Category Archives: Movies

Why I want 12 Years a Slave to win the Best Picture Oscar

Yesterday I did a two minute sound bite on a local cable news station following the Oscar nominations. During this discussion, in addition to forgetting Robert Redford’s name, I said that I thought Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave had a good shot at winning the Best Picture Award, making it the first film by a black director to do so. And who knows, maybe McQueen would win Best Director too, another first.

Not exactly stepping out on a limb there. But then I added that I hoped 12 Years did win. Before I could explain my reasons for this, we were on the topic of snubbed performances and that’s when I blanked on Redford’s name (now that I think of it I also forgot to mention the cat, or cats, in Inside Llewyn Davis, who I thought should have gotten some recognition. Damn!)

After the broadcast, my colleague Laura Frank Clifford, who was kind enough to watch, mentioned via Facebook (and I thank her for overlooking my Redford senior moment) that my endorsement of 12 Years a Slave seemed to contradict an earlier posting on Artsfuse where I had in fact listed the film among as number one among the worst films of 2013.

Another senior moment? Perhaps not. As I noted to Laura, that “worst” film list referred not necessarily to really awful films, but to films that either failed miserably to live up to expectations or were vastly overrated (okay, an amended list also included Grown Ups 2 and A Madea Christmas, which were indeed very awful films). And my reservations about the film remain – I am definitely with Gerald Peary and Jonathan Rosenbaum and even the printable version of Armond White’s opinion on this one.

At any rate, if quality was the issue I would not think 12 Years is deserving of the Best Picture Oscar. It’s not the worst of the nominees (I’d award that prize to Gravity, which barely missed inclusion in my ten worst list) nor the best (I’d go with Her, but probably would have opted for Llewyn Davis if it made the cut).

But as all but the most ingenuous or disingenuous would acknowledge, quality has little to do with who gets an Oscar. It is about image and p.r. and politics and making money.

Image-wise, an Oscar for 12 Years could serve to counter the Academy’s well-deserved reputation as a segregated bastion of white, male, middle-aged privilege that has denied access and recognition to minorities and women. It would be a historic first, a sign of better times to come! Just like giving Kathryn Bigelow Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Hurt Locker in 2009. And we all know how that threw open the doors for women directors in Hollywood.

It would be great for Hollywood’s image, then, but substantively meaningless when it comes to opportunities for black or other minority filmmakers. It’s an award that would honor the Academy more than the recipient. As was the case with Bigelow, McQueen doesn’t need this bogus imprimatur to prove that he is a brilliant filmmaker. Though not a fan of 12 Years, I believe his previous two films, Hunger (2009) and Shame (2011) are evidence of a major auteur. Whether he gets an Oscar or not, he’ll be making many great films and has at least a few masterpieces in him.

So I don’t think 12 Years should win the Best Picture Oscar either because it is the best film among those nominated or because it can serve as a token gesture that will make no difference in the fundamental racial imbalance of Hollywood. I think it should win because it might get more people to watch it.

I’m not talking about the already converted, those who know that slavery was an abomination and should not be forgotten or forgiven and who realize that the malignant racism that engendered that monstrous institution still lies not so far below the surface in our society.

Nor am I talking about those unembarrassed by their recidivist racial attitudes, like the fans and defenders of Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty who agree with his belief that African-Americans had it pretty good before the Civil Rights movement made them all uppity and angry. People like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, etc… For if even by some miracle those people are prodded into watching the film, they will no doubt dismiss it as a fabrication by the left wing traitors of Hollywood and the liberal-biased lame stream media.

Instead, those who would most benefit from watching the film are those who feel satisfied that the battle for racial justice is a done deal. And maybe overdone. These are people who don’t think much about these issues but who if pressed might be on the fence about whether we’re making too much of a fuss out of voting rights, equal opportunity, social programs for the poor. You know, the kinds of things that Martin Luther King Jr. and others spent decades fighting, and sometimes dying for.

It’s not an easy movie to watch. And in some ways it’s not even a very good movie. But it is a brutally efficient history lesson. It tells the truth about a terrible thing that most people would just like to forget about. If giving an Oscar to 12 Years a Slave in any way helps preserve the progress we’ve made in the 149 years since slavery was abolished, I’ll be rooting for it.

HS’s 2013 Top 10. And a few we could have done without.

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As you can see, there is some overlap with Mr. Keough’s list, best and worst. That is a good thing.

1. Nebraska — From the very first shot of an old man shuffling along the side of an urban highway – against the direction of the traffic – you know you’re seeing director Alexander Payne at the very height of his considerable cinematic mastery. The movie makes you want to say something about America, but I won’t.

2. A Touch of Sin — Zhangke Jia’s films till now have, broadly speaking, looked at the results of upheaval. Here he gets down to the upheaval itself, violent crime throughout China. Ultimately, it’s motive more than action that matters, but, boy, that action.

3. Welcome to Pine Hill — 2013’s other great movie about America. Keith Miller’s debut feature about a man brought up short just when he’s straightening out his life comes alive through Miller’s attentive technique, manifest in, among other things, editing dictated by emotion.

4. Her – Spike Jonez, traditionalist filmmaker? Certainly not in subject matter, but he has certainly absorbed the great historic lessons of American cinema. Combined with his very contemporary story, he’s come up with not just a fascinating movie, but a nearly unique one.

5. Beyond the Hills – Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mongiu continues to impress as one of the world’s leading filmmakers. Typically, this movie tackles big subjects (how do old and new types of knowledge co-exist in the contemporary world?; what is madness?) but does perfect justice to its story about the reunion of two grown orphan girls. Brilliant.

6. The Act of Killing – Joshua Oppenheimer undresses a monster’s psyche simply by offering to direct the creature in a movie about his crimes (during the Indonesian massacres of 1965). It’s as simple and as complex as that.

7. Leviathan — Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel carried some video cameras aboard a North Atlantic trawler, held them or bolted them down, and allowed the images to form themselves before the lens. But then, they also distorted the film’s clarity and color, making us work to really see what’s what. A paradoxical way of freeing an image from excessive authorial control, but it works.

8. Upstream Color — I think I got what Shane Carruth was trying to say here, but I just might have been affected by the same delusions as the movie’s characters. Original, engrossing, ingenious. What else do you need?

9. Byzantium — Neil Jordan’s best Gothic outing in quite some time asks us what are we looking at when we look at female vampires? And it answers.

10. Ernest and Celestine – A warm and charming, but never mawkish and just suspenseful enough tale of a country bear and a town mouse. Directors Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar, and Stéphane Aubier adopt a water-color style complete with imprecise lines, a “mistake” that works wonderfully. This listing is for the French original. The English dubbed edition opens in the U.S. later this year.

