By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
Last spring we suffered through a kind of movie drought. Other than “The Fault in Our Stars,” – a huge hit with teenagers – there was little to interest adults beyond the holdovers from 2013. As the year progressed the box office reflected that. Not until fall did a flurry of quality movies finally arrive.
The first part of this year was almost as dismal. Once the Awards competition ended, (more on that later,) distributors unleashed a series of expensive losers: “Mortdecai,” “Jupiter Ascending,” “Seventh Son,” and “Blackhat.” According to some in the industry, the losses were of historic proportions. But as the winter of 2015 lingered, several competent entertainments arrived that drew audiences into the cold in large numbers.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Like the critically reviled novel on which it is based, “Fifty Shades of Grey” elicited a virtual tsunami of bad reviews; only 25% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. But the grousing about nudity and perverse sex did little to discourage the books’ massive fan base; if anything the static only raised the movie’s profile.
The reality is that few other than cloistered grandmothers or pre-teens, hardly the film’s target audience, will find much that’s shocking in “Fifty Shades.” When it arrives on HBO or Showtime it will fit in seamlessly with the close quarters sex viewers of “Girls” or “Game of Thrones” are treated to on a weekly basis. For the multitudes around the world that endorsed it with their pocketbooks—to the tune of over 550 million in six weeks—the movie adaptation of E.L. James novel arrived with all the expected Hollywood trimmings.
I went at the request of my significant other and was not surprised to find the movie similar in appeal to the hugely successful “Twilight” series, which raked in billions over its four installments. My guess is that there will be a healthy appetite for the inevitable sequels, as long as their creators honor the shrewdly manipulated archetypes that made the books so successful.
Like “Twilight,” and other chronicles of star crossed lovers, from “Romeo and Juliet” to “West Side Story,” “Fifty Shades” deals with the ebb and flow of male and female energy. Keeping faith with conventions that predate Shakespeare, screenwriters Kelly Marcel and E.L. James’ quickly establish the attraction/repulsion between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, leaving most of the movies’ running time—a solid two hours—to focus on the hook that grabbed so many readers; Grey’s predilection for sadism and Anna’s’ ambivalence towards it.
The producers were wise to cast newcomers in the leading roles. Since they bring no prior screen identities to the parts, fans of the book are better able to project their own fantasies onto them. Just as important, there’s a palpable chemistry between the doe-eyed Dakota Johnson as a modern Snow White, and the handsome Irishman Jamie Dornan, a classic prince of darkness.
The opening, where the two meet, is so artless that it could have easily evolved into a Mel Brooks comedy. Anna is sent to interview a mysterious billionaire when her worldlier roommate gets the flu. Warnings arrive like omens from Greek mythology. Before he lays a hand on her, Grey declares that he doesn’t “do relationships,” and that included in that are sleepovers. On Anna’s first trip to his “playroom,” Grey informs her that fifteen other women have preceded her. Then she reveals that she’s a virgin. What more could we ask for in the way of obstacles, that one of them is a vampire?
The sex scenes that follow, from Anna’s bloodless deflowering to her first taste of S and M, are squeaky clean. Pubic hair has been vacuumed from wherever it’s usually found, and discrete edits prevent confrontations with genitalia. But the filmmakers never set out to make “Last Tango in Paris.” What they’ve devised is a lushly visual fantasy embellished with generous views of appealing flesh and a touch of suspense. The result is generally satisfying despite the lack of a real conclusion. After a little tease the movie simply stops, leaving the audience primed for the sequel.
When a narrative film like this one connects with a mass audience it’s usually because it effectively exploits classic archetypes. The characters and their place in our collective conscious can be writ large or small, depending on the filmmakers’ objectives, but two somewhat different approaches seem to occur repeatedly. In big, mass entertainments, the archetypes appear larger than other elements, which generally serve to support them.
These movies often feature super heroes or heroic quests. Recent examples include last year’s “Lucy,” (the Scarlett Johansen thriller) and the reboots of “The Planet of the Apes.” When these films are well crafted, audiences respond to familiar devices, or “tropes,” in great numbers. Studios have been known to employ psychologists in order to ensure that the patterns will be clear to audiences around the world.
The second category includes lower budget “indies” and “art” films, where patterns are less predictable. Here, the archetypes are often obscured by plot lines that seem not to follow any discernable scheme. These films are often referred to as challenging because they require that viewers engage them like puzzles. When these so called “specialty” films are well received, (usually by a much smaller audience than mainstream movies) it’s because a community has found a commonality with their creators.
“Ida,” the 2014 Academy Award winner in the foreign film category, serves as a good example. At first, the story of the young nun and her aunt seems unique to its unfamiliar setting, as chaotic and uncharted as the characters’ circumstances. But at the film’s conclusion the main characters’ decisions about her life, and all the events that led up to that decision, can be seen in terms of a familiar pattern. At the end the character becomes comprehensible, like she rose from the pages of the Brothers’ Grimm. This tiny black and white production, entirely in Polish, grossed almost 4 million dollars in the US, with very little in the way of promotion. Obviously, it spoke to a sophisticated audience willing to engage it on its own terms.
