‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ is all film noir trope and little substance — a film review

There’s an inherit problem to the Sin City movies. With so much visual flair, any sense of substance feels obscured by its imagery. As much as these films want to celebrate film noir, they strip the genre down so flagrantly and elevate the genre’s conventions to such heights, there is little left of drama or character. The first Sin City had its moments, wryly empowering women while objectifing them, for instance, but the formula has grown much thinner with the arrival of its sequel, almost 10 years later, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Robert Rodriguez directed the first one, based on the graphic novels of Frank Miller, who now co-directs with Rodriguez.

The film’s visual style, which is part live action and part animation, mostly in black and white with splashes of color and lots of shadows, of course makes it stand out from other movies. There really has never been a comic book adaptation in cinema as committed to the look of the source material as Sin City. But that counts for nothing more than form, albeit a sometimes elegant one. One would hope the involvement of the books’ creator would have fleshed out the characters of the books further, but really this sequel seems even more interested in its own look and feel over any presentation of … I don’t know… How about a little more about the darkness of men beyond action and compulsion? The fact that it was shot in 3D only adds more to the film’s gimmickry over depth.

But really, what more can be done with the age-old film noir genre than to deconstruct it (the best in modern movie-making still has to be Memento)? What Miller and Rodriguez seem most interested in is highlighting the principles of the genre to heightened effect. The hard-boiled monologues, the lighting, the role of the femme fatale, the plot twists. It’s all turned up a notch to heights of comedy. It becomes a joke for several reasons: nothing feels at stake because of the simple narrative and the film’s animated mise-en-scène distances violent acts from any notion of humanity. It all feels like some mean joke against civilization and a celebration of brutality. There’s no room for irony because there’s no sense of standard in Sin City beyond kill-or-be-killed/fuck-or-get-fucked. Characters are reduced to pixels in the worst way.

Ava (Eva Green), with her green eyes and red lips, is the femme fatal of the film’s title. Her acting and dialogue is played with so much loftiness, it’s hard no to laugh. The film’s biggest joke arrives when police detective Mort (Christopher Meloni) arrives to Ava’s home to investigate the murder of her husband. The chump falls for her as she purrs a few sly turns of phrase during the investigation, and he forgets his wife and his duty to “just the facts, ma’am.” The fact the “Law and Order: SVU” actor plays the detective adds a meta level of humor to the scene. But then he seems to be literally driven mad with lust. His reaction to his uncontrollable desires is so extreme it feels beyond implausible and falls with a grandiose thud.

A Dame to Kill For would have been so much more interesting had it been a deconstruction of film noir tropes instead of the celebration of them as bullet points to wink at. Typical of sequel syndrome, recurrent characters from the last movie have nowhere to grow from the last movie. Gail (Rosario Dawson) is still the same violent, pissed-off bitch. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is reduced to a helpless ghost watching his ward Nancy (Jessica Alba) downward spiral in her thirst for vengeance. The most interesting character of the last film, Marv (Mickey Rourke) is nothing more than a bruiser with a memory lapse and no more heart.

The film’s most interesting new character is Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the bastard son of Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) who rules over the town with a corrupt fist. Played with an intense but warm bravado that Gordon-Levitt always so easily conjures up, Johnny at first doesn’t seem to understand just how over his head he’s in when he tries to beat Pop at poker. Johnny is on a quest for recognition that will come with heavier and heavier costs. It’s probably the one story line that veers far enough from genre convention that makes the film at least a little interesting. But by the time the final shootout arrives, it all becomes numbing and tired when it should have felt climactic.

It’s interesting that the performances that are less touched up by effects, which also includes some soul from Josh Brolin as another man who falls under Ava’s spell, are the ones that bring some interesting heart to the film. But with mostly flat characters and a sense of little at stake plot-wise, the inevitable fight scenes and gun battles are deflated of any sense of urgency. Sure the graphics are impressive. But the 3D offers little seeing as the film tries to stay true to the flat, hand-drawn quality of the comic book. Occasionally objects jump out of the screen in slow motion and some images stand out as lusciously stylistic, as when Ava floats in her pool in the nude. Otherwise, A Dame to Kill For is really nothing more than what you expect from the trailer: randomly colored actors moving across backgrounds driven by violent urges that shift at varying speeds to connote some sense of dimension but no real depth.

