Deep Fried Molestation: Beth Hated Compliance

Compliance is about a nineteen-year-old fast food worker who is sexually abused under her manager's supervision because a guy who calls the restaraunt gets his kicks by pretending to be a police officer and urging the manager and other employees to perform a body-cavity-search-and-then-some on said fast-food worker. It is based on a true story.

You will not like Compliance at all. That is the kindest thing I can say about it.

The good news about Compliance is that it isn’t exploitative. It doesn’t enjoy or expect you to get any pleasure at all out of the sustained sexual humiliation of its starlet Dreama Walker, a grueling ordeal which takes up the majority of the film’s running time. The bad news about Compliance, then, is twofold: first, it is about the sustained sexual humiliation of Dreama Walker, and second, it is not a movie you will get any pleasure out of. In other words, this isn’t exactly a film you recommend to friends and loved ones..

That’s not to say that I would never recommend difficult movies to friends and families. I can think of dozens of once-is-enough movies I’ve passed on to others over the years, and the plain truth is that Compliance just isn’t one of those movies. Alongside the squirm-inducing imagery of Walker’s torment, this movie also features fatally inept plotting, character motivations that strain credulity, and general left-footedness in scripting and staging the events. It's impossible to make the arch of this story suspenseful or interesting. As soon as the mysterious voice on the phone starts suggesting that the manager (Ann Dowd) personally strip search her own employee instead of taking the girl to a police station, we know that this man is not a police officer. The only question that remains is 1) how long is it going to take this manager to realize that this man is not a police officer and 2) how ugly will this ordeal  will get in the meantime.

Compliance, then, is an hour and a half of watching abuse get worse and worse at the hands of increasingly gullible people. After the ruse is up, there is no more plot left to prop the story up. Everyone stands around looking shocked, there are rumors of a lawsuit, and the movie ends.

Interspersed with awful scenes of the girl's humiliations are mournful long shots of boiling deep-fat fryers and greasy sinks, as though we're supposed to be disgusted not only by sexual assault but also by the concept of fast food in general. It seems like a case of misplaced priorities, but then again, maybe I like Chick-Fil-A too much.

This movie was heartily acclaimed when it played at Sundance and I can't imagine why. Possibly because it's based on a true story and because it's a finger-wagging warning about listening to authority. I don't know. I'm gonna go get some Chick-Fil-A.

That'll make it better.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Fun with Jerks: Why Other People's Pain Is Hilarious

Sometimes it's fun to watch awful people suffer. In movies, at least. In real life it's no fun at all but on the screen it's hilarious.

Sometimes.

As case studies, I submit two black comedies: one the recently-released apocalypse comedy (one of four this year, actually) It's a Disaster and the other Diablo Cody's most tolerable movie to date, 2011's Young Adult. Both feature good writing, solid performances, reprehensible behavior, tons of despair, and, yes, truly despicable characters for the leading roles.

One of these movies is funny.


For those of you unfamiliar with this little indie gem, It's a Disaster is about four couples meeting up for their monthly couples' brunch, a ritual none of them seem to look forward to and a few of them actively despise. On the guest list is Tracy (Julia Stiles) and her new(set) boyfriend, Glen (David Cross). While Glen struggles to mesh his own awkward self into this group of garden-variety, brittle suburban sociopaths (who are also, apparently, insatiable cheaters), a massive terrorist attack in nearby New York City isolates the group from the outside world. Trapped inside with only hours to live before they succumb to the grisly symptoms of nerve gas, the group struggles to come to terms with their impending deaths and make the most of their last moments, mostly through orgies and meth. If this scenario sounds like a barrel of laughs, I'm afraid you're almost as sick as I am.

Young Adult, a bit more widely known than Disaster but not nearly as well known as Cody's nerve-grating Juno, is about a former high school beauty queen Mavis (Charlize Theron) who goes back to her rural hometown to reconnect with her high school sweetheart. The one wrinkle in Mavis' plan is that Mavis' ex Buddy (Patrick Wilson) has already married another lady and has an infant daughter. Completely unfazed by this discovery, Mavis sets out to destroy her ex's marriage, win her man back, and regain her status as queen bee in her hometown. Oh yeah, and she's an unemployed alcoholic and she sleeps with a guy played by Patton Oswalt whose, uh, plumbing doesn't work because he was the victim of a particularly brutal hate crime. And it's a comedy.

