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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Avengers: Age of Ultron

5/1/2015

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So, here it is. The Avengers are back in Marvel’s latest, Avengers: Age of Ultron. This time, as the brainchild of writer-director Joss Whedon, the Avengers assemble to defeat Ultron, an Artificial Intelligence, before he destroys Earth and the human race.

All things considered, Ultron is a pretty good villain. He’s selfish and childish, with boundless knowledge and delusions of grandeur, having convinced himself that all he does is done in effort to save humanity or the world or something like that. And in saving whatever that is, he must destroy the Avengers. Formerly being Tony Stark’s dormant project, his main rival is Iron Man, and this proves to mainly be their battle: a robot fighting what is seemingly a perfected version of himself. Despite all his villainy, he is a great source of humor throughout the film (in fact, the film was very funny throughout, much funnier than the last!).

And, as everyone has come to expect, the action was great. The action sequences were epic and large-scale, bombastic and high-energy, showing off each member of the team’s talents and new tricks they formed in fighting together, peaking in a cathartic, penultimate moment of epic togetherness. And, of course, the 3D was beautiful and utilized well.

Despite all of this, I have one main takeaway from the film: the story was very clunky. While watching, it was like a snag on your clothing got caught to one of Iron Man's parts as he went up in the air and took you for a wild ride. It had some clunky attempts at depth: tried to address the ideas of God and infinite power and artificial intelligence and creation and boundlessness of man and knowledge, but never really went or got anywhere with it. Essentially, those ideas were just tossed into the dialogue/script to give the film a veneer of depth and intelligence, but the movie never fully addresses them, resulting in the attempts being pointless, schlocky, and unnecessary. They even tried to insert a theme about togetherness, but aside from just being trite, that never went anywhere either, and that would really have been easy to do. I wish they developed more meaning, the film could have benefitted from that. But the themes and attempted depth felt like an afterthought. Whedon revealed that his first cut was over 3 hours long, and that was evident: the plot was chopped and screwed, scenes clearly being cut too much (uh, what happened with that scene of Thor in the magic lake?!), and was held together with a shoestring, barreling from one sequence to the next, leaving clear character motivation and development behind in its wake.

In fact, aside from not having enough time, the numerous characters also seemed to prove a problem for Whedon. There was not much character work in the film at all. The story just mainly focused on the relationship between Romanoff (Black Widow) and Banner (The Hulk), and some invented (i.e. for the purposes of the movie) character flaws within Stark. It did show some background of Hawkeye, but still everything was a bit incomplete, with characters being left in a sort of dramatic limbo. One could argue that a film like this is not the place to continue every character’s individual storyline, that there’s just too much else going on. But the film did take that route and attempted to give each main character some individual trajectory, but failed at doing it effectively or well, ultimately taking away from the movie. Which is really such a shame to do to these great characters.

So, the movie was entertaining enough, though I believe that its predecessors rose above it in that department. Marvel’s cinematic universe is going for more big entertainment, fun based movies, and that's fine. But, I say, if the writers are going to try to tackle such heavy topics as they did in this film, then they should either do it well, or not at all. Because a movie with things blowing up and super action fun is not an excuse for a messy, poorly thrown-together story that's not tightly knit and wrapped up, clear, and concise. Filmmakers are telling a story, first and foremost. Every film starts with a story; that's where it all begins. And if the basis is not strong, then how can the final product ever be as good as it could be? This is a cultural event! It should be on point!

Whedon and his team really could have made a more sophisticated movie. The problem is that they did try to, but failed. They tried to make it more sophisticated, but did it haphazardly and poorly, making all attempts at depth seem like rushed, infant afterthoughts. These guys are definitely making good-looking, thrilling action movies, but hey, let's try to make substantive, well-crafted ones also.

There is a nice cliffhanger, though.

Rating: C+/B-




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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Adult Beginners

4/24/2015

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Hm, what can I say about Ross Katz’s Adult Beginners? It was cute.

