Halloween Review: Enter The Village

If you’re reading this right now, congratulations.  You’re officially the member of a cultural elite devoted to pursuing intellectual activities like reading instead of badgering your neighbors in a stupid costume late one October night.  I honestly would have put this special scary edition of The Author’s Files up sooner, but none of you reminded me that today was Halloween except my brother earlier this morning, so I was forced to write up this review on short notice over the last 12 hours.  Life is hard for a part-time film critic who insists on being timely with his posts.

The late movie ‘critic’ Roger Ebert once wrote of The Village, “(It) is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn.  Eventually the secret... is revealed.  To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.  It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream.”  Such is the dilemma of the best M. Night Shyamalan movie and possibly best horror movie ever made, that it will unavoidably divide viewers into those watchful patriots who fear “the village” itself and those narrow-minded thrill-seekers in the critical network who desperately want to fear the monsters lurking beyond this village but find their reason getting in the way.  Through clever, unpredictable writing and symbolically rich direction, Shyamalan masterfully interweaves an array of tones and themes into a film that seems not like a disjointed jumble of genres but a cohesive and powerful story that terrifies thoughtful audiences on both an emotional and a psychological level.  Far from being just a generic monster movie that the ad campaign might indicate, The Village is a harrowing, Gothic, and thought-provoking twist on the dystopian tale, drawing viewers into a small community governed by fear and constrained by deceit. All is not as it seems in this village, which one character declares has “secrets in every corner”, and those secrets are best discovered for onseself instead of prematurely absorbed through a blog review, so if you haven’t seen The Village yet, please bookmark and close this page immediately, then revisit it once you’ve watched the movie.

The titular village is a vaguely 19th century community situated on a praire that’s enclosed by an ominous and alien forest.  The villagers, by rule of a council of elders, have marked the forest’s borders with yellow (“the safe color”) flags and paint to ward off “those we do not speak of”, dangerous and territorial entities cloaked in red (“the bad color”) who separate this isolated village from the towns that lie beyond the Covington woods.  Central to the story is a trio of young friends in the village who live under the constant shadow of the wood’s inhabitants.  Lucius Hunt is a stalwart and seemingly fearless man of few words who reads prepared speeches to the elders requesting permission to brave the woods and retrieve vital medicines from the towns.  Noah Percy plays the village idiot, not so much by choice as by mental impairment, erratically shifting his focus, struggling to learn, and succumbing to violent bursts of fury.  The nearly blind but ever vibrant daughter of the village leader Tom Walker, Ivy sees through a dense and unrevealing haze but recognizes Lucius by the unique color he exudes, a relationship that has drawn the two very close over the years, though the shy man has thus far failed to express what they both feel.  Shortly after they confess their love for each other in a beautiful and marvelously underplayed scene, by a disturbing turn of events Ivy ceases to see Lucius’ color, and desperation drives her to complete her lover’s long anticipated journey through the woods to the towns, a foreign place the elders shun for its great evil. At this point, our heroine, so blind in more than just the obvious way, comes to discover that those we do not speak of, the village’s rituals, and even her whole existence have been built upon a foundation of lies, and here The Village morphs from an effective if tired experiment in using creepy sound design to elicit scares into a full-fledged, horrific assault on the audience’s mind and senses.

More so than anything else I’ve ever seen, The Village is an emphatically 1st-person film, especially in the final act, even without condescending to cheap handheld camera tricks and the other pitfalls trapping modern horror flicks that profess to unveil “found footage” of real events.  As Ivy wanders through the forbidden realm of the forest, directionless and confused, her surroundings appear to blur in front of the camera’s eye, everything dissolving into a bleak and undistinctive gray while eerie moans and sharp noises of the wild spring from no definite area.  When she emerges from a pit and finds the bright yellow of her coat masked under a heavy layer of mud, the change leaves not just her but the audience alarmed.  Possibly the movie’s most chilling scene occurs when she unwittingly walks into a clearing of red flowers and the camera zooms out overhead, letting the stark and violent brilliance of the shade illuminate the full peril of her situation.  We tremble not at the literal image but at its symbolic association, for we, like Ivy, have been nurtured for so long with symbols that we struggle to dissociate them from reality.  When she subsequently turns to her side and glimpses one of the woods’ creatures standing at a distance, we see only the glaring red of its cloak against the muted backdrop of the trees, while the rest of its body is obscured in shadow, left to Ivy and her equally blind followers in the theater to imagine.  It goes without question that The Village utilizes color and camerawork within its storytelling more effectively than virtually anything else; by refraining from disruptive angle switching in favor of lengthy, uninterrupted shots, Shyamalan lulls viewers into a kind of trance so that they overlook they’re watching a movie, and in withholding vibrant colors for the majority of the film’s run time, he makes their rare appearances even more dramatic and substantive in the narrative.  The violin-intensive score by James Newton Howard enhances the mood exponentially, helping to establish a sad and haunting world away from worlds.

But all of Shyamalan’s directorial techniques would be for naught had he been working with a lackluster cast.  A veteran of Shyamalan’s also noteworthy thriller Signs, Joaquin Phoenix is given as the star of the movie; fine though he is playing the honorable and uncommunicative Lucius, Bryce Dallas Howard is the true centerpiece of the film in the role of Ivy.  Though she was basically an unknown face at the time this was shot, she’s since come to appear in a number of high-grossing pictures, portraying, for example, one of the evil white people in The Help.  Needless to say, she’s a lot more memorable in The Village, which depends completely on her performance for the second half.  The old “watch a vulnerable and usually unrealistically sexualized woman survive terrors in a haunted place” trick has been played many times throughout history, dating all the way back to Alien, in fact, but rarely have actresses played the part with as much tact and raw credibility as does Howard, who conveys both determination and apprehension, strength and fragility at once.  That the film succeeds at inspiring horror even after Shyamalan assures us that the woods hold nothing to be feared is a testament not only to his prowess at visual storytelling but also to Howard’s force as a literally and figuratively blind woman who falters to accept the real state of things and is compelled by love to face her deepest fears.

