Category: Film

Movie Review: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Forty years later, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shouldn’t be as powerful as it ultimately is. Tobe Hooper’s film is written in the bones of anybody who has even a slight appreciation for horror, and has been diminished by sequels and remakes and the continued recycling of its plot and scares. When I saw it recently at an anniversary screening, the audience spent much of their time laughing. Until Leatherface. With his hammer. With his mask. With his chainsaw. The plight of young adults looking to screw speaks to the young, I guess, but a man wearing another person’s skin over his face? That’s universal terror.

The film is unsettling from the opening note of its score, which is set against the title card’s laughable claim that the young men and women who found their way into Leatherface’s clutches were enjoying an “idyllic summer” (because the idylls of youth are often spent wondering if your grandfather was dug up by a cult of art-maniacs and pissing into a bottle on the side of the freeway). The first shots are disorienting, a sequence of flashbulbs casting an intense, brief light on rotting meat. Human meat. A corpse in the awful Texas summer. There’s nothing right about the world here, and yet, for the kids assembled in that van, there’s nothing to do but move forward. The worst is always behind them until it’s right there, screaming and swinging his chainsaw.

It’s never clear why Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her brother Franklin (Paul Partain), and their friends (Allen Danziger, William Vail, and Teri McMinn) decide to stay the night at the old Hardesty homestead. They’re out of gas (because of course they are) and the closest station won’t have any until morning, but the house they’re planning to sleep in is a husk (because of course it is) and their van is smeared with the blood of a lunatic hitchhiker, who slashed Franklin with a straight razor after terrifying everybody in the van by pulling faces and cutting open the palm of his hand. They can’t leave, but it doesn’t seem like they want to. Texas is gritty and hot, a miserable, sick place where people tailgate at the local cemetery, but the Hardestys can’t help where they are, nor what those places do to them.

This is America, Hooper’s film argues, a brutal land that hides away its psychopaths in places where they can quietly maim the innocent. It’s an argument made more visceral by the conditions the film was shot under—brutal sixteen-hour days in excessive heat, with no pay up front. The sweat, exhaustion, exasperation, and terror is real. But the screening I attended would seem to suggest that these things no longer hold sway the way they did in 1974. The audience laughed at the crazed hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), Grandfather (John Dugan), Old Man (Jim Siedow) and Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) in drag; twice—when the opening scene reveals the corpse art, and when the family has Sally over for dinner—a man raised a digital camera to his eye and took pictures of the screen. As The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was creating its grim spectacle from ramshackle houses and chicken bones, I found myself as agitated by the crowd watching the film as I was by the film being watched.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not a film that allows its audience to get comfortable for long, though. Leatherface’s murders are too brutal for that, deftly edited so that the shock of seeing a man get clubbed by a hammer quickly moves to the nausea of watching him twitch on the ground. Though its influence is unmistakable, few American slasher films work to this level. Its elements—the houses, the masks, the power tools, the fresh-faced victims—are endlessly transplanted, but are powerless when divorced from their original context. Its descendants play up the camp or the gore, gaze longingly at the bodies of those wandering into hell, or are completely undermined by the utter clarity of digital cinema. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre warns the audience that the events it is about to see are real, then presents those events through so many layers of grime and filth it’s hard to believe that anybody left the set unscathed. If the image of the family gathered around Sally at dinner seems ridiculous in 2014, the shots it is cut with—Sally’s eye in extreme close-up, widened and darting around the room for a means of escape—cast that image as real; the eye screams though she doesn’t. Her eye screams even if we refuse to scream along with it.

Finally, we are left with Leatherface, dancing with his chainsaw in the morning sun. Are there many horror films that do their gristly work in the daylight? Or with such unsettling beauty? Made on a paltry budget with limited physical resources, Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl subtly shift gears from the docu-realism of the graveyard scenes to the grotesque tableau of Leatherface’s murders so that it all feels unmistakably real, even when a man in a bad latex mask is feebly trying to live up to his reputation as the best killer at the old slaughterhouse. Far from operating under the pretense that a good murder or two is all that it needs to be memorable, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre revels in a miasma of sick, miserable images. It takes a prism to our world and twists it something awful, but manages, even in its darkest corners, to delight and disgust the viewer, often in the same frame.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. With Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty), Paul A. Partain (Franklin Hardesty), Allen Danziger (Jerry), William Vail (Kirk), Teri McMinn (Pam), Edwin Neal (Hitchhiker), Jim Siedow (Old Man), and Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface). Directed by Tobe Hooper, from a screenplay by Hooper and Kim Henkel.

October 19, 2014
Movie Review: G.B.F. (2013)

First, I’d like to acknowledge that the mere existence of a movie like G.B.F. is a good thing. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t looking hard enough (or at all) as a teenager, but there haven’t been many gay high school romantic comedies created for a mainstream audience. They existed at the fringes of culture, no doubt, but not to someone whose key to the world of cinema was a Blockbuster Video membership card. Even as the genre has progressed and films are more accessible due to the rise of Netflix and VOD, the LGBT community has mostly sat this one out: for various reasons, lesbians, bisexual men and women, and trans men and women (not to mention folks all across the spectrum) have largely been erased from popular culture (when a show like Orange Is the New Black is a success, this is the exception), and gay men are mostly there as sidekicks, ready to roll their eyes at a moment’s notice. We live in a supposedly post-everything society, and this is still how culture presents people outside the margins.

So it’s good, then, that G.B.F. exists, and that it opens on a group of friends comprised thusly: two gay men, one queer woman, one straight man of color. This is not the way characters in this genre are grouped. This may be the first group in so heavily and innocuously queered. This is vital because representation is vital, and because, too often, marginalized groups aren’t represented at all. And this is cinema we’re talking about. Gay, liberal cinema. It’s important to have a gay romantic comedy because But I’m A Cheerleader came out in 1999. Because Glee is one television show, and one is nothing. Because it’s nice to have a film that doesn’t begin, climax, or end in tragedy. G.B.F. wastes no time at all in letting you know that things are different. The opening credits feature a panda vomiting rainbows. This, the panda roars, spewing hues of pride across page after page of a high school yearbook, is gonna be gay. Only instead, this is just another bad high school comedy. This one just happens to sting a bit more.

It’s not enough, I think, for a movie to have good intentions. When I first heard about G.B.F., it was in the context of its MPAA rating, which is R, and how that rating might prevent some kid who needs a movie like this in their life from seeing it. This isn’t far outside the realm of possibility—the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated makes abundantly clear the kind of hell liberal censors put artists through; poor John Waters, after screening A Dirty Shame for the board, was told that, after awhile, they simply stopped counting the film’s infractions. While an R rating is hardly as damming now as it was before the internet made it possible to acquire everything regardless of entities like the MPAA, the R rating is the province of teen sex movies where sluggish miscreants get hammered with their mutant pals while trying to have sex with some object the dictionary calls “woman,” not that of the sweet-natured romance G.B.F. is marketed as. There’s a point to that, of course, but presuming G.B.F. was released with a PG-13 rating, it’d likely be the only one that drops a word like “jizzbin” as a casual means of describing one of its characters.

