Adult World

ADULT WORLD        C+                 

USA  (97 mi)  2013  d:  Scott Coffey

Another film about the Me Generation, the children of privilege, an entire generation that feels something is owed to them simply because they think they deserve it, not because they’ve done anything to earn it.  Here we see a whiny Emma Roberts as Amy, a fiercely driven young girl (there isn’t an ounce of grown up woman about her) just out of college who is so positive she has the makings of a poet that she invests everything she has, much to her parent’s dismay, in sending off packages of poems to publishers, and then feels disappointed when her parents can’t afford to subsidize her poetry career anymore.  In her eyes, it’s an investment in her future, while her parents think she ought to go out and get a real job.  A girl that sleeps with a poster of Sylvia Plath over her bed, in the opening scene, she replicates Plath’s suicide, plotting out exactly how she would asphyxiate herself from her gas oven, actually going through the motions, yet the tone of the film is an absurd comedy, so right off the bat we realize this is going for demented territory.  The film backtracks one year earlier when she’s in bed with a sleazeball about to have sex with a guy who’s obviously only interested in himself, yet tells her all the things he thinks a girl wants to hear, only to discover a film crew hiding in the closet shooting the whole thing, eventually running out of there in a state of undress and abject humiliation.  A closer inspection reveals Amy is a broken record, a walking advertisement for herself, continually spewing the same mantra of how it’s only a matter of time before she gets published, how she’s so close and on the verge, reminding everyone how her career is about to take off, yet at present, she has nothing to show for it.  Driven to desperation, she relies upon fate, and a Help Wanted sign in a window, where she walks in brimming with confidence and is all smiles until she realizes it’s an adult porn store, running out in a state of panic and hysteria, as if she’d been attacked by a swarm of killer bees.  Apparently, after the unpleasant incident, she still has a near psychotic aversion to sex.       

With her tail between her legs, she sheepishly returns back to the store, discovering it’s run by an old couple still madly in love (Cloris Leachman and John Cullum), where they’re not the least bit ashamed to use the names of sex toys and adult store vernacular in completed sentences, something she finds terrifying and revolting at the same time, so she’s a perfect fit for the store.  The store manager, Evan Peters as Alex (the real life fiancé of Emma Roberts), couldn’t be more friendly and helpful at every turn, yet he’s zeroville in her eyes, as she’s only slumming before the day of the big publishing event.  Roberts appears schooled in the Rosanna Arquette style of comedy, appearing to be one and the same at times, except she’s younger, more girlish, more of an airhead, despite her repeated claims that she was a straight A student, and much more aggravating.  While she’s cute and has a flair for humor, her wretched need to put herself first all the time in a continuous “look at me” syndrome reveals the surface level of superficiality where she operates, never having a reflective moment, which makes the premise of being a writer so absurdly ridiculous.  Yet she perseveres, butting to the front of the line of a book signing of her chosen poet du jour, Rat Billings (John Cusack), something of a washed up has been, a former punk poet who is in town to teach a course at the local university.  While he quickly escapes her outright stalking maneuvers, she finds out where he lives and plants herself on his doorstep, demanding that he read some of her poetry and offer criticism poet to poet.  Her credentials are that she “really feels a lot” and “wants to speak for all the people that suffer.”  Ingratiating herself to him, she’s willing to provide unpaid maid service while calling herself a protégé to her poet mentor.  While nobody really buys any of this, yet she continues to delude herself in a mad rush of youthful exhilaration that she identifies as budding genius. 

Cusack channels Bill Murray in his downbeat sarcasm, underplaying every scene, hoping for a moment of sanity in the enveloping madness, with Alex continually gushing that his work “speaks to an entire generation,” to which he can only answer “No, no it doesn’t.  That doesn’t mean anything.”  While initially he playfully and somewhat scornfully calls her “Suburbia,” by the end he’s describing her as “this generation’s Black Plague,” where he’s forced to  remind her “not everyone is talented.”  In a movie like this, the focus would have to be on a character named Rat, where Cusack does all he can with the role, much of which seems to resemble himself, as if he’s used to fending off the adulation of complete strangers who are positively bonkers in their outright expressed enthusiasm.  The film throws in handfuls of secondary characters, mostly for comic relief, but all of them are mere stops on the road of her meandering journey to success and fame.  While much of this resembles the more impressive work of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) or David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), this film doesn’t belong in the same category, as it’s more of a cheap, comedic imitator, a pretender to something it’s not, which is social relevancy.  Other than the obvious, where the film attempts to comment upon the privileged and the entitled, the film shows little insight, where writers like Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) or Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) have their pulse on middle class disillusionment, using more realistic characters to reflect the unique problems dealing with the emptiness and boredom.  This film has a few laughs and a few comic barbs, but Emma Roberts is such a loathsome, self-centered character that it’s easier to laugh at her rather than identify with her and the culture she represents, suggesting that tonally the director has mostly missed the mark, unless he simply wanted to make a goofy movie that will ultimately be forgettable.      

