As a Johnny-Come-Lately to such things, I thought I would weigh in on The Great Vulgar Auteurism Debate of 2013, which has blown up in recent weeks amongst cinephiles on social media and across the film blogging world, where everything has probably already been said on the subject.  This blow up was as inevitable as World War I, and as the Young Ottomans posted about the Resident Evil franchise, the Empires were bound to clash.  To extend the shaky metaphor, Calum Marsh’s piece in the Village Voice was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and since then all hell has broken loose, just as long as we define “hell” as a few vicious subtweets, a pretty harsh article by Nick Pinkerton, and a number of even-handed, thoughtful comments and blog posts, not the least of which are from Peter Labuza and Girish Shambu.  This is, however, a problem of terminology more than anything, and though I shan’t redress that particular issue (as Will Young once titled a song, “Who Am I?”), I’d like to explain my thoughts. 

So where to begin?  Well, Nancy Meyers is as good a place as any for my money.  If you’re unfamiliar, Nancy Meyers is one of the pre-eminent writer/directors of adult-oriented romantic comedies working today.  She started as a writer of things like Private Benjamin, Baby Boom, and the Father of the Bride remake (superior to the original, for my money) before moving on to directing her screenplays with her remake of The Parent Trap and onto original works like What Women Want (which Wikipedia tells me was the highest grossing film ever directed by a woman for a time), Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and It’s Complicated.  For my purposes, auteurism is a framework for consideration more than a stone cold fact separating the artists from the hacks, so in my mind, she is most definitely an auteurist.  At the very least she deserves a great amount of consideration for her exploration of gender roles through the decades, from Goldie Hawn in the military to Diane Keaton as the newly Hollywoodized Type A Career Woman trying to deal with motherhood to Mel Gibson as a chauvinist pig being able to read women’s thoughts. I’m not saying I agree with her conception of gender roles in the modern era, or what they should strive to be, but they’re widespread and worth considering.  Even more than just themes, she does have a particular visual style that, though not terribly showy, does favour a certain production design and class setting that, though somewhat typical of modern romantic comedies, is also in some way very distinct.  Her characters (generally a little neurotic but people often behave like adults, a la Jack Black in The Holiday), her situations, her settings, and her interests mean that I can turn on a film and tell that it’s Nancy Meyers within minutes.

Now, I have a certain admiration for her for making these watchable, sometimes-terrible but at least competently made films with moments of real enjoyment here and there.  Even more so I appreciate her desire to write aging characters as romantic comedy leads, where they actually do have discussions about getting older and the changing definitions of happiness that go along with it.  All that said, she is one of the premiere advocates of a relatively narrow form of feminism that almost all Hollywood romantic comedies fall into.  Her work, as well as many others in that genre, focuses mainly on upper-middle class lifestyles whilst ignoring pretty much every class lower for fear that it might be too depressing.  These are ‘aspirational’ fantasies, after all, and it wouldn’t do for people to be bummed out by the actual difficulties of life in late capitalism (this is one of the reasons I am such an admirer of Bridesmaids).  In The Holiday, Kate Winslet’s character works at a publishing company and yet lives in a storybook English cottage, while Cameron Diaz cuts movie trailers and, of course, lives in a massive Hollywood mansion.  Awaiting each of these women as they trade houses for a time is the perfect man for them, and though not without some level of charm, there’s a level of irksome privilege at work here.  That level of privilege is part of Nancy Meyere’s auteurism, however, but it’s not the only part, and it is certainly not unique.  Virtually every romantic comedy that comes out of Hollywood trades in this same economic comfort zone, where the biggest problem is usually that the woman is “too successful” and as such can’t find “the right man” or have time for him or a family.  They work in swank offices for magazines or in a successful, upscale boutique bakery rather than a grim mid-level management job at a desolate office park or at a chain restaurant in the suburbs*.  They live in nice houses and apartments with plenty of space, are generally comfortable with money, and it seems that the only purpose of the feminist movement was to allow women the freedom to engage in capitalism at a higher level.  Those issues are separate from any individual auteur, but are prevalent in the genre, certainly since the 1990s.  All of this is worth discussing and should be examined more, and yet if I were to use the term “rom-com auteurism” it would be totally inadequate.  These trends are symptoms of a studio system and an economic climate that favours aspiration and makes large assumptions about what women want to see.  Trends are different from individualist artistic ambitions, and as such “vulgar auteurism” doesn’t make a lick of sense to describe what this wave of critics wants to discuss.

(*) I just want to give a little shout out to the late Nora Ephron, who traded in many of these tropes with intelligent ease, and who was smart enough to feature a boutique book store in You’ve Got Mail being forced out of business by a powerful chain store.  It’s a fluffy romantic comedy that doesn’t deny the realities of corporate power in modern America.

Why bring up Nancy Meyers and romantic comedies when Vulgar Auteurism trades solely in B-Movie action pictures?  Well, partly just to tip a hat at the male-skewing nature of the whole business – something pointed out already elsewhere, though worth repeating again and again.  Partly because I watch a lot of rom-coms and love them dearly, even though I hate most of them.  Mostly, however, because I think the trend of upper-middle class characters dealing with a limited idea of female liberation in romantic comedies is what is worth investigating, and that’s not down to “auteurism”.

It’s easy to be taken in by a distinctive visual style.  Peter Labuza correctly draws attention to the visual-heavy nature of vulgar auteurism criticism (even more astutely he uses the word “screengrab”), and I’m reminded of Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (one of the leading lights of the VA critical momevent) talking about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and how one must take the movie away from Michael Bay by freeze-framing moments and appreciating their compositional grandeur.  Coming up with “vulgar auteurist” might be a simple way to discuss the trend, but the word “auteurist” is troublingly meaningless here.  Visually these directors are very distinctive, but what connects Paul W.S. Anderson, Neveldine/Taylor, Tony Scott, and Peter Hyams is not a mode of auteurism (which is necessarily individual) but the development of technology and culture.  They tend to make what can be described as “vulgar” films – they are often tasteless and ham-fisted, with no ear for dialogue and no brain for characterization, and certainly no interest in plot sensibility, but the vulgarity is not what makes them interesting.  What makes them interesting is their embrace of digital technologies, from the expensive (Bay, with his huge effects budgets) to the cheap (Neveldine/Taylor and their pro-sumer cameras), their ramping up of the sensory overload – usually to make up for the lack of a coherent script – and the sheer brain-batteringly stupid violence that comes with it.  They’re filmmakers for an ADHD generation, and that should be investigated thoroughly.  Their compositional work should be applauded and discussed, sure, but that is separate from ‘vulgarity’.  Their work often displays rampant consumerism in the modern age, whether it is the promotion of it (Bay’s Transformers films) or ambivalence towards it (Gamer), and that aspect should be discussed separate from ‘auteurism’.

Nick Pinkerton began his diatribe by mocking ‘mumblecore’ because it’s an easy target, but there’s an argument to be made that there was (is?) something a movement happening there.  Several of the leading lights of the group have acted and worked on each other’s films, and they’ve shared casts and crews.  The Nouvelle Vague could be considered a movement because of similar reasons.  But Andrzrej Bulawski is significantly different than Joe Swanberg, the same way Godard was different from Truffaut.  They are all individually (arguably, at least) auteurists (“individually” is crucial here).  They were also part of what could be described as a “movement”, in that there was a recognition of each other and a drawing from the same creative pool.  Really, though, mumblecore is defined by its mode of production and the resultant aesthetic, as well as the subject matter that generally involves the self-absorbed ennui of hipster 20-somethings.  “Vulgar Auteurism” is not quite a movement in the sense of creative forces drawing off each other, but it’s certainly a product of new technology and a certain draw towards particular cultural trends that heavily influence this new aesthetic.  The visuals and the content need to be considered and investigated, and the term “vulgar auteurism” only hampers the discussion.  This isn’t the reassessing of filmmaking greats like Hawks and Hitchcock who were previously shunned by “respectable” cineastes – for one thing they made completely good films and not just visually interesting ones.  This is about tracking and discussing a mode of 21^st century filmmaking that is distinctive and of its time, and the way in which it departs and reflects on the culture it is borne out of is important.  That term is not only inaccurate, it only really serves to troll the imagined critical establishment.

-M

In his supposedly penultimate film (I take his ‘retirement’ with a grain of salt), Steven Soderbergh once again genre-jumps feet-first into a Hitchockian “Wrong Man” thriller that draws heavily on the tradition of psychiatric suspicion.  Working again with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh’s observant, seemingly dispassionate (some say cold) approach is probably not best suited to the genre staples he’s working for, but it does offer a rich critical broadside against corrupted institutions and the people (knowing or unknowingly) complicit in them.  

