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The Future (2011)
Miranda July is a writer/performance artist/filmmaker whose unique voice earns as many praises of “precocious” as it does hails of “pretentious.” Her previous effort, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, had such oddities as a group of cars creating a caravan to save a goldfish left atop one’s roof and children engaging in online sex chat over sharing feces from behind to another ( ))<>(( is the visual articulation of this function). Yeah.
With her second feature film, The Future, we follow Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a couple who decide to adopt an injured cat they find. Named Paw-Paw by Sophie, they must wait 30 days for the medical checks to clear before they can pick up the cat. They believe that they are doing a kindness and giving the cat a good place to live in its last month of life. Then the vet informs them that if bonded, the cat could live an additional five years. Sophie and Jason will be 40 in another five years, and this realization stops them cold in their tracks. Both are unhappy with their lives, he works as a technical help guru and she teaches dance to preschool-aged children. They decide that for the next 30 days they will reinvent themselves. They will take the road less traveled and see where it takes them. Jason volunteers to be an environmental solicitor on a whim. Sophie wants to do 30 dances in 30 days but is crippled by fear. She reaches out to Marshall (David Warshofsky), an older single dad who proves to be a source of unlikely temptation. Along the way to the conclusion of those 30 days, Jason will utilize his abilities to stop time, speak with the moon, an old T-shirt will crawl will come alive, and the story will be narrated at turns by Paw-Paw.
It should be obvious at this point that July is not going to be everyone’s taste. You could just as well furrow your brow at all these pseudo-intellectual bohemian artsy smartsy pretensions and make snide remarks under your breath. And I can’t say I’d blame you at points. However, if you happen to catch a ride on July’s funky wavelengths, then The Future becomes a poignant, observant, and occasionally profound rumination on human connection. July’s two main characters encounter a full crisis of self, fearing that their lives will essentially be over upon turning 35, which they reason is almost 40, which is practically 50, and all that back-half stuff is “loose change” (not enough to really get what you want). I believe I heard none other than Jessica Simpson herself utter a similar statement on her ill-fated Newlyweds reality TV show. She said, “I’m turning 23, which is practically 25, which is almost 30.” Perhaps Ms. July was also watching that episode, and if so this will be the only time in print that I congratulate Jessica Simpson for anything. This manufactured anxiety over doing something of worth and lasting value with your time on this planet is nothing new but it is deeply relatable, despite the silly numbers game the characters endure. It’s a paralyzing existential doubt. Who doesn’t want to feel like their life had purpose? You only get one. July makes a series of observant comments about human interaction. For their life project, Sophie decides to cancel the couple’s Internet connection. They have but moments, perhaps seconds left, before the Internet is lost to them for 30 days, and they scramble to open their laptops to do important stuff. “Only look up stuff we can’t find in books or by talking to people,” Jason intones. Slowly, both of them come to the same realization and close their laptops. It’s a silent admission that the technology we feel dependant upon might not be so.
There’s a striking clarity when an artist cuts through everything and finds something dwelling inside your grey matter. For me, July is that kind of artist. I loved a sequence where Sophie, out of slumming desperation, takes a job as a receptionist back at her old work place. One day two of her female friends come into the studio. Both women are several months pregnant, and Sophie is aghast that she let time get the better of her. She keeps shaking her head, rationalizing that it must have only been a couple weeks since last she saw her friends. Then through a series of edits, we witness a fantastic fantasy that highlights Sophie’s abject feelings of accomplishing little while time flies by. Every time the camera cuts back to the friends more time passes; we see them hold newborn babies, then we see those babies as kids, then as young adults, and finally as adults who themselves have married each other and wish to enroll their own daughter into pre-dance. They inform Sophie that their mothers passed some time ago. And all the while, Sophie is still in her dead-end job. It’s a terrific scene that highlights the anxiety we all feel about being lead footed in life, watching others skirt by and negatively assessing our own personal journeys by someone else’s accomplishments. The Future is full of moments like this that hit so hard you feel like the ground beneath you has vanished. Jason’s refusal to restart time is painfully identifiable, the wish to stay frozen in time to defer facing the hard pains of a breakup, the rueful knowledge that life will be forever different, and worse, in the passing of a second. The future can be a painful place we’d all like to hide under the covers and avoid.
