Nevertheless, I accept that narrative is dead.  I’m in the seventh stage: snarkiness.  So even though Hunger Games is not especially dramatic, it’s vaguely fun to watch.  The truth is, unlike Twilight, there’s some there there, or there will have had been some there there, post revolutionary apocalypse.  And there’s a bit of campy good fun to watch the other characters, writers, CGI dogs, TV producers and despots doing everything in their power to prevent Ms. Jennifer Lawrence from actually killing someone and thus facing an ethical dilemma which might hurt her feelings.  Who can blame them?  I mean, look at that ponytail!  And to be fair, there’s also a sense of a lived in world, with the details that go with it.  The creepy sense of self-congratulations on the part of the show-makers felt congruent and complete.  Like all satire, it’s not about the future but the now: a somewhat arcane version of our relationship with reality TV, whereby we don’t watch it to enjoy it so much as watch it imagine what the other people who are watching it are like.

I look at this ticket and think: why didn't I remember to bring a spoon for the ice cream? The ones they give you are so small!

So as much as I enjoyed the set-up of the film, and might have enjoyed its weakass resolution, it all soon falls apart under the guidance of the the supremely incompetent Mr. Gary Ross, formerly of the execrable Seabiscuit, from which I take the above title (this is a line from the film, which my friend Alyssa pointed out to me, and by pointed out, I mean screamed out loud during the screening.  For future reference to all filmmakers, try to avoid bits of dialog that audience members can immediately yell back at the screen.  Things like ‘This is taking forever’, ‘I don’t see how anything could get worse’ or ‘Inception is just shitty filmmaking.  Why am I watching it?’  That last one is from The Bells of St. Mary for some reason.  Also memorable: ‘It’s warm’.  Yeah, you’re going to need to see Final Fantasy to get that.  I apologize.  And you’re welcome).  To be clear, Hunger Games could have been a perfectly serviceable night out.  What Mr. Ross so ably demonstrates is why we should never let directors make movies.  I’ve said that directors don’t make films, and I’m right, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t unmake films, something which Mr. Ross does with a knack verging on the uncanny.  The best you can hope for in a director is that they not fuck something good up; the best you can hope for in a director is a kind of competent nothing.

Mr. Ross fails this deceptively simple task, desperate as he is to demonstrate that directors matter, dammit!  As such, he must add his insight, of the ‘violence is bad’ variety, never you mind that we’re in the theater to see it.  The best way to prove this thesis is by making it real, man, ond the best way to do this is by shaking the camera really, really hard.  This technique is used frequently by another realism buff, Mr. Michael Bay, who notes that the ‘Bayesian’ technique (his name, not mine) of blurriness and fast inexplicable cuts is an appropriate substitute for action.  Technically, this is true; if we were on the set, we would see the camera man jumping up and down on an elliptical machine built out of miniature bouncy castles and say, ‘Hey, that is, from a definitional point of view, an action’.  Like watching a film about a TV show, this break between film and reality is not dissimilar to the game within the film itself, which seems to think an audience would watch something where the rules are changed at random, then changed back, then given CGI dogs for no reason.  And then changed again.  A reality show which breaks the covenant with the audience just so would become quickly boring, unlike the film we the audience are watching behind the scenes, which is boring for the same reason and because Mr. Ross can’t stop shaking the camera.

The shakycam effect extends, almost comically if it weren’t for the attendant nausea, to the surveillance cameras placed in trees by the titular show, as well as the possibly interesting but spoilt bit where three characters are on tiny slippery platform above the aforementioned CGI dogs, a scene where a sense of space is crucial, and so, to Mr. Ross, must be made completely imperceptible.  The only moment of respite is when the wide CGI cityscape shots come along.  I imagine how frustrating it must have been to explain to Mr. Ross that they can’t ‘shake the camera’ in the CGI shot.  I also imagine how long it would have taken.

And yes, I know that you can simulate the shaky cam effect in CGI, but Mr. Gary Ross doesn’t.  And the longer he doesn’t the better it is for your currently vomit-free shoes.  So…shhhh.

The exception to the feeling that your brain will explode are times when you’re being beaten over the head.  Like the close-up of the never break glass in Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, Mr. Ross shows us the apple, then Ms. Lawrence looking at the apple, then the apple again, then a man explaining that she wouldn’t shoot the apple, would she?, then a thought balloon with an apple and so on.  The last phrase of that sentence was an exaggeration, but when Mr. Stanley Tucci appears to explain that the bees with hallucinogenic venom may cause hallucination…as a hallucination, I am not exaggerating.  It’s the kind of directing is either terrified that we won’t know what’s going on, or unwilling to show us what’s going on.  Where’s the shakycam now, I asked?

Oh.  There it is.

She was eating a cake, for Christ’s sakes!  I had to make it real!

Thank God I speak perfect Spanish.

I almost travelled to London to see it. The ticket stub would have been better.

The reason this film fails so spectacularly is because of its success, the glimpses of authenticity you get the various hospital and legal office scenes which have no connection to the story, including an especially amusing – but in no way ironic, Sr. Pablo Trapero – bit where two semi-comatose fight victims come to next to each other, and, realizing that it’s them who put each other in the hospital, begin to go at it again.  The filmmakers did their homework, but they lack the dramatic ability to incorporate these details into the story and main characters, who half-assedly flounder around in something about how being a junkie is interesting and sometimes being a lawyer is bad unless it’s good.  It is the marked difference between NYPD Blue seasons 1-7, and NYPD Blue seasons 8-12.  They both had ex-cop Det. Bill Clark for background, who, during the years he spent as a detective in New York, had accumulated the amazing stories of betrayal, redemption and mind-numbing stupidity that occurred over scoring drugs, hiding bruises, embarrassing contests of manhood, and yep, even car accidents.  In seasons 1-7, the show had Mr. David Milch who possessed both the apprehension of characters who behave against their own interests – behavior which is also, incidentally, not ironic – and the ability to communicate this insight to an audience through dialog and story.  Sr. Trapero, like Det. Clark on his own seasons 8-12, either cannot penetrate the heads of the characters, or simply fails to make them congruent to a new and intriguing world.  Instead, they aimlessly wander about and check off their expected noir-y activities, and conveniently forget to make motivated choices.  Characters like that deserve to die.  In some sort of unspecified way, of course.

As a method for choosing films trailers fail as well as they simply give everything away.  Though as you’re about to find out, it’s totally okay when I do it.  But what about the rare instances when trailers just lie?  I’m not talking about the obvious lie, like when they show all the interesting parts, which creates the illusion that the film will be 9 parts good to 2 parts crap, and in so doing, spoil the good parts and the dilution ratio, leaving you with 0 parts good, and 283 parts crap.  I’m also getting it in chemistry, apparently.  So I’m not talking about the commonplace lie, but the fairly rare Marketing-Gone-Mad trailer, where some studio is stuck with an art movie, and they want to get their numbers up, so to speak.  In the case of Exotica, they cut a trailer make it look like a stripper thriller, and in the case of The Grey they cut it to look like Mr. Liam Neeson kicking some wolf ass.

The trailer had fluffy kitties, romping through the fields.

The problem, as is also the case with you, is me.  They’re making trailers that are preventing me from seeing the movie.  If I see a trailer about strippers, I’m going to think of Striptease, and pass out.  The blood rushed to my…feet to run away as fast as possible, ironically causing me not to run away.  Which must explain why I went ahead and saw Exotica, which is an exceptionally complex film about grief and has almost no school girl strippers in it at all.  The fact that I still liked it after that last sentence proves my point; it’s Mr. Atom Egoyen’s most coherent and complete work, and he’s pretty good as his job.  I was likewise disinclined to see The Grey, which violated the Road Warrior rule of doggies (incidentally the prospect of seeing the film was not helped by Mr. Joe Carnahan’s boneheaded move to have the actors eat real wolf meat.  I suspect this kind of crap is what keeps directors thinking that they ‘make’ films.  But we’ll get to that).  How did I know to see it?  Magic; there must have been something that mystically leaked through the trailer metaconsciousness.  Also boredom.  Jack and Jill wasn’t coming out for two weeks.

Two weeks.

So what is The Grey about?  It’s not about survival, or even killing wolves, despite PETA’s equally boneheaded protests to the contrary (and if anyone calls me anti-animal, I’m more than willing to feed their children to wolves to prove that I’m not), this is not a film or a character that hates wolves.  See the film that you’re protesting.  You never know; it could be about Jesus having sex.  With butterflies.

First of all, only two wolves die, and the first is early on, where Mr. Neeson shoots it to protect the pipeline workers, and compassionately spends a moment with it, hand on its chest, as it breaths its last.  I would have said ‘spoiler alert’ but that warning is about as visible to your brain as the speed limit sign in my village.  In fact, by not saying it, I give you the opportunity to blame me and not yourself, which makes me a vast improvement over the government.  I mean, they’re just passing laws to get off the hook.  Don’t blame me for your neighbor’s behavior; I put the murder statute in all caps with asterisks.

