I like 13 Going on 30. I saw it a long time ago and I liked it a lot. I saw the end on TV a few months ago -- still liked it a lot. I like Jennifer Garner and the movie has a cute, bubbly atmosphere that really works for me.
I'd forgotten that my enjoyment for that movie was the reason that I wanted to watch Bride Wars -- Gary Winick being the connecting thread that ties the two movies. Unfortunately, they have almost nothing in common otherwise. Bride Wars exists in a weird, mean, not-cute-at-all world where feminism never happened. A world where platitudes about how extremely important a wedding day is for a woman can be uttered without any irony or self-awareness.
Plays like Rushmore, only if the creators thought the best part of the movie was when Schwartzman and Murray were being childish jerks to each other. The only semblance to 13 Going on 30 lies in the performances of the main characters. Like Ruffalo and Garner, Hathaway and Hudson have an unforced chemistry together, which is a shame because the movie is structured like the invert of a romantic comedy -- keeping the characters apart for 85% of the movie. I almost hated the movie, but anytime the girls were together and not hating each other the movie almost came alive. There's almost something homoerotic about how much chemistry they have together, compared to the lifeless shells the movie calls fiances. A braver movie would've had them both realize their dream wedding wouldn't be complete without each other in a much more literal sense than what ended up on screen.
Though I suppose that could've introduced a whole new set of problems, and since this one couldn't even get relatively small things like the fact that it's okay to be excited about your wedding and acknowledge that it's a life-changing day in any person's life without making it out to be some final piece in The Complete Woman life cycle, it's probably best they left it alone.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Give 'Em Hell, Malone (Russell Mulcahy, 2009)
The kind of terrible, adolescent noir worship that is completely indefensible. Makes Brick look good. There's almost not enough bad things to say about this movie, but I guess the worst would be that it was somehow not made by rich 19-year-olds. If it had it might somehow be understandable. But this movie cost 15 million dollars. And stars Thomas Jane and Ving Rhames. Granted neither of these actors are at career high points, but were there any meetings between agents? Did people show them the script and say, "This will be good for your career." Are they that desperate for money? I have no idea of the inner machinations, but, thankfully, the world-at-large and I are, for once, in complete agreement. This movie was straight to DVD. That doesn't change the disappointment that comes from knowing it was made at all, but I'll admit it helps.
The mad scientists at the script lab came up with this noir style/dialogue/attitude fused with typical hitman action movie plot in which none of it works. Jane has never been more wooden, the girl he spends most of the movie "bantering" with is neither sultry nor badass nor compelling and the only guy who seems to have anything close to a pulse is French Stewart. I am wasting time and words writing about this movie -- a movie no one reading this would ever even contemplate watching, probably, but I watched the whole thing so here I go.
Or there I went. I guess I'm done, except for the part where an old dude hits on an Asian schoolgirl and she gives him a razor blade BJ as a way of killing him. Given the rest of the scene, it wasn't even necessary that he die, or that she take the time to get him into a room, take his pants down and momentarily have his penis in her mouth before he bled to death. I guess it shows how crazy and hardcore a villain she is, but, uh, she could've just shot him.
The whole movie is like that. Gratuity of the ickiest, most unpleasant variety.
The mad scientists at the script lab came up with this noir style/dialogue/attitude fused with typical hitman action movie plot in which none of it works. Jane has never been more wooden, the girl he spends most of the movie "bantering" with is neither sultry nor badass nor compelling and the only guy who seems to have anything close to a pulse is French Stewart. I am wasting time and words writing about this movie -- a movie no one reading this would ever even contemplate watching, probably, but I watched the whole thing so here I go.
Or there I went. I guess I'm done, except for the part where an old dude hits on an Asian schoolgirl and she gives him a razor blade BJ as a way of killing him. Given the rest of the scene, it wasn't even necessary that he die, or that she take the time to get him into a room, take his pants down and momentarily have his penis in her mouth before he bled to death. I guess it shows how crazy and hardcore a villain she is, but, uh, she could've just shot him.
The whole movie is like that. Gratuity of the ickiest, most unpleasant variety.
The Final Destination (David R. Ellis, 2009)
An exercise in joyless fatalism. It used to be I found these movies grimly cathartic -- to be reminded of all the ways in which I could be dying every day and yet wasn't -- but now their morbid infatuation with the characters' hopeless lot in life is too much to handle. I can no longer feel good about rooting for characters to die, even if they aren't real.
