Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Friday, August 13, 2010) (100)

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a wildly fun take on dating in the video-game age. Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, smartly adapted by Michael Bacall and video game/comic book lover Edgar Wright (whose Spaced series is totally brilliant and serves as a wonderful corollary to this film) and directed by Wright, this film is totally fresh and funny, taking itself seriously enough to connect with the characters, but being silly enough to know what its doing at all times.


Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a dorky bassist in a dorky emo punk rock band. He is in a year-long recovery from a long-term girlfriend who broke his heart when she dumped him. He starts seeing a girl much younger than him who becomes more of a buddy than a sexual partner (because she's too young for him). All of his band mates and friends mock him for his lame non-sexual relationship.


One day he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who he falls in love with immediately. They go on a few dates and he soon learns that she has seven exes who she broke up with over the years. These exes have formed a league of villains whose mission it is to destroy Scott and re-take Ramona's heart.


On his team, Scott has his gay best friend, Wallace (Kieran Culkin), his sister, Stacey (Anna Kendrick) and a passel of hangers-on. As he fights successive exes, he is wrapped up in his own nerdy self-doubt and never totally confident in his actions. He's the anti-super hero and totally relatable every-man.


Typical of Wright's earlier work, this film uses 1980s and 1990s video game references throughout to enhance the dramatic moments. When he defeats each ex, their bodies turn into coins that he can collect to move up to a "new level". Small, clever details decorate each scene, so when he goes to take a leak in the bathroom, we see his "pee level" go from 10 to 0, or when he gets a jolt of self-confidence, he wins an "extra life".


Wright also uses a wonderful score by Nigel Godrich, a frequent collaborator of Radiohead and Beck, that uses 64-bit sound effects and musical cues to underline critical moments in the story. Perhaps it's a bit obvious to use Nintendo sound cards to make some of the music, but it still works well in this context.


Michael Cera is a bit annoying as an actor (and has super-annoying hair here) mostly because he plays the same dweeby role over and over again. He's always the less-than-confident-but-secretly-brilliant teen or twenty-something - and he remains that in this movie. But I think he's very sympathetic here and helps convey the emotional story very well. At one point he worries that because Ramona changes the color of her hair without much thought that she might be flaky and could dump him with as much thought as well. This is funny because we have all been in this position of self-doubt and vulnerability - and that is exactly who he is in every movie.


This is a very light and easy movie and a ton of fun. Wright has a fantastic ability to mix a geeky tech theme into a very realistic emotional world, making a story that is both reminiscent of childhood feelings of deficiency with a more heady barrage of cultural references. Even as a person who really never had a deep connection with video games or comic books, this film totally works for me. Dating is like a bad video game where you constantly just miss the ledge and always fall into the lava pool - but then you get a new life and begin again from the last saved level.


Stars: 3 of 4

Most Valuable Players (Thursday, August 12, 2010) (99)

This is a very small documentary about high school musicals in the Lafayette Valley of Eastern Pennsylvania (Bethlehem, Allentown, Easton). Apparently the public schools in this area all have very good musical theater programs and as a result of the quality, there is a local award spectacle set up by a community theater and a local television station. This show, the Freddys, gives Tony-like awards to actors and technical departments and is considered a major honor in the region.

We see how different schools and different theater directors deal with the pressure of putting on the shows differently and how they view the award process in various ways. One teacher is very arrogant, suggesting that his kids are better because they have a bigger budget and put on a bigger and better show than their cross-town rival school, which is smaller. Another theater director emphasizes that the kids should do the musicals simply because they have a passion for it and not because they can win awards.

About half of the film shows the putting together of the shows themselves and the second half shows the build-up to the Freddys and the presentation of them. At some point the story goes a bit off the rails as one of the main production members of the Freddy team gets cancer and struggles to keep the show going on while fighting his own medical battle.

The content of this documentary is not all that amazing. It's basically a bunch of awkward kids doing awkward kid things. I certainly had flash-backs to my (very brief) personal history in my high school theater (basically back-stage in two productions) - but those memories are about as visceral as what I saw onscreen here. I never really felt very connected to many of the people in the film and hoped that I would see more out of everyone. That much of the content revolves around a secondary man's fight with cancer is a bit silly. I care about him even less than I care about the kids.

