David Fincher can do anything he wants in my opinion. If he wants to do Star Wars, let him do Star Wars. If he wants to tackle a full season of HBO television like True Detective, by all means do it. Fincher has this beautiful, yet blunt ability to dig deeper into a story and draw out every wonderful or excruciating detail and throw a spotlight on it. Okay, maybe more excruciating than anything, but his ability to present several angles fleshes out all this stories and makes them memorable at the very least. Gone Girl is no exception. This movie resonated with me for hours after I left the theater. This dark portrait on a marriage, first impressions and snap judgements in a media dominated society enthralled me for the two hours plus in the theater. While it may not ever hit that final gear in gripping the audience, you will walk out of the theater eager to discuss with your fellow moviegoers.
Less than a year after the release of his previous feature, Labor Day, Jason Reitman returns with Men, Women & Children, yet another take on relationships, albeit, more modern and ambitious. Infusing the perils of technology, Reitman creates an interconnected story featuring parents and teenagers trying to decipher what the Internet has done to our society. The segments range from a couple using the Internet as an escape from their strained marriage, to a high schooler struggling with a fetish that deviates from the common sex culture, to a star athlete whose lost interest in football after his mom runs off and finding comfort in the online world of Guild Wars. Some may laugh it off, or find the struggles of this Texas suburban community to be negligent to greater world problems, but it’s through Reitman’s raw telling of the story that makes Men, Women & Children the most honest film of the modern day. Nothing is sugar coated. Every storyline features people we’ve known, stories we’ve heard, and struggles we’ve felt. Yes, some threads are stronger than others, but the overall product creates an extraordinary film.
The binding of the story relies on an ominous narrator, Emma Thompson, who uses Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot to put a perspective on life. She chimes in throughout, ocassionally giving tidbits into the characters’ thoughts for comedic expense, yet mainly as a reminder of how unimportant we are, how insignificant everyone we know, everyone we love, everyone we’ve heard of, is to the universe. It’s through this thought, that the audience is forced to think what matters most to them. To some characters it’s sex, to others it’s love, fame or just acceptance. Reitman and co-writer Erin Cressida Wilson beautifully maneuver Chad Kultgen’s novel into an emotionally satisfying ensemble piece.
Utilizing mostly handheld camera (even shaky dolly shots) and little pop-up blurbs on the screen to show texting, internet browsing, etc., Reitman draws us into this realized world. Fruitvale Station, Sherlock, and others have used similar techniques, but Reitman fluently integrates the technology to demonstrates how naturally it has become involved in our lives such as having the Google search bar appear above a character browsing for escorts, or in one of the most memorable shots, showing kids walk through school with texting, music, tweeting effects hanging above their heads.
Across the board, performances are good with the high school kids for the most part outshining the parents. The standouts have to be Ansel Elgort, who most know as the love interest in The Fault in Our Stars. Adam Sandler, gives a very subdued performance akin to Punch Drunk Love and proves that despite his recent shit show of films, the guy is capable of being a good actor. Sandler’s son in the film, Travis Tope, is noteworthy, as is Judy Greer, a mom trying to jumpstart her daughter’s modeling career. Jennifer Garner, an overtly protective mother who will go to insane means to track her daughters digital footprints also is a plus.
That all said, the film is not perfect. Some of the teen storylines don’t wrap up as nicely as others, leaving a morally ambiguous finale for the ending montage. Also, the scenes where the story transfers from one character to another when they pass each other is a bit cheesy and too coincidental. There’s also some odd choices made of when Emma Thompson voice comes in that felt like Reitman wanted to keep the comedic tone rather then delve straight for the drama. And oddly, J.K. Simmons is given almost the exact same role he played in Juno. A lot of comparisons have been thrown around to last years film Disconnect, which dealt with similar problems derived from the internet and featured another comedic actor with a beard. The biggest difference, is the plausibility of the students and the situations. Men, Women & Children deals with the desire to stand out and the use of the Internet as an escape, while Disconnect was an overly exaggerated film about the extremes of using the internet. The former allows for connection, the latter allows for parents to panic.
Reitman’s film doesn’t say that using the Internet is bad or that we shouldn’t, it just wants us to realize how it has changed the world and to decide on our own whether that is good or bad. Is it wrong to find solace in others online? To some it may be, for example a character using online chatrooms to encourage her anorexic diet, but for others, like Ansel’s character using Guild Wars, it’s a place to be himself and to feel like he’s constantly working towards something instead of being unimportant to society. That’s the debate at the heart of Men, Women & Children. Is the easy access to our desires online good or bad, and whether these desires should be important or unimportant. The film doesn’t give a clear-cut answer, it simply gives the audience enough to recognize technologies connection to our society.