Lola Versus

LOLA VERSUS          C                   

USA  (87 mi)  2012  d:  Daryl Wein

Everything about this film screams conventionality, as if it’s crying out to be loved and appreciated for tapping into the mainstream market, especially the targeted 16 to 40 age group.  But unfortunately what it really ends up being is an updated 90210 high school movie for the twenty-something set, where a revolving set of characters are still going through the same relationship and adolescence problems ten years later.  What this does is extend teenage adolescence well into adulthood, at least in the movies, which is the new normal in the highly prized targeted audience that reflects a consumerist society. This is a continuation of Wein’s earlier effort Breaking Upwards (2009), both co-written by the director and actress Zoe Lister Jones (yes, the couple that couldn’t break up in that film are back together again), adding Greta Gerwig into the lead role, a somewhat charming and also punishing performance, as she’s constantly beating up on herself, continually making the wrong choices, where she’s something of a scatterbrained drama queen that revels in the center of attention as she constantly delights in her own failings, surrounding herself with so-called friends to commiserate in her misery, which is just another way of not being lonely, continually having someone to listen to you moan and bitch about your problems.  Real people are not as consumed with their own lives as this portrait, perhaps occasionally, but she never for a second spends time where she’s not obsessing about herself.  This can grow very tiresome after awhile, and is especially wearying considering this is the narrative goal.  One must question the rationale of Gerwig’s agent in accepting this material, as it seems like a crass attempt to break into the mainstream, to make a clean break from the critical acclaim of mumblecore and indie films to the bigger pay checks of Hollywood, where she can be sent the same scripts as milk toast overpaid starlet Jennifer Aniston.  Always appearing neurotic, also physically a bit awkward and klutzy, never at ease with herself, perhaps a less intellectual Diane Keaton, Gerwig would seem to be the perfect pairing in a Woody Allen movie, and she is slated to appear in his next release, TO ROME WITH LOVE (2012).     

In much the same way Gerwig’s character as Lola comes from unconventional parents, Bill Pullman and Debra Winger, both seen as weirdly off-kilter survivors of the psychedelic age, where Lola has strived all her life just to be normal, this film couldn’t be trying harder to find the middle ground between the comic wit of New York City Woody Allen and the likeability of TV sitcom Friends, where it ends up closer to the latter.  The film even wraps itself in popular culture references, where a male character relates to Ani DiFranco Ani DiFranco - Both Hands YouTube (3:16), the so-called “queen of hatred” during lovemaking, while Alice (co-writer Jones), the best friend of Lola claims “I learned everything I know about being a woman from 90210,” and Lola herself breaks up with a creepy guy using dialog from THE GODFATHER (1972), “But, that aside, let’s say that I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren, that I will not be the one to break the peace we have made here today.”  Marketed as the next hip comedy from “The Studio that brought you (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (2009),” it feels more like JUNO (2007), filled with wise-cracking remarks about the lack of trust and failed relationships, filled with an upbeat teen musical score that is mostly all-girl, which will really date this film in the long run, but for the present, it couldn’t be a more typically conventional, copycat Hollywood template for making a hit, but which is so obvious in its intentions that it loses any sense of naturalism readily displayed from Gerwig.  Her character takes a swan dive into deep melancholia after her fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman) calls off their wedding on her 29th birthday, where much of the actual wedding day events have already been booked and paid for.  Swooning into the arms of friends, she is comforted by her acid tongued best friend Alice, where the two continue to act and behave like teenagers with readily available credit cards throughout (though we rarely see anyone work), while a mutual friend of her ex, Henry (Hamish Linklater), suddenly takes an interest in Lola, all but upsetting the status quo.

