So it’s settled: 2012 is the year of M.I.A.’s new album, MATANGI

Just an hour ago, MIA released a preview of a track entitled “Come Walk With Me” on her YouTube account, and again, it is equally a declaration of her artistic identity as it is an off-kilter club banger. It begins and ends with glitchy, trippy psychedelic instrumental breakdowns heavily reminiscent of her work on 2010’s Vicki Leekx Mixtape (a few of the beats here are lifted off of it too, but there are like 6 different beats in this 1 and a half minute preview alone), except they’re sped up and far more haphazard for extra weirdness, which is really ironic (OMG hipsters are going to freak) considering the song has a bubblegum tune that sounds almost like a Katy Perry or Ke$ha cut — which, among other things, cement MIA’s embrace of the anti-popstar identity she so defiantly reinvented herself as 2 years ago with /\/\/\Y/\.

Just for kicks, there is a self-knowing stab at self-empowerment here (“There’s nothing that can touch me now/You can’t even break me now”), which feels vaguely like a sarcastic parody of Perry’s “Part of Me”. She even deliberately, squarely subverts the recent trend of club-oriented lyrics in pop music with an ironic declaration of hipster unity (“You ain’t gotta shake it just to be with me/You ain’t gotta throw your hands in the air/Cuz tonight we ain’t actin like we don’t care”).

The “Birthday Song”-esque, poppy vibe of the song almost confirms tepid or at best lukewarm reviews from Pitchfork again, but then again Pitchfork-worshipping hipsters don’t make up much of the market; pop-lovers and music-lovers do. M.I.A. here combines the straightforward catchiness of “XXXO” with the outright weirdness of her less accessible tracks like “Meds and Feds” to produce one of the most addictive, ironic and baffling pop tracks in recent history. If this track is any indication of what to expect from her new album, be prepared for M.I.A. to take the pop charts and perhaps even the Grammys by storm. I mean, if the two are more than ready to embrace Katy Perry, why not her weirder, infinitely more talented, pop-parodying counterpart?

I’m really excited for the new album.

FILM REVIEW: Mammut (Mammoth)

Written/Directed By: Lukas Moodysson

Starring: Gael García Bernal as Leo, Michelle Williams as Ellen, Marife Necesito as Gloria

Lukas Moodysson is one of the few Swedish directors, alongside Tomas Alfredson and some other people I can’t quite remember (lolz), that has a substantial presence in contemporary ‘world cinema’ (a term that I hate for its reductionistic tendencies and American bias but that is, unfortunately, inescapable); and I make the most of every opportunity to extol the beauty of Swedish cinema. He is also the main creative force behind the best lesbian romance film in history, the gorgeously understated Fucking Amal, and has on multiple occasions been dubbed “the new Bergman” — because American film critics’ only knowledge of great Swedish films is from their essential viewing of Bergman’s overrated classic The Seventh Seal and they have no idea who Victor Sjöström or Bo Widerberg is, and because Moodysson really is one of most interesting filmmakers Sweden has ever had to offer. Naturally, the thought of praising his work while decrying the vapidity and sheer triteness of American/mainstream cinema is incredibly tempting. However, Moodysson’s Mammoth is too much of a blithering disappointment to allow that.

For one, the soundtrack is a giant fucking annoyance. Some of the tracks here are appealingly hipster-chic, but like most other directors who aren’t Sofia Coppola and have cool music taste but a poor understanding of mood, they often feel tragically inapposite and/or painfully uncomfortable. For example, when Leo finally succumbs to fucking around with a prostitute, the post-coital scene is accompanied by a bizarrely moving electronic instrumental piece, which seems to indicate that we should appreciate the romance in it, but then the sequence continues with Leo secretly, inconsiderately leaving her while she’s asleep. I understand what Moodysson is trying to do — he wants to emphasize that the romance was just an escapist fantasy, an illusion of intimacy, but he doesn’t succeed because he doesn’t understand how soundtracks work. Non-diegetic music either tells the audience how to react, or hints at a hidden emotional state. The problem is, Leo doesn’t secretly feel that his encounter is romantic — he loves his family too much to make it out to be anything more than a temporary, regrettable but necessary behavioral anomaly in an alien world, and while Leo understandably wants it to be romantic, the film and the audience are supposed to remain ambivalent, because they, as presumably intelligent entities, must acknowledge both the essentialness and wrongness of his dalliance; they can’t and don’t have Leo’s privilege of living inside the fantasy. If the music were diegetic, it would’ve both emphasized the illusory nature of Leo’s affair while effectively disengaging the audience from the romance; if there were no music, the film would allow us the space necessary to ponder the morality and reasons for Leo’s actions. Instead, Moodysson smothers us with an inappropriately romantic song choice, emptying the scene of its depth and unconvincingly invites us to revel in its aimlessness. When Leo finally returns to his family, Cat Power’s poignant “The Greatest” plays in the background (great music taste btw lolz), and there is absolutely no attempt at addressing Leo’s lack of guilt over fucking a prostitute while being away from his wife. These haphazard, bewildering uses of music (there are so many other instances, but I don’t have the effort to list them all) also parallel the tragic self-unawareness of the screenplay, which is a point I’ll revisit later on.

In the second half of the movie, home to much of the film’s overwrought drama, there are also just too many scenes where dramatic instrumental pieces manipulatively bend us over backwards to fuck the sympathy out of us. For example, when the (sadistic) grandmother brings Salvador to a junkyard where poor children are collecting trash, sad piano music plays in the background because Moodysson too wants us to feel guilty over the fact that some children have shit lives. I mean, it’s really sad that people have to live that way, but what’s even sadder is that Moodysson thinks that this is some kind of powerful revelation deserving of a lot of screentime. Part of what makes Slumdog Millionaire so wonderful is its no-nonsense depiction of Indian slums; it shows us how disgusting the living conditions are, how unsafe and horrible that world is, but the insight is always just a sidenote. The movie, above all, is a story of triumph, of destiny and love, not of how sad the world is and how bad we should feel for owning iPhones while others don’t. The world is fucking unfair, and obviously sometimes it’s really sad. But get the fuck over it. How naive can you be? This naivete brings me to my next point: White guilt.

I think this film, above all, is an unwitting (but illuminating) insight into the dynamics of white guilt. Leo travels to Bangkok, and feels overly guilty about a pretty Thai girl being a prostitute, so he hands her a shitton of money and asks her to go home to ‘sleep’, possibly because he is stupid enough to think that his money will last her a lifetime and will effectively turn her away from lucrative nights of prostitution, but probably because he is actually condescending and self-important enough to think that he alone can change the way things are in the third world. This self-importance is suggested throughout the movie when he tells the Thai whore that she SHOULDN’T EVER THINK THAT BOYS ARE GOOD WHILE GIRLS ARE NOT and when he arbitrarily declares, in laughable sincerity, that he should think about DOING CHARITY in less fortunate places, especially since he has SO much time to spare for some occasional self-serving pseudo-goodwill. Even Ellen, his wife, immediately feels bad for unintentionally discrediting the merits of Tagalog (Philippines’ national language) and spends much of the second half of the movie attempting to make herself feel better by showing her maid, Gloria, some cheap parlour tricks involving an apple pretending to be an orange. When I first saw these scenes, I immediately thought that Moodysson was cleverly, self-knowingly pointing out the laughability of white guilt. But then I realized that he was juxtaposing them with some disgusting, cringe-inducing scenes involving Gloria’s children and their oh-so-sad lives; turns out, Moodysson, in true white ignorance, doesn’t even recognize how self-important and disgusting these sympathy ploys are. Yes, people in the USA are generally quite privileged, and yes, the people in third world nations (specifically Thailand and the Philippines here) aren’t as entitled, but so fucking what? Is Moodysson so ignorant that he doesn’t realize that there are too ghettos in the US? Does he not realize that there are too privileged people in third world nations? The Bangkok that Leo first sees looks exactly like a high-budget Hollywood set, yet Moodysson seems perfectly and tragically unaware of the implications here — because he too is an unwitting advocate of self-important white guilt and first-world condescension. Think about that. Moodysson’s underlying sentiments are truly disgusting.

The worst part of the film is the Gloria character. She is such a flat, nonsensical caricature of working mothers and maids across the globe it is almost painful and infinitely insulting. We are led to believe that Leo and Ellen’s daughter, Jackie, is a stand-in for Gloria’s sons, but Gloria seems genuinely delighted by Jackie. Gloria cries dramatically (and haphazardly) practically every night when she talks to her children, and constantly talks about her inability to be away from her children (something that has understandably been interpreted as an anti-feminist statement against working mothers), but this pain is never transferred into her job, where she magically puts her pain away and savors her time with Jackie, even praising her intelligence in front of her Filipino friends and teaching her Tagalog words. This incongruity is endlessly baffling and unconvincing. Necesito doesn’t seem to understand her character’s pain, but then again perhaps it’s Moodysson’s fault for not telling her? Her character immediately reminds me of Walter Salles’ segment in the anthology film Paris, Je Taime, in which a maid too is made to take care of her employer’s child while abandoning her own — except that film effortlessly conveyed her plight, while Mammoth remains as inarticulate as Gloria is ridiculous. Also, just to add on to Moodysson’s inherent racism, the Filipino character in his film is a maid, and the Thai character in his film is a prostitute. Right on, white people. Asians so enjoy being reduced to cultural stereotypes by the ever-wonderful white gaze. BRB, STABBING MYSELF.

This film bravely attempts to style itself as a piece of world film, but fails quite miserably. While most films tend to be in one language or at most two, Mammoth ambitiously sends its characters to 3 different parts of the globe and incorporates all 3 languages into its framework. I mean, it unwisely perpetuates the myth of difference between the three peoples, but at least there is some vague attempt to highlight the universality of disconnectedness, especially in the first half of the movie. Ellen and Leo, Gloria and her sons are both separated by distance, Ellen and Jackie by Gloria and by Ellen’s job, Leo and the Thai whore by language, Leo and Bob by lifestyle. However, instead of intelligently tackling this idea of disconnectedness and disillusionment and linking it to modernity, Moodysson bizarrely uses it to make a vapid statement about privilege, which in turn completely undermines his attempts at universality. The titular mammoth ivory pen at first too seems to be a metaphor of disconnection, in that the ivory is at once tangible and intangible, physical but of unimaginable, non-existent provenance, but it turns out to be a lame statement about Leo’s privileged life, a trite declaration of first-world/third-world imbalance.