I’ve never done a 10 Worst List and, as Ebenezer Scrooge once said, I’m too old to change. But there are movies which drive me crazy for different reasons.

No apparent adult supervision: 47 Ronin

Saying you are smart over and over again does not mean you are smart: Before Midnight

No, this is not a step forward: The Conjuring

No good outcome possible: R.I.P.D.

If you don’t know this by now, you will never, never, never know it: 12 Years a Slave

–Henry Sheehan

PK’s 2013 top 10. And bottom 10

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[An earlier version appeared on Artsfuse.org]

Ten Best

1.Her – Any film that includes the disembodied mind of Alan Watts deserves top billing. Spike Jonze engages in a visually stunning, superbly acted, disturbing and profound exploration of the frightening future of love and identity in a digital universe.

2. Inside Llewyn Davis – A naysayer asked me why I liked this film so much and, at a loss, I blurted out, “I am Llewyn Davis.” A long, embarrassing silence followed and I added, “And I liked the cat.”

3. Wadjda – Not only is this the first film made by a woman in Saudi Arabia (or by anyone in that country apparently), but it also rivals the early masterpieces of Abbas Kiarostami in its charming, tragic, achingly authentic depiction of what it means to be a smart kid growing up among dumb adults. Subtly, beautifully shot, with a terrific performance by Waad Mohammed in the title role.

4. Upstream Color – Still have no idea what Shane Carruth’s ecstatic narrative and visual assault means. Still am staying up nights trying to figure it out. Puts the trance back in transcendental.

5. Fill the Void – First-time director Rama Burshtein’s radiant recreation of a subculture – the orthodox Haredi Jewish community of Tel Aviv – and the exquisite performances elevate this tale of loss, loyalty, and independence into a universal tragedy.

6. In the House – I like self-reflexive movies that are about movies, and about narrative in general. And I like puzzles and clever dialogue delivered with sparkling grace by attractive actors. François Ozon accomplishes all this and more with wicked wit and panache.

7. Caesar Must Die – A deceptively simple and deeply moving recreation of a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar put on by inmates of a maximum security prison in Rome. The Taviani Brothers interweave the drama of the production, the interactions of the performers with their troubled histories, and the play itself into a deeply moving, illuminating fugue.

8. Our Children – Ignored by everyone, Émilie Dequenne put in one of the best performances of the year as a mother pressured slowly, insidiously, and inexorably into a shocking act of rebellion.

9. Computer Chess – Along with Her and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (which didn’t make the cut), Andrew Bujalski’s sui generis absurdist comedy presents the humble origins of our current digital gotterdammerung. It also stars my choice for the year’s Best Supporting Actor, my former Boston Phoenix colleague and friend, Gerald Peary.

10. All Is Lost – Just got to love a film where the sole line of dialogue is “fuck!” An allegory about individual and environmental decline that is as upbeat as the title suggests. I’m still scratching my head wondering why no one is noticing that this is Robert Redford’s best performance ever.

Whoops, inexplicably overlooked: Leviathan, The Act of Killing, Berberian Sound Studio. And others that will undoubtedly occur to me long after this year is gone and forgotten.

Ten worst.
There were far, far worse movies released this year – Grown Ups 2, A Madea Christmas, etc. But I’m thinking of movies that had pretensions of artistry, or a potential for greatness, or phony films that have inexplicably been revered by just about everybody but me. What’s wrong with me? Help me.

So with all due respect:

1. 12 Years a Slave
2. Blue is the Warmest Color
3. The Great Beauty
4. Before Midnight
5. Frances Ha
6. The Conjuring
7. The Butler
8. Short Term
And, what the heck, they were so bad they deserve to make the list:
9. A Madea Christmas
10. Grown Ups 2

Some Christmas Coal.

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“Christmas comes but once a year” is beginning to sound more like a promise from the major Hollywood studios than an expression of seasonal joy. There were some good films worth discussing; some bad films worth excoriating. But mostly we were served helpings a plain, squishy vanilla, movies so devoid of, well, almost anything, that they evoke as much a discussion as “Didja like it?” “Eh.”

So here, in no particular order, are some of our Yuletide visitations.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. No doubt lots of people were quick to call this latest Will Ferrell comedy dumb (even if as in “dumb but funny”), but I wonder if any in the audience realized that the movie called them stupid. Set in the very early 1980s, the movie takes the start of 24-hours cable news as its backdrop and says outright that CNN (called GNN in the movie) and its imitators were/are so successful because the pander to the emptiest part of the American brain. And that’s all of the American brain; no one in the movie differentiates between a smart American audience and a stupider one. We’re all idiots together as far as the movie is concerned. Well, good point.

Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and his misfit news team (Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and David Koechner) are disappointed to find themselves relegated to the graveyard shift at the upstart news operation, so much so that Burgundy takes it into his head to dedicate their hours to “America,” meaning cute animal and mawkish human interest stories. They area hit of course.

So much for the clever stuff. Otherwise, the movie is a rehash of the jokes in the first go-round, endlessly recycled. Carell’s character, the weatherman, is still a schizophrenic who spouts non-sequiturs; once more, Koechner is the clueless sports anchor who has a gay crush on Ron (is that gay “joke” still funny? was it ever?); and Rudd’s investigative reporter is still, well, kind of a womanizer, but in a nice way because he’s Paul Rudd. Typically for a Ferrell movie, if he and his director Adam McKay think they’ve got ahold of a funny joke they milk it until the cow runs dry. Whether you think the movie depends on your patience, your appetite for repetition, and your gratitude for a movie that has even a teeny tiny taste of satire.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Peter Jackson continues his vain effort to craft a trilogy out of J.R.R. Tolkein’s slight, unexpected bestseller, the one which prompted the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Even squeezing borrowed and invented characters to fill out the relatively scant dramatic landscape, Jackson has harvested acres of nothing. As he did in part one, Jackson employs the simplest of structures: some characters travel for a while, fight, travel again, fight, travel, fight, and so forth and so on. Such bare bones would be fine if Jackson sutured some flesh onto them, but there’s nothing with blood in its veins on the screen. In place of the painfully unfunny “comic” scenes of the last movie, Jackson has relied on two action scenes: one with giant spiders (shades of Bert I. Gordon!) and a way, way too long climax starring a dragon. Partly as a result, the enterprise doesn’t resemble The Lord of the Rings movies anywhere near so much as Jackson’s gaseous, ponderous King Kong.