Nick Kroll stars as Jake, a player in the tech industry whose career is just about to explode. The film opens with a striking initial impression of Jake: an infomercial where he delivers information about his newest invention, the hottest investment item on the market. However, shortly after, during a New York City high-life cocaine-laden party, a prior mistake completely upends Jake’s career, leaving him with no money, one friend, and nowhere to live. The one remotely positive thing that comes from it: a convenient excuse to move back to his childhood home in the suburbs, where his sister Justine (Rose Byrne) lives with her husband Danny (Bobby Cannavale) and young son, Teddy (Caleb and Matthew Paddock, who are literally the cutest boys on the face of the planet).

As Jake encounters difficulties with making friends, defining success, finding his place in his old neighborhood, struggles with harnessing his ability to responsibly care for Teddy, (i.e. someone other than himself) and debates the best way to navigate loyalty when it comes to a marital affair, he slowly matures while tearing down the affected charades of the other adults around him, proving that no one has really got it all together any of the time no matter their age. He grows up through having to handle questions of morality and what’s truly important in life: career and prestige, or family and love.

While all of the acting is good, Rose Byrne easily stands out as the stellar performance of the movie: her portrayal of the tired, fed-up, slightly crazed, yet slightly hopeful pregnant Justine is brazenly real and emotional, further cementing her comedic credibility. Nick Kroll’s affable nature makes for a good man-child, though Katz seemed to rely too heavily on him to completely carry the subtle humor and emotional content to a poignantly deep place.

The film is nicely funny, with no bells or whistles. It’s what you would expect out of a comedy produced by the Duplass brothers. It was calm, warm, and fuzzy, with slightly off-beat humor and truthfully fresh portrayals of the highs and lows of life and humanity. It’s not their best though, nor their smartest, wittiest, or most unique. But it’s not particularly bad either. I guess, my biggest critique of the movie is that it is completely forgettable. The movie is about finding yourself, no matter at what stage of life, redefining yourself and starting over when you need to, not being afraid to be an adult beginner. However, with its tepid humor, trite metaphors, and too tidily wrapped-up ending, the film failed at leaving a lasting impression of any kind and at making any sort of considerable impact.

Rating: B-

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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson interviews Alex Garland, writer and director of Ex Machina

4/18/2015

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Alex Garland, the writer and director of the new movie Ex Machina, graciously sat down with a few other college bloggers and me to discuss his latest work. We covered everything from Oscar Isaac’s secret talent for dance to Garland’s complete distaste for auteur theory…
There seems to be a huge film noir influence in the movie.

 Oh, sure. Um, here’s the thing. Ok, when you offer up a story – and I learned this way back. I’ve been writing for a long time, nearly 20 years. First thing I did is I wrote a book about backpackers just coming out of their teenage years. It was about young Western backpackers in Southeast Asia. They were kind of treating Southeast Asia as if it were some kind of adult-themed Disneyland, right? And it was supposed to be a critique of the backpacker scene. And when it came out, people saw it as a straight satirization of the backpacker scene. And I realized, you don’t have any control over narratives. It’s about what people bring to them. They have their own agendas. And you know, one of the examples I always think of is lawyers and judges, who spend their life trying to get the meaning of sentences that were written to be as clear as possible, and yet, they’re open to interpretation and ambiguity. So, imagine the exponential amount of complexity [that exists] within a narrative. So, here’s the thing: it’s not from my point of view. That’s your point of view. That’s fine. If you want to see it that way, that’s your prerogative, that’s what you brought to the narrative. I don’t see it as a femme fatale story, because I see it as a prison break movie. And I don’t see it as war. I don’t see it as war at all. In again, the types that would attach femme fatale as a sort of conceptual thing. From my point of view, it depends on where you position yourself within the story. I position myself next to the machine. The machine is stuck in a glass box. She’s been given weird kinds of things to tell her there’s an external world that she could access, and maybe a concrete knowledge that she’s proceeded by other machines, and a knowledge that if she doesn’t do things right, things might end up badly for her. Then there’s this guy who is her jailer, who’s keeping her in prison. And this guy’s friend. So, what’s a femme fatale? She’s got to get out. It’s a prison break movie. But it depends where you choose to position yourselves. I’m only answering that from my point of view. I’m not disagreeing with your knowledge of film history or anything, it’s not that.

No, I love that response. I just saw a connection between Ava and Rachel from Bladerunner.

Bladerunner is consciously and deliberately echoing film noir techniques the whole way through. Shot composition, even in the music, which alludes to earlier periods of time, so but, not in my opinion.

