'Snowden' isn't paranoid enough to be interesting.

Nothing excites in Snowden, the latest film from Oliver Stone, for whom the Edward Snowden case seems a rather obvious next step in a career spent shedding light on America’s demons—or at least pointing to the darkness in which they skulk like ever-present Boogeymen. Stone’s movies, as we all hopefully know by now, aren’t meant to be treated as historical documents. (For that matter, neither should any other director’s movies, no matter how “based-on-a-true-story” they claim to be.) Rather, the best of Stone’s work (such as his mesmerizing masterpiece JFK), asks us to question the status quo, to remain skeptical of what we’re told by the powers-that-be. That’s where Stone shines as a director, even when his thesis feels practically emblazoned on the screen like a permanent caption, or like the opposite of something you’d see with those dark sunglasses in They Live: QUESTION AUTHORITY. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt tries his damnedest as Edward Snowden, the CIA contractor who in 2013 released classified intel about the NSA’s troubling surveillance practices, and who now resides in Russia, because if he returns to the U.S., he will face charges—of espionage and other crimes—that will likely put him in prison for the rest of his life. But both Snowden the man and Snowden the movie fail to generate any heat as a subject: While the real Snowden remains a significant news story and an important—and controversial—figure in contemporary history, he’s essentially a pasty middle-class computer nerd, and the things he discovered can only be dramatized by distilling often inscrutable computer jargon. Watching someone type things on a word processor, or transfer files from a computer to a chip, just isn’t that exciting, even if in reality human lives across the globe are held in the balance.

When Oliver Stone made JFK, he was in full command of the medium. JFK runs around three hours, yet it speeds along like the best kind of crackling, tingling pot-boiler. Stone used actual footage (including the famous Zapruder film of the actual assassination) and intertwined it with dramatizations, following every kooky conspiracy rabbit trail down into its respective, labyrinthine rabbit hole. What Stone created was a movie equal parts truth and fiction, but brilliantly fused together with Stone’s sharp eye for detail and the best kind of bombastic performances. (Even Kevin Costner seemed alive in JFK.) But where JFK rivets, Snowden languishes. 

Like JFK, Snowden implores us to pay closer attention to our government’s actions, but this time Stone is going through the motions. The film would benefit from a more paranoid, eerie sensibility, like those great conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (e.g. All the President’s Men, a movie in which we constantly feel a sense of impending dread, and in which the subject, an ominous and paranoid President Nixon, is ultimately more interesting than pasty, friendly, Charlie Brown-esque Edward Snowden). There’s only one scene that comes close to this style: When Snowden is speaking to his superior (played by Rhys Ifans) via telecast, and the man’s face is framed by the enormous screen so that Snowden stands like the meek silhouette of a chess pawn in the wake of this sneering, scowling, terrifying countenance, which represents government overreach and duplicity at their worst. It’s worth noting that Joseph Gordon-Levitt speaks at a lower octave than usual, apparently imitating the real-life Snowden, and that this monotone, dulled-out effect on his voice represents a metaphor for the rest of the movie. We’re dulled out too, even if the movie does raise extremely important questions about the nature of surveillance and the ways in which our government monitors other countries, not to mention its rationale for so-doing. If Stone is right, then we’ve ostensibly used the War on Terror to justify our own fascistic agenda, and that is indeed something to worry about. But Oliver Stone has lost momentum: there’s no vitality to this movie. Even the exchanges between Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley, who plays his longtime girlfriend Lindsey, feel uninteresting: They fight essentially about the same thing over and over again: He can’t communicate (because he’s bound to keep silent about his work with the CIA), and what he knows is eating him up. But their skirmishes feel like the stuff of bad soap operas, and Woodley is reduced to playing the nagging, concerned wife, a role that Sissy Spacek had in JFK (although Spacek made it work better than Woodley.)