Looking over his varied career, Soderbergh heroes are often ragged outsiders taking on the powers that be from the outside, and in this sense, Side Effects is a break from his usual in that everyone involved is in some way corrupted.  Though he follows this to its logical conclusion, there’s a sense that he doesn’t particularly like any of the characters involved, which is both a boon to the ideas of the film and a bane to the normal pleasures of the story.  Emily (Rooney Mara) is married to Martin (Channing Tatum), who has just been released from prison for insider trading.  She also suffers from depression and, after attempting to kill herself, is taken on as a patient by Jonathan Banks (Jude Law).  She pushes to be put on a new drug, Ablixa, and Banks happily obliges.  There is sleepwalking, then a murder, then a trial, and then a career upheaval for Banks, who begins to suspect he’s been played.  After the murder of Martin (a supposed sleepwalk stabbing filmed with an impactfully observant Hitchcockian glee), and the subsequent trial, the film shifts perspectives from the depressed but somewhat unknowable workings of Emily to the more traditional Wrong Man scenario as experienced by Banks.  There is little doubt, even in the first part, that something is amiss (lingering over details like a long glance or the name on the badge of a subway cop belie something other than the traditional affected state-of-mind of Emily), and there’s little doubt that a previous therapist played by Catherine Zeta-Jones is involved.  Once the ruse is established, the film moves into a final act that plays out as a three-player game of deception.  For a film involving numerous twists and the attendant misdirection, it’s remarkably fair.  One never feels betrayed by the reveals, and all the elements Banks exploits in the final act (greed, mistrust, and the power the doctor has over his patient) are firmly established.

What really works in the film is Soderbergh’s distaste for all involved.  The supposed “hero” of the piece, Banks, is very similar to Emily in that their desire to maintain a certain status that wealth and prestige can provide has led them to abandon traditional moral virtues in favour of self-interest, though they do so in completely separate ways.  Emily feels betrayed by her husband but also feels the loss of the lifestyle he provided, so she resorts to murder and a complicated version of insider trading to get what she feels she deserves.  Banks’ wife has lost her job in the recession, and to maintain their lifestyle and to continue to send her son to private schools, he takes on extra work, including $50,000 to “consult” for a drug company, tempting potential participants with free drugs (even if he doesn’t believe it to be ‘wrong’, he knows how to exploit the current state of mental care for his own ends).  One of Jude Law’s qualities as an actor is his ability to effortlessly cross the line between charisma and smugness, and Soderbergh uses this to great effect when depicting the concerned but comfortably empowered psychiatrist in a session and with tossed-off luncheon between a Pharma rep and his partners where he strikes a deal to work for them.  As we reach the final act, Banks is interested in doing what is “right” by him, and has no hesitation with using the power he has as a court-mandated doctor to dangle the terrors of ECT and thorazine in front of Emily to get his way, and even the supposed punishment of the “villain” is marked with a certain cruelty.

It is here that the biggest problem of the film is found.  The Wrong Man thriller is dependent upon the audience’s identification with the character thrown into the Kafkaesque nightmare without having any knowledge or intent to enter it.  There is no explicit choice made, as in a noir, for that character to be thrust into the position he or she might find themselves.  If you think of Cary Grant’s Roger Thornwood in North by Northwest, he’s a charming and hapless salesman thrown into a dangerous, life-threatening world of intrigue because of mistaken identity.  The audience roots for him because the set up requires them to understand that this could happen to anyone.  Soderbergh just plain doesn’t care for Banks, and although the twists are fun and enjoyable, there’s never a real sense of investment in the character that would have us genuinely fear for his well-being – the stakes, after all, is a career and a really nice New York apartment and the luxuries his profession provides.

None of this is to say it is a bad film.  It clearly isn’t.  Soderbergh has his usual mastery of editing and cinematography (by this point he has so firmly established his personal visual palette with the RED camera it’s always a delight), and the performances, especially Law and Mara, who takes on a laconic daze for most of the film until she’s required to realise the trouble she’s in, are good across the board.  If the thriller aspect is lacking in emotional investment, it’s because Soderbergh is interested in presenting the faults of the characters through the corrupted world within which they live, and there’s absolutely no opposing force outside of the system for the audience to truly get behind.  The best aspect of the film is Soderbergh’s use of the workings of a classic thriller and the suspicion of psychiatry that runs through the classics of the genre (from Hitchock’s Spellbound and Vertigo to Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corrider) to draw a line between the barbaric past and the supposedly friendly present.  In Side Effects, there is a clear belief that nothing within the psychiatric industry has changed significantly.  They just have friendlier adverts.

-Matt

Not being a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wasn’t terribly keen on seeing the prequel, especially the story is smaller and perhaps less interesting then the huge events that take place in the “main event” series of Tolkien’s work.  Doubly worse was finding out that this relatively tiny children’s book had been somehow bloated beyond all recognition into a three-part, three-hour a piece movie extravaganza that was going to suck up nine hours of my life.  I don’t want to seem cynical, but considering Peter Jackson’s relative failure to reach the heights of success he had with the original trilogy, one might think it a desperate gambit to get back in the A-list game (and get some easy money) to revisit it.  That’s harsh, though, as he clearly loves the source material, which is a problem. 

I wasn’t excited about seeing The Hobbit, but considering the amount of money it made and the fact that, well, it’s a thing, I decided I had to bite the bullet eventually.  They’ve recently completely renovated a previously shoddy Safeway supermarket and aside from adding a little Starbucks kiosk and an impressive bakery and deli section, they’ve got a Redbox machine, which means I have to drive precisely one mile less than I did before.  The previous week I used my old machine, and given circumstances I couldn’t bring the film back within 24 hours of renting it.  Obviously I was none too pleased at the prospect of paying any more than I absolutely had to for the final installment of the atrocious Twilight saga, but nonetheless, there I was, running late and bemoaning the extra $1.58 that could have gone towards half of a venti iced coffee (sweetened with half and half) at the Starbucks in Old Town where I often walk as it gives me a chance to catch up on some music.  Anyway, much to my delight, I returned it “on time”, and further investigation revealed that the due time is 9:00 pm the next day, so that’s a really useful bit of knowledge I’ve tucked away for future use.  Anyway, I apologise.  That was a pointless digression.

So after a brief – and awkward as hell – prologue featuring Ian Holm and Elijah Wood reprising their roles from the original trilogy, we get Ian McKellan back as Gandalf the Grey, only now having to strip away the mild character development he had gone through before.  We also get Martin Freeman as the younger Bilbo Baggins, and he is the saving grace of the film.  Finding a perfect line between bemusement and annoyance, he brings a sweet and honest charm to the role that will see him largely (for this film, at least) as an outsider in a group of mostly anonymous dwarves.  The dwarves include their king, who is noble and good, but the rest of them are just bickering or a bit silly and always getting into scrapes where they’re roasted on a spit or crushed by a dead goblin king.  They’re trying to reclaim their once great mountain kingdom that was invaded and taken over by a dragon called Smaug, and the sequence showing that event is easily the best of the film.  The rest of the action sequences – and there are many – feel pretty uninvolving and rote by contrast, though it was nice to see Peter Jackson’s ever-swinging camera.  Still, parts of the journey seem incredibly superfluous, like the 15 or so minutes where a trio of trolls steal some of the gang’s ponies, and they have to get them back.

Now, I vaguely remember a stone troll in the original trilogy, and I guess maybe that’s why this sequence is included, but I can’t remember if I just made that up or not.  I haven’t seen the original trilogy in at least eight years, and my memory is pretty fuzzy save for the battle in the second film, the ridiculous “I am no man” moment in the third, and Sean Bean being pelted by arrows in the first.  I actually owned them in their extended editions back when they were released, and you’d think I’d have a better memory of something I actually had in my possession (as opposed to a film I saw once and never again), but that’s memory and time for you.  It just slowly degrades away, and you’d hope that it’s the important things that stay, but the reality is we don’t get to choose what our brains think is important every time. This sort of runs contrary to our current lives in 2013 and in the digital realm where everything we do is logged and kept on a server or in some mystical cloud in the sky.  All of those useless tweets are stored somewhere, and available to us with just a click of a button.  Silly, candid photos are etched forever on Facebook or on Instagram.  I’ve recently started using Snapchat a bit, just between two friends, but it’s thrown me into a mild existential crisis.  If you don’t know, the way Snapchat works is that you take a photo and you can write or draw on it, then send it to a friend or a group of friends and they have – depending on your settings – up to 10 seconds to view it before it’s deleted and gone forever.  Maybe these photos we take aren’t recorded memories after all, but fleeting bits of ephemera that are experienced for a short period of time and then gone?  Will there be no record of a moment in a bar, or a silly sign, or of a beautiful woman washing dishes to a popular recording artist?  Apparently not, and this anti-archival approach to social media is so against what we culturally expect that I can’t help but feel it’s a little bit audacious.  Maybe moments like these, as shared between two people in real life, should be temporary.  I often think of the notion that gods are jealous of humans, because humans aren’t immortal and thus life is far more precious.  If everything is here forever, how much can a moment actually mean?  Shouldn’t there be something fleeting about friends in a space at a particular time, or a brief flirtation with a woman that, in the end, goes nowhere and yet it means the world to you at the time?  Sorry, I’ve just gone off point again.

