2.21.2012

A Silly 'War' Worth Fighting

by Brett Parker

Most Hollywood romances strive for heartfelt profundity and end up looking like contrived messes. The great irony of This Means War is how it announces itself as magnificently delirious junk and turns out to know quite a bit about contemporary relationships. The flick is big, dumb, commercial trash--make no mistake about it--but trash can have its perks, especially doozies about the human condition that more serious films would be too self-preserved to indulge in. Some will find the movie so preposterous that they’ll be convinced it was made by Martians, but from where I sit, its really no less contrived that a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. And its more informed about how men and women relate to one another. Which is funny.

The film centers around two CIA agents who are not only the best at their jobs, but also the best of friends. FDR (Chris Pine) is a slick ladies man who uses his charms to get through any situation, while Tuck (Tom Hardy) is a hardened professional still reeling from being a divorced dad. When they’re not surviving shoot-outs and tracking a global baddie (Til Schweiger), the fellas ponder the future of their love lives. How does one go about dating when you’re a CIA Agent?

One day, the best buds are thrilled to discover that they both have their eyes on their very own lovely lady. Unfortunately, it turns out they’ve targeted the same exact woman: Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a working gal frustrated by her loneliness who decides to indulge in both of the sweet hunks throwing their affections her way, although she’s unaware that they even know each other. Upon discovering this complication, the boys decided to conduct a gentleman’s wager: both of them will try their charming best to win Lauren’s heart without standing in each other’s way, allowing the best man to triumph naturally. Things start easily enough, but pretty soon the agents are running surveillance and wreaking havoc on each other’s dates, employing such dirty tricks as indoor sprinklers and tranquilizer darts. Pretty soon, this vicious battle runs the risk of destroying their friendship, jobs, and even their lives.

Of course This Means War already had a target on its back once cinephiles caught word that it was in the hands of McG, the music video maestro who unleashed that bubbly, sugar rush of a Charlie’s Angels update on a bewildered world back in 2000. He took a fairly simple TV premise about three female detectives and amped it up to a level of pop overkill so fluffy and candy-coated that it quickly became the cinematic equivalent of diabetes. McG knew he’d be serving up commercial pop, so he raised the content to such a hyperbolic level of style--with babelicious leads reveling in the male gaze and implausible action stunts that make The Matrix look like The Hurt Locker--that it essentially became a cartoon for 16-year-old girls. The irony, however, is that the film is probably more memorable than if the adaptation were a straight-forward, sobering detective story (a theory strengthened by the recent cancellation of a sensible-minded series remake of Charlie’s Angels on ABC). Plus, there was a certain affection for the female leads in the way the film delved into the trivialities of their love lives, giving us a sneaky peak at modern females that feels unfortunately rare in blockbuster showcases. After a same-deal Charlie’s Angels sequel, McG aspired to dignity by churning out the heartfelt We Are Marshall and the worthless Terminator: Salvation. Now, he’s back to his old pop tricks in This Means War and the result feels like a chubby kid whose returned to his favorite candy store after a wistful sabbatical.

What most people find tiresome yet I find charming about his filmmaking is how he appears to see the world through the sunny spectacles of an uncultured teenager raised on a steady diet of Americana pop. The telltale sign is how This Means War returns to the same dreamy California landscape that was prominent in the Charlie’s Angels films. Of course, this isn’t the disillusioned California of, say, Pulp Fiction, but that magical fantasy one that pre-pubescents believe is a place where any dream can come true, one filled with dates to the circus and workplaces that look like Willy Wonka’s offices. This all may be nonsense, but at least its all his nonsense. After trying to be John G. Avildsen and James Cameron, McG returns to his fancy-free playland overflowing with an adolescent idealism that is undeniably his style. It takes an astonishing detachment to preserve such a teeny-bopper worldview all the way into adulthood while most of us have adjusted our minds to our maturity. What most people don’t realize is that seeing the adult world through the eyes of a junior-high schooler can sometimes illuminate grown-up afflictions in shrewder ways than serious dramas could. If only McG had made one of his CIA Agents a conflicted sex addict, then maybe Steve McQueen could stumble upon what was missing from Shame.