Amazon has recently taken big swipes in the entertainment industry. They’ve gone pretty wholehog into this Fire thing, and to be honest, I really dig it. I like their approach to digital media distribution and the way they handle their cloud. They’re also great at creating original content, which is something they’re really starting to get a handle on. In the past few years they’ve even gone and made a “Pilot season” for their original programming. The Amazon pilot season is now in it’s third iteration, and while I’m not familiar with the previous two “winners” (all the pilots are in a contest to be chosen which will continue by viewer demand), the current lineup has two clear front-runners out of the pack that includes:
Hand Of God
This is a pretty typical “ambiguous religious duty” kind of show. You know the type, where the character is maybe getting some secret message, or maybe they’re just crazy, man. It’s not written terribly well, but it’s not boring or laugh out loud stupid either. If anything, it’s pretty clear that the whole thing is a vehicle for Ron Perlman to strut his stuff and show off his acting chops, of which he has plenty. Perlman is the draw here, because his performance elevates an otherwise pretty dreary and dull script. The show is captivating because of him and him alone, but that in and of itself is enough to keep me watching. The issue with this is that when your whole show rides on one actor, it tends to create a pretty huge vacuum if, for some strange reason, he decided not to act in it anymore. I’m not saying Ron Perlman is gonna die, but if he does, then this show will suck.
Look: 75
Sound: 70
Players: 90
Script: 30
Red Oaks
This was the most pleasant surprise of the selection for me. I never thought a story about a tennis coach could be so interesting, but Steven Soderbergh has managed to produce a show about tennis that’s magically not stupid as hell. Granted, it’s accomplished by being set in the ’80s, which is the cultural equivalent of that neon colored frosting on store bought cupcakes. Bright and beautiful, but mostly just filler and lots of saturated fat. And cocaine. Did you know that all store cupcakes have cocaine in them? Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the pilot centers on a kid who teaches rich folk at a tennis club how to tennis better, or whatever. He eventually gets tied up in some hijinks and ’80s genre leitmotifs. I loved it, not only because I’m a sucker for ’80s music, but because everyone in this acted like real people who were trying to do things. When you’re making a dramedy, the characters HAVE to feel real, or else you’re just an unfocused director or writer trying to console their own feelings on camera while calling it an “exploration of the human condition”, or something really dumb like that. Red Oaks isn’t that, it’s just an interesting show that’s well-acted, and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Look: 80
Sound: 95
Players: 75
Script: 75
Really
This kind of show has been done. It’s basically This is 40, the TV show. Another dramedy about a group of middle aged 30-somethings trying to understand their own burgeoning maturity and mourning the loss of their youth. It’s a common story in these kinds of shows. The one aspect this brings to it is thankfully all the characters are likeable, which is a fresh breath of air compared to most of the other relationship dramas of this kind. It makes it stand out a bit more from the rest of these pilots, but not enough to warrant a continued series. Likeable characters in your show are the difference between an objectively bad show being fun and a mediocre to good show being unwatchable trash, like Mad Men. Yes, Mad Men is boring trash. Fight me. (
Look: 70
Sound: 65
Players: 75
Script: 77
Hysteria
This is one of those shows that is destined to fail. You know the ones, like666 Park Avenue or Happytown. Does anyone remember Happytown? This show is like Happytown. An incomprehensible mess. There’s the old TV trope of the one scientist or doctor who discovers a new virus that’s somehow spread by social media. Not to mention the dismal pacing, acting, plot and terrible editing. It’s the kind of idea that some really naive but peppy exec would pitch to appease some Suit, or a Suit’s idea of what’s hip and new in the drama scene. I can imagine the scene right now:
“Viral stuff is in! Let’s make it a virus story! VIRAL! THE INTERNET! MY GOD JIMMY, I’VE DONE IT AGAIN!”
And then we’re left watching Mena Suvari’s weird forehead bumble around in the dark and warn us of weird internet diseases. I’ve got a disease for you, and it’s called Dumb-Conceptivitis. Guess what the cure is? Not watching this piece of crap.
Look: 70
Sound: 50
Players: 30
Script: 10 (I like the kernel of the idea, but it’s a short story at best, not a full TV show)
Overall the standouts were Hand of God and Red Oaks, mainly because they were good, and the rest were either boring or really dumb. That’s kind of the case with every pilot season, though. If you had to pick and choose through dozens of pilots for each season of TV, you would end up hating a lot of crap too. Watching all of these was fun in a way, because it made me feel like a weird TV exec with some level of power over the content I watch. In a way, this is really the future of television. We’re the ones who will choose the shows that we want, and the stupid middleman system they currently have with the studios will slowly become antiquated and weird. Amazon is doing something interesting here, and I’m honestly looking forward to next pilot season.
*Since this was submitted, Amazon has renewed both Hand of God and Red Oaks for series continuation. Awesome.
Grizzly Bomb 