Category: Film

Movie Review: Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999)

Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace came out when I was 11 years old, and I’m not going to lie to you: I liked it, so much so that my memory for it to this day is nearly word perfect. It’s an odd thing, remembering what I was like at 11, when the story of young Anakin Skywalker was aimed directly at my heart like a missile gunning towards a space station’s ventilation shaft, but this is hardly something I’m looking at through the lens of nostalgia. Before the release of The Force Awakens, while my various social media streams were reaching, in unison, for the films from the original trilogy, The Phantom Menace was the Star Wars film I reached for. As much as J.J. Abrams’ reboot/remaking of the Star Wars universe was a love letter to the Star Wars films everybody loves, it is very much a product of and response to the ecology of blockbuster film-making that The Phantom Menace largely created, one where the imagination was set free from the limitations of physical space by CGI and bound instead to the principal of narrative ease.

Star Wars has always been a franchise dedicated to serving the whims of young boys. Its bright colors, easy charms, simplistic moral grounding, and elements borrowed from Joseph Campbell and the sci-fi serials of director/creator George Lucas‘ youth don’t leave much room for complication or nuance. But rather than examining my childhood (which wasn’t exactly damaged by the film) or the childhoods of the assembled horde of folks cheering that a film series owned by the Disney corporation has been liberated from the mind of its creator, The Phantom Menace needs to be examined in terms of the theoretical child George Lucas was directing for. Regardless of whether or not this represents the beginnings of a noble effort to document the fall of a democratic republic, the boy Lucas loved so completely when he made A New Hope is, with The Phantom Menace, a construct he holds in contempt.

There’s never a moment in The Phantom Menace where it feels like Lucas trusts his audience to understand what is happening, which is fair considering where he begins: In the middle of a treaty negotiation over blockaded trade routes. Like all great space-fairing epics, the galactic Senate is ineffectively wringing its hands over what to do about the Trade Federation’s illegal occupation of the routes to Naboo, waiting on a report from its Jedi ambassadors Qui-Gon Jin (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGreggor) before taking a vote on whether or not to sanction the Federation in some unspecified manner. In a way that’s clever (but not too clever considering the sheer number of corporate sponsorships attached to Star Wars), Lucas imagines the Trade Federation not merely as a corporation, but a body so large it has a seat in Senate. What they produce and who they service is unclear, but everything about The Phantom Menace is only clever on the surface, like the way Jedi Knights function in vaguely similar fashion to Jesuit priests. Because the Trade Federation are evil and stupid, they attack the Jedis with a squadron of easily dispatched droids, who spend the majority of The Phantom Menace bumbling about as various weapons cut through them like their sole purpose is to demonstrate the unspeakable power of the people they oppose. They also serve as a platform for Lucas to demonstrate both upgraded lightsaber techniques and his ability to create characters that would have once required an army of puppeteers and animatronics experts, the whole show meant to dazzle the eye at the cost of everything else.

Through a series of contrivances involving a hair-raising number of racial stereotypes, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan rescue Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) and slip the blockade, landing on the familiar desert backwater of Tatooine. Their ship in desperate need of repair, they decide to rely on the help of a young boy named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), who is the premier podracer in the galaxy despite his age. Qui-Gon sees something in the boy and seeks to free him, believing he might be the literal chosen one of a shadowy Jedi prophecy, and wagers it all on Anakin to win the big podrace. While the podracing sequence is a genuinely well-done setpiece that convincingly conveys the speed and danger of this NASCAR-like sport, there’s never any question that Anakin is winning the race. He’s important to the story, but decidedly a background figure, a child on the fringes of consciousness, let alone the centuries-long battle between the Jedi and the Sith, the film’s titular menace. As he jogs to the spacecraft that will take him from the only planet he’s ever known, his new friend is attacked by Darth Maul (Ray Park), a Sith with a double-bladed lightsaber and body modifications (woaaaaaaaaah, cool!).

The first two acts are long—whatever sense of pacing Lucas had as a director all but swallowed up by the 20-year gap between The Phantom Menace and A New Hope. The film picks up noticeably with the introduction of Maul, cutting back and forth between a siege on the palace of Naboo, a battle on the outskirts of town, a starfight over the orbital blockade, and a duel between the Jedi and the Sith that is easily the standout sequence of the film. It is, at least, the one sequence that feels real, as if the bodies that interact with each other in the scene exist in the same physical space. While the unreal sheen of so many of the organisms and droids in this Star Wars outing may constitute a sort of campy fun for some, they stand out today as the harbingers of special effects shots that are more effect than special.

