Profiting from the Revolution in 2013

This post contains spoilers for The East, Closed Circuit, and The Fifth Estate. Of the three, only one is actually worth the time, so if you have any intention of watching The East then read at your own risk!

When Occupy Wall Street burst into life on September 17th, 2011, there was a collective hesitation amongst mainstream media outlets to substantially cover the movement. Plenty of coverage on the lack of coverage, sure, but nothing that demanded any investigative clout. Nate Silver estimates that, between approximately four thousand American news outlets, an average of sixteen stories per day were produced about the movement. It wasn't until a certain act of police brutality that major television and print news networks were spurred into action, at least temporarily - viewers may not always show up for stories of protest, but they sure love their institutional violence. Comparatively, social media mentions of Occupy Wall Street totaled at around fifty thousand as quickly as the first day of the movement, a figure that multiplied five-fold after the pepper spray incident and only increased in the following days.

These figures have been echoed by a persistent sentiment in the political discourse of the last two years: there can be no dependence on the systems of old to enact social change, whether those of the government or the media, and the burden of revolution must fall on the common man. The film industry, finger ever on the pulse of popular opinion, has hardly ignored this. Asking audiences to willingly involve themselves in a movie that demands serious systemic introspection, however, is growing increasingly more difficult. Consider the glut of War on Terror films that came out in the mid- to late-2000s, every one of them not named The Hurt Locker failing to make its budget back in America. Domestic film production companies have since been reticent to finance movies about hot issues, perhaps for good reason: The East, Closed Circuit, and The Fifth Estate were all box-office disasters in this vein, "thrillers" cleaving to contemporary questions that simply didn't sell tickets. Conversely, The Dark Knight Rises came out in 2012 spouting almost the exact opposite message, that an impoverished and angry proletariat should wait around for the billionaire heroes of old to bail them out of trouble, and it made 450 million dollars on our shores. Are these the failings of a populace increasingly tethered to escapist entertainment? Can you sneak pro-corporate imperialism into a movie as long as you put a mask or cape on it?

The Disappointments of 2013

10) The Canyons 

Blech. This movie is gross and dumb and not fun at all. Paul Schrader owes Stephen Rodrick a fruit basket for that piece in the New York Times. Lindsay Lohan is one of entertainment's most tragic figures, painted in front of hundreds of millions of faces as a child star too weakened by her own vices to function, and Rodrick was wise enough to pour that narrative into a greater piece about failure in the film industry. Schrader, who once wrote with Scorsese, unable to get funding and forced to make micro-budget smut with Lohan and James Deen! It would be easier to feel sympathy for him if he hadn't chosen to film a Bret Easton Ellis script, or if the movie itself wasn't lit like a dive bar and completely lacking in even a single distinctive image. Ellis' script is overwrought hokum, as always, his gallery of drug-addled amoral nudes doing and saying nothing of interest. As for La Lohan herself, it's a bad performance, its marginal trainwreck appeal mostly drowned in mawkish amateurism, but it's fairly low on the list of things wrong with The Canyons. It would probably be easiest to list what's not wrong with it: it has boobs, and Deen's dead sociopath eyes are just right to play his menacing Hollywood wannabe role. And that's it. Any other compliments might cause you to actually watch the film, because admittedly it's quite a curiosity. I would recommend reading Rodrick's article, far more generous to the movie than it deserves, and then never thinking about this sorry black mark on the name of independent cinema again.

My Favorite Films of 2013

10) Computer Chess

Period pieces have an unusual burden. They must present a series of values and customs that are antiquated enough to appeal to an audience's historical curiosity, but they also can't be completely unmoored from contemporary framework, for fear of alienation. In that regard, Computer Chess is an anomaly. Shot on analog video cameras and improvised from an eight-page treatment, the film is formally vexing. Dry as a bone, rhythmically uneven, and laced with complex computer jargon, Andrew Bujalski doesn't transport you to the 80s so much as strand you in it, shooting "actors" on obsolete technology as they interact with obsolete technology. To call this niche would be charitable. But Bujalski's fourth feature is more relevant than its creaky exterior lets on, and once this tournament of competing computer chess programs sneaks in plot threads about a budding romance and a government sponsor, you're suddenly smack in the middle of an allegorical story about the birth of a new technological era. The film's freewheeling structure and casual engagement with genre elements allows it to bounce between the intersection of scientific growth and militarization, the human urge to reject new experiences, and the first inkling of a computer's capacity for intelligence, chillingly rendered through a series of simple messages. And this is to say nothing of the fetus or the prostitute or the army of cats. Difficult to watch, not for everyone, but unique enough to really stick.

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 3: The Killer Inside Me

I was really busy this week and I only wrote four entries instead of the typical five. I'm sure you are all beside yourselves about it. If you're curious, the omitted film was World War Z, which is probably my favorite blockbuster of the year. Who would have thought?

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane will probably be remembered more for its nightmarish release history than its content, a seven-year cautionary tale that catches Bob Weinstein in one of his more tone-deaf moments. Unshackled from the horror trends of 2006, a year glutted with remakes, sequels, and cheap torture flicks, Mandy Lane was cursed with a negative box office prognosis and bounced from studio to studio until the Weinsteins inexplicably purchased it again in 2013. That the film went on to double its budget in a limited international release may be a result of this sensationalized hype, but wouldn't it be nice if we could shelve the drama and give credit where credit is due? Mandy Lane, directed by the same Jonathan Levine behind this year's Warm Bodies, is a stylish and intelligent teen slasher sensibly rooted in the insecurities of its youthful cast. Mandy Lane (Amber Heard, better here than ever) is a stunning high schooler routinely hounded by boys, one of whom dies trying to impress her. Her enigmatic charm tarnished, she becomes something of a recluse, breaking out of her shell only long enough to attend a remote countryside party with a few acquaintances. As horror dictates, most of these teenagers are raging assholes, but Mandy Lane is sensitive enough not to fully place the blame on them. Their maladaptive behavior is instead shown as an extension of their self-hatred, manifested through body image issues and challenged masculinity; the film at large is a treatise on the corruptive influence of sexuality, and how complex the lives of the young grow when conscious attraction is introduced to them. Levine's emphasis on failed flirtation and body-shaming creates an embarrassed, uncomfortable atmosphere, one that the film only escapes during the moments where the gang forgets their sexual agendas and just has fun. The script is pitched a bit feverishly so as to facilitate the horror elements, which has led to reviews decrying its generic nature, most of them ignorant of the fact that this is a genre film and thus created in service of the aforementioned elements. It would be a different story if the ideas were stale (which they're not, as few teen horrors have such capably explored empathy for their victims) or if the execution was botched (which it wasn't - the movie looks gorgeous and the kills are solid). In their defense, Mandy Lane's greatest failing is that it can't fully reconcile the medium and the message, most noticeable in its clever but wobbly ending. Levine more than acquits himself with excellent craftsmanship, a talented cast, and the best damn soundtrack I've heard from the genre in years. Where else are you going to get a spread like Peaches, Beethoven, "Sister Golden Hair," and this lovely Bobby Vinton cut? Cool in 2006, cool in 2013. B+

