HOLY MOTORS: Who were we when we were who we were?

 

HOLY MOTORS is extraordinary cinema in its rawest form—it pickles the ordinary universe using something extra: a weirdly instable brine that suspends the audience too in disbelief, curiosity, and wonder.  It fucks with you, for real.  I loved it.

A plot summary is barely possible and almost superfluous but since this is a scarcely seen film here goes: a strange man named Mr. Oscar wakes up in an unknown place, possibly in a dream.  He unlocks a door in his wall and stumbles upon a theatre, where the audience sits transfixed by a film.  Cut to another time—possibly another place: Mr. Oscar leaves his family, waving to his kids and getting into a white stretched limo piloted by his loyal blond driver Celine.  Celine informs him he has nine “appointments” today, it’s going to be a busy one.   Mr. Oscar sighs and straightens his tie, ever the professional.

Here’s where things get weird.  Oscar proceeds through his appointments one by one, actions which constitute the bulk of the film.  Each appointment demands Oscar take on a new identity—and he literally transforms himself in the limo with much latex, makeup, and stage effects.  Each appointment, each little vignette Oscar participates in, ends as quickly as it begins and he returns to the limo afterwards, ripping off his costumes.

Here are the nine “appointments” Oscar has:

1-    As an OLD BEGGAR WOMAN he begs for change under a Paris bridge

2-    As a motion capture stuntman, he does green screen work and makes love to another performer

3-    As a strange, spastic demon, or perhaps a deranged leprechaun, he takes to the sewers and resurfaces during an artsy American photo shoot.  He steals the fashion model (Eva Mendes) after biting off an assistant’s finger,  and absconds to some trinket-lined cave, where the pair cuddle together in some sort of silent harmony

4-    He picks up his “daughter” from a party in Paris, chastises her when she lies about her behavior during the party.  “Don’t ever lie to me” this professional “liar” *

5-    He kills a man in a warehouse, and then shaves the man’s head and alters his body, effectively “becoming” his victim

6-    He performs a random assassination of a “banker” who is eating in a café

7-    He checks into a hotel, where a niece arrives to say goodbye to him before he dies of old age.  They have a lovely bedside goodbye as the man dies, at which point Oscar excuses himself, as he’s late for his last appointment

8-    His limo crashes into another Limo, which is driven by a woman who seems to be doing the same job he is—rushing around Paris performing random actions—and he recognizes her.   Apparently they had met 20 years before and had some sort of romance.  They have a brief romantic stroll where she suddenly breaks into choreographed song—oh, by the way she is Kylie Minouge—before he suddenly has to leave because “her partner” is arriving.  When he does, the woman—now in a wig and costume as a flight attendant—leaps from a rooftop in an apparent double suicide. *

      9-    Finally Oscar returns “home” --  a new home that’s  not where he started – and rejoins his wife and child.  They are orangutans.
  

Yes, orangutans.  As you can see—HOLY MOTORS doesn’t really resemble any film you have ever seen.  From the above you could reasonably suspect that the movie is drivel, meaningless “weirdness” meant to confuse and titillate, but not inspire or create some sort of emotional response.  You’d be wrong.  HOLY MOTORS pulls off an amazing trick—holy-moly it may just be one of the best films of the year.  There is meaning here.

I put two asterisks above on scenes 4 and 8 because I think the key to understanding the film is in the mathematics.  We know Oscar has nine tasks to perform, but the film cleverly obscures what exactly constitutes a task.  For instance, his “double” murder where he paints his victim to look like himself, does that count as one or two performances?  The banker he killed, which seemed a spontaneous action that, upon completing, Celine had to drag him back to the Limo – does that count? What about his “daughter – is that his real daughter or just his daughter for this scene, because he mentions he needs to get “back to work”? Most vitally, the romance with Kylie Minouge, they claim to have 20 minutes to spare before their next appointment so they can revive an old affair.  But then that scene explodes in the same hysterical, overwrought emotionality of the other vignettes—there is a stirring love song and beautiful rooftop vista.  Minouge commits suicide and Oscar is distraught, screaming and he rushes back into the limo.  Was that a scene, was that an appointment, or just “genuine” living between appointments?
  

At first you are inclined to think that that was the “real” Oscar, but later, when my friends with whom I saw this with it  tried to work out the numbers of Oscar’s appointments, it seemed clear that this was just another of the tasks he was to perform.  This isn’t incidental; it speaks to a major thematic point of this heavily existential film.  Playing with the postmodern device of stacked realities, we aren’t sure what behavior is the “genuine” action, how could we with these oddly-motivated “actors” riding around in limos doing behaviors just because some file tells them they need to?  What does anything in life mean if it is just a procession of scenes played out by actors, rote performances they are compelled to do?  There is no “life outside appointments” for Oscar because that too is an appointment.  We cannot escape the predestination of human interaction – we are, in a way, machines programmed to simply behave: this way, that way, this way again; stealing a kiss in the night, shooting a man in cold blood, holding a daughter to your shoulder, dying in the arms of a loving niece.  

The mechanical, cold existentialism the film espouses crystallizes amazingly in the final moment of the film.  SPOILER ALERT, if this film interests you I’d just see it rather than keep reading:

After dropping Oscar off to his last appointment, Celine says she’ll see him the next morning for another day of work, and heads off to the depot to drop off her limo.  There are many other limos pulling into this station—bright neon signs tells us its called ”Holy Motors”—presumably driven by people just like Celene, who have also just dropped off ciphers just like Oscar.  Celine lets down her hair, and puts on a mask—says to someone on the phone  that “she’s coming home.”  Perhaps she is performing an action too—perhaps she is also someone controlled by the "Agency"?  

