Bridge of Spies

It's not an especially amazing time to be America right now. Ever since the concept of terrorism belted down the doors of common understanding almost 15 years ago, the country has seen a political shift that is arguably starting to reach its boiling point. We continue to amass information of these shifts; we know the lengths to which the government is going to in order to spy on its domestic citizens and allies, we know the lengths to which the government went to get information out of people who had the misfortune of being of the same nationality as a few zealots, we know that a day hasn't gone by that a domestic citizen hasn't pumped lead into another domestic citizen. The list of atrocities goes on, and yet the discourse isn't, "Where the fuck did we go wrong?", but instead a staunch adhesion to the values the country was founded upon, the political equivalent of one child telling another on the playground that they're stupid, to have that child retort, "No, you're stupid." It wasn't always this way. I don't need to be another Aaron Sorken-penned monologue reminding you of how great America once was (for one, he's a much better writer than I). The problem with this approach is how often it takes place in the present, and so the reminiscing is inevitably contrasted more negatively against the current state of affairs. I imagine it would have been tempting to any other director to do the same with Bridge of Spies, a Cold War-era reminder that the old trope of the gee-whiz great American hero was not rooted in fiction. It would have been tempting to reflect a conflict so dependent on behind-closed-doors subterfuge and deceit against today's conflict of out-in-the-open torture and sporadic, explosive violence, especially when the end goal of both was, and is, acquisition of information. Nobody does it like Steven Spielberg, though. What does Spielberg do? He reminds us that the old trope of the gee-whiz great American hero was not rooted in fiction by showing us a gee-whiz great American hero refuse to abandon the ideals of his homeland, in spite of all the officials who are pleading with him to see otherwise. He also reminds us that he's our greatest living director, by filming a movie that in anyone else's hands would be banal, middle of the road fair like The Imitation Game, but in his is profoundly, overwhelmingly positive, and uplifting, and sweet, and damn it all to hell, so fucking gloriously mediocre.

Nobody shoots a dinner scene like Spielberg - that's an objective observation. Let's set the table (heh): James Donovan (Tom Hanks), an insurance lawyer, has been recruited for his gee-whiz great American hero qualities to provide legal defence to Rudolf Abel (Mark Ryland), an Irish Soviet Spy in all but his own admission. The intended goal of this is to demonstrate to the world, the Soviets mainly, that America stands by its Constitution even in the most dire of circumstances. And what better way to communicate this than with a gee-whiz great American hero who will play the part and yessir Abel all the way to the electric chair, after his "fair trial", of course. Here's the thing, though: James, unlike his higher-up counterparts, is a little too gee-whiz. He actually believes in The Constitution, you see, and plans to actually give Abel proper legal defense. The nerve. Sitting down to dinner, he tells his wife Mary (Amy Ryan) that he's considering taking the job, even though he's clearly going to take it. Mary is livid and terrified at the notion of what her husband representing a Communist in court might do to his reputation and their safety. You see, all it takes is a healthy dollop of fear and anxiety of what might happen to cause humans to throw idealism and belief structures to the wind. This alone around a dinner table would be enough for any other director, but nobody does it like Spielberg. Happening simultaneously with this argument, James is consoling his daughter, Peggy (Jillian Lebling), who was stood up by a boy at school, and James is discussing the realities of terrorism with his son, Roger (Noah Schnapp). Halfway through this, James's assistant, Doug (Billy Magnussen), has dropped by with a tower of legal books for the two of them to pore over that night, and when Mary questions why James's assistant is bringing over legal books for a case James might not even be taking, Doug happily reveals that they are taking the case, and are really excited. But it doesn't end there: James and Mary invite Doug to dinner whilst James and Mary continue to argue, James and Peggy continue to talk about boys, and James and Roger continue to talk about the Red Fear. Then they say grace, and wordlessly, James extends his hands for everyone to join. Mary doesn't take it. James grips air expectantly, pleadingly. In the last second, Mary extends her hand, lightly runs her fingers over James's palm, and places them back on her lap. She disagrees with everything he is planning to do, out of fear, but stronger than that is the love she has for him, and her knowledge that he is, ultimately, doing the right thing. And in the face of all of the terror and danger that is potentially going to be thrust upon them, she recognises that it is a necessary risk to uphold the right values. But she needs to communicate to her husband the weight of that risk, so she brushes his hand instead of holding it. The subtle brilliance of Steven Spielberg has always been within his refusal to be subtle. When Chief Brody's son asks why his dad wants a kiss in Jaws, there is no subtext, no rhetoric. Chief Brody wants a kiss from his son because he's exhausted by, and terrified of, the gigantic shark waiting out there in the water. James needs his wife to touch his hand because he's exhausted by, and terrified of, the knowledge that soon America will be watching him try to prove that their legal system works because it is built upon honor, and decency. And if an American nuclear family can't display that decency in their home at the dinner table, what hope is left?

