The Casual Vacancy (2012)

Author: J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Little, Brown

What’s this? A book? What the hell is that? Well kids, way back in the Jesus time some guy got it into his head that he would take a bunch of rolls of papyrus, smash them together, write some sweet picture-symbols on them, and then sell them to mongoloids to use for firewood during the winter time. I won’t always review them, mainly because I’m a slow reader and long-winded enough, but I thought it would be a nice change of pace to leaf through some pages and then tell you about it. Plus, with all the school I’ve been doing I don’t have time to watch movies as much as I like, but can sneak in a page or two during class downtime. So, without further adieu, let’s jump into this business and see what all the fuss is about.

I’m going to dispense with talking about how Harry Potter has ended and J.K. Rowling is trying to make a sincere and honest departure from the precedent she set with that particular series. It’s only natural to make that kind of comparison, and frankly my reviews at least try to make an attempt that allows a work to stand by itself wherever possible. It’s only fair.

The Casual Vacancy is a character-driven adult fiction story about a small town full of small-minded, nosey, and generally unpleasant people that are drawn together (both directly and indirectly) to deal with the death of a prominent young man on the local council who was a sort of paragon. His now vacant seat (of which the title is derived) is contested by several townsfolk who lust for the power and prestige that being a local leader over a rabble of hicks brings. As the story progresses, the point of view drifts transparently and fluidly from person to person, with little machinations set up and paid off in ways that are decidedly backhanded at best. There is no hero of the story to speak of, rather we’re left rooting for one person when they do something awesome, and then we switch gears to hate that same person when they do something particularly devious, sometimes in the same chapter. At its heart it is an easily digestible enquiry into the lives of the smallfolk as they scheme and plot against one another, with small victories and tiny tragedies that congeal into a perfect storm of sadness and guilt.

I think there is a little something here for everybody. If you live in a small town, for example, you are probably cognizant of the local crone who has a thumb in everybody’s business. You’ll find that archetype in Shirley Mollison, who has a tendency to ask probing questions of her consorts in a shrewd effort to hold the best cards in her hand at all times. When something particularly tasty happens, she is typically the first person to find out, and she relishes in being the first to spread the rumor. There’s Kay Bawden, a transplant from London (the big-time!), who moved with her daughter to tiny Pagford in hopes of securing support from lanky, indecisive boyfriend Gavin. Her daughter Gaia is ridiculously hot and hates the town and all its crazy people; pimply-faced Andrew lusts after Gaia, who accompanies the homely Suhkvinder around because she is so different from the rest.  It even features a town bicycle played by Krystal Wheedon!

Yet, all of these characters are unique in their simplicity which makes each one of them memorable without much unwarranted personality overlap. Ensemble casts are incredibly hard to do, and my argument is that a reader can feel easily overwhelmed with all the different strands in this particular web, especially when they run out of ideas for visualizing faces of so many fucking people.  It can be daunting to quickly jump from toon to toon and keeping everything straight as well; eventually it becomes easier to just kind of blur everything and focus on the political theater.  That’s more interesting, anyway.

Speaking of political theater, the dominoes take about half of the novel to set up before going down like a house of cards, so those reading on with trepidation may find themselves stumbling up to the halfway mark. The build-up is rather subtle in that regard, what with its little bits here and there that keep its continuity well in line.  I really liked how Rowling handled tension between the characters when the pay-off scenes came. They were very well managed and didn’t always turn out the way I wanted them, but were still satisfying turning points nonetheless. The picture she paints of Pagford Parish and its awful, backasswards populace is crude at first; but, given a chance, the novel warms up easily and we learn to care about these assholes even if we’d rather not.

The last thing I would like to mention before I conclude this review is that J.K. Rowling’s decision to go full-on adult audience is, well, appropriate. I guess this is where all that HP hubbub is all abuzz: F words, S words, rape, sex, drugs, cyber bullying, and physical violence abound in this story. Anyone looking for a fun adventure will certainly not find it here; most of these characters are tragic and pitiable, if not totally contemptuous, and the story plods along in a way that reminds me of a supermarket tabloid or dollar-bin book bucket (which is arguably the point). The Casual Vacancy opts for the grittiness of the small-town life rife with skeletons in the closets of its most stalwart and noble citizens. It aims to show a darker side to small town humanity while making no attempt to romanticize any of it and, as far as I’m concerned, it delivers well enough. It wouldn’t hurt to return to the small town simplicity and naivety that this little novel offers, even if it only serves as a bitter reminder about how we might all be trapped in are own little bubbles most of the time.

