Capsule Reviews: A Perfect Getaway, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Marnie

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway is a lean, juicy thriller with a twist so good that not even an hour's worth of teasing it saps its effect. "Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii, right?" says one character during the film's placid opening, though even then his voice betrays doubt, and Twohy's sweeping panoramas of lush forests and beaches communicate remoteness and isolation as much as postcard-ready beauty. Steady long takes let the murmurs of a double murder on a neighboring island sink into the frame visually, casting shadows on its small but dynamic cast of newlyweds and lovers who come to fear for their safety. The actors do their part too, with Steve Zahn's nervously darting eyes suggesting first humorous discomfort, then mounting dread, and Milla Jovovich getting the best opportunity outside one of her husband's films to show off her enigmatic poker face reactions. Perhaps best of all is Timothy Olyphant, almost endearingly arrogant as a "man in full" (as his girlfriend calls him) When the other shoe drops, Twohy's stately, patient direction obviously shifts into a higher gear, but this only shows off other facets of his skill. A chase through the forest is subtly propelled further by comic-panel-like screenwipes that elide over a few steps to give the sequence even more momentum. The final showdown manages to consolidate even the characters' relationships into its tense payoff. (A sidenote: stick with the streamlined theatrical version over the director's cut, which adds most of its extra time to a key flashback, nice and nasty in the original version but overlong in extended form).

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957)

My first Tashlin, though God knows why. This film plays like Amazon's "recommended for buyers of ____" feature for the entirety of my film-watching habits. From its deliriously cheeky credits, featuring both Tony Randall incompetently introducing the film and a host of leg-pulling fake ads, Tashlin wastes no time setting the frenzied tone of the farce. Tashlin's use of color and light makes artificial voids out of his sets, further emphasizing the mock construction of filmic images and how these false icons become social objectives for viewers encouraged to buy their way into a movie- and TV-approved lifestyle. As much peevish delight as Tashlin gets out of sending up advertisers, however, he also uses Rock Hunter to critique a society that gets its cues from advertising and pop culture, creating a Mobius strip of behavioral influence between pop and life that cheapens both. It ranks among the most pointed social commentaries of American life in the aftermath of World War II through the present, and even its lack of overt cynicism helps it embody the foolish, avaricious optimism that propels our self-image.

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

Given Tippi Hedren's recent, public revelation of her torment at Hitchcock's hands, it is almost unsettling to consider that this film, taken with Hedren's other star turn in The Birds, contain some of the director's most rounded, sympathetic views of women. (Granted, this is saying nothing, but still.) Marnie privileges its female protagonist's perspective entirely, its flashes of humming red and shimmers of fake lightning, as Robin Wood once perceptively said, throwbacks to the director's early and formative exposure to German Expressionism. Admittedly, it's a shame Hitchcock did not have the faith in either his own talents (or, more likely, the audience's capacity to piece things together for themselves) to let these visuals speak for Marnie's mindset, but the mad, brilliant excesses of the film help keep the film moving where, say, Psycho grounds to a halt. From its early close-up on a purse made to look blatantly vaginal through the disturbing scene of marital rape between Sean Connery and Hedren, and its aforementioned cinematized explanation, this is one of the master's greatest films.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

I only ever saw a piece of Niels Arden Oplev's original film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's exposition-heavy bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Barely 10 minutes into watching it from start to finish, I wish I'd left it that way. Replicating all the source material's overreliance on plot and painstakingly spelling out not merely every event but every feeling, Oplev's film omits Larsson's ocasional grasp of atmosphere and the tease of his parceling out of information. I'm still working through the book, but so far I've found Larsson at least playful enough to, from time to time, have a character acknowledge the long-windedness of the speech and backgrounds. Oplev, however, recreates without wit, and his direction manages to feel plot-heavy even when no one is speaking.

Looking like the miniseries it actually is, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo frames its chilled cold case mystery in flat, serviceable terms. Much as thrillers hinge on a sharp screenplay, they ultimately require great direction, great coordination of cinematography and editing, to stand out. Oplev's film feels like Masterpiece Theatre, not a sinister, gripping, immediate experience. At 150 minutes, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is long but still within the realm of potential suspense. But Oplev's pedestrian assembly cannot even faithfully recreate the fits of tension within Larsson's own book, much less add any of his own with the aided power of cinema.

The director does find a saving grace however, in the form of Noomi Rapace. Her Lisbeth Salander doesn't look as unorthodox as Larsson sketches the character, her stylish hair and piercings giving her a more attractive look. But Rapace plays the character with such masculine aggression and emotional coolness that her goth pin-up looks take on the intended harsh edge of Salander's sociopathy. Back her into a corner, and Lisbeth will fight back, sheer strength of will and righteous misandry overcoming even the strongest, most violent male. But there's less of Lisbeth's other side to Rapace's performance. Salander can be, well, not fragile, exactly, but displaced, someone who is fiercely independent and self-sufficient yet, in many ways, unable to function. Rapace gets the toughness of the character but not these deeper facets.

