Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Men in Black 3 (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012) -- D
Nothing is more disingenuous than a franchise that tries to shoe-horn sentimentality as a capstone for its latest installment - especially if said sentimentality was never earned in previous films. Yet, that's precisely what Barry Sonnenfeld's latest entry into the now comprehensively vapid, void of a sci-fi series has done, sending Agent J (Will Smith) back in time to prevent partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) from being offed by alien-lunatic-killer Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement). Eventually, the time-travel is revealed as a means for reuniting J with his father - a most distasteful conclusion that doesn't bear rehashing here. While the first film (a good one) established itself on irreverence and a rambunctious degree of sardonic humor, the premise and jokes the third time around have been thoroughly neutered and watered-down, presumably to make the product more "family-friendly" or "accessible." The latter term is something that could describe a lot of Hollywood fare these days (or the intent), which is why it becomes even more vital to praise films like Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for their, no pun intended, devil may care attitudes. With MIB3, the conceit of revisiting 1960's Americana is simply an excuse to waddle through cultural signposts. Andy Warhol jabs, Mick Jagger punchlines - the list could easily go on, but what's the use? The real potential lies in the possibility of juxtaposing Smith's "street smart" agent against a more tumultuous social background, then wryly revealing that ultimately, not all that much has changed over the last 40 years. That would be social satire - but Sonnenfeld couldn't be less interested in doing anything serious with the material. Furthermore, instead of producing or creating laughs on-screen, every single frame or line of dialogue plays pre-determined or canned, almost as if it's disintegrating right after it leaves the screen. None of these woes should be much of a surprise given the film's production troubles - it's been widely reported that the film began shooting without a completed script and eventually drew the pens of nearly half a dozen writers. All of this spells bad faith on the part of Sonnenfeld, Jones, and especially Smith, whose return after a four year hiatus should have yielded something with far more conviction and far less audience pandering. Luckily, with the film's lukewarm opening - this time, the joke's on them.
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012) -- B-
It pains me to report that Terence Davies, the man responsible for Distant Voices, Still Lives, The House of Mirth, and Of Time and the City (all truly great films) has lost his way in The Deep Blue Sea, based on the play by Terence Rattigan. Davies has always been a gentle, humanist filmmaker, with an eye towards exposing societal constraint, examining decorum, and probing ruptures in rationality - those which often result in human degradation. Thus, it's no surprise that he's chosen Rattigan's 1950's England melodrama to further examine these issues. Moreover, by beginning with an Impressionistic, chronology-skewing opening, Davies produces what he's always done best - synthesizing feeling and affect with social historicity. While the fractured longings of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) initially achieve these aims, Davies gradually degenerates her suicidal instability into a series of heated or logophilic exchanges, alternating between her rich, but effete husband (Simon Russell Beale) or her poor, but affectionate lover Freddie (Tom Hidddleston). Davies' linguistic sophistication has often remained implicit, organic. Here - his high art aims are rather clunky, especially in laughable lines like Hester stating her situation "isn't a tragedy. Sad perhaps, but hardly Sophocles." Moreover, Davies seems oblivious to establishing a discernible tone for his melodrama, as when Freddie flings a schilling at Hester and barks: "for the gas meter, in case I'm late for supper." The issue isn't necessarily these moments/scenes, themselves, but that Davies neglects to find means for presenting them with either a coherent, discursive manner or formal devices to further his aims and interests. The tone wanders, the focus lacks, and one gets the sense that the material has been rather dispassionately rendered - without the conviction that drives and propels the best melodramas towards a comprehensive, cathartic destination. When the music cues at the end of The Deep Blue Sea, it's as if Davies thought the viewer would do the work for him, projecting the needed emotive gaps since he neglects to proficiently enunciate precisely what is at stake in this love affair gone awry.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Box Office Predictions (June 1-3)

The weekend's other release of note is For Greater Glory, starring Andy Garcia and receiving a modest 700 theater release. The target demographic should respond with some interest, but it's unlikely to see any sort of break-out here. The R-rated drama should make around 3 million for the weekend.