Moments after the above, the plane crashes (and this is a really nice scene engaged in the interfilm tension problem.  Ever since Alive, Fearless, and the surprisingly ignored Final Destination[no, not 2, 3 or 5; 1 and 3.  Duh]), directors have had to up the ante in regards to visualizing the absolute terror with which we human travelers imbue the world’s safest form of transportation.  Instead of more people sucked out of the fuselage, or physics bending planes-in-half-that-still-fly via Lost, this film provides us with less: the plane turbulence gets worse and worse and…we cut to 20 minutes later, and everyone’s asleep.  When it does crash, it’s quick, and finishes with the striking image of Mr. Neeson’s head as the snowy background approaches.  The point of interfilm tension is that you have to recognize not only what works for the film in relation to the real world, or the film itself, but what we’ve seen in other films.  And this one did), the characters did something very suprising: they told me it would have been easier just to make such a large parenthetical its own paragraph.  I ignored them.

They also did something else which I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen before.  An injured character asks Mr. Neeson am I going to be all right, and before I could think wouldn’t it be cool if for the first time in film history he said, ‘No.  You’re going to die,’ that’s exactly what he did.  Instead of the traditional ‘You’re going to be just fine, and death doesn’t exist except in movies’, this film suddenly transforms into a film about dying, and how different characters approach it, and it’s a positively – in both senses of the word – Unamerican film on the subject.  Metaphysical films get a bad, but totally justified rap because they all generally suck.  The Grey shows how metaphysical films need to be totally grounded in the real, like trying to survive in the wilderness real.  When you start to go all Reloaded and Revolutions, you get the faux metaphysics of Mr. JJ Abrams and Mr. Christopher Nolan, with the convenient of cop-out of maybe it was real, and maybe it wasn’t.  But it was.  Or was it?  Yes, in the sense that we are answering the second negative question in the affirmative.  Or are we?

Ugh.

Upon finishing the film, during which I cried three times (this is not totally that rare, but the film earns them), we reach the final shot, Mr. Neeson’s face, and the perfect expression of ragged pride, that it doesn’t matter if he lives: only that he fights.  It is rare thing when I think that should be the final shot and it is, so I asked myself, or, more accurately, imdB: who is this Mr. Joe Carnahan?  Upon learning, I was surprised.  Not because a terrible filmmaker had made a great film; I was surprised because despite the fact that I won’t shut up about how directors are not responsible for films, my fingers typing into the phone were telling me that I still had some residual belief in the auteur theory.

The auteur theory, at least according to my unconscious, states that directors are responsible for the final product.  My conscious mind tells me that this theory is about as useful as ‘From the toy company that brought you Transformers.‘

Sorry, you thought I was making that up.

The societé theory (that’s ‘corporation’ in French) is actually more valid from a predictive point of view, since 1) Battleship and Transformers will be exactly same film in every way and 2) I will be powerless to stop myself from seeing them.  By the way, this theory has actually been argued for real, and pretty persuasively; how else to explain the mess of studio filmmaking creating something like Casablanca?  We are unable to accept the societé theory because we need a more concrete way to imagine the infinite of number of events that a bunch of people fighting, fucking, agreeing, smoldering with rage, telling jokes, working 22 hour days, wondering why the quality of the work seems like it’s made by people who were really tired, and haggling with hookers so much that you forget to have sex that results, accidently really, in a movie.

But the biggest argument against the auteur theory is Mr. Carnahan himself.  He’s made some terrible, terrible films, and one great one.  They are furthermore bafflingly dissimilar, including Killers Are Nice As Long As We See Them in Slow Motion, (released in the US as Smokin’ Aces, and in France as That Entorage Guy Does Coke!), the bland Narc, and unwatchable The A-Team (I mean that literally, actually.  I never saw it.  Don’t blame me.  Blame Orange).  And still you believe that the director is responsible for the film, instead of the sheer random chance that keeps us alive from moment to moment.  Worse still, I believe it, having used the word ‘made’ instead of ‘mayde’ or ‘nothinged’.  Giving credit to one person instead of recognizing the incredibly delicate social complexity of the process: I mean, what would happen if we ran a country like that?

I’ve explained The Author Theory before, but I will restate: in the mess of people that contribute to a film, I believe in the writer as the one most responsible, around 7% responsible to be exact.  And now I’m going to prove it empirically.  As in any scientific inquiry, we need a mass of data to rule out coincidence and apocrypha.  Thus, I will add one more film to our dataset, making a total of two, which is twice as many as one.  If I added one more after that, it would only be 50% more, and one after that 33% more, so technically one more film is the most I can add.  Ah, what you don’t know about what goes on in the social sciences.  Anyway, the film I add is the reprehensible The Descendants, which also conveniently proves 2011 is the worst year in cinema history, which in turn proves that I’m right once again, which in turn bolsters the theory.

That’s why it’s called social science.

Now that 2011 is on the table and not beating us over the head with its ineptitude, we can dissect as we need to.  And though I’d have preferred to do it while it was still alive, we can at least say that 2011, for all its faults, had even more faults than we initially thought.  The Descendants is a film of its time, or at least its arbitrarily defined eight month period (look, the 80s was only a 4 year decade, and there’s no way I’m counting Drive Angry 3D as a 2011 film).  And I’ve talked about the Let’s Give Our Sociopath A Hug films, but in the case of The Descendants, that would be diagnostically inaccurate.  It’s a Let’s Give Our Narcissist Some Attention film.

Sorry, Fran, I know you enjoyed it. Please forgive me. I'm not so much wrong as I am correct.

Voice over narration is always a risk, more so when it’s a computer generated composite of test screening cards, and even more so when you force me to paraphrase: ‘Hi, I’m Mr. George Clooney,’ I’m 90% sure it began and then continued, ‘I’m super rich from all the land my ancestors stole from the Hawaiians.  I don’t like making hard decisions, so we’ll just have the ending be that I postpone the one actual decision I do have to make.  What a life-affirming moment!, I say, having unknowingly reached the tragic point when it’s the characters and not the filmmakers who decide whether or not something is a tragic.  Additionally, I’ve become so entitled, what with all my stuff, that the thing that really bothers me about my wife’s fatal coma is that she had an affair.  What was she thinking?  Didn’t she just hear how great I was telling the audience I was?  God, it’s almost like she’s incapacitated is some medical way.’

Keeping the paradise metaphor alive, as the film constantly does, this is a story that wants to be about how having everything doesn’t give you happiness, but comes across instead as the story of how having everything entitles you to whine about how you have everything.  Isn’t there more, it seems to ask, than everything?  It is a dispositively – in a completely incorrect use of the term ‘dispositively’, but I needed a double inversion – American film on the subject, the whimper of dying empire, complete with the nods from the academy to validate it.

The Descendants was nothinged by Mr. Alexander Payne, who was also credited as the director on Election, which besides being a vastly superior film, was actually a satire directed at the same personalities that we are now supposed to nod and take seriously, or rather, directed at the personalities that make films like The Descendents.  Following the author theory, it is important to remember that Mr. Payne adapts novels, whose authors determine the quality, wit, story, characters, and yep, even the ethics of the resultant film.

Now people say that you can’t talk about ethics when talking about film, and I would in turn say that those people aren’t so much wrong as they are evil.  Somehow, as dispassionate analysts, we are supposed to separate the art from the message, with the typical example of Ms. Leni Reifenstahl, who is ostensibly a great filmmaker with poor ethical taste.  The few of us who have actually seen her films know that she is in fact a terrible filmmaker whose poor ethical taste dragged her films from ash heap of history to the ash heap of basic cable.

Well made unethical films exist, and are both entertaining and irritating at the same time.  I would, and have, point(ed) to Children of Men or Forrest Gump (or, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure actually made by Bill and Ted) as examples of such films.  I should have a name for this genre.  The Good Evil Film?  The Good Evil 2: Ambiguous by Dawn Film?  The Descendants, utterly lacking in wit, insight or pace, is simply an Bad Evil film (which would be a better name for a film then a genre: The Bad Evil.  I can’t wait.  In fact, I’m already pissed off how much the trailer gave away); its lack of even a halfway recognizable moral core is a major part of why it fails.  It’s fine that its populated with a bunch of white people live in a place where somebody stole the land from somebody else; everyone on earth lives there.  It’s even fine that the characters have no idea that the fact they’ve been land stealing for 200 years straight might be part of the reason that things are starting to be slightly less good.  Like all things that are threatening to pull apart the social fabric of everyday existence, this is potentially funny stuff, not, as the film seems to think, profound life lessons.

