Schedule/Apology

So I've been trying to post more often, but I haven't been succeeding very well.  Procrastination is one of my greatest weaknesses, and it's been showing up here just as it has in other areas of my life.  I do have things I want to say that I think are fairly interesting, it's just getting them written and posted that's the hard part.  I have about four pages of ideas for posts, reviews, series, musings, and such, as well as fairly extensive notes for reviews of Super 8, X-Men: First Class, Meek's Cutoff, and The Tree of Life, plus extra thoughts on Hanna.  I also have notes for posts on a comparison of three Spielberg films, five films of Robert Bresson, an overview of the career of Peter Weir, and the animation of Yuri Norstein, plus a few random reviews of things like Black Swan, Let the Right One In, Miller's Crossing, and Inglourious Basterds.  I would also like to do a write-up of my favorite films of the last decade, which I would like to start by mid-July.

So I guess my point is that I'm a pretty slow blogger, but I don't want to be.  I have big ambitions, I'm just not too good at meeting them yet.  With school out this summer, I would really like to get up to at least one post a week, more if I can manage it.  But we'll just have to see.  Anyway, I hope to have at least a few reviews up here in the next day or so--all I really have to do is transfer them from a notebook to the blog.  So if you're one of my very few readers, thanks for being patient, and watch out for more content in the future--it's coming.

Review: Sucker Punch

This review is very late to the party on Sucker Punch, though I myself was not.  I saw it the week after it opened, and again a few nights later, and I must say it’s gotten a bad rap.  People hated this movie.  It became a critical punching bag for most of a month.  Even regular supporters of director Zack Snyder and this of genre mash-up ran for cover.  The film and its director were criticized for being incompetently made, badly scripted and acted, and pretentiously stupid.  It was accused--vehemently--of being a juvenile, masturbatory, misogynistic desecration of a movie, symbolic of the worthlessness of modern popular cinema and fanboy fantasies everywhere.  Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.

Now, I’m not saying a couple of those criticisms aren’t accurate, and I’m not sure the movie’s actually good (I wouldn’t know who to recommend it to), but I kinda liked it, and I think most of those accusations are pretty overblown.  Perhaps it’s just my own impulse to contrariness, but the more criticisms I read, the more defensive and supportive I felt, and my second viewing of the film only confirmed my opinion.  So I’m going to attempt a defense of the film here and see if anybody agrees with me.

First off, I’ve never been a particular fan of Zack Snyder.  I enjoyed 300, but only because I was laughing most of the time.  I was supremely excited for Watchmen, but after enjoying it in the theater I gradually came to the conclusion that it destroyed all the book’s moral complexities in favor of extra-graphic sex and ultra-violence (though my liking for Sucker Punch has convinced me a re-viewing is in order).  I haven’t seen Dawn of the Dead or Legend of the Guardians.  So I really only went to Sucker Punch to be part of the conversation (that worked out), and I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked it.  Granted, I started off skeptical, and there were parts I thought were ridiculous, and I really hated the end credits sequence, but I came out of the theater thinking, “You know, that was actually pretty good,” and my opinion grew stronger over the next couple days.  

The story focuses on Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a young woman who is apparently 20 but looks 16, who loses her mother to illness and while attempting to protect her sister from her abusive stepfather, accidentally shoots the girl instead.  Her stepfather sends her to a mental institution and bribes the male nurse (Oscar Isaac) to have her lobotomized in a week’s time.  Unable to deal with all this, Baby Doll slips into a fantasy world, where she and the other patients/inmates are burlesque dancers/prostitutes who must plot an escape from the evil pimp (the male nurse).  They do this by distracting authority figures with Baby Doll’s erotic dancing, then sneaking around and gathering banned objects to use in their escape.  When Baby Doll dances, though, she slips into another fantasy/layer of reality, where she and the other girls are super-commandoes fighting their way through various landscapes that mash up anime, steampunk, cyberpunk, fantasy, and video game imagery--this is where most of the footage in the trailers comes from.  Unfortunately, their great escape plan goes horribly wrong, and not all the girls get out alive.

