So I saw The Avengers and it was pretty much the most awesome movie I’ve seen in ages. And I’m not exactly sure how to review it because a lot of the joy of watching is just being amazed by the various things happening on screen and going, “Oh my gosh that! And THAT!” So I’ve decided to do two reviews and you can choose your own adventure, basically. This is the short-form, spoiler-free review, and later in the week I’ll do a proper analysis. Yes/yes?
For discussion re: Joss Whedon is our Nerd King, please go here.
Yes, it’s good. Really good. As good as advertised. The Avengers is two hours and twenty minutes of straight ass kicking. Remember the Tesseract, that glowy cube from Captain America? Yeah, everyone in the universe wants it, literally. That and ass kicking, more ASS KICKING and then forty-five minutes of ASS KICKING is pretty much the plot. Everyone is good. Each Avenger is perfectly realized, everyone gets a good line and everyone has a moment with Loki, who is off the chain. Tom Hiddleston (War Horse, Thor) isn’t chewing scenery so much as devouring it whole. He’s having a grand old time and you can tell and it makes him enormously fun to watch. Whedon’s direction is confident and assured, and he frames his actions sequences so well that no matter how crazy things get, you can track what’s happening and who is beating whose ass at any given moment. Mark Ruffalo takes over as Bruce Banner/The Hulk and he knocks it out of the park—this is easily the best iteration of the Hulk yet. And the writing is deft and funny and The Avengers earns its humor honestly. You will laugh, a lot.
So that’s the spoiler-free rundown on The Avengers, which is a great start to summer movie season 2012. You don’t have to be a comic book nerd to enjoy it—this is classic summer popcorn fare at its best. And now here is a gallery of out-of-context quotes that are still making me laugh.
It can be annoying when people tell you how to watch a movie. That’s why I don’t care about spoilers, because a person should be allowed to know exactly what they want to know before they see a movie. Want to know everything? Great. Want to know nothing? Awesome. Either way, it’s on the individual viewer to decide. It’s also why I don’t like it when a movie is available only in 3D. What if I don’t care to see it in 3D, which I never do? Just let me decide how much I want to pay and what kind of experience I’m going to have.
That said, I’m going to tell you how to watch Cabin in the Woods.
Don’t read anything. Don’t even bother with the trailer if you haven’t seen it yet. I can’t review this movie without giving away something you are really, truly, better off not knowing. So here’s my review of Cabin in the Woods: Yes, it’s well worth your time and money. I highly recommend it. Whatever you think it is, it’s not that. It’s better. Funnier, scarier, WTF-ier. Long-time Joss Whedon underling Drew Goddard (co-writer of this film and writer of Cloverfield) makes his directorial debut and he acquits himself well. Whedon co-wrote the script and his fingerprints are all over it. When it was over, I turned to T and said, “That got me really excited for The Avengers.” But in and of itself, Cabin in the Woods is really…you just need to see it for yourself. And the less you know going in, the more you’re going to like it.
Now, let’s talk about Joss Whedon and why he’s amazing, so that in two weeks when The Avengers is finally here (!!!), we don’t have to rehash that yes, Whedon is the best; we can just refer back to this. When he was hired to direct The Avengers two years ago, I was like, Yes, that’s the guy who can make sense of it. And last year I remember someone asking me if I had any concerns about the movie, which had just begun filming, and I said, No—it’s Joss Whedon, and I never worry about Joss Whedon. I also remember throwing into at least one, if not all, of my Comic Con previews for LaineyGossip that Whedon’s annual panel is always worth attending because whatever he’s on about now, everyone else will be doing in future. Whedon is one of those guys who live ahead of the curve.
I come by my love of Whedon honestly. I watched and liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a kid, but I fell in love with Whedon as an auteur when I watched the ill-fated Firefly on TV. I’m not a sci-fi person, but goddamn I love that show about space pirate-cowboys. It was on Fox, who treated it abominably, and I followed it through schedule changes, episode switches, and finally, its untimely end. It was my first TV heartbreak, the first time I loved a show so much that I went around saying, “I don’t get it, I don’t get why everyone isn’t watching this.” Because of Firefly, the similar fates of Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights didn’t wound me too deeply—I was still feeling the loss of Mal Reynolds & Co. Then in 2005 Whedon managed to get out a movie extension of Firefly called Serenity. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time, and is a high-water mark for making a visually gorgeous film on a manageable budget ($40 million).
When it comes to Whedon, there are some expectations. If you’re not familiar with him as a filmmaker and you’re curious about what The Avengers might be like, I recommend watching Serenity and Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. They’re both on Netflix Instant and between the two of them you can get an idea of where he’ll take a Marvel movie. And if you are a Whedon devotee, you’re worried, right? You’re thinking about it in the back your mind, the fates of Wash and Penny. You should be thinking about Wash and Penny. No one is safe with Whedon. Nothing is sacred. He will make you LOVE and then he will BREAK YOUR HEART. And that’s part of his charm. He isn’t afraid of upsetting his audience. If anything, he loves to upset his audience.
