SAFE HAVEN: The Growing Anti-Institutionalist Villainy of Nicholas Sparks

Ah, the sweet sting of being a fan of Nicholas Sparks adaptations. You know there's a formula. You YEARN for the formula, and yet, you can't help turning a critical eye on the way each film tweaks the essential Sparkiness of rain-drenched, Carolina-tinged romance. Such was the case with Safe Haven (McStreaming!). We've got the beachy setting, we've got the painfully obvious objective correlatives ("New Start" paint primer anyone?) and we've got the script-crossed lovers, but what has changed is the nature of the obstacle between the two Abercrombie and Fitched B-list paramours: the patented Sparks obstacle (Sparkstacle?) that threatens to interrupt and dismantle the happily-ever-after of the film. If you actually care about such things, spoilers follow.


Films based on Sparks' "novels" always feature a cosmically-tinged "bad guy"--a force that plays the villain of the melodrama. In silent films he was the easily recognizable stock villain. In the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, this trope would take the face of Snidely Whiplash, strapping the heroine to the railroad tracks of certain doom. And in most of the Sparks adaptations, this incarnation of evil was just as uncomplicated, and just as unstoppable as that train. Former films feature villains such as CANCER (A Walk to Remember, The Last Song), or ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE/DEMENTIA (The Notebook), or TOO MUCH WATER (Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe). But lately in Sparksland, the bad guy is much less random, and much more human.

Both The Lucky One (2012) and Safe Haven (2013) place villainy in the character of a police officer. The Lucky One pits Zac Efron (a, crucially *retired* Marine) against a local sheriff deputy who is the former husband of the film's female love interest, relatively unfamous Taylor Schilling. Safe Haven takes the idea of the somewhat ominous local cop and raises it to Sleeping with the Enemy levels, giving heroine Julianne Hough a not-quite-ex-husband who is an alcoholic and abusive Chicago P.D. detective framing her for murder and hunting her down after she escapes his clutches and finds herself in an idyllic oceanside North Carolina complete with Josh Duhamel healing powers.

On the one hand, I can see this development as positive. Though Sparks is undoubtedly, creepily, conservative, it might be progressive to read this new, more localized and embodied source of evil as a critique of the institutionalization of power. Both The Lucky One and Safe Haven show how dangerous men manipulate existing power structures (the justice system) to further their own toxic domination. The conservatism of the small towns Sparks lauds then becomes a corrective to modernist demonstrations of power, and calls for a (nostalgic) return to interpersonal values.

However, then I think more, probably more than anyone should ever think about a Nicholas Sparks film, and fear that making abusive ex-husbands the villain takes the power (and the blame) away from random fate, and places it squarely in the hands of the female heroines. Both Schilling and Hough chose these men, and are rescued from them by the new, better male heroes (Efron and Duhamel). Sparks has introduced human culpability into the equation, and situated it squarely on the woman's shoulders. It's like the damsel in distress refused to block Snidely Whiplash on Snapchat.

Though it's never acceptable, fair, or remotely logical to blame the victims of domestic abuse for the crimes of their partners, Sparks' replacement of random acts of nature with former romantic partners seems a particularly ominous turn. If anyone other than me can bear it, we'll see what happens with The Best of Me next year.

For Your Consideration: How to Survive a Plague

So Oscar season has finally commenced (as evidenced by one of my favorite elements--the composition of Alisa's Oscar Menu), and as usual, I haven't seen as many nominated films as I should.

But I did catch How to Survive a Plague last night, and I think its content, if not its form, is worthy of Best Documentary Feature gold. The doc's title, as Jonathan points out, is a little misleading, as its focus is not on the macro issues of managing the AIDS crisis in the late twentieth century (largely leaving out issues such as worldwide infection issues, patients of color, and infected women), but rather the micro--the history of ACT UP, a subversive AIDS activist group that used guerilla tactics to raise awareness and deliver experimental drugs to patients who were dying at apocalpytic rates. And at this, How to Survive a Plague is masterful.

The documentary follows the lead provacateurs of ACT UP (some you might recognize--playwright Larry Kramer and artist Ray Navarro, and others you might not, like Bob Rafsky and Mark Harrington) as they stage massive and visually spectacular protests at the National Institute of Health, various drug companies, and the streets of New York and Washington DC in order to call attention to the lack of funding for AIDS research in the 80s and early 90s. While the protestors' flair for embodying the rage and grief they felt at the unspeakable loss the virus was wreaking (a large group scattered the ashes of their deceased loved ones over the White House lawn to call attention to President George Bush's inattention to the epidemic, for example), what is even more remarkable is their commitment to self-empowerment and education in the medical field.

With the help of retired chemist Iris Long, an American hero, the men and women of ACT UP wrote policy papers, researched drug trials, and shepherded experimental treatments through the FDA approval process. They for all intents and purposes created an underground health care system that provided practical assistance and emotional hope to those who were being cruelly and lethally overlooked by the mainstream doctors and pharmacists. And what is almost miraculous is, it worked. Due largely to the untiring work of the men and women of ACT UP, the current class of protease inhibitors--the "Lazarus drug, as it brought the nearly dead back to life--have rendered AIDS (for those who can afford the protocol--a crucial but little remarked upon distinction) into a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. As well a a documentary about the AIDS epidemic, Plague is also a testament to how committed and sustained social activism can (and does) change the world.

How to Survive a Plague doesn't offer a particularly innovative way of telling its story, but its archival footage of early ACT UP meetings and protests is remarkable, and evidences that even as these people were dying, they felt compelled to record the bloody and passionate war they waged against not only AIDS, but a social system that at best ignored the problem, and at worst blamed the victims for their plight. What was even more remarkable to me was the joy and laughter that punctuated the strategy meetings, even as their comrades were physically, unmistakably, wasting away. As the ACT UP motto insists, "Silence = Death," and even during infighting, arrests, and inconceivable loss and grief, these brave, brilliant, and hopeful men and women never stopped shouting, and never believed they weren't worthy of being heard.

