2012 in Film: Safe

Safe is basically a movie about fuck cops and #nodads. It also is a movie about some really cool action sequences, a self-consciously thin plot, and some unselfconsciously shitty racial stereotypes. I assume it was generally disliked by critics because the racism wasn't quite strong enough, in the final calculations, to counterbalance the fact that it didn't worship cops.

So Statham is a cage fighter who used to work as a semi-official assassin for the police, but got kicked out for ratting on his coworkers. Then THE RUSSIANS killed his wife and made his life a living hell because he failed to throw a fight. Then he tries to kill himself but sees a little Chinese girl running from THE RUSSIANS so he saves her & it turns out she has a Super Secret Number memorized because she's (you guessed it) a math genius, and then he protects her as THE RUSSIANS, THE CHINESE, and the crooked cops try to get her. He kills a bunch of dudes and then finds out the safe that the numbers unlock has like hella cash and something like The Entire Collected Knowledge Of The DHS, In Convenient Disk Form. Then the mayor's aide & gay lover fights a bunch of dudes & goes to fight Statham but Mei shoots him so Statham wins, and is like hey kid I'd be a shitty dad and she's like yeah fuck having a dad and hes like alright cool lets go to Seattle.

Honestly I don't really know what to say beyond that. Until I reread the plot synopsis I remembered literally nothing about this movie -- less even than I remembered about John Carter. I am not particularly well versed in action films, and I can't think of any other Statham movies I have ever seen. Was he in District B-13 or whatever that was called? I don't remember anything about that one either.

I am really out of my element here. I'm not even sure why I am trying to write this. I think the only genre I am less familiar with is comedy, because comedy is awful. Oh god the Men in Black 3 review is going to be such a disaster.

The cops in this movie are pretty unrelentigly shitty. Also one of them is stuffed into a trunk for the last like half hour of the film. The mayor almost gets stuffed in there too but they chickened out, which was really unfortunate, but he does get knocked out. The way the plot advanced seemed actively funny to me while I was watching it, in a pleasant way, especially the scene where Statham cracks the cipher effortlessly in the Hotel room while he is like fortifying it or whatever. The whole thing just deeply did not give a fuck about you and that was kind of wonderful. I literally don't remember anything about the cinematography, or the sets, or anything. Jesus man narrative analysis is so fucking boring how do people write this shit.

2012 in Film: John Carter

So, in case you were worried these would all be long rambling screeds, I will today review a movie which left roughly no impression on me whatsoever: John Carter, of Mars, or so they say.

What I do remember: the movie was hella racist. But you know, its Disney, and they weren't natives, they were aliens, so it was totally okay. Also that it was really just remarkably shitty on gender. But see previous.

The only bit of the movie I remember at all, really, was the scene where Carter goes all White Rage and slaughters a ton of aliens who, if memory serves, were pretty civil to his annoying ass prior to that moment. But as spectacle it worked surprisingly well, quite nearly managing to obscure the fucking despicable politics of the moment beneath its visual strength. Except not quite, because unfortunately for us white people these histories don't actually tend to disappear.

There was also that weird bit at the end, where Carter goes all Bond or Odysseus or whatever, and out-cunnings the godlike race of aliens by like, only pretending to be dead and buried in the mausoleum or whatever? That was pretty terrible too I guess.

I suppose there is something to be said, too, about the sheer implacable wall of boredom that this movie was. Which was, in its way, and as Keishi pointed out to me, its strongest aspect. Every single aspect of the film, from its scale to its content to its production, screamed that it was going to bore the hell out of you, and I can happily report back that the mission was accomplished. Even the aforementioned fight wasn't good in the sense that it rose above the boredom -- boredom is not something to be risen above, but is worthy of exploring in its own right -- as that it brought the spectacle fully down to its own level in a successful interpolation of the action sequence not as immersive excitement but as alienating boredom. Without diminishing the degree to which this is based on a pervasive racist logic, the flattened affect of boredom, which is not only experienced in relation to the narrative and visuals and music -- that is, the diegetic aspects of the film -- but is always also a self-conscious, meta reaction to both the film as experience and even to itself, produces a kind of awesome disharmony in the face of a glut of generic signposts that demand to be read as kinetic, immanent, and intense.

Which then leads me to want to rant on a bit about irony and how things like "post-irony" fail to acknowledge that the way that irony works isn't hegemonizing or even multiplying but splitting & doubling, creating concurrent extremes, and that New Sincere bullshit is just a way of sacralizing immediacy in a way that is not so much honest as itself a homogenizing mode of discourse. But I intended to keep this one short. And anyway, that would be boring.