Not long after the trial begins, James is riding the train to work. Everyone but him has a newspaper, and everyone but him is reading op-eds labeling him a traitor. It's a grey, dreary scene, but for the one woman wearing red (only Spielberg could reference his own work so simultaneously gratuitously and elegantly), who stares and glares deep into James. How are they to know the truth that James could only have known after being afforded the chance to sit and talk with Abel; that he's naught but a man, who did a job, and did it well, and will continue to do so. It's a quality deeply entrenched in that so-elusive American Dream James is determined to uphold the potential of, but when mainstream media and the threat not of what has happened, but what could happen, has affected the general public so deeply, so profoundly, how could anyone fault the woman in red for gazing upon him with such scorn? It's not too difficult a stretch to connect that with today's state of affairs, is it? So, how does James prove to the world that what he fights to maintain is worth fighting for? Well, when a U-2 pilot is shot down over Soviet territory and is taken into custody (where the Soviets torture him for information, a nice contrast to the relatively civil treatment of Abel, and to the actions of the US government on supposed enemies 50 years later), James is sent to Berlin to negotiate a trade. On his way to the negotiations, his jacket is stolen by foreign youth. James does not waver. By walking through Berlin without a jacket, he catches a cold, one that stays with him through the rest of the film, and to any other person in a strange place attempting dangerous acts, would be a sign to throw in the towel. James does not waver. The negotiations begin to go well, until the US government gets word that an American student has been arrested as a spy at the Berlin wall, detained by the Berlin government. One American prisoner to the Soviets, one American prisoner to the East German government, one Soviet spy to negotiate with, wanted by both parties for different reasons. James kicks his gee-whiz great American hero powers into overdrive and attempts to organise a trade for both of them. Those he's negotiating with and the powers that be of the United States tell him to give up his idealism and go for the soldier; the bigger bargaining chip of the two. James does not waver. Every life is worth risking your own for. He talks, and he talks, and he swindles, and he pleads, and he begs, and he threatens, and he does not waver, and he gets them both. On Glienicke Bridge, James and Abel are reunited as the trade takes place, and Abel tells James to look for how he is treated when reunited with the Soviets. If they embrace him, he will see his family again. If they show him into the back of the car, he will not. Abel seems to know how it's going to go before he reaches the car. He knows this is a war built upon mistrust, and he will be tortured and killed for his unwavering service. But without his devotion to his service, what else did he have? To that end, what else does James have? When James comes home, offering gifts and souvenirs to his family to uphold the ruse that he was away on a fishing trip, and he heads upstairs, and Mary and the kids turn on the news to see the two American lives that James fought to save, and Mary goes upstairs to find him passed out face down on his bed, a line of drool leaking out of his gaping, snoring mouth, how can your heart not soar at the grand reminder of the potential of human decency? And if that's not enough, the next day James is once again on the train heading back to work, as any gee-whiz great American hero does after saving the world, and once again everyone is reading the paper, including the woman in red, sitting in the exact same spot. Only this time the op-eds praise James's journey into the mouth of the beast to get our boys home. The woman in red looks up at James, and the corners of her mouth delicately twitch into a smile of gratitude and regret. But no apology or thanks is necessary. All James did is show everyone what America used to do, what America needs to remember it used to do, what America needs to get back to doing. Sometimes a nuanced critique layered in subtext isn't the right thing to do. Sometimes you need a brick to the face. Nobody does it like Spielberg.