August: Osage County. A Pulitzer Prize? Well, OK. This hackneyed tale of family woe in the boondocks was adapted by Tracy Letts from his own play and directed by John Wells with that misplaced reverence due Broadway tales of the common folk (think Bus Stop). Tell me if you’ve heard this before: A family patriarch dies and so relatives, their spouses and children come from near and far to join the stay-at-homes in an outpouring of vitriol and decades-old resentments, not to mention the revelation of scandals.

These machinations have chugged across movie screens so long that their operators have had to raise the scandal stakes and the scandals in such a recent rehash as this reach such ludicrous heights (or depths) that it’s hard not to giggle from the very first.

Out on the Oklahoma plain – which we see every once in a while on typically over-composed, postcard-perfect images –old man Weston has drunk himself to death, leaving behind his widow, pill-popping Violet Weston. Because she is the most mentally deranged member of her clan, Violet assumes the status of lacerating truth-teller, the one who slashes through pieties, battling one army of clichés with legions of her own.

Violet is played by Meryl Streep, a cold performer who acts like she’s a telegraph operator tapping out her meanings in broadly worded transmissions. There isn’t much scenery in the old dark house Violet inhabits, but there’s even less by the time Streep is done chewing and swallowing it. She is surrounded by a name cast whose names you will recognize but whose performances are unmemorable.

47 Ronin. Given its budget and what I assume were its ambitions, this is truly the worst movie of the year. Keanu Reeves stars as a half-Japanese, half-European young (?) servant in Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate. In an opening voice-over, a narrator refers to the shogunate era as “ancient Japan.” The shogunate existed from 1600 to 1868 so you’re tipped off literally from the movie’s opening that the movie has no respect for Japan, its history or culture.

Actually, you’re tipped off by the movie’s title. The tale of the 47 ronin is an old one which has been made into at least six movies. The most famous is Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1941 The 47 Ronin which he made under the orders of the Japanese wartime government. The emperor’s regime wanted a pro-war, militaristic propaganda film, but Mizoguchi returned with a magnificent anti-war drama that, even without its background, is a classic. But there have been other good versions, too: Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1962 Chushingura and Kon Ichikawa’s 1994 47 Ronin.

This movie, directed by Carl Rinsch, is essentially a showcase for barely adequate special/digital effects, so-so action scenes, and dramatic scenes that would be more at home in a second-rate manga. It drrraaaggsss, in other words. The whole point of the story is lost in what, I suppose, you could call an update, the story rearranged to appeal to a modern audience. If this movie had another title, it would be terrible, miserable, awful. With the title it does have, it’s also a travesty.

–Henry Sheehan

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part two: Blue Is the Warmest Color

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[A version of this previously appeared in the Artsfuse web site. Also, beware of spoilers.]

While 12 Years a Slave, according to Stephen Dedalus’s Thomistic formulation referred to in the previous post, induces “loathing” which “urges us to abandon, to go from something,” and therefore is “didactic” (and I would add, propagandistic), Blue Is the Warmest Color arouses “desire,” which “urges us to possess, to go to something.” It, too, is kinetic, not static, in its effect, and pornographic rather than didactuc. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s still art, though “improper” art.

That’s not how most critics see it, however. The film has gotten nothing but high fives since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It scores an 89% favorable rating at Rotten Tomatoes, an 88 at Metacritic, and is currently on a victory lap of awards from critics groups nationwide, heading for a sure lock on the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Nonetheless, almost lost in the near universal praise for the film, Manohla Dargis’s dissenting article “The Trouble With ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’” in the October 25 New York Times points out something that would seem obvious: The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, really likes asses.

Is that really a problem? Well, it is a distraction. Involvement in the characters’ ongoing drama takes a detour once Kechiche’s camera takes a leering up-close look as they engage in lengthy male fantasies of girl-on-girl action. The scene seem designed to arouse not contemplation, but desire. (Or loathing, if one is of an intolerantly moralistic bent).

Speaking of moralism, maybe this aspect of the film wouldn’t bug me so much had Kechiche not indulged in it with such self-righteousness. The film flaunts its sex scenes in a humorless and disingenuously sanctimonious way that discourages any discussion about it being a turn-on, if not for the viewer, then for Kechiche himself. It is a variation on the Emperor’s New Clothes, with the actors’ nudity exposing the director’s pretensions and predilections.

Be forewarned, then: if you want to enjoy the film as the intense and moving love story it claims to be (and despite everything, sometimes is), don’t pay attention to the man behind the camera indulging his voyeurism, fetishism, and his power over women. And if you find yourself stimulated during the relentless scenes of two naked, beautiful women engaged in energetic, artfully lit, exquisitely shot, explicit fucking, don’t worry, it just means you’re emotionally involved in a bravely realistic love story.

I think Joyce would regard this explanation with a skeptical smile and say, who are you kidding? I mean, where’s the stasis?

Instead of the sex scenes serving to intensify the love story, the love story exists to justify the sex scenes. Without those steamy interludes tarting up what is otherwise a routine narrative, would this film have garnered so many rave reviews and prizes?

Well, maybe “routine” is a bit harsh. I admit that at times the film stirred my tear ducts a bit and made me reflect on the eternal verities of life and love, my mind raised beyond desire and loathing to a condition of stasis, particularly in the scenes near the end…

But let’s take it from the beginning. Fifteen-year-old Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, who looks at first like she’s barely pubescent),

doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. She is also uncertain about her sexual inclinations. After an unsatisfying clinch with the class hunk, and a confused kiss with a female classmate, she catches the wry eye of Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is older and – as can be seen by her short-cropped blue-dyed hair, insinuating half-smile, and the way she smokes a cigarette – worldly wise and artistic.

She looks like she knows what she wants and what to do with it when she gets it. And, by the way, why is the twenty-something Emma hanging around a schoolyard?

Be that as it may, the two fall in love, or so you assume because they spend so much time in the sack. They do have occasional discussions about philosophy – after all, this is a French movie. Emma quotes Sartre while pontificating about the meaning of life and freedom, and the irrepressibly unsophisticated Adèle brings it all down to earth by observing that existentialism is pretty much summed up in the Bob Marley song “Get Up, Stand-up.”

Deep. Meanwhile, not everyone is keen on their relationship. Some of Adèle’s classmates get nasty. Of course, since Adèle is by far the prettiest girl in school, the ugly girls are the meanest to her. They corner Adèle, taunt her, and accuse her of ogling their asses. Dream on, ugly girls! Not even Kechiche is interested in looking at your posteriors.

But such petty obstacles can’t deter true existential love. Instead, the usual culprits break it up: the passage of time, the inevitability of change, and the vagaries of human nature. (Did I mention Being and Nothingness?) Blue’s big insight: relationships don’t last – deal with it.

