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

Spend Labor Day with “Drinking Buddies:” An interview with Joe Swanberg

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In an item that came out in the “Boston Globe” on Sunday I lamented the fact that as we “celebrate” Labor Day, the spirit of the holiday, which is to acknowledge the working men and women and the unions that have made America great, has given away to car sales and reports on movie grosses. Certainly not many films have come out recently that deal with the now controversial subject of workers and the working place. However I wasn’t thinking of an obvious exception to that rule, Joe Swanberg’s sneaky-brilliant “Drinking Buddies,” a look at the relationships, romantic and otherwise, between co-workers and their mates (Anna Kendrick, Jake Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston) at a boutique beer works, the aptly named “Revolution Brewery,” in Chicago. Unfortunately, this insight did not occur to me back in July when I had the opportunity to interview Swanberg. And another omission: his role in Adam Wingard’s recently released horror film “You’re Next.”

So what were you, drunk? What did spend 45 minutes talking to the guy about? Well, we did discuss topics such as the harsh criticism, matched by dogged adulation, he has gotten over the past ten years, during which he has made around 20 movies. (Okay, another thing I forgot to bring up with him was this boxing match he had with one of his more abusive detractors last September at the Fantastic Fest in Austin). He describes his evolution from being an enfant terrible determined to tear down all the artifices of cinema, to directing his first studio-ish, quasi-genre film (“Drinking Buddies” is a romantic comedy. Sort of. Explanation to follow) And we talked about beer, though we didn’t drink any.

JS: I’d be happy to talk beer, that’s for sure.

PK: You make your own beer?

JS: I do. I needed a hobby that was creative where I could begin and end a project in a relatively short amount of time. And also something that didn’t have any critical infrastructure involved with it. I could brew a beer, I could give it away to my friends, and that was sort of the end of the line. Whereas with movies you make it and it has to go out in the world and fend for itself. Making beer felt that it was purely for myself. And it’s hard because I love making movies and it’s hard to separate myself from the critical feedback. And beer was the perfect… also I end up travelling a lot for work so the beer was nice because I could brew it and it would take a week to ferment so if I timed it right I could disappear for stretches of time and the beer was fine.

PK: Is it good?

JS: It’s… alright. I haven’t had the time to – it’s about the same now as it was four years ago when I started.

PK: Unlike your movies

JS: Hopefully those are getting better. I’m working a lot harder on those.

PS: In 2011 you released ten movies. That’s a pace like Fassbinder.

JS: He was certainly an influence. Roger Corman was a big influence, too. Corman did like 50 movies in 15 years. Before he went into producing. He hasn’t directed anything in a long time. 2010 was crazy because my wife got pregnant so I knew I’d have a kid in November. The idea was to shoot a lot of stuff between now and then and slowly edit. That’s something I can do at home, so if my wife goes off to work I could edit while he was taking naps and I ended up finishing a lot of it. So suddenly in 2011 I had all these movies to get out into the world.

PK: That’s impressive that you did all these movies with a new baby.

JS: I did a year of promotion with the kid. It was crazy – Sundance had rejected everything that I made and then my son was born in 2010 and then they invited “Uncle Kent,”

which caught me off guard and my wife and I took him – he was three months old – to Sundance. And then Berlin which had rejected all my movies before took two of them that year so we had to leave my three-and-a-half year old son with my mom while we went to Berlin. It was very weird to be at this point where I had prepared myself to hunker down and be a homebody for a while when all of sudden the work was hitting a new audience that had not been open to it before. It was a strange year.

PK: What were the two audiences?

JS: The audience before seemed to be certainly festival-based. It felt young and there was an age gap and there seemed to be a critical gap also because I was getting bloggers and it didn’t get that high art audience to fully accept it. Unlike [Andrew] Bujalski, who was immediately embraced as a real filmmaker. But I don’t know why Sundance took one and Berlin took two (“Silver Bullets”

and “Art History”).

Maybe it’s just me but it felt like the serious critics were paying attention, whereas before they were dismissive.

PK: Some of your films have been criticized as self-involved and self-indulgent…

JS: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I understood it the whole time. I still understand it; it’s very easy for me to watch all my movies and see why people don’t like them. I think I stuck around long enough so that there’s a different level of generosity towards the work. Or at least as the opportunities arose to get more money or work with bigger actors and I just kept making the same kind of work, at least people started to consider that I was doing was for a reason and not because I couldn’t do something else. And I think that early on that plagued all the mumblecore movies. The idea that we didn’t know how to make real movies. But all of us had gone to film school. I certainly had learned three point lighting, had shot on 16 mm, and edited on Steenbecks. I came out of film school very rigorously trained in the methods of making films, and chose not to do that. As much as I understand why people would not like any of my movies, that was the only thing that was annoying, the assumption that none of us knew how. And that we weren’t trying to something different.

PK: “My kid could do that!”

JS: And they could. The criticism wasn’t wrong, but it was an exploration into something. And the world was changing. I was talking about that with somebody today. Through the decades there are ways of looking at something and processing it as realistic, as reality. So some movies that seemed so real in the 60s are in black and white. You look at them now and they don’t look anything like reality. And if you look at stuff from the 70s that felt real then, and it’s like crazy colorful and people wearing funny clothes and it doesn’t look anything like reality. In the mid-2000s when I started making movies what reality looked like was YouTube and reality television. That’s how American audiences processed the idea that something was real. So I embraced that aesthetic. I basically dropped all my formal film school training and was interested in reality and was certainly interested in the idea of conveying reality and to me it needed to look like that. It needed to be handheld, it needed to be shot on consumer grade video cameras, and if an audience is going to sit here and feel like they were seeing something real there couldn’t be dolly shots and had to look like it was done in shitty apartments. But I’m not as interested in that any more.

