The Sitter

Dear David Paulin, Costume Ager/Dyer

Hi there. I am surprised you were required for this movie. Yours sounds like a job more befitting an historical epic or meticulous art film. You’re not just making the clothes—you’re giving everything the proper aging by hand. That has to serve a purpose. But if the rest of the movie is just going through the motions, what exactly did they need you for?

In The Sitter, Jonah Hill plays Noah, a funny-but-lazyboned dropout that gets guilted into babysitting for his mom’s friend. The baby-sat kids, in this particular case, are essentially a Fox News list of top domestic threats: one is gay, one is slutty, and one is an immigrant. They exist in the movie as problems to solve, hurdles for our Noah to overcome: suburbanite versions of the ghosts from A Christmas Carol.

But before he can start on that, his girlfriend Marisa (played by the hopefully-intentionally-irritating Ari Graynor) calls asking him to bring cocaine to a party in far-off Brooklyn, for which he will be rewarded with sex. Noah pathetically (but understandably) tries to do just that. Then everything goes wrong. Then it seems to get better. Then it gets even worse.

I can’t deny that it’s fun. But, like the ash, abrasions, grease, blood, coke, and food stains you added to the costumes, the beats of the plot are obligatory, and since no one is really paying that much attention, just a bit unnecessary.

Maybe this is just another trivial summertime outing—the fruit popsicle between meals*. I’d let that slide, if it weren’t for the walking, talking parables that are the kids. It’s not the fault of the actors—they do fine, considering what they’re given to work with. My problem is with their individual character resolutions, which show just how dangerously shallow this movie really is.

Your job is so valuable because you can’t just “fix” jeans to look like the crotch has been set on fire. Hypothetically. That sort of thing takes time, and knowledge, and craft. The problems that each of the babysat kids are saddled with are so monumental, so loaded with the hopes and fears of specific segments of the American population, that it is appalling how quickly and simply they are solved.

In this movie, as the audience sits cuddled in its dark movie theatre, these core and compelling challenges shared by millions of kid – and society at large – are washed away with a night of shooting, drugs, fights, fire, car crashes, screaming, and a few short monologues. And a guy burns to death.

If that doesn’t creep the hell out of you, you aren’t paying attention.

Sincere Regards,

Cory

2/5 Return to Sender 

*Though in this case, it’s a fabulous dark-chocolate-covered cherry popsicle thanks to Karl the drug dealer, played by Sam Rockwell. He always brings it to everything he does, and this case, it seems like he dropped out of an entirely different movie (dessert) just to screw with everyone.

The Dark Knight Rises

Dear Recipient,

Rumor has it that you recently asked one of the prison guards how The Dark Knight Rises ends. You haven’t seen the film in its entirety (and hopefully never will), so I thought I’d tell you a bit about the movie with which, for obvious and appalling reasons, you will forever be associated.

Does it live up to expectations? Of course it doesn’t. It couldn’t. Sitting in the theater last Thursday, as the impatient throng fidgeted and twitched and laughed too hard at their own jokes, I had the strange sense of having been there before, of remembering a future memory. In retrospect, I know why. From bits of hearsay and gossip, trailer clips, score samples, set photos, and two decades of reading Batman comics, I had already constructed the movie in my head. And it was perfect. Indistinct, but perfect. Or, more accurately, perfect because it was indistinct.

I was set up for disappointment. At every moment the film onscreen diverged from the one I’d unconsciously contrived, I found myself bitterly unsatisfied. Which doesn’t make The Dark Knight Rises a bad movie. In fact, it’s a very good movie. Just not the one I’d been expecting.

And that’s the big spoiler: for all the grittiness and verisimilitude and ripped-from-the-headlines class-warfare equivalence that Christopher Nolan brings to it, The Dark Knight Rises is still just a movie.

