The Great Gatsby

Come out you Baz Luhrmann; come out and fight me like a man

Despite anachronistic and invasive music, Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – considered one of the Great American Novels by many (myself not included) – is more or less scene-by-scene accurate when it comes to story events.  This does not make a movie a “good adaptation,” however.  Two elements makes a good movie adaptation of a book: 1) the understanding that books cannot “become” movies, and that a movie adapted from a written work must stand on its own as a unique piece; and 2) a basic (or preferably advanced) understanding of the thematic material, i.e. what the book is “about.”  This film is more hot-and-cold in that area, though not as overt as Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

I won’t hash out the entire plot this time, because you do not need me to.  Leonardo DiCaprio appears as the titular Gatsby, a former soldier living as a wealthy socialite on the East Coast in hopes that his old lover, Daisy Buchanan, will show up at one of his unbelievably lavish parties.  She doesn’t, but her cousin Nick (Toby Maguire) does – am I hashing out the plot? Apologies.  I’ll stop.  The first bit of irony we’re fed is the title, specifically the word “great,” and this is where Luhrmann gets it wrong.  Much of the point of Gatsby is that the most morally corrupt characters are the ones idolized, and that the masses become obsessed with the most superficial garbage (i.e. the incredible parties, the glitz and glamor, the alcohol and whoring, etc.).  Fitzgerald’s inclusion of the word “great” in the title was meant to reflect this irony on the reader, and to invite us to look smugly upon the inhabitants of the novel who just don’t seem to reach the conclusion that the readers do.  In the novel, Nick is much more savvy to this knowledge than Maguire’s character in the film – one major difference includes his placement in a sanitarium, wherein he relates the story’s events to a doctor and eventually writes a manuscript called “Gatsby,” which he eventually changes to the title of the novel after adding “The Great.”  This injects a bit of narrative poison into a film that almost gets it right: Nick, as the narrator (not as a fictional representation of the reader, mind you) is supposed to realize (as he comes much closer to doing in the text) that Gatsby is in fact not great.  No one in this story is.

The other major missing element is that of “Owl Eyes,” a minor but very important character who appears in two scenes of the novel.  The above themes are in some ways conveyed through this character – a bespectacled man encountered by Nick in Gatsby’s library – who expects Gatsby’s books to be nothing but hollow covers (for purposes of giving the illusion of a great library) and is surprised to find that they are all real books.  Owl Eyes comments that Gatsby has mastered something similar to theatre – the elaborate party itself is a fabrication masking an ulterior motive – and suggests that everything in Gatsby’s life is mere illusion.  Thus, the “great” in the title feels similar to a moniker a mediocre magician might possess.  Instead, the film spends lots of time (and real-life money) on the glamorous parties and never stops to remind us how much of a sham they are (nor does it respect us quite enough to allow us to figure it out on our own).  In the end, Nick realizes that the people of the West (the entire main cast) are completely unable to jive with the values of the East, and that Gatsby’s lifestyle – which so closely resembles the exemplary “American Dream” (also a sham, represented by the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock) – is an illusion in and of itself, because Gatsby’s dreams are dead and gone before the story even begins.

The movie does include the billboard featuring the bespectacled eyes of forgotten oculist T.J. Eckleburg, which serve as a sort of uninvolved “observer God” who sees everything but does nothing to intervene or impart advice (much like the Owl Eyes character, who comes with some Lost Generation subtext as well).  The connective tissue between the character and the billboard, however, is never explored, nor is the meaning behind the fact that this billboard watches over the shittiest part of town.  But wait – I said that books cannot be “made into” movies, so some things get left out, right?  Sure, if your biggest concern is time.  But The Great Gatsby is a short novel, and what’s left out here is the most basic understanding of Fitzgerald’s themes.  Look at 2012′s Anna Karenina for an example of a film that (mostly) did a respectable job with its source material while creating a visual adaptation that was, in many positive ways, its own piece of art.

The despicable characters are still despicable, however, which is right in line with the novel.  Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), who goes on histrionic rants and says boring non-applicable racist stuff (which seems inserted simply because a period piece can get away with it), does all of the bad things he does in the novel, including getting Gatsby killed, though in the movie it’s spoiled (don’t you dare call it foreshadowed) far too soon.  At the very least, Nick realize that Tom and Daisy are horrible people who rely on their money to save them from every situation.  Bafflingly left out is Nick’s relationship with Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), one of the only likeable (and only in minor ways) characters in the story.  Elizabeth Debicki, who has only appeared in one movie previously, plays Jordan with such confidence and adventurous intrigue that her lack of involvement later in the story is nothing short of infuriating.  While DiCaprio’s performance (especially his completely organic-sounding “old sport” dialogue) is impressive as ever, Debicki is the highlight of the cast.

I’m just waiting for someone to screw up Absalom, Absalom! next.

The Great Gatsby (2013); adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel; directed by Baz Luhrmann; starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Toby Maguire, Elizabeth Debicki, and Carey Mulligan. 

