The Dark Knight Rises

Death by exile

Since this may be my last chance, I’d like to examine just a few of the logical missteps in Batman’s modus operandi, many of which were suggested to me by a friend during the car ride to see The Dark Knight Rises: Batman and other masked vigilantes cannot legally arrest anyone.  Without admissible evidence, any villain kidnapped by Batman and left on the stoop of the police department is free to get up and catch a cab home.  Adding the fact that vigilantism is largely illegal, “the Batman” (i.e. a nocturnal maniac in an elaborate costume who beats the tar out of people unprovoked) cannot present himself as a witness without revealing his identity.  The absolute only way Batman would be able to stop crime would be to murder every criminal he came across, curbing his “no killing” rule.  Even if Bruce Wayne were to come forth as witness to a crime or offer open help to the police, he has an endless assemblage of illegal tech in and below his house (including military-grade tanks).  If Christopher Nolan’s Gotham were a real place, rest assured, Batman would be spending plenty more time in his cave than anywhere else.

The final film in the Batman Begins series is an effective ending to the trilogy and the most character-centric film Nolan has done, albeit with more than a few failures.  On the upside, Batman himself appears for maybe ten minutes of total screen time, while his alter ego, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) deals with some personal trials after an eight year absence from crime-fighting.  The film focuses on these trials along with the exploits of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar who arranges to steal Wayne’s fingerprints in exchange for the elimination of her criminal record.  The film’s deuteragonist, John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) climbs the ladder of the Gotham police force and takes on a role very similar to that of Robin, the sidekick of Batman, a non-coincidence that provides some good payoff in one of the film’s final scenes.  The other major players are Bane (Tom Hardy), a terrorist with a cult-like following bent on purifying Gotham through its destruction, and Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), a determined businesswoman with lots of money and a nebulous agenda.

I’ve discussed Christopher Nolan’s writing problems in the past (see Inception), and although The Dark Knight Rises possesses a more emotional foothold than its predecessors, plenty of fundamental issues are still present, namely when it comes to female characters.  Women get a better deal here (which isn’t saying much, considering Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fate in The Dark Knight): Hathaway’s character gets plenty to do in the way of action, and more importantly, has some personal motivation for getting involved in Gotham’s criminal underbelly.  Cotillard’s character is an important business mogul with serious ideas for a billion-dollar company, but once the action starts, she becomes a damsel in distress, and later, when her true identity is revealed, she satisfies that Generation Nolan film convention in which women with goals must use sex to achieve them and/or be deceptive and snakelike (see also George Clooney’s The Ides of March).  Both women harbor romantic feelings for Wayne, and like Nolan’s two female characters in Inception, these two serve as disparate romance options for the male lead.  They revolve around the guy, and if he didn’t need them, they wouldn’t exist.  Additionally, while Hathaway tries to play against type and be a self-motivated character, these contrived feelings for Batman (not to mention the sexy catsuit and high heels she’s required to prance around in) subvert what is otherwise a valiant effort.  Selina gets a sidekick, Holly Robinson (Juno Temple), commonly known as one of the first openly gay characters in comic books, but Temple is criminally underused while time is wasted on individual male cops and criminals who have no real bearing on the story’s events, including Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy, who has appeared in all three films), in a mock courtroom side-story that is never actually resolved.

There are also some interesting “buzz word” moments that I think are worth examining.  Bane’s takeover of Gotham is described by Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) as an “occupation,” and Bane proceeds to dismantle the power structures of the city (which includes driving the entire police force into hiding) while claiming that he’s placing the power in the hands of the people; the word people is spoken very deliberately, like a taunt.  The city’s single court room is now run by a mob of cretins, and pyramids of books and papers are scattered and piled everywhere.  Every defendant is killed in a barbaric, Hun-like manner, regardless of guilt.  It seems that when the “people” obtain power and there are no billionaires or police to save us from ourselves, the system falls apart and the doors to the Dark Ages are reopened.  Nolan has already responded to this commentary, claiming that the film is “obviously not” a criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but if it was obvious, viewers would not be making these claims based upon evidence gathered from the film.  You cannot create a story with the intent of having it interpreted; no matter what “side” you’re on, Nolan’s film glorifies the police and reinforces the necessity of the wealthy while trodding on free will and treating ordinary people like commoners.  Wayne’s ascent from a gargantuan (and apparently unsupervised) prison tower among the burbling chants of other prisoners (who all happen to be trained baritones) evokes a sort of religious vibe, satisfying the Rises part of the title while making one wonder what Batman himself thinks of the people – he’s a wealthy man who unconditionally aids the police, but he’s adamant about ensuring that Gotham’s savior “could be anyone.”

Among the leaps in logic is Bane’s (and his boss’s) ultimate plan: destroy Gotham as per the wishes of Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), who was defeated in the first film.  Considering how petty their goals are (right up there with Hans Gruber), why are Bane’s thugs so devoted and ready to die for the cause?  The film’s opening brings on this question when a henchman happily goes down with a doomed aircraft simply because Bane asks him to (this scene also features Aiden Gillen as a cocky CIA agent with a pompadour haircut, illustrating the underuse of great TV actors in films).  How do the thugs plant bombs of incredible power beneath massive suspension bridges without anyone (particularly boaters) noticing?  What’s the point of isolating Gotham into a medieval city-state if you’re going to blow it up anyway?  How many movies are going to make use of the trigger-button MacGuffin before filmmakers realize it no longer provides any real tension or drama?

The film effectively book-ends the Batman saga despite the numerous hair-pulling moments, and the statuses of the film’s main characters (not to mention the Batcave) make for a surprisingly pleasing conclusion (with no cliffhangers or silly post-credits scenes).  For full enjoyment, however, please blacken your third eye.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012); written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan; directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Hardy.

The Lie

It’s a soul-crusher

I once gave a lecture on T.C. Boyle’s selected work, noticing various patterns in sentence structures and descriptions – namely that Boyle employs techniques intended to dazzle or surprise the reader.  One of his newest short stories, “The Lie,” goes against the grain and harkens back to stories such as “Without A Hero,” in which an unsympathetic (if not altogether loathsome) male protagonist wallows in his failures and allows them to color everything in his life, most notably his personal relationships; these stories, when compared to spectacles such as “The Human Fly” (in which a Hungarian daredevil straps himself to the wing of an airplane) or “Big Game” (wherein an anthropomorphic elephant battles yuppies in an African game ranch located in Bakersfield, California), seem almost underwritten, and their character/dialogue-centric narratives lend themselves well to something we can’t seem to get enough of – movies based on books.  Director Joshua Leonard seems to agree, having adapted “The Lie” into a recent feature film, an official selection at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Setting aside my feelings about literature being watered down to passive media, I am expressly skeptical about films adapted from short stories.  How do you remain “faithful” to a text that can be read multiple times in a half hour while converting it into a ninety-minute visual experience?  My favorite example is 1987’s The Living Daylights, one of the better James Bond films, adapted from an Ian Fleming story in which Bond decides against executing a spy because he develops a soft spot for her.  The film version covers these events in about fifteen minutes, then launches into an action film: three major villains emerge, there’s a KGB conspiracy, and Bond cultivates a romance with the woman (played by Maryam d’Abo).  When my mother called and told me, “The program guide says there’s a new movie based on a T.C. Boyle story,” the very thought prompted a familiar tang of the heartbreak Timothy Dalton induced in me all those years ago.

Boyle’s story is narrated by Lonnie, a married twenty-six year-old father with a dead-end video editing job.  One day, he wakes up and decides, after watching his wife, Clover, a law student, complete her morning routine in an old Cramps t-shirt for the thousandth day in a row, that he will take the day off.  Radko, Lonnie’s tyrannical Slavic boss, knows what’s coming.  “Let me guess?  You’re sick?”  Having a bad reputation for taking time off and no sick days left, Lonnie claims that his baby has a terrible fever and that the family is at the hospital.  After enjoying the day, which most notably includes a homemade dinner and quality time with Clover, Lonnie repeats this process the following morning, except this time he panics and says the baby has died.  Clover, thinking of changing her name, in part because she isn’t “who she used to be” and partly to push Lonnie to the edge, knows nothing about the lie.  Lonnie accomplishes shockingly little during his days off, but when he returns to work, his coworkers have put together some money for his family.  Once Clover discovers his deception and the money, she confronts Lonnie, who decides to walk out the door rather than explain himself.