Yes, just a movie. With actors, and props, and a musical score. A screenplay that predetermined every line of dialogue. A crew of computer artists who added false substance to it all. A craft-services table somewhere behind the camera, where, between takes, Christian Bale angled a Panini through the Bat-mask and Tom Hardy, biceps pulsing, buttered a low-fat carrot muffin. In a way, The Dark Knight Rises is disappointing solely because it exists. The tangible expression of a thing can never live up to the perfectly indistinct version one composes in forethought.

And you know all about disappointment, don’t you?

By all accounts, you had every opportunity to be a happy and healthy member of the human race (or at least as intermittently happy and healthy as most of us). And while I realize it’s unfair to hold such high existential expectations based only on your ethnic and socioeconomic background, I have no doubts, as a fellow middle-class white boy raised in the comfort of the suburbs, that we were born several lucky steps ahead of the roughly 15 Million children in the U.S. currently living in poverty. Unlike them, we’re not defined by what we don’t have, but by what we do: good schools, good grades, parents who were present, scholarships, degrees. Not a recipe for compos mentis, necessarily. But certainly not a recipe for mass murder.  

Whether it was an insurmountable pressure to succeed, some failed secret ambition, or just a general dissatisfaction with sensory reality of day-to-day existence, it’s clear that your life didn’t turn out the way you expected it to. I’m sure you didn’t aspire to drop out of the PhD program at the University of Colorado. I’m sure you didn’t dream of being evicted from your student apartment. I’m sure, with a BS in Neuroscience in your pocket, you didn’t expect to find yourself working at McDonald’s.

We all know from personal experience that the world rarely conforms to our idealistic projections of it. The exceptional life you hope to live is always imperfect in the act of actually living it. Growing older is all about the narrowing of life’s possibilities and broadening of life’s responsibilities. It’s a pretty disappointing truth, and some people deal with it better than others. Some avoid responsibility by living with their parents well into adulthood. Some fight the reductive nature of aging by refusing to commit; to a career, to marriage. And some, like you, try to exert control over fate through violent force.

But as much as you hoped it would be, the cowardly act perpetrated last Thursday was no metamorphic feat. Whatever romantic disagreement is rumored to have prompted your actions surely wasn’t resolved in your favor. Whatever spree-killer hysteria you hoped to inspire has been expressed, instead, as a national debate over gun laws. Whatever infamy you hoped to gain is obscured by passing days; the world chugs relentlessly along.

How disappointing for you.

In the coming weeks, I’ll likely see The Dark Knight Rises a second time. I imagine it will be a lot more satisfying now that the beats and breaks and chorus are familiar enough for me to sing along. Hopefully I’ll be able to appreciate it for what it is, not for what I wanted it to be (I’ll see the film I deserve, not the one I need).

You, though—you don’t get a second chance. You made your choice. Your disappointment led you to throw away any future opportunity you might have to experience the good things human beings are capable of experiencing: to love, to be loved, to be thrilled, to be surprised, to know the joyous burden of being a husband or a father, to be decent to the indecent, to show compassion for the uncompassionate, and, far down the list, to sit in a dark theater among friends and fellow geeks, absurdly excited to witness a thing as frivolous (and momentous) as a new Batman movie. Life’s small pleasures become apparent only when you accept that they occur in wholly unexpected ways. And, in that manner, they’re never disappointing.

Oh, but you wanted to know how the movie ended, didn’t you?

Okay, well, goodbye.

Jared Young

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

Dear Andy Bader, Camera Loader,

I’m really sorry, Mr. Bader. If you didn’t have a hard enough time living down that surname in grade school, I’m guessing this cast and crew completely wore you out. Did they pretend to flatter your camera-loading skills by calling you a “master”? Or did they just stick to “Handy Andy”? Either way, I hope they didn’t hurt your feelings. When your name so easily lends itself to masturbation jokes, it’s hard to resist the obvious. And being subtle is clearly not a strong suit for the people involved in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.

That said, the premise of Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck’s adult comedy is actually treated with more regard than the title might imply. Jason Sudeikis gives us a likeable party-hard who mainly gets off by showing others a good time. When his tight group of friends, entering their early 30s, realize they’re headed different directions in life, he proposes an intimate encounter that will see their glory days go out with a bang. The month-long build up to the big event gives ample time to seduce the nay-sayers and shrink the go-getters’ firm resolve. Some rather humorous research helps the men realize that they can’t only focus on keeping up people’s spirits, if ya know what I mean.