The Phantom Menace uses the technological firepower at its command to present armies of droids, starfighters, and amphibious frog creatures from an underwater city, and in doing so it completely eliminates the need to creatively stage a battle sequence. It’s been said by Star Wars obsessives far angrier than me that the Gungans of this film are the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi. Regardless of whether or not that’s true, the battle sequences featuring both make for a good point of comparison. Shooting in a forest and utilizing actors in suits and miniature models, Richard Marquand created sequences that were ridiculous given the combatants, but effective in staging a ground battle like no Star Wars film had or would until The Force Awakens. Given the utter limitlessness of greenscreen film-making, Lucas put two armies across from each other on a visually uninspiring plain and had one walk towards the other.

The tools refined here by Lucas were handed down to a generation of lesser directors and hacks who took high concept ideas and staged them for the lowest common denominator. This, more than box office (and possibly more than making Star Wars an unavoidable cultural juggernaut for a new generation of wallets), is the legacy of The Phantom Menace, a swath of low-stakes narratives complicated not by the corporeal risks faced by the characters we’re meant to identify with, but the glittering computerized metropolises they ostensibly inhabit. Any threat, large or small, can be conjured with the click of a mouse. So too can those threats be waved away.

Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999)

With Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jin), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Natalie Portman (Padmé Amidala), Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker), Kenny Baker (R2-D2), Anthony Daniels (C-3P0), Frank Oz (Yoda), Ray Park (Darth Maul), and Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu). Directed by George Lucas from a screenplay by Lucas.

January 1, 2016
Movie Review: The Hateful Eight (2015)

Quentin Tarantino’s been flirting with a film like The Hateful Eight for awhile now, a beautifully shot, well designed film that goes beyond feeling minor (the way Death Proof feels, for instance) and just ends up being bad. An inverse of Django Unchained, where the bounty hunters and rogues are just as despicable as the murderers and thieves they encounter, The Hateful Eight plays on the director’s obsessions with race and torture and whimsical men who are good at murderin’ folks, but with so little in the way of narrative pull that it often seems like Tarantino is just playing with himself, making a movie for the sake of making a movie, without a hint of impulse control.

The Hateful Eight concerns eight men and women who are all on their way to Red Rock, Wyoming, a blizzard nipping at their heels. Some of them are bounty hunters. Some are bounties. Some are working men. Not everybody is who they say they are, but there’s hardly any mystery to that considering the cast of regulars Tarantino’s assembled and the kinds of roles they’ve played for him in the past. Our lead bounty hunters—”Hangman” John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson)—are suspicious of everyone they encounter, and they’re usually right in their suspicions. Ruth encounters Warren on a trail, sitting atop a pile of dead bounties after his horse died in the snow. He’s on his way to Red Rock with Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an outlaw who is worth $10,000 dead or alive, and he prefers taking them in alive so as to not cheat the hangman, hence the nickname. The conversation between Warren and Ruth is intense—Tarantino is at his best when staging conversations between hypermasculine strangers—and when they pick up another snowbound traveler, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the new sheriff—things get more tense. This is just after the Civil War and there’ still tensions between Union soldiers and Rebel ones. Ruth and Warren belonged to the Union. Mannix’s father led a battalion that continued fighting the war in the face of unconditional surrender. None of them could be said to’ve been good men, and Domergue, when she’s not getting punched or spitting up blood, watches them argue with glee.

With the blizzard on them, the stagecoach holes up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where four other men are already gathered around the fireplace. There’s a fussy British gentleman (Tim Roth), a cowpuncher (Michael Madsen), a Mexican (Demián Bichir) who says he’s looking after the place for Minnie while she visits her family, and a Confederate General (Bruce Dern) who is familiar with Major Warren, even if he doesn’t know it. The idea, according to Tarantino, is for these characters to get together and tell stories to one another like an arc on a western, each person trying to figure out the intention of the other. This has been a pretty basic mode of narrative storytelling for a long time now. You can go farther than westerns like Gunsmoke and The Virginian to Rashomon or The Canterbury tales, people telling stories about things seen and unseen, only here, as Tarantino often has it, our storytellers have guns. Those are mostly holstered until a blood-soaked finale, so much of The Hateful Eight is talk and menace, a locked room there’s only one way out of.

