Most of the critics have been slamming Kick-Ass 2. Check out rottentomatoes.com. As usual, though, they find it difficult to explain their opposition. They think the film is gratuitous—or something. Largely the reviews are interchangeable and thus boring. Also, as usual, there is no true criticism here since the reviewers do the reader’s thinking for him or her instead of stimulating thinking. Too bad.
In Kick-Ass 2 (2013), a frightfully masculine Jim Carrey plays a superhero called Colonel Stars and Stripes, who is as violent as he is humanitarian, and is ostensibly born-again.
It’s an encouraging fact: Never does Jeff Wadlow’s sequel to Kick-Ass disparage the born-again Christian label, any more than it scoffs at the crimefighting gay guy who has been bullied in his life. This rowdy pop movie is as inclusive as it is illiberal, as anti-criminal as it is comical.
Again there is Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Dave/Kick-Ass and Chloe Grace Moretz’s Mindy/Hit-Girl, who are good friends now. The latter is hitting puberty, with a quickly beating heart over the sight of TV heartthrobs and of Dave’s bare chest. I can do without the teenage queen bee cliches—Mindy confronts the high school skanks—but it’s nice to see Hit-Girl’s vulnerable side and a few affecting moments. It isn’t long, however, before she’s in hair-raising peril and starts cracking skulls.
Like the first Kick-Ass pic, Kick-Ass 2 is politically incorrect to a minimal extent (Dave, posing as a pimp: “I’m the whitest pimp in the world”). Mostly it’s just edgy, and forceful. It’s sort of the cinematic equivalent of a pleasant hard rock song: Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box,” say.
Hit Girl is my new favourite character. (Photo credit: Melina.)
In the early Seventies, French director Louis Malle made a film about adolescents which deliberately went in a transgressive direction. This is Murmur of the Heart (1971), not merely a transgressive opus but, more seriously, a vile one as well. The three teenage boys at the center, especially the dominant Laurent (Benoit Ferreux), no one in his right mind would tolerate, but naturally the adults around them do until the story builds to an act of tender incest between Laurent and his freewheeling mother (Lea Massari). It’s nearly the last thing that happens in the film and—transgressively—it’s never censured. It’s condoned.
Whatever its pretensions are, Murmur is basically anti-bourgeois, an easygoing act of rebellion. What’s more, it implicitly believes that the most important thing that goes on between a man and a woman is sexual intercourse. It isn’t. But this absolutely accounts for the incest.
Lest I sound smug, let me put it profanely: Murmur of the Heart is a piece of shit.
Cover via Amazon
I doubt that the Christian film Courageous (2012) speaks to very many nonbelievers since it is overflowing with evangelical spirituality and is not at all subtle. Alex Kendrick did a lot of work here—he directed, stars in, and co-wrote the flick with his brother Stephen—but the finished product is neither art nor admirable craft. It concerns fatherhood, and Christian living for fathers, and although I agree with the religious and pro-family propaganda, propaganda is what it is and so does not belong in fictional cinema.
The Kendricks’ previous film, Fireproof, was somewhat better. For all its weaknesses, it fascinates—and its drama is relevant to subject and theme. That’s not always the case with the un-fascinating Courageous.
Courageous (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Would that Woody Allen were a major film artist. It would be good to have some artistically successful American comedies about how we live now, and that is not what Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, from 1986, is.
To begin with, it takes a long time for any of the movie’s humor to make us laugh (to make ME laugh, anyway, but I can’t imagine anyone finding the first 45 minutes of this film funny). Further, Allen is pathetically sloppy at writing dialogue, which is often thin and banal. And not all of the acting is good: Mia Farrow and Max von Sydow are dull, Allen himself dreadful. Finally, the film, though a comedy, is unpersuasively and even ludicrously optimistic. Michael Caine stops obsessing over and pursuing Barbara Hershey, and an infertile Allen actually impregnates Dianne Wiest!
Hannah and Her Sisters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The French film La Discrete (1990), by Christian Vincent, is a revenge tale in which revenge becomes, first, methodical and dispassionate and, second, unimportant to the man avenging himself. This is Antoine, an aspiring writer whose paramour leaves him for another guy, whereupon Antoine remarks to a friend of his, a publisher, that he would wreak revenge if he knew how. The publisher explains how: Antoine can get even with the female sex in general–and become a published author to boot—if he will find a girl at random whom he will court, sleep with and then abandon, and concomitantly put the details of all this into a diary. The diary will be turned into a book.
