REVIEWS IN BRIEF, JANUARY 2016

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the films watched by the blogger in recent weeks

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Mustang (Ergüven, 2015)

There us a great deal to admire around the largely French-made Turkish-language film Mustang. It scores two major coups even before you start watching it: it's a study of adolescent female psychology and sexuality in a cloistered Turkish family, which is rare enough; and it was directed and co-written by a Turkish woman, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, which is rare too. It is an altogether politically brave work. But it's really not that compelling of a movie. It's a rock-solid debut, but it's also a very debuty debut, the kind that you get when a filmmaker has many thoughts and much to say, and is terrified as all hell that we might not follow all of her thinking if she doesn't endlessly belabor it.

The film's subjects are five sisters, from oldest to youngest: Sonay (İlayda Akdoğan), Selma (Tuğba Sunguroğlu), Ece (Elit İşcan), Nur (Doğa Doğuşlu), and Lale (Güneş Şensoy). With their parents dead, they live under the dictatorial care of their uncle (Ayberk Pekcan) and grandmother (Nihal Koldaş), the unsmiling embodiment of all that is conservative and traditional - that is to say, repressive towards any expression of anything but utter docility on the part of the girls - in Turkish culture. Sick of his charges' recent willfulness, the uncle has decided to marry them all off as quickly as possible, which triggers a wave of resistance, as his nieces fight back in many small ways; Sonay is able to strong-arm him into letting her marry a young man of her own choosing, Ece finds a more drastic way of thwarting her uncles' ugly will, and Lale stages an outright revolution in the confines of the home where they all uncomfortably co-exist.

The setting and themes are Turkish, but the style is purebred European realism, to inconsistent effect. Like a lot of realist films from that continent, Mustang boasts a cast made up largely of non-professionals. As tends to happen in such scenarios, the actors get better as they get younger: Şensoy is the unabashed stand-out, as a fiery little modernist surrounded by arbitrary conventions who knows that she needs to keep her opinions to herself at the risk of her own well-being, but hasn't quite mastered the skill to avoid letting her anger express itself all over her face. Most of the performances surrounding her aren't nearly as organic, though the four actors playing the older sisters all have at least one big moment where they feel completely natural and in the skin of their characters.

Still, it's clear right from the start that this is The Lale Show, and Mustang suffers from the meandering it takes until the narrative catches up with that reality. Ergüven and co-writer Alice Winocour take great pains to make the film a compendium of all the various ways that being an adolescent woman in Turkey can be awful, and while admiring the intellectual nobility of that goal, it leaves large portions of the film, particularly in its middle third, feeling too much like it's covering bullet points rather than crisply moving through a story. Some of the individual sequences are bracing - a protracted sequence involving Selma's ritualistic social and medical humiliation around the act of losing her virginity is a horrifically potent snatch of down-with-patriarchy storytelling - but they invariably feel written, in a way that's never to the film's benefit.

That being said, Ergüven is on much surer footing when choosing where to set her camera and how to maneuver the performers in front of it; Mustang derives a great deal of effect from the sense of claustrophobic sameness in how the walls and rooms of the house are built into great slabs cutting off the back of the Z-axis. It's enough to argue that Ergüven has a great film in her future even if this distinctly over-heralded feature isn't quite there yet. There's nothing surprising in the film's aesthetic, but it's executed with admirable skill and vitality.

7/10

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Point Break (Core, 2015)

Christmas Day is late to make an end run for Worst Movie of the Year laurels, but the remake of Point Break holds nothing back in making sure it was the strongest possible candidate for that dishonor. It would be hard to run down a list of all the worst-case-scenarios the film manages to fulfill, though surely not least is the thoroughness with which the movie misses all the points of Kathryn Bigelow's sleek and sweaty 1991 original. It is, as it turns out, possible to tell a version of this story in which there is no homoeroticism, not even the basic nugget of a thoroughly hetero bromance. Once you've taken that out of the equation, I have to wonder why even bother.

