Film Review: The Hangover Part III

A New Twist, An Old Tale, The Same Result

In the stomach gurgling, head spinning state of being hung over, there is an extended moment when you tell yourself “I’m never drinking again.” Eventually your liver re-processes, your head gets straight, and the alcohol you’ve whiningly demonized doesn’t seem so putrid. You repeat it again the next week, but the same thing happens, and you begin vowing that the third time will be different.  Trying to embody this demographically niche problem could have easily been the mentality for director Todd Phillips, whose films have always pandered to and been seemingly stuck in college, or college-like atmospheres. The far more logical (and unfortunate) reason for creating The Hangover Part III and in effect wrapping up (we’ll see) this trilogy of lost memory and drunken reconnaissance is the easily diagnosable condition of Hollywood: money.

Doubtless this last chapter will earn a pretty penny with its established brand name and bankable stars who have all ridden the big wave of fame the first film produced. That one caught us by surprise in 2009 and introduced us to three men so perversely different from each other, a three-buddy comedy outrageously unexpected. But its repetition in Bangkok two years ago proved that a new location couldn’t revitalize an identical story, told in the same comedic beats and rhythms, adding on to the violent and grotesque. This third edition however strays from the backtracking mold of the first two in a desperate attempt to round up the “wolfpack” in relatively distinct circumstances and give closure to a series of films that never really needed it.

The first two scenes of the film involve the coke fueled international criminal Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) escaping from a Thailand prison Shawshank style. Back in California Alan (Zach Galifianakis) motors down the highway with a Giraffe in tow. If there has been an arc to this series at all, it has been the growth of these two characters, and the actors that play them, from being foolish props to plot-centric leads. Infused with a caricaturist portrait of an Asian stereotype, Jeong’s Chow is someone ideal for the margins, the wind up toy that’s destined to say something ludicrous in the right moment until he has to be wound up again. His role has expanded from being a naked man in the trunk of car to being the primary focus of Part III, his mannerisms accepted, his monotonous drivel with less bite. The fool often shines in the cracks until he becomes spread too thin.

The same could be said for Galifianakis’s Alan, the 42-year-old self-proclaimed stay-at-home son, though the conversation changes in his case. For most of this series we have accepted his social unawareness, his naiveté, his sensitivity shoved into all the wrong places, as simply being poorly parented. But as he turns around to look at the multi-car wreckage he has produced after decapitating his newly bought giraffe under a bridge, he gives just a mild grimace. Something is wrong with this man and it’s not just a sheltered upbringing. We laugh at his inane jokes, his inconvenient questions, his feminine T-shirts and crippling priorities, but we rarely laugh with him. The dialogue over mental conditions can be noted, somewhat more overtly this time around, but it is too large a topic for Phillips to bring into a movie like this, or even be discussed seriously by Alan’s friends and family.

That’s how the plot initially starts after Alan’s father (Jeffrey Tambor) dies of a heart attack (Alan’s headphones were too loud to help save him). Alan’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law Doug (Justin Bartha) regroup with Stu (Ed Helms) and Phil (Bradley Cooper) to host an intervention for Alan and convince him he needs treatment after he’s stopped taking his medication. The four drive down to Arizona to the treatment center not before being kidnapped and held at gunpoint by men in pig masks led by a big-talker named Marshall, played straight and angry by John Goodman. He wants the 21 million dollars worth of gold bars that were stolen from him by Chow, and they’re the only four who might know where he is, alluding to a scene from the first film. He gives them three days to find Chow and return his loot, and takes Doug as collateral, out of the picture again, naturally.

So the unlucky, but hardened triumvirate hit the road again, searching not for their memory but the man responsible for their first and hopefully last misfortune. There are no hangovers in this film (unless you count the post-credits) and Part III really turns into just a back hills chasing caper. In this sense, it loses some of its soul, the mystery and intrigue of watching men try to recover bits and pieces of their shattered nightlife that in large part had nothing to do with alcohol, and a lot to do with potent, misplaced drugs. The film is then left largely to the hands of Chow and Alan, whose jokes hit and miss with an unsettling equivalence. Such is the burden of viewing these man-children, who have ceased to really learn anything except the inner workings of the legal system.

Part of their journey takes them back to Las Vegas, the birthing place of their Rufied bachelor trip and poor decisions, but their sober presence dims the city’s lucid experience. Heather Graham makes a short-lived unnecessary appearance, as does her toddler, once named Carlos by Alan. A run-in at a pawn shop sparks romance between Alan and the storeowner played by Melissa McCarthy, and Caesar’s Palace becomes another infamous backdrop to the three’s mishandlings. There are drug serums, guard dogs, cockfighters, and a mildly amusing rendition of the song “Hurt.” It sounds like a jumbled mess and it mostly is, except that this is a chronological story and so these tokens of muse really just provide levity to an otherwise darker, dangerous plot.

Phillips forces a few shots at the end that flashback to earlier films of the three walking, dazed but determined, side by side again. If it’s not a gimmicky reminiscence, it’s at most a subtle conceit that there really is no way to end a series like this, no matter how much you try to make it different. These men never change. That’s the tragedy of a comedy like this. Once you’ve got a drink (or in this case two!) in you, it’s hard to know when to quit.

2/5

 

Film Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

The Dynamic Duo, In Epic Proportions

In many ways, Star Trek Into Darkness is an easily comprehensible, digestible film that zips and beams its way through the infinite confines of outer space at a constant driving force. Three dimensions and an IMAX screen help create this vast sense of space and speed, polished with blistering and invasive special effects that come close to mastering its holographic deficiencies. But it is also, in that manner, a simple, loud, and frenetic piece of blockbuster capability, an overwhelming immersive experience that eventually becomes overbearing.

Like the first film, which infused ample doses of humor and spunk to the Star Trek franchise, Into Darkness takes place before its original arrival on both the big and small screen. Its creator Gene Roddenberry was wary of giving the show a social current, an intergalactic context for the universal issues inescapable from both man and alien. To say the motley crew aboard this starship Enterprise has no relatable reflections of life on earth wouldn’t be correct. But rather than provoke any deep social commentary, allusions to our current world more closely resemble the cast functioning of television show “Real World.” Call it “Real World: Starfleet.”

