The Factual Opinion

Too Many Movies: That Cronenberg, Always A Crowd Pleaser

A Dangerous Method, dir. David Cronenberg
Matt Seneca

It’s been fashionable recently to say David Cronenberg’s a misogynist, at least in the film-criticism organs I regularly interact with (that’d be LA Weekly, LA Weekly, and the noted LA Weekly), especially in the run-up to his new movie A Dangerous Method. And yeah: the film does prominently feature a jealous wife who saps her brilliant husband’s vitality, women who have no ideas of their own until they develop out of studying male-proposed theories, and a plot that revolves around a hysterically insane beauty’s slow return to relative sanity once she realizes that all she wants is to get her ass spanked, belted, or otherwise tore the fuck up by a suitably awesome dude. And yet somehow the movie feels like a rebuke to the easy characterization of Cronenberg as woman-hater: for two hours we watch Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud blustering around in stuffed shirts on Joseph Campbell-style heroic quests for knowledge the women they regularly mistreat have had all along. What makes the film more complex than any mid-20th century piece of whimsy about that ole feminine intuition is that understanding things about who we are as people doesn’t look nearly as good on camera as topping a corseted and bound Kiera Knightley does.

Even in this relatively sedate, cerebral period piece Cronenberg’s way with the indelible image remains. Without special effects or even particularly crazy camera work, the onus is on the actors to communicate the director’s signature sense of a world stretched through some alien filter or other, and the result is the strongest performances ever to grace a Cronenberg film. Fassbender is wonderfully frustrating to watch, forever on the verge of an epiphany he never reaches -- in the S&M scenes that everyone in the audience knows should provide him with transcendence especially, the man visibly recedes, leaving only a creepily mustachioed robot swinging his arm wildly back and forth. Mortensen is sufficiently enigmatic, never giving any hint as to his inner workings: the perfect father figure, simultaneously benevolent and unknowable. And a bearded Vincent Cassel as coked out renegade psychiatrist Otto Gross is pretty high up there as personifications of amoral hedonism go. (The film misses the golden opportunity of showing us Cassel and Mortensen banging rails on an all night bender together, but that’s one of only a few strikes against it.)

The film, however, belongs to Knightley, who announces her arrival in the top ranks of working actresses with a performance that would be the only logical choice for the Oscar if not for its incandescent daring, which far outstrips that of the timid Academy voting bloc. As the mental patient-turned-psychiatrist Sabina Spielrein, she singlehandedly brings body horror to what’s essentially a period romance. A spitting, teeth-baring, writhing, masturbating vortex of mental illness in the film’s first third, she commands every bit of the viewer’s attention for every second she’s on screen, even when covered by blankets or subsumed in water. This is full-body acting for the ages, the former Disney pirate-princess’s willowy frame turned to an assemblage of bones that wrack and distort and melt back into captivating, piteous docility within a single breath. But Knightley really shows her chops once she’s cured: the whirlwind inside her does not disappear but is constantly kept at bay, an affliction tortuously written over by visible force of will, only allowed to resurface in the scenes of sadomasochism, whose questionable equation of female sexuality with mental illness is only visible in retrospect. In the moment, all we see is a woman caught somewhere between sanity and insanity, one who seems close to shedding her own skin or suffusing into radiant light. The best fight scenes of the year aren’t in any of the summer blockbusters or even the Korean imports: they’re here, inside Knightley’s body, unspoken but no less luminous for that.

So overwhelming is this show of talent that when the film strays away from Knightley toward the end it takes a minute or two to catch up: oh sure, we remember, Cronenberg might be trying to say something that isn’t contained in one individual’s performance. As such, the film’s real message hits exactly at the right moment. Leave it to a Canadian filmmaker making a movie set over a century ago to create the defining statement about a Europe that’s currently tearing itself to shreds: Spielrein’s theory that true purity can only come from a clash between dark and light that subsumes the individual identities of both is positioned as prophecy, building the violent, remedial sex between the Aryan Jung and the Jewish Spielrein into a metaphor for World War II, the looming memory of which softened borders and brought about a Europe that has managed to unite in name, at least. (Of course, a line of reasoning that views the Holocaust as a continent’s necessary therapeutic evil has its own problems, but look what the anti-Semite tag did for Lars Von Trier!) The film ends with a premonition of apocalypse -- Jung on the eve of the first world war, torn apart by dreams of approaching cataclysm, and a credits-sequence cue card informing viewers that Sabina Spielrein met her eventual end at the hands of an SS death squad.

It’s about as dire as sun-dappled endings shot along the banks of the Rhine get, but not for nothing: today’s united Europe inches a little closer to death with every passing morning, and it’s pretty terrifying to imagine what we’re in for once that particular cataclysm goes down. Good metaphorical films are a dime a dozen, and so are good movies about the past, but sometimes it takes a misogynist Nazi to put together something so cutting you fear for your own future.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The One That's In English, 2011

A way better movie than the story deserves, and a way better product display than H&M could have possibly paid for. There's no use arguing about this fucking thing anymore, so let's just list what we know: it's a shitty mystery, Lisbeth Salander has less human traits than a box full of ketchup, and Steig Larrsson's wish fulfilment sex and professional fantasies wear out their welcome after the first pass. Fincher does some great stuff in this with the way he cuts a scene together (my personal favorite is the part where Daniel Craig tells Christopher Plummer he has to leave at a certain time, only for Fincher to later cut from the two men sharing a laugh to the face of a clock/which is at a station/next to a sign/for the train that Craig just failed to catch), but this isn't a story that needed telling past the potboiler stage, and it certainly didn't need to waste the time of so many talented people in doing so.

Red Letter Media/Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Whoa, 2012

There's a section in this early on--if you haven't seen it, I'd hate to ruin it for you--where the guy who makes these things essentially throws down the gauntlet harder than I thought was still possible. It's the part involving the Olsen twins and screaming. The second that a better statement on creating "content" for the internet is made, let me know. Right now, this is the champion.

Star Wars Uncut
I made it about seven minutes in, 2012

In keeping with the prizewinning theme, the bar is now officially set: here is the best pro-SOPA argument ever made. Were you listening, webcomics?

The Mechanic
Statham's No Bronson, But Jan Ain't Got Shit On Foster, 2011

There's some bad action here, most of which is attributable to whoever it was that didn't have faith in the ability of the Statham/Foster duo to deliver intrigue without the help of all the overthought action pieces (behind a wall? off a high rise?), but don't let the comparison game get in the way of the general problem: this is a shitty movie that doesn't trust Jason Statham, and while you can get away with that when Jason Statham isn't in your movie, you can't when he very much is. Case in point? The best sequence in a Statham action flick shouldn't be a scene where Ben Foster executes three guys in less time than it takes to remember your mother's name. It should be a scene where Statham does something, preferably with his abs and his fists. Otherwise, you just fucked up the movie version of a peanut butter sandwich.

Kill List
That Happened, 2011

Here's a brief (stolen) list of some of the movies that relate in part to Kill List: Rosemary's Baby, Dead Man's Shoes, Wicker Man, Angel Heart, Straw Dogs, Come and See, Full Metal Jacket. Genre hopping, upsetting, increasingly violent the sort of degree that more than a few will most certainly abandon watching it after a specific sequence set at a kitchen table (and will be right to do so, considering what follows), this is an excellent piece of endurance testing. It is fearsomely compelling and yet almost unwatchable. Recommended?

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol
Scientology Totally Works, 2011

Following a solid piece of action-eering sullied only by its prominent usage in this film's many trailers, Ghost Protocol--which is a much more ridiculous, and therefore far better title than MI:4 would have been--turns its lens on the introduction of its main character. In keeping with Cruisian law number 714, which states that Tom prefers for his acting to circulate prominently around a character's proclivity for athletic equipment (see Few Good Men, see Top Gun), we're treated to the sight of Mr. Ethan Hunt playing with a rubber ball. It's a great reminder of what these movies are all about: a dude who has balls and does shit. Introspection is fun for some, but for this guy, the game's the thing, and if you don't have one to task him with, he'll find one all on his own.

It's a big fake out though. The real introduction comes next. As our phenomenally physically qualified Hunt stalks, rolls and elbows his way out of a prison riot, with Frank Sinatra cheering him own, a funny thing happens: you see it. It's a weird moment, the one where your brain clicks on a little sharper, realizing that this is going to be one of those action movies where you can't figure out how they did it, because aw shit did ya see that?! 

The entire rest of it is like that, and it only lets up so that Simon Pegg can roam around and make his co-stars (only one of whom ever really "acts", which is why he seems so out of place) laugh at all the Simon Pegg-type reactions he has to things. Everybody will have their own favorite set pieces; mine is definitely the one where Cruise hits the roof of a passing vehicle and falls onto the ground. It's not as flashy as any of the rest of them, and it certainly won't show up in anybody's highlight reel, but there was just something about it that called back to those post Supercop Jackie Chan movies: the honesty of a badass getting older, and yet still willing to get smacked around to make the shot work.

Super 8
Until They'll Put E.T. On Netflix Streaming, 2011

The thing that made that JJ Abrams Star Trek movie worthwhile was that it took something completely unwatchable (Star Trek) and made it tolerable for the first time. In Super 8, all he seems to have done is take something that was totally fine (The Goonies, E.T., your working memory) and brush it up with more nostalgiac dickpulling. The scene where Elle Fanning "acts" is pretty fantastic, but beyond that, this is just a waste of Eric Taylor's time. Ugh.

Patrice O'Neal Elephant In The Room, 2011
One Night Stand featuring Patrice O'Neal, 2005
Richard Pryor Live at the Sunset Strip, 1982

For whatever reason, it's the One Night Stand that made me laugh the hardest of these three, despite Pryor's classicness and the jaw-dropping terrorism of Elephant In The Room. Maybe it's because One Night Stand is the more violent performance, a torrent of energy from a man hungry to prove himself? All of these are great, though. Not a weak show in the bunch.

The Last Picture Show
Quaid Was Always Crazy, 1971

Lovely film, blessed with what has to be one of the all time scene stealing performances from Cloris Leachman. Every moment she's on screen it feels like everything around her is holding its breath, even the inaminate objects. The way she looks at Timothy Bottoms can rip your guts out in a way that Cybill Shepherd's absurd beauty can only hope to mimic.

Head
Hell Yes, 1968

A total financial failure that is absolutely entertaining and far more engaging than its detractors would have one believe. Very short, very funny.

-Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca, 2012

Too Many Movies: So Much Violence, Like Unlimited Birthday Cakes

This time around, Joe McCulloch delivers his take on Drive, direct to your heart (as the Gosling intended it), while Tucker goes through a bunch of movies with violence in them, as well as Guarding Tess and some movie about a picnic.

Drive
I liked Dead Man’s Bones, it was a cool album, 2011
Joe McCulloch


In case you’re wondering why this is drenched in the internet’s cum, the answer’s pretty simple. Despite its director’s public toasts to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Gaspar Noé, Drive is fundamentally the same kind of thing as the Crank series: a smart/dumb winking-but-just-because-I’m-enjoying-myself-so-much rendering of goofball movie thrills deep through the horizon of absurdity as a bath of sheer visual aesthetic, rippled and splashed through by a wildly and simply dedicated protagonist.

Mind you, instead of hyperkinetic racing racing racing it’s a mostly rich-lit thing of Mannish mise-en-scène, yet not above arching the authorial eyebrow as criminal chauffer Ryan Gosling -- who apparently insisted on the involvement of director Nicolas Winding Refn in what was at one point supposed to be a more straightforward heist-gone-bad picture -- passes through a garage full of flashy muscle cars to arrive at the nondescript consumer vehicle in which he’ll be pulling off his next big crime scene escape-for-hire, potentially rousing film critics of a certain inclination to stand on the seats screaming YES! YES! FUCK YOU MICHAEL BAY! GOOD GUYS WIN! GOOD GUYS WIN! Breathlessly, Refn withholds the speed release of Gosling’s adventure by portraying the getaway as a game of hiding your car in shadows until a dozen or so final seconds of furious velocity accompanied (knowingly, I’m sure) by the shittiest, hackiest trope imaginable: the Big Game on the radio appearing to comment on the protagonist’s on-screen action. THEN - pink neon credits! The most on-the-nose song-selections-as-commentary this side of Zack Snyder! Ryan Gosling dressed as a cop, but he’s really on a movie set where nary an eyes is blinked in the face of dangerous stunts before slipping on a latex tough guy mask because who is he, really? EH? EH??

