A Bloody Good (and bad) Time

Movies: Blood Car, April Fool's Day, Heartbeeps

Recently, I was lucky enough to watch a few movies with friends that ranged from awful in a genius way to awful in an awful way.

Blood Car

Everything you need to know about the 2007 indie horror film Blood Car is right there in the title. It is about a car that runs on blood. In the not-too-distant future, gas is priced at nearly $40 a gallon. Practically no one drives, although to actually be able to afford to drive is the ultimate status symbol. Our hero, Archie Andrews, is a vegan kindergarten teacher who attempts to invent a car that runs on wheat grass. When Archie accidentally cuts his finger one day and gets a little blood in the mechanism, causing the engine he's working on to whir to life, he has his "eureka" moment. It's not long before Archie is turning his back on his vegan principles: shooting puppies and killing disabled, homeless war veterans to fuel his car. Why does Archie feel the need to commit serial murder to run his blood car when he has a perfectly good bicycle? To get laid, of course! Blood Car has a really complex view of women: there's the dorky, nice, good girl who works at the wheat grass store and pines for Archie...and the bitchy, slutty, bad girl who works at the "meat shack" and wants to use Archie for his car and his...erm...meat. But I can't really condemn Blood Car for it's laughable misogyny when Archie himself is such a terrible, undeserving person as well. If there's such a thing as a sociopathic hipster, Archie is it. Also, it's a horror film. The whole point is to hate the characters so you don't feel bad when they end up in the trunk of Archie's death car.

For what it is, Blood Car is actually pretty damn funny. The very concept of a "blood car" has limitless potential, and I liked the idea of a self-absorbed, horny vegan guy as both the protagonist and the killer at the center of the story.

3.5 out of 5 stars

April Fool's Day


Speaking of terrible, sociopathic characters, April Fool's Day (the 1986 version) is full of them! The film is about a group of preppy college friends who get together at the "remote island mansion" (there's your first clue that something will go horribly awry) of their friend Muffy St. John (no, she's not a porn star...just a hardcore WASP) during April Fool's Day weekend. It's not long before bodies start piling up. But the characters are so, so awful that's it's actually a disappointment when you find out...

SPOILERS!

...that the whole "mass murder" thing was staged by Muffy as an elaborate April Fool's Day prank! Oddly, everyone was in on it except for two of the friends who were the ultimate victims of the prank, which is like, really mean when you think about it. I was so mad that no one was actually killed by the end of the movie because they all totally deserved to die horrible deaths. Lame.

Oh, and April Fool's Day may be the preppiest film of all time. Here's a partial list of the characters' names:
Muffy
Kit
Nan
Chaz
Arch
Skip

And yes, they behave exactly as their names suggest.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Heartbeeps

In the horrendous affront to human dignity that is Heartbeeps, Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters play humanoid robots that go on the lam and fall in love. I watched this movie at a "bad movie party" where the idea was to sit around and laugh at a bad movie. While Heartbeeps does have it's share of laughable-bad moments, there were also long stretches that were so bad and so boring that no one was laughing. One of my friends did fall asleep though.

The whole thing was just...weird. The dialogue was mostly stilted because, you know, these are robots. But after an hour of stilted, "logical" robot discussions about the nature of love and the meaning of life, I was ready to shoot myself. It was like listening to Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" talk for 80 minutes, but minus the humor and nerd references. Also, Andy Kaufman has a really annoying voice.

However, Heartbeeps was so terrible that you got to a point where you just surrendered yourself to the terribleness and end up gawking at the screen, gape-mouthed, the way someone would watch a train wreck. The badness was like a drug that made you unable to move...just sit there and wonder "how did this get made?!"

Oh Christ, no.







1.5 out of 5 stars

Warm Hearts and Cold Beds

Books: The Uncoupling

Meg Wolitzer's 2011 novel The Uncoupling mixes magical realism and suburban dysfunction. The novel centers on the students and faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt High School (known lovingly as "Elro") in Stellar Plains, NJ. A vibrant and intimidating new drama teacher, Fran Heller, is hired at Elro and decides to put on Lysistrata, the play by Aristophanes about a woman who leads the women of Ancient Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War.


Soon, a "cold wind" begins to blow through Stellar Plains, causing the women of the community to lose sexual desire (and romantic desire). Teenage girls break up with their boyfriends, young women stop sleeping around for fun, and night after night, the wives of Stellar Plains turn away from their husbands.

