Everything Must Go (3/5 Stars)

Nick Halsey has just been fired from his job of 16 years as vice-president of sales. It wasn’t a problem with his work. It was a problem with his drinking. There may have been an incident with a woman at a conference in Denver. It’s hard for him to explain his behavior because he can’t remember what happened. It seems though, from the way he walks and talks (one part resignation, one part vague guilt mixed in with a measure of self-loathing/pity) that he certainly believes he could have done something bad. On the way home from work he stops by the mini-mart and stocks up on PBR. He intends to drink it as quick as is comfortably possible. The house he comes home to is empty. All the locks on the doors have been changed. All of Nick’s furniture and stuff has been moved to the front lawn. On the door is a letter from his wife explaining that this is the last of these letters. Nick finds his easy chair, plops down on it, and continues drinking. His suburban neighborhood has bylaws that state a yard sale can be held for, at the most, five days. So given the front of selling his stuff, Nick has about that amount of time to hang out on his front lawn, drink some more, and decide whether he has hit rock bottom or if there is still plenty of self-destruction left to go.

“Everything Must Go” is directed by Dan Rush and based on a short story by Raymond Carver. I haven’t read any of Carver’s stuff but after seeing this movie and Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” (itself a very good movie that compiles several of Raymond Carver’s stories), he makes my impossibly long list of books that would be so great to read some day if only it didn’t take so damn long to read books. The movie itself is very much like an elongated short story. It is contained entirely within five days, it takes place almost entirely on Nick’s front lawn, and attention is spent more on small details than big action. The ambition and budget is limited. For what it is, as they say, it is what it is, and as they also say, it does a fine job of doing what it does. There is nothing wrong with “Everything Must Go.” It’s just a small movie. If you are in the mood for that sort of thing, add a star or two to the rating up top.

Nick is played by comedian Will Ferrell in a role that is hard to believe anyone else could pull off as well. The sight of a man living on his front lawn with all his stuff is absurd and the location of this movie, being a suburb in sunny Arizona, lends the movie lots of light, which bounces off all the furniture in bright colored hues. All the lawns around him are bright green. Nick even owns a Tiki Bar and a George Foreman grill. This lends the movie a cheery tone even if its subject is so dreary. Nick isn’t getting drunk in a dark bar like Nic Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.” He’s out in the open and fresh air. A comedian like Ferrell looks like he belongs in such a situation. And since all of this creates such an expectation of comedy, it is that much more effective as a drama when Ferrell doesn’t try to go for any jokes whatsoever. Sure there may be some witty asides to smile with (especially the talks with a bored kid played by Christopher Jordan Wallace whom Nick hires as a salesperson), but overall this movie takes alcoholism seriously. And watching a funny man that is too drunk to be funny is not funny. It’s especially sad. Even more so when one considers that the irresponsible man-boy characters that Will Ferrell usually portrays would perhaps at one point meet the same fate if they lived in the real world. It has been noted with surprise from many critics that Will Ferrell is a good actor in this movie. I agree but do not take it as a surprise. I can only assume that those critics don’t consider comedy acting as “Acting!” Watch “Old School” again and see Will Ferrell strike some of the same notes he does here. Besides being hilarious in that movie, he also realistically loses both his wife and home to drinking.

I’m sure there are a myriad of reasons why some people drink too much. Nick Hasley here seems to be doing it almost as a self-imposed punishment. A major theme of the movie involves Nick’s quest to find a reason as to why he deserves to be a happy functioning sober person. In this search, he employs the kid, a neighbor who just moved in next-door, played by Rebecca Hall, and his AA sponsor played by Michael Pena. He even goes so far as to contact a woman, played by Laura Dern, he hardly knew in high school and hasn’t spoken to in 20 years. She wrote in his yearbook that she considered him to be a diamond in the rough and suspected him to be nice even though he was a jock. So Nick, because I guess he was curious as to why someone who hardly knew him would think something like that, looks her up and shows up on her doorstep. He says he was just in the neighborhood, but come on, this is the suburbs. Nobody goes anywhere on accident there.   

And here I’m going to now pause and take my geeky liberty to talk about city planning and real estate development. If anyone living in the suburbs decides to watch this movie, please take a special interest in the scene between Will Ferrell and Laura Dern. It is the perfect example of why every house needs a porch. A grown man that just shows up on your doorstep after 20 years is inherently a weird thing. Under no circumstances should that man be let inside the house. This is something Laura Dern conveys quite explicitly in her body language. However, it is perfectly fine to talk to him on the front porch. After all, there is a possibility that he isn’t insane and you still have the ability of being able to walk inside the house and lock the door. Thus, having a porch gives one the ability to talk to strangers without sacrificing privacy or safety. It is elemental to making friends in a neighborhood. This nice conversation could not have realistically happened had Dern not had a porch. Now contrast this with the fact that Nick’s house doesn’t have a porch. In fact, even though this neighborhood is in Arizona, a place with such great weather that porches would be the most obvious things ever, none of the surrounding houses have porches. That is distressingly normal in suburbs that have been built in the last quarter century. What effect this has on the neighborhood is keenly observed in this movie. Take note that the only neighbors Nick has regular conversations with during his five day yard sale is the woman who has recently moved in across the street and the kid on the bike. In my opinion, this is completely realistic. Really, the only time one can strike up a random conversation with a suburban neighbor is the week they move in. After that it is awkward and usually an invasion of privacy. After all, you need a reason to invite yourself into somebody’s living room. Without a porch, taking the initiative to talk to people in the suburbs is more likely to be rude than friendly. The kid by the way doesn’t live in the neighborhood. His mother works there as a home nurse. She can’t afford daycare so she brings him along. He spends his days biking the desolate streets. He talks to Nick mainly out of sheer boredom. That too, I can personally attest, is completely realistic. 

Bridesmaids (5/5 Stars)

“Why can’t you just be happy for me and talk about me behind my back like a normal person!?!?”

