Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

Watching Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games, I found myself wishing, quite possibly for the first time in my life, that a movie were darker and grittier. I am by no means a fan of the “nolanization” of Hollywood, the recent trend of making absolutely everything edgier—especially since in edgier all too often translates to dull and humorless. (And I say that as someone who likes many of Christopher Nolan’s films very much, in spite of how inept the guy is at directing coherent action scenes.) One might also consider The Hunger Games, a film about kids killing each other for the entertainment of a privileged elite, dark enough to begin with. Yet Ross and Suzanne Collins (author of the Young Adult novel series the film is based on and co-author of the screenplay with Ross and Billy Ray) are content to use that premise to create an admittedly competent and often thrilling action/adventure movie, while their reluctance to delve into some of the more disturbing aspects of their story limits its impact.

The film revolves around Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a 16-year-old girl hailing from the 12^th district of Panem, a futuristic and dystopian version of the United States. After the districts rebelled against the Capitol of Panem and lost the subsequent civil war, the titular Hunger Games were created: every year, each district would have to send two randomly-chosen teenagers (a boy and a girl, referred to as “tributes”) to the Capitol, where they would be made to fight to the death in a giant free-for-all until only one was left standing. The Games serve to remind the districts of their defeat and to prevent any further rebellion (which doesn’t entirely make sense, if you think about it), but also to provide entertainment for the elites living in the Capitol, as the whole thing is filmed and broadcast all across Panem.

When Katniss’s younger sister Prim is picked for this year’s Hunger Games, Katniss immediately volunteers to replace her, and she soon finds herself aboard a bullet train to the Capitol. She’s joined by her fellow tribute Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and their “mentor” Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), the only person from the 12^th district to ever win the Games, now a cynic and a drunk who seems at first not the least bit useful. Once at the Capitol, the tributes are paraded for all to see and interviewed by talk show host Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci in a garish blue wig), while behind the scenes they train under the watchful eye of Hunger Games producer Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley). Soon enough the Games begin, and an entire nation watches rapturously as 24 kids proceed to murder each other on prime time television.

The Hunger Games has a lot going for it, starting with Lawrence as Katniss. Katniss is a great action heroine, headstrong and driven, an adept hunter with survival skills to make Bear Grylls jealous. She’s clearly in over her head when it comes to currying favor at the Capitol, and throughout she remains torn between the promise she made her sister to win the Games and her desire to do it on her own terms. Her relationship with Peeta is refreshingly complex, her initial animosity (likely caused by hurt pride, if her reaction when he makes her “look weak” and a recurring flashback are to be believed) slowly morphing into respect and friendship without losing any of its ambiguity. Lawrence continues to impress after her strong performance in Winter’s Bone, using the film to showcase her emotional range and screen presence. If the film feels a little too long at times (it clocks in at almost two and a half hours long), especially in its second half, it is never because of Lawrence, who is as comfortable outrunning CGI fireballs as she is  sharing an intimate and emotionally complex scene with Hutcherson.

Where the film breaks down a little is at the allegorical level. Like many science fiction stories, The Hunger Games is set in a sort of funhouse mirror version of our world, a dystopian future that’s not quite as unbelievable as it seems. Early scenes are set in Katniss’s native 12^th district, with a muddy-brown-to-dark-grey color palette that highlights the poverty and squalor in which most people outside of the Capitol live. The action then moves to the Capitol with its tall, gleaming buildings, its superior and easily accessible technology, and its decadent people wearing gaudy costumes and layer upon layer of makeup as they feast on cakes and candy. It’s neither the most subtle nor the most original commentary—last year’s In Time, to name just the most recent example, used similar imagery—but it’s effective at portraying a society split between have-nots and have-way-too-muchs.

More interesting are the titular Hunger Games and the way they serve as a commentary on our collective relationship, as a society, to televised violence, especially used for entertainment purposes. The first half of the film, in that regard, is much more successful than the second, thanks in large part to Tucci, equal parts slimy and seductive as reality TV host Caesar Flickerman. Even before the kids get thrown into the arena to try to kill each other, they are subjected to intense pressure and made to understand that what matters is not who they are, but the way they are perceived. Flickerman’s interview of Katniss, a few days before the Games begin, is a master class in audience manipulation; after building her up in front of several hundreds of the most garishly dressed Capitol denizens, he makes her look vulnerable and, with a final comment directed more at his audience than at her, subtly implies that she is doomed to lose. If you’ve ever watched a reality TV show, this should feel familiar.

Unfortunately, once the Games proper start, the commentary loses some of its bite. Some of it is undoubtedly to blame on the fact that this is a movie about an ultraviolent television show that, for obvious economic reasons, had to secure a PG-13 rating. And although, to be fair, The Hunger Games pushes that PG-13 rating pretty far, the violence remains sufficiently abstract to detract from the horror we should be feeling. It’s Hollywood violence, which we immediately recognize as not real; when, in what’s arguably the film’s most physically disturbing scene, a character gets his neck suddenly and audibly snapped, we wince, but the camera moves on immediately, and so do we. This refusal to dwell on the violence paradoxically turns it into the very spectacle the film seems to be decrying.

The main issue, though, has nothing to do with how graphic the film is or isn’t, and everything with Collins and Ross’s narrative choices and how they portray Katniss and the other participants in the Games. The night before the Games are set to begin, Peeta tells Katniss that he fully expects to die in the arena, and that he won’t let the Games’ organizers turn him into something he isn’t, to which Katniss responds that she understands but can’t think like that if she wants to win. It’s a great conversation that sets her up to make some difficult moral choices down the line, which sadly never materialize. Even when Katniss teams up with the adorable Rue (Amandla Stenberg), she’s never forced to face the fact that she will eventually have to kill her if she wants to win the game, which in turns means that we are never made to realize that rooting for Katniss to win actually means rooting for her to kill other kids. This is compounded by the fact that most of the kids Katniss faces are evil bastards who actually enjoy killing, stereotypical movie villains rather than characters with whom we can empathize, and whose death would actually mean something. At the screening I was at, a sizeable portion of the audience actually cheered when a particularly heinous character bit it. Perhaps they were missing the point; or perhaps the film lost track of its own point halfway through.

Of course, eliciting that kind of reaction could be Collins and Ross’s goal. Perhaps we are meant to cheer for Katniss and boo Cato and Marvel and other cardboard cut-out villains, only then to realize that we’re acting just like the people watching the Games from the Capitol. “Root for your champion, cry when he gets killed? That’s sick,” Katniss’s best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth, whose brief appearances only serve to set up the sequels) comments at the beginning of the film. Then, of course, Katniss becomes a tribute, and Gale ends up watching the Games and rooting for her. And so do we. Katniss’s unflinching heroism makes her easy to root for, after all, and The Hunger Games provides plenty of entertainment and thrills. Still, I wouldn’t have said no to some additional moral complexity.

Review: Bullhead (2011)

The best thing about Bullhead (Rundskop), Michael R. Roskam’s feature-length debut, is by far its lead actor, Matthias Schoenaerts. Schoenaerts, playing cattle farmer and small-time crook Jacky Vanmarsenille, is huge, a mountain of a man with hypertrophied shoulders and bulging neck muscles, with a broad, broken nose and a perpetually half-closed right eye that make him look even more imposing. But Jacky’s not a gentle giant. There’s an intensity to him, an anger that he constantly struggles to repress and that comes out in explosive bouts of violence. Yet he is also a profoundly sad being , a man always looking at the world as if he didn’t, couldn’t ever belong to it. A perpetual outcast whose condition tears at his very soul. All that Schoenaerts conveys not through dialogue, but through sheer physicality. He is not a handsome man by any means, but he has presence, charisma, even a sort of uncalculated and dangerous charm. Whenever he is onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off of him—and not only because he occupies so much of it. And when he’s offscreen, you find yourself waiting for the next scene in which he’ll be.

There are actually a number of plotlines that run concurrently through Bullhead, although all end up revolving, in one way or another, around Jacky and his Limburgian cattle farm (“It’s in Belgium,” as Colin Farrell would say). There’s the West Flemish gangster and beef trader Marc Decuyper (Sam Louwyck), with whom Jacky might be about to make a deal, encouraged by the crooked veterinarian who sells him the growth hormones he uses on his cows. There’s the murder of a federal police officer who was investigating Decuyper and its fallout, with which Decuyper’s henchman Diederik (Jeroen Perceval) has to deal. And then there’s the thing that haunts Jacky, that drives him to inject himself with steroids and human growth hormones every day, to stalk a young woman who sells perfume for a living. “There are things,” he says in a voice-over at the very beginning of the film, “that you can’t ever talk about. Not ever.” But you can’t forget them, either, as much as you might want to.

