Category Archives: Movies

Doomsday scenarios

Having just been overstimulated by Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim,” I think I’ll settle down a bit by comparing it to the other models of catastrophic destructiveness posed by the summer movies so far.

But first it occurred to me while that with its swirling, smashing, and hard-to-distinguish underwater action, an immersion that at times has the hypnotic effect of staring into a washing machine,

“Pacific Rim” looked a lot like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s, avant garde documentary about a fish trawler, “Leviathan,”

though with a $180 million budget. Or like “Transformers,” though with irony, wit, subtlety, and a twisted sense of the absurd. I don’t think Michael Bay would have, say, the poetic eye to show a tiny girl in blue cowering in the ruins of Tokyo as seen from the point of view of a robot as tall as a skyscraper. Spielberg maybe, though the girl in red in “Schindler’s List” loses points for self-conscious artiness and manipulation.

Be that as it may, how does “Pacific Rim” measure up to the summer’s other blockbusting blockbusters? Here are some comparisons,

In “Man of Steel,” the bad guys are, literally, supermen, the ubermenschen posited by Nietzsche and embraced by the Nazis and just about every other morbidly adolescent, narcissistic power freak up to and including neocons besotted by Ayn Rand. Decked in cool, black, latter-day SS regalia,

these refugees from Krypton unleash a 90 minute smash-athon as they prepare to terra-form our world to their liking before wiping out the indigenous inhabitants. Only another super being, Clark Kent /Kal-el /Superman, from the same alien race, can save us. Mere untermenschen, we puny humans can only cower and wait for the outcome of the titanic struggle.

Body count? Though no actual deaths are depicted, you’ve got to think that wiping out both Metropolis and Smallville is going to leave a mark.

On the bright side, though, Kal-El (or whatever he goes by) does rescue Lois Lane from a nasty fall.

A fascist elite also causes trouble in Roland Emmerich’s “White House Down,” though in this case they’re coming from the inside, not from outer space. A conspiracy of traitors, abetted by nutters, nihilists, and neo-Nazis, more or less turn the powers of the executive branch against itself. Coming to the rescue is the forgotten man of our day, the middle class schlump, who also, fortunately, happens to have elite skills from his time served in the Special Forces. And then there is the ultimate weapon, a brave little girl waving an American flag on the White House lawn as rockets glare redly and bombs burst in air and the harried President wields an RPG from the back of an armored limo.

Casualties and damage assessment: the Capitol bites the dust in spectacular fashion, and the White House is not looking good either. Plus the Secret Service is pretty much wiped out, as well as a few Seal teams and other military assets. The collateral damage among gawkers and hapless civilians is not so bad – again, we don’t see any actual carnage, but the bomb in the Capitol atrium alone must have taken out a few busloads of tourists.

In “World War Z,” (check out Henry’s shrewd assessment here) the situation is somewhat reversed. Here, the elite are the good guys, their skills and intelligence the last hope of the human race, and the hoi polloi, the horde of lumpen consumers as represented by the rabid zombies, are the problem. Complicating matters is the fact that you can change from endangered smart guy to mindless, angry consumer with a single bite, the equivalent in real life of an extended exposure to Fox News. Death toll? Billions, I’d guess,

with piles and piles of corpses, either ambulatory or burnt to a crisp. But do zombies really count as dead people when you kill them the second time?

Finally, we arrive at “Pacific Rim,” which combines many of the above elements but with the added madness of Del Toro’s chimerical brilliance and fallen Catholic world view. The Kaiju,

the giant beasts from another dimension that are laying waste to the planet, are an homage not just to Godzilla and the old guy-in-a-rubber-suit goliaths of Toho Studio, but also draw on primordial behemoths like H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu (Del Toro agreed to direct this film only after his hope of adapting Lovecraft’s “In the Mountains of Madness” faded), as well as the ancient world-destroyers of pagan myths and the Bible, especially the book of Revelations.

The peril is not just cataclysmic, but apocalyptic, which is what the leader of the human resistance, who goes by the loaded name of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba),points out in an otherwise uninspiring speech rallying the troops. A kooky pair of scientists (played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman in hilarious, hyperactive performances that almost make up for the total lack of personality of the rest of the cast) go on to explain how these creatures have been sent to our plane of existence by a predatory race seeking to eradicate the locals so they can move in (shades of “Man of Steel”). And, in fact, humans have done a lot of the work for them, as global warming has already transformed the environment into something more to the invaders liking.

Well, it all sounds a little clunky to me, sending in monsters to do the job any self-respecting aliens would enjoy doing themselves. Equally unwieldy is the human countermeasure of creating “Jaegers,” monumental humanoid robots operated by mind-melding humans in a kind of ultimate Wii video game. I mean, is punching the Kaiju out more effective than a couple of tactical nukes? But these gimcracky devices do allow Del Toro to insert a subversive subtext, or at least according to my tortured reading of the film.

Once again, the potential salvation of the planet lies in the hands of an elite – the uniquely talented pilots of the Jaeger. They’re regarded by the public as rock stars, doing talk shows and endorsement deals, and they sure look cool because in this movie it’s the good guys, not the evil invaders, who get to wear the sharp-looking, crypto-Nazi duds.

They also have the talent to meld minds, entering a state of “drift,” a psychological swirl of mutual memories, by which they bond with each other and with their machines.

