Most movies blithely celebrate self-absorption.  The highest tenet of most movies is: me, me, me.  Lead actors (and audiences) are used to being flattered for their sentimentality and easy moralising.  So it’s strange to encounter a film where the main character is challenged about her egocentric beliefs.  Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore effort as director is a complex, spiritually urgent story about conscience and consciousness.  The title, Margaret, comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, where a young girl’s first experience of grief serves as a painful step towards spiritual maturity.  In a sense, this is a familiar coming-of-age story, but one where true self-awareness comes from separating selfish “me” from what is meaningful.

When she inadvertently causes a terrible accident, teenager Lisa Cohen is confronted with the arbitrary injustice of life.  A stranger literally dies in her arms, and Lisa spends the rest of the movie trying to make sense of this senseless death.  At first, understandably, she is traumatised.  She wants only to forget about the accident.  Later, when she can’t forget, she decides she wants somebody to blame.  Lisa thinks of herself as a moral person, but her story isn’t about the virtue of doing the right thing.  The world of this movie is (to quote Swami Vivekananda) “a moral gymnasium wherein we have all to take exercise so as to become stronger spiritually.”  In short, Lisa’s values have no worth until they’re tested by the world.

Some critics have called Margaret a “post-9/11 movie”, but it’s so graceful in its allusions, you don’t become aware of them until you pause to reflect.  There is no crude allegory at work here.  Nor does recognising these allusions detract from the drama, or reduce any single character to the status of a puppet, or make the audience feel duped.  The central premise of Margaret just fits with reactions to 9/11 because it’s a movie about the insane difficulty of seeing someone else’s point of view.  It’s about how we communicate with people who aren’t like us; how we “falsify” people by making assumptions about them; how strident we become when we only listen to one voice.  What’s amazing is that it doesn’t get touchy-feely.

Lisa is not an angry teenage cliché who learns to love by the end of the movie.  Or rather (and here’s the really clever part), she is an angry teenager who learns to love by the end of the movie, but the screenplay is neither gloopy nor clichéd.  Lisa might take a superficial point of view about certain subjects (the accident, U.S. foreign policy), but there’s nothing superficial about her character.  She is both a manipulative, self-centred drama queen and an extremely moral, eloquent idealist, and it’s these contradictions that make her human.  Like the rest of the cast, she’s a pain-in-the-ass sometimes; things happen which bother her and she doesn’t respond with the equanimity of a saint.  Half the time she’s too busy reeling.  She’s as smart, if not smarter, than most of the people she meets, and yet they never speak or react as she anticipates.  As we all know, it’s frustrating to be wrong when you know you’re in the right.

New York is the ideal setting for this story because it bristles with life.  Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t want to make a movie where everyone learns to get along.  There’s nothing sappy or “Spielberg” about Margaret.  Moral choice in this film is not (the usual movie guff) about choosing to be good when the alternative is to be bad; it’s about how difficult it is to be objective.  Conflicting points of view abound in this story.  Lisa scarcely opens her mouth and she’s caused offence.  She lives in a city full of unabashed humanity; smart, complex people surround her, all jostling for the spotlight.  As one woman scolds Lisa, with righteous indignation: “We are not supporting characters in the fascinating story of your life!”

This movie wants to rattle spectators.  You’re not safe in your little narcissistic cocoon.  You don’t get to act superior to Lisa, or to pretend you know what the right thing is she should do.  You’re in her shoes.  Your heart’s scrambled.   I dare you not to cry.  What makes this movie truly great is that it doesn’t ask you to switch off your brain so it can move you.  The crackle of ideas isn’t doused by sentiment.  This movie is adamantly against a purely emotional response to complex issues.  In the poem which inspired Margaret, the key line is where the poet speaks of how, in her maturity, the young woman “will weep and know why”.  Feeling, alone, is not meaningful.  It’s what feeling connects us to that we call profound.

“You have a chance to occur…To make for you this second world that is always the same: with always a purpose to keep this world alive.”  So says a wise old tennis instructor.  The key to understanding David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece is the concept of human agency: the gift of choice, and how, if you abdicate your responsibility to choose, “if you just love, without deciding, if you just do…Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment.  Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments.  You become a citizen of nothing.  You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.”  Addiction (the big theme of this book) is a way of hiding from real life.

In a dystopian America of the near-future, Infinite Jest is a movie so mind-blowing that watching it will obliterate your every reason to live.  Paraplegic Canadian terrorists and the sinister (able-bodied) Office of Unspecified Services are each desperate to get hold of the film, and the boring bits of this book are dedicated to their struggle.  The interesting parts of the book are about Hal Incandenza; teenage tennis prodigy, eidetic etymologist, lost soul, pot addict… Hal is the son of the man who made Infinite Jest.  He is the book’s “hero of re-action”; by the end he will become “a hero of non-action, a catatonic hero”.  The book’s other protagonist, Don Gately (a.k.a., the Big Indestructible Moron), is a man who acts heroically.

