2012 in Film: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I've disliked Neveldine/Taylor since I walked out of Gamer feeling like it was so desperately close to interesting, so infuriatingly fucking near something really worth watching, and straight into Steve Shaviro's essay about it. I already took exception to Shaviro because of his terrible essay about Southland Tales, that unmitigated boring trainwreck of a movie, but the fact that neither Neveldine/Taylor nor Shaviro seemed even remotely interested in exploring the particularity of games, instead just assuming they could be abstracted into some bullshit about the Modern Condition or the social Real or whatever really kind of inordinately pissed me off. Plus I've never seen the Crank movies and am not very good at watching action films anyway so they didn't really have any leeway for me there.

The original Ghost Rider movie, though, I liked quite a lot; and luckily for me, I didn't realize Neveldine/Taylor had directed Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance before I went in to see it. Plus, they didn't write the script, so that was a blessing.

Credit where it is due, though; there were some good directorial choices here. Little moments like seeing Idris Elba frantically putting on his motorcycle gloves in the opening sequence when he goes to chase Danny and Nadya, certain jerky camera moves and pans during the chase scenes, and a general decision to continually remind the viewers that Ghost Rider isn't even so much an "antihero" as a purely nihilistic force were all very welcome. And, of course, letting Cage do his thing is always a good decision. The only part of the movie that really drags is the sequence with the monks toward the end, where they take Danny for safeguarding and Blaze to exorcise his demon, and even that bit has the fucking wonderful scene with Blaze and the Rider splitting ways, and with Blackout mummifying the monks. Both of those moments, along with when the Rider pisses fire and when he spins around floating for no discernible reason after a grenade goes off sort of near him, are an absolute joy to watch in 3D, too. Not only that, but they are significantly less interesting to watch in 2D, which I think is interesting in itself; that the use of 3D isn’t purely ornamental is saying something neat about this movie, I think, and its ability to engage with its own visual economy.

Which, basically, is the one thing that Neveldine/Taylor are good at. They have a very strong sense of the screen as a space of managed scarcity, which is why they tend to be accused of excess; there is, of course, a lot going on onscreen in their films, but the sense of excess is much more tied to the way that they distribute the visual resources of the screen in a way roughly opposite to, say, John Carpenter in Halloween. Where Carpenter innovated by turning the blank spots of the frame into sites of focus by drawing the viewer’s attention to the dark corners with anticipation, Neveldine/Taylor do everything in their power to impart a hyperkinetic garishness to a visual landscape which is almost always some shade of grey. In this way they occupy the space of the ordinary (or "Symbolic" if you want to play Lacanian about it, as it is the accepted language of the form) while curating the viewer’s gaze in the direction of the apparent irruptions (the "Real," y’all) which generally take the form of the absolutely excessive. Which I guess is just to say that Neveldine/Taylor do as directors is more or less identical to what Cage does as an actor, and while I admire Cage and think that the fact that they paired up for this film is pretty brilliant, I still think Shaviro’s basically dead wrong. Enough sniping though.

The critical reaction to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was more or less identical to the reaction to Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, albeit with slightly less rancor; unfortunately, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance hasn’t got shit for materialism, even the fantastical variety, about it, so I’m not really going to try to argue its merits on the same terms. Maybe that’s a good thing; maybe you’re bored of me harping on about that shit already. Probably not though.

There were two moments in the film that, when I first watched it, struck me politically as wonderful. The first was in one of the animated infodump moments, in which Johnny Blaze informs the audience that the devil is weak when he walks the earth. He tells us that the devil needs “emissaries” on earth to do his bidding, and that the devil’s most powerful tool is “the deal.” The second is when, just after the Rider is returned to Blaze, he rears up and whips out and slaughters a bunch of robed folks who were described as “politicians, murderers, men of influence,” -- a fairly clear bit of revenge fantasy on “the 1%,” I thought at the time.