Star Trek Into Darkness

The Waste of Khan

Star Trek Into Darkness is exactly what its trailer advertises: a bunch of men doing cool things, and then a shot of a woman in her underwear.  I am less inclined to trust J.J. Abrams with Star Wars, despite his ability to direct large groups of characters (and on that topic, the bigger the group becomes, the thinner each individual character grows, reducing them to stock characters reliant on tropes, as seen here).  He’s also gotten his mitts on the Spielberg family-alien-movie genre (see Super 8), so with 2015′s galaxy-far-far-away installment on the celluloid horizon, Abrams could be thinking, “Star Wars, Star Trek, and E.T. are mine!”  I know sci-fi blockbusters are a slick slope, but leave the megalomania to the cretins at HBO.

The formula plot follows Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) and crew, including Spock (Zachary Quinto), heading to the Klingon homeworld after the so-generically-named-it-must-be-an-alias Jon Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), a trusted Starfleet agent, lays waste to Starfleet HQ and kills Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) in the process, rendering the events of the first Star Trek film completely null, since the main conflict there was whether or not Kirk could rescue Pike from Eric Bana’s hammy Romulan villain.  Kirk, blinded by the desire for vengeance, accepts a dubious mission from Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller, aka RoboCop) to torch the area of the Klingon world where Harrison is hiding, which will hopefully destroy him.  Before too long, Harrison is revealed to be Khan Noonien Singh, a reimagining of one of the most famous Star Trek characters.  Here, he still embodies a flawed interpretation of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” (superman), but he’s been transformed from Ricardo Montalbán’s nuanced, developed, sympathetic ethnic antagonist into a whitewashed anime ninja whose chief concern is making sure to wear long, flowing black leather whenever he has do to anything that requires strenuous movement.  He forms a short-lived alliance with Kirk in order to take care of Weller’s “magnificent bastard” villain, who turns on Kirk to get his hands on Khan.  The rest of the principal cast from the first movie – Scotty (Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), Sulu (John Cho), and Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) – all reappear alongside the newcomer Carol Marcus (Kirk’s eventual wife if the old story is to be followed, played here by Alice Eve, complete with a dumb bob haircut that makes her look like a doll), and each gets roughly one short scene to remind us that they’re in the movie and to say their trademarked one-liners (Bones, of course, gets his obligatory “Dammit, man; I’m a doctor, not a __”).  Pegg is great as Scotty, so it’s a wonder that he receives a bit more material here than the rest.  Uhura, portrayed as a tough and confident woman in the first film, bickers with Spock in some truly funny scenes, and gets to fight a few times, although she’s never allowed to look like she knows what she’s doing, and yelps like a child when an enemy shows any resistance.

The best parts of the film occur when Abrams acknowledges the elements of the old series and movies that made the franchise (there’s that ugly “F’ word again) great.  At some points, the film re-imagines the entire Wrath of Khan mythos (Kirk’s temporary death-by-radiation, etc).  There’s also an encounter with Klingons (finally!), setting up a possible third film, which the fatcats in Hollywood will surely greenlight after such a big opening weekend.

Throw logic out the airlock here.  The film’s biggest problem is now Kirk.  Virtually every terrible thing that happens in the story is a direct result of Kirk’s negligence, lack of care for his crew, and refusal to follow the rules of Starfleet.  We are supposed to root for him when he makes controversial decisions that get his engineers sucked into space to suffer unspeakable deaths, and we’re expected to sympathize with him when he is caught.  Why would Abrams make this decision?  Is he trying to harken back to Josh Holloway’s “Sawyer” character on LOST?  There was a reason Sawyer was never in charge, friends.  Kirk is not only reckless and arrogant in this second installment, but he’s also sexist to the point that he briefly turns the Enterprise into a bit of a frat house (encouraging Bones to use pickup lines on Carol, etc).  Other questions arise: how exactly does one become instantly revived from death-by-radiation?  Why is Khan given the most powerful ship in Starfleet, hyped up throughout the film, and then not allowed to actually operate it?  Why is Khan completely invulnerable to Kirk’s attacks, only to later bruise and bleed after being knocked around by Spock?  Why don’t any of the women do anything?  How is the Enterprise able to function after dozens of crewmembers are sucked into space (read: redshirts)?  Who becomes leader of Starfleet after its longtime top Admiral is revealed to be a snake who gets their most powerful ship destroyed?  Why do the alien races all look like humans with weird growths on their faces?  Why are so many scenes, weapons, and uniforms 100% carbon copies of material from the Mass Effect series?  Isn’t there enough to work with in the Star Trek universe?  Where the f- is the colon in the title?  The most gripe-worthy bit is the new Khan, such a one-note antagonist that he makes Voldemort look three-dimensional.  The decision to make him a white Brit is beyond comprehension.  I understand the compulsion to cram every atom of vintage Trek into the new films, especially if there are only (!) two or three, but as Dennis Hopper once said, “Slow it down, man.”  You’re not doing anyone a favor by rushing through characters and events to the degree that the film series resembles a Wikipedia page.

I will concede that I had fun at this movie.  This may be because I saw it with my mother, the only true Trekkie I know, and we had fun predicting what would come next.  If you’re a fan of any kind of adventure film, action, and spectacle, this movie might do it for you.  You’ll just need to fit a nice black patch over your third eye for purposes of ignoring the boys’ club nonsense and gaps in logic.  “Enjoyment” is a word that gets thrown around far too often when describing what makes a piece of media “good.”  Enjoyment is subjective.  It has nothing to do with writing, story, originality, character depth, production quality, or anything else that determines artistic value.  Understand the difference.  Enjoy movies, but think about what you saw.  If thinking makes you unhappy, congratulations!  You are Hollywood’s target audience.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013); written by Damon Lindelof (big surprise!); directed by J.J. Abrams; starring Chris Pine, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, and Simon Pegg.

