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The Axis of Cool in DRINKING BUDDIES, and How It Tilts

Warning: This piece contains aggressive and open use of spoilers. In fact, spoilers are crucial to the piece. So, if you don’t want to hear about the surprise ending, where everyone leaves on a bal–oops. Never mind.

In the late 1980s, radio commentator Ian Shoales said he didn’t like The Big Chill‘s characters because he was positive none of them would have been friends with him in high school, or words to that effect. The four friends who form the center of Drinking Buddies, though not unlikeable, give off a similar whiff of coolness—so much so, in fact, that they resemble archetypes of young, urban hipsters. This is only worthy of mention, really, because coolness, or its lack, is a defining part of the film, and where each character falls on the film’s coolness axis at any given moment in the film is inversely proportional to that character’s ability to resonate with the unassuming, unsuspecting audience member.

Two of these four confused lovers work at a microbrewery, a perfect fit for them. The microbrew has long been an acknowledged emblem of hipsterhood, regardless of how many knit-capped gals and fellas might clutch Pabst Blue Ribbon 16-ouncers in however many over-crowded performance spaces these days. The brewery provides a perfect Petri dish in which cool affectations can grow and flourish—as when Kate (Olivia Wilde) wears sunglasses at work all too frequently, perhaps to hide hangovers earned after nights spent drinking with friends, but perhaps not. Wilde is comfortable and calm in this role—it’s not a complex part, at first blush, but she uses it to occupy the screen effectively, in the best sense of the word occupy: to inhabit, to live in, to stretch out within. Her friend Luke (Jake Johnson) should be a familiar figure to anyone who’s ever eaten in a gastropub, or been to a show in a hipster deposit area such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn—he has an artfully sloppy beard, he wears a gimme-cap indoors and outdoors, he likes building bonfires (a time-honored hipster ritual), and the company he keeps (artists and other clean-cut, well-spoken types) doesn’t match his folksy exterior. He’s on roughly the same high point of the coolness axis as Kate, for most of the movie. Most of it.

Kate’s boyfriend, Chris (Ron Livingston), is at the other end of that axis, as is Luke’s girlfriend, Jill (Anna Kendrick). Chris seems to be a writer, of some kind, though it’s not clear what type. Livingston is masterful here; Chris has an ingrained arrogance about him which he tries to cover up with a rustic, outdoorsy, wholesome affect, but can’t, quite, and it’s easy to sympathize with his failure. Uncool gestures issue from him like a series of violent sneezes he is helpless to control. In one particularly poignant moment, he lends Kate a copy of Rabbit, Run, a notable misstep, given that John Updike, apart from being one of America’s great prose stylists, was a master of near-pornographic sex scenes in which female characters were almost always objects, rarely subjects. Jill, also, is a wonderfully awkward special education teacher and artist; Kendrick is miles away, in this film, from her breakout role as the malfunctioning corporate drone in Up in the Air, spending her off-hours here making dioramas. When the film requires Jill to step outside of her comfort zone, to handle the possibility that she might have done something devious, she can’t—and all we can think of is that Kate would have handled a similar challenge with far more poise and, yes, cool. We can’t be sure if this is a good thing.

So what happens to rock the apple cart? These characters drink, a lot, as a rule. When you take them out of Chicago and into the woods for a weekend retreat near a beach, well . . . what do you think’s going to happen? Boundaries are crossed: first one, and then the other, and at the end, who breaks up? Kate and her boyfriend. All in all, this isn’t surprising; Chris doesn’t have much of a chance, here, among Kate’s crowd, and he knows it, which is why, after the weekend’s events, he calls things off. What tilts the film in Kate’s favor, though, is the facial expression she makes before Chris is about to break up with her, when he says, in simple terms, that they have to talk; she mashes her lips, and she grimaces, and we know, at this moment, that she’s really feeling something, that she’s reached the antithesis of cool. When is Jill’s uncool moment? Most of the movie, perhaps, but most notably when she returns early from a tropical vacation, crying because she’s done wrong by her man, Luke, and the honest girl inside her can’t stand the thought of it. And Luke? Luke collapses when, after helping Kate move, ripping his hands up on sofa nails, and getting into a fist fight with a stranger over parking, he can’t get Kate to spend time with him alone. The gimme cap, the beard, and the down-to-earth affect help Luke very little here, and he knows he’s whipped; when she suggests they hang out with friends, he makes fun of her, but he ultimately has to leave, his mimicry coming across as empty whining more than anything else. At these moments, the film casts an anchor out, and it hits bottom; we know, after waiting patiently, that we are in the presence of humans. It’s reassuring.

