Apollo 18′s Lunar Truth

The impeccably real - and terrifying - moonscape

If you’ve searched for www.lunartruth.com like many of us have, it is a testimony to how realistically director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego has managed to put together Apollo 18.  In large part, Gallego achieves this through the home movie filming style strongly reminiscent of movies like the Blair Witch Project.  The biggest challenge to our suspension of disbelief is the mere existence of a complex life form on the moon, although a devil’s advocate will point out that extremophiles do manage to exist in places above boiling point, for example, in conditions of extreme acidity or under extreme pressure such as at the bottom of ocean trenches, and they do suspect life on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa.  Regardless, Gallego makes no gaffs that yank us from our willful suspension of disbelief.  We are led slowly towards the reality of the creatures in a well-paced unfolding of discovery and crisis.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the setup is that NASA has sent two astronauts to the moon on a secret mission and has outfitted them with cameras that they set up around and inside their spacecraft in addition to having one with them at all times.  On top of the filming, the rendering of the moonscape and other environmental features (like 1/6^th the gravity) are impeccable.

The real villain of the movie, however, is the American government (and the Department of Defense) that has used these two astronauts as expendable test subjects to gather information about the deadly life form on the moon.  Nixon lied plainly and directly to the entire American populace, we’re reminded, so why wouldn’t the government lie to us now?  And, like the astronauts, we’re troubled by this question now more than ever with so many debacles, censorships, and conspiracies facing the western world – from a state of perpetual war and alarm to oil spills to a president that has increased military spending, reduced domestic spending and, while being commander-in-chief of multiple war theatres, wins the Nobel Peace prize.  The list of absurdities is long, and Apollo 18 taps into our political disillusionment quietly, in the background, as most good dramas do while a much more tangible opponent fills the screen.

If all this needs one concrete symbol in the film, it is the uprooting and shredding of the American flag by the creatures.

On top of being culturally relevant, Apollo 18 is scary, well-acted science fiction that provides a fresh counterpoint to the big and heartless sci-fi films we so often end up enduring.

4.5 / 5
JF

Our Idiot Brother (or Our Idiotic Script?)

Along with Paul Rudd's Ned, the film's humour at this moment gets arrested

It’s hard not to like Paul Rudd’s character in his latest film, Our Idiot Brother.  Ned is laid back, sweet and unassuming, and we all sense that his presence in our lives would benefit us some way or another – if not by helping us to see the bigger picture, then by giving us that odd laugh and making us thankful that we didn’t turn out as simple as he did.  Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than a likeable protagonist to make a movie watchable.  Our Idiot Brother is a perfect example of this.

The film follows Ned, a naïve and quixotic organic farmer, as he boomerangs from relative to relative trying to make ends meet.  After being released from prison for selling pot to a uniformed police officer, he returns to his farm to learn his girlfriend has a new guy and no longer wants him working there.  Adding insult to injury, she appropriates his beloved canine, Willie Nelson (giving the film a catalyst that it for the most part decides to abandon).  His other sisters (played by the coldly feminine Zooey Deschanel and the stunning Elizabeth Banks) do their best to help him scrape by, but find their own lives marred by his presence, particularly his penchant to disclose sensitive details of their lives to others.  The eldest sister, Liz, appears to be going through a mid-life crisis, and though she welcomes Ned into her family, her two-timing husband (the typecast yet brilliant Steve Coogan) shows him nothing but condescension and disdain.  Ned forms a bond with their son and helps foment his interest in martial arts, which Ned’s sister and brother-in-law will not accept.  This is where the film is its strongest – showcasing healthy relationships that must for whatever reason be severed.

It fails, however, in a number of places.  The star-studded cast is so plentiful that we never get the chance to cozy up to any of them.  They are all extensions of our hero, Ned, and as the titular “our,” you’d expect them to be sympathetic too.  After all, we are to see Ned through their lens.  But not only are they unpleasant, they are so absorbed in their own metropolitan hipster lives that we end up cringing as the film rotates through the build-up their trifling concerns.  Yes, it’s mildly upsetting to witness Deschanel’s character cheat on her more joyous and fun-loving girlfriend (played by Rashida Jones), but the distance between audience and character prevents us from ever truly caring.  And while we may have liked Jones’s character in the first half of the film, she ends up being just another person who betrays Ned when he needs her the most.  The film ends up a mess of two extremes:  Ned, the sympathetic push-over whose family takes care of him only out of a sense of duty, and the wholly unsympathetic secondary characters, all of whom are thinly painted and more or less contemptible.