The most frightening part of The Village, indeed, is not Those we do not speak of or the idea of becoming lost in the wilderness, but the sudden realization that one’s whole worldview and way of life have been based on a falsehood.  Whether one is deeply affected by this fear or simply perplexed by it, like Ebert, will largely boil down to the skepticism one bears towards authority figures.  The Village subtly raises many philosophical and sociopolitical questions, but Shyamalan wisely declines to spell out his verdict on them that plainly, as he unfortunately did with the spiritualist themes of Signs, which heavy-handedly pushed a rather simplistic and only vaguely theistic belief: “All things happen according to a plan/there are no coincidences.”  At its core, the movie obviously deals with the contrast between the idyllic fantasy and tragic reality; can the elders’ social experiment be morally justified, as they use deception and fear to protect their offspring from their world’s true nature, or is their retreat from civilization a moral necessity to keep men from harming each other in their self-interest?  Should we strive to “protect innocence”, and is such a goal even attainable?  Can a utopia be sustained apart from lies, and if not, can it really be called a utopia?

As with Shyamalan’s resolution to all these questions, The Village concludes on an ambiguous note, leaving its characters apparently contented regardless of whatever doubt has now infiltrated their minds.   Whether they choose to “move towards hope” and subdue that inner doubt or throw down their old beliefs to follow the gravel road towards truth falls ultimately to the individual viewer’s speculation.  The implications of those villagers’ decision are truly horrifying, enough so to make this one of the finest dramas I’ve ever seen.

Grade rating: AA (as in double-A, not Avatar: the last Airbender, which is frankly the polar opposite of this movie.  What happened to Shyamalan?

Rush to Your Bookstore

Serving humanity... and its best friend.  ~ Courtesy Fox Broadcasting Family Guy

In the grand scheme of history, books on current events have never fared too well as far as permanency and future appeal.  Whilst history does tend to repeat itself through human stupidity and historical ignorance, the worldviews and societal ills of one generation rarely correspond precisely with those of the generation directly preceding it or generations older still.  Commentaries by Mark Levin and Ann Coulter will generally soar to the top of bestseller charts and hover there for a few weeks until they and their specified grievances fade into perceived social irrelevancy, so recognized by political junkies who must keep their pulse on the constantly shifting problems and debates of their day.  So rare are the works of this genre which have lasted the test of time that I can only think of one outstanding example, viz. Thomas Paine’s Revolutionary advocacy pamphlet Common Sense.  With this in mind, the most astounding thing about Rush Limbaugh’s duo of books from 1992 and ’93 is how little they’ve aged relative to the political atmosphere of today.  The most unfortunate aspect of this phenomenon is that Rush’s media-spanning educational efforts have failed to significantly correct the United States’ self-destructive ‘Progressive’ direction, but the bright side to his books’ endurance is that readers can approach them as they would any contemporary political piece and unearth truths that apply equally to the present as to decades past.

Entitled The Way Things Ought to Be, the first of these books was written over the last year of George H.W. Bush’s presidency and concerns itself mostly with the shortcomings of liberalism, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a moderate Republican willing to enact their agenda.  However, Rush shrewdly chooses not to open his debut novel with a diatribe on politics, instead giving a detailed examination of his career and all the difficulties he faced in becoming the #1 talk radio host in the nation.  Far from shooting straight to the top of his business, he had to inch his way to the position he holds currently with numerous small advances, starting as a DJ before getting a show on WABC, surviving the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine”, and finally going nationwide with the EIB network.  Rush argues using his own history and other statistics that the American Dream cannot be handed to anyone on a silver platter or acquired instantaneously but must be earned through hard work, self-reliance, and perseverance.  From these opening chapters, the book segues from something unique into a more predictable Conservative Manifesto format, offering commentary on a smorgasbord of subjects contemporary to the 1990s, such as sexual harassment hysteria, Mikhail Gorbasms, animal “rights” and dolphin worship, man-haters/feminazis, condom distribution in government schools, homelessness advocacy, and Hollywood hypocrites, many of which persist to this day with only superficial changes. A lot of the controversies he dissects in the first book may seem outdated at first glance, as the flames of public opinion over Anita Hill, Rodney King, and the House Banking Scandal, for example, have diminished immensely over the past two decades, but in reality we see figures and outrages like these surface anew with every generation.  Herman Cain is the Clarence Thomas of today, an intelligent and principled black conservative whose reputation was unjustly smeared and slandered by, in his case, faceless and cowardly Democrat operatives who proliferated unproven and ideologically motivated attacks on his character in order to ruin his eligibility for American politics.  The Trayvon Martin racebaiting fiasco in the media also degenerated into something like the Rodney King coverage, wherein the news media edited and distorted material evidence in order to portray law-enforcement officers and not the true assailant as the perpetrators of crime.  As a result of the media’s racially driven reporting on the Rodney King affair, the defendants were subjected to a long, expensive, and ultimately fruitless judicial frenzy that yielded justice for no one, aggravated racial animosity across the nation, and allowed the true offendor to escape judgement for his violence.  Likewise, though we haven’t heard about representatives issuing fraudulent checks on so large a scale for a long time, Congress continues to put itself above the law, routinely exempting itself from the destructive legislation that it forces upon Americans and absorbing countless benefits and privileges denied to the people they rule.

If the first book recalls some isolated scandals that have despoiled politics in recent years, then the second, See, I Told You So, bears an even more striking resemblance to the Obama regime.  Barack Obama is so nearly the spitting image of Bill Clinton as articulated by Rush’s documentation that the book has essentially developed a resounding message over his last 5 years of governing: those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it, and the power-hungry will always exploit that historical ignorance to advance their interests.  Much like the current Messiah in chief, Clinton and his advisors devised a campaign strategy that in no way reflected his actual policy goals.  Masquerading as a “moderate” and a “New Democrat” who would unite Americans of all political leanings, he took great care never to honestly come out of the liberal closet and indeed campaigned on fiscally conservative promises of ending wasteful programs and reducing taxes on themiddleclass, which obviously cannot be identified by any objective standard and which probably doesn’t pay any taxes in the first place, depending on how you define said class.  Compare his statement in January of 1992 that “I want to make it very clear that this middle-class tax cut… is central to any attempt we’re going to make to have a short-term economic strategy” to his full reversal a year later: “From New Hampshire forward, for reasons that absolutely mystified me, the press thought the most important issue in the race was the middle-class tax cut.  I never did meet any voter who thought that.”  In fact, less than one month following his inauguration, Clinton was already peddling tax hikes on the very citizens he pledged to relieve of governmental oppression, all to pay for billions of dollars in new spending programs. 