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 2: Beasties/Boys

Berberian Sound Studio

Since horror is so dependent on culturally recursive imagery, often scaring us with things that we know we'll be scared of, it proves itself a fertile ground for namechecking, parody, and homage. None of these intrigue me more than the giallo homage. Despite the fact that Italy's wackiest subgenre is characterized by arrhythmic narrative structure, unpredictable editing, and shot after non-sequitur shot, films attempting to pay their dues to such a singular cinematic phenomenon often employ these techniques too academically. Berberian Sound Studio, arriving three years after staid but enjoyable Amer or Dario Argento's God-awful Giallo, mostly manages to avoid this. Toby Jones plays a sensitive introvert who, having only designed sound for nature documentaries, finds that his new overseas gig producing gory sound effects for an Italian horror movie exacts a high emotional and mental toll. This movie has no aspirations toward true giallodom, instead borrowing giallo's delightfully squishy sound design (what do you think that produce is for?) and baroque low-key lighting to grant style to a mostly conventional narrative. Berberian Sound Studio is a far cry from generic shock horror, though, instead a sinister character piece as portrayed masterfully by Jones and facilitated through a series of increasingly oppressive interpersonal encounters. The problems set in during the final fifteen minutes, when the house of cards finally collapses and our protagonist finds himself in a set of alien circumstances that do little to illuminate what we've already seen of him. Far from the Berberian Sound Studio that wet its hands playing in the blood of giallos past, the ending swings wide and fails both in the typical and atypical realms the rest of the movie bounces between. It has its own intrigue if you're into random things (see also The Lords of Salem), but thrust like a knife into a carefully written screenplay, it makes sadly little sense. B 

A Friday the 13th of Friday the 13ths

Friday the 13th has a well-earned reputation as one of the most venerable horror franchises in history, but despite its formidable box-office success, its entries were mostly derided by critics and treated as slasher movie junk food. That junk-foodiness is so much of the appeal, though: this is a series of incredibly low density, even less than contemporaries Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street. They are intellectually disengaged, basally pleasing movies, providing all of the notorious bottom-of-the-barrel thrills that the genre trafficks in. They're always short, always ridiculous, and typically entertaining on at least one level, with some really unfortunate exceptions. Ascending from "fucking dreadful":

Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

This is how Jason Goes to Hell makes me feel. It is pure profiteering garbage, a desperate bid from New Line to wring a few more dollars from Friday the 13th's corpse after acquiring it from Paramount. Not a drop of passion or talent went into crafting this cheap, muddy, incomprehensible mess, a movie that is often so poorly lit that you can't even see who's getting killed or how Jason's doing it. Aside from one technically impressive but overlong scene of a face randomly melting, this is 100% skippable. The theme song is hilarious, though, a sure sign of Harry Manfredini's complete disinterest in the franchise:

The David Cronenberg Sinister Beauty Parade

David Cronenberg films are led by men almost universally, but nearly every one of them features at least one compelling female role as well. Often these roles are enhanced by his eye for women who are darkly alluring, polished surfaces that give way to warped thoughts (much like the movies themselves). A few I've noticed lately:

Lynn Lowry, Shivers: The prototype, if you will; a blueprint for a newborn artist. Lovingly filmed right in the middle of an expository dialogue about "a parasite that's a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy." Lowry is a commanding presence in a movie that often finds its time divided amongst a bloated cast, but her lilting, eerie final monologue puts her above and beyond the rest.

Genevieve Bujold, Dead Ringers: Probably a top 5 performance for Cronenberg's oeuvre, Bujold's turn as an over-the-hill actress with a Master's in sexual depravity is both perverted enough to enliven the obsessive, sociopathic Mantle twins (Jeremy Irons, also top 5), and human enough to challenge them. Her face and voice and body leave her unable to deny this intense dysfunctional connection, no matter what words come out of her mouth. 

Judy Davis, Naked Lunch: Small picture, but you get the idea. For a while in the early 90s, Judy Davis was the go-to gal for auteurs looking to cast a cold, vastly intelligent woman. Naked Lunch is convoluted and sort of exhausting, but Cronenberg at least has his gift for prosthetics to give visual life to an inscrutable story, and the good sense to frame it autobiographically by dragging elements of crazy-ass William S. Burroughs' life into the narrative. Davis, despite a limited role, serves as both the catalyst for Peter Weller's delusion and his singular erotic obsession, the remaining vestige of an increasingly foreign life left behind.

Sarah Gadon, A Dangerous Method + Cosmopolis + Maps to the Stars: Cronenberg's newest muse and the only woman with whom he has collaborated repeatedly, Sarah Gadon's conventional beauty exudes more than a fair share of menace. There's an air of inaccessible power to her, something that both Cronenberg (frigid heiress in Cosmopolis, Hollywood matriarch of old in Maps to the Stars) and his son Brandon (Antiviral's celebrity to end all celebrities) have employed with considerable results in the last few years. Her career is young yet, but she's an intelligent woman with excellent taste in auteurs, so the prognosis for a rich filmography is promising.

The Trouble With Harry

At the peak of his popularity in the mid-2000s, Harry Knowles was making $700,000 a year through his self-proclaimed film nerd sanctuary Ain't it Cool News. No critic from now until the end of time will dream of collecting that sort of cash ever again. This astronomical success is, much more than any virtues of his own, a testament to the inestimable value of being in the right place at the right time. When Knowles founded Ain't it Cool in 1996, there was simply no competition; not even fellow early tech adopter Roger Ebert had the same magnitude of online presence that The King of Filmgeekdom commanded. Studios trembled in his shadow - a Knowles pan spelled certain devastation for a film, and his word is credited with the financial failure of such classics as Batman and Robin and Rollerball.

Here's the rub, though: Harry Knowles is a sexist manchild who, even at the height of his powers, was only able to generate dialogue amongst readers half his age. His "films are awesome!" credo holds its own valuable optimistic appeal, but in Knowles' case the awesomeness of a film is generally correlated to how much the studio heads kiss his ass at the junket before he watches it. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I believe that people of dubious principle can mature with time and reflection. But what happens when you don't develop? What happens when those studios you once cowed grow savvy to how easily bought you are, how derelict your journalistic integrity is? What happens if you've been writing the same crass, nonsensical bullshit for the last seventeen years of your life? Feast upon this juicy morsel from his Blade 2 review, all the while remembering that this is how an actual person felt about Blade 2 (NSFW!):

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 1: I'd Sell My Soul for a Good Opening Weekend

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but 2013 has been pretty good to horror so far! At least to its box office - the quality of this year's offerings have been a mixed platter, typical of any studio slate, but the real revelation is the genre's renewed, almost instantaneous bankability. The Conjuring had one of the highest opening weekends for an R-rated film of all time; the only other R-rated horror film to make so much money so quickly was Paranormal Activity 3. The Purge multiplied its budget by thirty. Evil Dead nearly broke $100 million. And those are just the R-rated flicks alone - World War Z took in major bank overseas, for instance. Mama did well, Dark Skies did well, Warm Bodies did well even though it shouldn't have. Maybe my 2011/2012 prognostications about the future of adult horror were preemptive, or maybe there's been some kind of worldwide attitudinal shift that's gotten mainstream audiences so interested in all this depravity. Could it be a growing notion that our world is falling apart?

