"Serena": What The Fuck Happened?

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Serena is, in a word, baffling.  It’s one of those strange films where all the ingredients seem to come together to make something that should be great.  Talented actors Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence star in a film by acclaimed Danish director Susanne Bier.  What could go wrong?  Apparently a whole hell of a lot, as I’m struggling to even comprehend what I just saw.

Set in the Depression era South, Pemberton (Cooper) meets a lovely woman named Serena (Lawrence), whom he immediately weds and brings in to assist him in his logging business.  At first, it would seem that film is intent on have two storylines bent on converging: one in which Pemberton is fighting off government attempts to convert his logging land into a national park; the other being Serena’s fight to be taken seriously as a savvy businesswoman in what is ostensibly a man’s world.  And yet, by the end of the film’s first act, most of that pretense is dropped, leaving me to wonder why exactly Pemberton’s business and Serena’s intelligence were so excessively established.

Rather, the film takes a hard left into making Serena baby crazy.  First she’s desperate to bear Pemberton’s child.  Then she is devastated upon losing her pregnancy in a manner that precludes her from ever being pregnant again.  And then she goes off the deep end by attempting to kill Pemberton’s former lover and out-of-wedlock infant son, through a convenient enough henchman who believes she saved his life in accordance with some prophecy.  So it’s up to Pemberton to save the day, I guess, fighting off the henchman in a climax to a conflict that is only established very late in the film.

Yeah.  This is some weird shit.

If there is one thing to point to in how this film goes so awry, it has to be the screenplay.  All the dialogue is stilted, melodramatic, riddled with clichés, and just downright awkward.  Cooper and Lawrence do their absolute best to make their dialogue sound natural, often resorting to scenery chewing eccentricities to distract from conversations that no two rational people would have.  Furthermore, as my garbled synopsis demonstrates, the plotting makes next to no sense, emphasizing scenes of lumbering, high life socializing, sexual encounters, and extraneous subplots that ultimately distract from what (I think) was the film’s intended purpose.

Given the title of the film, I’m assuming that the focus was meant to be on Serena’s tragic downfall from a strong independent woman to being an emotional wreck due to her sterility.  Though Lawrence manages to at least sell that as Serena’s arc through sheer willpower (more so than the film’s bizarre script at any rate), this is a painfully one-dimensional representation of a woman lead, reducing her self-worth to her ability to bear children, even though her character is clearly established to have other aspirations.  Yes, it is sad when a woman who wishes to have children loses the ability to do so.  But that doesn’t mean she will immediately break under the strain of losing her procreative abilities.  Give her a bit more credit than that.

Ultimately, Serena is a fascinating film in just how bad it turned out to be.  It isn’t even entertainingly bad; I actually found the film rather boring when I wasn’t gawking at its blatant sexism.  But the fact that such talented individuals were involved in producing such an obvious flop of a film is simply baffling.  Just… baffling.

What films have baffled you with their sheer horribleness?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"The DUFF": The Teen Comedy Starring... Her?

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

I am twenty-four years old, so I really don’t have any right to say this, but after watching The DUFF, I feel unnecessarily old.  I remember when I was a young teenager and I first saw She’s All That, a film that was supposedly emblematic of teens growing up in the late nineties and early millennium.  And The DUFF hits pretty much all the same plot beats, right down to the male tutor giving fashion and dating advice to the awkward nerdy girl only to end up with the two of them in love with each other.  What I don’t remember, though, was She’s All That being so blatantly pandering to its target demographic, and thinking that either makes me cynical or out of touch with those a decade younger than myself.  Probably (hopefully) both.

The term DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, a term that desperately wants to find its way into teenage lexicon via hashtag.  The idea is that in any group of friends, one person is the most approachable and consequently least interesting, acting as a safe mechanism to volley conversation between those too nervous to speak with the more popular, interesting members of the group.  Our protagonist, Bianca (Mae Whitman, or to those who watch Arrested Development, “Her?”), discovers that she has been an unwitting DUFF to her supermodel gorgeous friends, and so seeks to rebel against the trends and become self-sufficiently attractive enough to ask out the boy she likes.  Enter the jock who agrees to help her in exchange for chemistry notes, and you can pretty much figure out where it goes from there.

