Colette Arrand

Category: Film

  • Movie Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

    Movie Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

    essentialWes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, like many of his films, functions as a nostalgist’s guide to childhood and the weightiness of romance. The difference here is that Anderson focuses on two children, children who, unlike Rushmore‘s Max Fisher, are actually children. They don’t approach love in Fisher’s clinical, precise way, nor do they regard life as a bitter procession of tragic events, as do the man-children of The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited. Their way is more innocent, one ignorant of societal norm and responsibility, but still couched in the grim truths of reality. Considering how movies now try to appeal to children through the liberal use of rainbow wigs and catchphrases, this attitude, and the intelligence of Moonrise Kingdom, seems reliquary, lost to the past.

    In the summer of 1965, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kora Hayward) run away together, into the secluded New England wilderness of New Penzance, an island Suzy and her family live on which is only accessible by plane or ferry. The pair spent an entire year plotting their escape, beginning with a chance meeting between the two while performing in a school play, and continuing through a series of business-like correspondences. Sam is an orphan and a Khaki Scout. Suzy is the record- and book-collecting daughter of wealthy parents who are strangers to each other. Same brings with him camping equipment and the ability to read maps. Suzy has her records, her books, her binoculars, and her cat. They are decidedly ill-prepared for the coming journey.

    Their plot discovered, Sam and Suzy’s flight brings together the disparate members of the small community. Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura Bishop (Frances McDormand)—Suzy’s parents—Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis)—the island’s lone police officer—and Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton)—the meticulous leader of New Penzance’s pack of Khaki Scouts—spread out and go looking for the kids. The remaining Khaki Scouts, having long considered Sam a weirdo, hunt for him like he’s an animal they want to mount on the treehouse wall. When they’re found, it’s in a beachfront kingdom they’ve made for themselves. It’s just them, the cat, her records and books, a campfire, and the moon. It’s a perfect kingdom—an idyllic place right out of the books Suzy carries—but, like all utopias, Sam and Suzy’s piece of land is doomed from the start.

    Walt and Laura Bishop, ever the reactionary, mostly absent parents, expressly forbid their daughter from seeing that strange boy again. Sam’s foster parents decided they can’t handle the responsibility anymore, so Captain Sharp takes him in while Social Services (here represented by Tilda Swinton) flies to the island so Sam can be shipped off to a juvenile refuge. The Khaki Scouts, meanwhile, having learned a valuable lesson about friendship and impressed with Sam’s resiliency  decide to spring the couple and get them to the mainland, that wild, unspoiled stretch of earth to large and secretive for even the most obsessive parents and public servants to uncover them.

    That the relationship between Sam and Suzy never wears thin is Moonrise Kingdom‘s most considerable accomplishment. The threat of precociousness looms large over every story about a couple of crazy kids, but Anderson manages to exercise restraint, stopping just short of letting his children run amok in the woods. Again, there’s something to be said here about the difference between Anderson and Roman Coppola’s script in comparison that of any other recent children’s entertainment: say what you will about Anderson’s appreciation for and liberal application of whimsy and hipster quirk, but his characters don’t abandon their parents so they can gulp soda, gobble candy, and have endless and endlessly merchandisable fun. Nobody sits Suzy down for some big, lame speech about morals, and halfway through the one he delivers to Sam, Captain Sharp realizes how stupid, futile, and condescending he’s being and pours out a little beer for the sad kid whose dreams have been wrecked. The adults at the corners of this film are more than vacuous governors of joy. They bring their own problems to the island. They’re as ill-prepared to face them as their runaways.

    The most obvious problem is that Laura is cheating on Walt with Captain Sharp. Beneath the unhappiness of this particular damaged relationship, there’s a subcontinent of grief. The Bishops, of course, remain together for their children. Captain Sharp, living alone in a trailer on the island, is by no means a bad person. Neither, for that matter, is Laura. He is driven to her by loneliness, she to him because he represents something wholly different—and thus more exciting—than the family she knows. Theirs is a relationship running parallel to Sam and Suzy’s. Where the Bishops would seek to end it, Sharp comes to see himself in the orphan, seeking a way to keep him out of the system.