This is just one of many instances illuminated by Rush where Sick Willie knowingly lied to the people so as to curry favor. Clinton insisted also that he would reverse the Bush administration’s “immoral” “racial politics” towards Haitian refugees and take a more humane position on their plight, but this too was an abject lie that he retreated from immediately upon taking office, in the same exact way that Obama decried Bush for entering expensive conflicts in the Middle East, then turned around and beat war drums against Syria earlier this year.  Clinton crony George Stephanopoulos lamented conservatives’ devotion to truth and consistency by saying, “We have become hostage to LEXIS/NEXIS.  The problem is an excess of literalism.”  Rush contends, on the other hand, that the problem is really a deficiency of literalism in the mainstream media and the public, which allow liberal politicians to escape rebuke for any falsehoods they sow or catastrophes they create.  It’s this lack of accountability which enables Obama to claim that he “will cut the deficit by the end of his first term” and close Guantanamo Bay and also to say that, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.  Period.  No one will take it away.  No matter what.”

On this note, Rush emphasizes throughout both books that words mean things, that symbolism is inferior to substance, and that the preservation of liberty and legible speech requires us to speak with discretion, using words thoughtfully with a full understanding of what they indicate.  To that end he often assumes the role of a modern-day Socrates, who implores his fellows to comprehend just what they believe and why, impeccably ripping into seemingly noble and unapproachable conceits like “raising awareness”, “the politics of meaning”, and Hillary Clinton’s “children’s rights”, defending such perceived crimes as “sexual harassment” and “discrimination”, and exposing the anti-American undertones of “hate crime”.  Rush has a knack for stripping away the heroic and demonic connotations that society has ascribed to certain words and clearly explaining what those words actually mean. E.g., in chapter 18 of Book 2, he writes:



“… liberals couldn’t care less whether a crime is committed with hatred – unless the hatred is of a politically incorrect variety.  If a murderer commits a crime based on his hatred of African Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals, probably even pornographers, he is committing a hate crime that is deserving of more severe punishment than if he murders because he hates white males or right-wing evangelists, for example…

“First-degree murder is first-degree murder.  Assault is assault.  And the full weight of the law should be brought to bear against the persons committing these offenses… Whether one does so because he hates something about the victim should be irrelevant in terms of grading the offense.  By carving out a new type of crime called a ‘hate crime’, we are delegating to the left power over our private thoughts… If government can make it a crime to be a racist or a bigot, why not criminalize other viewpoints?  Don’t be fooled by the argument that this is not an infringement of free expression because the thought is coupled with a criminal act and it is the act that is being punished… The thought itself that accompanies that act is what aggravates the penalty under these bizarre statutes.  This is the insidious way the thought police can get their feet in the door to impose the tyranny of their views on the rest of society through the awesome enforcement authority of the criminal justice system.”

As is clear from this selection, Rush writes very logically and his voice on paper is almost an unfiltered translation of his voice on the radio.  This is both a good and a bad thing.  One of the reasons Rush has ascended to the supreme throne of talk radio is that he’s very conversational, forthright, and plain-spoken. During any segment of his daily program, he gets straight to his point, whatever that may be, and presents it in a reasonable manner that any of his listeners can easily follow.  As he himself acknowledges in the opening pages of The Way Things Ought To Be, the first draft of his book was compiled mostly from interviews he made with John Fund, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, and hence the book feels like a very faithful and certainly readable extension of the Rush we hear transmitted through the airwaves.  The downside of Rush’s fidelity to his on-air schtick is that his charisma and force don’t really carry through to the written word, a fact that should already be clear to anyone who has tried reading transcripts of his shows online.  Nor is his writing style all that satisfying or sophisticated compared to the works of his neighbor in the business, Mark Levin, who’s purely argument-oriented, eschews humor almost entirely, and uses citations extensively to prove his assertions, columnist and author Ann Coulter, whose books ooze with bitterness and exasperation at liberal buffoonery, most of which is justified if suitably inflammatory, or his arguably superior fill-in host Mark Steyn, who has such a command of the English language and so keen an eye for spotting the fundamental absurdity of political discourse that I wouldn’t hesitate to call him the modern Joseph Addison.

In contrast to these three writers, Rush doesn’t include any appendix of sources or footnotes of any sort, which is a darn shame given that many of the stories he analyzes, like Tom Cruise giving an Earth Day speech after accidentally driving over a flock of seagulls for a movie, Martin Sheen declaring Malibu a haven for displaced species upon becoming honorary mayor, or Project Dignity designing custom shopping carts for homeless people so that they wouldn’t have to “liberate” them from supermarkets, are so ridiculous that the reader is left begging for more details.  Unfortunately, most of these stories are so old that they’re a pain to find and research even with the advent of Algore’s internet and its various search engines.  Rush does reference a lot of data and tables from the CBO and Treasury in his chapters dealing with Reaganomics, free enterprise, and the failures of wealth redistribution, but the inclusion of a more traditional source list would definitely lend credibility to his arguments and appease readers desiring additional information.

Still, Rush’s books are a delight to read whether one experienced the early 90s and all its woes or not, particularly because the problems enumerated here are so reminiscent of today’s headlines.  Fans of the Excellence in Broadcasting network will appreciate the many throwbacks to the program’s first days, from caller abortions (wherein Rush cut off guests with a roaring vacuum sound effect) to Dan’s Bake Sale, and those who, like me, were too young at the time to vividly recall the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years will enjoy the immediacy and 1st-person perspective of Rush’s account.  His new children’s novel Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims should arrive in my mailbox today, and I may promptly devour it just to get that nightmarish, white whale Moby Dick out of my head.  More on that and the philosophical dimensions of the color white later…

Ironic Review: Heir of Fifth Estate Won't Pay Much Tax

Marking the first Ironic Review for The Author's Files...

