Category Archives: Abbie Cornish

BFI LFF 2012: Dans La Maison / Seven Psychopaths

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Regular readers will be fully aware/entirely sick of my repeated references to #TheProject, my in-progress stupidly ambitious tale of events, happenings and things (all plot deets embargoed for now) which has taken a backseat while I attempt to earn a crust writing this blog (if WordPress ever sends me my royalties, that is). Cryptic comments about #TheProject have taken the place of actually doing anything to complete #TheProject; troubling, but it at least makes me feel like it’s going to get completed, despite the massive plot cavity I’m currently trying to fill with word-caulk. One consequence of this mental struggle means I’m more aware of narrative theories presented by writers I follow, some of which make sense (though I’d prefer a dose of NZT, thanks).

However, I’m starting to get alarmed at the focus on “The Rules”, which at their best can be interesting ideas about how to enhance your stories, but at worst can be absurdly prescriptive constraints that can, if misunderstood, make every story basically a different flavoured version of all other stories. This focus on how stories fail when they wander outside the lines of what constitutes a “univerally-agreed” successful plot has led to some surprising critical reactions to stories that I thought were doing some fun, bold things. Even if only in terms of novelty or ambition, I think that’s worthwhile, but more importantly we all benefit when those rules are stretched, or shattered intentionally to generate emotion, make a point, or experiment with new techniques.

This is what has been on my mind for months now, making me more attuned to navel-gazing conversations about creators and their approach to art. The conversation between Arthur Krystal of the New Yorker and novelist Lev Grossman has been particularly fascinating in terms of what fiction is capable of. Krystal’s first paywalled article is here, Grossman’s response is here, and the latest installment is here. Thanks to friend-of-the-blog and excellent genre writer Sam Binnie for pointing me at that most recent, rage-inducing article (buy her book!). Yesterday saw The Wachowskis promoting Cloud Atlas, which they co-directed with Tom Tykwer. Their response to a question about why they resist interviews about their work really chimed with me:

Andy Wachowski: It’s four years on Cloud Atlas, and so I sort of resent the fact that now I have to sit down and explain it to people. It’s like the whole dialogue has been lost about… When I was a kid, we would go to movies as a family, and then we’d sit down and talk about them. I feel like this is the instantaneous-gratification generation, where they can just look it up and say, “Oh, well, this is what it means.” Our movies require a little bit of effort.

Lana Wachowski: And you feel it in a lot of critics’ approach today toward cinema. As soon as they encounter a piece of art they don’t fully understand the first time going through it, they think it’s the fault of the movie or the work of art. They think, [dramatic voice] “It’s a mess.”

Andy: [Dramatic voice] “This doesn’t make sense.”

Lana: “This doesn’t make any sense.” And they reject it, just out of an almost knee-jerk response to some ambiguity or some gulf between what they expect they should be able to understand, and what they understand.

As someone who has passionately, lengthily, exhaustively argued many times with many people over the quality of the Matrix trilogy and Speed Racer (or lack thereof; I’m no opinion-Nazi), I know what they mean. Just this week I tried to grapple with Post Tenebras Lux, though of course I was lucky to be writing blogposts for WordPress instead of being forced to write to a website or newspaper/magazine deadline (seriously, WordPress are going to be sending me a cheque soon, right?). Some critics argued it was a waste of time. With the space afforded to me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t an incomprehensible jumble of images, and tentatively gave it a sort of thumbs up. Yay me, I guess.

Which brings me to two movies shown at the London Film Festival which deal with the process of telling a story, and how expectations of what stories should do to be a success conflicts with ambition and intention. François Ozon’s Dans La Maison, adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play The Boy in the Last Row, concerns a jaded teacher, M. Germain (an fabulously grouchy performance from Fabrice Luchini), who discovers a talented pupil in his literature class. Claude (Ernst Umhauer) engages with a standard “What did you do last weekend?” essay question to a degree no one else in the class does, by relating a tale of how he has insinuated his way into a family that he has been interested in for at least a year.

Germain and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) are electrified by Claude’s peculiar and unpredictable tale, and the teacher urges his pupil to continue under the pretence of improving his writing, but also because of the voyeuristic thrill of this stealthy invasion. Claude’s tale is at first laden with class-based envy, leading to a caricatured portrayal, but under Germain’s guidance he begins to approach the “Rapha” family with greater compassion, leading to a richer download of information for his delighted audience-of-two, but also affecting his growth as a person. As the film progresses, though his spirit returns, Germain becomes compromised in his urge to receive more of these exciting updates, and Claude’s friendship with the family becomes precarious.

Ozon masterfully plays with the levels of fiction and “reality” here, creating a symbiosis between the art of storytelling and the act of living, from Germain and Jeanne’s feeble justifications for their almost prurient fascination with Claude and his adolescent crush on Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), to Claude’s clever manipulation of his teacher and ever-shifting accounts of what goes on in the Rapha household. The audience is given an unreliable view of his actions, shown through the eyes of a boy not only fantasising about his importance within the family, but also his self-worth, his rationalisation for his actions, and his relationship with Germain, who he regards with a fascinating mixture of respect and disdain.

Everyone’s intentions and desires are obscured, but Germain’s questionably-motivated tutoring has other consequences. Germain becomes so intoxicated with the chance to live vicariously through his student that he too becomes entwined with Claude and the Raphas, both in reality and fiction. Once he becomes part of the story, no amount of writerly knowledge can protect him from the ramifications; either a consequence of his hubris or his prosaic talents as a writer. On first viewing I found the finale a little unsatisfying but the more I think about it I see Ozon, as well as offering a kind of open ending for Germain and Claude, has also contrasted the neatness of narrative and the mess of life. Not an original idea, but one entertainingly depicted.