Like July’s previous film, The Future is more a series of encapsulated vignettes, each with their own peculiarities, than a fully formed coherent story. While I enjoyed the separate vignettes better in Me and You, the overall story congeals better in The Future even if the results are messy. This is a less romantic and hopeful film than Me and You. It’s much more ambiguous (that’s saying something) and bleak when it exposes the missed chances that can haunt, none more so than Paw-Paw, our bandaged feline narrator. Scurry to the next paragraph if you’d like this part unspoiled for you, sensitive animal-loving readers. Paw-Paw speaks about her new sense of happiness, about having owners that will be kind to her, and this new sense of belonging fills the cat with a ballooning hope that her real life has finally begun. But then Paw-Paw doesn’t make it. She dies a day before either Sophie or Jason comes by to pick her up. But the cruel irony is that Sophie and Jason missed picking up their cat/metaphor of their relationship on its release date. Paw-Paw could have spent her last day on earth with the people she had yearned to be with, the people she wrote an imaginary letter to telling them how grateful she was and how much she promised to love them. Instead, the cat dies, forever waiting. That’s pretty rough, and even though July’s scratchy, high-pitched Paw-Paw voice can be annoying, God help me if the pet lover in me wasn’t in tears every time this damn cat was narrating, including after its death. That’s the kind of film The Future offers. It does not dish out easy answers for life’s Big Questions. Even as the end credits roll, you’re left to ponder whether you believe that Sophie and Jason will reconcile.
July, resembling a cross between Kristen Schaal (Dinner for Schmucks) and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), is probably also her biggest hindrance. She’s not that developed as an actress, or is being purposely opaque, and thus Sophie seems to be lost in a medicated fog. This was less of a problem with Me and You because the ensemble was larger. Here, it’s mainly three actors. July delivers every line in a flat style that makes her character harder to decipher and harder to empathize with when she goes off into her affair. The entire storyline with the sign making “other man” is kept at a mystery. We’re not really sure why Sophie would be attracted to this man or what problems are ailing her relationship with Jason. I suppose the early mid-life crisis could serve as a fire to get Sophie to reach out to someone who offers more security, but that’s merely my best estimation. It’s a detour that could use more attention to explain its significance. I suppose it could be July’s version of a romantic comedy staple of being with the wrong man and finding out late your mistake. It’ll be up to the viewer which guy fills the role of “wrong man.” Luckily, Linklater (TV’s New Adventures of Old Christine) is a winning presence, affable without being offbeat and striving for meaning without coming across as pompous.
Whether it’s a dance inside an oversized T-shirt or choosing a song to communicate undying love in the event of amnesia, The Future is chockablock with memorable moments, images, insights, and peculiarities. Whether all of that comes together into a fully realized movie is another matter. The scattershot nature and July’s own acting shortcomings clip the film’s momentum, but the uniqueness of voice and observant vision of July as writer/director makes me forgive much of The Future’s faults. It’s not exactly an easy sell of a movie, especially to concerned pet lovers, but July is one of those polarizing artists I’m glad finds the time to empty their brain every now and then. I may not fully understand everything but The Future held enough promise for me to leave feeling satisfied.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Beginners (2011)
Burying a parent is one of the most gut-wrenching hardships of life, a passage I have thankfully not had to endure yet in my own life. Writer/director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) turned his own heartbreak into a subdued, life-affirming movie called Beginners. This gentle movie is comic, poignant, and frustratingly limited thanks to a miscalculation in its structure.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is reeling from the loss of his elderly father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). After the death of his wife, in his seventy-fifth year, Hal came out as being gay his whole life. And he decided to have some fun in those last years too, notably with a hunky younger boyfriend (Goran Visnjic, remember him, ER fans?). We get several flashbacks with Oliver and his ailing father, who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer soon into his gay reemergence. In the present, Oliver, as a dissatisfied graphic designer, is trying to find his bearings after burying both of his parents. Hal’s dog, a Jack Russell terrier, is mourning as well, refusing to be left alone. As a result, Oliver takes the small dog with him wherever he travels, including social events. He meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a friend’s costume party. He’s dressed as Sigmund Freud and she mimes having laryngitis. Anna, a young actress who spends most of her life in hotels, invites him back and the two explore the possibility of a relationship. She’ll be off to another film shoot in a month, but the two become inseparable during the time they have together. Anna learns about Oliver and his complicated relationship with the complicated man he knew as his father. Oliver, and in flashback Hal, are beginners on a road to making sense of their lives.