I have to say, Whitman really pulls her own as the star of her own movie, consistently exuding a charisma that many twenty-somethings playing teenagers never quite manage.  She’s goofy and funny, yet sympathetic in her desire to be more than just people’s stepping stone to her more popular best friends.  (How she is even friends with these girls when none of them remotely share the same interests, I couldn’t tell you.)  What is less than endearing, though, is the film’s constant attempts at referencing social media in order to appear hip and cool to teenagers.  Yes.  We get it.  Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest all exist.  But name-dropping social media sites in order to point out how foreign the concept seems to adults is not only antiquated, but also doesn’t get funnier with repetition.

Furthermore, the film has some really inconsistent moralizing, with a finale that seems to simultaneously tell its audience that it’s okay to be different and strange, yet still follows through on Bianca’s character arc of self-improvement through beautification.  This is a pretty common problem in the teen comedy genre, and I would love to see a film rise above childish moralizing and just provide an original story for once, without all the baggage that emulating teen movies from the nineties entails.

And yet, despite its issues, The DUFF is a pretty decent and mostly inoffensive film.  Whitman pretty much carries the film with her “Hollywood ugly” charm, and there were a few moments that genuinely made me laugh.  I only wish that the plot, subtext, and pop culture references weren’t so recycled and already dated.  In the information age, it only makes sure the film will be irrelevant to its target demographic by the time the streaming services pick it up.

Is the teen comedy genre inherently flawed?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Kingsman: The Secret Service": Pretty Dumb, Really Fun

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

In 2010, director Mathew Vaughn released his adaptation of a comic book by Mark Millar, a simultaneous mockery and deification of superhero tropes expressed through ultraviolence of near-cartoonish extremity.  That little film was called Kick Ass, and it has since become a cult classic.  Kingsman: The Secret Service feels a lot like that film, probably because it is another Vaughn film adapted from another Millar comic.  So, the short version of this review is that if you liked Kick Ass, you’ll likely enjoy Kingsman for a lot of the same reasons.  The major difference is that where Kick Ass was a send-up of the superhero pastiche, Kingsman is likewise a take on classic espionage flicks a la classic James Bond, and this carries some baggage with it that makes the film problematic in certain respects.

The film has two concurrent plotlines that eventually intersect, one introducing us to the world of the English secret agent society known as the Kingsman through the eyes of potential recruit Eggsy, the other revolving around the investigation of a mounting plot by megalomanical tech genius billionaire Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).  Eggsy’s story will be familiar to anyone who has seen the Harry Potter films, as his underprivileged background places him in stark contrast with his aristocratic competitors, yet that outside perspective is what enables him to succeed where others fail.  It hits its required beats with admirable efficiency, not lingering too long on what the audience realizes are inevitabilities and instead focusing on getting to the action.

And boy does this film lean heavy on the action, and it delivers in astoundingly choreographed ways.  The camera zips around and slows down in order to provide close-ups of bloody executions framed with comic book sensibilities, often not breaking a shot as it moves from fast-paced execution to extreme explosion.  There is one scene in particular wherein an agent engages in a hundred-person brawl inside a hate group church that will likely be the scene this film is most remembered for, despite how obviously contrived its presence in the film is just to provide the guilt-free spectacle of watching anonymously evil people rip each other to shreds.

But despite its ultraviolent spectacle, Kingsman attempts something that Kick Ass did not; it attempts to have a political agenda and comes off as more than a little… well, stupid.  Without spoiling the film’s third act, it involves a plot so reliant on a cynicism about the true intentions of the rich, famous, and powerful as to be childish in its lack of nuance.  Samuel L. Jackson plays a comically overblown American villain, who drinks his wine with a Big Mac and speaks with an affected lisp to hammer home is foppishness.  This paints the conflict as between American capitalist imperialism versus (a supposedly superior) proper English imperialism, which feels less than thought out to the extent that the film blatantly spouts its philosophies.  Furthermore, the film paints working class men as Neanderthals who universally beat women, and Eggsy’s personal journey revolves around him rising above that influence to become a true gentlemen, completely ignoring inherently classist implications.

And yet, these implications don’t detract from what is simply a really fun film.  The action is heavy, the characters are memorable, there are a handful of very unique setpieces, and, most important, the movie is just a blast.  Just don’t try to think too hard about the implications of a bourgeois society with no oversight fighting against foreign bourgeois through a mandate of moral supremacy.  Unraveling that thread can only serve to demonstrate how stupid the film truly is, but stupid fun in just fine when taken as such.

What films do you need to turn your brain off for in order to enjoy?  Does that make them lesser films?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.