In order to avoid clawing off my own skin while watching Bug, I theorized about horror movies

Due to a recommendation from Jonathan, and a desire to show solidarity with my fellow Tracys, I streamed Bug last night, a 2006 psychological thriller directed by William Friedkin and based on Tracy Letts's play (he also wrote the screenplay), starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. I watched despite my antipathy for a) bugs; and b) Ashley Judd. This is how strong my loyalty is to Jonathan recommendations and other people named Tracy.

And I loved it. And it was immensely, almost unbearably, difficult to watch. The film traces the co-dependent psychological breakdown of Judd's Agnes and Shannon's Peter within the increasingly claustrophobic and bizarre confines of Agnes's seedy motel room. To say too much about the origin of the hallucinations would be to rob the screenplay of its emotional and dramatic power, but I will share with you their nature: Peter convinces Agnes that the room is infested with near-invisible aphids that hatched from his body, and that the bugs periodically burrow into the both of them to feed on blood. And join me now in a *shudder.* The film is an assault on the senses (I can only imagine what it would be like to see it performed live). The ears are invaded by jangling telephones, chirping smoke alarms, and a buzzing air conditioner vent. The eyes narrow at the harsh blue light of bug zappers reflecting off of tin foil. And the skin, literally, crawls. It's impossible to watch Agnes and Peter clawing at the insects they believe to be swarming on their bodies without scratching in sensory sympathy.

Shannon's performance is a revelation, with which Judd, and Harry Connick Jr. (!) as her abusive ex-con ex-husband do their best to keep up. His character is physically and emotionally, literally and figuratively, ripped open by his paranoia. Watch the film to watch him. But a subsidiary, and wholly solipsistic, element of Bug that temporarily distracted me from my physical and emotional discomfort (in a good way--art should make you uncomfortable) was Agnes's particular brand of victimization.

I watched another low-budget, but imaginatively rich, horror movie a few weeks back, A Horrible Way to Die. Though Die is inferior to Bug in every cinematic category, both horror plots are provoked by a heroine, damaged by an abusive and traumatic past and trying to start her life over again, willfully entering into a relationship with a dangerous man. Both women, Sarah and Agnes, have jobs and female friends, but are desperately lonely and healing from deep and profound personal losses, particularly Agnes, whose son was kidnapped while under her care ten years earlier. It is this emotional isolation that opens the door to Kevin (in Die) and Peter, as surely as more literally isolated heroines opened the door to (non-sparkly) vampires in horror texts past.

During the course of each film, Sarah and Agnes embrace stories, about themselves and their lives, that place them in grave physical danger, because those stories, as unbelievable, or horrifying, or in Agnes's case, psychotic as they may be, are less scary and threatening than the truth of their emotional isolation and loss. To get all metatastic, they write themselves into the horror plot by and through their desire for emotional (and also heteronormatively romantic) connection with a man.

At this point, I'm left with more questions than answers. Is this a new theme in (indie, story-centered) horror (after all, I've only got two examples)? Is the agency demonstrated by these heroines enough to code the trope feminist, or is it a new sort of naturalism, in which unattached women are punished? Are these films commenting on the modernist anxiety of social isolation? Anyone? Anyone?

Chico & Rita: Who knew cartoons could be so sexy and sad and sweet?

Wait, don't tell me. Everybody knows that. But those who know me know that I usually have to be tricked into seeing animated films, so I'm not as familiar as I should be with the complexities of which the genre is capable. But there was something about Chico & Rita that broke through my animation antipathy. And that something was the music. Promise me that any or all of "Besame Mucho" will appear in your movie, and I'm in.

The Spanish film was nominated for Best Animated Feature last year, and I was instantly intrigued by the story, which follows two Cuban musicians as they fall in and out of love during the birth of jazz in the 1940s and 50s. Chico & Rita is beautifully, lovingly, hand drawn--a style of animation that captures the vibrancy, depth, and possibility of Havana, New York, Las Vegas, and Paris during the tumultuous post-war period. Chico and Rita's relationship is shaped by (and shapes, through their contributions to the musical culture) the racial, political, and gendered upheavals that rocked these cities after World War II.

But the story also remains deeply human, and deeply informed by the music that lends Chico & Rita its structure, plot, and atmosphere. Jazz is the conduit for the two main characters' romance--the medium through and by which their love not only expresses itself but also exists. This means that their connection is sensual, harmonious, and aesthetically beautiful. It also means it is mercurial, unpredictable, and improvisational. But above all else--the "else" in this film being, among other things, infidelity, bad timing, missed connections, deportation, revolution, and racism--it is intensely, vibrantly, and unwaveringly passionate.

A Horrible Way to Die is a decent way to spend the afternoon

Based on the title alone, A Horrible Way to Die is pretty intriguing. And it mostly lives up to the promise of its name, though not in the way you might expect. The film traces two plots: an escaped serial killer, Garrick, slashing his way across the Mid-South trying to make it back to the girlfriend who turned him in, and the girl herself, a recently sober dental hygienist, Sarah, struggling with some pretty bad memories as she tries to rebuild her life and form a relationship with a man in her AA group. When the plots converge, they do so in a way that surprised me, and didn't lead me to regret spending an hour and twenty-seven minutes with Simon Barrett's script.

There were moments I wasn't thrilled with Adam Wingard's direction, however. Though the gore both past and present is shown on the edges of the frame, in ways that make the snatches more horrifying for being so indistinct, Wingard is also a fan of the "shake the camera around to indicate frenzy and/or terror" school of direction. I, however, am not. The music was also a little too overblown for a story that is, in an odd way, quite intimate. Also, there is no way in hell that the rather large story of the escape of Garrick, according to the film one of "the nation's most popular serial killers" somehow escaped the notice of his ex-girlfriend, and  star witness of his prosecution, but she seems totally oblivious until, well, she can be oblivious no longer.

