It’s more like Days of Heaven meets dog-terror B movie classic White Dog.

I watched this movie about a dozen times as a child of the eighties and dreamt of being Natty Gann, taking zero shit from anyone in her drab butch woolens and smart newsboy cap. She’s on a crusade to find her dad (played by Ray Wise, aka Laura Palmer’s dad)
, who is seemingly the only love she has ever known (that is until she meets this wolf and sort-of fraternal/crushy teen John Cusack) and she throws as many punches as she takes and is just snaking through the adult world that barely cares for her to find her own way, to manifest her destiny. It’s hard to imagine a movie today where as many adults swat, slap, push or punch a child, and the movie is not shy about that realism of kids barely being in school, or working full time by age 10, or running in homeless packs, being prisoner in abusive reformatories or just being told to not bother the adults and be home by dark.

The other strange thing about the movie that would keep it from ever being made now is that it is essentially, like, a horror movie now. Natty is constantly in places and situations where you cannot rightfully put a child in a movie anymore because we recognize it as a telegraph of terror. She does stuff like wander into a dogfight filled with drunk men, she lives in a men’s boarding house BY HERSELF, or wanders through hobo encampment, rides in a boxcar alone with a scabby looking stranger-man. We know all of these situations now, in 2014 movies, as shorthanding a kind of girl-peril–invariably, the girl is going to get attacked or hurt–girls do not triumph because we are used to so much torture-porn. But in Natty Gann she just is like “piss off” or triumphs (by living!) or is defended by her wild-animal companion and just continues on, walking for days on foot with pitstops for eating out of the trash or lapping thirstily at a stream.

Natty’s tough-girl instincts serve her well is the essential text of the movie. Pre-teen girl as gambler–she has to be! Save for the kindness of her family friend/neighborhood sage played by Scatman Crothers,

all the adults in the movie alternately yell at her or try to use her. Whilst she is out hitchin’ in backwoods and byways of the American west, some creep tries to cop a feel while driving (“you’ll like it!”) and she DOES A TUCK N’ ROLL OUT OF HIS MOVING PICK UP TRUCK but not before Wolf breaks the glass of the cab and attacks the creeps face (YES!). One of the best rape-revenge scenes this side of Ms.45/Angel-grade films.

Meanwhile, amidst all this, Natty’s dad is calling back to Chicago to check on her, only to discover she has taken off from the flophouse where she had a bunkbed with dad, a puppy and Scatman Crothers her only solace–why would she even stay?! Her wallet (word to wallet-carrying 12 year old girls everywhere) has been found under a train in the Rockies, the assumption made by her dad being Natty’s dead. Her dad starts doing the most dangerous tree-top work back in the logging camp, in some Gift of The Maji kind of move–he has no family, he might as well die, creating tension as we know Natty is risking her life every second of the day to get back to the only family she has, will she beat the clock and find him before he suicides himself in some clear cutting “accident”?! Will her wolf-friend be sufficent protection from all the fucking creeps and predators of the world? I WILL NOT SPOIL IT FOR YOU.

Like the movie’s tagline says “Two thousand miles of danger separate her from her father. Only love, hope and courage can help her find him.” That should actually read “and courage and her wolf friend and her girl strength to survive an indifferent world”. It’s an unheralded tween feminist classic–watch it today!

What we get with this movie, The Bourne Indecency? The Bourne Referendum? The Bourne Quad Cities Sheepshearing Assemblée? is the bait-and-switch of the summer. It begins with Renner, puzzled, jockish, weirdly hirsute up in Alaska deep in the winter snow. I say weirdly hirsute in that his face beard is supposed to show us how long he has been out repeatedly diving into this icey river
and staring down wolves over a campfire in a survival assignment–it is shaggy and pubic-wild, moustache is snaggly and hanging into his mouth… but his neck and cheeks are perfectly clean shaven. With beards being such a hot trend, did these people in charge of the beard think we wouldn’t notice the difference between groomed and ungroomed. These are the kinds of things that set me off with a movie. Like in Drive when Joan from Mad Men has on lipstick and then she is shot and her lips are pale. C’mon, we are not that dumb!

