Author: Ben Siler

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Film Features Film/TV

Hardcore Henry

Hardcore Henry is a first person sci-fi action movie. Its story is seen from the perspective of a camera in the eyes of an amnesiac cyborg who wakes up in a futuristic lab, which is instantly raided by bad guys. He escapes, to discover the lab is actually a plane. He falls to the highway below, where he is surrounded by more bad guys. Then, off the highway to the car park below, only to encounter more bad guys. This goes on for the entire running time. It is exhausting.

The imagery is playfully influenced by first-person shooter video games. Henry is mute, and the people he encounters speak in the helpful, exposition-friendly manner of non-player characters. They repeat who the bad guy is, what Henry’s current goals should be, and cheekily hand him iPhones with maps. Slowly we notice many of these are the same person, Jimmy (Sharlto Copley), a seemingly immortal character who keeps reappearing after being blown up and set on fire. The bad guy, Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), a well-dressed man with strange eyes and perfect hair who shows up every few scenes to show off his telekinetic powers, deliver one-liners, and kill bystanders. (We also notice we are in Russia, which produces odd touches like a tough guy’s transparent trenchcoat.) The movie follows our hero, or point of view, down hallways with guns firing from the bottom of the frame as he blasts waves of henchmen.

Henry plays a very grown-up game of Who’s Got Your Nose.

Unlike real-life body cam and GoPro footage, there’s never a dull moment. Gaps where dialogue might slow are covered at first by digital camera glitches, then by regular jump cuts. Henry only slows down to punch, hit, kick, or receive information. Most locations are replaced by another in less than two minutes. The movie’s at its best when this is humorous, as when Henry hides in a kiosk and shares an awkward moment with a woman listening to pop, or scales a building to interrupt a couple smoking pot on their couch. A climactic battle is set to Queen. The opening credits, similar to Deadpool‘s recent ones, are slow-motion wounds made to the velvet sounds of the Stranglers’ “Let Me Down Easy.” The contrasting tones were a welcome reprieve from the nonstop sameness.

Most of the soundtrack is loud, modern rock, which goes well with gunfights. The predominant mood, revealed during a shootout in an upscale brothel, is ironic, decadent, aspirational, and hetero. The prostitutes all wear matching black lingerie and blonde wigs; like the incoming S.W.A.T. team, they are supposed to all look alike. The Jimmy of this section has a dragon belly tattoo and snorts cocaine to power himself up for battle. But it’s a little too distant because of the lack of personality in every other face. In a video game, sex and violence with and against the anonymously uniformed are both abstract, because the sexy and murdered aren’t completely lifelike, and performative. Hardcore Henry pales a little because you’re in less control than a video game. It’s always the same speed; it’s always the same tone.

Hold on for your life — Hardcore Henry is a wild ride.

That, combined with the fisheye nature of the lens, make everything a visual soup. When fight scenes are punctuated with over-the-top gore, Henry’s eyes can’t cut to a close-up. What registers instead is movement, every punch and duck. This becomes disorienting. It works better in small doses, as with director Ilya Naishuller’s music videos for his band, Biting Elbows, that inspired the film. And the sense of off-kilter Slavic security footage works better in Russian dashcam videos, where the everyday and the absurdly violent are more balanced and succinct.

There are good touches. Henry’s wife is bland until the plot subverts her role. Copley is fun, a solo Peter Sellers without a straight man. Lady in the Lake, an early point-of-view noir, is referenced. Naishuller’s professed love of Reservoir Dogs is signaled by a Tim Roth cameo. But what this film really needed to borrow from Tarantino is his multiplicity of viewpoints.

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Film Features Film/TV

Knight Of Cups

When you regret the past, do you stare pensively at oceans while wearing Giorgio Armani? When you feel melancholy, do you express it by lounging in expensive apartments while burning through relationships with a series of models? When you think, is it only metaphorically, in terms like “Because I stumbled down the road like a drunk, it doesn’t mean it was the wrong one”? If so, Terrence Malick’s film Knight of Cups accurately describes your inner state, but everyone else it might leave cold.

