Finch: Post-apocalyptic sentimentality

Finch (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violent images and dramatic intensity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.12.21

Tom Hanks apparently wasn’t satisfied with spending the majority of a film interacting solely with a volleyball, even if that coup did bring him an Oscar nomination. After all, 2000’s Cast Away did involve other people during the prologue and conclusion.

 

Ready for just about anything: Finch (Tom Hanks, left) and his humanoid robot companion
pack abundant supplies into a waiting RV, while the four-legged Goodyear leads the way.

Finch, on the other hand, is solely a one-man show.

 

Except that it isn’t … not really. Nor am I certain Hanks is the stand-out actor here; that honor arguably belongs to Seamus, co-starring as the four-legged Goodyear.

 

Since movies often reflect the times in which they’re made, the world clearly has been in a highly anxious state for awhile now, given the number of post-apocalyptic projects we’ve gotten during the past several years. This is yet another one, and scripters Craig Luck and Ivor Powell quickly establish as bleak a scenario as could be imagined.

 

For once (happily?), the cause is beyond human control.

 

The time is roughly 15 years in the future; the barren, heat-blasted St. Louis cityscape is beset by swirling sand and dust. Finch Weinberg (Hanks) appears amidst this inhospitable environment, unrecognized within a protective radiation suit, accompanied by a modified lunar rover possessing the ability to see and respond to spoken commands, while using its single extendable clawed appendage as needed.

 

(Given this ’bot’s appearance, and the fact that it’s named Dewey, the homage to 1972’s Silent Running clearly is intentional.)

 

They’re scavenging as-yet unsearched stores for anything useful, carefully avoiding the occasional skeletized body.

 

As we gradually learn, a massive solar flare destroyed Earth’s ozone layer a decade earlier. Temperatures rose to 150 degrees; ultraviolet radiation became instantly deadly. The resourceful Finch, one of few survivors, built himself a well-equipped bunker in the basement of the robotics lab where he once worked. He has lived there ever since, accompanied solely by his faithful dog, Goodyear.

 

Finch has kept busy — and maintained his sanity — with a variety of projects, including his most ambitious yet: a humanoid robot “fed” the scanned contents of the hundreds of reference books found during foraging expeditions. Once sentient, this new companion also is versed in Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, along with a new fourth law.

 

Although it draws a smile, when spoken, it’s equally serious: “In Finch’s absence, robot must protect the welfare of dog, This directive supersedes all other directives.”

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Signs of the Times?

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for violence and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang

This one’s not for the faint of heart.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh’s savagely dark assault on mainstream sensibilities is both a blistering burlesque and a painfully raw depiction of despair, frustration and unchecked rage. Much of this film obviously cannot — should not — be taken seriously; unfortunately, quite a lot also feels excruciatingly real.

Although troubled by the rather drastic step that Mildred (Frances McDormand) has taken,
in an effort to achieve closure regarding her daughter's long-unsolved murder, Police
Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) checks his emotions while explaining the
frustrating circumstances behind the case.

And not all that unlikely.

The film is powered by Frances McDormand’s sensational starring performance, an acting tour-de-force even more persuasive — more believably, subtly grounded, even within exaggerated circumstances — than her Academy Award-winning work in 1996’s Fargo. And I never, ever expected to write those words.

Her Mildred Hayes is wracked with grief and unresolved anger: a single mother pushed to the edge by her teenage daughter’s gruesome rape/murder, which remains unsolved after seven months. Fed up with what she perceives as investigative apathy, Mildred purchases messages on three long-unused billboards standing alongside the quiet road leading to her home.

The three-part message is a direct and controversial challenge to local police chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson).

Many of the residents in bucolic Ebbings regard Mildred’s provocative act as profoundly unfair. Tellingly, Willoughby isn’t all that bothered. But second-in-command Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature, racist, violence-prone mama’s boy who wouldn’t know prudence if she kissed him, gets ugly. Repeatedly.

The subsequent unraveling of McDonagh’s vicious narrative is laden with revelations, which is much of the fun: You simply cannot anticipate the twists and U-turns, and there’s no sense trying.

Casting is the first surprise, because Harrelson has built his career — in great measure — on a series of unbalanced and even dangerous misanthropes; we naturally expect the same here. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Willoughby is the story’s most rational, thoughtful and level-headed character: a decent man who wins our respect, because he responds to Mildred not with hostility, but kindness and sympathy.

It’s an absolutely cold case, he gently explains, after the billboards go up. No telling evidence. No DNA hits. Nada.

Harrelson exudes good-natured pragmatism and intelligence; he’s genuinely endearing. We all should be so lucky, to have such a thoughtful police chief.

Mildred is unconvinced; Willoughby acknowledges this as her right.

American Made: The satiric veneration of a scoundrel

American Made (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for relentless profanity and occasional nudity
By Derrick Bang

The only thing more unsettling than this film, is the possibility that the truth is even worse.

Barry Seal (Tom Cruise, left) hands an envelope stuffed with cash to Manuel Noriega
(Alberto Ospino, right), in exchange for a folder containing unspecified intel: merely one
of various questionable activities that Barry undertakes on behalf of the CIA.

The notorious Barry Seal’s jaw-dropping career has long screamed for big-screen treatment, and director Doug Liman’s American Made wisely casts the saga as a personality-driven dark comedy that transforms Seal’s illicit activities into the stuff of overstated burlesque. Tom Cruise is absolutely perfect for the role, his ear-splitting grin and smug swagger delivering the charisma that everybody acknowledged was Seal’s greatest asset.

At the same time, there’s no question that Gary Spinelli’s script — he acknowledges none of the existing books about Seal — sugar-coats a lot of bad things, time-shifts others, baldly fabricates events, and outright ignores some of his subject’s worst character deficiencies. The result would play well on a double-bill with Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, which similarly turned the heinous behavior of opportunistic swindler Jordan Belfort into the stuff of dark farce.

Both films are slick, fast-paced and thoroughly engaging: no question, a lot of fun to watch. Both also add an eyebrow-raising layer of sophisticated exhilaration to the illicit behavior of their respective subjects, as if to suggest they’re modern updates of E.W. Hornung’s debonair gentleman burglar, A.J. Raffles.

To be fair, Liman and Spinelli have the added advantage of what could be termed the “Barry Seal mystique”: the ongoing uncertainty that revolves around the degree to which his activities were — or weren’t — tolerated, if indeed orchestrated, by various U.S. intelligence, drug and government entities. No question: This film will be loved by conspiracy theorists, and particularly by those willing to assume the worst of the Reagan-era administration.

Spinelli goes all in, accepting and expanding upon rumors that Seal operated with the full awareness and cooperation of everything from the CIA to the DEA and those involved with Nancy Reagan’s “war on drugs.” Along the way, the saga suggests Seal’s intimate involvement with everybody from Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega, to Bill Clinton, Oliver North and the Iran/Contra scandal. Even a young George W. Bush gets a brief but telling moment (with a line of dialogue guaranteed to raise a smile).

Cruise’s distracting strut aside, careful attention must be paid to the way Liman constructs his film, most particularly with respect to the implications of his framing device. The bulk of the narrative may feel like an intoxicating roller coaster ride, but Liman carefully maintains an undertone of anxiety and outright danger.