Pajiba

New Moon Review

2009-11-20T19:00:00Z

Is Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the Twilight series, slipping something into Midol? Are teenage girls suddenly tussling their pubic hairs and excreting menstrual glitter? Are those little pills imprinted with Team Jacob or Team Edward on them now? Apparently, Midol Teen Formula relieves cramps, backache, and bloating, while addling the soft brains of our hysterical female youth. The unholy devotion to this franchise can't be explained any other way -- something is seriously affecting the judgment of teenage girls. They've lost their taste for plot, conflict, basic acting ability, or even marginal directing talent. New Moon isn't a movie -- it's an incoherent, clunky, maddeningly bland and fiercely tedious half-chewed bolus of sexual lubricant. It's cinematic Astroglide (Rated PG-13) with no apparent purpose but to shatter hymens, drench theater seats in armpit stench and elicit the ear-bursting squeals and coos of adolescent females with little impulse control and lots of discretionary spending money.

It's too easy, however, to suggest that mind-altering substances are at play here -- it's more than that, it's psychosomatic. There's something about the Twilight movies that seeps through cheap Bella Swan eau de parfum and taps its way into high-school insecurities and adipose and weakens the intellect. Maybe it's peer pressure -- maybe there's a designated Sparkletard bully in every high school who beats the Twilight into them ("Haters don't sparkle, bitch"). I'm not otherwise ready to believe that teenage girls -- and trust me, it's 98 percent tweebags and their mothers -- would so willingly give themselves over to this phenomenon. Not without social pressure, not without some deep-seated psychological manipulation. These girls are driven by something raw and angry and powerful and completely otherworldly (and glittery). I've never witnessed this level of feverish, hormonal passion -- it borders on ecstasy, and there's absolutely nothing on the screen to support it.

It has something to do with the thought of being saved from self-loathing, and the empty promise that every woman -- regardless of her level of traditional beauty -- holds within her a love so powerful that it can bend the true nature of men, and it's just waiting to be tapped by some mystical being who doesn't abide by the rules of this world. It's a weird feminine love-triangle wish-fulfillment fantasy about being fought over by the scrawny, sensitive (and glittering) bad boy and the earnest but temperamental protector with chiseled abs. It's about forbidden love and anticipation and bestial sex, the erotic pull between the sensual vampire and the ravenous werewolf. It's about biting and ripping, fangs and claws, rejection and temptation, and about being the forbidden fruit that's plucked from the tree and fucked seven ways 'til Sunday.

The problem, of course, is that while New Moon subtextually represents all of these things, on the surface, it's nothing more than a very bad movie. It promises a jackhammer drilling into the G-spot, but delivers only drunken dick and halitosis. There are worse movies, of course, but there's never been a chasm so wide between the intensity of devotion to a film and what it actually deserves. The fervor for Twilight is beyond what existed for Titanic eleven years ago, but as loathsome as the James Cameron film was, it's far and away superior to New Moon in every way but for the number of scenes featuring gratuitously shirtless boys.

Foremost, there's barely a story here, and certainly not one that supports a 130-minute runtime. The narrative arc is a straight line that falls off a cliff during the third act. As the movie opens, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) -- an inaudibly mumbling ball of faux suburban angst and lip-biting tics -- is happy-ish in her relationship with the perpetually expressionless Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), but for her fear that she'll eventually age. Edward is 109, but looks 17, and Bella worries that someday Eddy won't want to bone an exsiccated old lady. What she'd really like is to be turned into an immortal, so that she can live with Edward for an eternity, but Edward ain't all about that -- he loves her too much to damn her soul, so he won't deflower her, which would turn her into a vampire (hasn't he ever heard of anal? That's how teenagers do it in the South when they want to avoid alerting the heavenly father).

Things come to a head when Bella gets a paper cut during her birthday celebration at the Cullens, and one of the family members loses his shit and nearly makes a hemoglobin amuse-bouche out of her. Edward, naturally, fears that it's only a matter of time before one of his family members gives into his instinctual nature or he himself can't resist the temptation to give up his vampire seed. So, illogically and without much explanation, Team Edward relocates to Italy, so he can ask the Vampire Vatican (Michael Sheen) to kill him, leaving Bella to wallow catatonically in her own self-pity.