So, I was kind of curious, what were the thoughts that went behind Nathan’s version of the Turing Test? What was the inspiration for his version of the Turing Test?

Actually, it’s exactly what is expressed in the film, which is that if you set up this- there’s two things: one is, if you set up this experiment, as per the quote unquote rules of the Turing Test, should pause, so what’s the point? The question is not can she trick you into thinking that she is a human if you are hearing a disembodied voice while typing into a computer and getting text responses, which is how the Turing Test usually works. It’s if you see she’s a machine, do you feel she’s sentient. So, it’s sort of a post-Turing Test Turing Test. That said, the Turing Test is misrepresented a lot of the time. The Turing Test is not actually a test for sentience. It’s really a test for the Turing Test; it’s a test to see if you can pass the Turing Test, which is itself incredibly difficult to do. So, it’s representative of a very sophisticated AI, that is not representative of self-awareness. You can pass the Turing Test without – like the chess computer discussion that [Nathan and Caleb] have. A chess computer doesn’t learn it’s a chess computer. You could pass- a very sophisticated language program could pass the Turing Test without being self-aware or sentient. So, equally at dock, is it sentient and self-aware and it recognizes its reflection in the mirror and stuff like that, but could not get close to passing the Turing Test. So, it’s a little bit of a red herring. And it was partly to say, don’t get hung up on the Turing Test. Cause we are, so.

So, please tell me if I’m wrong. In the film, there seems to be a theme about the objectification of women. How much did Laura Mulvey's fetishistic gaze inform your writing of the script, if at all? And why did you decide to tackle this topic?

I’m not aware of it, so I’d have to say- that doesn’t mean I’m not affected by it because it could be, for example, the people who I was involved with, who I was talking with about the subject matter and showing them the script and asking them to critique it, they might have been affected by it. I am consciously not affected by it. I mean, in an analogous way, you could watch Apocalypse Now and be affected by Heart of Darkness, but not have read Heart of Darkness. So, the short answer is I don’t know. But I would say is that there are whole bunch of questions and propositions which are raised in the film, put forward, that is done consciously, and as consciously as possible, in sort of an aware way. And there was a responsibility, I thought, to be thoughtful about it. So, my process was to think about it as hard as I was able – as of course one has his own prejudices and limitations that one is unaware of, that’s the downside of the, you know – so, then what you do, is you test them with other people. I’ve got friends who I can show these things to and say, I want you to look at it hard from this angle and make sure it stands up and that kind of thing.

How has the story changed from its initial inception to the screenplay to the film, if at all?

Well, in some sort of fundamental respects, you could say, not much, as much as you could look at the scenes and say, well, there’s the scene, and look at the story and say, well, it’s roughly the same, although in the edit, things always get changed a little bit. But in other ways, dramatically, because the reason why I’m anti-auteur theory, and I don’t give a shit about it, and I don’t want to walk towards it, I want to walk away from it, is because the point about all of these pyramid structures that exist within the overall film, is that when the DOP’s good, and when the actor’s good, and they’re given responsibility, they make it better. They elevate it. They come up with something I didn’t think of. So, to micro-manage it would be a mistake because it would be less good. So, the short answer is, the changes, that it’s a better version of what I thought it might be because of the people I worked with who have their own inspirations and skill sets and talents that I don’t. So, that, I guess.

I think the unexpected joy about this movie that the marketing doesn’t touch on is that it’s very funny. It’s a very funny movie.

I hope so! I hope so.

And I think that’s such a difference in the other things that I’ve seen that you’ve written, that was kind of a separator, in a sense.

There’s always – maybe not Never Let Me Go, that one’s kind of grim – there’s usually a kind of humor in them, a sort of dry humor. And then what happens – talking about elevating, actually – you give that material to Oscar Isaac, he’ll fucking run with it. And he’s like, he’s a very funny guy. He’s witty, he has sort of a mercurial sort of humor. And Domhnall Gleeson is hilarious really. Actually, Domhnall is kind of like a comedian: if you put him in front of an audience, it’s like stand up. And so, if there’s a gag, dry humor particularly, it can land or not land according to the delivery. And Oscar can get every bit of blood out of the stone.

Was that a part of the reason why you chose those two particular cast members for those particular roles?