David R. Ellis uses the same skilled workmanlike craft he brought to Cellular and Snakes on a Plane. Many scenes create a palpable tension, even as their conclusions are preordained. That's certainly no easy feat, but I would prefer he get back to movies like those other ones, which at least showed a sense of humor that wasn't entirely founded in cruelty (this film technically has "jokes," but most of them involve asking us to laugh at the gory, splattered remains of the victims).
It's a shame, because there's hints of something better in here. An unexplored idea of paranoia, that surviving something horrible and traumatic changes you in a way that makes you infinitely more aware of your own impending death. That would be something worth delving into. At times the movie seems to be moving towards that, only to quickly pull away for the next Rube Goldberg-like death.
David R. Ellis uses the same skilled workmanlike craft he brought to Cellular and Snakes on a Plane. Many scenes create a palpable tension, even as their conclusions are preordained. That's certainly no easy feat, but I would prefer he get back to movies like those other ones, which at least showed a sense of humor that wasn't entirely founded in cruelty (this film technically has "jokes," but most of them involve asking us to laugh at the gory, splattered remains of the victims).
It's a shame, because there's hints of something better in here. An unexplored idea of paranoia, that surviving something horrible and traumatic changes you in a way that makes you infinitely more aware of your own impending death. That would be something worth delving into. At times the movie seems to be moving towards that, only to quickly pull away for the next Rube Goldberg-like death.
A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)
A film that becomes too enamored with its own genre awareness. Absolutely a post-Scream thriller in many of the worst ways possible. Unfortunate, as it wastes perhaps the only good performance of Milla Jovovich's career. Maybe it's just her own bad luck that the majority of her work has been with Paul W.S. Anderson and Luc Besson, two directors that, despite their many positive attributes, are more interested in archetypes and kineticism than realistic human emotion.
Twohy, taking a few notes from Hitchcock, uses the personas of his actors against the audience. Specifically Jovovich's naive, innocent work with Besson, as well as transforming Steve Zahn's perpetually flustered stoner act into a perpetually flustered uptight dude act. Then he sprinkles in Timothy Olyphant's penchant for charming sleaze to make a concoction that spends half the movie working pretty darn well, actually.
Unfortunately, the conclusion seems foregone as soon as it's suggested. In making us aware of its awareness about red herrings and the twists and turns of cinema thrillers, as well as a general condensing of suspects to an extremely limited number, it should surprise almost no one who has spent any amount of time watching movies just "whodunit." There's still an element of tension leading up to this unsurprising twist that keeps the movie watchable, but once the reveal is opened up for us the rest of the running time is spent spinning wheels. There's a lot of gruesome stabbing and shooting and maiming, but there's very little formal or psychological reason to care at that point. It's the equivalent of shouting "ta-da," striking a pose and then holding it long after the audience understands the trick and has started to become uncomfortable and unsure whether they should have gotten up and left already.
Twohy, taking a few notes from Hitchcock, uses the personas of his actors against the audience. Specifically Jovovich's naive, innocent work with Besson, as well as transforming Steve Zahn's perpetually flustered stoner act into a perpetually flustered uptight dude act. Then he sprinkles in Timothy Olyphant's penchant for charming sleaze to make a concoction that spends half the movie working pretty darn well, actually.
Unfortunately, the conclusion seems foregone as soon as it's suggested. In making us aware of its awareness about red herrings and the twists and turns of cinema thrillers, as well as a general condensing of suspects to an extremely limited number, it should surprise almost no one who has spent any amount of time watching movies just "whodunit." There's still an element of tension leading up to this unsurprising twist that keeps the movie watchable, but once the reveal is opened up for us the rest of the running time is spent spinning wheels. There's a lot of gruesome stabbing and shooting and maiming, but there's very little formal or psychological reason to care at that point. It's the equivalent of shouting "ta-da," striking a pose and then holding it long after the audience understands the trick and has started to become uncomfortable and unsure whether they should have gotten up and left already.
