Men in Black 3

Josh Brolin does a pretty damn good Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black 3. Good thing, because the actual Tommy Lee Jones is barely in the movie, and when he is, it seems he’d rather not be. By now, Jones can do the stoic, perpetually unfazed Agent K in his sleep, and that’s more or less what he does. Brolin is a different story. Playing a younger Agent K — in July 1969, where Agent J (Will Smith) has time-jumped to prevent an alien marauder from killing K — Brolin not only brings some Jonesian dry wit to the role but suggests a fresher, more optimistic K. He alone makes MIB3 a worthier sit than the previous sequel.

Beyond that, there’s Smith doing his usual shtick as J, who you’d think would be used to extraterrestrial shenanigans after fifteen years, but who reacts to everything the same way he did in 2002 and 1997. J has somehow kept his humanity in his job, but how? How do you deal with surreal threats to Earth every day for a decade and a half and not turn into a jaded cold cod like K? The movie isn’t interested in that; it’s more concerned with its Moebius-shaped timeline, in which the alien villain (Jemaine Clement) seeks to kill K before K can implement a shield to keep the villain’s cohorts from invading Earth. J isn’t even supposed to interact with the younger K, but he’s forced to, and the movie doesn’t get into any possible catastrophic consequences that may result from J being in 1969 — or any benefits, either.

There’s an intriguing character named Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), who sees all possible futures. I almost wanted MIB3 to break off and become a mockumentary about him — his butterfly-effect way of seeing life as infinite branches that can point to glory or doom based on whether someone leaves a tip at a diner. That’s the problem with the MIB movies — they serve up fascinating concepts, but they all take a back seat to the same chase scenes, the same shoot-outs with space-age weapons. Make-up wizard Rick Baker reportedly built a bunch of retro-looking aliens for the 1969 scenes, not that we get to see much of them. Mostly we’re stuck with Jemaine Clement’s Boris the Animal, who growls and shoots people with spines launched from his palms. There are two of him, too — the one from 2012 and the one in 1969 — so he gets tiresome fast.

MIB3 reportedly cost $250 million, though it doesn’t look much more expensive than the earlier films. The 3D, as usual ladled onto the film after shooting ended, doesn’t help. At this point, I think I’d rather skip such post-converted 3D movies — generally you miss nothing by opting for the 2D screenings — and hold out for the ones designed for 3D and actually filmed in 3D, like the upcoming Prometheus. The script, by Etan Cohen and the uncredited David Koepp and Jeff Nathanson, tries for some emotional depth with the fatherless J looking fruitlessly to K for some caring and sharing, but once J gets together with the younger K that aspect gets lost, only to be rediscovered in a last-act twist.

By that point we want to see J and the older K reunited, and we do, briefly, but there’s no weight to it. I suppose the point — and, for some, the appeal — of these movies is that they’re weightless romps. In theory, and with the cast of eccentrics the MIB series have attracted with a big paycheck, the movies should be nutball classics. But most often what they boil down to is Will Smith getting flung around by some giant beast, or Tommy Lee Jones smacking someone repeatedly with an alien fish. If that’s what hits your funny bone, bon appetit. The hip, knowing backdrop of the films — their winking acknowledgment that what you suspect about aliens is true — is more interesting than the run-of-the-mill plots scampering around in front of it.

The Dictator

Most movie stars would die without a script; Sacha Baron Cohen may be the rare actor who works best without one. In Borat and Bruno, Baron Cohen disappeared inside offensive foreign characters and then let them loose on America, interacting with actual people and recording his findings. The Dictator is different in that it’s a scripted narrative (by Baron Cohen and three other writers) about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen (Baron Cohen), the capricious and preening ruler of the fictitious Wadiya. Through circumstances too contrived to bear repeating, Aladeen comes to America, is stripped of his signature beard, and finds himself powerless and anonymous on the streets of New York. How will this dictator, accustomed since childhood to having his every whim satisfied, adjust to life as just another immigrant shlub?

One problem is that he doesn’t really have to. The script could have gone one of two ways: either he goes the Henry Hill route and lives the rest of his life like a shnook, or he somehow bends his surroundings to his will even without the support of the state. The Dictator opts for the second way, and though it seems fresher at first glance, it allows for very little shading for the character, comic or otherwise. Aladeen is pretty much one-note throughout; so were Borat and Bruno, though the structure of their films mitigated the characters’ lack of growth — indeed, part of the fun was in watching the unpredictable reactions of real people to these unchanging, predictable characters. Baron Cohen and his writers give Aladeen some quirks but don’t do much for the supporting characters. The result is a lack of any real comic tension between Aladeen and anyone else.