As with the technology in “Avatar,” this process is a video gamer’s dream, allowing any nerd to plug into a system that lets you grab, say, a beached ocean liner, or whatever else is handy, and knock around some monsters. They’re like Ripley suited up in the loader in “Alien” doing battle with the alien queen, except the experience is about $100 million in special effects bigger and better.

However, there is a downside. For one thing, the Jaegers’ titanic battles with the Kaiju have the opposite of the intended effect – the more successful they are, the more formidable the foe becomes, increasing in size and number.

Secondly, melding with the machine takes an insidious toll on the human operators, reducing them to components; despite their superstar status, they are just cogs in the machine. Becket, for example, the ostensible protagonist, is pretty much a cipher. It only takes a few seconds of his “drift” flashback montage to reveal all the cliches that make up his character. Nor does he get much more interesting when he quits the Jaegers after a bad experience and joins the masses who are laboring on an ill-conceived “wall of life” designed to keep the Kaiju out. I was hoping he might get more cynical and down-and-out, giving up the Jaegers, say, for Jaegermeister…

As it is, though, Becket and the others serve Del Toro’s purpose, which is not to detract from the magnificent machines and the stupendous Jaeger vs. Kaiju battles. Del Toro doesn’t need characters to develop his theme of dehumanization when the f/x, set designs, imagery, and mise-en-scene convey it with such spectacular impact. In the world of “Pacific Rim,” everything is retro and broken down and crummy; it’s a place where the human spirit has succumbed to the regimentation of an inhuman, mechanical universe.

The monochrome masses of the lumpen poor in the crowd scenes, the Gothic caverns of the Jaeger hangars, and the big rusty doors, enormous machine fragments, and other greasy detritus lying around evoke the dismal “desert of the real” of “The Matrix.”

At other times the settings seemed straight out of “Metropolis”

and “Modern Times,”

silent classics about the perils of an industrialized society.

Or, as mentioned above, they resemble the documentary “Leviathan,” in which a factory-like fishing trawler takes on the aspect of a Moloch-like devourer. As horrific as the sea monsters are in “Pacific Rim, they are only the distorted reflections of the inhuman giants that oppose them.

Product

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You might have trouble deciding whether to say “movies,” “films” or “cinema,” but Hollywood marketing execs have a word that, for them, trumps all others: “Product.” It’s a comfort word for the MBA boys and girls, one that lexicographically lines their business up with their equals in the hot dog and auto industries. “What do you guys do?” “We move product.” “Put it there!”

Like other marketing Solons, Hollywood’s prefer to have their products shaped to fit a prefab appetite. Not for them the old show biz task of taking an unknown quality and enticing the public into paying to see it. Now the job is first priming the audience’s taste and only then making something – anything – to satisfy it.

“Product” isn’t a synonym for “bad movie.” Avatar was product that was also a great film. The term simply identifies a type of movie that, as far as the suits in charge are concerned, does not have to be good – or bad or indifferent. To be product, a movie simply has to respond to a series of marketing-oriented requirements assembled by people who work in the distribution arm of the film industry.

The July 4^th weekend brings us to the high point of Hollywood product season. Or, given the sheer terribleness of the 150-minute The Lone Ranger, the low point. Assembled under the spasmodic hand of director Gore Verbinski, the movie is a compendium of Everything Wrong With Hollywood Movies. To review a movie this bad is simply to list failures. The movie is poorly constructed, a straight line of boom-boom-boom action sequences occasionally interrupted by dull bits of exposition. The filmmakers attempt to mask the disjointedness of the action scenes through the familiar distraction of rapid, quick cuts; since there’s not all that much happening in a particular image, they cut between, back and forth, into and out of different images, which is mere sleight-of-hand.

The studio – Disney – was obviously on the lookout for another Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (horrible word to describe a movie series). Verbinski directed three of those and their star, Johnny Depp, is back in place, this time as Tonto, the masked man’s faithful Indian friend. Depp, who has spent most of the last decade pursuing the lucrative trade of self-parody, can’t send up Tonto like he did his feckless pirate captain. Despite some stereotypical traits which adhered to the character, Tonto (despite his name) in his radio and television incarnation by Jay Silverheels was a dignified character, the equal to the Lone Ranger. To make him the same sort of broad caricature a la Jack Sparrow would be a racist regression. So there is an attempt to balance the comic and dignified aspects of the character but this fumble-fingered crew had already failed before they began.

The Lone Ranger echoes the imagery of a couple of classic Westerns, The Searchers (1956) and Little Big Man (1970). Talk about punching above your weight.

White House Down is an attempt to recapture box office primacy by producer-director Roland Emmerich after some years of commercial inconsistency. So he has brought forth a do-over of his massive 1996 box office smash and creative stinker, Independence Day. The earlier movie is in the marketing hall of fame thanks footage to of the White House being blown up by aliens that first ran during the Super Bowl.

There’s been some tinkering and updating, to be sure. The enemies aren’t aliens but terrorists (or are they? See Die Hard). The president has been changed from a taciturn hero-pilot-leader into Barack Obama, complete down to his Nicorette gum. And although the president displays a certain amount of athleticism, the real action-hero stuff is handed to a law-enforcement type.

