Top Warp Speed: STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Undoubtedly the most breathless of all Star Trek pictures, Star Trek Into Darkness is a nonstop barrage of spectacle, movement, and noise. It’s manipulative, relentless and a fun time at the movies. It gets the job done. With 2009’s Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams got a great deal of entertainment value out of dropping a wormhole into Trek continuity, scattering the familiar pieces every which way and providing a shock of delight as the pieces snapped back into place. It’s about as clever as a combination sequel, prequel, reboot, and remake of a nearly 50-year-old franchise could be. While Into Darkness can’t have the same pleasurable jolts of fresh perspective, what it lacks in discovery it makes up for in chemistry. The cast crackles through energetic banter and terse exposition as they’re forever running up and down the gleaming corridors of the starship Enterprise, desperate to solve the latest crisis in which they’ve found themselves.

With a plot that’s in some ways an extended riff on a classic bit of Trek – to even say whether it’s a movie or a TV episode would probably be enough for Trekkers to spring the film’s secrets sight unseen – the screenplay by longtime Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof is packed with dramatic incidents and fan-friendly winking. It’s an expertly calibrated event picture that hurtles from one bit of action or humor into the next without any room to slow down. We start urgently in the middle of a high-energy action sequence with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) fleeing an angry alien tribe while Spock (Zachary Quinto) proceeds logically into a volcano to shut it down and save this foreign world. As the sequence plays out, all of the returning cast – Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, and Anton Yelchin’s Chekov – get their little moments to shine. It’s like stumbling into the last few exciting minutes at the end of an episode and then sticking around for the next couple in the marathon. There’s recognizability and comfortability the cast has in the roles and with each other that provides an instant anchor and funny rapport amidst the chaos around them.

Chaos quickly comes in the form of a terrorist attack on Earth that blows up a Starfleet base in London. The man responsible is John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of their own who clearly has his secret motives for turning against them. The scheming scenes leading up to and including these surprise attacks have a scary edge. As the film progresses and Cumberbatch gets to put his sonorous voice into full intimidating villainy, the relationships his character develops take a few interesting twists and turns. Meanwhile, back at Starfleet, the good admiral (Bruce Greenwood) and crusty admiral (Peter Weller) agree to let Kirk take the Enterprise after the attacker in a rare show of force from this research and peacekeeping group that finds a new science officer (Alice Eve) escorting top secret missiles on board. They’re not out boldly going where no man has gone before. They’re on a manhunt.

This streamlined feature slams through its sequences of energetic intensity with sensational special effects and top-notch sound design expected from a Hollywood blockbuster in this budget range. Abrams, not particularly invested in the more cerebral, allegorical aspects of Trek lore, sees fit to deliver a slam-bang spectacle with phaser battles, whooshing warp drives, and brusque threats around every corner. This leaves plenty of time for the film’s politics to be a little muddled, if benign, with the exception of a weirdly misjudged bit of disaster overkill in the final stretch. It’s one thing for a movie like this to destroy a chunk of a metropolis, sending skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. It’s another thing entirely to do so almost off-handedly, skip the aftermath, and then put a strange title card in the end credits proclaiming tribute to post-9/11 workers. (Seriously, what’s going on there?) It’s a film that summons up War on Terror paranoia (potential drone strikes, brief pointed debates about killing terrorists without trial) and twisty conspiracy theories, but uses it only as set dressing for a plot that’s all present tense forward movement. Gone is the Cold War-era utopian optimism of Roddenberry’s original concept. This time it’s all about fear, dread, and explosions.

But it’s amazing how far momentum alone can take you. Abrams has made a film that’s a crackling roller coaster that’s all dips, dives, drops, and top-speed loops with an excellent, blaring score from the ever-reliable Michael Giacchino. The intensity never slows, even when the movie self-consciously incorporates a debate with itself about what kind of mission this Trek is following. “This is clearly a military operation,” Scotty disappointedly tells Kirk. “Is that what we are now? I thought we were explorers.” The fact of the matter is that Trek on TV had room to be as eggheaded as it wanted (at best, thrilling so), whereas the movies have always largely been about elaborate revenge schemes and potentially world-ending super-calamities. This just happens to be a particularly single-minded action adventure that’s constantly chasing the next thrill. And that works.

