Review: Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim
US, 2013
Co-written (with Travis Beacham) and directed by Guillermo del Toro

There's a difficulty inherent to reviewing Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's movie of massive monsters and mechas. This difficulty stems from del Toro's influences: Japanese kaiju films are mostly about creature effects and large-scale destruction, with social/environmental messages thrown in on top. We rarely meet characters worth remembering or stories that particularly stand out above the chaos of men in rubber suits knocking over models. Given that these are Pacific Rim's ancestors, why should we expect anything different? I mean, we're talking about a film whose plot consists of hordes of increasingly-unbeatable gigantic monsters (dubbed kaijus*) swarming from a portal below the Pacific as humanity attempts to hold them off via equally gigantic robots (jaegers)—this is no character drama.

* Yes, I know "kaijus" is not proper Japanese. The film uses the westernized pluralization, so I will do the same

And yet, del Toro and Travis Beacham's script wants very much for us to care about these characters. They spend plenty of time building up jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and his personal reasons for wanting to avoid (and, subsequently, return to) the war against the kaijus. Given that, in the film's science, the two pilots in each jaeger have to "drift" together, sharing memories, feelings, and emotions, in order to effectively control their mechas without frying their brains, character stakes and story arcs are built into the film's DNA. Which means that the film's biggest weaknesses—its formulaic, cliche-ridden war movie plot and its bland characterizations, things we wouldn't even care about in a standard monster movie—are here forced awkwardly into center stage.

Review: Frances Ha

Frances Ha
US, 2012
Co-written (with Greta Gerwig) and directed by Noah Baumbach

Even at his best, Noah Baumbach is a polarizing filmmaker. People tend to either take to his depictions of drifting artsy middle-class white folks, or really take against them. Some of this rancor comes from the perceived meanness and cynicism of his scripts (Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg), and some from the insularity and privilege of the groups he depicts. Frances Ha will do little to ameliorate complaints about the latter issue, bu it may help with the former; though far from wholly cheerful, it seems to accept its characters at face value and takes some pleasure in bouncing them off of each other.

Yet, as a fan of most Baumbach films (even the withering Margot) and a big supporter of co-writer/star Greta Gerwig, I was surprised by how cold Frances Ha left me. Part of that is certainly my own fault—I seem to have an innate loathing for stories about the artistic and interpersonal lives of young, contemporary Brooklyn residents—and part of it comes from the intentionally uncomfortable nature of the film's subject. A coming-of-age tale where that age is pushed back to suit the Millennial generation's arrested development, Frances Ha is about the ways we delay adulthood by pursuing self-discovery in everything and everyone but ourselves. It's a similar dynamic to that found in Baumbach's earlier, male-centered Kicking and Screaming—that film's lead, Josh Hamilton, even shows up in a small role—but here it's played straighter, sadder, and, to me, more wearyingly.

Frances (Gerwig) is a 27-year-old dancer, still toiling away as an apprentice despite her age, who lives in a symbiotic relationship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), her best friend from college. Frances says that they are "the same person, but we have different hair," and they live a frivolous, silly life together, a life Frances is so hesitant to leave that she allows it to torpedo a serious relationship. But soon, Sophie decides to move out to live in a more desirable neighborhood, and Frances can't afford to stay alone, so she's set adrift both in terms of where to live and who to live like. Forced to finally transition from her early-20s to her late-20s, she moors her hopes to various other people in her social circle, including trust fund artist Lev (a nicely subdued Adam Driver from Girls, which feels like a spiritual cousin to this), her boss (Charlotte D'Amboise), and a more successful fellow dancer (Grace Gummer), but quickly hits snags and obstacles with each.

Baumbach and cinematographer Sam Levy capture Frances's ups and downs in a jaunty black and white, reminiscent of Manhattan or films from the French New Wave, whose music Baumbach also borrows (Annie Baker's essay at the Criterion Collection touches on these New Wave tics in greater depth). Her behavior matches some of the more manic heroines of the New Wave, as well, but where their behavior seemed free-spirited in the '60s, Frances's comes across as juvenile in the 2010's. In one dinner party scene, her naive, self-indulgent babbling makes her into a sort of cute curiosity, almost like a kid sitting at the grown-ups' table—though, in fairness, the "grown-ups" are also self-indulgent in their way. The film at least partially redeems Frances by pegging some of her behavior as a defense mechanism against the reality of her situation, undercutting her cheerful quirks with a layer of sadness and anxiety. Still, as winning as Gerwig is—and she WILL win you over—even she can't fully overcome the difficulty of the character as written.