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
A fairly obvious precursor to Twin Peaks in their explorations of sexual obsession and romanticism of dead women. The choice to move Twin Peaks to small-town Americana is an interesting one, as Laura largely concerns itself with the rich upper-class elite and its seedy underbelly. Dana Andrews plays a working-class detective who acts as a cipher for the audience into the opulent and extravagant lifestyle of the rich and famous. Laura, too, is depicted as having worked her way up into this world with perserverance and smarts, rather than sneaky and underhanded methods of the people who surround her. This us vs. them mentality with regard to class in America, began in cinema as a reaction to the Depression, is a fertile playground still being dallied in today. It is not, however, the film's strongest point. Tough-talking Andrews is only sympathetic as a protagonist in relative comparison to the rest of the film's characters as the film's narrative economy leaves very little chance for the character to breathe and take on lifelike qualities. His defining trait is mostly the fact that he falls in love with Laura while investigating her murder case. Other women he's dated come up, and he discusses them bitterly. So the film appears to be trying to deal with the fact that it is easier to love a fantasy, as he does through the romanticized painting hanging in her living room as well as the biased accounts given to him by the many people he interviews, than to love a real person, who may contain all these lovable qualities, but also has a lot of messy, less easy to love ones.
The second act twist is a pretty great one, at least from a narrative perspective.. Even having seen the movie before, I'd actually somehow managed to forget it. But, upon consideration, it mostly only serves to complicate the whodunit mystery of the film without enlivening or trying to deal with any of the film's previous themes. Laura the person turns out to be just as lovable and sweet and innocent as Laura the fantasy, having somehow managed to exist in a world of creeps and swindlers without noticing or being changed at all by them. This makes the eventual coupling with Andrews problematic and unconvincing. Supposedly we are supposed to buy that their shared backgrounds of hard work and ethical beliefs tie them together in a way that the rest of her company cannot, but it raises unanswered questions about what attracted her to this world to begin with.
Ignoring these problems, though, the film is indeed a breezy and entertaining bit of noir. It drops the ball trying to be something more than pretty good, but that doesn't change the fact that it actually IS pretty good. Laura's omnipresence in the first half is handled very nicely, especially with the cute framing of the painting in her apartment, and for a whodunit it does manage to be fairly unpredictable, especially considering how many years Hollywood has had to grind most of noir's tropes into cliches.
The second act twist is a pretty great one, at least from a narrative perspective.. Even having seen the movie before, I'd actually somehow managed to forget it. But, upon consideration, it mostly only serves to complicate the whodunit mystery of the film without enlivening or trying to deal with any of the film's previous themes. Laura the person turns out to be just as lovable and sweet and innocent as Laura the fantasy, having somehow managed to exist in a world of creeps and swindlers without noticing or being changed at all by them. This makes the eventual coupling with Andrews problematic and unconvincing. Supposedly we are supposed to buy that their shared backgrounds of hard work and ethical beliefs tie them together in a way that the rest of her company cannot, but it raises unanswered questions about what attracted her to this world to begin with.
Ignoring these problems, though, the film is indeed a breezy and entertaining bit of noir. It drops the ball trying to be something more than pretty good, but that doesn't change the fact that it actually IS pretty good. Laura's omnipresence in the first half is handled very nicely, especially with the cute framing of the painting in her apartment, and for a whodunit it does manage to be fairly unpredictable, especially considering how many years Hollywood has had to grind most of noir's tropes into cliches.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958)
A probably well-meaning film that tries to argue against racism all while demonstrating a patronizing, white-centric attitude that ably pinpoints why we haven't come nearly as far as we should have 50 years later.
The two main characters are a white nurse and an older French colonialist. She falls in love with him, but soon he reveals that he was previously married, that his wife was Polynesian, that she bore him two half-Polynesian children and then died. The wife and children are complete non-entities in the film, serving only as a narrative prop to "expose" the white nurse's racial biases and force the two lovers apart. The scene when they fight, set at night against a gorgeous purple and gold color scheme that made me wish every scene in every movie ever could look that good, is the only really resonant piece in the entire film, dealing mostly with the fact that the children would be a constant reminder of the fact that the man she loves had had sex with a woman of color. It's exceptionally didactic, but in a way that didn't bother me much and actually ends with one of the few memorable songs in the whole show.
The Frenchman, by contrast, is completely unburdened by any notions of racism. His status as a rich colonialist with a servant who never once speaks in the film is completely ignored, as is the rampant exoticism of the film's attitudes towards the Tonkanese locals on the island. Another of the main characters, a Marine lieutenant, is introduced to, and immediately falls in love with, a Tonkanese girl who speaks almost no English. There's a horrifying song number in which her mother sings a song and the daughter mimes the words she's singing along. That the film can slap the wrists of one character, all while championing his love of this cliched depiction of mysterious, submissive, exotic beauty is exactly why Malcolm X once said that the fight for equal rights would never get anywhere if they let liberal white people help them.