That means lingering, for a long time, on the decisions Tarantino chooses to make. One of them, shooting in 70mm and keeping his characters mostly indoors, is ponderous, but there is a lot of loving detail put into Minnie’s Haberdashery and the sense that something’s off with it. The way-station is a one-room saloon with a couple of beds in it, but Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson make use of cinematic space such that the Haberdashery feels both open and claustrophobic at the same time. There are eight people in the room, eight different perspectives of a single unfolding narrative, and were that narrative any better than it was, the way The Hateful Eight cuts from one to another would be invigorating. But it isn’t. So again, you get to linger with the decisions Tarantino makes. You have three hours to wonder how, even in a movie where he’s only the narrator, Tarantino manages to give himself the film’s most troublingly racist dialog, or why he figures on adding a race allegory to a film about eight miserable bastards to begin with. Sampling, as he has been for some time now, from spaghetti westerns, the Confederate/Union line is one Tarantino plays with and tries to extend to today, but he frankly isn’t good enough to make a salient point, even though Samuel L. Jackson is the man making it. After Christoph Waltz’s Jew Hunter in Inglourious Basterds and Leonardo DiCaprio’s impassioned speech on eugenics in Django—both characters and monologues that Tarantino luxuriated in—it’s hard to take him seriously when he tries to inject social consciousness into The Hateful Eight, which is otherwise the director’s career-long fascination with bondage and torture writ large and gracelessly.

It takes a long time for The Hateful Eight to go anywhere, moving as slow as the stagecoaches that transport the players to their stage. Tarantino, as he’s done time and again since Kill Bill, is trying to make a film about outlaws and gunslingers who stand as legends that are of their time and outside it, but it just doesn’t work here, where he’s convinced to the marrow of his bones that it’s worth keeping the company of eight sadists who don’t have all that much to say. It’s a formula Tarantino has used effectively before, but here that formula is used to the point of exhaustion. And when everybody starts pulling guns on one another, as is Tarantino’s guarantee? More of the same, more of the same.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

With Samuel L. Jackson (Major Marquis Warren), Kurt Russell (John Ruth), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Daisy Domergue), Walton Goggins (Chris Mannix), Demián Bichir (Bob), Tim Roth (Oswaldo Mobray), Michael Madsen (Joe Gage), Bruce Dern (General Sandy Smithers), James Parks (O.B. Jackson), Zoë Bell (Six-Horse Judy), and Channing Tatum (Jody). Directed by Quentin Tarantino from a screenplay by Tarantino.

December 25, 2015
Movie Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

At last, our long national nightmare is over: There is a new Star Wars movie, and it’s pretty good. It feels like we’ve been living with the fact of J.J. Abrams‘ The Force Awakens for as long as we’ve lived with the franchise itself—since Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas, the possibility of more Star Wars became the inevitability of Star Wars, and the cultural stewardship of this sainted popular object passed, once again, from people to the corporations that sell things to people. If you ate food, drank water, or breathed air at some point between the release of the first The Force Awakens trailer and now, odds are that its controlling bodies had signed a licensing agreement with Disney so it could stamp BB-8 or Kylo Ren on the box.

As such The Force Awakens is a film designed to play as wide as possible, to get as much right as it can for the largest number of people. It’s a huge, exciting popcorn spectacle that both painstakingly sketches out its post-Rebellion world and has no real need to hit any beats that weren’t established by the original trilogy. Its heroes are orphans. Its villain is pulled between the light and dark sides of the Force. Decades have passed since the fall of the Empire and governments and regimes have changed, but this change, which is actually quite boring when played out in Senate chambers and offices, is mostly felt in costuming and set design tweaks, and what time has done to heroes like Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). No longer controlled by an Empire, the galaxy is stalked by the First Order, a frightening band of sleek new Stormtroopers that seems to have found a balance between adherence to the force and belief in fascistic military rule. With Luke Skywalker vanished, The First Order and the Republic-backed Resistance are in a race to find him in a star system whose map has been compromised with the fall of the Empire. Like in A New Hope, that vital information is stored in the files of an otherwise unassuming droid that ends up stranded on a desert planet, searching for a way to a secret base that finds itself menaced by the enemy’s planet-destroying power.

