The Hunger Games

   As much as I wasn't the target audience for The Vow, I am not the target audience for The Hunger Games either.  The dystopian novel by Suzanne Collins is geared towards young adults and the movie does an excellent job of playing to that demographic.  I enjoyed this film, but only as much as I enjoyed the book, which I found to be a fun, adolescent jaunt.  Similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 movie The Running Man, I enjoyed the combination of the Roman arena with reality TV.  There are obvious character arcs and social commentary throughout the film, but you never have to mine too deeply in order to access any of it.  Everything resides right on the surface, which is exactly where the target demographic can enjoy it most freely.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

 

2011

   As it turns out, one of the Olsen sisters is actually talented.  I wonder what Mary Kate and Ashley think of their little sister now?  Elizabeth Olsen is in every scene of this movie and, even when she is on-screen with the terrifying John Hawkes, she owns.  She plays a 20 year old girl named Martha who, when we first see her, is running through the woods to get away from an oppressive commune in upstate New York.  Marcy May is the nickname given to her by Patrick (Hawkes), the alpha-male of the commune, and Marlene is the generic name for all girls who live there.  

  Martha, as I will call her, has been out of contact from her family for two years when she realizes that her plan to escape her ordinary life has proven to be much more than she bargained for.  The commune is a self-sufficient farm in the middle of the woods that houses many young men and many young women.  Patrick is the leader of the commune and makes sure that the women rotate their chores each day so that everyone can know how to do every job.  The goal is to become completely self-sufficient and detach completely from the rest of the civilized world.  Every girl in the community is forced to have sex with the men, particularly Patrick.  The women cannot eat until after the men have finished eating and they also are forbidden to wear makeup, fancy clothing and bras.  I suppose the idea of having everyone share everything and have everyone pitch in to work together in order to benefit the entire community is a fine idea, but not when it is ruled by fear and abuse.  The women walk around like lifeless shells and, with the exception of Patrick, the men look somewhat similar.  It is clear that Patrick is in charge and his grip is suffocating. 

  Written in pencil on the wall above the telephone, there are directions for what to say when someone calls: "Ask three questions. Repeat name. Take message. Say your name is Marlene Lewis or Michael Lewis."    

  It is said that Patrick is the father of all of the children in the cult and that all of the children are boys.  We assume the worst happens when a baby arrives that is female.

  After she runs away, Martha calls the farmhouse looking for her friend Zoey but the girl on the other end (who identifies herself as Marlene Lewis, naturally) tells her that Zoey is not there.  Does this mean that women can't take phone calls? Or does it mean that Zoey ran away too? Or perhaps that Zoey was killed because Patrick thought she was withholding information about Martha's whereabouts?

  In his feature-length debut, the film was written and directed by Sean Durkin.  He manages the flashback timeline quite well by making Martha's past and present look starkly different.  Scenes from the commune are grimy and almost out of focus - it seems like there is a ubiquitous fog sitting between the actors and the lens of the camera.  Conversely, scenes that take place at Martha's sister's house in the present are modern and sharp.  

   Martha runs away from this cult, which sounds an awful lot like what I've read about Charles Manson's 'family,' and calls her sister to come pick her up.  Once back at her sister Lucy's beautiful, country home in Connecticut, some three hours from where she was picked up, Martha struggles to assimilate back into normalcy.  Hours after meeting Lucy's husband Ted for the first time, Martha strips off all of her clothes and jumps into the lake completely nude.  Days later, when Martha hears Lucy and Ted having sex late at night, she sneaks onto the corner of their bed and lays in the fetal position for a few seconds before being discovered.  Lucy asks Martha several times in the movie, "What is wrong with you?"  Martha doesn't know.  

   Durkin gives us increasingly disturbing glimpses of what occurred on the commune during Martha's two years there.  Whether it was shooting sick cats, forced sexual promiscuity or breaking into people's houses, Patrick controls everything and everyone.  Martha is filled with fear and paranoia and often struggles to separate her two realities.  As she begins to lose control over mind and her body, Lucy and Ted encourage her to seek help.  

