Blogorium Review: Young Adult

 Young Adult, the fourth film from Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air), is also the re-teaming of Reitman with Diablo Cody (Jennifer's Body, The Evil Dead) after their successful pairing on Juno. Long time readers of the Blogorium are probably aware that I don't like Juno. In fact, I hate Juno, find the movie to be obnoxious. Fortunately, Young Adult is not Juno. It's not anything like Juno, or anything about Juno that I found grating. What's funny is that I think you're supposed to dislike Mavis Gary and to pull for Juno MacGuff, but to be honest, I sort of feel the other way. It's tied to parts of Young Adult hitting home for the Cap'n, and I'll get to that in a bit.

 Mavis (Charlize Theron) is a semi-successful ghost writer for the Waverly Prep young adult novels. She's divorced, lives in a disheveled apartment with her dog and sleepwalks through one night stands in the aftermath of her divorce. The Waverly Prep series is coming to an end and her publisher needs Mavis to finish the last book, but she's more interested in a birth announcement from her high school sweetheart. Mavis decides to drive from Minneapolis to her hometown of Mercury to split up his marriage and live happily ever after.

 It's the funhouse mirror version of every romantic comedy ever (even The Baxter), but Mavis isn't exactly a likeable protagonist. Other than being perpetually drunk and belligerent, Mavis is delusional to the point she's willing to destroy every relationship she comes into contact with, lie to family members, and exaggerate passing glances or pauses in conversation into professions of love from Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), despite the fact that he seems uncomfortable (at best) with him Mavis ingratiates herself into his life with Beth Slade (Elizabeth Reaser). The problem is that because Mavis left Mercury to live in "the big city" and to be a famous writer, most of her fellow high school alumni defer to her judgement to a fault, even when it's clear she's back for purely selfish and destructive reasons.

 Young Adult's "voice of reason," Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), immediately and continually calls out Mavis as a horrible person. They nevertheless become kindred spirits, both emotionally stunted from high school (Mavis emotionally and Matt quite literally rendered to walking with a crutch after being attacked by homophobic jocks), and she's willing to overlook his frankenstein-ed super hero action figures because he also makes homemade bourbon. Matt overlooks Mavis' selfish ploy to woo a married man away from his newborn child because she hates everything about Mercury that he hates. High school opposites come together out of mutual disdain for small town Minnesota.

 In a normal romantic comedy I suppose that Mavis and Buddy would realize something important about each other and then Beth would do something horrible and they'd run off together to Minneapolis. Appropriately, this is exactly how Mavis imagines things should happen, so we should expect the opposite - Mavis fails spectacularly and learns a lesson about the downward spiral her life is taking, and then leaves to start life anew (or stays and ends up with Matt, maybe). But Cody and Reitman choose to do something a little trickier, something that apparently does not endear audiences to Young Adult in the way that Juno or Up in the Air do.

 Mavis does fail spectacularly, and as her delusional state crumbles, she heads over to Matt's, and they do in fact sleep together, but it's more as a last act of desperation for acceptance before she leaves. In fact, Mavis seems to be on the path of self awareness the next morning, when Matt's sister Sandra (Collette Wolfe) offers her some coffee. Sandra was one of the many Mercury High School students in awe of Mavis, and she mistakes a moment of clarity in her hero's mind for weakness. At the exact moment audiences expect Young Adult to go one way, Sandra Freehauf nudges it the other, by insisting to Mavis that she's better than everybody in Mercury, that she's better because she left, and that nothing that happened when she came back should even matter. And Mavis believes her, leaving Mercury once and for all convinced her delusions were justified and that Buddy is at fault that it failed. Sandra, trying to help Mavis feel better, has her idol drinking the "Mavis is Better Than Us" Kool Aid in no time.