All of Emmerich’s shortcomings are still on display. He was a pioneer overcutter of action films, and he succeeds in remaining at the front of this parade of miscreants. He has no storytelling gifts he wants to share, simply alternating between meth-style action scenes and dull rest periods.

But for the first time in his career, Emmerich manages to infuse the leaden kinetics with a sense of “Boys’ Own,” “Ripping Yarns” exuberance. For the first time, an Emmerich outing feels like it is supposed to be fun and, to that extent, White House Down has its share of exuberance.

As for the animated sequel, Despicable Me 2, it is just that, a sequel and only a sequel. You know what that means. You don’t need me to tell you. It’s just product, Jake. Just product.

–Henry Sheehan

Female trouble

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The Motion Picture Academy announced their latest members inducted, and it is about as discouraging as you might expect. Fifteen new directors were added – three of them women. A four to one ratio might actually be an improvement, however. Meanwhile, guess how many women have been nominated for Best Director since Kathryn Bigelow won it for “The Hurt Locker” in 2009? Zero, as in no Oscar recognition for “Zero Dark Thirty.” Screenwriters are a little better off – I counted four films with women sharing credit for the screenplay in the past three years, but that includes both the original and adapted categories.

But enough of your whining. Who can blame the Academy poobahs for not inviting women into their club or nominating them for Oscars when they haven’t done anything to deserve it? Just look around at the films playing today. How many were directed by women? And who wants to watch a film directed by a woman, anyway? Chances are it will be some kind of chick flick.

Actually, there is one film released recently in these parts directed by a woman, and you can be sure it’s not from Hollywood. As the brassy, eye-rolling “New Yorker” editorial assistant groans to legendary editor William Shawn, “She’s not one of those European philosophers, is she?” Indeed she is. The title protagonist of Margarethe von Trotta’s’s “Hannah Arendt” revolutionized the way we look at tyranny and fascism with such books as “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (“Catchy title,” sniffs the same assistant). She also made herself a household name of sorts when she covered the 1960 capture and subsequent trial of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, coining the term “banality of evil.”

She was a giant of 20^th century thought, but the trouble is, how can you show that on screen? Von Trotta resorts to what I guess we can call the cigarette smoking fallacy, in which a character’s inner processes, such as thinking, are conveyed by lighting up and puffing away. So Arendt will gaze into the distance, take a deep drag, and perhaps lie down on a couch, thinking.

Then there’s a cut to her hammering on a typewriter

or chatting with her friends about her latest brainstorm about evil and banality.

By my count she smokes some 30 cigarettes in the course of the movie – which if movie time were real time would add up to about 25 packs of cigarettes a day. Sometimes, instead of smoking and thinking, she puffs away and slides into a flashback to her college days in Berlin meeting with her favorite Professor, Martin Heidegger (another giant of 20^th century thought, but not smart enough to pass up an opportunity to join the Nazi party and disgrace himself forever),

in his office, listening, rapt, to him relating his latest thoughts on thought, after which the pair gambol up to a bedroom where Heidegger, who looks a bit like a plump waiter in a stuffy restaurant, puts his thought-burdened head on her lap. Hot stuff.

Say what you will about the cinematic dynamism of von Trotta’s film, it doesn’t have a lot of competition these days when it comes to roles in which women are empowered. They aren’t just objects or victims or decoration, but strive for independence, if not immortality, either historical or literal. Those that attempt his do so through the usual avenues: becoming a vampire,

as is the case in Neil Jordan’s extravagant (has the spirit of Ken Russell possessed him?) “Byzantium” (Henry is writing on this film in more detail); or a belly dancer,

as in French-Moroccan director Rachid Bouchareb’s first English language film, “Just Like a Woman.” In the latter two women flee their oppressive husbands (and the law), driving from Chicago to Santa Fe where one of them, a belly-dancing aficionado, hopes to audition for a company of similar abdominal terpsichoreans. Bouchareb’s film also intrigues because it clearly draws on that feminist film “breakthrough” of 1991, Ridley Scott’s “Thelma & Louise,” which turned out to be a breakthrough for movies with strong female characters in the same way that Bigelow’s Oscar was a breakthrough for woman directors.

But back to the recent releases. I was a big fan of “Bridesmaids” (2011) and like many I thought this was going to offer a back door for women into the mainstream, proving they could do the kind of raunchy comedy beloved of the adolescent male demographic, yet still retain their female integrity and autonomy. Instead, so far (and Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette”

was an encouraging, hilarious, albeit straight to VOD exception) all that’s happened is that the Oscar-nominated Melissa McCarthy has gotten more or less degrading roles in films like “Hangover 3” and “Identity Thief” and has received grotesquely misogynist notices from Rex Reed.

But “The Heat” promised more, directed as it is by Paul Feig of “Bridesmaids.” And indeed it delivers, mostly. It’s more relentless than the earlier film, and not as funny, and verges on a misogyny of its own. But it is refreshing to see McCarthy as Mullins, a Boston Police detective, call up the wife of a handcuffed perp busted for soliciting a prostitute, drop a dime on him, drag him through his car window into her own beat-up rattletrap, and then drive helter-skelter after a pimp trying to escape on foot through the vacant lots and back alleys of one of the city’s seedier neighborhoods. Now that’s Boston strong.