It works not just because Abrams and crew are skilled technicians, but because of the people on screen as well, with characters filled wonderfully by the talented cast working from borrowed cultural awareness without much original characterization in this particular script. (There’s an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the audience will know who these characters are and what they mean to each other, so that all emotional development can be left to shorthand.) These characters have lived long and prospered in the cultural imagination for a good reason. The core of the film is the crew, the group of professionals thrown together by duty, bound together by the friendships that developed. Even at their prickliest, when Kirk and Spock speak sharply to each other, engaging in their expected debate between reason and emotion, there’s a core of respect and love that’s a comfort and a constant, even when everything is constantly blowing up around them.

Fault Line: AFTERSHOCK

Aftershock is a charmless low-budget horror movie in disaster flick clothes. It starts out looking like it has the potential to become an enjoyable earthquake picture. Maybe the camera will shake and rubble will fly in from off-screen. Maybe some massive piece of set design will crumble on cue and squash a particularly loathsome character and the audience can get a little guilty giggle out of it. But that’s not to be. The characters to which we’re introduced are all at best irritating and at worst loathsome and all the fake slabs of concrete in the world would not be enough to serve up all of the comeuppances needed to satisfy me. But still, the way the characters are turned into nothing more than victims of the movie’s mean-spirited ain’t-humanity-the-real-disaster? mugging is cruel.

The worldview is somewhat recognizable from director Eli Roth’s splatter-filled Hostel films, which get their kicks out of torturing dumb Americans in foreign locales, a concept with at least a hint of satiric intent. Roth co-wrote Aftershock with Chilean collaborators Nicolás López and Guillermo Amoedo, a duo who produced a string of comedies in their native country. As directed by López, the opening moments of this film are pure failed comedy, a loose sub-Apatowian shambles that follows an American tourist (Roth again) and his two Chilean pals (Nicolás Martínez and Ariel Levy) ambling around the country looking for girls at parties. Individually almost tolerable, as a group they’re repugnant, lecherous, vulgar dopes. They meet up with a few nice ladies (Lorenza Izzo, Andrea Osvárt, and Natasha Yarovenko), tourists who match them for shallowness and for some plot-driven reasons manage to tolerate them. And so the group has swollen in number, but not in depth.

These opening moments stretch awkwardly and improbably to fill nearly half of the film’s runtime. Each second spent with these characters ticked by in emptiness on the film’s part and anger on mine. These thinly written constructs were no more believable than Roth’s acting. I was more than ready for the earthquake to start, let alone the aftershocks. The unconvincing disaster serves up slightly less than the requisite number of collapsed bits of set, shaking shots, and bloody practical effects. If I had trouble caring about the characters as they vacationed together, I certainly didn’t grow fonder of them as they suffered through a gauntlet of contrivances that turns them into little more than props.

The earthquake wasn’t that bad and certainly not the worst of what’s to come. Now, injured and stranded, they have to deal with the roving bands of looters, gang members, prisoners, and other malcontents who feel free to roam the rubble looking to get into trouble. That near-feral locals menace the tourists is a bit troubling, but it’s a theme unintended, no doubt. I’d be less inclined to care if the film were more skillfully made with characters of any kind that were more than crude stand-ins for actual characters in a plot that was more than a lame excuse to limp through some pitiful spectacle and cynically ugly human interactions. Real horror here is not found in the earthquake or the societal aftershocks. No, the only horror is how 90 minutes stretched into an eternity right before my very eyes. By the time it reaches its stupid punchline of a final shot (sadly the only shot close to memorable in the whole production), I was more than ready to bolt away from the screen and let the film start leaving my mind.

Borne Back Into the Past: THE GREAT GATSBY

It’s easy to see why over the years some have seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby a fine idea for a film. The book contains memorable characters and quotable lines contained in a plot of some intrigue and mystery, romance and regret. It’s not hard to see how it can all be pushed into tasteful melodrama of the kind the movies are so good at. (They’re even better at tasteless melodrama, but that’s not my point yet.) What previous adaptations of Gatsby have failed to grasp, however, is that this great novel needs not a cinematic transcription, but a jolt of cinema itself to play on screen. Last seen in theaters in 1974 directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the story felt stale, stiff and humorless, despite the best efforts of an all-star cast headlined by Robert Redford. This time around, the director and co-adapter is Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and Australia, one a musical and two so broad, vibrant, and melodic they might as well be. He makes films in a style that’s a kaleidoscope of the gaudy, the campy, the kitsch, proudly waving the flag of melodrama while shouting from the rooftops his themes and ambitions. He brings the spark of cinema the story needs to really take off on screen.