The Hobbit is not without its charms, and to some degree the world of Middle Earth is so rich that you can’t help but want to revel in it just a little bit and know just that much more about its histories and its peoples.  There’s also Gollum, played again by Andy Serkis, who gets an incredible riddle scene with Bilbo, which might be the finest hour of this whole enterprise.  Gollum became one of the most sympathetic and tragic figures in the original trilogy, and though he hasn’t grown yet, there’s a great deal of attention paid to the sadness of the character here.  That’s in no small part because of the technology improvements over the last decade that has allowed the eyes to tremble just that little bit more.  My heart genuinely when out to the guy, as it always does.

That got me thinking about the visual effects.  It’s such a recent series to be continuing, but still the effects here are considerably better in a number of places.  Notably, not all places, as there’s a run through a goblin cavern that still looks a bit silly and still recalls the Gauntlet arcade game.  Other areas, however, see noticeable improvements, and that’s partly because of technology and partly because, as this is now a tried and true brand, there’s more money put into it up front.  It made me wonder if Peter Jackson had a desire to go back and clean up little things like Legolas riding the trunk of not-quite-Mastadon or maybe some of the compositing work.  I guess this has been in the back of everyone’s mind since George Lucas went and “enhanced” the original Star Wars trilogy in the late 90s.  Cinema exists in a strange world between construction and reality, after all, and though it’s a series of images arranged into a certain order to tell a certain story, those people and that crew and that lighting was all once there being recorded for posterity, and now that’s just not the case.  As opposed to Snapchat memories, maybe films should always be in a state of permanence.  For better or worse, they’re a record of a time and place, and going back and endlessly fidgeting with something in an attempt to “make it better” seems strangely immoral.  All of this has been fought out for a long time, and I’ll admit that all of this talk is pretty half-baked.  Shit, there I go again, drifting away from the task at hand, which is to discuss the first entry in The Hobbit trilogy.  I didn’t even have much to say about it, really, but here I am crossing the 1500 word line with a bunch of tangents that some might consider padding.  Still, it looks at first glance like a long, considered review, even if the briefest of skims will reveal otherwise.  But hey, I’ll still get the hits and the word count regardless of the quality of content.  Funny how that works.

-M

The Marvel Machine rampages on in Iron Man 3, which is already taking in incredible amounts of money because, I think, Marvel is exceptionally good at product management.  It says something about the skill of digital effects companies that you can make a solid action blockbuster product without the specific skill-set of an “action director”, and thus we have reached the point where the talent is brought in for their ability to keep a certain level of quality, not take risks and, most importantly, keep the writing snappy.  Though some of the films have had minor aesthetic differences, they all more or less look the same:  generally bright, inoffensive, with a dash of pop art stylization without going full-blown Ang Lee.  The last two entries, especially, have had one major authorial difference and that’s in the writing.  The Avengers largely kept to Joss Whedon’s not inconsiderable talent for wit, and now Iron Man 3 flows right into Shane Black’s wheelhouse.  The fact that it’s distinctive is down almost solely to the script, and if it doesn’t set it necessarily to a higher standard than other Marvel fare, it’s at least different. 

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know my reaction to these films is varying degrees of lukewarm, save The Avengers which was through and through a lot of fun, and Thor, which had a wonderful colour palette and also worked it’s fish-out-of-water angle remarkably well.  It’s not huge praise to say that Iron Man 3 is probably the third best out of all of them, and also my favourite of the Iron Man movies.  It doesn’t have the enjoyably clean first hour of the Iron Man, nor does it have the dizzying Mickey Rourke highs of Iron Man 2, but it also lacks the skull-numbingly dull final act of the former or the shambolic mess of the latter.  It is a fine superhero film, and a perfectly enjoyable summer blockbuster (a quality we should probably embrace given what else is getting released this year or any other year).

It’s really all about Shane Black, who was for a time in the late 80s and early 90s the highest paid screenwriter working.  He made his name on quippy, violent masculine action pictures like the Lethal Weapon series, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.  The poor showing of that last film probably contributed to his banishment to the screenwriting wilderness as the time of the 80s action comedy had passed in the wake of digital revolution.  Rather than lying on the scrapheap of Hollywood Days of Yore next to Joe Ezterhaus, he reinvented himself with the witty, hugely enjoyable Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, also starring Robert Downey, Jr., and it featured a meta-narrative self-awareness that infuses much of Iron Man 3.  Indeed, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it begins with Downey’s narrating the story by first throwing out a quote and then joking about it.  As an aside, if you’re troubled by the introduction of the narration device into the series, wait until after the credits for a diegetic explanation.

It’s interesting that given the screenwriting pedigree that this film barely has any character development at all.  We learn the reasons why the villains do what they do, and the supporting characters are given enough motivation to make the plot progression passable, but considering Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), now CEO of Stark Industries and Tony’s live-in partner, has a pretty significant central role in the story, we learn absolutely nothing more about her than we already knew.  Tony gets a minor arc in trying to overcome the trauma of the climactic events of The Avengers, and he’s given to anxiety attacks (which are done well), but other than that he hasn’t significantly changed at the end of the film from where he was at the beginning.  This will probably feel like a letdown for those who saw the unique circumstances of a series of big-budget epics to introduce a more television-style element of character development, but given that I don’t particularly care about Tony Stark or Pepper Potts beyond their most basic attributes, I wasn’t bothered.  The stamp of Shane Black comes in the multitude of one-liners and jokes that are, for the most party, pretty funny – as well as some Joss Whedon-esque gags (one late in the game involving one of his many suits) – and in that of the plot itself, which nicely gets to strip Tony of his various gadgets and even his suit for a not-too-long stretch in the middle as well as the twists and the commentary on the absurdity of comic book heroes and villains.  I’m sure there must be some fans of the comics out there that are absolutely raging about what he’s done with Iron Man’s arch-nemisis The Mandarin, but I appreciated it and though Ben Kingsley put in one of his better performances.  I also liked how the final action sequence wasn’t just dunderheadedly boring, with some actual humans running around and some mano-a-mano-a-womano fighting going on.  There are elements of the film that ramped up, but they’re not dwelled upon, and thankfully this picture largely scales back instead of expands out, as though each sequel needs to be all bigger, all the time.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the inclusion of a gaudy Miami mansion, or a scene in a trashy rural bar, or the inclusion of a strung-out moron actor and a series of bikini-clad bimbos, or even a night-time climax at a shipyard, all straight out of the 80s action playbook.  In that sense it ties itself to that tradition of the dumb action movies of the past.  Though the effects are much better and the misogyny and even a little bit of the cynicism have been sanded down, these blockbusters aren’t terribly different from the ones of thirty years ago.  And that’s fine by me, because I don’t need a Marvel film to burrow deep into the psychological reality of its characters.  I just need it to be light and breezy and fun and occasionally thrilling, which Iron Man 3 more or less accomplishes.  These things should never take themselves too seriously, and this one doesn’t.  If you have any doubts, check the end credits.

-M

Derek Cianfrance’s previous film – and the only of his I have seen – was Blue Valentine, a somewhat inelegant but certainly affecting (really trying to avoid “raw” here) two-hander about the blossoming and breakdown of a relationship.  What it lacked in visual interest (grainy, handheld, American Indie by-the-numbers) it made up for with pacing and, of course, performances.  That picture worked through incredible acting, and it had to, as there wasn’t much else to rely on.  It was an exercise in reactions, movement, and glances.  It was a picture of big emotions because of its small proportions.  His follow-up, The Place Beyond the Pines, takes a different tack, although one suspects he was hoping to work within the same emotional model.  It’s a sprawling, 140-minute saga, with a triptych structure that unfortunately makes it feel like it is going on for a lot longer than it’s already lengthy running time.  It’s a shame he couldn’t have learned a lesson from his last film, then, and realized that Big Emotions don’t necessarily need a Big Story. 

Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorbike stunt driver at a traveling fair, finds out a fling he had a year before with Ro (Eva Mendes) has produced a son, and he decides to do “the right thing” and quit his job and stay in Schenectady, New York to try to help out.  She’s moved on and doesn’t really expect him to, but gives him enough reason to stay.  Determined to make some money, he falls into bank robbery.  Then there’s Avery (Bradley Cooper), a rookie cop with a law degree from a prestigious family who suddenly finds himself labeled a “hero” for something he doesn’t feel terribly heroic about.  Soon enough he’s caught up in shadowy department dealings, and all of a sudden we’re flung into a cop drama where someone actually uses the word “rat” as a verb.  Then, there are two teenage boys, Jason (Dane DeHaan) and AJ (Emory Cohen).  Jason is a somewhat sensitive “loner stoner”, and AJ is a douchebag of immeasurable douchiness.  They have a story too, and it all connects though not as obliquely as I’ve written here.  The narrative is incredibly straightforward, much to its detriment.

Despite the running time, Cianfrance doesn’t have the time (or the interest) in giving us anything particularly interesting or new in its constituent parts.  A problem with these sort-of omnibus films is that because each section is shorter than a feature length, filmmakers feel they can shortchange the audience on fresh ideas.  Each story is well-trodden territory, and though the Luke section is easily the best, it’s also the first, giving us a steady descent into diminishing returns.  The film is largely about fathers and sons, and yet there’s very little about being a father and only a tiny bit about being a “son”, and the latter is only presented in a somewhat abstract form given that the son never knew the father.  Perhaps because of this thematic rumination, Cianfrance thought it was fine to shortchange us on the female characters.  I’m not suggesting that a filmmaker shouldn’t focus on what he or she wants to focus on, but even if the two women in this film (Eva Mendes’s Ro and Avery’s wife Jennifer, played by Rose Byrne) aren’t central they still need to be actual characters.  Jennifer has a smaller role, but she’s either concerned wife or bitchy ex-wife.  Ro should be hugely important, but all we get is shrieking grief or dizzying love or just general uncertainty.  It’s a huge letdown after what he did with Michelle Williams’ character in Blue Valentine, and considering even Ro’s boyfriend Kofi (Mahershala Ali) is given the opportunity to have more personality than her, it’s absolutely shameful.

On the plus side, Cianfrance has wisely shifted away from the extreme handheld of his previous effort.  It’s often beautiful, with effective use of following shots, warranted shakiness, gliding overheads, and a genuinely well-done chase sequence.  The cast does what they can, and even Bradley Cooper acquits himself fairly well, even if he does end up in his standard smug-mode.  Ryan Gosling is particularly good, radiating earnest incompetence throughout, and really coming alive as a hysteric amateur during the robbery scenes.  There’s also Mike Patton’s wonderful score, which unfortunately only works with the film in two or three sequences.  The rest of the time it’s glowering and doom-laden, as though to remind us all we’re watching some sort of cosmic tragedy, when really it called for the sweeping strings that a hokey melodrama deserves.

The final scene with Jason is very pretty.  Shot with a slightly brighter, autumnal palette, it suggests reflection and optimism.  Then a Bon Iver song comes crashing in and the whole thing is ruined.  The artist is apt, perhaps, as Bon Iver trades in this kind of hokum.  He occasionally has a truly wonderful song that’s beautiful and affecting, but mostly it’s tedious tripe saturated with self-importance.  The Place Beyond the Pines isn’t much different, and Cianfrance has found himself making that critical mistake of thinking he can compensate for shallow notions by just having more of them.

-M

When I read Pete Collins’ bizarre, incredible “Pain and Gain” story, recounting the events in the mid-90s of the “Sun Gym Gang”, my first thought was, “this is a Coen Brothers film.”  The elements were all there: deluded moron criminals, ever increasing amounts of absurdity, horrific events that seamlessly combine tragedy and farce.  I already knew at the time that it was set to be Michael Bay’s next picture, however, and when I eventually saw the trailer, I predicted it would be crass, stupid, and not at all respectful of the real crimes or the victims.  I was basically right about all of that, and yet…

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg, buffed up to appropriately sickening levels) is a personal trainer in Miami.  He’s obsessed with bodybuilding and his physique.  He’s troubled by his lack of success in life, especially as he greatly improved the ailing gym at which he works.  Surrounded by beautiful people and rich Floridians has done nothing for his self-esteem, as in spite of his muscles, he hasn’t staked out a “piece of the pie”, as he would put it.   He gets a new client in the swaggering, rude, and rich Colombian immigrant Victor Kershaw (Tony Shaloub), and soon recruits his friends Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson, playing a composite character from the story) to kidnap and eventually torture Kershaw into signing over his house, businesses, and money.  Paul is freshly out of prison, where he discovered both Jesus and sobriety, and his dim-witted niceness is meant to serve as a sympathetic “in” for the audience.  Adrian is something of a bodybuilding failure whose steroid use has caused erectile dysfunction – a true element to the story that is played constantly for laughs by Bay.  He eventually marries the nurse who treats him, Ramona, which has the strange effect of elevating Rebel Wilson’s pretty lame shtick from “Bay humour cameo” into something like an actual character, only she eventually reverts back to the “Bay humour cameo” role in a crucial sequence.

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s screenplay stick remarkably close to the facts, though there are a number of embellishments dotted around, and of course the filming and characterization given by Bay and the actors change things significantly from the tone of the original story, at least as I read it.  Still, these embellishments, though superfluous, are not ruinous.  The utter ridiculousness of buying a chainsaw and then returning it because the chain pulled in the victim’s hair is one of those too-strange-to-be-true details that this film thrives on.  The material is perfect for a black comedy, and though Bay tries his hand at it, he just doesn’t have the sense of humour to make it work the way it should.  He interjects conversations and jokes at the wrong points, falling back on his usual broad, frat-boy impulses that leave the big guy really sensitive, or the fast-talking black guy to get really upset and talk fast, as though the content were less important than the delivery (which normally in comedy, it is, but not so much here).

Despite all of this, I can’t help but think that this is some kind of ideal telling of this story.  There are those that will argue endlessly about “artistic intent” with this film, but for me, I don’t think Bay has a sensitive bone in his body.  Interjecting an extended gag about Adrian’s penis size in the closing trial sequence is indicative of the numerous wrong-headed decisions that went into that making, and for me it illustrates just the kind of thing that attracted him to this tale.  That said, he does know that these characters are ridiculous, and even if he doesn’t mean everything to be a critique of the American Dream, there it is.  His glossy sheen and his extravagant camera movements are all part of the same delusion that Lugo and his motley gang share.  Bay can’t help but shoot the strippers and swimmers in bikinis in the most gaudy, sexually ferocious way he can, because he has the eye of an eighteen year old watching a Girls Gone Wild video.  Bar Paly plays a stripper and girlfriend to both Daniel and Paul, and while it seems hugely offensive that she’s so stupid she thought they were both in the CIA, that is an actual fact.  At the same time, Bay dresses her up and she’s forced to act like the ultimate Blonde Bimbo, and the line between satire and genuine lust is blurred.  I don’t for a second think that Bay sees the culmination of these men’s dreams to be something not worth striving for, but that’s irrelevant to how I watched the film.  The gaudy excess of the visuals and the cutting create the sense of a sickeningly putrid and shallow interpretation of the modern notion of “The American Dream”, and damn it if it’s not apt.

It might be insensitive to the victims, and it might be strange tonally for a real life story about how three people came to be murderers (two of which are on death row), but it’s vulgarity is, perhaps, precisely what is needed.  With his bright colours, slick sets, and action movie trappings, Bay has perhaps unintentionally created some kind of Platonic Ideal for this story, and by extension, that of the wasteland of pathetic American aspirations.  It’s just all so damn ugly in the end, and that’s what this story deserves. One of the most materialist, shallow filmmakers America has ever produced has made a film about some of the most materialist, shallow people America has ever produced, and it all seems so damn fitting that I can’t bring myself to tear it down for its poor humour and tonal failings.  When all is said and done, Michael Bay has put forth what might be the most aggressively Marxist critique of America today, and though he probably didn’t intend it, it is something.

-M

Easy is nice.  The world is difficult and indifferent, and as such there’s nothing wrong with opting for something easy when you can.  I get that.  I’m not against that.  But there’s “easy” and then there’s “easy”.  The Twilight Saga film franchise has, it turns out, been easy in a way that’s so unbelievably lazy and dull that I can’t imagine how a thinking human being can find it entertaining.  People talk a lot about liking films they can just “turn their brains off” and watch, but surely there are some basic elements of storytelling that require at least some semblance of a conflict to make it work, even if it is perfunctory or dumb or obvious.  I finally watched the final part of the series, Breaking Dawn Part 2, and I have come to the conclusion that nothing at all of interest happened in the 9 or so hours of time I spent watching them over the years.  Of the many, many problems that have plagued this $3 billion franchise, the worst is quite possibly that it plays like a young child’s imagining of a narrative for his toys.  My incredible, adorable nephew was once playing with some toy cars and figurines, and was explaining to me, “this truck has to get over here so he can see the cows!”  “That’s great”, I said, “but where’s the conflict? The truck just has to get over there to see the cows, and that’s it.”  He was all of five years old at the time, so what did I expect?  I should add I said it in a playful way and I’m sure he didn’t pick up on my criticism, so I didn’t rudely offend a child.  Still, there’s nothing to what he was trying to achieve, and that, in a nutshell, is what The Twilight Saga has turned out to be. 