What eventually holds Beginners back is its clipped structure. The film diverges into two main storylines, father and son (60%) and son with new love (40%). The new love stuff is presented fairly linearly, however, the father/son material is not, consisting of memories that can be triggered by objects or offhand sayings. Like (500) Days of Summer, memories are presented not in a linear fashion but through a connection of theme or tone. Rarely do we recount memories in a chronological fashion, and as such Oliver is beset by deluges of images of his father ailing at various points. But it’s like Mills took that fleeting memory approach to heart because Beginners is a slave to the altar of jump cuts. The editing, and the narrative, is constantly leaping forward; scenes rarely last longer than 30-45 seconds, making the film feel like somebody had their finger mashed against a stubborn fast forward button. As a result, the film feels hurried and unsettled, and this clipped structure mollifies the emotional impact of the movie. It’s because the romance only feels like someone’s remembrance of those burgeoning happy beginnings. The film doesn’t feel like it is in its own present; we’re in 2003 and Oliver will occasionally inform us, in High Fidelity-styled notation, of life at that moment. It feels like the entire enterprise is an assembly of past memories ping-ponging off one another. Another hurdle is that Anna and Oliver’s main conflict concerns their fear of happiness. Each had parents who wed as unhappy people, had unhappy unions, and both are fearful that they too will commit to living unhappy lives. It’s not an impossible feat, to be sure, but it does make it somewhat harder to relate to your characters when the main relationship problem is that they cannot accept happiness. While psychologically interesting in larger scope, due to the structure of Beginners, this conflict for Anna and Oliver seems petty and insufficient. The antsy story structure limits the emotional resonance of the movie. What should be a nourishing meal about the human condition ends up being a tidy snack instead.
Don’t get me wrong, Beginners is still a fairly moving film in its own right. Just the very nature of the story, dealing with the last months of an ailing parent and what to do next, is destined to hit poignant pockets of drama. Plus you have gifted actors doing fine work to wring out those tears. Mills’ tale is semi-autobiographical, which allows for several personal insights that can wound, like direct shots of honesty. Oliver narrates the steps taken after a parent’s death, including the mundane yet painful trivialities needed to convince every bill collector that their client has left the Earth. When Hal is informed that he has a spot of cancer the size of a quarter in his lung, the screen flashes to black as the doctor continues her somber diagnosis. A quarter appears. Then five nickels, finally twenty-five pennies. It’s a small little visual insert, and yet it manages to seem like a believable, personally relatable moment when delivered such thundering news. Something the size of a quarter will be responsible for your father losing his life. Five nickels. Twenty-five pennies. The scenes with father and son, coming to terms with saying goodbye, reflecting on lives lived and lives deferred, is what gives Beginners its beating heart. The clipped present-day romance plays more like a post-script attempt to forge a neat resolution after all that heavy grief.
Plummer gives a performance that is equal parts weighed with the gravity of death and the electricity of life. After his wife’s death, Hal finally has an opportunity to embrace who he has been his whole life. Mills and Plummer are delicate with how they handle the relationship between Hal and his wife (Mary Page Keller in flashback). Neither hated the other, and both did express love, but they were together in a marriage of convenience, both of them hiding who they were from preying eyes (Oliver’s mother hid that she was Jewish). Plummer’s celebration of life, the twinkling realization of accepting who you truly are, is an uplifting path for his character, and thanks to both Mills and Plummer it never feels like he’s dancing on the grave of his long-suffering wife. He’s not celebrating her death; he’s embracing who he is in the twilight of his years. He’s looking for a small amount of kindness and comfort while finally being socially recognized without fear or intimidation. Plummer is delightful during Hal’s happier moments and heart wrenching during the realities of his failing body. Plummer deftly bites into one of those juicy, Oscar-bait roles.
McGregor acts very well even if his character is kept in a very tight box of emotional expression. His character seems to sleepwalk from scene to scene; often little is said and much left to the imagination through pregnant pauses or gestures. McGregor does a fine job of balancing the different timelines of grief his character is experiencing. He’s in comic shock about his father’s newfound immersion in a gay lifestyle, he’s in mourning about the recent loss of his father, he’s in annoyance tinged with guilt about the burdens of taking care of a man that was often absent in his own life, leaving him in the care of his mother, resigned to a life of dutiful despondency, and he’s infatuated with the possibility of romantic love, a cleansing force. It’s a lot for one actor to keep straight and McGregor does an admirable job. Laurent does not fare as well. The Inglourious Basterds‘ actress is forced to rely mostly on wry smiles and her penetrating eyes. She also cocks her head to the side a lot, or a least that’s how I recall. She’s given something of a thanklessly underwritten role but she manages to be adorable from her first moment onscreen, which is her most vital acting accomplishment here. She’s supposed to be that happy ending we want Oliver to have.