Glittering and glowing with colorful period detail and wailing a mix of jazzy standards and anachronistic tunes from the likes of Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey (not to mention a great Charleston-style cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”), Luhrmann’s film is bursting at the seams with invention of the kind that illuminates Fitzgerald’s text without subsuming it. Now, I’m of the opinion that adaptations have no particular obligation to faithfully reproduce every aspect of their source materials. But this Gatsby is both faithful to the events, characters, themes, and symbols of Fitzgerald’s, while the telling – structure (mostly) aside – is all Luhrmann’s. It has the wild exuberance of a Gatsby party with all the distance to see how hollow it ultimately is. Using generous amounts of Fitzgerald’s original text verbatim in voice over, dialogue, and on-screen titles, the film maintains a sense of wit and social commentary amidst the colorful party atmosphere and melodrama that bursts forth.

The film, like the novel, uses the character of Nick Carraway as narrator and observer. It’s the height of the Roaring Twenties. He’s moved to New York City for a job on Wall Street and finds himself living in fictional West Egg, procuring a cottage next door to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. No one knows much of anything about the man; they only know he throws great parties, wild, packed, affluent parties in which the rich and wannabe rich, the influential and the climbers all rub elbows, drink bootleg alcohol, and dance the night away. Luhrmann, in a more restrained version of the carousing Moulin Rouge! hyperactivity, films these elaborate soirées with exuberance, using his mishmash of music choices and Catherine Martin’s impeccable production design to highlight the glamour and excitement of such an event. Gatsby parties seem fun, but they seem just as meaningless. No one knows precisely why they’re there any more than they know a thing about Gatsby beyond wild rumors. The host, for his part, seems spectacularly uninterested in the spectacle of his own making.

The summer setting is the perfect time for these lengthy nights separated by endless languorous days spent whiling away the hours. Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tells us all about the vacuous, energetic people he meets away from Gatsby’s, including his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), her brutish old-money husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), his mistress (Isla Fisher) and her husband (Jason Clarke). Carraway starts a flirtation with a famous golfer (Elizabeth Debicki). Sometimes he goes to work. He’s a busy guy, but he’s not really drawn into this world until he meets Gatsby. Luhrmann films the title character’s entrance in a grand, theatrical way that does not disappoint. Gatsby, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, turns in slow motion, raising a cocktail glass in toasting, smirk on his face, fireworks slowly erupting in the sky behind him while the soundtrack and his eyes are lost sparkling in a dreamy blue rhapsody.

I’ll preserve the mystery of Gatsby, his relationships, and his ambitions for those who haven’t read the book. But I will say that as the film goes along, Luhrmann brings a satisfying bitter romance, full of as much sadness as swooning, that slowly builds to a sequence in a hothouse of a hotel room where a crisply edited small party becomes uncomfortably personal until emotions boil over. It’s a lovely luridness of love and death, affairs and scandal, loss and loneliness. The performances are sharply drawn, from Maguire’s Carraway’s starry-eyed wonder giving way to hindsight skepticism to Mulligan’s Daisy’s flat affect and foolish affectations cracking under the pressure of the possibility of remaking her life. And then there’s Gatsby. DiCaprio brings exactly the right combination of irresistible charm and unknowability. He’s slick and smooth, but what’s he up to? He’s sympathetic, but how much do we really know about him? It’s a slippery performance that never feels unmoored as the audience learns more about who he really is.

