Her (2013)

 

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 01/21/2013

He stares straight into our eyes, his face filling the screen. In his delicate voice, he tells us how much we mean to him. The camera moves slowly to reveal he is dictating a letter to a computer program which produces virtual handwritten letters. He is not the only one doing this. He works in an office full of people doing the same thing, each of them hired to help voiceless people share their feelings. They spend their lives expressing ideas and love that aren’t theirs.

            Theodore Twombley, played by the great Joaquin Phoenix, is timid, insecure and a bit unremarkable. He’s also compassionate and loving, but above all, he’s lonely. He lives in a massive city with millions of other people like him. Something is missing. He feels like a piece of him has been torn away; his wife has divorced him and he refuses to sign the papers. 

            He withdraws into himself, whittling away the time by playing advanced video games, having phone sex, endlessly checking his e-mail. In many shots, he is framed against skyscrapers and huge lights, monuments to our progress as human beings. For all the progress we’ve made, monuments we’ve built and battles we’ve won, we’re still no better as a species at connecting with one another. 

            Spike Jonze’s gorgeous new film, “Her,” explores the nature of love by having its main character fall in love with an artificial consciousness. Thinking that buying some new technology will be just another distraction from his creeping loneliness, Theodore gets a new operating system, the OS1, which can learn and adapt as a thinking personality. He sets the voice to female. In seconds, she gives herself the name Samantha. 

Samantha (Scarlett Johanssen in an affecting voice role) gets to know Theodore better than anyone else. After Theodore blows a blind date, he shares his frustration with Samantha, and they develop feelings for each other. They are not the only ones in this situation.

Jonze’s sci-fi script, nominated for an Academy Award, balances humor with potent emotion and wisdom. Those who have felt the joy and pain of finding and losing love will feel themselves in familiar territory. The near-future scenario will be familiar as well, reminding us that digital technology is increasingly becoming a part of the human condition. Jonze seems to want to tell us that no matter what, we will always be human, and part of being human is being conscious, and connecting with other consciousness. 

Some say that all human achievements can be described as attempts to impress the opposite sex. I think that’s an interesting thought to keep in mind while watching this film. In this time, technology has advanced to the point where humans can replicate consciousness, and so we can replicate romantic relationships, which are arguably at the center of human society. Even though, in “Her,” we’ve finally gotten to that point, there are still troubles. Theodore and Samantha endure difficulties together, just like two flesh-and-blood humans. The resolution between them towards the end of the film suggests we don’t have as much control over our emotions, or our technology, as we thought.

All this existential musing isn’t necessary to enjoy the film. It’s a simple premise with enough honesty and inspiration to appeal to a wide range of audiences. It’s a great date movie, full of humor and warmth. The cinematography is colorful and vibrant, but not overwhelming. The original score by Arcade Fire is intimate and meditative, and Karen O’s “The Moon Song,” a duet between Theodore and Samantha, is so painfully beautiful it drove me to tears.

“Her” manages to be one of the best romantic comedies of recent memory, and one of the best science fiction films. Like all great science fiction, it uses the technology we create to explore the mysteries of the human condition. It’s an almost perfect film, and one of the best of 2013. See it. You’ll fall in love with it. 

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013)

If Sylvester the Donkey became a rock, we would still see him as Sylvester the Donkey. Even if he has all the properties of a rock, we see him as what he was until he changes back to a donkey. 

This is one of the many interesting, if odd, ideas expressed in Michel Gondry’s new documentary, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” The film is a series of conversations between director Michel Gondry and famed linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Most of the film is Chomsky meditating on Gondry’s questions, set to a series of animations concocted by Gondry himself. 

Gondry begins the film with a minimalist animation of himself sitting at an animating table, scribbling frames onto paper, clicking his camera, and starting a fresh frame. Self-writing cursive streaks across the top of the screen as Gondry reads it in a very thick French accent (which becomes the butt of several self-conscious jokes throughout the film). With this animation, he explains how he discovered Noam Chomsky in a New York video store, the manipulative nature of images, and the premise for his project, which he says he had better start soon because Chomsky “is not getting any younger.”

There are a few more moments like this in the film, where Michel Gondry comments on the moments of his life surrounding the interviews with Noam Chomsky. In this way, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is a very experimental film. It’s a project Gondry created almost completely on his own. It’s plotless, unfocused and has no single unifying theme, but what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in sheer imagination. Gondry’s animations are so inventive and charmingly rough, they alone are worth the price of admission. 

 

In Michel Gonry’s hands, a piece of work that could have been a straightforward documentary, with standard interview and stock footage, instead becomes a daydream. It’s a parade of fantastic images that feels like watching a person’s thoughts as they develop. 

Gondry’s animated images range from simple to sophisticated, explicit to abstract, serious to silly. Gondry is able to take complex ideas and simplify them to whimsical visual representations; when Chomsky talks about chaos theory and the emergence of complexity from simple systems, Gondry illustrates the idea as a fluctuating green web with simple triangles at its center. 