The film’s narrative structure is sometimes problematic, especially when it comes to the way Roskam (who wrote the screenplay) uses flashbacks. While Jacky’s back story is obviously central to the film, Roskam goes into a little too much detail, bringing the story to a complete stop when it’s just getting started so he can recount what happened to Jacky twenty years earlier. (I have been thinking a lot about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy lately (I think the word I’m looking for is “obsessed”), and that’s a movie that uses flashbacks (and there are a great deal more of them than here) in truly remarkable, never disruptive ways. Not that the comparison is necessarily fair or even all that relevant. Moving on.) The back and forth between the different plotlines isn’t always seamless, either, partly because the scenes that don’t feature Jacky are inherently much weaker than the ones that do, partly because the connection between the different plotlines seems a bit contrived at times.

But that is also what the film is about. Bullhead is built like a tragedy, like a death trap that’s closing in on Jacky without his even being aware of it, and all the contrivances and coincidences are just cogs in the machine that’s slowly crushing him. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” a character says on two different occasions, and she’s at once extremely wrong and extremely right. Call it fate, if you will. Or just plain old bad luck, and worse decisions. Bullhead often feels like it could have been written by the Coen Brothers; it’s sort of a grimmer Fargo. Instead of a Marge Grundersson, you get a tortured giant, a man of terrifying, barely-restrained violence and self-destructive impulses, a pathetic freak you can’t help but feel sorry for.

The film also contains a few almost absurd elements that wouldn’t feel too out of place in a Coen movie. Take Christian (Erico Salamone) and David Filippini (Philippe Grand’Henry), for instance, two bumbling Walloon mechanics who unwittingly find themselves linked to both Jacky and Decuyper. They provide broad comic relief, and although they are often indeed funny (there’s a hilarious exchange regarding a bullet hole which, I’m afraid, loses much of its comic impact when translated from French into English), they’re also an endless source of whiplash. The rest of the movie’s humor, what little of it there is, is more subdued, but also more effective, and much less distracting than the Guy Ritchie-esque montage of the two mechanics being interrogated by the police.

Much of Bullhead, like its use of flashbacks, or its comic relief, is clumsy. But even more of it is arresting, even beautiful. There’s Schoenaerts’s performance, of course, but there’s also Roskam’s undeniable technical skills, and the sense of implacability that permeates the whole film and drives it towards its inevitable (and, yes, a little awkward, with its final flashback) conclusion. Fate. Or, as Jacky puts it, those things “you can’t ever talk about.” He does try, because he has to, but by then it is too late, and what should be the film’s most important conversation turns into two people talking past each other about two entirely different things. Or perhaps that’s just fate again.

Review: Rage (2010)

Rage, the title card that opens Christopher R. Witherspoon’s thriller informs us, is a “violent, uncontrollable anger.” The bright red title card, though, gives way to a series of an apparently calm Portland suburb. A little too calm, perhaps. Witherspoon knows his horror movies (and, I imagine, his David Lynch), and the deserted streets are filmed as if from the point of view of a lurking serial killer in a slasher movie. The impression that something isn’t quite right, reinforced by the eerie music, is hard to shake off. Rage, though, is anything but yet another commentary on life in the paradisiac hell that is American suburbia, and if danger looms somewhere, it’s in the big city next door. Portland, Oregon, that den of iniquity and violence. (I kid, I kid.)

That’s where protagonist Dennis Twist (Rick Crawford), a thirty-something writer and teacher, is headed, to spend his day off and get his wife Crystal (Audrey Walker) a present. Or at least that’s what he tells her. What he doesn’t mention is that he’s first meeting with his mistress, the very eastern European Dana (Anna Lodej), to break up with her. Which, admittedly, goes relatively well. But somewhere along the way, Dennis somehow attracts the attention of a mysterious biker (played by Witherspoon himself), who proceeds to follow him around and play what are at first harmless pranks on him. As the biker becomes more and more threatening, though, Dennis starts wondering about the man’s identity and his motivation. Perhaps the guy is Dana’s former convict of an ex-boyfriend, out to hurt his rival. Or perhaps, Dennis muses, it’s just karma, the universe’s way of getting back at him for cheating on his wife.

Rage is, of course, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Duel, in which a man driving a Plymouth Valiant in the California desert is relentlessly hounded by a truck and its unseen driver (Dennis’s car, like Dennis Weaver’s Plymouth, is bright red). The connection is made explicit when Dennis overhears two people discussing Duel and its symbolic meaning in a somewhat clumsy scene that’s all the more redundant because it echoes an earlier, much more interesting (and funnier) discussion between Dennis and his best friend/shrink Stan (Richard Topping). While Dennis is busy wallowing in self-pity, Stan assures him that all the bad stuff that’s been happening to him isn’t karma, “it’s bloody life.” A little forward, perhaps, but I guess that’s what you get when you routinely get plastered with your shrink.

Witherspoon’s film is a solid thriller and, as a sort of revisiting of Duel for the 21^st century, nicely effective, with a few good scares (and a handful of laughs). The biker, who never takes his helmet off and remains silent throughout, exudes an aura of menace that makes Dennis’s predicament convincing when it could easily have been laughable. At the same time, there’s a sort of playful mischievousness to his early pranks that makes his crossing the line into violence, which he does suddenly and without warning, all the more horrific. There’s a very nice scene in which a terrified Dennis, having managed to escape his pursuer, finds refuge in a subterranean parking lot. There’s a long close-up of Dennis, hunched up behind the wheel of his car, illuminated by the unnatural blue light of the neon, listening intently for any sign of the biker. It goes on for the longest time, and just when you see Dennis’s face begin to relax, you hear the bike’s motor revving, a second before the bike itself appears, going down the ramp into the parking lot.

In its last third, Rage cranks up both the tension and violence, as the biker follows Dennis home and invades his private life. Witherspoon seems aware of just how over the top his story is, and revels in it. There is for instance a surprisingly bloody (and hilarious) scene involving a chainsaw and Dennis’s clueless neighbor Clancy, who was introduced at the beginning of the movie contentedly patting his potbelly on his front lawn. Not that Witherspoon can’t do serious horror: the chainsaw incident directly follows the film’s most chilling scenes, and the laughs are more than welcome.

Duel, one of the Spielberg aficionados mentions, was about an everyman facing a seemingly unstoppable force of nature. Rage is more about the stress inherent to life in the big city, in more ways than one. (The biker is basically a more focused version of the muckers of John Brunner’s science fiction classic Stand on Zanzibar.) In the end, Dennis can’t escape the biker, who pursues him even into his dreams. One may wonder whether that faceless, voiceless man isn’t simply a projection of Dennis’s pent-up frustration and anger, a doppelganger born of stress and self-pity. Witherspoon keeps you guessing until the end, and the eventual revelation of the biker’s motivation, in the film’s final minutes, thankfully doesn’t resolve everything neatly.

Review: Take Shelter (2011)

The opening sequence of Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter is the first of many nightmares protagonist Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) will have over the course of the movie. That it is a dream isn’t immediately obvious, although it’s clear that something is off. Curtis stands alone in his backyard, as if he were the last person left in the world. He stares at the dark clouds that gather in the distance, unnaturally turning and twisting, a storm that threatens to engulf everything. Then it starts raining, a yellowish rain so thick it feels, as Curtis will describe it later, like “fresh motor oil.” The camera lingers for a while on the rain flowing down Curtis’s hand, before cutting to a profile of Curtis, awake, head down under the shower, trying to wash the nightmare away. The sound of the shower, though, is indistinguishable from that of the rain (there’s actually a subtle shift a few seconds before the cut from one scene to the other, but good luck catching it on first viewing), and your brain is tricked into not registering the scene change for a couple seconds. Curtis is still very much trapped in his nightmare, and we’re trapped with him.