If you’ve not seen Dr. Horrible, please, get on it. It’s only 42 minutes and it stars Neil Patrick Harris and is a musical about a supervillain. It’s unabashedly nerdy, as is everything Whedon does, but another element of his charm is that you don’t have to be a nerd yourself to enjoy it. Again, I don’t like sci-fi, as a thing. But I am devoted to Firefly/Serenity because of the sharp writing and filmmaking (the tracking shot at the beginning of Serenity is a thing of beauty), and the perfectly cast ensemble that brought out the best in one another. This is why I thought Whedon was the best, most natural choice to helm The Avengers—his bread and butter is pulling together an ensemble and making it work in surprising, witty ways.
Joss Whedon has been something of a nerd-world secret for fifteen years, but with The Avengers pushing him into the mainstream, he’s a filmmaker who can’t be marginalized as the geek’s auteur any longer. He is a major, major talent that we need in filmmaking, for his writing, for his wit, for his visual flair. He’s the kind of filmmaker that inspires generations—he already is influencing a new crop of filmmakers for the better. If you think I’m overselling this point, just consider what the Batman movies have done for Christopher Nolan—how much power and pull he has behind him now as the director of a super-successful franchise.
Whedon is a filmmaker who takes a very mainstream product that we all think we know and twists it into something surprising and new. And with so many of the top filmmakers going on about mo-cap, 3D and frames-per-second, we need a guy whose idea of making an interesting movie is to start with a damn good script and turn it into a damn good movie, without the crutch of techie gimmicks. We need Joss Whedon to be that guy, and lucky for us, he already is.
I love bad action movies, so from the first time I saw the trailer for Lockout, brought to us from the mind of Luc Besson, I was really hoping for another Fifth Element. Which is to say, bad, yes, but also highly entertaining. Well, parts of Lockout are very entertaining. And parts of it make you want to stab yourself with a pencil. It’s basically every action movie ever made mashed together into one largely incomprehensible space mess. It would be entirely dismissible except that back-from-the-nearly-dead Guy Pearce (The King’s Speech, Memento) gives a solid performance as Stereotypical Action Movie Dude. He’s good enough that I would definitely like to see him in other, better, action movies.
Lockout is about a guy named Snow who is some kind of government operative/spy/rogue agent. He’s basically that guy in the Dr. Pepper 10 commercials who says, “Catchphrase!” It’s important to know Snow’s name, because that’s the only name you’re going to pick up on throughout the movie. No one else has a name. The future is a place with no names. Oh yeah, it’s set in the future. This is mostly so that 1) prisons can be built in space and 2) there can be a futuristic motorcycle chase. After the futuristic motorcycle chase Snow is arrested because they think he killed some guy because that’s how these movies go. If the plucky hero comes in government operative/spy/rogue agent flavor, then he must be framed for the murder of another government operative/spy/rogue agent. And because we’re in the future, we can completely dispose of the justice system (the future = no rules) and so Snow is convicted and sentenced to 30 years to be spent in cryogenic stasis in a brand-new space prison where, wouldn’t you know it, the president’s daughter is on a humanitarian mission. All of this takes approximately three minutes.
So that’s the basic “plot” of Lockout. Snow is offered a chance to save himself by saving the president’s daughter but he also is trying to prove his innocence by connecting with his partner from the botched whatever he was doing when he was framed (that’s never clear). My main problem with Lockout is that nothing makes sense. And I don’t mean just plot-wise, although the plot is no more cohesive than a piece of Swiss cheese, I mean literally nothing ever makes sense. What does the space prison look like? I don’t really know, because it looks different in every exterior shot and the interior sets run every which way with no sense of directionality. One of my favorite things about Joss Whedon’s Serenity is the long tracking shot at the beginning that follows the main character as he walks through the ship. In 90 seconds Whedon introduces us to the ship as an inhabited space and establishes how people move through it.
I don’t need such an elegant solution from Lockout, I just need some goddamn consistency so I know what the stakes are in terms of the characters being trapped in an enclosed space. As it stands, Lockout presents a place in which there is an unlimited number of escape routes, so being trapped barely matters. And indeed, most of the movie is just Snow escaping and escaping in every direction, continuously, because he never meets a dead end. I have a hard and fast rule about film—I don’t care what kind of movie you’re making, you must deliver on the fundamentals. I’m talking about the technical stuff, the below the line work like editing, art direction, sound engineering, scoring, et cetera. You can make up for a lot of failures on the above the line stuff (acting, writing, directing) if the fundamentals are solid (this is the sole explanation for the success of the Transformers movies—they LOOK cool, so people forgive the shoddy writing, barely-there plots and indifferent acting). Lockout fails to look cool—it is a visual nightmare of crazy proportions and schizophrenic editing. One example: At one point Snow is crawling through an air duct system that is as spacious as the room below it. There’s no reduction of space! Everything just looks the same and it’s all grey and boring.
