Reel Entropy

Christian Bale stars as an extremely stabby version of Moses. Bale called the character schizophrenic and barbaric. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Exodus: Gods and Kings looked like an awful, boring re-telling of Moses’ story that gives in to the same vices all biblical adaptations are subject to, and for the most part that’s exactly what it is.

One of the oldest stories in human history, the basic plot remains intact. Moses (Christian Bale), an adopted Egyptian prince, learns that he actually hails from the Hebrew people whom the Egyptians enslave. When this comes to light, Moses is banished into the wilderness, where he does quite well for himself, eventually settling down with Zipporah (María Valverde). But, while climbing a forbidden mountain after some sheep, Moses gets knocked out by a falling rock and hallucinates that a burning bush that a small, annoying child claiming to be God (Isaac Andrews) standing next to a burning bush tells him to … well, it’s implied that he tells Moses to return to Egypt and free the Hebrews and everybody knows that’s what he’s there to say, but he’s actually a deliberately obtuse little puke whose instructions are more reminiscent of a stupid person being cryptic to disguise the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

On this hallucination’s non-instruction, Moses abandons his family and rallies the Hebrew slaves into a dramatic looking but apparently ineffective siege of Memphis, because for some reason they can get horses, pitch, bows and arrows, the space to train with them and the room to use them effectively, but they can’t just walk out of the place. The mirage brat God mocks his military efforts, then causes a series of completely explainable natural disasters that Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) eventually interprets as proof that the Hebrew God is forcing him to let the slaves go.

Exodus: Gods and Kings, along with Noah earlier this year, are the first movies to really treat the Bible like a work of fiction that is changeable and adaptable to a filmmaker’s vision. It’s bold and I like it, but it carries much bigger risks than regular adaptations. Mess with the plot details of Twilight or Eragon, you alienate a fanbase in the midst an audience that largely doesn’t know the story. Mess with the plot details of the Old Testament, that fanbase is more than half of the global population and the audience they’re in the midst of also knows the story quite well. Every detail must be deliberate, either slavishly faithful or intentionally changed.

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That’s Steve Carrell. Seriously. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

It’s looking like all the major awards this year are going to be between Foxcatcher and Birdman, and Birdman should win every single one, but Foxcatcher is still pretty OK.

The third biopic of director Bennett Miller’s career, after following writer Truman Capote and general manager Billy Beane, follows Olympic gold wrestlers and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) after billionaire philanthropist John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carell) sponsors their training for the upcoming world championships and next Olympics. The characters are set up in a battle of mentors, with du Pont and Dave Schultz battling for Mark Schultz’ soul.

Miller is a masterful filmmaker who has demonstrated time and time again the ability to find the human element behind the real-life events that he recreates in film, though the reproductions do need to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Foxcatcher is much more Capote than Moneyball, driven by acting and constructed mostly of long shots in which not much happens.

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Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams) refers to his hair as a black hole for white people’s fingers. Higgins is supposedly an author avatar for writer/director Justin Simien. Photo courtesy Roadside Attractions.

In January, Paramount Pictures publicity coordinator Justin Simien entered his racial satire Dear White People into Sundance, coming away with the Breakthrough Talent Award. In October, the film starts releasing across the U.S. to critical acclaim.

In November, two grand juries in different parts of the country announced that two police officers who killed black men they were trying to arrest for barely ticketable offenses would not even be tried, despite multiple eyewitness accounts and, in one case, video evidence of the incident. These decisions have led to widespread sometimes violent protests and demand for police reform across the country.

Dear White People is a comedy about the new face of racism in the U.S., but that face has rapidly regressed to its old, violent self since the movie’s release, and it’s suddenly unclear whether the subject is funny anymore.

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Scumbag wife (Felicity Jones) marries man quickly losing the ability to control his legs (Eddie Redmayne) THEN BUYS A HOUSE WITH STAIRS. WHY DID THEY BUY A HOUSE WITH STAIRS. Photo courtesy Focus Features.

Stephen Hawking reportedly cried at a screening of his biopic and lent his own voice to the production.

The man is a physics wizard, but given this information, he might not know very much about movies.

Theory of Everything is a boring, standard, blow-by-blow breakdown of Hawking’s Wikipedia biography. Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne, studies at Oxford while coming down with Lou Gehrig’s disease and meeting Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), whom he marries after, like, one date. Then, later, they have children. Then, later, Hawking gets a doctorate. Then, later, some other stuff happens — it’s essentially a highlight reel of the man’s life from diagnosis to the knighthood he declined in ’89.

Director James Marsh might have never put down his copy of “Filmmaking for Dummies” while shooting this. There’s a lot of conventions in here that filmmaking textbooks say are good, but nothing is ever good just because that’s how the filmmaking textbook said it would be.

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