The Most Entertaining 'Gatsby' Yet

by Brett Parker

Whether or not you’ll get enjoyment out of the latest cinematic adaptation of The Great Gatsby probably hinges on whether or not you find director Baz Luhrmann to be an exhilarating visionary or a deranged lunatic.  His knack for giving old world tales an immediate contemporary energy and over-the-top glamour can either be seen as gloriously romantic or desperately shallow.  As for myself, I’ve always been a big fan of his grand style.  I was fascinated by the startling edge he brought to romantic tragedy in Romeo & Juliet and surprisingly floored by the candy-coated operatic emotions of Moulin Rouge.

Yet deep down, even Luhrmann’s biggest detractors have to concede that a Great Gatsby adaptation in his outsized hands is just what the cinematic doctor ordered for that story.  Past adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary work have either been paralyzed by a scripture-like devotion to the source material (the sluggish 1974 version starring Robert Redford) or laughable in its loose liberties (the 1949 version, which owes more to Al Capone than to Scott Fitzgerald).  Since past versions have proven to be vapid in hindsight, it wouldn’t hurt to see Luhrmann infuse his beautiful decorating and swing-for-the-fences melodrama with the classic.  And I must confess that this is undoubtedly the most entertaining and gripping movie version of the novel we’ve had yet.

For those of you that flunked out of high school English, I’ll offer a brief recap of the plot:  an ambitious Yale graduate named Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) travels from the midwest to New York in the summer of 1922 to seek a prosperous career in bonds.  In the blue-blooded village of West Egg on Long Island, he catches up with his beautiful cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan) who is married to old money millionaire Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).  While dining in their elegant mansion and accompanying Tom on a booze-soaked rendezvous in the city, Nick starts to get a taste of the rich excesses and loose morals associated with the era now known as the “roaring 20’s.”

But Nick doesn’t get truly up-close-and-personal with the grandness of the Jazz Age until he gets invited to a gargantuan house party thrown by his neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  Gatsby is a mysterious millionaire who throws the wildest parties at his gigantic mansion for the entire New York social scene weekend after noisy weekend.  An articulate gentleman decked out in the most dapper styles, no one can really pin down Gatsby’s backstory, especially where he gets the money to throw such ridiculous parties.  As Nick tries to get acquainted with his new neighbor, it becomes clear that the mystery man holds a curious history with Daisy and has a burning obsession with her that’s fueling a elaborate romantic plot in his head.  As Gatsby tries to reconcile with and romanticize Daisy with Nick’s help, things shockingly careen from care-free exuberance to soul-crushing tragedy.  

There are those that hold Fitzgerald’s novel in holy revere as one of the greatest in all American literature, and I happen to be one of those people.  I went gaga for the book when I discovered it in high school and I’ve read it once a year ever since I was sixteen.  So believe me, no one went to see this movie with a bigger red pen than myself.  But I honestly found very little to object to.  I appreciated the way Luhrmann threw subtlety into the fire and allowed the screen to lose itself in the rabid excitement and overwhelming emotions one feels when reading the novel for the first time.  Luhrmann’s taste for dizzying hyperrealities actually suits the wild, gorgeous energy of the roaring 20’s quite well: the outfits pop with dandified colors, the lavish New York landscape has the beauty of an old world painting, and the party scenes have a reckless abandon that’s as intoxicating as the booze being consumed.  One of the unspoken truths about the novel is that if it weren’t for Fitzgerald’s elegant prose and keen insights, the plot itself would slightly resemble a soap opera.  And since Luhrmann’s calling card is making soap opera stories vibrant and lyrical, you realize he does more to assist Fitzgerald’s ideas than to harm them.  

The only two things I really have to complain about, oddly, have to do with hip-hop and historical atmosphere.  Like Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann anachronistically employs modern day songs to help contemporary audiences feel the thrill that people of a past era felt when listening to their own music.  Songs by Lana Del Rey and Florence & The Machine fit wonderfully into the narrative, and I was surprised by the way an electric dance track by Fergie helped energize a infectious party scene at Gatsby’s mansion.  But tracks featuring Jay-Z prove to be a jarring mistake.  I love Jay-Z’s music, but proclaiming his songs as being in-sync with the Jazz Age is a hell of a stretch.  It sounds as if the New Jack City soundtrack has been played over random scenes in Gone With the Wind.  Such an incongruity makes one also ponder if the atmosphere itself is a tad too cartoonish for its own good.  While the world we see is certainly an enticing fever dream of the 1920’s, it’s not exactly a recognizable part of America’s historical reality.  

But these really are just minor complaints, for whatever lumpiness the film runs into, there are wonderful performances here to guide you through.  DiCaprio is quite honestly the best Gatsby there’s ever been.  He’s polished up his sunny matinee idol looks to superbly heat up Gatsby’s shiny exterior, yet it’s the actor’s experience in playing isolated eccentrics and riled-up obsessives that bring acute urgency to the character’s decidedly disturbing inner-life.  Mulligan makes for a wonderful Daisy by shrewdly allowing her fragility to simultaneously suggest a delicate beauty and spoiled child.  Edgerton displays the correct physical presence and brutish confidence to convey Tom Buchanan’s assured arrogance.  And I was surprised at how much power and feeling an ideally cast Maguire blasts into Nick Carraway.  If the narrator of this tale proved to be too timid and passive in past adaptations, then it’s refreshing to see Maguire exposing the fraught nerves and curious heartache within a man forced to witness the moral decay surrounding him.  

Literary purists can rest easy knowing that Fitzgerald’s novel is too towering to be hindered by the efficiency or incompetence of a filmed adaptation. While Fitzgerald in his lifetime had certain reservations about the art of film, and would undoubtedly shake his head at certain passages in this adaptation, I think he would’ve marveled at the extravagant shrine Luhrmann built to his words and been overall happy to see that his thoughts about modernity are still honored in these modern times.  As a true lover of the novel, it’s rather hard not to get seduced by Luhrmann’s gaga love for the era and material, and as a cinephile, it’s hard not to get caught up in such an outrageous explosion of vintage sights and sounds.  

Distinct Yet Seamless: A Word on M83's 'Oblivion' Score

by Brett Parker

If you have two hours of boredom to kill and movies are typically your go-to activity for that, then there are a lot worse choices you can make than watching Oblivion, a fine product from the recent surge of end-of-the-world flicks.  While you can often catch this futuristic tale swinging for the sci-fi fences, it ultimately ends up being enjoyable on the level of a short story in a pulp magazine, which isn’t a bad thing at all.  While the plot chugs away in splendid ignorance of the fact that movies like Wall-E and Moon exist, you still find yourself marveling at the sleek production design and the vulgarly picturesque evocation of a devastated Earth.  Plus Tom Cruise, a movie star I’ve always admired, proves efficient in a role tailor-made for him: an action figure who reflects on his own nature with great intensity.

