Blogs – Page 34 – Press Play Video Blog

GREY MATTERS: Chaos Is Here To Stay

When a movie turns into the biggest film that isn’t a sequel or a remake in Earth’s history, you can bet that Hollywood is going to do everything short of ritual sacrifice to figure out what made that film such a billion dollar baby. That movie, of course, is Gary Ross’ The Hunger Games, and the most easily utilized element of that film that can be transferred to other films hoping to cash in on the nonlinear zeitgeist is something not much loved around here—chaos cinema.

Chaos cinema: Yes, that pell-mell movie-making style of un-motivated shakycam and matching frenetic cutting style, both of which leave us confused as to where a character might be in a scene at any given time.

Chaos cinema: where the director starts a scene with a Dutch angle of a character running (a low, oblique shot like they’d use in a Batman cartoon), then cuts suddenly to her feet, and then a long shot in reverse from a helicopter, leaving the audience utterly baffled as to who’s where, or when, or how.

Ah, but making linear sense isn’t the goal. Visceral excitement is what’s on the menu, with a side dish of faux documentary-style verité.

And some folks here at Press Play really dislike it. Film writer Matthias Stork went so far as to craft a video essay titled “CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking.”

Stork looks back fondly on how, until the early 21^st century, classical style was the default. Camera movement and editing were motivated, and things happened in the frame for a reason.

But over the last decade or so, all that started going to hell. Films were speeding up, being packed with event, and thanks to nonlinear editing systems like AVID, being cut into often crazed new shapes that made less and less sense. Sensory overload, stylistic excess, and exaggeration became the coin of a realm Stork named “chaos cinema”.

Looking back, it looks like Mr. Stork has a point. It really did seem that if a movie wasn’t one of those spiritually rotted films reflective of the Cheney years’ new bellicosity, it was one of those cutting edge techno-nihilism actioners, and both were total chaos.

Cases in point: stinkers like Black Hawk Down (2001), Domino (2005), The Kingdom (2007), Man on Fire (2004), Michael Bay's filmography, and Quantum of Solace (2008). One particularly offensive scene in The Dark Knight was brilliantly deconstructed by Jim Emerson here.

We see how Nolan seems to have either lost interest, or never had it, in where cars and trucks are coming from, what direction they seem to be going when he cuts, what happens after that happens, and so on. This may seem like nerdy minutiae unless you think of it this way—if this were real life, and a car hit you, and your body was thrown a few feet, and you closed your eyes, but when you opened them, you found you were on the other side of the road, well, that would freak you a bit. Same thing in movies.

So yes, these particular “chaos films” were dreadful grotesques. But what was I to make of–

—Moulin Rouge! (2001), a rapturously gorgeous film that felt chopped together, at 120 BPM? Or 2004’s hyper-jacked The Transporter? Or 2007’s [rec], which combined chopped-up, personal DV and horror? Or The Hurt Locker (2008), the first chaos Oscar winner? Or Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) the first great show to import chaos values to serialized TV, and The River (2012) the first to do so to network horror?

To me, Rouge! Is a traditional musical, except with twice as many shots run at the speed of a trance remix. The Transporter is a Euro-trash version of a John Woo cartoon. And Friday Night Lights with graceful camera? Nope. Boring. We’d never be able to slink into those sizzling Texas mini-worlds on network time. And I’ve not yet mentioned Paul W.S. Anderson’s jaw-dropper of a surprise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, one of the greatest uses of multi-level geometry and spatiality in cinema I can recall seeing, where oneattack scene features twenty or so color-coded Milla Jovoviches attacking hundreds of color-coded bad guys, and it’s not even a high point.

Chaos, I think, has been evolving. And now there’s The Hunger Games, whose “high chaos” style will have an incalculably huge effect on action, drama, indie and hell, on all kinds of films, that just pulled in about $140 million its first weekend. In that film, Katniss' neo-Depression small town life of privation, hunting and solitude, her total love for her sister, and the ambient danger of a totalitarian government are all conveyed in quick, but soft-cut nonlinear hyper-montage that would take classical storytelling a quarter hour to express but here zips by in dreamy minutes. You've never seen a cinema future like this.

So: drop it. The argument is lost and over. Chaos is here to stay as a permanent part of televisual syntax. All that’s left is how we incorporate that reality into our critical discourses.

The exciting thing isn’t chaos cinema on its own—that can be as rote, knee-jerk and annoying to me as anything else.

It’s the incredibly exciting promise of what it will lead to that’s exciting, while classicism always just points back to more of itself.

“Truths” are death and taxes. Everything else is changing and subjective. Everyone said ET was full of “universal” truths, when all I found was the truth that my heartstrings had been mauled and mangled by a sociopathic optimist. And recently I showed Psycho to a friend—not a cineaste, a pro journalist, age 27—only to have her fall asleep. She felt terrible for just not getting it. Remembering my unseemly lack of ET resonance, I said not to worry. Universal, shmuniversal.

Meanwhile, this is a generation that’s been raised viewing entertainment on all manner of screens, some tiny, some tablet, in theaters, at home, everywhere. And a lot of the time, the image is literally shaky because it’s on your leg, in your hand, or wherever.

So televisual entertainment—movies, webcasts, networks, the whole shebang–wants to fit into our natural ecosystem by being a little wobbly itself—even Parks and Recreation and The Office are a bit shaky. So shakycam now signifies a base level of realism. The imperious side of chaos, then, is trapping artists in a small range of high velocities. This could be bad or…

I’m staying with my story—that Ross, who may not be a Great Filmmaker but is one helluva craftsman, trusted his instincts regarding how his market would best be served with the most valuable property on the planet. And he chose chaos. And, like that, chaos cinema became the mainstream.

SIMON SAYS: LOVE IN THE BUFF Redeems China Lion

For a few months now, China Lion Entertainment has been better in theory than in practice. For those that missed my Lunar New Year piece: China Lion is an American distributor of popular contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong films. Until this week and with the notable exceptions of some interesting but inconsistent melodramas like Aftershock and Love in Space, China Lion had yet to release a film worth recommending without serious reservations. China Lion films typically don't leave you with any resonant emotions beyond superficial first impressions. They're fluffy, and, even in the extreme case of Aftershock, a family drama about two generations of Tangshan Great Earthquake survivors, there's very little gravity to them.

Thankfully, with the release of Love in the Buff, Hong Kong co-writer/director Ho-cheung Pang's (aka: Edmond Pang) sequel to the equally moving and light romcom Love in a Puff, China Lion has finally released something worth recommending (China Lion never released Love in a Puff, presumably because it originally released when the company, which focuses mostly on first-run features, did not exist in 2010).

Love in the Buff follows a young former couple as they try to meet other people while struggling to get back together. Like many of Pang's previous offbeat comedies, Love in the Buff is a movie about storytelling and the cumulative effect of white lies. Pang's young lovers tell each other stories about people they know and about each other, like the one about the girl with a lover's pube stuck in her bracelet or the plain-looking blind date whose mother claims he looks like In the Mood for Love star Tony Leung Chiu-wai (the man explains that his mother only meant that he is as tall as Leung). In telling these small, incestuously inter-related fictions, Pang's characters create the lives they want to lead out of the unremarkable ones they currently live.

That heady concept is developed at the start of Love in a Puff, in which Cherie Yu (Miriam Yeung) and Jimmy Cheung (Shawn Yue), two soon-to-be lovers, meet while huddled over a trash can for a smoke (in 2009, a law in Hong Kong was passed that banned smoking in office buildings and some public parks, too). Pang frames the romance in Love in the Buff similarly by showing Cherie and Jimmy chatting conspiratorially about a mutual friend. No matter how hard their mutual friend tries to protect her boyfriends, they all inexplicably die, or so the story goes. One dies after doing laundry at a Laundromat so the friend buys a washer machine. But her next boyfriend falls to his death from a window while hanging laundry up to dry at home, and so on.