But good filmmakers have a tendency of fitting in at least a few redeeming qualities in even their worst movies. I really enjoyed the disconnectedness in the first half of the film, and had the film been about disconnectedness in a modern world, regardless of race or country, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. Of course, Moodysson’s racism would’ve remained as pervasive, but still. Also, in Moodysson’s defence, the film does have a marvelous premise — it is just executed in such a ghastly, unintelligent fashion that it is indefensibly offensive. Anyway. The two leads’ performances are absolutely spectacular. I’m a huge fan of Gael García Bernal, an ex-teen idol from Mexico turned critical darling with Alfonso Cuáron’s fantastic Y Tu Mamá También turned perennial supporting actor in an assemblage of Oscar-nominated films, and here he is absolutely spot-on in playing the awkward, guilt-ridden Leo, who is dreamily attractive but subtly awkward, child-like but tentatively assertive. It’s a gloriously strange, believable character that for once humanizes the Hot Male Lead, and it’s really, really sad that Bernal’s magnificent creation will be ignored because of Moodysson’s sub-par efforts. Michelle Williams, probably the most exciting actress today, is as always, unstoppably eclipsing and achingly humane. There is nothing she can’t do, except save this film (lolz).

KevinScale Rating: 1.5/5

FILM REVIEW: Before Sunrise/Before Sunset

Directed By: Richard Linklater

Written By: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Starring: Ethan Hawke as Jesse, Julie Delpy as Celine

So I’m not really big on romance films, but not because I don’t like sweet things. Contrary to popular belief, I do (occasionally, when it’s working) have a heart; it’s just that the writers in the genre too often and too enthusiastically throw out meaningless, obvious platitudes and predictably follow one of 3 formats:

1) Illicit lovers that look soooooooo cute together (their faces are drenched in orange light for much of the film, sensuous close-ups are generously employed, both the lead actors are ridiculously attractive, and one or both have unfairly hard lives) but are doomed to tragedy

2) The funny/adorable/awkward couple (most commonly involving a nerd and a hot girl — to satisfy the decidedly impossible fantasies of professional WoW addicts across the globe — but variations include the boss and the new employee, the outcast and the cheerleader etc.) that slowly but surely hook up. This is usually the PG13 variety so the horrifically awkward sex scenes don’t distract from the adorableness.

3) The sad, miserable couple that re-discovers their love after a tedious process of hedonistic cavorting with younger, more attractive and/or cooler people

These films, however, aren’t like any conventional romance films you’ve ever seen before. They have no plot, no contrived trials for the determined protagonists to pass. These films consist of 2 people talking. Just talking. In Before Sunrise, they talk about their hopes, their sex lives, childhoods, desires, politics, religion, feminism; in Before Sunset, they talk about their jobs, their love lives, their frustrations, age, maturity, happiness and emotions. Just talking. And these two are the best romance films I have ever seen. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have such natural, vibrant chemistry, it’s almost like they’re not even acting. Ethan Hawke, in particular, has a preternatural understanding of his character, and his self-unconscious display of Jesse’s insecurities and obnoxiousness is absolutely delicious. They occasionally have raw, startling bursts of genuine emotion, yet one must realize that this is a performance. Their dialogues are often light and meandering, yet their personalities still manage to constantly take helm. Their conversations feel spontaneous, unforced and natural, yet everything is supposedly scripted. It really is quite bewildering. As with all great films, I really don’t know what to talk about. The acting, writing (ESPECIALLY THE WRITING), directing jobs are uniformly excellent, and save for two problems, the films are perfect.

One problem in the Linklater/Krizan-penned Before Sunrise is that Celine is made much angrier, much saucier than Delpy can handle; this makes her performance occasionally forced and her execution occasionally awkward. In Before Sunrise, however, Celine is a lot less angsty (if a lot more unstable), and this change suits Delpy’s execution perfectly — probably because Delpy wisely contributed to the script to make Celine more effortless and natural a transformation for herself. Another problem is that the ending feels rather obvious in that we are naturally convinced by Hawke and Delpy’s chemistry that their characters will meet again. But at least the obvious ending led to Before Sunset, which in every way is superior to its prequel; it unravels with even more ease, it has even more focus, and its ending demands a standing ovation.

Before Sunrise KevinScale Rating: 4.5/5

Before Sunset KevinScale Rating: 5/5

FILM REVIEW: Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (The Lovers of the Arctic Circle)

Written/Directed By: Julio Medem

Starring: Peru Medem/Fele Martinez as Child/Adult Otto, Sara Valiente/Najwa Nimri as Child/Adult Ana

Los Amantes del Círculo Polar‘s first hour, until Otto and Ana’s almost-encounter at an outdoor café-ish hangout, is absolutely flawless. The juxtaposition of narrative perspectives (namely those of Otto and Ana) expertly finds a solid middle ground between the gorgeously problematic subjectivity of Kurosawa’s Rashomon and the tiresome objectivity of Travis’ tragically awful Vantage Point; like the latter, the film captures the same narrative, the same events, except at the same time, like the former, it adds different voices and different explanations, which rapidly and effectively unravels the narrative, revealing startlingly new interpretations and beautiful depths. Here, specifically, this juxtaposition allows abundant opportunities for the intelligent script to explore the complex psychology of the two protagonists. Both characters are born to broken families (Ana’s father dies while Otto’s mother leaves when they are very young), and are left with single parents too desperate for mutual support to provide the sensitivity and care that they demand. With only each other for emotional support and to cope with loss, they project their missing parents onto each other and clandestinely engage in an incestuous relationship, and grow to become rebellious, reckless souls — Otto and Ana casually try to kill themselves, Otto suddenly, arbitrarily leaves home in pursuit of nothing, and Ana unflinchingly ends a four-year relationship to look for Otto. They’re not even portrayed in a particularly sympathetic manner, and often do crazy, offensive shit just for kicks. But Medem knows better than to impose any form of judgment on them. He knowingly describes their flaws, explains their origins, and leaves it up to us to decide how we feel about them. Even when dealing with their sex scenes, which most lesser directors would use as opportunities for moral judgment, he takes a powerfully ambivalent stance. On their first ‘sexual’ encounter when Otto enters her room while Ana is sleeping (naked), Otto even has the gentlemanly respect to leave Ana the fuck alone, even if he can’t help his teenage instinct to jerk off outside. In fact, the only overtly sexual contact they have is the foreplay; that’s how sensitive Medem is — he knows that sexploitationist sequences (which are prevalent in another Medem film Lucia y el sexo) will beg accusations of sensationalism and that non-inclusion of sex scenes will beg accusations of immaturity and/or avoidance.

However, the last 30 minutes of the film, while admittedly important and necessary to the structure and plot, feel overly tiresome and sickly sentimental, and lack the gorgeous ambivalence that characterizes the first hour. The main purpose of this part is to explain and unravel the various myths introduced in the first part of the film (eg Otto the German Pilot, the meaning of the cryptic Arctic Circle etc.), but in an attempt to bestow these enigmas with a deeper meaning, we are made to watch as the two protagonists achingly yearn for each other through their separation — every revelation we have is too invariably coupled with pain and unrequited desire. While I appreciate Medem’s appreciation for depth, the pain is too overwrought, too dramaticized here, and makes for an overly painful watch. Others might find this pain transcendent or powerful, but personally I think it’s a little too close (and overdone) for comfort. Ana and Otto’s mutual search efforts, in their schmaltzy on-the-verge-of-tears-ness, are also quite boring and irritating after a while. Okay, I get it. You miss him, he misses you, can we just move on and stop this self-pitying fuckerdom? Kthx xoxo.

Stylistically, this is a fascinating work. One major motif in the film is the notion of circularity, a metaphor for destiny, which presents the relationship between Otto and Ana as something pure and beautiful and fated. Los Amantes del Círculo Polar opens with a brief, cryptic, seemingly unintelligible narrative, and repeats the same narrative at the end of the film, except unlike its sub-par arthouse counterparts, this repetition/circularity actually helps us understand its meaning and significance in the grand scheme of things. Characteristically, the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and Medem constantly finds a way to reveal the raw sensuality in a single glance, or a soft touch. Like Lucia y el sexo before it, this film is brimming with sexual tension, passion and energy, except it never once resorts to gratuitous sexploitation to get the point across; it’s subtle and awesome enough to leave much of the sex to the audience’s imagination.

Beyond its stylish sheen, however, this film is in many ways characteristic of classic Spanish cinema; that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. For one, the characters are inextricably linked together by an intricate network of relationships (Otto’s grandfather rescued a German soldier, who rescued a Spanish girl, had a son with her, Alvaro, who then started dating Ana’s mother and sent Ana to Finland, where she would eventually be reunited with Otto lolz), which imbues the plot with a powerfully engaging complexity. However, on the other hand, Los Amantes del Círculo Polar is occasionally weighed down by its excessively melodramatic score and its blatantly manipulative big-emotional-scenes, which together double-up as offensively helpful pointers of how the audience should act and respond to the film — a valiant but reproachable effort that undermines everyone’s intelligence and sense of discretion.

The biggest objection I have to this film is its ending, which perpetrates the notion that all forms of illicit love invariably result in death or destruction. Los Amantes del Círculo Polar is a film whose appeal banks heavily on its lack of judgment, its thoughtful ambivalence, and in killing Ana at the end, Medem too is suggesting that Ana and Otto’s love cannot result in a happy ending, that for all its purity and beauty it is still corrupt and punishable. The fantastic sequence at the 1-hour mark whereby Ana and Otto almost meet (but don’t) would’ve made a much better ending. As it stands, the ending doesn’t even tie in nicely with the notion of circularity. Medem suggests that Ana and Otto’s love will eventually find each other in the end (after they finish their circular journey of self-discovery), but the end offers only tragedy — which perhaps suggests that their love was doomed all along, or that Ana was dead all along. Either way, the final revelation seems out-of-place, and the tragic, illicit lovers bullshit is getting old. I want to see just ONE high-profile, high-budget, critically-acclaimed film about incest in which there is a happy ending. Right now, there are none. You have sex with your sister? Either one or both must die. Now, I’m not a fervent supporter of incest, but I’m also not self-important enough to judge other people for it, and neither should the few filmmakers bold enough to make films about it.

