Based on the novel by Rumpus founding editor Stephen Elliott. To stay updated you can like the Happy Baby movie on Facebook and follow Happy Baby on Twitter.

We’ll be announcing cast members shortly but the cast will include Sarah Sido, James Urbaniak, and Adam Busch. Cinematography by Adrian Correia.

You can read a section from the book here.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

I thought about weddings. What does it mean to wed yourself to someone or something? I thought about meeting someone and never wanting to leave them until you die. To feel so compelled that you want to weld yourself to them. I’ve always conflated the words wed and weld, but really what’s the difference? Whether it be a book or a person or a place or a thing, what is that quality that makes us abandon the rest of the options and choose this thing to be our resting place, the thing that owns a piece of our hearts?

Weeks later, after my friends had exchanged rings, and other smaller insects or a hotel maid had removed the roach, and the bikers had drifted off to another motel party, and the pizza delivery guy was counting and sorting his ones, I was in the dark watching Terrence Malick’s new film To The Wonder, thinking it was a thing I could wed myself to. It was a matinee in San Francisco, and I was one of only three people in the theater. I chose a seat far away from them, because I knew this was Malick, and Malick makes me cry.

The film opens with camcorder footage of two people’s love, and a woman’s voice begins narrating. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You’ve brought me back to life.” The part-Biblical, part-half-as-good-Rumi narration continues, and its elevated spiritual reach combines with Malick’s hallmark swaying camera. That camera, commanded by the great Emmanuel Lubezki, creates a dull seasickness in some, and a swelling of emotion in others (me).

The story of To The Wonder is fairly bare-bones. With almost no dialogue, it’s a love story about a couple played by the painfully beautiful Olga Kurylenko and the painfully stoic Ben Affleck. She’s a single mother living in Paris with her daughter, and they move to America (Oklahoma) to be with Affleck. The stark contrast between the European scenes and the American ones pits the Old World against the New World as Malick has done in his other films.

The couple fall in and out of love over and over, like the rest of us. Affleck’s character is noncommittal, while Kurylenko twirls through the film, searching for her freedom. The real meat of the story is in the surprising character of Javier Bardem as a lost and conflicted priest in the Oklahoma town.

Profoundly joyless and searching, he wonders where God has gone. “Everywhere you are present. Still I can’t see you…I have no experience of you.” Bardem’s character continues seeking God, finally finding some solace and meaning in treating the downtrodden. But still he searches, much like Malick himself.

These characters aren’t characters; they’re meant to be archetypes. Stripped of almost all their dialogue, and left only to wander and wonder, they become stand-ins for us. There’s not much more to say about what “happens” in the film, because it’s about the spaces in between, about the rapturous filming of light and the moments we can’t capture through speech and action.

Between Malick’s last film (Tree of Life) and To The Wonder, one has to note the heavy-handed spiritual direction of his films. He’s ramping up his production, from one every twenty years, to one every two, and he’s getting older. By this point, Malick’s style of folding in multiple dancing-in-the-grain shots with sparkling light of the magic hour has become a joke among many critics and filmgoers. People poked fun when he rolled out the dinosaurs in Tree of Life. But what were they really laughing at?

I suppose they’re laughing at the purported cheesiness of his expression. Take the following bit of narration from To The Wonder: “What is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere. From all around. The sky. You, cloud. You love me too.”

For some, it’s laughable; for others, it’s moving. It takes a certain kind of bravery to be so sincere as to verge on—then fall headfirst into—cheesiness, something critics never dare to do. From the comfortable point of watching art, it is easy to laugh, but who among us has not been moved by the ineffable? Has not seen a cloud and exchanged love with it?

In A. O. Scott’s review (which I enjoyed), he mocks Kurylenko’s incessant twirling: “…the twirling ladies look more commercial than cosmic, as if plucked from advertisements for perfume, high-thread-count sheets or other luxury goods.” He’s right. These supermodelesque actors do verge on the cliches of advertising. But he’s also wrong, because advertising imagery panders to and reflects our highest ideals: that elusive, spiritual, field-twirling joy. Malick’s women are not pandering to those ideals, but rather embodying them, twirling to a different tune, a music brought in on the wind by the gods. Who would mock a whirling dervish? Ultimately, Scott finds To The Wonder a “noble and sincere” effort but also a failure of sorts, writing, “…the fine intentions of To the Wonder pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.” But what is the difference between the two besides the semantic? Is not awe a state of bafflement?

Both atheists and believers alike acknowledge the coexistence of faith and doubt. Both groups understand that grace and magic flicker in and out. How do those of faith reconcile believing in a God who seemingly comes and goes? To whom do nonbelievers ascribe this magic all around, tucked into unexpected corners of life?

Malick seems to be interested in what is outside and underneath and around the framework of our lives. He’s not interested in the stories we tell as much as the moments that cause us to throw our hands up into the air. What large thing is hiding inside the tiny narrative of “born, fall in love, die”? All around us, the world is permeated with possibility and profound gestures of grace and surprise. How do we integrate that magnitude into the tiny story of our lives?