* I considered using the underwear shot as the photo at the top, for the sake of the automatic hits it would generate, which while proving a point, would be ultimately against what I do here, wouldn’t it?

*Hey, I’m working on another indie film.  Please support our Kickstarter here!

Help Support Indie Film!

Yo ho ho and a…

Greetings, readers.  I must break the fourth wall for a moment in order to tell you about a film project going on in Upstate New York.  This is the third full-length film I’ve written that will be translated to film, and we need some help via Kickstarter in order to get the ball rolling.  Anything you can contribute will help immensely, and the rewards are spicy.  Thanks in advance.

Anne Bonny film project – Kickstarter

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Stoker

Shoemaggeddon

Does Stoker mark the return of symbolism in film?  Regardless of how you read the interwoven narrative imagery, the post-Hitchcock camera acrobatics, and the sheer haunting uniqueness of it all, Stoker does things with cinematography unlike anything any of us are likely to see duplicated in the foreseeable future.

I may have used the term “image pattern” when looking at films before, but it’s a literary term, and this is the first film I’ve seen that uses image patterning in a literary way.  Consider the opening, in which a spider crawls up the stockinged leg of the lead character, India Stoker (the incomparable Mia Wasikowska) while she’s playing the piano.  An inexplicable sense of suspense follows the spider, despite the fact that we have no clue what kind of spider it is, whether it intends to harm her, or what it means if she smashes it.  But this scene is not resolved yet, despite the seemingly miniscule stakes relying upon its resolution.  Instead, since it revolves entirely around the image of the spider, it joins a string of short scenes, collected as the film’s story moves forward, that also revolve around nebulously-related imagery, including India lying in tall grass with a hunting rifle and awaiting her father’s (Dermot Mulroney) okay to take a critical shot at a fluttering bird; the image of the bird itself; people making snow-angels on surfaces other than snow; and others.  These scenes, which I might call micro-narratives, weave into the forward action in such a way that wondering where that spider ends up (and why) weighs as heavily on the audience as do thoughts about who’s going to live through the film’s central ordeal.  The starkest and most overt piece of imagery, though, focuses on India’s shoes and feet – we first see her popping a blister after running through the woods, realizing that she has outgrown her favorite shoes (unique blue-and-white low-tops which, were the world still small, would be selling out of department stores right about now).  But on her 18th birthday, as on every other birthday, she receives another pair of the same shoes.  I use the word “symbolism” because there are very clear “Who is what?” and “What means what?” questions silently posed to the audience through color and repetition.

The story that collects these images involves the young India, whose father, Richard, has recently died in a rather mysterious car accident.  India’s mother, Evelyn Stoker (Nicole Kidman), is known to be very dependent, and the wealthy Stoker family’s servants assume that India will be the one taking care of things from now on, not her mother.  Out of nowhere appears India’s uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who claims that since his brother is dead, he will temporarily stay with the family and help take care of their massive property during their time of grief.  The catch?  Neither Evelyn nor India ever knew that Richard had any siblings.  Evelyn, ever reliant on others, is intrigued by Charlie and welcomes all of his methods of comfort.  India, introverted and sheltered, doesn’t know what to make of her uncle.  Does he want to replace her father?  It doesn’t help that her relationship with her mother is strained and loveless, and that she will let no one touch her.  When Charlie claims that he just wants to be friends, India responds that “We don’t have to be friends.  We’re family.”

The beautiful and haunted piano/string score by Clint Mansell demands that this film take a turn for the macabre, and the red lights surround Uncle Charlie as soon as he appears.  What, we must wonder, does he want from the family?  Thankfully, India asks this the first time she’s alone with him, and we’re not left with a list of obvious questions that inept characters in horror movies never ask.  But the film’s sense of unsettling perplexity, not to mention what amounts to gorgeously-presented visual and aural poetry, allows us the knowledge that Charlie is the villain early on without ruining any of the intrigue.  During dinner with India’s visiting great-aunt Gin (Jacki Weaver), Evelyn mentions Charlie’s world travels, and a horrified look washes over Gin’s face before she tells Evelyn they need to talk about Charlie.  Before this can happen, Charlie murders her and a housekeeper who also seemed to know something about him.  Even more interesting is the fact that it seems like Charlie wants India to know about his penchant for killing and burying people (regardless, she finds out when she attempts to phone Auntie Gin at her hotel, and hears the latter’s ringtone coming from beneath the soil in the backyard).

Meanwhile, the greatest conflict is a case of Character vs. Self: India is eighteen and ready to wake up, ready to be “free,” as she puts it in a too-telling-but-not-telling-enough voiceover.  But she’s been cooped in her parents’ home her entire life and her only solace is in music.  She’s an accomplished pianist.  She is ostracized at school for being “weird” and seemingly asexual.  When she witnesses her mother and Charlie growing intimate, she imitates them and seeks the affections of Whip Taylor (Alden Ehrenreich), a classmate she trusts.  But she only wants to kiss him.  He has other plans, and attacks her.  Charlie, who shamelessly stalks India, materializes out of the shadows, and the body count rises.  She helps him bury the body, and we begin to worry for her.  Later, in the shower, she masturbates while thinking about the murder.  India, whose coming-of-age has seemingly been delayed, is awakening, but the admixture of Uncle Charlie and the violent nature of her own life prevent this awakening from being her own.

