Today's Review: White Bird in a Blizzard

Wrote another review for MovieScene this week. After all, I had some catching up to do in that department:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/157936/white_bird_in_a_blizzard_-_recensie

From director Gregg Araki, we both got what we expected and we didn't, in this film's case. White Bird in a Blizzard contained all his usual themes - surrealism, teenage social issues, sexuality, death - but it lacked his usual energetic visual style. It never got recognizably 'Arakiesque'. Usually it's a not a bad thing per se when you can't tell who the director is from looking at the picture, but in this case, it's no flattery at all. White Bird is a visually unimpressive, bland picture that in many ways feels like a missed oppurtunity on this director's part. You might say he preferred to stick to the source material, this being an adaptation of somebody else's novel, but considering he did change a fair amount of things already, it would also have suited him to get the film more in line with his signature style to feel less detached and make us care more about the characters.

At least performances are good throughout the piece. Shailene Woodley makes a better impression than usual. However, it's Eva Green who steals the show while playing her mother. That too, doesn't help the movie much, as it's not her show (hence the proverbial 'stealing'). In fact, it's much more about her absence than it is about her presence, but when she graces the screen, the movie lightens up considerably. Green does an excellent job portraying a seemingly perfect house wife, sizzling with the frustrations of a wasted life and unfulfilled desires just underneath the facade. Her unhealthy relationship with her daughter makes for the most emotional scenes, thoroughly uncomfortable yet mesmerizing to behold. However, the moment she's out of the picture, literally and figuratively,and  the story fully centers around Woodley's character just hanging out with her friends, having sex and going to college, our attention wanes. And then it uneasily evolves from a typical coming-of-age drama into a thirteen-a-dozen thriller in the second half and all the predictable dirty secrets come out. But we care too little, too late at that point.

White Bird in a Blizzard will always be compared unfavorably to that other adaptation of a literary work Araki directed, Mysterious Skin. That movie too featured all his themes (including a visually sober look), but fared a lot better combining teen angst, creepy sexual relations and a thriller component, as the movie unraveled in a way that did make us interested in the questions of what happened to whom. White Bird in a Blizzard sadly feels repetitive and redundant on Araki's resumé. But at least Green is not at fault.

Today's News: a threesome of trailers with a bit of casting

Time is always against me, so it has taken me a bit longer than I had hoped to get going with posting news again, though admittedly, there wasn't that much of it anyway this week:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/157929/eerste_trailer_iron_sky_2

Das ist ja spitze, toll und hübsch! I absolutely adored the first Iron Sky (Nazis on the moon, can't go wrong with that notion!) and though I didn't think its ending allowed for a sequel - it's a bit of a downer, you know - I'm pleasantly surprised to see the writers, total fanboys as they are, came up with a neat new direction for the franchise. Nazi lizard people riding dinosaurs! Apparently, things only get crazier and I'm loving it. You can't ask for a better trailer to convince people to put money in your project (as it still is in no way sure whether the budget necessary for The Coming Race will be reached). If this trailer doesn't pull folks over, they must really hate Nazis. Or dinosaurs. In all honesty, I must hesitantly admit I haven't donated (yet)... What with the Holidays and all types of social events like birthdays and marriages just around the corner, this isn't a particularly convenient time for me to part with more dough. But that doesn't mean I won't contribute to the cause financially at some later date, when it's more opportune. I'm not a hypocrit. I support national-socialist reptilians taking over the planet! I sincerely want this movie to get made, I really do! So if you people reading this have some cash to spare, you know what to do with it.

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/157928/jared_leto_in_dcs_suicide_squad

Jared Leto as the Joker? It's not the first name that springs to mind when asked who I could see in that role. However, neither was Heath Ledger's initially (heck, no!) and that sure turned out alright. I happen to know Leto is perfectly capable of portraying a wide range of emotions and characters, and I've also seem him unpredictably unstable before ('twas in Lord of War, I'll have you know). So I'm willing to cut him some slack, particularly with an Oscar for a serious role under his belt (again, a Heath Ledger type situation: hopefully Leto has learned to stay way from drugs via Ledger's example, and his own in Requiem for a Dream). The question is more whether I think it's a good idea to introduce the new DC Cinematic Universe take on the Joker in the baddies ensemble flick Suicide Squad, rather than in the next Batman flick, as most people would have expected. I don't actually, but I understand DC doesn't want to wait that long to get audiences reacquainted with an iconic villain like this, as the next Batman film proper isn't scheduled for release until at least 2019. Plus, doing the unexpected thing always has been the Joker's forte.

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/157949/eerste_trailer_testament_of_youth

Looks rather bland and predictable, to be honest. But then, what more can be added to everything that has already been said and seen about World War I? It was a bloody mess that never should have happened and a dark mark on humanity's track record, period. Of course, personal perspectives (be they from notable historical characters or common souls) could still be worthy of our attention. This one, from an early feminist point of view, doesn't seem particularly inspired. Similar stories have been addressed ample times. Atonement for example, or some plot lines in Downton Abbey. Of course, the need to warn us against the horrors of war remains, as does underscoring the notion that women are equal to men. I'm sure Testament of Youth will strongly remind us of both factors, though judging from the trailer - which you never ought to do, but usually can't be helped anyway - not without sitting through a good two hours of bland melodrama first. Good cast though (particular the female roles), I'll give 'em that.

