Monthly Archives: January 2016

The Martian Is a Feel-Good Movie that Earns Every Bit of the Feeling


Despite a number of well-crafted elements, the success or failure of The Martian absolutely depended on Matt Damon’s performance in the lead role. It’s true that, in contrast to spiritual predecessors like Gravity and Castaway, the film was not a one-man show, instead featuring a murderer’s row of stellar supporting players. What’s more, its narrative thrills were not limited to its protagonist’s adventures on Mars; The Martian told an equally compelling story of what was happening back home.

But Damon’s Mark Watney, and his lonely trials and tribulations on a desolate planet, were the lifeblood of the film, commanding the lion’s share of its run time and focus. That meant that for much of the movie, Damon alone had to convey his character’s distress, his resolve, his humor, and his humanity, with no one but the camera to talk to. And despite that handicap, he succeeded with flying colors. Few major roles share the degree of difficulty of Damon’s here, where the main character spends much of the film in solitude, with little in the way of major plot developments or action to maintain the energy of the picture, and the performance Damon delivered with that backdrop more than lived up to the challenge.

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The Simpsons: How “Moaning Lisa” Learns to Make Something Out of Sadness


The story of Lisa on The Simpsons is, in many ways, a tragic one. More than any other character on the show, she does not really fit into Springfield. That means that when she’s facing the type of complex problems that bother a sensitive young woman like herself, there’s little hope for a helping hand from someone who could address those problems with a level of understanding beyond her own.

Bart loves his sister, even if he can only admit it in a roundabout way, but he’s a brat whose bad behavior draws his parents’ attentions away from a child who needs it just as much, if not more. Homer, as Lisa acknowledges, means well and cares about his daughter, but he’s in so far over his head when it comes to the big questions nagging at her that he’s not much help beyond a good hug. That leaves Marge, perhaps the least-regarded member of The Simpson family among the show’s fans, as the only character on the show who “gets” Lisa.

Marge’s connection to her daughter makes her the emotional core of episodes like “Moaning Lisa”, particularly within the more grounded confines of The Simpsons’s first season. Even if Marge is, at times, a little too provincial to truly connect with her daughter’s world-weary concerns, she understands that Lisa is a remarkably precocious child, and that along with the insight and intelligence that will hopefully give her a better life someday, Lisa’s greater potential comes part and parcel with a greater set of challenges as well. The throughline for the episode, heavy stuff though it may be, is Lisa and Marge working through these types of challenges.

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The Hateful Eight Is Quentin Tarantino’s Meditation on Justice, Tribalism, and Identity

Caution: This review contains major spoilers for The Hateful Eight.

The Hateful Eight is filled with characters who are constantly performing for one another. Some of them are pretending to be something they’re not in the hopes of avoiding detection, some tell tall tales with theatrical enthusiasm in order to provoke, while others embellish at the margins to puff themselves up or knock someone else down. It’s no grand reveal when discussing a Quentin Tarantino movie to note that more than a few of them meet a bloody end, but what’s striking about the director’s eighth film is the way that the personas his characters assume, what roles they inhabit and which factions they align themselves with, change the kind of consequences they face within it.

The Hateful Eight is a film about justice and tribalism and how those two concepts inevitably lead to some strange, unsettling outcomes when combined. At the same time, the movie is just as concerned with how the identities that we project affect the kind of “justice” we receive.

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