THE HURT LOCKER: Just In Case You Still Thought Modern Warfare Sounded Fun

A preface--I apologize that the gaps between posts have been regrettably long, and it hurts me to think of the legions of fans checking this blog nightly, hoping for the companionship of another adroit entry--and having only disappointment follow them into sleep. Know, o ye faithful, that it only reflects the gaps between my own opportunities to see new releases. An unfortunate combination of being extremely busy and broke as shit has contributed to the delinquency of my output. And so, I offer this humble benefaction.

Kathryn Bigelow directed a series of commercially successful action movies in the eighties and nineties, most notably Point Break, which I've not seen but is frequently referenced as showing Keanu Reeves at his most absurdly stone-faced finest. I also know that it's about bank robbing surfers. This is not a dismissive write-off--I'm just trying to frame The Hurt Locker within the context of Bigelow's other films. The woman honed her skills making big-budget thrillers. And hone them she did--The Hurt Locker proves, as does Star Trek for J.J. Abrams, that the craftsmanship of directing is timeless and universal, regardless of the genre in which they are applied.

The film centers around several weeks in the life of Bravo Company, a bomb squad assigned to defuse IEDs around Baghdad. Yeah, we've all had shitty jobs. The film opens with Bravo Company in its first iteration--Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and team leader Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce). During an apparently routine defusing of a roadside bomb, their remote-controlled rover fails, so Thompson dons the imposing shrapnel suit and goes in himself. Eldridge notices a bystander holding a cell-phone--sudden panic--the bystander punches in a few numbers on the phone and the bomb detonates. Bigelow films the explosion in grotesquely beautiful slow motion--jutting spires of gravel, the jump of sand underfoot, and Thompson blasted to the ground, his otherworldly shrapnel suit rendered useless by the sheer force of the explosion.

Thompson is replaced by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) a competent but frequently reckless hotshot who chafes against the nervous precision of Sergeant Sanborn. The film unfolds from there in a series of episodes that make up the waning days of Bravo Company's assignment. Another roadside bomb. A car bomb left in a parking lot. A man who's had explosives chained to his body. In each situation, the tension is excruciating, and tiresome in its repetitiveness...and yet no less intense for its repetition. The proximity of death is horrifying--there is absolutely no safety net for these guys apart from their own wits and presence of mind, and they leave each morning knowing full well the high likelihood that they will die. The bombs are innocuous metal tubes, just one more piece of filthy detritus in the dry streets of this ruined city, and yet the knowledge of the force contained within each--and that it could quite possibly blow at any moment--makes the stillness of these worn metal shells all the more threatening.

And as the company faces these threats every day, bystanders look on, each one possibly carrying the detonator. In one scene, James hurries to defuse a car bomb while Sanborn and Eldridge cover him from the top of the surrounding buildings. A man across the street films them on a camcorder. Is he just interested in what the Americans are doing, or is he assigned to record for posterity their imminent fiery death? Three men stand at the top of a nearby minaret. Are those hand signals to the cameraman?

A later scene involves Sanborn and James in a sniper battle with a group of militants holed up in a distant bunker. The tension is unchanged by the variance in weaponry. The barrel moving a few millimeters left or right is the difference between life or death, and both Sanborn and his opponent are equally skilled--sooner or later, one of them is going to die. It comes down to the cold, dispassionate unfolding of small determinants of luck--a gust of wind, a jammed cartridge, a speck of dust in the eye.

Bigelow ignores the larger milieu of the war, the context of this daily agony...and it is not missed. Larger purposes fade in the face of the immediate need to stay alive. There is only the wire and the fuse--and when James successfully disarms a bomb, he keeps a memento of it in a box under his bed, a macabre edifice of uncertain intent. His ego? That's probably part of it...an expression of his obsessiveness and reckless pride...but I also saw in it a physical record that he was making actual forward movement, a retrospective paving of the progress he's made--that he had beaten death by this much.