It also calls into question the efficacy of Germain’s advice, which while solid enough also “tames” Claude. There’s a chance that the story he would have told would be sour, bizarre, even dangerous; his motives are unclear at first, which leads to some suspense early on, and accounts for part of Germain and Jeanne’s curiosity. The teacher’s interference channels Claude’s intentions, and creates a tension between the irrepressible spirit of the untamed teenager possibly giving in to his impulses (for better or worse), and Germain’s instinct to create a more conventional tale of a young boy falling in love with an older woman. Of course, while Germain focuses on this story, he ignores an unpredictable threat from another “character” who won’t play by the expected rules.

Story rules as the taming of ideas, real life as the chaos that surrounds it. At the same time Jeanne tries to keep her art gallery afloat as the philistine twins who fund it consider closing it. Jeanne’s ideas for generating publicity include lazily transgressive fusions of sexual imagery and fascist iconography, and bland computer-generated artworks or interactive installations, while at the same time finding pompous comfort in the thought that the family whose experiences they have been vampirically living off are the kind of ignoramuses who have Klee prints on their walls but don’t understand them. The only person who seems to genuinely want to learn about himself through art is Claude, and Germain’s prodding threatens to blunt this innocent eagerness.

At least, this is how I saw it. It would have been nice to have spent more time dissecting it, but after the screening off I raced to meet a friend prior to another screening, and if anything can wipe a mind’s blackboard it’s a trip on the Victoria line. There is so much to ponder in this complex story about story that it’s easy to forget that it’s also deliciously funny and lightly played. This isn’t a stuffy exercise in navel-gazing; though it tackles ideas about authorial intent, the impossibility of creating something without imposing yourself onto it, and the negative effect of pandering to an audience, it’s a delight from start to finish, even if I thought the final act went on too long. See? Even I can’t help interfering. WordPress should be proud to have me on the payroll.

If Ozon is curious about the interplay between artist, art, and audience, and unconsciously references genteel tales of middle-class ennui and yearning such as Six Degrees of Separation and Manhattan Murder Mystery, Martin McDonagh’s approach to exploring the constraints imposed on story by genre is feistier, and Seven Psychopaths is a much more flamboyant trip through layers of narrative, cliche, and viewer expectation. His follow-up to In Bruges shares some DNA with his play The Pillowman, as he uses the tale of a blocked screenwriter and his feckless dog-napping best friend to lampoon the well-worn tropes used in traditionally “male” genres — basically the kinds of tales that feature gangsters, buddy relationships, gun fights, and psychopaths.

Colin Farrell plays Marty Faranan, a screenwriter attempting to write a tale about seven psychopaths which will somehow convey a message of love and hope not traditionally found in stories about psychopaths — a commendable intention, to transcend the rules of the genre as I would hope all writers would aspire to do, at least to some degree. Hopelessly blocked on how to do this — and now writer’s block! McDonagh was speaking right to me — Marty takes on board plot and character suggestions from his friend Billy (possibly Sam Rockwell’s most entertaining performance yet), but withholds credit from him, selfishly pretending that he is the sole author of a story that is actually being influenced by real world events he doesn’t fully understand.

A series of bad choices by Billy leads to the two men and companion Hans (Christopher Walken’s best work since Catch Me If You Can) eluding a vengeful mobster (Woody Harrelson), before trying to save their lives and finish the screenplay that echoes their predicament. Their solutions conform to and transcend the conventions of the action genre, with Marty’s noble ideas hijacked by Billy’s cliched suggestions as well as the deadly impositions of the “real” world, which has its own demented film-based rules. By placing this in a familiarly illogical setting, where for example “psychopaths” have the convenient symptoms found in lazily researched narratives, this love letter to genre ends up with a lot of critical footnotes, and questions whether writing rules can be broken without breaking the story, and whether we should just embrace them for what they are.

Notably the movie barely features is women, with the two lead actresses in the credits — Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko — barely getting anything to do, and the one well-drawn female character being Hans’ wife Myra (Linda Bright Clay — a scenestealer in her short time onscreen). Without seeking to derail this post, it’s worth addressing this absence, which became quite a talking point after the movie ended, primarily because of a line in the movie about the fact that male-oriented action movies regularly dismiss, ignore or under-represent its female characters; a self-aware line in a movie that, to that point, had sidelined its two female leads into near-invisibility, and gives a better idea of McDonagh’s satirical intention.

McDonagh and producer Graham Broadbent appeared after the movie with LFF director Clare Stewart for a Q&A during which he responded to a question about the treatment of the female characters. At first he seemed (this is my impression; I could be wrong) that he’s been asked this question before, and no one had given him enough credit for creating Myra (who is indeed a terrific character). He revealed that there were more scenes with Cornish, but they were dropped for various reasons in post-production (Kurylenko may also have had more to do; the image below is not in the film). He then vowed that his next project would feature many “strong female characters”, a comment that got a laugh, mostly because it was delivered with a weariness that made it clear he’s said it before.

Despite the arguably dismissive reply (as I say, this is my impression of his tone but others found his response unsatisfactory) I think the deliberate choice to make Abbie Cornish’s girlfriend character a cypher who is treated like absolute shit by Rockwell’s insecure best friend archetype was the right thing to do, simply because it is done with such unapologetic vigour. Marty and Billy come off as assholes for treating her poorly; they’re the symbolic buddies you find in any number of lazily-scripted action movies, and they’re called on their crap by Hans, the most sympathetic and noble character in the film, the only male adult in a film full of pathetic children. The line gets a laugh, but it also sends the audience back to earlier scenes for reappraisal.