There's been a noticeable preoccupation with economic decay in many of the movies released this year, almost certainly a reflection of our nation's dire straits. This isn't a new trend to film, cropping up as early as Great Depression musicals in order to pair common audience anxieties with a gleeful, utopian worldview. To see these fears interlaced with the horror genre, however, is particularly exceptional. Three of the films below deal with financial crises, at least in passing, and the other two feature protagonists overcoming major drug addictions. The prevalence of such heavy subject matter in a genre with few escapist tendencies is strange, but as with any regularly employed cultural trend, its incorporation is livened or worsened by the skill of its creative team. The movies below, for the most part, depict these issues thoughtfully enough to merit their inclusion. Except for Evil Dead. Fuck that shit.

Antiviral [Netflix]

You would have to be a lunatic to desire fame in the 21st century. Paparazzi may seem intrusive enough as it is, but images of an otherwise average person going about her routine don't cut it anymore. Social technologies like Twitter have entitled millions of people to a feeling of constant connectivity to their idols; such an increased degree of exposure is a double-edged sword, because now any teenage shitheel can anonymously slander or threaten you whenever his shriveled heart desires. The Internet has left us all living in public, but to many, the life of a celebrity is hardly a life at all. Antiviral ups the ante on these already sad circumstances by depicting a near future where celebrity culture is the only kind of culture, a world in which the ultimate expression of adoration is paying hand-over-fist to be injected with the viruses of these beautiful people. These "celebrities" don't even sing or act, simply serving as proprietary pathogenic vessels for corporations to make money off the unwitting. Huckster Syd March (Caleb Landry-Jones of X-Men First Class, deliciously cold) peddles these germs for the omnipotent Lucas Clinic, but unsurprisingly the big guys aren't paying their workers too much in times like these, so occasionally he'll steal viruses and sell them on the black market. Unfortunately, Syd never accounted for this society's insidious idea of copyright protection, and so begins his great adventure. Brandon Cronenberg, inspired by an offhand remark in a Sarah Michelle Gellar interview, has created a world in the image of his father's work that is populated by obsessions entirely his own. This fame-forged dystopia is brimming with hardship, but its citizens are too doped up on entertainment to understand what a hard life entails except by relating to celebrity "Ordeals," manufactured traumas like having a camera zoom up your rectum (broadcast on the news as, of course, the Aria Noble Anus Ordeal). Beautifully shot and conceived, Antiviral nonetheless betrays its director's inexperienced hand, as the clever concepts and shifts in understanding are occasionally explained more closely than they need to be. Nonetheless, Cronenberg delivers a portrait of manic devotion that is not only contemporary (Miley, One Direction, Lady Gaga, et al.), but indicative of a society suffering a much greater structural disease than any one human might carry. B+

Elysium, Technocracy, and a Curious Case of "Heavy-Handedness"

Minor spoilers follow.

Elysium, the sophomore effort of South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp, continues a tradition of socially conscious action film established by his previous critical darling District 9. Moving away from D9's apartheid allegory into questions of class and privilege in the year 2154, Blomkamp can't be faulted for his ambition: how many blockbuster filmmakers are this invested in delivering a product with a substantial message? Most critics haven't seen it so reasonably, and although the response to the film has been one of lukewarm enthusiasm, many of its champions qualify it as well-made action (and it really is!) that is "hazy" and "on-the-nose" while detractors write it off as having a substantial base for an insubstantial result, as if one of the goals of an action film should not be to provide action. There's a vocal dissatisfaction with the movie's supposed unsubtlety in mirroring the American healthcare system, which is perhaps a result of critics' zeal to prove their understanding, but the multiple subterranean issues of technological superiority that inform the whole movie are completely ignored. Without understanding the face of a world shaped by technology's ubiquitous hand, Elysium might seem "hazy" or "blank," but Blomkamp demonstrates a sophisticated (if unevenly expressed) understanding of the forces that guide our economic and cultural development in an increasingly unstable time.

Sharknado and Pacific Rim: 21st Century Living for Monsters

Sharknado, SyFy's newest media Hail Mary, premiered on Thursday to squarely average ratings and a deluge of Twitter lurkers desperate for attention. I've already touched on the caveats of intentional camp programming, and this soulless nonsense doesn't deserve many more words than that. Bad movies are typically funny if they're unexpected and unintentional; when you have studios like The Asylum churning out mirror-image screenplays differentiated only by beastie, the thrill of discovery is gone. All you're watching is a movie that has successfully managed to be bad, a workmanlike mimicry of incompetence that begs for ridicule at every turn. Laugh at the man cutting an airborne shark in half with a chainsaw! Mock the newscaster's awkward voice! Groan at "We're gonna need a bigger chopper," just to show your friends that you understand the reference! Sharknado and its ilk are films forged in pure cynicism, the antithesis of what makes a work of art into camp.

Egress from the Winter 2013 Graveyard, or Finally Some Interesting Movies Come Out

Spring Breakers
Try as you might to disassociate yourself from the parts of Spring Breakers that have already entered our cultural consciousness - Disney bikini ass boobs murder gun fellatio piano James Franco??? - there's really not much else to the movie, so you kind of have to accept its lack of substance out of the gate. It is almost totally repetitive, probably a deliberate decision when you take Harmony Korine's enfant terrible status into consideration, but there's a method to this droning madness. Korine's subjects are four girls who flee college toward this soulless liturgy of party-party-party-party-party, under the pretense of "finding themselves" and "changing their boring lives." That this is achieved through scene after scene of constant drinking and carnage, all set to a Skrillex soundtrack, is a fairly transparent irony. But Spring Breakers has a sneaky streak, realized primarily through the fates of these young women. These supposed heroines are delinquents in training, securing their travel funds by robbing a Chicken Shack with sick ferocity. They knowingly exert seductive power over local crime lord/hip-hop demicelebrity Alien, played by James Franco with a degree of conviction that suggests actual interest in this project. And if Franco is involved and intrigued, you can only imagine what kind of raunchy, dopey, entry-level Social Welfare 101 nonsense this unholy alliance will birth. He and his cohort stumble through a series of bizarre events, all linked by the connective tissue of booze and tits on the beach of St. Petersburg and all ending in totally unexpected ways. When the end finally arrives, seemingly half an hour too late, he and the girls splinter from each other in unexpected ways in a climax designed for neither a vindictive nor a sympathetic audience. Selves are found, lives are changed, but these inevitabilities are livened by the details. Harmony Korine's message may be somewhat obvious, but his delivery is not, and the thumping machine that is Spring Breakers chugs on regardless of what anyone thinks of or expects from it. B-

The Disappointments of 2012

Not meant to be read, as always, as a "worst of" list.

(The worst movie of the year is Taken 2.)