Stone’s intentions may be admirable, but this kind of juiceless dramatization of real events is inherently un-cinematic, at least when it comes to narrative film. I don’t think anyone else could have done much better. Nixon made for great cinema because of, well, Nixon, not to mention Deep Throat and the aids sneaking through the Watergate hotel, and eerie scenes in dimly lit parking garages, and because there’s something more dramatic and exciting about hard-scrabble journalists sniffing out a story and pounding away at typewriters. Moreover, while Snowden has a clear hero (assuming you take up Stone’s side of the argument, which is the only side you’ll get from this movie), the villain isn’t quite as clearly shaped. It’s the impersonal face of bureaucracy, without a Nixonian head, a King Coopa to destroy once you get to the hellish castle. All of these may be reasons to see instead CitizenFour, the Oscar-winning Snowden documentary that Laura Poitras directed. (Poitras, incidentally, figures into this film too: She’s played by Melissa Leo.)

With Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Joely Richardson, and in a glorified cameo as a Snowden prototype, Nicolas Cage. Written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. 

The Fault in Our Stars

Initially, I did not want to see The Fault in Our Stars. It was obvious from all the hype that the book (written by John Green) and the movie (directed by Josh Boone) were intended to pull at our heartstrings in a very calculated way. But then I listened to the Village Voice film podcast, in which critics Stephanie Zacharek and Alan Scherstuhl discuss Ruth Graham's article denouncing adults who read young adult fiction. Graham hits YA (Young Adult) fiction pretty hard, insisting that adults who read it ought to be embarrassed. She makes a convincing point. There are a lot more adults reading young adult fiction nowadays at the expense of the more "grown-up" stuff they're expected to read. Actually, Graham argues that it's their privilege to read the grown-up stuff, remembering the time in her life when she "graduated" to reading grown-up novels and how thrilling it was to finally reach that threshold. I've heard it over and over again from my friends who are in some cases 10 and 20 years older than I am: "I just prefer YA fiction." "It's really getting more and more complex." "I like not having to think too much." (Those last two are contradictory but I have heard versions of them both.)

I suppose that reading YA fiction exclusively would be like me watching only 80s teen comedies. When I was a teenager, I found The Breakfast Club compelling, poignant, achingly honest, heartfelt, and powerful. It spoke to teenagers who thought their parents were the worst. As an adult, I no longer live in that bubble. Perhaps Ally Sheedy's prophecy in The Breakfast Club was true: that "when you get older your heart dies" and because all our hearts are dead, we think nothing of it. But if we could stand face-to-face with our teenage selves, they'd be screaming a warning to us (or rather, themselves) not to let it happen. But in any case, I see teenagery movies differently than I did when I was a teenager, and I'm only 28. Heaven knows I'll see them even more differently when I'm 38 and when I'm 50. 

Although Ruth Graham is right in calling upon adults to fill their minds with more adult literature, she doesn't really do The Fault in Our Stars justice. Yes, it's a gushy melodrama to a large extent (we knew that going in), but it also deals with death in a rather grown-up and complex way. Perhaps it's too easy to vest the main character Hazel (played by Shailene Woodley) with such nuanced views on mortality, and yet, she's a girl who's had to face what most people her age (and older) have not, at least in the Western world. Living with death (in this case a terminal cancer diagnosis) changes you. One of my best friends was born with cystic fibrosis, and all his life he knew he was going to die. The rest of us know this, deep down, about ourselves, but spend most of our lives wishing it away, pretending we're immortal. My friend Ben lived with his own impending death every day doing breathing treatments and spending sometimes weeks in the hospital, which was a normal part of his life. Likewise, Hazel knows much more about death than most of us because she's staring it in the face: every time she walks up a flight of stairs and gets winded, every time she wakes up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, every time she sees that look in her mother's eyes that says "I'm going to outlive you." She is forced to make peace at the age of 15 what many people refuse to acknowledge at 75.

There is one side of Hazel that is a bit childishly needy when it comes to life. Her favorite novel--which she's read over and over again--ends mid-sentence. And this abrupt, ambiguous finale deeply troubles her. When she gets her new friend Augustus Waters to read the book, he too is frustrated, and contacts the author, who's now living a reclusive, Salinger-esque life in Amsterdam. The author's unexpected reply initiates a trip to the Netherlands to meet him, which goes about as successfully as throwing a glass of water on a burning building.

So the big moment--meeting the famous, reclusive author--fails to give Hazel and Augustus any closure about their favorite book. But really, the film uses this to grow them up even more. Life ends in mid-sentence. What little there was remaining of their childhood (Augustus too has dealt with cancer, which led to the amputation of one of his legs) was wrapped up in getting a cushy ending to that novel, and it's shattered into shards of glass, with which they are left to deal.

