Four Faces of Summer

Courtesy of Nils Axen

While I would rather dedicate this column to the great films I watched over spring break (In the Mood for Love, Hitchcock’s Notorious and Shadow of a Doubt, et al) or my fresh takes on late 2012 fare (consider me an apologist for Life of Pi, but not for Holy Motors), I will, for once, try to look forward. My sole trip to the multiplex last week was to see Oz: The Great and Powerful, an abysmal, unlikable mess that, naturally, will at least double its $215 million budget in ticket sales before it leaves theaters. The summer movie season has effectively begun.

With that, I would like to examine not the movies but the people who watch these movies. Below, I present the four types of summer moviegoers, in a digestible (and admittedly lazy) list format. Keep in mind that these broad types can easily overlap with one another — in particular to those adjacent.

The Masses

Hollywood cares only about this group, by far the largest demographic, from March to September of every year. I cannot speak on its behalf, and I admit that, today, there are few people completely dispassionate about all movies. But you could say films “dumb down” over the summer in order to appeal to this crowd. That is not necessarily a bad thing — the world would be pretty bleak if all movies were as serious and demanding as Amour, and there is something serene about knowing what type of movie you’re in for with the cost of tickets these days.

The majority of summer moviegoers pick up buzz from mainstream publications and television shows or commercials, not to mention from the previews that precede the other movies they go see. The ubiquity of Rotten Tomatoes means that even those who consider themselves apathetic to film can still make a reasonable judgment, based on aggregate critic scores, on what movie they will go see.

The IMDb Crowd

Skewed young, male and white, this rising and influential demographic demands action films with at least a little bit of substance, or about as much as a comic book can provide as source material. While not everyone in this so-called crowd frequents the Internet Movie Database, the popular website collects this group’s opinion in its “Top 250” list, where four Christopher Nolan films rank in the Top 50 and The Lord of the Rings trilogy populates the Top 20. The website hosts message boards where users can debate over the ending of Inception or order Pixar films from best to worst. In real life, these people like to talk over the merits of what made a movie good or bad (there’s not always an in between) or at least have a firm opinion on what they thought of a film.

I find this group to be overly concerned with plot and its minute mechanics, like plot twists, continuity and unanswered narrative questions. Nolan succeeds with this group for this very reason. Nonetheless, “The IMDb Crowd” holds a lot of sway in Hollywood these days and at least brings some thought to the moviegoing experience. Without them, there would be no Star Trek Into Darkness or Man of Steel this summer, and that would be just awful, wouldn’t it ...?

The Critics

Professional critics do not solely represent this group — far from it, actually. Those who favor the movies crammed into the late-year Oscar season make up a perceptive community of summer moviegoers; these people love movies, and they would go crazy not to see any for months on end.

While they may not care for the Michael Bay swill that attracts so many others, “The Critics” do see value in the occasional summer flick. The Bourne films, District 9 and, depending on whom you ask, Prometheus worked for them. For this group, part of the fun of the summer movie season is in finding that unlikely genre film and defending its strengths, without irony, to all who will listen.

The Cinephiles

While plenty of “The Critics” will also rightly call themselves “cinephiles,” there is a stark difference that separates them from the real McCoy: These people don’t even watch summer movies. Sure, they are enjoying movies during the summer, but at art house and repertory cinemas like New York’s IFC Center or L.A.’s Egyptian Theatre, not at the local multiplex. These are also the types who make a big deal of their home theater system, but just when you expect them to take the speakers for a ride with some Top Gun, they whip out The Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Days of Heaven and harp on and on about the “grain” and “beautiful black levels.”

Basically, they are not the intended audience of most, if not all, of the films coming out of Hollywood, which studios don’t mind because there are relatively few of them, anyway. They may scoff at the praise you heap on the last Harry Potter movie, but, oh boy, Kino just re-released Metropolis on Blu-ray in its full-restored condition using a long-lost source print found in Argentina, and you just gotta see it.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Girls: Season Two Review

Disclaimer: This article contains Girls Season Two spoilers.

If you are fed up with HBO’s Girls like I am, you are also likely sick of those who write about Girls, too. Todd VanDerWerff from The A.V. Club is one of many in the vast Internet commentariat who basically subsists on churning out these think pieces (he once penned 2200 words under the headline, “How Girls challenges the masculine expectations of ‘good TV’”). So, it is with an ample dose of self-loathing that I now present my opinions on Season Two of Girls, which wrapped up yesterday.