PK: That sounds a lot like Dogme 95.

JS: Certainly. And that stuff was just starting to seep out in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was in film school. Those movies were a big push in that direction. But now it’s ten years later; reality doesn’t look like that anymore either.

PK: I don’t know what reality looks like anymore either.

JS: I’m speaking theoretically about an attempt to represent reality. Reality always looks the same. It always looks the way it’s seen from your eyeballs. It always looks like high resolution video.

PK: This then is a breakthrough film?

JS: It’s a breakthrough in the sense that exponentially more people are going to see it than have seen anything I’ve made before. I see it as less of a breakthrough and more like a first feature. After ten years in the woods it’s sort of coming home and embracing the way movies have been made forever. I got out of film school and tried to reinvent the wheel and unlearn everything I learned and tried to actively make these professionally amateur movies. With “Drinking Buddies” I’m fully embracing the system that’s been in place forever. I’m working with a script, with actors, with a producer, cinematographers, a wardrobe person; we’re scouting locations, shooting SAG schedules. It was the first movie I made.

PK: How was the adjustment?

JS: I loved it. It was incredible. Everything I expected to be a road block and a hurdle completely liberated me to just be a director. To show up every day. And work with actors and be a director.

It probably shouldn’t have taken ten years. But I had to get over some things. I had to get over that bratty punk rock attitude I had. Those first couple of movies I was aggressive, angry, and frustrated. Coming out of school and not only having made a lot of bad movies but also friends’ bad movies. I felt the reason those things were bad was because of the way they were being made. This kind of pissing contest of who’s got a bigger crew, who rented a dolly, who’s shooting on 35 instead of 16. These things that were so beside the point when every movie was going to suck anyway. Nobody was making anything very good so why were you parading and flexing your muscles? And maybe to my own detriment I created a link between those two things, between this kind of macho way of making movies and the badness of those movies. And so I got out and I didn’t want any excuses. I didn’t want to have to hustle and raise the money for a big crew. I had access to a camera; I had a computer with editing software. I gathered up some friends and we were all working day jobs so when we had time on nights and weekends we’d shoot a little bit, I would edit it, I’d save up some more money, we’d shoot a little more. Over the course of six months I put that first movie together and I didn’t hate it, and I felt like I had unlocked the key with “Kissing on the Mouth” (2007).

We spent only three thousand on it and it made its money back and it played some festivals… and so the process of going through that and making something I was actually proud of spurred me on to keep doing that, and avoid all the hubbub of doing a movie shoot.

PK: What film school did you attend?

JS: Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It’s a very experimental and documentary heavy program. To look at my early stuff, I’m so a product of that program and mindset. I went down to film school really obsessed with Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley and that 80s… they felt acceptable and like the kind of work I wanted to make. But at Southern Illinois University even Jim Jarmusch was way too Hollywood for them. They were showing us Stan Brakhage and stuff – that was like the artistic place they wanted us to get to. The big graduate from the school was Steve James, who made “Hoop Dreams” (1994).

PK: That’s not very experimental

JS: No, but he’s from the documentary side – he’s great. And the school had not changed from between when I was there and he was there – we had all the same professors. I loved it, though. I couldn’t imagine a better school experience. You had to shoot film; they were not all receptive to video. You had to edit on flat beds. It was really a rigorous old school film program, so getting out of school and shooting these cheap video movies it was like my act of rebellion against my parents. I was creating some distance between my mentors and the work I wanted to make.

PK Have your parents seen your films?

JS: Yeah. They did like some of them. My dad likes James Bond movies. He’s not watching independent cinema. But they like some of them.

PK: Now you’re working with a big name cast – including an Oscar nominee [Anna Kendrick for. Did you have to make an adjustment?

JS: I don’t think I did. It felt like the same with them.

PK: How did you get them on board?

JS: I talked to all of them. There wasn’t any script to send around. There wasn’t an audition process. It was just series of Skype conversations and phone calls. I was trying to feel out – I had been outside the industry for so long that I didn’t have a sense that anyone knew who I was or had seen any of my work, so the first stage in casting was just sussing out who had maybe seen “Hanna Takes the Stairs” (2007)

or some of the others that had gotten a little more attention. Once we had a sense of who was interested I’d have 45 minute conversations and tell them the scenes I was interested in for the new one and that I wanted to set something in the world of craft beer and some of the ideas I was interested in.

PK: They were your first choices?

JS: Jake [Johnson] came on very early. I hadn’t seen him anything but the actress Lizzy Caplan had done a couple of episodes of “New Girl” and she had a really good time working with him and I was talking to her and she said you should meet Jake he’s a really cool guy. He was on a month before we began shooting, through emails and stuff; he was a really big part of the writing process. I didn’t really have first choices, I was just really curious to meet people. And a lot of people I didn’t cast in “Drinking Buddies” I will cast in other stuff I met a lot of great people

It was crazy the caliber of actors willing to have a conversation with me knowing nothing about this project. It blew my mind. But actors want to act, and they don’t get to spend nearly enough time doing it. I think the way I work really allows people to act.

PK: A lot of the film was improvised?

JS: All the dialogue is improvised.

PK: How does that work?

JS: It’s sort of a honing process. The first take, you’re free to be really loose. To see what happens. I’ll hook onto a few things I like from that take and encourage them to do it again, but try this. And a lot of times they know too; after doing it once it becomes pretty clear to the actors too what worked and what they can do differently.

PK: Did they drink beer?