Through one thing and another, with the assorted micro-narratives vying for top-shelf plot importance, the truth comes out: Charlie, while on his apparent world travels, wrote dozens of letters to India as she grew, hoping to one day meet her.  The letters were intercepted by Richard, who locked them in his study for reasons unknown to India until she looks at the back of the envelopes and realizes that Charlie never traveled the world; he was shut away in a mental institution for most of his life.  India also discovers that her father and Charlie had another brother, Jonathan, whom Charlie killed as a child out of jealously for his relationship with Richard.  On India’s eighteenth birthday, Charlie was released from the institution, but then murdered Richard after the latter refused to let him meet India (and for good reason).  But India’s inner conflict is still approaching a boil, and she does not act out as we expect the protagonist of a thriller to do.  Charlie’s beautiful prose still dazzles her, and after another fight with her mother, she tells Charlie she will travel with him to New York.  He presents her with another box of shoes, but this time, they are not the identical blue-and-whites she has worn her entire life; these are high heels, the societal symbol of female adulthood (and, I might add, a patriarchal device for physically constraining women, and there’s something to be said for that here).  India steps into them and walks with ease.

Evelyn, realizing what is happening and reaching the point of ultimate fury at being unable to bond with her daughter, asks, “You were supposed to love me, weren’t you?”  When Charlie’s last plan before leaving the Stoker home is to seduce and kill Evelyn, expecting India to help him, the results are quite different, and as India brings out her old hunting rifle, the mosaic of micro-narrative images comes to a crescendo (as does Mansell’s score).  This scene – and this bears repeating – is so disparate from anything in recent film narrative, that it’s a miracle we are able to cling to the characters through the fantastically musical realization of virtually everything we have encountered in the film so far – including the spider.  It begins on the floor, makes its way up India’s leg, crawls up her thigh and past the hem of her skirt, and is last seen slipping across Charlie’s doornail-dead face.  No, India seems to say, I will not be controlled this way; this gift you gave me, I will give back.

The final scene, whether needed or not, poses some questions and answers other ones.  What kind of woman has India become?  Whether or not she’s leaving the Stoker home for good, and regardless of her methods, one thing is clear: she’s going to protect her family’s name, and to a separate-but-equal extent, her mother.

Mia Wasikowska, who gleamed as Jane Eyre in 2011, finally gets another starring role in which to showcase her various gifts.  Look at the difference in these performances.  More importantly, India is a strong character.  She’s layered and exists beyond her quirks, beyond what the plot calls for.  An introvert, a musician, a painter, a hunter. Reflexes like you’ve never seen.  A sheltered girl considering what it means to come of age before she goes ahead and does it.  Is the film commenting on womanhood?  I imagine that different viewers will have different readings of it, but all of the clues (think micro-narrative) must lead somewhere.  I am still flabbergasted that this film was scripted by Wentworth Miller (and kind of impressed that he submitted it using a pen name so that the film could be published upon its own merits and not his fame), an actor I would not have thought to possess such feminine sensibilities (violence notwithstanding).  The joke is on me.

This is an important film.

P.S. Thematic voiceover is still sloppy and flaccid.

Stoker (2013); written by Wentworth Miller; directed by Park Chan-wook; starring Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman. 

Tomb Raider

Woman Rescues Princess

Good news: Tomb Raider (2013) passes the Bechdel Test.  For the unenlightened, a passing grade requires a piece of media to feature two female characters, both with names, sharing a conversation about something other than a man.  Lara Croft, Tomb Raider‘s protagonist, who has finally become a respectable, layered, non-objectified female character after 10+ years of being the quintessential example of poor female imagery in gaming, shoots plenty of breeze with her best friend/roommate Samantha (Sam) about science, survival, filmmaking, and their deep-rooted friendship.  Her rival/frenemy is also female: Joslin Reyes, who considers Lara a greenhorn and blames her for the story’s central shipwreck.  Even the enemy, in the end, is a Sun Goddess (Himiko) who requires another woman to carry on her legacy every generation.

Most of the Bechdel-Test-scrutiny is placed upon media that has widespread influence – that is to say, big-budget films, episodic TV series, video games, and all manner of popular brainjunk, much of which stubbornly retains the view that a man must be a misogynistic, aggressive, meat-eating, alcohol-swilling American cowboy in order to be “masculine,” and women can only be measured by which role they occupy in regards to the man, and how well they can do it: love interest?  Damsel in distress? Dove-eyed sidekick?  Secretary?  Domineering mother?  Stripper?  An old strategy by mostly-or-all-male development teams has been to pander to male audiences by giving the illusion of strong and independent female characters (let’s stay away from the word “empowered,” since we all have different ideas of what that means) through implementation of shopworn stereotypes that still linger in the wrong column of most people’s “sexist or not?” lists.  The Femme Fatale is the one that comes to mind.  Bayonetta, for example, filled the shoes of the Old Lara Croft: she was an action hero who enjoyed murdering enemies with stylized flourishes, after which she’d strike a sexy pose as if she knew the camera was there.  “She uses her sexuality to get what she wants,” someone once told me when I questioned how-the-fuck Bayonetta is an [empowered] character.  We’re talking about a character who wears skin-tight, low-cut black leather, whose legs are twice the length of the rest of her body, and who is built like a telephone pole with two enormous Happy Birthday balloons taped to it.  Is there really any question about the target audience for this character?