It had to have taken Michel Gondry a ridiculous amount of work to complete this film; He animated the entire thing himself, by hand, over the course of two years.  “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” can often feel superfluous. It covers a wide range of topics; the birth of modern science, language acquisition, logical paradoxes, the effects of the Holocaust, and so on. Each of these topics is touched on briefly, but the conversation almost always shifts gears before the topics can be explored in greater depth.  

Even so, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is a fascinating, unique movie. At its core is a conversation between two men who see the world in different ways, and then there are the countless drawings where the two minds meet. It will satisfy viewers looking for food for thought, and their dates they’ve dragged along with them.  

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 01-13-2013

When given the right material, Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest living directors. His latest masterpiece “The Wolf of Wall Street” feels like it completes a trilogy of films he began a long time ago with “Goodfellas” and expanded in “Casino.”

Each of these films follows the main character, Our Man, who tells us everything about his life, from
his perspective, from the point where his life first matters all the way up to his spectacular downfall and emasculation. These films also all have close, family-oriented groups, crime, excess, drugs, brisk editing, violent marriages, a colorful rainbow of swear words and a meteoric rise through the social castes of our country. Above all, these movies also ask us to sympathize with some pretty ugly characters as they chase the American Dream.

That idea is more prominent in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which follows common stock trader Jordan Belfort from his humble beginnings through his role as obscenely wealthy and seedy head of Stratton Oakmont, a company that made its name by unloading penny stocks on gullible investors. Belfort is not a good person by any means, but his ambition is impressive. There are many people like him. The fact of Belfort is not so important. Here, it’s the idea of his success that drives the film.

Belfort is a vulgar go-getter who makes ridiculous amounts of money for doing nothing, while he thinks he’s kicking all the ass in the world. All the while he stomps and cheers with his friends over all their “achievements,” and all the money, women and drugs they acquire. In the end, it amounts to little but hyper-masculine posturing. Many of Scorsese’s pictures are about characters such as this. They speak directly to us, and although they say very much, they’re only trying to tell us what they think it means to be a man.

The themes Scorsese works out over and over again in his movies are the same themes many great writers have worked over for centuries: love and its complications, greed, betrayal, vice, religion, brotherhood, social divisions and so on.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is a gangster movie with brokers instead of wiseguys. They do a lot of drugs, which is just another way to display their wealth and status. They get a lot of women because they can. The sex and drugs stand out in the early scenes and resonate for the rest of the film. The experience of the characters is intensified to bring it closer to us, and that experience isn’t always pleasant. The pace, content, and attitude of the film all border on exploitation, but it retains style and sophistication as the characters burn their way to oblivion.

Scorsese’s greatest strength has always been working with his actors. Leonardo DiCaprio injects a snide Gordon Gekko-type affectation to his usual swaggering performance. Jonah Hill is surprisingly versatile as Donnie Azoff, the degenerate vice president of Stratton Oakmont. Who’d have thought Hill would mumble the line, “Do some crack with me, bro!” in a serious Martin Scorsese picture rather than a Judd Apatow-produced comedy?

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is also something of a comedy, nodding and winking the whole way through, while slipping in and out of a drug-induced coma. Hill provides the fulcrum in many parts throughout the film, but the ensemble cast, with actors too various to name, each contribute to an epic farce of vice and greed in the modern free world, and it’s pretty damn fun to watch.

 The fact that Martin Scorsese directed such an electric, edgy film at 71 is more than noteworthy. “The Wolf of Wall Street” is one of the best films of the year. Scorsese has stated that he plans to direct two more films, then retire. He’s at the top of his form now, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Can movies be evil?

  

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 12-09-2013

Is it possible to watch a film so reprehensible, so ugly, so mean and disgusting that it doesn’t just simply repulse us, but disturbs something deep inside us? Makes us feel sad?

I became a film lover years ago through watching horror movies. When I was younger, I sought out more and more graphic horror films in search for the sickest, most depraved film in existence. I ended up exploring Italian giallo movies and J-horror and moved on to less lurid, more mature fare, but that germ remains. I wanted to see something well, sick. I was always looking for that scene that would make me feel sick and want to turn away. I watched regular movies, too. I wasn’t a complete gore hound.

 Why would I want to see such things? I suppose it comes down to basic thrills.
Why do people love “Jurassic Park?” Or “Psycho?” Or those godforsaken “Paranormal Activity” sequels? The basic idea is the same. We want thrills. Dissonant imagery and shock value produce a kind of adrenaline rush, and that’s exciting. It doesn’t really matter whether you get that thrill from anime or action dramas or slasher films, so long as your interest is not harming other people.

Before I go into whether a film could be “evil,” what even is “evil”? We don’t have solid words for what this thing is, but we have strong feelings about what it might be. We know that good is good and bad is bad, even as most of our daily actions are painted in shades of grey. Suffice it to say, I define “evil” as extreme selfishness to the point of harming others, with great emphasis on the “extreme.”