Leading this confrontational grouping is the continuous classic combo of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the half-man, half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto), the superego to Kirk’s enormous id. Pine has never felt like the ultimate playboy, but it seems as though this franchise is trying to form him into one as Quinto suffers with bangs. Kirk is however always on the run in this film, specifically from its first sequence, bursting through red thickets away from a new budding species and erupting volcano. Spock is trapped inside it ducking lava and quickly a role reversal must take place. “What would you do in my situation?” becomes a motto both sides of the Freudian coin decide on, instinct acting on logic, rationality banking on emotion. Kirk breaks protocol early on and loses his captain’s badge from Pike (Bruce Greenwood). He’s later reinstated once disaster strikes.

But much of this balancing act is superseded by the film’s hyper-speed pace that explodes from its first frame and rarely lets go of the pedal. So much is happening, and happening at you, that in many ways certain characters seem like shells of themselves from when we first met them. JJ Abrams, the returning director of this born again franchise, prefers there be no rest stops on this journey that spans more interstellar road and even a trip to a Klingon planet. Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) don’t even have regular time to manage the space bumps in their relationship, so they do so while plummeting towards the planet in a small pod under duress. It keeps things tidy and economical, like the screen time Saldana receives.

Starfleet is in pursuit of an evil terrorist who blows up buildings and wipes out half a North American city with a smoldering ship later on. Captain Marcus (Peter Weller) meanwhile initiates torpedoes aimed at the man responsible after a large-scale assassination attempt occurs during a Dr. Strangelove style officials meeting. The name of the game is revenge, a staple in many sci-fi films, but one that Abrams relies upon to hold the narrative together. He has always been a director and writer who makes sure his characters drive his content, and his creations, like Super 8, have subsequently dwindled when he forgets about them. Sci-Fi however is one of those stages a director can get away with and make a starship battle, or a light-saber duel which Abrams will soon be administering in Star Wars, feel engaging to the actual story. It is also easy to get carried away by its enticing non-gravitational pull.

In fact in one scene, with the Enterprise in free fall, Kirk must sprint on the sides of walls amidst the shifts of the floor through the rotating labyrinthine of the ship. Kirk is constantly holding on for dear life, which eventually becomes a desensitizing dramatic plot point. Spock is the only one that can save, or at least control this id. The baddy responsible for all of this chaos is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, the rising British actor of Sherlock fame and recipient of small, severe parts in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse. To some he may seem a vacuous villain, to others a perfectly cold mentalist. That may depend on how much you canonize Trek and its long, extensive history of characters and villains. Cumberbatch doesn’t have much time to torture here, and so the heights of his motivations and potential evil empire strike less realizable in comparison to the headiness of a Spock or even a Scotty (Simon Pegg).

He gets the most to do reviving his engineering role on the ship while Bones (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), and Checkov (Anton Yelchin) become more marginal players. Alice Eve provides a new face as Carol, but does little on board the ship except to be caught changing her clothes with just her underwear and bra on. But this is not nearly in a phase of blockbuster eye candy selling out- referring to both women and explosions- that’s equivalent to a Transformers or Battleship. Abrams, along with his devoted writers Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, is not in the trashy genre that considers anything metal colliding with metal full of buttery popcorn goodness. This unfortunately is a rare achievement in big budget summer flicks.

He just might be forgetting though that Star Trek doesn’t have to be filled with those elements at a never-ending pace and spectacle. Into Darkness is an agreeable sequel, but should maybe be more than that. After putting on the 3D glasses, you may feel like you’re inside (or outside) this intergalactic, final frontier world. It’s just not as deep and dark as you thought it might be.

2.5/5

Film Review: The Great Gatsby

Pomp and Circumstance in Long Island

F. Scott Fitzgerald walked out of the theater when his timeless piece of American literature was adapted for the first time into a silent film in 1926. Now, nearly ninety years later, The Great Gatsby makes its fourth go around on the big screen and its most eager and fulfilling attempt to keep Mr. Fitzgerald in his seat were he still alive. Passing and exceeding the barriers of sound, color, and two-dimensional space, this film adaptation’s lavish grandiosity comes courtesy of modern fundamentalist of “pow” and pizzazz Baz Luhrmann, a dignitary artist whose cinematic brush applies broad, crisp strokes of grime and glitz. Here, his transformation of iconic written imagery is brassy and bold sometimes outclassing but wary to undermine the intricacies of Fitzgerald’s prose, expanding his adjectives while letting other verses speak for themselves.

It’s a somewhat humbled response for Luhrmann who took contemporary liberties with his first large-scale production Romeo + Juliet, supplying shotguns and urban chaos in Verona Beach Orange County. But it’s also a perfect opportunity for him to use his colorful palette, construct extravagant ensembles, and capture his destined era of filmmaking, a 1920s landscape of unending dancing, drinking, and partying. For a director whose primary cinematic iconography is Moulin Rouge!, the Jazz Age is both fitting and indulging to recreate a space, a time, so full of life and wealth, and simultaneously so close to the verge of collapse and catastrophe. It’s narrator Nick Carraway (played and voiced by Tobey Maguire) that bridles Luhrmann from exhibiting excessive excess and gives his vision a beautiful balance of words too descriptive, too sublime to forget or re-write.

The three-piece suits, sparkled headbands, and finely groomed hair fill the background of Carraway’s recollections of his time in West Egg, NY, the fictional town beneath the castled mansion of Jay Gatsby, his wealthy neighbor stuck in the past, in love.  The way the film starts is uniquely conceived, a sanitarium housing a troubled Carraway well into the Depression and his personal misery, trapped in his glimmering past, the one he recalls through typing and reciting, a catharsis that merges into the 3D spectacular seven years before. The extra dimension does not have much pop or immersion, making its presence felt only in confetti rain and in the camera’s swooping and speeding plunges from tops of skyscrapers. Without the depth or artistry it seems inspired by Hugo’s soaring spectacle, layering and overlapping scenes for an atmospheric presence. For its grand and recurring thematic of Gatsby reaching out towards the green light, his elusive reality, paradoxically, and maybe mistakenly, Luhrmann’s three dimensions lack that same illusion for his audience.