10) Django Unchained 

Perhaps I'm measuring this by an unfair barometer. Quentin Tarantino is America's premier cinematic provocateur and one of our most vivid auteurial voices, and although this doesn't guarantee quality product, he generally creates something that merits discussion at the very least. Here, though, all I'm seeing is the same old handful of tricks scrawled out over a new historical setting. Anachronistic musical selections, often cribbed from other films? Check. Gleeful ultraviolence? Check, though it feels watery compared to the man's other films - must be that overthick fake blood, gushing lethargically with every gunshot. Like Paul Thomas Anderson with The Master, Tarantino offers us something that demonstrates a continually growing sophistication of theme and tension, but is by design constrained by disheartening adherence to tried-and-true aesthetics and structures. Django Unchained has its share of charms, but their human expressors are Tarantino's least interesting set alongside Death Proof. Kerry Washington's role is utterly pathetic. Leonardo DiCaprio is fun playing against type, but I'm not exactly sure what Tarantino saw in him that demanded his placement in the role, short of that impish grin. Christoph Waltz is reliable if not repetitive in his darkside gentility, Jamie Foxx is good, and Samuel L. Jackson is an especial standout, but Tarantino's dialogue and scenario creation are much less memorable than his self-plagiarism demands. The ideas are there and tantalizing, but it's as if he floundered in finding some way to express them while expressing himself at the same time.

My Favorite Films of 2012

10) The Raid: Redemption

Roger Ebert gave this movie one star on the basis that it is pandering to a built-in "fanboy audience," appealing to us solely on the basis of our "reptilian complex," and does it all by approximating the critical capacities of people who enjoy the film to those of cats and dogs. Okay, whatever, The Raid: Redemption has a stupid plot. The characters are non-existent. I'm sure it would all have been better if a capable writer had helmed the thing. None of this matters because it is 101 minutes of unflinching martial arts action and it looks awesome. Listen, I will lament the dearth of thematically interesting, character-driven genre films for days, but sometimes you just need to watch a professionally trained martial artist kill two men with a door. There is no shortage of creative material out there with which to stimulate your cerebral neocortex, but hanging razor-sharp action filmmaking - of which there is so little these days! - out to dry because it's not tickling your intellectual fancy is completely absurd. In spite of us plebeians, he managed to find an ideologically challenging action film in Taken 2, which he awarded 200% more stars. ("Not to worry; this is only PG-13-rated hanging upside down and bleeding to death." MOTHERFUCKER NO ONE WENT TO TAKEN 2 FOR PG-13-RATED BLEEDING TO DEATH.) It's never taken a lot of effort to poke holes in Ebert's argumentation, but is this seriously the consistency of critical thought we've come to accept from the most prominent film reviewer in the world? Who watches the watching men?

2013 Review/Ranking Index

Go Now!
 

Laurence Anyways (A-): Enormous, buoyant, effortlessly expressive depiction of lives lived in many different margins. Meticulous attention to visual detail pays out both humor and heartbreak. Dolan's gift for turning "ordinary" queer narratives into extraordinary visual artifacts grows. Interview frame maybe unnecessary?

Upstream Color (B+): Ravishing technique. Sound design fits delicately balanced compositions like a glove. Evokes immense feelings of loss, depersonalization. Plot less favored by elliptical delivery than Primer. Seimetz excellent, but Carruth lacking as performer.
12 Years a Slave (B+): An embarrassment of riches, divided (perhaps too thinly?) amongst an extremely talented cast. Ejiofor's restraint, physiognomy remarkable. Contrast between beautiful compositions and scenes of stomach-turning brutality is riveting. Pitt's scenes feel like the product of a compromise. 

Antiviral (B+) (review, best of 2013): A huge surprise. Chilling sound, visual design. Landry Jones a delight as reptilian non-hero. One of the sharpest takes on digital-era celebrity/culture that I've ever seen, though a little overexplanatory. Continually expands on its premise in thoughtful ways.
Frances Ha (B+): Greta Gerwig holding it down for Sacramento! Balances optimism and reality without heaviness, right up to its inspiring ending. Loose structure and brief cutaways are appealing. A maturation of the admittedly tired little-artist-big-city story.

Go See It

Like Someone in Love (B+): More Kiarostami car adventures! Set design and mise en scene are aces, expertly laid images that open themselves to clever manipulation. Rich characterizations and performances. Not sure if its rigid intellectual quality is a perfect fit for its notion of love as an unbound force.

Before Midnight (B+): Concept, like marriage, shows signs of age. Edited too gently; Hawke and Delpy's energy is sometimes mismanaged. Still, feels like a vital and insightful contribution to adult cinema, just as its predecessors were.
The Bling Ring (B+): Sofia Coppola's best editing, shooting...probably just her best. Chilling use of light: dollhouse, nightclub, and in jarring passes, harsh reality. Excellent employment of montage. Formal virtues mostly, but don't completely, forgive the thinness of the source material.

The Place Beyond the Pines (B+) (review, best of 2013)
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (B+) (review, best of 2013): Effectively layers horror plot points over teenage insecurities over the implacable challenges that come with newfound sexuality. Fondness for its subjects, or at least the last moments of their innocent youth, enriches an age-old morality tale. A few lazy cuts and camera tricks. Great soundtrack.
You're Next (B+/B): Vinson a final girl for the ages. Excellent set and sound design, though shaky-cam is distracting early on. Otherwise solid script occasionally sacrifices plausibility for narrative flow. Fun, energetic, a little bit irreverent.
Ginger and Rosa (B): A smart little story about being young and impressionable when your world is full of conflicting ideologies. Fanning Minor is dazzling. Unexpected turns into High Drama leave a peculiar aftertaste.
Crystal Fairy (B): Funny, poignant half of director Silva's diptych about alienation and the dissolution of identity in an oppressive foreign setting. Hoffman, Cera and the Silva brothers all excellent. Visual language is confident yet occasionally cryptic. Climactic trip leaves something to be desired.
Computer Chess (B): Delicious period detail. Headiness and respect for audience knowledge is a plus; jargon demystifies when viewed allegorically. Still rhythmically flat, difficult to approach. Its most evocative moments veer wildly out of tone. The Man Who Wasn't There's bookish little brother.
World War Z (B): Surprisingly powerful imagery, especially in close-up and long shot. Impressive sense of geopolitical scope. Good action, despite tame gore. Ruptures in editing and sequel-ready ending, likely results of troubled production history, occasionally frustrate. 
The East (B): Plenty of challenging questions, admirably critical view of self-righteous anarchism. Bracing plotting. Glossy, overthought moments clunk into the question of how entertaining such an anti-corporate movie should be. Too diffuse to have much localized value as a "message movie," but it beats Cloud Atlas at its game.
Berberian Sound Studio (B): As expected, lovely sound design, perhaps the most reverent aspect of this giallo homage. Toby Jones navigates neurosis and emotional malaise masterfully. Ending falls flat, calling on very little of the psychological tension that precedes it.
Elysium (B): Blomkamp reins in the excesses that ultimately scuttled District 9's ambition; never loses sight of its end goal. Richly realized world and military-political systems with contemporary resonance. Damon great as unassuming hero, battered time and again by The Machine. Exciting action, though shaky-cam tires a bit. Plagued by a few storytelling bubbles.
Only God Forgives (B): Hyperviolent, suggestively sexualized power fantasy, staged in a red alien Thailand. Film's treatment of its genre arch and incisive and more than a little bit silly. Does not approach anything resembling humanity or human behavior, leaving the experience feeling like a bad dream.
Blue Jasmine (B): Not a ringing triumph for Allen, but certainly for his cast. Actors dull the sting of heavy parallel characterizations and clumsy cutting to flashbacks. Blanchett essentially creates the film's tone of nauseated melancholy, but Hawkins and Cannavale give it brio. A decent look at classism, but what kind of San Francisco is Ginger surviving in?
From Up on Poppy Hill (B): A sensitive, good-natured tale that keeps its eye on historical context. Conflating the role of fatherhood with the realities of sending men to war, even peripherally, leaves a considerable impact. The music is a bit overbearing.