Not to act as the tone police or anything, but G.B.F. is surprisingly mean-spirited for what it’s meant to be, or, I suppose, what it could have been. In the history of North Gateway High School, there’s never been a publicly gay student. There’s a smattering of them, sure, all obviously gay (though nobody in the film can parse this, short of the parents back home) but none of them are out. When a teen rag reports that gay best friends are on trend, one of those students in the closet plans to come out, hoping to leverage that article into a role as sidekick to one of the three most popular girls in school. Tanner Daniels (Michael J. Willett) is this closet queen’s accomplice, an also-in-the-closet kid who’d rather read comic books and not get beaten up than climb to social ladder. But when a series of contrivances leads to the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance outing him (they need an actual, living gay person in the group for it to exist, or something), he becomes the first and gains all of the privilege and esteem and makeover montages that come with that designation.

There are a number of topics here that are worth talking about, all of which are frequently glossed over in many discussions about gay rights. The pressure placed on an individual to come out, the sometimes detrimental actions of allies—heck, just growing up gay in a society that now “accepts” that—but G.B.F. has 90-minutes to play with and no interest in the details it uses to race to the finish of its cut-and-paste plot. Prom is coming up, after all, and to be its Queen, one of those three popular girls will have to play hag to the school’s lone fag. In a movie replete with stereotypes, these three can be labeled thusly: The “White” One, The “Mormon” One, and The “Black” One. You can assign these labels to all of the primary characters—The “Gay” One, The “GAY” One, The “Lesbian” One, The “Mormon” One Who Is in the Closet—without exaggerating how poorly the screenplay understands teenage culture; everybody is as fake as the Bucci sweaters they wear.

There is some sweetness here—Megan Mullalley shows up as a mother who has been waiting for some time for her son to tell her that he’s gay—but it is largely wasted; everyone in G.B.F. is beautiful and the biggest consequence anybody has to face for racism, sexism, or homophobia is that they’re not invited to the cool kid prom…but then everybody is anyway, and the world keeps on spinning. A better script wouldn’t necessarily have made G.B.F. a good teen movie—the direction is much too flat, and none of the adult roles register much higher than celebrity cameo—but that’s the major sticking point here, that the “teenage voice” adopted here is curdled to the point of bitterness. The result is an awkward, gawky prom date who means well, but keeps saying the wrong thing. Loudly. If this is what a gay teen comedy looks, sounds, and acts, maybe the genre isn’t ready to come out of the closet.

G.B.F. With Michael J. Willett (Tanner Daniels), Paul Iacono (Brent Van Camp), Sasha Pieterse (Fawcett Brooks), Xosha Roquemore (Caprice Winters), Andrea Bowen (‘Shley Osgoode), Evanna Lynch (McKenzie Pryce), Natasha Lyonne (Ms. Hogel), and Megan Mullally (Mrs. Van Camp). Directed by Darren Stein, from a screenplay by George Northy.

April 28, 2014
The Best Films of 2013 (With Reservations)

Depending on who you ask and when you ask them, 2013 was either one of the cinema’s best years, or one of its absolute worst. I didn’t find it to be either, exactly, but with my 2013 Guilt List standing at 92 films (including everything from Blue Is the Warmest Color to Escape Plan, as that’s how wide my definition of “guilt” goes when it comes to movies), my year unfortunately skewed more towards the apocalyptic wasteland of this summer’s comic book adaptations than, say, Her or Inside Llewyn Davis, neither of which have played my new home in Athens, Georgia. So, rather than give a definitive list of the ten best films of the year, here’s 2013 in the movies I think will bear revisiting as the years pass, with apologies to the Guilt List and every comic book movie minus Thor. There are nineteen films on this list, with room for everything from deeply flawed Ryan Gosling vehicles to deeply flawed stabs at recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In alphabetical order, then:

12 Years a Slave

Dir. Steve McQueen

Roxane Gay wrote brilliantly about 12 Years a Slave and its being symptomatic of the Academy Awards’ preference for black films that feature suffering or otherwise subjugated protagonists. It may not offer anything new to a history of slavery films, but considering how furiously white America is working to reshape the nation’s history as something less brutal and more respectable than human bondage, that a black director has piloted an uncompromising adaptation of a slave’s memoirs to near-universal acclaim and major awards consideration is something of a miracle. Beyond politics, 12 Years a Slave is one of the most technically accomplished films of the year. McQueen and his regular cinematographer Sean Bobbitt have, against an unending wall of brutality, composed some of the year’s most beautiful—and most startlingly violent—scenes, and against a cast including Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, and Paul Giamatti, the work of Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, a slave without Solomon Northup’s (Chiwitel Ejiofor) hope of rescue, is a revelation. The presence of Pitt as a Canadian who lectures Fassbender’s plantation owner on the cruelty of slave life consequence free—he isn’t even fired—goes a long way in proving Gay’s point; he holds court speaking with his Lt. Aldo Raine affectations and is Solomon’s eventual benevolent savior. The circumstances are wildly different here than in, say, The Blind Side or The Help, but 12 Years a Slave‘s final act hints that serious black narratives are being made for white audiences, who are more than willing to sit patiently through a few hours of torture and scourging so long as the payoff is uplifting.

The Act of Killing

Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Anwar Congo is what most would call a monster. During the anti-communist purge of 1965 and 1966, Congo was elevated from his station as a film-obsessed gangster to become head of one of the country’s most efficient killing squads. Congo is estimated to have personally murdered 1,000 dissidents, most of them by wire. The Act of Killing is a film about this man and his crimes, and its subject is only too happy to serve as its star, historian, and demonstrator. He has seen much death, but to watch him show the best technique for strangling a man, explaining that he wouldn’t wear white pants were the killing real, so as to not stain them, is to see a man completely unaware of his role in history. Oppenheimer (and his partner Christine Cynn; the two worked with an anonymous third director) works simultaneously to report on the largely untold consequences of American globalization while examining just how deep Congo’s unwillingness to confront the crimes of his past runs. Now a doddering old man, Oppenheimer allows Congo to live out his fantasies of being in one of the Hollywood movies he imagined himself starring in while leading his death squad. Initially thrilled with the chance to set himself up as a conquering hero, Congo retreats farther and farther into himself until he is asked to play one of his victims. Congo’s realization is the most startlingly honest sequence in any film this year, humanizing Oppenheimer’s villain in a way that only great films can, without letting the bastard off the hook for what he’s done. “I can really feel it,” Congo moans, trying to convince the director of his sincerity. If he can, it’s about forty years too late.

