Limitless, Sucker Punch and maybe a little Lincoln Lawyer

Limitless is, despite some key details left out, far better than it should be. It has a great visual style, using some interesting zoom shots and fisheye lens bits to alter the audience’s visual sense of the world within the film. It does  a great visual job putting the audience into the head of the the protagonist when he takes NZT… for those who haven’t even heard of the film, taking this drug increases brainpower, making connections between casual observations, long lost memories and new ideas. It allows Eddie, the main character, to write a novel in a matter of a few days, to make a name for himself in stock trading in less than a week, and to be running for senate by the end of the film when he started as a nobody writer whose girlfriend dumps him, among other reasons, for using her as his bank account. And, that girlfriend (played by Abbie Cornish), when she takes NZT during a key sequence in the film, she manages to make creative use of an ice-skating child that is the best use of a kid as a weapon in any film (not that there are many examples… the only one that comes to mind outside of this is actually from television, from the pilot episode of the soon to be short-lived Mr. Sunshine, in which Alison Janney throws a small child at some clowns with chainsaws—like this film being far better than it should be, that clown scene was far better than Mr. Sunshine is, for the record).

The primary fault with Limitless is that, in the end, we don’t know who Eddie is on a personal level, on a moral level, on a political level; he is at times a mere personification of ambition, a cipher… but maybe that’s the point. Eddie is writing a science fiction novel about a future utopia early on in the film, but we are never told what his notion of utopia is. He’s played by Bradley Cooper, an actor that is very easy to watch for a couple hours, so it’s very easy to be charmed by him and root for him when the plot gets going and mob guys and businessmen are out to get him, but ultimately, when we learn in the end that he’s running for senate, one has to wonder if this is a good or bad thing. Various antagonists resort to violence, so by cinematic shorthand, that makes them bad, but it is certainly possible that our lead killed a woman (considering, I also saw The Lincoln Lawyer this weekend, I am having trouble recalling if with whom he had a one night stand while in one of his high-dose blackouts… these blackouts reminded me briefly of  the Adam Sandler film Click, not necessarily in a bad way, but up until this point Limitless had been coming across as fairly original, so briefly, I was wondering if the film would take this into interesting places. Now, the film DOES take the story into interesting places, giving us easy visual cues (alterations of the color timing) to transition between non-drug periods and drug periods, much as Sucker Punch uses color palettes to differentiate between its levels of reality, but more on that in a bit. It allows Eddie to make huge changes, to take advantage of his NZT-heightened brain but also allows us to see why he makes the choices he makes, shows us how he puts things together, like those brief bits in A Beautiful Mind where the various letters light up and suddenly Nash can see a hidden message except actually a little easier to follow. Eddie knows how to fight because he can recall various martial arts films as if he just watched them. He can deduce that his landlord’s wife is a law student because he sees the corner of a bookcover in her bag and recalls seeing that same book back when he was in college. The film lets us see the connections he’s making, which is not necessarily an easy task. But, it does it, and it does it well, and despite a rather open ending (and for me, at least, a question about whether or not Eddie is lying when he says he’s no longer taking NZT) because we don’t really know where Eddie will take his political career, the movie is definitely one of the better ones so far this year. Robert De Niro doesn’t do anything too interesting with his role (but, then again, since he turned to comedy, he hasn’t done any real acting, has he?), Abbie Cornish, aside from the sequence where her character takes NZT, is wasted a bit. Bradley Cooper gets almost all the screentime, and that’s ok. Despite its flaws, Limitless is a great movie, with a subtle critique of our always-on-the-go culture that occasionally gets lost beneath the stylish veneer…

And, speaking of critique getting lost under the stylish veneer, Sucker Punch, like Limitless, pretty much tells you outright what it’s about early on. In Limitless, early on, Eddie explains what his novel is about, a future utopia except it’s really about the condition of man in society today (or something like that), and Sweet Pea spells out the central idea of what Sucker Punch is about early on as well. She says she gets the helpless schoolgirl act, but wonders if the asylum exploitation (specifically, lobotimization) takes the exploitation too far. And, the film has a tough time balancing between commenting on the exploitation of females and exploiting them itself. Plotwise, the film is a series of setups for putting women (first, just Baby Doll, then she and the four other girls, including Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea) into roles usually held by men, playing on cinematic stereotypes and archetypal roles, making an effort to deconstruct them and reconstruct them but not going far enough in that regard. The spectacle keeps getting in the way… but, like with Limitless, that is perhaps the point. Grab the male audience with the awesome visuals, the anime-style fetishized females fighting zombie soldiers, supernatural samurais, a dragon, medieval knights and defusing a bomb on a speeding train, but populate the film with empowered females (except when their depowering is necessary to the plot of course) and males who amount to little more than slavering dogs, intent on committing abuse or getting sex, or more often mixes of the two.

