Brave

As the father of a very independent little girl who wears pants, I've been excited about Brave for about a year. Her world is filled with Hermione Grangers–strong, independent, second-fiddle female characters.

And Brave truly is all about the female characters. It's about the tension between mothers and daughters, in this case Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald). And the conflict isn't about them having different ideas of who Merida should marry (although it's kind of about whether she should marry at all). Theoretically I applaud the choice. It's almost like the movie was designed to pass the Bechdel test. My only objection is: does she have to be a princess? Is that some kind of unbreakable Disney rule? Sigh.

Because the princess thing is feeling a little tired. If you've seen the trailer for Brave, you can pretty much arrive forty-five minutes late and miss nothing. Elinor just wants Merida to be all princessy and sew and sing and get married, and Merida just wants to ride through the forest and shoot arrows. It feels like a movie that would have been very progressive in 1972. What mother in 2012 wouldn't just go ahead and enter a daughter like that in all the archery contests? She's a better archer than Hawkeye from The Avengers. If nothing else, she might grow up to get a part in The Hunger Games!

And surely a really caring mother would never make her daughter marry anybody as buffoonish as the three prospective suitors who come seeking her hand? Here Elinor hints that Merida's being selfish and endangering the peace by refusing to marry, but suggesting that she's pimping her daughter out for the good of the realm hardly makes her seem like a better mother.

So a conflict that should be interesting becomes a conflict between a three-dimensional teenage girl (nudge nudge, wink wink) and her two-dimensional mother. There is, however, one truly breathtaking shot in which Pixar's superb animators show us exactly how alike these two stubborn women are. A lot has been made of Merida's red hair, but it is a real artistic achievement. I don't know if anything else about the animation really stands out, which is either a mild criticism or a backhanded compliment acknowledging that Pixar movies are all so visually stunning that we've become totally jaded.

Once the movie moves beyond the trailer, Merida does something she shouldn't out of teenage anger at her mother, and spends the rest of the movie trying to undo it. Part of the trick of making a children's movie is sweeping the audience away so thoroughly that they forget that the happy ending is guaranteed.


Brave never quite does that. We've waited so long for the movie to actually get going, and then it sort of limps along. Maybe the problem is that there's not really a villain. Merida is a wonderful character, brimming with energy, and she's breaking down an open door. She's so good with a bow, and yet she never actually shoots anything except a target. Where's the Angus McGhastly standing in the way of her dreams?

More critically, it feels like this awful event is just an excuse to teach Elinor the error of her ways. If Elinor had been less of a cardboard character, maybe this wouldn't have been necessary. Is it possible that Disney has finally bumped up against the limits of the princess genre? First we had princesses who waited for their prince to come; then we got princesses who wanted to choose their prince; then we moved on to princesses who got to fight for their prince. Now, finally, we have a princess who really just doesn't want a prince at all.

Merida repeatedly misses a good opportunity to take responsibility for what she's done, which, considering that she's a teenager, seems realistic–but, of course, movies aren't about reality. Screenwriting convention requires that Merida change, and I didn't really see that.

Instead, the rest of the world changes to accommodate her, which is a nice thought. The world is always changing to accommodate men, after all. But there's usually a price to be paid for that, even for the guys, and it's almost as if the writers were afraid to exact that price from a girl.

On the flip side, Chris Heller in the Atlantic says that it can't really be a coincidence that Merida stands up for young people being able to choose who to marry in an era when gay marriage is front and center in the national political arena, and he may have a good point.  Pixar films have always been good at appealing to adult sensibilities where humor is concerned, but maybe this one just wants to make the adults go "hmmmm...." while the kids clap with delight.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

The performance artist Marina Abramovic declares in a manifesto, "an artist should not fall in love with another artist." I followed her advice, which often makes it difficult to convince my wife to watch movies about people like Marina Abramovic. I'll let my wife tell it: "if you'd told me you wanted to watch a movie about a woman who sat in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art and stared at people for three months, I'd have said 'What? No way.'"

Performance art is a little like documentary film in that both are often obscure, hard to appreciate, and let's be honest, a little boring. But when well done, both are mesmerizing; and both Marina Abramovic's art and Matthew Akers' documentary are. 