Shouts the bride-to-be Lillian, played by Maya Rudolph, to her ex-best friend Annie, played by Kristen Wiig, at her bridal shower. There has been a seething conflict brewing between the bridesmaids, Annie and Helen, played by Rose Byrne, underneath all of the polite smiles and passive-aggressive I-hope-once-I-get-to-know-you-I’ll-like-you-better mannerisms. Annie is Lillian’s best friend since childhood. She is a failure at business (her bakery went out of business), at love (her current boyfriend considers them to be nothing but fuck-buddies), at home (her roommates are really weird and consider her the weird one), and everything else. Helen, the wife of the groom’s boss, is very rich, always beautiful, extremely organized and although she has only known Lillian for a couple months, seems determined to become her new best friend. Compounding things are Annie’s many failures at organizing the pre-wedding events from serious mishaps at the bridal dress fitting to a bachelorette party in Vegas that goes awry much earlier than you would think is possible. At one point, Annie is fired as the maid of honor and Helen is put in charge of planning the Bridal Shower. And what a shower it is. It’s just so goddamn infuriatingly perfect. So perfect in fact that at one exceedingly over the top moment that Annie would have loved to provide but couldn’t because she is poor and that Helen does provide because she is rich, Annie finally snaps and angrily exclaims, “You have got to be fucking kidding me!” What follows is a completely truthful/inappropriate tirade directed at the ex-best friend who has sold her out and a crowd of shocked party guests capped off with Annie running into the backyard to destroy the larger than life party decorations, which, it should be noted, she isn’t particularly good at doing either. That description unjustly summarizes one of the funniest scenes I have ever seen in a movie and more than anything should solidify Kristen Wiig as a bona fide movie star. The level of comedic ecstasy achieved in this movie is on the level of the best comedies ever made. The key to getting to that high level of superior comedy basically consists of finding a way for the characters to do outrageous things in ridiculous situations while still staying true to reality and the reasonable character motivations. That takes not only a large amount of creativity but also an in-depth understanding of human nature. This movie has both in spades. If this won’t be the best comedy of the year, it will definitely be one of the best. In my opinion, it should be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

A general rule in the movie business if you are a talented actor but aren’t getting good roles is you should take the initiative and write your own material. For years now, Kristen Wiig has been a virtuoso performer on Saturday Night Live, but unlike so many other great SNL alumni, she has been relegated to supporting characters in feature length movies of inferior comedians. Here, following the advice of producer Judd Apatow and with the partnership of Annie Mumolo, she has co-written her own screenplay. (You can see the fictional and real Annie sitting next to each other in the airplane scene.) This screenplay is perfect. Or should I say, Kristen’s performance makes it perfect. So many of the laughs in this movie would not exist if Kristen Wiig had not delivered the lines. She has an incredibly impressive ability to squeeze the utmost amount of humor out of a single phrase. Even most of her whispers get laughs in this movie. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything at all and simply employs her eyes and facial expressions to tell the joke. How many comedians can you think of who can do that? (I’m judging you, Seth Rogen.) That ability it especially important in this story because so much of it involves situations in which it would be rude for a character to complain about anything out loud lest it would ruin the experience for the bride. To be realistic then, Kristen has to convey her character’s enormous frustration with true subtlety. It is flat out brilliant the way she can say one thing and at the same time so clearly convey to the audience that she means something else entirely. And when the character finally gets loud, Kristen knocks that sort of thing out of the park too. Not to mention her ability to do great physical comedy, something most actresses aren’t even willing to try. In my opinion again, this is an Oscar caliber performance and she should at least be nominated.

Surrounding Kristen Wiig is a very good ensemble. Maya Rudolph as the bride has mastered the art of the straight character. When things get crazy she rightly underplays the social awkwardness in order to keep the scene going even farther. When things get fun she looks like she is definitely enjoying herself, which naturally suggests that the audience should too. The other bridesmaids include Rita, played by Wendi Mcloven-Covey, a blunt and frank long-married woman with three teenage boys. Rita is looking forward to the bachelorette party more than anything else. Then there is Becca, played by Ellie Kemper, who is young, naïve, and recently married. She and her husband went to Disney World for their honeymoon and haven’t been with anyone else. The wildcard is Megan, played by Melissa McCarthy, a short very stout and manly woman. She brings up the idea of a Fight Club themed Bridal Shower. All of these characters are so well defined and have such different comedic styles that the group scenes play effortlessly. No matter where they are or what anyone says, somebody in the group is going to feel out of their element or disagree or be offended on some level. When they talk in a group, it’s just one joke after another. Rita and Becca work wonderfully together. Finally, there is Helen, who is played by Rose Byrne. I was reminded of Russell Brand’s character in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Here you have a character that could have been so easily given no depth and made solely to be hated. Instead, similar to so many other great Judd Apatow productions, even the antagonist in this story is made to be deliberately sympathetic. There aren’t any real bad guys in this movie and, above all, in the midst of all the raunchy scatological humor there is a core of emotional honesty. The relationships, whether between Annie and Lillian or Annie and Helen or Annie the two love interests in the movie, (the jerk played by the dashing Jon Hamm and the nice guy played by Andy O’Dowd) are sincere and affecting. These are characters you can truly care about. Well, everyone except Jon Hamm.

Of course, I don’t want to downplay the comedy by upholding the dramatic stuff. It should be mentioned just how well this movie constructs gags and conversations with humorous payoffs. One example of many includes a scene at the engagement party where Annie and Helen give speeches about how great the bride is. Annie goes first. Helen gives a better speech. Annie decides to tack on an epilogue to hers. Helen comes right back. This happens a couple more times and includes a great laugh dealing with just how many microphones there are in the room. The tug-of-war goes on in more elaborate fashion until right before the scene starts to feel really awkward. Then the movie snatches victory out of the jaws of defeat by ending it with a speech that turns into a song that turns into a duet. This conveniently spares both participants from embarrassment because the crowd logically thinks the entire competition was planned between the two. Another example involves how Annie loses her sales job in a jewelry store. A 12-year-old girl walks in and wants to buy a “Best Friends Forever” bracelet as a present for a friend. Annie, deeply distressed by that time in the movie, suggests that the word “forever” might be pushing it. The girl rightly suggests that Annie’s loser life is her own loser business. A whisper fight ensues and how it ends, well, let me just say I never ever thought a situation in which the C-word was directed at a 12-year-old girl could be so funny.