Yes, yes, it's very sad. Don't worry, though, this is as low as the camera ever pans.

No one is getting out of the above scenarios with destroying a couple of lives, or at the very least, going out on a sour note once nerve gas has already destroyed what was left of their lives. But the first movie, Disaster, is significantly funnier than the second, because while both movies feature deeply unlikeable people, it's much, much funnier to watch terrible people punish each other rather than take it out on everyone else.

Although David Cross' character is at least a little sympathetic -- he keeps his head and tries to comfort characters who are scared and panicking -- most of the characters in Disaster are selfish jerks. They're punishing each other with their petty, narcissistic actions as well as getting punished in return, and it's as funny and satisfying as hell. It's funny to watch these people bicker and argue while, outside, the bodies of their neighbors get eaten by vultures, because we think they deserve it. They're mean-spirited, immature, shallow, and, hilarious, so watching them go out on a bad note feels like vindication. They're going to die from nerve gas, but it's funny because we think they have it coming.

Beth and Louise fully endorse the deaths of all these people.

Young Adult, on the other hand, still features strong dialogue and performances, but because it's such an amoral film it's not as satisfying. Mavis is in a downward spiral of alcoholism and depression, but she's taking everyone down wit her. And "everyone," in this case, includes her fundamentally good friends and neighbors, who seem to want nothing but the best for her. She ruins special occasions, embarrasses herself and her ex by flirting openly and publicly with him, and blows off the attention of the only people who seem to have any genuine compassion for her.

An unlikable heroine (or even a morally reprehensible but sympathetic one, as Mavis occasionally can

be) isn't necessarily a fatal flaw in a film. But the problem is that Diablo Cody, who penned this script, doesn't seem to understand how rotten Mavis can be -- especially compared to the other characters. Buddy and his wife are happily married with a beautiful daughter, and Patton Oswalt's character Matt is capable of far more kindness and sensitivity than Mavis ever shows. What is puzzling, though, is that Cody apparently agrees with Mavis, in that Mavis is better than everyone around her. In a late, triumphant monologue in the movie, Mavis "discovers" that everyone in her hometown is fat and uneducated, while Mavis is beautiful, lives in the city, and publishes books. Mavis can then do better than her ex, because she is in a class above him. Never mind that Buddy has a good family, good job, good life, and good heart. Mavis is superior because looks like Charlize Theron and has a college degree.

The moral universe of It's a Disaster, then - lousy people being lousy to other lousy people - allows it to be funnier than Young Adult - lousy people preying on decent people while the screenwriter remains oblivious to all the lousiness. If you're going to have fun with jerks on Netflix tonight -- and that's the best kind of fun, really -- it's more fun to watch jerks be jerks and die rather than be jerks and get vindicated.

So give It's a Disaster a few hours. It'll be more fun than couples' brunch, I'm sure.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Podcast #5 - Will It Blend?

The girls take a look at the work of director Adam Wingard, whose movie You're Next premiered at TIFF in 2011 and finally opened for wide release last weekend. After experiencing some serious appliance envy over the kitchen equipment in You're Next, we review Wingard's little-seen 2010 serial killer movie, A Horrible Way to Die.

You can listen and subscribe here! And why not do both -- it's free, after all! Leave us a comment and rating on iTunes!

If you haven't yet, see Take Shelter. Skip Mud.

Take Shelter (2011) is a disturbing, suspenseful thriller that hovers between genres: sometimes horror, sometimes a portrait of mental illness, sometimes gut-wrenching family drama, all of it a film you should rent as soon as possible.  Take Shelter is the story of Curtis (Michael Shannon), a construction worker in rural Ohio who is the sole breadwinner for his wife (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter (Tova Stewart). He has a steady job, good friends, a loving wife, a cute kid, and, apparently, excellent health insurance that will repair her hearing.  Ostensibly he has everything he needs to be happy, but is haunted by visions of an apocalyptic storm, one where rain “like motor oil” falls, birds collapse dead from the sky, and faceless villains appear in the windows of his house and car to steal his daughter away. To prepare for the coming storm, Curtis sets out to build a fortified storm shelter in their backyard.  The obsession costs him his savings, his job, the trust of his wife, and the insurance that he needed for his daughter’s surgery.  And the storm comes anyway. 

Sucks to suck, Jessica.