Joshua Leonard’s film version stars himself as Lonnie, along with Jess Weixler (of Teeth fame) as Clover, who has a much larger and more sympathetic role to play in the film.  Where Boyle’s Clover appears as a sort of mannequin with no described features and an inexplicable habit of instigating fights, Weixler’s Clover is on her husband’s side, loves him, and is understandably stressed about juggling work, school, and motherhood.  The couple is portrayed as nature-friendly, laid back, and a bit hippie-ish, whereas the text only hints at their pasts (Lonnie was once in a band and loved to snowboard, and Clover’s parents were hippies).  Here, their personalities are on the table, we can see the view from both sides, and Lonnie’s lie is fueled by far more than laziness – his extra time with Clover is an opportunity to, as he says, “press the reset button.”

Even in the film’s early scenes, it’s evident that the filmmakers have closely read the source material.  Even Clover’s punk-rock t-shirt is preserved (although in the film it’s changed to Crass, another punk diamond from the 70s; Cramps tees are likely in short supply).  Ancillary characters and background details are occasionally shifted and used to further the story in interesting ways.  Tank, a loser friend mentioned in the story, has a larger role in the film.  He’s still in a band with Lonnie and is starting his own line of organic edible face moisturizers, which he calls Face Food (something you’d think Boyle would have come up with if you hadn’t read the story).  Played by Mark Webber, Tank is bit of an enigma.  He lives in a Winnebago on the beach.  A VW bus is often parked near him, and when Lonnie and Clover ask on separate occasions who has been visiting, he says, “Some things are better left unspoken.”  He also acts as the movie’s ironic voice of reason, often spouting sagely advice to Lonnie.  On Lonnie’s first day off, the duo record a song together for the first time in years.

Lonnie: “I wish I could do that every day.”

Tank:  “Lonnie, I wanna tell you a story.  There’s a young man walking across a field and he runs into an old man who’s planting an apricot seedling.  He asks the old man, ‘Why are you planting such a new tree?’  The old man says, ‘Because I live each day as though I will never die.’  Then the young man says, ‘Well, that’s funny, because I live each day as though I will die tomorrow.  Which one of us is right?'”

Lonnie: “What does that mean?”

Tank: “Think about it, bro.”

The song they record is a transcription of Lonnie’s feelings on his trapping life, and this is obvious to everyone but Lonnie himself (he simply thinks it’s catchy): “It’s a soul-crusher, crushin’ my soul/it’s a soul-crusher, baby/waking up every day and playing this role/you love the soul-crusher, but it crushes your soul/you hate the soul crusher ’cause it kills your goals.”  Forget lyrical adroitness; this song has been extruded directly from Lonnie’s heart.  In a fantastic scene that shows almost nothing but Clover’s face for over a minute straight, Lonnie plays the rough track for her, and the fluctuations in her expressions (specifically when she knows Lonnie is watching her reactions) showcase her steadfast support of her husband even when she knows his creative work is a bit corny and probably not going anywhere.  It’s interesting to note that the phrase “soul-crushing” appears in Boyle’s original story, which may have inspired the jam.

Two important women aside from Clover appear in the film: Tipper Newton plays Jeannie, a secretary who is initially nitpicky about Lonnie’s work, but after news of the baby’s (fake) death spreads around the workplace, she becomes dejected and sallow.  Her inner tumult is evident, but she and Lonnie’s other coworkers must keep themselves composed, and Jeannie’s way of coping is to bring Lonnie lattes and cannoli; she even delivers a homemade quiche to Lonnie’s home. Eventually, she brings herself to call the house, and when Clover answers the phone, the lie is outed.  Alia Shawkat appears as Seven, Tank’s phantom girlfriend, who doesn’t show up until the second-to-last scene.  She relates a story of her own to Lonnie; the scene is shot with nearly the exact angles of the scene featuring Tank’s story, but Seven’s tale isn’t a shopworn parable; it is something that actually happened to her, and although the “meaning” of the scene is nebulous, it weighs much more heavily than Tank’s attempt to be insightful.  It’s a beautiful piece of reel.

Seven: “I love Portland.  I met an owl there once that really showed me where to go.  You know?”

Lonnie: “You met an owl?”

Seven: “Yeah.  Or it met me.”

Lonnie: “Right on.”

Lonnie’s other coworkers from the story also make effective appearances in the film: Radko (Gerry Bednob) is appropriately irascible, shouting over Lonnie’s every word.  Joel, played by Kirk Baltz (who famously had his ear sliced off in Reservoir Dogs), is more warmhearted, upset at having to take heat for Lonnie’s shortcomings at work, but who gladly covers for him after the supposed tragedy takes place.  There is a wonderful scene in which Joel seems much more grieved about the baby’s death than Lonnie (and understandably, considering that the former thinks it’s real), and seeing Joel’s sadness, we wish Lonnie had never told the lie.  This scene, along with another in which Joel and Radko present Lonnie with the collected donation money, provide a revelation that we hope Lonnie absorbs: these coworkers, people he imagines punching in the face every day, are actually quite giving and sympathetic, and consider him not only a part of their work family, but a dear friend.  Lonnie eats the cannoli, sure, but does he care that they care?

The film’s ending is heavily revised.  The original text of “The Lie” is cut off as soon as Lonnie’s deception is unearthed, preventing any real conversation or drama – how will the family move on from such a debacle?  I’m a big fan of anticlimax, but I needed another scene, and I do wonder if Boyle had anything to do with the film’s denouement: after the argument, Lonnie tearfully explains that he’s unhappy, that he’s stuck, that he wants more than anything to take care of Clover and the baby but has no idea how to do so with an unrewarding job and dead dreams.  “My music sucks,” he admits.  What follows is what he needed all along (and something we do not receive in the original): Clover’s feelings.  “What I’m doing sucks pretty bad too,” she says.  She’s not unhappily married, she’s not considering running away, but she’s buried beneath books, diapers, and the demands of her work, just like Lonnie.  The film is capped with a wonderfully organic “riding into the sunset” sequence, gentle, but assured.

I love titles like The Lie, titles that attempt definition, focus, and identification of a keystone.  In the film, it’s still pretty clear what the titular Lie is, but other lies are sprinkled amongst it: Lonnie’s career as a video editor; his hopes of making it as a musician (does he really believe he can go on tour at this stage of his life?); the couple’s “friendships” with wealthy pre-baby acquaintances; the thought that indie-rocker/hippie Clover’s true calling is law school and pantsuits.  Weixler’s performance stands out, and she radiates multitudes during a scene in which she gives Lonnie a look that, as Boyle writes, “spare[s] nothing.”  The filmmakers, using Boyle’s text as a storytelling springboard rather than copying it event-for-event, nicely round out their rendition of the story, and whether or not it represents Boyle’s vision, we must, as always, see the book version and film version as incomparable mediums.  Fading out on a stuttering blue landscape and seating us in Lonnie’s decrepit station wagon, The Lie spares nothing.

The Lie (2011); written and directed by Joshua Leonard; based on the story by T.C. Boyle; starring Joshua Leonard, Jess Weixler, and Mark Webber.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Results may vary

Let’s talk about dialogue for a minute.  In recent films (not all, but the majority of what’s advertised), the dialogue rides bitch to virtually everything else: plot action, concept, computer graphics, visuals, soundtrack, cinematography.  In action movies (which I’m more inclined to call Explosion Movies or Hunter-Gatherer Movies since they rarely contain much that I’d consider “action” and are always aimed at men who need a replacement activity for their prehistoric forefathers’ jobs), dialogue is reduced to laconic one-liners, all of which you’ve heard before, and which only seem to occur when the battle scenes make room for talking.  The very concept of laconic speech – that is to say, phrases that express ideas in as few words as possible – originated (or is leastways attributed to) the ancient Spartans, who, being a military culture and all-around tough guys, were expected to be men of very few words.  This tradition bled all the way down to modern America, which in its more embarrassing moments idolizes the same sorts of people – Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme (I bet you can name twenty of them) – and is used for a different purpose: not to forgo pompous polemics and long-winded spiels, but to avoid losing the attention of the twenty-first century ADD generation (non-readers, iPhone slaves, Facebook addicts, and tech junkies) that production companies seem to think constitutes 100% of consumers.  In other words, no one can pay attention anymore, and Hollywood is doing nothing to make anyone want to.