Luckily, the film does take shape at the end. Unfortunately, that doesn’t excuse some of the flaccid and predictable humour early on. A good comedy, Andy, would have had you working overtime to capture the money shot when an actor was on a roll. Tyler Labine comes closest with some over-eager moments that ring true, but other times his delivery falls flat. None of the performances feel particularly fresh, although the story at least explores its concept with more conviction than Hall Pass. And against the odds, the climax doesn’t disappoint.

You can also take solace in the fact everyone has probably grown up a bit, since the film was shot in 2008 and is only now (in 2012) getting a release. That’s a long time for comedy, especially blue comedy, to be pent up. You’d think after all that anticipatory swelling, that the eventual release would have been an explosion of joy spread across the faces of America’s youth. Come on people! Doesn’t sex sell anymore?

I know, loaded question. At least you can expect a lot of downloads.

Sincerely,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

The Dark Knight Rises

Dear Jason Devil, Set Security,

My poor Devil dressed in black. You bore the brunt of an unprecedented frenzy. Not only did you guard precious secrets from a rabid public, but you dealt with elaborate battle sequences involving thousands of people. With so much action on set and years of anticipation, how could you, one man, possibly keep everyone and everything safe? You can’t. That’s the reality. Even the greatest among us must have limits. We now understand that Batman is just a man and The Dark Knight Rises is just a film.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s a relief.

This epic, conclusive entry to Christopher Nolan’s so-real-you-feel-it superhero saga continues to take itself very seriously. That’s what works. Most of the film seriously kicks ass. But as you know, it also means the fans will get so very serious about the whole show*. So everything needs to be handled carefully, from getting the story just right, to dealing with sneaky spies snapping photos on set. The consequence of mishandling even a small detail would have a ripple effect through both real and imagined worlds. The Internet is like an underground society that will ruthlessly claw out any vulnerable piece of information, both before and after the film comes out. So at this point, it’s time you let your guard down, and let me defend Gotham for a while. Or at least do my best.

Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham is paralleling the post-9/11 experience with a Patriot Act that bears Harvey Dent’s name. Crime is down because criminals were all quickly locked up, and the city’s misunderstood protector hasn’t been seen since. Not-so-coincidentally, Bruce Wayne has transformed into a reclusive billionaire. But that can’t last when a bulging menace in a respiratory mask named Bane appears. He earns his screen cred by first one-uping The Joker’s bank robbery with a daring and spectacular aerial heist. He then retreats to his subterranean society to plot increasingly bold assaults on the city.

We’re also introduced to a sexy Cat burglar, played by Anne Hathaway in a (sigh-of-relief) satisfactory performance, and gutsy police officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is the heir-apparent to Commissioner Gordon’s virtue. Everyone alive in the real-world seems to affect the story in some way, plus a few more characters that are involved in delightful turns and surprises. All of Gotham City is now on trial for America’s corporate greed, and Batman is often stuck out of the suit. The final reckoning comes in waves, with more and more people taking to the streets and taking sides.

We see this all unfold with unexpected visual clarity, as though Nolan actually listened to some of his critics. The average shot length in this film feels much more digestible, without sacrificing any energy. Even Bane’s auditory performance is now thankfully crystal clear (after some near disastrous sneak peeks), although it does sound a little Jeremy Irons-meets-Darth Vader. But other moments feel visually cheated, like a climactic leap of faith and arguably the mid-point face-off that essentially breaks the film in two. The full frontal street battle managed to raise my pulse, but the limitations of a PG-13 rating let me down a bit with the sanitized mayhem. Batman himself is a moral creature who avoids killing, so I accept the approach, but it also reminds me how in terms of audience terror, The Joker’s pen is mightier than the machine gun.