There are few people in the present day who can testify to building a more polarizing reputation than Julian Assange, whom some will admire as a paragon of the Constitution and a Robin Hood-like rebel and others will despise as an arrogant, unlawful, lazy leftist and a Robin Hood-like rebel.  Whatever opinions one holds about Assange’s personal productivity, there can be no dispute that Benedict Cumberbatch is a very busy individual by actors’ standards, having traced a broad career spanning theater, film, and television and touching everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock to Star Trek to motion-capture in The Hobbit of all things, mostly to commendable results.  Unfortunately, as the first of at least four movies he appears in this Fall-December cycle, The Fifth Estate will be one of the least satisfying and, like its protagonist, most polarizing projects on which Cumberbatch has worked.  Although he has previously demonstrated an aptitude for portraying complex, multi-layered characters, he is nonetheless bound by the same article that guides and influences all actors, namely the script, which can be either a blessing or a curse, in this case the latter.  The Fifth Estate boldly invites controversy by the very nature of its subject matter, but fails to give a genuinely nuanced or thought-provoking take on the real people and events that inspired it.

Conceived from a script by Josh Singer, a veteran of the great political propagandrama “The West Wing”, that was itself based on two books I won’t bother myself to read and directed by Bill Condon of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” in-fame, The Fifth Estate follows a haphazard outline that jumps around to various points in Assange’s lifetime but dwells predominantly on the years 2007 to 2010, during which he raised his creation Wikileaks into an independent news giant on the web that eventually drew headlines when it exposed numerous classified documents mostly relating to the U.S. military.  Assange sees himself as a warrior for government transparency and an informed populace, arguing that freedom of the press and the unrestricted flow of information trump laws enacted by Congress to safeguard details concerning the Armed Forces’ operations and to protect citizens from dubious terrorist threats.  “This is information the world needs to know,” he drawls.   Other players in this high-stakes, ADD-afflicted story of secrets and internet sabotage include Assange’s German partner in crime Daniel Domscheit-Berg, which is actually the real name of a real person who wrote a book about his once colleague, a couple of other forgettable hackers, and two State Department officials played by Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci, a.k.a. Caesar Flickerman in a marginally better movie.  While many of the supporting cast members have shown a distinctive pedigree in the past, their characters here are painfully underdeveloped and overshadowed by Cumberbatch’s enigmatic, convicted, and ever dangerous Assange.

Cumberbatch’s portrayal of possibly the world’s most famous leaker is one of the few things that saves the movie from total failure, giving audiences a portal into the mind of an elusive and little understood man who keeps his own secrets close but has no qualms about stealing and disclosing those of his enemies.  By little fault of his own, though, the depiction of Assange is also the most disappointing element of The Fifth Estate, as the filmmakers can’t really decide on a consistent portrayal of his character.  On the one hand it makes him out to be both a principled freedom-fighter and an ingenious technological innovater, yet on the other it emphatically suggests that he’s a mentally unstable and constantly paranoid maniac with an irrational distrust of public authority figures.  Nor does the movie have a clear and composed outlook on the expediency of the leaks themselves.  Rabid isolationist that he is, Assange insists that the U.S. government’s silence on reckless and indiscriminate warfare endangers civilians in foreign countries, but the movie simultaneously counters this claim with the security freak’s argument that secrecy is necessary to protecting American lives from unidentified terrorists who would exploit every hole they perceive in the nation’s surveillance state.  Neither side comes out on top by the credits roll, and so the viewer is left with a jumbled mess of political ideologies and themes that are roughly equal in their merits based on the script’s analysis.

Even if Universal Pictures had entrusted The Fifth Estate to a competent director and writer, the movie would still likely be doomed from the start, merely because Julian Assange isn’t all that interesting a figure, either as a person or as a political icon.  A fugitive of several countries who’s ever wandering, looking for embarrassing videos of soldiers defiling corpses, and having sex with various strangers, sometimes for longer than they consent to (although the movie doesn’t so much as probe these accusations [terrible double entendre intended]), he’s the kind of pathetic lifeform you might expect to find in the swamplands of an alien planet: a wretched, self-inflated, morally destitute, and rather worthless addition to human race.  None of the ‘secrets’ he has stolen thus far have been especially eye-opening or infuriating, and the movie largely reflects his life’s dearth of lasting achievements.  In comparison to Julian Assange, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden would make a far more compelling basis for a biopic, not only because his history is more intriguing and philosophy more defined, but also because his leaks were so much more horrifying in their gravity.  The Wikileaks founder obsesses over tax evaders and malfeasant U.S. soldiers, while the renegade in Russia single-handedly exposed not one but several undeclared and sweeping programs that continually enable executive agencies to spy on Americans without warrant in a blatant violation of the 4th amendment.  Assange is just a revolutionary-lite when examined in the big picture, concerned not so much with unmasking widespread government corruption as with igniting momentary outrage against what he sees as American imperialism.  If he were to write for a mainstream newspaper, he would probably sign onto USA Today or Time Magazine first, two papers whose diction is roughly equivalent to this movie’s dialogue.

The Fifth Estate is a mildly engrossing, if clumsily edited story as far as biographical dramas come, but it apes Wikileaks’ own reporting by leaving the audience with one burning question: “Is this a story that needed to be told?”  Such is my reaction whenever I read about a new leak from Assange, and such was my reaction when I left the theater…

Grade rating: ?

… That is, if I had actually went to the theater and paid good money to see this piece of junk.  HA!  I’m waiting for the rest of the film to pop up on Wikileaks just as the official screenplay did a few weeks ago.  In other words, this whole review was fake, just like all the events retold in this film that alleges to be based on a true story.  Quoth the Sheldon J. Plankton: Psycheth!  Irony, right?  Whether this commentary is any faker than that of critics who really sat through the movie and still got the completely wrong idea is a whole other debate, one that’s probably worth having.