Behind the Candelabra

Dir. Steven Soderbergh

Despite the A-list actors and the man behind the camera, certain portions of Behind the Candelabra feel like the television movie it became. Given its subject, perhaps that is appropriate. It’s easy to look at Liberace as the living, breathing embodiment of gay camp, but to his fans—and to Liberace, to whom “camp” meant a disgusting tent pitched out somewhere in nature—his wardrobe, his car, his rings, and his candelabra were rewards earned for decades of hard work. For Liberace, the con he pulled was two-fold: convincing his fans he was a nice pianist who loved his mother, and convincing those same people that he wasn’t gay. Even before he died of AIDS-related health complications, it must have been obvious he was gay, but it seemed like for every tabloid that wanted to nail Liberace to the wall for who he slept with, there was some doddering old woman who believed he was just waiting for a girl as nice as he was to sweep him away. Steven Soderbergh’s biopic doesn’t really address the central fallacy of Liberace’s public life any more than it has to, which is fine: the one scene where a couple of gay men laugh at the straight folks in the crowd for failing to acknowledge Liberace as the flaming queen that he is was enough. In focusing on Liberace’s lover, Scott Thorson, Soderbergh has made a film about sexual identity and gay politics, using two of the biggest movie stars in the world to do so. In chronicling what is essentially a divorce case that took place before gay marriage was even conceivable, it functions as a better argument for gay rights than years of glossy propaganda produced by the Human Rights Campaign. If most mainstream films featuring gay couples seem intent on making those characters extranormal—Stepford Homosexuals, if you will—Behind the Candelabra does the gay community a solid in portraying its queer couple as real, troubled men: paunchy, balding, sweaty, paranoid, gross, inconsiderate, and often unfuckable. A lot of what I’ve read critically on Behind the Candelabra treats its eventual home on HBO as a slight on Soderbergh, Michael Douglas, and Matt Damon, and maybe it is if you wanted to see Douglas nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards. Studios, however, are at a loss when presented with gay stories. On cable television, that doesn’t really matter. Behind the Candelabra became an early year event and a shining beacon, something good, during the summer when new articles were going up daily about 2013 being one of the worst years for film in recent memory.

Berberian Sound Studio

Dir. Peter Strickland

Buried in any number of algorithmicly-composed lists on your Netflix homepage, Berberian Sound Studio was the best horror film of 2013, shedding nary an ounce of blood while still perfectly evoking the squeamish delights of Italian giallo. Brought in as a sound engineer on the unseen film The Equestrian Vortex, Toby Jones is a squat, polite, hopelessly lost man who couldn’t see himself working on a horror picture until his two assistants began smashing watermelons for one of the film’s many gory moneyshots. Though we can’t see the film, Jones’ Guilderoy can and is tortured by it, its cast and crew, watching intently as he rips at the stalks of one vegetable to simulate the sounds of human hair being ripped from the scalp or smashes another to approximate ritual dismemberment. The film is mostly in Italian, furthering the disconnect between Guilderoy and his life back in England as his coworker’s apparent friendly ribbing turns hostile. Punctuated by the screams of its cast and held together by Broadcast’s intoxicating score, Berberian Sound Studio really only has one note, but it’s a note that is mashed with glee by a group of artists reveling in the frayed edges of filmmaking, both the process of creating a film and the off-kilter personalities of those responsible for that creation.

Blackfish

Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite

The best traditional documentary of the year, Blackfish did a better job of radicalizing me than most docs engineered for that purpose. Perhaps, having been raised on Free Willy and the promise of trips to see Shamu, I’m an easy mark for footage of a whale climbing up to its platform, where a gaping wound begins to pour blood. Maybe that makes me more willing to believe the oceanographer who says that whales dorsal fins flop over in captivity, that they live lifespans roughly equivalent to that of humans, and that each individual pod has something like an individual language, especially when the corporation responsible for the capture and lifelong subjugation of these and other animals has everything to gain from their self-mythology of happy whales in small pools. Though certainly guilty of returning to the well of embarrassing-in-retrospect SeaWorld commercials one too many times, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has managed to craft an effective documentary of current events out of court depositions and talking heads, no mean feat considering the countless hours of television that’ve adopted and perfected the format. After establishing a kind of middle ground between exploitation portrayals of orcas as low-rent Jaws stand-ins and SeaWorld’s own representation of the animal as something cute, cuddly, and capable of crushing a bus full of doe-eyed children, Blackfish instead shows that what we think we know about the orca is largely guesswork, and that the end-result of that guesswork is that companies like SeaWorld have in captivity whales like Tilikum, who is responsible for the deaths of three people, two of whom were trainers. Because this is America, footage of one of these trainer’s deaths, Dawn Brancheau, is in the documentary. Perhaps because of this, Blackfish is the rare documentary that has produced more than anecdotal change since its release: gates are down at SeaWorld, many performers have canceled shows at the parks, and Disney reportedly changed the ending of its upcoming Finding Nemo sequel because maybe some fish wouldn’t choose to be held in captivity, were choice a factor.

The Bling Ring

Dir. Sofia Coppola

Though less likely to stir-up parental hysteria than an accidental viewing of Spring Breakers on Amazon Prime, Sofia Copella’s The Bling Ring chases after the same high. A group of loosely connected high school friends discover that major celebrities, perhaps believing the faux utopia they occupy is real, leave their opulent estates virtually unlocked. It isn’t the clothes they steal, the private parties they throw for themselves in these empty mansions, or the camaraderie of being in a group that drives these kids to burglary, but the fact that doing so puts them in the same sentence with Paris Hilton and Audrina Patridge. 2013 was thick with people moralizing over the rise of the selfie, and The Bling Ring is a film for that corner of the selfie-taking world that can’t put the camera down at a funeral or before a heist. Coppola’s screenplay leaves something to be desired, leaning heavily on a pastiche of character elements borrowed from high school comedies better equipped to handle the intricate details of teenage social life (though that says something positive, maybe, about the genre when a gang of four girls and one queer boy feels passe), and the conclusion she comes to is underwhelming senior thesis stuff. But while the Bling Ring is operational, especially in sequences like the one-take shot of the group ransacking Patridge’s glass house, it’s hard to deny how potent Copella’s drug is.

Blue Jasmine

Dir. Woody Allen

Watching Blue Jasmine, I found myself wondering if Woody Allen remembered what it was like, being poor. Ostensibly, his film yanks its title character from the monied stratosphere, pulling her down from her medicated, disinterested life on the east coast and throwing her to the hungry, angry dogs of San Francisco. But the “poor” Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) experiences feels like a less-than-authentic version of west coast bohemia—the streets are dirty, apartments are an aspiration, and the men who want to fuck you are named Chili, but there’s no real struggle. Given Allen’s oddly stereotypical riff on the 1% (Alec Baldwin shows up to play the version of himself that appears in Capital One credit card ads), it says a lot about Blanchett’s performance (and Sally Hawkins, as her sister, and Louis C.K. and Andrew Dice Clay, who are both believable representatives of the world Blue Jasmine tries to occupy) that Allen finds a lot of compelling middle ground between his two cartoonish representations of the haves and have-nots. And considering how unhinged Blanchett’s character is, perhaps the glassy eyed-indifference of her past and the poverty-by-way-of-Anthropologie of her present are both creations of her unhinged mind. Jasmine Francis is all things at once to her story—hero, villain, victim; a woman so ashamed of her past that she refuses to go by her real name, but so disgusted by her circumstances that she pushes away even the smallest gesture of compassion. Allen is no stranger to writing strong, distinct characters, but Jasmine is his best in some time, and Blanchett is transcendent in the role.