Election, recognized this, and was funny because of and not despite this recognition.  Its moral rage is what makes it so watchable, the cries of an optimistic pretending to be a pessimist trapped in a world built by a bunch of people doing the same kind of pretending.  Ethics are irrevocably part of the filmgoing experience, slightly less important than lighting or casting, but way, way more important than the director.  The Grey is not a comedy, but the fact that it contains a smidgen of profundity about the acceptance of, and the struggle against, death helps be a better film about Mr. Neeson kicking wolf ass, or, as it happens, kicking nihilistic mortality ass.  If you want to make it a comedy, find some people who have everything and drop them in the arctic.  Don’t like your perfect life?  Here’s some wolves, fucko.  And after 90 minutes of having them argue over which color of microfleece goes with their PETA wolf protest app, the wolves hug them.  With their giant teeth.

Spoiler alert.

Speaking, once again, and as I often do, of time travel, I formulate yet another carrycoat, more relevant to our age: the premake.  Like the hateful Episodes 1-3 (it seems that terrible films can also ruin cinema forever), it’s not enough that we simply remake the film exactly the same as before as a sequel, we now have to make the exact same film, only that happened before the first.  It’s a given that we live in such an anxious age that we’re so terrified of not knowing what’s going to happen next, we now have to know what will have had happened in the future with robots that are somehow more technically advanced in the past.  Next.  And yes, it’s worse that you do know exactly what I’m talking about.

And so I was explicably off to The Thing (to clarify: hereafter we will refer to the 2011 The Thing as TT, and John Carpenter’s The Thing, as JC’s The Thing, as in WWJCTTD).  I was stuck in Brighton Odeon’s dreaded theater 8, where somehow all the seats are too close and too far to the right of the screen, but I was grateful: I wasn’t watching Hugo (and no, that’s not getting old.  You’ll find that post yesterday’s Oscar nominations, I’ll be using that reference point for a long, long time).  TT, for all its faults, and they are numerous, still contains moments of genuine tension and thinking things through, and even fairly decent digital and practical effects.  There’s something appealing to me, as to pretty much every one, about rules.  This is an interesting aspect of science fiction and horror films, that they create (the good ones anyway, even though Evil Dead 2 is one of the good ones and has no rules whatsoever.  I didn’t say I liked rules; I said I liked rules.  Keep up).  Zombies need to be shot in the head, and if you get bitten, you turn.  Vampires are burned by the sun, unless they become all sparkly.  If you make a tolerable film early in your career, you will be allowed to work forever and so on.  And if that means that Mr. Spike Lee will do a premakequel of Fearless Zombie Killers of Vampires, set in the 2012 version of 1984 that took place before 1973, so be it.  Or so will have had been it.

Rules provide us a structure that we so desperately lack in real life, which is why we have sports.  And you thought it was just to annoy me.  So we might call this The Zombies Make More Sense Than Reality Rule.  Aliens (and God knows will get to that) bleed acid, impregnate humans for male birth and so on.  Once the rules are established, characters can get into trouble, and then out of it, which is, well, storytelling.  The Thing (not TT or even JC’s The Thing, the actual creature) likewise has this potential, one which the latter took full advantage of, and one which the 2011 half-remembered reflection of a dream of someone who fell asleep watching the JC’s version on late night TV gets right once in a while.  These bits of business, that the thing can copy human beings, except for non-organic matter, leading the erstwhile Ms. Mary Elizabeth Winstead to start searching for filings in people’s teeth.  The fact that some people might be human and not have fillings (they’re Norwegian after all), isn’t a contradiction, but actually adds to the character’s doubt, and thus, yes, in a post-Hugo world, tension.

Even at a right angle, tolerable. For 2011, of course.

The problem, as is so often the case, is my time machine.  In films, it’s fine to go back in time to do exactly the same thing twice (As Carlos Santayana warned: ‘Those who know the net gross of the past are doomed to try to recapture it set in the further past.  For future grosses.’  I’m enjoying myself way too much with this), but in real life we are completely unable to go back to 1991 and prevent Aliens 3 from ever being made.  I know what you’re thinking: You had me at ‘I built a time machine to kill Cameron Crowe before he caused “You had me at” jokes.  Also for Elizabethtown‘.

This is a potentially embarrassing story, but it may explain a lot (I did say it was potentially embarrassing).  Like when the five year old me cried discovering that the Pet Rock did not, in fact, do anything except be ironic, there was some 1980 book that was trading in on the whole Alien thing, which I, unlike you, actually did see in the theater, without a guardian (and yes, I’ve always looked 42.  The only advantage to this is turning 43).  Wanting, like so many of us do, to replicate the feeling of being totally terrified, I bought this book, the title of which totally eludes me, which claimed to ‘begin where Alien left off’.  It did in the temporal sense having technically been published after Alien came out, but having no aliens, taking place on present day earth, and just kind of sucking, otherwise did not.

But think of that: ‘begins where Alien left off’.  Not without giving Mr. James Cameron his due, that’s a great idea: the Aliens come to future earth.  In 1979, CGI didn’t exist, so a film like this was not financially feasible.  In present day, we have CGI, but no time travel to take us back to when studios would actually make a film that took place after the one we just made.  Even in 1986, when the excellent, and in many ways superior Aliens came out, Mr. Cameron had to make due with rear-projection and four, that’s right, four alien suits.  But it’s the future now, and we can seemingly afford to show whatever we want (thanks largely to Mr. Cameron), which leads us to simply show everything.  Except nudity, of course, which would entail showing everything.

Without the benefit of time travel, we make the baffling Aliens 3, and the equally dull Aliens v. Predators films, which can have scenes of thousands of aliens overwhelming a Mayan temple for the trailer, but not a movie that would logically have such a scene in it.  Unless you count the making of documentary with executives sitting around talking about cool it would be if we had a scene where thousands of aliens overwhelm a Mayan temple for the trailer (see: ‘a-scene-where-ism‘).  This leads only to another question: is it worse that they’re out of their minds on coke and hookers (out of their minds on coke on top of hookers) or that they aren’t?

In the place of Things or Lots of Aliens, we get the inert version where we know exactly how everything ends (the Swedes chasing the dog, Darth Vader saying, ‘Noooooooooooo!’ and so on).  From a temporal perspective, this creates more problems than it solves: in the universe of JC’s The Thing, no one on the mainland knows that there’s an alien ship crashed in the Antarctic.  In the universe of TT, taking place before the story, Americans come to the Norwegian’s rescue (placing this in the genre of Save Me, Whitey Save Me, where white people are saving, well, much whiter people.  Given the fact that Norway has virtually no crime, social equality, great cinema and access to natural resources, shouldn’t they be saving us?  The answer from a Hollywood film perspective is no, because they don’t speak English.  Except that they actually all do.  What can I say; coming from an English speaking country means we don’t know this), so now, the outside world does know about the crashed alien ship.  Likewise, the upcoming Promethius, the upcoming prequel of Alien actually made by the hack that future/past Mr. Ridley Scott became/always was, will have to explain how humans discovered the aliens and just forgot to tell anybody.  It seems that just because the past future has more advanced technology than the future past, doesn’t mean they have telephones.  Or common sense.

I acknowledge that I like my films about the undead running amok in a 2046 feather tannery based on Jane Austin’s The Wasp Factory to be realistic, but I can forgive some illogic in story-telling.  No, this requel of the premake thing is about something weird, what I guess we’ll call the comfort of trailers.  Now I despise trailers, and have made concerted efforts to arrive just as the hateful Orange ad starts (or in the US, the hateful THX mascot, whose body I imagine riddled with very well acoustically rendered bullets each time.  I suggest you do the same).  I am reminded of the last great trailer, for that of The Matrix, which simply had Ms. Carrie Anne-Moss whispering to Mr. Keanu Reeves; ‘do you want to know what the matrix is?’  And you know what: we did.  It’s as if they believed making a good movie meant the trailer wouldn’t actually matter.  The gall of it.

But this is another period to which we cannot travel.  No, we live in a time where more and more is being shown in the trailers, made worse by the fact that you can actually see them online.  Well, after you wade through an advertisement for a service that places ads in front of what are in fact advertisements themselves that is.  Trailers that show everything culminated in the otherwise forgettable The Double, which yes, I am allowed to comment on even though it hasn’t come out yet.  I’m allowed to because I’ve seen the trailer, which includes everything: the end, the surprise after the end, and the surprised look on the faces of the executives when they find out that if you base an entire movie on surprises and then give them away, people will not see your movie.  How the trailer manages to have more content than the film itself, I’ll never know.  It has something to do with the T.A.R.D.I.S., I think.  I’m not a scientist.  It may also be all the subliminal penguin jumping-jack wah-oooooh-ga messages.

Penis.

