Popcorn Kernels: The Fairer Sexploitation

In which we present mini reviews of two female-directed entries in stereotypically male-directed genres.

American Psycho (For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.)

Year: 2000

Director: Mary Harron

Cast: Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon

Run Time:1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pent-up Wall Street VP lashes out in a variety of homicidal ways.

American Psycho is a crazy film. One of the few generally accepted horror classics that I hadn’t seen, it defied my expectations at every turn. Based on the controversial Bret Easton Ellis novel that divided critics between viewing it as a dressed-up misogynist tract or a razor-sharp satire, the film was directed by – of all species – a woman. In case you’ve never read this blog before, let me make it very clear that this puts me firmly in the movie’s camp pretty much from the get-go. As far as I can figure it, this is the only popularly regarded staple horror film to have a woman behind the camera (I’m not counting The Babadook, which is far too new to qualify as a classic, as much as I may love it. And I’m certainly not counting Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).

And how does having a female director affect the horror and humor of American Psycho? Not one whit. Well, maybe we linger a little longer on a showering Christian Bale, but you ain’t catching me complaining there. Other than that, it’s a perfectly sharp yuppie satire for people who liked Fight Club a little too much.

Perfectly skewering the venal, acquisitive nature of Reaganomics-fueled Wall Streeters who are all shallow, greedy, and interchangeable, American Psycho depicts the meltdown of a single individual: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman – in this massive horde. As he strains to rein in his homicidal outburst, his peers ignore him entirely, even when he publicly confesses to his many sins. This is best encapsulated in a key scene where Bateman trundles a body into the trunk of a cab and a passing coworker coos over the trendy duffel bag he’s using to perform the deed. This is a world where you can be a murderer or, in fact, be murdered yourself, and you won’t make the slightest dent in the indestructibly grinding clockwork of capitalism.

It sounds intense, and it is. But it’s also pitch-black hilarious humor so grim that even the folks on the gallows might find it distasteful. Patrick Bateman is a man who murders people who can nab reservations at better restaurants than he can, discussing the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News while zipping up a plastic poncho to protect his designer suit from stains. Patrick Bateman is a man who trembles at the mere sight of  trendy business card, who has a stroke of panic when an opponent’s apartment is nicer than his. His viewpoints and motivations are so pointlessly inane that you can’t help but laugh, even as you cringe at the thought that the world around him allows him to get away with his crimes.

The only thing stopping American Psycho from being a flat-out black comedy masterpiece is a tendency toward repetition in the second act. Every scene follows a very precise structure, hobbling its ability to shock. A glorious ATM scene that simultaneously implies that Money is God and kicks the film’s craziest sequence into gear provides the jolt that the system needs, but the film enters a holding pattern for a little too long to preserve my patience. But we can’t all be perfect. American Psycho is a clever, superb little lick that’s just as keen to reference The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Ivana Trump. I love that, even if it houses a half hour that falls short of being a masterpiece.

Rating: 7/10

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Year: 1982

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The teens at Ridgemont High really love bangin’.

Another entry in an exploitation genre secretly helmed by a woman, Fast Times at Ridgemont High definitely wears its gender on its sleeve, at least a teensy bit more. Despite its unfair proportion of bare breasts (a male full frontal scene was excised by the ever-progressive MPAA), Ridgemont High is first and foremost a story of a young woman discovering her sexuality and learning what she wants from men. Of course, this is a rote toss-up between a smooth talking stud and a namby pamby Nice Guy, but this was 1982. Let’s not expect too much.

This young woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the role that made her a star (though she showed great promise in the previous year’s Eyes of a Stranger), is a sexually active teenager treated with a tremendous amount of respect. Her sexual misadventures are never presented as shameful, and an abortion scene late in the film is presented as a natural – if difficult – part of life, used to further Ridgemont High’s sweetest relationship, between Leigh and her ne’er do-well brother Judge Reinhold.

Of course, she’s the only character given anything even remotely resembling a story arc. The movie around her is a haphazard explosion of random, occasionally comic vignettes following stoners, football players, cool guts, and nerds through their daily lives. Each fragmented piece is part of a vast mosaic, depicting nothing in particular. It’s vexing, and the tendency to showcase overlong, almost actively unfunny sequences (an imaginary surfing championship interview, an enraged football player winning a game) is damning. To be fair, I have the personal bias that Sean Penn’s stoner drawl and Robert Romanus’ droning deadpan rub me exactly the wrong way, like a sandpaper suit.

This total disconnection from the concept of “story” or “character” is intensely frustrating and the movie’s habit of poor continuity editing only highlights how scraped-together the overarching plot feels. Even Phoebe Cates’ iconic bikini scene suffers from – frankly – a dreadful botch-job on the part of the splicer. This is less like cutting a movie and more like cutting the cheese (Hey! Rimshot!).

