Generation Baby Buster

The hero of the Canadian documentary Generation Baby Buster is Lenore Skenazy, a columnist who made the mistake of trusting her nine-year-old son to ride the New York subway by himself, and then made the further mistake of writing about it. The mistake lay in doing these things in an era of overprotective helicopter parenting. Skenazy was pilloried far and wide, and in response she has become an advocate for “free-range” parenting. Her point is that it’s actually safer for kids now than it was in the days when parents let their kids run off by themselves; the difference is that the media hammers on the perceived dangers without any perspective or rationality.

Skenazy is one of the featured interviewees in Generation Baby Buster, among several others (mostly women) who talk to filmmaker Terra Renton about why many women hesitate to have kids today. We hear a few possible explanations, most of which sound plausible. Renton herself isn’t sure she wants kids, and she isn’t sure why she feels that way. Isn’t she supposed to want to be a mom? Isn’t being a mom the highest level of womanhood? Aren’t kids the best thing that could happen to a woman? Well … not necessarily every woman.

The movie is fairly apolitical, and it doesn’t really fall on the anti-kids side. Mainly it speaks for choice, and notes that much of the pressure on young women to have kids, and then to be the “correct” kind of mother — selfless, anxiously protective, living solely for the kids — comes from other women. A woman who chooses to be child-free is often judged as selfish; child-free men generally aren’t subjected to the same judgment. But even when women become mothers, they are supposed to be endlessly happy and grateful for it, unlike mothers of past generations who felt free to grouse about their kids to their friends. These days, a mother admitting her annoyances to other mothers might be frowned on.

Renton keeps the movie active and engaging, with quick-fade editing, a bit of animation, and brief silent dramatizations. The many toddlers are filmed even-handedly: some are cute and funny, some are loud and gross. The experts who have written the books we see on Renton’s shelf are mostly older people who remember when things seemed simpler for parents. The consensus seems to be that well-meaning (and largely upper-middle-class) parents in the Western world have complicated parenting needlessly. I think Lenore Skenazy nails it when she blames the “if it bleeds, it leads” nature of what passes for journalism now. The news has been reduced to a klaxon of DANGER! DANGER! that deafens everyone and keeps parents and kids alike in a constant state of fear.

Into this culture of smothering paranoia come women like Renton, wondering if she would make a good mother, or if she even wants to be a mother. Simply to ask these questions in the current climate is itself heroic. Renton doesn’t say nobody should have kids. If you want them, have them, and have fun. What she does say, eloquently, is that asking those questions, and acting accordingly, should be viewed as equally valid as having kids. The unspoken question, though, is this: If motherhood is such an important and beautiful thing, why do so many mothers allow this free-floating societal anxiety to rob the experience of its importance and beauty, leaving only stress and a sense of futility?

Eat with Me

Eat with Me began life as a short film (2003’s Fresh Like Strawberries), and maybe it should’ve stayed one. The story really doesn’t gain from being expanded to feature length. Emma (Sharon Omi), on the outs with her husband, moves in with her gay son Elliot (Teddy Chen Culver), who owns a failing Chinese restaurant. Mother and son have never properly talked about his sexuality. A lot of stuff happens that feels like padding. Elliot gets a Brit boyfriend, Ian (Aidan Bristow), who’s in a band. Emma hangs out with Elliot’s extroverted neighbor Maureen (Nicole Sullivan) and gets high on ecstasy by mistake.

This is a personal, somewhat autobiographical film for its writer-director David Au, who doesn’t run a restaurant but whose parents did have some of the same troubles Elliot’s parents do. It’s a shame that Au doesn’t pull anything especially compelling out of his experiences. Like many other indie filmmakers, Au makes his living by editing, and some of Eat with Me feels a bit over-edited — not in terms of speed but cross-cutting. An early sequence goes back and forth between Elliot’s tryst with a friend-with-benefits and Emma in Elliot’s apartment finding his beefcake magazines. All this accomplishes is derailing any erotic rhythm (this is a fairly chaste movie, fading to tasteful black when things start heating up).

Sharon Omi and Teddy Chen Culver also starred in the earlier short film, and they acquit themselves calmly and well (except when Emma freaks out on ecstasy). The expanded cast, including a pregnant server whose condition affects the plot not at all, tends to distract from what should be the central conflict — the confused Emma dealing with Elliot’s sexuality, and Elliot dealing with his parents’ estrangement. Maureen, the next-door neighbor, is too baldly conceived as The Wacky, Life-Affirming Neighbor, and comedic actress Nicole Sullivan often goes too big in close-ups or makes weird noises. The effect is that Maureen seems to be trying to monopolize everyone’s attention, including ours.