(Note: Being a liberal white person, I don't actually believe that's true, but it's easy to understand why he would think so, especially back then.)
The two main characters are a white nurse and an older French colonialist. She falls in love with him, but soon he reveals that he was previously married, that his wife was Polynesian, that she bore him two half-Polynesian children and then died. The wife and children are complete non-entities in the film, serving only as a narrative prop to "expose" the white nurse's racial biases and force the two lovers apart. The scene when they fight, set at night against a gorgeous purple and gold color scheme that made me wish every scene in every movie ever could look that good, is the only really resonant piece in the entire film, dealing mostly with the fact that the children would be a constant reminder of the fact that the man she loves had had sex with a woman of color. It's exceptionally didactic, but in a way that didn't bother me much and actually ends with one of the few memorable songs in the whole show.
The Frenchman, by contrast, is completely unburdened by any notions of racism. His status as a rich colonialist with a servant who never once speaks in the film is completely ignored, as is the rampant exoticism of the film's attitudes towards the Tonkanese locals on the island. Another of the main characters, a Marine lieutenant, is introduced to, and immediately falls in love with, a Tonkanese girl who speaks almost no English. There's a horrifying song number in which her mother sings a song and the daughter mimes the words she's singing along. That the film can slap the wrists of one character, all while championing his love of this cliched depiction of mysterious, submissive, exotic beauty is exactly why Malcolm X once said that the fight for equal rights would never get anywhere if they let liberal white people help them.
(Note: Being a liberal white person, I don't actually believe that's true, but it's easy to understand why he would think so, especially back then.)
Friday, January 28, 2011
A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
There is a moment early on in A Serious Man when the Coen brothers appear on the verge of a career revelation. The Man Behind The Desk is generally well-integrated enough into their works that his omnipresence is never as distracting or arbitrary as, say, Hitchcock's cameos, yet in the 25 years they've been putting him to use they have barely even attempted to comment on his existence. His status as a buffoonish stand-in for all the things in the world that might be stopping them, you, everyone, from achieving greatness is declared and then left to sit, as if the acknowledgement alone is enough. But, for a brief whisper of a second, A Serious Man seems ready to give us the punchline to a joke that's been a quarter of a century in the making.
The film is already a culmination of his place within their work, finally stretching him to his grotesque, logical conclusion by making the entire movie be about men sitting behind desks. Without counting, I would guess that something close to 75% of the scenes in the film involve someone sitting behind something that either is a desk or resembles one, from the opening scene of protagonist Larry Gopnick's son, Danny, listening to Jefferson Airplane during Hebrew class, to the second-to-last scene, with Larry himself behind a desk receiving still more bad news. And it's this aspect that is, for the Coens, a first. Never before (at least, to my recollection) has the main character of one of their movies sat behind the desk.
The first time we see Larry behind his desk is the very moment I alluded to. A foreign-exchange student from Korea has come to dispute his failing grade in Gopnick's physics class. In a film situated in the very specific world of Minnesotan Jewish suburbanites, this part offers an opportunity to counter-point the tense, suspicious relationship Larry has with his "goy" neighbor, and expose Larry's aloofness as its own form of American xenophobia. In this way, it could acknowledge the Coens' own position as Men Behind The Desk, and then evaluate our own complicity in laughing at (almost never with) the fuzzy, unreal archetypes the Coens place in front of us. But the movie never goes there. Quickly regaining the usual Coen detachment, the scene ends with an envelope of money on Gopnick's desk that will, eventually, have a 99% chance of being an attempted bribe (it's never explicitly stated, but no other explanation for the money's existence is ever introduced). And, in the meantime, we'll be asked to laugh at him and his occasionally difficult to decipher accent.
From here on out the movie loses ground rather quickly, introducing more of the caricatures who speak in typical, carefully observed Coen speech patterns, yet never say anything believably human. They exist only as narcissistic impediments to Gopnick's desire for a simple, uncomplicated life. Before I get too far along with this, I should add that I don't necessarily have anything against the idea of outlandishly cartoon characters for the purposes of satire. What I object to is such a selective use of caricature. Gopnick and, at least within his social circle, his son, Danny, are mostly free of judgement by the filmmakers. The lone exception comes late in the film, when Richard Kind, as Larry's brother Arthur, is finally granted a scene of humanity. It's an unexpected scene, as Kind sobs and spits and wonders at his place in the world and, for once, the Coens roll with this emotional moment. Too little in the context of the whole, of course, but taken on its own this scene is a mini-revelation of pathos sans irony for the emotionally discomfited brothers Coen. But after it's over it only highlights the fact that Arthur, not Larry, should be the main character of the film.
