Movie Monster

In nervous times, such as our own, the rationale behind exorcism may seem a relief. It bolsters the iffy notion that internal evil is an external force—one which can be removed by the religious equivalent of a trained exterminator. There’s also a grain of masochistic chic hidden in there, the same congenital backwardness that once turned bad girls into “witches.” (The Christian fear of the human body, in all its reproductive funkiness, can itself be morbidly alluring.) William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which rammed the arcane practice into modern pop-cultural consciousness like a crucifix into a—well, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know—sponged clean any metaphysical kinkiness; but if that film is frightening nowadays at all (it didn’t so much as elicit a peep from me), it’s because of the way it systematically breaks down any barrier in its path that’s been erected by reason or modernity. A movie star’s daughter, privy to the best and brightest minds in the capital of the most advanced country on the map, is helpless to contend with spiritual rapine. She’s left with only one option. Who’s she gonna call? Ghostbusters!

There’s some bedevilment at the heart of any of these movies: They must affirm religious doctrine or reject the supernatural. Either way, I end up feeling a bit screwed over. So when I saw an ad for The Last Exorcism, my first instinct was: Finally! Fortunately, the writers (Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) and director (Daniel Stamm) took a middle path, and modeled their bayou-based yarn on the 1972 documentary Marjoe, which concerned a former boy-preacher who now sought to expose the phoniness of his florid techniques and the credulity of his tent-church followers. Our hero here, Cotton—to play anyone by that name you need a rustier drawl than Patrick Fabian provides him with—is out to expose exorcisms, in order to spare future children from not surviving that procedure. He’s vaguely agnostic, but doesn’t see himself as a fraud. He’s a placebo healer. So he takes a film crew in tow when he’s called to cast the devil out of a 16-year-old farm girl named Nell (Ashley Bell, who has a spectral, fluttery presence). As you may have already inferred, this chick isn’t your normal gal haunted by puberty and stunted by home-schooling. And whatever’s possessing her knows that Cotton has doubts…

There’s intellectual tension in the tightrope these filmmakers walk; they are intelligent enough to realize that losing their balance means more than losing their vitality—it also means selling out. The attention I paid to their gymnastics exceeded my concern for little Nell’s well-being or their Cotton-mouthed crisis of faith. Then again, I didn’t find myself praying for the movie to end. But, even if the jangly camera lingers over some images—like a baby doll’s head submerged in bathwater—just long enough for them to be arresting, there’s none of the obsessive trouncing that made Martyrs, a French slasher, the work of an artist. Not that these Yanks, who feign doc realism no more skillfully than reality-show editors, harbor any such pretensions. They’re not possessed by the art of filmmaking; when a boy asks the characters if they’re making a movie, he doesn’t even steal a vain look into the lens. But these low-budget filmmakers are not without integrity. They’re a cut above placebo spookers.

When I saw Hot Fuzz back in 2007, with a couple of compadres, it was like quaffing a cinematic yagerbomb; all I wanted to do afterward was cut loose, do a few keg-stands, and then chittychat my way into some soon-to-be-regretted-but-blissful stupor. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that Edgar Wright’s film put me in a sociable frame of mind; I was giddy. (It having been a Friday night certainly helped to advance and accommodate my mood; but rarely can one completely pre-game for college parties without so much as a sip of alcohol.) This limey is like Alain Resnais as a serial prankster—or, at least, his work has such an effect on those of us who grock it. Few filmmakers know how to achieve such calculated spontaneity; it’s all intricately planned out, but it feels in the moment, like improv. It’s dry without lacking in emotion; he finesses it so that the dialogue ricochets between performers, and it suckles on their individual energies and spunk. It’s both formalistic and freeing.

That Wright’s new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—starring Michael Cera and based on manga-inspired comic books by Canadian writer Bryan Lee O’Malley—has been a box-office dud is vaguely, if not wholly, anomalous. Although the film was well-received at ComicCon—Cannes for comic geeks—and can boast a hip soundtrack (featuring Beck and the genuinely eclectic Broken Social Scene) that should’ve been catnip to indie-music geeks, it seems to have been neglected by its target demo. Perhaps everyone’s so bashed by the state of world affairs that they need nothing less exorbitant than The Expendables to rouse them from their funk; or maybe the filmmakers have tapped into a demographic that’s tapped into online streaming; or, possibly, the old truism that people want to see people they “identify with” on the screen no longer holds true. In any case, it’s a misfortune. While it does not live up to Hot Fuzz, Pilgrim is probably the brightest, smartest movie this summer; and its failure, which will—for the time being, at least—vote Michael Cera out of stardom, prognosticates some possibly gloomy trends.