Frances Ha

Dir. Noah Baumbach

Greenberg has been sitting at the top of my queue in Netflix for a while, now. I saw the movie once, when it came out, and have felt a nagging impulse to revisit it ever since—it was one of my favorites, that year—but, now that I have the option to do so whenever I feel, I just can’t. Part of this, I suspect, is because I remember what it was like being in the theater, alone, watching that film on its last day of release in Cincinnati, paralyzed in my seat as Ben Stiller contemplated a dead raccoon. 2010 was a year of personal crisis for me, and something about the scene with the raccoon really hit me. I saw Frances Ha on the last day of its release in Ann Arbor, Michigan under the same circumstances. I had recently gotten an art degree, but was doing nothing with it; waiting out the deadlines for prospective PhD programs to get back to me and trying to face up to the likelihood that I’d be stuck with a cubicle job in Detroit (that I was, honestly, lucky to have) for the foreseeable future. I was depressed, and Frances Ha really spoke to that depression. I also missed the first fifteen or twenty minutes, so when it popped up on Netflix, I immediately re-watched it. I didn’t have the same experience, and it didn’t feel nearly so profound as when I was in the middle of a rather dire period of my life, but Baumbach really is a tremendous director, and Greta Gerwig may be the most arresting actress of her generation. I’m not a Brooklyn hipster and the kind of poor that Frances’ roommates speak about being lucky not to be is the kind of poor I actually am, so, in a way, Frances Ha went from being a document about how I perceived myself to a fantasy about what I’d like to be: broke but able to fly to Paris, stuck in a rut but still aspiring to do something with my art degree. I’m lucky to have avoided that fate entirely, but no movie in 2013 was able to say so much to me at such radically different points of my life.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Dir. Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasukov

After a slow trudge through the festival circuit, Werner Herzog’s re-edit of a Russian documentary series finally reached widespread distribution this year. Though it lacks the flair of the documentaries Herzog shoots himself, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga makes for a tremendous third entry in the director’s unofficial trilogy of nature documentaries, often feeling like the intersection of a Venn diagram of Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Like those films, Herzog’s fascination is with the fastidiousness of men and women living at the extremes of human existence and the means of their survival. Unlike Timothy Treadwell or the scientists in the Antarctic, the villagers didn’t choose to live in the Taiga—one trapper, who has mastered the art over decades of routine, explains that he was assigned the job by the communist government, airlifted to the forest, and left with the vague promise that more supplies would come later. Beyond Pokémon t-shirts and the occasional visit from a political candidate and his karaoke machine, the trappers and their family seem frozen in time, making their own skiis, canoes, traps, and lean-tos, farming to subsist on a winter’s worth of bread and root vegetables. But compared to native life, which is on the verge of disappearing completely, the goings-on in the village are practically contemporary. The sequence with the natives is perfect, contemporary Herzog, a seemingly unrelated interlude that serves as the thesis of the film. Most Americans, I imagine, will watch this film from the comfort of their beds, on a Netflix-equipped laptop. That’s an unimaginable comfort for Happy People‘s subjects, just as their lives are, beyond the limits of this documentary, unimaginable to the typical docu-viewer. But the natives, hooked on vodka and stuck doing the worst menial labor of a town where even the most important work is menial, are even a level below that. They’re unavoidable, like the albino crocodiles of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and make romanticizing life in Sibera tough even for those viewers most prone to doing so. For Herzog, everywhere there is pain and regret, even in parts of the world where it is too cold for feelings.

Gravity

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

There’s a distinct possibility that a second viewing on a smaller screen would have knocked Alfonso Cuarón’s lightweight space drama off of this list entirely, and that’s a problem. As much as I appreciate a good gimmick (3D that’s worth paying for is hardly Percepto!, but it’s something), I have huge reservations with Gravity, which puts all of its money on the screen, and none of it in the screenplay. Tentatively a feast for the eyes (unless repertory theaters come back, then long may this description reign), Cuarón and his son Jonás throw every possible disaster movie platitude out there, from an astronaut who is weeks away from retirement before the disaster strikes, to an atheist scientist coming to Jesus when all hope appears lost. It succeeds despite its aspiration to be an Oprah’s Book Club selection thanks entirely to its gorgeous cinematography—Gravity, unlike many films that receive this distinction, is a rollercoaster, a Space Mountain that threatens to ditch its patrons in the void. Sandra Bullock will receive plenty of awards consideration, but she doesn’t do much with what little she’s given. George Clooney plays a cocky space cowboy, which is to say that he plays himself, which is to say that he plays Bruce Wayne circa Batman and Robin, which is to say that he is charming and useless in equal measure. I think I’ve largely described something that will soon be on a lot of OKCupid profiles as a standard favorite movie, but between Gravity and Pacific Rim, it’s Cuarón’s technical achievements that I was more impressed by.

It’s a Disaster

Dir. Todd Berger

It’s a Disaster isn’t the funniest film of the year, nor is it the most poignant Friends vs. The End of the World riff in a year that was overstuffed with them. It was also the smallest of the three major ones (for every year will, for better or for worse, bring us television adaptations of Zombieland and Japanese curiosities like Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead), made on a shoestring and distributed widely on VOD services. Lacking the budget, stars, dick jokes, and Backstreet Boys cameos of This Is the End, It’s a Disaster is that film with a heart, the often effective shocks of Rogen/Goldberg replaced with a plausible house party for the apocalypse. And while watching Jonah Hill get raped by a demon is kind of gross, I suppose, there’s something truly unsettling about Ugly Betty reciting the effects of nerve gas upon the human body, a late couple to the party choking on the stuff outside. The late film twist involving one of the characters doesn’t quite work, though it does allow It’s a Disaster to end on its biggest laugh, a variation on the old game where two kids have to go to sleep, but nobody wants to be the first to hang up the phone. It’s a Disaster would have worked without its gimmick, which says a lot about the easy chemistry of its ensemble. The world here ends with a whimper, but then again, that’s kind of how it would go out, isn’t it?

Only God Forgives

Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

I’m not sure that I buy Only God Forgives as a calculated response to the success of Refn and Gosling’s Drive, the purposeful antithesis to their lurid neo-noir that gained a cult with such immediacy that I was able to see it in a beleaguered mall multiplex one afternoon in Bowling Green, Ohio. Drive wasn’t a stab at making a mainstream film anymore than Only God Forgives is an attempt to disgust the same crowd who loved it when Ryan Gosling drowned Albert Brooks in the Pacific Ocean. Refn makes his movies and lets the chips fall where they may. There’s something admirable and dangerous about that, and this, at first, was the only thing that kept me watching the film beyond its first act, which is so audacious that it sets the revenge plot moving for a murdered rapist/murderer/pedophile who is first seen requesting a 14-year-old prostitute. But Gosling’s mother-mandated quest for the head of the police officer who allowed the killing of his brother is upended by that police officer, a Lieutenant with a taste for karaoke and Biblical retribution. Like his character in Drive, Gosling here is near mute, weathering his mother’s abuse and staring intently at something we never see, but Julian lacks the resolve of the Driver and is ultimately no match for Lt. Chang, who is literally and figuratively the angel of vengeance in this world. This was declared the most divisive movie of 2013 by the social media site Letterboxd, and that’s entirely fair. Beyond the lush Thai scenery and another killer Cliff Martinez score, folks expecting another Drive will be sorely disappointed. But there were few films as risky as this one, where a major American movie star challenges a Thai actor to a fight and gets his ass kicked soundly for an eternity, with no return bout. The payoff here is worth squirming through the first twenty minutes.

