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Thoughts on Haywire

24 January, 2012 by

A surprising film from an always-surprising director

by Jack Kentala

It gives me great pleasure to say, in all earnestness, that Haywire (2011 or 2012 depending on the source) is Steven Soderbergh’s best film since Contagion. And the latter came out last September.

I don’t know what the fuck happens in Mission: Impossible – Shitty Title, but I guarantee this is a better film by several magnitudes. While Soderbergh is no stranger to fringe genre filmmaking – Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and, uh, Thirteen, as well as the still-underrated Out of Sight and the film-school staple/revenger The Limey – here he tackles an action/spy/thriller mashup that plays far better to his sensibilities than, say, Paul Greengrass or David Fincher.

Much fuss has been made about the casting of Gina Carano, well versed in the world of MMA (mixed martial arts, e.g. punching someone in the face until they lose consciousness…in a steel cage!) and someone you definitely want on your side in a bar fight. Many feared that a non-vet wouldn’t carry a film or, more importantly, stand her ground against phenomenal actors like Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor. And she pulls it off completely, with a quiet verve that, for whatever reason, reminds me of Richard Jenkins in The Visitor (or, dare I say, the lead in French Resistance piece Army of Shadows, but with a shade more emotion). Carano also looks like she could double for Rachel Weisz; wouldn’t be surprised if unwitting filmgoers mistook the two.

So that’s probably a good departure point between comparing the real-life exploits of Carano versus pornstar Sasha Grey in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. It’s not like Soderbergh hasn’t used non-pros before. Anyone remember Bubble? I sure do, and not just because it was fantastic. I think it’s definitely the fact that sliding Grey into the role of an escort and Carano into a physically-lethal operator in Haywire that led to this dubious comparison. Depending who you ask, the question is either “Who’s the worse actor?” or “Who’s surprisingly excellent?”

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Haywire is also very special because it’s a Soderbergh trifecta: he directed it, shot it (as DP Peter Andrews, as per guild rules), and cut it (as Mary Ann Bernard, also because of guild rules). It’s not as rare as a Soderbergh quadfecta (Solaris, which SS directed, shot, cut, and adapted [very liberally from Stanislaw Lem's book rather than Tarkovsky's film]) or the quinfecta (Schizopolis, with the man as director, writer, DP, lead actor, and music [sort of]). There’s a school of thought (actually a film school of thought that was drilled into my head [by a certain institution] and brashly discarded when I set about both my student shorts and no-budget features) that you should only do one thing on a film, somehow reasoning that if you, say, direct and shoot, you can only concentrate on one or the other. Haywire proves counter to this argument. Contagion (which SS “only” directed and shot), which everyone absolutely loves (right?), proves that the man can wear many hats and still deliver an unfairly-consistent film. (Wish I could do the same!)

I’m working off an outline written on a napkin, so you’re going to have to bear with me. This was also supposed to just be a bulleted list.

I’m mentally going back to Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a woman spy who can beat the shit out of people. But in that I didn’t once really think about gender roles in action movies, mostly since Jolie has done a lot of those. For a hardcore MMA fighter, Carano is miraculously easy on the eyes (yeah, I’ll trot out the Rachel Weisz comparison again), but she’s not as impossibly beautiful as Angelina Jolie. (If nothing else, Carano’s lips aren’t the size of those wax ones you used to buy as a kid.) So while Jolie has operated largely in the capacity as eye-candy-that-fights (Exhibit A: In Wanted, yeah, she kicks ass, takes names, etc., but also steps nude out of a bathtub while two dudes look on and pop hidden boners.), Carano doesn’t have the burden of having to look too pretty to sell her character because, hell, if her character was too pretty we’d want to check her resume. A colleague and I have an ongoing debate about Haywire, in which he insists Carano is far too low-key to play the lead. I countered saying that this sort of “realistic” spy film (aka not the sort of film with Bourne-esque miracle stunts) exists in the “real world” where a spy’s best asset is their ability to melt into a crowd. Granted, for a film, you have to strike a balance. I thought that Carano made that balance work; my friend didn’t.

(Aside: Just remembered that Salt was actually written with Tom Cruise in mind before they switched it to Jolie with nary a difference.)

And while Soderbergh has dabbled in pretty much everything, he’s fairly new at action outside of some scenes in the Ocean’s, Out of Sight, and a little in The Limey and Traffic. Well, Che is about dudes with rifles and grenades, whereas there are probably less than twenty gunshots in the whole of Haywire. Soderbergh (or screenwriter Lem Dobbs) wisely stuck with close-quarters combat, which is absolutely brutal. It’s much moreso brutal because Soderbergh lets David Holmes’ score completely drop out during fights; all we hear are body blows, things breaking, and gunshots. (Another aside: Gunshots in movies are “movie gunshots” that sound nothing like what actual gunshots sound like. I’ve fired many guns in real life and the sound is more of a singular, blow-out BLAM than a “movie gunshot” that sounds like twenty different things happening at once. Haywire gets gunshots right.) Soderbergh also wisely keeps the shots as wide as possible, which is akin to kung-fu films and early Jackie Chan (like Police Story or Druken Master II, not his American bullshit, back when Jackie Chan could fall three stories onto hard ground [as he did in Project A] and not die), which showed that the actors actually had some skill. This was long before the What The Fuck Is Happening? It’s Cut Too Fast! trend that’s been going on in Hollywood for a while, which was first used to hide the stuntmen and now is employed for reasons that are beyond me. (As much as I love exactly 41% of The Dark Knight, I hate their obtuse, obstructed, dark-as-fuck, edited-so-fast-it-could-induce-a-seizure fight choreography. And it extends far beyond just that film.)

Unfortunately, while scenes with Carano and random dudes (most likely stuntmen) duking it out are kept whole with longer and wider shots (since Carano can easily hold her own), her bouts with Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor are cut a little faster because, presumably, those guys needed a double lest they wanted a broken skull.

While I’m grinding out minor quibbles, here’s another: The whole framing device for about 75% of the story is lame. To summarize: Carano gets out of a hotspot by carjacking a car and its driver. For a private-ops spy, she sure spills her entire narrative to her passenger, and even though it’s in the spirit of trying to clear her name, it’s a tad convenient and cuts up the past and present at not-always-perfect points. Also: The carjacked man looks and sounds so much like Edward Norton (especially through windshield glare) that I had to double-check IMDb that it wasn’t him. Here‘s what I’m talking abut, though he looks a lot less doughy in the film.

One last caveat: The film seemed too short. That’s actually probably the biggest compliment I can offer up. It’s just that the spy genre has trained viewers to expect acts 1 and 2 to plot out the final “job” that unfolds in act 3. Here, the two main “jobs” blend into each other and, individually, don’t last that long. If you see Haywire, you’ll know what I mean when, near the end, Channing Tatum has a somewhat dumbing realization and says, “I was in Barcelona seven days ago?”

Much like I gushed in my thoughts on Contagion, it’s astounding how many great players are in the film given its $15 million budget. Carano probably came in on the cheap, and the rest must owe Soderbergh favors for dogsitting or driving them to the airport at 5 a.m. one morning or something. It’s like the starting lineup for badasses past and present: Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton (not Pullman), Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas. All that was missing was a Matt Damon cameo. (And Che Part 2 showed that Damon can have a minutes-long cameo without derailing the film and making everyone say, “Hey!… Isn’t that Matt Damon?” Probably because he was wearing a hat and speaking Spanish, albeit Matt-Damon-sounding Spanish.)