Had Take Shelter been released here just a few weeks earlier, it would have ended up near the very top of my best of 2011 list. Nichols’s masterpiece (there, I said it) is smart and affecting, beautifully shot, and put together with incredible skill and care. Above all, Take Shelter is fearless. Here’s a film, and a filmmaker, prepared to follow their main character all the way down the path to madness and self-inflicted alienation. That first dream awakens something in Curtis, a 35-year-old construction worker living in a small Ohio town with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and young daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf. The nightmares come back and back again, and with them comes a fear that some catastrophe is about to happen, some unnatural and vicious storm is about to sweep down and take everything away from him. Or perhaps Curtis is just losing his mind, a prospect no less frightening.

“It’s not just a dream,” Curtis says at some point, “it’s a feeling.” One of the most impressive achievements of Take Shelter resides in the way that feeling, of dread and impending disaster, is communicated from Curtis to the viewer. Curtis’s nightmares are vivid, and although you quickly come to recognize them as dreams as soon as they start, they never stop being terrifying. They all play on the same primal fear, that of something that you can’t control happening and turning your whole world upside down, your best friends into savage enemies. No less scary is Curtis’s waking life, which starts slipping more and more out of his control. Michael Shannon delivers an extraordinary performance; he’s a man walking on the edge of a precipice, constantly wondering whether it wouldn’t be best to just jump, his anxiety and desperation almost palpable as he tries to hold on to his life and his family.

He does so at first by pretending that everything is fine, resorting to the age-old male tactic of not acknowledging a problem in the hopes it will go away on its own. He goes to see a counselor, but says nothing of it to his wife, and mentions neither his dreams nor his fears to her. “I didn’t want you worrying about it,” he says when she confronts him about all the money he’s sinking into the house’s old tornado shelter. But of course she can’t help but worry. That Curtis isn’t fine is obvious, and his silence and occasional outbursts, far from keeping his family together, are threatening to tear it apart. It comes as no surprise when one of the film’s very best scenes begins with Curtis telling Sam, “I haven’t been honest with you.” And if Michael Shannon is amazing as Curtis, it’s Chastain that holds the movie together (just like it’s Sam that holds the family together), with a subtle performance that beautifully responds to and complements Shannon’s.

One of the many small pleasures of Take Shelter is the way the screenplay, also written by Nichols, never hits you over the head with exposition. Although the fact that the film is set in a post-economic crisis America is vital to the plot (especially if one considers that the storm Curtis dreams of may not be a literal one), the LaForches’ economic situation is dealt with obliquely, through a series of subtle visual markers and throwaway lines. Whether it’s Curtis paying close attention to how much gas he’s pumping into his car or Sam haggling with a customer and keeping her savings in a small metal box, we understand that money is a concern long before the topic is actually broached. In one of my favorite scenes, Curtis, who has just come home late at night, stands in the doorway of his daughter’s bedroom, watching her sleep, when Sam comes out of her own bedroom, stands beside Curtis, and drapes his arm around her shoulder. “It’s funny,” Curtis says, “I still take off my boots so I won’t wake her up.” “And I still whisper,” Sam says. This tells us that Hannah’s deafness was only recently diagnosed (which becomes relevant to the plot later on), without taking anything away from a sweet and touching scene with unwieldy exposition.

The gorgeous cinematography by Adam Stone (who also worked on Nichols’s debut, Shotgun Stories) only adds to the elemental terror the film evokes. The clear Ohio skies suddenly fill with dark swirling clouds and flocks of birds flying in strange circular shapes, or with lightning that Curtis may or may not be the only one to see. But as scary as Curtis’s visions of apocalypse may be, in the end you may find yourself not so much afraid that he may be right, but that he may be wrong. For madness would be just another sort of nightmare, and one he would have to face alone.

Review: New Year’s Eve (2011)

Just because 2011 was a great movie year doesn’t mean it didn’t have its fair share of dreck. A favorite (so to speak) of mine was Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, a film so stupid and needlessly convoluted it played like an atrocious M. Night Shyamalan parody. There were countless attempts to cash in on tired franchises with half-assed efforts (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Strangers Tides), some jingoistic propaganda trash (Battle: Los Angeles), and a distressingly high number of casually sexist wrecks (the appalling Adam Sandler vehicle Just Go With It being perhaps the worst of the bunch). Unsurprisingly, the one film that somehow managed to be all three at once was the lovechild of the man who’s become the poster boy for shitty summer blockbusters; somewhat more surprisingly, Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon was more or less well received by some critics, seemingly for managing not to be as dreadful as the previous entry in this exercise in awfulness that is the Transformers franchise. Given the level of the competition, it would therefore be bold to deem New Year’s Eve the worst film of the year, though a case could definitely be made for it. What it undoubtedly is, though, is the hokiest film of the year.

New Year’s Eve follows the same formula as director Garry Marshall’s previous intelligence-insulting offering, last year’s Valentine’s Day. (Insert your own jokes about the name of his next movie.) It revolves around a bunch of famous and somewhat less famous actors playing characters with next to no personality doing stuff we don’t care one bit about. Even their names hardly matter. New Year’s Eve is built around one very simple concept: recognition. Its characters aren’t characters so much as vessels for faces we all recognize from countless previous movies, and to whom we supposedly already have some sort of emotional attachment. Katherine Heigl plays the same character she’s played in every single romantic comedy she’s ever been in (which seems to be every single romantic comedy made in the past five years), a character New Year’s Eve encourages us to identify not as Laura but as Katherine Heigl herself. Jon Bon Jovi plays Jon Bon Jovi (or Jensen, a name only somewhat less ridiculous), and Sofia Vergara basically plays her character from Modern Family.

Marshall and screenwriter Katherine Fugate (who also wrote Valentine’s Day) play on the intense overexposure of actors and other public figures to create what’s less a film than a sort of fantasy/fan fiction hybrid, in which even the smallest role has to be a cameo. (Alyssa Milano as a random nurse with perhaps twenty seconds of screen time has got to be the most egregious example, but you also have rapper Common playing a soldier we only briefly see and, according to imdb, New York Knicks power forward Amar’e Stoudemire as a “Party Dancer”.) I wish it were some kind of ballsy postmodern commentary, but sadly it’s nothing but lazy and exploitative writing.

(It can also have some unexpected consequences: recognizing Til Schweiger as Inglourious Basterds’ Hugo Stiglitz, I kept wishing he’d snap and start stabbing people left and right. No such luck.)

It’s all fake, of course. The Katherine Heigl on the screen is not the “real” Katherine Heigl, but a fictional construct we are nonetheless, as I have already mentioned, encouraged to see as the “real” Katherine Heigl. It’s par for the course, as everything in New Year’s Eve is similarly fake. According to the film, New Year’s Eve is all about two things, namely, watching the Times Square ball drop (er, okay) and finding love (I’m sorry, what?). Whatever happened to getting drunk and making resolutions you know you’ll never act on, I have no idea. That Valentine’s Day should be all about love, or rather about Hollywood’s idea of love (which is a very different thing to which I’ll come back in a bit), made sense; New Year’s Eve being about the same thing is somewhat of a stretch, to put it generously. Fugate and Marshall must have sensed it, for they have their characters deliver speech after speech trying to justify it, with Hilary Swank’s (or Claire, if you insist on calling her by her character’s name) being by far the most obvious and contrived of the lot. New Year’s Eve, we’re told, is a time for fresh starts and second chances, so we should try to love one another more, okay? This in order to justify spending close to two hours following a bunch of inane stories, not a single one of which has the least ounce of interest or originality, every one of which is designed to elicit the most superficial emotional response.

Early on in the film, Hilary Swank, who’s supervising the dropping of the ball on Times Square and all the accompanying events, is displeased with the way some of her unnamed worker bees are dropping confetti from the top of one of the Times Square buildings onto the crowd below. “Don’t just throw them,” she says. “They should float on the wind! It should be magical!” So the subordinates do as they are told, and Swank is apparently pleased. That scene nicely sums up Marshall’s, and most of Hollywood’s, approach to not only storytelling, but also to feelings, and particularly love. It’s all hokey sentimentality and empty symbolic gestures, stupid confetti floating on the wind that only look magical if you’ve been force-fed that kind of bullshit forever. (The phrase “empty symbolic gestures” might sound like an oxymoron, but I think it describes quite well the way New Year’s Eve, like every other awful romantic comedy, is built entirely on events that are presented as pregnant with meaning but are ultimately entirely empty. New Year’s Eve takes it to the next level, as it’s arguably nothing but such moments.)