It's not long before bitterness and sadness (mostly of the part of the men) begins to build to a fever pitch in the community. The men of Stellar Plains are literally begging the women to take them back, love them, and have sex with them again. I won't reveal what happens at the climax (heh) of The Uncoupling, but I will say that it's difficult to tell who triumphs in the end--the men, the women, or both.

[Side note: There's only one gay couple in liberal Stellar Plains, and the spell doesn't affect them. Apparently, there are no lesbians. Wolitzer gets a C- on her LGBTQA inclusiveness]

Wolitzer is excellent at the "realism" part, and not so excellent at the "magical" part. She masterfully creates a suburban world and high school that has just enough fictional elements to make it seem even more real, if that makes sense. She sprinkles made-up pop culture references (a band called "The Lungs" is named-dropped; the students of Elro are all into an MMORPG called "Farrest") that sound real, even though she just created them for the book. Wolitzer is great at getting the small details of suburban and high school life just right. I could see clearly the halls of Elro and what all the teachers and students looked like.

Wolitzer also gets the feelings that the characters go through. Every couple affected by the spell reacts differently: a passionate couple argue fiercely; an older couple who have already given up on sex give up on it even further and grow in resentment; a couple with a solid, happy marriage simply become bewildered and then resigned when the wife becomes repulsed at the thought of being touched. Each couple's current sex life is key to how they react when sex is suddenly off the table.

As far as the "magical" part, it's clear that the whole "cold wind" thing is just a construct to move the plot forward. The fact that it's supernatural (as opposed to a coincidence or a collective decision by the women) is taken for granted and then barely mentioned until the end. Why include this element of magic and then never comment on it or explain it? It's clear than the drama teacher, Fran Heller, has something to do with it. At the end it is revealed that, yes, the spell "follows" Fran, but she does not control it. She's not a witch or a gypsy with magical powers or anything like that. I thought this "explanation" of the spell was lame and flimsy.

Wolitzer is obviously more interested in the politics of what would happen if women collectively denied men sex. But even this intriguing scenario isn't examined very closely. The women of Stellar Plains start denying men sex, the men get upset--individual relationships get tense, but the community as a whole remains unaltered. When the spell is broken, most relationships are mended and are even better, and hotter, than before. This conclusion was a bit of an anti-climatic let down.

Overall, Wolitzer is great at describing people and relationships. If this book was anything, it was realistic, and the details of the characters' everyday lives were fascinating. Wolitzer is not so great at making a point. I read the book and wondered, "Did I learn anything about male/female relationships or men and women's sexuality?" No. No, I did not. I didn't feel like I wasted my time, because The Uncoupling was very well-written and entertaining. It just felt a bit lacking in the end, like Wolitzer had the opportunity to say something interesting and controversial...but chose not to.

I'd recommend The Uncoupling to readers who like literary fiction, specifically about adults living in suburbia. If you like Tom Perrotta, you'll probably dig The Uncoupling.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Twee Factor

Movies: Beginners

Cute is in right now. It's unavoidable. You can't do a Google search without a lolcat popping up in your face. You can't avoid Zooey Deschanel--she even has her own TV show now! You can't walk around in a downtown urban area without seeing guys in pants so tight you can read their credit card numbers right through the butt pocket, and young women with dyed black hair and tattoos of kittens wearing Native American headdresses (it isn't racist because I voted for Obama!!). Cuteness, tweeness, hipsterness, whatever you want to call it, is here and dammit, you better learn to like it!

And in addition to fashion and the Interblognets, tweeness is quite prevalent in movies and entertainment. Garden State, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go, (500) Days of Summer, Sunshine Cleaning, Lars and the Real Girl...and now, Mike Mills' (who is married to the Queen of Twee herself, Miranda July) semi-autobiographical film Beginners, about a man, his gay dad, his philosophical dog, and his Manic Pixie French Dream Girlfriend. Now, before you think I'm going to rip into this movie, let me just say this: I'm not. I really liked Beginners. I thought that, despite the twee elements, the movie had more emotional depth than 1,000--nay, 10,000!--Days of Summer. I thought that the lead actors--the wonderful Ewan McGregor and legendary Christopher Plummer (as well as the supporting actors, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visinjic, and Mary Page Keller)--elevated Beginners above the mire of oppressive cuteness.

