Kristen Stewart Goes a Whole Movie Without Mentioning Werewolves

Welcome to the Rileys


Sometimes a plot’s most important event happens before the story even begins. Such is the case with the Rileys, an archetypal American couple living in Indianapolis. We meet the Rileys several years after their daughter has died in a car crash. Despite the elapsed time, the couple is still possessed by the loss.

This is because the Rileys have no way to define their grief. As reticent Midwesterners, they rely on social norms to determine how to live their lives. However, their lives defy conventional categories. When a child’s parents die, that child is put into an orphanage and, ideally, adopted. But for the parents of a dead child, there is no ritualized progression to solve the issue. We don’t even have a word, like the word “orphan,” to describe the unfortunate people that survive their progeny.

Without any cultural custom to refer to, the Rileys pioneer their bereavements alone. They refuse to discuss their problem. Lois Riley (Melissa Leo) is crippled by anxiety and cannot leave the house. Doug Riley (James Gandolfini), unable to face his wife, becomes deeply involved in an affair with a waitress.

Then, in the first five minutes of the movie, the waitress suddenly dies of a heart attack. This may seem like a lot of action for so little celluloid, but the pacing of the movie is hardly rushed. From the very hectic beginning, a series of gradual consequences untangle for the next 100 minutes.

Just as Doug Riley does not know how to be a childless father, he struggles to create a ceremony for the loss of his mistress of five years. Not a traditional widower, he wanders around the graveyard in a dark suit that no one can see him wear. Because “it’s something people do,” he had purchased his own headstone to put alongside his daughter’s. But when he comes across his own name on a grave marker while mourning the death of his beloved mistress, something snaps.

Doug then disappears into a New Orleans business trip, telling Lois that he does not know when he’ll be able to come back. In his wanderings, Doug finds himself in the back room of strip club with Mallory (Kristen Stewart), a 16-year-old orphan whose life really, really sucks. Taking her as a surrogate for his daughter, Doug does his best to rescue Mallory.

Kristen Stewart’s role is the headline of this movie. Because she is also in the Twilight movies, her choice to portray a stripper with bad skin is probably what you’ll hear about Welcome to the Rileys, if you hear anything at all. However, she brings more to the part than rebellion against being pigeon-holed as a teenybopper starlet. She has genuine edge. Her sexuality isn’t forced. She captures the irritating stubbornness of a teenage girl expertly while allowing us to still feel sympathy for her.

Stewart is in the privileged class of actors that gets all the money from a tween-oriented franchise, but none of the Disney sub-clauses. That is to say, no entertainment executive seems to be telling her to sing at a Jonas Brothers concert. Daniel Radcliffe has a similar freedom from his role as Harry Potter, which allowed him to show his wand* onstage during Equus. It looks like Welcome to the Rileys will not garner any commercial success, but it will certainly be a feather in Stewart’s indie-cred cap, which I believe she deserves.

Despite its specific American setting, the film actually utilizes very European cinematic themes that have also been adopted in Latin America. Like the protagonists in a great deal of European movies, the Rileys are starkly realistic characters (not larger than life) that are faced with an enormous personal challenge (not a struggle to save the government/Earth). Then, like a great deal of European and Latin American movies, the Rileys deal with their problems by taking a roadtrip to a new setting. In this case it is New Orleans instead of a Mediterranean backdrop. Also, unlike most American movies, there’s hardly any soundtrack. Also: no vampires.

Overall, Welcome to the Rileys is powerful. The film moves through measurable chapters, but its tensions are subtle. The plot is single-minded: a man seeks to replace his dead daughter with a troubled teenager. However, this single thrust has multitudes within it. The stakes are high, but it is difficult to determine what Doug Riley is trying to accomplish. His attempt to repair something he doesn’t understand raises haunting questions for the audience.

When a conventional life is no longer possible, where will our instincts take us? If your family were destroyed, what would grow on the structure that remained?