B+

Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (1984)

Indiana Jones & the Temple o’Doom is a brand new adventure of the world renowned adventurous badassiest archiest whippingest muscliest hattiest archaeologist, directed by Steven Spielberg. This time, Indy (or is it Indie?) finds himself stranded somewhere in India with a little Chinese sidekick and a gold-digging harpy. While trying to get back to civilization, he happens upon a little Indian village whose inhabitants are starving because thieves have stolen a magic rock and are using it to worship some blood god that likes human sacrifice. Indiana Jones decides that helping these poor helpless people would be a terrible idea and totally ignores them and rides a camel back to Delhi in probably the quirkiest plot twist ever.

I’m kidding; he does help them out and discovers the titular Temple o’Doom along the way. Wouldn’t it have been cool though if we just watched Indy ride on a plane the whole time? It would be like 12 Angry Men where all the action boils down to the human drama that occurs while riding in coach. Alas, what we get instead is a heaping dose of racism interspersed with gratuitously awesome violent spots that this series has become known for the world over. You just can’t get any more sophisticated than a flaming hot skewer through the gut or a guy ripping another guy’s heart out of his chest Tenochtitlanian style. Or how about the fat Indian dude eating the monkey brains for dessert or whatever, belching loudly like some terribly lazy fat oaf? Talk about offensive!

This movie is very dark and gruesome and violent and racist and dark. There is absolutely no way something like it could ever be made ever again–the world is a lot more advanced in terms of cultural understanding than it used to be. Sure, there are some bubba redneck types out there that probably think that people in the Far East are crude bloodthirsty savages but they don’t count. There isn’t a whole lot I can say in terms of making this review make any sense, actually. This is a movie you could like a lot or hate a lot; it all comes down to a matter of taste. And while I do like this movie quite a bit, I don’t think it lives up to the awesomeness of its predecessor.  As the saying goes, Your Mileage May Vary.

B

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

The Girlfriend Experience is an indie movie about a girl and a guy who are in an open relationship and live together. She is an escort while he is a gym trainer. The film follows her around for five days and it is revealed that she is very upscale, pulling in amazing amounts of cash-money as she wheels and deals with some robust Manhattan elites. One of her clients piques her interest more than usual and she decides that she needs to see if there is some kind of magic there or something.

This movie is a piece of crap. Firstly, the decision to take prolific porn star Sasha Grey and make her an escort in a feature length film instead of a “normal” was a stupid one. Hey everyone! She has range! Check it out! We made her a hooker! Second, the editing is slipshod and sloppy; often I couldn’t decide where in time the characters were at any given moment and couldn’t connect with anything anyone was saying. I didn’t understand what the hell was going on for at least half the film; since I’m not the sharpest tool in the drawer already maybe someone can explain the flood of blurry close-ups and gratuitous overuse of flat angles to me?

Finally, and perhaps most damning, is the shitty acting. You know those Barely Legal porn movies that open with a girl saying “Dear Diary, today I was riding home from school thinking about how I’m still a virgin?” There are a lot of dispassionately similar monologues used here, perhaps to draw some cheap connection to Sasha’s roots for some reason. Completely unnecessary. Throw in some line-reads that lack any emotion or grit and a retarded ending that suggests everyone involved sort of gave up on the whole affair. In the end, we have a confused girlfriend experience that fails to connect even on the most visceral level and is a complete waste of time.  I’m sorry, Sasha.  Call me and we’ll talk about it.

D-

Miral (2010)

Miral is an indie historical drama that focuses primarily on the perspective of the Palestinian people and their plight after Israel got its statehood post WW2. Miral is the main character of this film, though it’s not apparent at first because the film wisely decides to fill us in on what is going on with this whole Israel/Palestinian conflict dealio. She is sent to an orphanage known for its neutrality, safety, and education at the age of 5 and lives her life as a naive young student all the way through her teens until she is exposed to the grim realities facing the Palestinian refugees. Jailings, condemnation, lies, deceit, untruths, whippings, holding childrens at gunpoint… all the things that make anyone want to jump in and bash some heads. With a new sense of purpose, Miral decides to get involved with the P.L.O. and its mission to make Palestine a country. Which as we all know ended peacefully without issue.

Miral is a good film. It’s not a great film; it’s not a super-bad film; it’s a good film. I think its primary motive is to give the Palestinians a voice in addition to showing audiences a different perspective of a conflict they’ve been vicariously living for years. There are no huge character developments or big turns or swindles or lame-as-fuck love stories or any of that other crap. The film invites us to live alongside Miral as she grows up in a world ravaged by hubris and conflict; she helps us to better understand why things are the way they are over there. Normally, a plot without a plot is a bad sign for a movie. But here, it was alright; I was actually pretty engaged trying to understand and get behind these people and could see myself legitimately hoping for their success. Seriously, what’s wrong with people not getting along and shit? Is this the way things are always going to be?