The star-studded cast sets out to make us as bored as they are

The script falters, hardly providing any satisfaction for Ned in his journey.  Instead, he fumbles with even the most menial responsibilities, and we grimace as we watch time and time again where his patheticness will lead him.  There is some minor relief at the conclusion, but it comes much too late to negate the tedious jibber-jabber that constitutes the bulk of the film.

Despite the producers’ attempts to pitch the film as a comedy, the biggest laughs are shown in the trailer, chief among them the scene where Ned earnestly sells a cop a bag of weed.  Watch that clip on youtube sixty times in a row and not only will you save yourself 11 bucks, you’ll leave the room no less clueless about what makes a good story.

Verdict:  Despite Paul Rudd’s apt portrayal of a painfully naïve hippie, the script proves humourless, and the secondary characters are too uninspired to elicit anything more than a resentful yawn.

1.5/5

MN

The Debt

The Dr. of Birkenau, the real-life Nazi soldier that The Debt revolves around, is alleged to have been the father of the abortion and to have performed a rainbow of horrid medical experiments on prisoners such as testing tolerances to the point of death and killing and inspecting twins, a particular interest of his.  On one occasion, he is reported to have overseen a sewing-together of Romani twin children, leading to their death by gangrene (and this is likely the inspiration of the movie The Human Centipede, a horror in which an evil German doctor sews together humans, anus to mouth); and, in conspiracy theories, it is this man who pioneered slaving and mind control methods by way of tortuous methods (see the Monarch Project) .  Meet Dr. Josef Mengele, the “angel of death,” or, Dr. Dieter Vogel in The Debt.

Dr. Josef Mengele while head physician at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The story of The Debt steps between the present day and the mid 60s, slowly bringing together the two and dispelling the mystery of why their reportedly successful mission to capture Dr. Vogel has led to, many years later, David’s gruesome suicide and a guilt-ridden Rachel.  The team’s mission is to snag the evil Dr. Vogel from East Berlin to stand trial in Israel, and the audience is held in stressful suspense at every stage of this attempt.  An early sample of such tension is when Dr. Vogel hovers over the spread legs of Rachel (Jessica Chastain) for a gynecological examination, with which your skin crawls knowing this killer has his fingers inside the young (and beautiful) protagonist’s vagina.  This same feeling of invasion is then continued later when Dr. Vogel invades and unravels Rachel’s mind.

The important question for The Debt, however, is how – if at all – does it contribute to that hackneyed narrative of revenge against the evil Nazi(s)?  There is now a cartoonish development of the Nazi character in movies, and is this one any different?  Whatever the movie loses by being built on such an overdone theme, it does save ground by providing many talking points and some subtleties: one such subtlety is the question of how does one avoid becoming the kind of monster that one sets out to stop?  In other words, Rachel and David confront the terror that they too want to kill this man just as this man wanted to, and did, kill many at the Birkenau concentration camp.  In one captivating scene, Dr. Vogel chides Rachel, pointing out that should she bring him to a farcical court in Israel that will decide on his death, isn’t his blood on her hands?  She may as well kill him now, he says, as she holds a shaving switch-blade to his throat.  She wants to, but can’t, and is morally torn.  This moral anxiety wracks Dr. Vogel’s captors.

A second subtlety is the movie’s attention to truth versus the accepted narrative.  In the present day, Rachel’s daughter has written a book on her mother’s heroic act that, we later find out, is untrue.  Literally, the written word, the book, is a false narrative made up by her mother for political reasons.  Still another source of anxiety in Rachel and David is their continued maintenance of their false story, their living a lie.  Rachel is torn between the truth and needing to maintain a beneficial lie for her daughter and for Israel.  Stephan, now a politician, tells Rachel that “truth is a luxury.”  Deepening this point even further is the fact that when Rachel does decide to tell the truth of what happened with the pursuit of Dr. Vogel, the truth changes (the pursuit unexpectedly continues).  So, there is never a time when the narrative and the truth are the same; they always differ.  This is “the debt” between the narrative and the real.