But Oplev insists keeping focus upon the technical protagonist, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who is even more unengaging here than in the novel. There, at least, we had a grasp of his credentials and talents, even if they were mainly laid out in exposition, and the character served to air Larsson's grievances as a daring journalist in an increasingly mollified and blindly obedient field. Here, Blomkvist displays just enough competence to find his way to Lisbeth when she deliberately leaves a hacked trail back to her so simple my mother could track her down. Lisbeth is the clear star of the series, with her vigilante retribution and genius intellect casting her as a viscerally effective superheroine, and Blomkvist proves so useless without her that his scenes feel like mere padding.

The narrative, of an old capitalist titan hiring Blomkvist to uncover the truth of his beloved niece's 40-year-old disappearance, allowed Larsson to delve into the themes he held dear as a journalist: the aforementioned sorry state of journalism, Sweden's extreme right sect, and an abhorrence for violence against women ingrained in the writer after helplessly witnessing a gang rape as a teenager. Oplev covers this terrain but gives no dramatic oomph to any subject, never selling the disgust that rolls off the page when Larsson broaches each topic. And it seems tragically obvious in retrospect that the one artfully arranged moment of the entire film involves Lisbeth's treatment at the hands of her legal guardian, the use of obscuring close-ups and tinkered-with sound mixing for the one moment that would have benefitted from Oplev's banal, matter-of-fact staging.

Likewise, the director's other flashy touches, reserved chiefly for flashbacks of both Lisbeth's and Blomkvsit's childhoods, only reveal his fundamental limitations as a shooter. Scenes simply start and stop without any sense of construction, especially before the two leads team up and editor Anne Østerud simply cuts haphazardly between their storylines. It's hard to believe that a longer version of this film—by a full half-hour—exists, as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo could use with more than that amount of trimming. I'm slightly worried to see that David Fincher's version sports the same running length, but frankly, the rapidly edited trailers for the upcoming remake sport more atmospheric, evocative tones than the whole of this interminable slog.

Valhalla Rising (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2009)

If one were to play the old "X meets Y" game of critical shorthand, one would have to plot Nicholas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising along several other axes. Unequal parts Apocalypse Now, Aguirre and, of all things, Stalker (this reference actually supplied by the director), Valhalla Rising creates oneiric abstraction out of bluntly realistic primitivism. A far cry from the epic, glorious tone of swords-and-sandals films, Refn's meditation on the meeting point of barbarism and religious fervor depicts not the raw energy and codified nobility of man's first hints of civilization but of the unformed rage and atrocity that truly defined the early man. But then, the Greeks and the Romans came long before these Celts and Norsemen, and Refn leaves the social effects of early Christianity hanging in the air as we see a world far more primitive and savage than the supposed heathens who practiced their idolatry.

Divided into six parts, the film initially presents no story at all, and for a long stretch, no dialogue. Instead, we are treated the the sight of tattooed Viking slaves pounding each other into mulch for the amusement of their captors. Amusement may be the wrong word: unlike the cheering throngs of bloodthirsty Romans, these tribesmen watch their slaves beat, bash and strangle each other with impassivity, as if this were some kind of perfunctory act, just some way to pass the time. It almost looks like the barbaric equivalent of discussing the weather. Even the worrying proficiency of the slave One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) at destroying his opponents prompts little more than water-cooler chat, as it were. When One-Eye gets a hold of an arrowhead that allows him to break free of his bondage and slaughter his captors, their brief flashes of overwhelming fear mark the first emotional beat of the film.

This opening segment is the highlight of the film, a grim, muddy closed loop of clacking chains, howling wind and the wet thump of fist on flesh. No story arises from this first part, but then One-Eye has no use for a narrative. His only dramatic motivation is to stay alive, and if he has to snap a stranger, maybe even a fellow tribesman's, neck or beat in a head with a rock, he'll do it. Crystal clear imagery captures the craggy, desolate hells of untamed Britain with desaturated imagery, emphasizing the cold, black mud in which the slaves fight and the half-frozen, nutrient-less vegetation that clings to its own meaningless life in this foggy, frigid terrain. Only the modicum of kindness a boy shows to One-Eye alleviates this sense of overarching inhumanity, but not even that can do anything to soften the edges of this uncomfortably crisp view of brutality, a brutality that reaches its peak when One-Eye manages to free himself and take his revenge.

