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.

 
America is a no-good boyfriend to the world: sexy, dangerous, and narcissistic.  America’s enemies are the world’s less attractive friends.  And the U.N. is, I guess, yo’ momma.  This helps explain why the world is in the state it’s in.  We all know America is crazy; a nation of gun-nuts with blood on its hands.  But that loose cannon persona is hot.  There’s no denying it.  Sensible countries, like Canada, don’t set the heart racing.  You could marry Canada, but America will always be the country that turns heads.  The new movie, This Means War, only makes sense because it’s American.  Romance and violence don’t mix so well in other nations.  In America, they’re inseparable.  This is why loving America is so likely to get you hurt.

At the start of the story, Reese Witherspoon meets two guys and can’t decide whom to date.  One guy is slick; the other is sensitive.  They both want her and they both look like they’d be a great night in the sack.  Little does Reese know; they’re both spies.  Or rather, they both work in fantasy espionage, the kind that’s more akin to James Bond than real life.  The two men proceed to put Reese under surveillance, to use tax payer’s money to fund their lavish lifestyles, to do very little in the way of actual work, and to kill a lot of people, without any pang of conscience.  In other words, they act like America.  And Reese gets hot.  The guy who reaches for his gun fastest isn’t an outlaw these days; he’s a good marriage prospect.

I wish I disapproved of this film.  Unfortunately, I’m as bad as Reese when it comes to sexy disposable action.  McG, the director of This Means War, is responsible for the majority of my guilty pleasures at the movies.  He did Charlie’s Angels and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.  And I bet he doesn’t regret doing either of them.  He makes trash with a kind of innocent glee only usually found in Saturday morning cartoons.  He was born to work in Hollywood.  In the opening sequence of This Means War, a briefcase full of money explodes; showering dollar bills over a heli-pad that sits atop a sky-scraper.  This is quintessential McG: setting fire to cash.  Later, we learn that one of the spies has a swimming pool for a ceiling in his apartment.  The other spy keeps motorcycles in his lounge.  You’re not meant to take this seriously.  Either you embrace it, or you wince.

It would take a lot more than This Means War to rattle Reese Witherspoon, I’d imagine.  She is many things as an actress, but I wouldn’t describe her as fragile.  Not unless I wanted my jaw reset.  In this movie, you never doubt she could handle two macho boyfriends.  If the exigencies of the rom-com didn’t require Reese to dither, she’d have ’em both doing her bidding before you could say “whipped”.  She’s never going to be the girl who sits around listening to Moon River and waiting for a man to save her.  She’s the kind of girl who sits in the Senate and practices writing POTUS (President of the United States) after her signature.  You couldn’t find a whiter, blonder, more indomitable example of American womanhood.

Like the movie, Reese is popcorn made of steel.  Watching This Means War is like being strapped to the deck of an aircraft carrier.  You want to run, or protest for peace, but when you’re right there, drunk on adrenaline and male-ness and war-mongering; it’s your inner jock or cheerleader who calls the shots.  Preposterousness is a turn-on.  The bigger the explosion, the more impossible the escape, the more the audience gasps.  Perhaps it makes sense, ultimately, that romantic comedy and the action genre should overlap, at least in the American imagination.  They’re each about saying: the hell with the world, I want a man!  Collateral damage doesn’t matter.  So long as you’re not the one who’s dead, or single.

The world might think it’s above movies like this, but we were all sixteen once and This Means Waris sixteen for posterity.  It’s crass alright, but it knows who looks cute.  Tom Hardy is cast to show the word “charming” doesn’t preclude muscles.  Chris Pine could act like a maverick in his sleep.  The murky ethics of espionage are left to John Le Carré.  And hearts and bones are broken to smithereens.  For Reese Witherspoon, there’s no choice: she has to marry a maniac.  The only options are: Maniac 1 or Maniac 2.  In the same way the world gets into bed with America (reluctantly), so Reese accepts her fate.  Better to be wedded to calamity, than to risk the alternative.  No girl wants to be calamity’s bitch.

