2012 in Film: The Hunger Games

I am going to probably not have a whole lot to say about The Hunger Games. Which is sort of a shame since I figure probably would have had plenty to say if I wrote this when it first came out. But I didn't, and I don't really have time to revisit these movies given the schedule I've set myself; and anyway it feels now as though it has been ages since I read the trilogy, even though I read it all in about two days maybe a week before the film came out.

I do remember coming out of the theater and wanting to know if the movie felt claustrophobic for people who hadn't read the books. The ones I saw it with didn't have any problems with the pacing at all, but the whole time through I noticed myself thinking the movie seemed incredibly packed with information. Which was primarily me reading the contents of the book, as fresh as they were in my mind, into the direction of the film.

The movie was, if nothing else, an object lesson in why you don't let people who aren't deeply and weirdly in love with monsters design or work on your monsters. Especially when those people are administrative types. What was basically the best moment in the book, when all the threads about brutality and audience and biopolitics and competition were transmuted into really fantastic, if overwrought, body horror, was a complete fucking joke in the movie. And knowing, as someone who read the book would, what was supposed to be going on at that moment made it that much more risible.

There were other moments like this of course -- Peeta's rock makeup was pretty inexplicable in the film, for instance -- but or the most part the movie did a fairly good job of anticipating the viewer's familiarity without requiring it. The biggest problem was the one that couldn't have possibly been avoided. Where the novel was, if not necessarily incredibly sophisticated, at least capable of generating interesting reflections on the tension between the public and private in consciousness, and if not lodge critiques then at least develop characters for whom the tension is more than just an academic question. The film, on the other hand, had to embed any of those thematic elements in ways that are significantly more indirect, and so less capable of generating the reflection. I am, to derail slightly, probably the only person who is actually more excited to see the third book turned into a film than I was this one, since the books as a whole can probably fairly easily be read as a weird retelling of the American Revolution and the part where there is actually a revolution seems, along with the fact that the celebrity theme is more or less reduced to agonizing over the use of the image versus the use of the person, altogether much more amenable to film.

This movie though was fairly toothless, and the controversy over the character of Rue was a pretty perfect encapsulation of that. The only conceivable way for a movie to become controversial for being insufficiently whitewashed is for it to be as innocuous as possible. It is cool that they didn't whitewash it though, even if it is ultimately the case that it then proceeds to sprint right into another shitty racist media narrative.

But again I find myself describing a film toward which I felt positively in fairly mean terms. The movie was good, and I was glad to see it; I suppose it was highly coloured by the fact that I had just devoured the books, which I had enjoyed even with their problems. Because of that a lot of my experience inside the film was spent trying to tease out the ways that the adaptation of a novel could potentially be read in ways that go beyond the simple “the book was better than the movie” stereotypical reaction – especially in how the foreknowledge of the characters’, but in particular the protagonist’s, interiority, can be a powerful way of overdetermining their actions. Unfortunately it has been a while since I saw the movie and a lot of those thoughts are totally gone at this point. So, well, sorry.

2012 in Film: Wreck-It Ralph

So I suppose that my initial "review" of Wreck-It Ralph could use some elaboration, and I could write more about other stuff in it generally. So let's go ahead and do that.

So first, the link between Wreck-It Ralph and the Eminem song. I came out of the film kind of enamoured of the idea that, since the movie is framed by "Bad Anon" meetings, one coherent way of reading the film would be essentially as a binge/relapse. The thing that has always struck me about the video for When I'm Gone is how, at the end, as the (A/N)A frame closes, there is a sort of insane, almost frightening narcissism in the way that the other members respond. They clap as though they are fans, not participants; it is the kind of round of applause one receives for a performance, not a sharing. Which, given the content of the song - particularly the line attributed to Hailey, "take another pill, yeah I bet you will; you rap about it, word, k-keep it real" (which has always seemed like a moment of devastating honesty to me given who we are dealing with, but that is beside the point I guess) - speaks to the ways that the interpolation of the personal by the performative, and the freedom of signs from things, can and must be in the end an extraordinarily painful process. It is also a very pedestrian, ordinary process, one that everyone goes through, no matter that it is presented as being a symptom of celebrity, which is the point of the Anonymous meetings, and is at the heart of the idealizing/domesticating dialectic of celebrity (finding its ultimate unresolved realization in the "celebrity crush").