That’s really all the eager public who harassed you wanted to know – can this film possibly live up to the previous one? Let’s put it this way –it’s a thrilling, ambitious, big-scale climax to an outstanding trilogy. The dramatic structure borrows a lot from The Dark Knight, and the story brings back many elements from Batman Begins. So the short answer is yes, it can withstand the hype, but it can’t surpass it. The overall stakes are raised, but as advertised, the legend must end. 

Sincerely,

Christopher

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)

*Editor’s Note: We here at DC&C try to avoid the hype leading up to big movies, so that our critical eye remains sharp and our initial enthusiasm unabated. Still, our strict editorial guidelines require that someone other than the original author must proof each review. In this case, Christopher was the only one to witness the sneak preview, meaning some poor soul had to step up and read this before seeing the movie. Your editor was bribed with both beer and popcorn to complete his task. If there are mistakes, it is because the keyboard was slick with tears, and the monitor blurry. Cry, for innocence lost too soon.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Steve Stafford, Aerial Coordinator,

Disaster movies, by their very nature, usually rely on epic aerial shots to remind people that we’re relatively puny and insignificant. Writer and director Lorene Scafaria takes a different approach, opting for ground-level vision of the apocalypse that focuses on a more intimate picture of total loss. It’s a bittersweet romantic comedy that most likely left you, as a motion picture pilot who specializes in providing sweeping views from above, feeling a little left out. Then again, it’s possible you were the inspiration for the entire film.

Dodge (Steve’s Carrell) is first introduced as he learns that an impossible Michael Bay-like mission to save the planet from an oncoming asteroid has failed. His stupefied wife, who’s also in the car, immediately abandons him and never looks back. Dodge, meanwhile, carries on like an emotional zombie and tries to maintain his dismal status quo. I assume your contributions up until this point, professionally and personally, were not included. Who knows, you may have had an equivalently spectacular relationship crash this was based on, but the pathos the director is going for at this point is mainly hyperbolic.

Eventually we meet Penny (Keira Knightly), a British ex-pat who missed the final flight home. This unfortunate event leads to some distinctly Knightly-esque neurotics that could only have appeared subtle from 10,000 feet above. So the twitchiest actress in Hollywood follows Hollywood’s favourite sad clown under a suspicious promise that he can help ‘aerial coordinate’ her home. See, you’re the hero!

Along the way, we have a couple fun stops (like the orgy-prone restaurant Friendsy’s) and at least one pointless side trip to some survivalists that feels forced into the fold. The road trip sequence never lives up to the atmosphere in the first act, when the world is slowly falling apart around Dodge, but the film lands a smooth third act that doesn’t shy away from it’s dark premise. The plot offers just enough moments of dread to balance out the genre’s predisposition for optimism.

The final view may not be as grand as a man of the skies would have liked, but for once it’s nice to see a far-fetched story stay grounded.

Clearing you for landing,

Christopher

Status: Air Mail (3.5 / 5)

Cosmopolis

Dear Archie Rodrigues, Travel Agent

Maybe you can help me understand where David Cronenberg’s career is going. Sure, you’re probably booking his tickets to Cannes, Venice, and other prestigious film festivals, but onscreen he seems to be stuck. He’s in the top 1% of his class, making decisions that are both bold and pointless, while calmly circulating with a gang of elite peers trying to get on board with him. Cosmopolis, it seems, might be more of a metaphor about his own career than it is about the state of American capitalism.

But you’re not in show business, you’re in the travel business. So let’s start by looking at the actors you flew in for production. Robert Pattinson is perfectly suited to play a stolid billionaire quickly losing his fortune—along with his will to live. Sarah Gadon is probably the film’s second star, based on her tangled relationship with the protagonist. But after that’s it’s a toss up: Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, Jay Baruchel, Matthieu Amalaric, Paul Giamatti and others all get a scene in which they try to get through to the robot-talking sociopath hell-bent on getting a haircut while the city is under lockdown. Clearly the film is trying to go somewhere more profound than that, but it takes an exhaustive route.