I liked Crank and Crank 2, though. I liked Drive too. Hell, despite how my review sounded, I also liked Joe Wright’s Hanna, which, alternatively, married intensively stylized action to a defiant intellectualization of every fucking thing in sight. Refn, meanwhile, is content to play at games of performance and illusion -- Gosling is a stuntman pretending to be a movie tough guy by living as a tough guy until the burden of toughness demands he wear a literal tough guy mask in audition for perhaps the ultimate cool stoicism of death… and the villain is a producer! -- which I found to be largely banal and overwrought. He’s far better at presenting Ron Pearlman and Albert Brooks(!) as ludicrously clichéd mob types, the former gesticulating wildly underneath an awesome spray tan while the latter, in response to Gosling’s refusal to shake because ’my hands are dirty,’ suckles the inevitable ’so are mine’ like a honeyed lozenge. Better still is the (again shopworn) idea of time and sound slowing as Our Man readies himself for action (I mean, there‘s a fucking Saving Private Ryan hearing blowout bit! Seriously!), which Refn takes to the frankly wonderful extent of Gosling stepping into a veritable pocket dimension, lights shifting and everything, to exchange a long, erotic kiss with Carey Mulligan As the Good Girl in the millisecond before moving in to crush an assassin’s head like a plastic cup, Toxic Avenger-style.

Yet if there’s anything that remains constant between these bursts of ecstasy, it’s gotta be Gosling; heaven knows if Drive starts up a trend, its already got its Nicolas Cage. This is the kind of performance that dares to appear completely ridiculous for a good portion of screen time in the service of a persona sewn together from so many classic toothpick-chewing gestures the Driver comes off like an uncanny living seinen manga tough guy with all the stiffness of the page somehow intact in three dimensions. But by the time heads are erupting from gunfire and pierced necks are gushing blood in the bathroom, Gosling is sweating and trembling, like he never really expected to be this guy he’s been playing for everyone, most of all himself. Again, it’s not so fascinating an arc, but its actualization is something to enjoy moment by moment, which describes the film neatly.

Rise Of The Planet of The Apes
Who Let The Dogs Out, 2011 

This was pretty exhilirating, and surely the best of this summer's dire crop of popcorn blockbusters. There's a lot that could have been improved--that's one of the most tacked-on female characters in recent memory, practically could have been added in post--but considering the film is, essentially, the action thriller equivalent of Roger Rabbit or Space Jam, it's hard to come down anywhere but "yeah, sure" on this one. It takes balls to set that much action in the daylight, y'know?

The Man From Nowhere
He's not gay incase anyone is wondering, 2010

This is broadly similar to Taken in terms of plot structure, but it's more just any movie ever about a guy who wants to look inward (because of a tragic loss) being forced to act outward (because of an innocent victim of evil). On the other hand, it's also movie about a guy with a really horrible haircut and no personality who is pretty good at beating people up, and then he cuts his hair and becomes a really beautiful physical specimen who is insanely good at killing people. Some really great violence in this one.

13 Assassins
Total Massacre, 2010

Diabolical film. The sequence where the camera is turned on its side nearly knocked me off the couch. There's a lot else to love here, although much has been pointed out that might be a sticking point from a certain intellectual level. Honestly though, it would take me multiple years of rewatching to get to a point where those final battles no longer carried a visceral impact. I envy the teenagers who are currently soaking their brains in this thing's brine.

The Chaser
This Metal Folding Chair Will Show Me Your Head Secrets, 2008

Although the hammer/chisel scene that occurs early on nearly had me bailing for less gross-out pastures, I stuck it out, am glad I did. Perfectly aping the dead-run style set up by After Hours or Booty Call (and maybe a dash of 24), The Chaser is the sort of movie that would've been singled out as a "non-stop thrill ride" if that phrase hadn't been attached to basically every non-comedy ever made. It's of the mean fucker variety though, an action thriller that takes some aggressive detours into hard R slasher. Oh, and it also made a massive amount of money, and everybody involved in this movie apparently became a superstar afterwards.

Guarding Tess
Down In The Ground Where The Dead Men Go, 1994

Not sure if it's accurate to time it out perfectly, but I think I actually sank into a deep, deep depression right around when I decided it would be a good idea to watch this entire movie from start to finish. It's kind of fascinating to watch pre-crazy Nicholas Cage, because his performances aren't markedly different in any substantial way, and yet there's just a general sense nowadays that yeah, he's gone pretty far out on the beam. I genuinely love that scene where Cage shoots Austin Pendleton though, that hasn't changed a bit. Otherwise, I've got nothing to say here. We make our own hell, sometimes.

Lethal Weapon
Lethal Fucking Weapon, 1987

God, wouldn't you like to read that Chris Ryan book right now? Right/right/right now? Anyway: the only thing I noticed for the first time on this rewatch of the fifth greatest movie involving Shane Black ever made was that Mel Gibson doesn't seem to have a grasp on how to play Riggs until the second or third scene, to the point where it even sounds like he's speaking in his native accent. Then it clicks into place, he does that out of breath laugh thing and, bang, it's countdown to the scene where he kills somebody who torturers him. Watching Mel Gibson kill people who torture him is a time-honored American tradition, one he almost ruined along with all the other traditions he did ruin when he went batshit crazy (in an unfunny way) for the second time. This one still works!

The Bermuda Depths
Bad Movie Club #1, 1978

Oh, this is a stone motherfucking classic, right here. A sleazy cash-in on Jaws stapled to a story about an immortal ghost (married to a gigantic killer turtle) who falls in love with a paranoid schizophrenic orphan (orphaned by the evil, omnipotent spirit that animates the turtle and immortalized the ghost) under the watchful eye of Burl Ives and a drunk Carl Weathers (!), this is one of those movies that actually incorporates a scene shot in a bathtub, with a toy boat, and pretends that it's a boat on the open water. Oh, and you know how you've never seen a movie where a gigantic turtle jumps into the sky and knocks down a helicopter, thereby killing the people onboard said helicopter? That's a loss you can remedy. Wow.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
Dude Still Makes Movies, Dude Still Kicks Ass, 1978 

This is one of those movies whose cultural impact and overall wonderfulness overshadows a lot of its minor failings, the most egregious being that its way more interesting to watch the main character go through 35 chambers of Shaolin training than it is to watch him do anything with said training, and since the end of the movie is (necessarily) going to be him doing stuff just like that, the movie ends on a down note. (Except for the graveyard scene, which plays out like a black box theater production of Faces of Death style snuff/shlock, and pretty much redeems everything around it.)

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three
Walter Matthau Threw That Piece Of Shit Like A Piece of Shit, 1974

Some movies you remember watching for the first time, some movies are just woven into the fabric of one's existence. Hail, hail. Prequels are stupid fucking concepts, the province of lazy audiences and lazy entertainment merchants: but man, I'd watch a movie about whatever mercenary work it was that Robert Shaw's character was doing up until he decided to bring hell back to the underground. That's an untapped vein of gold right there.

Wages of Fear
How's That Leg Feeling, Slippery Sam, 1953

Is there any working filmmaker who scares people as much as Clouzot did back in the 50's? The only one I can think of is Lars Von Trier, but he really just offends people, he doesn't scare them. Does any artist scare people the way Clouzot did? It might be a question of audience--Clouzot made supremely skillful thrillers, and "artistic" directors seem to have completely abandoned genre entirely, with the only exception being non-American filmmakers who still get stuck in arthouses when they leave their own countries and end up subtitled.

Whatever, it's not like this train of thought is giving me any pleasure. Wages of Fear: this really is a perfect  movie.

People On Sunday
From Your Hips To Your Finger Tips, 1929

Part of the reason people get so amped up about the past has gotta be that you could be one sexy motherfucker based purely off of attitude, as that's what all silent movies from the 20's constantly imply. (Unless you were a woman, of course.) Almost all of these flicks have dudes in them that are considered the Ryan Gosling/Jude Laws of their day, and yet those dudes appear indistinguishable from the specimen of man you oft find lurking around the 2AM hour at your local Waffle House (or local Waffle House equivalent). That whole "go to the gym"/"eat some boiled chicken" thing is totally a new creation. Movie star dudes used to be skanky.

Anyways: this movie is about a picnic. The dude who sets it up ends up banging it out with one of the girls while her pal gets all jealous and breaks a record. Trees are climbed, paddleboats are paddled. Solid as steel? You know it.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Roid Robots And Rap Royalty

This week, Sean Witzke powers down a Transformers Dark Of The Moon shake while Martin Brown gets specific about Beats, Rhymes & Life. Tucker tipped his hat to Impolex before getting rustic in The Star Chamber.

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
Real Men Settle Their Disagreements On Twitter, 2011
Martin Brown 

One of the most overlooked aspects of A Tribe Called Quest’s career is the group’s artlessness. Unlike their Native Tongue peers, no one aspect of Tribe’s music calls attention to itself over the whole. The Jungle Brothers had their house music experiments. De La Soul had the D.A.I.S.Y. Age and Prince Paul’s Hall & Oates and Steely Dan-lifting sampledelica. But Tribe were gimmick-less craftsmen, in the mold of Eric B. & Rakim. As a producer, Q-Tip mostly lets his crate-digging speak for itself; as a rapper—especially on Tribe’s 1990 debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm—Tip employs a minimalist style, allowing bars to float by in between his lines. Phife’s verses are self-contained blasts of sophisticated lyricism. Ali Shaheed Mohammed and Jarobi White’s presences are scarcely felt but, from Tip and Phife’s perspectives, the two least-heard members of the group are equally essential to its impact. The dynamic between all four personalities (or three in the periods Jarobi left the group to pursue a culinary career) is deeply felt on record. Tribe’s work is more about the centrifugal force of the cumulative effect than it's about any one member or musical phrase shining brighter than the rest.

So it makes sense that Michael Rapaport directs his Tribe documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life, with a similar artlessness. At no point does he let on that he knows a single thing about filmmaking. Editing and setting up shots are lost on him, and in interviews you can hear him yelling at his subjects from off screen, as if he was still on the set of Beautiful Girls. Rapaport is less interested in cinema than in raw storytelling. Through his lens, the story of A Tribe Called Quest has everything to do with the exact dynamic between the four original members that made their music exhilarating. So Rapaport takes his time laying out the basics: how they all met, how they chose the name, how they built the Native Tongues community around them—all of which will be common knowledge to rap fans. But if the opening third feels a bit like an episode of Behind the Music—padded out with animation, stock hip-hop footage, and sound designer Madlib dropping Stones Throw staples like the bass lick from Pure Essence’s lost 1977 gem, “Third Rock from the Sun”—Rapaport’s groundwork pays off when the group begins to splinter.

Rapaport goes through great lengths to define each member of Tribe’s function within the group, not only as musicians, but as personalities. He also sneakily establishes each member’s complex relationship with the others—most specifically in how Q-Tip and Phife Dawg relate to one another. Q-Tip talks about pressing Phife to show up and rhyme at the early Tribe rehearsals, and how he still had to push Phife to show up ten years later. Phife feels like Tip marginalizes him within the group in order to focus the public’s attention on himself. They’re both right. Interviews with a young Tribe depict both Phife’s reticence as an artist and Tip mugging for the camera. Their relationship gets complicated by Phife’s type 1 diabetes and dangerous addiction to sugar. At one point, as Tribe prepares to perform on The Dennis Miller Show, Phife has to be rushed to the hospital. Q-Tip and Ali go on without him.

The documentary patiently traces Phife and Tip’s relationship as it begins to deteriorate over the course of Tribe’s final two albums. There’s a lot of internet chatter about Tip’s dissatisfaction with Beats, Rhymes & Life, insinuating that Rapaport portrays him in a negative light. But Tip doesn’t come off badly at all. His flaws—namely the perfectionism and subtle self-loathing—are part-and-parcel with his charm. Often talent is an inseparable bundle of skill and neuroses, and—though there’s a lot of talk devoted to Phife’s lyrical acumen—Tip is clearly portrayed as the driving talent behind the group. If his egotism frequently shines through, his actions often betray a deep affection for his band-mates.

Ultimately, though, Phife Dawg is the protagonist of Beats, Rhymes & Life. He is the one who changes over the course of the film—from abusing his body with mass amounts of Snickers bars and Dr. Pepper, to pulling away from the group by moving to Atlanta, to playing the diabetic guilt-trip card in a text-argument with Tip, to finally embracing his role within the group after receiving a kidney transplant from his wife. Q-Tip, then, plays the antagonist—his perfectionism and camera-hogging remain consistent from People’s Travels up through the release of his 2008 solo album, The Renaissance—so it’s easy to see why he might feel slighted.