1 | Snow White and the Huntsman | 61.8 | NEW |
2 | MIB 3 | 26.6 | -62% |
3 | Avengers, The | 21.6 | -54% |
4 | Best Exotic Marigold Hotel | 6.9 | -15% |
5 | Dictator, The | 4.8 | -59% |
6 | Dark Shadows | 4.4 | -53% |
7 | Battleship | 4.2 | -69% |
8 | What to Expect When | 4.2 | -52% |
9 | For Greater Glory | 2.9 | NEW |
10 | Chernobyl Diaries | 2.1 | -77% |
Monday, May 28, 2012
Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012) -- D+
Dark Shadows is perhaps the most slapdash film ever made by the once talented, artistic, and provocative Tim Burton, a director whose name was once a stamp of assurance to filmgoers that they would indulge some shape or form of wacky, eccentric filmmaking. Lately, it's proven to be nothing more than a ruse in offering disposable product. Joining the likes of Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Planet of the Apes, the director's latest feels flat and forced from the start, commencing with a mundane, by-the-numbers prologue, in which Barnabus Collins (Johnny Depp) explains how he was scorned and made-vampire by witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) in the late 18th century. Resurrected by a construction crew in 1972, Barnabus quickly finds his estate, now occupied by a new generation of Collins, and tries to turn the family's fortunes around. Burton's typically "high concept" premise, much like Barnabus's fish-out-of-water observations, feel decades late compared to the recent works by filmmakers like David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Neveldine/Taylor, Tomas Alfredson, Matt Reeves, and Edgar Wright - directors who have brazenly taken genre and given it a particular, specifically revisionist imprint. Relying on gags that range from Barnabus not knowing how a television works, to thinking a car's headlights are "the eyes of the devil, himself," to a funky-ball/"happening" featuring Alice Cooper, Burton sloppily juxtaposes, and indecipherably waddles through, genre tropes (montage here, set-piece there) to little meaning or affect. Indeed, the set-design is magnificent and Depp's schtick sporadically amuses, but Dark Shadows steadily becomes one of the more bloodless mainstream offerings in recent years, while remaining one of the strangest. While that paradox may sound enticing or even subversive, it never plays as such, since Burton is unable to speak visually as a means to undermine the rote, formulaic script. With other gags about McDonald's and confused terminology ("Are you stoned?" "They tried stoning me, my dear. It did not work."), Burton's film could be read as a cheeky allegory for his anachronistic genre interests - a lament that the times-are-a'-changin', were the film not so seemingly oblivious to its own inert, dispassionate tone and style. Instead, one word consistently comes to mind throughout the film's two-hour running time: irrelevant.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Box Office Update (May 25 - 28)
MIB 3 didn't disappoint like I expected (okay, let's be honest, hoped) it to, but with an estimated 18 million on Friday, it still didn't live up to the expectations Sony must have believed, given the bloated budget and Will Smith star power. With a B+ Cinemascore, word of mouth should be relatively solid. Likewise, Chernobyl Diaries, after positing a nice 525K from midnights, was only able to scrape up 3.5 million on Friday. With a D+ Cinemascore, it should experience a significant Saturday dip. Otherwise, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel expanded to moderate success, with a 1.7 million Friday - and Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson's latest, made a whopping 175K from only four theaters. It stands a chance to take down Dreamgirls for the highest, live-action limited, opening weekend of all-time.