The film is deliberately simplistic in its characterization. Even the lead, Emily Browning’s Baby Doll, has little depth except where the plot necessitates… SPOILERS AHEAD, LOTS OF THEM …in that she doesn’t even really know who she is or what she’s doing until she realizes she’s the fifth plot coupon necessary for the breakout, and this at the point that she and we realize this isn’t actually her story but Sweet Pea’s. Unless, of course, the second level of reality, the orphanage/brothel, is not a good measure of what actually happened in the first level of reality, the mental hospital… though there is evidence presented (the burned out closet, for example, the mention of Baby Doll helping another patient escape) that the basic events of the second level happened on the first, we can’t know the details. As far as we know, the details of the first level are as far from the second as the various third levels (the samurai one, the war one, the medieval one, the train one)…

It occurs to me, though, that the bomb sequence and the level two kitchen scene that frames it demonstrate several direct iterations of events between levels, but this isn’t Inception. The exact ratio of events one level to those on another are not the point. The question is, does inserting these otherwise helpless girls into stereotypical masculine roles, with all the usual phallic weaponry—Freud would have a field day with this film—betters or worsens the female cinematic role. Seriously, this film succeeds or fails, in my opinion, on whether one buys the commentary on exploitation more than the exploitation. There is room for serious study of the various roles from level to level in the film (and the opening for study is a good sign that the film is doing a good job), how Baby Doll connects to Baby Doll connects to Baby Doll, how the female psychiatrist (Carla Gugino as Gorski) whose signature is being forged to lobotomize helpless girls becomes the madam out to teach these girls to survive in a male-dominated world in level two, how Baby Doll has been responsible accidentally for the death of her younger sister in level one, yet Rocket willingly (sort of) sacrifices herself for her sister, Sweet Pea (I’m not sure if the film ever establishes which sister is older here, and, while Abbie Cornish looks (and is) older than Jena Malone, I’m more familiar with Malone so think of her as being older), how the High Roller (barely seen) is the lobotomizer (also barely seen, but given some possibly key dialogue in the interpretation of Baby Doll’s willingness to be lobotomized), how Blondie and Amber are unknown quantities in level one, are expendable in level two, and cannon fodder in level three. And, especially, there is something to explored in how the orderly who is secretly running his own game behind the scenes of the mental hospital in level one is the master of the brothel in level two. The man who should be nothing is really in charge—at least inasmuch as his power over the girls—and so in brothel level, he really is in charge, so much so that the promise of violence we get in level one in the end, is only actually shown here, when he seems on the verge of raping a just-lobotomized Baby Doll.

But, then, one must wonder why Wise Man (played by Scott Glenn) is, well, a man. Gorski is the one ordering and training (though we never really see the latter) the dances, and the dances are excuses for/entrances into the level three fantasy sequences, so why is it Glenn’s Wise Man who is the cliché-spewing captain over the girls and not, for yet another example of sticking a female in a male role, Gugino’s Gorski instructing them? Is it because in level two she is teaching them to survive in their submissive roles rather than teaching them to break out of them? Is it because in level one, she is herself being used by a male to further dominate the girls? Despite being a female, is Gorski’s role actually a male one? And, for that matter, why, in the end, is the final rescue of Sweet Pea by Wise Man and not Baby Doll or, God forbid, her own ingenuity? Is this one last comment on the female role, that even in a film arguably about empowering females, a male has to intervene in the end?

Or, am I overthinking it?

Is Sucker Punch simply a lot of eyecandy, an excuse to get the masculine action with scantily clad females on screen at the same time? The level one sequence before we get inside the mental hospital plays out like a music video, could easily be excised from the film to stand on its own as a tragic short, and the various level three fight sequences also play out like music videos, with almost no dialogue (some subtitled dialogue in the war sequence, and a few rather unnecessary lines of dialogue in the train sequence are all that come to mind), just action and violence and visual effects and cute girls in small outfits… it’s what every geek guy wants and what every geek girl needs. It’s marketed more toward the male audience—and arguably they could use the lesson it’s trying to impart—but deserves to be discovered by the female audience. Director Snyder had to cut some sequences (including, supposedly a sex scene, which could completely upset the balance between commentary and exploitation, depending how it plays out) to get the PG-13, but ultimately, I think the film will be better off having a PG-13 version available, as teenage girls are probably the ones who should be seeing this. Still, I look forward to the R-rated version, hoping the Director’s Cut clarifies the balance a bit more.