Most of the films that make any artistic impression are now independent, and free of the five-seconds-per-shot-and-sentence rule, making use of effective dialogue that moves the story along but also means something, and moreover, sounds as though the screenwriter (which, as a writer of literary prose judging the current state of film dialogue, I’m more tempted to dub a screen-outliner) actually put some time and thought into what the characters say.  Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed is one such film.  Billed as a movie about time travel, the film only skirts the subject, avoiding any real science and focusing chiefly on its characters and how they might actually interact if they were people.

The story follows Darius (Aubrey Plaza of Parks & Rec fame), a recent college graduate slogging through a dead-end internship at a snobby magazine.  When Jeff (Jake Johnson), one of the magazine’s contributors, discovers a classified ad asking for a time-travel partner (the writer of the ad claims that he’s “only done this once before”), Darius volunteers to be Jeff’s sidekick.  Accompanied by Arnau (Karan Soni), who more or less embodies the Indian Friend character archetype, the duo travel to Ocean View, Washington, with the goal of tracking down Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass) and pretending to be interested in time-traveling with him in order to get a good story for the mag.  On top of this deceit, we soon learn that Jeff couldn’t care less about the story, and simply needs an excuse to travel to Ocean View so he can hook up with an old girlfriend, Liz (Jenica Bergere).  Since Arnau is relatively antisocial and only interning for the magazine for the sake of broadening his resume, Darius is left to get the story on Kenneth herself.

What follows is a carefully painted picture of how film characters act when they exhibit actual human behavior, and lo and behold, the filmmakers manage to accomplish this without use of the cheap “found footage” or “documentary style” narrative, which often involves shaky-cam and contrived storytelling meant to mimic “realism.”  Since characters, especially in a film, are still characters and not people, Darius and the others remain bound by the rules of narrative, and thus certain plot points must be unraveled before the end, but Safety Not Guaranteed handles film formula in such an adept way that the events play out naturally.  The ending is too delicious and well-delivered to spoil, but Darius and Kenneth’s motives for time travel evolve with their respective characters, and if (but especially when) time travel has taken place is something to talk about while the credits are rolling.  The film manages to forgo all of the time-travel-tropes – the fish out of water story (a modern character travels to the past and tries to blend in, or vice versa), the epic adventure (characters return to a pivotal time period in order to correct a problem), and even the doom-and-gloom story (a character’s life is saved by time travel, albeit only temporarily), and the film does this without becoming a full-on comedy (Back to the Future; A Kid in King Arthur’s Court), an adventure movie with flat characters (The Time Machine; Timeline), a tragedy (The Time Traveler’s Wife; Donnie Darko), and even without resorting to convoluted time-travel science (Primer).  The wonderfully human performances by Plaza, Duplass, and Johnson reinforce the humanity of the characters, who remain passionate about things real people are passionate about, even in the face of the fantastical: love, money, the satisfaction of a job well done, and the approval of a supervisor.  Even Jeff’s story, which involves his misguided attempt to reunite with Liz, armed only with his rusty wit and unbridled misogyny, ends the way it’s supposed to.

Aubrey Plaza is excellent in her first major leading role, and I would love to see her break further away from her April Ludgate deadpan style (although she’s very good at it) in future roles; with this film, it’s plain to see she’s got plenty of diversity in her.

It’s also interesting to note that Darius is not only a male name, but it was the name of three different Persian kings.  As the Persians and Spartans didn’t much care for one another, consider, then, a character like Darius (and a film like Safety Not Guaranteed) the antithesis to the Explosion/Hunter-Gatherer films that we (the writers, thinkers, and attention-payers) no longer want to be dragged to and deafened by.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012); written by Derek Connolly; directed by Colin Trevorrow; starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, and Jake Johnson.

The Moth Diaries

Can you open the window a little bit?

Much of The Moth Diaries, a film by Mary Harron based upon a novel by Rachel Klein, revolves around the question of whether Lily Cole’s character is a vampire, and we’re (to a certain degree) left to our own analysis in the end.  I wonder whether my recent interaction with Cole has colored my comprehension in some way.  “No,” I think, “she can’t be a vampire.  She’s a really nice person.”

The Moth Diaries follows Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) as she attends a new year at an all-girls boarding school.  She and her roommate, Lucie (Sarah Gadon) are inseparable.  In an early scene involving these two and several friends (played by Valerie Tian, Laurence Hamelin, and Melissa Farman), a sense of foreboding upstages an otherwise garden-variety “teenage girl” conversation, perhaps due to the deliberate wide shots, which allow the viewer to memorize each face and personality, inviting us to figure out which qualities of each girl will lead to her inevitable exeunt from a horror movie.  The first night of the semester goes as usual, but soon, a teacher introduces Rebecca to the new girl, Ernessa (Lily Cole).  Ernessa appears sullen, ignores Rebecca’s greetings, and looks past her to make eye contact with Lucie, who has just gotten out of the shower.

Rebecca bonds with the only male teacher on campus, Mr. Davies (Scott Speedman).  Rebecca’s father was a poet (who later committed suicide and was found by Rebecca), and Davies is a big fan of his work.  Davies is teaching his students Carmilla, the vampire novel by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, from which Bram Stoker took a heap of inspiration for Dracula.  “There are always three things that show up in a vampire story,” Davies says.  “Sex, blood, and death.”  From here, we can guess what structure the film will take on.

The film loosely adapts two formulas: the Alien school of horror, which first introduces us to the band of main characters, then sees them picked off one by one; and select plot points of Carmilla itself (because Klein/Harron apparently believe a novel written in 1872 is fair game).  But the film deals with these two structures in interesting ways: the supporting cast is trimmed, as you would expect, but we never actually see anyone killed, nor do most of the characters die – some are expelled or kept by their parents from returning to school.  Secondly, the plot of Carmilla doesn’t happen to Rebecca, our protagonist; it happens to Lucie, into whose life we are given very few glimpses.  Rebecca’s obsession with the novel and her trauma regarding her father make her believe that her time at school is becoming a real-life Carmilla story, and because we see the story through her eyes, we begin to believe it with her.  In this way, the answers are never dropped in front of us, regardless of how obvious the film may be with its references.

Is Ernessa a vampire, or is Rebecca losing her mind?  The film, like Carmilla, contains a certain amount of circumspection regarding what’s actually happening in the story.  Le Fanu’s novel concerned a woman’s romantic affair with a female vampire; Harron’s film forgoes even telling us whether the narrator is in her right mind, let alone whether Ernessa is a supernatural creature or not.  The unreliable narrator, however, is a brilliant device in this story, because we are able to examine the clues for ourselves:  Ernessa, when misbehaving, is made to swim laps.  It appears she’s afraid of water and cannot swim.  She never eats.  When the other girls smoke pot, she refuses to be near the smoke.  Rebecca walks in on Ernessa and Lucie having sex, but from Rebecca’s angle, Ernessa appears to be biting Lucie’s neck.  Another time, Rebecca sees Ernessa walking the roof of the school and passing through a closed window.  Or was the window open?  These scenes are shot so well that we truly cannot be sure.

The story is more about suicide than it is about vampires, so its focus remains on its main character.  Rebecca is bursting with melancholy, desperate for the attention of her best friend, and frequently muses upon her father’s suicide.  Why did he do it?  Was it something she did?  Did it hurt?  How is she supposed to recover from it?  She even carries around a razorblade, the film’s one true attempt at symbolism, which actually works in a film with so many fairy-story attributes.  The threat of Rebecca’s own suicide seems sincere.

The performances of Sarah Bolger and Lily Cole are the linchpins by which this film is made or broken, and both deliver.  Bolger allows us to feel Rebecca’s sadness and confusion, and even though The Moth Diaries is billed as a vampire story, we honestly want Rebecca to reunite with Lucie and have a normal year at school.  A scene in which Rebecca professes her need for Lucie’s friendship, despite the way the latter has treated her, is rife with emotion and feels incredibly genuine.  Cole manages a performance that can be interpreted in two ways: that of a stoic, manipulative succubus, or a timid misfit whose only modus operandi for making friends is to inadvertently steal them from other people.  All of this is present in Cole’s Ernessa, and the few scenes in which she appears as a “vampire” (floating through the air, causing a storm of blood to shower the library while taunting Rebecca into killing herself) are wisely contained within Rebecca’s dreams or visions.

Ingeniously, even the ending, which seems “happy” at face value, can drastically change in tone depending on whether or not you think Ernessa was really a vampire.  Rebecca finds Ernessa’s diary, which states she may have died at this very school when it was a hotel back in 1907.  Using this evidence along with her own suspicions, she breaks into the school’s basement and finds Ernessa sleeping in her own trunk (a “coffin” of sorts?).  She then makes a decision that will have a lasting impact on the school and everyone she knows, a decision she claims has “freed” the two of them.

