The Darkest Hour: C'mon, give it up for the B movie!

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I liked "Skyline" (2010) and I like "The Darkest Hour" (2011), and fuck off if your one of those prigs who doesn't like a good B movie. And these movies are both definitely B movies, without pretension to be otherwise, and are clever uses of small budgets. You don't go to Disneyland expecting the Louvre, and you don't expect funky, cheapie alien invasion flicks to be Masterpiece Theater. Unless you're a dick. Don't be a dick.

The Darkest Hour follows two American friends, two found American girls, a German asshole who steals the boys' website, and a cute Russian chick, through the eradication of human race by bad aliens. It's a formula, and it keeps getting repeated over and over. In "Skyline," you also have a small bunch trying to survive a bunch of invading aliens, holed up in a highrise, which itself is an admirably scrappy way of milking a whole movie out of aliens without having to spend a lot of money (they spent $500,000 on shooting, and $10,000,000 on visual effects). Darkest Hours goes a bit more upscale at $30,000,000 (probably because it was produced by that crazy Russian director of Day Watch, Bekmambetov), and actually shot in 3d, which I don't hate as much as the Cohen Brothers, but really, that would be hard to do. Thank the divinity of your choice that I could watch it in 2d.

Aliens as unintentional solution to
energy crisis?

So. The Darkest Hour has the boys fly into Moscow to pitch a website (or app, maybe?), which gets ripped off by a German kid (Dutch? Czech? Anyway, some European douche bag), presumably their former partner, who they then re-meet up with at a swank Russian disco. They meet up with two American girls (one looking like the sister of Anne Hathaway), and without much ado, the aliens attack. Sorry, the aliens attack! And part of the fun (if you're not a dick) of these movies is to see what kind of aliens they inflict on the human race. Here, the aliens are "wave" creatures, electrical somehow, who walk/fly/float around in inviso-shields and microwave the humans, sometimes directly and sometimes grabbing them with electrical cords and then pulling them into the appropriate microwavable distance. The coolness factor here is in the contortions that the dying do enroute to being powdered. It looks like the wire-work guys and stunt people had a lot of fun whipping through the air, to be CG'ed into glittery powder. ("Skyline" had people getting yanked into the sky, or sucked, vacuum-like, into the sky, and then having their brains litterally extracted. The aliens were litterally after their brains. Their brains! That's fucking funny.)

Ok. Many hip Muscovites get twistilly fried, while our heroes hide in a basement for several days, until emerging into a silent and ash-strewn city. The white ash is PEOPLE! (Soylent Green reference, what what.) They then do what all such heroes have to do, being, they must learn the new rules of the game. This they quickly do, noticing (humans are clever) that the aliens turn on electrical devices, and thus, like a light-stench, announce their presence. For unknown arcane reasons, they can't see through glass. Yeah, I know, but don't be a dick.

European douche bag, redeemed!

My wife and I watched it and tried to guess who gets sacrificed first. Yup, the European douche bag! Stupid and venal probably-German guy goes wandering out with a machine gun, then sacrifices himself in touching redemption for douche baggery, allowing our heroes to escape. Then out they go, find a Russian mad scientist type who informs them on more Rules of Game, and gives them a magic wand to stop the aliens (a gun that shoots microwaves). Mayhem ensues, they flee, find Russian soldiers who have learned how to wound the bastard aliens, then they all go through the subway, we lose a hero, then another hero (oh, wait, that was back with the scientist), onto safety, then rescue mission, then heroic destruction of several aliens, then off on a submarine as news of fighting back comes to them. Hurray, humans!

Today's Tom Sawyer, with mineral theft
in background.

Oh, and we learn that the aliens are here to mine the Earth's mineral resources.

Ok, here's the alien quibbles. And this does not mean that I don't like the movie. If these kind of movies made too much sense, then there would be a very short movie with little tension, because the More Advanced Species would simply drop toxic mold into the atmosphere and go have mohitos until all humans were dead. A little ridiculousness is necessary for conflict, but having them just be butt-fuck stupid, like the water-toxic aliens in Signs, that's just criminal behavior. Don't do that.

So, quibble one, which is the same as in my Avengers review: don't attack a whole species with foot soldiers. If your intention is to wipe out the species, as opposed to strategic political control, it is terribly inefficient to send in individual troopers. Like, hello aliens, there's 7 billion of us! It makes good screen time, but c'mon, if you made the trip all the way from timbuktu star system, didn't you have time to think through your attack plan better?

Quibble two: why does such an advanced species not have walkie talkies? When one of their members is attacked by the Russians, given how many of them we see falling from the sky onto Moscow, why don't they, like, call someone? "[Static radio crackle] This is Gor Formore, soldier ID#45678. I'm getting my ass shot off here by some of these buggers. Could maybe all you local fellow attacking alien comrades, who I know aren't fucking busy because the whole population is floating around like super-zapped popcorn--could you come swarm these bastards before I pop like a zit?" You know, our soldiers invented such strategies, uh, I'm pretty sure back in Egyptian days, so maybe better strategic protocols might be in order.

Quibble three: wouldn't it have been easier extracting Earth's mineral resources somewhere in the Australian outback, instead of all over Moscow and other major cities. I'm pretty sure the molten core/mantle/whatever (Heather said that's what they were after) exists all over and under the crust (our little scab of home...). Seems like that would have precluded some of the angry monkey reactions.

Limited sensors.

Ok, end of alien quibbles. Oh, wait, fourth quibble: again, being all advanced and shit, why haven't they developed better sensors, like ones that can see through glass, or can switch from electromagnetic to (human) visable light spectrums, and beyond that? We're vulnerable fleshy apes, easy to flash-cook, and yet we developed that tech a long time ago. Get with the times, aliens.