After One-Eye's escape, he and The Boy stumble across a band of Christian Crusaders looking to sail for the Holy Land. The clan's leader (Ewan Stewart) invites the two to come along, clearly desirous of One-Eye's strength. The chieftain even promises that the warrior's sins will be forgiven, ironically through yet more killing. This change of pace introduces something approaching a narrative into the film, but Valhalla Rising still moves on with its atmospheric drift. The cold sharpness of Britain's windswept hills gives way to a fog-drenched voyage at sea, mist obliterating visibility past a few feet. Refn alternates between a hallucinatory, brown-red tint that gives the fog a hellish hue and a silver-gray, ghostly luminescence, the obscured sun making everything bright but still obscured. Directionless and without food, the men begin to fear for their lives, and Refn shows the breakdown with cold precision. There are no screams of panic, merely whispers of curses and superstition, growled orders to dispatch those who might be dooming them all and swift, dispassionate defenses of the targeted blights.

When One-Eye's visions tell him they've reached fresh water, the fog dissipates and reveals not the arid sands of the Middle East but the coniferous expanse of the New World. But in a movie where fear and single-minded dedication to brutish life are the only concretes, the rich possibilities of this new land induce only panic and more superstitious infighting. Refn enhances this bewilderment and unease by stripping the lush terrain of game and fruit, leaving only leafy trees to blot out visibility, and to conceal territorial natives from the confused, vulnerable Vikings as the steady fall of arrows begins to confirm their belief that this mockingly fertile land is Hell itself.

Morten Søborg's cinematography, aided by the Red One camera's range of possibilities, finds a balance between Alexander Knyazhinsky's contrasting styles in Stalker: desaturated, tinted shots emphasize black mud and pallid flesh, but color bleeds in in dream-like fashion even before the stylistic shift when this ragtag group of Vikings reaches the New World. America naturally comes to resemble The Zone, a realm of beautiful color (though still slightly chilled, à la Stalker) that is as inviting as it is unsettling. But where Tarkovsky made his alien realm into a place where leaps of faith were the only way to survive, Refn's New World displays the inverse. Scared and desperate for a sign from God, the men ingest psychotropic drugs, which only further awakens their paranoia. Previously hallucinatory imagery brought out One-Eye's supernatural visions, but Refn does not resort to much trickery to show the breakdown, keeping a firm eye on the now-uninhibited flow of fanaticism and violence. Tarkovsky's Zone was the dangerous, testing path to Heaven, or at least spiritual self-realization. Refn's America is merely a place of death, an area so vast the controlling elements of religion escape into the expansive air and leave those who cling to it lost at sea. It's no wonder they prove more dangerous to each other than the hailstorm of shafts.

Refn clearly molds this film for maximum stylistic impact, and he makes as good a use of Peter Kyed's music as the cinematography. A score of noise rock and pre-Gregorian tonal chants, the music crafts moods of unformed, primal aggression, fear and surreal breaks from the diegetic world. Organ chords are held until they threaten to pulsate every civilized thought out of your head. Jagged, atonal feedback escalates the tension when the Crusaders begin to fall apart in their verdant Hell, walls of electric squall puncturing the mix just as the rain of arrows continues to pepper the Vikings. It is a defiantly anachronistic touch in a film that, unlike nearly all such medieval films, truly feels as if you've been dropped back in time with no way to return to modern comfort, yet it somehow seems appropriate. It captures the sound inside these men, formless textures of white noise, capturing not only their base, instinctual moods and motivations but the absence of any guiding voice save the one they insert into this wash themselves.

An opening title card reads, "In the beginning there was only man and nature. Men came bearing crosses and drove the heathen to the fringes of the Earth." Valhalla Rising posits that the heathen was driven to the fringes of the mind, not any geographical location. The only thing separating the converted Vikings and the native tribes is the natives' purity of violence. Without the awkward, often counterintuitive application of Christian soldier values to complicate fighting with guilt and self-righteousness, the indigenous warriors act on animal instinct alone. It's not a preferable way of being, of course, but Refn isn't out to show humanity's civilized side. For that, he'd need a woman.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Tony Scott's remake lacks any and all suspense (as do nearly all his movies despite his penchant for thrillers), but he also finds a surprising resonance in the material. Blessed with a superbly written script, Scott tones down his usual madness and lets his actors do most of the work. Oh, he still can't help himself at times, but Scott puts his talents toward a sense of visual pacing and structure that uses the battle of wits between Garber (Denzel Washington) and Ryder (John Travolta) to slyly bring out back story and sociopolitical themes.

Travolta hams it up to no end, playing ex-con stock trader Ryder like the demon of Wall Street unleashed below the city, his outrage at serving time for his white collar crimes well-timed to the outrageous entitlement displayed by the real stock brokers who took all kinds of shortcuts to make a fast buck. Garber too is guilty, but we see the disparity between them, greed motivating one and financial desperation the other. Washington and Travolta have the awkward task of playing off each other mainly through long-distance radio communication (an analog take on the potential for meaningful friendships through Internet communication?), but they make for one of the richest hero-villain pairs in years and get across some unexpectedly keen social commentary to boot, even if Travolta oversells it. Supporting players John Turturro (as an arrogant negotiator), James Gandolfini (a scandal-ridden mayor) and Luis Guzman (a former MTA employee nervously helping Ryder) also deliver solid performances.