From a critical perspective, there were a few problems--James is reasonably well-developed as a character, but I wanted a little more--wanted to know what at stake for him, what drove him to trade in such deadly skills. Episodic structures only succeed when I'm wholly invested in a character. I never quite got there for James, and as such, the film dragged in the four or five sequences when I wasn't biting my own lip off in tense anticipation. Nonetheless, Bigelow shows remarkable restraint for a movie of this type--it's the self-assured craft of a veteran with nothing to prove. There are none of the easy conclusions that undermine otherwise solid films on the subject, such as Ridley Scott's Body of Lies. Basically, the movie is two hours of driving home the horror of knowing that you could be dead in the space of a second, with no warning whatsoever. It's being lauded as the best film of the year, and certainly the best film on the Iraq war. I'm not willing to underwrite either of these statements quite yet--but at the very least, it is a visceral and unromantic impression of war, and a brutal blow to the gut. It makes Transformers look like a romcom twee-fest.

THE HANGOVER: Why Are You Even Reading A Review?

Its humor is juvenile.  Its premise is contrived.  Its plot is implausible.

It's completely hilarious.  For Christ's sake, you don't need a review--everything you need to know is in the poster.  Go see the damn thing.

GOODBYE SOLO: The Primacy of Restraint

I first heard of director Ramin Bahrani in a previously-mentioned New York Times article about a vanguard of "realist" filmmakers brought into focus by the surprise success of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.  This generation of realism isn't burdened with the conceptual theorizing of its Italian progenitors, nor has it been pushed to the margins of popular taste by obsequious academic adulation.  In fact, knee-jerk comparisons to prior movements may be a disservice to the films themselves, as their very merit is partially due to their refreshing lack of conscious referents.  Wendy and Lucy was a simple story beautifully told, a simple character fully realized, simple emotions deeply felt.  It was, quite simply, a success in every way, and the fact that it ended up breaking even--nay, even profiting--is extremely heartening.  Good films still come down to a core craftsmanship, and the general public will appreciate them accordingly.  (Admittedly, it helped that Wendy and Lucy had Michelle Williams as branding tool--and yet, the celebrity persona was entirely absent in the film, and the actress disappeared into the demure character).  

And so its association with Reichardt's film compelled me to see Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo.  Bahrani's previous films were modest but well-received for their hushed, unadorned style.  I'd just seen The Wrestler, whose realism was a bit too self-conscious to be effective, and looked forward to a film genuinely pared down to its essence--a film with no agenda and nothing to prove.  And Bahrani succeeds, narrowly--a gorgeous understated conclusion makes up for a number of hackneyed plot points.  The premise is pure film-school sentimentalism--a brokendown old man (Red West) hires a plucky Senegalese cabbie (Souleymane Sy Savane) to drive him to a mountain top on in two weeks' time for unspecified reasons (read: suicide), and the resolutely positive cabbie spends the interim trying to revive the old man's withered spirit.

William (West) is a tired husk--chain smoking, yellowing hair, tributaries of wrinkles draining into red and swollen eyes.  He is introduced in the back seat of Solo's (Savane) taxi, in which he is negotiating an appointment for the aforementioned ride to a mountain top.  Where William is all dust and fatigue, Solo is spark and vitality, compensating for the taciturn William with a constant stream of spirited exclaiming and pontificating.  Both characters could easily lapse into cliche, but Bahrani allows his actors to deliver their lines quietly, without histrionics or swelling violins, and in their interactions and behavior both emerge as genuine human beings. The characterization of both is achieved in generally the same elegant, pithy understatement that made Michelle Williams' Lucy so effective.

However, Bahrani panders to the audience in the unfolding of the plot.  Solo's unflagging spirit is believable, but his dogged concern for William is a bit forced--I could sense the writer's hand pushing the plot forward as Solo repeatedly tracks William down with the tenacity of a private investigator, as if he doesn't have enough problems with his crumbling marriage and failed job prospects.  The very premise requires a bit of suspended disbelief--why would William bother arranging a driver two weeks in advance of his plan, when it would be just as easy to call one up the morning of?  A convenient poetic liberty for the sake of putting the story into motion.  