The second point is cheap, of course, and not really worth lingering on. It is wonderful to watch though. The first one, on the other hand, is worth taking a moment on, I think. This movie is very, very insistent on playing up the angle of the Faustian bargain, which is one bit of Ghost Rider which generally gets left to the backstory in favor of exploring some sort of variation on his being an allegorical struggle with inner demons. But from the very early voiceover where Blaze (speaking to the audience) mocks himself for being the guy who made a deal with the devil, to the at least half dozen flashbacks to the deal being made that are peppered throughout the movie, to the way that any time the plot advances in an even insignificant way Blaze grabs his palm that is scarred from the bottle he smashed to be able to sign the deal, the contract is obviously not just an incidental thing here. So when the movie not only says that the devil makes nasty deals, but that deals are the devil’s most powerful tool, the slippage seems to indicate that the Faustian bits are not so much played as a way of characterizing the devil as they are forming an incipient ethical position against contracts.

Of course, even Goethe’s Faust tends to be read along the lines of claims of authenticity, with Faust himself seeking, in the first book at least, what we might call (because fuck “enough sniping,” I guess) unmitigated access to the Real. His contract with the devil is less about personal demons than attempting to slice through the social forces that dominate in his time. Faust comes to terms with this in Scene I, Act I of Part II, with the lines:

The rainbow’s arch of colour, bending brightly,
Is clearly marked, and then dissolved in air,
Around it the cool showers, falling lightly.
There the efforts of mankind they mirror.
Reflect on it, you’ll understand precisely:
We live our life amongst refracted colour.

By Scene IV of Act I, we have this:

‘To whom it concerns, may you all know,
This paper’s worth a thousand crowns, or so.
As a secure pledge, it will underwrite,
All buried treasure, our Emperor’s right.
Now, as soon as the treasure’s excavated,
It’s taken care of, and well compensated.’

Which is to say, the introduction of paper money. And so the the mediation goes round and round, moving inexorably between the universal and the particular.

To say that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance’s focus on the contractual even makes the same move is overstating things a bit, of course, but there is a resonance there that is well worth acknowledging. And to say that there are strong parallels between Goethe’s Faust Part I and Part II, and Ghost Rider and its sequel, well that would just be stretching, wouldn’t it; totally beyond the ambit of something so lowly as a review on a stupid blog.

It isn’t the act of comparative criticism that matters nearly as much as it is its consequences, and the way that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance takes a more Faust Part II approach to its working through mediation by way of economic forms means that its thematic economy (Faustian Bargain), its visual economy (Neveldine/Taylor’s direction), and its performance economy (Cage) all collapse nicely into each other.

The narrative economy, of course, is nowhere to be seen here, and thus the critics begin to snarl: without the proper establishment of motivation for characters, without the plot’s advancing properly, without arcs and structured acts, how is the viewer to be immersed? How are they to change their slip of paper for the coinage they were promised, when the exchange rate to which we’ve agreed is nowhere in sight?

Of course, the production of value occurs outside of the narrative economy as well. But it looks suspiciously more like reproduction, and we all know that’s no good. It’s derivative or tired or lazy; it’s histrionic or melodramatic or ironic; it’s, well, just not worth your time.

But then, in the relationship between the critic and the reader, only one member actually needs to understand viewing a film as a straightforward exchange of labor time for wages, and it obviously isn’t the reader. The reader obviously isn’t “outside” of capital, but neither are they implicated in the most obvious labor relationship with what they watch. In fact, the reader of reviews who watches a film is much more likely to view it analogously to the reproduction of labor than productive labor (which, in a literal sense, as recreation time, it is).

Of course, this is all just me footworking around saying fuck critics, and not saying much of anything at all about the movie. Which I’m okay with, although on the other hand I also kind of totally adored Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and would like to talk about it specifically too. So I’ll try to do that, to wrap this whole thing up. And what better place to end a review of Ghost Rider than with burning vehicles?