On the level of a film about growing to accept our limitations and take chances that seem like settling (though, really, all we're "settling" for is reality over unattainable fantasy), Frances Ha works. This seems to be an increasingly difficult lesson for young people to learn, if you listen to the number of browbeating articles about Millenials, but one the post-downturn world is continuing to beat into them. My issue is that I never felt sure whether we're meant to be amused by the characters' antics, or to scoff at them, and I was never comfortable doing either. The film's refusal to stick to a normal narrative pattern is refreshing, especially considering how much of the film is about the narratives we attempt to create for our own lives. Frances Ha depicts maturation more realistically than most movies where people don't so much come into themselves as become someone else. Even as she becomes less self-absorbed and more self-reliant, Frances's core remains the same through all of her misadventures. Unfortunately, that means she's still an irritating person in an irritating world, so if you can't get past that, you'll probably never get on the film's wavelength.

Though it is a Criterion release, Frances Ha is currently NOT on HuluPlus like most of its Criterion family. It IS streaming on Netflix, so feel free to check it out there and see if its quirkiness does more for you than it did for me.

Before Midnight: Love in Maturity

Before Midnight
US, 2013
Directed and co-written (with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) by Richard Linklater

The Before series, featuring stars and co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and writer/director Richard Linklater, is one of the more original cinematic projects of the last few decades. Each film takes place over a discrete period of time on a single day, and each entry has been separated by nearly a decade in both our time and in the world of the series. We covered the first film, Before Sunrise, a long time ago on the blog, and while I could describe that again along with the second film, Before Sunset, to set this one up, I'm not sure what value that would bring. I don't know why someone would watch this third entry without having seen the first two. You probably could do it, since the characters and their relationship are so well-drawn that they pop off of the screen, but why would you want to? These stories are just as much about the passing of time and the development of the characters between films as they are the scant time we spend in their company on screen. So if you haven't seen the first two films and don't want to know where Céline and Jesse wind up, stop here.

This Is the End: Bropocalypse Now

This Is the End
2013, US
Written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

The one thing I couldn't stop thinking about after watching This Is the End, the apocalypse comedy from writers/directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, was "How would this movie play to an audience who doesn't know these stars and their personas?" This isn't to say that the "characters" played by core cast members Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and James Franco don't come through—they play fictionalized versions of themselves, each with salient parts of their star images either played up, subverted, or inverted, and each is well-established over the course of the film. I just couldn't help but wonder what a person not enmeshed in today's American pop culture climate would think of this film, whether they would miss anything or see through character/narrative shortcuts we might miss due to our familiarity. I wonder whether the specificity of the stars, their cameoing friends, and their milieu will ultimately limit This Is the End's future replayability, like some of the awful " [X] Movie" parodies, or if that won't matter in the same way that we can watch classic ensemble comedies or non-domestic films without getting all of their points of reference. This isn't to say that This Is the End is either as good as those classics or as bad as Epic Movie and its ilk, only that this is the frame of mind it left me in.

The Great Gatsby: Against the Current, But Down Luhrmann's Stream

The Great Gatsby
US/Australia, 2013
Directed and co-written (with Craig Pearce) by Baz Luhrmann

If there's anything I've learned in my years of watching films and studying film reception, it's that, when it comes to how a person receives a film, expectations play as big a part as the film itself. These expectations can, of course, be shaped by a number of factors: ad campaigns, media coverage, experience with any pre-existing source material, familiarity with the stars or creative team, word of mouth, critical opinion, even memes and jokes on the internet. Often, when a film subverts your expectations—whether it is better, worse, or merely different than you thought it would be—your immediate response is more intense as a result of its being colored by the gap between expectations and reality. But when a film meets your expectations, and is no different, no more or less than you expected it to be, there are only two responses I can imagine: either satisfaction of the "fits like a glove" variety, or the sort of apathetic "Yep." that follows naturally from being shown a movie you'd basically already seen in your mind's eye.