Yet for all its visual bells and whistles, the best thing about Oblivion is the musical score.    French rock band M83, known for their distinct electronic sounds, helped develop the score with composer Joseph Trapanese and it’s not hard to hear why the marriage between the band’s music and a sci-fi movie is a perfect match.  Anyone who’s ever heard their stuff knows they churn out the kind of tunes the crew of the USS Enterprise would listen to during their downtime, so it makes sense that their robotic sounds help give a sense of cosmic otherness to a galactic dystopia tale.  Another paradoxical yet beautiful effect of M83’s contributions is the futuristic retro vibe it gives the film.  The band’s spaced-out tunes feel as if they’re straight out of the 80s, a period in which such sounds represented that era’s idea of what the future might sound like.  As a result, Oblivion ends up having the old school sounds of a sci-fi popcorn flick from the 80s, incongruently giving a tale of futuristic despair a glowing vibe of cinematic nostalgia.  

I certainly don’t want to oversell this expert score, however.  It falls more into the category of a competent movie score as opposed to transcendent rock.  Long stretches of the music play like Hans Zimmer hand-me-downs and you really wish M83’s trademark sounds were given more room to breathe.  But the band’s triumph is that they made me want to listen to the entire soundtrack album for pleasure outside of the movie, which certainly isn’t the case with most film scores.  The brutal truth about most movie score albums is that they largely go unsought, for most of the time they consist of bland and unremarkable musical undercurrents that aren’t much fun without viewing the actual film they accompany.  This makes sense, however, for if instrumental scores consisted of mostly killer, stand-alone jams in their own right, then they probably wouldn’t fit too easily into the bedrock of a film narrative.  M83’s Oblivion work respects these two ideals and demonstrates that a perfect film score should be distinct yet seamless.

There’s a school of thought that a film score should almost disappear into the film, helping emotions and plot points move along with little fuss.  In theory, this is a sophisticated idea, but in practice, it can prove to be uninteresting in an area where great power can be added to a film’s aesthetic value.  42, for example, provided a score by Mark Isham that proved to be sentimental and syrupy.  It owed more to Hollywood’s bags of manipulative tricks than to anything organic in the film’s actual story.  Perhaps the score could’ve evoked the music of its time period or even music that the film’s hero, Jackie Robinson, enjoyed in his day.  But the score certainly doesn’t betray the craftsmanship of the film, for it does its job of helping the story along in the most primitive way possible.  For most composers realize that it’s far more damaging to have a score that steals all the attention from everything else on screen.  The biggest perpetrator of a distracting score I can remember is Nobel Son, which employed a heavy techno score by Paul Oakenfold for no coherent reason.  His work on Swordfish fit perfectly into that world of electronic chaos, but in a human con game with greedy double-crosses, you really had no clever idea why his music showed up there.

When it comes to transcendent scores that marry both of these ideals wonderfully, my favorite recent example is composer Cliff Martinez’s ambient work on the Drive soundtrack.  With sublime assistance from a crystal baschet, Martinez produced an unconventional dreamlike sound that shrewdly honored director Nicolas Winding Refn’s fairy tale take on his noir tale.  With great assistance from retro-centric pop songs, the hymnal-like score held such wounded and yearning sounds devoid of any time and place, that it made you realize it fits the hero’s psychology perfectly.  Another exceptional recent score is Jonny Greenwood’s mischievous work on The Master, which took formalities from a classical American melodramatic score and filtered them through a nightmare.  It’s as if the music from Written on the Wind was played through Satan’s record player.  The result is an unsettling score that perfectly reflects the movie’s idea of a picture-perfect America twisted into unease.  And now we have M83’s Oblivion work to add to this growing trend of striking and unique movie music.

If nothing else, Oblivion director Joespeh Kosinski certainly knows the power of a good movie soundtrack.  He employed techno kings Daft Punk to help with the score of his Tron: Legacy, although even a casual Daft Punk listener knows the duo’s sounds were kept on a very tight cinematic leash in that outing.  M83 is certainly used in a more cannily fashion.  But the point is Kosinski’s acute realization that a musical score shouldn’t rot in monotony but should push the creative boundaries to see how unique it can be while still serving its purpose.  And I’m all for this, since music can be one of the most beautiful pieces to a cinematic puzzle.  If directors can put so much emphasis on an actress’s eyes, beautiful lighting, and dapper costumes, then why can’t they also obsess over a killer soundtrack that fires on all cylinders?

Reflections on Roger Ebert

by Brett Parker

When Roger Ebert passed away on April 4th, 2013 after a long and grueling battle with cancer, it was safe to say that we’ve perhaps lost the most recognized and popular movie critic we’ve ever had.  An exuberant and witty critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert first gained face value on At the Movies, a TV show where he faced off with rival critic Gene Siskel over opinions on all the latest releases, giving birth to the trademark seal of cinematic approval: “Two Thumbs Up!”  Yet years after Gene Siskel passed away and the TV Show went through several different incarnations, Ebert began to grow a really inspiring hold on the film community just as he was being tested with the most horrific battle of his life.  He had a battle with thyroid cancer that ended with the removal of his lower jaw, robbing him of his ability to speak.  It was during this period of silence in which Ebert churned out writing like never before, enriching his web site with all kinds of thoughts and essays, mostly on cinematic matters and human observations.  Since writing online became one of the few ways he could still communicate with the world, his personal homepage became a hub of cinematic communication across the world, as film minds from all over contributed their opinions to his page and Roger graciously gave them a platform to speak and converse with them.  Ebert’s enormous output and constant curation of his site makes one realize that perhaps he did more than anyone to alter the face of online film criticism as we now know it.

Yet when he passed away recently, I didn’t immediately feel like we had lost a seminal cinematic figure but more like I had lost one of my most treasured film buddies.  Mind you, I never actually got to meet Roger Ebert.  The closest I ever came to communicating with him was the time I posted a picture on his Facebook page of John Belushi and himself hanging out at a restaurant in Chicago sometime in the late 70s.  He commented back, saying he had fond memories of that restaurant while thanking me for the post.  It was a small exchange of perhaps the lowest communicative facet, but I was still as excited as a teenage 1960s girl who got to talk with one of The Beatles.  It was, however, a testament to his writing style that his good-humored, down to earth musings made one feel like they were hearing off-the-cuff thoughts from one of their closest friends.  His words were breezy and laid-back (which would make him unjustly accused of being dimwitted) yet were packed with overzealous love for the movies you could find in any enthusiastic cinephile.  While he had a scholarly knowledge of film and an intelligent grace for writing, he still made you feel like he was an eager movie nut just like you.