Answering another question, McDonagh referred to his interest in Sam Peckinpah’s movies; a telling comparison considering how the notoriously macho director used his movies to work through his issues with aggressive masculinity and his own relationships with women. I talked about Peckinpah’s struggle with his masculine nature in this end-of-year review of the Straw Dogs remake (scroll down). Straw Dogs was an expression of his ambivalence toward the stress between his public image and his inner nature, with the character Amy reduced to pawn status in the middle of a battle between Alpha and Beta males, though Amy is arguably more complex than most female characters in movies, as shown by the “stronger” less-interesting Amy in Rod Lurie’s remake.

To display the misogynist tendencies of the genre, and formulaic Hollywood product in general, McDonagh excludes the women closest to Marty and Billy to the most extreme degree, and only gives agency to Hans’ wife Myra, both of whom don’t correspond to the traditional action movie protagonist template (e.g. they’re old, they’re an interracial couple). The homoerotic overtones of the buddy sub-genre are mixed with the casual disposability of story-complicating women in action movies, a trope McDonagh makes fun of while using it to great effect. Much as I don’t want to admit it, the most upsetting scene in the film, in terms of shifting the audience’s allegiance behind one of the protagonists involves exactly the trope being mocked (and references Scott and Tarantino’s similarly violent tale True Romance), which makes the audience question their acceptance of this convention.

McDonagh may note the efficacy of these dramatic choices, but through Hans’ line he also expresses a hope that female roles in this genre will be improved in order to give a voice to the voiceless, an admission that the emotional impact of using female characters as a narrative tool comes with a cost that is only recently being debated. Look at the recent uproar over the new Tomb Raider game, in which Lara Croft is given an origin story that includes the threat of sexual assault. The discussion of the treatment of women in narratives is rightly addressing these issues, and statements about “strong female characters” mean nothing if all that means is better-defined biceps and abs on women who are still victimised, sidelined, or used as motivational tools in a male-led narrative.

I suspect your mileage may vary on whether McDonagh is lazily casting aside criticisms of poorly-written women in macho cinema with one well-timed laugh line, or whether he is forcefully iterating his objection to it by reducing Cornish and Kurylenko’s roles to almost nothing in favour of scenes in which his male characters, who mistreat or ignore them, are portrayed as pitiful child-men scrabbling to survive in a world more dangerous than they realised. I’m willing to give McDonagh the benefit of the doubt because he brought it up, but I understand and support concerns about disappointing representations of women in the media, and hope that future works by him do branch out past his interest in what it is to be a man as he sort of promised, to focus on what it is to be human.

As for McDonagh’s games with storytelling, he does an excellent job of playing with our expectations of what these movies require to be considered satisfying by less questioning audiences, most notably in a superb sequence in which Billy, finally given free reign to participate in Marty’s writing process, gives his version of how the ending (of the screenplay but also their predicament) should unfold, which conforms to every boneheaded cliche about action movies you can imagine, including absurd levels of cartoonish violence. The way the movie ends, playing against and with these cliches, is one of its most enjoyable aspects, topped with a graceful final note that I can’t spoil, other than to say this writer gaped in awestruck appreciation of McDonagh’s talent.

I spent the movie’s running time in a state of bliss, thrilled by its depiction of the struggle between the writer and his material, his ambition and the constraints of genre, not to mention how our stories are affected by all the stories in our past and what we think are the essential components of them. Genre conventions are only recognisable once we’ve experienced numerous tales with a certain structure and consistent components. The good thing about such exposure is you absorb these important elements and can deploy them without thinking about them too deeply. The bad thing is you take the elements for granted or see them as unchangeable, leading to stagnation. A million identikit stories, all making the same mistakes as those that came before.

Seven Psychopaths is a response to the stifling expectations of genre storytelling, addressing the genre limitations while providing a film as entertaining and wittily written as the best movies of this kind, in much the same way Shane Black did in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. McDonagh highlights our lazy acceptance of these elements and then offers them up to us again to show how silly they seem in a new context; the “Rules” suffering a judo assault from a master storyteller, using their power against them, showing their flexibility when tested by an ambitious artist. The result is invigorating, and, to those of us with a vested interest in working in genre writing, inspiring. Man, I gotta get back to #TheProject. That’s it, WordPress, I’m handing in my notice.

Listmania ’11: Performances Of The Year

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Yet again my blogging schedule is thrown into disarray by what can only be described as a waking coma. A combination of night work, lack of sleep due to warring cats, and god know what else — probably some hex cast on me by some anti-blogging warlock — meant that last week I felt like I was trapped under a fog of confusion as thick as the thickest Greek yogurt. I’m not fully out of it yet, so this prologue might become a little off-kilter. Please bear with the blog until normal services are restored.

Not really much to say about this post other than that I’m watching a recording of the Golden Globes and seriously, this blog is more composed than this goddamn mess. It’s an uncomfortable experience made even more hard to bear by the fact that we’re watching it on the UK’s E! channel which has bleeped out every vaguely risque comment or mention of a product, thus rendering it unintelligible. Also in our favour; SoC hasn’t spent all year talking about last year’s Listmania as if it was easily the most shocking and daring blogpost of the year, and how we don’t care about the controversy it caused, and holy shit wait until you see what shocking jokes we’ve got in store for you this year; a build-up somewhat ruined by being followed with a couple of Kim Kardashian jokes.

No. We’ll be honest. This is merely a blogpost, one of millions. And yet we have our integrity, and our annual awards for Sam Rockwell and Michael Sheen, no appearances by Sofia Vergara’s Voice, and no awards for The Iron Lady. That, somehow, is enough. Please enjoy, and imagine them being read out in the voice of a slightly tipsy Ricky Gervais, punctuated by some cozy jokes about Johnny Depp and that faux-sneering thing he does to make out that he doesn’t really worship the people he is mocking (with, I’ll admit it, a bit of skill). The atheism is also implied.