The Night Before

In spite of being orchestrated by his collaborative buddies more than himself, The Night Before continues Seth Rogen's goal to demystify and promote drug positivity, get well-respected dramatic actors to hop out of their comfort zones and give being funny a crack, and explore the more vulnerable and sentimental side of male friendship. If you can forgive the egregious product placement, The Night Before is a cute, charming, classic, Christmas comedy that should be integrated into the Holiday rotation of Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Gremlins, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Love Actually, Iron Man 3, and Christmas Vacation. See it with friends. Thank you for a great year. Merry Christmas. <3

Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak's unmarketability is ultimately its greatest strength and weakness. On the one hand, a relatively high profile film that's hard to categorise incentivises more filmmakers to attempt challenging the status quo that regular genre conventions so often limit our palette with. On the other hand, people don't like shit that's challenging. That's the whole reason marketable genres exist in the first place. And make no mistake: Crimson Peak is a film that you can't categorise. It's even explained in the film: Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) submits the new work on her novel only to be treated with skepticism when the publisher believes it to be a ghost story. "It's not a ghost story," Edith replies. "It's a story with ghosts in it." If we observe this thematically, the same results are present. Crimson Peak opens with the line, "Ghosts are real" and a wonderfully Guillermo del Toro-esque horror scene, before diving into a traditional 17th century romance. It's a film that wants it both ways, and once again, on one hand, I celebrate that. I can't recall the last time I saw a film like it, and on that alone, it's a success. But, on the other hand, how the fuck are you supposed to sell this film? It's too romantic to be categorised as a horror movie, but it's far too scary and violent to be categorised as a romance movie. In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter. Art would be freely available to make, and we could allow ourselves experiences with no preparation or prior perceptions. But we live in a world where art is a business, and as such, we're not going to see another Crimson Peak on this budgetary scale for a long time. We have to live with what we've got. Good thing Crimson Peak is a fucking winner, then.

I've said before that the best horror is that which reflects upon us what it means to be human. Crimson Peak technically isn't a horror movie, but it understands this principle more than most. The writing is on the wall as the film progresses. Guillermo del Toro isn't often lauded for his storytelling ability, which makes his leaning into gothic romance tropes all the more effective. We know as soon as the Sharpe siblings, Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are introduced that they're not the most straight and narrow folk. And as Edith continues to fall harder and harder for Thomas, and he for her, we know where this is going. But that's okay, because where Guillermo del Toro's strength does not lie in surprising story beats, it does lie in surprising moments of character. He deliberately subverts the damsel in distress trope by introducing and developing the traditional handsome hero, here in the form of Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who rushes to Edith's rescue at the first sniff of danger, only to have the stupid dork be stabbed in the stomach as soon as he walks through the door, leaving it up to Edith to save him. What makes the moment all the more surprising, however, is what comes before it. We get sniffs and hints that Thomas and Lucille's continuous plot to seduce young heirs into marriage before murdering them beneath the cloak of darkness and running away with the money is more Lucille's game than Thomas's, and over the course of time there are more than enough signposts to indicate he's actually fallen in love with Edith, but it comes through at its strongest when Thomas is the one to stab Alan. Whispering low enough so only the two of them can hear, he says, "You're a doctor. Tell me where." Alan delicately grabs Thomas's hand and shifts the blade to a non-lethal area, and with extreme pity in his eyes, Thomas drives the blade in. You could call him a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. There are shades to him, you know, just like human beings. Even his sister, inarguably the more moustache-twirly of the two, muddies the waters of easy categorisation. Jessica Chastain knocks it so far out of the fucking park with this role, crafting a villain that is at once tragic and hilariously over the top. At times, this happens simultaneously; a perfect example being when she's feeding bed-ridden Edith porridge. As she details the awful, repugnant acts of her parents during their upbringing, she draws the spoon across the bowl at an agonisingly slow pace, creating a cacophonus crescendo of screeches, her steely eyes full of hatred never leaving Edith's. It's a beautifully absurd moment that also gives insight into the extreme pain of these characters, and makes it that little bit harder to not empathise with the siblings' plot to kill rich girls and keep fucking each other. When the world fucked them over this hard, why should they see any benefit in being a part of it? Thomas can't follow Lucille to the end this time, though. He pleads with her to let Edith live, and for the three of them to exist in harmony together, and Lucille responds by flying into a hurt rage, and stabbing Thomas in the face. As he dies, and two tears fall from his eyes, one clear and the other tinted red, your heart breaks - not just for the fucking mindblowingly cool imagery, and not just for what this means for Edith and Thomas, but for what this means for Thomas and Lucille. Once again, you could call Lucille a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. She is human, after all.