Dr. Vogel held captive. Played superbly by Jesper Christensen.

Ultimately, although the viewer knows what the true story in the movie is and what is made up, the point of narrative versus factuality points to the flexibility of history, or merely what we are told, say, in the news, versus what is actually happening.  This is found everywhere, including in how Israel readily cites its victimary history to justify its continuing crimes of aggression.  This is history used as a political tool.

With excellent performances from Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Marton Csokas, and especially Jesper Christensen (who plays Dr. Vogel chillingly) and for providing many talking points such as these, The Debt is worth the watch.

4/5
JF

The Rise (and Fall) of the Planet of the Apes

Caesar, the aptly named first leader of the Apes

It’s a strange wonder that Times’s Richard Corliss names The Rise of the Planet of the Apes “this year’s finest action movie.”  The movie has been marketed as an action movie, and would do best as an action movie, but writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (both credited for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and The Relic) have instead struck an unsuccessful balance between an action and a drama and completely fail to deliver any relevant cultural commentary as did the original Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston.

If an action movie is defined by its action, then the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in the simplest test, fails significantly.  The trailer presents a captivating scene where a chimp rolls the smart-making chemical canisters along the primate cages, and we naturally assume that this comes from the early stages of the film – it is the catalyst, the beginning of the violent struggle – when it is in fact drawn from the final stages of the movie where the only notable action scenes await.

Dr Rodman (Franco) prepares to test his final drug

Instead of an action, we have a movie that feels more like a drama.   Dr. Rodman (James Franco) is driven to find a cure for his father’s Alzheimer’s disease and, in testing for this, creates Caesar, a highly intelligent, genetically augmented chimp.  Caesar is the central character of The Rise; and, after seeing the stages of his growth, it is his imprisonment, subjugation, and eventual abuse by humans that is meant to emotionally draw the audience in.  And, although we are drawn in enough to care for Caesar and understand his revenge, it’s difficult to be very captivated by a computer-generated, non-speaking primate.

This flatness of character infects the other characters of the film far worse – as odd as that is.  Dr. Rodman’s boss and girlfriend, the zookeepers, and other supporting characters are all markedly flat.  Only Dr. Rodman himself fairs better, and his father (John Lithgow) and the head zookeeper (Brian Cox) manage some more depth by virtue of their physicality and expressiveness, ie, their excellent acting abilities.  All in all, then, with cardboard characters the film doesn’t work as a drama, and without much conflict – especially the conflict we want to see between humans and primates – it fails to be very impactful as an action movie.

The most eerie silent point for The Rise is its absence of cultural commentary.  This is, after all, what made the biggest mark on the original film.  The final scene where Colonel George Taylor (Heston) falls onto his knees on the beach, seeing the statue of liberty and realizing that humans have destroyed themselves (“you blew it up!  damn you all to hell!”) has been replayed and parodied so much mainly because it struck a note with the world (North) Americans lived in.  On the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the terrifying awareness that the world was, and will continue to be, on the lip of a nuclear war electrified that final scene in The Planet of the Apes.

The final scene of Planet of the Apes

In The Rise, the demise of humans is essentially accidental, a virtuously motivated mistake, even.  In a time of alarm greater than the 60s – in the midst of ecological and economic collapse and regional upheaval – it seems almost harder to avoid touching upon a charged socio-cultural nerve than to touch upon one.  Or perhaps it touches on another strain for America and the West: it exemplifies the psychological truth that the closer one gets to disaster, especially if one is implicated in that demise and disaster, the greater the denial.

Though enjoyable enough if you enter with light expectations, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is, unfortunately, a forgettable experience.

2.5/5

JF

13 Assassins – and only four Rotten Tomatoes?

How many rotten tomatoes did Inception deserve?