It wouldn’t be so bad if that hokey sentimentality didn’t actually hide (barely) the deepest cynicism. New Year’s Eve is nothing but a two-hour commercial for a whole bunch of companies that helped finance this piece of trash only so that their name would appear on the screen every now and again. Product placement, sadly, is something that touches every single Hollywood movie, good or bad (Source Code, a film I like a great deal, was almost ruined by constant product placement), but New Year’s Eve is particularly obvious about it. One of the film’s first shot is a five- or six-second take of one of the giant Times Square screens, whose only purpose is to show the giant Toshiba signs that surround said screen. Worst of all is the blooper reel that plays over the movie’s end credits, though. It’s made up of some genuine bad takes and some obviously set-up gags, including one in which one of the film’s actors holds up a couple copies of the Valentine’s Day DVD in front of the camera, brazenly peddling Marshall’s previous commercial maskerading as a movie. That anyone could have thought that was an okay thing to do is mind-boggling. It is perhaps the most insulting thing I’ve seen in a movie this year (and I’ve seen Just Go With It).

That cynicism extends to the way Fugate and Marshall will exploit anything and everything to pull at their audience’s heartstrings. One of the characters is revealed to have a soldier stationed in Iraq for a boyfriend, and one of the film’s last scenes is them talking over the computer. Not only is that scene shamelessly playing on the knee-jerk sympathetic reaction the audience is supposed to have upon seeing a soldier serving abroad, but it’s also engaging in an insidious process of negation of the reality of war. War here becomes little more than a personal tragedy that prevents two lovers from being together on New Year’s Eve; all its moral and political implications are neatly swept under the rug, if not outright denied in the first place. (Just so we’re clear, I’m not asking a film like New Year’s Eve to take a moral stance on war in general and the Iraq War in particular, but I’d be grateful if it didn’t put it on equal footing with the traffic jam that might prevent Josh Duhamel from reuniting with the mysterious woman he met the previous year.)

That combination of empty sentimentality and unabashed cynicism would be somewhat easier to take if it weren’t so widespread in Hollywood. So, sadly, is New Year’s Eve’s portrayal of racial minorities: the movie features four non-white characters, all of whom are broad racial stereotypes stuck with minor supporting roles with no storyline of their own. There’s nothing unique about New Year’s Eve, except perhaps the incredible shamelessness of it all, and that’s what makes it all the more infuriating. If someone were to devise a case study in everything that’s wrong with Hollywood, it would look like this film. Is it the worst movie of the year? Perhaps not. But damn if it doesn’t try its best to be.

The best films of 2011

December is a month defined by its traditions. You stuff yourself on Christmas, get smashed on New Year’s Eve, and if you’re a film critic, or play one on the internet, you make a list of your best films of the year. It’s always “best,” never “favorite,” as if we truly did believe that our list was the definitive one. Claiming objectivity just as we’re engaging in the most subjective act of all. Since I’m nothing if not a slave to tradition, here’s my own list of the 10 best films of 2011. If you disagree with it, you’re probably wrong.

2011 was a great year for cinema. After all, a year in which we get two genuinely great action blockbusters (Fast Five and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) cannot be a bad one. (I kid, I kid. Except for the part about Fast Five and Mission Impossible being great. They are.) This is perhaps why I found December to be such a disappointment, relatively speaking. The last few weeks have seen the release of a number of critical darlings, including Shame, Carnage, Hugo, A Dangerous Method, and Le Havre, which all failed to elicit in me the same kind of passionate reaction they did in others. (Well, I hated Le Havre, but that’s not what I meant.) Most of them were good, but none of them struck me as great, perhaps because of heightened expectations. Carnage was a particularly frustrating offender, the promises of its brilliant first half remaining unfulfilled until the end as its characters turn into little more than drunken caricatures (the moment when John C. Reilly starts spouting tired clichés about marriage being the film’s low point for me). Unsurprisingly, A Dangerous Method is the one that I find most fascinating, and while I was originally underwhelmed for a number of reasons, I’ve found myself unable to stop thinking about it since then and will probably give it a second shot soon. This month’s few bright spots came with less exposition, either commercial or critical. They were the aforementioned Mission: Impossible and Joseph Cedar’s Footnote, as well as what I expected to be a minor film from one of my favorite filmmakers and which ended up making my best of the year list as number 6. (Another example of the absurdity and artificiality of those lists: did I really like that movie slightly better than the one in 7^th place and slightly worse than the one in 5^th place?)

December was also a frustrating month because, try as I might, I simply can’t see every single film I’d want to see before the end of the year (he says, having seen over 300 new releases this year). This includes films I missed during their (sometimes much too short) theatrical run as well as films that won’t be coming out in France until next year. Some heavy hitters and/or critical favorites that won’t be hitting French theaters until 2012 include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Margaret (not slated for release until late August, brilliant), Take Shelter, and Martha Marcy May Marlene. Conversely, many international movies that may never see a theatrical release in the US have already come out here. In compiling the following list, I therefore used the same eligibility rules I did last year: any film with a 2011 French release date is fair game, with the exception of movies that were released in the US in 2010 or earlier (because as much as I love Black Swan, Somewhere, and Animal Kingdom, I don’t think it would make much sense to have them on my best of 2011 list). Films that will be released in the very last week of December are also exempt (for the obvious reason that I haven’t been able to see them yet), which, sadly, include The Mill and the Cross and Snowtown, two films I am very much looking forward to.

One last thing before we start: although I didn’t get to see Raul Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon until early this year, it actually came out in 2010 here. Had it been released in 2011, it would probably be sitting at number 2 or 3 on my list.

10. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Gorgeous cinematography is a minor recurring theme in this top 10, but Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning (sorta) crime film has them all beat. Shot almost entirely at night, it is, if nothing else, a marvel to look at, and features what’s probably my favorite opening shot of the year (amusingly, the number one film on this list features my favorite closing shot of the year). The film unfolds as a group of cops, led by a prosecutor, a doctor, and a police captain, escort a couple of suspects in search of the burial place of the man they killed. The night is long, the body seemingly impossible to find, and the men start talking. They all have their stories, their ghosts and their demons. They’re all looking, if not for help, then for reassurance and comfort, which they can’t and won’t find in one another.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is as sad and cruel and funny as a Chekhov story, with its men who are ostensibly looking for truth but want nothing less than to find it. Blessed indeed is the gendarmerie sergeant who accompanies the men, and for whom truth is but a geographical location.

9. Sleeping Beauty

Whether you read it as a twisted fairy tale about a bored young girl or as a feminist allegory (notice how, in spite of the numerous shots of naked female bodies, the careful framing and composition deny the very possibility of a male gaze), or as both, Julia Leigh’s debut is an astonishing piece of art, just as unsettling as it is fascinating. Sleeping Beauty follows Lucy (Emily Browning), a young Australian student who works several odd jobs to pay for school and finds herself hired by a strange company first to serve, half-naked, at exclusive upper-class dinner parties, then to lie asleep and naked as men do whatever it is they want with her body save actually having sex with her.

The film plays like a vivid nightmare spiraling ever more out of control as we watch Lucy lose herself in her new job, body and, perhaps, soul. It’s the former that interests Leigh the most, though. Bodies and how we represent and see them, and what ideology lies behind. It’s hard to think of a fiercer skewering of Hollywood’s still much too common objectification of women.

(You can read my original review here.)

8. Tomboy

Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to her masterful debut Water Lilies would actually make for quite a fascinating double feature with Sleeping Beauty. While Leigh looks at external representations of the body and at the ideology behind them, Sciamma is more interested in processes of self-identification. Water Lilies was all about the sexual awakening of three fifteen-year-old girls; Tomboy is about ten-year-old Laure (a brilliant Zoé Héran) who, upon moving to a new neighborhood, introduces herself as Michaël to her new friends and does everything in her power to pass as a boy. The endeavor is doomed from the start, as summer is coming to a close and Laure will undoubtedly be found out on the first day of school, but she clings to it with all her might, especially as she starts to build a relationship she doesn’t quite understand with her neighbor Lisa (Jeanne Disson).

Sciamma refuses to provide us with simple answers and explanations; what she does give us is a bittersweet tale of friendship and early sexual identification, as well as quite a harsh look at how, and how early, society imposes gender roles on us. (Don’t worry, this isn’t about to turn into an essay on gender politics. That’ll be for another day.)