What’s best about the film is its consistency of vision, a vibrancy that never forsakes the source material while confidently striding forward as its own postmodern construction. Luhrmann freely mixes and matches artistic inspirations, bringing his swooping 3D camera through digital recreations of Jazz Age architecture, energy, and glamorous coarseness. He’s such a big believer in the power of movie magic to evoke strong emotions through gorgeous fakery that he’d never mention the unutterable fact that it’s not always true. He’s too busy making the story burst to life with every trick he knows. For this, Gatsby feels truly cinematic in ways it never has on screen before. It’s lively, funny, and rewarding without suffocating under its seriousness. Through irresistible, shameless visual frippery and vividly colorful melodramatics Douglas Sirk might have been proud of, Luhrmann finds and takes as his own Fitzgerald’s core laser-sharp, gin-dry social commentary. Consider this exchange between Carraway and Gatsby, concerning complicated decorative plans for a small get-together: “Is it too much?” Gatsby asks. Carraway replies, “I think it’s what you want.” Is this Gatsby too much? It's what I wanted.

Color Wield: UPSTREAM COLOR

Reader, it will do neither of us any good if I pretend here that I have anything approaching a definitive understanding of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. It’s a deliberate, persistent befuddlement, the work of a puzzlemaster carefully, solemnly revealing each and every piece without once letting us glimpse the overall design. Characters speak as if in a trance, if they speak at all. Images, full of carefully obscured import slowly pile up into a collection of textures of sound and image, color and emotion. It’s as intriguing as it is irritating. Carruth’s first film, the similarly complicated and elusive Primer, made for a mere $7,000 and meeting some acclaim upon release in 2004 before becoming something of a modern cult classic, is a sci-fi time travel film of pretzeling timelines told with simple staging and cold strings of jargon that exert a push and pull of mystery and confusion. I find it invigorating. With Upstream Color, however, I felt no pull, only push.

None of that is to say this film is particularly punishing or unspeakably incomprehensible. The narrative makes some sort of intuitive sense, even as the edits, each and every cut, appear to line up more with mood and music than narrative coherence. The first movement of the plot – for that’s what it feels like, less of a conventional narrative arc, but rather swirling movements of story and emotion – starts when a young, professional woman (Amy Seimetz) is cornered in a dark alley. Her attacker (Thiago Martins) pumps wriggling worms down her throat, creatures that must have some effect since she’s left a shell of herself, intently following her attacker’s confounding, hypnotic orders to solve puzzles, write Walden on paper chains, and sip ice water. This quietly terrifying section summons up great mystery and great expectations.

The next movement, which occurs after further complications I have skipped over in the effort to avoid springing all of the film’s puzzling developments, finds Seimetz, in a performance of powerfully rattled normalcy, some time after the attack. She seems to have no recollection of what has happened to her. On the train she meets a man (Carruth himself) and feels drawn to him. He’s drawn to her as well. They strike up a hesitant courtship, drawn into each other’s worlds with a romantic connection tinged with conspiratorial sparks unacknowledged. Did the hypnotic man with the worms attack him too? Their scenes together are intercut with the routine of a pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) who, as a hobby, takes a large microphone out into the woods and records interesting sounds to later speed up, slow down, and play on large speakers he places face down in a field for some inscrutable reason.

There are images and sensations in Upstream Color that I’ll not soon forget. I’ll remember the woman lying on a bed, her limbs wriggling like the worms that are, well, worming around inside her. I’ll remember the man and the woman telling stories of their childhoods in a montage that slowly blends their stories into one intimate, mildly hostile jumble. I’ll remember a burlap bag of piglets floating away. I’ll remember the man with the microphone solemnly looking out over the pigsty, watching the animals interact with each other. I’ll remember the couple huddled fully clothed in a dry bathtub, terrified that something – or maybe, worse yet, nothing – is out to get them.

But while all that memorable and intriguing material is all well and good, by the time the film arrives at its climactic scene of rapturous reunion (of a sort) I found myself unsatisfied. This incredibly simple plot in event and feeling is told with maximum obfuscation and artful complexity, but that’s largely for the sake of hiding its thinness for as long as possible. If the film merely continued on as a kind of dream, a trance of hypnotic imagery continually sliding past complete cohesion in perpetuity, it’d be better off. Alas, as a film it must eventually end and in drawing to a close, its conclusion reveals the whole enterprise to be nothing more than a mood, the wavelength upon which I could never quite get. Carruth is an exceptionally promising director. I’m glad he’s out there experimenting with structure, even if, to my mind, it doesn’t pay off nearly as well here as it did in Primer. I can only hope we don’t have to wait nearly a decade for his next film.