The film and the fractiousness within the group come to a head in 2008, with Phife’s transplant and a slot for the reunited Tribe on the Rock the Bells tour (which Tip, in one of those moments of deep affection, agrees to in order to help cover Phife’s hospital bills). Over the course of their final three shows, the tension between Phife and Tip turns into total fallout. Rapaport, having deftly established the group dynamic, can now effectively follow all the effects of the beef, zeroing in on each member individually. In one scene, the camera zooms in on Ali Shaheed Mohammed, who leans against the dressing room wall as Tip defends his side of the argument to De La Soul’s Maseo. Even though he’s clearly aware of being filmed, Ali’s tempered reaction reveals that he’s caught in the middle of the two friends. In another scene, Phife’s blood pressure begins to drop in the middle of a performance. He continues to rap for the crowd while literally leaning on Jarobi for support. In these moments, watching the members of A Tribe Called Quest continually break apart and come together, Beats, Rhymes & Life paints one of the most subtly complex depictions in film of a band-as-family. Though we never actually see them squash the beef, one of the film’s final scenes shows Phife, Ali and Tip rehearsing for the 2010 Rock the Bells tour. Phife and Tip work out a simple dance routine while Ali scratches records on the turntable. After only a little bit of talking, Phife and Tip’s moves fall precisely in sync with each other and with the music.

Transformers 3
We Michael Bay At Moons, 2011
Sean Witzke

I'm broke, and I don't get to actually see movies in the theater much anyone. So this year, I've actually only seen four movies on a big screen - a Liam Neeson murder-em-up I would've enjoyed more on TBS on a sunday afternoon (Unknown), a horrible revival theater experience of one of my favorite films (Evil Dead 2), a really fantastic but nonetheless small scale comedy (Bridesmaids), and 13 dollar laser eye surgery, featuring robots (Transformers Bark at the Moon). So I don't know if my expectations have changed recently as to what I'm looking for in a theater experience. But for the most part, I watch movies at home, usually in the dimestore film school quality where I'm just going down lists of older movies I watch online with the occasional new thing thrown in. While my action nerd muscles run deep, over the past few years I've largely been watching smaller things because I've been watching them on a smaller screen. So I don't know if it's in me, because I saw the first Transformers in the theater and got viscerally angry at how stupid it was. Not because I care about Transformers -- I never really did beyond a youthful YAY! ROBOTS -- but because the mental leniency I usually give to Michael Bay movies wasn't even rewarded. Hell, I saw Pearl Harbor and The Island in the theater, and I can tell you which are the good parts of those stupid, stupid, terrible movies. 

Shit, you see Bad Boys II? Did you see the part in Armageddon where the Mir blows up? The first Transformers didn't live up to my low standards of "does the shit blowing up outweigh the stupid?". But it would be disengenuous to just write Bay off as a guy who can just do action (which, if we're being honest, means that he's a better director than most directors you can name because action is much harder to do right than anything else), Bay is fantastic at filling his movies with character actors who are compelling on their own - the Transformers movies especially. The biggest problem is that he can't direct his leading men to do anything other than be more bland than the previous guy, and unless they're a compelling weirdo like Nicholas Cage or an automatic screen presence like Martin Lawrence, it gets real dicey real fast. He's also crazily into objectifying women, but it's Hollywood so you kind of have to accept that as part and parcel of this sort of thing. I mean, Scarlett Johanssen and Megan Fox are on equal ground in Michael Bay's universe, which is proof that misogyny is a great leveler when it comes to talent. The first Transformers left me feeling that Spielberg had attempted to graft his sense of wonder formula (which it must be noted, he himself hasn't used in decades) onto Michael Bay's framefucking aesthetic leaving the audience satisfied with neither, the second one I barely watched (the pyramid was kind of cool but it came after the previous 2 hours and was subsequently followed by another hour). 

But Transformers The Search For Spock, for some reason, is a film that I was completely psyched to see. Part of it was the circling press in which Bay had basically said that the previous film was terrible and this one was take no prisoners action, part of it was the pavlovian response to the massive destruction in the trailer, part of it was morbid curiosity of how Michael Bay could shoot a movie in 3d. But generally I just think I needed to see a real action movie again. I haven't seen one in a while, and if we're thinking of action movies I've enjoyed it's been longer. So I don't necessarily know if Transformers Turn Off the Dark is a particularly good movie so much as it was the movie I needed to see right now. 

Transformers Rise of the Machines is what happens when you let a guy who seemingly directs entirely on the whims of his 13 year old self but has the money, technical skill, and casting clout to back it up (which are the exact three things that keep Zach Snyder from being Michael Bay. That and, y'know, the rape fixation), what happens when you give him the reins to a franchise which can sustain even after the release of a near-unwatchable film. Transformers is more teflon a property than Batman--they're pure product, soulless toys hungry for the constant redesign--and that means Michael Bay can breathe a little easier on this one. In his hyperactive, retard-glee way, Transformers Ultimatum is also shot in 3D, which physically forces the legendary "frame-fucking" style of Michael Bay to slow down just slightly, making him a more comprehensible stylist. So instead of 3 hours of Spielberg-worshipping and idiotic mythology, Bay plays this one a little looser. And by doing that he kind of stops giving a shit about making a Transformers movie, and just makes a movie. While he's at it he hops around - yes, there are giant robots fighting here, lots of them. And lots of incomprehensible mythology and poorly drawn characters (near as I can tell Megatron and Starscream are the only villains who both have names and speaking parts, and there are a whole chunk of new good guys who are only here to pad out the fight scenes). Transformers and the Deathly Hallows is a Michael Bay movie because it takes what is happening in current cinema and treats it as a challenge to be hurdled rather than another work of art that must be processed. So of course, there is a lot of game-changing work in the final sequence in the film, where 1) the Decepticons take over Chicago, 2) a gigantic building is chopped in half, 3) a military team in jump-flight suits leap out of a plane while the rest of their fleet gets slammed by giant robots, 4) Shockwave wrecks even more of Chicago, and 5) a three-way orgy of death and spine-ripping starring the only 3 robots anyone could care about in this thing (Megatron, Optimus Prime, and whatever they called Leonard Nimoy even though no one is legally allowed to call him anything but Leonard Fucking Nimoy, praise Jesus). This time, instead of Spielberg, Bay starts to just do what he does instinctively, and any tributes seem to be intentional rather than part of the job. And there's some Apollo 13/Forrest Gump digital history, and some shoutouts to his peers Christopher Nolan and James Cameron. 

Think about it - sure, Cameron and Bay had a lot of talks about 3D and did some press together that were essentially commercials for the technology, but this movie is the first to go toe-to-toe with Avatar's technical acheivements - this is the first legitimately immersive 3D for the kind of mindless brain-napalming spectacle it needs to be to work. And it has to be said, Transformers 3 isn't really a Transformers movie once Chicago hits. It's a Terminator movie. Faceless robots against nameless soldiers, all destruction and skree and horror. This isn't a movie about intergalactic robots waging war with one another. It's Judgement Day. The major players get their moment, but if no one had said "Shockwave" out loud, that thing with the gigantic robot would just be this horrifying thing. Those planes look exactly like updated Hunter/Killers. This is what we wanted from Salvation but got whatever the hell that movie was. It just has Megatron getting his spine ripped out at the end of it. The location of Chicago, down to certain locations, is an outright "I see you" to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The building getting chopped in half by that gigantic worm thing, with the people inside, sliding around trying not to die as the building spins? That's one up on Inception, with stylish Joseph Gordon Levitt balletics replaced with Bay's kill squad predilictions. Bay calling out to his peers, but in his competitive Bay way. Cameron is getting old, and getting overly techy to really dive in the way that Bay does anymore. Nolan is the biggest popcorn director in the world, but Bay doesn't need to point out that he can't direct an action scene with an iota of the skill he can direct two people talking in a locked room. Michael Bay, for all his myriad flaws, is above everyone else at one simple thing - and that's directing an action scene. Now, because of the limitations of content and technology, he's gotten even better at it. You want characters, acting, story, mythology, thematic heft, visual splendor, or even a Transformers movie? Look somewhere else. You weren't going to like this anyway.

Impolex
He's Not Exactly Team Six Material, 2009
Tucker Stone

Loosely inspired by its writer/director's interest in the story of Operation Paperclip and a dream, Impolex is a 75 minute movie following a sleepy British soldier as he roams around a unnamed forest in unnamed Europe, searching for unexploded enemy rockets. Although the war seems to be over, Tyrone (the soldier) is also commissioned with the task of bringing in an enemy agent. While the appearance of an old girlfriend and a talking octopus (an actual octopus from Chinatown plays the role) strongly implies that Tyrone is hallucinating much of what is happening, the truth of the film seems wholly left up to the viewer. The movie's budget is, one has to assume, far beneath what even the cheapest independent film usually has. 

It's not an easy movie to give over to. There's some humor in it, mostly the kind of laughs that stem from people mishearing the other, but for the most part, it's a movie that looks to have been filmed in a particular large backyard by a quartet of stoned Vonnegut fans, one of whom was able to convince their dad to come along and hold a machine gun. But to dismiss it as such would be a mistake, because if there's one thing that becomes clear as Impolex trudges around much like its lead, it's that this movie was made like this on purpose. The people involved know that the audience can hear the cameraman's feet crushing leaves during what's supposed to be a solitary scene, they know that the talking octopus scenes are (to say the least) confusing, and they're aware that Tyrone's uniform doesn't look like something a real soldier might have worn. Impolex isn't a realistic movie for a second, it isn't a plot driven one despite what's written above, and it's questionable whether applying the definitive narrative characteristics of story to it would even make sense. Even though describing it requires me to do so, I couldn't describe a train ride without making up certain moments to fill in the unknown gaps, and the immediate interpretation that demands means I've already drawn closer to myself, and further away from what the movie itself may or may not be about. Like it, hate it, I'm closer to the first, all I can guarantee you is this: you've never seen a war movie like this one.

The Star Chamber
Your Second Mistake Was Thinking We'd Root Against Hal Holbrook, 1983
Tucker Stone

While it eventually becomes a predictable attempt to make the liberal paranoia version of Death Wish, the first forty five minutes of The Star Chamber are pretty fascinating. A couple of visually striking sequences following no-fuss police work and an extraordinary adrenalized parking garage chase scene that choose not to ground themselves in any relationship with the main narrative, and eventually only reveal their connections with cursory blips of text buried inside yawning chunks of legal verbiage, the movie at times seems more in line with the late 70's fuck-this-country, we're-so-fucking-stoned films that are so often heralded as our best. Strangely lit and framed even stranger, The Star Chamber doesn't just act weird, it looks it--more like the black and white crime comic of a noir-infected imagination than the people-arguing-in-rooms movie that it essentially is--and while the film is eventually strangled by its leading actor into a blister-free will-he-make-it-in-time chase scene whose narrative climax revolves around a guy who won't fight being stuck in a room with those who will, there's enough strange meat left to make it worth a look. If only real life always had a Yaphet Kotto right around the corner, ready to save us all, one more time.

-Martin Brown, Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Here's The Movies Not Giving Cars 2 Any Competition

This week, Joe McCulloch has your Green Lantern while Tucker has your Bad Teacher. 

Green Lantern
Bill Finger: unwelcome in opening credits for almost seventy years, 2011
Joe McCulloch



There’s been a lot of complaints about this one -- and, unfortunately, I agree with basically all of them-- but even beyond the stuff lobbed out a hundred times already, I feel the need to articulate a very fundamental sinking feeling I got from so elephantine a summer mega-production: this thing looks shockingly cheap. I mean, like they seriously ran out of money at some point. The first 10 or so minutes in particular are just totally artless, crashing between abbreviated action sequences, pace or build up be damned, looking for all the world like an ugly CG cartoon with only enough resources at hand to put together the high points of set pieces, maybe in the hopes of attracting investors to fund the connecting fiber. That really shouldn’t feel like a problem with Green Lantern, yet the whole movie seems filled with weird cut corners, from the would-be dramatic flashback of Hal Jordan witnessing his father’s death-- populated with a small handful of spectators planted in an open space and lil’ Hal running up towards the fatal explosion completely alone -- straight on through to the grown Space Cop’s final struggle with dread Parallax (presented as a gigantic black snake firework, or maybe a writing mass of burning turds) abandoning its kinda-cool city battle stage after a scandalously brief period to leave poor Ryan Reynolds flailing suspended in chroma key space orbit and reacting alarmedly to animation elements for the rest of the climax.

It looks low-rent, is what I’m saying, and while it could be that a particularly heroic pre-production period racked up costs to the point where the quoted $200 million before-advertising budget wasn’t nearly what was available to work with -- remember the Jack Black comedy iteration of the mid-‘00s? -- I’m wondering if there wasn’t some very fundamental post-production shenanigans going down, possibly locked into the death spiral of simplifying the subject matter to protect against escalating costs, thereby running costs up further. The risk/reward ratio on withholding information for the purposes of suspense or wonder or whatnot in super-big movies gets badly skewed, apparently enough so here that an opening voiceover is presented to detail background information in anticipation of spelling it out again via expository dialogue after approximately one hour.