I think The Fault in Our Stars marvelously shows us the tragedy and the beauty of human existence, and even if it's a melodrama full of moments crafted to squeeze the moisture from our eyes and noses, it's a heartfelt film, one that doesn't shy away from the painfully unanswered questions of life. Furthermore, this movie has a sense of humor about death that everyone seems to conveniently forget. Sometimes it's a big relief when we can laugh at our own mortality. And, as Stephanie Zacharek and Alan Scherstuhl point out, it's one of the few movies aimed at young people (or any people) this summer that doesn't involve explosions. For that I am eternally grateful. My only fear is that this film's success will open the door to a new terminal-teenager-melodrama sub-genre, and that the quality of such films will exponentially diminish over time. I guess we can only hope. (Also, I hope that the young stars of this film, Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, are given more opportunities to show us what they're made of as actors. They're both passionate and exciting young performers.)

With Laura Dern as Hazel's mother, Sam Trammell as Hazel's father, Willem Dafoe as the grumpy novelist, and Nat Wolff, as a friend of Augustus who's also dealing with cancer. The novel was adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber.

Identity Mongering: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and 'Divergent'

I've been lost in a whirlwind of books. It's as though the crippling pall of academia has finally been lifted and I am struggling to keep up with my newfound desire to just read, read, read. Yes, I was an English major and an English graduate student who hated being forced to read books. It took me about a year and a half to get into the discipline of reading for pleasure. Since January, I've finished eight books, including John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Tab Hunter's autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential. I also gave up on one: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which was truly the definition of dismal reading.

The movie watching has suffered as a result I'm afraid. I've been thinking about this blog and what it means. Whether or not I want to continue it, whether or not I want to be a film critic. I've been thinking about this whole internet life we lead, and how it's not working for me. This need to put myself out into the online world for all to dissect and consume. It doesn't satisfy. So, dear readers, I don't know what that means for Panned Review. I'm not going to make any big statements because I'm likely to change my mind in two weeks. But there is a stirring in me to leave this big technological monstrosity behind, or at least, to take a few steps back and get to know the person who doesn't need to stare at a screen for some semblance of an identity.

For now, let's talk about the two movies I did see in theaters this month, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Divergent. As for Grand Budapest Hotel: I'm not in any way a Wes Anderson fan. I remember watching The Life Aquatic with my good friend Neal in pure agony. He was laughing at it, I wasn't. I didn't, I don't, I probably never will, get it. Moonrise Kingdom only reinforced this feeling about Wes Anderson movies for me. I fell asleep. The reason Wes Anderson annoys me is the reason he annoys everyone else who finds him annoying: His movies are just so precious, so cutesy, so meticulously storybook, as though Anderson had stumbled across a myriad of dollhouses and toys in his attic and breathed some kind of pompous auteur's life into them. He's the puppeteer who can't decide if he finds puppets amusing in a sentimental or an ironic way. He probably wants it to be both.

That being said, I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel. At first, there was the same cutesy-ness and the same stultifying flawless-beauty aesthetic that permeates his other work. But then the story grabbed my attention, and the film's quick adventurous tale transcended all the obviousness of Wes Anderson-land. The story is about a hotel clerk in-training who becomes the protegee of Liam Neeson, a wise and seasoned concierge at the titular hotel. Neeson's character is named Gustave H., and he maintains emotional and sexual relationships with many of the hotel's elderly female guests. One of them (played by Tilda Swinton, entombed in aging make-up so that she looks like poor, shriveled Bette Davis did in the late 1980s) croaks and leaves him a priceless work of art which her son (Adrian Brody) tries to keep for himself. He employs a murderous thug to aid him in this endeavor. Eventually, Gustave is arrested when the angry son accuses him of murdering his mother. Thus the young hotel clerk (Tony Revolori) is enlisted to help bust Gustave out of jail.