Dare I say that “Bridesmaids” is an important movie. If you take a look at most of the broad comedies out in the movie marketplace you will notice that they are almost exclusively anchored by male comedians. The few women who do anchor comedies, like say Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, or Anna Faris, usually do not find themselves in truly funny movies. This has quite a lot to do with the way movies confine the way that nearly all women look and act. To be more specific the general rule is that the main female character in a movie has to be beautiful all the time. This may be fine in drama but it hardly ever works in comedy. This is because the work of comedians is based in so many ways on self-degradation. “Bridesmaids” is a special movie in that it enables actresses to not wear makeup, curse up a storm, act awkward in conversation, act awkward physically, make disastrous embarrassing mistakes, be immature, and even, from time to time, be disgusting. That’s a good thing comedically speaking. It may seem odd that I would be arguing to allow women to degrade themselves in movies, but may I please point out that we certainly allow men to do it without any qualms whatsoever. Think of all the many lead actors in broad comedies that are not abnormally good looking or have incredible flaws. When a movie casts men of ample gut, like say Kevin James, Jack Black, John Candy, Vince Vaughn, or Chris Farley, in romantic leads in broad comedies, it essentially means that the movie is making a bet that the audience will accept that person romantically despite their appearance based in part on their personalities. Movies are very rarely willing to make the same bet with women comedians. To rephrase a classic Nora Ephron conversation between otherwise good-natured men from “When Harry Met Sally,” to say a woman has a good personality means nothing more than she is an ugly woman.

That type of attitude is precisely why the average Katherine Heigl/Jennifer Aniston Rom-Com will never be as funny as “Bridesmaids.” There are some jokes you just cannot do with makeup on. There is a very funny scene in “Bridesmaids” where the women eat at a Brazilian restaurant right before getting fitted for dresses. Everyone but Helen, who didn’t eat the meat at the restaurant because she is a vegetarian, gets food poisoning. And as the rest of the group is throwing up in the bathroom, the prideful Annie will not admit that she too is sick, as that would prove her inability to choose a good restaurant. Helen pressures her. Annie stubbornly sticks to her story even as she turns a sickly pale and lines of sweat start running down her face. Does Kristen Wiig look sexy in this scene? No way in hell. Is the scene funny? It’s hilarious. The big question of course is whether the audience will accept Kristen Wiig as a romantic interest even though she is a brave enough comedian to allow herself to be ugly. I hope so. If there is any woman that can become the first female comedic movie star it is Kristen Wiig. I hope that this movie makes a ton of money and becomes the first in Wiig’s hopefully illustrious career.

Surely some people who read this may comment that there are plenty of great female comedians on television. I surely agree. I intend to make a distinction between television and feature length films. Television broke this barrier at least fifty years ago when it allowed Lucille Ball to flex her comedic muscles in order to get drunk on cough syrup and eat an assembly line’s worth of chocolate. Since then, the vast majority of great female comedians from Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne to recently Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey have found their home on television. In fact, it should be noted that the majority of the cast in “Bridesmaids” have done their best work on television. Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are both from “Saturday Night Live.” Wendi McLendon-Covey is from “Reno 9-11.” Ellie Kemper is from “The Office.” Melissa McCarthy can be found on "Mike and Molly." The only bridesmaid who is best known from movies here is Rose Byrne (aka the abnormally beautiful one). Rose, by the way, is not a comedian and is not so funny in this movie, although she does get much funnier as her character is more developed and her perfect hair gets out of place. I don't believe that is a coincidence. 

I don’t want to seem like a feminist in bringing this sort of thing up. (Quite frankly, the more I think about this sort of thing the more I'm inclined to think requiring an -ism to be treated equally is itself demeaning) I am much more comfortable saying it as a person who considers comedy to be a hobby and passion. To the studios I would argue that there is plenty of money to be made by giving talented female comedians like Kristen Wiig leading roles that allow imperfect looks and behavior. There are plenty of profitable comedies that are directed entirely at male audiences. The same should be able to be done conversely. “Bridesmaids” might be a very clear example of that.  

Thor (2/5 Stars)

I find it amazing sometimes just how much faith a movie will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular visuals but how little faith it will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular audio. “Thor” takes place in three different interstellar realms. One is Earth. It looks like New Mexico. One is a name I can’t remember how to pronounce or spell. It is where a bunch of surly frost giants live. It looks like a craggly icecube. The last is Asgard, which is where all the Norse gods of mythology live. Asgard is what the earth would look like if it were flat, made entirely of a city on a mountain, and contained the most extravagant and impractical architecture ever. The inhabitants of Asgard are Norse gods. There is King Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and his two sons Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Then there is a crew of other Norsemen that aren’t very memorable. Finally there is the great Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from “The Wire”) who plays the dutiful gatekeeper that guards the realm from evil threats. Guess what? The conversations of these immortals never rise past the level of present day high school English. The sentences are short and clipped. The vocabulary is limited. The phrases are unimaginative and totally underwhelming. If the gods could speak, I would be hugely disappointed if they sounded like this. I’m making a huge point about this mostly because the movie was directed by Kenneth Branagh, a man best known for his Oscar nominated movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. If anyone is capable of punching up a script to include more exalted dialogue it would be this guy. The fact that this wasn’t done suggests that the makers thought the audience wouldn’t accept it. Because I guess larger-than-life steroid-toking Norse gods that hang out in gargantuan palaces and wear over-elaborate warrior costumes is one thing, but if they had intelligent conversations, well that would just be snobbish.

The plot works really well in the form of a one-paragraph pitch. Earth is a battleground between two realms of gods. One contains the frost giants and the other contains the Norse gods of Asgard. Somehow a couple of frost giants trespass into Asgard. Thor wants to escalate the mere trespass into a war. This is something Odin forbids Thor to do. Thor goes into the frost giant realm anyway and starts a big fight with his hammer. Odin, angered by such arrogance, banishes Thor to Earth. He also banishes Thor’s hammer to Earth but not before putting a curse on it. Only those worthy of the hammer will be able to pick it up and receive its power. That includes Thor at this point, who is now stranded on earth without any of his powers. The first people Thor meets on Earth is a astrophysicist played by Natalie Portman, her mentor played by Stellan Skarsgard, and a college intern played by Kat Dennings. Meanwhile in Asgard, Thor’s half brother Loki connives to usurp the throne.