Thematically, Cosmopolis is structured like a traditional road movie. Large portions are set in a car, and while a destination  supposedly drives the plot forward, it’s the rotating cast of characters along the way that defines the journey. But instead of sweeping landscapes and open opportunities, we get a decidedly un-cosmopolitan claustrophobic tale in a poorly-substituted New York (the opening shot in front of Union Station will take anyone familiar with the urban Toronto landscape out of the story before it even gets rolling). Keeping the city anonymous might have helped the cause, since we never see more than 20 feet out of a car window anyway. 

These technical deficiencies are some of the film’s most glaring faults. For the past decade, Cronenberg has been making an unflattering move into the realm of filmed theatre. Sure, every film student studies the deep focus shots in Citizen Kane, but they involved complex compositions; here we get a lot of heads and no focal point, which gives Cosmopolis even more of a play-like sensibility than A Dangerous Method.  His uncomfortable insistence on wide-angle close-ups also could be considered distinctly cinematic, but their overuse renders them ineffective.

In a nutshell, Cronenberg needs to take a break. He’s out of touch with his own talents and seems to be having some sort of late-life crisis. Please make sure when you book his next trip that he gets some time to himself. To think, to relax, to remember what he loved about filmmaking in the first place. Cosmopolis makes it clear that he needs to start spending more time in cinema seats and less on the red carpet.

Admiring you from afar,

Christopher

Status: Return to Sender (2/5)

Ted

Dear Kristen Borges, Fur Groomer,

I promise right now to not refer to you as Ted’s official fluffer. That would be very demeaning to your profession. And childish of me. There’s just no room for that kind of language in a serious film review. Plus, you probably were defluffing half the time. Like combing Ted’s teddy hair just right for the practical shots. Cleaning away the smell of marijuana and powdery traces of cocaine. Wiping off chocolate from his mouth after simulating oral sex with a Fudgesicle. Washing out hand-lotion that was mock semen from a gang-bang. Besides, we’re told multiple times that, despite his rabid libido, Ted doesn’t have a cock to fluff anyway. I mean penis. Fuck! Shit! Comedy!

Alright, now that we have that out of our system, let’s look at what else you were working with. First off, it must have been nice to brush up against a pop culture icon in his feature film debut. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is the writer, director, producer, (voice)-actor and all-around appeal of this R-rated comedy. Sure it has moments of shit-on-the-floor raunchiness, but pushing boundaries in film is a lot harder than on network TV, where the Griffins have been living on the edge for better part of a decade. Here the muzzle is finally taken off, and what we get is a tough-talking teddy bear that still needs to cuddle. This sets up some warm and fuzzy moments early on, when the film is probably at its best, but still struggles to find a real heartbeat in an otherwise painfully conventional romantic comedy.

Mark Walhberg, who wishes Ted to life as a child, is certainly not an obvious choice for the pot-smoking slacker he’s playing. But if you can suspend your disbelief that his muscles just sort of aren’t there, he does have a knack for playing a doe-eyed dumbass. And it doesn’t take much imagination for any guy to believe the perfectly groomed Mila Kunis is “the one”, but like most male-dominated comedies, her girlfriend character is ultimately just a wet blanket for the fun. This kind of formula is actually defluffing me.

Even Ted himself starts to fall apart by the end of the film. His once fluffy coat becomes worn and patched as he wears out his cuteness. These are nice deliberate touches, but was MacFarlane really this self-aware of the effect the bear is having on the audience? We do know he loves his post-modern references: the joke “there’s no way I sound that much like Peter Griffin” is funny, but pointing out that Ryan Reynolds (in a bit part) looks like Van Wilder is just lazy. And of course, like all modern comedies, we seem to need to resurrect some forgotten 80s star.  This time it’s Sam J. Jones, a.k.a. Flash Gordon, whose fair blonde hair you undoubtedly were tasked with grooming as well. It’s just another trope in a comedy that, on the surface, looks original, but underneath is as conventional as they come.