Vampires are one of the richest inventions in the history of human literature.  It plays to some deep, dark desires that both horrify and intrigue.  The obvious sexual elements are mixed with the notion of immortality-as-a-curse, and the idea that our mortality makes us human is essential.  Twilight has always bucked the trend – and not in any interesting ways, it turns out – by making vampires at best a weak metaphor for horny males and at worst a simplistic ideal that solves all of humanity’s great questions.  Is it awful and lonely to live forever?  No!  It’s kind of great.  What if you fall in love with one, and you’re a mortal?  Well they’ll just turn you into a vampire and it’s awesome with no significant downside.  The disgustingly backwards morality and the anti-feminism of the series has been discussed to death, so I’m not going to dwell on those aspects here.  Instead, I want to highlight just how awful the storytelling is, and how the poor directors handed the job to make them into films has been a struggle against the source material.

David Slade, director of Eclipse, once talked about adding a line for Bella (Kristen Stewart) when she had to make a choice.  The line was, essentially, explaining that she wasn’t making a decision because of Jacob (Taylor Lautner) or Edward (Robert Pattinson), but she was making it for herself.  It doesn’t make any sense given everything we’ve seen, but even Slade realized that it was completely ludicrous how her entire life was based solely on men and nothing at all on her own agency.  Bill Condon, who directed the final two parts, has tried his hardest to inject absolutely anything of interest into his installments, and though I applaud the effort (especially the somewhat horrific birthing sequence), in the end it reveals just how terrible the source material is.  Outside of the opening of Eclipse – which features an absolutely fine sequence of actual suspense that is the only nod to the horror genre this series has ever bothered to include – the best sequence in the entire series is a big battle towards the end of Breaking Dawn Part 2, in which the Cullens and their allies (both vampires and werewolves) take on the Volturi in a go-for-broke battle that features as many bloodless beheadings as you can conceivably get away with in a PG-13 movie.  The key excitement to this sequence, however, is not really the choreographed spectacle of a big fight, but of the fact that major characters die left and right.  It’s the first time in any of the films that it felt like there were stakes (not literally, of course, because the wooden implements never surface in the series).  Extraordinarily, it the sequence turns out to be padding.  It’s a sad attempt at giving a climax to something that doesn’t actually climax.  It was all a vision, it turns out, and all the death and destruction never really happened.  Everyone continues on their way and lives happily ever after.  Everyone.  Condon and his screenwriter must have felt compelled to cap off the “saga” with something grandiose and exciting because the source material didn’t offer it.  Instead, after the vision, we’re given a deus ex machina of a half human/half vampire who explains that it’s all going to be fine.  All of this is not even touching on the fact that the reasons for the final confrontation make no sense at all.  The fear is that the daughter is a turned child, which is a crime because child vampires can’t be controlled, so a lengthy section of the film is devoted to the Cullens getting “witnesses” (i.e. friends of the family) to meet the child who can prove she’s half human/half vampire just by touching them.  Why did this need to happen?  Why couldn’t she have just touched the Volturi leader (Michael Sheen, eating it up splendidly) when he arrived?  I’m not generally one to get into the plot holes of films, but this was pretty glaring considering how much time it took to deal with it.

In the end, there’s no real conflict.  Jacob creepily imprints on an infant, and though we’re given a pretty solid scene of Bella’s reaction to the news, it is quickly brushed away and is, apparently, not creepy to anyone.  Bella has to become a vampire and give up her mortality, but that doesn’t mean giving up any aspect of her personality our soul.   She’s the same person only she has a lot of powers, is incredibly fast, and will live forever with her immortal husband.  Smart writers question the notion of immorality, but not Stephanie Meyer.  It’s no better than weak fan fiction, or the thoughts of a child, wanting to come up with the best way to fulfill the fantasy of an easy, beautiful life.  It was a bad sign when it turned out that vampires couldn’t be in the sun because it was lethal, but because they would shine like diamonds, but I was genuinely shocked at how much that thread of defanging went.  It’s as though the author felt guilty about being sexually aroused by Tom Cruise as Lestat in Interview with a Vampire and so set about to write a fantasy in which she could enjoy the romance and the sexuality without actually dealing with what she felt to be sins.

Credit where credit is due, however, and Breaking Dawn Part 2 is at least the most self-aware of the series, where there are actual jokes about the absurdity of the story – namely multiple jokes about just how stupid a name Renesmee is – and that’s a welcome jolt of humanity to a series that has strived so hard to squash any semblance of real emotion.  Also, and perhaps less excitingly but no less impressive, the series has perfected the art of combating absolute boredom by injecting just enough cringes for the audience that they can’t fall asleep easily.  It’s a snarky statement, sure, but I don’t think the fans can tell the difference.  They’ve clearly hit a stage where “easy” is not necessarily “boring”, and “easy” is all they can handle.  That easiness is the most disappointing thing for a discerning viewer.  Everyone involved had 9 hours/4 books to build a universe and create a mythology, and explore them for dramatic purposes, and they chose not to do it.  If there are no stakes, then all we’re left with is the drippiest and most obvious romance since every romantic comedy Katherine Heigl has been in, only without the pathetic stabs at humour.  Life is great because it’s hard, and because we have to overcome adversity and subsequently we feel better about it because we did.  The only difficulty in the Twilight franchise is that of the viewer putting up with it, so in that sense, Stephanie Meyer did a good job of making life difficult.  Unfortunately that was only achieved because she didn’t have the guts to actually demand anything at all from her audience, and we’re all a little bit dumber because of it.

-M

Roger Ebert is dead.  This isn’t really a shock, and yet it is a total shock.  A few days ago we found out that the cancer he had been battling for the better part of a decade, and which ultimately claimed his voice and his jaw, had come back, as it is wont to do.  I didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly after he enumerated all of his plans for the next year so recently, but here we are.  So in memory of the man and the critic, let’s talk about me.

I grew up in Southern Alabama, in a home of born-again Christians who seem to have run with the evangelical revolution of the late 70s/early 80s.  As such I was denied the pleasure of watching most films that were not animated.  This wasn’t such a big deal to me until when I was about 8 years old all of my friends would talk about Alien 3 or later Terminator 2: Judgment Day and I couldn’t be a part of those conversations.  I wasn’t even allowed to see Home Alone, and when I was at a sleepover in 1991 at a friend’s house and they all watched it, I left the room on my own accord.  I remember my friend’s mother dropping us off at the cinema to see a movie about Christopher Columbus that the paper had listed as “PG”, but upon buying the ticket I realised it was PG-13 and called her from a payphone to take me home.  I was not one to confront the wrath of the Almighty.  Because of this I later reflected and figured my obsession with films started there, at that phase of denial and the way it made me feel left out on the playground.  Really, though, it probably started with Aladdin, and my mother deeming it okay to just drop me and a friend off at the cinema.  Before long she was dropping me off every weekend.  When Jurassic Park came out I wasn’t allowed to see it because it was PG-13, but I grew obsessed.  I had the soundtrack, folders, and I even read the incredibly violent book.  They eventually relented and allowed me to see it, and the feeling of sitting in the cinema seeing a film I couldn’t believe they allowed me to see was far more terrifying than any raptor attack.  In my obsessiveness, I had kept Ebert’s three-star review from a syndicated column and read it upon seeing the film.  How could he not think this was the most amazing movie ever made?  If I remember, he discussed the way in which Jaws had held back the shark for most of the running time, allowing the audience to build up a sense of unseen dread in their minds, while the dinosaurs are revealed very early in Jurassic Park, as though Spielberg were more interested in what the effects could show instead of how they could work on the audience.  I didn’t buy it at the time, of course, but he was right.

As films became a bigger and bigger part of my life, and my mother would drop me off in the mornings and pick me up in the evenings on Saturdays or Sundays and I would just sit in the cinema watching whatever was on, I began to watch his show with Gene Siskel, as well as Sneak Previews with Michael Medved and Jeffrey Lyons (thank the maker I had the common sense to realise which one was more edifying).  Of course, as a geek, you do this just because you can’t stop.  You want to see clips and hear discussions just to get excited or to relive the sensations of seeing the film itself, but the criticism began to creep into my brain. I was, subconsciously or conciously, learning things.  How to view films, perhaps, or more importantly, how we as people understand and explain our feelings about something.  It was probably my first real exposure to critical thinking in that sense, and from there on I’ve had a real drive to know why I feel the way I feel about one thing or another, even if I can’t fully explain or justify it in intellectual terms.  It also taught me that golden rule of film viewing:  It’s not what a movie is about, but how it’s about it.  The notion that it isn’t just about the story or cool things happening, but about how it portrays those things and what that means in a larger sense was crucial to my development as a moviegoer and, I suppose, as a person.

