Hanna (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Our names’ tattoos curl a thorny path down the skin of our futures, leading us inexorably towards a fate at once preordained and incidental. Names are either important or not. Our first form, their primacy makes them meaningless. It occurred to me, as a little girl, that other girls got named Hannah, or Hanna, or maybe even Hana, but it did not strike me that they might be real, in the way that I was. This is the first fallacy of childhood.

I saw Hanna twice this weekend. After the first, driving home fast and late, a huge slab of marbled bone and meat loomed up from the black stretch of highway—a deer carcass, flayed of all its skin. I was going 70, and I didn’t swerve. I just ran right over it. This is because I am an adult.

In the 1980s, my hometown was rife with Sarahs and Stephanies and Ambers. I didn’t meet another Hannah until I was at least 15 years old. No matter I got called, with my brother Noah, “the Bible kid.” Hannah could be spelled the same way forwards and backwards! I was perhaps destined for some obscure greatness. For who among us has not built their fort out back in the woods and waited for fireflies at dusk? This is the second fallacy of childhood.

The next time I saw Hanna it was with Mark at the mall. Earlier that day I had gone for a walk through the woods and thought about the ways in which we mistakenly hold onto beliefs about who we are as friends, and lovers, and daughters. I remembered a passage from Rilke about how life is full of strange experiences meant for one person alone, and that can never be spoken of. I felt some ancient longing roll up inside me, like a storm from far out across the prairie.

I sat down on a pile of leaves, still dusty from winter, and remembered a scene in the movie where archetypal changeling Saorsie Ronan kicks archetypal father-figure Eric Bana’s ass, telling him mournfully that he “didn’t prepare me for this,” and how the wreckage of her fairy-tale is actually the wreckage of all fairy-tales. How we come of age only when we learn to endure the ruin.

I almost burst into tears when Mark began a litany of Hanna’s aesthetic, cinematic, and narrative sins. This is because I am not really a critic, nor an adult.

The fight scenes in Hanna happen like pantomimes, or corps de ballet: the edges of objects sharpen; colors brighten; the soundtrack pumps. The movie is not a successful “action movie” in that it neither subverts the conventions of its genre nor deploys the tenets of realism. It is not real. It is a fairy-tale. And yet it is not entirely fantastical—the gestures it makes point towards some truth only found in the checkable reality that is our own muddled, pied existence. We anxiously shrug off the woolen coat of childhood, and are chilled; we hide our aging faces in the shoulder of another, like a child. We are chased forever by wolves. This is the third fallacy of childhood—that it exists.

Certified Copy (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

What a gift life is. What a gentle wind it is. What a strange radiation it gives off. What a feat of engineering it is. What a cypress it is. What a lovely, ruffled farce it is. What frigid heat it has. What faces. What invisible languages. How slowly fast. How it rolls over every morning. How it offices. How it houses. How much like a branch anchored to the molecules of air by its leaves it behaves. How little like itself it sounds. How steep its walls. What fights its boats put up against its awesome squalls. How beautiful are the consonant masts and the vowelled sails. What a mess it is. What teeth it has. What sleek sleep it seeks. The bizarre and pointless gardens it extends and tends. What rains are nourished in reverse by its great versed vegetables. What weird, coiled weeds. What cheap cameras and expensive expertises.  What belltowers it raises like flowers of sound to the eary sky. How sad it is it has to die. What finality. What a face. What a can of dreams. What a cavern of a movie. Echoing happiness. All good art begins pretending to be about art and ends up being about love.

What an actress Juliette Binoche is. What ample, living gnocchi. What intimacy Abbas Kiarostami knits with his direction. What forgotten nuances of human love nest just around the corner in the novel placement of a camera. A placement that articulates not only the point of view of the character on the screen, but of the unseen character’s perception of the psychology of the seen, tiptoeing up a twizzled stairway, stomping out of a church. What sweet originality burgeons in the careful observation of the fringes of an omnipotent genre. Who let the dogs of a dialogue about art and perception twist into a bleakly beautiful duet about love out? Kiarostrami’s magnanimous eye. How lovely realism is. How honeycombed and bee-protected are its sticky mysteries. How forever I want to live. Film! Bright dungeon! Spring! Drown me in your ocean of Binochean dreams. If I were a quiet, green hill barely visible in the distance from the balcony of her Italian villa, from which she sipped a cappuccino and stared out at the sun painting the morning, and her brown eyes briefly fell on me, I would be weightless in their grace.

Insidious (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

Insidious is like terrorism. Intermittently frightening, but 99% of the time a cheap narrative slapped down onto a bleakly stupid vision of the human condition. It slips between boring, intentionally funny, unintentionally funny, not scary, and genuinely scary. The story is about a generic American family whose shame about their private, imaginative visions of the world prevent them from sharing those visions with each other. This unsung longing—for freedom, sexual gratification, omnipotence, life—clogs the channels of intimacy and forgiveness that might otherwise characterize the practical, day-to-day operation of the family, cutting every interaction with a many-bladed, nameless edge. Psychic tension percolates, traversing even generations, as the gulf between private and familial meaning widens like a torture rack cranked steadily by the grim, star-knuckled hand of time. Conversations become surreally polite, or purposely apocryphal, and sublimated urges grind and undulate into grotesque clouds bulging and banging against the wafery veil of social order until they tear—with eloquence in art and violence in war—through us like their doorways into the world.

A perpendicular gulf: There is great pleasure in watching great actors grapple with roles far, far below them. Think Nic Cage in Con Air or Don Cheadle in Drunk History. But if the difference between good actor and bad movie and movie is not an abyss, matrices of dramatic flaccidity, like Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson as the unhappy couple, or Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, arise. This of course the point of a movie like Insidious, and of a war like the one on terror. The characters are supposed to just competently be there, like the inoffensive suites of wallpaper that come with each new version of Windows. The point is not to look at it, but to click on other things. I saw Insidious alone in a theater full of drunk and stoned and very happy undergraduates. It made me jealous of when I was that thoughtless. Of when I too was possessed with an insidious innocence. The movie is unevenly enjoyable. A vacation through our collective domestic nightmare, glancing some humorous side-characters, and fleetingly inventive frights, with a long layover in the astral plain. Perfect for a date or a group of beloved friends with low standards, happily bored by their own political and existential terror. Click, click, click.