In the end, one must wonder if is important that Sweet Pea, the girl most reluctant to escape (and crossing level two to level three, the most reluctant to fulfill the male role?) is the one who actually gets free (if being rescued by Wise Man and getting on a bus home to presumably a paternal household (from which she and Rocket already ran away once) can be called “free”).

Sucker Punch is a fantastic film, literally, full of awesome visuals and trying its darnedest to really say something about male and female roles, just as Limitless is mostly saying  but occasionally forgetting to say, something about how are brains are being altered by our interactions with the modernizing world, how a crash is inevitable if we aren’t careful. These two movies are good for the medium of film. They are not simple stories out to entertain us. Whether they succeed or fail at it, both of these films are trying to tell us something, trying to get us to think about our society and how we interact with it.

The Lincoln Lawyer, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to say about our world or our society. It includes a lot of the tropes of the modern legal thriller but holds up well because of a good cast and a well put together (though still complicated) conclusion. It’s a great legal thriller, but it is deeply steeped in its genre, doing nothing to break out of its mold, and with a few of its subplots (notably Martinez in prison and Gloria in rehab) it could have taken more time and I’m guessing the book on which the film is based lends more space to these two. Still, like Limitless, like Sucker Punch, The Lincoln Lawyer has a great lead, good looking and easy to root for. And, as far as Chekov’s guns go, a motorcycle gang is a good one.

Gnomeo & Juliet and Rango

Gnomeo & Juliet is, in the end, an attempt to improve on Shakespeare, while also diminishing his work significantly… At the same time, it’s occasionally quite clever in its references to various Shakespeare plays and in its throughline’s occasional detachment from Romeo and Juliet. (SPOILER… sorta) Once Shakespeare is actually on screen, it’s a given that the ending will not be the dual-suicide of the original. But, the happier ending that comes seems incomplete. I actually expected (not a spoiler, per se, but you won’t get this if you haven’t seen the film) the destruction at the end of the film to bring the two humans together as well as the feuding groups of gnomes. I also found it a little odd that somehow the new flamingo female shows up and all is well—she’s not the same flamingo as before, so for a movie that’s relying a lot on notions of romance, it blatantly forgets them here.

Still, the movie is entertaining, and kids should like it. The pace is quick enough. The character designs are nice and the voice talent is good. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s good. It does a good job of skipping along the surface of Shakespeare’s play while finding its own way around various aspects of it, i.e. the notable deaths of more than just those of the titular characters.

Flashback on my recent blog about romantic comedies, and I must mention Gnomeo & Juliet has it’s “meet cute,” and—like Romeo and Juliet—fits the romantic comedy mold fairly well, except the grand gesture bit takes the dramatic tack instead of the romantically comedic one, obviously.

Rango is a little bit Road Warrior (at least in one sequence), a couple parts Chinatown, and a whole lot of parts spaghetti western, though framed in the present day. The titular character dreams of going to Hollywood and being a famous actor, but he gets sidetracked in the town of Dirt (is there a specific (sub)genre for the whole gets sidetracked in a smalltown and it changes him forever story? There should be). He takes on the persona of Rango, impressing the locals with his tale of killing seven brothers with one bullet, and he’s quickly introduced to the town’s mayor and made sheriff.

Now, a lot of the plot is fairly simple—town doesn’t have water because someone’s been “stealing” it, there’s a seeming romance between Rango and Beans (who has a “survival tactic” tendency to freeze in place from time to time), and there’s the usual assortment of old west town characters… but, the designs for these characters are probably some of the best in, well, any animated film, multiple animal types with individual personalities and styles to them all. The film is gorgeous, like any western should be—Roger Deakins, who totally should have gotten the Oscar for cinematography last week for True Grit, is listed as cinematography consultant. The setting comes across quite real, as do the characters, and the plot plays out just fine, nothing fabulously original but slipping comfortably into a beautifully designed package…

Is it too soon to start suggesting nominees for next year’s Oscars? Actually, I saw a post from Tom O’Neil of the Los Angeles Times has already called it an “Oscar tragedy” that Johnny Depp will be overlooked for his voicework here; the Oscars don’t have a voice category and don’t nominate voicework for acting awards. So I guess it isn’t too early. Of course, there are still a lot of good animated films to be released this year: Cars 2, Rio, Puss in Boots, even a Happy Feet 2, just to name a few I’ll be seeing. Rango is on par with your average Pixar feature, so it’s definitely worthy of a nomination…

Now, to end this blog entry, I would like to wonder about something in Rango (or various other films with anthropomorphized animals): how do you pick which animals get to be the most human and which ones still come across like animals? Pigs as the work animals in Rango—I get that. But, why do they ride on birds and bats? Well, bats are creepy and it’s the bad guys riding ‘em, so I guess that makes sense, except bats are mammals, and otherwise in the film it’s mammals and reptiles that show human-like intelligence. Birds, though, are consistently less intelligent. This is a western, so it needs “horses” for the posse to ride. I get that. But, you would think that in a world where animals have human-like intelligence, they wouldn’t go around working other animals like that. Or maybe I’m just being weird.