The best thing about this film was a pair of precocious best friends (Ali and Katie) who have a very sharp view of the goings on in the theater world. Basically everything they said was hilarious and they showed that if filmmaker Matthew Kallis had spent more time talking to interesting kids about what they were going through (with no painted-on bullshit), it might have been a much better film.

Stars: 2 of 4

Catfish (Thursday, August 12, 2010) (98)

Before I saw this film the one thing I heard was that it's important that you don't know anything about it before you go in, otherwise you would risk ruining the hook of the piece. I will respect that warning and try to say as little as possible as a synopsis and criticism here.

Catfish is a documentary about a New-York-based photographer, Nev, who gets into a "relationship" over Facebook with an artistic family in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. He initially receives paintings inspired by his photographs that are done by the youngest daughter, Abby, and then is contacted by her mother, Angela, and finally falls into a romantic back-and-forth with the oldest daughter, Meg, though only via the interwebs. Curious about who these people are in "real-life" he sets out to visit them.

This is a fascinating examination about ontology and the human experience in the mediated world of the present. Things are not always what they seem on the surface and even deep, emotional interactions can be fractured and digitized.

Filmmakers Ariel Schulman (Nev's brother) and Henry Joost do an adequate job with the presentation, though I think they slip at some point into pure voyeurism and less documentation. They show us the emotion and then keep the cameras rolling in a rather sensationalistic way that I think feels rather uncomfortable and sometimes mean-spirited.

I'm not totally convinced there's much to this film other than "caveat emptor." There's not a lot of discussion of the meaning of Nev's experience and I think it's generally oversimplified to very pop-ish psychology. The story here is really interesting (and I have to trust that it's totally true, though sometimes I had doubts), but the conclusion and evaluation of it is less than brilliant. I'm not convinced that these filmmakers have much more in their tank, but that they just got lucky with a good series of events here.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Green Zone (Tuesday, August 10, 2010) (97)

Green Zone is an action film that really should just be an office drama. Army Chief Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is in charge of a team of soldiers searching for weapons of mass destruction cashes in Baghdad in the early days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Every time they're sent on a mission, his team comes up blank finding absolutely nothing. Miller gets upset and seeks help from CIA spook Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a Middle-East expert who doubts the source of the Pentagon's intelligence.

It seems that Brown and Clarke Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), the Pentagon intelligence head, are bitter rivals. Brown doesn't like how political Poundstone is and how he has not put in adequate time in the region. When Miller and his team come upon a secret Baathist meeting and arrest a few of the minor players a series of events leads him (and us) to doubt the entire reason for going into the war.

There is really no need for any action or any gunfighting in the film at all. Most of the interesting action is the discovery of different layers of deception they Pentagon went through in the build-up to the war. That there are car chases and explosions, not to mention helicopter heroics, seems sorta beside the point of the movie. Most of the time, the chases are teams of American soldiers chasing other American soldiers - not really bad guys chasing good guys, but guys with one mission chasing guys with a different mission. (Morals are strangely never discussed after Miller kills some fellow solders who chase him - killing comrades generally being something the Army frowns upon).

The film is very anti-Bush and anti-war, to the point that it's all a bit silly. Director Paul Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland show how extremely guilty the architects for the war are of starting such a campaign and not having any idea of how to fight it. Once it becomes clear that the case for war was entirely made up, Poundstone basically says, "so - sue me!" He goes off largely without any punishment.

Making this all even more strange is that the details of the film are presented as fact, yet I'm not sure these things actually happened. Certainly the case for the war and the suggestion of WMDs was mostly fabricated, but it never came out that the Pentagon invented intel sources to prove their case. As far as I know, the amazingly named "Curveball" (who said that Saddam met with Al Qaeda in Prague) has been largely dismissed as a fabulist, but never outed as an invented person.

