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[Movie] Don Jon

There is a beautiful moment about a third of the way in to Don Jon that shows a commercial on the television that’s always on during Jon’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meals with his amazing caricature of a New Jersey Italian family. The commercial is for a fish sandwich (I want to say cod) and involves a woman who is naked except for her underwear and appears to be about to orgasm over this fish sandwich; the parallels to the crazy amounts of porn Jon watches are very thickly drawn. The commercial ends with the message: More than just a piece of meat.

This was the moment I started taking notes. Because I realized for all Don Jon is hilarious, this movie was really not fucking around.

There is a lot of porn in this movie. And a lot of sex. And a lot of porn. And yet somehow, it doesn’t end up being at all exploitative, I think because the movie is so conscious of how it uses those images. Just as when the camera takes a good look at a woman’s bottom in a night club, it’s because it’s standing in for Jon’s eyes, and you hear him and his “boys” baldly rating women with numbers. Why yes, he is treating women like objects, he does see the world this way, isn’t it a bit pathetic and empty?

I’ve seen Don Jon described as a romantic comedy. I don’t think I quite buy that, since it ignores or actively mocks the tropes of the genre, which I appreciated greatly. It’s more a comedy about false expectations, particularly as they relate to romantic and sexual relationships, selfishness, authenticity and hypocrisy. And it’s hilarious. It was even funnier than I expected to be.

“The shit I watch on here, they’re not pretending.”

“Of course they are.”

In the movie, a parallel gets drawn between romance movies and pornography multiple times, implying both are fake, unrealistic, and ultimately set up one-sided expectations. Now, I don’t entirely buy that parallel or the idea that both are equally harmful, but it’s a powerful statement. Jon whines about “real pussy” not being as good as porn, because real women won’t do the same things porn actresses do. Barbara (Scarlet Johansen) has several wonderfully cringe-inducing rants about how in a relationship, the woman should be all the man needs and he should do everything for her, and also what “real men” do or don’t do. (Jon is apparently not a real man because he takes pleasure in keeping his apartment clean.) Both of them seem addicted to their poison of choice, and constantly trying to reshape the world around them into that very processed vision, then very disappointed when their efforts fail.

It’s a movie about incredibly artificial and self-centered people.

“You’re a real winner. You respect people. You listen to people.”

And then Don Jon becomes, at its heart, a movie about people attempting to honestly connect.

So there’s a lot here, and it’s also hilarious. I definitely want to see this one again; it’s rare for me to get this thinky about a comedy. And I do not want to spoil it, because I really enjoyed the ending and felt like it sailed in to a good spot and resisted the urge to get schmaltzy.

But I will say one more thing. My favorite character in the entire movie is Jon’s little sister Monica (Brie Larson); she speaks only once, but the rest of the time she doesn’t have to. Her constant, wonderful I cannot fucking believe the bullshit soap opera that surrounds me looks just make every scene involving Jon’s family a treat.

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[Movie] Salinger

I’ll note right now that I went into this documentary absolutely blind. I know nothing about JD Salinger beyond the fact that he wrote Catcher in the Rye and fought in World War II. So I honestly can say nothing in regards to the veracity of anything that was said in the documentary. I can, however, tell you if I liked it.

And… I mostly did. The focus was definitely more on JD Salinger himself than on his works, which makes sense. There were quite a few interesting interviews, which covered his more reclusive days, his lingering trauma from the second world war, and his (in my opinion) incredibly creepy thing for really young women. What I found most interesting about the people discussing his reclusive tendencies was the divide between those who really saw him as Howard Hughes in author form, and those who pointed out he wasn’t a true recluse, because he still reached outside his own world and seemed very conscious of the power behind his name. (And used that power on the aforementioned really young women.)

Really, the best and most powerful piece of the entire film was the portion about Salinger’s experiences during World War II… and the fact that he continued to write through all of it. The continued struggle to keep writing no matter what is something I really appreciated as a writer (though obviously, I have never experienced that kind of adversity, and hope that I never will). Also, his determination to be published in the New Yorker really struck a chord. (And nice to know rejection letters really haven’t changed much.)