  It is never quite clear how Martha stumbled into this cult or why she decided to leave her life in the first place.  We are told that her mother died and that her father may have been abusive.  Lucy, who seems to be about 15 years older than Martha, feels guilty that she wasn't around when her sister was finishing high school and should have been applying to colleges and thinking about her career goals.  Martha tells Lucy that she has been living with a boyfriend for two years in the Catskill Mountains, and that she had to leave because he lied to her.  Martha never tells Lucy anything about what really happened to her, but Lucy knows it was something more than a bad breakup.  Her once-innocent little sister has returned as a fractured vessel of what she once was and Lucy cannot figure out why.

   I last saw John Hawkes in my favorite movie from 2010, Winter's Bone, in which he also played a terrifying alpha-male role.  Although he must only weigh about 150 pounds soaking wet, he has a knack for conveying a great deal of strength and intimidation with a believable tinge of crazy.  His biceps have the circumference of most men's wrists, but still I would not mess with him.  

  The tagline on the cover of the Blu-Ray for this movie is "You can get away, but you can never escape."  After she runs away, Martha's fear and paranoia of being discovered by someone from the cult is real - we feel what she feels as she is compulsively looking out the window of her sister's house wondering if the next car she sees will belong to a very pissed off Patrick.  I loved the ending of this movie, which reminded me of some other wonderfully ambiguous endings that I have seen in recent months, most notably in Kelly Reichardt's 2011 slow-burn western Meek's Cutoff.  

  I found the tone of this film riveting and suspenseful.  The score, which sounded a lot like Johnny Greenwood's work in There Will Be Blood, worked to increase the film's tension.  The acting, particularly by the most talented Olsen sister alive, was fantastic.  This movie was at or near the top of many critics' lists from 2011, but I can't say that it would quite crack my top ten.    

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Even though I couldn't fit it in anywhere in my entry above, I wanted to include a few lines that Patrick says to Martha shortly before she flees the commune:

"Death is beautiful because we all fear death.  Fear is the most amazing emotion of all because it creates complete awareness.  It brings you to now and makes you truly present.  And when you're truly present, that's nirvana.  And that's pure love.  So death is pure love."