It’s hard to fault Abrams for nostalgia—Star Wars has largely been a callback machine since Return of the Jedi, and his script, co-written with Lawrence Kasdan, is at least using familiarity to push forward into new territory. That script is unbelievably smart when it comes to handling the legacy of the original films. Luke Skywalker is a mythological figure, the stories about he and his companions rendered unbelievable in the totality of his disappearance. The Force’s role has shifted somewhat, too, from science to sorcery to religion. Leia and Han, having taken their respective roles in the new world, are at the periphery—our principals characters are the cocksure pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Stormtrooper deserter Finn (John Boyega), and desert-bound scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley). They’re an engaging trio, propelling Abrams’ vision of a Star Wars for the future while burnishing the figures they encounter as the legends of the past.

As for its villains, Abrams really dials up the Riefenstahlesque staging to mark the First Order as the terror of the galaxy, and for however terrifying Darth Vader fanboy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) appears, the fact that he’s a relative novice to the force means that the banners-and-battle-stations pageantry of these new, sleek Stormtoopers actually means something. The difference between Abrams’ conception of evil and George Lucas’ is stark. In the first action sequence, which is among the best in any Star Wars film, Stormtroopers disembark from a landing craft and fire into a crowd of villagers. Their laser bolts strike, accurate and deadly. There is blood. Finn, yet unnamed, is on his first battle mission and shakes. Dameron fires his rifle at Ren, who freezes the bolt. It hangs suspended in the scene for a minute, then slams home into a piece of machinery after Dameron’s capture. Later sequences don’t have the same impact, but they look like they were staged, directed, and shot by a crew that was having fun with everything, somehow unburdened by the fact that they are making a Star Wars for the sake of getting the gears turning again.

That The Force Awakens is fun is probably Abrams’ biggest accomplishment. For years, he’s been laboring in the shadows of Lucas and Steven Spielberg, making epics that lived and died by the same principles as the epics of his heroes. Given the sandbox he’s so clearly wanted to play in for awhile, Abrams puts on a show that manages to rival his predecessors, creating some of the most indelible images in any Star Wars film to date. The best of these take place on the desert planet of Jakuu, which is littered with the hulks of Star Destroyers abandoned after an unseen battle, an elephant graveyard that scavengers pick scraps from to clean and sell for food. The economy of Jakuu works well as a metaphor for what The Force Awakens represents, which is the stirring of a great machine that will run much longer than anyone can account for. Some of those scraps are just junk, useless pieces of space debris that look cool but serve no real purpose. Some of those scraps are the Millennium Falcon, begging to be taken to lightspeed. This one’s all lightspeed.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

With Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker). Directed by J.J. Abrams from a screenplay by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt, based on characters created by George Lucas.

December 18, 2015
Movie Review: Creed (2015)

It’s hard to write about Creed because it is a movie I fell in love with early and repeatedly, a film that had me on the verge of tears at times and past that verge at other times. So I’m going to start with what I found most impressive about director Ryan Coogler’s re-framing of Rocky and its legacy, which is that Creed has a heart of its own, not one merely borrowed from its predecessor. Considering that the likability of Rocky Balboa, one of the great screen characters of American history, is what propels the bulk of the franchise through bloat, bad script choices, and an inability to recall its own identity, Creed‘s ability to stand on its own merit is both necessary and surprising. Creed is less about the revitalization of a character that will see his 40th anniversary next year than it is about loving something so much that something new and, frankly, equal to the original is created.

It’s a Rocky film, so it is grounded largely in cliché. But, as the series has repeated over and over with a piston-like ferocity, it isn’t a fighters origins that matter so much as what he makes of them. To that end, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) was dealt a particularly bad hand of cards. The illegitimate son of boxing great Apollo Creed, Adonis is introduced as an orphan in a juvenile detention center, in lock-up for fighting to defend his dead mother’s name, which he later takes up as an adult looking to build his own name. He is adopted by Apollo’s wife (Phylicia Rashad) and raised in his home, but it’s obvious that he’s a second-class Creed: no gym will train him, and he’s stuck taking up bar fights on the weekend in Mexico for the experience. Self-taught and using his mother’s name so he can avoid the pressure of legacy, Adonis quits his job and rents a room in Philadelphia, hoping to convince his father’s former rival and training partner Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to come out of the shadows and become his trainer.