Anyhow, Jeremy Renner and his ass beard make their way to a cabin outpost of a fellow in his same spy? superdefender? man machine? program and he we learn that unlike Jason Bourne, these dudes are made superhuman style not through heavy duty PTSD-inducing tortures but by blue pills (insert Viagra joke or allegory here). It’s unclear why Jeremy Renner needs more–is he cracked out or trying to double down or kill himself or is it like Roids and he just wants to have a huge nasty chest. It’s unclear. We find out he is really good at being super human. That is established, and perhaps that is all that is clear. Meanwhile, scenes from the end of the last movie are intercut so as to posit this as happening concurrent to Jason Bourne going rogue, Pam Landry exposing it all and David Strathairn yelling “SHUT IT DOWN” or “Cut it off!” every 85 seconds. The Bourne program getting out into the open means that all the other way dicey programs will be exposed so they have to kill all the tuff bros and operatives round the world. That, right there, is like, 38 slow minutes into the film. The best thing that happens in the first half of the film is Renner trying to feed some sort of tracking device to a wolf, which will make anyone who has ever had to feed a pill to their cat or dog laugh. It is also funny because it is a bad CGI wolf momentarily. AND THEN (SPOLIER ALERT!) A DRONE PLANE BLOWS THE WOLF TO KINGDOM COME!

I kind of forgot what happens after that but I think the idea is that Renner walks a long way to freedom, but maybe I am confusing that with the new Batman movie. Oh, yeah, he steals a plane! And flies it down a creek, about 10 feet off the water. Not exactly a thrillride, but it made me think a thrill might come.

Then there is a side plot that is never quite explained about the gov’t lab where the blue pills and tests are tracked and administered to these buff man machines. A guy who is in every movie and who was also super scary in the horrible 4th or 5th season of HEROES (OMG REMEMBER THAT SHOW!?) goes on an inexplicable shooting rampage, perhaps commanded by the government in order to clean up some loose ends. It’s a tangle not worth recounting. Somehow Jeremy Renner in his Alaskan pontoon plane gets to Virginia to the house of Dr. Rachel Weisz, they escape and burn some hokey actors who are chasing them.

We now learn, in the actiony drama of Jeremy Renners intuitive killings, that he wants free of this medicine. Though maybe he has a virus that makes him free. But either way he wants to get off the shit, not be the government’s junkie, which you understand because he is way to vulnerable and just doesn’t seem like he is up for the job in the first place. The only way to get free is him and the Doctor have to go to Bangkok or Malaysia or Panama City and re-up his pill supply from a mini-fridge in a basement, that he can overdose his way out of it. Blah Blah some flashback and back and side story and crunch crunch he breaks some Asian necks. Maybe him and Rachel Weisz are kind of having a moment amidst his killing-for-survival spree. After a long night of sweating, he wakes up and either does or does not have his super fighting strength. An Asian SUPERSECRET INDESTRUCTIBLE KILLING GUY IS UNLEASED VIA PUDDLE JUMPER AT A PRIVATE AIRPORT TO GO KILL RENNER… and so begins a long stupid chase that is mostly running through a slum–a rip from every previous Bourne movie. It’s not a Bourne movie unless someone is hopping from atop a tin roofed shack on to an improvised third-world trash-built dwelling.
This is where most of the trailer comes from, the last 20 minutes of the film or so. There is a He’s dead/oh no he’s not/Oh yes he is/now he is really dead motorcycle chase where you do not believe for a second that Renner will not escape because we have been given no reason to believe the Asian Killing Machine is as tough as they say. He got on the plane with a manly leather overnight bag looking all GQ’d out. How tough can he be, you know?

The ending is mad hokey. White people having a romantic brunch on a barge, cue theme song. ZZZZZZZZ. No wonder Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon bailed on this installment. It’s boring aaaaaaand hokey and barely made sense. Worst of all, because we paid a babysitter and full evening movie ticket prices and got twizzler and a Sprite that only came in illegal-in-NY bucket sizes, I paid $66 out of pocket to see this. This is my shame.
WAAAH.

Anyhow. We went. Hardly any one there. I felt weirdly scared about going, fearing some copycat shoot-em-up would leave our children orphaned because we couldn’t keep ourselves away from some Hollywood dreck. Like it was risky. Like we should of gone to see Beasts of the Southern Wild because it would be safe.

I think the Batman franchise is the best of all the superhero movies. I have seen all of them save for the first hulk and the two Green Lanterns because Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern seems like a lose-lose. Perhaps if he was Aquaman I might care. The previous Batman movie, with Heath Ledger so scary, is my favorite. It is everyone’s favorite. Though after a recent half-viewing of Mr. Mom, I want to see the Michael Keaton-era Batman. That was really his last hurrah after presiding over the 80s.

Anyhow. This Batman is all guns, all the time, and an unsettling kind of terror upon the rich, dumb, thoughtless privilege one associates with America. It is like a 99%-fever dream turned rancid. It’s paralleling of the zietgeist was heavy in spots. Poking at our bruised terrorism fears. Anne Hathaway as a self-serving Robin Hoodrat of a CatWoman was a nice way to break up all the brooding macho backstory, but I wanted her backstory, but I imagine that is what the next sequel or spin-off is for. The pre-ending, a hand-to-hand fight against a merciless foe armed with perfect machines in a steely metropolis was instant flashback to Transformers and the bloated Avengers, but I think that is just how these movies have to happen now.

