Posts Tagged movies
Where The Wild Things Are: After The Rumpus
I ended my short jmag review of Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where The Wild Things Are with the following: “Even if you’re sick of handmade, golden-glowed nostalgia, you need to see Where The Wild Things Are. It’s not more pointless whimsy. It’s something else entirely.”
I thought I’d explain what the hell I meant.
Over at The Millions, Jeff Martin admitted that the film itself left him cold, but the trailer “remains to be a revelation”. He’s right: the first trailer for Wild Things is a thing of pure awe. Its combination of imagery and music has a voodoo-like power to make grown men burst into tears.
(Other men, I mean. Other men less manly than me.)
“I’ve come to think of the full-length film the way I think of those indulgent overlong director’s cuts that always seem to show up on DVD,” says Martin. “[Spike Jonze] has created one of the best (and certainly most expensive) short films in the history of cinema. And I, for one, am thankful.”
The first third of the movie was pretty much what I was expecting from that trailer. Maybe not packing quite as much emotive power, but still gorgeous, sad, and capable of generating near-nuclear levels of nostalgia. Max flees from the conflict of his home life, finds a boat, and travels to the island of monsters where he’s declared to be their king.
It’s what happened after the Wild Rumpus that surprised me. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but this isn’t a movie for children. It’s a movie about childhood, just like Scorsese’s King Of Comedy is about humour without being funny. That’s why adults should be less concerned about the movie scaring their kids – though, yeah, it probably will – and more concerned that it’ll bore them stupid.
As the film continues, Max finds that the same fears he faced at home have infected this new world, too. His escape into a fantasy world of giant monsters becomes more complicated; our attempt to retreat into some kind of warm, wild, uncritical nostalgia with him also fails. The movie seems to stall, overwhelmed with doubts. The promised fun and freedom evaporates, and Max is left desperately struggling to understand his place in this world, just like he was in the last.
In the words of Buckaroo Banzai: no matter where you go, there you are.
The first note I scribbled after coming out of the movie was this: “SADNESS IS UNAVOIDABLE”. (Sigh.) A little later, though, I began to think about superhero stories – the ‘grim and gritty’, sex-and-violence kind, usually seen as starting with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. In his book How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock points out that “comic books were now expected to tell stories for adults using the building blocks of children’s literature”.
Just like some think it’s wrong to, say, turn a goofy superpowered criminal called Doctor Light into a full-blown rapist for some ‘adult’ thrills, I see how turning a classic of childrens’ literature into a slow, difficult film about unavoidable sadness might be missing the point.
Did we need to see Maurice Sendak’s untamed monsters bursting into a flood of self-loathing tears? I don’t know. I just know I won’t ever forget it, and that’s enough for me.
Zero Stars For Star Ratings
On July 31, 1928, the New York Daily News gave The Port of Missing Girls one star out of three. It’s only fitting that what many think might’ve been the first appearance of a star system to rank movies was for a bad review.
I hate star ratings.
Seemingly immortal film critic Roger Ebert – when accused of handing out stars like candy – said that he’s always happy for people to disagree with what he said about a movie. If you want to disagree with how many stars he gave it, though, you “can mail your opinion to where the sun don’t shine.”
He’s right. No one expects opera, or dance, or novels, or elaborate and pretentious modern art to be summed up in one to five stars. People are expected to read the reviews instead. We use star ratings over at jmag where my reviews are only around 170 words a piece. I swear it’d barely take more time to pick out the key words than to count the stars under the title.
Maybe it’s because movies are “show business” – the emphasis on that last word and not the first. People just want to know if I movie is worth their money; so a movie ticket is thought of as a less complicated commodity than other kinds of art. (Music is, too.)
I’ve never been much of a thumbs-up / thumbs down critic. One editor once said they still couldn’t tell if I actually liked the movie after reading my take on it. I suppose I try to point out some things that I thought were interesting about the movie; maybe the things that I think made it worth seeing, so if you value those things – a great performance, a kick-ass action sequence, a clever genre twist – then you’ll like it.
That means a 2.5 star movie might be A) an amateurish, clumsy, disappointing film with one gobsmackingly amazing performance right in the middle, or B) a perfectly competent film that takes no risks but is a pleasant way to waste an hour and a half. Is that fair? Is there any kind of metric with which you can accurately compare a schlocky-but-smart teen horror flick with a desperate-for-Oscars costumed tragedy? I don’t know.
When I first needed to use star ratings, I found myself agonising over them. (“Two? Two and a half. No, two. Two. Three? Two and a half.” This could go for hours.) Now I just tell myself that there’s at least a full star margin of error and leave it at that. Still, though, I find myself trapped in weird inconsistencies: I’ll happily give a film 4 stars if I really enjoy it, but 4.5 seems lightyears ahead; two stars might still be enjoyably mediocre, but 1.5 is pretty damn terrible.