So unlike Love in a Puff, which started with a story about a man being trapped in a trunk and the aforementioned pube anecdote, Love in the Buff starts with a personal, fatalistic myth of Cherie and Jimmy's "Black Widow" friend. You don't have to know who Cherie and Jimmy are or where they are in their relationship after the events of Love in a Puff because Pang has just had his jaded lovers tell us. They're scared of losing each other, an anxiety that soon proves to be self-fulfilling.

In the Love in the ____ series, Cherie and Jimmy relate to each other and people in general primarily through character-embellishing tall tales. So it's not surprising that, even after the couple drifts apart in Love in the Buff when Jimmy announces that he has to move to Beijing for work, Cherie and he still both remake their lives based on little fictions. And when Cherie and Jimmy's friends and loved ones can't meet the high expectations that the set up in Cherie and Jimmy's private stories, the nee personality traits that hey exhibit become the raw material for new stories.

For instance, Jimmy starts dating a Beijing girl named You-You (Mini Yang), a flight attendant, after she promises to repay a favor that Jimmy did for her by helping him "in bed." While Jimmy's thinking he'll get laid, You-You actually just wants to meet at a trendy bar where patrons are served food and drink in beds. But bear in mind: Jimmy only meets You-You after Eunuch tells him a yarn about flight attendants, saying that stewardesses can be sexually harassed twice before there are serious repercussions for their molester. A man sitting behind Eunuch overhears this and tries to grope one of You-You's fellow stewardesses. He immediately gets caught however since Eunuch was, uh, apparently mistaken! So Jimmy decides to meet You-You at the bed bar and checks to see if Eunuch’s new theory (Eunuch insists that You-You is sexually aroused by Jimmy) is true. But he only does this after Eunuch's story about groping women proves to be untrue.

The opposite dynamic is true of Cherie's post-Jimmy search for love. She first tries matchmakers that hook her up with their sons, like the one that misrepresents her son as a Tony Leung look-alike. But then, when another blind date turns out to actually match his mother's description, Cherie winds up stuck fishing her cell phone out of a public toilet while her best friend, now clearly enamored with a Huang Xiaoming look-alike (actually played by Hong Kong actor Huang Xiaoming), hits on Cherie's intended date. So Cherie winds up meeting Sam (Xu Zheng) instead, a guy she later realizes she wants to date because she thinks he is, personality-wise, Jimmy's complete opposite.

But the situation Cherie's in when she dates Sam is not an inversion of when she first started to date Jimmy in Love in a Puff. In fact, it's just like the circumstances that led Jimmy and Cherie to originally date each other. Whereas Jimmy chose to date Cherie knowing that she was already seeing somebody, Cherie is now cheating on Sam with Jimmy while Jimmy cheats on You-You with Cherie. Everybody's telling a different story in Love in the Buff, making it both a knotty and accomplished variation on Puff's meta-textual main theme and a very clever and resonant romantic comedy unto itself. This: this is the China Lion film to see.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

TRAILER MIX: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

If Snow White and the Huntsman initially seemed like yet more fairy tale fodder (another film to push Hollywood's fantasy trend from comic books to storybooks), then the second trailer promotes the movie as a formidable CG spectacle, serving as a veritable effects reel for awards consideration. Given the sheer abundance of eye candy, it takes a moment to remember that this is not the Snow White film by wild visionary Tarsem Singh, but rather a Universal Pictures tentpole helmed by debut filmmaker Rupert Sanders. Epic battles, first-rate makeup, and a very nifty man in the mirror loudly convey that the studio spared no expense in the pursuit of visual pizzazz. Whether or not that will translate to actual quality is another story.

Unless you're considering a work by someone like David Cronenberg, an uncompromising filmmaker who cast Robert Pattinson in his latest effort, the trippy drama Cosmopolis, it's tough to regard films that headline Twilight stars as anything more than cash-hungry. While clearly committed to making the most of its budget, Snow White and the Huntsman waves a red flag, almost more so than Taylor Lautner's action mess Abduction. Kristen Stewart, who is confidently showcased as being “fairer” than great beauty (and wicked queen) Charlize Theron, is given nary a line in this extended clip, implying that the studio puts little stock in either her performance or her grasp of an English accent.

And it's probably best that the starlet largely remains silent, for what is heard here is a hokey string of catchy one-liners, an unfortunate staple of modern trailer creation. In general, Theron can’t do much wrong as an actress, but she's chewing the scenery like the Big Bad Wolf in this showy, nimble clip, calling to mind the histrionics of ABC's Once Upon a Time. “Let them come,” she growls as an on-screen battle starts to rage, her words implying that Universal doesn't much care about subtlety when it comes to courting audiences.

Perhaps the greatest concern introduced by the Snow White trailer is that the movie, at least as represented here, seems to lack an identity of its own. It may not resemble prior incarnations of the fairy tale, but its visuals appear derivative at nearly every turn. Theron's milky bath recalls the finale of the dreaded Queen of the Damned, her life-sucking powers mimic Bette Midler's in Disney's Hocus Pocus, and her bursting into blackbirds owes a serious debt to Madonna's “Frozen” video. It's evident that the film has polish to spare, but one would hope there's more up Sanders's sleeve than variations of established tricks.

Like most movie previews, what this glimpse does promise is that you'll get your money's worth at the multiplex, a notion supported by the expensive-looking shards that finally attack the sword-wielding do-gooders, in a scene that is most likely the film's climactic showdown (admittedly, this is the one effect that truly reads as innovative). But how many viewers are content with just getting the requisite bang for their buck? Surely they deserve more than one big pricey mirror, which looks to merely reflect extravagant magic that's come before.

R. Kurt Osenlund is the Managing Editor of Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, as well as a film critic & contributor for Slant, South Philly Review, Film Experience, Cineaste, Fandor, ICON, and many other publications.

THE HUNGER GAMES: The Conversation

Now that The Hunger Games, the new film adaptation of the first book in Suzanne Collins's hyper-popular young adult book series, has raked in $68 million dollars on its opening day alone, it seems especially prudent to take a somewhat harder look at the film, both as a stand-alone work and as an adaptation. Below, Ian Grey and Simon Abrams discuss the film, which is set in a futuristic America comprised of twelve districts barely held together by a fascistic central Capitol. The Capitol residents hold an annual event called the Hunger Games, a gladiatorial contest where 24 contestants, 12 girls and 12 boys chosen at random from 12 districts, fight as a means of humiliating the residents of outlying districts. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a plucky fourteen year-old who's developed survival instincts by illegally foraging for food in the forests surrounding District 12, volunteers to take her younger sister Primrose's (Willow Shields) place in this year's Hunger Games. With the help of fellow contestant Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) and their hyper-cynical mentor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), Katniss fights for her life while everyone in the Capitol and the outlying 12 districts watches.

Ian Grey: I think The Hunger Games does something conceptually radical—it’s the first CG-lite blockbuster pastoral. Otherwise, I liked-not-loved this first table-setter. The set design was a fun mélange of Starship Troopers and American Idol. Capitol's people were a properly daft mix of Lady Gaga fans and Ziggy Stardust's band and Gaultier ala The Fifth Element. Lenny Kravitz makes an unexpectedly winning Cinna and Woody Harrelson's liquored up Haymitch is even better. And, you know, there’s Jennifer Lawrence.

A big critical complaint is being slapped at the hyper-editing style used during the opening scenes of District 12 as Walker Evans-style Appalachia. I'm fairly certain the style was used because it leaves you with no choice but to pay close attention.