Haywire was great. It’ll be great again when it hits DVD in two months and I can watch it again, most likely with the always-excellent commentaries by Soderbergh. But no matter how hard I try, all these recent Soderbergh films are depressing because the man insists that he’s retiring after Magic Mike (let’s just all pretend it’s not about male stripping so we won’t feel weird getting tickets), his HBO-miniseries biopic on Liberace, and a 2013 film currently titled The Bitter Pill. I feel like I’m pre-eulogizing, but even if Haywire is derided as a subpar genre pic (most likely by those whose palette is more used to Mission: Impossible – Shitty Title, the schizo Bournes, and whatever turd the next James Bond turns out to be), Soderbergh threw his full force (or at least the trifecta) behind a new genre, a first-time lead, and a non-sexy (read: non-Ocean’s) style. And it came together. And I want more.

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2011 In Film (Not Really) / The Three Worst Superhero Movies of 2011

22 December, 2011 by

by Jack Kentala

2011: I finished the picture edit for my second feature film (with a sound overhaul in its late stages for an early ’12 release); wrote a very long book; started prepping my third feature; seriously considered getting a dog and/or getting engaged; and I saw none of the movies that has caused nationwide critics to cream their pants.

I take a bit of that last part back. It’s rather thrilling to see The Tree of Life tentatively making the top of giant amalgamating Best-Of polls, and it’s a huge victory for director Terrence Malick, who has started a late-career Renaissance that will probably kill him. (I “reviewed” this fine film and own it. I’ve watched the universe-creation sequence roughly fourteen times. No comment on how many of those times I may or may not have cried.)

And now I’m slowly remembering my point: I didn’t see enough awards’ bait to feel like I can make any sort of definitive statement on 2011 as a whole. I didn’t like Drive nearly as much as everyone else. I refuse to see The Artist (and don’t get me started). Hugo gave me my first 3D headache. Shame is playing two states away. I’ve got Tabloid and Margin Call in my Netflix stack (right underneath a disc of Justice League Unlimited cartoons). I’d rather spend the ticket price on an actual racetrack bet than see War Horse.

I did, though, see a fair amount of middling fare, like the unreasonably-enjoyable Fast Five, the oh-god-they’re-probably-going-to-turn-this-into-a-franchise Battle: Los Angeles, and director Zack Snyder lost all his cred with his better-than-it-deserved Watchmen adaptation with the fetish flop Sucker Punch.

I also saw pretty much every superhero film released and, these days, that’s no small feat. So in keeping with the time-honored tradition of making pointless lists at calendar year-end, here are the three worst superhero films from 2011.

The Worst

This poster is more exciting than the movie

Captain America: The First Avenger

Let’s get the title out of the way. I’m sure the studio marketing hit squad pulled their hair out over this one. Sure, anyone with a passing knowledge of Marvel’s stable of superheroes knows Captain America (especially after his much-publicized comic-book death). But given that Captain America: The First Avenger is set back in that quaint time of the 40s, Marvel must’ve thought we’re all too stupid to see the fast-incoming Avengers films (set in the present day), so they tacked on “The First Avenger” so we mouthbreathers wouldn’t get too confused between scenes of horrid CGI and Hugo Weaving’s ghastly German faux-accent. (In his defense, he was probably having fun while getting paid.)

A lot of my problems with the film (which are also problems within the film itself) have to do with the framing narrative. It’s World War II. The US is at war with Germany. There’s a reason why so many videogames go back to this era: It was arguably the last time our nation faced off against an adversary that could be considered unredeemably “evil.” It was also a halcyon era sandblasted by the idea of an America owned by middle-class whites, and just off every Main Street there were pies gently cooling on windowsills and pretty girls who’d get “serious” by holding hands.

We all know it’s total fucking bullshit, though, but Captain America’s world is that fantasy world. All the more fantastic because the titular Captain, in his European scrapes, only fights a weird branch of the German Army that spouts lame, just-off-the-mark chants of “Hail HYDRA!” and gear up for war wearing big masks. The latter lets our heroes murder as many HYDRA drones as possible without that pesky PG-13 rating climbing up into the R realm. It’s one of those MPAA tricks: You can murder as many people you want as long as it’s historical (Saving Private Ryan) or you can’t see their human faces (here), but if you say FUCK more than twice, it’s an R for you, sir. (And never mind that Captain America is nowhere near an R-rating. Just saying.)

There’s also the typical Superhero Movie problem in that the Captain America mythology is so huge it has to include some of the bare bones of his band of hooligans. They barely get any screen time beyond Howard Stark (e.g. Iron Man’s dad) and the Captain’s gee-gosh love interest, the criminally-underused Hayley Atwell. (See AMC’s pretty-good miniseries remake of The Prisoner to see her do more than give teenage boys boners.)

So Captain America is dragged down by the central tenets of the genre, though it’s certainly not the first to befall its fate. Simply put, the running time can’t cram in the Captain’s origin story, a love interest, hooks into The Avengers (other than in the title), and any substantial fear wielded one of the worst villains in 2011: Hugo Weaving as a Voldemort lookalike, both missing their noses, though Weaving’s Red Skull is, yep, bright red.

And I didn’t even get around to the creepy-as-fuck scrawny version of Chris Evans, who looks like he desperately needs to find the visual effects supervisor for Benjamin Button. At least Evans won’t need to play a weakling for the planned 2014 sequel.

The Second-Worst

Why is everyone always looking UP?

Green Lantern

Hal Jordan, hero of Green Lantern, is given a ring of power by a dying pink fish-man. He plays the reluctant hero and becomes part of the weird-alien collective called the Green Lantern Corps. And with his ring, using sheer willpower and imagination, he can create any solid object. Well, as long as it’s bright green.

So during the first public need for using his power, Jordan is faced with a helicopter about to crash. With his ring, it’s obvious he can easily save it. He could make a giant pillow for it to land on. Or rebuild the broken parts of the helicopter with juicy green energy. Or, hell, do it like the goddamn cartoons and encase it in a giant stasis field and slowly bring it down to land.

But what does Jordan do? He turns the rest of the helicopter into a Formula-1-style racecar and builds a winding track for it to drive on and slow down.

This is what we’re dealing with.

A college friend was big into comics, and he and I saw Batman Begins the day it came out. He was blown away by the film which, while far from perfect, wasn’t as shit as the other Batmans before. Through him I learned a passing knowledge of comics and, like all comic nerds, he always argued that a Green Lantern Corps ring is inherently overpowered. I actually remember getting a rather long treatise on the Justice League and how Hal Jordan is considered to be the greatest Lantern in the Corps.

I’m really glad I wasn’t with him when he saw Green Lantern.

Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the fantastic casting of the original Iron Man. Robert Downey, Jr. was already Tony Stark. Ryan Reynolds is still best known as Van Wilder and Scarlett Johansson’s leftovers (good thing the Marvel Avengers and DC Justice League stay separate lest there be some awkwardness between Reynolds’ Jordan and Johansson’s Black Widow). He’s not a strong actor, and while his reluctant-hero shtick works, he doesn’t have the necessary gravitas to step into the role of a badass whose power comes from a ring that looks like it was made from melted-down Ring Pops.

Also, I may have spoken too soon when dissing Weaving’s Red Skull as the most laughable villain, since Peter Sarsgaard’s elephant-man Asperger’s-syndrome-suffering troglodyte might beat out silly red makeup.

What’s interesting about Green Lantern, though, is that the studio and DC Comics aren’t pushing for a Justice League movie yet, so we’ll have to suffer through Green Lantern 2 first.