I think I’ve learned this the hard way, but you can’t always trust Rottentomatoes.  It is not, as I may have previously thought, the be-all and end-all of movie reviews (though it’s often pretty accurate).

One bit of proof I had a while back was the mindfuck Inception.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I like my mind to get blown on occasion.  But not fucked.  I guess calling Inception a mindfuck sounds like it might be a compliment, seeing as that’s what it sets out to do – alter your perception of reality, make you re-examine the very fabric of your existence (which The Matrix achieved 11 years prior) – but I mean mindfuck in its most vicious sense.  You watch it and come out completely confused about what just happened, and then feel like you have to applaud because it was smart enough to confuse you.  And then you pay another $14 to watch it again and enhance your initial interpretations.

But Inception got 86% on the Tomatometer, a sure winner for a website that counts anything higher than 60% as a “fresh” film.

Miike Takeshi’s 13 Assassins, a 2010 Japanese film about samurai coming together to fight a sadistic lord, also did extremely well.  The premise is interesting; Japanese culture forbids disobeying a superior except under the most dire circumstances.  And what reason do these men have to revolt?  For one, Lord Naritsugu is brutally sadistic.  One scene near the beginning shows one of his victims, a maimed, tongueless woman drawing with her teeth a sign that tells one of the samurai to help her.  Later, Naritsugu practices his archery skills – on a family of lowly villagers who lie helplessly with hands and feet bound.  We then understand why in the opening scene, a man is shown performing harakiri, the Japanese art of honourable suicide; he cannot bear his existence under such an awful leader.  The samurai come to hate Lord Naritsugu, as do we, and we happily endure the lengthy exposition about each of the characters and their personal backgrounds (only to later find we can’t keep track of each person’s unique story).

About halfway through the film, the action picks up – and doesn’t relent until the end credits.  Sound exciting?  I thought so too.  But it’s hardly original.  Naritsugu’s men are led into a room they think is safe, only to find it rigged with explosives.  The 13 assassins take on dozens of men each – à la Rambo – and all miraculously prevail.  And save for a few rolling heads, you don’t see too many deaths on-screen; you just hear the unsheathing of swords and the clank of battle.  One obscured sideswipe and the enemy’s down.

It’s almost as though this film were an homage to the day when these movies were popular, and in a way, I suppose it is.  But after watching Kill Bill, my once-per-decade quota of throwback films has been reached.  And Kill Bill had a compelling storyline, dazzling visuals and a tongue-in-cheek tone that told us it was laughing at itself with us.

13 Assassins, unfortunately, lacks any of those traits.  The plot is much too lacklustre to derive any more than passing interest in it.  If they settled for cliché when devising the action scenes, why didn’t they choose to go all out and have the villain kill one of his own men?  Why not, at the expense of realism, put a mole as one of the thirteen and have him lead the gang in a trap that they must think their way out of?  There are too few twists of plot here to truly engage the audience, and the story ends up more linear than Lord Naritsugu’s arrows.

How many reviews of all the ones Rottentomatoes counted were favourable?  96%.  Critics laud its “villain who transcends evil and ascends to a realm of barbaric madness” (Roger Ebert) as well as a “masterful battle sequence inside a deserted town” (J.R. Jones).  Masterful?  I’ve eaten Fruit Loops more masterful than that.  Choreography can be impressive, but only in the context of a compelling narrative, where the end result is unpredictable – and matters.

From left: Yoshi, Kato, Hiro... oh who am I kidding. You've stopped caring.

So added to the list of films-that-shouldn’t-be-critically-acclaimed is Miike Takeshi’s 13 Assassins.

And added to our movie-loving minds is an important piece of advice – never try convincing yourself a tomato is fresh when you know it’s rotten.

2/5

 MN

The Hitchcockian Predicament of Horrible Bosses

Horrible Bosses is like the three stooges in a Hitchcock movie.

Thankfully the slapstick is kept to a minimum – happening only once – but it works because of the foolhardiness of the character trying to make a clean dive into a garage before it closes.