From the very first image—a chintzy pixellation of the Universal logo, accompanied by a N.E.S.-styled rendition of its fanfare—we know that Wright is playing with video games. Honestly, that jarred me a bit—particularly when, only a few minutes later, Pac-Man and Zelda’s names were both conspicuously dropped. I sensed the presence of Diablo Cody loitering behind the scenes. But, I was happy to discover, the video-game references are chiefly—and cleverly—stylistic, not spoken. Wright pays homage rather than sucking up. He employs the usual “kaboom!” and “meanwhile” title cards, but—rather than simply reproducing comic-strip frames and thought bubbles—he’s devised an equivalent style of dislocations that is both unique to him and unique to movies, all without failing to scribble in recognizably cartoonish shorthand. True, it’s an instant-gratification machine: A few brief scenes exist merely to be setups for gags, and the quips go by so quickly that the new ones banish the old ones from one’s head. It’s tweet-paced. But his style is also at the service of the boho-Toronto characters—20-somethings who, typically, are fashioned to be idolized by teenage romantics. Pace Iron Man 2, the garishness of comic books can appeal to the outsize feelings of young people; to that extent, comic tropes can provide lighthearted metaphors for real-life experience. The writers’ sentiment (Wright cowrote with Michael Bacall), and Pilgrim’s gentle nudging of hipsters, reminds me of recent lyrics by Arcade Fire: “So much pain for someone so young, well / I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”

Actually, those lyrics also encapsulate Cera’s persona. He teases his moral uptightness, but it’s there—and it was there hardcore in the last outing of his I saw, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I think I underrated that movie a bit; I misunderstood its target audience. This isn’t to say that it was anything stupendous, but it carried a laudable amount of conviction for a teenie-bopper flick. Cera, however, seemed to be folding his arms tighter than before; his sorrows were too nebulous for Nick. In Pilgrim, he’s finally gotten a little ballsy; his passive-aggression is in tact, but he’s not afraid to be a dick. However, beneath the balls—yeah, I went there—he still has the awkwardness that manifests itself in the few extra words he interpolates into every sentence, and his not-fully-comprehended need to do the right thing. His naïveté is in the classic Huck Finn mold, and I think it is—or was—at the core of his appeal. Cera might’ve been playing it safe by harping on his little-guy-ness, but he stamped it on every role like a name tag, and—until now, it seems—didn’t do much to renew his caricature. But if his appeal is on the decline, I’m curious to know who—if anyone—might fill that vacuum; and if a vacuum persists, does that mean a regression in tastes? Not-quite-grown-up grown-ups are in now; yet Cera’s edge is that he has a dinky body but an old-soul sensibility. Although he hasn’t demonstrated the same range as an actor, Cera may end up like Elliott Gould: someone so feasted on by his particular film generation that he can’t help but become a relic of it.

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Two of the biggest craniums in cinema are at loggerheads in Cyrus. They belong to John (John C. Reilly), a ringer for Shrek, and the eponymous man-child played by Jonah Hill, whose submerged neck forms a halo—like the frame around a medieval portrait of a saint. But, like the painted saints of way-back-when, there’s something eerie, ivory, impassive in his features: his iceberg eyes and mouth agape. He bears a passing resemblance to his beloved ma, Molly (Marisa Tomei). She has the sort of long-lashed brown twinklers that could either be kind or too kind; they camouflage her thoughts. Despite being out of his league, she hits it off with John—who’s seven years on the rebound—after she catches him releasing into the bushes his intake from a hitherto luckless mixer. He’s shit-faced enough to stop fretting over his lackluster social skills; he cranks up the stereo when an old favorite pops on, and Molly is the first to sing along. Unfortunately, this scratches the needle on her 21-year duet with the almost-22-year-old Cyrus, who’s just a few retinal stabs away from being the Oedipus to her Jocasta.

But this movie’s aim is not to be a bom-chick-a-wow-wow Greek tragedy; and it wouldn’t be quite fair to compare it to other mother-lovin’ comedies, like Murmur of the Heart or Spanking the Monkey, in which genealogy is actually defied, and the kinfolk really do get kinky. Rather, it’s spawn of a more standard form—an inversion of Meet the Parents—though, in technique, it’s very different. The writing credit allotted to the directors—the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass—may be largely symbolic; according to Reilly, “90% of the movie is first or second takes.” It’s as if they were importing the concept of sustainability to film; but the honesty that’s composted doesn’t quite jibe with the comedic potentialities heaped on the trash pile. They seem indisposed to break past slaphappy gentility, so Cyrus coasts on its delicate charm, like a bodyboarder riding the mellow whims of a glassy morning tide. Clearly, the Duplasses—masters of mumblecore—didn’t want to grease up their style, and harsh their (critical) buzz. This is their first sort-of-marquee-name cast, and their first sort-of-big-studio (Fox Searchlight) production. Despite the salable simplicity of their plot, it was bold of them not to crumble to commercial tastes.

