Why Han Solo Is Cooler Than Luke Sywalker

1. Han wears a white shirt open to mid-chest, a black vest, tight black pants and black boots. Luke wears a bathrobe.
2. Leia: “I love you.” Han: “I know.”
3. Han hangs out with a wookie. Luke hangs out with droids.
4. The Millennium Falcon can do the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs. Luke drives a “speeder.”
5. Han shot Greedo first. And then left a tip.
6. Han is good friends with Billy Dee Williams.
7. Han is frozen in carbonite for a year and thaws into an even bigger smart ass. Luke spends a few hours on the surface of Hoth and needs Han and the carcass of a dead taun-taun to last the night.
8. Han Solo’s next feature? Raiders of the Lost Ark. Skywalker’s? Corvette Summer.
9. Han kicks ass without the force.
10. Han probably tagged Leia. So did Luke.    

The Last House on the Well-Manicured Cul-de-Sac

Let me begin by saying that The Purge, starring Ethan Hawke and Lena "House of Lannister" Hedley is not a movie for everyone.  My mother, for example, would hate this movie from the outset.  So my comments are really for those who might like this movie, if this is the type of movie one is inclined to like.  Who is that, exactly?  I'm not sure writer and director James DeMonaco knows exactly.

On the one hand, it's part home invasion thriller.  So, you know, all of the typical testosterone-filled 18-35-year-old males who go in for those movies might be the intended audience.  On the other hand, it's kind of an intelligent dystopian future political commentary, the kind that might be based on a book you had to read your junior year of high school if you had a progressive English teacher who also assigned Animal Farm and Brave New World.  Except this isn't based on a book.  So the intended audience might be the intellectual type who call movies "films" and think the NSA poses a serious threat to civil rights.

I guess the problem is that the type of film that appeals to both of these groups isn't likely to be the same film and The Purge probably falls a little short with both groups.  (See what I did there?  I called it a "film.")  In fact, I might be just the perfect intended audience member for this movie, because I like both home invasion thrillers and dystopian political commentary, but it kind of doesn't work for me either.

Briefly: the story is set in 2022 and there has been some sort of political upheaval leading to a "nation reborn."  Once a year for a twelve-hour period, all law is suspended, and many citizens go on a "hunt" - wreaking havoc and murdering others with impunity.  The net result is that crime at other times is exceptionally low and the economy is thriving.  Our supposed protagonist, James Sandin (Hawke), has benefitted considerably from the purge by selling very expensive home security systems to wealthy families.  The movie begins just an hour before the 7:00 P.M. start of the bloodletting, with Sandin arriving home to his wife (Hedley), a teenage daughter who has a boyfriend the parents don't approve of, and a misfit younger son who is luckily precocious with robots and hiding.  Two potential sources of story conflict begin when a. the boyfriend sneaks into the home just prior to the security system being armed and b. the junior Sandin, possessed of scruples of unknown origin, disarms the security system to let in a homeless man who is being hunted by a mob of entitled ivy-league collegians, dressed in school blazers, khakis, and creepy masks.  Learning that their prey has found refuge chez Sandlin, they come knocking.

As a premise, I think it's pretty brilliant.  Yet it comes apart in execution.

<Spoilers ahead>

I'm guessing it's in the interest of time, but DeMonaco gives short shrift to world building.  We're looking at a U.S. just nine years in the future and no real explanation is given about the events that led to the "nation reborn."  It strains credulity to watch the Sandins' neighbors proceed to deliver cookies, chant government mantras, and mutilate teenagers in Stepfordesque complicity.  DeMonaco seems to believe that the wealthy would happily populate the world he has created with nary a thought to the psychic repercussions of murder.  Strangely, the Sandins seem to be the only ones in the neighborhood who are troubled by the practice at all, in spite of the fact that their wealth is built on the purge.  I have no doubt that wealth may create the amoral zombies that we see in the movie, I just think it might take more than a decade.  Perhaps if the setting were 2042 instead of 2022 . . . I don't know.

What the film does best, in my opinion, is work Edwin Hodge's character, the target of the hunt.  Hodge plays the role close the reality that we see on a daily basis in this country.  We truly feel his fear as he is hunted, first in the street and later in the house.  Even as we watch him attack the family, our sympathies are with him: what else could someone backed into such a desperate corner, literally and figuratively, possibly do?

