Table of Contents
1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978
2. Restrepo, 2010
3. Rango, 2011
4. The Good, The Bad, The Weird, 2008
5. Cedar Rapids, 2011
6. The Social Network, 2010
7. The Town, 2010
8. Prince of Darkness, 1987
9. Winter's Bone, 2010
Review: Philip Kaufman's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 1978
If you’re not a film nut, it doesn’t matter. You know Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You might not have seen it, but you know it’s that sci-fi movie from the 50s that you can’t be bothered to watch because it’s in black-and-white and it was super influential and all that. Oh, and it had something to do with Communism. What you don’t know is that it isn’t the best movie with that title. Not even close.
The 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman is a superior film in every respect, effectively updating the formula of the original for modern audiences. When I use “modern” I don’t mean it in respect to the modern environment at the time of the film’s release; I mean it in respect to the general idea of modernity. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and not once did I feel as if I was watching an “old” movie.
Perhaps those a few years older than me might argue otherwise, but the original Body Snatchers is unbelievably dated: it’s not just the black and white, it’s the sensibilities, the dialogue, the general atmosphere, the quality. It still feels like the B-movie it was meant to be, albeit obviously a very good one. When I first watched it with my parents, I felt like I was on the outside of a joke. I could see the nostalgia in their eyes, could tell my mom used to have a crush on the lead actor, could tell my dad had seen it in theaters as a kid and loved it. They mouthed certain lines of dialogue. But all I saw was a glorified Twilight Zone episode.
Which doesn’t mean that the original isn’t important, or doesn’t have value; it’s just set in a world that audiences nowadays for the most part have no connection to. Communism, the central object of the film’s satire and antagonism, hasn’t been a buzzword for two decades now. The first version of the film stands as an interesting historical artifact cataloguing the pervasive paranoia and repression of the 50s (its treatment of the female characters is so misogynistic it’s hilarious), but unfortunately little more.
Nor does it mean that I’m recommending either of the two more recent remakes, 1993’s Body Snatchers or 2007’s The Invasion (they sucked, by the way). It means that Philip Kaufman’s film simply works better as a movie. I haven’t seen a thriller this good since Silence of the Lambs.
We all know the general setup. Or should. Donald Sutherland plays the protagonist, a health inspector in San Francisco named Matthew Bennell. My god, Sutherland owns this movie. He plays such a fantastic everyman that you can’t help but feel for him as he comforts his beautiful coworker, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), who suspects something strange has happened to her live-in boyfriend. Not a word about it is said, but we know immediately that Matthew has been in love with Elizabeth for some time. A world of subtext is opened up; like the best movies, you can imagine the characters having had conversations offscreen, and continuing to have them. They are real people, with real histories, most of which we aren’t privy to and can only imagine. Matthew thinks Elizabeth is having a nervous breakdown. He continually advises her to sit down and talk with his good friend Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) and “just forget that he’s a psychiatrist.”
Nimoy is perfectly cast as a cloying, arrogant self-help guru, the butt of much of the film’s humor. His “treatment” of Elizabeth is nothing short of comic gold. Dr. Kibner represents everything that is wrong with academia: he is both pompous and unfathomably cocksure. It’s a much more timeless idea to skewer than Communism, as academia is still in danger of collapsing under the collective weight of its masturbatory rhetoric. It feels as fresh to me today, if not more so, as any contemporary satire.
Even as Dr. Kibner tries to convince Elizabeth that her fears about her boyfriend are merely “the manifestations of her subconscious mind trying to justify leaving him,” Matthew’s friend Jack (Jeff Goldblum) finds a body. But not just any body: it is deformed, without fingerprints, and bears a disturbing resemblance to Jack himself. As soon as they call Dr. Kibner to examine it, they realize the body has disappeared. Enter the Pod People: the titular “body snatchers,” emotionless copies of human beings who emerge from extraterrestrial, plant-like “pods” that infect a host and replace them while they sleep. It soon becomes clear that the Pod People are intent on spreading their ilk, infecting all they can and cooperating single-mindedly to accomplish complete assimilation.
Which brings me to my singular complaint about the film: the pods look stupid. There, I said it. They’re like giant cucumbers. There’s some unintentional laughter in here as hordes of Pod People walk out of an industrial center each carrying the giant plants. It looks like a surreal PSA about eating more vegetables.
But I digress. In the second act, the world literally dissolves around the small group of terrified survivors, most of them already infected, as they try to fight off sleep and avoid the Pod People long enough to escape the city and warn the rest of the country. This is the best part of the movie, the “meat” if you will. The action sequences are among the most tense I’ve ever seen, as hordes of Pod People relentlessly chase down the survivors, emitting piercing screams to alert one another of any human presence. The cinematography in these scenes is perfect: shadows dance across red brick walls, looming large and unnatural behind the protagonists, following them, perhaps the embodiment of the Other inside them all, simply waiting for its opportunity to take hold.