Beginners is a moving, charming, and perceptive movie. If only there was more of it. The clipped, hurried jump cut-heavy structure keeps the audience at a certain distance and capping the emotional resonance. The father/son stuff is going to be easier to empathize with, both good times and bad, than two good-looking thirtysomethings afraid of being happy because their parents are screwed up. Ultimately, the film’s pretenses of a budding, quirky romance will take away from the more genuine father/son bonding late in life. You’ll get weepy at turns, maybe even swoon here and there, but the rewards are sadly too momentary, never cohesively assembling into a full-fledged narrative. Beginners has an equal number of hard truths and light moments of whimsy (the subtitled dog is a hoot), but ultimately it’s a movie that makes you wish it had left a better impression when it had the chance.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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happythankyoumoreplease (2011)
Josh Radnor’s (How I Met Your Mother) writing/directing debut reads like a heavy order of sitcom plots rolled into one tight space. There’s enough New York navel-gazing to fill up a spate of twee indie films. There’s Sam (Radnor), a struggling writer prone to relationship problems, having a three-night stand with Mississippi (Kate Mara), a waitress/cabaret singer. There’s Sam’s cousin, Mary (Zoe Kazan), is being pressured to move to L.A. by her boyfriend (Pablo Schrieber). Sam’s best friend Annie (Malin Akerman) suffers from dating the wrong kind of guys. She also suffers from alopecia, which makes her hairless (doesn’t sound like a deal-breaker to me). She’s being pursued by a suitor, Sam #2 (Tony Hale), a good man who acknowledges he’s not exactly a lady’s first image when it comes to Mr. Right. If this wasn’t enough plot to fight over for 100 minutes, Sam becomes an unlikely caretaker to a young child, Rasheen (Michael Algeri), left behind on a subway. The kid refuses to go back to foster care so he just sort of becomes Sam’s pet. Actually, the child is a plot device to facilitate Sam’s maturity and personal growth, which is why he all but disappears in the film’s second half dominated by romantic drama. Radnor is a relaxed presence onscreen. As a director, he knows a thing or two about pleasing shot compositions. As a writer, he has a good feel for droll observation (“Don’t make me run, kid, I’m almost thirty,” had me ruefully chuckling). As with most ensemble movies, some storylines are stronger than others; the Annie/Sam #2 stuff could have been its own movie. Both actors, Hale especially, are winning. Mara is sexy and a star in the making. The Mary stuff would have been better left alone. Kazan’s performance is somewhat irritating, and my interest sunk every time her face came onscreen. And yet, the film is carried by a sweetness that doesn’t tilt into saccharine. Given some of the sitcom-level setups, this could have spilled into eye-rolling cuteness (a girl named after the poorest state in the nation!). It’s romantic in a somewhat cheesy way but that’s part of its charm. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but happythankyoumoreplease rolls agreeably along thanks to being earnest, but not too earnest, and witty without being overly whimsical.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Skyline (2010)
This movie is out-of-this-world terrible. Who wouldn’t want to spend an alien invasion stuck in some L.A. condo with a load of insufferable Los Angelinos? From a storytelling standpoint, watching characters I don’t care about talk about amazing and horrible things happening off camera is not the best use of anyone’s time. Skyline is a movie that keeps surprising you with the depths of its stupidity; just when you think it couldn’t plumb any deeper, the aliens have invaded to eat our brains. Yes, they’re after our brains. So that explains why gigantic monsters will claw away at a building, scrounging for the tiniest morsel of human (that still doesn’t explain it, really). That does not explain why they targeted L.A. if they’re after brains. The special effects are notable for a $10 million dollar movie, but due to the budget restraints, that’s probably why most of this alien invasion is spent indoors and behind trusty sets of Venetian blinds. The pacing is as shoddy as the character work. I kept waiting for these nitwits to step into the light and be vacuumed up into the alien mothership. The end almost looks like it might redeem part of this monstrosity, with our survivors accepting a doomed fate together. But then… I can’t even put into words how shocking, dreadful, and groan-inducing the true ending is for this junk. Suffice to say, it ends with zero resolution, a jagged plot left turn, and setup for a sequel that I’m absolutely positive not one person will be demanding.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)
Consider the ultraviolet, gleefully vulgar movie Hobo with a Shotgun is the SECOND feature-length film that began life as a fake trailer for the 2007 exploitation opus, Grindhouse. Except this film began as a fan-made trailer to win a Grindhouse contest. Director and co-writer Jason Eisener’s winning entry followed a homeless defender of the streets, a hobo who found himself thrust into greatness thanks to oen fortunate shotgun. The two-minute fake trailer became a viral hit, was even attached to Canadian prints of Grindhouse, and Eisener was asked to extend his bloody trailer into an actual movie. He scored Rutger Hauer (Bladerunner, The Hitcher) as the star. finally, an actor from the 1980s who begs for change – on purpose! Hauer’s hobo rides the rails into a very Canadian city (the hookers say “aboot” – it’s cute) discovering an urban landscape overrun by scum. Drug dealers, gangs, pedophiles, crooked cops, all under the thumb of crime boss, the Drake (Brian Downey) and his two sons, Slick and Ivan (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith). Can one hobo, shotgun in hand, inspire a city to stand up?
