The Face Knife

The Face Knife Endorses the Use of Spoilers
The X-Men, who by the way are a revolving band of Superheroes who also teach at prep school, have this practice facility that goes by the poetic name The Danger Room. The Danger Room allows them to hone their skills, powers and witty one-liners while experiencing a likely scenario (such as a giant robot attack), under parameters that almost infinitely fiddle-able (the giant robot attack may occur in the dark, with smoke and fire all around, or the giant robot may have been dispatched by an overzealous government, or the giant robot might be a manifestation of their DEEPEST FEARS) with the help of cutting edge CGI. While some of our mutant heroes just take the Danger Room exercise as a chance to blow off steam by indulging in some consequence-free environment, others take the simulation far too seriously. And I guess, to spell it out, some of us fall somewhere in between.

Although I like to think of myself as a fundamentally silly individual, I take movies seriously, sometimes even those that have no business being taken seriously. ¹ Some movies and genres sit up and beg to be taken seriously, and Science Fiction in particular has a history of using speculation or amplification as a lens to examine How We Live Now (as the NYT would put it), and the X-Men series of films has been more explicit in this regard than most. So when X-Men: The Last Stand makes allusions (some more graceful than others) to the ex-gay movement, The War on Terror and employs an actor that makes me think, god, what the hell is Vernon Jordan doing in this film, it makes me bracket my “holy shit is that poor green screen work” and “I soooo would join Magneto’s (Sir Ian MacKellen) ‘Brotherhood’” reactions and think about the film in a social context, and maybe I’m a huge dork but I think it’s just as fun to react to movies this way as it is to cheer when a blue-furred Kelsey Grammer whacks some guy in the face. On second thought, maybe there ARE dorkier dorks than I.

As I understand it, and this is based on an early teenage immersion in the Paperverse, the X-Men were Marvel Comic’s most popular property for two reasons: a realistic portrayal of the mindset of the outcast and an unprecedented level of interpersonal psycho-sexual melodrama (that often veered into what now looks like to be really kinky territory). The films have tried to replicate that formula and have had much more success with the former than the latter, which has been hampered by in some cases poor characterization and in some cases poor casting.

The filmmakers early on boldly jettison major character and fan-favorite (fan of the comics, that is) Cyclops, who it becomes apparent met his demise during an offscreen session of reunion boning. Cyclops was the heir apparent to run the team after Professor Xavier (Patick Stewart) died/retired/was trapped in another dimension, but as he had progressed from tight-ass whiner to, um, even more tight-assed and whiny during the period between the last sequel and this, his presence as leader would have dragged the Team as well as the film down into maudlin bullshit. So, even before his atomization, the Professor turns over the reins to Storm, played by bona fide major star Halle Berry, who must have been cast when the filmmakers were all like, “Hey, she’s black, and a woman, she’s perfect.” Berry is completely charisma-free (except for her hair) so it only makes sense when she more or less lets Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) the loner-rebel dude, make all the major decisions when it comes to how and where they should fight, etc.

While the X-Men makes the female characters powerful in terms of the ability to kick ass, their personal lives are still more or less characterized by reactions to the male characters in the film.

Part of the film’s plot centers on a ‘cure’ for the mutant condition, and two of the female characters are directly affected by it in profoundly sexist terms. Rogue (Anna Paquin), the touch of whose skin is like being slipped a Roofie, sees the cure as a chance to be able to lock down her wandering dweeb of a boyfriend by becoming able to, you know, “kiss.” After being admonished by Wolverine (who says he is not her father) to not do it because of “some boy” she goes ahead and does it. When she returns sans powers and but ready for action her boyfriend says “this is not what I wanted,” but the fact that what provoked Rogue to leave the school was seeing her BF ice-dancing with another girl puts all of this in perspective.

Mystique, played by Rebecca Romijn in full-body makeup that makes one expect her to hurl herself against one of Yves Klein’s canvases, is forcibly denuded of her powers by the government, and promptly turns traitor because she is a “woman scorned.”

Jean Grey, the only class-5 mutant on the planet (mutants are ranked like Twisters) is more or less the love-interest of not the virile Wolverine (in fact, her sexuality proves to be WAY too much for him) but the point of a love triangle between a dude who is paralyzed from the waist down and a crypto-gay. Telekinesis, which is one of Jean’s powers, has a cinematic tradition of appearing in female characters at the onset of sexual maturity, and in this case, her supreme power is explicitly linked with “joy and lust and destruction ” (or something like that). The male characters result to all sorts of gambits to restrain her but her power proves to be too much, that is until Wolverine manages to penetrate her with not one but 3 foot-long appendages in a patriarchal recuperation of the scenario at the end of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2.² Go Team!