It was hard to watch a movie, to just participate, in something that was so violent and “enjoy” it knowing the very real violence that had been done it in.

Last nights viewing I just kept thinking Omar Epps should have a way bigger star. Should be. When was the last time I saw Omar Epps in anything? I mean, lately it seems all I watch are Werner Herzog movies and mountaneering docs, but why isn’t he in those?

We started with the new one. It was fine for what it was, or maybe not given that it was the 49th biggest worldwide grossing movie of all time. I kept thinking that Tom Cruise must like acting alongside Jeremy Renner because they are both buff and about 5’5, right? Also, Jeremy Renner is handsome, isn’t he? I saw him in the Avengers the other night and when he gets kind of buffed out he looks like Miss Piggy.

This new one—MI:5? 4? Ghost Pooptocol: #YOLO–Well, It wasn’t so terrible that I objected to the renting of the pre-quel, but about 22 minutes in, we both realized we had actually seen this movie together in the theatre and it was of such negligible merit that we had wholly forgotten it. The only genuinely good part is Philip Seymour Hoffman, sweating blood and looking like a hot pink lunatic while Tom Cruise chews the scenery at a fake dinner reception at the Vatican? SERIOUSLY. Who parties at the Vatican? Don’t ruffle us with some BS illuminati chic, Cruise. It, too, works as a great dumb movie. Many cars flip and also, it’s the era of Tom Cruise really working to prove, really trying to expand his Ethan Hunt character.
Is there a third one? Maybe that was the third one.
But then, then there is Mi:2. I think it’s is from the nineties. Tom Cruise’s face is still pert and it was pre-Oprah couch jumping, before all of America turned the tide on him for being a batshit magic-think Scientologist nutjob—back then, all he had to do was do stunts and look pretty. His hair was so feminine then, before he had to prove. MI:2 is the twilight of that era, that golden blast of pure Tom Cruise as he was, untempered, not yet having to be ETHAN HUNT, CHARACTER WITH A PURPOSE. Before he was playing characters in hope we would conflate their image with his own. Mi:2 has no CGI, just really inane car tricks and chases and slow editing and innuendo and people hiding diamonds in their boobs and no hi-tech weapons caches. At one point, his hi-tech secret spy weapon is like a giant Dell laptop and it’s plugged into a wall and it’s like C’MON, TC, TAKE THAT SHIT BACK TO THE DORM WHERE IT BELONGS AND GIT ME A SPY COPTER MADE FROM A RETRACTABLE PENCIL! For the love of L.Ron! This movie is so awful, we made it to 37 minutes only because I fell asleep and so I stopped threatening to divorce Matt for bringing this slice of Old Cruise into our home.

Do you think he is reading I Saw That on his laptop in bed?

The truth of Shame is that it is, as my sister put it as we were leaving the theater, “the saddest quasi-porno ever made”. Fassbender isn’t just a love em and leave em lothario, it’s not just like “a peak into the sexual psyche of the modern man” or even “the darkside of someone’s porn habit”–you come to realize that as much as his character seems down to freak it and able to woo any woman with a look or some opportune nasty words, it’s part of an addiction. He’s not fucking because he wants to, he’s fucking b/c he has to. When he’s not able to get his fix, when his sister shows up and disrupts his life with her similar problems, things culminate in a sort of sexual apocalypse–full on fuck the pain away style.

(This is the weirdest Peaches fan-made vid I could find.)

While Fassbender is in the throes of his addiction, even though he is like, non-stop nude and freaking for the final, like 20 minutes of the film, he just looks tortured, not valiant or sexy. The only thing I said to my sister, towards the end, was “God, he looks so dehydrated!”. Mid-orgy, his look is totally pained and he looks like he has coke-and-booze-bender face, you know when someone clearly has not had any nutrients or water in 48 hours. Probably not what the rest of the audience was thinking while watching him rim a prostitute, but his frantic sex is really about his breakdown, not his pleasure, so it’s not hot. Like, at all.

Nothing says "single man" like teal sheets.

It is heavy!

If you are in the market for footage of Fassbender looking hot, you are basically limited to the early part of this movie, most of X-MEN and if you are a true freak, the other MCQueen movie where he starves to death and is beaten by cops. SHAME is one of the best films I have seen in a long time, but I really don’t ever want to watch it again.