And so, like parents spawning kids to donate organs to their terminal older children, movies are, for worse and for especially bad, trailer donors.  And this is your fault.  Why?  Because you don’t hate trailers, possibly for two reasons, or really just one that leads to another.  Because you just don’t see as many movies as I do, 1) you’ll probably only see the trailer once, and never see the movie, which 2) means trailers, by virtue of their being the world’s most expensive short films, are in many ways the best part of the total experience.  The reason you don’t see as many movies as I do is, of course, because they are terrible.  What do you expect from films made for the express purpose of being good trailers?

This is the gateway reason to the third, which has to do with the new narrative.  In a time when children can’t go to schools within 500 yards of suggestive advertising (this is in case their spleen becomes traumatized, and thus not viable for their older sister), it seems even the slightest unsettlement is too much of a risk.  Movies like Hugo and the Twilight series are themselves devoid of tension, but this type of trailer makes the experience of going to any movie an experience likewise.  Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol probably wasn’t good (it didn’t help to get charged IMAX prices for digital projection, which will probably be another rant soon enough).  But the trailer gave away pretty much everything, so I’ll never know.  As you check off your list of what you’ve seen in a trailer, the only surprise is the order in which things happen.

And I get it; it is comforting.  We want to live in a world without accidents.  It’s fun.  Well, not fun, but all the work that goes into preventing the possibility of fun certainly is.  I don’t mind that I have to travel in a plastic bubble to the movie theater (until we find out that the plastic might be carcinogenic, of course.  Or a child molester), but when I get there, I want to be scared and excited and cry and certainly not be bored.  The new narrative, and again, I blame you, is like what therapists hear all the time.  Not ‘I want to be happy, but I don’t want to change’, but ‘I want to experience excitement, but can we do without all the excitement?’

Like the baby that learns to avoid touching all the scalding hot baby mines I leave out, we grow old and learn to avoid disappointment.  Which is fine if you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; in that case, you can actually die.  But in the case of films, you’re ruining it for me.  Film is about risk, and I’d much rather see an explosive disaster like Margaret (I really do see anything, but I confess a weakness for films put on the shelf for three years) or Cowboys and Aliens or even Hugo (after which I was pissed, and yeah, that counts as feeling something) knowing that by doing so, a We Need To Talk About Kevin or even a Underworld: Awakening was coming down the pike.  But as trailers lull you into the sense that it might be safe to experience the movie, we’ve let risk management seep into a place where it’s actually okay, and sometimes even beneficial, to be hurt.  We don’t want to see a bad movie, so we just make the entire experience of seeing a movie average.  Which is much, much worse than bad.  

Also, the ice cream sandwich was pretty good. Not Bercy Ciné Cité good, but pretty good.

Post Hugo, it can be said that nothing irritates me more than idiotic film critics, not even idiotic films.  And just as the reprehensible Hugo needs an attacker, poor rotten tomato target The Darkest Hour needs its defender.  Yes, the characters are as cardboard as can be, and the film a little dull in parts, but like the equally forgettably titled Time Out or Out of Time or Time to Time Out of Time, or whatever it was called, this is a film that does what it says, and God knows there are so few of those.  This is what my friend Richard calls 7 out of 10 films, which is all he’s looking for.  He’s right, but I call them unaware films just to be different.  There’s no time for references or self-aware nods, because you have to watch out for the monster.  Or very, very silly wigs.  Sorry, you haven’t seen Time Without a Place Before Time Out.  There are wigs in it.

The Darkest Hour is far from perfect, or far from even necessarily good.  There’s an especially egregious violation of what I will call the I, Moron rule.  It’s the idea that it’s okay to risk the lives of everyone on earth as long as you Save The Girl.  It probably should be called the Saving Private Ryan rule given that that film was about 20 men dying to save one, this despite the fact that such an ethos was the exact opposite of what World War II was about.  But I think the otherwise entertaining I, Robot is more appropriate, as the ending involves telling a robot to risk the entire planet for the life of The Girl.  Mr. Will Smith is teaching said robot the actual principles of humanity, at least 21st Century US carpet bombing humanity, though I fear that this intolerance of even the slightest idea of sacrifice or risk in the face of difficult choices and uncertain futures may get us into trouble down the line.  I mean, if W.E. and New Year’s Day are both at 12:30, what is humanity to do?

Oh, and the theaters are exactly the same number of steps away.  Yeah, you thought you wiggled out of that one, didn’t you humanity?

What’s worse, my boredom (the concern of all of Hollywood) with making the girl the victim could be solved so easily, by giving her some ability or even just some geegaw that is vital to shooting monsters, making it part of the story to go after her (or God forbid, make her part of the story).  This is in place of our typical weak girl climax, which is not at all what it sounds like.  I hate feminism as much as the next girl in a bikini drinking beer, but I really hate boring narrative.

But The Darkest Hour, for the most part, I had a good time.  The monsters make internal sense, the characters only occasionally act like complete idiots, and characters take themselves seriously, just as the filmmakers don’t, the perfect combination when there are monsters around.  This is what I mean by the Unaware Film, which involves a lot of awareness.  My praise is crucial, and perhaps a bit desperate, since this is the first film of the year, and so the auger of 2012.  Though it would be literally impossible to have a worse cinema year than 2011, I’m reminded of those ads that say no toothpaste works better.  This is adspeak for the technical reality that they’re all the same, and so the last thing I want to hear, from myself, I suppose, is that no 2012 works better.

I would say, however, that the signs point to 7 out of 10 cinema.  Damn Richard, his saying is just better than mine.  There was some controversy between me and my editor before the Glecknor 7 incident over whether or not the first film of the year should be a UK or US release.  The Darkest Hour came out in the US on Christmas, and on January 17th here, meaning it could be great, but 2012 wouldn’t know the difference.  As much as a year can know things, that is.

There was thus a lot riding on Haywire, as it was the first film in both US and UK release.  I postponed a trip to Paris to see on Wednesday, so how could I not be disappointed?  Yet worrying about my expectations meant that I was expecting to be disappointed, and so my feelings were neutral.  Yes, but were they neutral enough?  In fact they were too neutral, as Haywire turned out to be another 7 out of 10, though it’s a slightly different 7.  Maybe Gill Sans or something.  But definitely in the Helvetica family.  While Mr. Soderberg has maintained a flair for space and thematic (as opposed to temporal) editing, Haywire has that certain Lem Dobbs feeling, and upon seeing his name in the credits, the foibles of the film suddenly made sense.  Learning that for Mr. Dobbs anyway, this film was about a ‘woman’s emotional journey‘, we can only be grateful that Mr. Soderberg was wise enough to make that emotion ‘feeling good after beating the crap out of people’.

And after today’s screening of Underworld: Awakening, I have to say, 2012 is looking good.  This film was better than either two previous (from my strict narrative point of view), and the first straight up decent genre film in the last year and a half.  There’s lots of good gags (if I had seen the trailer, I’m sure it would have spoiled the film by giving them away, which I will do now for you: a girl ripping a werewolf’s head in half, Ms. Kate Beckensale shooting a hole in an falling elevator so that it falls around her, silver grenade shrapnel in a fan and so forth.  I’d feel bad, but it’s your own fault; you shouldn’t have seen the trailer), and an impressive pace.  After 40 minutes of solid action and story, I just didn’t care if the rest of it was terrible: I had my one good Hollywood film of the year, and it was only January.

Can't find the ticket for Haywire, but this one will be worth a fortune someday.

Can I say also, one of the appeals of the film is the inverse of the Superman Is An Asshole rule, which I used to call the Adonis Villain rule, but this title is better, and clearly I’m feeling a little threatened over my friend Richard’s ability to wax metaphorical.  Anyway, Underworld: Awakening is actually smart/lucky enough to create an environment where vampires are the de facto victims of a genocide (not so subtly called a ‘cleansing’ in the film).  The thing of it is, and it bears remembering, we identify with victims, not heros, and their superhuman powers are balanced by the external threat.  I’m sure Richard will come up with a name for this that’s better than the Claude Reins rule, but he’s not getting the credit.

And that’s what I mean when I say keeping it short.  If only there was some kind of job that monitored the length of writing…

In Time.  That’s the name of it.  Who comes up with these generic and completely unforgettable titles?

…and structure.  Monitored structure.

I already said.  Because I just saw Hugo.  Pay attention.

Hugo, though not the worst film of the worst year in cinema history (come on: it’s competing with Cowboys and Aliens and Green Hornet and (shudder) Elle s’appalait Sarah, which are fucking Hall-of-Famers (oh, crap, forgot about Meek’s Cutoff.  2011, you can go to, I don’t know, an existential desert of indecision, sociopaths and drug-addled improvisation.  Ah, 2011 hasn’t actually seen any of those movies.  2011, you can go to Hell), it’s probably only the sixth worst film of the year.  I’d make a list, but I don’t want to please you by giving you something to argue with.  Instead, I will displease you by being correct about everything), nevertheless represents its nadir.  Why?  Since Mr. Scorcese’s overpraised abomonation, even in the case of the extremely dull La fille du puistatier (see ‘I will see anything’ above), I will inevitably write in my notes ‘Still, it’s better than Hugo‘.  And it is.  Everything is.  Even movies that are worse than Hugo are better than Hugo.