Best Performance by an Actress: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin

Honorable Mentions:

Anna Paquin – Margaret

Olivia Colman – Tyrannosaur

Jessica Chastain – Take Shelter

Carey Mulligan – Shame

Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia

Best Performance by an Actor: Michael Fassbender – Shame

Honorable Mentions:

Michael Shannon – Take Shelter

Gary Oldman – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Jean Dujardin - The Artist

Brendan Gleeson – The Guard

Woody Harrelson – Rampart

Best Supporting Performance by an Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia

Honorable Mentions:

Jennifer Lawrence – X-Men: First Class

Anna Kendrick – 50/50

Ellen Page – Super

Déborah François – The Monk

Emily Mortimer – Our Idiot Brother

Best Supporting Performance by an Actor: Christopher Plummer – Beginners

Honorable Mentions:

Benedict Cumberbatch – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo

John C. Reilly – Terri

Albert Brooks – Drive

Don Cheadle - The Guard

Best Individual Voice Work: Johnny Depp – Rango

Best Voice Cast/Direction: Rango

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Elizabeth Olsen - Martha Marcy May Marlene

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: John Boyega - Attack The Block

Best Career Moves of the Year (Actress): Jessica Chastain - The Tree of Life / Take Shelter / The Help / The Debt / Texas Killing Fields / Coriolanus

Honorable Mention: Carey Mulligan - Drive / Shame

Best Career Moves of the Year (Actor): Michael Fassbender - Shame / Jane Eyre / X-Men: First Class / A Dangerous Method

Honorable Mention: Ryan Gosling - Drive / The Ides of March / Crazy, Stupid, Love

“See? I Told You He Could Act” Performances of the Year: Matthew McConaughey - The Lincoln Lawyer / Bernie

“Wow, He Actually Can Act?” Performance of the Year: Jake Gyllenhaal - Source Code

“My God, I’m Even Angrier About The Uselessness Of Gilmore Girls Now Because You Deserve So Much Better Than The Bog-Standard ‘Pathetic Best Friend Of The Protagonist Who Is Only There To Make Her Look Better’ Stereotype And Look What Happens When You Get A Chance To Let Your Freak Flag Fly” Performance of the Year: Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids

“Dude, Where Have You Been? This Is The Best Thing You’ve Done In Ages. Oh Man, I Really Missed You, You Know. Jesus, X: Men Origins: Wolverine Sucked, But I’ve Got No Hard Feelings And This Kind of Commitment To Your Craft — Enhanced By Your Effortless Charm — Is Why We’ll Always Have A Place For You In Our Hearts” Performance of the Year: Hugh Jackman - Real Steel

Scenestealing Actress of the Year: Kat Dennings - Thor

Scenestealing Actor of the Year: Stanley Tucci - Captain America: The First Avenger

Most Wasted Actress: Robin Wright - Rampart / Moneyball / The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Most Wasted Actor: Walton Goggins - Straw Dogs / Cowboys and Aliens

Most Fearless Performance of the Year: Keira Knightley – A Dangerous Method

“Look, Can We Just Stop Acting Like He’s Some Anonymous Beefcake And Accept He’s Got Smarts And Range On Top Of His Looks And Is Actually A Very Charming, Committed and Talented Actor, FFS” Performances of the Year: Chris Evans - Captain America: The First Avenger / Puncture / What’s Your Number?

Best Cameo: James Franco - The Green Hornet

“Holy Shit, You’re Seriously Scaring The Bejesus Out Of Me” Performance of the Year: Pollyanna McIntosh - The Woman

“Please Let Him Become A Huge Star And Use His Clout To Bring Friday Night Lights To The Big Screen” Performance of the Year: Kyle Chandler - Super 8

“I Bet All Those Critics Who Used To Think You Were Nothing But A Pretty Boy Feel Real Stupid Now” Performances of the Year: Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life / Moneyball

“Now Can You Please Do Me The Favour Of Shutting The Fuck Up, Assorted Whiners Hiding At The Bottom Of The Internet Like The Tiresome Trolls You Are?” Performances of the Year: Kristen Wiig – Paul / Bridesmaids

Worst Performance by an Actress: Cate Blanchett – Hanna

Dishonorable Mentions:

Natalie Portman – No Strings Attached

Milla Jovovich – The Three Musketeers

Taylor Schilling - Atlas Shrugged: Part I

Julia Roberts – Larry Crowne

Blake Lively – Green Lantern

Worst Performance by an Actor: Jim Sturgess – One Day

Dishonorable Mentions:

Colin O’Donoghue - The Rite

Paul Rudd – How Do You Know

Ashton Kutcher – No Strings Attached

Henry Hopper – Restless

Grant Bowler – Atlas Shrugged: Part I

Worst Supporting Performance by an Actress: January Jones – Unknown

Dishonorable Mentions:

January Jones – X-Men: First Class

Lucy Punch – You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

Lucy Punch – Bad Teacher

Juno Temple – The Three Musketeers

Lake Bell – No Strings Attached

Worst Supporting Performance by an Actor: James Corden – The Three Musketeers

Dishonorable Mentions:

Richard Coyle – W.E.

James D’Arcy – W.E.