Although it’s a bit tedious, Ted the film luckily isn’t a bore. It might be stuffed with a lot of clichés, but at least you kept that outside coat nice and shinny to draw us in.

Fur-ever yours,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (2.5/5)

Madman

Welcome to Dear Cast & Crew’s summer film series, in which we write letters home from some of the goriest, bloodiest, throat-slashiest summer camps in film history.

Letters from Slasher Camp: Dear Richard W. Haines, Sound Effects Editor,

A silhouetted figure stares down at the blissfully unaware camp counselors during the prerequisite “let’s all gather around the campfire and tell scary stories about the guy who will be ripping us apart in the next ten minutes” scene. And your haunting soundscape ignites our imagination with what grisly horrors await Madman Marz’s victims. We get so much with so little! It’s too bad the rest of the film fails to live up this early tone of dread and unease.

This is also one of the few times we actually see Marz. His time onscreen is fairly limited, which doesn’t give him much of a chance to establish any sort of personality compared to the other genre icons near and dear to our hearts. However, due mainly to your very effective use of sound, we don’t need to see him. The heavy, labored breathing you laid over the POV shots, along with the animalistic shrieks and growls that punctuate the gory set pieces, means Marz nonetheless becomes a madman to be feared.

(Drinking game: take a shot every time I write the word “madman”!)

Your sound effects also impressed me in the flashback of a hulking farmer inexplicably slaughtering his family. Given the subject matter – young children being slaughtered – it could have easily dragged the film into the territory of nasty, needless exploitation. But the way the violence is tastefully toned down, mostly implied by the sound effects of the killer’s booming footfalls, make this entire sequence incredibly unnerving. Let me tell you, Richard, it rattled in my head long after seeing it.

Other times, the violence gloriously explodes in front of us, like when a character peers underneath the hood of his car, only to have Marz bounce off the hood with a thundering metal drumbeat and decapitates him. It perfectly sets up the next payoff, in which another character wonders why the car won’t start and quickly finds out it’s because “AHHHHHHHHH there’s a severed head stuck in the engine!”

But, here’s where Joe Giannone’s script and direction let you down. 

When Marz isn’t a) stalking the counselors, or b) performing lethal spinal enhancements (I’m better off not knowing which foley effect you used for that one), there isn’t really a heck of a lot for you to do. I realize we’re talking about a teensploitation slasher film, but it still might have been nice to see a narrative more complex and interesting than: character A and his fantastically huge belt buckle going off into woods, disappearing, is searched for by character B, who, after meeting his maker, is searched for by character C…and so on and so forth.

That standard sort of plot structure can work, sometimes. But not when every character is a screaming bore and so completely devoid of personality that you’re checking your watch every ten seconds, wondering why they aren’t being dispatched by the resident madman (drink!).  I don’t need profound character drama, but anything that might have made these people more likeable and interesting (a personality, say, or a motivation more complex than the desire to reproduce) would have been greatly appreciated. It’s the cardinal rule of horror films: if you can’t bring yourself to care about the characters and what may happen to them, there’s little suspense to be had. They become nothing more than meat for the grinder.

Oh, and one last thing: I’m not sure if you played part in the toe-tapping bluegrass tune that closes out the film, but it was truly inspired, and I’ve been humming it for days now.  Bloodthirsty maniacs definitely need their own theme songs.

Sincerely,

Kelan Young

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

Moonrise Kingdom

Dear Lee Wimer, Color Timer,

For someone like you, who has overseen the color correction for nearly 200 films, a Wes Anderson project must be the ultimate gig. No other filmmaker so painstakingly composes the colors in every shot and so faithfully adheres to his own strict aesthetic code. Yet critics can be pretty black and white when discussing Anderson – either he’s praised as a peerless American auteur or dismissed as a one-trick pony.  I’m caught in the middle, believing he’s a hit-or-miss director that often struggles to express shades of grey. But when his films work, his colorful characters and palettes can come together as near-perfect cinematic compositions. And Moonrise Kingdom is the best expression of his talents yet.