This could make a really good movie I bet. Let me explain what the movie should have done. Here we have Natalie Portman playing what is said to be a brilliant scientist with social problems. It wouldn’t hurt if she acted like the description. The way she is in the movie is abnormally normal. Then there is the Stellan Skarsgard whose character basically consists of unbelieving skepticism of the existence of Norse gods in the face of increasingly obvious evidence. Almost every conversation he has with Natalie goes something like this:

Stellan: This is silly Natalie, there is no such thing as Norse gods.

Natalie: But what about the elaborate computer generated effects we saw and the man that fell from the sky that looks like Thor and even calls himself Thor.

Stellan: Oh Natalie, you silly person.

That’s paraphrased somewhat but you get the gist. There should have been only one of these exchanges. After awhile Stellan starts sounding really dumb. Finally there is Kat Dennings who is this movie’s attempt at comic relief. If the movie followed my advice in allowing Thor to speak in exalted prose and allowing Natalie to be a total nerd, then this character would have a lot more material to make jokes from. But as it is, she is just another normal person in a town of normal people. She tries, bless her heart, but there is very little to work with. It is hard to make sly wisecracks about people who act just like you.  

I am now going to suggest something that will essentially rewrite the story. How about instead of being banished for his arrogance, Thor was instead banished for being a big dumb idiot. Imagine that his foray into the Ice World was not merely macho zeal, but incredibly stupid. That instead of him going in and easily beating the frost giants (as what happens here), he instead goes in against much larger odds and has to have his ass saved by his dad. Then Odin banishes for his stupidity, sends down his hammer and curses it with hex that Thor can only lift it if he proves that he can use his brains in battle as well as his biceps. Now that he is on Earth without any powers, he will have to do just that.

This would accomplish a couple of things. One, it would make the bad guys much more formidable. Right now, the Frost Giants are kind of pushovers. Two, it would help the movie avoid melodrama and slow motion; the absence of which would have made the movie move faster and be much funnier. Three, it would make the Natalie Portman character much more useful. Here, she helps Thor overcome his arrogance by teaching him table manners. How about instead she taught him the basics of working your brain to accomplish things. Natalie Portman would then be perfectly cast. Did you know that in real life she is brilliant? She's a Harvard graduate and a bona fide scientist. Add to that the fact that she is small and weak. Portman and Thor technically complement each other very well, if only the characters could be developed in a way that allowed them to do so. Thor could help the socially inept scientist in return. For example he could improve her social standing by being a hunk that talks to her in public or perhaps he could help her move a large piece of furniture.

The way it is in the movie, Thor’s problem with arrogance can only be cured with being a more polite person. That’s great I guess but it hardly helps a summer blockbuster. You may be surprised by how many slow scenes of touchy-feely soul searching there is in this movie. Just take the climatic battle sequence. To win, the mighty Norse god Thor pulls a “Jesus.” He “turns the other cheek.” Now I do hesitate to suggest that a character shouldn’t act like Jesus, but I think something must be said about staying true to the source material. Would the Norse god of Thunder really be into self-sacrifice? Come on.

One more thing, I really have to complain about Branagh’s decision to film so much of the movie in weird tilted camera angles. The point I would think of using those angles would be to confuse perception and unsettle the audience. Sometimes that is called for in a movie like “12 Monkeys.” But in this movie? I don’t think so. This movie should be presented in a straightforward manner with confidence. This is a blockbuster about an immortal after all.

The Beaver (1/5 Stars)

I am not a doctor. So you should take what I’m about to say next with a grain of salt. As far as I know, not all depression comes from the same types of places. The most typical kind of depression I would think can be characterized as a lack of hope. This lack of hope can basically be about anything really and have many psychological or emotional causes. In that case, it should help the patient to have a happy family, a loving wife, and a decent job. Therapy, prayer, social interaction, and the like should have positive effects. A second type of depression is merely a symptom of some other type of physical disease, syndrome, or problem. The best examples I can think of are people with sleep apnea. One case involved this horribly depressed guy that no amount of therapy helped. Turned out he was such a loud snorer that he would consistently wake himself up at night. He hadn’t had a decent sleep in years. In his case horse tranquilizer would have been a better help than therapy ever could be. They performed surgery on his nose to fix the snoring problem and his depression vanished.

Now take the example of Walter Black, played in this movie by Mel Gibson. Walter Black used to be a successful businessman, a loving husband, and a good father to his two sons. Now all he wants to do is sleep. He still is the CEO of his toy company although due to his off performance it has been suffering in the stock price lately. His wife, played by Jodie Foster, still loves him but has just kicked him out of the house as a measure of last resort. Every type of therapy, self-help mantra, and pill has been tried to no effect. Keep in mind that his depression apparently preceded all the problems he now has in his life. Now, knowing all of that, which type of depression profile does Walter Black seem to fit? Does he sound like the type of person that has severe complex emotional and psychological problems or does he sound like he is simply utterly exhausted.

This movie is under the impression that Walter Black suffers from emotional problems. I admit that I don’t get it. I spent the entire movie wondering what exactly his problem could possibly be. The depression itself is never explained or given a cause. I’m just going to assume that the writer of this movie, Kyle Killen, got his inspiration from some very successful and brilliant person he knew that inexplicably fell into a depression. He must think that these things just sort of happen from time to time. (That’s life, alas.) That kind of attitude is a mistake I think because it can lead to some pretty wacky very unhelpful solutions not just in the movies but also in real life. A person suffering from physical depression can’t mentally “snap out of it,” because the problem isn’t a mental thing. No, sticking a beaver puppet on your hand and creating a new personality for yourself is not going to work. To this movie’s credit the beaver solution doesn’t work for the entire movie. However, I find it inexplicable that the beaver would work at all. There are several scenes in this movie where the practical aspects of a grown man wearing a beaver hand puppet with a cockney accent are glossed over to a shameful degree. The most distressing is when Walter Black shows up to work with it on and the beaver starts giving orders. Guess what? Nobody quits that very same day. I don’t find that very realistic. If Walter Black is suffering from neither physical depression (for which the beaver would not help) nor emotional depression (for which the comfort of his wife would be a much better solution), then he must be insane. Except he does not look or act like an insane person in the movie. In effect, the character as written and as Mel Gibson plays him doesn’t make sense. And that might be okay in a comedy, but it is fatal in a serious movie. I can’t have empathy for something I don’t understand. Then again, I’m no doctor.