Heavy Metal: IRON MAN 3

Marvel has these Iron Man movies down to a formula that works for them. Going into one, we know we’ll meet Tony Stark, he’ll quip while introductions to this installment’s rouges’ gallery are made, and then things will get real serious for a time until everyone hops into metal suits, robots and weaponry activates, and the big showdown lasts until the pyrotechnics run out and the credits roll. After the overwhelming success of The Avengers, which put Stark in with a bunch of other Marvel heroes and let them rumble around for a while, there was some question if this old formula would still hold. To this I say, why not? Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, the sarcastic rich jerk jokester who can manage to hold that down long enough to save the day. He was instantly iconic when he first put on the armor back in 2008 and by now the role is inseparable from his inhabitation of it. He’s more than engaging enough to hold an entire movie, even one as perfunctory and mechanical as this one is.

The first Iron Man was an introduction, the second a total delight of a screwball actioner. In both cases, the charm came from the way director Jon Favreau pitched it all at the pace of a comedy, keeping the focus squarely on the performers and their interactions without letting the explosions weigh things down too heavily or distract from the personal stakes of it all. With Iron Man 3, Favreau handed the reigns to Shane Black, the screenwriter behind such muscular, sarcastic action efforts as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and who made his directorial debut in 2005 with the Downey-starring meta-genre goof Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Black knows his way around a quip but, unlike Favreau, doesn’t keep things frothy. He brings the pain. The threat here isn’t as strictly personal, unlike the first two installments, which had baddies (Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell) out for Tony Stark more or less individually. Here, a theatrical international terrorist known only as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is broadcasting threatening messages and setting off explosions in public places. He’s not after Iron Man; he’s after us, or so it seems.

It’s Tony Stark who makes it personal, arrogantly giving the address of his Malibu beach house to news cameras, daring the villain to come to him. Bad move. He does. This sets off a chain of events that leaves Stark out of his suit fending for himself, giving Downey plenty of screen time before he's put back into his inexpressive digital cocoon. The plot soon involves two scientists from Stark’s past, one (Guy Pearce) who runs and one (Rebecca Hall) who works for a mysterious organization that’s clearly up to no good. There’s also a flammable, repairable thug (James Badge Dale) and a cute little boy (Ty Simpkins) who factor into the proceedings when convenient, as well as returning characters like Stark’s long-suffering girlfriend and business associate Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the helpful, professional Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). All of these actors are clearly having a fun time, which helps to keep a movie with wall-to-wall special effects, danger and anxiety from becoming oppressively dour. Kingsley, especially, is having such a ball with his purposely over-the-top villainy that I found myself chuckling at his grave threats even as I vaguely registered the escalating stakes to which the film required me to respond.

Black’s script features a few nice twists, fun banter, a rapid pace, and some finely tuned comic lines of dialogue that sail in unexpectedly now and then and provide a welcome relief to the string of bloodless violence and collateral damage that makes up the villains’ plots. It’s all in good fun, evoking real-world menace and politics only to quash it under the metallic CGI boot of a billionaire engineer who is there to fix things as he can. It makes for an awkward fit, sliding between joking and deadly serious, cruel and almost sweet. The action set pieces are perfunctory at times, but end up mostly satisfying, like in a well-photographed air disaster and in one standoff that ends with a surprising bit of honesty on the part of a henchman. The finale may drone on for far too long and the explosions grow exhausting after a time, but that’s all part of the deal. There’s something to be said for a movie that sticks to its formula and serves up exactly what’s promised with some amount of skill. It’s rather inconsequential fun, the work of talented people simply giving us the usual skillful empty thrills.

Dumbbells: PAIN & GAIN

Michael Bay is Hollywood’s preeminent vulgarian. With movies like Armageddon and Transformers, he specializes in slick imagery that turns a gleaming gaze on people and technology with the same slobbering glee, an objectification that turns everything into button-pushing jolts of spectacle, collateral damage, and queasy humor that leans on distasteful stereotypes more often than not. This sometimes leads to enjoyable movies, sometimes not, but it certainly makes him the right person to direct Pain & Gain, a based-on-a-true-story caper about some lunkheads with big small dreams who basically imagine themselves the heroes of their own Michael Bay movie. His proudly juvenile adrenaline machines in which an outsized id runs free through a glamorously ugly caricature world fits with a story so grotesque and unbelievable it simply must be true (or at least exaggerated from the truth).