 
Britain is no longer the quaint, old-fashioned idyll of Ealing Studios.  It’s a place better represented by concrete than crinoline these days.  These days, Britons don’t Look Back in Anger; they Look Forward to Anger.  Impotent rage is like a bookmark, separating out the week.  Perhaps it’s a legacy of Thatcherism.  Maybe it’s a post-colonial bellyache.  But the tea cosy world of Alastair Sim is long gone.  British cinema isn’t something you’d show to your granny.  You’re lucky if you come away from a British film without a thorn in your eye.  On paper, Paddy Considine’s bleak drama, Tyrannosaur, seems like a case in point.  After hearing the premise, I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t make me want to slit my wrists.

A violent alcoholic meets a miserable woman in a charity shop; he’s just kicked his dog to death, she’s being abused by her husband.  Amidst the squalor and degradation of modern Britain, the couple form a tentative friendship, only to find their bond tested, by rape, murder and a second man-on-dog killing.  Oh yes, and the husband pisses on his wife at one stage.  And a small boy has half his face bitten off.  And the sky is the colour of offal most of the time.  And God is dead.  And why why why would you watch this (when life is hard enough already)?  Well, I’ll tell you.  While this film is, ostensibly, the usual British treasure trove of ugliness and despair; it’s also touching and beautiful.  You have to look past the dead dogs.

Look at the face of Peter Mullan, for instance.  Yes, he looks like the angriest man in the world.  But he’s also a handsome devil, when he isn’t scowling.  The role he plays in this movie is the same role Mullan nearly always plays: drunk and belligerent.  In Tyrannosaur, his character seems to be paid by the local council to smash windows and get into fights.  And yet, Mullan brings his usual integrity to the role as well.  He can’t help but instil this human bacterium with some virtue.  You just know he’s going to be the hero of this story, no matter what he does.  It’s the same quality Steven Spielberg saw in him, when he cast Mullan as a drunk and belligerent (and yet noble) tenant farmer in the recent weepie, War Horse.

Interesting to compare the rose-tinted view of Britain proffered by Spielberg with the shard of glass that Paddy Considine shoves at you.  The two films don’t look like they have much in common, apart from scenes of animal cruelty.  However, that’s the superficial view.  What saves Tyrannosaur from nihilism is the same thing that prevents Spielberg movies from being only about schmaltz: a simple faith in human nature.  There is kindness in Considine’s film.  I’m not saying Peter Mullan is playing a human version of the horse from War Horse.  The woman from the charity shop doesn’t wind up saving him from the trenches.  But in the same way that War Horse was about compassion and loyalty, so too is this carnivorous drama.    

Events do not unfold the way you expect.  You see two stone-faced angry bastards pitted against one another, over a woman, and you think you know the outcome.  You couldn’t be more wrong.  Mullan doesn’t lay a finger on the abusive husband.  No love story evolves, or at least, not in the conventional sense.  Olivia Colman, who plays the battered wife, is a far more complex figure than she first appears.  And it’s largely down to her that the film makes such an impact.  She’s the most British character in some respects: stoic and forbearing on the surface; a mass of resentment underneath.  Her sad little life is carefully hidden from prying eyes.  She’s someone who’s easy to ridicule.  Many actresses would play up the pathos of the role, but Colman’s secret is to find this woman’s strength.  There’s as much wounded pride in her eyes as any hard man who daily gets into fights.  They’re both trapped by disposition.

For some people, the effect of watching Tyrannosaur will be as if you were Peter Mullan’s dog.  You go in wanting to support this poor Brit and wind up feeling like your heart got squished.  I wish I could help those people put aside their fears.  I wish the dour look of this film were misleading and that it was like The Artist, imbued with a witty savoir faire, instead of gritty realism.  All I can say to those people, who hear the words “dead dog” and want to run a mile, is that this film is about more than senseless violence.  It wasn’t made to make you depressed.  Broken Britain might be real, and forgiveness hard to come by, but this film isn’t just a slab of misery.  There is cause for hope; albeit, not for man’s best friend.