The New Yorker just profiled one of the anonymous ‘inspectors’ from the Michelin guide: one of the most prestigious restaurant guides in the world. You’d think that food would be more like opera and dance than movies and music, but no – there’s a long tradition of ranking restaurants with stars. The New Yorker writer – given rare permission to tag along with the inspector he called ‘Maxime’ – asks her what she liked about her latest meal:
“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’” she said. “It’s an analysis. You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’”
It’s a fascinating approach to criticism: either something is correctly cooked, or it’s not. Yes or no. Zero or one. It’s a way of thinking that’s completely foreign to me.
Look, I can’t even make myself rate my songs in iTunes. (It just feels rude.) I give you permission to entirely ignore my star ratings in the future. My opinions, however, should of course be followed as if chiselled into stone tablets by an angry god.
A Serious Man: jmag review
Here’s my glowing review of the Coen Brothers’ latest, A Serious Man, from the latest issue of jmag.
A SERIOUS MAN
Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind
Remember seeing the last Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, and wondering: what the hell was the point? Or their film before that, No Country For Old Men, with its bamboozling, creepy non-ending? Now the Coens have taken that same sense of pointlessness and transformed it into their best screenplay since The Big Lebowski.
A Serious Man is impossible to do justice to in a plot summary. (Okay, fine. “Larry Gopnik, head of a Jewish family in 1960s suburbia, who loses his faith as his life inexplicably falls apart.” You happy now?) Larry, played by mostly-unknown Michael Stuhlbarg, is utterly sympathetic as a man trying to do what’s right while slowly succumbing to hysteria.
It’s funny, awful, and heartfelt. Like an absurd episode of the Wonder Years, maybe, if Kevin’s grown-up narration was actually the Voice of God and had gone mysteriously silent. It’s been true for two decades now: when a Coen Brothers’ film is firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing else like it.
Other reviews by me this month: Dead Set and Crank 2: High Voltage on DVD, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in cinemas.
Issue #34 is on sale now.
Scrubbing Tombstones With A Toothbrush
I love high-concept screenplays. When I heard the storyline for the movie Stealth – “an artificially intelligent fighter jet is struck by lightning and turns evil!” – I swear I nearly burst into applause. I’m not necessarily defending the films themselves; just the ludicrous poetry of the idea that drives them.
High concepts can quickly curdle, though. The movie blog I Watch Stuff crystallised this for me while discussing the poster for the latest Jackie Chan film Spy Next Door. The headline: “Actual Spy Next Door Poster Marks End of Spoof Movie Posters”. Take a look. It’s hard to argue the point.
For me, it’s the recent Bruckheimer blockbuster G-Force that hurts. A squad of celebrity-voiced, crime-fighting, wise-cracking 3D animated guinea pigs? When the worldwide landslide of promotion began, I thought: “You’ve got to be kidding.” Actually kidding, I mean – because G-Force looks exactly like one of those fake movies that act as an easy in-joke inside real movies.
The clip made available of the fake sitcom “Yo Teach!” was perhaps the single best thing about Judd Apatow’s recent (and disappointing) Funny People. It’s freakishly plausible. The script, the set, the laughter. You could drop it onto prime time TV and no one would notice. The same goes for the “MILF Island” clips featured on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. It barely even functioned as a joke; more an only-minutes-away-at-best Reality TV prophecy.
(In both these cases, you can easily argue that the fake shows are cultural artefacts that are far more likely to exist in the real world than the actual shows that spawned them.)
This confusing play of reality-versus-parody leaves me suspicious of satire. Consider how studies seem to show that the reason Stephen Colbert is beloved by all sides of the political spectrum is that his refusal to break character makes him unpindownable. He’s a Rorschach blot in a classy suit.
I keep thinking of a quote from Steve Aylett’s faux-biography of science fiction writer Jeff Lint. In it, he writes that “satire was like scrubbing tombstones with a toothbrush, but honourable nevertheless.” Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whose tombstone Colbert’s cleaning.
And if Colbert’s fanbase can leave me feeling bewildered, something like G-Force mostly just leaves me feeling old. (You kids and your confusingly parody-tinged entertainment! Turn that music down!)
Old, that is, until I think back to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It began as a parody of Frank Miller’s Ronin, but its stars became bona fide pop-culture heroes. When the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters inevitably appeared on comic book shelves soon after, I don’t remember batting an eyelid – despite the logic puzzle of parody squared staring back at me.
So to all the wise-cracking, gun-toting, celebrity-voiced guinea pigs out there? I may not understand you, but I salute you nonetheless. Just make sure you’re not struck by lightning.