Now quibbles have ended. It's fun, these films, just that. Not highbrow, not sophisticated, but regurgitations of formulas that speak to basic archetypal fears and hopes of humans, much broader and deeper themes than some bio-pic or Emotional Human Drama. These films speak, crudely, loudly, often quite unconsciously, to some of the archetectual sub-structures of the human psyche, and in a way that's not all cluttered up with detailed personalities and relationships. Those simply are not the point. The point is to fill in the mold and let you experience that level of the human mind in a more obvious form.

And I love that. In this setting, the lack of "human detail" actually allows a clearer experience, in this case, of the fear of loss of control and relationship, and then the restoration of control and relationship. Aliens, volcanoes, invading Mongol hordes, viruses, doesn't matter and shouldn't matter to the watcher, because they are just the foils or forms.

So come to these movies in all their B glory, like one of those x-rays that shows a man walking, but only in his skeletal structure. Don't expect him to be all fleshed-up and anxious about upcoming taxes. Leave that to PBS and don't be a dick.

The Avengers: Dumb Aliens, Smart Film

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Ok, I'm going to get the quibble out of the way before reflecting on what otherwise is a decent and entertaining popcorn movie, with Whedon-esque flourishes.  


Here's my complaint: it's that when the aliens come to invade, they attack the whole world as if laying siege to a village.  Why are alien beings, 1) so aggro, 2) so tactically stupid, and 3) incompetent in doing their research?  First, what's with all the conquest, anyway?  E.T. may have been the liberal's version of a space alien (and frankly, much more my preference, all things considered), but why do the aliens so often just want conquest?  I mean, what do they think comes after conquest?  If you don't exterminate everyone, then you have to rule them, meaning beaurocrats, managing squads of quizlings, battling insurgents, etc.  Which brings us to two:  why so tactically stupid?  Aliens, when they attack, are attacking humans, as a race.  That means 7 billion and counting.  Most with a strain of nationalism that can easily transfer to the species en toto.  And yet the aliens come with what essentially amounts to a conventional army.  They pop out of a portal over New York, with laser thingy weapons, with armored flying worms (tanks), and little "manned" flying skiffs (humvees with guns).  And then they commence to attack, with that, the whole human race.  C'mon, "people," think it through!  Be smarter than your biceps (thingies)!  Do some research (third point):  at least watch the movies.  Even just the ones about New York, because that's the most cinematically destroyed city in America (my wife, caringly, just warned a couple friends of this, as they plan their move to Brooklyn).  But for a cheap subscription to Netflix, they can look over what their brethren have already tried and can quickly see that the frontal assault on a whole species is not very good planning, and does not speak to even cursory background research (I mean, look at "Signs":  can't aliens for whom water is toxic not attack a watery planet?  Wouldn't such stupid creatures have failed the galactic gene-weeding process by now, before reaching Earth?).  
Lesson for future alien attacks:  use a toxic mold.  Cheap to produce, hard to defend against, does not require a gazillion soldiers, and not subject (because alien) to terrestrial sanitation laws.  It's not that hard "people"!

Ok, other than that convention, The Avengers is a fun movie.  Not particularly deep, not revolutionary, not radically innovative.  But enjoyable and with beats in which the director, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog), gets to poke his head out from inside the big budget blockbuster cage and go all, "nerd joke!"  Not that it's a particularly processed, Velveeta-like production, and it makes me once again goggle at the effect one human can have on a film that gathers and organizes more resources than the annual civic budgets of many cities.  Because the film throughout has a subtle, but noticeably tone of not-so-Hollywood.  The pacing is a little unusual, not because it doesn't follow the three acts, the buildups and releases, but because it does it like a drummer playing a conventional rock beat, but then dragging just slightly the last measure.  You feel it more than see it, but it's there.  

Loki.

The story is, apparently, old hat to comic geeks, having been originated in the Marvel-verse back in the 60's.  I don't understand comic books, really.  My wife bought all the "graphic novels" of The Walking Dead, after getting turned on by the cable show, and now she reads me them as we're driving and fills in the visuals in her own inimicable style ("And then the one zombie is, like, 'argh!', and Rick is all, 'Pow," and then the woman--which one is that, this new artist sucks?--goes 'ack!'").  I think it's that the discord between the writer and the graphic artists is too jarring for my system, as well as the artwork generally being too histrionic for my tastes.  Frozen panes of scowling, I just can't take that for too long.  Given my reaction, it somehow, inexplicably, is still a popular medium (self-effacing joke, what what!).

Story:  different characters from different lines of comics come together, as organized by the Super CIA organization, SHIELD, to battle super bad Loki, who comes out of the Thor mythos (and the movie from last year or so).  He's made it back from the abyss, allied with the afore castigated aliens (who look a bit like chitanous humans, with some vague S&M overtones, and depersonalized, like they were assembly-lined rather than born--you just can't imagine them being rocked by mother alien, and later, being scared about monsters under the bed and being soothed by their parents.  Maybe that's the point, that these types of aliens are the adult equivalents of Romanian orphanage children, with kind of a species-wide brain damage derived from profoundly poor parenting and a deep misunderstanding of the neurological needs of infants for what in the imagistic realm is experienced as an archetypal Mother.  Because in humans, like the profoundly deprived orphanage children, you see deep disruption in ability to make connection, to see others with empathy, to modulate aggressive impulses through social connection.  As fascists know, you have to start beating the children early, and as all militaries know, non-conformity is dangerous.  If we look at the literature on adult attachment styles...uh...um...but I digress...)