The third act drags just a tiny bit, but it’s worth it for the final sequence. I won’t spoil it, but the last ten minutes are so poignant that you’re almost caught off guard by the final, utterly terrifying shot. I haven’t been actually scared by a movie in what feels like forever (pop-out scares don’t count). Excuse me; I meant, “Hadn’t.” The final shot is seared into my brain so intensely that I’ve had nightmares about it for the last week.
Glorious, glorious nightmares. I missed them. Just when I find myself dying to find another great horror film, I find that there’s been one hiding in plain sight all along, behind the moniker of a much better-remembered but inferior film. If you’ve never been body snatched, this is the place to start.
Review: Gore Verbinski's RANGO, 2011
Review: Ji-Woon Kim's THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, 2008
Review: Debra Granik's WINTER'S BONE, 2010
Review: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's RESTREPO, 2010
Usually it’s a bad thing when a ninety-minute film feels long. But Restrepo is the exception that proves the rule, it seems. The film drags, it’s unevenly paced, and there’s no plot structure to speak of, but that only heightens the heart-pounding tension and realism that pervades every moment. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger root out the heart of modern combat: long bouts of waiting, seconds of unbelievable intensity. They have set out to create the anti-Hollywood war movie and utterly succeeded, placing the audience in a real warzone for an hour and a half and relentlessly refusing to take them out of the action, even for expediency’s sake. Watching Restrepo is the closest thing to an actual combat deployment that ninety-nine percent of Americans will ever experience, but the beauty of this fact is that viewers don’t take away some false “understanding” of the war experience, as if they’ve been there and done that; rather, they are led to the knowledge that a civilian can never understand what these soldiers have been through.
Restrepo follows a single platoon of marines on a 15-month deployment to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, from a few days before their flight to their return home. Korengal is no normal deployment: the valley has been dubbed “the valley of death” by American soldiers, and “the deadliest place on Earth” by National Geographic, CNN, and numerous other publications. Between 2006 and 2009, forty-two men were killed there and over three hundred were wounded. Burdened with such statistics, the audience watches painfully as the soldiers, for the most part unaware of where they are headed, giddily cajole and mock one another aboard a train en route to begin their journey.
“We’re goin’ off to war,” the cameraman says, pointing the lens at himself as he smiles thickly behind dark shades. While he giggles and pokes the camera in the face of his sleeping friend, a graphic near the bottom of the screen informs us that the toothy jokester is Juan “Doc” Restrepo, and a pit grows in one’s stomach. Sure enough, almost immediately after the beginning of the platoon’s deployment, Restrepo, a much-beloved friend to many of his comrades, is killed in action. He will not be the last.
The namesake of the film comes not from Restrepo himself, but from the outpost (OP) the marines then name in his honor, which they painstakingly construct in a single night under heavy gunfire from insurgents. OP Restrepo, as the marines call it, becomes a beacon for the marines: as politics obscure the meaning of the war and the soldiers struggle to identify why (or even whom) they are fighting, they look to OP Restrepo for purpose.
“When I look back at what we accomplished,” says Captain Dan Kearney, the platoon’s commanding officer, “I think of OP Restrepo.”
Finding purpose, though, is the last thing on many of the marines’ minds. The filmmakers state that the platoon withstood over 500 firefights in their time in Korengal, and the film itself testifies to the veracity of that estimate. Firefights occur early and often in the deployment, not the least of which is an extensive operation dubbed “Rock Avalanche” that leads the marines deeper past enemy lines than they’ve ever gone before. The operation’s consequences are hard to stomach: Junger and Hetherington are unflinching in their portrayal of the destruction wrought not only on the platoon itself, but the villages peppered throughout the valley. It is in these scenes involving the native people that the audience is made aware of the marines’ true situation. Everyone is a potential enemy: intending to care for children mistakenly injured by a recent American bombing, the marines discover a pile of fatigues in the upper stories of the building. They retreat cautiously.
When Restrepo ends and the platoon comes home, it’s impossible not to imagine yourself sharing in the soldiers’ elation at least a little bit. The movie feels like a battle because it is one; one gets the idealistic sense that the directors didn’t do any editing at all. But after this sense comes the realization that the marines of 2nd platoon weren’t in the Korengal valley for ninety minutes. They were there for a year and a half, sleeping and eating in the same places where they would fight for their lives the next day. Restrepo is a sobering reminder of war’s ultimate reality: young men being stripped of their lives, whether by a bullet or the constant stress of living by a gun. It’s also one of the finest documentaries I’ve ever seen, and required viewing for anyone hoping to preserve a pretense of understanding the Middle Eastern conflict.
Review: Gore Verbinski's RANGO, 2011
What a colossal disappointment. This is a movie that should have been hilarious, should have been intelligent, should have been at the very least a good time, but it is none of those things. Rango is only smarmy, self-consciously clever, aggressively unlikable, and a waste of money, time, and thought.