Adèle and Emma’s seemingly non-traditional relationship devolves into sadly traditional roles, with Adele becoming the docile drudge who waits alone at home and Emma the self-absorbed artist who increasingly neglects her as she pursues her career. In one dinner scene, Emma barks over the phone at an art dealer who wants to exploit the lesbian sexual imagery of her work – imagine! – while Adèle feebly offers her a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered bread to get her attention.

Such is the fate of those with low self-esteem involved in an unequal relationship. At parties Emma’s arty friends are bemused at Adèle’s ignorance of Klimt and Schiele, and then compliment her on her prettiness. Adèle tries to keep up with all the fancy talk, but all she really wants to do is cook and clean and pose for Emma’s erotic paintings. That, and tell stories to her classes of preschoolers. (Emma suggests that Adèle try writing children’s books, but the matter is wisely dropped). Adèle tries hard to make it work, but her efforts only result in more loneliness and neglect, and finally, infidelity, jealousy, and rage.

To his credit, Kechiche – as in his brilliant The Secret of the Grain – is masterly when depicting the passage of time, a subtlety that is the antithesis of his approach to the sex scenes. The years pass unnoticed until you realize that Adèle is no longer in high school, but has a job, and that the pregnant woman whom she met at a party now has a three-year-old child. Had Kechiche practiced such artful restraint throughout the film, he might have attained the elusive “esthetic emotion” that Joyce describes.

Instead, Kechiche the pseudo-realist decides that truth requires gawking at some bodily function. In the film’s final break-up scene, for example, the focus of attention shifts from the feelings of devastation experienced by the characters to a close-up of the growing stream of snot dripping from Adèle’s nose. Give the girl a tissue, for crying out loud!

Maybe Kechiche here is leaning towards the loathing side of the desire/loathing dichotomy that Joyce was talking about. In any case, just as the spectacle of slamming vulvas and enthusiastic cunnilingus distract from the love in the love scenes, so, too, does this prolonged, gratuitous booger deflate any sense of tragedy when they break up.

Maybe now I’m just getting petty. Like my annoyance at the eating scenes. Always spaghetti, with a greenish chunky sauce that sticks to lips and faces and moustaches and is clearly visible as a half-masticated pulp when people yammer on about Klimt and Schiele with their mouths open. Why is there never a tissue or napkin available when people need them in this movie?

They had far better table manners in The Secret of the Grain. Maybe that’s why I prefer it: it is a film about food in the same way this is a film about love, and it does not need to show the biological processes of chewing, digestion, and excretion to make its point.

Another thing – Emma’s artwork bugs me. Here is one of those situations in which everyone in the film wildly acclaims the creative work of a character who is an artist or writer. And then some of the writing is read out loud, or the paintings hang in a gallery, and you say to yourself, wow, that is really, really bad.

Theoretically, perhaps, Emma’s paintings serve the purpose of setting up a self-reflexive conceit in which the male gaze (Kechiche’s) is directed at the female gaze (Emma’s) which is being directed at an objectified woman (Adèle). But when you come right down to it, the paintings are vulgar, soft-core pornography hypocritically disguised as art. And so, at its worst, is this overpraised movie.

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part one: 12 Years a Slave

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“ – The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Not that Joyce had a problem with pornography or didacticism. They might be “improper,” but they are still “art.”

When it came to porn, he was no prude. Not only did he write filthy love letters to his wife Nora, but in 1933 his masterpiece Ulysses was arraigned in a New York Southern District Federal Court (United States v. One Book Called Ulysses) before Judge John Munro Woolsey on charges of obscenity (in a landmark decision, Woolsey, an enlightened jurist and not a bad literary critic, explained why the book wasn’t pornographic.)

And as for didacticism, you can’t get much more didactic than does Stephen Dedalus in the multi-page discourse on Thomistic aesthetics quoted in part above.

Therefore it is a qualification and not a condemnation to say that, by the above definition, 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of a 1852 memoir by Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold to slave owners, and Blue Is the Warmest Color, a chronicle of a lesbian love affair directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, fall into the category of “improper art.”

But for many people, they pass for masterpieces. Both films have swept awards from just about every critics society and are en route to likely triumphs at the Academy Awards. What can Joyce offer to counter such an overwhelming movement to canonize these pictures as masterpieces?

Let’s take the case of 12 Years a Slave. In it, the mind is not “arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” Quite the opposite. Nor is it that its intention. It is a didactic screed, a potent piece of propaganda, powerfully belaboring the message that the institution of slavery was an abomination, a debasement not only of the enslaved but also of those who enslaved them. And as such it succeeds with brutal, manipulative effectiveness.

For myself, by the end of the first hour, with over eight years as a slave still to go, after repeated whippings and cruelties and humiliations, I was fully convinced that slavery was a terrible thing, as I had been before I saw the movie. Ante-bellum slave traders, morally degenerate Southern plantation owners, pitiful liberal milksops who regarded the system with distaste while profiting from it, seeming sympathizers who prove to be inevitably treacherous, and sadistic white trash overseers like the guy played by Paul Dano

(who, though a talented actor, has unfortunately been typecast as loathsome characters of one sort or another), were all, without question , horrible human beings

Truth be told, I wanted to kill them. Exterminate the brutes!” Trouble is, those people have been dead for over a century. So it’s pointless, and inconsequential, to hate them, because they no longer exist.

On the other hand, their legacy obviously endures. But here again I don’t think the film will make much of an impact when it comes to the racism and injustice that prevails to the present day.

Those who already feel guilt and shame and anger about these things will feel the same way. But those who might actually learn something from the movie — say, Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, noted among other things for declaring that black folks were better off singing in the cotton fields before thy got all uppity with that Civil Rights stuff; or Robertson’s politically opportunistic enablers such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz — well, you won’t find them lining up at the Cineplex to buy tickets to see 12 Years a Slave.

But for those who do see the movie,although it won’t change their opinions, it might make them feel better about themselves. It offers scapegoats to take the blame for all the bad stuff we feel guilty about. Michael Fassbender’s psychopathic plantation owner is a perfect example:

now there’s someone you love to loathe. Forget that those who owned slaves back then included such enlightened American heroes as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. That just makes things too complicated. It’s much more clarifying to pretend that they were all wicked and beyond the pale. This tactic is the essence of that sinister offshoot of didacticism, propaganda: create a demonic “other” who will take on our sins and serve as a despised projection of our guilt and rage,

In his “Contrarian View” of 12 Years a Slave posted on the Artsfuse website, Gerald Peary suggests that Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) might, in fact, offer a more effective and legitimate approach to resolving such conflicted feelings. At first glance, this notion seems absurd, if not blasphemous: how can Tarantino’s absurdly violent, wish fulfillment fantasy be considered in the same context as McQueen’s earnest depiction of an actual historical nightmare?

