Kill Your Darlings (2013)

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 12/6/2013

“I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

So go the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and madness is a part of what John Krokidas explores in his film, “Kill Your Darlings.” The film takes its title from a William Faulkner quote: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”


What he means is that as a writer, one should be careful not to overuse personal meanings, lest you alienate your reader. In the film, a young Ginsberg, played by Daniel Radcliffe, receives this advice from his English professor.

The film casts light on an under-explored chapter in the lives of the Beat poets Jack Kerouac, played by Jack Huston, William S. Burroughs, played by Ben Foster, and Ginsberg, who all met while attending Columbia University in 1944. After being accepted to the university, Ginsberg meets Lucien Carr, played by Dane DeHaan, whose intelligence and charm earn Ginsberg’s admiration.


Enlivened by one another and frustrated with rigid academic tradition, they vow to begin a new literary movement, which they dub “The New Vision.” They rendezvous with the infamous Burroughs, who introduces them to the possibilities of better writing through stimulants. There’s a fantastic scene where Ginsberg, Carr and Burroughs spend the night in a colleague’s study, taking drugs and cutting up literary classics to create new meanings and sentences. When the colleague finally walks in, Burroughs croaks, “Someone get this man a pair of scissors!”

“Kill Your Darlings” wants to wander through its historical setting rather than keep with a straight plot line. This is an issue with many films based on true events, but this one manages to keep it together. The movie’s appeal may be limited to those who are familiar with the Beat generation, but it may offer an interesting attraction for members of the gay community. It’s a rare film where the gay characters are not defined by the fact that they are gay. It also features Radcliffe in a brief but daring gay sex scene, a far cry from his Harry Potter days.

The real story, however, is the murder that bonds these men for the years to come. One of the first images in the film is of the body being disposed of, but those not familiar with this true story do not yet know who has been killed. Once we do learn his identity, the title of the movie takes on a grim subtext.

The movie is full of strong performances from Radcliffe, DeHaan and Foster. Foster makes an excellent turn as Burroughs, the frog-voiced junkie queer criminal poet, and DeHaan is great as Carr, who displays sophistication and cunning on the surface while angst and torment smolder underneath.

The main attraction for college-age moviegoers will probably be to see what Radcliffe is up to in a post-Potter world. It’s very clear in “Kill Your Darlings” that Radcliffe is an actor with range, and one hopes that he will continue to take on similar interesting roles in order to stay relevant after the end of the massive franchise.

On the whole, “Kill Your Darlings” is a competent study of real-life characters that takes equal turns into romance and tragedy. It’s a good film for those who are interested, but some viewers will be turned off by the prevalent sex and drugs. Regardless, it’s a worthy film about a morose, disenchanted group of men and what they all meant to each other.

Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 11/15/2013

Up to a certain point, I felt like “Blue is the Warmest Color” would play out to be epic softcore pornography; that it would be another teen melodrama like so many done before, only with more sex. It follows the life of a depressed, self-absorbed teenage girl named Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and her romance with the older, blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux.)

Adèle is pressured by her catty friends into dating a boy she doesn’t really like. She has sex with him, and the scene we see is graphic and depressingly empty. After she breaks up with him, she starts crying and shoves a candy bar in her mouth to console herself. The very first shot of the film is Adèle running toward the bus, but then it drives away without seeing her. The movie really picks up once Adèle meets Emma. Most of the running time is devoted to their intense romance and sexual exploration.


The film is structured in a way that implies the emotional growth Adèle will experience as we follow her story. The screen is always filled with faces, so close to us that we feel like we can just reach out and touch them. The soundtrack is riddled with wet, smacking noises as we watch characters eat meal after meal. The same kinds of sounds are heard as Adèle and Emma kiss. The sounds are sometimes uncomfortably intimate, and they reminded me that love is not always pretty and clean. Love can be dirty and leaves one vulnerable to pain. When you are in love, the world falls away, and nothing else matters.

Director Abdellatif Kechiche must have said something along those lines to his cinematographer, who filmed the movie as a series of intimate close-ups with backgrounds out of focus. We don’t really feel the need to know anything about why Adèle is the way she is; why she hangs out with her petty friends or any details about her relationship with her parents. All that matters is that she felt emptiness — then she found Emma. There is even one scene in which the two of them are so overcome with tenderness and passion for one another that they begin to grope each other loudly in the middle of a café. There are other people around, but we are not given reaction shots of those people, because who cares what they think?

By the time we reach the controversial eight-minute sex scene, we may not understand why it’s there. I think the scene is as long as it is because it contrasts the routine emptiness of the earlier, briefer scene with Adèle and her male classmate. This scene feels more alive and meaningful. Adèle is here because she wants to be and not because she is pressured by her peers. Both actresses, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, were brave not only because of the skin they bared for their roles, but the depth of emotion and pain they brought to their characters.

The film is not without its flaws. There’s the ever-present shaky cam that I feel is the bane of modern cinema (somebody get these cinematographers some Dramamine). The sex scenes may feel gratuitous to some viewers, and they could be right. There have been complaints of a male perspective in the scenes of female-on-female sexual intimacy. Because this was directed by a man, that criticism isn’t far-reaching.

I also think it could be shorter, but I don’t know what could be cut out. Kechiche spends a lot of time with quiet shots of walking, sitting, reading, etc. There is an interesting rhythm going for this movie, and I think cutting it down would diminish its impact. I walked out of the film not with a neatly wrapped up story on my mind, but with an impression of what the characters felt in the time I spent with them. It’s not a movie for everyone, but for anyone who wants to see an unsentimental love story like few ever depicted in the cinema, I highly recommend it.

new blog time

It's good to be here on the internet. I'll just leave this here in the front.

You can come on over any time!

 There's just so much to see. So many people posting blogs, writing really interesting stuff. It's awesome. You just have to be careful where you step sometimes. Shit can get weird, and it often does depending on where you are in the internet.

But I'm mostly glad to be here because I get to share my thoughts on certain movies with you, and tell you why I think they deserve a lot more credit than they get. Or why they don't deserve the credit they got. Mostly I'm here to write about a lot of films because I think they're great, and the most fun a true cinephile can have is discovering a film over again through writing about it, or by sharing the experience of the film with others. You can put a film together better by talking about it afterwards. You can see it in a different light when you watch it with someone else.

Movies are like sculptures in the fourth dimension, revealing their truths while weaving through time. Re-living that time over and over again can change your perception of it. Better film making means more detail, more reasons for returning to the movie.

But besides that, sometimes it's just fun to see really gnarly shit happen to people on the screen. Remember The Human Centipede? Or those Friday the 13th movies? All pretty violent, yet profitable movies. Why do we watch them? Is it for the thrill of being scared? Or is it out of cheap, morbid curiosity that we go to see awful things done to human flesh on film?

I'm guessing the latter. People are hungry for emotion and sometimes they don't care what kind of stimulation brings it out. I think it's good that people go out and see all types of different movies, because we need all types of stimulation in our lives. We ought to see horror movies, comedies, action films, art films, silent films, foreign films and independent movies. We ought to see everything, because no one film can truly be everything. In this sense, all film is exploitative. After all, nothing we see is real. It is all predestined, plotted out and labored over for months and years. Entire months and years for just a couple of hours of entertainment.

Cinema is a grand illusion, a master's modern art commanding many people, many talents, and the environment itself into a singular work. Even in terrible films, there is so much more on screen than the director intended.

This introduction will end on an open note. I figured an open beginning would be the best way to start this thing. You know, provide the basics and just leave the rest open. More films should be like that.