In true mismatched cop partner style, Mullins is hooked up with FBI agent Ashburn (Sandra Bullock), her polar opposite – anal, nerdy, lonely (she doesn’t even have her own cat, and instead has to surreptitiously borrow a neighbor’s), and just snooty and condescending when she’s around the guys.

But like Mullins she’s a woman striving for autonomy, empowerment, and career advancement in a traditionally all male profession, and thus equally obnoxious to the fatheaded patriarchal powers-that-be. She’s kind of like Maya in “Zero Dark Thirty,” except a lot funnier and more pathetic and after much smaller fry.

Paul Feig settles for small fry too, and the film falls into a long-winded, routine tale of Boston mobsters, family ties, and departmental treachery, with that soupçon of local color we’ve come to expect from so-called Boston noir. I got the sense that Feig might have watched the family scenes from “The Fighter,”

said “Yes!”, and applied everything he picked up to filling in the details of Mullins’s feral, hateful clan.

And you’ve got to throw in the requisite sports mania (paintings of Jesus playing on various Boston sports teams!) and the accent jokes (“Are you a nahk” “A what?” “A NAHK!” “Oh, a narc!” “No, a NAHK! Etc.). Wicked funny; I laughed so hahd I forgot to pahk my cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

However, and this is a major accomplishment, “The Heat” is the first film to really capture the sloppy transcendence, the spilled beer, cigarette-butted, vomit-splattered, delusional grandeur and besotted epiphany of getting wasted in an East Boston dive bar.

If women can break into that realm, there’s nothing they can’t accomplish.

Cartoons

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Frank Tashlin was a rare example of an animator who made a successful switch from directing drawings to directing live action. Justifiably, much has been made of his habit of staging action with the nutty freedom from physics that are routine in cartoons but generally absent from movies. That liberating madness is captured in a line Bob Hope shouts out in Tashlin’s second feature, Son of Paleface (1952): “Hurry up – this is impossible!”

Tashlin’s contortions of the laws of the universe weren’t his only borrowings from animation. He also translated cartoon backgrounds into feature language. Tashlin worked at Warner Bros., where stingy budgets prevented any experiments with the illusion of three dimensions. Stuck with flat backgrounds, the Warner animators responded by using broad swatches of color and strict geometric forms to replace naturalistic scenery. Tashlin kept doing that when he turned to features, whether he could use the sharp brilliance of Technicolor or was stuck with smudgy, bleary “Color by Deluxe.”

That’s pretty much what Pedro Almodόvar does with the background of the main set in I’m So Excited, the first class section of an airliner cabin. The set-up involves a full complement of crew and passengers stuck circling for hours in Spanish airspace after the discovery of a mechanical clitch. Having ingeniously trapped a large cast in a small space, Almodόvar sets in motion the cartoon version of a telenova, with extravagant romantic and sexual complications built on the already baroque designs of a flamboyant cast of characters.

The problem is that caricaturing a telenova is the same as sending up a Bond film: How do you send up a send up or – as here – caricature a cartoon? Almodόvar does as well as can be expected, though he produces an amusing comedy rather than the gut-buster he seems to have had in mind (occasionally you can note the mini-beats he’s built into dialogue to accommodate anticipated yuks from the audience).

But this brings us back to Warner cartoons, which were built around the lifelong struggle between the id and the superego. In his few outright comedies and undoubtedly in his dreams, Almodόvar constructs a world where the id always triumphs and always with happy consequences (id doesn’t necessarily translate to sex; there are repressive, though acted-on, sexual relationships in nearly all his films, especially over the last decade).

The Warner animators could depict these fights and consequent transformations literally, even to the point of distorting a character’s shape. Tashlin, especially when he worked with Jerry Lewis, managed to do the same thing with live action. Almodόvar’s movies and Tashlin’s exhibit different sorts of genius and so Almodόvar responds to the cartoon challenge with hair styles, costumes, make-up and behavioral tics. It’s not as big a laugh-getter as Tashlin’s style, but it is an effective means of expression.

I’m So Excited is, thus, a must-see for Almodόvar aficionados and for the curious, but not for those who simply want a burlesque with a Spanish accent.

–Henry Sheehan

“Song” and dance

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I liked “Unfinished Song”

more than “Amour.”

There: I’ve said it.

I could qualify my preference by conceding that Michael Haneke’s relentless dirge of a love story was the better made film, as its near universal critical acclaim, Academy Award nominations for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress, and its Oscar for Best Foreign Language film would testify. Or that Paul Andrew Williams’s bittersweet riff on the same theme appeals in part because of its shameless manipulativeness and sure-fire formulaic approach. All that would be true. But does it matter in the end? “Unfinished Song” moved me; “Amour” did not. Or rather, it did – it made me angry.

And that’s not because I am one of the Haneke haters: I have written appreciatively of his whole body of work and reviewed almost all of his films positively – most recently “Caché” (2006) and “The White Ribbon” (2010), and I also favored the generally reviled remake of “Funny Games” (2008). Heck, I even liked the guy a lot when I interviewed him, though that might be in part due to the fact that he’s a dead ringer

for my friend, Lloyd Schwartz.