Well, for a couple of reasons. For one, the hero of Django is not a passive victim rescued by the kindness of a white stranger

(a carpenter, no less – and note the cruciform framework in the background in this still from the film). That may well have been what really happened, but Northup’s actual revenge, the writing of the book on which the film is based, and his subsequent activism on behalf of the abolitionist cause, is mentioned only as an afterward.

In contrast, Django is no victim: he’s a juggernaut of vengeance who kills white people.

Lots of them.

“Am I alone (perhaps),” Peary asks, “in preferring, as a screen hero, Jamie Foxx’s rowdy, impolitic Django to [Chiwetol] Ejiofor’s impeccably behaved Northup?”

And if not the fictional character Django, why not another historical figure? Why not, as Peary suggests, someone like Nat Turner? Why has no movie been made about this leader of a bloody, failed slave uprising in Virginia in 1831?

Like Northop, Turner also wrote a book about his ordeal – as told to his lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray

– and it was fictionalized by William Styron in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. Perhaps that story is too complex, too hard to compartmentalize into facile categories of good and evil. Too tragic.

And while we’re on the subject, is it wrong to prefer a complex, comprehensible, even seductive villain as opposed to the cartoon monsters in 12 Years? Someone like the malevolent plantation owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django, a diabolical villain with a certain joie de vivre, a nihilistic charm, someone who arouses not just loathing, but also terror, awe, even pity?

But to do so is to invite the condemnation of those who think that such reprobates should not be depicted as in any way remotely human like ourselves, but only as alien and demonic. They see any attempt to comprehend these fiends as an endorsement of the evil they have perpetrated.

That’s what Kathryn Bigelow learned to her regret when she depicted the CIA agents who inflicted grotesque, almost unwatchable torture on naked, chained and masked victims in her film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) . Other than that, however, they seemed kind of normal. They worried about their jobs, told jokes, were nice to their friends, and believed in the validity of what they were doing. Bigelow defended her non-didactic approach to this complex and ambiguous evil by insisting that depiction was not endorsement. To no avail.

More recently, Martin Scorsese has faced similar heat for his The Wolf of Wall Street. Some condemn it for glorifying the excesses of a generation of narcissistic sociopaths who lived an exotic (if tasteless) Satyricon-like life while destroying the economy and millions of lives. But Scorsese is attempting something more insidious than flat out condemnation; instead, he seduces the viewer into the attractions of a forbidden, alluring life style, itself a hallucinogenic version of the American Dream, in order to show that evil comes not from the pathology of a few, but from the sickness of a culture.

For these admirable intentions, as was the case with Bigelow, Scorsese can kiss his Oscar chances goodbye.

It may be some consolation to him and Bigelow and Tarantino that they are fulfilling James Joyce’s definition of “proper art.” They seek to elevate the soul to a level of aesthetic contemplation that induces a profound perception of good and evil and of human fate.

It is the essence of tragedy, as Stephen Dedalus points out in another of his aesthetic musings in Portrait of the Artist. Referring to the familiar Aristotlean formula that tragedy arouses pity and terror in order to produce in the audience a catharsis of those emotions, he adds:

“Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have…

“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”

Pity and terror might not be as easy to take as an invigorating dose of desire or loathing. But in the long run they are more rewarding, and enduring.

NEXT: part two: pornography and Blue Is the Warmest Color

Children’s crusades

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After grown-ups have proven inadequate in dealing with the life-or-death crises of the day in films such as “Gravity,” “All Is Lost,” and “Captain Phillips,” perhaps it’s time that a child came to show the way. Not that the children in recent films such as “Ender’s Game,” “City of Bones,” and most recently, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” (opened November 22) – have had much choice in the matter. Instead, hapless adults have shoved their children into the lurch when all else fails. They commit them to messianic quests and suicide missions in order to end an evil reign and save the world.
It’s not a new story. Kids have been called in to bail out adults before, not only in films but in books, many of which that have been made into movies. Dickens could claim a whole shelf of such adaptations if there were any more video stores with shelves to put them on. Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, and numerous fairy tales, going back at least to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But in those stories the child hero has only his or her own fate at stake, or that of a loved one or two, or at times, such as with Theseus, a thriving city-state. These days, though, the survival of whole human race, more or less, rests on some poor kid’s shoulders.
Blame, in part, the YA fantasy book industry, and its seemingly inexhaustible goldmine of franchises pushing that theme, with more than a dozen such YA adaptations planned for production by the studios in the coming months and years.
Though hugely popular now, stories about child heroes are not a new phenomenon. C.S. Lewis and his seven volume “Chronicles of Narnia” (published between 1949-1954) might have been the first to come up with the notion of having adolescents or children engaged in apocalyptic battles with superhuman adversaries in quasi-messianic allegories. His sometimes heavy-handed Christian subtext might have had something to do with the books’ late appearance on the screen and their comparatively poor showing at the box office. Though the Narnia series started out strong with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2005), both critically and financially, it met with diminishing returns with “Prince Caspian” (2008) and “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” (2010) and it doesn’t look like we’ll be hearing much more from bossy Christ stand-in, Aslan the Lion, any time soon.
Another prototype of this formula from around the same time, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”

published in 1954, adapted into a stark, critically well received film in 1963 by Peter Brook, posited a far less magical scenario than the Lewis books, unless you’re talking about the kind of brute magical thinking explored in James Fraser’s “The Golden Bough.” But both books – one Christian, the other existential, if not nihilistic, one drawing on the desolation of WWII, the other on Cold War angst – don’t have much faith in the adults who are supposedly in control of a chaotic world.
Speaking of the Cold War, I have yet to recover from the terror I experience as a ten-year-old watching “Invaders from Mars” (1953) on the old TV horror movie show “Fantasmic Features.” To this day I have nightmares about drills slowly boring through my skull to insert a crystalline device into my brain.

Needless to say, it has made visits to the dentist problematic.
Like many sci-fi films of that era, the film begins with the landing of alien space craft, which descends into the backyard of 12-year-old David, and burrows into a sandpit.

Who has not felt dread about the sinister sandpit in their backyard?David tells his father, a rocket scientist of some sort, who checks it out, and returns not quite the same affable ’50s dad he was before.