Creed recalls the narrative and structure of Rocky, playing on its themes and iconography in a way that would have been tired if this were once again a film about an aging Stallone putting on the gloves for one last fight. Wearing a hoodie and reading glasses, Rocky Balboa looks well past the aged, muscled fantasy warrior Stallone has been projecting for a decade now. He’s a hard worker whose instincts are keen, but Balboa is in his 70s and the torch he carried for so long, with his wife dead of cancer and his son estranged from him, is out. He’s a ghost, his image and name haunting Philadelphia and boxing, and Adonis finds him shuffling around a restaurant built to house both. There is the question of whether or not Rocky will train Adonis, but it’s never one that much hangs over the young Creed’s head. He came to Philadelphia with a purpose, and it’s clear that he’s going to try to achieve it with or without Balboa’s help.

That Adonis is always his own man in a film that could have easily become a redemption story is due largely to Creed‘s smart script, by Coogler and Aaron Covington. Creed is never not a Rocky film, but it’s never Rocky’s film—Stallone’s arc here is the B-story, it serves to complicate Adonis’ already complicated rise to boxing prominence, but it is told so well by Coogler and Covington and acted so well by Stallone that the melodrama outside the ring acts as Creed‘s driving force. A boxer’s life outside of boxing, in film and in reality, is necessarily reduced to recognizable, sellable figures: Balboa the working-class palooka; Creed the unknown orphan; and Creed’s eventual rival, “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew) the fighter who came from nothing and was compromised by his fame and fortune. Watching Creed, I thought of the year’s other boxing film, Southpaw, and how it reduced its fighters to the same necessary images. How the Rocky films after Rocky did the same. The assumption is that the audience’s payoff is a triumph of one body over another, which necessitates the long, erotic training sequences: if a man can transform his body enough, he can punch through any obstacle.

Creed‘s strength is knowing that there are some obstacles a boxer can’t beat. There’s time, which Balboa is fighting a losing battle against. There’s regret. There’s pride. There’s the possibility that a man’s passion and skill can very literally kill him or leave him damaged beyond repair. Winning a boxing match changes none of this, and a good boxing story knows it. A good boxing story can use that knowledge to make the rest of the boxer’s world seem sharper, more necessary than a judge’s decision at the end of 12 rounds, and Creed is a very good boxing story. It is capable, at times, of feeling like more than a boxing story. It’s the story of a city. It’s a romance. It’s all of these things at once. Trying to sleep after a particularly fruitless day, Adonis is kept awake by the louder than necessary music of his downstairs neighbor, Bianca (Tessa Thompson). She’s a beautiful woman, and Adonis falls for her immediately, but again Creed‘s script is so good that Bianca never feels ancillary until the structure of a boxing film makes her so. A talented singer coming up in Philadelphia’s club scene, Bianca suffers from progressive hearing loss and continues to make music though she’ll someday be unable to. She’s a character with her own dreams and ambitions, and, like a boxer, she’s racing against time to put together something meaningful, something that will last longer than a body that will progressively fail her. It’s something of a departure for a film like Creed that the relationship between a boxer and a woman goes two ways, that her desires are as large and as important as his, but for Coogler, the triumph of one man’s body over another is secondary to watching people create something from nothing: a relationship, a life.

If Creed falters, than it does so in its third act, where Bianca is largely Adonis’ cheerleader after the two have a falling out over a fight between he and a headlining musician at Bianca’s biggest gig. That she nails the show performance should feel triumphant, but Creed hasn’t quite figured out what to do with Bianca’s art beyond the fact that she makes it, and that its creation mirrors the way Adonis creates himself for the purpose of a fight. If there is a follow-up to Creed, then what’s already present here suggests that Coogler and his team are smart enough to not make the same decisions Stallone did decades ago, that he will focus on the humanity of Adonis and those around him, rather than the idea of him as a macho icon. Michael B. Jordan is clearly up to such a challenge, as are Stallone and Thompson. And if it is necessary to yield to the carnage of the ring (which, let’s be frank, it is), then at least boxing’s thrilling spectacle of excess seems as though its being put to some greater use, rather than being the end all of its players are the means to.

Creed (2015)

With Michael B. Jordan (Adonis Creed), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Tessa Thompson (Bianca), and Phylicia Rashad (Mary Anne Creed). Directed by Ryan Coogler from a screenplay by Coogler and Aaron Covington, based on characters created by Stallone.