Another problem I'm willing to forgive Ross has to do with some blurry action scenes. I assume this has to do with the MPAA, outed recently as morally insane for giving a life-saving film like Bully an R, and who no doubt gave Ross endless notes on how to more tastefully slaughter teens.

But every time Ross' action got wonky or his pace meandered, his character love sold me on the movie. There was Katniss tucking in Prim's clothes. The strange wound erotica when Katniss and Peeta attend to each other in the cave. Or Cinna's sole vanity, his lovely thin golden eye shadow. And those extreme close-ups to Lawrence's lips to show her controlling her breath/herself before shooting an arrow.

And please, T-Bone Burnett and James Newton Howard's soundtrack? The way it eased from full-blown Dvořák-like romantic cues to eerie Glass-ian arpeggios to rust-bucket

Americana? Amazing work. And there's that 2001-level jump-cut that's officially Occupy's first cinema moment.

And Jennifer Lawrence. As they say, out of the park. There's a scene where she thinks Peeta has betrayed her and her rage is so violent you don't only fear for the boy's physical well-being, you feel the accumulated rage beneath Katniss' 16 years of deprivation. Like Ripley in Alien, she represents an entirely new way of thinking about women in films. For that alone, The Hunger Games is an instant classic.

That duly noted, there were things I thought simply wrong, miffed or unrealized. But that's enough for me for now.

Your turn, kind sir!

Simon Abrams: Et tu, Ian? I was sure that if anyone would get why I intensely disliked the movie version of The Hunger Games, it'd be you. The critical tongue-bathing that this movie is getting is fairly intimidating, even downright disheartening. It's sort of like when Iron Man came out and was hailed for having a semi-distinct personality rather than for its quality, or lack thereof. I can't discredit director Gary Ross as the sole reason for this new adaptation's consistent mediocrity. Collins herself co-adapted the film's screenplay along with Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Breach), a writer/director I quite admire. But honestly, while I agree that Lawrence did deliver the goods, I find most other aspects of The Hunger Games to be sorely lacking. And like you, I dig Collins's book! I wish I could say the same for this new adaptation.

Firstly, as you anticipated, the use of violently shaky handheld cameras really bugged me. I'm specifically talking about the establishing scenes in District 12 before the Reaping, the moment when Katniss takes her sister's place. In the scenes where we see the mine workers of district 12, their hard-working wives and, uh, soil-tilling children (?!), Ross's shaky cam-work violently makes us feel like looking at working class people is punishment. Once in the Capitol, protagonists are treated like hamburgers in McDonalds commercials: they're fetishized to the point where they look beautiful. There's lots of negative space behind them, they're shot in only the most flattering close-ups and they're just generally purty-looking. So in spite of the stupid and garish-for-garish's-sake costumes of your average Capitol resident (Versailles by way of Clown College), Ross tacitly accepts that people just look better in the Capitol. This is problematic, to say the least, because spectacle is supposed to be an inherently stigmatized aspect of The Hunger Games.

Then again, Ross makes the scenes of violence during the actual games so joyless and anti-spectacular that I also kind of hate him for doing what he was supposed to, albeit in a more a creative way. Ross goes so overboard in denying his audience the relatively simple pleasures and horrors of watching kids we care about die that he zealously cuts the legs out from under his own film.

But again, Ross isn't the only one to blame, really. Collins and Ray don't follow through on a number of crucial plot points. One of the reasons why the act of being watched is so crucial to The Hunger Games is that Katniss knows she's participating in a spectator sport and must win the crowd over in order to attract sponsors that can give her food, medical supplies, weapons, etc. This is most apparent in the scene where Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) sends Katniss a care package of soup with a note that says, "You call that a kiss?" The soup is Katniss's reward for giving the games' viewers a spectacle. She kissed Peeta, the boy that's already won viewers over with his earnest displays of affection for Katniss, and has been rewarded for it.

In the book, Katniss doesn't know whether Peeta is faking it or not, though, so she is constantly wary of his advances. That aspect of their romance is not in the movie. In fact, after Katniss smooches Peeta some more, it's just understood that their romance is genuine, even if it falls apart in the book. That real-or-fake aspect to Katniss's romance with Peeta isn’t followed through on in the movie, making it a fairly dismal and dimwitted entertainment.

Ian Grey: First, Katniss's ambivalence towards Peeta has not been exnayed for the movie version, even if it's not as agonizingly nuanced as in the book.

But still, what we get are one highly qualified kiss, and another to help save Peeta's life. And afterwards Katniss rolls away in the dark.

This is not exactly love's battle's won. As Ross has chosen not to do a voice-over, the only way we can see Katniss’s ambivalence is through actions. But even now, she remains true to the books' essence of Everdeen.

The essence, Simon, is still there. Love was nothing she looked for or wanted. After Peeta declared his affection, Katniss very nearly clocked him. That Katniss is still here and we'll be seeing her in the next film. Yes, she's holding his hand. But that parting overly-glow-y smile? I don’t buy it. She knows there are cameras everywhere and that Prim and her mother’s fate depend on her ‘performance’. The smile is for them.

As for the matter of critical reception, I shielded myself, so I was, for once, a virgin regarding something.

I'm confused about the problem you have with Ross' class system, in which "Ross tacitly accepts that people just look better in the Capitol."

Dude, they're RICH! And without taste. That's the entire point of them–and of Cinna.

Look at this in real world fashion terms. The Capitol citizens are like coked out 80s Upper East Siders bonkers onmanhandled Mugler, Sproise and Johnson. Despicable but fun to watch, in a zoo-ish kind of way. Their couture trashiness establishes that it's money, not style, art or beauty, that drives the Capitol. (Alas, Ross completely omits Collins’ concurrent fashion fascism critique.)

Anyway—who are the ugly Citizens’ opposite number?

Cinna. With his understated elegant blouse, his gold flecked eyes, his hopeless adoration for an impossible charge. He literally—in the book and in the film—fights spiritual and material ugliness with material and spiritual beauty.

That black fire-retardant chic totally worked for me. Ross and his fashion and CG team totally pulled it off. Respect.

When you say "Ross makes the scenes of violence during the actual games so joyless and anti-spectacular," I have to stop you here. I know you know that Collins' Dad was a Vietnam war vet, that the books were written out of a seething hatred of war and everything it touches.

Ross worked hard to escape that war movie paradox, that even antiwar movies are so exciting they become recruitment pictures. Not here. Ross' war is ugly and pitiful..

Simon Abrams: Your argument about Katniss and Peeta is mostly reliant on the assumption that there's a subtle but visible intelligence motivating Ross's direction. To put it bluntly: I don't think he's that clever. And because neither Collins nor Ray works to explicitly suggest that there's a disingenuous element to Peeta and Katniss's relationship post-Hunger Games, I don't buy the whole "smile for the camera" argument either.

Also, the movie's presentation of Katniss and Peeta's relationship is more inconsistent than you've suggested. For instance, during pre-Games training, Peeta abruptly decides to train alone with Haymitch. This surprises Katniss in the movie, but in the book, she just assumes Peeta wants to work on a new strategy privately. He is an opponent, after all. But in the movie, we don't see Katniss even consider that maybe Peeta's just doing what she was doing a few days earlier: trusting nobody and scheming to stay alive. So in the movie, Katniss looks doe-eyed and confused when Haymitch announces Peeta's private final session. What happened to the independent, calculating and openly wary young heroine we saw a few scenes ago?