A Horrible Way to Die is very deliberate in its pacing, and very careful in its depiction of human relationships. Though at times the film's almost parable-like plot seems at odds with the brutal naturalism of its violence, the point its making, about what we will and will not ignore in order to find intimacy, is pretty sophisticated for a slasher flick.

Pontypool: The Talking Dead

With apologies to Chris Hardwick, but I couldn't resist. This 2008 microbudget Canadian horror flick is a nice creepy way to kick off Halloween, and it streams! Pontypool is a small town in Ontario, where everyone knows each other, and the local morning DJ Grant Mazzy (who looks like a craggier Willem Defoe, if that's possible) reports the traffic, obits, and lost pet stories as he heartily spikes his morning coffee and spars with his producer, Sydney. Except this Valentine's Day, Ken the traffic reporter (whose "chopper" is a Dodge parked on a hill) starts to talk of "herds" of people roaming the town, hunting and devouring other citizens.

The entirety of the action takes place over ten or so hours in the tiny church basement while Grant continues to try to broadcast the developing catastrophe and figure out what is happening outside and upstairs. The claustrophobic setting works well, as eye-witness descriptions of ravening humans tend to be more frightening than the images themselves. Though you will get a bit of that, as the not-quite-zombie hordes center in on the radio station. And about that ontological ambiguity . . .

One of my pet peeves about The Walking Dead is that no one, after learning of a mysterious plague that causes the dead to rise and feast on the living, says, "Oh, like zombies?" Pontypool avoids this blind spot by making the monsters not quite zombies. And the explanation for the horror is actually pretty clever and satirical. I won't give it away here, but rest assured, English majors will enjoy it.

Life During Wartime: Is Todd Solondz a Cinematic Bully?

Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz's 2009 pitch-black comedy-drama, further establishes the project that he first began building in Palindromes. That 2004, again, pitch-black comedy-drama a) had eight characters of different races and genders playing the heroine, and b) featured a father and son who first appeared in his indie classic Welcome to the Dollhouse. Life During Wartime is a loose sequel to Happiness, which came out eleven years previous, and includes the father and son from Palindromes. All of the recurring characters are now played by different actors. On the surface, it would seem that these two impulses are antithetical. On the one hand, the multiplicity of actors playing a single role suggests a definition of identity as fundamentally unstable, if not outright fictional. (The content of the films precludes a reading that multiple actors playing a single role can actually deepen our understanding of identity like it does in I'm Not There--a film which is referenced in Life During Wartime.) On the other, there is continuity in Solondz's cinematic universe--characters appear and reappear like in Faulkner's Yoknapatwpha. Well, if Yoknapatwpha were filled with drunks, suicides, sexual deviants, and self-loathing narcissists. Um, oh, right. But  Faulkner's fiction aims to deepen the emotional resonance of the inhabitants of his 'verse through the breadth of their appearances in his oeuvre. That's not what Todd is up to.

Solondz's writing actually joins these two philosophical poses by and through his abiding cynicism. In Solondz's universe, the narrative arc irresistibly bends toward disappointment, rejection, and loss. Even though the individuals change, the story remain the same, and it ends in the same reaffirmation of the meaningless of this pain. Life During Wartime follows the three sisters who anchored Happiness trying to rebuild their lives after the events of that film, which saw oldest sister Trish's husband and father of her three children jailed for pedophilia, middle child Helen cruelly rejecting a prank phone caller with who she had become fascinated, and youngest Joy trying and failing to find love. Life During Wartime traces the theme of forgiveness, with Trish's middle son trying to come to terms with his father's crimes and discover what it means to be a man as Trish herself tentatively tries a romance with a "normal" man, Helen having cut off all communication with her family, and Joy married to her sister's prank caller. The film is for the most part a series of two-actor scenes, with more often than not, one or both participants dissolving into tears either sincere or in-. All the major players, with the exception of Helen, whose self-involvement and self-pity act like armor, end the film bereft and haunted, in some cases literally, by the failure of their love relationships.

So why do I keep watching this dude's movies? Good question. He's unapologetically unflinching in his examination of suffering. He is also a masterful director--the attention to detail in set design and framing reminds me of Wes Anderson, if someone drained Wes Anderson of all his whimsy and replaced it with cynicism. Because that's the thing that's bothering me now--Todd Solondz doesn't like his characters. There's a way of writing about people who are monsters, or people who make the same bad decisions over and over again, or people who lie to themselves, and still encouraging if not empathy, at least a recognition of and respect for their humanity. By putting his characters through the emotional wringer, and keeping such a distance, both through the script's humor and its naturalism, Solondz has bypassed irony and entered the realm of sadism.

The Perks of Getting Your Heart Smashed: The Deep Blue Sea

First of all, don't come into this flick expecting Sam Jackson and mutant sharks. You'll be sorely disappointed. Second of all, I'm not positive what calendar the Academy follows (Julian? Gregorian?) but Rachel Weisz either should have been or should be nominated for her balls to the wall, woman on the verge of getting her soul ripped apart performance in The Deep Blue Sea.

Weisz's Hester (her character's name is not one of the film's subtleties) is a beautiful young woman living in post-war England married to a much older (and richer, and titled) man with a mother complex. It's almost like if there were a sequel to the film version of My Fair Lady--because Hester even falls in love with a dashing pilot named Freddy. And that's where her troubles begin.

Though her marriage to Sir William is clearly a mismatch, her affair with Freddy is no better in terms of romantic success. Freddy (Loki from Thor/Avengers!) is vain, careless, and weak, and hates Hester for loving him so well when he seems incapable, whether from war trauma or a constitutional deficiency, to love her back.