I do not take Girls to be nearly as artful as many claim it is, but at least Season One provided engaging character dynamics punctuated by blissful song cues (Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own”) and hilarious, genuine moments (Shoshanna’s “crackcident”). Season Two darkened the colors, widened the distance between former friends and favored half-baked profundity over consistent entertainment. Of 10 episodes, there were three concept and/or “bottle episodes” where the main narrative arc simmered while Hannah (Dunham) traveled to somewhere or tried something new (Jessa’s dad’s house; cocaine; Patrick Wilson). These were, by far, the worst episodes of the season (though some, including VanDerWerff, will vehemently disagree), offering few laughs, platitudinous insight and way too much naked Dunham. Along with the abrupt introduction of Hannah’s OCD two episodes from the finale, Girls has taken an off-putting, serious turn. The first season worked because Dunham and co. embraced the trivial problems of not-so-rich but far-from-poor NYC twentysomethings; their attempts to validate their characters’ struggles with an added layer of angst and realism ended up fulfilling the narcissistic/detached/privileged criticisms that have followed them since even before day one.

But the season finale, “Together,” fell short because it actually disregarded the drama that led up to it. Perhaps that is hypocritical of me to say, because I don’t like most of Season Two’s narrative; however, what we are left with is an assortment of unearned reunions and break-ups. Charlie (Christopher Abbott) and Marnie (Allison Williams) get back together in the cheesiest, Jerry Maguire-iest speech this show has deigned to yet. Considering that Charlie is now the moderately wealthy CEO of a mobile app company, Marnie seems to have forfeited the three-episode-long dream of becoming a singer and resigned to being a housewife, wanting nothing but having Charlie’s “little brown babies” in the “eventual” future. As for Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) and Ray (Alex Karpovsky) calling it quits, we have long known the former to be naïve and the latter to be cynical, so their outbursts at each other over these respective traits came not as a revelation but as a thud of dramatic irony. For the only lovable characters on the show, you’d expect a more fulfilling final straw, if there had to be one.

I just used the word “irony” and that is surely the defense those will use in favor of the scenes above as well as when Adam (Adam Driver) runs shirtless through Brooklyn to “save” Hannah from … well, herself? (I’m not sure.) Irony is a classic and healthy mode of humor, but there must be some foundation for viewer-character connection and narrative truth. Sure, Marnie’s devotion to Charlie may be a subtle indictment of our secret desire for an easy, dependent life, and perhaps Ray and Shoshanna were so infatuated with one another that they overlooked their obvious traits. But the direction of these scenes, with tearful close-ups and exacting musical cues, treats the romance as sincere. You can’t tell me the moral ambiguity of, say, Zero Dark Thirty also applies to a show that ends its season finale with a dramatic tracking shot of a boy cradling a girl in his arms and a song by Dunham’s boyfriend (that would be “Sight of the Sun” by fun.). To launch this defense would confirm that Girls navigates Inception-like layers and levels of irony that it expects the viewer to dissect and critique. We are either entering some intolerable, meta/postmodern/sublimely hipster 21st century territory or dabbling in sloppy character development. Either way, I call bullshit.

As it stands, the characters of Girls have regressed by the end of Season Two, and perhaps Dunham will kick off Season Three with a stark acknowledgment of the finale’s fake cheshire smiles. But right now, I only have the latest and prior episodes as texts before me, and the last 10 have meandered their way through quasi-profound and grating digressions. Let us hope Dunham reclaims the hope, humor and ecstasy of Season One and keeps her clothes on in the process. And let this be the last anyone writes about Girls until then.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Amour Review

Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
Released in 2012

The power of Michael Haneke’s Amour borders on paradox. On the one hand, this film imparts a quiet, rich message of how art, in all its forms, provides the ultimate respite from the harsh realities in life, like illness, attacks and aging. However, the film so fully immerses the viewer into a suffocating depiction of these realities that the experience of watching it becomes its own struggle. It is not a film I recommend lightly, nor one everyone should see, but it grasps the human condition with such conviction and insight that anyone prepared for its brutality should explore its cavernous depths.