Hobo with a Shotgun is a movie that lives up to its very title. It’s a gleeful, jubilantly violent, colorfully over-the-top genre exercise that doesn’t push your nose in its campy excesses. But it is excessive, and to what effect? If you stop to catch your breath, you’ll start to realize that there isn’t a whole lot holding the film together. It barely covers 80 minutes and that’s with a lot of wheezing to get to the finish. The plot is mostly a series of beheadings, stabbings, and, of course, gunshots. Sure it’s a fun throwback and meant to be entertaining due to its homage to awful exploitation films, but it’s a one-joke movie that’s pretty hollow at its center. He’s a hobo, he’s dispensing justice (“one shell at a time” a newscaster reports), that’s about all there is, not that I expect a film with a title like Hobo with a Shotgun to tackle weight philosophical topics (the titular hero seems like a figure that would give Ayn Rand fits). If somebody wants to go to the effort of making the hobo some metaphorical everyman, lashing out at a society he feels impotent and angrily displaced by, then by all means. This is not a film with commentary in its blood. It lacks the creative consistency of a Black Dynamite or the narrative pulse of a Planet Terror, or the genre-rattling re-purposing of a Tarantino effort (have your pick). But the violence is often brutal and sickeningly clever, sating base appetites.
This is a movie chiefly about grotesque characters, grotesque violence, and grotesquely dark and demented laughs. Luckily, the film has a finely attuned sense of humor that elevates what otherwise might be static genre exercises. The film is fully aware of its outrageousness. One of the Drake’s thuggish sons literally walks around with ice skates on before confronting the hobo of fame. He declares somebody’s going to be “skate raped.” He then uses these unorthodox shoes as an unorthodox weapon. A hooker (Molly Dunsworth) with a heart of gold saves the hobo. He remarks, without a hint of irony: “You’re smart. You should be a teacher.” He then refers to her as a teacher for the rest of the film. They develop a bizarre relationship that involves the shared desire to see a bear in a zoo (no joke). A cop reasons, “Well at least he’s only shooting the dirty cops,” in reference to the hobo, to which the chief responds, irony-free, “We’re all dirty cops!” A pedophile is dressed up as Santa Claus and abducts children, including one who bangs on the back windshield of a car as it drives by our hobo. The fact that it happens not a second later than two or three other incidents of crime, creating a melange of overrun criminality, made me giggle. And some of the jokes in this movie are dark; I’m talking scorched earth dark, but I was howling throughout. Now you know where my sense of humor lies. The newspaper headlines decrying the vigilante uprising have a frenzied penchant for rhyme and overly serious statements that are often hilarious (“Hobo Refuses Money, Demands Change”).
Eisener takes care to make his film look like a relic from the 1970s, from the low-budget mayhem, to the ominous synth-laden score, to the highly saturated film colors that advertise being phony “Technicolor.” His camera is antic, constantly swooping to find its intended target, and the cinematography feels grimy, constantly lit by strong neon colors like Joel Schumacher was a paid consultant. Eisener would do best to settle down a bit at times. His direction is a little too erratic, a little too antsy, like he’s constantly afraid that his audience will turn on him. Hobo with a Shotgun is a loving yet messy and uneven homage to the schlock movies of old, and your enjoyment level of this flick will depend greatly on whether or not you appreciate movies aim low on purpose. The crazy nature of the film, its frenetic pacing, and its strong sense of humor will delight fans of trashy cinema. The rest of the audience will probably just view it as trash.