Like most people, I first became aware of Ebert when he became the co-host of At the Movies which would later go on to become known as Siskel & Ebert.  The show was not only the dawn of movie review blurbs on television, but some theorize it was the program that launched a thousand adults fighting like school children on talk show settings.  As a very young cinephile, I was curious to see the men behind the “Two Thumbs Up” seal that graced the many VHS boxes I had encountered in my life.  So I used to sneakily stay up late on Sundays to catch their show, and I was quickly hooked.  The sight of two grown men who looked like college literary professors arguing ferociously over their opinions of movies was, and still is, a hypnotically awesome sight.  Their thoughtful praise of good films and cynical nitpicking at bad films was nirvana for film nerds and a delightful education for unsuspecting civilians.  But of course there was nothing quite like their heated on-air arguments, which made most divorced couples look like Care Bears by comparison.  In fact, the most unpleasant antidotes in Ebert’s life story outside of his cancer are the nasty acts of sabotage and relentless bickering between the pair that allegedly happened behind-the-scenes of their show, according to eye witness accounts.  YouTubing “Siskel and Ebert Outtakes” will quickly give you an idea of what I’m referring to.

Once the internet eventually came about, I was excited to learn that every Friday, Ebert would have his print reviews released on the Chicago Sun-Times website (and later on his own home page, rogerebert.com).  I recall that the very first review I ever read of his was Charlie’s Angels, a film he rated with 1/2 a star, alerting me to the notion that it was theoretically possible to rate a film with 1/2 a star.  While I’ve always been entertained by Charlie’s Angels in the same way most people are entertained by train wrecks, Ebert was having none of that.  “Charlie’s Angels is eye candy for the blind,” he wrote, “this film is a dead zone in [the starring actresses’] lives, and mine.”  From this first review, I noticed qualities in his writing that would keep me coming back to him time and time again for his opinion: his sense of humor and his ability to see past a film’s surface to just what the hell is really going on.  Since the Chicago-Sun Times website and his own home page archived his reviews from his early days of being a critic, a ritual formed where every time I watched a movie, I would immediately seek out Roger’s opinion of the movie online.  He was great at getting to the essence of what a movie was trying to do and hinting at the unconscious ways it could effect your mindset.  The uncanny thing about him was that I would love a specific movie, he would hate that same film, yet I would agree with every single thing he wrote about the film.  I think the biggest gulf between our opinions ever was when I had absolute love for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village upon first viewing only to discover that Ebert couldn’t have hated it more.  Still, he wasn’t necessarily wrongheaded in his reasons for hating the film.  Besides, I would soon go on to discover that defending The Village as a really good movie is something of an uphill battle in the cinephile community.  

I spent my college years studying cinema at Purchase College in New York, and it was amongst my film professors and fellow classmates in which I discovered that there are, in fact, a number of people who have very little respect for Roger Ebert as a film critic.  The main problems his detractors have with him is that they find his writing style and opinions of movies to be too simple-minded, they feel he champions frivolous flicks too often, and that he’s too hyperbolic in his praise and too condescending in his put-downs.  While there are film writers out there who hold a more academic vocabulary and scholarly thought process than Roger, it’s still a sin to mistake his simpleness for stupidness.  His achievement is to make the idea of intelligent film criticism accessible and readable to people of any age, creed, or education, allowing everyday people to form their own intelligent thoughts about movies.  And he wasn’t above showing the public that he could have fun with silly flicks, too.  As Pauline Kael once wrote, “movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”  So I admire Roger greatly for favoring trash when he saw fit, while the pretentious idea would be to snobbishly frown down upon them.  You can say what you want about the man, but he stuck to his true opinions no matter what.  I’ll admit that I’ve gone on in life to find better film writers than him.  Pauline Kael, amidst all her cynicism and curious celebrity encounters, took my understanding of movies into a whole new stratosphere and, for my money, Tom Carson  gets my vote for the best film critic I’ve ever read, for most critics couldn’t match his wit and perceptions at gunpoint.  But still, I’m eternally grateful for Ebert pointing my understanding of movies into the right direction.  If he was indeed a gateway towards a grander academic understanding of cinema, I couldn’t have asked for a better entry portal.

No matter what you think about his movie opinions, you still have to admit that his online efforts during his period of physical silence was quite an achievement.  I can’t think of a film critic who has used online social media more shrewdly than he has.  I remember he used his Facebook and Twitter accounts wonderfully to dish out awesome links and articles regarding all things cinema and also found clever ways to make his older reviews relevant in the present (“Today would’ve been Humphrey Bogart’s birthday?  Why not check out my essay on Casablanca!”)  Since the loss of his voice gave him a more burning need to communicate, he started to go beyond cinema and began writing about matters of human nature and spiritual philosophy.  No matter what subject he wrote about, his words were always deeply heartfelt and surprisingly illuminating.  I remember his article about his battle with alcoholism, “My Name is Roger, and I’m an Alcoholic,” brought invaluable clarity to the horrors of the disease.  I sat down recently to read Life Itself, Ebert’s memoirs covering the entire scope of his life, and I have to admit that I was initially frustrated on first reading.  Usually when I read an autobiography, I urgently wish that the author would dive headfirst into the nitty gritty of why the subject is famous in the first place instead of lumbering endlessly through their early childhood and formative years.  And Life Itself displays Ebert so in love with every minute aspect on his life that he romantically rambles on over what seems to be every damn thing that ever happened to him.  If you want to read about his trips to Cannes, his fights with Siskel, and his ordeal with cancer, you must first read him go on and on about the books he loved as a kid,  what his catholic school looked like, his high school newspaper experiences, etc.  But once I stopped acting like a lunkhead towards the book did I truly see the beauty in what he was doing.  He undoubtedly knew he was facing the final years of his life, and he couldn’t help but be thankful and loving towards every single aspect of his entire life, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The book revealed that Roger could spot all that is special and holy in every moment he every experienced and his touching perceptions of both the boring and exciting things are truly inspiring.  We should all be so lucky to recall our lives with such warmth and appreciation when we reach the end.

Once the full realization of Ebert’s passing began to sink in, I became filled with sadness knowing that I would never again get to read his opinions on all the new releases.  There would be no more eager rush to his website every Friday morning to find out all his latest thoughts.  And there would never again be any more of his treasured Great Movies essays, in which his re-evaluations of cherished classics would not only deepen your appreciation of said films but make you re-watch them with a rejuvenated enthusiastic glee.  I usually try to avoid hyperbole when writing about a famous person’s passing, but I truly do feel a void with Ebert’s loss.  As a devoted cinephile, I often wonder if they have movies in the afterlife.  Heaven just won’t be heaven without a movie theater that churns out all the new releases and beloved classics.  For Ebert’s sake, I hope such a theater really does exist.  It’s wonderful to ponder that perhaps he could use that big heavenly screen to help share his warm views and wonderful jokes with all the other movie-loving souls surrounding him in the other realm.

