I ended 2014 with a big old post on all the movies I'd seen but not posted that year - movies I didn't "own" in any sense at the time I watched them. I think this new streaming kick is here to stay, and I've been on quite a roll so far in 2015. Rather than wait until the end of the year to reflect on all these movies - hell, this year there will probably only be a handful of legitimate "I own it on DVD" movie posts - I plan on dropping in periodically with a bunch of scattered thoughts on whatever it is I've been watching. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, On Demand, in theaters, borrowed from friends - you name it. At any rate, here comes the first batch.
The One I Love
A lot of what made this one fun was its immediate but unexpected genre shift. When the film starts out, you've got Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in marriage counseling with Ted Danson. It has all the signs of being another low-budget mumblecore movie about a dissatisfied couple. I never seek these types of movies out, and only gave this one a shot because I heard that it quickly got weird "in a good way." That much is absolutely true; within twenty minutes or so, The One I Love takes a sharp turn into the surreal. It doesn't seem fair or accurate to say that the movie ends up squarely in the science fiction department, but the big twist that takes this movie into left field isn't something that could feasibly happen in this world at this time. I really don't want to spoil this at all, even though it happens fairly early on in the movie (and even though the poster above contains some subtle clues) - but, if I can be vague, the best part about the big twist is that the film doesn't just hint at what's going on and let audiences fill in the blanks. Rather, the weird occurence gets noticed directly by the characters themselves, and they spend the rest of the movie - the meat of the story, really - exploring the ramifications of their unique circumstance. Absolutely worth checking out; it's on Netflix, and only 90 minutes long to boot.
Venus in Fur
Brace yourselves for this description. Roman Polanski's 2013 film is an adaptation of a 2010 play by the same name, in which a (fictional) playwright is auditioning an actress for his upcoming stage adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's nineteenth century Austrian novel Venus in Furs, an erotic novel full of sadism and submission. I read that book a few years ago and posted about it on the blog. I liked it. It had far more humanity and romance than kinky fetishism and it ended on a bittersweet note. Anyway, this movie - in French, subtitled in English - takes place on a single set and features just two actors: the playwright and the actress. It's less an exploration of masochism or even the original Venus in Furs story than it is a ninety-minute single scene in which the power dynamic between the two characters teeters back and forth. We start out with the actress more or less begging on her knees for an audition from the disinterested playwright, and by the end of the movie she wields all the power, with the playwright at the point where he'll do anything for her to stay and continue reading lines. It's a simple premise, and there's not much else to this movie, but the actors and the writing really sell the natural evolution of the pair's dynamic. Seduction, manipulation, and contempt are weapons employed by both players here, but in the end, true to the original novel's exploration of a femme fatale and her power to enslave a lovestruck suitor, it's the actress who comes out on top. This definitely isn't for everyone - hell, Roman Polanski alone may be a deal breaker for many - but it held my interest for ninety minutes. A few aspects of the ending felt completely over-the-top and absurd, but then again, why should a small-scale story about a sexually-charged power struggle aim for anything lower?
Coherence
This one starts out as an indie flick set at a dinner party among slightly bitchy thirtysomethings, and for a little while it looks like there'll be little more to it than watching strong personalities undercut one another. But then a comet passing overhead causes something supernatural to occur, and the rest of the movie is spent piecing together what exactly is happening, whether or not it's a big deal, and how best to handle it. Strong personalities do in fact undercut one another as expected, but with some weird and actual stakes on the line, their arguments actually matter. Like The One I Love, it's the debut film from a new director; unlike The One I Love, its cast is full of no-names and unknowns. There's another huge similarity between the movies, but to reveal it would be to spoil the central premise of The One I Love that I tried so hard to keep under wraps a few paragraphs ago. (If you really want a clue, then here too, check the poster.) I haven't gotten around to watching this a second time yet, but it's absolutely one of those movies where seemingly arbitrary or odd things from the first half of the movie make perfect sense once you've seen it all the way through. This one's available on Amazon Prime, and I strongly and openly recommend it to anyone who isn't put off by a little bit of sci-fi or a low budget. Slightly more so than The One I Love, it makes you think and asks you to reconsider some initial assumptions. But both movies are very straightforward and neither one will leave you confused or unable to follow the plot. Seeing both movies within a week helps tie them more closely together from my perspective, but really, these are two of a kind, and if you like one you'll like the other. Check them out.