But Lara does not enjoy the killing.  Not only does the new Lara Croft game feature un-stupid dialogue between women, but the mostly-or-all-male development team (female writers notwithstanding, since the execs make all the final decisions) resisted even the temptation to have a shot of Lara in her underwear (which they probably could have snuck in, considering she’s trapped on an island wearing the same set of clothes for days straight and would need to clean or dry them after spending hours in pouring rain, muddy jungles, and even a river of blood).  Throughout the adventure, Lara is clad in a tank top, baggy cargo pants, and hiking boots, and can also don a cool-looking bomber jacket.  Even with all of the climbing, rolling, and getting soaked she does, the camera lens is never opportunistic or crude, and never attempts to make Lara an object of the player’s (or anyone else’s) sexual desire.

Sometimes, a big problem occurs when male game developers attempt to verbally sell these games to the public.  Consider that these guys, if I may be so bold, do not, as it were, “get out much” (i.e. social interaction, specifically with and about women, is not on their daily to-do lists, and they’re forced to aim these games at male audiences, despite the fact that plenty of women and girls play video games, too).  Consider also that public speaking is not their forte’.  Ron Rosenberg, executive producer of Tomb Raider, used the word “rape” at a pre-release conference to describe what the island’s scavengers try to do to Lara before she’s forced to kill for the first time.  He also stated – and this miffs me just as badly – “When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character…. They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her….’”

First off, Lara never becomes a victim of sexual assault in the game.  In one scene, a grizzled island inhabitant who has captured Lara attempts to feel her hip and makes a pretty obvious threat, but before anything goes further, the player is tasked with pressing a button combination that allows Lara to fight back, kill the guy, and escape.  On one level, the enemy character’s actions fit what the developers are trying to say about the people of the island: they’ve been trapped here for years without seeing a woman, and have become savage brainwashed cultists in the meantime, so when they’re tasked with killing Lara anyway, touching her body comes to mind.  Okay, whatever.  But even if the player fails to press the buttons in time and in the right order, the implied sexual assault does not go further (the player does, however, receive what amounts to a “game over”).  With real-life events such as the Steubenville Rape Trial (which I canceled a lesson in order to talk to my students about last week), we don’t need to act out sex crime in games.  Using a term like “rape” to describe what the enemy tries to do to Lara in this scene also perpetuates the inaccurate and frustratingly widespread  assumption that every rapist is a bogeyman in a dark alley (or an island) who jumps out of the shadows to grab the woman, and that the woman always screams and fights.  Young people are impressionable.  If you present this material to a young man enough times, this is how he thinks things are.  Before you say “But this game is for mature audiences; young people aren’t playing it,” consider the fact that when I used to teach kindergarten, I met five year-olds who played Call of Duty.  Send your sixth-grader into GameStop and see what they can’t buy.

Rosenberg’s haphazard comments (which I have to believe were at least partially informed by the need to pander to male gamers who need a “reason” to play female characters in games) caused the problems, nothing in the game itself.  He also likened sexual assault victims to “cornered animal[s],” which again has nothing to do with the actual content of the game, but which is cripplingly reductive and creates a pretty shitty image of his company.  I can only hope he’s looked back on these comments and realized what’s wrong with them (not to mention that one should actually plan out what one says in a public forum).

What disturbs me even more than the rape comment in and of itself is the thought that it was made on purpose.  No, Lara as a character does not ever give the impression of needing protection or help (as appropriately overwhelmed as she is by the story’s events), but was this just a way to get men to want to play the game?  Just like the Femme Fatale, the Rape-and-Revenge trope has only been perpetuated by male storytellers and is aimed at male audiences who get off on the idea of women as victims (whether or not in tandem with the Chicks With Guns trope).  Lara gets plenty roughed-up in this game, even if the player never “dies” or fails at a task.  She jumps off cliffs, slides down waterfalls, is shot non-fatally by arrows, does plenty of bleeding, and spends lots of screen-time tending to her flesh-wounds.  I immediately think of Nathan Drake, the main character of the Uncharted series, who was originally envisioned as the male Lara Croft and who never receives so much as a bruise in his games.  Is this because, when playing a male character, a male player wants to be completely dominant and in control, but with a female character, the titillation that comes with the victim/protection/violence against women nonsense is too much to resist?  I know this is not how all men and male gamers feel, but maybe it’s still what the gaming industry considers a safe bet for getting a game sold.  To briefly counterpoint this, I don’t think even my kindergarteners would have “believed” the story of this game if Lara had emerged from the adventure without a single cut.