The lights go off in the garage and suddenly—well—suddenly the unmanned parked limousines start talking to each other, their headlights flaring briefly as each “speaks” (oddly, in English).  They talk about their owners and their place as antiquated “machines” in a world where men no longer want to use machines they can see—machines with physical engines.  They refer to one another by their model numbers and talk of their long days of work.  A final headlight blinks out as the film ends.

Nonsense? Hardly.  It’s a funny joke surely, as is much of the film—designed to smack you over the head with its absurdity and visual clarity.  But the cars talking are more than a joke – they emerge as the “real” characters and one further Russian Stacking Doll in the conundrum postmodern reality of HOLY MOTORS.  A mind fuck, sure, but also a fucking mind – that’s what this cars represent.  A genuine mind functioning outside of the narrative chaos of the “Actors” outside the parking garage.  Human society, then, in the final moment, is little more than the daily work of our cars, the machines that shuttle us around, who bring us to one appointment or the next.  They are doing the true work, and we are are what they use to do it.

As Kylie Minogue sings in her mournful song sequence: who were we/ who were we/ when we were/ what we were/  back then.

It’s  a bleak message in a truly hilarious film: our love scenes, our deaths, our hard choices and big moments are more or less interchangeable and forgettable.  One human life resembles another.  We are performing the necessary scenes, and that’s all, but is it really “us” at all doing these things?  Who are we when we are who we are? 

We are living out scenes from so many generic movies—a romance, a gangster movie, a family drama.  But we are incapable of discovering anything original, because everything is programmed. We are machines indeed, celestially programmed holy motors.  Us.

You go to the movies for fun, to eat twizzlers, laugh cry get scared fall in love remember live die.  Holy Motors offers all of this and it’s glorious.  But it also asks us to think—to really think—and to engage with the ideas of the movie.  Why is that so hard somehow?  It seems against our programming to think about our programming, an amazing insight this film strips bare.   If you have the opportunity, and you can stomach it, get in your car and head to the theater.

 Or maybe walk.

SKYFALL

I was really looking forward to seeing SKYFALL, so I gathered a group of James Bond fans and spent my Saturday night in the slightly dingy seats of the Court Street multiplex.  And the verdict: like the theatre itself, it’s fine—does what it’s supposed to do—but is truly, if you really get down to it, just a little bit shitty.

Yes, light your torches and sharpen your sticks to pierce my disaffected, iconoclastic heart: did not like SKYFALL.  Or, to be more precise, I liked certain action sequences and moments but did not get into this film the way I got into, say, CASINO ROYALE—probably my favorite in the series.   I feel a little better saying it because my fellow movie going group felt similarly – worth the money maybe, but not nearly what we were expecting.  But still I’m up against what amounts to an insurmountable firewall of goodwill around the film, which top critics—including persnickety, academic, Hollywood-outsiders like Armond White—are calling the best of the series, or just merely exceptional.  That’s probably the only word I would NOT use to describe this film, which has all the hallmarks, all the gadgets, all the cars—yet lacks…what is it exactly…

For one, I think we are encountering an unexpected and unfortunate fallout from the financial success of these multi-film powerhouse franchises that seem to be bolstering the industry for the last, say, ten years—the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTERS—where one film markets the next: they are reliably released, easily categorized, and for the benefit of an under-informed, can’t-be-bothered populace, crystal-clear on what they will deliver.  You don’t see ORDER OF THE PHOENIX if you hated GOBLET OF FIRE, although maybe you do, I don’t know. 

This ties into SKYFALL, which is not an outright sequel, because the tendency in Daniel Craig’s stint as Bond is to create what is more of a sequence of essentially unified adventures—an unfurling mythology—than what used to be the Bond series M.O.  Before, we had the same guy, same ways, same martini – but each film was stand alone and inconsequential towards the greater universe of the Franchise.  We get Halle Berrie or the latest flavor of the week—they live, they die, it doesn’t matter.  There’s always next time, and by then the tears will be dried up, the wounds will heal, the faces we know may even change.  This is the engine by which runs a franchise that has seen some seven or eight leading men take on the titular role.  This is one of the singular joys of James Bond—we know how this guy works: he’s sexy, he’s smooth, he’s a killing machine, and more than anything else—he’s replaceable. 

SKYFALL—and in hindsight the entire Craig trilogy of Bond films--doesn’t trust this formula.   Now Bond needs to be vulnerable as well as stoic, loving as well as lustful.  He needs to be mortal.  Worst of all, he needs a past.  SKYFALL offers a glimpse at Bond’s upbringing, the fate of his parents, his recruitment by Judi Dench as ‘M’.  Craig’s is a Bond not interchangeable; a covalent bond—bound as much by audience’s shared understanding of what it is to be a person (the lonely, misunderstood spy) as the awe they feel for his awesome, jetsetter lifestyle.  For all his chiseled granite features, his dead eyes, he is in many ways the “softest” Bond we’ve seen.

So I resent in a way New Bond’s tendency to mythologize, which somehow subtracts from the pure jouissance of these loveable tropes.  Fine.  But even if you disagree with me that this compulsion does some sort of existential damage to the capital-C Character of James Bond, surely you’ll agree to this: the fact that Skyfall, a buzz word teased throughout the film as meaningful to Bond, turns out to be the name of his childhood home—his Xanadu if you will—is just plain silly.  Come on.  How facile a place for this whirligig plot to land?  I was hoping Bond would be somehow tied into Silva’s (Javier Bardem) past, complicating the plot a bit, asking us to keep focused on connecting dots.    But it never happened.  Towards the end of the second hour of SKYFALL my feelings were uncomplicated: boredom.  The bobby-trapping, HOME ALONE antics of the fifth act (Bond at Skyfall) seemed to underline the point: since we’ve thrown just about everything into this film, why not this too?  Perhaps it was an overreaction to the last film QUANTUM OF SOLACE, which apparently many people found to be overplotted (I admittedly haven’t seen it).  But this film just seemed reductionist in a very bad way.  It had no surprises.  It had little real thrills.  Like every Sam Mendes movie, as my perceptive boss described, it’s little more than a “slow plod towards death.”  If you don’t see M dying by act two, you haven’t seen AMERICAN BEAUTY, ROAD TO PERDITION, or REVOLUTIONARY ROAD.