Ultimately, this film is a stunning meditation on destiny, relationship dynamics, loss and love, and manages to seamlessly incorporate Oedipal and Elektral complexes, incest, divorce and death (among other taboo subjects) without once ever losing focus on the two powerfully written protagonists. With a less tragic ending, and if the revelations in the last 30 minutes were spread throughout the film, this could’ve been one of the best films in the history of Spanish cinema. As of now, it just stands as a brilliant film that could have been more.

KevinScale Rating: 4/5

FILM REVIEW: Bicho De Sete Cabeças (Brainstorm)

Directed By: Laís Bodanzky

Written By: Luiz Bolognesi

Starring: Rodrigo Santoro as Neto

This is a film that, after the first 30 minutes, becomes suspiciously like Darren Aronofsky’s arthouse melodrama Requiem for a Dream, except much worse. Both movies deal with drug use and addiction. However, Aronofsky is intelligent and self-knowing enough to understand that Requiem has an incredibly sadistic premise, and as such measures must be taken to address this sadism by either amplifying the characters’ pain or by filming the painful scenes with a fervent emotional detachment. Aronofsky chooses both, but he wisely uses the former to complement the latter, and ends up producing a landmark film that invites the audience to move beyond sadness for the characters’ self-destruction, and into a self-reflective rumination of their own psychosis. Bodanzky, unfortunately, is nowhere as intelligent. Sure, he’s gloriously stylish — something he competently proves with the opening sequence alone — but like most Brazilian filmmakers, his penchant for self-serious in-your-face melodrama precludes any attempt at greater depth. This penchant translates to a systematic depreciation of the characters’ integrity, an episodic documentation of the characters’ immeasurably painful trials: Neto is betrayed by his friends, then his father, then his ex-lover, then his father again, and we are made to watch unflinchingly as he rapidly becomes a sad, angry, hopeless, suicidal mess surrounded by abusive policemen and batshit insane wardmates. Granted, the purpose of this film was supposedly to highlight issues of patient abuse in Brazilian psychiatric hospitals (which it did so successfully), and I suppose it was precisely this brand of emotional manipulation that made it as politically relevant as it became, but it also doesn’t really help when considering it as a standalone film, because the emotions invoked never feel organic; they feel planted and manufactured by the filmmakers who so desperately want you to feel sad so that their cause can be amply promoted — which is the case exactly. The most moving films are those that are effortlessly or unintentionally so (Like Groundhog Day, The Virgin Suicides or the less melodramatic parts of Central do Brasil) because they address universally relatable ideas of loneliness or disillusionment that beg an emotional response not because one sympathizes or pities, but because one understands. Here, however, the emotional bits feel contrived and obvious; Bodanzky simply tortures a hot guy as much as he can, and waits expectantly as we cry for him. I, for one, will not give him such cheap satisfaction (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID). Worse still, he does this without an ounce of self-awareness; there are no attempts at addressing this blatant contrivance — which brings me to my next point.

In his overblown sense of self-seriousness, Bodanzky occasionally steps into dark camp territory, and does so as an unwitting participant. This, above all, is probably my biggest objection. For example, when Neto attempts to convince his family that he is being abused, they act shockingly cavalier; Neto’s father seems genuinely preoccupied with keeping his pride, while his aunt seems fervently interested in extolling the wonders of a psychiatrist who has also authored many books. This scene, as I think it would anyone, first struck me as an awkward, clumsy stab at dark humor, but Bodanzky immediately follows it up with a depressing scene where Neto’s wardmates are causing a ruckus in the communal bedroom, which suggests either an inability to sustain comedic tone or a laughable lack of self-awareness — both of which are reproachable. If it were a matter of tone, and Bodanzky really meant it as a slice of dark humor, I would say that that wasn’t clear enough and that he should’ve made more jokes more often, then I would chide him for his lack of discretion for insensitively juxtaposing self-serious tragedy with sadistic mockery. There are several other scenes in which the film becomes an unwitting joke, like the scene where Neto fantasizes about his ex-lover and wakes up to find his batshit insane wardmates staring at him (it was supposed to be poignant, but just turns out funny), or where Neto tries his coffee and grimaces from the taste (it was supposed to be sad, but just turns out awkward, and thus funny). Moments like these really spoil the tragic atmosphere, so even if Iwerea lover of melodrama, I would still be disappointed in the film because it so readily and clumsily ruins its own attempt at self-seriousness with cheap, unwitting jokes.

But for all the film’s missteps, it has a lot of redeeming qualities — which definitely make this film a hard one to rate. Rodrigo Santoro’s performance, for one, is spectacular. His unassuming grace and whole-hearted trust in Bodanzky’s sadistic direction immediately reminds me of Bjork’s in Lars von Trier’s similarly manipulative Dancer in the Dark. That’s a great thing. The film, as mentioned earlier, is also really stylish. Bodanzky has a sensitive awareness of colour and cinematography; he uses orange lighting to indicate fantasy, blue tints to make the wards dingy and grimy, handheld cameras to reinforce the sense of realism, and paranoid tracking shots to amplify the sense of futility and inescapability. There’s this scene of a blue sky laden with telephone cables, and when juxtaposed with the sex scenes between Neto and his lover, it is powerfully sensual and mesmerizingly erotic. The scene of a match lighting a sheet of cloth on fire is also really beautiful. There is also a particularly wonderful sequence where Neto experiences a mental and emotional breakdown in his room, and Bodanzky uses arbitrary jump cuts to underscore a sense of disconnectedness and disjointedness. Brainstorm is often well-filmed (barring the scene where Bodanzky strangely pans across a room, focuses briefly on Neto’s crying mother, then zooms into a random handbag before the screen fades to black), so it’s really super sad that it suffers so much from poor direction and subpar screenwriting.

One of the bigger problems with the screenplay is its lack of dramatic scope. It focuses, hard-headed and narrow-minded, on Neto’s plight, without engaging many pressing questions: What do the doctors have to get out of patient abuse? Why do they have all these random torture facilities? Why doesn’t the government have inspectors and shit within the ward premises? For a film that has marketed itself as a political statement, it is hardly as politically aware as it would like to believe. Where’s the analysis? Where are the connections? Where is the evidence? Where are the socio-political realities? Without properly addressing these questions, this film can’t even stand on its own (let alone as a political film), because it too carelessly and too rapidly descends into platitudinous THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO TORTURE INNOCENT PEOPLE territory, and without any self-awareness. Other problems include the self-serious dialogue, the first, almost-irrelevant 30 minutes of the film, the flat, empty supporting cast etc.

Brainstorm, ultimately, is a sad example of a film that often hints at its potential but that constantly disappoints. The soundtrack has a few fantastic collages of disconcerting, jarring, digital bleeps, but they are used so haphazardly, so clumsily by Bodanzky that he empties his own soundtrack of its glorious insidiousness. In scenes such as the climactic breakdown in the club bathroom, the contrast between the soundtrack and the film’s content is starkly inapposite, and one gets the sense that the director doesn’t really understand how to use music in film — and that basically is the impression one gets from much of the film’s stylistic devices. They’re conceptually intriguing, but clumsily used. The premise is sufficiently engaging, but the execution is so lacking in self-awareness and subtlety that it immediately becomes rather off-putting. The cinematography and score are often gloriously absorbing, but the writing and direction is so flat that one is too often left with a helpless ambivalence. Style facilitates substance; you can’t just do something interesting but overtly superficial, and expect it to turn out well. This film needs a smarter, darker screenplay and a distinctive, consistent visual style to really work, but at least it’s visually interesting and well-acted enough for you to feel like you didn’t waste your time… I think.

KevinScale Rating: 3/5

OH the ending is also bewildering in that it strives for a classic indie film atmosphere of quiet rumination, but it just feels awkward.

FILM REVIEW: L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year In Marienbad)

Directed By: Alain Resnais

Written By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Starring: Giorgio Albertazzi, as X, Delphine Seyrig, as A, Sacha Pitoëff, as M (The characters are actually unnamed in the film, but they were labelled as such in the published screenplay. M is A’s presumptive husband, and X is A’s illicit lover)

So I just watched the trailer for the first time now, and it’s almost alarmingly funny how commercial the distribution company makes the film seem. “THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS THAT YOU, THE AUDIENCE, MUST ANSWER!” LOLS. It’s glaringly obvious that no one really knows how to market a film like this. Yet at the same time, perhaps it’s better to approach this film knowing that it’s supposed to be a mystery. When I first watched this movie, I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the plot or of Resnais’ cinematic oeuvre, and suffice to say, I felt extremely stupid for the first half of the film, in which nothing really happens, and I was convinced that I was missing out on some larger significance (which is probably true, actually, but at least everyone feels the same way).

Alain Resnais’ magnum opus Last Year in Marienbad won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival (a.k.a. the quintessential embodiment of arthouse-chicness), and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, but the critical plaudits pretty much stop there, and in all frankness, it is unsurprising as to why. This film, by far, is the weirdest film I have ever watched – and this coming from one who has watched 4 David Lynch films (albeit reluctantly, because Lynch is stupid and annoying) and who has spent numerous Christmases watching old experimental films (and eating copious amounts of chocolate, but I guess this detail would only lend credibility if I ever decided to be a professional connoisseur of cheap candies).