The next problem is that no one is good except for Pearce. I’m not looking for revelatory performances from actors in bad action movies, but I do need to feel like they’re participating and not phoning it in. Good-bad action movies are most often made good-bad by gleeful, over-the-top performances that you really enjoy watching, and it’s frustrating when one person is delivering but is stranded by a disinterested cast (see also: William Fichtner, Drive Angry). This is what happened to Pearce. I can’t hold Maggie Grace (Lost) too accountable because she’s an inherently awful actress who never should have been cast, but Peter Stormare (Prison Break) can and has done better. Here he appears to be sleepwalking. Of course, this goes hand in hand with the appalling writing. Besson collaborated with first time co-directors Stephen St. Leger & James Mather on the script and while they took the time to set up dozens of jokes for Snow (most of which are actually funny), they did not bother extending this courtesy to anyone else. I don’t need everyone to be cracking wise, but I do need intelligible words that somehow advance the plot to come out of the actors’ mouths.
The credit I will give Lockout is Pearce’s performance. He’s charismatic and watchable, he nails all the one-liners, even the ones that don’t work, and he’s a good enough actor to sell you this mess and not seem like he’s whoring himself out (too much). Mostly this is because he does appear to be having fun even as everyone else around him does the acting equivalent of falling into a black hole. Also he got really buff and hot so at least there was a nice gun show to enjoy. But, in the end, I wouldn’t recommend Lockout as anything other “sick with flu and can’t reach the remote while home on a Tuesday” basic cable viewing. Sorry Guy. You deserved so much more.
The L stop near my home in Chicago is plastered with Avengers posters in advance of the movie hitting theaters on May 4. As I was studying the display, I thought about how much Scarlett Johansson stands out, and no, not just because her little gun looks ridiculous next to Thor’s hammer and Iron Man and The Hulk. No, I was thinking about how, as the only woman featured in the marketing campaign, Johansson solely represents what women will be in Joss Whedon’s version of the Avengers universe (good thing Whedon has a history of creating intricate, strong female characters). What I get from Black Widow, the superhero Johansson plays, in the ads is “sexy but functional”. Her leather body suit, though tight and unzipped, doesn’t actually show any cleavage. It’s no more exploitative than Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye costume or Chris Hemsworth’s Thor getup, which leaves their awesome guns bare.
The other woman featured in The Avengers, though not in the advertising, is SHIELD agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders, How I Met Your Mother)—you can see a clip of her here. And that’s pretty much it. Two women. I’m sure that Gwyneth Paltrow will make an appearance as Pepper Potts at some point, but she’s not featured throughout the film like Black Widow and Agent Hill. Then I started wondering if that was an issue, that there are only two women in The Avengers. Comic books are and always have been ripe with interesting, strong female characters. Having only two in the movie seems like tokenism—here you go boys, here are some hot chicks to look at. But then I thought about the five X-Men movies and realized that though they feature a plethora of female superheroes, most of them are useless. Storm is so awesome in the comics that I always wanted to be her when we played X-Men as kids, but in the movies she’s best known for Halle Berry’s series of increasingly awful wigs. The best we got from X-Men was Jean Grey and Mystique and that’s, well, two.
So it’s quality, then, not quantity when it comes to female superheroes in movies. I’ll take two great heroines over nine useless bimbos any day of the week. But why is it so important that we have “good” female superheroes? Well, empowerment, sure. Twenty years ago when I was a kid (OMG I’M OLD), no one ever challenged my right to run alongside the boys in the neighborhood, pretending to shoot lightning bolts out of my hands. But looking at it now, I think who we’re really empowering with female superheroes are little boys. They grow up reading comics featuring an array of strong, ass-kicking women who may be scantily clad, but they’re also shooting death lasers out of their eyes and sometimes they even save—or defeat—the heroes. Boys grow up accepting that women can be beautiful and badass, and that they are equal partners in whatever death-defying heroics you’re reading about that week.
And as for the “scantily clad” bit, yes, female superheroes are inherently sexual. For the most part, they’re drawn by men for the male gaze. But in the realm of the comic book, it doesn’t feel like objectification. If in The Avengers movie we’re treated to the sight of Johansson’s jiggling breasts, it comes simultaneously as she beats the shit out of a couple dudes (while she’s tied to a chair). It says, “Yes, boys, my boobs are bouncy, but I can choke you out so watch yourself.” It’s the unification of female power and female sexuality and it presents it in a way that does not scare boys, but subconsciously programs them to find strength and independence sexy and desirable. I might be reaching, but when I think of the comic geeks I know and the kind of women they’re attracted to, I think there’s something to it. They grew up reading about these incredibly self-determined women and now as adults, they’re to a one attracted to free-thinking, independent women. It’s not universal I’m sure—nothing ever is—but it can’t hurt that boys are exposed to a system in which female power and sexuality are treated as inherently the same.