Once said story is put into gear, it unfolds fairly predictably--Solo suspects William's intentions and tries to intervene.  William wants only to be left alone and cuts off contact.  Solo consequently tracks William's calls to the taxi agency and reinstates himself as his unofficial driver.  Beyond the aforementioned assignment to drive William to his supposed death, William requires a taxi for his frequent trips to the movies, where he makes small talk with the kid at the ticket counter. 

Spoiler alert, but who gives a damn--it comes out that the kid is William's son, whose ignorance of this relation is a significant contributor to William's despondency.  This fact is hinted at several times, and then made plainly clear when Solo comes across a few of William's diary entries detailing his affection for the boy, and, albeit begrudgingly, for Solo.  Beyond my questioning that a man as unsentimental and emotionally estranged as William would take the time to write journal entries, I was disappointed that Bahrani would resort to such an overused genre trope as diary entries to show the inner softness of an otherwise hardened character.  

I appreciated the sparseness of the plot and characters--but the film still fell into stilted storytelling conventions that weakened its impact.  I'm loathe to use the term "realism" myself, because such a broad label leaves itself open to criticism--not to mention that critical analysis in the years since its cinematic application has essentially rendered it meaningless.  For the sake of convention, however, I will define any film as "realistic" in which the filmmaker is not lying to me.  When I can sense the writer's hand moving things forward, as opposed to things unfolding naturally by the mechanism of fully realized characters, then realism, however one defines that, begins to crumble.

The film's saving grace, however, is a truly graceful conclusion at the mountain top.  We do not see William after he parts ways with Solo at the bottom of the trail.  We are left only with Solo, later, on top of the mountain, alone with the wind and fog and no resolution--and the quiet bond between Solo and the audience, the shared space of that unresolved stillness, felt real and organic.  For all its failings along the way, Goodbye Solo ends on a note of humility and respect between viewer and filmmaker, and that will endear me to any film I see.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL: Two Hours Searching For The End of a Damn Roll of Tape

I must preface this post with a disclaimer.  I have seen exactly four of Jim Jarmusch's eleven feature films: Down by Law, Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, and this. I have not seen some of his supposed classics--Stranger than Paradise and Dead Man are frequently brought up in his defense when I voice my displeasure with Jarmusch, and I must admit the paucity of my schooling in his work.  As such, I won't write off Jarmusch completely.

Having stated my disclaimer, let me now state the facts--The Limits of Control is a waste of my time.  I'm not saying it outright sucks--Christopher Doyle turns in some consistently beautiful camerawork, and there's a few scenes with a hot naked chick.  I'm saying that, as a whole, it's irrelevant, irritating, self-absorbed, insular, smug, and a total waste of time.  Technically brilliant, visually beautiful, and otherwise made up of the most flat, stale, emotionless two hours of my young life.

The plot in a nutshell--an ascetic, silent hit man (Isaach De Bankolé) travels through Spain wearing a series of tasteful and well-tailored suits, and meets a succession of enigmatic characters outside coffee shops who spout a few arcane lines and hand him a battered matchbox.  In each matchbox is a small scrap of paper displaying a cryptic series of numbers and letters.  He reads and then swallows each scrap.  This continues until he is led to a heavily guarded compound in the Spanish hills, into which he mysteriously breaks in and kills a nefarious government (or something) suit (Bill Murray) for an unexplained crime.  It's good the movie ends there, because I'd quickly exhaust all other synonyms for "mysterious" trying to summarize any more.

Jim, it's not that I don't get it--it's that I just don't care.  So you're deliberately confounding genre conventions and audience expectations.  You're more interested in the temporal and visual texture of the story than with its linear narrative.  You have a fleet of talented actors and musicians and cinematographers (and somehow critics) at your beck and call.  And were I so inclined--as so many film students and Los Angeles Times film critics seem to be--I could write an essay pondering the significance of various visual motifs, of the shifting line between dream and reality, of my own need for resolution.  I could fortify my arguments with a formidable parapet of invocations--Godard, Fassbender, Antonioni (and I'm sure it just perks Jarmusch's well-coiffed hair to be associated with such art house titans.  For the record, Jim--Godard was a dick too).  