Needing a way into the United Nations to switch places with his double before the double can declare Wadiya a democracy (I told you it didn’t bear repeating), Aladeen goes to work in an earthy-crunchy organic food store managed by the super-p.c. Zoey, played by a nearly unrecognizable Anna Faris with short black hair. Aladeen falls in love with her, and while the reasons for that are cleverly worked out, we mostly have to intuit that he’s pleasantly shocked by the very notion of a woman who speaks her mind (or, indeed, has one and is allowed to prove it in front of men). As for what Zoey sees in him, your guess is better than mine; she seems to bond with him while helping him deliver a baby, a script decision considerably less sexist than what Aladeen takes for granted, but still pretty sexist. Ah, gals will always go mooshy around a baby.

The Dictator cribs a lot from Borat in that both are about blinkered males who can’t help being sexist and racist — there’s no malice in it, it’s just the way they are reflexively. Borat, however, was used partly as an instrument to draw out American sexism and racism: he would say something offensive, and Americans would genuinely agree with him. There’s nothing like that here, so there’s no satirical bite to Aladeen’s worldview. He just behaves predictably indefensibly in scene after scene. The same point is made over and over. Baron Cohen performs with his usual gusto, but he’s acting in a self-made vacuum. If it were anyone else in the role, and if The Dictator weren’t riding on the audience good will left over from Borat and (to a lesser extent) Bruno, it’d be a complete flop.

Some oddball touches lift the satire a bit: the movie seems both amused and obsessed by the notion of powerful political figures renting the sexual favors of celebrities. (We know from the ads that Aladeen buys Megan Fox’s attentions, but the real joke is his wall covered with Polaroids of other stars, including a hilariously shamefaced former politician. There’s also a cameo by a fairly random star who must be a good sport, or a fan of Baron Cohen.) But by now, what looked like good dirty fun, a funhouse mirror pointed at America, has calcified into easy shtick. Baron Cohen can’t do his covert-op comedy any more — he’s too easily recognized — but he’s got to come up with something other than “guy with funny accent comes to America” if he doesn’t want Borat to be his peak. He reportedly has other things on deck, including a movie about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and that might be a fine vehicle for Baron Cohen’s fearlessness and high energy level. But the next time he and his coterie come up with a one-joke premise like The Dictator, they’d do well to confine it to a short film on Funny or Die — indeed, that’s how Borat, Bruno and Ali G started, in short segments on Baron Cohen’s TV show — instead of stretching it to 83 minutes.

Dark Shadows

If there’s anything remotely goth-flavored in our culture untouched by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just wait a while; they’ll get around to it. Their latest collaboration, Dark Shadows, checks off “vampire” on the Burton/Depp wish list, a mild disappointment for those of us who’d hoped to see them remaking London After Midnight someday. (People remake well-loved films all the time; why not remake one few living souls have ever seen?) Following the lead of its forebear, the 1966-1971 supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows doesn’t stop at bloodsuckers; it also throws in a witch and — rather randomly, I thought, and with little explanation — a werewolf. It is not the loosey-goosey fish-out-of-water farce the ads lead you to expect, though it’s far from serious — this may be the only live-action film I can recall in which a climactic explosion is a perky magenta.

Indeed, the look of Dark Shadows is intriguing; it’s the strangest-toned mainstream film out there right now. The stock appears slightly faded, as if it were aping both the left-out-in-the-sun graininess of ’70s cinema and the wretched video quality of the old show. It all coalesces into a uniquely anti-goth palette (and the opening credits, too, are bland enough to be part of the joke). Into the tackiness of 1972 comes Barnabas Collins (Depp), cursed to vampirehood by scorned witch Angelique (Eva Green) two hundred years ago. Freed from his coffin/prison, Barnabas shows up at Collinwood Manor, now occupied by a dysfunctional family headed by disdainful matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) shoehorn as much melodrama and subplots into Dark Shadows as an hour and fifty-three minutes can hold. I suppose they’re trying to get as much of the original show into the movie as they can. Too young to have been one of the fabled kids running home from school to catch Dark Shadows on ABC, I prepared by popping in a DVD of nine “fan-favorite” episodes. After the first one, which introduced Jonathan Frid as Barnabas a year into the show’s run, my attention wandered elsewhere. You had to be there at the time, I guess. Frid played Barnabas as a melancholy romantic anti-hero, and Depp — looking like a cross between Count Orlok in Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — follows suit; though the script makes the new Barnabas boggle his eyes at the trappings of 1972, Depp mostly stays away from easy laughs (he gets them anyway, largely with his sly inflections). He brings out the tragedy and anger of Barnabas’ situation.