I only saw this film based on the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction: the trailers, if you’ll pardon my French, looked like balls, and I’m not a big enough Johnny Depp fanboy to salivate over everything that flashes his name on the poster. I should have gone with my gut. It took this and True Grit, but I think I’m finally starting to learn that there is no such thing as a reliable critical consensus, especially in desperate times like right now. Critics, it seems, have a sort of unspoken quota to fill when it comes to positive reviews, so from now on during the dry season I think it’s best to at least be wary of the odd wide release that gets this kind of praise.
Seriously, screw this movie. The first scene sets the tone: Rango, the eponymous Chameleon-with-a-Hawaiian-t-shirt (one of several obvious references to Depp’s portrayal of the Thompson alter ego Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), has aspirations of theatrical greatness. Pretending props from his immediate environment- such as a wind-up plastic fish- are his co-stars, he acts out his own little play, pontificating grandiosely on the nature of drama and acting. It’s exactly as pretentious as it sounds. But it gets worse: Rango ends his monologue by complaining something along the lines of, “the main character needs to be propelled into conflict!” After which, of course, the car he’s in swerves and the terrarium he’s heretofore been occupying is thrown out of the back window onto the road, stranding Rango, who is miraculously unharmed, in the middle of the desert. You can almost hear the writers vigorously patting themselves on the back.
In the desert, Rango first meets a mystical armadillo(?), who tells him to set off in the direction of a settlement in the wasteland. Soon, he arrives in Dirt, an old-west saloon town ruled by the way-too-obviously-evil-from-his-first-scene turtle named Mayor. Dirt is running out of water, and out of hope, but Rango’s blustering arrival and his accidental dispatching of a notorious hawk cause the townspeople to name him Sheriff in the belief that he can stop the impending disaster. Here’s a spoiler for you: he does!
Rango might’ve just been forgettable fluff, if not for the self-important “cleverness” and constant, unnecessary references to other films. Actually, I’ll retract that: forgettable fluff can still be funny. This film is a black mark on the history of humor. I didn’t laugh more than once or twice, and believe me, I was in a forgiving mood (read: inebriated).
The film shamelessly panders to movie buffs, which is my best explanation for why all the critics loved it so much. After all, it seems the general public agrees with my take: CinemaScore, which conducts exit polls of audiences, reported an average grade of C+, a far cry from the respectable 88% “fresh” rating the movie has on review aggregator RottenTomatoes. For future reference, critics: just because the creators of a film have seen the same movies you have, that doesn’t make theirs any better. The plot of Rango echoes that of Chinatown, and Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ character appears in an extended dream sequence to offer advice late in the film. This isn’t inspired tribute: it’s easy, it’s laziness. Excuse me for wanting my movies’ plots to have at least a sense of mystery, but once Mayor mutters “The future, Mr. Rango!” it’s pretty tough to not realize that he’s the Noah Cross character and every story development is about to come verbatim from Polanski’s classic.
Depp, of course, acts his heart out in the title role. He’s full of energy, but his manic quips simply never amount to anything resembling a laugh. It’s hard not to give him credit for effort, though. And Abigail Breslin is cute as always, even if she’s only a voice here.
What really damns Rango for me, ultimately, is that I can’t even let it have the caveat that it was made for children. This is a movie that is decidedly not for children: too scary, too violent, and too dark, I wouldn’t dare take any kid younger than 10 or so to see it. Which is totally nonsensical, considering that many of the film’s toilet-humor jokes (which are funnier than the “adult” jokes) seem catered to that exact audience. But would you want your 5-year-old to see a run-over anthropomorphized animal dying in the road? Or how about a murdered corpse, left in the desert to rot? Didn’t think so.
Damn you, critics. Well, at least now I’ve learned a lesson about expectations. After all, mama always said life was like a box of chocolates- you never know what you’re gonna get (I can reference movies too, yay!).
Review: Ji-Woon Kim's THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, 2008
Five minutes in, I thought this was going to be the best movie I’d seen in years. Ji-Woon Kim gets things started fast: a powerful government official in the 1930’s is presented with a mysterious map (a treasure map, perhaps?), which he sends to be transported aboard a train. But when his flunkies leave, he contacts the gangster Chang-Yi, the eponymous “Bad,” whom he praises as the most feared killer in all of Manchuria. “Just Manchuria?” Chang-Yi quips, with a mean grin at the camera. The official instructs Chang-Yi to board the train and steal back the map, then gives him a ticket. Chang-Yi slashes it in two with a knife. “Bandits don’t need train tickets.”
Cut to the train: cue the credits: get ready for the best action sequence of the last decade this side of Quentin Tarantino.
Aboard the train, Ji-Woon Kim treats his viewers to a mind-blowing, movie-defining tracking shot. The single shot, which follows a ticket collector making his way down the length of the train, not only injects thematic context (a man waving a Korean flag and shouting “Independence for Korea!” is tackled by Japanese police as the ticket collector inches past, unconcerned) but also subtly introduces the audience to all the major players in the story, whether apparent at first or not; it’s such eloquent filmmaking that it makes you shiver. By the time the shot is finished, the train is being robbed (but by whom?), and the Good, the Bad, and the Weird are all present and accounted for.