The man directing The Avengers, Joss Whedon, is a comic geek from way back and he’s built his career on strong female characters like Buffy. Even though I’m not a huge Johansson fan, I’m interested to see how Whedon makes use of her in The Avengers, especially since she was little more than an eye-candy afterthought in Iron Man 2. It’s only 66 seconds, but the clip of Black Widow linked above made me happy. There’s some wry humor, sure, but the key to me is the reason she’s on the phone. Hawkeye (Renner) is in trouble and the Black Widow needs to go save him. This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s Johansson with her boobs out, but she’s also being set up as the savior of an equally powerful male counterpart. It’s a very fine line to walk between celebration and exploitation but I feel like Whedon is managing it. And that’s why I’ll take The Avengers and its two female superheroes over anything starring a bunch of pointless dolls. At her best, the female superhero shows us that a woman can be beautiful, sexy, and desirable while simultaneously being independent, strong, and capable.
With only one month to go before the uber-competitive summer season starts, April is bit softer as the studios wind down from March and gear up for May. There are a handful of releases that could hit in a big way but mostly, it’s middle of the road fare all the way, nothing super ambitious going on. Except for The Pirates! Band of Misfits because stop-motion animation is always ambitious.
April 6
American Reunion
In 1999 American Pie launched its young cast of mostly-unknowns to stardom. Thirteen years later, almost all of them are in need of a totally unnecessary and unwanted sequel in hopes of boosting their flagging careers. (I say “almost” because Alyson Hannigan has had a pretty nice career in television over the last decade.) I thought the first American Pie was funny when I was seventeen, but by the time the third movie in the franchise, American Wedding, came out in 2003, I was over it. And I have zero interest in this money-grabbing four-quel. If you’re looking for funny this weekend, see 21 Jump Street, if you haven’t already. And if you have, check out Goon, which stars Seann “Stifler” William Scott and is getting decent reviews.
ATM
This is one of those “people trapped in a confined space, waiting to die” horror movies. I’m not really into those, because the gimmick of the space usually overtakes actual storytelling (see also: Buried, Open Water). It’s about three people who get trapped by a murderous person in a little ATM lobby. Reviews have not been overwhelming.
Limited
Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope
Documentarian Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) is back with his look at the annual nerd-stravaganza: Comic-Con. A Fan’s Hope has gotten good reviews thus far, with most people appreciating Spurlock’s change in perspective as he spends most of his time behind the camera, instead of inserting himself into the narrative as a participant, his usual MO. Comic-Con makes for some pretty wild people watching, so this should be a fascinating look at nerd culture at its zenith.
Limited
Damsels in Distress
Much-admired writer/director Whit Stillman hasn’t made a movie since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco. He returns now with Damsels in Distress, a story about a group of girls at college determined to save everyone from themselves. I’ve heard mixed things about this movie. Reviews have been generally positive, but talking to people who’ve seen it, no one seems to enjoy watching it. I wonder if the reviews owe more to general affection and nostalgia for Stillman, who has made several excellent films in the past (Barcelona and Metropolitan, as well as the superb Disco), than whatever is actually going on with Damsels. Starring indie doll Greta Gerwig (Greenberg), Megalyn Echikunwoke (House of Lies), newcomer Carrie MacLemore and Analeigh Tipton (Crazy Stupid Love).
LA/NYC
Detention
It is inevitable that after a young actor gets some attention in a big movie, their next movie is some crap horror flick that has probably been sitting on the shelf, waiting for someone in the cast to get famous enough to justify the expense of releasing it. Detention is that movie for Josh Hutcherson. Fresh off The Hunger Games, here is a crap horror flick about kids stuck in detention trying to escape a killer called Cinderhella. CINDERHELLA. Dane Cook is in this movie, too, which guarantees it will suck. His movie career has been less than stellar.
The Hunter
Willem Defoe stars as Martin, a professional hunter who is hired to hunt the last Tasmanian tiger. In reality, the Tasmanian tiger is extinct, but the premise of the film is that there is one left in the wild and a biotech company wants it (presumably for cloning and/or to mount death-lasers on its head), and so Martin is sent to capture it. As he tracks the tiger through backwoods Tasmania (my Australian ex used to joke about Tasmania like Americans do Alabama—is this accurate, Aussies, or was he being a dick?), Martin meets a cast of predictably backwards people. Again, the reviews have been pretty strong for The Hunter, but no one I’ve talked to likes it. It sounds like Defoe gives a great performance in an otherwise weak movie, and I wonder if it’s a case of praise for Defoe is covering up complaints about everything else.