Akers chooses to document an installation where Abramovic sat on a chair all day, six days a week, for three months, and museumgoers could sit on a chair opposite her and look at her, for as long as they wanted. This is a big challenge for a documentary, because film is about movement and Abramovic doesn't move. 

Thankfully, Akers is a cinematographer and he has made a beautiful film. Usually documentaries can't compete with narrative films visually–they're shot on crummy formats, they're underlit, poorly framed, and the camera is moving around like it's 1994 and NYPD Blue is really avant-garde. Digital video has made documentaries so much cheaper and easier, but often it doesn't do the genre any favors. Sometimes you feel like you're watching The Eleven O'Clock News: The Feature Film.


The Artist is Present does none of that. It's easy on the eyes, but don't get the idea that I'm so grateful I'd watch a documentary about anything if they used a tripod. It's a beautiful story, during the course of which you come to understand just what performance art really is. Maybe the most telling moment in the entire film is when James Franco comes and sits in front of her; Akers doesn't identify him, but he does show Franco talking with audience members afterwards (one of whom asks innocently: "are you an actor?") One woman says that what Abramovic is doing is very much like acting; Franco denies it, and having come to this place in the film, you realize he's totally right. The actor is playing a role, and the artist is playing herself. Actors may be motivated by realism but not reality; they may talk about exposing themselves, but they can't do it as truly as Abramovic does.


Or as bravely, or as selflessly. You may not leave the film understanding her art any more than you understand credit default swaps, but you will certainly appreciate the grit and fortitude that it requires. There is a religious aspect to Abramovic's performance, and there are many shots of people moved to tears by it, or inspired by it to stare intensely at each other in the hope of finding the same fleeting feeling. 


That's not to say that The Artist is Present doesn't have its tangents and its dull moments. Personally, I found the story of her romance with fellow performance artist Ulay to be a little thin, although it does eventually provide a huge payoff, which I wouldn't want to spoil. The film finds many such small moments of beauty, and it is refreshing to see a movie that can move an audience by crooking a finger rather than unleashing an earthquake. 

The Avengers

If all genres eventually end in satire, then The Avengers is the logical evolution of the superhero genre, and Joss Whedon is the perfect person to helm a superhero movie. I wasn't sure if Whedon could make the transition from Dollhouse, which for all its brilliance often felt like it was filmed in someone's basement in the Valley, to a $200 million blockbuster. 

The answer is that he definitely can. Points for the additional degree of difficulty afforded by having to write around incredibly boring characters like Captain America (Chris Evans), whose main weapons are a shield with a bullseye painted on it and a deadly earnestness; Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who wears phylacteries and shoots arrows at things that don't seem to be bothered by guns; and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who talks like Yoda and wields a weapon that looks like something you'd play whack-a-mole with. 

The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) shows up tied to a chair in her underwear, and in a charming set piece, um, answers the phone–to say any more would spoil it–and really sets the tone for the movie. For the rest of the show, Johansson does her best to act out from under a harrowing dye job and a character who doesn't actually have any super powers at all, although she is super-sexy. Her specialty is allowing men to think she's weaker than she is and using their assumptions to her advantage.

It only takes one thing to make up for all of this: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) We meet Tony in the penthouse of the Stark building, bantering with Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and the two of them ignite the movie, like a modern Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. 

In fact, it's a tribute to Whedon's writing skill, and Downey's acting, that the movie doesn't collapse like the Golden Gate Bridge in a disaster movie when Paltrow and her cutoff shorts get into the elevator and leave the building. For that, we have Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to thank, since he gives Stark somebody to talk scientific twaddle with, and somebody to needle. 

Here's the plot: there's a glowing blue energy cube, and whoever controls it controls the world, and...oh, really, nobody gives a rat's ass. It's all just an excuse for the heroes to quarrel with each other, and then eventually team up against supervillain Loki (Tom Hiddleston, having almost as much fun as Downey). There might be a hidden message here about whether the superheroes are causing more damage than they cure, or whether the good guys are actually using the superheroes to help them build evil weapons, but if there is, the audience is pretty much guaranteed not to get it, because they'll be too busy laughing at Stark's nicknames for his fellow Avengers (Hawkeye the archer is "Legolas"; long-haired Thor is "Point Break"...you get the picture).