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” follows the well-travelled path of the former category. Its’ characters are larger than the setting. They follow trajectories that are as familiar to viewers as the story lines of “The Avengers” or “Iron Man.” Nobody goes to these movies expecting to see the characters driven to defeat or humiliation in the final fade out. They go to see how heroes (or their appointed proxies) prevail, regardless of the odds. Now, consider the characters in “Fifty Shades:” Anastasia Steele, and Christian Grey. Do the names alone tell you about who they are and their place in the world? And right from the start do we not get a sense about whose energy will prevail in the end?
Do Steele and Grey negotiate a detente that keeps their passion alive? Will the plucky heroine transform the reluctant lover’s predilection for whips and chains into something a little less taxing, like polo? I haven’t read the two sequels so I can’t say, but as great masses converge in theaters everywhere to witness their mating dance only a fool would wager against them.
The Interview
Few comedies were as unloved as this latest Seth Rogen-James Franco farce. While executives at Sony may have blanched when they pitched a comedy about the assassination of a standing head of state, the two stars finally got their way. How could they not? Franco and Rogen birthed the monster hits, “Pineapple Express,” and “This is the End.”
Commentators lambasted the movie with such fervor you’d have thought the team had savaged Nelson Mandela rather than Kim Jong-Un. There was a lot of high minded talk about disrespect, poor judgment, and bad taste. But were the writers, Rogen and Dan Sterling, obligated to defer in any way to an international thug and his cohorts, who routinely menace their own continent and the west? After veiled threats from that same cabal forced the cancellation of a wide release, Rogen and Franco plugged the movie at the only theaters with the nerve to play it; small indie houses for which risk taking is their reason for being.
As far as I’m concerned, the business should have engaged in a bit of soul searching, regrouped, rescheduled a wide release and given North Korea the finger. But once the major chains backed out there was no taste for principled resistance. Pity.
What hurt just as much is that critics turned on the film. Finally, the most damning charge leveled against “The Interview” was that it was not funny. Again, I have to disagree. Franco, as a feeble minded celebrity chaser and Rogen as his cunning but equally vain producer, trickled me right from the start. Once I bought into their relationship, the movie’s main objective, an absurd but hilarious junket to North Korea, was like a long slip on a banana peel.
One of the many elements that rankled critics is the characterization of the North Korean dictator. When talk show host Skylark and producer Rappaport first arrive in his rogue state, Kim, smartly played by Randall Park, welcomes them as fellow party animals. In no time he’s sharing his toys, from tanks to harem with the makers of his favorite TV show. Only when he uncovers that they’re acting on orders from the CIA does he revert to his true nature and let loose the dogs of war.
Rogen and Franco are reliable as sex and drug obsessed millennials, updates on the characters Bob Hope and Bing Crosby played in a series of comic road movies in the 1940s. Their motor mouths produce a high quotient of vulgar and knowing jokes, and when their backs are against the wall, the two call on a reserve of anarchism that recalls the Marx Brothers.
Is “The Interview” uneven? Yes, of course, but most farce is uneven. The very best of the Marx Brothers’ output lurches from peaks to valleys. For the most part, “The Interview” is fast moving and light on its feet. The script is as disdainful of western media as the cult of the North Korean dictator. There are no pretensions to subtlety in depicting its many objects of scorn and yet the targets are well chosen. When brickbats are launched they’re fast and furious.
Before I actually saw the film, I thought that writers Dan Sterling, Rogen, and director Evan Goldberg, might have been better off exercising a little discretion; changing a name or two or moving the setting to some imaginary locale. That’s the way most of farces handle sensitive material. But having seen it, I’m glad they didn’t. “The Interviews” most inspired moments have been cribbed from what we know of Kim and his regime. From the very beginning that’s what Rogen and Franco were after. They might not be scholars but they knew enough about these bad actors to hit them below the belt, and hit them hard.
Kingsman
This is a smarter than usual take off on the Bond thrillers. It stars Colin Firth and a relative newcomer, Taron Egerton, who proves that he can hold his own against veterans like Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Caine, Mark Strong, and the relatively unknown Sofia Boutella, who makes a stunning impression as an evil doer with razor blades for legs.
The movie isn’t as hip as its ads suggest; the material is anchored to its origin–a comic book–but the predictable plot turns are peppered with welcome surprises. Whenever the story threatens to stall writer Jane Goldman and director Mathew Vaughn, (X-Men: First Class,” “Kickass,”) inject a twist of dark humor that leavens this very English pastry. Vaughn appears at his best when unencumbered by the constraints of a PG-13 rating. The best jokes in the movie are the most vulgar, and several are laugh out loud funny. Shot on location in the UK, the settings in “KIngsman” feel a lot less contrived than the Canadian locations that were tarted up to look like New York in “Kickass.”