JS: They did.

PK: That was unsimulated actual beer consumption?

JS: Definitely.

PK: It’s kind of like “Crystal Fairy.”

JS: I really want to see that. Were they doing drugs?

PK: They apparently sampled the magic cactus.

JS: I’ll stick to the beer.

PK: When I saw this film, and “Crystal Fairy,” it occurred to me it must be tough to be in your 20s these days. Do you think being that age is especially difficult now?

JS: I don’t think it’s more difficult. People my age —we’ve been allowed to be kids our whole life. I’d say it’s a lot easier to be 20 now than it used to be. You don’t have the pressure to get married right out of college. The pressure for women to have a family right away isn’t there. We’re allowed a grace period where, ideally, people can learn something about themselves. Before they enter into lifelong relationships and have children and have things like that. But the same kind of panic sets in for people and it’s harder to find a job than it probably was 40 years ago if you’re college educated. That kind of thing is happening. People are getting out of school when they’re 22 and they’ve got major student loan debt and they have to move back in with their parents and it’s not going the way they thought it would go.

But I don’t see the pressure being put on us that other generations have had to grow up with. The onus is on you to grow up. Nobody is going to do it. Society isn’t going to do it and their parents aren’t going to make you do it. You’re the one who has to decide to become an adult. It’s a conversation I was having a couple of years ago with my friends: what does it mean to be a man? What determines that you have become a man? What are the external signifiers? I don’t think there are any anymore. Just an attitude you have to embrace that you are grown up.

It’s related to peer pressure. I’ve been married for six years now I have a son who’s almost three and very few of my close friends in Chicago… they’re just getting married and haven’t any kids. It’s very annoying for my wife and I to see these guys go out until three or four in the morning and sleep in and have brunch while she and I are in bed by midnight and get woken by seven. I certainly have had occasional regrets that maybe we should have waited a little longer and maybe we could be participating in all this stuff. But then I think that when my parents were this age they had me, plus my too younger brothers, and were way more grown up. And then I’m also happy that I’m not going to be dealing with a toddler when I’m in my forties. If you’re going to do that you’re going to have to do it and the older you get the less energy you have and the harder it is to have a baby.

PK: What do your parents do?

JS: My father was an engineer and my mother stayed home with my brothers and me. Now she’s been writing a lot. I think she’s been writing books.

PK: Where did you get your inspiration to make films?

JS: I grew up loving basketball — until my freshman year in high school, when it was very apparent I wasn’t going to be a professional athlete. I always loved the movies but the arts weren’t where I was expecting to be putting my energies. And then I got frustrated with jock culture. I got to high school and I realized that the guys I was playing sports with or hanging out with weren’t very smart or interesting. Nobody was trying to challenge each other to grow in any kind of interesting way. They were kind of mean. It was disillusionment with that crowd of people. And then the people I started to relate to were the kids with mohawks listening to punk music and art kids who painted. And I started watching movies in the mid-90s and it was a really good time for independent films, especially the stuff coming out of Sundance. So I started seeing Jarmusch movies and Spike Lee movies and then I took a summer film course at Columbia College. I’d take the train in from the suburbs twice a week during the summer and we shot on 16 mm and that was the no turning back point for me. I just realized I just totally loved it. While watching movies like “Raising Arizona”

it occurred to me that… there’s something that happens even as a kid you suspect they were just made magically and there’s not a real sense of what’s going on behind the scenes. And certainly for me there was no awareness of an auteurist aspect. I didn’t care who directed a movie I only cared who acted in it. But “Raising Arizona” finishes and the first title that comes up is Joel Coen and I think, well, maybe that’s why I like that movie. Who’s this guy Joel Coen? What decisions is he making that affects the way it turns out? And this was pre-internet – I mean the internet existed but I didn’t have it at my house – and so I would just go to the video store and turn over every box looking at the names of directors and try to make connections between things.

It’s so silly to think about this because it’s so easy now to find stuff, but I saw “Raising Arizona” (1987) and it probably took me three months to find another movie directed by Joel Coen. Of active searching every time I was in a video store. And then one miraculous day I picked up “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and there his name was again. I rented it and watched it and probably three weeks later ended up in a conversation with someone who said you should really see “Miller’s Crossing”(1990) It took me forever to piece together this guy’s filmography. Today it would be five seconds after I googled his name. So it was a different time and during that searching I came in contact with a wide range of stuff. I couldn’t hone in on a specific thing you had to take in a lot of it.

PK: Initially it seems your films were more derived from actual experience than from other films. Is this film more of a genre film? Are you evolving from making films about raw experience to making films about films?

JS: I don’t think so. I think with “Drinking Buddies”

we needed something to raise money for it because there was no script. And we were asking for more money than we had ever asked for. And the romantic comedy template was a way to talk about it that made sense. And also the two big movies that were inspirational for this were “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969)

and “The Heartbreak Kid” by Elaine May. I considered both of those romantic comedies so they sort of existed before the genre became cemented as sort of the lame thing it is now but it was helpful to have a template. I was nervous going into this one. I knew it would be a different kind of challenge and it was useful to have some signposts along the way in terms of structure and characters and narrative. But since I did drinking buddies I did another really small movie that I hot mostly at my house with a crew of five again I’ll bounce back and forth.

PK: Which one is that?

JS: It’s called “Happy Christmas.” Anna Kendrick and Melanie Lynskey star in it, and Mark Weber and Lena Dunham…

PK: Just having a couple of friends over.

JS: Yeah I’m having this weird experience where my friends are getting famous now. I don’t know what to do about that if you want to keep working with your friends.