The film opens with a trippy, nearly ten-minute-long wordless sequence where Hester flashes back on the twin stories of her disintegrating marriage to Sir William, and the salad days of her affair with Freddy. The fact that this scene takes place in a grungy walk-up during Hester's suicide attempt should tell you where she's at during the film's present. The rest of the movie takes place over the course of roughly twelve hours, with Hester desperately trying to make Freddy be the lover she wants, or, failing that, the lover who stays, interspersed with flashbacks of London during the Blitz.

The Deep Blue Sea is almost a melodrama (and I don't mean that in a bad way) / opera hybrid. There are striking musical interludes, and several scenes are punctuated with choral sing-alongs that cleverly comment on and complicate Hester's journey to and within the hell that is unrequited love.

The title of the film refers to Hester's dilemma: what do you do when you're between the devil and the deep blue sea? The answer is lovely and surprising. Though Sir William could (and would) offer her a life of comfort, she has been deeply and irrevocably awakened by her lust for Freddy, and doesn't want to return to a life bereft of passion.While "researching" (Wikipedia) the Terence Rattigan play on which this film is based, I found out that the gay Rattigan conceived it as a metaphor for the torture of a closeted life. The Deep Blue Sea works with that reading, though, before I knew that, I found it more a feminist parable. But really, the story is resonant for anyone who has deeply and disastrously and destructively loved someone who wouldn't or couldn't love them back.

Into the Abyss: 30% Review, 70% Love Letter to Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog. I want that name to appear in the title of this review, because knowing that Herzog is involved will tell you a lot about the form, and a bit about the content, of Into the Abyss. In his documentaries and features, the German auteur/existential nihilist/madman does not blink. His unrelenting contemplation, demonstrated through shots that linger several beats too long, forces his audience to contemplate too. There's nowhere to hide when you're watching Herzog.

Into the Abyss takes as its subject the death penalty. Sort of. It's also about a triple homicide in a tiny town in Texas (oh, how I like to imagine Herzog ordering breakfast at a diner in Conroe), the nature of grief, and the haphazardness of life. It's always difficult to make a convicted murderer the subject of a documentary or film and not, intentionally or un, elide the victims. There is an empathetic impulse inherent in centering art on a human being, whether the treatment of the prisoner is sympathetic (like in the Paradise Lost trilogy) or not. Dead Man Walking, based on a true story, tried to address this imbalance by cinematically resurrecting the teenaged victims of Matthew Poncelet as silent witnesses to his execution. Paradise Lost consistently returns to footage and photographs of the three murdered boys' mutilated bodies.

Herzog, perhaps unsurprisingly considering his well-documented musings on the omnipresence and omnipotence of death, takes as a given the absence of the three victims and instead immerses himself in the families and friends they left behind. His unambiguously stated opposition to the death penalty is secondary to his interest in how people continue living after such traumatic and violent loss. And, in the course of this investigation, for no other reason I can reckon besides that he's Werner Herzog, he captures on film a group consisting of who must be the most fascinating and strange people in East Texas.

And that minor miracle is what really struck me about this film. Into the Abyss is important and interesting because of what it has to say about law and order (ka-chung!), but even more so, it reminded me of what I love so dearly about Herzog. Because it's not a miracle, actually, that the people associated with this crime and the Texas penal system are fascinating. Actually, what Herzog reminds us, is that all people are fascinating and strange, if you let them be. Herzog doesn't look away and he doesn't go anywhere during his interviews, and so we get the moment where the death row chaplain breaks down after recalling what an encounter with two squirrels and a golf cart taught him about the preciousness of life. We get Michael Perry, the death row inmate, relating an Outward Bound experience where he thought he would be killed by alligators. We get an acquaintance of one of the convicts, in the course of telling his story, reveal how he became literate--a personal detail that has nothing to do with the film's ostensible subject, but that Herzog pounces upon with delight and admiration.

And that's the minor miracle of Herzog. Despite his commitment to not denying the abyss, and despite his articulated philosophy of the futility of existence, his subject is always, as he titles the sixth section of this film, the urgency of life.

In the Land of Blood and Honey: A War Movie that Remembers the Women

If you're anything like me, you know far less than you should about the Bosnian War in the mid-90s. Angelina Jolie is here to change all that. The plot of In the Land of Blood and Honey, which Jolie wrote, directed, and produced, is pretty much given away in the title. There's going to be horrific violence and there's going to be moments of sweetness made all the more perverse by the carnage that surrounds and produces them.

The film opens with a very successful date between Danijel, a Serb, and Ajla, a Bosnian Muslim. Their flirtatious dancing is blown apart by a bombing, and they find each other again at a detainment camp where Danijel is a commander and Ajla a prisoner about to be raped. He saves her, and they begin a relationship that lasts the duration of the war. It's complicated doesn't begin to cover it.

The two are clearly metaphors for the way war both imposes and exposes the fictionality of nationalist and ethnic boundaries between people. Though the two actors are excellent, I'm not sure the film itself knows how to play their relationship. The tentativeness of the love story is preferable, though, to the clunkiness of the exposition. Jolie knows she's dealing with an audience that is probably under-informed about the conflict, but the expository speeches and conveniently placed radio news reports is not the most elegant way to keep us apprised of the intricacies of the war.

What does not only work in the film, but makes it desperately important, is the unflinching way it details how women's bodies are literally and figuratively used as battlefields and human shields in warfare. This is a reality which most war movies literally and figurative do flinch away from exploring. The closing text reveals that Bosnia marked the first time sexual violence in and of itself was prosecuted as a war crime, and presents us with some truly staggering statistics about the number of women who were raped during the conflict. Jolie's war movie recovers the experience of women in war--how they're used, how they're wounded, and how they manage to survive--scenes that too often get left on the cutting room floor.