I also found notable the interview with a fan of Salinger, who had gone to the man’s home and wanted to speak with him. Going in to Salinger’s antagonistic relationship with his own fame was something I found fascinating, particularly the way people would feel as if they had a deep connection to him because of the way they related to his work and felt they were entitled to his time.

While I still don’t think it was anything close to a full portrait of the man, it did all add up to a very multidimensional picture of a human being deeply wounded, intensely flawed, and beautiful.

So all of that was excellent, and kept my attention.

Unfortunately, there was a lot about the documentary I didn’t like. All of the above that I spoke of was done with interviews and fairly sparing analysis from the director. But there was a lot of flash and bombast that kept making me ask why is this necessary. The music was often intrusive and frankly annoying. There was also reenactment footage (way too much of it, in my opinion) which really did not add any value; rather, it was more distracting than anything else. Seriously, the movie didn’t need minute upon minute of a man, smoking, clacking away at a typewriter while the music pounded home that something portentous had happened.

If you’ll have a hard time concentrating on Catcher in the Rye with the knowledge of the more sordid aspects of the author’s life banging around in your head, I’d recommend skipping this one. And if you’re hoping for more depth about Salinger’s work, this documentary won’t cut it. Salinger might have believed that a writer should be known solely through his work, but the documentary was determined to find out as much as possible about the man himself. If only it could have worked on that question without the music.

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[Movie] Prisoners

I have very conflicted feelings about Prisoners as a movie. I’m going to say there are some mild(ish?) spoilers in this one. I’m not going to go in depth on a lot of the plot points. (Honestly, if you watch the trailer you already know 90% of what I’m going to be talking about.)

I will say one thing flat out–it’s a very well put together movie. The cinematography is excellent. The way the movie was shot really adds to the suspense, and makes it feel very enclosed and claustrophobic… which of course goes with the entire Prisoners idea. There were several scenes where I hunched over in my chair, covering my mouth with my hands because the movie did drag me along into a dark and terrible place.

The entire reason I wanted to see Prisoners was because I thought it looked like an ode to vigilante torture porn, basically, which is normally how kidnaping movies go. You know, kids get stolen, police can’t find them, someone (normally super manly dad) takes matters into his own hands, goes vigilante, saves the day, and we all live happily ever after.

For all the very real problems Prisoners had, that was surprisingly not one of them. There are some bloody and intensely discomfiting scenes where Keller (Hugh Jackman) beats and tortures the man who he is certain kidnapped his daughter. Perhaps the only payoff on this is that the ending in no way justifies what he did; him torturing the mentally disabled Alex Jones does not really help him find his daughter.

Rather, what saves her in the end is the continued efforts of Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal and seriously Detective Loki???), and I’d even argue Keller’s activities actually delay Loki solving the case. And the point is brought up subtly and largely ignored by the other characters that ultimately, Keller was torturing a victim. (In fact, Keller’s wife Grace, who has spent most of the movie in a sleeping-pill-induced stupor, tries to convince both herself and Loki that Keller is a good man and what he did was somehow necessary.)

So Prisoners didn’t, to my relief, overtly lionize what should be considered an appalling act. And there are some interesting points it raises along the way–like when Franklin (father of the other abducted girl, played by Terrence Howard) tries to talk Keller out of torturing Alex, and basically gets steamrollered by Keller’s utter certainty. There’s definitely something there to the way Keller drags more people into the horrors he’s perpetrating… and then ultimately is left to his own devices as Franklin and his wife Nancy (Viola Davis) refuse to participate but also refuse to actually stop him.

Keller is also presented as a very stereotypical religious hunter/survivalist/gun nut–the movie opens with him taking his son hunting and reciting the Lord’s prayer before they shoot a deer. Which I’m sure will rub some people very much the wrong way, but it’s also very believable he’d be the sort to talk tough about trying to make like Jack Bauer and beat someone half to death until they tell him what he wants to know.