Hauer is a classic movie tough that actually has a bit of a soul inside those steely blue eyes. He’s an actor that’s been giving small, quietly menacing performances over the last decade. He plays the character completely straight, which makes him far funnier and even somewhat surprisingly sympathetic and less sociopath than a Travis Bickle-esque figure that wants to cleanse society through blood. His dream is to own a lawnmower, which he loftily dreams of opening his own lawn care company. He’s spat on, beaten, and treated without a shred of respect. To many, the hobo is just a nuisance at best and a subhuman lecher at worst. Hauer doesn’t even have to say a word, just hang onto his weary grimace and it says enough about the character. The hobo character makes for an interesting dispenser of justice, though the character is little more than a concept with legs. However, Hauer makes this hobo one for the ages. Way better than the creepy magic hobo from The Polar Express.
The movie is more fun than it should be and at the same time the movie is nothing more than the power of its admittedly awesome title. This seedy, blood-soaked is destined to be an acquired taste for a select few, however, I doubt anyone will randomly stumble into something as provocatively titled as Hobo with a Shotgun. This is a self-aware B-movie celebration of the grindhouse canon while giving is a gentle parody nudge; enough to capture a wink without going into camp. It has enough of a chaotic energy and cracked sense of humor to make up for its narrative deficiencies. Hauer somehow finds a soul inside his cartoon hobo, which is more than I can say about any of the other actors. But when you’re in a movie with burning school children, pedophilic Santas, oddball lines like, “When life gives you razors… make a baseball bat filled with razors,” and a hero who dreams of owning a push mower, well, you’re not expecting Shakespeare.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Super (2011)
Super is a different kind of superhero movie. Writer/director James Gunn (Slither) has crafted a story that attempts to deconstruct the superhero fantasy. In his story, the people that put on the costumes to fight crime are just as dangerous as the criminals.
Frank (Rainn Wilson) has two memories he can hold onto as his life’s highlights: marrying Sarah (Liv Tyler), a former drug addict, and assisting the police in finding a crook. He works as a short order cook and dreams of being something more. Then local crime lord Jacques (Kevin Bacon) comes into Frank’s home, eats his eggs, compliments him on his cooking of said eggs, and then walks off with Sarah. He’s been gotten her hooked back on drugs. Frank tries to rescue her but Jacques and his goons (Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn) won’t let him get anywhere close to his wife. Then Frank becomes inspired. He feels that God has spoken to him and instructed him to become a crime-fighting super hero, the Crimson Bolt. With a wrench, Frank patrols his streets looking for crime to vanquish and a way to thwart Jacques. Along the way he gets help from Libby (Ellen Page), a 22-year-old girl who works in a comic book store. She jumps at the chance to live out her super hero fantasies and elects herself to be Frank’s sidekick, Boltie. Together they plot to clean up their city and maybe enjoy some of the perks of superhero-dom.
Super mines familiar territory scene in other movies, the what-if scenario of what might transpire if people put on some tights and attempted to fight crime. Unlike last year’s similarly themed Kick-Ass, this is a movie that refrains from overt style. It does not portray Frank as a hero in any traditional sense. Gunn takes great pains to showcase the frayed mental state of his main character. Frank is troubled, seriously troubled. His attempts to escape his reality are borderline dangerous and his violent attacks are without warrant. I watched this movie shortly after seeing the suitable violent Hobo with a Shotgun (good pairing, folks), and the tone of the violence between the two films was starkly different. Hobo‘s violence is meant to make you laugh; Super is meant to make you wince, then laugh in a “Oh my God” kind of alarm. In Super, the extreme bouts of violence, which are not as prevalent as in Hobo, are meant to make you think how stunningly dangerous Frank and Libby are. When somebody cuts in line at a movie theater, the rest of the people react in disgruntled anger. But Frank goes into his car, changes his clothes, comes back as the Crimson Bolt and declares, “You don’t cut in line,” and strikes the guilty party across the face with his trusted wrench. The crowd is freaked out, naturally. These revenge fantasies are taken to the limits, and Frank has decided that everyone deserves the same punishment for breaking the rules of society whether they be a drug dealer or a line jumper (“You don’t butt in line! You don’t steal! You don’t molest little children! You don’t deal drugs! The rules haven’t changed!”). Frank follows in the same vein of disturbed social justice as Travis Bickle.