Snyder films the whole thing in his distinctive style: cool characters in mostly CGI environments, moving with lots of slow motion and set to operatic rock music.  This style has its ups and downs.  It’s hard to depict complex themes when everything is so exaggerated, and action scenes don’t really become more exciting they’re slowed down.  I certainly understand those who can’t stand it.  Nevertheless it has its charms.  It allows for the creation of ridiculously gorgeous/awesome/just-plain-ridiculous environments, with the camera lingering on details and moving in and out of the action to give us as many angles as possible.  Unlike Michael Bay (who does share a certain immaturity and attempt to make explosions really gorgeous) and other quick-cut and shaky-cam directors, Snyder generally makes his action spatially coherent and physically comprehensible.  He’ll slow things down, then speed them up, but where before that seemed like a distracting tick, here it felt to me like a familiar friend.  Literal eye-candy that doesn’t offer much suspense but sure is fun to look at.  He drapes the whole film in wall-to-wall rock music, mostly remixes of classics, notably the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?,” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”  He syncs up his psychedelic imagery and video game action sequences with the songs to create pseudo-music videos which also advance plot.  There’s something about this synthesis that grabs me, and occasionally puts a big, goofy grin on my face.  It’s ridiculous, as I’ve said, but it still manages to capture a mood and a movement and plunge you into a gloriously surreal world of the imagination.  Snyder’s style is heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino (especially Kill Bill and the way QT picks up and discards genre styles and tropes at will), as well as Baz Luhrmann, and the delirious way colors, effects, and songs can combine to create emotion in Moulin Rouge. The nearest I can come to analogizing my pleasure in the style Snyder creates here is the delight one can get from the purple prose of an old EC horror comic, or a pulp writer like Robert Howard.  The writing is over-the-top, overly descriptive and faux-poetic, but the fact that it’s not actually good poetry matters not at all--it achieves its own delight and mesmeric power through its total commitment and blindness to its own verbosity.

The actors are a mixed bag, but several of them give surprisingly good performances.  This seems to be a common quality in Snyder’s movies--a few characters extremely well-cast and gripping (off-)balanced by a few really bad, exaggerated performances that make it difficult to judge the ensemble accurately.  Here the acting honors go to Oscar Isaac as the deliciously evil Blue.  He strides dominates every scene he’s in, moving effortlessly from devilish comedy to genuinely scary anger.  Browning as Baby Doll and Abbie Cornish as Sweet Pea are also strong. Though neither lights up the screen like Isaac, they end up carrying most of the plot of the film, and they hold up well.  My favorite, though, was Jena Malone as Rocket, who almost singlehandedly imbues all the girls’ interactions with humor, emotion, and sexiness.  Her character arc is not especially large, but it is the most personal and dramatic, and I admit to feeling the emotion of her last scene pretty strongly.  She was also my favorite thing about Donnie Darko, and I admit to having a bit of a crush on her.  She and Isaac really make the film, for me.  On the other hand, Carla Gugino is horribly over-the-top as the Polish psychiatrist/madame, a weird, porny stereotype come to life.  Jamie Chung and Vanessa Hudgens don’t embarrass themselves, but they’re not given much to do, either.  And Jon Hamm shows up for one scene where he seems completely out of place--though that may have been due to time and rating cuts.  Scott Glenn is in a strange category by himself as the Wise Man, the only character who is clearly tongue-in-cheek.  I say “clearly,” though some reviewers didn’t take him that way and it took me a little while to be sure as well, but the little aphorisms of wisdom he imparts to the girls are so clearly nothing but silly cliches--and the fact that he wears eyeliner in every scene--pushes him well past the line into intentional goofiness.  I’m not entirely sure how to feel about him, since he is supposed to signal real growth in the girls, too, but I feel certain that we are supposed to laugh at him as well.

Now for all those accusations I cited above:  I do not believe the film is either deeply feminist or deeply misogynist.  The film clearly does wants to be a feminist-geek cult object; it wants to take stereotypes and comic book roles for its women and then turn them on their heads, making all men into hulking, threatening rapists, and the girls into superheroes who reject patriarchal tyranny by taking measures into their own hands--it would be a mistake to see it otherwise.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite make it there.  The plot sets up the themes, but they never follow through with anything like real profundity, and I readily admit that searching for deep meaning in this film is a fool’s errand.  There are morals, and there may be hidden plot complications, but deep meaning is something it doesn’t really have.  So I accept that it is a failed feminist anthem.  