Limited
Titanic 3D
The moment I knew I wanted to do something to do with movies as my livelihood: Age 14, sitting in the theater watching every person I’d ever met lose their shit over Titanic while I sat there, going, “But this movie is TERRIBLE!” and realizing that I was going to have to do something about the situation if such a hackneyed, derivative movie could not only get made, but be such a massive hit. I did not like Titanic in 1997 and I haven’t liked it any time I’ve been subjected to it since then. If you feel like hearing my list o’reasons it’s one of the most overrated movies in history, let me know. Otherwise, just know that every time someone says “I like Titanic” I hear “I’m a sucker, please sell me a bridge”.
We Have a Pope
Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room, The Caiman) is very popular on the international scene. His latest is We Have a Pope, which follows Cardinal Melville (Michel Piccoli, Restless), the newly-elected pope who, incapacitated by fear, is unable to take office. So the Vatican appoints a therapist (Moretti) to try and help coax the pope out so he can officially be announced. Reviews have been mixed, but I find Moretti’s films are usually worth checking out. His perspective is never expected and his movies almost always feel quite fresh and interesting. Also, Piccoli is one of France’s greatest actors, so there’s that.
Limited
April 13
The Cabin in the Woods
It’s the merger of two very dedicated fan bases—horror nerds and Joss Whedon fanboys. They’ve been waiting ages for the Whedon produced and written Cabin in the Woods. I know nothing about this movie, as anyone who has been exposed to it repeatedly emphasizes that you shouldn’t even watch the trailer for fear of having whatever the twist is spoiled. I’ve posted the trailer below—whether you watch it or not is between you and your tolerance for spoilers.
Here
This bounced around festivals last year and is now getting a limited release. Starring Ben Foster (The Messenger), Here is about a cartographer who falls in love with a photographer while doing a new survey of Armenia. It looks pretty sad and depressing, but even when the movies aren’t that great, Foster is always worth watching.
Limited
The Lady
Director Luc Besson made a big impression with The Professional in 1994, but ever since then, he’s made a string of bad action movies and has run down his reputation in the process (although I do enjoy The Fifth Element as a trainwreck). He takes a stab at redemption with The Lady, which got decent reviews on last year’s festival circuit, and won star Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) generous praise for her portrayal of Burmese democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. As a fan of Yeoh, I’ll see this eventually, but I’m not going to lie. I find Besson, as a director, to be pretty off-putting and I’m not really into his films.
Limited
Lockout
I had the BIGGEST crush on Guy Pearce when Memento came in 2000. I’m so glad he’s back and healthy and we can enjoy him once again. This movie looks terrible—it’s about a prison in space that is overtaken by the inmates threatening to crash it on earth—and I’m sure it will be eye-roll inducing. But it’s Guy Pearce. I love him! I totally want to see this and I hope it sucks in the good way (you know, the fun, bad-action-movie-is-good way), and not in the bad way (the bad-action-movie-makes-me-want-to-set-the-theater-on-fire way).
The Three Stooges
I’ve never been a fan of the Three Stooges, so please feel free to explain to me why this movie is so offensive to people who are. Sure, it looks extremely silly and is second-hand embarrassing, but the Three Stooges were extremely silly and second-hand embarrassing. Obviously, I’m missing something because I don’t get why Stooges fans are so up in arms about this. I mean, it looks terrible, but the Three Stooges are kind of terrible, so… The expectations are so low and early word is so bad that the general consensus in the industry is that this movie, which is not a biopic but is meant to be a recreation of the Three Stooges style of comedy, will kill the actual Stooges biopic project by association. And that is a shame because the Stooges biopic is quite dark and interesting and could maybe, finally, explain to me what I am just not getting about the Three Stooges.
Darling Companion
Lawrence Kasdan is a good filmmaker with a pretty bizarre resume, from The Big Chill to Wyatt Earp to French Kiss. This is his first film since 2003’s Dreamcatcher and it looks halfway decent at least. Diane Keaton stars as Beth, an empty-nester struggling with a disinterested husband (Kevin Kline). Beth rescues a dog and it becomes her constant companion, until her husband loses it after their daughter’s wedding. Beth enlists wedding guests to help find the dog, hijinks ensue. It doesn’t look groundbreaking, but it’s got a good cast and an identifiable premise—loneliness, companionship, rediscovery of love. That should be enough for a steady expansion that will see Darling Companion carry into summer as counter-programming to the popcorn fare. Also starring Mark Duplass, Elisabeth Moss, Dianne Wiest, Sam Shepard and Richard Jenkins.
Limited
The Lucky One
Zac Efron + Nicholas Sparks + inevitable Sparksian ending where someone dies in a maudlin fashion = zero interest on my part.
Marley
A documentary about Bob Marley from the director of The Last King of Scotland. Pretty straightforward, should be worth it to Marley fans.