There’s a joke about fish about half way into the book.  “This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.”  The joke being: even water doesn’t occur to some fish.  They have yet to “learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, [so that] everything will be done by what’s around you.”  As in all his work, David Foster Wallace impels his readers to be philosophically engaged.  This is a book of immense ideas, impeccable erudition, awesome vocabulary and every other virtue of intellect.  Fortunately for us mortals, it also has heart.

No major character in this book is without pain.  Compassion for the fucked-up is boundless.  While academics and know-it-alls may wet themselves at the prospect of deciphering the writing; David Foster Wallace didn’t write this book to play word games.  I know this because the best parts of this book are not clever, or esoteric, or post-modern; the best parts are “unslanted, unfortified, and maximally unironic.”  As Hal’s brother Mario puts it: “It’s like there’s some rule the real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes of laughs in a way that isn’t happy.”  Don’t be fooled by anyone who tells you Infinite Jest should be read as irony.  There are real things at stake in this book.  The cartwheeling, hyperbolic prose is not just show-off trick designed to poke fun at literary convention; it’s a means of “fracturing reality” in a way that’s authentic to Dave Wallace.

Depression is the book’s nemesis, not a “blue kind of peaceful state”, but real depression, “more like horror than sadness…lurid, that’s the right word for it, like every sound you hear has teeth.”  Depressed characters long to be dead, to feel nothing, to turn their hearts to ash.  Hal Incandenza exists in a medicated haze.  Hal’s dad committed suicide.  Don Gately is haunted by “the wraith” of Hal’s father, who confesses that he created Infinite Jest in a bid to prevent his son’s “fall into solipsism… death in life.”  Kate Gompert (a recovering addict at the halfway house where Don works) calls it: “a nausea of the soul…lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed…a hell for one.”  No prison was ever so pernicious, or harder to escape.

This book, too, makes some people break out in a cold sweat.  It’s 1,000 pages long.  It has about a thousand characters.  It’s not written in chronological order.  Nothing is resolved at the end.  But all these things are part of a grand scheme, and Dave Wallace isn’t without a self-deprecating sense of humour.  Joelle Van Dyne (one of the more perceptive characters in the book) criticises Hal’s father’s work for having “no real story” and for coming across to others “more like a very smart person conversing with himself.”  This is how many readers react to Infinite Jest.  I’m certain, though, that this book is true.  You should react with a jolt.  Any supreme act of concentration needs time and effort to “leap over the wall of self”.

 
Here’s a movie that can’t win.  We’ve already had the definitive Batman.  Unforgettable scenes are already in our heads.  Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his immortal turn as the ultimate villain.  There is no way to top The Dark Knight.  No reason, ever, to want to go back; unless, of course, you count money.  And it’s fair to say, the one thing new movie doesn’t lack is adequate funds.  Bruce Wayne goes bankrupt in this film, in what could be read as an in-joke about exorbitant costs.  The Dark Knight Rises is bigger in every way than its predecessor.  But you can’t buy lightning in a bottle.  No paycheque will bring Heath Ledger back.  As Bane, the muscle-bound new villain has to learn, there are limits to bulk.

Nothing in this film can match Heath Ledger as The Joker.  If I’m honest, nothing in The Dark Knight could match him, either.  It was a one-off, Marlon Brando-in-Streetcar performance, tense and alive and seething.  In the new movie, Bane might be capable of beating Batman to a pulp, but he’s the goddamn Easter Bunny compared to The Joker.  Bane’s Darth-Vader-slash-James-Bond-villain voice is more “camp ring master” than servant of chaos.  He looks like he stomped out of a He-Man cartoon, where The Joker’s look was pure Francis Bacon.  Even Bane’s evil scheme, to blow up Gotham City with a nuclear weapon, seems tried and tested, oddly quaint.  You are never left speechless, the way you were by The Joker.

I know it’s strange to talk as if the movie were toned down, when it’s so blatantly amped up, the experience of watching the film is more like Batman meets The Super Bowl!!!  But there is a sense that The Dark Knight was reckless where this film is controlled.  It says something that you never fear for Batman, even when he’s mashed to bits and penniless, lying broken in a foreign jail.  Perhaps it’s because so much of this film keeps harks back to Batman Begins, the often silly, not-entirely-successful first entry in the series.  Where The Dark Knight stood alone, magnificent, and had more in common with Michael Mann’s epic crime story, Heat; the new movie wants to tie the first and second films together, awkwardly, like a marriage between a Comic Con nerd and a handsome killer.  Exposition keeps barging in.  No wonder so many characters in the film are concerned about trying to start over with a clean slate.

In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Dark Knight Rises aims to capture the zeitgeist by drawing parallels between the 99%ers and Bane’s army of “gypsies, tramps and thieves” (possibly inspired by Cher).  But the whole thing feels compromised from the start by the fact that Bane and his army are the bad guys, and Tom Hardy is too restricted by his costume to seduce the audience into believing in his cause.  Bane doesn’t have The Joker’s dark charisma.  He doesn’t induce a feeling of moral free fall.  He just goes about his lumpen plan with a cheery determination, like a gaffer rigging up an electric chair.  You know he’ll lose from the moment he opens his mouth.  He only wants the pretence of revolution.