Joe Swanberg, as has been duly noted elsewhere, is building a portrait of a generation with his body of work. You’ve been next to these people at the grocery store, you may have ridden on subways with them, you’ve seen them at certain movie theaters, you’ve most definitely seen them at coffee shops. It’s easy to imagine that, as Swanberg’s films expand in scope, the crisis his characters face, the crucial question—can my plaid, my organic coffee, and my iPod survive my larger life crisis?—will become a more and more resounding issue, until it’s almost deafening. This is a moving, coherent film that could communicate to viewers at any point in the coolness spectrum—the question is, how far is Swanberg willing to depart from that frame of reference to tell a story?

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

Kill the Rich: YOU’RE NEXT and the Discreet Charms of the One Percent

For a culture obsessed with maintaining control—over our
minds, our bodies, our borders, and our relationships—horror films serve as a
necessary reminder of the futility of such endeavors. Horror is all about disruption, deprivation,
penetration, dislocation and all manner of mess, chaos and spillage. And a horror film is most frightening when it
breaks through the fragile borders that protect what is most precious to
us. Adam Wingard’s disturbing new film
makes the most of such fears by taking up the popular thriller scenario of the
home invasion. And while You’re Next is genuinely frightening,
ranking right up there with other recent films that excel in this mode, such as
The Strangers and Them, it also offers a sharply satirical
take on a distinctively American sense of privilege and entitlement. Embedding his fairly traditional sequential
homicide plot in a dysfunctional family drama, Wingard gives us a taste of what
Last House on the Left might have
looked like if it were directed by Luis Bunuel instead of Wes Craven, and in
the process re-politicizes a genre too often exploited for mindless thrills.

The film concerns itself with the reunion of a very wealthy family
celebrating the parents’ anniversary. But the darker underpinnings are
set by its alarming introduction. The wealth of the Davison family is in inverse proportion to its
sense of community and compassion, as we see when mom and
dad pass a neighbor’s home not far from their own country estate. Noticing a car in the driveway, they remark
that no one has occupied it in quite a while, and Paul (Rob Moran) remarks,
“It’ll be kind of nice having neighbors – we’re so isolated out here.” Struck
by the peculiar novelty of actually living near someone else, wife Aubrey
(Barbara Crampton) eyes him uncertainly and replies, “Um, maybe.”

This sense of narcissistic detachment permeates the family,
and as their reunion gets underway a palpable chill settles on their enormous
country estate that has little to do with the weather. Beyond the usual sibling rivalry, family
relations are strained by a father who seems bored even by his children’s
achievements, while at the same time straining after an illusion of family
warmth and camaraderie. As the house
fills with guests, Aubrey seems increasingly out to lunch, a classic portrayal of a trophy
wife who has ceded her status as an individual. The significant others of the younger family
members are regarded as somewhat annoying curiosities by the other Davisons, as
if they were stray pets who haven’t been entirely housebroken. Significantly, the daughter’s partner is an
underground documentary filmmaker played by one of independent horror’s leading
figures, Ti West. The family is deeply
perplexed by the question of what would motivate anyone to direct low-budget
films, and the oldest brother encourages him instead to direct advertisements,
which he deems the twenty-first century’s premier art form.

Suffice it to say that by the time the masked invaders begin to pile up bodies,
no tears will be shed (at least by the audience). Wingard demonstrates his mastery of the genre
by knocking his annoying characters off in a disturbing, and often amusing,
variety of ways. Many of the murder
scenes verge on elaborate slapstick routines, at times suggestive of Rube
Goldberg stunts designed for the Marquis de Sade. Critics have praised the film’s deft
management of the fine line between horror and humor, and while it’s true that
this series of killings is a genuinely funny and frightening tour de force, the
film’s real appeal is in the pointed nature of its satire.

Early in the film, as Crispian Davison (A.J Bowen) and his
girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) are driving up to the reunion, she asks him how
his family became so wealthy. When he
answers that his father used to work for a Halliburton-like firm of defense
contractors, he jokingly asks, “Are you sure you’re okay having dinner with
fascists?” Military concessions aren’t
the only thing the Davison paterfamilias has been contracting out: as the
siblings discuss the slow progress of their family estate’s restoration, they
note that dad bought the place as a kind of retirement project, but has lazily hired
other people to work on it rather than restore it himself. As the film progresses, certain members of
the family are shown to have a surprising connection with their killers, and
the film comes to serve as an extended meditation on the connections that exist
between members of an economic and social community, and the impossibility of
compartmentalizing them. The Davisons
would like to believe that they have achieved a pristine sense of isolation from the society they profit from, but their financial ties bind them to a
population on whom they would prefer to turn their backs.

