Hey,
it’s been a while.
Last
time we checked in, the Oscars had just blown past us, and I figured after a
couple of months I’d check in. Q1 is, as a rule, something of a dead zone for
cinema, so I haven’t seen many movies, but I don’t feel worse off for it. In
fact, as of mid-April I’ve only seen three in theaters. I have some opinions on
them, naturally. Read on after the jump.
The
first movie I saw was Steven Soderbergh’s supposed swan song, Side Effects, a film that can generally
be described as a “pharmaceutical thriller.” It concerns itself with the
struggles of Rooney Mara, whose husband (Channing Tatum) has just finished his
jail term for a bout of insider trading. Mara falls into fairly serious
depression, and goes to psychiatrist Jude Law for some antidepressants, and it
moves from there – and I mean moves.
If I were going to sum up the plot progression of this film, my go-to
descriptor would be “twisty as hell.” It’s hard to even provide much of a plot
synopsis for fear of spoilers, as there are no fewer than five dramatic plot twists
in the film’s 106 minutes. It has to play a clever game where these revelations
are both effective and not entirely ridiculous, which I would say it mostly succeeds
at.
The
film itself plays almost as a microcosm of Soderbergh’s whole career: going in
so many directions so quickly that you don’t know what will happen next, but
doing it so stylishly that you couldn’t possibly mind. The film has
Soderbergh’s trademarked smooth, assured directorial touch, with notable, well-implemented
flourishes like soft focus and low angle shots, making it a perfectly
well-oiled machine of a thriller with a distinctly unnerving psychological edge.
The comparisons to a Hitchcockian thriller are frequent and warranted. There’s
good acting on display here, as well. Rooney Mara shows us once again why she’s
a hot commodity, giving a complex and layered performance – for my money, the
best in the film. Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones put out good work here too,
Law giving one of his better performances of late and Zeta-Jones being as
generally reliable as ever. Tatum, though he has limited screentime, continues
to prove that he is, in fact, a charismatic, talented actor, and not simply a
nice body. Overall, Side Effects succeeds
in supplying thrills. It can’t stand with Soderbergh’s best films, perhaps, but
it sits as a solid credit to his body of work, and if this is truly his final
film, he could’ve done much worse.
The next film was Harmony Korine’s newest and
most commercial effort, Spring Breakers,
perhaps the most hilariously mis-advertised film in recent memory. The plot is
simple: four college girls want to get away from their quiet college life for
Spring Break, but lack the money to do so, and to fix this three of the girls
rob a diner with a fake gun and a sledgehammer. From there, they go down to St.
Petersburg, FL, party it up, get arrested, and then get bailed out by Alien, a
local crime lord, and they join his ranks in an effort to realize their mantra
of “Spring Break forever (bitches).” This is the first film by Korine I’ve actually
seen, and it just makes me even more intrigued than I was before. This film is
equal measures of creepy, psychedelic, uncomfortable, sexy, deranged, and
hilarious. It presents itself in a vague, nebulous manner, often eschewing
strict narrative linearity and revealing an event via quick cuts during its own
buildup. It adds to a sort of fantastic unreality of the film – the whole thing
seems so dreamlike.
This
is Korine’s first time working with a particularly well-known cast, though he
has worked with Chloë Sevigny, Werner Herzog, Diego Luna, and Samantha Morton
in the past. The inclusion of the very recognizable Selena Gomez and Vanessa
Hudgens let him address his favorite theme – youth culture – and also allow for
a veneer of glamor not usually seen in Korine’s films. His films usually have
this gritty, marginal feel to them (looking at you, Trash Humpers) but this is the opposite. It’s bright, loud, and
initially alluring from the outside, drawing you in with the promise of young,
nubile (and famous) girls in little
to no clothing, a bunch of partying, and music by dubstep sensation Skrillex –
and Spring Breakers delivers all of
that. The thing is, it delivers much more that most moviegoers wouldn’t expect.
This film is considerably darker than one would expect, even the moments of
apparently overt comedy have this offsetting touch to them and for the whole
movie you’re not exactly sure how to feel. James Franco contributes a great
deal to this dissonance, giving one of his best (and most unhinged)
performances as Alien – both the funniest and strangest character in the film.
This film is not for everyone, certainly, but it is undeniably a memorable
experience, which, sometimes, is all you need.
The
most recent film I saw was The Place
Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s incredibly ambitious follow-up to the
contentedly understated Blue Valentine.
Pines is split into three distinct
parts, one following Ryan Gosling’s run as a bank robber to provide for his
child, the next following Bradley Cooper’s attempt to clean up the corrupt
Schenectady police department, and the last following Dane DeHaan and Emory
Cohen, the sons of the previous two protagonists, and how their relationship is
informed by the lives of their fathers. The segments of the film cover very
different subject matters, each one connected to the others only by characters
and setting. The first part is a crime story, the second part is a police
procedural, and the third is a sort of mini-Bildungsroman, and while the
transitions are easy to pinpoint, they’re pretty seamless. No formal
introduction is given to Bradley Cooper’s character at the end of Ryan
Gosling’s story, for example, he simply appears in the middle of an action
scene and then a few minutes later we’re following him around. Pines is a heavy effort, an attempt to
weave together a sweeping, multigenerational tale from pretty disparate
threads. It holds together, but it does feel like you’re watching three
different movies, which just seems to add to the 140-minute running time.
The
actors at work are the film’s strongest suit. While you’d expect Gosling to
pull a reprise of The Driver here, he instead channels a more sensitive,
emotive character, someone who genuinely cares about the people around him and
who only turns to crime hesitantly. Cooper proves that Silver Linings Playbook was not a fluke, and his performance in Pines as the stubborn good-guy cop might
even be a career high. Dane DeHaan also proves that he’s a worthy fresh new
talent, giving a performance just as good as his work in Chronicle, and every bit as angst-ridden. There’s a large, talented
supporting cast at work here too, including Emory Cohen, Eva Mendes, Ray
Liotta, and especially Ben Mendelsohn. Overall, The Place Beyond the Pines is a film more admirable than enjoyable,
which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a very ambitious storytelling effort
with a number of memorable performances from its large cast, on one hand, while
on the other it’s a bit overlong and has a few slow spots, especially as the
film goes on. Its flaws are comparatively minor. This is a kind of filmmaking
we need to reward though – it has a distinct vision and is trying to do
something new, but it still wants to be accessible to a commercial audience.
Too often we get films that do either one or the other, and we should promote
movies that buck this trend. I recommend it on principle.
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