Trailers of the Week — Our Patron Saint of Surviving Double Standards

by Gabriel Valdez

Some of you know this blog treats Kristen Stewart as something of a champion. You can read why here, but the brief reason is that she’s been effectively blackballed from studio filmmaking for having an affair, while the man she slept with, Rupert Sanders – her director, twice her age, with a wife and children – never received similar treatment from the industry and has been offered his choice of big-budget studio projects.

Another director, Frank Darabont, won the directing job for Snow White and the Huntsman 2 by pitching the plot that most effectively cut Stewart out of the franchise she launched. So we champion Kristen Stewart here (or at least Vanessa and I do; we’re not a hivemind) because an attitude that holds young women accountable for affairs yet rewards old men with families for them deserves every ounce of vitriol we can muster.

CAMP X-RAY
Oct. 17

All of that is immaterial when it comes to Camp X-Ray. This just looks like a good film. Stewart gets a bad rap as an actress for her part in a Twilight franchise in which everybody – even Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning – indisputably sucked. People neglect her roles in The Messengers, Into the Wild, Welcome to the Rileys, and The Runaways. That’s certainly a better resume than most of the actors involved in Twilight boasted.

Kristen Stewart with a chip on her shoulder and something to prove, in a film with a chip on its shoulder and something to prove? That’s something I want to see.

Camp X-Ray. It’s about the soldiers assigned to a particular section of Guantanamo Bay, a military prison that holds its prisoners free of international law, trial, and in violation of the Geneva Convention. (Barack Obama campaigned on closing it in 2008. It is still open today.)

The film follows a friendship that develops between Stewart’s Private Amy Cole and a prisoner named Ali Amir. As a guard, her job is not to keep him imprisoned; it’s to keep him from killing himself.

RED ARMY
Jan. 22

A sports movie for people who hate sports movies? What if I like sports movies? The closest I’ve ever gotten to understanding the sports camps of Soviet Russia is catching the rerun of Rocky IV on a lazy Sunday afternoon. You see, the key to boxing is glistening as hard as you can.

Children would dream of growing up to play hockey or wrestle for the USSR in the Olympics, and when they achieved that, they would dream of escaping the nearly year-round sports camps (read: prisons) that were dedicated to perfecting athletes whether they liked it or not.

An investigation of Soviet Russian policies and their mutual obsession with the United States through the lens of sports? That’s what documentary is made for.

AMERICAN SNIPER
Dec. 25

Never count Clint Eastwood out. Regardless of conversations with empty chairs, the man is still a consummate director obsessed with plumbing the depths of the American experience. His politics rarely make it into his films, at least not in the way you’d expect.

American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, looks powerful. Its trailer comes across not like a tease but as a statement in and of itself. It’s the kind of film – centered around a lone figure, juxtaposing family life against dangerous work, tension inherent to the job – that plays to all of Eastwood’s strengths as a director. Cooper himself is a burgeoning talent, only now getting the recognition and roles he deserves after films like Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.

THE WATER DIVINER
No date set

As I pointed out in last week’s special feature, it’s looking like a banner year for Australian film. Add Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, the tale of a father who travels to post-World War I Turkey in order to find his three dead sons.

You can see the edges of the movie’s budget in the trailer, but there are a number of factors recommending this film anyway. The most obvious is wondering what Crowe can bring as a director. Some of the visuals here look compelling. I already know what he can bring as an actor. That’s another reason.

Then there’s the story dealing with the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign. Gallipoli is a bitter moment in Australian history – young Australian soldiers fighting halfway around the world for the British Empire were slaughtered. Gallipoli, a 1981 film directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, remains one of the more salient – and often overlooked – war movies ever made.

Finally, there’s Olga Kurylenko. Once dismissed as a model who only appeared in B-films as eye candy, she’s built a career of very solid performances in films including Quantum of Solace, To the Wonder, and Oblivion. She hints of an actor about to break out.

BLACK SEA
Jan. 23

Jude Law gets laid off and decides to take his skills – salvaging underwater wrecks – on one last freelance job. He assembles a rag-tag crew to exhume a Nazi U-boat full of gold from the bottom of the – you guessed it – Black Sea.