Not "because of the rest of the plot", for the new screenplay by Kurt Wimmer - last seen mauling an early '90s classic to death when he wrote the 2012 remake of Total Recall - doesn't care about that, either. Point Break, then as now, is about an FBI agent, Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) - his made-up YouTube name, we learn in the first of many points where the film sounds like an 80-year-old man confidently identifying what The Kids Today enjoy - who has a background in sports, which makes him a good candidate to infiltrate a group of bank robbers/extreme athletes. Which in this movie, does very much mean X-Treme, since everything that happens in the movie resembles a big budget Mountain Dew ad devised by cocaine addicts. You would not think that this plot would be very taxing, since the '91 movie devoted about twenty minutes to it and still felt more than complete, but Wimmer and first-time director Ericson Core lose the thread entirely. Multiple times, in fact.

Primarily, Point Break '15 has some notion about being a story of Johnny's seduction by the fast-paced life of beatific enlightenment-seeker Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez, the worst he's ever been), despite his certainty that Bodhi is the leader of a group of extreme athletes/robbers. Why is sure of this, given how incomprehensible the gang's modus operandi is, with the painstaking exposition completely contradicted by the subsequent plot, is quite hard to say. But he is very much correct, and the film thinks that it's about the tension between Johnny's desire to be a good cop, and his desire to let Bodhi's bullshit quest for spiritual purification through base jumping and rock climbing heal his lost soul. In practice, Ericson Core (who is not the state-of-the-art motherboard in a cell phone, but a veteran cinematographer, who shot this very film) is so busy filming the constant yacht parties and shabby-chic environs of Bodhi and co. with the most luxuriant lifestyle porn tones, that the whole movie completely forgets that there's anything resembling a moral dimension is lost for well over an hour.

In the "yes, and the portions are so small!" half of the evening, Point Break is also colossally ugly lifestyle porn, managing to make towering Alpine peaks, severely blue Mediterranean waves, and the profound greens of the Mexican jungle all look equally filthy with the ugliest digital cinematography in years (Venezuela's Angel Falls emerges with its beauty intact, because you can't be so untalented as to fuck up Angel Falls). It is a beastly film, just beastly, with paper-thin characters played badly and given awkwardly overdetermined and under-examined motivations as they parade in front of way too many piss-yellow backdrops. I had hoped for something tacky enough to be enjoyably infuriating; and I guess I got it, though this is the kind of joy only a dyed-in-the-wool masochist could ever appreciate.

1/10.

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The Forest (Zada, 2016)

Natalie Dormer has an interesting face. I don't necessarily mean to say that she's enormously attractive, though of course she is, in an unconventional way. That "unconventional" makes the difference - the shape of her head is flatter than you'd expect from a Hollywood-type star, and that pushes her features together in an unusual way, and the net result is that she grips the camera even when she's not doing anything particular with her expressions. She has the kind of face that makes one yearn for silent movies to come back, because the basic matter of looking at her is pure cinema, and only encumbered by having to factor in dialogue.

Then again, when the dialogue is that of The Forest, Dormer's leading debut in the movies and the first American wide release of 2016, it's all too easy to wish for any kind of scenario that would lead to us not having to hear it. It's a perplexingly racist serving of hot, steaming Orientalism, in which the very real Aokigahara forest at the base of Mount Fuji, the world's second-most frequented destination for suicides after the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco, serves as a generic haunted setting for a hokey chain of totally predictable ghost-related scares, and this isn't even the worst thing about it, though it's easily the most offensive (Aokigahara is played by a forest in Serbia, thank Christ). Dormer plays one-half of identical twin sisters, Sara - which is to say, of course she plays both twins, the other being Jess, but the whole point is that Jess went missing on a trip to Japan, last seen entering Aokigahara, and now Sara has traveled to The Exotic East (Where They Eat Still-Living Bugs, Ew) to find her sister and confront her own metaphorical ghosts which the menacing, evil forest represents as literal ghosts, in case you only started watching horror movies three or four days ago and haven't come across that old chestnut yet.

The solitary thing the film does that is interesting, other than train Mattias Troelstrup's camera on Dormer's face in many close-ups, is cut the first act into tiny slivers and thread them through the first two minutes or so of the second act, so the film functions as a series of discordant flashbacks through most of its "getting to know you" phase. This pays off, as well as it might, in establishing Sara as a person morbidly incapable of living fully in the present when she can keep niggling over things from the past, and if The Forest ever manages to do something worthwhile as a character study - it does try, bless its heart, that's a lot for a PG-13 January horror picture - it comes from building Sara's particular brand of depression into its structure.

