The Invitation

 

The Invitation (dir. Karyn Kusama) is a smart and expertly crafted psychological thriller that explores the long term effects of grief. After Will and his wife Eden split after the death of their child, Eden disappears for two years and abruptly returns with a new husband, David, and invites Will, his new girlfriend, and several of their friends to their house for a party. The situation is already awkward at best for Will; he and Eden used to live in this house, and she had cheated on him with David, and a collision with a coyote leaves him and his girlfriend Kira shaken, but its Eden and David’s new blissful personalities that truly rattles Will. They credit “The Invitation,” the program they attended for two years in Mexico, for their newfound happiness, and the happiness of their new roommate Sadie. Will’s instincts tell him that this “Invitation” is a cult that’s unhealthy at best, but he’s carrying so much emotional baggage that it’s almost impossible to know for sure.

That uncertainty is the main tension in the film; things do seem very “off” from the beginning, but Will is obviously not starting off in a good state of mind. He’s going to the house he used to share with his ex and his deceased son, seeing her and the man she cheated on him with. Kusama takes advantage of framing, sound design, and focus to unnerve; a simple trip up the stairs becomes ominous in slow motion, the lavish dinner party turns into a barrage of overwhelming voices and grotesque chewing. Although the house is huge, each room feels claustrophobic.

Will obviously has not moved on yet, but has the Invitation program helped Eden and David do so? Or does it just allow them to avoid the pain that Will is still stuck in? Is Sadie’s happy-go-lucky, sexually open approach a sign of inner peace, or of desperation? The situation seems fishy to Will, but the other partygoers are unconcerned; they admit that Sadie’s presence and Eden and David’s newfound bliss is strange, but they feel that weirdness is acceptable as long as they’re happy. When the couple insists on introducing “The Invitation” to them, they encourage Will to be “open-minded.”

Grief and depression are an uphill struggle to overcome, and hard for others to support or understand. Immediately after the loss, people can handle the initial devastation, but there’s a point where you’re supposed to be “over it”, and if you’re not, people will eventually lose sympathy, or just becomes frustrated with you. With the outside world side eyeing you and the sadness overwhelming you, it’s impossible not to wonder if something is wrong with you, and the program provides both an easy answer to that fear and a concrete method to overcoming that sadness. Does everyone else truly believe that Eden and David are happy, or are they just happy that the couple isn’t moping around anymore?

After a bit of lag during second act, the last act veers away from the psychological to a much more violent genre, and though it’s shocking, it’s not out of place. The entire film has been asking how to handle grief, and the last parts, the ending in particular, show the consequences of unprocessed pain.

2015 roundup [aka what I've been watching in these six months]

I'd like to blame the lack of updates on this blog on getting a much steadier job than I had before; it's undeniably a huge factor since I started the job maybe two weeks after my last post and whoops where did those updates go??? But to be honest, I wasn't as enthralled by what I watched as I've felt in previous years. I always hate when someone declares that it's a "bad year" for film (especially since you hear it Every. Single. Year.), but I wasn't quite feeling it the same way.

There were some standouts though, and even ones that I'm genuinely still enthusiastic about.

The best ones [that made me feel feelings]

