Screenshot Reviews - Dark Knight Rises and Contagion

Savages - Luke McKay

Savages is Black Hawk Down meets Blue Crush, with the occasional scene made awesome as shit by the presence of Benicio Del Toro’s glorious hair/acting.  The three main characters are so boring.  I despise their stupid privileged lives, especially Ophelia’s.  There is nothing remotely worthwhile about Blake Lively’s character except, some may argue, her extremely un-unique rich ass surfer girl hotness.  Her character is a prop.  Her only purpose is being the object of desire tossed back and forth between California and Mexico.  As far as I can tell she’s desired only because she’s hot.  But she would be way hotter if she like, I don’t know, had a sense of humor or played the harpsichord but wasn’t very good at it but kept insisting on playing songs she’d just written or something.  Why can’t she be something real and new?  Ben and Chon are the main(er) characters, and the ones who have a supposedly functional love triangle thing going on with Ophelia, and they suck too.  Basically all three characters are plastic action figures freshly plucked from the still warm recesses of their factory molds.  They’re not even painted yet.  There is nothing distinguishable about them for fear of flitting too close to the edge of what is acceptable within pop culture’s strict calipers.  The plot was very entertaining, but the movie is all plot and no character.  I guess that does it for some people.  Lado, played by Del Toro, is one redeeming component of the movie.  But it’s rare (impossible?) for Benicio Del Toro not to be awesome.  I have a feeling his part wasn’t written as awesome as he made it.  Also, my friend Tedd pointed out a highly allusive scene in which Lado sniffs cocaine off of the tip of a bowie knife, as perhaps a self-given good game butt pat to Del Toro’s character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Out of 10, I give this movie a 5, because half of the time the movie was an 8 and the other half it was a 2.  As an afterthought I’d like to disclaim a bit of the above negativity by mentioning that the Navy Seal loving always camouflaged and jackknife smuggling little boy in me loved the urban warfare scenes, although he admits that good characters are still important.

Killer Joe - Nell Green

Killer Joe has to be one of the most unsettling cinema experiences I’ve had in a long time, Tine and I sat until the end credits had finished rolling in a surreal stupor and when we finally left the cinema we were both speechless (which is a rarity). I really had very little to say about this movie.  It’s taken me a week to scrape together some thoughts...

This film is extremely violent, deeply disturbing, relentless and at times very funny. Things are pretty messed up from the start – the premise is that kids Chris and Dottie (Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple), along with their father and step mum, agree to have their biological mother murdered by local cop/assassin ‘Killer Joe’ (Matthew McConaughey ) in order to claim the life insurance payout. Of course, things don’t pan out as planned and the inevitable downwards spiral of violence and desperation begins.  The audience is dragged into their miserable, fear-fuelled lives; increasingly uneasy about their prospects of making it we become enthralled in a tense race to the finish, repeatedly punctuated by ever more twisted acts of aggression, sex and intimidation.

All else aside, this film looks awesome on the big screen – it has a hint of Drive about it but less cool and more gritty. The performances are great, some are incredible - they are difficult parts to play and I was suitably impressed.  Despite the barely comprehensibly warped world and insane rollercoaster lives that these characters inhabit, mostly I was convinced by it and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a cult hit.  Their world is revealed to be consistently cruel and as the story unfolds you search in vain for the expected redeeming feature/s. Instead you are left reeling in shock – not only at what is happening but also the characters’ acceptance of it.  They are all fundamentally flawed and there is a devastating lack of empathy between them – even the protagonist, our ‘hero’ (if someone who decides to have his own mother assassinated can be considered a hero, but he is the closest thing we have and I found myself rooting for him), gets little support from his family when his life is in danger from the local heavies. In fact, it barely concerns them. Life is apparently less valuable than we were led to believe.

Now, I love a gritty genre movie as much as the next person, and I’m a sucker for the noir ‘look’. My problem is that I left the cinema unable to work out what the point was. I kept waiting for the payoff, the lesson to be learnt, the thing that justifies all this craziness. I’m still waiting. Maybe I’ve been conditioned to expect this and it’s an unreasonable criticism. I think the only thing I took away is that it reminds us humans can be fundamentally cruel, selfish and violent (but it tells us this very stylishly, so I guess that makes it OK). Sure, they all live in a pretty horrible world where it’s a struggle to survive – they’re painfully poor and lacking any opportunity to change that – but maybe they’d have a better chance if it would only stop raining for a minute, or the dog could quit barking long enough for someone to hear themselves think. Perhaps then they would bother to get dressed in the mornings instead of walking round their trailer half naked, literally.

OK fine, maybe I should get over it – there doesn’t need to be a point.  I suppose my main frustration is that the storyline is so extreme that the movie would have been more effective if it was toned down. By the end the characters are all revealed to be such nutbags that the last sequence is completely surreal. It didn’t shock me as much as it could because I didn’t quite believe it. 

So – I would recommend Killer Joe (although not to the faint hearted). It will probably make you very uncomfortable (there’s something wrong with you if it doesn’t), but there’s some merit in that, right? Failing that, go and see it for the great cinematography, awesome performances, intriguing lack of music and a whole new perspective on Matthew McConaughey. But definitely don’t go see it with your mum (or your mom).