Christian Bale fades into the background, the way Batman does when he hangs out with Gotham villains.  It’s hard to sympathise with Bruce Wayne in the midst of global recession.  He’s a rich man who beats up the disenfranchised in his spare time.  He might claim that “anyone can be Batman”, but that’s like saying “money doesn’t matter to me”, i.e. it’s something you say because you’re blinded by wealth.  Batman’s superpowers, lest we forget, come from having billions of dollars.  He wasn’t born an outsider.  He bought the trappings of a freak.  In a sense, Batman’s secret identity is Bruce Wayne, the man in the ivory tower.  He dresses up so he can hang out with cops and robbers, but he’s a trust fund kid; crime-fighting is his hobby.

There’s no such thing as a left-wing vigilante; unless it’s a guy who goes around at night instilling tolerance and egalitarianism in people. Whichever way you slice it, Batman is a Republican.  Watching The Dark Knight Rises, I was reminded of Sideshow Bob’s words in The Simpsons years ago: “Because you need me, Springfield.  Your guilty conscience may move you to vote Democratic, but deep down you long for a cold-hearted Republican to brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king.”  In its imperial excess and titanic solemnity, The Dark Knight Rises wants to quash criticism.  It’s almost suicide to knock it.  But what the hell.  For Heath.  For the sake of honesty.  I’ll man the barricade.  This movie is decadent, bloated and unnecessary.

I like vulgar movies.  I’d pick a vulgar movie over something “tasteful” any day.  This isn’t specifically because I like to be shocked.  I just think there’s more life in so-called bad taste.  William Friedkin’s Killer Joe (based on a stage play by Tracy Letts) is a good example of what I mean.  Very little of what happens in this movie is pleasant.  It starts with scheming, betrayal and a middle-aged woman brandishing her pubic hair, and it only gets wilder from there on out.  If I didn’t like the movie, I’d say it was lurid.  But I did like it, so I say it’s vulgar.  I grant you, the difference between the two words is subjective, perhaps even spurious.  If I had to try to define it, I guess I’d say I prefer the baroque to the grotesque.

In a sleazy part of Texas, where matricide is not unthinkable if you’re in a jam, we meet Chris, a young man who wants his mother dead.  Chris owes six thousand dollars to a man named Digger, who will kill Chris if he doesn’t pay up.  In order to prevent his untimely demise, Chris hires Killer Joe, a cop who moonlights as a hitman.  Joe will kill Chris’s momma, and Chris will pay Joe (and Digger) with the money from his momma’s insurance policy.  The only hitch in the plan is that Joe wants a retainer for his services.  The retainer Joe has in mind is Chris’s sister, Dottie.  Chris doesn’t like this little caveat one bit.  But he’s desperate.  So he gives Dottie to Joe: a man whose eyes “hurt” you when you look at him.

When Joe first meets Dottie he tells her a story about a man who “set his genitals on fire” to “teach his girlfriend a lesson” after he caught her having an affair.  “Was [the man] alright?” Dottie asks.   “No,” says Joe. “He wasn’t alright.  He set his genitals on fire.”  To which Dottie replies: “I had an aunt who set herself on fire –” Now, I don’t know about you, but I sit up straight when I hear this kind of exchange.  There’s danger in the air when Joe and Dottie meet.  He’s a charming psychopath and she’s hot and spooky.  Or maybe there’s danger because it’s the other way around.  You can’t trust Dottie not to kill anyone when she gets mad.  The goddamn air in Texas seems violent.  Lightening threatens havoc from the sky.

You may think you’ve seen it all, but I promise you haven’t seen what Joe does with a piece of fried chicken.  Matthew McConaughey is like the big bad wolf in the title role.  He’s a man out of Cormac McCarthy’s darkest imaginings.  Unspeakable acts happen when he’s around.  He isn’t the villain of the piece, so much as evil incarnate.  “I’ll slaughter you all like pigs!” he howls, and you don’t doubt his intentions for a minute.  McConaughey is like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.  His role is almost pantomime villainy.  Part of the thrill of watching him is the fact that he’s bigger than life.  But he’s no cartoon.  Like De Niro and Juliette Lewis, the lust between McConaughey and Juno Temple is always disturbingly real.

William Friedkin isn’t averse to voyeurism, judging by the number of times Dottie/Juno takes off her clothes.  The director certainly lets his camera linger on the naked girl like a dirty old man.  But then again, this movie is set in a place where moral boundaries have all collapsed.  And Friedkin always did enjoy screwing with his audience.  You’re hardly going to find political correctness in a movie called Killer Joe anyway.  We’re in James M Cain territory, a world where men and women do bad things to each other because they like breaking rules.  There’s a no-holds-barred quality to human behaviour in this film.  Everyone is reckless.  Every intimacy is fraught.  It’s a scuzzy milieu, no question.  Gina Gershon appears bottomless both as a provocation and as a warning.  Sex is a source of chaos in this movie.  The plot is a series of wanton acts.