PK: I guess Greta Gerwig is probably too expensive to work with now.

JS: Probably.

PK: What was the budget on “Drinking Buddies?”

JS: It was about a half million dollars.

PK: So it was the most…

JS: By a lot. Ten times more than what “Hannah Takes the Stairs” cost and I don’t think any of the others cost more than that.

PK: Did you have to pay more for the actors?

JS: Ironically the actors in “Hannah Takes the Stairs” probably cost the same as those in drinking buddies which was $100 scale. These actors probably lost money making “Drinking Buddies” because they had publicists; their lives cost money.

PK: Recently Steven Spielberg made a statement to the effect that blockbusters are imploding. Is that good news for you?

JS: Simultaneously [Steven] Soderbergh had that San Francisco thing in which he said that Hollywood is the only trickle-down theory that works. When the studios are doing really well everyone is doing really well. Those are conflicting reports. But the movie industry is doing great right now. It’s just the big blockbusters that aren’t doing well. They’re making huge profits – every year is better than the previous year. It’s exciting to me that a movie like “Pain & Gain” which cost around $25 million did well and that a $250 million movie completely tanked. Those to me are healthy messages for Hollywood to be receiving – that if you take more risk and spread it around a little bit it might take a little longer but you can make the same money. Stuff like “The Purge,” which cost $2 million and made a ton of money. That’s really exciting. I think what we’re discovering is just about marketing. The movie itself doesn’t have to cost practically anything if you make a cool poster and trailer. That’s a little discouraging, but it means that if the studios really got behind a movie like “Drinking Buddies” and they committed to spending $30 million for promoting it they could probably make that money back. Right now they’re choosing not to do that. Definitely not.

PK: There’s no sex or nudity to speak of. Is that a first for you?

JS: Maybe. No, I did this movie “Marriage Material” (2012) that doesn’t have any. It’s just about two people babysitting a kid. I’ve made a few that are pretty PG-rated. But it just didn’t feel like it needed any. I think the actors would have been fine in going there but whenever I thought about the movie I just never – putting a sex scene in would have been distracting from the stuff I was interested in, but that’s also something I’ll probably bounce back and forth on. I have strong political beliefs that our culture is way to puritanical and these images are good for us to see. It would be good to go to the movies and see real human bodies on the screen. Not perfectly airbrushed but also not this attitude that sex is a taboo subject and not a normal, healthy part of our lives. Those are the things that annoy me. And if I care to change that I have to do something about it. I can’t just do interviews and bitch about no realistic sex in movies. I’m in the position to do something about it.

PK: Are you going to make more big movies?

JS: It seems like that’s in the realm of possibility. A lot of that will depend on whether any of these make any money. That’s always the easiest route to access that stuff. I’ve been out to LA a couple of times the last few months and having meetings. I’m reading a lot of scripts to see if there’s something somebody else wrote that I might like. I’m certainly open to it. I’d love to find scripts that I really like that I can just jump on.

PK: Maybe the next James bond?

JS: I’m real curious about how those movies even get made. It’s such a mystery. Those big budget action movies are a complete mystery to me what the directors are doing all day long. I have no idea. Making decisions probably.

PK: Would you be interested in that challenge?

JS: Yeah. Definitely. I’m open to everything. I used to be so closed off. It’s part of that bratty punk rock attitude I was talking about. When I was hardly open to anything. Now I feel I would be open to that challenge. Just to do it. Why not? Life is short.

PK: Maybe take on a different genre?

JS: I would. Those become tools that you can put in your tool box if you know how to direct a car chase scene or a musical number. I’m interested in being as good at directing as I can possibly get. To do that is to try these different things. So I have a renewed interest in putting myself in those positions to potentially fail but to hopefully learn.

PK: I never knew Camus was a good way to pick up women

JS: Try it some time.

PK: It’s too late for me.

JS: Ron [Livingston, as the character Chris, who alludes to “The Stranger” while wooing Anna Kendrick’s Jill] beat you to it.

PK: Chris was the most mysterious guy. [SPOILER] He just kind of disappeared and you don’t really know what happened. There are a lot of ellipses.

JS: That’s the stuff I respond to. A lot of that is probably the Maurice Pialat influence. The way he cuts and deals with time in his movies was hugely inspirational to me when I first started making stuff. There was a retrospective in Chicago where I saw, like, seven or eight of his movies back to back. Like in “À nos amour” (1983) Sandrine Bonnaire’s character says, “I’m going off to boarding school for six months!” And in the next scene she’s back talking about it. That’s six months passed in one edit. She runs into a girl in a store who says, “How was boarding school?” and she says, “Oh, it was okay.” I think that’s awesome. A beautiful way to deal with time and solve these problems. So I’ve got that running through my head and also just a real strong desire that the audience doesn’t need all the information. Sometimes it’s helpful not to give them everything so there’s room to spend some time in the movie.

PK: When will we see “Christmas Movie?” And what’s after that??

JS: I’m editing now. So hopefully it will be playing at the festivals next year. It’s a little open right now. I have a few projects that I may or may not get to make. They are sort of within the industry. It’s not going to be up to me. But the success of “Drinking Buddies” will help.

PK: Is the term “mumblecore” now acceptable?

JS: I think it’s impossible to avoid at this point. I think the word is here to stay. I can either spend the rest of my life calling it the “m” word or I can just embrace it. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Plus I happen to like the other filmmakers who are associated with it. It’s not an insult to me to be grouped in with really talented filmmakers.

PK: Is there a unifying thread to the filmmakers referred to with that term?