Ok, Loki teams up with these presumably insecurely attached aliens to attack the Earth and become its ruler (and then what, Mr. Man, you want to have to deal with zoning issues?)  So he comes to Earth via the tesseract (super powerful, super high tech blue cube of power energy thingy) that SHIELD has gotten hold of, and promptly shoots a lot of red shirts in the SHIELD mega base, converts the physicist (who was in Thor) and Hawk Eye (Jeremy Renner's super archer character, who, ironically, in style and posturing, is the most super hero-y character even though his main talent is a very good aim, while the demi-God Thor is looser and funnier--my wife is all gaga over Renner, so she gave him a pass, "Because it's Renner!") via his glowy blue sharp pointy stick, and then takes off leaving the base to blow up and collapse on itself.  The growly one-eyed Nick Fury (Samual Jackson) makes it out, as does his lieutenant (cute girl).  The bad guy and unintentionally now-bad minions drive off to fix up the tessaract to create a Big Portal for the poorly parented aliens.  

he love-starved aliens.

Meanwhile, we get reintroduced to the Avengers, who consist of:  Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawk Eye ("Renner!!!").  I think that's it.  So they all come together onto a flying air craft carrier belonging to SHIELD (which is super cool to watch, and then when you imagine how much that costs, it's a bit of a metaphor for a blockbuster film, utterly outrageous and awesome at the same time), while Loki n' Friends are plotting the end of the world.  Loki manages to get himself captured (by Thor, who fights with Iron Man and Captain America, tres cool), but it's a trap, as Loki is trying to goose David Banner into going all Hulk and destroying the SHIELD ship (I think that's his plan).   But they save the ship, turn Hawk Eye back to the the non-dark side, and have a big fight in New York after the portal is open and the sad-products-of-fascistic-love-deprived aliens come pouring out with their tank-worms.  Iron Man/Tony Stark proves he's not a narcissistic dick by nuking the alien ship out on the other side of the portal, but falls back through before his comrades shut down the tessaract. Order is restored (although it's going to be unfathomably expensive to repair New York, again), and the after-the-credits scene has the whole worn out troupe eating schwarma.


As I said, it's not the structure that makes this film, although that's competently handled by Whedon and his legions of workers (I heard him say in an interview that with a film this big, the studio simply won't let you fail, though I think he meant in a technical sense, as John Carter of Mars turned out to be a black hole in that studio's ledger, although it was actually a wonderful film that should have been very successful, though perhaps they did not sacrifice the right maidens).  What makes the film is the relationships and the repartee, the same thing that makes all of Whedon's productions.  Buffy was seven years of relationship, irony, tragedy, and nerdy intelligence.  The Avengers is moments like when The Hulk and Thor are battling bad guys on the ground, and they reach the triumphant conclusion of the sequence, standing next to each other on rubble surveying their success, the Hulk suddenly punches Thor out of frame.  


Another has Loki, fighting the Hulk in Stark's new all-green tower (thanks to the granola munching Pepper Potts), stopping after getting thrown against a wall, shouting at the Hulk, something like, "Stop!  I'm a God, you are a lesser being," and then getting cut off as the Hulk grabs his feet and smashes him over and over into the floor and leaving him stunned, half submerged in concrete.  These are the little populist flourishes that come out of the essentially modernist sentiments of Whedon, where individuals get to exist very distinctly, but also struggle to build and maintain community and relationship, which they are conflicted about, but recognize they need.  So someone like Loki is held as the antithesis of these modern human values (and dilemmas), and is therefore soundly, and literally (Whedon loves his literalizations of psychology and politics) thrashed.  

Joss Whedon

But Whedon (see the review of Cabin in the Woods) also has his more unconscious, less nerdy, unstudied aspects that inevitably come out in his work, almost like they slip out of the basement and join the party while he's not looking.  One of these is the Sacrifice, which seems to be there in all his work.  In The Avengers, the overcoming of evil requires the death of the old family and the grieving through to a restored family.  Meaning, Agent Colson (Phil to Pepper Potts) gets the big zap from Loki.  In Serenity, it was the pilot and affable sidekick Wash.  In Dr. Horrible, it's Penny the girlfriend.  In Buffy, it's a lot of people over the years.  And it has punch when it comes;  the animating force is not post-modern deconstructionist fun, but rather the depth of the modern mind and its painful attempts to find, and hold onto, community in the face of manifold overwhelming challenges.


Other Whedonesque gut-punches comes in The Avengers in two forms, the 9/11 references and the Nazi references.  We see first responders helping civilians out of destroyed cars, while skyscrapers are destroyed, or ravaged by the flying worm-tanks.  There's not overt carnage shown, but we know what this means, and it's resonant with what we experienced in 9/11 that our minds (my wife says she has no reaction, but she's probably full of shit on this one--just sayin') can fill in, emotionally, the details, and flash on those memories.  OK, at least mine does, and it's a powerful, evocative thread of emotion that gives depth and resonance to what on its surface is one more urban catastrophe sequence.  The design, of course, of the New York battle is beautiful, with all the intelligent craftsmanship that the Hollywood infrastructure can bring, but the emotional power comes from those allusions and half-glances to what has been real, very real tragedy.  

The other eyebrow raising moment is when Loki extracts an eye from a doctor at a fancy pants German ball thingy, and then goes outside in front of the old German structure and tells all the terrified party goers to kneel before him.  One man stands up (Kenneth Tigar, one of a group of wonderful cameos, including Harry Dean Stanton as a security guard), an old German who must have seen the Nazi era, and says no to Loki, knowing that it will be his death.  It's the rebellion of the individual against the tyrannical meglomaniacal impulses of the virus-individual who will not be in community, but rather wishes to absorb community into self.  It's another scene in which the post-modern delights of Whedon drop away and expose, or allow to rise, another, more raw and sincere, aspect of the director and transmits an emotional power that the trappings of the scene don't really lead you to expect.  