There’s a lot of mileage you could get out of how Keller dehumanizes Alex (he even literally says, “he’s not human any more”), or how he seems to be a very weak man desperately trying to be strong and take control of a situation that is by definition uncontrollable by means of violence. There is even a point in one of those oh god I can’t watch this scenes were Keller screams at Alex, “Why are you making me do this to you?” I honestly think the movie is at its (horrified cringe-inducing) best when it’s focused on Keller’s transformation into something monstrous.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stay on target. Instead of keeping with the true horror of the film, it goes off into serial killer conspiracy symbolism land, and that’s kind of where it started spinning off its axis. There are several instances in the plot where the choice to make it that much more convoluted really added nothing to the story and just created more loose ends that were never satisfactorily tied up. I also think those plot decisions meant that details got lost in the shuffle.

This is not a movie I would tell people to go out and watch. It was creepy and made me cringe in my seat and not because it was bad. I don’t generally go out of my way to watch movies like this one. But I will say that I thought the cast was really excellent (and Jake Gyllenhaal specifically, though I’m still not sure about his spasmodic blinking) and obviously it made me think a lot. This one is going to stick with me and keep making me feel deeply uncomfortable for a while.

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Still in Love With the Sword Button

I saw Pacific Rim for the fourth time today. Shut up, I don’t have a problem. It’s still just my favorite movie of this year. It’s a love letter to my twelve or sixteen or even twenty-two-year-old self.

And the sword button is still my favorite moment in that movie, among a lot of really wonderful moments that fill me with marzipan-flavored glee.

I noticed that people keep ending up at my other Pacific Rim entries with google searches of things like, “why don’t they use the sword button earlier” and variations thereof. And of course, there is the fun question of how the heck did Raleigh not know about the sword button because even if the sword was something Mako added in during the refurbishment, he was quite literally in her head at that point. (The Punchline is Machismo has the best explanation ever, by the way.) Honestly, you could do a lot of arguing about why the pilots even speak out loud to each other at all while in the Jaegers, and I’m sure we could come up with some good excuses like okay Raleigh is the right hemisphere but maybe he’s got other things on his mind and and and…

But this is the thing about the sword button. This is why the movie is so precious to me as someone who grew up watching anime, sentai shows, and kaiju movies. The sword button has nothing to do with narrative logic and everything to do with the emotional language of the movie and its purposeful use of sentai show tropes. The sword didn’t come out until that moment quite literally because that was when it was most dramatic. Think of how many shounen anime (eg: Bleach, DBZ, Rurouni Kenshin) where there are battles that stretch over episode after episode (or issue after issue in manga) in which the hero and villain take turns being almost defeated and then suddenly oh wait did I forget to mention I have an even cooler power/weapon?

See also: Eleventh Hour Superpower, Heroic Second Wind, and Die or Fly. In this case, the eleventh hour power is I have a motherfucking sword button. Pacific Rim is at its heart a movie about teamwork and tropes. Sometimes it challenges the tropes, such as making Raleigh the most emotionally intelligent and open character in the film, and have Mako as the main character and not in a romance. But there are just as many tropes that the movie gleefully plays to the hilt because they are what defines its aesthetic.

The coolest weapon never shows up until the heroes are at the brink of total defeat. All is lost! They’re being dragged up into space by the most ridiculous kaiju ever invented! Raleigh thinks it’s hopeless! And then the biggest badass who has ever lived says no, we can still win this, we have a sword.

That is why the sword button was used then.

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Elysium

Finally, finally saw Elysium. Glad I did.

As scifi movies go, I’m honestly fairly pleased with it. Elysium was directed by Neill Blomkamp, the guy who brought us District 9, and it’s easy to see the thematic similarities between the two: haves and have-nots, segregation, abuse of power. District 9 was very much about Apartheid, however. Elysium goes more toward the increasing distance between rich and poor, down to the distribution of healthcare. And of course, there are quite a few very pointed scenes regarding illegal immigration, well-suited perhaps because those movie was set in Los Angeles rather than Johannesburg.

One thing I found very cool about Elysium was just how much Spanish was used in the movie (note: though I have no idea if the Spanish was any good) and how natural it felt. Blomkamp imagined a future Los Angeles with a heavily Hispanic population, which I think made it feel more realistic. (Also made the talk on the space habitat about illegal immigrants and the threat they pose all the more pointed.) Of the major supporting characters, two were played by Brazilian actors and one by a Mexican actor.