7. Road to Nowhere

Road to Nowhere, Monte Hellman’s first film in over two decades, has the look and feel of a David Lynch movie set in North Carolina. Indeed the opening credits can be seen as an homage to Lynch’s masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. The film itself is a rather complex affair: it follows young director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) as he’s making a movie about a real-life (within the film) accident/murder involving one Velma Duran., played in the film-within-the-film by a non-professional actress by the name of Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), who may or may not actually be Velma Duran.

Road to Nowhere is a film about relationships of power, with characters who constantly shift and change, even sometimes adopting entirely new identities. Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Road to Nowhere, because there’s no such thing as a fixed reality there, and in that sense it’s also a film about how we tell others and ourselves stories in which we end up believing even though we know they’re not true. Don’t expect a clean resolution here; the title tells you precisely where Road to Nowhere will end up, but what matters is how it gets there.

6. Oki’s Movie

Oki’s Movie, the second Hong Sang-soo movie to have been released here this year after Hahaha (which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2010), sees the South Korean director return to some familiar characters and themes: there’s a semi-failed filmmaker with an alcohol problem, a sort of love triangle, and some fascinating meta commentary. The form is new, though, as Oki’s Movie is composed of four distinct short films revolving around the titular Oki (Jeong Yu-mi), a young film student, and the two men who pursue her, fellow student Jingu (Lee Sun-kyun) and married professor Mr. Song (Moon Sung-keun).

Human relationships are always at once extremely complex and extremely simple in Hong’s films (“How can you win against your own sexual desire?” Mr. Song asks. “Show me anyone who’s done it. You can’t.”), and men are rarely positive figures, though they’re usually more pathetic than bad. Oki’s Movie provides us with a hilariously thorough deconstruction of the dogged nice guy archetype (the first segment actually revolves around an older Jingu who seems to have forgotten all about Oki, is now a full-blown alcoholic, and may or may not make it a habit to sleep with his students), Mr. Song proves to be a much more enigmatic and nuanced figure. And then there’s this delicious moment in the last segment, also titled “Oki’s Movie”, in which Oki narrates what is presented (within the film) as her student film and remarks that she chose actors who look like Jingu and Mr. Song for it to be as close to reality as possible. But of course those actors are played by the same who did play Jingu and Mr. Song in the first three segments, and suddenly you’re not quite sure what you’re watching after all.

5. The Kid with a Bike

Much like Tomboy, the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid with a Bike (which shared the Grand Prix in Cannes this year with Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia) is a seemingly simple story with much hidden depth. Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the eponymous kid, an impetuous and sometimes violent boy who’s been left in an orphanage by his deadbeat father (Jérémie Renier). By complete chance he meets young hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), and on a whim she decides to take him into her home on weekends.

The Kid with a Bikeis perhaps slightly less grim than some of the Dardennes’ other works, but it is no less relentless in its portrayal of social and emotional distress. Cyril, portrayed by a pitch-perfect Thomas Doret (2011 could very well be the year of the child actor), is wounded and hurting, and lashing out at everything and everyone in response. The Dardennes wisely refuse to make him an entirely sympathetic figure; the kid is almost feral and, at times, frightening in his violence. And if The Kid with a Bike packs quite the emotional punch, it’s never of the cheap, easy variety. As usual, the Dardenne brothers want not only to make you feel, but to make you think.

4. Attack the Block

What do you do when your neighborhood is attacked by a bunch of aliens that look like “big gorilla-wolf motherfuckers?” If you’re a kid from the South End of London, well, you grab a baseball bat (or a katana) and take the fight to them, of course. At least that’s what Moses (intense John Boyega) and his friends do in Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, which would play like a tribute to both John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg (don’t talk to me about Super 8) if it weren’t so much its own movie. On top of the aliens, the kids have to contend with the police and with a local drug lord who’s not at all amused by this turn of events.

Attack the Block is choke-full of thrills, laughs, and blood, and provides a much subtler commentary on race and class relations than it may seem at first glance. That some critics felt it impossible to empathize with the kids because the film opens with them mugging a nurse speaks volume when we are routinely made to root for cold-blooded killers and other unhinged individuals in movies. But forget about that; for pure entertainment value, nothing this year beat Attack the Block, with its tight story, brilliant acting, clever zingers, and great action scenes.

(You can read my original review here.)

3. Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her devastating Wendy and Lucy is a marvel of a revisionist western that follows three families on the Oregon Trail, led by real-life pioneer and guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood). The group is lost and Meek’s authority is challenged, especially by Emily (Michelle Williams, marvelous), who thinks she has found a replacement guide in the Indian (Rod Rondeaux) the group has captured, and with whom they can’t communicate. (His lines are never translated, leaving us as much in the dark as Emily and the other pioneers as to what he’s thinking.)

With its ponderous pace and oppressive atmosphere (quite an accomplishment, given that it takes place entirely on the wide open Oregon Trail), Meek’s Cutoff manages to convey both the dullness and the sheer terror of a westward voyage in the middle of the 19^th century. It also gives a voice, so to speak, to the nameless Indian as well as to the bonnet-wearing women, generally voiceless characters (again, metaphorically speaking) in westerns. (Yeah, I may have been lying about this not turning into a gender politics essay.) Incidentally, it also closes with my second-favorite final shot of the year, an image that should keep you thinking for days after the film’s end.

2. I Saw the Devil

Kim Jee-woon’s demented revenge movie pits serial killer Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik, in a performance that’s even better than the one that made him famous to western audiences in Oldboy) against secret service agent Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun), whose girlfriend he murdered. I Saw the Devil ostensibly takes the form of a classic duel between good and evil, intense, grim, and bloody, but it soon turns into something else entirely when it turns out that Soo-hyeon may be just as much of a monster as the man he’s hunting.

With its extremely graphic displays of violence, I Saw the Devil clearly is not for everyone. There’s a lot of blood and close-ups of people getting beat up and maimed, but that violence is never gratuitous. It is used instead to turn I Saw the Devil into a brutal deconstruction of the revenge movie genre and into a reflection on movie violence and its moral implications in general. It is also a viciously effective thriller, beautifully shot, with two brilliant performances by Choi Min-sik and Kim Jee-woon regular Lee Byung-hun.

(You can read my original review here.)

1. A Separation

We started with a fake police procedural, and we end with another one. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation chronicles first the divorce of middle-class couple Nader (Peyman Maadi, magnificent) and Simin (Leila Hatami), then the lawsuit that opposes Nader to Razieh (the incredible Sareh Bayat), the woman he hired to take care of his Alzheimer’s-stricken father, and her short-tempered husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini). It’s a film of incredible complexity, both in terms of narrative (which doesn’t mean that it’s hard to follow), and in terms of characters and relationships. No one comes out of it unscathed; not Iran’s westernized middle-class, nor its ultra-religious masses, nor Iranian society as a whole.

Farhadi would rather leave his audience with questions rather than answers, and A Separation literally ends with an unanswered question and with a final, sustained shot that gets my vote (as I have already mentioned) for best final shot of the year. A Separation is, ultimately, a film about how we live with ourselves, with our principles and our compromises, and that heartbreaking final shot shows just how costly it all can get.

Twelve movies that didn’t make the cut but came pretty close (in alphabetical order):

Beginners, Drive, Fast Five, Footnote, Hahaha, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Melancholia, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, Source Code, The Tree of Life, Warrior.

Review: In Time (2011)

Andrew Niccol doesn’t make movies, he makes movie-shaped metaphors. There’s a decidedly old school feel to the way he approaches science fiction, building worlds that resemble slightly exaggerated versions of our own and focusing on them rather than on characters. In the ’70s, he would have made Soylent Green. Gattaca, his first (and best) film, was a tight thriller about genetic and social engineering in a semi-totalitarian society, and he wrote the screenplay to the often prophetic The Truman Show. In Time sees him at his most topical yet, delivering a film that could as well be called “The 99%: The Movie”.

Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in a world in which people are genetically engineered to stop aging (at least physically) at 25. The catch, because there must be one, is that after that, everyone gets one more year before they drop dead. People walk around with bright green numbers tattooed on their forearm, slowly ticking down to zero. A clock, but also a wallet: in Will’s world, time literally is money, and you pay in minutes, hours, days, even decades. When you run out of money, you die. Will lives in the ghetto, along with legions of poor and disenfranchised factory workers who rarely have more than a day or two on their clock and thugs who’ll kill a man for a week. One day he saves the life of one Henry Hamilton, who tells him that the game is rigged so that the wealthy can live forever and gifts him over a century before killing himself. So Will moves to New Greenwich, the enclave where the wealthy live, where he meets Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of a powerful and virtually immortal banker. It isn’t long before cop Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) shows up, though, convinced that Will is responsible for Hamilton’s death, and determined not to let anyone make it out of the ghetto.

The idea at the heart of In Time is brilliant. By making time and money one and the same, Niccol creates a world in which social inequalities are exacerbated and, if not actually worse than in our world, more visible. He wisely doesn’t waste time trying to explain how the whole thing works, but instead delves right into the logical consequences of his premise. The early parts of the movie are by far the strongest; you see people working at the factory, earning time so that they can come back the next day to do the same, or quite literally drink and gamble their lives away in cheap bars. Making rent really is a matter of life and death, and homeless people are routinely found dead in the streets, having “timed out”. Unfortunately, Niccol seems to feel that his metaphor isn’t explicit enough, and he litters the movie with increasingly awful and irritating time-related puns. Cops are “timekeepers”, people who have inherited their wealth “come from time,” Cillian Murphy states that he “didn’t start the clock” and “can’t turn it back,” and so on. “I’d say, ‘your money or your life,’” one character says at some point, “but since your money is your life…” Yeah, we get it.

The other, more important problem with the film is that Niccol doesn’t seem to have much interest in the actual story. Will is an extremely bland character: he’s handsome, knows how to fight, always wins at poker, and has little to no personality. Sylvia doesn’t fare much better, as the archetypal poor little rich girl, bored with her easy life and ready to fall for the first bad boy that shows up and promises adventure. There is a massive discrepancy between the scale of the story and what’s at stake. Niccol would have us believe that Will and Sylvia’s actions could lead to the collapse of the capitalist system in which they live, yet the story remains that of a couple of good-hearted criminals hounded by one ruthless cop, with Alex Pettyfer thrown in as a minor cartoony (and deeply annoying) villain. There’s no popular movement either in favor or against (or, more realistically, both) Will’s actions, and there’s no one to back-up the local cop against the criminals that threaten to make the whole system topple. The final shot of the movie, which I won’t spoil, could be read as a nice commentary on that issue of scale if it wasn’t so unironic.

All that makes In Time at once extremely relevant and entirely at odds with what’s happening in the real world. At a time when the Occupy movement seems only to be picking up steam in spite of a generalized and often violent crackdown, this “me against the world” story seems most unrealistic. (Although Gattaca followed the same pattern, it worked there because the ultimate collapse of the system was symbolic rather than literal.) Then again, that makes sense considering the pre-digital sensibilities of the film: although In Time is supposedly set in the near future, there seems to be few to no cell phones (payphones are everywhere, though), and the internet is conspicuously absent. Only the cars look somewhat futuristic, with their weird lights and odd revving sounds. In Time’s world looks like a glossier version of the future as depicted in 1970s and ’80s films, rather than as the future as we would imagine it now, down to the cool cars as symbol of technological development. In that light, Niccol’s film seems to send a most ambivalent message, at once decrying a broken capitalist system that crushes everyone but the super-rich and yearning for a simpler time, before the internet mucked up everything, when one man alone could make a difference. When exactly that time was, I have no idea. After all, even Charlton Heston was powerless against Soylent.

Review: Sleeping Beauty (2011)

A young man in a lab coat sits at a table, alone in a large room. Only his hands move, precise, deliberate movements as he affixes a rubber balloon to a long plastic tube. After a while a young woman enters the room and comes sit next to him. They exchange pleasantries as she signs a waiver form and receives an envelope we understand contains cash. “Open your mouth,” the man then says, and he shoves the tube down her throat. Deeper and deeper it goes, and as she starts gagging on it, the only reassurance the man can offer is that she’s “doing great.” “Now,” he says as she sits next to him with her head tilted back, in a posture of total vulnerability, “I’m going to blow air into the balloon, so the pressure on your chest is going to rise a little.”

The opening scene of Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is remarkable in that it contains the whole movie within it, both stylistically and thematically speaking. The film’s cold, distant tone (reinforced by the almost complete lack of a score) is already on display and already commented upon, or at least highlighted by the similar cold distance for which the medical experiment calls; the extreme attention paid to composition and framing throughout the movie likewise finds an echo in the man’s meticulousness (given what Sleeping Beauty ends up being about, it is quite fascinating to consider that this man, who otherwise plays an insignificant role, is perhaps the closest we get to an avatar of Leigh here). While the incredible semi-repressed violence of the scene is never quite reproduced, at least not to that degree, the woman’s passive and silent position, and her existence as nothing but a body (here to be experimented on), brilliantly prefigure the film’s thematic concerns. The scene serves as a sort of disclaimer: this, it says, is an extremely cerebral film about bodies. You’ve been warned.

Lucy (Emily Browning) is one of those too numerous students who seem to spend more time working to pay for school rather than studying. She waits tables and gets paid to participate in unpleasant medical experiments. There are strong hints, though it is never explicitly stated, that she prostitutes herself in high-class bars and clubs. She lives in a small house with a couple: the man is needlessly antagonistic, the woman seems nice enough but doesn’t dare contradict her boyfriend. Her only friend is neurotic Birdmann (Ewen Leslie), who lives like a recluse in his cramped studio apartment and is always wearing the same old jacket.

One day Lucy answers an ad she found in the student paper, and soon she finds herself serving wine at fancy dinner parties while wearing next to nothing, along with other girls who often wear even less. The money’s good, so she doesn’t care. When her boss, the dignified and elegant Clara (Rachael Blake), offers her an even more unusual job for even more money, she says yes. All she has to do is take a powerful drug that will put her in a deep sleep and lie naked while older men do whatever they want with her body. Or almost whatever they want. The one rule, Clara says, is that Lucy will never be penetrated.

Taken literally, Sleeping Beauty is the story of a bored young woman adrift in a meaningless world, told as a beautifully shot fairy tale turned oppressive nightmare. Beyond the title, the film is choke-full of fairy tale imagery, such as that moment when Lucy, en route to an unknown place for an unknown purpose, grabs a handful of cranberries and slowly lets them trickle out of her hand, like a modern-day Hansel. (This gesture, however, is a symbolic one, doomed to failure, as Lucy is inside a car; unlike Hansel and Gretel’s pebbles, Lucy’s cranberries can never lead her back home.) The slow pace and lack of a soundtrack can be off-putting, but that’s exactly the point. This isn’t a film that aims to grab you on an emotional level; rather, its goal is to force you to confront its disturbing nature (in terms of form, tone, and thematic content) and engage with it intellectually. Sleeping Beauty is indeed in many ways an intellectual exercise and its story an extended metaphor, which doesn’t mean it is dry, boring, or unejoyable as a piece of art—quite the contrary. If you accept it for what it is and engage with it, this is an extremely rewarding film.

Beyond its obvious formal qualities and its bare-bones approach to storytelling, Sleeping Beauty is, perhaps first and foremost, a reflection on the objectification of women in culture and particularly in movies, at a time when gender inequality is still the rule in Hollywood. As such, the casting of Emily Browning is either pure brilliance or an extraordinary happy accident (given that Mia Wasikowska was originally supposed to play Lucy, the latter seems more likely). Browning, you’ll remember, starred in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, this year’s quintessential teenage male masturbatory fantasy. (I’m aware that Snyder has argued that Sucker Punch was intended as a critique of that very sort of film. However, what he ended up with, which is the only thing we can judge, is a narrative and thematic mess, and in the end is just as exploitative and objectifying as any of Michael Bay’s features.) Here she appears as, well, the quintessential male masturbatory fantasy (that it is older men rather than teenagers that now lust after her has little incidence). I mean that in the strictest possible sense; after all, as Clara constantly reminds her clients, and as I have already mentioned, the only rule when they spend the night with Lucy is that there can be no penetration, making her, again, a quite literal masturbatory fantasy.

