FILM REVIEWS: The Place Beyond The Pines

I always complain about explosive-laden action movies, but there’s another end to the spectrum of film that is equally obnoxious. This category is inhabited by films like The Place Beyond the Pines, pretentious and dull movies that feature hamstrung plots and cliche-ridden dialogue. Oscar bait like this legitimately angers me, as not only does it waste my time, but it also wasted the time of the people acting in it-- they could have been doing something much more interesting with their careers instead of starring in this quasi-indie crap.

The Place Beyond the Pines stars Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, although contrary to what the posters and trailers lead you to believe, the pair share only a few split seconds of screen time. The movie starts out as a story about Gosling’s foray into bank robbery, and it’s quite strong here-- Gosling delivers with one of his stronger performances, and the robberies are entertaining and fun. But when one of them goes wrong, he is shot and killed by a cop (Cooper). The entire focus of the story then shifts over to Cooper’s character, and later moves again to Gosling’s son, who is out for blood to avenge his father’s death. I understand that this movie is supposed to handle dark themes about fatherhood and how one event can change a person’s life, but there came a point in the film where I just didn’t care anymore.

The dialogue is mediocre at best, and moves at an astronomically slow pace-- I actually found myself watching it in 1.2 x speed, as that was the only way I could make it through the characters interacting without falling asleep. Director Derek Cianfrance makes the mistake of getting right into the drama, without an intro to establish the characters and make the audience care about them. As a result, we are left with several scenes between Gosling and his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendes, where we don’t know or care about what is going on. The plot itself is straightforward, but it is buried under layer upon layer of boredom and treacle. The worst thing I can really say about this movie is that I’m indifferent to it. It bored me, and I didn’t even care that I was bored.

The cinematography, however, is spectacular. Scenes of urban blight are interspersed with slickly-filmed heist sequences, and the style is one of the few things that actually coheres in the film. Even though I saw the movie several months ago, several of the shots have stuck with me, especially the moment of Gosling’s death. But even with the visuals, the movie tries to be oddly poetic, which doesn’t work when the audience doesn’t give two shits about the characters being filmed. You could film a dead rat with a beautiful range of primary colors, or with a great camera lens, or in sepia tone, but at the end of the day it’s still just a dead rat.

Fortunately, Gosling and Cooper bring enough charisma to the table to actually power the movie briefly, although Gosling clearly has the easier task. After he is shot and killed, Cooper has to then steer the movie in an entirely different direction, shifting the audience’s focus to a completely different story. It’s like starting a movie over halfway through-- it doesn’t work. Cooper brings as much as he can to the table, and Gosling fits his role perfectly, but neither of them are quite able to keep this movie from venturing into pretentious territory. Also, I wanted these two actors (who are widely considered to be two of the best young actors working today) to actually have some moments together onscreen. But while Gosling was on, I kept waiting for Cooper, and when Cooper finally showed up, I didn’t care about his story.

A balance between these two is never found. Perhaps the film would have been better if the two storylines were spliced between each other, alternating back and forth and finally culminating in Gosling’s death Memento-style. However, this would make a boring movie even more confusing than it already is, and there’s not much that can be done to save a film that the audience has stopped caring about. The story ends up going on far too long, and by the time it starts focusing on Gosling’s son, it has become too scattershot to entertain.

Final Score for The Place Beyond the Pines: 5/10 stars. I respect certain aspects of this movie, and parts of it are certainly enjoyable, but I can’t abide with most of the plotting, dialogue, and weak characterization. The film is incredibly flimsy, and eventually gets crushed under the immense weight of its pretentious message. The acting is fine, the cinematography is great, but if these two good aspects could have been used in the service of a better overall movie, we would have a serious Oscar contender here. Instead, all we have is a simultaneously weighty and fluffy piece of pablum that is one of the many, many overrated movies of 2013.

FILM REVIEWS: Gangster Squad

Potential is often squandered in Hollywood, but I have yet to see such a perfect example of it as Gangster Squad. Trying to be clever in an LA Confidential kind of way, an all-star cast (including Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, and Sean Penn) is assembled in a big-budget gangster blockbuster set in 1940s Los Angeles. There's a shitload of gunplay, an overabundance of gore, and the gratuitous Emma Stone as the stereotypical and one-dimensional love interest. Everyone's armed to the teeth, and they seem to be having a great time. What could go wrong?

