Who Needs Actors?

Should the visual beauty of a film come at the expense of the emotional depth and character connection?  That is the question probably inadvertently posed by Joe Wright’s 2012 version of Anna Karenina.  A classic tale about a married woman who succumbs to the affections of another man, Anna Karenina has been adapted numerous times with a variety of conceptions.  Wright decided to put his on a stage on film with partial success.  Despite the big name actors, such as Keira Knightley and Jude Law, it is almost not worth mentioning them since the standout players of the film were not the characters but the intricate dance made of image, set, and sound.

            Besides being stunning to watch, the concept of the characters lives taking place on a stage did help illuminate and emphasize several symbolic points.  The conceit worked best when it was used to expose a character, when a dark secret truth was being set before society for judgment.  The pounding of the binoculars and snapping fans and the clumping feet of the horses blurring together highlight Anna’s extreme reaction to her lover’s fall during a race.  Likewise, after being exposed as an adulteress, Anna attends the ballet to the scorn and horror of society. As her once friend says “I’d call on her if she’d only broken the law, but she broke the rules”.  That was another aspect that the staging was able to emphasize: society.  There was a beautiful party scene in which the camera swept through the dancing glamorous couples to behind the wooden sets, exposing the working men and women acting as stagehands to the theatrics of the elite.

            However, these elegant machinations came at the price of engaging and enjoyable characters.  Even the characters you could like have a falseness to them – Levin’s vision of Kitty floating amongst the clouds, his love illuminating her, is proven wooden and false, the unpainted back of the clouds gives a sense of unreality and woodenness.  It’s a façade and nothing more. As much as this is a critique of the director’s choice, I cannot deny that the main characters, Anna, Karenin, and Vroknsky are not the most likeable characters in and of themselves.  Whether that’s the actors’ faults or just the nature of the story is unclear.  With the being said, I have drawn a conclusion which I had not originally been intending to draw. While normally I would disdain at a movie that chose artful conceit over character, in this case it just might have worked.  I did not enjoy the film when I first watched it, yet as it sat with me over the next week, I began to love it more retrospectively, appreciating it.  It was not bad performances or unlikeable characters that flash in my mind as I think of Anna Karenina, but instead the beautiful dance choreographed with cameras, sets, sound, and costume that Joe Wright created. 

What's Behind the Facade

The Architect shows that the façade doesn’t matter: whether a luxury home or a decrepit mass housing project, the families inside can all feel misery.  This movie was as off putting as it was engaging.  There were many lines of plot that ran along side each other, dipping into each other’s paths without ever truly weaving together.  I would say that in order to enjoy this movie you must focus on performance over plot or resolution.  Anthony LaPaglia’s Leo Waters is a man whose job it is to control, design, and create but whose personal life cannot seem to fall into place with such efficiency and ease.  His wife is bored and distant, afraid that their marriage and life has left her “eroded”. His daughter is miserable, upset at her family’s dysfunction and uncomfortable and confused about her changing body and her father’s awareness of it.  His son, played by Sebastian Stan, is rebellious and in the midst of a sexual awakening that is desperate, difficult, and ultimately heartbreaking.  Alongside this story is that of Tony Neely, portrayed movingly by Viola Davis.  She feels the oppression and dangers of the world she lives in.  Gang members at every corner, smart kids dropping out of school for a life on the street.  Her eldest daughter revels in trash television so she can know that she at least has not fallen as far as some have; her youngest daughter barely even lives with her having earned a scholarship to a better school in a better part of town.  Her son’s death was the final push to begin her campaign to tear down the inefficient and inhumane housing project that was more conducive to gangs than to families.  These two worlds cross paths when Tony seeks the support of the architect of the housing facilities in her quest to tear them down and build them anew.  Only Leo’s pride will not let him concede the buildings’ failures. 

