I, Frankenstein (2013)

Originally Published in The Daily Nebraskan, 1/30/2014

Before we go any further, I have to ask, what do demons and gargoyles have to do with Frankenstein’s monster?

The answer is nothing. Demons and gargoyles have absolutely nothing to do with Frankenstein’s monster. Yet there they are, attacking the monster as he prepares to bury his creator, Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster, whose lumbering menace has been iconic for generations, is agile enough to take on a team of four demons by himself. 

Okay. I can buy that, but what I can’t buy is the idea that 666 legions of demons (see what they did there?) need Victor Frankenstein’s journal to figure out how to reanimate dead bodies so they can possess them. They’re demons. They come from hell, a place definitively beyond death. Why do they even need to possess human bodies? They seem to go after Frankenstein just fine. 

If this all sounds dreadfully stupid, it is. The plot follows Frankenstein’s monster, played by Aaron Eckhart, as he’s enlisted by The Gargoyle Order to fight the 666 legions led by the demon prince Nibirius, played by Bill Nighy, who is trying very hard to stay serious in the midst of all this nonsense. 

Aaron Eckhart's monster compared to previous incarnations.

“I, Frankenstein” has many faults, and they add up. There’s the canned symphonic score that sounds like it was lifted straight from a low budget RPG, the ridiculous premise and the cringeworthy dialogue, but the biggest issue in this film is its main character. Aaron Eckhart is simply not an action hero. He tries very hard to scowl and act like a hardened badass, but in the end he is just terribly miscast. Was Mickey Rourke not available? Eckhart is just too handsome, his face too symmetrical to play Frankenstein’s monster. He doesn’t look like he was put together from spare parts. 

And Frankenstien’s monster, dubbed Adam by the Gargoyle Queen, wears a hoody throughout the entire film. Frankenstein’s monster wears a hoody. Just let that sink in for a minute. 

What this movie also lacks is enough clever action set pieces to justify its meathead script. It takes itself way too seriously. The actors deliver their overwrought, comic book lines as though they were reciting Shakespeare. One area “I, Frankenstein” excels in is unintentionally hilarious dialogue. In one scene, two scientists are trying to re-animate a dead rat, which by the way is the fakest damn rat I’ve ever seen. They turn the current up and see some brain activity. One of the scientists is afraid to turn off the current. “But that will kill it!” he says. His colleague responds, “IT’S ALREADY DEAD!” 

Flaws aside, the action sequences and 3D are at least competent. The climax is fun; imagine thousands of reanimated dead bodies possessed by fiery demon souls at once. As the bodies are being reanimated, a little screen attached to each corpse informs us: RE-ANIMATING, 92%. Wouldn’t it be something if the loading bar got stuck and foiled the demons plans right then and there? 

A side note—why do all the villains and heroes in movies like these always have British accents? At this point we’ve all accepted it, but just think about how that conversation must go: “Okay, so you’re playing a Gargoyle. You’ve been around since the dawn of time. You’ve seen things human beings can’t even imagine or perceive. You’ve seen the rise and fall of entire civilizations. You have served God Himself.” “Wow, that sounds like a great challenge for me as an actor!” “No, we just need you to watch the first season of Downton Abbey and talk like them. That should cover it.”

“I, Frankenstein” is just one huge misstep after another. A fiasco. One can see the potential in a story like this if the filmmakers had had the guts to deviate from its sophomoric source material. Unfortunately, a movie that could have been a lot of fun has ended up deader than its title character. 

A fucking hoody, guys.

Spring Breakers (2013)

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 1/24/2013

Alien has tons of shit.

He’s got nunchuks. He’s got a really nice bed – excuse me – work of art. He’s got shorts in every damn color, Calvin Klein body spray, dark tanning oil, tons of sheeeiiit. And that's just his bedroom.

He has “rooms full of shit.” He believes life is all about big booties and money falling, y’all. He even has followers. He preaches to crowds of them once every year. Alien is even willing to die for what he believes.