Personally, I don’t mind this sort of thing.  I was far more appalled when I watched The Descendants, with George Clooney.  In that so-called “tasteful” film, a broken family learns to love again.  The acting is subtle, the direction is subdued, and it’s all so goddamn nuanced it makes you want to punch someone in the mouth.  I can’t abide that sort of hushed quality in movies.  Piss and vinegar is what I crave.  Now, I know there are those who’ll say Killer Joegoes too far.  I winced too, at the grand guignol of the finale.  But in vulgar movies you have to allow for the macabre.  Bad taste is unpredictable.  Unpleasantness is part of the deal.  Like a slap in the face, this movie will rouse you.  Just don’t expect it to be polite.

Every prequel is a badly told joke; the kind where the comedian shoehorns-in extra details, adding “oh yeah, and the penguin was Jewish” after the punch-line.  Prequels are even worse than a bad joke, in fact, because what they add is always unnecessary.  They’re the story before the story, based on a false premise: that the audience cares what happened before.  This is the worst kind of craven, Hollywood-thinking.  In effect, a prequel says: we’re so out of ideas, so lacking in integrity, we’re not even satisfied with copying good ideas (in sequels) any more.  We need a new way to defame the original, so we’ve come up with this: the prequel, wholly useless and asked-for by no-one.  I give you: Prometheus.

On an unnamed planet, an unnamed alien swallows some black goop and disintegrates.  (Is his suicide a criticism of Ridley Scott’s film?)  What follows is a movie which “shares some DNA” with the Alien series, the same way a Big Mac “shares some DNA” with fillet mignon.  A group of scientists touchdown on an alien world (one strangely familiar to the audience).  They are searching for evidence that God was an astronaut.   Among them are the all the usual suspects in an Alien film: a sneaky cyborg, a spunky heroine, and a corporate slime-ball.  Sure enough, something nasty is impregnated in someone’s womb.  Fluids spurt.  Sexual neurosis explodes.  And the best advice – to nuke the site from orbit – gets ignored.

I think it was a mistake to hire Lost-scribe Damon Lindelof to doctor this script.  Lindelof has only got one set of ideas and his cack-handed attempt to re-cycle them is patently obvious in Prometheus.  The mysterious island from Lost is now a forbidden planet.  The passengers of the downed aircraft (in Lost) are much like the spaceship’s crew.  Prometheus has all the pseudo-“spiritual” baloney that crippled Lost in its final seasons, plus all the plot holes and “that’ll do” approach that led to the worst final episode of a TV series you could think of.  Even the misguided folk who want answers from the Alien series are going to be bitterly disappointed with what they get.  There’s no substitute for H.R. Giger’s opium-dream, man-size penis-monster in Prometheus.  The bad guy aliens are big bald white men… with great abs.  They’re more like a sauna gone wrong than something that scuttled darkly out of our collective unconscious.

Ridley Scott is getting old, and like all old directors (Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood) he’s let his standards slip.  The seasoned professional is still in him, and Prometheus is the work of a skilled craftsman.  It moves along at a brisk pace and the jumpy bits make you jump.  It’s just that… there’s nothing he (and sure as hell not Damon Lindelof) can do to improve on Alien.  We’re already seen the best version of this idea.  Prometheus was misconceived from the get-go with its gormless Erich von Daniken plot and its shameless lack of conviction.  Neither Scott nor Lindelof has a clue why anything happened in the original movie, they just know Twentieth Century Fox has a lucrative opening in its summer release schedule.

The only good idea in this film is to cast Michael Fassbender as a cyborg.  Better still, a cyborg who worships Lawrence of Arabia (as played, inimitably, by Peter O’Toole).  There’s no-one who can match Fassbender when he displays supercilious contempt for lesser beings.  His chin is as unyielding as the future.  He’s merciless, a supermodel… he looks like that, and he’s Irish, too.  Even though he gets brutally decapitated in this movie, he still gets the girl.  The grateful look he gives Noomi Rapace, as she pops his severed head in a holdall, is the one moment of sweetness Fassbender’s character allows himself.  Otherwise, he looks at people like he’s into something kinky.  What Schwarzenegger was to guns; Fassbender is to sex.

David Fincher described making Alien 3 as a “baptism of fire”.  “I’d always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid,” he once said. “[The producers] would say, ‘Look, you could have somebody piss against the wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and it would still do 30 million dollars’ worth of business.”  Not much has changed in twenty years, except now it’s the director, Ridley Scott, who doesn’t give a shit.  Prometheus has a brilliant marketing campaign, but it’s a major disappointment when you see the film.  This Alien has no guts, no brains, no balls.  It’s a prequel.  Not even an afterthought.  To paraphrase Ellen Ripley: “Get away from the original, you bitch!”