And as for the inarguably stupid-looking costumes that the Capitol residents wear, it's too easy to go over-the-top with these characters. The film's righteous characters are always unadorned and simply dressed, whether they're Cinna or Katniss. I mean, Cinna only gets along with Katniss because he supposedly can judge her character based on her actions. But even that nonsensical cop-out logic doesn't apply to the Capitol residents. Consider the blunt contrast Ross, Collins and Ray draw between the film's simple/good characters and the more flamboyant/evil Capitol residents. The Capitol is represented by Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), the Games' announcer and the Capitol's hammy version of Bob Costas. The Capitol's absurdly decadent nature is driven home with all the grace of a sledgehammer by Caesar's hokey, theatrical commentary alone. So why then do we also need his hair to be made-up in that stupid blue bee-hive hairdo? That kind of camp may be intentional (it's in both the book and movie). But that doesn't mean I'm groaning with the moviemakers when I'm looking at it projected on the big screen.

The same goes for Ross's deadly earnest "war is hell so it should look like hell" ethos. The desperate hyper-realism inherent in that kind of violently shaking camerawork doesn't convince me that what I'm seeing is any more intense or violent. It's a textbook example of shortcut storytelling: Ross wanted to get a point across quickly and efficiently so he did it in the most direct way possible. The emotional stakes in this film don't really seem to matter, either. Even Katniss's interactions with Rue (Amanda Stenberg), the young Games contestant that she bonds with because Rue reminds Katniss of her sister, felt canned and lifeless. This movie’s three main architects all obviously know what they need to emphasize but are ultimately stumped as to how to do so.

Ian Grey: With all due respect for what you’re arguing about, regarding whether or not Ross has the skills to pull off the nuance of Katniss’ romance or lack of it with Peeta—forget the books. As much as you can, forget them.

It’s impossible, but especially now, I can’t do a book/movie battle. I could talk about how much richer Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch is than Collin’s broad comic relief confection. I could also talk about Kravitz’s gravity as Cinna (man-crush alert!) and I could complain about how they downsized the other Tributes to mere canon-fodder (at last a literal description).

Point is, I need to think about the film.

May I suggest we start with not agreeing about Ross’ war work?

What’s up with your sour grapes about the “deadly earnest "war is hell so it should look like hell" ethos”?”

I mean, is that unhip? Should war look groovy? What’s undesirable about a movie that thinks war is filthy, chaotic work done out of desperation at the bidding of morally insane monsters?

And your claim that “The emotional stakes in this film don't really seem to matter, either” is a real head-scratcher. Katniss’ entire universe circles around Prim—and so in what universe would she not transfer her feelings to a dear, small,Prim-like creature like Rue? “Canned and lifeless”? It takes two to tango.

And what follows Rue’s awful death, a death of two girls, by the way, to double Katniss’ reflecting agony, is for me, one of the greatest film experiences of my life, so when you trash it, respect that.

For me, this scene IS The Hunger Games, distilled. (It’s also Occupy’s National Banner, in images and sound.)

It’s where the film soars and Ross—who’s often all-thumbs—finds the place where subtext becomes syntax and then the only working currency in the frame.

Against Howard’s eerie Glass-on-Eno funereal thrum, Katniss prepares Rue’s body with flowers. The music and the low camera looking at Lawrence’s ruined-heart face…everything keeps building, the festering wound sun and inhumanity and that insistent music and then a jump cut to Rue’s District and the enraged crowds are tearing down the monitors that show the Hunger Games and they’re trashing barriers and attacking Peacekeepers and… Ross and Collins are saying, screaming, that a human life has worth. That sometimes one death can be one death too many. It’s what history is based on.

Simon Abrams: I wish I agreed with you, Ian. This movie fails as both an adaptation and a stand-alone film in general. You can forget the books all you want. I'm referring back to them for the sake of pointing out that Collins was more thoughtful there about themes and plot points. Even if the books didn't exist, there would still be crucial ideas that were misconceived in the movie. But the books do exist and I think that's a very good thing. Because I wouldn't care about The Hunger Games if its source material didn't exist.

With that in mind, let me address your dislike of my dislike of the abhorrent use of shaky cam. A visual aesthetic is not a mandate to replicate reality. People came to see The Hunger Games to be entertained, yes? But there are ways to get across a semi-complicated view of violence, one that reflects intensity in a visually exciting way, other than making it visually incoherent. I am not at war, I am in a movie theater. So unless Gary Ross has suddenly turned into Gaspar Noe, I don't think it's a good or especially interesting thing that The Hunger Games looks ugly. Again, the use of shaky hand-held camerawork is just a cheap means of making violence look immediately violent. It doesn't allow spectators the pleasure of realizing for themselves why the violence they're looking at is so deplorable.

Which is why I brought up Rue. Yes, I know her death is supposed to mean something. But I felt nothing when it happened. Had Ross, Collins and Ray done their job well, I would have gasped when Rue died.

You point to the moment where Katniss puts flowers on Rue's body as a moment of intense sadness but I could just as easily point to it as another shortcut. You want to show me Katniss mourning Rue's death? Show me her running and thinking about Rue. Show me her talking about Rue to Peeta. Earn my tears with something other than cheap flowers and a dopey riot.

Again, the Hunger Games's moviemakers just didn't grasp the power of symbolic representation in their movie. Their film is all thumbs because it's all chintz.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out/New York.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal.His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

MAD MEN RECAP 1: A LITTLE KISS

Megan knows about Dick Whitman.

Say what you will about this episode, discuss the meaning and the symbolism and the complexity and whatever else you like, but it all boils down to just one thing.

Megan knows about Dick Whitman.

Leaping into Mad Men after a long delay is a thrill, and I'm as eager to gobble down this episode as anyone. It's been agony, but all is forgiven after these two amazing hours. At the end of Season 4, the Surprise Marriage Proposal prompted an awful lot of people to say that Don would never have married Faye, because Faye knew his secret. I may be the only writer on Mad Men in all of cyberspace who didn't say, when Don revealed Dick-in-a-Box to Faye, “Well, that's over.” Honestly, I felt kind of stupid, like all the other writers had more insight than me. But I still couldn't bring myself to say it. It felt too simple, too much of an equation: This, then that, and therefore… That's not Matt Weiner's style.

So just a wee little bit, I feel vindicated. (A wee bit? Like Pete looking out a big window!)

In Episode 4.10, Don said to Faye, “I'm tired of running,” and told her his secret. Then he said, “Now I think that’s over.” And now? Now he's decided it was a good idea. He really was tired of running, really was relieved when he thought it was all over, and despite his terror that day, despite his hand being forced, it seems it has become a decision. Eight months later we see him living the results.

For those of you keeping score, A Little Kiss* takes place May 30 through June 6, 1966, seven months after the Season 4 finale, Tomorrowland.

About Megan, Don says to Peggy, “You don't know her at all.” It almost doesn't matter why he says it; what matters is that he really does know his second wife, as he never knew Betty. And Megan knows Dick Whitman. She has a lot to learn about her husband, and she made a real miscalculation with the party, but he's given her the means to know more: something he never gave to Betty until she forced his hand.

Looking at the broader themes of this episode, let's start with babies. There are an awful lot of babies in this episode: Tammy Campbell is just off-screen, Kevin Harris gets passed around, Gene Draper is with his siblings (I guess now that Don has a wife, he's not afraid of having the baby along with the older kids), and there's a hint that Megan is next (Joan says it outright, plus Megan feels inexplicably sick—maybe it's morning sickness, maybe it's foreshadowing, maybe it's just a hangover—we'll have to wait and see). Does it symbolize renewal? Rebirth? Is it Matt Weiner winking at the audience since his series is "reborn"? We'll have to wait and see, but the motif is plain enough.

Thematically, we're looking at the interplay of work and domesticity. Consider: The Drapers come to work together, leave together, and finally, the show ends with a discussion of that intersection. Joan, coming to work with a baby, also provides a clear illustration of home and work intermixed. The visual references (couples at work, babies at work) open the door for a wide-ranging exploration. Joan misses work, and she doesn't even have the language to express that. She tells her mother she wants to go back to work because “I don't want to break my promise.” Like Peggy, I'm inclined to say “bullshit.” She wants to go back to work because it's interesting, and diaper rash just isn't. I've been there, honey.