As with Cabin in the Woods, these streams and adjacent streams--the super hero movie, the post-modern meta-commentary, and the emotionally raw statements--make what could have been another velvety construction into something much more rich, interesting, and enjoyable.  It's one of the only such films that I can think of which warrants re-watching for the details and the flourishes.  There's quite an intelligence behind what should be simply a colorful cash cow, and blessings on the producers and studios for taking the chance with the punk-nerd equivalent of an auteur.

Melancholia: A Tone Poem of Depression

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Melancholia is actually not the kind of violently anti-human cinematic war crime that I've grown to expect from Lars von Trier, the enfant terrible of world cinema, a brilliant stylist, artist, and craftsman, who I would usually want to run over with a bus, after I'd run it back and forth over the Cohen Brothers.  (You can see this revulsion in my review of Trier's Dogville, here).

Unlike his other films, which purport to eviscerate human kind in order to read the truth in the entrails, Melancholia is essentially a tone poem to depression.  Depression is something I know something about, so I can say that Trier gets it right, technically, relationally, emotionally, and symbolically.  The feeling of the movie is the felt-sense of depression:  bleak, crushing, violent, helpless and hopeless.  The conceit of the film, that a rogue planet is inexorably coming for the earth, crushing it, extinguishing life completely and irreversibly, is the interior experience of major depression.  And the saving grace of the film is that there is no claim to any final ontological conclusions.  Trier does not say that this bleak and hopeless state is the final one for humanity, nor that Justine is the model of the seer among poseurs.  Her claim to authority about the position of life on Earth is not otherwise supported or upheld by the film;  it is answered by her sister's, "Sometimes I hate you so much."

Melancholia begins with an absurdly comic scene of two newlyweds, Justine and Michael, in the back of their limo, whose driver is trying to negotiate the narrow and windy entrance way to Justine's brother-in-law's estate.  John, an absurdly rich man who is footing the bill for Justine's wedding and party, is played by Keifer Sutherland, and whose house (it's always his property, with Justine's sister Claire attached) provides the backdrop for the entire film.  Joking and embracing, the two arrive, walking, at the estate building, late for their reception.  The initial impressions of the two and their relationship quickly devolves, or rather, clarifies.  We see Justine's parents, a roustabout and neglectful, if warm-hearted, father (played by John Hurt), and a bitter, toxic harpy of a mother (Charlotte Rampling), who both take the opportunity of their daughter's big day to take swipes at each other and, for mom, at the basis of her daughter's happiness, attacking marriage as an institution.  We see Justine's blushing bride persona slip, and then crumble, first freezing, then cracking, then shattering as that single night goes on.

She tries to hide in solitude, but is dragged back into the ritual of the evening, and into what is apparently a house-of-glass relationship to Michael, who is portrayed as basically a loving, caring, and "young soul" of a man.  He tries to cheer Justine up after she retreats from the wasteland of her parental war, announcing to her in a back room that he has bought an orchard, planting young trees which he hopes she will sit under if she is feeling sad so that they may lift her mood.  He gives her a photo of the trees, explaining the type of apples.  She tries to play along, saying she'll always keep the picture with her, and then a minute later leaves the room and leaves the photo laying on the floor, forgotten or punished.  Michael looks both devastated and resigned:  we get that he's been here before, has tried to kill her demons with kindness, and lost over and over (before he leaves the estate, and the marriage, that evening, she says, "What did you expect?" and he nods).  It expresses something tragic about depression, both the demonic anti-social (anti-relationship) actions that the depressed person takes to defend themselves against contact with a corrupt and voided world, as well as the naive ministrations, and therefore painful confirmations of futility, that the caregiver tries to offer the afflicted.  Michael is a decent man, but for a depressive, he's poison.

Justine keeps trying to rejoin the community, the social web, but finds only the toxic strands.  She destroys her job and career, after her advertising executive boss (an ugly portrayal of self-servingness by Stellan Skarsgard) has his nephew dog her for a tag line to what appears to be some trivial ad image.  She destroys her marriage (or gives it the coup de grace) by fucking the nephew in a sand trap on John's 18 hole golf course.  She tries to hang on by keeping her father nearby, but he slips out to tryst with one or both of the Bettys he brought to the party, which he tells her in a note.  Mother at least abandoned her years ago.  We see why her inner life, when it spills over paste-and-glue retaining walls, spills such devastation and bile throughout her life and relationships.

Therefore it's no wonder that the second act starts with her coming back to John's estate in a major clinical depression, and being nursed by her sister in one of the endless rooms of the manor.  She has sprayed all the props of her life with gasoline and tossed the match, but nonetheless her sister pulls her out and tries to put her back together.  Meanwhile, John is reassuring Claire that the planet, entitled Melancholia, is going to fly by and miss the earth, although we've been prepped by the initial montage of near-stills (Trier uses the phantom cam for hyper slow motion) to know that Melancholia does consume the earth.  The physics of the event are absurd, but since that's not the point, it doesn't matter.  We're in the last days of life and watching it through a tiny patch of humanity, whose drama is all in the interior and in the relationships.  Until the last, obliterating contact, virtually nothing in the external world of the estate changes.

Now, Trier could have ended Melancholia with something akin to the bitter, poisonous statements of Justine's mother, and does have the following exchange that made me cringe, as I was expecting a existential sucker punch at the end.  Justine and Claire are sitting together as the inevitability of the Earth's destruction is made obvious.  It goes like this:

Justine:  The earth is evil.  We don't need to grieve for it.
Claire:  What?
Justine:  Nobody will miss it.
Claire:  But where would Leo [her son] grow?
Justine:  All I know is, life on Earth is evil.
Claire:  Then maybe life somewhere else.
Justine:  But there isn't.
Claire:  How do you know?
Justine:  Because I know things.
Claire:  Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
Justine:  I know we're alone.
Claire:  I don't think you know that at all.
Justine:  678.  The Bean lottery.  Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
Claire:  No, that's right.
Justine:  But I know.  678.
Claire:  Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
Justine:  That I know things.  And when I say we're alone, we're alone.  Life is only on Earth, and not for long.