 
Jim Henson was like a father to me.  He was everywhere in the 80s; a puppet didn’t appear on TV or in film without Henson’s imprimatur.  My images of childhood are mostly foam or fur-covered, thanks to him.  I’m eternally grateful that I grew up in the halcyon days before CGI, when puppets were king.  The kind of wholesome anarchy Jim favoured was paradise for kids.  He was Walt Disney without the evil.  His most famous creations, The Muppets, didn’t have that weird, repressed quality you find in Mickey Mouse.  They’re free-wheeling, loose-limbed, all-too-human.  Kermit the Frog is wonderfully frayed.  You can’t feel so tenderly about pixels, or a drawing.  There’s a vacuum of sentiment.  Jim Henson’s legacy is tactile.

In their new movie, the Muppets return to the big screen with a little help from Jason Segal.  It’s fitting they’re brought back to life by a fan.  Segal plays a nebbish Muppet enthusiast named Gary, who lives with his Muppet brother, Walter, in a small town Norman Rockwell might’ve painted.  Amy Adams plays Gary’s girlfriend, Mary, in a piece of casting that seems to have been pre-destined for Adams since birth.  The fun begins when Gary and Mary take Walter to visit the now dilapidated Muppet Studios in Los Angeles.  Hard times have befallen the puppets of yesteryear.  With the rise of new technology, there’s a danger that Kermit and company might be relegated.  That is, unless the gang still have it in them to put on a show.

I can’t say the new movie is perfect, but its imperfections are part of its charm.  Like the original Muppet Show, it’s a mixture of wry humour and mawkish songs.  Jason Segal’s script isn’t strong on plot, but he obviously loves his source material.  The resulting film is like a Liza Minnelli concert at times, celebrating a phenomenon that was probably biggest in the 70s, somewhat camp, somewhat sardonic, somewhat Broadway.  Kids will like it for the Selina Gomez cameo and because, well, kids like anything.  For adults, it’s more a question of being in the right mood.  You don’t have to be charitable; it’s a better movie than you’re probably expecting.  But you do need to remember the original wasn’t meant for grown-ups.

Quite what youngsters will make of a James Carville cameo is hard to speculate.  Are kids eager for any other Clinton administration insiders to make guest appearances in children’s films?  Is Dee Dee Myers going to be in Dora the Explorer: The Movie?  I’m as happy as Mickey Rooney to see that Mickey Rooney is still alive, but it seems incredible that he also makes a cameo in this thing.  Jason Segal appears to have rounded up anyone who was walking past the studio for a walk-on role in The Muppets, and the paucity of A-list talent does make the finished product feel a bit second-rate.  That said; the original Muppet Show was built on the sawdust of showbiz, so perhaps has-beens are the most suitable support.

Kermit the Frog is an emblematic frontman for this group: part Gene Wilder and part Jimmy Stewart, inherently decent but perpetually nervous.  He embodies the camaraderie that is central to the Muppets; he literally can’t do his job alone.  As much as the other Muppets play havoc with Kermit’s plans, as much as they seem to court disaster every time they take to the stage; they’re a family, as the new movie makes clear.  Puppets are not sleek or efficient, like creatures imagined on a computer; they’re raggedy and wild, awkward and misshapen; closer to human beings, in fact, than some of us would like to credit.  Unlike Mickey Mouse and the whole creepy Disney cohort, the Muppets have jobs, too, don’t forget.  And difficult relationships.  Maybe that’s how grown-ups relate to them, or certainly grown-ups who work in the entertainment business.  These puppets are really stand-ins for the carnival of freaks we call “actors”.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth once launched an attack on the Muppets, in his novel Sabbath’s Theatre.  The protagonist of the book, puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is a former friend of Jim Henson, who rejects what he sees as Henson/the Muppets “untainted view of life” where “everything is innocent, childlike, and pure”.  It’s typical that literature’s foremost grumpy old man should begrudge the Muppets their happiness.  But I think Roth missed out on something, besides his usual omissions: i.e. men who aren’t horny old Jews, and women.  The Muppets may be a bunch of cuddly toys, with tie-in merchandize at the ready.  But they’re cuddly failures, dammit!  I admire Jim Henson for creating puppets with feet of clay.