Barnabas’ main antagonist is Angelique, who’s stayed around all these years to put the Collins fishing cannery out of business. I can’t quite decide if Eva Green’s scenery-gnashing performance is great or terrible or both, but whatever it is, it’s memorable. Aside from Green, this is one of the more eclectic casts in a Burton film in a while, the standout for me being Helena Bonham Carter as the live-in shrink for the troubled little David Collins. She seems to be channeling an unholy combo of Jacqueline Susann and Fran Lebowitz, with a pre-punk orange wig topping everything off. Burton certainly has found his muse.

Dark Shadows isn’t top-tier Burton, but he remains a classical director who trusts the image (some would say to the exclusion of anything else). It’s a pleasure to watch a film that isn’t over-edited, that basks in elegance. The blood, as in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd, is bright Hammer red. The movie is more or less what you’d expect a Burton Dark Shadows to be, only with less emphasis on the purple-on-black color scheme and a lot of Super Sounds of the ’70s — including Alice Cooper as himself, performing two songs at a Collins mirrorball party — fighting Danny Elfman for dominance on the soundtrack. It turns into a bit of a mess towards the finish line, but at least it’s a fun mess, and if you’re looking to Tim Burton for narrative tidiness you must be thinking of another Tim Burton.

The Avengers (2012)

The Avengers — or, as the onscreen title has it, Marvel’s The Avengers — is perhaps the most purely fun and frisky superhero movie since Christopher Reeve put on the red cape in 1978. (The Dark Knight was dazzlingly accomplished, but “fun” isn’t the first word I’d use to describe that brooding crime thriller.) Marvel Studios has been building towards this film for four years, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and continuing with The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), commander of the spy mega-agency S.H.I.E.L.D., has showed up portentously in all those movies, and here he assembles the aforementioned heroes, plus S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), to do battle with an alien army commanded by Thor’s evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Got all that?

Once the set-up is out of the way — and I’ve no idea how much of it will fly over the heads of viewers who missed the previous five films — The Avengers settles into a pleasantly lighthearted combat mode. The stakes are high, but writer-director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) never met a quip he didn’t like, and his familiarity with decades of Marvel comics shakes out as a kidding, don’t-take-this-too-seriously approach to the characters, all of whom get to be tersely witty in the Whedon tradition. This is the best writing any of these heroes have enjoyed onscreen; there’s not much of what’s pejoratively called “comic-book dialogue,” and most of that is dispensed with at the start. After that, it’s regular people with superpowers or super-tech putting on their game faces and working as a team.

For comics fans, it’s an undeniable thrill to see Captain America and Iron Man in the same frame. Additionally entertaining is seeing Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in the same frame, rubbing each other’s nerves raw and ultimately arriving at a grudging mutual respect. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, who under duress turns into the rampaging green Hulk, is deceptively laid-back; it seems Banner has developed a bit more control over his transformations, but we still get plenty of crowd-pleasing footage of the Hulk leaping around and bashing the enemy. At its best, The Avengers is like one of those giant-sized Marvel Treasury Editions they used to issue in the ’70s, with the massive conflicts playing out in clean broad daylight. At some points the swooping camera shows you two or three epic fights going on at once; everyone gets his or her turn in the spotlight.

Whedon, whose only previous film as director was Serenity, keeps the fun coming as if nothing at all were riding on it — not millions of dollars, not the hot expectations of fanboys. Whedon understands that this stuff is outlandish and ought not to be taken with monkish sobriety. Most of these heroes — including Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk — were co-created by legendary comics artist Jack Kirby (who also had a hand in Iron Man’s design). The Avengers does full honor to Kirby’s work, even if Marvel hasn’t; last year Kirby’s heirs were denied any of the billions that Kirby’s creations have generated for the company. Some people (rightly) incensed by the raw deal Kirby got have called for a boycott of The Avengers, and I do sympathize, though denying yourself the chance to see a Kirby-esque adventure writ large (and in 3D, though, as with the other 3D Marvel films, 2D is just as good) would be self-punitive and a drop in the bucket besides.