After a few months of Richard Marx ballads, however, Bella realizes that she can call up visions of Edward and have her own little Cullengasms if she does something dangerous to raise her adrenaline levels, like ride a motorcycle! So, she saves a couple of two-wheelers from a scrap yard and enrolls her best friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) to the cause. But wait! What's this? She's developing feelings for Jacob -- he helps her to heal "the hole in her soul" that Edward left. But Jacob also has a secret, and that secret is that he doesn't want to get up on in her missionary style -- he wants to were-bone her. Turns out, puberty brings out Jacob's inner lycan, and holy shit, being an actual werewolf is, like, three times better than owning a Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt -- Bella be stuck to him like a corn dog to a stick, setting up the eventual love triangle that fizzles toward inevitability.

The problem, unfortunately, is that besides limp acting and some of the worst dialogue ever written ("You're so warm; you're like your own sun") there's very little real drama. When Bella learns that Jacobs is a werewolf, she accepts it nonchalantly. Two people die in New Moon, and yet there's no emotional response. It's just a series of treacly confessions of devotion: I swear I'll never hurt you; I swear I'll never leave you; I swear I'll protect you. It's two hours of 7th grade love note readings, and it's impossible to tell what the fuss is all about: Bella is morose, self-pitying, solipsistic, and really fucking wearisome; Edward is wooden and seemingly incapable of expression; and Jacob takes a goddamn bath in afterschool special earnestness. Also, his head looks tiny and disproportionate, propped up on that barrel chest and 12-pack of abs.

Indeed, every character in the movie is insufferable, save for two: Dakota Fanning's Jane and Michael Sheen's Aro, who are part of the Italian Volturi clan. Combined, they have less than ten minutes of screen time, but it's easily the best ten minutes of the movie. Fanning, nearly unrecognizable and mostly silent, does more actressin' with her eyes in four minutes than the rest of the cast does for the entire movie. Sheen, likewise, is flat-out magnetic, deliciously creepy, and completely out of place in a movie otherwise devoid of talent.

Chris Weitz, who took the director's chair from Catherine Hardwicke, has no idea what the fuck he's doing, nor does he seem to understand what's supposed to be at play here. His direction is rote and rushed and inert. He completely fails to capture whatever it is that teenage girls love about Twilight (before taking the director's chair, he once confessed a disdain for the series, and it's apparent here). Sloppy and overwrought direction would have been preferably to this -- it's empty, vacuous, and over reliant on Stephenie Meyers' painful dialogue, which is delivered with all the zeal of trophy wife accepting the purchase of her wealthy senior citizen husband.

Twilight was awful, and the whole damsel-in-distress bullshit wore thin about 12 minutes into it, but at least there was something going on -- a salvation fantasy where Bella was plucked from obscurity by a vampire who teased her libido into a wet hot frenzied hormonal mess. There's very little going on in New Moon -- it's a placeholder movie, establishing the conflict between Edward and Jacob, the vampires and the werewolves, and the masculine and the sensitive, but it never really teases it out. It crawls around on all fours, but never pounces. New Moon just kind of lays there, indifferent, blowing on its nails, while the audience does all the work, eventually giving up, rolling over, and falling asleep unsatisfied.

Pajiba Love 11/20/09

2009-11-20T18:00:00Z

I know this is going to be very sad news for you all, but "The Oprah Winfrey Show," a television institution for the past two-plus decades, is going to air its final show on September 9th, 2011. Your move, "Simpsons." (Yeeeah!)

Gwyneth Paltrow's latest edition of GOOP informs you of what to do with your Thanksgiving leftovers, because apparently that bitch thinks that turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwiches are too fucking pedestrian. (Agent Bedhead)

An extensive Tim Burton exhibition is opening this weekend at MoMA which will be running through April of next year. So even if you live on the other coast, you've got no excuse not to see it. (Atomic Popcorn)

Alex Trebek might be embroiled in some sort of sex scandal involving young Korean boys. Then again, he might not be. (Litelysalted)

I've never seen Disney's animated Hercules (as many of you probably didn't) but here is as good case for it as ever. (Alert Nerd)

Speaking of Herculean characters, the "American Gladiator" movie is apparently still happening. Oh, goody. (Film Drunk)

I picked up a copy of Stephen King's new novel Under the Dome, at Target the other night but put it down after realizing there was no description on the bookflap. Sure, I could have easily just looked it up on my iPhone but I require bookflap description, dammit! Anyway, it just came out and it's already being adapted into a miniseries by none other than Steven Spielberg. (The Playlist)

Ooh, last night was a "Ryan" episode of "The Office." Speaking of which, but not really, was anyone else totally disappointed with the pre-hiatus episode of "Supernatural" (which I watched in place of "The Office") last night? Um, can you say "anticlimactic?" (Hairballs)

Tina Fey spoke at the Ad Council last night and tore into her bosses at NBC. But hey, lay off Philadelphia, got it Fey? We happen to have some VERY NICE industrial parks on the Schuylkill river. (Celebitchy)