The point being, though, that this is a sort of buried thematic of Wreck-It Ralph as well, although it tends to be smokescreened by the way the movie tries to present itself as a "learning to come to terms with yourself" narrative. Of course, Ralph is less interested in mapping the labyrinth than he is in playing a different role within it. The movie is actually structured more like High Fantasy than anything else, with the ultimate thrust being that the world is fucked up, although no one really knows that, because the rightful rulers aren't sitting on their rightful thrones. Even the main villain, who you don't know is a player at all until the end, is basically the bad guy because he's a cosmopolitan who upsets the landed aristocracy from their rightful positions, and it is only by defeating this menace who dares to do other than what he was "programmed for" that the proper balance can be restored to the world. Add to this the fact that if you close your eyes you might think that you've accidentally stumbled into Talladega Nights 2 featuring Sarah Silverman and I can kind of see how you might want to give this one a pass, maybe.

But of course, on the other hand, I dug this movie. Not fiercely, but not tepidly either, and it is worth saying that the biggest complaint that it leaves you with is that it doesn't do more, that the Games Hub isn't quite cool enough, that there weren't enough game worlds represented. Because what they did do they did well enough with that one assumes if they had made more they would have done well by it, too.

There is also something to be said about a movie inspired by video games that doesn't overwhelm the viewer. It seems as though most cinematic understandings of video games are incapable of dealing with any aspect of the medium except the visual, which is probably unsurprising. But divorcing the visual from the interactive elements of video games leads to hilariously stilted representations. When you hold a controller the neon assault of a video game isn't overwhelming at all, because you aren't trying to see the whole picture. You necessarily focus narrowly on what you are controlling and where you are trying to get it. The idea that video games are all bright visual assaults only makes sense in cinema (or by people watching you play the game, perhaps); all the visual noise is actually designed around the fact that the ordinary player isn't seeing it for the most part. So while Wreck-It Ralph does offer gaudy, sugary, borderline self-parodic designs, it does so in a way that is actually much more like playing a video game than watching one, which is an achievement I don't think I've encountered in film representations of video games before.

I do wish the arcade shooter had been better done though. It was easily the most boring bit of the film, at least as far as I remember. Well that and the denouement. Marriage and Benelovent Queendoms (even, and especially, when they masquerade as democratic) are boring as fuck.

There is something especially difficult, I think, in attempting to offer an incisive or totalizing argument about this film. Maybe that's just because I enjoyed it well enough and don't think it is particularly interesting to claim that the overarching theme of a Hollywood film is basically heteronormative and assimilationist. Or that its themes are about self-realization in a way that means you realize that you just needed to be happier with your lot in life and the structures that exist might be flawed but are ultimately good. Because no shit.

But there is something there about the Anon frame. Something unnecessary, something that presses up uncomfortably close to the themes, like a calculated bungle, at least as awkward as the "it was all a dream" frame but without nearly as much baggage. "It was all a binge. I learned that the system is good, and it works, and all I had to do was relapse" has something toothsome there, I think.

2012 in Film: Rise of the Guardians

Rise of the Guardians is a movie whose protagonist and antagonist are both so phenomenally unengaging, so devoid of anything even remotely compelling, so miserably caught up in their stultifying Peter Pan desparation to be believed in that they are bordering on radically inhuman. Even Peter Pan recognized that the point of the belief is not that it is there, but how it functions as an analogue for trust and the desire to be given autonomy over one's own life at a point when your entire life and identity is structured by its denial. Rise of the Guardians blithely ignores that slippage, instead taking belief in an exclusively theological register. It is less the epilogue to The Tempest, more Pokemon crying over Ash's corpse after Mewtwo kills him.*