Scott frames his film with flattened compositions, a beautiful array of neon-lit streaks of blue, red and green, and Scott's "Big Board" fetish realized by the flashing subway map back at Rail Control (a board framed, like all of Scott's giant screens, as a means of both clarifying and abstracting action). Yet despite his usual touches of altered speeds and on-screen text, Scott's aforementioned ease off the throttle shows that his love of visual style does not blind him to seeing and focusing on the great chemistry between Washington and Travolta. In fact, as a movie about a sedentary narrative spruced up by slick, action-oriented direction, I found The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 to be not only more tasteful but more emotionally affecting than Danny Boyle's slick con job 127 Hours.


Sidenote: I don't know if Travolta decided to play Ryder as a flagrant homosexual or that's how the part was written, but if and when he ever comes out of the closet, expect this movie to be gutted for clips on late-night shows. Dressed like he just came from a gay bar, Travolta finds ways to be even more suggestive. Describing a teenage hostage to Garber, Ryder notes his outfit and tangentially throws in "he makes it work" before getting back to the threats. Talking with one of his cohorts about Garber, Ryder bypasses the fact he doesn't know what the man looks like and says, "He's got a good voice, though; he'll be my bitch in prison." Bless his heart; he seems to know he'll never be a star again and at least balances out his usual tat with unorthodox performances in this and Hairspray.

Gamer

Gamer suffered from such an abysmal marketing campaign that I never once even cared enough to bother looking at the names listed under the director credit. A film targeted at the attention-deficit, violence-inured current generation, it met with general derision in trailer form before a host of the same mindless entertainment it clearly wanted to comment upon. Even your friend and humble narrator joined in the chorus of sighs that greeted the final shot of Ludacris telling the audience, "This is not something you can control!" with all the actorly sincerity he could muster, and only the presence of the handful of proper adults in this college town theater stopped youths from making the dismissive hand-wanking motion, a sort of cynical version of The Wave. Nearly a year elapsed until I finally discovered what I'd somehow missed: Gamer was a Neveldine/Taylor project. Why, oh why, didn't I look into this beforehand.

Taking into account the self-admitted attention deficiency of the filmmakers, allow me to be brief: Gamer is one of the most daring, avant-garde mainstream films in recent memory, alongside Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Inglourious Basterds and Domino. It is, as much as any sociopolitical tract, a movie about The Way We Live Now, but rather than sit back and discuss cultural perspectives in a way that allows critics and other audiences to more easily dissect its meanings, it embodies that which it examines. There are innumerable examples of films in the first category being provocative and great -- The Social Network, for example, mines the same territory as Neveldine/Taylor's movie via dialogue and more lyrical direction -- but Gamer belongs in that rare breed of films that do not always work, but only because they reach for something fare more difficult to grasp. Jean-Luc Godard rightfully viewed filmmaking as the purest form of criticism, because all art is commentary on some level and film allows the critic to criticize through embodiment of that which is being critiqued. To be sure, Neveldine and Taylor are not critical in nearly the same fashion as Godard, but their frenetic embrace of the way information has processed in the two decades since Internet usage has completely rewired the brain makes them the best filmmakers currently depicting an attention-deficit world.

A title card cheekily informs the audience that the film occurs "some years from this exact moment," a wry bit of humor but also a way of communicating that, like all dystopic fiction, Gamer is directly extrapolated from from sociopolitical conditions of the present. Thus, it projects a future that is even more dominated by the immediacy of self-satisfaction than the one we have now: the masses consume the latest fad like a swarm of piranha, stripping it to the bone in minutes before moving on to the next big thing. Coupled with a more philosophical extrapolation of Moore's Law, the accurate prediction by Intel's co-founder that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip doubles every two years, this rapid consumption of the new fuses the exponential breakthroughs in technological advancement with a consumer base hungry to make all those breakthroughs turn huge profits.

Thus, Gamer exists in a neoliberal nightmare, in which consumerism has grown to such mania that the entrepreneurs of the world have effectively taken over governments. As with a number of dystopic films, Gamer posits a society that uses death row inmates as entertainment, teasing them with the faint hope of freedom in exchange for putting their condemned bodies on the line to risk grislier deaths than they'd ever suffer in a lethal injection. By broadcasting these events, the man behind "Slayers," Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), creates such a lucrative enterprise that he single-handedly pays for America's penal system, which is brutally taxing state budgets back here in the present, to the point that privatization of prisons is already occurring. The use of death-row prisoners as slave labor no longer has the connotation of mere satire: prison labor is already happening, a means for corporations that invest in penitentiaries to get cheap work in return, maximizing their investments.

