Mother! (2017)

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! isn't a film I liked much at all, but one thing you have to give it is that it's worth talking about. At the very least, it's interesting – so I guess I'm saying this is the cinematic equivalent of a guy wearing a clown costume and alternately blowing a trumpet while screaming Bible verses on the street corner. It's annoying and pretentious, but at least it isn't boring.

And yeah – there are gonna be SPOILERS in this one!

To be fair, there are some decent parts to this... the directing is nice and can have a rather uncomfortable claustrophobic feel to it, and the acting is good. The first half or so is a decent enough curiosity, telling an odd story of a couple trying to keep up a perfect house and stalled writing career when a stranger (Ed Harris) comes to the door and ends up staying with them. Everything is creepy and foreboding enough that you want to see where it goes – though later on, when the guy's wife shows up, it turns out the scariest thing in the movie is really just marital insecurity over whether or not Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are going to have kids.

Mostly, the tension in this comes from how much everyone treats Lawrence like shit – her character is just constantly stepped on in this. It's revealed that Ed Harris is a big fan of Bardem's poetry, I guess – and he's also dying of cancer.

Then things take a bizarre turn when Ed Harris's two psychotic sons come to the house and have no problem at all getting into a violent fist fight over their father's will, or some shit like that, and it ends as one of them kills the other. Bardem and the family go with him to the hospital while Lawrence cleans up the blood. What a good wife she is. I would have just fucking left.

And this is really where the movie starts to lose me and the problems start to become apparent. What happens next is a pretty crazy parade of people who know Ed Harris' character come and stay at the house to mourn the dead son while waiting for the funeral. They partake in all kinds of merry funeral activities like having sex in the bedroom, having sex on the stairs and trying to have sex on an unstable kitchen counter that explodes through the wall and rains sewer water everywhere – just good that these assholes are keeping things proper for the funeral mood. They have no logic or reason to it of course; they're just unrealistically nasty, because they have to be for this to work at all.

Lawrence, after like 20 minutes of screentime trying to get them to calm the fuck down and listen to her, finally melts down and screams for everyone to leave. I guess this was all it took. Why didn't she just lose her shit earlier then? Apparently that's the only thing these people will respond to. Not the dead guy they apparently knew – just a random woman losing her shit.

But seriously – this is one of the movie's problems, honestly. I just can't see the character or logic in what she's doing here. She's way too passive about everything. And I know – it's the metaphor of it all, about how she's supporting her husband even though it's tough. But that just doesn't make a good movie for me. Her actions, and the plot as a whole, only seem to exist to serve the metaphor. Everything is just about that message; there's no actual insight into the character. Lawrence is just moved around like a chess-piece so Aronofsky can say look at this message I have, and while all fiction is sorta like that, it really does come off as too transparent here. It's just too easy of a story when you can handwave away anything by saying it's the message! I just find stories more interesting when they're well-constructed around how people actually act in the modern civilized world around each other.

Then things get even worse and more insane when Bardem completes his work of poetry and then, without apparently sending it to anyone or advertising, people begin coming there on a pilgrimage to worship him for his art, even going so far as to set up churches and start treating him like a God. And before you get any crazy ideas, no, this has nothing to do with how Aronofsky sees his own art...

Things do get slightly out of hand when bombs start falling on the house randomly and people get lined up and executed like some kind of African jungle war prisoner ritual or something. Yes, I'm serious – you didn't click into another movie review. It's all very over the top and, while it's entertaining for how batshit crazy it is, you start to check your watch after a while. How long is this gonna go, anyway? I'm an American – we see this shit on TV all day.

Lawrence has the baby and Bardem insists on taking it from her to show to the raving hordes of religious nutballs who now worship him as a God. Within like, a few minutes, they tear the baby apart and eat it, which I am really curious if they got the anatomy right. We should consult some scientists. It would be a shame if the movie got this part wrong – would totally ruin its credibility.

Lawrence, after she gets the shit beaten out of her in a gruesome scene even I have to admit was effective, burns down the house and finally kills everyone except for herself and Bardem – curiously without a scratch on him. He carries her through the house burnt to a fucking crisp, and then takes her heart, the last thing she has left to give him.

Then it turns out Bardem is actually using her heart to restore his entire home to exactly how it was before - he is some kind of vampire or something, I guess, and while I get what the movie is saying here, about artists feeding on others' generosity, it is kind of funny, you have to admit. I think it's humorous that this is how this movie ended.

And I get it, okay – I get the message here. It's saying a lot about the tenets of marriage, especially to one so drawn to art, and the differences between how the archetypal Man and Woman act. Some of it is at least passably interesting commentary, not coming off as anything too dumb or base-level.

But there's just no real meat to this as a movie – all there is is the message. Everything is totally in service to that message. And that means basically nothing that actually happens in the movie has any significance. It's all just metaphoric, anyway; every bit of what happens. The rude people treating Lawrence like shit, the bombs falling, the execution, the eating of the child – it all just passes over with the airy, transparent feel of a ghost, because it doesn't matter. Nobody talks about the repercussions behind any of it, and the people don't act like real people, because they're all just chess-pieces and mouth-pieces for Aronofsky's message. It all exists only because Aronofsky needed to get a point across, which consequently comes off extremely heavy-handed.