The Place Beyond the Pines

Dir. Derek Cianfrance

The Place Beyond the Pines is overlong and sloppy, attempting to smash the decades spanning familial drama of a series like The Godfather into a single three-act film, if Michael Corleone were the best carnival dirt bike rider in upstate New York. The third act, which takes place sixteen or so years removed from the event that ties the three films together, is necessary in the sense that it provides closure, but a real let-down; neither the writing nor the acting are up to the standard of the film’s first two thirds, and its closing shot seems tailor-made for a washed-out .gif set on a Tumblr. But those first two acts, man. Ryan Gosling is the kind of quiet, intense character he is in a Nicolas Winding Refn film, though it feels much different, watching that character operate here, since it’s so different from the one Gosling played in director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. And while Bradley Cooper will continue to make more money and earn more acclaim for his roles in films like Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, he plays a conflicted cop so well in The Place Beyond the Pines that it’s easy to forget that Cooper rose to prominence as a sleazy, dickish elementary school teacher in The Hangover. The way these characters intersect involves a fair measure of All Cops Are Bastards boilerplate, but the turmoil their meeting leaves Eva Mendez—an actress who has created an unlikely sideline for herself as the siren of off-beat dramas like this and Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans—in says more about class privilege than one might reasonable expect from a film that uses a shotgun to apply temporary tattoos to Ryan Gosling. The Place Beyond the Pines requires effort to enjoy and will eventually collapse under its own pretension regardless, but in terms of scope and ambition, there weren’t many films capable of topping this one.

Room 237

Dir. Rodney Ascher

The various theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—moon landing apologia, allegory for the slaughter of Native Americans, Holocaust metaphor—are united in their lunacy and banal attention to detail (Look! An arrangement of Calumet Baking Powder canisters! Hey! The Apollo 11 is there onDanny’s sweater!) but buried beneath the not-quite-lucid theorizing of the quacks who’ve spent their lives decoding every frame of Kubrick’s adaptation of (or, if you prefer, gigantic “fuck you” to) Stephen King’s novel is some rather fascinating film criticism and experiments in experience. Room 237 gathers a diverse array of Kubrick scholars to speak about their passion projects relating to this particular film, and while none of them are particularly in conversation with one another, seeing a film show how radically five different people can interpret one pop culture artifact is grist enough for the mill. The conspiracies, obviously, are the meat here, but hearing about the guy who projects two copies of The Shining at once, one moving forward and one playing backwards, with clips of that process, manage to cast the well-worn images of Kubrick’s film in a new light, and the more academic theorizing that happens here, as well as the amount of work that has gone into showing that the Overlook Hotel has an architecturally impossible layout, are fascinating compared to the illusions reached for by the moon-landing theorist who claims to have been cold called on several occasions by the FBI. All of the theories here, regardless of visual or textual evidence, are too grounded in coincidence to make The Shining any more profound than it already is (and, for me, The Shining is very profound), but that, too, speaks to the film and the director’s power. Stanley Kubrick, for all his exactitude, was a human being. Yes, he oversaw The Shining, but even the most hardcore proponent of auteur theory wouldn’t posit that Kubrick arranged the contents of the walk-in fridge by hand, hiding a codified message within, or that, while shooting, the man had control over the sun. Kubrick’s powers were immense, but the man wasn’t exactly subtle. If he meant half of what the people in Room 237 believe, The Shining would have beaten that message into the collective consciousness with a gigantic ceramic penis.

The Spectacular Now

Dir. James Ponsoldt

Were it not for the fact that I moved to Athens, where The Spectacular Now was filmed (“Look,” an excited high school kid said, pointing to the screen at a local fried chicken chain, “a Zaxby’s!”), I might not have seen it. Trailers for high school rom-dram-coms set in idyllic, green utopias, usually backed with trailers for high school rom-dram-coms seeking the sweet spot of 1990s nostalgia, played with such frequency at the arthouse theaters I went to in Michigan that they all started to blur together—a mish-mash of trees and swimming pools and young faces. It turns out that The Spectacular Now wasn’t a comedy at all, which, considering the toxic nature of screenwriting duo Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber’s {500 Days of Summer}, was something of a relief. Though still decidedly a romance, The Spectacular Now is serious drama, well-aware of the fact that high school students have problems as real as adults. It’s an odd comparison, but I recently watched the first few episodes of American Horror Story. In its attempt to be as lurid and shocking as possible, the gamut of problems its high school protagonist faces—bullying, abusive boyfriends, depression, familial distress, cutting, etc.—becomes as farcical as, say, the faux-promiscuity of Emma Stone’s character in Easy A. Here, Sutter Keeley (Miles Teller) is clearly an alcoholic and rarely appears without a red Dixie cup in his hand or a flask in his pocket. Keggers and house parties are such a staple in high school films now that it’s almost shocking when Sutter’s boss (Bob Odenkirk) calls him out on it, and legitimately shocking when Sutter chooses alcohol over his potential. Of course, the kid cleans up (romance movie!), but not before The Spectacular Now makes clear just how willing Miles is to wreck his life and drag down the people he loves to stay drunk. A very mature negotiation of an often cloying genre.

Spring Breakers

Dir. Harmony Korine

John Waters called Spring Breakers “the best sexplotation film of the year,” and he’s not lying. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by way of the Disney Channel, Harmony Korine sends a gang of young starlets to St. Petersberg for spring break with no moral compass, no ambitions beyond getting fucked and fucked up—when one of them gets too skittish, no longer able to imagine a world where spring break lasts forever, he sends them home on a Greyhound bus. Shot and edited to resemble a banned music video watched through the haze of a sizzurp binge, Korine turns the MTV-sponsored fantasy of spring break into a waking nightmare of bared flesh, spinning rims, and gold teeth. James Franco, playing Alien—a white rapper whose empire is largely financed by stealing from the drunk, stoned tourists who invade his turf one week a year to indulge their hedonist impulses—creates the kind of indelible character worthy of his self-curated reputation as a pop art renaissance man. Sneering at his budding gangsters as he bails them out of jail, bragging about having Scarface on repeat, or giving head to the barrel of a gun, Alien is a guy who dreamed of being bad, and who finds new ways of achieving that dream every day. Spring Breakers is a trash masterpiece, a giddy and lurid exercise in stunt casting and outrageous set pieces, from the innocuous use of a minor professional wrestler as a youth pastor to a montage of brutal crimes set to a sentimental Britney Spears ballad. Like a Nightline special where a blacklight is taken to hotel linens, no filth is left unexamined.

Upstream Color

Dir. Shane Carruth

Given the force with which studios flooded multiplexes with sequels, remakes, and vain attempts to launch new franchises, it’s incredible that 2013 had room for a film like Upstream Color, which no amount of summarization can do justice to. It is, at once, an elaborate heist film, a science fiction puzzlebox, and an intimate epic, quietly laying out its materials and trusting the audience to sort them out with as much care as they were assembled. A student of mine in freshman composition wrote an essay on this film (which surprised me, because what freshman in a composition course puts Upstream Color in their Netflix queue?) and came pretty close, I think, to one of the movie’s essential truths, writing that being in a relationship with someone is like being tied to them with a thread, only neither person knows where that thread came from or can remember, exactly, how the thread was knotted in the first place. She left out, however, that the thread here is a parasite, which is fine because I’m still trying to figure out what Walden has to do with anything going on here. If there was a job to be performed during the production of this film, director/star/writer/producer Shane Carruth did it, eventually distributing the film on his own in limited release, then on home video and Netflix, where its presence in a haphazardly composed list of New Releases acts simultaneously as invitation and challenge. That’s a gutty undertaking for an artist, even one as fiercely independent as Carruth.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Dir. Martin Scorsese