What follows is kind of the kiddie precursor to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956). Deftly shooting from the point of view of view of the young protagonist, the film evokes the trauma experienced by all kids when they realize that their parents, and perhaps all grown-ups, are actually zombies whose bodies have been taken over by malevolent extraterrestrial entities. With none of the adults to be trusted, it looks like David might have to deal with the problem on his own.

I had strong flashbacks to this movie when watching Gavin Hood’s adaptation of James Olson Card’s 1985 (based on a 1977 short story) YA sci-fi novel, “Enders Game.”

The drilled-in-the- base-of-the-skull implant from “Mars” has returned in this film, with a twist (literal and painful, as it turns out). Young Ender, a prime candidate at age 13 to lead an armada of starships against an alien menace, has a similar device inserted into his brain. In this case, though, it’s not a probe designed to control adult humans, but one installed by adults into young folks like Ender to monitor their every experience. This is a superego with a vengeance.
But though the grown-ups are omniscient, they are far from omnipotent. In fact, they’re desperate. The alien hordes have already invaded twice before and each time the planet has come close to annihilation. Determined not to face this prospect again, Earth’s leaders, a consortium of those tyrannies that seem to be the unavoidable destiny of human society, hope to end the threat once and for all with a devastating pre-emptive attack on the enemy’s home planet. Since for some reason only kids have the conceptual skills or hand-to-eye coordination (associated these days with veteran videogame aficionados; Card, his grotesque opinions about gay rights notwithstanding, was prescient about a lot of things)

to handle such a complex mission in the infinity of outer space. Mentored by wily Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), Ender alternates between neediness and resentment when it comes to the adults who have commandeered him. He is especially hostile when his training requires him to draw on his lethal skills to dispatch rival child-warriors during his Spartan-like training period. At one point he confronts Graff with the question – are the aliens the enemy, or you?
That same question arises in “Catching Fire,” the adaptation of the second book in Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” trilogy, and the first directed by Francis Lawrence, who previously put out a surprisingly effective rendition of Richard Matheson’s zombie apocalypse classic “I Am Legend” (2007) . “When you’re in the arena,” says Graff-like mentor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) to “tribute” Katniss Eberdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), “don’t forget who the enemy is.”
At first glance, the enemy’s identity seems obvious. True, Katniss must battle a bunch of other tributes, a repeat of her ordeal in the first movie. But these fellow pawns aren’t the real foe – Haymitch is referring to the whole oppressive system of the dystopic future society of Panem. Here “The Capitol,” an effete, tyrannical aristocracy inhabiting a latter-day Roman Elysium of excess and cruelty, dominates and exploits the 12 districts of the futuristic state of Panem. A revolution against the Capitol 75 years earlier failed, so as punishment each starving district must supply two youthful tributes, aged 12 to 18, to fight to the death in the annual “Hunger Games.” A high-tech kind of “circenses,” as it were, but for the impoverished multitudes, not much in the way of panem.
But, as is the case in “Ender’s Game,” the enemy remains ambiguous, and, by the end, it is unclear who is manipulating whom, especially with Philip Seymour Hoffman in full reptilian mode as the master of the games, Plutarch Heavensbee.
Katniss, however, just wants to be left alone. She thinks about fleeing with her childhood friend Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) to the primal, paradisal outback beyond the electric fences, living off the land, kind of like the two kids in “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012). But she’s compelled by two opposed forces to play the game. First, the diabolical autocrat of the Capitol, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who wants to manipulate her celebrity and that of her co-victor partner Peetah Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) into a gaudy romantic fantasy of true love and self-sacrifice to serve as “a distraction so people forget what their real problems are,” as Haymitch explains to her.

But maybe the most compelling obstacle to her escaping her destiny are the oppressed people of Panem themselves, who see her as a symbol of revolution.
Either way, it doesn’t allow Katniss much of a private life. Kind of like Jennifer Lawrence herself, who has established herself as a bigger celebrity in our world of pop culture than her character http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/21/jennifer-lawrence-meltdown-new-york-premiere_n_4315999.html?ir=New+York has in the world of Panem. Watching her appearances on talk shows that are at least as frivolous as her interviews in the film with hyperactive host Caesar Flickman (Stanley Tucci), it seems clear that she’s conscious of the irony of her position.

Like the film, she poses a curious paradox. Though the subtext of “Catching Fire” subverts the Hollywood fantasies and celebrity culture that distract young people from what is really going, at the same time it also profits from it.

Matters of Gravity

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[BEWARE OF SPOILERS]

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but three movies released in the past couple of weeks – all high-profile studio films and so far box office winners and definite Oscar nominees – all seem to be about the same thing. In Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips, J.C. Chandon’s All Is Lost, and Alfonzo Cuarón’s Gravity, someone is cut off from the rest of the world, and takes shelter in a womb-like refuge from hostile elements that strip away all their connections to the outside world. The ordeal forces these characters to draw on their inner strength and rediscover their essence, and in doing so, they are reborn.

Are these films tapping into some current kink in the collective unconscious? Or are they just cashing in on the universal appeal of claustrophobia and motion sickness?

Motion sickness doesn’t figure much in Captain Phillips, a recreation of the real-life 2009 hijacking of a US cargo ship by Somali pirates, though a lot of time is spent bobbing about in high seas. Instead, it exploits our fear of starving, khat-addicted, zombie-like third-worlders with AK-47’s coming to kidnap us and grab their share of the bounty of the West. That’s the situation the captain of the title, a Yankee from Vermont played by Tom Hanks with an erratic accent reminiscent of the Pepperidge Farm man in the TV commercials, will find himself in. He already has a premonition that something bad is going to happen as he drives to the airport to take the flight to Dakar where he’ll assume command of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama.

Meanwhile, an ocean and a continent away in a fishing village in Somalia, a similar situation unfolds. Minions of a local warlord show up and order Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi, who is terrific; Best Supporting Actor nominee maybe?), a scrawny fisherman turned pirate, to get off his ass and snatch another big ship so they can demand millions in ransom. Begrudgingly (Muse probably has a bad feeling about things, too), he enlists a ragtag crew of desperately poor men (watch out for the big mean guy with the scar!) and sets out in a frail skiff to track down and land a 500 foot behemoth and its 3,000 tons of cargo, kind of like an African Ahab after a mechanized Great White Whale.

We all know how this ends, but maybe not what it means – at least according to Greengrass, whose previous films about geopolitical inequity and conflict range from Bloody Sunday (2002) to United 93 (2006),to The Bourne Identity 2004). As might be expected, his new film dutifully critiques the disparity between rich and poor that leads to such tragic confrontations. These pirates may scare the hell out of us, but aren’t they just victims themselves, the road kill of globalism whose only way of living the dream is at the expense of nice guys like Phillips? And Phillips, after all, is not all that different from them, just another working stiff who has to answer to a boss.