'Oz' the Mild and Mediocre

by Brett Parker

The Wizard of Oz is such a universally beloved classic that there are those who find the existence of Oz the Great and Powerful, a big budget special effects-ridden prequel to the classic tale, to be something of a sacrilege.  As for me, I don’t mind it so much.  Author L. Frank Baum wrote 14 novels about the land of Oz, proving that mythical landscapes are usually too vast and fruitful to be limited to one story.  What if Tolkien put Middle-Earth to rest after The Hobbit?  And those that accuse the new film of being a transparent excuse to roll out bloated CGI candy for cash forget that the original Wizard of Oz was also a display for Hollywood bells and whistles of its time (ponder when Technicolor was new and musical numbers were the norm).  The allure of the Oz universe mixed with director Sam Raimi’s adolescent need to deliver a popcorn genre’s giddy jollies had me sorta, kinda looking forward to the movie in the vain of growing an unexpected craving for a hot fudge sundae.

So it’s somewhat disheartening to the child inside of me that I found Oz the Great and Powerful to be a disappointment.  While the rainbow-soaked visuals give your eyes something to do and star James Franco’s reeking luncay is an entity to behold as usual, the plot turns out to be pretty flimsy stuff.  It’s obvious the film is pitching the story at a children’s tale level, but when you consider the richness of the original classic story, this film’s vapidness truly grows unnerving.  

The film opens in 1905 Kansas where we meet Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a sideshow con artist who uses slight of hand tactics and grand illusions to fool normal folks into thinking he is a powerful magician.  Aside from being a calculating huckster, we also learn that Oscar is a heartbreaking cad who has torn through a string of beauties, including the kind-hearted country girl, Annie (Michelle Williams).  Upon discovering that one of the circus strongman wants to hurt him for flirting with his wife, Oscar races to escape unharmed by hopping into a hot air balloon and flying away.  Yet seconds after doing so, the balloon comes up against a deadly tornado and Oscar gets sucked right up into the center of it.

Instead of dying, Oscar discovers that he’s been mysteriously transported to a magical land called Oz, a bizarre and beautiful hallucinatory landscape filled with singing munchkins, flying monkeys, dark forests, giant bubbles, and a yellow brick road to help guide him around.  The first person he meets in this strange land is a beautiful witch named Theodora (Mila Kunis) who believes that he is a prophesied powerful wizard who has been sent to save a kingdom from doom.  Theodora takes Oscar to an extravagant Emerald City and introduces him to her witch sister, Evanora (Rachel Weisz), who informs him that all the riches in the city will be his if he travels to the darker part of the land and kills a Wicked Witch.  Realizing he’s out of his depth but yearning for endless gold, Oscar decides to take the mission.

Guided by a talking winged monkey (voiced by Zach Braff) and a tiny porcelain girl (Joey King), Oscar travels to the darker forests of Oz and discovers not a scary, wicked witch, but a beautiful, pure witch named Glinda (Michelle Williams).  Since Glinda is a dead ringer for the sweet-natured girl Oscar knew from Kansas, he suspects that she may not be the evil witch he was led to believe and that the sisters back in the Emerald City may be up to something sinister.  This all leads to revealing motives and an epic struggle that will cause Oscar to rely on his wits and tricks to convince an entire kingdom that he has what it takes to be a mighty wizard. 

With all the dreamlike sights and capable actors on display, you keep wishing that the script would do evocative things with them, but things are kept achingly simple-minded and devoid of such things as complexity and creativity.  It’s a mystery why this written-from-scratch prequel didn’t dive more into Baum’s other Oz novels, which went to richer and darker places than the first story did.  Walter Murch’s Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel to Wizard of Oz which followed Baum’s novels much more closely, may have been too disturbing to become beloved family entertainment, but it was uncompromising and fascinating in the way it explored more troubling depths within Oz’s logistics.  I don’t feel like it’d be too daunting to find a middle ground between children’s entertainment and edgier mythic drama, and it would certainly make Oz the Great and Powerful miles more fulfilling than it actually is.

That’s not to say that potential isn’t hinted at in the film’s membrane.  One of the many pleasures of the Oz universe is how it’s an exuberant fantasy playground to work out human morals and values.  The eventual trajectory of Oscar’s journey of redemption evokes neat ideas regarding realizing one’s potential, the scrappy resourcefulness of oddball simpletons, the strength of ordinary people when they unite in a crisis situation, and the salvation one can find in camaraderie.  If only the screenplay by Mitchell Kapner (The Whole Nine Yards) and David Lindsay-Abaire (Rise of the Guardians) knew how to make these things pop with emotional power.  Plus another reason this prequel is so disappointing is because for some cinephiles, seeing the Evil Dead filmmaker at the helm of an Oz film is something of a beautiful oddball triumph.  One review pointed out that this flick has more in common with Army of Darkness than the original Wizard of Oz.  While some may find that infuriating, I find that some kind of awesome.  Raimi has always been a director in love with the simple, primal pleasures of popcorn movies, especially their corniness (which I mean as the sincerest compliment).  As a beloved fan of all things Oz, you can certainly sense Raimi’s childlike joy in dishing out his merry set pieces, especially in scenes where monstrous threats lunge at the camera with some of that old Evil Dead pluck.  The enthusiasm is certainly there, it’s just a shame a smarter screenplay wasn’t there to guide Raimi through his candy-coated passion.

While some people raised their eyebrows at the casting of James Franco as the man who would become the wonderful Wizard of Oz, I must admit that I was looking forward to the performance.  Franco’s puckish nature and curated weirdness seems like the perfect fit for a calculating conjurer in a mythical kiddie land and I feel like original choice Robert Downey, JR. would’ve been too overqualified to put yet another spin on his whole irreverent-oddball-seeks-redemption act he curated to magnificence in Iron Man (while were at it, I think Bruce Campbell, a Raimi all-star who turns up in his trademark cameo here, would’ve made a phenomenal Oz).  In practice, Franco isn’t as commanding or possessive in the role as you wish he could be, but his naturally oozing strangeness easily makes him the most interesting thing in the whole movie.  By the time he reaches his eventual destination as a gigantic floating head surrounded by smoke and flames, I smiled.  What’s really a let-down with the cast is seeing some of the most beautiful and talented of today’s actresses being wasted in watered-down witch roles.  Weisz and Williams look stranded in roles that are pure cardboard and Kunis is especially a gigantic fumble.  While her radiant eyes are certainly the most memorable visual from this trip to Oz, the eventual nature of her role has her overselling it way too much.  It’s annoying to ponder that she probably developed laryngitis from her performance.   And speaking of vocals, I found it extremely amusing that Zach Braff, voicing a talking monkey, sounds uncannily like Billy Crystal.