(Note for all three of you interested: Granted, Marvel had a big lead on its superhero-ass-kicking-ensemble with two Iron Man films, Thor, Captain America, an appearance by Black Widow in Iron Man 2 [though neither Ang Lee's Hulk or the Ed Norton-starring The Incredible Hulk will use that Hulk], but DC seems to be having a tricky time assembling their Justice League. While it’s confirmed that there won’t be standalone films for Avengers Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Hulk, only Green Lantern has a “canon” Justice League movie with the other six either in the making or being rebooted. What’s somewhat sad is that after the will-probably-be-very-good-but-not-brilliant The Dark Knight Rises, there will be another Batman that has nothing to do with Chris Nolan’s Batmans, since this rebooted Batman will serve on the League. Zack Snyder is already on damage control, erasing all memories of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns with the upcoming Man of Steel. If DC goes the route of Marvel and only makes three standalone films before venturing into an orgy of superheroes, there still has to be a sensical way to exhibit the “classic” Justice League lineup of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and the Martian Manhunter without confusing filmgoers insofar as to dry up the box office. In other words: There will be a lot of probably-shitty superhero movies coming out for the next foreseeable, uh, decade.)

The Least-Worst

Hey, look, Natalie Portman!

Thor

Look up the plot synopsis of Thor if you haven’t seen it or want to spoil it or just want to follow along with the few zingers I have left because, my dear Dincanauts, you do realize it’s almost Christmas, right? This writer has to make dog-treat cookies for my favorite canines without typing my fingers off.

Why Thor gets the backhanded compliment of being the least-worst of this honorable three is because, despite unwisely splitting its narrative between fantastical Asgard and boring-as-fuck New Mexico, the film is loaded with brownie points. First being that the early parts of Thor work splendidly as a fish-out-of-water tale, with godly Thor crashing down to Earth and, despite speaking remarkable English, doesn’t quite figure that things don’t work the way here than in Asgard. It speaks enough that I can remember a scene where Thor downs a cup of coffee at a diner, breaks his mug on the table, and shouts for more, confused why everyone else is confused because it’s apparent common in Asgard to smash your drinking object when finished. And I saw this movie back in May whereas the rest were DVD viewings within the last two months.

Thor’s crippling identity crisis stems for aforementioned narrative splitting. We have Asgard and its Shakespearean betrayal (which is probably the exact phrasing they used to attract director Kenneth Branaugh and actor Anthony Hopkins), all rendered in vivid color and crazy CGI. But then Thor quite literally crashes to Earth; and not just Earth but New Mexico, which is where all of America’s unwanted sand goes. I’m sure the disconnect was intentional, but it simply does not work, especially when the Earth story was far more compelling than the boring power struggle in Asgard; it’s like we, the viewer, are being punished for wanting to see candycane Asgard but only in very, very boring scenes, while all the interesting stuff is happening on Earth.

Thor also suffers from having too much talent that all seem like they’re slumming it for a paycheck. Natalie Portman is just shy of being too hot for portraying an astrophysicist, but she could pick better projects coming off her Black Swan Oscar win. (Never mind Portman’s appearance in the lame stoner fantasy Your Highness.) And while Chris Hemsworth effortlessly charms, the story lazily has Portman going all dreamy-eyed for Thor without reason. Stellan Skarsgard kind of flits around, since he doesn’t have breasts or big muscles. The Wire’s Idris Elba must be the first black guy after Asgard relaxed its Jim Crow laws or started equal-opportunity employment for dudes guarding a big galactic wormhole gate thing. Kat Dennings continues her career-long role as a semi-apathetic smartass who gets most of the one-liners (regardless of whether or not they’re funny).

There’s a common thread here: None of these films – and pretty much every superhero or action film released within the last decade – seem particularly-fulfilling because we know there’s something on the horizon. In the past it’s been a sequel, but now we have these unwieldy superhero-posse affairs threatening to consume the brains of our male youths. There’s already a trailer for The Avengers, despite Marvel confirming Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3 (the latter of which director Jon Favreau is as confused about as am I, because what the fuck can Stark do without his Avenging buddies?). So logic also follows that, at some point in production, someone had a great idea for the film but, nope, we need fodder for the sequel. It’s like climbing the hill of a rollercoaster only to find that there’s no big drop at all; just a low-speed, no-thrill ride through pretty scenery.

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Brief Thoughts on Drive

21 September, 2011 by

Forget the map; the route is flawed

By Jack Kentala

Here’s how you do it right:

Take a dogshit script and, instead of throwing a few million at the marketing budget to get two decent box-office weekends and enough longtail cashflow like DVD sales and streaming rights, you hire the following people:

  • Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who helmed the challenging Broson and the criminally-underseen Valhalla Rising, to try to keep a hold on the nowhere-subplot-heavy screenplay and purge any unnecessary pap from something that should’ve been far more straightforward than the end product;
  • Director of Photography Newton Thomas Sigel (his best work: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Three Kings) to light nighttime driving scenes that don’t look like a lazy gaffer taped a mini-kino on the dash to give that always-lit sheen to the driver and passengers;
  • Editor Matthew Newman, who, hell, has basically only worked with Refn, but whose work on the triumvirate of Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and Driver should get him his ACE invite soon enough;
  • Supervising sound editor Lon Bender who, like any solid soundman, works for the sake of working (between the lines: he’s worked on a lot of duds), and, here, turns the roar of Fast Five to a whisper, in which cars pass like ships in the night save for a gentle razor-blade slice (I swear the source effects he used were lion and tiger roars);
  • Composer Cliff Martinez, who just runs with the not-motivated-whatsoever 80s vibe that seems relegated only to some pieces of music, the neon-pink cursive credits, and Ryan Gosling’s racing jacket;
  • Ryan Gosling, who acts across all levels of budget to gives James Franco a run for his money as the most chameleonesque actor of his generation; and, hell, he’s better than Franco;
  • Carey Mulligan, who’s criminally underused (and whose accent forgivably slips a few times); but then again, she’s been criminally underused in all of cinema except for her turn as the haunted Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go (which just might be the performance of her career… both past and future);
  • And Bryan Cranston since he’s Bryan fucking Cranston.

And then there’s what you don’t do but, well, sometimes end up doing them because of a crap script:

  • Have all sorts of gratuitous violence that is 1) sudden, 2) uncharacteristic of the characters, and 3) uncharacteristic of the actors portraying said characters;
  • Slap some 80s vibe on the posters and realize, shit, there’s nothing 80s about this movie;
  • Introduce about ten subplots or big details that are never important or explained (Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver; Mulligan falling in love with a total dude [pre-Gosling, natch]; a mess of mob ties that go nowhere; the whole thing with the mask; and, well, how some parts of the ending just kind of fizzle out).
  • Start the movie with a taut setpiece that gets you hoping the movie will be that exciting, only to repeat a semi-heist later that doesn’t come close to eclipsing the beginning.

But this is me here. Probably the biggest compliment I can give Drive is that the ending is exactly what the characters and style dictate. Chalk it up to Hossein Amini, who wrote the adapted screenplay, or maybe credit is due to Refn for draining it of all surplus; or all bloated emotion (un)deserved by all bloodied Heroes that may or may not make it to the end of the movie is probably not what said Hero wants, or ever wanted, or ever will want.

Postscript: My WTF moment: Refn won Best Director at Cannes? Well, at least they gave Malick the Palme d’Or, else there’d be hell to pay. Drive is a good film, but a Palme d’Or winner it definitely is not.

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Thoughts on Contagion

9 September, 2011 by

When you get home, I guarantee you’ll wash your hands

by Jack Kentala
Steven Soderbergh: Easily one of the ten best American directors alive; who has directed over a dozen films (most of them very, very good); whose hyper-prolific output began a mere twenty years ago, with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies, and Videotape, when the son-of-a-bitch was only 26; who turned the modern noir The Limey into every film school’s selection for the day they talk about non-linear editing; who churned out three better-than-necessary Ocean’s films that made gobs of money so he could finance little-seen cheapo masterpieces like The Girlfriend Experience and the epic Che; who serves as cinematographer (as Peter Andrews, per guild rules) for most of his films, which seems almost impossible; who redefined the use of color in film in his 2000 Best Director-winning Traffic (competing against himself with Erin Brokovich, splitting his own vote and winning) and, by extension, probably spurring the rise of hyper-saturated films through a digital intermediate instead of negative manipulation; who has one film in post, one shooting, and two in pre-production; who, at the tender age of 48, has made repeated, probably-serious claims that he plans to retire to become a painter, simply to express himself in another visual art form–

–has just unleashed Contagion (2011), one of the best thrillers in a very, very long time.

