Savages

Move over Citizen Kane. This is the greatest film I have ever seen.

That's how I could have reviewed this movie. But here's how I am really going to review it:

In Savages, two Laguna Beach drug dealers (Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch) must figure out a way to retrieve their shared girlfriend (Blake Lively), who's been kidnapped by a powerful Mexican druglord (Salma Hayek) because the guys refused to form a business partnership with her. And yes, as the title suggests, they have to resort to some decidedly savage behavior in the process.

I felt slightly rotten for giggling during what appeared to be a reverential experience for some of my fellow movie-goers. (At least, they didn't seem to find Savages as uproariously bad as I did.) It's almost worth the price of admission for this ludicrous action thriller to see Salma Hayek hamming it up as the villain, complete with her magic hair and her sexy Mexicannness. Remember how funny she was as Alec Baldwin's girlfriend on 30 Rock? It's hard to take her seriously now, when she's always got her tongue in her cheek anyway (one hopes). It's kind of like going back and watching Leslie Nielson pre-Airplane, when he was a straight man. All his "serious" work has a new comedic side to it. Watching Salma play the villain makes you think back to those cheap exploitation films from the 70s, where there was always some hot mama running the show, and people would call her "Mommie" or something creepy like that. I'm thinking, perhaps, of Stella Stevens in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold. Or, sometimes, it wasn't a hot mama. Sometimes it was Shelley Winters, like in the first Cleopatra Jones.

At any rate, Savages resembles one of those cheapie action flicks, except it has an Oliver Stone budget, not to mention Oliver Stone's contempt for the audience. The film is based on a novel by Don Winslow, and was adapted by Winslow, Stone, and Shane Salerno. I can only imagine how bad the novel was. There are moments when Blake Lively is narrating the film that all you can do is laugh at how stupid it all sounds. She tells us at the beginning that she might not be alive, this could be just a recording, and reminds us of this later. We're never very worried, though. She's not interesting enough. Right before she gets kidnapped, we see footage of her on a shopping spree at the mall. The bags keep accumulating, and she has this dumb-surfer-girl look on her face. Later, when she's being held in some underground bunker by the druglord, she asks for a hit to help her concentrate. She embodies something that is currently morally offensive: decadence. It's like watching one of those moronic celebrities on a reality television show, oblivious to the problems of the real world. Who could possibly care about this lady? Only the men who sleep with her. She's the middle (wo)man in their quasi-homosexual fantasy. But this movie isn't honest or deep enough to explore what amounts to an incredibly obvious elephant in the room. There's never an acknowledgement of the sexual ambiguity, which is probably the most interesting element of the movie. Savages prefers to numb our minds with its brutality. (The brutality is mitigated, mercifully, by this movie's inability to be taken seriously.) 

Instead, Oliver Stone wants us to witness the transformation of two hot pot-smoking dudes into savage beasts, taking their once carefree girlfriend along with them. They're meant to be elevated in the process, to some kind of mythological status, where they're as free and instinctive as nature itself. It's a whole lot of BS, the same brand of BS that Stone peddles in every one of his movies.

NEXT PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS.

What's most offensive is that the ending is deliberately deceitful to the audience. They actually pull the "this is how it could have happened" line, showing us one monumentally nihilistic ending, and then backing out of it with mind-numbing laziness, in favor of an easy, cop-out of an ending. The first ending wasn't real, just an imagined scenario in the girl's mind. (I remember seeing an Italian splatter film where at the very end, the hero woke up from the movie, which, we're informed, was a nightmare. Then, as he rolled out of bed and the film came to an end, a caption at the bottom of the screen read, "The nightmare became reality.")

END OF SPOILERS.

I guarantee a lot of unintended laughs at this movie's expense, and there are parts of it that are entertaining (it's not a boring film, exactly, although it takes far too long to get to its obvious conclusion), but if you were groaning during the trailer, I can promise you that Savages the movie will not exceed your expectations, if you have any standards about movies.

With John Travolta as a snitching FBI agent, and Benicio Del Toro as one of Salma's right hand men.