Rami Malek – Larry Crowne

Rafe Spall - One Day

Ken Stott - One Day

Worst Individual Voice Work: James McAvoy - Gnomeo and Juliet

Worst Voice Cast /Direction: Gnomeo and Juliet

Actress in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Naomi Watts - Dream House / You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Fair Game

Dishonorable Mention: Olivia Wilde - Cowboys and Aliens / The Change-Up / In Time

Actor in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Jason Bateman - The Change-Up / Paul / Horrible Bosses

Dishonorable Mention: Ryan Reynolds - Green Lantern / The Change-Up

Actor/Actress Duo With The Worst Luck in 2011: Abbie Cornish and Oscar Isaac – Sucker Punch and W.E.

Performance Most Likely To Make Fans Think Some Consciousness-Altering Substances Were Involved Though I’m Sure That’s Not The Case And I’m Certainly Not Suggesting He Was As High As Voyager 1 When He Slurred His Way Through This Piece Of Shit: James Franco - Your Highness

“Hmmm, Okay, You Were Actually Okay This Year, And Thus Deserve Recognition And A Temporary Reprieve From My Usual Derision” Performances of the Year: Cameron Diaz – The Green Hornet / Bad Teacher

Most Entertaining Performance by an Actress in a Bad Movie: Andrea Riseborough - W.E.

Honorable Mention: Mindy Kaling - No Strings Attached

Most Entertaining Performance by an Actor in a Bad Movie: Anthony Hopkins – The Rite

Honorable Mention: Anthony Hopkins – 360

Most Bafflingly Busy Actress of the Year: Frieda Pinto - You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Rise of the Planet of the Apes / Immortals

Most Bafflingly Busy Actor of the Year: Billy Burke - The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 / Drive Angry / Red Riding Hood

Worst Cameo: Convicted rapist Mike Tyson, again – The Hangover Part II

“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: Fred Ward - 30 Minutes Or Less

Best Accent: Chloe Grace Moretz – Hugo

Worst Accent: Anne Hathaway – One Day

Most Entertaining Acccent: Gary Oldman – Red Riding Hood

Most Disconcerting Accent: Jeffrey Wright – Source Code

Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Cowboys and Aliens

Best Argument For The Use Of Performance-Capture Technology And The Freedom It Gives To Actors Performance of the Year: Andy Serkis - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Best Argument To Destroy All Performance-Capture Technology To Prevent Such A Crime Ever Being Committed Again Performance of the Year: Seth Green – Mars Needs Moms

“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actress of the Year: Rose Byrne (More comedies like Bridesmaids as she has a real gift for comedy, less dramatic roles like X-Men: First Class and Insidious.)

“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actor of the Year: Bradley Cooper (More dramatic roles in unexpectedly entertaining movies like Limitless, less fratboy bullshit in odious crap like The Hangover Part II.)

Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One

Hammiest Performance By Chow Yun Fat: Let The Bullets Fly

Next up: crew contributions of the year. Best screenplay is a lock but I’m going back and forth on best director. Who will it be? #HitchcockianSuspense

BFI LFF 2011: W.E.

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Madonna’s biopic of Wallis Simpson was notorious long before screening at the 2011 LFF, following a disastrous premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The version screened in London was reportedly re-edited; one clip released a couple of months ago is indeed different than the version I saw, in that the original is an incomprehensible and absurd rapid montage that was eventually toned down to be much slower but equally as incoherent. It would be interesting to compare the two versions, but it’s not like the London version was a phoenix rising from the ashes of that first screening. It remains one of the most misguided, inept, and unintentionally entertaining movies of recent times, so much so that my derisive giggles threatened to get me in trouble with the huge and scary guy sitting next to me who, commendably, seemed to be able to take this slice of insania a lot more seriously than I could.

The blame for W.E.‘s many sins can be laid at the feet of Madonna and her Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian, who co-wrote the screenplay / transcribed the dialogue from a book featuring Fabio on the cover. It’s their choice to pull a Julie and Julia, crosscutting between dramatisations of Wallis’ life and the plight of a modern woman, the key difference being that W.E.‘s protagonist Wally Winthrop is fictional. We see notable moments from Wallis’ life, painting her as a victim of circumstance, a woman horribly brutalised by her first husband who then cuckolds her second husband seemingly by accident, before causing the abdication of the King of England despite begging him not to do it as it would ruin their lives.

These overwrought scenes, alarmingly similar to the kind of godawful TV movies made to cash in on royal events like the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton,* are intercut with Wally, a young woman who takes refuge from her empty life by wandering around her former place of employment — Sotheby’s — in the days before an auction of Wallis’ belongings. She is visited by the ghost of Wallis in a Play-It-Again-Sam-stylee, who gives her meaningless advice about self-actualisation that prompts the viewer to wish that Madonna had written a New Age book instead. The bond between the women is strong; Wally is also abused by her vile and uncaring husband, and finds solace in the arms of a kindly security guard, Evgeni, a man whose soulful nature is perfectly summed up by the fact that he keeps a picture of his dead wife in a copy of Rilke’s Letter To A Young Poet on the bookcase near his piano. Seriously.

There’s the germ of an interesting movie there (I mean holy crap, Wally learns from Wallis’ mistakes and goes for a sentimental pauper instead of a chinless toff, and is therefore happier OMG money isn’t everything that’s so deepz), though it would require far more than a bit of an editing trim to make it work at all. Not that Madonna could see her movie objectively any more. It’s hard not to watch W.E. and see it as Madonna’s love letter to herself via Wallis. She’s spoken of how she empathises with Wallis, and the movie oozes with sympathy for the woman, painting her as someone whose joie de vivre and irrepressible nature was such that she was unable to avoid the attentions of powerful men, as well as excusing her notorious interest in the Nazi party by giving her a dismissive line about how she courted Hitler just the once and only because she was just like everyone else, trying to stop him from annexing the entirety of Europe by being really really nice to him. And with one bound Madonna was free! Except not.