This is a transcript of a classic dialogue between depression and "conventional mind."  It is a hate filled statement by Justine, and attacks hope and connection not because its true (it claims an authority it can't prove) but because it's functionally useful. The raison d'etre of depression is disconnection, and it achieves that by propagating and supporting futility and unexamined conviction through the system, mind, body, and heart.  Justine, the voice of conventionality, is not then the heroic antidote to the depressive bile, but represents that consciousness which is about survival and the staving off of despair. Grasping for some solace amidst the crushing of her world, having just discovered that John suicided in the horse barn, she asks Justine to drink wine with her and her son, on the terrace, waiting for their deaths.  "You know what I think of your plan," she asks, "I think it's a pile of shit."  She walks out as the camera stays with Claire, who says through her hands, quietly, "Sometimes I hate you so much."

That exchange is why Trier gets a day pass from the gallows on this one.  That, and the final sequence of Justine helping Leo, her nephew, get ready for the end.  Leo expresses his fear, saying that his father had said there's nowhere to hide or escape.  Justine says that she knows of a magic cave, and sets out with him to cut sticks, that they assemble into the barest structure of a cone, and then they enter it, and Justine takes Claire by the hand and guides her in.  They sit together, holding hands, Claire grieving, Justine accepting in the as-if acceptance of depression, and die in wind and flame as Melancholia hit the Earth.

In Dogville, the protagonist enacts revenge on humanity for its evils and weakness.  In Melancholia, there is neither accusation nor punishment, at the level of Trier's engagement with his characters, nor at an existential or ontological level.  Perhaps despite himself, somehow he let this film be merely a beautiful and scary depiction of an interior state, outpicturing that utter wasteland of the soul that is depression when it has infected the whole person and possessed them with it's anti-social heart.  There is much that Trier misses about the greater phenomenon of depression and its treatment, but with the essential felt quality of this particular human misery, he gets it dead on.

NCIS, My Love

It started while I was looking around for distraction.  I didn't mean to fall in love.  Just a little fling, a little dalliance to pass the time after work, after my neurons were stretched out like dry rubber bands, having seen clients all day.  Just poking around the recent postings on On Demand, not even the casual encounters, just the television series.  It was all innocuous. I'd gotten tired with my off and on affair with CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York;  it had gone on for years, and I'm not happy to admit it.  But I just couldn't do it anymore, with the same old crimes, the same old cities, night after night.  I just couldn't take it anymore, all right?  Alright!?

It was probably the international flavor, the tres exotique quality that finally drew me away from CSI.  It felt like a bigger world with NCIS, and then her friend, NCIS: LA, was like a Moroccan fashion model.  It just kind of happened, and now six seasons later...well, we haven't made it official, but it's definitely not a one-nighter.

I'm not feeling like I have to defend myself, but I do want to explain.  I need to explain.  I need you to understand me.  And not judge.

I love the international thriller.  It's one of my favorite categories.  I love the Bourne movies, the James Bond movies.  I even liked "The International," although surely Clive Owen is the J. Edgar Hoover of Hollywood.  How else do you explain his success except for having bugged many producer's bedrooms?

And I also love stories of functional ad hoc families.  I watched all of "Buffy the Vampire Story," and all of Joss Whedon is pretty much centered on these kind of groupings, which is more or less the story of my generation.  Adrift from conventional moorings, coming together in alleys and desert towns, forming societies out of the wreckage of the old, not yet coalescing into a new, integrated structure.  That's me and mine.

So!  NCIS, with less fan boy vibe, revolves around similar families but in particular work settings.  But the tension and rough love is still there, the backing-each-other-when-the-chips-are-down, the humor and the functional dysfunction.  Then add the involvement-with-world-affairs-and-important-stuff, and how could I refuse that third drink?

The attraction of these shows, maybe all procedural shows, is a ritualistic one.  A procedure is followed in each episode;  the same arc with inflections, riffs, and different textures...but always the same arc.  Sometimes there's a larger arc that helps hold the smaller stories, and those, like the meta arc of the X Files, are really what I love.  They are like the huge science fiction novels I used to get as a kid, thick like a massive sandwich, taking forever to get through, holding one's mind in a warm, directional embrace that bridges the childhood cultural ice fields of crevices and brittle surfaces.  With the broken suburban narrative of youth, these big, multi-faceted, and ultimately integrated stories, that moved from chaos to order, from confusion and disorientation to resolution and transformation (or at least clarification), can't you see why I was primed for this affair?

My life has a lot of inelegant and geometrically lumpy arcs, clients moving forward generally, but with many curly cues and wavy lines.  Not to mention my own, more faith-based arc.  So exposing myself to these matmatically luscious designs, episode after episode, and then savoring the different paint schemes while my social network of add ons and ad hocs is reflected without ridicule--it has a saluatory effect on the general background anxiety of modern life.  You know?

We have to surrender to our loves.  To try to stuff our love into prescribed forms, only cavorting with Masterpiece Theater, or on the other end, teenage slasher films, it distorts you, it twists you like a metal bar propping up a tank.  So I declare it:  I'm in love with NCIS (and her slutty NCIS: LA friend--don't tell her).  It's a modern love.  It's maybe a post-modern love.  It cuts against across my idealized identity.  It exposes shame, blame, rage...well, not rage, actually, a slight blush maybe.  Ok, that came from my dream last night.  Sorry.

So don't judge me.  Love me.  And my darling NCIS(s).