Malick has always been interested in the strangeness of internal thought. The childlike killers in Badlands or the beatific soldier in The Thin Red Line were extremely specific characters even as their minds rambled into abstract philosophy and poetry. By contrast, Knight of Cups‘ Rick (Christian Bale) is a man without qualities, who only stares and looks sad. The film details his Hollywood mid-life crisis with all the heft of an ad for clothing. Its beautiful landscapes look like a luxury car is about to pull up. The phrases that populate its inner monologues are so perversely scrubbed of anything approaching detail that they read like platitudes. Skilled actors show up and start to fill in that detail but are drowned out by wind or surf or their own voiceovers, which are phrases like  “I was afraid when I was young. Afraid of life,” repeated without context. The intent seems to be to replace the day-to-day with the timeless, but it’s bland.

Christian Bale looks sad in Malick’s Knight of Cups.

Bale thinks of himself as a knight from a childhood story about one who was bewitched and forgot his quest. Interspersed with his thoughts are those of his father, brother, and girlfriends, as well as John Gielgud reading Pilgrim’s Progress and Ben Kingsley reading Biblical apocrypha and the Persian medieval philosopher Suhrawardi. Beneath these run a never-ending array of interactions with women between chapter headings named after tarot cards. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant) constantly moves the camera, floating up and down bodies, away from and towards faces, in an effort to give static scenes excitement and interest. Many of the actors are comedians (Dan Harmon, Nick Offerman) or crusty old pros (Brian Dennehy, Armin Mueller-Stahl) who would be interesting to hear speak, but have little audible dialogue. We see their raw emoting under ambient noise and classical music. Comedian Thomas Lennon has described the process: He was thrown into a scene with Christian Bale with no explanation and told to improv.

Things that actors and models do when told to interact with no script include: playing with dogs, drawing in the sand, breaking chairs, breaking TVs, chasing each other with plants, making out in an empty bathtub, jumping in pools, aerial dance, ice sculpture, ballet, putting their feet in the other’s mouth, and crying. Malick is excited about beaches, water, highway interchanges, children playing, models, and helicopters. Images of these recur and recur. My favorite shot is of a pelican that Bale and Wes Bentley momentarily follow on a pier. The camera stays on it for a few seconds, and its face has a lot of character.

The shots of expressways and cities at night recall Solaris and Koyaanisqatsi, two films which make the purely visual enthralling. Malick should follow his interest into the impressionistic and grandiose.

The funniest thing here is that Rick is a screenwriter in a film in desperate need of one. Or it would be funny, had I not learned that online. Despite the fact that Rick is often seen on film sets, the viewer is not able to discern his job.

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Film Features Film/TV

Krampus Knows You’ve Been Naughty.

The Christmas holiday’s power as an inducer of seasonal affective disorder lies in its rigid family decorum and enforced good feeling. That’s why Christmas movies like Bad Santa, Gremlins, and Die Hard resonate: Their blood and vulgarity ridicule that decorum and the sinking sense of not living up to an impossible ideal.

The horror film Krampus invades the suburbs with blood and shock, but wrapped around that is a disgust with annoyances of the season that isn’t as lived-in. It opens with a slow-motion montage of a Black Friday shopping riot, which segues into our main character’s onstage fight in a Christmas play. The slo-mo isn’t subtle, but it is special. From there, things get less so. Max (Emjay Anthony), a true believer in Santa Claus, has his love for Christmas challenged by the arrival of in-laws and the resulting tension between his mother and father (Toni Collette and Adam Scott). In anger, he rips up a letter to the North Pole and tosses it into the wind, where the mythological German monster Krampus finds it, thus precipitating his family’s ruin.

Krampus, a reverse Santa Claus who steals naughty children, is a perfect premise for horror. Director Michael Dougherty makes the mistake of taking his sweet time getting to his horned monstrosity, alternating between Max’s trite wishes for family togetherness and the in-laws’ one-dimensional idiocy in a slow build to the supernatural. The result is the first half plays like a weaker version of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Max, played by Emjay Anthony, versus Krampus

Old pros like Scott, Collette, and David Koechner can’t elevate the material. The slow build only leaves those beats for brief, imaginative stops in a German-speaking granny’s animated backstory, and wonderful It Follows-like visuals of Krampus stalking the rooftops. A magical storm descends upon the family, stranding them in their house. The sudden claustrophobia of electricity loss, missing neighbors, and blocked streets is well done. But the film only truly comes alive when the characters visit the attic, and are attacked by a league of wonderfully designed nightmare toys.