Any action becomes monotonous when it’s repeated too often.  Even fist-fighting with drug dealers gets boring, after the hundredth brawl.  Yeah, yeah… another bone-crunching blow to the jaw.  Blah, blah, blah… another psychotic kick to the ribs.  You can’t muster enthusiasm for ass-kicking indefinitely; beyond a certain point, you’re being hectored more than you’re being thrilled.  The new action movie, The Raid, suffers from inertia because it doesn’t know when to stop.  Like the continual motion of a washing machine, the film’s constant velocity lulls you to sleep.  “Oh, they’re fighting again,” is all you can think, as the pummelling goes on.  Turns out, it’s a thin line between a bravura fight sequence and flogging a dead horse.

In Jakarta, the killing starts early.  Morning has scarcely broken before a SWAT team is rolls into a bad neighbourhood, ready to be shot to pieces.  Their mission is to clear out the scum who’ve infested a derelict apartment block.  A local crime boss runs his operation from the fifteenth floor.  Only one of the policemen has any backstory (his pregnant wife is waiting at home), so no bets on who’s going to be Bruce Willis in this scenario.  Every other cop might as well have a sign taped to his back that says: “KICK ME (TO DEATH)”.  The motley tenants of Drug Dealer Towers certainly need no encouragement.  Once the cops go in, it’s time to knuckle up.  Everyone in this crack den seems to have won a Kung-Fu tournament.

The film’s director, Gareth Evans, comes from Wales.  Now, I don’t know how much you know about Wales, but I’m Welsh and I can tell you, from personal experience: we are not a nation of experts in martial arts.  Oh sure, the Welsh like to fight.  But we specialise in the drunken scuffle.  It’s more about self-disgrace than self-defence.   I’m guessing that Mister Evans’ knowledge of unarmed combat stems more from Bruce Lee movies and video games than it does from real life.  The different “levels” of the apartment block wouldn’t look out of place in a game; nor would the homicidal tenants who attack, one by one, and disappear the moment they’re felled.  Even the indigenous martial art the film is set-up to showcase (Silat) seems reminiscent of playing a video game, with its emphasis on twitchy repetition, where fighters compete to land the most punches, like gamers frantically pressing the controls.

One of the big attractions of The Raid (if you like that sort of thing) is the amount of thought that’s gone into killing bad guys.  There are some spectacular deaths in the film.  You’re almost tempted to believe the cops have uncovered a suicide cult from the way tenants’ race to their demise.  In a scene that’s bound to make you wince, one bad guy snaps his spine on a brick wall, after being thrown off a staircase.  Another bad guy has his neck skewered on the serrated remnants of a front door.  The boss’s right hand man has both his arms broken before being stabbed with a strip light.  And a lot of people get beaten to death via the wonders of Silat.  In keeping with the Die Hard tradition, a one-man-army inflicts most of the damage.

Our hero’s name is Rama (he doesn’t need a surname), and woe betide you if you get in his way.  He treats bad guys as if they came to him on a conveyor belt.  He’s an ass-kicking machine; invulnerable to pain.  Rama doesn’t waste time on wisecracks, or charisma.  He dispenses justice with a dreary vigour.  Maybe it’s my fault I find the strong and silent routine incredibly boring, but when you cross Gary Cooper with Jackie Chan, the net result is a mannequin who’s good in a fight.  All the wit and the charm of Bruce Willis are absent in this guy.  I don’t blame the actor entirely.  It’s an impossible task to humanise a character in a video game.  How can you have an inner life when your heart’s akin to a trigger?

You wouldn’t claim a rom-com had re-invented the genre if it was just a montage of designer shoes and wedding dresses.  So why pretend The Raid does anything new?  The best part of Die Hard isn’t Bruce’s bloody feet or the leap off Nakatomi Plaza; it’s the part where Bruce confesses: “[My wife] heard me say ‘I love you’ a thousand times.  She never heard me say ‘I’m sorry’.”  That line matters because it reveals character; it tells the audience that, while Bruce is a kick-ass sort-of guy, he’s also flawed, and human.  In contrast, the guy we’re asked to root for in The Raid has all the personality of a toilet seat.  He’s not even a cypher for anything.  Be warned: this movie may cause carpal tunnel syndrome in your soul.

 
“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui – these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed.  For they are real.”  So we are warned, by David Foster Wallace.  His novel, The Pale King, is a clerical epic, set in the catacombs of the Internal Revenue Service, where men and women fight against the “soul murdering” nature of their dreary, repetitive jobs, and the “true heroes” embrace boredom, as a path to bliss.  Wallace believes in enlightenment through wilful attention to complexity.  The enemy here is not tedium but the idea that the majority of life is tedious.  Boredom is the coward’s way out.  A hero welcomes monotony.

Leonard Stecyk, Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, Shane Drinion, Lane Dean Jr., Chris Fogle, Challa Neti-Neti, Toni Ware, and two David Wallaces (the author, and another man with the author’s name) all worked for the IRS in 1985 – at least, according to this book.  One of them was pathologically nice as a child, one of them is a “fact psychic”, one of them can levitate when in a state of profound concentration…one of them can fake being dead.  Most of them had difficulties in childhood.  In the course of their lives, 1985 was not an especially eventful year.  David Wallace writes about this period only because this is when, according to him, he worked for the IRS, briefly.  Nothing happened that shook the world.