So the film is a messy collage of clunky action scenes, romantic cuteness, and gags that would just make the cut on a sitcom. Yet read between the lines, and you’ll find nifty insights on the peculiar social world we live in now. The biggest surprise for me is the fact that the women are the smartest characters in the entire film. Most romantic comedies treat ladies as cutesy bimbos and find subtle ways to punish them for any signs of independence. The level-headed delight in which Lauren has her beefcakes and eats them too is kind of refreshing, and the feminist musings of her friend Trish is astoundingly not tired comic relief, but pretty much sounds like snappy advice any smart woman would give to her best friend. The idea of FDR and Tuck surveillancing Lauren with the latest technology may seem creepy, but when you think about the cyber stalking most people do nowadays with online social networks, you realize the duo’s tabs are pretty accurate by today’s standards. And you know how whenever two attractive males play best friends in a movie, there’s always talk of homoerotic undertones? Well FDR and Tuck come so close to boyfriends status that they make J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson look like Tom Hanks and Wilson the Volleyball kicking it on a beach. There were moments where they talked so close to each other’s faces that I honestly suspected they were about to kiss (a throwaway line about Tuck having once seen FDR’s penis while on assignment is also a giveaway hint). The duo’s curiously intimate hang-outs and fierce competitiveness to land a girlfriend probably says more about today’s bromances than most dudes are willing to admit.

If nothing else, This Means War is a big excuse for new-age actors to try on movie star glamour and see how it fits. Of course any critic who questions why two men would fight over Reese Witherspoon is either A) Dumb or B) Blind. The miracle here is that Witherspoon isn’t just drummed up to be a sex object but is given plenty of room to be a modern day independent woman. Not only is she allowed to be silly AND smart, but the fact that she treats seeing two men as a logical way to find romantic happiness is pretty damn enthralling. Lauren Bacall may have wanted to tweak this fetching angle up a bit, but it sure smokes Katherine Heigel’s boneheaded characterizations. Since Tom Hardy is such a dedicated method chameleon who shines in dramas, its kind of a thrill to see him doing his thing in Hollywood fluff. Of course he can do such trifle in his sleep, yet his rugged and internal characterization of a shell-shocked romantic is pretty damn inventive. I just wish Hardy’s character was written with a lighter touch to allow his charms to be jacked up full wattage, for he would probably set fire to the screen. Yet if you want charisma in hyper-drive, Chris Pine could be enough for anyone. In an era in which humble everymen have become the new screen idols, seeing a mega-smooth slickster like Pine is like a jolt of old school awesomeness. Most filmmakers and performers fumble hopelessly nowadays with smoldering ladykillers, but Pine is the real deal. When Paul Newman died, I said there will never be another like him, but man, is Pine putting up one hell of a fight!

Every once in a while, we like to eat frosting right out of the jar without any cake at all. Watching This Means War is the cinematic equivalent of doing the same thing. People who condemn this movie for being too dumb and implausible are making the dreary mistake of taking this material seriously. Sure, if this idea were played more straight-faced, we’d probably have a flick of loaded dialogue and clever deceptions that could rank with David Mamet’s best. But I can’t deny that the sugar-coated treats relentlessly dished out here left me with a big, stupid grin on my face. And the fact that McG originally planned to release different alternate endings to different theaters showing the film in the style of Clue only proves that it was designed specifically to cause such a response.

I think the essential effect of the film can be summed up in one aspect: FDR’s apartment. You’d think most CIA Agents would keep a low profile in their private lives, yet FDR has a tricked out apartment that features a see-through glass swimming pool encasing his entire roof. Never do you see such a thing in real life, but its so cool to look at! Its not necessary at all, but how often do you get to see something so insanely stylish?

2.07.2012

The Top 10 Movies of 2011

by Brett Parker

If there was one thing on the mind of movies in 2011, it was nostalgia. The cinema took every chance it could this past year to dive into the past like a Skynet Robot frantically trying to kill a member of the Connor family. There was a silent film, a look at the very invention of cinema itself, a time travel back to 1920s Paris, a greatest hits package of vintage pulp fiction formulas, a love letter to 70s-80s Spielberg hits, and Spielberg himself even paid glorious tribute to a comic book hero of yesteryear. Hell, one film even showed us the very dawn of creation. Hows that for a flashback?


With an America divided against itself, struggling to repair a broken economy and government, it made all the sense in the world that today’s audiences were yearning to revel in the comfort of earlier, golden times. But whats inspiring is that all this time traveling wasn’t just comfort food for comfort’s sake. Each film contained hidden ideals about how all this nostalgia can help us feel hopeful for the future. With 1920s Paris suggesting that no other time is as glorious as right now and a silent movie reminding us that the future can bring about wonderful creations, the past sure got us pumped to face the present.