Overall, this is as smooth and sprightly a franchise machine as we’re likely to get this summer; even at two hours and twenty-three minutes it goes like lightning. It’s brawny but punches fast, yet not so fast that we can’t see anything. Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye shoots arrows into his targets without even looking at them; Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow comes out the best under Whedon’s jurisdiction, gaining a sense of humor and a similar suave disregard of her own combat skills. The Avengers never overplays its hand (though the marketing machine sure has); everyone in it is smart, using strategy rather than brute force, though the force is certainly brutal when called for. If every superhero movie we’re about to get for the next decade were as loose-limbed yet tightly-wrought as this one, I’d have no cause for complaint; they won’t be, of course, but at least this one is.

The Raven

For many years now, Sylvester Stallone has talked about directing a film about Edgar Allan Poe. He wouldn’t star in it — last I heard, Robert Downey Jr. was the favorite — but a lot of onlookers have doubted heavily that the man who directed Stayin’ Alive could do justice to a complex figure like Poe. Well, The Raven has obligingly come along to make anything Stallone could come up with look austere and intellectual. The movie puts our embattled author — lord help his poor soul — at the center of a murder mystery wherein the killings mimic his stories. Even Stallone wouldn’t have had the hubris to have Poe riding a horse while firing a gun into the Baltimore fog, but this film does.

If you’re a Poe fan, you might enjoy such details as a reference to Poe’s ill-fated wife, the princely sum he was paid for his famous poem “The Raven” (nine dollars), and an explanation of why he said “Reynolds” on his deathbed; you might also enjoy seeing Poe’s nemesis Rufus Griswold, the critic who in real life lived to defame Poe after the latter’s death at age 40, unwillingly re-enacting “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But if you’re savvy enough to spot all these things, The Raven won’t be nearly enough to keep you awake. For one thing, serious Poe fans have read any number of Poe-as-detective stories and novels, and William Hjortsberg’s 1995 fiction Nevermore also concerned a murderer patterning his crimes after Poe’s work, though it was Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, not Poe, on the killer’s trail. Now that would’ve made a much cooler film.

The Raven is coarse and stupid, pitched to the jocks in the audience despite all the chat about literature, with anachronistic profanities and turns of phrase, as when someone refers to himself as Poe’s “biggest fan.” The killer is disappointed that the drunk and disorderly Poe (John Cusack) has stopped writing tales of the grotesque and arabesque in favor of poetry and lit-crit, so he has kidnapped Poe’s sweetheart Emily (Alice Eve) and threatens to kill her unless Poe writes new stories about this ongoing case — in effect, becoming the killer’s collaborator. This premise sounds promising, but the execution is dullsville; it sorely needed a gothic sensibility like Tim Burton’s, but what it got was non-entity James McTeigue, who previously distinguished himself with V for Vendetta and Ninja Assassin. McTeigue has no apparent feeling for 19th-century America; a lot of it looks like cheap backlot or green-screen. This movie needs madness and delirium swirling around in it like fog, but all it has is fog.

If you’d told me twenty years ago that someday John Cusack would play Edgar Allan Poe, I’d have advised you to cut back on the nepenthe. But here he is, and he isn’t the problem with The Raven. He plays Poe as an arrogant elitist who knows how much he’s wasting his gifts and his life. He’s constantly broke and near-constantly drunk, though we see that he drinks to kill his pain. Cusack puts across the more objectionable bits of Poe’s personality, but as an actor he can’t help projecting decency and affability, so we perceive a tension between the mask Poe wears publicly and the wounded person underneath. Despite the dumb script he has to enact, Cusack seems to feel honored to play Poe, even in a lukewarm pastiche like this, and he commits himself.

If you like Cusack and Poe, my advice is to rent The Raven someday and tune everything else out. That includes the non-actress Alice Eve, who couldn’t convey gravity if you dropped her off a cliff, and the unimaginative score by Lucas Vidal, and the dull Heath Ledger clone Luke Evans as an inspector on the case, and the way one sequence evokes the terror of “The Masque of the Red Death” only to climax with some dude on horseback with a note. “The inventive or original mind,” wrote Poe in a glowing review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, “as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter.” The Raven displays neither.

Marley

It’s weird to see Bob Marley without that iconic thick head of dreadlocks, which he called “my identity.” Near the beginning and end of the epic documentary Marley, we do indeed see a closer-cropped Marley — in his youth, when he was covering American hits like “A Teenager in Love,” and close to death, when chemotherapy had ravaged his identity but not his spirit. The latter is a tragic sight, the former sort of comic. One revelation, for a casual Marley listener like me who hasn’t dipped into the zillion or so biographies written about him, is that Marley didn’t emerge fully-formed. Once upon a time he was Robert Marley, a kid trying to do something with “What’s New Pussycat”; like Richard Pryor, whom he resembled in those pre-dread days, he took a while to find his own voice. Once he did, the serenely ecstatic sound of it moved millions.