The book is exhilarating to read not because of content, but because of form.  David Foster Wallace could describe a toilet seat in such a way as to make your heart swell.  His goal in writing The Pale King is to use the English language like the Large Hadron Collider: as a means of revealing, in the minutiae, the goddamn secrets of the universe.  He rejects the whole notion of “the epiphany” because it’s antithetical to his aims; he wants his readers to understand not the moment of change, but the unseen process by which “irrelevant” details inform what we choose to pay attention to.  This is why he focuses on the dullest job he can imagine.  When immersed in what other people ignore, his characters discover ecstatic truth.

Sadness is just one of the details of life, in this book.  We assume these office drones are depressed by their work.  But that isn’t the sum total of their experience, any more than a lottery winner is always full of joy.  The Pale King asks us to look beyond lazy assumptions.  It’s unusual for a reason: to stop you from being blasé.  In the longest chapter in the book, “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle describes, in mind-bending detail, how he came to work for the IRS.  Fogle’s epiphany came while watching daytime TV, when he realised the double entendre in the announcement “You’re watching As the World Turns”.  He suddenly recognised that he has been wasting his life up until that moment, and that he had been depressed without even knowing it.  The point of Fogle’s story, however, isn’t for us to understand why he changed, but to understand that his conventional life, and its changes, can be seen as a beautiful mystery.

To prevent the danger of settling for a glib apercu, or “the Paulo Coelho approach”, David Wallace is careful not to make Chris Fogle the novel’s hero.  This isn’t a story about how one man triumphs over the system using Zen.  As Fogle admits to the reader, he’s “a cog, not a sparkplug”.  Enlightenment, in his case, only leads to greater efficacy at work.  He doesn’t inspire anyone around him.  You could equally resent him for being a non-entity.  He’s like the hero of a play one character describes, where a man sits at a desk, working, and working, and working, until the audience leaves, and “the real action of the play can start”.  It’s never explained to us what bliss feels like.  We’re meant to be challenged, to struggle for insight.

“What we need now to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to man as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible.”  So wrote William James (in a passage taken as a rallying cry by David Foster Wallace).  The Pale King is about a kind of heroism that seems meek in contrast with dying for a just cause.  We don’t associate gallantry with office work.  We expect bravery to be conspicuous.  Our heroes are a breed apart.  A life of routine is deemed pale, tragic, unadventurous, and unlived.  It’s deathly to be dull, “soul murdering” to be bored.  Madness to live like that, or else, sublime heroism.

 
Well kids, if you want to know what the 90s were like; The Cabin in the Woods isn’t a bad primer.  People had a lot of fun, back in the 90s, with concepts like irony.  The TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, became a touchstone for the smart/dumb paradigm, and the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, was revered like a king.  Funnily enough, Joss Whedon is the writer of The Cabin in the Woods, so I’m not too surprised that the movie plays like a good episode of Buffy.  All the Whedon trademarks are here: sexy girls, smart aleck quips, a hefty dose of meta-fiction, and a splodge of the macabre.  The result feels like being pricked by a pair of inverted commas.  While it might tickle you with its cleverness; irony never cuts too deep.

Five friends go to stay in a cabin in the woods.  They are all young and at least two of them are horny.  They drink, they smoke pot; one of the girls makes out with a stuffed wolf’s head.  Then zombies attack the cabin.  And the friends do their best to survive.  Little do they know, their suffering is controlled by a team of scientists.  The undead are unleashed at the push of a button.  Middle-aged men direct what happens in the cabin.  The teens are pawns, compelled to live (and die) as part of a meticulous fantasy.  It’s like in horror movies, gasp!, where sexy teens are put to death for our enjoyment!  And the men directing the action are like directors, y’know, directing a movie.  And the sexy teens are, well, exactly what they appear to be.

I apologise for the sarcasm.  But I think Joss Whedon picked a pretty easy target when he decided to write a satire of slasher movies.  I’m not saying The Cabin in the Woods isn’t fun, or that anyone involved has done a bad job.  But you can’t reinvent a genre by dissecting it, no matter how witty you are with dead bodies.  The fact is, unless you’re willing to invest in fear, a horror movie is empty.  Fear and dread are the strange rewards of this genre, and you can spot the archetypes and play around with the conventions if you like, but if it doesn’t scare the shit out of people, something is lacking.  This movie thrills and excites you while you’re watching, but it doesn’t linger in the mind, potent, like the best bad dreams.

Not that there aren’t incidental pleasures, I admit.  The scenes set in the underground control room are full of gallows humour.  Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford orchestrate the madness with a mordant rapport, taking bets on what kind of monster the luckless teens will summon.  I loved the way the title card slams down, blood red, as Whitford whines to Jenkins about his marital problems.  Middle-aged frustration provides a wry counterpoint to the bold do-or-die attitude of the teens.  Even when Bradley Whitford is eaten by a merman, he’s more resigned to his fate than the kids.  Although the scientists are cynical, voyeuristic assholes, it’s hard not to relate to them.  The older we get, the more everyone becomes an onlooker.

