Film Carew: Sex, Scrubs And Skeletons

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez first announced plans for a Sin City sequel when their original to-screen adaptation debuted in 2005. It made sense at the time: the first film had struck a chord with its hyper-stylised treatment of Miller comic book; capturing the black-and-white shading of his hand-drawn noir-movie tropes in CGI’d approximations of through-the-horizontal-blinds lighting. The film, in truth, wasn’t actually any good, rendering a dim, violent, misogynist world in which every woman was a prostitute and every dude was down on his luck, in which fistfights were plentiful and justice came down the barrel of a gun. But the years have been especially unkind: its once-revolutionary visuals now look video-game cheap; its parade of ultra-violence cartoonish and silly; and, well, its cast keeps dying, with the years-since claiming Michael Clarke Duncan and Brittany Murphy.

And, so, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For fails, totally, to wind back the clock, arriving dead-in-the-water as the decade-on sequel absolutely no one was awaiting. With some shuffling cast replacements (Josh Brolin in for Clive Owen, Dennis Haysbert replacing Duncan, Jeremy Piven for Michael Madsen), we return once more to this collection of cobbled-together clichés. There’s men riding in vintage musclecars, chomping cigars and playing poker, haunting rough-house saloons where they leer at strippers. Women are all whores of varying stripe, getting about the house in studded leather gimp-wear, the camera creeping in for recurring ass close-ups. Eva Green —the film’s only real spark of life in a turn the right amounts of camp and crazy— is a self-described “selfish slut” who is rarely clothed; a Femme Fatale who fucks men so they’ll do her bidding, and is due the comeuppance of a beating and a bullet. In Sin City, everyone’s got a gun and is not afraid to use it; no one is innocent, so everyone deserves to die.

Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis, both of whom died in the original, return; the former due to shuffled chronology, the latter as a ghost (just like The Sixth Sense!). And so does Powers Boothe, as the Mendoza-esque Senator who rules over Basin City with gleeful corruption and a gun in his hand. Joseph Gordon Levitt tries to take him down via the shame of defeating him at a poker twice(!), but it’s up to the eternally-twerkin’ Jessica Alba to mete out justice the only way this film knows how. She’s “nothing” until she can work up the pluck to shoot him in the face; the last good woman in town soon another lost-soul lost to the dark side. “This rotten town, it soils everybody,” Willis —with the weariness of a multi-millionaire cashing yet another cheque— intones from beyond the pale; this rotten movie does the same.

WISH I WAS HERE

Sequels are never the same as the original, even when they’re only ‘spiritual’ sequels. Wish I Was Here was conceived as a quasi-related companion piece to Garden State. But where Zach Braff’s directorial debut was entirely loathsome, one of the most noxious cinematic concoctions of its day —the film that gave us the definitive exemplar of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl— Wish I Was Here feels too inert to bother hating; it having all the rote predictability and essential meaninglessness of any conscripted sequel.

Things have stayed the same, even if Braff portends change. No more mid-20s malaise, now he’s got the mid-30s blues; there literally a scene, herein, in which Braff stares at bills, frowning. His career’s stalled, his marriage is strained, his kids struggle to deliver their dialogue convincingly, and his dad’s dying (again!). But, worry not: for every failed career, there’s an unexpected new opportunity. For every marital tension, there’s a scene in which Braff and wife Kate Hudson sing each other James Taylor as sexy foreplay(!). For every horrible piece of child acting, there’s a million montages in which someone reads poetry over the children playing in slow-motion. And for every parental death, there’s a deathbed reconciliation waiting to happen.

Just as Garden State aimed —and failed, horrifyingly— in its portrait of generational malaise and family burdens, so to does Wish I Was Here ask the big questions only to come up with pat answers; greeting-card homilies and new-age platitudes served up as if profound (“I know that you don’t believe in God,” says a kindly rabbi, “maybe you can believe in family”). It’s a Manic Pixie Cancer Drama, flipping between scenes of rote quirk and sage pronouncements on life (“try to remember how fast it goes!”) by Mandy Patinkin’s bearded patriarch. “Life is happening all around you!” Braff marvels; but this is no one’s version of life, just a cut-and-paste assembly of montages and ‘moments’ slapped together on the dime of a surfeit of mom-and-pop investors.

Due to its high-profile Kickstarter campaign, it’s impossible to watch Wish I Was Here without thinking of the cash it cost to make it, something which isn’t a great aid to suspension-of-disbelief. There’s scenes set at Comic-Con that feel like transparent pandering; a ‘comic’ sequence with old Scrubs pal Donald Faison that is actually literally a luxury-brand-car commercial; and, once again, the filmmaker trying to stuff the contents of his iPod into any available moment, every scene beginning with the opening bars of a swiftly-faded-out pop-song. And, of course, there’s Braff himself. Despite being unfunny, untalented, and unconvincing —he may actually be worse, here, than in Garden State— the millionaire panhandler remains front-and-centre, forever there, the star of his own disaster.

THE SKELETON TWINS

“Maybe we were doomed from the beginning,” Kristen Wiig intones in an opening voice-over that cheerily pronounces that The Skeleton Twins is heading to dark places. She’s one half of the titular duo, Wiig and Bill Hader playing siblings who’ve grown estranged over the years. They’re a now-familiar staple from dramedies like these: the once-gifted youths lost in the slow sink of depressed adulthoods; wondering why their so-called ‘special’-ness has lead only to disappointment. The family burden they bear is one of suicide: their dad killed himself in their adolescence, and Craig Johnson’s comedy merrily opens with them each attempting their own. It’s a piece of screenwritten contrivance that serves to reunite the twins, Hader attempting to get back on his feet back home in autumnal upstate-New-York; with Luke Wilson (a bro who says “boo-yah!”), Boyd Holbrook (American-doing-an-Australian-accent alert!), and Ty Burrell rounding out the cast.

Like Johnson’s debut True Adolescents, The Skeleton Twins is less dark than marketed, less clever than it imagines. It’s another Sundancey drama that offers opportunities for ‘failing’ adults to find redemption and reinvention, that’s happy to teach audiences a ‘lesson’. It may promise doom, but it delivers therapeutic victories: dragging its twins out of their ruts, carefully meting out a run of dramatic-reveals, spilling secrets and shaking skeletons from their haunted family past. It promises doom, but, instead, delivers a reversal-of-fortune; Johnson the kind of auteur who loves his characters so much he longs to save them.

The Skeleton Twins is lifted beyond the generic, however, by the presence of Wiig and Hader. Whilst they both signed up for a chance to show off genuine dramatic chops, their chemistry is best when comics. The film’s most memorable moments aren’t its portentous pronouncements on life and death, but when it hands itself over to spontaneity, and leans on its leads natural charisma. When Johnson turns the actors loose, it changes the whole tone: his characters no longer feeling like screenwritten concoctions, but actual human-beings.