One of my most reliable tests for if a movie is worth recommending to other people is whether or not I’m thinking about it the next morning.  Take Shelter stuck with me through the next morning and several mornings following in a visceral, primitive sort of way.  This isn’t a story of a man gradually succumbing to his family history of schizophrenia, though that is hinted to be the explanation for his nightmares.  Rather, Curtis’s terror is one that pushes beyond the bounds of mental illness.  This is a man surrounded by a home and by people he loves desperately and would die to protect, but he is haunted by the constant awareness that one day, inevitably, these people and things will be taken from him.  The “storm” can be read as death, or foreclosure, or sickness, or a stock market crash, or anything else, but the constant, gut-level dread that Curtis faces is one that many viewers will find relatable. 

If you’re going to pick a Jeff Nichols movie to watch this weekend, make sure it’s Take Shelter and not Mud (2013), no matter how much buzz it got and no matter what its tomatoameter rating was.  Nichols’s second and third films were remarkably similar in their setting— rural, character-driven dramas— and in their downright moodiness, but Mud makes a lot of missteps Shelter managed to avoid.  For starters, in terms of casting, Nichols stacked the deck of Shelter in all the right ways.  Shannon, in particular, progresses stunningly from a visceral, body acting of anxiety in his shifting eyes and facial features and builds slowly to his full-on meltdown in the climax of the film, and the static performance from Chastain, who is resolutely loyal but puzzled and heartbroken by his husband’s unraveling, is perfect opposite him.  By contrast in Mud, Matthew McConaughey’s performance is solid, but the script gives him little to work with, and places him opposite Reese Witherspoon who contributes nothing to this film but a tattoo and accent. 

 Take Shelter is one of the standout films I’ve seen over the last two years, and this weekend I’m planning to sit down and watch Shotgun Stories, Nichols’s first film.  If it’s anywhere close to Take Shelter, and I’ve heard good things, I’ll be even more convinced that this is a director to watch.

For more Beth and Louise Hate Movies, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast.

Long-range Vocalizations and Why I'll Never Go Back to SeaWorld

We're sneaking up on the 100th anniversary of the death of Murderous Mary, whose life has become a cautionary tale on the abuse of animals for entertainment.  If you don't know the story, here it goes: Mary was an circus elephant who, after years in captivity, flew into a rage and crushed a handler.  The details of the death are vague, but in the days following the "murder" people in the nearby eastern Tennessee towns demanded her execution.  After attempting to shoot Mary, and seeing that the bullets had no effect on her massive body, the circus owner realized it's hard to kill a six-ton elephant.  He and the other handlers brainstormed numerous inventive and gruesome ways to kill Mary, finally settling on a public hanging with an industrial crane.  After breaking the first chain, Mary was successfully executed by hanging on September 13, 1916.

I thought about Mary last night as I left the Tennessee movie theater close to my house and seven hours from the place of her death.  I was there to see Blackfish, which tells the story of Tilikum, a 12,000 pound bull orca whale who was captured off the coast of Washington in the 1980s, and since has spent his entire life in captivity, most of it at Florida's SeaWorld.  Since then, he has been involved in the deaths of three people, most recently an experienced SeaWorld trainer in 2010.  Tilikum is not a murderous monster, but rather the product of industry that has damaged him physically and psychologically, rendering him dangerous.  After all, Tilikum is not the only orca in captivity known to be unpredictable.  The film describes some of the 33 other recorded incidents of orcas acting violently toward humans in zoos, yet there is no record of these whales doing intentional harm in the wild.  By the end of the film, the message is clear: orcas are brilliant, complicated creatures with full emotional and relational lives we do not understand, and to keep them in captivity is physical and psychological abuse.


According to Blackfish, one of the consequences of commodifying orca whales is the breakup of their family units, which have unique languages and cultures when left intact in the wild.  This film shows two scenes of baby whales being taken from their parents, and they are as gut-wrenching and disturbing as if it had shown a human child separated from her mother.  During Tilikum's capture from the wild, drag nets pull him and three other baby whales into a pen away from their mothers, where cranes then hoist them into boats.  The whole excruciating process is captured on camera, while the mother whales wait in a line on the other side of the drag net, their heads out of the water, screaming back and forth to the babies trapped in the nets.  The sound of grief and terror transcends all languages; even the boat's crew members cry in interviews years later when they recount the event.  The whole incident leaves three of the baby orcas dead, whose bodies are cut open, filled with rocks, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.  Apparently this brutal separation of families takes place in captivity as well.  Years later, when Florida's SeaWorld sells one of Tilikum's offspring to another park, the mother whale goes into mourning for her child.  She goes to the corner of her pool, refusing to eat or move, and then begins screaming.  When SeaWorld calls on a marine biologist to explain the cries, she reports the whale is making "long-range vocalizations," trying to get in touch with her lost child, wherever she was.