My Four-Day Weekend Estimates:
1. Men in Black III - 69.5 million
2. The Avengers - 48.5 million
3. Battleship - 12.9 million
4. The Dictator - 11.5 million
5. Chernobyl Diaries - 8.9 million
6. Dark Shadows - 8.4 million
7. What to Expect When You're Expecting - 8.1 million
8. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - 7.8 million
9. The Hunger Games - 3.3 million
10. Think Like a Man - 1.6 million
My Four-Day Weekend Estimates:
1. Men in Black III - 69.5 million
2. The Avengers - 48.5 million
3. Battleship - 12.9 million
4. The Dictator - 11.5 million
5. Chernobyl Diaries - 8.9 million
6. Dark Shadows - 8.4 million
7. What to Expect When You're Expecting - 8.1 million
8. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - 7.8 million
9. The Hunger Games - 3.3 million
10. Think Like a Man - 1.6 million
Friday, May 25, 2012
Pop Culture as Allegory in the Films of Giorgos Lanthimos

It
is the intention of this essay to evaluate Dogtooth
(2009) and Alps (2012), with
these issues in mind, and draw parallels between the EU and Hollywood, in terms
of Global dominance, inescapable influence, and a loss of identity via the
mimetic impulse. These are the two most recent films from Giorgos Lanthimos,
one of Greece’s most prominent, contemporary filmmakers, even though he only
has three films under his belt.[4]
Though neither film outwardly discusses or even seems to be concerned with the
real-word economic woes in Greece, Lanthimos uses the guise of pop cultural
discussion, with its Greek characters immersed-in and learning from American
culture for their primary means of expression, as a way to align Global Capitalism
with what Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi have termed “The Cultures of
Globalization.”[5] In
a sense, though finance and capital barely factor into Lanthimos’s films, on a
textual level, the subtext emerges, as does a consistent, rigid, and clinical mise-en-scene
that implicitly denigrates conventional logic, the sort of rational cognition
that leads to Global Capitalism (the erasure of sovereignty, the emergence of
cultural totalitarianism). Ultimately, Lanthimos seeks to venture away from
this sort of cultural (and thus narrative) logic and more towards a “logic of
sensation,” to borrow a term from Deleuze – it is my intention to argue that it
is not individual scenes, themselves, that evoke sensation in the work of
Lanthimos, but the films as a whole. Thus, it will be difficult to point to
individual scenes that engage sensation, because Lanthimos’s style is clinical,
detached. At least – it appears this way outwardly. Inwardly, the projection is
filled with sensation, affect, and echoes Deleuze’s claim that:
There are no longer grounds for talking
about a real or possible extension capable of constituting an external world:
we have ceased to believe in it and the image is cut off from the external
world. But the internalization or integration of self-awareness in a whole…has
no less disappeared…the relinkage takes place through parceling…this is why
thought, as power which has not always existed, is born from an outside more
distant than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts
an inside, an unthinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world.[6]

Thus,
these qualities are not readily identifiable in either film, though a
consistency exists that directly points to such implicit analysis/formal
rigidity. Dogtooth is, in many ways,
about the construction of identity via cultural forms. On a very basic
narrative level, the film concerns a family of five, secluded away from the
rest of society. The Father (Christos Stergioglou) manages a factory of some
sort, while the Mother (Michele Valley) stays at home with their three, adult
children, a Son (Hristos Passalis), an Older Daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) and a
Younger Daughter (Mary Tsoni), all of whom have no knowledge of an outside
world, other than the altered, redacted stories they hear from their parents.
They learn new words every day, but with changed meanings, as to erase any
concept of movement or migration from their minds. In a very Kubrickian manner,
the framing of characters operates under the internal logic of the film,
itself: stable, observant, and devoid of attempts to heighten the
emotion/content of the scene by a negation of conventional
filmmaking/continuity editing. Often, characters heads will be just out of
frame when talking, or some other sort of metonymic device is used to unsettle
a screen-space that is all about uniformity and stability. The unsettling
effect comes not through quick editing or canted angles; in fact, much of the
film is shot in long takes and with little movement. Nevertheless, the effect
is highly contrapuntal and serves as auto-critique of a fascistic, patriarchal
construction of society. The content is so absurd that the clinical observance
of it creates the film’s heavily ironic, comedic undertones.