• The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos): I saw this at the New York Film Festival, and I'm still smiling about it. The best way I can explain it is that it's a dystopian love story written by aliens who have no understanding of 'love' but they've watched some romcoms and dystopia films and they're pretty sure they can fake it. With beautiful cinematography and brilliantly deadpan performances, it's more than a takedown of societal pressures to couple and become married; it pokes fun at the innate needs we have to bond with others and to have our freedom.
• Memorable moment - an early scene where Colin Farrell's character applies for the hotel and finds out that there is no bisexual option; he's forced to pick on the spot whether to be heterosexual or homosexual. It's a small moment, but it perfectly encapsulates the way we treat bisexuality, either just denying it exists, or demanding that they 'choose one already'.
• Spotlight (dir. Tom McCarthy): All the comparisons to All The President's Men are completely accurate; the gradual uncovering of the scope of the church scandal plays as suspense: how far does this go? And the emotional stakes are legitimate, not just for the victims, but for the journalists as well. As much as I love Mark Ruffalo, it's Liev Schrieber who really stood out to me. Maybe that's just because I too, am an atheist New Yorker...
• Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland): An amazing use of AI and sci-fi tropes to explore gender stereotypes, particulary regarding women; Ex Machina comments on both the nature of sentient life and patriarchy; Oscar Isaac and Domnhall Gleeson play the Gross Bro and Nice Guy to Alicia Vikander's Girl of Interest, and all three of them are fantastic. Vikander in particular stands out though; she looks and moves like she's not quite out of the uncanny valley. Female androids in media are inevitably sexualized, and it's great to see a film that scrutinizes that.
• Chappie (dir. Neill Blomkamp) Speaking of sentient life....Chappie is 200% a mess, but I will maintain that many of its storylines ask interesting questions. Like Ex Machina, it is concerned with the possibility of sentient AI, but also about the responsibility of its creators. There's a ton going on, but the primary story is about how humans will shape new beings and the creation of morality in aritificial intelligence.
• World of Tomorrow (dir. Don Hertzfeldt): The first time I watched World of Tomorrow, a short where a little girl, Emily, is contacted by her future clone, I was devestated. I've watched it twice since then and it's just as beautiful and melancholy as the first time. It's interesting that this is Hertzfeldt's first digitally animated film, since it shows so much future technology that we (or we, as Emily Prime), can only understand in the abstract. Compare its representation of skewed reality with the breakdown of reality in Rejected; the world of tomorrow is not particularly comprehensible, but has its own beauty. Emily Prime is traveling outside of space-time, but not in a void. Instead, she and Emily-3 move through the dimension of memories, which can be exaggerated and vivid (like the saturated colors) or fuzzy and indistinct (like the memories of the dead).

Other standouts

• Mojave (dir. William Monahan): After reading Allison Willmore's piece on the tiredness of "manly malaise" as shown in Malick's Knight of Cups and Scorsese's Vinyl, (among others), I see it as an absurd parody of the troubled artist, mashed up with a western's revenge plot. Weird stuff goes on in both the desert and Hollywood, where the rules might not apply to you, and when a troubled director meets a mysterious desert guy, things get strange and silly. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, things really get out of hand. There's a bunch of intellectual noodling, but little reason to take it all seriously. Plus, Oscar Isaac in a speedo and Garret Hedlund taking a shower, if that's your kind of thing (it should be.)
• The Assassin: So beautiful it barely mattered that I didn’t understand the plot. There’s an austerity that runs through the entire film; the performances are stolid without being stiff, as if every line, every movement is dictated by a strict tradition. Eye contact during conversations is rare; men stare straight ahead and women glance through a mirror. As someone who’s unfamiliar with the genre (and Chinese cinema in general), it provides a level of obfuscation that makes my lack of comprehension seem intentional (or at least understandable.)  The cinematography is as careful ans the performances; most of the camera movement is slow, relatively short pans, occasionally drifting behind curtains to veil the performers. There’s barely a musical store, mostly just a steady beat of a drum, thickening the air with tension
• Clouds Of Sils Maria: The best moments of Clouds focus on the craft of acting and slipping into a role and relate it to how identity can be defined by the outside world;  how hard it is to acknowledge that your self image might not represent who you are anymore, especially being a woman in an industry that judges on looks and aging. The jabs at Modern Hollywood and millennials, as well as the anxiety about The State Of Our Culture are pretty tired, but Kristen Stewart evens it out in a great performance, becoming the bridge between the two eras, supporting Juliette Binoche's character while understanding the values still present in modern pop culture.
• Mad Max: Fury Road: much more eloquent people than I have written tomes about this, so I'll just mention the highlights. The colors! The excess! Smashing the patriarchy to sweet war music provided by the war party and its flamethrower guitarist! (Also I guess Tom Hardy was there.)
• The Forbidden Room: "What did I just watch?" in the best way; it's the film equivalent of a matryoshka doll. Each story contains another story, clips of "lost" films of varying absurdity. Highlights include submariners who eat pancakes for the air bubbles, a song about an ass-obsessed Udo Kier, and poisonous skeleton women. When watching it I thought it went on just a bit too long, but it did teach me that I can acheive self-actualization by murdering my double (though only after she tells me a story).

The Tribe

Miroslav Slaboshpitsky's The Tribe, about a young man at a boarding school for the deaf who becomes involved in a clandestine crime ring, has been going around the festival circuit for a while, and is coming out in limited release on Wednesday, the 17th. It's gotten a lot of buzz since its premiere at Cannes last year, and I had the chance to see it back in March at the New Directors/New Films.