Then there is this subplot involving his son. He has a business at school where for two hundred dollars he will write your paper and at the same time make it sound like you did it. Quite the skill, the novelty of which the movie takes for granted and never explores. One day the school valedictorian/head cheerleader, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who as I am writing this is 21, comes up to him and offers him $500 to write her commencement speech. She explains that even though she gets straight A’s, is the most popular girl in the school, and excels at everything she has ever done, she still has nothing to say. This is what I would refer to as a clever screenwriting technique that gives the lonely misunderstood emo boy an excuse to be needed by the most beautiful girl in the school. Anyway, even in the presence of such a character as Walter Black, she takes the gold medal for most unrealistic character in the movie. This comes to a head in one scene that seems to be constructed as a revelatory insight into the human condition but comes off as more of a cruel joke. It is revealed that this girl was arrested when she was in 8th grade for tagging, which is slang for graffiti. She hasn’t exercised her art in over four years. And then one night, inspired by a sort of “express yourself” cliché, she decides to take it up again. What she accomplishes in one night after four years of no practicing and apparently with only an 8th grade art education looks like something that would take an accomplished artist several weeks to do. She steps back and nonchalantly remarks that, “I guess I had a lot of things to say.” The art is very modern so its hard to understand what exactly she was trying to say, but I will take a guess that is something along the lines of a huge “F*** You” to every teenager who has ever picked up a pencil or paintbrush, tried art for the first time, and realized that it might actually take some time and practice to become good at it.

Again, these sorts of mistakes wouldn’t bother me in a broad comedy, but a movie that intends to be realistic about mental illness and teen angst can’t be allowed to get away with not knowing what it is talking about. These are serious issues after all. Here are some good movies that deal with depression that perhaps you should watch instead: Lars and the Real Girl, Punch-Drunk Love, and Fight Club. Those may seem to be odd choices but they are the best I have seen at portraying how being in a hopeless funk feels like. If you don’t think “Fight Club” is about depression than may I direct you to the scene where the imaginary friend gets so fed up with his real counterpart that he starts beating the living shit out of him. A similar thing happens with the beaver in this movie, but “Fight Club” did it better.

p.s. If you know someone who seems depressed because all they ever want to do is sleep, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that they are actually sleeping and not simply lying on a bed hoping to God they could go to sleep but finding themselves physically unable to. Sleep deprivation is a killer. It’s what interrogators use on prisoners to break them. At least 7 hours a night, people. Chances are you’ll feel better.

Meek's Cutoff (3/5 Stars)

Day (???), Wagon Axel broke, LOST

Director Kelly Reichardt and star Michelle Williams, the team from “Wendy and Lucy,” are collaborating for the second time on the near perfect movie about a lost wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1845 named “Meek’s Cutoff.” The star rating I gave and the words “near perfect” may confuse you. Let me explain. Star ratings aren’t really helpful in that it rates a movie good or not relative to all movies and not other in kind movies of a particular genre. For instance I gave “Sucker Punch,” a flawed movie, four stars mainly for its ambition. It tried for about 100 things and got fifty of them right. “Meek’s Cutoff,” a near perfect movie, gets three stars because it is small. It tried about 10 things and got nine of them right before ending on an ambiguous anti-climax that I didn’t really care for. Does that mean people should like “Sucker Punch” more than “Meek’s Cutoff” generally. No of course not. I just like a bigger movie, that’s all. What I’m trying to say I guess is that the reader is better off reading the review before deciding whether they want to see the movie or not. The mark of a superior reviewer is one that describes a movie well enough that someone interested in that type of movie will have their interest piqued whether or not the reviewer liked it himself (and vice versa). 

In describing Reichardt’s work one has to take out some pretty arty words. Words like “contemplative,” “aesthetic,” “serene,” “minimalist,” etc. Reichardt likes setting her places in Oregon. She likes lingering in long shots. She focuses in on minute details and treats conversations like she would the cinematography. Most of them are not entirely important and fit nicely into the background. I would be surprised if the budget for this movie went into seven figures. In a way, Reichardt works like the wagon train. She’s out there in the wilderness with very little crew or way of direction, trying out something original that almost nobody will see. Still the movie is very well made. The score gives the movie an unsettling tone. The acting is exceedingly natural. Over time, as the water runs out and tensions rise, suspense builds. The climax of the movie should be completely unexciting by any normal movie standard as it involves a situation that is often only the start of much larger action sequences. But here it still works because there is such a sense of reality that people pointing guns at each other feels very serious. It also helps that one is a woman who does so reluctantly. “Meek’s Cutoff” isn’t some sort of revisionist history. The Michelle Williams character, like the other women in the three wagon train, is of her time and place. She acts subordinate to her husband and men in general. But she also doesn’t want to die. And after wandering the desert being led by a braggart named Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood) who hasn’t the slightest idea of where he is going nor the slightest inclination to admit it, she becomes less and less enthusiastic about standing around waiting for the water to run out. Little by little she oversteps her bounds in the politest way possible until finally there is no more room for being polite.   

It was once said by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) that the hardest thing about writing a Western was finding something interesting for the women to do while the men had fun shooting each other and what not. “Meek’s Cutoff” doesn’t necessarily give the women things to do that usually belong to the men, but it is told through the POV of the women. Normally this wouldn’t be so interesting as it involves them spending a good amount of screen time gathering brush, cleaning, and cooking. But here it serves the movie’s purpose in that it underscores the complete hopelessness of the journey. It’s one thing to have an argument over whether to go North or South in search of water, it’s another thing to have to silently stand around while the men argue over which way to go off in the distance. Things get more complicated when Meek captures a lone Indian. He has the bright idea to kill the heathen right then and there. Or perhaps they could ask the Indian to lead them to water. I guess you can say this is the Oregon Trail version of the modern cliché of a guy not wanting to ask for directions.

Bringing along paranoia and emotional wailing is another couple on the wagon train played by Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Every time I see Dano he is hanging out in an unforgiving desert (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will be Blood.) You would think at some point he would get a tan. Anyway he has been perfectly cast. Mr. Paleface does not belong here. He should not have come. Providing the movie with the necessary amount of historical racism is Shirley Henderson. She has a nice way of going about it, like for instance fearfully remarking that Indians are murderous non-beings and then subsequently backing up the statement with the words, “It’s a well documented fact.” On some level every truthful historical movie is going to have characters that are flawed in such a way. Almost everybody back then was what we would call racist and sexist today. Future generations will probably say similar things about us I’m sure, though for what I have no idea. 