While this musical chairs of changing partners takes place, former partners continue to express jealous insecurities, self-loathing, and suppressed anger, where neurotic behavior becomes fertile ground for comedy, supposedly, if it all wasn't taken so seriously, as Lola falls deeper into misery and self-contempt, acting inappropriately with alcohol abuse and having sex with the wrong partners, guys she could really care less about, but she’s hoping it will somehow make her feel better.  Hint—with your self-esteem at an all-time low, sleeping with the wrong guys only makes you feel more miserable.  Add a little pot smoking and who knows what other pharmaceutical cocktails, this is meant to appeal to the ever indulgent middle class, where pampering themselves is what they typically do.  Between bored yoga sessions and inappropriate party behavior, humor is found in Lola’s appearance at an all-male Russian bath, mostly older guys in towels sitting around sweating profusely while Lola is being slapped senseless with leaves from small tree branches by some oversized Russian health czar, while Alice is seen acting in a horribly wretched play that’s amusingly (we find out later) about genital mutilation, called Pogrom, a Yiddish expression for historic anti-Semitic Jewish attacks in 19th century Russia.  Mild laughs all around, with a likeability factor for Gerwig, beautifully shot by Jakob Ihre, the camera behind Joachim Trier’s REPRISE (2006) and Oslo, August 31 (2011), but the trite script is unsuitably bland and doesn’t even attempt to be anything more, where Gerwig is much more appealing as the dizzy space cadet from the 50’s in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) than she is here sleeping her way through all her friends, none of whom are “Mr. Right,” ultimately discovering self-empowerment in accepting yourself, where supposedly a light bulb clicks after years in the darkness, perhaps the weakest feminist message ever, remaining predictably underwhelming throughout, despite the best efforts of a talented cast.  What this feels like is a musician that’s overproduced, where the appeal and fresh naturalism of the artist is overwhelmed by an intruding production design, all but drowning out whatever talent was on display to begin with.  It feels like a Hollywood studio that doesn’t trust the material and/or the director, despite the impressive cast, so it revamps everything in a previously successful format.  Copycat cinema is an old trick, but it certainly minimizes the film’s impact, undermining and suffocating every attempt at innovation or freshness provided by a skilled set of cast and crew, where it’s hard to believe a film’s highest aspirations are only to be average, an easily achievable mark of success in the self-adulation world Hollywood. 

Blue Like Jazz

BLUE LIKE JAZZ          B-                

USA  (106 mi)  2012  d:  Steve Taylor             Official site

Do you have any idea what your hateful, bullying tribe has been up to? Cause around here, you represent a whole new category of despicable. So, if you plan on ever making friends, or sharing a bowl, or seeing a human vagina without a credit card, get in the closet, Baptist boy, and stay there.

—Lauryn (Tania Raymonde)

Easily the best thing about this film is the title, which immediately offers a multitude of suggestible images inside each individual’s head, which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the movie, though it attempts to link jazz improvisation to the unforeseen forks in the road of life’s journey, though that’s at best a feeble effort.  Instead this is an occasionally smart, often funny and bitingly satiric comedy on the fickle nature of youthful idealism, where God and religion often get tossed into the mix of corporate evil and religious persecution, where it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.  While this film is occasionally hilarious, often similar to the dizzying kaleidoscopic blur that is Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011), though not nearly as consistently entertaining, this on the other hand moves to the other coast and reflects West coast elitism.  Loosely adapted by the director, cinematographer Ben Pearson, and author Donald Miller from his autobiographical book Blue Like Jazz:  Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, a collection of personal essays, this much more fictionalized journey starts out in Texas with a glimpse of Southern fundamental Baptism through the conservative eyes of a true believer, Don (Marshall Allman), who is the assistant youth pastor.  An only child living with his devout single mom (Jenny Littleton), the two are like peas in a pod, while off in the distance somewhere is the more out-of-sorts divorced and atheist father (Eric Lange), known as the Hobo, looking a bit like Allen Ginsberg, living inside a trailer in the woods somewhere, a free thinker who also believes in free sex and jazz, compiling an extensive John Coltrane record collection, whose claim to fame is his philosophy that jazz is like life “because it doesn’t resolve.”  Using his contacts, knowing his son is bright, he gets him into the prestigious Reed College in Portland, Oregon, affectionately known by locals as Weed College, labeled “the most godless campus in America” where the average IQ is 138, supposedly two points higher than genius level, a bastion of hippies, art students, and environmental junkies, the kinds of kids that comprise the hard core leftist agenda, but with rich parents who can afford their transition into progressive activism.  When Don realizes his mother is concealing an affair with the already married youth pastor, he’s off to what is arguably the most liberal college in the United States. 