Descendants Into Hell

I used to think that the sound produced in kicking a dying animal was a harsh and heart-wrenching whimper, the pain of which only increases with each successive blow. Then I saw The Descendants, a made-for-Oscar* picture that delights not merely in kicking dying animals but in kicking a dying audience relentlessly for two hours of Hawaiian drama drenched in sorrow and intense emotional conflict.  Just when the viewer thinks that the film’s state of affairs can’t get much worse, writer and director Alexander Payne delivers another poisonous draught of misery to the lives of his characters, setting them free to rip each other apart even as the impending death of a family member hews away at their consciences.  Strangely, the result of this boldly depressing narrative is not a sadistic and one-dimensional melodrama that obsesses over human death but a thoughtful and understated examination of several outwardly stereotypical characters and the relationships that bind them.  The Descendants executed a remarkable achievement by breaking almost every cinematic rule concerning a story of this subject matter, most notably the one that Thou Shalt Not Have An Unhappy Beginning, Climax, and Ending All In One, and still managing to attract a flurry of awards and nominations, rightly so.

One of the few funny parts in the movie.

Matt King is a lawyer living in Oahu who already has enough problems, being buried in paperwork because of an expiring land trust in Kauai, when his wife Elizabeth lands in a permanent coma following a boat accident.  “My friends on the mainland think that just because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise,” he narrates.  “Paradise can go (do something to) itself.”  Compelled by circumstance to take care of his long neglected daughters Scottie, a 10-year-old up-and-coming bad girl, and Alexandra, a teenage, fully-grown bad girl whose attendance at an expensive private school apparently hasn’t done much good, Matt is thrust unprepared into an alien land of active fatherhood which only grows more trying and complicated when his firstborn shares her revelation that his wife was having an affair with another man.  As Elizabeth lies wasting away in the hospital, her confused and vengeful husband forsakes his other duties to hunt down and confront the coward who partook in this heinous breach of trust, scouring Hawaii and dragging along his two descendants as well as Alex’s idiotic surfer dude of a boyfriend turned adopted brother, Sid, who nevertheless insists:

“I’m not that bad.  I’m smart.”

“You are about a hundred miles from smart.”

The final scenes, needless to say, spare to no one a Happily Ever After, and thus they initially seem abrupt and inconclusive; however, this has less to do with the movie’s own failings than with Hollywood’s great success at inuring viewers to perpetually expect uplifting conclusions which overlook the grimmer aspects of real life.

The Descendants, as a whole, is fixated on this thing called real life and draws its strength by communicating in a pure and unglamorous tone all the intricate tragedies that come with it.  None of the characters are perfect and everyone tends to clasp hatred before humbling themselves enough to forgive their enemies, the difficulty but necessity of which is one of the movie’s overarching themes.  The screenwriting is intelligent and original, never succumbing to clichés, and the acting is superb on all fronts.  As a struggling father and angry husband who was constantly occupied with business before his world dissolved into chaos, George Clooney brings a range of subtlety to a role that’s been explored numerous times, and Shailene Woodley, transitioning smoothly out of a career that had formerly spanned nothing besides a stupid TV bullsitcom, likewise instills depth and complexity in Alex where another actress might have reduced her to just another one-dimensional, foul-mouthed, and completely unlikeable teenager.  In all sincerity, I would earnestly be anticipating her starring performance next year in the movie adaptation of a post-apocalyptic, vaguely dystopian, young-adult novel with a kick-butt female protagonist called Divergent, if only it wasn’t based on a post-apocalyptic, vaguely dystopian, young-adult novel with a kick-butt female protagonist.  Nick Krause deserves a huge shout-out as a young man who masks his own personal suffering and intentions behind a veil of sloth and stupidity, Robert Forster wins a sizeble acknowledgment in the part of Matt’s bitter and grief-stricken father-in-law, and just about the whole cast merits an ample recognition for its talent.**  All the other aspects of the film’s production are exemplary, from the relaxed and methodical pacing by the editors, who naturally splice Hawaiian music into transitory sequences but wisely abstain from using it manipulate the audience’s mood in scenes with dialogue, to the spectacular Kauaian set and art design by God, which compares in beauty to anything we’ve seen in big-budget blockbusters like Jurassic Park.  Oh, wait… Still, the film is overwhelmingly somber for something billed as a comedy-drama, and while witty humor shines through briefly in scenes with the unintentionally hilarious Sid, The Descendants is definitely not in the same vein as The Blind Side or The Impossible, which aimed solely to lift audiences up rather than wearing them down (although the latter only lifts people after wearing them down to the point of exhaustion).  This is not a critique of the story itself, as I myself would argue that movies written to inspire thought are generally higher than those written simply to entertain, but it’s certainly a telling evaluation of the story’s limited appeal.

In spite of all its strengths, The Descendants does have a fair share of flaws that detract from its narrative’s impact.  Alexandra swears… a Lot, more than is necessary to establish that she’s a rebellious, ill-raised, and mourning teenager.  I had gathered as much by about the fifth F-bomb, and everything after that felt like either an attempt to shock the audience, in which case there are more positive ways to raise publicity, or to “show how teenagers really talk”, in which case there are more clever ways to depict realistic dialogue that don’t involve excessive profanity.  Call me a sexist if you like to entertain yourself with false delusions of moral superiority and political enlightenment, but I also contend that there are some things men can reasonably do in movies, like cursing profusely, getting stoned, and gratuitously beating each other up, which women as the fairer sex should not stoop to doing even in a fictional setting.  This philosophy explains why I don’t jump for joy in unison with mainstream, equality-at-all-costs movie critics when studios announce, say, Bridesmaids or The Heat, both of which prided themselves on giving leading actresses a license to do all kinds of disgusting and demeaning things which used to be reserved for their male counterparts in the industry, and it also informs why I despair somewhat to see a pretty young face like Woodley try to draw attention by spewing filth in contexts that don’t really develop her character or advance the plot.  Another possible weakness with the film is that we see nothing of the parents’ relationship prior to the crash, perhaps because Matt hints that such a relationship never fully existed due to his business engagements and personal withdrawal, or perhaps because the writers believed it wouldn’t mesh effectively with the rest of the story.  Either way, I felt that I was missing the complete impact of the loss that Matt and his family endure, as though I was glimpsing but a shadow of the sadness that afflicted them.  I could understand their deprivation on a distanced, observational level but not on a really personal one.  Nevertheless, I would much prefer a fairly detached and unassuming drama like this over a weepy and nauseatingly sentimental tearjerker that ignores meaningful storytelling to elicit a certain response from viewers.