Under the Skin
An awful lot of hype preceded Under the Skin, as I'd seen it on tons of year-end "year's best" lists. I'd read a few reviews that called director Jonathan Glazer the next Stanley Kubrick. I'd heard that Scarlett Johansson turned in a phenomenal performance that would be worthy of an Oscar if only the Oscars weren't afraid to look at films as far out there as this one. This is all very high praise, and as so often is the case when anything gets talked up enough, I ended up just a little bit underwhelmed by what I saw. For those who don't know, the movie is about an alien who comes to Earth, takes a human female form, and proceeds to lure men to their demises by promising them some sexy times back at her place. (It's more abstract than overt, but presumably the men are consumed as food or energy in some way. It doesn't really matter.) About halfway through the movie, the alien begins to take pity on her victims and stops doing her job - only to ultimately bear witness to some of the worst aspects of human nature. Because the movie is heavy on visuals and light on dialogue, it initially feels rife with symbolism and hidden meaning. But there's really not a ton to unpack here thematically beyond the predator-prey dynamics of casual sex and the human capability to empathize. perhaps you could tack self-awareness on there as well. To me, the movie felt like far less than the sum of its parts - but that's less an indictment on the movie, and more a compliment to so many different individual aspects of the film. Yes, the film's tone is Kubrickian. And yes, Scarlett Johansson is amazing. And two completely separate scenes are memorably horrifying, each in their own way. And the score - particularly during the alien's ritual of seduction and ensnarement - is as haunting as anything I've ever heard, stuck in my head like nothing from any movie since the much happier Frozen. Every aspect of the film works brilliantly; I'm just not sure the film itself is a new favorite of my own. It's absolutely worth seeing, though. I did so on Amazon Prime.
Taken 3
After beginning the year with four movies meant to stimulate the intellect, I enjoyed the change of pace associated with a low-stakes PG-13 Liam Neeson action flick. And man, this delivered - and really, really sucked. I liked the first Taken movie so much more than I expected. The second was clearly inferior, but still fun enough for me, particularly in its absurd moments - like when a kidnapped Liam Neeson tries to pinpoint his location using triangulation methods based on the sound waves from grenade blasts around the city to reach him. Taken 3 seemed to know that Taken 2 was only as successful as its over the top moments, because the only thing Taken 3 even tried to be was absurd. Liam Neeson matter-of-factly saying things like, "I have low blood sugar. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning," is funny, but when an entire movie is just a series of these kinds of quips among intermittent action sequences - terribly underwhelming action sequences, too - what positives can you take away from it? I saw this in theaters with a couple of friends, and collectively we had no reaction to most lines and sequences, and then burst out laughing at instances of bad editing, awkward musical choices, and giant plot holes. The movie wasn't frustratingly bad as much as groan-inducing. It just felt like, generally speaking, no one was trying to make an exciting or interesting movie, from the writers to the director and from the actors to the editors. Oh yeah, I haven't even described the plot here yet. Liam Neeson's ex-wife gets murdered, and naturally he's the chief suspect - not the woman's current husband who has a $12 million life insurance policy on her or anything - and instead of just accepting the arrest he knocks out a few cops and goes on the run to figure out who killed his wife - even though the police figure it out without his assistance in literally a day's time. It's very much just The Fugitive, but shittier, and Liam Neeson is at least ten years older here than "old guy" Harrison Ford was in that movie. Oh, and what does Neeson get for resisting arrest and interfering with a police investigation? He puts several lives in danger, including chiefly his own daughter's, and he racks up several felonies along the way. Like, he definitely causes the deaths of multiple innocents and scores of Russian mobster henchmen - completely unnecessarily, again, since the police figured everything out themselves - and at the end of the movie not one person cares. It's insane. But yeah, those are more words than Taken 3 needed. Current Rotten Tomatoes rating: 11%.
Spring Breakers
Some critics called this one of the best movies of 2013. Some put it on their "worst-of" lists instead. James Franco, for whatever it's worth, called it the most important film in years. Take that with a grain of salt for two reasons - he's in the movie, and also, he's James Franco. The jury's still out for me; on one hand, I think I can see what the film was trying to do, and I liked it. On the other hand, so much of Spring Breakers just felt like a never-ending MTV promo: women in bikinis or nothing at all, dancing and gyrating, in varying video speeds, on the beach in the sun and in brightly lit up nightclubs, with drugs and booze everywhere, to cranked up club music, and, oh yeah, with tons of gun-based violence as various felonies are glorified. So it's easy to see why this was so readily dismissed as garbage by so many people. But then, if this was a satire on "spring break" culture - and those who regard it highly say that it was - then, hey, major props, since it absolutely nailed the atmosphere it meant to lampoon. Here's a question, though. When a satire meant to detract from something can be interpreted as a straight-faced celebration of that same thing, did it really work as satire? Like, we've all seen bad attempts at "satire," where a guy says something ridiculously offensive, and his point is to mock the kind of bigots who would say something so offensive, but instead he just comes across as a bigot who said something very offensive. If Spring Breakers was spoofing the "anything goes" aspect of college party culture (it was) and lots of audiences missed the boat on the joke (they did), then who's at fault - the film or its audience? Frankly, I'm on the fence here. Spring Breakers was either a brilliant movie or a tonally off failure. It wasn't anything in between. It didn't "sort of work and sort of not," so to speak. Schrödinger's cat is either alive or dead, and this movie either succeeded or failed. I just can't decide which one it was. Why don't you check it out for yourself and lend me your take? Whether you end up loving or hating it, you will be treated to some amazing scenes - most of them involving excellent work by James Franco.
