Posts Tagged sadness
Blue Valentine: jmag review
Here’s my review of Blue Valentine from the latest issue of triple j magazine. You want to know how shattered I was by this film? I didn’t cry while I was watching it. That’d be too easy. Almost any film can make me cry if the music swells just right. After Blue Valentine, though, I only started crying afterwards. In public.
BLUE VALENTINE
Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams
Be warned: Blue Valentine will make you want set fire to the concept of love and bury its ashes where they’ll never be found.
Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) are a young married couple struggling to keep their relationship from falling apart. These painful sequences are intercut with scenes of them first falling in love, six years earlier.
It sounds sappy, I know, but Blue Valentine makes magic by picking the exact perfect moments to cut back and forth. It also has some of the best sex scenes in years. I don’t mean the most arousing – jeez, settle down, perverts! I mean sex scenes that show you things about who the characters really are and what they really feel.
It’s a testament to Gosling and Williams’ acting that I believed every second they’re on screen. It’s always weird to praise actors for ‘honest’ performances. They’re acting! They’re pretending to be people they’re not! Blue Valentine felt true enough, though, to successfully break my heart.
Other reviews this month: Rare Exports and Somewhere in cinemas; Me and Orson Welles and Breaking Bad season three on DVD.
Issue #46 on sale now.
The Walking Dead: Zombie Pathos
One: the pilot episode of The Walking Dead might be the best thing Frank Darbont has ever done.
Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.
Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.
I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.
(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)
I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?
Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”
So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.
From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.
Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.
It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.
The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.
My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.
You’re welcome.
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.