These
qualities are fairly obvious and, not surprisingly, the ones most critics have
latched onto. What has been less discussed in Dogtooth is how innocence becomes disrupted via the infiltration of
technology and outside cultural construction. Certainly, the sexual “lessons”
taught by Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a worker from the Father’s factory used
as a prostitute for his Son, to the Older Daughter, such as erogenous zones and
cunnilingus, serve as a conventional starting point for the deterioration of
the heavily ordered, ritualized space. Nevertheless, as the sex becomes a means
of exchange, often trading sexual favors for something trivial like a headband,
it ultimately is something not so trivial: a VHS tape. The sex (although influential) is
not what ultimately drives the Older Daughter’s decision to flee the domestic
space (the children are told they may leave when the “Dogtooth” falls out, an
event which obviously, will never naturally occur); it is her mimetic desire,
her capacity for imitation, after viewing pop cultural heavies like Jaws, Rocky, Flashdance, and Enter
the Dragon that drives her towards rebellion. We might say she finds her
“double bind,” what RenĂ© Girard calls “a contradictory double imperative, or
rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives…it is so common that it
might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.”[8]
The desire to be self-sufficient, but to also imitate (or, perhaps better
stated) and play “follow-the-leader.” In Dogtooth,
the leader is not ultimately the most literal form of patriarchy (Father), but
the figurative presence of Cultural hegemony via pop art (films), that, devoid
of context, provide the Oldest Daughter with nothing to do but carry out empty
mimesis – in other terms, not only what contemporary Hollywood cinema is often
denigrated for engaging in, but also, in more specific terms as related to
Greece, their imitative double-bind of belonging to the EU, at all costs,
including their own disintegration.

Like
Dogtooth, there is a key patriarchal
figure in Alps, who dons himself
“Mont Blanc,” because, “it is the biggest of all mountains.” Monikers and
linguistic exchange/confusion play a significant role in both films, especially
in the latter’s concern with pop cultural influence. The film’s recurring joke
is that people, of any sort, are often defined by their favorite actors or
musicians. Riding in the back of an ambulance with a dieing girl, Mont Blanc
squeezes her hand: “Who is your favorite actor? Brad Pitt? Johnny Depp…what,
not Johnny Depp?” Likewise, another deceased person is said to have been “a big
fan of Morgan Freeman. He saw every single one of his films.” Characters openly
and often discuss their favorite pop cultural figures as if it were akin to
personal experience: in Alps, it is
the most essential question anyone can be asked.
In
many respects, the integration of pop cultural discussions into feature films
has existed for decades. Tracing back to American films like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992),
and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996),
directors began to define not just their own parameters through influence, but
their character identities through pop cultural savvy, often in discussing the
meaning of specific films and songs, rather than the contents of their own personal
lives and themselves.[9]
Indeed, one might say these films prompted an excessive obsession and immersion
with the past for the past decade: "Instead of being about itself, the
2000s has been about every other previous decade happening all at once: a
simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the
present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and
feel."[10]
Moreover, in the ninth annual “State of Cinema” address given at the 55th
San Francisco International Film Festival, author Jonathan Lethem detailed what
he calls recent “ecstasies of influence” in cinema, where B-movie ethos can
often burrow their way into the subconscious of contemporary popular culture.
He notices a recent trend in filmmakers emphasizing a performative nature in
the art form, itself, and that their characters are often trapped between
personalities, uncertain of what or who they really are.[11]
Alps, in particular, embodies exactly
what Lethem is talking about, detaching its characters from any singular
identity – more a multiplicity, but none that are particularly genuine, honest,
or, perhaps worst of all, satisfactory. Moreover, it’s particularly noteworthy
that in many of the American films interested in pop cultural influence,
characters are often discussing American figures. In Dogtooth and Alps, every
single influential figure is American – never is a single Greek or, even,
European influence noted amongst the characters. Such an inclusion (or
exclusion, as it were), speaks to the crux of Lanthimos’s imitative, mimetic
crisis, where not only is identity being constructed outside of the self, but
it’s coming from another cultural referent entirely – the pop cultural
equivalent of the EU, if you will: Hollywood. That Lanthimos refuses to give
nearly any of his characters names (unless they are self-ascribed monikers)
further solidifies his aims at revealing identity crisis.