The premise alone deserves praise; while it has a simple 'climbing the ranks of a criminal organization' story, all the characters speak exculsively in Ukranian sign language, which is left unsubtitled. That combined with the long, often static takes gives it the feel of a modern silent film. Unfortunately, it turns out that wasn't enough to engross me, and it's taken me a while to figure out why. At first I thought it was the lack of information that led my mind to wander; how could I get attached to a character in such a simple and well worn story when I didn't even know his name and he looked like 90% of the other students/gang members? But the real problem is in Slaboshpitsky's formal choices, which end up undermining the attempt to evoke silent film.

All of the cast are non-actors, and it does show; the attempt at naturalism just ends up being unremarkable, which was what made it hard for me to differentiate most of the characters. Without dialogue, or even a confirmed name for out main character (the credits reveal his name is Sergey, but there's no way to know that from the film alone), the actor has to make non-verbal choices that give the character life onscreen. Silent film acting focuses on a different set of skills since the audience can't hear (or in this case, understand) not just what the character says, but how he says it, and these non-actors aren't trained for that. The choice to shoot entirely in wide shots makes this worse; the close up provides the most powerful emotional connection between the actor and the audience, and The Tribe is determined to leave us detached from its characters. So without dialogue, compelling performances, or closeups, most of the film falls flat.

I also feel I should mention that The Tribe occasionally throws in a shocking scene seemingly just for the visceral reaction; there's a gruesome accidental death whose only impact is to put Sergey in a new position that will move the plot forward and a medical procudure one step above back-alley that lingers for way too long. The actual violence is brutal but not gratitious (with the exception of one late scene), and actually fits the feel of the film without forcing a reaction from the viewer, so it's frustrating to have to sit through some scene made specifically to make you uncomfortable.

In short, The Tribe's form ends up more interesting than its content, and that form actually ends up hindering the film as a whole.

[If you want to read my first reaction when I saw it back in March, which was shorter, blunter, and has some very mild spoilers, you can read my letterboxd review here.]

Film Festivals - what you might see soon

It's June! And apparently that means a whole bunch of film festivals, so here's a overview of what's going on and what I might write about in the next few weeks.

I'm developing an extensive collection of festival badges and passes.

Right now: Brooklyn Film Festival (May 29th - June 7th)

I'm still deciding whether to write an overall post or talk about the films individually; I've got a 4 film pass and have already seen one film, a documentary called Placebo about life at the hardest med school to get into in the world (which I recommend, but warn that the narrative structure makes it somewhat uneven). I've already posted a review on Letterboxd, which will probably show up here in some form at some point. The other three films I plan to see are still up in the air, though Placebo is probably the only documentary I'll see there.

Soon: Lower East Side Film Festival (June 11th - 21st)

Right on the heels of BFF is the Lower East Side Film Festival, which I have even less of a plan for since I'm going to be volunteering there. I'm most interested in Jane Wants a Boyfriend, Party Time Party Time, and Pop Meets the Void, so there's a good chance I'll end up writing about some of those.

Later: BAM Cinemafest (June 17th - 25th)

Cinemafest has got a real interesting selection; the sci-fi film Advantageous is a must see for me, but I probably won't be able to see more than that; my theater staff perks don't include the festival, and summer's not a particularly lucrative time for me. There's a chance I may get to see The End of the Tour since it's showing in the Opera House instead of the movie theater, but I'm not getting my hopes up.


Ones I'll be missing out on: Northside Festival (June 8th - 10th), American Black Film Festival (June 11th - 14th)

There's obviously only so much I can do, but I'm still sad I'll be missing these two. Northside is a week long festival encompassing film, music, and technology events, taking place around north Brooklyn. The film part runs the first three days, but between limited funds and the venues being a bit difficult to get to (you'd think getting from southern Brooklyn to northern Brooklyn would be simple...but it's not), it's not something I can do this year. I'm even more disappointed to be missing the American Black Film Festival; I can't deny that my film choices overall are overwhelmingly white and that needs to change. But once again, money, and time, and the fact that their volunteer application period ends at the beginning of March, and I didn't even check until after Tribeca.

The "originality problem", which has nothing to do with originality

After the apparently disappointing box office opening weekend for Tomorrowland, Variety posted an article "'Tomorrowland' exposes Hollywood's Originality Problem",which points to it as a shining example of why studios would rather make franchises than gamble on original movies. Nobody should be surprised to hear it's because franchises continue to make money, and Bret Lang, the article's writer, seems to suggest that viewers are less likely to see films based solely on the actors involved. And while he does mention that films like Inception, Gravity, and Interstellar have all been hits, he claims that today movies like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War of the Worlds, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith wouldn't get made, due to waning star power and the risks they carried.