Guhhh ... This review of Amy's ravioli bowl is totally making my stomach growl. I love Amy's deliciously overpriced frozen foods. (Impulsive Buy)

Because I cannot get enough of the trailer for MTV's "Jersey Shore," here are the top six "Jersey Shore" trailer quotes. But really, any quote from the "Jersey Shore" trailer is at least an honorable mention. (DListed)

Here are five reasons not to see Twilight: New Moon this weekend. Of course, this being Pajiba many of you don't even need one. (Cinematical)

I don't really have any words to describe the picture contained in this link, other than it hurt my heart. (Notes on Bar Napkins)

True story. I just watched Total Recall earlier this week when my boyfriend and our roommate made me sit through a double feature of that and Robocop, which I also had never seen. Anyway, it made me totally excited about this clip compiling all of the violent deaths in Total Recall:

Pajiba Love brought to you by Stacey Nosek, who can be reached via email here.

The Many Faces of Robert Pattinson

2009-11-20T17:00:00Z

Although Robert Pattinson is still fairly new to Hollywood -- some know him as Cedric Diggory from the Harry Potter movies, while most know him from the Twilight series -- in his few years on the big screen, the actor has already impressed us with a remarkable range for a thespian of his age. With his mussed hair and stone-cold eyes, Pattinson can deliver a variety of acting faces -- the man's exceptional versatility has already earned him three MTV Movie Awards and four Teen Choice Awards, including one for Best Hottie.

Impressive, indeed. And as a movie critic, steeped in film knowledge, I've had quite a bit of time to study Pattinson, to soak in his talent. And as such, I thought we'd take a look back at the many faces of Robert Pattinson, a pictorial that will demonstrate his versatility while simultaneously allow us to breath in his awesomeness. Here are my favorite Pattinson expressions:

The Bemused Face

The Angry Face

The Sad Face

The Sleepy Face

The Ecstatic Face

The Fierce Face with a Half-Beard Twist

Precious Review

2009-11-20T16:05:00Z

How much can you handle? That's the central theme of Precious, a Job parable without religious overtones. It's more of a fairy tale, complete with an ogre who will whoop your ass unless she get the welfare. Precious is a child with children of her own, accepting hope not out some naive belief that perseverance will champion the day, but because she literally has absolutely nothing else to hold on to. It's Greek tragedy for BET -- harsh, unyielding, and unwilling to give easy answers or a shiny happy resolution. The story delves into after-school special territory with raw anger -- for every Dangerous Minds aphorism, there's a spit-in-your-face, gouge-out-your-eyes cruel truth. And those aren't even the more scarring moments -- it's the casually carried out horrors that kick you in the gut. You don't watch Precious for the plot; it's just a slightly repackaged version of every harrowing film that blossoms in time for awards season. You watch for the performances, and by God, there is some fine actressin' of the highest degree going on here. Precious easily contains one of the best performances of this decade, but it is little other than a ghastly tale acted at a breathtaking caliber.

Claireece "Precious" Jones (newcomer Gabourey "Gabby" Sibide) has it rough. I mean, spectacularly rough. She falls through the shitty tree and hits every fucking branch on the way down, bounces, and breaks her back on the trunk. She's a morbidly obese 16-year-old struggling through middle school who gets suspended for being pregnant with her second child. She's never had a boyfriend. It's her mother's boyfriend Carl -- Precious' own father -- who rapes her in the middle of the night and gets her pregnant. TWICE. Her mother Mary (Mo'Nique), an abusive ghoul parasitically living off the welfare checks that she collects for Precious and her granddaughter/stepdaughter, squats in their Section 8 apartment. The granddaughter's name is Mongo, which is short for Mongoloid, because she's developmentally disabled. Mary's mother keeps the child with her, save the few days when the welfare counselor comes around for inspections. Precious's old principal gets her enrolled in the Each One, Teach One program, an alternative school that caters towards troubled girls. See, not everything's dreary and miserable in her life. But most of it is. Keep reading. Precious comes home from a lengthy stay in the hospital after she gives birth prematurely to a healthy baby named Abdul. After her mother attacks her and the baby, Precious ends up homeless for a time. And from there, things actually manage to get worse.