Don is happy at home and nice to clients, while Pete is frustrated at home and surly at work, even in response to success. Lane and Rebecca are unhappy at home, and Lane is lost at work, missing Joan (who is something like his “work wife,” in the most positive sense of that phrase), fantasizing about having something, or someone, different. He refuses to allow money to be spent on pranks at work (but is overruled) and refuses to allow his wife to write checks (and isn't). Roger is miserable at home and increasingly meaningless at work. He's trying to buy his way out of emptiness. (He should try actually working and see if that's satisfying, but I may be asking too much.)

Two quotes encapsulate this theme: Trudy says to Pete, “This becomes a home the minute you walk through that door.” Later, Lane says to Joan, “It's home but it's not everything.” In truth, both work and home need to be satisfying, and when one is broken, it drags down the other.

Matt Weiner likes to start us in the middle, and teasing the audience into catching up. By making the party the centerpiece of everything, the episode accomplishes so much. It plays on the theme, as coworkers interact in a home environment. It sets a lot of the conflicts of the era: It's 1966, Megan is in a mini-dress. Look around the party and you can see the beginning of the “Generation Gap;” more than in past decades, people are dividing into age-specific groups (“key demographics,” Harry might say), and you can see it in the clothes, makeup, and dance styles. And it re-introduces most of the key players and their current situations. We hit the ground running, which is fun, without the structural tedium a re-introduction could have in weaker hands.

Rebecca: “Don't forget to get the name of Megan's real estate agent.”
Lane: “Yes dear.”

Rebecca: “And her decorator.”

Because that's what makes a happy home. Rebecca wants a piece of that happy marriage and that exciting life, and she's hoping the surfaces will somehow provide it. Lane is going for the surface too, falling for a picture in a wallet. Do you think we ever meet Dolores? I bet we don't, but that Lane has an affair with someone else. Dolores is like the mechanic that Betty encounters at the beginning of Season 2; the beginning of a sexual experiment, not its culmination. (Infidelity of a different magnitude than what Lane did while his wife was out of the country and when he believed his marriage was over.)

I haven't even talked about Pete. He is an inflamed cyst of dissatisfaction right now, and is also Don Draper minus ten years (and a lot of charm). He doesn't like the suburbs, he doesn't like the way Trudy has changed post-baby, and nothing satisfies, not even winning. Pete gets the client, he gets the bigger office, he even gets to successfully prank Roger, but none of it is the same as feeling good.

By the end of Season 3, it was hard to remember that Pete was very much the villain of Season 1, but after A Little Kiss, I feel confident that Pete Campbell's Bitchface will have plenty of material. My goodness, what a petulant little brat. Talk about "love to hate"!

There are a lot more subjects worth exploring in these two hours. In a little over a thousand words, I feel like I've just scratched the surface, and I'll be writing a lot more about this episode on my own site.

The racial subplot is going to become very important. I predict a new cast member, hired as a result of this improbable prank. Tanner Colby wrote a recent article in Slate about race, Mad Men, and Madison Avenue. He got the year wrong, but I think he got the trajectory right. Predictions?

Speaking of getting the year wrong, most people did. I've been saying since Season 2 that things won't continue to skip too far ahead, because Matt Weiner loves the sixties and doesn't want to see their end too soon.

A lot of money changed hands in a lot of different ways, and serves as a secondary motif, after babies and domestic life.

At this moment, I have no idea what the title means. Thoughts?

Don Draper is so sexually complex. I can't even.

No Betty this week. Don't forget they were working around January Jones's pregnancy.

*For the sake of cohesiveness, I'm treating A Little Kiss Part 1 and A Little Kiss Part 2 as a single episode.

Deborah Lipp is the co-owner, with her sister Roberta, of Basket of Kisses, home of "Smart Discussion About Smart Television," and the premiere Mad Men blog. Deborah has written six books, including The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book. She lives in Rockland County, New York with her son, two cats, and an assortment of unfinished projects.

GREY MATTERS: A Defense of BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

After the first time my interest felt forbidden, something to not share in smart company. But with my second viewing three months later, I realized my reaction wasn’t just a quirk of mood or contrarian impulse, or the film version of one of those inexplicable crushes that make your friends smile politely and count the days until sanity returns.

No, I really, truly love the heck out of Battle: Los Angeles. And there are sound reasons powering my affection. For every knife the critics stabbed into the film–that it was a chaotic wreck of shakycam, Weed Whacker cutting, clichéd plotting, and even fascist subtext—I found an argument that not only answered these cavils but enriched my appreciation for South African director Jonathan Liebesman’s panoramic vision.

I don't expect to change minds or opinions—when was the last time that happened? But I know one thing and believe another.

I know that more than any film from 2011, Battle: Los Angeles barges through my defenses and just plain touches me in the same ways as Joss Whedon’s alternative family adventure, Firefly.

Meanwhile, I believe that all criticism is always filtered through, and colored by, the observer’s needs and desires. This is only an argument for aesthetic relativism insofar as it’s an argument from the gut that comes from living through the times when everyone agreed, no two ways about it, that Carpenter’s The Thing was an abject failure, that Mario Bava was a hack, and that Cronenberg was an artless freakshow dealer of literalized bio-erotic metaphors that just happened to happen at the peak of the AIDS epidemic.

And now we have Battle: Los Angeles, which is to Marines what Friday Night Lights was to football, and already I can see I have some ‘splainin’ to do, so here goes.

The POV character here is Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart). He’s about to quit active service as if in penance for a failed Iraq command where one bad decision led to the death of his entire, very young, squad.

While cable TV announces strange environmental irregularities, we meet a partying group of young Marines. They’re a racially mixed group, representative of LA’s Latino/black/white demographic. They all love the sense of belonging and service being a Marine provides.

Battle: Los Angeles (B: LA for short) offers a frighteningly pell-mell sort of invasion.

First, what look like canisters surrounded by smoke ring haloes fall on and obliterate a Navy destroyer. Liebesman sacrifices his own expensive/excellent beach-invasion effects so he can show a group of Marines watching and reacting to this on low res cable news broadcasts. Tokyo, not Manhattan, is the first city attacked. So much for American exceptionalism. The focus here is on the human reaction to the intrusion of wrongness into the everyday.

Nantz and a squad of freshmen Marines are given a mission: find whatever civilians you can before alien forces in LA are nuked in three hours.

What happens: Women and children are killed with no action-film taglines or Hollywood mercies in pitched battles with superior bio-mechanic alien forces.

By B: LA’s third reel, only an Air Force tech (Michelle Rodriguez), a veterinarian (Bridget Moynahan), a Latino named Joe (Michael Peña), and his small boy Hector (Bryce Cass) augment what’s left of the squad.

And as Joe dies of an alien-blast in Nantz’s arms, what “Marine” means—the simple notion of a branch of the US military united by Marine-specific, world-exclusive rituals–changes radically under the weight of Nantz’s guilt and the context of species extinction.

Nantz tells little Hector that his father loved him, that he has to be strong, that he needs him to be his Marine.

There’s no logical reason for this progression. But by now, we realize that “Marine” has already morphed from a traditional squad into a fluid Whedonesque alternative family group where a female Air Force tech with no field experience (Rodriguez’s character), a female veterinarian, a child, and a man (Joe)—the last three with no obvious military "worth" —now work as an effective combat unit according to their abilities and represent a stateless species patriotism. (I’m assuming the film’s lack of “USA! USA!”-style bellicosity helped with overseas box office.)

Eventually, our Marines manage to bring down a (not the) mother ship. Finally, they’re helicoptered to a functioning military base, are offered food and rest, and Nantz instead loads up on ammo. The others follow his lead. The war for the world continues.