The Moth Diaries is a good story about a girl finding strength.  Aside from the use of the shopworn “perverted male teacher” trope, the film hits all the right notes.  I don’t believe I have ever seen a film in which the intention of making the audience “interpret” the film’s action actually worked, perhaps because most of those films also lack a real ending, whereas this one sees Rebecca all the way to the fresh air she severely needs.  I felt a good breath of it once the credits rolled.

The Moth Diaries (2012); based on the novel by Rachel Klein; directed by Mary Harron; starring Sarah Bolger and Lily Cole.

Detachment

Always absorbing everything everywhere all the time

I was a substitute teacher for two years. If that wasn’t enough of a reason for me to be treated for serial masochism, consider this: I was a substitute teacher at three schools, and two of them were the elementary school and the high school that I attended as a student. The third, situated in a slightly better-off nook of the rural fringe (at least until Hurricane Irene) had been my high school’s perennial rival. My old school district still employed teachers with whom I’d taken classes as a child; now we were colleagues. Nobody at the Other School cared for me much.

Henry Barthes, played by Adrien Brody in Tony Kaye’s Detachment, reflects the characteristics I tried to embody during my stint as a sub — namely, a genuine empathy for students and a desire to put time and care into teaching them something that would stick. Barthes, despite working a job in which everything is temporary — school, class, relationships with coworkers, bonds with students — takes his duties seriously and delivers lessons (which seem to be completely of his own invention, not from any curriculum I might recognize) with vigor. When Ms. Madison (Christina Hendricks), a fellow teacher, asks why he doesn’t become a real teacher, Barthes responds, “I teach every day. What do you mean?”

Detachment is an engrossing, occasionally heavy-handed (mainly when it slaps us with quotes from Albert Camus and Edgar Allen Poe), character-driven story that follows Barthes through three weeks of personal and professional trials. He has begun subbing at an urban school with a decaying administration, exhausted teachers, and students who threaten him within five minutes of his first class. He frequently visits his grandfather (Louis Zorich), who lives in a care facility, his memory and life-force slowly fading. He also meets Erica (Sami Gayle), a sixteen-year-old prostitute who roams the bus route near Barthes’ small apartment. After witnessing her physical abuse at the hands of a repulsive customer, Barthes decides to let her stay with him for a while. The ephemeral nature of everything in Barthes’ life is immediately evident: these are all temporary situations. Eventually, he will have to move on to a new school. His grandfather will die. Erica will have to move out. His reasons for embracing this lack of commitment, whether consciously or unconsciously, are explored through intermittent flashbacks, which slowly unravel the fact that Barthes’ mother killed herself when he was young, and he never knew his father.

What initially enthralled me about this film is that it takes an old trope — the Man With No Name — and applies it to two characters, then forces them to spend time together. Barthes is stoic and ashen for nearly the entire film, maintaining “I have no feelings you can hurt” and that “I’m a non-person. You can see me, but I’m hollow.” Erica comes out of nowhere, materializing on the bus as Barthes cries in his seat. According to the formula, familiar to us from the old Westerns like Shane, the Man (or Woman) With No Name appears abruptly “just passing through;” (s)he gets involved in other people’s business, solves a core problem or provides the necessary tools with which to solve it, then disappears, never to be seen again. This is the myth Barthes wants to claim for himself. He says he has no feelings yet he’s vulnerable, prone to quick anger and deep sadness at matters over which he has no control. His job allows him to show up, have an impact, then vanish. Just as he begins displaying emotion, Erica appears. Erica becomes the catalyst for Barthes’ change; they form a classic Travis-Iris Alliance and the better sides of both begin to shine through the grime of the workday.

The film features an ensemble which includes Christina Hendricks (sadly underused), James Caan, Lucy Liu, Marcia Gay Harden, Bryan Cranston, Blythe Danner, and Tim Blake Nelson. The teachers often appear in group scenes in which they get to kvetch about the school; these scenes, along with Barthes’ disconnected testimonials, out the film’s agenda in regard to the education system in America (and screenwriter Carl Lund’s feelings are, to say the least, not optimistic). Memorable exchanges include a harrowing scene in which Liu’s character, the school guidance counselor, finally snaps into a histrionic (yet genuine) polemic concerning the hopelessness of the students at her school — this is directed at a student, who begins to absorb the lesson, but then responds with “Fuck you” and walks out. Caan’s character, a substitute for the former dean (another temporary situation) shows students pictures of gonorrhea-infected genitals. Nelson’s character, yet another unhappy teacher, spends his breaks standing on the school’s playing field, staring at the sky. Barthes finally notices.

Barthes: You alright?

Mr Wiatt: What, you see me? You see me standing here?

Barthes: Yeah, I see you.

Mr Wiatt: Oh god. So relentless. Thank you. Thank you!

Unfortunately, we see most of these supporting characters only fleetingly with Barthes. The most developed relationship is a hackneyed attempt at romance between Barthes and Ms. Madison.

In spite of his apparent apathy, Barthes puts care into his lessons when he could just be a glorified babysitter, and we can see in his face that he wants to leave these students with something. Consider this speech from his first week teaching the new students.

“How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you?” He goes on to explain doublethink: “Deliberately believing lies while knowing they are false. Examples of this in everyday life: I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable. Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, shamed. This is a marketing holocaust! Twenty-four hours a day, for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work, dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read, to stimulate our own imaginations, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need these skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.”

How many of these students will learn to read, to cultivate their minds, to think independently? In this situation the moviegoer is just another temporary visitor witnessing a story that is clearly the middle of a story. If evolution begets resolution, then the end is well on its way, because there is a good amount of evolution on the part of Barthes once things begin to change (he confronts his feelings about his mother, finishes his three weeks at the new school, and makes two very substantial decisions about Erica).

In the final shots, Barthes reads aloud the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher” as the school empties around him (nailing the parallel between the Usher house and family and the school). Has he let go? Will he become a real teacher? Explore a new career altogether? Has he left his fixation on the transient behind him after his experiences over the last three weeks? What’s the next step with Erica (there’s a conclusion to this story in the film, but even so there must be another step at which we can only guess)? I like that Detachment seeks to tell a human story (and tackle large social issues), dropping questions in the audience’s lap without making pretentious and unavailing stabs at final answers.

Detachment (2012); written by Carl Lund; directed by Tony Kaye; starring Adrien Brody, Sami Gayle, Christina Hendricks, and James Caan.

Prometheus

What are my chances?

Prometheus, previously titled Paradise, and which I’ve privately renamed Battle for the Planet of the Space Jockeys, is Ridley Scott’s reimagining of 1979’s Alien mythology.  This time, however, Scott is armed with twenty-first century movie effects and has poured copious amounts of CG into an otherwise live action film (which makes one wonder whether he would have done the same had he possessed the technology in the seventies).

The popular question concerning this film seems to be whether or not it is a direct prequel to Alien.  The short answer is no, because Dan O’Bannon, who wrote the original, didn’t write Prometheus, having passed away in 2009.  Instead, we’re stuck with Damon Lindelof, whose unbridled hubris and laconic dialogue rendered the final season of Lost nearly unwatchable.  Lindelof’s writing has not improved, but having screenplay groundwork previously laid by Jon Spaihts and a plot structure defined by Alien, he manages to keep the goings-on (relatively) tight in this case.  I did occasionally feel “Island Syndrome,” however, during certain scenes in which the actors were clearly making the dialogue sound better than it actually was.

Set several decades before Alien, the film follows Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo), a religious archaeologist who discovers identical cave paintings all over the world, most recently on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  Along with her romantic partner, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), whose sensibilities starkly contrast her own, Shaw receives funding from the Weyland corporation (the company of devious motives for which Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo worked in Alien) to follow the coordinates suggested by the paintings, which lead to a previously-unexplored world in outer space.  The two are joined by a crew that will bring back immediate memories of the motley group of marines in James Cameron’s Aliens, in that they are unprofessional, disagreeable, and harbor an inexplicable disdain for the protagonist.  The film’s deuteragonist, though, is David (Michael Fassbender), an android in the tradition of the other films.  While David is described as having no soul, he displays limitless curiosity, seemingly genuine care, and a very real sense of vengeance.  Going against a popular sci-fi trope, David doesn’t want to be like his creators (who are, in turn, searching for their own creators in space); in fact, he’s quite relieved to be nothing like them.  Also onboard is Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a Weyland executive with the compassion of a wolverine and the personality of an ice cube.  Guy Pearce makes an appearance as the elderly Peter Weyland, the megalomaniac who runs the company, and considering the tenure of his appearance in the film, I’m not sure why Scott couldn’t have cast a famous older actor instead of making Pearce go through five hours of makeup for a walk-on role.

