Film School Rejects » Landon Palmer

SXSW Review: The Runaways

Landon Palmer — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:00:56 +0000

The Runaways has plenty of components working against it. It’s an independent film that stars Kristen Stewart, who since her work in Twilight has been dismissed by many of us who avoid that series like the plague as a textbook example of the overexposed and the undertalented. It’s a rock music biopic, a genre which usually manifests itself as a set of unavoidable, interchangeable clichés. Also a problem with rock biopics is seeing conventional, bankable stars trying to come across as anti-establishment, which typically rings corny and false. Lastly, the film, like the band itself, involves a problematic oversexualization of underage females, and there often exists a fine line between representations of exploitation and exploitation itself. I can’t say that The Runaways rises above all these potential handicaps of the rock biopic, but it certainly surpassed what I expected from it and proved to be thoroughly entertaining despite any of its apparent inadequacies.

The Runaways concerns the quick rise and fall of the first successful all-female rock group. A group constantly confronted by the male musicians that fear them, The Runaways utilized inspiration from the punk movements of the time (notably The Sex Pistols) to establish a place for all-female rock acts in the future. Dakota Fanning plays Cherie Currie, the lead vocalist who – appropriate for the genre of music and their particular influences, lacks any formal vocal training or range. Stewart plays Joan Jett, the band’s guitarist and (a)moral center of fuck-it-all rock attitude. Michael Shannon plays their manager, Kim Fowley, a character for whom eccentric hardly holds a candle to his lightning bolt of a personality.

The great thing about music biopics is that it doesn’t matter what type of music the figure(s) at the center of the film performs, the same rise-and-fall set of triumphs and challenges remains uniform. The Runaways is no different, following a connect-the-dots formula of the rock biopic and embracing nearly every trope in to book. From the band’s humble beginnings to the parents who either have substance abuse problems or aren’t present at all to the quick rise to stardom to the band’s own substance abuse problems to their inevitable fall from grace, The Runaways meets expectations and never diverts from even the most rigid formulas of the genre (and often runs through the conventions rather quickly, rarely allowing time for the film to breathe), but I’ll be damned if the movie isn’t a breeze to watch along the way.

The Runaways is in no way a great film or even a notable film of its genre, but it is an infective burst of energy propelled by its fast pace and fun music. One may cringe when the film’s dialogue and the cast’s performances delve into the most hackneyed of tropes (like this exchange between Stewart and Fanning as the band starts to fall apart, F: “I can’t do this anymore,” S: “If you weren’t aware, we’re cutting a record here!”), but it’s easy to overlook and forgive when getting swept up in the manic energy of it all. Music video director Floria Sigismondi employs lively, engaging visuals as first-time feature director, which often clouds the fact that her writing could use some honing. At least she knows, really knows, how to film music.

Performances vary. Stewart is only sometimes convincing as a punk-rocker, but like her turn in Adventureland, she proves here that her talent contains more range than the Twilight series would suggest. Fanning is discomfitingly convincing as an underage teen all to eager to become a sex symbol, and the fact that she’s underage in reality combined with The Runaways being a follow-up to her controversial turn in Hounddog and her more subtle sexualization in the more mainstream action film Push may draw questions regarding where on the line between exploring exploitation and exploitation itself the film lies, especially in the context of her recent career. Lastly, Shannon, a standout talent in almost anything he’s in, is given permission to take it to eleven here, and while his mania and peculiar performance decisions are always entertaining to watch, a bit of restraint might have helped him come across more like a fully realized character than what often delves into footage of Shannon simply having a really, really good time on set.

What I do appreciate in the film’s story, however, is how it depicts a band self-awarely manufacturing their own image. Shannon’s Fowley often utters lines akin to calling The Runaways the most revolutionary rock band since The Beatles, but unlike the ham-fisted “something’s a-happenin’ here” forced contextual significance bestowed within the narratives of many a musical biopic (and as parodied in Walk Hard), Fowley’s sentiments read as cynical and opportunistic, intently creating and forcing importance upon the first female rock band – assembling the band through appearance, for instance, instead of talent – rather than allowing their collaboration to organically evolve. You get the sense that this is really how bands form and resonate within the zeitgeist, as opposed to some romantic cultural necessity for a certain band at a certain place at a certain time. The Runaways is fun, if immediately forgettable.

SXSW Review: A Serbian Film

Landon Palmer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:19:33 +0000

The two midnight screenings of director Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film that have taken place so far here at South by Southwest have already flirted with a degree of notoriety, both within the fest and elsewhere. The first screening even got a write-up in the Wall Street Journal, the one where the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse, Tim League, who brought the film to SXSW, led the filmmakers and five select attendees in a special type of tequila shot in order to get energized for the screening. I was a member of the audience at this premiere screening, and if you’re wondering why I’m discussing the circumstances of my viewing in the context of the screening itself, it’s because my experience of seeing this film and the subsequent meaning I took from it, perhaps more so than any other film at the fest or elsewhere, was so overtly determined by the context in which I saw it, a context that needs to be transparent in order for me to write an honest review.

The film centers around a veteran porn star named Milosh who, in order to take care of his family, returns to the business to star in a progressive work of pornography by a supposedly genius filmmaker. When he shows up on his first day of shooting, he is followed by bodyguards holding videocameras and reluctantly subjects himself to a few despicable acts only under the assumption that everything he’s involving himself with is staged, but he quickly finds himself in too deep in a plot by the director to manipulate Milosh into performing horrendous acts that are difficult to describe, let alone see carried out on screen. In interest of allowing those who haven’t seen the film to experience its full intended effect upon first viewing, I won’t give away any details regarding what happens. But I will say this: I’ve subjected myself to a lot of shocking films. In contrast to what was buzzed about them, I found Antichrist, Salo, and Irreversible all somewhat easy to endure. A Serbian Film, I can safely say, is, content-wise, the most shocking film I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.

A Serbian Film is intended as a broad allegory. I know this because the filmmakers in attendance iterated this point time and again before and after the screening. Would I have picked up on this otherwise? I can’t say. Serbian Film does suggest a degree of thought going on behind the episodes of abhorrence occurring on screen, but I can’t safely say that a national allegory would be what a given spectator takes away from a cold viewing.

But in seeing it within this context, the metaphorical intent is clear as the two most popular definitions of the term ‘fuck’ are conflated here into one. Milosh gets both fucked and fucked-over, and in turn does the same to others as, say, a corrupt government may do to its people or inspire its people to do to others. In other moments that I’ll refrain from discussing in detail here, the allegory conflates these two definitions of fuck in far more disturbing ways. Thus, the film’s title subversively operates as correlating a horrifying filmic product with a nation that would no doubt reject that product.

There is a lot to say about A Serbian Film, and whether or not this exercise in allegory truly works in its entirety. While I do believe that the film contains shock value not just for it’s own sake, and while I give my due regard to the thought and intents put behind this challenging piece of cinema, I have two major problems with the film.

My first issue is that the allegory only works broadly, not specifically. The entire story of the film is a generally encompassing analogy of the experience of being perpetually fucked by the government, but only a few specific instances of what Milosh endures can be said to carry meaningful specifics that further inform the events within the film’s allegorical correlation with the history of Serbian social reality. The events of the film were deliberately constructed with allegorical meaning, yet meaning often gets lost when considering the extensions of the allegory not within the greater scope of the film itself, but in terms of individual events and details. (Also, if this is an allegory of national oppression, then what is the purpose of the video cameras and the implied distribution of a finished film? Wouldn’t the end product of the pornography being made serve as vast evidence of oppression, in contrast to the intents of secrecy typical of tyrannical government powers?)

This ties to my second point, the fact that A Serbian Film is also a thoroughly aesthetic experience, forgoing the grittiness of documentary realist filmmaking that typically characterizes films of socio-national relevance with a particularly sleek visual and aural aesthetic. While what is seen on screen contains is intended to be reprehensible, the stylistic choices are, admittedly, aesthetically pleasing. Spasojevic and company show a remarkable ability to frame any given scene with a well-honed and consistent visual style, an impressive feat when considering that this is the debut feature for most of those involved with the production. It is in this vein that I think A Serbian Film runs an oscillating gamut never transparently admitted by the filmmakers, one which marries the shock value we seek through exploitation and (horror) genre filmmaking with the intents of national allegory. Thus, some events operate within Serbian Film through allegory, while others suggest a desire by these filmmakers to exhibit such events because they wanted to see them on film in a way consistent with how genre and exploitation typically operate.

Thus, A Serbian Film possesses the danger, in part, of justifying exploitation through genre rather than acknowledging the far more interesting (albeit uneven) union of allegory and exploitation possibly going on. Everybody in that midnight showing of A Serbian Film understood the shock value of what we were about to witness, and attended inferentially for that reason, even if the film went far beyond what we expected in terms of content, so there is an appeal towards exploitation that this film holds whether it wants to or not. I’d rather the approach by the filmmakers and within the film itself to be as transparently proud of A Serbian Film’s exploitative intents as they are of the intended allegory within it. The film suggests these two elements are mutually exclusive. They aren’t.

While A Serbian Film may work partly as an allegory and partly as an exercise in exploitative genre filmmaking (the awkward middle ground of the film, as I see it, lacks in both realms), it hardly works at all as a story on its own. The problem with incomplete attempts at allegory in film is that they eventually lose the story in total favor of exterior meaning. By the end of A Serbian Film, the evil intents of the director with regard to what he wants to achieve in cinema (is he seeking a greater pornographic cinema, or simply manipulating Milosh? The film never decides) are murky to the point that he surrenders being a character to becoming an object of pure symbolism. In effective allegory, characters should simultaneously be both. As I said before, there are many things to say about A Serbian Film, and in some ways its inherent contradictions and inconsistencies make it a more interesting film than it would have been otherwise.