It’s funny how so many sad films are labelled comedies.  There’s a real gap in the movie lexicon under sad.  You’ve got weepies, of course.  And ubiquitous dramas.  But both those end with either death or change.  There isn’t a genre where the protagonist just stumbles on, helpless.  Movies aren’t meant to be like life that way.  Audiences don’t want to be told that loneliness and defeat can triumph.  We can cope with death on-screen.  A sad life is infinitely more hellish.  Maybe that’s why movie marketing departments prefer the word comedy.  Like Jason Reitman’s new comedy, Young Adult.  It’s the saddest film of the year.  Watching it, you come to realise: a woman without intuition is a heart-breaker, alright.  But not in a good way.

The movie is about a ghost writer called Mavis Gary.  Mavis is nearly forty, divorced, bitter. She is damn lucky to still look like Charlize Theron, given her diet of microwave food and alcohol.  But time is catching up with her.  One day, Mavis receives an e-mail from an old high-school sweetheart, informing her that he has recently become a father.  This message is misinterpreted by Mavis as a cry for help, and so she decides to win back her old boyfriend, by sabotaging his marriage.  With her trusty Pomeranian wedged into a pink holdall, Mavis heads back to Mercury, Minnesota, determined to relive her glorious past.  She was not what you’d call a nice girl in her youth.  Nostalgia is an excuse, to act like a total bitch.

The male version of Young Adult works better; it’s called Bad Santa.  With a man in the lead, we’re more ready to laugh with a drunk, no matter how sour or surly.  When it’s a woman who’s drunk, she’s a pariah.  It’s ugly for a woman not to care about other people’s feelings.  Maybe that’s why this movie shies off big laughs.  Whereas, in Bad Santa, Billy Bob Thornton could punch pre-teens in the face, and make a joke of it; in Young Adult, Charlize Theron is vilified for using harsh words.  This is because a man can be a drunk and still be a hero to other men.  Recklessness is masculine.  When a woman is reckless, other women think her cruel.  There’s no such thing as female bravado.  There’s no female Don Quixote.  For a woman, being a misfit is sad.  It’s not even tragic.  The truth in Young Adult is that Charlize doesn’t even seem to enjoy being bad.

A possible Best Actress nomination hasn’t been mooted for no reason.  Theron’s Mavis is a complex and finely nuanced performance.  I’m not taking away from that, when I say it’s not funny.  But it’s important to recognise: the movie is more a drama than a black comedy.  And quite a meek drama, at that.  Mavis is never allowed to relish being a bitch.  Her meltdown at the baby naming ceremony is shrewish where it could be Shakespearian.  She isn’t permitted to be dangerous.  It’s as if, worried about alienating a female audience, the film-makers have tried to make Mavis palatable by making her powerless.  I’m sorry, but she’d be a lot more fun if she crashed into Mercury, Minnesota with the power to ruin her ex-boyfriend’s life.

Young Adult is downbeat where it should be wild.  There’s too much of Mavis on the verge of tears.  Either she’s alone and gazing into the abyss, or else she’s trudging around town with sad sack Patton Oswalt.  I understand that calamity has to follow Mavis wherever she goes, because she’s misjudged her life and spent years living out a failed dream.  But the idea that the film shouldn’t be sexy in the least seems ludicrous.  It goes back to my Bad Santa comparison, where the lead character had charisma to go with his malaise.  In contrast, Mavis seems to become almost asexual for being on-edge.  She’s treated like a nerd.  But she still looks like a supermodel.  This is a woman whose bad deeds should be scandalous.

Maybe I wanted a different movie.  For an idea of how I think Young Adult should have played, take a look at the Between Two Ferns sketch Charlize Theron made with Zach Galifianakis in 2010.  In it, she plays a tearful, coquettish version of herself.  It’s clear she that she enjoys the chance to be naughty.  Now admittedly, this isn’t the sort of role you get nominated for in the Oscars.  It’s all a bit daft and both parties seem to be having a lot of fun.  But Charlize is a thousand times more entertaining to watch in this thing than the whole of Jason Reitman’s movie.  My problem with Young Adult is that it treats Mavis like an August Strindberg heroine: doomed to tears.  No-one in Bad Santa let sadness get in the way of laughs.