At the other end of the social spectrum is the family
background of Crispian’s girlfriend, Erin. As the dwindling family members hunker down in their embattled home, she
reveals a surprising efficiency at defense tactics, which she confesses having
learned during a peculiar childhood raised in a militia compound in the
Australian outback. Her father was a
survivalist who believed the world’s problems of overpopulation, food and water
shortages would result in global anarchy, and devoted his life to ensuring his
and his family’s continuation. Yet while
Erin’s and Crispian’s families may come from different sides of the class
divide, their social values are surprisingly similar, and reflect some of the
dominant tendencies in American culture. Gun-toting survivalists in their militia compounds and retired
millionaires sequestered behind their capital gains share a common vision of
freedom and independence at any cost, and Wingard’s film effectively shows what
happens when this twisted version of the American dream goes horribly wrong.

While Erin is certainly the film’s most dynamic character
and the closest thing the film has to a heroine, she differs from the
familiar “last girl” figure of traditional horror films. Unlike the resourceful Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre survivor Sally Hardesty, Erin goes beyond
merely getting out of the nightmare in which she finds herself: she becomes an
essential part of that nightmare, engaging in brutal overkills that constitute some
of the film’s most uncomfortable viewing.
In one especially complicated encounter she hesitates before the kill,
before dismissively asking, “Why the fuck not?” as she finishes the bloody
deed. Survivalist Erin is no worse than
the selfish Davisons and their ruthless assailants, but it would be quite a
stretch to suggest that she offers an alternative moral center to the violent
maelstrom in which she finds herself.

In its by turns disturbing and hilarious portrayal of a
privileged family’s reunion gone horribly wrong, You’re Next gives us what is perhaps this year’s most trenchant commentary
on an America increasingly riddled by narcissism and greed. That it chooses to center its satire on a
family gathering points up its difference from the summer’s other major horror
offerings, The Conjuring and Insidious 2, both directed by James Wan. Where Wan gives us a disappointingly
traditional vision of the home as locus of love and solidarity, Wingard reminds
us that houses are designed as much to keep others out as to shelter those
within. Wingard’s film takes its title
from the bloody words scrawled on the walls of the Davison’s home by its
invaders, and these words might be taken as a dark reminder of our common
lot. You might think you’ve landed
yourself a comfortable position and a secure future, but as horror films remind
us, it may be only a matter of time until you’re next.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Ramble On: THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

From one perspective, it’s ironic that the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books have been so successful; they owe their success to technological progress, and yet an argument against such progress is one of their underlying themes.

Rambling along country roads in England, for instance, was much better in the past. Back then, as you meandered about, puffing on a brier pipe, the world was a sunny paradise. Birds chirruped; cows chewed cud contemplatively; and portly farmers grunted surly, friendly greetings. These days, some chump in a Land Rover will no doubt mash you into the nearest clump of gorse, upbraid you in crude “estuary” English, and speed off.

In Britain during the past century, there was no shortage of people who could tell you how things were sliding downhill, fast. The past was better, merry, mirthful; dirtier in some respects, but good, honest dirt for all that. And we, with our plastic flowers and cement grass, have left our soul behind in yonder merry medieval ditch.

I have always found this narrative fairly hard to fathom. Tooling around in medieval times, wooing the odd damsel, and banging out a few ale-drenched Chaucerian stanzas may sound great fun, but on closer examination of only a few historical statistics, the Chaucer and the damsels pale into insignificance. Fact is, if you were around in ye olden days, you would probably be dead, since child mortality rates were astronomical. Other illnesses were so little understood, they didn’t even have the right names! (Anyone for the bloody flux?)

The reverence for a supposed golden age ruined by progress is a recurring theme in human history. The Romans had it, no doubt the guys before the Romans had it too. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose children’s story The Hobbit has now been adapted to the screen as a trilogy by Peter Jackson, also subscribed to this philosophy, along with his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. As the twentieth century progressed, Tolkien would be embraced by the alternative society as a sort of prophet of doom, accurately predicting the harrowing bleakness wrought by modernity.

To this day our hemp-wearing chums will knowingly roll their eyes and talk—at length—about Tolkien’s prophetic abilities (in theme, at least). Machines ravaged the earth only a handful of years after he wrote The Hobbit, in the carnage of the Second World War, they pronounce. But machines are operated by people. Human cruelty can be catalogued as far back in history as you want to go. The twentieth century has no exclusive rights on the charnel house.