At those moments, the film's central thesis comes through clearest: poverty is violence.  In a world where even our personal security is dependent upon wealth, the poor are victims of the larger culture.  Poverty is an assault on one's personhood, an idea given an exclamation point by DeMonaco's refusal to give Hodge's character a name.  At the movie's denouement, Mrs. Sandin is left at her dining table saying goodbye to the neighbors who have terrorized her, calling them by their names.  She doesn't invite the homeless man to stay, or even inquire as to his name, even though he has saved her life and the lives of her children.  He is instead left to return to the streets where the purge is just a particularly nightmarish episode in a life of daily terrors.

(Aside: Bravo to DeMonaco for making the homeless man almost the only black face we see in the movie.  Although the film is tackling poverty, the subtext of racial inequality is given a human face through Hodge.)

On this level, the movie should work, addressing poverty, along with the country's obsession with guns, our desensitization to violence, and the sometimes sinister roles of media and government.  Yet it doesn't work, not really.

The main fault of the film is that it spends fairly substantial screen time engaging in just the sort of violent voyeurism that DeMonaco seemed to set in his sights.  We get sprays of automatic weapon fire into various torsos, axes buried into backs and skulls, and the leader of the hunting party glibly blowing off the head of a cohort.  The audience is left reacting precisely as they would in any other home invasion thriller, not only hoping the Sandins make it through the night but cheering wildly when the bad guys get their bloody comeuppance.  In the theater where I watched, the audience of mostly white twenty-somethings only really seemed to come alive when someone was being butchered.  This was made easier by the fact that the hunters themselves were dehumanized, not only through their inexplicably unconscionable acts, but also because most of them remained masked throughout the movie.  In short, DeMonaco seems to be offering a critique of the way the poor are dehumanized and then provides an alternative: dehumanize the rich instead.

Now, I'm rarely a critic of movie violence.  While I am given occasional pause considering its effects on the very young, I believe that Bowdlerized stories lead us to imagine that violence is not real.  The problem with The Purge is that its use of violence is to the detriment of the central point of the film.  Just as the audience is beginning to consider the brutal reality of poverty, they are given an out through escapist fantasy.

I really wanted to like this movie, but it was ultimately unsatisfying.  Maybe if there is a remake in a few years, they'll get it right.  In the meantime, I hope we see more art that wrestles with this uncomfortable issue in American life.

Superhero with a Thousand Faces

I am fresh from seeing Man of Steel, Christopher Nolan's Superman reboot.  A few stray observations (spoilers ahead):