Limited
The Moth Diaries
Sarah Bolger (The Tudors), Sarah Gadon (A Dangerous Method) and model Lily Cole star in this horror movie about catty girls at boarding school. Scott Speedman is their teacher—I assume at least one of them has sex with him at some point. This does not look good. I’d recommend renting Cracks instead.
Limited
Think Like a Man
Based on Steve Harvey’s relationship book and starring Taraji Henson, Romany Malco (The 40 Year Old Virgin), Chris Brown—wait. Chris Brown? Pass.
To the Arctic 3D
Meryl Streep narrates this documentary that follows a mother polar bear and her two cubs through the Arctic. It’s Warner Brothers’ answer to Disney’s annual Earth Day nature-doc, and I’m sure it will pull plenty of heartstrings. Assuming you have heartstrings to be pulled and not, you know, scorpion tails and thistles like me.
April 27
Bernie
Writer/director Richard Linklater defined Generation X on film in the 1990’s with movies like Slacker, Dazed & Confused and Before Sunrise (I know Dazed was set in the 1970’s but the parallels are there), and then he made The School of Rock with Jack Black and lost my unconditional love forever, though A Scanner Darkly did kind of put him back in my good graces. Bernie looks to be another step in the right direction for Linklater, even if he is re-teaming with Black. Given the right material, Black can be an effective actor, and Bernie might be the right balance of black comedy and outright weirdness to tap into Black’s inner actor. Based on an actual murder in 1990’s Texas, Bernie is about a mortician (Black) who becomes friends with the least popular person in town, the bitter widow Marjorie. Eventually Bernie kills Marjorie but she was so unpopular in town that the prosecuting attorney (Matthew McConaughey) finds it difficult to charge Bernie. As far as creepy crime movies with weird murders go, this is more intriguing than The Raven.
Limited
The Five Year Engagement
Jason Segel and his creative partner, Nicholas Stoller (The Muppets, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) re-team for The Five Year Engagement, another of their skewed-perspective rom-coms. I’ve been a big fan of the Segel/Stoller movies to this point, so I’m hopeful that Engagement keeps the tradition alive. Segel is joined on screen by Emily Blunt and they play a couple that, for various reasons, ends up with a long engagement. I like the idea of a rom-com dealing with what happens when the perfect couple of the love story suffers a disaster-strewn ever after, but something about Engagement has not been landing with me. The trailer doesn’t look especially funny and the chemistry between Segel and Blunt seems a little flat. It almost feels like Stoller and Segel had to make this movie to fulfill a contract requirement. I hope I’m wrong, though. I hope it’s funny and worthy of the pedigree that brought us The Muppets and Sarah Marshall.
Girl in Progress
This movie stars Eva Mendes, who is Bitch-Enemy #1 right now thanks to her ongoing relationship with Ryan Gosling. So I imagine if you do go see it, it will be to make fun of Eva and tell each other how fat she looks and how their relationship must be fake because The Gos would never like a bitch like her. Because otherwise, this movie doesn’t look any good and I can’t imagine why you’d be seeing it.
Limited
Headhunters
Norway has been turning out some very intriguing and visually interesting films lately, and Headhunters is another entry in the “what is going on in Norway because they’re making some sweet ass films all of a sudden” category. It’s a crime thriller about an art thief attempting to acquire a painting from an ex-mercenary. It was a surprise hit at several North American festivals last year, including blow out reviews from TIFF. I am definitely making time for this one.
Limited
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
I CAN’T WAIT THIS WILL BE THE BEST MOVIE EVER.
Seriously, though, I adore the book series by English author Gideon Defoe. They’re short, charming and funny—it’s a bit like reading Monty Python—and an Aardman Animations stop-motion cartoon is a perfect match to the silly, campy tone of the books. And the vocal work is stellar—Hugh Grant is virtually undetectable as the Pirate Captain and Salma Hayek, Imelda Staunton, Martin Freeman (Sherlock, The Office), Brendan Gleeson (The Guard, Harry Potter) and David Tennant (Dr. Who) all do excellent work. I’ve gotten a glimpse and as both a huge fan of the books and an exacting film-goer, I am really enthusiastic about this movie’s potential.
The Raven
I should be into this movie. I love Edgar Allen Poe, and I like creepy movies about murder. The Raven stars John Cusack as Poe in his final days, in an alternate-reality in which a serial murderer is recreating all Poe’s fictional murders in real life, and Poe teams up with a Baltimore detective (Luke Evans, Immortals) to solve the crimes. The trailer is moody and dark and a little weird and basically has a ribbon and a tag that says, “Sarah, this movie is just for you.” And yet, I am unmoved. I don’t know if it’s Cusack, who looks a bit zombified here, or if it’s the lack of cleverness, but I’m not really feeling The Raven.
Safe
I liked The Transporter, and I enjoyed Jason Statham in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, as well as The Italian Job (whatever, that’s a guilty pleasure movie for me), but the other side of Statham are these incredibly stupid Transporter knock-offs like Crank and Safe. He’s got to protect some girl and get her to some place and he’ll kill a bunch of people in increasingly not-possible ways throughout the film. That’s all there is, really.