I just chose them because they were brilliant actors. Domhnall, this is the third movie that we’ve worked on together, and Oscar, I’d seen him in a bunch of things and seen how he’s got this particular kind of confidence. And he vanishes. He just vanishes. There’s this guy in one film, and you think you’ve got the measure of him, then he’s not there anymore. Someone else is there. The name’s the same, but the guy is gone somehow. So, it’s that. That’s why they got casted. It’s like, one of the real pleasures in Oscar was finding out how funny he is, and how good he was at dancing.

I love that scene. It was so good. It was one of the best scenes of the film.


...

I know that you mentioned that your emotional position was closer to Ava. And I think when I was watching the movie, my emotional position was closer to Caleb. Initially, it felt like Ava was this sort of other, this alien. And all the robots Nathan made were female. And I wondered, is that sort of a comment on the way men see women, in the tech industry especially?

What it is, is so many things are conflated into the answer to that question. That it’s difficult to settle on one and give a pat answer. But one thing would be that given some of the concerns of the film and some of the agendas of the film, it simply would have been inaccurate to the world to have reversed the genders. So, that could relate to the tech industry, or in a completely separate way, it could relate to the objectification of early in their early 20s. I mean, and the two are not actually connected. The tech industry is not dominated by men because of the objectification of women in their early 20s. They’re two separate things that coexist. And also, women are not just objectified by men. They’re also objectified by women. And so there’s tons of stuff that layer into it. One of the things that I got most interested in and that I used to puzzle over a lot – which is presented really in the middle of the film, in a conversation – is to do with gender. It’s just simply to do with gender. So, where does gender reside? Is it in consciousness, or is it in a physical form? Cause consciousness is not a physical form, it comes out of a physical thing, the brain, but consciousness is obviously something else. And is there such a thing as a male consciousness and a female consciousness. If so, how would you demonstrate it? Are there things that a woman would think that a man wouldn’t? Can you give an example? Can you find a man that would then contradict that because he doesn’t think it, and there’s a women that does? And so it goes on. And these are all the sort of implicit questions. And there was another thing as well, which is if you flip the genders in your mind, if you give it a thought experiment, which is to flip the genders and say, I’m not going to care whether this is accurate in the world or care about what it represents or anything like that, I’m just going to flip them. I would argue that you would get a very, very misogynistic film, if you did that. You’d get a misogynistic film that was not saying anything accurate about the way the world works. So, that would be another reason to not flip the genders. So, that’s from my point of view. It’s about proximity. You might not agree with that because of where you position yourself within the film. And if you position yourself with Caleb, some of those arguments might not make sense. It’s complex. But like I said, if you’re going to do something contentious, do it thoughtfully, and then understand that people have their own opinions.

So, we talked about the two other stars, but obviously, at least I think the big, breakout star here is Alicia. I’ve seen her in other things before, but what was it about her? What were the things that really convinced you on her for this movie? Because I think she’s really, really great in it.

It was the same with all of them. The thing about this film right- so, you’ve seen it, right? So, it’s an actor’s movie. It’s got a huge requirement on the way it’s shot, and vfx, and music and all that stuff. These are all like the legs of the table, as people phrase it, but, more than anything, it’s an actor’s movie. So, the way acting works, and the most of the way film finance works, is you can get things set up with actors who are not necessarily very good actors, but they’ve got a huge profile, they’ve got enormous charisma. And there are some kinds of films where charisma is what’s needed to make the film. It actually works. The dazzling smile and the sort of cheeky wink, that’s all you need, right? And in this case, it’s absolutely not what the film needs; they have to be actors. So, they were cast primarily just as actors. I’d seen Alicia Vikander in this film called The Moral Affair. She’s acting opposite a very charismatic and very gifted actor. And yet, she’s carrying the movie. Now, whenever you see that, you note it. And you don’t need to work in the film industry to note it. I have met nobody, literally nobody who would argue to me that Philip Seymour Hoffman was a bad actor. He’s a good actor. You can see it. And actually you can see it in Alicia, as well. So, that’s why she was cast. But then, subsequently, I found out in a conversation with her that she had this ballet training. She had actually worked as a ballerina at a very high level from a very young age. And that’s actually also true of Sonoya, who played Kyoko. Both of them were ballerinas. And that enabled a kind of slightly preternatural control over physicality that gave the machines a sort of otherness. Which I think is also to us, not as machines, and not as ballet dancers, seductive. I don’t mean in a sort of eroticized way. I mean, seductive as in it makes you lean forward, you know, because you’re intrigued by this strange sort of semi-perfection that none of us really have, actually, they don’t have, either because they’re humans, too. But they do the performance, and the performance has a supernatural quality.