December 5, 2015
Hasta La Vista, Silver Screen: Arnold Schwarzenegger on The Celebrity Apprentice

Arnold Schwarzenegger taunts a T-800 with the skull of one of its babies.

Sure, Donald Trump is running to be the man who brings about Idiocracy, but the National Broadcast Corporation couldn’t just let his show, Celebrity Apprentice, end gracefully, whatever “grace” looks like for a show where a sentient hair clippings sloshes the words “you’re fired” around like so much bourbon, more smug than he should be considering that he’s firing a stage magician who is actually quite secure in the knowledge that not catching a bullet in his teeth would, in fact, be better than another week of Celebrity Apprentice. To that end, NBC has hired a new host to take over until the show becomes President Trump’s preferred means of formal address: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has, to his credit, been known to publicly fire folks for their harebrained schemes as far back as 1994.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3Kyv_iaNs”]

Seeing Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and box office champion of the universe, on a television show that wasn’t initially developed for him is something of a shock: Though Celebrity Apprentice draws millions of viewers every week, judging a celebrity talent contest, regardless of how good the paycheck is, is a stunning departure from his attempted silver screen comeback. With the recent failure of Terminator: Genysis, however, a move like this had to be coming: If the revitalization of his most popular character flopped, what else could Schwarzenegger do to rehabilitate his image? Smoking cigars and chuckling with minor celebs actually isn’t a bad idea, considering what it’s done for his grotesque predecessor’s image in the popular consciousness.

I’m actually a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Action Star, and think that several of his post-politics films rank among his best work. Films like The Last Stand and Sabotage deal with the realities of aging and regret with much more maturity than, say, The Expendables, and Maggie, though something of a bore, sees the Austrian Oak bust out some legit acting chops in service of a father-saves-daughter plot that can’t be solved by single-handedly toppling an entire autocratic dictatorship. All of these, it should be noted, failed without much notice. When I mention Sabotage as a movie that slipped through the cracks, people look at me with their head cocked, like a dog hearing something strange and distant. Sabotage? they ask, looking it up. It’s got, like, 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. To this I say Yeah, but, only to quickly realize the futility of liking Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2015: Politics. scandal, Batman and Robin—not only is he box office poison, but it’s hard to figure any of his recent outings as future cult favorites. So here he is on a show where his big, awkward charm will play huge with your grandparents. They’ll speak of his extramarital affairs and allegations of sexual abuse in disapproving tones before adding a Yeah, but of their own about how cool he seems in the boardroom, how affable, how nice. My, how people can change.

As a fan who was rooting for a return to form, the Celebrity Apprentice announcement was a letdown. With the exception of the heavily hyped Terminator reboot, most new Schwarzenegger films are now released in the first quarter of the year, doomed to their failure and obscurity. Justifiably, it seemed as if studios had no faith to draw money at the theater, and hosting Celebrity Apprentice suggests that he knows the same, that his name is worth something, but only if it’s attached to a sure thing. How did this happen? Scandal, yes, but there’s something…off…about Schwarzenegger’s comeback pictures, something preventing them from becoming the kind of artistic successes (yes, artistic) that attract true cult followings: A decided lack of bad-ass women to compliment Schwarzenegger’s alien grace.

It’s weird, probably, to think about Arnold Schwarzenegger films in terms of the women who fought with him or against him, but as a child I was fascinated with the Schwarzeneggerian equivalent of the Bond girl. Jamie Lee Curtis, Sharon Stone, Grace Jones, Brigitte Nielsen, Linda Hamilton—they cycled through Arnold’s movies as warriors and revolutionaries, heroes and villains. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is both one of the great Final Girls in film and an affecting portrait of a woman dealing with unimaginable trauma. She’s an icon whose image matters as much to the Terminator franchise as the killer cyborg she’s running from. The first time I saw her in T2: Judgement Day, I thought That’s it—that’s the woman I want to be. And I still want to be Linda Hamilton. But, thinking about his late period films, I’m stuck. There are no icons here—just faces in the crowd.