Is it even possible to make a film or novel of artwork that captures all of life? Ask almost any artist, and they’ll tell you they never told the story they wanted to tell. Do we ever fully tell our story, or are we always reaching? In Tree of Life, Malick was trying to do it all, and the failures and successes of that film reveal one thing: his admirable reach. Malick has been trying to tell this story his whole life, and he seems to be getting closer and closer.

I almost never read reviews before I write them, but I’ve heard that almost everyone panned To The Wonder, both critics and filmgoers alike, which made me feel crestfallen and alone. What was I seeing that they were not? Then I remembered that beauty strikes us in different ways at different times. Certain films I loathe I often rewatch in moments when my heart’s a bit more open, and I see them radically differently. Perhaps one has to be prone to a state of wonder when watching Malick’s films.

In the end, it’s the ineffable that seems to move us so. Maybe we’re so intrigued by death because we don’t know what it is. Why is it that we can fall in and out of love and back in again? We have moments of inexplicable synchronicity. Mystery. Miracles abound. And we can never understand them. We are rendered wondrous.

To the Wonder is an ode to that wonder. It’s a film for people who will never tire of watching blades of grass wave against the sun. It’s for those of us who doubt and still strive to have faith in something. It’s for those of us who might still believe in a truth. It’s for those of us who lie in beds in motel rooms on the sides of highways, wondering what it means to want to wed yourself, to weld yourself to something beautiful, forever.

Related Posts:

• Reelings #4: SPRING BREAKERS
• Reelings #3: THE IMPOSTER
• REELINGS #2: MEEK’S CUTOFF
• REELINGS #1: MOONRISE KINGDOM

Human memories and their mercurial, inexact nature also make for high drama in life and story, most especially in film. What if you couldn’t remember your name, or you blacked out during the critical moment of a murder or robbery? What if, as in Rashomon, different players’ POVs of a series of events result in diametric outcomes, onuses, and liabilities? There’s immediate conflict and intrigue, but to make the payoff and to sell the feasibility of it throughout—and often through the eyes of an unreliable narrator—requires work, artistry, and agility. Take Lenny in Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento, or Dr. Edwardes in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. One has short term memory loss, the other amnesia, and what they know in their impaired states of mind is all the audience knows. Their stories build one foggy bread crumb at a time with many false steps and sudden revelations along the way. Each new reveal, true or not, ripples through the audience’s understanding of what has transpired, halting, upending, and enriching it. In Memento, we yearn to know who killed Lenny’s wife, and in Spellbound, the world sits rapt to see if the virtuous Gregory Peck (well, his character, Dr. Edwardes) is actually capable of murder. The gradual reparation of the splintered memories takes the viewer teasingly close to the truth, and then, in the denouement, the final curve masterfully reshapes and cements everything that came before it.

Danny Boyle’s Trance is a continual reshuffle, too, full of spit and vigor even if the artifice isn’t quite as genuine or ingenious as the other two. Like all of Boyle’s films, it’s handsome to behold, driven by a heavy blue composition that radiates with a noir-ish ambiance, but at its core, Trance feels a bit like forced sleight of hand, where the audience can see behind the curtain yet still appreciates the showmanship of a master who may have played on too long. Part of that disappointment may come from Boyle himself. His ability to tap into raw human emotion in the face of insurmountable odds is unparalleled, and with the likes of 127 Hours, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later to his credit, our expectation is one of near perfection.

That’s not to say that Trance doesn’t bear fruit. It comes out fast and angry as a band of roguish art thieves hit a London auction house midday. Things don’t go quite as planned, as the last person to see the lifted Goya (Witches in the Air) in its frame gets smashed with a rifle butt and can’t remember where he’s stashed it. The job’s ringleader, Franck (the angular Vincent Cassel), an impatient but amiable rogue hopped up on frustration and short on options, sends his forgetful interloper to a hypnotherapist to try to shake out the painting’s locale.

As the sheep caught between the wolves and the shepherd, Simon (James McAvoy) bides his time with the very real prospect he’ll be offed once Franck and his lot have procured the painting. He’s not one of Franck’s regulars, but rather the auction-house insider recruited for access and information. There’s an ingrained wariness between the two men, and Franck, afraid that Simon might be a flight risk and knowing he’ll reveal the painting’s location while under hypnosis, bugs his patsy.

Simon’s aware of the wire too, but when the first session only yields the whereabouts of his mislaid car keys, and he’s sent back for a second session, the hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) catches a glimpse of the wire. Instead of going to the police, Dawson’s Elizabeth calls out Franck (through the wire) and lets him know that she’s onto his game but willing to help for a cut of the action. What ensues is a series of hypnotherapy sessions that begin to piece together the events before and during the theft.