Try to guess which of these describes my feelings about Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

The Bling Ring: A Hole in the Center

The Bling Ring
US/UK/France/Germany/Japan, 2013
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola

The affluent California suburbs of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring are a sprawl of cookie-cutter mansions, populated by scores of absentee or ineffectual parents and entitled teens with no responsibilities. In this world, so close to wealth and stardom yet so far removed from the work it takes to achieve either, a curious cult of TMZ and designer brands grows up in the absence of anything more substantial. This was the fertile ground that sprouted the true-life tale of the "Bling Ring," a group of teenagers who used the internet and gossip rags to find celebrities' homes and determine when the stars were out of town so they could break in and steal things (or "go shopping," as they phrased it), cloaking themselves the lifestyle they aspired to possess.

In this fictionalized version of the story, Marc (Israel Broussard) is an isolated, fashion-conscious teen whose excessive absences force him into an alternative school in Calabasas. There, he meets Rebecca (Katie Chang), an amoral but vivacious girl who sees nothing wrong with taking anything—money, jewelry, cars—their wealthy neighbors leave unattended. They spend their money on flashy things and partying at clubs, where they get together with mutual friend Chloe (Courtney Ames) and the Moore sisters—Nicki (Emma Watson) and adopted Sam (Taissa Farmiga), who are home-schooled, along with younger sister Emily (Georgia Rock), by their New-Agey, The Secret–obsessed mom (Leslie Mann). The group talks of little save designers or celebrities, often on a first-name basis as though they were acquaintances. Soon, they hit on a plan to sneak into Paris Hilton's house while she's out of town, assuming (correctly) that she would just keep her key under the doormat. This kicks off a near addiction to the twinned highs of breaking the law and aping their victims' opulent lifestyles in public and on social media. The Ring continues their life of crime and escalating drug consumption, with Rebecca always egging the group on to more and more (though, in truth, they need little pushing) and Chloe's sleazy boyfriend (Bush's Gavin Rossdale) ready to fence their ill-gotten goods.

Bellflower: Mad, Muddled Max

Bellflower
US, 2011
Written and directed by Evan Glodell


Let's play a game:

Imagine, for a moment, that I'm not a fake internet critic, but rather an average indie film fan, one who doesn't much research the movies he sees, but takes recommendations gladly. He's flipping through Netflix's streaming selections, and chances upon Bellflower, the debut feature from Evan Glodell. It sounds intriguing, so he puts it on. Now, this Hypothetical Me isn't going to be aware that Glodell designed a special camera for the film, one that fuses digital tech with old, archaic analog bits. He might appreciate elements of Joel Hodge's cinematography, its unsteady focus and grungy, retro look that feels like an Instagram come to life, but that's it. He might also grasp that the film was likely made on a low budget, but he wouldn't know just how low, nor necessarily concern himself with how much value the film got out of that budget. Hypothetical Me isn't giving any bonus points for ingenuity; he's just going to be thinking about the text of the film itself.

Amour: Real Love

Amour
Austria/France/Germany, 2012
Written and directed by Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke can be a difficult director to like. His work is challenging, often provocative, and occasionally confrontational to the point of feeling like a lecture. But Amour, which won Haneke his second Palme D'Or at Cannes, might be his most tender and accessible work yet. It's not all light and rainbows, by any means, but the film is less concerned with audience-baiting and social problems, and more interested in painting an intimate, unsentimental portrait of what it means to follow the standard vows "in sickness and in health [...] 'til death do us part" to their logical conclusion. It is a love story, as the title suggests, but one set in neither the demographic nor the mode of Hollywood romance, where love is a product to sell or a quirk looking for its complement. This is the maturity of love, when the word itself becomes synonymous with coexistence, commitment, and mutual responsibility. This love hurts, but in a very different way than the songs tell us.

The Bay: Brackish Water

The Bay
US, 2012
Directed by Barry Levinson

The fever of found footage films that followed in the footsteps of Paranormal Activity's revival of the genre had mostly run its course by the time Barry Levinson's The Bay came out last year. Despite its late arrival, The Bay does attempt to do something different with the conceit, crafting "found footage" culled from a range of sources into an issues-based "documentary" with clear authorial intent. It also manages to credibly turn the sight of water into an anxiety-laden potential threat—something The Happening never pulled off with its killer plants. Unfortunately, that's where the positivity ends. Though shot and put together well enough to overcome the audience's genre fatigue, The Bay squanders its potential, suffering from a lack of focus and a repetitive, over-obvious script.