Here’s hoping the guy just might change his mind and go Altman-style, directing until, shit, he dies.

So here we have Contagion. You’ve seen the previews. (I didn’t; I just heard who directed it.) You get the gist. Virus, pandemic, chaos. 1, 2, 3, right?

The greatest praise I can give to Contagion is that not a single scene (save, maybe, a bit of a tacked-on pre-denouement [let's just call it Prom Night] that reeks of test-audience input) drifts along on a lazy, panicked emotion; that Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (their second collab since the tonally-opposite The Informant!) have enough faith in the unashamed bleakness of the story to have absolutely zero comic relief (and, hell, even Traffic had some buddy-cop hijinks with Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman); and manages to cram what could’ve easily been an entire television series into a sub-two-hour film.

And whereas a director like Danny Boyle’s style is that he has no style, Soderbergh is the ultimate chameleon, in which he tailors each film’s aesthetic to exactly what it needs. Here he’s smart enough to know that Contagion is all story, and he doesn’t fluff it up with flashy editing or overblown cinematography. He has the rare gift, like Terrence Malick, to turn major stars into ordinary people, though it may just be as easy as not putting any makeup on Kate Winslet. Maybe chalk it up to Soderbergh’s lighting (or his gaffer’s, really), but this is as far removed from any CSI bullshit as you can get.

I majored in cinematography in college, so I like to imagine that I know a thing or two about it; namely, who has the chops to helm a Big Movie and who doesn’t. While Soderbergh might not be able to earn an ASC invite, he’s one of the finest cinematographers around. While he knew he could get away with murder (uncorrected bulbs, weird angles, odd, unmotivated camera movements) in the Ocean’s trilogy given their built-in profitability, his recent Che epic showed that, armed with the freakishly-awesome Red camera, he can do anything, and usually he’s the one doing it as operator. (Though on the Criterion commentary for Traffic, Soderbergh professed that he simply can’t work a gear-head tripod. Maybe in the eleven years since he’s learned how.) Though Che worked beautifully as a two-parter, each with a well-defined cinematographic style, Contagion might give it a money-run for his best lens work.

I can’t decide, though, that what I initially perceived as Contagion’s greatest weakest might actually be its strength. There’s not much substance here. Characters are given only basic motivation (protecting their family, trying to cure the world, et cetera et cetera) to soldier on with their increasingly-difficult lives and survival. We know the stakes are high just by looking at the world maps that pop up every ten minutes that show the world plunging into illness. The film expertly balances the trials of Matt Damon’s role as a Minneapolis dad keeping his daughter healthy and the ensemble of WHO and CDC employees trying to prevent the world from going out with a whimper-bang. Simply put, for this type of story – the Ticking Time Bomb, a rugged screenplay model among the pantheon of plot templates – we don’t need much else.

And here comes the part where I spiral back down to earth, find myself hitting this keyboard with less and less frequency, and trying to give my usual sort of non-conclusion. I hope you’re at least content that I’ve never slapped on a number or a letter grade or some bullshit to distill a movie into something to glance at to decide if you’ll check out Contagion tonight or stay in and watch Mad Men on Netflix Instant Watch. No, Contagion probably won’t be the best film of the year. No, it probably won’t make a Scrooge McDuck-sized vault of money akin to Ocean’s worldwide take. (Though with the inexpensive Red camera and Soderbergh’s knack for working hella fast and on the cheap, I doubt that there’s really much money to lose.) And yes, you’ll probably still hate Gwyneth Paltrow after seeing it. But Contagion is one of Soderbergh’s best films, and that’s no small praise. It also happens to give a good thrill-scare for something more terrifying than any terrorist can dream up or execute.

(Footnote: I was going to mention how I didn’t hear anything at all on the news or from friends that Soderbergh was shooting a film set largely in Minneapolis and, by extension, that they’d at least film exteriors here. IMDb doesn’t have MPLS listed as a shooting location, and if that’s true, production design Howard Cummings did his research to make the snow look like snow and not those damn soap flakes they use for everything else. And, thank god, there’s not a single hint of the not-real-at-all Minnesota accent as seen in Fargo. Yeah, some people have a trace of that accent, but dammit, don’t play it for comedy.)

(Footnote 2: These fine ears swear they picked up some recycled dissonant piano from The Limey for Cliff Marinez’s score here. And did I mention that Contagion has a great score?)

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Thoughts on The Tree of Life

8 June, 2011 by

Life, death, and everything in between

by Jack Kentala

It seems oddly appropriate that I spent yesterday in a suburban mondoplex, eyes glued to X-Men: First Class like any respectable summer moviegoer. X-Men: First Class was a film that has its merits like any other, sure, but it has superheroes and thus has to blindly prescribe to the Louder Is Better school of filmmaking; so much sound and fury that Faulkner wouldn’t know what to do with it.

During the much-publicized climax, Michael Fassbender’s Magneto hangs precariously from the exposed landing gear of the mutants’ ship, focusing all his energy into lifting a nuclear submarine, propeller still churning, up into the skies around Cuba. It’s the film’s money shot; it’s something so awesome, in the truest definition of the word, that I couldn’t help but get a little dumbstruck at considering that kind of world-changing power, lodged in the mere shell of a man. It’s a showstopper. As a lover of giant spectacle, I had to wink a few tears out of my eyes.

Now imagine if I hadn’t seen a thing about it in one of the millions of trailers.

The Tree of Life (2011), by way of its increasingly-experimental director Terrence Malick, contains scores of these money shots – something so beautiful or rapturous that you can do nothing but take a deep breath – that are almost tossed off, as though they have no value. Malick – and I don’t want to waste unnecessary prose on this short attempt at highlighting the film, so if you don’t know about Malick’s reputation, do some research and find out what a fascinating figure he is – is known for his visual flair. He and his cinematographers (here, Emmanuel Lubezski, a second collaboration since 2005′s The New World) take the usual ordinariness of the natural world and blow it up to screen-filling wonder. Here, the nearly-80-years-old director sets his sights a little grander – including universe- and earth-creation footage that I presume will mostly be withheld for the rumored IMAX documentary about such events – and shows us not only the world, but the way in which that beauty in our world was created.

Here is where I make the semi-apologetic statement that, yes, I plan to see The Tree of Life at least another time, maybe another after that, since I’m such an unashamed Malick fan that I doubt I can really find solid footing about The Tree Life so soon after my first viewing. The first time I saw The New World – my first Malick film in theaters (was, alas, too young for the R-rated The Thin Red Line, and my twelve-year-old sensibilities would’ve probably hated it) – I came out of a 20-screen compound into a 2 a.m. parking lot, frozen in a Minnesota winter and freezing in a poorly-warming-up car, mostly with a head-scratching “Huh?” on my mind. I had known I had just seen another very, very, very great film by my favorite living director (I’m very guarded what I call a “masterpiece” – it takes at leas ten years of hindsight to give that gavel-pounding verdict), but I had to let it settle like a, uh, big meal. Only later did I come up with my little theories about the film that I didn’t see elsewhere – like how the Wagner suites played over scenes of the “Naturals” showed that the film is viewed through the prism of Smith and the West, and how they can only equate the Naturals’ beauty with something they know (Wagner) and around and around we go – and tried to bury the still-in-film-school attempt to write a paper about it and, thus, invariably ruin the movie forever.