Probably.

B

The Lorax (2012)

The Lorax is a CGI feature film and adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children’s book of the same name. It is about a boy who wants to bang the girl next door really bad.  She suggests, as all girls usually do, that this might be possible if he were to bring her a IRL tree. This is because they live in the town of Thneedville which is governed by plastic and the omniscient O’Hare company that has made a fortune selling fresh air to the locals and no one except for Betty White actually know what a tree is. Also: trees don’t exist anymore because the humans cut them all down. In the pursuit of sex, the boy sets out to find the reclusive Once-Ler in a quest to discover what it takes to get the girl of his dreams in the sack and, through a series of flashbacks, the Once-Ler’s rise and fall is depicted alongside the wanton destruction of the environment at the hands of filthy unwashed human interference despite the titular Lorax’s attempts to dissuade him.

Because this is a children’s film made for children based on a short children’s book that was also made for children, The Lorax faces roughly three challenges. 1) Keep the kids distracted using cheap gags and cut-aways early and often. 2) Keep adults engaged with a somewhat topical message of corporate greed and environmental destruction. Throw in a few voices they might recognize as well so they can be all like “Hey! It’s that guy! Wasn’t he on The Daily Show once?” 3) Pad the running time as much as possible in order to show that this is, in fact, a movie. Maybe throw in a few forgettable music numbers and moar whacky-cute-and-not-at-all-subtle animal hijinks as a sort of wink-wink to the audience. Blammo! Box Office gold!

So I guess the question is, does The Lorax succeed in its mission to entertain? Certainly. Your kids will probably take to it, and I think it would make a pretty good spring board for signing on to certain green causes. I was impressed by the colorfulness of the visuals and a few spots where they turned the camera into a roller coaster ride. However, I also thought that the environmental story was a little too heavy-handed (even though the source material could also be argued as such). From a completely observational standpoint, the constant nagging that humans fucked over the planet grows increasingly tiring and jarring. “Oh, here’s the plot. Time to move things forward!” And then 20 seconds later, “Alright, time to tell everyone how bad humans are to the environment!” Okay. Got it. Thanks.

B

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Steel Magnolias is the ultimate chick flick about a bunch of women who are sometimes friends and sometimes frenemies who share each others’ lives down somewhere in the state of Louisiana. It opens on the wedding day of a girl named Shelby who has some kind of complicated diabetic condition that’s made her somewhat frail. Despite her mother’s and doctor’s misgivings on the subject, she is determined to have a baby with her husband-to-be. Meanwhile, a hair-dresser named Truvy has recently hired a quirky and mysterious weird chick who fits in as the outsider of the group for most of the film. Shelby invites them along with several other friends to the wedding and we watch them all grow older together over the next 2 in-movie years or so.

This film is remarkable in that it doesn’t really tell a singular story from one central character’s point of view. Rather, it opts to just let the audience peer into the daily lives of a group of women, all at different stages of their lives, with a myriad of personalities both complimentary and complementary. Shelby’s plight is the closest thing we get to an actual plot, but my thought on the subject is that it just gives all the characters something to talk about, something that drums up interest. There isn’t anything particularly special about any of them aside from the fact that they are all charming in their own quirky way while sharing an exactly appropriate amount of screen time with one another. For what it’s worth, the writing and script are very smart in that there is very little overlap here; everyone fills their niche. There are neither hopes, nor dreams of a greater good, nor some inner desire to find the self hitting us over the head constantly (well, except for maybe in Shelby’s case), and all of this makes Steel Magnolias quite pleasant and bearable.

I hear that this movie makes people cry when the you-know-what-happens. I just couldn’t be moved that way, though. I think the collectivistic tendencies of the group kind of overwhelm any real sense of tragedy. You just know that they are going to make it through and be as happy as they were before. The moral of the story seems to be that life goes on; we’re all friends here, we’ll make it through together. I like the film for this reason. Now-a-days, you’d get these sequences where each character would get some time to deal with the problem in their own minds and learn some quirky or new thing about themselves that may or may not serve the story, but here that is definitely not the case. We grow up with these ladies, and we emerge from the end credits with the understanding that collectively our lives have gotten a tiny bit better.

A

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Trigger warning: This article discusses and plays with schizophrenia, which is not something to be taken lightly. Also, it probably contains spoilers.

A Beautiful Mind is a biopic about John Nash, a professor at Princeton University who hates most people. In his early days as a student, circa 1940ish, he aspires to leave his legacy in the world of mathematics and ultimately develops a groundbreaking thesis on governing dynamics. The U.S. Government takes notice of his genius after graduate school and secretly recruits him to assist in cracking a complicated Soviet spy network that has infiltrated every arm and leg of the media. Along the way he marries Jennifer Connelly and makes friends with a quirky rube named Charles.  His life begins to unravel as he works to prevent anyone’s discovery of his Top Secret mission.