If I'd seen it in 3D, I'd be dead. Where is Thelma Shoonmaker when you need her? She was there all along.

It is a watershed film, really more like pus breaking out from an open sore, so a pus-shed film.  As such it allows cinema once again to flourish, or whatever cinema can do in a river of pus.  Such historical moments manifest great mystical signs in the world, as tacos with burn marks that look like James Van Der Beek, or film cans swimming in pus, and Hugo was no exception, since, filled with rage as I was after, I had forgotten to transfer the Brighton football times to my calendar.  Actually, I had transferred them, but neglected to put an alarm that screams ‘Stay off the trains, idiot!  For God sakes, stay off the train’.

What’s that now?  Well, we have sports here in Britain, more specifically football.  In Brighton, we have the Brighton Seagulls, a seemingly inoffensive title in a world gone mad with political correctness.  In fact, the Brighton seagull, like the Brighton Seagull, is one evil fucker, who will take a sandwich out of your hand in mid-flight.  This is not hyperbole.  I’ve seen this happen, which would be bragging if everyone in Brighton hadn’t seen the same thing everyday.  They’re Brighton seagulls.  They’re almost as bad as Brighton Seagulls.  Football, being ‘fun’, seems to merit various rioting and senseless beatings, and so the The Authorities, in an actual case of political correctness gone mad, decided to outlaw the selling of alcohol at football games.  This action, needless to say, completely solved the problem of social drinking forever.

No it didn’t.  What it did do is ensure that the aforementioned Seagull must get so mind-splittingly drunk before the game that the effects don’t wear off for its entirety, in case, you know, you might become conscious enough to discover that you are, in fact, watching football.  Football being ‘fun’.  As such, getting on the train before the game is…unwise.   Now, I like to type my notes into my laptop right away, as I often write things like: ‘It’s genius!’, or ‘Make it stop.  Please, just make it stop.’ with no reference to what ‘it’ may be, and, more often than not, with ‘it’ referring to exactly the same thing.  So it helps to get it all down before my brain fills up with useless things, like the name of that guy who was in that thing, or my PhD.

This, needless to say, was in no way acceptable to our erstwhile Brighton Seagulls.  Keeping my head down and eye contact non-existent, I still engendered comments like, ‘He just won’t stop typing.’,  ‘I bet he’s writing about football.’,  ‘What’s he writing?’.

I got the impression they were talking about me.

What I was writing, incidentally, was ‘What’s the matter with them, godammit?  I have an unpaid and non-existent job to do!’  But football – being ‘fun’ – meant that they had nothing else to talk about, and my presence on the train was a baffling abomination.  I must have looked like a communist.  Or an Arsenal supporter.  Ugh.  I can’t believe I actually know what that means.  I’ve lived here so long, I’ve turned into a communist.

But as they piled out at Falmer station, to suffer more than I ever would, I knew it was the end, the crawl out of the trough.  The infected grapefruit sized pustule had exploded and it was over.  I had seen Hugo, so even if I had made the mistake of actually looking up from my computer, and taken my well-deserved beating, I would have thought, as the rib cracks echoed through the compartment, Still, it’s better than Hugo.

Why do I hate this shit film, which not incidentally recently won the National Board of Review best picture you might ask?  I think because it is basically the same film as Twilight, but with unjustified praise instead of inexplicable popularity.  As an exemplar of The New Narrative, things just sort of happen without choice or context, careful not to evoke any emotion that we might have to explain to our kids: PG13 – may contain scenes of slight jeopardy of losing her dolly.  Don’t worry she finds it right away.  Also sci-fi decapitation.

Sir Ben Kingsley takes away Hugo’s notebook, and thus all hopes of Hugo ever discovering his father’s secret…and then immediately gives it back.  Ms. Chloë Moretz is lost in the train station crowd…for a second, and then Hugo finds her, and then inexplicably finds the key to the painstakingly creepy automaton, thus instantly solving the film’s main mystery halfway through.  The two characters turn the key, it begins to draw, stops…and then starts again.  One more turn of the key, and it picks up a cleaver…and just starts killing.

No, it doesn’t, but if it did, Mr. Scorcese would find a way to make sure no one got hurt or scared.  It is an extraordinarily flabby film, the dialog equivalent of:

‘It’s true’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Because it’s true!’

which would be an impressive parody indeed if I hadn’t lifted it word for word from the film.

Likewise, the movie’s great mystery is then solved halfway through, leaving us with nothing to do but look at our watches, and write encouraging self-help notes to oneself like, ’45 minutes.  You can do it!’ as the massive Gare de Montparnasse tower clock transforms into the achingly slow sweeping hands at the back of the geometry class, where you accidently learn math by calculating that 14 minutes is in fact 840 seconds.  839.  838.  837.  Hey!  You!  Hugo!  Stop hanging from the clock!  You’re slowing down time!

Now to be truly awful, A Life Less Ordinary or Nine Months awful, a film must also contain a hateful message.  Hugo saves this for the end, and I was surprised by this to be honest.  Not that it would be despicable, no, that fit.  After an hour of moaning why he had given up filmmaking, I just though the film would ignore this potential conflict and Mssr. Méliès would suddenly be happy again.  On one hand, I wish that they had.  On the other, I’m glad they gave me a reason to really fucking hate it.  Hatenfreude.

We learn, very, very, very eventually, that Mssr. Georges Méliès gave up films because after World War I, people were too depressed to see his movies.  In a rhetorical idiocy that baffles even the most uncommon decency, it argues that the great tragedy of the event that changed Western civilization forever isn’t the death, the futility of death, or even the reverberations of violence that led directly to another event that changed world civilization forever.  It’s that George Méliès was sad.  Don’t worry George!  We’re going to organize a tribute for you, and we’ll show your films and everyone will applaud.  Congratulations, Mssr. Méliès.  You are loved!  Your career matters!  I’m getting teared up just thinking about the importance of film restoration.

But the real congratulations goes to Mr. Scorcese, who was smart enough to praise you in the first place, and by proxy, the critics who praise him.  This should explain the film’s popularity among those who see films for a living: a film where the statement: ‘Let’s have an adventure!’ means, and I’m actually not kidding or paraphrasing, going to the cinema.  I’m trying to think of something more boring than watching someone watch a film.  Ah, got it: watching someone watch a Charlie Chaplin film.  Hugo‘s inevitable conclusion is that the real casualty of war is our dreams.  And film restoration, of course.  And possibly some nameless dead people who don’t make movies.  In the interest of democracy, let’s not write them off entirely.  I mean, we need an audience to applaud at film tributes, don’t we?

After this, I had to see anything, even if it was a ‘the’.  Thing, that is.  Article follows.

The second option is that you do read French.

Sunday. 9a. Bought tickets in advance. They had to open the theater just for us. We were right to do so. There were, like, three other people there.

Now, I totally support blaming Twilight series for the downfall of girls 9-15 everywhere.  And I admire any balls-out (yep) feminist power argument.  But halfway through Twilight 3.1, I began to suspect that this was in fact a weirdly feminist film.  You may say that I have no right to say this, as I have a penis, but that’s getting into a tricky area, since women clearly should and do have the right to have penises.  The reason that I have no right to say this is that it’s a completely idiotic argument.

Hasn’t stopped me before: action films are about the boy’s fantasy, flying around the city with webs that in a spider would come out your ass, but in this case come out of your arm for some reason, blowing stuff up, being aloof, and keeping as many hot girls on hold until you need to kiss them.  Twilight 3.1 is crap to be sure, but one could argue that this is no different than any action film, only that it switches the gender to which the fantasy is directed.  The wedding scene, which seems to happen in real time, doesn’t contain plot points but visual details, secret feuds and quick glimpses of memory.  That’s what the flowers would look like!  I can’t believe she wore that.  And that guy would say something at the toast; that was funny.  But now I’m getting bored.  Which is strange, since it’s technically my fantasy.