It’s a realism-infused old school war story the critics largely hated because it was so old school. Never mind that nobody had seen this narrative style since Guadalcanal Diary, or that Drive’s hipster brand of ancient school noir-ness is celebrated (see: trend trumps quality). Or that the film plays with its own antecedents, as when a Marine jokes about one Marine’s brave actions, “That was some serious John Wayne shit!” which is followed by another’s meek question, “Who’s John Wayne?”

Otherwise, B: LA was universally and inaccurately despised for a shaky-cam style routinely compared to despicable, fun bloodbaths like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and The Kingdom, where faux documentary shooting style comes off as the cinematic version of Tourette’s, meant to gin up verité on the creative cheap.

B: LA has nothing to do with such low fare. Liebesman’s mobile, subjective camera has the same intent as the Dardenne brothers following Rosetta in the way his camera, once interested in a character, will not leave them, will stay with them like a guardian angel with OCD, or like Lukas Moodyson in Lilja 4-Ever, except with breaks where it pulls back to medium shot to observe the world around that character, to see what she’s up against. Or most specifically, Friday Night Lights.

You can believe this last claim because B: LA begins with a hailstorm of FNL shout-outs.

Over Brian Tyler’s echoing guitar score theme, actionably similar (for three minutes) to W. G. Snuffy Walden’s FNL theme, we enjoy a FNL-like vibe of non-partisan Americana, even as the late-fortyish Nantz struggles to jog at his old pace on a setting-sun-lit beach. The camera mirrors his pains with a simultaneously rolling and halting gait.

Liebesmancuts to a young squad boasting and bullshitting, his camera excited, non-linear and lens-flared with youth, never just observing, always symmpathetic. (It’s around here that Liebesman stops with the FNL homage.)

When we meet a Marine (Jim Parrack) struggling with PTSD but trying to hide it from a shrink, Liebesman’s camera is discrete, occasionally showing clenched fists, or otherwise gently conveying tension. Even in the film’s most iconic, sci-fi-esque image, the slow, endlessly vast mother ship rising from the bowels of a ruined Earth, Liebesman keeps Nantz in the foreground, his focus on his men.

And so it goes. A director rewriting how you do this. Total character devotion. You’d think there’d be more love.

Meanwhile, here on Press Play, there a continuing discourse about “chaos cinema”, that frothy mixture of a shaky cam style B: LA doesn’t use, mixed with slapdash mise-en-scène and hyper-cutting meant to gin up excitement while disguising an ignorance of classic style.

This one is easy to disprove, courtesy of a sequence where Liebesman does go full metal bedlam. If what came before this sequence were nothing more than ‘chaos cinema’, this would be like adding more white to a paint mixture consisting of eggshell and ivory. Instead, it’s a gold standard nerve-wracker that shows Liebesman’s mastery in orchestrating multi-POV pandemonium and slowly restoring order.

After investigating the smoky ruins of Santa Monica during a lull in the action, our Marines are attacked and Liebesman’s camera takes the role of battle victim, always falling, getting up, and tumbling, with no sense of left or right as alien energy weapons alight in the fog in flash frames, and the audio becomes a Murch-ian soundscape of ring-modulated screams and clatter, and we glimpse the occasional mecha-alien in chiaroscuro, before a Marine finds a safe house by sheer accident, and the film, by degrees, calms down.

Is this cut too quickly? Is Moulin Rouge? Within certain parameters, you just cannot quantity too fast or slow.

I loved Rouge. But I also loved the glacial non-pace of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising. I’m also aware both spoke very directly to shadow parts of my own secret history, a thing defined by extremes of alcoholism-powered chaos and the bad quiet of madness. So are my assessments incorrect due to my biographical special needs? Or am I actually more attuned to certain velocities because of my history, and therefore a better judge?

What seldom gets questioned outside of academia is the fascism of Comic-Con-y action-hero cinema, the way we all bend over backwards for Iron Man, Batman, Superman. Part of the appeal is that we give it up to these, uh, men.

So it’s ironic that B: LA, the rare action film steeped in meritocracy, should be accused of fascist subtext.

The only explanation I have is that some Americans look at young people happily in uniform and fall into one of two traps, both occluding what’s on-screen.

It’s always been a Republican-pimped sell that liberals are anti-military pussies. This is bullshit except for the extremist fringes, where, especially during the lawless Cheney years, the creeps claimed soldiers were culpable.

But what also exists is the left’s dubious comfort with our Platoons and Full Metal Jackets. More on point, I think the way B: LA celebrates being happily in The Squad (oorah!) collides with the left’s greatest fetish–endless individuality (hence the old joke that getting Democrats to organize is like herding cats. Or getting Burning Man participants to dance in lockstep. You get the point). The same dynamic was at play with the contrast between being an individual and being on the Team in FNL.

But like FNL, B: LA strips away partisanship and finds people thrown together and struggling for one goal. Not much of a fascist vision.

Why this would attract me—well, you and I don’t know each other well enough.

But I have, in my articles here at Press Play, outed myself as a person dealing since the late 80s with the life-long effects of brain trauma, so it’s not surprising that, on some Pavlovian level, a film that limns an assaultive world would resonate with me.

Brain trauma, which at one point left me able to navigate Lacan and advanced audio engineering but unable to talk at a table full of people, renders fantasies of interconnectedness incredibly seductive.

So yeah, I’m pre-inclined towards this sort of narrative, where isolated people come together to create a family unrelated to the accident of birth. But that doesn’t make me more easily impressed.

No, because I desire or even need the real deal, whether it be Firefly, or SyFy’s Alphas or Battlestar Galactica, I’ll reject the bogus item—the list is too long–with great antipathy. But that’s just one angle. I could go on about Liebesman’s unique compression of depth, ‘grain’ and perspective (the upcoming Wrath of the Titansis instantly identifiable as a Liebesman film), his love of actors’ faces, and so on.

But what perhaps more delights me on a meta-but-real level is that almost everything about B: LA probably has something connected to it that’s connected to something else beyond the film that resonates with me. Something from when I was a kid. Or from an unrecalled painting, comic, film, toy or dream I liked. People throw around the word "awesome" too much. But this really is.

SIMON SAYS: Come Out to Pla-aaaaay: What Pop Culture Has Made of THE WARRIORS

The pervasive influence of The Warriors on pop culture is pretty staggering. As an update of the Greek heroic epic Anabasis, Walter Hill’s movie strives for archetypal narrative simplicity. But like any good remake, The Warriors is also very much about its setting: a four-colored comic book caricature of crime-infested, Fun City-era ‘70s New York. The titular gang struggles to make its way back to Coney Island after an unprovoked attack suggests that they’re being stalked, but why is a mystery. The Warriors stalk through several of the city’s five boroughs, stopping over in the Bronx and Queens and then passing through Manhattan in order to finally end their long journey in South Brooklyn (Staten Island, as usual, stands alone).

So it’s interesting then to note that a new movie like The FP, an action pastiche directed by Brandon and Jason Trost that comes out this Friday. The FP, blatantly inspired by Hill’s movie, only selectively appropriates aspects of Hill’s film. The FP follows an escalating feud between two video game-obsessed gangs in Frazier Park, a small town in California. Both gangs claim to be the best at what they do and what they do is competitively dance against each other in a variation on Dance Dance Revolution. There’s no journey to get back home as in The Warriors however, in The FP, so the film’s colorful characters’ dispute is not the same as the turf-v-turf feuding at the heart of The Warriors. Because, really, The FP’s nerds are just fighting for control of a relatively homogeneous community.