But such is the difficulty in bringing what many will call a canonical piece of American literature to the screen. There is plenty to chew on here besides the fact that liberties are taken in respect to minor characters  (Meyer Wolfsheim is not a Jew, but played by Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan) and the anachronisms that fill the soundtrack produced by Jay-Z. What the film may struggle with in its substance should be a small factor amidst the roar of the roaring 20s. The Great Gatsby, above all else, is about feeling, about riding the exuberant roller-coaster of wealth and bright lights, and doing so in what Nick Carraway call’s Gatsby’s mansion, an “amusement park.” Gatsby’s wood panels may not have reverberated from the overbearing bass of techno and hip-hop, but they promote the same current of intensity and fervor that billowed throughout his halls and the city’s underground speakeasies long before. Gatsby drives Nick into town over the Queensborough Bridge and you can faintly hear Alicia Keys billowing “Newww Yooorrrkk,” recreating that sense of empowerment and wonder so contagious, proud, and like the lyrics, inspiring. Taking almost a quarter of the film to appear, Mr. Gatsby is at first as elusive and dreamlike as are his visions of the past. He is played by Mr. Hollywood Leonardo DiCaprio, and sometimes he and his character are indecipherable. His introduction to the film is nothing short of cinematic gold and indulgence, a symmetrical close-up of the wealthy, tanned, golden-locked playboy who gives a hallmark sealed smirk and smile amidst a backdrop of flanking, fizzling fireworks. Luhrmann summons movies past with this iconic character, an immense home and egoistic spoken delivery mimicking Charles Foster Kane and adding “old sport”; later, an identical underwater shot invoking Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Fortunately, Nick was not there to tell Luhrmann that “he can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby would imply however that his arrogance is merely confidence, his self-made wealth and parties gestures of generosity, and to Nick, he is his most conceited. But DiCaprio’s angular face is just a mask hiding a sensitively determined love for the iconic ditzy girl Daisy (Carrie Mulligan), separated for five years and now neighbors across the bay. His slow retrieval of their gap apart displays his false vibrato, but DiCaprio, who has now become a staple actor trying to recover lost love (Inception, Titanic, Romeo+Juliet, to name a few) slides into his familiar melodrama with an ease and charm even at his most visceral levels. Daisy has become his “Rosebud” and figment of his lucid imagination she proclaims is “perfect.” She is the green light piercing through the fog of memory and Luhrmann hammers this imagery home.

Mulligan is a bit more stoic than Mia Farrow’s 1975 interpretation, but much more engaging as a character. The same can be said for Elizabeth Debicki who plays Jordan Baker, Daisy’s golfing best friend who has transformed into the idyllic flapper model. Her presence as Nick’s girlfriend doesn’t seep into the story even as much as the affair between Daisy’s husband Tom (played boisterously by Joel Edgerton) and Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of garage worker George Wilson (Jason Clarke) that takes its fatal spiral downward. The fact that Luhrmann has corralled mostly Australians for the pure American novel doesn’t register in the glaring miscasting way you’d think it would.

But I will not criticize a director who establishes a style, a perspective, and subsequently implements it throughout. Gatsby and Daisy’s scenes together are less effusive and dry, maybe a product of bland underwritten parts, or possibly an intentional opaqueness, consistent with Nick’s lingering on the periphery of the relationship- fueled mostly by vocals of Lana Del Ray and romantic visions of pre-war love. It’s here the film dips away from its feeling and tries to fabricate one instead. It thrives much better in its Manhattan environments where the streets are alive, the lights are brighter, and the senses heightened, like when Tom and Nick visit Myrtle and her friends in a flowery-laced apartment building. Sex and champagne fill the air and on a weekday afternoon a small room becomes a brothel, ripe with carelessness, articulated outdoors by an unconfined fire escape trumpeter.

It’s at that moment when Nick Carraway feels both within and without at the same time, reveling in momentary hedonism, finding its yellow glow despicable. And it’s the way I surmise you will feel after experiencing this adaptation, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled” by Luhrmann’s “inexhaustible variety of life.” Both might not have it any other way.

4/5

The Tribeca Diary

Red Carpets, After-Parties, and Prince Amukamura

I’m sitting on a leather couch in an upscale bar on Fulton Street and New York Giant cornerback Prince Amukamura is a few feet to my right. My colleague/friend/socializer Kris Venezia is next to me and we engage in conversation to avoid any awkward stares in our direction, which we knowingly received from many people, including Hannah Storm’s younger daughters to our left. You see we inadvertently had situated ourselves in the VIP section of the bar, an open room with neon lighting that offered us a chance to breathe. There were no signs delineating this space from the rest of the log-jammed upper-class attendees in the dimly lit gathering hole, but no one told us to leave. When you act like you’re supposed to be somewhere, no one really questions you.

That understanding didn’t directly enter my conscience as I naively stepped into sacred space, but it could have been in my subconscious. I had just seen the film Big Shot about corporate scammer and improbable New York Islanders’ owner John Spano, one of several ESPN documentaries making its premiere the past week.  I was granted access to the film’s aforementioned after-party thanks to an admit one green ticket you might find at a county fair auction, a rather small token for a luxurious event like this.

Somehow I’ve managed two after-parties the last two years I’ve covered the Tribeca Film Festival– the other was for the band Journey’s doc “Don’t Stop Believin’– and I’m not sure why. You migrate from theater to bar amidst the lower east-side neighborhood’s jumbled collision of streets that have ceased being numbers and you eventually follow the herds of suits to the right location. It’s mysterious, and then you enter, rub shoulders, and try not to be awkward until you leave shortly after.

Of course, the Tribeca Film Festival is an event that can highlight some young filmmakers, give subpar films a chance, and occasionally lay claim to showcasing a bigger budget feature. For anyone attending it however, it can be as big a maze as roaming around Tribeca itself. There are several types of publicists, some for screenings, some designated just for the red carpet, some for whom it’s impossible to tell which is which. I write my name down on a list when I arrive at the carpet and as soon as I do a handful of photographers begin second guessing the validity of the list I just signed. “What about the other list that guy’s holding?” Oh, the humanity. That will all quickly become white noise but red carpet experiences are mostly thankless ones. Unless you have an ESPN or E! logo around your microphone, questioning time will be limited and sparse, answers will be worn down and regurgitated mechanically, and there may sometimes be a small verbal altercation with a reporter next to you who claims they were supposed to have the last question, and not you! (Luckily this was not my experience this year, but one in the past).

The movie in question for this red carpet, screening, and gala is as I mentioned Big Shot, directed by Kevin Connolly, the famed “Entourage” actor who has started his slow trajectory into directing. The documentary is an imperfect but fascinating, outrageous story about John Spano, the owner of the New York Islanders for four long months in the mid nineties who lied his way into the front office.  Yes, this guy from Texas owned a small company, maybe not even worth six figures, and with a little paperwork trickery and socializing with the right people passed as a guy worth billions. The Dallas Stars actually rejected his phoniness when he applied to become their owner. The Islanders however were content to let their dwindling franchise be revitalized by an ostensibly no-named wealthy mogul in an attempt to save the team. He couldn’t front the down payment because his money was “tied up” overseas. “Get it to us later” the organization said.