Getting that nugget from inside Simon’s cranium proves to be a daunting undertaking, and the sessions begin to reveal more than just what happened during the robbery—like the fact that Simon and Elizabeth have a past (one he can’t remember and one she’s coy about). As part of Elizabeth’s master game plan to make Simon relax so he can remember, she insists that Franck and his flunkies go under as well. The puppetry here, which is always held confidently from the very top by Boyle, changes control among the three leads. One always has the upper hand, and there’s an uneasy sexual tension between them that feels strangely akin to the cloistered edginess that permeated Boyle’s gritty debut, Shallow Grave.

The two writers, Joe Ahearne and John Hodge, are clearly masters of the Rubik’s cube as they twist and rearrange and go in every direction possible without hitting a wall. Most everything that is presumed at the beginning is shot to hell and flipped on its head by the end. There’s even a thread that involves the neatly shaved southern region of a woman’s body presented with a glabrous pucker.

One of Boyle’s biggest assets here and in his recent endeavors has been the opulent lens of the talented cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. The cast is pretty slick as well; all three leads are lean individuals with alluring eyes. Cassel and McAvoy have large clear baby blues that register opposite impressions—one’s capable and confident, while the other’s worried and uncertain. Dawson, who’s never quite gotten enough roles worthy of her talents, bears a deep dark soulfulness that evokes just enough mystery and calculation to keep her paramours and the audience off kilter. She’s the continual spark that keeps the film charged, even when the writers’ circuitous machinations begin to sag from exhaustion.

The near-victorious foray into the inward-folding psycho-thriller puts Boyle in the fine company of Martin Scorsese and Nolan himself. Not even three years ago, Scorsese adapted Denis Lehane’s asylum mystery Shutter Island, and Nolan returned to familiar turf with the sensual feast Inception. All three films, possessors of great texture, depth, and pedigree, are well-crafted odysseys of mind-addled turmoil in which the tormented protagonist’s dilemma invites us in and endears us. We care, we register sympathy as they push for discovery and truth, but in the end when all the arcane circumlocution stops and the cards are laid on the table, what the audience was so invested in turns out to be a device of the plot and not the earnest journey it pretended to be for so long. The plug is pulled from the drain. Like the Salvador Dalí–crafted dream sequences in Spellbound, these films invoke an eerie, hypnotic wonderment, consuming you and transporting you, until inevitably, the fingers snap, the eyes open, and the rapturous trance is broken.

Related Posts:

• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of The Place Beyond The Pines
• Rumpus Readers Remember Roger Ebert
• An Ode to Roger Ebert

The shot is technically simple, but builds like a drumroll, and it conveys the seedy energy of the carnival crowd and the cheap, bountiful thrills of summer nights; it captures Luke’s tawdry but undeniable glamour and the small towns where it thrives; and it establishes Luke as a man willing to take chances, a man totally immersed in the strange and specific life he’s built for himself, a man who seems to have a calm, matter-of-fact approach to danger and love and almost everything else.

After the show, Luke discovers that a fling he had the previous year, when he last passed through town, has produced a son. He decides that he, the baby, and the mother, Romina (Eva Mendes), should be a family (“My father was never around me, and look how I turned out,” he warns Romina), and he quits his carnival job to try to win her back from Kofi (Mahershala Ali), her current boyfriend and a committed father to the baby. But when Luke has trouble finding enough work, he takes to robbing banks.

This opening section is one of three related plotlines, and it’s by far the strongest. It’s hard not to wonder what this movie might have been if director and co-writer Derek Cianfranco had limited himself to a smaller-scale study of character and place, instead of reaching for an epic. This section stands out because of Gosling, of course. He does his Gosling thing—the brooding, the easy charm, the torso—but he manages, in his minimalist way, to give Luke nuances that are almost too good for such a sloppily written film: For example, when he’s robbing a bank, Luke’s voice rises into a shriek bordering on panic—he seems distinctly desperate in a way the Kid, his character from Drive, never was. And in the hours after he’s pulled off a job, he’s cocky, self-assured again, he revels in it. Even after he’s gotten away with several robberies and his partner wants to quit, Luke wants to do more; he’s almost frenzied in his insistence. It’s fair to ask where the need to earn money for his baby leaves off and where the thrill of it all takes over, but this tension comes entirely from Gosling, who remains freer from his public persona than his audience may be. We think of him as the coolest guy in any movie, but he’s still willing to exploit the essential strangeness he first showed playing a sociopath in the otherwise forgettable Sandra Bullock thriller Murder By Numbers. The script of Pines is not his equal.

The second section follows the cop who took Luke down, Avery (Bradley Cooper). After his act of heroism, Avery finds himself in the spotlight, a celebrated cop with a bright future, and then before we know it he finds himself pulled into department corruption. Stopping Luke was largely a matter of luck, but exposing the crooked cops around him is more calculated, and Avery, who has a law degree but chose to join the police force out of a sense of idealism, parlays it into a promotion to assistant D.A.