And now that the stupid emotional shit is out of the way, let's talk about the other thing that Guillermo del Toro does better than anyone else: set design. Holy shit. This is a film soaked in blood as far as narratives go, but Guillermo takes it one step further by putting the Sharpe estate on overflowing red clay mines. When Thomas introduces Edith to her new home, he warns of the clay and demonstrates by stepping on a loose floorboard. The thick, red goop oozes and spreads around them. The house literally fucking bleeds. And as the film progresses, and shit gets wackier, nobody seems to notice that the red clay is coming out of every fucking hole it can. The bright red material twisting and snaking around the detailed tapestry of the Victorian mansion is a testament to the strength of practical set building. There's an unrelenting sense of a primal savagery lurking just below the surface, that intensifies and becomes more literal as the characters succumb to their baser instincts. The animalistic connotations that come with the colour red sink into the ghosts themselves, too. In this universe, spirits come to be through emotional resonance left behind in death. And considering in this universe it's unusual to not have at least one family member who was murdered through unclear, yet clearly passionate, motivations, it makes sense that each ghost's remaining emotional resonance is that of a blind rage. They don't speak English, opting instead to communicate through a series of clicks, howls and growls, and navigate their environments with a twitchy, violent anger. Those that aren't left behind with the grumps are no more subtle, either, a perfect example being the spirit of Thomas that appears in the film's climax; sporting a look of pure sorrow as each tear lifts off his face and floats upwards into nothingness. But, as I've said so much now, how are you supposed to sell this film? It's proof that genre hopping is perfectly acceptable so long as your aesthetic is clearly defined and adhered to, but what general audience-goer, who only has time and money for one film a month, is going to pony up for a film that can't even tell them what it is? Crimson Peak is exactly what I look for in cinema, and I'm glad that it exists. But I won't be surprised when I never see something like it again. 

The Martian

What a film. What a fucking film. When you encounter someone who laments for the state of cinema today, and pines for the golden-age (whenever the fuck that was), instead of explaining to them the clever ways a lot of mainstream cinema is advancing or challenging its place in the cultural pantheon, or bringing up the leaps and bounds independent cinema is making now that it's even more cheap to produce something, direct them towards The Martian. This is classic-to-the-core storytelling, that not only proves that the only thing stopping Ridley Scott from making a good movie is a screenwriter, but proves something much, much more important: every single one of our problems can be solved. Devin Faraci's beaten me to it, but I stand by his statement: this movie can save the world. In a period of history in which humanity seems to be up against insurmountable odds attempting to solve unsolvable problems, there's an overwhelmingly beauty to this film's simplistic approach to its central conflict: an unsolvable problem is naught but a small series of solvable problems. Come up with a solution to enough and before you know it, the unsolvable has been solved. This is math and science working at its most exhilarating and uplifting. 

The Martian's Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is in a bind. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a bind most of us aren't going to encounter in our lifetime: he's stranded on Mars with a hunk of metal hanging out of his abdomen and his crew mates have fucked off home. This is in the first five minutes. It's a grueling succession of events, in which Watney wordlessly stumbles back to the base of operations on the planet and gets to work performing surgery on himself to get the debris out. Few shoot body horror like Ridley Scott, and it's on full display here. Covered in sweat, body heaving, open wound on his belly, Mark Watney utters his first line since waking up a dead man: "Fuck." From here, it's wordless scenes of a tragedy, as he potters around the living quarters, silently collecting his colleague's personal belongings and storing them away in boxes. This is someone who knows that hope left the planet not long after it fucked him over. That is, until he decides to see if there's any merit to not being consumed with self-pity and conduct a full analysis of the situation at hand. "I'm not going to die here," he proclaims, literally to a camera but metaphorically to himself, and begins to work out what he can do right now. Well, there's another group due to arrive on Mars in four years. Mark doesn't have food to last him that long, but he can utilise his career as a botanist to makeshift a farm using potatoes, converted hydrogen from rocket fuel and the elephantine amount of shit Mark and his crew produced during their time here. Not having to spend time thinking about food affords Mark the chance to spend time thinking about how he's going to get his rover designed for short-term travel a quarter of the way across the planet. All of a sudden this insurmountable task is a couple of small steps closer to being fixed.