So The Tree of Life is about a mom and a dad father and their three sons in suburban Waco, Texas sometime in the whitewashed 1950s. To say that it’s a mostly-plotless film that sort of gives and takes – disregarding the usual axis of peaks and valleys that characterize most three-act films that don’t actively engage the viewer – will be, for most, a source of many yawns. Ever since The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick films haven’t worked the way other movies function. While there’s usually some element that anchors or pushes the narrative – the crimes in Badlands (1973), something similar in Days of Heaven (1978), the battle for Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, and the colonization of Jamestown in The New World – The Tree of Life might be Malick’s coming-out party that, after a mere five films but certainly forty years of conceptualizing unrealized projects, he’s decided to stick with his guns of visual arrest and running voiceovers and, maybe, just maybe, throw linearity out the window and following a sort of elliptical narrative that recalls Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971).

It’s this lack of one standard timeline that gets the movie into its most trouble. Sure, there’s some bouncing between the 50s and the modern day in some anonymous urbanscape. The latter is the first time Malick, in the whole of his career, has set part of a film in contemporary times, and, if nothing else, it gives him a new visual playground. His naturalist’s suspicions of glass-and-steel high-rises give the modern-day segments a natural claustrophobia. (The sequences are painfully short – including scant screen time by Sean Penn, who’s in the movie about as long as George Clooney in The Thin Red Line [the first collab between Malick and Penn, who had a substantial role].) That stuff is easy to kick through vis a vis what is happening where. But a few spots in the 50s timeline either point to my terrible abilities as a filmwatcher or my own half-certainty it was all a cinematic device. Particularly, one of the three sons of Brad Pitt and the luminous, haunted Jessica Chastain seems to die twice, yet subsequent scenes show all three boys together. Given that a possible read on the POV is that it’s all in Penn’s head, maybe you can chalk it up to an Unreliable Narrator. Or maybe I’ll go on Wikipedia after I write this and see how wrong I was.

(Update: I did indeed check some sort of plot summary, and while I’m [mostly] wrong, it’s still confusing given that there’s no warning that the narrative sort of fractures at one point and jumps forward. Minor quibble.)

The universe-creation scenes are mostly confined to one reel and act  elsewhere as intertitles between major sections of the film. Rumor is that The Tree of Life was going to be coupled with an IMAX documentary called The Voyage of Time (and yes, I know it sounds like a Disneyworld ride that exits through a gift shop). To get ready for Cannes, this supposed time-voyage was scrapped, and what was completed was put into The Tree of Life. For the large part, it’s hypnotic, astounding, and mind-bending enough for a certain LA theater proudly advertising they have daily Tree of Life showings at 4:20 p.m. During the sustained narrative of how our hot, lava-covered, noxious-gas-filled earth turned fertile, it soon comes clear that it plays as a perfect analog to how a tumultuous, oft-ugly process can create something beautiful, the same as – ta da! – the birth of a human child.

Here’s another PSA about what’s probably the biggest misstep of the film: You’ve well known by now that there are DINOSAURS (capitalization necessary) in The Tree of Life, and yes, they’re fortunately relegated to the deep past and play no part in man’s future. After the free-flowing exhibition of oozing primordial matter and cold, cold wind forming the earth, a mini narrative suddenly takes brief shape as a few dinosaurs show up. Of course the CG isn’t the greatest, and that always has the nasty tendency to pull back a disbelief-suspension layer. There’s a scene of some dinosaurs interacting – such as a predator possibly finding mercy within its reptilian brain by sparing a wounded iguanadon (right?), which has about as much evolutionary significance as Moon Watcher picking up a bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – and while it’s done with a minimalism that makes it work within the context of the greater film, it still seems like a cast-off scene from the (obligatory) supposed Voyage of Time documentary.

We’re almost done, I swear.

Again, any filmwatcher with an opinion of Malick usually sides with one of two opposite poles, and Malick’s refusal to make a film without a voiceover track leaves some permanently turned off of his work. What’s really sort of amazing is how little voiceover there is in The Tree of Life. Gone is the somewhat heavy-handed expository VO of The New World and some of the on-the-nose poetry of The Thin Red Line’s stacked cast. Here, it’s mostly barely-heard whispers, nothing ever enunciated clear enough to get across any plain meaning. The Tree of Life also has barely any dialog whatsoever. It’s one of the closer attempts at a modern silent film I’ve seen.

In interviews with nearly everyone who’s worked with Malick and uncomfortably spoken about Malick’s methods (since a man of such intense privateness doesn’t like his trade secrets aired, I imagine), apparently it’s a common practice for Malick to run a take with script lines, then run another with no words said at all. It’s something that I’ve – rather successfully – ripped off in my own work, and something that Malick, in his quiet, impressionistic films, can get away with and have few people be the wiser.

At the risk of sounding like some Ebert-style fuddy duddy: Filmmaking and film have been cheapened with every passing year and the many, many ways you can watch them. I have my first feature up on YouTube, but I cringe at the thought of someone watching it piecemeal, prone to distractions, hideous compression artifacting, seen under too-bright lights and played out of shitty laptop speakers. And that brings me back to where I started: I watch movies like X-Men: First Class because, aesthetically important or not, they’re designed to play on a big screen with big sound, in a big dark room where you’re not allowed to talk or use your cell phone. But that experience, to me, is like a meal full of empty calories. Shortly after seeing The Tree of Life, I said to a friend, “This might not have much stock coming from an atheist, but seeing a Terrence Malick film, for me, is like going to church. There’s just something… nourishing and fulfilling about it.” (And yes, I was laughed at.)

Feel free to put that blurb on a poster, Fox Searchlight. Not that there’s any harder way to market a film like this other than, thank god, getting to plaster the Palme d’Or logo on one-sheets and trailers. (The one-screen arthouse theater in Minneapolis I saw this at – the Landmark Uptown – had on its marquee “THE TREE OF LIFE – CANNES WINNER” like that’s supposed to bring in more traffic?) The Tree of Life, in extremely limited to release, is pulling in huge per-screen averages (the metric best used to determine limited-run box-office takes versus something like X-Men, which opens on several thousand screens while The Tree of Life opens on several dozen), and it always raises the little specter of hope that the adult filmgoing public still has an appetite for something daring and slow and, many times, terrifying beautiful about the fleeting joy and intense sorrow of life and death.

Now that Malick – again, about to top eighty years – might be entering his most prolific phase now that, honestly, he doesn’t have that many years left. And even though there’s still his stubborn (but by no means unnecessary) trademarks voiceover and the nature-doc cinematography, he’s still the only man who can do what he does. It’s a thrilling time to know one future Malick feature is in the can – the prospective The Burial with Javier Bardem, Ben Affleck, and Rachel McAdams – and another prepped for shooting this summer. Even at his glacial pace, and even without any official word from the man for decades, Malick’s looming presence is felt in every frame of The Tree of Life and, for those perceptive enough to feel it, over the entirety of modern filmmaking.

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Thoughts on Fast Five

29 April, 2011 by

Obligatory mention of it being fast and/or furious; also primed to be one of the better movies of the summer

by Jack Kentala

(Correction: I had erroneously posted the poster for Fast & Furious on the original poster. The above is the official poster. Apologies to all offender parties – JDK)

Early into Fast Five (2011), it seems that five installments into a series ostensibly about cars and heists reaches its saturation point with the very first setpiece. Most of the scene has been crammed down your throats in the trailers, so you already know what I’m talking about. There’s a train, cars, and a cliff, and it doesn’t take a Mensa membership card to put them in the right order.