Eat with Me was shot, unaccountably, in a very wide format, which seems too overbearing for such a tiny movie. Au doesn’t use the wide frame terribly artfully, and the color scheme is drab more often than not. Towards the finish, for no apparent reason other than that the filmmakers could get him, George Takei shows up as himself, counseling Emma on gay matters, because presumably he’s the expert on being gay and Asian-American. Takei brings some theatrical brio to his few minutes, but the marketing is pimping the poor man as though he were a supporting player throughout. For full metal Takei, I refer you to the mild but affable documentary To Be Takei. For a great Asian foodie movie that deals with identity and family, I recommend Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, which David Au cites as his favorite film. At least he has good taste in movies.

Mad Max: Fury Road

And so we return, after a full three decades, to the post-apocalypse as rendered by George Miller. Same as it ever was: Miller’s beloved original Mad Max trilogy, fronted by Mel Gibson, was a frenetic hell of sand and blood and lawless freakazoids, and the tradition continues in Mad Max: Fury Road. Gibson’s Max, one felt, was mad in both popular senses of the term, angry and insane. The rather more soulful Tom Hardy, inheriting the role, conveys only the insanity. Someone else holds the anger this time. There it is, right in the title, evoking “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.” Even the heroine is named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). This Mad Max is about female rage in the face of warlike male dominion.

I don’t think Miller sat down intending to craft an action-flick SCUM Manifesto; he probably considered it a cracking good yarn, which it is, one that deviates from what he’s done with Max before, which it does. The plot is simplicity itself: Furiosa rescues five young women from the grandiloquent warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). They had been kept for breeding purposes, and one of them bears Joe’s child; now they are on the move in Furiosa’s massive war rig. Joe’s minions, a pack of powdered baldies called the War Boys, take off after them, and one of the Boys, the sickly Nux (Nicholas Hoult), is hooked up to Max, feeding off his blood. Joe and his people — his whole way of life — are premised on using people like disposable product. Furiosa is conceived in opposition to that.

Much of the action is real, not sculpted in a computer, and Miller gets a properly caffeinated vibe going by speeding up the frame rate — some of the motions look jerky, impatient. Where the pacing is more jagged, the images, courtesy of veteran cinematographer John Seale, are rich and bronzed and fierce — the hues pop, the compositions have rock-solid clarity. Technically, as pure cinema, Fury Road is masterful, unimpeachable. It deals in the lost art of readable, exciting set pieces; the editing is a hell of a lot more “cutty” than it was in Max’s prior outings, but Miller still manages to root everything in plausible physicality.

The movie is getting slightly overpraised for this very reason; by doing what action cinema should be expected to do, it has earned shiny gifts of rhetoric from a grateful nation of movie geeks. Expect fun, excitement, thrills, and surprisingly relevant subtext; ignore most of the hype telling you it’s the sun and the moon. Besides, some of the action is rather obviously computer-enhanced — a dust storm so chaotic, with multiple tornadoes, that we wonder how anyone survives it — and some of it is a bit samey and repetitive, which has been a problem with this series from the beginning; the constant roar of engines becomes almost a lullaby.

The freakiness elevates the film. Maleness is represented mostly by cultish deformity, death’s-head zombies looking like Kurtz’s Montagnard spectres near the end of Apocalypse Now. Femaleness, when not roughly used for reproduction and milk, seeks to get back to an idyllic sisterhood in the greenness of nature. In the middle of this is Max, and the hyper-masculine Mel Gibson wouldn’t have worked as this particular in-between avatar — Tom Hardy, with his full lips and yearning eyes mitigating his punchy features, carries enough femininity to place him naturally opposite Immortan Joe and his despoilers. Hardy is content to hand the movie over to Charlize Theron, who gives a no-nonsense performance eloquent in its silences. Talk is bad in these movies, as if language were as scarce as water and petrol, and were to be hoarded as violently.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared

“It is what it is,” says the dying woman to her young son, “and it will be what it will be.” That’s as apt a mission statement as any for the Swedish comedy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, in which the young orphan grows up to be Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson), the titular centenarian. Allan drifts through the decades in a narrative that flips between past and present, bringing him into contact with Franco, Stalin, Oppenheimer, Truman, Reagan, and Einstein’s less intellectually gifted brother Herbert.

About all that links the historical anecdotes is Allan and his fixation on blowing things up, which endears him to warmakers the world over. Allan has no politics, though. He just likes to make things go boom. He’s a bit of a moral imbecile, which in this darkly shaded epic satire qualifies him to last out the 20th century. In the present-day sections, Allan has been cooling his heels in a retirement home after blowing up a fox that killed his cat. He can’t bear to face his 100th birthday in this place, so he just leaves, picking up a mob-owned suitcase full of cash along the way.

It doesn’t occur to Allan to turn the money in to the authorities; he and his new friend Julius (Iwar Wiklander) just decide to keep it, and the low-level gangsters who come after it tend to die in comical ways (accidentally frozen, sat on by an elephant) that Allan can’t be held responsible for. Allan just continues to drift, untroubled, through his newly eventful life. The stakes don’t seem very high, but I guess that’s what makes this a comedy. We never worry about Allan or his acquaintances. Director Felix Herngren keeps the tone deadpan and absurdist, which I suppose is more palatable than heartwarming and sentimental. Allan is never softened for our consumption, and Robert Gustafsson, a massively popular comedian in Sweden, gives Allan a lackadaisical, shrugging vibe throughout his often violent encounters.

I laughed a few times, but the movie didn’t leave me with much, possibly because it sets itself up as satire but then has nothing much to say. It’s not enough to goof on historical events and their famous players; then you just have farce. Again, a man with little regard for human life — he looks at the atomic bomb as just another thing that goes boom — is being positioned as the great winner of the 20th century, but that seems to be all that’s going on under the hood. We’re supposed to chuckle at Truman’s naïvete when he says that the bomb will end all war, or at Reagan’s buffoonishness when his rant about a garden wall is mistaken for a hardline position on the Berlin Wall (it’s the worst Reagan imitation I’ve ever seen, by the way), but this is schoolboy stuff. The 100-Year-Old Man is currently the number-three biggest hit in Sweden of all time, which doesn’t speak well of a country that once produced Ingmar Bergman. It’s comforting, I guess, that America isn’t the only nation with falling cultural standards.

The Film Critic

The only thing more boring than a movie about movies is a movie about a movie critic. I mean, come on: we are not, as a group, enchanting. We do a lot of sitting: we sit and watch movies, we sit and write about them. We are as dull as any other kind of writer, and with the exception of Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael (subjects of past and future documentaries) or, in the realm of music criticism, Lester Bangs, critics are not movie material. There was that ridiculously pandering bit in High Fidelity when John Cusack referred to an ex-girlfriend’s gig as a film critic as “unassailably cool,” but no. It’s not. Maybe it used to be, back in the glory days of the ’70s, but not now.

The Argentinian comedy-drama The Film Critic seems to take place in some alternate universe where people still care what critics think and a harsh review can end a filmmaker’s career. (I’d say the movie is set in the past, but modern tech is used throughout.) The eponymous critic, Victor Tellez (Rafael Spregelburd), mopes from screening to screening, complaining about the overused clichés in most movies, particularly romantic comedies. He sits with his androgynous niece Agatha (Telma Crisanti) and roasts the usual Hollywood endings featuring slow-motion running, kissing in the rain, and so forth.

Then Victor meets a woman, Sofia (Dolores Fonzi), who wants the same apartment he wants. At this point, the movie could go one of two ways. It could follow the lead of the film’s American tagline: “What if your life became a movie … that you hate?” Or it could blandly nod to the clichés but put nothing interesting in their place. The Film Critic goes the second and less engaging way. After all, we know quite well that life isn’t a movie. A movie telling us over and over how non-movie-ish its events are seems a bit like special pleading. That Sofia is more or less a non-entity doesn’t help; we don’t know what they see in each other or why they keep each other company for a while other than that they’re in a movie.

Writer/director Hernán Guerschuny apparently thinks the answer to boringly conventionally-structured narrative is boringly anti-climactic narrative. Whatever is introduced in the script, nothing seems to come of it. A moneybags of Victor’s acquaintance offers him money to write a script for him to turn into a movie; nothing comes of it. A filmmaker whose career Victor ruined becomes an eleventh-hour mustache-twirler who breaks Agatha’s heart; nothing comes of it. The city is presumably littered with the corpses of cinematic careers Victor’s withering prose has butchered in their cribs. I don’t know if that’s what it’s like in Argentina, but in the larger world, nobody kills movies except the merciless and largely tasteless whims of the market. Critics can assume neither credit nor blame for the failure of terrible movies, the success of great movies, or, more frequently, vice versa.

The Film Critic could have been a meta-fantasy in which a cynical critic does find himself inside a clichéd Hollywood story that he either loathes or grows fond of. But it isn’t; Victor neither loves nor hates his own story, he just shlumps around inside it. He’s never especially witty or appealing; I don’t think he ever even smiles. He’s a dull protagonist, film critic or not. We don’t care whether he ends up with the equally dull Sofia; the only character of more than passing interest is the niece Agatha, and she gets the short end of the narrative stick. If a movie called The Film Critic is not to be a red cape waved in front of film critics, it should probably be unassailably cool.