But what about Javier Bardem?  I think he is the most overrated part of this overrated film.  And I’m a huge Bardem fan—he’s fucking brilliant time and time again.  He’s also “good” in this—creepy, nonchalant, sibilant.   But allowed to inhabit the space of his character in any way he wants, Bardem take it to a place so familiar, so cliché, that it occasions a bit of social deconstruction to think about it.  He is, the gay bad guy.

“Another addition to the annals of gay villains”  a friend remarked.  And it’s true.  It’s left me not quite offended, but exasperated.  Building on Anthony Perkin’s psycho or THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS sexual deviant, there is no shortage of characters out there that equate being a little flaming with being a whole lotta evil.    I’ve done some research on the matter now, and it’s a well established concept (check out this amazing website, which I can’t believe exists – “TV Tropes”.  What PhD student put this together?: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SissyVillain)

The “Sissy Villain” isn’t necessarily homosexual but embodies the degendered confusions of homosexual panic.  His potency isn’t the physical prowess of James Bond—who can survive falls, fuck the girl, chase the chase, and keep going with a bullet in his shoulder.  Bardem’s is the power of backdoor cyber assault, computer buggery, techno-buttsex.  You’re ports aren’t safe from a guy like him.

Because there’s something fishy about a guy like him, isn’t there?  Not gay, but not right.  You can’t throw a stone in popular culture without hitting a similar example, from blockbuster cinema, to Professional Wrestling, even cartoons (Adam sent me this truly funny link to a standup that exposes the Care Bears villain as the ultimate homo.  It’s true.  So is the Strawberry Shortcake villain, Inspector Gadget’s Dr. Claw (fondness for Persian Cats-much), or essentially anyone with a mustache in all of toondom.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TamBV00kVLA)




Then again, unlike every example I can think of, Bardem takes it a step further—Silva is actually gay (Right?  I’m not 100%.  He does pretty much feel Daniel Craig up, but he doesn’t call himself gay and the characters essentially ignore it).  If you accept this, then Bardem would be the first openly gay villain – which in itself would be interesting, if his homosexuality didn’t so inartfully resemble so much winkwink-psychosis in so many other films.  If Silva could match Bond physically, that would be a more transgressive, progressive, and exciting character.

But who am I to account for tastes?  The critics love it.  Audiences love it.  It made some 80 million dollars and will be around a while yet.  So SKYFALL may be a bit of a Chicken Little scenario—the sky is falling, right?  RIGHT?  RIGHT?  Who is anyone to say no.

THE MASTER OF NOTHING

THE MASTER OF NOTHING

Heads-up: I liked this film, one that seems to be pretty divisive among critics and audiences, as far as the naval-gazing of ‘serious’ scant-seen cinema can ever be considered divisive.  Here P.T. Anderson (BOOGIE NIGHTS, MAGNOLIA, PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD) adds an odd, lumbering “thinker” to his award-studded oeuvre.  And it’s amazingly boring.

Indeed, Ye Who Tread Here Beware: There Will Be Boredom.  There Will Be Overlong Sequences and Empty Conversations.  There Will Be Trivial Dialogue that Leads No Where.  There Will be Dropped Plotlines.  There Will Be Little Evocative Sex.  There Will Be Essentially No Blood.

If you come to the movie to be entertained—which is probably a perfectly sane reason to spend $12 bucks to sit in a dark room for two hours—THE MASTER is probably not the film for you.  If being entertained is not a necessity for you when you commit to watching a film, there’s a shot you’ll mine something worthwhile here, which is where I finally landed.  But this one should be firmly and without judgment stamped: NOT FOR EVERYONE. 

Why’s it so difficult?  THE MASTER works very hard to go no where.   It is a work of studious and meticulous anti-entertainment, which has more in common with a film like INLAND EMPIRE than THERE WILL BE BLOOD.  It’s almost three hours, and yet barely anything happens that is recognizable as plot.  I mean characters meet and fight and reconcile and fight again and are arrested and are freed and eat dinner and then breakfast and then dinner again – but as far as the Aristotelian hallmarks of “drama”: no where, no how.  Conversations are repetitive and fatuous.  A lot of bombast is drummed up around ideas, but at a certain point you stop and think—what does any of this MEAN?  Isn’t this all a load of bullshit?   And the answer is Yes.

Anderson has pulled off a trick here, whether you (or, I think some may argue, he) knows it or not.  For THE MASTER is a movie that parallels the rise of Scientology as envisioned by one cryptic yet gregarious charlatan.  THE MASTER’s own filmic rhetoric matches that of the discourse it thematically apes: a whole lot of nothing, artfully sold.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the E.L Hubbard substitute provides everything you need for a “Religion” except that pesky detail of content: big promises, vague concepts, dynamic personae, and—as it is slowly and ‘masterfully’ revealed—rooted instability.    Who is the more dangerous man? Joaquin Phoenix’s drifter, prone to  drunken paroxysms of violence and anger?  Or PSH’s learned guru, so "sure" of his beliefs that he cannot even engage with dissenters?  I’d argue the latter.