We Need To Talk About Kevin

  Truly great movies force us to ask difficult questions.  They spark meaningful conversations between friends and loved ones.  Most of my favorite films have left within me a significant residue of contemplation.  We Need To Talk About Kevin, the 2011 film from director Lynne Ramsay, has left me to tend to very serious questions about the connection between parenting and child development.  I can't compare this to any of Ramsay's previous works because I haven't seen any of them, but here she directs with a very unique style and manages a non-linear timeline masterfully. 
  Tilda Swinton is wonderful as Kevin's mother, Eva.  Without spoiling anything, I will say that the movie is divided into two parts: before a catastrophic event and after a catastrophic event.  Before the event, Eva is a travel writer who is married to Franklin (played by John C. Reilly) and whose two children are roughly ten years apart in age.  Kevin, the older sibling, is played with unearthly horror by Ezra Miller.  The film follows Kevin from infancy to toddlerhood to adolescence to high school and slightly beyond.  Eva admits, to infant Kevin, that her life is worse with him than it was without him.  She finds Kevin impossible to love because of his incessant screaming as a baby.  As a toddler, he is defiant in the way that he plays - or doesn't play - with his toys.  He throws things, he ruins things, he says hurtful things.  Throughout the timeline of the story, he refuses to obey his mother in every way while showing his father unconditional love and affection.
   One of the big questions that this movie left me with deals with the nature vs. nurture argument.  There is concrete evidence that Eva has never really been able to love Kevin because of how badly he behaves towards her and how well he behaves for his father.  The film suggests that Kevin was never really born with a clean slate at all, but rather was doomed before he drew his first breath.  He has evil in his eyes and this is without question - but where did it come from? What, if anything, caused it?  Who, if anyone, caused it?
   Kevin seems to be paying his poor hand forward upon his younger sister by constantly telling her that she is stupid.  In one gut-wrenching scene, she says to her mother, "Kevin always calls me stupid and that's what I am.  I'm stupid."  Are we supposed to believe that Kevin is only as good a person as the mother who has raised him?
   Teaching on the front lines for eight years, I've always said that 99.9% of a child's behavior is a result of parenting.  I stand by this, but I think I would like to slightly amend it to "99.9% of a child's capability to do truly good things or truly bad things is a result of parenting."  The difference, I suppose, is in the severity of the behavior.  Parents shape how intrinsically good or bad a child is - this is inarguable in my mind.  As we know, kids - and adults, for that matter - make mistakes and do stupid things, which has very little to do with parenting.  If the stupid things either repeat themselves or become more severe, it has almost everything to do with parenting.  And no, I don't think I need to be a parent to say these things.  Ask any teacher whose been in the classroom more than a year if they feel like they are qualified enough to make judgments on what it means to be responsible for children - they would all say that they feel like they have a perfectly sound understanding of the basics of how to develop a child.  When you have hundreds of kids that you're responsible for, you quickly learn what techniques work and what techniques fail.  I have a very firm understanding of how to do good things to a child's development and also how to do harm to a child's development.  But what I struggle with is just how much a child can sense when he/she is very young.  Can a newborn baby feel a lack of love from a parent?  If so, can a baby remember that forever?  If so, can a baby develop spiteful and/or vengeful emotions towards such a parent at a very young age?  Can babies carry these feelings with them through childhood and into adolescence?
  Eva asks 17-year old (I'm estimating his age) Kevin if he remembers how he got a particular scar on his arm.  The injury, we find out, occurred when Kevin was around 6 or 7 years old.  Eva accidentally broke his arm when she threw him to the ground during a moment of intense frustration.  Kevin never forgave and he certainly never forgot.  It wouldn't be a very interesting movie if the genesis of Kevin's bad behavior was when his mother broke his arm.  He was a difficult baby from day one.  Did he sense that he was unwanted even while still in the womb?  We see a shot of Eva and Franklin at the hospital just after Kevin was born - the dad is ecstatic; the mom blankly stares into space, clearly unhappy with her new life.  Can a baby sense this?  I don't know the answer to that, but it sure makes for a fantastic film.
  Since everyone responds to films differently, I rarely come right out and say that you should see a movie, but this is one that you should see.  It is perhaps the most devastating story I've ever seen on film.  The agony is almost palpable.  It left me with difficult questions: What would I do if my son turned out to be a bad person? What would I do if my son was born a bad person?  Is the latter even possible?  Was Kevin a bad person solely because of his mother?  To what extent, if at all, should kids use bad parenting as an excuse to be a bad person?  Can someone consciously change the person that they've been molded into?  Should we ever give up on a child?  Can it ever be too late?

Woody Allen: A Documentary

   This fabulously thorough documentary about Woody Allen is a satisfying three-hour look at an American master.  The film is directed by Robert B. Weide, who has directed nearly thirty episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and other documentaries about comedy icons, most notably among them are the Marx brothers and Lenny Bruce.  In the bonus features, Weide tells the story of how Allen turned him down for over a decade when asked if a documentary can be made about him.  He says that Allen refused because he didn't feel that he was good enough to have such a fuss be made over him.  Allen speaks with genuine humility about his theory on probability and persistence, "I've been working on the quantity theory. I feel if I keep making films, every once in a while I'll get lucky and one will come out OK."  Allen has made a film a year for four decades and I've only seen about 15 of them (Annie Hall is my favorite, for the record).  
   The celebrity interviews are top-notch and Allen's own forthright cooperation makes this a paramount look at one of my favorite film makers of all time.