Click here for more from SXSW 2010

SXSW Review: Micmacs

Landon Palmer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:42:43 +0000

I’ve enjoyed every single one of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French films. From the dark fairytale of City of Lost Children to the enchanting Cinderella story of Amelie to the sprawling, visionary war epic (and my favorite film of his) that is A Very Long Engagement, each and every one of his films have offered something new, surprising, and wholly original. The auteur now transitions his impeccably creative lens to a whimsical, charming story about a group of misfits enacting one of cinema’s most playfully executed acts of revenge. The whole experience is fun and enchanting, and Jeunet’s incomparable eye for illustrious visuals and his equally unique storytelling skills make for an experience that will put a permanent grin on your face.

Micmacs concerns a social misfit named Bazil (Daniel Boon), a man who has been dealt an unfortunate proportion of bad cards in his life. After enduring the death of his parents in his early childhood and the difficulties of having a bullet lodged in his head as an adult (this is a comedy, I swear), Bazil encounters a team of fellow eccentrics and outcasts with rather unique talents, including an Olive Oyl-channeling contortionist, a genius of memory, and a struggling stuntman played by Jeunet mainstay Dominique Pinon. All are joyous and unique characters who, like Bazil, are suggested to have a dark history behind their idiosyncratic talents. Tragedy, of course, is typically cited as a necessary source of humor, but Jeunet thankfully doesn’t dwell on these details as a brooding undercurrent to an otherwise fanciful tale. Instead, the two are conflated as one, as moments like Bazil being shot in the face in the film’s opening minutes and his struggle find a place to sleep outside with a cardboard blanket later in the film have light comic touches that ring as neither insincere nor blissfully ignorant. For Jeunet and for these characters, being able to realize what is funny in the world is the only way its darkness can be endured.

This conceit comes especially into play when the team assembles an intricate revenge plot against two competing arms dealers. It is in this respect that the film finds a way to laugh at the darkest of realities as we witness the methodical Looney Tunes-style comic torture of two fictional characters responsible for arming some of the world’s greatest modern atrocities, including Darfur. The joy of watching Micmacs is in witnessing Jeunet’s boundariless imagination at work as the misfits carry out scheme after scheme with a whimsy and a visual style that allude to anything from Bugs Bunny to Buster Keaton. In fact, in many ways, watching Micmacs is like watching a great comic silent film, one that embraces the endless possibilities of visual storytelling, inundated with visual gags both great and small in nearly each moment of its running time.

Micmacs is truly cinema-specific. The experience of seeing it cannot be paralleled within any other medium, and one gets a sense throughout that Jeunet is working purely within his element here. He possesses a magnificently detailed vision, and I can’t stress enough how fun it is to watch those details at play onscreen. Micmacs gives the impression that an extended amount of time and effort was put forth to manufacture every living detail. It’s been more than half a decade since Jeunet’s last feature, but if such gaps in time guarantee a result this astounding, then the intricacy and patience with which Jeunet approaches his work is no doubt well worth it.

Because Micmacs is so uniquely cinematic, the social realities depicted within its plot come across as inconsistent, even misplaced (if a film is presented as a living cartoon, does it possess the grounding in reality necessary to be considered satire?), but the man is a visual storyteller in the way that few filmmakers are, and all the strengths in his cinematic arsenal are at work here in full force.

Click here for more from SXSW 2010

SXSW Review: Get Low

Landon Palmer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:18 +0000

It’s difficult to find the words to express in reaction to Get Low, mainly because the film doesn’t say much in and of itself. This is not to say that the film is either terrible or magnificent; when one watches Get Low it’s hard to get the sense that it is good or bad as much as it is simply a non-event. The film’s ambitions are modest, its approach straightforward, its style restrained, and it contains a story constructed with what seems like thoroughly intended thinness.

Director Aaron Schneider’s first feature (the filmmaker won an Academy Award in 2003 for his short Two Soldiers), Get Low is a folk-tale-based story of a reclusive old curmudgeon in 1930s Tennessee who throws his own funeral while he’s still alive. What at first comes across as a bold act of eccentricity by a man who himself is a living folk tale in his small hometown becomes a story about redemption, forgiveness, and regret in the twilight of one’s life. Robert Duvall, plays the man in question, Felix Bush, while Bill Murray and Lucas Black run the funeral home that Felix is staging his party through. Sissy Spacek rounds out the supporting cast as Mattie, Felix’s old flame and lost object of affection, while Bill Cobbs makes an appearance as the preacher who reluctantly officiates Felix’s living wake.

While Duvall showed a strong presence last year with his supporting turns in The Road and Crazy Heart, it’s hard to think of the last time he had a solid leading role, and Get Low, if nothing else, reminds you why Duvall can be such a commanding presence when he’s front-and-center in the film. Duvall’s role as Felix is his most commanding, memorable lead since The Apostle, but that’s more of an indication of the veteran actor’s recent career choices than an endorsement of praise for his latest film. With a giant beard and his deep, gruff voice, Duvall’s presence is as heavy here as his impressive career would justify.

Duvall adds a great deal to Felix that comes across as hardly present on the page, embedding his character’s reserved moments of silence with the impression of dense introspection. But Duvall unfortunately has to do the homework of filling out the character where the filmmakers choose not to, as Felix is bestowed characteristics by those who share the screen with him that simply aren’t evident to the audience. Characters say that Felix is a silent introvert, but we see him talk quite often; characters say that Felix is a recluse who resorted to decades of solitude as a result of being unable to deal with his personal demons, yet nothing about him seems antisocial; other characters say that there are numerous ‘crazy stories’ about Felix, yet none of these stories are explicitly recounted and Felix never displays a temperament that would inspire such stories, true or false. There is an odd disconnect in Get Low between the character the filmmakers want to create and the impressions ultimately derived from what is projected onscreen, showing a lack of control behind the camera as such heavy acting talent exists right in front of the camera. Duvall simply makes the most of what sparingly little he’s been given to work with.

Regarding the rest of the cast, Bill Murray is a welcome presence but comes across as oddly miscast, his sense of humor and general demeanor being incongruous with the setting and tone of the rest of the film. Lucas Black is just fine as Murray’s assistant, and Spacek, like Duvall, bestows gravitas to a role in which too much is left off the page, which brings me to Get Low’s greatest flaw. Get Low is a character piece in which its central character makes an odd decision, and the rest of the film is the methodical unraveling of the reasons behind that decision, yet these revelations never contain the depth, or even the detail, necessary to achieve the intense emotional response that it clearly aims to elicit from the viewer. The film is hardly attempting to be a tear jerker, but it does aim for a modest degree of emotional resonance that it simply doesn’t achieve. There are appealing elements here, and besides the major plus of a great cast the film is technically proficient for the most part (mainly in terms of production design, as other areas – notably editing and framing – flirt with the amateur), but Get Low simply doesn’t take the effort to fill everything out, to provide the sense of depth or backstory necessary for all the emotions on display to be convincingly earned for the audience. At times the modesty of the film is a welcome relief, but by the end it’s simply too underwhelming and weak to justify its efforts.

SXSW Review: Enter the Void

Landon Palmer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:15:28 +0000

We all know that film is a collaborative medium, but some films give the impression of such a strong singular vision as if the work itself were simply the direct projection of the director’s imagination onto the screen, with all the ease of such a vision achieved that my statement implies. With respect to Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, by “ease” I mean that the film is as much of a technical accomplishment as it is artistically ambitious. Noe’s camera weaves in and out of buildings, through walls, across planes of consciousness, and even moves in and out of human bodies – not to make explicit the overt sign of a great technical accomplishment that such a feat truly is, but through various means in the context of the film such an employment of technique feels more like a pure manifestation of the many things that we in the extents of our imaginations wish film could actually do. Like many an astoundingly ambitious an original film, Enter the Void is profoundly flawed in many respects, but the epic 2.5+ hour meandering journey that this film takes you on is, often simultaneously, a frustrating and euphoric singular cinematic experience.

Enter the Void is Noe’s first feature since 2002’s Irreversible, a film whose notorious real-time rape scene and challenging stytlistic choices caused massive walkouts at its Cannes premiere. Enter the Void is an equally challenging film, but for drastically different reasons.

Both films are similar in that they each have a nonlinear approach to examining an inciting act of violence at its center, exploring how one violent action is determined by what came before and how it affects all involved after. The film takes place (mostly) in Tokyo amongst a group of English-speaking friends living in the city. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a drug dealer, and his sister Linda (Limits of Control’s Paz de la Huerta), who he paid to fly to Tokyo to reunite as siblings, is a stripper. The film (both literally and in terms of narrative structure) circles around a drug deal gone horribly wrong, and Noe lends his restlessly wandering lens to Oscar and Linda’s childhood (which involves a similarly traumatic incident), Oscar’s life in Tokyo before Linda’s arrival, and Linda’s life after the film’s inciting occurrence.

While plot is always apparent in Enter the Void, it’s a secondary element when experiencing the film itself. The story as a framing device is a rather weak one when taking into consideration that the film has exhausted its thematic developments and possibilities to a breaking point long before its running time is complete, but it is in Noe’s vision, rather than the story – or even meaning – behind it, that the real worth of Enter the Void lies.

In some ways, Enter the Void is a more “complete” film than Irreversible. Where his previous feature’s extended journeys through dark landscapes provided little more than formal indulgences that stuck around long after they had served their purpose (notably the extended gay night club scene at the beginning or the subway conversation towards the end) between its notable bouts of brilliance, the wandering uncut camera of Enter the Void is justified by its intended perspective. The film is a case study in the subjective eye of the camera’s relationship to personal subjectivity as it stays within an almost exclusively consistent viewpoint of one of the film’s central characters, even after that character stops being an active participant in the story. Every moment of Enter the Void’s unique (sometimes frustratingly so) stylistic decisions serve the thematic and narrative purpose of the story being told.