John Tillman (Gerard Butler), renamed Kable by an adoring crowd that needs a snappier name, becomes the unofficial star of Slayers for surviving 27 games, far more than any other prisoner. If he completes 30 matches, he gets to go free, though everyone appears to look forward to the potential release of a killer they also feel deserved a death sentence. Like a college football player, Kable makes millions for everyone but himself, luxury labor that makes the owners rich but the actual workers unpaid. He doesn't even realize how many people around the world are cheering him on; if he had any concept of the money he personally brings in to Castle's empire, he might reasonably demand some of those profits. But then who would pay a prisoner?

But the corruption of America's prison system does not particularly connect to the kinetic, addled vision of the modern world: to make matters more interesting, Castle's Slayers runs on a technology the wunderkind invented that allows people to control other human beings. In effect, Slayers ups the ante considerably over, say, Death Race 2000 because it turns the carnage into a video game that necessitates direct involvement over passive spectating. Death Race 2000 was extrapolated from a generation that still looked to television for mindless entertainment; Gamer represents the cultural evolution of the present. A society raised on video games and the consumer power of the Internet, in which everything from entertainment to facts themselves can be programmed according to taste, is more apt to demand hands-on interaction.

And because they've spent a generation or two growing increasingly inured to violence, they can gather in stadiums to watch inmates be controlled by teenagers and fat shut-ins and cheer with each death. Castle's other invention to come out of his nanite technology is Society, the ultimate endpoint of The Sims and Second Life, where people are paid to be the avatars of players who can control an actual human being and live out their fantasy life. Naturally, the section of city carved out for Society is a lurid, hedonistic explosion of glitter and cum, a den of sin that projects the aesthetic and sensual hollowness of a strip club onto a large section of metropolis. Where Slayers feeds into bloodlust with its desaturated look, cloudy haze and urban rubble, Society is shiny, shiny, too shiny. It looks as if a hentai cartoon vomited on a Lady Gaga album cover.


What links Society and Slayers is the uncomfortable suggestion of the future of the working class. With menial labor being outsourced to save corporations even more money or being done by programmed machine, the disparity between skilled and unskilled labor in terms of wages and living conditions is wider than ever in this country. Kable's wife, Angie (Amber Valletta), must makes ends meet with her husband in prison by becoming one of the Society avatars. Each day, a fat man glued to a chair consuming junk food sends her out to be screwed so he can watch a hot woman reamed. Even porno is interactive, it seems. (that too, to my utter amazement, is not an invention but merely an expansion of something that exists now). The poor, then, become the literal playthings of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy after spending so many centuries as figurative playthings. As Castle sees it, one can be paid to be a character or pay to be a player. Capitalism in action. (This treatment of Angie also suggests that, even in a world that caters so exclusively to the id as this, slut-shaming is still ingrained in the patriarchal consciousness.)

This neoliberal lack of any sort of regulation, of reveling in the misery and indentured servitude of human beings, is founded on a harsh vision of Social Darwinism: Angie goes to see her caseworker about regaining custody of her daughter, but the man notes that she has been placed with a wealthy family and that the girl wouldn't have as good a life with "people like you." Class warfare continues to rage, and those who must prostitute themselves or risk their lives are viewed as inferior. Of course it's alright to cheer for the deaths of the I-Cons; after all, they went to prison, right? And no one has ever been falsely imprisoned, especially when corporations can tap the inmate pool at will for labor. Simon, the rich, spoiled 17-year-old who controls Kable in battle, views him as a toy, having justified the man's sure guilt in his head and done his best to keep the man alive simply to prove his own prowess as a gamer. Simon hasn't had to work a day in his life, yet he literally holds power over a man's life (and the lives of all the other prisoners he kills through Kable). And until a mysterious, anti-Castle organization known as Humanz (a revolutionary cabal as led by Banksy), sends him a modification for the nanites in Tillman's brain that allows two way communication, he never once considered what the man he operates thought about all this.

Earlier I compared Kable to a college football player, and the same hypocrisy that surrounds the ethics of not paying players extends to the ludicrous sense of good form here. Simon gets flagged for cheating for (reluctantly) letting the man he controls go free before his time, and the fans turn to jeering detractors who spam his wall with cries of "Cheater!" By displaying a slight amount of humanity, Simon will be casually dismissed with the same flippancy that he himself previously called things "gay."