So, why the name Ava? Is there a deeper meaning behind it?

Yes, sort of. Sort of. It was a two-step process. One is, when I first configured this in my head, it was Eve. I thought I was going to call her Eve. But it’s too prosaic, just too on the nose. And I thought, I can’t do that. And then, I thought of Eva, but I thought, I can’t do Eva because my daughter’s called Eva, and that would just be too weird given the way the film plays out, it’s too creepy. And so then, it was actually my wife, said Ava. And the thing about Ava that was nice is that is has sort of a relationship with Eve, but it’s a step removed. And it looks like it’s an acronym. It stands for Automatic Vehicle Assurance, or something, I’m not sure what it stands for. But you know, so it felt- but it’s got this sort of roughly Judeo-Christian type background.

There were all Bible names, weren’t they?

They were. But it’s unconscious, apart from with Ava. Somebody – this is so like that thing about other people watching your film – a journalist back in the UK, this very smart woman that I’ve spoken to before, said, I assume that Nathan is this, and Caleb is that, and laid out this beautiful, elegant argument that none of which was true. And I sort of thought- I had a moment, it was like a test, I could have gone, yes, that’s exactly right. But I didn’t. I took the honest route. Tempted.
You can read Elizabeth's review of Ex Machina here.
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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Cinderella

3/13/2015

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Once upon a time, a famed British director named Kenneth Branagh (Thor, Hamlet, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and a writer named Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass, American Pie) took on an iconic fairytale that resided in a special place in children’s hearts and memories the world over. That special fairytale was called Cinderella, and their version, though it couldn’t ever compare to the first, was a raging success nevertheless…
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All tropes aside, Branagh’s Cinderella was so cute! The film deviated from Disney’s animated version (and, as expected, the traditional European folktale). This time around, Branagh decided to include expository backstory that wasn't depicted in the Disney version, like Cinderella’s childhood and her mother's death. It gave her mother and father faces and a larger, more important role, and showed Ella as a child. Oh yeah, and her given name is Ella in the film (I didn't like that so much). Nevertheless, a narrator recounted this first act’s exposition like a fairy tale, hitting several key emotional highs and lows of Ella’s adolescence. The film rushed through the deaths of both her parents, maybe as to not dwell in that emotional low too long. They did manage to induce some emotional reaction in the audience, but I think they could have been given more weight and could have been more grounded, instead of being glossed over. I mean, that sucks. Both parents gone at such a young age; it's a big deal. The other deviations were fine and worked well enough to be inoffensive.

The score was gorgeous, and Cinderella's theme was just dreamy and magical enough. However, I wish they would have utilized some of the original music from the animated classic outside of the credits. Using "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" would have pushed the cathartic impact even more (and would have just been nice). I think it would have added to what is already a nostalgic experience for older audiences.

Of course, Cate Blanchett was great as the wicked stepmother. The filmmakers and Blanchett added dimension to the character, doing a touch to humanize her by giving her visible reasons of intent and allowing her character to be visibly hurt and react to that feeling. The stepsisters weren't completely despicable, also, as they added comedic relief in scores. Lily James and Richard Madden were marvelous, as well, although Madden as the prince was more penetrable, rounded, and human than James as Ella.

The movie was a proper fairy tale. It was nice and romantic and triumphant and it transported you to a place of magic and childhood and dreams. It wasn't surprising in any way, but it didn't disappoint me at all, either. The filmmakers accomplished what they set out to do. Just as her stepsisters looked upon Cinderella with utter and sheer heartfelt, desperate longing right after the Prince named her his fiancé, the film made the audience wish we were in her place and that we were in fact Cinderella herself. There were tears and laughter, and at the end, huge smiles, reminding us that the kind thing to do, is always the right thing to do, and that a little bit of love and belief can go a long, long way.