Lord knows this movie barely had any shot at toppling the original Wizard of Oz, but as much as I tried to conjure up my inner-child like the kidnapped tyke from Poltergeist, I honestly couldn’t make myself care that much about anything happening on the screen.  The best thing I can say about Oz the Great and Powerful is that I found it more enjoyable than Tim Burton’s misguided Alice in Wonderland, which more or less demonstrates the same plot and idea.  It’s been reported that another Oz adventure is in the works and I hope that this time the writers delve further into Baum’s novels and realize that a lot more was going on than just cutesy kiddie stuff.  And if for some reason James Franco can’t return for the lead role, they better get Bruce Campbell on the phone immediately.  

A 'Man' Who Knows His Noir

by Brett Parker

Dead Man Down is a neo-noir thriller which marks the English-language debut of director Niels Arden Oplev, and the film really signifies how much the genre and Hollywood needs people like him right now.  At a time when a lot of tough guy crime thrillers feel like copies of a copy of a copy of watered down ideas, Oplev dazzles us with his economical bag of tricks, which includes slow-burn narrative layers, rich characters who make you feel the ooze of their torment, and a relentless feeling of dread that never stops reminding us how this movie world has too many scary things in common with the real world.  All of these things come together in the end to create what has to be one of the most gripping and involving crime thrillers I’ve seen in many a moon.

As the film opens, we meet Victor (Colin Farrell), a rising player in a crime syndicate led by the ruthless Alphonse Hoyt (Terrance Howard).  Someone has been sending Alphonse and his flunkies ambiguous clues that hint towards a deadly game of revenge in which the crime lord is at the center of.  What starts off as distorted pictures and notes soon leads to the death of one of Alphonse’s comrades with the promise of more violent deeds.  This sends his crew of trusted thugs scrambling to solve the mystery of who could possibly be trying to wipe out the entire gang, although Victor knows more about the situation that he hints at.

Things grow complicated as Victor meets Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a facially-scarred woman who lives in an apartment building directly across from him.  The two have been exchanging glances from their living room windows across the distance, and Beatrice has decided to break the ice and get to know him.  Yet what starts out as a harmless courtship turns into a dark plot of revenge once Beatrice reveals that she knows a dark secret about Victor and tries to blackmail him.  She wants him to kill the man responsible for the death of her husband or else she goes to the police with his secret.  As Beatrice tries to course Victor into her seething desire for retribution, what she doesn’t realize is that Victor himself is already deep into his own complicated plans for vengeance.  

Oplev is perhaps most famous for directing the original-Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the version that wisely knew how to make its troubled world terrifying while David Fincher unnervingly fetishized it in his American version.  The joy in watching Dead Man Down is the way Oplev allows his foreign values to nest right into a dependable Hollywood genre.  His characters hold a fascinating way of being both paralyzed and driven by concealed pain.  While his protagonists take direct lines of action towards vengeance, it’s that very thirst for revenge that numbs them out from making normal human connections.  This is felt in the way the early courtship scenes between Victor and Beatrice hold the quiet delicacy of trying to munch on potato chips in a library.  Most thankfully of all, Oplev knows how to conceal depths of duplicity and moral decay in his plot and allow them to spring up like baby sharks as the plot rolls along.  The smart script by J.H. Wyman (The Mexican) is ingenious in the way it ties everything together throw hidden motives and sneaky agendas and Oplev makes it burn with a vivid resonance of wistfulness and corruption.   

One of the biggest treats Dead Man Down dishes out is the pleasure of seeing an ultra-cool cast giving expert performances in roles they soar best in.  Colin Farrell gets to employ his action movie smarts and inward nuances to make you feel every inch of Victor’s haunted core.  As Beatrice, Noomi Rapace once again plays an emotionally and physically scarred woman for Oplev, but this time she is allowed more of a feminine vulnerability that is quite heartbreaking.  Terrence Howard finds the perfect villainous role to make great use out his dapper suaveness, smoldering masculinity, and distinct voice.  One of the great mysteries of the current Hollywood mentality is why a unique smoothie like Howard isn’t more of a marquee movie star.  And the cast doesn’t even slum it in the supporting roles, for Oplev is generous in giving us seasoned veterans who could crush these roles in their sleep.  Dominic Cooper, Armand Assante, and F. Murray Abraham bring such color and verve to supporting parts that it helps shade in the reality of this pulp world.

Dead Man Down hits so many right notes that it’s kind of a let-down to find that the film’s climax descends into the usual shoot-em-up and blow-things-up finale that Hollywood is known for.  This bang-bang ending really skewers the painful relish of revenge the characters have been itching for, all while reducing Alphonse from a complex demon to a bumbling baddie.  But I still must admit that I haven’t seen an ending with a car crash and an explosion like this in quite some time.  Still, Dead Man Down is a welcome antidote to the numbskull mentality of Hollywood’s action thrillers and easily the strongest film to come out of this popcorn-trash winter season.  If this film is indeed the first of many in a long, Hollywood career for Oplev, then I hope he shows us many more flicks like this one where pulp formulas are given expert dramatist flourishes towards fascinating multiplex entertainment.  

'21 and Over': Ho Ho or No No?

by Brett Parker

Its peculiar how a comedy can have all the right moves yet be devoid of the consistent laughter you'd expect from such an enterprise.  Such is the case with 21 and Over, an irreverent, college-age bromantic romp that serves up a talented cast, plenty of zingers, and endless slapstick gags, yet never really delivers the side-splitting belly laughs you yearn for.  If its any indication, the audience I watched the film with didn't turn out to be the laugh-on-cue sitcom audience you usually get with a flick like this.  Still, the film has its likable side.  Like a chubby, weird kid doing a stand-up routine during an elementary school talent show, you smile at the effort while secretly wishing that Richard Pryor-level laughs were being dished out in waves.

The film follows the drunken mishaps and chaotic mayhem that erupts on the 21st birthday of Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), an overly-studious college student.  When his big legal-drinking holiday finally arrives, that attracts a visit from his old high school buddies Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin).  The fellas can’t wait to take Chang out and get him drunk beyond belief, but they soon receive a dire warning from Chang’s stern and intimidating father, Dr. Chang (Francois Chau): Jeff has an early morning med school interview the day after his birthday and if he misses out on it as the result of a bad hangover, there’s gonna be hell to pay.  Although terrified at the prospect of Dr. Chang’s wrath, the gang decides to move forward with their pub-crawl plan all while being mindful of Chang’s early morning appointment.