Tiny Furniture: A Little Lena Dunham Goes a Long Way

Once Natalie bestowed HBO Go(d) upon me, for some reason I didn't hit up the latest season of Game of Thrones or finally catch up on Deadwood. Instead, I was drawn to Girls, billed as a latter-day Sex in the City but with a more realistic depiction of both New York City and the (sex) lives of young women. I've watched the entire season one and a half times, and though it isn't as groundbreaking or edgy as a) it's marketed to be or b) it sort of wants to be, it hits me where I live. So while waiting for season 2 (which according to Twitter will feature Christopher Noth perhaps as Mr. Big! Meta!), I turned to writer-director Lena Dunham's equally autobiographical first movie, Tiny Furniture, as Girls methadone. And it was about as satisfying.

Let me begin by saying I have a lot of admiration for Lena Dunham. Though plenty have spoken about the advantage, unfair or otherwise, that Dunham and her costars share in the industry, she did write and direct a feature film at twenty-five. And for my money, she does a better job translating the Apatovian trope of perpetual adolescence to a female sensibility than Bridesmaids. She is also a fearless physical actress, and I find Girls compulsively watchable.

Though several Girls regulars show up in Tiny Furniture--including Alex Karpovsky, who plays one of my favorite characters and Jemima Kirke who plays essentially the same free-spirited and irresistibly charming narcissist she does on the show--there's something about the film that wasn't as appealing to me as the series. Which is surprising, as the film is much more ambitious. Rather than focus entirely on Lena Dunham's avatar (a wry, insecure, not as charming narcissist) and her friends and boyfriends, Tiny Furniture is equally, if not more, concerned with Aura's relationship with her mother and sister (played by Dunham's real-life family). As Aura languishes in her artist mother's fabulous apartment after college graduation and halfheartedly tries to find a job and full-heartedly tries to find a boyfriend, she reads through her mother's journals from the 70s, when she was also in her 20s. The conversation the two have at the end of the film, when Aura finally gets the invitation to share her mom's bed that she's been angling for the whole movie, is both a moving representation of how mothers and daughters begin to become friends, and also a fairly unsettling indication of how little Aura has grown.

I think the reason Tiny Furniture left me a little cold and a little annoyed was that Girls reminds me less of Sex and the City and more of Seinfeld. The four girlfriends share the same casual and witty self-involvement of Jerry and Co. that lead them to solipsistic statements and actions that would be staggeringly obtuse at best and borderline sociopathic at worst if they weren't so sincere about it all. Girls is nowhere near as funny as Seinfeld, but I think it shares a similar ethos--and similar limitations. Thirty minute situations highlight these character types to their greatest effect. Tiny Furniture, with its hour-and-forty-minute run-time, gives you a bit too much opportunity to get frustrated and bored with the characters making the same mistakes and the same justifications. So unless you really want to hear "sweat the bed" used in a sentence, I'd stick with the series.

Sleeping Beauty: More Like Magic Mike Than You Might Think

As someone who writes on gender and the body, I practically *had* to see Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, being, as it is, about a woman who agrees to be heavily sedated in a room alone with paying customers. What I expected was an extended version of the bizarro masked ball/orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. What I got was a pretty clear-eyed examination of how bodies, beautiful or no, get consensually commodified.

The film follows Lucy (Emily Browning, who you might remember from Sucker Punch, aka, the movie I kinda liked that the rest of universe hated), a university student putting herself through school with the help of several odd jobs and without the help of her alcoholic and thieving mother. Early on, she demonstrates a detached relationship to her own sexuality. One scene has her deciding which stranger to sleep with in a bar and when based on a coin toss. Therefore, when she answers an ad in the student paper (!) for a job in the sex industry that involves a full-body inspection and a threat about the consequences of indiscretion, she's not too thrown.

Lucy begins her new job by wearing lingerie at dinner parties and serving wine and brandy to tuxedoed old men, and is eventually "promoted" to the role referenced by the title--she drinks a tea spiked with the mother of all sleeping pills and lies naked in a room where clients are ushered in, admonished not "to penetrate or leave marks," and left alone with her for unspecified amounts of time. If this sounds at all erotic, I'm not explaining it right. We see what a selection of the men do (it ranges from the poignantly mundane to the pathetically, and ominously, dominant), but Lucy remembers nothing, and earns enough for a sweet penthouse apartment.

And here's where the comparisons to Magic Mike come in--Lucy, baffingly, despite making major bank, does not quit her other jobs as a waitress, copy girl, or university research subject. (The latter requires her to be, ahem, orally penetrated by some sort of esophageal balloon.) The reason, I think, is a not-quite subtle indication to the audience to realize the work is basically the same. All of it requires Lucy to disassociate herself from her body because the jobs are so soul-crushingly repetitive (and/or physically unpleasant) and to disassociate herself from her mind because she doesn't need a brain to do any of it. Herbert Marcuse, with his theory of surplus repression, would have a field day with this movie. The late great Frankfurt school philosopher argued that the modern world had to repress the body over and above what was necessary for social development because if it didn't, we would all go freaking crazy over how unsatisfying and unappealing our jobs are. To translate this argument into the sphere of erotic freelance work, which is supposed to be about pleasure, is actually pretty interesting.

Also, much like Channing Tatum, it matters that Emily Browning has a beautiful body, and the camera does not refrain from lingering over it, naked and clothed, for a good 30% of the movie (ballpark). Which, of course, implicates the audience in her objectification, and possibly her exploitation. Though Claire, the icy madam, promises her clients they are "safe" in the room with Lucy because "no one can see," of course we can. But Lucy can't. Her inability to connect with the experience in any way begins to drive her mad, indicating that the less literal iterations of alienating work will have a similar outcome. Sleeping Beauty is a pretty clever and cutting economic critique in an erotic fantasy's lingerie.