The entire film is essentially an extended dream sequence. Characters are placed in one setting and suddenly, inexplicably, they appear in another. The palatial mansion is littered with richly costumed socialites, but they don’t even seem real; sometimes they talk, sometimes they are suspended in inaction, sometimes they turn to stare blankly, judgmentally at the lead characters, sometimes they aren’t even there. The script is brimming with gorgeous imagery, boasts a poetic vocabulary usually reserved for critically-acclaimed novels, and often reveals an undeniable, ineffable emotional poignancy, yet, when considered in the context of the film, it almost doesn’t even makes sense. The same lines are repeated over and over again, and often even by different characters. Generic proclamations are woven into emotional scenes, but we don’t really understand how they connect. Some objects cast no shadows; others cast disproportionately, frighteningly long ones. The same music plays softly in the background. Suddenly, it lurches to the foreground and blares with a vengeance, then it stops, and all is terrifyingly quiet. The camera examines the same places languidly, over and over again, yet they remain no less impenetrable, no less enigmatic, no less haunting. At times, shadows threaten to disengage themselves from their hosts, but this isn’t a film with CGI, so that’s impossible — so why is it that one is convinced they might…? MIND BLOWN.

And I could wax lyrical about how breathtaking the visuals are (this is, hands down, the most gorgeous film I’ve ever seen, maybe right behind Bergman’s The Silence or Kubrick’s The Shining), or about how gorgeous the script is, but any attempt at description or explanation would simply diminish their beauty and desecrate the gift of subjectivity. Besides, the best arthouse filmmakers don’t depend solely on stylistic inventiveness; that’s just a sidenote, and they know it. Arthouse films must too wield visceral impact, and must be emotionally relatable, because without these, they are simply empty, sadistic exercises in unintelligibility. Here, Resnais makes a powerful case for his place among arthouse gods; despite radical leaps in plot progression, opaque lead characters and impenetrable use of symbolism, he still manages to render his film’s central themes and issues comprehensible, which is something beautifully rare in the world of art film. Undoubtedly, there are vastly differing interpretations of what this film really means, but just to prove my case for Resnais’ intelligibility, I’ll just put mine out there:

The film is an extended erotic fantasy that A creates to escape from her suffocating marriage (or long-term relationship, at the very least) to M. This is why the central narrator and relationship explored is between A and X. M here is an uninvited, unappreciated presence, who appears presumably because his domineering nature precludes escape, or because A is projecting his possessive need to drive all thoughts of other men from her mind. Alternatively, he could possibly be a personification of her guilt for being an unfaithful wife, or at least thinking of being an unfaithful wife. X could be a real one-night stand that A had, or perhaps he is simply a personification of her desire to escape. Either way, he serves the same purpose; he provides her with the love and (awesome) sex that M does not. The central conflict is derived from A’s negotiation between her reluctance to cheat and her desire to escape, and Marienbad is the imaginary platform on which this negotiation occurs. The game of Nim that M and X play parallels a larger tug-of-war struggle to occupy a place in A’s imagination. M constantly wins, but X is given infinite opportunities to try again because A refuses to allow M’s authority to undermine her own, which is absolute in her own dream; the power that M wields (as exemplified in the scene where A ‘kills’ X in a bid to prevent M from hurting him) is more a manifestation of her guilt rather than a reflection of his actual authority. The richly ornate but empty corridors in Marienbad reflect the contradiction between the image and reality of marriage. Alternatively, perhaps it reflects that inherent in any relationship, which is why A is so reluctant to ‘run away’ with X. Ultimately, I see this film as a deconstructionist take on marriage; feminists would probably enthusiastically declare it a lamentation of androcentric culture, but I try not to go that far. In any case, it is clear that this isn’t just an empty exercise in strangeness; it has something to say about marriage, something to say about relationships, and does so with unabashed, incomparable style.

Part of me wishes Last Year In Marienbad were shorter and/or had more focus, but part of what makes this film so brilliant is that it takes a potentially legendary short film and boldly, defiantly expands it into a full-length feature film. Short films thrive on its brand of inventiveness and experimentalism, and it undoubtedly would be much easier for Resnais as a director if he had less scenes to work with, less time to fill, but instead he takes his time, allowing the audience to revel in the film’s many visual pleasures while allowing the central tensions of the films to naturally, gradually unravel themselves. With supreme confidence, I can say that absolutely no other revered director (I’m ignoring Francis Ford Coppola and his gloriously awful Youth Without Youth here) would have the balls to make a full-length with a script that reads like a documentary-esque monologue, and with a premise this powerfully sophisticated. Besides, every second is another opportunity to marvel at Resnais’ inexhaustible bag of visual invention, to frown inexorably in reticent decipherment — and that kind of wonder I decidedly would not trade for any irrelevant stab at in-your-face comprehensibility. The stranger the film gets, the more intoxicating the sense of helplessness, the more palpable the enigma of the human psyche, the more viscerally powerful the effect.

So many surrealist filmmakers (I’m blaming you, Luis Bunuel, whose infamous short Un Chien Andalou remains the perennial inspiration of unoriginal but erudite film students since the dawn of avant-garde experimentalism) have attempted to capture the magic of dreams, but none have quite as adroitly distilled their impenetrability, whimsicality and emotional power without once descending into all-out absurdity or cringe-inducing preciosity. So dedicated are Resnais and Robbe-Grillet to the enigma of their film that it never once feels contrived or even deliberate. They immerse themselves in it, they believe everything in it, they feel everything in it, and we too are drawn into the suffocating power of its magic. So expansive is their passion for cinema and poetry, so bold is their desire to explore the stranger, uncharted depths of relationships and love that we are left, limp and helpless, unwitting instruments of their insanity. After watching the standard Lynch fare (RE: Lost Highway, Blue Velvet), one still isn’t any closer to understanding the meaning behind it; his works are so often self-indulgent exercises in aimless opacity that the only praise-worthy feat is his cinematography – but too is the case with most arthouse films; it’s nothing special. After watching Last Year In Marienbad, though, one is imbued with an intoxicating sense of wonder, a refreshed awareness of cinematic possibility. If one is lucky enough, one might even understand why.

KevinScale Rating: 5/5

Also, in defense of my taste in films, which is bound to be deemed ‘pretentious’ by anyone who has ever watched Last Year In Marienbad and hated it (and there, quite understandably, are many): I hate almost everything from the French New Wave, and I think Godard films, while occasionally stylistically interesting, are tiresome and endlessly trite. Resnais films make up a large proportion of the few exceptions, and what I love about his films is not just their bold sense of experimentalism (a common praise for any film from the movement), but their poetic fascination with life and love, and his astounding passion for films. His oeuvre, more than that of any other director, more than Bergman, more than Welles, more than Kubrick, embodies the magic of cinema; it reflects an artist that approaches film with child-like wonder at its possibilities, and that recklessly, unthinkingly immerses himself in them, because in the face of something so magical, something so great, he doesn’t know how else to react.

FILM REVIEW: Les herbes folles (Wild Grass)

Directed By: Alain Resnais

Written By: Alex Reval, Laurent Herbiet

Cinematography By: Eric Gautier

Starring: Sabine Azéma as Maguerite Muir, André Dussolier as Georges Palet, Anne Cosigny as Suzanne, Emmanuel Devos as Josépha

So Wild Grass is the first movie I’ve watched in a week, and for all its unevenness and directorial missteps, it is a poignant reminder of what I love most about arthouse cinema and film in general. Perhaps because I have exhausted myself of my articulacy in my previous post, a regrettable, indulgent exercise in verbosity, I’m finding this review particularly hard to write, so I’ll start with the easy part: the cinematography. When watching Wild Grass, it’s fiercely impossible to not notice how beautifully filmed it is; there is, in all honesty, not a single scene that isn’t gorgeous and awe-inspiring and brimming with depth. Launching into geek mode…

The film takes every opportunity to celebrate the beauty of lighting; Gautier uses soft lenses and digitally alters the lights with feathering techniques and various enhancement effects to make them have a dream-like haziness, and the effect is calming and gorgeous. Just look at how the red backlights are glowing and surrealistically expansive. Even the arbitrary spotlight in the background transcends its tangibility and becomes a disembodied, enigmatic, watchful eye. The red almost portends danger about to intrude uninvited into the warm, yellow confines of Georges' house. Even in the dark, the various shades of turquoise and green and brown and yellow on the house are clearly visible.

Here, the dream-like haziness of the lighting we witnessed in the previous still becomes an all-embracing, expansive sea that immerses and caresses the entire frame. In most arthouse films that make use of coloured, neon lighting (Tom Twyker's Run Lola Run, Cam Archer's Wild Tigers I Have Known, Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats etc., the lighting is often harsh and abrasive. Here, the lighting is no less striking, but it is soft and gorgeous rather than excessively lurid and gawdy. It's a refreshing change, bestows an immediate stylistic recognizability and ties in too wonderfully with the disjointed surrealism of the narrative.

But the beauty of lighting is not all Resnais wants to extol; colour, as observed in the previous two shots as well, is an important visual element here, not only stylistically but thematically. The film, in its entirety, is a celebration of life in all its unpredictability and elasticity, and in this scene, Resnais passionately and sensuously captures the beauty of an obligatory house chore. It's arbitrary placement within the narrative is itself important because it is one of many instances where Resnais eschews plot linearity for a gloriously indulgent celebration of the quotidian.

Here, Resnais drenches the tired 'family dinner' scene with warm, fuzzy, homely orange lighting, painting a portrait of utopian idealism. Yet, it is in this scene that Georges has a rendezvous (of sorts) with his mistress (of sorts) Marguerite, and that Georges' son insults his father's surname. The irony is quite self-evident, and lighting is cardinal in the bestowal of this added dimension. The bigger implication is of how the world at large (represented by the half-witted policemen) falsely perceives Georges to be living a perfect life. He has a lasting, functional marriage, money, a big-ass house, grandchildren, a seemingly wholesome family, yet his life is so wrought with loneliness and ennui that he turns to an imaginary lover to satisfy his need for something different, something immediately meaningful.