From the very beginning, Jordan Belfort lets you know he’s in control. Racing down the freeway in a Lamborghini, a beautiful woman’s head in his lap, he complains, via voiceover, that the color of the car is incorrect. Wham! it changes—isn’t it great, being rich? Yes, unequivocally. The Wolf of Wall Street will make no argument against that, not when its protagonist, who swindled hundreds of millions of dollars pushing fake stock, got out of prison and immediately hit the public speaking circuit, offering sales strategies to men who probably wouldn’t be in a hotel conference room with him were they meant to be salesmen. But Belfort is long exiled from the trading floor, where he was the ruler of a vast empire, writing checks and racking up credit card debt at a rate that’d be alarming were it not for the fact that he made money twice as fast as he could spend it. His inner circle may have consisted of nerds and outcasts, but Belfort, the subject of a Martin Scorsese picture, is unmistakably a shakedown artist, a man living so fast and so recklessly that his regimen of drugs, pills, and alcohol weren’t crippling inhibitors, but necessary supplements, like a bodybuilder’s creatine. The Wolf of Wall Street is frequently vulgar and absolutely unashamed of its depiction of drug use, the stock market, and Belfort’s treatment of women, but Scorsese hardly valorizes him—for all his magnetism, for all his control of the narrative, nothing Belfort does or says can convince even the dimmest rube that he isn’t a total scumbag, and that’s pretty much how a film about a Wall Street pirate should operate. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there’ve been films about men like Jordon Belfort; there’s even been a sequel to Wall Street. But despite the world’s mistrust of the markets, despite the still-visible anger over the bailout, these movies often end up toothless, tacitly professing their belief in the noble billionaire. Not here. The Wolf of Wall Street runs three hours, even finding room Belfort’s endless bacchanal for a gay orgy held at his expense, but you’d be hard pressed to find a minute where Jordan Belfort has a soul. Sure, The Wolf of Wall Street says that it’s good to be a prick. It is. Even when the FBI holds a press conference announcing the arrest of someone like Jordon Belfort, there’s always another WASP waiting to sponge up as much money as he can before he, too, gets popped. That kind of scum never scrubs clean.

The World’s End

Dir. Edgar Wright

Navigate around its special effects laden fight sequences, the bulk of which are fairly tiresome once the group figures out what they’re up against, and The World’s End is a very compelling comedy about ruined friendships and alcoholism. You have to do a lot more navigating here than in prior Wright/Pegg/Frost collaborations, as The World’s End, perhaps anticipating Edgar Wright’s leap into the Marvel cinematic universe, is both less focused—it isn’t spoofing the conventions of horror or action films so much as it becomes a muddled attempt at one—and more preoccupied with pulping every last robot occupying the formerly quaint village of Newton Haven. It’s less funny than Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and less technically accomplished than Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but until it comes around to identifying with Simon Pegg’s drunken, nostalgia-obsessed wrecking ball, The World’s End is the most mature of the Wright/Pegg/Frost Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. The villain here is a member of the group. He’s not infected with a disease, and he’s not a slasher. His weapons are an unwashed trench coat, an old rust bucket of a car (with original mixtapes), and an unending phrasebook of forgotten high school catchphrases. This character belongs to a collective history—I have had friends in my life like this, and I have been this friend to others. Both positions are painful, and enduring comedy often comes from a place of pain. Like a lot of films on this list, the ending (despite being somewhat triumphant) sells out the larger issue at hand. It isn’t that the world is ending now, but that, for Gary King, the world ended when he graduated high school.

January 10, 2014
Movie Review: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

Katniss Everdeen has nightmares. This is important. This means something. Luke Skywalker blew up a space station that housed millions of men and women without shedding a tear. James Bond remembers the dozens of women slaughtered by association by naming martinis after them and glowering at the baccarat table. Bella Swan slurps blood from a Styrofoam cup. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire doesn’t allow its heroine much time to rest after her victory in the franchise’s titular organized bloodletting, but when it does, even her few moments of rest are shattered by memories of the Games. A nation believes they’ve gained a young star. In reality, they’ve rendered a young woman a hollow shell.

Having made history as the first ever co-winners of The Hunger Games, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) clearly suffer from PTSD. Twenty-two children were killed in the Games, and while they weren’t personally responsible for even the majority of them, they lived for months expecting knives in their backs, finding solace in the report of an unseen cannon. Back in District 12, they try to return to something like a normal life, but even if nobody from home treats them any differently for making it out of the arena, the state has relocated them to the district’s Victor’s Village, whose only other occupant is Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), whose alcoholism probably makes a little more sense to them now. Though they barely know each other, Katniss and Peeta survived by convincing a nation that they were star-crossed young lovers. Thrust into the role of celebrity, they have to maintain that ruse before the cameras and the fawning millions in their living rooms. Both wonder if eating the poison berries that won them the Games would have been a kinder fate.

In victory, Katniss becomes a symbol, a sign to the downtrodden lower districts that they can rise up against the opulence of Panem, whose capitol houses the uber-wealthy who exploit the labor of the starving working class. President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who watched ambivalently as Katniss and Peeta upended the rules of his Games, takes a much more active role in Katniss’ life outside the arena. He meets her in District 12, threatening to kill her and her family and her actual boyfriend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), if her act with Peeta isn’t convincing. Her happiness—or the perception of her happiness—may quell a brewing rebellion. This is a losing proposition. On the train to the Capitol, where a huge party is to be held in her honor, Katniss sees graffiti of the mockingjay symbol she’s become associated with and anti-government slogans. When she arrives in District 11, her and Peeta are unable to read the cards prepared for them by their PR rep, Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), and instead give teary dedications to Rue, the little girl who died in their Games. An old man in the crowd whistles the call Katniss and Rue had and holds up a sign of the revolution. He is dragged before the stage and shot in the head. Katniss and Peeta read from the cards from that point on, but this scene continues to play itself out.

Catching Fire eventually makes its way back into the arena, but it and its predecessor are at their most interesting when exploring the kind of dystopia that would broadcast the life-or-death struggle of 24 well-armed children. While The Hunger Games only captured glimpses of the other districts, focusing largely on the Games themselves, Francis Lawrence finds the franchise’s heart beating in the districts. Lawrence, whose I Am Legend and Constantine were toothless sci-fi adaptations to whom the concept of mythmaking was alien, while not doing anything to rock the boat too hard, manages to craft a middle entry that does three things more expertly than many expensive sequels: feel larger than its predecessor, further define the characters, and improve upon what previously worked. Much of that is due to Jennifer Lawrence, whose Katniss is now a character and not an archetype. It’s still hard to believe that the star of these massive Hunger Games films and Oscar-baiting prestige ensembles like Silver Linings Playbook was in Winter’s Bone three years ago, and it’s something of an odd fortune that the trajectory of her career matches that of the character she’ll likely forever be identified as. In life, Lawrence gets Google news alerts when she steps out of the house with a new haircut. In Catching Fire, a pregnancy hoax involving her is nearly enough to end a seventy-five year tradition.