            Unfortunately, this film never quite reaches its peak.  There are brilliant moments: Sebastian Stan’s desperate surrender to his homosexual feelings, Viola Davis’ confrontation with her youngest daughter over her denial of the reason her son died, and Stan’s quiet intensity as he gazes over his one time lover’s body.  While poignant and thought provoking, these moments of intense emotion and exploration of one’s identity and one’s own hidden motivations are not connected in a way that flows or advances their meaning.  This is a movie of snapshots.  They are merely the blueprints of a great movie: terrific acting and the exploration of very real questions.  But with nothing filling in those blueprints, no structure or consistency, the film remains just that: great in concept, adequate in execution. 

Shhhh....Never Know Who's Listening

One of my biggest fears growing up was a planted camera in my room. Irrational and unlikely as it might be, the idea that someone could see what I was doing when I thought no one was watching was horrifying.  Not all camera angles are flattering!  Whether for vanity or for privacy, Harry Caul lives a life of intense privacy, fearful of people knowing more about him than he saw fit.  Perhaps this is exacerbated by his career choice, a surveillance specialist.  Francis Ford Coppala, in The Conversation, smashes Caul’s life apart. Caul takes a case that he can’t stay aloof from, too afraid that it will lead to murder.  The tension mounts and the vagueness clears through Coppala’s expert use of sound and image. The same scene repeats over and over again, a man and a woman walking in circles around a park, their voices intermittently obscured by static.  They are Caul’s latest targets and as  the scene repeats and the recording sharpens, a picture starts to emerge.  “He’d kill us if he had the chance”.

            The repetition of the mysterious conversation adds tension to the film, the truth obscured from both the viewer and Caul, being chipped away at until new conclusions arise and past ones fall.  It is both an innovative choice and a lesson: what we think we see and hear are not always the truth, our impressions are never completely accurate.  And there is always the chance that someone is listening to you.  

Sinister: A New Way to Do Old Horror

      Don’t have a creepy attic.  If you buy a house with a creepy attic – DESTROY IT IMMEDIATELY!  That is the primary lesson I learned from Scott Derrickson’s Sinister this weekend.  That and don’t be an asshole who lets your family live in a house where a bunch of people just got horrifically strung up on the tree in the backyard.  Because lets be honest, even without the supernatural that’s just asking for trouble.

      Sinister centers around a true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, masterfully played by Ethan Hawke, desperate to get his name back in the spotlight.  One element that raises this movie above the typical horror film clichés, is Ethan Hawke.  My friend turned to me during the movie and muttered, “oh hey, that guy’s actually acting.  Huh”.  But yes, having someone who recognizes the benefit of subtly and emotional depth adds a real layer to what could be another one note ‘been there done that’ addition to the genre.

     What really intrigued me is that the plot, while layered and surprisingly continuous, held no real surprises.  The entire mystery was spelled out almost from the beginning.  And nothing legitimately terrifying happened for a long time.  Yet it was the tension of what could be that frayed my nerves and kept me on the edge of my seat.  The all too real home videos and the red herring camera movements meant that I was always expecting a more chilling image or something to pop up in the unused left side of the frame. 

    Yes, there were cliches: the "creepy child", scary attic, and against all common sense, yelling at the screen idiocy of nighttime wanderings after noises in the dark.  Yet Derrickson took these cliches and layered it with real depth and emotion; there was a legitimate plot of a man who puts everything, including his family, below his need to regain a lost fame. Finally, a modern horror movie that doesn't rely on gratuitous violence and gore, but on suspense, emotions, and chilling and lasting fear. 

