Lessons of Darkness

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011): B-

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a stunning apotheosis of many sorts – of supersized CG spectacle, of cruel and cavalier carnage, of sexist T&A and militaristic fetishism, of narrative inconsequentiality and crass stereotypes, and of size, scale and over-over-over-the-top juvenile orgiastic cartoon mayhem. It’s a 157-minute pinnacle of contemporary mega-budgeted blockbusters that’s simultaneously atrocious and astounding, overflowing with bad taste, dim-wittedness and cacophonous aesthetic overload, and so totally surpassing its aggro-testosterone dictates that it plays out like an assault or, more precisely still, like a final conquering salvo. In its extremeness, Dark of the Moon proclaims its – by which I mean, director Michael Bay’s – domination of the mainstream action landscape, with the film, in its astonishing excess, throwing down the gauntlet with the arrogant ferocity of a work that knows it can’t be bested at its own game. Promoting jingoism and heroic platitudes and yet also salaciously reveling in death and destruction, Bay fully embraces his role as directorial commander-in-chief, driven by no ideology but to proffer consumer-grade apocalyptic warfare designed to both satiate young boys’ bloodlust and arouse their libido, all with the box-office bottom-line as the true, guiding ambition.

With Dark of the Moon, 3D saves Michael Bay from himself, forcing him – in a manner similar to the wretched Revenge of the Fallen’s IMAX-customized centerpieces – to partake in relatively prolonged, smoother camera movements and less editorial franticness as a means of avoiding blurriness. When married to copious slow-motion, the effect is a visual lucidity that surpasses almost every previous Bay effort. With the plot (especially during the first tedious hour) wholly beside the point, his images take on an almost abstract splendor, be it of men freefalling from a Chicago high-rise, a serpentine mecha-monster (like a techno-variation of Dune’s sandworms) tearing through Trump Tower, or hero Sam (Shia LaBeouf) floating through the air as his Autobot BFF Bumblebee transforms from roadster to humanoid and back to roadster all while he’s riding inside the ‘bot. The fact that such car commercial-slick style is in service of ogling Megan Fox replacement Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Bay introduces the Victoria’s Secret model-turned-actress via a close-up of her ass, to convey her prime eye-candy purpose), or of evil Decepticons incinerating innocent humans with no pity, makes the film more than a tad noxiously infantile. But as a feast for the senses, it handily accomplishes its gonzo goals, enlivened by Amir Mokri’s TV ad-shiny cinematography and Steve Jablonsky’s grandiloquent score, both of which seamlessly mesh with a cast of A-listers (John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, series mainstay John Turturro) overacting their hearts out, and a script that places a premium on screaming.

If morally dubious – oh, alright, reprehensible – and dumb as steel, Dark of the Moon at least goes mercifully light on the intolerable banter of Sam’s parents, though Julie White’s mom (the most grating character in a franchise overrun by them, including Ken Jeong’s typically crude gay caricature) still gets in a crack about the size of her son’s penis. Yet Bay only cares about humans insofar as he can turn them into machines, as evidenced by a late tracking shot of LaBeouf leaping and sliding through an urban battlefield with Autobot-ian grace. Similar disinterest is shown to the story, which involves the first Apollo moon landing, Buzz Aldrin (looking confused in a cameo), JFK (resurrected through CG wizardry), and the heroic Optimus Prime’s attempts to prevent nemesis Megatron (along with another traitorous, fire engine-red ‘bot voiced by Leonard Nimoy) from enslaving the planet. Like the rest of the metal-on-metal insanity, this hodgepodge of revisionist U.S. political-history elements – which includes Megatron sitting in Honest Abe’s Lincoln Memorial chair, and 9/11-esque metropolitan demolition – exhibits no coherent or sincere beliefs except that more is everything. It’s a stew of adolescent-hormonal sex and violence whose pleasures arouse not guilt so much as mouth-agape shock and awe, culminating with a jaw-dropping hour-long bout of robot-combat madness that, fulfilling the wildest wet dreams of Transformers and action-movie fanboys by realizing the genre’s full potential for titillating amoral nastiness, solidifies Bay as the conquering Decepticon despot of our awesomeness-above-all-else modern cinema.