What makes this all the more digestible, and fist-in-the-fucking-air inspiring, is down to two things:
1. Everyone in this film is good at their job.
2. Everyone in this film is a real human being.
They seem like trivial criteria, but I swear to you that's not the case at all. Let's start with the first. Mark Watney is no fool. Accompanying most actions he takes in this film are video testimonials breaking it down, as much for himself as for you, the audience. Eventually, as his actions begin to become a little larger than a one-person job, he has to work out a way to communicate with the NASA folk back home, and once they're on board, they have to be as switched on as he is. In many other films, the needed tension and conflict would arise from these people making a mistake that no-one saw coming, or acting rash, or in the moment, and having to scramble towards victory from an improvised angle. In The Martian, it's neither. In The Martian, tension and conflict comes simply from the weight of time. It turns out it takes a bit to get from Earth to Mars, and this time influences every decision made by Mark and the rest of the team, from something as relatively simple as deducing that Mark will have to starve for a collection of days whilst more food is being delivered to the planet, to something as tense as a beyond-complicated maneuver that will connect a gutted pod that is rocketing into the sky whilst holding Mark with his rescue ship. Time exacerbates this further by Mark being relatively helpless during this moment; sitting in his pod with no windows, just waiting for the time to come where he's no longer at the mercy of his mathematical projections. And it's here that we can segue quite organically into the second reason I stipulated above. When the math reveals itself to be slightly off, down to either miscalculation or chaos, and the pod is not going to connect with the rescue ship, someone has to do something, and Mark gets the idea to cut a hole in his suit and let jet propulsion allow him to "fly around like Iron Man". It's a dorky comment from a total dork. But it's the fact that Mark is such a dork that allows us to feel so fucking strongly for him. He swears. He dances like an idiot. He thinks posing like Arthur Fonzarelli for a NASA photo is a good idea. He likes super hero movies. He hates disco. He's us. And we want to think that in a similar situation, we'd be able to think of the perfect pop culture reference to distract us from the overwhelmingly dire odds we were up against. If we were to build on that, the ease with which we identify with Mark allows us to see his problem as something that can be overcome, and when everyone back home is a real person, too, who run the gamut of emotions during the film's run time, we come to understand that problems concerning the world concern each and every one of us, too. Many times has a technological development been influenced by an artist with a vision, and The Martian knows it has the potential to be looked back on as a turning point for scientific progress, and our perception of it. This is film-making at its most accomplished; it's exciting, it's engaging, it's funny, it's emotional, it's honest, it's scary, and it's hopeful, but it's not in excess of any of these things. It's the necessary amount of each to communicate its message and save us all. Praise be to rational problem solving.

Sicario

Apart from the poster, I knew nothing of Sicario going in. It dropped on my radar on release, and criticism thrown its way was glowing. It seemed to be a shoo-in for a lot of people's Top lists of the year. With that in mind, I decided to throw caution to the wind and sit down to it, hoping upon hope I wasn't about to experience the same cultural alienation I experienced watching The Hurt Locker, thinking, "Yeah, he loves bombs and can't leave the bombs. I get it. What am I missing?" Be careful what you hope for, folks. About halfway through Sicario, I took a bit of time to lift my chin off the armrest, open my eyes, and think about what I was watching. It most reminded me of Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, a film that I reviewed in 2013 as "the most expertly crafted episode of Law & Order I've ever seen." It felt like Prisoners, but with a Roger Deakins impersonator behind the camera as opposed to the man himself. Imagine my surprise to reach the credits and find out who the director and cinematographer were. Now, not to say that my opinion holds any sort of weight, worth or merit, but if I can pick a director based on a film's superb aesthetic that is entirely devoid of substance, is that a good thing for said director? The critics and numbers would indicate that the answer is, "Yes", but let me have a crack whilst my soapbox continues to support my weight at telling you the danger of celebrating subtlety without fully looking at what it's hiding.

Sicario might be about a lot of things. That's sort of one of Denis Villeneuve's strengths - his films have no shortage of symbolism tucked into every nook and cranny it can fit. Britt Hayes over at Birth.Movies.Death. wrote this excellent piece that puts forth the notion that this film's central theme is rape, and it works so well because it only allows that truth to be conveyed through the abstract; that the examination of the psychological fallout of rape only exists within the literal examination of an FBI agent getting fucked over with obfuscation of information by her CIA counterparts. Other critiques of the film have gone slightly more literal, instead using the film's synopsis of Emily Blunt being mercilessly, unflinchingly used by the aforementioned CIA in spite of her kicking and screaming with her staunch idealistic beliefs as a metaphor for the systemic persecution and smothering of women in the patriarchal juggernaut that remains modern society. Both are valid, and I'm not about to say that the film isn't about those things. My problem with this angle is the idea that cinema is supposed to challenge what it raises, or at the very least, offer insight or solutions to the problems. Sicario does not. Sicario raises the idea of blanket emotional and professional persecution of women to then, in a way, kind of say, "Well, that's just how it is. Deal with it." You can say I'm missing the point, but when it comes to rhetoric in film, there are really only two places to look:
1. What a film says about something.
2. How a film sees something.
So what is Sicario saying about Emily Blunt and her plight? That her ideals have no place here, and if she doesn't learn to play ball with the real boys, she's either out or dead. How does Sicario see Emily Blunt and her plight? As entirely, mercilessly, futile. The film doesn't end with Emily Blunt working out a way around her oppressors that both provides her strength and affirmation of her beliefs and the narrative satisfaction of seeing notions of 'good' and 'evil' rewarded and punished appropriately. No, Emily Blunt loses, the bad guys win, and to add insult to injury, she is forced at gunpoint by one of her CIA oppressors to sign a statement saying everything they did was on the level.