The ultimate irony is that these giant reaches towards yesterday sure did a lot more to nail what we’re dealing with nowadays than a bunch of pretentious misfires that proclaimed to say profound things about our current state of affairs (i.e. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Shame). So here are ten films that soared above the rest this year, giving our eyes, minds, and hearts quite the workout:


1) Drive

Armed with subtle candy colors, beautifully synthesized music, and one of the coolest jackets in film history, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a pitch-perfect L.A. noir. A dangerously cool and inward Ryan Gosling takes us on a hypnotic and chaotic ride as an enigmatic wheelman out to protect his lady love (Carey Mulligan) from scary gangsters (led by Albert Brooks, doing an expertly sinister spin on his screen persona). Not only does the film dish out some of the most jazzed-up pulp we’ve ever been served, but it shrewdly comments on the World We Live In Now the way action films of the 60s and 70s used to. Whether its highlighting muted loneliness, aching romantic yearnings, or a world haunted by brutal violence, Drive is a unique pop cruise that strikes the bruised heart in all of us.


2) Hugo

Who knew that when Martin Scorsese decided to make a 3D family film based on a children’s book, he would make his most blatantly autobiographical movie since Mean Streets? On the surface, the story of a Parisian orphan named Hugo (Asa Butterfield, looking a tad like a young Scorsese, yet with majestic blue eyes all his own) unraveling the mystery of a sad toymaker named Georges (Ben Kingsley) is a whimsical adventure wonderful in its own right. Yet any cinephile can spot the delightful allusions to Scorsese’s own life: the isolated boy peaking out at the world from a tiny home, a love of the cinema, a world haunted by death and danger, an obsession with a mechanical invention, the complexities of dealing with a tough-minded female (the always-excellent Chloe Grace Moretz). Its only when the toymaker reveals himself to be Georges Melies, the pioneer of early cinema, that the film’s true subject comes in to play and Scorsese reveals his heart like never before. As the film tells the story of the invention of cinema through Meiles’ eyes, Scorsese puts his love of cinema on full display and the result is truly magical. Film restoration is one of the great passions of Scorsese’s life and career, and by finally finding a movie that makes that its centerpiece, Scorsese is able to make a film thats as wildly romantic about movies as he is.


3) The Artist

At a time when new screen technologies are rearing their head and movie theaters themselves are in threat of becoming endangered, it made a certain kind of sense that a silent film revealed itself this year to show us the ups and downs of progressive innovation. In telling the story of a silent film star (the delightful Jean Dujardin) and an up-and-coming sound starlet (the striking Berenice Bejo), The Artist fully commits to the technical formalities of the silent era and miraculously treats audiences to the magic of pure cinema in one of its most primitive forms. Its stroke of brilliance is the way director Michel Hazanavicius depicts the slow rise of the “sound era” from the viewpoint of the silent aesthetic. In doing so, we’re able to contemplate how change can be a very scary thing to deal with, but is absolutely necessary if more beautiful things are to manifest in this world. Its rare to see a love letter to art so nostalgic for the past yet so optimistic of the future.


4) Midnight in Paris

Some people have dismissed this film as just one of Woody Allen’s silly day dreams, but it sure is a fun daydream to get lost in. Allen imagines a hack Hollywood screenwriter (pitch-perfect Allen avatar Owen Wilson) visiting Paris and slipping through a time warp that allows him to visit the 1920s Golden Age, in which writers and artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein indulged in art, ideas, and partying. Allen’s Paris of yesteryear may be a highly-romanticized one, but it captures everything we love and admire about the characters of that era and probably isn’t too terribly off from how we’d hope our own time travel to that very place would be. The real beauty comes in Allen’s realization is that no one living in a golden age ever realizes its a golden age, so perhaps the present is far more splendid that we realize.


5) The Tree of Life

If I were to tell you that the Meaning of Life could be captured in a single film, you’d probably scoff and tell me that such a thing couldn’t happen. Yet Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life damn near proves it can. The film follows the story of a 1950 Texas youth (a terrifically alert Hunter McCracken) who grows into a disillusioned modern man (a melancholy Sean Penn) haunted by the imprints of his graceful mother (a radiant Jessica Chastain) and harsh father (a pitch-perfect Brad Pitt in one of his very best performances). Malick brings a stunning vividness to the peculiar beauty of everyday life while his bold depictions of Earth’s prehistoric creations to its afterlife end prove to be transcendently magnificent. Malick is a cinematic poet who ponders the enormity of nature and the uncertainty of the universe, and this is undoubtedly his masterpiece.