The film was adapted from the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - but it seems like it was mostly written fresh by Helgeland with some light inspiration from the book. In one scene when Miller goes to the main palace in the Green Zone and sees American diplomats drinking and playing games by the pool as if they were on vacation. This is about all the movie has to do with the book. Overall Greengrass' style, with handheld cameras and a very immediate point of view, helps to underline the reality and non-fiction-ness of the story, but I think this is rather unfair to the uninformed viewer.

The end result of this film feels to me like Greengrass and Helgeland (or someone else) wanted to make an anti-war movie and the studio said they could only do it if it was an action flick. In the end it's not really a good action flick (it's too heady and the action isn't really thrilling because there aren't really any bad guys) and it's sorta a silly spy movie (because the spying has already been done and now we're just trying to put the pieces together about what happened).

Considering this, it is a lot of fun to see a movie tell the truth about the Iraq war and show how everything from the lies told during the build-up to the war, to the mismanagement of the troops, to the horseshit stories we were fed about WMDs once we got there, to the disastrous decision by Paul Bremer to fire the Iraqi Army all add up to a massively terrible situation. The film reminds us of how guilty people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, Pearle, Wolfowitz and all their underlings are. Sadly, it tells us these things underneath totally dumb gunfire.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Bluebeard (Saturday, August 7, 2010) (96)

Catherine Breillat is one of the most interesting contemporary feminist filmmakers working today. Her 2001 film Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur, en francais) remains one of the most interesting works of the aughts and one of the most powerful works on feminine sexual liberation, jealousy and vengeance.


Here, in her adaptation of the Bluebeard fairytale (which she adapted and directed) she gives another fascinating portrayal of ownership and possession of female sexuality, femininity and freedom. She does this not only on a story level with the script, but also beautifully integrates formal, technical elements to this too. Bluebeard is as much an essay on the use of color and the power of color as it is about the power of gender and traditional sex roles.


The traditional story of Bluebeard (as written by Charles Perrault) is that there is an ugly, rich man who lives in a lavish castle. He marries a series of girls who are never heard from again. One day he goes to a neighbor lady and tells them that he'd like to marry one of her two daughters; the younger girl decides to marry him, despite the fact that he is incredibly ugly (and has a blue beard!).


As the story goes, he gives her a key to a secret room and tells her not to go into it. She's not able to not see what is forbidden so she goes in and finds the bloody bodies of all his previous brides. When he discovers that she disobeyed him, he insists on killing her too (clearly this is how her predecessors met their ends as well).


In the context of this film, however, that traditional story is shown to us by a more modern girl (maybe from the 1930s or 1940s) reading the story to her older sister. In other words, you have two different levels of sisters and two levels of sisterly jealousy spanning centuries. Interestingly it is never obvious which story is the framing story and which one is the story within the story. At times they are both either the primary or secondary stories.


This is very important - especially how it relates to the growth of the girls' views of sexuality (even as preadolescents). In one moment the old and new stories merge, suggesting the modern younger sister is liberating herself by seeing herself in the fairy tale. (Does "self-liberation" have to necessarily mean masturbation if it involves a prepubescent girl? I really don't know.)


Breillat uses color here beautifully. Cinematographer (and Emir Kusurica alumnus) Vilko Filac does a wonderful job of giving the film a very muted color palette. It almost looks like what technicolor films from the 1960s and 1970s have come to look when shown today. It is colorful but somewhat muddied and gray overall. Still, within this more somber color scheme, bold colors stand out - and convey power.


Clearly Bluebeard has power because his beard is, well, blue. But beyond this, when the brown-haired younger sister becomes his wife, she puts aside the black smocks her mother has dressed her in after her father's death and puts on a brightly colored red cape and a green silk gown. (Interestingly it is her older red-haired sister who is the most vocal against the convention of wearing black for mourning; the younger sister is rewarded for her conventionality with a shower of color and freedom).


I love that both the Bluebeard story and the more modern story feature sisters with red and brown hair respectively. In the former, it is the older sister who has red hair and is generally more free-thinking; her younger brunette sister is more aloof. In the latter, the younger sister is red-headed, but has more power than her older, brunette sister and takes a dominant role. This back-and-forth is very reminiscent of the relationship between the sisters in Fat Girl, a discussion about sisterly jealousy and the power of sexuality.