And, most tellingly, neither of Tolkien’s books that have now been adapted into live-action features, The Hobbit or its cinematic precursor The Lord of the Rings, would have been possible without advancements in film production. Both were turned into feature animations of varying success in the 1970s, and John Boorman had long planned bringing the latter to the screen in the same decade, but it was technological progress that allowed Peter Jackson, et al to successfully tackle such densely—and idiosyncratically—crafted works of fantasy. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a rousing success, hugely popular with both audiences and critics, garnering billions of dollars at the box office, with the final film, 2003’s The Return of the King, sweeping the Oscars. Jackson and his films put the fantasy genre on film culture’s map.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Before Jackson’s trilogy, fantasy in film had been about as cool as a tweed g-string. When I was young, it was, speaking bluntly, rubbish: fascinating for the Dungeons and Dragons set or habitual devourers of superhero comics, but to be avoided like the plague by people with any taste (I can say these things—I used to belong to the D and D set). But the Lord of the Rings films changed something, and people started talking about not just them, but also the fantasy genre, in hushed, awed tones. For better or worse, the genre and its fans owe a debt of gratitude to Peter Jackson and technological wizardry.

This tradition of marrying fantasy with high-tech hermetics and portentous narrative continues in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which promises to be the first part of a new trilogy, fashioned from a book that a particularly slow reader could devour in a lazy afternoon. Despite his initial protestations, Peter Jackson returned to the director’s chair vacated by Guillermo Del Toro, whose sole contribution seems to be an afterthought-like screenwriting credit. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a dense picture, but perhaps not as densely conceived as it could have been (the original plan only included two installments). It neither disappoints nor enchants. If anything, it leaves the viewer wondering what all the fuss is about Tolkien.

I have recently watched Fellowship of the Ring, and found it once again to be utterly delightful. It remains my favorite of Jackson’s Ring Cycle, mainly because I love the quaint, rather English scenes set in the Shire before the plot kicks in. The Hobbit, judging from its advance publicity, promised more of the same. And it delivers. To a point.

The Hobbit opens with not one but two prologues, the first showcasing how Erebor, the greatest dwarf kingdom in Middle Earth, was overtaken by the treasure-hungry dragon Smaug, forcing the dwarfs into a nomadic existence. The second works, assumingly, as a bookend to the earlier films and a narrative device connecting them to The Lord of the Rings, as old Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) sits down to write his memoirs. This takes us back to sixty years previously, when Gandalf, once again played by Sir Ian McKellen, who knocks on the younger, and much more timid, Bilbo’s (Martin Freeman) door to enlist him on an adventure with 13 dwarfs, who want to reclaim their mountain kingdom from the dragon. The dwarfs (I refuse to use “dwarves,” Tolkien’s in-universe plural for dwarf) are led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), who remains unconvinced of Bilbo’s talents, which Gandalf says will make him useful as a burglar. Hesitation, though, is overcome by all parties involved, and the group set off on their quest, in which they come across elfs, goblins, and many other creatures, the knowledge of which once assured the relative longevity of my virginity.

Peter Jackson, who, along with Del Toro, also wrote the screenplay with long-time collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, has put together a fine, if uneven, almost paradoxical, film. The Hobbit is long and feels long, but it has a new challenge for the characters every few scenes. Tolkien’s original book is highly episodic, but Jackson overcomes this with a deft, natural-seeming touch. Having said that, the film leaves one with a sense of incredulity. Unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, whose titular band ends up in tatters, The Hobbit comes to a close, after almost three hours, just as it is revving up.

Indeed, so much of the film is filler that it amazes me to hear there will be an extended version for home video. Short of having the dwarfs sing the full version of the Lonely Mountain song (which is, admittedly, a terrific moment) or showing the fat dwarf wiping his arse, one wonders how a film that spends ten minutes showing a wizard trying to resuscitate a hedgehog left anything on the cutting room floor.

The film has many high points, though: Martin Freeman is great as Bilbo: the sense of underhanded sarcasm in his delivery of even the most sincere lines is welcome in a series devoid of such thespian frivolities. Sir Ian is equally delightful as Gandalf, thanks to a higher screen time than he had as Gandalf the Grey in Fellowship.

The film’s scope is perhaps even greater than The Lord of the Rings, if not wholly logical (at one point the group is in the middle of verdant greenery, in the next cresting a snowy mountain overpass). Accompanied by Howard Shore’s instantly hummable main theme, the visuals are stunning. The effects look magnificent, especially during the Erebor scenes in the monologue as well as a later battle between stone giants. Even Gollum (Andy Serkis) looks much better than he did in the earlier films; the game of riddles he embarks on with Bilbo is the film’s single most wonderful sequence.

In the end, though, Jackson’s film remains a bit of an enigma. It cannot be dismissed as either a vanity project or a mere commercial endeavour. It’s grand, yet it also feels small. More than that, though, the film’s central philosophy is muddled. It advocates leaving one’s creature comforts behind and venturing out into the wild, and yet its reasoning for this, in Jackson's interpretation, remains the eventual restructuring of a once-stationary order. The film argues for progress, only to inhibit its natural inclination: the destruction of boundaries. What’s best: localization or globalization? At least Tolkien and his kin thought the old ways were better. Jackson hasn’t quite made up his mind.