The King’s Speech (and The Adjustment Bureau… and just about any movie, really) as Romantic Comedy

The following begins with an aborted attempt at comparing The King’s Speech to a conventional Romantic Comedy. Watching The Adjustment Bureau today, it occurred to me that it isn’t just the Romantic Comedy subgenre that has this same basic throughline; really it’s a fairly basic story structure since as long as humans have had stories. But anyway, before expanding that idea, here’s the aborted King’s Speech blog entry:

I’ve complained before about the generic throughline of The King’s Speech. But, I want to spell it out a little more clearly. The King’s Speech, despite its British pedigree, despite its highbrow historic subject matter, is structured like a fairly basic romantic comedy. Allmovie.com’s description for the subgenre describes it simply: “a subgenre of comedy that focuses on the complications arising from the search for romance, courtship or a new relationship.” The King’s Speech fits that last one, if you go for a literal interpretation. But, going less literally, the structure fits; AllMovie continues: “couples usually started off disliking one another, only to slowly overcome such obstacles and fall in love y the upbeat conclusion.” When Bertie first meets with Lionel, he doesn’t care for the man’s familiarity, for the man’s methodology, for the man really.

Backing up, even before Bertie meets Lionel, the film has—in modern critical parlance (which I don’t care for)—a meet cute when Elizabeth comes incognito to Lionel…

I’d hate to steal from Wikipedia (especially since this entry has no sources [note, after the fact, this Wikipedia bit is actually quoting but not citing filmbug.com]), but this description of the basic plot is a good one:

The basic plot of a romantic comedy is that two protagonists, usually a man and a woman, meet, part ways due to an argument or other obstacle, then ultimately reunite. Sometimes the two protagonists meet and become involved initially, then must confront challenges to their union. Sometimes the two protagonists are hesitant to become romantically involved because they believe that they do not like each other, because one of them already has a partner, or because of social pressures. However, the screenwriters leave clues that suggest that the characters are, in fact, attracted to each other and that they would be a good love match. The protagonists often separate or seek time apart to sort out their feelings or deal with the external obstacles to their being together.

Bertie and Lionel actually have a few small arguments—the dispute right up front when Bertie doesn’t trust Lionel’s methods in recording him reading from Hamlet, Bertie accusing Lionel of treason and ridiculing his failed acting career—before the big one, when Lionel’s qualifications are questioned by the archbishop. That’s the big breakup before the end, the big obstacle keeping Bertie and Lionel from being together.

It was at this point in my blog attempt that I realized I really wasn’t very familiar with the more conventional romantic comedies of recent years, the kind that star, say, Sandra Bullock. I was trying to think of those big breakup moments that always come just before the couple realizes they belong together and maybe there’s a grand gesture or maybe there’s mutual epiphanies and they run into each other’s arms (not always literally, of course)… and I couldn’t think of any really obvious ones. Here’s what I had, in no particular order:

It’s Lisa discovering who Akeem really is in Coming to America.

It’s Anna thinking Will betrayed her location to the press in Notting Hill.

It’s Jack’s inability to tell Lucy not to marry his brother in While You Were Sleeping.

It’s Diane choosing her father over Lloyd in Say Anything.

It’s Linda answering the door and calling herself Robbie’s fiancé in The Wedding Singer.

And numerous other (probably better) examples. I realize in recent years I haven’t bothered with any of the more conventional romantic comedies, so…

After a little more brainstorming, I thought of So I Married an Axe Murderer, but I couldn’t decide if that big obstacle was Charlie’s suspicion of Harriet, or her sister turning up at the hotel, or… well, my whole attempt to boil down the structure of a generic romantic comedy was stalled. Obviously, there’s the two people who are total opposites but deep down are just perfect for each other. There’s some story going on as they get to know one another and outside forces (jobs, family members, or though it’s not a comedy, the titular bureau of The Adjustment Bureau, or conversely the Devil in Two of a Kind, or mortality in Love & Other Drugs) get in the way, building up to that huge obstacle/breakup that sets up the final act. And, then you get the grand gesture, say Lloyd holding that radio over his head, Josie getting on that pitcher’s mound in Never Been Kissed… Patrick singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in 10 Things I Hate About You is a little early in the film, structurally, to qualify, but that’s a good grand gesture kinda thing.