In 1995 my mother finally gave up and let me see R rated films.  Obviously first and foremost I was catching up with the Alien films and Speed and Bad Boys and Executive Decision - I was a teenage boy after all – but I was also riding my bike up to Blockbuster to rent John Sayles’ Lone Star the day it was released because I saw a glowing review on Siskel and Ebert’s show.  It was the middle of the American Indie Rennaisance of the 90s and I was taking in Tarantino in one hand and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory with the other.  Fargo felt like an epochal moment for me because of Ebert’s review, and I haven’t looked back since.  When I discovered his reviews were being posted online for free in 1998, I went full tilt mad.  His archive only went back to 1986, but I was reading review after review after review, trying to catch up with recent movie history.  When he started his Great Movies column, I began to educate myself on the glories of world cinema, from Resnais to Kurosawa to Fellini.  Not that it was easy to get a hold of these things in Alabama, but when I could, I would.  Since 1998, I still check his website every Friday (or in the past few years, on Thursday) to see the new reviews.  Not being able to do so from now on is going to be strange, because you don’t keep up a habit for 15 years and not feel the lack when it’s gone.

He was a populist critic, to be sure, and this has drawn the ire of people like Armond White and I’m sure twitter and comments sections are ablaze with naysayers (though my own Twitter feed is almost nothing but respectful celebrations of the man).  Eisenstein’s writings changed the way the world made movies.  Bazin’s changed the way the world viewed movies.  Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris and Robin Wood and Manny Farber changed the way American criticism was written and received and discussed.  Arguably, Ebert never did any of that for the intellectual circles, but he reached a wide audience and influenced so many way after film critics were supposed to have that kind of reach.  In recent years he’s done a lot to foster young writers on his site.  His shamefully short-run PBS show, Ebert Presents At The Movies was brilliant for the way it used Christy Lemire, a vibrant but traditionally populist critic as a counterpoint to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who is a great representative of the new kind of internet criticism that has sprung up over the last decade.

After his first battle with cancer and his leave from the show, his reviews seemed far too kind to mediocre films for my taste, at least for  awhile.  I suppose we all move on and want to explore different areas of cinephilia, and I (wrongly) thought I had “outgrown” him in some way.  I could never dismiss him, though, especially as even after he lost his voice he became absolutely prolific in his writing, and not just about films.  His pieces on alcoholism, evolution, politics, and everything else on his site are incredible pieces of writing from anyone.  Not bad at all for a man who seemed to just fall into film criticism in the late-60s.  It’s easy to scoff at the films he would give four starts to in recent years, but if you really look at it, his reasoning and his writing actually improved.  We can be pretty cynical out here in the world of cinephilia, and it’s important to have someone remind us that there’s a beauty to the moving image and the way it transports us from our own world or reflects back upon us our own lives.  In the end, it all felt incredibly generous in the best possible way.  We should never lose sight of how lucky we are to love and cherish this art.

Throughout everything, he was a defiant optimist.  I never met him, and I never knew him, but I always felt like I did.  That’s the mark of a great writer, a great thinker, and a great humanist.  Thank you, Roger, for everything.

-M

At this awkward but significant time in the television calendar, there are any number of reasons why this viewer could be prone to anxiety, consternation, jubilation, or excitement.  The impending return of Mad Men and Game of Thrones, the final season of Breaking Bad, the gaping hole in our collective chest as 30 Rock has come to an end, the decline (something that’s both exaggerated and unmistakable) of the beloved curio Community, or ABC’s seemingly willfull destruction of the fantastic Happy Endings are all likely to weigh on my mind from time to time, but the one that causes me the most grief is, of all damn things, the slim renewal prospects of ABC Family’s Bunheads.

Amy Sherman-Palladino, of Gilmore Girls fame, along with Lamar Damon (whom I do not know, so he is going to be horribly underserved for credit here…sorry) has created something strange and special on the that most snubbed of networks, and it is not terribly surprising that its ratings are sub-par even by their generously low standards.  Whilst I have only seen episodes here and there of the network’s other offerings, they seem to have a tendency for the more simplistic virtues of teen soap operas aimed at 14 year olds, and despite the network name have made some effort to attempt to catch up with the supposedly faster-maturing of young people today.  Landing like some alien relic in the middle of teen murders and switched-at-birth intrigue, Bunheads is from the very start pure Palladino.  Indeed, it begins with so many elements similar to Gilmore Girls it was a little off-putting.  An attractive, fast-talking smart-alec woman in her 30s, a small quaint town right out of a wet dream from 1950′s conservative minds, Kelly Bishop as a fast-talking (okay, let’s just assume everyone on this show can be described as such and leave it), matriarchal figure that’s not interested in nonsense but is still quite savvy, etc etc etc.  All in all it smacks of a complete redux (the first episode is also very pilot-y, which doesn’t help, but that are pieces to put in place), but at the end of the second episode, when there’s a gorgeous ballet number to Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame”, I was, not surprisingly, hooked.  Still, it took a number of episodes for it to move from viewing afterthought to appointment television, and I think part of that is due to the way I’ve been trained as a viewer to understand shows and their relative “importance”.  

Television critic James Poniewozik just posted an article about the importance of the show and how it is necessary to make room for it in our increasingly violent TV landscape, thus effectively horning in on the area of what this post was originally going to be about.  Still, he is right about what the media landscape seems to favour for a number of reasons (mostly prestige and, of course, vocal viewers), and I think it’s easy to get swept up in labelling certain shows “minor” versus “major”.  Straight-up dramas tend to gain the most from these distinctions, as they probably should generally (The Wire, after all, is about modern America in a post-capitalist environment, and what could be more crucial?), but even the hugely discussed sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation tend to get more respect just for being more inventive or emotionally satsifying – not to mention on broadcast networks with larger reach.  Prestige, then, is saved for the extraordinary or the HBO, not for ABC Family, and certainly not from the seemingly-light fare of a Palladino show.  This is also partly because of the modern tendency for cynicism, something that has caused classical Hollywood musicals to fall firmly into the realm of kitsch viewing even as the clever-clever (not-so-clever) Glee briefly held the public’s imagination, or Tom Hooper’s grittily dull adaptation of Les Miserables manages to make some cultural and box-office headway.  I’m being somewhat general here, but it’s not at all a stretch to watch the lives of the denizens of Paradise and see the heightened, pleasant nature of their world.  There is snark galore, to be sure, and people are always getting into minor tiffs, but that underlying sweetness of their world is inescapable.  In an age of anti-heroes we can only condescend to watch good-natured people going about their good-natured lives.  This is a huge mistake, and one that took me a bit of time to come to grips with.  Like Gilmore Girls, I spent much of the season only recommending Bunheads to a select few, and always qualifying that recommendation with “well, if you can handle the cutesyness and the pop culture references and just get into the rhythm of it, it’s really good!”  I am part of the problem, but no longer.  Everyone should be watching Bunheads, because it is currently one of the most audacious and emotional and intelligent television shows on the air.

The basic premise is as such: Michelle (Sutton Foster) is a once-aspiring broadway dancer working as a Las Vegas showgirl.  She has been publicly admired by a salesman, Hubbell (Alan Ruck), for years, and when he decides to propose, she decides very quickly, “why not?” and agrees.  She then moves to his hometown of Paradise, where she finds his mother, Fanny (Kelly Bishop), still lives on his property and runs a dance studio there.  A tragic turn leaves her seemingly out of place but also inextricably tied to the town, and the early stages of the show sees Michelle struggling to form a relationship with her new mother-in-law.  Meanwhile we follow a group of four close-knit friends in Fanny’s dancing class:  Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), Ginny (Bailey Buntain), and Melanie (Emma Dumont).  Though they’re not terribly assured when it starts, the kids grow better and better throughout, particularly Bailey Buntain and Julia Goldani Telles – only Emma Dumont is as of yet a bit underserved.  The relationships grow, the comedy starts to gel and gets delivered with a relative ease, even allowing for some fairly broad stabs at humour and simple reaction set-ups that work a treat.  I always thought of Gilmore Girls as vaguely Whit Stillman-esque (thanks in no small part to its setting amongst East Coast WASP elites), but it’s intriguing how Bunheads resembles in terms of tone and broad comic oddities Stillman’s latest feature, Damsels in Distress.  It is heavily stylized, though perhaps not so much as that work, but it is also less tonally jarring for the uninitiated.