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog. Occasionally, he updates his personal blog Cerebral Mastication. In addition, his writing appears on various film and pop-culture sites on the blogosphere. He also believes in the transformative potential of Twitter.

DJANGO UNCHAINED Is All Too Restrained

A plantation in the antebellum South is a perfect setting for a Quentin Tarantino film. His movies flip expectations, revealing gangsters as mundane chatterboxes and assassins as loving parents, transforming the would-be victims of murderous stalkers and World War II Nazis into forces of vengeance. So with Django Unchained, Tarantino takes aim at the mythology of the southern plantation through his genre-colliding structure to bathe the culture in his excessive style. The film is intermittently thrilling fun—the director is in complete control of his camera—yet for all its surface pleasures, it feels oddly unfocused. It rarely displays Tarantino’s ability to undermine or reinvent the familiar. Too often it feels like a film by one of his poor imitators.

In many ways, the structure of Django Unchained recalls Inglorious Basterds. It’s a mix of spaghetti western and blaxploitation that takes its title from the Sergio Corbucci film Django, and even features a cameo by its star, Franco Nero. The film begins with a shot of whip scars on the back of the titular Django, played by a quietly soulful Jamie Foxx, as he’s led across the landscape as part of a chain gang. Dr. King Schultz, a dentist played by Christoph Waltz, approaches the slave masters in the middle of a forest, using words such as parley and malarkey to intimidate them with his control of the English language. It turns out the good doctor is actually a bounty hunter who needs Django to identify his next targets. When Django’s owners turn down Schultz’s request, he turns this nighttime encounter into a bloody mess, sending our heroes on their way, and planting the seeds of black revenge.

In terms of sets and locations, Django Unchained is Tarantino’s most expansive film, but it features his most straightforward story. Django and Schultz first team up as bounty hunters across the South before deciding to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). She’s being held captive by the vicious, maniacal slave owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, miscast) and Samuel L. Jackson as Candie’s loyal servant Stephen, an Uncle Tom to the nth degree. Schultz and Django must perform in order to deceive their captors, hiding their shock at the violence and pain of slavery around them. Playacting in service of the job is a Tarantino signature (see Reservoir Dogs’s undercover cop posing as the bank robber Mr. Orange, the Pulp Fiction assassin Jules bellowing Biblical passages as a prelude to murder, and the various role-players in Inglorious Basterds). Django doesn’t come at this theme with nearly as much originality or verve, nor does it present its bloodshed in a way that comments upon the moviegoer’s attraction-repulsion to violence. The characters obsessively discuss the savagery onscreen and the way violence is commodified, but their observations never add up to a critique.

Tarantino’s initial concept is promising; one would think that if anyone could re-imagine the clichés of Spaghetti westerns and slavery exploitation pictures, he could. But because the outcome of this tale feels inevitable and telegraphed, there’s little at stake, and the characterizations are disappointingly one note, and don’t defy our expectations as thrillingly as some of his other creations. Although Foxx plays Django with a cool and calculated depth, the hero never seems more than an archetype at the center of a myth, and Washington, another excellent performer, is given even less to do as Django’s mate Broomhilda. As much fun as DiCaprio looks like he’s having shouting epithets, his character is still a bombastic cartoon—stylish and fun but rarely complex. Only Waltz and Jackson give their characters more complicated, dynamic shadings. The plot machinations eventually lead to violent battle at the plantation, but it takes so long that when it arrives, it seems more a peak of excess than a satisfying climax, and throughout, the film lacks most of the other elements that make his earlier work more than just flashy entertainment. The hero slays all those who perpetuate the culture of slavery, but after the apocalyptic finale of Basterds, the bloodbath feels rote.

Tarantino, the Man Who Loves Movies, is still a virtuoso with the camera, taking inspiration from his idols to craft thrilling and exciting scenes. Sergio Leone’s tight closeups, Corbucci’s zooms, John Ford’s vistas and Howard Hawks’ editing patterns are all in play throughout Django, and there are echoes of blaxploitation films, too, particularly Shaft and Superfly. His camera movements are bold, taking you right into the action, and with Robert Richardson as director of photography, Western iconography hasn’t looked as good since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The film also boasts some of Tarantino’s most violent action, which for him is saying a lot, and its point-of-view is squarely with the oppressed rather than the oppressors. Scenes of violence toward blacks have an intense visceral quality and are often shot in tortuous close-ups with a grainy, oversaturated texture; violence against whites often plays in long shots, which lend these scenes over-the-top comical quality.