“Spring Breakers,” the film in which Alien is a character, is one of the best that came out last year. It’s the latest work from Harmony Korine, whose previous film, “Trash Humpers” was shot on VHS and consisted of little more than him, his wife and his friends humping trash cans, talking to odd locals and breaking stuff.

That film is trash, but it’s beautiful trash (You’d be surprised what you can learn about a society by going through its garbage). It’s about strange, numb people living lives of quiet desperation in the mundane streets of Anywhere, USA.

“Spring Breakers” is like that. It wants us to care about people we don’t feel comfortable around, like the mindless, binge drinking party-girl or the mindless, macho jackass who flaunts his possessions to strangers. Aren’t they human beings, too? The genius of Korine’s work is that he manages to have it both ways: He criticizes and celebrates his subjects at the same time.

The film opens with a semi-music video for Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” It’s an exploitative montage of party people gyrating their bodies, flipping off the camera and grabbing their crotches, all in slow motion. “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” is the perfect song to open this movie. It contrasts light electronic hums with brash, loud bass droning, a contrast in tone that parallels Korine’s contrast of intent. These opening shots are repeated ad nauseam throughout the film.

The movie’s sun-bathed spring breakers want nothing more than to get loaded and have a good time; they’re hedonists, and Alien is their prophet. They’re enjoying themselves, and maybe they’re even happy. It’s an empty lifestyle that attracts vice and violence. They’re human beings. They’re shallow. All of these things are true, and the movie wants us to alternately condemn and celebrate the exploits of these characters.

Three of the four girls are basically interchangeable. Faith (Selena Gomez) stands out amongst her friends. She’s the “good” girl. Faith wants an escape as much as her friends. She just has a different kind of escape in mind. Her idea of “the best spring break ever” doesn’t involve getting arrested, bailed out by a fishy-looking thug named Alien (James Franco), then taken to a thuggin’ house party full of gangsta ass, well, thugs. Things get too real for her. Faith decides to drop out of the spring break odyssey, but not before Alien can express his love for her. Think about that – Alien, the prophet of spring break hedonism, conveys his devotion for Faith, the Bible study girl who tells her grandmother, “This is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been.”

The remaining girls become Alien’s disciples of sorts, brandishing assault rifles as they dance to his performance of Britney Spears’s “Everytime.” Alien calls Britney Spears “an angel if there ever was one on this earth.” He truly believes that. The scene itself is tender, but ridiculous. Heartfelt, but satirical.

“Spring Breakers” is surprisingly egalitarian. Alien, going against the grain of hip-hop culture, doesn’t subjugate the girls to the role of “hoes.” He treats them as equals, calling them his soul mates. He even enlists their strength in a series of robberies. It could be that he had an epiphany during the scene where Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens turn the tables on Alien by making him fellate the barrel of a gun as though he were giving the two of them oral sex. This is the point where he declares them his soul mates.

One might pose that the film objectifies women. Or is it the women in the film who are objectifying themselves? What if that is what they want? (Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour,” a 1967 French story of daytime prostitution, comes to mind.) Benson and Hudgens seem perfectly aware of what they’re doing. Their characters are definitely strong enough to carry out their will, even if that will is in service of vice and greed.

As Alien says, “Some kids want to grow up to be president, be a doctor … I just wanna be bad.”
There’s more to this film than meets the eye, but the stuff that does meet our eyes is gorgeous. Korine told cinematographer Benoit Debie to make the film look like “a Skittles commercial on acid.” The score by Cliff Martinez and Skrillex is like a simmering cauldron of bass and electronic pomp. It’s meant to be an intoxicating experience. This is why lines of dialogue and images of writhing beach parties repeat themselves, like in a fever dream.

It’s a vicarious experience. There’s glamour and glory in crime and vice. If there wasn’t, movies like “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” wouldn’t exist.

Better to work out those fevered dreams of being bad on the screen than on the streets.

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.