The seminal image of the film comes in something of a montage, as Phoenix’s character Freddie Quell is instructed by Hoffman to undergo a series of exercises designed to achieve…something.  Like everything else in this film you are never sure what these are supposed to lead to, when any sort of psychological revelation is expected, and—most importantly—what that revelation will even look like when it arrives. One of the exercises is for Freddie to walk back and forth between a window and a wall, putting his hand on each surface when he arrives.  He is to describe the feel of each surface—the warm, glossy window; the cold hard wood—and then walk back to the other side of the room and do it again.  Freddie is frustrated when he just feels a wall—“it’s just a fucking wall!”—time and time again.  It’s a version of the “Wax on-Wax off” Karate Kid trope: a repetitive tasks that will giveway to insight.  It’s coming right?  Yet, in THE MASTER our Danny-san never learns the fabled Crane Kick: insight is not coming because the philosophy behind it is so thoroughly specious.

And so that is the experience of watching THE MASTER in sum and substance: walking between a plate glass window and a hardwood wall and waiting for some sort of revelation that will not come.  You may not need to sit through all three hours of this film to realize that.  But P.T. Anderson hasn’t failed in this film to give us something.  It may not be the grandiose set-pieces of THERE WILL BE BLOOD’s oil rigs or the hipster realism of PUNCH DRUNK LOVE's earnest-Sandler.  It doesn’t have the cacophonous poetics of MAGNOLIA, nor the giant Wahlbergian schlong of BOOGIE NIGHTS.  With THE MASTER, P.T. Anderson has given us something bigger than any of them: nothing at all.

David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS = Death.   But in a good way.

COSMOPOLIS may be something of a masterpiece – but it is also a frustratingly hard to recommend, abstruse fucknugget of a film.  I’m not sure who I confidently tell to go see this film—and I can’t begrudge the opinion of someone who sees it and thinks its essentially the worst piece of trash they’ve ever encountered.  But I mean it when I say I loved it, and think it’s the most important Cronenberg piece since DEAD RINGERS.

This isn’t the commercial Cronenberg who served up Viggo Mortenson first as a small town angry-dad in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and then as a naked, showering Russian gangster in EASTERN PROMISES.   This isn’t even the body horror David Cronenberg who obsessively traced the intersection between the human body and technology in genre defining cult-classics like THE FLY, eXistenZ, and VIDEODORME.  This is closer to something David Lynch would create, although COSMOPOLIS’ brand of perversity is more the societal and less the individual and psychoanalytic.  But I mean that in so far as the stilted, stuffy, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the film – something’s rotten indeed in a very Lynchian kind of way.

And more to the point—it’s pure Delillo.  The match here between source material and director is—simply put—crazy good.  I’ve now read a lot of Delillo and COSMOPOLIS is pretty much like the rest; it’s your thing or it’s not.  If you like postmodern malaise and evocative acausality you’ve come to the right place.  If you like realism, explosions, or pat character arches you have not.

Very quickly – the plot of COSMOPOLIS is this (no real spoilers) – a rich young guy (Robert Pattinson) takes a cross town limo trip in New York City in order to get a haircut.  He’s waylaid on this journey several times—chance meetings with his new wife, rendezvous with various fuckbuddies, meetings with business associates, angry mobs of proletariat storming the streets, and finally the advances of two stalkers, seemingly out to take his life.  He finally makes it across town to get the haircut—well half the haircut.  That is, with some limited other surprises I won’t get into here, essentially it.  It’s not A TALE OF TWO CITIES.  It is, in fact, a tale of  just one – not New York, per se, but the Global Cosmopolis that has risen with increasingly-convoluted tenets of international commerce.  Banking on iPhones is only the beginning.

Ahh yes, so that’s the other thing COSMOPOLIS is about – finance.  I am hardly a finance geek and honestly neither is Cronenberg, you aren’t going to learn anything about the buying and selling of money.  See MARGIN CALL if you want a sharper indictment and/or critique of pecuniary matters.  MONEY here is a metaphor – COSMOPOLIS is more precisely about the depersonalization of wealth, the chasm between possession and satisfaction, and the problems that come out of satisfaction not met.  It’s also about DEATH—even with some intense sex scenes this is far more THANATOS than EROS—and that’s where Cronenberg beautifully comes into his own.

“Money has lost it’s narrative”  is a comment made by Pattinson’s character’s “chief of theory” during a business meeting in his limo (80% of the film takes place in the limo in fact, a directorial challenge that Cronenberg quite frankly knocks out of the park.  He puts on a clinic for interior work that maybe all filmmaking students should bear witness to).   It’s a deceptively simple statement.  And, as others have pointed out, it maybe even a little of a banal one.  But insofar that COSMOPOLIS is about this evolution of wealth it is also about losing one’s narrative in all ways, and the inchoate, spastic, violent atmosphere that results when we are left narrative-less (which is, in a purely theoretical mode, the very essence of the postmodern).  VIOLENCE NEEDS A MOTIVE, Pattinson reminds when confronting his would-be assassin—egging him on while intimating he won’t kill him because he doesn’t have “reason.”  

Cronenberg has already explored the history of violence, but here we get something infinitely more interesting—violence without history.  In fact, we get History without history.   The world and the city of Cosmopolis, are places where meaning and narrative have completely evaporated.  The edicts of  some ominous central organization (“The Complex”) tell our protagonist what to do, or warn him when he’s in danger (and the danger is vague -- is it a pie in the face, a rat thrown in protest, a bullet in the brain?).  He stumbles between encounters, acausally.  Sex is pleasureless, and money—whether he’s making or losing it—seems to matter little.  In a world where anything can happen, nothing really does – for although there are guns brandished and shots fired and affairs arranged and haircuts (half) received, little of it can be called story.  There is no history here, a state akin to death.  Watching COSMOPOLIS is experiencing death.