Nor was I was put off by the spectacle of what really happens when you get old, or when love proves impotent in the face of time and mortality, or am turned off by the efficacy [spoiler] of a pillow or some other means of euthanasia when the situation gets hopeless. Like most people, I’m sufficiently familiar with these concepts from personal experience, and also from other works of art that elevate these blunt facts to the level of comprehensible, illuminating truths.

So maybe I just prefer films that exploit universal emotions and then offer pat resolutions and platitudes as consolation. “Unfinished Song” has its share of that. But then again, so does “Amour.”

That might seem at first a crazy notion – after all, the film opens with first responders breaking into an apartment and being greeted by the stench of a decomposing corpse. It dangles the horribleness of it all in your face without reprieve, but isn’t that just another kind of exploitation? Nothing gets an audience’s attention like having their worst fears tossed like a pie in their face. And such abject pessimism is itself a form of romanticism, I think, a perverse sentimentality, a variation on Oscar Wilde’s definition that “a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it,” or as Stephen Dedalus puts it in “Ulysses,” “he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.”

Okay, when you start quoting Joyce you know your argument is getting weak. So I’ll state simply that I prefer “Unfinished Song” because the people in it are much more pleasant to spend time with. The notion that a character has to be likeable to be good is fallacious, certainly, but that doesn’t mean you have to enjoy their company. True, Terence Stamp’s character Arthur in “Song” is a bit of a shit throughout almost the entire movie, but he’s a more appealing shit than Jean-Louis Trintignant’s basilisk-eyed bourgeois bore.

More importantly, he changes, and grows in awareness by the end of the picture, and this conversion is believable, in part because it’s being performed by Terence Stamp, perhaps the most beautiful man in movies.

Tritignant is no slouch either, to be sure, and I really liked him in the far more successful geriatric role in Kieslowski’s “Three Colors: Red” (1994). But really, when it came to his spat with the callous caregiver, awful though she was, I had to sympathize with the bitch nurse over the cranky, humorless old fart.

And Vanessa Redgrave versus Emmanuelle Riva? Riva might have been nominated for the Oscar, and she was exquisite in “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” but aren’t we in the habit of giving actors extra points simply because their characters are basket cases?

As for Vanessa Redgrave, well, in addition to being brilliant, she reminds me of my mother. And I guess that’s the real reason I preferred “Unfinished Song” to “Amour.”

–Peter Keough

Chewing it Over

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It was bound to happen sooner or later: A mega-budget, summer Hollywood action picture would actually be good. The perhaps unlikely winner is World War Z, a zombie movie with a strong environmental subtext and an unusual amount of ambiguity about worldwide social disintegration. There is even a hero who works for that most unjustly vilified institution, the United Nations.

Don’t get overexcited. Director Marc Forster approach is to break the movie down into a series of set pieces, each featuring star Brad Pitt, who ends up with a sequence of family/allies/zombie meals. The first three or four scenes show Pitt’s character, Gerry Lane, saving his wife and two young daughters from the first mass onslaught of the fast-moving and rapidly-reproducing zombies (it takes 11 seconds for a person to die and rise to zombiedom) and getting them to safety. After that, he travels to South Korea, where he meets a unit of American soldiers; Jerusalem; and Wales, where he hopes to find one of the last surviving World Health Organization laboratories (and there are more stops along the way). Some of the scenes are strictly functional, meant to establish Lane as a Really Nice Guy or even just to set the stage for the next scene.

But while these events are hinged rather than conjoined, they are edited together adroitly, the considerable macro-suspense rising, falling, rising and falling always with competence and sometimes with flair.

The key description of the movie just might be “competence.” If you think that’s a left-handed compliment, well, look around. Most Hollywood movies these days are a mess. Expectations have fallen so low that a film made with the unimaginative monotony of a film school exercise are frequently and wrongheadedly lauded as “ambitious.” Say what you will about Forster’s previous movies (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, The Kite Runner), they display authentic artistic ambition (not always achieved, of course). His list of real stinkers is limited to a single effort, Quantum of Silence.

What you might not expect is his handling a big scale action. A zombie assault on Jerusalem stands out in its massive fearsomeness, but World War Z’s action sequences, without a single exception, boast toe-curling suspense. And while a movie like this must feature shots of zombies chowing down on their human prey, they are carefully rationed. In fact, Forster does such a good job that he’s been subjected to the sort of insider sniping that often accompanies success in Hollywood.

The most intriguing side of World War Z is its attitude towards the zombies. The original outbreak was due to a viral epidemic openly and quickly attributed to complications of pollution and global warming. Lane, a U.N. investigator, describes the zombie outbreak as a variation on regional wars, famines, and plagues he has seen in other parts of the world, going so far as to refer to the zombies as victims.

But the scenes of these victims play on Western fears of the global rabble, intent on destroying the civilization responsible for its misery. The attack on Jerusalem cannot help but recall Israeli fears of being “overrun” by Palestinians. The firefights in Korea replicate fears of the North’s communist “hordes.” And so forth. Would that more “quality” American films were up to an equivalent effort.

As to Peter’s question as to whether World War Z is a date movie, I’d answer yes. As long as you’re not expecting to enjoy an episode of sexual intimacy later that evening.

–Henry Sheehan

First/last date movies

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Having seen both Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight” and Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy”

recently got me to thinking: what is the worst date movie ever made? (I am in fact hosting a poll of readers in the “Boston Globe” on that very subject). And what exactly is a “date movie?” To answer the latter question I referred to the ever helpful “Dictionary.com,” which describes a “date movie” as “a film that would be enjoyed by someone on a date, like a romantic comedy.”

