Genre/Gender-Bending with Mr. Soderbergh

Haywire (Steve Soderbergh, 2011) Fairly standard actioner about a wet-ops unit for hire, and one particular freelancer who's beginning to suspect harmful links between gigs, directed by Soderbergh (written by past collaborator Lem Dobbs), with some unusual qualities of note.  For one, the director stages his fights like they were dance sequences from an M-G-M musical—full-frame/full-figure (but without the Lion Studio's "stage" angle on the axis of the central figures).  There are no tight shots, tight editing, it's all composed of mis-en-scene, rather than montage, just an angle/reverse angle one-two parrying between perspectives.  It's tough, athletic, and the only real reason to cut away is if something goes wrong—a fluffed punch, or bad timing that creates a lull in the fight or a disconnect with "reality."  There's no "lull" between hits because the way the altercations are staged you never see the connections, and there's no simulation of connection, because they're composed mostly of gymnastics, wrestling and fast action—the opposite of The Bourne Identity style of rapid cutting and implication of "hits." Soderbergh does something different with this style, while accomplishing the same intensity of the edit-dependent fisticuffs of the last few years.  The most critical part, however, is who's doing the fighting, and that's where Haywire is really different and utterly dependent on its athletic lead.

Gina Carano, mixed martial artist—and frequent participant in "American Gladiator"—plays Mallory Kane, and she is disciplined enough to pull off the fight sequences with a savage speed.  Any actress can train to look convincing, but Carano has the moves down for her character who is supposed to be a berserker weapon of mass-destruction, so there's rarely a cut-away or an insert shot to betray the use of stunt-doubles.  There aren't any.  So, Soderbergh (who also shot the film) keeps his camera out of the way and keeps everything and everybody in frame as best he can.  We've seen women in fights before—fights with men (Tarantino loves to do that)—but it's slightly unnerving to see these, knowing full well that everything was done in-camera, with few editing tricks.  The speed makes it a bit more visual—there's no 1/4 second adjustment/orientation lag between cuts—and more upsetting initially, but one does, as the fighting continues for minutes unabated, used to it (except for the question of what kind of make-up she uses to hide the bruising).

Because Carano is largely unknown except for her MMA career—she's fine in her dramatic scenes, just not great (but then, have I ever complained about Jet Li or Jason Statham's acting?)—the cast is a little top-heavy with big-name victims...Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender (the latter doing a fine riff on Bond coolness—of course, he gets his ass kicked in the film's best fight), Bill Paxton and Antonio Banderas.  Nobody is required to do anything beyond displaying detached coolness.  But the internal logic is there, so at least this one is a better example for the experiment than, say, Salt.

The girl breaks bones and furniture.

Welcome to the Crazy Club!
or
The Moon's Just a Cheap Shot Away


And what's good for the goose...

Soderbergh's next film after Haywire (if we don't count his second-unit work for The Hunger Games), also goes against the grain in the traditional genre/gender roles that we come to expect in movies—a dance/backstage drama movie, but with male leads.  Magic Mike is Flashdance with testosterone, the only thing missing is the "if you give up your dreams, you die" line.  Here, the basic dream is moving out of Tampa, Florida...to a bigger venue, or a better life.   The clutch of male strippers each have their own motivations—mostly money—and for them, the gig is a better alternative than slogging through a 9 to 5 job, wearing a tie.  So, at night, they dance, flirt, tease, and as club owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) "pry the cash out of their purses."

We're introduced to the skin-trade by Adam (Alex Pettyfer) irresponsible brother of Brooke (Cody Horn), who makes a good enough living for him to sponge off by having a steady job dealing with medical claims.  At a construction job that he's ill-equipped for, he runs into Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), who, despite seeing Adam as a loser, takes him under his wing, giving him a job as a "gopher" for the Xquisite dance club, where Mike, he finds to his surprise, is a featured dancer.  Well, you know how these backstage stories go: one of the performers can't go on-stage—he's passed out from a growth hormone overdose, and so Adam must make his stripper debut.  Dallas and Mike watch from the wings and simultaneously offer an opinion: "Can't dance worth shit." "But..that..can..be..taught," replies Dallas.