The mainstream comic movies today have alarmingly effective defense mechanisms. The specter of big-daddy postmodernism is certainly to blame; something like The Hangover is insulated by our society’s dwindling gamut of sexual taboos (even the culture warriors have cozied up with this sort of safe sex, emasculating the satirists’ sting), the fungibility of the fungal jokes, and the pop-cultural echolalia, the references that feed off one another. Ergo—to my tastes, at least—the less affected the bonehead comedy, the more purely enjoyable. Ambitions can be crippling when the audience wants an easy laugh. Turning their laughter against them when they seek the safe-bet mindlessness that a certain class of comedy is a shoe-in for can come off as a betrayal. I don’t mean to sound condescending; smarty self-consciousness in this type of movie can slaughter laughter, and lead to a posture of condescension that may not have been intended. Witness Hot Tub Time Machine from this year, or Observe and Report from last; neither were hits. Despite my reservations about them, I did sense creative intelligences at work—if sometimes slacking off. They were trying to latch onto the frat-pack school of comedy, headquartered in decaying Guyland—or, if you’ll permit me, Brahpolis. Unfortunately, they also wanted us to know how distasteful Brahpolis is—and even if they’re right in finding the milieu rather slimy, there’s no better way to snag a laugh in ice-cold intellect, restricting its access to the mouth, than by sucking up to something while cussing it under your breath. (An Apatow production like Pineapple Express isn’t really an exception. The actors flirted with satire, but the filmmakers couldn’t sustain the winkiness, and welded both eyes shut. It became a shoot-’em-up, and bungled another genre.) So, as ironic-funny as Rob Corddry was in H.T.T.M.—he has a better outlet on the show Childrens Hospital, now on Adult Swim—his lines became grating. The filmmakers just didn’t get that Will Ferrell himself is a parody of fatuity. (The trouble is that he’s been impersonating George W. Bush for too long; playing him as a harmless, good-natured dolt just doesn’t quite cut it for me anymore.) By attempting to parody a style too self-conscious (and too self-consciously lowbrow) to lampoon, the filmmakers ended up degrading themselves.

You can’t satirize Brahpolis within its city limits, but you can within your own niche, or in the freeing light of realism. Though Lynn Shelton’s Humpday did not critique Guyland, or at least not its typical habitués—the shameless self-caricatures who populate Jersey Shore—it did touch on the bromantic gray areas that remain taboo to bozos and bohemians alike. It was like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice for a time of post-sexual-revolutionary capitulation, or a weak-tea Americanization of Alphonso Cuarón’s brilliant, electrostatic Y Tu Mamá También. Weak tea, but sweet tea. Shelton directed the 2009 problem comedy—about a pair of straight college buds who decide to star in a gay porno together—in mumblecore fashion, and there were briar patches of revelation and fascination in the off-the-cuff interplay; but it too was marred by hyperconsciousness. With an introspective filmmaker like Mark Duplass cast as one of the leads, the film awkwardly went about doing the audience’s interpretive work for us, and I felt that bogged the picture down. But how can it be avoided anymore? That sort of hippie-lineage let’s-talk-it-out bullshit is imprinted on this chastened generation. I hate to castigate honesty.

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When Leonardo DiCaprio washes ashore at the beginning of Inception, I thought that Jack had survived the sinking of the Titanic. But if he had, it would only be to drown in the subconscious depths that this movie layers on. Don’t get me wrong: This new film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is artful and enjoyable—thought-out, if rarely thought-provoking. I liked it; and it’s nice to go into a summer movie without being impaled by sequels and Happy Meal prototypes. But if Inception is a mind fuck, it’s sex with a virgin brain.

Although this is the latest model in the dude-this-blows-my-mind-pass-me-the-joint mold, and it’s meant to whirl like a dervish in the viewers’ brains, enticing ’em to scamper back to the theater to reverse engineer its backed-up cranial plumbing, I didn’t find it too hard to follow—and that’s a compliment. Nolan fluidly hopscotches from one nightmare to the next, dragging his mottled dream team in tow. DiCaprio heads up this rather esoteric bunch. For high-income clients, he and his gangly assistant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will climb over the mental membranes of unsuspecting schmucks, and purloin secrets from their subconscious. Is this legal? Is this common? Does John Q. Public know that his dreams are no longer private? You might need to rock Nolan’s dream boat to get any concrete answers. Perhaps the closest we get to a clue comes when Cobb (DiCaprio) recruits Ellen Page to be an “architect” of mental states after her predecessor is vanished—presumably tortured to death by a Japanese bigwig named Saito (Ken Watanabe). (Her job is to design the topography of the dreams that Cobb dips into, and I’m sure someone will draw a soggy parallel between it and to film direction.) Under Michael Caine’s tutelage—he makes hardly a cameo, unfortch—she seems to have learned the basics of Cobb’s trade; but she’s about as aware of the specifics as the Ivy Leaguers were of the C.I.A. when they were harvested to staff its first generation.