The shared dream running under either form of nonsense is not wanting to take responsibility for anything.  In the boy version, it manifests in the villain who always stupidly draws his weapon at the end so you can shoot him ethically, even though the fantasy manifests the villain, the villain’s action, and two hot girls who are like totally into you.  Oh, and also the murder.  But, naturally, no responsibility or hard choices.  The girl version is even less interesting.  Choice, risk, tension is to be avoided at all costs.  Here Edward confesses that he is a killer, but…he’s kills serial killers.  Bella ‘chooses’ to keep her baby, even though it would kill her to abort it (see anti-avortement, below), thereby rendering the choice moot.  It manifests visually as the styrofoam cup that Edward puts blood in so Bella can survive.  It’s not blood, so the characters seem to be saying, it’s a high-iron smoothie.  In the girl version, it’s okay to live a world where you drink blood, where vampires and werewolves run around killing each other, but we wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

The price of this is narrative slackness.  As Mlle. Frau-Meigs rightly argues ‘(Il y a) deux univers paradoxaux, normalement irréconciliables – les valeurs de la liberté des femmes et les valeurs de l’autorité masculine – dans un récit où l’héroïne ne choisit pas.‘ or ‘Belle has no actual power or ability, other than being cute and kind of bitch’.  She doesn’t actually do anything, and in fact, makes a point of not choosing for four movies.  Having just seen the emasculated (yep) Frk. Noomi Rapace in the equally slack Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, writing scenes for girls to sit there and have nothing to do isn’t anti-feminist, it’s just fucking boring.  When are filmmakers going to realize: giving the woman power as the central figure in a narrative is the only way to further feminist agenda and make them super hot?  How does anyone lose here?  That’s feminism!

Right?

I should really get back to something safe, like making fun of Marxists.  Or war heroes.  Or babies.

Actually, I’m getting to that.

It would be easy to see my casual misogyny as an insult, since it probably is one, but even if you could divide a species into two exactly defined halves, let’s face it, boys aren’t really that much better.  Girls are, justifyably, grossed out by the parts that we like, faces peeling, retributive gunshots, and competent narrative.  Last cheap shot, I promise.  The reality is what girls want is equally as foolish as what boys want, only without the ridiculous anger and inexplicable violence.  But what makes for a shitty and nearly unliveable world makes for exciting cinema.  And everyone agrees: a world filled with misery and war is a small price to pay for good storytelling.  No, really.  Look around you.  Everyone actually does agree.

But please, let’s stop insulting Mlle. Frau-Meigs’ political agenda, and begin to insult her intelligence.  Having finished off the anti-girl-pouvoir part, we reach the anti-avortement argument, which is just technically incorrect.  First of all, name a film or television show since Maude – that’s right since Maude – where a character gets an abortion.  Really.  You can’t because there isn’t one.  We’ve reached a very strange cultural point when Juno is considered edgy for doing something that every film character has ever done: kept her baby.  (‘What are you rebelling against?’  ‘What kinda rebellion ya got?’).  If the new Twilight movie is anti-abortion, then every movie ever made is.

Ah, right.

But there’s a second problem, which will bring us back to why this entire bit was to be an aside in the earlier piece.  Having just seen a temporal double feature of We Need To Talk About Kevin, convincingly showing the guilt and powerlessness of the mother over her grown sociopathic child, and Twilight 3.1, which depicts having babies as the disgusting version of a David Cronenberg slug rape, I mean, I wasn’t going to have babies, but now I’m really really not going to have babies.  Whatever Ms. Meyer thinks her agenda is, or says it is, or what Mlle. Frau-Meigs says she says it is, there is also her weird unconscious which, well, you know, wrote the damn books.  Upon walking out the ostensible PG-13 version of a baby trying to eat its way out of its mother’s womb, I immediately made an appointment for sex reassignment, just so I can have tubal ligation.

Which leads us to our final illusion, one which Mlle. Frau-Meigs and I both share.  In hers, watching the Twilight films transforms their target audience into the kind of passive robots that would, you know, pay good money to see Twilight films.  After they travelled in time to see the first Twilight film of course.  In mine, the visceral body horror and actual consequences of having kids depicted herein would send its audience to the nearest sterile-o-matic concession, whatever that is.  Neither will happen because people pay money to see films, not the other way around (though how money would pay films to see people is lost on me).  This is the kind of illusion that compels people to show The Boost or 28 Days to recovering drunks, an idea better served by showing The Green Hornet, the consequences of writing, acting in, editing, marketing, and forcing us to sit through a movie while high.

Even then it wouldn’t work.  It’s possible to make the argument that films make people do stuff; they certainly make them keep paying for more films.  But even if films do magically transform people into agenda zombies, we’re faced with the same problem.  We fantasize about rewriting, editing and censoring films because it seems a practical way to transform all those people who just plain refuse to do what we want, even if we did pay a thousand bucks for Final Cut Pro.  But in order to do that, we have to acknowledge that films don’t arise sui generis, like flies from The Green Hornet.  No, they’re made by people, whose minds we’d have to change…by showing them films?  And so, in our zealous righteous blindness, Mlle. Frau-Meigs and I are both idiots.  And that’s feminism.

Did I get it right that time?

But whether this is causal or correlative, it can be said that the filmmakers in question began a decline soon after their most complete and personal work, some of whom (Mr. Cronenberg in particular) never recovered.  I acknowledge that what with all the money involved, it’s much easier to give the Longbowman’s Salute to the critics if you’re a painter, or some idiot writing a blog.  But we do this to be liked, and it hurts bad enough when people don’t like your Legend’s or Topaz’s, but you when you do something amazing, and no one really notices, it’s like when the horrible girlboyfriend breaks up with you.  And it leads to the same place: maybe I should just give up, dress schumpy, get some cats and make Hollywood Ending.

It could happen to anyone.

And so I must praise, and praise loudly, Ms. Lynne Ramsey and her, yes, exceptional, We Need To Talk About Kevin.  This is a film that played at this years Cannes, and was overlooked for the A-Narcissist-Suddenly-Figuring-Out-He’s-Going-To-Die-Is-The-Same-Thing-As-Insight-At-Least-To-Another-Narcissist’s Tree of Life.  But surely best-director, dear jury?  No, they reply, because we’re art-types and we’ve never actually seen an action movie (or any of the better films it was based on), let’s award that to the soulless, and confusedly boring Drive.  My first reaction to finding this out follows unedited:

‘Re: Cannes, Of course it doesn’t win against The Tree of Life or the shockingly bland Drive.  It actually has an emotional impact and competent filmmaking.  How can someone make something so astonishing, not get any praise, and keep the hell going?  I’m so glad I don’t do this anymore, if the shit they’re praising is Drive.  Fuck everybody.  I’m going to Cannes next year to scream at all the idiots.  From my extremely expensive hotel balcony.  Hey, jury member?  What’s the gravitational velocity of a 2008 Vauve Clicout from 20 stories?  The correct answer is you’re dead.’

I think you’re probably more shocked to find out that what you read here are, in fact, edited, versions of what I write.  And that I haven’t the faintest idea how to spell ‘Veuve Clicquot’.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Have Unprotected Sex

In the first few minutes, how would I have known that WNTTAK would be the best film of the year, and in fact the best in a long time?  It begins much like Tower Heist (which I’m fairly certain is a sentence you will read nowhere else).  Tower Heist, slight but vague, opens as all movies do: with the money shot.  Either crane shot transitioning to helicopter view of the city that runs through the iris of the main character, or overhead zombies turning into the bacterium that infects the zombies and we zoom out to reveal…zombies, pretty much every filmmaker, even the erstwhile Mr. Brett Ratner, thinks about the first few shots of the film.  Having gone over the script eight billion times, it’s just the part you know the director has read the most before they got bored, leading them to actually take the trouble to visualize it.  The fact that this is typically one or two pages should not discourage us.  Unless we’re actually paying money to see movies, of course.

My notes, almost in their entirety: 'Nice Font'. Never a good sign. Also, possibly a very good sign. Don't remember if I was ambivalent or indifferent.

And so, the first few minutes of We Need To Talk About Kevin, cut between the red of an unexplained tomato festival, and the red paint thrown on Ms. Tilda Swinton’s home in retaliation for her son’s mass murder (also unexplained).  ‘Strong, but can she keep it going?’, or so say my notes.  I had been hurt by Brett Ratner before, you see.

Everyone thinks about the first few shots of their film, and Ms. Lynne Ramsey is no exception, only she has thought about the first few shots of her film because she has thought about all of them.  Speaking on the visuals alone, there isn’t a single moment of laziness.  In fact, given the fact that you get your narrative information in dribs and drabs, her visual skill acts as a kind of CGI, which may be another sentence you won’t read anywhere else.  Let me explain:

There’s always going to be boring bits in films; if it was all narrative… okay, once again, that would be great, but in the real film world (as opposed to the real world in film), there are going to be parts where nothing is happening to propel the story forward, as in the title sequence of, I don’t know, anything, where we see the guy parking, turning off the car, checking the parking brake, opening the door, checking the parking brake again, crossing the street and finally exclaiming: ‘Story.  There you are’.  In recent years, CGI has taken up the fight against unskilled filmmaking, with the excesses of Mr. James Cameron being the most obvious example: you’re not bored silly audience member, look at the shiny thing over there!  And so, like seeing a nanobot climb an eyebrow on the face of Mr. Keanu Reeves as he jumps into the pilot’s seat of nanobot on the face of Ms Charlize Theron, the shots of WNTTAK, bits of eggshell and fingernails, a CD that says ‘I Love You’, a mouth surrounded by cheetos detritus, tomato juice and blood keep you in.  It’s like an action film for scopophiliacs; you’re kept in a perpetual state of bliss even if you don’t know what’s going on.