In other words, the second section of Pines boils down to a fairly rote tale of ambition, but it’s a half-built contraption at best. Part of the problem is Cooper, who’s a reliable actor doing a reasonably good job of not becoming the next Matthew McConaughey, but who remains better at nailing single scenes than he is at making those scenes hang together into something larger. He makes Avery earnest, kind, and idealistic almost to naiveté, but he fails to add any note of darkness of ruthlessness that would explain his aggressive career maneuvering and eventual transformation from devoted father and husband to icy political climber and eventual divorcé. He isn’t helped by the script, which lacks a moment when that pivot happens, the moment when Avery has to choose sides, and chooses wrong (Michael Corleone at the hospital with Vito and whispering, “I’m with you, Pop. I’m with you.”).

The third act is where Cianfranco tries to bring it all together, but by then the story’s momentum is long gone. The story flashes forward 15 years, and the two babies are grown and, in a coincidence that almost works, become high school friends. The two actors here are exceptional, especially Emory Cohen, who plays Avery’s son, AJ. Like Gosling, he brings a great deal more to the role than is written, but again, it only serves to underscore the movie’s shortcomings: Cohen’s performance swings between his scenes with friends, when he’s all rich kid bravado and goombah posturing, and a handful of scenes with his absentee father, where the pain of neglect and rejection is written all over his face. But the movie hasn’t taken the pains to explain or even show us that neglect, and because we understand so little about Avery’s decisions and emotions, these scenes lack the punch Cianfranco obviously intended them to have. By the time the pieces have all moved into place for a calamitous reunion of these characters, you’ll be lucky if your interest holds out, never mind your emotional involvement.

Oh, and back to that opening shot: It doesn’t just capture everything that’s good about Pines, it captures all its failings, too. It telegraphs the greatness Cianfranco is striving for, because long tracking shots have been a badge of indie style and credibility ever since Orson Welles pushed his camera through the streets of Venice Beach, CA in 1958 for the electrifying opening shot of Touch of Evil. But if you’re going to announce yourself in that way, if you’re going to put yourself in the company of Welles and Scorsese and Tarkovsky, the audience is going to expect a lot. Ambition is a good thing. Pines simply isn’t up to the task.

Related Posts:

• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of Trance
• Rumpus Readers Remember Roger Ebert
• An Ode to Roger Ebert

He played an enormous part in the shaping of my life, and, in the days since his death, I’d discovered that I was far far from alone. It’s hard to think of him right now without some sort of hyperbole, so all I can do it proceed and pretend that “that’s what he would’ve wanted.”

Up until recently, societies would employ literary saps who would entertain the folks with tales or books summaries or relevant information. Though these saps were expected to be well-read and articulate, they were treated primarily as entertainers. That is not to say they were not taken seriously; but rather, people flocked to their re-telling of the history or tales or facts not so much to learn, but rather as an escape. In the West, they sometimes took the form of scribes, like the sap from Love in the Time of Cholera. In the Far East, where I grew up (Taiwan, to be precise), they were known as “book-tellers.”

That was Mr. Ebert to me. He was a knowledge siren in the guise of a jolly newspaperman. I was 15 when I discovered him, and had been speaking English for about two years. My family spent every penny we had (and some we didn’t) on a house in Westford, Massachusetts. We now owned a piece of America. Unfortunately, it was one of those pieces that was almost arrogantly bland, which was just what my mother wanted.

My mother, a preacher, was on an almost singular mission to prevent me from being exposed to anything “secular”, fearing that I would be easily corrupted. This included The Simpsons, school dances, and even Christian rock. That summer I came across a window to the outside world, in the form of a film encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, which led me to summaries of Mr. Ebert’s reviews. I then went down to the local library to check out his books, which I had to smuggle between novels I never read.

And so began the corrupting of my mind. Mr. Ebert was my “book teller”—the titles, histories, theories, and stories that he so effortlessly referenced in any given review amounted to so much more than that; he illuminated all these bright corners of the cinema world, with the casual matter-of-factness of a newspaperman. It was the same journalistic rigor that made Garcia-Marquez’s magical realism so potent. Mr. Ebert’s joy and discipline go hand-in-hand; he takes advantage of his training as a reporter to craft his reviews in such a way that his reactions, no matter how grand, are always justified by the cold hard facts. He talked about Kieslowski’s “anti-comedy” White with the same seriousness as his re-enactment of the gun gag in Jackie Chan’s Mr. Nice Guy. Each work was judged by its own merit, as filtered through his biases, which he has been very honest about. By treating every movie from every region and period equally, Mr. Ebert promised not a world that was better, but one that was bigger. During the time of Blockbusters and American Videos making sure the same 200 movies adorned the walls of every video store in town, Mr. Ebert’s retelling (and he’s a master story re-teller) managed to instill some hope in me.