Saito’s brain is the first we see hacked; but whatever they retrieved from it must not have been too vital to his conglomerate—he becomes Cobb’s next client. The plan now is not the usual retrieval, but “inception”: planting an idea in subconscious soil. Apparently, though, this is risky business; ideas metastasize like cancers, and eventually wrack the whole brain—for all intents and purposes, warping the victim’s personality. Their mark is a preppy named Fischer (Cillian Murphy, posed in stock photos like a Ralph Lauren model); he’s the inheritor of his cold-fish father’s business empire, and rival industrialist Saito wants to see that kingdom as divided as Lear’s. (Cobb & Co. are like trust-busting privateers, even if Nolan doesn’t frame them that way.) Over the course of an international flight, they break into the yuppie’s soul, and face off not only with an army of superegotistical white blood cells, but also Cobb’s own demon—his late enchantress of a wife is down there waiting for him.

It’s also down there that Nolan gets to show off his kickass blockbusting skills. He ups the ante, widening the ambit of slumberland to dreams within dreams—and that only accounts for the goings-on in Fischer’s noggin. Cobb caroms through the synapses on his own guilt trip, with Page accompanying him, acting as an in-house analyst. In the world above, we’ve already bounced between continents. (It’s an open secret of good summertime moviemaking that one should dazzle the audience with exotic locales, titillating their inner tourist—particularly at a time when real tourism budgets are strapped.) The world below isn’t quite what it could be, though. We get a rainy day in New York (?), a five-star hotel, and what looks to be the ninja bivouac from Batman Begins situated on the ice planet Hoth. There’s also the decomposing remains of a comatose limbo that Cobb once cohabited with his wife (Marion Cotillard)—don’t ask me who their real-estate agent was—which is finely imagined, if curiously. Of why they’d choose to build a Mies van der Rohe nightmare for themselves, with a skyline of identical obelisks, I have no idea. I heard some guy bitching about Inception on the of the entertainment-industry channels, and he compared it to Mulholland Drive. In truth, Nolan’s dreamworlds have nothing on David Lynch’s intuitive dreamscapes, or the feeling one gets even from Lynch’s lesser movies; but this is a thriller first and foremost, and, considering that, some of his visuals—M. C. Escher stairwells, Gordon-Levitt curb-stomping through zero-G hallways, and cities folding on themselves like board games going back into the box—are very impressive.

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Toy Story 3 deserves the praise it’s been given; and, to my surprise, the 15-year lag between this film and its progenitor actually serves to enhance its poignancy. When, in this installment, the playthings are exiled to a daycare center, it seems more like an old-folks’ home. Their owner, Andy, is off to college; his childhood relics are being retired. Of course, the minds at Pixar are ever-resilient—they stick with a more commercially accessible rubric: prison. They stuff the ol’-boy warden from Cool Hand Luke, and he’s reincarnated as a l’il girl’s teddy bear.

But Pixar pastiches are too richly imaginative to feel like hand-me-downs; they don’t make allusions, they draw together familiar threads and stitch them into a unified whole. What separates Toy Story from The Velveteen Rabbit or Where the Wild Things Are or A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh—though not The Brave Little Toaster, a childhood favorite of mine borrowed from liberally here—is its inclusion of consumer culture. In earlier eras, sentient dolls weren’t threatened with the garbage pail; they had the insurance policy of being passed on to the next generation. At a time when there’s a new hot item every Christmas, these figurines have to stay in shape if they want to stay in the crate; the conflict between cowpoke and spaceman in the first Toy Story was not instigated insignificantly. Though the toys’ acceptance of their new phase of “life” is cheerful in part three—and, for a blockbusting cartoon, courageous—there are strands of feeling that seem almost heartbreakingly mature. When, as they inch perilously closer to the hellish maw of a fire-breathing incinerator, the toys link hands and form a chain, it’s an eerily moving moment—the acceptance of moving on in Up has advanced to an acceptance of moving beyond. No plastic circle has ever left our mortal coil so gracefully unfurled.