I’m honestly more interested in the trailer when it’s about conflicting personalities taking on an improbable job (and Jude Law’s crack at brogue). If it were all underwater rigging this and running out of air that, I’d be happy. To make it an everyone-turns-on-the-next man thriller is predictable. I’m not saying it can’t be done well – the trailer’s solid enough – but I’m more interested in Jude Law as a man against nature than I am in his pointing guns at people. Still, the talent involved and premise are enough to get me interested.

INTERSTELLAR
Nov. 7

Trailer #3 is better than this place on the list, but we’ve had quite a few Interstellar trailers (it’s more like #5 now), and this is the only one so far not to put a lump in my throat. It looks phenomenal, but it’s looked more phenomenal in other trailers. This could be the only major film left this year with a real chance to unseat the ridiculous twosome of Under the Skin and Gone Girl.

Worst Trailer of the Week
MISS MEADOWS
Nov. 14

I don’t want to put this one here, I really don’t. I’ve always liked Katie Holmes – she seems like a nice human being I want to see do well. As a prim schoolteacher by day, vigilante killer by night, she looks like she’s having a lot of fun in this.

Unfortunately, everything not having to do with Katie Holmes here seems off. Deeply off. Miss Meadows has been in a holding pattern for a while now, and I can see why.

I really expected to be putting Taken 3 here, but you know what? That looks like all the dumb car crashes and needless explosions I’ve ever wanted to see Liam Neeson create. Next time, give Katie Holmes an assault rifle, a Mustang, and some C4. Then we’ll talk.

All release dates given are U.S.

Trailers of the Week — Jennifer Lawrence Season

Let’s just dive straight in:

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1

My worry for the Hunger Games series has been how it goes bigger, how it goes from a franchise about very orderly deathmatches to a franchise about chaotic, messy war. The series’ strength has never been its action. Its strength has been psychology. From the first moment of the first film, Hunger Games invoked the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange. The games were secondary, a function of presenting fashion and celebrity. They could just as easily have been a football game, or a celebrity feud on reality TV distracting us from our everyday struggle. That’s the whole point – deathmatches are just more cinematically compelling.

I remember walking out of the second Hunger Games and thinking, This is the franchise we need. This is my generation’s most complete, mass-market call for resistance. Not the kind of guns-out resistance in the movie, but a social and cultural resistance. Films like Hunger Games and this year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier make the reality of how our nation’s evolved toward oligarchy a little easier to comprehend for many. The broadest tools for social change can’t be the sharpest – they have to be accessible in order to reach a wide audience. These are the movies that most finely balance being a blockbuster with translating social commentary.

So I worry for Mockingjay Part 1 not because I have reason to, but because maintaining that complete social comment across multiple films is a truly staggering task. In going bigger, in becoming messier, will it lose that psychological edge, that critique that makes it compelling not just on a cinematic level, but on a social and political level? It has created an opportunity event franchises just aren’t allowed. I have no doubt this film will be good, maybe even great, but it can’t just be that. It needs to be socially crucial. It needs to build exponentially on the ideas of its predecessors, like the second entry did.

The subtitle on this blog is “Movies and how they change you.” There’s a real chance The Hunger Games can not just embody that, but that it can continue to redefine the scope and scale on which event films are able to take social stands.

SERENA

Mockingjay isn’t the only Jennifer Lawrence movie to trailer this week. Serena has been held back as Lawrence’s star continues to rise (and as the studio figures out how to sell it). It would seem to re-unite her with Bradley Cooper, but this was actually shot before American Hustle.

Serena follows timber barons George and Serena Pemberton during the Great Depression as they scheme their way to power. There will be tragedy, neat costumes, and acting your face off aplenty. The trailer’s ill-defined, but Lawrence and Cooper – aside from sounding like a law firm – are enough to make it must-watch. Danish director Susanne Bier is a staple in the Oscars’ Foreign Language category, and her In a Better World won the award in 2011.