The characters are played straight, which only highlights their demented oddball qualities even more. Wilson is a strong comedic actor as he showcases week after week on TVs The Office. He’s always had something of a unique “off” quality to him, be it presence or looks or demeanor. It allows him to slip into cracked characters so easily. Frank is a troubled individual, but there’s something sympathetic about his plight to finally assert himself in the world and stand up to forces that he feels have victimized him. He’s a sad guy, lonely, deeply insecure, feels impotent to the world, and yet he can put on a costume and work out his varied psychological issues. Wilson can be terrifying, deadpanned hilarious, and even potentially touching as he desperately seeks a life filled with moments he can be proud of.
But it’s the little firecracker that is Page (Juno, Inception) that makes Super come alive with risk. Page’s performance is bristling with uncontrollable energy; she practically shakes with excitement over becoming a superhero sidekick and leaving her boring reality. Then, when they actually do kill bad guys, she jumps around, taunting at the top of her voice, chuckling at a level of violence that should be disquieting to most normal human beings. That’s because Page, in particular, has tapped into her character’s manic wish-fulfillment role-playing persona. What would faze people makes me laugh and hop around in impish joy, because she is laying out her idea of justice. And Page is joyous to watch. She’s so excited onscreen that her words practically trip over themselves. And then there’s the superhero sexual angle. This is the first movie, by far, where I ever viewed the elfin actress in a sexual manner. And with Gunn’s film being what it is, prepare for some strange discomfort. Libby tries to seduce her superhero partner into being a partner of a different sort, and she leaves the sidekick suit on.
The tone is meant to make you squirm and laugh under your breath through gritted teeth. Seeing Frank legitimately hurt people can be funny in a bleak sense, and the delusions of the main characters and their inept execution as superheroes certainly adds plenty of chuckles. When Frank tells his newest sidekick that they’re going to fight crime, she’s bouncing off the walls in happiness. That is until she discovers “fighting crime” means sitting in an alley and just waiting for crime to materialize. “This is so boring,” she groans. Frank’s oft-repeated catch phrase of empowerment, while swinging his wrench of justice, is: “Shut up, crime!” But then he later starts to reconsider his place in the order of society, reflecting upon his brute force actions and whether he too has become a criminal in the pursuit of battling evil (“How can I tell crime to shut up if I have to shut up?”). The side stories involving the evangelical TV superhero The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) are a hoot. They’re even funnier when you consider that Frank uses these outlandish bits of corny Christian message-delivery as confirmation from God. For those looking for some Kick-Ass kicks, they will be sorely disappointed until the violent confrontation between good (Frank and Libby?) vs. evil (Jacques and his minions).
Super isn’t so much of a superhero parody as a morally queasy, crazy, discomforting comedy of the darkest sort. Gunn’s film shows that people with unchecked superhero fantasies can be just as dangerous as the criminals they seek to penalize. Gunn de-romanticizes the concept of vigilantism. Wilson and Page make a fun pair of superheroes with a few screws loose themselves. This is a different kind of superhero movie, the type that shows how dangerous and ridiculous and insane the fantasy can be in a real world where the bad guys have guns and a short fuse. Gunn’s Troma-fied super story has plenty of dark laughs, uncomfortable moments, and nutball characters. I don’t even fully know what to think about the film. Do I really like this? Am I supposed to? Is this all entertaining or just uncomfortable? Is it an entertaining form of discomfort? Does the ending, which aims for emotion, work, or has the film burned too many bridges and fried too many nerves to attempt something tonally different? Super probably won’t win any new converts to the genre, and I imagine its bleak laughs will push many away, but the film also has a car-crash watchability. I do not mean that in a backhanded way. Super keeps you watching but you don’t know if you want to.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)
Only Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man) would make a feature-length documentary about doodles on a cave wall. But hold on, those aren’t just any doodles. In the recently discovered Chauvet caves in southern France, explorers discovered cave paintings from humankind’s prehistoric ancestors. The pristine paintings are 30,000 years old, shockingly twice as old as the next oldest cave painting. That means these remarkable displays are the oldest artwork in human history and a great insight into mankind’s beginning; Herzog dubs the cave “the place where the human soul was born.” Herzog was given special permission to film inside the cramped cave, and to share the experience he shot with 3-D cameras. The theatrical experience comes alive with the 3-D, watching the rippling contours of the cave walls, finding that our prehistoric artists actually used the topography of the cave intentionally (abstract thought from long ago). The movie itself is a bit dry and Herzog is prone to ramble on melodramatic pontification, but the real star is the art. It reopens our ideas of life 30,000 years prior. The artwork is also far more sophisticated than you may be assuming. Due to the limitations of shooting, Herzog relies on several talking heads to fill us in on historical/archeological contexts, but it’s never enough. You hunger for more information that the movie ultimately never dishes. But Herzog has given the world a cultural treat, an artifact to remind us about our shared history and the significance of art to humanity.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Win Win (2011)