    The outlier here is Scout Master Ward. As tempting as it is to lump him in with Anderson’s stable of man-children, few of his characters live as meticulously or selflessly. He, like many adults, is oblivious to the inner-workings of the children he looks after. When he realizes this, he becomes Moonrise Kingdom‘s most vulnerable character. He considers himself a failed scout master when Sam runs away, is depressed when Sam tenders his resignation from the troop, and is largely helpless before Social Services. He begins the film as a man as well-manicured as any number of Anderson’s dollhouse sets. Like New Penzance, the Belafonte, Rushmore, and the Darjeeling Limited, Ward’s put-togetherness is a facade, something that’s beginning to crack and fissure.

    Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s eighth film, and hardly the first to deal with dysfunction and longing. He’s no chameleon—even the claymation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox looked, felt, and sounded like something distinctly of his brand—but Anderson continues finding subtle ways to express his themes differently. Here, it’s the intersection of Sam and Suzy’s dream with the reality of the adults who watch over them. The lives led by the Bishops, Captain Sharp, and Scout Master Ward are fractured and sometimes terrible. However well they think they’re hiding this, however much they assume their children remain oblivious, the two understand the problems of the real world, perhaps better than their wards. That the unknown holds so much potential is why they run away. But potential is often not realized, and is rarely perfect. Their utopia, the Moonrise Kingdom, lies at the edge of the sea. Storm clouds are gathering. Look at their empire. How easily the ocean could sweep it away.

    Moonrise Kingdom. With Jared Gilman (Sam), Kara Hayward (Suzy), Bruce Willis (Captain Sharp), Edward Norton (Scout Master Ward), Bill Murray (Walt Bishop), Frances McDormand (Laura Bishop), Tilda Swinton (Social Services), Jason Schwartzman (Cousin Ben), and Harvey Keitel (Commander Pierce). Directed by Wes Anderson from a screenplay by Anderson and Roman Coppola.

  • Best Worst Movie, or Worst Movie? — Zombie Strippers (2008)

    Best Worst Movie, or Worst Movie? — Zombie Strippers (2008)

    Cultish devotees of film often celebrate failure, box office, critical, or otherwise. By designating awards to the year’s worst movies, organizing midnight screenings of a film on the fringe, and writing endlessly about one flop or another, bad movies have a way of sticking around well beyond their typical cultural sell-by date. The phrase “so bad it’s good” is often ascribed to these movies when, in a pre-Internet, pre-Mystery Science Theatre 3000 world, they used to be considered so bad, they’re virtually forgotten. In Best Worst Movie, or Worst Movie? Fear of a Ghost Planet takes a good, hard look at the supposed jewels hiding in a cinematic junk heap. This week, it’s 2008’s strippers-and-zombies epic, Zombie Strippers.

    In 2008, as a means of introducing a decidedly NSFW review of the straight-to-DVD breasts-and-gore-fest Zombie Strippers, I wrote that I had never visited a strip club. A weird boast, but something that remains true four years later. My impression of the typical strip club is still informed by what I’ve seen in movies and what I’ve heard from people who have been. In my mind, they’re a strange mixture of Las Vegas glitz and Detroit misery, over-the-top routines and under-the-table transactions, beautiful women bearing it all while also bearing scars. Zombie Strippers presents a world wholly unlike the one I believe in, a world where the only desperation in the job is that it’s been made illegal by a long-reigning Bush/Cheney oligarchy, the only desperate people behind the club’s closed doors the men desperate to get their rocks off. This being a movie starring Jenna Jameson, they do just that. Then they’re eaten.

    This is the movie that launched dozens of hopeful Strippers vs. _______ films into the straight-to-DVD sea, and is, in most ways, the only one worth a cursory glance. Beyond Jameson—who plays, appropriately enough, the lead stripper-turned-zombie-stripper—Zombie Strippers functions as an introductory class in stunt casting. Blink and you’ll miss Tito Ortiz as the club’s cowardly bouncer. Stay long enough, and you’ll see Robert Englund in one of his meatiest non-Nightmare roles, the sleazy proprietor of Club Rhinoceros who offers up “face dances” to his customers, leering at the dismay of his dancers, a cadre of women cast as if director Jay Lee was trying to complete a Stereotypical Stripper BINGO card. Vying for the sliver of spotlight that isn’t Jameson’s are a goth (Roxy Saint), Jameson’s rival (Shamron Moore), and a bubbly Christian girl (Jennifer Holland), new to the city but determined to make enough money to keep up with the bills for grandma’s colostomy.