This Cele/Bitchy article draws a parallel between Madonna’s inclusion of John Galliano and Leni Reifenstahl’s names in the credits and the decision to airbrush Wallis’ possible Nazi support from the movie, but I think the truth is closer to Madonna just deciding she likes Wallis and felt sorry for her and just couldn’t let her own ego shut up long enough to realise that comparing yourself to someone as dodgy as Wallis just because you like to fame-compare yourself to one of the most notorious and historically significant women of the last century is probably a really really really bad idea, no matter how hard you like to shout that she was just trying to talk Hitler out of being such a dick and hell she wasn’t interested in being Queen anyway. As such, W.E. stands as possibly the most expensive and gaudy example of fanwank ever made; I’m amazed Wallis isn’t revealed to be a Jedi Knight in the final act.

Ah yes, gaudy. Much has been made of the look of the movie; Madonna enlisted A-list names from the fashion and jewelry world to clothe her actors, but it says something about my interest in such matters that I just spent 10 minutes wondering if this sentence’s separation of “fashion” and “jewelry” was redundant because maybe they both belong to the same world. If a movie doesn’t feature costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka or Danilo Donati then I’m not going to notice them. As for jewelry, the only piece I’ve ever been interested in was a Superman logo ring that I wanted to wear on my left ring finger, but my wife Daisyhellcakes rightly vetoed that decision with a quickness. There’s an argument that W.E. is some kind of fairytale saga with bad guys and princesses and lessons learned about true love, but not only is that a bit of a leap, it’s entirely at odds with these glum, anti-magical visuals.

As far as I can see, W.E. is a relentlessly ugly movie, with flat lighting made worse by Madonna’s choice to complicate the visual palette of the movie by adding tons of grainy close-ups of objects and noses and headlines as if the only movie she has ever seen before was Oliver Stone’s JFK. It’s possible that this betrays an ambivalent attitude toward superficial beauty, that Madonna is perfectly aware that the trappings of glamour are nothing compared to the true glory of the world, be it the martyrdom of misunderstood women, or empathetic sisterhood, or some kind of penitent rejection of riches as shown when Wally runs away from her contemptible rich husband to live with honourable peasant Evgeni in his still-pretty-bloody-nice NY “hovel” (which we know is horrible because Madonna has considerately looped in the sound of a dripping tap to hammer it home), but it’s an unconvincing theory, undermined by the participation of those legendary designers. I’ll believe it when I see Madonna slobbing about in one of the fragrant and awesome Tulisa Contostavlos’ pre-glamournisation tracksuits.

The ugly photography helps obscure the actors that struggle to make something of Madonna and Keshishian’s sixth-form dialogue. James D’Arcy and Richard Coyle fare particularly badly, with D’Arcy’s Edward given little to do other than pine for his hyper-confident American lust object while being a little bit decadent; the overall effect is of a creepy aristo with some weak inbred genes losing his decorum in the presence of That American Chutzpah. Coyle is even worse, but then he’s given an impossible acting task to fulfill. His character — the dastardly, abusive husband of poor martyr Wally — is an RKO serial villain with a very nice head of hair and a glass of Scotch glued to his right hand, who brazenly cheats on his saintly wife for no apparent reason other than that Madonna needed Wally to suffer just like her namesake, before finding the love of a good man.

Madonna’s weak facility with actors spreads to her extras; scenes like the auction sequences are littered with scenery-chewing attention-seeking overactors seemingly egged on by the director to be as unsubtle as possible. “Look at them”, she seems to be saying. “They’re awful aren’t they, the rich. They just want to take a piece of me… I mean Wallis, as a souvenir. They don’t understand me… er, Wallis the way I… erm, Wally does.” They clown and yawp and boil away in their seats like hyenas, which Madonna makes sure to emphasise by intercutting the auction footage with shots of Wallis’s friends, off their mash on Benzedrine, rolling around on the floor to the tune of The Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant, as Wallis dances in front of them with an African woman from high society (like they used to do in the 30s, I bet) who suddenly materialises behind her. Do you see? Do you see what fame is? Poor Madonna, that prisoner of infamy. Only a truly noble martyr like Wallis could possibly understand what it is to be a massively successful and influential woman, but instead she has to deal with us gawping at her and bidding on her clothes and taking Benzedrine… er… hold on… ::Level 8 Warning — Metaphor Collapse Imminent — Prepare Hydrangea Distraction Protocol Omega::

Does any of this work? Abbie Cornish is better than she should be, though mostly her role requires her to be quiet and stoic and defiant. She’s been busy this past year or so, what with appearing in Bright Star and misfiring “Gurl Powah” debacle Sucker Punch which, oddly enough, shares a few similarities with W.E., though not because W.E. features dragons or ninjas or cosplay, sadly. Cornish is becoming one of the more interesting actresses working today, but Jane Campion’s movie aside, she’s not getting the projects she deserves. She’s often paired up here with Oscar Isaac as Evgeni, who gives yet another terrific performance to rank alongside his work in Nicholas Winding Refn’s retro thriller Drive. He gets the only “funny” lines in the film, but he’s so likeable that I actually laughed with them just out of gratitude that the movie actually recognised a human emotion other than “Melodramatic Mugging”.

Andrea Riseborough’s Wallis is problematic. There are details to her performance that show effort and understanding, an attempt to translate Madonna and Keshishian’s appalling muddle of histrionics, cliche and lumpy exposition into something resembling the behaviour of a human being, but these moments are obscured by a terribly misguided accent that makes her sound like Jennifer Jason Leigh’s impersonation of Katherine Hepburn in The Hudsucker Proxy. Add to that the awful things Madonna makes her do, such as her final moment with Edward, which will go down in history as one of the wrongest things ever committed to film. Many weeks later I’m still not sure if it’s meant to be a joke or not, or whether Matt Groening and the Futurama team should sue over the misuse of this character design.