But Resnais is too youthful, too romantic and too ironic to lament life's pains without too simultaneously, self-knowingly, celebrating its mundane minutiae. Even an unclean lawn mower with grass residue scattered hastily across its prodigious body has an ethereal, mesmerizing beauty. Scenes like this and the extreme close-up of paint being slathered against concrete suggest the endless beauty of life -- if only we are wise enough to open our eyes to it.

Again, this is a celebration of the little things, except this time it is (characteristically) more strange than pretty. When Georges walks to a police station, the hyperactive camera stealthily tracks his movements from his car until he steps through the police station door, at which point the camera bizarrely lingers instead on a trash can outside it. This is mostly just Resnais having fun; he knows that we expect him to follow through with the tracking shot, and purposely subverts our expectations, because, as with all of his films, he fluidly and unexpectedly interrupts conventional scenes with unexpected twists and plot progressions and transitions.

In fact, the first 30 minutes or so of the film is solely dedicated to disturbing and undermining cinematic tradition, a testament to the endlessness of human ingenuity and creativity. The narration is gloriously self-aware, continuously tempting us with slices of unoriginality but then immediately overturning our expectations with brilliant turns of phrase and often outright strange plot progressions. This part of the film, in its very deliberate, self-knowing eschewal of all predictability, is endlessly surprising, fiercely inventive, and specially catered for those who (like me) obnoxiously attempt to anticipate dialogue and plot. Also, I really love how the narration here is refreshingly unassuming and styled as a real-time stream of consciousness; it’s almost child-like in its gentle, sensual laboriousness. Arthouse films so often tend to be esoteric and philosophical, and perennially revolve around the bigger questions of existentialism and love and humanity, and because Resnais tackles something far more tangible and far more pertinent — beauty — Wild Grass at once becomes startlingly relevant and refreshing.

Again, unlike most art films, this film actually really, really fun moments. The scene where Josépha calls Maguerite out of concern for her health and Maguerite responds in a droning, deadpan monotone while the camera hypnotically documents the movements of a rocking chair is particularly wonderful. The scene where the camera focuses judgmentally on Josépha’s slutty boots. The scene where Georges dramatically reaches out to Maguerite in a pseudo-illicit embrace and the 21st Century Fox theme music emphatically swells in the foreground as the camera rapidly zooms in. The scene where Georges dramatically reinvents the encounter between Marguerite and her neighbour as a campy film noir. The scene where a farmer with extensive knowledge of aeroplanes ponders the legality of performing aircraft aerobatics in a civilian flight zone. The scene where Maguerite is dramatically recreated as the stock protagonist of an evil dentist horror show.

But this is not a particularly good movie; at least not by Resnais’ standards. To all those unfamiliar with Alain Resnais, he is one of greatest, most revered (I hold him in higher regard than his more widely acclaimed contemporary Jean-Luc Godard) directors in French cinema, and was instrumental in the establishment of the French New Wave in the 1960s (he was fucking 88 years old when he made Wild Grass, a testament to his youthfulness, vibrancy and endless ingenuity). He, along with Godard and some other obscure French directors, essentially pioneered the notion of the Auteur, one who makes a film as an author with stylistic and thematic conventions and not as a faceless storyteller. Before David Lynch took the arthouse scene by storm with his debut film Eraserhead, Resnais was the face of surrealist cinema. Resnais is the original weirdo of film. And as such, this movie, while it does have some wonderful moments, is not nearly in the league of Resnais’ best work. But even when compared to other brilliant arthouse films (Mullholland Drive, The Future even) this doesn’t really hold its own. For example, it’s not made particularly clear why Maguerite calls Georges after spending half the film chasing him away (and successfully managing to do so, with the help of some painfully stupid police officers). It’s a very nonsensical, improbable turn of events, and not the good kind either. One assumes that Georges and Suzanne are still married solely for the preservation of habit, but this isn’t really explained either; Resnais would much rather indulge himself in searching cracks in the road for random grass patches than do something necessary like that.

In true spirit of arthouse cinema, which, in its conformity to convention is inherently surprising and perhaps even uninspired — although in all fairness Resnais probably does it for the irony — the narrative in Wild Grass is interjected sporadically by numerous visual motifs (the flying handbag, the wild grass, the traffic lights, the neon-drenched roadtrips), except unlike the best art films they don’t really add much to the film except more aesthetic beauty. There scenes where Georges is seen walking backwards in a dream-like state into a cinema as a circular frame closes in on him the traffic sequences are also quite aimless. The celebration of neon lighting in the wordless driving scenes start out being wonderful and inspired, but then Resnais opts to drag them on for the longest time, and to insistently stuff as many of these as he can into the film. Again, he probably does it for the kicks, but the audience is not invited for the ride, and it just comes across as tiresome and boring.

There are a few moments where the film abruptly becomes supremely hard to follow, becomes seemingly nonsensical, but at least these moments are bursting with inventiveness and are endearing in their passionate refusal to be constrained by the modalities of logic and convention. In fact, I would have liked this film a lot more if it were a lot more whimsical and a lot more experimental with the plot progression. Resnais works best when he is being self-indulgent and optimally weird, because his eccentricities are what make his films such joyous, masturbatory romps. But, alas, too often the movie meanders aimlessly, too slow to enjoy and too repetitive to really get into it. When his characters are swept up in their ridiculous imagination or their tension-filled encounters, the movie finds its niche, but these sequences are too few and too far between, and it takes a lot of speed and whimsicality to sustain a film predicated on unpredictability. When the film does work though, it has a certain exuberance of spirit, an inimitable passion for cinema, and that, above all, is really what makes this film wonderful. Ultimately, I’m really glad that I got back into movies with Wild Grass, because more than any movie I’ve watched recently, it’s a celebration of arthouse impenetrability, of arbitrariness and creativity and possibility, and that’s a really, really special thing.

The ending sequence has a random farmer’s daughter, who we see for the first time there, ask the question “Mommy, when I’m a cat, will I be able to eat cat munchies?” It’s gloriously random, indulgently nonsensical, passionately weird. If only the entire film were executed with such speed and idiosyncrasy.

KevinScale Rating: 3.5/5

Introspection #1: Kevin, Blog Culture and the Indie World

WARNING: SELF-INDULGENT LOSERDOM AHEAD.

You’re the kind of girl I like/because you’re empty/and I’m empty/and we can never quarantine the past — Pavement, Gold Soundz

So I haven’t been watching movies in a while (and by a while, I mean > 4 days), and I had started to write an analytical disquisition of sorts (I would like to flatter myself with self-bestowed intellectual authority) about Sofia Coppola’s importance in the film industry, but I just couldn’t go through with it; I’m assuming it’s because I have a lot of things I’m sorting out in my personal life (I always do, apparently, maybe because I’m growing my hair out for the first time in 73 years. Yes, I have, in actual fact, been alive that long) and this post is to facilitate that process. Usually, my self-indulgence is strictly limited to witty banter, and on many occasions I have quite openly admonished blog culture (I refer to the ubiquitous tendency for teenagers to curse wildly at their parents, or to lament the Abril Despedacado-esque tragedy that is their lives), but I really do feel like I need to get stuff off of my chest, although you most certainly will not have the misfortune of me launching , unbridled, into a self-pitying diatribe, nor will you hear me curse or even complain about my parents, who are, without a doubt, the two most important, most wonderful people in my life. Apart from me and my Swedish alter ego, Ingmar, that is.

Ain’t it like most people/I’m no different/we like to talk on things we don’t know about — The Avett Brothers, Ten Thousand Words

(And omg yes, I have written the above paragraph in one take and without the use of a thesaurus or whatever; I have been steadfastly plowing through Angela Carter’s ridiculously extravagant Nights at the Circus and her lavish use of vocabulary unfortunately — because many show-offs I know are secretly stupid and to be affiliated with them is almost hurtful — encourages the same linguistic excess in her readers.)

Grab a calculator/and fix yourself — Nicolas Jaar, Space Is Only Noise If You Can See

We’ll start at the beginning. In Sec. 3, during BSC (Beijing Satellite Campus, this 6-week immersion program in Beijing where we were made to listen to Chinese women talk about Chinese culture and bargain with smug shop vendors), my friend Ming introduced me to the likes of Regina Spektor, Bjork, Kate Bush, Charlotte Martin, Lykke Li, Amy Winehouse, Tori Amos etc. among other artists. Before this, I was an avid follower of Billboard (and I remained so, until last year, actually) and the only artist I really listened to was Mariah Carey. I mean, I liked Prince too but I think only because he commanded a certain artistic integrity that validated my music taste. Obviously, the music videos of Kate Bush dancing provocatively on a double bass (See: Babooshka music video) and of Bjork screaming in a dark room (I forget the song…#lulz) were incredibly strange –by any standards– but were even more so to me because until then I thought that a music video meant an aimless, self-indulgent distillation of an artist’s sex appeal (Watch: Any post-1997 Mariah “My Boobs Are Fucking Hyoooooge” Carey videos). I got into some of the early Kate Bush albums (Lionheart and The Kick Inside are still endlessly surprising listens) but I mean, that was about it. I didn’t really think about its appeal in like, sociological terms and shit. Then the following year, with Ming’s ever-growing presence and influence, I started downloading indie rock playlists. I remember discovering Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and thinking what the flying fuckkk it was so weird. There were some awesome moments, though, like “For Our Elegant Caste” by Of Montreal, “Britney’s Tears” by The Steeples, “Billionaires” by “Your Twenties”, “Letting Go” by Team Waterpolo etc. (btw you should check them out lulz), and they were so cool and infectious that I at once developed an irrevocable interest in indie music. I justified this interest with my desire to be ‘open-minded’, but in all honesty, I think it pertained to my growing relationship with my friends (I had friends then) and my need to preserve a safely impenetrable sense of self.