Well, the last romantic comedy couples on a date might have enjoyed was probably “Silver Linings Playbook,” and I can see why.

It features a kooky mismatched pair (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) who are both self-destructive and mentally ill and includes an abusive father, nymphomania, a hopeless, pathological, unrequited past love, a mob of obsessed, racist, and violent football fans, and a dance contest. How can a couple see that movie and not leave the theater walking hand in hand?

But as I look at the films in theaters today, I don’t see any that might qualify as a date movie.

“This Is the End?” Though I find the spectacle of Michael Cera impaled on a lamp post appealing, I can see some being turned off by it, and also having uneasy feelings about Jonah Hill being humped by Satan.

“Star Trek into Darkness?” Any movie attended by people wearing fake pointed ears is not a date movie.

“Man of Steel?” The love interest between Lois and Superman might be of interest for about ten minutes, but I doubt if anyone’s ardor will be fanned by the final hour or so of what is the equivalent of “Hulk smash!”

“World War Z,” on the other hand, features Brad Pitt,

one half of Hollywood’s most romantic couple (if they’re still together!) But you just can’t make a zombie sexy. Rotting flesh, cannibalism, mass killings of lumbering mindless humanoids, endless head shots – it’s like a video game. And it is.

Henry will be reviewing the movie, and maybe he can give us a heads-up about how it rates, date-wise.

Anyway, summer might be the wrong time to look for a good romantic comedy. It’s not that nobody goes on dates in the summer, but Hollywood seems to believe that from May to September the only people who go to movies are males with an average age, chronologically or emotionally, of 12. And it won’t be long before “summer” will be with us 365 days a year.

So this is probably the wrong time to be searching for date movies, good or bad.

Except, as mentioned before, “Before Sunset” and “Journey to Italy.” I’m sure anyone who took someone out for a dinner and a movie and caught one those two is probably sorry they didn’t stay home and watch “Mad Men” or “True Blood” on TV.

“Before Sunset” and “Journey to Italy” are definitely examples of what I’ve been calling “last date movies,” a term I’ve been congratulating myself on coming up with until I found out Roger Ebert had long before beaten me to that idea in his review of “Valentine’s Day” (which, oddly enough, also stars Bradley Cooper)

“Valentine’s Day is being marketed as a Date Movie,” he wrote. “I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.”

I find the idea of attending a “first/last date movie” as a litmus test of your partner’s compatibility intriguing, but risky. A better method might be taking a date to a movie you do like, and then gauge the reaction. I find that John Ford’s “The Searchers” is a deal maker or breaker. Consequently, I at one time found myself home alone a lot watching “The Searchers.” So you might want to start off with the easier stuff first, rather than hit the person straightaway with, say, “Shoah” or “Salo” or “The Three Amigos.”

But back to the topic of worst/best/first/last date movies. Perhaps the worst first date movie was a movie in a movie, “Taxi Driver,” in which Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle takes the beautiful sophisticated woman played by Cybil Shepherd to a porn flick.

Can you imagine how the film might have turned out had he taken it her to say, “A Star Is Born,” which was the third highest grossing movie in 1976? Then “Taxi Driver” itself might have turned out to be a date movie. As it is, though, I think it might a bit of a risk. I think you might want to try “The Searchers” first.

There have been other movies that I have liked, but which in retrospect proved not to have the best to bring a date to. They include Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day,” with an unfortunate oral sex scene, and Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting,” for too many reasons to list. Speaking of “Trouble Every Day,” “World War Z” and the date deadening effect of zombies notwithstanding, you shouldn’t write the undead off. Vampires are hot, as witness their proliferation on the both the big and little screen, the “Twilight” movies being the most obvious example.

But are the “Twilight” movies actually “date movies?” Here is where the concept of “date movie” has been supplanted in the lexicon by “chick flick,” defined, again by my invaluable authorities at “Dictionary.com” as “Sometimes offensive. A movie that appeals to a woman, usually having a romantic or sentimental theme.” That pretty much describes “Valentine’s Day,” especially the offensive part.

Or, to define “chick flick” in light of the many hours I have spent watching beer commercials on TV: a chick flick is an unpleasant chore a guy has to do occasionally in order to get the old lady off his case so that he get back to the important guy stuff of eating pizza, drinking Bud with his buds, playing video games, and going to movies like “Star Trek into Darkness.” And they say the age of romance is dead.

– Peter Keough

A long way around the block to get to reviewing “Berberian Sound Studio”

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Henry’s earlier item about mise-en-scene got me thinking about another filmmaking fundamental that seems to be falling victim to the plague of blockbusters: sound. You can’t leave a movie these days without being numbed by undifferentiated, over-amplified noise. Also, his enlightening interpretation of “Man of Steel” reminded me that it’s always fun to write about fascism.

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So as I was writing my review of “Berberbian Sound Studio” for the “Boston Globe” I reminisced, as is my wont, about my days back in graduate school when I was toiling over a final paper for a film course on Hollywood film genres. I cooked up what I thought was an intriguing thesis, but it got bigger and bigger and more and more complicated and I couldn’t finish it and now it’s only useful for writing long-winded prefaces such as this one.