The Conjuring (B): Rough dialogue patches mostly eclipsed by some committed performers. Communicates far better through light and sound. Suspense builds naturally; balances a surprising number of narrative elements admirably. Fun in the moment, but may not hold up.
Iron Man 3 (B/B-): Eye-popping action, as is Marvel's wont. Maturity of theme and self-exploratory questions regarding decadence and image are necessarily upset by mandated cheesiness for the kids.  Ending feels incomplete. The best iteration of the Iron Man character yet.
The World's End (B-): Messy. Aliens serve Wright's plot less effectively than zombies and maniacs did for him. Good start, as strong a middle as possible with misjudged sci-fi trappings, weak ending. Fun action, game actors, some great jokes.
Byzantium (B-): Involving macabre tone, excellent acting, smart ideas about immortality and creating "time" for yourself. Well-planned use of gender as narrative catalyst. Lumping nearly all the exposition into the second act seriously sways the momentum. Flashbacks within flashbacks, full of names and faces that take a long time to matter. (Byzantium/byzantine?)
Magic Magic (B-): Last five minutes feel unnecessary, poorly judged. Blunt, unusual but engaging performances from Temple and Cera, the latter guiding obnoxiousness into sociopathy with notable skill. Anxiety captured well by claustrophobic spaces. Baghead with production values.

Pacific Rim (B-)
Dark Skies (B-): Insightful hash of contemporary anxieties, given a decent if repetitive genre spin. I always welcome unintentional humor, but the film is competent enough that occasional lame lines and cheesy shots clash with the experience. A fine example of PG-13 horror for teens who can look past the goofy stuff. 

Stoker (B-): Dizzy, unpredictable imagery generates an intriguing dialectic with protagonist and subject matter. Superb craft in service of redundant script. Wasikowska a question mark, though plays a sharp Teresa Wright to Matthew Goode's Joseph Cotten. Love those opening credits.

Spring Breakers (B-)
The Grandmaster (B-): Many virtues, many problems - hard to tell whether the 20 minutes lost in re-editing might remedy the latter. Constant slow motion, instead of romanticizing, eventually exhausts. Bounty of interesting narrative ideas brings attention to their unfulfilled potential. Zhang never fully convinces as a kung-fu legend. Gorgeous cinematography, choreography; earth-shaking fights.
The Hunt (B-): Harrowing, well-acted but sometimes implausibly plotted trial in the court of public outrage. Actions and motivations occasionally don't make sense; Mikkelsen, though quite good, can't always sell creaky characterization. Feels more powerful than it should.
The Call (B-): Slowdowns and freeze-frames a bit gaudy, sort of like a recent Danny Boyle film without the psychedelics. Has its ups and downs as a thriller, but never loses momentum even in the face of silliness. Berry good (!), Breslin unavoidably shrill.
American Hustle (B-): Energy and tone are brisk and delicately balanced at the cost of structured storytelling. Generic con plot doesn't feel worth keeping up with when placed alongside fun morality shifts and character flourishes. Excellent performances, especially Adams.

Trance (B-)
This is the End (B-): Funny, if inevitably masturbatory, dissection of five prominent comic personalities. Some more successful than others - what the fuck was with Hill's character? First half hour best highlights the movie's strengths: analysis of social interplay, culture clash, Hollywood narcissism. Graceless exposition leads to bloated second act.
Gravity (B-): Script succeeds only at hurrying Bullock, viewers from one visually remarkable crisis to the next. Despite being thematically foregrounded, the human elements are slapdash and never seem to matter much. Bullock is dubious and Clooney brings nothing. Tense start, but ultimately unsurprising. Cumulative power does some good in alleviating frustrations.

Go Ahead

Resolution (B-): Complex if heavy-handed metanarrative may deserve a second watch, may also be supported by shaky deductive reasoning from its characters. Plot-pushing "clues" don't always make sense. Good characterization, decent acting. A few striking shots on a microbudget.
Side Effects (B-): Mara compelling despite unimpressive support from the rest of the cast. Good ideas behind the camera, but Soderbergh's balmy golden digital is starting to tire. Themes never land, plot ultimately feels less than the sum of its parts.
Black Rock (C+): Well-acted thriller with a rarely seen emphasis on female camaraderie, despite shortage of actual thrills. Not much to think about or look back on after the story is told. Worth watching, if only because it's so short; lack of substance would be unsustainable over 100+ minutes.
The Lords of Salem (C+): Zombie's technical maturation is clear: film looks good, sounds great, but his writing remains entropic. An okay stab at portraying horror as a local phenomenon, abetted by mass casting of genre icons, that results in zero payoff. Repetitive first hour, senseless final act. Sheri Moon Zombie intriguing but limited.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (C+): Lawrence excellent in this role, as before, but whole film lacks dramatic spark. Scenarios seem contrived to avoid the looming question of "revolution" and its costs; Katniss is rarely asked to make tough choices, seriously contemplate, etc. Already overlong, it ends just when it starts to pick up traction. Costuming has improved.

V/H/S/2 (C+): Overall quality of filmmaking has improved, and is less hostile toward women. Lacks the grungy aesthetic of obsolescence that made the first one so powerful. Frame story ends in flaming disappointment, again.
August: Osage County (C+): I related, possibly too much, to theatrical self-pity as a trait passed through generations. Occasionally funny, but its attempts at emotion are diluted by its incessant need for dramatic overdrive. Hard to appreciate any specific actor when they are all asked to perform at the same wavelength. Flatly filmed.
Closed Circuit (C+): Lusty middlebrow legal thriller; feels uncomfortably like a romantic espionage fantasy for adults who wish their white collar jobs were less boring. Interesting, topical ideas but not much character. Use of high-angle shots gives courtroom scenes an imposing edge. Eric Bana in a barrister's wig is darling.
What Maisie Knew (C+): A mixed bag. Cheesy music, sloppy storytelling leave strong acting and premise hobbled. Skarsgard and young Aprile are MVPs, full of palpable chemistry. Parents, especially Coogan, too caricatured to really bring the ending home.

Dead Man Down (C+): Lots of character, charming if overdetermined symbology. Story is disappointingly unconsidered when placed alongside mood, rhythm. Rapace's best; Farrell sleepwalking, as is sometimes his wont.

Admission (C+): Intriguing thesis about who deserves a top-tier education too often gives way to bad jokes, shaky characterizations. Rudd and Fey warm but lack comic chemistry.

Mama (C+): First hour is both playful and sinister, acted sensibly. Several very strong setups unfortunately bring attention to poorly-realized space and production design. Bad CGI monster in the final act essentially ruins the movie.
Prince Avalanche (C+): David Gordon Green's callback to George Washington lacks most of its strengths: unification of setting and milieu, consistent characterization, impact, consequence. Explosions in the Sky is way too overproduced for natural quietude. Vividly pretty, at least. 