One of my favorite books, “The Education of Henry Adams” had the following quote in it that caught my eye:

“The study of history is useful to the historian in teaching him of his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself.” (1905)

Growing up in school you have this notion that all of world history is accessible simply by opening a book, but this isn’t the case. History is limited by memory and preserved only by the efforts of real people who take the time to write it down. It is a profound truth that the people who did write things down were mainly concerned with men and were almost never women. According to what I’ve rated on Netflix, I have seen 1,511 movies. I can count on one hand how many of these were stories about historical women told by a woman (In this, I am subscribing to the auteur theory of filmmaking by crediting the role of author to not the writer but the director of a movie. In either case, still one hand) Specifically, I have only seen two movies. One was Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and now this one. This isn’t simply me being not very broad in movie choices nor is it completely the fault of the Hollywood boy’s club (though admittedly they do a downright awful job of marketing their products to half the movie going public.) It represents a literal gap in our knowledge of the world. These stories are lost to history. “Meek’s Cutoff” is based on a true story. There was a guide on the Oregon Trail named Stephen Meek who led a wagon trail in 1845 off into an uninhabitable no-man’s land. He didn’t know where he was going. The train ran out of water. People died and the settlers mutinied. But there were thousands of wagons not just three. And the Michelle Williams character? She’s completely fictional. Certainly there were women there. Yes, they did all the work we see them do in this movie. But if they had any personalities at all, we have no way of knowing what they consisted of. Nobody bothered to record it.

Hanna (4/5 Stars)

Once upon a time there was a very special girl who lived in the woods.

Hanna is the name of a teenage girl, played by Saoirise Ronan, who apparently has spent all of her life in the arctic somewhere with no other human contact but her father, played by Eric Bana. He has been training to be the ultimate warrior. She can hunt deer with bow or gun, she knows several languages, she is an expert at mixed martial arts, etc. etc. What is he preparing her for and why her? Well, we don’t really know because he never tells her and this movie more or less doesn’t explain anything until Hanna discovers it for herself. Events unfold. Her father tests her ability one day and finds her ready. He hands Hanna a honing device that will give away the position of their house in the woods if switched on. Hanna switches it on. Her father gives her instructions on how to be captured, kill the CIA agent on her case in her holding cell, make her escape by evading a SWAT team in an underground labyrinth, and to meet him in Berlin. The rest of the movie is the unfolding of that plan in various chases and fights. No doubt, the sheer ambiguity of what is going on dampens the suspense and urgency of “Hanna,” and one can see how this movie could have been downright awful. But there is behind this movie a very good director named Joe Wright who has been able to assemble a terrific cast and construct some damn good action sequences. Because this is the type of story that is impossible to know if it is worth watching until the end scenes finally provide some motivation for what you’ve just seen, the only way it can work in the meanwhile is if there is plenty to admire that can stand alone. There is. You can appreciate the clean crisp look of “Hanna.” You can admire the acting ability of Saoirise Ronan, who has created a character that is believably both an innocent and a killer. You can admire Cate Blanchett’s stoic style and screen presence. You can admire Tom Hollander’s ability to look dangerous in short shorts. You can admire the chases and fights all of which are logically edited, competently shot and choreographed, and develop within the thin overlapping lines of creativity and possibility. Finally the ending does make sense of the beginning and things that happened are justified. This is actually one movie that I wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel to. Of course, I don’t mean another thriller like this. I’m thinking more along the lines of a comedy where Hanna tries to assimilate in the world and gets a job working at a carnival or something. I think that would be funny. Just throwing it out there.

This is Director Joe Wright’s first true action movie. It suits his style very well. In the past he has done dramas like “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement” but they have always felt and moved fast. Wright loves to move his camera around his characters in long shots. In “Hanna” there is an especially impressive fight scene with Eric Bana and five special agents in a Subway station. The camera tracks ahead of Bana as he enters station with an agent following him. As he walks forward the camera circles around Bana revealing adversaries on all sides. A fist-fight starts (hand to hand combat because the head bad guy wants Bana alive)  as the camera keeps on circling. This goes on until all the bad guys are incapacitated, at which point Bana picks up a dead bad guy’s phone, calls the last number and acquires some useful information as he is walking out of the station. The entire scene was done in a single unbroken camera shot. It must of required a hell of a lot of choreography, planning, and practice. This is something directors rarely do especially in fight scenes as it is much more work for something the audience might not notice anyway. (The point of long shots is to add realism to a scene. There isn't any movie cheating in a long shot because nothing is being edited.) But the fact that the director can pull it off at all is a testament to his coordination, skill, and ambition. That doesn't mean the technique can't be overused though. Wright's seemingly favorite thing to do in this movie is focus in on Ronan’s face as she is hurriedly going somewhere. Since the camera is moving quite a lot, the background of a shot is always changing and noticeably out of focus. It can get dizzying. But then again, it is a very watchable face to look at. It always looks like its viewing the world with heightened awareness. Go ahead and Google Saoirise Ronan before going to see this movie. If you find it objectionable in any way then “Hanna” is not the movie to see. You will be staring at her in close-ups for a substantial period of time. (Psst, I think Wright might be in love with Ronan...or at least her face)  

Playing the role of bad guy is Cate Blanchett, a CIA agent intent on capturing Hanna. She is exceedingly impeccable in this movie. There isn't a single blemish or a hair out of place. She looks like she's been carved out of alabaster marble and fitted with a fiery red wig. Cate the Great gives off a natural fierceness but unfortunately never goes over the top. I’m still waiting for a performance from her that matches that one line about being a hurricane in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” but goes on for an entire movie. I can definitely see her in the type of role that a Jack Nicholson would play. One of her hired henchmen is Tom Hollander, playing against type as an unstable mercenary with a strange sense of fashion. He does good work as well. This is his third movie working with Wright who has only made four movies. They make a good team. There is also a family on vacation that Hanna meets on the road and travels with for part of the journey. The mom is Olivia Williams who you may remember as the teacher in “Rushmore.” The daughter is about Hanna's age. She quotes pop culture references as if they're important. I think it's a toss-up over who sounds more like a freak. Anyway the family provides a welcome human and comic element in between all of the chase scenes. In one side scene Hanna goes on a double date with the daughter and a couple of soccer players they meet at a campground. They listen to music, which Hanna has never heard before and then there is almost a kissing scene. Almost. I’m telling you this character would be great in a comedy. She reminds me of the aliens from “3^rd Rock from the Sun.”