A really assertive personality at the helm can cure this state, but I can’t imagine Martin Campbell was quite Christopher Nolan, or even Zack Snyder; the result is a film about a man with a wishing ring that can do anything, wherein the vast majority of miraculous feats he performs are flat recaps of stuff he either witnessed earlier or was specifically taught to do, right down to his observation of a slot car racetrack in his nephew’s bedroom improbably moving him to rescue a falling helicopter by transforming it into a giant slot car and sending it zipping around a massive playset he’s willed into the middle of a bustling party with dozens of people standing around - it might not make a lick of sense in terms of logical motivation, given the circumstances of the threat, but at least it squelches the slightest opportunity for even one audience member to go “hey, how’d he do that?” and thereby feel a slight twinge of anxiety or helplessness over having had something potentially inexplicable occur in this story of the limitless potential of human will.

Still, there’s some blessed relief to be had in the form of Peter Sarsgaard, splendidly playing a version of evil researcher Hector Hammond made over in the manner of Dr. Forrester from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Basically, he’s a huge, awkward nerd, and his storyline -- uneasily positioning him as a sort of accidental herald of Parallax, despite his actions having virtually no applicability to the villain’s arrival --affords Sarsgaard all kinds of opportunities for odd twitches and eccentricities and little bursts of anger and that bending over to sip at a really full drink thing you see people do and maybe do yourself - all the itch oflife.

Naturally, this is pitted against movie-smooth, sneering, handsome Reynolds, who in one scene heroically beats the shit out of angry blue-collar workers whose livelihoods he’s ruined (which isn’t a political statement, mind you, it’s just another means of connecting the scene to something, anything from earlier inthe movie, so nary a soul might wonder “but why is Hal Jordan being attacked?” and thus feel uncertainty’s sting in this fable of mighty emotions in a vast cosmos) - needless to say, Sarsgaard stands absolutely no chance, because that’s how this airtight world is built. Yes, yes, Reynolds comes to a nominal realization that being nice is good, and extends the hand of friendship and use of the magic ring to the fear-consumed Sarsgaard, so full of self-loathing over his unattractiveness to lovely Carol Ferris and the political favors his father has done for him - except, it’s a trick! Hector Hammond can’t really use the magic ring, because the concept of Green Lantern as presented here requires Hal Jordan to be at-heart superior, elite - CHOSEN. He’s just better, the very universe knows it!

I ask you - who wouldn’t soak in nihilism given that scenario? Truly it’s Sarsgaard that’s the film’s tragic hero, its true (if accidental) source of light and heat and sound, the lattermost element specifically being the beating of millions of awkward folk’s knuckles against their desks as they lament how irreversibly crap this Earth can be while imagining that everything beyond our atmosphere is much the same, only bigger and gaudier and more dubiously composited. Christ, no wonder this thing hasn’t cleared $150 million!

Bad Teacher
More Fake-raham Lincoln Please, 2011
Tucker Stone 

This isn't getting the best shake of it from our nation's film critics, and that's no surprise: it isn't a very good movie. From the very beginning moments, when an after the fact recording of dialog is slapped atop a scene built out of shots of the back of whomever is supposedly speaking all the way to the very end, when the same lame attempts at punch-up make the concluding moment of expected romance look more like a homemade Vimeo drama than it does a movie, with movie stars, Bad Teacher never lets you pretend that what you're seeing was figured out long before you arrived. Being a mostly school based comedy, there's multiple fill-in shots of the same extras in different clothes, the same shot of one slack-jawed kid confusingly used twice, and the conspicuous lack of dialog amongst all but four of the school's children. (As soon as they talk, you gotta pay them more.) Of course, flaw-picking isn't novel enough to be more than a time-killing game, and while Bad Teacher provides plenty of sport, lambasting it in advance of the unknown IMDb heroes who will eventually fill out its "Goofs" section provides little pleasure.

In a depressing twist, the movie actually didn't necessarily have to be this bad, and there's even some moments of genuine greatness that shine through it's unnerving failures. Jason Segal's impossibly good-natured attempts at shlubby seduction seem to have been dropped in from a far better film, and there's some wonderfully absurdist anti-comedy (the stuff that Adult Swim traffics in) roaming around in the middle of a few scenes. (Cameron's best line--"better get yourself good and hard, cuz I'm gonna suck your dick like I'm mad at it" is unfortunately dumped too early in the film, but her evil replication of teenage peer pressure makes for a close second.) The good of it isn't enough to overplay the bad, and yet it's essentially a harmless film: entertaining, dumb and mean. If only it could have been so in equal measure.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Matt Seneca Takes In A Marvel Double Feature

Matt Seneca is a cartoonist responsible for many fine comics (some available here, the currently ongoing Affected available here) who writes for CBR, TCJ, CA as well as his wonderfully intoxicating Death to the Universe who was kind enough with his time to cover the Marvel Movie beat for TFO, thus extending his grip over websites with three letter shorthand names beyond all reason.

Thor, 2011
X-Men First Class, 2011
Matt Seneca 

Marvel Movies -- is there any more recognizable commodity at today’s box office? In comics the time when “universe building” was an achievable task seems to have well and truly left us, with every company that’s placed an emphasis on constructing a shared story space for their properties to interact in either decayed into something else or gone belly-up entirely. There are worse testaments to just how much the average comics reader isn’t-a-child-anymore than that: it was easy to accept that Sal Buscema’s Avengers and Herb Trimpe’s Hulk and Gene Colan’s Dr. Strange all hung out, easy even to keep on accepting it as time went on because hey, you were twelve when you first read that stuff. And you were only five when Kirby first imagined it that way. But these new attempts, the ones undertaken when you were already a grown-up, they were just insults to your intelligence. Tell me why the WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn were allowed to bump up against eachother without explanation. Or why the stars of both Sojourn and Scion both had glowing ying- yangs tattooed on them. But we’re talking about movies here, people. Ahem.

All I’m saying is, the fact that Marvel Films has managed to build a coherent, believable shared universe for their characters the same way the comics built one half a century ago is nothing short of a conceptual/marketing miracle. I’m tempted to call it yet another proof of the power Jack Kirby’s imagination held -- “that stuff can translate to any medium!” -- but the cynic in me wonders how many people would also think Star Trek and Transformers were part of some giant unified crossover scheme if they both bathed everything in the same sterile blue-gray lighting and featured atmospheric cameos by Samuel L. Jackson. Even if the by-now unmistakable Marvel aura is really only a bland sense of uniformity, the fact that it’s been successfully cast over so many actors, bad and good, so many directors, mediocre and slightly more mediocre, and just so many damn movies, is impressive in the abstract.

Is it impressive on the silver screen, though? Does anybody actually get sucked into these flicks, obsessed with them the way the comics have managed to make people obsess from the Kirby days right through to the present, when the conceit of a shared universe still binds a perplexing spell over a hundred thousand acolytes of Brian Michael Bendis? Well, I mean -- speaking for myself here -- hell yeah. I went and bought a ticket to Thor at eleven last night and when it was over I was so pumped that I was positive it was a good idea to sneak into the X-Men First Class showing that didn’t end until well past three. Then again I’m not a movies person, I go to see maybe one or two a year, so if you put something on a giant screen and the big multiplex subwoofers in front of me I am basically guaranteed to get bowled over by it, an easily entertained infant in the face of the sheer novelty and romance that is The Movies. Especially the kind where people fight each other.

I grow ever more certain that I am the perfect audience for these things, an uncritical viewer with an embarrassingly encyclopedic knowledge of the “source material”. (Boy, if that doesn’t sound like a Kirby term!) I mean, we were late to Thor by a couple minutes so I had to describe what the general situation was going to be for the uninitiated -- without having seen a preview even, mind you -- and whoops! I ended up describing the entire movie! Maybe that’s another aspect of these films’ success. They understand that one of the key tenets of the action blockbuster is an aspect of familiarity. The preordained formulas of body count in relation to perceived threat level, the ratios of interrupted kisses to explosions that mysteriously don’t go off, the precise amount of time for which to cut the sound off during an action scene before bringing it back in at full blast.

Marvel Films, though, does familiarity plus. Thor has all the classic big- budget fight movie beats, but it’s also got a backstory that was literally ancient knowledge back when Kirby first put pencil to paper on it. And there are just so many more things we know to expect from these particular blockbusters. The “hidden” Jackson cameos, of course (credits roll and nobody even makes a move to get up because we’ve all seen Iron Man, or maybe Hulk, unless it was Iron Man 2, and we’re excited for that little cherry on top the folks behind the red and while logo love to throw at us), but let’s not forget the way the visage of Stan Lee is ingrained somewhere on the print of every one of these movies like Christ on a Mexican pancake, or the “NEW MEXICO: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY” tourism-bureau billboard placed in the corner of the screen for those of us who’ll know what that means, or the haphazard mentions of Dr. Hulk Banner, who despite his ostensible status as a recluse hiding somewhere in the Canadian wilderness is apparently road dogz with every member of the American theoretical-science community up to and including Natalie Portman.

Familarity breeds predictability, however, and predictability breeds boredom. (Who’s got the energy for contempt when they’re sitting in a multiplex?) But somehow these movies manage to stay engaging, to keep the eyeballs stuck to the screen even when the face turns to the next seat over and mutters “that Black Swan chick would never kiss a man she believed to be homeless.” With Thor, the secret is one that the less talented harsh-noise bands have been using for years: make it hit hard enough and it’ll be like they’ve never been hit there before, even if they were less than five minutes ago. In the comics the thirty days’ wait between instances of Loki bamboozling the all-knowing Odin with a few tourettic proclamations is always just enough to force you to suspend disbelief, somehow. It doesn’t have that going for it when it’s happening all at once on a screen the height of my apartment building at the volume of a low-level volcanic event, lubed up by the combined efforts of a few hundred tricked out MacBook Pro’s, but polished to such a sheen it’s left the behind all logic for the realm of pure experience now: instantaneous. Immersive. And that fool is pure fucking evil up there with his watery eyes and his leather pants! Look at how much skinnier he is than everybody else! He’s wearing a scarf! The complete and utter bastard.

As with Kirby, when the amplitude of the packaging forces the critical eye to retreat and beats the audience down into passive receptors, the images alone hold more than enough meaning. And Thor as played by what’s his name is a gigantic blonde man with a winning smile and a Gap t-shirt that I have a copy of too. I would follow that guy into battle. I love that guy. I am that guy. And then even when the credits roll, I don’t sit back and say “no I’m not” because I’m waiting for the Jackson cameo. MAKE MINE MARVEL.

As a movie? As art? I mean, do I really have to type the words it was wack? I can barely remember the thing it got me so high! If I had to explain I’d say that there was only one extremely puny fight at the end, that Kenneth Branagh can’t choreograph an action scene to save his life, and that Anthony Hopkins as Odin reminded me a little too strongly of Rory Root. Yes, this was a fiercely unoriginal action movie, the least transcendent film about gods to come out in a good long while. That’s the point, though. Branagh filmed an all-time great autocritique in the scene where the goddess Sif and the immortal Warriors Three (one of whom is played by Tadanobu Asano) show up full-armor in a small Southwestern town crawling with federal agents. “Call it in,” one faceless suit says to another. The walkie goes to the mouth, and the words come out: “Uh, we got Xena Warrior Princess, Jackie Chan, and Robin Hood.” Would that all filmmakers possessed such crystal-clear knowledge of exactly what their product is.

Most of all though, Thor was a Marvel movie where the blue-gray (and alternately, black-gold) lighting was ever so occasionally shot through with full- spectrum sparkles of CGI rainbow, and I just wanted way, way more of those. On, then, just down the scarlet scurf of trampled multiplex carpet, to X-Men First Class. Here is an entirely different visual environment, a Jello bath for eyes scoured to the veins by Thor’s ascetic vigor. Sizzling pinks, waves of yellow, clean grass-green, and shot after shot of a thick, glabrous blue, a hot one far from the typical brushed steel tones, suffusing out over everything. It sounds like a triviality, but the colors are the most immediate part of a movie, the first thing any of our senses perceive -- out in front of our comprehension of spoken words or figurative images. They are the first determiners of what we feel. And the chroma of this new X-Men movie is closest to the kind of stuff you might fail to change the channel over on Cinemax, or maybe the Austin Powers movies. Farcical, sure; gaudy, no doubt… sexy? That too, definitely.