You don’t necessarily have to enjoy watching young people being slaughtered to get the most out of The Cabin in the Woods, but it is a bit of a gore-hound’s paradise.  Whedon and his co-writer/director, Drew Goddard, have a merry ol’ time dispatching their victims, and there is a ghoulish abandon to the violence that goes too far, for the squeamish.  The death of one of the girls, in particular, is genre-savvy in being so extreme, but it’s still sleazy, even if the girl is topless as part of a bigger meta-fiction critique.  For those who don’t love gore or gratuitous nudity (I grant you, it’s hard to begrudge the latter), Kirsten Connelly is the film’s saving grace.  She plays the heroine, a girl who doesn’t have sex or die gruesomely, and who takes the villains to task for their lazy stereotypes and reactionary moralising.  By refusing to play her assigned role in the scientist’s evil schemes, she encourages a much wider audience to be less creepy.

The big idea in this film is that all horror movies are a kind of blood sacrifice, and that there’s no real difference between Aztecs and us, except that we’ve seen more movies.  Joss Whedon writes as a fan of the genre (he knows the clichés, and the shibboleths) but he’s also conscious of how messed-up the horror genre is, how much it hates women, and endorses male cruelty, how it taps into unresolved cave-person issues about gender identity and sexual personae.  The Cabin in the Woods is a form of cognitive therapy for horror fans, using irony as medication.  I just wish it wasn’t so anally retentive about the arcane lore of slasher films.  I wish Joss Whedon had the courage to be less ironic, and more human.

 
Flattery will get you anywhere, in a thriller.  The whole genre is founded on subconscious bravado; the secret belief that, when faced with injustice, any Regular Joe could win a fight.  “If I was mad enough…” you kid yourself.  “If my loved ones were in danger…” you lie.  The truth is: most of us couldn’t whip cream, let alone the “ass” of a man with a gun, who would most likely shoot you before you found your gumption.  Thrillers understand that the audience is deluded; more Walter Mitty than John McClane.  In a movie like The Cold Light of Day, the film-makers don’t even bother explaining how the civilian hero becomes Jason Bourne.  He does so because he’s in a thriller.  The rest is left to your cocky imagination.

Surprisingly, Bruce Willis gets killed about twenty minutes into this film.  Newcomer Henry Cavill has scarcely had time to grapple with his daddy issues before daddy (Bruce) is dead.  Henry had been expecting a family sailing holiday in Spain.  Turns out, his old man was working for the CIA.  Sigourney Weaver has Bruce whacked over some bit of business involving a briefcase.  I must admit, I was never exactly clear what Bruce was up to before his death.  But never mind that, because now Henry has to go on the run.  Israeli intelligence has kidnapped his mom, his kid brother, and his kid brother’s girlfriend.  The CIA has framed him for murder.  Screw the tan!  This summer, this tourist is going to get his revenge!

All of which is fine, of course, and perfectly justified under the circumstances, except that, unlike his opponents, Henry has no formal training in hand-to-hand combat, or small arms, or driving like a bat out of hell.  He appears to be a pretty good swimmer, but I think it takes a bit more than that to cut it as a Navy SEAL.  Lucky for Henry, he seems to have a knack for fighting, once he gets started.  Despite being shot, beaten, and falling more than sixty feet onto stony ground, all he needs to do is grit his teeth, and his courage never falters.  It’s left to Sigourney to point out he’s an “amateur” at killing.  But even then, she only says so out of frustration, after Henry has put on a dazzling display of non-professional ass-kicking.

I wasn’t particularly bothered whether mom, kid brother and kid brother’s girlfriend got rescued, to be honest.  It was another branch of our hero’s family tree that snagged my interest.  Mid-way into The Cold Light of Day, we’re introduced to Verónica Echegui, a sort of Spanish Natalie Portman.  Her character is related to Henry because she also calls Bruce Willis “dad”.  Bigamy isn’t a word the movie is comfortable with, so Verónica doesn’t harp on about her origins.  But it’s obvious that Bruce had been enjoying his work in Spain a little more than a monogamous American husband should have (Got that?  Okay, now you can lower your eyebrow).  Verónica stabs an assailant with a letter-opener, then decides to help Henry… in a fiery, reckless Mediterranean fashion.  Mostly she’s there to make you picture Spain as the land of Penelope Cruz, where dark-haired crazy women drive Anglos mad with desire.

The director of the movie, Mabrouk El Mechri, deserves credit for his casting and his choice of cinematographer.  The film looks slick even when it gets ludicrous, and so what if Henry Cavill is out-acted by his wardrobe?  All the old pros have fun passing on the reins.  Sigourney Weaver, in particular, brings a nice chilly sang froid to her role as the villain.  She seems very comfortable shooting Spanish pedestrians, and I liked the way she didn’t get ruffled, even when Israeli commandos had her out-gunned.  Bruce Willis was born laconic, and he dies laconic here too.  What I really liked was the fact Colm Meaney shows up for about ten seconds at the end, presumably because he was on holiday near where they were filming.