—Hans Morgenstern

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For runs 102 minutes and is Rated R (graphic sexuality and violence abounds). It opens everywhere today, Friday, Aug. 20. Weinstein Films invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.

(Copyright 2014 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

Film Review: ‘Looper’ smartens up sci-fi tropes to riveting effect

Time travel and dystopia: two key tropes of the science-fiction genre. With Looper, director and sole screenwriter Rian Johnson has breathed a fresh verve of visceral life into them. After bursting onto the scene with the neo-noir Brickand falling a bit flat with the Brothers Bloom, Johnson returns to feature directing with a couple of “Breaking Bad” episodes under his belt and a sure-handed confidence.

Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also co-executive produced the film, impersonating Bruce Willis, who plays his character Joe in the future. The only misstep in Looper maybe the makeup Gordon-Levitt wears to look like Willis, which sometimes feels surreal but other times seems distracting. Gordon-Levitt has the Willis mannerisms down (that cool, half-interested reserve). That’s all many films have demanded to attach two different actors playing the same character.

The film takes place in a future where mobsters rule crowded cities, and you can shoot someone in the back in broad daylight for trying to take your stuff. The invention of time travel 30 years in the future (2072) allows for the two Joes to meet in this current past, 30 years into our future (2042). With time travel, the mafia’s hit men have become semi-skilled junkies (loopers) who just wait for their targets to be zapped back to 2042, who they take out pointblank with handheld cannons called blunderbusses. Usually, the targets arrive bound and hooded, making for easy hits. When Joe’s future self arrives hands free and staring him back in the eyes, the younger Joe chokes. Old Joe easily overtakes him because he has the experience of the future, not to mention who-knows-how-many groundhog day-like opportunities of having lived these encounters. The marvels of time travel.

The film’s gimmick may seem to rely on young Joe fulfilling his contract to kill old Joe so he might live out his future 30 years with happy abandon. But Looper has many more interesting things up its sleeve. The future seems to arrive thanks to capitalism gone awry and the loss of human rights. Technology has only advanced to make cell phones smaller, computers holographic, motorcycles wheel-less and drugs as easy to take as eye drops. Otherwise, most everyone seems to be a squatter living in decrepit buildings or on the street. The fact that some people are born with a “mutant” telekinetic ability they never seem to master beyond floating a coin an inch above their palm feels like a cute aside. However, Looper does not waste a single plot-point. When old Joe’s reason to avoid his death sentence comes to light, his mission in 2042 proves gasp-worthy.

At just under two hours long, Looper may sound long for a time travel sci-fi flick, but it earns a downshift in tone and pace by the film’s midpoint for an impressionable climax. Johnson knows what he’s doing when he seems to drag out young Joe’s respite from the chase at a farmhouse with Emily Blunt’s single mother Sara and her 10-year-old child Cid (Pierce Gagnon playing too-smart-for-his-age with creepy timing). This slower section is broken up by Old Joe’s scorched-earth rampage back in the city but also with a gradual deliberateness to allow the viewer to invest in these characters as channeled by some fine actors. Of course, not all movies need to run two hours long, but Johnson knows how to extend and earn the quiet moments with wit, and a revelation that follows will prove breath-taking.. You wonder why some films seem to pass through you like fast food? Those are the 88-minute, non-stop movies, which numb the mind via a barrage of action, horror, comedy and even dance moves, sapping any emotional investment by not pausing for a moment of reflection. A payoff does arrive in Looper beginning with a hired gun in search of Joe who appears at Sara’s door.

A well-earned series of plot twists and conflicts in morality will soon unfold that will leave the viewer wondering which characters they should sympathize with. It will surely leave some on edge. Looper built up the urgency to a sense I had not felt since I saw Drive last year. I felt as conflicted about these characters as I did for those in that ingenious identity mind-bender from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs, which inspired Scorsese’s the Departed.