Jackman's Easter Bunny and Baldwin's Santa and Fisher's Tooth Fairy are all pretty flat too, expressions of one character trait that grates pretty quickly. Antagony & Ecstasy covers this pretty succinctly in the fourth paragraph of his review here (the one paragraph in the whole thing which is entirely a parenthetical), so I don't really have much to say other than what I already have. Honestly that whole review is pretty spot on, in my mind at least, and this one is very informed by it. Antagony & Ecstasy is probably the only reviewer I give a shit about at this point, largely because I think we share a lot of fundamental assumptions and I tend to totally disagree with his conclusions most of the time, which as far as I am concerned is the best thing about critical writing. Anyway, back to the movie.

The overwhelming sense I got from this movie was that it was going to ram 3D down your fucking throat and you were going to like it. Every action sequence seemed designed exclusively to fucking pop out at you. And given that I think the best 3D I saw in a movie this year was for a movie that critical consensus seems to agree should have been a direct-to-DVD sequel, it is maybe not that important that I was not especially impressed. Which isn't the whole of it really; there is something to be said about the way that the 3D in Guardians managed to come off as technical and not gaudy, especially given how in your face it was. But then, on the other hand, who cares.

I am finding that this review might cause a bit of cognitive dissonance given how negative it seems, since the way I am describing it is on grounds that I usually reserve for hyperbolic praise. Which is to say: isn't strong environmental design, especially when it flies in the face of characterization, basically exactly what the fuck I'm all about? And the answer is yes, complicatedly but no less straightforwardly. So what is the problem?

Well. It is kind of difficult to say. The movie isn't unenjoyable, and there are things about it that I think would be worth looking at more closely; I am just not sure that I have the right ideas to do so. The review is coming off a lot more negative than I anticipated, actually, although I think that has a lot to do with the fact that criticisms I am putting forward tend to be not so much points made in passing, as I think of them, as ways to condemn a movie wholesale, and reading back makes it unclear that that distinction is in place.

For the most part I think my disappointment in the movie was largely a product of two things; its focus on the technical and its use of certain framing techniques. The technical issue is, as I have said, possibly something that can be taken as a positive, with regards to the 3D at least. But because every bit of the movie seems engineered towards technical proficiency in that specific way that technique gets used to describe something artificial that "feels" natural, all of the interesting frisson is ultimately smoothed over by the movie's technical achievement. If Silent Hill: Revelation 3D had the most interesting 3D effects I saw in theaters this year, it isn't unrelated to the fact that it does seem very much like it "should" have been a direct-to-DVD project; one of the precursors to that movie, in my mind, and one of my favorite films of all time, is Pulse 3, which was in fact direct-to-DVD. And the main reason it is so amazing has to do with how the technical aspects of the movie are so hamstrung that half the movie is very clearly shot in front of a green screen, which given that the movie is premised on a post-apocalyptic world where ghosts have come out of the Internet, is actually so poetically perfect that the failure of the technical is actually to the absolute benefit of the film as a whole. I doubt anyone agrees with me though; but the point is that Guardians is a bit too sprezzatura for my tastes.

Now for the more complicated point, in that I don't quite believe I will be able to do it justice even to myself, about frames. I touched on this briefly with the allusion to Peter Pan; Antagony & Ecstasy touched on it as well with the offhand joke about jRPGs. It is more the way that the character frame (amnesiac protagonist surrounded by NPCs...) gets fitted within the narrative frame (...fights Ultimate Evil who is a symbolic reflection of himself...) which is in turn fitted into the conceptual frame (...on an epic, mythological or theological scale...) and ultimately the thematic frame (...to Save The Children, and Find Himself). In practice, though, the conceptual frame -- which is also literally the only reason anyone is interested in this movie at all -- doesn't even remotely fit with the rest. It isn't that it can't -- I already mentioned Eternal Sonata in another review, which isn't a particularly close fit but is nevertheless an instructive one -- but that it just doesn't. And it works well enough on its own, as do most of the other bits, and it even seems to fit, smoothed over as it is by the technical aspects. But there remains something about it which just doesn't ever work. And perhaps worst of all, that technical flair right where I find most interesting only serves to obscure how it doesn't work, and to make it impossible to enjoy the friction that would be there in any other movie.