By involving Snow and featuring a new game maker (Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing himself as a D&D dungeonmaster with one of the series’ more ridiculous names), Catching Fire raises the stakes so high that the 75^th Hunger Games’ twist—all of the competitors are surviving winners from Games past—feel trifling by comparison. Sutherland’s despotic President Snow is sniveling and arch in a way villains in movies this large no longer are allowed to be; watching him preen and glower like an evil, gay Santa Claus has been a highlight of the series. Hoffman’s Plutarch Heavensbee isn’t quite as dynamic, but he’s an upgrade over the original film’s focal point for Katniss Everdeen’s rage, who was mostly notable for his beard. Heavensbee is the architect of a plot to restore the districts to order by wiping out their symbols of hope. While it’s hardly subtle, watching him tell President Snow to broadcast speculation about Everdeen’s wedding dress and honeymoon location next to scenes of beatings and executions in the districts is the kind of specific, calculated evil action movies figure their audiences can’t handle. Here, the storm clouds never dissipate. If any sunshine is going to punch through, it’s sure taking its damn time.

All of which is nice, but ultimately somewhat empty. Catching Fire is somewhat hamstrung by its obligations to young adult literature in a post-Twilight world, which necessitates a go-nowhere love triangle between Katniss, Gale, and Peeta. Beyond the state’s intervention, there’s never a moment when one of the men in her life controls her, and in the arena it’s usually Peeta who is in need of rescuing. This makes The Hunger Games the standard bearer for love triangles done pleasantly enough, if that’s a standard worth bearing, but I can’t help watching the scenes where Katniss and Peeta pretend to love one another with an editor’s eye, wondering if it would have been more dramatic had two actual lovers been forced into the Games twice instead of two people who have to pretend for the sake of a narrative. Stanley Tucci returns as Caesar Flickerman, the voice of that narrative, and while he’s charming and funny in his role as the ingratiating host of The Hunger Games, success has made his character something of an ironic statement, simultaneously mocking the hosts and unearned grandeur of reality television talent contests while occupying a significant amount of space in a major Hollywood movie being used to shill everything from Subway sandwiches to Covergirl makeup. Not that Catching Fire had to inspire revolution to work, but if a major film harps on the need for its audience to question authority while simultaneously shilling for the footlong creamy sriracha steak melt—a delicacy the denizens of District 12 would murder you for the right to look at, let alone consume—how successful can that film be in realizing its ambitions?

The answer, of course, is very. Catching Fire’s ambition is to make money, and it is doing so hand over fist. The film rarely falters or falls short of being entertaining spectacle, but it’s telling that for all the scorn it heaps upon the rich for enjoying the bread and circuses of the Games, it never stops long enough to ask the same question of the audience in the theater. Intrinsically, one knows that the ritualized slaughter of children is a horrible practice. Perversely, The Hunger Games franchise films these long sequences not as a horror, but an entertainment. The kills are quick and clean and leave no blood. When the show’s helicopter arrives to dispose of a body, it is hefted into the air striking a messianic pose to a theme commissioned just for the solemnity of the occasion. Those who die in the Games are offerings to the state, sure, but are they not also offered up to us? Are we not somewhat culpable?

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. With Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta Mellark), Liam Hemsworth (Gale Hawthorne), Woody Harrelson (Haymitch Abernathy), Elizabeth Banks (Effie Trinket), Lenny Kravitz (Cinna), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Plutarch Heavensbee), Stanley Tucci (Caesar Flickerman), and Donald Sutherland (President Coriolanus Snow). Directed by Francis Lawrence and produced by Nina Jacobson and Jon Kilik. Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael deBruyn, based on the novel Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins.

December 4, 2013
Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Thor: The Dark World is the year’s fifth superhero movie. That’s five different films where spandex-clad men bash in the brains of other spandex-clad men. Five films featuring speeches on subjects like truth, justice, and doing the right thing. Five films where one major city or another—sometimes fictitious, sometimes not—is turned into a smoking cinder by the gods who use it as an arena. The Thor films—counting The Avengers, whose villain Loki is central to the narrative of the entire Marvel cinematic universe, there have been three—have a decided advantage over other movies in the genre. In Thor, director Kenneth Branagh was able to find a nice balance between fish-out-of-water humor and action largely indebted (though unfortunately not monetarily so) to Jack Kirby. Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor wisely decides to spend much of his time exploring Thor’s celestial homeworld of Asgard. It’s a nice change of pace from a Marvel film’s usual focus on large, clean military installations and glittering R&D research laboratories, but even the best aspects of this movie aren’t enough to distract from what is now a very shopworn formula.

But if long-running network sitcoms and The Avengers franchise have proven anything, it’s that people like hanging out with their favorite characters, even if nothing truly significant happens. Thor: The Dark World does more with the fallout from The Avengers than Iron Man 3, did, sending Thor (Chris Hemsworth) planet-hopping with his warrior friends to quell the revolts stirred in the wake of Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston) rebellion against Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and his near-conquest of Earth. Odin’s helpful narration reveals that there’s a threat much greater than these rebellions, a long-lost cosmic weapon created by a race of dark elves upset that the Big Bang turned all the lights of the universe on. The opening scene—Norse gods crossing their swords and shields against the space lasers and gravity grenades of their elven enemies—is a highly polished mash-up of pulp sci-fi and hard fantasy paperback covers, but there’s nothing particularly creative or threatening about this largely faceless horde. Even their weapon—The Aether, which threatens to turn the lights off again—inspires a shrug of the shoulders. But when Thor’s girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) finds herself the vessel of this cosmic power, the God of Thunder hastily arrives on Earth to whisk her away to the halls of Asgard, hopeful for a cure.

Of course, there isn’t one. Odin, clearly the most pragmatic man on a floating rock connected to the rest of the universe by a rainbow bridge, suggests that Jane’s malady is evidence of the difference between the fate of an Asgardian and the fate of a human, imploring his son to maybe fall in love with someone more suitable as Queen of the realm; Sif (Jaimie Alexander), for instance. But Thor: The Dark World doesn’t fool around with love for long. The Aether is something of a homing beacon, and its inhabitance of Jane Foster’s body sends a signal to the dark elves, who’ve long been asleep at the fringes of the universe. They storm Asgard furiously, laying waste to the city and killing Frigga (Rene Russo), the Queen. Odin vows to quash the elves, even at the cost of his realm. Thor, however, has other ideas. Hoping to save his people and Jane Foster, he reaches out in desperation to Loki, serving out a life-sentence in a rather nice-looking jail cell for his crimes, and plots a sneak attack on the elf Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) and his few compatriots who remain from the prelude’s long-ago war.

Of course, the real draw here is Hiddleston’s Loki, who is once again the most compelling, entertaining aspect of a Marvel film. This is causing something of a problem, narratively speaking, as all of the movies in this franchise have largely used even their heroes most iconic villains as one-off castaways, focusing instead on whatever piece of world-destroying technology they happen to possess. Loki’s popularity, which is potentially greater than that of any of the Avengers save Iron Man, virtually guarantees that he’ll continue to be part of the narrative, even as phases two and three of the Marvel cinematic universe provide ever-diminishing space for him. Thor: The Dark World flirts with making Loki something of an anti-hero. Sure he destroyed an entire town in New Mexico and most of Manhattan in a fit of jealousy, but he was pithy and funny while he did it, and he is burdened with issues of identity, purpose, and godhood in a world where he may be the only person smart enough to qualify as a psychoanalyst. While plotting his jailbreak, every character (and the audience) knows for a fact that any Loki/Thor team-up is doomed to end in betrayal, but they (and we) go along with it. For Asgard, Loki serves as an unlikely last hope. For the audience, the ambitious terrorist of the cosmos happens to be written in such a way that he seems like the most fun guy to have a drink with.