    Since Jenna Jameson’s character is the first to be turned into a zombie, it’s Holland’s Jessy whom the film comes to rest upon. When it turns out that being an undead, rotting stripper results in more turned heads and flashed cash, she’s left in a pickle more typical of Ugly Duckling teen romances: submit to peer pressure and join up with the gaggle of flesh-eaters, or be herself, lose everything, and end up mid-afternoon lunch. Given her cornhusking ways, aww shucks accent, and her devotion to Jesus Christ, what she ultimately decides shouldn’t be hard to figure out. The rest of the strippers aren’t nearly as levelheaded. Once the guys in the club go nuts for Jameson and Saint’s living dead girl routine—which isn’t a world of difference from the 15 minutes of stripping Zombie Strippers featured before anybody lost a limb—the rest of the strippers line up and ask to be bitten.

    Wondering why the women zombies can strip while the male ones moan and shamble? That’s just the first instance of Zombie Strippers trying its hardest to have and eat as much cake as possible. Early, a scientist explains that the zombie virus remains pure in women and goes bad in men—reanimated women soldiers come back with the strength and ability of ten highly skilled operatives, while reanimated women shuffle around with their arms outstretched. So a good stripper becomes a super stripper when bitten, twirling around the pole like a tornado while the bros in the club make it rain. If I were to die tomorrow, the zombified stripping in this movie would likely go down as the least erotic thing I’ve seen in a movie. The routines of the live strippers here rate a close second.

    Famously—if anything in Zombie Strippers remains famous four years later—the inspiration for this film comes from an existentialist play. Existentialism’s fingerprints are everywhere, from the name of the town (Sartre) to the hardcover copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Jameson reads (“This really, really makes sense now,” she claims) to and the identity crises suffered by the strippers who still number among the living, but the film is only playing at being smart. In terms of depth, Zombie Strippers‘ treatment of existentialist thought runs as shallow as its criticisms of the Bush presidency, a compendium of bumper-sticker sloganeering laid out on a one-page pamphlet dropped onto a group of unsuspecting shoppers at a mall by an anarchist collective trying to hide the gigantic cups of Jamba Juice occupying whatever hand isn’t striking down the man.

    The fact is, Zombie Strippers is as bad—and, at times, as bigoted—as the machine it purports to rage against. The closest this film comes to making a solid argument is when Holland’s character goes up on stage for the first time and tearfully enters her routine. The men surrounding the stage, pumping their fists and waving dollar bills in the air, moan and gnash their teeth like a zombie horde. Men are pigs! the movie lazily points out, but when Robert Englund holds his Mexican janitor’s hand up to the poor guy’s face and asks what color it is, when that janitor is naming his bullets after Mexican heroes before calling the last two “Cinco De Mayo” and “guacamole” because the screenwriters can’t use Wikipedia, when the zombie super-strippers, rotting on stage, take to insulting each other’s hair and cellulite, when the club’s black DJ approaches a a zombified stripper and, in an effort to subdue her, uses a pimp-slap, the marketing copy of this film being some subversive political and social thought piece goes out the window, leaving Zombie Strippers with one leg to stand on: its special effects.

    Those, at times, are impressive. Beyond their purpose, what often separates SyFy Original Movies from a proper release in theatres or on a VOD platform is that the special effects fail to live up to the promise of the week’s exotic, too-expensive-to-be-properly-realized title. The zombie make-up here is often pretty good, the best fleshwalker being the unfortunate patron who has his head pried apart like a bag of chips. Chin distended and tongue lolling around, it’s the closest thing to horror in Zombie Strippers, horror not being the film’s aim, but nevertheless an effective image. The work done on Jameson and the rest of the strippers once again suggests that Jay Lee wanted something that’d generate buzz—Jenna Jameson, zombie!—but not at the risk of failing to titillate those who popped the DVD in just wanting to see zombies strip. That goes out the window in the film’s final firefight, as Lee uses every hokey CGI trick at his disposal to crush zombie heads like watermelons, blow their heads up, and have Jameson fire billiard balls howitzer-like from her vagina before getting torn apart, limb by limb. The only things keeping this from SyFy’s Saturday line-up? Nudity, and Robert Englund. That’s an incredibly thin line.