Paz de la Huerta’s performance is disappointingly stuck between sexpot and grown adolescent. The film’s religious themes are interesting when one discovers the structure of the movie as a whole by the film’s end, but they are, unfortunately, skin-deep. Noe’s camera isn’t any less indulgent than it’s been in his previous work, but Enter the Void (especially in its first half) occasionally achieves profound moments of a transcendent cinematic experience, an encouraging example of how cinema possesses the potential to eliminate or manipulate any sober conception of lived time and space. It reaches beyond previously perceived limits of cinema’s capability and disguises its technical achievement through immersion into its dreamlike, hallucinatory aura. This experience of immersion isn’t consistent throughout, but by the very end of Enter the Void you’ll literally have gone places you never thought the kino-eye could go.

Click Here for more from SXSW 2010

SXSW Review: Dogtooth

Landon Palmer — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:04:09 +0000

When writing about Dogtooth the question is not, as it is in approaching many film reviews, whether or not some elements of a film work and others don’t in order to achieve what it sets out to, but whether or not the audience accepts or rejects what is set out to be achieved in the first place. Tonally and stylistically, Dogtooth is consistent, informed, and well executed on every aesthetic and technical level. There are no real missteps in its process. So to critique the film is to feel repelled by its confrontational methodology of storytelling or the entirety of the challenging story being told, and such a critique would be legitimate as Dogtooth is a profoundly disturbing film, difficult to watch on many levels, and meant only for a very particular type of audience. That being said, I absolutely loved this movie.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes, Dogtooth is a Greek film about…let’s say, an insulated suburban family. The immediate family remains nameless, but the patriarch of the household is some sort of manager at an industrial power plant who, without the slightest intrusion from the rest of society and without the slightest hint of suspicion of anybody residing outside his house, has raised his two daughters and one son exclusively in the confines of their home without ever once leaving. It’s a very tight rein he holds on his three full grown adult-children, having implemented decades of conditioning that have caused them to be so obedient and fearful of the outside world that the father doesn’t even have to worry about them wandering off with the garage door wide open.

One could bestow many things upon the inspiration for this narrative, from a thorough examination of Stockholm syndrome that reflects several recent histories of children kidnapped and raised exclusively at home to the result of permanent psychological damage, or as reflective of cultures of religious extremism rooted in the insecurities of power-hungry patriarchal control freaks who literally breed a culture that fears society and never questions its immediate masters. Whatever Dogtooth is exactly, it’s damned compelling and quite unlike anything I’ve seen, and as absurd as each and every moment of the film may be, there exist precedents in Western society that suggest its horrifying scenario to not be so unrealistic.

What’s fascinating about the film is seeing how it methodically unravels until we the audience are able to put the pieces together and understand what is truly going on. Director Giorgos Lanthimos accomplishes this through the slow reveal of intricate details that allow the father to be able to accomplish such an ambitious and twisted conditioning project in the first place, using a mostly static camera and quiet moments (while there is occasionally music incorporated by the characters, Dogtooth contains no score) to exhibit odd details through a deliberate pace until we are finally able to piece such details together ourselves. It’s an intriguing exercise in assembling meaning through film, and one that puts a great weight of responsibility upon its audience.

The film’s use of language is one of the more interesting ways in which such a complex project of oppression is manifested. From the very first scene it’s established that the parents (the mother, who possesses a vague history of insanity, is both participant and victim of the rouse) have built an entire lexicon of their own, conflating words with meanings not typically associated in order to implement a form of doublespeak that squelches any opportunity of rebellion through thought control. Words signifying communication devices, objects of popular culture, or those suggesting blunt sexuality gain connotation with a less threatening counterpart – telephone coming to mean “salt shaker” or pussy meaning “big light,” for example. Thus, rebellion is rendered impossible if one is prevented from acquiring the vocabulary necessary to even conceive of it. It’s a fascinating idea thankfully implemented here in a pragmatic, covert, non-Orwellian way.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Dogtooth is its sense of humor. Throughout the methodically paced movement from scene-to-scene, detailed revelations of the household’s function can’t help but come across as darkly comic in its total absurdity. The absurdity is convincing, and laughter somewhat mitigates the profoundly discomfiting experience of enduring this otherwise shocking film, but when laughing in response to Dogtooth one never gets the sense that they are laughing at it, but with it, and somehow this reaction makes the whole experience far more troubling, not alleviating. Imagine if Michael Haneke had a sense of humor, and what you’d end up with is Dogtooth.

SXSW Review: Leaves of Grass

Landon Palmer — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:02:48 +0000

We all know Edward Norton is talented, but probably the truest and scariest test for an actor’s talent is playing opposite himself, thus having to encounter the insecurities and limitations of one’s skill in both action and reaction. Few actors have done a great job acting opposite themselves (Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers and Nic Cage in Adaptation. are the only two that come immediately to mind), and it’s something that could potentially be fatal even with a strong actor giving two performances at the center, but with Leaves of Grass Edward Norton can be added to that short list of great double-performances in a single film.

Norton plays Bill and Brady Kincaid, twins whose adult lives could not have become more different since their shared upbringing in rural Oklahoma. Bill is a Classics professor at Brown University – a rising star in academia who is in the process of being given a major promotion – while Brady stayed in Oklahoma, accent and all, using his allegedly superior intellect to revolutionize the growing process of marijuana and creating a potent new product. Brady fakes his own death to convince Bill to return to his southern hometown and blindsides Bill with the proposition that Bill act as Brady’s double so that he has an alibi as he tries to cut ties with his Tulsa financier Pug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss). Meanwhile, Bill develops a love interest with a striking Walt Whitman-quoting English teacher (Keri Russell), attempts reconnection and forgiveness of his mother (Susan Sarandon), dodges the bullets of a sex scandal with a student back home, and is forced to avoid the interference of a rather invasive orthodontist (Josh Pais).

Obviously, Leaves of Grass has a lot to juggle, and writer-director Tim Blake Nelson (who also costars in the film) handles the many idiosyncratic characters and intersecting subplots adeptly. In viewing the first two-thirds of the film, one doesn’t become overwhelmed by all the goings-on as Nelson implements these story elements with a tempo that keeps us on our feet. Bill and Brady have great chemistry, are convincing in their history without any unnecessary exposition, and neither character feel like Edward Norton simply performing opposite himself – a feat by any standard.

As a born-and-raised Texan, I appreciate Nelson’s complex portrayal of the South. The region as depicted in Leaves of Grass contains a varied array of characters occupying different backgrounds and disparate cultures. Southernness is never conflated with ignorance (in fact, Bill often encounters situations where he reveals his own ignorance in dismissing his hometown), and southern culture is never used for an easy laugh. Nelson, who grew up in Oklahoma, obviously identifies with both Bill and Brady in terms of where his life could have gone. He has a tenable love for his home and the people in it, while acknowledging the defining particularities and oddities of that culture, and Nelson’s love manifests itself into characters that we the audience find all too easy to love.

Leaves of Grass exists across many planes. It isn’t a stoner comedy, and in some respects it’s hardly a comedy at all. The tone shifts drastically throughout, as moments of levity quickly morph into shocking violence or tragedy. After speaking with Nelson about the film, it became evident that he didn’t want Leaves of Grass to fit readily into the trappings of genre, instead mixing comedy, drama, violence, and irreverence in ways that would allow for a more complicated and ambiguous exploration of the themes within and reflecting the consequences that happen in every day reality but often aren’t witnessed in the limitations of movie logic.

The whole effort is admirable, Nelson has clear talent in all of filmmaking’s roles in front of and behind the camera (his knack for dialogue is particularly notable, as the film has several great one-liners), and Norton gives a great performance, but unfortunately Leaves of Grass falls prey to its ambitions in the third act. The changes in tone become too drastic, the narratives becomes haphazard and chaotic, and the many interlocking subplots and supporting characters don’t successfully integrate their stories into the film’s larger scope by the finale, leaving several loose ends that leave the time spent on its subplots unjustified. Leaves of Grass is enjoyable throughout, and a mostly solid film by a creative mind whose skills I’ll be anxious to see mature, which makes it unfortunate that something which laid the ground for this much promise in its first two acts falls apart by the third.

Leaves of Grass will open in theaters on April 2, 2010.

Culture Warrior: Kathryn Bigelow’s Next Move

Landon Palmer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:17 +0000

For an industry that is viewed reductively by much of middle America as being politically left-leaning to the point of being out-of-touch with the rest of the country, Hollywood has shown a stagnant lack of progress in terms of gender equality. Actresses’ careers are in jeopardy as soon as they hit 35, it always seems like there’s a dearth of good roles for women, and much of the business behind the camera is dominated by a boys’ club. Particularly striking are the lack of female directors. There could be many determining reasons for a lack of female representation in one of the industry’s most coveted titles – a history of sexism, a self-canceling cycle of young female filmmakers who lack interest in such positions because of the existing dearth of women, etc. – but the truth is undeniable. One struggles not only to think of female directors, but especially of female auteurs. For the few women that have made a career directing, too small a fraction of them have had visibly great careers. From Sally Potter to Mary Harron to Catherine Breillat, even the greatest of these have had to ensure giant obstacles and in the end few actually paid attention to their work.

While the Oscars are indeed a largely meaningless affair whose accuracy in picking the most resonant films of any given year are more often than not contradicted by the test of time, Kathryn Bigelow’s win for Best Director on Sunday night is not without its own significance. Yes, the Oscars are a popularity contest in which we watch the wealthiest and most overexposed in Hollywood pat each other on the backs and drink in their own honor, but lucky for us it is exactly this audience (not, by contrast, the viewers at home) that needed most to see Bigelow win.

While male filmmakers – anybody from James Cameron to Pedro Almodovar – have consistently made movies with women at the center with varying degrees of success, the output of successful female filmmakers have largely been relegated to movies for women. With the occasional exception of films like Bigelow’s Point Break or Harron’s American Psycho (or the more introspective femininity-themed arthouse fare of Potter or Breillat), successful female directors are characterized far more visibly by the likes of Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers. I am in no way am blanketly criticizing these films, for they are tailor-made for a specific audience and do indeed achieve a connection with that audience, and are often far better than the competing He’s Just Not That Into You school of romantic comedy, but they do exemplify the limitations for successful female directors. Ephron and Meyers have achieved continued, unparalleled success in their niche filmmaking, while movies that have a more critical engagement with femininity fall into obscurity (Harron’s Notorious Bettie Page) or are even potentially harmful to advancement in femme-centric filmmaking thus far (Jane Campion’s In the Cut).