*by which I mean penis

Louie, Louie You're Gonna Die

LOUIE, SEASON 1

Louie is very much unlike any other show I’ve ever seen. But, there are certain elements that are typical for a 30-minute comedy. It is certainly not the first television program to address the difficulties of dating or raising children. Nor is it the first to feature a schlub as the protagonist. Louie also uses stand-up comedy interludes, like Seinfeld, to give the show structure.

But Louie is unlike any other show I’ve ever seen, not because of anything in its form or content, but because of how it’s made. Louie is the only modern television program that is, at its core, a one-man show. Louis C.K. writes, directs and stars in every episode. In an interview, C.K. said that making the show taught him that he did not need a team of writers to help him generate content.

And it’s interesting to see the effects of a show made almost entirely from the ideas of a single person. You’d expect that it would make the show, at best, more focused and intentional, or at worst more repetitive and homogeneous. Instead, Louie is incredibly scattered. It’s clear that the show is as varied as C.K.’s mind, and also just as twisted. As a result, the show constantly defies expectations. Every new sketch or segment is different than the last. This can be jarring, but it also creates constant opportunities for comedy and, at times, poignancy.

Although the content of the show clearly centers on C.K.’s real-life biography (it is about a divorced comedian named Louie C.K. with two kids, after all), no two episodes are even remotely alike. Some are absurdist and self-deprecating sketches, like the pilot and Heckler/Cop Movie. Some are buddy comedies, such as Poker/Divorce, which is actually like two completely separate 15-minute buddy comedies. And some of them are not very funny at all, but contain captivating monologues that are delivered by supporting characters (Bully, God).

Additionally, the show is more edgy (though some may prefer to say lewd) than anything I’ve ever seen attempted on basic cable. A dentist puts his dick in Louie’s mouth while Louie is under anesthetic, for one example. This is moments after the hallucinating C.K. stumbles across Osama bin Laden in the desert and says that, though it may be oversimplifying the issue, 9/11 was a bullshit move.

There’s an auteur element to Louie as well. In numerous sketches, drugs or dreaming affect C.K.’s consciousness in a way that is represented using cinematic techniques. He gets high at a neighbor’s apartment, cuing a series of rapid cuts and continuity errors that mirror his suddenly fractured perception. Also, the childhood Louis C.K. is represented by no fewer than three different young actors across the first season. The actress that plays his date in one episode plays his young mother in the next.

By utilizing such artful methods, C.K. conveys the impression that these little bits and sketches are meant to be more than just a sitcom. The show strives to do more than entertain. It makes a statement about how bizarre and difficult just ordinary living can be.

Possibly the most incredible thing about Louie is not its original style, but the fact that it got picked up for a second season. Perhaps it will suffer the same short run as other breakthrough series, such as Arrested Development, whose genius are only realized by an adoring public just moments after they are taken off the air. But maybe not. After all, Louie is made by only a single man who does just about every job and only draws one salary. In essence, it is a high-budget YouTube video, a student comedy film made by a master comedian. Far be it from me to speculate on what may be “the future of television” in an era when the network prime-time dramedy is becoming less sustainable. But, at the very least, Louis stands as an example of how modern television can be brilliant with just a camera, a few crewmembers and one very funny man.

The Twist

PREDICTIONS FOR DEVIL

The trailer for the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, Devil, portrays a psychological/religious thriller. Here’s how the movie seems to play out:

• A group of strangers gets into an elevator
• The elevator stalls
• While the strangers wait for help, one or two strange things happen
• Someone suggests that one of the strangers in the elevator is the Devil
• Everyone tells that person to get fucked
• More strange things happen
• "Oh my God! Somebody in this elevator really is the Devil"

Suddenly, all the strangers in the elevator must fight for their lives, while at the same time trying to figure out which of them in this confined space is the biblical Lucifer. As viewers, we will also be invited to speculate.

Is it the guy in the business suit? Too easy. The hot chick? Maybe. The black guy? That would be racist. Questionably unshaven man? Old lady?

Anyway, in the end we are going to find out the answer. Then they’ll role the credits. Then we will all be allowed to go home.

Except anyone familiar with Mr. Night Shyamalan knows that it won’t be that easy. There has to be some sort of twist ending. Just because he made The Last Airbender, does not mean that anybody forgot. To be fair, M. Night did not direct or write this movie, he just came up with the story. But to me, that sounds suspiciously like code for “he came up with the twist, then didn’t bother to do anything else.”