    I’ve yet to see anything anointing Zombie Strippers the dubious honorarium of being “so bad it’s good,” but I’ve seen a lot of processed trash in the years following Grindhouse, and this example still stands out, made more noticeable by movie like this year’s Strippers vs. Werewolves and the dozen-or-so uninspired zombie movies that rise every year to stalk the OnDemand section of your local cable operator. It’s easy to see why so many get made: this is a fairly lavish production in comparison to most, but it’s still cheap enough to score a profit on even the most modest return, the big set-pieces looking like a bunch of kids playing a point-and-click shooter at the local arcade. The big, egregious sin here is dressing up a story about strippers and the zombies that bite them as something more than a 90-minute buffet of breasts and blood. Only those with the most sophomoric tastes will find anything here worth remembering. I imagine that sad bastard before his television, gnashing his teeth and pumping his fist. What he would give to be eaten alive by one of these women. No judgement here. We all have immature fantasies about the first time. It’s growing up that matters, and in that regard, Zombie Strippers has aged about as fine as the prospect of a face dance from one of its stars.

    Best Worst Movie, or Worst Movie: Worst Movie

    Zombie Strippers. Directed by Jay Lee. With Jenna Jameson (Kat), Robert Englund (Ian), Jennifer Holland (Jessy), and Roxy Saint (Lillith). Released April 18, 2008, by Stage 6 Films.

  • Movie Review: Bernie (2012)

    Movie Review: Bernie (2012)

    essentialImmediately, Bernie doesn’t seem like much of a film beyond the performance of Jack Black in the titular role. Based on Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly article “Midnight In the Garden of East Texas,” the pseudo-documentary style director Richard Linklater brings to the story of genteel assistant funeral director turned murderer Bernie Tiede (Black) seems destined to keep things small potatoes. Beyond the core cast, Bernie fills itself out with character actors and townsfolk, talking into the camera about a beloved community figure—devout christian, endlessly charitable, patron of the arts—who nobody believes is capable of grisly murder. Yes, Bernie is a film buoyed by Black, Matthew McConaughey, and Shirley MacLaine, but as the community continues to assert Bernie’s innocence (despite his tearful confession), it’s clear that Linklater’s aim is not merely strong, character driven drama, but the portraiture of a town driven temporarily insane by its passion for a favorite son.

    Bernie is most certainly guilty, but what he’s guilty of beyond the murder of curmudgeonly millionaire widow Marjorie Nugent (MacLaine) is the question the townsfolk pose to exasperated D.A. Danny Buck (McConaughey). Figuring that Bernie is otherwise “too light in the loafers” to shoot someone in cold blood, they propose that he must have been temporarily insane to shoot Nugent in the back and stuff her in the freezer. It’s a fair point, one that Linklater is careful to examine. Bernie, who routinely dotes upon the little old ladies of his church, the newly widowed women who happen into his funeral home, gives his life to Nugent. As the owner of a prominent local bank, she’s the kind of person who’d shred a person’s loan application before thinking to look at it. Is it Bernie’s persistance that wins her over, or does she see in him a simpleton rube, a man she can exploit endlessly and without complaint? How culpable is Mrs. Nugent in her own demise, the townsfolk ask?