This structure won’t matter to the older children the film seems pitched at — the two-dimensional Christmas love-hate will be fresh to them. For their benefit, the film has been denuded of gore that would ordinarily punctuate every monster attack. (Several characters helpfully sink into the snow without blood.) Lovingly terrifying images, from a gingerbread man catching children with a hook and pulling them up a fireplace, to a kid’s slo-mo fall into Hell, will stick in the mind even when the script fails.

I particularly liked the Gremlins-esque gingerbread men’s nailgun attack, a teddy bear with sharp teeth, and a Christmas tree angel with gargoyle wings. The film’s ending also strikes the right horrific note for kids, in the manner of an old Twilight Zone. Dougherty, who has done seasonal horror before with Trick ‘r Treat, is very spirited when it comes to visuals, and when we finally see Krampus up close, he’s a wonderful Guillermo del Toro-like creation. He should have had more to do, in the manner of frequently seen villains like Freddy or Jason. Future Krampus films letting forth the bloodcurdle everyone feels at the group-schmaltz belch of our collective winter holiday should just get right to it.

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Film/TV TV Features

Jessica Jones

As Marvel continues to infect our lives with stridently competent comic book adaptations, it’s nice to see what they produce actually be about something. Previous incarnations dealt with joy (Guardians of the Galaxy) and the security state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Jessica Jones deals with rape.

Kilgrave (David Tennant) is a walking nightmare. His power is mind control. He’s constantly using and throwing away people to serve his immediate needs, sexual and otherwise, which results in support groups, self-medication, discussions of the cycle of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is unique for a mainstream narrative. Like Preacher‘s Jesse Custer, he can compel someone to his will just by speaking to them. At any point in the story, he will walk into the room with a purple suit and a sneer and demand strangers do his bidding. His attitude is one of entitlement to other people’s bodies, and dismissive sarcasm to empathy. His most frequent dictum is a short, curt “Leave.” His one passion is stalking Krysten Ritter’s title character, a superpowered private eye who deals with having been in his mental grasp by descending into alcoholism.

Krysten Ritter in Jessica Jones

Jones is a Hulk-Buffy variant wrapped in friendly Marvel packaging. She can’t kill her nemesis because she needs to prove he compelled a victim to murder; he won’t kill her because he professes love. This makes for a wonderful fluidity between hero and villain. He shows up to talk, and it’s terrifying. We could have gotten a version of this character that delves into the mind control aspect as wish fulfillment, and his British accent as suave. (He is often seen with women and money, or having people take his insults literally.) Instead the emphasis is on what it feels like to have your mind scrambled.

In the support group Jones starts, victims talk about a loss of identity and being overcome by shame for things as simple as Kilgrave asking for their jacket. Ritter is great at both snappy dialogue and weightier PTSD moments. She enlists a large number of allies, including fellow comic book heroes Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor). Kilgrave’s horror is the show’s star, unusually scary for a Marvel villain. His dialogue is often textbook chauvinistic defenses of sexual assault, and his psychology based on abuse as a child: the medical experiments which gave him his powers, done by his parents.

Like other Marvel entertainment, there are tonally off supporting characters, once and future comic-book plots awkwardly grafted on, and wastes of good actors. The ending is anticlimactic, the action repetitive kick-punching.

Overall, it says something. Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has said she was trying to make a blatant corrective to the use of sexual assault as a plot device on shows like Game of Thrones, where no time or realism is given to the psychology of victims or perpetrators. The result is a corporate product that has the ring of something honest and direct.