Tae-Goo, the Weird, is a petty thief in far over his head, and he provides the vast majority of the film’s humor, which ranges from light slapstick to the blackest of black. Korean star Song Kang-Ho, previously seen in the excellent The Host, is a blast to watch in the role. Some of his action sequences reminded me of a young Jackie Chan, mixing complex fight choreography with dick jokes, but the role is altogether his own: Tae-Goo is luckier and less skillful than Chan’s characters. During one sequence, Tae-Goo is being pursued down a flight of stairs when he comes face to face with a gun; the fright of it causes him to trip and fall backwards onto the stairs, dodging the bullet and accidentally discharging his own pistol in the face of his attacker. It’s tiny, brushed-off moments like these that make the movie.
Do-Won, the Good, doesn’t fare as well. He brings a lot of punch to the frequent gun battles with his double-barreled shotgun, but other than that his character isn’t very well defined: all we get on his origins is that he’s a famous bounty hunter obsessed with finding Chang-Yi. Why, you ask? “Because he’s Bad.” Answers Do-Won. Hmmmm.
Chang-Yi’s character starts out promising enough, but in the latter half of the film devolves into incoherence. He’s a caricature of cruelty, killing left and right seemingly out of wanton bloodlust, but it turns out Chang-Yi’s just completely obsessed with being “the best.” At what, nobody seems certain. Maybe something was lost in translation, but some of his later scenes were absolutely painful to watch, filled with rambling dialogue and not the slightest lick of sense.
Which leads me to the main issue I had with the film: as the plot unravels, it becomes rather clear that it’s a tenuous thread, just strong enough to connect the spectacular action set pieces but too thin to tie them together.
The ending, especially, is a massive disappointment. The entire affair is one massive “huh?” moment that stretches out to almost ten minutes of really odd exposition, some tepid reveals (apparently “Finger Chopper” is a more menacing nickname in Korean; in English it sounds pretty silly), and an unsatisfying after-the-credits scene that seems like it’s there just to keep a sequel as a possibility. It’s like the director just threw his hands in the air and said, “Screw it.”
Despite how I felt upon realizing that the film wasn’t the masterpiece I thought I’d get after the opening scenes, I had so much fun throughout the runtime that I can unequivocally state that I’d watch it again in a heartbeat. I can’t say that for many movies nowadays. It’s unapologetically dumb, but that shouldn’t detract from a gleeful romp through Ji-Woon Kim’s active, bloody imagination. I don’t think there’s been a more upbeat, energetic action movie made in the U.S. in years and years, proving once again that international cinema is catching up on us.
Review: Miguel Arteta's CEDAR RAPIDS, 2011
This movie should be terrible. All the pieces are in place: the protagonist is totally unlikable, the grouping of the jokes in the script might’ve been achieved by giving a palsy victim a pepper shaker (or perhaps a shotgun), the plot is unabashedly formulaic, the whole thing hinges on a pretty blatant deus ex machina device late in the film... I could go on. But somehow, Cedar Rapids still manages to end up feeling like a mild breath of fresh air in a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by cynics. It’s flawed, but it’s funny, and it’s so sweet that it’s tough not to leave the theater smiling if not busting a gut laughing.
The very beginning is slow enough to incite worry; there really are almost no laughs until John C. Reilly shows up. These sequences evoke the easygoing mystique of the American Midwest the film seems to celebrate, but not in a good way. Helms’ character is introduced, then we see him having sex with an underused Sigourney Weaver (his ex-grade school teacher), then we see him at work, and then finally the stage is set when an unforeseen circumstance causes him to be sent to compete for an industry award at a hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Not a joke or an interesting plot development in sight, really: just rote progression. While the movie picks up remarkably with Reilly’s introduction, the pacing throughout is perpetually scattershot. Some scenes seem packed so full with jokes that the audience doesn’t have time to stop laughing before the next delivery, while long stretches are almost entirely bereft of humor. This is in part due to the fact that certain sideplots (notably the romance) and even certain characters are just boring.
And what happened to Ed Helms? All the star power that was on display in The Hangover has deserted him as the unbelievably naive insurance man Tim Lippe. He spends the majority of his screentime mugging blankly for the camera. Granted, Lippe is written pretty thin, but Helms’ acting is nothing more than a modified 40 Year Old Virgin routine crossed with his old character from The Office. It’s a shame, because the rest of the veteran cast is fantastic, and they largely save the show. Reilly’s rival salesman Dean Ziegler, ostensibly the foil to Helms’ Lippe, steals every single scene he gets and in the process manages to account for almost all the big laughs in the movie. He’s loud and obnoxious and brash, and he’s precisely the shot in the arm the story needs when he shows up about fifteen minutes or so in. The other two leads, Isaiah Whitlock Jr. and Anne Heche, are almost as priceless to the film’s eventual success. The three of them make a group so endearing that as they follow Helms into wacky situation after wacky situation, you can’t help but feel like they remind you of a group of yourself and your own friends, albeit when you were ten or twenty years younger. That’s the beauty of this film: with the exception of Helms’ character, it’s all about adults who get a chance to act like they’re kids again, if only around each other.