A newspaper ad calling for a typist is what the blackguards use as bait to acquire a girl, and a student named Catherine is the one who comes along. At first revolted by Catherine’s near-plain visage, Antoine nevertheless initiates a romance with her and, yes, he sleeps with her. Not at all a bona fide woman-hater, however, the restless writer loses all desire to betray the girl, much to the publisher’s disgruntlement. And yet—though I will not elaborate on it—Catherine gets hurt, feels abandoned. The film is about how life inevitably moves on after plans are dropped, after evil is decided against, after scores no longer have to be settled. And it’s about loneliness and solitude: Catherine, it turns out, is consigned to isolation. Too, there is the theme of the malice which sometimes lurks behind loneliness: we see this in the publisher. Solitude prevails whether scores are settled or not.
Christian Vincent directed with taste and shrewdness, and co-wrote the talky but intriguing script. He seems very surefooted with actors too. Fabrice Luchini gives Antoine a perfect intellectual glitter and seductive extroversion. Catherine is made appealing, and this despite a certain self-effacement, by young Judith Henry. Maurice Garrel fills the bill, with virile sobriety, as the publisher. Once again we feel like celebrating French acting as much as we have celebrated British acting.
(In French with English subtitles)
English: Fabrice Luchini, French actor Français : Fabrice Luchini, acteur français (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mom gets wildly demon-possessed in James Wan’s formidable The Conjuring (2013) but before that, she and the rest of the family incur “infestation”: unclean spirits in the house, getting all spooky. Mom is played by a magnificent Lili Taylor, who is every bit a mother (of five daughters) in the role, is convincingly worried and appalled, and is creepily demonized without a trace of overacting.
The film itself needed the excess happenings sliced from its plot unless of course the excess went on in real life, for The Conjuring is “based on a true story.” It’s a story involving not only demons but also two Catholic paranormal investigators (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), who manage to be efficacious in a vital exorcism. And it does this without any jabs at the Catholic church. (Take THAT, Village Voice.)
As a horror director James Wan knows what he’s doing. It’s an expert work visually and photographically, if not so much in its scenario. There’s a clever title sequence at the end, too.
How melodramatically directed, by Brian DePalma, Casualties of War (1989) is!–so much so that the film almost fails. As it is, it is neither quite a failure nor a success; it’s just worth seeing.
Based on a true story about a war crime—the rape and murder of a girl—during the Vietnam War, it has a hero in Michael J. Fox but a very low view of human nature. It does what author John Irving once said the novels of Kurt Vonnegut do: It makes us wish we were more virtuous. It makes us wish the world made greater moral sense, that human nature wasn’t so filthy. The screenplay by David Rabe is earnest and scintillating. Consider: the opportunity to rape a Vietnamese girl prompts Sean Penn’s Sergeant Meserve to laughingly praise life in the army, to which Michael J. Fox responds despairingly, ‘This ain’t the army, Sarge. . . This ain’t the army.” The army, he knows, is honorable, the war crime despicable.
Casualties of War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
English: AnnaSophia Robb at the July 2006 San Diego Comic-Con International. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The new Nat Faxon-Jim Rash movie, The Way Way Back (2013) doesn’t quite work. Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) takes a trip with his mother, his mother’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s teen daughter to a beach house whose locale is inhabited by sundry interesting folks. Virtually none of them, I’m afraid, is complex or multidimensional, like actual human beings. Duncan’s mother, Toni Collette’s Pam, is complex enough, but where is the screenwriters’—Faxon and Rash’s—psychological insight? For Duncan, a quiet nerd, to gain self-confidence as rapidly as he does is preposterous.
Duncan’s relationship with a girl played by AnnaSophia Robb, a “love interest”, amounts to almost nothing, and that this girl has a friendship going on with the boyfriend’s teen daughter comes as a near-surprise, so glossed over is it. Even the directing in The Way Way Back—again, by Faxon and Rash—is not always what it ought to be.
What the filmmakers do well is write dialogue. It sparkles. In truth, however, the movie should be seen for its performances. Collette couldn’t be shallow if she wanted to be. Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney display marvelous energy and savvy, although with Janney there is the benefit of charm as well. Steve Carell plays a deeply flawed man adeptly and enjoyably. Ah, but it may well be that by saying the film should be seen for its performances, I’m saying that nothing else about it justifies its being seen.
There are several memorable scenes in what is a truly lousy Sam Peckinpah film—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)—which quickly nosedives with an insane script.
Undeniably, a pretty raw experience is offered in this enterprise—raw enough to be offensive. Warren Oates engages in a lot of very dopey, mow-’em-down shooting. Peckinpah strips Isela Vega of her clothes a bit too frequently, and when she confronts Kris Kristofferson . . . well, never mind. See it for yourself if you want to bother.
By the way, I don’t know who Isela Vega is, but her acting has subtlety and quiet appeal. She makes the film seem a little less ridiculous than it is.
The director of Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, and The Wild Bunch made THIS?
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