As for Castle himself, he exists in pure B-movie fashion, the identifiable head of an organization that has infiltrated society to such an extent that taking down one person could never undo it. But, in the movies, all you need is to take down the head. However, Castle recalls numerous heads of mega-corporations specializing in entertainment and leisure. Neveldine & Taylor say they modeled Castle as a loose amalgam of "Mark Cuban and Bill Clinton," but he could just as easily stand in for Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, figureheads who become the personification of a brand. When someone complains about Facebook's privacy issues, is a personal insult on Zuckerberg's exaggerated personal stake into reading everyone's secrets far behind? The entire reason Castle arranges for Kable to be killed before reaching his 30th match is to ensure he remains the true face of Slayers.

But the questions of identity raised by the film compound the issue of who, if anyone, could be considered the face of anything. Tillman becomes Kable to further emphasize his loss of identity, and though his face adorns the Slayers ads plastered on every building, it is Simon who is the top player? Or is it? Back at the prison/training ground, one of the guards at the rifle range reverently asks Tillman, "Who aims? The player or the Slayer?" Kable responds that his player might see what's going on, but it's ultimately up to him to pull the trigger as the split-second lag between Simon's command and his brain receiving the information could leave him open to death. Ergo, Tillman deserves more credit for his success than simply being Simon's conduit, but that also means he shares in the culpability of mass murder for spectacle. Castle's overriding use of nanites allow him to take over more than simply a player in a gruesome game of his making: having made Tillman one of the first test subjects of his technology, he owns a piece of Kable's identity as well, and his way of connecting millions, maybe even billions through his entrepreneurship, might soon become more literal.


All of these ideas swirl around what is, fundamentally, a conventionally structured science fiction thriller. In their (often hilarious) commentary track, Neveldine and Taylor acknowledge the influence of '80s action films on Gamer, and it is by far their most straightforward picture in terms of plotting. We move from seeing Kable in action to slowly uncovering his back story and how it conveniently connects him to the grand villain, leading to a showdown that pits massive social upheaval on the outcome but is ultimately fought on more personal terms.

Yet the film also displays the duo's typical avant-garde aesthetic, now condensed just enough to turn the pure anarchy of the Crank series toward a more honed form of satire (and even a bit of anti-satire, for the filmmaking team are as gleefully turned-on by their antics as they are revelatory of a cultural mindset). Even outside Society and Slayers, the epileptic pops of light roll over the film, whether flashing in strobes through the holes of the prisoner transport that takes what few I-Cons survive back to the penitentiary or exploding in holographic computer displays that fill entire rooms with images of porn, commerce and entertaining violence. Their vision of the future is so chaotic that even the conservative groundswell of humanism that is Humanz could never be mistaken for a Luddite group for all their anti-technological screeds because the members themselves have grown up in the same wild environment, and even their hacks have an element of childish amusement to them (they use crude and lewd animations to insult Castle).

It never ceases to amaze me how Neveldine and Taylor can be so arrhythmic with their editing yet create a decently clear sense of continuity. Where, say, Michael Bay continues to haphazardly edit his action scenes in an inept fashion, a garish display of thick-headed cluelessness, Neveldine/Taylor rank with Tony Scott as some of the few filmmakers who can not only push action cinema to its gaudiest extreme but make something that flows out of the insane result. Behind-the-scenes discussion on the home video release reveals that the duo did not storyboard their giant Slayers and Society sets, simply setting loose extras, stuntmen and effects teams and following behind with a camera, catching all that caught the eye. It's a seemingly random approach, one informed by their A.D.D., but it leads to a presentation that teases the audience even as it adds up to a complete picture. They may foist a loose hodgepodge of imagery and sound onto us, but it works. For all their trickery, I have had a much easier time sorting out the spatial relationships of objects in the frame during the most frenetic moments of Neveldine/Taylor films than I do with the average work of sub-Greengrass shaky-cam action. And only Neveldine/Taylor can get away with the use of 1st-person camera in shooting scenes, recalling video game playing in such a way that, while we are still frustratingly spectators instead of controllers, that frustration is played against itself to show how quickly a film audience will turn on the medium when reminded of something that lets them interact with their entertainment.

Gamer inspired as much derision as all other Neveldine/Taylor movies upon its release, and I certainly didn't rush out to defend it, though I might have if I'd been interested enough by its marketing campaign to check who helmed the project. There have been defenders, however, and none more impressive than cultural critic Steven Shaviro, who penned a towering, 10-000 word defense of the film that goes into much greater detail on the neoliberal extrapolations and the crises of identity posited by the film. I feel critics too often avoid saying they don't understand something, so it behooves me to admit that I don't get large swaths of Shaviro's essay (I always had to work at understanding philosophy, so when he wades into it I occasionally get lost). But it is a fascinating read that breaks down the film in ways that the makers most assuredly never thought of. Shaviro says that Gamer isn't really satire but an embrace of its warped view, and that's probably true: in their commentary, neither Neveldine nor Taylor discuss any deeper thoughts to their process, even if the sheer cleverness of the details of their action shooting suggests more active minds than they let on*. But they also display a keen ability to gauge society as it is now and expand from there, and if the critical element is underdeveloped, the sheer accuracy of its projection allows the audience to make its own commentary without the setback of being forced to sit through a lecture.