In fact, the most striking thing about First Class is how pervasively the aura of sex hangs over it, by turns the product of typical comic book movie repression (there are far less involved contortionist acts than Matthew Vaughn’s continuing refusal to just show nipples already) and look-what-we-can-get-away- with liberation, which the very presence of the ever-hypnotic sexpot Emma Frost character attests to. X-Men III blew up the idea that these films had to carry a consistent narrative momentum half a decade ago: this one is another collection of loosely strung bits, its overall success dependent on how many of them you can remember after stumbling back into the real world. I can remember like… six? Or maybe seven? Of those, a majority have at least an angle of the erotic to them -- Vaughn isn’t much more of a superpowered-battle choreographer than Kenneth Branagh, but he can make his sexy scenes stand out from the dreck like a Bruce Lee roundhouse. Chris Claremont’s eternal nerdy girlfriend Moira MacTaggart, recast here as one of those compassionate CIA agents that all seem to be stationed in Hollywood, kicks the movie off by stripping down in her surveillance vehicle and wandering over to a swanky burlesque party in lingerie and garters to swipe a few Russian state secrets. There are a few leaden jokes about Professor Xavier and Magneto double-teaming the Grant Morrison female version of Angel when they first meet her in the gogo bar where she works. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos makes a five-second cameo as a sheet-sheathed nude body, a definite aesthetic evolution from her role in the previous films as a paint-and-scale-covered nude body.

The most memorable bit in this one -- or any X-Men movie -- is also the most sexually avant-garde set piece I can remember seeing in a superhero film. Logic, always a tenuous presence in the Marvel mutants’ saga, is completely out the window here, as in I can’t even remember how it got led into, so maybe it’s best to just describe it. Emma Frost, diamond-skinned, blonde and beautiful in a bra and thigh-highs, gets bound to the front of a bed by the metal bars of the frame itself, courtesy of Magneto’s powers. A Russian general reclines on the mattress above her, absorbed in the psychic illusion that he’s having sex with the woman sitting fully restrained a few feet in front of him. Magneto bends a bar around Emma’s throat. We watch from straight on as the breath whooshes from her lungs, her diamond shell subtly flickering between the white of precious stones and the pink of the velvet skin beneath it. The image is one of pure, utterly erotic strangeness, a soft and decadent surrealism on par with anything Bunuel could have dreamed up if they’d handed him the X-Men. Domination and submission in one, the same person directing and receiving malevolent sexual force. Bondage and choke sex thrown in for good measure. This movie is serious, and no amount of asinine plot maneuvering can possibly erase that one picture from memory. It’s one of the more incredible sections of film I’ve ever seen, an exquisite torture that would have done Pasolini proud.

Even the muck they throw on to cover such a shining moment back up again has a strange, uncomfortable edge, though. The other bits that stand out are the Hugh Jackman Wolverine cameo -- an attempt at the same kind of familiarizing Thor pulls off so well that ends up as an utter failure, sticking out like a sore thumb for its most prominent use of the word “fuck” ever in a Marvel movie -- and the death of Darwin, a character whose existence I had no previous knowledge of. He’s the one black guy, so yes he dies first, but more striking still is the sudden cut to a closeup of his face a few moments previous as the nefarious Sebastian Shaw asks the group of young mutants Xavier’s assembled if they really want to be enslaved. Not an undropped jaw in the theater, folks. But then, subtlety was never there to begin with.

First Class is farce -- mistakenly hilarious, campy, overblown farce that manages a kind of majestic sleaze, a transcendence via banal degradation that outshines any feat of godly power on display in Thor. Notably, it’s the first Marvel flick not to feature the reassuring presence of Stan Lee, the semi-estranged godfather of this whole shambolic media empire. Maybe it’s just because he pulled out after he saw the dailies on that Emma Frost asphyxia scene, but this is also the first Marvel film to be co-produced by an outside studio since the company’s merger with Disney. As I understand it, at this point Fox is basically holding the X-Men hostage, pumping out whatever works in order not to lose such a lucrative license. We’ll be seeing a lot more of these a lot quicker is my guess, each more lo- fi and logic-light and riddled with the ridiculous than the last. Mutant movies about mutants: there are worse things. And hey, thank god I don’t have to watch Halle Berry trying to act anymore.

Fascinatingly, this film’s final two big emotional beats are Xavier lying on a Cuban beach whimpering “I can’t feel my legs,” and Magneto finally first getting his Kirby-helmeted badass on for realz: moments that get you jacked as fuck to see more and then drop you right off into a wacky, Pink Pantherish credits sequence with the greatest of ease (no Sam Jackson cameo afterwards, obviously). You want more? As we all know, it’s to be found in the first through fourth installments of the series, and the only real question after that is whether this prequel is the serpent’s head chomping away or the bloodied bits of tail sliding down its gullet. X-Men III is still my favorite superhero movie of them all because with its gaps in rationality, its kid-language bombast, its propulsive sense of self importance, it most closely approximates the actual experience of reading a superhero comic book. This one is every inch a worthy successor. If you don’t like the sound of that then maybe you should think about learning to embrace trash a little more fervently. After all, if you’re watching these things you’ve already got the gist of it.

Thor: Thumbs Up
X-Men First Class: Two Thumbs Up

-Matt Seneca, 2011

Too Many Movies: Maybe You Should Walk In Pairs?

This week, Joe McCulloch watched Super and Hanna, Matthew J. Brady roared into action with Four Lions while Tucker put all his money down on the sure thing that is Michael Keaton by watching The Other Guys. That's not all though! Since the last time we checked in on the movies and what not, Joe's first essay--on Sucker Punch, Frank Miller's The Spirit and more--was published over at the esteemed MUBI website. If you haven't read it yet, do so now!

Hanna
The kind of thing where, should the heroine begin the film by remarking that her arrow just missed a reindeer’s heart, you just know that line will recur at a crucial moment to reinforce the lingering compassion at her center, 2011
Joe McCulloch

What we have here is an action movie firmly in quotes, a mightily arch, rather literary-minded thing eager to collapse boundaries between folk tale archetypes and conspiracy villains while coaxing out sublimated sexual impulses. Director Joe Wright, veteran of ‘prestige’ pictures like Atonement and The Soloist, insists that his primary influence here is David Lynch, but on the screen it’s a studied influence, capable of transferring Lynch’s scary/funny half-dream renditions of America to a globe-trotting scope -- at least in terms of visual style or as a means of characterization -- but avoiding any particular sense of the uncanny, anything potentially confusing or alienating that won’t stand up to tidy enough back-tracing through a history of aesthetic influence: the stuff of myths, genre mechanics and contemporary political images. It’s Lynch by way of his tweediest admirers, subscription to The Economist and all.

That’s not to say the approach doesn’t have its benefits as good decoration for efficient entertainment; Hanna has such a simple plot -- basic enough that the titular super-girl-raised-in-the-woods-and-on-the-run-from-villains-connected-to-her-very-birth at one point puzzles out her background via internet searches at a public library and it doesn’t seem unrealistic -- that it can function without a lot of fuss as merely a venue for style. Wright compartmentalizes his action, blocking it off by making the fight/chase scenes the primary venue for the Chemical Brothers’ score (otherwise, the soundtrack is dotted with jaunty preexisting tunes juxtaposed against scary or violent events); at one point an escape from an underground facility erupts into strobe lights and matching cuts, selling the rush of the title character’s freedom as a kind of hellish dance party, with actual combat moves kept quick and nearly bloodless, no doubt partially to accommodate a PG-13 rating and the audience’s suspension of disbelief re: 16-year old Saoirse Ronan (of the aforementioned Atonement and The Lovely Bones) taking down a modest slew of buff adult men. Still, the best of the action scenes is more traditional: a long tracking shot following Eric Bana (as Hanna’s rogue CIA woodland mentor) through a Berlin street, stalked by occasionally visible opponents, and then down into a subway station where he disposes of his foes with naught a gratuitous motion.

Indeed, if there’s anyone not associated with onscreen sleekness it can only be malevolent government handler/wicked stepmother/vain evil queen/general arch-foe Cate Blanchett, surely the most successfully Lynchian character, ‘sold’ via the plot as quick & deadly but actually depicted onscreen as moving in a bizarrely robotic, stifled manner, as if worried she might tear out of her skin at too quick a jerk. Brushing her teeth until her gums bleed and pondering a multitude of high-heeled shoes, Blanchett is a monstrously barren, plastic simulacrum of femininity by way of political authority, her down-home mama grizzly accent varying in intensity depending on whom she’s addressing/coercing. Her loyal huntsman is Tom Hollander as a riotously Eurotrashy assassin/pimp, promenading with a whistle through nasty business while clad in extra-short shorts or a variety of bright track suits; he is an absolute nightmare of decadent camp, positioned as hopelessly capital-driven and spiritually barren in comparison to Ronan’s polyandrous kickass woodland sprite, who enjoys a none-too-subtly homoerotic snap relationship with a British tourist girl. No actual fucking, mind you; Hanna beats the snot out of a boy with kissy designs on her, deigning only to snuggle with those her super-senses confirm as pure of heart: it’s soulful erotics above the mess of congress, the latter fallen state comically portrayed by the tourist girl’s indulgent ‘open-minded’ parents, who of course fold quickly under Blanchett’s cruel pressure.

Don’t ask me where the politics on this thing are supposed to be going; it’s mostly a wooly anti-authoritarianism, mocking ineffectual liberals while suggesting the fruits of abusers will eventually grow up to destroy them, which strikes me as idealism to the point of non-commitment. But then, the whole of this picture is less than the sum of its parts, as its mix of Snow White and Red Riding Hood archetypes (with a dab of Electra) culminates in a typical cat-and-mouse finale set in a Brothers Grimm theme park. Best stick with Wright’s sensory engagement, racing Ronan through her journey of maturity toward the realization that she’s less a fairy heroine than a perfectly big bad wolf in her own right.

Super
Directed by James Gunn, 2010
Joe McCulloch

It’d be easy to say this largely mediocre thing is exactly the same as the movie version of Kick-Ass and be done with it, since they’re both comically violent superhero pictures that play at being acid satires of genre tropes before eventually just becoming straightforward genre pieces, like ‘ha ha, just kidding, love ya, fans!’ Admittedly, Super waits for the last fifteen minutes or so as opposed to the halfway mark, and plays even harder at gory, indistinctly aimed set pieces, but that’s not the substantive difference.

No, while Kick-Ass seems merely content to pander, Gunn’s film (which he also wrote) is comics-savvy enough to evoke Fletcher Hanks early on as a patron saint of brutal justice, even using the dismissal of such naïve work by Ellen Page’s yay-for-violence comic book store clerk as foreshadowing her inability to distinguish bloodlust from a burning sense of justice. Even when Page and grim-voiced homegrown superhero Rainn Wilson -- who turned to the costumed life having received a heavenly vision after troubled wife Liv Tyler left him to relapse spectacularly with drug lord Kevin Bacon -- wonder why superhero comics don’t show characters being bored in between their duties, it feels less like a genuine question then a sop to less-experienced viewers who might not suspect the superhero genre of being explored so thoroughly there may not be much material between panels left to imagine.

Everything here has been done before, often decades ago in fantasy/sci-fi/action person comics by the likes of Pat Mills and John Wagner. It’s worth noting, though, that those comics came from a fairly specific political milieu, a genuine suspicion of the presentation of ‘heroics’ from positions of power and authority. From there -- and the more explicitly political pages of Crisis -- came the contemporary likes of Garth Ennis and Mark Millar. For much of its running time, Super follows in essentially that tradition, contextualizing Wilson’s turn to violence as the product of psychological damage and religious mania; when he tries to yank Tyler out of Bacon’s car he hurts her, and Gunn lingers on it in the same way a wheelchair-bound woman’s screams linger a bit too longer after she’s knocked over in Wilson’s pursuit of a thief. Page, meanwhile, is basically a nutcase, and sexually driven to the point of destroying Wilson’s fantasies of endless fidelity to his lost wastrel bride, which of course only spurs him to take on ever-more drastic action to destroy evil and obtain his personal goals through brute force.

The final turn firmly in Wilson’s favor then at least registers as a twist, though it’s hard to tell if Gunn has a specific point to make or if he’s just slinging some old Troma contrarianism (and yes, Lloyd Kaufman does cameo), perhaps the same impulse that prompted the critical turn of Tyler’s character away from sympathies with Bacon to hinge on her rape by a lecherous black drug-trafficking foreigner. What’s certain is that Wilson finally roars with the power of justice as he sees it -- albeit with the deeply ill-advised inclusion of onscreen sfx rendered in indie movie poster hand-drawn fonts -- and sneers via voiceover at our cynical presumption that he’s no better than Kevin Bacon. This is him fucking your expectation he was going to be fucking your ass, fuckface.