So what’s the twist going to be? Since M. Night Shyamalan thinks that an intelligent film means that the ending is really hard to guess, it will not be easy to anticipate. But I have some ideas:

The Devil is someone not in the elevator

• There are some security guards and firefighters in the trailer that are trying to get the strangers out. Maybe one of them is Devil. If this is the case, then another one is also probably God. Also, watch out for some sort of wager.

All the people in the elevator are collectively the Devil

• In the trailer, a security guard (or firefighter) can be seen yelling into a walkie-talkie, warning the strangers about the Devil. In the movie, he will probably be the only one that believes that the Devil is real, and all the other security guards and firefighters will laugh at him. Perhaps the events in the elevator are not real and have actually been contrived by Devil to torment the security guard. In the end, he realizes it was a test of his faith or that the Devil just did it to be dick. He is the Devil, after all.

There is no Devil

• For Christ’s sake, I hope this isn’t it. Here's how it would go: At the beginning, none of the characters believes that it’s the Devil. But after a while, they become convinced because of all the supernatural events occurring in and out of the elevator. At the end, it turns out that there’s a perfectly plausible explanation for everything that happened and we’re all a bunch of stupid idiots for thinking that the Devil was in an elevator just because someone told us he was and because it’s the goddamn title of the movie. If this is the twist (which again, I really hope it isn’t), then there will be some moral about how the real Devil is the potential evil inside of all of us. Cue groans.

Everybody’s dead

• The Sixth Sense was his highest grossing movie to date, so maybe he’s going for a repeat. If they are all dead, then it’s an elevator to Hell or, more likely, the elevator itself is Hell.

The elevator is not really an elevator

• Maybe they accidentally wandered into an empty broom closet. Or perhaps it isn’t an elevator full of strangers, but actually a kangaroo pouch full of marbles. I don’t know how this one would work, but undermining the basic assumption that they are actually in a real elevator is just the kind of twist he would go for.

Something you could not have seen coming, so you should not have bothered guessing

• In The Happening, everyone in the world started committing suicide and no one knew why. In the end, it turned out that (look away now if you don’t want to know) plants were making them do it with special pollen. Somehow, the plot then turned into a message about climate change. This made the film like a slightly more boring version of An Inconvenient Truth (zing). But anyway, there was no possible way to guess the twist ahead of time because there were no clues provided in the movie. Point, Shyamalan.

Ambiguous ending/no twist

• This is very unlikely. But maybe, at the end, the elevator will open (probably on floor 13 or 66) and it will be empty. The investigators will investigate, and never find anyone. We will be left to wonder what happened, with no explanation or moral. This would make it dangerously close to what I would call a "good" movie. Like I said: very unlikely. But hey, things happen.

So that’s the best that I got. For some reason, I always get obsessed with M. Night Shyamalan’s movies when one goes to theaters. Maybe that means he's more compelling then I give him credit for. Either way, I probably won’t see this one, but I will definitely read the Wikipedia synopsis tomorrow.

It's Not About Us, It's About Him

INCEPTION REVIEW

Despite a pretty strong positive critical reaction to the movie Inception, I’ve noticed in the reviews a slight undercurrent of negativity. These anti-Inception sentiments are typically not from the reviewers that let readers know which movies are a ‘great way to beat the heat this summer.’ Rather, the critics that disparage Inception are the kind that attempt to immediately determine how new movies will fit into the overall canon of Cinematic History. And some are saying that this movie is vying for a spot and should be denied.

Paradoxically, the two major criticisms that I’ve heard about Inception are that it is either too smart or that it is not smart enough. Those in the “too smart” camp usually were not confused by the movie themselves. Rather, they think that such high-mindedness has no place in a blockbuster for general audiences, that its complexity is over-reaching the genre. But Inception is killing at the box office, which is literally all the genre of blockbuster is meant to accomplish. So if people aren’t getting it or are bothered by its intricacy, then they are—at the very least—afraid to say so for fear of seeming dumb. Besides, as Chuck Klosterman said at a recent reading, Lost really taught us as viewers to take several levels of reality as a given.