Even Terminator: Genysis, with Sarah Connor recast as Game of Throne’s Emilia Clarke, seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the crucial role of women in Schwarzenegger’s best work. Updated for 2015, Connor mostly stands around and listens to her robot guardian and her maybe-lover from a potential future bicker about the fate of her womb while trying to stop a killer app from uploading, U2-style, onto every smartphone on Earth. Where the early Terminator films are about Connor and the dangers of being a woman and mother, Genysis included the character as a point of obligation—not to the franchise, per se, but to the idea of casting Just One Woman in an action film.

2015, thanks largely to Mad Max: Fury Road and its scores of women warriors, is the end of it being acceptable for women to exist in these mainstream universes as useless objects blocking our view of the beefcake parade, but the men responsible for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback scripts left them entirely out. The end result was the failure of Terminator: Genysis, which might, mercifully, be the end of the franchise. What’s obvious now is that Schwarzenegger needs a break, and, not to disparage the network, that’s what a stint on NBC represents. Beyond sequels for Conan (yay!) and Twins (really?), Celebrity Apprentice is the only work on Schwarzenegger’s docket for some time. When he comes back, I hope the people working on new vehicles for him reassess what, to me, is an essential part of his success. If, at the end of his television obligation, they’re unable to come up with something better than a creaky excuse for Schwarzenegger to mention his advanced age, then it’s time for him to pass the torch he used to call the Predator out with to Imperator Furiosa and the future.

October 17, 2015
The Danish Girl and Marketing Trans Narratives

Since the release of its trailer last month, something about The Danish Girl— Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper’s Eddie Redmayne-starring biopic about Lili Elbe, the first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery—has nagged at me, tugging at some part of my consciousness that refuses to allow me to look past another Oscar-hopeful film that’s cast a cis man as a trans woman. I’m a trans woman, and I’m tired of this trend (and the trend of cis actors receiving awards for trans stories while trans actors and actresses struggle to find work), but I like Redmayne and find Hooper’s films audacious enough to admit that I’ll be giving The Danish Girl a shot when it is out of the festival circuit and in wide release.

But there’s my consciousness and how it keeps poking at me, like a burr stuck in my collar. The Danish Girl isn’t like Dallas Buyer’s Club, which garnered Jared Leto an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor amidst article after article of criticism for that film’s handling of its (fictional) trans character and Leto’s handling of the acclaim. Here, I just Googled The Danish Girl, which currently clocks in at 81% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety put Redmayne’s “transformation” on its cover. WIRED helpfully suggests that I “prepare all of my tears” for the trailer. Buzzfeed, too, is excited, calling the trailer “incredibly powerful.” I’ll watch the trailer again in a minute, but my eye is wandering over to Google Images, laden with pictures of Eddie Redmayne en femme. I’m looking at the film’s poster, which is the sort of sleepy, respectable design work that will get your elders whispering excitedly about that transexual movie with the guy who played that guy. Scan down past Redmayne and his co-star, Alicia Vikander. Stop just before the credits that note that this movie, “inspired by the extraordinary true story,” is not based on Lili Elbe’s own memoir, but on a novel written by a cis man. There, the tagline: Find the courage to be yourself.

There it is: The Trans Narrative.

Trans people are useful, in mainstream culture, as an inspirational teaching tool. Here is a woman who was trapped in a man’s body, the narrative goes, and how she fixed that should serve as inspiration to us all. Well, yes and no. If popular culture is going to slowly (but surely) peddle in trans narratives as inspirational pablum, the ultimate result (one hopes) is the kind of sympathy that makes real, substantive change happen for us. When a cis actor wins an award for a trans role and dedicates his or her performance to the trans community, it is this that they are ultimately gesturing to. It’s an actor’s job to find the humanity in their character, and to translate that so that it comes across to the audience. At the same time, to watch a film or a television show with a cis actor in a trans role is to confront the reality that trans bodies and narratives are often commodified without the benefit of trans remuneration, and that the process of change through narrative storytelling is slow. In short, representation really does matter, not just in front of the camera but behind it.