Beautiful Creatures (C+): Likeable leads given realistic dialogue with personality. An 100% superior alternative to Twilight for a teen. Questionable use of Viola Davis; plot offers interesting issues of morality, too bogged down in mythic window dressing.
Carrie (C+/C): Moretz not horrible, but usually kind of obvious, paling in comparison to Sissy Spacek. Side characters hardly contribute anything. Prom's bombast too overworked, not sinister enough, a desperate bid at creating a memorable ending setpiece rather than an expression of Carrie's anguish. Well-made but empty.
The To-Do List (C): Flabby editing sabotages a talented cast's comic timing. Conflicts are half-baked and joke setups heavily telegraphed, but both are just effective enough to warrant watching. Smart, inclusive sex-positive message. Much flaunted period setting doesn't really add a lot.
Prisoners (C): You get what you pay for with Deakins. But the symbol-heavy, repetitive, cryptic screenplay betrays his handsome setups. Calls upon many kidnapping film antecedents without bringing much of its own character. Acting starts and remains top-notch.
Furious 6 (C): Overextended between way too many characters. Plot is rooted in all of the uninteresting parts of the Fast/Furious canon. Car stunts slackening a bit but martial arts cover for them. Becomes suddenly and violently weird at times, often to amusing effect.
Lovelace (C): Not much complexity. Vibrant colors/music, high energy are fun for a while. Film's supposed disinterest in titillation/exploitation stands in contrast with the small period of Lovelace's life examined; doesn't cut deep enough either way. Smoothed-out portrayal of subject, in middling biopic tradition. Seyfried's decent, despite dodgy accent.
Maniac (C): Looks good; POV gimmick is sloppy but works sometimes. Wood, badly cast, tries his hardest. Cheap pop psychology is a disappointing substitute for the grimy randomness of the original. Unrealistic setpieces and victim behavior.

Go Away

 

Nebraska (C): Dern excellent, naturally. The rest just feels so maudlin. Obtrusive music, glossy landscapes wear down quickly by force of constant repetition. Forte is not expressive enough for this role. Warm moments that never cohere into a worthwhile whole.
Man of Steel (C): Wondrous pyrotechnics stimulate as planned, but quickly grow tiresome. Exhausting pace, coupled with lousy dialogue in the movie's few quieter moments, guarantees an early checkout. Hand to hand combat looks sluggish when augmented with CGI stunts. Toothless. 

Dracula 3D (C): Decent by the standards of Dario Argento's twilight hours, but by no others. Simultaneously fun and depressing to watch him debase himself so thoroughly. Cheapness highlighted by abysmal direction. Some of the images might have been striking in more competent hands.
Room 237 (C): Film nerd porn, and pretty shameless too if that's your thing. Individual interpretations all fall flat, supported by flimsy evidence and confounded by lack of context. Lack of compelling or complicating imagery fails to produce a point of view. Overall effect of the doc capably teases out The Shining's alien nature, though.
Much Ado About Nothing (C): Whedon's actors have their charms, but Shakespeareans they are not. Acker is inconsistent, Denisof straight bad; together they are void of chemistry. Awkward staging and blocking leaves most players standing around uncomfortably, unsure what to do with their hands. A few lively scenes, but mostly indistinct.
To the Wonder (C) (review, 2013 disappointments)

Kiss of the Damned (C): Well-shot and lit but lacking atmosphere. Milo Ventimiglia cannot carry a movie. Soundtrack works double-time to vitalize drama, which cheapens the handful of musical sequences that are actually quite good. A 70s vampire throwback was a great idea but this just doesn't get there.
Passion (C): de Palma's situation eerily similar to Argento's: relegated to cheaply-filmed Europudding trash that few people see and fewer people like. Ludicrous musical nods to Hitchcock, inconsistent lighting, smutty lesbian depravity betray any pretensions of artistic merit. Still hits its mark occasionally, mostly thanks to McAdams and Rapace.
Disconnect (C): Constant visual emphasis on computer interfaces and chatting is uncinematic. Lifeless, perfunctory dialogue. Use of "hyperlink" structure to connect each story feels heavy-handed. There's a good movie to be made from the idea of technology as a depersonalizing agent, but this isn't it.
Hours (C-): The role as written should not have gone to Walker, though few actors could make their way through such mountains of schmaltz. Screenplay beats creak under the weight of supporting the conceit. Lifeless invocation of Hurricane Katrina. Scenes well-blocked, with an undeniably effective final shot.
Evil Dead (C-) (review, 2013 disappointments): Shockingly stupid characters, bad acting, abysmal plotting. Gore is impressive and over-the-top enough to suggest aspirations of parody, dismissed fully by lack of wit or charm. The prosthetics artists rescued this one from a direct-to-video fate.
Somebody Up There Likes Me (C-): Grating, shopworn quirk mashed indiscriminately into dour misanthropy. Unappealing lead. Characters caught hitting the exact same emotional notes over and over. Occasionally clever wordplay and a few funny shots.
Rush (C-): Terminally dull races with nary an interesting shot to be found. Sound mixed way too loudly, perhaps to overcompensate. Tacked-on ending leaves most of the movie feeling like filler. Fine work by Bruhl. 

Go Fuck Yourself

After Earth (C-): The likely death of Jaden Smith's misinformed acting dream; he resembles a young Hayden Christensen. Some well-staged action scenes, despite regularly cheap special effects. Decent themes, awful plot and dialogue. M. Night Shyamalan has no tonal range except for melodramatic quiet, which works about 10% of the time.

The Great Gatsby (D+): Savaged by bad casting: DiCaprio as a charismatic man of calculated mystery, Maguire as anything resembling an interesting person. What Luhrmann considers "cinematic" stands in direct contrast to the material's worthy qualities. Overactive camera high on gaudy, big-budget spectacle creates a nauseating look.
Warm Bodies (D+): Inconsistent, mostly thoughtless attempt at putting a cute face on a slackening zeitgeist. No meaningful engagement with the genre it mines so shamelessly. Malkovich is terrible in a terrible part. Talented young actors, a few smile-worthy jokes.

The ABCs of Death (D+): Sparse good images and ideas (courtesy of D, L, O, T, X), adrift in a hundred awful ones. Unavoidably hamstrung by a bad conceit. Wide variety of races and cultures is refreshing, though.
The Fifth Estate (D): Just as Assange's letter reckoned: a thinly veiled assassination attempt on subversive action that nonetheless tries to profit from it. "Revolution" is swathed in conditional positivity, good until it compromises the people it's meant to disenfranchise. Narrative aims to discredit noble intent through self-righteousness. Assange, WikiLeaks, et al. painted as singularly damaging by film's end. Short-sighted, profiteering trash.
The Last Days on Mars (D): A horribly written Alien ripoff, mired in science fiction flavors of the month. Senseless lighting and editing choices. Plot bends over backwards trying to accommodate the most banal of storytelling contrivances. Acting proficient but perfunctory.
The Purge (D): An inkling of a good idea, given no deeper thought whatsoever. "Monologue, then unexpected death" trick gets old after the second time. Every member of the family deserves to die for different, equally moronic reasons. Hideous production values.
The Canyons (D): Intentional meaninglessness that, through failures of technique and drama, remains meaningless. Will be remembered en masse as (impressively) lurid pop culture detritus. Deen sometimes in sync with character's darkness; Lohan an uncomfortable, distracting stunt cast.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (F): Ugly, unappealing product, through and through. No joy to be found in lifeless action scenes, bad action-parody joke lifts. Should have been shelved forever.