Defiantly, Gunn shows that all of this destruction never really hurt society all that much, and that indeed he ensured a little bit of joy for a few good people. The moral is plain: sometimes people do crazy, ugly, violent, immoral, irrational, illegal, religiously maniacal things, and that preserves motes of freedom and liberty so jesus christ shut the fuck up you ungrateful sack of stupid shit. The final shot alludes to About Schmidt, cementing the solace Wilson finds from his abhorrent altruism. Call it plain genre contrarianism, or a bona fide toast to authoritarian abuse to a justified end, or maybe just the mewling of a fanboy upset that nobody respects real violent badass heroes who save people -- or, y’know, super-double-secret critique by way of a straight-faced this-can’t-be-serious happy ending gambit -- but even as the lame comedy bits of Super drag on way too long and its plot eventually fails to stand up to any logical scrutiny whatsoever, even by its own internal rules, at least it leaves a visible and disquieting slick behind it, which is no great feat but unfortunately more than can be said of any of the proper contemporary movies struck from perverse comic heroes. 

Four Lions
Could have used subtitles for the English dialogue too, 2010
Matthew J. Brady

Man oh man, is it good to see a comedy with some bite. This thing is harrowing, but also hilarious, and even though it's about inept terrorists, it's one of the best humanizations of Muslims I've seen on film. Sure, its main characters are a group of dumbasses who plan to martyr themselves for no reason, but they're presented as people, not turbanned ciphers or crazed religious fanatics. They're the brown, British versions of those redneck idiots you know that think it's cool to shoot road signs, or the college kid who becomes an in-your-face vegetarian. They seem to want to act, but have no real direction, which might make them prime candidates for manipulation by those who use the easily-led to do evil if they weren't such complete fuckups. Maybe that makes it "safe" to laugh at their actions, but it's also a humanization of that faceless enemy, a demonstration of its stupid humanity.

If there's anything lacking in this portrayal, it's the reason behind this desire for martyrdom, at least on the part of Omar, the most relatable of this conspiracy of dunces. The others fall into understandable (stereotypical?) categories, from the belligerently misguided activist, to the rebellious young person, to the easily-led moron, but Omar seems like a nice, happy guy, married with a child and not especially radical in his beliefs. He (and his family!) just seem to accept that Jihad and martyrdom is the right thing for him to do, without questioning why he would feel this way. If there's anything controversial about the movie, it should be this, since it seems to indicate that regular Muslims are happily accepting of the desire to blow themselves up to get into heaven.

Of course, it's possible that I just missed something, since the heavily-accented dialogue in this movie is often impenetrable, and a large portion of the jokes seem to be cultural references that go completely over my head. The thing is still pretty fucking hilarious though, as when Omar convinces Barry, the aforementioned belligerent fellow, to punch himself in the face as a demonstration of his desire to blow up a mosque as a method of convincing moderate Muslims to "rise up", or when Faisal, the dumbest member of the group, demonstrates his avoidance of suspicion when buying ingredients for explosives from a drugstore by speaking in different voices and pretending to be a woman by covering up his beard with his hands. The most pointedly funny moment comes when the authorities stage a raid, but they end up busting Omar's conservatively religious brother's Muslim study group instead of the guys who are gigglingly testing their explosives in the street. Omar's disastrous trip to a training camp in Pakistan comes close though, and there are many, many other conversations, arguments, and scenes of pure idiocy that amuse and manage to make us forget that we're enjoying the antics of a bunch of wannabe suicide bombers. Not exactly heartwarming stuff, but holy shit does it stick.

The Other Guys
Probably Had A Director, 2010
Tucker Stone

While this was marketed as a Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie, it, like nearly every Will Ferrell or Mark Wahlberg movie ever made, is far funnier everytime it abandons Ferrell's ever-more-clumsy laugh-flailing or Wahlberg's always-end-sentences-like-they're-a-Question? voice and chooses instead to embrace the supporting cast...which, like every post-Anchorman Will Ferrell movie, is a bench deeper than the Mariana Trench. Rob Riggle, who had the second best line* in Childrens Hospital despite not ever appearing in Childrens Hospital, The Rock reminding his agent once again how much more interesting his career could be if his agent could get a real director on the phone, Steve Coogan in one of his embarrassingly rare non-horrible American roles, and Samuel L Jackson doing a decent variation on his Jules Winnfield shtick--that's just some of the people who use this film's cliche-ridden plot as excuse to fuck around. But while a decent amount of what those five minute wonders lands, there's no one operating on the same wavelength of Michael Keaton. Clearly enjoying the pinch hitter status that age has given him, Keaton serves as the glue that makes what's ultimately a terrible movie worth watching, delivering all but a couple of the movie's best lines in a curiously pitched style that never fails to remind one how much of a live wire he remains under the surface. Snapping his scenes to attention in active opposition with Ferrell's messy, improv-heavy performance, maintaining a character that--despite a unexplained movie-length obsession with TLC song lyrics--makes sense alongside the hammiest of modern comedy's pork loins. Eyes bugged out, his wiry frame leaning as far away from Mark Wahlberg as the camera allows, Keaton's choices here are a blistering rejoinder to the American comedian of today, a subtle warning to watch yourself, skit-boy. A real actor might just be able to do what you're doing way, way better.

*The best line in Childrens Hospital is "I'm a neat freak!", said by Ken Marino while being interrogated by Nick Offerman because he, amongst multiple crimes, left an infant in a dumpster. 

-Joe McCulloch, Matthew J. Brady, Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Jake Gyllanhall Is All About Stealing Your Heart, Ladies

This week, Joe McCulloch plugs in to Source Code, Tim O'Neil takes issue with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, and Tucker dives deep into the past, with Samurai 1, Lonely Are The Brave, Blackmail & Michael.

Source Code
I dunno, probably spoilers - yeah, spoilers, let’s be safe here, 2011
Joe McCulloch

The title here probably affected me on some half-conscious level, but while this new stripped-down sci- fi/suspense thing is easy enough to trace in non-interactive conceptual lineage -- it’s Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day, versus Terrorism -- I mostly registered it as the latest among feature films to grapple with gaming devices in a visible manner, picking up from last week’s Sucker Punch and following 2010’s prolific crop of Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Enter the Void, etc. Jake Gyllenhaal is a hero pilot whisked away from his Afghanistan service to a strange, chilly capsule, where his “Al” -- Vera Farmiga, whom I will always remember triumphantly kicking pre-teen Isabelle Fuhrman in the head, because cinema can be immortal -- cryptically instructs him as to an odd mission: leaping into essentially a parallel dimension to occupy the body of one Sean Fentress, hapless traveler on a commuter train that exploded a little while ago on Earth Prime, and puzzle out what was really going on before a subsequent, imminent terrorist threat from the same source can eradicate Chicago. If he fails -- and, from the point of leap, Gyllenhaal has only eight minutes of space before the train blows up -- it’s back to the capsule and then back to the stage from the beginning, knowing the layout of a little better, dying and trying, and hoping, initially, that continues don’t run out.

It’s an effective little piece, making good use of its somewhat limited locations -- director Duncan Jones has a good reputation for this, going by reactions to his prior, debut feature, 2009’s Moon, which I haven’t seen -- with a tight little script worked over so that the ‘starting over’ theme recurs in just the right places, from the mystery villain’s wicked scheme to the extremely apt small talk initiated at the start of every life by Michelle Monaghan, an acquaintance of the obliterated host form that was Sean Fentress whom Gyllenhaal gloms onto as a living beacon of everything in space-time worth living for, intuiting that she’s a splendid, altogether decent person from the fact over the course of many eight minutes - and naturally she fancies him in secret! Er, Sean she fancies, although clearly not enough to act on it until Jake Gyllenhaal hits the physiological scene, all flawed but stout-hearted -- there’s even a little action vignette warning about the perils of racial profiling, but, y’know, not too hard, since structurally these little boo-boos are shown to be for the greater good -- and hurting from unresolved issues with his father, voiced by special guest Scott Bakula, because seriously: this thing’s a lot like Quantum Leap.

Except, eh - part of the fun of that show was the idea of some goofy/heroic adventure guy popping into your head like a Super Guide to sort your important shit out for a while, the long-game being the hope that the hero would eventually find his way back to his real body. With Source Code, the very slick, smooth, economic storytelling prods you firmly toward hoping that poor hero Jake Gyllenhaal will get to stay in one of those parallel worlds and smooch Michelle Monaghan without their bones burning dry. Since the main suspense plot resolves with a solid reel of footage left to go, we’re inundated with theme-completing bromides, urging us to seize the day and live life to the fullest, and appreciate the life-affirming magic of stand-up comedy.

Me, I kept thinking about Sean Fentress, who’s like the bland dude who gets dumped by the heroine in formula romantic comedies, but on a cosmic scale. This guy not only gets replaced, his very consciousness is extinguished. I mean, I hope he doesn’t have a wife or anything, and he really wasn’t just platonic chums with an unrealistically hopeful Michelle Monaghan, ‘cause Jake Gyllenhaal sure as hell doesn’t stop to check! Ah, fuck it. That’s the kind of stuff that gets cut as ‘unnecessary’ in screenplay revisions or after test screenings. Stuff’s not thrilling, and this is a thriller. No, even better - this is a video game! A real video game, a dip-your-virtual-balls-in-a-felled-opponent’s-mouth red meat video game! Yeah! Not some fucking two-bit indie browser freeware art project or frou-frou Love-de-Lic bullshit! Fuck you, crytard! This is GAMING, this is fucking smash-mouth winners-fuck-the-prom-queen end of stage VICTORY, this is HEROES, and HEROES TAKE whatever the FUCK they want! In a SENSITIVE way!!

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell
Does it Matter In The Least?, 2009
Tim O'Neil

Sometimes it's late at night and you're too tired to pay attention to a real movie and yet still awake enough to be game for another. Sometimes you end up picking a movie almost at random, the worse the better, simply a way to kill an hour and a half in pleasant company. And when it's over, sometimes you find yourself wondering, "why did I do this? I think the time would have been better spent watching violent pornography, al Qaeda recruitment videos, or even How I Met Your Mother."

But I have long operated under the guiding principle that you can learn as much or more from bad art as from good or great art. What, really, can the average commercial filmmaker learn from Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai? Maybe something or other, but the actual level of craft and attention to detail is simply beyond the capabilities of all but the most talented artists. You can learn a lot more by watching mediocre to bad movies with a critical eye. In terms of practical knowledge, you learn a lot more by correcting and learning from the mistakes of others than by attempting to emulate the masters. This may not be a truth universally acknowledged - until recently fine art education was always predicated on painstakingly learning to copy the work and techniques of the masters. But the most valuable experience I ever had as a writer was spending two years as a copyeditor for Popmatters. Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald can certainly inspire you to want to be a writer, but it's not until you spend a few years wading knee-deep through shit that you can actually begin to pierce the veil of style by relearning the essential fundamentals of technique over and over again until they are completely reflexive.

Watching I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is a bit like smearing your face with bacon grease in the hopes of raising up a fine bumper crop of carbuncles. You certainly get everything you bargained for, but it ends up as far more of a mess than you could ever have hoped for in your wildest dreams. By which I mean: this movie was terrible, but it was terrible in such an awesomely awkward way that I can't help but think that the experience was nonetheless enriching.

The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is simple and central. To wit: the movie is based on the 2006 book of the same name, written by a man named Tucker Max. Before I sat down to enjoy his cinematic masterpiece, I knew almost nothing of Max besides the fact that he was apparently a repulsive human being. This presents a huge obstacle for any screenwriter unlucky enough to land the gig of adapting this material. Popular books have always been and will always be fertile territory for Hollywood for the reason that they offer fully-developed story concepts that have already proven their popularity and appeal in the marketplace. A best-selling book has already proven its value as a commercial property. The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is that the book itself is, from everything I have seen, fairly reprehensible. Everything Max does meets with condemnation and protests from NOW and any number of like-minded organizations. A Hollywood accountant with no understanding of the greater cultural context might be excited at the prospect of optioning a bestseller with a proven track record by a highly charismatic semi-celebrity author. But then the studio reads the book and realizes they would have to somehow sell a story that does for gender relations what The Turner Diaries did for fertilizer sales.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell was independently financed in part by Max himself, and produced by Richard Kelly, the brainchild behind Donnie Darko. Credit to Hollywood for realizing that this was a non-starter. The screenplay is credited to Max himself along with a man named Nils Parker, who according to IMDB possesses no other film credits. So we are left with a movie that was partly financed by the author, produced by the auteur behind Southland Tales, and written by the author and some other dude with - I repeat for good emphasis - no other film credit. Somewhere along the line maybe one of these people should have stepped back from the precipice and realized that the world didn't really want this movie to be made.

Making movies is hard, I do not doubt. I've never made one, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it off the top of my head. And yet somehow Max decided that this was a film that needed to be made, and needed to be made so badly that he was willing to do it himself. I guess if you put your own money behind your vanity projects there's something at least vaguely respectable about that, but at the end of the day it's still a vanity project.