 There's a little more going on beyond the reductive ending I mentioned, including emotional trauma on Mavis' part that cut as deep as Matt's physically abused body, and while it doesn't justify what she does, it hints at a firmer foundation of her illusory vision of "true love" gone wrong. Young Adult does, in some ways, feel anti-climactic because the main character doesn't learn anything despite the best efforts of almost everyone, but it's more appropriate considering how easy it seems for Hollywood narratives to turn a life around in ninety minutes. Beyond Reitman and Cody, Charlize Theron is fearless as the anti-social, condescending, and emotionally manipulative Mavis. She drinks herself into oblivion, abuses anyone who gets near her, and vicariously lives through her Waverly Prep characters (delivered in narration throughout the film). So I get that people wouldn't be happy that Mavis "wins" in the end.

 Strangely, I didn't dislike Mavis the way I think you're supposed to. It seems clear that Matt is probably the audience surrogate (and Oswalt does a spectacular job as the guarded geek man-child) and while it's an inevitable course, we hope that Freehauf and Mavis don't have sex because he succumbs to her magnetic (if toxic) personality. To be fair, I understand the Matt Freehauf character, but the reason I don't hate Mavis is because some of how she sees herself reminds me of where I'm at. Let's take a brief look, with as little navel-gazing as humanly possible.

 While I don't feel, like Mavis does, that I "peaked" in high school and everything went downhill after that, I totally relate to her feeling of not being where she wants to be in life. The characters are roughly the same age (probably two or three years older tops) to where I am, and the Cap'n definitely isn't pleased with where I find myself. Thankfully (I guess), most of the people I went to high school with don't idolize me, so there's no risk of delusions of grandeur beyond "internet movie blogger," but I can relate a little bit. When I look back at old yearbooks, it's clear that people expected big things from the Cap'n, things that didn't materialize. As a result, I'm more comfortable with most high school peers not knowing where I am or what I'm doing. Like Mavis, I prefer an illusion to the reality, even if our reasons are different.

 Anyway, so Young Adult worked for me, even with the "unsatisfying" ending. Nobody gets off the hook, and Mavis Gary and Matt Freehauf will in all likelihood go back to their lives of desperate solitude. Not a happy ending, but a believable one. Reitman's direction is assured and improving with every subsequent film. My concerns that Young Adult might be like Juno because of the presence of Cody were ill-founded - other than a nickname for the combination Pizza Hut / Taco Bell / KFC's, there isn't much of the "clever" dialogue that had me gritting my teeth last time around. The Young Adult screenplay feels more reflective, more self-deprecating, but that may just be me projecting the character of Mavis onto the screenwriter. That may not be fair, but whatever the reason, Young Adult feels more rounded as a film than Juno. I can't say you'll like how it ends - you might even feel cheated - but the film is worth investing in on the off chance you don't. I wouldn't be surprised if more people in their thirties related to Mavis Gary than they'd think.

Five Movies: Year End Recap Appendix

 At the end of 2011, I set out on an insurmountable task: to catch up with everything from the year I hadn't seen but wanted to. As many of you know, I posted a list of the movies I wanted to see before the end of the year. I managed to see a third of those by the time I threw my hands up in the air and said "it's halfway through January so I have to get this thing going."

 Since then, I've seen most of the films nominated for Best Picture and quite a few I wasn't expecting to see but am glad I did. They'll get proper reviews (if they haven't already), but I'm The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Skin I Live In away from hitting all of the major films from last year that I really wanted to see.

 Because I'm not sure quite when I'm going to watch those, I thought I'd take a look at some of the films I have caught up with from last year and see whether my Year End Recap Lists would have changed if I had seen them before writing it. As a rule, I don't amend the lists - where they are is where they stay, but I think it's a worthwhile exercise to consider the films I've seen since in the context of other movies from 2011.