But that lack of specific referentiality is pretty much par for the course, unfortunately. More often than not, references to The Warriors in pop culture, ranging from video games to rap songs, are more about the film’s costumes and catch phrases than they are about the milieu that gave birth to those costumes and catch phrases. I mean, granted, it’s a very quotable movie: iconic lines like “Can you dig it?” and “Oh, Waaaaaariors, come out and play-aaaaay,” have been sampled in everything from Wu Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga” to the 1991 Sega fighting game Streets of Rage, the latter of which features a gang of baseball bat-wielding thugs who recall The Warriors’ Baseball Furies. Still, there’s something fundamentally off-putting about the way that many of these references reduce The Warriors to context-less sound bites. It’s almost as perverse as the way that Father Merrin’s ineffectual command, “The power of Christ compels you,” in The Exorcist has become a mantra for semi-jocular peer pressure. Um, you guys do remember that Max von Sydow’s character dies shortly after saying that line, right?

At the same time, there are some tributes to The Warriors that do get where their source of inspiration is coming from. I’m rather partial to the reverent set piece at the heart of actor/choreographer/director Seung-wan Ryoo’s 2006 actioner The City of Violence. Here’s a movie where a penitent gangster (Ryoo) and a police detective (Doo-hong Jung) reunite in their hometown of Onseong after a mutual friend dies at the hands of a big local gang. This gang is the crime world equivalent of an impersonal conglomerate, a point that’s driven home when their boss hires several smaller gangs to dispatch the film’s two resourceful protagonists.

This great fight scene, in a film full of great fight scenes, most successfully goes beyond the Tarantino-style of pastiche, where pop culture signifiers are divorced from their original context (The City of Violence’s last fight scene is, however, weirdly reminiscent of the orgiastic bloodbath at the end of Kill Bill, Volume 1).

The street fight excerpted above is terrific, if only for the way it shows the various gangs—breakdancers, yo-yo slingers, field hockey players and more—converging on a single spot. Events only really come to a head in The City of Violence once all of these gangs converge on a single spot for a spectacular melee. So this scene is not the climax of the movie, but it is the plot’s critical tipping point. It’s fitting then that this scene also is the one where Ryoo pointedly and cleverly refers to The Warriors as a location-based action film. Everything comes back to Onseong, so naturally that’s where all the gangs converge.

But as long as I’m talking about The Warriors as a movie that makes burlesque out of New York City’s diverse, heterogeneous population, I should also give props to Fighting, Dito Montiel’s breezy 2009 modern-day-Rocky-in-New York. As a trenchantly New York-based filmmaker, Montiel is obsessed with self-mythologizing. For example, in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Robert Downey Jr., who plays a version of Montiel, periodically interrupts the film’s story. In doing so, he both undermines and reinforces the veracity of Montiel’s autobiographical story of growing up in Astoria, Queens. So it stands to reason that Fighting, a movie about a young hustler (Channing Tatum) who participates in illegal street fights, should evoke The Warriors in its depiction of the colorfully partisan nature of New York’s various boroughs and neighborhoods.

To earn money, Tatum’s hero faces off with Latino gangs, Russian gangs and Asian gangs that are scattered throughout Montiel’s city. And as Tatum’s precocious meathead participates in more fights, it also becomes more apparent to viewers that these various race-based factions are united in their need to protect their respective territories. The Big Apple of Montiel’s movie has only cosmetically changed in the 30 years since The Warriors: it’s still very much a city defined by ethnic difference. Now if only we could get Spike Lee or Abel Ferrara to remake The Warriors….

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

GREY MATTERS: The Dark Turn of JUSTIFIED

Maybe I’m just touchy, or prone to over-reaction. But I’m thinking there’s something about Quarles, Justified’s bleach-blond, Oxy-popping, batshit, gay-teen-torturing, Motor City gangster and all-around homosexual kill-freak that rubs me the wrong way.

Partially because he’s a huge step down from the peckerwood-noir magnificence of Margo Martindale as Harlan County’s crime matriarch, Mags Bennett.

But mainly because he’s a hateful creation that suggests the show’s creators trawled through all of American cinema and dredged up every repellant stereotype of queer mutation and threat and fused the results into one inarguably, impeccably well-dressed and well-coiffed sociopath named Quarles (Neal McDonough).

And as Quarles revealed himself, with bottomless self-pity, to be more queer-centrically worse than we’d ever imagined, with a godawfulness that was a function of being queer, I realized that aghast was the only way to react to the new, suddenly appalling Justified.

The first question that comes to mind is why? Why did Justified’s staff need to dream up and feature this evil fuck-chop of regression?

My guess: Out of sheer, contemptuous, cynical utility. The season has been a listless bust.

Yes—the chewy nugget center of Justified, the it’s-so-wrong-it’s-right bromance between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and jack-of-all-crimes Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) still sparked, but it sparked in something of a void.

Raylen’s life-love Winona (Natalie Zea) got pregnant, accepted him for who he was, and then dumped him. We learned that, without a woman to add vulnerability to his hard ass routine, Raylen often came off as distant, sour, or too cynical.

Elsewhere, we traveled to a trapped-in-time African American community called Nobble’s Holler where everyone dressed like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, run by a gnarly black godfather named Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson)who seemed perpetually on the verge of doing something epically badass . . . only to go back to cleaning pigs.

A really promising plot strand involving black market organ harvesting from still-walking donors started, then petered out. The sole surviving Bennett, Dickie kept showing up like a persistant cough; I could never figure out why he was even in the show anymore.

And Quarles? He’s a Detroit mob enforcer who, while doing some Mob business, sees a way to cash in on the local Oxy trade. And to clarify: I was fine with Quarles for a while.

As played by McDonough, Quarles originally made an alternately terrifying and fun TV sociopath, Dexter in a Hugo Boss suit, another family man who switched between business, murder, and torturing people behind closed doors. He was fine as long as his monstrousness stayed behind those doors.

However, none of these things connected or built any narrative steam as the clock ticked on the basic Justified narrative: someone had to become sufficiently vile for Raylan to justifiably mete out frontier justice.

Thank god they had their own resident freakshow friend of Dorothy, someone to carry on the grand tradition of Peter Lorre as the barely human child killer in M,the queer-killing queer in Cruising, the incest-freak killer in Gladiator, the serial murderer of Silence of the Lambs, Big Love’s similarly impeccably dressed closet case.

One even imagines the head of the writers’ room assigning these films—and the hundreds more that came before them—as homework for the writers, inspiration for ways to make Quarles more terrifyingly gay.

Anyway, as the good ship Justified hit rough waters on the way towards its finale, the show pulled out its big gun.

One of Quarles’ victims grabbed and drew a gun on him. Quarles talked him down with a heartfelt, teary-eyed backstory of abuse, rape, and being forcibly whored out, and so on, all of it much worse because when all of that happens and it’s queer-based, well, man, that’s way worse. At least 65 per cent worse.

Of course, the boy ended up raped, tortured and dead at Quarles’ hands–Que sera—but now there’s no doubt what team Quarles plays for. Why do we need this detail? Because, once audiences know he’s a fairy on top of everything else, an alien, family-threatening, scary, seductive, anti-Leviticus queer, what else do we need to know? The writers count on audiences’ ticking the “no” box and move on.

Meanwhile, would the writing staff use a homo, boy-raping, whore-torturing, dope-fiend African American character?

No, that’s terrible. Plus, blacks have civil rights (technically). Gays, not so much, and if the election turns the wrong way . . .

Meanwhile, the writers’ choice betrays what’s really meant when the word “homophobia” is used. It’s what happens when what are probably entirely decent people try to concoct a TV bad guy and, when their imaginations are faced with an eternity of choices, the darkest, most horrible thing they can imagine is a homosexual.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out/New York.