Wish the rest of it could be.  It'd save us all a bunch of time.  Mike's the hero of the tale, the veteran, "the guy most-together," but Adam is the neophyte and must go through the unfulfilling one-nighters, the drug problems, the crack-ho relationship, the debts to the hood-pushers, the spiral down to the bottom.  Mike just goes home to a brewsky and a night of uncrinkling his Benjamins on the edge of his self-designed furnishings (the establishment of such a business is his dream).  He's the cleverest of the bunch—Tatum developed the story based on his own experiences dancing in Tampa, so naturally he's the cleverest—and he's the most romantic of the bunch, mooning over a past-patron (Olivia Munn*) and very interested in Adam's sister.  He probably stays around being The Kid's Obi-Wan just to keep her in the picture, because there's only so many times you can say "You don't want that in your life, bro'" before it gets tiresome.

It does, but it could be a lot worse.  It could be "Showboys," and in outline form it resembles it, but it avoids the smarmy camp quality of that film by having a sense of humor about itself** and what it is (and what it doesn't aspire to, which is anything with an overt message) and it stresses the economic times that drop the unskilled (but ripped) into such night-work (day-jobs being rather scarce, especially when you party until 4 am) without having any pretensions about suffering for your art.  And the performances are fine, especially Tatum and McConaughey, who clearly relishes playing an out-and-out bad-boy with no shame.  But, all the men throw themselves into the roles of buck-a-throw sex-objects, with a brio and swagger that's fun to watch—as long as nobody takes it for anything more.  

It's the old "show-biz is a rough road, kids" movie, but with a "y" chromosome in the script of its DNA, a morality tale with enough immorality to make it worth watching.  And it's a healthy thing for Soderbergh (or anybody) to be turning the tables on these themes with their built-in sexism—even if the tables have some dancing on them.

Magic Mike is an immodestly modest Rental.

The boys break rules (but not twenties)

* Interesting role for her.  She plays a woman who plays with Mike like a boy-toy for jollies, but he finds, much to his dismay, that she does not consider him someone to bring home to meet Mom and Dad.  Dude...(if I can use the language of the film) Why do you think you never went over to her place??  As they might say in Showgirls "Denial's not just a river in Egypt, honey..."

** Reviews and synopses are saying it's a comedy-drama, though.  No.  No, it's not.  It's a light drama (with sprinkles of heaviness) and some clever writing here and there.  Maybe that hyphenate was there to attract the ladies (as if all the beef-cake and pretty boys wasn't enough).

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

"Greed...(For Lack of a Better Movie)...is Good"

Entering into the third year of the Great Bank Swindle, it was only natural that someone in Hollywood would try and make hay off of it.  Enter Oliver Stone, with a sequel of sorts to his "Wall Street" film of 1987: "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" (a rather loopy title, in my eyes).  Wall Street high-roller Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is released from prison to find himself alone, short of cash, and unable to get back into the game—the rules, such as they are, have changed, and prison never looks good on the resumé.

Seven years after Gekko is sprung, young Wall Street investment trader Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf) finds himself in the middle of the banking crisis, his company folding and his mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide as a result.  The rootless Moore is then determined to avenge the death of both his Father Figure and livelihood by taking on the entities that led to his firm's collapse.  It was only a matter of time before he ran into Gekko, on a promotional tour for his new book, describing his life on top and behind bars.  Their stars are due to collide for another reason; is engaged to Gekko's daughter (Carey Mulligan), estranged from her father for his sociopathic wheeling-dealings and the subsequent overdose death of her brother.

Already it starts to feel icky.  Stone's original was, much like his "Platoon," less about their subjects (Vietnam, insider trading) and more about the writer-director's coming to terms with Daddy issues.  His protagonist in both films (played by Charlie Sheen) had to choose between good and bad fathers in both situations (Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe in the first, and Douglas and Martin Sheen in the second), hovering about his shoulders like angel-demons, prodding him to go one way or the other, making him choose which Father Knows Best.

Everybody has Daddy problems in this one, to the point where that seems to be the only issue concerned.  Oh, there's some touching on of Green Energy and of the Banking conspiracy, but for the most part it is of the characters pin balling between Male Authority Figures, and the Mentor-Protegé thing (right down to Josh Brolin's character's favorite art-piece).  The only thing left is the kinda squeaky relationship between LaBoeuf and Mulligan, with Gecko acting like some Yojimbo playing all sides against each other.  It's a little disappointing to see Douglas' Gekko-monster being soft-pedalled in this manner—like finding out that Darth Vader (another Dark Father figure!) is merely Hayden Christensen in disguise.  Disappointing if one could get a handle on the character at all.  Douglas vacillates between being a tough-as-nails financier with all the answers and vulnerable Fair-Market Father trying to win back his little girl—that transformation gives Douglas and Mulligan a well-played if ultimately hollow scene in which they come to tearful terms.  He has never been better than that scene, and takes chances that recall his father Kirk's fearlessness in hitting for the bleachers.