Insidious (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

I didn’t actually see Insidious. The New Yorker described its leading little boy as a “nest of evil spirits” and no doubt the movie trotted out every weird-shit-on-walls/mysterious-thuds-overhead/doorknobs-turning-of-their-own-volition/static-on-random-electrical-devices horse in the Stygian stables that is the Possession Genre. Instead, I stayed in and watched a real horror film: Junebug. The fact that this movie is often housed under “drama” or perhaps even “comedy” should not fool you. If the pact we make with horror is a boozy, adolescent one—trading the pinot noir of plot and cabernet of character for the warm 40 of shock—Junebug attends to the murderous, blinding bath-tub brew that is actual terror, in our actual lives. Its potent swill of family, class, culture, and shame induces a visceral reaction that few horror movies can, for what we react to is not a “nightmare” (realized in the shaky camera effects and suggestive soundtracking we’ve been trained to recognize one as), but the contours of what approximates real horror in our post-secular, post-bourgeoisie, capriciously capitalistic, and endlessly commodified times. The camera freezes on interiors in Junebug as if a crime has been committed: the carpeted stairs leading down to the basement, and the fake wood paneling in that basement; the Stairmaster at an odd, sad angle in the master bedroom; the matching cherry dining set. Everything came from someplace like Furniture Barn or Wood Unlimited, and did so 20-25 years ago. Junebug’s protagonists are middle-class, and monstrous. When the prodigal son returns home with his expensive, elegant wife, what happens, happens. And it’s scary. And I hid my head in my T-shirt more than once.

And it reminded me of what else I did today: attend a teach-in. My political history is vague and unwinning: I once slept at a “peace camp” protesting the rerouting of a highway through contested sacred Native American ground in college. Then I committed myself to poetry, the discovery of sex and booze followed soon after, and the political, except as a whetstone for whatever theoretical model I was attempting to learn the jargon of, limped out of my life like a pudgy, discarded BFF. Distancing oneself from the grimy, sweaty, generally unattractive earnestness of “activism” is a time-honored tradition of the intellectual classes. Whether you advocate to rescind the inhumane system of capitalism in favor of a just and equal socialist nation (as one speaker at the teach-in did), or accuse those who organize events like the one I attended today as “whiners” (a-hem), you’re equally drowning in the gooey vat of diagnosis; in stopping at the café of the critical-descriptive, you miss the mad rush for the spit, where the hordes grill and devour the endless, rotten meat of the so-called civilized, and their civilizing process. I spout nothing new here. The facts I heard today were discouraging, and horrifying. The response I felt in myself even more so. For when asked to stand and chant, “Tax the Rich!” did I stand and chant? Did I want to?  Here is Susan Sontag on Emil Cioran: “His aim is diagnosis. For relief, it may be that one must abandon the pride of knowing and feeling so much—a local pride that has cost everyone hideously by now.” Sweet dreams, folks.

Jane Eyre (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

The male imagination is a windy, terrifying place.

Its appetites insatiable, unstable, black, pornographic, and endless.

Rare is the movie that makes you want to not just fuck, but love the female lead—rare as I suppose it is in life.

Rare is the girl so pure and beautiful that to love her would be enough.

In every scene, Mia Wasikowska coruscates this rarity.

Never more eloquently than in sparring Michael Fassbender’s magically smoldering Rochester.

The teary, electric passion between the two is nothing short of a gift.

They make the Lifetime movie-brutalized genre of melodrama not only forgivable, but venerable.

Rare is the movie that can make you believe an unbearable love is possible.

The billowing torch Eyre and Rochester bear along the gusted midnight plain of their narrative makes my own sporadic bursts of pussy-chasing look like a miniature flashlight not even bought—shoplifted—from the CVS of my imagination, whose only light is its own fluorescent torture.

Like all good movies, Eyre helped me realize I am a fool and an asshole, even as it gave me hope I might not be.

The function I suppose Jane Eyre herself performs for Rochester.

That she does not exist in life, in the dark, rainy parking lot of Amherst Cinema, as I walked out to my car, seemed mankind’s keenest tragedy.

If in Eyre’s braids alone I could not glimpse all the universe I beheld’s coiled splendor, I would be blinder than an underwater mountain.

When Rochester smokes his cigarettes in virile anguish, just as Fassbender’s British spy in Basterds, for a few nighmarishly tantalizing seconds I literally become homosexual…

If women looked at me the way they must at him in my imagination, I would fear nothing.

I would walk through walls, breathe fire, stick my head into the mouth of death like a large black lion and laugh  into the throat-hole like a metaphysical bullhorn.

The first act is slow.

The dialogue is rich, baroque, and conceptual—yet effortless.

Fukunaga’s engaging direction; Goldman’s cinematography is quite lush; Buffini’s screenplay shivers between competence and excellence.

The acting is so close to being, we see into the consciousnesses of our two leads that thing we have no easy name for, and so, throwing up our hands in gratitude and disgust, call poetry.

Ten women with a tenth of Eyre’s courage and mettle, working together, could rearrange the madhouse we call the world into a paradise.

Go see Jane Eyre if you want to relearn how pathetic, petty, impotent, simple, tepid, empty, shallow, and alone your own experience of love has been.