    Linklater crafts an extremely effective procedural despite there being little in the way of actual police work. His film acts as an anthropologist, unearthing details of the relationship between Bernie and Nugent—who wouldn’t be driven crazy by someone’s habit of chewing each bite of refried beans 25 times?—and examining a D.A. driven to wit’s end by a city sympathetic towards a confessed killer. McConaughey’s performance is less showy than Black’s—indeed, Linklater seems one of only a few directors well-suited to Jack Black’s bombast and propensity to sing—but serves as an anchoring neutral between the overwhelming niceness of Bernie and the spiteful nastiness of the woman he serves. The townsfolk paint Danny Buck as a guy just seeking reelection at Bernie’s expense, and the way Buck brags about the way he’s nabbed perpetrators in the past, that’s more than a bitter claim. But this case is a no-doubter, something he should be able to sleepwalk through. Instead, he’s assailed in restaurants, pestered at the grocery store, taunted by everybody in town that they’ll acquit Bernie if called to the jury. Sure, it’d be easy to acquit a man like Bernie Tiede, but what kind of justice is that?

    It’s the trial of Bernie Tiede that serves as the best scene here. After moving the case to a different county, Danny Buck does everything he can to paint Bernie as a big city liberal, and Bernie plays right into his hands. His love of theatre, the vacations he and Mrs. Nugent took to New York, the first class seats on the plane to the city—outside of Carthage, away from those who know him and his victim, Bernie’s a freak, a man who murdered and old lady for her considerable fortune. It’s brilliant, the way Buck barbecues Bernie, and the disbelief with which the accused responds is genuine. He’ll admit to being a murderer, but a monster? Hardly.

    Bernie. With Jack Black (Bernie Tiede), Shirley MacLaine (Marjorie Nugent), and Matthew McConaughey (Danny Buck). Directed by Richard Linklater from a screenplay by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth, based on the Texas Monthly article “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas” by Hollandsworth.

  • Movie Review: V/H/S (2012)

    Movie Review: V/H/S (2012)

    V/H/S is a horror anthology presented as one complete story, the tale of a gang of thugs who break into a house to recover a specific video cassette for an unidentified employer. They break into a seemingly empty house, scouring it for the cassette, and make two discoveries: a pile of tapes in the basement, and a room with a dead body slumped in a chair. The dead man has apparently been watching some cassettes, so one member of the crew is tasked with watching what’s already loaded into the VCR. Like a child invoking the Candyman in the bathroom mirror, the thought of pressing play and glimpsing whatever the dead guy watched proves irresistible, and, thanks to a cadre of tapes directed by a constellation of indie horror filmmakers, the loop binding together this anthology is closed. Not logically, and not so far as it bears on the plot of the wraparound feature, but it’s closed.

    The nicest thing I can say about V/H/S is that it proves that the horse franchises like Paranormal Activity and [rec] (not to mention Chronicle and any number of cheaply made riffs on The Exorcist) have taken to beating isn’t quite dead yet. There are a number of good, inventive uses of the handheld camera here, a few new tricks to a genre that’d practically exhausted itself with The Blair Witch Project, but they’re all put to middling use. A spy camera hidden in a pervert’s glasses, a paranormal plot that’s carried out mostly through ongoing Skype conversations, a killer who appears on film as a glitch—these are nice gimmicks, but they don’t exactly lead horror—first person or otherwise—anywhere new or exciting.

    The segment that comes closest to breaking new ground is Ti West’s “Second Honeymoon,” which is perhaps most like a full length found footage horror movie in that the majority of it is comprised of filler—the “umms” and “ahhs” of a couple roadtripping out west to rekindle their flame. As obvious as this seems, the difference here is that “Second Honeymoon” is only twenty minutes long. Those “umms” and “ahhs” aren’t filler, but are essential in building the couple as some sort of unit, their disagreements hinting at the problems they’ve set out to overcome. Thinking of how much time is wasted in the typical full length setting up the cameras and explaining to the future victims how that rig is going to definitively prove that the house they’re occupying is haunted, “Second Honeymoon” is perhaps the first horror movie about people with cameras that show those people using their cameras as real people would. That it relies on a big, shocking twist is a little cheap, but manages to encourage a second viewing.

    The same can’t be said of the rest of V/H/S‘s segments, the shocks and reveals of which are fairly stock. David Bruckner’s “Amateur Night” was singled out as the best of the bunch by The A.V. Club but one needs only to observe the strange, quiet girl a group of dunk, high dudes take back to their hotel room to know that she’s literally a maneater, and the “glitch killer” of “Tuesday the 17th,” cool as he sounds, is a slasher killing horny teens in the woods with a knife.  “10/31/98,” which sends a group of dudes to an abandoned-looking house they think is first the site of a party, then the sight of a pretty cool haunted house attraction, manages to mash together the beats of a feature-length haunted house yarn into a compact, compelling short feature, but, like its cohorts, is let down by its ending, a bit of lazy storytelling employed by filmmakers who ran out of steam once they let the protagonists out of the house.