True Adolescents: Camping with an Apatovian Peter Pan

I love the twenty-first century cinematic exploration of male perpetual adolescence just about as much as anybody. But there is always a moment when I'm watching Knocked Up or Forty Year Old Virgin or Role Models where I have to willfully not mind that the hero's emotional immaturity is defined against and made to aspire to a female character's more normative (and usually more uptight and way less funny) adult ethos. True Adolescents, written and directed by first-timer Craig Johnson and starring mublecore kid made good actor/writer/director Mark Duplass, imagines a different equation for how a juvenile thirty-something finally grows up.

Duplass's Sam hits all the major chords of an Apatovian man-boy. He's unemployed, he fantasizes about being a rock star, he performs the bare minimum of personal grooming, and he's a bit of a dick. But rather than position Sam against a love interest with more ambition and/or money (which seem to be metonyms for maturity in this genre), True Adolescents places him in juxtaposition with two, well, true adolescents: his teenaged cousin Oliver and his best friend Jake. After moving in with Jake and his mom (a predictably excellent Melissa Leo), Sam reluctantly agrees to take the boys camping after Jake's dad bails. The next three days expose, challenge, and recalibrate Sam's assumptions about what is valuable in his personality.

And that's what I really loved about the film. Rather than have Sam transform into a person radically unlike who he was before, the time he spends alternately joking with and bullying his companions, and the way he has to take control when Jake goes missing in the woods and he and Oliver get lost looking for him, forces Sam to emphasize aspects of his self--and his latent adulthood--that were there all along. To the film's credit, these woods are not metaphorical. They are dark and cold and dangerous, and Sam's stronger body, as well as his capacity for good-humored leadership, are crucial to surviving the night. True Adolescents argues that the reason Sam can become a man (and I'm using this gender designation because the major players were all male, though the film doesn't explicitly suggest this model is available only to boys) is because it's necessary. His maturity blossoms when it's needed--sort of like the seeds that only germinate in the heat of a forest fire. And, just like those trees, there's no going back once the process has been activated. The film concludes with a series of scenes that demonstrate the extent to which Sam isn't the same "greasy little bastard" he was at the beginning.

Another truly valuable--and, to my knowledge, unique--element of True Adolescents is its rigorous treatment of the casual homophobic language that serves as default slang in so many films of this type. The teasing-by-way-of-gay-slur that comes so naturally to Sam, and is already becoming second nature to boys Oliver's age, is shown to have real and potentially devastating consequences. Watching how this damage is thoughtlessly inflicted, and the attempts at repair, is one of the most moving tropes of the film.

Many thanks to the President and Creative Director of the Jonathan Alexandratos Movies You've Never Heard Of Collection for the recommendation.

Daylight: Why Hemingway Didn't Write Horror

Yesterday being Friday the 13th, I thought it apt to scan my instant queue for a horror movie. It would probably have been more apt to work on my composition syllabus, speaking of terrifying, but we all know that's not going to happen until the first day of class is hours, not days, and certainly not weeks, away. I came across Daylight, a "psychological thriller" from 2011. My other choice was A Horrible Way to Die. I chose poorly, which should be obvious from the titles alone.

Daylight is like a Michael Haneke movie in that evil inexplicably explodes into the lives of an upper-middle-class couple (Daniel and Irene) with shocking brutality. What's missing is Haneke's ability to make that very unknowability of suffering and punishment, though graphic and stomach-churning in its intimate visitation on a handful of human bodies, indicative of the human condition. There also aren't any animal mutilations in this film, which is actually a Haneke trademark that I didn't miss. The kidnappers in Daylight are polite and even affable, even as one calmly explains that he will be slitting Daniel's throat in four seconds. That's not a spoiler--Daniel manages to convince one of his captors that his father-in-law will pay millions for the safety of himself and his very pregnant wife. They leave to arrange the ransom, leaving Irene alone with the other two kidnappers, Renny and Leo, in a country house with a rather ominous bloodstain on the wall. (Is there any other kind?)

It's in the interplay of this triangle that the movie lives and dies, pun intended. As Renny and Leo alternately bully, seduce, console, and terrorize Irene, they do the same to each other. It's like if Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote a horror movie, but left out all the subtlety and strangeness that makes her theory interesting. So really, she would have done a better job. The positive reviews of this film, including one from the New York Times to which I've linked above, laud its tendency to withhold--to suggest rather than illustrate the troubled relationship between Irene and Daniel, the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between Renny and Leo, and the motivation behind the abduction in the first place.

But the problem is, a horror movie has to either tell or show you something. It's a genre that depends upon, and I'm paraphrasing Stephen King's great "Why We Crave Horror Movies," our capacity to emotionally empathize with the emperiled characters. If you go for the Hemingway-esque compression and extraction of pathos, as writer-director David Barker seems to, it makes such a connection difficult. In fact, the conceptual rhyme of Irene's pregnancy with the threat of impending death (the tagline is "Things die . . . new things are born") also smacks of Hemingway, but again, without the depth. Basically, what I'm suggesting is a Haneke adaptation of A Farewell to Arms. You're welcome, Hollywood.

The film is beautifully shot and had violent moments so shocking that they made me gasp, but it also felt overlong at an hour and fourteen minutes. Oh well. I have it on good authority that Daylight was  better than the 1996 Sylvester Stallone movie of the same title in which he battles concrete, so at least there's that.

The Swell Season: Falling Slowly Apart

If you haven't seen the 2006 Irish musical Once, do yourself, independent cinema, the republics of Ireland and Czech and the ideal of artistic collaboration a favor and do so immediately. I'll wait. Done? Wasn't it great? Now for The Swell Season. This 2011 documentary follows the stars of Once, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, as they tour with their eponymous band on the massive wave of popularity and recognition gained by the film and the duo's Oscar win for Best Song, "Falling Slowly."