As nighttime falls, the fellas hit the town and hit up every bar in sight, pounding endless beers and an obscene amount of shots.  Chang seems to be enjoying his own drunken exuberance right up until the moment he pukes his brains out and passes out.  As Chang lays unconscious, his friends discover a problem: they have no idea where he lives or how to get him home since they’re not familiar with his college town.  This sets off an epic quest to get Chang back to his house safe and sound so he can be fresh and ready for his interview, a perilous adventure that throws everything at our heroes from a wild buffalo, a sociopathic jock (Jonathan Keitz), a hostile sorority, a video-game style frat party, and disturbing revelations about Jeff Chang’s college life.  

21 and Over is brought to us by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the same frisky shenanigan-mongers who wrote The Hangover, and your heart sinks a little knowing that the duo is more or less just ripping off their own formula.  This plot also turns out to be a booze-soaked journey towards saving a fellow bro filled with outrageous detours and a near-identical climactic twist.  Yet the duo's work on this flick and The Change-Up proves that maybe The Hangover’s success was due more to the beautifully incongruent chemistry between its stars and Todd Phillip's knack for finding soulfulness in zaniness than the simple-minded script.   Perhaps this movie would've worked a lot better if it focused less on raunch fest hand-me-downs and more on actual situations faced with going-out as a 21-year-old, such as pub formalities, awkward pick-ups, dance-floor silliness, drunken fist fights, tacky sartorial choices, and bizarre conversations.  A little less of The Hangover and more Swingers, if you know what I mean.

Whatever saving grace this movie has comes from the more-than-capable cast.  Like the young crew of the Starship Enterprise on their first mission, you sense that these cool cats are destined for greater things.  Miles Teller proves here as he did in the Footloose remake that he's a charming comic actor, especially as this film pushes him towards becoming the next Vince Vaughn.  Skylar Astin is like watching a young Dane Cook trying to be a young Tom Hanks, which he makes miles more appealing than that sounds like.  And even if Jeff Chang skids dangerously close to being an Asian stereotype, Justin Chon sure plays him otherwise, which is a wildly optimistic observation considering the drunken Wookie his character is made out to be. 

On a spectrum where comedies are either wildly funny or mind-numbingly awful, there are those that fall in the middle of being occasionally funny with a few laughs here and there, which can sometimes be more frustrating than downright terrible comedies.  21 and Over falls into that middle category, with yearning eyes staring towards the top.  I'm really back and forth on whether or not the movie works for me, and I suspect that watching it at home after a few beers may enhance its appeal.  I'm reminded of how I saw Anchorman in theaters and disliked it, until I watched it again on DVD in college and laughed hysterically at it.  In the end, I’ve decided to give the flick a mild recommendation because the cast is likable, the soundtrack is rather fun, a party scene with video-game style levels is a cool idea, and the film's final moment had me smiling and laughing enough to think, "oh, what the hell....I'll tell people to go and see this."

The Top 10 Movies of 2012

by Brett Parker

I love movies more than you can possibly imagine and I always vowed to stick up for the medium in all shapes or forms.  That’s why I’m usually weary of the more grumpier cinephiles who constantly grumble about the troubled state of movies.  Like the Kryptonian High Council with a very bad hangover, I’m sure most of you have heard their sing-along cynicism at some time over the past few years: “Hollywood keeps putting out mindless garbage, everything is pointless reboots or remakes, only superhero movies get greenlit these days, it’s all formulaic trash, TV smokes movies in content,” and so on.  I’ve never been down with such arguments because 1) dumb-minded romps have been present since the dawn of cinema, 2) most film snobs never realize that trash can unwittingly say more about how we live and how we think than most art house flicks, 3) every film era is filled with bitter killjoys who complain about the movies they’re getting until realizing years later that they actually had it pretty good at the time.

So I’m somewhat bewildered to admit that even a crusading optimist like myself has felt a bit of a mind-numbing strain with Hollywood products in recent years.  I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment I felt something was amiss in my moviegoing pleasures.  Was it when the Footloose remake fumbled with it’s own musical identity?  Was it during Ryan Reynolds’ climactic surfer-dude monologue in The Green Lantern?  I’m actually pretty sure it was when I witnessed in horror as the Total Recall remake smugly neglected the original’s wit, creativity, and reason for existing.  Mind you, I’m one who doesn’t mind checking his brain at the front of a theater lobby, but recently I’ve been feeling so separated from my mind that I feared I was turning into a scarecrow.  It was during a recent viewing of Sylvester Stallone’s macho shoot-em-up Bullet to the Head, a candy-shop of old-school testosterone treats, where I wistfully realized that they don’t make trash like they used to.

That’s why I felt my frown turn upside down in 2012, a year in which primal generic pleasures reclaimed their intelligence and miraculously dazzled both the popcorn muncher and intellectual in all of us.  As we dabbed in the worlds of superhero flicks, historical love letters, crowd-pleasing dramedies, cutesy indie flicks, and sci-fi mind-benders,  the movies of 2012 gave us plenty to think about and stayed with us a lot longer than we initially suspected they would.  Mind you, I’m not saying that an artistic revolution kicked into high gear, but it seemed that a lot of flicks caught on to the Right Idea.  And in a town filled to the brim with Wrong Ideas, I’ll take multiple Right Ideas straight to the bank anytime.  So without further ado, I give you my Top 10 Movies of 2012:

1) Silver Linings Playbook

On paper, there’s a ton about Silver Linings Playbook that sounds cutesy and ridiculous, but the way director David O. Russell brings it all together makes the final product a cocktail of heart and hilarity that’s damn near impossible to resist.  Using a tenderly funny Bradley Cooper and sensationally smart Jennifer Lawrence as sympathetic guides through the world of mental illness, Russell finds lively juice in exploring his usual themes of wildly dysfunctional families and the ways human behavior can allow unhinged wackiness into the real world.  While the story appears to hold the usual trappings of a quirky dramedy, it’s old-school slapstick energy and surprising warmth towards the darker shades of life truly grabs you.  In a world where preposterousness has become the new normal and it seems like every person has something internal eating away at them, it’s Silver Linings Playbook’s acute understanding of this world, and the sensible optimism it offers up to deal with it, that helps it score a touchdown in our hearts.

2) The Master

With his usual ideas regarding hustlers and outsiders latching onto each other to find purpose in an unpredictable universe, Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a difficult dazzler that explores the ways in which man’s spiritual and animal sides try to uneasily co-exist with each other.  With Joaquin Phoenix giving the performance of the year (and the performance of a lifetime) alongside Phillip Seymour Hoffman displaying a scorching reptilian charm, Anderson teases the curious ways in which preachers and worshippers need each other to exist.  Using the origins of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology movements as a cryptic starting point, Anderson discovers the fascination in how religious institutions can bounce between sneaky hope and suspicious skepticism simultaneously.  This all makes The Master a spellbinding study of the cracks in created belief systems and the backhanded ways we can use them to deal with our lives.