But, anyway. The throughline is pretty basic. Simplify it even more: instead of two people trying to be together, it’s one person or a group of people just trying to do… something. Outside forces get in the way—that is the essence of drama, right? The stuff getting in the way reach a peak, say the destruction of Hometree in Avatar, or, for another James Cameron reference, the ship starting to sink in Titanic. With your basic three act structure of most any film, especially out of Hollywood, inevitably any one of them can be compared to a romantic comedy then. I don’t have to simply pick on The King’s Speech just because I’m still bitter over it winning the Oscar for best Picture over several better films.

The Adjustment Bureau, by the way, is a tragic casualty of Hollywood rescheduling. It’s a great film, touching on some of the same themes as Inception—supposedly, it was delayed from last summer/fall to not be released so close to Nolan’s Best Picture nominee (one of those that was better than The King’s Speech, in my opinion)—free will being a big one of those themes. Of course, The Adjustment Bureau has a different take on it, and doesn’t have us following a bunch of thieves out to potentially ruin a man’s life for a good chunk of money… seriously, the film never actually suggests that Fischer (the son) is capable of making his own way without his father’s business empire. But, somehow it plays like a great idea, the film pulling a good game of suggestion on us almost as well as the characters do on him. There’s a lot of shorthand, universal relationship stuff, father and son, or husband and wife (with Mal and Cobb), without really giving us reason to care about what happens to Fischer in that vault at his father’s deathbed, or what happens to him after all this dreaming is done for that matter. Keep in mind, he’s not our protagonist. Cobb is. Cobb, a guy who make s aliving stealing people’s ideas, and who is essentially as responsible for his wife’s death as his wife wanted him to look (only not for reasons that might necessarily hold up in court), and we root for him, because Hollywood shorthand puts us on his side right from the opening scene. We want to identify with someone up there on the screen, and whoever they give us first, he’ll do.

For the record, I think Inception is a great movie. I even think The King’s Speech is a great movie. But, picking these things apart—this is fun. And, anyway, I was talking about The Adjustment Bureau. It’s take on freewill is more in line with man versus god (or, specifically the “Chairman” of the Adjustment Bureau) in what destiny is. We’re given a likeable enough guy, David Norris, running for Senate (and destined for higher office?) and we get the “meet cute” (that term is kinda growing on me the more I am forced to use it, so I must never again use it) with Elise hiding in a men’s room stall when he comes in to practice a speech (spoilerish but only in a minor way as this is early in the film), his concession speech after having lost this election. This one meeting is supposed to be all they’ve got, enough to inspire him to change his style for the speech, to go off script and come off as the frontrunner for the next senate run and maybe even the presidency after that. But, chance steps in—it’s almost like a Greek drama, chance versus fate, free will or the illusion of it caught in the middle. Outside forces just like any romantic comedy (or drama) get in the way, an ex fiancé, adjustment bureau knowledge making David hesitant to move forward with the relationship, a car crash, and a promise of dreams quashed. The point to my rant against Inception above was that arguably this film should have actually gotten a more positive audience response, since it’s a love story at the heart, not a bunch of thieves taking down an heir to a corporate empire (not that taking him down isn’t a good thing). And, the science fiction is downplayed here. It’s almost omnipresent, but it’s often subtle, such a given for the premise that it’s never really huge. The visual effects are numerous, though often playing on the same element; if you’ve seen the trailer you’d know about the doors opening to places they shouldn’t, and there are a lot of these doors in the movie, a fairly simple visual effect but done expertly and often.

There’s a coup small breakup moments leading up to the big breakup and then (HEREAFTER THERE BE SPOILERS) David has his grand gesture moment when he lets Elise in on what’s going on and makes a run through the bureau’s doors across (if you can apply such a simple preposition to the directionless travel these doors imply) New York, eventually getting into the Bureau building itself, heading for a meeting with the Chairman. Where Inception has its cleverness, dreams within dreams that got a bit too complicated for some viewers, The Adjustment Bureau takes on a bigger idea, effectively debating the existence of and/or the role of god in our individual lives, but plays it straightforward enough that its hardly confusing. It steps past attempts at cleverness and goes right to intelligence, if you can understand the distinction.

Is unfortunate that The Adjustment Bureau got delayed into the doldrums of the movie year. It deserves more attention, and a larger audience, than it is bound now to get… even if it does have a fairly basic structure.