"The Cabin in the Woods": Negotiations with the Old Gods

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

We just set off, after a lazy Sunday morning, to see Joss Whedon's new film (as writer and producer), "The Cabin in the Woods," a film that gets odder in the aftertaste than in the viewing. Something like "Blue Velvet" is odd all the way through, both self-consciously and at the level of primary process. I often refer to that opening scene of the father's heart attack and the suburban lawn filled with savagely waring ants--that's so rich and apparent. But "Cabin" inserts or layers on the oddness at different points, and then in reflection; as I think more about it, its multiple and conflicting levels stand out more and more. It's an odd film.

At one level, it's a very clever wink-wink, nudge-nudge, postmodern deconstruction of teenager horror films (are there adult horror films? Heather says there's some: "They are much more psychological--that piece is a big part." So.). Its topic, at the apparent level, is the meta level of how these films are constructed and executed. The puppeteers who are usually behind the screen--the film makers--are put in the film, as an organization tasked with constructing these rituals of the punishment of youth, in order to keep the "Old Gods" from rising. It's a yearly thing that, in the modern context, is run by high tech, but serves the same purpose as tossing a virgin in a volcano. It doesn't then blow and ruin everything.

The ritual itself has become technological, and therefore bloodless, as the ritual priests (here, dressed in white like doctors) flick switches and watch on multiple screens, able to manipulate the characters to satisfy the rather rigid requirements of the Old Gods: one whore, one jock, one mental type, one joker, and one virgin (the virgin must be left for last, and her death is optional, not required). And they must be "punished for transgression," which seems to be a necessary form, though more honored here in inadvertent action than in intention of the characters. As the control room guard says (to paraphrase), "Isn't this a setup?" It is, and is supposed to proceed according to ritual form.

It doesn't. Surprised? It also doesn't come off at any of the other ritual sites in the different nations (though it seems it's more cultural groupings than nations per se), which puts pressure on the American team to pull through and finish the ritual. It is more or less on track until the three remaining kids--the virgin, the jock, and the brain--are driving out the entry tunnel, and it has not been, as is proscribed, collapsed. Some message never came through, and for some reason, "power was rerouted from upstairs," (as the explosives techs say later). Their escape is not sealed until the last minute.

So things are not going to plan, all over the world, with this ritual negotiation with the Old Gods. Then it gets worse as, at the celebration party at the ritual control room, they learn that the joker (a smart stoner kid named Marty) is not dead, and shows up to save the Virgin from the head Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie Family leader. They find a way into the complex of the ritual engineers, evade the guards, and when cornered in a control room, hit the Big Red Button and open up all the (clean, modern, stainless steel) containment cases, letting out humanities collected nightmares loose into the (clean, modern, stainless steel) innards of the facility. Blood and guts and horrors tear the place and its working stiff staff to pieces.

The dénouement has the Joker and Virgin in the bottom level of the facility, the stone room with the carvings of each member of the sacrificial band, that fills up with blood as they die. They are met by The Director, played by Sigorney Weaver. I don't know why, really. It works. But maybe just because she's in every other movie these days. But there she is, explaining the function of the place and their sacrifice, and why Virgin must shoot the Joker. The Virgin does seem about to do so, following the injunction of the maternal authority figure, but is attacked by a werewolf (shadow masculine?), allowing the Joker to attack the Director, who is then axed in the head by the one armed Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie daughter (her arm was eaten off by her family, if I remember right), and Joker tumbles them both into the void where the Old Gods are getting pissed. The two then sit back and smoke a spliff, deciding to let the whole thing go to hell (literally), and the last scened has a giant God Hand erupt through the cabin, fade to black, and end of human world.

Ok. Breath. Pause. One more breath. Ok, so, what was all this about, anyway?

What it was not was an exercise in postmodern meta-commentary, in the way that "Rubber," the film about a homicidal desert tire, was. It's not that clean. None of Whedon's productions are that clean or focused. "Cabin" seems to have levels of meaning and levels of the artists' understanding of those levels of meaning.

At the top is the exercise in deconstruction, the wry and ironic commentary-in-motion on the structure and function of modern teenage horror films. The archetypal characters are all presented, and put in the standard encounter with "objects from the past." I think the best reading of these genre films (and actually, much of genre film in general) is as the experience of modern minds and identity looking back at previous developmental levels and, not having yet stabilized the integrity of the modern mind (think here of WWII), looks on the last developmental level as a consuming, rapacious, heartless and cruel entity. How do you deal with the anxiety of this transition in the modern mind? In horror films, it's through and as these ritual sacrifices, tossing the young and weak to the monster, and leaving the modern aspects of mind to survive and conquer the evil. The Jock (life as physicality), the Whore (life as sexuality), the Joker (life as hedonism), and the Scholar (life as abstracted mind) are consumed, and the Virgin (who is often also sexy, physically competent, smart, and most important, heartful) survives.

That's the pattern. We are moving, culturally, and developmentally, towards more and more expression of what Ken Wilber calls the Integral stage of development, in which all these archetypal forces represented by the different kids are brought together and integrated in individuals. So the most integrated one, we want her to win and mark the way out of these negotiations with the old gods.

But that's the enactment. In "The Cabin in the Woods," the meta level is played out by literalizing this enactment. We see it as a conscious, and consciously presented, act, that has become so conscious that, within the film, it is seen as prosaic and an act of art, divorced from its bloody roots, and outside the film, is known so thoroughly that it can be represented (rather than simply enacted unselfconsciously) and its elements commented on, riffed on, and mocked.

But Joss Whedon can't seem to produce happiness. Every film of his I can think of requires a sacrifice. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series), love, relationship, and some major characters, are regularly sacrificed. In "Serenity," the ship pilot is crucified on a huge stake. "Dr. Horrible" has the sweet, wounded super villain killing his love object and actually becoming an embodiment of Evil. There's really no transformation or triumph in his work, or at least none that's not tempered by a blood sacrifice.