The accusations of misogyny, on the other hand, are pretty wildly off the mark.  They rest on a surface reading that dismisses all the pseudo-feminism as crap and simply looks at the style and outfits of the film to find it sexist.  The truth is, the girls do dress in stylized, revealing outfits throughout the film, but the outfits aren’t used as a sexualization.  The burlesque costumes the girls wear are treated as prisons--they reflect the dinginess of the brothel around them, and act as oppressive symbols of their subjugation.  (Their little-girl names are also symbols of this male domination--but they take of hold of the names and make them their own.)  When they enter the third level of reality--the action sequences--they get rid of the burlesque costumes to bedeck themselves in leather uniforms/armor, influenced by everything from The Matrix to Batman to Sailor Moon.  Of course, one can see misogyny here, too, if one is so inclined, but I think that would be a mistake.  The uniforms are not especially practical, but they are not nearly as revealing as many outfits worn by female superheroes in today’s comic books, and they are never sexualized in these sequences--clearly, they are meant to be as “awesome”-looking as possible, the female equivalent of generations of masculine heroes whose outfits emphasized their musculature and impossible coolness.  Whether this represents a desirable style of heroism for women is another matter.  I don’t see many girls running around looking for hyper-stylized, violent female action heroes.  On the other hand, the actresses starring in the film obviously loved it.  They delighted in going to press junkets together and describing the training they went through and the great fun they had, as well as emphasizing the way the film is supposed to be liberating for girls.  And in the first (late) showing I attended, of the five people in the audience, three of them were girls.  Bottom line on Snyder’s depiction of women:  He clearly cares about these characters as people and wants us to care, too.  He never once, that I noticed, directs his camera at the girls in a truly titillating or eroticized way, except when depicting the point of view of evil male characters, and then only very briefly.  He never shows Baby Doll’s mesmerizing dance, because the dance is not important except as a plot device and showing it would be sexualizing her.  I saw more titillating objectification of female bodies in the 2-minute trailer for Fast Five before the film, and that’s a fact.

Ultimately, I can’t claim Sucker Punch as a completely successful or really “good” movie--there’s too many flaws, too many narrative inconsistencies, too much slow motion and scenes that fly wildly over-the-top.  But I think it is a genuinely enjoyable movie, one with a unique style and some really breathtaking moments, populated by several honestly compelling characters and a pretty sweet soundtrack.  It doesn’t live up to its ambitions, but it deserves a much better reception than it got, and Snyder deserves to be watched in the future.  If he can one day succeed in completely marrying his style with a tight, exciting plot, and genuine emotion and complex themes, he will be a force to be reckoned with.

Rating: 6/10 stars, objectively, but I’m leaning toward a 7/10.

This guy is the only other person I can find who makes a strong defense of the film.  He goes farther than I do, but he helped clarify my own opinion.  Other people who take the film seriously can be found here and here and here.  I don’t agree with the first link’s argument that it’s all ironic, and I don’t think I want to, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.  The second link is a really excellent article exploring the film’s imagery and symbolism (not always positively).  The third says many of the same things I said, differently.

I Saw The Tree of Life

This weekend.  Nothing else to say right now.

I Hate it When People Are Rude During Movies

I think most people do.  It's nice to know some theaters are taking a stand against it.

Recent Movie: Thor

Light and frothy, Thor is essentially a kids movie, with shiny costumes and goofy characters.  As such, it is harmless summer entertainment, though not very compelling, with little real danger or violence and stakes that are so ridiculously huge that they have relatively little urgency.

The sets and effects are big and overblown, and they achieve a certain kitschy grandeur.  Most of the characters are given short shrift, especially the earthly ones, who are entirely one note.  The only actors who come out of this looking good are Chris Hemsworth, excellent in his first starring role as Thor, Tom Hiddleston, Machiavellian and (relatively) complex as Loki, and I suppose Idris Elba, as the intimidating Heimdallur.  The plot is both convoluted and simplistic, with an akward structure attempting to support universe-spanning events rendered in the most obvious comic book-y way; the type of thing where characters can destroy inter-dimensional pathways with hammers.  That might be the best way to think of the movie: as a sixties-era Marvel comic writ large.  It has an innocence and cheerfulness that mostly makes up for its general silliness.  On the other hand, I can easily see the general cheesiness of many scenes leading it to become a cult classic 20 years down the road, watched only for its camp value.  As you can see, I'm of two minds with this one, but I think its good nature wins out.  It's dumb, but not stupid, tiresome, or offensive.