Onward.  If I had anything like an epiphany during this game, it was that during the second-to-last scene of the story, after 20-ish nonconsecutive hours of play, I realized that this ended up being a story wherein a woman rescues a princess.  Yes, Sam turns out to be descended from Japanese royalty and is the “chosen one” Himiko requires in order to remain in control of the island.  Lara’s final task in the game is to rescue her.  After she does so, we witness a long sweeping hero-shot of Lara carrying Sam from Himiko’s lair to the beach, where safety awaits.  Throughout the story, the duo have a very chummy rapport.  They are referred to as “best friends” and “roommates” on occasion, and Lara goes to incredible lengths to save Sam multiple times.  Not only is Woman Rescues Princess noteworthy, but there’s some gay subtext here.  I’m not the only one who has noticed; there’s even a Tumblr page devoted to “shipping” the Lara/Sam relationship (note the word relationship; no one is saying “I wish they made out onscreen!”).

This is encouraging: are gamers more willing to accept and love LGBT characters in their games?  Mass Effect 3 included openly gay male and female characters, and the option to place the player character in a steady relationship with either of them (depending on gender of course).  Rhianna Pratchett, writer of Tomb Raider, says this concerning Lara’s sexuality:

“There’s part of me that would’ve loved to make Lara gay. I’m not sure [the developer] would be ready for it! But we’ve not spoken about it directly, either. Who knows what the future might hold?…But people have talked about Lara’s boyfriends and stuff like that, and I’m like, ‘No, no, I don’t want that to be part of it!’ This is about her. I didn’t feel like a boyfriend or that side of things fit into it. But I do like the fact that people speculate about what Lara’s relationship to Sam might have been…”

And the following concerning Lara’s identity as a female character in gaming:

“I wanted to make a human story. But I never wanted to forget that [Lara] was female either. And, I mean, certainly the way she reacts to things could be said to be more female as a reaction. I’m not talking about being scared, or being vulnerable. But the way she interacts with other characters, her friendship with Sam in particular…you wouldn’t see a male character holding the hands of an in-pain male character or hugging a dying male character…And certainly her friendship with Sam, especially when it’s fleshed out in the camera sequences, it’s quite a female friendship. It’s quite sort of playful and fun and girlish. And that underlines Sam’s importance in Lara’s life. They both have their differences, but they’re both ambitious women in their field. And they care a lot for each other. Maybe with a female character it’s easier to show those kind of emotions…But there things—the language she uses, or the way that she interacts—that could be said to be more feminine. I’m very much not talking about her sense of vulnerability or being scared. That again has been rolled out as: male characters aren’t shown as being scared or vulnerable, why should female characters? Well, just because it hasn’t been done with male characters doesn’t make it wrong! It’s probably more of a problem of the way we depict male characters.”

Subtext, then, maybe be enough to work with for now.  More significant is the desire of the game’s fans to see a relationship like this not only canonized, but portrayed as wholesome and equal, not steamy and exploitative.  We certainly have issues with how we portray male characters (see my comments on masculinity above and throughout this blog’s pages), rugged heroes and gay men alike.  When they’re one-note tough guys, no one has a problem.  Same with female characters: if they fit a familiar role, male gamers are satisfied and the game sells.  Give them some substance, realistic quirks and ambitions, anything to rock the boat, and there’s “controversy.”

We need to be able to go all the way with the idea of women being “equals” in gaming if we’re to go there at all.  Mass Effect made strides when revealing that more players, including men, chose to play the female version of Commander Shepard, and BioWare (the game’s developer) subsequently released the final game in the trilogy with a reversible cover that could feature hardened, cool-looking versions of either gender of the hero (yes, you can still have the pervy-looking buzzcut Shepard gracing your shelf if you like).  The previous two game covers, however, feature only the male version of the character.  Why not have the mandatory “FemShep” printed on this one?  Could the assumption be that male gamers would not want a female character, however strong and deep, on display in their home lest their friends consider them – gulp – feminine?  How about the marketing campaign of the new Bioshock Infinite that featured Elizabeth, the male protagonist’s female partner (action partner, not romantic), with her breasts mostly exposed and a crosshair circling her head as if to declare her a victim that must be rescued by any man who would purchase this game, only to realize that in the game, she’s actually a well-developed character who keeps her clothes on?  Come to find out, the game developer left the marketing to another company altogether.  What is it?  The need to “possess” the female character?  The need to let male friends know that you do?  This one really killed me.

With game-scripters like Pratchett taking risks and breathing life into characters like Lara, who has traveled as long a road as any game character to earn her place, maybe we’re not far away from something that truly feels like inhaling new air, something that will dissolve the conflict some of us have about enjoying video games vs. smashing the status quo, or even just admitting to colleagues with preconceived notions about video games (and often how video games should be steadfastly discouraged) that we find enjoyment in this stuff.

Burt Wonderstone

Escape what?

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone begins at the very top of Vonnegut’s Fortune Graph, then quickly dips to the near-bottom and pulls some clever loops.  Thankfully, there’s some nuance.  Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) is at the top of the Las Vegas magician circuit along with his partner, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi).  The duo perform a ten-year-old act in a theatre named after themselves, and their act is the exclusive property of tight-fisted hotelier Doug Munny (James Gandolfini), who tolerates their show’s repetitive nature as long as they rake in the bucks.  Mixed in with their stage crew is the mature and intelligent Jane (Olivia Wilde), an aspiring magician who looks up to Wonderstone until she realizes what a self-involved, sexist fop he really is.  Out of seemingly nowhere, magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey), from the David Blaine/Criss Angel school of street-combing, heavy metal non-magic, appears on the scene and makes everyone wonder whether his act, which involves little more than self-mutilation, is the future of magic.