Unlike most of her peers, Bigelow has made a career or making films with male leads, or working in what are typically considered male genres, so in terms of her filmography, The Hurt Locker was hardly something new or revolutionary. But the fact that she was recognized for this particular film, and the fact that it is this particular film by this unique director that marked the first Academy Award for a female in that position, hopefully signals to those who wield Hollywood might the most obvious of messages: women are capable of making literally all types of films. In the best-case scenario, Bigelow’s win will enable the possibility of varied, creative female voices to make themselves known behind the camera, and it is the responsibility of women filmmakers – both fresh and seasoned – to take advantage of this opportunity while the door remains open.

But there is another, far more cynical and largely unaddressed possibility that must be taken into consideration. That Bigelow won for making what is essentially a masculine film in a masculine genre could manifest itself as a negative, even possibly a greater limitation, one that dictates that successful, celebrated female filmmaking is more readily manifested when the film at hand is largely male-centric. In other words, we could find ourselves in a situation where women filmmakers could be more readily recognized if they make films primarily for men and about men.

In answer to the question, “What should Kathryn Bigelow do next?” the answer is obviously whatever the hell she wants. She’s won the award, she’s got the clout, and she should continue to tell the stories that inspire her and those that utilize best her obvious talent (and chances are she’ll continue to make the types of films she’s known for making). All female filmmakers, of course, should do whatever it is that inspires them, not overtly considering what will advance their gender in the industry, for continued opportunity will realize itself if women simply tell the stories they are compelled to put on screen, no matter the gender of the protagonist or which genre they are working within.

While I’ve found that the taste of the true cinephile is hardly gender specific, on the broader cinemagoing scale film genres are explicitly gender-specific and it is for this reason that the relation of the gender of the filmmaker and the perceived gender of the genre will always be an integral factor in advancing opportunities for burgeoning women filmmakers. So while Bigelow should do whatever she wants without the potential interference and pressure of considering her next project in the face of what she has thus far achieved, the flip side to this coin is, “What can Bigelow do next to advance the opportunities and visibility of women filmmakers? What can she do to continue this respect for female directing talent?”

The answer lies not only in making evident the versatility of women filmmakers in approaching any given subject or genre, but how the individual woman filmmaker can make this versatility evident within the span of her own career. While I know it likely won’t happen, I’d love to see Bigelow make good on this clout by taking a fresh approach to the genre where many a female filmmaker has found herself stuck or limited, the romantic comedy.

The romantic comedy genre has been the catalyst for some of the greatest films in early Hollywood history. From The Awful Truth to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, the romantic comedy represented the seemingly unlimited potential of Hollywood films to be both highly entertaining and bring with them a profoundly emotional and enlightening experience, and the genre was hardly as gender-specific in its perceived audience as it is today. But in recent years the romantic comedy has become one of the most repetitive, stagnant, predictable, and unappealing genres whose logic has no connection with lived reality. From the same film made time and again graced by the likes of Matthew McConaughey to Hugh Grant to Sarah Jessica Parker to Kate Hudson to the abominations released this year alone – Valentine’s Day, When In Rome, Leap Year – today’s Hollywood romantic comedy is lazy, humorless, in no way sincerely romantic, and regressive in its social politics and constant portrayal of women as fragile people stuck in the 1950s whose total range of happiness rests on the potential acquisition of a man. The reason the chick flick is such a pejorative term is because the entire system behind today’s romantic comedy is in of itself so offensive, articulated through its backwards-peering portrayal of female characters and the audiences these films are fed to in the assumption that women will watch the same movie time and again.

If Bigelow were to make a truly progressive, original, and entertaining romantic comedy, this would do wonders to further close the gender gap in Hollywood filmmaking, providing opportunities for more varied roles for actresses and giving female directors the power to have the opportunity to tackle a variety of subjects and not be relegated to female genres lest they vanish into obscurity.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Oscar Breakdown: Best Director

Landon Palmer — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:33:03 +0000

Best Director is a tricky category with, like many awards bestowed at the Oscars, a questionable track record. Venerated filmmakers like Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Altman, for instance, never won the award. While it’s arguably impossible to objectively compare different works of art, Best Director is an especially elusive and subjective category that forces one to compare apples to oranges, especially with this year’s nominees. Where the evidence of what deserves a cinematography, editing, or screenwriting award is pretty straightforward and evident within a given film, it’s difficult to qualify what constitutes great direction.

Is great direction that which contains the most unique vision, or is it the best direction of actors? Does the award belong to the individual who possesses the best storytelling abilities, or the most striking aesthetic sensibilities? Does great direction reside in the ability to engage all members of the cast and crew to work together for a collective vision, or is it the best individual interpretation of a script? There are so many disparate factors that go into effective direction, and credit is hard to locate as the director is the center of an involved creative collaboration. We know great direction when we see it, but it’s nearly impossible to define.

And the nominees are…

James Cameron, Avatar

Why He Was Nominated: If there is a category aside from Special Effects that Avatar, without controversy, deserves to be nominated for, it’s for directing. Cameron displays a perfectly singular vision, using the tenable talent of his extensive crew to achieve the story he sets out to tell. It’s a joy to spend two and a half hours in Cameron’s endless imagination, and the sci-fi epic immerses us in a world that’s detailed in ways rarely seen these days in event filmmaking.

Why He Might Win: Yes, Avatar has major flaws, but Cameron’s achievement is unparalleled. Only history can be witness to this, but Avatar may prove to be, for better or worse, a benchmark in filmmaking and filmgoing, so the Academy may attempt the foresight to lay stake in this moment by giving The King of the World another Oscar. An Avatar sweep would make good on the Academy’s inferential promise of recognizing populist entertainment

Why He Might Not Win: “Another Oscar” is the operative term here, as Cameron has already won the award for directing the highest-grossing film of all time once before. Avatar’s evident flaws – the too-familiar story, uneven acting by Sam Worthington, and a lack of subtlety and nuance – may be a bit too evident to warrant another statuette for Cameron, as some voters may feel these things also fall to the responsibility of the director (one who, in this case, was also responsible for the film’s weakest aspect, its writing).

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Why He Was Nominated: Tarantino delivered a rare breed of movie this year: simultaneously entertaining and intelligent, a crowd-pleaser and a critic’s favorite. He captivated us for two and a half hours, restraining his typically overindulgent penchant for nonlinear storytelling and extraneous dialogue, keeping the movie tight and engrossing even in the Chayefsky-length monologues. This was pure Tarantino, an amalgamation of the best reasons that we see his movies.

Why He Might Win: The man deserves the directing statuette at some point in his career, as his work has defined so much in the evolving means of cinematic storytelling within the past decade and a half. His win would reward a thoroughly realized, unique vision while keeping in line with the ceremony’s supposed intent to reward audience-friendly films, and put a true cinephile on the same level with who he venerates. That, and this might very well be the best film he ever makes.

Why He Might Not Win: The Academy Awards have had a history of honoring directors who helmed war films (especially WWII films), but never anything as unconventional or farcically inaccurate as this. To me, all the power to Tarantino, as cinema, as DePalma once put it, is “24 lies a second.” But Inglourious Basterds may be (more appropriately, in the minds of voters) recognized and best represented instead for its impressive writing, or as a Best Picture upset.

Lee Daniels, Precious

Why He Was Nominated: He’s made an affecting, socially conscious film that features characters rarely represented on screen. He doesn’t pull his punches, delivering an unflinching look at Harlem poverty. It’s the type of independent-spirited filmmaking that awards season eats up, and it shows what American indie filmmaking is capable of that studios shy away from. He also directed an unknown, a comedian, and several musicians all to commanding, surprising performances. This film goes places that others don’t.

Why He Might Win: This is visceral filmmaking that can’t be ignored, and Daniels here shows an ability to direct performers that’s unparalleled in this category. The man made Mariah Carey act, and inspired Mo’nique to go to places we never thought she was capable of. These achievements certainly deserve attention.

Why He Might Not Win: There are problems with Precious. Daniels doesn’t pull his punches, but in some moments the film might have been better served if he showed some restraint. Furthermore, his visual style needs some honing. Daniels did an impressive job, but he’s still in his newbie shoes and his achievement is more visible in his direction of performances rather than in his vision.

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Why She Was Nominated: She delivered the first great Iraq war film, made a film in which explosions are not mutually exclusive to character development or artful storytelling, and she implemented suspense with a degree of control comparable to Hitchcock. The Hurt Locker is a film where the presence of a director operating in full form is tenable in every frame, yet at the same time she immerses us in each captivating moment. Bigelow is a natural-born filmmaker if there ever was one.

Why She Might Win: The Academy has a chance to make history here, and not just for history’s sake, but for a film in which she really deserves it. I stated earlier that even though it’s difficult to articulate, you know good directing when you see it – well, you know when you see The Hurt Locker that it’s the best directing of the year.

Why She Might Not Win: I would say the only thing standing between her and that statue is the possible interference of Cameron, but I think that even he – who was her creative collaborator far longer than they were married – wants her to win. The trophy is hers.

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Why He Was Nominated: With Up in the Air, Reitman silenced accusations that his talent was overrated and that he was a product of nepotism. Personally, I didn’t think he showed real directing chops with Juno, but with his third film I’m convinced he could be the closest thing we’ll have to a Hawkes or a Wilder in this century. The man can tell a story with the commanding wisdom of a director seasoned over the decades, and his talent is rapidly maturing.

Why He Might Win: He operates on all cylinders, with astute writing, a detailed knowledge of the challenging craft of eliciting the best from his actors, transitioning and sustaining moods whenever appropriate, and never letting any overt attempts at a signature visual style get in the way of telling a good story. By many people’s definition of what makes a great film (great characters and story, exhibition of sincere emotion), Reitman is a great craftsman.