Elysium is decent scifi. It asks “what if” and then explores how humanity might change around that development, embracing it or fighting it or using it. I thought the space habitat for which the movie is named was pretty interesting, particularly that it was set up so the atmosphere was kept inside entirely by the rotational force that created the artificial gravity. (Kind of like a miniature Ring World.) Though occasionally some of the scifi elements were also plainly set up to force the plot in a particular direction to stay on message, which is not so good.

 

To be honest, I think the only reason I’m at all disappointed in Elysium is because I’ve watched and loved District 9 and can’t help but compare the two. That doesn’t seem too unfair with their undeniable similarities. While Elysium benefits from a much larger budget than District 9 (and Matt Damon was more than satisfactorily Matt Damon in it)–the special effects are excellent and I didn’t feel they were overdone–it’s also much more heavy-handed and much clumsier in the way it deals with issues. It’s much more of a big budget scifi/action movie than District 9. Which was honestly to its detriment, I think.

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The World’s End

The Worlds End is the final installment of the “cornetto” trilogy written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. It’s a satisfying end to a set of fabulously hilarious movies.

I don’t make any secret of the fact that Hot Fuzz is my favorite movie ever. (Or as I like to call it: the greatest movie ever made.) I’ll admit, I didn’t like The Worlds End quite as much. But that’s kind of like complaining about the sex because you only had three orgasms instead of five and are still capable of walking afterwards.

There’s a really different tone to this move than there was to the other two. Shaun of the Dead is very much a zombie apocalypse movie, Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop film, but The Worlds End doesn’t fit so neatly into the apocalyptic move (since honestly, most movies in that slice of the genre are actually post-apocalyptic) nor quite into the alien invasion slot. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because this movie feels much less like it’s film tropes with a side of feelings. The feelings and relationships are the red meat of The World’s End, with the blue-blooded and easily broken not-robots (robot is a word that means slave, yanno, it’s not accurate) as more of the backdrop.

And there was a lot of meat there. I very much enjoyed that it was Nick Frost’s turn to be the competent guy who has it together, with Simon Pegg as the colossal fuck up. There’s so much in the movie about how you can never go home, how you have to move forward with your life, and it makes a compelling case for an idea I’ve believed in for years: there is something seriously, seriously wrong with anyone who believes high school was the best life ever gets. Or, more accurate, there is something seriously wrong with their adult life.

Because the movie is about a set of adults going back to their old home and interacting with their past, there’s a lot of other great stuff in there that just touches my nerd heart. One of the characters interacts with someone who bullied him, and it just about broke my heart for all it was hilarious.  It’s also the reminder of the wild and crazy free-spirited guy/girl who tends to be presented as an ideal in movies (hello, manic pixie dream girl) isn’t necessarily the kind of person with whom you want to be friends. There’s also a few lovely stabs about the homogenization of local culture.

And it’s funny. It’s laugh out-loud funny. (And sometimes cringe in your seat funny when Simon Pegg’s Gary King is being particularly awful.) About the only complaints I have is that I felt like there was a teeny something missing between where we finally see Gary’s crisis and where he ends up, and that I felt like the arguing at the end (you’ll see what I mean when I get there) went on a tad too long for my tastes. But maybe it needed to for Bill Nighy’s excellent closing line as the king of the nobots.

See it. If you liked the other two movies, definitely see it. I’m hoping to go again this weekend. Hopefully with fewer problems getting there.

Because on the way to the Alamo, I had an adventure with my housemate. The kind of adventure I prefer to never have. We were trying to make it to the theater so we could also see Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz beforehand. But instead, my housemate’s car (an automatic) stopped changing gears, and then white smoke began to pour out from under the hood. So that was fun. We managed to pull off into a commercial/light industrial park that literally had nothing but fenced-in lots and had a nail-biting time trying to find somewhere to park the car before it died entirely. Then I remembered HEY I HAVE AAA, and at least we got a free tow back to the apartment. (So yes, I’ll be renewing AAA, it was worth it for that alone.)

The moral of the story, kids? If you know something is busted in your car, don’t procrastinate about fixing it.