EVERYTHING. But I'll refrain from ranting and get to the plot. Gangster Squad is about a group of detectives in LA who are assigned to wage guerrilla war against a mob super-boss (Penn). This premise alone is ludicrous. Excuse me if I find it hard to believe that the LAPD would assign a group of officers to literally escalate an already tense gang war in a process that kills dozens of innocent civilians and razes whole buildings to the ground. But hey, benefit of the doubt, suspend your disbelief, it's just a movie, right? Wrong. If a movie creates its own little world in which ridiculous things are possible, that's all okay, as long as it follows the rules that it set up. Gangster Squad, however, is supposed to take place in the real world, meaning that people should act, talk, and make decisions the way they normally would. And they just don't do that in this film.

Speaking of which... the dialogue in Gangster Squad is some of the worst I have ever heard. I am talking ANUS OF CINEMA shit right here, ladies and gentlemen-- Here's some of the corniest, lamest, and most by-the-numbers lines:

"The war path? Looks like he's on the 'gimme some more' path."

"You're kind, you don't talk too much, you're a demon in the sack..."

"You know, this... a brighter future... this is what we fought for."

"I don't want out of town, I want out of this life."

And it's not just how poorly written these lines are, it's their delivery. Brolin never bothers taking his character outside of the typical gruff and commanding policeman, and Gosling basically tries to be his old character from Drive, just with more lines. He sounds whiny, meek, and shy. His whole mysterious pretty-boy act might charm the pants off of millions of fangirls (literally), but at the end of the day it's a one-note actor playing a one-note character. Penn, meanwhile, is just as awful and nasty as you should want a villain to be, but he's pretty bland as well. There's nothing more to his character than THE BAD GUY. He might as well have it tattooed over his forehead. The movie establishes that he is essentially the Antichrist within the first five minutes, so in every subsequent scene, he has to top himself. He becomes so overly indulgent in his role as the bad guy that it's hard to watch-- for all the wrong reasons.

However, the movie does have a warm, fuzzy, 1940s feel to it, which I give it credit for. It's fun watching old cars getting shot up by guys with tommyguns in coats, and it's all set to a soundtrack that gives it a pleasant and fitting retro vibe. Of course, this basic setup allows room for even more terrible dialogue. I couldn't count on all my appendages how many times Brolin and Gosling talked about how they went to war, and then came back from war to a war, and how deep and meaningful this sappy, crappy dialogue is... and it most definitely gets old fast. Then in the end, Brolin rips off Dirty Harry and throws his badge in the ocean in a scene so bland and pathetically generic I wanted to scream.

Final Score for Gangster Squad: 3/10 stars. This is not a movie that is worth your spare time, but fans of explosions and mobsters saying cutesy one-liners should revere this movie as a message straight from heaven. Really, the target audience for this thing is very small, as it sets up a Scarface-style showdown with plenty of blood and gore, but pulls back at the last second to pretend that it's something it's not-- Intelligent. It's a fun movie, and I won't deny that I wanted Penn dead with a PASSION, but if you want serious and smart entertainment, I advise you look elsewhere.

FILM REVIEWS: Only God Forgives

Coming off of his success with Drive (2011), Nicolas Winding Refn was almost universally acclaimed as one of the best directors to watch out for. He had successfully blended the indie art house style of filmmaking with a somewhat action-y concept, and created a movie that appealed to a wide range of moviegoers-- even Ryan Gosling fangirls. He had begun his transition from obscure little hipster flicks into mainstream cinema, and was picking up a lot of fans. So, the obvious question we now must ask is... WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED? Refn followed up Drive with Only God Forgives, one of the most deliberately confusing and pretentious movies of all time. But what’s interesting about OGF is that, unlike other Refn films which are equally pretentious and brutal, it is not critically acclaimed. So maybe everyone stopped eating up the shit Refn was shoveling at them long enough to realize that this movie is fucking awful.