For the record, unless you’ve been in a fight (and won) recently, you probably can’t handle yourself in a fight.  A punch in the face – a real punch – hurts.  So too does falling sixty feet onto stony ground.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve got right on your side.  Your skin and bones don’t have a concept of injustice.  They only know pain and fear.  In The Cold Light of Day, the callow hero finds out what most of us would like to discover: that he’s tough and resilient in a crisis.  In reality, he’d be dead.  A good thriller creates a plausible scenario for heroism, not a plausible protagonist.  Jeopardy brings with it the know-how of how to prevail.  All Henry has to do is look good.  The rest is down to us, and whether we accept the charade.

 
This is the B-list movie everyone wants to see.  It might be shallow, derivative and cheap-looking, but none of that matters: the fan-base is ravenous.  For millions of teenage girls across America, The Hunger Games is the new Twilight.  When the audience is hungry for a film, you’ve got a hit.  Forget vampires and abstinence; fiction for Young Adults Young Women is all about dystopias now.  It’s all set in ruined futures where teenage girls have to fend for themselves… against their hormones.  The only hangover from Twilight is that cute boys still out-number the girls, by a libidinous margin of two-to-one.  Really, what you’re looking at is Sex and the City, if Carrie Bradshaw had a bow and arrow, and two Mr. Bigs.

Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12 of Panem, a country which used to be called the United States.  Every year, the cruel and badly dressed rulers of Panem hold a contest, called the Hunger Games, where two teenagers are selected from each District, to fight to the death for the entertainment of the rich.  Katniss volunteers for the Hunger Games when her less kick-ass sibling is chosen to represent District 12.  Her fellow gladiator from her home town is a cute boy with a crush on Katniss.  There’s also another, taller hunk in the background, who I guess we’ll see more of in the sequel.  For Katniss, the Hunger Games poses as much of a challenge to her love-life as it does her life-span.  In this dystopia, it’s literally murder being single.

The costume department have had a field day with this movie. Everyone from District 12 dresses like an Okie from Depression-era America; all the bad guys dress like aristocrats from pre-Revolutionary France.  Lenny Kravitz shows up to give Katniss a make-over after she leaves District 12, and you have to credit the movie for knowing its audience: the make-over scenes last as long as the big fight.  It’s fascinating (as a man) to watch an action movie aimed at teenage girls.  Yes, there is homicidal mayhem once the Games begin, but you sense it’s nothing compared to the terror of wearing the wrong dress, or choosing the wrong boyfriend.  I know I sound like a male chauvinist for drawing attention to this stuff, but I honestly think it’s interesting to flip the sci-fi/action genre on its head.  I should point out; Katniss does also kill a few people, as well as wearing nice outfits.  The Hunger Games isn’t only a fashion contest.

In any case, the problem isn’t who the film is aimed at.  The problem is the quality of the film.  To be frank, The Hunger Games looks like the pilot for a (fairly cheap) TV series.  Writer/director Gary (Seabiscuit) Ross stages the action with a distinct lack of thrills.  Long periods of the film are spent painstakingly recreating minor events from the book.  And the story could have been better told in half the time, with space for a few jokes.  I know it’s the Great Depression all over again in District 12, but it wouldn’t hurt for Katniss to lighten up a little occasionally.  Woody Harrelson and Stanley Tucci have fun in frisky supporting roles, but for the teenagers in the cast, it’s Twilight-time: Heart-ache! Agony! The torment of who to kiss!

It’s lucky they picked Jennifer Lawrence as the lead.  She almost single-handedly saves the movie from disgrace.  No matter how silly the costume, or how cheap the “special” effects, Lawrence retains her dignity.  Her face wouldn’t look out of place in a Depression-era photo by Dorothea Lange.  You can picture her, staring into the distance, stoically, as the bank forecloses on her family farm.  She has an abiding strength.  I still wouldn’t have minded if the film had let her loosen up a bit, or be a bit more human.  But there isn’t a young actress working today who makes “earnest” so watchable, and I’m grateful that J-Law isn’t a one-note stick-insect, like the star of Twilight, Kirsten (could I be any more mannered?) Stewart.

When they made The Hunger Games in 1987, it was called The Running Man, and it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.  When they made The Hunger Games in Japan, it was called Battle Royale.  The idea of a dystopian gladiator contest is a pretty careworn trope in science-fiction.  All (Hunger Games author) Suzanne Collins did was to give it a make-over.  She got rid of the muscle-bound male protagonist from The Running Man, and did away with the moral ambivalence of Battle Royale.  In place of these, she put in Katniss Everdeen and two good-looking boys.  It isn’t a nuanced appeal to the target audience, but the new formula obviously works.  Future America might be short of food, but it doesn’t starve for man candy.