The Ward (2010): C

Back behind the camera for his first feature since 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter serves up some sluggish and silly shock-scary horror with The Ward, a tale about the supernatural mysteries that engulf Kristen (Amber Heard) after she burns down a farmhouse and is institutionalized in a spooky mental ward. This story, penned with next-to-no inventiveness or wit by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is set in 1966 only so plausibility won’t be stretched by bits involving electroshock therapy and lobotomies, but such antiquated, crude medical procedures have by now become such rote genre clichés that there’s no terror to their employment, just yawns. Kristen’s symbolic dreams, strange interactions with her fellow inmates (each one a distinct “type”), and frequent run-ins with a mutilated-faced specter all foreshadow the inevitable twist ending. Yet before the film can reach its deflating Sixth Sense-style denouement, it first indulges in a bevy of loud-noise jolts that, relative to the ominous atmospherics of Carpenter’s masterpieces, seem thoroughly beneath the director. Even Carpenter’s trademark widescreen framing seems lethargic, providing a sinister recurring shot of the ward’s hallways but otherwise failing to gussy up what amounts to a torpid guessing game about the true nature of Kristen’s identity and circumstances. From a wannabe Nurse Ratched, caring doctor (Jared Harris), and sexually deviant orderly (who, despite unseemly whispered threats, rejects the come-ons of Danielle Panabaker’s crazy girl), to Heard’s feisty if featureless protagonist and a ghoul straight out of central casting, The Ward proves a musty shadow of the filmmaker’s smart and stylish classics.

Cedar Rapids (2011): B-

Hopelessly benign but still boisterous enough to deliver a mild buzz, Cedar Rapids details the efforts of goodie-two-shoes insurance salesman Tim (Ed Helms) to win his firm a coveted award – nabbed the past three years by his revered and now-deceased predecessor – at an Iowa convention. That goal is complicated by his budding friendship with wild man Dean (John C. Reilly), who demands to be called “Deansie,” the come-ons from married Joan (Anne Heche), and the moral judgments of God-loving convention bigwig Orin (Kurtwood Smith). Director Miguel Arteta doesn’t do anything particularly novel with his material (written by Phil Johnston). Yet his clean framing, snappy pacing and convincing evocation of Iowa hotel banality help moderately invigorate Tim’s gradual development of a mature emotional, professional and moral compass, which comes via drunken one-night-stands and smoking crack at a roughneck party out in the middle of rural nowhere. Though rehashing his usual awkward-nebbish routine, Helms never tips Tim into full-blown caricature, and though one can feel Reilly straining to be the action’s humorous wild card, he nonetheless brings a welcome dose of legitimate craziness to the proceedings. It’s a tepid work built on the backs of its fine comedic cast, which is highlighted by Heche, who nails her repartee with Helms while subtly expressing Joan’s unhappiness and hunger for the temporary escape that’s provided by her annual convention getaways. With understatement and nuance, Heche proves to be the star of Cedar Rapids, even if she – as well as Isiah Whitlock Jr., stuck making two dreary wink-wink references to The Wire – ultimately deserves a better film.