I am being particularly hard on this movie -- a movie I do not even actively dislike (there are a few moments of interest, mostly dealing with faith and tradition and the confusion that comes with ritualism that has lost its connection to meaning) -- but in a way the watching of this was like a ritual slaughter of nearly the last remaining sacred cows of my infant cinephilia. Fargo was one of my favorite movies as soon as I watched it. The Big Lebowski I have seen probably a dozen times (though none of them lately). Miller's Crossing was, at one point, the movie I loved so much I even made my grandparents watch it. A time ago Kubrick appealed greatly to my adolescent misanthropy, but by my mid-twenties his frigidity and hatred tarnished my appreciation. Now I suspect that his more playful Minnesota children will follow the same fate. True Grit, despite its problems, shows promise. Here's hoping they can tie that movie's empathy to something a little less fleeting.
The film is already a culmination of his place within their work, finally stretching him to his grotesque, logical conclusion by making the entire movie be about men sitting behind desks. Without counting, I would guess that something close to 75% of the scenes in the film involve someone sitting behind something that either is a desk or resembles one, from the opening scene of protagonist Larry Gopnick's son, Danny, listening to Jefferson Airplane during Hebrew class, to the second-to-last scene, with Larry himself behind a desk receiving still more bad news. And it's this aspect that is, for the Coens, a first. Never before (at least, to my recollection) has the main character of one of their movies sat behind the desk.
The first time we see Larry behind his desk is the very moment I alluded to. A foreign-exchange student from Korea has come to dispute his failing grade in Gopnick's physics class. In a film situated in the very specific world of Minnesotan Jewish suburbanites, this part offers an opportunity to counter-point the tense, suspicious relationship Larry has with his "goy" neighbor, and expose Larry's aloofness as its own form of American xenophobia. In this way, it could acknowledge the Coens' own position as Men Behind The Desk, and then evaluate our own complicity in laughing at (almost never with) the fuzzy, unreal archetypes the Coens place in front of us. But the movie never goes there. Quickly regaining the usual Coen detachment, the scene ends with an envelope of money on Gopnick's desk that will, eventually, have a 99% chance of being an attempted bribe (it's never explicitly stated, but no other explanation for the money's existence is ever introduced). And, in the meantime, we'll be asked to laugh at him and his occasionally difficult to decipher accent.
From here on out the movie loses ground rather quickly, introducing more of the caricatures who speak in typical, carefully observed Coen speech patterns, yet never say anything believably human. They exist only as narcissistic impediments to Gopnick's desire for a simple, uncomplicated life. Before I get too far along with this, I should add that I don't necessarily have anything against the idea of outlandishly cartoon characters for the purposes of satire. What I object to is such a selective use of caricature. Gopnick and, at least within his social circle, his son, Danny, are mostly free of judgement by the filmmakers. The lone exception comes late in the film, when Richard Kind, as Larry's brother Arthur, is finally granted a scene of humanity. It's an unexpected scene, as Kind sobs and spits and wonders at his place in the world and, for once, the Coens roll with this emotional moment. Too little in the context of the whole, of course, but taken on its own this scene is a mini-revelation of pathos sans irony for the emotionally discomfited brothers Coen. But after it's over it only highlights the fact that Arthur, not Larry, should be the main character of the film.
I am being particularly hard on this movie -- a movie I do not even actively dislike (there are a few moments of interest, mostly dealing with faith and tradition and the confusion that comes with ritualism that has lost its connection to meaning) -- but in a way the watching of this was like a ritual slaughter of nearly the last remaining sacred cows of my infant cinephilia. Fargo was one of my favorite movies as soon as I watched it. The Big Lebowski I have seen probably a dozen times (though none of them lately). Miller's Crossing was, at one point, the movie I loved so much I even made my grandparents watch it. A time ago Kubrick appealed greatly to my adolescent misanthropy, but by my mid-twenties his frigidity and hatred tarnished my appreciation. Now I suspect that his more playful Minnesota children will follow the same fate. True Grit, despite its problems, shows promise. Here's hoping they can tie that movie's empathy to something a little less fleeting.
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