We Bought a Zoo: Imagine your heart in a Chinese handcuff finger cuff

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

So, a somewhat grey San Francisco summer day, and perhaps that seeped into our collective souls.  So we did what we often do on days like this:  order a pizza.  And you gotta do something while waiting for pizza, so, since also our collective libidos were similarly muted, we did what most American couples do:  "Wanna watch a movie?"

We chose pretty quickly, in what is that usually a painful process of movie selection, and settled on "We Bought a Zoo."  I thought Heather would go for "Man on a Ledge," being it has her heartthrob Sam Worthington as lead.  Who knows;  she's a complex, deep, rich, and at times capricious mind.  You learn to roll with it.

The trailer made it look like a tear-duct squeezing heart yanker, which doesn't usually draw me.  But something in this one, plus a "I thought it would suck but it really didn't" review from a friend made me pull it from the all-movies list and she bit.

Tear jerker would be a mild way of categorizing the film.  I was on the verge of tears for the whole two hours, and then wracked with sobs through the whole credits.  Now, I cried at the end of "Armageddon," so I admit to being a softie.  But you'd have to have had all your mirror neurons destroyed by the mirror neuron equivalent of an EMP bomb to not shed a tear for this one.  There's a recent widower, a young boy, a cherubic 7 year old girl, Scarlet Johanssan looking sweet and awkward and totally not sucking actress-wise, a found family (in the sense of "found art," beauty made out of random bits of detritus), and a lot of rare animals who, if not for our hero, would be euthanized.

Plus, the sound track, by an artist named Jonsi (with a few songs by Cat Stephens and others), is ethereal and seems to be tailor made to evoke both sadness and uplift.  The Icelandic band Sigur Ros (here's a sample) has a track on the movie, and if you listen to their music, you'll see what I mean.  It's oddly the right choice, both manipulative and true, giving you the experience of Benjamin's (Matt Damon's character) grief and his hope.

But beyond that, the film is so moving beyond its Hollywood schlock trappings because it actually gets into something true about human experience and grief and inevitable loss, of the simultaneity of joy and connection and loss and sadness.  That's why I, as they say, lost my shit at the end of the movie.  Sitting next to the love of my life, what was authentic that was magnified by the film was the truth that one day, either Heather or me are going to be in Benjamin's position.  There's no getting around that, and there's no contradiction with the joy of this human life.  That's what the film essentially presents, and with a rather surprising truthfulness, that life is neither joy nor sorrow, but both, inextricably and astoundingly intertwined.

Savages: Curiously Bloodless

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Oliver Stone:  he's one of these master craftsmen, like the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg, Ripley Scott, who can't produce a bad film, technically speaking, but also can't seem to see into the depths of the stories that they are telling.  All the story is there, the technical elements of making a film, the characters are interesting enough, and the plot promising.  Yet there's a bloodless quality in a film that should be much more bloody.  There's a lack of viscera in a film that should be fundamentally visceral.  But what is offered is a somewhat ugly but surface take on violence and cruelty and vicious business.  It's almost a pastiche of gangster/cartel film moments and building blocks, strung together in the prescribed way, but without...what...maybe embodying it?  Something's missing.

The setup is pretty simple:  two high school friends go into business selling extremely potent marijuana, the result of Ben's talent with botany.  Chon is the muscle for the duo, providing the occasional corrective measures when the genteel world of Laguna Beach grass business gets messy.  They apparently go along for 6 years like this, till an aggressive Mexican drug cartel, beset by business problems south of the border, begins attempts at hostile takeovers north of the border.  Chon and Ben's business comes in their sights and they're given an offer they can't refuse.  Which they refuse.  And then their shared girlfriend, O (shortened from Ophelia), is kidnapped for leverage, and the two work to get her back.  And there's a corrupt DEA agent played by John Travolta.  And Penelope Cruz plays the ruthless cartel head, who runs much of her business by Skype.  She comes north to visit her daughter, who is ashamed of her mother, and lite mayhem ensues.  And then the nominal good guys win and the nominal bad woman loses, but the creepy enforcer (Benecio de Tores) takes over the cartel with the creepy politician, and the DEA agent protects the boys and gets credit for busting Cruz.  With a strange fantasy ending before the real ending.

So, that's pretty straightforward.  Yet I couldn't really give a shit.  About the drama, the characters, the cartel chieftain who had suffered losses of her sons and husband, the DEA agent whose family is threatened, etc.  Not that they weren't potentially sympathetic characters, or that the story isn't potentially rich with both human drama and political/cultural commentary, but simply that none of that was in the film.  

For instance:  the boys, after robbing the cartel of $3 million (killing 7 cartel employees), then use their wiz-bang financial fixer guy to create a fiction about him being the leak in the organization.  That man is then tortured by de Toro's character, and when he confesses under duress, Ben is told to burn him to death.  Well, that should be high drama, right?  Ben, the Buddhist pot-head and philanthropist, has to enter the gritty underbelly of his own world and participate in an aspect he's outsourced to Chon, and what we see about his inner world is a scene where his face hardens.  That's our peek into his heart, a perfunctory conversion or baptism in violence, and on we go.  It's like the movie is a piece of music in which all the chords are played as single notes.  

Or another example:  when they go to rob the money counting operation in the desert, they bring along three or four other ex-military, and set up an ambush in which they quickly dispatch the "bad guys" (who are probably just low-level flunkies on the illegal analogue to working in a warehouse).  There's some cars exploding, and a scene where two guys walk up the road and shoot some guards.  And one of the money carriers gets shot by Chon (when Ben can't pull the trigger) and blood splashes on Ben's Mexican death mask.  And yet it plays out with a strange kind of either aloofness or detachment.  It had all the elements of something I should and in many other films would emotionally care about, but when it ended and Ben was puking out of the car, I just didn't feel much.  

I wonder if Stone got into the film making and started getting confused about what he was doing there, but contractually couldn't get out of it.  You look at, say, "Natural Born Killers" or "Platoon," or even Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," and you see gut wrenching films (in different ways), but with "Savages," you know the gut is there, you just feel it's kind of empty.  I imagine somewhere into shooting he kind of got distracted, maybe a crisis in his family, and when his minions came to him he'd just wave and nod and say, "Yeah, that's sounds good enough."  What could have been a fun and stylish genre film turns out to be a dull and lust-less exercise.