Green Lantern (2011): C

A second-rate superhero receives a second-rate summer extravaganza in Green Lantern, the first big-screen adventure for DC Comics’ intergalactic do-gooder. Director Martin Campbell’s saga is one of creation, destruction and daddy issues, all revolving around a daredevil fighter pilot named Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) who is chosen by an alien ring – fueled by the positive green power of “will” – to be its new owner, thus making him part of a galaxy police force that, in the person of leader Sinestro (Mark Strong), views his membership with skepticism. Hal’s hero credentials are also questioned by former flame Carol (Blake Lively), who still has feelings for Hal and serves as the damsel in distress whom Hal must periodically save. Such valor is accomplished by using his magic ring, which makes manifest anything he imagines (be it a giant fist or a machine gun turret), and which comes in handy during his quest to thwart a planet-devouring force of yellow “fear” known as Parallax as well as the creature’s Earthly proxy, mutated scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Skarsgaard). Campbell’s CG-heavy action boasts his usual lucidity and fleetness, even if too many set pieces race by without building to a satisfyingly thrilling conclusion. Yet his story, in which Hal achieves self-actualization and becomes a savior by confronting his dead dad’s fallibility, is a tedious hodgepodge of rote conflicts and character hang-ups, all while failing to provide Reynolds with a single cocky one-liner to go with his wiseass routine, which ultimately proves as strained as the film’s energy is dim.

Submarine (2010): C

A Welsh variation on Rushmore’s Max Fisher, 15-year-old Oliver Tate comes of age through a budding romance with classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) and his quest to save his parents’ (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) marriage in Submarine, Richard Ayoade’s off-putting ode to quirky teen desire and self-discovery. From knowing narration and addresses to the camera, to literal and thematic allusions to Jean-Pierre Melville’s doomed noirs and Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Ayoade’s debut (based on Joe Dunthorne’s novel) steeps itself in cinematic self-reflexivity, a wink-winkiness that’s rarely elevated by the dry wit of its protagonist, who woos Jordana by engaging in distasteful bullying and convinces her to have sex with him by sincerely expressing his feelings in a letter. True happiness is achieved through confronting and overcoming fear and insecurity, be it with regards to Oliver, Jordana, or Oliver’s dry-as-toast parents, whose stilted marriage (which Oliver spies on, in order to maintain its health) is challenged by the arrival of mom’s former crush (Paddy Considine), a wacko psychic with a van featuring a Dark Side of the Moon-style painting of himself on its side. Whereas the early going boasts at least a bit of lighthearted drollness, the film and its copious eccentricities become less charming the further the material veers into serious betrayal-and-forgiveness crises, with verve flagging and Oliver’s oddball earnestness and desperation coming across as wan affectations. His pretentiousness may not wholly sink Submarine, but it’s enough to prevent the film from rising above its numerous quirk-fest predecessors.

Red Riding Hood (2011): D

Red Riding Hood is nothing like Twilight – except, of course, for the fact that it’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, tells a tween-targeted supernatural story of a young featureless beauty (Amanda Seyfried’s Valerie) caught in a love triangle with two bland boys (one of whom may be a werewolf who shares a special bond with her), and features lots of chaste romantic brooding and misty-mountain scenery. Oh, and did I mention that said legendary werewolf also can’t come out in the daytime or enter Christian churches, just like vampires? Rarely has a project attempted to duplicate a trendy franchise’s every element in ways as transparent as this awful film, in which Valerie (aka Red Riding Hood) is torn between working-class Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and wealthy arranged-husband Henry (Max Irons) in a medieval town where the parents are vapid, the guys are hunky, and the girls are catty and back-stabby. Once religious wolf-slaying zealot Solomon (a beyond-over-the-top Gary Oldman) arrives in town eager to burn anyone even related to the wolf, Hardwicke’s film (penned with overwrought clichés by David Johnson) turns into a whodunit in which suspicion is cast about with unbridled fervor. Is the wolf Peter? Henry? Valerie’s two-timing mom (Virginia Madsen)? Her big-eyed granny (Julie Christie)? Who cares? Valerie is such a milquetoast nobody and the beast is such an awful-looking CG creation that it’s hard not to root for their mutual destruction. However, between the laughably breathless writing, passionless paint-by-numbers romance, and matching slow-motion-and-erotic-electronica aesthetics, what truly needs abolishing is the notion that the wretched Twilight saga is worth emulating.