But let's talk a little more about twee since I'm on a roll here. When did twee begin? Whose fault is it, really? Some may point the finger at Wes Anderson (full disclosure: I love Wes Anderson). But I personally would trace twee back to French New Wave. Have you seen Breathless? There's a reason college kids love that movie. It's twee as fuck! Or how about another one of my favorites: Jules and Jim, which features a scene of a woman drawing a moustache on her face, as well as shots filmed by cameras mounted on bicycles (the preferred method of twee transportation, btw), and mild homoeroticism. Twee!

The difference between old school twee and new school twee, in my opinion, is that old school twee didn't use preciousness as a substitute for character development. Take Jules and Jim as an example: the character Catherine is described as "capricious" and "free-spirited", much like Natalie Portman's character Sam in Garden State. The difference is that Catherine is a woman with a full range of personality traits and emotions. Catherine is simultaneously seductive and frightening; fickle and decisive. You can't decide whether you love her or hate her--and neither can Jules or Jim. What is Sam? Sam is a girl who wears a helmet to work and thinks the Shins will "change your life". She, like every other character in Garden State, is merely a collection of quirky traits and interests who exists for the sole purpose of getting Zach Braff's pathetic life back on track. Catherine is part of a vibrant and sexy and ever-changing love triangle...Sam is a really cute crutch.

So this sums up my problem with twee. Actually, I have two problems with twee. The first is that twee movies use weirdness, quirkyness, and preciousness in place of quality story telling and character development. And they usually go overboard with the whole "quirky" thing anyway. The second problem is that twee really, really, really wants to live in a world without problems. In the world of twee, Lars of Lars and the Real Girl acts like a sex doll is his living, breathing girlfriend...and the whole town goes along with the charade! In real life, Lars would probably be institutionalized or, at least, mocked. In the world of twee, 16 year old Juno gives her out-of-wedlock baby to a very nice woman and gets back together with her boyfriend. In real life, Juno would be tormented at school, her parents would probably be ashamed and angry at her, and her boyfriend would almost certainly break up with her at some point. The world of twee is a fantasy world where people are infinitely accepting of eccentricities and where sad things happen, but horrible things never happen. Oh, and the world of twee is almost exclusively populated by white people (It isn't racist because they listen to Danger Mouse!!).

But I'm being way harsh on twee movies. The fact is, I enjoyed a lot of the movies I've poked fun at. I'm not immune to a soundtrack populated by Belle and Sebastian and Nick Drake. I love the clothes people wear in twee movies. And I can pretty much guarantee that most twee movies have better scripts, cinematography, and acting than a great many blockbusters. At this point though, twee movies seem to be just as formulaic as any other lazy and oversaturated genre. Twee has gone mainstream.

But back to Beginners. The movie is about a man named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) whose 75 year old father, Hal (Christopher Plummer. Give this man an Oscar already!), comes out as gay after Oliver's mother dies. Hal decides to make up for lost time. He joins gay political organizations and gay movie nights. He gets a disturbingly younger boyfriend (Goran Visinjic). Four years later, Hal is dying of cancer. The movie is also about the avoidant, closed-off Oliver starting a relationship with the avoidant, closed-off Anna (Melanie Laurent), and the problems the two inevitably face, both being avoidant and closed-off and all. Beginners jumps back and forth between these two plots and I have to say, I strongly preferred the former. The whole coming out of the closest as a senior citizen story was both funny and fascinating. When Hal gives Oliver a rainbow sticker and tells him that it means gay pride, Oliver tells Hal that everyone knows that, which Hal can't believe. To Hal, gay culture is new and exciting. To Oliver, gay culture is pretty much just part of everyday life. McGregor is excellent as a modern and tolerant man who is bewildered by his dad's homosexuality, but not disgusted by it. He watches Hal kiss Andy, his younger boyfriend, on the lips, and the look on Oliver's face is amazement: this is a new side to his dad that was always there, but always hidden, and now surfacing. Oliver isn't threatened or angry, but simply in the process or recalibrating his whole view of his father.

When Hal gets sick, his attitude changes from "let's fight this thing", to complete denial, to acceptance. Plummer is remarkable in this role. He plays Hal as a gentle man with a happy and thankful disposition. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Hal takes advantage of all the happiness and pleasure and fun available in life--even while lying on his deathbed. It's Oliver, who like Hal is a very gentle man, though a bit more passive, who carries the sadness of Hal's sickness like a weight on his shoulders. Maybe that makes Oliver a good son: he bears the emotional pain for his father, who is forced to bear the physical pain.

McGregor and Plummer breathe life into these fully-drawn characters, so that even when the cuteness is a little too much, the film remains grounded and substantive.