Firstly, to nitpick, I have to point out that two of the three 2005 films he mentioned are only sort of original; with franchises reigning it's easy to call anything that's not a major part of the current cultural climate "original," but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is based on an extremely well known children's book, and even War of the Worlds is an adaptation. I think we tend to complain too much about adaptations (particularly young adult fiction, but that's a different discussion); it's terrible and annoying until it's your favorite book or tv show. Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise also aren't the best examples of how star power is waning; in the last ten years Depp has become a caricature of himself along with Tim Burton, and Tom Cruise has lost almost all of his goodwill with fans from his erratic behavior (remember the couch jumping? denying all of psychiatry? That hadn't happened quite yet.) and Scientology ties. Both films also had household name directors; Burton's prior film was Big Fish, which at the time I remember hearing nothing but good things about, and Spielberg's last collaboration with Cruise, Minority Report, was also a hit.

But regardless, I still think "originality" isn't the problem; it's marketing. Lang does mention in his article that Tomorrowland's trailers were too vague to give people a reason to see it, and that's definitely something that needs to be examined further. You can't take a step without tripping over some hype for the latest Marvel movie or DC project or the Star Wars still of the day, so of course when people make decisions on what to see this weekend, those will be the first things they go to. On the other hand, there are "original" movies that don't have a fraction of the effort put into their marketing. Trailers are great, but for someone who doesn't see a lot of movies in theaters, commercials are incredibly important. I remember last year I found out about Edge of Tomorrow* from the trailer, but when the commercials started on tv, they told you nothing about the film besides Tom Cruise, desert, guns. When it underperformed, the studio recut the ads, not to show any context or try to sell anything about the story, but to rebeand it as Live, Die Repeat, which was originally the tagline. . Because when you want more people to see your film, the solution is to completely rename it. Personally, I knew people who would have loved Edge of Tomorrow, but never saw it in theaters because they had no idea it existed. John Wick came out later that year, and I only knew about it because of the internet; I never saw a single commercial for it, and "Keanu Reeves fights dudes" should not be particularly hard to sell.

Unfortunately this problem is far wider than summer and action films; remember how Selma got ignored in practically all the industry awards nominations? One of the reasons for that was that they didn't have enough in the marketing budget to send out screeners. It had a great release date, Christmas Day, but that was only in limited release, and it had way less incoming advertisment fanfare compared to what Birdman and Boyhood got. If the marketing can't compete with bigger films, of course the film isn't going to do as well. It seems like the studios expect their "original" films, when they do deign to make them, to sell themselves, and then they're disappointed when the box office revenue won't power the gravy train.



*I'm aware that Edge of Tomorrow is actually based off of a manga named All You Need Is Kill, but for this conversation it's "original" enough.

TriBeCa part 2 - narratives

I went much safer with narratives than I intended to; at this time only one of the films I saw doesn't have a distribution deal, and half of them have familiar actors involved (which probably has something to do with the first point). For the most part I avoided movies I could see pretty soon; Good Kill and Far From Men interested me but both have May release dates. Unfortunately, due to bad timing or just plain exhaustion there were a few I wanted to see and regret not doing so. Cronies and Lucifer came highly recommended; they were both featured on the festival website for cinematography and Latin American films (which Ives seen almost none of.) The Survivalist had its world premiere at TriBeCa, and it's always nice to see some speculative fiction, and I was looking forward to some oddball dark comedy in Applesauce and Mickey Rourke in Ashby. There's only so much one person can do though, so here's what i actually did see:

Further posts coming!

It's been about two weeks since my last post, and since I tend to disappear from this blog I wanted to explain why (because I actually have a reason this time). My laptop is in for repairs, so I've been running off my phone, library computers, and my eight year old dilapidated laptop with a terrible keyboard. Just applying to jobs has been a monumental pain in the ass, so part 2 of the Tribeca report is going slower than I would like.

The good news is that in the meantime I've seen three other films: Clouds of Sils Maria (fascinating, love Kristen Stewart), The D Train (missed opportunity, possibly kinda offensive???), and Ex Machina (I LOVE ROBOTS AND OSCAR ISAAC), and I plan to write a real post about at least one of them. Probably Clouds of Sils Maria, because there's a lot to unpack there both about being a woman in the entertainment industry and the art of acting itself.

I do have a letterboxd account that I update more regularly with small quips if you just have to know what I've been watching; I try to go into more detail here. Please do not judge me for watching John Wick three times in one month; I was going through a rough time and it's the perfect film to get rid of a bad mood.