Grand Budapest moves with verve and comic charm, and even when I rolled my eyes at Wes Anderson laying his usual bag of tricks out on the table and then parading them around the room with the kind of hipster-reverie that only Wes Anderson can exhibit, I couldn't help liking it. It was fun. Maybe he's just worn me down and my defenses are so low that I'll take anything remotely enjoyable. I think this may be the Wes Anderson film that the non-initiated can finally get behind. (It may also be our last.) With Saoirse Ronan. Featuring cameo appearances by Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban.

And then there's Divergent (directed by Neil Burger) the latest trend in pop young adult dystopian story-telling. It's based on the book series by Veronica Roth. I liked it, but are we ever going to be released from the prison of dystopian craptacularness that permeates popular movies and literature? This kind of gook is somehow highlighted as the catalyst to a reading revolution among young people. I recently read in the book The Dumbest Generation that what's actually happening--with successful book series such as Harry Potter and the like--is that most kids who read them read nothing else. They read these books to be in on the cultural event that they perceive is taking place and dare not do so without them on board.  The author, Mark Bauerlein, points out how many people under 30 are proud of their anti-literate sensibilities. They're too worried about pop culture, too obsessed with engaging social media to keep their social lives alive. This may be cynical, but it's certainly compelling. I imagine that there are plenty of people who read widely. They're the ones who aren't on social media 24/7. That's why we think they're non-existent. They aren't making any noise because they're reading. Right now. Let's join them, shall we?

Okay, back to Divergent. The basic structure of Veronica Roth's futuristic, post-apocalyptic world had me laughing inwardly. Everyone is divided into one of five factions, according to their gifts and personalities. Once adolescents come of age (i.e. when they become old enough to theoretically figure out who they are), they are allowed to choose one of these identities. The trouble is when someone doesn't fit in just one box. That's where Beatrice Prior (played by Lindsay Lohan-ish looking Shailene Woodley, a compelling young actress who impressed me in The Descendants) finds herself. She fits into multiple categories. The community has a word for people like her. (Any guesses?): Divergent. Divergents are seen as a threat to the stability of the community, so the villainous Kate Winslet, head of the faction of smarties known as Erudite, has basically issued death warrants for any Divergents who might be wandering around. It's kind of Blade Runner mixed with The Hunger Games mixed with The Giver mixed with Every Other Futuristic Movie/Book Ever Made.

On the plus side, Divergent is an interesting movie, once you get past the inane set-up and the inevitable message of "being yourself" and "not letting people put you in a box." (These two slogans comprise the messages of 97% of all high school yearbook inscriptions.) The whole training program that Beatrice undergoes when she makes her choice is quite absorbing. (She's pretending to be one of the athletic, super-energetic, comically over-the-top Dauntless people, who are basically like a bunch of hot young things on steroids who protect the city from danger.) There's a little romance between Beatrice and one of the Dauntless trainers, a guy who's imaginatively named "Four" and played by hunky Theo James. (He manages to keep his shirt on most of the time, and even when he removes it, it's not gratuitous ala Taylor Lautner in Twilight.)

Also, it's somehow very gratifying to see Kate Winslet play the heavy. Has she ever played the heavy before? Her performance was cool and collected, smoothly and elegantly evil. She reminded me of Jodie Foster in the wretched Elysium. Foster was the wicked wasp queen keeping the dregs of society away from the privileged. And while Foster's performance didn't really work for me, the general idea is the same: a revered screen actress taking on the part of a couth, clean, polished Cruella Deville. Winslet's quite a natural at it. And Shailene Woodley holds her own.

With Ashley Judd, Zoe Kravitz, Mekhi Phifer, and Miles Teller.

The Descendants

Are modern filmmakers afraid of emotion?

Hip as we audience members might like to think we are, we go to movies for catharsis. We spend our lives so glazed over and blitzed out that we turn to movies to help us reconnect with the emotions that we've buried deep inside, and then we learn how to express them on cinematic terms: we stage, we enact high drama using the minutiae of our daily living as its impetus, ignoring the fact that the intensity of the performance doesn't match the very undramatic qualities of our lives. And so when December rolls around, in metronomic timing with the holiday season, the "important" movies are released: the ones about Big Serious Life Problems: family dramas and poignant biographies of famous people who made Big Choices and "changed the world." We flock to these movies like geese to bread crumbs.