All the Grimm Fairy tale stuff in the production design are a nice touch. It makes perfect sense for a child-in-danger movie. If you've ever read a un-Disneyfied version of any of the tales you will know what I mean. The Grimm's had literally no qualms about putting children in mortal danger.

p.s. Coming Soon! Hanna 2 - Death in Montana!

Source Code (5/5 Stars)

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the first great movie of 2011. “Source Code” is a top-notch science fiction thriller about a secret government program that allows a person to relive the last eight minutes of another person’s life. This is possible because each person has an eight-minute track of short-term memory that theoretically can be preserved after death. The government sends a soldier back into the memory of a teacher named Sean Fennersten. Once he is in the Source Code, he inhabits Fennersten’s body for eight minutes before a bomb explodes onboard the train he is riding in, killing Fennersten and all the other passengers. The soldier has free will and can control Fennersten’s body, even going so far as to change events within the memory, but he won’t be able to save anybody because the bomb already went off in the past. The soldier’s mission is to identify the bomber in order to prevent another impending terrorist attack. This theoretical technology is completely absurd. I was expecting to see a flux capacitor somewhere but instead the scientist in charge merely invoked quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus. Obviously, he’s counting on my ignorance of the subject so I won't know exactly why his explanation is ridiculous. Well played, sir. But still the story works extremely well because the director, Duncan Jones, and the writer, Ben Ripley, instinctively know that the power in any science fiction story is not how the technology works but how it enables the characters to fulfill some universal need or desire that normally would be impossible to achieve. Why would anyone want to relive the past? Is it because if you knew then what you know now, you wouldn’t have said what you said or done what you did? Let’s be honest. Time travel, at least to the recent past, is about regret. The soldier, Captain Colter Stevens, being the first test subject of this technology doesn’t really know what he is doing. And so he consistently fails in one way or another before the eight minutes runs out and he dies a fiery death, again. Unlike the rest of us, he can reset the clock and start all over. Perhaps, if given enough tries, he can find a way to use his time wisely.

This conceit should be most familiar to anyone who has seen the great movies “Groundhog Day” and “Run Lola Run.” Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, starts each Source Code at the same place right before the woman across from him, his girlfriend, played by Michelle Monaghan, thanks him for his advice. Nobody else in the train remembers the last train ride. This means two things: One, Stevens can act as impulsively and rashly as he wants and not fear any reprisal because the world ends in eight minutes. And Two: Since nobody remembers, nobody can really help him. It’s a good that Stevens spends much more time acting rashly than trying to convince anybody of the situation. He’s not wasting any time, and besides, they’re all dead anyway. Give credit to the Ben Ripley because Stevens’ actions have a persistent logical thread to them. He never repeats himself and no other passenger ever changes his or her personality. (Monaghan, in particular, does a pretty good job of being somebody one could logically fall for in eight minutes). This is a movie you can pay close attention to and get a kick out of how they don’t cheat. Everything is considered and taken into account. I especially liked how the writer put a professional comedian, played by Russell Peters, just two rows behind Stevens as this gives the movie several excuses for witty quips once Stevens’ behavior starts getting more and more irregular. I also got a kick out of when Stevens automatically resorts to racial profiling during one of his first runs because, let’s be honest, if you knew there was a ticking time bomb and nothing else, wouldn’t you suspect the only middle-eastern guy on the train. This movie isn’t afraid to admit that undesirable tendency. Stevens follows him off the train at the next stop, confronts him, and assaults him. And as he is beating him up, to the horror and shock of his girlfriend and everybody else at the station, somebody else activates the bomb and the train in the distance blows up anyway. Back to the drawing board, buddy. No, it’s not going to be that easy.

I won’t go too much more into the plot because following where it twists and turns is a natural pleasure of the movie. Except for one more thing: Why doesn’t Captain Colter Stevens remember training for this mission? The last thing he remembers is being in Afghanistan with his unit. Then one day he wakes up to find himself as Fennersten. At the end of each eight minutes he finds himself in a type of isolated chamber speaking over a video intercom to a soldier named Goodwin, played by Vera Farmiga, and a scientist, played by Jeffrey Wright. Where is he? I won’t tell you but if you ever saw Duncan Jones’ first movie, Moon, the discovery that Colter Stevens eventually makes is not unlike astronaut Sam Rockwell’s discovery that he is living in a cloned body that has a contractual expiration date. Duncan Jones has only two movies under his belt but he is already developing a personal style and motif. His movies are low budget but look like they cost quite a bit. They are sleek, clean, and tightly wound. He is especially interested in science, technology, and bureaucracy’s disregard of the sanctity of human consciousness. If Jones ever wanted to make a period piece, Frankenstein would be the perfect story to adapt. He has a keen understanding of the topic.

For my money, this movie is about two minutes two long. There’s a nice moment near the end with a still frame pause. They should have just held that for a few more seconds and then went straight to the credits. But hey, that’s just me.

Sucker Punch (4/5 Stars)

Zach Snyder, director of “300” and “Watchmen,” tries out his writing chops for the first time with “Sucker Punch,” a story about a wrongly committed girl who attempts an insane asylum escape. Well actually there is five of them and they’re prostitutes in a bordello and um…The whole escape thing involves fighting World War I, giant mechanical samurais, a dragon…and it all takes place at or in uh…imagination land…you know what? I’ll get back to that. “Sucker Punch” lives up to its title. It is a totally unpredictable unapologetic excess of heightened emotion, ultra violence, and stylistic overindulgence. You can arguably say that “Sucker Punch” is a bad movie but that's sort of like remarking that Opera isn’t realistic enough. I will say this though about Snyder. I’ve always had the feeling while watching his movies that I was witnessing something unmistakably new. If “Sucker Punch” is folly, it is at least my favorite kind. An ambitious one.