Rating: 6/10 Stars.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The blogosphere has been alive over the past month or so with raves for this film, directed by acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and winner of the 2010 Cannes Palme D'or.  Unfortunately, I can't join in the praise.  Frankly, I didn't get it, and I'm not sure what I'm missing.  I readily admit my judgment is not the "correct" or best one to follow here, so all I can offer is a subjective account of what I liked about the film and what I didn't.  


I came to Uncle Boonmee with a lot of excitement and expectation.  I had been hearing about it since its premiere at Cannes a year before, and the reaction had been universally positive.  Every critic around assured me it was a masterpiece for the ages, one of the few high points of a weak festival, a feast for the mind and the senses.  One critic even suggested that when Uncle Boonmee won the Golden Palm, "What happened in 2010 was what would have happened in 1960 had L'avventura won over La dolce vita. The myth that cinema has been in a state of steady regression is crushed once and for all."  (Incidentally, I also hated L'avventura, but for completely different reasons.  There the characters were so completely empty they drove me to rage and despair, and by the time the film was over I wanted to punch something.  That was not the case here.)  I understood that the film would be slow, filled with long, lingering shots of trees, grass, and jungle, and a calm, gentle attitude toward plot and character.  I knew it might be a challenge to get through and that it wasn't the sort of thing that would play to a multiplex, and these expectations were certainly correct.  Where my expectations were off was an overconfidence in my own ability to get through the film and an overestimation of the level of masterpiece I would be watching. 


I have watched a fair amount of slow, airy, and/or spiritual cinema over the past year, including but not limited to films by Terrence Malick, Robert Bresson, and Andrei Tarkovsky.  I think that I was expecting something of a cross between Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Malick's The New World, both films I fell in love with on first viewing and regard as absolute masterpieces of the highest order.  What I got, though, was more mystifying than either of these films, and left me feeling frustrated and irritable rather than awestruck or even mildly confused.  Many other films, like some of Bresson's, have left me with mixed and uncertain feelings, which eventually coalesce into admiration, when I have applied thought and time to what I've seen.  With Uncle Boonmee, though, I've just grown to dislike the film the more I've thought about it, and I'm not sure why that is.

I saw the film in the newly restored IU Cinema, a beautiful theater with comfortable seats, frequented by art-appreciative crowds.  I went with my father, who is not a connoisseur of such films, but took a fancy to see this one with me.  Our seats were comfortable, the atmosphere pleasant, the audience quiet, and I settled in ready to immerse  myself in the film.  I found the opening scene remarkably beautiful--the water buffalo pulling at its rope while incense smoke rises from the grass.  It reminded me of the horse that rolls over near the beginning of Andrei Rublev, though I'm not sure why; it had something of the same transfixing, symbolic beauty.  At the same time, I was very conscious of what I was watching and thinking--I did not find myself given over to beauty and transcendence as I did with The New World.  I hoped that I would feel this way eventually, but it turned out that this was the closest to the feeling I would come.


The next scene showed Jen and Tong riding in a car, and it lasted a long time.  I was conscious of this length but not overly bothered by it, because I had expected things like this.  Nevertheless, it established the pattern:  Individual shots and scenes throughout the film would take my breath away with their mundane-yet-otherworldly beauty, but these would be followed by long scenes that left me cold.  There's nothing exactly wrong with these scenes that I know of, they just seemed to lack signifcance to me and I found myself waiting patiently for them to end so more interesting things could come along.  I suppose this sounds like I just got bored with the movie because it was slow, but it wasn't really that.  I was engaged by certain scenes more than others, but for the first two-thirds of the movie I was still fascinated, if rather mystified.  Other scenes which struck me with their beauty were the ghostly dinner scene, the shots where Jen walks through the orchard, and the journey to the cave.  One shot I particularly admired was just an "empty" shot looking out at a hammock on the porch, the vast jungle trees swaying with the breeze in the background.  That scene did seem to me to achieve a certain beauty and peace.