 Very quickly, here is how I broke down the films from 2011:

 My Absolute Favorites (Drive, Midnight in Paris, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Tree of Life, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Guard, Melancholia)

 Really, Really Great Movies That Didn't Make the Above List (Attack the Block, Bridesmaids, Super, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop)

 Movies That Were Pretty Good, Very Good, but Not Life Changing or Anything Like That (A Dangerous Method, Paul, Drive Angry, Hobo with a Shotgun)

 Garbage (The Thing, Blubberella, Sucker Punch, Scream 4)

 To put this in perspective, I'd put Moneyball in the Movies That Were Pretty Good category (it's a well-made movie that's inherently pointless because of how it ends), and Cowboys & Aliens in the Garbage category (not in the "Bottom Five" slot, but definitely with the likes of In Time, Killer Elite, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides section).

 There's probably only one movie that would cause me to reconsider the Absolute Favorites, and I'll get to that shortly, so most films not listed below fall right in the Pretty Good to Very Good (that would include Absentia, Some Guy Who Kills People, and My Week with Marilyn). Captain America is probably going into Cowboys and Aliens territory, and Your Highness? Well.... that I'd have to think about.

 The five films up for serious contention are:

 1. Hugo - I really do struggle with whether Hugo should leapfrog Attack the Block and go into the rarefied air of "Absolute Favorites." It's every bit as good, if not in many ways better, than Midnight in Paris (which it shares some tangential connections to) and certainly has more to say about film than Woody Allen's movie does about literature. Hugo is a film that caught me off guard; first I was concerned that by not seeing it in 3-D that I was missing one of the major reasons Scorsese made the film, and then second the initial burst of "kid crap" pratfalls had me worried.

 But this is a Martin Scorsese film, and I should have known better than to have doubted a master filmmaker to lure in the younger audience without pandering to them for the entire film. He hooks them with a tease of dumb kiddie humor and then draws everyone into a world indebted to cinema. I really think what's holding me back is that I didn't see it in 3-D, and even though you forget that it was filmed that way shortly after, I suspect that it would have made a difference. As it is, I look forward to watching Hugo again. And again. And again.
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 2. The Descendants -So The Descendants is probably the least "typical" Alexander Payne film: to be sure, there are maladjusted adults behaving badly to each other in funny but also painful ways, but with a sense of warmth I wasn't prepared for. I've noticed a distinct critical dismissal of the film based on the fact the protagonists of The Descendants are all essentially products of privilege, and that their struggles are accordingly irrelevant because people who are well-to-do don't have problems. And okay, I get that some online critics don't want to watch movies where characters in better life positions than they deal with infidelity amidst the decision whether to make millions of dollars selling land that doesn't belong to them. Fair enough. I'm not sure why you liked Sideways if that's the case, but fair enough.

 The issue of class and rightful ownership was in the back of my mind during the film, but at no point did I think about Matt King (George Clooney) as a wealthy lawyer whose wife was cheating on him because he didn't spoil her. That was the argument that her father made (minus the infidelity - he blamed the accident on Matt's "miserly" behavior). I saw a guy who thought he was doing right by his family but knowing deep down that he was giving them a raw deal, one that he hoped he could compensate for some point "later." Then things fall apart and he finds himself unprepared to be a father, a son-in-law, a husband, or a mentor. Instead, he latches on the role of "victim" when he finds out about Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), but he's not even sure how to do that the right way. It takes Speer's wife to give King some idea of how to move forward. The "I'm not going to sell the land" was a perfunctory plot line you could see coming a mile away, so when Payne cuts away from the "big speech" to return to the hospital, I was relieved.

 I don't know that I agree with the characterization of The Descendants as a "mom movie," but I can kind of understand the impetus for that. It would fall under the classification were it not for a film about dealing with the death of a cheating wife that exists in the movie for other characters to project on. It ends as well as it can, but I don't know that it's going to supplant The Help as "mom movie" material for last year. For me, it sits comfortably in the Really Really Good list.

