Of late, I have enjoyed what Hollywood had to offer–all these commercial releases, with no pretense that they are more than popcorn entertainment, yet most of them somehow making me believe that all is not lost in the dream factory.
Most often, slaking this thirst for popular entertainment is a tricky thing to accomplish. There is just no formula to what makes popular cinema throb, and most of all connect with the mainstream. People are often mindlessly cruel, for example, with their ignorant ambivalence about things in popular culture. They decry, for example, that they hate the predictability of many forms of popular entertainment–and yet if you give them a sumptuous reimagining of something familiar, they almost always fault it for its jarring “departure” from “expectations.” They patronize a perfectly capable actor’s performance for staying true to the wooden nature of a character in a popular book series–and yet when she ventures into other films and proves herself effective in them, they crucify her for their own silly projections of their guilt for liking those same stupid popular films in the first place. (Twilight, anyone?)
I am talking about Richard Sanders’ deliriously breathtaking take of the fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman and its lead star, Kristen Stewart. Ms. Stewart has never been a bad actress, contrary to the strange notion, popularized in cruel Internet memes, that she has one expression for a variety of emotions: we did love her in pre-Twilight films, most notably in David Fincher’s Panic Room [2002], where she proved her mettle opposite the acting titan that is Jodie Foster. Post-Twilight, her work as Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways [2010] was breathtaking in its raw simplicity, and now her new film with Walter Salles in the screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road [2012] is starting to create some great buzz. She has never been a bad actress. All she has become is being a favorite target for everybody’s poisoned guilt for patronizing the truly awful Twilight series. It’s projection of the worst kind.
Which is why I was amused by some people’s hate for the new Snow White film, picking on her performance as the fairy tale princess as a study in cardboard acting. What unoriginal fools. Ms. Stewart is perfectly fine in this film. It is Charlize Theron who seems a little off her rocker here with her hoary shouting, although she retreats back to a kind of brilliance in her quiet scenes of pure malevolence. The film itself is a brilliant throwback to the dread and understanding of evil of the original story, breaking away from the Disneyfied expectations we have of this story and many others of its kind. [To wit: the narcoleptic rape of Sleeping Beauty, the bodily mutilations of Cinderella, the animal cruelty of The Frog Prince…] And it has done that without losing the fantastic luster we have come to expect from such adaptations. Still, it is not a perfect film, and there are too many elements that seem like ungraceful rip-offs of other films–like the forest spirit from Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke [1997]. But it is a good film. Be wary of other people who say it isn’t so.
Then there is Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. It is not a perfect film as well, but at the same time you simply cannot deny its majesty. It is a triumph of tone and philosophical reflection–why are we here? who made us and why? what happens after death? what went on before there was life on Earth? –but does not deny us from the expected shocks and thrills only to be expected as the Alien prequel this truly is. The frightening Xenomorph here, something we have already become so familiar with because it has been exploited to death by the studio that has produced it in unworthy sequels (as well as a Disneyland ride). This presence is reminiscent of the shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws [1975], or even the original perfect monster in Scott’s own Alien [1979]: we never get a full glimpse of it until right until the very end. Because the monster is not Scott’s concern here. He has instead provided a story that seeks loftier philosophical, biological, technological, and moral inquiries, likening our search for origins to the Greek mythological tragedy that gives the film its title. It falters somewhat in that reach, but nonetheless. It’s a glorious film. It’s not your typical Hollywood blockbuster, which may disappoint the shallow. But the shallow will always have their Transformers sequels ad infinitum.
We come to see movies hoping to be transported to some wonderful celluloid limbo where we lose ourselves. It’s immersion of a different kind. We are lost into a world, and sometimes that world is strange and tantalizing, and sometimes it is familiar–and yet different. This, of course, does not happen all the time. But when it does, the pleasures are incalculable. Remember Avatar? Remember Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Remember the first Star Wars? That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Shankman’s film adaptation of the musical Rock of Ages. Here is a world we have known too much from too many Hollywood films: L.A., the rock scene, the late 1980s, boy meets girl. And yet, it transcends the familiar and somehow comes to us with such fresh delight, it very much defines the word “awesome.” What a glorious ride this film was through some of our favorite (if cheesy) late 80s rock anthems. And it helped that everybody in it–Tom Cruise, Paul Giammati, Mary J. Blige, Malin Ackerman, Catherine Zeta Jones, Julianne Hough, and Diego Boneta–was in it for that fun ride. I swear I can never ever look at Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand the same way again, ever.
And finally, I like Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-man, even with its cheesy bits. (Those ominous strings in the track, for example, as The Lizard hunts for Gwen Stacy in the Oscorp offices…) The film felt true. The sequences made emotional sense. Emma Stone gives spunk and likability, bordering on the funny, to the role of Ms. Stacy, and Andrew Garfield gives his iconic hero that right amount of torture and youthful arrogance that felt, well, true. (I repeat myself.) I also liked that there are no true villains in the story, not even the mad scientist, and not even the school bully. The film is saying that we all have secrets to hide, and sometimes all it takes is just some effort in our part to rise to the best of our humanity. And I like that. This is a very human movie disguised as a Marvel superhero story–and it deserves an applause.
Heck, all of Hollywood deserves applause. Six months into the year, they’re somehow getting their formula right. What a ride it has been so far.
That I saw these movies with you may have been a part of it, too. But that’s another story.