3) Looper
While most time travel stories get caught up in their own metaphysical logistics, Looper is a refreshingly imaginative sci-fi tale that uses time travel as a backdrop to evoke bigger ideas about the troubling habitual mindsets that wreak havoc upon mankind and how we could even hope to repair such negativity.  As an assassin who kills human targets sent from the future, a smoldering and intense Joeseph Gordon-Levitt faces off with an implosive and conflicted Bruce Willis playing an older version of the young assassin as he dives into the past to repair a disastrous future.  Writer/director Rian Johnson’s script is a model of intricate and contemplative sci-fi writing that leads to a shattering climax in which hope and gloom are reconciled in brilliant form.  Looper is a welcome reminder that big ideas can always trump big special effects when given the most attention.

4) Argo
Riffing on the spellbinding true story of how Hollywood created a fake movie to rescue American hostages during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Argo became one of the most unlikeliest and generous crowd-pleasers of the year.  Relying on his growing knack for vivid surroundings and rich character details, actor/director Ben Affleck showed off a relaxed straight-forwardness in molding a tale of nail-biting danger and Hollywood insider humor that proved to be surprisingly fluid.  With all of its expert storytelling and great evocation of its time period, what makes Argo ultimately engaging is the adventurous kick it gets in showing both the U.S. government and Hollywood proving to be heroic in a time of great crisis.

5) Lincoln
What was initially assumed to be a lumbering and sentimental portrayal of one of our country’s most beloved presidents turned out to be one of the most illuminating and absorbing movies about the political process ever made.  By focusing primarily on Abraham Lincoln’s quest to abolish slavery at the end of the Civil War, the film highlights  great fascination in the shrewd dealings and grand emotions behind the difficult business of passing an amendment.  Helping matters is the work of top-of-their-form experts who spare this tale from being a lumbering history lesson: Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing at evoking Lincoln’s homegrown warmth and intelligence, the model screenplay by Tony Kushner finds surprising poetry and suspense amidst a political ordeal, and Steven Spielberg uses his lyrical gifts to find peculiar beauty in our nation’s past.  It’s rare to find a film so honest about our nation’s inner-workings that lifts our spirits about the institution at the same time.

6) Celeste and Jesse Forever
Female-driven films can feel like a rare entity at times, especially ones that don’t peddle cliches and stereotypes.  That’s why Celeste and Jesse Forever is such a gem, for it offers a rare glimpse of a woman dealing with a divorce, and the various emotional bases that includes, in a way we barely see handled well at the movies.  Armed with a script she co-wrote with Will McCormack, Rashida Jones turns in my favorite female performance of the year as an emotionally-imploding woman who proves to be hilarious, contemplative, challenging, tender, and heart-wrenching all at the same time.  It’s rare to find a movie about a modern woman packed with killer-funny laughs and deep, eye-opening insights into the female psyche.  

7) Moonrise Kingdom
While most filmmakers offer us unique visions of the world we live in, Wes Anderson offers us a portal to a whole new universe, one in which retro styles, candy-coated locations, peculiar pop, and internalized yearning emotions collide within a delightfully whimsical canvas.  Moonrise Kingdom is yet another worthwhile trip inside Anderson’s head, this time exploring the innocence of young love and the deep ways 1960s America rationalized its choices.  Fusing subtle touches of a hippie rebellion story and an age-old tale of adolescent romance across opposing summer camps, Anderson hints at how institutions of sanitized structures are no match for appetites of the heart and exuberance within the human spirit.  Filled with his trademark deadpan humor, european flavorings, and childlike vision of the world, Anderson offers one of his most heart-poking and bright-eyed landscapes yet.

8) Django Unchained
If Inglorious Basterds re-wrote the book on what historical war movies are good for, then his latest opus, Django Unchained, re-imagines the birth of blacksploitation to fit a time when black culture probably needed it the most.  Playing around once again with his favorite cinematic delights, Tarantino creates an epic fusion between the Western and blacksploitation, although the film is more an incarnation of the latter than most people realize.  Through the super-cool cowboy that is Jamie Foxx as the title character, Tarantino offers us troubling glimpses of the atrocities white people have committed against the black race during slavery and hints at the smarts and bad-ass resourcefulness blacks can possess to stick it right back to The Man.  While some people have trouble dealing with the fact that  a white filmmaker has used the horrors of slavery to get his moviegoing jollies off, it’s important to remember that Tarantino isn’t trying to solve the problems of racism.  He’s merely demonstrating how B-Movie formulas can be used evocatively to suggest the darker aspects of humanity and offer up release anxiety fantasies to deal with them in our heads.  It’s an important cinematic reminder and one that I’m thankful shows up in an exciting Tarantino package.  

9) The Dark Knight Rises
With this final installment in Christopher Nolan’s take on the Batman legend, the filmmaker pushes the series’ comic book themes to their absolute breaking point and the result is compelling entertainment on a grand scale.  The success of The Dark Knight allowed Nolan to pull out all the stops this time, and one can’t help but marvel at the epic scale in which this comic book tale is carried out.  Adding electric interest is the wonderful perceptions of Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway, who take popular villains Bane and Catwoman, respectively, and dazzle us endlessly with their theatricality.  Yet it’s Christian Bale’s weary and tortured take on the legendary caped crusader that holds us the entire way through this troubling world.  Throughout the trilogy, he’s been alert to every complicated nuance the hero demanded, and he brings it all home here with piercing resonance.  In the end, we realize that The Dark Knight Rises isn’t just unlike any superhero film we’ve seen before, it’s unlike any film we’ve ever seen before period.

10) Chronicle
While hand-held “found footage” and superhero flicks feel like they been overdone to death in Hollywood, Chronicle meets both genres halfway and the result creates one of the most intimate and involving takes on each medium I can remember.  As three teenagers (the wonderful Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, and Alex Russell) obtain superpowers from a mysterious glowing substance, the film offers a unique bridge between a superhero origin story and a teen angst tale along with the scary, dangerous ways those two ideals can threaten each other.  The hand-held footage gimmick is actually used provocatively to bring a real sense of emotional discovery to scenes of superpower awakenings and a white-knuckled impending doom when those powers begin to fuel troubling juvenile emotions.  Everything comes to a head in a heart-stopping climax which is like a clash between the endings of Superman II and Rebel Without A Cause.  Your head reels from the fact that the film is overstuffed with exuberance, terror, and excitement until you catch on that being a teenager also bounces feverishly between those very same feelings.  