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Byzantium

“It is still a fact that the day you are born is the day you are most likely to be murdered.“

There is a lot from Byzantium that sticks out in my mind, but that line is perhaps the strongest. I’m not even certain why, but it feels right when you roll it up with the rest of the bloody meat that makes up that movie. Yeah, write this on the calendar. I found a vampire movie I liked.

Visually, it’s a beautiful movie. It goes from period piece to modern day, and both have their beautiful and disturbingly gritty sides. It’s really two stories running in parallel and explaining each other. In one story, we find out how Eleanor, and before her Clara (her mother) became vampires. This in turn explains what they’re running from in modern times, and their fucked-up family dynamic. And on top of that is Eleanor’s story of breaking free from her mother, reconciling her desire to the tell the truth with the necessity of lying, and falling in love.

Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan were both excellent as Clara and Eleanor respectively. I was already impressed by Ronan in Hanna. Honestly, I felt the only shortcoming of the entire movie was Caleb Landry Jones as Frank, Eleanor’s love interest. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to that character, let alone any chemistry between him and Eleanor. I also honestly had a hard time understand Jones when he spoke sometimes… and I was just never able to grasp Frank as a character. He just didn’t seem consistent in how he acted from scene to scene, sometimes too young and sometimes much too old and… bleh.

But I really liked all the bits that didn’t involve Frank. It was excellent. And now I’m going to get a bit more in to why I’m still thinking about this movie, so you can consider it spoilery. But the following ramble is exactly why I think this was a good movie. I love it when movies keep me thinking and interested. (As opposed to keep me thinking about how much they pissed me off hello Oblivion.)

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2 Guns

I didn’t go into this movie with high expectations. I mean, just look at it:

Guns and shooting and guns and explosions and Bill Paxton being hilariously evil and southern. And let me be honest: this is one of those rare movies where what you see in the trailer is exactly what you get. There are guns and shooting and explosions and a bit more brutality than is perhaps necessary and oh lord the banter. It’s basically a buddy cop odd couple movie with a bit of a twist, since the two buddies start off by betraying each other right before they get betrayed by everyone else and driven back together. That’s the entire motive behind the story. There’s not a back story for either character you ever learn, and you don’t need to; they live in the now, dealing with the current crisis and exchanging quips between bullets.

And yet, I fucking loved this movie. I think I might have laughed for this more than I did at This Is the End. Because ultimately, it’s not about the little twist on a fairly standard plot. It’s all about Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg snarking at each other like a married couple. Those two actors (with a side of Bill Paxton) carry the entire movie and make it fun, because they seem to be having a damn good time with every moment they’re onscreen. It’s fast paced, plot twists exist just to give the apparently indestructible Wahlberg and Washington another chance to hilariously bicker, and the soundtrack is excellent.

2 Guns is ultimately two grown men snarking, blowing things up, and then exchanging more witty banter. It’s exactly as advertised on the packaging, no surprises. If you like that kind of thing (and I sure do) it’s more than worth the price of admission.

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Europa Report

This is an independent science fiction movie. It was released a week ago, but the release is so limited it’s not in any theaters near me. Thankfully, it’s also available from On Demand for $8, which made it cheaper than actually seeing it in a theater. I was excited about this movie. It didn’t disappoint.

To be honest, watching it on the home screen I think might have worked better than at the theater, just because of the film style (found footage, so generally not high quality) and the CGI wasn’t the greatest; what flaws I was able to see on a 55″ flatscreen would have no doubt been all the more glaring on a movie screen.

This is definitely one of the most scientifically accurate movies I’ve seen in a long time. (Per Phil Plait, JPL scientists were consultants on the film, and it looks like the filmmakers really took what they said to heart.) And the science really plays into the story and helps drive and define the plot. It’s the motivation and not the villain, which was very refreshing. It also serves as a good reminder that accurate, basically present-day science still has some amazing storytelling possibilities for speculative fiction in it.

At its heart, I think the movie is very much about science, and the wonder scientists feel, and the sacrifices they are willing to make for the sake of answering one of the greatest questions to ever face our species: are we alone? The cast really sold it, I think, and Daniel Wu and Anamaria Marinca were particularly good I think.

And there’s an adorable reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey at the beginning, which I loved.