Unfortunately, Tarantino’s proficiency stops with the visuals. He seems more interested in its surface pleasures than actually engaging with his text. The movie’s most subversive moment—a comical set piece involving a very game Don Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan—feels less like Tarantino than a deleted scene from Blazing Saddles, and the deliberately anachronistic use of rap and soul artists, including 2Pac, Rick Ross, and John Legend, feels more intrusive than organic. (None of the songs feel as strangely right as David Bowie’s “Cat People” did in Basterds.)

More puzzlingly, the verbal tangents, a Tarantino hallmark, fall flat. Those elongated discussions usually serve one of two purposes: They contribute to the creation of unique character moments later, as in the TV pilot discussion in Pulp Fiction or the lap dance narrative in Death Proof; or they suggest what is not being said in a scene and build tension, as in the German pub sequence in Inglorious Basterds. Django’s talk lacks such richness. Much of the dialogue in the film’s second half centers on discussions of how slaves’ strength is rated; it should cut to the heart of the film’s subject, but it only underlines how much Tarantino loves his own phrasing. By the time Candie gives us an anatomy lecture with a human skull, the film seems as if it’s trying to be bold for boldness’ sake, without giving much thought to its ultimate goal. What, if anything, is the filmmaker trying to say about race, racism and slavery throughout Django Unchained? It’s not clear. The film plays out the fantasy of African-American revenge to an appropriately bloody conclusion, but it all seems more passé than inventive, clever but never revolutionary.

The movie’s failures are all the more depressing when one considers how many great films Tarantino has made, and how his talent has evolved over time. Twenty years ago, he revived commercial cinema with an adrenaline shot to the heart, but any complexity or surprise Django Unchained might have had gets asphyxiated under Tarantino’s love of his own craft. The movie is technically impressive but never emotional, its flourishes are witty yet superficial, and over time it becomes tedious. A film involving this many sticks of dynamite should have been more powerful.

GREY MATTERS: HOMELAND and the art of playing crazy

As a certified crazy person, I’m here to tell you that either vampires burn in daylight or they don’t. I’ll accept no wiggle room on this. Anything less and you’ll quickly lose my suspension of disbelief. To get what I’m babbling about, this way, please. I’m talking about Homeland, which is, by the way, about almost nothing but crazy people.

Homeland, in case you’ve been busy catching up on something more realistic – I suggest Syfy’s zero-dollar wonder, Alphas – is about Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a C.I.A. operations officer haunted by the notion that she failed to do something that may have stopped 9/11 from happening. She was also compromised in an Iraq operation because of an American soldier who’d turned against his country.

Then a Delta Force raid uncovers Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) in a compound belonging to super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Brody becomes a hero but Carrie pegs him as connected to her failed op and worse, a turned sleeper agent.

When the C.I.A. turns down Carrie’s requests for invasive surveillance because dammit, we don’t do that sort of thing in America, she does it herself with some spy pals. (Alphas, with its metaphor-fraught tales of working class, genetically “super-powered” people fighting Cheney’s still-booming and lawless torture system that Homeland needs to pretend doesn’t exist, is the more clear-eyed, adult view of post-civil liberties America.) In episodes Alfred Hitchcock would love, Carrie watches Brody eat, talk and have sex with his stunningly gorgeous wife (Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame).

The season-long hook, teased sometimes to exquisitely hair-pulling extremes, is a has-he-or-hasn’t-he game of whether or not Brody has been turned and is out for big-time trouble.

And then, for me, it all went to hell.

Carrie’s a character whose entire life, as the brilliant credits sequence reminds us every week, is literally defined by terrorism, fear and trying to control that fear by building a life, a personage as a person in strict control, serving her country, her profession and the one real man in her life, her mentor and father figure Saul Berenson (the mighty Mandy Patinkin).

So of course she decides to throw it all away, including, quite possibly, the security of the United States, so she can get drunk and fuck Brody.

The show recovered in fits, some so good and others so bad it was like tuning in to get whiplash, but this was the first trumpet sounding Homeland’s true nature, and televisual literature was not included in that symphony. Homeland never dived so far as The Killing. It stayed professional, keeping us interested (and glad there were no commercial breaks where we could pause to think about its manifold absurdities). Then there was last week’s finale that led to an explosive terrorist conflagration that wasn’t – because if it was, one of the players would be taken off the board, and so much for Homeland Season Two.

But what about the vampires? What about you being crazy?

Okay. What I mean is, if a show has vampires who can never walk in sunlight because they’ll burn up in flames except when the writers need them to, well, I’m not going to be watching that show, because the writers have contempt for me, or their material, or both.

On the most basic level, that’s the deal with Carrie and Brody. In order to accept Carrie and Brody, we must accept some whoppers about what we know about bipolar disorder – if only from Oprah, what millions of people know about returning Iraq vets and P.T.S.D. and what we all know about what it is to be human.