It’s with this lovable portrait of small town friends that the movie achieves something like greatness, even with its obvious mistakes. The characters surprise you because they actually are just as sweet and harmless as they appear, despite what the script would lead you to think at first meeting. This manages to add a new element to the humor, somehow: I actually wanted to be laughing with these people. The barbs are so cushion-soft, and the jokers themselves so innocent, that the humor becomes altogether more relatable than some of the nastier stuff that gets tossed around nowadays. None of it leaves a bad taste in your mouth; Cedar Rapids is a feel-good comedy that deftly tiptoes around saccharine artificiality.
Some people might see the film as a condescending jab at Midwestern Americans (“they’re just so hokey!”), but it’s more like a good-natured ribbing. In a very funny moment, Lippe, arriving for his first-ever hotel stay in the seeming metropolis of Cedar Rapids, is absolutely shocked to find that his roommate is black; however, it doesn’t take the two long to make friends, and nothing more is made of the incident. The filmmakers aren’t trying to allege that Midwesterners are racist: maybe just a little xenophobic, but nobody’s perfect.
All in all, nothing should matter so much as the fact that Cedar Rapids is funny. In this barren cinematic era that suddenly seems like a lot to ask for, and Miguel Arteta’s little flick delivers.
Review: David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK, 2010
It’s not the best movie of the year. What you get instead with The Social Network is a surprisingly small, well-done character study on a realistic, infuriating protagonist.
Everybody knows this is “the Facebook movie.” But your familiarity with the website doesn’t have anything to do with your ability to connect with the film, essentially about paranoia, isolation, friendship, and betrayal in the 21st century. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t necessarily someone I’d like to meet in real life, but his story is definitely one that needed to be shown on the big screen: it is, in ways, a story emblematic of our generation. The Social Network lives up to his gargantuan personality.
That said, the film moves far too quickly: some of the editing is a little dizzying, and it wouldn’t have felt much longer with an extra half hour of running time. That’s a backhanded compliment, though: I just wanted more. Aaron Sorkin’s script is fantastic, brimming with wit and topicality. The rushed pace keeps the film from reaching the status of epics like There Will Be Blood, but it’s still just so sexy and funny and dark that it’s impossible not to recommend highly.
David Fincher’s fingerprints are sometimes hard to spot on the film. Maybe the castrated running time left few moments for directorial flourishes; I wanted to see more scenes like the boat race towards the end, a sequence beautifully photographed in deep blues and hazy but brilliant whites, laid out like an allegory of immense importance but left hauntingly unexplained. Fincher must be commended, though, for coaxing such brilliant acting out of his talented leads, perhaps with the exception of the well cast but dramatically inept Justin Timberlake. Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield deliver literally career-making performances.
Get off your Facebook and go see it already.
Review: Ben Affleck's THE TOWN, 2010
Watching The Town is like getting stood up on a blind date in a fancy restaurant. You show up nervous and giddy about who you’re meeting, having heard such great things through a mutual friend, but that concern takes a backseat as you’re immediately overwhelmed by how amazing the atmosphere of the restaurant is and how lucky you are to see the inside of it (let’s assume the mutual friend is also paying for dinner). You can’t believe the quality of the room’s construction, the attention to detail and home grown authenticity (let’s assume Italian) that gives it such a unique air: “are those the same fixtures from the Sistine chapel?” You might whisper to yourself in astonishment as you exit the bathroom. Roman columns support every wall; your waiter swings his hands around a lot and says “buongiorno” when he greets you; you’re even pretty convinced you heard a “bada bing” from somewhere off behind you while you were being led to your table. Authenticity is just oozing from the place; it’s the only word you can think of. Authenticity. Authenticity. You keep on repeating it in your head without even realizing it. You sit back in your chair and you’re simply delighted with how the evening is coming along so far, and then you realize your date was supposed to show up twenty minutes ago.
You try not to worry. After all, maybe she’s just waiting to make an entrance. At first, you really don’t worry: working from a fixed menu, your waiter soon brings out hors d’oeuvres. They’re incredibly distracting. The taste is at once restrained but powerful, efficiently highlighting the ingredients of the food to their greatest effect. You begin sipping at the wine, which you find to your pleasure to be equally superlative. The cuisine has an effect on you: you’re laughing, smiling, joking gregariously with your waiter, and generally having such a good time that you realize you haven’t even been checking your watch. When you do check it, you find that your date is now an hour late.
You start to worry. It’s impossible not to at this point, especially since the main course is being served. Your mind is racing with explanations- she’ll call and explain, she’s probably just in traffic, maybe she fell asleep- but you’re still convinced, on the strength of your friend’s recommendation, that she will in fact show up. It’s just a little more difficult now to enjoy the sumptuous feast that is in front of you. The steak is still perfectly cooked, the pasta is still al dente, the waiter is still your BFF and the restaurant is still more Italian than the Pope, but there simply isn’t anybody sitting across from you. While for the last hour this has seemed the best night of your life, the first droplets of disappointment begin stirring inside of you.
By the time dessert rolls around, you aren’t even surprised that it leaves such a bitter taste in your mouth: your date still hasn’t shown. At this point, she would have to burst into the restaurant wearing lingerie and doing a strip tease to your favorite song to make your night anything more than a total letdown. It doesn’t matter; your waiter comes up and explains that the restaurant needs the table, and so you need to leave. The evening is over, and you head home thinking about the night that could have been. Such is The Town in a very complicated nutshell.
Of course, you’ve got to do some substitution to really understand the (admittedly drawn-out) metaphor. I won’t do all the work for you, but suffice it to say the night overall is the film; the date, the most important part of the night and the only one which failed to satisfy, is the film’s just-as-absent emotional core.
Watching The Town, just like at the restaurant, it’s easy for one to get caught up in the swift, efficient execution of its opening sequences. The film, about a group of professional thieves in a notorious Boston suburb, starts with a tremendous set piece depicting Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) and his crew of childhood friends (including Jem (Jeremy Renner), Doug’s vitriolic partner in crime) robbing a local bank. Of course, it doesn’t go as smoothly as planned. When a silent alarm is triggered, Jem ruthlessly beats the man he assumes responsible and impulsively takes a bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall), hostage. Her abduction proves unnecessary. After a narrow escape, the two men, still disguised, verbally intimidate Claire before releasing her near the ocean: “walk until you feel the water on your toes,” they yell as their van screeches down the road. Soon, with a dogged FBI agent (Jon Hamm) assigned to track the thieves down, Jem’s recklessness comes back to haunt him when he realizes their one-time hostage lives mere blocks from their Charlestown hideout. He doesn’t want to take any chances; Doug, however, already wracked with guilt, persuades his friend to leave the girl to him. But this only further complicates the messy situation. When Doug realizes he’s falling in love with Claire, a collision with Jem seems unavoidable.
That’s all in the first twenty minutes or so, and if that seems fast-paced, it is. Intense action dashed with sly character development, peppered with sharp dialogue and a great degree of directorial flair, make the beginning of the film slick as an oyster and just as tasty (assuming you’re into that kind of thing). But the hors d’oeuvres stop satisfying after a while, and even when the film gets meatier, it doesn’t matter, because enjoyment of the beginning presupposes the expectation of something more than just meat. When you’re on a date, the food is a plus, but it isn’t what you’re counting on.
It’s tough to explain why the film ends up feeling so emotionally uninvolving since everything else about it is just so damn good. The performances are rock solid. Jem is especially complex, a man-child whose violence stems from his lack of maturity rather than sadism. He’s almost pitiful, emotionally blackmailing his best friend in an attempt to cage him in Charlestown and secure his idealized vision of their future together; when Doug tells him to “stop playing house” it sets the stage for a dramatic, real conflict. Renner should get looks from the academy come next year. And, though he stands out, the rest of the cast performs just as admirably: even Affleck himself is convincing as the brains of the operation, the one who doesn’t belong, but does belong somehow among the group of thuggish outlaws.
Affleck also shows himself, once again, to be an enormously capable director. The polish of each scene is astounding. The film’s tone is very, very similar to that of his first feature, Gone Baby Gone, but for the most part this isn’t an issue. It does make the Bostonian atmosphere seem a little heaped-on: he’s working from the same bag of tricks, so if you’ve seen his former effort, the latter might come off overbearing. Still, you can’t exactly get angry with a director for plagiarizing his own work. Mostly, the direction improves upon its predecessor’s, notably in the orchestration of the action, imparting a manic desperation to each robbery and chase scene.
If it’s so similar to Gone Baby Gone, though, how can The Town lack an emotional core? Gone Baby Gone, after all, was an overwhelmingly emotional movie. But that film’s emotion came largely in the form of the choice forced upon its protagonist in the finale. I won’t ruin such a great ending, but this choice presented a moral quandary so perilously ambiguous, so far-reaching in its implications, that either decision would invariably have haunted the man who made it. Audiences leaving the theater couldn’t escape discussing what they would have done in the same situation.
There is no such quandary in The Town; the film doesn’t raise any important questions about morality or love or friendship, and no one is ever forced to make an even remotely difficult decision (with the exception of one minor character, Jem’s sister (Blake Lively), whose choice is totally unbelievable in context).