Instead, the filmmakers – such as franchise veteran director Justin Lin (see also: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious; or if you want to check his dramatic chops, the pretty-great Better Luck Tomorrow) – wisely ditch that formula for what has been the talk of the franchise’s future. Alas, gearheads, but the NOS and illegal mods are pushed aside for a heist that provides the main thrust of the film once we get to Rio de Janeiro mere minutes into the runtime.

I think I’m going to paraphrase what a lot of critics have said and, whoa, tie it into something else I need to get out of the way: that the fast cars, the dreadful CG of 2 Fast 2 Furious (guess which film in the franchise that was?), and the complete disregard for car-induced destruction has made the series into a videogame. While I’d love to say that’s false, there’s a rather unforgivable sequence that makes up the second gigantic setpiece of Fast Five, which is a rooftop run-and-gun chase with armed Good Guys and masked favela Bad Guys that seems rather ripped from another videogame: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

With the first act out of the way, Fast Five shifts into heist mode. (My god, a pun!) As per the rules of that genre, musclehead bad-boy Vin Diesel and pretty-boy bad-boy Paul Walker need to recruit “a team” to, naturally, take down a drug cartel for a reason that, shit, I don’t even remember, and I just saw the movie three hours ago.

While 2 Fast 2 Furious wobbled with the absence of Vin Diesel, and Tokyo Drift had trouble finding any semblance of a protagonist with the absence of Paul Walker (yes, I did my research and watched all four prior films in a week), Fast Five is the high-school reunion of the franchise. Just by dint of everyone getting in the same place and visibly happy to come together, there’s an immediate chemistry to the ensemble cast. Specifically, for all the flack, Paul Walker’s surfer-brah accent (albeit waning since the first movie) is the perfect foil for Diesel’s well-rehearsed, almost-whispered growl.

(An aside: Said growl is a one-note trick that, somehow, hasn’t lost its potency, even when used in pretty much every Vin Diesel movie. Chalk it up to Diesel’s intimidating physical presence, or the sheer texture of the gravel in his throat. It’s worked through all Fast and/or Furious movies, and it helped define his most [in]famous character, Richard B. Riddick, in the cult horror gem Pitch Black and the gaudy The Chronicles of Riddick. The character, though, is arguably at its best in the videogame The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and its slightly-lesser-because-it’s-not-about-an-awesome-prison-break sequel Assault on Dark Athena.)

The most-hyped addition to the cast is The Rock, whose real name will remain forgotten to anyone who has ever heard him question aloud what’s he cookin’ and, specifically, if or if not you can smell it. Unfortunately, until his rather obvious actions at the film’s end, he serves mostly as a man with the physique to match Diesel. Despite the fact that his deep tan makes him several shades darker, it’s fairly obvious that they gave his Special Forces Whatever character a borderline-ratty goatee to easily distinguish his baldness from Diesel’s baldness. Until said end-of-the-film actions, he’s criminally underutilized, speaking entirely in quasi-military jargon, mindlessly bossing people around, and driving an enormous Humvee From Hell that looks like it gets worse mileage than a coal-powered Model T.

Am I conveying the fact that I found this film immensely enjoyable?

If there’s any legitimate criticism to toss at this film, it’s that all the “soft” moments fall completely flat. Sure, you need to break up the action, but you don’t need to stick two actors on their marks and play a shot reverse-shot dialog about not wanting to go back to prison or why This or That is what is really Important in life.

(Fortunately, the sparse comic relief from Tyrese, Ludacris, and the two goofy guys from Fast & Furious – that, to my knowledge, aren’t famous at all, other than having been randomly cast in Fast & Furious – works because of the elusive, innate chemistry of getting everyone together.)

One thing about the series that I’ve come to respect (and yes, that is the exact word I’m looking for) is the reliance on using actual humans and vehicles for stunts. Just the element of danger involved in a stunt ups the excitement in ways that no CG puppets or too-shiny computercars can provide. While tight shots and fast cuts usually mean the stunt drivers probably execute their moves around forty miles per hour (standard practice so no one dies), a lot of the expert rally and drift racers used for the impressive Tokyo Drift stunts gave that movie a legitimacy despite being the weakest in the series. (For those of you who don’t know what “drift” racing is, it’s the same thing as “powersliding” in Mario Kart. But without the hop and the colored smoke and the mini-boost.)

As one of the first blockbuster (how I hate that term) movies of the summer, Fast Five sets a high bar. And considering that it has to have built-in mass appeal (requisite shots of female asses barely covered), a PG-13 rating ensures that nothing too off-putting happens (and even the MPAA’s allowance of two “fucks” for PG-13 isn’t used; maybe it was traded for a scene where The Rock mercilessly shoots a guy dead at point-blank range). And since it’s also one of those One Last Job heist movies, it’s a foregone conclusion that there’s a happy ending.

And given that a sixth film in the franchise has been greenlit for months, it’s not a surprise that Fast Five’s end hints at the setup for the next installment. You just have to sit through a pretty motion-graphics sequence of all the above-the-line end credits before you’re treated to a “hidden scene” that hints that #6 might have to start with some baggage leftover from #4, kind of how Fast Five started during the last minute of Fast & Furious. It’s forgiveable given the circumstances, even with the garbled timeline of the five movies. (Tokyo Drift is obviously the last for reason I’ll let you investigate.)

But this is just me talking. I’d rather listen to Vin Diesel growl this whole review.

Postscript (that may or may not contain a statement of political disgust): In this stupid world in which we live, one in which old guys with bad hair who host a goddamn reality game show can question our president’s birthplace (and, thus, his right to his elected presidency), I decided to provide photographic proof that I saw Fast Five and am not simply guessing how this all went down. And that I didn’t download a pirated shakycam copy. Here’s the stub, that’s me (Google my name if you need further proof what I look like; the black-and-white picture is ghastly but close enough), that’s the title of the movie, today’s date, and the $7.50 I do not regret whatsoever for paying to see Fast Five.

Ticket stub will be framed or bronzed

Post-postscript: If anyone thinks Vin Diesel has the IQ of a discarded pack of bubblegum, I highly suggest you watch his low-low budget directorial debut, Strays. For a guy with biceps about as big as his head, he shows a surprising tenderness and a you’ll-miss-it-if-you-blink vulnerability. It also doesn’t cheat its own ending which, coming from this I-usually-hate-the-way-movies-end asshole, that means a lot.

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Thoughts on Sucker Punch

25 March, 2011 by

I hate titles with double meanings

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to trash a film.

Sucker Punch (2011) has the misfortune of being director Zach Snyder’s first film not rooted in a different medium. Just look at his filmography: he remade Dawn of the Dead; copped the graphic-novel style for 300 and Watchmen; and even “that owl movie” came from somewhere.

Here are where the problems immediately surface. Without source material providing a narrative roadmap, Snyder and his team simply spin their wheels until they get traction and then run with whatever ridiculousness they can concoct. In Sucker Punch, the title is far too apt: it can refer, quite directly, to the fact that the fractured narrative of the movie – which is actually explained in greater detail in the many trailers than in the final cut – simply jumps from one over-CGI’d setpiece to another.

At best, it’s visually interesting (albeit many of the scenarios have been played to death in too many videogames to count), and at worst, it’s loud, tiring, and reeks of a narrative and emotional bankruptcy. Explosions are louder than dialog; girls in school-uniform fetish outfits sub in for meaningful characters; and instead of tying it together through a means far more coherent than is presented in the movie, it simply seems like a glorified clearinghouse of visual concepts.

