Film Carew: 50 Shades Of Grey, The Interview, Citizenfour

50 SHADES OF GREY

Here’s a question: what does Christian Grey do at work? The most famous sadist in Twilight fan-fic history is described as a “billionaire businessman”, but 50 Shades Of Grey never bothers to say how he earns his money, not even with a throwaway line. Some might say that it’s beside the point, that the sexually-unfulfilled housewives buying into this bodice-ripping, bondage-lite fantasy care not about what goes on at Grey House board-meetings. But to me it seems endemic of this witless story’s essential nothingness, in which two characters of no depth, no personality, no humanity, no specificity, and no interest are set against each other in an erotic tango devoid of desire, frisson, wit, a pulse.

At first, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation of E.L. James’ widely-mocked, wildly-successful novel begins as dead-eyed romantic comedy: delivering a meet-cute moment between rich, unsmiling, bland Jamie Dornan and shy, cute, klutzy, virginal Dakota Johnson (her character is actually really called Anastasia Steele, which sounds like a parody of a Mills & Boon author), who trips over both feet and tongue when she blows into his office for a disastrous interview.

Against our listless, lifeless heroine’s expectations, this man of means is soon ‘wooing’ her, in which the lavishing of extravagant gifts is the opening salvo in the advancement of an abusive relationship. He shows up in her life, constantly, unannounced; breaks into her house when she tries to break it off with him; sends her a computer so he can keep tabs on her correspondence; furiously grills her about any and all male acquaintanceships; seeks to isolate her from friends and family; and either implicitly or explicitly threatens her. What a guy!

“It’s one of the dullest experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema.”

Those wishing to just dismiss 50 Shades Of Grey as harmless fun need to look at the gender politics at play; in which Johnson is portrayed as an Independent Woman pt.2 for refusing to be anally fisted, but is happy to live life under the yoke of an overbearing, hyper-controlling man. Seeing Dornan rough up and run away Victor Rasuk, a pal of Johnson’s who’s dared harbour a crush on her, isn’t romantic, but horrifying. At best, you can see this sex-prisoner set-up as a commentary on modern American life: where, in exchange for being allowed to live an existence of obscene wealth and privilege, you must submit to living in a surveillance state. At worst, well, hey, just watch the film.

Love, or what passes for it here, knows bounds of neither bondage nor logic, and, lo, our star-cross’d paramours are drawn together with bated breath and heaving chest. Along the way —through scenes so badly-penned they seem ghostwritten by Tommy Wiseau— there’s soap-operatic handwringing re: this fatal attraction seemingly lifted wholesale from Twilight. “I’m incapable of leaving you alone!” our stalker says, right after he’s warned her that he’s bad news —low-hanging forbidden-fruit that shouldn’t be tasted— but, I believe, right before she’s fainted in his arms (no, like, really).

With all the predictability of genre convention, this ‘romance’ must forge on, apace, with unfunny jokes and rain when people are feeling sad. Soon, we’re in Grey’s penthouse apartment, in front of a skyline so patently ersatz that you wonder if Taylor-Johnson is making some sly commentary on the unreal nature of this dimwitted fantasy. Finally, after a full first-act of soggy cinematic foreplay, we get shown Dornan’s ass, his bondage room, his non-disclosure-agreements, and, most importantly, his helicopter!

And, at long last, after a seeming interminable time, they have sex. Tedious, lifeless, oh-so-simulated sex. Dornan, that billionaire businessman, treats fucking as all business, showing no signs of verve or life, even when popping prized cherry; his every thrust robotically edited to the metronomic rhythms of Danny Elfman’s awful score. Johnson bites her lip and coos, but she’s a bad actress as it is, and her desire is about as convincing as the sets.

Dornan and Johnson each deliver the redundant dialogue with a freshly-lobotomised air. Playing characters of no humanity, they barely resemble humans. Instead, they’re so wooden as to evoke marionettes, so bland as to seem like Barbie dolls incarnate. Yet, even the Team America puppets could approach conflagration with some enthusiasm. Watching these two bad actors, who clearly hate each other, performing fake sex with all the joy and sparkle of tortured inmates isn’t even funny. It’d be great if there was something, here, akin to Showgirls’ swimming-pool sex-scene —anything giving off the sweet air of camp— but there’s not.

50 Shades Of Grey is just fucking boring. That is my official film-critic’s opinion. It’s one of the dullest experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema. After Dornan’s full-blown stalker routine, there’s absolutely no danger in his limp-wristed smackings and erotic peacock-feather ticklings. Even when it attempts to get ‘dark’, the film is as safe, neutered, and bloodless as any kind of masochist fantasy could be. Johnson demands to be shown treatment “as bad as it gets,” but the only ones receiving it are those in the cinema; five gentle whips of a belt is nothing compared to 125 minutes of 50 Shades.