HONORABLE MENTIONS

-Amour

-The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

-Seven Psychopaths

-Zero Dark Thirty

A 'Warm' View of Zombies

by Brett Parker

In an age where it feels like every possible angle on zombies has been done to death (no pun intended), along comes Warm Bodies, which offers up the wildly incongruent perspective of the zombie as anguished romantic hero.  Seeing as how zombies are inherently rotting human carcasses who can’t exist without devouring living human flesh like a fat kid at a pie eating contest, having them fall helplessly in love with their food John Hughes-style sounds too ridiculously implausible to work.  But in an age where nonsense like Twilight has proven to be a smash, anything is possible, right?  So it’s bewildering as much as it is refreshing that Warm Bodies actually works as a film miles more than you’d expect.  No one ever really suspected that a shotgun marriage between George A. Romero and Cameron Crowe could gel, but maybe it’s just what this genre’s doctor ordered.

The film opens in what appears to be the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in America.  We meet R (Nicholas Hoult) a teenage zombie who can’t remember what his first name was when he was human, but he thinks it began with an “R.”  We see R as he conducts his daily routine of scrummaging through the North American wasteland with other decaying zombies looking for live humans to feast on.  He considers M (Rob Corddry) his best friend, but they’re too dehumanized to muster up a coherent conversation.  R has made an abandoned airplane his home, which is filled with relics of former civilization that include a record player and a vinyl collection.  Listening to what music used to be (which includes Bruce Springsteen amongst R’s records) causes R to pine for human feelings that he used to feel.  R spends his days wondering whether or not he could ever overcome his undead condition to act like a normal, full-blooded person ever again.

Things change dramatically for R when he goes out one day to hunt for flesh with his fellow zombies.  He meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), a pretty blonde fighter for a band of uninfected humans trying to survive in their post-apocalyptic world.  As the other zombies feast on Julie’s friends, R is hit with feelings of romanticism instead of feelings of hunger for her.  R tries his very best to convey a sense of human decency through his rotting exterior and he’s miraculously able to convince Julie that there’s remnants of a spirit inside of him.  Pretty soon, a peculiar courtship develops where R tries to convey his surprising romantic feelings towards Julie while she hopes to find a way to bring whatever heart and soul remains in him to the forefront.  Julie’s Dad, Grigio (John Malkovich), is the leader of the human resistance against zombies and R has the blonde warrior hoping to convince her father that zombies aren’t hopeless demons that have to be exterminated but could probably become human again with traditional feelings of love.  

What’s so enduring about the zombie genre is how shrewdly oozing corpses have consistently served as the perfect metaphors for the trials and tribulations of American society.  Since Romero’s pioneering heyday, zombies have kindly offered us reflective commentaries on post-war trauma, consumerism, nuclear anxieties, social unrest, government corruption, mob mentality, and even crackpot Americana resourcefulness when depicted as comedy.  Perhaps Warm Bodies never feels as fully preposterous as it should because the repressed zombies on display perfectly depict present-day American people: numbed-out slugs trudging through a compromised existence yearning unconsciously for an emotional connection and nourishment of the heart.  The story gets its juice from the realization that if you were to ask a random zombie “what’s on your mind?,” then you’d probably get the same cryptic answers as any disillusioned American of today asked the same question.  To say that all a zombie needs is a lot of tender, love, and care to cure his problems may seem like a hell of a theoretical stretch, but the fact that most of the audience watching the film could use the same kind of medicine these days gives Warm Bodies an emotional connection that spares it from being completely vapid.

Warm Bodies is perhaps as surprisingly engaging as it is because director Jonathan Levine sees this tale as just another one of his trademark riffs on young men trying to find solid emotional ground in an increasingly confusing world.  Like a teenager trying to deal with youthful angst (The Wackness) or a young man battling cancer (50/50), Levine depicts R’s view of his own zombie condition as an inconvenient affliction that can perhaps be overcome with the right emotional mindset.  If Levine’s heroes are males trying to retain a strong sense of self as they fight for normalcy amongst bewildering circumstances, then his themes are put to the ultimate test here since zombieitis could be considered the ultimate threat to those very ideals.  Of course, reducing the entire zombie experience down to a young man’s coming-of-age quest to find emotional fulfillment sidesteps a ton of hellish circumstances naturally inherent in the basic concept of a zombie tale, but it sure does bring a lot of empathetic juice to a lunatic cinematic concept.  Plus it offers moments of cockeyed beauty rarely felt in this genre, as when R is drawn to the positive vibes he feels when he plays his vinyl records or when R’s newfound romance inspires the other zombies around him to feel all tingly at the sight of a poster depicting a romantic couple on a beach.  

To whatever extent this crackpot tale actually works, most credit can be given to Nicholas Hoult and the tricky sympathy he blasts through the guise of being a rotting corpse.  The trouble with a zombie being a romantic hero is the inherent lack of romanticism in their appearance, for ultra-pale skin, decaying flesh, and demonic eyes are hardly considered dreamboat traits.  Yet Hoult is able to make all of those things feel like it’s part of a disheveled, lonely teenager package and is able to generate a Quasimodo-style sincerity with it all.  His voice-over narration has a charmingly down-to-earth quirkiness about his ordeal, kind of like a post-apocalyptic Lloyd Dobler.  A scene in which Julie and a friend give him a shower and cover him with make-up offers up a rare moment in the zombie genre: one of heart-warming uplift.  As the lady love R pines for, Teresa Palmer proves here as she did in Take Me Home Tonight that she is a suitable throwback to that ancient Hollywood tradition of having a pretty blonde with inklings of spunk as the ultimate romantic holy grail.  If Julie is lacking in the personality department, then that makes sense seeing as how R would have a hard time dealing with a real ball of feministic fire.  Katherine Hepburn, for example, would make him give up and just start eating her out of inadequacy.  Julie feels like the perfect starter girlfriend until more of his lost humanity kicks in.  If their tender courtship scenes seems like pretty basic stuff, then they feel all the more impressive once you grasp the unlikely bizarreness they grew out of.

It’s not hard to suspect that a work like Warm Bodies was most likely concocted as a result of the Twilight series wild success, but I couldn’t help but notice that this zombie tale smokes the vampire one on its own ideological grounds.  My biggest qualm with Twilight is its heavy reliance on numbskull logistics and overdone romantic pulp to distract from the hard answers to the premise’s central question: why would a monster fall in love with his own food?  From where I sit, Warm Bodies answers such a preposterous question with a lot more tenderness, humor, and level-headedness.  Twilight makes the mistake of taking its ridiculous world so dreadfully seriously while the joy of Warm Bodies is its comic curiosity and gaga hopefulness about whether or not a zombie could actually fall in love.  That you can kind of halfway believe they could is the film’s ultimate success.