The action takes place in Miami during 1994 and 1995. There at the time Bay was filming his feature debut, the cop buddy action comedy Bad Boys. So, alas, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the main character of this movie, instead cites Rocky, Scarface and The Godfather as his cinematic motivation. He, conveniently forgetting the ultimate fate of the protagonists of those films, thinks of them as good examples of guys who made something of themselves, something to aspire to as he prepares to chase his American dream: lots of money, lots of things, and lots of pretty women. He has what he thinks is a great get-rich-quick plan, a sure-fire all-American, get-what’s-coming-to-him windfall. When questioned about his scheme he says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.”

And what is Daniel's plot? He has happened to gain a new client, rich jerk Victor (Tony Shalhoub), who walked into Sun Gym looking for a personal trainer. He’s the kind of guy who says, “You know who invented salads? Poor people.” He’s not a nice guy. Daniel's idea is to recruit two of his co-workers, the steroidal Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and the born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), to help kidnap Victor, make him sign over all his assets blindfolded, and then return him to his routine unable to do anything about it. That sounds easy enough, if rather implausible and with countless details that need to be worked out. But Daniel doesn’t seem to notice those and his partners in crime don’t ask many questions. They all think they’re about to get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s a group of guys smart enough to cook up a scheme, but too dumb to get away unscathed.

The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gives us overlapping narration from all three men and their victim, giving us four perspectives on the events as they unfold. The dissonance between the confidence they constantly speak to us and each other, the pumped-up sheen of Bay’s filmmaking, and the string of dumb decisions they proceed to make provides a recipe for a savage pitch black comedy. When things start to go wrong, as you know they must, it turns into a kind of humid, sun-baked Fargo. (There’s a nasty bit of business with a pile of dismembered limbs that rivals that film’s wood chipper scene.) Bay shoots it all with a smug satisfaction, snickering at these meatheads for buying so whole-heartedly into the American dream of having it all and getting away with it that they can’t see it’s a lie with which all truly successful people learn to compromise. Early on, Wahlberg attends a lecture from a transparently phony motivational speaker (Ken Jeong) and leaves feeling nothing but starry-eyed confidence. Yes, he thinks, even he can make his dreams of obscene wealth come true. That he should go about it in a brutal, haphazard, illegal way is a source of the humor, but in the insistence that perhaps he’s a fool to try anything at all, the film is cynical, nihilistic social satire to its core.

There are no heroes here. The criminals are misguided lugs impossible to root for. Their victim is a smarmy slimeball who’s impossible to wish victory upon. Bay puts the audience in the sometimes uncomfortable position of simply watching the gears of plot turn on these awful people. The late edition of a private eye played by Ed Harris as a weary pragmatist and the only person of professional competence in the whole movie and as such seems to be subtextually shaking his head at the sad weirdness of it all, like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, does much to help cut through the ugliness. But what sometimes beautiful ugliness! Bay’s muscular showiness is put to good use here, laying out tawdry, glittery lifestyles of the almost rich and gaudily infamous-in-their-own-minds, lives that play out sadly in gyms, strip clubs, and on Floridian beaches.

There’s huge entertainment to be had in the rapid-fire montage that keeps the pace speedy throughout the entire two-hour-plus runtime and the collision of light performances with the heavy dark violence and vulgarity. Instead of risking the audience lose track of his satirical point, Bay makes it quite clear that he’s in on the joke. As brutish satire, it makes its jabs early and finds only ways to repeat them thereafter. Luckily the performers (I haven’t even mentioned fun supporting roles filled by Rob Corddry, Bar Paly and Rebel Wilson) are agile and funny and the story itself is strange and unpredictable enough to keep things interesting. It’s a credit to the great cast, twisty plot, and Bay’s aggressively watchable, just-shy-of garishly colorful style that I didn’t grow tired. I didn’t love it or loathe it, but I think I had fun.