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Film Features Film/TV

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp

When I first watched the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, I only responded to the unexpected pang in Michael Showalter’s romantic plot and the non-sequitur trip-to-town sequence. But my 25 subsequent viewings had a Lebowski-ian effect. Everything bloomed with dry confidence. Mundane teen movie staples turned first from deadpan parody into casual emotional violence, then into reassuring absurdity. The charm was in how the movie knew when and when not to try. There were “rake gags,” where a bit went on so long it became hilariously absurd. There were moments where a key prop, stunt, or exit was left out or drastically undercut, which called attention to the ridiculousness of the actors’ histrionics. (In the update, for example, a toxic waste spill is represented by a Day-Glo green puddle.) There was also the comedic freedom of unrestrained expression without consequence. Horniness, despair, and aggression were deployed for comedic effect and then forgotten a minute later. In addition to playing with tropes, writer Showalter and director David Wain were arguing that human emotions are mechanical, that they come along regardless of whether or not there is a prop or plot to excuse their expression. Teens (and the adults playing them) flail and scream because their conditioning tells them to, then rationalize a grandiose reason later.

Postmodern prequel with an all-star cast

Fourteen years later, as a Netflix series, Wet Hot is very successful at mimicking the beats and rhythms of the original, from the bright grass greens to the absurdist, Brechtian schtick. It is a prequel, set on the first day of the camp, whereas the first one took place on the last day. Showalter, now conspicuously overweight, bewigged, and 45, is playing an even younger teenager, whose lovelorn crushes are even more about entitlement and possession. He is specifically labeled “a nice guy” who can’t deal with the fact his quasi-girlfriend (Lake Bell) wants to sleep with a visiting Israeli (Wain), who has wonderful patter: “The tongue in the mouth, it can mean so many things … This is the true meaning of community, of kibbutz.”

The scope widens to include spies and undercover reporters, but it’s basically the same as other work by Showalter and Wain, like Wainy Days and Stella. The huge cast (Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, H. Jon Benjamin) is supported by ringers (Michael Cera, Jon Hamm). The core players from comedy troupe The State are true to form, if less fresh-faced. They still make familiar Hollywood devices feel dumb and unnatural, while grounding them in feelings of longing, rejection, and the sense of otherness.

On first viewing, it’s a little too dry. Comedy that comes from character more than unbridled absurdity is better. I enjoyed another recent online show involving idiots yelling, Other Space, more for this reason. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp is a fine example of a postmodern prequel, but it’s still a prequel, with all the expectations and emotional baggage that entails.

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Film/TV TV Features

True Detective Season 2

The cops in True Detective‘s second season are so world-weary, it’s a wonder they’re able to move. They’re so stern, grim-faced, and defined by work, they’re puritan. They wrap themselves in strip clubs, perps, and denial as they move about their fallen world. In real life, in the age of small cameras, cops can be terrifying. An iPhone can take corruption and put it online for all to see. But in fiction, police are vehicles for philosophy. The detectives and officers who solve the world’s mysteries on our screens always have reasons to step over the line and are always negotiating them. They’re the protagonists. The citizens they rough up are, depending on the show’s level of grit, incidental to the larger goal of getting the bad-guy-of-the-week.

Their weariness is part of the time-honored existentialism of detective noir, making sense of a world and finding your own code within it. True Detective‘s Season 1 wore this on its sleeve. Its most pure expression was its opening credits, which took images of the actors and story and mixed them like a soup. The appeal in Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle was his ability to take atheistic observations about the world, sprinkle in some nihilism, and serve them in a movie star’s mouth. Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s more lived-in Marty Hart were both fully realized characters, darkly funny amid all the Gothic imagery. Most everyone else was Southern stereotypes, and HBO-mandated nudity ate the agency of the female characters whole. But ultimately, everything was abandoned in an unconvincing last-minute switch to optimism by Cohle.

This season the grimness takes the forefront. The weary cops’ stories unwind in much more regular fashion. We have no Cthulhu mythology and unreliable narration to sift through. Rachel McAdams’ Bezzerides has problems with sex caused by her growing up in a cult her father ran. Her most prominent quality is that she smokes an e-cigarette. Taylor Kitsch’s Woodrugh’s sexual repression is defined by an unhealthy relationship with his mother. He likes to drive fast on his motorcycle, on highways we’re repeatedly shown in beautiful aerial shots. Farrell’s Velcoro is a crooked alcoholic cop who beats up the father of his son’s school bully. He works for mob boss Semyon (Vince Vaughn), after the former helped him kill his wife’s rapist years ago. They’re terse, they’re pissed off, they’re told they need therapy, and all they’ve got in the world is this case they’re obsessed with unraveling.