The film explores the history of the once great Islanders during their four year Stanley Cup championship run in the late seventies. Connolly, a life-long Islanders fan, is up front from the beginning that he’s been a die-hard since he was a kid, and narrates (he probably shouldn’t have) the franchise’s slow decline until the Spano hoopla began. Spano was supposedly making millions and yet asked questions about how the lotto paid out. There was reason for speculation, but the Islanders assumed that Gary Bettman and the NHL would do the vetting, and they thought the Islanders would. Connolly sits down with Spano for a one on one during the film and the scammer explains how everyday he’d have to think about what story to make up.

Spano seems completely uncomfortable when discussing his exploits with Connolly, but not necessarily ashamed. Which is the odd part about this man. For all of his trouble, he doesn’t think twice about saying he’d do it all again. Part of the documentary’s success is simply due to the fact that its subject matter has got to be partially insane, and also that he actually pulled it off. “Last night I was throwing up,” Spano tells us on the Red Carpet when asked if he was nervous before watching his deviancy on screen with a New York crowd for the first time. “We never talked about [the film, referring to his friends], the first time was on film of all places. In some ways it was cathartic and got me over some things I had been carrying around.”

Making things more awkward in the theater are watching the film’s colorful talking heads rip this guy, like former Islanders’ coach Mike Millbury. We interview Connolly in a rare opportunity to speak with a celebrity at my eye level. “This is pre-Mark Cuban, before the super owner, so here was this guy that was going to come in, build a new building, was going to sign Messier, was going to buy the Stanley Cup, pull a Steinbrenner, a Jerry Jones,” says Connolly.  Well, he didn’t. But he did switch the team’s uniforms, the insult to the fraudulent injury.

I walk out of the after-party and down to the subway. So rapid is the environment change from upper-class nightlife to the underground grime. It’s kind of similar to Spano’s million-dollar life at the top and subsequent fall into the prison cell. Before I leave I ask Amukamura (I still don’t know why he was there) if he is nervous about the NFL Draft. “As long as they don’t draft a corner.” They didn’t.

Speaking of meteoric rises and falls,

there’s Lenny Cooke, the eponymous documentary by brother filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie about the could-have-been megastar now cautionary tale touring the country. He was the best high school basketball player in the country; better then Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony. Better than LeBron James. He didn’t start playing until he was sixteen, which is insane but also a testament to his natural 6’8” power slamming, crisscrossing ability. The year was 2001 and the three of the first four NBA draft picks were high schoolers, like the historical first overall selection Kwame Brown. The film’s producer knew that draft would change everything for basketball, so he rounded up the Safdie’s, only 15 and 17 at the time, to document Cooke and his inevitable jump from high school to the pros the next year.

It was probably going to be a one to two year process. Capture his life before, during and a little after David Stern called his name from the podium. It ended up taking twelve years and the only footage of Cooke and organized basketball is his time at prospect tournaments and then years later watching his former competition on TV. When did things go wrong? These are answers somewhat unexplainable but paradoxically understandable. It’s a contradiction the film attempts to display but also consciously shies away from as we jump from the grainy home video quality of the early 00’s to the HD era of Cooke’s present reality, now a shadow of his former physically dominating presence, still struggling with the same broken, repeated lexicon of “Naw mean?” that ends his sentences. The video quality change is cruel metaphor and one I’m sure Cooke would’ve had the other way. His basketball career is figuratively and quite literally a blur. Years after, his regret and misfortune are crystal clear.

Of course that’s also just the reality of the extended process that this film took to make. Cooke became the poster child of a naïve kid with no work ethic and all the talent in the world. A Brooklyn native, his later years in high school were spent in suburban New Jersey with his guardian Debby- who necessarily spoiled him but gave him a chance to escape his posse’s urban culture and focus just on basketball. He shows up late to 5 Star Basketball camps, fakes pushups, and then turns heads on the court. It’s later inferred his demise was his decision to leave Debby for a no name agency he happily signed to receive a lump sum of money. He says after the screening in the theater that he never knew how the agent even found him.

That decision sent him to Flint, Michigan and he didn’t play organized ball after that for over a year but would still make his press conference at Junior’s Cheesecake in Brooklyn to announce his entrance into the 2002 NBA Draft. Commissioner Stern never called his name that night. Cooke had no college back-up and little to no future. He would go on to play sparingly in minor leagues like the CBA, USBL, and in leagues overseas, but his performance never reached the right eyes, was never given a chance. It’s a doc similar to Billy Corben’s “Broke” that premiered last year at Tribeca. There’s no narration or much omniscience. We just witness the two alternate universes of a man with everything ahead of him and one quickly with it all behind.

As the film cuts towards the present, we see Lenny watching LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony play against each other during a Heat and Knicks game, guys he rubbed shoulders with during his All-American tourneys. It stings to watch his overweight self watch in his less than sanitary Virginia home, just as it stings to see his broken relationships with members of his old entourage. Cooke was so far ahead of the curve at 17 that he hit the club instead of the books.  There is a strange tone at the ending Q and A of the film; a thunderous applause arises for Lenny as he walks down the aisle to join the directors. It’s clear the brothers have grown close to him when one of them starts talking about how the NBA doesn’t respect individuals. “LeBron’s a machine,” he says, and then alludes to a previously troubled J.R. Smith as being a “real” person that has finally molded into NBA form. The real answer to Cooke’s downfall, which these two filmmakers maybe refuse to accept, is that Lenny just didn’t want to be a machine.

Back in the beginning of the film, a sixteen-year-old Cooke is eating McDonald’s with his friends while watching the NBA Draft. Cut to the present, and his fiancée wipes away tears from her eyes as she questions her and Cooke’s present reality. “How do you go from the NBA Draft to working at McDonald’s?”

Later in the film, a New York Times reporter comes to spend the day with Cooke in Virginia to write a feature about him. In the background of an interview he conducts, Joe Buck is announcing a Redskins-Giants football game and I can faintly hear him mention the name “Prince Amukamura.” Like I said, Tribeca is hard to navigate. Luckily for me, things came full circle.

Film Review: Pain and Gain

The Three Muscleteers 

At the beginning of Pain and Gain a narrator explains that the real life tale of three body builders turned kidnapping criminals is “unfortunately a true story.” It’s the kind of backhanded, subtle conceit that says, “Come along and enjoy three men’s catastrophic fall from grace, won’t you?” But it’s also a nod to the surreal and farcical nature of the film, which pokes more fun at itself than it does capturing the reality that was a severely amateur money-robbing plan gone fatally wrong. And that, in some essences, makes this a black comedy more than anything, though, within mid-nineties Miami in which this story takes place, the color black might be better exchanged for any shade of highlighter.