The central problem behind the movie is Tucker Max himself. Building a story around a reprehensible character is very difficult, and Tucker Max is no Humbert Humbert. He barely qualifies as sentient, to judge by the evidence of this movie. My guess, from watching this film, is that the actual content of this movie has been slightly bowdlerized. (I'm not going to go back and do the research necessary to verify this assumption, and I hope your'e OK with that.) The reason why I make this assumption is that, during the course of the film, nothing particularly reprehensible actually happens. Don't get me wrong: lots of stupid things happen. But anyone watching this film in hopes of finding in Tucker Max some sort of role model will come away sorely disappointed, or will dedicate themselves to a lifetime of idiocy. The filmic Max is no predatory avatar of "rape culture," he's a moron who insults women and gets slapped for his troubles.

In fairness, if you were charged with the task of making a film version of your life you would probably iron over some of the more regrettable details in favor of presenting a more attractive and appealing version of reality - especially if you wanted to make a movie that would conceivably appeal to a larger audience than the few hundred thousand people who read your blog and bought your books. Perhaps I'm at something of a disadvantage, not having read the book on which these stories are based, but I just can't believe that the Max in the book is anywhere near as ineffectual and boneheaded as movie Max. We hear about Max's great sexual conquests throughout the film, but all we actually see is Max repeatedly trying to pick up women and bars through by insulting them. That's a strange tactic. Does it work in the real world? I don't know, I've never really been able to pick up women in bars using flattery and conversation, so I have no clue how successful insults and hectoring would be. Is that what his books are about? Picking up women by making them hate you? I thought the whole idea was to make the women hate themselves so much that they can set aside whatever pitiful shreds of self-respect their child-molesting stepdads left them with and spread their legs like they swallowed a quaalude factory?

Tucker Max is, basically, a fool, and what is all the more puzzling is that the real Tucker Max decided that the best way to portray himself on film was as a fool. Howard Stern, in Private Parts did a good job of making himself seem like a regular family man who just happened to luck into a career doing raunchy radio. (The fact that his family dissolved a few years after the book and film is neither here nor there - Private Parts did a fairly decent job of burnishing the reputation of someone who was frequently characterized, like Max, as hopelessly reprehensible.) Max, however, isn't likeable at any point in the film. Put aside the constant string of insults leveled at the women he encounters, he is just plain mean to his supposed friends. The plot - such as it is - revolves around Max hijacking two of his friends on a road trip to a famous strip club whose main attraction is a promiscuous midget. One of the friends is still suffering the aftereffects of a bad breakup and the other is about to get married. You can probably guess how this unfolds: the first friend finds lasting love in the unlikely context of a strip joint, while the second friend finds the strength to resist a shrewish fiancee through the power of male bonding.

You'd be right in the first case but, shockingly, not so much in the second instance. (I'm not even bothering to try and remember these characters names, again, I hope you're all OK with that.) The second dude's fiancee is remarkably reasonable, in that she does not actually object to her man visiting a strip joint - what she objects to is him spending time with Tucker Max. She perceives with no trouble whatsoever that Max is a toxic person who nevertheless consistently manages to convince the people around him to do monstrously stupid and self-destructives things. The real erotic axis in this film is not Tucker Max and the women with whom he sleeps - he only has sex on-screen with a single person, the aforementioned midget. It's between Max and his friends, who are completely devoted to their friend and entirely unable to say no to him about anything.

There is, I believe, a certain age group for whom this story might hold some resonance: early-to-mid-twentysomething males who have moved away from their parents and family but have not yet begun to seriously pair with members of the opposite sex. They are extremely insecure about their place in the world and very much intimidated by women in their peer group, particularly those women who appear to be far more confident and professionally secure than the men they date. Men in this situation cluster together like packs of bachelor dogs, held by common insecurities and usually easily manipulated by alpha males who have figured out the art of exploiting the vulnerabilities of the weaker members of their peer group. None of these people have grown up: they may have jobs and they may even have girlfriends but they still play video games and organize their social lives around sports and drinking. The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is that while we're supposed to believe Tucker Max is some manner of master Svengali, he's just a self-destructive idiot who's going to be left in the cold when all his other male friends get into serious long term romantic relationships with mortgages and car payments. In this context, while (movie) Max may have a fairly enjoyable ride in his twenties, things will be pretty desperate by the time he reaches thirty and all of his former sycophants have married and he is not welcome in their homes because he always leaves a greasy film of silt on the toilet seat.

All of which is to say: I don't think the real Max is an idiot, because he's managed to wring two successful books out of elaborate dick stories. That takes a bit of ingenuity. Based on the movie, though, he's hardly a threat to the republic: he's an idiot without a shred of self-awareness. (There's a tacked-on epiphany moment at the end of the film that is supposedly about Max growing up a little bit but is actually just about him being even more of a narcissistic ass than before by upstaging his friend at his friend's wedding.) I wonder, does the real Tucker Max understand just how stupid he looks in this film? Ir would be one thing if he were actually some kind of credible rogue: assholes are always appealing, which is why Samuel Richardson had to repeatedly admonish his readers against sympathizing with Lovelace even though he was a kidnapper and a rapist. Asshole are charismatic. But Max isn't really an asshole, he's just an ass. There's a big difference. Again: it's really hard to build a story around a truly reprehensible person. At least Humbert Humbert has a strong personality. Max is just a douche.

This movie was ill-conceived in every conceivable way. It's a vanity project from a person who apparently needed to neuter himself in order to come off as not completely reprehensible, but ultimately succeeded only in rendering himself an idiot. I don't deny the possibility that Max may actually be an idiot in real life, but I seriously doubt he's the holy fool his movie paints him. But this was actually quite an educational experience: it's hard to write a story. It's hard to write convincing non-cliched characters and have their actions dictate the plot and not the other way around. There is a brief hint of picaresque charm at the core of the story that might, under a more experienced hand, have been shaped into a convincing raunchy comedy. But of course, no one with a shred of talent would have had anything to do with this story or (real life) Tucker Max. Although these are supposedly true stories from Max's own life, the events are themselves unconvincing, strung together with coincidence and convenience. They've been pasted together for the purpose of shaping Max's stories into the rough shape of a romantic comedy - it even ends with a wedding, for goodness' sake. But the movie is just a flabby mess, and I don't believe a word of it.

If I taught screenwriting, I think I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell would be a fantastic pedagogical tool. It's the product of such patent incompetence that it should be mandatory viewing for all up-and-coming filmmakers. Seriously, if you want to make movies, watch this movie. Ask yourself how they could have made a better movie. Watch this movie with a notebook and make a note of every stupid thing that happens in this movie. Task yourself to never make any of these mistakes yourself. Go forth, and do better. As hard as it must be to make a movie, it can't be that hard to make a better movie than this.

Lonely Are The Brave
Where's That Sumbitch George Kennedy, 1962

Edward Abbey was a mean son of a bitch, but he was an interesting son of a bitch. His plodding, ungainly books--most of which consist of rage-against-the-machine anger delivered in polemic by pro-environmental/anti-government men--don't scream for a movie the way so many other authors do, and that's maybe because Abbey was a sort of anti-hippie hippie, a guy who lived outside the margins while still hating most of what was around him. His books don't appeal to mass audiences--the misogynism is too naked, the contempt too crude, the nihilism too loud. The Brave Cowboy--the book Dalton Trumbo adapted for the studio-named Lonely Are The Brave--is a little softer around the edges, but not as much as one might expect. That truck of doom, carrying death and toilets? It's in there. The matching personalities, worn classic-style by Kirk Douglas and the always brilliant Walter Matthau? That too. The most pointed change is (unsurprisingly) the one delivered by Gena Rowlands, who adds a layer of much-needed ravenous depth to Abbey's carbon copy bitch-goddess.

It's a great movie, actually. Sad, funny, terminally hip and weirdly ignored, there's more than enough reasons to be familiar with it beyond wanting to play the anti-western western trivia game with this as trump card, but the most fascinating moment--the one that stood out for this guy--was when the movie ended with the final half still left to go. There, right in the middle, in a carefully framed sequence from a movie that was clearly filmed with one eye on the clock and the other on the budget, Douglas says goodbye to Rowlands. It's layered onto the screen like a hotel painting, a storybook's conclusion to a prideful cowpoke fairy tale, and even the music spells it out: this is where these stories usually end. But then it keeps going, because it's not that kind of story. It's a nastier kind, no more honest but far more cruel, and with wits to match between two powerhouses, dark violence and George Kennedy's bared rodent teeth left to go, there's much more movie to come. The wheels that crush, the screaming of a horse: your favorite American myth, blasted to extinction in the rain under the bored eyes of housewives. All that's missing is an American flag, ritualistically gobbled to shreds by obese children.

Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto
You Know, For Kids, 1954

Being the first of a trilogy; being one of the many spokes of the wheel of fictional Miyamoto depictions: this is the one kissed with the touch of American acceptance, in the form of a 50's Academy Award and an eventual Criterion release. While it stars Toshiro Mifune, who would cement his immortality through the many films he made with Akira Kurosawa, Samurai is also populated with a healthy backbench of Japanese acting talent, including some who would leave this set to go across the street and film another competing Musashi film, released around the same time. This one is pleasant, a little slow in parts, but if you're the type of person who likes your Gone With The Wind type of movies to have a bit of snob cred, Samurai 1 is a great place to plant a flag. The second part is reportedly about a duel, and if it's anything like the hillside-to-river battle that sees Miyamoto send a solid 20 to a screaming end in this one, then consider me committed. I like violence.

Blackmail
Hitchcock, Motherfucker, 1929

It's been called Hitchcock's first sound film, which is technically true, but one has to wonder how important that sound can be if the film in question was made to play in both theaters-with-speakers as well as those without, which is what Blackmail also happens to be. It's also a bizarrely acted movie--the female lead's accent was so incomprehensible that what you actually see in Blackmail is a woman pantomiming speech while an off-screen actress yelled the lines. That's all paper tiger shit though. Blackmail's great, a nasty mindfuck of a movie with a no-bullshit brilliant conclusion that succeeds in making any of Hitchcock's future happy endings look like an artistic compromise. And while she doesn't speak up--not really, at least--our happy lead delivers a nice near-her-career's-end performance that proves how good she'd gotten at doing it without words, right there at the beginning, when she grabs a knife and takes a lecherous painter down to a new fresh hell. "Death to artists" is what it says on this one, and brother, it says it loud.

Michael
It's That Sumbitch Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1924 

 

Michael is one of Dreyer's earliest movies, and based off a viewing of it and what the world's film library has to offer for comparison, it's one of his best. A somewhat melodramatic take on betrayal and stubbornness, the movie follows the growing distance between an aging painter (the "Master") and his prized model and erstwhile student Michael. In keeping with the period tendency towards explaining every aspect of a movie's plot on the lobby cards before the film began, try this: The Master dies of a broken heart, and Michael comes across as an ungrateful cad. There is a woman, and she's a horrible beast of vindictive greed.

The film itself doesn't explicitly push either of these things--the woman in particular never seems as selfish as the film's own textual history claims she is, and the obvious homosexual component of the relationship goes unacknowledged--but they're inescapably obvious to any viewer, and 1924 couldn't have been any different. But how cares? If lots of plot were the high water mark of quality, people would study Luc Besson's The Messenger instead of Dreyer's letter-best take on the same material, and this one's no different. You come here to see a terrifying close up on eyeballs made by dropping black bars on the lens, and you stick around for what might be the first example of that classic show-the-eyes/show-the-screaming-audience's-mouth/now we know he's losing it montage. This is the beginning of film, the first signs of dawn, historic. There can be no substitute.

-Joe McCulloch, Tim O'Neil, Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: I'm Still Holding Out For The Notebook 2

This time around, Joe "Jog" McCulloch presents his thoughts on Black Swan and his in depth look at Godard's Film Socialisme, while Tucker minces around with Edge of Darkness, Hunger, Quantum of Solace and the delightful Un Prophete.

Black Swan
[What follows is the slightly edited text of an email sent approximately twenty minutes after arriving home from a late showing], 2010
Joe McCulloch

SUBJECT: Have either of you enjoyed the pleasure of the Black Swan?

Because it is hands-down the most ridiculous theatrical motion picture I've seen in a long time, to the point where I was whisked back to the days where this one friend and I would catch $5.00 early bird screenings of Battlefield Earth and Dungeons and Dragons: Starring Thora Birch and Dragons solely on the basis of their disrepute, except this thing is up for a shitload of lucrative trophies, particularly in the area of Natalie Portman adopting a baby voice so as to convey vulnerability and having her head digitally pasted onto things. The impact is so great that I'm compelled to talk about it into my email. Hereinafter are three moments which summarize the Black Swan experience:

1. When the leering foreign ballet director guy first says the words "Black Swan," there's a low DOOOM effect on the soundtrack.