I guess I did have something to say after all.

Safety Not Guaranteed

I'm starting to believe that there are two reasons or two ways to make a movie. One, the movie exists to tell a story not so much about people but a just a story. Two, the movie exists to teach us about people. A story is told and it's a story about people, in the general all encompassing way, that is to say, humans.

On one hand, I'm thinking that Titanic is a movie about a story. I'm willing to say that Ghost Writer, Haywire, and Avengers are all just stories that have people or persons as props or voices. On the other hand, Forest Gump, Lawrence of Arabia, There Will Be Blood, The Right Stuff (some of my favorites) are movies that obviously tell a story. They're great though because they teach about humans. It's that they share with us, they foster imagination and empathy. This designation is observed in how a plot is folded into the characters versus the characters folding into the plot. A writer or director seemingly makes a decision on behalf of the characters. Will the character's dialogue further the plot in the first place or will it further the emotional appeal of a character's plight. Maybe we could call this plot versus plight. This is about as far as I'm willing to take this designation at the moment because for now it's more of a feeling than it is a science. It's a hypothesis more than it is a law. Indeed, I love great movies that are just stories, so don't take this the wrong way. But I might be loving movies that are not just stories more than I love just stories. To call both of these versions of a movie, 'stories' might be inaccurate. I'm going to stop now cause you need to hear about Safety Not Guaranteed.

It starts with a personal ad in a newspaper from Ocean Beach, Washington, U.S.A. The poster is looking for a companion to time travel with. The poster has only done it once and he/she can't promise safety and he/she asks that the companion bring their own weapons. The wording of the ad and the jest of the journalist that pitches the idea of tracking down the foreseeable, W.O.W. enthusiast for a hopefully, humorous story leads us to believe that we're dealing with a poster that's going to be heart-warming. From the start I felt like I was watching Cool Runnings on a couch in my best friend's basement cause our Saturday little league game had been rained out. Things around me were pleasant and I settled in for a more adult, intellectual Cool Runnings experience. Aubrey Plaza and the Indian (could have been black) sidekick were emerging as more than just props in the early scenes and I was glad for that. Characters were the story as opposed to the story using some characters. Aubrey and the sidekick are interns for the abrasive, arrogant but affable journalist, Jeff (Jake Johnson). Jeff posed the story as something that could be funny but it also gave him an excuse to track down a high school hook-up. Off to Ocean Beach in Jeff's Escalade. Aubrey is staid and aloof. Sidekick is playing computer games. Jeff is hungover. Great start.

We then get to meet Kenneth (Mark Duplass). Duplass is the real deal. I'm told that he's jumping around Hollywood, meeting with and performing for and writing for and directing for big timerz. His character on The League does so well fulfilling a role in every group of guys raised on Sportscenter and internet pornography that it's eery. He steals the show on The League and does the same in Safety Not Guaranteed. He believes in time travel and believes in himself and I believe that Duplass was Kenneth. Back To The Future and a whole slew of other time travel movies have never encountered a better recipe for time travel - belief in it and belief in self. Science aside, I'll side with a character that believes like Kenneth does for making the unreal a reality. Isn't this what I'm talking about? Real people as opposed to semi-real character that just don't say much? Kenneth says something in this movie and the writers (Duplass and one of his buddies) deserve some recognition for pulling this off. "My calculations are flippin' pinpoint." I mean this movie had so many opportunities to completely wipe-out and fail miserably. Duplass and Kenneth, together, walked over the coals and quicksand with ease. Gosh, this movie is good.

So this is all I'm going to say because I want you to see this movie. Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson, Plummer, and Karan Soni (Indian sidekick), achieve Goonie-esque sportsmanship and team work and likeableness. With my ten year high school reunion on the horizon I'm urged to think about high school because of this movie. I mean how many movies have been inspired by our collective high school experiences? Be it the turmoil eccentric writers, directors, actors, and producers had to endure or be it their hilarious experiences or be it their tumultuous, tortuous experiences or be it the stories they (Kenneth) want to go back and re-write, there is something to all of this in Hollywood and plenty of all this in Safety Not Guaranteed. No doubt, you'll leave the theater with the same feeling I did when I'd leave my best friend's basement after a Saturday rain-out matinee. And, depending on how affirmed you felt in high school, you'll raise your fist as Jeff does in the last scene, a perfect scene.

Moonrise Kingdom - Luke McKay

James King killed this review (ie, good) so what I have to say is only a continuation.  This movie indeed shares multiple Wes-isms with other Wes flicks, including sets and characters that are fashionably coordinated, the hilarious and endearing resistance to believable special effects, severe quirkiness of characters and dialogue, and careful organization of small prop combinations.  I’m a big fan of King’s sentiments that MK could be just another disc to slip into Anderson’s box set.  Each of his films seems to exist within the same Anderverse and is simply separated from the next by geography or chronology, though not a difference of opinion about the world: the past is really fucking important and people make mistakes--lots of them.  One crucial missing element was Anderson’s knack for unforeshadowed and heart-wrenchingly tragic loss.