And the premise lives up to its name of Hitchcockian grandeur.  All of the bosses are horrible, with the possible exception of Jennifer Aniston’s Julia, who quite frankly lacks the “-ible.”  The more unsuccessful she is in bedding her dental assistant,   (Charlie Day), the more unapologetically lustful she gets, at one point threatening to tell his fiancé they slept together – but only if they don’t.

The others, though – Kevin Spacey’s David and Colin Farrell’s Bobby – truly are despicable human beings.  Spacey once again mesmerizes in a villainous role (as he did in 21), this time bringing a smug, power-tripping superior to the screen.  There is not even minor sympathy for this character, even when we find out his wife sleeps around on him like a virus.

Farrell’s Bobby is another piece of work who outright admits that he’s only taking over his father’s company so he can raise enough money to flee toHawaiiand snort coke while women serve him cold cocktails.  The epitome of self-absorption, Farrell’s role is another that is well-filled, completing the film’s hydra of workplace horror.

While the bosses serve as hyperbolic, farcical catalysts for the film’s plot, their respective subordinates are responsible for carrying it.  Jason Bateman plays Nick, who’s been stuck in the same position for years and is passed up on a sure promotion when Spacey picks himself for the role instead.  Jason Sudeikis is also the shoo-in to be boss, but when the boss of the ink company (Donald Sutherland) dies in a car accident, it’s his son Bobby who takes the reins.  Charlie Day’s Dale is perhaps the most sympathetic of the three (who wouldn’t want to be hit on by the sultry Ms. Aniston, especially when she uses such classy lines as “I want you to slap my face with your cock.”).  Dale is the most nervous and mouse-like of the three (apt phrasing courtesy of Sarah “Michelle”) and probably provides the most humour.

Dr. Julia seduces

Together, they are three friends who bear the burden of their work days to one another over drinks, eventually hatching a plan to off their bosses.  Walking into the wrong part of town where they figure they’ll be likely to find a hitman (at least more so than by hiring a “wetworker”), they encounter “Motherfucker” Jones (Jamie Foxx), an opportunist who lends them advice for the hit.  Motherfucker’s real name is “Dean,” but he can’t be seen with a “Disney” name in that part of town.  Understandable choice, especially when such laughs as “how are you, Motherfucker?” arise.

As with many buddy comedies these days, many of the laughs come from the style of over-speculation that was popularized by Seinfeld and perfected by Curb Your Enthusiasm.  It’s naturally amusing to have straight-laced forty-somethings try to be hip, using phrases like “bend her over and show her the fifty states” that don’t actually exist – at least till now (as Sudeikis observes in the credits).

While it’s an original concept, some scenes drizzle with cliché, one instance of which is the use of cats.  When was the last time you were watching a comedy and a cat didn’t leap out of nowhere and shriek?  Another is the requisite car chase, which provides comedic thrills at times but is otherwise terribly redundant.  But it’s hard to stay critical.  Even when we’re watching three stooges faced with a Hitchcockian predicament, we laugh our heads off at the bumbling idiocy of our heroes – and perhaps grin at the offchance that their bosses’ fates could one day be shared by our own.

3.5/5

MN

Grammar rules, 1. Lazy writing, 0.

Meet Tyrion Lannister, the “Omar Little” of Game of Thrones

To elucidate the plot threads of Game of Thrones would be a daunting task; like many other shows of its ilk, its many characters and their alliances with each other make it nearly impossible to explain every detail.  In brief, the show, which just finished its first season, is a smorgasbord of sex, violence, and vying for power – and not necessarily in that order.  It is a show that at its introduction posits us in a semi-fictional universe and asks us to familiarize ourselves with the surplus of names and characters.

