Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

Hanna is either a high concept gimmick as an excuse for an action movie, or else an action movie as an excuse for Joe Wright to revel in high concept gimmickry. I'm not entirely sure which, but I suppose I would lean towards the latter. The action sequences are only intermittently interesting (most of the movie's midsection is relentlessly dull in this aspect), while the emotional cues are all infused with the kind of overwrought E-M-O-T-I-O-N that can only come from someone who sincerely believes he/she is saying something of great worth about the human condition. It stinks of Art, I guess you could say.

Unfortunately, that something he's saying about the human condition either isn't there, or is so poorly extracted from the material that the end result is the same. There's a heaviness of emotion and an attempt to examine the idea of growing up in seclusion and being thrust upon a strange, alien, oddly shaped world. But what does that say that isn't fairly obvious? If the message is that we shouldn't raise our kids in the wilderness and teach them nothing that doesn't come from a book, well, I would expect that by putting that message in a movie you are already preaching to converted. If it is an attempt to say something larger about the process of raising children and forcing yourself to let them grow up and experience the world, and Wright has chosen to tell this story via a fairytale action movie metaphor about a homicidal teenage girl, well this narrative concept has abstracted the idea to such a great length that it no longer has any real-world relevance. Wright attempts to fill this void of meaning with a highly touted Chemical Brothers score mixed way, way into the forefront, as if the throbbing electronic beats can somehow pound the poignance into you. The highly stylized camerawork is similarly overbearing and insistent, assaulting the viewer's eyes with visual cliches at a rapid-fire clip (a sun-dappled Hanna hangs her head out a car window, hair blowing slowly and wonderously in the wind; Bana dispatches a group of assailants in a whirling Scorsese meets Oldboy single-take set piece).

Worse, like Kick-Ass, it never makes any attempts to address Bana's systematic destruction of a girl's childhood for the sake of a mostly-empty vendetta. While it does a better job than that movie about questioning his tactics, it never once questions his motives. The audience is expected to take it as a given that if Bana had tried to raise her in a normal life somewhere, anywhere, in the world, that the all-encompassing arms of the CIA would eventually find them and kill them. This seems a very curious leap to ask, and is far less plausible than the idea that Bana's character is simply a psychopath. And, going further down the rabbit hole, the audience is never asked to reflect upon Hanna's path of destruction, which results in the deaths of numerous military and government personnel, but also a fairly large number of civilians. While she is not directly responsible for the latter deaths, it is somewhat difficult not to hold it against her, especially in moments where she fights a few guys, then proceeds to run away, leaving her innocent benefactors to whatever fate they're destined for. This seems weird, especially since it runs against the only idea Wright semi-coherently manages to state over Hanna's inflated 113 minute running time -- that, despite whatever we may convince ourselves, empathy does come more naturally than not-empathy, and there is a short little window from the time we are self-involved children to the time we are self-involved adults when we don't know how to not be empathetic. I don't know that I'm 100% on board with this idea, yet it's fairly clearly there -- only to be shaken apart by aforementioned Hanna totally manhandling the hell out of some dudes then inexplicably running away.

Also, can we all just acknowledge that Cate Blanchett is an awful impersonation of an actor at this point? She's like the world's most serious little kid playing dress up -- throwing on all kinds of wigs and accents and somehow making that whimsical idea an exercise in joyless austerity. Regardless of project, her acting tone always consists of the same theatrical demand for recognition. You're not gonna get an Oscar nomination for this one, I'm afraid, so can we please just stop pretending you're performing brain surgery on the Dalai Lama.

Now that I'm finally caught up on these, I'm going to try to start writing longer(-winded) pieces that deal with more specifics than I've previously been doing. I think it's good exercise to mix in both the thematic overview and the more surface-level examination, plus I'll only have to write one or two a day so I think I can then pour all the words I would've written on 3-5 of these trying to catch up into one movie I've seen recently and remember well enough to write more specifically about!

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

In some ways a mirror of Jones' earlier film, Moon. While my largest problem with that film was that it spent its first third tricking the audience into thinking it was watching a different movie -- a movie that, for me, felt a little lifeless and dully conceived to begin with, I would say that Source Code's strength is in its premise and beginning. In some ways playing out like a cinematic video game, the main character must solve a mystery in which eight minutes of real time pass before he "dies" and, in video game terms, gets a game over. Then he must try again, but armed with the knowledge he gained on his previous game. In a way it's a little like an action-mystery Groundhog's Day. This, I think, is fine for the length of time that the movie continues its eight-minute, real-time structure. It also manages to subtly introduce ideas about the way we interact with each other, as minor sentence structures alter without even being prompted by any other changes. Unlike Groundhog's Day, in which actors minutely repeat the same lines with the same inflection (whenever possible, I would guess, using the same takes), implying a fatalistic attitude towards our behavior and demeanor on any given day, Source Code uses the impossibility of actors completely mimicking their previous takes to its advantage -- suggesting that any time we speak there are a myriad of ways that sentence could turn out. It gives a nice juxtaposition of freedom and chance when combined with the movie's repetitious structure, as Jake Gyllenhaal, again, unlike Bill Murray, is not the only person who's decisions affect the day. He is not god, tinkering with the lives of playthings for his own bemusement and eventual self-improvement. He's just one guy in a world where everyone's decisions matter.