The space expedition, as it must, quickly devolves into bad decisions, bickering, and jump-scares.  The less important/interesting members of the crew (a geologist and a biologist whom I mistook for mercenaries based upon their behavior) are the first to be picked off by the indigenous denizens of the planet, which clearly resemble the alien “facehugger” of the original film.  From here, however, the story does not fall into the slasher-movie structure of killing off each crew member one at a time as they grope around in the dark.  The discoveries and intrigue begin to pile up, including the revelation that the “space jockey,” a being discovered in passing by the crew of Alien, was a member of the species that may have spawned humanity and now wants to destroy us.

Sadly, Ridley Scott has never been as good with characters as his brother Tony (who along with Quentin Tarantino crafted True Romance, pound for pound one of my favorite films).  The former has always focused on set pieces before the people and stories inhabiting them, and therefore the character deepening (which should not be confused with character development) does not get off the ground until well into the adventure.  After Holloway, unbeknownst to Shaw (“but knownst to us” – Mel Brooks) has been intentionally infected with an alien agent by David, we get a tender scene in which Shaw reveals her sterility and her desire to “create life,” a possible motive for her obsessive quest for knowledge concerning the Engineers.  This is, for the most part, all we get.  The film relies on its action to familiarize us with the characters from there on out, and conversations between them serve to reinforce their respective dominant traits: Shaw is quixotic, Vickers is ostentatious, Holloway is a skeptic, Janek (Idris Elba) is a stoic, Fifield (Sean Harris) is a bit of an asshole, and so on.  Attempts to deepen them beyond these traits are glossed over.  David is the one who remains a mystery.  He gets his own scenes before anyone else does, puttering around on the ship for two years while the human crew members sleep through the countless light years it takes to reach the Engineer planet, and even though we get to spend this time with him, we’re never quite sure what he wants.  He’s always following orders, sure, but Fassbender often lets slip (in both his expressions and clever dialogue) that something more is going on in that milk-and-pasta-filled head of his.

Vickers is another anomaly.  While the rest of the crew, despite being esteemed scientists, continually fall into the Principle of the Inept Adventurer (moving toward scary places, thrusting their hands toward the maws of alien beasts, and taking their helmets off on an uncharted planet, which not even Buzz Lightyear was dumb enough to do), Vickers is always pragmatic.  She stays indoors when she knows something dangerous is outside.  She demands that everyone do their jobs and follow protocol.  When Holloway is infected, she will not let him back on the ship, and a scene reminiscent of one from Alien in which Ripley refuses to allow the infected Kane back onboard, yields ghastly results.  The issue is that the screenplay sets her up as an antagonist, then hints that she will eventually let her hair down (which she should, since the antagonistic forces in the film severely outnumber the good guys by the third act).  After the standoff scene, Shaw and Vickers are well-established as the yin and yang of the ship, two strong women made enemies by Vickers’ rash actions, but they barely, if ever, have another interaction before the story’s climax, and Vickers’ part in the film ends with an “isn’t that cool?” moment meant to inspire applause, but which rang hollow for me.

Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw is the film’s character centerpiece and performance gem.  Once the cast is inevitably shaved, she is forced to carry on plenty of scenes by herself, and these contain the most revealing bits of her character’s steadfast nature.  The film’s most frightening scene comes when Shaw is implanted with an alien embryo (retaining the original film’s theme of unwanted pregnancy) and must perform a Caesarean section on herself in order to remove it.  Suddenly, the horror is real.  The tears are genuine.  The sci-fi landscape crumbles away for a few minutes and we are left in a whitewashed room with only our heroine and an impossible decision.  In this scene and forward, Shaw begins to mirror Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, the unwavering protagonist of the original film series: fixations on motherhood (Shaw is sterile and later must remove an alien fetus from her own body, Ripley’s daughter died and she must later care for an orphan), relentless pursuit of their respective alien Others (Shaw must gain knowledge, Ripley must destroy them), and a sort of quiet sympathy that radiates from both, despite their apparent two-hundred year gap (though their real-life timestamps are all too evident from their hairstyles).

Finally, H.R. Giger’s art style is well-preserved (the space jockey, the interior of the spaceship and pilot’s seat, the phallic-headed alien).  His name appears in the credits, but I do wonder if he was on set painting everything himself like he was decades ago.  Regardless, the use of his unique style (considered in the seventies to be too horrifying for audiences) is the linchpin for any argument in favor of this film being a true prequel (besides all the chestbursting, of course).

“Prequel” is a term I dislike for reasons created by George Lucas at the turn of the century.  Consider Prometheus, then, part of a grand mythology, one defined mostly in the imagination since it only spans three 120-minute films (I do not acknowledge Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, nor the Alien vs. Predator series), and a look at the other side of the mirror concerning powerful female figures through the sci-fi/horror ages – a rarity for genre fiction.

The Alien DNA is all there, but I promise, connecting stories with your imagination will work and satisfy much better than comparing graphics and storyboards.  It always has.

Prometheus (2012); written by Damon Lindelof; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron.

Coriolanus

Hear you this Triton of the minnows?

Ralph Fiennes’ modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragic Coriolanus is either a masterpiece or a travesty depending upon your level of reading comprehension in high school and college.   When I was working on my theatre minor, this was one of the plays I wished our department would put on (next to George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House), but alas, we were stuck with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that one bit of Shakespeare that’s impossible not to “get.”

Fiennes’ version of the story takes place in “Rome,” though the soldiers wear American army fatigues, and the streets and the protesters occupying them look painfully familiar.  As contemporary as the scenery may be, however, we’re still playing by Rome’s rules, and if you want to be on the same level as the characters when the story begins, a basic understanding of Roman government is necessary.  Fiennes plays Caius Martius, a newly appointed general in the running for consul during the era of popular rule.  He almost gets there, but because of the scheming tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson), the people realize that Martius, a brutal, idealistic military man who believes the people should have no control over the patricians (“allowing crows to peck at the eagles”), may not be the best person to represent them.  The tribunes push Martius over the edge during a heated conversation in front of the entire capital, driving the latter to denounce the government and its people, a crime punished by banishment.  Eventually, Martius, a shell of himself, forms an alliance with his blood enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), concerned with nothing but vengeance against his country.

Fundamental issues already exist in this narrative, including the fact that Martius has a wife, Virgilia (played by Jessica Chastain, the most prolific actress working today, as far as I’m concerned), often described as one of Shakespeare’s loveliest female characters (which isn’t saying much, but that’s neither here nor there); an overbearing mother, Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), and a young son.  He leaves them behind without a word, also forsaking his friends, including Senator Menenius (Brian Cox).  If Martius loses his self-righteous battle against Rome, can we really see this as a “tragedy?”  He’s a violent maniac, a pathetic husband, and a dangerous political figure.

Performance-wise, Fiennes, Chastain, Redgrave, Cox, and Nesbitt bring their A-games, as one would expect in a film of this type.  Butler, billed as the co-star but playing a character who doesn’t actually appear much, does a competent job looking menacing, but I occasionally got the sense that he memorized the thick Shakespearian dialogue without much thought about its meaning.  Unfortunately, the second half of the film does not live up to the first.  Aside from an extended battle that might make you think you’re watching The Hurt Locker, the film’s first hour is ripe with drama: Martius vs. his mother, Martius vs. his wife, Martius vs. the people, Martius vs. Aufidius, Martius vs. the tribunes.  This is all forgone once he is banished, and the “raid on Rome” is never actually shown, so the desperation of Volumnia and Virgilia to stop him in the climactic confrontation is not completely evident; the scene itself, however, shines.

Additionally, material from the original play is changed and removed, often for incomprehensible reasons.  Why, for example, does screenwriter John Logan choose to have Menenius commit suicide in the latter 3/4 of the film after being unable to convince Martius to halt his advance on Rome?  The danger is not real enough for him to think the entire city is doomed, and his friendship with Martius is never developed enough to make us believe he would be so devastated.  The other unforgivable change is the omission of Aufidius’ final speech in the play, where after seeing to Martius’ death, he expresses not satisfaction despite his lifelong desire to kill the man, but a great sorrow, and orders that Martius be given a noble burial.