The problem is, these are all external concepts the audience must bring to the film, the applications of which are invariably conjecture, and the appreciation of which is entirely intellectual and abstract.  In no way am I saying that a film should lead the viewer along like a puppy dog and tie up every last end in the third act.  Such films, in fact, are guilty of the same sin as those of Jarmusch--namely, disrespecting the viewer.  A work of art is a language, a means of communication between artist and viewer, and I enter into that relationship with the same expectation of mutual honesty and respect as I do any personal dialogue.  True communication is only possible if the other party is being genuine with me, attempting to tell me something deeply felt.  Art, then, is the seeking of a new means of communication--abandoning stale and inadequate conventions of dialogue and forming a more potent language, not for its own sake, but in the hopes of genuine mutual understanding.

In no way do I feel that Jarmusch is attempting communication.  Rather, the viewer is the incidental participant in an indulgent mental puzzle, an emotionless exercise in form and in vague, abstract ideas in which Jarmusch has no personal stake.  Jarmusch is leading the audience on like a cat chasing a string, showing off his mastery of filmic styles and his disdain for convention; and whether or not the cat catches the string is of no consequence to him.  Unfortunately, Jim, that's not how human relationship works.  You reveal something of yourself, and speak honestly, with the earnest hope that common ground will be found.  I'm willing to puzzle over a certain amount of narrative conundrums, but only if you're willing to occasionally venture out from behind your wall of scholarly formalism.  This happens, albeit rarely, in a couple of other films I've seen from him (and not often enough for redemption).  In The Limits of Control, he never even peeks his head out.

THE WRESTLER: I Secretly Wished He Was A Heroin Addict

There was a period in high school, around sophomore or junior year, when I started watching what I considered Important Films, the primary characteristic of which was that watching them made me feel Very Artsy and Cool.  Fight Club was among them, as was American Beauty and Magnolia.  Some of these films passed the test of my maturity; most did not.  At any rate, in my adolescent mind, I had stumbled upon some pretty cool shit.

Darren Aranovsky's Requiem for a Dream is a significant entry in that canon.  I remember watching it in my friend's basement with a small group, all of us reeling in stunned silence through the credits and a good while after.  Man, that shit was so REAL!  They were heroin addicts, and they destroyed their lives, and what a grave note of warning against the American myth of hope and future!  REAL!

I don't mean to come off as excessively derisive, because in truth, eight years after my first viewing, I still think Requiem for a Dream is a damn good movie.  Pessimistic, to be sure, and perhaps it goes over the top in showing Jennifer Connolly's defilement (ASS TO ASS!!), but for a young filmmaker, Aranovsky showed some real visual talent and narrative craftsmanship.  And, bottom line, it left me feeling like my gut was imploding in paroxysms of horror, and that always endears me to a film.

I was excited, therefore, for his next film, The Fountain, which was apparently a millenia-spanning soujourn through the metaphysics of birth and death and time.  This all sounded very good to me.  I was greatly disappointed, then, when the movie turned out to--well--suck.  Overbearing, ponderous, pretentious--I was rooting for Aranovsky, but I couldn't overlook his failures.  Nonetheless, I was willing to write it off as over-reaching by a, relatively, still-fledgeling filmmaker.  And by God, he deserved praise trying something challenging, even if it failed.  Hopefully in his next film--as Paul Thomas Anderson did with Punch Drunk Love, his brilliant follow-up to Magnolia--he would shake loose the pretentiousness of his cinematic juvenescence and join the ranks of true American cinematic masters.  From the outset, The Wrestler seemed like it fit the bill.  A simple story line, an understated tone--it looked like everything The Fountain was not, in the best possible way.  