Only Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde manages not to land herself in a sexist predicament, and that’s probably because she’s supposed to be like 14 and she’d cut your balls off if you tried.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then, that the X-Men become more or less counter-revolutionaries and defenders of the status quo, more or less reflexively so. Magneto, who in addition to being a bundle of charisma is right about nearly everything including the reflexive perfidy of the government, is stopped when the X-Men use the ‘unfair’ weapons and tactics of the enemy against him.

In spite of all this revolution recuperatin’ and woman subjugatin’, I enjoyed this movie, though I’m glad I’m writing about it the day after I saw it because I’m sure the details will soon fade from mind, like the first two, which I can barely recall. The film gets high marks from me because of the relatively short run-time and decent pacing - and it’s really rare that you see an action movie combine those two qualities these days. The CGI was acceptable except for a few moments of really shitty green screen (Angel flying?), and I guess that’s all I can ask for from CGI, is to be acceptable. But that’s a subject for another day.

¹ My favorite justification is that films are “things to think with” and although I sometimes try to get into criticism about form or style, none of those things are as important as what the movie makes me think about (and I hope it goes without saying that some of these thoughts are far more tongue in cheek than others). Call it philosophical criticism, biographical criticism or just good old self-obsession, that’s largely what you’re going to get here. Oh, and spoilers. Tons of spoilers.

² Not the only call-back to Buffy. As Matthew pointed out to me, in a weird mobius strip of pop-culture red-heads, Famke Jannssen is inflicted with the “Dark Willow” make-up from Buffy 6, which was directly inspired by the Dark Phoenix X-Men comic books

No Sympathy for Little Miss Vengeance
Since I’m a great fan of what we in the pre-random subway search days used to call “due process,”¹ endorsements of vigilantism tends to rub me the wrong way, particularly when the film in question feels the need to exculpate the underage Bronson (Ellen Page) in question by rigging the plot so that the viewer can go home without any messy questions of justice to lose sleep over. It helps to have a pretty despicable villain on tap, too.

Lucky for us, then, that the perp (Patrick Wilson) in Hard Candy does not only have excellent modern taste in interior design but is also by profession a photographer, two perennial signifiers of shifty if not outright villainous characterization. Much like how the cinematic scientist is usually an over-reaching god-mocker⁴, the cinematic photographer always has something to hide, and while sometimes that secret happens to be the power to crawl up walls and shoot webs from your wrists, most of the time it’s something pretty pervy. ²

The photographer in Hard Candy is, natch, a pedophile, and at first it seems our precocious Punisher’s task is to figure out exactly which level pedo he is in order to mete out the appropriate level of punishment. This happens through a lot of talking and a little bit of shake-the-camera search-the-house . The talking, although sometimes veering into weird Gilmore Girls gone gritty territory, is a lot better than the shaking, although towards the end of the film neither method of ratcheting up the tension makes much aesthetic sense³. Hard Candy, whatever the theme of the film is, is a classic “stand-off” situation where characters are withholding information from each other in a limited setting. The current gold-standard of this kind of film is Reservoir Dogs, which uses the position of the characters and the camera within the confined space so effectively as to nearly obviate the appearance of cutting, except when it comes to important things, like amputation. Which Hard Candy does have, in the form of a radical orchidectomy.

Only, not really. Page’s pre-emptive torture/strike/whatever turns out to have been merely shock and awe enabled by a stagily placed TV monitor and a VHS copy of “Castration Jams ‘05″, a bravura performance put on in order to convince the pedo to….what, exactly? The error of his ways? At this point, the plot becomes hopelessly contrived as it tries to rehabilitate the psycho-leaning Page and irrevocably damn Wilson, who may have been effective in “duping” some in the audience with his psychoanalytical rationales for his behavior. I suppose that’s necessary, because we don’t want sympathetic pedophiles in our movies, unless Todd Solondz is responsible, and even then…yech.

The ending “reveal” is just useless, and the way justice is finally done elides any questions by making it happen at the hand of villain. Though I guess the hanging modality of the execution does bring to mind the spectre of lynching.

Maybe I have a problem with this rough justice only because I serendipitously watched Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936)the same morning, which was a specifically pro-due process film and quite effective at it (if equally narratively implausible as Hard Candy) or maybe, you know, it’s the Zeitgeist even though the blogosphere told me that Bordwell banned that word or whatever. But fuck, what is this movie for? Is it an empowerment fantasy? If so, empowerment for whom? I know that the proliferation of camera-phones has made the world an even less understanding place for subway flashers, and good for them, but um, do we want our middleschool students taking time out to cut off some creep’s cock? Or even fantasizing about it, for that matter?

Coming Next Week: The Face Knife Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2006 (2005),(2003)

¹Except in the case of vampire-hunting, but only because there’s no good legal recourse for that problem yet. Constitutional Amendment, people!
² See my upcoming review of The Notorious Bettie Page for more on this
³ Though, when do micro-second handheld shots edited together ever make sense?
⁴ Since I wrote this entry, this Slate slideshow about cinema’s Scientists was published.