Casa de mi Padre

   I am happy to see Will Ferrell and his comedy team produce something truly original once again.  Casa de mi Padre was written by Andrew Steele and directed by Matt Piedmont, who have both been creatively involved with SNL and the website, Funny or Die.  This is a film that takes meta to a whole new level.  It pokes so much fun at itself, it almost makes you feel bad that the film is hurting its own feelings.  99.9% of the film's dialogue is in Spanish, or what I thought sounded a lot like Spanish.  I get the feeling that Ferrell's version of the language was a loose interpretation, but I can't be sure.  Ferrell plays Armando Alvarez, a dim-witted Mexican rancher, whose drug-dealing brother is set to marry a beautiful woman named Sofia.  He instantly falls in love with her and battles to save her from violent Mexican drug lords.  There isn't much more of a plot than that, so I won't even bother.  What this film lacks in story, it makes up for in satirical style, creativity and uniqueness.  It is going to gain its fans - and I do feel that it will develop a cult following - because of the hilariously cheap and sloppy style by which it was produced.  I feel that this movie will not make much money in the U.S., but due to its incredibly low budget, it will be a huge financial hit.  Because it is primarily in a foreign language, its popularity will not come close to Ferrell's previous hits like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, but it is unfair to make comparisons to any of his other films since this one is so different from anything he's ever done. 
  There are plenty of guns, cigarettes, stuffed cats, mannequins, fake sets and green screens.  The first 30 minutes of this movie were filled with these shockingly funny gags.  These same gags got a bit tired in the second and third acts but there were just enough laughs to keep me interested until the end - particularly when the movie paused for the 2nd Assistant Cameraman to insert an on-screen note apologizing for the shamefully poor production quality of a fight scene between a lion and a coyote.
    The laughs, while rarely gut-busting, are the type that cause you to shake your head at the set designers' lack of interest in making backgrounds look real or the editors' indifference to cinematic continuity.  Bottom line is, this movie plays like a feature-length sketch, so if you liked SNL from the mid 1990s up until about 5 years ago, it will probably bring you quite a few laughs.  

Take Shelter

  Picture this: a film opens with a shot of a man in his thirties standing in the gravel driveway of his perfectly average house looking up towards an ominous sky.  Thunder rolls and rain begins to fall.  The man opens his hand and notices that the afternoon storm is dumping very abnormal caramel-colored rain.  Then we see what he sees: a dark, rolling storm cell off in the distance.  The camera sits on the ground behind the man and captures a view of the back of his wet clothes and drenched hair with a terrifying cloud formation beyond.  Then it cuts quickly to him in the shower and we realize that the moments prior to this weren't spent outside in the rain at all - they were spent asleep, in his bed, wrapped in a dream.  The dreams increase in frequency and intensity as the man begins to slip into what he thinks may be the early stages of schizophrenia, a disease that runs in his family.  As his mind becomes less and less reliable, he feels the need to build a better storm shelter in the event that his dreams become a reality.  He loses his job, his friends, his place in the community.  But his shelter is perfect.    
  It took me a while to write about Take Shelter not because I didn't like it, but rather because I liked it so much I wanted to see it twice.  I've heard a lot of good things about this movie and I am pleased to say that it lived up to the hype.  Michael Shannon delivers a powerhouse performance as Curtis, a 35 year old blue-collar everyman who lives and works in rural Ohio.  He has a patient wife, a beautiful daughter, and a loyal dog named Red.  His best friend and shift partner, Dewart, explains to Curtis that he has an enviable life - a life that every man would be lucky to have.  This, as far as we can tell, is true.  Everything about his life seems perfectly content to me.  It isn't a life of spectacular highs and devastating lows; it isn't a life of tremendous wealth and fabulous possessions; it isn't a life worth writing a story about but it also isn't a life worth complaining about either.  His is a life that I imagine to be perfect for a man his age. 
   What I loved most about this story (and also what scared me the most about this story) was how everything in Curtis' perfect life comes crashing down so unbelievably fast.  The timeline of the movie is very brief, so we get to see how it all unravels from beginning to end.  Life has the potential to change so much so quickly. 
  His wife, played beautifully by the very busy Jessica Chastain, is a lot like a hundred other women I have known in my life.  She is a loving wife who has breakfast on the table in the morning.  She attends conferences for her daughter at school.  She gets upset when something bothers her and she laughs when something is funny.  The way she talks is very believable; very normal.  There isn't a line of dialogue that seems out of place.  Not one false moment.  She handles her husband's rapid breakdown in an extremely plausible way.  She is deeply in love with her husband and he is in love with her.  This is a love story that I could latch onto. 
  Originally, I had much more written in this post.  I began to outline the plot points further, but then I realized that the movie is like a fable and I only wanted to write about two things: first is the potential for even a perfectly satisfactory life to crumble so suddenly; second is the ending.  As the movie reached its climax, I felt that there were two points that would have made a fantastic ending, but it didn't stop there.  Much to my delight, the film's coda blew me away.  I walked away from this movie with a sense of great satisfaction about what I just witnessed.  What a brilliant ending.  Of course, I won't spoil it, but I will say that you are sure to engage in conversation as the credits roll.