I was less thrilled with the other story, the love story, though Melanie Laurent and McGregor definitely have chemistry. I don't know how else to explain it, except to say that their kisses look real. Maybe it's just because I've had the hots for Ewan Mcgregor since early high school, but he kisses actresses like he freakin' means it (and maybe he does...McGregor and his wife apparently have an open marriage).

Overall, I found that Beginners was a rare twee movie that worked. The characters (well, Hal and Oliver at least) have solid personalities, yet they both change throughout the film. They have arcs. They react to situations such as cancer, sex, and love in believable ways. They live in a world where there are problems and hardships, yet they find ways to thrive and adapt. The father/son story in Beginners is heartwarming, but not sentimental or saccharine. Even at age 75, Hal is still able to teach his son something about life and embracing change. And that's exactly the point of the movie: it's never too late to try something different.

4 out of 5 stars

Life, Death, and Catfish

Movies: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Like The Tree of Life, which won the Cannes Palm d'Or prize this year, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of last year's Palm d'Or, is beautiful, slow, and weird as hell. It boggles the mind, but Uncle Boonmee actually has less of a coherent plot than The Tree of Life. This is not to say that a thin or non-existent plot is inherently wrong, it just means that films like these aren't really meant for entertainment purposes. But when does a movie cross the line from being unusual and unique, to incoherent and weird for the sake of being weird? That's a line viewers must draw for themselves.

I was quick to praise The Tree of Life, giving it 4.5 stars on this blog, not because I enjoyed it immensely, but because I thought it was beautiful and figured "Hey, it must be important!". Well, I'm kind of rethinking my position. Tree of Life, like Uncle Boonmee, is certainly a unique vision that blasts right through the conventions of film, and I admire that. Both films must mean...something. But they are so personal to their respective directors and so symbolic and so out there that it seems impossible to make sense of what the films are trying to tell us. In addition, Uncle Boonmee is a Thai film. At least with Tree of Life, I understood the American tropes of small town suburbia and the nuclear family. I almost don't want to try to interpret Uncle Boonmee since I have so little knowledge of the culture and traditions it came from.

So I won't try. Instead, I'll briefly explain the plot of Uncle Boonmee and a few personal impressions I got from it. The film centers around the titular Boonmee, a man in his early 60's who is dying of kidney failure. His sister-law-comes to live with him and take care of him during his final days. In addition, the ghost of Boonmee's long-dead wife arrives (everyone, not just Boonmee, can see her) as well as Boonmee's long-missing son, who, after mating with a female monkey ghost, has become a monkey ghost himself--covered in black hair, with red, glowing eyes.

Then there is a random interlude where a woman (played--I think--by the same woman who plays Boonmee's sister) goes down to a waterfall and has sex with a catfish. Yes, this actually happens.

Eventually, Boonmee and his family travel to a cave that Boonmee says is "like a womb". He passes away. After his funeral, Boonmee's sister and her niece are counting the money they received from friends and family after Boonmee passed on. Brother Tong, a monk, stops by to take a shower. He and Boonmee's sister go out to get food...but actually, their spirits go out to get food while their bodies remain in the hotel room.

The end.

Some observations and thoughts:

* Certain scenes, including the crazy-ass catfish sex scene, are beautifully filmed and have a poetic quality to them. The scene I liked the most was when Boonmee's dead wife holds him as he asks her where his spirit should go to look for her after he dies.

* There is a  theme of interconnectedness that runs through the film. If there is one idea or concept that can be extracted from Uncle Boonmee, it's that the line between this life and the afterlife, as well as the line between animals and humans, are paper thin. This movie is full of ghosts, monkey-ghost-humans, out of body experiences, and inter-species mating. It's all very weird, but also kind of interesting how the director blurs the lines between boundaries that are otherwise set in stone.

* The movie is very slow. The camera holds on certain scenes or landscapes for minutes at a time. I actually shaved off a few minutes of the movie by fastforwarding through the slow parts. Hey! Don't judge me! I didn't want to miss the beginning of The Daily Show.

* According to Wikipedia, the director explains: " the film is primarily about "objects and people that transform or hybridise". A central theme is the transformation and possible extinction of cinema itself. The film consists of six reels each shot in a different cinematic style. The styles include, by the words of the director, "old cinema with stiff acting and classical staging", "documentary style", "costume drama" and "my kind of film when you see long takes of animals and people driving". 