The key here are the dance sequences, which fit so perfectly into the show it makes no difference whether it’s an actual performance for the story (Fanny’s ballet about plastic bags and the environment is a particular treat) or whether it’s totally non-diegetic (and even irrelevant to the emotions of the characters, a la the wonderfully incongruous “Istanbul [Not Constantinople]” sequence).  There is an understanding among the creative team that this show is not like the heightened, technicolor worlds created in the Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of yore.  It’s not our reality, but it’s an emotionally logical one, and when Sasha has a falling out with her parents and performs a stunning ballet, or when Michelle attempts to coach Ginny for a showtunes audition, and takes over herself, the payoff isn’t just about the words or the dance or the music, but with the emotional journey we know she’s been on.  This isn’t new stuff – musicals have themselves been using this forever – but it’s surprising to find it fit so comfortably on a television show.  The formal experimenting with the dancing and, most notably, the visuals is as audacious as anything else on television (take, for instance, the dance in the darkness with the miners’ helmets on to Sparks), and yet it can switch to gorgeously classical (“Makin’ Whoopee” in the finale).

From here on out there will be spoilers so beware.

None of which would mean much if the characters weren’t so well formed (even if it takes a bit time with the kids), and there wasn’t an extremely intelligent understanding of human emotions and teenage awkwardness.  What seemed for a while to merely a plot device to get Michelle into her new circumstances turned into something gutting and beautiful when she sees her drunken self on the wedding video, and Michelle’s constant unease with her new station (adult, responsible, no longer a dreamer) is all wrapped up in her unshakeable feeling that she’s a fraud (she was married to Hubbell for 24 hours and barely knew him), and has never acted like enough of an adult to have kids look up to her.  The kids have all moved at different paces, and though Melanie still hasn’t totally struck out on her own terms, they’ve done a damn good job in 18 episodes with the other three, most recently (and perhaps better than the others) with Ginny.  To take an easy example from the finale, the girls (led, as ever, by Sasha) have decided to learn about sex and set goals for when they should have it, only for them to find their own differing ways on how it is to be done (Boo finally stands up to Sasha and says she and her boyfriend are going to do it two nights before prom – the extra day being in case it’s awful and they have to do it again so they won’t be awkwardly looking at each other at the dance itself), and in the final reveal, that Ginny has already done it with her quiet crush of mystique.  It’s a heartfelt and honest moment, and impressively doesn’t rely on the average teen drama cliches (why won’t he call me!? does he love me?), but rather her emotional distress at having done it just because he’s so beautiful.  It’s a small thing, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted in American television (or anywhere in our culture) when there’s an admission that teenage girls have sex drives too, and when they see someone attractive, they want to do something about it, and that’s not mutually exclusive from feeling confused and even upset about it.  The show is aggressively female at it’s center, and it’s refusal to give us a will-they-or-won’t-they cliche to hang the story on (Lorelai and Luke, anyone?) is one of many examples at just how smart this show is.  It’s about women, and girls, and finding themselves at different times in their lives.  What can be more ‘major’ then that?

-M

10.  Not Fade Away

David Chase, of The Sopranos fame, makes his directorial debut with this strange and glorious ode to that most tired of subjects, rock and roll in the 1960s.  Clearly drawing from a number of very personal memories, the film begins with the dweeby Douglas (John Magaro) seeing the Rolling Stones on television.  The trajectory from this is pretty standard for this type of film.  Douglas has a crush on a Grace (Bella Heathcote), and he’ll win her over through the band, he has disputes with the frontman Eugene (Jack Huston), the culture shock of the late 60s doesn’t sit well with his father (James Gandolfini), and on and on.  Despite the familiarity, the performances and the writing breathe a lot of life and subtlety into even the most cliché developments (Heathcote is especially good).  Beyond that, though, and the real treasure of Not Fade Away is it’s peculiar style.  It’s not easy to get into in the beginning, but somewhere around the first band rehearsal it begins to click: this is all about rhythm, and not a tight one at that.  The editing is incredibly elliptical – scenes seem to wander off and then bleed into another.  There are gaps in the narrative, and not so much in the sense that it is disorienting but that this is a progression of moments and memories.  That word “memories” is important, because I can’t remember a time where a film has felt more like a series of memories that were happening in the now.  The present-tenseness is key, and in that sense, virtually every scene becomes its own mini-pop song.  It’s all part of the whole narrative, sure, but also self-contained.  In its final scenes, the reality bleeds into hazy myth, and the disembodied sometime narrator becomes corporeal and demonstrative of the power of music as an engine for living.  There are very few films that understand rock and roll quite like this one.

9. The Grey

Liam Neeson’s gruff, wolf-hunting Ottway is suicidal.  Banishing himself to the cold brutality of an Alaskan oil refinery to protect its drunken, debased staff of criminals, he is subjected to a viscerally terrifying plane crash and appoints himself as the leader of the small band of survivors.  They must escape the wolf pack that appears to be hunting them, and make it so safety.  So far, so whatever, and if the name Joe Carnahan means anything to you, you’re probably thinking that this is just another over-the-top shitshow of violence a la his Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team.  Though there is violence, of course, it is modulated by a contemplative air.  Yes, the plane crash is fantastically disorientating, but it’s the scene after, when Ottway bluntly soothes a man into death that it shows itself to be something more than just a survivalist saga.  More Ernest Hemingway than Jack London, it becomes less and less about man versus nature and more and more about man versus death, and the many relationships he has with it.  Rarely do you see Hollywood action films take into consideration what it means to actually be in the situation the characters are in, but this one grabs it by the throat and treats it as though it were the only thing.  The touching flashbacks to Ottway’s father, or those to his dying wife, actually work to build on an idea of what it means to live and die.  At a certain point, the characters stop looking for a way out and begin looking for a moment of grace.  Anyone expecting Liam Neeson: Wolf Puncher will be wholly disappointed by the final scene, but that’s sort of the point.  When hope fades away, you still have a choice.  It’s masculine as all hell, but if masculinity were treated as thoughtful as this, I’m okay with that.

8.  The Turin Horse

So yes, this is basically a black and white film about two impoverished people eating potatoes day after day.  There are a number of films on this list that I would consider “not for everyone”, but none moreso than this.  If you hate Bella Tarr, this isn’t going to convince you to feel otherwise.  If you don’t know Bella Tarr, then this is about every cliché about European arthouse cinema you can possibly imagine.  For the two of you who are still with me, let me please impress upon you just how great this, the supposed swansong for everyone’s favourite Hungarian auteur, really is.  An opening narration gives us the story of Nietzsche confronting a man beating his horse in Turin, and the subsequent mental breakdown he experience because of it.  The film then asks, “What happened to the horse?”  This sort of intuits that we’ll be following the horse, but it’s hard to say – for one thing, this doesn’t look a damn thing like Turin, but at the same time, it’s not supposed to look like anywhere.  The owner of the horse, Ohlsorfer (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) live in a small one-room home with an adjoining stable for their rather temperamental and uncooperative horse. They live in an almost barren hell, and a severe and seemingly never-ending windstorm is bearing down upon their land as we follow them over the course of six days.  As this is Bella Tarr, there are the expected long takes (the 146 minute film is only about 30 or so shots), and we follow them through their daily routine of waking up, fetching water from the well, checking on the horse, boiling potatoes (one each) and then eating them (her somewhat elegantly, him less so as he only has one functioning arm).  We see this process, day in and day out, always filmed differently to give us a different perspective on the near wordless tedium of their existence.  There are a few differentiating incidents, however, in the form of an acquaintance coming to stock up on brandy, a group of gypsies stopping by to take water from the well, and then a very funny sequence of the father and daughter deciding to leave the godforsaken place, only to turn around for reasons unknown.  Their circumstance isn’t just grim, it turns out, but apocalyptic, and we follow them as they shruggingly adapt to the ever-worsening circumstances.  Life and all of its mundane tedium continues, even as the world ends.  That’s survival, and that’s what we do.

7.  Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ostensibly tracks the long night of a farcical expedition into the Turkish countryside to find where a body is buried.  A policeman, a prosecutor, a driver, and the suspect who has admitted to the killing look long and hard for the burial place of the victim, guided by a vague sense that there was a fountain nearby, maybe, or perhaps a specific tree.  This is an anti-procedural, where Ceylan’s camera and editing sap out the suspense of discovery of the murder in favour of the lives of the characters involved.  Long shots of the countryside and the small caravan of cars traversing through it tie the characters to their environment.  It’s less important for a large part of the running time that they find the body than it is to talk about mundane existence and watch an apple float down a stream.  It works beautifully as the lives of the characters deepen as they tell stories or talk about their situation or even how humanely they treat their suspect as he struggles to remember just where he buried the damn body.  The glorious sequence where they stay in a village elder’s home and see his daughter is revealing and moving in the small ways only a truly attentive film can be.  As that dreary morning comes, we get answers about the mystery, but the particulars don’t matter as much as what the doctor – who has largely been our entry point throughout – decides to do with them.  Haunting and gorgeous, it’s a supreme effort and worth every minute you fall under its hypnotic spell.