Why He Might Not Win: Reitman shows amazing promise as a director, and Up in the Air is a great film, but he’s still got many great films potentially ahead of him, and this film never achieved the social resonance or struck the chord with audiences that was so buzzed about leading up to its release. Also, Reitman’s writing is where his signature lies, not in his direction, and his lack of a visual sense hurts him here in this specific category competing with these particular directors, even as it serves the film. And lastly, he won’t win because Bigelow will.

Who do you think will win?

Culture Warrior: The Coens’ Uncertainty Principle

Landon Palmer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:47:32 +0000

“The Uncertainty Principle: It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on.”

As illustrated by this scene in the Coens’ latest Best Picture nominee A Serious Man, certainty – as stated in so many words by Sy Abelman – is subtle, clever, but ultimately unconvincing in an overwhelmingly uncertain world. The uncertainty principle, as articulated in this film, is evidence that even in the realm of mathematics – that discipline where logic, evidence, and patterns of order reign supreme – contains its degrees of the unknown, the indefinite, even the ambiguous. Even in disciplines that rely solely on what is known, the unknown elements of everyday life still permeate, for mathematics (and, inferentially, science), is the art of the possible, as Sy states, rather than the art of the real. According to the recent work by the Coen brothers, cinema is, in so many ways, the art of the real.

The last three films by the Coen brothers – No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man – represent something of a trilogy of work exploring uncertainty and meaninglessness in varied forms. These are not films that exist, in and of themselves, in intentional meaninglessness like some sort of Dada/Coen hybrid, but films that explore profoundly the ways in which meaninglessness operates, not necessarily as a direct reflection of reality (as the Coens’ films are more a reflection of cinema than an attempt at realism), but an exploration of meaninglessness operating in a medium in which meaning is typically intent through form as well as constantly sought and dissected. We look for meaning in most films, but the Coens provide no easy access to such a destination.

With No Country for Old Men, the Cormac McCarthy/Coen collaboration brings uncertainty to one of the filmic landscape’s most distinct arenas employing specifically certain rules, expectations, and outcomes: the western genre. For Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the clear delineation between crime and law/order becomes challenged as he encounters horrifying acts with no motive – pure, unadulterated chaos. The meaninglessness, incomprehensibility, and inconsequence of chaos brings confusion to the western’s previously clear distinctions between good guys and bad as the supposed “bad guy” operates on just as rigid of an ethos characterized by unbreakable principles as the inferred “good,” but the ethos is of personal value rather than a universal standard of ethics. The impenetrable nature of chaos is ultimately, inevitably escapable for the “old man” (Bell) who can’t adapt to a new landscape that challenges the distinctions of his past which gave his life meaning and order up to this point.

The ending is reflective but ambiguous, no closure is attained, and the closest thing the movie has to the Western hero (Llewelyn Moss) dies unheroically and off-screen. For Bell and for the film’s audience, this is never how such narratives are supposed to play out, but as the films of the Coen brothers are more reflective of cinema history than of daily human life (in their constant games with genre and homage to cinema’s past), Bell’s vision of a clearly understandable past leading to a progressively worse future in terms of human behavior is suggested to have no grounding in reality as his perception of an ideal perpetuated by the Western myth of honor and civility in the face of the (defeatable) uncivilized enemy which has no grounding in the frequent incidents of injustice he faces daily.

Burn After Reading provides an interesting counterpoint to No Country. Where No Country was thematically dense, Burn After Reading revels in the cosmic insignificance not only of the events within the film, but the film itself. Seeming to be intently minor-Coen entry as sandwiched between the thematic juggernauts of No Country and A Serious Man, Burn After Reading delights in a narrative that deliberately features no message at all. Like all three films, nothing is resolved and seemingly nothing is learned for its characters, but only in Burn After Reading does the meaninglessness reflect on the film itself to an almost, yes, Dadaist degree. Unlike the sudden, shocking drop-off-the map endings of their films before and after, Burn After Reading is framed stylistically by a CIA meeting featuring the same characters – a narrative device which would normally suggest a progress of story up to a point of closure – but when we the audience reach the point the started with, we’ve gone in a circle rather than to a comprehensible, natural linear endpoint. By the time we reach the end, signaled by J. K. Simmons’ literal closing of the book, the entire turn of events are framed as comically insignificant both for the audience and the characters involved.

Great consequences are undertaken. Characters unexpectedly die horrible deaths, while others unwittingly become murderers in a grand scheme which is only imagined, but these signs of consequence, narrative progress, and significance are rooted in characters’ fundamental misunderstandings of current politics (it’s a post-Cold War Cold War comedy, a postmodern Dr. Strangelove that satirizes nothing) and the illusion of conflict where it doesn’t really exist in a desperate attempt to break the infinite, deadening cycle of their lives (as symbols, events, and character encounters repeat themselves with only slight differences) – and these cycles reflect the circular, futile illusion of progress within the narrative itself as literalized by the film’s framing device.

“…But even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”

Instead of pursuing a theme of meaninglessness in alterations of meaning-intent Hollywood genres like the Western or the Cold War satire/screwball comedy, A Serious Man delves into one of society’s most potent sources of extracting deep meaning: religion. What encapsulates the thematic spectrum of this film is the fascinating Guy’s Tooth sequence where protag Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) comes to Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) to search for the answers to the many simultaneous troubled cards his life has been dealt (in a story argued to be reminiscent of the Biblical fable of Job), and is received with a cryptic tale regarding a Goy’s tooth that clarifies nothing in Gopnik’s life except for what lies constantly right in front of him: that the futile search for the meaning of suffering will only manifest more suffering and endure more meaninglessness. Gopnik has familiarized himself with the rituals and rhetoric of Judiasm, jumping to the most available Hebrew term here and there whenever he encounters one of life’s great enigmas rather than acknowledging life’s impossible mysteries head on. For the Coen brothers, religion – Judiasm or otherwise – is never a shortcut to answer life’s greatest questions, rather it bestows even greater questions in the intimidating shadow of what often feels like cosmic insignificance. It yields more questions than answers, and more troubling realities of the universe than sources of comfort (for Gopnik and for us, an unquestioning reminder of the truly illustrious nature of a seemingly insignificant parking lot is farcical and impossible).

Thus, it makes perfect sense that Gopnik approaches religion the same way he approaches physics, as exemplified in the dream sequence that features this post’s two quotes. For Gopnik, mathematics is understandable to him because it’s convincing (although the imagined Sy states otherwise, preferring the ‘art of the possible’) – convincing like the Hebrew words he implements without bothering to truly understand, and convincing like the parables of the Torah that he believes should prepare him to tackle life’s every moment. Yet, as the film’s last shot illustrates, a search for meaning in some circumstances itself becomes meaningless as even more troubling circumstances arrive. Like (for him) the physics parable of the dead cat and (for us) the fabricated Yiddish parable of the film’s narratively unconnected prologue, the religious parables in which Gopnik searches for meaning elude true understanding.

Funny that this all makes the marginal character of Clive’s father the greatest source of advice when viewing the Coens’ latest work: “Please. Accept the mystery.”

Review: The Ghost Writer

Landon Palmer — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:30:16 +0000

Roman Polanski’s newest film finds the infamous director mining familiar territory. This is a welcome return. Like Scorsese and the gangster film or Fincher tackling mystery/suspense, Polanski is never more comfortably in his element than when he handles paranoid thrillers and political intrigue. With The Ghost Writer, Polanski manifests dense atmosphere, brooding tension, and complex political corruption in a way similar to the best paranoid thrillers of the 1970s (a category which included some of the director’s greatest cinematic achievements), and the adaptation of this format to the 21^st century filmic and political landscape proves largely successful, even if it occasionally flirts with being middling and awkward.

The Ghost Writer thankfully wastes no time jumping into its plot in the film’s first few minutes, where an unnamed writer referred to in the end credits simply as The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) is assigned to ghostwrite the autobiography of former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). What seems like a well-paying job that’s demanding only in the short span of time he hast to complete inevitably becomes more complex as The Ghost’s curiosity over the previous ghost writer’s death quickly transforms into an obsession, the film revealing at a deliberate pace the many complexities and justifications behind a corrupt administration.

It is interesting that The Ghost Writer was released (on 4 screens) the same weekend as Shutter Island, because both films represent entertaining, assured, densely well-crafted entries by each of their respective filmmaking legends, yet neither will be canonized amongst these directors’ best work. The Ghost Writer shows that Polanski is still capable, after fifty years of filmmaking, of crafting a thriller that puts the talent behind most of its box office competition to shame, yet at the same time the film is more of an assurance of continually possessed skill rather than a return to greatness or a progressing of his cinematic boundaries.

In one sense, The Ghost Writer is a welcome stylistic flashback to great political thrillers of decades past, upgraded in a way to not feel dated. The transformation of an outspokenly apolitical protagonist too involved to remain so as he goes deeper in uncovering various levels of abuse in executive power is articulated at a methodical pace, focusing on each detail to make the ultimate reveals more believable and thus more affecting. Where an arbitrary action scene would normally take place, Polanski chooses the brooding quietude of a murmured mystery slowly ramping up to a fever pitch of whispers and questions. Polanski shows remarkable control in this regard, employing suspense through slow reveals rather than bursts of forced drama. The director exhibits that he hardly needs a great catalog of toys to create suspense, for something as simple as a parked car can be inundated with meaning and endless questions if handled right.

In its narrative of political corruption, The Ghost Writer confronts reality in a way that many recent politically themed movies shy away from. There are obvious parallels here with Bush and Blair’s collaboration up to the Iraq war, and details of British affiliation with American corruption that hark back to controversies of false intelligence and private interest (there is a thinly-veiled reference to Halliburton). It’s refreshing that a movie about political corruption – even, in this case, one that seems to exist more for entertainment purposes rather than force a revelatory message about a decade that has already been analyzed to no end – possesses the necessary balls to actually reference events in a way that is convincing. Also refreshing is that figures on all sides of the political aisle here (forming a cinematic pinball machine of competing interests that the mostly observant The Ghost is pushed from corner to corner in) are portrayed as backstabbing political opportunists whose priorities hardly extend beyond personal interests and career survival.