To the Wonder: Intimacy and Distance

To the Wonder
US, 2012
Written and Directed by Terrence Malick

Wikipedia classifies To the Wonder as a "romantic drama" film, but that's a very misleading description. Love Story is a "romantic drama." Casablanca is, too, as are a good many films noirs and melodramas. To the Wonder is something else entirely. Most films do one of two things: reveal plot through character, or illuminate character through plot. I'm not sure To the Wonder really qualifies as having either characters or plot. Instead, it seems to be a film that exists to reveal emotion through film style, and perhaps to convey director Terrence Malick's thoughts on his own struggles with love and faith.

The film focuses on a couple, played by Ben Affleck and the luminous Olga Kurylenko. Their names don't matter much, nor does much else about them. They meet in Europe, where she lives with her young daughter (Tatiana Chiline), and fall in love. Eventually she and her daughter move to Oklahoma to be with him, but, like any relationship, what starts white-hot slowly cools—especially when an old flame (Rachel McAdams) enters the picture. Also in Oklahoma, there is a lonely Spanish priest (Javier Bardem) who struggles with that old Bergman conceit, "God's Silence," even as he attempts to console the downtrodden, infirm, and incarcerated. As far as plot and character go, that's more or less it.

The film's focus is elsewhere, on the aesthetics of its shot selection, on Emmanuel Lubezki's unbelievably gorgeous cinematography and ceaselessly-moving camera, and on Malick's trademarked hushed voice-overs, provided here by several castmembers. Because so little of who these people are gets conveyed through traditional means—the film has very little audible dialogue and few dramatic scenes—these bits of internal monologue bring us as close to the characters as we are going to get. Which, sadly, isn't very close at all. Bardem's character feels like he's in a different movie entirely; in spite of his occasional interactions with our central duo, he just never connects. And while, yes, disconnectedness is one of the film's primary themes, this feels more like a lack of focus in the original concept—an assertion backed up by the number of actors who filmed sequences that were eventually excised in toto from the film. This gives the impression that, although Malick clearly had emotional and tonal aims, here, the story was always secondary.

Once you sweep past the beauty of To the Wonder's images (and, indeed, they are some of the most beautiful I've seen in years) and the small, affecting moments Malick captures on his actors' faces, it's hard to say how much is really going on. There's a lot of imagery suggesting loneliness, isolation, and the inability to truly know another person, though its deployment is far from efficient. Still, if you're stirred by the impressionistic collage of elliptically-edited shots of Kurylenko frolicking or moping while Affleck places a firm, paternal hand on her shoulder—without that paternalistic vibe putting you off—then Malick has probably achieved what he wanted. But if you`find yourself struggling to relate to these people, or overwhelmed by the voice-over's philosophical wankery, or simply looking for a narrative hook to hang your hat on, well, firstly, why are you watching a Terrence Malick movie? And secondly, you're not wrong.

This isn't a film that will work for everyone, or even for most people, and that's not because it's something sublime that goes over everyone's heads. It's because not everyone works in this poetic/emotional/spiritual register, and Malick isn't interested in using standard narrative techniques to bridge the gap. That's not to say the film is flawless, even to those people for whom it does work. It's draggy, repetitive, and simultaneously sexualizes, infantilizes, and idealizes its female lead. It's somehow less plot focused, and, therefore, more difficult to grapple with, than the similar (and better) The Tree of Life. And it is a film about intimacy that never invites us to become intimate with the people who drift through its scenes. These are legitimate issues. Whether or not you can look past them is on you. For me, I admired To the Wonder's vision and visuals without ever finding that they touched me, in mind or in spirit.

Swimming with Sharks: A Bucket of Cinematic Chum

Swimming with Sharks
US, 1994
Written and Directed by George Huang

Look. Since I've gotten back into writing about the movies I watch, I've been pretty positive towards most of the films I've seen, even when they have disappointed me. In part this is because I don't go out of my way to watch movies I don't expect to like, but it's also of a piece with my operating philosophy towards film criticism. Whatever opinion I might ultimately express, I try to at least describe what a movie does (and how it does it) in impartial terms, such that an interested party might feel free to ignore me and watch anyway if something sounds worth trying. But as for George Huang's Swimming with Sharks, well, I just can't do that. Don't watch this cynical, self-indulgent turkey. Take my word for it.