Source Code (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens who is played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the newest film from Duncan Jones aka Duncan Zowie Jones aka the son of David Bowie whose first feature was Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, and whose second, Source Code, stars Jake Gyllenhaal as both Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens and some History teacher named Sean Fentress, who is actually played by a French guy or at least a guy with a long French name and whose bland mug we see exactly twice, fleetingly, when Jake Gyllenhaal the star of Source Code, stares, with his already huge peepers stretched to impossible circumferences, first into a train lavatory mirror and aforementioned possibly French, definitely “attractive” actor looks back, and second, during the insultingly improbable ending, as he grins back at Jake Gyllenhaal, whose star-wattage is best branded as “energy-saving,” from the infamous “bean” in front of the Art Institute of Chicago, the city where Source Code was filmed and whose pretty geometry Duncan Jones lingers pornographically over in the opening of Source Code

which stars Jake Gyllenhaal having one of his better fits of acting as he attempts to convey the seriousness of the existential implications in a plot screenwriter Ben Ripley seems to have cribbed from Groundhog Day, Shutter Island, and all those Iraq war movies no one ever goes to see, except perhaps Duncan Jones aka Duncan Zowie Jones aka the son of David Bowie, the elegance of whose British pedigree not so subtly interacts with the purity of his Hollywood indoctrination, the result of which, in Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as some kind of hastily conceived and “flawed” hero for our undeserving times, means his over-stuffed palette of philosophical tropes, action sequences, stabs at character and dramatic arc, and patriotic master-narratives gets mixed together to produce a kind of shit brown, which is to say healthy enough though messy upon examination and the dull, bodily repetition of which falls to the goofy yet game Jake Gyllenhaal who seems himself to remain in a perpetual state of arrested adolescence, his large thighs encircled in tweenager fat as he hunkers down a train speeding towards

Chicago, a city at once shabby, vainglorious, and cruel, like ambition in poets or mega-fame in parents, and yet whose sad glory Duncan Jones aka Duncan Zowie Jones aka the son of David Bowie seems not to notice as he simply pins its form, as a slightly dumb and over-sized lepidopterist might, to the opening, middle, and end of his movie, Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as semi-dead helicopter pilot Colter Stevens, and Vera Farmiga as the steely Army captain who will not even blink a tough, sexy eyelash as fundamental questions involving the persistence of matter and the existence of multiverse are answered and traversed by a simple Yahoo email account in Source Code, a movie which gives Jake Gyllenhaal multiple opportunities to become complex, and itself numerous exits from which to swerve off the crumbling infrastructure of high-concept “what is reality” plot-ways and yet which settles for the kind of movie “magic” that is as cute, earnest, and smear-offable as the lip gloss of Michelle Monaghan, who is also in Source Code, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens, a…

Source Code (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

What if every time you read anything, you summoned the author’s mind into your own, housed it there on life-support, and for the duration of your attention span, that consciousness became a living thing. As long as you concentrated on this stranger’s words and let them overdub your own internal monologue, that writer was awake, alert, looking out through your eyes, feeling what you felt, thriving within your body. Then the moment you closed the book, or were distracted by a squirrel outside, or an email, or a phone call—the writer’s mind, as if struck by a freight train, is wiped from existence. It drifts without sensation or agency in the lightless void whose barest description belies a dimensionality it is defined by the lack of. Until the squirrel on the powerline runs out of your field of vision, or you delete the Facebook invite you just received, and return to your reading. Suddenly as if sucked out of purgatory and spit back into life the writer breathes again, or at least thinks, which is the breath of being. Once again the writer is smiling, weeping, opining, thrilling and being thrilled by the spongy, plangent joy of your form. As if to live in the empathetic present is the only heaven.

Reveling in the concept of a non-writer doomed to relive the same moment over and over is the primary Source of pleasure in Code. Watching whiskered, big-eyed Gyllenhaal grok his paradox isn’t nearly as wonderful as watching Bill Murray do it in Groundhog Day, but this sisyphean DeLorean gets adrenalized by shrinking down the existential loop from 1 day to 8 minutes. The other good thing Code does is blur in all its glossy, techno-thriller glory the line between the never-ending present and mother Death. Right now, reading this, you could be having a flashback on your deathbed, remembering when you read it long ago. Maybe we are all already dead, and the thing we call life is just one long, slow flashback. Something we lived before and now are falling through in a perfectly representational montage. Eternity, momentarity, the dream of forever realized through sheer faith in the infinity of now—in Code these venerable leitmotifs are like the most delicious Sicilian dough ever kneaded being grinded through the Play-Doh hand-crank of hackneyed idiocy that is the loud, plastic sacrament of blockbuster form. But it’s non-toxic, so you can still eat it. I’ve been eating it my whole life. It’s good!

Limitless (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Limitless is probably the malest piece of movie making we’ve seen in awhile. It’s not misogynistic, or even sexist—though Abbie Cornish’s bit part as Bradley Cooper’s love interest is pretty and perfunctory, we must admit it’s classily done—it is just really, really male. Like bong hits and video games male; like computer chess and burritos; like snappy puns traded at lightning speed and a mattress on the floor, “Chocolate and Cheese” on the stereo for old time’s sake. Bradley Cooper exudes a certain kind of large, safe, and tasty masculinity: he is equal parts the prom king who secretly befriended you in high school, and the pony-tailed philosophy major you dated in college. The zero-to-hero story this movie tells could be some kind of indictment of the American dream, or a clever retelling of the Faust myth, or a sly endorsement of drugs. Whatever it is, and whoever wrote it  (former frat boys is what we’ve heard), it is the funnest action movie in theaters right now, its under-the-influence conceit consistently pushed to jaw-dropping extremes. We saw this movie in a crowded theater—one of the first in a long time and oh what a difference some public makes—and the middle-aged couple next to us seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. At one point, Bradley Cooper is required to drink some blood. Some shit happens and it’s his only way out of a bad situation and blah blah blah. But the way director Neil Burger allows us to arrive at this conclusion with Cooper, to vicariously assess all the possible scenarios and realize—with him, nay, as him—that this is truly the only way, is a mini-masterpiece of pacing and focus. An image that has been Twilighted to death suddenly became disgustingly pleasurable. As Cooper opened his lovely mouth to slurp at the black stain of sangre, the older gentleman in the exact next seat to us chuckled, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

It reminded us of the first few months of our friendship with Mark—in fact this whole movie is what it’s like to be friends with a man, to behold with bemusement and horror the quotidian workings of the bland, megalomaniacal logic that has somehow ruled the world for thousands of years—when we would engage in absurd thought experiments like: If all your poetic ambitions would be fulfilled but you could only eat tacos for the rest of your life, would you do it? Or: Would you rather be able to instantly know people’s darkest desire or have any kind of new car that you wanted? Would you drink blood if it allowed you to access 100% of you brain? If you could access 100% of your brain, would you use it to make an ass-ton of money, learn a bunch of foreign languages solely to prattle to a UN’s-worth of maître ds, and run for president? Or would you use your powers in some non-self-monumentalizing way? Eschew the priapic path in a true quest for empathy, and the maximum good? As the camera zoomed us down another montage of NYC’s streets and the club-music soundtrack pounded like the rain of a thousand remixed Adidas commercials, we didn’t care that Cooper was merely a cipher of contemporary male anxiety, his meteoric ascent the raging hard-on every white American dude knows he could at any moment have in the over-priced skinny jeans he has somehow found himself in. We were having fun, as one does, when one is hanging with the boys. Go see this movie if even the thought of illegal substances now makes you paranoid.