I was generally impressed, but...maybe my hopes were too high, because I left underwhelmed.  Mickey Rourke turns in a damn good performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and flashy camerawork was refreshingly absent.  The long tracking shots of Randy walking through his trailer park or the supermarket where he works, his labored breathing and muttered sighs saturating the soundtrack, create a tangible aura of faded, sober weariness.

However, the problem is, Aranovsky just isn't good at subtlety.  There were just too many meaningful camera movements--zoom to Randy's scar from open-heart surgery, zoom to his love interest's conspicuous absence at his final match, pan to the colostomy bags of other washed-out retired wrestlers at a poster signing.  His fight with his daughter over his long absence in her life was just on the wrong side of the line between heart-wrenching reality and melodrama--their subsequent make-up in an abandoned ballroom pushes it even further.  

Perhaps I'm comparing it too harshly to other stark, quiet tales of gentle downfall--I couldn't get Kelly Reichardt's mind-blowingly brilliant Wendy and Lucy out of my mind.  The New York Times published a great article on a resurgence of "realist" filmmaking, which gives me great hope for the future of film.  The Wrestler almost makes it into this list...but there was a general feeling of Aranovsky restraining his instincts as a filmmaker, as if to compensate for The Fountain, and as such, it falls just short of greatness.

My new hope for Aranovsky is that he gets back to his roots.  Screw nuanced portraits of the faded luster of youth--no one portrays savage, violent, merciless failure like you, buddy, so keep it comin'.   The Fountain was a means to a thematic ends; The Wrestler's ends are aesthetic.  In contrast, Requiem for a Dream was just Aranovsky flexing his filmmaking muscles and having a hell of a time--ends be damned--and as such, it felt like the most genuine film of the three.  I'm not advocating that he shy from risk--but rather, that he make a movie like he wants, without trying to pour it into a preformed mold.  And if that movie happens to be about tragic hipsters drugging themselves into irredeemable decay--Darren, you just do what you need to do.  I'll always come watch.

WATCHMEN: Zack Snyder's Filmmaking-By-Numbers

A brief prologue to this post, and to this blog in general:

Soon after watching Watchmen, I wrote a pithy review on Facebook, which read: "Watchmen is shit and Zack Snyder is a hack."  I considered adding "infantile" or "sadistic" to the list of Snyder's descriptors, but decided the terseness of the existing message was effective enough.  I soon received a response from a friend expressing his disagreement with my sentiments.

A while ago, I had a conversation with this friend in which I contended that I do not have opinions about movies, but rather objectively know their inherent value.  Other people spout conjecture; I report fact.  This resulted in a lively argument, ending with me thinking him an idiot about movies (which is true) and him thinking me an asshole about movies (which is also true).  A similar discussion with another friend ended with him comparing me to Hitler.

I can understand where these people are coming from.  However, despite the sacrifices that must be made, someone must stand up for justice.  Someone must stand up for righteousness.  Someone must stand up for truth.  Some movies are brilliant, and some movies suck, and someone has to tell it like it is.  That someone is me.

I have watched many a bad movie in my time, but somehow my exposure to the colossal pile of shit that is Watchmen, and the ensuing flood of comments on my first public review, was a moment of clarity for me--the world needed to know the truth.  And thus, this blog was born.

Now, on to the meat of it:

Watchmen is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore, to which all reviews of the film inevitably must reference.  Alan Moore is a British graphic novelist, anarchist, and occultist who wisely severed all connections with this film.  I came across the novel for the first time about six months ago when my zealous friend heard about the upcoming film and lent the book to everyone he knew.  I read the entire thing (and it's a hefty volume) in about six hours on one Sunday afternoon, and for days afterwards walked around in a stunned and wary stupor.  The story concerns costumed pseudo-superheroes contending with the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust, set in an alternate 1985 in which Nixon is running for a third term on the strength of his victory in Vietnam, and the arms race with the Soviets is nearing a breaking point.  

