The Shallows

It’s probably in the DNA of shark movies to be hyperbolic — even the legendary Jaws made its great white 25 feet long — but The Shallows endows its toothy antagonist with powers well beyond mere mortal sharks. This motherfucker leaps into the air to take down a surfer in mid-surf; it chomps fearlessly into whale hide, rocks, and finally metal; it leaps into the air again to escape the fiery surface of the ocean. What it doesn’t do is swim around lackadaisically, mostly just farting around until it occasionally bites something, which I imagine is what real sharks do. No, this shark isn’t just a human-killer (making it an anomaly in the world of sharks), it’s a serial human-killer, taking out two men within minutes of each other (making it idiotic in the world of narrative). This shark doesn’t just kill to feed; it kills because, I dunno, it’s an asshole.

The shark is trying to kill Blake Lively. Blake Lively is just trying to make it home alive and prove she can carry a movie almost literally by herself, as her husband Ryan Reynolds did in Buried. But whether Lively can anchor minimalist suspense is a question the movie doesn’t allow itself to answer, because it weighs her down with backstory. And the backstory — her character mourns the death of her mom, which has made her question whether she should continue working on her med degree — doesn’t really play to Lively’s strengths. The backstory is only there to turn the movie into a Chicken Soup for the Soul fable about fighting for life. But would we not feel the heroine’s life was worth fighting for without all the special pleading?

Anyway, Blake is out surfing off the same beach her dead mom used to frequent, and the aforementioned shark, defending its turf (a decomposing whale carcass), bites her. She makes it to a bit of rock, accompanied by a blood-streaked seagull. Using her med-school know-how (leading us to think that if she were, say, a marketing major or something instead, she’d just bleed out 35 minutes into the movie, the end), she takes her earrings and, in tight, nauseating close-ups, “stitches” her wound closed. Is this something doctors can do to themselves without anesthesia? I was reminded of the notorious Stephen King short story “Survivor Type,” in which a doctor marooned on an island removes and eats parts of himself to live another day.

The Shallows also reminded me of a similar and vastly superior nature thriller, Open Water, which had the dark wit to let one of its yuppie protagonists howl into the uncaring void, “We paid to do this!” The new movie, though, has no wit, dark or otherwise; it’s too sappy to be lean and mean. As a fable of endurance, it lacks the visceral tension and based-on-a-true-story veneer of authenticity of 127 Hours. We know Blake Lively will survive as soon as we see her talking to her kid sister and dad via videochat. Indeed, we may easily imagine the heroine going on to a lucrative career giving feel-good talks about how she conquered her demons (grief, nihilism, shark), and you can too for the low introductory price of $49.95.

The backdrop for the sad blond white woman to have her crisis is a never-named beach somewhere in Mexico. Blake encounters five Mexicans. One is an amiable guy who gives her a ride to the beach and refuses payment. Two are surfers who condescend to her. One is a drunk fatso who steals her phone and backpack, and is about to go steal her surfboard when the shark comes calling. And one is a boy, the amiable guy’s son I guess, who happens to find the GoPro helmet camera Blake records her goodbyes on as a sort of message in a bottle. The movie is set in Mexico, I guess, so that Blake is alone among people who can only speak limited English or can’t understand her limited Spanish. Certain orange-skinned pundits and their followers might catch a matinee of The Shallows and conclude that what’s needed to protect great American med students from loser Mexican sharks is a wall — an underwater wall — and the sharks will pay for it, and let me tell you, it will be terrific.

Knight of Cups

And so we enter that rarefied realm again, the world of reclusive writer/director — or poet/director — or poet/poet — Terrence Malick. This confounding auteur once spent twenty years between films, but of late the 72-year-old daydreamer appears to be obeying the exhortations of Thomas Carlyle, who advised us to “produce! produce!” because “the night cometh, wherein no man can work.” So in the wake of the universe-straddling The Tree of Life (2011) and the ode to romantic love and difficulty To the Wonder (2012), we now bear witness to Knight of Cups, which, for those of you who thrilled to the voice-over musings and lamentations of To the Wonder, provides more of the same.

I used to razz Malick for his ontological excesses — the mere thought of his 1998 The Thin Red Line makes me break out in hives. But as he and I have gotten older, Malick has stubbornly borne down on his woolgathering style, drifting farther away from standard narrative, while I have grown tired of standard narrative, especially as Hollywood practices it these days. So Knight of Cups, which peripatetically follows L.A. screenwriter Rick (Christian Bale) as he shuffles his deck of memories of past women, doesn’t make me want to tear my own face off the way it might once have done. Perhaps it’s just capitulating to the experience: Malick gotta Malick. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Malick gotta wander around in exquisite imagery — a painter lost in a gallery of his own paintings — while women twirl and throw their hands in the air, and men mope around weighed down by the eternal struggle between Nature and Grace.

I can say that the style here seems jumpier, odder, less becalmed than that of Tree of Life or To the Wonder. Rick seems to be Malick’s object lesson in how not to comport oneself as an artist and a human. He fritters away his life on empty pursuits, breaking hearts along the way. He searches, but the crass milieu of Los Angeles has blunted his perception. Rick also thinks about his dead brother, as well as his still-living brother (Wes Bentley), one of those saturnine, bitterly witty black sheep so many movie families have. Now and again, Rick’s religious father (Brian Dennehy) heaves his bulk into view; Dennehy, in his seventies, still has the most Brobdingnagian shoulders you’ve ever seen, and still looks as though he could just shrug you into the next life. Knight of Cups must be the artiest movie Dennehy has been in since Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect many moons ago.