What's admirable about the script from Geoffrey Fletcher (based on the original novel Push by Sapphire) is that it never lets the cliches and platitudes rule the film. I made the Dangerous Minds crack, but truthfully it's more like Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver. Her teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) genuinely cares about her girls but doesn't brook any bullshit. Sure, there are scenes where she tearfully stares into Precious' eyes and tells her she does matter and she is loved. Yet the students of the Each One, Teach One program feel like real girls. They talk shit to each other and make fun of each other, but then they show up at the hospital for Precious. It's not nearly as sentimental as it might seem. Precious doesn't talk much, but she fights back, which I liked. It would have been easy to show her sadly eating or taking the fat jokes from the other students. But she'll suddenly bust someone in the head for talking smack. She's a victim, but not in every scene, which adds a complexity that allows the film to be more than just a sad-fat-girl-tale like She's Come Undone. Because frankly, Precious has a fuck of a lot more shit on her plate than just being massively overweight.

And that something she has to deal with comes in the sweaty, menacing cunt of a mother Mary. I haven't seen parental figure imbued with so much casual vitriol since Doyle in Sling Blade. She's Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest smothered in gov'ment cheese, a Shere Khan pantheress who'll sit lazily swaying its tail before pouncing and clawing your fucking eyes out. Mary loathes Precious, because she had the audacity to get pregnant by her boyfriend (nevermind the unspeakable incestuous rape). She sits on the couch, cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth, and like an approaching storm cloud, she builds and builds her rage and indignation until she explodes. She flings pots, books, glassware. But what makes Mary so frightening is that she can play sweet. She can fake it, wear nicety like a store-bought mask, and then pitch it aside when the coast is clear. She dawdles her disabled granddaughter on her knee for the nice welfare counselor, but the second she disappears, Mary tosses the toddler toward the end of the couch like a cushion. Mary is a monster that Precious has to slay, but Daniels -- through Sapphire's original story -- is too smart to try to kill her off like a lazy Lifetime plot.

Everyone in the film is outstanding. Yup, I said everyone, dammit. Mariah Carey gets mocked for being wooden, but she's playing a welfare supervisor named Ms. Weiss who's stopped giving a shit. She ratchets up the Brooklyn just shy of Rosie Perez and strips off all the niceties to play the stone face who may or may not give Precious and her mother the money. Sherri Shepherd surprised the shit out of me as an administrator for the alternative school. And without his fisheye lens, I hardly recognized Lenny Kravitz as the affectionate Nurse John, who takes care of Precious when she's hospitalized. Precious's fellow misfits are all outstanding, with particular notice to Xosha Roquemore as Joann, she of the infamous "my favorite color is fluorescent beige" line in the trailer.

But even with all the fancy side fixings, the movie reminds us it is always about Precious versus her mother. Gabby Sidibe is wonderful as Precious, not for the moments where she suffers, but the moments where she shines, particularly for a first timer. Anyone can play depressive. But the Oscar might as well be polished up and handed to Mo'Nique for her portrayal of Mary. Most black actresses, particularly those who happen to be pleasantly puffy, tend to get relegated to roles like "Mmm-hhm Friend" and "No You Din't Lady." But villains are always the juiciest roles, and Mary would make Miranda Priestly shit a sweatshirt covered in kittens. Halle Berry might have set the precedent and Jennifer Hudson might have tainted the honor, but Mo'Nique earned this with every sweaty grunt and hideous scowl.

There are two scenes in the film that pretty much guarantee this. Precious comes home from the hospital with her baby boy and Mary's waiting in her chair, wreathed in cigarette smoke. She seems docile, almost sweet, and asks to hold the baby. Even I screamed "DON'T GO IN THERE, GIRL!" Precious lets her mother hold the baby while she starts to fix dinner. Mary springs up from the chair to hurl a glass at Precious, and lets the barely month-old infant topple from her lap onto the floor. Even knowing that it's coming does nothing to take away from this excruciating moment. Precious and Mary fight each other, drawing blood, and Precious flees down several staircases, tumbling at the end and falling on the baby. I thought, oh, God, they actually killed the baby. But no, everyone's OK. Right before Mary drops her television from the top floor. The second scene occurs in Ms. Weiss's office. Mary has begged to be reunited with Precious and her grandbabies. Mary sits there, enduring the accusations of sexual and physical abuse, and her response will make your heart and stomach wrench. It's part accusation, part threat, and part tearful confession. But the entire time you realize, her entire motivation is to get a welfare check. She doesn't care about Precious, just the money. It's fucking brilliant.