Most films are neutral. They are produced with a genre, an idea, a story, actors and other things in mind. The great films aim to enlighten us about the world and can even start us on the path to being better people. It is a rare film that is truly reprehensible at its deepest level, and I can only think of two historical examples of “evil” films: “The Birth of a Nation” and “Triumph of the Will.”

“The Birth of a Nation,” released in 1915 and directed by D.W. Griffith, is often hailed as one of the great masterpieces of cinema for its epic scope and abundance of pioneering cinematic techniques (which in fact were not new, but borrowed from earlier, marginalized film makers like Alice Guy-Blache). Its first half covers the Civil War, and the second half details a white supremacist vision of reconstruction, in which the Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as the saviors of the South. Its impact was so powerful at the time of its release that it caused a resurgence of the Klan across the country. “The Birth of a Nation” is a film which valorizes the worst kind of people, but does it brilliantly.

 

Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” nearly speaks for itself. It is a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.

The identities of individual Germans are dwarfed by the immensity of the crowd, the juggernaut of war and the ideology of the Nazi movement. Various Nazi officials make speeches, including Hitler. One of his speeches is shot as a gradual pan, the likes of which we see so often in Hollywood blockbusters. The camera is moving in the way Hitler is moving the crowd. His speech is intercut with the smiling faces of blonde-haired German youth.
Luis Buñuel was hired to edit the film in a way that would make Hitler look bad. Reportedly, he could not do it. Such is the insane brilliance of Riefenstahl’s method. To see the hundreds of thousands of people, all united for an evil cause, all surrendering themselves to the messianic Führer, is to witness pure madness on an enormous scale.

There is a consensus that those two films are evil, and they seem obviously so. I haven’t seen many films which I felt were truly amoral, but I did see something several months back which shocked, appalled and disgusted me like absolutely no film I’ve ever seen. Not only was this movie the sickest movie I’ve ever seen in my life, I felt like the director was trying to hurt me, as though he were personally mocking me. Maybe just the fact that I watched this film and sat through the whole thing is reason enough to be mocked. I am talking about “The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence.”

“The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence” is a sequel to the notorious “The Human Centipede: First Sequence.” For the lucky readers who have never heard of it, “The Human Centipede” was about a mad German surgeon who creates a conjoined triplet joined by their digestive tract. In laymen’s terms, he sews them together ass-to-mouth. The second film is about Martin, played by Lawrence R. Harvey. Martin is a fat, balding, mentally deficient, mute man who lives with his mother and works in a parking garage. He’s inspired by the first “Human Centipede” movie to assault and kidnap twelve people for use in his own centipede. Contrasting to the first film, “The Human Centipede 2” is in black and white.

“The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence” has virtually no plot. People are knocked on the head and magically pass out just long enough so that Martin can transport them to a warehouse where he will attempt to stitch them together. The idea of a man like this kidnapping so many people without arousing the slightest suspicion is ridiculous until the very last shot, where we realize (spoiler) that the entire movie has taken place inside his head. We’ve just sat through over an hour and a half of this disturbed man’s fantasy, the second half of which has next to no dialogue; all we hear is the groaning, screaming and crying of Martin’s victims in the warehouse.

I never want to see it again, and I don’t understand why anybody would want to. Director Tom Six created this film in response to horror fans who said the first film didn’t go far enough. That movie was more psychological dread than visceral gore. In this movie, Six mocks those who were disappointed with the first film through Martin, who in his own way is so disappointed with “The Human Centipede” that he quadruples the number of people he will have in his creation. A sense of inescapable dread pervades the film. Six throws everything at us: violence, rape, incest and coprophagia. Even children and infants are not safe from the mad director’s vision.

It made me feel sad. I was sorry that I watched it. “The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence” is evil, but unlike “The Birth of a Nation” or “Triumph of the Will,” it has no redeeming technical qualities. It subtracts from you. It is not socially relevant other than as a piece which makes us ask ourselves, “Why am I watching this? Why did I ever think this was a good idea?” The film is as ugly and empty as Martin’s mind. Nothing exists within but suffering. The film only wants to hurt you, the viewer. It exists for no other reason. It is evil.

I believe it is entirely possible for films to be evil. The chilling thing about people we regard as evil is that they believe fully that they are doing good. Griffith thought he was simply telling the truth when he made “The Birth of a Nation.” Riefenstahl believed in the transformative power of the Nazi party when she documented the 1934 rally in “Triumph of the Will.” I have no idea what Six was thinking when he made “The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence,” but I can’t imagine it would be positive. Out of all the films mentioned here, this is the only one I don’t think anyone needs to see.

There are no boundaries, no rules in cinema. People can create what they want, and that’s beautiful, even if what they create isn’t as beautiful. It is important that we know what evil looks like. If we understand the darkness, we can hope to prevent it.

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.