While The Ghost Writer is in many ways a specifically 21^st century look at British and American politics imbuing an approach within genre popular in decades past, the third act presents several problems that make the film come across dated. The ultimate reveal of the corruptions within the Lang administration (and post-administration) resonate as hardly so corrupt compared to the real-life controversies it alludes to (sometimes reality is far more bizarre and shocking than fiction can hope to be). In a day and age where Dick Cheney can go at talk show and openly reveal, without the slightest fear of encountering criminal charges, that waterboarding and other advanced interrogation techniques were his idea as soldiers who carried out those orders continue to serve time in military prison, it’s hard to believe that the Prime Minister associated with Bush-type politics in this film would fear the knowledge of corruption possessed by his ghost writer. This, and the particular fates that ultimately befall these respective central characters, seems more resonant alongside the layers of secret corruption of 60s and 70s politics rather than the frightening transparency that characterized the corrupt politics of this past decade.

One aspect of Polanski’s work I haven’t noticed before that is utilized in an interesting way here is the use of architecture and production design, particularly that of Lang’s getaway home on the shore of Cape Cod, which is presented here as a grey rain-soaked misery of a place containing impersonal monochromatic walls that trap these characters in like a prison. Performances are solid all around. McGregor has always played a good everyman-type caught at the center of circumstances beyond him, and Brosnan uses the weight of his persona to such an effective degree that his presence resonates even in the many scenes in which he isn’t present (the role is small in its running time, but big in its impact). Olivia Williams as Lang’s wife and Tom Wilkinson as a mysterious former colleague are also up to par, but Kim Cattrall is out of place here as an assistant who apparently only sometimes possesses a British accent.

The greatest joy of The Ghost Writer is to see Polanski in full form, controlling every frame and returning to a genre that he’s so damn good at crafting. Some moments – like the last two minutes, showing brilliant technique in an ending that unfortunately doesn’t contain the impact to warrant or justify the ingenuity of Polanski’s direction – even hint at a director superior to the material he’s co-written.

On the Upside: Polanski making the type of film that made him “Polanski.”

On the Downside: An uneven and out-of-place third act.

On the Side: This review made absolutely no reference to the controversies in Polanski’s personal life, as they have nothing to do with the film itself.

Culture Warrior: Twists, Tricks, and Surprises

Landon Palmer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:25:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: This article may contain hints, tips and clues about the ending of Shutter Island. We don’t think they’re spoilers, but we know that some of you are sensitive about these things. If that’s the case, go see the movie first. If not, enjoy this excellent article.

The twist ending is a difficult thing to perfect. Attempting such an ending runs many risks. For one, if the twist occurs with the natural trajectory of the story, the impact of the twist can be lessened for the spectator if they accurately guess it along the way. Perhaps more commonly, twist endings simply don’t work most of the time – more often than not, they come across as cheap, insincere attempts at making the spectator think they have experienced a more intelligent film than they actually have. Such endings act as buffers disguising a lack of depth within the rest of the film. But in the rare instance that a twist does work – when it makes sense, is thoughtfully executed, and doesn’t come out of left field – it has the potential to manifest one of the most powerful types of cinematic gut-punching impacts. The successful, smart twist ending is so effective because it embodies what cinema does best, in that films (intentionally or not) always deliver a selective amount of information from a particular point-of-view (whether that perspective be from a character or the filmmaker), so the effective twist ending shows the skilled filmmaker operating in full awareness of their potential to control everything and anything the audience knows and sees. But what exactly is a twist ending, and does it differ – semantically and in its employment and effectiveness – from a trick ending or a surprise ending? The differences between these terms are vague and overlapping, but an attempted distinction between them can potentially explain why some of these endings work and others don’t.

I’m discussing this subject, of course, in part because of Martin Scorsese’s new film. Shutter Island is certainly no masterpiece, but it’s a strong genre exercise by a director well-versed in cinema technique and well-read on the history of suspense thrillers. With this film there’s been a lot of discussion of its ‘twist ending’ and how predictable it was for many of its viewers. While the mystery structured within Shutter Island may suggest, on the surface, that the ending intended to come across as a head-spinning twist, I’m not sure if this ending is consistent with prevailing definitions of what a twist ending is and what it intends to achieve. Scorsese’s film, and many strong genre pieces like it, fit more readily into a combination of categories.

In the surprise ending, no trick comes out of left field, and no twist makes us rethink the entire film. With the surprise ending, the film concludes at its most natural point. It’s an ending that is explicitly expected in that throughout the film we feel something conclusive will happen – we’re just not sure what – while the trajectory of the film maps out a direct line to such a conclusion, with minimal detours along the way. Despite this clear linear trajectory, the surprise ending remains surprising because of the shock value of the conclusion itself. What the conclusion reveals does not change the entire meaning of the film – rather, it answers the question we were asking the whole time, but perhaps not in the exact way we envisioned it or speculated it taking place. Here is the key to what distinguishes a surprise ending from other endings: the entire film poses a central question, and the surprise ending answers that exact question in a shocking, effective, startling, or revealing way. A good example of a surprise ending is The Vanishing. That film’s end features nothing that puts a twist on or changes the meaning of everything seen up to that point, it merely answers the film’s repeated central question effectively. The Vanishing cannot be categorized as containing a twist ending because it is the most natural, linear way for that film to naturally end.

So what, then, is a twist ending, and how does it differ from the surprise ending? Perhaps it’d be best the approach the twist ending – the most elusive yet all-encompassing of these semantic categories – by negation, distinguishing how it is neither a surprise nor a trick ending.

As hard as I’ve tried to come up with a positive example of the trick ending, I simply can’t. The trick ending is the most cynical manifestation of what is typically referred to as ‘the twist,’ those stamped-on-at-the-last-second uninspired marauders posing as a genuine change in plot and meaning, when in reality such endings simply occupy a slot disguising the emptiness and thinness of the plot thus far. Trick endings suppose that audiences will unquestioningly take in a seachange in meaning at the last second, not bothering to go back and figure out whether or not it makes any sense. The trick ending often poses as a source for deeper meaning, but actually potentially negates and deflates all that came before it. Identity is a good example of a trick ending at play, using one of the most exhausted clichés in the book in a reveal that proves only that everything which has been revealed thus far is of no circumstance to the characters involved or the audience involved with them – a vapid, unimaginative thud of an end to what was otherwise an effective dramatic buildup. A trick ending is called so precisely because of what it does: it tricks the audience into thinking that there’s something more layered and intriguing going on.

So that leaves us with the twist ending, the definition of which was appropriately articulated by Cole Abaius on Sunday’s Reject Radio when he defined it as something along the lines of using the misperception of an initially minor detail to change the meaning of almost everything that has come beforehand. If, by my definition, the surprise ending is one that answers a central question in a startling manner, the twist ending is one that answers a question the audience did not know was being asked, or a question that the audience didn’t know was the most important. With The Sixth Sense, for example, the film’s central question upon first viewing operates with regard to how or why this boy sees dead people and whether or not it can be cured. What goes on in Bruce Willis’s personal life is a secondary question, but becomes the primary question upon the reveal of the twist and its conflation with what we thought the primary question to be up to that point. The twist ending is one of the most impossible to execute effectively, as even the most celebrated of twist endings –from The Sixth Sense to The Unusual Suspects to Fight Club – can be argued to possess their inconsistencies and jumps in selective logic and reason to achieve their ending point. But the effective twist is sought after because it is potentially one of the most satisfying of film experiences.

Following these definitions, my general rule for the employment of the twist is that if the movie is good, it’s good with or without the twist and whether or not the twist can be guessed. Shutter Island’s twist – if you can call it that, and locate exactly which element(s) of the film’s many changes in meaning you’re talking about – is predictable for some, yes, but that’s because it operates within a story containing a strict set of rules that allow such a resolution to exist in its most natural manner. It’s an ending padded by reason and thought, not something desperately tacked on (as trick endings, by contrast, are often unpredictable because they make no goddamn sense). Because of its natural, inevitable execution, Shutter Island’s ending falls more evenly in line with the surprise ending category.

With the well-handled surprise ending, a level of predictability can even be a benefit. Take Seven, for instance, a film in which the answer to what’s in the box can be accurately guessed a few moments before, only to allow the audience to be further horrified with the reveal that what is in the box is exactly what they think it is. The horror of the imagination is tied to the surprising horror when what was imagined becomes what is real. Likewise, Shutter Island’s gradual, detailed, deliberate reveal of the reality of the characters’ situation is so thoroughly realized that the ensuing flashback revealing what’s really going on is hardly a gut-punch, but an emotionally draining scene about family. This isn’t the work of somebody who is trying to trick us or woo us, but to immerse us in the very best way such a story can be told, which should always be the first priority when it comes to these endings. Sometimes the effect of the surprise owes itself to just how shockingly unsurprising the ending can be.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Please, Don’t Call ‘The Hurt Locker’ an Arthouse Film

Landon Palmer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:01:39 +0000

Try as I might, I can’t quite get over the fact that The Hurt Locker only made $12.6 million in its theatrical run. I’ve never judged a movie’s quality by its popularity, and I realize that the particular tastes and moviegoing practices of my colleagues and I don’t necessarily correspond with the majority of America’s filmgoing habits, but it does give me pause when I realize that more people saw The Box, I Love You Beth Cooper, New in Town, and Imagine That in theaters last year than Kathryn Bigelow’s 9-time Oscar nominated masterpiece. With ex-Hollywood power couple James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow both nominated for Best Director and having their respective films nominated for Best Picture, next month’s awards battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker is being presented by some critics and journalists (like on the February 2^nd episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest) in terms of the Hollywood mega-blockbuster vs. the humbled, smaller-scale indie or arthouse film.