A conclusion, then, I suppose. A phenomenally well done movie whose craft is the only thing keeping it from being truly interesting.










*Compare:
Now my charms are all overthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Versus:

2012 in Film: Norwegian Wood

Although Norwegian Wood falls within the group of Murakami's novels that I am perhaps least fond of, those being the ones which could be broadly & misleadingly categorized as straightforward realism; & though the film tended to highlight all those bits of the novel which were the most unappealing to me; & though it has been nearly a full year since I saw this one, I am going to go ahead and give this movie a "positive review," or whatever.

Murakami tends to shine brightest, for me at least, when the alienation and sadness of his characters is more refracted than expressed or symbolically deployed. Especially when those moments of magical realism or explosive violence don't comfortably fit into any explanatory frame (or at least when they manage to evade the ones that I attempt to apply), with the prime example being the rain of leeches from Kafka on the Shore. With a close second being the assault from Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Norwegian Wood has none of these moments, instead off(er)ing characters whose reactions tend toward the extreme but whose psychological makeup is fairly easily ascertained. And it is very much within these extremes that the characters of the film operate, placing their reactions at the emotional and dramatic center. The scene in which the main character stands on a rock screaming and crying being only the most obvious and unfortunate instance.

By choosing to do what it does, though, and sticking to it faithfully, it succeeds on its own terms. Given that it is the story of a set of varyingly solipsistic youth and their attempt to connect to each other, the cinematography which is often so pretty it verges on cloying fits very well, even and especially that it flirts with kitsch in a way that I think I have only ever seen Antichrist do; the woods around the psychiatric retreat in particular are shot with an almost alienating reverence that I still remember very vividly today. Unfortunately, the score isn't really up to par, at least in my memory, and the short shrift given to the roommate and the school friend is really disappointing.

The absolute best thing about the movie, however, is the way that it doesn't forget its sociohistorical moment, or try to shoehorn its relevance. When, in the beginning, we see masked-up student radicals rushing across the background of the scenes, we are given the tools by which to situate the film.

Murakami's fiction can be broadly read in two ways; as universal or as particular. It has moments in support of both, but it is only at its best when read through its particularity. He deals with broad themes, of course, but to fail to acknowledge them as acting through very specific subsets defangs them, makes them into boring paeans on Modernity and Loneliness and so on. It is in particular in his more realistic fiction that the impulse to read this way is present, and it is why I tend to find it boring.

The inclusion of those students, racing across the background of the frame, seemed to me a wonderful acknowledgement of that fact. We are not here to experience the lives of those who seek to change the world. But they exist, and obliquely inform, the lives we do experience. And, like the song from which the title is taken, we find ourselves experiencing that particular story of impossible, painful intimacy that tends to crop up only when absolutely everything in the world around us is broken, and we are too wrapped up in the pains of our particular moment to notice the trend.

Just as Rubber Soul marked the break between the early Beatles and the late, this film indexes a vary particular instance of the moment that the popular was forced to reckon with the political. And just as Norwegian Wood (this bird has flown) opened a space for non-Anglophonic instrumentation within pop music, finally taking a tentative step away from the purely insular and at least nominally creating a space for dialogue (see: "world music," and all its problems), this film is an act of translation in a wonderful sense, albeit one whose impact has not, and almost certainly will never, be felt. It translates the moment of its production, of its content, and of the moment that it title takes from, and returns them to the Anglophonic sphere, mutated through all these transformations that register only in brief flashes in the background. And it does this, when it manages not to fail, by speaking through the particular, which is not to say the individual.