As one might expect from any Oscar-considered work, The Descendants’ critical hype drastically overshadows its actual quality, but it possesses a richness of character development and subtlety of writing that’s rarely encountered in the modern day.  A wise and melancholy portrayal of real-world struggles, it makes no attempt to cleanly resolve the mess that faces its subjects, and is all the more profound for that reason.

Grade rating: B+

* Yes, I am aware that I prematurely ridiculed this movie, among other things, at length after the Oscars aired in 2012.  Given the opportunity to rewrite that blog post, I would probably ridicule it again, just for the ironic fact that Clooney’s character says he thinks, “You give them just enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing,” when Clooney’s actual creed is more like, “Give them just enough to do nothing, and give them much more on top of that.”

** Those are all Tim Conway Jr. Show sound bites.

*** The post title is a punny allusion to something you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re Mr. Perry.

One would think that casting such comedic legends as Jack Black of Nacho Libre and Kung Fu Panda, Steve Martin of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Three Amigos, and Owen Wilson of Weddings Crashers and The Google Movie (OK, that last one was a joke) in the same film as a trio of extremely dorky nature nuts would be a recipe for uproarious laughter; the main reason why The Big Year never delivers such comedy is that it takes so analytical and humorless a perspective on its characters’ ludicrous hobby.  Like director David Frankel’s and Wilson’s last joint venture, Marley & Me, The Big Year was billed as a comedy but occupies a nebulous space between the really funny and the really serious, never settling comfortably on a single tone.  That doesn’t make it a bad movie – after all, John Carter was advertised as mindnumbing, CG-intensive crap, though it actually had a fairly substantive story beneath its visual flair – but The Big Year is certainly an unexpected journey given the background of its stars.

The movie revolves around the exploits and ambitions of three avid birdwatchers, or birders as they prefer to be titled, competing to witness as many North American avians as possible in a single year, i.e. a Big Year.  Jack Black’s Brad Harris, whose voiceover unnecessarily runs throughout the movie, never clearly defines the distinction between doing said Big Year and doing this brand of extreme birdwatching without engaging in a Big Year, but the revelation that a fellow birder is going for a Big Year almost always yields strife and contention in the birding community.  Such is the case with Brad and Stu, a business executive nearing retirement who aspires, like his younger competitor, to unseat the national Big Year record-holder, Kenny Bostick.  “It’s Hitchcockian stuff.”  When the champion starts to fear that these two up-and-comers might seize his hard-earned crown as the world’s best birder, he ups his game considerably and travels all over the continent to glimpse the rarest of species, all but abandoning his wife at home in an effort to best his own record and retain his prestige.  Stu, for his part, remains happily married and grandfather to a newly born grandson, while Brad is recovering from a divorce that stemmed partly from his obsession with birding.  A modern dramedy like this would be neither complete nor reasonably marketable without a romantic interest, so master birdess Ellie fills the void handsomely – or beautifully, because girls aren’t handsome – and gives Brad something to think about besides the most ideal region to visit next on his literal goose chase across the country.  As the Big Years of these three competitive adventurers draw to a close, the prizes they once sought so ardently grow to be less and less attractive; their experiences mold them into better and wiser men, if not always happier ones.

The Big Year could have been much funnier had it spared more pains to mocking its relatively banal subject matter rather than to expounding it for the audience’s education, but it still works as a tried and true commentary on the things that really matter in life.  The movie essentially has two morals woven throughout the narrative: “severely indebting yourself and inconveniencing all your family members is alright so long as you’re following your heart/making your dreams come true”, and “the greatest trophies one can hope to win consist not of material possessions or prestige but of the love one shares with friends”.  The first is obviously BS, and the 2nd is a cliché, but in the era of Facebook, Twitter, and the media-sponsored clamor for fame at any conceivable cost, The Big Year resonates with an important reminder that there are better ways to dispose of one’s life than endlessly chasing after renown.   Such pursuits are vain and doomed to failure, their products buried in time with those men who earned them, according to the observation of Percy Shelley: “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair! Nothing besides remains.  Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One can only wish that this movie was as poetic as Ozymandias.  The Big Year doesn’t do anything remotely original in terms of storytelling, its normally funny cast flounders without anything funny to say, and the $40 million some idiotic ex-producer granted to this box-office dud appears to have been squandered on some of the worst effects-generated critters I’ve seen outside of Terra Nova.  Still, ridiculous-looking and expensive birds aside, this film has a long way to go before it reaches the depravity of Terra Nova.  “How many dinos have you sighted so far this episode?”  “I saw a CGI fish, a giant dragonfly, and a triceratops egg – does that count?”  “Wow. I saw a poisonous spider and a statist utopian village powered entirely by the clean energy of a single windmill, but nothing else.  You must be doing a Big Series!”  “I wish.”  

I’m done making fun of Terra Nova on The Files now.

Grade rating: B-

Once Upon A Time, This Was A Good Show

Those who have been following my mom’s blog for some time might have deduced that my family has never been an ardent viewer of scripted television (at least not openly scripted television; a swarm of Duck Dynasty maxims has gradually seeped into our everyday conversation and mother consumes an arguably obscene number of 99% fictional house/wedding dress shopping shows).  We missed Lost, we missed 24, we missed Breaking Bad, and we continue to miss both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones; when we do end up watching a scripted program devotedly, it usually falls under the denomination of classy British import (Sherlock, Downton Abbey) or classic family comedy that has no continuous, overarching plotline (Gilligan’s Island, Hogan’s Heroes, Get Smart, and other great shows loaded with racist and sexist humor that would never get past the FCC in today’s sickeningly PC television atmosphere).  ABC’s modern fairy-tale saga Once Upon A Time is decidedly divorced from each of these categorizations, so it must have been doing something exceptionally well to retain this household’s attention for a full two seasons.  Since its inception, however, the show has lapsed so far into tedium and nauseatingly complicated world-building that it will take a daring feat of conclusive and intelligent writing to wrench this ship from the whirling tides of Charibdis that threaten to consume its characters and the show itself.  Every good story must needs possess at least three components, a beginning, a middle, and an end, but OUAT is so deeply mired in the middle and focused on making every episode a climax that a satisfying end is but a distant mirage on the horizon.  History has generally indicated, not only in television but also in literature and other media, that the likelihood of a series delivering satisfying closure varies inversely with its length, and OUAT appears to be testing this theory yet again after ABC previously flipped off viewers of Lost, which coincidentally was written, produced, and acted by many of the people involved with this fairy-tale-gone-wrong.