The documentary is as impressionistic and natural as the film, shot in a beautiful black and white, so footage from performances and rehearsals, interviews with Hansard's fame-obsessed mother and pathologically disappointed father (who drank himself to death before filming ended), and testimonials from fans are given as much weight as the movie's most compelling thread--the dissolution of the professional and personal relationship between Hansard and Irglova.

Though Once is a modern-day fairy tale, it seems that both the stars played versions of themselves-- Hansard is as brash and loud as his scratchy and powerful tenor, whereas Irglova's delicate harmonizing corresponds to her more subtle strength and introspective personality. While this combination once fed the couple's creative and romantic energy--as Hansard wistfully remarks when remembering co-writing the songs for Once, "it was just so easy with this girl"--The Swell Season chronicles how that very interplay turns against the two, cannibalizing their love.

Irglova begins to resist and ultimately resent the way she has to make herself available to the public, an element of touring that the extroverted Hansard clearly thrives on. And his cheerful devil-may-care approach to deadlines and schedules begins to wear on Irglova's sense of responsibility. These two don't break up the way people do in the movies, with one partner clearly wronged. They break up the way people do in real life--with heartbreaking hesitancy, a little bit of meanness, and a lot of sadness. The Swell Season is a bittersweet but beautiful companion to the magical Once. But Jesus, it's Friday and it's a gorgeous morning, and not all love stories end this way, so let's leave this post on a hopeful note, shall we?

"We Were Here" Will Make You Proud to be an American

In a recent editorial,  Leonard Pitts argues that in order for America to be a great nation, and for Americans to be great, there must be a common cause around which we must unite ourselves. He cites the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II. David Weissman's 2011 documentary about the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, We Were Here, powerfully and movingly makes the case that this sort of mission and purpose can be not only provoked by warfare, but also by attacks much more intimate--disease and loss.

The film takes the form of an oral history, interviewing four men--a political activist, a volunteer to the sick, an infected artist, a longtime merchant in the Castro--and one woman, a nurse, about their experiences during the late 70s to early 90s, when AIDS was termed "gay cancer" and no one knew what caused it, how you caught it, or how to treat it. What makes these five individuals remarkable is the way, like firefighters, they ran towards the catastrophe, not away from it. As they calmly and lovingly narrate the of losses each one of them witnessed and suffered, poignantly and staggeringly illustrated on the macro level by visuals of the scores of young mens' obituaries, and on the micro by chilling before and after photographs of healthy bodies reduced to skeletons, the strength and resilience of these remarkable people is shown, not told.

The response of the San Francisco community captured by the film belies the heteronormative and homophobic argument, current at the time and sadly still extant, that characterizes gay men as narcissistic hedonists. Many of the infected, marginalized by their own families and their country, found themselves desperately ill and largely alone. What We Were Here demonstrates, through its title and the stories of the representative figures interviewed, is that San Franciscans gay and straight, male and female, white and of color, became a supportive family to men who had none, even when all they could do was help the sick to die. They cared for each other and buried each other with tenderness, humor, and love.

We Were Here also offers an informative look at the development of groundbreaking therapies and the political activism that has nearly transformed HIV/AIDS into a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. But it also serves as a primer on how to mourn the unspeakable, and how to recover from the apocalypse. It's a moving and welcome reminder that sometimes, America is home to the staggeringly brave.

Inspector Bellamy: If Agatha Christie were French

And those of you who have read the 1001 blog  know that is not an endorsement. First, why am I watching an obscure French film from 2009? Well, I have decided to work my way through my Netflix instant queue in order this summer. Why work through the queue? Because I have some fairly bizarre shit on there that I must have added for some good reason, and really there's no better time than the summer of my unemployment to wade my way through. And it is a version of clutter, which makes my Virgo self quite uncomfortable. Why in order? See Virgo self. I'm neurotic.

Why I added it: I think I thought it would be a charming country mystery. Gerard Depardieu stars as a retired Parisian inspector who solves a crime while on vacation. See? Charming! Shades of Hercule Poirot (who I know was a Belgie, not a Frenchie, but you catch my drift).

Should you add it? Well, imagine a charming country mystery that suffers a hostile takeover from a soporific French existential family drama. The inspector's cute quirks (loves gardening, talks over the day's clues with his beloved wife in bed) as he attempts to identify how the charred body of a homeless man turned up on the coast where he's vacationing, are quickly and irrevocably overwhelmed by the appearance of his ne'er-do-well brother and all the attendant angst. What could have been an enjoyable unraveling of the sloppy mess of adultery, insurance fraud, and radical plastic surgery that the inspector uncovers devolves into endless conversations about the Bellamy brothers' family dynamic. Yawn. The director, Claude Chabrol, is apparently a giant of French cinema, and this was his final film. So if you're a Chabrol completist, give it an add. If not, just re-read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. At least it has the decency to remain a murder mystery the whole way through.

Summer Lovin'

We’re sooooo close to our 500^th (!) post that I couldn’t wait any longer.  This is #499, which is really just here to take up some space so I can get to the one I actually care about.  So now I have to decide what to discuss.  Don’t worry, it won’t be another rant about James Cameron.  I won’t have more to say on that until the Avatar sequels come out.  Instead I’m going to talk a bit about what media addicts like myself do in the summer. 

First I’m going to reveal something very personal and shameful.  I like the Twilight movies.  I KNOW!  I know.  I’m not proud of it but there’s no denying that I own all the movies on DVD.  Last night I found myself with nothing to watch on TV.  I was busy playing with hairstyles and practicing my smoky eye technique for an upcoming wedding.  I’m a girl, I do these things.  Shut up.  So while I was doing that I needed something to be on my television for background noise purposes.  As most shows have ended there was nothing I really wanted to see.  What I should have done was watch the four episodes of The Vampire Diaries that are sitting on my DVR.  What I could have done was watch last week’s 2hr. Glee.  Instead I decided to hate myself a little and pop in Twilight 4.1.  This was the first time I had seen it since it was in the theater and I was really excited at the thought of fast-forwarding through the awful wolves talking to each other scene. 