How our stories are told and who tells them is just as important as any casting decision. Consider, for instance, Dallas Buyer’s Club director Jean-Marc Vallée’s that in casting for a trans role, he wasn’t “looking for the real thing,” pondering whether or not there even was such a thing as a trans actress. (The interview on CBC’s Radio Q was purged when former host Jian Ghomeshi was released amid accusations of sexual assault, but lives on through a back channel of trans- and ally-maintained Tumblrs that decried the transmisogyny of the film.) That’s not a failing on Jared Leto’s part, but a failure of vision at the highest level. Which is why, with The Danish Girl, it’s important to look past the casting of Redmayne as Elbe towards the promotional material, since this is how trans bodies will be packaged and sold until the film’s wide release, whereupon it will be repackaged and resold as a daring, brave performance by a gifted actor.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d88APYIGkjk”]

Tom Hooper, obviously, has a profound love of period pieces and biopics, and all the trappings of that genre are here. The subjects are monied, the sets are grand, the dresses are lavish. The big hook, of course, is seeing Redmayne as Lili Elbe, and, yes, he is beautiful in a dress and make-up. When a man at a party says that he feels compelled to ask her permission to kiss her (which, woah, buddy, way to seek consent in a way that borders on sociopathic), the audience says Of course! because Lili Elbe is so goddamn radiant. Red wig, red lips, green dress—she pops against the muted blues and grays of the set design, whereas Elbe’s masculine presentation (Einar Wegener, a name which, you’ll find, the film’s promotional material frequently refers to Elbe by, which is a rather deliberate act of misgendering) blends in completely with the surroundings.

This is a key piece of The Trans Narrative, which supposes that trans women (pop culture has yet to find any purchase for trans men) live dull, colorless lives until they discover lipstick and rouge, that our identities are no more complex than a fresh coat of paint. I’ve wondered, as a trans woman who has written about film for seven years, if movies were capable of something as intense and intimate as a transition narrative, and The Danish Girl’s trailer suggests that it is not. Two hours is a brief, unenviable amount of time when dealing with what is, for many, the unfathomable idea that a person might identify as something other than the gender they were assigned at birth. So the trailer focuses as much as it can on the things that have become hallmarks of The Trans Narrative: life “as a man,” the moment one discovers that they are trans, and, most titillatingly, The Surgery.

The trailer leaves The Surgery and its consequences (here, Elbe’s death) as it relates to Elbe’s life to the imagination: There’s Magnus Hirschfeld speaking quietly about the never-before-performed procedure, Elbe and Gerda Wegener declaring their devotion to one another despite the risk they are taking. The trailer thus hinges on the moment of discovery, Elbe modeling a dress for her partner’s painting.

Hooper’s cinematographer shoots Redmayne’s hands, feet, and face in an extreme close-up, resembling Hooper’s brazen decision to focus tight on his actors’ faces in Les Miserables. The way the trailer cuts from stockings to bodice to face lends Elbe’s moment of discovery a sense of tactility that is frankly impressive, given that we’re not there fingering the dress with Redmayne. But it’s also knowingly erotic—here, we’re voyeurs looking in on a private moment between husband and wife, and the look upon Elbe’s face as she traces the dress is one of pleasure and desire. It’s also the look of a person who, oddly, seems to have never touched a dress before, as The Trans Narrative demands of its protagonist that every feminine article she comes in contact with carries the shock of something new.

Despite the frock draped upon her posed body, Elbe remains a mute, gray figure in her mute, gray house. The trailer’s first real touch of color breezes into the room at the precise moment Elbe discovers, to her surprise, that she’s a woman: It’s Amber Herd’s Oola Paulson, dressed like she’s completely unaware of the somber tone Hooper is otherwise aiming for. She bequeaths unto Lili her name and a kiss—color!—and cuts to an establishing shot of the lights in a room turning on for a party.

It’s hard to miss the metaphor here, but again, it’s in keeping with the narrative. Here’s a lifeless, broken person in need of repair, a trans person made better through the concern and kindness of her cis contemporaries. I’ve got nothing against framing The Danish Girl as a love story where two people have to work through a series of incredible (and incredibly dangerous) circumstances (even if that’s, as they say, not the whole story), but as a trans narrative, again, we have a failure of imagination that is inherent to the system that birthed it.

The Danish Girl is a movie about a man who wants to become a woman, which is a false narrative cis culture uses to “understand” us. Lili Elbe was a woman, and her story is one of a woman taking great pains for society to accept her as such. Casting a trans actor in this version of events would change nothing without a fundamental shift in the production’s understanding of what’s at stake for Elbe and the trans women that came before and after her. That Hooper’s production appears to suck all the marrow out of this story is hardly surprising. This is the business of inspiration, after all, to take real people and turn them into a message. To take a woman and reduce her to a Girl.

October 7, 2015