I named this one of my top 10 most anticipated films at the beginning of the year, but I’d begun to think it had been pushed once more. The release date is still in question, but it looks like October 24. Frankly, whether the film is good, bad, or indifferent, Magnolia Pictures is doing an atrocious job of advertising what should be easy money. People will go watch Jennifer Lawrence read a phone book for two hours at this point, and she’d still do it well enough to win an Oscar for Best Documentary. Put some money into advertising and get it out there.

MR. TURNER

EFFIE GRAY

Originally, the title this week was going to be “British Painter Season,” but then Mockingjay hit and, well, that was that.

In truth, I held Mr. Turner off from last week so it wouldn’t get quite as buried. The visuals of Mr. Turner look particularly striking, and I enjoy that the film appears to be as focused on his watercolour landscapes and their impact as it does on J.M.W. Turner’s personality.

Effie Gray excites me a little less, if only because the trailer makes it unclear quite what’s happening. Is Dakota Fanning secretly the painter in question, or is she the wife of the painter, or some combination thereof? The film looks like it has potential, however, and at this point, you don’t overlook a film with Fanning’s involvement (and Emma Thompson’s, for that matter).

IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

Revenge comedies are few and far between. In fact, when the Coen Brothers and Guy Ritchie aren’t applying their talents to one, all we’ve got left is Scandinavia.

Thank the gods for Stellan Skarsgard. Whether delivering the best one liners and running naked through Thor or charming and terrifying his way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he’s too overlooked for his dynamic and disarming performances.

In Order of Disappearance looks like a superb vehicle to showcase his talents, and I can’t wait to see it.

JOHN WICK

You can take Keanu Reeves’ dignity. You can take Keanu Reeves’ car. But you better not lay a finger on Keanu Reeves’ dog.

That’s a message I can get on board with, and that’s the theme to this wackadoodle-meets-Euroslick trailer for John Wick. Put Nic Cage in this, and it makes Worst Trailer of the Week. Put Keanu Reeves in it, and suddenly it’s stylish as hell. Such is the power of Keanu.

A host of unexpected actors and the sheer grace Keanu possesses in the choreography they drop at the end suddenly takes this from iffy into got-to-see-it territory.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

I’m not much for slasher movies, unless you’re talking Italian giallo films from the 70s. The problem is that American slashers dropped all the psychology, opera, and art history from the genre and replaced it with torture, cheesy masks, and fear-mongering misogyny. That said, The Town That Dreaded Sundown looks like it has potential, with a small-town mystery at its center and some brilliant shots and color composition in the trailer. Then they drop in the guy with the cheesy mask and I lose all hope. Still, it’s one to keep an eye on just in case it delivers on those wonderful visuals.

Worst Trailer of the Week: MAPS TO THE STARS

This is one of my more anticipated movies this Autumn, but boy oh boy, is this an awful trailer. You’ve got to be careful cutting a David Cronenberg film for ads. His movies are composed of long stretches of quiet, of set-up, of reinforcing the mood, and sudden explosions of outright violence. That’s hard to define in a two-minute stretch, but my god, do they do a terrible job of it here. There’s a complete lack of dramatic timing in how it’s edited together.

The Best Film of 2013 — “The Place Beyond the Pines”

The books that meant the most to me as a kid were the ones where, once I put them down, I’d feel a sadness at having left their characters behind. I remember closing White Fang and feeling a sadness I’d never felt before. I can’t remember how young I was, but it was profound to miss a dog who didn’t even exist. Little did I know I was practicing for the first time one of the most defining feelings of a person’s life.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that meanders like an 800-page novel, with the details of entire generations of lives laid bare. Its first act concerns motorcycle stuntman Luke (Ryan Gosling). He performs in a traveling carnival, but settles down when he discovers one of his girls in port, Romina (Eva Mendes), has a baby son. It’s his, and even though Romina is in a relationship with someone else, Luke wants to be a part of his child’s life. Luke has no prospects, however, and is talked into taking advantage of his unique skills by robbing banks.