Lee Daniels fought to get Precious made for practically no money, but he's the man who produced both Monster's Ball and The Woodsman (seriously, why the fuck haven't you seen this yet? Go now, watch Kevin Bacon and Mos Def do some actressin' goddamn you). Only after the Sundance success did Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry come in to brand this project and champion it. So for those of you who are staying away because of the big glowing O and the sloppy TP stamped on the side, give it up. Precious isn't a property of either of them, though it does share their melodramatic penchant for depressive heroines and violent family struggles. They only helped get it distributed. Daniels imbues his film with a sense of hateful rawness and manages to scrub the sentimentality until it bleeds. Buoyed by awe-inspiring performances, Precious is a movie about survival rather than hope or redemption, reminding me of Requiem for a Dream, in that I will never watch this again.

An Education Review

2009-11-20T16:00:00Z

The dilemma at the center of Lone Scherfig's British coming-of-age drama, An Education (2009), is quite simple. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is an attractive, incredibly smart, and witty 16-year-old growing up in a drab suburb of London in 1961. Judging from the lifestyles of the female role models around her, her future can be narrowed down to two options: housewife or schoolmarm. In order to meet the requirements of one of those employment opportunities, Jenny's caring but overly concerned parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and school teacher (Olivia Williams) forcefully suggest an education at Oxford. In order to market herself as a valuable candidate, Jenny must ace English, Latin, French (hence the title), and show cultural breadth (her "hobby" is the cello). Yet, if all goes according to plan, Jenny will meet a similarly cultured wealthy man and will no longer need to do any of those things. The irony, of course, is that an Oxford education is simply a means of making the bait more alluring. Jenny comes to this realization early into Scherfig's film and asks the question "Why must I attend Oxford when I could easily take a shortcut and reach the same inevitable conclusion by attending the school of life? I'd have a lot more fun."

And fun, indeed, is what Jenny has. En route home after symphony practice on a rainy day, she meets a man named David (Peter Sarsgaard). David is not only twice Jenny's age but is also cultured, financially endowed, charming, and witty, thus inspiring in Jenny the desire and the means to slightly cheat the game of life by passing "GO," collecting two hundred quid, and finding herself at the former of two options: a housewife, but a wealthy and cultured one at that. David and Jenny go to concerts together, enjoy beautiful dinners at jazz clubs with their friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike), and vacation in Paris. As time progresses, Jenny becomes the object of envy of her classmates and represents the freedom that her mother, school teacher, and school administrator (Emma Thompson) repressed when they once rolled the dice. Not long into their relationship, David proposes to Jenny and her deliberate subversion of the conservative order that an education at Oxford represents seems to have been dealt its coup de grace.

However, both David and An Education are ultimately not what they appear to be. Throughout the film, Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby (author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, who is adapting a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber here) give us ample clues that David is not really the type of person he presents himself as. Where does his wealth come from? While his ability to use his charm to smooth talk Jenny and her parents is incredibly powerful, everything in the plot, form, and direction of the film (Sarsgaard's performance in particular) disables David's superpower when it comes to winning over the audience. We want to like him, but we don't trust him and, in the end, we're right not to.

This said, the film and David have one key characteristic in common: they are both dishonest. Coming out of An Education, I felt the same way about the film as I did about David. I wanted to like it, I wanted to fall under its charm, but there's something rather slippery and off-putting about its ultimate message. While I will be quick to admit that the film is to be praised for the performances of Molina, Sarsgaard, and particularly newcomer Carey Mulligan, whose face and personality are this film's raison d'être, I found the ideology represented by the characters and events portrayed rather troubling. The film critiques the conservative lifestyle of an Oxford education for the bulk of its running length, favoring world experience and seizing the day as the correct and more fulfilling alternative. Yet, at the end of the film, we're left with the impression that while seizing the day makes you rich and fulfilled, you're ultimately an immoral fraud, poser, and a coward. The school of life is a shortcut viewed with contempt. Thus, Jenny loses a turn, does not pass "GO," does not collect two hundred quid, and finds out all along that the established social order of conformity was, in fact, the only correct path.

Even from the perspective of a man who has spent nearly eight years in a university lecture hall and who deeply treasures the education of the film's title, this ideological conclusion made me uncomfortable. Surely, there is much to be learned in life that does not involve French, Latin, and deciphering Geoffrey Chaucer, and the bulk of those learning exercises do not render the subject dishonest or morally crippled. While the film offers up the briefest hint that Jenny is perhaps more seasoned and less näive about the workings of the world after her brief stroll on the road less taken, the film's final scenes seem to cast aside that sentiment completely by repressing David and the lifestyle he represented. While this provides with an ending that is a happy one, the moves taken to get there feel dishonest and ideologically suspect.

Drew Morton is a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles. He has previously written for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and UWM Post and is the 2008 recipient of the Otis Ferguson Award for Critical Writing in Film Studies.