But I love this movie. Love it. It paralysed me with delighted mirth for almost all of its considerable length, and made me want to drag busloads of people to see it. Please dear Lord give me a chance to book out the Prince Charles and set up a screening just like with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (another movie where the director’s ego leaps in front of the camera and inadvisably shakes it all about). I dream of a large posse of W.E. fanatics throwing jewelry and Masai spears at the screen and quoting along with Madonna and Keshishian’s Mills-and-Boonian dialogue. We can mock the melodramatic blocking (all hurled martini glasses and weeping / leaping at beds), the bizarre inclusion of Mohamed Al Fayed as a character in order to draw a parallel between the Royal Family’s treatment of Wallis and Diana Spencer (I mean FFS), Wallis’ magical cocktail shaker which she shakes with such vigour that it brings all the boys (and girls) to her yard, the incredible scene where a horrified Edward visits Wales and is greeted by a village full of monosyllabic commoners muttering words of adoring deference from beneath a veil of worthy soot. It’s a bad movie masterpiece, ranking right up there with Showgirls. It will be celebrated and adored for years to come, for all the wrong reasons, but then that’s more than Wallis Simpson got, so Madonna can chalk this up as a success, I suppose.

* An earlier version of this post claimed that Prince William actually married to BBC Breakfast’s one competent host, Kate Silverton. My error — one which gives away my antipathy toward matters of the monarchy — was spotted by Shades of Caruso contributor Masticator, who added, “TV event of the year”. Indeed. ::retires from blogging::

Sucker Punch: Moulin Rouge + Bayonetta + Inception – Coherence

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Okay, let’s get this post out of the way so I can use my words in more constructive ways. Yes, I just saw Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, and as a member of the nerd community I am therefore compelled to give up my thoughts. These are preliminary conclusions – more reaction than actual concrete theory – but I don’t want to spend too much time on it as America has had a week of arguing about whether it is sexist or the end of cinema etc. and so my wurblings already mean less than nothing. But hell, if I’m going to pay £17 to see a movie (in the afternoon! Not even at night when they jack the prices up!) then I’m going to at least get a blogpost out of it.

First thing’s first. Smarter and nicer people than I have already batted this around a lot, so if you want to understand the current state of play re: reaction to Snyder’s magnum opus, then you need to check out these:

All very good, and very thought-provoking. Which leads me to my first point; Snyder may have made a clunking, clattering, noisy and annoying failure, but he sure as hell got people talking, and I think that was his main goal anyway. Sucker Punch is designed to generate a reaction, though only occasionally does his filmmaking actually generate an emotional response other than numbed gurgling. I’m thinking here of the opening sequence; a dialogue-free and surprisingly nerve-wracking slow-motion prologue that sets out the stakes very quickly. It’s a bit unfortunate that the casting of Emily Browning means comparisons can be drawn to the Lemony Snicket movie (orphans, evil family members, etc), but this distraction means little.

My second point follows on from that. Snyder wanted to start a dialogue, but what was it? Sexism, exploitation, objectification and all that unpleasant jazz. The story is obviously drawing a line from familial sexual abuse, denigration and oppression of women, and the use of barbaric psychiatric regimes to deal with women who cause problems for their men, to the modern gender debate and the continued ill-treatment of women around the world. Snyder’s use of these emotive images and tropes is blunt, but then there is a real sense of anger here. You get the feeling he’s genuinely annoyed about these things, and sure as hell wanted the world to know about it.

So why the hot chicks in the sexy uniforms? Third point: nerd bait. Snyder wanted to give nerd culture a wake-up call about its objectification of women, and knew that we are all such snivelling little children that the only way for us to take the bitter medicine is to dress it up in sweet costumes and such. No nerd worth his salt is going to sit there and get told he’s wrong to have that poster of Megan Fox on his wall, so the Snyder-spider weaves a web and hides it behind a bunch of shots of Browning zipping around in a schoolgirl outfit with a samurai sword, and we multitudinous priapic clowns wander into the cinema and after a really quite boring 90 minutes of clumsy metaphor piled on top of clumsy metaphor… BAM! The equivalent of someone appearing on screen wagging their finger at the audience for being misogynists. I’ll give him this, it certainly wasn’t what anyone expected. Guess that “You Will Be Unprepared” tagline was right.

Point four: Is it gratuitously sexy? Yes, the ladies wander around in their smalls a lot of the time, but some of the money shots are surprisingly ambiguous. One slo-mo shot of the five girls walking in slow motion mimics some titillating Michael Bay-esque shot of models parading towards the camera, but the surroundings are more interesting. It’s the steampunk Nazi robot section of the movie, and they’re walking into a trench populated by “our boys”. What’s telling is that none of them look up, their eyes fixed down or away. As Snyder spends a lot of time focusing on eyes, there’s something being said about the Male Gaze here, perhaps that in Babydoll’s fantasy world she at least can escape that. In fact, the only man who looks at her (who even actually exists) in these fantasy worlds is Scott Glenn, and now that he looks like Leonard Nimoy’s older brother he arguably doesn’t pose a threat. He’s certainly a kindly old soul, though sadly lumbered with the worst dialogue.

In fact, the many tribulations of the five female characters very noticeably happen off camera, just as we do not see Babydoll’s supersexy dancing. All of the female characters who get killed have their moment of mortal wounding occur off screen, and when Babydoll dances we move into her fantasy worlds. Again, not what I was expecting. More to the point, the sexy costumes are less provocative than they seem at first, but as has been pointed out, there’s a difference between cosplay and dressing like a human being. Snyder is still making sure he adds the nerd bait with these costumes, and there’s just no point denying it, seeing as they add precisely nothing except sexiness to the plot. Such as there is one.