Johnson has produced a film with such confidence, you can forgive him for taking any perceived liberties with the rules of time travel and its effects on the notion there is only one continuum of existence (of course, it’s beyond that, thanks to quantum mechanics, so get over it). Looper indeed has a playful side, but Johnson turns on the dread just as quickly, making for one of the better, smarter science fiction films surely to leave all sorts of viewers satisfied.

—Hans Morgenstern

Trailer:

Looper is Rated R (the violence does get gruesome) and runs 118 min. It opens in wide release today. TriStar Pictures invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.

(Copyright 2012 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

‘Moonrise Kingdom’: a different kind of Wes Anderson film

Moonrise Kingdom is not your typical Wes Anderson film. As a long-time fan, I have always thought his films existed in some hyper-real dimension of unreality and loved them for it. But Moonrise Kingdom shows Anderson taking a turn into almost surrealistic territory with a more focused mise-en-scène and a subtle shift in tone. Most of his previous films, even his 2009 puppet-populated stop motion masterpiece Fantastic Mr. Fox (Fantastic Mr. Fox lives up to its title), possess a sardonic, sometimes mean-spirited tragie-humor.  Moonrise Kingdom reeks of so much innocence and purity it exists as a slight detour from Anderson’s usual aesthetic. Despite taking place mostly outdoors, Anderson heightens his usual stagey feel, his actors behave stiffer than usual and he introduces a more atmospheric score, working with Alexandre Desplat for a second time. Long after the film has ended it sticks with you like a pleasant little memory.

The film follows Sam (Jared Gilman), a 12-year-old orphan who has run away from his “Khaki Scout” camp on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965. When Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) finds Sam missing (“Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop!”), he gathers the other scouts for a search party. They arm themselves with some scary weaponry for some strange reason. But any sense of foreboding dread is subverted by the perky bounce of plucked string instruments from a classical piece called “Playful Pizzicato” on the film’s soundtrack. Sam has made plans to meet his pen pal Suzy (Kara Hayward). She is also 12 and has run away from her own oppressive atmosphere: her bitter, lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and three hyperactive, younger brothers. These two are probably Anderson’s most innocent duo at the center of the drama since Dignan and Anthony (Owen and Luke Wilson in their own debut roles) in Bottle Rocket (1996).

Anderson sets up the action at a leisurely pace, though it still seems to overflow with information. The film starts with neat, symmetrical shots of the interior of Suzy’s three-story, brilliant red home. The camera tracks through large rooms that, through props and the inhabitants’ activities, date the home to its mid-1960s time frame. The family members mostly stay apart from one another. Suzy reads and looks out of the house through binoculars, a not-so-subtle quirk that reveals her longing to escape. The camera explores the home with neat zooms and smooth pans from one room to another, as the boys listen to “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34: Themes A-F” by Benjamin Britten on a portable record player. The exterior, with its perfectly pruned shrubbery and immaculate red paint job contextualize the neatness inside the home. From the outside the house’s paint job seems so polished, it looks like a doll house.

The set pieces throughout the film seem almost fetishistic in the attention to detail that produced them. In a parallel to this introduction of Suzy’s living conditions, Anderson offers an indulgent tour of Sam’s scout camp, Camp Ivanhoe. The scene opens with a kid with an eye-patch (Charlie Kilgore) blowing a wake-up call on a bugle. During a long tracking shot, the camera follows Scout Master Ward making the rounds as he accounts for all his troops. He stops next to one small group of busy boys after another, as they work on projects of various quality and ingenuity. While some practice their bow and arrow skills, others concoct an outhouse with plumbing made of sticks, water pails and a bell. Ward lingers a moment with each group to offer criticism before striding on to the next batch of industrious lads.