JS: My guess, and this might sound grandiose, my guess is that the lasting influence will be performance based. Most of us as directors acted in our own stuff or each other’s movies and I think it led to a much different approach to performance. I think it wasn’t an acting school approach. It was very much rooted in a close analysis of behavior and an attempt not to act. I’m seeing its effects. And I’m seeing that the actors like Greta and Mark Duplass and now Lena Dunham and other people who came out of that world – that performance style has really connected these people. It feels different and it feels exciting. Whether the movies get remembered or not and whether there’s any lasting impact of the style, the stripped-down bare style of mumblecore, I have no idea. I certainly suspect that some actors will come out of that world that will be really big important actors who will influence kids who are young now who are starting to get into movies.

One Good (The World’s End), One Bad (Lovelace), Two Uglies (The Canyons, Passion)

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Here’s a quartet of flickers playing down at the local Bijou, holdovers from a week or so back.

Top of the list is The World’s End, the third comedy from the team of writer-director Edgar Wright and writer-star Simon Pegg (we might as well add actor Nick Frost, since he’s prominently featured in all three himself). The team has come a long way since Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), very funny movies, but which lack the technique and emotional vistas of this latest work.

Wright and Pegg have hit upon an approach that avoids formula as it allows for so many variations. Starting with a large cast of characters who are, each and every, victims of their own personalities, they bore in on the most socially marginal of the group. This hero – because that’s what he becomes – resents his marginalization to the point where he thinks he should be a model for, if not the whole of society, then for a very wide circle of his friends and acquaintances. He is not a reject, but a semi-voluntary non-conformist.

Pegg, as always, plays the square peg (sorry) who can’t seem to find the right shaped hole. A now grown ne’er-do-well who lives by sponging off his more responsible, middle-class friends, he rounds four of them up to have a redo of a 12-bar pub crawl they weren’t able to complete the night of their secondary school graduation. So back to their quiet hometown they go and start all over again.

The sketches of the four friends is remarkably adept for a contemporary comedy (though it would have been considered par for the course in the 1940s). The pacing of the humor is sure and the big twist in the plot (analogous to those in the first two comedies) is unexpected and funny (at least if you haven’t seen the movie’s television commercials). In fact, the whole movie is funny, even when it slips in a soupcon or two of sentiment.

Lovelace is the second feature directed by the well-regarded documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. As was the case with their first, 2010’s Howl, they are basing the movie on “real life,” in this case the story of Linda Lovelace, nee Boreman, the star of Deep Throat (1972), the porn film that made explicit sex on the screen not just acceptable but chic.

The two directors haven’t fallen into the trap of making a mere docudrama, but they have constructed a peculiarity that doesn’t offer much more. In essence, they use the first half of the movie to tell the old story of Lovelace and Throat, a popular yarn that emphasized sexual freedom, taboo-breaking, the thrill of celebrity, and oddball respectability. The second half, using Lovelace’s own 1980 autobiography, Ordeal as a resource, tells a much more harrowing and ugly tale of a woman brutally forced into a porn career by an abusive boyfriend.

The first story is told entirely objectively. Though Lovelace is the center of the camera’s attention, there’s no sense that we’re seeing the action from her or any other character’s viewpoint. That’s decidedly not the case with the second version of the tale, which begins with an older, wiser Lovelace beginning to write Ordeal and then proceeding to flashback.

The contrasting stories don’t seem to have much point. Anyone who saw Lovelace’s name during the 15 or 20 years she was in and out of the public eye knows what she wrote in 1980, even if they didn’t read it themselves. Is there anyone left out there who believes a career in porn is all party favors? Taken separately, the two halves of Lovelace are competent, if uninspired, pieces of filmmaking. Together, they are less than the sum of their parts.

Gosh, sex is dirty – but then, so is everything human, ain’t it? Welcome to Paul Schrader’s world where everything that isn’t tawdry is literally divine. A proponent of Calvinist views (that good works not only won’t get you into heaven, but aren’t even indications of worthiness) and, less so, Jansenism (the gift of grace can be less a blessing than a curse), Schrader is usually content to lay out these premises as finished statements which he then illustrates with pictures of varying solemnity.

The Canyons finds Schrader at his pedagogic worst; the movie, which is turgid in any case, can’t even rouse a spark of titillation from entwined limbs and bumping torsos – or the drug taking, the cruelty, the bitching and moaning and manipulating. It’s not even good soap opera, so Schrader has to force a potential for murder into the action in order to make it seem that something is at stake.

The canyons of the title are those which surround and divide Los Angeles and which contain a large portion of the Hollywood “creative community” (as they like to be called). The little squared circle at the center of The Canyons involves a scuzzy producer, his girlfriend, an actor friend/former lover of hers, and a woman who just seems to be around for the sex.

The two guys struggle for the affections of, as opposed to mere access to, the girlfriend. At first, the producer is depicted as playing underhanded games, but, when it suits Schrader, it is revealed the actor is sort of a cheat himself. But that’s OK because… see above.

Bret Easton Ellis wrote the screenplay, which guarantees the backdrop is in a legitimately unreal Elliswood. The Canyons also engages in stunt casting. Lindsay Lohan does on screen what the tabs say she does in her “private” life and an excruciatingly untalented porn actor plays the producer. Class all the way.

If Paul Schrader is deploying his old ideas – make that idea – Brian De Palma is recycling his fragmentary techniques in Passion, a thrill-free thriller. Everything you’d expect to see, you see. The plot features his standby doubling, with the tension between a businesswoman and her protégé mirrored by tension between the protégé and her protégé. His visual reflexes still spasm when hit with a hammer; for example, one character’s face is seen in a reflective surface so that we’ll know – as we know in nearly all De Palma’s thrillers – that she has a secret self.