The simplicity and economy of the film is also very refreshing. Clocking in at a mere 81 minutes, the film opens a world of interesting debate about the role of female sexuality in the feminist world of today. There is only a minimal score and Breillat beautifully uses the repetition of shots (showing one shot three consecutive times) to show the passage of time or movement across space - almost in a dream state.


The story is highly symbolic (as is the fairy tale, I'm sure). With the "keys" to the "doors of the castle" Bluebeard gives to his young bride being very overt symbols for her own sexual identity and expression. He respects the young bride because she reacts to him in a non-submissive fashion - almost a masculine view and knowledge of things. The young wife becomes a proto-feminist by embracing her self-ness, showing him that she will control her own sexuality, rather than letting him defile her at his own whim. The unwashable blood on the key she drops in his secret room is clearly blood from her auto-defloration.


The more modern sisters act as a Greek Chorus here - but a very contemporary chorus, despite the more mid-century clothing they wear. There are moments of their part where it almost appears to be documentary-like. It's not clear to me if everything these girls say is scripted or if it might be two young women in the present day talking about sexual and social mores - through the eyes of children.


At one moment, one girl mentions that "marriage" between a man and a woman is something of a "homosexual" act. That marriage is about self-love rather than love of one another. That marriage is in its essence a non-sexual pact, but a narcissistic or masturbatory one. (I wonder if this idea works better in the context of the French reflexive verb construct, s'aimer.)


I think it's important to remember that this film is a feminist appraisal of sexuality by a woman through the prism of the male gaze - Breillat is showing us how men see women sexually. Considering this, there is a good chance that the "girls" in the film are not really girls at all, but the slanted male view of sexual women. Throughout our culture women are infantilized and reduced, particularly in sexual ways (here Bluebeard makes his wife sleep in a child's toy bed).


Women do not own their sexuality the same way that children are not responsible for their actions. I think it's entirely possible that the girls in the film are really grown women in control of their sexual destinies who are seen by men as silly girls with no understanding of things. Breillat shows us directly what society thinks of women - that they're all just "girls." (This would also make the concept of masturbation easier to understand.)


Near the end of the film, Breillat invokes the Salome story and suggests that female sexual liberty threatens men with decapitation or castration. This is really interesting to me. She says that for women the devil you know (sexual liberation) is better than the devil you don't know (sexual repression). The young wife is not afraid of Bluebeard because she is sexually open and interested. Were she a more traditional girl of the era, she would be scared of him because he represents raw sexual power.


Stars: 4 of 4

Spring Fever (Friday, August 6, 2010) (95)

I admit that I am not an expert on so-called queer cinema. As much as I see movies that are necessarily gay or gay-focused, I really don't seek them out or know much about the genre or the merits therein. I don't think I have ever seen a gay Asian movie before, let alone any gay movie that was this interesting.


This is a film that if it were American would be a mumblecore movie. It basically has the same non-three-act structure of most mumblematerial and the same approach to the technical aspects of the filmmaking process as well as the same view of sex and relationships as cultural commodities. I am very interested in whether director Ye Lou knows the American mumblemovement or if this is just a wonderful parallel evolution.


As the film opens up, we see Wang Ping and Jiang Cheng, two professional men in their late 20s escaping the city to have a sexual tryst in a remote country house. We soon see they are being followed by another young man, Luo Haitao, who has been employed by Wang Ping's wife to spy on her husband and see if he's cheating on her, as she suspects.


Luo Haitao has his own girlfriend, but as he continues to follow Jiang Cheng (past the deal with Wang Ping's wife) he begins a sexual affair with him, which clearly threatens his relationship with her.


Basically the movie is about young people fucking other young people despite relationships they might have and despite their necessarily prescribed "sexuality," inasmuch as society deems them gay or straight. On a more specific level, the film is about how Jiang Cheng is a catalyst for the sexuality of a whole group of people, either leading them to have sex with him (homoerotic sex) or leading the women to act in ways they might not otherwise act.