The primary draw of the show is a spectacular if not remotely original concept that’s ripe for creative storytelling and thought-provoking allegory.  The early episodes of Once Upon A Time take a clever narrative slant by retelling a familiar fairy story as it plays out alternately in the past and the present, affecting characters in a fantasy setting just as their real-world contemporaries struggle with almost the same conflicts.  At the story’s beginning, an evil queen named Regina (ha ha, I get it – real smart, writers) has placed a might curse on the land of the Enchanted Forest, once ruled by the noble Prince Charming and his benevolent queen Snow White, which condemns all the fairy tale creatures to live out the rest of their miserable lives as amnesiacs in a small seaside town called Storybrooke that’s more or less insulated from Obamacare’s hefty tax and premium cost increases, the IRS’ political machinations, the NSA’s widespread invasions of people’s private lives, and all the other phony scandals that have erupted across America.  In all sincerity, though, it would hardly be inaccurate to state that Storybrooke is completely isolated from the nation at large, as no one can leave or enter the city except for a 30-something single mom named Emma Swann, who can travel to and from Storybrooke because she’s a child of both universes, being born to the royal family and sent to the “real world” just before the witch forcibly exiled everyone, herself included, from the Enchanted Forest.  When Emma faced an unplanned pregnancy (yet another word that needs to be added to the dictionary of New Newspeak) in her younger, wilder days, she gave up her child for adoption assuming that she’d never see him again, so she’s naturally confounded when a 10-year old boy named Henry turns up on her doorstep declaring himself to be her son.  Though Emma resists at first, Henry ultimately succeeds at dragging her into Storybrooke, where she becomes the new sheriff and discovers that her son’s adopted mother, also named Regina (the creators gave everyone in our universe an alter-ego except for her – lazy), is actually the mayor of the town.  Henry insists not only that all the fables in his storybook are historical accounts of actual events, but also that his mom is a kind of Chosen One whose destiny is to liberate Storybrooke’s denizens from the Evil Queen’s curse by reminding them of their true identities.  Emma’s gradual conquest of her nearsighted, overly literal worldview and her eventual acceptance of magic over materialism together form the basis of the first season’s conflict, making also for some remarkably stimulating commentary on the intersection between reality and fiction.  OUAT has a kind of Matrixy element underlying its surface action with the whole “What is real?” question, something that’s probably overused in modern pop culture but is still interesting to ponder in a society that scoffs at fantasy/science-fiction as the sustenance of nerds while praising the latest uber-biased documentary, historical drama, biopic, or whatever ‘based on a true story’ as a more accurate portrait of reality, which of course is anything the critics want it to be.

Although I initially thought that Once Upon A Time’s premise was the most revolutionary and imaginative thing to come by since, well, Terra Nova, which is literally and most unfortunately the only TV ‘drama’ I’d watched prior to this except for maybe a couple Firefly episodes, my admiration of the show’s false originality soured slightly when I started conducting extensive research into comic book lore and gleaned that OUAT is almost a direct ripoff of Bill Willingham’s long-running series Fables, albeit with marginally less adult content.  Still, as far as comic book adaptations come, one could certainly choose a worse series to adapt than Fables; when you think about it, there exists a theoretical possibility that some totally delusional company like Warner Bros. might choose to make a Batman Vs. Superman cross-over movie starring Ben Affleck and based on Frank Miller’s overly talky, deficiently walky Dark Knight Returns, but we all know that will never happen.  As highly derivative as it is, OUAT is at least partially successful for a triumvirate of reasons, the first of which is its strong character development.  OUAT wisely resists the temptation that has seduced many another fantasy epic, mainly the easy decision to pit flawless heroes against irredeemable villains.  The show’s creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who previously wrote episodes for Lost before moving on to script 2010’s spectacular Tron: Legacy, have imagined a world where clear good guys and clear bad guys are hard to distinguish.  Most of Storybrooke’s residents, even those who seem to be the purest of heart, suffer from dark sides that can overwhelm their reason and lead them to commit terrible acts in strained situations.  Prince Charming and Snow White are noble and kind-hearted royals who nonetheless give into their baser lusts, Rumplestiltskin is a violent and cowardly beast who constantly struggles between his love of himself and his love for others, Regina exacts revenge against innocent people for the tragedy she endured in her childhood, and so on and so forth.  No one is without wrong, yet many have been severely wronged.  The actors, for the most part, excel in capturing the conflicting emotions and desires that torment their characters, but the dichotomy between the high and low end of performances often seems like a war between angels and demons orchestrated by John Milton.  Robert Carlyle (Rumple), Colin O’Donoghue (Hook), and Eion Bailey (August, whose secret I won’t divulge, even though his character essentially got killed off a while ago for inexplicable reasons) are all superb actors, and the women overall do a good job, though the contrast between all the drop-dead gorgeous girls and their admittedly “dweeby” (to reiterate my mom’s verdict) partners in the male cast is a little jarring and decidedly unsuitable for what should be a romantic fairy tale.  On the opposite side of the talent spectrum, however, you have the guys playing Henry and Charming, who are frankly so bad that I won’t run the risk of furthering their careers by calling out their real names.  Child actors already have a bad enough reputation without someone like Henry delivering every line with the same blank stare and a vocal tone that shifts only in volume to signify moments of peril or extraordinary frustration.*  Of Charming, I’ll just say that Anakin Skywalker might finally have some real competition in the Least Romantic Actor In A Romantic Role category.