When the action scenes start, though, Downey has trouble projecting his mojo through the red and yellow suit, and Whedon's writing feels trapped in there with him. The heroes yell stupidities at each other, get thrown into a bus from a mile away, and arise breathing hard and lightly covered with dust. What finally saves these sequences is the animated Hulk; the incarnation of the character looks a little like Claymation, but the movement is so filled with life that it doesn't really matter. The Hulk is, in a word, hysterical.

Is it the best superhero movie ever? I don't know. It's certainly the best one that doesn't take itself seriously. And since comic books themselves often don't take themselves seriously–Spiderman is all about corny puns, isn't he?–that's probably okay. There's a little hint of backstory between Black Widow and Hawkeye that makes a perfunctory effort at drama, but overall it doesn't really aspire to more. Which is a shame, because usually Whedon does aspire to that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, especially, had juicy layers of serious right underneath the crispy strudel of one-liners. Maybe now that he's proven his box office abilities, in his next movie Whedon will be able to give us, along with his trademark wit, the depth of, say, Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Chronicle

Or "Heathers, if it starred teenage boys with super powers."


This movie is saddled with an unfortunate title–unfortunate because I had seen trailers for it and knew I wanted to see it, but kept forgetting the name.


It's also weighed down by the eye-rolling contrivance that one of the characters is filming all of the events in the movie. Thanks for nothing, Blair Witch Project. But if you make it past the first twenty minutes or so, Chronicle swiftly becomes a breathtaking film–visually and aurally stunning and emotionally wrenching.


Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) is a shy high-school loser with a videocamera, an abusive father, a dying mother, and an alpha male cousin, Matt (Alex Russell) who feels compelled to hang out with him but clearly doesn't relish the job. 


At a party, Andy, Matt and student-council president Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find an alien-artifact Maguffin. It quickly becomes clear that the encounter has given them super powers, and we watch the trio's sophomoric glee as they use their telekinetic powers to pull adolescent pranks, and their genuine joy as they use their newly found ability to fly to play football in the clouds and hang out having incredibly awkward conversations on top of the Space Needle. While I wasn't fond of the found-footage conceit, I did find myself amazed at how much more interesting the special effects seemed when melded with footage that wasn't quite so slick. In that respect it reminded me a little of Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (and ironically, Chronicle was also shot in South Africa).


As I watched this unfold, I was struck by how much more feasible this superhero-origin story seems. If a sixteen-year-old boy was able to move things with his mind and fly, would his first impulse really be to put on a colorful costume and nab crooks?


From the beginning it's clear that of the three, Andy is the best at mastering his new abilities. One of the first things he does is learn to levitate his camera, which measurably improves the movie from a visual standpoint. At first he just basks in the respect he gets from Matt and Steve, and we cheer him on as he finds the strength to confront his dirtbag father. Gradually, Andy becomes the alpha male. Watching the teenage dominance pyramid invert is a barrel of monkeys.


It's only at this point that the real genius of Chronicle becomes apparent. In most superhero movies, an external threat would materialize and the new superheroes would save the earth. In Chronicle, the real threat turns out to be within. We realize that the source of Andy's power is actually the explosive rage that he has spent years repressing, and now that he's more powerful than anybody he knows, there's no reason for him to keep repressing it. As his mother gasps and wheezes frighteningly in the next room (some of the best sound design I've ever heard), Andy dies inside too.


All it takes is one brief Carrie moment, one public embarrassment he'll never live down, to snap him. As the film escalates, the visual effects up their game, as well--Chronicle is a $12 million movie that feels like it cost ten times that much.


Maybe the most interesting conclusion of Chronicle, in the end, is that all boys turn into their fathers.

The Lorax

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
That's one of the very few rhymes left in this movie, although there's plenty more left in it. Enough left, anyway, to make the right freak out about it. How dare Hollywood making a movie denigrating captains of industry?


They might not have bothered. In 1971, when The Lorax was published, it was pretty far ahead of its time. To most, its save-the-Truffula-trees ideology must have seemed utterly daffy. But forty years later, it's the people who think saving the trees is daffy who look like idiots. So from a political standpoint, the movie's self-congratulatory tone feels a little like the guy who takes you aside at a party and tells you he's just discovered the abacus--and it's going to take the world by storm.