It’s exciting, weird, challenging, and—yes, indeed, highly academic.  COSMOPOLIS is certainly anti-entertainment—so meticulously unwatchable that it somehow goes back around to be highly engrossing.  If you’re looking for summer pop entertainment, see TOTAL RECALL.  This isn’t to say—you’re not smart enough for this shit—it is to suggest that you’re probably a much saner and happier person than I for wanting to be entertained at the movies.  No promises for that here.

But challenged, definitely.  Delillo by way of Cronenberg asks you to look into the monolith of global finance and experience the human alienation that the digitization and commoditization of wealth entails.   It can be seen as a psychological portrait of Occupy Wallstreet dissent.  It is my favorite movie of 2012 (so far).

POWER FAILURE: The Dark Knight Rises, Beats of the Southern Wild, The Newsroom

So, for the last month I’ve been in a hole studying and, occasionally, masturbating, so I apologize if I’m late to the party on some of these diatribes.  But honestly I’m just about done with Hollywood after three recent huge colossal disappointments—in my view anyway.  What’s worse—and alas, this is my destiny—I can’t find many people who agree with me.  Maybe Hollywood is just done with me.

So in no particular order, I want to discuss THE ABUSE OF POWER in Hollywood, through three particular endeavors. (and note, I mean Hollywood in terms of movie making in general, and how films are distributed to an audience)

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

I'm still waiting for that explicative conversation with one of the many people I know who loved BEASTS that will elucidate what I am missing on this one  This movie is everything bad about Terrence Malik without the saving grace of say a Emmanuel Lubezk or a Hans Zimmer.   It’s so utterly dripping with pretention that it’s  even more waterlogged than the world that first time, overhyped director Benh Zeitlin envisions “The Bathtub” to be.    It’s mind blowing that such uncouth poetics are here considered genius just because someone at Cannes decided that they are.  The homespun wisdom that young Quvenzhané Wallis offers in cloying voiceover is so ridiculously banal, familiar, and unstimulating.  Come on people, don’t fall for it!

Ahh, Quvenzhané Wallis.  Here is my gripe.  She is a fine young actress, I really look forward to her next role.  I love when  nonprofessionals are given a role like that, it’s like when someone comes up from the minor leagues and hits a home run—you can’t help but rooting for them.   But let’s call a spade a spade, gents – she was just fine.  She’s not the second coming of Christ-cum-Haley Joel Osment.  I think there is a major problem in American cinema with people grasping the quality of CHILD ACTING.  A child is either totally incapable of mature performance—in which case, they are given a pass as “just kids, doing their best”—or they are heralded as some sort of prodigy.  When was the last child actor who was just, you know, okay?  The Gary Sinise of child acting?  You know, it may have been Gary Sinise. Quvenzhané Wallis has gravity beyond her years, sure, and she was probably the best part of the movie for me, but that doesn’t mean the film wasn’t a stinker.  It was essentially stunt casting, the Gaboray Sibide of 2012, and precious in another sense too.  How can a thinking movie-goer fall in love with a character so utterly adorable, so morally upright, so tough?   What is complicated about Hushpuppy’s portrayal besides the fact that she stares deeply into the camera and she has possibly-gray eyes?   She shouldn’t have been called Hushpuppy, she should have been named UNDERDOG, because that is the only quality the filmmakers care about. 

Speaking of PRECIOUS, I also found this movie extremely racist.  What the fuck?  Just because there was white trash in the bayou as well doesn’t mean the whole thing wasn’t some post-Katrina guilt trip from a Wesleyan Educated child of academic “folklorists.”  Suck a dick, folklorists!  Your central metaphor—the BEASTS themselves who are periodically cut to and shown traipsing through the wilderness—are they after Hushpuppy?  Are they the Storm or the Saviors?—does not play out because they have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the plot.  It’s such a facile, unfulfilling metaphor that the movie would be 10 times better without It’s another stunt.  The Warthogs—let’s call them what they are—are unsatisfying in every way.  The scenes of them interacting with the environment look like the culled Japanese Zord sequences from old School Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers episodes – slightly off kilter and somehow, even wordlessly, mistranslated.  I was so excited about this film going in because I knew about the Beasts sequences and was thrilled that there was gonna be some WEIRD in this movie. I love weird.  But the reason for the beasts never reconciles in any even quasi-intelligible way.  And even if it does—Fine the Beasts are Katrina.  Fine the beasts are the ever present threat of catastrophe.  Fine the beasts are what’s going to destroy us or save us or make us see or blah blah blah---even it does mean something it’s so hackneyed that again, I am floored by the positive response that so many critics have towards this film.

 I just don’t get it, and I swear I’m not being iconoclastic…or not purposefully so.  I really want to like this film but I find it snobby, unsubtle, manipulative, and mediocre.  I don't know how this director accumulated the clout, and money, to make this film -- and I don't begrudge him that he has talent.  I just hope the next movie he makes doesn't suck.  Like Lena Dunham, it makes you wonder how certain people get so much power in Hollywood, when great scripts by great writers sit unproduced for years.  While filmmakers with real vision and talent--we all know them--never "make it" at all.  It's upsetting.


THE NEWS ROOM

This is more uniformly loathed, so it’s a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel, but there is no worse show on television—and yes I’m including 2 Broke Girls—then Aaron Sorkin’s hilarious abortion THE NEWSROOM.

It moves the target off Lena Dunham anyway because, turns out GIRLS is the best new series on HBO this year. Damn.  THE NEWSROOM is so utterly misconceived I can’t stop watching it, if just to see the lengths—or shall I say depths—to which it will go to be blithely unentertaining.  It is totemic of Aaron Sorkin’s tremendously unchecked ego; it’s a Nicki Minaj album of a television series.  Did no one, HBO executives with whom I interact with sometimes, think to put even a modicum of check on this guy?  Why does he have such unlimited clout? Did someone lose a bet? 