    In terms of sheer bugfuck weirdery, Joe Swanberg’s “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” takes the cake, presenting itself first as a straightforward haunted apartment scenario before barreling into uncharted territory without pausing for the benefit of those unable to divine Swanberg’s scant signs and portents. “The Sick Thing That Happened,” despite its obviously low budget, contains within it elements of body horror and psychodrama, the webcam cinematography gleaning some genuine tension from a student apartment distinguishable from every other such apartment by how nice and clean it is. The reveal doesn’t quite work  in terms of shock—the relationship between the girl and her doctor-in-training boyfriend works best when they’re talking to each other—but it paints the boyfriend in an interesting, unflattering light, casting “The Sick Thing That Happened” as a story about male-female control, with some creepy ghost kids thrown in as a kicker.

    For whatever bumps and jolts the individual segments contain, the only uncomfortable moment in V/H/S comes early in the wraparound, when the gang who eventually break into the house film themselves sexually assaulting a woman in a parking structure. There’s a lot of sex in V/H/S, which is perhaps de rigueur in the genre-at-large, but there’s a cold, septic nastiness to the way the men in this film treat women. The “top-sharking” jerks in the wraparound, the drunken leches who plan to film themselves having sex with women they’ve gotten too drunk to function, the husband who pleads with his wife to allow him to film them having sex—the only people who aren’t fooling themselves here are the horny teenagers, who claim to be exactly what they are, and the dude talking to his girlfriend on Skype.

    It’s tempting to claim that the sex and sadism in V/H/S is a comment on the way men look at women, but it’s no good to just say “men are douchebags” without the sexual tension resolving in any meaningful way. In fact, the women here are deceitful, obsessive banshees in their own right, letting the “nice guy” of the group off any kind of guilty hook because he never managed to get his dick out of his pants, leading her friends into a situation she knows is dangerous, and otherwise “justifying” every untoward act of male sexual aggression. Ugliness is something I have no real issue with, but the ugliness of V/H/S is so often unaddressed that it bears wondering what’s meant as message, and what’s meant merely to titillate. The two segments that best address their male/female dynamic—”Second Honeymoon” and “The Strange Thing That Happened”—happen to be the best of the anthology, with “10/31/98” serving as the outlier that doesn’t fit the de facto theme. It’s a shame, then, that “Second Honeymoon” ends up pandering to the pud-pullers in the audience. Those five seconds may just be the strongest indication of where the anthology’s head is at.

    V/H/S. An anthology directed by Adam Wingard (“Tape 56”), David Bruckner (“Amateur Night”), Ti West (“Second Honeymoon”), Glenn McQuaid (“Tuesday the 17th”), Joe Swanberg (“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”), and Radio Silence (“10/31/98”).

  • Movie Review: Haywire (2012)

    Movie Review: Haywire (2012)

    essentialEfficient. That’s Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire in one word. These days, it’s nothing for a thriller to hop around the globe, to squeeze in swerves and car chases, to fashion for themselves a superhuman killing machine. Haywire does these things as well—if not better—than its contemporaries, but its pace is ruthless, breakneck. At 92-minutes, there is no fat on its bones, and no queasy-cam gimmicks, either. When Haywire stops to take a breath, it’s only to show how tightly the net around its heroine is constricted.

    Malory Kane (Gina Carano) is our superhuman, the focus of a plot that aims to take her out. As Haywire opens, shes sitting in a cafe in upstate New York, sipping tea. Before she has time to finish her cup, she’s locked in a brutal fight with Aaron (Channing Tatum), a man she worked with on a project in Barcelona. A good samaritan (Michael Angarano) hands her the keys to his car, and the two speed off for Parts Unknown, Kane narrating her story to the mostly terrified teenager. The story is simple enough. Kane’s a contractor who works for a private firm that governments hire out to glean information, recover lost assets, rescue dissidents—spy business. She’s requested to be a member of a team extracting a hostage from Barcelona. Her boss, Jeremy (Ewan McGregor), is hesitant at first, but when his employers—U.S. governmental employee Alex Coblenz (Michael Douglas) and Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas), a man with no specific origin—agree to certain contractual details, Kane is put on the case, the hostage is rescued, and all is well. Or so it seems.