Coriolanus is a good film because of its cast.  Fiennes is rarely so fierce, and we’re reminded why Vanessa Redgrave should be leading more ensembles.  I can only assume that the modern combat visuals and bizarre revisions are an attempt to rope in the Call of Duty crowd, but hey, if it gets young people to absorb staples of literary culture (and more so to attempt to understand their construction, flaws, and their racial and gender issues), I support it.

Coriolanus (2011); written by John Logan (adapted from William Shakespeare’s play); directed by Ralph Fiennes; starring Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain, and Gerard Butler.

Snow White and the Huntsman

My kingdom for a pair of flaming slippers

Yes, I saw The Avengers.  No, I did not find it worth writing about.

My favorite part of the hype and media jabber for Snow White and the Huntsman is that the most common piece of feedback I’ve seen, particularly in positive reviews, is that this is a “darker/gritter take on a classic fairy tale.”  This is problematic to me.  Do these paid movie critics believe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was first created by Walt Disney and later adapted by the Brothers Grimm?  Or perhaps that the Grimms’ version in the original German featured dwarfs whistlin’ while they work and a nice cozy ending?  Sorry to break this to you, but fairy tales (especially the bizarre Brothers Grimm versions) were the nastiest, grossest, crudest (“darkest” if you must) stories of their time, and most of them end with death, body part removal, or inexplicable acts of violence.  There’s a reason the Addams Family were big fans of the Grimms, you know.

Rupert Sanders’ action-adventure adaptation of the tale is not so much an adaptation as a reimagining, but it retains enough of the fairy tale’s spirit that it skirts a line somewhere between the two.  One of the film’s most true-to-tale scenes (albeit a scene invented for the film) is one in which Snow White (Kristen Stewart) wanders into a mostly computer-animated meadow and encounters dozens of peculiar creatures, including a tortoise with moss on its back, mushrooms with eyes, and an enormous stag, which seems to somehow represent the heart of the forest, and which Snow White lovingly caresses in a surprisingly touching (and beautifully wordless) minute or so of reel.  The film keeps the Grimms’ “three drops of blood” motif as well.  At other times, the films borrows from The Lord of the Rings, most notably in a scene in which the seven dwarfs (played by a group of famous actors including Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and Ray Winstone) sing a harrowing lament for their fallen eighth.  I’d hoped the film might retain Snow White’s manner of coming back to life after being killed by the poisoned apple – that is, the Prince’s servants trip on a shrub and drop the coffin, dislodging the piece of apple caught in her throat – but alas, we are left with opportunistic kisses.

By the same token, there can be little to no nuance in a film that wishes to stay true to a folk tale.  Snow White must be absolutely good, and the Queen (renamed Ravenna and played by Charlize Theron) must be absolutely evil.  As such, Ravenna is often seen eating the hearts of cute animals and sucking youth from the mouths of young girls (whereas in the original, she wants to eat Snow White’s lungs and liver), as well as pandering evilly to her magic mirror (an object/character that seems thrown in for familiarity and doesn’t serve the one function it serves in the Grimm tale: informing the Queen that Snow White is alive after the Queen believes her dead).  Snow White, in this version, is someone we enjoy spending time with and want to know more about, but if you begin to develop a character, you have to go all the way, and Sander’s princess is somewhere between a good character and a Boring Hero.  The manner in which Ravenna overtakes the kingdom of Snow White’s father is ingenious, however, and when she explains why she mercilessly disposes of male monarchs and usurps their thrones, we, as an audience, are pretty much with her.

The film uses its supporting cast well, mainly the seven dwarfs, which could have been confusing to keep track of, but somehow manage not to exhaust us nor to fall into comic relief (though they do provide the film’s one or two laughs).  Chris Hemsworth appears as the titular Huntsman, pretty much doing the same thing he does in Thor, but the filmmakers wisely do not allow him to upstage the heroine.  Sam Spruell plays Finn, the obligatory secondary bad guy in a film with two leads, but even he has his place and never wears out his welcome (which is more than I can say for his hairdo).  There’s even a surprise appearance by Lily Cole (of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Rage) as Greta, one of the Queen’s prisoners.  The only character who seems out of place is William (Sam Claflin), Snow White’s childhood friend, who is never quite sure what part he wants to play in this story – love interest?  Loyal soldier?  Enforcer on Finn’s brute squad?  The film occasionally plays at a romance between William and Snow White, but the main action is resolved before either acts upon impulse (when both are conscious, leastways) and we are left wondering whether William has been permanently friend-zoned.

I don’t know what to call this film.  I adore the classic folk tales and fairy tales (in spite of their quirks), but this film doesn’t attempt to copy them, nor does it seek to become the new standard for future generations to use as a frame of reference (as the Disney version sadly has, at least as far as modern film critics).  Where the animated feature has glitz and color and resolution, this movie has sensibilities.  I am tempted to refer to it as a feminist war movie.  Sure, the Huntsman helps Snow White here and there, but she alone inspires the (all male) Duke’s Army to fight in her name, all for the sake of personal revenge against Ravenna, since the latter doesn’t pose a threat to the duchy.  There’s also some business with hearts and messages about beauty and its inevitable fading.  If we’re looking at it from the media standpoint, it’s a fantasy film with big battles (and one too many ambushes), but the main conflict is between two women and they’re not fighting over a man.  Whether or not fantasy is your dish, that fact alone is worth ten-fifty.

Lastly, let me say that Kristen Stewart is a fine actress.  The unfortunate stigma is that so many viewers know her only from the Twilight films and not from her great roles as Joan Jett in The Runaways and Lucy Hardwicke in In the Land of Women.  Regrettably, she doesn’t have as much to say in this film as I would have liked, and for all of the Queen’s malicious taunting, Snow White could have had a few more pearls of wisdom for us.  I’m not saying I needed her to take up the voice of the Brothers Grimm and tell me the moral of the story; no, I needed her to take up her own voice, just a little bit more, because I was (and still am) ready to listen.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012); written by Hossein Amini (based upon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by the Brothers Grimm); directed by Rupert Sanders; starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, and Chris Hemsworth.

The Hunger Games

Game so hard, Peacekeepers wanna kill me

Based upon the first volume in Suzanne Collins’ young adult sci-fi trilogy, Gary Ross’ The Hunger Games is a quiet, understated survival/rebellion story carried by a badass female protagonist.  At the theatre, a friend and I were encircled within a clot of rambunctious adolescents of varying ages – the perfect environment in which to witness this spectacle.  I’m only kidding about half of that.

The Hunger Games book series is a diamond-in-the-rough amongst Y.A.: soundly-written (albeit in need of a better copy-editor), engaging, and headed by a confident female character, Katniss Everdeen (played in the movie by Best Actress nominee Jennifer Lawrence).  It’s the age-old tale of a dystopian future in which the Capitol, a government born from the Big Brother school of logic, has oppressed its people after a failed rebellion.  In order to remind the citizens that their government could crush them at any moment, the Capitol holds an annual fight to the death between twenty-four children (aged 12 to 18), two from each district.  Since its inception seventy-five years ago, the Hunger Games has become not only a horrifying tradition, but the country’s greatest form of entertainment, as the Capitol’s citizens excitedly bet on tributes and passively discuss their favorite killings.  This setup provides not only an effective entertainment for real-life readers and viewers, but an operative commentary on present-day reality TV and the fact that absolutely nothing can shock us anymore.  This commentary is hopefully thinly-veiled to the point that the intended audience can read into it.  How long will it be before kids are stabbing each other on ABC’s 10-11pm lineup?

Katniss volunteers to compete in the Hunger Games so that her twelve year-old sister, Prim (Willow Shields) will be spared.  She and the other tribute from her district, the sloppily-named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are mentored by Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), the only former winner of the Games from District 12, who has long since become an alcoholic and all-around misanthrope.  His reasons for mentoring the young tributes are never explored, though we can infer that this job position was more the Capitol’s choice than his.  Also appearing in the film are Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, a glitzy Capitol flunky who collects the tributes from each district; Donald Sutherland as President Snow, the main antagonist of the series, who spends his time clipping rose bushes and brooding silently behind his villainous beard; Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, Katniss’ stylist and one of the only Capitol folks she can trust; Liam Hemsworth as Gale, Katniss’ dreamy childhood friend; Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman, a talk show host who can work a crowd better than Oprah but who seems to truly sympathize with the tributes’ predicament; and Isabelle Furhman and Alexander Ludwig as Clove and Cato (respectively), two Career Tributes who train their entire lives for the Games and consider it a glorious opportunity.