Only God Forgives is about Julian (Ryan Gosling), a professional boxer and a respected member of the Bangkok criminal underworld whose favorite pastime is staring off into space. Seriously, a good 85% of this film is just Gosling staring blankly at the camera. He’s an okay actor (supposedly), but here he’s just awful. I don’t know if Refn told him to show literally no emotion, or if it was a choice he made himself that was supposed to be ‘deep’, but it seriously distracts from the story. Or at least it would, if there was a story. On paper, yes-- this movie has a plot. Julian’s brother is killed, and his control freak of a mother makes him avenge his death. But if you watch the film without any prior knowledge of what to expect, GOOD HOLY FUCK, will you be confused. There are a maximum of eight scenes in this movie that are actually vital to the plot; the rest of it is just Gosling doing what he does best: Staring, pondering, staring again, getting beaten up, and staring.

It’s pretty obvious that these long-winded stares and exhaustingly monotonous art shots are just space fillers, as the movie’s actual story should take only about twenty minutes to tell. But for some unknown reason, Refn decided to cram the movie full of blank looks and WTF scenes. And when I say WTF, I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK IS GOING ON. Within the first five minutes, Gosling has given us the infamous line “I want to fuck a 14-year-old.” What’s even worse is that it doesn’t stop there: Gosling’s mother talks to his date about his and his brother’s relative penis sizes. There’s a lot of hinting at incest in that family as well. And when his mother is killed, Gosling sticks his hand in her open belly wound. Oh, and I neglected to mention that at one point, a girl ties his hands to a chair and has him watch as she fingers herself. If this doesn’t elicit a visceral “JESUS CHRIST WHAT DID I JUST READ” reaction from you, I don’t know what will.

But here’s the thing: Only God Forgives isn’t trying to be some kind of a gross-out movie. It’s legitimately trying to be psychological, deep, and intelligent, three things it fails at massively. Apparently, the film is about redemption (an Asian cop plays the role of God, hence the title) and Gosling’s guilt over killing his father. At the end, God cuts off Gosling’s hands to symbolize his cleansing of sins, thereby forgiving him. None of this could possibly be gleaned from watching the movie, as it doesn’t even try to tell us that the guy is a stand-in for God, let alone the story of redemption. Even the deed Gosling is supposed to be redeemed for is mentioned for about ten seconds, then never brought up again. There’s also a buttload of obvious foreshadowing throughout the whole thing, with dozens of repeated shots of Gosling’s hands, some of them lasting a full 30 seconds. The damage your brain suffers while watching it is monumental.

There really aren’t any relatable characters in this film either. Gosling is an interesting character, but seeing as he only has about six sentences of dialogue (most of which are “TAKE IT OFF”), the audience doesn’t really know much or care much about him. His mother is a sadistic fucking bitch, which was probably supposed to symbolize something... I guess. Even Refn probably doesn’t know what he was trying to say with this thing. And then there’s God, who talks about as much as Gosling, but most of it is karaoke. Oh yes, I forgot-- there are three scenes where God sings karaoke, each more intolerable than the last. I’d rather watch the Rick Astley Rick Roll video than this guy’s singing.

The only saving grace of this film is the soundtrack and visuals, which are both spectacular. The neon lights that blanket every character in every scene are trippy and fun, and the music stays with you well after the movie is over. If only these small positives had been given a script or plot to work with. But no, instead we’re stuck looking at a purple wash of Ryan Gosling’s dumb face for 90 minutes, then some random shots of a dead hooker’s body beautifully bathed in blue light. Of course, this visual grandeur is almost always undercut by some retarded line like “Wanna fight?” But I think Refn definitely had some good ideas back when this movie was in the abstract concept stage of creation. It’s a shame that he got too egotistical and self-absorbed to realize that this film is an enormous anus.

Final Score for Only God Forgives? 2/10 stars. Although you will undoubtedly feast your eyes and ears on the beautiful visuals and absorbing soundtrack, this is still one of the worst movies of the year. It features hopelessly wooden acting, a plot that goes absolutely nowhere, and an assortment of needlessly disgusting scenes that really detract from the movie as a whole. It’s a shame, really, as I was looking forward to this movie. I wasn’t a fan of Drive, but this definitely had potential. Maybe it’s because the trailer had every line of dialogue in the whole movie crammed into it, making it look legitimately good, but it certainly had the capacity to be more than a boring and pretentious mess. At the end of the day, only God forgives Refn.