Down a level from the postmodern critique and fun is a kind of despair at the possibility of escaping and transforming the past. In "Cabin," the horrific past has been mollified through negotiations that ritually destroy life each year rather than literally destroy life (again, think of WWII). The Old Gods have not been understood and integrated, and thereby transformed and detoxified. Rather, they have been paused, and it's only time till they emerge and consume.

That's a bleak psychological model of human life. There has been development, of course, but only in the technological realm. From virgins being pitched into the volcano, there are now high tech rituals, sanitized and tightly controlled. There's something to be said for that, and for, given the alternative, keeping the catastrophic forces of destruction sedated. But it's not stable, and that's what the Virgin and Joker respond to ultimately in allowing the culture that's based on the consumption of its young to be consumed. Within the film, it makes its own sense.

But the meta to this meta film is this bleak picture of the heart of humans. Negotiation with evil, rather than its transformation; codification and sanitization of one's relationship to that evil, rather than integration and transcendence. Fuck it, the film says in the end, this is the system and it's all that's available, so let it burn.

At the end of the day, it's an adolescent's world view, which makes the Nine Inch Nails singing the endcap ("Last") particularly apropos. But there is an interesting strain running through the last part of the film, which adds to the oddness, because it seems to be an enactment, rather than a comment, meaning that Whedon and his director don't seem fully aware of it. Or maybe one is and one isn't and you're seeing the tension. "The world is shit!" "There is hope!" and they never worked out a resolution.

Because one wonders, why now, why are all the world's rituals failing during the same year? Why are the Japanese children able to, collectively, sing the evil spirit into a bowl of flowers and safely contain it in a cute frog? What did they do right? Did they find out, genuinely, how to transform evil in a way the ritual engineers can't conceive (there's a great image of Richard Jenkins telling the little girls on his monitor, "Fuck you, and you and you!"). These girls are not negotiating with the Old Gods, but rather, besting them. And then there's the oddly explained and not-explained failure to collapse the exit tunnel (until Jenkins manages it at the last moment). The implication is that someone or something prevented it. Why?

In other words, it's not as simple as, say, "Natural Born Killers," which Oliver Stone described as his "fuck shit up" movie. It's not simply glee in tearing down the parent's institutions and status quo, or a triumphant return of the body to what has become a bloodless (clean, modern, stainless steel) exercise that itself simply hides the awfulness of "the before." There's an odd, seemingly un-self aware, strain going through "Cabin" that reminds me a bit of the early Disney films, in which one group of artists tried to present life in the raw, and another life as we'd like to see it (watch Bambi and you'll hear Bambi's mother get murdered by men, and then it cuts to butterflies and lurid colors of Spring).

I have little tolerance for tragedy as a life view; as the astrologer Caroline Casey has pointed out, there's always a 4th act. After King Lear dies, life continues. Some peasant off over that hill has a great crop of lettuce come in, and celebrates with life-affirming orgasms with his wife. "Cabin" would be an adolescent throw away if it were only that, or if it were as left-brained in its deconstruction of the genre as "Rubber." Thankfully, it itself is not bloodless, and exhibits a rich confusion and dis-orientation in its own right that belies the preciousness of the conceit. There's something disturbing in the guts of this film, which mirrors the disturbance in the age we're traversing, and that's what makes it keep echoing out long after the popcorn is gone.

"Wanted": logic, depth, and morality...oh, what the hell, it's fun

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

"Wanted" is a film you really shouldn't like or tolerate, but it's really too goofy and stylized to give much to react to. Sure, the opening few minutes has six humans getting bullets through their heads, some in slow motion with beautiful hand crafted chunks of metal. And sure, there's probably 50 or so deaths to follow, including several ordered by an elaborate sweater-making machine. But it's all so ridiculous and odd and well done that it's hard not to at least wink at. Plus, if you were at all a nerdy, picked on 13 year old boy, the wet-dream fantasy of it is hard to put away with smug adult rationalizations.

I mean, who wouldn't want to be picked up by a uber sexy femme fatale, included in a fraternity (I never got to be in a fraternity, and the one party I ever attended at a frat house, I wore the wrong clothes and got mocked), shown how to fight and shoot cool guns, and then gets to shoot real people because a loom told you to.

That's actually about the whole story, except for the betrayal and final retribution. The structure of the movie is actually exactly that of a typical first-person shooter video game. The protagonist is plucked from his normal, drab life and given an orientation (the training period where you learn the controls and weapons). Then you have a number of unrelated challenges, here, two assassinations. Then you go after the hoards of minions, being the beautifully shot mill shootout. Then the henchmen are taken one by one in protracted fights. And finally the showdown with 'the big boss', being Morgan Freeman. (I'd love to go mano-a-mano with Morgan Freeman.)

If you saw the director's Russian films, Day Watch, etc., you'll remember the odd Hollywood-through-Russian-Eyes aesthetic: slightly muted color palette, stylized camera movements, shifts in speed, and baroque violence. And a physics engine (that's a term from video games, for non-geeks) that's half-way between here and Wiley E. Coyote. Which means, they make an attempt at explaining the magic in terms of physics--the cars form a wedge and he flies in the air; the arm is whipped in a certain way and the bullet curves--but it's basically just to look cool.

But though there are all the elements of a Western Hollywood film, there's still something just odd and foreign about the production. There are all the Hollywood icons, the chases, the wish fulfillment for thirteen year olds, but it's like an early Beatles tune played on a Sitar: there's odd over and under tones even though the melody is the same.

And just like there's a nod to real-world physics, there's a nod to real-world morality. The director strikes me as more sterilized version of Lars von Trier, a man with a masterful sense of film as a technical and stylistic medium, but the moral sense of a pre-adolescent. The morality of "Wanted," like the logic of the story, has to be seen from a certain precious angle, like that sculpture of the impossible box. It's that wire frame box that can't exist because the edges interweave, but when viewed from just the right angle, appears like a living paradox. But you step away just a bit, and the illusion is clear.