Movies often used to be histrionic in terms of expressing emotion. Perhaps filmmakers and studio executives were keenly aware of what audiences wanted: big emotions for the big screen. (This might have come about during Hollywood's ill-fated attempt to compete with TV in the 1950s.)  But then the march toward realism reshaped what people thought went into a good story, so the trick became this: A filmmaker had to convey great emotions without making it obvious or overwrought. Soon this obligation was taken up by the smaller movies as the gulf began to widen between the mindless big-budget Hollywood fodder and the self-important indie movies.

Now we have The Descendants, which is being heralded by many and is already up for major awards. George Clooney, playing a lawyer and family man named Matt King, is receiving high praise for his performance as the husband who must face certain cold realities after his wife Elizabeth goes into a coma: she was cheating on him, and he wasn't exactly Husband-- or father-- of the Year.

The title of the movie refers partly to a land deal between Matt's relatives and a commercial developer. The land, some of the most beautiful untapped oceanfront property in Hawaii, has been part of their family for generations, but the money from the sale would pull many of Matt's relatives out of debt and into permanent financial security. Matt must prove to us that he's with it enough to resist the financial lure of selling out and patch things up with his comatose wife and "troubled" teenage daughter in two hours or less.

But the title also refers, inadvertently but most definitively, to us, and to movies. This movie is a descendant not only of the bloated, emotionally overcharged family dramas, but of the slight, we-can't-be-cheesy-if-want-to-be-hip indie films. The director, Alexander Payne, has made some of these before (About Schmidt and Sideways). Payne somehow manages both: he cuts away whenever he's afraid of the movie being too serious, and when the wife of Elizabeth's other man comes to visit, erupting in tears and platitudes about forgiving her, Matt nudges her out of the room. "That's enough. That's enough." I think this movie wants to have it both ways. The moment with Clooney's character trying to silence the gushing spouse was to me representative of the director's desire not to be too emotional. But emotional enough for the movie to feel important and to be a major contender for some Oscars.

Nevertheless, This movie is quite good. It has a funny side to it that punctuates the scenes, keeping them from being maudlin. And as much as Payne seems unsure of expressing the dramatic emotions of the story, he manages to do it, to let the characters and the audience feel for what's going on in the movie.

I was impressed by the performance of Shailene Woodley, as Matt's teenage daughter. She gave such a strong performance that I found myself more interested in her story than in her father's. People will assume George Clooney is giving a good performance because he's George Clooney, and while he's certainly better than say a Kevin Costner or a Tom Cruise, he's not always as believable as you'd like him to be; maybe he's too identifiable, the way Tom Hanks is. You always know you're watching George Clooney play a lawyer whose wife is dying. Apparently this works with most people. Some may even believe that Tom Hanks himself served in World War II.

The Descendants is entertaining, and affecting, and I really liked it. But why does the seriousness of the subject matter predetermine a movie's chances at being considered great or important or award-worthy? And moreover, why do all these movies have to come in December? (This question may be a no-brainer, but is worth uttering nonetheless.)

Gazing at the coming attractions, I couldn't help but wonder if filmmakers and studios and audiences have all gone soft in the head and hard in the heart. We're getting more crap than ever. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close purports to be about a child's emotional journey after the death of his father (played by Tom Hanks, the Father of Movie Audiences, apparently) in the World Trade Center. The bad title I will put aside to argue about another day, because the movie itself looks so preposterous. Now that we've established Tom Hanks as a WWII veteran, we can also place him in the WTC. Is there any American tragedy this man hasn't been through?

We are indeed the descendants of some very unfortunate choices in Hollywood that have made the state of movies so depressing (all money-related). Yes, good films continue to be made, but they tend to be overlooked when we can't brand them as good for us, or massive in their scope or their emotional appeal. The Descendants is an example of a good movie that suffers from wanting to pander and not wanting to at the same time. It's a miracle that something worthwhile and engrossing was able to register, as indeed it seems more and more a miraculous occurrence any time there's a good movie to be seen. I think The Descendants transcends all the self-seriousness and all the slightness that has been popping up on the screen over the last ten or fifteen years.

With Amara Miller, Judy Greer, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Mary Birdsong, Rob Huebel, and Michael Ontkean. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.