It doesn’t seem like the perfect fit then for its director Michael Bay who has never been sharp on comedy, growing his reputation towards prodding considerable polarizing fan bases. Rather die than be called a minimalist, Bay has somewhat championed the “movies as pure entertainment” argument in his Transformers series, a loud, relentless clash of CGI metal robots, noisy explosions, and exploitative auteurism. Maybe that gives him too much credit, but his style, or lack thereof, crashes and bursts its way into your presence, oftentimes providing a jumbled mess of action and unnecessary angles. But Bay only presses one explosion in his new film and while the second half of Pain and Gain runs off the track, it’s nice to see him working strictly with humans again.

He does however stick to his guns, but not the kind that store bullets. The main ones in question belong to Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a longtime manager for Sun Gym who bristles with bulging bicep and suntanned confidence and an “I’m Hot, I’m Big!” attitude. He believes in fitness and also an American Dream that has little bearing on finances and more on improving yourself by improving your body.  But something is missing in his life that makes his current job and achievements, like tripling membership for his boss (Rob Corddry), feel utterly pointless. It’s his client Victor Kershaw, a self-made half-Jew half-Colombian wealthy big-shot played by Tony Shaloub that spawns this bridled escapism and desire to take his assets for his own.

In order to make the theoretical- kidnap Kershaw and transfer all of his funds out of his account-practical, Lugo enlists fellow trainer Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and ex-con Paul (Dwayne Johnson), a big muscled born-again Christian who makes Jesus his role model, to kick start their better lives. Lugo was an ex-con himself, scheming his way as a lending banker. But he’s a “Do-er,” as told to him by Johnny Wu (Ken Jeong), a television motivational speaker. They dress up in Halloween masks and steal their man.

Penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Pain and Gain’s story comes from a Miami Sun-Times article by Pete Collins. It doesn’t shy away from details, and neither does the film, especially during Kershaw’s torture: taser jolts followed by punches in order to make him sign documents, make the right calls, and transfer his accounts. Lugo is intent on making Kershaw taste justice, and in the process reaps the rewards of his massive wealth, inheriting his mansion, boat, sports car, and fulfilling a lifelong dream of driving a lawn mower. His partners use it on other things.

Adrian impulsively buys a new house and marries his nurse (a scene-stealing hilarious Rebel Wilson) while Paul rediscovers his love for cocaine in the voids left from his devoted Christian faith. It’s quite amusing seeing Mackie and Johnson in vulnerable, dimwitted roles, and its clear Bay thinks so too. In certain aspects, Pain and Gain feels like a potential Quentin Tarantino project, but Bay, like he did in Bad Boys, roams Miami without the real bite and edge. Instead he switches from choppy personal handheld to slow motion shots of blood, lingers on a severed toe, and throws in some penile injections and grilled hands.

None of these cinematic choices really amount to much besides chaos, but the film earns its weight once Ed Harris as an undercover detective cracks open the case. It also carries the parody deeper in its somewhat dwindled critique of humanity’s incessant need for “more,” spurred on by Lugo and company’s unquenchable, expensive vices. Wahlberg, who in his most recent films has submerged into tough guy anonymity, appears to enjoy tapping his brazened, but temperamental side. At one moment he’s a poolside hotshot, in the next, he’s fleeing from police while his face melts into agony.

His amateur criminal skills are highlighted in a scene on the run, when before he marginally escapes a crime scene, he pumps some free-weights to ease his tension. Each man gets their own narration in the film, and while they’re all big muscled-small brained fitness freaks, it adds another layer of understanding to their short-lived disaster.

Pain and Gain shares both an aesthetic and stylistic palette with Harmony Korine’s recent Spring Breakers, as well as a similar discussion to be had about both film’s exploitative lenses with it’s female characters. Bar Paly plays Sorina, Lugo’s foreign girlfriend, and also consequently the standard Bay lady sex symbol, continuing the thankless legacies of Rosie Huntington-Whitely and Megan Fox. Her curvy body quickly turns into a table for Johnson to snort his white powder. The line between a story’s exploitation and authenticity is unfortunately negligible in a film like this. But then again, this is “unfortunately a true story.” At least Bay is up front with us this time.

3/5

Film Review: 42

More Than Just a Number in the Box Score

At the end of this year, New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera will hang up his cleats and retire as the game’s best closer. He will also retire the “42” on his back, the last current Major League baseball player to still wear Jackie Robinson’s number after it was retired throughout all of baseball back in 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson’s first professional game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Forever immortalized in the landscape of sports, Robinson’s status as a baseball legend reaches far beyond his play between the white lines, breaking a color barrier in a game rooted in unwritten rules and codes. Now nearly seventy years after his fateful walk to the batter’s box, Robinson is recognized each year on April 15^th, his number stitched on every player’s jersey.

42, directed by Brian Helgeland, does not capture the far-reaching effects and totality of Robinson’s career, neither his time in UCLA nor the majority of his successful stint with the Dodgers. Instead it dwells within his two-year height of adversity, the front lines of racial intolerance and the man who led the charge into breaking the color barrier. Bookended by archival footage of civil rights struggles and facts about Jackie’s life, the film begins in 1945 when young Robinson, performed earnestly by Chadwick Boseman, is playing in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs. The twiddling fingers, the hopping off first base, and the climactic feet first safe slide into second are documented here. We must first meet Jackie as a baseball player before he realizes he’s playing for much more.

The proceeding play he steals home and it’s clear he’s bound for greater things. That’s where Branch Rickey (A phenomenal Harrison Ford) steps in and decides Jackie will be the first player he will attempt to integrate into the Brooklyn Dodger organization. Jackie tries out and makes the Dodger triple-A team in Montreal amidst spring training Floridians and teammates unwilling to accept a black man in their sacred sport. Rickey knows the hardships will follow and makes it clear that Robinson must have the guts “not” to fight back. He even makes sure a black reporter, Wendell Smith, who typewrites from the bleachers, looks out for Jackie in precarious situations. When he’s called up to Brooklyn another prejudiced storm awaits him.