But Dormer, interesting face or not, isn't a very emotionally expressive actress, and The Forest does her no favors by saddling her with Taylor Kinney as a co-star, an actor who radiates insincerity, but at least has the rakish meatiness of a charming cad. Neither of them, meanwhile, benefit from the exposition-heavy script by Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai, which requires both of them to state very simplistic things in too much detail, while making choices whose one and only reason for being is to make absolutely sure that the movie doesn't stop after 30 uneventful minutes. Composter Bear McCreary tries to make it a horror film, and tries very hard to remind us that the film takes place in a Disney World version of Japan; director Jason Zada also tries to make it a horror film, and even succeeds at staging a couple of jump scares, wrings some level of tension out of delaying the reveal that a creepy Japanese schoolgirl is a ghost well after we've figured it out but before Sara has, and isn't afraid to let the frame go murky when the sun starts to go down. But in its best moments, this is still a dimestore J-horror knock-off, and its worst moments are so hideously routine and made more unnatural than necessary by the script and actors that the best moment seem like you might have imagined them as a means of staving off boredom.

4/10

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Sisters (Moore, 2015)

The bar for movies starring TV genius Tina Fey is so low that really, I only needed to not actively hate Sisters to declare it a success. Mission accomplished, but not by a nearly secure enough margin. Perhaps the easiest way to point out the great gaping hole in the movie is to mention that it is about a pair of sisters throwing a party at Mom & Dad's house and hoping not to get caught - that's it, the whole plot, outside of the "who are these people" scenes at the beginning, and the "what happens to them next" scenes at the end - and to this classic, trivial slip of a scenario, Sisters dedicates all of one hundred and eighteen fucking minutes. Even granting that R-rated American comedies have gotten much too long ever since Judd Apatow came along with his love of improv and his hatred of editors, Sisters is still an outrageous grotesque.

It starts out fine, dragging in Fey and partner-in-crime Amy Poehler into its dizzy cartoon world - for you see, the sisters are grown adults, and Mom & Dad (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) are Florida retirees planning to sell the old homestead - providing a series of warmly affectionate gross-out gags, and calling forth a truckload of comedy ringers (Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, and Samantha Bee were the ones I was happiest to see, but basically the entire party is made up of comic Somebodies. All of whom, incidentally, are bested by an immensely game John Cena in the kind of giddy "wait, you have THAT kind of comic timing?" performance that Dwayne Johnson started breaking out with a decade ago). And the party starts, and goes on - and on, and there comes a point where one starts to realise that the party isn't going to end anytime soon, and we're going to be trapped in a series of scenes that have the exact same plot beats with the exact same jokes for quite a long while.

It murders the comedy to have that little variety for that long, which is one of the two big problems with Sisters. The other is that it doesn't really do right by its leads: Lord knows this is better than Baby Mama, as letting Fey and Poehler play characters with a long history of knowing each other to go along with their "can't get along" personalities is infinitely more satisfying than anything in that tire fire of a comedy. But they're playing painfully generic character arcs - Fey is the sister who can't hold down a job or take care of her resentful teen daughter, Poehler is the prig who can't land a man - and Fey, at least, seems utterly disinterest in trying to redeem her part. Poehler tries, thankfully. She does the clipped, befuddled thing very well, and she telegraphs comic stress in a way that's actively funny more often than not. But she's carrying huge portions of the film alone on her back, while Fey only comes alive in the zaniest and/or raunchiest scenes.

Parts of the film land perfectly; there's too much onscreen talent for that not to be the case. Hell, Poehler, Ian Barinholtz (in the unenviable role of "unfunny cute guy") and director Jason Moore even manage to put over a "tchotchke up the butthole" scene that has no business being funny in the tiniest degree, thanks mostly to letting moments play out in dismal silence and to Poehler's steely line deliveries. Sisters is absolutely not a great comedy, and in many places, it's surprisingly barely even a functional comedy. But worse comedies there have been, and worse there will yet be - probably, sadly, involving many of these same people.

6/10