2012 in Film: Looper

I left Looper feeling weirdly similar to how I felt when I left the theater after Inception; vaguely better than when I had gone in, but in a way that didn't seem at all to correlate to the film I had just watched, which just seemed to have sort of been there. There have been other similarities noticed between the two, although for me the most important thing is one difference; that Looper never comes across as a fucking Allegory For Cinema. That's what made me go from a sort of pleasant nonchalance about Inception to an active dislike; I get the impression that pleasant nonchalance is where I will stay with regards to Looper. And I say "pleasant nonchalance" because it seems like the right nonsense mixture of words to convey the non-feeling it doesn't really correspond to.

I think the reason this film was so talked about is in a lot of ways attributable to how little there really is to say. Genevieve Valentine hit the nail on the head here, although even that doesn't manage to convey just how much this appears in the film. Other than the psychosexual issues, it is tightly plotted (I suppose), well acted (if that is even a thing), visually impressive (what does that mean), and has a fairly interesting premise (even though it has flaws or whatever what the fuck is even going on do people actually care about any of these things).

I think the most interesting thoughts I had about the film were actually thought in reaction to this review over at Strange Horizons. And that largely because I disagreed with it. Specifically the last couple paragraphs, which mix a variety of arguments from authority – the rules of genre fiction, of personal experience, and of the "real world" and mature, adult understandings thereof – which ultimately to me seem made to justify the final claim that "while the film has a point, it’s not one that needs a science-fictional telling." Which is all well and good, I suppose, and I think on its own terms the argument works well enough, is properly supported and so on; but the idea itself seems fairly suspect to me.

Because I don't think the film has much of a point, really. And I mean that in a good way – Inception sucks because it "has a point," and so each moment of it becomes an overdetermined mess of Significance, and the whole thing ultimately allegorizes itself all the way to being an insulting piece of shit in the exact way that, say, Shutter Island manages to palpably barely avoid throughout. To take Looper as "having a point" makes it at best a really awkwardly bad Coen Brothers movie at best, and I say that as someone who really really hates the Coen Brothers.

But the argument which stresses rules is one which seems to me both obsolete and actually more obstructionist than useful, as it makes any fictional property into a boring feedback system in which rules are posited and then obeyed, and flattens all texts to this possibility. So something like the Extended Universe of Star Wars can be praised on the grounds of how it adheres to the rules that were laid out in prior texts, instead of being engaged on multiple levels regarding their craftsmanship, their content, and their place within the genre, and so on.

Specifically to that review, the focus on the rules leads to an understanding of the movie which forecloses any political possibility that doesn't conform to a very narrow understanding of politics. What are presented as "real world" understandings are more symptoms of exactly the type of cynical "realism" with which political thought is pervaded, and rely on a view of reality which is nothing more than the "rules" of genre writ large, such that they cover the whole world. The claim, for instance, that the links between the government of the film's present and the government of the film's future are not immediately graspable only makes sense if one assumes that a state hews closely to the progressive idea of the state; that there could have been some sort of fascist irruption doesn't even cross the reviewer's mind, precisely because the framework under which they are reviewing the movie doesn't allow for that. It wouldn't be playing by the rules.

There is even a suggestion of this within the film itself, in the form of the TK characters. The rules-based interpretation of the movie sees them and, because it necessarily operates on the meta-level as well as the diegetic, thinks "Get your Children of the Corn out of my time travel adventure!" What it doesn't see is the possibility that what is being described is not just an awkwardly shoehorned trope into a Proper Genre, but an element of the frame which suggests the relatively unseen social structure that informs it is thoroughly different, and getting rapidly stranger. Time travel itself is almost a retro concept within science fiction at this point, especially when it involves a machine, functioning more as one of those things you list when you are mocking your friend who likes science fiction – so what, you read about space ships and time travel and alien abductions all the time? – than something that is encountered in the literature very much. Which is just to say that the movie, from the beginning, seems to be working with a certain idea of genre as such, rather than within any genre; and because of that, it is both boring (as it doesn't ultimately enter dialogue with anything) and not particularly well-described by a genre-specific interpretation.

So uh, ultimately I suppose what I have to say about Looper itself is that it was fine or whatever, I guess.

2012 in Film: Silent House

Silent House is certainly a horror film through and through, right down to its embarrassing psychologizing explanation at the end. At the same time, though, it presents itself in a way that begs for a reading against the usual modes of valuing a film, so I totally fell into its trap.

The film, shot in such a way as to convey the sense that it is in "real time," is at least as much a riff on Russian Ark as it is on Paranormal Activity, even if the technical achievement is really just a fabrication. And instead of the awesome technical spectacle that Russian Ark provides, we have what is more or less High Tension with less Halloween worship and more formal spectacle. Elizabeth Olsen's acting is pretty fantastic -- and I say this as someone who has no capacity to judge acting ability whatsoever, in addition to having terrible taste & not being able to recommend things to save my life -- but overall, to say the movie drags is sort of a terrible understatement.