Besides the bigoted fans, his teammates don’t take kindly to his presence, even forming a petition not to play with him on the team. Rickey calls manager Leo Durocher (an underused Christopher Meloni)– he’s always on the phone in the film—and tells him to knock sense into the team. “More are coming,” Durocher tells his team referring to African American players. “Jackie’s just the first.” Branch Rickey knew the burden he had in bringing in Robinson, but he also knew he had to be the right baseball player. Anyone less than a humble star would have inflicted a mutiny. Winning was the ticket. Winning changes everything. Winning helped an intolerant team see Robinson as more than a black man. Winning gave hope and cause for an African American population to see Robinson as a hero.

Every hit, every slide, every shoulder shrug, every knowing glare towards an unjust umpire built his confidence in an era where helmets weren’t instituted and getting hit in the head was a strong likelihood. Jackie’s wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) plays his emotional rock, present at every home game suffering along with every fan’s jab, triumphing with every hit. Helgeland has experience in these stories, the height of which came most notably in “A Knight’s Tale,” in which a peasant played by Heath Ledger unlawfully enters a jousting competition, a sport of nobility. Historical anachronisms aside, he conjured the same kinds of highly emotional brotherhood relationships seen in 42. Robinson gave his teammates a chance to display their changed racial attitudes to their intolerant friends during their numerous road trips. Before a game in Cincinnati, Pee-Wee Reese races across the field and puts his arm around Jackie for the whole world to see.

Rickey was a rare man able to see an inevitable future taking shape while still desiring America’s pastime to be played with the same integrity. Harrison Ford is perfect for this role and congeals nicely into a character that constantly lights a stogie and recites religious rhetoric like “God’s a Methodist.” You forget that this man, with his slow tongue and gait, played Indiana Jones, but quickly remember again when he lights up his big smile, specifically as he hears Red Barber’s (John C. MicGinley) voice over an empty Ebbets Field, pronouncing Robinson’s pennant-winning performance in Pittsburgh.

This is ultimately a baseball movie, which means certain facets of the game must be shown, namely home runs being cracked with regularity, clunky broadcasting quips, and CGI baseballs to match a CGI stadium re-creation. That doesn’t necessarily mean some of those moments aren’t potent, but they’re noticeable, isolated staples of the game and films about the game. There is something for everyone, specifically the younger generation, which is the ultimate mission for a biopic like this, but that means it also leaves out scrupulous detail, which for stat heavy baseball nerds is a criminal offense.

But baseball films rarely ever capture the perfect nature of baseball, a sport predicated upon imperfection. Robinson rarely is shown to struggle in his at-bats except for one crucial game against the Phillies in which Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) tosses just about every racial epithet into Jackie’s ear in the batter’s box. Boseman’s personality is rather tame as Robinson, but his one moment of rage comes after Chapman’s insults.

Robinson sprints into the dugout tunnel, and, away from his teammates, saws a bat in two against the concrete wall. He thinks no one is watching, but then Rickey appears from the shadows, ready to embrace a belittled man. “Why did you do this?” Jackie asks him later, to which Rickey responds, “I want to see baseball played at its best.” It’s fair to say Robinson fulfilled his wish in multiple ways.

4/5

Film Review: To The Wonder

Grasping for Meaning, Love

There’s a shot in the middle of Terence Malick’s new film “To The Wonder” that lingers for a moment -like many of its images- that partially captures the ever-reaching essence of a Malick film. To the right of the screen, a backyard with fertilized lush green grass, children skipping and swinging from a play structure, contained by a large wooden fence. To the left, a barren wasteland of dead, faded weeds that stretch for miles into the dusty, flat infinite. The camera sits in the middle, its liminal placement a recurring theme for a story based on both its lasting, transient imagery and characters constantly on the verge, hesitant, and primarily silent, whose looks are filled with feeling.

Far be it from Malick to guide you into a coherent narrative that explains its themes through comprehensible dialogue. His transcendent, spiritual Tree of Life almost two years ago offered little in terms of linearity, spanning over four billion years, including a brief dinosaur age, while mostly settling into 1950s Texas full of crew cuts, dresses, and dry, sun-drenched earth. Malick continues his journey into the sensory pleasures in To The Wonder but creates a less grandiose vision of existential questioning, voice-overs, and God-seeking. This film is much simpler in its narrative, but just as emotionally complex and fulfilling.

It begins and also ends in an environment similar to the Tree of Life’s conclusion, a muddy shore where intermittent waves skim the surface in varying degrees, erasing footprints in the ambiguous meeting point of earth and sea. Instead of an intentional metaphorical place of heaven, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko wade in the squishy waters beneath Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the coast of Normandy. They play Neil and Marina who are shown to be deeply in love in a cloudy Parisian backdrop. She has a daughter Tatiana from another man, and Neil constantly aims to earn both of their French affections. But this is not his home, and so, accepting his request, they leave Paris for Neil’s Oklahoma housing development, an area vast with big blue sky and golden dry grass, its telephone poles stand-ins for skyscrapers.

Neil is an environmental inspector, and migrates to different homes, testing water and soil while being confronted by angry townspeople about their living conditions. Details are kept at a minimum. Affleck never looks fully content and sputters but several lines the entire film, most coming through breathy voice-over narration pursuing love’s meaning, asking questions of “why?” That is how we hear Marina’s thoughts as she at once finds herself reclusive and mesmerized by her new world. Love has brought her to a land “so honest and rich,” but her life in Main Street Middle America feels empty and stifling, especially for her daughter, ostracized by a language and emotional barrier. In one scene she stands on a football field sideline frozenly observing a high school marching band rehearse, springing instantly to Neil’s car as he pulls in to pick her up.

He sends them back to Paris, in part for Tatiana’s well being and because Marina’s visa is expiring. Neil almost instantly rekindles an old relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams), presumably a former girlfriend. Their attraction grows and Neil regains some joy again, unburdened by continental divide, now infatuated with a blonde country girl. There is a way Malick, who reteams with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubzecki, captures a raw beauty in McAdams with an Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World” sensibility that follows the two through the chest high wheat fields with his stylized intimacy.  She is authentically American, but a perceived spiritual connection turns into an exercise of lust and pleasure, which none are ready to accept.

The weaving, creeping, and revolving camera does more than just follow the two couples; it interacts with them. It is Malick’s signature, transforming static relational energy with movement, a way of bridging his nearly silent, orchestral film with emotional glue. It’s only in the cracks that we find real dialogue, or even snippets of passing conversation. They predominantly come from the local priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), a man Marina grows closer to as he drifts farther from his own Catholic faith. “Jesus says you must choose,” he preaches to a handful of parishioners. “The man who hesitates is nothing.” His sermons feel intended for Neil, but they are also personal reminders, caught in the in-between, hanging on to a God, a love that has no evidence of its past presence. His black collar is the lone hope for so many of the town’s forgotten, physically and mentally damaged poor and jailed, living under tin roofs and regret, clinging to repentance. Quintana must give but he struggles to find his own fulfillment.