Barney’s Version (2010) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Perhaps the occasional surprise is the best life has to offer—the milder, the better. For having one’s expectations gently overturned whilst simultaneously being thrust upward is surely the closest we humans actually ever come to anything like divinity. We provide ourselves with the tiniest of tinseled miracles; and the fact that they tarnish easily, smudge and vanish as quickly as chalk in rain, only allows for their quiet reoccurrence to press that much more insistently into the blinding momentary flash in which we only ever consciously live. To think things will go the way you think they will, and to be positive in your thinking so, to clutch your certitude sweatily in the palm of your point of view, and then to find—suddenly and almost inexplicably in the midst of the experience itself—that in truth the thing is going much better, that you are enjoying yourself much more, and in fact surprising yourself with the level of enjoyment you are experiencing—for you had quite forgotten that you were a person capable of unfettered enjoyment, of unconscious experiential glee—is to ride the random, miniscule rollercoaster of the critical act.

And so we found ourselves last night at the 9:45 showing of Barney’s Version, a movie at whose preview we had harrumphed so frequently, and with such vehemence, that it had gradually gained syntax, and vocabulary—curdling like Bailey’s in Jameson in Guinness into a diatribe against Paul Giamatti, narratives featuring middle-aged men and their sexual peccadilloes, mid-century American novels, and baby-boomer aesthetics as a whole. “Who wants to watch another unappealing bourgeoisie male sleep with a slew of beautiful women, mess up, be forgiven, crack some semi-entertaining jokes, and die?” we’d ask whoever would listen, stage-whispering in agitation, the tips of our braids flicking popcorn from the top of the bag with every emphatic jerk of our head. “This movie looks hideous.” Not for the first time, we confront the mystery of expectation. Had we believed the opposite, that BV was going to initiate our personal constellation of 2011’s poignant character-studies, to be the first disarming and honest cinematic daffodil to sprout in the humus of early spring, we probably would have been profoundly disappointed. There are some dull moments in this movie, as there probably were in the Mordecai Richler novel from which BV was unmistakably yanked: the amount of whiskey, and cigars, and bad behavior on display is yawningly retro. But overall we were charmed. We were pulled in. There were moments of actual tension we squirmed through, remembering with horror similar scenes in which we had unluckily been participants. For the chance to revisit your own disgraces through the aestheticized prism of art, to view what you once endured, is another instance where we are granted god-likeness. As it must be for god, watching our own dilemmas of soul re-cast and externalized is at once heightening and nullifying. It’s also the only occasional surprise we ask of art. Go see this movie if you used to have time to read books.

Barney’s Version (2010) | Review by Mark Leidner

Ten thousand generations were born, struggled with nature, made love, waged war, bore young, feared death, gazed into the grief-guitared eyes of their survivors, and then died—before we even discovered language. Ten thousand generations of joy, terror, and bewilderment—multiplied laterally across all the people in each generation— mothers, fathers, hunters, explorers, gatherers, thieves, weaklings, strangers—all before anyone we even know of was born. Sometimes this perspective buoys me when angst and longing have wound a ball of anxiety so tight behind my eyes I feel I might explode against the nearest brick wall. Even the comfort literature offers, like a pillow of all-time’s futile similarity to the present, is dwarfed by it. Those lost consciousnesses from which we all came, like an extra layer of past wrapped loosely around the already unfathomable body of known history, wrapped tighter around the unfathomable body of the present, form a kind of dim, halotic corona. An orb bereft of detail and of a scale too epic to picture. But still I like to think about it, when I want to tint the possibly tedious talk of say, reviewing another movie, with mystery. I picture this idea like the belt of golden letters scrolling backward at the beginning of Star Wars, before the movie of the review begins. Barney’s Version is about a man’s life. Not a particularly likeable man, and not a particularly interesting life, but its particularity is in its totality of scope. Had it been shot and scripted by Mike Leigh instead of Richard J. Lewis and Michael Konyves, B’s V might have been able to overcome uneven pacing, some forced plotting, and visual style that sags as much as it blossoms. But I still wept walking out of the theater, and on the walk home as the clock on my cellphone struck midnight, pulling close the collar of my jacket, zipping up because the temperature had plummeted ten degrees during the 132-minute runtime, watching the shadows cast by the streetlight stretch and collapse on the sidewalk under my shoes as I stepped, I felt saddened and buoyed by the stupid similarity of the titular character’s plight to my own, flooded with gratitude for how many scenes in which I’d silently pled with him to wake up, simply forgive himself, love himself and allow himself to be loved; wiping tears and flinging them into the Northampton night with the side of my hand, knowing I too could change if only because I’d wanted Barney to so badly. The cast shines. Dustin Hoffman oozes charm. Minnie Driver cloys lusciously. Rosamund Pike is the womanly embodiment of dawn. And pasty, bloated Paul Giamatti fucks bad acting in the ass with a skyscraper. Gorged on popcorn and tortured by thirst, I climbed the two flights of stairs into my dark apartment. Light painted my profile as I opened the refrigerator, found the Brita, and poured a cord of cold water into the bottom of the Jacksonville Jaguars glass I’d drawn from the cupboard. The music made as it struck and filled and danced into the vessel echoed the voice of an ancient angel.