Based on Passion, it appears that De Palma has lost interest in everything aside from his own mechanical self. A movie isn’t a window to a world; it’s just a great big mirror filled with one tiny figure.

I don’t know about you, but I’d head for the pub crawl.

–Henry Sheehan

Big Brother and Don’t Bother: “Closed Circuit” and “Getaway”

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Alfred Hitchcock would have loved today’s surveillance state and the ongoing war against terror, with the endless opportunities for exploring voyeurism, treachery, paranoia, and the predicament of innocent bystanders caught up in conspiracies beyond their control and comprehension. But in lieu of his genius, director John Crowley (“Boy A”) and screenwriter Steven Knight (whose screenplay for David Cronenberg’s 2007 masterpiece “Eastern Promises” was a lot better) and their “Closed Circuit” will have to do. And it looks positively Hitchcockian compared to that third rate video game that passes for a movie, “Getaway.”

Crowley’s fitfully engrossing but mostly routine espionage thriller shows promise at first, opening, as befits the title, with multiplying rows of closed circuit TV screens showing a busy London marketplace. Then there’s a flash and all goes dark. Those of us in Boston a few months after the Marathon bombing can only grit our teeth.

Over a hundred people are killed in the attack, and the authorities have in custody Farroukh Erdogan (Denis Moschitto), a Turkish immigrant whom they believe is the only surviving perpetrator.

But after Erdogan’s court-appointed defense lawyer commits suicide by jumping off a roof (sure he did; this is a film in which the audience is always at least two moves ahead of the characters on screen), barrister Martin Rose (Eric Bana) is asked to take his place.

One look at Rose’s unshaven, hung-over face, his suit looking like he’s had it on since the night before, and it’s clear he wasn’t picked for his legal-eagleness. As is disclosed through wispy flashbacks and exposition-heavy dialogue, he’s still recovering from a divorce and a messy custody battle for his teenaged son. And making matters worse, who should be his partner in the trial but Claudia Simmons-Howe (Rebecca Hall),

his ex-lover and the “other woman” in his marriage break-up? Well, the film needs a little spice as a diversion from its implausible, predictable plot.

Perhaps in order to mirror the multiple surveillance camera screens of the opening, a motif repeated throughout the film, Crowley favors parallel editing, intercutting bits of two or three or more simultaneous, ongoing events. Unfortunately, the resulting narrative unfolds as randomly as those closed circuit broadcasts. In it Rose and Simmons-Howe ignore not-so-subtle warnings and investigate inconsistencies in the official story.

To no one’s surprise but their own, they discover that nothing is what it seems – though it would appear from the get-go that Jim Broadbent’s bemusedly sinister Attorney General

isn’t on the up-and-up. The usual suspect, MI-5, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, is to blame. Cornered, a member of the agency whines, “You want the freedom to attack me but without me you wouldn’t have any freedom at all!”

That old story. A word about MI-5, at least as depicted in this film: what’s wrong with these guys? Maybe after watching Jason Bourne handle battalions of assassins with just his bare hands, a book of matches, and an aerosol can, we’ve gotten spoiled. Yet how is it that these agents can be foiled by a bureaucrat armed with a water glass, and a kid with a hair drier? Are they just incompetent, or too paralyzed by moral fine points to get the job done? Anyone who has watched the BBC TV series “MI-5” would expect better – this film would rank as one of its lesser episodes.

Nonetheless, when it comes to recent films about the inexorable intrusion of Big Brother into our lives, “Closed Circuit” runs circles around “Getaway,” a film that is quite content to run circles around itself. It’s Christmas in Sofia, Bulgaria, a city known apparently for its cheapness as a movie location and, judging from the film, its inept police force. Haggard, washed-up racecar driver Brent Magna (an anagram of “Bran Magnet,” among other things), played by a haggard Ethan Hawke, who will be washed up as a credible actor if he keeps taking on pictures like this one and “The Purge,” returns home from whatever work an American ex-race car driver does in Bulgaria, to find his house ransacked and his wife missing. A phone call from “the Voice” informs him that unless he performs certain dangerous, illegal, and uninspired assignments not only will his wife be killed, but he will keep pestering him with his nagging, hectoring phone calls.

First on the agenda is stealing an armored super muscle car, a Ford Shelby GT500 Super Snake to give credit to the product placement that may be the sole reason for the movie’s existence. This he accomplishes, but as collateral damage he takes on an unwanted passenger, “the Girl” (Selena Gomez).

She proves to be the backseat driver from hell – the bickering of this pair recalls Hawke’s spats with Julie Delpy in “Before Midnight,”

except with more property damage, small arms fire, explosions, and panic-stricken Bulgarian Christmas shoppers.

“The Girl” screams, asks dumb questions, and offers useless advice as Magna performs the tasks demanded by the Voice, which mostly consist of what seems a repeated, horribly shot and scattergun-edited loop of the same car chase in which Sofia police squad cars crash and roll over like latter-day Keystone Cops.

Sadly, there is an explanation for this punishing, repetitive chaos. It lies in the identity of the foreign-accented Voice, who sounds a bit like the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis ads (“Stay thirsty, my friend”).

[SPOILER] Played by Jon Voight, he is apparently that other bête noir of paranoid conspiracy theories, the billionaire tycoon whose cupidity is mixed with a playful bit of sadism. So between the ruthless omniscience of the intelligence community and the inescapable omnipotence of the super-rich, we’re pretty much screwed. I just wish someone would make a decent movie about it.