 
There are ways of dying that shouldn’t exist anymore; like being shot with an arrow, or run over by a medieval siege tower.  Being eaten by wild animals is right near the top of that list.  I can never quite imagine how you break the news, when “Chet” (hypothetical web designer and Apple enthusiast) gets gobbled up mid-Tweet: Lotta growling round here LOL…  And the next thing: Chet’s lunch.  Death should keep pace with the times.  You shouldn’t be able to buy an iPad in the same era when you can be eaten by wolves.  Unfortunately, the majority of scary beasts don’t own a calendar.  Whether it’s 2012 or the Bronze Age; to a wolf, we’re still man chow.  We always have been.  It’s only iPhones the wild animals can’t stomach.

Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is set in Alaska, the frozen armpit of America.  Liam Neeson wants to die, so naturally he lives here.  In the first five minutes of the film, Liam puts a gun in his mouth.  He’s tired of his job: lone wolf hunter for a big oil company.  When his plane crashes on the way home, it almost comes as a relief.  Now Liam is stranded on the snowy wastes with six other male survivors.  Their only companions are man-hungry wolves.  Apparently, the oil company is too cheap to send out a search party.  So it falls to Liam to teach his new buddies how to fend off a wolf attack and/or, failing that, how to die like a man.  Lucky for them, he brought his knife on the plane.  Luckier still, Liam knows how to go berserk.

If ever a film star had the face of a wolf hunter, it’s Liam Neeson.  He looks prehistoric, like a guy who might befriend a woolly mammoth in one of those Ice Age cartoons.  His nose is like a missing piece from Stonehenge.  You pity the wolf that would try to eat him.  In The Grey, Liam is like David Attenborough crossed with Rambo.  He’s got wolf trivia at his fingertips.  Need to know the “kill radius” for a wolf?  Ask Liam.  There’s never any doubt about who’ll be the last man standing on this hiking trip.  The other dudes are all dog biscuits.  For the audience, the main fun is trying to decide who’ll get it first: the Latino, the black guy, or Dermot Mulroney.  The wolves certainly plan their meals with D-listers for hors d’oeuvres.

This movie is tough as beef jerky.  The plane has barely crashed before the first man gets munched.  As director, Joe Carnahan seems to have spent his entire career living up to his own name.  “Joe Carnahan”, the kind of name they give to teamsters.  You can’t have that name and not be a man.  There’s a scene, in The Grey, where a guy cuts the head off a dead wolf and Liam nods gravely, as if to say: Yes, that’s what a man has to do.  Anything less and you might as well be Hugh Grant.  We’re in Hemingway country for this film.  These men are stronger for being fed to the wolves.  Their hell on Earth is treated as a test of character.  By not weeping, wailing, or crying for mommy; they prove they’ve got what it takes.

The wolves are computer generated, I suppose.  It’s hard to find a good wolf in Hollywood.  Real wolves or no, the film still retains a visceral urgency.  Joe Carnahan has coaxed some fierce performances out of his cast and the plane crash alone is harrowing enough to make you wince.  There’s a shelter-less feeling to this story, as if the world had ended.  I could go right off the deep end and say Liam Neeson was playing Alaska’s version of King Lear.  But future high school students are unlikely to be writing essays on The Grey.  The film does contain some metaphysical stuff, but it’s most there to break-up the feeding frenzy.  This is, foremost, a thriller, where the wolves might as well be hostile aliens.  It’s made with integrity, and the ending isn’t a cop out, but you shouldn’t go looking for meaning in The Grey, beyond the fact that bloodthirsty wolves mean us harm.

There’s a line from an Angela Carter short story: “We keep the wolves outside by living well.”  And it’s true: the best defence against wolves is living in a city, shopping on-line and viewing camping holidays as suicide.  I’ve never trusted nature much.  Even squirrels make me nervous.  The Grey is the kind of outdoorsy Gotterdammerung that looks, not only plausible to me, but inevitable, as far as any visit to the woods is concerned.  I’m pretty sure bareknuckle fighting with wolves is best left to Liam Neeson.  He seems to draw strength from the contest, rather than, for instance, pissing himself.  While I wouldn’t call being eaten by wild animals ”a good death”, I guess it beats having a heart attack at the gym.