And for the acting junkies (dramaphiliacs?), who are clearly willing to tolerate terrible films whose only credible interest is the performance, there’s Ms. Tilda Swinton.  ‘I don’t even think Tilda Swinton could have pulled that off’ is something you might say about another actor, and now I’m saying it about her.  Ms. Swinton has done exceptional and compelling work (post Duplicity and post-post-Bourne, I am convinced this she may be the singular reason that Michael Clayton is the only good movie that Mr. Tony Gilroy will ever make), but she, and the deeply creepy Kevin children, are outstanding here.  Being a fetish based medium (you can’t see what’s beyond the edge of the screen after all), film performance works largely on what’s not shown.  The first time we meet Kevin in jail, we only see his mother’s face, and she somehow expresses what we need to see in him.  This, without saying a word.  Conversely, when it’s revealed, in a devastating moment, What The Bike Locks Are For (I was confused by the critic’s appraisal of this film, as well as their simply missing parts of it entirely.  I was supposed to be surprised by this, even though it is revealed early on in a montage.  Maybe they were too engrossed in the first two pages of Brett Ratner’s script), Ms. Swinton’s face isn’t even shown.  And yes, the Academy Award for Best Actress goes to….the back of Tilda Swinton’s head.

Which leads us, conveniently at least for me, to the story.  It may sound like I’m shorting the narrative aspect, but this is equally as skillful, which leads us further to the otherwise inexplicable title of this piece.  No, I’m not talking about ladies undergarments or cancer, but the way in which effective narrative lets us as the audience fill in the gaps.  Ms. Ramsey’s restraint is remarkable, and it contributes to the story and the experience.  The Kevin in question is shown wearing diapers at age 6, and it’s not foregrounded.  In any other movie there would be a best friend to explain this, and a response, and over the shoulder shot-reverse shot reaction.  Come on; it’s been two pages.  I’m bored.  It’s a sign of immense confidence in both her ability, and in her audience’s to read it.

Thank you.  Thank you very much.

This makes the film not unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (though not at all like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is great in its own right.  If Mr. Kenneth Brannagh went to the gym, we want to see him.  Oiled).   Hidden beneath the layers of the book is, underneath the captain’s log, beyond Dr. Frankenstein’s self-serving nonsense, is the story of the monster, coming into being.  Likewise, Ms. Ramsey very deliberately (in the correct sense of the word) lets us get to the heart of, well, not the story.  We know the story, so the heart, I guess.  We know what’s going to happen.  But we only learn gradually what it’s about.

And so, it’s entirely possible, given what I’ve read of the reviews, that this film may have been unhailed because of the subject matter.  Critics have no problem with violence, as evidenced in Drive, which shows violence is real, man, so that we’re like, not encouraging it.  So we’ll just let Mr. Eli Roth keep practicing his Nobel Peace Prize speech, and instead praise this film’s restraint once again, as WNTTAK has virtually no onscreen violence.  No, I suspect that critics have eschewed this film because it’s about something deeply primal: the fear that all parents have about the utter lack of control over their children.  And yes, after 20,000 years of civilization, someone finally said that out loud.  What makes this film a success is what dooms it; a worse made film on the same subject would have left room for argument.  Instead it captures,  perfectly and completely, the mood of being a parent, anxious, loving, ambivalent, totally responsible yet powerless.  Whatever its subject, it is a film of absolute singularity, and the way in which the acting, shots, narrative coalesce into its core and clear purpose, this is its masterful accomplishment.

I’m aware of the irony that no one will notice the praise I heap upon a film that no one seemed to notice.  It’s possible, no, no, I must accept this, that even Ms. Ramsey may never read this.  But I send this post to be absorbed into the electromagnetic ether for two reasons: 1) as you have no doubt gleaned by now, and for reasons unknown to me, I caught the I’m-My-Own-Biggest-Fan bug long ago.  No one finds my jokes funnier than I do, and certainly no one finds my insights more insightful.  The fact that I’m the one who made them technically means that I can’t find them insightful, but that’s just another example of my insight.  If you’re going to beat your head against the wall, this is a disease that you need to protect you from damning praise.  Which may make it an antibody.  What do I know?  I’m a electromagnetic-etherologist, dammit, not a doctor!  And so, 2) in, by, via and through my sheer egostity, I fully believe that I can help Ms. Ramsey catch this disease/antibody, if she doesn’t have it already.  If not, the crushing disappointment will cause her to accept the reins of Pink Panther 3: The Exact Same Movie In Every Way As Pink Panther 1. 

Okay, once again, that would also be pretty great.  Have at her, world!

The trailer cutters choose these scenes for a reason, and it’s basic psychology.  As Sigmund Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a giant cock in your mouth.  Apologies, of course, for the sudden outburst of repressed homoeroticism; why can’t movies made in 2011 not star Ryan Gosling?  The comment I meant (in the sense of the word that I meant, but not that I…oh, never mind) to repeat was Freud’s contention that every fear is also a fantasy.  As Christian mythology, Al Gore and Zombieland has made abundently clear, we want the world to end.  We say we don’t, but methinks we doth blow things up too much.  Every fear must be a fantasy; otherwise we would be afraid of actual threats to our existence.  As it turns out, we find babies adorable.

With a film like Contagion this fantasy would seem at first to be of the Emmerich variety.  Some superbug comes along and everybody dies: boo, but secretly hooray.  Sadly (happily?), this does not happen, for this is not the fantasy of the film.  I, like you, was severely disappointed to discover that this very realistic movie flu has a mortality rate of 20%.  20%, I mean why even get up out of prophage in the morning?

7 minutes of trailers. 7 minutes. Plus, having built the Mann Chinese 6 five years ago, they're tearing it down to built another one, even though you can still smell the outgassing. I don't hate everything about LA.

The film reveals two other fantasies, the first involving ‘fulminates’.  Fulminates, or so the film tells us, and no I cannot be bothered to look it up and it’s besides the point anyway, are the bits of virus left on surfaces that survive for a few hours.  Like the ridiculous, great, and ridiculously great Outbreak, which I feel was directed by Mr. Emmerich, but probably wasn’t (see can’t be bothered to look it up, above), it’s all about the close-up of things.  Lookout for the doorknob!  No, really.  Lookout for that doorknob.  It’s going to kill you.  Contagion takes this absurd everyday fear and just keeps going.  Stay away from the elevator button!  Don’t eat that!  No hugging!  It’s a very expensive obsessive compulsive’s visualization of a CDC public service announcement and it feels like the film has to state even the most obvious things, just to cover their asses.  We already know to stay the hell away from Gwyneth Paltrow.  Jeez.

In so doing, it’s not unlike Mission Impossible (the TV series, not the irksome films).  This show was never about spies or ideology; it always took place in some apolitical non-country specified Înstîtüt.  It was about the state of paranoia and suspicion of everyday life, that your girlfriend could at any moment pull off her mask and reveal that she was Barbara Bain.  Again fear=fantasy, which the IM force took great delight in recreating.  Likewise Contagion is about a fear we already have: touching, and a fantasy we don’t admit, wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to.  This is evidenced when Mr. Steven Soderbergh investigates every crack and crevice of a Hong Kong casino in macro lens detail, and everything that we touch is a threat.  Especially other human beings.  In other words, clean everything or your baby will not survive!

Don’t touch your baby!

Which leads conveniently to our second fantasy, since it wasn’t long before I realized that this film was the unholy marriage between Outbreak and Children of Men, itself also an extremely well made, and deeply evil film.  I am out as much as one can be regards my views on population, babies, and so forth.  The train conductors are getting a little tired of hearing about my vasectomy.  And I’m getting tired of telling them.

I’ll be bombarding you with an article next week about the extremely great We Need To Talk About Kevin, where I will be making various arguments that you can ignore about tying a fucking knot in it already (this is opposed, of course, to tying a knot in fucking already).  I am bringing up my views on overpopulation and not actually voicing them in this piece because we are on the topic of Children of Men, a film which does exactly the same thing.  I remember shaking with rage the first time I saw the trailer, which depicted a world where we no longer had children (getting us back to fantasy=fear, by the way).  Here, or so I thought, was a film about how the one thing we need more than anything is more babies.  I prepared myself not to be pleased.

