Reviews

Sympathetic to the subject matter of the show - gender fluidity and exploration - I eagerly binge-watched Transparent over three nights. Rarely have I been so disappointed.

Nearly every character is screechingly awful in his/her own way. They corner the market in "selfs" - self-regarding, self-conscious, self-absorbed, self-interested, selfish. I wouldn't want to share a sidewalk with any of them, much less a friendship or a life.

While fictional characters are often awful people, there is usually something redeeming about their interactions, explorations, or character growth that propels their arc into a highly-touted show. Not so here.

The overarching sensibility of the show is, dispiritingly, "naughtiness." The writers clearly vied to outdo one another in breaking media taboos, referencing or showing "female squirting," "cameltoe," female pubic hair and oral sex performed on women. But instead of seeming refreshingly open or subversive, it just felt like giggling eighth graders saying "dirty" things out behind the school to titillate their pals.

Worse, the main character, whose transition from male to female is ostensibly the subject of the series, is herself so flawed and unpleasant a personality that her quest for dignity as a woman is undercut both by her own boorishness and that of her harpy ex-wife and three revoltingly entitled and desperately cruel children, for whose personalities her character surely bears significant blame?

Lastly, I hope the production was written by Jews, because if not, it is the most desperately anti-Semitic thing I've seen in years. If Jews wrote this story, then they are not spreading cheer about their culture.

The Hurt Locker is one of those testosterone-driven movies that seems to have fallen over the sharp edge of the Great Male-Female Divide, landing firmly in man-land. Despite having been directed by a woman, the film offers virtually nothing that women tend to seek in movies: characterization, story, back-story, beauty, visual interest, irony, hope, subtlety, redemption, etc. I'm sure some women will disagree with me, but it is inescapable that nearly all the mainstream, OTT praise has come from male critics.

Instead, IMHO, The Hurt Locker offers unremittingly tense - and eventually tedious - expositions of attempted and successful bomb defusions filmed largely (and nauseatingly) with shaky, hand-held cameras. That's it. That's the whole thing. The characters react to the bomb defusion efforts and each others' reactions to those efforts, and occasionally worry about Iraqi insurgents that may be targeting them. To blow off steam, the soldiers beat each other up. (Really? Perhaps men understand that sort of thing, but women mostly don't get it, and certainly don't think it's entertaining.) All in all, I would never have guessed that a film about exploding ordnance could be so tooth-grindingly dull.

I read that director Kathryn Bigelow based the story on the accounts of a freelance journalist who was embedded in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, so perhaps what resonates with male viewers is a certain "authenticity" of the war experience that is offered by this fictional re- telling. But "authentic" does not always equal "interesting," and so it was here.

But that's OK - nothing in the film was entertaining. While the acting was sound and dedicated, the actors were given very little to work with. The high point of actorly expression was a scene in which the two leads had to let flies crawl into their mouths, eyes and noses while lying motionlessly in ambush. That must have taken some grim dedication to the craft.

Had this been a documentary, it might have had resonance based on the unscripted and often chaotic nature of efforts to film reality as it is happening, particularly in a war context. But in case anyone has lost track of this fact, the director set up, shot and approved every scene in this film, and then edited them together. So although it may include kernels of real events, those kernels have been processed as extensively as corn kernels are processed for breakfast cereal, and with the same sub-nutritious result.

And of course, neither the movie nor its characters ever ask the ultimate question, "What the heck are we doing in Iraq defusing bombs, anyway?"

Conceivable spoiler (though I cannot imagine how)

Various critics' reviews, and certain of those here, bash this pleasant movie as being "predictable." Well, yeah - it's a romantic comedy. Two people try to get together, suffer obstacles, and finally at least one of them winds up with someone. If you don't want a predictable plot, don't see romantic comedies.