They aren’t different enough from the thousand previous iterations of these archetypes. Learning about their ex-wives and boyfriends feels like work. Some of the most effortless, efficient characterization so far has been Farrell’s hair. The Cape buffalo bangs and droopy moustache scream that this man has stopped caring.

Promisingly, each episode has gotten weirder, with small Lynchian touches. Water stains on a ceiling crossfade into carved-out eye sockets. A Russian trophy wife huffs pot smoke out of a bag. A character shot with rock salt hallucinates a Conway Twitty impersonator singing “The Rose.” Oral sex is a running theme.

But the weirdness isn’t enough to help Vaughn’s delivery of a speech about having to crush a rat with his bare hands as a child. It’s the moment when things should come together, told in a dead-eyed close-up at the start of the second episode, when his mobster’s money worries should take center stage. Vaughn always seemed capable of more since he carried the movie Swingers 20 years ago, but instead he has gotten less and less expressive with each role. He is better irritated and frantic than mournful and sad. His flashes of anger work, but the glum nervousness about his position in life doesn’t come across.

It’s a slow burn with wet kindling. Unless the weirdness builds or the performances build — or its depiction of police corruption comes to feel as immediate as watching a viral video — it might be more interesting if the characters actually went to therapy.

True Detective Season 2
HBO
Sundays

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Film Features Film/TV

Orange Is The New Black Season 3

In place of a social conscience, we have pop culture. It is a conversationally unobjectionable comfort, unsuited to anything but filling Hollywood coffers. Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is very comfortable. The social ills it engages include racism, transphobia, rape, homophobia, and, most of all, the prison-industrial complex. This makes our binge-watching feel more honest.

Looming over it all is Lost, a show whose redundant flashback structure has been imported here and grown longer in the tooth. All character traits must be foregrounded with strange actions in the past. All plots must be delayed to tell us what we already know. The flashbacks help continue series creator Jenji Kohan’s greatest success: her campaign to humanize all the characters in Litchfield prison, from the villains to the comic relief. It is part of the novelistic project of modern television. But in practice, it often delays the story, and tells predictable tales with an excess of melodrama.

Orange Is The New Black cast

Characters act evil because a villain is needed to drive the plot. Humorous situations don’t build into serious ones; they switch on and off the way real world physics does in action movies. A scheme to sell soiled panties online results in bitter betrayal, but it’s hard to take seriously because the situation feels like a joke. A silent character grows a cult around her saintly quietude, but when the group banishes a member, her resulting suicidal depression seems strangely hollow. It’s the shadow of another show, Kohan’s Weeds, whose narrative also suffered from unearned swerves.

This is all offset by the scatology of a comedian hiding the deeply felt in offensive jokes. Jolly Rancher shivs, vaginal discharge viscosity discussions, bifurcated penises in erotic sci-fi literature all undercut any self-seriousness. Orange is full of details expertly delivered by its murderer’s row of actors. The only false spot is newcomer Ruby Rose, an Australian model introduced to pay lip service to the concept of gender fluidity. But mostly, she’s just there to beat the show’s dead horse of a romance. Her love triangle with Piper (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon) has all the dynamism of a plane stuck on the tarmac.

Lea DeLaria as Big Boo

The best actress is Lea DeLaria as Big Boo, who is even better than Natasha Lyonne at personifying the show’s combination of Borscht Belt jokes and real-life hurt. She and Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), a one-note villain from earlier seasons turned into a squeaky-voiced stalwart, are the season’s true stars. There’s a moment where Pennsatucky declines to sodomize someone with a broomstick that works as both low comedy and character drama. A wordless sequence devoted to the daily routine of Chang (Lori Tan Chinn), an older woman ignored by the other inmates, is also a highlight. We see her mash Fritos in secret, with her feet. Unlike the flashbacks, there’s joy in not knowing where it’s going.