I watched both of these scenes with open-mouthed horror.  One of the critiques I've read about this movie is that it is one-sided, and at times emotionally manipulative, but this isn't a movie that is trying to give you both sides of a debate on animals in captivity.  This is a movie that wants to leave you in awe of the mind and power of these animals, and in awe of the evil we do against them when we act in ignorance and motivated by profit.  And does Blackfish ever accomplish this goal.  In another scene, an orca attacks his trainer by pulling him under water for as deep and as long as his body can withstand, then releases him to the surface, only to pull him back again.  Two things jarred me in this scene.  First, the whale seemed to know exactly how long he could show his frustration without killing the trainer, and second, that all the trainers left on shore did nothing.  This isn't to their shame.  After all, what could they do?  How do you stop a 12,000 pound orca whale from doing anything?  Could you even kill it if you wanted to?  These are the images that bring Murderous Mary to mind, another intelligent, relational animal whose story leaves us wondering what to do when you've captured and damaged an animal you can't control.

Go see this movie.  Yes, it's content is political; this is a movie with a clear platform against the captivity of orca whales and it makes no attempt to balance that message.  But it's also a cautionary tale that is deeply resonate in the years of the global warming debate: what happens when humans insist on asserting their dominance over nature, in all its complexity and intricacy that we do not understand and for which we lack the proper reverence.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: Come for the Accents, Stay For The Bondage Edition

I hate this movie.

I generally applaud David Cronenberg’s devout love of brevity. I really do. But in order to adapt Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure into something more suitable for a jittery, distractible film audience, he’s trimmed the already-brisk original screenplay down to a starved, skeletal, ninety-seven-minute corset-ripper. So get this movie a sandwich, because this poor thing looks hungry, and get out of this movie's way, because it's in a big damn hurry.

Apparently the many minutes left out of this movie included any reason we might have for caring about the characters bickering on screen, other than the fact that the characters are important thinkers and they are bickering about important things. This is a problem because, even if what Jung, Freud, and Kiera Knightly say and do is significant according to modern historians, it doesn’t mean that what they say and do is interesting to this movie’s audience. A Dangerous Method wants to be an account of the complicated relationship between two brilliant psychiatrists and the woman who has the potential to rise to their level. Unfortunately, because the movie clips by so damn fast we get the feeling that most of the drama is taking place while we’re busy watching another character hurtle through his own arc. Thus, A Dangerous Method is not about disillusionment in academia, the strain of having a famous mentor, the birth of psychoanalysis, and sex, lies, and anti-Semitism in Victorian Europe. It’s about Michael Fassbender pretending to be Jung, Viggo Mortenson pretending to be Freud, and Kiera Knightly pretending to be Russian.

"I'M CRAZY!"

And boy, does Kiera Knightly bring her Russian A-game. She is aggressively, furiously, in-your-face Russian. She lays her accent on so thick you can barely understand what she’s saying. The good news is that for the first twenty minutes, Miss Knightly’s character is demented, so what she says isn’t particularly important. But in the next two acts she becomes a highly literate, mentally balanced academic (apparently in a couple of afternoons), so we ought to care about her thoughts, opinions, and observations. Just kidding; she plays a Jewish woman in Victorian Europe, so it’s okay with these characters if Miss Knightly talks like she’s gargling a mouthful of borscht. 

What’s more, Miss Knightly’s transformation from spastic to sane also seems to have been left on the editing room floor, because when Miss Knightly plays crazy, she plays Black Swan crazy. When we first meet her she is thrashing in puddles and yelling at no one through carriage windows. Then Michael Fassbender decides to let her analyze a word association test he did on his wife, and Knightly is cured, though unfortunately still Russian.

"I'M SOOOOO CRAZY!"

Other than that, there’s not a lot of movie to talk about. Michael Fassbender is fine and Vigo Mortenson brings his best Freud face but there really isn’t anything here to connect with or get excited about. I would say something about Vincent Cassel’s performance because he’s a well-known actor in a bit part, but I frankly forgot he was in this movie until I rewatched the trailer while writing this review. I think he’s the guy who talks Fassbender into having sex with Knightly, so we can blame him for those sequences.

