Vampires, Melodrama, and Bad Erotica: Something for Everyone?
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) 1/4
Tepid, timid, turgid, tedious, and tame, if barely staying off the track of terrible, Fifty Shades of Grey is a monochromatic misfire, a syrupy softcore melodrama, a Harlequin Romance with pulleys. Chaste and clumsy, drab and dull, silly and sanctimonious, limp and ludicrous, it’s a Twilight ripoff that’s almost inferior to its already inferior inspiration.
Anastasia “Ana”Steele is a twenty-one-year-old English literature undergraduate at Washington State University’s satellite campus near Vancouver. When her roommate, Kate Kavanagh, becomes ill and is unable to interview wealthy twenty-seven-year-old publishing mogul Christian Grey at his company headquarters in Seattle for the college newspaper, Ana agrees to go in her place. Ana’s instantly intimidated; Christian’s immediately intrigued, showering her with lavish gifts, asking for a non-disclosure agreement, and pushing her to pursue a lifestyle of radical sexual experimentation, with him as the tour guide.
There are more accurate ways to describe the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey: A wimpy, wounded billionaire/dominant with a cleanliness fetish and no friends stalks a passive-aggressive virgin with helicopter rides and sports cars. A charm-free hero with control issues and a passive, fretful heroine have simpering and vanilla pretend-sex. The point’s the same: if searching for erotic cinema, choose Last Tango in Paris, choose That Obscure Object of Desire, choose 9 1/2 Weeks, choose sex, lies and videotape, choose Crash or Secretary or Blue Is the Warmest Color. Avoid Fifty Shades of Grey.
As clinical as a classroom lecture and as sleek as a Calvin Klein commercial, Fifty Shades of Grey has at least one more redeeming quality as Ana, the coy, likeable Dakota Johnson (The Social Network, 21 Jump Street) summons warmth and sweetness, traversing Ana’s zigzagging with reasonable aplomb. Yet the dreary Jamie Dornan has no ability to communicate deep, unimaginable pain. He’s more self-serious than self-loathing. Grey is a cutout character with an actor who refuses to transcend the material.
Fifty Shades of Grey needed to strengthen the sexual moments and submit to its “mommy porn”reputation. Instead, it played it safe. If not exactly embarrassed by its subject matter, director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy) and writer Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks) are extremely wary of plunging into it. Where Fifty Shades of Grey should be fun and frisky, it’s sterile and sanitized. Creating a genteel R-rated film from an X-rated book is like adapting a musical without the songs.
Taylor-Johnson may have tried: anyone would struggle to make EL James’BDSM potboiler into a spanking cinematic silk purse. Marcel certainly didn’t: she lifts much of the book’s lukewarm, laughably rudimentary dialogue verbatim, and there’s nothing as agonizingly awkward as James’tin-eared prose. The result is startling: in a narrative about getting out—far out—of one’s comfort zone and a film criticized for glamorizing domestic abuse, Fifty Shades of Grey is monumentally boring. It’s a love story without passion, a bondage movie without perversion.
Like some mutant spawn of The Bachelor, Fifty Shades of Grey is bland, flaccid, willfully wrongheaded about sex, and crippled by its own construction. Designed neither to menace nor to offend but to cosset the fatigued imagination, destined to inspire more head-shaking than lip-biting, it has about as much steam as a day-old cup of chamomile. It’s a desultory dud that swaps out the novel’s prolonged and explicit intercourse for flat, vapid inserts, padded out by a perplexing relationship between a strawman and blowup maiden.
Like Ana, you’ll roll your eyes many times over the course of Fifty Shades of Grey, but there’s no need to step into the playroom: enduring the running time is punishment enough. It’s worse than fifty shades of blah and better than fifty shades of dreck. And let’s be honest: in today’s day and age, stealing 120 minutes of an audience’s time in exchange for fifty shades of beige—a guileless, sexless, and artless retread of bad source material—isn’t merely a crime, it’s a sin.
Still Alice (2014) 2.5/4
Raw and airbrushed, poignant and straightforward to a fault, Still Alice is an absorbing and affecting portrait of loss and vulnerability; a moving inquisition into the emotions, memories, and connections that make us who we are and how we cope when they’re taken away. It exhibits a tough delicacy.
When Dr. Alice Howland, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, wife of John Howland (Alec Baldwin), and mother of three children—Anna (Kate Bosworth), Lydia (Kristin Stewart), and Tom—learns that she is suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s disease, she takes action and begins memorizing random words. As the disease progresses, it takes a significant toll on her speech and memory, straining relations with her family and professional career.
Still Alice is the kind of movie that exists solely to facilitate a great performance in the lead role. Although the part barely scratches the surface of her ability, Julianne Moore (Children of Men, The Kids Are All Right, Don Jon) succeeds smashingly as Alice, delivering one of the more memorable efforts of her career. She gives a controlled portrait of emotional implosion, bringing quietly heartbreaking nuances to a calm, considered treatment of a life-shattering situation. Alive with ferocity and committed to truth, Moore shows a staggering technical proficiency while never losing a whit of emotional resonance.
Moore’s formidable, much-lauded, Oscar-bound performance of a person disappearing before our eyes is heartbreaking to behold. She does her utmost to pull Still Alice toward the realm of meaningful social drama, and elevates Still Alice above its made-for-cable-television trappings, from disease-of-the-week fare to the role of a lifetime. To watch it is to observe one of the masters of the craft singlehandedly rescuing a film from being a maudlin mess into a watchable piece of cinema (a feat she’s pulled off twice in 2014, the other being Maps to the Stars).