Then there are the critics that think Inception lacks the artistic impact and philosophical complexity of a Great Film. A. O. Scott (who regularly writes brilliant reviews of movies I’m convinced he’s not bothered to watch) acknowledged that Inception was a pleasant diversion, but said it should not be considered alongside great movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Which, in a way, it is sort of a compliment to compare any movie to such masterpieces. But what Mr. Scott assumes is that Inception is another movie about the universal questions of technology, identity, and subjective reality. And in that, I believe, he is wrong.

Christopher Nolan began writing the screenplay for Inception ten years ago, which was around the time he made Insomnia. This was his second major release and it grossed over $100 million, as has every movie he’s made since. And Inception is the first film that Nolan has made entirely from his own material: he based Memento on a short story by his brother, he didn’t write Insomnia, he adapted The Prestige from a novel, and the Batman movies are (I believe) based on real-life events.

Because the movie is ostensibly about dreams and reality, it is tempting to view it as a commentary on our universal experience. However, Inception to me seems more of a personal meditation by Nolan on his own professional life. For the past decade, he has been creating fantasy worlds and attempting to induce catharsis, while working for a vaguely evil corporate interest (Time Warner Studios). When Nolan sets out to create a film, he must “assemble a team” of filmmakers. They craft a story with situations of sufficient complexity so that the audience gets lost and forgets the existence of the artifice.

In fact, if you view the structured dreams in Inception as a direct metaphor for Hollywood movie making, then the whole thing gets really post-modern really fast. Cobb’s (DiCaprio’s) assembled team sits down halfway through the first act and basically writes how the second and third acts will unfold. They design the sets and the story to implant an idea in the mind of the “mark” (or the movie-watcher). But there’s a problem. Cobb (or Nolan) can’t keep his personal issues out of the narrative, even though they threaten the whole project. It should be noted that Nolan is married to his producer, Emma Thomas. The emotional and financial stakes within the movie are high, just as they are when Nolan sets out to make a film that uses artistic methods to bring in millions of dollars in ticket and DVD sales.

Adding to the meta-cinematics, Inception is full of visual homages to great films such as Citizen Kane (the billowing curtain) and Royal Wedding (where Fred Astaire dances around a revolving hotel room). Once again, reviewers who think Inception only pretends to have artistic depth point to these moments as proof of its lack of authenticity. But that’s like dismissing The Wasteland for being derivative. It just shows you missed the point. As someone who has only adapted the work of others, Nolan has Cobb say that true inspiration is almost impossible, while stealing ideas is easy.

Inception also has visual references to less-great films, such as the ski-fighting sequence that directly recalls The World Is Not Enough. It seems too easy to dismiss these familiar scenes as unimaginative. At the risk of overstating my point, the mountainside is a constructed reality that the “mark” (viewer) must accept. So it makes sense that it a familiar stock image. Besides, at this the point, the mark knows that it is a dream. The reality becomes more ridiculous as the movie-watcher becomes complicit in suspending his disbelief. From this angle of analysis, I feel like I could pretty extensively get into how everything within the movie is a symbol for what is happening outside the movie. But that would be annoying and academic, so I won’t.

It’s hardly my intention to convince people to like Inception, I more just feel like it’s fundamentally misunderstood. I think Nolan struggles to put a message into his blockbusters, to provide insight instead of just profits. Although he does not always succeed, Inception is at least a reflection on the difficulty.

But there is one more final layer: I do not think Nolan wrote an autobiographical element into this movie on purpose. In an interview, he said, “I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing…I tend to examine my own process of, in this case dreaming and in Momento’s case memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed or manipulated.”

Who knows how honest he’s being, but this statement seems to show a writer who does not have post-modern awareness, he creates more naturalistically. When Nolan looked inside himself to find what he thought of dreaming, he found movies. Nolan could not help but explore the problems that arise when you impose your dreams on other people in exchange for vast sums of money. Because those are his problems, and this is the first movie that is truly his own.