MOVIES SEEN: 79

One 24-Year-Old, Five Twilight Movies

Spoilers for the last two Twilight movies.

As of twenty-four hours ago, I have seen every single movie in the Twilight saga. Offering comprehensive criticism would be both redundant, in light of the fact that Twilight has been the Internet's punching bag for the last five years, and impossible. I really don't know how I feel about the films at all. They're so dramatically inert that they are rarely fun to mock, and even when the craftsmanship is decent (Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Part 2), it amounts merely to a streamlining or beautification of total uneventfulness. I don't relate to any of the characters or situations, and the saga isn't exactly a must-see cultural phenomenon since the majority of people will likely turn against it or forget about it within the decade.

And yet I watched all of them. I even paid ten dollars to see the final installment in theaters, which I regretted just like I knew I would. Just like the previous four, it was 20% moderate schadenfreude, 80% tedious moping. So the odyssey came to a close and I found myself no more aware of why I stuck through it all.

Lincoln: Anatomy of a Rottentomatoes Capsule

"Daniel Day-Lewis characteristically delivers in this witty, dignified portrait that immerses the audience in its world and entertains even as it informs."

- Rottentomatoes.com's summation of the 90% positive critical response to Lincoln

a) "Daniel Day-Lewis characteristically delivers"

Oh, yes. Coming in as a shocker to absolutely no one, DDL knocks another one out of the park. What's that "one" exactly? Over a dozen weighty, metaphorical monologues, most of which are underscored by a typical John Williams orchestra wank in order to remind us to be moved or stimulated or wryly entertained. He's the smartest, saintliest man in every room he enters, which ultimately grows weary because we already know he's right and we already know that the 13th Amendment will be ratified. It's like trying to convince an audience that Hitler was evil. Lincoln's hollow racial motives are handwaved away via one conversation with a tearful black maid, and what few personal demons we are privy to are teased out by - surprise! - his wife. Using a woman to peer into the troubles of a venerable public figure feels cheap and common. And sure, Lincoln was a great man, but Amelia Earhart was a great woman and that didn't stop critics from crashing that plane. That film had its problems, but it's not like Lincoln doesn't either. Biographical sanctification, long decried as a major flaw for any biopic, is apparently excusable here through the efforts of DDL alone. He's great. Of course. But the Lincoln he portrays is shallow, made to sound deep through densely worded politicking and a surfeit of three-minute tangents (also given an attempted handwave by a character attempting to make Lincoln sound like he isn't the best storyteller in the world). The entire movie is a gift from him to Spielberg, a two-point-five hour long Oscar reel for a man that hardly needs it.

b) "in this witty, dignified portrait"

Counterpoint to "witty": how about babbling? Again, the movie is so enamored with its own wordiness that anything that could be remotely construed as wit becomes agonizingly protracted. Not that I expect Tony Kushner, an awfully long way from Angels in America, to Sorkinize 1865 political parlance, but every single scene and dialogue has the same rhythm: slooooow. The only change from line to line is volume, because even with the linguistic evolutions that have transpired over the last century and a half, people still used to shout when they got angry.

Counterpoint to "dignified": any scene with James Spader's woeful political buttonpusher W.N. Bilbo. The movie's most gruesome scene, involving a wheelbarrow full of limbs, paired with its refusal to show the assassination of the president under the insinuation of "dignity." The very idea that a film that contains at least half an hour of gale force monologuing has any grasp of the kind of restraint necessary for aforementioned "dignity".

c) "that immerses the audience in its world"

The movie looks beautiful; top shelf Janusz Kaminski, reverently lighting and shooting the film like a collection of Old Hollywood portraits. That's basically where my praise for the movie ends. Immersion is awfully difficult to reach when the only noteworthy characters you've got to guide you through this Congressional marshland are DDL, a serviceable Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field doing a pretty unremarkable Long-Suffering Wife, and about five useless minutes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This movie doesn't skimp on its casting, with a gallery of fresh and familiar faces alike, but it suffers a similar fate to last year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in that nearly all of these faces are used to push a point of view or political stance rather than do anything vaguely human. They are not, nor does the movie ever even pretend to care that they should be, people. The only differentiation between a majority of this movie's hugely overstuffed cast is what kind of Muppet they look like. Forget any hopes for a notable African-American presence in the film, by the way: their sole purpose is to remind us, by standing in silent solidarity while their light-skinned oppressors propel all the action forward, that this was a very good thing to happen for black people.

d) "and entertains even as it informs."

Ugh, but only in the most insulting way possible. Spielberg wants us to remember that history can be fun too! So what better way than to break the flow of a movie that's already excruciatingly long and boring by inserting scenes where James Spader is really wacky? Did you guys know that people said fuck back then? Did you know that they made jokes about poop? They really are just like us! There hasn't been such an ill-conceived marriage of drama and comedy since...well, Cloud Atlas. Call this the year of ponderous, overreaching bullshit.

D

Skyfall: The Bond Brand

Skyfall is a good, solid Bond movie. Not without its problems, if you choose to disregard the predictably hyperbolic BOND IS BACKers: the third act is a pretty thorough wash, squandering a handful of intriguing ideas laid out by the first two; not every action scene lands; and the normally reliable Naomie Harris is terrible in ways that bode ill for future films in the franchise. For the most part, though, the movie is an exciting, beautifully shot, intuitively paced entry in the canon, an effort that buries the forgettable Quantum of Solace and restores its flagbearer to nearly full vitality.

What caught my attention, however, was Skyfall's frequent self-reference and its acknowledgement of Bond as an indelible cultural standing stone. The film is peppered with inside jokes, many of which I'm sure I didn't catch because of my lack of comprehensive Bond knowledge; it also focuses on the perceived obsolescence of England's beloved old guard, Bond and M, and how there's no room for their clandestine methods in a world "without shadows." Bond may be Bond, sure, but is Bond enough these days? Can the world still rely on this aging, lecherous old boozehound? The answer is yes, of course, but the film constructs itself around the incomprehensible possibility that it can't. Skyfall is obsessed with its roots and using them to entertain, raise thematic questions, and perhaps redundantly in the face of its 50th anniversary, celebrate itself.

But does it earn that right? Preying on nostalgia is dangerous, and though it typically pays out considerable financial and popular dividends, it can also make the work in question seem opportunistic or manipulative. This has become an exceptionally popular tactic in the last decade, with remakes and reboots and reimaginings galore. What makes Skyfall's frequent callbacks to its lineage problematic, however, is that the Bond franchise has been transformed so radically in those 50 years that Craig's recent iterations hardly feel like Bonds at all. Sure, there's goofy humor and intermittent camp to be found, most of which is provided by Javier Bardem's hilarious turn as a bottle-blond M-hating ponce with some icky secrets. Skyfall is careful to parcel these Silly Scenes separately from its Serious Scenes, and a majority of the film gives way to a granite Bond deftly maneuvering through action setpieces of desperate urgency. Certainly a far cry from the likes of the Connery Bond films, where he would rarely even take cover during firefights, or especially the iconic-in-a-bad-way intro to Thunderball where he flies away on a jetpack George Jetson-style. Somewhere along the way, probably after Die Another Day came out and was pilloried by the public, some suit at MGM realized that Bond was going to have to start pulling his weight in order to justify his blockbuster status. No more of this hokey claptrap, unless the script specifically calls for a calculably groan-worthy pun or some "witty" "banter." (Side eye to Harris.)