When
asked to describe how he came up with the idea for Dogtooth, Lanthimos responded: “[My] original inspiration was
almost science-fiction…it’s a thought about the future. What if there were no
more families anymore? Do we actually need them?”[12]
By questioning the family unit and larger super-structures, his films get to
many contemporary issues of identity crisis, be they financial, individual
personality, or cultural. To conclude, in February 2010, it was widely reported
that Goldman Sachs, the now infamous American investment firm, helped mask
Greece’s debt in order to increase profits on a (legal) derivatives deal.[13]
Taking into account both Lanthimos films, as a whole, the broad, sometimes
surreal and murky strokes of “meaning” are juxtaposed to instances of minutia
that lack affect or sensation, but retain an empty specificity. Indeed,
Lanthimos might be offering his characters’ (and his country’s) posterior mask – the intrusion of American capital
and culture at the expense of comprehensive autonomy.
[1] Harry Wallop, “Greece: Why Did
It’s Economy Fall So Hard?” The Telegraph,
April 28, 2010, accessed May 20, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/7646320/Greece-why-did-its-economy-fall-so-hard.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gary Becker and Richard Posner,
“Should Greece Exit the Euro Zone?” The
Becker-Posner Blog, May 20, 2012, accessed May 21, 2012. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
[4] His first feature, Kinetta (2005) screened at festivals
like Berlinale, but never had a North
American release. His second film, Dogtooth,
was the first Greek film since Iphigenia (Michael
Cacoyannis, 1977) to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film. It, unsurprisingly, did not win.
[5] Fredric Jameson
& Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
[6] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 277-8.
[7] For further discussion on this
matter, the link between cognition and sensation, there is no greater book
than: Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, Putnam, 1994).
[8]
René
Girard. Violence and the Sacred
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 156.
[9] The lineage can certainly be
traced back further, to Godard and Fellini, but the above examples are the most
notable from an emerging Hollywood obsession with the past, not just with
directors, but actual characters in the films, as well.
[10] Simon Reynolds. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its
Own Past. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), x-xi.
[11] Jonathan Lethem, “Jonathan
Lethem’s State of Cinema Address at San Francisco Int’l Film Festival,” Indirewire, April 26, 2012, accessed May
23, 2012. http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/jonathan-lethams-state-of-cinema-address-at-san-francisco-intl-film-festival#
[12] Larry Rother: “Dogtooth: No
Indifference Allowed,” The New York Times,
February 4, 2011, accessed May 20, 2012. http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/dogtooth-no-indifference-allowed/
[13] Beat Balzli, “How Goldman Sachs
Helped Greece to Mask it’s True Debt,” Spiegel
Online International. February 8, 2010, accessed May 20, 2012. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Box Office Predictions (May 25 - 28)

Chernobyl Diaries also opens. Given audiences disinterest in Blockbusters and seemingly surefire romantic comedy vehicles, yet another hand-held horror flick (without a readily identifiable hook or premise) doesn't seem to stand a chance making any sort of dent beyond drawing requisite horror geeks who will consume any and every genre entry Hollywood churns out (raises hand). Look for no more than 9 million. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel also expands into wide release (1100 theaters) after a moderately successful limited run. It should see close to 7 million for the Memorial day weekend.
Official Predictions:
1. The Avengers - 49.2 million (-12%)
2. Men in Black III - 48.9 million (NEW)
3. Battleship - 13.5 million (-47%)
4. The Dictator - 11.1 (-36%)
5. Chernobyl Diaries - 8.3 million (NEW)
6. What to Expect When You're Expecting - 8 million (-24%)
7. Dark Shadows - 7.3 million (-42%)
8. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - 6.6 million (+106%)
9. The Hunger Games - 2.8 million (-5%)
10. Think Like a Man - 1.4 million (-46%)
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