And says, ‘How does it feel to be such a freak’/and you say ‘Impossible’/as he hands you a bone — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

I think I’m probably the most introverted person I know. In primary school, I didn’t participate in PE lessons because of my eye (something that changed in secondary school, although my participation rendered me no less inept), and I spent them inventing awesome adventures for myself in which I was Firen and my best friend (I didn’t have one then) was Freeze. And then I started writing some stupid fantasy novel and made it into a cool Fighting Fantasy-esque CYOA game in which I made my friends (I had a few; turns out I was always adorable and charming) go on adventures with me. Perhaps because they too were subconsciously disillusioned by the world, they were always (I say this with pride and insistent self-validation) happy to come along for the ride. I was particularly proud of myself because a boy named Kah Khang, who was decidedly an outsider in his all-out geekiness and his tendency to cry if he didn’t get above 90 marks for a test, was part of this game and he felt happy for being included. He even wrote an essay entitled “My Best Friends” in which I was one of three main characters *smugness* But anyway the point is that I was always a person who had his head up in the clouds and who never really lived in the real world (woah Matrix reference? SO DEEP), probably because I had never really felt accepted. It’s not like I was always ostracized or anything, I’m too awesome for that, but at the same time it’s like there was no one else to discuss Charmed with or to share books with (I know this sounds zestfully euphemistic but I was fucking 12, so stop).

Do I have to scream in your face/I’ve been dodging lamps and vegetables — of Montreal, The Past Is A Grotesque Animal

And because I so desired to be accepted, I thought interests were instruments of community more than anything else, and thus I was more than willing to compromise on my interests (I only read my Charmed books outside of school, lols jk I was parading around with them by the armfuls. But srsly) because I didn’t see myself as an individual if I were not part of a community. And I think this, ultimately, is why the indie world appealed so much to me. It represents a world where people are decidedly different (“alternative” is the inescapable word in indie culture: alternative rock, alternative rap, alternative jazz, alternative neo-soul-folk-hop-electro-bash-what-hiiiiiiiyi) from the average, boring person, and are allowed to ‘belong’ solely because of that incredibly general difference. It’s a very embracing, accepting culture, and I think it’s also a very non-judgmental one. I’m ignoring hipster culture here, but then again there wasn’t really a hipster culture then anyway.

I’ve been looking for something else/duel it, duel it, duel it, juggle it, duel it, duel it — Phoenix, Lisztomania

And in Sec 4, I was feeling more at home with the people around me than I had ever felt in my entire life. The table. The gang. The BFFs. I had like a routine and a default group of friends I actually liked. And it was then that indie culture revealed itself to be something else entirely. It was an excuse for impenetrability, an exercise in reflexive self-defense. Turns out, the more the relationships with the people around me grew, the more I didn’t want to be understood, the more I shunned relatability, maybe because I wasn’t used to it, maybe because I hated myself and I thought if people knew what kind of a person I was they wouldn’t be as accepting or as nice even. I don’t really know still. I remember liking Half Nelson and Little Miss Sunshine before I really even knew why. I was just supposed to like it, so I claimed I did — not wholly untruthfully, in my defense — and over time I really did, maybe because my act was so convincing I inevitably too became convinced, maybe simply because they were such good movies (they really are — even if Half Nelson has a predictable plot and Little Miss Sunshine is occasionally bogged down by its caricature-y characters that Sundance so adores *smugness*) that they encourage instinctive rather than reasoned love, maybe because with a rich (albeit superficial) social identity I thought I could deflect the attention away from my perceived monstrosity and onto something that was far more interesting and engrossing. Regardless, I became increasingly fixated with the indie art scene, and at one point obsessed over digital surrealist art simply because it was colourful and different and begged inclusion into my numerous claims of individuality. And so the Kevin of 2010 was born, complete with a witty, interesting, insistently strange persona that was much too happy with his own creation to consider self-reflection or self-awareness. During the trip to the US for Operation Mozzie, for example, at one point I played Taylor Swift songs from my phone and disengaged myself from communal conversation — which, in regrettable retrospect, is something I did quite a lot — and proclaimed my antisocial tendencies insuperable. I think that was just another instance of staying true to the ‘insistently strange’ part. In truth, I don’t think there’s much to me at all. I overanalyze everything, I make mistakes, sometimes I make people laugh and sometimes I don’t, I like being intellectual even if my intelligence possibly abnegates that right — but that’s the kind of stuff everyone too experiences. There’s nothing particularly special about my experience, and I think I’m okay with that.

I feel like an artist/who’s lost his touch/who likes himself in his art/but not his art too much — Darren Criss, Human

And in J1, I was involved in Dramafeste and the Mid-year production, and for some ridiculous reason, I thought I had crossed the threshold from acceptance to celebration, when there was, in all frankness, very little to celebrate. So I can I say a few lines; I do that everyday. Everyone does that everyday. I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating pseudo-humble way, I’m not that noble. I just mean, what’s the point of having so many happy people around you that you don’t really know but hug anyway because apparently you give hugs when they don’t even matter and you’ve very carelessly handled the relationships that do? I really don’t want to sound like some fucking self-important teenager who knows nothing yet who necessarily has the trite epiphany: WHAT’S THE POINT OF DOING ALL THAT, IF I DON’T EVEN HAVE THE ‘THINGS THAT MATTER’ *temper tantrum*, because I’ve always been very fortunate in that nearly everything that mattered or that I needed, I had presented to me, what I never had and still don’t is the wisdom to act on this glorious privilege. In primary school, I had my fucking game. In secondary school, I had Melvin and Bradley and the table gang. In JC, I had acceptance and good friends, and at the end I even got acceptable grades, considering a lot of things that happened, that got me into UCLA, which I’m learning quickly is the home to a lot of awesome, weird people I think I would really love to be around — on top of its academic prestige and all that bullshit. I think the problem is inarguably and undoubtedly me, and I say this with self-knowing certainty and frankness, and not with self-pity. I think the only way I can approach relationships is with reciprocation, because it so clearly defines the boundaries in which a relationship functions. If you don’t wanna talk to me, I would convince myself that I too do not want your conversation. If you ask me to take time out to meet you, and then you spend most of your time with other friends you claim aren’t as important, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it, and I wouldn’t understand the terms of the relationship anymore, because, I guess, I don’t really work that way.

I’m not trying to forget you/I just like to be alone — Panda Bear, Bros

Being an introvert means that one is really careful with who one chooses to be close with, and with any sign of destabilization or potential emotional conflict one instinctively is made to retreat, because once the emotional attachment is made, it can’t be broken — for better or worse. I don’t know whether it’s something I can change, and I might if I had like a manual or something, but then again I don’t really know whether I want to. I’ve always been baffled by how some people smother their inner emotional conflicts so brazenly and so recklessly on other people in Facebook posts or in blog posts or on Twitter feeds (another reason why I’m against blog culture, btw), like don’t you want to save a little for yourself? If you’re sharing everything with everybody, how can you even differentiate between a friend and a close friend or whatever? It just doesn’t make sense. But I guess maybe I see it as a negative thing not because it doesn’t make sense, but because maybe I wish I had that kind of openness. Even in this post, in which I think I am inarguably being the most transparent I have ever been, there is so much that I could say, but that I want to preserve, to keep for myself and for, maybe, people that matter, because the things not shared are special, and besides, isn’t it just kind of vulgar to just release everything special and personal to the world? Even if not for the desire to honor that untouched, unjudged specialness, I don’t know if I even could. I mean, is it even possible to distill one’s frustrations into words, even if with the enthusiastic assistance of sociological terminology or psychoanalytical categories, without them losing their fundamental meanings — without which they would ineluctably be rendered hollow and limp and meaningless? I don’t think so, and besides, even if one could, one would only be adding unnecessary burden, to oneself because articulation necessitates an almost brutal self-confrontation, and to the people around one because confessions necessitate empathy — at least in the human ones. And for those reasons, I really do prefer reticence, and I don’t really see why anyone who respects the people around them enough to not smother them with their decidedly sadistic personalities wouldn’t either. Sometimes, I think it’s asking a little too much to want a listening ear (unless, of course, the other party is willing; but I’m referring specifically here to broadcast culture, in which the pseudo-torments of the pseudo-tortured are aimlessly pontificated in a masturbatory stab at self-consolation). There’s enough pain in everyone’s life as it is. Besides, there is so much more sincerity and power and beauty in wordless, mutual understanding, with sympathy communicable only by humanity and gentleness and kindness (I’m kind of paraphrasing Charlie Chaplin at the end lols; I expect an award for my authoritative command of unoriginality). Words are much too deceiving and too easily manipulable to mean anything anymore.

I wear a coat of feelings and they are loud/I’ve been having good days — Animal Collective, The Purple Bottle

Maybe, as numerous Facebook quizzes have smugly declared, I’m a romantic — and it’s not like I’m not particularly proud of this; it’s just a fact. I most certainly am not one of those half-wits who are like I’M A ROMANTIC SO LIKE I LIKE CUDDLING AND LIKE REALLY CHEESY POP SONGS GIGGLE GIGGLE. Btw what the fuck is up with Jason Mraz’s new single? I love Jason Mraz, and I 4shiz balked at its supreme, unadulterated shittiness. Anyway. I just mean that, I guess because I function most comfortably within my internal world, and it is so hard for me to allow people to be part of it, I naturally only expect like one or maybe two people to really understand me in my entirety, not that I’m particularly complex but I think my efforts to be impenetrable have definitely (albeit, perhaps, unfortunately) paid off, and it takes explanation from the source to really get anywhere close.

Fuck gold/I’m a platinum digger — M.I.A., 10 Dollar

And here’s where I want to talk about my internal world. Even within the indie world, I have come to learn, there are various echelons of indie-ness. There are the Little Miss Sunshine/She&Him indie pop necessities, artists and things that one knows simply to validate one’s indie-ness, and then there are the Alain Resnais/The Music Tapes-ish kind of all-out opacity, things that you know because you’re either really, really passionate about the arts, you’d like to think yourself as one like so, or perhaps just because like David Bowie you’re so consumed by your dedication to your strangeness and unfathomability (be them real or imagined) that you instinctively possess knowledge of things so esoteric that film professors and experimental indie musicians pause to consider their own artistic credibility in your presence (I am proud to declare that my taste in movies has left a film major speechless with ignorance. SCORE). I, obviously, am of the latter kind, because I think the world has become so transparent (and blog culture is definitely a testament to that) that I feel the need to construct a safe place, an impenetrable place where I can explore and feel unjudged, a place empty of unqualified opinions that invariably possess the power to destabilize regardless of validity or credibility.