The immediate plot points about averting nuclear war were secondary to the larger issues about man's inability to know what is good and what is evil in the modern world--a collective uncertainty about the unstoppable pace of technological advancement, about the fragility of our way of life, about our vulnerability to our own primal nature, and all the while the horrifying silence of God deafening our tired ears.  It was these unanswerable questions that rendered my surroundings in a disconcerting pallor for days after I finished the book--that juicy philosophical marrow that stains the hands and sharpens one's vision to grainy definition.  The New York Times complained of the book's nihilism.  However, I contend that Moore's intent was not to encapsulate humanity absolutely, but merely to explore the fears lurking in the dark corners of our psyche that exist whether we like it or not.  I believe that such explorations are a healthy part of self-analysis.  I retain a generally positive and optimistic view of humanity, but nonetheless found Moore's novel salient and insightful.

Zack Snyder, as far as I can tell, read the book and was impressed by all the explosions and fighting and cool shit going down.  

As such, much in the same vein as his utterly vapid 300, Snyder set out to use as many cool camera tricks as possible to film as many cool fight scenes and dismemberments as possible, throw in some sweet CG landscapes on Mars, toss in a little soft-core sex, and hopefully, somewhere along the line, make a rigidly faithful adaptation of a work that he, by his own admission, deeply respects.  Well, guess what, Zack--you failed.  

In fact, he did worse than fail.  Snyder does, technically, make a literal adaptation--in terms of plot and dialogue, it's basically a transcription of the book.  However,  Snyder takes the heart of the story and keelhauls it across every last frame of the novel, stringing up its flayed and eviscerated corpse and re-animating it into a grotesque and blasphemous dance.  The philosophical inquiries that were the hot lifeblood of the novel are trampled to death by an unceasing display of gore and violence, interspersed with some remarkably shitty acting.  In the name of "faithful adaptation," Snyder has his actors read mostly the exact lines from the novel. In the stylized world of a graphic novel, the words had impact.  In the more literal world of a movie (or at least the world Snyder ineptly creates), they just sound hackneyed and melodramatic. 

As a point of comparison, I would reference Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief.  The film--titled Adaptation--follows a different plot entirely than the book--and yet I would argue that, tonally and thematically, it is one of the most faithful adaptations I've ever seen.  Kaufman takes Orlean's story and finds his own story within it, thereby breathing life into it that is unquestionably personal and genuine.  Watchmen is a lesson in the polar opposite approach to adaptation.  

Snyder tops it off by adding a number of culturally revered American classics to the soundtrack--"The Times They Are A-Changing," "The Sounds of Silence," "All Along the Watchtower."  Even overlooking the manipulativeness and audacity of using such potently American anthems, the purpose of their inclusion is unclear.  Is it supposed to bring us back in time?  No, because all these songs predate the story's timeframe.  Is it supposed to set the mood?  Perhaps--but the only effect it had on me was fragmenting the flow of the narrative, awkwardly interspersed as the songs were with dramatic score for Dr. Manhattan's palace on Mars or Ozymandias's Antarctic fortress.  Are we heading towards the climax?  Am I supposed to feel afraid?  I only wish I could.

Critics derided the film for its excessive violence and nihilistic milieu--and while I will forever defend Moore's novel of this claim, it is all too apt for the film.  Snyder ignores all the best parts of the novel--the tension, the pervasive unease, the spiritual malaise--and amps up the dismemberments and bone-breaking.  Perhaps the book was sufficiently stylized as to make these aspects of the story, which were undeniably present in the novel, poetic and allegorical--the violence sublimated into the telling of a larger story.  In Snyder's clumsy hands, however, it comes off as merely grotesque.  There is no allegory or nuance in his portrayal of Rorschach burying a meat cleaver into a murderer's skull while blood sprays over his face.  Larger implications are lost--we're watching savagery for its own sake.

I only hope that the reputation of Moore's novel is not irreparably damaged by its filmic adaptation.  For a viewer to wish that of a film that was purportedly a faithful adaptation is, quite frankly, unforgivable.