Rating: A
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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on '71

3/13/2015

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Suspicion, lies, hatred, pride: all things festering in British society following the 1969 Northern Ireland riots between the Irish Catholic Nationalists and the English Loyalists, in which the Irish Catholic minority fought against the English Protestant majority after their civil rights demonstrations against discrimination were attacked by English Protestants, leading to thirty years of conflict called the Troubles. This high stakes and incredibly tense time and place comprises the setting for Yann Demange’s ’71, which depicts the story of Gary Hook’s (Jack O’Connell) escape from enemy territory after being left behind by his army unit after trying to end a riot in Belfast in 1971.

The film was a fairly turbulent and dichotomous trip: the typically genre-specific content of war, violence, and suspense was set against a bleak feel and a soft, romantic look, with high grain and poetically conceptual scenic shots captured by the use of handheld camera throughout. Composer David Holmes’ synth-filled, pulsating score heightened the tension and underscored the id-filled and blindly passionate desires of the people entrenched in the conflict.

Jack O’Connell always does well with what he’s given. Gary Hook, a young British soldier, is a somewhat passive figure that seems to have more things happening to him against his control, instead of always having agency and causing story events to happen. Despite the only bit of characterization or backstory being an introductory episode of Hook playing with his younger brother before he leaves to be stationed in Belfast, the audience can still sympathize with Hook enough to make us want to go through the story with him and root him on as he stumbles through trying to make it out of enemy lines without getting captured and killed by a group of radical Irish activists who had been pursuing him from the second he was left behind. O’Connell somehow manages to be dense, yet believable, mainly impenetrable, outside of obvious physical ailments, but translucent enough that we understand and feel the emotional resonance of the troubling conclusion.

However, this seemingly thriller/war genre film never quite gelled with the story at its heart. The wavering loyalties, treachery of war, and the evil that lies deep within man, almost hinting at a pacifistic message, never took enough hold or had enough significance throughout, leaving it without making the impact it could have made. It’s a genre film trying to be more than just that, and coming close, but just barely missing it.

Rating: B+/A-
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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on 50 Shades of Grey

2/13/2015

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“I’m fifty shades of fucked up,” Christain Grey proclaims in reflexive frustration to a persistent Anastasia, as a multitude of audience members chortle in response. Why reflexive, you ask? Because that statement verifies the chortles and acts as a mostly complete summation of the entire film.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 50 Shades of Grey, based on E. L. James’ novel, fails to transcend the poor source material and titillate while exploring the topic of BDSM. The movie opens to stunning wide-sweeping shots of Seattle set to Annie Lennox’s “I Put A Spell On You,” which instantly sets the tone and mood of the story familiar to everyone who engages in American pop culture. Anastasia Steele’s (Dakota Johnson) roommate has the flu, so she sends Ana to fill in for her in an interview with billionaire business tycoon Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). And then he takes a liking to her, asserting control over her life and later showing her his “play room.”
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While Taylor-Johnson succeeds in visually capturing the world of 50 Shades as one would imagine it and Johnson and Dornan are good in their roles, almost everything else fails. The biggest issue to me: the flawed story. It’s weird: there were superfluous scenes, yet there were too few scenes. The dialogue and story tools were schlocky and trite. There was no motivation (at least on Ana’s part), and there were no stakes, or at least I certainly didn’t feel any. There’s nothing in the film that pulls you along with the story, nothing that keeps you in your seat other than making it to the end just so you can say you did it. Even then, the sequel set-up ending was so stupid, it was laughable.

The next glaring issue: the sex. There was not enough of it! At least the whole 20 minutes of sex certainly didn’t feel like enough for the book that is supposedly the steamiest thing that happened to 2012. And you would think, that since there is so little sex happening, that there would be enough room for interesting subplots and storylines to take place. Well, you would be wrong. Moreover, the sex scenes were so tepid! Maybe I’m ruined from having watched Kink (2013), but this is freakin’ BDSM people! It should make the viewer at least a little uncomfortable! It should be a little rough! They just weren’t bold, in content or shooting style/choices. The movie failed to deliver the literal single thing it should’ve delivered on.