More Murderers Among Us

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Documentary filmmakers must be ever vigilant lest their movies get kidnapped by their subjects. It’s not a question of whether the filmmaker and the subjects don’t have similar goals; they might or might not. But even the most naturally empathetic documentary director has to ward off the seductive charms of a subject who implicitly offers to exchange access in exchange for uniformity of perspective. Complicating the matter, some subjects don’t want what is conventionally regarded as sympathy. They might want the audience to fear them or even be repulsed by them. It’s the games people play.

Wild Man Blues, Barbara Kopple’s 1997 post-facto promo of a Woody Allen musical tour, is a case in point. Although Kopple had proven her ability to look at her subjects with two eyes – one admiring, one skeptical – in American Dream (1990), she got all dewy-eyed over Allen and sympatico with his apologists. The movie was a vessel for Allen’s narcissism.

With The Act of Killing, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer pulls a double-dare on his subjects, Indonesian gangsters and militia members who led death squads in the mid-1960s. He offers to turn the movie over to them, to make the movie they’d like to see made about themselves. He provides some historical background, includes present-day documentary footage, but mostly shows the retired mass murderers plotting, rehearsing, and staging their feature film.

As cut, The Act of Killing focuses on Anwar Congo who, before 1965, was a scalper and low-ranking gangster of vague description. Then the Indonesian government, led by President Sukarno, was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup led by General Suharto. The coup leaders used private militias and criminal gangs to carry out a massive number of massacres, ultimately leading to the death of well over a million civilians, including men, women, children, infants and the elderly. The aim of the coup was to eliminate communist influence within the government; the aim of the massacres was to kill all the communists, with the term broadly defined to include anyone with liberal leanings, union affiliation, or a teacher’s credential, and their families. An entire village could be wiped out just by an unproven allegation of communist “sympathies.” In the United States, the press coverage played down the massacres, instead praising the new rulers for keeping the Indonesian domino from falling.

Anwar Congo led a death squad and according to someone in the film meaning to praise him, personally killed a thousand people. Congo doesn’t propose a personal death count of his own, but he does demonstrate a strangulation technique he personally developed to speed up his kill rate.

There are other killers in the movie, including an old gangster buddy of Anwar’s and the head of a still-popular militia. The culture at large has done more than protect these people; it has lauded them. In one brain-blowing sequence, Anwar appears on a local TV talk show where the smiling young host talks about his murders as if they were the recipes of the week.

It’s Anwar’s movie that is at the heart of The Act of Killing. A stop and start affair thanks to Anwar’s indecision over both the appropriateness and liveliness of certain scenes, the movie is loaded with the kind of kitsch that seems endemic to the totalitarian mind. In fact, both Anwar’s movie and the “real” movie begin and end with a musical sequence that promises comedy to begin with and then ends with devastating irony.

But the largest pay-off comes when you pay close attention to the way Anwar structures his own movies. When he’s alone with the movie crew, revisiting some of the scenes of his many crimes, he appears disturbed, talking about ghosts and guilt and even vomiting in apparent self-revulsion. But when he’s directing himself in scenes which feature his supporters and old comrades he is not exactly boastful, but he does allow himself to bask, apparently modestly, in their praise for his barbarism.

This is where Oppenheimer’s brilliance makes its mark. Plenty of filmmakers have interviewed and/or followed murderous sociopaths, but I can’t think of any who have revealed sociopathy at work.

At times, it’s easy – crushingly easy – to see. Anwar’s recreations of massacres involve the impressment of locals as cinematic victims, especially women and children. But the horror of brutalism is not past. Although they naturally don’t measure up to the original crimes, these reenactments still terrify those forced to impersonate the raped, mutilated, and dead. You can see women struggle to keep their mounting panic under control; worst of all, you can see children break out into nearly hysterical crying. When Anwar goes over to calm the children after the scenes are finished, what you are witnessing is not true compassion, but the exercise of power, they private gloating of a killer pleased to see his talent for terrifying is still intact.

Those scenes where Anwar shows apparent regrets are equally troubling. Anwar isn’t overtaken by genuine grief. He is doing what deadly sociopaths do all too well: He’s mirroring, discerning what his more human audience expects to see and delivering it to him. Like his mad brethren, he is copying what we’d consider “normal” affects. Paradoxically, when he’s at his most pathetic, he’s revealing his most deadly side.

So An Act of Killing isn’t a record of a killer who had outlived his time. It’s a warning that monsters still live among us.

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Remember the 99%? Hollywood does, sort of. Two very different studio releases – “Elysium” (which opens today) and “Paranoia” (opens August 16) – revisit the oh-so-2011 issue of economic and political inequality, and explore the possibility of returning power to the people..

But first of all, what is it with these big-name, presumably fully-coiffed actors playing it bald in their latest movies? Harrison Ford in “Paranoia”

and Matt Damon in “Elysium”

both sport the skin-head look. Just wondering, but in addition to this superficial similarity (or is it so superficial?), the two films have a lot in common.

In the tradition of movie dystopias going back to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) and even H.G. Wells’s novel “The Time Machine” (1895) – or, more recently, the ambitious but silly 2012 allegory “Upside Down” – the world in Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” has taken the upstairs/downstairs arrangement to extremes.

In the year 2154, the planet has gone to pot, poisoned by pollution, wracked by crime, poverty and disease, and monitored by a brutal police force of Robocop-like automata.

But if you’re one of the lucky few to be a citizen of the title space station, an orbiting Garden of Eden featuring unlimited luxury, eternal youth, with piped-in classical Muzak and unflattering, monotone pant suits,

who cares? But the surface does provide the parasitic Elysium with the raw materials and labor that keeps the good life going, and there’s also the pesky problem of shuttle-borne illegals sneaking in through the tight security, so Elysium’s Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster with an inexplicable, affected, plummy accent) keeps herself busy maintaining draconian order.