Still Alice relies entirely on Moore’s performance to mask a multitude of shortcomings. Hampered by an unimaginative script and ordinary direction, hobbled by a naff aesthetic and a jarringly mawkish score, afflicted with glib contrivance and predictable writing, Still Alice cannot rise above the level of uninspired melodrama. Delivered with the expected emotional beats, Still Alice achieves modest goals, but one wishes it had a grander vision.
Banal in its Lifetime-movie execution and shot in the stolidly inconspicuous style of a low-rated cable drama, Still Alice feels a little schematic. It’s a much better movie than it ought to be, but not good enough to escape its pulpy, mendacious roots. Co-writer and co-director Richard Glatzer has cited YasujirōOzu as an influence, and Still Alice honours the Japanese master’s serenity unto nothingness, but pales in comparison to the miraculous purity and magnanimity of Tokyo Story.
In terms of character development, Still Alice lacks the thickness that made us sympathize and grieve with Julie Christie’s Fiona Anderson in Away from Her and Emmanuelle Riva’s Anne Laurent in Amour. Writer-directors Sarah Polley and Michael Haneke know the worst, and consider it their duty to show it; Glatzer and co-director Wash Westmoreland flinch and recoil at every opportunity the worst threatens to reveal itself. The audience gets close enough to feel the pain without reliving the depths of the horror. It’s Alzheimer’s made digestible, and that’s borderline disrespectful, if more accessible.
I wish Still Alice had the courage not to shy away from the uncomfortable, to shine a light into the abyss, knowing full well that down is sometimes the only way out. Instead, it merely provides a valuable lesson in empathy and understanding, a message of accepting what is lost, and celebrating what is not yet gone.
Is Still Alice the tearjerker of the year? No, that dubious title would likely go to Two Days, One Night. Yet the blemishes in Still Alice are generally overshadowed by sheer commitment from a fine actress. Julianne Moore’s artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice. That achievement takes remarkable talent—and a performance that most are sure to remember for a long time.
What We Do in the Shadows (2014) 3/4
Conceptually clever, consistently inventive, endearingly dorky, and exceedingly good-natured, What We Do in the Shadows is an affectionate, genial send-up of the vampire mythos; a respectful, delirious, surprisingly delicate farce; and a sly satire on millennial slackerdom. Darkly, edgily, riotously, murderously funny, it’s a fiendish, full-blooded delight.
Viago, Vladislav, Deacon, and Petyr are four vampires who share a flat in the Wellington suburb of Te Aro. Viago, Vladislav, and Deacon are between two and eight centuries old and have retained human appearances; the eight thousand-year-old Petyr resembles Count Orlok. Deacon has a human servant, Jackie, who runs errands. They are invited to “The Unholy Masquerade,”a ball where they run into supernatural creatures including zombies and witches, as well as Vladislav’s ex-girlfriend Pauline, who he nicknames “The Beast”due to their breakup. Mostly, though, the vampires fight werewolves, grieve, reconcile, and learn to get on with life.
What follows is partly a “Big Brother”-style reality spoof, complete with stagey confrontations, domestic melodrama, and introspective talking-head interviews. But it’s also one of the richest and most satisfying depictions of the vampires-in-the-modern-world conundrum ever concocted, capturing all the silliest, scariest and saddest aspects of the nocturnal bloodsucking tradition in one delicious package.
Perhaps it’s the cultural exhaustion and exasperation with the undead that’s the secret ingredient; it makes something hackneyed and stale newly irresistible. Playing out something like True Blood by way of Waiting for Guffman, What We Do in the Shadows is wonderfully irreverent, infectiously silly, and irrepressibly charming. An early montage provides historical context for how each of the four housemates ended up in New Zealand, and several of the group photos are almost worthy of their own prequels.
Loaded with inspired sight gags and memorable one-liners, What We Do in the Shadows filters the routines of the living through the lens of the dead, breathing fresh ideas into a genre threatened with creative exhaustion. With unflagging energy, entertaining inventiveness, and sustained ridiculousness to spare, it’s almost a jocular slant on Roy Andersson’s illustrious A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.
If Jim Jarmusch vividly reimagined the vampire caste as aging 80s bohemians grown too cool and too bored for life, these vampires are symbolic of something else: epic unkemptness. Any comparisons with This Is Spinal Tap, Shaun of the Dead, or Only Lovers Left Alive don’t do writer-directors Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement any favours. Yet if it’s not nearly on par with the “gold”standard of inanity, Three Amigos!—or tries to be New Zealand’s answer to Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz) and doesn’t get there—it’s still the most newfangled horror comedy to come out of New Zealand since Peter Jackson’s Braindead.
This mockumentary transcends its lowbrow inspirations, matching fantastic characters, sharp humour, and a well-polished story completely in tune with its source material with an undertone about life in a very remote city. Paying frank attention to the gruesome possibilities of the premise, it’s a dry, cheerfully horrific affair, a sanguine comedy that feels more than a bit like a Christopher Guest farce or an elaborate Monty Python sketch, imprinted with Kiwi comic sensibility. It brings warmth to its silliness, underscoring the loneliness of beings doomed to watch their loved ones die.
More often amusing than gut-busting, What We Do in the Shadows is a risk: some in the audience will chuckle, and some will cackle throughout like a witch after sucking helium. But it’s pleasingly thorough and innovative in its treatment of a well-worn subject, and quietly smart about dealing with the way things can change over a few hundred years (“yes, now Google it”), and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. At a brisk eighty-six minutes, it never sags or drags. Being immortal doesn’t mean your film has to stick around forever. (It can be canny, wistful, admirably executed, expertly paced, and bloody awesome.)
When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will move to Wellington. And if they’re anything like the quartet in What We Do in the Shadows, I’ll be stopping by for a drink.
For more reviews, visit Absurdity & Serenity at absurditys.wordpress.com.