Unfortunately, I found the meandering narrative further broken up by what appeared to be scenes from Boonmee's past lives, though the is only a guess as they were left completely unexplained.  The main scene is the already-infamous catfish scene, which involves a princess apparently receiving oral sex from a large talking catfish in a lagoon.  I have no idea what this scene means, or how it connects to the rest of the movie.  It seems to be a fragment of a fairy tale, but why it is here is so vague that I'm not sure there's even an answer.  Certainly I haven't found any reviewer who's actually tried to answer it.  The scene is partially redeemed, though, by its final shot:  The camera dives beneath the waves to see a torrent of bubbles, kicked up by the thrashing princess and the nearby waterfall.  The bubbles fly everywhere in an incredibly beautiful abstract composition.  This is probably the only shot in the film I thought ended too soon. 

It is the last twenty minutes, though, that really threw me for a loop.  Boonmee and company travel to a cave in the jungle, and then inside it, past crystals that look like stars, to a vast cavern where Boonmee is to die.  It is a mesmerizing sequence that is beautifully done and immediately suggests comparison to Plato's Cave, and the discovery of meaning.  But here, instead of finally giving answers or more boldly engaging with the questions tangentially raised so far, the film spins off into a still-photo montage of kids with guns and a guy in a monkey suit.  What does this have to do with anything?  What does it mean?  I had no idea then and I have no idea now, despite reading a dozen different reviews of the film by intelligent, appreciative critics.  They offered a few possible explanations--another past life, a future life, another story of monkey-ghosts, a reference to one of Apichatpong's other video projects.  Most said it was a political comment on that region of modern Thailand, but what sort of comment and to what end no one bothers to explain, if they even know.  Whatever its meaning, from this point onward I found myself completely divorced from the events and characters of the film, alienated instead of involved, with no idea what to feel or think about the events onscreen.


After Boonmee's death, the others go back to the city.  They hold a funeral with a huge, garish, tower of electric lights and plastic to commemorate him (the contrast with the naturalism of the jungle is obvious here, at least).  Then they go sit in a hotel, watch TV, and sort letters.  Tong takes a long, real-time shower.  Then he and Jen get up and leave other versions of themselves still sitting, go to a karaoke bar, and a pop song plays over the credits.  What does all this mean?  I don't know, and frankly, at this point, I don't care.  I expended quite a lot of energy trying to figure it out, reading other reviews, thinking, and discussing it with my dad, and I'm no closer to finding an answer than when I started.  I left the theater feeling confused and uncertain, and now I've come the point of irritation and exasperation.  That may seem petty, but it's how I feel.  If the last act of the film has any meaning--and I think it does, Apichatpong is nothing if not a serious filmmaker trying to make major statements--then it is known only to him and a chosen few.  It is closed to me, and there's nothing I can do but throw up my hands and give up.


I understand that plenty of others disagree with me and found the film truly powerful and brilliant.  I am not by any means saying my opinion is correct on this one.  I went in with high hopes and wanted to like it.  And I did like certain scenes and shots quite a bit.  It is clearly a significant aesthetic achievement, but I'll be doggoned if I know what it means.  Even the themes that seem clearer to me seem rather underdeveloped.  Hardly and reference is made to past lives, and having three sentences about Communism is apparently considered a powerful political statement.  Clearly the fear of death and the effort to die peacefully and well is at the forefront of the film's mind, and that, at least, seems well-served and successful.  Everything else is so oblique, vague, and mystifying that it doesn't really make any impression on me at all.  I find that discouraging.  You may have noticed my reference to other cinematic masterpieces in this post, pretty clearly an attempt to bolster my own cinephilic credentials for a negative review.  Hopefully I wasn't too whiney about it.  I will reserve judgment on Apichatpong's works as a whole until I have seen more.  I especially wish to see Syndromes and a Century; if and when I do I will offer my updated opinion.

If you want reviews of Uncle Boonmee that are actually appreciative of the film and try to explain it more thoroughly, I recommend going here, here, here, here, or here.