Donnie Darko (2001): A-

A haunting work of loneliness, alienation, and the universal desire for companionship and meaning that’s wrapped in a guise of understated ‘80s nostalgia and head-spinning science fiction mythology, Donnie Darko defines itself through sustained mood, otherworldly intrigue and deep, abiding humanism. In a quiet suburb in October 1988, troubled teen Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) attends therapy and is plagued by sleepwalking, and after one nocturnal jaunt – during which he’s guided by a man named Frank (James Duval) in a furry, malevolent bunny suit – he returns home to find that he’s escaped death at the hands of an airplane engine that’s crashed into his bedroom, and which hails from a jet the FAA can’t locate. That near-miss doesn’t initially disrupt the family’s day-to-day, as Donnie profanely spars with his sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) over dinner while she proclaims allegiance to Michael Dukakis as a rebuke to her conservative father (Holmes Osborne), a sequence of unaffected familial love and contentiousness that’s emblematic of writer/director Richard Kelly’s intense empathy for his characters. Such compassion most forcefully centers on Donnie, though it also extends to high school teachers (Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle) trapped – like teens, be they outcast Donnie or picked-on overweight Cherita (Jolene Purdy) – in a world that decries individuality, intellectualism, unique expression, and emotional complexity.

The competing forces of evil are many in Donnie Darko, from monstrous self-help guru Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze) and his hateful disciple Kitty Farmer (a phenomenal Beth Grant) – a gym teacher who coaches Donnie’s youngest sister in the popular, highly sexualized dance troupe Sparkle Motion – to the apathetic principal and sadistic bullies that populate the high school’s corridors. As these cretins increasingly seem poised to snuff out rational thought, Donnie plunges deeper into apparent madness, experiencing visits from Frank during which he’s told to flood the school, set fire to a house, and – more crucially still – that Frank himself is a time traveler, and that the world will soon end. Is Frank, as a midnight movie marquee suggests, the Evil Dead, and is Donnie’s saga that of The Last Temptation of Christ? Kelly drenches his material in ambiguous clues to the nature of his tale’s reality, with characters’ offhand comments implying ulterior roles in this apocalyptic passion play, and the sight of a jet engine’s curly-cue hub intimating a chasing-its-tail temporal structure to the proceedings. Yet for all its time-space paradox and wormholes-emanating-from-human-chests mysteries, Kelly’s film remains a sorrowful portrait of feeling alone, a notion relevant to many of its supporting players but most fully to Donnie, driven to make sense of a universe that seemingly provides no lasting solace.

A wide-scale panorama of grief and sacrifice that’s shot by Kelly with expert widescreen acuity, Donnie Darko also provides a wrenchingly authentic vision of adolescence as a time of uneasy identity formation and – via Donnie’s romance with new girl Gretchen Ross (Jenna Malone) – first romance. Gyllenhaal’s creepy-eyed glares are chilling but its Donnie’s heartfelt fury, confusion and fear that ground the increasingly topsy-turvy action, never more so than in an early scene where he lashes out at his mother by calling her bitch, and the director – refusing to shy away from the act’s callousness, and yet sympathetic to its underlying causes – lingers on Donnie’s immediately regretful follow-up reaction. Nonetheless, to describe Donnie Darko as purely a work of grave internal and external conflict would be to deny its great humor, which springs forth from borderline-caricatures given distinctive verve, Donnie’s amusing refusal to sit quietly while life-lesson lies are propagated as dogma, and its more general, absurdist outlook on the surreal craziness of childhood and adulthood alike. As with his assured visual compositions, his pitch-perfect use of ‘80s pop hits, and his story and style’s gentle Steven Spielberg and David Lynch-indebted touches, Kelly’s tonal balancing act is flawless, leaving his debut an alternately sad and hopeful investigation of destiny, free will and God which recognizes, ultimately, that no one dies alone if they’ve touched the lives of those they love.