Putting our world on a screen: how our private lives become public

It’s amazing how we have found ways to translate something as uniquely sensory as food so that we can appreciate it when we are unable to use taste: the ink in cookbooks, the images flashing on our television and against the glow of a computer screen all conjuring memories of food past and hopes of food to come.  Julie and Julia explores this journey through technology using the parallel lives of famed food personality Julia Child and devoted blogger, Julie Powell.  Amy Adams and Meryl Streep bring charm, humor, and determination to their respective Julies and it’s easy to see where a bit of hero worship is warranted.  The movie alternates between eight years of the life of Julia Child in tantalizing Paris and a little over a year of the life of modern day Julie Powell.  Both women begin the movie lost and out of place:  Child, despite her exuberant love for Paris, her husband, and food, finds herself bored and itching for more.  Powell, dissatisfied with both job and new apartment, follows adoring husband Eric’s off hand suggestion that she begin a blog.  And that is the start of these two women’s adventure together; while they never meet, their lives continue on similar trajectories:  they find something they love, culinary school and Julia Child’s comforting recipes, face success, failure, rejection, and acceptance, and live their lives finally pursing something to the end.  Their parallel is best displayed in a montage of changing technology:  steel versus aluminum, a churn versus a food processor, type writer versus a computer.  Regardless of the differences, technology dramatically affected these two women’s lives: literally, as their means to success and symbolically, as a catalyst for change in relationships and dynamics between the great big world and their little dreams.

The movie explores the muddling of private and public life brought about by this technology.  Julia Child, after making a mistake during her cooking show, reassures “you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s to see”.  The irony of that statement and her mistake being aired on television for generations to come to watch is thick.  Likewise, Julie’s world is lived online.  She both gets lost in it, miserably breaking down and worrying about her readers and their comments, while finding her self in it too.  Everyone knows her business, it is how her mother found out she was having problems with her husband.  Yet at the same time, it was her apologetic, self-deprecating blog entry that brought her husband running back home.  Jane Lynch, as Julia’s sister Dorothy, gave a sad yet uplifting summation of the girls’ lives: “from the beginning we just didn’t fit in.  So we don’t!”.  Julie felt that too, her uncomfortable glances and awkward interjections at the Cobb Salad lunch with her friends revealing to her feelings of inadequacies and insecurity.  Yet through the blogging she was able to create her own persona, find herself, and have her own successes and failures.  She was able to create a niche for herself just as Julia Child did in her day. 

Food Coma on a Screen

How does someone watch a sizzling plate of crispy roasted chicken or the decadent oozing of chocolate streaming into a pie crust without feeling sympathy hunger pains, without having it tingle on the taste buds in phantom enjoyment?  In Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron explores the start of enjoying food on a sensory level that excludes taste.  Julia Child is a pioneer of food television and might be partially to blame for the creation of an entire network devoted to showing us things we can’t eat but WANT TO SO BADLY!  Julie Child started a craze, she changed how we think about food in this world and decades later Julie Powell honored that memory by blogging her way through Child’s cookbook.  This movie made me feel just as a delicious meal does: warm, cuddly, with a hint of a smile and the knowledge that it would be a very bad idea to have another bite.  Julie and Julia hit the right note, idealizing a legend while showing that sometimes that idol is just in our head; it was sweet and loving but moved from those romantic scenes quickly enough that we did not get bogged down in their cuteness or feel like the focus of the movie was romance instead of these pioneering women.  In the end, I wanted to be at both tables, Julia’s perfected originals with paper hearts and Julie’s modern day hit or misses.  Because both tables had friends, laughter, and most importantly, FOOD!

Who's Real on the Internet?

What gets put on the internet never gets lost.  Nothing truly disappears.  And all it takes is a few clicks and your life is revealed for everyone to see.  The internet completely revolutionized the conception of community, culture, and social network.  No longer are people we connect to and communicate with solely the people we can physically run into, send notes of paper and ink, or have one –sided relationships with across the airwaves.  Now communication becomes a two-way path that stretches across the globe.  As Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer incredulously remarks in The Social Network “Bosnia, they don’t have roads, but they have Facebook”. 