The film wisely makes little use of music, relying on realistic sound effects to percuss quiet scenes in which young people are brutally murdered: this is not epic, glorified, Hollywood-glossed action filmmaking, and Ross displays an understanding of the material through these scenes.  You’re not supposed to cheer when a twelve year-old receives a spear through the chest, when a teenage girl of model beauty is swarmed by killer wasps, or when Katniss is forced to mercy kill a mortally-wounded enemy.  Every dead child is a victory for the Capitol and the evil President Snow, whose appearances are limited, but who promises to be a big problem for Katniss in the future, even after she leaves the arena.

The film’s best moments come in the form of Jennifer Lawrence’s solo scenes.  I was with her when she was treating her own burn wounds, crying at her failure to save a friend, throwing fits of frustration – and don’t confuse frustration with teen angst; this is not Twilight.  It’s not Harry Potter either – the coming war is much more real.  Lawrence’s Katniss is believable and sympathetic all the way through; through her experiences, most notably the death of her father, she has become a protector, both of her family and her friend (the appropriately homely and weak Peeta), and Lawrence plays this role resolutely.  The filmmakers make no attempt to sex her up, not even when the Capitol does, and while the book’s scenes of lone Katniss were far grittier, the PG-13 rating allows germane grit without frivolous gore.  As long as we can feel for Katniss, we can do without (most of) the bloodspray.

My biggest issue with movies based upon books is that while I try to hold them apart as starkly different mediums, I know what the key events are ahead of time, so instead of enjoying the film as an entity of its own, I find myself anticipating how the next scene will be adapted, which lines characters from the book will say, whether plot threads will be properly tied off.  In this case, the material is, for the most part, expertly handled, aside from a few book-to-film deviations and the relegating of certain important characters to background roles.  I couldn’t help feeling (and knowing) that Haymitch, Effie, Cinna, and the other tributes, specifically Clove, Cato, Rue, and Glimmer, all had more to offer in terms of character and had the life squeezed out of them in the painful transition from novel page to script page.

Since the film has been critically acclaimed, there is the natural backlash of the Moron Brigade, the latest claim being that The Hunger Games lifts material from the Japanese novel Battle Royale.  Let’s put this to rest right now.  I’ve read both, and the similarities literally stop at “young people forced to fight each other,” a convention used a thousand years (both in real life and fiction) before either story was written. Whether Collins was “aware” of Battle Royale is inapplicable at this point; she would have been better off saying “I’ve heard of it, but I deny ripping it off” instead of the knee-jerk reaction when accused of plagiarism (or most other offenses) – “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” which, when you’re in the public eye, you must stick to, lest you be called a liar later.

The Hunger Games, if anything less than original, can be classified as the unraveling of a new story from a familiar story environment. We’ve all heard that every-story-has-already-been-told rubbish. The list of stories involving the “arena” plot device (and device only, not plot as a whole) goes on forever – Series 7, The Most Dangerous Game, The Running Man, etc. If we want to say they’re all variations of the real-life Roman Coliseum, I’d be more willing to buy that, but to say the entire plot of The Hunger Games is a bold-faced ripoff of Battle Royale is, in my view, completely ludicrous and ignores a few important details – you know, like characters and the entire rest of the three-novel arc.

If The Hunger Games (the whole trilogy) should be remembered for anything, it’s a female protagonist in a male dominated dual-genre (Y.A. and sci-fi). When I have young women in my Comp classes telling me how empowered Katniss makes them feel, I’m more than willing to accept a bit of genre-sampling (which is ages away from plagiarism).

The Hunger Games (2012); written by Suzanne Collins; directed by Gary Ross; starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, and Elizabeth Banks.

Mass Effect 3

Your complaints are Massively Ineffectual

If you drill down to this blog’s proverbial crust, you’ll see that I enjoy a video game now and then.  As a fiction writer, I particularly (nay, almost exclusively) enjoy a game with a strong narrative, hence my whatever-comes-right-before-obsession with BioWare’s Mass Effect series, which began in 2007 with a single-player sci-fi/space opera adventure on the Xbox 360.  The final volume of the trilogy, in which your decisions from the first two games (ranging from the way you treat certain characters, your conversations with them, and your romantic ventures, to the manner in which you chose to complete missions with galaxy-wide consequences) are reflected in every character interaction, every quest, every blade of grass.  Nothing like this has ever been done in a game.  Mass Effect 3 alone contains over 40,000 lines of dialogue, considerably more than most films.  The development team has worked themselves to the bone trying to cater to their fans – a naive choice and a perpetually thankless task, as any writer knows.  As was inevitable, a world wide web of whiners were unhappy with the game’s ending, and a host of “change the ending” campaigns have begun, including but not limited to a shameful hostage situation in which $70,000 in charity money has been raised for Child’s Play, only to be paid if BioWare modifies the game’s ending.

This morning, BioWare’s co-owner, Dr. Ray Muzyka, released an official statement addressing the concerns of the “fans” (a term I use very loosely to describe the folks who have issued such disrespectful, inflammatory, and in many cases unfounded and ignorant feedback to the developers).  In a nutshell, BioWare as promised a modification to the ending, and while no real details have been given, the development team is trying its “damnedest” to provide more “clarity” to the trilogy’s finale.

Allow me to back up for a moment before explaining why I am satisfied with the already-provided ending, and why everyone complaining, pandering, and threatening the developers are spoiled, entitled, and just plain wrong.  For readers unfamiliar with the series, I won’t tread the stories of all three games, but the overarching thread is that a race of machines known as the Reapers enter the galaxy from Dark Space (a real place, by the way) to harvest all organic life every 50,000 years.  Taking a page or three from Lovecraftian horror, the Reapers’ motives are incomprehensible to humans (not to mention the dozen other alien races who share power in the galactic government) and their methods are ruthless and absolutely thorough.  Commander Shepard (Jennifer Hale/Mark Meer), the story’s protagonist, an officer of the Earth Systems Alliance (the human military), whose gender, appearance, and complete background are determined by the player at the outset of the first game, is the first organic being to come into verbal contact with a Reaper and uncover the truth behind the cycle.  Among the series’ wonderfully-woven character-centric sub-plots, the lion’s share of Shepard’s story revolves around foiling the Reapers’ plans, and more importantly, preventing the cycle of galactic genocide from ever happening again.  Prior to this discovery, the galaxy enjoys prosperity and commerce among its various races through use of the Citadel, the center of galactic politics and trade, and the Mass Relays, a network of (for lack of a better word) “portals” that make use of mass effect energy, a substance/process that virtually erases the issue of light years by providing quick transport from one star system to the next.  The Citadel and Relays are thought to be created by an ancient race known as the Protheans, who disappeared from the galaxy after the Reapers attacked.

Spoilers follow.  In reality, the Citadel and the Mass Relays were created by the Reapers in order to ensure that once the galactic races discovered them, culture and society would develop along specific, predictable paths.  Advanced technology would be based upon the technology of the Mass Relays, and the Citadel, a majestic, technological dream several times larger than Manhattan, would become the center of galactic society.  The Protheans, like the countless races before them, were systematically wiped from existence when the Reapers returned, harvesting and destroying every sapient life form in the galaxy and leaving only the primitive races (which, in the time of the Protheans, included the humans, asari, turians, and salarians) to inherit the galaxy.  Once the technology of the new races reached its apex, the Reapers would return and the cycle would be repeated.

At the end of Mass Effect 3, the final chapter in the series, a battle between the Reapers and the amassed galactic fleets takes place, after which Shepard goes to the Citadel with her mentor, Captain Anderson (Keith David), in an effort to activate the Crucible, a large weapon with an unknown function, whose plans were left by extinct races in order to provide the future generations with a means to defeat the Reapers.  Still with me?  After a final confrontation with Shepard’s rival, the Illusive Man (Martin Sheen), who believes the Crucible will allow him to control the Reapers, Shepard is the only one left standing and must activate the device herself.  Upon doing so, Shepard is confronted by the Catalyst, an ancient virtual intelligence responsible for creating and controlling the Reapers.  The Catalyst explains that the purpose of the Reapers and their cycle is to prevent organic races from destroying themselves with technology by harvesting and preserving them (in the form of new Reapers) before they reach that point.  Shepard, having united races of organic and machine people throughout the course of the story, maintains that the Catalyst’s logic is flawed (and it is – it destroys organic races with machines in order to prevent organic races from destroying themselves with machines, albeit with the long-term goal of ensuring the ongoing existence of organic life).