I mean, come on, the fucking crane sequence. What an absolute beauty of visual filmmaking, of pure awesome excess, of fidelity to character by stretching the limits of believability, of fucking film. Better even than the burning trestle of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the Rider’s flaming crane isn’t just any old toy, it’s the whole chest. From the Rider’s maniacal glee in operating it to the car that gets launched into space, from the bunker busters pointed at it to the fucking bizarre decision to actually view the paramedics cleaning it up afterward, that sequence alone is more than worth your fucking time, no matter what economic rubric you privilege. And just like the other peaks of the movie, from the Rider’s initial defeat to his triumphant slaughtering of the ruling class and that glorious final pun, it collapses its own filmic economies so elegantly, with such beautiful disregard for narrative, that you’ll feel like you’ve been offered a slip of paper for a fortune you could never imagine. And if any libertarian fucks try to tell you that it isn’t worth anything because it isn’t properly backed, let them know that they’re stupid assholes who can politely fuck off.

Oh, and if anyone ever tries to talk shit on Nic Cage or Idris Elba (especially Idris Elba), that goes double.

2012 in Film: The Secret of Arrietty

I'll just go ahead and apologize for this one from the start; I haven't got anything to say about Studio Ghibli's movie from this year. The absolute best I can come up with is lazy shit like "the animation was good but the design, I felt, was a bit lacking," or "a solid story, and well enough told, but lacking something indefinable."

Arrietty was good but not great, and so on and so on. I don't know though. I have always had a weird relationship to Ghibli films; Ponyo didn't really do it for me, and I never quite got how Spirited Away was a masterpiece, though I do love it. But I fucking lived and breathed Totoro growing up, and Mononoke was like a kick in the head for me in the best possible way. Even those, though, don't have any nostalgic power; I just think that Totoro is still a wonderful movie that I associate with my childhood only in the most abstract fashion, and I've never even bothered rewatching Mononoke.

I can say that there is a lot to recommend in the premise of Arrietty, with its promise to defamiliarize the space that I am, probably above all others, invested in theoretically -- the house, by way of presenting it at a radically changed scale. And I vaguely recall that there was at least one scene that seemed to do that. But then, I don't know, almost a year on I have a hard time thinking back to whether there was any real impact there.

Ghibli films are, to really blithely overreach, almost always about some sort of break within the family, I think, the consequences of which play out within the frame, and the resolution of which is rarely their reconstitution into a nice nuclear whole, which I do like. I can’t quite remember if Shawn’s impending death was ever referred to explicitly, or whether they backed away from it at the end, but it seemed to me to be obvious that the film was very much about the death of a kid.

Which is, I suppose, maybe the core of my lack of enthusiasm for this movie. There did seem to be something that everything was "about," a broad thematic towards which each moment of the film seemed to be referring. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily, just not one that I find particularly compelling. Especially when those themes roughly corresponded to abstractions of friendship and personal responsibility.

2012 in Film: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

There is something to be said about a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter when the critical consensus seems to have been, roughly, “it wasn’t ironic enough.” For a film that should have been one massive winking shitfest, and a profoundly racist one at that, what we got instead was just a racist shitfest with some killer style (and good lord to I hate to say that about a movie to which Tim Burton’s name is attached) and a couple of moments of honest-to-god awe at the toys that it had to put in front of you.

There really is nothing for the contemporary vampire film to do but to recognize that it is nothing but a toybox for the viewer to enjoy, and in its best moments Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is the best movie I’ve ever seen at doing this. Better even, in its way, than Let The Right One In was about its Coen Brothers action figures, or Let Me In was about its Hitchcock doll. The beautiful shamelessness with which the pocket watch got punched into Adam, or the awkward reverence of the longshot of the burning trestle, or the deadly earnest with which Abe wielded his stupid, silly weapon; or even the gooey, dripping melodrama of the scenes between Abe and Mary Todd or when Willy dies, or the sociopathic glee with which the film depicts the death of Barts. There is, in all these moments, the gleeful greediness of rifling through a just-opened toychest, the pleasure of being able to snatch up and discard in quick succession whole generations worth of entertainment, and I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you if the fact that it isn’t grinning in your face the entire time it does this somehow pisses you off.

It’s probably worth noting, too, that, at least based on what I’ve heard of the other one, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter managed to be the less racist of the two movies about Lincoln that came out this year. Given that, y’know, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter at least acknowledged that black people did things, and didn’t just stand politely offscreen while the white saviour got down to business. Which isn’t to say that this movie didn’t do the same goddamn thing, only that it at least didn’t do it as bad as a Spielberg movie did, allegedly. So congratulations on that one, y’all.