The second aspect that largely works in OUAT’s favor is its unique and dynamic storytelling approach of showing the present unfold through the prism of the past.  Most of the early episodes attempt to tell two narratives at once, one from the characters’ past adventures in the Enchanted Forest and one from their comparatively mundane lives in current-day Storybrooke, which together complement and overlap each other to give a fuller picture of the characters and their struggles.  The show is equally creative in the way it meshes figures from different fables, using Rumplestiltskin, for example, to represent not only the mischievous troublemaker of renown but also the undeserving Beast to a compassionate Beauty and the crocodile that Hook hunts with a vengeful passion.  OUAT doesn’t have a clearly defined brightline for what kind of story qualifies to enter its fantasy world, and the effect of mashing Hans Christian Anderson/Brothers Grimm into Lewis Carroll into J.M. Barrie into Carlo Collodi into Mulan (whose author, if a single one exists, I don’t care to look up) doesn’t always work, but the broad range of literary sources ultimately adds to the show’s appeal, even if the writers occasionally take heavy liberties with the original texts (gone is the Christian symbolism of Pinocchio).  Unfortunately, the show only adheres to the coinciding stories formula faithfully for the 1st season, after which the theme more or less recedes and the plot devolves into a boring and conventional narrative that just happens to focus on entirely unrelated events happening in separate dimensions.

The show’s final advantage, specifically its production design, is probably the least important of the bunch, but deserves recognition anyway.  Filled with colorful landscapes and castle settings, catching costumes, and some imaginative CG wizardry, the Enchanted Forest is certainly a pretty place to look upon which stands well above the typical made-for-TV alternate universe (again, I would clarify that my “typical” is Terra Nova).  Bad green screen abounds and the effects team never really figured out how to translate Jorge Garcia into a giant, but these are just the smallest complaints I can muster.

As for the biggest complaints, I might boil everything down to the simple fact that tonight marks the dawn of a whole new season to a story that should have wound down many episodes ago.  Now in its third year running, OUAT has amassed such a convoluted entanglement of unresolved subplots, brutally gnarled family trees, and arguably irrelevant supporting characters that I perceive no logical reason why I should commit another 45 minutes every week to unraveling the Gordian Knot that ABC and Team Kitsis-Horowitz have so tightly drawn.  Since the very beginning of the program, OUAT has entertained a perilous habit of introducing a new character in virtually every episode and leaving old characters’ plights completely unresolved.  This tactic could be sustainable for a short while on condition that the writers commit themselves to wrapping all the loose ends up in a concise timeframe, but otherwise it only ensures that the show will build up an increasingly greater deficit of trust in its audience and become ever less likely to close everyone’s story in a satisfying manner.  Similarly to the government’s devastating practice of adding another $1,000,000,000,000+ to its debt every year with no eye to the burden of relieving it in the future, OUAT has piled so many characters and conflicts onto its already onerous set of main players that it falters to give anybody a proper sendoff and thereby lighten its load.  Thus it resorts to aggravating filler techniques in order to artificially buy time until the series’ inevitable collapse/fiscal cliff/shut down/whatever you want to call it.  Season 2 was particularly maddening in the way that it separated the central heroes from each other for almost a dozen episodes, briefly reunited them, then split the party again in a lead-up to season 3, all while intimately familiarizing viewers with a new villain who appears to be a lasting character but dies abruptly after building up a dramatic presence for an entire season.  Another example of the show’s lunacy: I’m totally a card-carrying member of Team Rumpbelle (though I’m vomiting inside as I type that), but it’s hard to cheer two lovebirds on when one thinks she’s a slutty club girl for what seems like eternity and the other delights in beating up random people to ease his grief.

On top of its ridiculously complicated and overlong plotline, Once Upon A Time suffers at times from what can only be described as a serious case of moral bankruptcy.  Having grown weary of but accustomed to the rants of Free Love fundamentalists, I can tolerate some glorified depictions of single motherhood or even the perennial stereotype of the hateful Christian who doesn’t want anybody to love, i.e. “marry”, besides herself – after all, don’t such stereotypes really function more to expose the ignorance and bigotry of those who endorse them?  Still, the program crosses a red line in its handling of the Snow/Charming romance.  The problem lies in that Charming, or David as he’s called in Storybrooke, is an unhappily married man when he falls deeply in love with Snow, or Mary Margaret, and neither one of them seems to give a damn about his attachment to another woman.  Charming is comitted to standing loyally by his wife, but only in so far as she remains pregnant; in the absence of this one condition, the show’s illogic suggests that he retains a moral right, maybe even an imperative, to philander with any woman he presently desires.

The insanity starts at 0:35.  This conversation has absolutely no logical sequence of ideas.

If their whole affair wasn’t appalling enough, the show also peddles the message that it’s better to come clean to your spouse and leave her to be with the one you really love than to “live a lie” and stand by someone who just doesn’t do it for you anymore.  The way the writers handle such a tragic and sensitive issue as divorce is simply disgusting and completely inappropriate for a show that’s ostensibly aimed at families.  As a result of their adultery and unrepentant stance, it’s nigh impossible for the audience to sympathize with Charming or Snow, even after the latter gets turned into a Hester Prynne-like societal outcast.

If I had to describe a single instance at which Once Upon A Time reached a point of no return, it’d be the episode wherein Red Riding Hood joins a union of gay werewolves who fancy themselves the Lost Boys of the Enchanted Forest.  Had the production team decided not to pursue such laughable tangents, this fantasy could and should have drawn to a close once upon a long time ago.  “All convoluted plots come with a PRICE, dearie!”

Final rating: Nyehehe!

* Come to think of it, pretty much all the kids in this thing suck at acting, which is a darned shame given that Hollywood has such a vast pool of talented young stars including Hailee Steinfeld, Chloe Grace Moretz, Quvenzhané Wallis, maybe the cast of Moonrise Kingdom, and... never mind.  I can count all the good child/teen actors I know on one hand.

Side-note: Yes, I did watch the pilot to Marvel’s Agents of Shield, and yes, it was lame.  Maybe it'll get better with time, but for now I’m assuming that Agent Coulson died a noble death stopping Loki in The Avengers.