The other most successful subplot is the acquisition of the prison by a private company that sets the prisoners to work and cuts the guards’ hours in half. Their attempt to unionize is pitiful (their union song is from Les Miz), but the show effectively stresses how corporate structures prevent real reform, because financial pressure privileges short-term gains over things like mental health care, of which prisons are our largest provider.

Against real world problems, the only hope the show offers is a swerve towards transcendence. Laverne Cox and Piper Kerman have both used it as a springboard to discuss transgender rights and prison reform. Does it matter if we can see the strings? John Oliver and Jon Stewart’s soapboxes are modern examples of comedy as a method by which actual political discussion can leak in through corporate media. Orange Is the New Black is another unsung example.

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Film Features Film/TV

Far from the Madding Crowd

The bucolic British countryside, like pornography, has a preordained end. BBC Films like Far from the Madding Crowd, which haunt our PBS stations and Academy Awards, are full of restrained and elevated diction and dress working their way to release.

Far from the Madding Crowd enriches this formula by placing Carey Mulligan front and center, often photographed in front of beautifully filmed landscapes as if green-screened there. Mulligan is great at registering emotions on her face and working to sequester them in her mouth. With a shock of mad-scientist hair dribbling over her forehead and a triple set of dimples, she constantly looks left and right and communicates sharply whatever her character won’t say.

Her costar Matthias Schoenaerts is a great match as Gabriel Oak, a beautifully bearded, aptly named rugged bit of handsome restraint. Their meet-cute over sheep is edited briskly, the vibrant colors of her dresses and the rolling hills changing to suggest even the editor is bored with this genre. As the film starts, it’s a pleasure to watch Mulligan turn down a series of too-sudden marriage proposals: She comes off like a modern girl in a world of traditional male suitors.

Carey Mulligan and Tom Sturridge

But unfortunately, as an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s early novel, the movie cannot go where the casting and early scenes suggest and create a kind of In the Mood for Love for Wessex. Nods toward the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal agrarian society are made. Work is something mostly offscreen or metaphorical and delegated to peasant types. The English-speaking past is exoticized as a place where mildly aristocratic people can get over their shyness and find love.

As always, animal husbandry and farming are there to give something elemental: Udders are milked, fields shine, tadpoles are glimpsed in pools, but there is a remove — you know none of these details will touch the main plot or heroine. Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights did this, but better. The brutality of everyday animal murder on a farm, which looked real but was fake, sold both the violent passions of the narrative and the alien nature of the past through the outsider protagonist’s eyes.

Here, the dark melancholy of later Hardy books isn’t fully formed in the plot. The most evocative non-romantic bit comes early, when Oak’s sheep get herded off a cliff to smash on a beach and Oak bitterly shoots the responsible dog. That rough-hewn shock gives way to a standard plot and two well-cast but underwritten suitors. Michael Sheen’s Boldwood is all obsession and stammering. Tom Sturridge’s Sergeant Troy has a pool-cue nose, pert moustache, and pouty lips straight out of villain central casting. But they lack definition, and when the story jumps forward in ellipsis and suggestion, we don’t know how to take it. The pair primarily embody the two mistakes of marrying for sex and money, but only that. There’s a great bit where Troy drops his caddiness as he talks to his pregnant ex-girlfriend. It suddenly seems like the story will be jarringly modern, and the characters will mutually recognize that while illegitimate pregnancy in the 1800s may be a scandal, financial accommodation for destitute mothers is a must.

Likewise Troy’s erotic and possibly metaphorical sword prowess demonstration in the woods is another nicely jarring bit where the movie suddenly seems like it could go anywhere other than the regular stops. Sex might not result in shame. Choosing the wrong first boyfriend might be an ordinary misstep. But the movie adheres to Hardy’s plot without enthusiasm. A late murder is not set up well, and the body lands like a feather.