TRAILER MIX: A New Press Play Column

Trailer Mix: A New Press Play Column

These days, movie-trailer creation is largely a lost art, reduced to an easily-pegged formula akin to the one that gives us the John Carters of the world. But trailers and teasers remain key components of the way we consume cinema, and the rarity of true art among them makes it all the more necessary to scrutinize what these brief glimpses do—or don't do—to distinguish themselves. Trailer Mix will take a close look at a different film trailer every week, pointing out the highs and lows of its form and function. The shoddy will be skewered, the middling will be chewed over, and, hopefully, the transcendent will be praised.

The latest U.S. trailer for Prometheus debuted on Saturday; however, as expected, it couldn't trump what's already been unfurled to promote this cryptic prequel to the Alien films. Though tonally similar to its ultra-savvy predecessors (a teaser and a TED Talk clip), the new clip seems comparatively diluted and compromised, inching, with every beat of its subbed-in, synth-rock soundtrack, toward convention that's otherwise been bucked.

If you’re on the hunt for the finest trailers of recent years, your path will surely lead you to those that offer little narrative, splicing together scored imagery with minimal exposition (consider the previews for Little Children and Garden State). The initial, superior peek at Prometheus was cut from this cloth, and yet its impact was enhanced tenfold, for rarely have a popular film ad's briskly-edited shots been so stirringly evocative. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, promised that Prometheus would boast some Alien DNA, but more than mere strands showed up in the first teaser, and through glimpses of the original movie's iconography, legions of devotees were artfully enticed while newbies were roped in by a handsome enigma.

Static appropriately opens this one-minute collage of ambiguity, but there's near-instant familiarity too: A spacecraft drifting into the frame is a signature shot of the Alien saga, and before one can even process that thought, the title starts materializing in telling, bone-fragment pieces. In tandem, dread and excitement are superbly mounted here, as what fans know and what they don't combine in pulse-thumping glimpses.

The monolithic face (the movie's flagship image) remains unexplained, but this clip is otherwise flooded with elements first unveiled in 1979, including the horseshoe ship the Nostromo crew investigates, the telescope-like “Space Jockey” apparatus that's yielded decades of scratched heads, and of course, the nest-like tunnels and egg lair. That these visuals hold up, and fuse seamlessly with CG effects to be projected in 3D, is a testament to the enduring power of H.R. Giger's concept art and the original film's production design. In line with industry trends, Prometheus is partly driven by nostalgia, but there's an ageless aesthetic purity on display, made thrilling by its connection to franchise mysteries.

It's not often that a film series can look to past breadcrumbs for whole new threads of plot. And if the aforementioned flashes aren't implication enough for how deep the movie goes into the Alien rabbit hole, look no further than the faux TED Talk clip that recently went viral, featuring a title-illuminating speech from Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), the voracious bigwig behind Weyland Industries, which first sent Ripley and company off to LV-426. Weyland waxes egotistical about playing god, and without being explicit, peels back scads of narrative layers (shot independently of the film itself, the allusion-heavy scene serves as connective tissue between storylines). All the while, he stands in an arena that has the teaser's same throwback polish, the grayed vision of a commercial, screen-riddled space evoking Scott's Blade Runner.

The newest trailer is another tool with which to sell Scott's return to sci-fi mastery, but with lack of novelty and diminished panache, it's missing its forebears' deft balance of new and old, which beckons while it bewilders. What the first clips offered, in stylish, first-rate fashion, was something both recognizable and very alien.

The Assassination of Sterling Hayden by the Auteur Francis Coppola

This morning, I was pondering the mini-movie-marathon TCM will be dedicating to one of my favorite actors, Sterling Hayden, on his birthday, March 26th. The tall, Nordic-looking blond was often relegated to heading up B-Westerns and crime stories in the 40s and 50s, like Arrow in the Dust and Suddenly, before finding a fan in director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick first used Hayden in just that type of film, 1956's The Killing, an early genre piece that really didn’t set the box office on fire. Hayden's reputation didn't really begin to attain a certain stature until a few years later. By then, Stanley Kubrick had become Kubrick™, the reclusive, one-named auteur who’d buck the Hollywood establishment and direct Hayden in the slightly bent role of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). This atypical, blackly comic role helped Hayden get darker, pivotal roles from many of the top auteurs who'd come after Kubrick, as they ascended in the New Hollywood's director-led artistic revolution, filmmakers like Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye), Bernardo Bertolucci (1900) and most notably, Francis Coppola. It was then, while thinking of Hayden’s role in Coppola’s The Godfather, that something wild occurred to me.

In 1972, The Godfather was something new to American cinema (the movie celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release on March 15th). It was a crime story that was also a prestige picture. No expense was spared in adapting the bestseller by Mario Puzo, mostly because the demanding Coppola resisted Paramount’s previous attempts to produce it quickly and cheaply, a la Martin Ritt's box office bomb, The Brotherhood. It's hard to imagine in retrospect, but actors lacking any trace of Italian ethnicity, like Ryan O'Neal and Robert Redford, were being considered to play The Godfather's protagonist, Michael Corleone, just like The Brotherhood had cast the lantern-jawed Kirk Douglas as its lead (for more on the ins and outs of The Godfather's production, read the indispensable The Godfather Companion by Peter Biskind). And why shouldn't the studio have done so? Up until then, heroes and antiheroes, regardless of intended ethnicity, were played by WASP (or in the case of Douglas, WASP-looking) actors like Hayden himself.

A lack of positive ethnic representation in cinema forced Cuban Americans like myself to adopt Scarface and its Cuban drug-lord Tony Montana into our cultural iconography (which I talk about at length here). One thing Cuban Americans do share with Montana is his immigrant experience. And one of the reasons Tony Montana in particular was so easily accepted by myself and others like me is because of the actor who played him. Al Pacino not only looked like one of us, he looked nothing like Sterling Hayden. You couldn't just stick Pacino in a Western without some kind of lengthy exposition to explain his presence in the film. But you could cast Pacino as the lead in a crime movie just like the ones Hayden starred in. And that's what Coppola did, casting Pacino as the star of The Godfather against the protests of studio executives, while assigning the aging Hayden a secondary role as a police chief. And not just any chief, but an utterly detestable, racist, and corrupt one.

Pacino's Michael Corleone was the first hero Cuban Americans had called their own, in a movie known to us as El Padrino. What Coppola did not just for Italians or Cuban Americans, but all ethnicities, was demonstrate that a prestige picture by a major studio could be carried by an Italian American, one who wasn't fair-skinned and blue-eyed like Frank Sinatra, but brown-eyed and of olive complexion and short stature like Al Pacino. Combined with the casting of character actors like Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson or black actors like Richard Roundtree as leads in some of the most popular films of the era, it’s fairly simple to see why Pacino’s success in a movie of that scale opened doors for so many offbeat-looking characters that would follow. Coppola's The Godfather was not just a major release. It won the Best Picture Oscar, spawned another Oscar-winning sequel, and has become one of the most watched movies of all time. And despite the risk of being overshadowed by no less an actor than Marlon Brando, Pacino carried The Godfather simply by virtue of being in every scene.

Coppola, who based many of the cultural touchstones of the film on his own family's experience as first-generation Italian Americans, then did something remarkable when he cast Hayden as Captain McCluskey, the despicable police chief we rooted against. He had Michael shoot him in the head midway through the film. Al Pacino, New Hollywood icon and one of my cultural heroes, shot Sterling Hayden, Old Hollywood stalwart and one of my favorite actors. In the head. Francis Coppola assassinated Sterling Hayden, and American cinema would never be the same again.

Atlanta-based freelance writer Tony Dayoub writes about film and television for his blog, Cinema Viewfinder, and reviews DVDs and Blu-rays for Nomad Editions: Wide Screen, a digital weekly. His criticism has also been featured in Slant’s The House Next Door blog, Opposing Views and Blogcritics.org. Follow him on Twitter.