Lucy, furthermore, seems to have no real core, no actual personality to speak of. She morphs in order to accommodate the fantasies of men around her, whether her clients or not. From student she becomes waitress, then high-class prostitute, changing outfits, make-up and hairdos to such an extent that she seems a different person every time. She serves at fancy upper-class dinners wearing nothing but a garter belt and a bra that barely covers her breasts. She spends a lot of time naked (including in a sequence where she wakes up after sleeping with a co-worker, which I can’t help but read as a scathing commentary on Hollywood’s hypocritical faux-puritanism when it comes to sex scenes). Even her name isn’t fixed; she’s Lucy, and Melissa when she calls to answer the ad, and Sara for the agency and their clients. Her identity is constantly shifting because she exists not as a real person, but as a projection of sexual fantasies. “I would love to suck your cock,” she tells a man she just met in a club as he’s awkwardly trying to pick her up; she’s not a woman, she’s a blow-up doll (but one that actually wants to have sex with you).

The subtext comes dangerously close to becoming text once Lucy accepts to spend the night naked, drugged and sleeping with men she doesn’t know. The men all treat her differently; some are even gentle with her. None of them, though, interact with her. They have no interest whatsoever in her as a person, only as a way to fulfil their fantasies. She’s no more the “dirty whore” one of them wants her to be than the gentle and fragile princess another treats her like (based on what we see of her, she’s actually a rather irritable and aggressive person). The madonna or the whore, two equally unrealistic fantasies, is all she can be to those men—and, as it turns out, even to her friend Birdmann, who early on confesses to having once wanted to kiss her but refrained from doing so (regardless of the reason he gives, this says much about how he perceives her), and later reveals he also sees her as an incarnation of his sexual desires. The madonna or the whore, the damsel in distress of the seductive slut: two archetypes that are still too often prevalent in culture at large and Hollywood movies in particular. (Do I need to mention Twilight? Didn’t think so.)

Which brings me back to the film’s opening scene, in which a silent Lucy is entirely at the mercy of a man who cares not for her as a person, but only as a body (and of course the sequence, as unpleasant and unerotic as it is, is full of sexual subtext). But what we’re watching here is also Browning the actress being subjected to an unpleasant experience, both physically (if we assume she really did have a tube shoved down her throat which, judging by her physical reaction, seems to be the case) and symbolically, by a director and, to a larger extent, by an entire industry (the movie industry stands behind the director just like the pharmaceutical industry stands behind the young doctor performing his experiment on Lucy). Sleeping Beauty is one of those films whose every frame deserves to be similarly closely looked at and analyzed. Not only because it looks so good, thought that alone would be reason to do it, but also because there is so much going on at all times.

Review: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

Every once in a while, I tell myself I really should get around to seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’m not sure whether it’s out of morbid curiosity or some far-fetched hope that it will actually turn out to be better than I expect. I’ve heard the horror stories, of course. The fridge, the aliens. Shia LaBeouf. On the other hand, I tell myself every time, it’s Steven Spielberg. The same Spielberg who made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How bad can a Spielberg adventure movie really be? Well, after seeing the awful mess that is The Adventures of Tintin, I’m afraid the answer to that question is pretty freaking bad. We’re talking Pirates of the Caribbean (post-Curse of the Black Pearl) bad here. If Tintin is a step above the atrocious On Stranger Tides, it’s only because Spielberg, unlike Rob Marshall, is actually a competent director, and because Tintin’s story isn’t quite as stupid or convoluted.

Before I delve further into Tintin’s shortcomings, a word about the way the movie looks. I am by no means a diehard Tintin fan. I did read most of the books as a kid, and for the most part enjoyed them, but I haven’t read one in over a decade. If Spielberg’s decision to use motion capture to bring the world of Tintin to life bothers me, it is therefore not because it betrays the spirit of the comics, as some have put it, but simply because it looks rather ugly and, worse, utterly charmless. Tintin, Haddock, and the others look like a bunch of puppets; finely animated puppets, sure, but puppets nonetheless. The uncanny valley effect is in full force; some will get used to it faster than others, but I never did. I can only take so many close-ups of a screaming, empty-eyed Haddock before it starts looking like the stuff of nightmares. Not an auspicious start, but really, the film’s visual identity is the least of its problems.

(Need I say that the 3D is, as is so often the case, utterly pointless? As I always do during 3D movies, I took the glasses off at random intervals, and there rarely was even a slightly noticeable blur; in other words, it seems like most of the movie isn’t even in 3D.)

As you’ve most likely already read somewhere else, Tintin does not follow one particular volume of the reporter’s adventures, but instead combines three of them to create its own story. It’s a perfectly defensible choice on the part of screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish; unfortunately, the story is merely a backdrop for a relentless succession of tedious action scenes, and quickly devolves into a pile of clichés and predictable twists. It starts with Tintin (Jamie Bell) buying a model ship off a market stall and meeting the sinister Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), whose interest in the model is such that he first has it stolen, then resorts to kidnapping Tintin. (Sakharine, by the way, is a dead ringer for a younger Spielberg. Make of that what you will.) Tintin, who before his kidnapping has managed to figure out that the model is part of a puzzle leading to a sunken treasure, wakes up aboard a cargo ship that’s been hijacked by Sakharine. Tintin, of course, escapes, runs into Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), and together they set out to counter Sakharine’s plans and find the treasure themselves.

Tintin’s screenplay is incredibly lazy, and more often than not treats the viewer like an idiot. Everything is repeated two, three times, just to make sure you got it. Tintin mentions that a particular item is kept within a bulletproof case; a few minutes later, we actually get to see the case, and the camera lingers for a good three seconds on the “bulletproof” sign on it. It’s bulletproof, get it? Tintin also has the annoying habit of thinking aloud, which is used to deliver stilted exposition or to clue in viewers on things they guessed ten minutes ago; coupled with Tintin’s tendency to repeat whatever he’s told in a surprised tone, it makes him look like an incompetent idiot. (You might remember that Indiana Jones would also think aloud at times. However, it never got as bad as in Tintin, and it was actually used to great dramatic effects in a number of scenes, such as in the trials at the end of Last Crusade.) The screenplay also relies way too much on contrived coincidences, starting with Tintin buying the model mere minutes before Sakharine can. “Nothing’s an accident,” Sakharine tells Tintin at some point, but almost everything in Tintin is. An entire subplot involving a genius pickpocket is even created for the sole purpose of having Tintin lose his wallet early on in the film; once Tintin needs his wallet back at the halfway point, that subplot is hastily resolved and never brought up again. The entire screenplay is equally sloppy, and most of the time, problems aren’t actually solved by the characters, but by chance.

That wouldn’t be such a problem if the action, for which the story is but an excuse, was any good. Unfortunately, it is most often tedious and lifeless. Tintin, and that’s its greatest fault, is not a fun movie, and part of the reason is that it’s not a funny movie. We love Indy so much not because he’s good-looking and handy with a whip (though we do love him for that, too), but because of his dry wit and cynicism. That’s the reason why we root for him, though it helps that his enemies are complete monsters. Tintin is the opposite of Indy; he’s an extremely bland, unfunny character, which makes it hard to relate to him in any way. The entirety of the film’s humor actually comes from two sources, the first being Haddock and his drunken antics, which get old really fast. The second is the obnoxious duo of Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), the incompetent Scotland Yard detectives that follow Tintin around and provide us with slapstick on par with the R2-D2 scenes at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith (needless to say, Laurel and Hardy they’re not). Pegg and Frost are shamelessly typecast, and since viewers know they’re supposed to be funny guys, they aren’t even given any actually funny jokes. That’s how lazy the movie is. It is all the more disappointing because Wright and Cornish have made some incredibly smart and funny films over the past few years, and with Shaun of the Dead and Attack the Block, have written or co-written two of the tightest screenplays in recent memory, but none of their skill is on display here.

The action, I mentioned earlier, is relentless, so much so that it makes Raiders of the Lost Ark look quiet by comparison, and while most of it is dull and tiresome, there are a couple flashes of brilliance that convinced me that Spielberg hasn’t completely lost it. The first is the retelling by Haddock of what happened the night the Unicorn was lost at sea. It’s a genuinely great action sequence that’s everything the rest of the film isn’t: thrilling, funny, and full of life. (It also borrows, perhaps unwittingly, one very recognizable visual element from the climax of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, in the one moment that’s entirely unlike anything from that tired franchise.) The duel between Sir Francis Haddock and Red Rackham alone is better than many adventure movies in their entirety. There’s also a nifty chase scene that gets more and more ridiculous as it unfolds, but is sadly punctuated by yet another unfunny joke by Thompson and Thomson, the film veering dangerously close to self-parody.