After two stellar movies (The Station Agent, The Visitor), writer/director Thomas McCarthy has proven that he may be one of the greatest humanist voices working in cinema today. He writes wonderful stories about people who find connections via unorthodox family units. McCarthy can spin bizarre elements into deeply felt human dramas. Win Win is another hodge-podge of storytelling elements. It follows the life of Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a midwestern lawyer and high school wrestling coach struggling to get by. Then a sullen teenager (Alex Shaffer in his acting debut) lands on his doorstop looking to see his grandfather in Mike’s guardianship. The kid also happens to be a gangly wrestling phenom. Things are going great for Mike, that is, until the kid’s mother comes looking for him and wants him back. Win Win assembles a great group of flawed, empathetic, relatable characters that make conflicted choices that they then have to abate. Giamatti is reliably fantastic as the center of McCarthy’s humanist universe. He can communicate so much despair and relief just with his expressions. Teamed up with a cast that includes Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, Burt Young, and Jeffrey Tambor, the movie works best when you can just sit back and take in great actors relishing playing great roles. Win Win doesn’t all come together in the end like other McCarthy films; there’s definitely a missing ingredient feeling to the movie. Shaffer’s limitations as an actor hamper some of the later dramatic moments. The end is satisfying, but I felt like I should have felt more. While it doesn’t strike the same seamless balance of comedy and drama as The Station Agent, this is certainly a film that should be winning for most audiences.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Dogtooth (2010)
Dogtooth is a surprising, sometimes shocking, sometimes maddening vicious little film that serves up dark satire with plenty of tense, incredulous laughter. But make no mistake; this is no comedy in the traditional sense. This Greek flick is deceptively slow-witted, drawing us in to a very different world. The film chronicles the three teenage children (one older brother, two twin sisters) kept at home in isolation by their parents. These kids have been taught to fear the outside world, they have been taught erroneous vocabulary (a “zombie” is a yellow flower; a woman’s privates are known as a “typewriter”), they believe that cats are man-eating beasts, that Frank Sinatra is their grandfather singing to them, their dead little brother lives on the other side of a hedge that they toss food to, and that overhead planes can be plucked from the sky. They even have to get on all fours and bark to scare away intruders. And then there’s a troubling budding sexual element, made considerably more complicated once the woman the father hires to satisfy his son introduces sexual curiosity to the twin sisters. Dogtooth is a detached yet fascinating portrait of one seriously screwed up family, where children are trying to make sense of the limited and sometimes fantastical concepts they’ve learned through severe sheltering. This manufactured artificial world, a satiric swipe at those who believe ignorance to be a suitable protection, is perilous yet believable. Dogtooth raises plenty of questions about the nature of society, parenting, knowledge, responsibility, and identity all in a package of bleak social satire that Luis Bunuel could admire. It may take some effort, but give yourself over to this Greek oddity and enjoy the unique weirdness.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Runaways (2010)
This fizzy 1970s glam rock biopic on the teen girl rock group The Runaways is a fairly shallow tale elevated by a handful of strong performances. All but completely ignoring the other members of the famous girl group, the movie focuses on lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). Both actresses slip under the skin of their real-life figures, imbuing the anger, desperation, and sheer nerve of pubescent rock stars being exploited. Watching Stewart’s attitude-filled strut, or how Fanning transforms from any other California girl into a slinking rock goddess igniting a Tokyo stage, is downright exciting to behold. But the chief reason to watch this film is Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) as the group’s flamboyant, lewd manager who put the girls together. Shannon is his typical bug-eyed sensational self, but the profane tirades he unleashes are downright poetic. He gives the movie a desperately needed pulse, and thus when he leaves the screen he also takes most of our interest. The biggest issue The Runaways has is that writer/director Floria Sigismondi doesn’t convince us why any of this matters. We watch the girls get together, play their first gigs, improve musically, and then all of a sudden they’re famous thanks to a magazine headline montage. Then they’re broken up. You neither feel the rise nor the fall, nor do you ever truly get a good feel for any of the characters. The Runaways spends too much time posing and trying to look fierce when it should have spent more attention on a decent script.
Nate’s Grade: C
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