The first scene gets right to the point: Firefighters break through the locked door of a posh, worn Parisian apartment and find the wizened corpse of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) on her bed, hands crossed and surrounded by flowers. From the start, writer-director Haneke shocks us with an image of absolute serenity and truth. Flashback several months back to octogenarians Anne and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) attending a concert of one of her former piano students, Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), and then returning to their apartment, where the rest of the film remains. These opening shots are composed entirely of long shots, as if these two could be any elderly couple strolling the city. As tempting it may be, however, it is wise not to identify Anne and Georges with kindly grandparents you have or had. Rather, it is better to conceive of them as young lovers still so enamored with each other that the perils of age sneak up on them unawares.

This “attack” hits Anne the morning after the concert, when she stares off at the breakfast table, not responding to Georges’ concerns. Her subsequent surgery (not depicted on-screen) renders her right side paralyzed; coping with this abrupt rearrangement of responsibility tests Georges, as well as the boundaries and definition of love (amour). Cheery stuff. There are moments of levity — Anne spinning donuts with her electric wheelchair, or Georges describing his friend’s “bizarre” funeral — that never deign to “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” levels of irreverence, but the mood only darkens as Anne loses her facilities and, for George, his patience.

Film students will likely study Amour for its restrained camera movement, long shots and varied compositions within a single setting (which calls to mind the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu). Amour could just be a clinical textbook example of how to make a soulless and agonizing ‘art film,’ but Haneke’s direction provokes real feeling. Haneke wants us to empathize with Anne and Georges, two characters who may just be us someday in the future. He also, however, allows us to be frustrated with them, particularly the helpless Anne. As Anne regresses into a more infantile state — framed in unglamorous, laborious close-ups — and Georges grows more irritable, Haneke leaves his audience to just witness their acts, free of sentimental cues or melodrama. It’s not forced but real, which is why it’s so tough.

There is a subtle undercurrent regarding the ineffable, healing power of art throughout the film. As cultured, bourgeois Parisians, Georges and Anne appreciate music, cinema, painting, photography and literature, and Haneke includes a scene with one or both of them interacting with each of these mediums and finding strength therein. The most touching, naturally, relates to cinema, when Georges recounts how he was overwhelmed by a film he saw when he was a young boy. “I don’t remember the film … but I remember the feeling,” he tells Anne, who is enraptured by his story. And so the cycle continues: She will cherish her feelings when hearing his story, and he experiences them once again through the act of confiding to his love. When ailments and age impede on a devoted relationship, Haneke reminds us that art can alleviate the painful path to, well, you know, the end.

Amour recently won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and, back in May, the Palme d’Or, the prestigious honor bestowed at the artsy Cannes Film Festival. Any fears that this is a pretentious, boring film should go unfounded; instead, this is an emotionally draining, arduous two hours that will leave no one unscathed. I have not even mentioned the performances of Riva or Trintignant, though their eminence needs no description. But it is Haneke who deserves the utmost praise for his Oscar-nominated screenplay (a Freudian can analyze the meaning of the pigeon and dream sequences to no end) and direction. He put his all into this honest and unflinching masterpiece — though you may just resent him for it.

Final Verdict:

4.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Noncreative Fiction

Courtesy of Nils Axen

As I turned the corner onto Dryden Road and trudged through the Collegetown slush, hands in my pockets and cheeks huddled behind the neck of my jacket, the thought that materialized was not entirely my own: Hey, this reminds me of the cover for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Adjusting to that image, I hunched my back even more and forced an apathetic scowl (it looks better than wincing at every gust of Hoth-like wind). I then probably rattled off movies defined by their snow-swept settings: Fargo, The Shining, The Thing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…

Artists do not create from a blank state, a tabula rasa — or do they? After taking "Intro to Creative Writing" last semester and "Screenwriting I" this spring, I have come to appreciate the creative process, because damn, it doesn’t come easy to me. As you might pick up, I associate many things with works of music or cinema. Since picking up movie criticism as a hobby in my sophomore year of high school, I have hammered in critical thinking as my approach to art. This devotion to watching a wide range of films and breaking them down makes for a fun education, but, if this passion is not siphoned now and then to a more creative outlet, it sort of just stagnates. To me, brainstorming short stories or scripts takes much more effort than I believe it should, with intertextual references rather than original germs of thought dominating my cluttered thought processes.