Marley is a family-approved documentary (Marley’s oldest son Ziggy is one of the executive producers), co-produced by Bob’s own label Tuff Gong, so if there were any truly troubling aspects of his personality — aside from some anecdotes about his competitive streak, expressed best in his full-tilt foot races against his toddlers — we don’t hear much about them. He comes through when he speaks for himself, most often subtitled for the benefit of Western ears that can’t decipher his light patois. By and large, many other heads do the talking for him. In the end, the songs explain him most eloquently. We hear bits of dozens of them, including the dorm-room standards “Could You Be Loved,” “Stir It Up,” “Jamming,” and “No Woman No Cry.”

If that last song is true, Marley must’ve cried a lot. As the film tells us, he fathered eleven children by seven women; only three were with his official wife Rita, who more or less looked the other way as Bob welcomed a wide variety of lovers, including one-time Miss World winner Cindy Breakspeare. (Even a German nurse who treated Marley near the end tells us there was “a spark” between them.) When asked if Marley was charming, one woman looks bemused and answers “D’you know Bob?” Actually, we don’t, not really. When a man who only died 31 years ago inspires biographies numbering in at least double digits, it speaks of a man who was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Marley buys into the view of him as a humble Trenchtown kid who became the voice of the poor and disenfranchised not only in Jamaica but worldwide. (The film reaches a climax of sorts during footage of his 1980 performance at Zimbabwe’s Independence Day.)

A little bit is made of Marley’s mixed ancestry: he was the son of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a white Jamaican father. After visiting the father’s construction offices and being turned away, Marley wrote “Cornerstone” (“The stone that the builder refused/Will always be the head cornerstone”). We get a sense of a much more complex figure than the hagiography of the film is really equipped to deal with: even at two hours and twenty-four minutes, Marley feels like a well-rendered sketch, but still a sketch for all that. It’s smoothly drawn, though (and nice-looking: one of the cinematographers was Christopher Nolan regular Wally Pfister); director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) does manage to suggest the turmoil Marley rose out of and seemed to be a part of despite himself. Pressured to come down on one side or the other during a particularly fraught conflict between the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party, Marley demurred, only to be shot in 1978. Soon after, he came out at his scheduled One Love Peace Concert and showed off his scars to the crowd.

“Holy Wound of the Left Arm of my Bob, I adore thee…” Well, the movie doesn’t go quite that far. The more relevant comparison would be to Achilles, though it was Marley’s toe, not heel, that started giving him trouble in 1977, portending the malignant melanoma that would later infest his entire body. This was thought by those close to him to be more of a caucasian disease than a black one, so if you take that all the way, the white man in his very DNA killed him. The movie doesn’t do much with this irony, nor the added irony of Marley’s sojourn to a holistic clinic in Germany, which barely a generation earlier would’ve treated an ailing Jamaican far less gently. Marley recounts a short life that seemed to straddle worlds and eras, and perhaps the definitive portrait will never be filmed or written. Until it is, though, there’s always the music.

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods destroys itself. You don’t see very many movies do that, especially movies that open on 2,800 screens. It shows you the machinery inside itself, and then blows up the machinery. It’s a horror movie about horror movies; it destroys horror movies, too. It’s a bit on the cold side, as a lot of clever films are. It’s a semester of horror tropes packed into 95 tight minutes, with sidebar snark about bureaucrats. It’s the work of two wise guys — writer-director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon — sitting in the back of the classroom, snorting disdainfully about the cheap stuff horror movies scare us with but also admitting that the cheap stuff is fun. The Cabin in the Woods has too much on its agenda to be truly scary (though it has its moments), but it’s the most fun I’ve had at a horror film since Trick ‘R Treat, which also toyed with horror clichés. It’s a big gift bag handed to horror fans with a cheerful invitation to root around inside.

Cabin starts out mysteriously, at an antiseptic facility manned by blasé techs. In the first of the movie’s really good jokes, we freeze-frame on a dull shot of two of the techs — played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as regular-guy mad scientists — and the movie’s title comes up, in huge, red, screen-filling letters. But where’s the cabin? Where are the woods? It seems designed to confuse the uninitiated. We get the cabin and the woods soon enough, as a quintet of college kids go off for a weekend. Goddard and Whedon sketch them in for us with quick, deft strokes — the jock (Chris Hemsworth), the virgin (Kristen Connolly), the party girl (Anna Hutchison), the stoner (Fran Kranz), the brain (Jesse Williams). They don’t know that they’re in a horror film or that they represent very familiar horror-film types.