            The Social Network delves into the website that revolutionized how people interact with one another.  And by doing so with a fictionalized account of a true story, the movie reveals the true power of putting a personality on a screen.  In some ways, the computer allows us to become more than our real selves, to choose how we want to be perceived and do what we want to do.  And in other ways we lose control of our own image, as the real Mark Zuckerberg lost his to Jesse Eisenberg’s affectless version. 

            The Social Network cuts from image to image in a rapidly building montage as Zuckerberg smirks and sums up life in this new world: it isn’t a matter of who sees it, but “who are they going to send it to”.  The Internet. It moves fast. It hurts. It heals. It allows a socially awkward kid desperate to both rebel and fit in to create something that will make him known.  Make him remembered.  For someone who does not always understand how to interact with people, Mark has a keen sense of what the people want: knowledge, fast and personal and all in the comfort of wherever they are.  And yet can the complexities of human persona and relationships truly be captured by a ranking algorithm written on a dorm window or a relationship status and a few words on a Wall post?  Can everything be created on the web or does there have to be some real world connection to anchor a person? 

No matter what image you post as your profile pic or what you type for your “about me”, real interactions can still permeate into the viral universe.  What happens in the real world gets put on the internet and what gets put on the internet has consequences in the real world.  Zuckerberg’s attempt to friend his ex-girlfriend and his repeated refreshing of her homepage radiates the coldness of their real life relationship; Facebook becomes both a means to connect with those lost and a portrayal of how impersonal and distant the world has become.    It is too simple to only say that Facebook has severed all human interaction or that it has miraculously connected all people.  The Social Network looks behind the glowing screen; it sees both the positive and the negative of new media and in a kind of meta way, reflects it.  Like the internet, it’s not clear who is good and who is bad: each character is flawed, sympathetic, right, and wrong.  It doesn’t matter that they are on a screen or are portraying a fictional account; it doesn’t mean it’s not real it’s just not the full story. 

Infighting in the Social Network

What is the next big thing?  We all hope for a cool story with it: if you’re the creator, a story of triumph and wonder; an outsider, a story of scandal and intrigue.  In 2010, The Social Network looked at the story behind a site that is on millions of laptops and cellphones; the site that more students update in class than their notes.

 A question asked about this movie is how can watching someone type on a computer for two hours be enjoyable?  Yet, in our life that flickering feed is a major source of entertainment.  Still, it’s a fair question: I find myself itching to refresh the page when I’m bored at work, but I can’t say that watching my roommate update his status was the most entertaining Saturday night of my life. I think its David Fincher’s use of contrasts that makes it so riveting:  the intense, single-minded concentration of Mark Zuckerberg is pushed against sharp dialogue and fast paced images.  Dissonance is in the music too:  In the first of many sequences of Zuckerberg running, ominous, reverberating tones are taken over by classical melodies; tempos overlap:  slow piano with frenetic strings. And the story itself contrasts: the triumphant success of the underdog and the scandalous world of lawsuits, drugs, betrayal, and pride.

Movies are NOT the real world: Buster Keaton Solves that Case

Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. is, on its surface, a fantastical slapstick piece,

designed to amuse and bemuse. There’s a great rhythm to it and an ingenuity that

weaves its way through the entire movie. Once you begin to look deeper, the real

intelligence that lies behind the film starts to shine through. Keaton’s mastery of

special effects is in the spotlight in this movie within a movie. Keaton manipulates

dimensions, using safes as entrances into other locations and a movie screen as a

fluid portal between the real and the reel.

The story itself is easy to follow, especially as similar circumstances play out

in two worlds, so if you missed it the first time you just have to check out the movie

within a movie to get on board. Personally, I’m rarely a fan of silent films; I find

they’re overacted and not particularly to my liking. However, Sherlock Jr. managed

to surprise me. It was quick and clever and Keaton’s famously stoic face balanced

out the potentially overwrought caricatures that silent film can sometimes produce.

Creativity and self – awareness allowed this movie to parody the melodramas of its

day and create a witty, charming, and surprisingly thought-provoking film.