This is a problem many must face, though, particularly those who try to phase out of the heavy academia they have entrusted in for so long in favor of making a mark of their own. While creative genius may not be teachable, format, parameters and allusions certainly are, which is why I take these courses here at Cornell, which is why anyone seeks out the masters of a craft and asks for advice and assistance. Right now, I see screenplays as an easy entrance into this world. They are not the final artistic product but the catalyst to future collaboration with other talented actors, cinematographers, editors and directors (the latter two of which I am most interested in pursuing, more so than writing).

The question of creativity — How to harness it? Where to point it? Do I have it? — intrigues me, as the answers, so far, have only peeked out of the shadows. According to Newtonian principles, pure creation is impossible, and this must apply to the creation of art, as well. If there was any “pure” artist, working in a void without any precedent, it was Homer when he babbled or bard-ed or whatever about Patroclus and Odysseus. But even Homer found inspiration from historical events and allowed his genius to fill in the rest. The creative process takes in far more information and experience than it puts out. An encyclopedic knowledge of some subsection of art assists greatly here; the filmmaker, painter or writer can amalgamate disparate past works, fuse them together and emerge with a “wholly original masterwork,” as some critic is likely to call it (In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco spoke of literature’s endlessly referential nature: “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told”). A keen, say, journalistic eye of the world around can provide that spark too, for, as Robert McKee harangues in the Charlie Kaufman-penned Adaptation, “People are murdered every day … People find love, people lose it … and if you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life!”

There is a reason why the Academy Awards present two separate writing awards, one for Best Adapted Screenplay and the other for Best Original Screenplay. I don’t know what that reason is, but I’m sure there is one and that it has more to do with crediting logistics than quantifying creativity. The brilliant David Cronenberg has adapted William S. Burroughs and Don DeLillo into films that allow his directorial nuttiness to run amuck, while self-taught filmmakers like François Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson sift through their expansive cinematic memories when writing and directing films that remain uniquely theirs. Even the most idiosyncratic movie makers like David Lynch or the Coen Brothers find inspiration in their own past (as the Coens do in A Serious Man) or through actively engaging with their subconscious (à la Lynch). Nobody pulls this stuff from thin air, basically. So, for now, I’ll continue to watch old movies while allotting time for other, more active outlets and perhaps a few more wintry strolls through Collegetown.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

And I, for One, Welcome Our New Digital Overlords

“Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies,” read a loud and stupid headline blazoned across page one of The New York Times’ Arts section last September. The coverage over the last four or so years of this “film versus digital” debate has led to some woeful hyperboles and conjecture. I wanted no part in it — that is, until I saw Side by Side, a documentary that, as its peacemaking title implies, balances the pros and cons of both celluloid (physical film stock) and digital filmmaking and leaves judgment up to the viewer.

But not even Keanu Reeves, celluloid advocate and Side by Side narrator, can dodge the facts and sensible arguments that point toward one conclusion: Digital is here to stay, with complete domination in its sight. While celluloid still has many years until it shuffles off this mortal coil, financiers and amateur filmmakers have long preferred digital filmmaking technology since it is cheaper. “But film is an art! I won’t sacrifice 35mm just so Lena Dunham can film herself play naked ping-pong with Patrick Wilson in an increasingly inconsistent HBO sitcom!” you may say (you being I). To you, Side by Side makes the most crucial case of them all, in the form of modern auteurs like David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and Danny Boyle all voicing unqualified praise for digital technology.

Christopher Nolan is one of the few talking heads, along with a conflicted Martin Scorsese, who makes an impassioned case for the old-school approach. As much as I believe that film stock captures the superior image, his argument defies objective reasoning. This is a religious matter, devoted to the 115-year-old medium of his forefathers — this time, it’s personal. Nolan’s passion for celluloid has paid off so far: Inception won the Oscar for Best Cinematography in 2011, the only movie shot on film to do so since Slumdog Millionaire broke the mold in 2009. Poor Scorsese and cinematographer Bob Richardson, both vocal celluloid stalwarts, dabbled in digital 3D just once with Hugo, and the Academy slapped Richardson with his third Oscar. We welcome you and Marty to the 21st century, a blood-written note taped to the bottom of Richardson’s Oscar probably said. Don’t look back.