While Hollywood gets a lot of (potentially well-deserved) stick for being self-congratulatory, it may well deserve even more criticism for all the times it talks shit about itself and the industry that makes it run. Yes. this has been done well in the past (Sunset Boulevard) and even more recently (The Player, State and Main), but most of these movies risk coming across as the bitter ranting of people the system left behind—as is the case here. Swimming with Sharks is the epitome of biting the hand that feeds; in the process, it bites its own audience by making us hate the people who make the films we watch and, by extension, ourselves for watching them in the first place.

Miss Bala: A Bullet in the Guts

Miss Bala
Mexico, 2011
Written and Directed by Gerardo Naranjo

An ordinary young woman from a poor town pins her dreams of escape on a beauty pageant she enters with her friend. In most other cities, in most other countries, this story is an aspirational one, and probably ends one of two ways: either she perseveres through challenges and wins, getting her heart's desire; or she loses, learning a valuable lesson in the process, and life goes on. Except this city is super-violent Tijuana, and this country is drug war–torn Mexico, where few things go as they should, and where ordinary people end up paying the price. This is the premise behind Gerardo Naranjo's relentless Miss Bala.

Spring Breakers: My Not-So-Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Spring Breakers
US, 2012
Written and Directed by Harmony Korine

As a tee-totaling, antisocial nerd, I find it hard to imagine real people wanting to go to Spring Break even half as badly as the characters in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers do, but from early on, it's clear that we've left the real world behind. The slow-motion, fluid-soaked world Korine depicts on screen bears little resemblance to reality, but a break from the "real" is just what the protagonists hope to find in the Florida sun.  For them, "Spring Break" has become both a byword for freedom, and an excuse to live a life they've only dreamed of or seen on TV. In that regard, they've long since parted ways with reality, and the film goes on to examine how the appropriation of cultural images can obscure the line between the real and the unreal with dangerous consequences.

Cloud Atlas: A Tough Map to Follow

Cloud Atlas
Written and Directed by Andy & Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer
Germany/US 2012, 172 mins
Available on DVD/Blu-Ray

One of the six interwoven stories in the Wachowskis' & Tom Tykwer's Cloud Atlas features a piece of music called "Eternal Recurrence." That "eternal recurrence" is also, essentially, the three-hour epic's main thematic conceit is a testament to how on-the-nose the film can be. I haven't read the David Mitchell novel on which the film is based, so I can't say how much of this is carried over from the source text, but what strikes me most about this frustrating but occasionally brilliant film is the way it holds the audience's hand in the wrong places, spoon-feeding us its thematic material while its plot tosses us hither and yon through space and time with only minimal explanation. Having faith in the audience is one thing, but whether asking them to take so many leaps over such a long running time is commendable or certifiable is another matter entirely.

Margaret: A Marvelous Mess

Margaret

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

US, 2011, 150 mins.

Available on DVD/BluRay/Amazon Instant

Movies shouldn't need a disclaimer, but sometimes the struggle involved in making and releasing a particular film leaves traces so evident in watching the thing, it becomes hard to imagine what viewers who don't know the backstory would think.

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is a film that bears such traces. Originally set for a 2006 release, Margaret was instead dogged by a spate of post-production problems. Lonergan reportedly angered studio bosses by taking too long to come up with a final cut, and the film languished, unfinished and in litigation, until a salvage-job cut was more or less buried in limited release last year. The version that hit theaters is unevenly paced, full of seemingly-bizarre tonal shifts and plot threads that appear to either arise from, or end up going, nowhere.

Yet, despite the film's missteps and not-quite-fulfilled ambitions, Margaret is a beautiful, masterfully acted and directed work of cinema.