Oh that’s right, NBC did - -when it aired STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP to disastrous results.  Did nobody learn a lesson?  Here’s an unfunny joke—STUDIO 60 was fucking amazing compared to THE NEWSROOM.   Aaron Sorkin’s fever dream of liberal truth-telling is like a bad one act story, dragged out over several hours of TV.   It’s a newsroom the way he wishes a newsroom was.  It’s the early 2000’s the way he wishes the early 2000’s went.  It’s the CNN he seems to think he’s better equipped to envision.  It’s the America Aaron Sorkin has made a brand out of, and it’s tired and crabby and dated. 

Jeff Daniels is annoying but he is ironically the best cast member of this motley crew of losers – I’m sorry but Alison Pill, who is a cutie, absolutely blows.  She’s a 26 year old intern in the pilot and then breaking high level stories in episode two—WHAT?  Dev Patel—our slumdog millionaire himself--surely they won’t make him just another Indian IT nerd…oh wait…Merde.   And the mechanics of the workplace sex comedy, while the cheerful engine of NEWSRADIO (one of my favorite shows) is just embarrassing here.  Nobody gets any work done they just argue silently behind glass walls, lace on-air speech with double-meaning innuendo, pine over a missed chance for an embrace, fight when they should kiss, kiss when they should fight.  It’s absurd to believe these people are producing the news every night, and insulting to the men and women who actually do. 

Make no mistake I am grossed out by Fox News and even so called “liberal news”  who readily jumps on whatever hyperbolic bandwagon is crossing the plains of American consciousness at any particular moment.  But I do not need Aaron Sorkin to tell me what a great newsman he can be.  In the latest episode a black republican gay staffer for Rick Santorum lashes out at Jeff Daniels for trying to presume that he shouldn’t be in Santorum’s camp because he is gay.  He claims: I do not need your help, sir!”   When, Mr. Sorkin, I do not need your help, sir, in defining my liberal values.  Your power in Hollywood has become unchecked, and your work is suffering for that.


THE DARK NIGHT RISES

Leaps and bounds better in every conceivable way then the last things things I’ve discussed, I still have to say I’m pretty disappointed with the latest from Christopher Nolan.  THE DARK NIGHT RISES doesn’t quite rise to THE DARK KNIGHT, a superb film and probably the director’s best.  And while it’s hard to expect Nolan to coax out another enthralling performance like Heath Ledger’s Joker, you do wish he did a bit more with what he had to work with. 

I like Anne Hathaway and I’m glad they made her good at karate—yay karate.  But I prefer my catwomen a bit more unhinged.  Michelle Pfeiffer nailed it way back when—catwomen should be BAD.  Nolan’s catwoman  is some misunderstood pick-pocketer—lame.  The character is underwritten and despite Hathaway’s gameness their isn’t much for her to do.  Tom Hardy also brings his A-game for Bane.  While I never loved Bane in the comics, I do love Tom Hardy – and I liked the vocal effects employed here very much.  Problem is, as has been pointed out to be by a number of people, obscuring a great actor’s face with a breathing apparatus does not a great performance make.  Also, without getting too much into plot here, I resented how they undermined Bane’s importance in the end by making him NOT the son of Qui Gon Jin (or whatever his name is).  It took sort of the center of everything and cast him aside for some meaningless twist.  That was ridiculous, you have to admit—even if you loved the film.

As was the scene in the prison Bane was born in, where he traps Christian Bale.  This prison is supposed to be utter hell on earth, a cesspool of scum and depravity, but in reality it’s sort of nice, isn’t it?  The lighting is great; it’s spacious.  The other inmates, all clean, cheer you on when you try to escape.  It’s a Rube Goldberg device to allow Christian Bale to summon the confidence to rise “psychologically” and then defeat Bane.  Why the hell didn’t they just kill him?   Or at least break his back (to appease fanboys).   Instead, he gets put in a nice jail which he can escape form if he wants it enough.  Sharks with friggen lazerbeams attached to their heads.  Well, guess what—eventually he wants it enough; eventually he escapes.  It’s a waste of our time as an audience; and uncharacteristic for Nolan a total  failure of mis-en-scene.  The jail could have been an amazing part of the story if it seemed sketchier and more horrible.

I think it’s hilarious that Rush Limbough points to the “liberal” attack on ‘Bane’ Capital in the movie—clearly he hadn’t watched it.  It’s actually hilarious, as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is one of the most conservative moves I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s as conservative as BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is liberal.  If this is our first OCCUPY WALL STREET cautionary fable it is clearly on the side of Wall Street….as Bane’s mob of lawless outsiders are flatly called evil and soulless.  The need for Law and Order isn’t tempered by some modern idea of ethical moderateness or egalitarianism; in the end, the police need to regain control and then, what, everyone is happy?  Do all of Bane’s men just call it a day?  Do the rich ladies that were hoisted out of their upper east side townhouses, stripped of their mink shawls (another hilarious, overstated inclusion), just go back to their apartments?

The answer is yes; as does Christopher Nolan, who establishes himself with the Batman trilogy as the director Hollywood will give any amount of money to he wants, because he proves he can make more.  Hence INCEPTION, a passion project that was so meticulous about making the implausible plausible that it failed to be entertaining.  While Nolan is certainly one of the best action directors out there, I’ll take a David Fincher film any day.  Budgets are a GOOD THING for films, especially in an age where the expense of filmmaking is already embarrassingly high.  BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, for all its inanity, at least shows you when pluckiness and vision can accomplish if you pack up and move to New Orleans and go get ‘er done.  THE DARK NIGHT RISES illustrates that all the money in the western world can’t by itself replace a good script, a good design, and a good director in telling a good story.

Power corrupts and absolute power makes some shitty television and movies.