I've gone on the record before laying out praise for a film that brings a complicated social problem to the surface only to say that it exists and is a problem, which you could argue is the exact same reason I'm not dishing out praise for Sicario. The difference between this and Mystery Road, however, is that Mystery Road brings its social problem to the table as a problem. Sicario does not. Because the part of this film that much of the glowing praise for it doesn't take into account is the political aspect that runs parallel to its social one. The CIA has brought Emily Blunt's FBI Agent into the mix to "supervise" the CIA's attempts to bring to justice a cartel boss in Mexico, following an IED explosion during a drug raid on an immigrant household on US soil. I use quotation marks on supervise because what they really want is someone weak to manipulate, so they can tick the representation box whilst bending and outright breaking every humanitarian rule in the book to not bring in the cartel boss, but give Benicio Del Toro's freelance mercenary the opportunity to exact brutal, bloody revenge on the fella that murdered his family. And it's here that the aforementioned rules of cinema rhetoric return. What does this film say about the actions of the CIA? That border relations between the US and Mexico are complicated, and paranoid slaughter is an acceptable response to that, and fuck your naive ideologies. How does the film see the actions of the CIA? As necessary responses to the situation at hand. And perhaps it's here that Sicario and I just head down different roads. I'm not in support of a film that seems to exist to encourage complacency in the general public regarding border relations because of a vocal, violent minority that seems compelled to fuck it up for everyone. I'm of the mind that there might be a more effective solution than utilising subterfuge to blind most to the blanket prejudice that breeds a mass in support of an iron law that starkly contrasts 'us' with 'them'. Having said that, if we go by Sicario's logic, a bleeding heart dipshit like me better keep my hippie hole shut lest I cop a bullet in the head. And not being one to stand by my ideals when being threatened with violence, allow me to conclude this review by saying Sicario is great, and fuck the Mexicans.

The Visit

I really like M. Night Shyamalan. There was a time when it wasn't controversial to say that. There was a time when it was controversial to say that. His more recent work muddies the ability to understand him, but his early efforts coherently display why he's equally lauded and loathed. To me, it's best depicted in Signs, a film that entrenches itself in the mundane minutiae of everyday life so that it may ask you to believe not only in the cosmic absurdity of human existence, not only in the even more cosmic absurdity that life elsewhere in the universe could come across our own, but in the ultimate cosmic absurdity that a series of seemingly unconnected coincidental idiosyncrasies could connect and culminate not only in saving mankind, but also in preventing a child's asthma attack and restoring a man's faith in, well, faith. M. Night deliberately smothers you in the normal, the bland, so that the batshit insanity, when it inevitably arrives, is lent that much more gravitas. It's a tricky balance, and while not perfect films, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and even The Village, walked it well, providing you were willing to throw caution, and logic, to the wind and enjoy a really big fan of Steven Spielberg professing his love for genre cinema to the rooftops. Things get a little more complicated from there. The Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth are pretty widely disdained, in spite of the fact that you can tell, watching them, that they were made by the same person. What's the difference? I think it's that aforementioned balance, or lack thereof in this situation. These films double down on the realistic and the absurd, which only serves to highlight the artifice of and disparity between the two. Put simply, you smell the bullshit. And what makes those trainwrecks even more fascinating is that you're not sure M. Night smells it. Surely this is all some sort of cynical meta-commentary on him happening to stumble into some good movies early on, right? Personally, I don't think so. I think he's been nothing but sincere in his career, blissfully ignorant of the inherent silliness to his product. This is what I thought before I saw The Visit. I couldn't exactly stand by my words after watching a film that features a scene in which a young boy gets super real and emotional about his anxieties regarding his absent father, and a scene in which that same boy has his face mashed up by a shitty diaper. I think M. Night just became self-aware.