In ’98, we even had a very brief correspondence over Stephen Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, I was ecstatic. Eventually I moved out of that little town, coupled with the advent of internet, and graduated from a film school. The world was every bit as big as he promised, and I tried getting by via treating every story on its own merit, plus my own biases. Though I was dismayed to discover that, even in a world as big as the one he reported, the likes of him are still very rare. I got a job producing and directing food ads, music videos, and martial arts movies. I have always worked hard to ensuring that each job is taken seriously, on its own merits.

And now that he’s gone, to paraphrase Mr. Ebert’s review of Inframan (a 1976 kungfu monster film that Mr. Ebert has enjoyed so much he changed his rating of the film from 2 stars to 3 stars some 25 years after his review was published), “a little light will go out of the world.”

–Pete Lee, San Francisco filmmaker

*       *       *

Many consider Roger Ebert to be the Garth Brooks of film criticism. Both used exciting fake names (Reinhold Timme and Chris Gaines, respectively) and both are complete masters of their industries. I watched Roger since the first episode of his show and I loved how when I didn’t know if I would like a movie, his thumb would tell me what to think. I would stare at his thumbs while he was talking, waiting for any twitch of indication. Would it go up or down? What if the film he was discussing wasn’t objectively good or bad? Would his thumb break in two? Fortunately he never encountered such a film.

Being a professional movie critic like Ebert is one of my goals in life, so I work my thumb out vigorously each day, making sure it’s capable of making the hand gestures necessary for summing up my thoughts on a film.

I’ve developed an intensive workout routine for my thumb which until now has been a private affair. In tribute to the great Roger Ebert, I opened my exercise program to budding film critics (and people seeking physical therapy).

My class meets three times a day and each student is filled with the vigor of youth. Their thumb skills are getting better by the day, although I have doubts about their tastes in film. They unanimously think The Hangover was funny. Some of them even liked Inception.

None of my students will be able to fill the role of Roger Ebert. One of them, possibly, because he’s chubby and his name is Bert Rogers, which could lead to some confusion in his favor, but definitely none of the others.

It’s a different generation now, no matter how dextrous their thumbs.

–Ted Wilson of The Rumpus

*       *      *

I’m a little too young to have fully appreciated Roger Ebert in the heydays of Siskel and Ebert, though “thumbs up, thumbs down” has, in my lifetime at least, been fairly ubiquitous. However, once a friend of a friend started posting Ebert’s tweets—perfect pearls of pithiness—on her Facebook page, I was inspired to do something I swore I wouldn’t: I joined Twitter.

In between asides like “G.I. Joe Retaliation: Maybe you should just play with your dolls instead” and “Ayn Rand died this day in 1982, inspiring indirectly my review of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 31 years later,” he was re-tweeting pieces about Steubenville and drone strikes. When he could have coasted on his own name recognition and turned his website into a repository of greatest hits, he championed the work of other writers.

Ebert moved adroitly between forms. His personal essays about alcoholism, cancer, faith, family and his own impending death have an unforced intimacy and a jeweler’s eyes for composition. This big-heartedness found its way into his film reviews—how could it not? Ebert was renown for his deliciously vicious takedowns of films he loathed, but he could be unexpectedly kind to movies that might have proved easy marks.

In his review of The Host, an adaptation of another speculative ‘tween romance by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer, Ebert finds empathy with the teenage protagonist, and with the girls who might relate to her: “When Wanda is about to kiss the boy she loves, for example, the film uses voiceover to warn her: “No … Wrong! No! He’s from another planet. True, in our own lives, we pick up warnings on that frequency: No! You’ll get pregnant! No! He’s from the other side of town! No! He’s your best friend’s boyfriend!”

Ebert was uniquely attuned to, and sympathetic toward, people who were different—often less privileged—than he was. In his essay “How I am a Roman Catholic,” he attributed this quality to lessons imparted by the Dominican nuns who taught him in grade school: “those nuns guided me into supporting Universal Health Care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders.”

After his passing, many of his greatest zingers and longform essays have been circulating the Web.  As much as I relish them, what I will carry with me, as a writer and as a human being, is a single line: “I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.

–Laura Bogart, Rumpus Contributor

*       *      *

When people think of Roger Ebert they probably think of numbers, specifically ten and two. No, Roger Ebert was not a fly fisherman, although I’m suddenly curious to see where he stood in regards to that Brad Pitt river movie.

His numbers were two thumbs up and top-ten lists. Of course, he was one half of a team of two film critics who, as they sat in an empty movie theater each week, summed up which movies were worth seeing and which ones didn’t make the cut.

Like most people, I also think of two-thumbs up and the first row of the mezzanine when I remember our beloved Roger Ebert this week. But I also smell whipped mashed potatoes and sea mist because my remembrance of him is woven with nostalgia from my childhood.

My family was religious about our Sunday traditions. We went to the beach, came home for dinner and never missed an episode of Siskel and Ebert at 6:30 on PBS. I can still smell my Mom’s cooking when I think of that show. There was never one without the other. Just like there is never a movie without a talking point, one of the many lessons I learned from Roger Ebert. In fact, if ever there was a teacher to whom I could attribute my film education, it would be him. He taught me that you could both love a film and still be critical of it. And inversely, that no matter how bad a movie is, there is still something to talk about.