It would probably take a hermetic band of analysts a year to unpack all the symbology in Knight of Cups, starting with its Tarot-inspired title and chapter headings. In the Tarot, the Knight of Cups card signifies love and joy; however, the same card when drawn upside down means the reverse, and the movie’s poster features Bale upside down on a card. There are also Malick’s usual favorite habitats: the beach at magic hour; water, water everywhere, though not cleansing or baptismal but weirdly isolating. Los Angeles from Malick’s viewpoint is spiritually adrift, no country for thoughtful men. Yet even such places as a nightclub or a strip club are artfully abstracted.

The interior monologues more or less take over; what few direct dialogue exchanges we see are often muted or blanketed by music. The largely improvised scenes have the tone of actors restlessly prowling a stage in some Off-Off-Off-Broadway experimental play; Emmanuel Lubezki’s mostly hand-held cinematography adds to the restlessness. There’s something insecure and almost frightened in the emulsion of the film; it seems to be making itself, finding its way in a dark room. Readily ripe for parody, Knight of Cups exists in a world of great sincerity. Snark is too easy a response to it. Reverence probably is, too. So: this is more of Malick doing more of what Malick does. He’s the only one doing work of such curiosity on this scale and this budget level. When he dies, his entire unique microgenre of filmmaking will die with him. You may be grateful for that when it happens, but I won’t be joining you, not during a period when idiosyncrasy and art are to be valued more than ever.

Ghostbusters (1984)

As we approach the dawn of the Ghostbusters reboot, the original film seems to have assumed the status of a sacred text, an inviolable classic, so it’s good that the thing itself is getting a brief re-release in theaters nationwide. That way, we can be reminded that the movie is … good. Often very good. But great? There is a collaboration between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis that does achieve greatness, and that’s Groundhog Day. But Ghostbusters? It’s fine, funny, painless entertainment, and it benefits from co-writer Dan Aykroyd’s soulful sincerity on the subject of metaphysics. It’s also formulaic and made out of a bunch of older parts — which, I suppose, one could also say about Raiders of the Lost Ark,  except that Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman on his best day can’t come near Steven Spielberg on his worst.

For all its wit and snark and baggy-pants-Lovecraftian mash-up, Ghostbusters is very much an ‘80s film, and not just because of the pop music on the soundtrack (even Air Supply pokes their heads in, and Reitman buries their smarm as best he can). It’s a bit thoughtless politically; it has the same slobs-against-snobs structure as earlier Ramis efforts like Animal House and Caddyshack, but here the stakes are much bigger, so the snobs are represented by the Environmental Protection Agency, as obvious a Reagan-era straw man as any (Reagan and his advisors loved the film). The Ghostbusters begin as a trio (Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis) and then bring in an African-American (Ernie Hudson) who seems a sop to tokenism even though he’s more likely meant to be a regular-guy avatar for the many non-techies in the audience. (Which means the black guy gets to have metascientific concepts whitesplained to him.) Women are receptionists or bimbos or victims of the uncanny; even Gozer, the plot’s evil entity from another dimension, is played by foxy Serbian model Slavitza Jovan (“prehistoric bitch,” “nimble minx,” etc.).

Most of this, though, is mitigated by a surfeit of personality. It’s tempting to say that Murray, Ramis and especially Aykroyd were ideally cast at that point in their careers — the more I see the film the more the enthusiastic, emotional, uncool Aykroyd shines through as the movie’s true hero by right of sheer likability. Sigourney Weaver wrote herself a second career as a screen comedian (she’d been funny onstage for years by 1984, often in plays by Christopher Durang) and also got to be empoweringly erotic in a way that trumped Leia in the previous year’s Return of the Jedi. Rick Moranis’ Louis, the single-minded accountant, is a fresh and gently satirical creation, and William Atherton contributes the first of his ‘80s triptych of assholes (continued with Real Genius and Die Hard) with that aforementioned EPA agent. Reagan-friendly as that villainous character is, he has a point, and it’s only his arrogant manner that truly marks him as deserving of ridicule and Stay-Puft glop.

The movie is ‘80s-slick, with the typical soundtrack selected to shift units — Ray Parker Jr. had his one hit with the theme song and was seldom heard from again — and a certain flashy, bluish-purple look courtesy of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. The lighting has that big-movie John Badham nighttime sheen to it, wedded to Elmer Bernstein’s usual semi-parodic instrumental score he specialized in for various comedies (in, again, the ‘80s) involving SNL alumni. The human beats in the story are small (the biggest arc is Bill Murray’s as he becomes less of a pig to deserve Sigourney Weaver’s hand), but the scale is vast — though not as wild as Aykroyd originally envisioned, apparently. That’s the true conflict of the movie, between shlubby humanity and filmmaking gigantism.

And yet, despite the flaws I’ve dwelled on here, I feel real affection for Ghostbusters. How could you not? It’s goofy, funny, homey — it’s genuine comfort food. It’s just that I don’t see a great difference, qualitatively or thematically, between it and Caddyshack or Stripes or Meatballs; it just has massive effects by Richard Edlund and company. It’s probably the most kid-friendly of those four Murray vehicles (if you ignore a quick PG-rated blowjob joke), and thus it has endured as a horror-comedy alongside such peers as Gremlins and Beetlejuice. (A case could be made that Ghostbusters was a Tim Burton film a year or two early.) Its jocular DNA persists in blockbusters ranging from Men in Black to Guardians of the Galaxy, and it was one of the movies “sweded” in Be Kind Rewind. And its honor is now being defended against the girl cooties of the reboot by aghast baby sexists from sea to shining sea. The anti-establishment supernatural farce has become, finally and inevitably, establishment.