Everything about The Visit seems like a comment on, and possible parody of, M. Night Shyamalan's formula. You've got the way-too-smart-for-their-age kids with some serious emotional baggage in the form of two siblings sent to hang out with their estranged grandparents for a week. You've got the way-too-dumb-for-their-age adults completely emotionally absent to the damage of their children in the form of the siblings' mother, more focused on the cruise she can have with her new boyfriend than her children's concern that something's fishy with Nan and Pop. And you've got the larger-than-life possibly supernatural force that can clumsily serve as a metaphor, and elixir, to the emotional turmoil beset upon our protagonists in the form of the aforementioned grandparents, one of whom may be possessed by a demon, one of whom may be suicidal, both of whom are probably just old. What's the difference, then? What stops this from being like his first four films, or his last four films? Oddly enough, the answer is the same for both. The connective tissue between the real and the absurd kept his early work digestible in the same way that it highlighted the dopiness of his later work. Up until now, every one of his films have had tonal inconsistencies between scenes, but they've been mitigated by his adherence to aesthetic, his efforts to ensure you that these characters are simply just reacting to what's happening around them, coupled with his slow, meandering drip-feed of the insane. Don't forget it's a good hour before we even see an alien full-form in Signs, and even then it's blurry CRT footage. In The Visit, this connective tissue is gone entirely. The very first night of their stay, the two kids are told bedtime is 9.30pm. The older sibling sneaks out and, within seconds, sees her grandmother shuffling through the house, intermittently projectile-vomiting. The very next morning, the kids are playing hide and seek in the crawl space under the house, and with zero subtlety, the grandmother gets in on the game, shuffling way too fast for her age and being really vague of her intentions should she catch one of the kids. That night, they hear scratching outside their door, and open it to find their grandmother naked and furiously running her nails up and down the wallpaper. The shit has well and truly hit the fan, but we've still got an hour and change to go. On top of that, the kids have all but forgotten about it the next day, focusing more on how bored they are, and the different ways they can play with each other's emotions the way only siblings can. There's artistic merit to the notion that this is meant to highlight a likely realistic turn of events should actual children find themselves in a situation similar to this, but I like to think it's instead a comment from M. Night on the perilous threads his films have walked, something that comes in useful when the film takes the idea of putting the shit to the fan early on so it can descend into full-blown actual insanity come the third act. Because there's nothing more freeing than staring down that perilous thread and jumping straight off.

It's possible that I'm reading too far into this. It's kind of what I do. But I genuinely think there's something here. You don't reach the dizzying levels of inexplicable craziness that this film does without being somewhat self-aware. You don't have two kids being held hostage and forced to play Yahtzee, one of the hostage takers feverishly eating cookies while the other is quietly literally shitting himself, followed by one of the kids being locked in a room with an old woman who crawls along the ground and occasionally makes a screeching sound while the other kid freezes in the face of danger just-like-he-did-at-the-football-game-which-is-why-Dad-left and has his face smeared in old man shit while the old man posits cryptic dialogue about his grand divinity amongst worthless humanity, followed by the kid trapped in the room cutting the old woman's throat with a piece of glass while the other kid snaps out of his freeze, and crushes the man's head repeatedly in the fridge door while screaming commentator's dialogue from the aforementioned football game, followed by the most saccharine that saccharine can get scene between a mother and daughter about not holding onto rage which is totally why she didn't realise earlier on that the kid's grandparents were actually murderous crazies from the local asylum, followed by a three and a half minute freestyle rap over the credits from the boy who had shit on his face about having shit on his face, and Mel Gibson, without some degree of transparency. It even seems like one big goof to make it a found-footage horror film. Whether M. Night's artistic decision, or strain from a studio, it's certainly satiric in its delivery. Poor shaky-cam cinematography here is anaesthetised and in a way improved by making the cinematographer a budding documentarian, so naturally, she wants the shots to be good, but is still limited to her meager understanding of the craft. It's genuinely impressive. There's also the question in every found-footage horror film of who the fuck edited this together. The Visit's answer is, "The documentarian, of course!" Seriously, in spite of the turn of events I just vomited into this paragraph, the film ends with title cards written by the girl documenting her editing process. M. Night Shyamalan isn't asking you to question whether he knew it'd be a bit weird to say that someone who found her dead grandparent's rotting bodies in a dumpster would still want to make the film she set out to make, he's asking you to identify with the inherent absurdity of this sort of film, and of his films in general, and to laugh at it. And make no mistake, this film is funny. Having said that, is it enjoyable? That's kind of an irrelevant question, in my opinion. "Is it interesting?" is the more pressing question, and the answer is "Yes", if for no other reason than to see someone who was a cultural icon at one point, who has since slipped into a mixture of obscurity and incompetency, hold up a mirror to himself and his legacy with a smile on his face. A big, shit-eating grin. You're welcome.

