tone Stein has so well-crafted is occasionally threatened by some rather cartoonish characters. He etches in the details of the owner, his wife, and his daughter through the particular lens of this incredibly philosophical dog. They are spare, but they leave you room to imagine. When he introduces the grandparents and some minor characters who take up the second part of the story, however, the balance is threatened. They feel like characters from a different, far-less subtle story. They do, however, provide an obstacle that the characters we side with must overcome. If there’s anything that works well about the dramatic characterization, it’s that our immediate hatred towards them makes us pull that much more for the characters we care about.

I also want to give credit to Stein for descriptions of what it’s like to race in the rain. Part of what gives the dog’s owner, a race car driver, an advantage over other drivers is his ability to drive well in the rain, something that many drivers tend to struggle with. The descriptions of racing here are so gracefully detailed, without become too much, that you feel you’re in the car yourself. It’s a great way to take something that could easily be an overwrought metaphor, and commit to it with detail and sincerity. It works beautifully.

In the end, this book isn’t nearly as sappy as I expected. I finished it – which felt like an accomplishment in itself. But your enjoyment with this book will depend on what you demand of your stories. If you want a simple, (melo)dramatic story with some great grace notes thrown in and told from the perspective of a dog, then this is a book for you.

We Are Human: 2014’s ‘Dear White People’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

When we first meet Sam White (Tessa Thompson), she’s speaking on her college radio show, Dear White People. She’s got opinions about the racial culture of her Ivy League college, and the serve both as a manifesto for the black students who want to be heard and a reminder to everyone else – who think seeing Good Hair means they know everything – that they know nothing.

As we meet the characters that populate this fictional college, it feels as if the radio show never stopped. It continues throughout, with each character’s dialogue feeling like it’s own radio channel. Opinions are given and expressed, and it becomes difficult to understand where the speech ends and the character begins.

But that’s the point. Everyone at this school is a walking facade, trying their best to establish their place in the world by espousing the cultural conversation they think they should push. Sam wants everyone to know the black students won’t be pushed around; the main white character, Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), wants his little college magazine to mean something. They’re all chasing something, even if they’re not sure exactly what it is. And so it goes – characters getting angry and struggling with the intangible.

The movie continues to build towards an all-out culture war on campus until it hits an almost literal crossroad: just before Sam is about to join a protest that her followers have been clamoring for, a protest she’s not even sure is the right thing to do, she gets a phone call that stops everything. For the first time in the film, she seems human. She has feelings. She has family she cares about. And she retreats. It’s a necessary reprieve from the escalating atmosphere, a way to show us that deep down, these are just kids struggling to find and fight for their place in the world.

The film’s climatic moments, at an incredibly racist college campus party that’s unfortunately ripped from the real world headlines, show just how far we haven’t come. The culture is still bruised and tattered. Misunderstandings are as ever-present as before. The school’s president and vice-president show they’re not as interested in fixing it as they are in getting some cash and attention off it.

But writer/director Justin Simien, understanding that underneath it all we’re built with the same needs and wants, pulls back the focus at the end to show us what motivates Sam. It’s not about the radio show. It’s not about the uprising. It’s about having a place in which you can comfortably hold the hand of someone who looks different from you and no one will care. Of course, the student body walking by notices Sam’s final gesture. It shows how far we haven’t come and still have to go. But Dear White People is an impassioned, entertaining reminder that we’re made far more of the same things than we’re not.

Fare Thee Well: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

There’s a moment where I thought the film lost me. Driving on a long, empty road, with one-word-mumbling beat poet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) steering beside him and jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) in the back seat punctuating his tedious non sequiturs with short naps, our main character Llewyn struggles in and out of his sleep, unsure of just how long this damn trip will be. Each time the film cut to the road, it seemed to grow longer. It felt like no end was in sight, even if we knew the final destination.

No way the Coen Brothers would lose their pacing like this, I thought. Something is up. This must be a magic trick of sorts.

It’s not until we see Llewyn, playing a rather quietly intense version of “The Death of Queen Jane”, only to be told “I don’t see much money in this”, that we realize what they’re after. They’re allowing us to feel the struggle; the frustration of losing the cat people have trusted you with; the constant need for a couch or money or something to keep you going when your dream alone isn’t enough to sustain you. By the end of the film, Davis, growing weary, is ready to give up. And just as he leaves the nightclub, Bob Dylan is about to play. Folk music is about to have some money to it. He just had no way of knowing.

It’s often said about any Coen Brothers movie that even their minor characters suggest an inner life; they arrive on the scene so fully-formed that even when they don’t say a word, they surely make an impression. This film is no different. From Carey Mulligan’s sweet-voiced but quietly agitated Jean to Justin Timberlake’s happily aloof Jim to the aforementioned John Goodman’s Roland and Hedlund’s Johnny Five – all these characters pop on the screen and keep you smiling, even when the story isn’t exactly a bright spot of sunshine.

This film would make an interesting double feature with their 2009 gem A Serious Man: both films feature men who suffer throughout the film and are aghast at the forces that seem to conspire against them. The difference, however, is that A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik is a good man while Davis is more than kind of an asshole. Gopnik does his best, providing for his family, being kind to others – even listening to angry parents who want their underachieving teenage students to be given a totally undeserved higher grade. He takes it all in, all these maladies he by no means deserves, and does his best to find answers. Davis, on the other hand, is shown time and time again to be oblivious to the concerns of others. He regularly finds new ways to ask for a couch to sleep on, only showing a slight twinge of guilt. He talks down to the people who try to help him, assuring them they just don’t get what this music is and why it’s important.

In the film, Davis runs into a military boy, Troy Nelson, who gets a music contract. He’s perfectly harmless military man. There’s no edge to him. He’s just a good, wholesome man who wants to play good music for others, another service for the people to partake in after his tour of duty. Davis has no patience for him. It’s people like him, he decides, that take folk away from what it can be. But in A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik doesn’t go blaming people. He goes to three different rabbis looking or answers, and when they ultimately prove unsatisfactory responses, he still does not blame anyone. This is the life he’s been given, he decides, and there’s not much more he can do about it.

So is this a film that celebrates sucking it up and making the best of everything? Of not being an asshole to others because your time may be around the corner? As always, the Coen Brothers don’t explain their films. They stitch these beautiful yarns together and then leave them on the floor, ready for viewing but not for sale. They keep the secrets inside, like the dust that gathers underneath.