So we feel bad for the pirates. Nonetheless, everyone rejoices when Navy Seals show up and blow their brains out. And so I would say that as a political parable, Captain Phillips is kind of ambivalent, with two ideological impulses cancelling each other out.

Instead of being political, then, Captain Phillips, like All Is Lost and Gravity, is existential. All three films tap into the state of mind of felt by people faced with the prospect of catastrophic loss brought about by causes beyond their control. Confronted by this fear, they recover their true selves. But this occurs only after an ordeal that has stripped them of everything that has defined their lives, uncovering the indomitable spirit beneath.

For Captain Phillips, that means he first loses his authority, as Muse climbs on board with his three followers and declares, “I am the Captain.” No longer in command (and it is clear from their interactions before the hijacking that Phillips wasn’t exactly a crew favorite) the deposed Captain must draw on those basic, traditionally masculine virtues of rationality, sang-froid, and self-sacrifice. In short, he becomes the Tom Hanks we all know and love from such roles as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Vulnerable, decent, level-headed, and when it matters most, utterly courageous.

But is it enough? After he loses his ship, he then loses his freedom, and may well lose his life. The pirates drag him from into a lifeboat – an enclosed, womb-like vessel

– and head out to sea. As the situation deteriorates and the pirates get desperate (we warned you about the guy with the scar!) Phillips jots down a farewell note to his family, cutting off the last tie that binds him to the world beyond. But having reached that extremity, he is pulled from the lifeboat covered with blood, courtesy of the miraculous intercession of SEAL Team Six.

Meanwhile, things are not looking so rosy in All Is Lost. “All is lost,” Robert Redford intones at the very beginning of the film, reciting in voiceover a farewell letter he has written, put in a bottle, and thrown into the ocean. Like Captain Phillips when he scribbled a similar note, Redford’s character (referred to in the press notes as “Our Man” – a variation on Everyman?) has reached the end. The film then flashes back to the beginning and retraces the events that led to this situation.

Like Captain Phillips,” All Is Lost also involves cargo ships, except in this case the hero is not on board with these symbols of mass consumption and international capitalism, but is their victim. One of these behemoths has apparently lost a container en-route, and the bus-sized metal box has drifted into Our Man’s yacht, the Virginia Jean, rupturing the hull. A prolonged battle for survival reminiscent of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” follows, as Our Man resourcefully struggles to overcome every new ordeal (rendered in fascinating detail; you keep wondering what life-saving tool the guy will come up with next).

But with each new crisis he also loses more of his possessions – both material items and personal belongings – that preserve his identity and link him with the human world. And as with Phillips, this attrition reduces Our Man to his core being – a beleaguered soul determined to survive.

His initial patching of the hull succeeds at first, but subsequent storms undo his work, forcing Our Man to abandon ship and take refuge in an inflatable life raft – a vessel much like the one in Captain Phillips.

He navigates the tiny craft into the shipping lanes, where, like Muse and his tiny skiff, he tries to waylay passing container ships, the cause of all his problems in the first place. But lacking an attention getting device such as an AK-47 (a flare gun has no effect), he is ignored by the towering hulks, which seem devoid of any human presence. By the end he has lost everything, and sinks into the sea, until he too is rescued by a near miraculous intervention, even if it is only imaginary.

Which brings us to Gravity, number one at the box office for the second week in a row and, perhaps not coincidentally, the least political film in the group (though a stickler might complain about its compliance with gender stereotypes). Once again, our hero gets cut off from the rest of the world, but instead of pirates or cargo ships being to blame, it’s those darn Russians who, for whatever nefarious warmongering reasons, have blown up an old military satellite, setting off a chain reaction of blasted orbiters. The debris storm rips by at mindboggling speed and in utter silence into the path of astronauts Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Kowalski (George Clooney), who are tending to an ailing Hubble telescope. The lethal space junk shreds the shuttle, not to mention their fellow astronauts, and sends Stone adrift, her umbilical cord to the mother ship severed.

And so Stone goes through the now familiar drill of losing touch with all that connects her to her old life (not just Kowalski and Houston but also her grief for a dead child — a perfunctory, button-pushing attempt to establish a backstory) and in so doing discovers her inner resources – the resilient, resourceful, independent identity she didn’t know she had. Well, not entirely independent, as Kowalski

– here the disembodied male superego that grounds Stone’s flighty femaleness – walks her through the various procedures via radio contact. Again, the protagonist is ensconced in a vessel and even assumes a fetal position to make sure everyone gets the point.

And after a stunning last minute reprieve from certain death (ah, the miracle of oxygen deprivation), Stone, too is reborn, and like Phillips and Our Man, emerges from the sea of troubles renewed.

So, once again audiences are taken to the brink, they learn to “let it go” (the phrase repeated in Gravity), learn that “everything is going to be all right,” (the somewhat ironic refrain in Captain Phillips) even though, as in All Is Lost, it looks like all is lost.

And what does this mean? Are people flocking to these films because they are scared, feel cut off from and ignored by those who are controlling their lives, and are looking for either their own resources or some deus ex machina to save them?

Probably. Also, they are really good movies.

Just a couple of closing notes on the many films that Gravity resembles. Two in particular, both of which explore similar themes with darker conclusions: 2001, though with Bullock as the space baby and Clooney as the monolith; and Alien with Bullock as Ripley (there is a scene with Stone in her skivvies manning a spacecraft that must be an allusion)

and Clooney as the alien, but a benevolent one.

And, a final caveat: if someone says they are going to “talk with the elders,” don’t believe them.

Expended families

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The movies have always relied on screwed-up families for stories, but I can’t remember seeing as many on that subject as I have recently. They make “The Family,” adroitly discussed below by Henry, look well adjusted. And not just mainstream, genre, or Hollywoodish movies, like “You’re Next,” “Prisoners,” “A Single Shot,” and “Baggage Claim.” but also Indie films like “Mother of George” and “We Are What We Are.” So is the nuclear family undergoing a crisis these days? Probably, but when isn’t it? But I think the prevalence of such movies reflects a crisis experienced by society at large, of which the family is the smallest unit, a microcosm of what’s going wrong in general.

These kinds of extrapolations always get me in trouble with people who deny such close connections between real life and the world on the screen. After all, these films are developed sometimes years in advance of their release. Are the filmmakers psychic, then, and can predict what the hot issues will in the future? And then, of course, there’s the usual– “it’s only a movie.”

But how does one account for the fact that both “Prisoners” and “A Single Shot” open and close with nearly identical scenes? Both begin with the protagonist hunkered down in a wintry forest with a rifle, setting up a shot on a deer.