Very much a genre film, Gamer is also proof that people should stop considering that some sort of setback. I don't know when critics stopped accepting B-movies as legitimate artistic endeavors (presumably some time after critics accepted B-movies as the only legitimate artistic endeavors), but Gamer offers more than exceedingly well-made action sequences. If it is not a commentary, it is at least a summation of our times. Apart from a deliciously show-stealing performance from Hall, all Southern drawl and arrogance, everyone else is very much locked into the more rigid, inexpressive roles defined by their types. But that is merely the identifiable anchor for the rest of the film, which breaks so many boundaries that one forgets how normal its structure is. The Crank movies may be better examples of the pure artistic anarchy Neveldine and Talyor are capable of, but Gamer demonstrates how daring they can be when actually aiming at something. Perhaps it will grow in stature as the years wear on, or perhaps not. Either way, I can only regret not seeing this ingenious work when it came out and will do my best to make up for lost time. But that's the great thing about genre movies: not only can they be smart, they're a damn sight esier to return to with frequency.


**They are, however, magnificently witty, and their commentary, apart from being surprisingly revealing when it came to their aesthetic, was also delightfully freewheeling. My favorite excerpt: "We hired a speech coach to beat the Scottish out of him [Gerard Butler]. As you can see in this scene, he was an overpaid speech coach."

35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum may be the warmest depiction of an Electra complex ever put to film. In fact, it's such a minutely layered, understated work that to pigeonhole it with such a lazy bit of Freudian explanation does a great disservice to its subtlety. Denis' film is not elliptical, merely unspoken, relying on the faces and slightest action to tell the story. As captured by Agnès Godard's quiet but expressive color palette, 35 Shots of Rum makes cinema of the trace elements of life.

Immediately, the director delves into the dynamic between Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower who conducts RER trains in Paris and its suburbs, and his daughter, Joséphine (Mati Dop), a beautiful graduate student working as a teaching assistant at a local school. Jo spots a rice cooker in a shop window and notes how she wants it, coming home later that day after purchasing one only for her dad to surprise her with the exact same thing. "I didn't think you'd remember," she says gratefully as she keeps her own copy out of sight. One naturally assumes that she doesn't tell her father about the cooker she bought out of consideration, not wishing to hurt his pride, but Denis leaves so much hanging in the air that the audience can think about the nature of the father-daughter relationship. As more pieces fall into place, we can better see that moment as a reflection of the intimate but increasingly impersonal bond that links the two: clearly, the death of the mother brought father and child together, and they care so much for each other that no one else seems to register. Yet that is a relationship based upon convenience and proximity. It's only natural that a family should find comfort in each other following a tragedy, but instead of moving on, Jo and Lionel got used to their bond and do not seek anything that might shake up their lives. Dating is hard; not growing up is easy.

Yet there are several hints that the two do not understand and appreciate how close they are. Jo doesn't expect her dad to remember about the cooker when she is the only woman in his life. In turn, Lionel doesn't even have to play the role of the stern dad when boys come calling because Jo turns them all down on her own. A bouncy, middle-aged cab driver, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), lives in the same apartment complex and clearly has feelings for Lionel, but when she comes looking for her beau, Joséphine turns frigid and lightly confrontational. Whether they realize it or not, father and daughter have created a matrimonial relationship, and they subconsciously act to maintain that thread by edging out any other force.

Slowly, however, the pair come to terms with their existence. Lionel attends a retirement party for his friend René, who smiles good-naturedly at his friends' toasts and gifts but looks slightly troubled. He pops up throughout the film, not saying much with his voice but speaking volumes about the predicament in which Lionel might find himself in a few years: by devoting his life to his job, René has nothing left when he retires. If he ever had a family, his offspring moved on, just as all children, even Jo, must. When he reappears every so often, he hangs in the background, a specter in tiny cafés and bars that Lionel sees in his peripheral vision and cannot shake. Denis intended the film as a loose homage to Ozu Yasujiro (it particularly borrows some elements from Late Spring, and René reflects Ozu's solemn musings on the existentialist nature of industrial livelihood: the man retires in good health, but because he defined himself as a train conductor, his life is over.

Also hanging over Lionel as a dark portent is Gabrielle, whose lovesick longing not only gives the man a chance to change his life path but also shows him the danger of pining for something until it's too late. Gabrielle wants to be with Lionel, and Lionel wants to stay with Jo. But once the young woman can no longer fight the nagging urge to make her own life, what will Lionel have?

