The MacGuffin

Human beings can really suck sometimes. In the case of Burma (also known as Myanmar), there are a lot of human beings that suck really badly. Unfortunately, they’re the ones in charge. Since the military took control in a coup in 1962, Burma has been under the military’s full lock and key. It also has one of the highest and worst counts of human rights violations in the world. Since 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi has been one of the loudest and most important figures in the opposition to Burma’s military rule. In director Luc Besson’s latest film, she is the center of the subject matter. The movie is a biopic that follows her life from a young age, when her father was assassinated for opposing the military rule, to her return to Burma in 1988, when she was approached to lead a new political movement against the military, through her time in house arrest for 15 years.

Somewhere in the future lays an apocalypse. With all the pretenses to such an event—gangs overrunning what’s left of society, a lack of resources, duels to the death—you would think it would look a lot worse than what it does in the Trost brothers’ feature film debut, The FP. However, to make a judgment like that is to ignore the reason the film exists: the 1980s. A long time ago, when Coke and Pepsi waged a war, punk rock turned pop sensibilities into oxymorons, and the Cold War made everyone paranoid a nuke might send us into Mad Max’s world, the economy boomed. Reaganomics caused a lot of money to be funneled all over the place, and Hollywood provided no shortage of epic fantasy, sci-fi and action films that infiltrated theaters, video cassettes, and late-night cable. One genre that caught on for a bit was the post-apocalypse film. Mad Max of course helped popularize the concept of a world after nuclear holocaust, but the market was soon to see the likes of A Boy and His Dog, Defcon 4, Survivor, and The Bronx Warriors, to name a few.

Kill List starts off with a subtle air of tension. Jay (Neil Maskell) is currently unemployed, with a wife and child. We soon learn he hasn’t had a job in over a year, and the last one he did have did not go well. His wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) is unhappy and the two are not getting along. One night while Jay’s closest friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his girlfriend are over for dinner, Shel’s and Jay’s feelings clash in an explosive argument. The situation leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth of Gal’s girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) concerning her opinion of Jay. In response, she takes action that is directly responsible for what is going to happen to Jay.

One of the most curious and difficult things about growing up just may be the collision of reality and preconceived notions. Our worldview is shaped by our experiences as children, from the education we receive, to the friends we keep, to the way we are treated by others. These things form the way we see the world, or, more importantly, the way we want to see the world. As we grow older and enter the proverbial “real world,” these views we’ve shaped growing up clash with the views the rest of the world operates under. This is at the heart of writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s latest film, Margaret.

In this latest art house action thriller, Haywire, director Steven Soderbergh returns to some familiar stylistic territory while simultaneously adding to a growing subgenre. The story is rather basic when it comes to the plot; a black-ops special agent for a private security firm is double-crossed after pulling a job and seeks out revenge. Since Soderbergh is such an interesting and dynamic filmmaker, he takes a rather tired plotline and revitalizes it with style and character. Last year director, Nicolas Winding Refn did a similar (and even better) job of stylizing a retro concept with the film Drive, and pumped life into a seldom-sought-after genre of the art house action thriller, especially in a time of mega-budgeted, fantastical epics such as superheroes, transforming robots, and kung-fu-ing sleuths of Scotland Yard—all of which provide many grandiose explosions.

Last Man Standing

Much of my adolescent movie-watching years were spent during Bruce Willis’s tough guy box office reign. Films like Die Hard, The Last Boy Scout, and even the rather disappointing Striking Distance were top priority for my film watching time. When the film opened in 1996, I had just graduated high school earlier that year, and it was my birthday: exactly what I wanted, a new Bruce Willis action film.

In modern society, technology has made privacy something of a rarity. Even if you choose not to participate in the hubbub of social networking and other various internet activities, chances are something about you is somewhere online. Privacy is something society has cherished for a long time. The option to intermingle with others but be able to always retreat to where one is not seen by anyone is to some societies just as important as it is an enigma to other societies. In privacy is where we can be who we feel we really are, without the judgment of others; where we can indulge the desires we feel might be deemed shameful by the people around us. In artist-turned-director Steve McQueen’s latest film Shame, he turns the camera’s eye on this concept and what happens when the privacy we rely on to indulge ourselves is stripped away.

Just released from prison, Mitchell (Colin Farrell) is a criminal who just wants to go straight. Most importantly, he never wants to do time again. As is the case with most criminals in stories like this, Mitchell’s life is surrounded with people who are steeped in crime, leaving Mitchell embroiled in the life he wants to escape, but with little means to do so. In a vain attempt, he takes the tip of a woman he flirts with on the night of his release, who tells him of a job working for a reclusive actress as a handyman and bodyguard. The job turns out to be for a woman named Charlotte (Keira Knightley), presented to us as one of the world’s most famous actresses. She hasn’t acted in some time and has been hiding away in seclusion since, which has only served to make her a fixation for the paparazzi. Mitchell and Charlotte fall for each other, but as Mitchell falls further into Charlotte’s private world, he also becomes further entangled with the world of crime that he lives in.

When the tagline of your film is “Was Shakespeare a fraud?,” you’re immediately courting controversy. Then, when your film proposes the idea that someone besides Shakespeare really wrote all his plays, and the man himself was simply an opportunistic actor who took advantage of a situation, you immediately put the reviewers of your film in a precarious position. One that teeters between critiquing the film in its challenging, historical context, and simply as the film itself, set apart from its accusations and presuppositions—which is exactly what writer John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich have done with Anonymous. By the time the film hits theaters and this review is published, there will already be a bevy of articles debating this very “what if?,” most of them doing their best to discredit any legitimacy the film may hold on its claim.

It is a rare ability for a film to both rely on a sense of nostalgia and simultaneously introduce something new that is its own. Drive, a neo-noir thriller from director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising), is a perfect example of one of those rare films. The story follows an enigmatic man who drives stunt cars for films by day, and moonlights as a getaway driver at night. The driver, who has no name, meets his neighbor and her son one day and establishes a relationship that leads him into a web of betrayal and violence.