The one great thing about Tintin is the brilliant score by John Williams. The first few notes tell you the master hasn’t lost his touch, and those opening moments may actually be the best of the movie. The credits feature an animated silhouette that looks much like Hergé’s Tintin chasing bad guys, getting into fistfights, and trying to recover a mysterious artefact. It’s silent but for Williams’s music and told all in ellipses, but it’s funnier and more thrilling than everything that is to follow. No lame jokes, no corny exposition. Just adventure as it was meant to be.

Review: Pearl Jam Twenty (2011)

I was nine years old when I fell in love with Pearl Jam. It was September of 1994, Kurt Cobain was already dead, and grunge was nearing the end of its short-lived mainstream popularity. Within a few years, both Soundgarden and Alice in Chains would have split, and Pearl Jam would be the last of Seattle’s “big four” still standing (at least until the Soundgarden and Alice in Chains reunions of the late 2000s). Not that I had any idea what grunge even was back then. It was the mid-’90s, and all I knew was that I didn’t recognize myself in the Spice Girls or the numerous and interchangeable awful boy bands many kids my age listened to. While my friends listened to Ace of Base and Take That, I played my dad’s Police Greatest Hits album over and over again and wondered whether I’d ever find something that echoed in me the way the guitar solos on the Jimi Hendrix cassette tape a Polish friend had given me for my previous birthday did.

That all changed that September, on a day that, like most days after school, my best friend and I were hanging out in his room (he had a SNES and I didn’t, so we spent a lot of time at his place). “Listen to this,” he said, popping a brand new CD into his old hi-fi set. “This” was Pearl Jam’s Ten, and it was about to change my life. As the deceptively calm intro to “Once” gave way to the first few chords, I felt that something was about to happen, was happening. Then Eddie Vedder growled the first line, and even though I had no idea whatsoever what he was singing about (my English back then was more or less non-existent), I knew one thing for sure: I may have been a nine-year-old French kid growing up in the Paris Chinatown, but this, this was home.

Watching Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Twenty brought back memories of how it felt to be nine and hear Vedder’s voice rising out of those trashy speakers for the first time. To be swept up in the music and feel, if not understand, that something was changing, right there and then. “It was a voice on a tape that blew my mind,” Mike McCready, Peal Jam’s lead guitarist, says at one point, referring to Vedder’s demo tape. “It was kind of, ‘who is this? Is this real?’” Nine-year-old me undoubtedly asked himself that very question, if not consciously. More than fifteen years later, even as I’ve spend thousands upon thousands of hours listening to Pearl Jam, I sometimes get the same surreal feeling. “Wow, our guy sings really fucking good, too,” Stone Gossard remembers thinking upon hearing “Hunger Strike”, the duet Vedder sings with Chris Cornell (then lead singer of Soundgarden) on the Temple of the Dog album, released a few months before Ten. That he does indeed.

Unlike my own memories of Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam Twenty does not begin with Ten, or with Temple of the Dog, but with another band, Mother Love Bone, and with another charismatic and hugely talented singer, Andrew Wood. Crowe retraces the success of Mother Love Bone in the late ’80s Seattle scene and its seemingly unavoidable rise to superstardom, halted only by Wood’s death from a heroin overdose, mere days before the planned release of the band’s first album. Left without a band and with their dreams of success smashed, bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard (previously of seminal grunge band Green River) set out to recruit new musicians and a new lead singer, which would eventually lead to their getting a tape from a shy kid from San Diego.

From there Crowe tells the story of Pearl Jam’s first two decades of existence, from those early days playing in clubs in Seattle to their performing in huge venues all over the world, from their feud with Ticketmaster to the Roskilde tragedy that claimed the lives of nine fans in June of 2000 and nearly broke the band up. Crowe, a self-described “former rock journalist,” is a Pearl Jam fan, and it shows; the film’s tone might put off those most impervious to the band’s music and to grunge in general like, say, Andy Rooney, whose unfortunate comments on 60 Minutes following Cobain’s suicide are partially reproduced here. That would be a shame, because there is much to like here, even for non-fans. Crowe is an accomplished filmmaker and, working with “over 1,200 hours” of footage, he tells the fascinating story of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) American rock bands of the past twenty years. As for fans, they’ll marvel at the incredible footage to which Crowe had access, including videos of some of the band’s earliest shows.

Anyone who’s ever been to a Pearl Jam concert will tell you just how intense those get. When I saw them in Paris (they don’t come to France nearly often enough), they opened with “Corduroy”, a song whose intro slowly builds up until it explodes into an angry guitar riff just as Vedder sings the opening line, “the waiting drove me mad,” lyrics that sounded immensely appropriate. By the third song I couldn’t feel the ground, literally swept off my feet by the crowd as I sang “Animal” at the top of my lungs along with 20,000 people. Pearl Jam Twenty features a similar scene, with Vedder launching into the first line of “Better Man” and immediately stopping as the crowd takes over. “There’s this communal exchange,” Vedder explains. “There’s obviously a line drawn between who’s on stage and who’s in the crowd, but not really.”

Some might therefore be surprised to see images of early shows during which Vedder did not try to communicate with the audience, even tried to hide from them. During one of the band’s first concerts, you can even see Vedder trying to conceal his face behind his long hair as he sings “Alive”. That all changed with one show in Vancouver, in January of 1991. Vedder starts his usual (back then) shy self, but as he’s singing “Breath”, he witnesses security taking out some kid and being unnecessarily rough about it. At first Vedder stands dumbfounded, even forgets to sing a line or two, but then something happens. “You could just see this change come over him,” Gossard recalls. “All of a sudden his voice changed, his attitude changed. It just got really intense.” Watching Vedder angrily shout the chorus to “Breath” at an oblivious security guy standing right off the stage is at once funny and thrilling. This is the anger and intensity you’ll hear on Ten; if it weren’t for that night, perhaps Vedder would never have found his voice and Pearl Jam would never have had the success it did have. As it is, that night must have unleashed something, for soon Vedder would be stage diving and climbing lighting rigs during shows, often scaring his bandmates half to death in the process.

More than just chronicling Pearl Jam’s evolution through the years, Pearl Jam Twenty also offers an often fascinating window into the minds of 40-something rock stars who still play each and every show with the same energy they had when they first started. Every current member of the band provides his own insight and stories, along with Soundgarden front man Chris Cornell. (Cornell hilariously relates how, upon first hearing Mike McCready play guitar, he realized there was something not quite right with him that came out through his music. “I would say that’s 100% accurate,” McCready responds.) For a long time, the band struggled to deal with their own success; Vedder’s advice to his younger self “to be careful” no doubt refers to that overnight success and its consequences, such as the mostly manufactured “feud” between Pearl Jam and Nirvana that finds some very emotional closure here, with footage of Cobain and Vedder dancing backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards while 45-year-old Vedder talks about his relationship with Cobain (“If we’re good now, it’s partly because of him,” Gossard adds). Ament more prosaically says that “shit got fucking crazy,” and McCready remembers how he couldn’t recall having played “Daughter” on Saturday Night Live the next day, and “essentially blacked out on TV.”

Even when they seemed at their most self-destructive, Pearl Jam always acted in accordance with their own artistic beliefs and convictions. “I don’t think this means anything,” Vedder infamously declared when the band received a Grammy in 1996 for “Spin the Black Circle” (the lead single from Vitalogy, which ironically featured many songs dealing with the band’s struggle with success). Years later, Gossard stumbles upon that same Grammy collecting dust in his basement. “You can tell how I feel about the Grammys,” Gossard laughs. “You get an award for art?” Ament adds as he recalls defending Vedder’s declaration to some of his friends. “That’s just ridiculous!” Twenty years after the release of Ten, they still feel just as strongly as they used to about the music and about everything they did, the highs and the lows, the smart choices and the mistakes.

Pearl Jam Twenty closes with a montage of numerous moments of communion between Pearl Jam and their audience set to “Alive”, a song Vedder originally wrote as dark and depressing and which has since become an inspirational anthem for the band and their fans. “We’re all still alive,” Vedder shouts from atop a speaker as McCready delivers an otherworldly solo and another, younger Vedder dives off the stage into the arms of a welcoming audience. This, then like now, in 2011 like in 1994, is Pearl Jam. This, to me, is home.