Even though Roger Ebert lost his voice in 2006, he continued to talk about film. And even though we won’t be seeing him at the movies anymore, the conversation he began years ago continues today over long walks on the beach, during Sunday night dinners, and for all of us who love movies.

As for the Brad Pitt river movie? Thumbs up.

–Meg Taylor is a writer living in San Francisco. She is the sales and marketing manager at Small Press Distribution and writes about food for Wilder Quarterly.

***

Image by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

Related Posts:

• An Ode to Roger Ebert
• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of Trance
• The Rumpus Review of The Place Beyond The Pines

Related Posts:

• Whale: 1685, Kitten: 1
• Donnell Loves Fran
• An Interview with The Wire‘s Omar
• Sounds like a reasonable position
• Some Special Video Interruptions for your Turkey Day

The opening montage of this romp is filled with budding tatas, American-colored popsicles-as-dicks, and girls who don’t look old enough to drive doing bong rips. But what looks right out of MTV’s Spring Break quickly devolves into a nightmarish echo of capitalist culture.

It’s no surprise, and quite a delightful choice, that Disney’s darlings are culled to play demon teenage girls who cruise through the film in bikinis and ski masks, holding up people at first with squirt guns and moving quickly along to blasting people to death Natural Born Killers style. While the obvious subversion of casting Disney stars as soulless gun-toters could have fallen flat, it was repeatedly met with delight.

The trailer for the film prepared me for what I anticipated to be a whole truckload of misogyny. It’s clear that only in a male fantasy would college girls spend their time in class drawing hearts that say ‘I love penis’ inside of them, drink out of squirt guns, and do handstands in their underwear. But suprisingly, just when the audience is positioned in an exploitative stance as we watch the four teenage girls in bikinis shotgunning weed and stroking each other’s hair in a faux-lesbionic fashion, Korine turns the trope on his head, making the four youngsters base and nihilistic. These aren’t girls gone wild, they’re girls gone wrong. They seem to care about nothing (save for Selena Gomez who turns in the only emotional performance of the film as a born-again Christian roped in with the wrong crowd), and proceed to blindly rob, steal and kill anything in sight.

After holding up a chicken shack, wearing short shorts and powder blue hoodies, they have enough money to go to Florida for spring break, where they meet a gangster rapper named Alien, played with panache and eerie conviction by James Franco. Franco sips through his silver grill, and his corn rows shake around like a wild lawn sprinkler as he ushers the girls into the world of St. Petersburg, Florida.

He takes the girls round in his Camaro (license plate BALLR), and introduces them to his life of hustling, though to his surprise they seem to need no introduction. In a gripping scene two of the girls turn the gun on him, and make him fellate his own hardware. There’s also a very Korine-esque scene where Franco’s character Alien plays Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on a white grand piano situated on the deck of his pool, while the girls stand around holding machine guns, wearing pink ski masks and sweat pants that say DTF (down to fuck), even though the girls in this film have very little fucking on their minds. And that brings us a central problem with Spring Breakers: the protagonists of the film seem to have no real desire. Can you have characters without desire? The lineage of art seems to say no, though Korine seems to be asserting that desirelessness is our cultural inheritance.

When Alien says, “Big booties and money is what life’s all about”, for a second I had to reconsider what life is all about. Had I gotten it wrong this whole time? Was my belief that life is about truth and beauty just a dreamer’s fantasy? Have I become un-American?

If nothing else, Spring Breakers seems to be just another way of saying what we’ve known for a long time: consumerism is eating us alive. In fact, our real desires have been wholly replaced by manufactured ones. The girls in the film, when presented with buckets of cash, reply, “Seeing all this money makes my tits look bigger.” And the insidiousness of subliminal advertising plays a role via Alien’s repetition of the phrase “spring break” which he whispers over and over throughout the film, even when he’s not on screen, like a narrative mantra lulling us into a capitalist-induced coma.

It’s this base need to be a cog in the money-making machine that is the nexus of Spring Breakers message, if there is one. The girls tell each other affirmations in the form of, “just pretend like you’re in a video game” and “act like you’re in a movie or something” – could not those phrases be instructive for anyone dealing with modern life?

When one of the girls hesitates, the others get firm and say, “you have to be hard”. Welcome to the new economy ladies! There seems to be no time to develop ethics when struggling to get by financially. How do you get to Florida for spring break and eventually pay for your student loans? By dealing drugs and robbing people (duh!). It’s not a sad statement of where we’re at; it’s a damning one.

And aside from all that, the there’s the issue of race. The one time we see the girls in school, the topic at hand is the civil rights movement, but instead of paying attention to Emmett Till on the screen, they’re busy doodling testicles in their notebooks. While many students went south in support of equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights movement, the young stars of Spring Breakers return South to rob and then eventually kill a party full of black men. That’s quite a portrait of how little we’ve come, if we’ve come anywhere at all.