6.  It’s Such a Beautiful Day

It seems a bit of a cheat, but it did technically get a theatrical release as one film this year, so I’m counting it.  Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day is actually a combination of three animated short films that tell the singular story of almost-stick figure Bill, who is suffering from depression, illness, and an increasingly shattered psyche.  With no dialogue other than Hertzfeldt’s constant narration of Bill’s thoughts told in the third person, we’re treated to an increasingly imaginative vision of a cracked mind.  Bill is ill, and he has or had a job and he had a girlfriend but he’s lost or is losing them as his mental state deteriorates.  Through the bizarre myths or realities of his family history up to his contemplation of mortality and immortality, we’re treated to a dizzying representation of a life lived (or not) through a stunning array of photographic and animated skill.  Acerbically funny and incredibly moving, it’s a sad, beautiful, life-affirming exploration of existence.  Animation is rarely quite like this, utilizing an impressive array of resources for a DIY aesthetic that speaks to the thematic and emotional core of the story.  It is absolutely not to be missed.

5.  Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg’s supposedly “minor” work is also a return to the more flat-out weirdness we’ve missed in his last decade of filmmaking.  Adapted almost verbatim (supposedly, I’ve never read it) from Dom DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis takes place in a near future and follows the hugely successful, young trader Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) as he travels in his luxurious and technologically advanced limo across the city to get a haircut.  What follows is a strange, funny journey through a dystopian future (or present?) as Packer gives into his death drive (see what I did there?).  Timely as hell, we get a portrait of a ruling technocratic elite divorced from emotion and to some degree reality, eerily echoing the post-recession world of Occupy Wall Street and Too Big To Fail Banks that has brought to the fore the crippling realities of late-capitalism, income inequality, and the supposed deserving rich.  Cronenberg navigates this world with a sense of unreality and humour that he’s best known for, and the film features a number of brilliant sequences including a hilariously sexual meeting during a proctology exam and a fascinatingly blank conversation with an advisor (Samantha Morton) that plays out as though both characters are monologuing to each other.  As Packer loses his fortune, or watches the head of the IMF get mutilated on live TV, or passes the protestors self-immolating, there’s a distant contemplation of the breakdown of the mathematical structuring of society from which he has made his fortune.  This all leads to a spellbinding scene between him and a deranged ex-employee (Paul Giamatti) that manages to be complex and absurd.  This final scene and especially the final shot sees Packer breaking away from his cold façade and it suggests that Pattinson is no mere teen pin-up.  It’s brilliant and fascinating, and Cronenberg proves himself once again to be one of the most vital filmmakers working today.

4.  The Deep Blue Sea

Terrence Davies’ first narrative feature since The House of Mirth, The Deep Blue Sea is a formally brilliant exploration of love, honor, desire, class, and British society in the 1950s.  Rachel Weisz gives the performance of her career as Hester, the wife of an older judge (Simon Russell Beale) and respectable member of the aristocracy who falls in love (or has fallen in love with) a ravishing alcoholic ex-RAF pilot played by Tom Hiddleston.  Past and present are mixed in a glorious opening sequence, and through the style of a classic British melodrama (all “old chap” and Noel Coward and, well, Terrence Rattigan, who wrote the play upon which the film is based), Davies explores the ideas and ideals and passion and love and society in a peculiarly impressionistic way.  Not so much about the constraints of society’s accepted practices than it is about the acceptance of true passion as something different than true love, or maybe that true love is relative, the film uses its melodramatic trappings to dig deeper into Hester’s psyche.  It is rife with exquisite moments, from the intertwined bodies of Hester and her pilot to the deeply respectful exchange the judge has with Hester after she has left him to the stunning flashback to the Blitz, where a long tracking shot witness all of the people hiding in the underground tunnel whilst a man mournfully sings “Molly Malone” and everyone joins in.  The retro-sytlized nature of the piece only enhances its brutally emotional core.

3.  This is Not a Film

For this documentary, backstory is important.  Jafar Panahi is one of Iran’s most lauded filmmakers internationally, and he was charged of making anti-Iranian propaganda by the government.  Sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on screenwriting and directing, Panahi’s career is basically over.  There was an enormous outcry from the international filmmaking community, but so far it is to no avail.  This is Not a Film, made by Panahi and his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, takes place over a few days (though it is edited to look like one day, which is one of the many fascinating questions the film raises) as Panahi films himself on his iPhone and then Mirtahmasb comes over with a prosumer camera to help him out.  Unsure as to what they’re even doing, Panahi just seems bored and restless.  We see him talk to his lawyer about the prison time, and the fact that because it is a political prosecution as opposed to a judicial one there is no chance of an appeal.  Panahi puts tape down in his living room and attempts to play out what his next film would have been, before eventually giving up when realizing that if you could “tell” a film, there’s no reason to make one.  He discusses his hopes for that film, however, and plays scenes from his earlier films on his TV to talk about the amazing spontaneity of filmmaking – not everything can be planned, and true inspiration can just be happenstance.  There are discussions about his sentence and his fate, and it all leads to an absolutely extraordinary final sequence where he’s in the elevator talking to a sometime resident who is charged with collecting the garbage.  The film was supposedly smuggled out of Iran to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive hidden in the middle of a cake.  In not making a film, Panahi has made one of the most revealing films of the year.  It gets to the center of what art can do, what it can be, and what’s so damn important about making it.

2.  Moonrise Kingdom

Oh, I know it was utterly predictable, but I absolutely loved Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.  He has solidified himself as one of the best filmmakers in the world today with this film, charting the love affair between too misfit children on a fictional island in 1960s New England.  I’ve reviewed the film already, so for the particulars you can go back and read that, but suffice it to say it feels like a culmination of his career in a number of ways.  His very particular style is on display here perhaps more aggressively than it ever has before, and he’s now got it so totally in sync with the narrative that it’s hard to think of anyone else working today that has such a clear vision and sheer mastery of the ability to put ideas in the head onto the screen.  Anderson has managed to focus all of his quirks and fantasies into a singularly sweet and powerful experience, contrasting the optimistic love of two young people with the devastating death of love in their adult counterparts.  His famous use of music is brought to new levels here, as he moves away from merely highlighting moments with the perfect song to structuring an entire film around a single piece.  The opening sequences predict what is to come, and the romantic fatalism is never lost.  Good work from the young first-timers is complemented by some of the most touching work of Bruce Willis’ career.  For some reason I always feel that the next Wes Anderson film will be the breaking point where quirky idiosyncrasy overtakes the emotions of the story, and though it might yet happen, I’m feeling much more confident about his next feature and the one after that.  This will be the film I come back to more than any other on this list.

1.     Oslo, 31^st August

There are surprisingly few times in your life when the right film comes along at just the right time, but it happened in 2012 for me with Joachim Trier’s Oslo, 31^st August.  This is not to say I’m a drug addict or anything, but there are very few films that have meant as much to me when I saw them as this one.  The particulars aren’t as important in this case as the general emotion on display.  The film follows Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering addict who attempts to kill himself in a lake before walking back to the shore a failure.  He’s been given a day’s leave from rehab to go to Oslo for a job interview, and while he’s there he plans to see his sister and a few old friends.  Beginning with a montage of old films and home movies of Oslo, Trier sets up a feeling of a place both real and fictional; the city is a collection of memories as much as it is a real place in the present where a future might be possible.  While there is a degree of cliché Euro-shaki-cam gritty realism on display, it is punctuated by gorgeous pans and following shots that get us right into Anders’ head.  A scene in a café where he overhears a number of amusing and banal conversations perfectly exhibits the way in which we can appreciate the everyday lives of those around us whilst also feeling completely separate from it.  The agony of the job interview, where Anders proves himself to be exceedingly intelligent (he was raised in a very educated, middle class home) but haunted by his past transgressions is utterly brutal.  His descent into the long night is less about tragedy than it is about an elegiac wandering through a life once beautifully lived.  His conversation with a good friend reveals how Anders is now coming to grips with the way his actions have seen life leave him behind, unable to ever fully catch up and reach his potential.  This is a film about the way time catches up with you, and if the present in brutally hopeless, there’s still beauty to be found in the past, even if its ends are tragic.  Trier conveys this in a way that feel so familiar and yet outside of reality.  His floating camera in the later stages of the film catch the silly but beautiful scenes of puffs of a fire extinguisher being let off from the back of a bike, or the glory of the early dawn at a swimming pool.  It might seem wholly depressing to some, but for me it was a gorgeous, honest, and celebratory look at a failed life.

-M