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/157970/eerste_teaser_insurgent

Also doesn't exactly get me stoked, this teaser for Insurgent. The film already has the issue going against it that its predecessor, Divergent, didn't exactly agree with me. Of course, it did with the millions of paying teenage girls - I'm none of these three categories - who happily devoured both novel and motion picture, so I doubt the future of Insurgent looks in the slightest bit troubled on my account. But still, this isn't exactly an adequate teaser by most standards. It feels more like a fragment from a scene from the film, randomly picked and stripped of all context and emotional investment that should make us give a damn. Just seeing Shailene Woodley hallucinating about her mom (if that's what's going on, since I can't tell, nor do I care at this point) isn't enough to pull me or many others apart from the fanbase in. I guess I'm really just more of a Hunger Games guy anyway, though I hate taking sides between popular franchises aimed predominantly at young adults. Though naturally I'm always very much in favour of taking the sides of good films over bad ones, and I wish more teenage girls would share that sentiment.

Today's review: Divergent

Divergent: **/*****, or 5/10

There is nothing 'divergent' about Divergent. It's a formulaic piece catering to the prime Hollywood target audience of young adults in every conceivable way (save for the absence of the near obligatory love triangle perhaps). Accusations that it was only produced to cash in on the success of the superior The Hunger Games franchise among that most lucrative demographic cannot be denied a certain degree of validity. Divergent is a predictable teen flick with overt aspirations to grow into a full fledged franchise too, and it continuously feels as such upon viewing.

The greatest pleasure to be had from the film is the set-up of its admittedly ludicrous dystopian society, a singular form of repressive civilization that feels completely untenable from the get-go and unsurprisingly proves just that over the course of the plot. Sometime in the future the world order has collapsed. The city of Chicago – or what's left of it, as it still appears rather disheveled – has cut itself off from the rest of the world by an enormous fence, protecting the supposedly harmonious society within from the ruined world outside. Life is determined by belonging to one of five factions: Abnegation (selfdenial and government), Dauntless (police/army), Erudite (science), Candor (law/order) and Amity (farming/food production). Children grow up with their parents in one of these groups, but get to pick their own faction at the age of sixteen after a harrowing personality test, potential family pressure to stay in their current niche notwithstanding. There is also a number of factionless people, those that failed to cut it in the factions they chose, who are tolerated despite seemingly not contributing anything to society. Of course, rivalry and shady alliances have formed between the various factions, and nobody appears to like Abnegation as they seem a redundant part of the whole. There's your overall plot right there.

Enter Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley, aged 23), a 16-year old girl who never felt truly at home growing up as a child of Abnegation parents but kept her personal convictions all bottled up. When the test reveals her personality not to fit in into any one specific group but rather to carry qualities of all, her sympathetic test agent labels her a 'Divergent' and swiftly falsifies her results, as these rare outcasts are considered a danger to society because of their mental versatility and are eliminated accordingly. You'd think the people who came up with this social pattern would have opted for the city to be run by Divergents to coordinate the other factions and guide them to get along better for the good of the whole, but that would put an abrupt ending to the following two hours of Beatrice's self-exploration. When the choice is put before her, she goes with Dauntless, because that's where all the cool kids are. This future dystopia is actually little more than a caste system reflecting an ordinary contemporary schoolyard, where the usual stereotypical classifications of punks, nerds and the like are strictly adhered to by people of all ages. Really scary, not to be able to break away from the high school pecking order for the rest of your life.

After abandoning her parents and changing her name to the much slicker 'Tris', our protagonist is confronted by a rigorous mental and physical training, to get rid of her former abnegating life and determine whether she's tough enough to join the warrior caste. Fortunately for her, her enigmatic tutor Four (Theo James) proves a likeable guy with a killer body and charms to match. You know where this is going the moment they first meet. If you're hoping to see more of the logistics of this particularly unlikely dystopia, you're out of luck, as most of what follows revolves around Tris and Four (too) slowly but (too) surely getting romantically entangled and making that most shocking of discoveries imaginable; they're both Divergents. As much as Woodley is no Jennifer Lawrence, the chemistry between her and James is passable at best, but never thoroughly engaging. The same is true for the interaction between both characters and their peers, while the more experienced actors among the cast hardly get a good chance to shine. Even Kate Winslet, an otherwise impeccable actress who has ever proven a joy to behold, delivers a less than stellar performance in her role as the movie's baddie, an Erudite official out to wipe out the Abnegation caste, including Tris' parents, so her scientist order can take control of the system. It's a diabolical ploy nobody is surprised to encounter after the first five minutes of exposition of Divergent, which already convinced the spectator this form of government was doomed from its infancy. Our heroic duo of Divergents swiftly prove their worth as they figure out a way to halt Winslet's evil plot of assuming mind control of Dauntless to annihilate Abnegation. However, since there's two more books and three more films to follow, don't expect them to get thanked for their decisive actions just yet.

Ideologically speaking, Divergent's plea against mindless conformation and its case for individual freedom is handled just a little too obviously. The movie proves a teenage angstfest, laced with the pubescent search for personal identity and the development of the sense of true belonging to such an excessive degree that the plot's metaphorical value is utterly wasted. Tris gets to question her role in society through all the tests and challenges to such a lengthy extent her process of selfdiscovery simply starts to bore us. Whereas the fear of growing up to the status of adulthood and the anxiety regarding the need to fit into society's often repressive standards were addressed to much better results in the Hunger Games franchise, such thoughts prove all too overt and in-your-face in Divergent. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement as much for this film as there was for the first installment of that rival series. Now that the set-up is over and done with, the viewer does wonder where the plot (not the romance that is) goes from here. The brief glimpses – limited both in terms of scope and frequency, mostly due to budget restrictions no doubt – we witnessed of this odd dystopian future do leave room for curiosity as to how exactly this world functions, as it has done for an alleged century. Considering the target audience has flocked en masse to theaters to get lost from their own woes and indentify with these relatable issues (for them at least), those sequels have been guaranteed. Hopefully a final similarity to The Hunger Games can be made in the future, as Divergent's sequel proved to be much more intricately crafted than its otherwise bland and forgetful predecessor.