Oh yeah -- Fassbender and Knightly have an affair, and there’s some rudimentary bondage and spanking scenes (which of course got top billing in the movie’s marketing) but this subplot of Knightly's and Fassbender's suppressed and explosive desires  is hardly more engaging than anything else that happens in this movie. We just don’t care about these people enough to care about their relationship. We do get to watch Fassbender spank Knightly into what looks like a hilariously telegraphed orgasm, which is apparently possible in this movie, so this scene is worth the price of popcorn if not the price of admission. This scene is particularly memorable because all the slapping and yelling caught my attention (I was too bored to think straight that this point) and got me to look up from my knitting for a couple of minutes. But then Knightly starts up talking again in her ever-loving Russian voice and I was back to being more involved with my knitting. Some more stuff happens. Jung write a letter. Jung and Freud get on a boat. Jung goes to America. Jung comes back. Knightly dies in the Holocaust. Then it's over.

"SERIOUSLY CRAZY!"

If you’re in the mood for a Cronenberg movie, you have at least a dozen other far more interesting films to choose from. There’s one where Jeff Goldbloom turns into a giant fly and one where Jeremy Irons thinks John Lone is a woman (M. Butterfly), for starters. Cronenberg pretty much canonized the concept of body horror, but it looks like costume drama chamber pieces just aren’t his game. Mortenson and Fassbender have both been in better films and Knightly has surrounded herself with better performers for so long that she’s managed to trick most people into thinking she can actually act. Given the filmography of all involved, A Dangerous Method is a a disappointing, lackluster turn, and it’s a memory I’m better off repressing. 

"Cured!"

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Ben-Hurting: A Fail of the Christ

Why, oh why, is a remake for Ben-Hur in talks?

MGM must be barren wasteland of no ideas.  I see this going one of two ways: this could have been pitched as Oscar bait, an expensive winter release with an all-star director and cast, or a summer blockbuster that uses modern technology to, erm, update all the effects of the 1959 original. 

The all-practical effects in an 18-acre set piece with 15,000 extras and live chariot racing, as seen in 1959.  BUT IMAGINE IF IT WAS ALL CGI.

 Given that MGM is currently in talks with Timur Bekmambetov, the guy who directed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’m guessing the latter choice.  Ben-Hur will be an unnecessary, uncalled for summer action blockbuster with a B-grade cast so they can spend more money on all the fight scenes and action sequences.

I’d like to float Liam Hemsworth for the lead.  He seems like a pretty major cinema draw.

Here’s the problem: summer blockbusters are not the cash cows they used to be.  Quite the opposite, and we’re hardly the first to notice this.  This summer, a string of over-long, 200-million-dollar-plus budget films, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, White House Down, After Earth, and Elysium have all lost money.  Lone Ranger alone may lose 190 million dollars for Disney, after an insane 215 million dollar budget, and that’s the low estimate, by the way.  This bad boy clocks in at 149 minutes, a budding hallmark of the drawn-out, big-budget summer action movie.

The 1959 Ben-Hur fits the portrait of the expensive, over-long summer blockbusters of today.  At the time, it was the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of  $118 million, adjusting for inflation, and this sucker has a run time of 224 minutes. The updated Bekmambetov version will have to be long and expensive to do any justice to the original story.  But here’s the problem: A Ben-Hur update has no clear audience.  I don’t know who MGM thinks will go see this movie.  On one hand, Bekmambetov could up the violence of the action sequences and go for a PG-13 rating, drawing action-oriented audiences.  But the subtitle of this movie’s source material, the Lew Wallace novel, is, “A Tale of the Christ,” and somehow that doesn’t sound like a tagline that will bring the fan boys running.  Alternatively, Bekmambetov could keep this a family film, shoot for the PG rating, and try to attract the Evangelical dollars.  This brings to mind films like Evan Almighty, at date the most expensive comedy ever filmed and which had banked on bringing Christians to the box office, and John Carter, which didn’t specifically aim for Christian audiences but did try to pitch itself as a family action film.  Both of these films were studio disasters, losing $88 million and $200 million dollars for their respective studios.

Can you believe we’re talking in dollar amounts this insane?

I’m calling it right now: The new Ben-Hur will lose $150 million dollars.  You heard it here first. The only upshot is that if this movie fails spectacularly-- and oh, it will-- we'll never have to sit through a remake of Casablanca or Gone with the Wind.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!