I felt nothing. Zero of the things. I wasn’t turned on. I wasn’t swept up in Ana’s supposed fantasy. I tried, but the movie didn’t paint the fantasy effectively or much at all. I didn’t really feel Grey’s power, passion, sexiness, control, or dominance. I didn’t feel Ana’s ambivalence, curiosity, infatuation, submissiveness, or intrigue. This wasn’t the actors’ faults (they did pretty well with what they were given, which wasn’t much, in terms of dialogue or development of content for the potentially interesting characters); rather, it was the fault of the filmmakers, editors, and writers. This was really such a missed opportunity.

Rating: C-/D

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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Blackhat

1/16/2015

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I have to make a confession: after seeing the Blackhat trailer/ads several times in the past month or so, I must admit that I was only even remotely interested in seeing this movie because I really like looking at Chris Hemsworth. And that's the only reason anyone should see this movie.

Hemsworth plays Nick Hathaway, an ex-MIT student turned hacker who, at the start of the movie, is serving 15 years in prison for hacking into banks. The FBI, prompted by Chinese government official Chen Dawai (who also happens to be Nick's old roommate in college), looks to Nick to help find the security breach at a Chinese power plant that caused one of the power plants to explode. While trying to catch the bad guys, Nick falls in love with Dawai's sister, Lien.
It's a somewhat convoluted storyline and is even harder to follow. 98% of the movie is shot in close-up/extreme close-up and shallow focus - two cinematic choices that I love - but that left the viewer constantly not knowing where we were in space. In fact, the picture assaulted my eyes occasionally: it was hard to look at the screen. I tried to rationalize this choice: is it reflective of Nick's inner and outer imprisonment? Is Michael Mann, the director, trying to portray a sense of claustrophobia? I don't know. It seemed superficial.

The tone of the entire movie is set with the gimmicky open: it looks beautiful, yes, but the story doesn't go too far or anywhere interesting. The acting was good enough, the action sequences were cool, but as a whole, it was one of those movies that probably had a lot of potential on the page, but was executed too poorly. They tried to change up the classic action thriller, but came up just short with a generic and boring product. Sorry, Chris.

Rating: C+
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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on The Green Prince

10/7/2014

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The Green Prince is Nadav Schirman’s cinematic take on Mosab Hassan Yousef’s book, Son of Hamas. A combination of stylized reenactments, never-before-seen found footage, and compelling interviews help weave the heavy and intricate tale of Mosab, a son of one of the most prominent leaders of the early 2000s Palestinian Islamic Hamal movement - a "project" with military support designed to overthrow the Israeli occupation in Palestine - and Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the Israeli Shin Bet interrogator who brought Mosab in to act as a spy for the Israeli military.

Schirman succeeds in building a world of tension and suspense that sucks you into Mosab’s story and the war-torn, violent world of Israel and Palestine. The interviews are so strong; each word of accented English enraptures you. The editing is even better; fuzzy aspect ratio changes induce a haze of distant memories of a surreal reality. Every moment is engaging, and you never lose sight of the monumental stakes. The movie plays out like Hollywood's best spy thriller creation, but then grounds you, reminding you that it is actually someone's very real and extraordinary life. There is not much rise and fall, but that doesn't negatively affect much for the film is at a constant high fever pitch and doesn’t miss a beat.

The only thing that was missing for me: the story moves at a rapid pace, so there wasn't much time to understand Mosab's motivations or inner dialogue. I was left questioning how Mosab was able to abandon and turn against the very life and philosophy that he was surrounded by and steeped in his entire life so quickly and so completely. I feel that betraying one’s father, especially when you have a loving relationship, is not an easy thing to do. Of course, I understand why one would choose peace over terrorism and cruelty; I just do not fully understand Mosab’s why. However, the events that occurred and the explanations that are given did enough to prevent this from becoming a major issue.

The Green Prince culminates in an emotional end that reveals the story the entire time to simply be a story about friendship and purity of heart. It proves that amid all the hatred, violence, selfishness, stubbornness, and war of not only the Gaza Strip, but of the entire world, that good people and love still exist. This simple message interweaved with Mosab's story makes me cry. And this simple message is why this film is so effective and a must-see.


Grade: A

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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Teenage

5/28/2014

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Spanning the end of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, Teenage follows the invention of the teenager in Western culture.