The movie starts with your average worst-case scenario. A woman dies. She leaves her entire estate to her two daughters. The evil stepfather gets enraged and with largely incestuous overtones attacks his kids. The older daughter, a girl named Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning, runs to get a gun but returns to late. Her sister has been murdered. The evil stepfather frames Baby Doll and gets her committed to an insane asylum. He then bribes the sadistic operator, played by Oscar Isaac, to have Baby Doll lobotomized within the week.

At this point, the movie becomes a completely different parallel movie, whereupon it seems that Baby Doll imagines herself to be a prostitute in a bordello, who is to be sold to a character called the High Roller within the week. She enlists the help of four other fellow prostitutes, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung), and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) to plan an escape. They will need a map, a cigarette lighter, a knife, and a key. The plan is for Baby Doll to put on a highly entertaining burlesque act that will distract all the men in order for the others to steal the items.

I left something out. In the asylum story, there is a psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) who has the inmates perform their sad stories on a theater stage as a sort of therapy. In the bordello, she is a madame who runs the burlesque show. When Baby Doll starts dancing (or supposedly acting out therapy in the first storyline) the movie switches over into battle scenes, which include the five girls donning salacious battle-rattle and fighting various armies for the items. They have to kill Zombie Germans stationed in World War I trenches for the map, a fire-breathing dragon for the fire, and so on. Throughout most of this you can sort of tell what is actually happening in the other story-lines although you may have some very good questions. Like for instance, why is this woman imagining herself in a so very male fantasy world. Or who is the Scott Glenn character, a wise entity that shows up only in the battle fantasies to intone enjoyably ridiculous advice, supposed to be in reality, whatever that is.

The best answer I think is that the several story-worlds have less to do with plot or logic and much more to do with giving Snyder an excuse to zealously indulge into what could perhaps be called an “artistic vision.” I’m guessing he worked backward with a thought process like this: How can I get a team of scantily clad women to battle World War I zombies, medieval dragons, and science fiction robots, all in the same movie? Well, it can totally be in the imagination of a stripper on a mission. That would provide the excuse for putting them in full makeup and revealing outfits the entire time. But wait, what type of stripper would be crazy enough to imagine all that? Well, perhaps if the stripper was but the schizophrenic alter ego of a truly insane woman. But wait, what would make someone be that bat shit crazy? Aha! I’ll have her father kill her sister and frame her for it! Break out the champagne! I’m going to start up the drawings for the gigantic samurai robots!

Really, your enjoyment of this movie is not going to come from the plot or character development. It will come from your willingness to enjoy stand-alone set pieces of ridiculously outfitted women battling equally ridiculous things. In that aspect, the movie truly delivers. The action scenes are outrageous and innovative. Helpfully, Snyder also has the habit of using slow motion. This allows the viewer to admire the artistic still frame, which in turn stops the action from becoming a Bayesian mish mash of mindless confusion. Outside the battle scenes, there is also plenty to admire in style if not in substance. I especially like the camera angles and the exaggerated details in objects and characters. (The Mayor and Cook were my favorite grotesquely comical caricatures). Plenty of attention is placed on composition, color palette, and atmosphere. Snyder’s use of green screen in every shot allows him the requisite control to stylize every single shot. The voiceovers and serious talk could have been more poetic and Snyder's choice of music isn't very good, but still there is a truly great movie waiting somewhere in Snyder’s style. I hope to someday see it. 

The character development in this movie leaves something to be desired. I don’t think it was a very good idea to name the characters Sweet Pea, Amber, or Baby Doll. Blondie is okay I guess. But really, given what the women are made to do, the only name that makes any sense is Rocket. She’s played by Jena Malone and is appropriately the only actor here that gives off any lasting impression. (Emily Browning on the other hand seems to have been cast solely on her ability to look sad). Jena you may remember from “Donnie Darko” and “Into the Wild” and probably don’t remember from one of my favorite hidden movies, “Cheaters.” She deserves to be on the short list of underrated and perpetually underused actresses. Her presence here lends the team its admittedly limited amount of credibility. 

Two more things. The makers will have you believe that this contains themes of female empowerment. Plenty of critics, including two I highly respect A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, say it is decisively misogynistic. I disagree with both. It’s neither. It’s a comic book movie and as such it contains a certain style that equally applies to both men and women. The good guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal beauty and the bad guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal ugliness. I don’t recall anybody saying that the one-dimensional Spartans in “300” with their ridiculously perfect perpetually uncovered abdominals were somehow demeaning to men. They simply commented on how nice the abs looked. That attitude should be applied to the heroines of this movie. It's true, Snyder deals in the objectification of people. But then again so do all comic books, and for that matter anything dealing with fashion, or why not the entire branch of art called Humanism going all the way back to when Michelangelo added all those muscles in the Sistine Chapel for no other reason than he thought the human body was an admirable thing and that there was no harm in making it look its best. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and people may logically be turned off by the presentation of these women (or like me have a preference for one amongst the others), but I don’t think anyone can argue that Snyder, or for that matter his wife/executive producer Deborah Snyder, wasn’t trying to make the team look as gorgeous as he thought possible. There's nothing wrong with that. 

As far as the plenty of "women in danger" material in this movie, I can’t see how you can have an action movie without it. If there isn’t any danger, there isn’t any conflict. The movie might as well have taken place at a shooting range with the bad guys being cardboard cutouts. The test I would think is whether the makers intend the audience to empathize primarily with the women: Do they mean for us to feel scared when they are in danger and to be relieved when they are triumphant? I think the answer to that is obvious in this movie. If the test worked any other way than every movie with a female action star would be automatically exploitative. That would include Ripley, Clarice Starling, and Lisbeth Salandar. Truly we would be missing out by keeping all those fictional women in the movie universe up on their pedestals totally safe all the time.

Having said that, the PG-13 rating is completely absurd, a perfect example of how hypocritical the MPAA can be. Future moviemakers take note. You can kill all you want just as long as there isn’t any blood. You can present sexual violence just as long as there isn’t any nudity. And you can have characters yell "motherfucker" just as long as you cut out the audio for the second half of the word. Of course, the most ridiculous thing is what the MPAA apparently thought was too objectionable to keep in. The credits and trailer show what sort of look to be like the actual burlesque shows that we never get to see in the movie. So apparently murder and near-rape is fine, but a song and dance number that the women seem to be actually enjoying isn’t. Hmm…now is that misogynistic?