At this point, does anyone really care about the future of magic?  By “everyone,” I mean the real-life audience of this film, because the characters within are certainly concerned enough.  The great illusionists were the most wonderful novelties of their time, and even magicians like Blaine were enjoyable if you couldn’t figure out his year-one card tricks and could get past the fact that his enthusiastic onlookers were plants, but now, in the Age of Irony, the magic of magic would probably be lost on the Youtube generation, who are all too eager to type “FAKE!” in the comments section before a video even ends.

Burt Wonderstone is a formula screwball-comedy; any strange craft or activity could have been implemented in the place of Vegas magic shows for funny results.  The film does some interesting genre-hopping, however; much of the humor, particularly anything involving Jim Carrey, is dark and visceral (I actually looked away during one of Gray’s street tricks), but then, not five minutes later, we receive family-oriented dialogue about friendship.

With Gray becoming more popular, Wonderstone and Anton decide (with more than a little strong-arming from Doug) to change their act.  This leads to an amusing parody of one of David Blaine’s “stand still in public for a week” spectacles, and for these two, the results are calamitous.  With a friendship and a career in shambles, Wonderstone is reduced to rags (near-bottom of the graph!) and must, as we know he will, bounce back and reignite his career while learning a lesson or two about giving.  The problem at the outset is that he’s a horrible person.  His heightened “accent” makes Everett McGill sound like Morgan Freeman.  He’s also unbelievably bigoted, and tells Jane (who refuses to be either his sexed-up assistant or a one-night stand) that she can never be a famous magician because she’s “a girl.”  He also constantly refers to her as “Nicole,” the name of his previous assistant.  His very sincere apology concerning this behavior later in the film makes one wonder whether he’s just been playing a character his entire life.  He admits that he knew her name the entire time and deliberately objectified and insulted her.  Given the joyless and mechanical way he performs in the beginning (including sex with a groupie played by the multi-talented Gillian Jacobs), could he have been acting this way simply because it’s expected of him?  Worth thinking about.  Regardless, he becomes a much more sympathetic protagonist once he admits he was wrong, stops wearing a platinum blonde wig, and begins speaking like a normal person.  The “romance” between Burt and Jane, though, feels completely dialed-in, and I daresay it was not in the script until a big-name studio got involved.

The sexism chat leads to one of the funniest exchanges in the film.  Burt: “I’m sorry.  Back then, women did not have the same freedoms they have now.”  Jane: “It was a month ago.”

Alan Arkin appears as Rance Holloway, the magician whose home kits inspired Burt to do magic in the first place.  There’s some good era-specific humor when, in the 80s segment, Rance’s commercial states, “I’m Rance Holloway.  You’ve probably seen me on the Merv Griffin show.”  Whomever did Arkin’s makeup for this film should win an Oscar next year. Gandolfini plays the voracious Doug as a straightforward parody of Vegas hoteliers: he opens a billion-dollar resort named after himself (“The Doug”), cannot remember how old his son is, and has even fewer layers to his character than Virgil from True Romance.  Buscemi is hilarious and heartwarming as usual in these comedic roles that he loves, and after watching him for three years on Boardwalk Empire, this role is borderline novel.  Wilde plays Jane as a down-to-earth career woman whose character could have potentially been far more than a love interest (though she does achieve her dream of becoming The Astonishing Jane in the end).  Carrey’s Steve Gray is something else.  Even in middle-age, he’s successfully brought back the material he did in The Mask; a kooky niche character who, despite being crazy, manages to be more than a caricature.  Not much more, but Jim Carrey has effectively returned.  Gray is the quintessential celebrity magician who doesn’t care how his dangerous acts affect children.  Jane asks, after Gray mutilates himself at a birthday party, “What if kids try to copy you?”  Gray answers, “I’ll sue them.  It’s my trick.”  Finally, there’s a great cameo from David Copperfield, the guy who made me love magic shows when I was a kid.  I won’t spoil his involvement in the movie, but I still cannot figure out how he did that “interact with your TV” trick wherein you always end up on the moon.

In this case, if you’re entirely sure about what you saw, you overthought it.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone; written by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein; directed by Don Scardino; starring Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Olivia Wilde, and Jim Carrey.

Side Effects

And he guessed at the number of script rewrites as a child guesses at jellybeans in a jar

By the third act of Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects, you will feel lied to.  And appropriately: the film does what A Beautiful Mind did, but in the wrong way – making the audience think the story is about one thing, and then making it about something else.  Ron Howard’s film, based on a man’s true life experiences with auditory hallucinations, appeared at first (to the layman/non-trailer-watcher) to be about a math whiz inducted into the CIA due to his uncanny ability to make connections between important pieces of information, when in reality, he’s suffering from schizophrenia and inventing the entire thing.  Here, we have a story that at first purports to be about a “very sick girl” suffering from serious depression and being riddled with useless medications, and most refreshingly, seems to be one of the only honest movies about depression itself, but it isn’t that.  It turns out to be – and I don’t use this term lightly – ugh.