If only that were true of Oliver Stone.

For the fact of the matter is, despite being one of our more (self-professed)radical film-makers, the once angry young man has made one of the most conventional of movies.  To be fair, he didn't write it, so the personal complications among the characters that one can see coming a mile away are not his fault.  And though he may trick the movie up with visual legerdemain (including a simple use of split-screen that he abandons fairly early on), pervasive songs by David Byrne and Brian Eno (that are banal), and "cuting" it up with several visual and aural "in-jokes," the film couldn't be more "safe," preaching to the choir, and goo-ing the whole thing up in a veneer of soap-scum. 

If one wants to be a truly innovative film-maker, to push the limits of visual story-telling, tell us something we don't already know.

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is a low-yield Cable-Watcher. 

Disclosure

"Disclosure" (Barry Levinson, 1994) Handsome, but su-leeeeeeazy mounting of the Michael Crichton story about sexual politics in the work-place. With Michael Douglas heading the cast, the film could be confused for "Fatal Attraction II," and one wonders just how far the makers were going for that, what with Douglas toplining "...Attraction" and "Basic Instinct" and Demi Moore, late of "Indecent Proposal." Unfortunately, where those films whetted the national apetite for dangerous sex-capades, Crichton's cold-shower-of-an-idea seems tame.

At a cutting-edge Seattle software firm* experimenting in virtual reality, Tom Sanders (Douglas) thinks he's getting a promotion from his slick-as-shit boss (Donald Sutherland). He gets passed-over for Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore, all power-suit, push-up bra and stiletto heels), who's robotically quick with company-approved shpiel, with just a bit of predator to her. She's also an ex-girlfriend of the Douglas character.

Wuh-oh! Better watch out, Mike!

But because it's a two-hour movie, when Meredith invites him for an after-hours conference with some wine and her tongue in his ear, he goes--rather than saying, oh, I don't know--they've got e-mail at this high-tech Seattle firm?--"Hey, let me draw up a complete scenario of where we've been for that last three months with documentations and e-mail that to you, and then we can tackle it fresh in the morning." No, he doesn't do that, he's a little slow. Meredith, though, is pretty darn quick. When she starts unzipping his pants, what does he do? Stop her? Nooooo...When the simulated sex act begins? Noooooo. (I should mention that, at this point, Douglas does the patented Sharon Stone "pleasure" move from "Basic Instinct"--cock your head back so your neck is bent double and spasmodically open and close your mouth in a guppy fashion).

Finally, after the two are in a quasi-missionary position, the panting Douglas grows a conscience and decides to leave the office, after which Meredith follows him screaming "Get back and finish what you started, or you're dead, do you hear me?!" Since the office is in Pioneer Square, just about every bar-patron and driver on the Alaska Way Viaduct could hear her. As does the cleaning lady.

Anybody think this is a bit dumb?

It is. It gets dumber, when the Douglas character sues for sexual harassment, and she sues back. Crichton is making a point about sexual politics in a predatory environment in the work-place, but the message gets a bit dulled, and then the film-makers make a last-minute bid for political correctness that works as well as it did in "The Bonfire of the Vanities," that is, not at all.

Even the high-tech elements are a little suspect, with a virtual environment that evidently sucks so much CPU that it slows down the "Delete" process long enough to make it a race to amp up the drama.

"Disclosure" is a by-the-numbers package deal combining the movie-making cachet of Crichton, Douglas and Moore, in the hope it would translate to big bucks at the box-office. In that way, it resembles nothing so much as the fly-by-night computer companies that took a collective dive when the hi-tech bubble burst. Both had similar problems.

No one was buying.

*One of those very rare films set in Seattle that is actually filmed in Seattle rather than Vancouver, BC. Even "Battle in Seattle" about the WTO riots was filmed in Canada. Okay, they did come to town for a week-end to shoot pick-ups. I tell ya, the Seattle Film Commission's doin' a bang-up job!