Initially, this fish-out-of-water transition is hilarious, as the portrait of Reed feels like something right out of Mad magazine, as the attention to detail is uniquely accurate while seemingly greatly exaggerated, but this is a college campus that prides itself on free expression, where no cause goes unnoticed, and everyone seems to already have a fairly well developed, often capricious, point of view.  Immediately Don is singled out as the Texas Baptist boy, a lone voice on campus, where he soon finds that blending into the majority views is easier, often making self-effacing jokes about Christianity, where the suppressed anger of his mother’s morally hypocritical actions remain foremost in his mind.  When he starts submerging his personality in a self-imposed purgatory of alcohol abuse, the film immediately loses its edge, as he’s obviously a sheep gone astray, and it’s only a matter of time before he finds his way back to the flock again.  The film then goes on two parallel tracks, one delightfully successful, a developing romance with a cute blond named Penny (Claire Holt), who’s in one of his classes and happens to be a similarly God-fearing Christian who is conscious guided, somewhat along the lines of Sally Struthers on the Christian TV Network, where Struthers is always seen soliciting religious contributions for starving orphans around the world, while the other is a walking disaster, the irreverent and obnoxious actions of the Pope (Justin Welborn), a student running around in a Pope’s garments whose sole mission appears to be to prevent students from reading church-based literature, freeing them from the regressive force-fed chains of mental bondage, an anarchistic figure who takes Don under his wing, almost always in a perpetual state of inebriation.  Despite her supposed naiveté, Penny may be the best thing in the picture, as she’s the only one, apparently, standing up for and acting upon her beliefs, while everyone else seems to be pushing a constantly shifting personal agenda of some kind, which may as well be a new theme of the week. 

Adding to the religious blasphemy is Don’s first friend he meets on campus, a lesbian named Lauryn (Tania Raymonde), whose decisively opinionated conversation he overhears in a unisex restroom, but the two become fast friends and confessional soulmates, where Lauryn is often hurt by the unpredictable twists and turns of love, while Don is turning into a one-man wrecking ball, where he’s basically against whatever the prevailing point of view may be, deeply immersed in a sort of self-protected bubble of immunity where he refuses to allow himself to get hurt simply by not believing in anything.  Penny has a hard time with this side of himself, as he’s the one suddenly turning a blind eye to his own hypocrisy by pretending not to care about anything, including his inability to forgive his Commandment breaking mother.  Despite the stereotype of Christian outreach, at least Penny’s view of religion doesn’t alter or change her perspective, nor does she force her views on others, like the everpresent overbearing Pope who’s simply a pompous ass, instead she’s a persistent force for good.  But despite high hopes from the smart and freshly atypical opening, the film bogs down at the end in a kind of Pope-led Bacchanalia ceremony of pagan worship, which is a climaxing set piece of godless sin, initially a mockery of Catholicism and rigid thinking before it turns out to be an unseen healing force for Don, just as naïve as Penny, a novice in the world around him, where the college journey turns out to be his road to enlightenment.  This gentle, coming-of-age film gets the existential tone of transition correct from a kid living at home with his mother, basically brainwashed by the church, suddenly free to explore other trains of thought, which is of course liberating, even if what you discover isn’t far from where you started.  The progressive world of college is seen as a neverending series of choices, where his previous assurance and cliché’d understanding of God in his life turns into a search for meaning and truth, where college is fertile grounds for exploration.  This is an oddly satiric exposé of secular extremism that rejects the hypocrisy and turns into a much healthier and well-rounded understanding of religion. 

Damsels in Distress

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS                  B                     

USA  (99 mi)  2011  d:  Whit Stillman               Official site

The past is gone, so we might as well romanticize it
—Charlie Walker/ Fred Packenstacker (Adam Brody)