A few episodes in, though, and we’re hooked.  New characters are still being introduced, but more importantly we learn whom to trust and whom to despise.  In the pilot, Bram, the youngest son of the Eddard family, is scolded by his mother, Catelyn, for endangering his life by climbing high buildings.  At the end of the episode he reaches the top of a castle to see the Queen having sex with her brother, who don’t take too kindly to someone learning their secret.  It is here that we know that the Queen and her brother, both of whom are Lannisters, are among the chief antagonists of the series – or at least of the first season.  Not all of the Lannisters are villainous, though.  Tyrion the “halfman,” portrayed by Peter Dinklage, is so far on neutral territory.  Wise beyond his years, he seems to be aware of his siblings’ incestuous bond, and though he hasn’t joined the Eddard clan yet, a huge war is hinted at for early in the second season in which Tyrion is likely to fight alongside the Eddards, if not by taking arms then in a more intellectual capacity.  As small in stature as he may be, his nobility more than makes up for his lack of physical ability.  He is a character who is consistently disrespected, and yet has proven to be one of the show’s most dynamic characters.  Not only does he deliver some of the best lines (“The gall of them, fighting back!” he replies, when a character expresses surprise that not all of their men made it), but he serves as an important reminder that physical shortcomings are no match for internal strengths.

Never forget who you are, for surely the world won’t. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.

                                                    

On the left, Tyrion Lannister with shield.  On the right, The Wire’s inimitable Omar Little, with bulletproof vest.  

To look at it differently, Tyrion is the Omar Little of Game of Thrones.  Omar, from HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Wire, also had terrific lines that bespoke his values and the cruel nature of the “game.”  While Tyrion deals with dwarfism in a world where physical stature is crucial, Omar was a gay gangster on the streets of Baltimore.  The same way Tyrion shows no loyalty to anyone but his most trusted friends (and perhaps his whores), Omar takes no sides between the predominant thug family and the police that are trying to put them behind bars.  They are both lone soldiers who only have their wits and values to guide them.

The best of today’s dramas are sprawling epics with storylines that parallel our own.  They place us in an inspired setting – think The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire – and show us the human response to crises. The stakes are invariably high, often a matter of life and death – or in the case of Game of Thrones, honour and disgrace.  The characters are multifarious, some being heroes, some being villains, and the most interesting of them falling in that middle ground until their true selves are slowly revealed.  There is sex and violence in the most original and suspenseful of ways, and when done properly, you just accept it as part and parcel of the story rather than an unnecessary add-on in the style ofMichaelBay.  And it’s always the characterization that keeps us wanting more.  As compelling as dragon eggs – which make an early appearance that’s expanded on in the finale – may be, viewers could always rent Eragon to watch dragons fly around.  But we keep watching because we want to see what part they’ll play in the broader narrative, and how they’ll affect the characters we have grown to love, what with their fortitudes and fragilities.  Nor would all the treachery – Shakespearian in its magnitude – be as impactful if we didn’t care about who’s getting the short end of the sword, as it were.

With stunning set pieces, sharp dialogue, jaw-dropping action visuals and a highly compelling story, Game of Thrones is a journey worth following.  But like many before it, the series’ greatest asset is its ability to form convincing characters that make us feel – be it anger, humour or sympathy.  Chief among those characters: Tyrion Lannister.  All hail.

Season 2 of Game of Thrones begins Spring of 2012.

Season 1:  4/5

 MN

Drogo, with knives

Khaleesi Daenerys

“The Point Between Rage and Serenity”: X-Men: First Class

Although X-Men: First Class should be considered on its own with having some freedom from its sequels, one can’t help but remember Wolverine and his broken mind – his deep character fault that drives so much of what he does and which locks him into a dynamic love and hate for Striker, his part-creator and his abuser, who stands there on the other side of a wall of ice.  These kind of emotional through lines are what engage the audience and garner their sympathies and are what is so absent in this latest X-Men instalment.

We are first introduced to Charles Xavier (to become Professor X), who is a charming and brilliant Englishman who receives his doctorate in genetics, and who happens to have met Raven (to become Mystique).  His unique understanding of genetic mutations connects him with a befuddled CIA operative, Moira, who sees a woman’s skin change into an exoskeleton of glassy diamond and subsequently seeks out a geneticist such as Dr. Charles Xavier.  Erik (to become Magneto), of course, starts his journey in a Nazi concentration camp where his mutation is deliberately drawn out by the wily mutant Sebastian Shaw.  As a grown man, Erik hunts Shaw and other Nazis, globetrotting as he does so.