Indeed, Scorsese’s next movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, will be a film-free production; Life of Pi and Skyfall, two digitally-filmed, color-corrected visual feasts, are the favorites to win the Cinematography statue Sunday night; and the Nolan types are a dying breed. Almost all young filmmakers now start with digital cameras, reared on attractive equipment compatible with their MacBook Pros. Out with the old, in with the new. “But, still, is it good? Is all this right?” you plead. I know not all the answers, young lad, though it pains me to realize that the medium responsible for all the enrapturing images in my Ingmar Bergman film seminar will, certainly in my lifetime, become extinct. Yes, well — wait … how is my class watching these Bergman films, you say? They are screened from an HD projector, off high-quality DVDs. It beats watching movies in my dorm.

And this is where this this silly debate hits home. As a viewing platform, film started to lose its footing with the invention of VHS in 1977 (digital movie cameras only took off in the early 2000s). Since then, the home video market has seen Laserdisc, DVD and now Blu-ray and Netflix Instant. Blu-ray represents the pinnacle of any physical storage medium for commercial movies, with its 1080p high-definition resolution and lossless (code for “real sweet”) audio. Specialty distributors like The Criterion Collection have dedicated themselves to re-releasing the treasures of American and world cinema — the works of Fellini, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Powell & Pressburger and Malick — in pristine condition, albeit in digitally-encoded files.

Over the weekend, however, I noticed a telling update on The Criterion Collection’s Facebook page. In honor of Valentine’s Day, Criterion was streaming all its titles for free — on Hulu. Apparently, you can break up marathons of New Girl and The Bachelor with a little Michelangelo Antonioni or Jean-Luc Godard. I’m all for more access to film, but what if a poor connection renders Yojimbo to look like the screen is smothered in Vaseline? What if someone views Wings of Desire on a 13-inch laptop, at lowest brightness? What if, God forbid, some heathen watches Solaris on his iPhone?

Cinephilia, “the love of cinema,” is dead, provided that “cinema” not only signifies “movies” but also the movie theater as well as the physical medium of film itself. To the millions of you who still go to the movies, chances are, whether you watch The Avengers at Regal Cinemas or even Side by Side at Cornell Cinema, you are watching a digital projection. For the casual moviegoer to the obsessive collector, film is long gone. For filmmakers, it’s on the way out. For all of us, we’ll cherish our access to all the films in the world even as we debase visual and audio fidelity in the process. Just set some limits and don’t you dare watch a film on, to quote David Lynch, “your fucking telephone. Get real.”

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

But Why Can't I Save the World?

Courtesy of Santi Slade

After watching Zero Dark Thirty for a second time and binging on both 12-episode, 12-hour seasons of Homeland in just three days, I was struck by a pang of melancholy. For reasons that don’t trouble me nearly as much as they should, this realization had little to do with my supine disregard of exercise or summer internship applications. Instead, I felt insignificant and small, humbled by the extraordinary acts that both Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Carrie (Claire Danes) of Homeland achieve, the latter on a serialized basis.

Granted, these two heroines are among the most flawed protagonists in film and television history; Carrie spends significant screen time crying, screaming, panicking, bugging her eyes out or — and this is how Claire Danes wins all the Emmys — colliding her many bipolar symptoms at once, while Maya sits on the opposite end of the clinical spectrum, possessing more of a psychopathic coldness that I consider to be the film’s apparently-too-subtle critique of America’s callous, post-9/11 foreign policy. Regardless, as I emerged, bleary-eyed, from the couch and the cinema, I could not resist the superficial allure of such “heroic” work. I want to join the CIA!

Even after admiring the gray tones of counter-terrorism in Homeland anddefending Zero Dark Thirty’s anti-war message to anyone who will listen, I find myself at the most base and opportunistic of temptations. As damaged as Carrie and borderline sadistic as Maya may be, they pull off peerless feats of deduction and investigation that are based on hunches only they believe. And that’s pretty cool. In the vacuum of fiction, a writer (or, in the case of Homeland, a room of them) can prescribe witty retorts and enviable bravery to a character and, with a mental breakdown here and a sobbing fit there, still pass off the creation as human. It is when we believe that these superhumans could even possibly be real that the aforementioned sadness, the most unwarranted of phenomena, creeps in.