Ok, now that's kind of interesting to me. A meditation on death that is also a meta-meditation of the "death" of cinema. But is cinema dying? Or is it, and our expectations of it, evolving? If movies like Uncle Boonmee and The Tree of Life are winning awards, doesn't this show that visionary film and mash-ups of different genres are celebrated now? Does that equal death? Who knows. All I know is that I can't puzzle out what Uncle Boonmee means all on my own. It's an interesting film, for sure, but like the art of Sergej Jensen, Uncle Boonmee is too minimal and too unusual for many people understand or care about.

2.5 stars for enjoyment
3.5 stars for artistic vision

Also, I think director Apichatpong Weerasethakul may have ripped off the Guerrilla Girls with his depictions of the monkey ghosts.

 Guerrilla Girls

   

Monkey ghost

Be Better than Soulmates

Movies: Crazy, Stupid, Love

Crazy, Stupid, Love has a lot going for it, despite a few flaws that kept it from being a truly excellent and wonderful movie. It boasts a strong and funny cast: Steve Carell as Cal Weaver, doing his sad-sack schtick that never seems to get old; Julianne Moore, as Cal's wife, Emily, who unexpectedly asks for a divorce; Ryan Gosling as Jacob, a slick ladies' man who looks at pathetic Cal as a makeover project; Emma Stone as Hannah, who is onto Jacob's game, yet also falls for it.


These four characters own Crazy, Stupid, Love and I wish the movie had been entirely focused on their stories. Unfortunately, there are a couple subplots in the movie that are just, well, crazy and stupid. Cal and Emily's son, Robbie, has an inappropriate crush on their babysitter, Jessica, even though Robbie is 13 and Jessica is 17. This crush is not something Robbie keeps to himself. He tells Jessica repeatedly that he loves her, even after she tells him to bug off. Robbie even visits her high school and makes a dramatic and grand gesture of love, insisting that she's his soulmate and that she'll "learn to love" him. Sheesh, even though the kid is 13 and harmless enough, his obsession with her is genuinely creepy. And--semi spoiler here--Jessica gives Robbie a memento at the end of the film that is incredibly creepy and gross.

Meanwhile, Jessica nurtures an inappropriate crush on Cal that also appears out of place and bizarre in an otherwise sweet film. To me, Crazy, Stupid, Love is about four adults dealing with the ups and downs and complications of relationships--not about kids and their unrequited crushes. I don't have a problem with kids and unrequited crushes--I've had my fair share, after all--but the directors took these subplots in icky directions that distracted from the characters I was actually interested in.

Speaking of childish sensibilities, Crazy, Stupid, Love pushes the belief that there is one person out there for everyone, and when you meet them "you'll just know" and you'll "never stop fighting for them". In a flimsy romantic comedy, I would expect characters to swallow the idea of soulmates hook, line, and sinker. But I felt like Crazy, Stupid, Love was too good, too honest, too mature for this nonsense. There's a line where Cal wants to purchase jeans at the Gap and the fashionable Jacob tells him "Be better than the Gap". I wanted to tell Crazy, Stupid, Love to "be better than soulmates". Soulmates is the easy way out. Think about it: if you're watching a movie (a mainstream one, at least) and the two romantic leads have an argument or some kind of obstacle, but one of them says "you're my soulmate", or "you're the One", or even simply, "I love you"--it shuts down all other arguments and discussion. Movies that pull the soulmate move take romantic love for granted. They think that, in the end, romantic love will solve all problems and wash away all inequities. In reality, we know that love doesn't work that way. Yes, love can be transformative, and in some cases even more powerful than life itself. But the idea of "true love" presented in fluffy rom-coms is too much of a Deus ex machina to be believed: it immediately solves all problems. That's fine for a lot of movies, but Crazy, Stupid, Love *appears* to want to soar above all that, yet never quite does.

Inside Crazy, Stupid, Love is a better movie waiting to be born. There are moments of such honesty and longing (for example, a scene where Jacob tries to explain to Cal  his surprise--and fear--at discovering his own ability to fall in love) that make you feel as if you are spying on real people and not just watching actors say lines. Crazy, Stupid, Love is very slick (the characters are wealthy and educated, and spend their time in suburban malls and upscale bars), yet never phony. Still, the fact that the film rests a little too comfortably in the security that True Love will win out in the end--without truly addressing the dark side of relationships (stalking, obsession, promiscuity, loss of desire for one's spouse...the list goes on) that it hints at--brings an otherwise transcendent film down a notch.

Oh, and FWIW, Crazy, Stupid, Love has an awesome soundtrack.

3.75 out of 5 stars