It's own particularity is that it manages to index without abstracting; we see these characters, and they are not us, and they do not live near us, and we do not become them, but we might live with them in their cinematographically advanced world for a moment. In its best moments of the film, it manages to not reduce the characters (it keeps) to depression-type and angst-type and turmoil-type without whispering to you that there is a reason for this, but they cannot see it so you cannot either, unless you choose to look; but even if you do, do not forget that you are the intruder here.

Of course, what we watch when we see this film is a particularly well-done form of kitsch, and it is not unimportant to note how this is reinforced by the melodrama of the narrative, in which nothing really happens except that everyone fucking dies. So it isn't so much that the characters react unrealistically to how shitty everything is as that the world itself is an adjunct to their solipsism. Which is why when the student radicals appear, their passing leaves such a strong impression; even if this whole world is a solipsistic nightmare where all your friends kill themselves and sex is even more traumatic and alienated than everything else and the only way out is a desperate search for love with someone who will only be immediately codependent on without anything changing, at least this isn't the only possibility for everyone, even if it is for who we see.

But again, this is all deeply embedded into the fabric of the film; the melodrama that constitutes the film's narrative never touches it. It is relentless, and that is only useful as a backdrop, not a moral, because the second it becomes the center it adopts the frame of love which is always then reduced. The love story at the center of the film is The Love Story, of course, and ultimately who really cares. It is that The Love Story is framed subtly in this way that matters.

2012 in Film: Men In Black 3

As far as time travel movies from this year go, I think I would recommend MIIIB over Looper, at the end of the day. That's maybe just a symptom of me having a wretched track record of recommending movies to people, though. And the fact that the last time I was interested in time travel as a fictional conceit was when I used to get high and watch Primer over and over in high school. I dunno.

Maybe the strangest thing about Looper was that it wasn't adapted from a novel. That would have gone a long way towards explaining why it seems to so relentlessly disavow anything filmic about itself. MIIIB doesn't have this shortcoming. Compare the two modes of time travel; one is a little capsule, the other a watch that you press after jumping off a building. To claim either is more "realistic" is to play into the hands of boring rule-based criticism; to claim that one works way better in the cinematic medium is pretty fucking undeniable.

So, the film. Basically we get the story of how Will Smith's dad was actually really cool all along. So that's cool.

I didn't realize it at the time, but there's something of a highly sanitized Cthulhu Mythos feel to the aliens in the lab, and the movie itself could maybe be read as an attempt to translate unspeakable horrors from beyond the stars into hilarity instead of terror. It isn't quite Monsters, Inc about it either; there is something that remains of the genuinely weird in the aliens here. They are comprehensible without being totally domesticated, and many of the most famous comedy moments could very well have been played for horror without much alteration.

The biggest disappointment I had with the movie, I think, was how seriously it took itself. That maybe sounds weird to say about a movie in which Andy Warhol is an undercover agent for a secret governmental organization that polices aliens, and is a comedy, but there is something indefinable, except maybe in the moralizing ending, about the movie that made me think that it wasn't nearly as interested in being of itself than it was of being, well, serious. Maybe it's the lack of a new Smith rap song. Possibly it was how the most absurd alien of all happened to be the main villain and his actions were for some unknowable reason treated as if they had dramatic effects. I can't really remember, honestly. Pretty sure it was there, though.

What this film does do is to treat itself as a film, which is to say that it builds its world and narrative with a sense of the visual at least as much as the thematic. For that alone it beats Looper hands down, though who out there exists that needs to hear me compare the two I don't know. But just for good measure, the opening subway scene outpaces anything in Looper by miles, so fuck it. Also that fucking dog wasn't in this one I don't think? or maybe only really briefly? which is great.