So I don’t consider myself a Russell Crowe fan. I generally think that You are worthless. his range is limited to tough guy roles as seen in the likes of L.A. Confidential or reddit’s darling Roman film Gladiator. However, he seems to be right at home as a sort of awkwardly anti-social stiff guy You’ll never amount to anything. who’s not very good at parties. I think it’s mainly due to Ron Howard’s fantastic direction in addition to a powerful 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1/3 cup unrequited hatred of our species screenplay. Schizophrenia is a hard thing to describe in a believable way, and I agree that the necessary approach this film needed to take (which it does They’re out to get you.) was to goad the audience into thinking that what they see is real and then peel back all the layers of fakery. The discovery that things aren’t as real as they might seem are both disappointing What are you doing? Don’t fucking talk to her. She wants to and devastating in quick and painful stroke. At a certain time, I was still kind of hoping everything was real and this was all just a big mind-screw, as I’m sure most audiences felt upon first watching this movie It’s not real. Nothing is. NOthIng is raeL. Liar..

Preheat oven to 350°F. In an 8-inch square baking pan combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In small bowl, whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells This film leads us down a bizarre path of the weird and the strange. After a time, we begin to understand the significance of John Nash’s You can’t write worth a shit. predicament, In small bowl, whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells in the flour mixture; pour oil in one and egg as well as just how tricky it can be to accomplish anything For fuck’s sakes, just quit already. when he is relentlessly assaulted and fundamentally crippled by mental forces that he cannot control and no one else can see. whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells in the flour mixture; pour At the end of it all, we feel like we have a slightly better understanding of ourselves Liar. and of other people, even if it’s only this Go to hell. superficial sense that we aren’t truly all that similar after Idiot. all.

But how are we supposed to know what is really normal when normal is all that we see? Does society dictate what is normal because it has set up all the rules or is it just that society thinks that it knows what is best for us? A Beautiful Mind doesn’t attempt to explore this deeper philosophical meaning to things; it just wants to tell a story of a guy who overcame some invisible forces out of his control to establish the legacy he always wanted in spite of all odds being stacked against him. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t think too hard about it, and maybe we should also come to this understanding that those unfortunate enough to hear the unseen probably don’t want them there, either.

A

E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982)

themoviedb.org

E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial is best known for inspiring at least three things. 1) The North American Video Game Crash of 1983, 2) Drew Barrymore’s descent into the wonderful world of drugs, and 3) the reason I was conceived. Okay, may not; but #1 is true at least. By the way, I’m 30.

The film is about a creepy alien who gets marooned in some California suburb somewhere. He scares the shit out of some poor hapless kid who only wants to get in on some action at his older bro’s D&D table when the kid goes outside to pick up a pizza. Curiosity compels the kid to seek out the creepy alien and with the help of some Reese’s Pieces the kid succeeds in luring the creepy alien into his house where he intends to keep him as some kind of toy or plaything forever and ever. It’s a playful sort of fairy tale where we see a sentient being of superior intellect get lost in the humdrum goings-on of adolescent life while being stashed away like some Teddy Bear in a little girl’s closet. Good things aren’t meant to last forever, though, and soon we see our creepy alien hero pining for the good old days of space-faring in the great beyond.

E.T. is a fine film that arguably put Spielberg on a bigger map than Indiana Jones and JAWS combined. It’s more casually paced and family-focused than those two efforts and definitely exposes Spielberg’s range as both a director and a producer. It has all the sort of things that you’d expect to see in a Spielberg movie: iconic visuals, time-expanding editing, creative use of foreshadowing, and some fairly impressive visual effects; not to mention one of the greatest bicycle chase scenes in cinematic history. That sequence inspired me to want to ride around the country side on my own bike, jumping over dirt mountains and powering down ravines. As an 8 years-old boy it’s easy to think that taking flight with a bicycle isn’t that far fetched. Overall it’s not a bad movie by any means and it still holds up just fine even today.

I kind of wonder what would have happened if E.T. would have descended into the forests of Tennessee or Kentucky. Do you think he would’ve had his head blown off? What if he landed in Saudi Arabia? This kind of shit keeps me up at night. Mr. Spielberg, I beseech you: E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial demands a sequel! Perhaps one where he lands in the ruins of Babylon and some asshole throws an IED at his feet. I could see the marquee now: E.T. 2: Intergalactic Apocalypse. With the tag line This Summer: The 4-Horsemen Will RIDE. And then Bruce Willis will be all like “Phone THIS home, motherfucker!” or something. Reviewing movies is hard.

A