I just find this a dull, almost immature way to write a movie. Personally it didn't gel with me. I know some people really liked it – such is the nature of taste. I like movies that treat the characters as more nuanced and complex beings. This one didn't do that for me.

Image copyright of its original owner; I don't own it.

REVIEW: The Hunger Games (2012)

This is the newest young adult novel phenomenon, The Hunger Games, originally written by Suzanne Collins. The book was good and while the premise wasn’t anything too original, it was a solid, well done story for the young adult demographic. Now we have the movie, and it is a huge, searing epic with a ton of great things about it – I mean damn. I don’t remember being this blown away by something based on a book I had already read in a long time. The Hunger Games rules, and I am here to tell you why, so let’s do that, shall we?

Director: Gary Ross

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

The story is a dystopian tale of a world far in the future, where each year young children are randomly selected from their ‘districts’ to fight to the death in “The Hunger Games,” which is passed off as a grand and fun-filled celebration of sorts by the corrupt, spoilt “Capitol” government city. The lead character is Katniss Everdeen, who subverts the usual and volunteers to be the tribute for her district so her younger sister does not have to. She enters into a strange relationship with fellow tribute Peeta and the two have to fight off 22 others in a game for their lives.

The main reason this works so well as a movie is that The Hunger Games was a very visual story, even in the book – it required you to see a lot of the things happening to get the full effect. I’m not one to decry the power of imagination and the benefits of a good page-turning book, but the massive effect The Hunger Games movie has on the viewer is just undeniable – everything feels big. There is a big epic undercurrent here that turns this rather bleak dystopian story into a swinging, mighty hammer of destruction that will just demolish you.

The action is a full-throttle festival of mayhem that works despite the sometimes overly shaking camera, and the dramatic moments are heartfelt and truly tragic at times. At one point a character, a young child, dies, and the effect is absolutely heartbreaking in how they present the scene. I won’t spoil too much, but I always think tragic moments like these are the cornerstones of a great epic, adding much needed weight to the situation. Everything feels like it matters, and because the people making the movie were so clearly into it, you will be, too.

The acting is just great, with Jennifer Lawrence, previously of Winter’s Bone, giving one of the best lead-heroine performances I’ve seen in a movie in the last few years as Katniss. She is a kick-ass lead, tough as nails, but also capable of being kind, and endowed with certain flaws that make her human. It’s the subtleties in this performance that really make it shine, like her conversation with Gale (Liam Hemsworth) in the beginning – their relationship is very well detailed and shaded, and it feels like two very real people in the midst of something abnormal and hard to deal with.

The fact that this is a dystopian story with a highly un-relatable plot and a futuristic setting is never a deterrent to the excellent characterization, and Lawrence’s Katniss is charismatic, relatable and believable. Much better than crap like the Children of Men movie, which pretty much took the good characters from the book and dialed them way down into the background as cardboard cutouts – ugh. This is a much better dystopian-world story.

Other great performances include Woody Harrelson as Haymitch, their trainer and mentor for the games. In the book you get to see a lot more of him, but the movie makes use of his shorter screen-time very well. He is a character haunted by the past, having survived a Hunger Games some time long ago, and though he hides it a lot by drinking, you can tell he’s hurting inside. He feels desperately sorry for the two tributes and resentful toward the Capitol making them do this in the first place. One of Harrelson’s best performances in years. Josh Hutcherson as Peeta is good, and he conveys the lovelorn-but-tough boy character very well, although he seemed a bit subdued at times – most of the focus was on Lawrence/Katniss a lot of the time.

The directing is pretty raw, and contains a lot of shaky-cam visuals, which I admit is a good tactic to make the whole movie seem more gritty and hard-assed. But sometimes during the really intense action scenes it gets a bit too much, and just feels like the cameraman was having a seizure in the studio. The special effects are top notch – witness the scene where the forest burns down, or the one where Peeta and Katniss ride out on their chariot, endowed in black leather and burning flames. Great stuff.

Now, of course this is a commentary on voyeurism and the blood-thirsty nature of much of today’s reality television – that much is obvious. It’s not a new message, but it’s delivered competently and the conviction with which it is presented is chilling and poignant. A lot of these scenes and characters feel so real that you will begin to feel that you shouldn’t be watching and propagating this kind of violence yourself. But the over-arching purpose is meaningful and necessary – and should not be missed.

This is a great film for its huge presence, and it makes you feel like you are literally in the middle of the battlefield. Most fantasy/sci fi movies can’t do that this well. The Hunger Games boasts brutal action, astounding acting talents from young up-and-comings, some chilling social commentary and as icing on the cake, some really wonderful visuals and special effects that make the whole thing a treat for the eyes. Hell, this was just a superb start to the “Blockbuster season,” and I can’t wait to see the sequel hopefully next year. If you like action movies or dystopian science fiction, The Hunger Games is about to rock your boat. Absolutely awesome.