But honestly, honestly, why am I trying to do this, when all there is to say is my god, the toys. The fucking toys. The scene on the trestle is such a masterpiece in its incredibly limited way, so deeply in love with its ability to show off just how to play with a toy it has never seen before, so good at knowing that the pretenses it contrived to get us there can be joyfully suspended for the duration without anyone giving the slightest fuck. And then, when they have exhausted the playful bit, they contrive a plot point that reinforces the fact that what you just watched had no bearing on the plot whatsoever; the silver wasn’t even on the train to begin with, it was just a ploy for a neat fight scene, and nothing whatsoever hangs in the balance.

I’ve been sort of agonizing over the fact that I don’t have enough to say about this movie, wanting to be able to better defend it, to offer a way of reading it that cuts through the shit, that acknowledges the problems with all their weight along with the shit that’s done right, and to do so with aplomb. But fuck it; you open the toychest or you don’t. It’s not like its fucking locked.

2012 in Film: The Cabin in the Woods

The ambivalence that I felt when I first heard of Cabin in the Woods, or when I think about it as a sum of aspects like its premise, its director, its alleged reason for existing, and so on, is approaching ontological. On paper, I cannot imagine anything in the world that would inspire more fierce ambivalence in me than a Whedonian sci fi horror film that thinks “torture porn” is bad.

The movie itself, on the other hand, I was pretty okay with. Which isn’t something I’ve been able to say about a Whedon property since Buffy probably, which I haven’t seen an episode of since I was like 12. So congratulations on that friend, and I hope Firefly fucks right off the face of the earth.

Let’s take a little trip to Wikipedia real quick, shall we?

Whedon described the film as an attempt to revitalize the horror genre which he, along with director/co-writer Goddard, felt had "devolved" with the introduction of "torture porn". He called it a "loving hate letter" to the genre, continuing:

On another level it's a serious critique of what we love and what we don't about horror movies. I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification/identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be all right but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful. The things that I don't like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances. Drew and I both felt that the pendulum had swung a little too far in that direction.

Now, aside from the fact that I remain unconvinced that there is such a genre as “torture porn,” especially given the fact that Hostel is basically a really shitty action movie and I barely remember any violence in it at all, and that’s supposed to be the ur-text of the genre from what I understand. And it’s exactly the sort of moralistic bullshit that’s that shit I don’t like.

That quote does describe pretty precisely why I can’t stand Whedon and would have seriously preferred not to enjoy the directorial debut of the Cloverfield writer. Just looking at the penultimate sentence quoted from Whedon; that three part list is atrocious. Aside from my already stated skepticism regarding torture porn, the things that Whedon lists as being awful about the horror genre are exactly what people complained about in what Whedon is claiming to be the Golden Age or whatever, and what Cabin in the Woods chooses as its template; early 80s slasher films. And even more than that, what he ends up doing is sucking any interesting critique right out of that format, replacing the oftentimes interesting female characters (if you choose to read them in a counterintuitive way) that these movies smuggle in with characters who have nothing even vaguely resembling interesting stories. It is, as I’ve said, shitty moralizing, and Whedon’s cod-feminism has been mocked elsewhere and basically fuck him, etc etc.

Once again, though, the monsters basically saved this film. Not the ones that pursue the characters for the bulk of the film, but the ones in the orgy at the end; redneck zombies is really really fucking unfunny. But movie monsters murdering security guards who are dressed up like the SWAT team fucking rules. And the supremely low regard I have for anything bearing Whedon’s brand made the nihilism of the ending a wonderful little surprise for me at least.

This is maybe the first movie that I find myself not minding that I am describing it in much more negative terms than I feel like I should be. Which seems to've been the case with basically every movie I've reviewed in the last week or so. The Cabin in the Woods is just so fucking clever, so fucking meaningful, which aren't bad things at all, in fact I often like them and get annoyed when people deny that they have affective power that goes beyond flattening, but at the same time, I mean fuck. Whedon you piece of shit.

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.

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