Heathers
Hey, another violent satire that takes aim at certain aspects of teen culture. And, here too, I'm not sure how well it worked. Satire is, to be fair, easily dated. It's generally not very timeless. Once a social trend or attitude reaches a point where it's being openly derided in pop culture, it tends to subside soon afterward. Gulliver's Travels is a classic satire that still works today because in addition to being a great story, it takes aim at plenty of broad and generalized characteristics of human nature and various forms of government. But that book is also - apparently - just loaded with specific details meant to ridicule certain people, certain political parties, and certain fashions in vogue during the early eighteenth century, and none of these aspects translate across the centuries whatsoever. When a character in the book is described as wearing a puffy hat and a blindfold, for instance, a reader today will just attribute it to the imagination of Jonathan Swift, instead of saying, "wow, what a savage depiction of so-and-so!" I bring all of this up because even though Heathers clearly plays with extreme stereotypes and flattens most of its characters into broad caricatures, it's already losing some of whatever sharpness I'm sure it once had. For instance, in Heathers, all the popular girls are named Heather and they're obscenely rich and they have immaculately permed hair and they wear high-end blazers and skirts with tights and such. And all the jocks are extremely dumb chuckleheads who wear varsity jackets and call all the nerds fags. Obviously that's not how any high school actually was back in 1989, and depicting such extremes was intentional on the part of Heathers, but watching the movie in 2015, the rich girls didn't strike me as particularly fashionable and the jocks didn't strike me as particularly mean-spirited. I just thought, "oh, right, the '80s. People wore absurd clothes and dropped casual homophobic slurs all the time." Extreme caricatures from 1989 just felt like weird '80s tropes 25 years later. I say all this because, honestly, Heathers only kind of worked for me. It's an insanely quotable movie, but while some lines felt brilliant and sharp, others felt unintentionally cheesy and melodramatic. Could this just be due to changing teenage speech patterns, or were the lines just as bad back then? I don't know, just like I don't know how solidly Jonathan Swift put his political adversaries on blast in the 1720s. Anyway, it's also worth pointing out that Heathers was really, really dark, sometimes in ways that just wouldn't fly today. One scene just depicts a low-stakes rape happening in the background. A guy is pinning a girl down in a field at night while two characters in the foreground are talking, and she's visibly struggling and trying to push him off, and it never comes to the foreground in any way. Again, without benefiting from a 1989 mindset, I have no real way to know whether this was supposed to be funny in a "kids these days" sense or funny in a shock value sense. Also, Christian Slater wore a sinister-looking trenchcoat and tried to blow up the high school, which was just way too Columbine-ish for comfort. Did Heathers take a lot of flak back in 1999 for "life imitating art" or was it all just video games and Marilyn Manson? I can't remember. Oh, and as for the darkest part of the movie that still worked really well for me in 2015 - after Winona Ryder and Christian Slater murder one of the Heathers and two of the jocks, they stage the deaths to look like suicides - and then suicide becomes a new nationwide teen fad that "all the cool kids" are doing. Well done!
Blue Ruin
This was great. A low stakes 2014 indie movie starring no one you'd recognize, and a very simple premise: revenge. The plot's pretty bare here, and it's all the better for it. There's this homeless drifter who's been understandably fucked up ever since the day his parents were murdered. The guy who killed them gets out of prison, and the homeless drifter resolves to kill him. This sets of a series of events where more and more innocent people come into various crossfires. If there's a moral here, it's just that revenge is really stupid; that point has been made over and over again in stories throughout history, and it's not a reason to watch Blue Ruin. Instead, you should watch Blue Ruin just because it's a really well-made movie. If you liked No Country for Old Men, but thought that it dragged at times, or that it had an unsatisfying ending, give this one a shot. It's just a really impressive and well-made movie. Stream that shit on Netflix for an easy and entertaining hour and a half.
Good Morning, Vietnam
When the tributes to Robin Williams came pouring out last summer, it seemed like most of the specific praise was given to a select handful of the man's several dozen performances. His portrayal of Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam was one such stand-out, and seemingly the only one from a movie I hadn't already seen. So when I saw it on Netflix, I gave it a try. It was good! Or at least it wasn't bad. Robin Williams was good. The rest of the movie was just fine. I will say, this did feel like a quintessential Robin Williams role; he improvised a ton of his rapid fire radio bits and he got to play an irreverent armed forces radio DJ of high moral character. It isn't clear to me how much of this story was made up and how much was true to reality, but Cronauer was a real person who really did host a radio program for the armed forces in Vietnam. Watch this one if you need a good dose of Robin Williams at some point.
And with that, I'm out. I promise to get back to making some real posts soon, but I hope these little movie reviews can hold everyone over until then.