The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

You can literally smell the cheap glue holding together the pages of the mass market paperback from which The Lincoln Lawyer was adapted. You can smell the airport bookstore in which thousands of upwardly mobile ants of capitalism purchased it, desperate to inexpensively distract themselves from the emptiness of endless, meaningless travel. Meeting Hannah in the food court of the Hampshire Mall before the movie, I immediately sensed disillusionment emanating from her demeanor. Something to do with school, or money, or work had piled up in her mind and was bearing down when she  she looked up at me and said, “It’s all a scam.” Then she listed off everything in her life that had been beating her down, and it was not a vain whine, but a true and tragic perception, and while I felt nothing but empathy as her litany intensified, I decided it nobler to risk offense by challenging her doom-warble than to let it run on unchecked, malingering through her mind like a vile river, tainting all the beautiful parts, so I interrupted her mid-sentence by slamming my fist on the table, “Snap out of it!” Some heavily-pierced teenagers turned to look at us, as did the overweight security guard with his elbow on the ATM, as did the Mexican mother in a black hoodie bouncing an infant on her hip, as did the white slave behind the glass at Subway. “Not everything is a scam, Hannah,” and as the words came out of my mouth I wondered if I believed them. “Friendship isn’t a scam.” I gestured to the surrounding mall. “This isn’t.” I touched my heart. “Love isn’t a scam.” I held my arms out wide. “Family isn’t.” Then I paused and tried to summon into my face everything I’ve learned about acting from the 27 movies I have seen in the theater since last November. I stared into Hannah’s eyes. “Your soul isn’t a scam.”

Here Hannah laughed—barely—which is always enough for me. Half an hour later we were seated, relaxed, ready to be drawn into the Los Angelesy glow of The Lincoln Lawyer. Matthew McConaughey reprises his wily Southern lawyer role from A Time to Kill, which is what you’ll want to have, and about all you’ll accomplish, by buying a ticket. There are two okay things about the movie. Cast and concept. No one is a bad actor, and the legal finger trap at the center of the plot is mildly clever. But Brad Furman’s direction is strictly by the numbers. Remember when Danny Boyle used his camera in crazy ways to make James Franco’s one-scene battle with mortality feel miraculously expansive and multi-dimensional? This is like the opposite of that—a great cast with lots of plot twists and locations filmed through such a flat, lifeless lens that nothing at all appears to happen. The script is equally dead on arrival. I wish I was a two-bit gangster so I could corner screenwriter John Romano in the alleyway behind Hollywood and say, “You wanna write a courtroom drama, Johnny?” Romano would nod. “You know what makes a good courtroom drama?” He would shake his head. “Verbal sparks.” And here I would punch him hard in the gut. He’d double over and his fedora would fall off. I’d pick it up, dust it off, then throw it at him and say, “As in you ain’t got any.”  At this point he would struggle to stand upright and shout, “You poets, you don’t know what it’s like to write under the gun we write under! They’re throwing literally thousands of dollars at us! Real money!” And I would just keep walking, not looking back, but muttering over my shoulder, “If you can’t take the heat, Johnny, stay outta the pictures.”

Romano’s flaccid screenplay and Furman’s sloppy, castrated direction are like jury tampering and attorney-client conflicts of interest motivating the Your Honor of my suspended disbelief to throw his hands up by the middle of the first act and declare a cinematic mistrial. Go back to film school, you hacks! Or wherever it is people go to learn about form. After the movie Hannah and I attempted to restore some semblance of respect for ourselves by strolling around the mostly shuttered-up mall, past the empty Bath & Body Works, past the GNC with towers of protein supplements stacked outside, past the two adjacent mani-pedi salons sans customers, home to two different clans of Koreans eying us grimly from within, past the combined Verizon and WE BUY GOLD kiosk; and we talked about how The Lincoln Lawyer represents the kind of plodding narrative young writers so often reject in favor of experimentation, hold up as straw men in order to flagellate convention in “lyric essays” chic journals publish by the bushel, shrilly decrying the scam of realism, its pat, capitalistic parables, its edification of consumption, objectification, imperialism—objection! Realism isn’t what is codified. It’s like the universe—always expanding—by definition. And its fulfillment necessitates our infinite gymnasium of experimentation and invention. Airport fiction and its filmic correlatives are just the bathwater, baby. As in don’t throw yourself out with it. If you decided to become an atheist because all the Christians you ever met were ignorant, angry, and warlike, you would still be a fool. How many self-proclaimed experimental writers make the same mistake. The defense (never) rests.

The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Variously, we consider boredom. We endure it. We loll in it—at times not even minding it, really, for boredom is stasis and being still at the very least means not getting worse. What is funny about boredom is that it is not a verb: I bored it does not mean what it should. This review, as we write it, threatens to bore us—thus proving the difficulty in articulating a phenomenon without becoming complicit in its reproduction. In that way, boredom is also empire. Or family, its bland embrace like that of the fattest aunt you’ve ever had, welcoming you back to the biennially-organized fold. Or like certain people of power who occasionally feel compelled by some arcane force of convention to justify whatever action they have taken to whatever end, their glossy lips spewing signification like so many generic strawberry hard candies into the huge cut-glass simulacrum our polis hath become. Extract the gooey center of that ruddy, foil-wrapped confection, shove it into a Lincoln Continental, plop that Lincoln down in the middle of John Grisham’s pre-Firm morning fart, set the whole thing en flambeau with an “urban” soundtrack, and you’ve pretty much got The Lincoln Lawyer, a movie that gestures endlessly, and emptily, towards the thin, toned Cougar it could have been. Towards the just, verdant society it should have joined. Towards the dappled, tensile realism it might have made.

The previews gave any moves this movie might have entertained making on us entirely away. If you’ve heeded any of our recommendations, or warnings, these last few months, you can probably recount the plot of TLL better than William H. Macy, who takes his shoulder-length bob right out of the action half-way through, no doubt in search of more exciting fare. Matthew McConaughey drawls “witty remarks” and Marisa Tomei responds with rueful grins; Ryan Phillippe is beautiful but callous and uber-rich; there’s a black chauffeur, a wrongly-accused Latino, and some dark-haired, tattooed women of ill repute. Also a square-jawed state prosecutor. And an aging black judge. Oh! And John Leguizamo. We believe that’s America accounted for. A not-unpleasant boredom—the boredom of genre, and fulfillment—turns the tiny spit of TLL’s gamey plot. Though we managed to flatten any plot twist ourselves long before Matty McC could strut his way over to it, we didn’t really mind watching him flounce and emote while swigging back bourbon straight from the bottle, his face-sweat an entire character unto itself. And that is exactly the problem with contemporary poetry!

Limitless (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

Limitless stars Bradley Cooper as a bad writer who swallows a magical pill and overnight is neurally rearranged into a multilingual, supermodel-fucking Beethoven of day-trading. Cooper’s acting chops are sharper and more self-deprecating then you might expect for such a slick-lookin’ Alpha. He brings his versatility and charm to bear on what would otherwise be a Matrixy cliché difficult to not make suck. Add to that the Hitchcockian visual and psychological ironies director Neil Burger lets coalesce around several action sequences, and Limitless blossoms into enjoyable. Aussie goddess Abbie Cornish, for example, escapes capture in one scene by charging into a crowded ice-skating rink, grabbing a random schoolgirl by the wrists, and swinging her around so that the blades of the girl’s skates slice open the face of a murderous pursuer. I am so happy to be alive in a world in which I am able to write the previous sentence without hyperbole or embellishment. That mainstream moviemakers could even dream of seriously filming such a simple, insane spectacle is a testament to the serendipity of stupidity, and the surprise it repeatedly yields. Another spell in Limitless’s wand is that screenwriter Leslie Dixon actually gives venerable villain Robert DeNiro some awesome lines to chew on.

DeNiro’s plunge from iconic pugnacious thespian into the unfunny punchline punctuating Hollywood’s long, shallow joke is sad, I guess, all the more so because it’s so unnecessary. If you give him good lines, he rifles them further into wry tenacity than almost anyone. But if you give him bad lines, he will look like a mumbling, squinty-eyed pile of doo-doo. So cheers Leslie! This movie isn’t for snobs though. Massive plot holes and impossible coincidences keep it firmly pedestrian. Since no one has cell phones, long, 80’s-style answering machine messages are constantly being left for our heroes to check by pressing flashing red buttons when they enter their apartments. And while Bradley Cooper is made smart enough to make a bazillion dollars and manipulate everyone through Herculean Sherlockian deduction, he somehow remains too stupid to think even briefly, critically about his burgeoning addiction to the unstable source of that omniscience. Analogies abound. Lower guard, enter Limitless, leave thrilled, but don’t forget the first step.

Poets on Film (2010-11) | Review by The Kinks

The King’s Speech (2010) | Review by Mark Leidner

David Berman, a poet of negligible academic value who nonetheless remains popular among the aging hipsters now clawing their way into positions of authority within the rotting carapace of the academy, has a line, “All my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” Voice, then, is a function of confidence, not talent. Poetry, then, is a function of faith, not intellect. The singer who believes against all countermanding evidence in his own truth, and who projects it most ferociously into the echo chamber of public discourse, tasseled in seeming unconcern for its critical reception, is heard for longer and listened to more fully than the smoothest nightingale. House limps. McNulty drinks. Whitman sheaths his penis in the anuses of boys. Christ bleeds. Tony Soprano feels. Obama is black. Palin is female. I am a sexually frustrated megalomaniac. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is so burdened by honor he rides horses through Rohan while tumorous Gondor metastasizes into political cannibalism. The othering power of perceived defect is the bedrock upon which empire heteronormativity erects its omnipotent steeple. This is the paradox of the West, and the mystery warms the core of our every art form, personal relationship, and social endeavor. The song of singers who aren’t meant to sing is the only music or literature that matters, or will ever.

The King’s Speech hits every note in this symphony so effortlessly that even the most cynical elitist will find it at least periodically rousing, for cynicism itself is aaa critical stutter. Hate Hitler? The most talented singer of German of all? Then it’s hard not to root for his stammering Limey foil. Especially when everyone around Colin Firth is becoming a douchebag right when England needs a hero. I didn’t watch the Academy Awards. It’s everything horrible about poetry multiplied by money, fame, and the most corrupting influence of all, an actual audience—so I don’t know who or what movies won for what things, but after watching The King’s Speech, I bet it won for best adapted screenplay, direction, and picture. I also bet Colin Firth won best lead actor. Geoffrey Rush probably didn’t beat out Christian Bale’s virtuosic crackhead in The Fighter, but that’s not to say Rush doesn’t still soar in The King’s, racking up what must be a world record for tender, knowing twinkles-in-the-eye per scene. As Hannah found in January¹, the lessons re: finding one’s voice that effloresce across  the consciousness after even cursorily reflecting upon Speech are so large and obvious that for a poet to illustrate them would be counter-poetically tedious and self-serving. But fuck it. We must stop trying to sound so much like each other. A good poem should make half of us hate you and half of us adore you, not all of us like you. Light dies without an anchoring darkness to break through. Voice is an iceberg of which technique is but tip; courage the voluminous, submerged most. Your nations need you. In a form unrecognizable now as then, the spirit of Hitler, of Voldemort, of Black Swan, of AWP is always calling the weak, increasing its flock, hissing across the world like wind between buildings. Who but a poet will reach inside, wrest the ember of their own weakness out with bare hands, let it burn through their fingers, and hammer it into a sword in the forge of creative writing workshops? Who will give neutral onlookers cause to open their mouths and whisper to no one, “Sweet, fancy Moses…” Who will give their voice to the voiceless.

Jane Eyre (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

My dearest lady friends,

You know that we have spoken of the Brontës, those poor, strange, and secret creatures we read too early, too often, believing in their portraits of love, and passion, and suffering, as we believed in little else at whichever of the tender feminine ages we happened to be when first we chanced upon their fat, flooding novels. We have spoken of Catherine, and of Jane; of Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester, choosing to align ourselves with the version we felt most encapsulated what we were certain was to be both the nature of our incipient womanly selves—wild, long-haired, glorious—and the character of our eventual true loves—brooding, raven-eyed, devoted to none save us. And having cast ourselves in the vast movie that each novel performed inside our extravagant minds, we have looked askance at actual cinematic portrayals, for how could anyone other than we—those bursting stars we flamed as—inhabit fully the jealous vicissitudes of Catherine Earnshaw, the fierce modesty of Jane Eyre. Impossible! We thought at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty. The Brontës wrote for us, and us alone, and neither the BBC nor Orson Welles nor Juliette Binoche nor, diminishingly, Anna Paquin nor Joan Fontaine nor Ralph Fiennes could understand this. And thus they doomed themselves to failure.

And yet now, my good gentle women, we find an adaptation perhaps worthy of our intelligence, and our distressing youths. Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre! Mia of the long last name is Jane Eyre! As Michael Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester—his eyes glowing with the unearthly passion we have sought ourselves—sputters to her pale, braided Jane, “You transfix me quite.” It was as though, and finally, he spoke from out the screen to me. Delicious in its dialogue, its snatches of late Early Modern agony, its loving sweep of moor and estate, Cary Fukunaga’s version of our beloved Charlotte’s tale stayed my heart, my brain, my nerves, corseting me in the pleasantest, most despairing dream I ever dreamt. Watching this elegant candelabra of a film flicker and illuminate the dark corridors of my girlhood reading, I recalled my own nascent and dim understanding of the powers of eloquence, responding with a thrill to Rochester’s ability to articulate Jane to herself as I turned the pages on a long-ago family trip out West. To be seen, and seen truly, is the one wish of love—to be told mellifluously, the second. We have all of us waited most patiently through these last two decades of Jane Austen—the squabbles, the silliness, the oh-so-clever modernizations. But these are less glad times, we understand, as too the Brontës understood. The world darkens; the plots assemble, and thicken. We sit in our rooms and wring our hands and feel ourselves at once uncontainable and too easily dismissed. We pick a book from off the shelf. We purchase tickets and take a seat. We run out to meet ourselves.

 

Heartbeats (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

We fall for those who have power over us. Those whose approval we long for. Those who know how to dangle that approval in front of our eyes, whose body language and conversation knit some suggestion of sexual prize awaiting us just around the corner of the next glance, the next casual touch or accidental innuendo, if only we can respond to it quickly or cleverly enough, and with decisive enough action—a daring first kiss mid-conversation, a wine-fueled invitation to bed, a tearful declaration of love in the middle of traffic—offering ourselves to them, dangling our own approval in front of them at the carefully selected moment, to finally equalize things, to ring in a new era, to balance the scales of power in one dramatic swipe. They will see in the purity of our desire that we too are beautiful and good. Then they will finally love us the way we love them—adoringly, madly, desperately, happily—but they never do. The only thing they have ever wanted is for us to want them—and the last thing they would ever want is to want us. We make our pathetic move, and that is the last we ever see of them. They disappear into the crowd of clones like us who love them for their power, and we are discarded. We walk away, off the grand stage love has built under our feet, and step carefully down the side stairs, back into the maze of tedious, unlit passageways that tunnel the rest of our lives.

Heartbeats almost gets at this, but the movie loves the outfits and accoutrements of youth more than the truth of desire. Like a rooster loosely fastened to its weathervane, the story spins in the ambitious direction of the inexperienced point of view that yielded it. For those who read contemporary poetry, these are bellwether gales. Two things authenticate any trope. First is the style with which it is presented, and second is the context into which it is thrust. Writer-director-star Xavier Dolan, brave in the former, remains afraid in the latter. The moment the ‘beats’ love triangle escapes its vapid playground of Québécois chic houseparties, botiques, and cafés, the action quickly sinks into the forced. Or when the mother of the blond adonis magnetizing the trio is introduced as destabilizer, she quickly succumbs to Eurotrash cartoon. Our otherwise convincing ménage à trois is never convincingly pierced by the outside world; dramatic stakes deescalate to aesthetic exercise where they should be elevating to life. Acting, music, some documentary genre-bending, and the fact that in several scenes we feel Dolan studying desire’s distortion upon our perception of time, however, contribute to Heartbeats‘ surprising charm. The ending made this wry old poet smile. A moment when the deep and simple poetry of human behavior coalesced with the shallow and complicated poetry of human fashion. A union all too rare in this film, as elsewhere.

Rango (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

Toy Story 3 was the best movie of 2010 because it revived the cadaver of adventure with brilliant scripting, realistic characters, and inventive action. Rango takes that resurrected corpus adventura and jabs a syringe of adrenaline into its heart. The first scene—too surprising, weird, meta, and smart to describe—is the best opening since Inglorious Basterds. And Rango’s multiple chases, battles, and other staples of action are so aware of their historical predecessors that watching each is like gorging yourself like a hog at the trough of homage to and parody of all the most beloved tropes of spaghetti western, space opera, noir, Freud, and Homer. Constant, riotous, gonzo wit at machine gun pace obliterates all your defenses against Rango‘s eleven-layer irony-cake of visual and narrative gratification. In one scene, our not really-eponymous hero, an Odyssean lizard and archetypal chameleon with no name—Johnny Depp, perfect casting—turns to a kid and shouts, “Burn everything but Shakespeare!” It was like watching something written by a future, infinitely more successful and disciplined version of myself. As the crowd shuffled me out of the theater I looked back over my shoulder and thought, “I want to see that again.” Last time that happened was Fantastic Mr. Fox, and before that Basterds. What do these three movies have in common? One, an oneiric swirl of fulfilled conventions. Two, a reeling, panoramic sensorium of metaphor. Three, a seemingly suicidal level of self-referentiality grounded in tight storytelling. Four, an almost obscene amount of jokes. Five, cornea-crushing cinematography. Six, sincere, devoted direction. Seven, perfectly executed setpieces. Eight, all squeezed through the estranging eye of auteurial mise-en-scène. No windmill goes untilted at; no saddle goes unblazed. No god of cinema goes uncrucified and seconds later, raised. Rango is generous and savvy in these ways. Gore Verbinski also directed the first Pirates of the Caribbean, another epic that took me back to the theater multiple times. Rango is so decadently good, it seems passive-aggressively pathetic to point out its only flaw: an impatient dénouement. The film could’ve luxuriated in its coolest characters more. And there are many cool characters. Anyone who does not see Rango, or anyone who sees it and doesn’t like it, Fuck you!

Rango (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl

1.     Why is Rango delightful

2.     What specifically delights us about the animal in human attire

3.     Not of dress only, but of attitude

4.     Lizards in Hawaiian shirts; some sort of bird thing in a poncho

5.     Is it an aspect of miniaturism

6.     And from the miniature do we extrapolate perspective

7.     Is it perspective that delights

8.    How is it possible that for the first five minutes of Rango I literally did not know what was going on

9.     Why was this so delightful

10.    Is there less at stake for an actor in an animated role

11.     Or do they consider it an exercise in formal invention

12.     Like a Mark Leidner movie poem, for example

13.     What is the equivalent in poetry to Jesse Eisenberg being the voice of a blue parrot in the forthcoming, highly sucky-looking Rio

14.     Is this like if Mark made a movie of a Tony Hoagland poem

15.     The Tony Hoagland poem

16.     Does a topic’s importance—its claim on the political, the social, the real—bar it from delight, not to say delightfulness

17.     Is Rango partly delightful to me because it is fundamentally concerned less with the social and more with the self

18.     Whilst acknowledging the awkward demands of the polis—its tug

19.     But what is perennial about the search for the self

20.     When we sense allusion without perhaps knowing the exact nature of the referent, what is the pleasure

21.     Is this an allusion of codes—the hilariously absurd shot of Rango’s posse riding against the pulsating semi-circle of sun, for example

 

22.     “Hilariously absurd” because Rango is a lizard, his steed some sort of pheasant

23.     Because Rango is the voice of Johnny Depp, his steed a roadrunner with a butt-full of feathers

24.     In intuiting allusion do we feel bound more closely to the culture in which we and it bask

25.     Is allusion thus a tool of tribalism

26.     Which, like racism, is not delightful

27.     When I laughed so heartily at its Star Wars allusion, was I simply pleased to have been allowed access to the cerulean depths of Rango’s cultural sea

28.     Access because it proved I too am deeply cultural

29.     Is delight predicated mostly on consciousness or un-

30.     Is delight more complicated than we generally consider it to be

31.     Are good children’s movies the cinematic equivalent of the medieval jester

32.     In that they allow adults levels of experience conventional grown-up fare assumes

33.     Bewilderment; delight

34.     And yet it is only through recontextualization of cultural knowledge—which depends on the experience of exposure—that such delight can function

35.     Is it better to be young than old

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) | Review by Mark Leidner

hannah.. txting u review from bus stop where two undergrads r talkin bout where theyre goin for spring break.. florida.. ten decibels louder than is necessary.. clear ly more interested in performing for strangers their perceived roles as ebullint partygirls than communicating w each other.. thumb incredibly numb from cold.. all wrapped up in scarf face.. adjustment bureau veers wildy btween almost interesting to ridiculou ly stupid.. obligatory strobelit danceclub conversation scene serves no purpose.. that little floor raising finger flick u see in previews done by mad men guy.. used up entire special effects budget.. matt damon good actor trapped in plot writer no skill to d liver..  minor chars shout down featureless corridors where are we?! inadvertently echo audience n director etc.. leidners law.. the worse the movie the better a metaphor its dialog is for that movies writing process.. bus just got here.. now in seat under florsescrnt light.. bus half full.. students n poor ppl.. bundled up.. curving through walmart parking lot.. organic co op bag girl just got on.. thumb warmed [Exceeded maximum characters] meant to say thumb warmed back up.. adjustment B fun at first.. damon gives cool straight tlak speech after losing election that eventual ly propels second canidacy but falls in love n these business suit angels try to break him up w lady.. emily blunt.. bc fated to b prez one day according to destiny chairman matrix god thingy.. but dream cant happen if damon in love.. no motivation if happy.. can relate ie absence of intimacy drives inner performer to great risk beauty etc.. crowd commanding.. ok if unconcious.. but only fool wld knowing ly sacrifice intimacy to gain applause.. gotta trust your heart.. damon knows.. tho ncie to see studio take on god ish angel typd shit.. possibilities unlimitd.. but unearned slash boring unexplo. sive endingn proves thing u worry whole way through.. story cant cash check cool premise wri

[Exceeded maximum characters]  cool premise writes.. just got off bus at cross walk waitinf for little white man to blink.. hope power is on in apt.. bc wasnt this morning when I left.. basement flooded from rains.. gas n elec turn d off for safety until dickless landlord cld pump out water.. mo fucker need to adjust rent of this borough if shit keeps up.. neway adjustment bureau like somebody got really high stoned n thought of cool idea for movie n forgot to get sober before writing script.. like drink some coffee shit at least.. whoever you are.. cool metaphorical poss though for angel dudes as writers how theres this plan were always tryin to for ce our writing to fit.. btu the chars or images or lines ur sounds.. little damons.. dont want our vision want their own.. oh one last thing.. adjust ment B a love letter to NYC.. lots of bklyn n manhattan crap.. magic doors plot device.. ie open one it takes to you statue of liberty.. takes you to yankee stadium.. other big appl cliches.. love letter from an ugly person if that makes sense.. maybe all bad art is.. ugly on inside I mean.. most made by ppl too beautiful on outside to ever need [Exceeded maximum characters] ever need to developt inner resources.. or too rich.. why need imagination if u have bank.. okay walking inside.. power doesnt look on.. nope. no internet..  got hot water.. okay gonna take warm bath in dark.. relax my eyes… touch chi.. save laptop for morning.. txting this to you to post.. go see adjustmstnt brurea if the idea of drinkin a soda called diet inception appeals to you.. i guess there is a good kiss at the end.. i mane blunt n damon make love convincing.. the cellphone im txting this on is my only light