Malick is not a director who lends himself to escapist filmgoers. He requires attention and thought but never a direct response, except maybe to watch with an innocence and sense of awe. You can approach this film with the mentality of “getting” it, but that might be the wrong course for a healthy viewing experience. That isn’t to say that Malick doesn’t tempt us with images to search deeper, but they in certain ways exist like Marina’s childlike spirit, ephemerally charged and fleetingly passionate, like incongruous spurts adding levity to the deeply melancholic existential journeys the film’s characters take.

The disconnect that gradually forms between Neil and Marina is a slow and arduous ordeal that can seem both frustrating and authentic. The refined beauty Malick captured in Jessica Chastain in Tree Of Life is again posited on Olga Kurylenko, a woman who indeed embodies Marina’s conflicting sentiment that there are “two women inside of me.” Her pliable spirit is in constant search of a higher power with no answers.

Underneath the Oklahoma white noise of summertime crickets and locusts is a silent town. Backyards are kept green by constant nurturing, but when untended devolve into the barren wasteland held permanent beyond property lines, leaving no trace of its previous fertile state. There’s a reason Neil and Marina have so much fun together wading in the muddy tide pools of Normandy and why Malick keeps coming back to that environment. For a moment they live in an ambiguity, a love without delineations. To The Wonder, for its sometimes artsy esotericism, shines, or more appropriately sinks in, during these moments, happy to bask in Mother Nature’s own momentary, beautiful hesitation before its tides make their decision.

4/5

 

Film Review: Trance

A Painting Is Gone and So Is His Memory 

Before the New York City premiere of Trance, director Danny Boyle introduced the film, flanked by stars Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel (the other, James McAvoy, is performing Macbeth in London), and said he wanted to “apologize that this isn’t a life-affirming film like 127 Hours.” It wasn’t necessarily an indictment about morally corrupt movie plots, but it did seem like he was hedging his bets for a corporate audience maybe eager to feel enriched. It’s hard to blame them, even when referring to the heroine existential adventures in his Trainspotting or the haunting portrayals in 28 Days Later, films whose cores remain positive even in their darkest light. For this slight change in Boyle’s content however, he still infuses his crafty, colorful signature with the same zeal and polarizing power.

Trance has that engaging appeal to it, a thriller heist film that cares more about the human’s psychological tendencies than delivering intricate robbery schemes. McAvoy plays Simon, an art auctioneer who decides to join a group of thieves led by Franck  (Vincent Cassell) to steal a Goya painting. Things go haywire in the process. Motivations possibly skewed, Simon (we learn he’s a deadly gambler) disrupts the heist and Franck whacks him in the head for it. Little does he know the mind bending implications that will have, especially when he opens up the sealed casing and finds the canvas missing.

Simon knows where it is, but he can’t remember where thanks to that bump on his head. That leaves Franck to pry it out of him, including some graphic displays of torture, but he quickly realizes inflicting pain can’t tap a mental block. So they enlist a hypnotist played daringly by Rosario Dawson named Elizabeth Lamb, a mysterious character who quickly perceives Simon’s threatened position and enters the ring with Franck’s group of thieves. Memories aren’t forgotten, they’re just trapped in an iron cage she says, and a simple mental reconnaissance becomes a complex, multi-layered spiral into the depths of psychological distortion.

Boyle translates this quick turn into cerebral chaos with his dramatic visual movements and pumping techno soundtrack, which sometimes enhance his kinetic frame and other times attempt to fill its less frenetic voids. Simon does a similar thing, filling in his memories under hypnosis with visions of Elizabeth who has crept under both his and Franck’s skin in haunting, seductive fashion. In the midst of this lab experiment and hypnotic conditioning, Boyle captures these self-reflexive sensibilities within the gritty London environment, observing his characters’ pensive and fragile states looking through television screens, mirrors, and windows, their own reflections.

Like Inception and Total Recall, much of the film becomes a journey through delineating reality from dream from hypnotic hallucination. But as much as these trippy flashbacks and alternate realities repackage the above films, Trance actually leans heavily towards Steven Soderbergh’s last feature Side Effects. The mind-bending twists, the violent melodrama, the potential to mine the classics of Western art, which includes a soulful Rembrandt stare, quickly boils down to the more simplistic desires of love lust, money, and revenge.

It might not work as well without its trio of actors. Rosario Dawson takes over the film from her sturdy perch in her opposing therapeutic chairs, even more so when she starts walking towards the camera nude. Cassel, with that omnipresent deviancy and menacing hungry look swaps unsettling interactions with McAvoy, whose character also slowly devolves into a state of unbridled rage. Boyle, with writers John Aheare and John Hodges, knows how to shape these diverging personas and twists them so that a mild auctioneer becomes a monstrous mess.

But in these types of films there is little time for connection or empathy with anyone in our presence. Trance is properly titled because it is, in the moment, entrancing, and casts you under its hypnotic spell, but it is just as easily broken, and the whirlwind of an experience quickly fades from imprinting memory. I’m not sure questions of confused plot points are necessary qualifiers for a deft, psychological film to be considered great, but Boyle at least makes sure to throw us hints and clues the best he can.

I think a better film is hiding here that has the power to jump from someone’s forgetful short-term memory to a more pensive, lasting one. But, it’s nice to be hypnotized by a movie for a while, even if it isn’t life affirming.

3.5/5

Roger Ebert: In Memoriam

When I first found out that Roger Ebert had passed away, I initially thought to myself, “I’m going to miss his Facebook posts.” That might sound like a slight against someone who redefined film criticism and took it to iconic places. But really, it’s an appreciation for all of his worldly interests, his Internet, social media savvy, and ultimately his strong and motivating passion for film.

Ebert dies with 46 years of film criticism to his name, 31 of them on television, mostly with his good friend Gene Siskel. Together, sitting in an empty, old-fashioned movie theater, the competing Chicago newspaper critics made movie watching more than just an “I liked it,” “That was dumb,” “It was cute” two second responsorial art. They engaged with films, analyzing silly sequels like “Jaws: The Revenge” to really discuss the logical flaws with the camera capturing an above-water shark’s point of view, or why Michael Caine’s dry shirt after getting out of the water is a serious and disrespectful, illogical mishap. For many people who didn’t head to the theater often, their banter would oftentimes suffice.