What works are Mulligan and Schoenaerts. Arguing over a scythe sharpener, degasifying the bellies of sheep, working to cover phallic haystacks in the rain, their sly rapport is better than the plot. Mulligan so often does this kind of character well. In Never Let Me Go and Drive, she played restrained characters who interact painfully with the world. But those worlds were weirder. Here, director Thomas Vinterberg, one of the Dogme 95 creators, is far too normal. Mulligan’s character avers her independence constantly, to the end uninterested in affirming marriage proposals, even as she is stuck in a movie operated by their mechanics.

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Film/TV TV Features

Game Of Thrones Season 5

Game of Thrones is about a vampiric government sleepwalking toward impending disaster. Some would say that is why it has captured the zeitgeist. Others would say you just throw money at the zeitgeist and it does what you want. We are the ruled. The exercise of power in our lives — whether by government or corporate house — is something
we receive.

The premiere episode of the fifth season, which aired last Sunday, returns to the subject of obtaining and maintaining power. It’s appealing because the serfs — us — are mainly offscreen. So many of its favored characters are royals or nobles or secret royals. They are born into agency, then according to their respective empathy levels, proceed to brutally or morally pursue change.

Game of Thrones, Season 5

The audience I saw it with was rowdy. They yelled at man ass and gasped at cut throats. They were wearing costumes — I sat near a lovely Tormund Giantsbane and Brienne of Tarth — drank from fake goblets, and ate chicken legs. As the show started its plot machinery for the year, they maybe wanted a little more action, a little more thrill. Instead, it started contemplatively, giving us a childhood witch’s prophecy that fuels the neuroticism of the evil but sympathetic queen Cersei (Lena Headey). Elsewhere, a eunuch warrior went to a brothel in order to be held. Lancel Lannister (Eugene Simon), one of my favorite comic-relief characters, returned with a monk’s tunic and a shaven head, having found consolation in religion. We saw warrior king Mance Rayder’s (Ciarán Hinds) proud bearing ebb away into vulnerability on his way to being burnt at the stake. These tender moments are good.

But couched in that is something sad: doom. This is a nondemocratic world about to crumble into apocalypse. Ice zombies and dragons are closing in on Westeros from either end. There’s tension between the portrayal of medieval realpolitik — what series author George R.R. Martin calls “Aragorn’s tax policy” — and how reassuring a godlike eagle’s eye view of doom can be. The realistic character work and worldbuilding are spiced not only with heavy dollops of fantasy war, titillation, and sex, but the comfort that a corrupt world is explainable because it’s fueled by the Olympian lusts of a powerful few. Order in a crooked universe is preferable to the anarchy without it.

“The future is shit, just like the past,” says Tyrion Lannister on being freed from the crate in which he’s been hiding on an eastbound ship, recounting pushing his literal feces out of holes in the side. The premiere’s director, Michael Slovis, wonderfully shows off his Breaking Bad roots by giving us first-person glimpses of a passing marketplace through those holes. The eunuch Varys tells him he wants to install dragon mother Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) on the Iron Throne to create “Peace. Prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless.” Tyrion answers, “Where the castles are made of gingerbread and the moats are filled with blackberry wine. The powerful have always preyed on the powerless, that’s how they became powerful in the first place.”

Peter Dinklage

This is the bedrock of the show. It soups up its soap opera by making its deaths more realistic and therefore unpredictable. But the emphasis on face-crushing and disemboweling also implies that the world is so brutal it may not be worth sticking your neck out. That’s a defeatist sentiment those of us interested in complex and decadent entertainment may not agree with. It’s the opposite of The Wire, which tried to explain the complex way a social order regenerates itself and traps its participants, who were often dirt poor. Game of Thrones is not revolutionary, even though the horribleness of its hereditary monarchy is a foregone conclusion. You get lost in the details of this lovingly realized, tragic world.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss get better each year at streamlining those details. They have removed Viking pirates, vengeful zombie mothers, and much repetition. But the digressions that strangle Martin’s literary narrative also keep its hopelessness from becoming airtight. Streamlining the world makes it more clockwork in its dourness. The moneyed are further removed from changing things, but they are the only ones who can. This may not be accidental. Martin is a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from New Jersey. Benioff is the son of the former head of Goldman Sachs.