In many ways this is a generally gay twist on Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig's 2007 film Hannah Takes the Stairs. Sexuality is a fluid thing that strikes you at unexpected moments. It can be traded with people for power, love or companionship, but the suggestion is that there is always a transaction of some sort - something is being traded for the sex. (In Hannah's case, she used sex as a way of gaining power over men and killing boredom; in Jiang Cheng's case, sexuality is a way of giving love and friendship to lost people as a way of relating to them.)


I think this is fascinating and very modern, especially in the setting of modern-day China which is so super-capitalistic. Sex and sexuality is merely another service that can be bought or sold (metaphorically, at least). Some people, like Jiang Cheng, are "rich" because they are sexually liberated, an object of attraction for many and get a lot of it; some people, like Luo Haitao, are purchasers on the market because they are in need of a connection and less comfortable in this world.


The style of the film is very beautiful and simple. It was shot digitally by Jian Zeng, much like its mumblefriends across the globe, and transferred to celluloid which gives an eerie grainy quality to the images. It's mostly blue-gray and dark, which is a very evocative look in general, but also relates well to the general melancholy, secretive tone of the film.


The one non-mumblething about the film is the score and musical sound track, which is quite beautiful and sad - but much more polished than the rest of the film. It is not used throughout the film, but comes in to heighten moments of drama and emotion. (I think the score might be the evidence that Ye Lou just happened to make a mumble-like movie by chance rather than by design. No mumblecore movie has a score nearly as traditional as this one. But that's a happy variation in this case, I think.)


My main problem with the film is something I'm rather embarrassed about. Through my non-Asian, Western eyes, the story is a bit hard to figure out as the two main women look a hell of a lot alike and play almost the same role (a woman whose husband is having an affair with Jiang Cheng). On top of this, the actors who play Wang Ping and Lou Haitao look somewhat alike (and also look a bit like another secondary character), making following the narrative a bit tricky. I do not mean to say "all Asians look alike," but these actors happen to look very similar. Considering I don't speak the language, it was a bit confusing (especially because the story has effectively two cycles and an AAB form, where the story repeats itself in the second act with different characters).


But I really do like this story structure and like it's mumbleness - how the three-ish acts really flow into one another and are not as clearly delineated as they would be in a traditional script. I like the gentleness of the film and how Ye Lou lets characters sit and gaze into the distance (into their deep thoughts) without interruption. This is not a fast-paced movie and I really like that. It's slow, steady and quiet with a very interesting and powerful message about love, relationships and sex.


Stars: 3 of 4

Middle Men (Friday, August 6, 2010) (94)

Despite its two-hour runtime, Middle Men is not much of a movie and not really interesting at all. Apparently it's based on a true story (or rather "inspired" by a true story, whatever the hell that means).

Jack (Luke Wilson) is a business man living in Houston in the late 1990s with his wife and kids. He's called to LA to help a friend fix a problem because Jack is good at fixing things. Once he gets there he ends up working with two losers, Buck (Gabriel Macht) and Wayne (Giovanni Ribisi) who have somehow invented a way to pay for Internet porn with a credit card online (apparently this couldn't be done before these two schmucks came around). Jack works with them to grow their business and keep it clean.

Along the way, they get into a partnership with the Russian mafia (because as a fixer, Jack thinks this would be a good idea), kill a Russian mobster and Jack falls into a relationship with a young porn starlet and leaves his wife (who is bizarrely still in Houston while he's swinging his dick around Southern California).

The story would be more frustrating for it's holes if it wasn't totally trite. You can expect every little plot twist long before it comes onscreen. Buck and Wayne are such fools it's totally impossible they could have designed the program they designed or set up a website to feed porn through. More than anything, Jack seems like a character from another movie. He's very straight and normal, but he's surrounded by over-the-top cartoon characters like the Russian mob boss, the slimy lawyer and these two stoned freaks. Even the murder and the money are not good enough reasons for him to stick around.

There are a ton of topless women in this movie - but that is about all the excitement you get from it. Most of those tits are plastic and surgically enhanced - which is a good metaphor for the film. It's big and round and has a big cast, but it's totally phony and doesn't move much (when lying flat).

Stars: 1 of 4