There's not much wiggle room in terms of where you stand to view the morality of this film. And the logic has as narrow a perspectival tolerance. Heather brought up the unraveling point that the loom, while it does name names, doesn't tell you what to do with the names. Maybe when Joe Smith is spelled out in binary code of missed stitches, it means go give the man a kiss. Or money. Or love to convert him from his evil ways. How did the interpretation, a 1000 years ago, that you had to kill the loomed-named, how did that triumph? Did the more compassionate weaver have to leave the room to piss during that debate?

Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant, because the director seems to not really care whether you see the illusion of it all--dare I say, threadbare quality?--because the illusion is so obvious within the frame of the film, and the little winks and nods are, um, woven into the tapestry of the film. Like in the big operatic/Matrix-ic factory floor shoot out, there's all these flourishes that play out as, "Gee, isn't this fun?!" The protagonist grabs guns out of the air from dying minions, then shoots a henchman (remember the video game sequence of challenges?) through the head and commences to carry his body as a shield, hanging off the gun that now is embedded in his head, and shoots other minions as he continues to run through the battle. Now that is, well, gross, but totally cool!

Then end has our protagonist being neither the Mariner nor the Wedding Guest from the "Rime of Ancient Mariner": he's neither relieved of guilt by sharing his story, nor sadder but wiser from hearing it. He's Wiser and Butcher, and Morally Finger Pointing to boot. His last line, after describing how he's taken back control from the Big Boss (by shooting him through the head in the same way as his father was killed) and looks at the camera, asking us what we've done lately. It's hard to think that the film would put me sitting with a distressed client, or Heather interviewing to work with under-privileged urban youth, in the same category as murdering a bad guy. But then, after he shoots the bad guy and has to go take a crap, whose going to fix his toilet if it's broken?

Zohan!

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

After our swing dance class last night, with our perky Swedish instructor Cat ("tree-pull step!"), we went to see You Don't Mess with the Zohan. I wasn't expecting much. Adam Sandler has had about one good movie and one half-funny movie (Punch Drunk Love, and Anger Managment), and a lot of dumb-ass productions, like drawn out SNL skits.

But this was not only funny in an outrageous but not heavy-handed or contrived way, it was actually very sweet. Sandler's clueless superhero Zohan, an Israeli counter terrorist agent who apparently usually works on his own because he doesn't really need anyone else (he catches bullets in his teeth and up his nose, and sticks a piranha down his pants without flinching), comes to realize that he's tired of all the fighting, and longs to go to New York to be a hair stylist. OK, funny setup which could play the macho Israeli male stereotype against the male stylist stereotype--which does get some play, but Zohan is so sincere and unaware of the stereotypes, without irony, that he comes across as rather clean and pure. When he talks with the young man whose mother takes him in, and whose mother Zohan quickly starts screwing, he sincerely tells the son how happy his mother is and how could he want anything different (apparently in Israel there's no such thing as the primal scene, i.e., walking in on your parents having sex). And he really means it, and you believe it totally. There's really not a wink-wink nod-nod in relation to Zohan. You are expected to take him at his word.

Thus what we get is something of a checking of the American ironic stance via this foreign transplant, who doesn't even understand irony and is fearless about his own sincerity. When he starts seeing hair clients, little old women from the neighborhood, and adds a little shagging at the end of his hair care, you get the sense that he really and truly appreciates these women whom American culture (and American film culture) view as hags or sexless wisdom figures. Zohan sees an inner quality of beauty and lustiness that is so obvious to him, that you start actually seeing the obviousness yourself. It's in this way that the film really tweaks some of the dehumanizing that goes on in American culture.

Not to mention what Zohan is doing with the Middle Eastern conflicts. It's essentially a pacifist and humanistic film. All of the characters (except the evil-doing mall developer and his hick-terrorist hireling) have dreams of a better life, free from conflict and inherited hatreds and divisions. The super-terrorist The Phantom (played wonderfully by John Turturo) secretly wants to sell shoes. His hatred of Israel is something given to him, and forced on him by circumstance; essentially, he wants to live a useful, joyful life doing something he loves.

Same with Zohan, the master soldier, who is tired of the constant fighting and wants to make the world "silky smooth." He also wants to serve others, not support division and dis-integration. He also wants to find his own internal integration, where he does not have to choose only one incarnation of himself, the soldier, over the lover or the servant or the artist. He is tired of only choosing a part of himself, and having his culture insist on only that part.

So in a sense, the film is upholding a cherished, and older, value of America, that you can come here and shed the Old World--the cultures of rigid relationships and inherited animosity--in favor of a life of opportunity. However, here's where the film updates this story to one of not Horatio Alger-like rising to the top, not a narcissistic climb over the bodies of your fellows, but of self-integration, the expansion of the human community to include all struggling, yearning beings. Even the hick hireling--played by Dave Mathews, in a weird and wonderful casting decision--is not killed in the end, but rather catapulted by the combined, uh, singing of The Phantom and Zohan--never done in 2000 years!--into the gay party helmed by George Takai (nee, Sulu from Star Trek). Even he is given an opportunity to face his fears through exposure to the feared community, which presents itself as both wonderfully idiosyncratic and totally human.

I am such a sucker for such films, because I so believe in and yearn for this deep healing and recognition of connectedness. And I love the archetypal nature of pop culture, how it can express in simple terms deep longing and hope. And I really love genre literature and art, in its both honoring the structure/tradition/community of life, as well as the joyous reinterpretation of that life by the artist, a conscious expression of what we all do all the time.

So, the reason why "you don't mess with the Zohan" is not actually that he's so tough and macho, it's because his essential nature is loving, and there's no way to fight that.