Ava: Believable Assassin

Checking in with a review of Ava, a relatively new movie (September 20) about a female assassin which just went up on Netflix last week.

First of all, it has some real star power: Jessica Chastain as the assassin, John Malkovich, Common, and Colin Farrell in her supporting cast.  Now, they've been any number of atrocious movies with big stars over the years.  But Ava isn't among them.  It's a pretty good movie, lifted by the likes of just hearing Malkovich talk.

And the fight scenes are good.  I don't know, are there assassins of either gender in real life who can take on and out 20 people coming at you?  Probably not.  But Ava was convincing.

And so was the worn narrative of your own organization turning against you, because you some sort of weak spot (in Ava's case, talking to the mark about why he or she thought Ava was about to kill them).  This narrative was convincing as soon as it got to the point where you couldn't tell who was going to survive or not, and when.  This included the effective question mark at the very end.

So, if you're up for a somewhat offbeat assassin movie, with characters who manage to be believable because of acting more than the script, give Ava a shot.   And make sure no one like her gets too close to you in real life.

 

Bird Box: Definitely Watch, Don't Do

I'm not usually a fan of post-apocalyptic horror - I even gave up on The Walking Dead last year - but Bird Box on Netflix is something else.  That is, it's post-apocalyptic horror alright, but done with such sensitivity and style as to be in a class by itself.  It also doesn't hurt to see top talent like Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich on the screen, along with newer talent like Trevante Rhodes who does a fine job, too.

The story is a take on the ancient Medusa myth.   If you looked at her, you would turn to stone.  In Bird Box, some hideous creatures that we never actually see afflict our world.  To look at them is to go crazy, in one of two ways.  Either you commit suicide, which is what happens to most onlookers, or you become an agent of the creatures, with a view to convincing other humans to look at these "beautiful" things.  In that sense, Bird Box is also in the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In such a world, the only way to survive is to be indoors with the curtains drawn, in a car with the windows covered and the driver can't look outside either, or if you're outside on foot make sure you wear a blindfold, too.  (This has jumped off screen and led to the Bird Box challenge, which Netflix has warned against.)  In the movie, driving with blindfold requires reliance on GPS - in one of the best scenes of the movie - and you know how reliable GPS is even in a world without monsters.

Bullock plays Malorie, a mother of two little kids, and Malkovich someone who professes to never be wrong (and he's right).  I won't say  more about plot, because there are many jolts you'd be better off seeing uninformed.  But I will say that I did guess one of the key plot points, which is that blind people have an edge in this world on the precipice of insanity and death.  (This also harkens back to Marshall McLuhan's view that in his explorations of media he was like a blind man with a cane, tapping the world for deeper resonances, not distracted by visual biases; see McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 1972, p. 8).

Beautifully photographed.  Directed by Susanne Bier from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer from the novel by Josh Malerman, and highly recommended.


brief interview with Josh Malerman

 

winner, Locus Award, Best 1st Science Fiction Novel, 1999

Crossbones: Slow Start but Possibilities

Hey, I like erudite pirate stories.   So I took a look at Crossbones, which debuted on NBC last Friday.   It seems to have a lot in common with Black Sails on Starz, except no nudity, no frank language - casualties of being on a broadcast network, unconstitutionally regulated by the FCC - and not much sex, either, explicit or otherwise.   Still, those absences are not necessarily fatal to a TV series, and indeed network series still garner millions of viewers without those cable accoutrements.

But Crossbones directly stole a major part of the Black Sails plot - the ingenious idea to memorize vital information, after destroying its printed source, to make the memorizer's life safe from the dangerous crew seeking said information.   Now, I know there's been theft of ideas going in Hollywood since the days of D. W. Griffith, so, for all I know, the Crossbones writers had this idea first.  But in terms of the presentations of the two stories on television, Black Sails was definitely there first.

Crossbones does have a few things going for it, though.  The dialogue is indeed as intelligent as the talk on Black Sails, and both are still rarities on television.  John Malkovich is a great actor, and his performance as Blackbeard  on Crossbones is good to see.   Richard Coyle as Tom Lowe - apparently a doctor as well as an operative for the British crown with a license to kill - is also pretty good.   And Claire Foy's Kate Balfour has some potential, too - as a romantic interest of Lowe, even though she's married, and as an intriguing character with unclear and complex loyalties in her own right.

There's also a pretty good twist at the end, as Lowe seeks to complete his mission to kill Blackbeard, which we know cannot succeed, since eliminating Malkovich from the show at the beginning would be insane.   But the swift, surprising developments at the end show that Crossbones has the capacity to engage our interest, and mine is at least engaged enough to watch the next episode.

 
more ancient than Crossbones, and even more erudite