21 JUMP STREET: STUPID SMART

I just finished reading yet another blithely laudatory review of this “new” DEATH OF A SALESMAN that everyone is creaming their pants over—in the most respectful, urbane way possible, I mean—but I find myself compelled to write not about this play—which quite frankly I don’t really want to see ever again—but about another bastion of contemporary high culture, a little film based on a scarcely-remembered TV show called 21 JUMP STREET. It’s a movie about two cops who try to blend in as high school students in order to stop…drugs? Something like that.

I loved this movie and suddenly—because I have paranoid schizophrenia?—feel the need to defend it.

Or perhaps not so paranoid, although that is precisely what a paranoid schizophrenic would say (this ouroboros only leads to madness, I assure you). Yesterday in discussing the movie with one friend who actually saw it and eloquently-enough “thought it fucking blew” I started to question exactly why I, actually, didn’t think it blew. But really, how can I not respond to the following:

“I didn't know you liked cheap, middle America humor”

and

“I am so shocked that a film snob like you liked this”


First of all, I’m a movie snob not a ‘film snob.’ A film snob has wet dreams about like—I dunno-- Kurosawa, and I just think I’m right all the time. Secondly, I LOVE cheap middle American Humor -- that’s what our country was built on, Lewis and Clark giving each other dead-arms n shit. (Disclaimer: Sorry Brett don’t mean to pick on you—you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with this one)

I pride myself in my movie snobbery—tautology, ahoy!—but specifically because it is so boundary-less. I love a horror movie that is a right horror movie; I love a soporific Estonian melodrama if it is a correctly soporific Estonian melodrama; and I love a high school teen comedy when it gets the genre right, or turns the genre on its head smartly. 21 JUMP ST, a teen comedy or something in the way of a buddy-cop movie, does both those things—it gives you the very-real pleasures of “those kinds of movies” but also gives a smart-but-not-too-clever wink-wink in the direction of “this is parody, bitches, come along for the ride!” So MIDDLE AMERICAN HUMOR doesn’t, on the outset, turn me off – in fact it thrills me if I feel it’s being wielded by filmmakers not as a parochial limitation, but rather a tool in their arsenal for telling stories.


So that’s the first reason I like this movie. Subtle genre nods – such as a fast cut to a “chase sequence”—only to reveal Channing Tatum is on a bicycle and is trying to awkwardly pedal across a lawn—isn’t ground breaking comedy, but it is perfectly acceptable physical humor. Or ICE CUBE as the stereotypically angry black sergeant—he goes balls-to-the-wall with it instead of trying to round out the character (Tangent: I wonder how Samuel L Jackson will handle his role as Nick Fury in THE AVENGERS; he’s too “good” an actor to embrace such arch-‘blackness’, but I feel like the role really could use that). Surely there are earlier movies that have, to varying success, utilized this approach to parody. But it’s a good framework for a film, which, yes comes down to a matter of tone—and that really is something you either see or don’t see. I don’t feel like anything in 21 JUMP ST was done “just because” – and purposefulness is really one of the best criterion in judging any directorial endeavor.

Second, and when the movie really broke out as excellent for me, was in its depiction of modern high school. As they prepare for their first day as ‘fake’ high school students, Channing Tatum chastises Jonah Hill for “two strapping” (wearing your backpack how it’s supposed to be worn, instead of the cool, hanging-off-one-shoulder, I-don’t-give-a-crap look). Surely this is signifier for “cool” in some cheap but categorical way. When they get to school, however, they find that everyone is “two-strapping” now – lame is cool again, in the forever repeating circle of trends. All you have to do is wait long enough (so save those hammer Pants).

It seems simple enough, but I think ever since AMERICAN PIE we’ve had some sort of filmic arrested development in the depiction of high school – it’s always jocks v. nerds, football players and cheerleaders, “mean girls” and geeks. It’s a ridiculous economy that isn’t based on untruths, but doesn’t reflect the weird, postmodern milieu of the suburbs of 2012. As the surely-insipid AMERICAN REUNION looms ahead, I think it’s good to reflect on the lazy way we’ve defined this setting, and the damage it does to story telling. This isn’t about trope, or filmic posturing—which is of course the very brand of movies like SCARY MOVIE or NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE. It’s about something infinitely more and also less subtle—tone. We don’t dismiss the scenarios in 21 JUMP ST entirely, this isn’t some cartoon where one frame informs the next not at all, but we also allow for a comic elasticity. We let it get away with its clichés, and it rewards us by bringing us into the joke.

High school, 2012: Everyone is two strapping; caring about the environment is cool now(???), a gay black kid is one of the popular guys. I cannot overstate how splendidly transgressive a throwaway line is like this one: this cool kid, not feeling the vibe at the house party going down, comments “let’s get out of here, there’s not even any hot guys.” That is a hilarious, carefully observed line. I also happen to think it’s progressive, not because “gay” can be cool, but because it is both aware of and doesn’t take for granted the assumptions an AMERICAN PIE would come out of the gate holding on to. There are some other “gay jokes” here that I feel are less successful, but mostly because they are bad jokes, not because they are mean spirited. There’s no denying the homosocial aspect of the buddy cop movie in general, indeed aren’t Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill a little “gay for each other” – indeed, isn’t the movie as a whole a little “gay for” Channing Tatum, whose godly physically appearance is just this running gag among all the characters, male and female. It’s okay to be gay for your buddy; gay for an actor; gay. But it’s okay only because WE DON’T NEED TO SAY THAT. (Glee does, by the way, which is why it is infinitely less evolved).