Tearing down corruption is a hopeful thing. When your dragons breathe fire, you want them to
shine bright.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Walking Dead Shambles To Its Fifth Season Finale

The Walking Dead, one of the most popular shows on television, is about the South. To survive the zombies is to be dehumanized through repetition. The characters are always negotiating this. Life is horrible, and it wears you down. If you aim for something better, you are letting your guard down and will be consumed.



In The Wire (from which Walking Dead imports cast members) and Romero’s zombie films, it was not simply about the code of survival. It was about the social order that leads to racism—capitalism without empathy. There was an analytic, satirical lilt that brought the hope of something better. That kind of thoughtful remove only appears here when it comes to blood and guts, and silent action sequences.

Makeup artist Greg Nicotero’s zombie effects are a recurring highlight of The Walking Dead.

Instead, The Walking Dead extends its continual, hysterical horror to every waking moment in a cornpone apocalyptic South that is 90% backwoods and dirt. The first half of the fifth season, airing last fall, featured an improbable Twilight Zone hospital in Atlanta. The second half-season, ending Sunday, is better, speaking to showrunner Scott Gimple’s strength: quiet character moments. The group enters a suburban stronghold and for once are the cause of the conflict, a new twist on the small communities with secret flaws they’ve run into.

The quiet bits get better and better. A solitary character digging a hole eats a worm. A mourner cries, gets up and stabs a zombie, then goes back to crying. When the show goes for bigger ideas it fails, such as that still-functioning hospital populated by uniformed cops and nurses. The cops are rapists who create patients by hitting people with their cars, and the patients who survive get scrubs. The hospital is held in a delicate balance of power by a character named Dawn, so thinly drawn that she and her locale are unbelievable from start to finish. The same is true when characters leave for Washington, D.C. on the word of a mulleted redneck character who claims he is a scientist and has a cure. They are improbably flabbergasted when he does not.



Andrew Lincoln and Norman Remus in The Walking Dead

But the current story arc works. The characters exhibit PTSD. Group leader Rick (Andrew Lincoln) gets clean-shaven and becomes an awkward neighborhood hunk. Carol (series MVP Melissa McBride) memorably threatens a child with a literal monster story while promising him cookies. They read as veterans unable to fake their way through civilian life. And no matter how clumsily an ill-fated supply run or tenuous alliance is set up, I’m still frightened by the inevitable zombie attacks. There’s no new monsters, no head zombie, no new wrinkle in the human sadists or built to spill communities we see, only more zombies.

Melissa McBride as Carol in The Walking Dead


The Walking Dead is secretly about the state of labor in this country: the act of doing something just to get by. Instead of earning money, the action is sending a knife or bullet into a dirty head. Even when it experiments, as with Tyreese’s stream-of-consciousness death, the camera always lingers on Greg Nicotero’s compelling makeup effects, which have humor and detail the storylines lack. Heads deflate lovingly. What would a skull look like with a flare going off inside? How do branch-impaled zombies sway? Our heroes destroy faces, and this violence is what we came for: the utter denial of another’s identity to preserve our own.

In horror film criticism there is much discussion of the Other. But The Walking Dead is resolutely less and less able to investigate the zombies or tell their stories. In Frank Darabont’s first season, Rick told a poor woman who had become melded to her bike, in an arty moment of empathy, “I’m sorry this has happened to you.” Now the undead are simply flesh thrills of the week, while the dramatic emphasis is on how weary everyone is. And, as they tell you about 200 times in overwrought Southern accents, they are really fucking weary. 



To be a sleepy-eyed crossbow enthusiast or a grizzled sheriff with a bizarre British-Southern cadence is to want to let your guard down, to want to stop being alert. As Rick puts it, talking about how to let go of fear: “Rest in peace, now get up and go to work.” It sums up what it is like to be in an environment where your job is a repetition that slowly beats the life from you. To be an action hero requires a romanticized view of oneself, to see the world as full of monsters and a denial of empathy for others as the only way to stay alive. This viewpoint is very appealing. But even some of the worst real-life experiences have moments of respite. The romance is that there never would be, it’s the lie that sells the hole you’re stuck in.

The Walking Dead season 5 finale airs Sunday on AMC.