Insurgent

Hollywood loves nothing more than a good bandwagon. The American movie industry’s motto seems to be: “That made money? Well, let’s do more of that!” Certainly, this thinking is responsible for the rampant case of sequel-itis Hollywood has, but also it’s to blame for copycat syndrome. Studios hear about projects in the works at other companies and often rush their own version into production trying to beat one another to the release date. During the 90s, there times when there were no fewer than three Robin Hood movies, two Wild Bill Hicock films, and two meteors-coming-to-smash-the-earth movies in some stage of development at the same time. Hollywood may be the dream factory, but few of those dreams are original material.

This brings me to our current trend of the moment – dystopian science fiction films based on Young Adult novels. The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Maze Runner, The Giver – they are all more or less the same film over and over again. In the future, society has broken down and has been remade. In an effort correct problems from the past, the new society is strict, repressive, and based entirely on conformity. One lone person bucks against all that homogeneity and becomes a reluctant hero who liberates the rest of the benighted population.

 I saw Insurgent last weekend and was again struck by the powerful sameness of these movies. Each one of them is essentially two hours of adolescent anxiety made up to look like science fiction. When you’re a teenager, you’re really interested in where everyone belongs. Remember how well you knew the geography of your high school lunchroom? How you just knew that all the baseball players sat in one place and the drama kids sat in another? Remember how you mentally assigned people to their clique based on what they wore, what kind of music they listened to, and who they sat with in class?

This simultaneous need for and fear of categorization is at the heart of these films, especially the Divergent series. The whole premise is that following a vaguely outlined collapse of the world we know, Chicago became a city-state all unto itself and is divided up into different boroughs. Each person is tested for their dominant personality trait and is then assigned to live and work in a faction with people just like them. Bravery, love, intelligence, self-sacrifice, and honesty are the five factions to which people can belong – except for people who somehow don’t fit inside the box, people who diverge from what society expects of them, people like Tris Prior, played by Shalaine Woodley.

Tris is a typical “chosen one” figure – like Harry Potter or Neo or Frodo – she is inherently special but is reluctant, unsure of herself, and insistent that she’s just like everyone else. The first film in the series focused on her discovering her divergence which means she has traits from all the factions - while the second film, Insurgent, is all about reconciling herself to the cost of being different. 

Between this role and her work in the teen-weepie The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley is the teen actress of the moment. I haven’t seen her in much else, so I’m not sure if she has more range than she demonstrates in Insurgent. But in this movie she has basically only one setting which is various degrees of the self-loathing pout. She’s good at it, but seemingly it’s her only trick.

Besides the obsession with categorization, another thing the dystopia movies share is an old, white, Aryan authority figure. Think Donald Sutherland as President Snow in the Hunger Games, Meryl Streep as The Chief Elder in The Giver, or Patricia Clarkson in The Maze Runner. All older, all white or blonde hair, all insistent that these rebellious teenagers essentially get off of their futuristic lawn and turn down that goshdarn loud music of rebellion. In Insurgent, this role is taken by Kate Winslet in a bleach blonde, unbending turn as Jeanine, the head of the intelligence faction. Winslet is a great actress and makes a fun villain, but it’s not a terribly nuanced role, so she doesn’t have much to do except look superior and occasionally superior and slightly threatened.

Insurgent isn’t a great film. It’s not even one of the best dystopian films. It is an interesting example of how Hollywood works to draw in teen and tween dollars by taking their concerns about fitting in and dealing with adult authority figures and turning them into the widescreen epic that they feel like when you’re a teenager.  

Singles

I had a friend whose theory was that whatever you love in high school and early college is what you love for the rest of your life. He suggested that your favorite music, tv show, or movie when you were eighteen or nineteen is still probably your favorite today and the new things you encounter get measured against it. 

Now this theory doesn’t hold 100% true because I know for a fact my 90s love affair with the Dave Matthews Band is long since over. But there are a lot of things from that period that I still think are wonderful, and one of them just came out on Blu-Ray this month. The 1992 film Singles is kind of Cameron Crowe’s lost film. Right before it, he directed his first movie, the classic high school love story Say Anything, and after it he directed the unexpected Tom Cruise blockbuster Jerry Maguire. Right between those two notable movies came this small film about a group of six friends who all live in the same apartment building trying to navigate the single life in grunge-era Seattle. It’s like an extended episode of Friends set in the northwest and with a far better soundtrack.

 

Crowe is among America’s most writerly filmmakers. He loves character, idiosyncratic dialogue, and bumper-sticker worthy one liners. Let us not forget this is the guy who introduced “Show me the money” to the national lexicon. Singles is divided up into vignettes with short story-like titles such as “Have Fun, Stay Single” and “What Took You So Long?” Each one focuses on both the pathos and occasional absurdity of being single.