THE INTERVIEW

The banal “this is a work of fiction” disclaimer that arrives at the finish of The Interview feels far weightier than mere legalese tacked onto the tail-end of a closing-credits crawl. For few films have so tested the limits of fictional responsibility as this one. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s latest bawdy bromance infamously provoked an international incident of hacktivism, corporate shaming, gossipy titillation, and military politics; a mass-media scandal that caused the initial cancellation of the film, only to, ultimately, serve as its perfect publicity.

Finally, now, for those who didn’t seek freedom-fighting access to a digital copy via the internet, here comes The Interview into good old-fashioned theatres; Apatovian bro-down turned politically-resonant cinematic event. After a pre-release furore like that, there’s no way for the film to live up —or down— to its scandal-making epoch; and disappointment may register for anyone expecting a bona fide film of our times. For those who just wants to laugh, well, satisfaction may come easier.

The fourth feature-length collaboration between Rogen and Goldberg —who’d previously penned Superbad, The Pineapple Express, and This Is The End— is a broad farce, in which James Franco and Rogen play a pair of tabloid American TV-journalists roped into assassinating North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Franco hams it up Franco-style: a bluthering idiot and strutting peacock who boasts he’s “fucked more women than Ellen Degeneres”; Rogen, equal parts stoned and ashamed, forever his loyal sidekick.

When the film drops the first of its many references to the homoerotic Hobbits of Lord Of The Rings, it taps into the Rogenist tone: smart-assy yet sincere; goofballs dudes obsessed with dicks and ass (The Interview delivers multiple shots of boners-straining-within-underwear, and builds an entire sustained comic riff around anal insertion), yet unafraid to look into each others’ eyes and say ‘I Love You’.

Upon bumbling upon the seat of dictatorial power, Franco evidently befriends Dear Leader, bonding with the contemporary world’s great despot by way of ballin’, blunts, and bitches. Randall Park plays Kim, winningly, as an insecure rich-kid: obsessed with status and privilege, the wealth-porn of rap-videos and capitalist branding; yet wounded by his disapproving father, and grappling with the burden of maintaining the Potemkin Village façade of the bountiful, powerful DPRK.

Rogen and Goldberg, in writing this caricature of Kim, mix mythology, fact, and comic invention, alighting on Kim’s documented obsession with basketball —he grew up worshipping Michael Jordan, and, with shades of fact begetting fiction, recently befriended Dennis Rodman(!)— and, thus, sympathising and humanising a man it’s soon to kill.

When the insurrection finally comes, there’s a Frost/Nixon TV showdown, gunfire, explosions, the cultural terrorism of Katy Perry’s music, and an adorable puppy. And, lo, a character based on the sitting head-of-state of a contemporary country —the reigning ruler of an Axis-of-Evil nation— meets his fiery death in a finale equal parts Team America: World Police and Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Those who’ve followed along with leaked Sony emails know that much consternation was caused by this graphic depiction of Kim’s demise, great weight given to just how much brain matter should be sent careening across the screen. But, even at its most violent, vicious, and ridiculous, this great act of cinematic warmaking seems plenty benign.

The dissonance between the headline-grabbing scandal, political blowback, and cause célèbre status of The Interview pre-release, and the actual picture in question turns out to be profound. North Korean threats of terrorist retribution unto American cinemagoers turned out to be so much hot air; and, now, for Sony, the release of the film is turning out to be a profitable affair. But let’s not forget that, for a moment, the world was pushed closer to a Nuclear standoff by a movie in which Kim Jong-un sharts on live television.

CITIZENFOUR

Laura Poitras’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Citizenfour has became known as the ‘Edward Snowden movie’, but there’s nothing in here that hews to traditional cinematic portraiture, be it fact or fiction. This isn’t a story of Snowden’s life; a picture, like those of Julian Assange, in which the cult-of-personality surrounding the seditious subject is worked into the text.

Instead, Poitras —with static compositions that reflect her calm, measured, observationist approach— stages an opening coda of gentle scene-setting (the construction of the world’s largest digital data-bank in the Utah desert; AT&T customers engaged in a long, slow court battle against their tel-co for, y’know, spying on them; former NSA chief William Binney, who turned whistleblower in the wake of 9/11, giving a talk on civil liberties and Big Data), before we get to the meat of the story. She’s contacted by a mysterious figure who wants to leak damning evidence that the NSA has turned America into history’s most-thorough surveillance-state, and who, eventually, invites her to meet him in his Hong Kong hotel.

It turns out to be a polite, reasonable, moral young man, an otherwise-non-descript citizen acting in hopes of sacrificing his freedom to grant other Americans more of theirs. He, eventually, when pressed, introduces himself as Edward Snowden, and sits down with Poitras and two reporters from The Guardian to talk them through what he knows, and what it means. The camera watches, quietly, non-judgmentally, but the admiration is palpable. And what results is a profound portrait of the stillness at the eye of the hurricane; four people in a hotel-room, talking quietly, whilst a global-political shit-storm rages around them. It’s history as it’s happening, in the moment, delivered unvarnished; Citizenfour an ‘Edward Snowden movie’ made minus myth-making, moral outrage, and attendant hysteria.