That’s about all you should know going in; there are surprises beyond the obvious twist given away in the first five minutes. I can try to be oblique, though. Horror is chaos encroaching on order: when an idyllic summer afternoon drive becomes a nightmare, to quote the opening crawl from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or when the boogeyman comes, as in Halloween. In this movie, the horror is precise and controlled — the horror is order. And eventually, when true chaos arrives to scatter that order, horror fans everywhere will break into a wicked grin, and perhaps laughter. It’s as though the collective ghosts of horror past focused their wrath on the man-children and idiots who have held horror hostage for years with boring, derivative stories, remakes, sequels: this is the Whedon film that should be called The Avengers. And maybe it’s just me, but I thought David Julyan’s score kept threatening to turn into Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” otherwise known as the ooh-spooky pipe-organ music from 1962’s Phantom of the Opera and a hundred others.

Aside from how it plays roughly and relentlessly with what we expect from a horror film, does Cabin work as, well, a horror film, or is it a meta-essay like Funny Games? Goddard and Whedon aren’t into punishing the audience for what we came to see, what we want to see; that isn’t their game. They would, however, like us to think about why we come to see and want to see certain things in a horror film — why horror filmmakers work so hard to appease our base appetites for destruction. Their project goes deeper than a comparatively shallow exercise in deconstruction like the Scream franchise. That said, yes, the movie does work as an example of what it’s examining; it’s a bit like Alan Moore’s Watchmen that way, in that it looks under the hood while acknowledging that the rusty, oily engine still runs, otherwise why bother looking at it? People still stupidly isolate themselves and die violently, and that still works our nerves the same old way.

God Bless America

In his new black comedy God Bless America, writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait vents about some of the cultural detritus that annoys him — or, given the typical lead time for low-budget indie cinema, the stuff that annoyed him a few years ago. American Idol! Spoiled reality-show princesses! People who chat on their cell phones during a movie! People who take up two parking spaces! Fuck those people, amirite? At the risk of sounding like one of the trendoids Goldthwait despises, this is all so 2004 (at the very latest). The movie does gesture at more recent irritants like the Tea Party, but even that reaches back a few years, and the bit about the Fred Phelps-style protesters might’ve felt fresher if Kevin Smith’s Red State hadn’t scooped it. God Bless America isn’t a bad movie, but it’s a step back from the more daring material Goldthwait’s been doing, like 2009’s World’s Greatest Dad, or even his directing debut, 1992’s criminally underrated Shakes the Clown.

Joel Murray, Bill’s younger brother, is Frank, a sad sack who gets fired and learns that he may have a brain tumor. Even before that, though, Frank is fantasizing about storming into his cretinous neighbors’ apartment and blowing away their incessantly crying baby with a shotgun. He’s obviously unstable and ready to pop, and a night of channel-surfing through the various outrages on TV squeezes his mental pimple. Frank seems to fixate on a Will Hung-type contestant on an American Idol-like show as proof that America has become a nation of cruel, vapid bullies. While stalking an insufferable reality-show brat, Frank meets a teenager, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who’s as disaffected as he is. For a while, Roxy might be Frank’s imaginary friend, spurring him on to a killing spree, though that possibility ends when a cop sees her in Frank’s stolen car. Too bad, because that might’ve been an interesting touch.

We spend most of our time watching Frank and Roxy platonically hanging out in between killing annoying people. The killings are presented in such a deadpan, facile manner — these two don’t murder in the heat of rage, they just coolly execute the rude — that I kept thinking it was all in Frank’s head, especially since the pair go so long without getting caught despite carrying out most of their crimes in broad daylight in a bright yellow car. How literally are we meant to take the killing spree? Sometimes Goldthwait seems to intend Frank and Roxy as avatars of his and our own disgust, particularly when he gives Frank lengthy, vituperative speeches that sound like Goldthwait talking. It’s probably cathartic as hell for Goldthwait, but a lot of the targets, as I said, are made of very stale straw.