Unfortunately, this begins to break down about halfway through the movie, as impatience and sentiment get the better of Jones. Soon the rigidity of the eight minute structure is broken down, with quick cuts through time that destroy the world's cohesion. Rather than a delightfully repetitious exercise, we are back to watching a normal mystery. One in which time no longer matters or exists. And this introduction of melodrama and happy endings and swelling orchestral music is unbefitting what begin as a cool, calculated exercise in confusion and tension. On a semi-related side note, how is it that the son of David Bowie is so awful at music? The punchy, force-fed emotional cues of both Moon and Source Code are by far the worst aspects of each movie, as they make what could be poignant and heartfelt into something cheap and saccharine. That is how I feel about the ending, regardless of the many interpretations and plot holes that reveal it to be even weirder and more thoughtless than Jones may have considered.

Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997)

Buries most of its most salient points about women in the office world, the beginning of the end for the print industry and the cutthroat nature of business downsizing in a heap of Freudian psychology by-the-numbers. Not content to suffer the titular character with one or the other, the film chooses both an implication of sexual abuse from the father and an endless stream of repressive scolding from the mother. Some might argue that this is part of the film's existence as a maybe-parody of typical slasher films. Yet despite its moves into dark, and occasionally grotesque, humor, I don't really see this movie as a parody. It feels more like an embrace of genre types as a shorthand to suggest something frightening and inhuman about the corporate world. And when it hits these moments with gusto and strength unburdened by easy pop psychology explanations, it strikes an unexpected chord about the dismantlement of the American job market into the bare minimum of specialized occupations.

What Sherman does get right almost 100% of the time, as expected, is a suffocating visual aesthetic long before the movie veers into the grotesque. The office seems an inescapable labyrinth of tall walls and maze-like walkways. Despite my reservations about Carol Kane's mother as a character, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic is compellingly handled. As a somewhat new fan of Sherman's work, I was definitely excited to see this movie. While I didn't love it as much as the beginning made me think I would, I was not disappointed, either. I'm honestly surprised how much critics hated it. And sad that that hatred probably means Sherman won't make another movie.

Speed Racer (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 2008)

Triumphantly, an action movie that embraces movement in an all-encompassing tribute to friction and gravity. It creates a wonderful movie that lasts 18 minutes long. Then it continues to be a movie for two more hours, sometimes including parts that are good enough to be in that 18 minute movie. Other parts are not. The parts that are not eclipse the parts that are by quite a large quantity, yet these drowsy moments of slippery gloss are not enough to keep the hard, crushing, bouncing, diving, swooping, cheering parts from boggling the eyeballs. When I was talking about movies taking inspiration from video games, this is what I meant. A cavalcade of weighty, beefy CGI race cars hurtling at and through and over and against each other in spinning, exploding, joyous ways.

It's difficult for me to come to terms with the idea of car racing being a sport, exactly, I suppose for the reason that, despite the great physical skill and stamina required, the car is the real participant. And, though likely for different reasons, Speed Racer is all too willing to indulge in my distinction between driver and car. Unlike Sucker Punch, which likely could've increased its watchability ten-fold by simply being a 100% animated movie, the faces of drivers are only seen in close-ups, while CG cars bounce and shift and slide in their own cartoon world gloriously divorced from reality. This is the movie I was hoping for when I started to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was insantly bogged down by endless chatter and an awful sense of how to make movies. The Wachowskis, whatever their faults, apparently can actually make movies. And make em good. If only this weren't a flash in the pan in a long and strange career that apparently has them moving away from genre exploration and into that most turgid of film exercises, the hot button political drama.

The world should apologize for this movie's flop at the box office. In the same way that Usher's Love in This Club promises a pop world we are not good enough for, Speed Racer should've ushered in a beautiful new era of action filmmaking. Maybe in some alternate reality Thor and Captain America wouldn't look like awful husks of comic book antiquity, and people everywhere are grooving to delirious ambient space pop. I wanna be in that world so bad.