The film’s characters of color only exist on screen to remind us just how much white culture has stolen from them. The character of Alien, faux-rapper, middling gangster, is meant to be an apex of appropriation. The fact that Franco’s character learns everything he knows from fellow Black ganster Archie (played by Gucci Mane), and then has him killed is an obvious metaphor for white suburban consumption of hip hop culture. Additionally, to have two white girls in bikinis blow up an entire party of Archie’s crew, without suffering one scratch, seems gratuitous and sick, though that seems to be the film’s point. While Korine doesn’t seem to have the intellectual chops to fully deal with the issue of race, his film at least nods to the fact that he’s aware. Every artist has their limitations and Spring Breakers is more reflection of racial tension than analysis.

In the end Spring Breakers is much like having sex with a praying mantis—an experience that seduces at first then spits you out headless, and thus brainless. Which is not to say that the film is dumb, but rather that it’s mind-numbing. It’s a testament to the fact that we’re easily seduced by bright lights and hypnotic base lines. The film’s success can largely be attributed to the flashy neon cinematography courtesy of Benoît Debie and the trance-like editing of Douglas Crise. Throughout the film I was repeatedly reminded of the pulp-nod of Drive, so it came as no surprise to learn that the video-pumped soundtrack was created by Cliff Martinez (who scored Drive) and Skrillex.

Korine is nearing 40, (how long can you be referred to as an enfant terrible?) and I suspect Spring Breakers is more likely to appeal to aging film critics, middle-aged men, and women who never got a spring break (see:me) than the completely non-existent demographic of 18-year-old nihilist girls in neon bikinis. If that demographic actually existed, we’d all be doomed. Let’s be grateful, this once, for the pulp and fantasy, but not forget that the reflection comes right from the other end of the looking glass.

Related Posts:

• Reelings #3: THE IMPOSTER
• Talk About “By the Numbers”
• Reelings #5: TO THE WONDER
• An Evening with Derek Waters at SFIFF
• The Rumpus Review of Trance

We’re shooting Happy Baby in New York beginning May 8. We need so many things! We need volunteers to donate and serve meals for the cast and crew. We need locations, including a couple of apartments and an office and filing room to shoot in.

If you can’t bring a meal to set but you’d like to sponsor one day’s meal, you can do it for $400. If you’d like to sponsor a crew member (so we can have more crew!) that’s $2,200.

If you’d like to volunteer, or donate money, or have a location we can shoot in, please contact Rebecca Rubenstein, rubenstein AT therumpus.net.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

“Never let the truth spoil a good story.”
–Bill Wyman

***

My gateway high was a compilation album, 1966’s Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass). In particular, I can recollect driving helter-skelter around the San Fernando Valley in the soft, anything-goes California light, the volume turned up on my cassette deck for “Get Off of My Cloud,” gathering adolescent momentum to deal with girls, enemies, and everyone else in-between. I knew the big hits, of course, and I dug the vibe as much as the music itself but I didn’t really get it and I wasn’t a true Stones fan until a few years later, only after making for myself delirious personal knowledge in the first two-thirds of youth’s greatest trifecta, that is, the sex and drugs parts.

‘Sex, drugs and rock and roll,’ of course, was the sixties generation riffing on wine, women and song— it wasn’t just a jazzy cliché but a lifestyle, if a hedonistic one that left some beautiful corpses along the way. The Rolling Stones, who as a band turned fifty in 2012, have survived almost everybody. That they are still together (more than forty years after their principle rivals, the Beatles, disintegrated) is something of a miracle, what with the hypothetically massive egos involved in playing in (arguably) the greatest rock and roll band of all time. But what Brett Morgen’s fiftieth anniversary documentary, HBO’s Crossfire Hurricane, makes clear is that they made it through the years not just because of timing, talent, swagger, and the projection of a certain sinister image, but also because they were laid-back guys who seemed to really appreciate the fact of their divinely granted lottery tickets, fulfilling a Dionysian dream life far more exhilarating than the lurid fantasies of your most hard-up teenaged wanker.

A collection of interviews with the band narrated over wonderful archival footage, Crossfire Hurricane begins backstage at a concert in New York City’s Madison Square Garden in July, 1972. The band is promoting their double album Exile on Main St., a period when the Stones were cresting artistically and commercially, as well as having more fun than anyone else on the planet. This is the druggiest time for the band, and its most debauched, rife with babe-swapping and conspicuous orgies (famed photographer Robert Frank was hanging out with the band, filming the beautiful, yet surprisingly dull Cocksucker Blues). In one corner, there’s Bill Wyman eyeing the babes, holding his bass like a phallic ramrod; the young, diffident lead guitarist, Mick Taylor, waiting in the shadows; drummer Charlie Watts looking like he’d rather be anywhere else; Keith Richards, a wicked, puckish rascal, chain-smoking, sniggering at some joke only he knows the punch line for; and Mick Jagger, now changing into a jumpsuit, adjusting his panty-wetting junk in a full-length mirror. When seventies TV personality Dick Cavett describes Mick Jagger as the “supreme sexual object in modern Western culture, a compound of menace and energy, a sadomasochistic freak, and a pussycat,” it sounds pretty close to the mark when the Stones take the stage and Jagger, released into the limelight, bounds, gambols, and flourishes in the flamboyant dervish twirls of a coke-fueled, footloose troubadour. Even if his music means nothing to you, the man has indisputable stage presence.