1. Overall the movie is an excellent addition to the Superman canon.  For an origin story appearing in 2013, it seems to avoid most of the hipster meta-commentary on the meaning of the superhero. This seems particularly noteworthy, given director Zack Snyder's past with Watchmen and Nolan's vision for the Dark Knight trilogy.
2. Joseph Campbell needs a co-writing credit on this one.  I don't know if Nolan and Snyder immersed themselves in The Hero with a Thousand Faces or have just spent lots of weekends at Lucas Ranch, but this movie wears its mono myth on its sleeve and borrows heavily on Biblical imagery.  Clark/Kal has been made "a little lower than the angels" for awhile, the father sending his only begotten (not made, contra other children on Krypton) son, to save the world.  He is found in a basket-shapped ship, which is kept in the stable/barn, and he grows up as a normal human until he's ready to begin his ministry and ultimately his destiny . . . at age 33.  He even has his own garden moment in an inoffensive church of nondescript denomination, complete with a stained glass depiction of  Christ in Gethsemane over His his shoulder.  (According to adherents.com, Clark's family are Methodists.)
3. This is really the first Superman film fully imagined as an alien story.  Others certainly play around with the idea, but Krypton is completely developed and the alien craft would be right at home on Star Trek.
4. Speaking of which, Krypton is a pretty groovy planet that kept reminding me of Vulcan on the Star Trek reboot for some reason, maybe because we spend a good portion of our time there watching the place destruct.  They have really cool computer interfaces that frankly make me sorry I'm typing on a keyboard right now, and I really dig the art deco/Metropolis feel, especially when ghost Jor-El is telling Kal about the history of the place.
5. In case anyone forgot, Superman is a 'Merican.  He even says so, including once while American flags are waving over his shoulder.  His mom (Diane Lane) works at Sears, dammit!  (And was anyone else surprised by that product placement, including widow Kent's blue Sears polo and worker lanyard around her neck?)  He does manage to take out an unmanned drone that is spying on him.  He is currently still silent on the ones used to kill Afghans and Pakistanis, however.
6. Other unexpected product placement: IHOP.  And like, 27 times.
7. Henry Cavill is pretty great in the lead and manages to reimagine the character in a way that departs entirely from Christopher Reeves' portrayal, while keeping close to the source.  I was never personally a huge fan of Reeves' Superman, though it was certainly hard not to imagine it as commentary on his own life in later years.
8. Can someone just go ahead and acknowledge that Clark/Kal seems to have a pretty nonchalant attitude toward "collateral damage," including that which he seems to cause by, for example, chucking aliens into the gas pumps at 7-11 and watching the place blow up?
9. Amy Adams is a pretty forgettable Lois Lane.  I can't buy her as the "intrepid reporter" and really wanted Margot Kidder back.  She is given a few clever moments, however, like her inquiry about what the "S" stands for (interrupted just before she posits "Super") and her tongue-in-cheek greeting to Clark at the newspaper ("Welcome to the Planet.")
10. General Zod is one of the great villains and Michael Shannon is perfect.  He brings a lot of the self-righteous-but-ultimately-evil vibe with him from Boardwalk Empire.
11. Russell Crowe is a cool Jor-El, but I'm pretty sure they cast him for his dragon flying skills.  I didn't like his Ghost of Christmas Future bit on board the ship though.
12. The "dream sequence" (or whatever that was) between Zod and Kal seems lifted (in style at least) from Watchmen's dream sequence with Night Owl and Silk Spectre.  Except the part where Kal is sinking in human skulls, which reminded me of the climax of Drag Me to Hell.
13. Also, the Kryoptonian ship seems to employ the same technology as is used in The Matrix, where bits of metal can reform into some sort of sentience.  Scary shit.
14. Laurence Fishburne is a completely unintimidating Perry White, perhaps due to his earring.
15. Is it strange that we are now better at depicting what major American cities might look like if attacked by large destructive powers?  I mean, we know all about the clouds of ash and the papers floating around.  Did anyone think of those things pre-2001?
16. For my taste, they spend too much time just blowing shit up.  They could have easily trimmed the 143-minute run time by twenty minutes with no damage to the story.
17. Something in the Earth's gravitational pull ensures that anything entering the atmosphere (baby-ship, meteor, flying aliens, etc.) will only land in Metropolis or Smallville, KS.
18. This is my favorite suit, by far.  It's not just that the suit is stylish and indestructible, it actually looks indestructible.
19. Also indestructible: Kal's coif. 
20. Ghost Jor-El apparently insists (offscreen) that Clark/Kal shave before dawning the suit.  Which leads to the obvious question given the above observation, "How does Superman shave?"  I'm so glad you asked.
21. The cape does seem a particular disadvantage if you encounter fellow Kryptonians in battle, however.  They will use it to sling you into buildings.
22. Also cape-related: one of the flashbacks near the end shows a boy Clark Kent in his back yard pretending to be a superhero while wearing a quickly-fashioned red cape.  But, um . . . who is he imitating?
23. Kevin Costner reprises his role as Kevin Costner.
24. Was it just me, or was there some sort of under-current of faith versus science in the movie, with science wearing the black hat?  Clark/Kal discusses some nebulous "faith" at various points (and is clearly a Christ figure, as noted above), but the baddie-woman also says at one point, "If history has taught us anything, it's that evolution always wins," just before Superman and the 'Mericans kick her space ass.
25. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack is completely forgettable and although I understand they didn't want to do the whole John Williams thing, this barely rises above mood music.  Notable exceptions: some song with guitar when Clark is on a fishing boat (have to search this one out via the Google) and Allison Crowe doing "Ring of Fire."

All in all, if you care about Superman or superheroes, you should go see it.  Of course, if you care about these things, you've already seen it.  Also recommended for Jungians, Christopher Meloni completists, and people who like seeing things blown up.

P.S. For my own take on the Superman mythology, go take a listen over at Soundcloud.