Wonder, Wander: TO THE WONDER

To the Wonder is the kind of film that’s so evocative and thought provoking that to say it is about nothing says more about you than about the film. It’s the latest from Terrence Malick, the master poet of cinema. He wields the camera and the editing bay like Whitman or Frost used their pens, sketching beautiful imagery and natural detail to evoke in an instant the deepest of reflections. Unlike his last film, the confident spiritual coming-of-age panorama The Tree of Life, this new film is confident in its hesitance. Here is a film that pushes his style even further, more abstraction and more ellipsis, dialogue slipping further away from the images, narration sparser and rarely less than a kind of pure yearning for an elusive something. Where Tree of Life, through an intensely personal montage of childhood experience, managed to examine existence itself from the dawn of time to an abstract timelessness of a conclusion, To the Wonder is an earthy, specific, and wounded picture about characters shyly, strongly trying and failing to connect with each other and with a sense of a bigger picture. What is Truth? What is Love? What is Wonder?

The Wonder of the title refers to a literal place, the island Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France, where Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) spend happy hours in the beginning of their romance. We see them nuzzling each other, caressing shoulders, holding hands, relaxed, leaning into each other’s arms. But Wonder can be both awe, a miraculous feeling of surprise and revelation, and pondering, to be filled with curiosity and questioning. These two characters will spend the course of the film wondering towards wonder as the film follows them in and out of love. Neil, in love with this Parisian woman, wishes to move back to the United States with her and so Marina, along with her daughter, follows him there, happy at first, but eventually consumed with a nagging emptiness as their relationship strains.

But we begin in a state of love. The two communicate their love, their infatuation, through touching, through subtle exposures. They chase after each other playfully, entering into a kind of dance with Emmanuel Lubezki’s expressive cinematography that captures landscapes both natural and manmade with a wandering poetic eye, lingering on tall stalks of grass in windswept fields, shallow water on shifting mud as the tide rolls in, tidy lines of colorful packages on aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves, cool fluorescent reflections on a row of laundromat washers. These two people are merely another aspect of these landscapes, their every movement, their very proximity to each other becoming richly evocative of their emotional states.

As they fall out of love, that distance is no longer a dance of playfulness, but rather a hazy mood of stillness and resonant, hesitant serenity. Dissatisfaction sets in with the distance. Proximity often brings argument, muffled dissonance beneath the quietly swirling score. We hear their voices, hers more than his, whispering to us in urgent narration, questioning their place in the world, entering in conversations with their innermost desires and fears, pleading to a God they may or may not find comfort in. Even what Malick captures of their routines gathers metaphoric weight. He tests soil and water near construction sights for underlying problems, trying to keep forward movement from inadvertently destroying those around it. She is often found drifting, twirling, sitting in sparsely furnished rooms (impeccably designed by Jack Fisk) and empty streets, aimless and yearning. There’s a sense that they need more than each other to be happy, but the matter of what that more entails is something with which they wrestle and wonder, together sometimes, but largely alone.

An intriguing comparison to their plight – held in tension between needs both philosophical and physical – is found in an even more sparsely plotted and overtly meditative subplot about a priest (Javier Bardem) who presides over the congregation the characters attend. We follow him as he moves, every step and action controlled, as he moves isolated through a Bressonian collection of visits to the homes and neighborhoods of his most impoverished congregants. We hear his voice on the soundtrack as well, whispering to God for answers even as he’s reaching out to those in pain, which causes him pain. Is this love? It’s a spiritual love and earthly devotion that becomes a burden on the man who takes it as his solemn duty.

To call To the Wonder plotless is only to note how Malick has moved from positioning his poetry of cinema in more conventional containers – his Badlands and Days of Heaven period pieces with genre elements held in place by a mood that was already distinctly his, The Thin Red Line and The New World historical epics, The Tree of Life bildungsromans of both one boy and the world itself – to a film that is ruminative and expressive, finding outward expression of interior feelings its overwhelming feature and intent. I found myself thinking of poet Archibald MacLeish’s line “A poem should not mean / But be.” In its abstraction in pursuit of stronger emotion, To the Wonder does not mean, but is. Detail comes strong and precise – a new flame (Rachel McAdams) during a separation, a child suddenly entering the picture – sitting in focus, then fading, perhaps unexplained, but still felt, into the current of life, in a questioning quest to the purity of awe.