But what I can’t stress enough is the total lack of exposition, which is a bold statement coming from me, who likes to dig into a piece and extract precious nuggets of thematic meaning without getting the hammered-over-the-head Bruckheimer treatment. Not more than five minutes into the movie does anonymous main character Baby Doll find out that the supposed mental institution in which she is imprisoned is actually some sort of brothel, though flipping between those two fudged realities and the all-out fantasy of the trailers is done even worse than Inception.

(An aside: I had a bit of a Nolan-fest the past week to give the man another chance, and a repeat of Inception yielded no added enjoyment. Intact is my continued disgust for the kind of “mindfuck” movies that never come full circle and just leave the audience hanging on a head-scratching sigh. Or, in Inception’s case, the massive rage many experienced at the abrupt end of the film’s final shot.)

Sucker Punch is, unfortunately, one of those movies with no clear story, no characters, no justifications for CGI abuse (a growing post-millennium, post-The Matrix problem), and, to be a little too cruel, no point at all. I say “unfortunate” because the marketing blitzkrieg certainly charged at cinema’s juicy 14-year-old-boy demographic (I’m not making this up; go look at some numbers) with the promise of fishnet stockings, miniskirts, push-up bras, and a lot of skin. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the crowd that made the also-PG-13 Battle: Los Angeles an early-spring blockbuster will migrate to Sucker Punch and net, let’s say, $40 million its opening weekend. (I’m including grossly-inflated IMAX ticket prices for Sucker Punch: The IMAX Experience, even though Sucker Punch was not shot in the format.)

It’s a bit unfair on the part of the filmmakers in that the girls aren’t there to further the sort of female empowerment first championed by Ridley Scott’s Alien, but to tighten the pants of every male in the theaters who isn’t thinking that girls in PG-13 movies are starting to look a little too young these days. I didn’t spot any dirty old men in trenchcoats at my theater, but they can wait two months for the DVD without missing much.

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Thoughts on Battle: Los Angeles

13 March, 2011 by

You know what you’re getting into

by Jack Kentala

As I’ve matured as a filmmaker, I’ve come to appreciate genre films. My ultimate guilty pleasure is American Pie, which isn’t shot particularly well, has editing that’s deliberately invisible, bears no particular directorial stamp, and yet it hits every bullet point on the list that determines what defines a perfect teenage sex comedy. Or consider the fact that I have seen every Saw film, every Rocky, both Hostels, the Cube trilogy, and will eventually start a campaign to watch all Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies.

So, then, my sound designer and I saw Battle: Los Angeles yesterday. We were recording ADR a week prior, and we both somewhat sheepishly expressed a curiosity in seeing a film that, by all accounts (and remains true after having seen it) is exactly what you expect from the trailer.

Before I go any further, I suppose I need to clear the air and make a definitive statement: I enjoyed Battle: Los Angeles. I enjoyed it for exactly what it was. Maybe it was low expectations or a palette-cleanser after so many awful year-end prestige films that fell flat when it came time to dish out Oscars. But no number of fifty-cent words can express that, stay with me here, I really enjoyed the movie.

If I just lost all credibility, go ahead and X out of this and watch some Criterion Collection. I watched Ken Loach’s intriguing, low-tech Kes the night prior, so let me off the hook once you cool off.

Battle: Los Angeles doesn’t start off so much with a script oversight but pointless “soft” character moments that don’t actually establish anything. All we know is that Aaron Eckhart’s Staff Sergeant Nantz isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, and wants out of the Marine Corps after twenty years of service, all under the shadow of a recent tour in Iraq in which many believe he was responsible for the deaths of several servicemen in his unit. Catastrophic “meteor” impacts delay Nantz retirement and pair him with a unit short a sergeant and commanded by a – you guessed it – cherry 2nd Lieutenant. In this unit, many soldiers don’t even bother to hide their contempt for Nantz, especially the brother of one of the killed men, who gets up in Nantz’s grill for coming home from Iraq with a silver star while everyone else came home in metal boxes.

And then we’re off. (more…)

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Jack Kentala's Three Most-Favorite Films of 2010

2 February, 2011 by

Say what you want about the state of cinema in 2010. It’s the same deluge of sequels, remakes, and spin-offs that characterize most years prior to the late-fall Prestige Films shoved out by studios to keep fresh in the minds of Academy voters.

I think we can all agree on the worst trends of the year: 3D and “rebooting” franchises that are barely dusty (e.g. Spider-Man, the last trilogy of which started less than a decade ago).

But I’d prefer to shed some light on my favorite films of the year, two of which seemed to go entirely unnoticed by both audiences and critics.


1. Never Let Me Go directed by Mark Romanek

This is delicate territory to tread. The trailer itself gives away a chunk of what’s really Going On, but all the themes behind it are tucked away in Spoiler Territory.

I’ll try to paint this in broad strokes. Never Let Me Go is a tragic love story. That seems pretty obvious, right? But there’s a wrinkle in that fabric revealed not long into the film. It’s about the price of love, and if it’s possible that you can find some sort of True Love with someone else even when you know it can’t last for more than a few years. A done-before trope, sure, but in Never Let Me Go it’s particularly potent, given the characters have almost zero control over their own lives, and they all have a big ticking clock above their lifespans.

I wouldn’t be honest without admitting that my serious crush on Carey Mulligan led me to this movie. If any of you follow my Twitter schizorants feed, you’ll know I’ve made the claim several times that it seems Mulligan and Michelle Williams have a monopoly on looking sad. I think Mulligan edges ahead, if only because she’s younger and to summon the sort of pain her character feels she must have to dig into some reservoir of pitch-black experiences to get there. She’s beautiful, and she’s beautifully sad.

I really hate doing these sort of PSAs, but Never Let Me Go comes out on DVD on March 1, and it’d be a disservice to let it go quietly into that good night. If you live in a city with some decent theaters, you might be able to still catch it somewhere instead of waiting a month.

Correction: Amazon has Never Let Me Go available since February 1. I can only imagine this is a case where Netflix has been blocked by a distributor or, worse, Blockbuster from getting the disc to its subscribers on the day-and-date release.


2. Restrepo directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger

Imagine my surprise when Restrepo was nominated for Best Documentary by the Academy. Here’s a film shot with what seems a Sony Handicam, with horrid audio and a perpetual smear on the lens.

But I guess you don’t have time to clean your camera when you’re embedded in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, which, according to one apocryphal account, Bush saw on CNN and immediately labeled it the deadliest place on Earth.

Restrepo follows the 15-month deployment of an infantry unit to “the KOP” (Korengal Outpost) and how the rumor that they’d get shot at every day turned out to be true. It’s about the death of a friend that led a bunch of 18-, 19-, and 20-somethings to push into Taliban lands and create an outpost that served as a game-changer for the Valley.

It’s not about armchair generals talking about pie-in-the-sky plans for Afghan democracy or the Progress they think we’re making. It’s about boots on the ground, none of whom seem to ever once engage in the sort of faux patriotism in every war movie ever. To say it’s apolitical misses the mark; politics never play a part. They build the titular OP Restrepo not because they think it’ll convert the Taliban to all things good and American; they build it as a stuck-up middle finger to the guys harassing them day in, day out for over a year.

Restrepo is about those fifteen months where, yes, the unit gets in multiple firefights every day, all while trying to live like human beings: playing guitar (including a surprisingly-moving acoustic, instrumental version of “Stay Together For The Kids” by Blink-182 plucked by an enlistee); painting their plywood and Hesco outpost to make it a little homier (if a giant “SPARTA” and helmet in spraypaint counts); playing PSP; writing letters home with a drawing of the Valley (“Because it’s the only thing I know how to draw,” the raised-by-a-hippie-mom Pemble quips).