Predictability aside, this is a delightful version of the genre. Amy Adams has never been so luminously beautiful, and Matthew Goode is scruffily appealing. The Irish countryside, no surprise, is green and glorious, and the obligatory supporting comic rural coots are charming. Yes, Amy's character steps in cow pats and falls in mud, because how else would we know that someone who looks like Amy Adams is less than perfect? And all rom-com characters must have an Achilles heel that makes their opposite number love them. But this sort of pratfall comedy is kept to a minimum, and is cleverly offset by Amy's brave face, soldiering on despite adversity.

Essentially, this film is an old-fashioned version of the brand. It is not heavily weighted towards sex, debauchery and crudeness as such recent offerings as The Ugly Truth have been. Rather, this film lets us get to know the two main characters, feel the way they inch towards one another, and enjoy the scenery along the way. Really, what more could you ask for in a romantic comedy than a light-touch love story with two attractive characters in a wild and lush countryside? Not much, I submit.

Possible spoilers:

Monster's Ball asks us to believe that Billy Bob Thornton's character, a life-long vitriolic bigot and hater of his own kindly child, undergoes a complete reversal of personality and alteration of his belief system following a pair of tragedies. This romantic notion is appealing as a general proposition, but unfortunately never takes flight in this film, where the reversal remains unsupported by any character or plot development that would render it believable.

Directors take note: it is not reasonable to require audiences to infer not only what is going on in a character's mind, but all the rationales and justifications for it. Somewhere, we need to see an overt expression from the character himself as to WHY he is changing. Here, the "why" is simply missing, making Thornton's character's motivation impenetrable and thoroughly unconvincing.

*****SPOILERS *********SPOILERS ***********SPOILERS

Who is at fault? The critics, the audiences or the director of this film, Todd Field? Someone, somewhere, has made a grotesque error in repeatedly characterizing this movie as a "moving portrayal of parents' grief," when instead it is a study of vengeance at its most repellant. Simply put, Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson play monsters, and audience empathy with their characters is sorely misplaced.

The film lays out the facts: a young man is killed in a fracas with his lover's husband, and the husband in turn is killed by the young man's grieving father. The issue at the heart of the movie, then, is vigilantism. These days, film conventionally portrays vigilantism either as a necessary response to inutterable evil, or as the anguished response of an individual faced with a government or system that can provide no redress for a grievous wrong. Indeed, the observance of one of those conventions is usually critical if the audience is intended to empathize with the vigilante.

But this film lays out facts that defy those conventions. We learn that the husband will probably to go to jail for five years, at least, but then he is murdered before he is even tried. More starkly, the nature of the crime is not clear. Did the husband and the young man struggle for the gun, and it went off accidentally? Was the gun wrested away from the husband, who then merely struggled to defend himself? Or did the husband shoot the young man deliberately? Might five years' imprisonment not have been fully appropriate or perhaps even excessive, depending on what actually happened? We, as the audience, do not see the crime committed, and vigilante "justice" is meted out before the the evidence is ever brought out. Finally, the mother's statement that her son's killer "smiled" at her when she encountered him in a store is false; the audience sees the scene, and the killer looks startled or scared, not gleeful. Yet it is this statement that finally brings the grieving parents together and hardens the father's resolve to kill his son's killer.

If Field intended this film as a commentary on how readily our thin layers of civilized conduct can be stripped away to reveal the ugliest, basest impulses lurking beneath, he has done a creditable job: the seemingly-upright parents have not allowed the law to take its course; the seemingly-educated parents do not know or learn the truth of what happened, or seem to care; and the seemingly-moralistic parents alter the facts conveniently to fit their grief and sense of injustice.

But if that is the message of the film, then why has anyone shed a tear for the vigilante parents, who perverted the course of justice in a singularly disgusting way, and for little discernible reason other than a revolting blood-lust? Why doesn't their evil deed erase any vestige of concern we may have felt for them?

For me, it did. For Mr. Field, I'm not so sure. If he intended the parents to be seen as evil, or at least profoundly ambiguous, then he has, by failing to speak out on this point, opportunistically permitted his film to succeed on the false premise of audiences' and critics' unaccountable and misplaced empathy with the parents. Or, worse yet, he actually believes the parents to be sympathetic. Either way, Field's vision is severely flawed.