The film opens with an enigmatic introduction; I noticed the music, scored by Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, right away. You then are quickly transported into the soft and easy world of the movie: a mix of archival footage and soft voiceover make for a lyrical, hypnotic, and beautiful feel to the story of a demographic group that many consider to be the very opposite of soft and easy.

The movie moves chronologically, acting as a historical profile through the lens of the teens in each generation, starting in the Industrial Revolution, a period when “teenage” literally did not exist. Little vignettes telling the stories of individual teens bring the viewer deeper into the feelings and situations of teens of each era, and each transition is punctuated with a quote that adds just enough cathartic impact, really incorporating resonance into the spectrum of emotion from the ride of the previous story events, including the flapper scene of the 1920s to WWII.

Basically, the movie is like one of  those educational films you watch in school, profiling a subject in a straightforward manner, but not bad or particularly dry; rather, it is soft, romantic, and pristinely interesting. It's not what I expected at all. It simply and unpretentiously shows what it means to be a teen in each of the presented eras, from the out-of-work young adults of the Great Depression, to the Hitler youth of the '40s who weren’t allowed to dress in the fashions or listen to the music of the American swing fad. It ruminates in the rosy nostalgia of the birth of teen angst and titillates the beginning of our current reality, suspending us in the sweet innocence of youthful rebellion. I'll leave you with a line from the movie:  "Once you glimpse the world of tomorrow, you can never go back."

Grade: A

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Elizabeth Johnson-Wilson on Neighbors

5/9/2014

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So, I will start this by saying that I am a huge Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg fan, and I love 99% of everything that comes out of their incredibly smart and hilarious minds. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement for their newest project, Neighbors, directed by Nicholas Stoller. Neighbors depicts the story of Mac and Kelly Radner, a young family with an adorable baby named Stella, who live in a college town. A fraternity moves in next door, and, after a broken promise, an all-out feud ensues between the two parties.

As viewers have come to expect from the filmmakers behind the project, the movie was indeed hilarious. The laughs abound all the way through, and there is, refreshingly, no one token dramatic scene that kind of brings you out of the humor of the movie. The casting was spot-on: forget what you know about him, Zac Efron was raunchy and completely right as frat president Teddy Sanders, and Dave Franco gave a great performance (as always) as frat vice-president Pete. Rogen and Byrne were so unbearably hilarious and had great chemistry, and even Ike Barinholtz and Craig Roberts shined in smaller roles. Speaking of smaller roles, I especially loved all the great cameos in the film: there are some unexpected treats from other frat boys of comedy, so to speak, and each one made me oh, so happy. Oh, and even the baby, played by twins Elise and Zoey Vargas, was great! The jokes definitely toed around and took great leaps over the proverbial line (the trailer reveals the baby mouthing a used condom, and that's just as horrific and gut-wrenching and disturbingly funny as you think it would be), and Stoller didn't hold back from anything inappropriate and horrible as long as it was funny (and it all is!, including maybe the least offensive use of the n-word by a white guy ever...), but that's just my kind of humor (although I personally thought there weren't as many dick jokes as promised and wanted more; I wonder what that says about me...). I loved it, and the guffaws from the rest of the audience seemed to indicate love, too.
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Despite all my love, I do feel that the film suffered from sloppy storytelling: the story events escalated really quickly, didn't always feel totally warranted, and the story as a whole felt rushed. It moved at an aggressively fast pace, lean and mean, but not necessarily beneficial for story content and development. As a viewer, you were along for the wild and crazy, bombastic ride, and you very quickly ended up in places that you didn't see coming. But instead of feeling  unexpected and fresh, it felt like the story and characters weren’t ready to be in that place yet. Also, we didn't spend a lot of time with the characters. There was a bit of smart character work/development, especially in the lovely meatiness of Byrne's role (aka, a female role that would often not receive much focus in some of these guys’ other films), but not enough of it; I wanted to know some of the main characters better (especially the frat guys), to spend more time with them. I was missing some character connection.

But whatever. The movie is definitely hilarious, lewd, uproariously stupid, and filled with filth: it delivers what you expect from a Rogen/Goldberg movie, and ups the ante for a Stoller film. Go see Neighbors; you'll have a raucously fun time and won't regret it.

Rating: B+/A-
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