I guess Retrespo is so obviously a great war documentary because it’s genuine. The filmmakers were in the Korengal for all fifteen months, putting themselves in as much danger as the soldiers. This isn’t Dan Rather – “Gunga Dan” – posing for a photo op walking along some dusty trail with an Afghan elder during a two-day trek through safe territory. These are guys trying to sift through the fog of war and make it home at the end of their deployment (and, then, probably return). The pro-war company line of The Mission couldn’t be any farther from the day-to-day lives of these men.


3. Catfish directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Catfish is a better movie about Facebook than The Social Network. And this isn’t just because one is a documentary (there are nay-sayers but fuck ‘em) and the other is much-exaggerated fiction. But The Social Network was about the embryonic days of Facebook, when the community was so insular that you needed to put yourself as truthfully as possible up online, since most of your Friends were real-life friends who’d call foul if they saw a doctored profile.

Catfish – again, without any reveals – is about today’s Facebook, which we can all agree has as much use as a dating site. And, naturally, Catfish is about someone who misrepresents themselves online under the auspices of starting a relationship.

But that’s just the start of the rabbit hole. Catfish starts with one lie and spirals into a nest of them. I don’t think I’m violating anything too secret, so here’s the iceberg tip: Brooklynite documentee Nev is online chatting with a girl from Michigan, and she gives him a few choices of a song she’s going to cover for him. Nev picks, and less than an hour later, he gets the file. It sounds like all the other recordings this girl has given him.

Nev hadn’t heard of one song before, so he Googles it. Turns out, the first YouTube result is a woman performing the exact same song the exact same way. And it’s obviously not the girl Nev is talking to.

So that starts off, among other things, the most obvious question: Why would someone do that?

You might think you know or can guess the trajectory of Catfish, but the truth isn’t just stranger than fiction. The truth behind Nev’s online crush is surreal and heartbreaking. Catfish is what you can do with Facebook, and how easy it is to disappear and become someone else entirely online. It’s about the longing to escape yourself. It’s about confronting the age-old maxim that you can always start over and realizing you can’t. It’s about claustrophobia. It’s about, in its own way, hope.

(Endnote: For this article I looked up the poster, and I recall the trailer, and try to forget that there’s the promise of some giant reveal at some point. It comes gradually, and I think it’s just a case of a distributor having no idea how to market their film.)

Thus ends my yearly assessment of films. It was a bit off the beaten path from everyone else, since most everyone last year latched onto The Hurt Locker pretty quick, myself included; I was a lot more lukewarm about The Social Network than everyone else, too. This year was a bad case of some really great stuff slipping through the cracks, especially in face of so many giant, self-proclaimed spectacles in glorious, dim-as-hell 3D. Hollywood is, in many ways, a giant shouting battle, and whoever is the loudest wins. That’s probably why I’ve only met one other person who saw Never Let Me Go. That movie is, comparably, a whisper. But what’s said in that whisper is more salient than anything else I saw this year.

And it wouldn’t be the internet without a semi-pointless little section of 2010 movies I really liked that aren’t worthy of canonizing by dint of praising them in a handful of paragraphs:

Black Swan
Blue Valentine
Enter The Void
Exit Through The Gift Shop
The Fighter
Iron Man 2
The Town

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Thoughts on Call of Duty: Black Ops

12 November, 2010 by

Another game, another war, and more of the same

by Jack Kentala

The Call of Duty franchise, ever since the template-setting Call of Duty 2, has taken most of its cues from Hollywood war movies. You’re steered down a path of ultimate linearity, and besides all the player-controlled, stop-and-pop shooting, you’re just following the action-flick script laid out by developer Treyarch.

But there’s really nothing wrong with that. Hell, considering that, if you number the main installments, this is Call of Duty 7, the formula has proven itself durable enough to get this far. Game-wise, it’s a straightforward first-person shooter without a cover system, relying on a two-weapons system (first swiped from Halo), grenades, and levels filled with cover-like objects, in which the objective is usually to push forward enough to trigger the next sequence.

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Thoughts on The Social Network

1 October, 2010 by

“Every origin story has to have a devil”

by Jack Kentala

What’s unexpected from The Social Network: That, even in the midst of everything, and once the smoke clears, Zuckerberg comes out clean. He’s not some megalomaniac asshole – that role is convenientally filled by Justin Timberlake’s Sean “Napster” Parker – or straightjacketed in a ward for paranoid schizophrenics. He’s a brain in a vat that was put into a human body. He has no inner censor, and having that perceived total lack of empathy ends up ruining more than one relationship. Saying he’s not very social is the understatement of the day. It’s more like he’s this little bubble floating through society and very, very rarely interacting on any more than a superficial level.

And yes, it’s a movie about people, and it’s far more a movie about Facebook than all this nonsense, left-field Oscar buzz (who the fuck started that?) would have you believe. I don’t think anyone over forty would get this movie the same way us hip kids do. I still get chastised at work if my boss catches me on Facebook, even if I’m computing something work-related in the background.

Zuckerberg, clearly at the movie’s center, acutely speaks about this generation gap. During his multiple depositions, he’s adrift, aloof, but probably thinking about a way to improve Facebook. There are some choice lines during such scenes – such as whether or not a lawyer has Zuckberg’s full attention, of which he clearly does not – that were spoiled in the trailers. But during all this lawyering, all these depositions, all these cease-and-desists and workarounds about IP law is a bunch of garbage – implied by Zuckerberg – when really he just seized on an idea at the right time and bet on the right horse. (Well, he built the horse.) It’s like those people who correct you when you say Bell invented the phone and they say nuh-uh it was some Italian guy. In the movie, when defending his Facebook, Zuckerberg says, “If you build a chair you don’t go out and pay everyone who’s ever made a chair before.”

Everyone knows the story of Facebook and Harvard Connect / ConnectU. What’s unfortunate about that is the beefy brothers who tried to start the latter end up as total buffoons, and only when they wield the cudgel of the justice system do they actually have to get down in the dirt and figure out what was Zuckerberg, what was Harvard Connect, and what was just floating out in the ether, ready to be snatched.

That’s a lot of the first part of the film: like how Zuckerberg marries the idea of separate dorm house facebooks into one giant facebook; or how a friend asking if Zuckerberg knows whether or not a girl is dating somewhere jumpstarts the whole idea of adding relationship status onto profiles.

There are a lot of scenes of Zuckerberg running, usually to his room to hammer out some new code. It also serves as a pretty blatant visual metaphor: Zuckerberg always, always running past throngs of people and students, all socializing, showing that he’s the lone genius, the loneliest man atop the mountain. And that’s part of the allure of his character. That’s why we’re drawn to reclusive or troubled or eccentric or socially-stunted geniuses; why we’re fascinated with J.D. Salinger, Terrence Malick, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, and, in an extreme form of the latter, the real-life Rain Man.

Being a writer/director myself, I definitely know that feeling of catching lightning in a bottle, of having this absolutely genius idea and greedily knowing it’s all yours. It’s bliss. It’s intoxicating. But at some point you have to release it into the wild, and sometimes it’s not ready. And it’s usually terrifying when you uncork that bottle.

A bit about the direction. From Alien 3 through Zodiac, Fincher dealt only with action or thrillers. Then with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button it seems he made the career move to only make Prestige films. This ties in with my earlier assessment that The Social Network was, first, scoffed at; second, thought Too Soon in the vein of Stone’s W.; third, buzzed as Pretty Good; then magically, considered in a horse race for Best Picture. But anyhow, what I wanted to say is, with just two films, Fincher has become a chameleon; he could make any kind of film short of a costume drama or musical. Other than looking at his filmography, it’s totally unpredictable what he’ll do next. It’s his mid-stage renaissance of sorts, sort of like Darren Aronofsky coming back after three heady, heavy films and making The Wrestler.

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