Of course, the “time in a bottle” aspect of Ridgemont High does much to soothe any wounds it may have caused. With a pitch perfect soundtrack of 80’s hits that have actually aged terrifically (Jackson Browne, The Go-Go’s, The Cars… This is a synthcrap-free zone) and a horde of future stars (joining Penn and Leigh are Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, and horror icons Amanda Wyss – Freddy Krueger’s first victim in A Nightmare on Elm Street – and Kelli Maroney, who would eventually return to the Sherman Oaks Galleria where this film was shot four years later in Chopping Mall), Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a dreamy time capsule of days gone by.

It might not be a perfect high school sex romp, but it’s decently funny and occasionally sweet. I can make do with that while jamming to “We Got the Beat.”

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1155
Reviews In This Series
American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
American Psycho 2: All-American Girl (Freeman, 2002)

Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Year: 2011

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

Run Time: 2 hours 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There are two schools of thought when it comes to viewing most arthouse films. There's the "this movie changed my life," and the "this movie ruined my life." I hate to go against film student credo, but I tend to fall into the latter category more often than not. Sure, I like myself some Jean-Luc Godard from time to time, but I will always grab American Pie from the stack instead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's not even a contest.

Maybe it's because my film analysis skills haven't fully developed yet. I will concede that that's a possibility. Or maybe it's because some films are so unbelievably pretentious that their intense need to prove something to themselves chokes out their narrative landscape. Enter The Tree of Life.

Terrence Malick's 2011 film is a remarkable effort that heroically strains to push the envelope and fill itself with Important Meaning, in the process giving itself a hernia.

Actual footage of the universe not giving a crap.

Insofar as The Tree of Life is "about" a story rather than a series of theological ephemera, it is mostly about middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn) remembering his boyhood in Waco, Texas (his younger self is played by Hunter McCracken). Living with his brothers under the stern rule of their unloving, taskmaster father (Brad Pitt) and guided by their ethereal, caring mother (Jessica Chastain), they... do some things. 

It's basically Boyhood with less narrative drive and more pit stops for quasi-evangelical soliloquies. As the family goes about their daily lives (and exactly how many films do we need about white dudes coming of age in Texas?), the film explores its overarching themes of choosing the path of grace over the path of human nature, the idea of how a loving God could allow bad things to happen to good people, and the motif that Terrence Malick is the goddamn best living director on the planet, no contest, look at him go.

When he's not preening in the mirror, he briefly looks back at the action to shout "More ambiguity!" then retires to his trailer with a bagel, leaving the camera on an extended shot of some rocks, or maybe a mysterious light blob.

OK, fine, maybe I'm being facetious, but still.

I will give this to The Tree of Life: It's one of the most visually ambitious motion pictures I've ever seen. The mostly handheld camera bobs and sways, inhabiting the space of its world with a kinetic urgency and, in one truly memorable moment, peering into a doorway while following the mother down the hallway. In this way, the camera adds meaning to the actions around it, exploring the world that the characters inhabit rather than necessarily being tethered to them.

Where the power of this style wanes is in the filmmakers' frequent use of jump cuts to the same angle, which assuredly hold some private meaning to Malick himself, but mostly look like they're feebly trying to disguise a lack of decent coverage. The frequent cuts to black also contribute to the film's jittery, overwhelmingly distracted aesthetic. It's very challenging cinematography, and a little to drunk on its own sense of artistic purpose to be truly watchable.

And for better or for worse, The Tree of Life explodes the very idea of narrative cinema. Exhaustively extended visual and spiritual symbolism abounds, to the point that the narrative hardly sticks to one's mind for lack of earning itself any decent screentime. In one dangerously long sequence obliquely depicting the creation of life, the film sloughs off its characters, slams Lady Gaga music video aesthetics into a 2001: A Space Odyssey framework, tosses in some Turok-reminiscent CGI dinosaurs, and culminates in what seems to be a bafflingly laborious Planet Earth episode.

Well, at the very least it's the easiest paycheck Brad Pitt has ever gotten.

In one scene, the children jump around in the cloud of gas as a truck sprays DDT up and down the suburban block. Considering that this film is heavily based on Malick's own childhood, this might actually explain a lot of the imagery.

This "pictures first, questions never" style holds a lot of meaning for some people, but I am unfortunately not one of them. It's frequently tedious and occasionally beautiful, but always inscrutable. Jessica Chastain holds her own as character that's more metaphorical construct than human woman, but Sean Penn is utterly wasted in a useless bookending role, and Brad Pitt is no more and no less than what he needs to be.

The Tree of Life might hold the answers of the universe for all I know, but as a piece of narrative cinema, it is bankrupt. If you're the type who like to crack open your skull and pour some trippy arthouse cinema right down your mind hole, go for it. But if you're an American Pie guy/gal like me, skip it.

TL;DR: The Tree of Life is an overlong, overheated arthouse flick with some admittedly beautiful imagery.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 856