The only suspense in the film comes from slowly realizing the plot is going in the exact same direction you’d have expected from the opening moments, or even the trailer: one starts waiting for a turn that never materializes. Every character development becomes rote, and every repetition becomes frustrating: Affleck’s Doug maintains his one-last-job attitude through three separate major robberies, to the point that it becomes laughably insincere. Even this insincerity, though, could’ve worked, if perhaps Doug were ever punished for it; instead, his and Jem’s seemingly inevitable reconciliation is ingloriously sidestepped by a late plot device, every loose end keeping him in Charlestown is tied up, and Doug ends up getting, for the most part, everything he could’ve wanted. The end. It isn’t very realistic and it definitely isn’t very probing; it just doesn’t feel right.
In short, The Town is a decent ‘flick,’ but it should have been a great film. It certainly had every opportunity to be one. Going back to the blind date metaphor, if you’re one of those people who can live life without expectations, who can go into that restaurant and savor the food regardless of who happens to sit down across from you, you’ll be able to thoroughly enjoy the frenetic action and dense character development that a ticket to The Town will buy you. If you’re like me, though, you might just leave feeling a little tricked.
Review: John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS, 1987
Prince of Darkness came at a bad time for John Carpenter. A decade earlier, flying high on the monumental success of his indie Halloween in 1978 (which returned 20,313% of its budget), the young director had been a hot commodity in tinsel town. He wasn’t a one-trick Shyamalan, either: once the studios snapped him up, he had eagerly cranked out a fairly successful follow-up (The Fog, 1980) and what became the second biggest moneymaker of his career, Escape From New York, the year after. But, starting with The Thing in 1982, Carpenter had a long string of critically lauded commercial flops, that unfortunate death knell of so many talented directors working within the system. All of the films he made in this time period, ironically, have since become cult classics (The Thing, Christine, and Big Trouble In Little China), but in 1987 studios were treating him with the kind of deference usually reserved for schizophrenics and insurance salesmen.
Prince of Darkness was supposed to be a big middle finger to those studios.
Produced independently for three million dollars, the film was the first since Halloween to see Carpenter given complete creative license from start to finish; he wrote, directed, and scored it. Unfortunately, this lack of quality control is painfully evident upon viewing the final product; it’s doubtful anyone else read the completed script before Carpenter started filming it. There’s a very good reason studios were hesitant to deal with the man if this was the idea he was pitching them. To be blunt, this is a horror movie about a bottle of liquid Satan.
Carpenter’s vision failed him with this one. For a long time now, it’s been something of a cliché in speculative fiction to try to reconcile biblical history with modern science. Seemingly hoping to capitalize on this trend, Carpenter’s script casts God and Satan as measurable subatomic phenomena, equated ham-fistedly with matter and anti-matter. Quotes from Carpenter, oddly enough, seem to highlight the lack of genuine inspiration inherent in this half-baked concept: “I just thought it might be interesting to create some sort of ultimate evil and combine it with the notion of matter and anti-matter.” He might have been right, but the idea certainly requires a definite subtlety that his approach entirely lacks. The script seems only to set aside time for three things: cheap scares of either the pop-out or gross-out variety (the whole liquid Satan thing? Yeah, it possesses people by shooting jets of green goo into their mouths), cringe-worthy 80’s slang catchphrases delivered like Schwarzenegger one-liners without the Austrian accent, and an absurd amount of exposition laying out exactly how the movie-science works. You really don’t even want me to explain it to you; if you did, you’d see the movie, and I hope you don’t do that to yourself. Suffice it to say that Satan, in liquid form, has been locked up for seven million years in the bottom of a Los Angeles church(?), but is returning on account of the world’s evil ways. Along for the ride, he’s bringing a boatload of nasty insects and zombie homeless people.
Surprisingly enough, with everything against it, the film starts out with promise: the first scene is startling, tensely edited, minimally scored with dark percussive bass (a Carpenter trademark), and beautifully shot. As a priest explains to theoretical physicist Howard Birak that the world is in danger, only he can save us, yada yada yada, it’s easy to tune out the dialogue and stare at the dissonant, cluttered compositions and threatening angles created by the cinematographer. The whole sequence seems to give the film a sense of doom that isn’t impending, but rather already unstoppably in motion; it’s exactly what you’d expect from a superlative Carpenter flick. And then the wheels fall off.
Even within Carpenter’s filmography Prince of Darkness feels like a B-movie, and that’s saying something: among his pre-90’s work, it’s the only one that’s noticeably been made on a shoestring budget, and it cost ten times what it took to make Halloween. Carpenter is usually much better about spending his money; to start with, he could’ve splurged on at least one or two professional actors. The ensemble is entirely composed of unknowns, and it’s difficult to shake the inkling that there might be a shared last name or two between cast and production staff. Great movies have been made with worse actors, though (the first Saw springs to mind, oddly enough). What really kills the movie is what the actors are saying.