I’ve heard the phrase Deus ex Machina thrown around to describe the introduction of the Catalyst.  Deus ex Machina, a term I teach my writing students, from the Latin “god out of the machine,” is defined as a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is abruptly pacified by way of the contrived or unexpected introduction of a new character, device, or ability.  The Catalyst, while quite literally a machine god, does not fit this description, as it doesn’t come completely out of left field.  As far back as the first game, Shepard and others have speculated that the Reapers were controlled by someone (come to find out later, even the Protheans knew this).  Who would it be besides a machine?  Moreover, the Catalyst does not solve anything; it actually creates a fresh conundrum.  Seeing Shepard’s determination in preserving her people and her home, the Catalyst rethinks the cycle and offers three choices to Shepard, all of which involve activating the Crucible: 1. Destroy the Reapers, which will also bring about the deactivation of the Mass Relays and the Citadel, as well as the destruction of all purely synthetic life (a choice the Catalyst doubts Shepard will make due to synthetic implants that saved her life in Mass Effect 2); 2. Control the Reapers, per the Illusive Man’s wishes, which will remove the Reapers from the galaxy (albeit alive) and cost Shepard her life; 3. Add Shepard’s own life energy to the beam fired by the Crucible, the fallout from which will create a new DNA framework such that every living being in the galaxy will become part organic and part machine (per the wishes of Saren, the original Mass Effect‘s main antagonist, who was, notably, brainwashed by the Reapers into thinking this was a good idea).

My choice, which I believe not only to be the best ending but the only choice, was to destroy the Reapers.  In this ending, the Crucible’s energy spreads from one Mass Relay to another, deactivating each, killing the Reapers (many of which are seen collapsing on Earth as humanity cheers) and obliterating the Citadel.  Shepard’s crew, separated from her, speed away in the Normandy (Shepard’s ship), and crash-land on a lush, green planet in an unknown system near Earth.  They escape the wreckage, safe and sound, looking out on this beautiful world as a new day begins.  Meanwhile, Shepard awakens in a pile of rubble (perhaps on Earth, judging by the color scheme) and takes a deep, hopeful breath.  Cue credits.  After the credits, a scene is shown: at some point in the future, an old man (voiced by Buzz Aldrin) living on the newly discovered world, speaks to a grandchild about how anything is possible, including this young child one day traveling to the stars.  As the child looks out into space, dazzled, he/she begs his/her grandfather to tell another story of “The Shepard.”

Complaints about the ending have stemmed from the very short cinematic that accompanies any of the three choices, and that the scenes are too similar and non-reflective of the player’s previous choices: the Normandy’s escape is always the same, and the crash-landing is always the same, albeit with slight landscape/character changes depending upon what choice the player made, who the player’s love interest was, who was on the player’s squad at the time of the escape, etc.  However, to say something as sweeping as “My choices had no effect on anything” is absolutely ludicrous.  Player choices are reflected throughout the entire game; the fact that you did or did not fetch a random person’s car keys should have no bearing on the fate of the galaxy.

Aside from the pallet-swapped ending cinematic, other questions arose, most of which are answered in the game if you’re paying attention and not cruising Facebook while characters are speaking (Q: How did the Normandy escape Earth?  A: It never landed; Joker explicitly states he’s rejoining the fleet after he drops you off; etc.).

The other big complaint is that after all of Shepard’s work and sacrifice, she deserves to be reunited with her friends and love interest.  Sorry, but this is not what happens to heroes.  This can never be Shepard’s fate.  Heroes throughout literary (and spoken) history give of themselves and offer the greatest sacrifices for the sake of others.  Heroes die, and if they live, you don’t get to see them buy a big house with a white picket fence, a golden retriever, and little blue children.  I’ve seen blogs and forum posts, in some cases by “journalists” who actually get paid to write blogs, in which the ending (every option) is described as “dark” and “unhappy.”  Let’s examine this.  Shepard, whether sacrificing herself or living, has completed what she set out to do from her first step on Eden Prime: stopped the cycle of death, prevented future generations from ever having to know the horror of the Reapers, which included not only the destruction of entire worlds, but the re-purposing and indoctrination of men, women and and children to serve the needs of the machines.  A new life has been made possible, a life in which the organic races will discover and develop technology on their own terms and develop along their own paths, not the paths of machines or gods.  This, to me, is the happiest ending possible.

Here in the first world, though, we have an unfaltering craving for entertainment that is “comforting,” and if we don’t get to see that scene with the big house and the blue children, something sits uneasily.  Somehow it’s unhappy if every thread isn’t tied off, if we don’t have a Tolkien-esque epilogue ensuring us that every character lived a happy, conflict-free life and died of old age in a big house surrounded by little blue…okay.  I’m sympathetic to folks who get so invested in fictional characters that they become impassioned about a story’s ending.  Hell, as a writer, I love getting that response.  But you, the reader, the consumer, do not know the characters better than their writer does.  Don’t be entitled.  Don’t threaten the developers.  Don’t demand another ending.  The writers do not owe you anything; you knew what you were getting into when you slid your 60 bucks across the counter at Gamestop, that every story in media form, no matter how open-ended, must have a finite end, and if you don’t know or believe that, I cannot help you.

So, what will the modifications to the ending be?  “Clarity?” Artistic integrity will be difficult to uphold if you’re slapping padding on an ending that was already conceived, revised, and executed. As a fan of the ending as a whole (particularly the “destroy the Reapers” ending wherein Shepard survives), I would humbly put down my vote for no major changes. “Clarification” can sometimes trump drama, and as a writer, I’d ask that primary attention always be given to the story, not the consumers.  As it stands, the ending is a beautiful set-piece with the biggest stakes imaginable for a series of this type, percussed by the wonderful music of Clint Mansell.

That being said, if the proposed changes will be made only in the form of additions (and not a complete retooling of the entire end sequence), I would ask for two things: more dialogue choices with the Catalyst (a la the conversation with Vigil in the original game) and a post-credits, post-Buzz Aldrin, text-only catch-up on what the future of the galaxy’s other races held, depending upon the player’s choices.  This way, the drama of the ending, so epic in scale and rife with scene (no summary!) is preserved.

Pandering for more content is one thing – if I was blessed with so many readers that thousands of people demanded another book featuring the same characters, I would be flattered, but my first instinct would not necessarily be to hit the grindstone: I wrote the ending I wrote for a reason.  Demanding a different resolution to an already resolved narrative is another side of the same coin; when either gets out of hand, it becomes an entitlement issue, and as the story scribbler, you cannot marry yourself to your readers (or players), even if they’re tossing money at your feet.  Unless, of course, you’re willing to forgo the integrity of your work for another paycheck or further “attaboys” and pats on the back.

This does not apply only to writers with a wide circulation, either.  Most of the best literary writers of our time aren’t making a full living (and in some cases, no money at all) from their work, and still have readers (whether they be friends or avid devotees to literary magazines) who rabidly lap up every published word.  If one of these writers is asked (or better yet, told) by a reader to change a pivotal scene, resurrect a dead character, or tack on a “happier” ending, is she going to do it?  Will she even consider it?  Whether or not she does, the demand is insane.  This is the position you must put yourself in when considering what you’re asking of the writer.  These aren’t people playing with chess pieces.  Characters cannot be moved with the flick of a finger.  At some point, the writer and the character found one another, and the former has, hopefully, gotten to know the latter as intimately as possible through drafts, revisions, outlines, brainstorming, and a truckload of scrapped synopses.  The writer knows where the character’s story ends, and you must understand that, even if you hate where the story ends up.

If there was any question, no, I do not hold video game writing anywhere near the same tier as literature, but the reaction to ME3‘s finale seemed a valid touch-point for a growing issue that spreads as the concept/practice of “fandom” expands.

Would I like to see Shepard reunite with her romantic partner?  Sure.  I’m human.  Does it belong in the finale of this story?  No.  It does not.  Muzyka announced the development of further Mass Effect games in addition to the modified ending, so there is going to be a rebuilt galaxy, if that wasn’t evidenced enough by the post-credits scene, which is why I think the ending where the Reapers are destroyed and Shepard lives despite the Catalyst’s warning about Shepard being unable to live without synthetics due to her implants, is so fucking stellar.  That breath Shepard takes upon awakening is the final defeat of the Reapers and the final flaw in the Catalyst’s argument, not the big explosions and the collapsing metal squids.  A single breath.

Stop complaining and take one yourself.