Thankfully, The Lorax has done a much better job than other Dr. Seuss adaptations of turning a few hundred words into a movie of 94 minutes (yes, I'm looking at you, The Cat in the Hat). Some of the padding is achieved through musical numbers, which are done well enough that I wish there were more of them. They're big, and bold, and modern, and they don't sound like they're begging to be in The Lorax--The Broadway Musical.


In the plastic city of Thneedville, where zeppelin-dwelling tycoon Mr. O'Hare sells people bottled air (he sells them something they can get for free, get it?) tween Ted (Zac Efron) is in love with the beautifully bemaned Audrey (Taylor Swift). She wants a tree, and he's going to get her one. You would too, if your beloved's locks were so beautifully rendered. Spurred on by his grandmother (the ubiquitous, luminous and hilarious Betty White), he goes in search of the Once-ler, who supposedly knows where they went.


There follows a kind of awkward plot structure in which the Once-ler (Ed Helms) narrates the story, in installments, of how greed and mommy issues drove him to become an evil tycoon and chop down all the trees. But it's punctuated with beautiful moments. When the Once-ler chops down his first Truffula Tree, all the animals build a ring of stones to bury it. That brought a tear to my California liberal eye, although I imagine it caused the Fox News team to roll theirs and wonder aloud how many trees died to print the script of The Lorax.


Visually, the movie is nice, although they've slipped visuals from Dr. Seuss's original artwork under the end credits, and added just a little three-dimensionality (if you see it with specs), and it's hard not to judge the movie harshly in retrospect, with a few exceptions. I've already mentioned Audrey's hair, and the Lorax, who actually looks not unlike Audrey's hair, is also very attractive. Watch the credits for the people responsible for the hair and cloth rendering, and give them a special round of applause. The birds and fish and bears are beautiful and speak volumes with their eyes. The humans look a little bulbous, and truthfully, they don't emote so much as bloviate.


I'm guessing I don't have to tell you there's a chase scene, Ted delivers a big eco-friendly lecture, and trees win out at the end. 


But I can't help thinking that if you're going to the political well, you might as well drink. And if you're going to end with the quote I began with, maybe you should give people a little push. On your way out of the theater, how are you going to make things better? Aside from singing "Let It Grow," which, mind you, will certainly make the world a little brighter all by itself? And hawking "Truffula Tree Approved" eco-friendly cars?


So take the little ones to see The Lorax. And then teach them to turn out the lights when they leave the room.

The Ides of March

Or The West Wing, minus all the walking and talking. Where's Aaron Sorkin's right hand Tommy Schlamme when a film needs him?

The title of this movie is very carefully chosen, as if to say that they want to appeal to an audience that remembers its high school Shakespeare just enough to remember what exactly "the Ides of March" is. It's almost as if the movie is saying: if you have to Google it, don't bother. It's kind of elitist. Why exclude John Q. Public from your movie by giving it a title that he doesn't understand?

But it's actually kind of accurate, because the movie appeals to exactly the sort of overeducated liberal political junkie who finds a title like that appealing. Ryan Gosling plays Steve Meyers, a brilliant young political operative working for the presidential campaign of George Clooney's Governor Mike Morris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clooney also directed this film, and surprisingly, his direction lacks flair. The scenes where Morris is on a podium have the requisite bright klieg lights; the scenes in stairwells or the back of limousines are appropriately high-key; but the camera doesn't move much and the editing adds nothing to the dialogue. I wasn't really fond of the performances either, with the exception of Clooney's. It's almost as if he knew what he wanted but was unable to convey it to everybody else.


There's a lot of pseudopolitical babble in this film, "we're going to run the numbers in the 17th and the 22nd and check the demographics against the voter reg," and the like. The purpose of this eye-rolling nonsense is to give the movie a veneer of truthiness that it totally doesn't deserve, and to make us feel, as The West Wing does, that these are not slimy political operatives, but whip-smart, dedicated professionals. Meyers even makes a point of telling someone that he's working for Morris because he truly believes in him, because the country needs someone like him. Come on, only the interns really think that. You're bound to think that this kind of naiveté is going to get its comeuppance.

Morris is a liberal's wet dream. In the course of the movie, he manages to give speeches supporting every progressive cause. He refuses to compromise, dammit! He's going to win this his way! He's like Dennis Kucinich without the plaintive whining.