Here’s the problem: Aside from the fact that many of Goldthwait’s pet peeves aren’t exactly up-to-the-minute — which means God Bless America is dated now and will only get more so — only someone in the foulest mood would define an entire country by passing fads and fringe idiots. I kept waiting for Frank to exhibit some icky, troubling behavior (other than killing folks, of course) that would discomfit us for enjoying his crimes. Joel Murray occasionally lets his face go dangerously slack, looking like the stone psychos we see on TV after a mass murder, but mostly Frank’s presented as a regular schmoe who goes rogue. I hate to say it, but Observe and Report was a lot more disturbing — yes, a major-studio film starring Seth Rogen was edgier than a Bobcat Goldthwait film that begins with a man daydreaming about killing an infant. That’s partly because that film was subverting what the audience expected from a Seth Rogen flick and partly because Rogen’s rage was both organic and non-specific. And I guess it isn’t Goldthwait’s fault that the unbalanced-dude-with-grrl-sidekick thing was done so recently, and better, in Kick-Ass and Super.

I don’t hold Goldthwait’s past as a funny-voiced stand-up comedian and Police Academy regular against him. I think he’s one of the most original comedy directors we’ve got. He’s done bold stuff before, and I hope he gets a chance to do it again, but God Bless America feels like a project he got the money to make from some like-minded financiers — yeah, man, stick it to those American Idol judges! (The shot at a Simon Cowell-style judge seems kind of forlorn now that the actual Cowell’s been off the show for, what, two years now?) And by the time he got behind the camera, the anger had dissipated — that’s the problem with directing your own rage-fueled script you started writing years ago; it’s hard to sustain that level of bile for so long. So we don’t feel Frank’s fury, nor are we horrified by his actions. We don’t feel much of anything, and that’s not something I ever expected to say about a Goldthwait film.

The Moth Diaries

Rachel Klein’s well-regarded 2002 young-adult novel The Moth Diaries plays with the perceptions of a disturbed girl, whose father committed suicide. At the boarding school she attends, she encounters a dark, mysterious girl, Ernessa, whom she believes to be a vampire. Unnamed in the novel, the heroine is presented as an unreliable narrator, and her fear and dread can be explained as a melodramatic girl’s cracked filter on such hot-button issues as anorexia, sexuality, and the love that dares not speak its name. But movies aren’t as deft at ambiguity; they literalize everything they show us, or, at least, a movie as squarely conceived as this one.

The Moth Diaries is atmospheric but very slight. It’s supposed to be about a girl, here named Rebecca (Sarah Bolger), who must fight the psychological pull of self-annihilation. The supposed vampire (Lily Cole, looking like Carroll Borland in 1935’s Mark of the Vampire) seems to know everything about Rebecca’s tragic past, and beckons her to death in various dream sequences. Ernessa also befriends Rebecca’s BFF Lucy (Sarah Gadon), gradually draining her essence, or so it appears. All of this could still come across as ambiguous, and the writer-director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page) is certainly no stranger to warped narratives about self-deluding protagonists. But Harron seems on autopilot here. What’s missing is the allure of death, whether this is an actual vampire film or a psychodrama about a girl who’s read too much Dracula and Carmilla in her fiction class.

The movie runs only 82 minutes (including credits) but feels twice as long. The usually reliable cinematographer Declan Quinn (Leaving Las Vegas) tamps his palette way down, shooting everything through drab blue filters. Harron doesn’t edit to move the film along — she just lets each scene dribble to a conclusion. After the early scenes, which establish some sort of normalcy between Rebecca and her friends at the boarding school, the movie loses all humor and attends to Rebecca’s increasingly emo mood. We’re stuck with rote, tired stuff about rigid schoolmarms and a professor (Scott Speedman) who admired the poetry of Rebecca’s dad and seems to have a fixation on her. Or does he? The problem with a movie this unimaginative and amorphous that tries to be ambiguous is that we’re not sure how to take anything it shows us. Ambiguity becomes meaningless game-playing.

The young Irish actress Sarah Bolger tries hard, but as written Rebecca is too boringly straight-arrow to make us feel that her mask of sanity is about to slip. (Compare The Moth Diaries with Neil Jordan’s underseen masterpiece The Butcher Boy for an instructive lesson in how a fragmented adolescent mind can be conveyed on film.) Ernessa, as written here, has no personality other than the weird traits that Rebecca can construe (or misconstrue) as supernatural. In a night scene, Rebecca and another friend witness Ernessa apparently passing through the closed glass window of her bedroom. The movie seems to forget that once it establishes that someone other than Rebecca has seen something that can’t be logically explained, the ambiguity is dead and we’re looking at a lukewarm teen horror film. Mary Harron, who hadn’t directed a feature film in six years, must have been attracted to the book’s is-she-or-isn’t-she narrative. She doesn’t seem the type to jump onto the Twilight bandwagon (though Klein’s novel preceded Stephenie Meyer’s). But she toys very feebly with this story’s elements, ending up with a goth version of the god-awful lesbian boarding-school drama Lost and Delirious, only without the eroticism. In a movie full of blood fantasies and predatory intentions, that’s a big “only.”