Anderson was born to tell a children’s story. The Fantastic Mr. Fox brought him into that realm, but his visual signature felt conventionally artificial in stop-motion animation. Moonrise Kingdom allows him, for the first-time, to put children at the center and let us experience their storybook understanding of the world. Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and (of course) Bill Murray may be the headliners, but newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward are the emotional center which all the other performances must be adjusted against. In the language of your work, they are the flesh-line and the white balance.  And because the characters are drawn more than skin-deep, the whole movie succeeds.

Set on a remote island in 1960s New England, twelve-year-old Sam Shakusky (Gilman) escapes from the strict regime of the Khaki Scouts and joins an emotionally disturbed but lovelorn Suzy Bishop (Hayward) in a journey that will test the survival skills of their budding romance. We believe their childish sincerity, which keeps the comedy fresh instead of contrived. The vivid and artificial define a lot of what we see on screen, but with the exception of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the calculated character portraits have never felt more appropriate. The anal-retentive scouts are a perfect foil for meticulously campy art direction.

There are also moments where the dark tones are more pronounced than I would expect. Not just the nighttime climax in monochromatic blue, or catalyst phone call in overpowering yellows, but in the subtle approach to violence and sexuality.  Sure the treatment is comparatively harmless, but relative to a child’s experience, these moments are illustrated as important highlights and lowlights that provide a refreshing range of experiences.

So if you, like me, were worried that Anderson may have already over-saturated his own formula, breathe easy. There’s gold at the end of this rainbow.  

With flying colors,

Christopher

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)

Savages

Dear Blake Lively, Actress

I’m a forgiving type of guy, especially of pretty girls. I was ready to overlook your introduction at the beginning of Savages as a spacey, possibly unreliable narrator because I was ready for things get weird; this is an Oliver Stone movie, after all. I kept waiting for that dramatic turnaround, or masterful embrace of at least one of the many available plot points. I felt sure something would make your awkward role fall into place. But no. You stayed pretty but awkward, and so did the whole movie.

I didn’t have high expectations, really. Maybe you could call them big. I expected big Oliver Stoney violence and sex and drugs and all those fun summer things that could make this a sort of more mature version of Natural Born Killers. I didn’t know anything about you, but the rest of the cast looked so promising. And for the most part, they brought it. Benicio del Toro as a psychopath and John Travolta as a crooked DEA agent are great! The leading dudes, Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson certainly looked ripped and rarin’ to be awesome. Salma Hayek was game to be an evil drug kingpin with a secret soft side. Even you come across as a plausibly laid-back centre – the lover, the victim, the confidante – to what should be a whirling nexus of ass-kicking and mind-blowing. All the people were in place. 

So one of two things failed: the Script, or the Stone. It could have been the script: the narration – your narration – was such a constant and heavy presence, introducing everyone, establishing distracting details and even undoing the whole climax of the first act.  Maybe there was no coming back from that. Or, it could have been the fault of director Oliver Stone, who probably gets free reign on the movies he’s making, and he hasn’t made a good one recently. The things he seems interested in are not the things the characters or the audience really care about. So maybe he just fit the story elements together in a compelling way, and no one felt they could point that out to him. A quick look for a review of Don Winslow’s original novel tells me that it was probably the director’s fault.

 

We have an ongoing discussion here at DCAC about how it is hard to make a truly bad big budget movie nowadays. There are enough professionals on hand for each one, that most of the time the worst they get are “meh”. You have to go to small movies to see the spectacular messes like The Room. Yet in The Savages there were a few moments where the audience laughed that were not supposed to be funny. And a few lines that were supposed to be funny (I think…again, awkward) made about a dozen strangers groan out loud. But that balances with some pretty exciting action sequences and some pretty fun performances.

Don’t be too mad. This isn’t a bad movie at all. It just should have been much, much better, or at least more fun. Maybe you should be mad. You’re so pretty when you’re mad.

Ready and Forgiving,

Cory

(3.5/5) Air Mail

P.S. I also wonder how you felt when you saw the term “wargasm” among your opening lines. Just. Ugh right?