It makes you wonder why Clooney is play-running for President. After all, he's very good at it. Unless you live under a rock, you know that he's one of those liberal actors who teases the public about running for something, like Harry Belafonte or Alec Baldwin, and never does. Good God, he's like a horny teenager who watches porn endlessly but is afraid to actually approach a girl.

Luckily for the movie's ultra-liberal audience, Morris is a shoo-in for the nomination--unless he fails to make a huge, contrived compromise in his ideals, by making a deal with a senator played by Jeffrey Wright. If he sticks to his ideals, he will lose Ohio, and then he loses the nomination.

Frankly, though, this deal does not seem particularly awful, and I'm not fond of this kind of contrived plot anyway. My first thought was: if this is the worst thing you have to do in order to be president, jump at it! I know I'm sounding very politically cynical, but in a country of 300 million people, compromise and accommodation are necessary. Note that I didn't even say "necessary evils." This is the way things get done. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Then Meyers learns that Morris is not as squeaky-clean as he seems. The posters in his campaign headquarters rip off Obama, but his behavior is more Clinton. Need I say more? Meyers seems tragically upset by this discovery, which makes him look even more naive, and he handles it in a way that seems unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger. Again, my reaction was to think that if the movie really wanted its progressive audience to feel that outraged at Morris, they were going to have to find a much bigger skeleton.

So you clearly know there is a betrayal in this play, and I say "play" because it is actually based on Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, and unfortunately it looks a little like a play, as well. Morris often appears to be running for student council president, and Cincinnati, where most of the action takes place, appears to be completely deserted.

When the long-awaited knife in the back comes, the film wants us to see the birth of a political Darth Vader. Instead, it only feels like the allegedly smart Meyers has just figured out what everybody else has known all along: that politics is sausage and you shouldn't ask what the ingredients are unless you have a strong stomach.

Contagion

This movie is so good, I actually think I caught something from it. As I write this, my throat is sore, my nose is running and I have a mild cough. These symptoms are not unlike those of MEV-1, the fictional virus at the heart of this movie. I'm a little worried for me, because in the movies--dating back to Camille--a slight cough is usually a sign that you'll be dead in a week.


Many of you will be glad to know that the first cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow. She is Patient Zero for this scary new epidemic--an epidemic that was not caused by evil scientists or frothing terrorists and does not turn people into zombies or body snatchers. It just kills a quarter of the people who get it, and mathematically, that's more than enough. For the first few minutes of the film, the camera lingers on spots where germs are apt to spread; a doorknob, a keypad, a glass. It's a great way to heighten the tension right from the start.


The first half of the film, in which the virus gradually spreads all over the world, wreaking logarithmic havoc, reminds me of two books: Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, the story of the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, and Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, about the Ebola and Marburg viruses. In these books, the heroes are CDC doctors, and they are in Contagion as well, played by Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle.


How refreshing to see a movie in which the scientists are actually the good guys. And they actually get to be the good guys by just doing what they do. There is no eye-rolling fake biobabble. The scientists do not have to swashbuckle through an African forest in search of a magic ingredient. The CDC labs look exactly like real labs, although you might not believe it unless you Google it. Apparently somebody in Atlanta takes a little time off from saving the world to make a few flashy graphics now and then, but hey, it's a movie.

If there's a flaw here, it's that the doctors are a little too goody-goody, which is why one of my favorite moments is when Fishburne's Dr. Ellis Cheever makes a very bad, and yet totally understandable, error in judgment, and starts a rumor that spreads like the virus he's fighting.

It's not all doctors versus germs, though. Matt Damon plays Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, who loses his wife and son but is determined not to lose his daughter as well. Damon may be moonlighting as Jason Bourne, but he really shines as a regular, overprotective dad. Meanwhile, Jude Law chews the scenery as a conspiracy-mongering blogger.

As the virus spreads, we quickly realize that it isn't the biggest threat out there, and this is where Contagion really sets itself apart. Civil society starts to fall apart. People become paranoid and violent; hucksters and charlatans reign; the authorities tighten their grip or lose control completely. The real question the movie means to ask is this: will the virus destroy us or will we destroy ourselves first? I'd tell you, but *cough*.