The linchpin by which this film remains what the casual viewer would call a “pretty good movie” and not a total wash is, of course, Rooney Mara, who plays the main character – named Emily Taylor – and who gleamed as Lisbeth Salander in 2011 (and was more worthy of the Best Actress Oscar than anyone else nominated that year).  The story begins when Emily picks up her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), from a four year prison sentence and attempts to reconnect.  There are no longer any sparks, however, and Emily is severely depressed, going through episodes that the couple’s friends and Martin himself simply cannot understand.  Finally, she goes to see psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a recently-married doctor who sees an opportunity for extra money by participating in a study of some new depression meds.  He prescribes them to Emily, who is desperate for any relief whatsoever, and they’re seemingly ineffective.  While sleepwalking one night, Emily stabs Martin to death and calmly goes back to bed, her bare feet soaked with blood.

Now we have a real dilemma: who is at fault?  Emily, who physically performed the killing and doesn’t remember a thing, or Banks, who prescribed the pills that turned her into a sleepwalking, knife-wielding zombie?  Banks, feeling sympathy for Emily and wanting to clear his name, as his entire life – including his practice (his partners do not want to be affiliated with someone who so recklessly caused a tragedy) and his wife, Dierdre (Vinessa Shaw) – is threatened.  Wonderful, I said to myself.  Finally, a story in an accessible medium that sympathizes with people who have spent their lives suffering from depression (myself included), identifies with their interior plights, quietly observes their very real struggles, illustrates so vividly the fact that non-depressed people cannot understand what we go through, and even demonizes the opportunistic pharmaceutical industry for haphazardly tossing pills and miracle cures our way; there’s even a commentary on the misleading, cheery ads with supposed formerly-depressed people prancing along beaches with their laughably photogenic families.

Not quite.  Side Effects is that film insofar as Reservoir Dogs is a film about Madonna.  Soderbergh pulls the curtain away and reveals the fact that he really wanted to make a neo-noir movie about a Holmes-like detective trying to investigate his way out of a legal and marital nightmare.  After an extended bout of gumshoeing, Banks deduces that Emily faked the entire thing in an elaborate scheme that also involved her ex-therapist, Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), as the two wished only to make exorbitant sums of money through stock market manipulation (there’s a fortune to be made if a popular drug kills a patient).  Through one thing and another, Banks puts into motion his own dastardly scheme for revenge and freedom, winning his life back in a painfully obvious post-test-audiences ending that left me with my palm glued to my forehead.

So if you watch the second half, you get the opposite of what I thought the film would be (and of some importance, what the film was marketed as).  I do not like the implication that depressed people are “faking” their symptoms or exploiting the sympathy of others.  Thinking about it makes my third eye hurt.  In fact, any attempt at critical analysis causes this film’s internal logic (or lack thereof) to collapse: How was it so easy for Emily to murder her actual husband of five years?  Why would Emily act drugged when being injected with saline solution if she knew it would tip her hand?  Why would Dierdre think John would take photos of a patient in her underwear and then send them to their shared home?  Why wouldn’t she recognize the handwriting on the envelope as someone else’s?  How would rigging the stock market by murdering someone and hoping for victory in a very specific type of lawsuit seem like a viable get-rich-quick scheme to any thinking person?  Martin (Emily’s husband) knew about her depressions, as if these episodes were something they’d been dealing with together ever since they’d met. If she wasn’t really depressed, we’re supposed to think she’s been maintaining this ruse for five years?  Why is Martin seen as a simple murder victim and tragic figure; why does the film forget that he is a real criminal?  Why do both of the film’s principle female characters turn out to be the evil schemers?  Other than the titillation it provides male viewers with, why did Emily need to initiate a romantic relationship with Siebert in order to make the scheme work (it paints gay people in an unnecessarily negative light)?  Why is Banks, the doctor who admitted to prescribing ineffectual meds to a desperate person (and thus taking advantage of a patient, whether or not she turned out to be scamming him) so easily exonerated by the narrative?  Why is it seen as “okay” for him to get revenge by sending Emily away and prescribing her with additional medication she doesn’t need, essentially turning her into a real zombie and severely abusing his oath as a doctor?  How is Emily legally sent back to the ward after being declared legally “not crazy” barely a day before (any basic scrutiny of the legal system, which I’d expect from filmmakers who spend a third of their movie in a court, would tell you that this can’t happen)?  The film’s non-logic sends one’s head into enough of a cyclone to make even my dumbest question – Why do Emily and Siebert basically bite each other’s lips instead of actually kissing? – seem full of critical merit.

Mara’s performance and the score by Thomas Newman keep the film afloat, and the latter will remind some of Hitchcock’s strategic use of tension-building music (though I am reluctant to compare every single thriller featuring atmospheric music to a Hitchcock movie; this film doesn’t hold any other resemblance).  Jude Law is convincing as usual, and despite its ludicrous pitfalls and dialed-in ending, the film manages to keep interest.  Hopefully, enough good films about mental illness are floating around as to render this film’s potentially-dangerous underlying message innocuous.

You have to admit one thing, though: killer or not, you still want to root for Emily when she’s sitting in front of an abusive male doctor who angrily dismisses her and prescribes harmful medications – both times.

Side Effects (2013); written by Scott Z. Burns; directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Channing Tatum.