The relationship between Steve, the traffic engineer trying to solve Seattle’s gridlock problem, and Linda, the more-wholesome-than-the-granola-she-eats environmental activitist, is the heart of the film, but I love the subplots and side characters even more. Matt Dillon, for example, plays Cliff Poncier, the empty-headed puff-chested lead singer of the ridiculously named band Citizen Dick. He’s pursued by the sweet and naïve Janet played by Bridget Fonda. He neglects and ignores her until a very Cameron Crowe moment when Janet decides to test Cliff by pretending to sneeze around him. Her only standard left for a boyfriend is that he say “Bless you” when she sneezes. She tries it and he hands her a box of Kleenex saying, “Don’t get me sick, babe. I have to perform this weekend.” She breaks it off with him and he is left to suddenly realize that he lost a really good thing. 

 

My other favorite supporting character is Debbie Hunt played by Sheila Kelly. Debbie is a bit of a man-eater and at one point has a full-on auction-slash-negotiation with her roommate in the kitchen for the eligible bachelor sitting well within earshot in the living room. The bacherlor is disappointed when he hears that Debbie is willing to give him up to her roommate in return for doing the dishes for a month.

The film is thick with cameos including members of Pearl Jam as Cliff Poncier’s band and director Tim Burton as the guy who directs Debbie Hunt’s entry for a video dating service. Real-deal grunge era bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden play in clubs attended by the singles. Crowe himself makes an appearance as a rock reporter, which is a bit of an inside joke because he got his start as a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone.

 

Looking back now, almost 23 years later, the film doesn’t seem very grungy. Its version of the club scene in Seattle looks tame and quaint, and as Crowe’s camera pans across the singles various apartments, it’s kind of funny and dated to see what used to seem alternative and edgy. Still, outdated or not, Singles has been one of my favorite movies for a long time. Since late high school/early college to be exact. And I’m glad it’s being reintroduced to new viewers on Blu Ray.

Review: Poetry

National Poetry Month continues! And this week, I review a movie titled, appropriately enough, Poetry. It’s a South Korean film released in 2010 directed by the filmmaker and novelist Lee Chang Dong. The film centers on a grandmother, Mrs. Yang, living in a smallish Korean city where she raises her teenage grandson and works part-time as a maid and home health care aide. It’s a small, quiet life but things begin to change for her as three events converge. First, after noticing she’s regularly forgetting basic words, Mrs. Yang is diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Then on her way home from the doctor, she sees a poster advertising a poetry class at the local community center and decides to sign up. Finally, Mrs. Yang discovers that her seemingly typical, pimply, inarticulate teenage grandson is one of a gang of boys involved in regularly assaulting a girl at school. She discovers this only after the girl commits suicide by jumping off a bridge and the fathers of the other boys get together with Mrs. Yang to make a plan for how to protect their sons’ futures. 

The film follows her as she tries to continue on with regular life while simultaneously trying to write poetry for her class by dwelling on the beautiful things of the world and trying to understand and reconcile how her own grandson could be part of something so monstrous. Both efforts are confounded as her Alzheimer’s continues to creep up on her. 

 

One of the saddest scenes in the film takes place when Mrs. Yang travels to the country to find the dead girl’s mother and convince her not to go public with the reason for her daughter’s suicide. She walks out to the field where the mother is working and gets so distracted by the beauty of the scenery, that she forgets why she came in the first place. She has a pleasant chat with the mother and then leaves, only realizing as she’s walking away what she forgot to do. Too embarrassed to correct herself, she just keeps walking.

 

Mrs. Yang tries to write a single poem over the course of the entire film, and she pauses every time she sees something stereotypically poetic – birds in the trees near her apartment, flowers outside the restaurant where she plans with the other parents to pay off the mother of the dead girl, the rippling water of the river where the girl jumped in. But each time, she’s never able to get more than a line or two before realizing she isn’t really inspired by these things. 

Mrs. Yang wrestles with the morality of trying to pay off the mother of the dead girl rather than allowing her grandson to be accountable for his actions. As she is gently bullied by the other boys’ fathers, she then struggles with how to come up with her part of the payoff. Each parent is expected to chip in five million won or about 4500 hundred U.S. dollars. For a woman of her means, it might as well be five million U. S. dollars.

In the end, Mrs. Yang gets her share of the money, but it doesn’t save her grandson. She also finally writes a poem, but rather than giving her peace, it only seems to highlight the fact that her life is irrevocably different and that she can never go back to what it was.

The film is largely about waking up – to the world around you and to the people in your life. It is about understanding that real poetry is not in birds or flowers but in the discoveries we make about ourselves and others when we truly open our eyes. It is in the contradiction of finding that you can still love someone even when we hate what they’ve done.  

It is not a fast moving film. It lingers and takes its time in ways that most American movies never would. There are subtitles and cultural differences that will keep away casual viewers. But like poetry itself, the film Poetry is something that rewards the patient, open-minded viewer.