 3. Young Adult - I was not expecting to like this movie. Hell, I wasn't expecting to WATCH this movie until several people I talked to mentioned that they liked it, even if it "went nowhere." When I get to my actual review, I'll address that point and try to reconcile my reaction to Young Adult with my feelings about My Week with Marilyn. In the mean time I wanted to let you know that Young Adult, despite my strong distaste for Juno and all things Diablo Cody related, stuck with me. Not in a "why did I watch this" way, but in a "well damn, that hit home in a lot of ways" way.

 I've noticed that this is a common reaction among online reviews, in part because Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is the misanthropic writer many of us relate to even though we probably shouldn't. The film is concerned with bad decisions, feeling like you "peaked" too soon, and most of all about how perceptions of others affect you at critical junctures in life. The dialogue is so removed from the "hip speak" of Juno that aside from one reference to a combo restaurant, I wouldn't have pegged the film as being from the writer of Jennifer's Body. Like Melancholia, Young Adult is a movie that I've come back to in the weeks since I watched it, and as a result deserves mention among 2011's best surprises.

 4. The Artist -The backlash against The Artist began almost immediately after the film won Best Picture (and Best Director and Best Actor) and has only increased since many of the competing films landed on home video. I'm not going to pile on the film, which was by no means the best film I saw of 2011 but was a perfectly enjoyable hybrid of Singin' in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard. It's a movie that makes you feel good, and it's fun to watch and is clever at times. It makes you smile, even if it doesn't make the longest lasting impression. That's fine, because the Academy Awards doesn't always reward the "best" film or whatever criteria you want to judge disparate films by. Like The Departed, The Artist is starting to get the "well it wasn't that good" chatter, so whether it deserves the top spot of 2011 or if it was just marketed to win awards is kind of irrelevant.

 I did want to say that while I did really enjoy The Artist, I'm not sure I'd put it in the Really Really Liked list. I thought long and hard about this, and will probably watch it again before I make up my mind, but in the wake of films I've seen since, The Artist continues to be bumped down by movies I was more surprised by, more engaged with, or ones that linger in my memory. I don't want to pile on The Artist, but I'm not sure where it would fit if I had the list(s) to do over again.

 5. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil - This is going to be a strange comparison, possibly the first time it's ever been made, but I kind of feel the same way about Tucker and Dale vs. Evil as I do The Muppets. I wasn't necessarily sure what I was going to see when I watched both films, but had high hopes. The buzz was generally good, but every now and then I'd run into a negative review that made one or two very salient points, and I'd be a little worried.

 Both films are a lot of fun, if not perfect, but set out to do what they intended: The Muppets exists to bring, well, the Muppets back, even if they don't really show up as we know them until more than halfway through the film. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a killbilly slasher movie that flips the protagonists and antagonists and pushes coincidences and "accidents" to extreme degrees to maintain that inversion. Both films are clever takes on expectations, with likable leads and slightly unexpected plot twists near the end. In keeping with that, I'd put the two films side by side on the list. That should give you some idea of whether Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is worth your time.

 Keep an eye out for an actual review of Young Adult sometime soon. I'll be back tomorrow with a look back at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Blogorium Review: Up in the Air

Watching Up in the Air, much like the recently viewed Facing Ali, makes me wish I could travel back in time to last week and amend the Year End List a bit. I'd add those, as I suspect that when I do see The Road and Big Fan I'll have two more. Up in the Air isn't quite the movie I was expecting, but to be fair I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

I'd read the Walter Kirn novel a few years ago, when it passed through Edward McKay's, but I didn't remember the book very well. Despite all the movie watching and writing, I do read quite a bit, though most of it wouldn't ever end up in the blogorium. But I digress.

Back to the movie at hand: if you don't know anything about Up in the Air, it's the story of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who is paid to fly around the country and fire people so that their company won't have to. He's also periodically a motivational speaker, specifically with a piece called "What's in your backpack?" The movie, directed by Jason Reitman, starts comedy. This is appropriate, because Up in the Air is initially going to remind you of Reitman's first film, Thank You For Smoking. The narration is similar, the disdain for humanity is similar, and it plays the funny for quite a while.