Denis' camera moves more than Ozu's, but she displays the same eye for body language and the power of a look. Descas has one of those masterful faces, seemingly chiseled from obsidian and filled with dramatic weight. His is a Stoic look, breaking his poker face only to let the slightest hint of deep pain out from behind those eyes. Dogue, on the other hand, is brilliantly convincing as a lovelorn fool awkwardly attempting to hang around the object of her affection until maybe he accepts her. So convincing is she that I thought less of a middle-aged person trying to find love than a hopeless romantic of a teenager hanging around the school halls doing anything to impress the cool boy or girl. Dogue constantly arcs her back and neck, leaning with all her might to stay in Lionel's sight even as he turns away. Even her smile, radiant and wide, carries a hint of desperation, and she may be more heartbreaking when at her most outwardly cheery than she is when that smile fades.

The film's centerpiece occurs about halfway through the film, as Lionel, Joséphine, Jo's sort-of boyfriend Noé (Grégoire Colin) and Gabrielle pile in Gabby's car to head to a concert. It's a stiflingly uncomfortable ride, with cautious looks exchanged all around and Gabrielle breaking the tension only to add even more awkward silence by saying, "We haven't gone out as a family in years." In the middle of a pouring rainstorm, the cab breaks down, and the four of them all look more relieved to be standing outside pushing the Mercedes minivan down the road than to be back in the car.

When they stop in a bar to dry off, something magical happens. The Commodores' "Night Shift" strikes up on the jukebox, and Denis' camera, formerly the same mix of intimate and detached as the characters themselves, suddenly becomes so sensual your toes will curl. She lingers on Gabrielle's back as revealed in her low-cut dress, the look of nervous, budding love on Noé's face and the self-awareness mounting in Lionel's. Not a single word is spoken, but as partners change hands for friendly but revealing dances, the entire structure of the characters' social order rearranges. From that moment, the inevitability of Jo's progression is made plain, while Lionel continues to swim in circles despite seeing his options clearly for the first time.

Fundamentally, 35 Shots of Rum is about the necessity of living life. When Noé invites Gabrielle and Joséphine to his flat, he discovers his 17-year-old cat dead. Without shedding a tear, he grabs the poor thing by the neck and stuffs it into a trash bag along with toys and all the cat's other "effects." The women, speaking for the audience in this situation, simply gaze in horror and ask sensible questions like "A trash bag?" (which would have been exactly the way I phrased that question, too), but Noé's action shows an exaggerated model for moving on from grief. Buried in Noé's rushed attempt to throw everything away is the desire to not be reminded of his cat's death, but he also frees himself by placing the reminders in the bin. As soon as he finishes, he mentions taking a job overseas, which he can now more easily accept because he does not need to worry about his old, sick cat anymore. It's a bit callous, yes, but Jo understands the deeper meaning, and when she gets home she obsessively cleans the flat of her mother's stuff, trying to throw out the shackles that keep her and Lionel chained to their lives. Lionel, of course, intervenes.

Rarely does the film do anything wrong, but two extraneous scenes do drag the more subtle and evocative story. A scene in Jo's class serves only to bring up Denis' usual attention to race and class dynamics, but it's the only moment of the movie to do so, making the academic arguments of the students regarding international development seem even more stilted and rehearsed. Late in the film, Jo and Lionel head to Germany to visit the dead wife's sister, Jo's aunt. Played by Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven, the aunt has a monologue that is not so obvious that it detracts from the visually-oriented mood but makes the mistake of trying to put into words what has already been bountifully expressed through the camera.

But these are fleeting moments, hiccups in an eloquent and insightful look at familiar and familial relationships. Much subtler is the symbolism of Lionel's job, always moving but trapped on the same circuit, that small but key distinction from Gabrielle's own status as a public transporter (and is Lionel's name a reference to those train sets that let us play conductor as kids?). Jo's own, part-time job, a music shop clerk, comes right out of adolescence and is as demonstrative of her trapping herself in young adult years. These are symbols handled with a deft hand, open enough to be guessed on a first viewing but left in the hands of the viewer to work out. Thankfully, it is material like this that defines Denis' film, not the minuscule broad moments.

The film ends with Joséphine set to finally move out into her own life, and to commemorate the event, Lionel downs the titular 35 shots in a personal ceremony that looks as much a wake as it does a wedding reception. The final shot shows Lionel coming home with a new rice cooker, one that appears to be made for one, not two. It's a moving moment, but also a hopeful one. We are spared trite epilogues, left instead to ponder whether the man has processed the various clues sent to him about the state of his life and whether he can alter it before the window of opportunity closes. As with everything else in 35 Shots of Rum, these final moments are as haunting as they are affirming. And compared to the films that sandwich it in Denis' canon, it's proof that she is capable of absolutely anything. Americans tend to outdo each other with spectacle; Denis proves her mettle by stripping all away but the essence, and what is left is overwhelming.