This is only the very outset of the plot of First Class, and it thickens considerably and burdensomely for much of the film.  In addition to weaving so many threads together into the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film gluts us with mutant characters, making them very thin, even for an X-Men film.  Magneto and Professor X are equally narrow in their rage and overweening sagacity, respectively.  Magneto seems especially unfairly done, lacking all of his sinister charm, composure, and intelligence offered in the sequels.  The rest of the characters manage to be even more deprived of content.  The one exception is Kevin Bacon’s superb portrayal of Sebastian Shaw.  Bacon manages to inject Shaw with menace and playfulness, and heaps of gravitas.

Bacon superb as Sebastian Shaw

It is a wonder how none of the four writers of the screenplay – Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, and Matthew Vaughn – whose joint editing power must be considerable, did not think the script overwrought in these ways, or how they failed to pick up on other tokens of sloppiness.  Of several examples, perhaps the least excusable is Professor X’s refrain to Magneto to find “the point between rage and serenity” in order for Magneto to fully harness his abilities.  The line bears no thinking.  If not lost in ambiguity, we would have to guess that the point between rage and peace would be some kind of mild irritation.  It is totally empty of meaning.

In this way, the phrase suits the movie as a whole: it has a nice ring to it, a dazzling appearance, but lacks even the content of a fully fleshed out character.

2.5 / 5

JF

“Hell is yourself” – Agony and Redemption in Boy A

Tennessee Williams once wrote, “Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” It is as though the American playwright intended this specifically for Boy A, a 2007 production that explores the life of a young ex-con after his release from prison. Under the fatherly guidance of rehab worker Terry (Peter Mullan), Eric Wilson (Andrew Garfield) attempts to step into a new persona – both on the official front and internally. With the new name “Jack Burridge,” he finds new friends at a new job and falls in love with the secretary, a woman who bathes Jack in affection in spite of – or because of – his social meekness and fragility.

The film weaves between Jack’s past and present, giving us deeper exposition of Jack’s criminal past with each flashback. We come to see how exactly Jack got to where he was today, how his marginalization in school years led him to be bullied, and how he befriended a child of the same age who took a much more violent approach with his aggressors. And in close-knit scenes at the climax, we learn what Eric the miscreant youth did – and whether Jack the freedom-seeker can truly escape. But it won’t be easy. Jack’s old pal Phillip is dead, and Jack is perplexed enough by his cause of death that he finds it hard to close the door of his past completely.

Feeling cornered

Garfield, who jumped to fame as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network and has recently signed on as the new Spider-man, is outstandingly versatile as Jack, projecting hope, anxiety, sadness and isolation. The supporting cast is also praiseworthy, specifically Peter Mullan as a man who believes so much in second chances that he confuses his estranged son’s name for Jack’s – a mistake that costs him more than temporary reprisal.

Jack’s own father is never fully shown; we only see his arm with a cigarette dangling from his hand, and hear his authoritarian voice telling Jack in no uncertain terms to leave his mother alone. His mother is also negligent in her parenting. Bedridden from cancer, she seems so paralyzed by her own mortality – and by Jack’s deviant ways – that she cannot bring herself to say anything more than “shut the door!” Hence, Terry is a personal saviour for Jack, exhibiting a patience that neither of his parents could maintain.

Terry gives "Jack" an encouraging word

Despite the support, Jack is marginalized by a society that has nothing but contempt for criminality, a public that only extends compassion to those with passable offenses. The tabloid culture of the U.K. takes a hit here, as they brand Jack as no less than a demon. To them, simplicity equals convenience (and sales). Why bother getting to know someone’s private circumstances when assuming they are “evil” is the easier option?

Just like in Tsotsi, another highly engaging tale of redemption, the hero does not go directly from bad to good. He dabbles misguidedly in the only thing he knows of – questionable moral behaviour such as drug use, trespassing and physical assault – until, through one act or another, he achieves his personal absolution.

But what form this absolution takes depends on society’s threshold for forgiveness. South Africa might not blink much of an eye to violence when compared to an England that is fed up with miscreant youth and willing to lump them into one despicable category. In this sense, the film is antithetical to Harry Brown (http://criticalgrasp.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/harry-brown-alfred-stealing-batmans-cape/),  in which an older Englishman takes to violent measures to stifle the unmitigated violence in the streets of London. There, grit is the solution; here it is mercy.