6) The Skin I Live In

With his usual tastes for ambiguous kinkiness and the blurring lines dividing sexual identity, Spanish legend Pedro Almodovar pushes his themes to their absolute breaking point, and the result is shockingly spellbinding. In telling the story of a mad plastic surgeon (a superbly creepy Antonio Banderas) conducting scientific and sexual experiments on a captured human subject (the beautifully mysterious Elena Anaya), Almodovar has made his Vertigo, only he goes to outrageously perverse depths that Hitchcock wouldn’t even dream of visiting. I’ve seen some crazy twist endings in my day, but this one has one of the most jaw-droppingly disturbing ones I’ve ever seen. But since Almodovar is an expert on making the twisted seem poetic, he makes this mad science shocker seem brilliantly philosophical.


7) J. Edgar

Here was one of the trickiest subject matters for a modern day film with one of the most demanding roles for an unlikely actor, and it was pulled off with expert ease so seamless, you can almost miss the grandness of it all. In exploring his usual idea of conservative values growing hip to outside ideals, director Clint Eastwood was able to see controversial FBI pioneer J. Edgar Hoover in a light that both deconstructed his flaws and humanized his ambitions. Leonardo DiCaprio is perhaps not the first actor you’d think of to portray such a pudgy bulldog of a man, but the performance is one of his most convincing chameleon jobs to date. Whats most surprising, and most endearing, about the film is how it turns out to be one of the best love stories of the year. The script, another triumph of history and heart from Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, suggests that the close relationship between Hoover and his live-in confidant Clyde Tolson (an outstanding Armie Hammer) was every bit romantic as most people suspected it was. The result is astoundingly touching. Hoover’s old-age confession to Tolson about how much he always needed him is one of the most blindsided jabs to the heart I experienced at the movies in this, or any, year.


8) Warrior

Director Gavin O’Connor likes to explore masculine archetypes through the device of old-fashioned melodrama, and with Warrior he’s crafted his most complete and exciting work yet. O’Connor’s bruising and painful tale of estranged brothers forced to do battle in a Mixed-Martial-Arts match was greatly assisted by true grit performances from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as the toughie brothers and Nick Nolte as their wistful, recovering-alcoholic father. As one brother fights to atone his actions in war and the other fights to save his home from the effects of the Great Recession, O’Connor comments on today’s America in shrewd ways the Hollywood of yesteryear used to favor. What that leaves us with is a sports film with the crowd-pleasing draw of a Rocky picture, yet with deep, unrelenting wounds that makes this an East of Eden with fists.


9) Super 8

J.J. Abrams makes no secret about the influence that Steven Spielberg has had on all of his work, and here he sets out to honor the popcorn thrills and childlike wonder of his idol’s earlier works. The result is an uncanny resemblance to the late 70s-early 80s Spielberg thrill-rides, with an exhilarating zippiness and sneaky heart that is all Abrams. Abrams exudes a giddy, autobiographical joy as he depicts a group of adolescent cinephiles who try to make their own homemade zombie flick and accidentally stumble upon a real-life monster the government is racing to keep under wraps. Abrams shows impressive control as he fuses alien wonder, monster movie horror, and jolly childhood exuberance into his Spielberg Greatest-Hits package, yet the real surprise is the way the ending reconciles adolescent pain and supernatural wonder in a way that, yes, outdoes Spielberg himself.


10) The Adventures of Tintin

Speaking of old-fashioned Spielberg, he also decided to get in touch with his old-school-self by treating us to one of his adventurous roller-coasters basked in the latest 3D, motion-capture technology. Inspired by his longtime love of the inspiration comic, Spielberg brings the candy colors and elaborate dangers of Herge’s classic comic to eye-popping life with an animated performance-capture zest thats honestly more fun to look at than anything in Avatar. Spielberg gets back in touch with his inner-Indiana Jones as his camera whooshes through irresistible cartoon landscapes with the reckless abandon of a classic B-movie. The actors tear through their animated disguises with breathless glee, the camera circles frantically and doesn’t let up for one minute, and the film’s centerpiece chase scene, a frantic race through a Bagghar town, is one of the most thrilling chase scenes I’ve ever witnessed on the big screen. Some have dismissed Tintin’s big screen outing as nothing more than a big screen comic book, but most of the time, comic books can mean more to us than pretentious Oscar bait, and there is simply no denying that the child inside me was thrilled out of his mind.


STAND-OUT PERFORMANCES

This is usually the part where I highlight the “Honorable Mentions,” exceptional films that almost made my Top 10 list. Yet looking over the films of 2011, I couldn’t help but notice that there were an abundance of films in which the key performances were better than the actual films themselves. So I’ve instead decided to pay tribute to those knockout performances that shined ever so brightly this past year. For these gifted actors reminded us that you should never underestimate the power of movie star wattage:


Michael Fassbender, X-Men: First Class

Ryan Gosling, Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Justin Timberlake & Mila Kunis, Friends with Benefits

Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn