Wednesday Collective — Acts of Killing, Vivian Kubrick, Women Critics, BBC Cuts, & Werewolves

(Apologies! Some of the links got messed up when this first posted. They are all fixed now – enjoy!)

I’ve been asked a couple of times if I’m doing any sort of Oscar review. Nope. My Movies We Loved in 2013 post was my personal Oscars, composed of the opinions of the creative minds that I call friends and mentors.

All I’ll say about the Oscars themselves (a week late) is that I’m very happy for Lupita, a graceful and talented representative for my alma mater. On the subject of Hampshire College, another alum, Jonathan Kitzen, saw a film he co-produced, “The Lady in Number 6,” win best documentary short.

Other than that, I’ll say that Ellen was a thoroughly pleasant host, but my dream telecast is still Hugh Laurie and the Muppets.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
“Yesterday I Met a Man Who Has Killed a Lot of People”

This isn’t about movies per se, but it is about our interest in stories. Many of the stories told in our country today concern war and death. Military and postapocalyptic narratives are popular in film, television, books, and video games. The Loquacionist’s article is a brief and beautiful reflection on hearing one such story from a person who lived it.

CO-ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
The Critical Fight over The Act of Killing

I’d like to suggest, much as a group of fish is called a school and a group of crows is called a murder, that a group of critics be called a kerfuffle. The Act of Killing is a documentary in which dictators and generals are asked to face the massacres and genocides they carried out in decades past by re-enacting them. I haven’t seen it yet, but it is by many accounts a masterpiece of cinema. Filmmaker Magazine posted an excellent write-up on the generational fight between critics and the debates over theory amongst documentary filmmakers that have formed in support of and against The Act of Killing. It may have been too feel-bad to win the Oscar for Best Documentary, but I’m fairly certain it will be the doc we talk about most for years to come.

Vivian Kubrick’s Twitter

Vivian Kubrick, daughter of Stanley Kubrick, has been posting never-before-seen photos of her father’s productions, ranging from A Clockwork Orange to The Shining to Full Metal Jacket, on which she composed the score. Not only are they deeply personal photos, but they also reveal hints of a childhood spent amidst terrifying and magical cinematic playgrounds most of us can only visit 3 hours at a time.

Can Women Save Criticism?

This is an interesting piece over at IndieWire. Women certainly need a larger role in the critical community. The title is a lead-in to a greater argument over the evaluative nature of criticism. What I can speak to here, and what I’ve written before, is that criticism has reached a state of perpetual navel-gazing. Criticism is too often mistaken for a critique. I’ll allow myself the occasional “300 Sequel Sucks” review when a movie isn’t just bad but morally wrong, but it shouldn’t be my job to decide whether something is good or bad. That means too many different things to too many different people. It should be a critic’s job to help guide people to the movies they’ll most enjoy by clarifying, concentrating, and amplifying a movie’s deeper purpose or message. My idea of a perfect “review” is something you can read through a different lens before and after you see a film. Beforehand, it should shed light on whether it’s the kind of film you might enjoy. Afterward, that same review ought to be a stepping stone toward discussing a film’s deeper meanings. A good review should have the passion of a work of art put into it, the same passion as a poem or story or a movie itself might have.

Anyway, I’m not qualified to speak to a woman’s experience in criticism, but I can say that it’s my view that film criticism as a whole needs to be taken over by a more engaging, less cynical perspective.

The BBC Makes Cuts

The BBC faced a choice between cutting its youth channel BBC3, featuring shows like Little Britain and Being Human, and cutting funding for shows like Sherlock and Doctor Who. If they chose the former, it would be the first channel cut in their 80-year history. If they chose the latter, it would mean the end of their most popular show at home and their two most popular shows abroad. What do you think they chose?

Of Werewolves and Men

On a lighter note, my favorite critics Down Under, Jordan and Eddie, put together a list you typically don’t see everyday – the top 10 werewolf films of all time. I’m glad to see such films as the underseen Dog Soldiers and Neil Jordan’s classic allegory The Company of Wolves featured on this list.

Wednesday Collective — Wonder Woman, Liam’s Bond, Soderbergh’s Psycho, & Lupita’s Beauty

Wednesday Collective is a new series, so I’m still allowed to tweak the rules. This’ll be a weekly roundup of any article about movies that caught my eye. There’ll still be a section at the bottom dedicated to collecting reviews for this week’s home releases, but I’d rather devote the bulk of this series to discussion about storytelling on film:

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
On Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot, and the Nature of Muscles

This is from Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press. It’s a few weeks old, but a very good read. When Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder’s untitled Superman-starring Man of Steel follow-up, there was an internet-wide backlash against the choice. You see, she comes across as a bit petite. Fans had wanted everyone from Gina Torres (who, frankly, lacks the acting chops) to Lena Headey (one of the most underrated actors going).

Unfortunately, it’s the Internet and the tone of the argument quickly turned to replacing Fetishized Woman A with Fetishized Woman B. Instead of discussing casting and symbolism, we got commentary over which unrealistic ideal of a woman fans would like better. Braak re-frames the argument into something more useful, while not discounting the choice of Gadot:

“It is true that Wonder Woman does not actually NEED giant muscles…that it’s not required for whatever passes for realism in comic book movies that she be tall and broad-shouldered, she can have magic strength like Buffy or whatever, that’s fine. But here’s what I would like us to consider: muscles are not just a source of power for average human beings, muscles also represent power.” It’s a superb read.

12 Years a Slave Producer’s Links to Apartheid

Arnon Milchan is a producer on such important films as 12 Years a Slave, LA Confidential, and the harrowing Alvin and the Chipmunks trilogy. He revealed late last year that he had used his position in the film industry to visit foreign countries and illegally import nuclear-weapon technology to Israel. He’d often use director Sydney Pollack to do it. The most notable trade involved Milchan using his connections to promote apartheid (South Africa’s system for ghettoizing and segregating blacks) in exchange for uranium. The FBI was investigating before the Reagan administration told them to drop it. Under the Radar‘s Bryant Jordan has the most complete article wrapping it all up, but Harriet Sherwood’s Guardian write-up is also worth checking out.

Neeson. Liam Neeson.

The Hull Daily Mail has an intriguing interview between Liam Neeson and Keeley Bolger, in which he talks about turning down the James Bond role that eventually went to Pierce Brosnan because his late wife gave him an ultimatum.

Steven Soderbergh’s Psychos

The great director of Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, and Magic Mike enjoyed perhaps the most diverse career of any modern director. He retired last year, but he’s very slyly been doing a terrible job of it. Aside from helming Cinemax’s Clive Owen-starring hospital drama The Knick, he just released online his re-edited mash-up combining Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho with Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot, 1998 remake.

Lupita Nyong’o on What Makes Beauty

The speech Lupita Nyong’o gave upon accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was beautiful and inspiring, but the speech she gave to this year’s Black Women in Hollywood gathering was a remarkable commentary on the biases we still enact upon each other and how best to surpass them.

The 30-year Mystery of The Terminator‘s Score

This article from Slate gives some insight into how an accident helped create one of the most unique, underrated, and iconic scores in film history – the main theme to the original The Terminator.

ON DVD / BLU-RAY

12 YEARS A SLAVE

The Loquacionist wrote a stellar piece about confronting his own family’s slave-owning history as he watched 12 Years a Slave.

Film Threat gets angry that so few movies are made confronting the ugliest piece of foundation on which the United States was built.

Alessia Palanti, as always, portrays the emotion of a film while diving into the meaty theory behind it at Camera Obscura.

And my own response considers the ease with which cultures slip into performing atrocities and explains how the film emotionally broke me like very few others.

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

Bad*ss Digest raved about the film, stressing both its political and storytelling subersiveness.

Reel Antagonist thought the film strong, but that it lacked in rewatchability.

I thought it was a beautiful political statement, and that The Hunger Games is positioning itself as the science-fiction epic of my pissed off and discontent generation.

I also write about Jennifer Lawrence’s performance here.

OLDBOY

I still haven’t seen it, but Outlaw Vern has a humorous and entertaining write-up on Spike Lee’s remake of Chan Wook Park’s original masterpiece. He says he didn’t hate it or anything, but that they should’ve thrown caution to the wind, dumped Brolin, and gone full-on Nicolas Cage with it. That’s never a good sign.

Liam Neeson Doesn’t Let Down in “Non-Stop”

Liam Neeson is a lot like Punxsutawney Phil. Just as the famous groundhog looks for his own shadow every February 2, the rugged Irish actor stars in a low-budget action movie every February or March. The only difference is the groundhog predicts how much more winter we have left to endure. Neeson’s a lot more consistent – his arrival always marks the beginning of the action movie season.

This time out, Neeson plays Air Marshall Bill Marks. An hour into his transatlantic flight out of London, he begins getting strange texts on his phone declaring a passenger will die every 20 minutes. As set-ups go, it’s a clever one, sort of like an Agatha Christie novel on fast-forward. Thankfully, it’s handled very well. For its first two-thirds, Non-Stop is an engrossing mystery. The smartest thing it does is immediately cast suspicion on Marks himself, creating a narrative in which even the protagonist has to earn your faith. After all, when you can’t trust Liam Neeson, who can you trust?

Like his characters in Taken, Unkown, and The Grey, Neeson plays a weathered alcoholic whose family has been broken by trauma and his hard-nosed, job-first lifestyle. There’s a formula to these films, and Neeson’s developed a dedicated shorthand to communicating these characters to us by the time the first scene’s done. Non-Stop fleshes the cast out a little more than those other films, however. As in the Airport movies of the 70s and more recent disaster films, the plane will inevitably hold a doctor, a policeman, a corrupt policeman, a banker, a teacher, a distressed pilot, and a young child who must overcome her fears when it’s most emotionally poignant. It’s like an overpopulated “So-and-so walks into a bar” joke.

Again, Neeson knows how to skip across these set-ups in a heartbeat in order to focus us on the plot’s tensions. It helps that director Jaume Collet-Serra films the movie’s tensest moments as a trained marshal might perceive a knotty situation, scanning his environment, selecting details that don’t fit, and gauging the relationships between different suspects. Neeson’s supporting cast is better than many of his previous action movies, as well. Julianne Moore (Children of Men) plays Jen, a spunky, maybe-too-helpful passenger who spends takeoff trying to pick Neeson up. She’s joined by Linus Roache (Law and Order), Anson Mount (Hell on Wheels), Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) and our newest best supporting actress (and my college classmate) Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave).

I mentioned the first two-thirds of Non-Stop are a good mystery. That begs the question, what does the last third become? Perhaps inevitably, it turns into a cheesy 90s action movie, in which heartfelt speeches earn trust better than hard evidence, and outnumbered heroes even the odds through superior stunt work. What earlier seemed clever may suddenly feel a touch too simple. It’s at this point that Non-Stop should lose you, but it’s too late – the mystery’s tension and the performances of such a strong cast have already earned more than enough goodwill to convince your brain to just let it ride.

This is the kind of movie that the Neesons and Bruce Willises of the world pull off with ease. They cover when the plot falters because they know all the steps – heck, they invented half of them. Non-Stop does want to say something about how too much security can make us less safe, but it suffers a severe case of wanting to have its cake and eat it, too. You’ll know what the film’s trying to say by the end, but all the wrong people have all the wrong motives to make its message even remotely effective. Non-Stop is really best viewed as a thrill ride, and not any kind of commentary.

On a personal note, I tried to see this movie four times. The first, I was waylaid to the hospital, the second I postponed because of a sick pet, and the third saw me 30 seconds into the movie before a fistfight broke out between a half-dozen people in the theater. If you go to the theater, please have the decency to leave your fistfights outside – they won’t be nearly as good as Liam Neeson’s. Hmm, perhaps we need theater marshals. Non-Stop is rated PG-13 for action, some language, sensuality, and drug references. All of this but the action’s in passing, so it’s fairly safe for family viewing.