Right, bipolar disorder. I didn’t mention that, to add some tension spice to Carrie’s character, Homeland makes Carrie suffer really badly from bipolar disorder. Like, it’s so bad that she has to take her meds every day or else she’ll go into a manic tailspin and lose her mind. The poor thing, she can’t even go to a regular doctor for those meds because the C.I.A. would kick her out as a security risk. So, she visits her psychiatrist sister on the down-low for her weekly supply, which translates into even more suspense, and some shame and anxiety to boot; this bipolar thing is paying off big-time and all they had to do was say she has it. Poor Carrie. This is going to be one rough season.

Except, not so much, because on Homeland, vampires can walk in daylight, so to speak. After a few episodes, her bipolar kind of…goes away. Why? I would imagine because its rigors would get in the way of other plots leading to such flights of fancy as Carrie blowing off seeing her sister for meds so she can get blotto drunk for some hot Brody ooh la la. Unlike all of us, intemperance does nothing to aggravate her bipolar; hell, she doesn’t even get hangovers.

Yes, “us.” I outed myself a while ago on being bipolar. It’s no big thing – as long as you remotely behave like a grown-up about this controllable thing, i.e., not like Carrie.

Don't get me wrong: I don’t suggest Homeland hang itself on the horns of scientific accuracy (or a WebMD search). I just ask that it create a ‘verse where there are laws for Carrie’s condition, and then stick to those laws, like the way Vulcans can or can’t intermarry and the like. (On the other hand, absurdity met ugliness when the showrunners had Carrie, in deep depression, diagnosing herself – with her sister mutely complicit – for electroconvulsive therapy, a.k.a. shock treatment, a controversial, risky, cognition- and memory-impairing but highly photogenic treatment calling for Danes to be strapped and gagged, electrodes glued to her scalp. Then they cranked the juice as her body spasmed grotesquely. If you’re suffering from depression, there are a million other ways to get help – this is just an ignorant TV show by the guys who made the torture-happy 24.)

Danes has created a viable person built off the showrunners’ thumbnail description and her own vision of Carrie, which manifests in endlessly fascinating halting speech patterns, “talking” body language, odd glares and more. The creators of Homeland were insanely fortunate to get such an artist.

As for Brody – good grief. Here’s a man who for eight years was brutalized, beaten, locked in solitary, became a surrogate father to an adorable child who died horribly, was forced to brutalize other Americans and, for a freshet of memorable detail, was pissed on while he bled. And yet within a day or so he’s home, and aside from limited, soon-to-improve sexual dysfunctions and some behavioral dissonances, he’s on his way to a full recovery with timeouts for plot-advancing nightmares.

Meanwhile, in Brody’s frequent shirtless scenes we see his scars and their implied memories of unimaginable months of pain and horror, which now have no apparent effect. (Even his attempted terrorist act is based not on torture, but on love of a child.) This is Spielbergism; take a sad song and make it ludicrously better, one-upping it by saying the sad song doesn’t exist even as you’re looking at it.

As Brody breezed through photo ops, interrogations, his love affair, superior fathering, a remarkable act of remembrance in a church, the first steps towards a congressional run and the build-up to his terror attack, watching Homeland, for me, became the job of creating in my mind a less ridiculous backstory for Brody. Something Uwe Boll would not reject as failing to meet his stringent standards of realism. (I also had to ixnay the absurdity that any country would allow such damaged goods into the ‘burbs with no decompression process, where anyone could get to him, or the poor bastard could just blow his brains out in 24 minutes.)

Again, it’s entirely the actor’s art that pulls this nonsense off. It’s Lewis’ eye and neck muscle work, his oddly timed blinks, his general tightness of bearing suggesting things blowing up inside. Everything that nobody bothered to write.

But there were such great moments! Like when Brody and Carrie went to her family cabin in the woods, with its implications of a peaceful childhood she somehow missed, and his connection to a person who gets his deal. It was beautiful. And then she flat-out accuses him of being with Al Qaeda, and he’s back at her, yelling that he isn’t (which technically is true). It’s the spy scene we’ve always wanted to see: the breaking of both players’ pose.

Pure gold. But moments like this get lost in a spy show’s mechanics and, as Carrie’s mental illness makes that special guest appearance, devastating her just in time for dramatic effect, I’m just over these daywalking vampires. Next season, I’ll recalibrate my expectations of Homeland. I’ll enjoy the acting, the twists and turns. What do you want? It’s just TV.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

SIMON SAYS: Tom Cruise in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 4: “it is my destiny to be the king of vain.”