The plot of the film is preposterous, and it gets no help from strong characters or dialogue. In fact, of the seemingly endless protagonists Carpenter marches across the screen, not one is easily named by the end of the film (I caught myself more than once identifying characters by their facial hair or lack thereof). They are utterly interchangeable; Carpenter doesn’t even deign to fit them into the typical group-of-survivors-in-a-horror-movie archetypes, even when he does succumb to the cliché of having his characters slowly picked off one by one after barricading themselves in the church. The two romantic leads, in particular, are so wooden and obnoxious that when their arc finally does reach its supposedly tragic conclusion, it’s hard not to feel a little satisfied that they got what was coming to them.
Prince of Darkness is a frustrating movie, made more so because the opening sequence is so promising, and the cinematography so good throughout. The film leaves you with the sense that a great movie is buried somewhere far, far beneath the surface of its hack-job script, its non-existent characters, and its cheese-encrusted scares. Thankfully, it seems for Carpenter this was a learning experience; perhaps he was simply shaking off the rust of a long period spent working within the Hollywood system, because his next film, They Live, was fantastic and similarly budgeted. Tellingly, he brought along his cinematographer and only his cinematographer from Prince of Darkness, and the same boost is provided to the far-superior latter film; it’s nice to see talent noticed and exploited by a director, especially after such a depressing outing as this.
Review: Debra Granik's WINTER'S BONE, 2010
I shouldn’t have watched this again the night before the Academy Awards. It just made everything Winter’s Bone lost that much more disappointing. A starkly bleak neo-noir set in the modern Ozarks, the movie is probably the best independent film of the last decade: only Duncan Jones’ debut, Moon, immediately jumps to mind as a contender for that title. It’s a shame neither got much recognition come awards season.
At the start of the film, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence, who never once hits a false note) is in a bad situation, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Her dad isn’t around, and it doesn’t seem like this is a new development, which leaves the jobless Ree alone raising her two young siblings and caring for their mentally ill, withdrawn mother. What is a new development is the news, delivered by the vaguely slimy county sheriff, that Ree’s father Jessup, a known meth cooker, put up his family’s home as collateral to get out of a recent arrest and they will lose it if he fails to show up to court in seven days’ time. And so Ree desperately sets out to find him, balancing detective work with teaching her siblings the survival skills (such as gutting a squirrel) they’ll soon need in the unforgiving Ozark wilderness if they lose their home. As the search wears on, it becomes clear that most of Jessup’s old friends and associates seem to believe the loss of the house is a foregone conclusion. Something smells wrong.
An amazing thing about Winter’s Bone is how deftly it avoids any sort of melodrama while still packing a relentless emotional punch. Exemplifying this aspect is John Hawkes as Teardrop Dolly, Ree’s uncle and Jessup’s brother, who becomes a sort of ally to Ree after initially threatening her and coming off as near psychotic.
I’ve always been scared of you.” Ree tells him.
“That’s ‘cause you’re smart.” Says Teardrop.
In any other year, in a just world, Hawkes would have won Best Supporting Actor. His portrayal of Teardrop, a sinewy, unpredictable man consumed by a potent cocktail of regret, compassion, and blinding rage, is flat-out devastating. What makes the performance so unbelievably impressive is that the character isn’t awards bait whatsoever: Teardrop is a drug addict, but that’s the least important part of his persona, and is presented as a given; there’s no false sentimentality wrung from his and Ree’s relationship; he’s not a hero or an antihero, he’s simply realistic. He provides a perfect foil to Ree’s sad, determined outlook: Teardrop is a man guided by rigid principles, even when they lead him and those he cares about into ruin. His final scene is haunting, and will have audiences thinking- and deeply caring- about the repercussions of his actions long after the credits have rolled.
Only slightly less impressive is the performance by Jennifer Lawrence. Ree is stoic and determined, but by no means fearless, and we’re never once made to forget that she is far too young to be handling the responsibility with which she’s been saddled. One of the most wrenching scenes in the film has Ree breaking down and begging her hopelessly withdrawn mother for some- or any- help, but by and large hers is a performance that is delivered in silences, not lengthy monologues: you really have to watch her face and pay attention to her movements to understand the full depth of the emotion she’s displaying.
Winter’s Bone works on a visceral level because, in the end, it’s a movie about survival. The Ozark timber-woods background, populated mostly with locals in place of professional actors, sets the perfect tone for the film. Everything is a shade of brown or gray or both, and the only music comes from the banjos and soulful voices of the country folk. We are constantly reminded that this is a real place, not just the oft-parodied backdrop to Hollywood travel comedies, and that the struggles experienced by Ree’s family are a real and often overlooked aspect of modern existence. Ree’s quest, even if she succeeds, won’t end with the family’s troubles evaporating or Ree’s mother returning to sanity or everybody moving to a new place in the city. Their lives will simply go on. Survival will remain a struggle, and once the kids are old enough to feed themselves, Ree will likely be gone, to the Army if not someplace else.
It’s not a film for everyone- it seems intent on being as silent as possible for most of the runtime- but for those who can stomach the occasional depressing realist drama, this is a fantastic one. There are scenes that are hard to watch, but there are countless more that are impossible not to.