Bingham lives in hotel rooms and in airports. It's where he's comfortable, and his nomadic lifestyle keeps him from having to form long term relationships, even with his family. His actual apartment is embarassingly spartan, down to what I believe is a jar full of Pop Tarts above the fridge and abandoned food containers littering his counter. The life works for Bingham, and he even meets a fellow traveler, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), who meets... shall we say, other needs. In between this, he spends his time coaxing people into accepting their status as unemployed by saying things like "Anyone who ever did anything great sat where you're sitting".

One of the first people we see Bingham fire is Zach Galifianakis, the first of several cameos or small roles in the film, which also includes J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliot, Jason Bateman, Heavenly Creature's Melanie Lynskey, and Danny McBride (the latter two play Bingham's youngest sister and brother-in-law to be). We don't see a lot of these folks, but each brings something interesting to the story, which gets a little more complicated after a breezy introduction.

See, Bingham's job is in jeopardy because the company's new whiz kid, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) developed a simpler system of firing people via video conferencing. Bingham's convinced it won't actually work, and when he learns Natalie doesn't know how to fire anyone, his boss (Bateman) makes him take her out on the road. This could easily be an excuse for more comedic hijinks, and for a little while there's humor to be mined from the mismatch, particularly a non-PC explanation of which ethnic groups are best to get in line behind.

Then, perhaps predictably (or at least as I was expecting), Reitman gets a little sentimental on us. Movies like this are mean to challenge people like Ryan Bingham's beliefs, so Natalie shakes his resolve not to make a serious connection with Alex, and everyone bonds a bit. Ryan decides to go to his sister's wedding with a Plus 1, and even gets the chance to talk Jim (McBride) out of his cold feet. You can see the movie we're heading towards; life lessons are being learned, conventions are being challenged. Yikes, I thought, this is Juno territory... the other side of Reitman territory, the one I don't like so much.

But then Up in the Air does something else, something that a lot of similar movies wouldn't do, something that won me over. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but it's nice to see a movie that presents a character with easy outs, but doesn't necessarily make them ones that can or should actually happen. Maybe that big life change takes more work than an hour and forty nine minutes allows for. Maybe it does get messy instead of "happily ever after", and while the ending may not satisfy everybody, it's certainly true for the characters. And I appreciated that.

George Clooney is again excellent, and I found his character arc to be similar to Lyn Cassidy's in The Men Who Stare at Goats, but more resonant. Both films presented themselves in a one dimensional way and then veer off in unexpected third acts. Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick are also great as foils for Clooney, and Danny McBride gets the rare opportunity to play it totally straight, without being a jokester or an asshole, and does so very well. I always enjoy seeing Melanie Lynskey in films, and J.K. Simmons makes a lot out of a very short scene. I don't have anything bad to say about Jason Bateman, who again is playing the straight man role - as in Extract - or Galifianakis, who's in and out so quickly that you might not realize it. I'm not going to spoil how or why Sam Elliot plays into the story.

Jason Reitman, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Sheldon Turner, has a knack for great shot composition and organic storytelling, even when working with something that could so easily be a "feel good" film. He makes the best out of the cities Ryan travels through, mostly middle-America, and the aerial photography is at times hypnotic. All is forgiven for Juno, Mr. Reitman. I'll chalk that up to the writer and leave it at that. Up in the Air sits comfortably with my very favorite films of 2009, and because many of you might not check it out, I advocate seeing it on the big screen.

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Maybe tomorrow I'll give a short write up of Facing Ali, an excellent documentary about Muhammad Ali's life from the perspective of the men who fought him. Or I might take a second to talk about a new development involving Warner Brothers and Netflix that continues last night's question about the impact of "on demand" rentals, but this time relating to dvd sales. We'll see when I get there.