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In the recent Mission: Impossible movies, Tom Cruise has basically played a charismatic body under stress. While Mission: Impossible III is still the most satisfying film of the series because it takes the Ethan Hunt character and gives him personal stakes to fight for, Hunt’s main appeal has always been his charm as a humorless beast of burden. No film in the series makes this more apparent than the fourth and most recent entry in the film franchise, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Here, Cruise, who gets a prominent producer credit in the film’s opening credits, shows his age; in fact, he flaunts it. Not in an “I’m getting too old for this shit” kind of way. More like a “My body has seen better days but I’m still pretty amazing, so shut the hell up and watch me scale the tallest building in the world…one-handed” kind of way.

Okay man, sure, I just came for the movie, I swear, don’t hurt me!

Tom Cruise in Ghost Protocol is intimidating-looking. In fact, watching the grooves on Cruise’s scored face is so distracting that it’s sometimes just as thrilling as watching the film’s immaculate set pieces. The bags under his eyes are always more pronounced, the contours of his face more angular and the wrinkle lines etched into his cheeks like stone always suggest more texture than his co-stars’ features. Take note: Tom Cruise’s body hasn’t gone to seed. But Hunt’s hair is longer than usual and his face is certainly showing signs of age.

null You’d have to work pretty hard to cover up that kind of wear, but that’s kind of the point of Ghost Protocol: Cruise’s Hunt is not in denial. He’s in great shape – did you not see him clean up the world’s tallest building in Dubai? Or, on foot in a sand storm, running around like a madman? Or crashing several BMW luxury sedans? Just think of Tom Cruise’s face as the portrait of Dorian Gray, which I guess makes his body Dorian Gray…except in Ghost Protocol, Dorian Gray is galloping around the world with his portrait on display. Which is…odd, to say the least.

So Ethan Hunt in Ghost Protocol is going around doing incredibly impossible missions. He’s not developed well enough to be treated like most characters, with ulterior motives and “feelings” that extend beyond the circumstantial peril Hunt is constantly forcing upon himself. So in this film, he’s just a really versatile guy that takes it upon himself to do much of the heavy lifting of tracking and disarming an evil Russian madman, codenamed “Cobalt” (Abduction’s Michael Nyqvist).

Until Hunt and his team catch Cobalt, they’re in the shit. But even though he’s working with them throughout the film, Hunt has to basically lead the group because none of them are capable of doing things with restraint, improvisatory skill or much brawn without him. He’s the Mr. T to their A-Team; if they were replaced by other actors mid-film, no one would notice or care. That lopsided team dynamic is sort of a given until the film’s last big set piece, which reminds us that the film is about a team of spies, some of whom, unlike Hunt, are actually both charismatic and capable of laughing at themselves, too.

Cruise’s Hunt has no such default setting. His onscreen persona throughout the series has been, and continues to be, pretty brittle. So it’s a very good thing that Cruise is naturally charming. The curious thing about these Mission: Impossible movies is that in them, he’s constantly trying to remind us of this by performing spy hijinks and superhuman acrobatics, like his big Dubai Spider-man act in Ghost Protocol, where he climbs up 11 stories using magnetic gloves, one of which short-circuits mid-climb. This only momentarily fazes Hunt. He keeps climbing.

Director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and Ghost Protocol’s capable stunt choreographers play up Cruise’s glassy charms by making a sight gag of Hunt’s malfunctioning magnetic gloves. After he callously shucks the glove off, Hunt soon finds the errant glove stuck to a pane of glass just a few stories below where he originally ditched it. This is a rare thing in Ghost Protocol, a joke involving Hunt’s man of action. But it should be noted that the joke is not on Hunt but rather the malfunctioning equipment that Benji (Simon Pegg), a geeky and relatively effete fellow spy, gave him. Modern technology can’t even keep up with Tom Cruise!

null But in all seriousness, Ghost Protocol needs Cruise’s over-seriousness and his tendency of making himself look that much more focused, that much more determined and that much more capable than everyone around him. Even newcomer Jeremy Renner looks like a girly man compared to Cruise, like in the scene where Renner is floating around (literally, floating around) in an overheated subterranean tunnel while wearing a chain mail suit that levitates his whole body.

Yes, there is actually a sequence where Jeremy Renner, a new macho action hero for our times, is floating around with his arms outstretched in front of him like he’s Supergirl. And he’s sweating. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt doesn’t sweat, not even when he’s fighting Michael Nyqvist’s Cobalt, a villain that is so hardcore that he’d rather kill himself than let Hunt get the upper hand. Cruise’s Hunt, by contrast, is all upper body strength and an unending supply of physical endurance and facial tics when he wants to show you just how hard he’s pushing his body (note: pretty freaking hard). Without him, Ghost Protocol would be nothing.

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, 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, The Extended Cut.