So as I was hate-watching Twilight 4.1 it got me thinking about the upcoming summer shows.  Thank goodness for cable channels like USA that air their series twice a year.  I can’t wait for Suits, White Collar, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs to start.  Plus TNT has Falling Skies, which wasn’t perfect but was pretty darn good.  A&E has another favorite of mine, The Glades.  Both of those, along with USA’s shows, come back in June.

Oh and I need to also admit that I’m a big fan of dancing.  Whether I’m doing it or someone on my TV is, I love it.  I got tired of Dancing with the Stars and am truly grateful to Tracy for watching it for me.  So You Think You Can Dance is coming back for another season and I’m thrilled.  I’m less thrilled about the fact that there won’t be a second night a week for the results show and I’m curious as to how that will be handled.  Also on the dance front are Bunheads on ABCFamily and Breaking Pointe on the CW.  The former is a scripted show staring one of my Broadway faves, Sutton Foster.  It was created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls, so I’m sure to love it.  The latter, Breaking Pointe, is an unscripted show about a ballet company in Salt Lake City, Utah.  If you’re a fan of SYTYCD and even DwtS you’ll know that a lot of talented dancers come out of Utah.  I’ll let you form your own theories on why that is.  Suffice it to say, I’m looking forward to this one too.  Ballet, done well, is really the most beautiful form of dance and I know it’s probably also the toughest. 

So what else is going to be on?  I don’t have HBO anymore so I don’t get excited about True Blood.  Speaking of HBO I really want to see Aaron Sorkin’s new show, The Newsroom.  Hopefully that will make it to Netflix at some point.  Damages isn’t on FX anymore so I can’t get excited about that one either.  If I don’t stop myself now I’m gonna start rambling.  Huffington Post has a great schedule of all the summer shows and when they premiere so I recommend checking that out. 

The other thing I’ll be doing this summer is catching up on Netflix.  I haven’t been on there in months.  I plan to finally watch Doctor Who this summer and will be posting about it season by season (starting with the ninth Doctor).   

Also, I may even read a book or two.  It could happen.  I have been meaning to read Game of Thrones so maybe this summer is the time to do it.  And I hear summer is a great time for blockbuster movies so I'm sure Tracy and I will be busy seeing some of those too.

Go to hell, Lars von Trier: A fair and balanced review of Melancholia

I took a break from Fifty Shades Freed for this?

Oh how I've always hated you, Lars von Trier, using your pseudo-feminist plots as a flimsy cover for pervasive and disturbing misogynistic characterizations. And oh how I cursed your name when I heard about the plot of Melancholia. I wished it had been directed by anyone but you. The idea of conceptually rhyming a planet slamming into Earth with a woman's bout with clinical depression has such promise. Depression is a planet--one that you live on after it collides into you, obliterating the Earth everyone else is enjoying. That's how Ang Lee, David Fincher, Alfonso Cuaron, and even Quentin Tarantino would have filmed it. Hell, I think Brett Ratner would have gotten there by accident.

But you, you Lars von Trier, used this promising plot as an excuse to run every woman in the film through your exploitative, voyeuristic, and humiliating wringer. It's not a good sign for your film when you make your depressive heroine annoying, her sister impotent, and their mother a witchy harridan who makes the worst wedding toast in the history of cinema. (As an aside--worst wedding toast in the history of cinema is actually sort of a stiff competition. Old School, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Wedding Crashers--but the difference is, those screenwriters all knew that no one would ever say such a thing out loud at a wedding. Von Trier hasn't gotten the memo.)

Also, I've about had it with your pretentious, over-scored, self-indulgent opening set pieces. Though I suppose it was a fair introduction to the film's argument that women are most beautiful and magical when they've surrendered to death, and most hysterical and pathetic when they hope for survival. I might have even forgiven the misogyny--God knows I'm in good practice from my love for and compulsive rewatches of Fight Club--if everything in the entire movie wasn't such a heavy-handed half-baked Metaphor. When you already have a planet named Melancholia, you really don't need a wedding limo that can't get on the road, or a lost Edenic apple orchard.

Melancholia is notable for two reasons--the opportunity to see Alexander and Stellan Skarsgard act together, and the dubious honor of containing the most over-long and ultimately pointless wedding reception scene in modern cinema, unseating Deer Hunter. Other than that, I was alternately bored and pissed for two hours and fifteen minutes. I won't get fooled again, Lars von Trier.

Give It a Stream: Small Town Murder Songs

This film is like a novella by Faulkner, if he were Canadian and Mennonite rather than Mississippian and Christ-haunted. Small Town Murder Songs demonstrates a Faulknerian fascination with what happens when individual minds, bodies, and towns try to cope with the sort of epic passions and brutal violence that the Greeks invented drama to adequately capture. The film follows Walter (Peter Stormare), a middle-age police chief with a bloody past, as he struggles to subdue his inner demons while investigating a rape and murder in his community. The structure of the movie mimics the way Walter's mind consciously and subconsciously associates and revisits his own crime (and its harsh consequences on his romantic and familial relationships), while investigating the girl's death. The human impulse towards violence, which the film argues is pervasive and endemic, finds its objective correlative in both the bitchin' soundtrack--Canadian indie band Bruce Peninsula composed a series of pseudo-hymns and blues ballads that are shouted by a choir, hammering your brain like a baseball bat over shots of the deceptively tranquil landscape--and the religious exhortations that appear like chapter titles on the screen. Though the film only clocks in at an hour and fifteen minutes, its intricate characterization (aided by excellent performances not only by Stormare, but also Martha Plimpton and Jill Hennessy in supporting roles) and narrative pathos betray more sensitivity towards and curiosity about human beings than movies twice its length. Give it a stream!