What I was trying to do was combine ideas in Thomas Schatz’s book “Hollywood Genres” with the “The Political Unconscious” by Fredric Jameson (whose prose, I discovered, made more and more sense the more Jameson’s you drank), and use them together to analyze two films from 1933, “King Kong” and “Gold Diggers of 1933.”

Schatz’s study drew, in part, on one central insight: all genre films are waking dreams in which the basic, irresoluble conflict of civilization – the desire for individuality versus the need for conformity – is enacted through a series of dramatic crises until resolved in a “utopian” final showdown (literally, in a Western, but figuratively in, say a screwball comedy).

Jameson also saw genres (literary and others as well as film) as a way of resolving irreconcilable conflicts with make-believe solutions except, resolute Marxist that he was (I’m talking around 1988 when I was writing this paper) he saw the conflicts as economic, consisting of the struggles between different modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism) existing simultaneously in the same society with each vying for supremacy.

See where this is headed? Neither did I. Anyway, let’s cut to “King Kong” and “Gold Diggers.” My insight, and it was doubtlessly not original, was that both the metaphorical conflict of Schatz and the dialectical materialist version in Jameson could be reconciled when you throw in how each is reflected in the conflict in Hollywood modes of production, that is, the revolutions in the technology of the film itself. In 1933 Fascism and Communism and Capitalism were all vying for supremacy, with Hitler just taking over in Germany, Roosevelt beginning his first term, and Stalin doing his Stalin stuff, but in the tempest in a teapot that was Hollywood the biggest deal was sound, established in 1927, and now totally reshaping the industry. The genres that flourished during this period? The musical and the horror film.

The musical makes sense, but the horror film takes a little bit of a song and dance to fit into my theory. Let’s start with Schatz. For him, the utopian resolution of the insoluble conflict occurs in a transcendent moment when oppositions exist simultaneously, as they so often do in movies. In a musical, that would happen during the production number when, contrary to the way things usually happen in real life, the orchestra sounds and Astaire and Rogers or everyone and their brother would dance their troubles away.

And in horror films? They existed before sound, but sound allowed one missing element that elevated the story to a transcendent realm, of sorts: the scream.

How does this apply to “Gold Diggers” and “King Kong?” Actually, the question wasn’t exactly rhetorical. My notes are gone and my recollections are spotty. Maybe it went something like this:

In “Gold Diggers,” a film that, despite its seemingly lighthearted genre, was about the Depression and how to reconcile the plight of the disenfranchised (read “conformity to society,” as in social responsibility) with the demands of capitalism (read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” but only if you feel you have to. I haven’t). The impossible resolution? The incredibly moving final production number “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which in a sense is a big plug for the New Deal.

And “King Kong?” Kong, I figure, represents the reign of a feudal, or tribal mode of production (big chief, placated by the tribute of his tiny followers) and could be interpreted as a metaphor for Hitler and the successful barbarian Nazification of a modern capitalist state. Though it worked in Germany, for a while, in the movie version that is “King Kong,” things are a little different. Here the capitalists, in the form of a movie mogul and his production company, invade a hidden enclave of a lost primitive mode of production, the fascist dictatorship of Skull Island.

The Yankee capitalists’ secret weapon is not the gas and guns (and later, planes) but “Beauty,” that emblem of the downtrodden of the Depression, the starving out of work actress Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray. She’s cast by the producer as the heroine of his spectacle, and in a revealing scene he coaches her on how to scream. “Scream Ann, scream for your life!” he suggests.

And so she does,

winning the heart of the beast, leading to his downfall, and prefiguring the victory of American capitalism over Nazism.

Kind of like Kracauer’s “Caligari” except with a big gorilla.

So far I don’t know what the meaning might be of the technological innovations of today – such as 3D, digitalization, and what have you. But I suspect it won’t be pleasant.

Okay, now I feel better. I’m ready to review “Berberian Sound Studio.”

— Peter Keough

Übermensch

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“You will be a god to them,” the dead but talkative Jor-el assures his son Kal-el, who is on the verge of manhood. “Them” refers to us pitiful humans, soon to be cowering behind the nascent Superman’s cape. We’ll need to cower because soon Earth will be under attack by the army of General Zod, an angry and well-armed refugee from the wrecked planet Krypton, which was also the home of the El family. Oh yes, weak and helpless as the people of Earth are, their pitiful lives will be in the hands of a powerful leader. Make that Leader.

Peter traced the fractured line of Christian references in Man of Steel. Director Zack Snyder didn’t stop there; he’s also shoved shards of paganism. The very opening scene is set on craggy, mountainous Krypton, which is hours or days away from imploding. During an all-over-but-the-shouting session, the robed members of the planet council are listening to scientist Jor-el tut-tut them when in bursts Zod in Krypton’s update of ancient helmet and armor.

Zod is attempting a coup, as if he were Ares, the savage Greek god of war, facing down fellow Olympians. A special being, someone such as Herakles (who once bested Ares in battle), the offspring of Zeus and a mortal.

Everyone knows the rest of the story. The baby Kal-el is rocketed off to earth, where he lands in Kanasas and is raised by a pair of jes’ folks farmers, Ma and Pa Kent, who christen their space baby Clark. And so, Kal-el/Clark has mortal parents to go along with his immortal ones (Jor-el is killed early in the action, but this doesn’t keep him from reappearing throughout). And so forth, and so on.