Trainwreck

I wouldn't have the vision for Tenouttaten that I do if it weren't for Film Crit Hulk. His brilliant, post-modern dissections of cinema are among the most thoughtful and inspiring validations of criticism that exist in the pantheon of the internet, and he consistently makes me want to be better than I am. In his essay on Gone Girl, he cites an interview with Gillian Flynn in which she addresses some of the criticism leveled at her work for being sexist; that Amy Dunne was nothing more than the 'psycho bitch' trope. Gillian's response is that Amy isn't a psycho bitch, she's just psycho. More than that, women deserve a character like this; a character that transcends their gender to become a monster. The media we consume projects women to be either to-their-core nurturing and good, or outwardly negative through their 'bitchiness'. Both of those extremes still hold gender to their identity. In his essay, Hulk takes these quotes to theorise that in Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn finally offers women a female Hannibal Lecter, a character whose identity doesn't stem from being a man, but from being a monster. And, in that regard, with Trainwreck, Amy Schumer offers women a female Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; an affirmation that you are allowed to be damaged, and to be a shitty human being, because you are human, and you're trying your best. And maybe, if you can finally admit that you have a problem, you can start to get better.

There's a scene in Trainwreck where Amy (Amy Schumer) is eulogising her late father. As we see in the first scene of the film, he's the one who taught Amy that monogamy is a fallacy, and set her on her path of having as good of a time for herself and herself only. She starts off professional, and well-meaning, before acknowledging that her dad was kind of a shithead. He was a racist homophobe, and with a show of hands, everyone at the funeral had been personally offended by him at some point in their lives. But in the same thought, she also acknowledges that he was honest about himself, and his shortcomings, and each person who had raised their hands could leave them raised for a time in which he had touched them with the good person he was at his core. To me, the only scene that even comes close to as accurately portraying the deep pain beneath Amy's surface is when her boyfriend Aaron (Bill Hader) suggests that they take a couple of days off and walks out the door, leaving Amy on the couch desperately trying to hold back sobs before hard-cutting to her getting wasted and dancing against her workmates in a club. There may have been a point in Amy's life when this lifestyle was exactly what she needed, and she should not be held accountable for that. This movie is not slut-shaming anybody. But Amy's at a point in her life now where that lifestyle isn't reaping the same benefits. Her flippant, carefree lifestyle is now hurting people. Her boyfriend at the start of the film, Steven (John Cena), finds out about her promiscuity, and when she can't see how it could possibly be hurtful for him to have this knowledge, he says, "Fuck you, Amy. You are a mean person." Try as she might to continue looking out for number one, she spends the film losing the battle inside of herself that's trying to tell her she's looking for something more. And it all comes from that eulogy: her parents were just as damaged as she is now, but they were good people deep down, and so is she. So are we all.

It could be argued that the fact that Amy gets the guy in the end in spite of herself isn't an earned victory. To me, it wasn't a victory, it was a second chance, and to say that she wasn't deserving of that is to say that Fight Club celebrates Tyler Durden. Trainwreck makes you work hard to see the good person beneath Amy's shell, but it is there. I can name innumerable situations in which I've been unbelievably selfish, with little to no regard for those I care about, but I still consider myself to be a good person. Why? Because I can admit the times when I wasn't good. Amy's efforts to win back Aaron demonstrate a person admitting that she needs to get better, and she wants to try. This transcends her gender, and demonstrates, as I've mentioned before, feminism as it truly is: equality. Feminism is about recognising that every human being has the capacity to be the same person. More so, in her final act of penance, a synchronised dance with the Knicks City cheerleaders, she transcends the deep, cultural understanding we have that only one body type can dance, and dance good, and look good. She knocks it out of the fucking park because she's a human being laid bare, and you can trace that back through the rest of the film. We don't see her and Aaron old and happy together; for all we know, he is but a chapter in her life. What we do know is that Amy has acknowledged that she isn't happy with who she is, and she wants to change. She doesn't win the guy, she earns the opportunity to try and get better. She's a character that is more than her gender. She's Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. She's fucking brilliant.