This year in which the Best Picture category was problematically expanded to include ten nominated entries rather than five, allowing for typical awards contenders (Up in the Air, Precious) to compete with crowd-pleasers (Avatar, Up, The Blind Side), fan favorites (District 9, Inglourious Basterds) and arthouse picks (A Serious Man, An Education). Where the typical five available slots in recent years have alienated both your typical American audience as well as those of us who frequent the art house (The Reader, for instance, seemed tailor-made for Academy voters and few others), the Academy’s decision to expand it to ten allows for various audiences to feel that their taste in movies are actually reflected in the Kodak theater, but in the meantime illuminates more clearly than any divisive year the extensive differences in types of American moviegoing, quality assessment, and, most importantly, the mostly-arbitrary process distinguishing the perceived differences between the arthouse and the multiplex.

I take issue when The Hurt Locker is lumped along with A Serious Man and An Education as an arthouse flick, for it seems that this designation is arrived at purely because of the film’s disappointing financial intake, and not regarding the film’s style or potential for pleasing audiences. As much as I loved it, A Serious Man clearly has little appeal beyond metropolitan audiences and Coen fans, while a modest film like An Education simply can’t hope competing in a landscape of sexy teenage vampires and giant blue cat-people. But The Hurt Locker is a film that contained potential mass appeal that simply wasn’t realized. Here are the reasons why The Hurt Locker is not an arthouse flick:

1) The distributor: While independently produced, The Hurt Locker was distributed by Summit Entertainment, an indie studio that grew toward major competition (a la Lionsgate) with forgettable genre work (P2, Sorority Row, Sex Drive, Next Day Air), a couple of “bigger” competitors (Knowing, Push) and one major franchise featuring the aforementioned sexy vampires. So even if they aren’t carrying something with Twilight in the title, they now how to send a film through mass release. This isn’t a studio that seems like they can’t afford to make more prints.

2) Movie stars: One could say that The Hurt Locker didn’t possess a larger appeal to mass audiences because of its lack of recognizable stars (if one ignores the Guy Pearce and Ralph Feinnes cameos), but star appeal can’t be attributed as a factor to many of the highest-grossing movies of 2009, from Avatar to The Hangover (and, as I wrote last year, the movie star is an increasingly irrelevant factor in why audiences choose to see certain movies), as it was some other appealing factor that drew hordes of audiences into these movies. And that potential appeal for The Hurt Locker was…

3) Explosions!: Critics and journalists have posited the Avatar/Hurt Locker dichotomy in terms that suggest The Hurt Locker to be an alienating art film in the vein of something like The White Ribbon rather than what it really is: a very good action movie. Bigelow employs the type of exciting, in-the-moment camerawork used in the Greengrass entries of the Bourne movies. The camera (and story) moves, it’s not subtitled, and it’s not in black and white. In other words, it’s not exactly Bergman. And it’s a movie about explosions, the most clichéd identifying characteristic of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. All the immediate descriptive traits of this film would suggest appeal as popular entertainment, not arthouse ghettoization.

4) It’s a movie about the War on Terror: True, and such subjects have proven to contain limited mass-audience appeal, but Lions for Lambs, Syriana, Body of Lies, Traitor, and The Men Who Stare at Goats all made more money than the far superior and far more entertaining The Hurt Locker.

The issue here is hardly with the film itself, but with the nature and recent practices of limited-run distribution. Limited release films typically work three ways: 1) to keep the release especially limited because the film in question possesses little mass appeal and/or the small distributor can’t afford to roll the film out in many cities simultaneously (The White Ribbon, A Town Called Panic), 2) to test the appeal of a film that may or may not strike a chord with mass audiences based on buzz and reactions emanating from its limited release (Slumdog Millionaire), or 3) to actively build buzz for a highly anticipated film by keeping it from mass audiences in its first few weeks of release (Brokeback Mountain, The Princess and the Frog).

The idea behind such a distribution practice is simple, one inspired by the core ideas behind free market capitalism and, in turn, simple formulas of supply and demand: if American audiences exhibit the desire to see a film, it will be provided. This idea seems to make perfect sense on paper and in selective (albeit extraordinary) examples like the online campaign to expand Paranormal Activity (though whether or not this actually would have changed Paramount’s rollout is up for debate). In reality, and in most cases, the distance between film and audience/consumer desire is not so straight – it’s inundated with twists and turns. The demand for a certain movie isn’t a given, it’s something that must be manufactured through marketing and buzz. More important than good buzz or an effective marketing strategy, however, is simple awareness of a film. If an audience isn’t aware of a film, how do they possess the freedom of choice to demand it? With stronger numerical delineations in theater count between limited and mass theatrical runs and the disappointing box office of potentially appealing movies from The Hurt Locker to Moon to Gentlemen Broncos (not a good movie, but easily one that could’ve made more money if handled differently), it seems that distributors are deciding the fates of such films long before audiences even have a chance to demand it.

I’m not saying it would be a smart idea to ever give something like The White Ribbon a wide release because of some idealized fantasy I have that the average moviegoer is more discerning than distributors and marketers make them out to be, but we’re in trouble when an action movie like The Hurt Locker or an original sci-fi flick like Moon are relegated to the arthouse with little chance of competing elsewhere. Did either of these films ever have the slightest chance to financially compete with Avatar or The Blind Side? Hardly, but creative, original genre movies like these certainly had the potential to reach and affect audiences far outside your metropolitan movie theater in the same way that the hardly-conventional Inglourious Basterds and District 9 actually did reach such an audience last year.

To label any unique but still accessible genre work as ‘arthouse’ does two harmful things to the rest of the cinematic landscape: 1) it relegates ‘mainstream cinema’ and multiplex fare to purely big-budget, high-profile filmmaking (so only what is often the most repetitive and predictable type of filmmaking can be considered mainstream), and 2) it leaves no real place for true arthouse fare, uncommercial films that truly challenge conventions. Journalists, critics, and various members of the Academy can consider The Hurt Locker and A Serious Man “arthouse” in a way that prevents serious awards consideration for true arthouse filmmaking like Hunger or Antichrist, both of which feature Oscar-nomination-worthy performances at their center. They’re rendered invisible by an ongoing confusion of the small with the arthouse. Finally, the labeling of a film like The Hurt Locker as arthouse furthers the cycle of problems with limited distribution, thereby preventing further unique-but-accessible films to ever be seen as marketable and potentially competitive through an initial wide release. This limits choice for the average moviegoer, limits awareness of the options and freedoms typically thought of as necessary for supply and demand to work, and limits the potential for studios – big and small, independent and incorporated – to dare to test a ‘smaller’ film’s performance against other wide, big-budget releases, further narrowing the variety at your local multiplex. I guess that’s really why it’s called a limited release.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Review: The Wolfman

Landon Palmer — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:24:23 +0000

Hollywood, particularly Universal, has made an effort to resurrect their classic 19302-40s horror franchises in recent cinema history. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The Mummy to Van Helsing, Universal (and Columbia) have, for better or worse, mined the box office potential of their old properties to wildly different results. When tackling this material, one can’t simply make a straightforward remake from a horror film from the early American sound era. These nascent horror films starring Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. possess their own lasting artistic value, but they certainly don’t resonate in terms of effective, modern means to achieving a lasting horrific effect relevant to practices today. Tod Browning and Lugosi’s Dracula supposedly turned audiences into fits of heart-racing fear back in 1931, but contemporary moviegoing struggles to see how he induced such a reaction.

These films work more interestingly as important signposts in the historical evolution of horror than lasting entertainment experiences for the modern era. More importantly, horror has changed focus since 1960, when the genre lost its concern with supernatural creatures and space aliens and focused instead on the horror and potential for evil inherent in man in the forms of serial killers and psychopaths. Thus, when adapting these creatures, who in their adaptation process have more in common with their filmic predecessors than the literary source material, the end result and newly manufactured appeal of such films don’t lie in their potential to be terrifying, but in some other form of entertainment value. Coppola’s Dracula and Sommers’ Mummy films are entertaining in their own respects, but they aren’t remembered for being scary. Bring in Joe Johnston’s long-awaited update of The Wolfman, a film whose failure or success doesn’t necessarily ride on how horrifying it is, but on potential original value excavated from the source material that couldn’t be realized in its 1941 predecessor. It is in this respect that the film fails.

Benicio Del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a British expatriate who has returned to his homeland from New York City to inquire on the disappearance of his brother at the request of his fiancée Gwen (Emily Blunt). The village of Talbot’s home has been ravaged by brutal, unprecedented animal attacks. Talbot gets bitten by said animal and, of course, begins to endure a mysterious transformation while Aberline (Hugo Weaving), a Scotland Yard inspector, enacts a looming counter-investigation.

Like the revitalization of any franchise within the last few years, the story of The Wolfman is (pun not intended) universal and immediately recognizable. What audiences want in films like this are two basic things, 1) creative but slight variations in their interpretation on this familiar material, and 2) a unique stylistic and entertaining approach to such familiar source material. Johnston and company, unfortunately for us, deliver on neither.

The Wolfman is no way a terrible movie. It’s not an abomination. Trade papers and journalists will spin this movie to be the aborted realization of a troubled production, but there are far worse examples of rushed business decisions in studio history. What’s wrong with The Wolfman is that it never solidifies a coherent artistic or narrative vision, which calls into question the necessity for a relaunch if the inspiration isn’t evident. The Wolfman moves at a lightning pace to its detriment (a probable result, in this case, of too much time revisiting the editing room by too many people) as the filmmakers never allow the film time and space to breathe and establish – let alone immerse the audience in – the world that it has created. What follows this botched, haphazard opening act is far better than the film’s first thirty minutes, but without the necessary foundation, none of what follows is convincing enough to be effective or affecting.