But then, there is that one sequence. And god, is it good. When the genre busts right the fuck out of the editorial constraints and stains the walls and the camera and everything, for just a couple minutes, is a delirium of bleeding structures and visually unlocked trauma and just a giant fuck you to the rule-obsessed cretins who appoint themselves gatekeepers of genre.

Unfortunately, it then slinks back, asking their permission for inclusion, with a finale that is well done, for what it is, but betrays the possibility of that sequence in favor of The Motivating Power of Past Rapes and the safe Strong Female Character. Hooray.

What I think is worth preserving about this movie is the way that for it to work requires a mode of reading that is both counterfactual and past-tense; there is not really any critical attempt, at least that I am aware of, that tries to make sense of what having seen a movie achieves, as opposed to actively seeing or going to (in the future) see, barring the way that they pile up on one another in lists of influence. Because of the way the film presents itself as being in a sort of covert dialogue with other films -- the decision to "hide" the cuts cannot possibly be seen outside of the cultural dialogue which would have you believe that movies like Transformers, with their rapid-fire editing (allegedly; I haven't actually seen any of those either) are the latest and truest manifestation of the Death of Cinema -- in conjunction with how, well, boring this film itself really is, for the large majority of its running time, encourages a sense of the film as a thing that had been watched, as opposed to a Viewing Experience. Thematically, that this film's narrative is structured around trauma and how its intrasubjective shattering plays out then makes at least a little more sense, even if it isn't especially well handled. It is basically psychoanalytic in this sense, figuring trauma as not so much an event as a locus, a post ex facto origin story which collapses both development and motivation into a singular symbolic inscription, and which will be symbolically reenacted until the individual makes an appointment to sit on the Magical Ahistorical Couch to work it out from the stranglehold of the Imaginary into the Symbolic & thus be able to sort of purge it.

Uhm, anyway. All these things combined seem to me to suggest, again, that where the film works is not so much in its experience as in how it lingers, and what about it does. So the fact that I now think, however many months later, about that fantastical sequence in terms that don't rely whatsoever on the way it works in relation to the whole, where whole is generally understood as the experiential aspect of the formal, leaves me with the sense that there is something lingeringly worthwhile about the film, even if it isn't good in the way we tend to value these things.

2012 in Film: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Okay, so it is maybe a bit unfair to lead off with this one. Particularly because I just had a review of it published over at Strange Horizons. But, it being my favorite movie that I saw this year, and since it seems to be in an accidental intimate dialogue with most of the things that fascinate me these days, I am going to suggest that those of you who are interested take the time to read that review, because what I am going to try to do here is draw out some of the stuff I found interesting about the film that I didn't talk about there.

So to begin, the stuff about video games. Specifically how games themselves are structured to absent the protagonist. There are obvious echoes here with my concept of Fantastical Materialism, and the way in which Miéville treats his generic creations with a materialism generally absent even from things like "hard sci fi" and how it then results in an absence of interiority in his characters. An easy reading of this would then be to say that all video games are therefore Fantastical Materialist, and then (hopefully) to throw the idea out altogether, given how video games actually act (both formally and culturally; either way one doesn't tend to see much materialism (except maybe in the moralistic sense) therein). There are other consonances; video games tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to allegorize -- even games like Eternal Sonata, whose premise boils down to "yr anime chopin" (also it is a wonderful game) or Bioshock, with its preachy boring anti-Randian premise saturated through its whole structure, aren't in practice reducible to these meanings -- as well as tending to require, for reasons both formal and of perceived consumer prejudice, much more clearly defined internal worlds & therefore fidelity to what occurs within them. They also almost never indulge in the "it was all a dream!" frame, which, despite being almost exclusively thought of as a form of lazy writing, is basically a way of conflating content to form by breaking the frame. Because the dream-frame is predicated on the idea that the text is a product of a specific interiority, and video game protagonists must be stripped of their interiority, the frame doesn't fit; the few counterexamples I know of, where a game does do this, perform it for much more material purposes than it gets used for in film, as in the end of Super Mario Bros. 2, where the game itself was a reskinned version of a non-Mario game and as such had almost nothing to do with the previous game, even in terms of mechanics, and so the dream-frame presented in the credits offered more of an excuse/apology to the player, a "get out of canon free" card, than a way of pretending that Mario is well-developed enough as a character to have a subconscious. That Silent Hill provides one of the only other examples is also telling, given that it is one of the only video games that engages with interiority whatsoever.