Judging by the sparse audience for this theatrical release, people have no idea anymore what to expect from films unless it fits a specific type of movie where they can conveniently be categorized and shelved in video stores under drama, foreign, popular, comedy, adventure, children, etc.  As someone who sees a lot of art films, perhaps it’s easier to come to grips with a film like this that chisels out its own space in the cinema universe, perhaps best seen at a film festival where the stylistic artificiality would stand out, as there’s something clearly unique about writer/director Whit Stillman’s running dialog in this film, which is playfully fun, almost lightheaded, yet filled with literary commentary as if reading lines from a book.  Greta Gerwig is the indie *it* girl, seen here as Violet, an over-the-edge, slightly demented, but overly motivated college girl who insists her life be more than the insipidly vapid college experience that typically exists for all too many.  Stillman himself graduated from Harvard University in the early 70’s, while his father was a classmate of JFK at Harvard, ultimately serving in the Commerce Department under Kennedy.  Despite the prestige attached to such a highly influential university, there is also a layer of ivory tower inaccessibility attached to the experience which may seem completely unrealistic, where the make-believe world of students is a facsimile of the real thing.  This film reflects that gulf in reality, using a highly exaggerated sense of wit and sarcasm that uses caricature instead of authenticity in the story’s character development, where women are aspiring social workers hell-bent on fixing the obvious flaws of the Neanderthal caveman aspects of the male species.  Using a highly unusual cast of characters, they come down to two distinct social groups, the female damsels in distress, and the interchangeable males causing the distress.  While attending a preppy East Coast college, four girls led by Violet, each with floral names, Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Heather (Carrie MacLemore), and Lily (Analeigh Tipton), comprise the protagonists who run the Suicide Prevention Center (where the word “Prevention” keeps falling off), while their male counterparts are Frank (Ryan Metcalf), Xavier (Hugo Becker), Charlie (Adam Brody), and Thor (Billy Magnussen), with plenty of colorful side characters. 

The gist of the film is that the experience, despite all the obvious advantageous opportunities, is an unhappy one, where characters continually fall into easily recognizable social traps where it’s easy to dispense advice to others, but then get down in the dumps when it happens to you.  Violet has this idealized sense that the world can be saved by simple acts of human kindness, and then when that fails, she has nothing left to fall back upon and heads into a tailspin of depression.  There’s the always interesting game of musical chairs where the girls seem to continually be switching guys with one another, getting hurt when the boneheaded actions of the guy sends them into a whirlwind of confusion.  Amusingly, when Violet chooses to utilize the benefits of her own suicide treatment plan and enroll in a tap-dancing therapy program, she’s told by one of the participants (who’s too depressed to dance) that she doesn’t qualify unless she’s been clinically diagnosed with depression.  Violet thought she could avoid all the heartbreak by developing a surefire plan to only date guys who are neither handsome nor intelligent, so the screen is filled with dweebs for guys who are so backward they still belong to Roman instead of Greek fraternities.  The continual dumbness of some of the guys can get a little irritating, but let’s face it, movies often pretend only guys with British accents attend preppy East coast schools.  Even Violet is not all what she seems and is a little bit of a fruitcake herself.  All of this is a satiric swipe at being cool, where this fearsome foursome, whose project is to improve the lives of others, are something of an eccentric lot themselves, where Lily’s defiance of groupspeak with her insistence that she wants to be normal comes across as a defiant and subversive act, like a revolt from the conformity of the pack.     

But it’s Violet’s idiosyncratic character that really excels, as she refuses to get mad at her rivals, or even her double-crossing boyfriends, always finding a convenient rationalization as a silver lining to excuse their dubious intentions, where she instead takes out her frustrations with her love to dance.  And if truth be told, the dancing sequences are among the most appealing in the film, not because they’re so choreographically complex, but because they generate fun and an infectious enthusiasm.  These scenes elevate the spirits of the participants, especially Violet who seems to secretly crave the idea of turning this film into a musical.  At one point, she’s caught up in a country music line dance that couldn’t be more exquisite in its simplicity, while in another she’s in rapturous delight recalling the breezy Hollywood romance of Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine in “Things Are Looking Up” from A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS (1937) Stray Moments: A Damsel in Distress (1937) - YouTube (4:14).  There is a period of adjustment at the film’s outset where the audience has to adjust to the strangely archaic use of language, which may initially send some to the exits for the sheer off its rocker, absurdity element, but one has to acknowledge the clever wit behind the film’s broad-based, dark comedy, not the least of which is the retro look of the 50’s where dance crazes felt like a novel invention in rebellious defiance against the conformity of the era.  Underneath the artificial tone, there remains a free-spirited EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY (1988) subversive voice clearly reveling at this delightful social exposé of the college dynamic where little time is spent in the classroom and every minute of every day is spent analyzing and overanalyzing each minute detail of one’s chaotic personal lives, which for the first time in one’s carefully controlled childhood the multitude of choices can be simply overwhelming and the experience nothing less than liberating.