Overriding any concerns of tone, however, is that Bond has always been a commercial icon. Universal consistency be damned: the Broccolis, MGM, and their superspy lovechild have always answered to the dollar before all else, reaching waaaaay back to those conspicuous crates of Red Stripe in Dr. No. These movies have never been shy about embracing shiny, shiny capitalism, what with the cool brand-name cars and the increasing prevalence of recognizable corporate logos on fancy gadgets. Skyfall itself features plugs for Heineken, Omega Watches, a whole bunch of Sony shit, a resuscitation of the classic Aston Martin, a theme song by ostensibly the year's most popular singer, and a bevy of other goodies for us to subconsciously assimilate. Though Phil Rosenthal's "Forming a Bond with Brands" does a good job at delineating the science of restrained yet overt product placement, it misses the rather obvious fact that commercial restraint is not really necessary in a film franchise twenty-three entries strong. The supposed evils of product placement should hardly be a concern when the franchise's most lucrative product is, has been, and always will be Bond himself. So long as his name remains, these films can be changed and warped beyond familiarity, fluctuate in quality, fellate themselves shamelessly, shovel in wares from every gadget-peddler in the world, and people will still go to see them in droves. The Bond brand is unstoppable. Everything else should feel lucky to share the screen with him.

B (is for Bond)

66 Things I Hate About Cloud Atlas

It is as it says.

MAJOR SPOILERS. 

1) Cloud Atlas is a crushing 164 minutes long. I have absolutely no problem with long movies, but this is the cruelty that makes these other sixty-five abuses of the cinematic form possible. If you're going to bind your audience to their seats for nearly three hours, you'd better at least have something of substance to sustain that kind of runtime.

2) So what does Cloud Atlas attempt in this generous frame, exactly? Everything. It's less a movie and more a shameless, pearl-clutching missive on the ills of the world. There is a desperate lack of focus to its sociological ranting - the class system, "natural order," human bondage, identity and cloning, race, homophobia, nuclear power, capitalism, greed both private and corporate. It never ends. And that doesn't even include the porridge of grander philosophical concepts bubbling under all this...

3)...reincarnation, predestination, the infinite rippling of causality, the existence of a soul, religion and belief. On their own, all of these things are interesting, which is why movies are made about them. When they're all crammed together, dispersed over six different narratives, and then delivered with all the grace and subtlety you'd come to expect from the folks who made The Matrix, it turns into a giant, unwieldy, overstuffed sack of hot nonsense. 

The Master: Bring Your Own Paint Thinner

There Will Be Blood was the first P.T. Anderson film I'd ever seen, way back in 2007, and it knocked me on my ass. I was enraptured. Five years and six views later, the film shows a little wear and tear: as if he lost faith in his audience and their ability to capture his themes, Anderson hamstrings the film's subtle thematic buildup with a few bloated expository passages, but by and large, it is an experiment whose vibrancy and darkness and insanity I cannot help but surrender to every time. In that regard, I have to wonder if the critical reaction to The Master serves as a publicly visible inflation of my own experience. Perhaps it's all the collective gushing of a group of neophyte movie reviewers who saw There Will Be Blood and loved it and are trying to prove as fast as they can that PTA's newest work is, yes folks, a masterpiece, you read it here first. Probably this is lazy conjecture.

It would be unfair to compare The Master to There Will Be Blood, but only on the basis that I am a biased party. The films don't seem particularly similar at a superficial level, but Anderson seems to be operating on a newfound template, which is sort of an unpleasant discovery. Lush, shadowy set design and lighting, courtesy of Mihai Malaimare Jr.'s best Robert Elswit impression. (The film is gorgeous, its art direction likely its sole inarguable asset.) Discordant Jonny Greenwood score. Brutal runtime. Exploration of two perverse, wretched human souls in combative waltz with one another. Operatic acting, pitch black comedy, inscrutable behavior, the religious-industrial complex, all forced down with a chaser of extreme nihilism. The primary difference between the two is The Master's increased presence of women, though with the exception of Amy Adams they're mostly sex objects for the depraved protagonist. I would swear up and down that these are sister films, or perhaps the first two parts of a "Broken Man Trilogy," and there's nothing wrong with either of those possibilities. It just seems a shame that a director who has spent the better part of two decades cultivating a wildly diverse, bizarre filmography would then spend five more years reining himself into a relatively constrictive aesthetic box, taking two different approaches to fundamentally similar thematic material and then homogenizing them.

Our guide for Anderson's next plunge into the depths is Joaquin Phoenix as Freddy Quell, a man in his darkest hour. He drinks paint thinner, chokes rich white dudes, and sleeps indiscriminately with woman after woman until he meets The silver-tongued sociopath Master himself, Lancaster Dodd. Dodd, embodied by the perfectly cast and thus somewhat predictable Philip Seymour Hoffman, spearheads a pseudoscientific system of belief called The Cause, which is aimed at using hypnotherapy to induce a sort of time-traveling euphoria in its charges and cure them of "past traumas." The mechanics of this are repeatedly debunked throughout the film by skeptic and believer alike, to which Dodd reacts with manic rage and tips his hand as A Very Irrational Cult Leader. Not that I'd want to deny anyone the visceral thrill of watching ol' PSH spit "pig fuck" at someone, but it's a pretty lazy way to connect the dots. Quell and Dodd are both men of extremes, men who lash out at everyone around them when their backs are to the wall, which we are shown again and again to decidedly diminishing returns. The execution is on point, as always, but this is the first time I've ever watched a PTA movie and found myself wishing for a less lenient editor. Assault me once, shame on you, assault me twice, shame on me, assault me thrice, cut it out already...

This urges the question of what I would have preferred to see in the place of all this excess, and honestly, I don't know. The film is spare despite its length, and ultimately all it says about religion is that it fulminates in damaged souls and simply leaves them as damaged souls trapped in a dogmatic hivemind. If you're looking for a scathing anti-Scientology screed, something to fulfill all those Internet rumors of its troubled production, the film issues no direct attacks on the religion itself and simply makes a few metaphorical feints at generalized cult practices. Sure, you have the insane "applications," and Dodd's raving inconsistency, and the repeated pittance of The Cause against any sort of rational thought, but these are all things that anyone watching this movie likely knew about cult belief in the first place. 
 

The argument could be made that P. T. Anderson was aware of all this when he made the movie - how couldn't he be? - and that the movie is not about what it is, but what it is not. That's a tough justification for something as aesthetically charged and zealously acted and SIGNIFICANT as The Master, though. Sure, it's a character study of two men caught in behavioral, psychic, ideological circles. But two and a half hours of beautiful, weighty nothingness, whether intentional or not, is going to come with its advantages and its caveats. The movie casts an obfuscating haze about itself and its motives, offering plenty of opportunity for continued study and appreciation, but also rendering what it really wants to say indeterminate. I don't know what it is; I wrote this review hoping I could decipher it in the process but I didn't. I would recommend seeing The Master, but for selfish reasons, because I just want people to talk with about it. To see if there's something buried deeper that I haven't found yet or if it's just hot air.

B- (?)