I’m in love all ri-i-i-ight/with my crazy beautiful life/with the parties/the disasters/with my friends all pretty and plastered — Ke$ha, Crazy Beautiful Life

I think the progression that indie culture has made today is particularly interesting, one that I would never have expected. Foster the People, for example, have taken (OMG BRITISH PLURALIZATION OF THE GROUP WHAT) the pop charts by storm with their single Pumped Up Kicks, and the current #1 single right now is an indie pop collaboration between .fun and Janelle Monae. It’s pretty awesome, yeah, but ridiculous at the same time. Both songs are catchy (although I don’t think either are particularly memorable, but that’s just me, apparently), but they don’t really sound anything like Kelly Clarkson or Taylor Swift or Demi Lovato or any artist with Dr Luke productions and unabashedly formulaic songwriting. At the same time, Pitchfork, smug, perennial publicist of obscure, experimental indie bands since the dawn of Internet journalism, is writing reviews for the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce and Lauryn Hill, and praising them for their ingenuity. Even Drake gets away with experimental sampling and minimalist downtempo electronic productions and still manages to constantly stay on the top of the charts. Indie and mainstream cultures are gently, gradually colliding (for lack of a more unoriginal word), and soon quirky, strange indie pop outfits will be ubiquitous. I guess I kind of appreciate how people are becoming more open-minded towards different sounds (again, even if the sounds aren’t particularly good; I don’t really understand Foster the People at all) but at the same time this conflation is undermining the regolith on which indie culture stands. When indie pop outfits become mainstream pop outfits, where will those who favor impenetrability but who instinctively and helplessly repudiate the exponential strangeness concomitant with the more opaque depths of the indie world go? Or maybe that’s why hipster culture is pivotal to indie culture; in a time where the safety and smallness of the indie community is being threatened, one can defend oneself with irony: Oh but like my love for Foster the People, even after they WENT MAINSTREAM is like, ironic. Then again I really don’t want the indie world to be entirely relegated to the hipster world, which to me is the pinnacle of inauthenticity — but then again I have spent much of this post proclaiming my inauthenticity, so I’ll just shut my pie-hole. And my mouth.

I can’t do what ten people tell me to do/so I guess I’ll just remain the same — Otis Redding, Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay

So I guess I’m not authentic, and my interests are probably the walls of my safe haven, but really, is anyone respectable authentic? Isn’t inauthenticity the price to pay for self-awareness? In knowing how you are viewed, everything you do naturally feels like a modification not of the essential self, but of the perception of the self; the self is untouched, or if it is we wouldn’t really know, would we? Sure, people too obnoxious for self-reflection or too nescient to understand the meaning of ‘nescient’ (you know who you are, fuckers) might be the only authentic ones here, but who really wants to hang out with them anyway? Or even if they are, I don’t really know how that affects anything. If you’re an asshole, you’re an asshole, and I will stay the fuck away, regardless of whether or not you are authentically or inauthentically one. Maybe the only thing that is authentic about anyone is their comfort with their identity; if you’re comfortable with being a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual prick (why, honey, I most certainly am) then you’re probably really interesting. If you’re comfortable with being profanely boring, you’re probably a really chill person and we should be best friends. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the indie fixation with authenticity (M.I.A. and Lana Del Rey, among others, have been victim of this pointless obsession) is painfully stupid, and M.I.A., as she does with nearly everything else, should attack it in true iconoclastic spirit.

Why’s it so hard to tell you what I want/why can’t you just read my mind — Alanis Morissette, These R The Thoughts

A lot of the time I feel like there is so much I don’t know. I mean, I’m working towards political awareness and proficiency in Spanish, and I try to be understanding and good, and often I don’t succeed, and I can’t even point out funny-sounding cities on a map and I don’t know how to deal with (and god — without the capital G, mind you, Kevin The Subtle Iconoclast at work here — willing, love) people without hurting them in the process. I don’t know how to convey my feelings on a daily basis, and it just seems so much easier to release them in dramatic paroxysms of tears and snot…except it’s unnecessarily hurtful, and I really do try my best to avoid drama; my weekly dosage of Breaking Bad has plenty of that already. I really want to be happy, not in general because that’s a myth created by religion in a self-justifying circulus in probando to bolster the beams of conformity, but like with myself. I don’t want to be self-conscious all the time. I want to be around people whom I think are the shit and who too think that I am the shit. And I don’t want to write a fucking 4000-word essay everytime I want to convey my opinions, because whatever this post would have you believe about Kevin The Sympathetic Person Underneath The Persona, often he just can’t muster the strength nor the energy to seek the very things he so claims he wants. Maybe ambivalence is his territory. At least that’s indie enough for him *smirks*

If you wasn’t so ugly/I’d put my dick in your face/dick in your face/PUT MY DICK IN YOUR FACEEEEEEE — Nicki Minaj, Come On A Cone

FILM REVIEW: Broken Flowers

Written/Directed By: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Bill Murray as Don Johnston, Jeffrey Wright as Winston. Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy and Sharon Stone as Don’s ex-lovers.

Broken Flowers was released in 2005, only a little more than a year after Bill Murray’s critically-lauded role as Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola’s transcendent Lost in Translation, yet it shamelessly and artlessly steals much of what made that film work and awkwardly claims them as its own. If Jim Jarmusch had waited, say, another 60 years, or if he had any of Sofia Coppola’s instinctive storytelling smarts, I probably wouldn’t be getting all worked up. But this film, in concept and in presentation, is frequently a lackluster, tiresome attempt at recreating the magic of Lost in Translation, and its unoriginality is so blatant, so stark, that it is irrevocably insulting. Both Bob and Don are extremely wealthy men with no semblance of direction in life, both films are portraits of their loneliness and aimlessness, both films incorporate extended sequences of inaction and silence, both films bestow a certain tenderness and poignancy to Bill Murray’s improvised cynicism. But while Lost in Translation is a revelation disguised as meandering inaction, Broken Flowers is meandering inaction disguised as a revelation. Nothing much happens in Lost in Translation, that’s true, but the expansive script still manages to be a thoughtful meditation on celebrity culture, marital dysfunction, existential disillusionment, cultural displacement and alienation. Broken Flowers, on the other hand, explores aimlessness, only aimlessness, and does so with a resolute, obstinate aimlessness. It has absolutely nothing to say, and attempts to disguise this fact with Don’s quasi-cryptic, pseudo-intellectual revelation at the end of the film (“The past is gone, I know that. And the future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So all there is, is this. The present.”), which incidentally is a vacuous declaration devoid of meaning or significance.

Like Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, which Broken Flowers steals liberally from, this film is about a man taking a road trip to visit his past lovers, and both incorporate torturously long sequences of the protagonist driving down ill-maintained roads and through expansive, rural landscapes. The former is too a film that solely explores aimlessness, and that has little to say about it, but at least the final payoff (Chloe Sevigny’s blowjob, the realization that Gallo’s character witnessed her being raped and did nothing) is arguably devastating enough to make the film’s inertia into a powerful emotional statement. This film, however, wanders aimlessly and concludes after nearly fucking 2 hours with deadpan indifference and frustrating opacity. Granted, films like Groundhog Day (Murray’s 2nd finest work) wander aimlessly too, but at least the journey is gorgeously decorated with jokes and fantastic bursts of pure hedonism. Broken Flowers, despite having Bill fucking Murray in the lead, is often quite humorless, and as a result is an extremely torturous and aimless watch.

Bill Murray mostly plays the same type of character: cynical, world-weary, self-aware, caustic. In Lost in Translation, Coppola even goes a step further to explore the bitterness and loneliness that presumably crafted this on-screen persona, and does so by juxtaposing Murray’s sardonic improv work with extended sequences of him staring blankly into space and raising his eyebrows defeatedly at the world around him. In Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch steals the latter idea, but Murray is given extraordinarily few moments to be sardonic or even opinionated about anything. Mostly, he repeats what other people say with a deadpan weariness, recites reluctantly from a standard script or stares blankly into space. In fact, so restricted is Murray by the god-awful script that he is almost painful to watch. He is too wooden, too weary, too nothing. By any stretch of the imagination, he remains fiercely, stubbornly impenetrable, and because Jim Jarmusch doesn’t even do what Nicholas Refn did for Ryan Gosling’s reticent character in Drive, there is no semblance of hidden depth, no air of mystery; only a bored old man waiting for meaning (and personality) to find him. To be fair, there are occasionally moments where Murray’s understated charisma suddenly eclipses the screen like a brilliant wave of light, but these moments are too few and too far between. Immediately, Don reminds me very much of Johnny Marco from Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere in his woodenness and his lack of personality. However, Somewhere is intelligent and self-aware enough to be littered with smug observations of Hollywood culture, to be grounded in the sweet, tender relationship between Marco and his angelic daughter Cleo, and to acknowledge Marco’s nothingness in its powerful, poignant ending. Broken Flowers finds no such redemption.

The film boasts an all-star cast. Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, four of the most revered actresses in Hollywood, play Don’s ex-lovers — but only because their presence affords Broken Flowers the sort of artistic validity that would otherwise prove elusive. None of them are given substantial roles, and despite being outrageously talented, none of them are given the opportunity to bring anything particularly special or intriguing to their parts, because the script is much too wooden to afford them complex personalities, much too restrictive to allow them room for improv. None of them even appear for more than ten minutes. They wander aimlessly into the film, and without making any kind of impact and without doing anything, really, they leave. Tilda Swinton’s job consists of opening her door, saying “FUCK YOU DON” and storming back into her house. For artistic cred, even perennial indie queen Chloe Sevigny makes a presence here as a bespectacled secretary who is (apparently) fucking Jessica Lange. Thankfully, in a sea of missteps, Jarmusch almost redeems himself by having the smarts to cast chameleonic stage actor Jeffrey Wright of Angels in America fame to play Don’s annoying Ethiopian neighbour, who also incidentally is the most well-written character here. Winston’s insufferable enthusiasm serves as a convincing counterpoint to Don’s woodenness, even if he doesn’t have enough screentime, he serves to obviously as a plot device and his chemistry with Don isn’t particularly palpable. In any other movie, Bill Murray would invariably be stealing the show, but the huge disparity in writing quality turns the tides, and Wright effortlessly steals every scene he’s in. To be fair though, Wright is a magnificent actor; it’s just that Murray is, given a good script, even more so.