And I wasn’t.  But not at all in the way I expected.  First of all, it’s an astonishingly well made film.  Mr. Alfonso Cuarón having made HP3 and Little Princess, is probably the best living shot chooser, and I am genuinely sad he isn’t working more.  Filming the action scenes in single (admittedly digitally altered) takes works so well you don’t notice until you exhale at the end, and I get angry every time I see a cut in another movie.  Or, as in the case of Mr. Michael Bay, 1,000 cuts.  And no, I am not advising that Michael Bay be cut 1,000 times.  I am merely hinting at it.

(My praise of Mr. Cuarón is lightly veiled jealously, as I have always wanted to make an action movie based on the aesthetic of Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, the designer of Super Mario 64, and thus of the third person platformer.  What’s that now?  Well, I play video games, and I’m old, which means very few of my friends do.  Consequently I have seen first hand how people become mesmerized watching someone who is, at best, an average player (this assertion merits a further nested parethetical: I know that I am average having played cooperative Quake back in the old days in the times where I was the first person to have a dual ISDN connection.  The other players, with dial-up (you’re too young, and that’s my third nested parenthetical by the way), were confused by my sudden appearance, shooting them in the head, and disappearance before they could even say ‘what the?’.  Let’s just be glad a person like me doesn’t exist in real life).  From this, I can infer that watching play video games may be oddly interesting, and I think it’s because we identify with the character whose face we don’t see more than one who we do.

Movie critics complain about video game movies in general, and with the exception of the-confuse-a-Dalí Super Mario Bros. (see it and see it now), they’re right.  But also please rent Doom and fast-forward to fourteen minutes from the end, which has actually recreated the first person shooter in a movie.  All one shot, three minutes long, and you’re really sad that the rest of the movie is not like this.  Also, having renting it you don’t have to watch the agonizing talkity-talk talking parts (nevermind, here it is.  I’m saving you money all over the place).  I still say that this is the way to make a great action sequence, and Mr. Cuarón has beat me to it.

I ain’t dead yet, Cuarón).

Fortunately for my schadenfreude, Mr. Caurón has made a fairly evil film, but, as it turned out, it wasn’t because he was making the tired argument that children are the only way we’re going to solve the mess made by all the children.  In this film world, which is falling apart because no one has had a child for 24 years and one woman is unexpectedly pregnant, we encounter characters, pretty much all of them, who are just, well, shitty.  They all want to use the pregnant lady, shot in beatific light and so forth, for their own various political and selfish purposes.  As everyone keeps betraying and killing each other, it’s like being naturalist dedicated to studying cannibalistic scorpions.  If aliens came to earth, went to Pacific’s The Grove 18 and saw Children of Men, they would wonder: wait, why haven’t we blown this place up?  And then reassemble the molecules of Mr. Roland Emmerich and have him make a movie about it?

Which is fine for the aliens, but from a film point of view we have a problem.  Contagion, like Children of Men, is about the end of the world, and is likewise populated with, well, dicks.  People fight over food, sell each other out, Mlle. Marion Cotillard is kidnapped at gunpoint by the people she was helping, held hostage to get medicine for their village, the CDC gives them fake medicine, whereupon she goes back to the people who kidnapped her, Patty Hearst-ified enough to be an idiot, and I have to ask: why, as an alien, do I care if these people live or die?  I don’t.  I’m an alien, I only care about reruns of Glupnor’s Homeworld and eating brains.  It’s like if you made a film and populated it with Freddy Krugers, Hannibal Lecters, Michael Bays, and…okay, again, terrible example.  I would see that movie.  It’s like a film populated with Bellas.

But this is what scared me a little.  Because if every fear really is a fantasy, then this is, what?  Misanthropefreude?  The fantasy here is that is what people ‘are really like’.  It reminds me of the various Marxists I encounter on a daily basis (and yes, I have exactly the same reaction you do: they’re adorable!).  They’re always arguing about the masses and how they’re manipulated by the media and so on.  The problem being, of course, if these people who you want to save and not so secretly hate have no free will, and are essentially robots whose only problem is that they are just waiting for the good programming that you will no doubt provide, why do want to help them in the first place?  It should be no surprise that the conservatives, neo-Hobbesians that they are, have exactly the same viewpoint.  They’re just better at it.

And so we’re back to where we started a second time, except that now it’s about zombies.  If we do want to live in a world where we get to shoot people in the head, it’s because we see people as so selfish as deserving it in the first place.  Which is entitles us to act selfishly and be confused why people are looking at us like we’re zombies.  It’s like if someone saw an impressively light and energetic film by Mr. Steven Soderbergh – a true rarity these days – and didn’t mention the fact at all.  Like the penis-breasts in Aliens, a tightly constructed narrative makes it easy to give in to the impulse to ignore the film and dive instead into the mucky zeitgeist that gave birth to it.  Luckily for me, this is cause to rail against whatever dark motivations that lurk in Mr. Steven Soderbergh’s subconscious, rather than simply praise his ability.  What can I say?

I’m afraid of bad filmmaking.

Sadly Obama was nowhere around to save us, Obama, save us, so it was up to me.  Why do I hate taking responsibility?  Well, it’s your fault, actually (see what I did there?).  If the movie, restaurant, social program or war turns out to be a bad idea, you’re going to blame me.  This isn’t fair, since it would mean I knew that the girlfriend, tax rebate, television show, or war was a bad idea before I did it anyway, which would in turn mean that I was both all-knowing, and extremely stupid.  Ah, I see.  That is what you were thinking.

So what do I do? I let the randomizer on my phone make the decision for me.   Of course being omniscient, I also know what it’s going to say, but the illusion helps me from being harassed at parties.  Incidentally, you’re going to die in 2034.  Of future disease.  

When the little blue screen popped up:

Come on, I don't have time to write in the entire title of the movie.

frankly, I was a little disappointed.  I had just flown 9000 miles to Los Angeles for the express purpose of seeing a movie with Nathan, and now, thanks to the randomizer, it was going to be an art film that really had no business being released.  The whole point of seeing going to the movies with Nathan in the first place is to have a conversation to keep you entertained during the kind of movies that Nathan and I go to see.  Yes, it’s irritating, but we’re the pinch on the arm that keeps you distracted from the pain of the missing limb that is say, Green Hornet, or Dragonball Evolution.

You’re welcome.

Feeling that pang of dread that maybe we should go two out of three on the randomizer, I, again, with my all knowingness, realized that I already knew what it would say, or rather I knew that I wouldn’t do it, knowing what it would say, which was another movie that I would have more fun at.  Being all powerful is more complicated that you might initially realize.  I should have trusted my own god-like powers.  That’s technically incorrect.  My own god powers.  The Man Nobody Knew had a great deal more inanity, characters acting baffled by their own dialog and comic horror than any film from Mr. Shawn Levy.  Well not Cheaper By The Dozen, but you get the idea.

Look! A '$'!

TMNK is a documentary about the life of Mr. William Colby, who presided over the CIA during the Vietnam war, as well as the various revelatory bits during the Ford administration.  The problem being that it is a documentary made by his son, which gives it one of two directions to go: a kid with an axe to grind, or a home movie.  Thank God (me) that he went for the latter.  Why, you might ask, would I want to see a home movie, and a 1 hour 45 minute one at that?  That’s easy: home movies are dull, pedantic and small.  How else would you want to treat the subject of Vietnam?

Having been trapped in an arthouse cinema, we were forced to watch various arthouse trailers, one of which was for an awful looking film attempting to comically recreate Sarkozy’s rise to power.  It was the trailer cutter’s job to find all the funny bits, and he, well, succeeded.  Ahem.  I soon realized that TMNK was what that film should have been: an epic failure to notice what the hell was going on in real life.  In interviewing his mom, who admits ‘We had to face that we bore some small responsibility’, the narrator, Colby’s son, explains that the fact that his father’s absence during the war ‘was tough on my mother.  She was a good woman.’

Also, one million people died.

And yes, I did say that, very loudly, in the cinema.  The audience of four did not object, which I take as a sign to keep on doing it.  You’re welcome.

I suspect that there have been many films of this nature, what can only be called the subconscious documentary, films which reveal more about the filmmaker than the subject matter, and thereby really reveal more about the subject matter.  His insider access, which includes Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Edwark Luttwak and Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, is impressive, but more to the point, embarrassing: they simply speak of their various brilliant strategies, the mistakes that those damned Kennedy brothers made, and all the brilliant tactics employed by Mr. Colby et. al., to well, you know, win Vietnam.

Sorry.  You may not have heard.  If you see this film, and have not read a book in the last twenty years, you will genuinely come away with the impression that Vietnam is planted firmly in the US success column.  Way to go!  This is the Inglorious Basterds documentary, whose (admittedly subconscious) point is very clear: I am not the only one who likes to avoid responsibility.

Hey, it was the 1960s.  If only they had the randomizer:

Ah, well.