Meanwhile, back on earth in a future LA

that makes the city in “Blade Runner” look like Beverly Hills (actually, it’s a CGI-souped-up Mexico City; as is also evident in his “District 9,” if there’s one thing Blomkamp is good at, it’s futuristic grubbiness and squalor), lumpen laborer Max (a bald Matt Damon) is enjoying the fruits of over a century of government deregulation and is working in a factory under subhuman conditions. In an ironic touch, he works at an assembly line building the same robotic police robots that had broken his arm in a preceding scene. But an accident irradiates hum lethally, and he’s told he has six days to live, is given some pills, and is sent home.

Now one of the big draws of Elysium is that citizens have access to a device that can heal everything (it looks like a tanning bed); the place combines Obamacare with the miracle cures of Lourdes. So in order to save his life, Max must somehow gain entry into Elysium and get into one of the healing machines. This involves working with the quasi-revolutionary human trafficker Spider (a hyped-up Wagner Morra) who has him fitted with a mechanical exo-skeleton that combines the power of Iron Man’s armor with the excruciatingly application suffered by Wolverine for his adamantium implants.

It turns out a bad guy has the same outfit, and the last hour of the movie consists of the kind of rock-em, sock-em action seen in about a dozen films this summer.

So by the end I don’t think too many people will be pondering the future of class conflict, nor will the filmmakers after raking in an estimated $35 million opening weekend box office.

A more down-to-earth version of the same scenario, “Paranoia,” adapted by Robert Luketic from Joseph Finder’s 2004 novel, investigates solutions to economic disparity that are less drastic than crashing space shuttles into utopian real estate or blowing people to smithereens (another of Blomkamp’s talents – graphic displays of the effect explosives have on the human body).

At an Apple-like corporation, the loathsome mogul Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman at his malice-oozing best) cans a bunch of 20-something employees after Adam Cassidy (Liam Helmsworth), their spokesperson, gets mouthy at a pitch session. Pissed off that his generation has been disenfranchise dfrom the American Dream by a bunch of old fogies , Adam does something indiscreet, gets caught, and is extorted by Wyatt into infiltrating his rival Jock Goddard’s (a bald Harrison Ford) company and stealing their secrets.

So instead of donning a pumped up exoskeleton and taking a shuttle to the promised land, Adam puts on an Armani power suit and drives a Porsche, infiltrates the inner circle of power, gets a taste of it, and faces some tough moral – and political – choices while sampling fine wine and the charms of his thoroughbred co-worker, Emma Jennings (Amber Heard).

Among those films that “Paranoia” probably will be compared to (in addition to “Elysium,” though I think that I am, so far, alone in that). Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987) offers some of the more interesting parallels. Indeed, when I recently interviewed Finder, the author of the book, he said that he had deliberately imitated elements of that film, but with key changes.

In particular, the father: in “Wall Street” the aspiring financial buccaneer played by Charlie Sheen has a broken-down working class dad (played by Martin Sheen) who is a font of wisdom and moral clarity. In Finder’s book, however, Adam’s broken down working class father is a total prick, an abusive monster dying of emphysema. You want to hand Adam a pillow and say, “Do it quickly.”

But in the movie, dad is again the font of wisdom, advising Adam about the right thing to do, and let’s say it doesn’t involve armed rebellion against the oppressive ruling class.

Which brings up another difference between the book and the movie, a change that may be attributed to the economic turmoil of the years since the book’s publication in 2004, in particular the financial meltdown and the abortive Occupy movement. Finder’s Adam is a cynical loner out to help himself. In the movie, though, he represents a generation of young people who want access to the same rewards of the system as their stingy elders. In other words, the system is fine, as long as we get included in it, too.

That’s my take, anyway. I’m still working on what the deal is with the bald guys.

–Peter Keough

Inner and Outer Space

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There’s a subset of sci-fi movies whose setting is a spaceship in deep space and whose cast of characters begins small and gets smaller. They include John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) and Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and, perhaps in a stretch, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

Europa Report, directed by Sebastian Cordero, is an intelligent addition to the list, particularly due to its additional dynamic, that of the group under psychological pressure, pressure that will force the group to cohere or disintegrate.

Briefly, the plot, which is told retrospectively, is about a months-long expedition to one of Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Because of the possible presence of water, the moon is considered a likely home to cellular life and so a small crew of scientists and pilots have been sent out to take samples. This physically enclosed group have to endure the inevitable friction of cashing personalities, lethal accidents and, once they get to Europa, strange and deadly, if apparently primitive, life forms.

Cordero delivers all the necessaries: The stark contrast of space’s enormousness and its consequent physical and psychological claustrophobia; a shooting style which, again and again, creates a palpable reality of emotional stress and bonding; and a moody lighting scheme that manages to combine dramatic needs with plausible ambient light sources.

Europa Report is in sum a good movie, intriguing and intelligent. Fewer and fewer of those these days.

–Henry Sheehan

Critics A Go-Go

Two Movie Critics, Two Coasts

Children’s crusades

Matters of Gravity

Expended families

Cinema of the Ants

Spend Labor Day with “Drinking Buddies:” An interview with Joe Swanberg

One Good (The World’s End), One Bad (Lovelace), Two Uglies (The Canyons, Passion)

Big Brother and Don’t Bother: “Closed Circuit” and “Getaway”

More Murderers Among Us

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Inner and Outer Space

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