High School is different now, sure. And the cool kids are different too – Dave Franco (James’ equally offbeat brother) and Jonah hill’s love interest Brie Larson are these oddball hipsters, and I think it’s so smart not to just cast pretty people in these roles. You cared about them in a way that is actually quite surprising, I found. They are funny and odd and stupid in a great—realistic way. So this is the third reason I like the movie—I feel like it encourages some fun performances. No MONEYBALL turn, but Jonah Hill delivers the skinny version of SUPERBAD, and Channing Tatum—who I already admit I have a thing for—rises to the occasion with some really excellent comedic work. I have never seen him so suited for a role, and so funny. Partially it’s because the role is really just him – a hunky, dumb guy who just sort of fakes his way through doing his job – but it’s to the credit of the actor and the director that this is the route they go with it.

Ultimately this movie pulls off a great trick – it straddles the gray area between parody (a ‘farce’ of the buddy-cop movie) and pastiche (mélange of influences, bequeathed ideas, hackneyed images, idiosyncratic diversions) in a funny, interesting, and in my opinion ORIGINAL way. An original remake of an 80s television show that wasn’t very good in the first place? Starring actors de jour who can get laughably hit in the nuts but don’t exactly offer anything in the way of comedic grace? I wouldn’t have thought it, I didn’t think it; I do now.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it takes the risk that smart people can have fun at stupid movies, and doesn’t need unrelenting silliness (Will Farrell/Jim Carey) or heart-on-its-sleeve-amidst-the-dick jokes bathos to know it’s worth our time. Run, don’t walk.





Holy hell.

KILL BILL with Spies!!: HAYWIRE

In all seriousness it is my contention that Steven Soderbergh's current film HAYWIRE is better than any of the 2011 Academy Award Best Picture nominees. It is pure genre excess. KILL BILL with spies! This is what HANNA could have been if it wasn't so goddamn boring!

In short what do you get when you take MMA legends Gina Carano, put her in a little black number, and let her destroy furniture in expensive looking hotel rooms while doing AWEOSME KARATE to beat up generically evil men? Fun. This shit is a ton of fun. Granted I am somewhat of a sucker for AWESOME KARATE, but I don’t think I am alone here. HAYWIRE is decidedly a movie for fans of KILL BILL 1 who thought KILL BILL 2 was garbage pastiche; I don’t need the goddamn cinephilic pandering, just give me fight scenes! KILL BILL part 1 is one of my all time favorites, just pure visceral action, with only the most basic gestures towards plot. A seminal work in a subgenre I call ‘creative violence.’

HAYWIRE is of this ilk. Carano jumps between walls, flips, uses props, mercilessly kicks more than one testicle. Soderbergh realizes the best technique at his employ is to put us in there with Carano, let us see what she sees. There is a awkwardly long chase sequence through Barcelona, but instead of getting the god’s eye view (a la Bourne) of where the good guys and bad guys are, the chessboard view, we are right there in it with Carano. Will she/will we catch the bad guy? Can she/we run that fast? Make that leap across rooftops? Can she/can we anticipate who will double-cross, who will deceive, who will break the tenuous quiet and throw that first punch?

Look I’m not saying movies should be all explosions and no emotional substance. The gestures towards plot and character here are purposeful softball tosses. It’s Soderbergh having a good time—which is the greatest tool in his arsenal (and the single engine that propelled a less-face-it pretty damn slight movie like OCEAN’S 11 through two sequels—this shit looks like a ton of fun.) This is the antidote to a movie like TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, which is so wrapped up in its clever intricacy that it forgets to be entertaining. This is also a great example of the kind of movie I like, which is any kind that is exactly and 100% what it purports to be. I liked MELANCHOLIA because it was so persistently unlikeable, Lars von Trier’s bizarre modus operandi. I like HAYWIRE because it so effortlessly runs on adrenaline, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Opposite movies but equally yielding to their disparate set of rules.

The cast is…well, let’s just say “acting” has not much of a place here. I mean he cast an experienceless MMA fighter as his lead, and then had her re-dub all her lines in the studio (you can’t really notice, most of the time). She is tough and aloof, which honestly makes sense for her character, though I wouldn’t say she has a long and storied acting career ahead of her. Ewan McGregor and Michael Douglas are comparative clowns, on such a different comfort level acting that their performances seem somehow over the top (they aren’t, really). Then there’s Channing Tatum (or is is Tatum Channing—I never remember, for real. Either way it’s stupid).

Channing Tatum is very very very very very very very very good-looking. Crazy good looking. Channing Tatum can't act his way out of a paper bag. I mean literally, if some evil multimillionaire genius commissioned greedy scientists to create some sort of hyperbolic, human-sized containment vessel-cum-paper bag (bear with me), and hired some drugged up thug to kidnap Mr. Tatum using a formaldehyde-soaked cloth on his way out of the Starbucks on Melrose and Vine, and then in some weird Saw-inspired contrivance threatened to slowly and brutally dismember the actor, UNLESS he performed Sir Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet or at the very least Robin Williams Mrs. Doubtfire--that scene in the beginning where he does all those nutty voices--Mr. Channing could not act his way out of that fucking bag. He is almost the paradigmatic example of a meathead-he doesn't have eyes, rather just lumps of muscle and a cute smile. Catch him in about five upcoming movies this Spring.

But Hollywood loves that shit, and he’s almost the definition of ‘fine’ in his limited role. Michael Fassbender also makes a stylish cameo, another actor who is popping up everywhere after his intense leading performance in SHAME. Fassbender is similarly piercing here (although in HAYWIRE the part of Fassbender’s dick is played by Channing Tatum), but it’s a joke. It’s no spoiler to say he is but a straw man for Carano’s weapons-grade thunder thighs. It’s a great fight.

All in all, it’s not changing any rules or crowning any stars, but HAYWIRE is another great Soderbergh piss in the snow. It doesn’t belittle anyone nor hang the ornaments of meaningless explosions on a Christmas tree of weaponry—it just does its thing and ends. God bless the finite.