Tangled (Bryan Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

This is, in essence, a remake of The Little Mermaid, only better. It's a literalization of the idea that part of growing up means moving outside your comfort zone and making mistakes and basically floundering around without much help until you figure out how to do things. It's messy and fun, just like this movie! And, unlike The Little Mermaid, Tangled shows a surprising amount of female agency for a Disney movie. Rapunzel's desire to escape her perceived parental entrapment (much more literal here, since the ocean is, uh, actually way bigger than the not ocean) is motivated by curiousity for the outside world and nothing more, whereas Ariel's curiousity is at least in part inspired by her affection for hot dude whose life she saved. Rapunzel also spends much of the movie acting of her own volition, solving her own problems, and, for the most part, helping herself. This is a fairly stark contrast to Ariel, who is mostly helpless without her animal friends and spends much of the movie not even being able to speak -- certainly problematic as a portrait of the supposedly "ideal" woman Disney tries to paint her as.

Now I cannot honestly trumpet Rapunzel as a strong, feminist portrait. She is, in her own somewhat different way, a sensualized idealization along the lines of Ariel or Aladdin's Princess Jasmine. There is also something about the suddenness of the relationship that develops between her and Flynn Rider, which, I suspect, is as abrupt as it is because it is one of the few Disney films in which the love story is not the point. They go from disliking each other to liking each other to maybe being in love far too quickly. If Disney can go this far out on a limb, it would be nice to see them go even further and maybe suggest that it's okay to date someone BEFORE you fall in love with them, rather than the other way around.

It's interesting to note, though, that the promotional material for the movie actually creates a completely false impression of what the movie is. More so than usual, I suppose I should say. Rapunzel is depicted as a mysterious other, showing up first as magic, violent hair defending itself from Flynn Rider's intrusion. She doesn't show up until part way through the trailer, giving the impression (along with the movie's ambiguous title) that the movie is far closer to Aladdin than The Little Mermaid. What was the motivation behind this? Was there some kind of 7-10-year-old focus-testing that showed little boys would refuse to see a Disney movie if they thought it was about a girl, but that little girls had no such qualms about a movie about a boy? Depressingly, that whole sequence of events doesn't seem implausible. But I really wish it did.

Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

The relatively few Iranian films I've seen have all, more or less, been an attempt to address gender relations in Iran, and put forth ideas for more forward-thinking views of women's rights. So it was a surprise that this movie was not about that at all, instead tackling ideas about class stratification in Iran, and the resentment that builds among lower classes due to their poor treatment.

I will go right out on a limb now and say that Abbas Kiarostami still confounds me. While he technically didn't direct this, he did write it. And despite Panahi's usual human, involved, directorial work, it was difficult for me to parse in a way that neither The Accordion nor Offside were. Kiarostami is like the cinematic equivalent to physics, for me. At this point in my life, I just don't have the knowledge base and tools to properly comprehend the information he's trying to give me. I could make some of it out, and the main actor, Hossain Emadeddin, gives a frankly astounding performance, eliciting a world of emotions with small, reluctant gestures. Two sequences stand out immediately for the typically Panahi-like warmth and poignance -- sequences so memorable and effective in their simple pleasures that it makes me want to revisit the movie immediately, as I only understood their effect on me later on, as I thought about it. This is a stark contrast to Offside and The Accordion, two movies so upfront and raw about their emotions as to verge on sentiment, but never quite spill over into it.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, sadly, I don't have much to say about this movie. I enjoyed it a lot, and the emotions still resonate with me when I think about it almost two weeks later, but as for higher understanding you will have to seek someone with a better knowledge base.

Dying of Laughter (Alex de la Iglesia, 1999)

An interesting, if not quite as successful, dry run for his latest film, The Last Circus. Both deal intensively with the entertainment industry, and a kind of decimation of Spain's humanity brought on by the fascist government. While The Last Circus takes place entirely within the fascist regime, climaxing just as Franco was about to die, this continues from that ending in to the present. Both suggest that Franco's influence continues to be felt in modern Spain, the only difference is literal (in Dying of Laughter) versus figurative (in The Last Circus). The difference between the two comes down to how far de la Iglesia is willing to push the audience. In The Last Circus he pushes them to the brink, then jumps so far into the abyss that there is no hope for escape. Dying of Laughter is a little nicer, only forcing the audience to lean uncomfortably far over the edge.

I'm not quite sure what to say about it, really, that I didn't already say about The Last Circus. The movies are honestly that similar. Both involve a duo of public entertainers who privately despise each other, coveting what the other one can do and what they have before dissolving into hideous, monstrous caricatures of their former selves. Both movies look deep inside the idea of fantasy and come out of it with the conclusion that these fantasies are ugly and hollow and we've lost something humane and real in the process of fooling ourselves.