The second act follows rookie cop Avery (Bradley Cooper). You can imagine how he and Luke encounter each other. Like Luke, Avery has a baby son. Avery comes from privilege, however, and even if he lacks the foresight, his father Al (Harris Yulan) will make sure that Avery’s track takes him into politics. To reveal too much about Avery’s plot would be to spoil some hard, left turns the film takes.

The third act follows Luke’s and Avery’s sons, 15 years later. Of how they meet or what transpires afterward, I won’t say anything else. The results are a mix of tragedy and hope.

The Place Beyond the Pines is about the cycle of violence, the reality that drives the hopeless toward crime and the privileged to idolize it. It’s about the inevitable corruption that growing older has on the ideals of our younger selves and it’s about those beautiful moments that stay in our hearts forever, that let us survive the worst that life comes to throw at us. It’s about forgiveness, vengeance, struggle and honesty. It’s about the first time we share something special with a loved one, intending to repeat it for the rest of our lives and never getting to. It’s about how quickly we leave our dreams behind for what’s practical or what others expect of us. It’s about more than any single movie I may have ever seen before. How it fits its story into two hours and 20 minutes is beyond me.

2013 was awash in impossible movies – the relentlessness and importance of 12 Years a Slave, the technical splendor and intensity of Gravity, the outsized antics of American Hustle, the absurdity of Spring Breakers. No film may be more impossible than The Place Beyond the Pines, however. It has no camera tricks you haven’t seen before and it isn’t outlandish in any way. Its characters aren’t nearly as likeable as those other films’. Instead, writer-director Derek Cianfrance tells a human story, and weaves it together with another human story and another and another into something that, once the credits roll, makes you yearn for just one more moment to watch those characters exist.

When the movie was done, and I got up to pull the DVD, it was 1:30 a.m., it was snowing outside, and I could do nothing more than lean back against the wall and miss those characters a long moment. I’d spent the week caring for a very sick pet whom I hope is on the mend, and putting things in place for projects I’d like to do later in the year, once New England thaws out. It had been the latest of many stressful weeks, but I was reminded that the week of stress is just one of many things that shapes us. We have a habit of looking at photographs of times past, of a day at the beach with an ex, of a grandmother you never got to know, of cheesy family vacation photos when everyone was wearing 90s haircuts, and we do it to yearn, to repeat in our minds the echo of a moment we can never repeat, or to play out in our minds the possibilities of paths not taken.

The Place Beyond the Pines, when all is said and done, has much the same effect. We look at its characters at the end, and we know where those paths went, how they got to the place they are, and we understand so deeply that feeling of nostalgia, of contemplation, of playing pretend with an echo in our heads. This is what The Place Beyond the Pines is, beyond a crime thriller and a chase scene and domestic drama and love story. It’s that moment of closing a book, of looking at a photo. It is regret and acceptance and the strange feeling of possibility into which they somehow translate. This is a brave, unprecedented narrative, by turns exciting, cold, languorous, intense, heated, inscrutable, and heartbreaking. This is lives trapped in amber. This is the film of the year.

Impossibly, Somehow: “American Hustle”

American Hustle exists. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? The film about con men in the 1970s is the funniest film I’ve seen all year, but many of its laughs are the kind that bug my conscience. Some even come through tears. There’s as much lust for life as in any film I’ve seen in recent memory. Its cast of characters is the most passive-aggressive since All About Eve, and that was made in 1950.

American Hustle is deeply American. Every character wants that next leg up. Every character thinks he or she’s the one to get it. Everyone has that extra drive and that bit of luck we’re all convinced we have in our very best moments. Every character lives in dread and survives through hope. Christian Bale plays con artist Irving Rosenfeld, potbellied, middle-aged, and sporting “a rather elaborate combover.” His partner in crime is Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who plays the part of English royalty as much to forget she’s a small-town girl from Albuquerque as to bamboozle her helpless marks. Irving and Sydney’s operation is light on its feet, until it’s busted by the FBI. Agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) isn’t interested in prosecuting them, however. He wants to use their talents to take down politicians and make a name for himself.

American Hustle loves its characters enough to put them through hell. Against Irving’s better instincts, he helps Richie create an irresistible “investment opportunity” – the rebuilding of Atlantic City. The plot is based on Abscam, an FBI sting operation that netted the conviction of one U.S. senator, six representatives, and a variety of other corrupt politicians. (Can we please launch Abscam 2?) Writer-director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) isn’t interested in politics, however. He’s barely interested in the sting operation. He lets you know what you need to know when you need to know it.

American Hustle is instead obsessed with the con each character plays on him or herself in order to make it day-to-day. Characters trick themselves and each other so often that most cease to be happy without a steady diet of deception. Love triangles have nothing on the flow chart going on between Irving, Richie, Sydney, Sydney’s alter-ego Lady Edith Greensly, Irving’s wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), Rosalyn’s mob suitor Pete (Jack Huston), and Richie’s fiancee. Each character has a moment when they try to come clean to someone they trust, and each character has a moment when they are soundly rejected. These moments are one and the same.

American Hustle knows that in a world of con artists and men who only value their own renown, an honest man is doomed. The only one trying to do right by his fellow man is also the only character you’re certain will suffer in the end. Mayor Carmine Polito’s (Jeremy Renner) only interest is in securing funds to rebuild Atlantic City and put his constituency back to work. In him, Richie sees a big conviction and his ticket to the big leagues. Irving sees the betrayal of a kindred spirit, of the only man who cares at all to change the sort of conditions that made Irving what he is. Renner invests such earnestness and empathy in Polito that his unsuspecting role in the con becomes tragic – except for the parts where you’re laughing.

American Hustle proves Christian Bale is the most capable chameleon of an actor working today. Two weeks ago, I reviewed Out of the Furnace. A few nights ago, I re-watched Batman Begins on TV. Yesterday, I enjoyed American Hustle. Bale is the common thread: heartbreaking in one, iconic in the next, and – through a deeply affected performance – the most genuine thing on-screen in American Hustle. It’s a rare actor who can make a philandering con man on the downside of his career this endearing and earnest.

American Hustle is really the crowning achievement of its entire cast. Amy Adams mines a depth of pathos I had never even suspected. Her Sydney is so alluring and full of verve she’s contagious, but so out-of-control and vindictive it must be viral. Bradley Cooper has been working up to Richie DiMaso for a long time, and as an agent becoming a legend in his own head, he provides much of the film’s comedy. One scene, in which Sydney tries to reveal who she really is to Richie, reflects the whole film – hilarious at one instant, sexually charged in the next, and nearly ending on a violent note that would derail the entire plot. The sharp turns in mood and energy of it all would be over-the-top if it wasn’t so finely controlled by the director and his actors. Instead, these moments become so deeply felt that aggressive, out-of-control, and over-the-top become smooth, soft, and supple.

American Hustle is the announcement that Jennifer Lawrence is both the actress of the moment, and of her generation. As Irving’s wife, Rosalyn, she naturally enamors whomsoever crosses her path without the effort Sydney has to put into conning them. Lawrence commands the screen every second she’s on it.

American Hustle is the cinematic embodiment of jazz. It throws the hopes and dreams of four unstoppable objects together and basks in the human drama and paradoxical comedy that arises from it. It weaves four brilliant soloists together, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict, and it demands everything these actors have, every shred of commitment and ounce of energy. These characters are each awful, and we should hate them, yet we feel sympathy. We root for them because we recognize their acute panic at being lost in life, controlled by others. We know that drowning feeling that you’re less and less who you thought you could be by the day. We root for them because they’re each so hopeful.

American Hustle is an impossibly brave film, constantly an inch away from being too ridiculous. It feels more real than real, supersaturated with feeling and color only in the way movies can be, yet too embarrassingly private in the way only life is. It’s charged, it’s classic, it’s a masterpiece and one big put-on all at once. The more absurd a moment, the more it matters. It knows what all the notes are but doesn’t look at the sheet music because it’ll play what it wants – it knows how the music should feel – and, somehow, that becomes the more perfect way to do it.

American Hustle, like its characters, is determined to make sure you know it exists. And boy oh boy, does it ever exist.

American Hustle exists. Somehow.

American Hustle is rated R for pervasive language, some sexual content, and brief violence.