Sound of My Voice
Co-written by and starring indie darling Brit Marling (Another Earth), Sound of My Voice is about a journalist (Christopher Denham, Shutter Island) and his girlfriend getting sucked into the cult he’s investigating. It was popular at Sundance 2011, but a lot of the complaints I’ve heard center around the unevenness of the story, since it was originally conceived as short webisodes and was later turned into a feature film. The inherent nature of a webisode isn’t exactly feature-friendly, which is why Joss Whedon hasn’t tried to turn Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog into a movie. Points to Marling & Co. for trying, but this looks like a rental to me.
Because men aren’t the only ones who can be pervy. We like to look, too. And turnabout is fair play. So I asked for your suggestions and added in some of my favorites and here we have it, the first ever celebration of the Female Gaze, Cinesnark style. And for the three dudes reading this—um, fun?
And I really don’t want to be one. I consider myself a feminist in that I am a woman who thinks that women should be able to do whatever the fuck they want with themselves and have equal access/opportunity as men. But I don’t like getting militant about it, because that’s usually when people start writing you off as a nut and rolling their eyes and generally tuning you out. But sometimes, no matter how hard I try to keep an even keel, eventually the effect of a hundred slings and arrows reaches the point that there’s nothing left but the Boudicean rage of a thousand years of repression and oppression. On that note, let’s talk about Vanity Fair.
Sexism AND racism – it’s a two-for-one deal!
Vanity Fair takes a lot of shit for being a super whitebread publication that has several annual issues pertaining to the entertainment industry and then failing to reflect the ever-increasing diversity of those entertainments. Put simply: They always put white chicks on their cover with a token woman of color thrown into the background on the inside flap. Today VF has released their May issue, which is dedicated to the “Ladies of TV”, and they put a not-white person (Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara) on the cover…and then stripped her down and stuck her between the sheets. Overall, this VF cover shoot is very…booby. The ladies on the cover—Vergara is joined by Juliana Margulies (The Good Wife), Claire Danes (Homeland) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey)—are tucked into sheets with cleavage busting out, or, in Dockery’s case, bare back exposed. The inside cover fold-out is an equally egregious offense—a collection of women posed in vintage-inspired lingerie, boobs out.
Giving credit where it’s due, this is one of the most diverse spreads VF has done in recent memory, which isn’t really saying much, but let’s take progress where we get it. Besides Vergara on the cover, the fold-out includes Kerry Washington (her new show Scandal begins in April), Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife) and Grace Park (Hawaii Five-0). We’ve also got some positive body-image stuff happening with the deliciously voluptuous Kat Dennings—I’ve never been a huge fan of hers, but GODDAMN her body is crazy—and the normal-sized Emily Deschanel (Bones), plus proud curvy girl Vergara. And the ages are fairly well represented. Dockery is the youngest cover girl at 31—Margulies and Vergara are both over 40—and only three of the seven women featured on the fold-out are twenty-somethings: Dennings, Revenge’s Emily VanCamp and Shameless’ Emmy Rossum. So, yes, progress. There is SOME diversity in color, age and body type.
But is it enough?
I might not be so sensitive to this except we’re just coming off the appallingly racist reaction to casting decisions in The Hunger Games and the issue of how progressive we really are is on my mind. There’s something I heard about the movie Hitch once that has stuck with me and the VF cover calls it to mind. Hitch was developed as a vehicle for Will Smith, and in the initial casting cycle they auditioned several well-known leading ladies who happened to be white (Hitch, if you haven’t seen it, is a romantic comedy, albeit a pretty terrible one). Then someone decided that America wasn’t really ready for an interracial rom-com, but they also worried that white audiences wouldn’t support the movie if Smith was partnered with a black actress (I am dying on the inside, writing this out). The compromise? Enter Eve Mendes, a Latina actress. This was seen as “the answer” to the interracial “problem”—dark enough to “match” Smith but still light enough to qualify as “interracial”. I don’t even know which part of this offends me the most. Literally years later and I still can’t process that this happened in the twenty-first century. But the VF cover reminds me of the Hitch thing. I don’t know that Vergara’s inclusion on the cover over, say, Taraji Henson, who is the female lead on the popular new Person of Interest, is a Hitch-like compromise, but knowing the decision has been made at least once before, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion.