The Hunger Games

To those scandalized by the kids-on-kids violence in The Hunger Games: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The movie, based on the first in Suzanne Collins’ young-adult dystopian trilogy, will clearly make enough bank to justify adapting the subsequent two books, and the third book, Mockingjay, is shot through with nightmarish war imagery: a man’s legs blown off, another man melted by some sort of death ray, the gory limbs of children scattered everywhere. Before we get there, though, there’s this first entry, which has been handled with a certain amount of taste. The brutality, when it comes, is glimpsed fearfully, not lingered over. The titular Hunger Games, which pit 24 “tributes” from ages 12 to 18 against each other in a vast arena, don’t look remotely fun. There’s very little triumph or exultation upon killing someone, just a sickened relief that someone else is dead and you aren’t. Yet.

I was unprepared for how quietly engaging, almost contemplative, The Hunger Games is. I enjoyed Collins’ books, narrated by sullen heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who enters the Games in the place of her younger sister Prim (Willow Shields). We’re in some horrid far-flung future where America has been divided into poverty-stricken districts (Katniss is from District 12, the coal-mining segment) under the iron rule of a fascist government operating out of a central, one-percenter-filled Capitol and headed by the vicious gray eminence President Snow (Donald Sutherland, looking as though he wants another cat to kill as in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 but having to settle for a Katniss). Katniss goes to the Games with another boy from District 12, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who secretly loves her and then lets millions of viewers in on this on TV. Yes, everything’s on TV. But will the revolution be televised?

Katniss’ glum, matter-of-fact narration from the books is gone here, and maybe the movie could’ve used it. Director Gary Ross, who worked on the script with Collins and Billy Ray, tries to do as much without words as possible. I frankly don’t know how much of the movie will be clear to non-readers; with Katniss’ first-person-present-tense inner monologue gone, nobody explains to us why Peeta seems to throw in with some brutal “career” tributes, and the urgency of Katniss’ having to keep up the “starcrossed lovers” ruse between her and Peeta seems undercooked. A lot of the movie, in fact, is under-emphatic; it seems to take its cue and tone from the mournful twang of the score by T-Bone Burnett and James Newton Howard. The narrative itself guarantees suspense, but Gary Ross seems consciously to disregard excitement in favor of bedraggled burnout.

Jennifer Lawrence is in almost every frame, and she communicates the Encyclopedia Britannica with tiny shifts in expression. She has to, because Katniss, who’s from stoic coal-miner stock, doesn’t talk much. The movie, which still tips the scales at two hours and twenty-two minutes, doesn’t have time to get into the culture and politics of the Capitol; we somewhat lose track of Katniss’ mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and advisor Effie (an unrecognizable Elizabeth Banks), though Gamemaker Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), hardly seen at all in the book, gets more screen time than I expected. It’s all on Katniss’ shoulders, and Lawrence carries it with quiet grace. Her scenes with Amandla Stenberg as Rue, a tiny young tribute who allies with Katniss, constitute a fine mini-movie in themselves.

The Hunger Games has its problems — according to the movie, the corpses of the fallen tributes seem to be just left there to rot, instead of being airlifted immediately as in the books, which removes some urgency from a scene in which Katniss has to salvage a bow and a quiver of arrows (Katniss’ particular set of skills) from a recently stung-to-death tribute. But Ross doesn’t seem overly interested in the logistics of the arena or in gladiatorial thrills; he stays inside Katniss’ emotions and perceptions (most effectively in a trippy passage when Katniss herself is stung and hallucinates). I should say for the record that the thought of teenage girls, as well as many others who are neither teenage nor female, responding so readily to the story of an honorable, heroic and self-sufficient girl warms me far more than the thought of teenage girls swooning over a love triangle between a non-entity, a sparkly vampire and a werewolf. The Hunger Games stomps the Twilight saga flat, and though I found those films somewhat amusing, this one is the real deal, pointing the way for two sequels that will get much more real and give the mass audience food for thought about violence, war, the power of the 99%, propaganda, and the truism that until everyone is free, nobody is free.