Point five: All of the nerd trappings here serve zero purpose, and – as has been pointed out before – are completely incongruous as Babydoll doesn’t seem to be the sort of person with a collection of Manga and video games in her sad room in the evil step-father’s house. They literally have no point whatsoever in the movie, but then the “sexy dancing” level of reality doesn’t either, other than as a way for Babydoll to process her experience in the mental institution. But then does that even exist, as the movie starts with Babydoll on a stage before she later sees the same stage in the institution? Are we just meant to assume that the movie is nothing more than a metaphor on every possible level, with only the wire framework of a narrative to keep us in our seats until the voiceover very bluntly tells the women in the audience to use their “weapons” to fight for themselves? If so, then Snyder’s need to lecture nerds about their unacceptable behaviour and immaturity could just as easily have been accomplished by putting some posters saying, “Don’t be such dicks” all around Comic-Con.

Point six: What the hell is this message anyway? I’m all for someone saying, “women deserve better than to be treated like objects for the sexual or visual gratification of the unevolved male”. I wholeheartedly endorse this message and am pleased to see Snyder is grappling with the way nerd culture has struggled to absorb this very simple idea into itself. Sadly, as Watchmen showed, Snyder can have a thought but have great difficulty expressing it very clearly. His love of Moore and Gibbons’ comic was obvious, so slavish was his imitation. However, the clunky failures of tonal translation were numerous, suggesting that while he loved the comic and wanted to show to the world just how strong that love was, he didn’t actually know why it worked, or why it has resonated with readers for decades. It was all surface. If he had understood it, he would see it needed to be ripped apart and put back together again for it to work. His love got in the way of the storytelling.

Same here. He really really really wants to make a big statement about sexism and objectification, and adds some interesting ideas (the covering and uncovering of female faces, the absence of actual names, the stretches where women are robbed of their voices, the facelessness of the male enemies in the sub-levels, etc.), but he doesn’t know how to put them together properly. It doesn’t help that his nerd-bait imagery gets in the way so much. They look sexy, and yet don’t and yet do. It’s iconography that gets in the way of the message while being necessary for the dissemination of the message and yet is utterly superfluous.

I’m having trouble describing the multiple cognitive disconnects needed to make sense of his haphazard jumble of meaning, but then in a way that perfectly describes it. He’s against the thing he’s using to show how he’s against it, but the reaction of the audience is not under his control. Whether he likes it or not, there are going to be audience members who think the talking got in the way of the hot chicks with the guns and stockings, and so should he have bothered putting it in in the first place? I think this is where Sucker Punch falls down the most. Certainly most of the to-and-fro in the blogosphere concerns the level of exploitation here, and whether it enhances or detracts from the message.

One thing is clear, though. In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, whatever it is, he’s against it. It’s impossible not to see that he’s struggling to say something, but he’s not a strong enough storyteller to get that point across without patronising the audience or realising that he’s muddling things up to the point that it’s impossible to pick through it. Maybe that’s actually intentional and he’s smarter than us: why bother making a clear point when we will do it all for him? Or he’s trying to make something for everyone. Titillation for the troglodytes, “empowerment” for the feminists. If so, he falls short on both counts, which, in the second case, is a shame.

What makes things worse is if we take his metaphors literally. Is he really saying to women that they have the advantages because while men are murderous rapists who treat women like possessions, we’re also so boner-obsessed that whenever the ladies dance all sexy-like, we literally fall into a stupor, enabling the canny women to get their way? There is not enough WTF in a million sub-levels of mental reality to even begin to cover this cheeky and absurd idea that manages to insult both genders simultaneously. Shake that booty, ladies, then pick our pockets! That’s using your “weapons”, all right! What a fucking awful world-view. What a reductive and insulting way to address the gender debate of our time. It’s the sort of fucked-up philosophy you’d hear some “nice guy” coming up with. “You women are so awesome, and powerful, and so in control of your sexuality. Nobody else out there understands how awesome you are. Except me. Now please go out with me.” No no no no wrong wrong wrong please stop.

So is there anything worthwhile in the movie besides the mish-mash of misogyny, misandry and feminism? Abbie Cornish is pretty good (though it’s sad to see her here after being so good in Bright Star), as is Jena Malone, both of whom are better at breathing life into the cyphers they are playing than anyone else in the cast, though Oscar Isaac makes a very hissable villain. Carla Gugino’s accent is… not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. The action scenes are occasionally well-staged, with some being surprisingly clear and others being a headache-inducing barrage of… splarg is the only word I can think of to describe it. The robot level was quite clever; a “single shot” that goes on for a while and flies around all over the place. There was a nice shot involving mirrors at one point, but after Black Swan – surely the most mirrored movie ever made – it was just unnecessary. Scott Glenn seemed to be having a good time. The dragon was pretty. The godawful cover versions of good songs end eventually. Erm… It was fun spotting all of the nerd iconography: steampunk, orcs, single-shot pistols, samurai swords, miniguns, etc. Sad that none of it was there for any reason other than that Snyder wanted to cover all of his bases. There’s a thesis to be written about his use of that iconography, though it would only ever get a C- at best.

The only other thing to praise is its ambition. It fails pretty spectacularly at almost everything it attempts to achieve, but it is trying to do – and say – something. That’s something that it has over just about every movie that will be released for the rest of the year. It’s just a shame that Snyder didn’t sit down and work out exactly what he wanted to say before he made this garish and needlessly complicated nerd epic, a movie that desperately wants to mean something but ultimately means nothing.