    It happens that Jeremy’s business is wholly reliant upon Malory Kane and that, after the dissolution of their personal relationship, Kane is looking to get out of her business obligations with him, as well. First, he gets her to agree to an assignment that’s pretty much a “paid vacation,” a chance to persuade an agent to join Jeremy’s team while at the same time making contact with that agent’s mark under the guise of being a power couple. That agent, Paul (Michael Fassbender), has been assigned to kill the hostage Kane rescued, plant evidence on the body pointing to Kane, then kill her, making it look like an act of self-defense. Simple enough, except that Kane ends up killing him and going on the run, making her way back to the United States to clear her name, uncover the conspiracy against her, and gain a measure of revenge.

    Haywire‘s frequent action set pieces are engaging, covering all the bases. Across rooftops, on foot, and behind the wheel of a car, it’s clear that there’s nobody like Malory Kane, who, when she is brought down, succumbs only to the sheer number of people set against her. Soderbergh’s films, regardless of how kinetic they often feel, rarely move like Haywire, which has a fluidity and clarity of vision rarely afforded to a typical thriller. There’s an effortless cool to the way he films Carano chasing down her prey, jumping from roof to roof, and employing her dazzling array of mixed martial arts maneuvers.

    Speaking of Carano, this is her first feature film, though it would be surprising were this to prove her last. Carano is granted quite the set of crutches in Haywire: she’s guided by McGregor, Douglas, and Bill Paxton (as Kane’s father), prodded by Banderas, and romanced by Fassbender and the great lunkhead Tatum, who, given this film and his self-effacing turns in 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike, is perhaps smarter than anybody has yet to give him credit for. Though she sometimes looks out-of-depth when standing across from somebody the caliber of Michael Douglas—it’s worth pointing out that whatever charisma she possesses has, thus far, only been used in brief flashes during pre- and post-fight interviews and press conferences—she mostly holds her own.

    It helps that Soderbergh is a director who’s proven masterful at identifying and exploiting the strengths of his cast. The choice of Carano in this role is no less unusual than, say, his choice of Sasha Grey as an escort, and Carano’s fighting skills are put to good use here, the reality of maneuvers like the cross armbreaker and the triangle choke only further embellishing the punishment she deals out. Tatum’s character has his arm broken in Haywire‘s opening sequence. Watching Carano swiftly grab his arm and snap it back, it’s little wonder that Tatum later appears in a cast, arm hanging useless at his side. Here, it’s the little flourishes of realism that matter, that paint Carano as a budding star as opposed to a neat little stunt casting. Like her character, it’s clear that Gina Carano can do things no other actress is capable of. So long as she avoids becoming a female Expendable, her presence in the genre can only change it for the better.

    Haywire. With Gina Carano (Malory Kane), Channing Tatum (Aaron), Ewan McGregor (Jeremy), Bill Paxton (John Kane), Michael Fassbender (Paul), Michael Angarano (Scott), Antonio Banderas (Rodrigo), and Michael Douglas (Alex Coblenz). Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs.

  • Movie Review: Seven Psychopaths (2012)

    Movie Review: Seven Psychopaths (2012)

    Seven Psychopaths is a movie about making movies. More specifically, it’s a movie about writing movies, putting it in the same ballpark as Barton Fink and Adaptation, but with a few crucial differences. Its protagonist, for example, never holds himself up as some great artist, and once he gets into his story, he approaches his characters with zeal, if not a true sense of where those stories are going. Where Barton Fink and Adaptation (and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, which was technically about a playwright) are darkly comic, psychologically-intense mirrors of the men who wrote them, Seven Psychopaths leaves darkness out of the equation. There’s scores of violence here, buckets of blood and more than a few charred corpses, but never a sense that it’s weighing too heavily on the writer’s mind. He puts pen to paper, unconscious of the fact that he’s part of his story’s tapestry.