And like all inept arthouse filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch too litters Broken Flowerswith bizarre, hyperstylized sequences that don’t actually add anything at all to the film. Towards the end of the film, he takes various scenes from the film and re-edits them to make them all psychedelic and tinted, and while they are effectively dream-like and hipster-chic, they serve no purpose other than to create some awkward illusion of purpose.

This is a film so awful that it actually makes Bill Murray look bad. Given a better director, this could’ve been a much better film, but under Jim Jarmusch’s direction it comes across as a radically uninspired rehash of Antonioniesque conventions.

KevinScale Rating: 1/5

FILM REVIEW: The Hunger Games

Directed By: Gary Ross

Written By: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins (Author of the original series), Billy Ray

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, Amandla Stenberg as Rue, Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman

The main creative forces behind this film have an impressive track record (that is, excluding Suzanne Collins, famed plagiarizer of Japanese epic Battle Royale). Ten odd years ago, director/co-writer Gary Ross produced Pleasantville, a film that not only manages to be cheeky, inventive and startlingly original, but that also manages to coax a star-making turn from MTV Best Kiss Award-winner (I quote Tropic Thunder here) Tobey Maguire. Billy Ray, on the other hand, helmed 2003’s fantastic Shattered Glass, a film that is so fiercely intelligent in its exploration of moral ambiguity that it occasionally threatens to eclipse Peter Sarsgaard’s insanely powerful performance as an unwittingly victimized magazine editor pushed to his limits. Even the lead actors have tons of artistic cred, if only because they rose to prominence via critically-acclaimed indie films. Jennifer Lawrence, obviously, is the breakout star of 2010’s heartbreaking Winter’s Bone, and Josh Hutcherson was last seen as the emotionally opaque, big-hearted son Laser in Lisa Cholodenko’s marvelous dramedy The Kids Are All Right. However, despite a fantastic lead performance, big-budget sets and some genuinely incredible action sequences, the film is too bogged down by the weak source material, a crippling lack of self-awareness and its (occasionally) startlingly poor execution.

The movie begins promisingly enough. An introductory short collage of shots reveal District 12 to be the Panem equivalent of a ghetto, but thankfully, surprisingly, it doesn’t descend into cringe-inducing Hollywood dramatizations, and there is no needless sentimental music or extravagant accompaniment to tell us that we’re supposed to feel sorry for poor people. In fact, the first half is my favourite part of the film precisely because there is no music, and the unsentimental, gritty vibe settles well with the film’s grim subject matter. However, as soon as the action kicks in, arbitrary insertions of melodramatic orchestral music start to get increasingly excessive, and exponentially annoying. There are two scenes in particular where the use of music feels particularly ridiculous, but these scenes are problematic too in the context of the film; they are naked turns of irony that contradict the very premise of the film; they are irretrievably out-of-place.

1) When Rue dies

I know I’ll probably be criticized for being heartless and cruel, especially by all of you big-hearted Samaritans who help people on a daily basis by praying before bedtime and not wasting food because poor, bloated children in Africa eat rice off of muddy washing boards, but the Rue/Katniss relationship feels obvious and manipulative to me. The film opens with Katniss singing a lullaby to Prim, her sister, and when Rue is dying, Katniss sings the same lullaby to her. Before she does this, and before she weeps and sobs and screams and dramatically lays Rue in a bed of tuberoses, it is already clear that Rue is supposed to be Prim’s in-game substitute. Amandla Stenberg, who portrays Rue, has big eyes and Corinne Bailey Rae curls and she’s quick-witted and adorable, and this is important because it is very clear to me that the filmmakers have chosen her not for her acting ability, but for her sheer lovableness. They make her cute, they make Katniss cry, so we too would feel something for her death. But let’s think about it. The filmmakers know the material; they know exactly what’s going to happen to Rue. She’s going to die. It’s absolutely clear to them. So what do they do about it? They manipulate us into falling for her, they make us watch as Katniss mourns, wallows in sorrow, and we feel something. At the very core of The Hunger Games is a bitter critique of aestheticized violence, of sadistic entertainment, yet the filmmakers are themselves guilty of using Rue’s death to elicit a sympathetic response from us; the filmmakers are themselves guilty of using her death to make us root for Katniss — because it in Rue’s death we are reminded of Katniss’ love for her sister Prim, and we feel ever strongly about Katniss returning safely to Prim.

If The Hunger Games were really to be taken seriously, such manipulative gestures cannot be allowed to pervade the film; it’s a laughable contradiction that completely undermines the underlying social critique!

2) When Cato is killed by the dog things

When Cato is killed, we as the audience are encouraged to feel triumphant. The camera lunges upwards in a gesture that unequivocally glorifies Peeta and Katniss, and a triumphant orchestral crescendo booms aimlessly in the background. The camera focuses deliberately on Peeta and Katniss, diverting our attention away from the fact that they just killed a person, and instead inviting us to feel happy that they won after all. This is absolutely unacceptable. The books (and the first half of the film) are clearly bitter about the Capitol sadistically slaughtering people from the twelve districts for its sick, twisted brand of entertainment, yet we are invited to be sadistically triumphant when Katniss and Peeta slaughter Cato, a person who, seconds before his death, breaks into a heartbreaking confession of his helplessness? There is no reflection, no invitation extended to the audience to make us realize the real violence and horror of the scene: that the heroes we want to triumph are themselves killers, are themselves disgusting and evil.

These are inexcusable missteps that suggest that the filmmakers don’t really know what The Hunger Games is really about, and that’s incredibly disappointing. Before going to watch the film, I thought it obvious that the real revelation of The Hunger Games shouldn’t be that THERE WILL ALWAYS BE REBELLION WHEN SHIT’S UNFAIR, but that LIFE IS A DISGUSTING GAME OF SURVIVAL AND EVERYONE IS EQUALLY HORRIFIC AND DISGUSTING. I don’t know how this simple, obvious truth could’ve evaded the eyes of filmmakers whom I once considered intelligent. Again, disappointing.

But enough bashing of the filmmakers. Suzanne Collins is responsible for crafting the film’s tenuous premise; she too must be bashed. The script self-knowingly incorporates a sequence at the beginning where the reason for The Hunger Games (the actual games, not the hopelessly superficial film I’m reviewing) is explained (“A little hope is effective”), but this hardly serves as an explanation. So, let me get this straight, k. If one person from my ghetto coal-mining district has a possibility of winning a game and qualifying entry into a world of superior everything, I, along with all my moronic, unintelligent comrades will be kept in line? Oh okay. Just checking. Because for a second I thought that THIS IS UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. It matters not about HOPE or FEAR or whatever. If there is injustice, there will be mass rebellion. And because this single line was given as the excuse for the entire film, I don’t see the point in the film anymore. I don’t see the point in the premise. It just doesn’t make any sense. I also don’t see why the head Gamemaker is made to commit suicide. It just seems overly melodramatic and sensationalist. A very classic OMG YOU DISOBEY, SO YOU DIEEEEEEEEE kind of sequence. Superbly trite and arguably as absurd. Furthermore, Peeta Mellark also doesn’t seem to have a personality. Normally, I would be okay with that; superficial character studies are abound in Hollywood. But I have a problem with getting Josh fucking Hutcherson to play a humorless, empty train wreck. In interviews and in extension, presumably, in real life, Josh Hutcherson is effortlessly charming. He’s funny, self-deprecating and just immensely likeable. Here, he only becomes somewhat likeable in his interview with the Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci in all his scene-stealing magnificence), where he flashes a winning smile, playfully flirts with everyone and descends suddenly into manipulatively tragic pseudo-poeticism. Apart from that scene, he is completely devoid of personality. He obviously has a predilection for dramatic proclamations, the film makes it a point to establish that, but which Hollywood teenthrob doesn’t?

Katniss appears to like Gale (played by glorified extra Liam Hemsworth, who smiles occasionally and speaks even less), but according to the book, she falls in love with Peeta over the course of the games. Of course, this isn’t really conveyed very well in the film, especially since Lawrence’s perpetual hard-faced indifference makes her love for Peeta seem like a bona fide show rather than anything genuine, but we have to assume that she does. WHY WOULD SHE? If she already likes Gale, shouldn’t there be an extra reason why Katniss, an unsmiling, asexual hardass, would compromise on her oh-so-axiomatic principles (she seems like the monogamous type, don’t you think?) to go for Peeta? If Peeta were more likeable and charming (incidentally, like the real Josh Hutcherson), I might believe their relationship. But now, it feels stale and unconvincing.

The film’s only perfect feature is Jennifer Lawrence’s performance. She tears through the film with a deadpan indifference, yet her presence is palpable and eclipsing. She bestows her character with a steely strength of character, but also with a certain wounded, almost primal vulnerability. There are a lot of comparisons between The Hunger Games, Twilight and Harry Potter, but Lawrence is in a league of her own; no young lead can so effortlessly helm a franchise.

Ultimately, this is a film that digs its own grave. It fervently opposes the aestheticization of violence, yet is actively engaged in it. It begins with cinematography reminiscent of a Nazi documentary, suggesting an exploration of evil, but yet actively disengages itself from it. It is, however, rather entertaining; the scene where Katniss runs through forest fires and past charging fireballs is particularly incredible. But being sporadically exciting isn’t enough. A film likes this needs intelligence, and it needs to be more determinedly character-driven. Get Joss Whedon and Noah Baumbach to write the next film’s screenplay, give Josh Hutcherson an actual personality, then maybe this franchise will go somewhere worth following. But the Whedon/Baumbach collaboration will never happen, not in a trillion years. So I have doubts.

KevinScale Rating: 3/5