I (probably totally spuriously) attribute the original Men In Black movie with an inordinate amount of importance in shaping, or at least predicting, much of what I would end up being fascinated with in my teenage years. I didn't watch a lot of films growing up; I was one of those book nerds who would hide in my room and read when the rest of the family was watching television or a movie. But one of the earliest birthday parties I ever had -- probably in fourth grade, because that was when I finally first made some friends -- was to go see Men In Black in theaters. I then spent a few formative years, during high school, basically a recluse reading conspiracy theory bullshit about September 11th a few years after the fact. I also wore around multiple pentacles -- a necklace and a ring, primarily -- along with other magickal objects. I can't say that I ever much believed in any of these things, but they held my interest for a long time in a way that wasn't really academic or whatever so much as just, well, interest, and was only tangentially at best a way of creating an image for myself.

What Men In Black had to do with that is hard to pinpoint, exactly, and I am not especially proud of that moment, but there is something there, I believe. Because unlike the X-Files with "the truth is out there," or Lovecraft's cod-philosophizing, one of the most important things about the Men In Black movies is that they do not attempt any sort of extrapolation. They simply present a very vibrant world, which draws on certain mythologies of our own, without ever needing to claim that it impacts our understanding of reality. The series doesn't have a pedagogy; meanings get thrown off them, many of them unsavory, and there is obviously an assumed subject to some extent, but unlike the milieu out of which it rises, and which it lovingly mocks, there is no directed program on how to teach you to see the world better. There is only the sights themselves, for you to make of them what you will. And that is wonderful; and it is also why MIIIB's seriousness can almost terminally wound it.

2012 in Film: The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man finally gave us an accurate version of the shittiest of all super heroes. Batman, especially after Frank Miller got his hands on him, might be a fascist or whatever, but he doesn't hold a candle to the nasty geek wish-fulfilment and entitled prickishness known to the world as Peter Parker. And finally, free of the curse of Toby Maguire's charisma and Sam Raimi's kitsch sentimentality, the reboot unveils the kid in his full glory.

Everything about this movie screams wish-fulfilment for a specific set of those entitled self-proclaimed victims known as white dudes who were "bullied." Not just the high-flying heroism and getting the girl, not just the fact that the webslinging is back to its bootstrapsish origin; not even just the Uncomplicated Moral Righteousness. More than anything Spidey is the wet dream of the self-identified nerd who loves to imagine lunchroom encounters with jocks where his debate skills debilitate their underdeveloped brains, with a nice little helping of ultraviolence to cap off the encounter with their "oppressor."

Obviously this fantasy is bullshit down to its very premise. But then, the film itself is informed by it down to its very structure, so. And much better to have the fantasy shown for how it would actually play out, with the fantasist coming off as a snarky, entitled prick, than to mask it with cheap sentimental hooks. Because even when the movie isn't letting Parker spout grating one-liners, it is fetishizing technology (occasionally masked as science) at the level of both plot -- it being the only thing that can actually impact anything, for good or ill -- and form -- the fucking 3D, man, my god.

Which isn't to say that the 3D is any good, of course. Both Silent Hill and Ghost Rider did it way better this year, which was kind of a dissappointment given that Spidey is probably the single most 3D friendly film character who ever was born. But it not being particularly well utilized doesn't stop it from being fetishized just like every other technology in and of the film, presented with all the mystical reverence that nerds show for their toys. In fact it even ends up being more apt for its incompetence, expecting you to coo at it just because it is so clearly cooing at itself; a better description of this movie I cannot imagine, and sort of charming in its infuriating, loathsome way.

The fact that all of this is perfectly internally consistent is kind of marvellous, ultimately. Every thread collapses in on itself, each apparent misstep an even more accurate portrayal of itself than a more technically accomplished or politically or psychologically robust alternative could have possibly been. The barks of laughter that came from the audience when Stan Lee showed up were such a perfect response I was floored; it was the opposite of the Hitchock self-insert, whose pleasure is for the quiet collector or self-described cinephile. Lee instead parades himself as a librarian listening to classical music as Spidey and Lizard smash up his library, while he is totally oblivious. There is nothing to be said about this. Every single aspect is so self-aggrandizing, so narcissistic, so utterly fucking thrilled with its own vapid power that the only possible reaction is to laugh.

And, y'know, laughing can be fun.

2012 in Film: 21 Jump Street

fuck cops