Hall Pass (2011): B-

Despite their gross-out reputation, Bobby and Peter Farrelly are conservative romantics at heart, a fact once again borne out by Hall Pass, the story of two horndog husbands who are given a week off from marriage by their frustrated wives. This deal strikes good-natured Rick (Owen Wilson) and slightly sleazier Fred (Jason Sudeikis) as a golden opportunity to finally act on the libidinous impulses that drive them to stare at every passing woman’s ass and chest, much to the chagrin of their respective spouses Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate). Given such freedom, however, they prove not only incompetent at picking up women but increasingly lonely without their other halves, though the revelation that loyal, loving matrimony is preferable to meat-market clubs and one-night stands only comes after boys-night-out hijinks – pot brownie-fueled golfing, affairs with older women, drunken brawling and gunfights – that never quite rise to the humorous heights one expects. Nonetheless, as doofuses vainly attempting to convince themselves that they want their wildest dreams to come true, Wilson and Sudeikis make an amusingly goofy pair, even if their funniest moment comes during an early sequence in which their characters are overheard at a party (via a security camera) discussing the hosts’ genitals. That Maggie and Grace ultimately wind up grappling with their own fidelity is as predictable and bland as the last half-hour’s devolution into toothless sweetness. Still, the final line is a classic, recognizing as it does that nothing – not marriage, not love, not happiness – is worth enduring a live Kathy Griffin show.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): B

In Two-Lane Blacktop’s rural American landscapes, Monte Hellman captures an aura of existential despondence that’s married to a far less evocative (and durable) strain of counterculture romantic doom. Hellman’s cult classic road movie follows a vacant driver (James Taylor) and his equally blank passenger-seat sidekick (Dennis Wilson) as they meander about the country, looking to make some cash from drag-racing their souped-up 1955 Chevy. Their aimless anti-adventures eventually lead them to pick up a similarly featureless hitchhiking girl (Laurie Bird), and to engage in a cross-country match against deceitful Warren Oates and his yellow Pontiac GTO. Except, however, that there’s no real race to speak of – instead of competition, the owners of these dueling vehicles form a half-assed friendship marked by either wholesale indifference to everything (Taylor and Wilson) or self-deluding dreams of reinvention and success (Oates). It’s an impeccably crafted work of ambivalence that only obliquely touches upon its generational and gender undercurrents, and one that’s elevated by a soulful, humorous Oates performance of deeply humanistic pitifulness. Hellman isn’t interested in conventional narrative but, rather, in crafting a free-flowing hippie-ish mood piece about futility (hence the film stock burning to shreds in the final image). And in that limited sense, Two-Lane Blacktop is almost outstanding – almost, because Hellman’s story and characters, seemingly guided by whichever way the wind is blowing, eventually morph from intriguing to insufferable.

Kaboom (2010): C-

Greg Araki’s Kaboom melds sexual discovery-through-promiscuity with apocalyptic shenanigans and a pro-pansexuality brio that’s overly pleased with itself. Set at an unnamed college and in a variety of locales (dorm room, cafeteria, campus green, apartments) that deliberately look like stylized theatrical sets, the pioneering New Queer Cinema director’s genre-mash-up tale boasts a distinctly ‘90s patina, full of amateurish performances, cheesy hallucinatory effects, and smart-ass dialogue so tone-deaf (and yet self-satisfied) as to be embarrassing. The actual plot involves Smith (Thomas Dekker) falling in and out of men and women’s beds, as well as learning that his supposedly dead father is actually the leader of a cult that has strange ties to the disappearance of a classmate, to Smith’s regular fling London (Juno Temple), and to his recurring dream of the future. Through Smith’s saga as well as the related experiences of his insufferably snarky lesbian best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) and her witchy lover (Roxane Mesquida), Araki drools over unclothed torsos of hunky men while celebrating his cast of characters’ open-to-anything bedroom proclivities. Such an everything-goes ethos also extends to his surreal sci-fi/horror/coming-of-age story, but despite the script’s attempts to parallel Smith’s homo-hetero struggles and his daddy-related revelations – both of which lead to actualization – Araki’s material isn’t anarchic and invigorated but sloppy and limp. There may be more graphic chit-chat about anal sex and orgasms, but Kaboom remains a pale imitation of a David Lynch work.