For Stones fans no new ground is broken in Crossfire Hurricane. Like a visual “greatest hits” package it borrows plenty from the Maysles Brothers 1970 masterpiece Gimme Shelter, Charlie Is My Darling (a lesser known documentary about the Stones touring Ireland in 1966), and a wealth of archived concert scenes (including the magnificent Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus). We survey the band’s bluesy cover roots; their bad boy press; the fanatical response of female fans urinating in their seats during the band’s early performances; the breakthrough hit “Satisfaction;” London’s Summer of Love; the famous drug bust at Keith’s pad; the death of Brian Jones; Mick Taylor’s hiring; Altamont; the band’s tax issues and the move to the French Riviera; Ronnie Wood replacing Taylor; and finally Keith’s Toronto drug bust being a wake-up call to kick heroin because he loved the band best. The documentary concludes with the mainstream legitimizing of the Stones— no longer dark princes but white knights. Over the film’s credits we fast-forward almost thirty-five years to contemporary footage of a performance, grey-haired, pension-aged, but still kicking.

So the story we’re talking about focuses on the first fifteen years of the band’s existence. Because let’s face it, by the 1980s New Wave, punk, rap, and synth-pop were ascendant and the Stones were in their forties, culturally irrelevant, a greatest hits band, recycling sixties decadence to sold-out stadiums. You can’t hold this against them too much. They had an astounding twenty-year run (1981’s Tattoo You being their last great album for my money).

Like Elvis, they made their reputation alchemizing an affection for rhythm and blues into a gritty yet finger snapping sound accessible to a larger (and mostly white) record-buying audience. (Besides their musical chops, Jagger concedes learning to dance by admiring Little Richard). Once established, the Stones stayed true to their rock and roll sound, mostly avoiding the segueing zeitgeist movements (psychedelic, prog rock, punk), building on their original sound, evolving musically, experimenting within a successfully established framework, but still mostly providing the ideal soundtrack for getting drunk, and, ideally, laid.

The thing about the Stones is there will never be a rock and roll band with their reach (just as I suppose there will never be another Beethoven, John Lee Hooker, or Miles Davis due to disparate listening tastes, demographic heterogeneousness, and other complex social developments). Today rock and roll is still a viable musical genre but hardly the cultural touchstone it was when the Stones were young and glorious. There’s no question that due to the proliferation of technological options such as iPods and the Internet, as well as the decline of FM radio, rock and roll is forever too decentralized for an apotheosis on the scale of Jagger. Mick and the boys were in the right place at the right time for becoming superstars.

In fact, one of the qualities that make Crossfire Hurricane so engaging is how it invokes this aura of collective experience. Jagger intones, “You’re merely the catalyst of the crowd.” Aware that an audience is the visceral counterpoint to a band’s energy, the documentary explores the mass psychosis involved in Stones’ concerts: namely women urinating into their pants, and young men rioting in the streets. Tracing the Stones’ trajectory is moving from sixties-generation dissatisfaction into seventies-era narcissism. You can see it in the crowds as much as in the Stones themselves. What you get then from the film, is that in the end, for better or worse, performance was about a good time. “It all comes down to those two hours on stage,” Ronnie Wood affirms. “They’re the reward.”

Jagger explains, “You’re thrust into the limelight in a youth-oriented thing. It’s not about growing up, it’s about not growing up.” This is disconcerting for those who believe the pleasures of life have a time and place. The older I get, the more I find myself fetishizing sixties culture, of which Jagger, Richards, and company were its more riveting ambassadors. I’m addicted to their energy and find myself wondering if something more than their music is at work— could my obsession with their legendary posturing be early onset symptoms of midlife crisis behavior? The years are passing but when I listen to Jagger doing “Street Fighting Man” or “Honky Tonk Women,” age feels like just an arbitrary number, irrelevant, and youth reemerges in my being, manifesting itself as a sensibility, a visceral gut feeling. And then I get it: why the geezers are still on stage, why the show goes on. I’m just a fan, but it feels really good, like anything’s possible. And this is the reason I’ll probably never stop listening to “Street Fighting Man.” The moment might be an illusion and yesterday’s one at that, but it gets me through the day.

Related Posts:

• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #9: Chilly Scenes of Winter
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #2: Chicago
• Elegant Trash
• Leibovitz Schadenfreude
• THE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: #24 Nicolas Roeg’s First Five Films