Of course, what these consonances achieve in video games is basically the opposite of what they achieve in Miéville's novels; instead of reconfiguring the ideological base of the form in which they act, they serve to lubricate the transferance that gamers like to call "immersion," which is itself the primary ideological vehicle of the form. The player doesn't need to have an objective interiority structured for him; this is the primary material difference between a player and a reader. The gamer is immersed exactly to the degree that her subjectivity can be made to fill the void that the character/protagonist creates; where the reader identifies, the gamer inhabits. Both are implicated in the production & reification of bourgeois subjectivity, because of the difference of form.

I should note here that I am using too broad a category for the thing I am describing. This obviously breaks down in a lot of places; for our purposes, though, I suppose I am using "video games" as shorthand for the "narrative component of character-driven video games."

All of this, of course, is an extrapolation on my claim that what Silent Hill: Revelation 3D does is to invert this relationship, in the same way that the Silent Hill games do. Which is to say that instead of operating in a form in which idealism & bourgeois subjectivity are predicated on the creation of a central character as void to be occupied, it operates in a form in which the central character produces these same ideological effects by presenting to us a subjectivity which is in the process of being constructed, and uses our and their visuality to short circuit the viewer into identification. By basically not having any characters, and by treating the plot as a paranoid conspiracy/mythological structure become material, it recreates the sensation of estrangement from form that makes the games as effective as they are.

Also, I don't really know where this fits but the video game-y stuff in the movie is so good, Heather checking her inventory in the motel room especially, oh my god that made me real happy.

Now that I have said something that makes this seem like a review or whatever, lets telescope back out and talk briefly about how this lack of characterization intersects with the fact that this is a movie in which the both the protagonist and antagonist are not only women, but the same woman; the villain is also a woman; the main infodump is given by a woman; and the men are either dudes in distress (Harry), totally ineffectual afterthoughts (Vincent), creepy stalkerish detectives (that dude who was a creepy stalkerish detective), or dumb fucking monsters (Leonard, Pyramid Head). Like how the romance arc ends with Vincent awkwardly kissing a really distracted and at best vaguely interested Heather, who isn't necessarily repulsed by him but is a bit busy living out her recurring nightmare, and even the way the scene is shot seems to be aware that this is more them enacting certain social assumptions than True Love.

The question, to which I have no answer, is how treating a film which is ostensibly in the horror genre and which is stacked with female characters as a shining example of an approach toward genre that moves away from the centrality of characters, might create apace for that wretched form of academic misogyny that hides behind interpretive frames to perpetuate male supremacy. Because Heather does spend an inordinate amount of time yelling "dad" into the haunted corridors of the town, and the climactic fight scene does involve a dude (albeit a monstrous one) stepping up to protect a woman from another woman (albeit a monstrous one) & ultimately decapitating her. So while there isn't so much of the shitty moralism of a slasher film, the problem is still very much there, and I worry that claiming the actors aren't characters as such could be used to justify them.

That the film simultaneously reifies & (possibly) subverts social roles, then, is an argument that is not so much in its favor -- even those moralizing slasher films often do the same thing, and whether we take this as a horror or weird film, the sexual politics of the genre provide a legacy which requires much more critical engagement.

2012 in Film

I am going to try something that I haven't ever really done on this blog before: regularly scheduled updates. Every day for the next sixteen days I hope to post a review of one of the films I saw in theaters this year. Some of them will be very, very short; others will probably be of about medium length. I doubt any will be particularly long. What follows is a list of all the films I saw & will review, in order of their release date according to Wikipedia.

• Norwegian Wood
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
• The Secret World of Arrietty
• John Carter
• Silent House
• 21 Jump Street
• The Hunger Games
• The Cabin in the Woods
• Safe
• Men in Black 3
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Looper
• Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
• Wreck-It Ralph
• Rise of the Guardians

I will begin tomorrow with Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and hop around the list from there. Some of these movies were absolutely wonderful, others wretched. As someone who has impeccably shitty taste & a total inability to recommend things well, these reviews will almost certainly tend more toward the analytic/critical than the normal recommendation-based model. There really is no particular reason for me to do this, no grand critique to be made through themes or whatever. I just kind of want to.

Quickly, I would like to mention that I will not be reviewing those stupid movies that everyone seems to have wanted to have a go at; The Dark Knight Rises and Cloud Atlas and The Avengers. I didn't see them, first of all; and second, who cares. I think the fact that I avoided these films contributed as much to my enjoying my year of theater-going as much as anything else. So if you want to read about how Batman's a plutocrat or zombies are proles are whatever, feel free to look elsewhere.

Wreck-It Ralph (Review)