Perceived in the aggregate, Garfield’s character is neither Eric nor Jack. He is simply Boy A, a non-entity trying to make a clean segue from one world to another. Sometimes, though, stains do not go away. As his old pal Phillip once explained of his dream, “I think of a room with hundreds of doors, and they’re closing. The ones furthest away first. And then getting closer. Just closing, just banging shut. And I think, if I can keep from crying until the last one shuts, then it won’t hurt at all.” Just like Williams said, only in very personal terms.

4/5

MN

Hanna and the Return of the White Dream

This spring’s action-thriller Hanna, written by Canadian (and Vancouver Islander) Seth Lochhead, and directed by Joe Wright, is a quiet testimony of reactionary politics and white interests.  Couched in its predominantly German setting and German characters, and offering a German villain and neo-Nazi henchmen, the notion of white nationalism and white interests is quickly drawn up in the not-so-distant background.  Add to this Hanna, a wondrous product of genetic manipulation and an exemplar of the stereotypically perfect Aryan with blond hair, icy blue eyes, and a towering intellect.

Hanna is set up as two sides of the same coin.  The ugliness of violent reactionary movements in Germany and elsewhere is embodied here by the villains, out to either capitalize on a military asset or who embody a mindless bloodlust.  Conversely, the good fruit of eugenics and the re-emergence of the perfect Aryan is embodied so appetizingly in Hanna, our Nordic warrior.  Hanna’s symbolic value in this way is made most plain when she enters Berlin, the heart of 20th century white nationalism, in all its modern decay.  Wright takes care to include not just the dirtiness and dispirited quality of Berlin but also both non-white and white degenerates – genetic throwaways – against the perfection of Hanna.

We can only read Hanna in this setting as an alternate history that we wish had happened: in her skill and beauty, she is the unchosen ideal of an active pursuit of bettering white racial groups, of eugenics and its embedment in white nationalism.  The real history, Wright quietly suggests, is that society has chosen to build itself with weak fabric of human degeneration instead.

This reactionary trend is slyly showing up in other mainstream movies, too.  In his latest book Living in the End Times, Slavoj Zizek gives an incisive critique of I am Legend, the 2007 action film starring Will Smith.  The film, Zizek says, is indicative of ideological shifts in how it has been remade over the decades.  There are three films based on the 1954 novel I am Legend.  The first film, The Last Man on Earth, tracks Neville, the main character who believes he is the last man alive.  He finds, however, that a mutated species of vampire lives parallel to him, living at night and sleeping at day.  He eventually discovers that these vampires fear him just as he fears them.  He is a legend to the vampires.
In the second version, The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, the mutated humans blame science as the cause of their mutation and consequently feel that Neville, a man of science, must die.
And in the third version, I am Legend, Neville becomes a legend to the surviving humans having sacrificed himself to give the cure for the mutation to the surviving human colony.

What gets obliterated in this change, Zizek says, is the “mulicultural” experience rendered by the title’s original meaning, the realization that one’s own culture is no better than the “eccentric” cultures of others. Neville’s death in the third version, though, reasserts his roots in his lost community (the Church, the family).  The final message, then, is not the exchange of positions (we are now legends the way vampires were legends for us), but our “irreducible attachment to our roots” and overt religious  fundamentalism.

Right-wing gains across Europe

In a similar way, Hanna is a flirtatious return to the ideals of white nationalism and eugenics.  It’s able to do this by filling the villainous positions by neo-Nazis, by which it seems to meet our needs of political correctness, while our sympathies amass around a brilliant and just Aryan warrior.  As Tea Party numbers grow in the US and right-wing movements flourish across Europe, the image of Hanna leaving the forest and entering the world is a metaphor, then, with political and psychological relevance.

Leader of Finland's far-right party True Finns Timo Soini reacts as he listens to the first official results of the country's general election at his party's headquarters in Helsinki on April 17, 2011. Conservative National Coalition party was leading elections as True Finns surged to a close third, according to early partial results announced after polls closed.