The film employs a CGI-laden, cartoonish approach to gore which is fun to witness in its initial moments, but when The Wolfman offers little in terms of a fresh approach to entertainment with this all-too-familiar material, it becomes evident that the gore offers little more than a diverting replacement for where genuine suspense is supposed to be. The film is indeed entertaining in several moments, especially the first two scenes where Del Toro transforms into the eponymous creature. It’s an unchallenging, mostly inoffensive breeze to sit through, but its entertainment value is superficial, its vapid core sleekly disguised beneath the immediate appeal of sound and image. I will say, though, that I the first few scenes of Talbot’s painful transformation – while frustratingly rushed through – were a joy to behold as Del Toro’s digits and joints methodically dislocated themselves into an artful grotesquerie – a beautiful marriage of aesthetique and industrial effect. Sure, one can’t help but become nostalgic for the far more appropriate use of Rick Baker’s makeup talents iconically utilized in An American Werewolf in London almost thirty years ago, but Johnston’s take on the wolfman story is never grounded enough in any conviction of reality to feel that something of depth is lost without the employment of practical effects and animatronics in the process. On the contrary, the CGI transformations were one of The Wolfman’s few redeeming factors to behold.

As far as performances go, Weaving and Sir Anthony Hopkins (as Lawrence’s father Sir John Talbot) seem to be having grand fun with what little they’re given. Weaving in particular owns the screen, and he’s generously given the film’s rare moments of funny dialogue. One of The Wolfman’s most surprising lacking aspects is that it is, of all actors, Del Toro who doesn’t deliver here. Supposedly a passion project for the actor as he is purportedly a fan of original wolfman Lon Chaney, Jr., Del Toro comes across as even less interested and less inspired than the talents behind the camera. He’s bland and dry, especially as Talbot (and he displays no convincing history of chemistry with the father figure, which hurts the film’s third act), and as the creature this allegedly method actor brings nothing new to the table. I wasn’t expecting the arguably inappropriate existential take on Frankenstein’s monster via De Niro in Kenneth Branaugh’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but Del Toro is an actor whose track record thus far warrants fully all the praise he’s received. He’s notoriously achieved a great deal with small roles in the past, but instead of wishing he had more screen time as I did in witnessing his innovative supporting turns in The Usual Suspects and Traffic, Del Toro does directly the opposite here: delivering scant to nothing in a role that occupies the majority of the film’s screen time.

As a director, Johnston doesn’t necessarily disappoint because of how haphazard his career has been so far. He’s never displayed a collective vision, and as a typical director-for-hire he is the wrong choice for this stylistically heavy subject matter. His fast-moving camera and quick cutting at first alludes to the intoxicating overstylization of Coppola’s Dracula, but where the wine baron resurrected the styles of Abel Gance and German Expressionism for his take on a classic monster, Johnston uses style as an allusion to something deeper going on underneath the (apparently) lightning-quick clouds of Victorian England, but this is a veil over the empty, uninspired, and unfortunate missed opportunity that this take of The Wolfman finally realizes itself to be.

The Upside: An entertaining (if lacking) breeze after the first act, Hugo Weaving’s fun performance.

The Downside: It’s all an empty, uninspired affair.

On the Side: Sir Anthony Hopkins stipulates in his contract that he only play characters possessing the title “sir.”

Culture Warrior: On Hollywood and Cheating

Landon Palmer — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:01:11 +0000

Editor’s Note: The following article features possible spoilers on Dear John, 2012, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones. You’ve been warned.

I typically save the boiling points for Robert Fure, aiming instead to frame my column as an observation of media rather than a critique, analyzing trends and their meaning in the context of film and television as an intersecting object of commerce and art. But there is something that has been getting under my skin in some films released in the past several months, and it’s the way that Hollywood deals with the subject infidelity. Repeatedly in recent mainstream films, Hollywood shirks away from the potential complexity or diminishing empathetic audience identification that could occur if they portray any of their protagonists cheating. Instead, they either avoid the subject entirely or embrace the clichéd convenience of a supporting character’s death so that a reunion with the potentially cheating couple can occur guilt-free. I find these alternatives to cheating protagonists more bothersome than if they actually allowed a central character to cheat in the first place, and it represents a level of cowardice on behalf filmic storytellers afraid to explore flawed, multidimensional, human characters to such a degree.

Two weeks ago I saw and reviewed Dear John (I think I’m the only Reject who’s seen it, or at least the only one who admits to having seen it). The third act of the film finds the eponymous John (Channing Tatum) returning home from fighting abroad to bury his father, and he encounters his lost, long-distance love Savannah (Amanda Seyfried). Savannah has married since (or rather, resulting in) their long-distance, longhand breakup, and one of the film’s big reveals is that Savannah has not married the bothersome douchebag college friend who flirted with her repeatedly right in front of John’s eyes, but Savannah’s older, much more sympathetic family friend Tim (the underappreciated Henry Thomas) who is now—in typical Nicholas Sparks fashion—hospitalized with terminal cancer.

So the supposed insurmountable obstacle that a couple must go through in every Hollywood romantic comedy or drama – being pulled apart and then thrust back together for little more than the dramatic effect of a third act tied into the idea of distance/separation making the heart grow fonder – is rather easily surmounted by the fact that the man in the way of the couple’s reunion is set to die at any minute. What should be a mountain of conflicting desire – staying loyal to one’s spouse versus reuniting with a true love – is rendered almost irrelevantly insignificant by the easy out of killing the character off. We as an audience are put into this situation for the necessity of drama, but for the sake of simplicity, narrative closure, and fear of creating an unsympathetic (albeit layered) character, Dear John – and many films like it – reduce a mountain into a molehill.

Narrative cheats like this are in no way rare, and numerous examples can be excavated just from films released in the last few months. 2012, for instance, featured amongst its overflowing global and interpersonal conflicts a broken home at its center that must, like the fate of humanity, be restored by the end of the film. But instead of having Amanda Peet confront the fact that she, in the face of death, has realized she must make the difficult decision of allowing herself to fall back in love with her ex-husband, in the process breaking the heart of current husband/boyfriend (?) Tom McCarthy – all of which would make a compelling character moment regarding the wholly different decisions made when faced with extinction (as opposed to everyday life decisions) in what is otherwise a bloated mess of a movie – 2012 instead does what is easiest and most cowardly by killing off McCarthy’s character and having Peet and John Cusack completely forget about him in their embrace five minutes later.

What writers, producers, studio execs, etc. think they have achieved when they make such decisions is to do what is necessary to give the audience what they want (the reunion of the central couple, the affirmation of the nuclear family) and what the story purportedly needs without making its central characters seem like bad people. But what happens in movies like Dear John and (especially) 2012 is that, if such a thing occurred outside the emotionally enraptured, subjectivity-directing world of the film, these characters would come across as opportunistic, heartless bastards. In a way, what Peet and Cusack do in 2012 is in many ways worse than if she simply cheated on McCarthy or left him for Cusack, as it renders the entire existence of McCarthy’s character a meaningless obstacle in way of Peet and Cusack’s inevitable reunion.

In the world of such films, supporting character actors like Henry Thomas and Tom McCarthy have no autonomously important purpose of their own. They turn into cogs in a giant wheel who exist as both the obstacle and the means for the more important central characters to reunite. I left both films feeling far sorrier for these supporting characters than I was happy for the protagonists’ reunion, for what was probably the love of one’s life for the marriages and relationships of these periphery characters is morphed into merely a forgettable, barely significant speed bump for the lives of the main characters.

Even when a Hollywood movie does deal with infidelity, it’s often dealt with kids’ gloves. In last fall’s failed Oscar grab Amelia, Earheart’s cheating is approached with a simplistic three-scene revelation-conflict-reconciliation process that concludes with the married couple holding hands on a beach as if nothing’s happened. We get it, their marriage survived all sorts of conflict, but what is the purpose of introducing infidelity into the narrative if it’s portrayed as having no lasting changes in their marriage? Are we really supposed to believe that everything went back to being the same, with no enduring tensions? Wouldn’t it be more dramatic and interesting if Amelia disappeared during a bumpy patch in their relationship? The film I discussed last week, The Lovely Bones, entirely dismisses an infidelity subplot involving Susie’s mother and the detective that was featured in the book, instead pushing that character out of the narrative and underutilizing the great acting chops of Rachael Weisz. Was Peter Jackson actually afraid of portraying somebody whose teenage daughter has just died as somebody who could afterward make irrational decisions? Instead of giving us a potentially complex and possibly even unlikeable character, Jackson gave us no character at all.

We get it. A cheater does not typically make for a very attractive character. But we need to get over the idea, first of all, that we need likeable characters at the center of every mainstream movie (look at the unrelenting villainy in There Will Be Blood or the magnetic narcissism of Capote). Showing a character making questionable decisions makes them more human, and internal moral dilemmas and moral ambiguity is always more interesting. Nobody can relate to a saint. If the issue of cheating is even alluded to, it should be dealt with consideration of all the complexity and scars involved, not forgotten about, skirted over, or problematically resolved in a simplistic manner. Secondly, filmmakers should understand that sympathy operates differently than empathy. We don’t always have to be supportive of a central character’s decisions, just understand the reasoning behind them. A protagonist can do something absolutely reprehensible in a film, but we will still follow them if we’re given a reason to be invested in them and understand them. We need this character depth not only regarding the specific subject of infidelity; rather the implementation of these practices would make stronger characterization in movies all around. When it comes to narrative shortcuts and quick, simple resolutions, Hollywood needs to get its act together and stop cheating.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Film School Rejects » Landon Palmer

SXSW Review: The Runaways

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: A Serbian Film

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: Micmacs

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: Get Low

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: Enter the Void

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: Dogtooth

Related Reading:

SXSW Review: Leaves of Grass

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Kathryn Bigelow’s Next Move

Related Reading:

Oscar Breakdown: Best Director

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: The Coens’ Uncertainty Principle

Related Reading:

Review: The Ghost Writer

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Twists, Tricks, and Surprises

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Please, Don’t Call ‘The Hurt Locker’ an Arthouse Film

Related Reading:

Review: The Wolfman

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: On Hollywood and Cheating

Related Reading: