jentleman film journal.

The Year in Review, Part I: The Worst Movies of 2011

I thought I was going to hold off on putting out any ‘Year in Review’ posts until we’d formally closed out 2011, but, looking at my slate of movies from now ‘til New Years, I just don’t see what’s going to crash my Worst-of-the-Year picks. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? By some reports, it’s overlong and a little dull, but no worse than that. The Iron Lady? But how bad can a Meryl Streep movie really be? Only Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close looks like it has any potential to be a game-changer, but no matter how overwrought and emotionally manipulative it turns out to be, I just don’t see how it plumbs the depths pioneered by the material on this list. (Though I reserve the right to change that opinion.)

I was expecting to have a hard time figuring out what to include, in the way that it’s difficult to give an answer when asked who your five best friends are. But crap will out, it seems, even more readily than quality, and it seems that I’ve been fortunate enough this year to have only seen five films truly deserving of inclusion in the record of the year’s least inspired productions.

A final note: My list is, of course, based entirely on films that I myself saw. Cars 2, Green Lantern, The Smurfs, The Help, The Change-Up, most especially Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star — all had the potential to be mind-numbingly, offensively awful, and I, shamefully, did not give them the opportunity to depress me.

So, here we go:

Dishonorable Mentions: The Sitter, 30 Minutes or Less, J. Edgar, Midnight in Paris
The Sitter and 30 Minutes or Less were both slapdash, perfunctory efforts to cash in on the raunch comedy bubble, but neither had nearly enough disregard for their characters and their audiences to qualify them for this list. Formulaic and trite, to be sure, but I laughed a couple of times and didn’t emerge from the theater feeling any stupider. Astute readers will point out that I also didn’t hate J. Edgar when I saw it, and they are correct; its Dishonorable Mention comes from the fact that, for a movie directed by one of America’s most important living directors and featuring its biggest movie star as a seminal historical figure of the recent past, there are certain expectations, and J. Edgar failed to meet them. Midnight in Paris is also Dishonorably Mentioned because, as explored more fully in my article on Woody Allen, half of it is a really good movie, but the other half is really bad.

#5: In Time
2011 was the year the Justin Timberlake decided that he wanted to be a movie star, and the one where the few of us who went to see In Time discovered that he wasn’t one. The movie follows the conventional plotline of the Hollywood dystopia, with Timberlake playing a proletarian living in a dystopian world who discovers that it is all, in effect, a massive conspiracy to keep a few people living forever while everyone else dies young. Naturally, he sets out to bring down the system, which is represented by professional douchebag Vincent Kartheiser (known as the watery Pete Campbell on “Mad Men”). The premise is interesting, but the filmmakers make the Faker mistake and try to turn the movie into a grand statement about class and the evils of capitalism rather than focusing on telling a truthful story; even worse, the movie’s not even well-made enough to qualify as a Faker. Disappointing on multiple levels.

#4: The Hangover, Part 2
The first Hangover was a fantastic film, mostly by virtue of daring to break cinematic convention and tell a different kind of story; it traded on its novelty to become a huge hit when it came out in 2009. What does it say about Hollywood that its response to a movie that was all about freshness and novelty was to immediately pump out a sequel? Nothing good, that’s what. What does it say about us that we collectively gave them a nearly $600 million subsidy to do so by buying tickets to said sequel? Something much, much worse. THP2 is a clone of the first movie, but transposed into Bangkok and with every element bloated by an extra fifty percent. Even the concluding revelation is almost identical. I lauded Sherlock Holmes 2 for playing up the friendship — okay, we can say bromance — between its main characters. There is no such positive feeling in this movie.

#3: Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Breaking Dawn follows in the pioneering tradition of The Deer Hunter in opening  with an interminable wedding scene, then succeeds in becoming progressively more boring afterwards. I went to see it to try to understand just what it was about these films that made women go mad about them. Apparently, they like watching emasculated men not fight with each other and fret about how to treat bland women who seem to exist only so that these men can continue to not fight about them. Actually, I’m not even sure you could term this a ‘story’: it has no discernible conflict, has no beginning, middle, or end in the traditional sense, and the only transformation in character comes in their literal transformation from a human being into a vampire. Basically, you get to spend two hours watching the characters invent stuff to be angsty about. If that’s your thing, you may respectfully disagree with my analysis here.

#2: The Three Musketeers
I described this movie as ‘inane,’ ‘soulless,’ and ‘utterly lacking in intelligence,’ which remains the most succinct way that I can think of to describe The Three Musketeers. Narratively lazy and, like The Hangover Part 2, totally uninterested in suggesting that its characters like each other at all, 3M substitutes gigantic, plush airships and anachronistic vulgarities for any sense of fun. It’s boring, tired, and insulting in equal measure.

That said, it could never approach the noxiousness of the bottom movie on this list…

#1: Melancholia
I was so incensed by Melancholia that, after seeing it, I immediately fired off an invective-filled email to my friend Will, purporting to be excerpts from a review that would remain unwritten. Here are some of my thoughts on the movie:
“A loathsome piece of crap.”
”Melancholia is a movie about the world ending — and when it does, by God, is it a mercy.”
“Some critics have trumpeted Melancholia as an artistic triumph, but this is great art only in a world where masturbation qualifies as great sex.”
“The worst movie of 2011, and possibly the current millennium as well.”
Melancholia is a Faker if there ever was one, a movie purporting to offer some sort of insight into the nature of our lives and our world but ultimately trading only in facile condemnations of human existence. Critics have made reference to its having beautiful imagery and drawn attention to Kirsten Dunst’s performance. That may all be true, but even if it is, it does nothing to mitigate the fact that this film is philosophically bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. There is no doubt that Lars von Trier has a vision. Unfortunately, it is only of things that he has decided that he wants to see.

Love and Undeath: “Twilight,” Misandry, and the Female Blockbuster

With a sense of trepidation and mild disbelief, I bought myself a ticket on Monday to see Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One, with the idea that I should see what all the fuss is about. I emerged two hours later, rueful, even a little shell-shocked: there really are some things that you’ll never be able to un-see, and Twilight, as it turns out, is one of them.

The important question, though, isn’t “Just how bad is the new Twilight flick?” but “What is it about these certifiably awful films that has captured so many people’s imaginations?” Like so many Michael Bay movies, the Twilight series has overcome generally poor reviews to ride to box-office success, yet it bears little resemblance to Bay-type blockbusters. Beyond its vampires and werewolves, Breaking Dawn has none of the characteristics of a fantasy or sci-fi film, without spectacular set pieces or epic battles or even the darkness of tone that one might expect from something dealing with its subject matter. Its closest cinematic kin isn’t Harry Potter but the Underworld films, which have been reliable, if unspectacular, earners for Sony.

Where Twilight has found its success, of course, has been in its appeal to women: an incredible eighty percent of the opening weekend audience was female, and when I looked around a crowded-if-not-packed Monday night theater I couldn’t have counted more than four or five men, including myself, in the audience. Deconstructing the appeal of Twilight, then, must mean understanding what it is about these films that is so attractive not ‘to people’ in general but ‘to women’ in particular. We’ve all heard of the chick flick, but Twilight isn’t that – it’s a chick blockbuster, something that Hollywood has never really seen before.

Actually, let’s stay with the ‘chick flick’ angle, because I think it is a revealing one. The stereotypical chick flick – the one that husbands and boyfriends groan about when their significant others bring it up, then go anyways – is the romantic comedy, a familiar genre going back to the Golden Age of Hollywood and before. Boy meets girl; hijinks and misunderstandings occur; boy and girl split; boy tries to win girl back; they all live happily ever after. This seems to be, more or less, the storyline of the Twilight movies: they may not be comedy (at least not intentionally), but they are romantic, and with the added bonus that ‘happily ever after’ can be read as ‘happily forever and ever.’ Twilight simply does what any successful genre hybrid does. In reappropriating the tropes of the romantic comedy for a fantasy film, it rejuvenates and re-empowers them. What was in Letters to Juliet a recipe for sentimental schlock suddenly becomes a treatise on everlasting, undying love.

In that vein, there’s much to be said on the film’s portrayal of its male characters. Feminist critics like to talk about how Hollywood reduces women to objects of male fantasy, sex objects that exist to please and titillate their mostly-male audiences. Hollywood has responded to this criticism by trying to insert ‘strong’ female characters into its movies, a la the fight-evil-and-look-good-doing-it female action characters of The Matrix or, most recently, In Time. These characters still end up being hypersexualized, however, either because we are at some point made to see that they look good in a dress (I refer you to the the trailer for the new Mission: Impossible movie, among any number of possible examples) or because they invariably end up taking their clothes off.

Well, turnabout is fair play, after all; Twilight, in my view, is just as much a female sex fantasy as any Lara Croft-type character is a male one. Sure, part of that is in Taylor Lautner’s never-out-of-sight-for-long abdominals, which make an appearance within the first minute of Breaking Dawn: one female friend of mine told me that one of the reasons that she watched the Twilight films was that it gave her a chance to look at bare-chested men. Really, though, the men who figure in Twilight, not just rival love interests Edward and Jacob but even Bella Swan’s father Charlie, aren’t so much sex objects as they are ‘affection’ objects, emasculated adorers whose only function is to make Bella feel loved.

If this seems like an unlikely claim, one need only consider what these three characters do over the course of Breaking Dawn. Charlie Swan puts aside his distrust of Bella’s choice of mate and walks her down the aisle; later on, when she is pretending to be sick on her honeymoon (actually pregnant with a half-human, half-vampire demon child, by the way) he states his intention to fly to wherever she is and bring her home immediately. Okay, but he is her father: perhaps it is to be expected that he would be so protective, though to be so after she has just been married seems mildly overbearing. Edward, meanwhile – the vampire that she weds at the beginning of Breaking Dawn, if you’re not familiar with the story – refuses to touch her after the headboard-annihilating consummation of their marriage because it has left her with bruises on her back and arms, even though such noble submission of the self seems misguided when she herself is unbothered by it. (That said, Edward may be forgiven for not believing it when Bella asks, “Why can’t you see how perfectly happy I am?”, given that Kristen Stewart’s wooden acting comes off making her seem like she isn’t happy at all.) Submission of the self characterizes Jacob’s interactions with Bella as well. His conflicts with the protagonist are never about how what she does affects him but because he worries about what the consequences of her decisions will be for her. Similarly, when Jacob and Edward argue, it is because of their rivalry over Bella, and when they join forces it is likewise because they agree that Bella’s safety is more important than their disagreements.

Admittedly, the I-know-best attitude that all of them take with Bella may smack of misogyny. The problem with such a rebuttal is that it ignores that fact that none of them have much of a personality or identity beyond their love for the protagonist. They really think that they’re behaving in her best interest, and in the end they always let her do what she wants, swearing to support and protect her no matter what. Despite his temper tantrums and his musculature, no character is as emasculated as Jacob, who rejects his tribe for Bella even after she has gone off and married someone else. To the women who had made Twilight a blockbuster, this may be read as the ultimate romantic sacrifice and a testament to some sort of twisted modern ideal of courtly love. Such an idea of romance, however, is one that denies men any interiority except insofar as it is overpowered by their love – some might say obsession – for a particular woman.

The point, of course, isn’t that women (necessarily) desire the attention of such emasculated males but that this form of emasculation works, however meretriciously, towards constructing the movie’s ideal of perfect, undying romance. Crucial to this as well is the fact that this movie has no ambitions to be about good and evil or right and wrong in the way that more male-oriented fare usually is. There are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ not really: conflicts are personal, not political or moral, and so, in Twilight’s romantic ideal, they are insignificant, and therefore resolvable, in the face of the power of love. Twilight is a character-driven movie in a genre and medium that are almost always plot-driven, and women tend to prefer more character-driven fare, as the fact that so many girls (and so few boys) like Pride and Prejudice and stories of its ilk is indicative of. At least part of Twilight’s success is that it’s a cross-genre spectacle that’s aimed at women and that plays its brand of misandryst romance to the hilt.

The reason that that fact alone can overpower its obvious cinematic and narrative weaknesses has as much to do with the scarcity of female-slanted offerings as it does with any actual strengths of the film. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Twilight isn’t a phenomenon so much as a beneficiary of Hollywood’s almost willful ignorance of half of its potential audience. We could have drawn the same conclusion when Mamma Mia! grossed twelve times its budget back in 2008 and Meryl Streep went off on how Hollywood ignores women, but the sample size at that point was too small. What Twilight has definitively proved is that there’s a huge female audience out there that’s just as willing to pay for schlock as the male audience is. It just wants that schlock to be something that caters to its own interests, not to its boyfriend’s.