Let us take a more agreeable example, especially as I remember the more unsavory details of Maya’s character. For me, Harry Potter embodied this saintly, yet still powerfully empathetic, protagonist. Here is a teenager, just slightly older than me when I first read The Deathly Hallows in 2007, vanquishing the greatest evil his world has ever seen. How does he do it? (*Spoilers, I guess*) He walks into a dark forest, guided by the souls of all the family and friends who have perished in the decades-long war he is about to end and accepts that, to fulfill his destiny, he must die. Harry follows through every step without curling into the fetal position or crapping his pants — he approaches his certain demise with maturity and grace. And, after flatlining right there in the Forbidden Forest, he returns to life to kill Voldemort in front of all his peers. Rowling likely intended Harry’s defiant victory to strike the reader as inspirational and comforting, yet I found myself plummeting into an existential crisis as I examined my own life and found my worst struggles woefully pathetic compared to Harry’s. Gee, I haven’t levitated a feather, no less slayed anything close in size or strength to a basilisk or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!

Am I alone in finding some of our culture’s most popular and satiating movies, TV shows and books inherently depressing? That I expect an answer from a rhetorical question may hold an answer. Moving away from the morally questionable heroines of Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty, the hagiographic elevation of protagonists in more crowd-pleasing works like Harry Potter, Star Wars or Les Misérables may very well provoke an unintended moment of self-reflection. The Sopranos knows this well: In a very meta scene, gangster Christopher Moltisanti freaks out after reading in screenwriting books about how every character has an arc. “Where’s my arc?” he asks.

Of course, the only way to cast off this pall of self-deprecation is to build your own character — in a video game, that is. Super Mario Bros. or Call of Duty don’t cut it, as they focus only on objectives within a predetermined playing style, leaving no other options for the player but to master the mechanics. Bioware’s sci-fi trilogy Mass Effect, rightly considered a masterpiece of the medium, still falls short in granting the player complete control of his or her destiny. Although the player must make a plethora of in-game choices, the core narrative still follows one of three — good, bad or neutral — pre-determined paths that all funnel into basically the same ending. The storywriter has more authority over the narrative than the player, which is no different than non-interactive media like film and literature.

This brings me to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the black hole that annihilated the rest of my free time over winter break, and then some. This game makes no attempt to emulate cinema through shot reverse shot dialogue exchanges, “cutscenes” or “quick time events,” a la Mass Effect. Rather, Skyrim throws the player into a massive world of high fantasy, borrowing names and creatures from Norse and Camelot folklore and severing all other ties from the world of our own. Sure, there is an epic story involving a prophecy and a mythical villain, but like Fallout 3, the other popular game by Bethesda Studios, the plot serves as a vehicle for gameplay and not the other way around.

A game like Skyrim offers an oddly empowering experience. Why stick to a sword, bow or fire spell when you can wield them all simultaneously? The citizens of nine cities and countless villages, forts and dungeons depend on your agency to decide a Civil War, reconcile warring factions and kill a plague of dragons, in whatever order you choose. Or you can forget about all that and buy a house, collect potions and assist the local business owner in finding his lost family relic. But be wary about investing too much into your character: The humbling heroics of Harry Potter and Homeland have nothing on realizing that your video game character is living a more listless life than your own.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Zero Dark Thirty Review

Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Released in 2012

9/11 introduced the world and the 21st century to a new kind of evil. Al-Qaeda struck unannounced and nearly unseen, inspiring fear and a gnawing sense of helplessness that no one has been able to fully shake since. The rules of war changed once again, and the U.S. government adapted with wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. If there was one boogeyman behind the madness, it was Osama bin Laden, though it would be an oversimplification, of course, to blame it on any one individual.

The triumph of Zero Dark Thirty is that it takes what could have been jingoistic genre fare — the pursuit and killing of bin Laden — and tangles it in the global turmoil we have lived through over the past 11 years. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning pair behind The Hurt Locker, open the film with a traumatic audio montage of 9/11 distress calls and dot the background and, in a couple of startling moments, the foreground of the plot with other al-Qaeda attacks, like the 2005 London and the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombings. The result is an epic of incredible focus, a 157-minute film that earns every second. Zero Dark Thirty belongs to us, now, as a candid document of the anxiety and dislocation of our time. The filmmakers closely follow historical record while creating a piece of art, a riveting cinematic experience and the best American film of the year.