Both end with the protagonist trapped in a deep pit, literally or figuratively, of his own making. I think what transpires between these two scenes can be read as a commentary on the audience’s subconscious anxieties about domestic security in general, about what threatens it, what should be done to protect it, and what the moral ramifications of such measures might be.

In both films the father either initiates or exacerbates the threat to his family by his macho behavior In “A Single Shot,” the protagonist John Moon (Sam Rockwell), a marginal recluse type with survivalist tendencies, finds himself in a moral dilemma after the title discharge, and his poor judgment, driven by greed and a desperate need to restore his broken family, directs him to action that not only compromises him morally but also makes the situation worse.

In “Prisoners,” on the other hand, the pater familias Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) lives in a more upscale middle class neighborhood. But he also has the makings of a militiaman, what with his basement stockpile of goods and ammo in preparation for some apocalyptic social breakdown. Unlike Moon, he does not actually initiate the crisis – the kidnapping of his and a neighbor’s daughter – but he certainly doesn’t improve the situation by resorting to extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation of the chief suspect

(i.e., he chains him to a radiator and beats the shit out of him to get him to talk).

“A Single Shot,” seems to suggest the notion that, like Moon, America is responsible for its own troubles, having instigated terrorist assaults through their own indiscretions in foreign policy. And in “Prisoners,” the subtext suggests that though the US does not bear any responsibility for the woes inflicted on them by outside evil-doers, it can be faulted for its poorly thought out, heavy-handed response, which seems only to have made matters worse.

Whether these subtexts were intended, or even exist, seems moot at this point. They did not resonate with audiences. “Prisoners” has grossed to date about $49 million, but since it cost $46 million to make and who knows how many millions to promote and market, it hasn’t been a winner. As for “A Single Shot,” it made around $16, 000 bucks, which might cover catering costs.

Perhaps the two movies got stiffed by audiences because they both engage in the never popular practice of male-bashing and discrediting the patriarchal roots of American society. In which case “Prisoners” gets a raw deal, because [and this involves really major spoilers] the ultimate culprit proves to be that archetypical bad guy, the wicked matriarch. Yes, behind every bad or mixed-up man is an evil woman.

“Prisoners” doesn’t reveal the gender of the real culprit until near the end. But a couple of the other films mentioned above don’t beat around the bush, but put the blame on a woman from the get-go.

In Andrew Dosunmu’s “Mother of George,”

set in a sumptuously rendered Nigerian community in Brooklyn, a woman fails to bear a child for the easy-going restaurant owner who brought her over from Africa for that purpose. Though it’s clear that the husband is shooting blanks, his termagant mother badgers the wife, subjecting her to potions and charms and finally insisting that she commit an act that is duplicitous, but effective. To the mother-in-law’s credit, however, she is nominally acting in the service of a male-dominated system.

In David E. Talbert’s “Baggage Claim,” another woman, a flight attendant named Montana (Paula Patton, whose appeal escapes me),

is berated by mom for failing her gender responsibility of getting married, settling down, and having kids. She takes drastic measures to get with the program, but the situation is made more urgent when her younger sister gets engaged. So Montana sets off to revisit her various exes across the country (though not, and perhaps this was intended ironically, in Montana) to see if maybe she overlooked something the first time around, and come up with her own beau when the wedding takes place in 30 days. Kind of like Bill Murray in “Broken Flowers,” except offensive and stupid.

What a surprise when Montana realizes that you don’t need a man to define who you are, unless you mean Mr. Right, who turns out to be right under her nose! As for mom, sure she was a tyrant (and a bit of a castrating man-eater, as she has been married and divorced six times) determined to destroy her daughters’ lives, but she had the best intentions at heart. Plus, she’s family. So, hugs all around. Even Djimon Hounsou’s billionaire hotelier – who is inexplicably smitten with Montana and wants to underwrite her freedom and pretty much her every desire but will not marry her

– has to admit that all turns out for the best.

And it turned out pretty well at the box office, as the film ended up grossing $16 million, or about twice what it cost to make. So maybe the state of the family is not so bad after all.

Cinema of the Ants

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There were only two possible outcomes for Luc Besson’s The Family: either it was going to be bad or Besson was going to direct his first good live-action feature (I haven’t seen his animated work). Well, Besson hasn’t broken any creative ground and his latest is bad in the usual way, with flurries of incoherent action interrupted by clock-watching dialogue scenes. You could say that the replacement of his usual pseudo-philosophizing by comic back-and-forth is a step in the right direction, except for the fact that Besson doesn’t have much of a sense of verbal humor.

Obviously cast for their associations with gangster movies, Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer (sometimes people forget 1983’s Scarface and 1988’s Married to the Mob) play a married couple who, with their two teenaged children, relocate to Normandy under the federal witness protection program after dad turns mafia snitch. It’s a hallmark of how much the family resorts to criminal ways that the government has run out of U.S. locations in which to squirrel them away.

The plot follows the family’s interactions with Besson’s take on the “insufferable” local French and then shifts to the mafia’s eventually successful attempts to track down and murder the “protected” Americans.

Besson takes what, for him, is unusual care in depicting peripheral characters, primarily locals (some of whom are relatively nice) but also the family’s bodyguards. One might almost think that Besson has awoken to the human potential of his typically flattened supporting casts.

As it turns out, though, Besson is just setting these folks to be slaughtered in the most graphically violent ways imaginable, often at just the moments they are expressing their inherent humanity. Besson has found that what for him is a more agreeable way of expressing his directorial control: Sadism.

Sadism has been a running, if minor, strand of European cinema practically since its birth. Bunuel, who explored it and expressed it, found it woven throughout the human condition. Michael Haneke hides his under a gloss of artistic “objectivity” and thus turns it into middle-class “art.” Besson just seems to enjoy it. Gesturing towards the humanity of the bodies on screen makes him all the more gleeful when he shatters those bodies into blood, bone, and flesh.

He takes the view of the man on the tower looking down at ant-sized people and, rather than imagining, actually tosses something off the roof for the sake of amusement. Luc Besson is not an auteur; he has neither the eloquence nor the preoccupations to stake that claim. But he has created a cinema, the Cinema of the Ants.

–Henry Sheehan

Critics A Go-Go

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Category Archives: Movies

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HS’s 2013 Top 10. And a few we could have done without.

PK’s 2013 top 10. And bottom 10

Some Christmas Coal.

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part two: Blue Is the Warmest Color

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part one: 12 Years a Slave

Children’s crusades

Matters of Gravity

Expended families

Cinema of the Ants