A Familiar "Stranger"

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Spain/US, 2010

Directed by Woody Allen

When it comes to Woody Allen, it's been a cliché since at least 1980 to state a preference for his "early, funny" films. Even if those are his best work—a debatable point—he's made plenty of good films since then. That said, his output over the last ten years has been, to put it charitably, mixed. For each good movie (Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona) there have been at least as many bad ones (Cassandra's Dream, Melinda and Melinda) and about two times as many that rate no more than a "meh" (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Whatever Works). Because of the high bar set by Woody's earlier works, even the films in the neutral category often feel worse than they are. Such is the fate of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

Another Year: Time Marches On

Another Year
United Kingdom, 2010
Directed by Mike Leigh

The Northern Irish band Therapy? once declared, perhaps paraphrasing Tolstoy, that "happy people have no stories." Yet Mike Leigh's Another Year depicts a year in the life of a happy, successful couple in late middle age, their story broken into four sections corresponding to the seasons. Tom Hepple (Jim Broadbent) is an engineering geologist. Gerri (Ruth Sheen) is a counselor. They have a lovely home, a well-adjusted adult son (Oliver Maltman), and work diligently in their allotment garden during their free time. So what is the story, here?

Well, true to the quote, most of the "story" isn't about Tom and Gerri, but their interactions with the friends and relatives whose troubles blow them into and out of the Hepples' happy little life. This includes friend Ken (Peter Wight), an overweight, lonely jokester, and Tom's taciturn, grieving brother Ronnie (David Bradley, Harry Potter's Argus Filch). But the most troubled of these outsiders is Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri's unstable, tragic co-worker, whose presence ties the four sections together.

True Grit: Vengeance and Death in the West

True Grit
US, 2010
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

This may be a break from the usual format of a film review, but I have to say, here in the first line, that I really enjoyed True Grit. However, I would be a liar if I told you that I'd found a place to hang my hat in talking about it. I don't believe it is a terribly difficult film, in any sense—well, unless you count the thickness of the dialect-heavy dialog the Coen Brothers lift from Charles Portis's novel, which does take some getting used to. But the film itself is not convoluted or hard to follow. This is no sparse, philosophical treatise filled with hard-to-decipher symbolism; it is an entertaining, widely-accessible, successful exercise in genre. It is a journey film, with a very definite Point A and Point B. So why do I find it so hard to talk about?

The Illusionist: When The Magic Fades...

The Illusionist (L'Illusioniste)
UK/France 2010
Directed by Sylvain Chomet

In talking about The Illusionist, I feel conflicted about whether or not to consider the controversy surrounding the script (adapted by Chomet from an unproduced screenplay by the late, beloved French comic Jacques Tati) and its relationship to real-life events. This complicated relationship does have some impact on the film's emotional journey, but I usually think that films have to be reviewed for themselves rather than any external issues. And, in and of itself, The Illusionist is a beautiful-looking, melancholy, sentimental film about the conflict between illusions and reality, and the ever-progressing march of time.

Tatischeff (an animated likeness of Tati himself, bearing his actual last name) is a music hall magician who struggles to find a place for his old-fashioned act in 1950s Paris. He keeps moving farther away to ply his trade until, at a Scottish seaside village, he meets Alice, an innocent young girl who fully believes his illusions to be real magic. The two form a close father-daughter bond and move to Edinburgh, where, in the company of other failing music hall acts, Tatischeff uses his meager earnings to continue providing Alice with gifts in the hopes of keeping his one real fan happy.

Blue Valentine: Hurting the Ones You Love

Blue Valentine
US, 2010
Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Amongst the first tricks you learn if you want to pass college-level liberal arts classes are the complementary skills of narrowing in from the general to the specific, and extrapolating from the specific to the general. For the former, you bluntly restate a character's traits from different broad angles (as a made-up example: he's a manual laborer, a person who lives in a world of schematics and blueprints) in order to shed light on facets of the story (this is why he thinks of people as parts, of no use unless in service of some larger "machine"). For the latter, you take a specific scenario or character (a rudderless, unemployed assembly line worker) and make it stand for something bigger (the human cost of America's move from a manufacturing to a service economy). For a critic, these skills become instinctual to the point where you simply can't help but look at stories this way.

I suppose this is why Blue Valentine—a tough film for any audience—has been particularly devastating for critics. Not only do they see this story of a love in its death throes and empathize with the characters on the screen; they must also take in all of the context clues (broken homes, marriages maintained by habit rather than love, elderly couples separated by death) and realize that Derek Cianfrance and his co-writers Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis have made a picture about the self-perpetuating cycle of doomed relationships in 21st century America.