Like Argo and Lincoln, spoiler warnings are unnecessary. The foreknowledge of the main plot puts added pressure on the filmmakers to find other ways to generate suspense. Bigelow, cinematographer Greig Fraser and editors Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg respond with a look and feel more polished and artful than a BBC news feed, though not by much. That is a compliment, as the film never brings attention to itself. Sure, Fraser composes beautiful images — Arab fruit markets never cease to dazzle — and Bigelow packs some profound juxtapositions into single frames — a North American map reflecting a white, Muslim CIA official (Fredric Lehne) practicing Salah in his office must mean something. But there is a spontaneity to the film that keeps you constantly on edge, in constant fear that innocent people will die yet again. And when a few dozen of them inevitably do, the film cuts to actual news coverage of the attack, and the line between reenactment and reality stays blurred.

CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) is, in her own words, “the motherfucker who found” bin Laden. She truly is, but the film — in one of the its boldest choices — shies from granting its protagonist too much sympathy. She often loses it with bureaucrats, from her Station Chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) to the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini, here for comic relief), and not in a sassy, Sandra Bullock kind of way. She is unhinged, bordering on insanity. Multiple characters at multiple times stress the impossibility of her goal or the incompetence of her colleagues; most memorable is a tirade by Mark Strong, reminiscent of Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross but with, you know, actual stakes. While you may admire her resilience, Maya comes off as cold, internal and sexless, the opposite of the giddy Southern housewife she played in The Help. She finds a friend in rival-turned-BFF Jessica (Jennifer Ehle, unjustly shut out from supporting actress awards so far), but even when they trade texts with “brb” and “u” in them, Maya always bends the conversation back to bin Laden. Chastain keeps Maya at arm’s length, which is incredible to think about — somehow, the mastermind behind bin Laden’s death is just not very likable.

Parallel to the film’s treatment of Maya lies the big rhetorical question of Zero Dark Thirty: We killed bin Laden, but at what cost? This core, and obviously unanswered, question has gone over the heads of all the senators and columnists manufacturing a baseless controversy over the film’s alleged “pro-torture” stance. Indeed, the first half-hour consists of graphic sequences where agent Dan (Jason Clarke) and eventually Maya waterboard and emasculate an al-Qaeda suspect (Reda Kateb, in a thankless role), not to mention confine him to an awfully small box. For one, the prisoner never seems to disclose any actionable intelligence, though that plot point is up for debate. The larger issue remains Maya’s, and in turn the U.S. government’s, own morality in executing this mission. Regardless if torture was necessary to locate bin Laden or to win this war, Zero Dark Thirty wants you to consider whether these two goals were morally bankrupt from the start. Far from lionizing President Obama or excusing Dick Cheney, the film sees past partisan politics and quietly contemplates whether justice during wartime can be called justice at all. The final shot grants credence to this reading, and it is not heretical to consider the cost of a 10-year quest for vengeance. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty approaches something akin to Direct Cinema (a documentary film genre that aims to record objective truth) by staging some version of the truth, refusing a didactic little bow and letting the audience think for itself. That last part may be the problem.

I had conflicting emotions during the final 30 minutes, when SEAL Team Six flies to, invades and clears bin Laden’s compound. Viewed on a big screen with surround sound, the experience will render you immobile (a special shout-out to sound designer Paul Ottosson, who engineers the mesmerizing stealth helicopter sound effect, and sound mixer Ray Beckett, who keeps the gunfights startling and realistic). The deliberate pacing and night-vision lighting immerse you to an almost unbearable extent, like a fly on the soldiers’ helmets. The sequence inspires fear, angst and awe, the latter of which stuns the soldier who took the final and fateful shots — all he can say is “I shot the third floor guy,” as his comrades scramble to vacate the premises. Around this moment, I was on the verge of tears as a Navy SEAL handed one of Osama’s children a glowstick to quiet her down and coax out her father’s name for confirmation. I don’t know how to explain this emotional impact or why it struck me then. The mastery of Zero Dark Thirty is that it operates on an ineffable register, free to collide feelings and abstain from easy answers. Call it relativistic or postmodern or any viable, theoretical tag. All I know is that the world post-9/11 has been one of confusion and contradiction. Zero Dark Thirty also knows this, and by draping America’s triumphant moment of victory under the same ambiguity, it has rewritten history while staking a spot in it, too.

Final Verdict:

5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.