The movie is mostly found footage style, which is a format I’m increasingly disenchanted with, though I understand why it’s used–it’s generally a cheaper option. For the most part I felt like it worked pretty well, and it put us in the action with the crew. I didn’t like how some of the jumps and cuts were done, since it really didn’t fit with the narrative frame of “here we edited this together for you.” It felt like a transparent attempt to make the movie seem scarier than it was or needed to be.

This was not a scary movie, despite what the trailer wants you to think:

If you believe the trailer, this is going to be a “found footage thing where team of astronauts goes to alien world and gets horrifically eaten by sneaky, evil aliens that may or may not look like giant space spiders.” And it’s really not. It’s tense, it’s heart-wrenching at times, but this is definitely not a horror movie.

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Hey Thor 2: Star Wars Called, It Wants Its Poster Back

I had about three seconds of excitement yesterday when Marvel dropped the new Thor: The Dark World poster on Twitter. I’m so excited about that movie, I can barely stand it. And I really loved most of the posters there were for the original Thor. So… yay! And here it was!
thor poster
Well. That’s sure a thing. I don’t like the composition (she says as if she has more artistic ability than the average potato).It’s really… busy. Unlike the posters for the first movie. But more than that… wow. It feels really familiar. Reeeeeeeally familiar.
iron man poster…wow. Yeah. But no, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. We have to go back further. Much further. Like maybe…
star-wars-return-of-the-jedi_movie-poster-01A bit like this, perhaps. Except while they put Leia in the stupid-ass bikini, at least she’s not clinging to anyone. But of course, Star Wars really owes its artistic allegiance to far pulpier roots…
UFO_MovieArt_01
Just as an example. That’s art from a release called UFO from the 70s. Though then we need to add a little side of this just for full replication:
eileen-dreter-barely-a-lady-cover-art-by-jon-paul-ferraraAnd there you go.

Why the hell are we still doing pulp movie clingy woman and manly men posters in the year 2013? There is just so much about the poster that I really, really don’t like. About both the TDW and IM3 posters, really. I’m not a big fan of women with their necks broken, to start with. But the position is so classic clingy damsel in distress oh let me lay my hands on your manly manly chest so you can save me. I loathe it. Particularly because in IM3, Pepper was pretty fucking awesome. She saved Tony’s ass twice. She was not the damsel in distress.

That gives me hope that maybe the TDW poster is a big troll just like the IM3 poster kind of was. (Or maybe we’ll get an awesome joke poster for Captain America 2, like this idea.) But it just upsets me on a basic level to see another awesome female character turned into the visual clingy appendage of the guy. I actually like Jane as a character. She kind of fell by the wayside when I first watched Thor because I was too busy losing my shit over the complexities of Loki. But in subsequent viewings, I’ve come to really like Jane.

In a super hero movie, it’s nice to have some normal human characters around who aren’t just living furniture. That they’re regular people means yes, they occasionally need their bacon saved by the super hero, because that’s what super heroes do. But both Pepper and Jane are eminently competent women, and they solve some great plot problems by being excellent at what they do. While I didn’t really buy the Thor/Jane romance in Thor, I loved that Jane was the one who decided to kiss him. I loved that she was impulsive and smart and very much had a life and a being outside of the whole romance angle.

The one thing that I’m still mad at Thor for was what I felt was the lazy writing. We need some redemption–quick, have him instantly fall in love with someone and that will make him a better person because boobies are magic! It was cheap, formulaic, and trite. I’ll still be seeing the new movie who knows how many fucking times because Loki. And Sif. And Loki. And Frigga in armor. And Loki. But I’d love to not give myself a headache from rolling my eyes through the rest of the movie. At this point I’m already assuming that Jane will get kidnapped by Malekith and Thor has to almost die again to save her life because obviously Malekith blowing shit up across the Nine Realms isn’t sufficient motivation for the man to be self-sacrificing. Barf. (I’d love to be wrong, by the way.)

I’m sick of shit like that. I’m so sick of it. It’s ultimately disrespectful (if that’s the right word) of two really awesome characters. It reduces Jane to just being an object to motivate Thor, and it reduces Thor to someone who can only stir himself to do great and noble things and grow as a person if his dick warmer is in danger.

Really. Do better.