2. I get the feeling this lady sitting behind me was holding herself back pretty heroically for the first fifteen minutes, but during the first of Natalie Portman's three masturbation/sex scenes she just started ROARING with laughter, particularly during the bit where she flops over onto her belly and points her butt pertly into the air like some straight Zalman King shit. I didn't exactly need the reminder, but there's no doubt now that Darren Aronofsky is totally a comics reader because this movie is distinctly superhero-like in teaming non-stop male-gazey boner framing with a noticeable absence of actual nudity or any sexual activity that doesn't inspire agony or paranoia in at least one participant/onlooker. Another big crowd-pleaser was the part where Natalie Portman is standing there staring at Mila Kunis rubbing a dude's package, because she represents sexy. Can't wait for "The Wolverine"!

3. Aronofsky -- seriously, no joke at all -- has his Directed By credit appear on screen at the end to a massive round of applause on the soundtrack, which he gallantly allows to continue onto succeeding creative contributors. Did Quentin Tarantino inspire this? Because fuck that, now I've decided David Foster Wallace was totally right about him. AND fatalism.

There a lot of other great aspects to the movie -- for instance, at one point it turns into a woman- in-peril creature feature with Winona Ryder as the monster -- but mostly I'm struck by how obviously it seems to think it's totally deconstructing Swan Lake itself into a cutting-edge statement about femininity in a ferociously sexualized, male-dominated world, although I do suspect from way in the back of my coal-filled head that presenting the central character as an infantalized, sexually paranoid basket case does little to engender thematic/socio-political sympathy when her lesser peers are written and shot as basically normal people and the abuse she suffers is framed in a manner so as to ultimately drive her into the divine arms of the Prince that is the Ecstasy of Art, doubly so when there's a tasty dribble of coyness spooned on about most of the exploitation actually occurring as a half-willing fantasy of hers, again for the purposes of bearing her manfully toward perfection.

In conclusion, Natalie Portman was a crazy lady and so crazy things happened in the movie, but it was good because art. FIN.

The Edge Of Darkness
Next Stop Green Lantern, 2010
Tucker Stone 

This was originally a British mini-series, and you can tell, because lots of what happens in it is very, very condensed (like the plot) and the "bad guys die" ending is delivered with an embarrassed bleakness that Brits always have whenever they try to make gunplay movies. (Get Carter was a long time ago!) If it had been stretched out long enough so that the reasoning behind the evil (multiple murders to cover up radioactive pollution) meant anything, the tiresome business of sad men shooting mean functionaries might have been worked, but that didn't happen. Instead, you've got a bunch of people who probably still think the word dramaturgy is a turn-on trying to pretend that they're making something more important than a whiny version of Death Wish, while Mel Gibson wanders around trying to top every bad accent ever committed to film. Man that dude is such a racist I mean really

Un Prophete
So Fucking French, 2009
Tucker Stone 

It turns out the people who made this movie actually had some political reasons for doing so, but the only moral they seem to have cogently presented is "don't go to fucking prison", which is something most people probably know already, especially because subtitles. However! Their failing to incisively dissect the human cost of incarceration does not necessarily result in a product lacking in merits, it just means those merits are shifted over into a pile called great-crime-film, which Une Prophet totally is, especially in the parts where it gets fucking mean, which starts at the beginning and stops around the end. Beyond the stuff that one expects/checks off with this sort of film--great acting, mostly by unknown actors, a smart, concise script that expects the audience to pay attention, well chosen music, etc--Prophet is fucking gorgeous and weird, a film that mixes creepy horror and sideways religious fervor into its Godfather-indebted study in the building of empires. Smoke blowing from mouth to face, homoerotic hallucinations, the best floating-white-shit deaf ear shoot out Forrest Gump should have had, and more uncomfortable blade-play than anything in Ninja Scroll. Sharp like a razor.

Quantum of Solace
Let's Burn Down This Ugly Hotel, 2008
Tucker Stone 

There aren't enough sequels that begin five minutes after their predessor ended, but that's not why Quantum of Solace is fucking grrrrreaat. (Even Noah Berlatsky agrees!) It's great because it's not about anything other than one character trait, and that character trait is "mean". James Bond is MEAN. He doesn't like women, sure, he treats them horribly, but he also checks his only male friend's pockets for cash seconds after the guy dies, whereupon which he throws his body in a dumpster. There are so many more examples of him being horrible, but that is the best of them. Such a horrible person! He's a nasty mother fucker, and while Solace keeps shoving the idea that all this nastiness is because he lost his favorite gal, there's no evidence beyond the script that the dude cares about anything other than putting the hurt on people as often as possible. The one doomed girl who gets the worst of it is picked up solely out of his own desire to teach her a lesson in his awesomeness, and while that results in her catching one of the worst deaths a Bond girl ever got (because gold paint on your body is way better than oil, just ask Marky Mark what choking that stuff down is like), it gives him more reasons to go kill people, as if he needed any, which he doesn't, because killing foreigners is his job already. The funny thing is--not ironic, but just funny--is that he seems aware that his behavior constantly results in him ending up standing with a frowny face over graves while the roses wilt in his hands, but he also seems aware that he is kind of incapable of fixing things without all that doom and gloom for motivation. Bring plenty of body bags? I guess? By the way, this movie is edited like its a rap video for a song on the Transformers soundtrack, so don't watch it with an epileptic kid.

Hunger
Unleashed By Steve McQueen, 2008
Tucker Stone 

The initial minutes of Hunger are pure endurance, but not the same kind that will be required later in the film, when oozing sores and human waste go on prominent display. No, these opening minutes are straight mental punishment: boring fucking people, samey fucking mornings, my ugly fucking hands. There's a bit of foreshadowing--he's checking his car for bombs, and he'll eventually catch death in an upfront fashion--but this is just shot after shot of the nothingness of life, the minutes in between. Eat your food. Lean on a wall. Wash your hands. Put on some clothes. Go to work.

The film never truly explodes out of that, the way you'd think a violent movie would, excepting during the  introduction of a naked Michel Fassenbaum, getting rusty scissors shoved into the mass of shit, sweat and hair that clings to his scalp. But even when violence ramps those minutes up, it drops them back down again, and the actions in between return, with their hellishness laced in: what you do in a cell, what you paint in handfuls of your shit, the walls your food make, the piss you force through the door. Your naked flesh exposed, the violence that rains down in the trenches, the trenches that they'll make you crawl. 

Hunger's a short movie. You meet some sideline characters, you meet Fassenbaum, you watch naked men get beaten and tortured, there's "the scene", and then you spend the rest of the movie watching Fassenbaum starve himself to death while his captors sit alongside him. Some of them gawk, some of them pray, some of them torture, but that's it, that's all there is to it: the politics are addressed by their effects, with some care taken to deliver a graphic portrayal of the way the other side handled themselves (shooting a man's brains all over his senile mother's absent mouth in the day room of an elderly care facility, another mother holding a grown man turned into the infant she once bore), but Hunger isn't likely to be classified alongside The Boxer or any of the other Daniel Day Lewis IRA movies in the near future. There's none of the pettiness of simplicity, there's no one to root for, there's just hands and skin and flesh. People shouldn't do this, but McQueen--writer, director, photographer--trusts that you knew that already, and he'd rather let the light play its way across the wall.

*The scene is what makes it, honestly, although the visuals deserve their praise. A seventeen minute, one-shot/one-take scene, where two men argue their way past one another regarding the use of suicide as an acceptable form of social protest, as a reasonable route toward political change. Superbly written, flawlessly performed, it's the kind of thing that points towards a direction film almost never takes: calmly drawing out complexity, hammer and nail. The shot that follows--a literal mopping up, this one of the puddles of piss that the inmates have sent flooding the halls--cements the fury that motivates the horrific sacrifice to come: we're gonna die on purpose, fat man. You're just gonna die with that mop in your hand.

Film Socialisme
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 2010
Joe McCulloch

Fittingly for a director who depicted himself in his prior feature, Notre musique (2004), as struck silent by the implications of digital cinema, Godard returns with an all-digital film, his first ever, that mimics the three episode structure of the prior work with a multivarious texture apt to address the realities of watching movies alone and remote. From its opening credits, accompanied by isolated beeps from the left side and the right -- testing both the directionality of the sound as well as the hearing of any viewer who might be listening in on headphones, and I mean ‘testing’ in the friendly checkup sense -- this seems to be the first of Godard’s features designed to be watched just as well on your laptop, perhaps better. The Socialism of the title is, per Godard’s indication, a matter of both politics and associations, though the title, Film Socialisme, firmly implies a Socialism of Film (rather than a Film about Socialism), and Godard makes every effort to draw attention to the cinema form.

Of course, I say this as an English speaker with a poor command of French; Godard’s film is primarily in French, and subtitled for English consumption at the director’s insistence in so- called “Navajo,” a script that boils down long sentences into groupings of five words or less, while ignoring other stretches of conversation entirely, like an easily distracted closed captioner attempting to perform their duties with Twitter hashtags. Godard claims not to have internet access, but collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville does, and anyway he seems perfectly aware of the jumble of perspectives that is cinematographic matter online; the excellent first segment of the film, Des choses comme ça, compliments the opening news footage barrage of Notre musique with an arrangement of video footage shot aboard a cruise ship, ranging in quality from extremely shiny, glossy, distinctly unreal splendor to scenes captured on what might be a cell phone.

The video often burps and glitches in a manner that suggests Godard’s own famed early use of jump cuts, and sometimes freezes at the end of scenes like YouTube videos; distortions render some images into colorful mosaics, while the sound -- again, headphones are highly recommended -- typically segregates disparate elements so that the left ear hears post-recorded dialogue while stock music dredged from an older movie hesitantly intones in the right ear, only to give way to a noise barrage of live-captured sea wind or degenerated club music recorded as roughly as possible at the scene.

Importantly, this is part of Socialism: it is disparate media put together, as compiled by a crew of Godardian assistants along with the man himself. Likewise, the first segment melds ‘staged’ footage -- ranging from dialogue between possibly non-professional performers to a shipboard lecture set up with philosopher Alain Badiou that actually resulted in the empty room as presented -- with unsuspecting tourists passing by the camera or, say, Godard happening to run into Patti Smith, resulting in a small role, emphasis on the small: “I don't see why I should have filmed her for any length of time greater than I would, say, a waitress.” (From the link above.) This again is Socialism, as is Godard’s now-familiar recontextualization of movie scenes, soundtrack cues, found footage, even the dvd menu screen of Scarface (the old one) and an FBI warning against media copying - to abuse a metaphor, Godard uses every part of the cinema beast, while also suggesting parity between expensive hi-def footage and some kid’s Terms of Use Violation parody video, half-comprehensible added titles and all.

But this is no utopia, as you’ve no doubt guessed. The most critical juxtaposition in the film occurs when a funny cat video suddenly appears on screen; the cats seem to be speaking in human words, and are then followed by a girl laying in bed and meowing at her laptop, which is playing the video. French, German and several other languages are spoken onboard the ship, forcing almost any viewer to attempt to resort to the potential commonality of English, but it is Navajo, and thereby as elusive and misleading as early American relations with the natives (see again the Indian ghosts wandering Notre musique). In this way, the content of the film’s dialogue (the “writing,” as it is) sinks back into line with montage, mise-en-scène; it has naturally been suggested that if we knew what Godard’s images were saying, we would dismiss them as boring or vapid or ugly, but then I suspect as rip-worthy a digital affair as this is perfectly aware that the individual viewer can download fuller subtitles online, if they want. The provocation -- hardly new, but very well-put -- is that perspectives are mutable, and cinema, perhaps dead in Godard’s view, is now also as boundless from its inexplicability as communication itself.

Notre musique structured its three parts as epic poetry: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Film Socialisme, has been identified by Godard as lateral travel, hence the mass of humanity aboard a ship, but I see it as another ascension. From the churn of humanity massed on an artificial consumer civilization, Godard pulls back into his second segment, a more typical narrative film shot mainly in the hi-def glossy manner, concerning a girl staging a protest at her parents’ gas station while her mother runs for public office. The “Navajo” conceit becomes enervating here, which may be part of the point, though there is a fine entry in the annals of cinema as boys taking pictures of girls -- i.e. Godard shooting a sweat-glistened newswoman in cargo pants and a bikini top shooting the girl as she vamps in a stripy dress and sunglasses -- and an instantly striking political summary in the form of a little boy conducting an off-screen orchestra in a hammer & sickle t-shirt and feeling his mother’s body as if blind and painting a portrait that temporary blasts the film’s colors into over-saturated heat and chases people away with sticks. This brand of people-as-politics is distanced from the improvised mess of the prior segment, and itself distanced from the third and final bit, revisiting Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma essay project as a study of ancient lands. From the swirl of the mass to the remove of narrative to the self-evident authorial address of narration over image - this is the cinema Godard has lived, and now, streaming before you know it, it is all aligned before the viewer.

-Joe McCulloch & Tucker Stone, 2011