Of all the films in Anderson’s career, Moonrise Kingdom mostly recalls Fantastic Mr. Fox. Even the many outdoor scenes have a stagey quality. There are moments of action that include a bloody death and several scenes with explosions, but Anderson has stylized the action, which include quick cuts of still animation, to such an extent there is nothing too horrific about it. The characters also deliver their lines more stiff than I have ever seen in an Anderson film. They may have well been puppets themselves. Here are two short clips that offer a good taste of what I mean:

Though Murray makes his sixth appearance in an Anderson film and Jason Schwartzman his fourth, the film also features many new faces for an Anderson film. Both children in the lead roles make their big screen debuts with Moonrise Kingdom, and they do a decent job. There are also major acting forces new to the Anderson stable besides Norton and McDormand, like Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban. All these new faces delivering the terser-than-usual Anderson lines (this script was also co-written by Roman Coppola) makes for a slightly jarring effect. Some (Keitel and Balaban) do it better than others (McDormand, Swinton, Willis, Norton). But the style of acting does not feel much different from that of the recently hyped Greek New Wave cinema*, which also tells stories as if so aware of the cinematic limitations of representing “reality,” it skips naturalistic acting for the cold distance of human vessels delivering lines. It only heightens the surreal, nostalgic memory of long-past experiences. After all, most of the film follows the two 12-year-old kids at the heart of the film as they try to carry on a passionate love affair of 12-year-old proportions.

Using Sam’s camping skills, they disappear to the hidden inlet they Christian “Moonrise Kingdom.” Suzy reads from her young adult fantasy books like “The Girl From Jupiter,” “The Francine Diaries” and “The Seven Matchsticks.” With their simple, hand-drawn covers the books recall a time before airbrush technique much less Photoshop and the titles offer an evocative, nostalgic quality. She also plays her seven-inch singles of Françoise Hardy on the portable record player she borrowed from her brothers. Sam, meanwhile, offers his life-saving skills he learned as a camper, like putting leaves under your hat to stay cool or sucking on pebbles to stave off thirst. He also fishes their meals, keeps inventory of supplies and paints watercolors of his muse.

The icing on the cake that is Moonrise Kingdom arrives in the form of the majestic score featuring original material by Desplat, another newbie to the Anderson aesthetic first introduced to slighter effect on Fantastic Mr. Fox. Before that, Anderson mostly went to former Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh for music that had a more self-consciously precious quality. Desplat’s score has a more subdued quality with a light, sprightly touch and offers a more colorful palette of instruments that Mothersbaugh could never seem to muster. There is dynamism in the quiet moments, lending some subtlety to the mix.

Anderson’s own song selection, again with Randall Poster supervising, also adds a lot to the film’s atmosphere. The music stays true to the era, as all of it existed before 1965. From the era-appropriate French pop of Hardy to the quiet majesty of the early thirties music from Songs From Friday Afternoons by Britten.

Britten’s presence is also significant in a children’s staging of his opera Noye’s Fludde (Yes, the story of Noah’s Ark). Both its music and the on-screen staging of the opera are highlights that play to Anderson’s strengths as a filmmaker. It marks Anderson’s third cinematic detour into staging a child’s play during one of his films. The extravagance of Noye’s Fludde within Moonrise Kingdom, however, figures heavier into the drama than any of the other brief plays, be it a high school staging of Serpico in Rushmore (1998) and a play about animals by one of the children in the Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

Beyond the power of the music, it is during a production of this opera when the film’s lovers meet. Also, its dramatic quality compliments the actual storm that will soon affect all the characters of Moonrise Kingdom.

The film does have an odd quality that might seem even more hyper-stylized than previous Anderson films. But it is also one of his more focused films, elevating puppy love between two children to an almost epic quality and forgoing his usual cynical characterizations (even Schwartzman’s teenage Max Fischer of Rushmore seemed more adult than humanly possible). Everything else around Sam and Suzy is just odd noise that only enforces their need to be together. They are both lonely in their own way, and it is their private forms of loneliness that draws them together to form an original coupling that will seem impossible to break.

—Hans Morgenstern

Moonrise Kingdom is rated PG-13 and runs 94 minutes. It finally hits a select few South Florida theaters today, Friday, June 22. It plays at the Regal South Beach in Miami Beach, the Gateway 4 in Fort Lauderdale and Cinemark Palace in Boca Raton. Focus Features invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.

*I’m working on an overview for an up-coming mini Greek New Wave film festival at the Miami Beach Cinematheque for “the Miami New Times.” Update: read it here.

(Copyright 2012 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)