Carrie

Poor Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is the scapegoat at school because she's awkward and quiet and plain. She lives with her raving lunatic of a mother (Piper Laurie), who's such an avid fundamentalist she makes up her own damning scripture verses and then utters them with gospel fervor. On top of all Carrie's problems, she's noticing some strange behavior: she can move objects with her mind if she concentrates hard enough. It's telekinesis, and director Brian De Palma has never had so much fun with it than here. (He takes the theme and runs--in too many directions--again in The Fury).

It's interesting to note that Carrie was Stephen King's first novel, but that we really don't think of Stephen King as much as we think of Brian De Palma when we think of Carrie. De Palma had begun making Hitchcock-influenced thrillers with 1973's Sisters, and some consider Carrie to be his ultimate thriller (that or 1980's Dressed to Kill). More than any of his other thrillers, Carrie has become part of pop culture. There's something sleazy and irresistible about it.  

Carrie is the outcast who simply snaps after she's been pushed too far. She's hated because she's stuck in a shell of social ignorance and otherness. But no one can really blame her for her ignorance, given her home life. In the opening scene, she panics when she experiences--rather late, biologically--the first signs of menstruation, and then pays for it when the other girls in the locker room begin hurling tampons at her. When Carrie gets home, her mother treats her like she's a harlot. Femininity is the enemy in Carrie's house, a sign of weakness and uncontrollable appetites that must be hemmed in by a rigidly dogmatic denial of pleasure.

Despite whatever it's saying about repression and fundamentalism, the movie is really just a big buildup to its grand finale, where the pig's blood prank turns Cinderella into the Medusa, and the Love Under the Stars dance into the prom from hell. De Palma uses a lot of European techniques to endow Carrie with a certain artful trashiness. It's visually very entertaining. Even in its most disturbing moments you find yourself laughing--it's all too histrionic to take seriously, unless you want to view it as a morality tale about the dangers of sexual repression.

Pino Dinaggio's score, which frequently rips off Bernard Herrmann's staccato violin from the Psycho shower scene, is very elegant but also over-the-top. It echoes De Palma's sensibility as a director all the way: violent, chaotic, and sensual, driving yet richly beautiful. Except for the Hermann imitations it's good.

The revenge element--the reason I'm including Carrie in my series on revenge in high school--points, partially, to the movie's endurance in popular culture. Sissy Spacek is so pathetic in the lead that it's hard to really see Carrie as the monster. She's been spit on by everyone, and stifled by her mother, who comes off as the movie's true villain. This might explain why Sissy Spacek did not become typecast as a horror movie star the way Anthony Perkins did for playing Norman Bates in Psycho. People seem to view Carrie as a validation of their wretched high school experiences, and they take comfort that they weren't alone. Carrie's always having a worse day than you, and her telekinetic meltdown elevates high school into the Shakespearean tragedy that everyone falsely makes it out to be in real life. She validates the stupid drama by sending the school up in flames. At least they had the guts to in Carrie what they ultimately couldn't do in Heathers.

With Amy Irving, William Katt, Nancy Allen, Betty Buckley, John Travolta, and P.J. Soles.

Primary Colors

Based on the book by Anonymous, Primary Colors (1998) is a roman a clef of the Clintons during their 1992 Whitehouse bid. John Travolta plays Southern governor Jack Stanton, Emma Thompson, his wife, Susan. Travolta dons the Bill Clinton-esque accent and that bullshit twinkle in his eye fairly well, but the supporting cast really makes this film come to life. Emma Thompson is superb--not just in concealing her English accent, but in embodying the aura of Susan Stanton (Hillary Clinton): cold enough to survive the nastiness of politics and the onslaught of scandals, smart enough to channel her ideas through her husband (who's better at connecting with the voters on an emotional level than on an intellectual one). In Short, Primary Colors offers a richly conceived glimpse at (and under) our political landscape. Sure, things have changed since 1992 particularly because of technology, but I think Primary Colors taps into a somewhat universal truth about the necessary cynicism one must have when approaching the subject of politics and politicians. Kathy Bates gives the most poignant--and frequently hilarious--performance as one of the Stantons' campaign advisers, who realizes--for the second time in her career--that ideals are lost in the political spectrum where appearances and behind-the- scenes deals carry more weight. While I was left feeling that this film was a bit of a love note to the Clintons (in spite of its frequently unflattering portrayals of them), I think it also captured the seeming hopelessness of politicians. People are constantly looking for someone to put their hope in, and if you can get that, you can do anything. ★★½