    To begin, Irish screenwriter Marty (Colin Farrell, standing in for director Martin McDonagh) is struggling to get through the first draft of his new movie, Seven Psychopaths. His agent is calling him, his girlfriend is barely tolerating him, but he’s got a movie about seven psychopath and not one good psychopath to write about. His friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), an aspiring actor, points out an article in the newspaper about a serial killer known as The Jack of Diamonds, who kills ranking members of organized crime syndicates. He also tells Marty about a Quaker (Harry Dean Stanton) who haunts the man who killed his daughter until, having suffered a complete mental breakdown, the killer commits suicide. He does this guaranteeing his own damnation, but figures he’ll never see the Quaker again. He’s wrong though, as the last thing he sees is the Quaker slitting his own throat. Two psychopaths down.

    Despite Billy taking out an ad in the paper for psychopaths looking to tell their stories (a contrivance that leads to the always welcome Tom Waits telling the grisly tale of his and a lost love’s quest to go on a cross-country killing spree) and his wish to see the best damn movie called Seven Psychopaths possible, Seven Psychopaths isn’t about Marty’s quest to write a movie, but about friendship and bonding. After establishing Billy and his partner Hans (Christopher Walken) as a pair of dognappers who’ve abducted the prized Shih Tzu of an emotionally unstable mob boss (Woody Harrelson), the three head out to the desert to camp out, eat peyote, and finish Marty’s movie. Billy has designs on finishing the movie with a grand, climactic, somehow cathartic shootout involving the real and fictional psychopaths they’ve crossed paths with, but both Marty and Hans are pacifists who eschew violence and who want Seven Psychopaths to stand for something more.

    As entertaining as the conversation between these three on the nature of violence (in life and in film) is, none of Seven Psychopaths‘ higher ambitions hold up to even cursory scrutiny. Marty speaks of Buddism at one point, but in this very western way that feels ill-considered and improperly applied. There’s a point to his discourse, and the way he, Billy, and Hans speak leading up to the dramatic final shootout is one of McDonagh’s many meta-textual winks and nods, but at no point does it feel like the cleverness of Seven Psychopaths is being put to any true purpose. With nowhere to go, the meta-textuality of Seven Psychopaths tends to distract, rather than enhance.

    But Seven Psychopaths doesn’t need a smart hook to succeed. It does so largely on the merits of its characters—most of whom play like outsized urban legends—and the actors occupying them. There’s a kind of sweetness to Billy’s quest to cure his friend of writer’s sickness, to his encouraging Marty to lay off the booze and put pen to paper, an endless charm to Sam Rockwell’s manic energy. Marty’s frustrations and breakthroughs in writing Seven Psychopaths are perhaps the most realistic of any movie outside Adaptation. There’s something about the way he dreads hearing whatever story Waits’s character has to tell, followed by the flash of recognition once it becomes clear that he’s hearing a really, really good story.

    The film belongs to Walken, who this year has put aside soulless comedies using him as a man with a funny voice to once again become an actor who has within him the very soul of strangeness. His brand of peculiarity is one that is rapidly disappearing from movies, replaced by increasingly plasticine imitations. Hans is no great stretch for Walken, but it has been awhile since a character of such conviction has stumbled into a bloodbath like Seven Psychopaths. When he talks about a non-violent resolution to Marty’s problem of the Vietnamese warrior who has come to America to kill the men responsible for the slaughter of his village, there’s weight to his proposal. After all, he’s sat across from the man who killed his wife. He didn’t have the urge to pull a gun.

    Rating: Seven Psychopaths. Directed by Martin McDonagh. With Colin Farrell (Marty), Sam Rockwell (Billy), Christopher Walken (Hans), Woody Harrelson (Charlie), Michael Pitt (Larry), Michael Stuhlbarg (Tommy), Abbie Cornish (Kaya), Harry Dean Stanton (Man In Hat), Olga Kurylenko (Angela), Gabourey Sidibe (Sharice), and Tom Waits (Zachariah). Released October 12, 2012, by CBS Films.