As for the film’s human ciphers—Foster, Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings)—they’re largely inessential, shoehorned in because the final battle needs some recognizable faces running around in panic while the world burns. Portman, as Jane Foster, does her usual capable job, and a scene where she goes on a dinner date with some guy but can’t think of anybody but Thor is one of those fleeting instances where these movies actually address what it’d be like to be a normal human being in a world occupied by gods and monsters, but even with a cosmic entity flowing through her veins she’s little more than a combination damsel in distress/MacGuffin. The Selvig character has the most to do with the continuing story of The Avengers, though his function here as the world’s most brilliant man to have stripped nude at Stonehenge while muttering incoherently about Ragnarok is largely that of comic relief. Skarsgard and Dennings are given the film’s snappiest non-Loki dialog, but the film just isn’t as interesting when focusing on its earthbound characters, which, if anything, is an indication of how fully-realized Asgard has become, almost by accident. Jane Foster’s visit and the dark elf raid necessitates that a good deal of Thor: The Dark World‘s runtime takes place on Asgard, which, fantasy tropes aside, manages to feel like a real place. The plot doesn’t allow for much exploration of the realm’s tertiary Asgardians, which is something of a shame. I have a rough idea of what a political science major does, but a character like Heimdall (Idris Elba), who can see some ten trillion souls, probably deserves a better fate than serving as Thor’s Facebook app or failing at his job as gatekeeper.

Thor: The Dark World was perfectly enjoyable; not only was it the best superhero film of the year, it may be the best of The Avengers series. But these movies have quickly become a succession of James Bond adventures, right down to the credit text assuring viewers that THOR WILL RETURN in a year or so, whenever the next production requiring a blonde-haired, hammer-wielding meathead is mounted. The difference is that Thor is part of something larger and ultimately more organized than Bond or any other long-running franchise, and coming at a two- or three-a-year pace as these Marvel movies do, there’s less opportunity for Thor to distinguish himself from Captain America, let alone allowing Thor: The Dark World to stand apart from Thor. For now, audiences seem contented by these opportunities to sit down and catch-up with their favorite superheroes and villains. Manhattan may still be smoking, and Liverpool may lie in ruins, but nothing about Earth is fundamentally altered. There’s comfort in that, I suppose, but it’d be nice if a Marvel movie shocked the world by growing up a little, maybe by being something more than not terrible.

Thor: The Dark World. With Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Christopher Eccleston (Malekith), Jaimie Alexander (Sif), Rene Russo (Frigga), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Stellan Skarsgard (Erik Selvig), and Kat Dennings (Darcy). Directed by Alan Taylor and produced by Kevin Feige. Screenplay by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeeley, based on the comic book Thor, created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby.

December 2, 2013
Movie Review: Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

There are no filmmakers quite like Werner Herzog, who has been so prolific over the course of his career that it’s hard to fathom how his every move construes a passion project of some kind. Working in fiction or documentary, in books and lectures, in scripts and plays, Herzog’s is a voice so indelible, so distinct, that not even the strictures of a three-part miniseries on the sensationalist true crime cable network Investigative Discovery could hope to suppress him. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga finds Herzog editing and narrating a series of documentaries by videographer and “co-director” Dimitry Yasyukov, and the result is something of an inverse Grizzly Man. Herzog is clearly enamored with both subjects, but where he couldn’t understand (and was even somewhat frustrated by) the life of Timothy Treadwell, he looks upon the fastidious men of Siberia as if there’s was a life he could settle into. Here, he’s looking into another kind of abyss, but returning with something warm.

Of course, when speaking of “warmth” in a Werner Herzog film, that quality is relative to the environment. Even beyond the snow-crusted, freezing forests of Siberia and Encounters at the End of the World‘s Antarctic wastes, those environments are universally extreme, cruel, and fit to be occupied only by the world’s most clever—and most stubborn—human beings. The fur-trappers who live in Siberia, who have lived in Siberia since the government dropped them from a helicopter in the 1970s with a rifle and a weak promise to return with food and supplies, aren’t phased by the conditions, nor are they particularly philosophical about their place in the world. Yasyukov’s cameras capture them at work building huts and crafting skis, fetching driftwood from the river so the village will have fuel for the winter, and Herzog makes reference at several points to the modern tools the trappers allow themselves—snowmobiles, mostly—but what looks backwards to an westernized city-dweller is a necessity of the Taiga. Modern tools and methodology aren’t built with a fur trapper’s use in mind.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is as methodical in its approach to the life of a trapper as its subjects are to the business of trapping. Each man has a tract of land in the Taiga, and each spends an entire year preparing that tract for the winter’s hunt, which is performed in utter solitude. In spring, summer, and early fall, the 300-person village of Bakhtia prepares for the season in the same way, planting, fishing, building dug-out canoes, baking bread, getting ready for the business of survival in a region where, beyond the snowmobiles and chainsaws employed by the trappers, the only hint of the outside world is the Pokemon t-shirt a child wears. Later, before the river freezes over for the year, a politician visits on a luxury boat bearing sacks of grain and a karaoke machine. The village’s children dance along to the music, but the adults wordlessly load the politician’s gift into the truck and drive it away without listening to his pledge to rid Russia of corruption. There’s no corruption in Bakhtia, just work.

And the trappers are exceedingly good at their work, otherwise the merciless Taiga (or its bears, who make fleeting cameo appearances at the fringes of Yasyukov’s camera) would’ve had its way with them decades ago. The documentary’s central hunter, at rest, tells Yasyukov a few stories from his decades in the region. The partner the Soviet government left him with? He didn’t make it through the first winter. His favorite dog? Eviscerated by a bear. This second event, he says, caused him emotional distress, but the dog did her duty, she was a useful tool. Late in fall, he and the other trappers head back into the forest. “These are happy people,” Herzog intones, in his way. Somehow, it’s hard to disagree.

If Happy People is flawed, it’s in that the film is only partially Herzog’s. He edited and narrated this finished product, but it was stitched together from four complete documentaries, and, unlike Grizzly Man, the questions Herzog is answering are not his own, but Yasyukov’s. Over the last decade, Herzog’s camera has grown into something more than an extension of the director—it’s as though the camera is a person the director is in conversation with, as if both beings are contemplating the same vast unknown. The images Yasukov captures are startling in their beauty, but are more interested in recording fact than theory. The film never feels more like a Werner Herzog film than when the camera comes to rest on the trapper’s dogs, for whom Herzog’s voice is a wonderful medium. Leaping from their masters boat to swim after a moose or running behind a snowmobile for 150 kilometers between camp and the village, Herzog is as awed by their determination as he is by the trappers’. The master, Herzog says, leaves the village and is able to contemplate space and solitude. The dog is afforded no such luxury, but, finding an animal in a hollowed out tree, is able to provide for himself and the trapper. For this, he is rewarded. There’s a measure of happiness in that act, too.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. Directed by Werner Herzog and Dimitry Yasyukov. Produced by Herzog and Timur Bekmanbetov. Screenplay by Herzog, Yasukov, and Rudolph Herzog.

November 8, 2013