And what of Melissa McCarthy, Oscar nominee and Emmy winner for her CBS sitcom Mike & Molly? That’s an awful show that I wish would cease to exist on principle, but you can’t argue that this has been McCarthy’s year, between the success of Bridesmaids and her Emmy win. And now she’s producing, too, developing pilots and getting them to network. Why not put McCarthy on your cover? She’s a long-time television presence—Suki!—who has turned into a burgeoning power player. She was the first—and most obvious—exclusion I noticed when I looked the spread over. I thought, How can they not include Melissa McCarthy, who is the new queen of TV comedy? And then I thought, Oh yeah, because she’s a big girl and this is a lingerie shoot. Note to the VF editors: When an actress is having the kind of year McCarthy has had, you can’t ignore her, and if including her means you have to scrap your objectifying lingerie-themed photoshoot, YOU SCRAP THE OBJECTIFYING LINGERIE-THEMED PHOTOSHOOT.
Which brings us to the ogling.
This year in entertainment belongs to the female ass-kicker. This is the year we met Katniss Everdeen in the flesh—in ALL her glorious flesh, which we’ll get to—the year that Bella Swan finally does something approaching useful, the year that fairy-tale princesses put down the goddamn singing sparrows and take up arms, and that women on TV are some of the best schemers and politickers around, thanks to Revenge and Game of Thrones, and I have high hopes for Washington’s Scandal. So why then is the theme of VF’s TV issue “scantily clad eye candy”? Why not put them all in varying styles of armor, give them swords and shields, and stage it like a motherfucking uprising of amazing? Because the message here, as always, is that women can go so far before they must be sent back to the boudoir, because that’s the real domain of women. And if you think I’m being oversensitive, I want you to ask yourself what a similar cover shoot for men might look like. Unless it’s all the hottest dudes on TV doing this, then no, I’m not being oversensitive.
Your Body is Bad, and other lessons we need to un-learn
Before we get into the quagmire of double standards and learned body dysmorphia that surrounds The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence, I want you to read the following statement, and then repeat it back to yourself, out loud. I’m deadly serious—say this back to yourself, OUT LOUD. Go into the bathroom, your dorm room, your car, whatever, and look in a mirror and tell yourself the following:
There is no wrong way to be a woman. There is no wrong way to be me. This (point at yourself, for real) is right and worthy.
I talk a lot of shit about celebrities, most of them women. I’ll pick apart clothing and style choices, I’ll photo-assume the state of someone’s relationship based on one candid photo, I’ll judge a person’s worth in the arena of public opinion based on which designer she wears to the Oscars. I accept that all that means I’m a shitty person with a heart made of spiders and turpentine. But one thing I won’t do is criticize a woman—or anyone—for something she can’t help. That’s why excessive plastic surgery makes me so sad-mad—women slicing their faces into oblivion to meet some arbitrary (and let’s face it, probably male-determined) standard of beauty is infuriating. You are the way you are, and while there are certain parameters that can be adjusted, everyone has their basic shape and reality. And there is nothing wrong with that. There’s no wrong way to be a woman, to be yourself, and we’re each right and worthy in our own ways.
So the mere idea that the “fatness of Katniss” is a thing makes me BREATHE FIRE.
From the moment Jennifer Lawrence was cast as Katniss Everdeen, there was discussion about whether or not she was the right choice, as there always is whenever a beloved literary character is brought to the big screen. And yes, I do remember people questioning whether or not Lawrence could accurately portray a character with a history of malnourishment, but one who also runs and jumps and shoots things and whose physical prowess as a hunter has kept her family alive. To me, yes, Lawrence embodied that Katniss. She was strong and athletic and capable—when she shot a bow and arrow you believed she could really handle that weapon. But her tiny waist and long limbs also suggested a willowy-ness, a hint of vulnerability under the steel. And speaking of Lawrence as a person, she’s GORGEOUS. She has an insane body that is all the more beautiful because it isn’t the Hollywood norm. She’s tall and has breasts and hips and an ass and thighs and it’s beautiful. She looks like a real person.
So far, it seems like Lawrence is handling the criticism of her body well, supposedly laughing it off and pointing out the double-standard that her equally fit male co-stars, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth, are not being criticized for appearing too “well fed”. But the larger issue is what this is telling the girls out there who look up to Katniss and see in Lawrence that having jiggly bits is not only acceptable but also sexy and beautiful. The “fatness of Katniss” tells girls that while too thin is a problem so is strong. Because this isn’t about being overweight or childhood obesity, this is about a young woman with a very fit, athletic body that happens to be bigger than an A-cup being judged as too fat. Jennifer Lawrence is not a stick insect but she is far, far from fat. And I resent the implication that she—that anyone with her body type—is too fat. I resent it on behalf of the tall girl who slouches down, the short girl who wears platforms every day, the thin girl who binge eats and the plump one that purges.
So what’s the lesson today? That you can’t be too thin but you also can’t have any curves and the pinnacle of female empowerment is on par with being trussed up in lingerie and posed, boobs out, to be gazed upon as an object of desire. And too bad if your skin is dark, you’re still an also-ran and we’re deigning to acknowledge you.
Fuck that noise.
There is no wrong way to be a woman. There is no wrong way to be me. This is right and worthy.