Of course, their five-minute reviews could also trod on your heart just as easily. When you love a film and you don’t know precisely why, Ebert, like many critics, could help articulate that for you, but he could just as easily tear it to shreds. “No good film is too long and no bad movie is short enough,” he said. When Siskel passed away, Ebert found a somewhat sturdy replacement in Richard Roeper, continuing “At The Movies” through 2008 as a worthy substitute. “Ebert and Roeper” was once the only thing I knew about film criticism, their names plastered over billboards and bus frames, always giving “two thumbs up,” sometimes “way up.” My naïve mind thought all Ebert did was just give films a point with an appendage.

He still worked for the Chicago Sun-Times but he was really a national critic. His prose had such a nice blend of intellectual thoughts and personal reflections, which I think invited his widespread reading crowd. Eventually he made it to his own webpage, a digital forum that housed his reviews and opinions. He didn’t just write about film though, posting videos, essays, articles, and anything else that fascinated him about the world to his blog. As I researched the decline of celluloid film within the industry last year, he affirmed my trade journal searching by writing, in essence, a love-letter to celluloid film and his disappointment in its slow evaporation. He most recently posted about the earth’s warming, gun control, and the latest YouTube fads, further enriching and spreading his voice that physically left him several years ago.

But it was those Facebook posts. He opened up a world of cinematic knowledge for me and consequently boosted many writers’ page counts by sharing their work. He led me to Jim Emerson, a former critic who writes a rich film blog and who sadly is also dealing with health complications. He promoted his “Far-Flung Corespondents,” writers from all over the world with thoughtful and intriguing perspectives and essays on recent films. He made me feel like an intellectual when he’d post articles from “The Paris Review” or “The Atlantic,” which I’d subsequently share and pretend that I’d found those articles in my own daily web scanning. When you can’t speak, you can’t eat normally, you can’t walk, reading and writing are the only fulfilling outlets. He was nice enough to share everything with us.

It will now be strange not finding him on my newsfeed, or seeing his outdated mug on RottenTomatoes anymore. Like many, that was where I felt I knew him, through his writing, his critiques, and his book of four-star reviews sitting on my desk.

But Roger, I’ve still got a bone to pick with you. You gave one of my favorite comedies “Old School” one star and in part of your review bluntly stated, “This is not a funny movie.” I think you’re completely wrong, but I want to thank you for eliciting such a pessimistic, insane opinion. I never had to defend “Old School” to anyone. I wanted to after I read your review. Part of loving something is defending it. Ebert knew that better than anyone.

 

Film Review: The Host

Two Souls, One Bodily Experience

In the book worlds of Stephenie Meyer, and many other Young Adult authors, teenage characters, specifically girls, are the vehicles that bring danger, rescue, and romantic love into their communities with the same pace that their stories are made into films. “The Host,” directed by Andrew Niccol (In Time), is the latest Meyer adaptation, about a four-month layoff for all of her hung-over Twilight fans yearning to find another love triangle to be reopened and melodramatized. Their hopes in that respect are fulfilled. This time, substitute vampires and werewolves with alien vectors and a dwindling human population in a post-apocalyptic world and you get, well, something entirely predictable and everything you’d expect.

This is something the genre has relied upon, a special understanding that teenage girls will continue to lap up the emotional complexities of pubescent life. When their hormones mature however, a new crowd of Young Adult consumers has been waiting in line and is happy to carry the torch in seeing up and coming actresses bridge humanity with the inhuman. This time they look to Saoirse Ronan, a fine actress whose short career has thrived on mature roles in mostly adult-centric films like her entrancing physical performance in Hanna. Here, she appears to enjoy the pleasures of acting in a younger demographic focused film, but is probably well aware of her limitations, too.

“The Host” might have been a good film if it weren’t tethered to the tropes of boyfriend romance and love’s sacrifice. Of course, it also suffers, as many of these films do, from cramming as many themes inside its two-hour time frame as it can. Ronan plays Melanie, a girl we only see embodied for a few minutes until an alien life form is implanted into her neck. On their own, arachnid-shaped silver creatures, they have taken over the earth, one of the many planets they have inhabited, using former humans as “hosts.” Their apparent job is to purify; they wear white, drive the speed limit, and always tell the truth. To distinguish themselves from the remaining humans is a silver circle emblazoned over their iris.

Melanie’s body is subverted by her alien invader named Wanderer, but unlike regularly submissive human souls, Melanie’s still exists in the alien body. She’s a rare fighter and initiates internal dialogue with Wanderer who becomes an emotional prisoner to Melanie’s memories and sensibilities. Instead of following commands and giving away information to her “seeker” played by Diane Kruger, Wanderer escapes to find Melanie’s friends and family hiding away in the desert.

Influenced by memories of Melanie’s boyfriend Jared (Max Irons) and little brother, she finds them hosting other remaining humans in a hollowed-out cave. Her uncle Jeb (William Hurt) sees her eyes and knows Melanie has been turned, but she’s not like the other aliens. This is also the debate between Jared and his friends, who in the course of about ten minutes want to kill her and then defend her. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then Melanie’s is gone, but maybe Wanda (Jeb shortened her name) has one, too.

It’s not as confusing as it all sounds, but it is preposterous, especially during a scene in which Wanda must make out with her own love interest Ian (Jake Abel) and then Melanie’s boyfriend back to back in order to get Melanie’s inner dialogue back in her head.  It’s an amusing back and forth they share. “You can’t kiss him, he’s my boyfriend!” Team Jacob and Edward are replaced with Team Jared and Ian, but technically this isn’t a love triangle. As one person said after seeing it, it’s more of a love square.

Semantics aside, Ronan does double duty acting as a mild schizophrenic, verbalizing Wanda’s thoughts to Melanie’s conscience. For a story like this to make sense on screen, some logistics must undergo tepid examination. Like the vast cave hotel the human rebellion has created, a labyrinth of rock tunnels and an interior grown wheat field from a masterfully designed mirror system. How did they do that? They all must hide from the alien search parties in their metallic helicopters and sedans. Wanda’s presence is a burden and blessing, a threat and a possible way out. Sorting out her romances however appears to be the more pressing issue at hand.

Nothing really changes in these stories except for character names, environments, and the antagonists that make life hard. Following this year’s Beautiful Creatures and Warm Bodies,  The Host, if it wasn’t already engrained into us, exclaims that a fighting, loving spirit cannot be corrupted. Yes, the human soul still exists and it wants nothing more than to kiss a boy in a wheat field under the pouring rain.

2/5