This might have been nothing more than harmless and, under Snyder’s direction, meaningless template but for 20^th-century history. Lo not so many years ago, it was fascism that evoked ancient pagan myth, for both ideological and ceremonial exploitation. Hitler was a Teutonic Herakles, an offspring of mortals (Austria) until he recognized his true, divine parents (the Eternal Reich), who emerged from among the people but soared above him (see the opening of Triumph of the Will). It has been the generational project of comic book creators and filmmakers to somehow treat their characters “mythic,” a turn that leads them into traps like V for Vendetta, a putatively anti-fascist film that was utterly fascist itself.

Their predecessors who were pleased to make their work as childish as possible and to do that self-consciously. The primal joys of a child gaining new strength and maturity went all the way towards keeping the stories universal and, hence, non-fascist.

Man of Steel might have offered some pleasant escapism of its own if it didn’t take its emotional cues from the pouty Kal/Clark/Superman. As the ever-growing legion of superhero movies demonstrates, adolescent sulking isn’t exactly a mood lifter. Sam Raimi, who directed the Spider-Man movies starring Tobey Maguire, was able to leaven the teenage angst with humor and romance; compare that with the dismal mood of The Amazing Spider-Man of 2012. Man of Steel has a can’t-miss romantic opportunity in the person of Lois Lane which turns out not to be “can’t-miss” after all. Superman’s guiding response to life is resentment, the source of political reaction.

Snyder is hung up on conflicting desires to make a full-out effects action picture and a movie that “means” something. He ends up in control of neither. Like Superman himself, the action scenes surpass human scale, but similarly without a saving exuberance. When young Superman learns to fly, the emotional tone is less a joyful, “I can fly!” than an unappeased “I told you I could fly, but oh no, you didn’t believe me…” When he fights, it’s at the cost of hundreds of human lives. They are the sacrifice for his heroics. And Man of Steel is a holdover of the death cult we thought had been buried nearly 70 years ago.

–Henry Sheehan

Purgatory in Paradise

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In 1960, the English critic V.F. Perkins has this to say about the films of Nicholas Ray: “… the quality of the films is not literary, since it owes little to the original script, but cinematic; it results from the subjection of a frequently banal narrative to an idiosyncratic mise-en-scene.” Mise-en-scene is, put simply, the arrangement of décor, props and actors within a lighting scheme, all shaped by the camera through lens selection and aspect ratio. Although frequently associated with long takes, it is just as important to techniques which rely on quick cutting. As vital as it is, mise-en-scene is the most neglected facet of American filmmaking.

Not by Sofia Coppola, though, and certainly not with The Bling Ring. The fifth feature by the 43-year-old writer-director, it is her most stylistically assured effort to date. Like her first four movies, it reflects her fascination with untried, inexperienced, naïve, and/or vapid people (mostly young, mostly female) who stumble into a situation too complex to handle. But their stories don’t emanate from plot, but from the tensions between the characters.

Coppola bases the movie on an article by Nancy Jo Sales that appeared in Vanity Fair. Sales wrote about a group of (mostly) teenagers from the toney Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas who, in 2008-2009, broke into the houses of numerous celebrities (Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, and Lindsay Lohan among them) and made off with cash, jewelry, and lots of clothes, shoes, and accessories. Coppola changes names, alters family relationships, and so frees herself from the chains of mere journalism, but the film generally reflects the thefts and, ultimately, arrests and convictions as they happened.

The Bling Ring, though, is about a group of kids who mistake an affected amorality as a paradisiacal state of mind, an imaginary, adult-free Eden from which they’re expelled after repeated bites of the apple. It’s about the unconsciousness of sin.

The very first shot hints at what is to come. Aside from the upper right corner, the frame is black. In that snug corner, a pool of yellow light illuminates some teens climbing over what is clearly the a security camera, a judgmental sentinel gazing impassively from above.

Coppola goes on to depict the assemblage of the gang, at first within frames that take in wide-open backgrounds, even in interiors. As the teens begin to bond, those background spaces shrink in scale so that that they provide a comfortable teen-size, whether they’re in their bedrooms, outdoors, or in the homes of their victims. Finally, when the police close in and the kids begin to turn on one another, Coppola alternates between medium long shots that emphasize the distance and discomfort between the characters with close-ups the emphasize their isolation.

Coppola also fills and empties images with, well, stuff. During the actual break-in scenes, she jams the frame with celebrity possessions, the detritus of fashion. But when the adolescent thieves get home, they have to hide their booty away from prying adult eyes. Their bedrooms, the center of their lives, remain empty. Even the expensive, large homes their parents bought and maintain are often comprised of nothing but large, empty, colorless spaces. The decor emphasizes a free-floating, unanchored existence.

Some viewers have mistaken the vacuity of the characters for a lack of intelligence in the movie. But The Bling Ring is a densely rich film, another persuasive affirmation from Coppola that emotional and moral crises can happen even to the people least intellectually prepared to deal with them.

–Henry Sheehan

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Category Archives: Movies

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A long way around the block to get to reviewing “Berberian Sound Studio”

Übermensch

Purgatory in Paradise

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