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Mila Kunis

Preview Review: It’s Not Deja Vu, but it Feels Pretty Familiar

by Dustin Freeley on June 10, 2011 · 0 comments

As if they were recovering from a bad breakup by trying to mimic and outdo the other, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have both charted their trajectory from Black Swan toward movies where each female protagonist is just looking for a little symbiotic carnal catharsis. Natalie Portman, fresh off her Academy Award win for Best Actress, began the new year by starring with Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached, a movie that pits their long friendship in the oft-pondered sex without relationship conundrum, where Adam (Kutcher) gets to request that Emma (Portman) not “ask [him] what [he] thinks of her body,” absolving him of any responsibility to be emotionally supportive before, during, and after he’s present for sex.

At the same time, Emma is a doctor who works “eighty hours a week” and needs “someone who’s going to be in [her] bed at 2 am and not need [her] to eat breakfast with them.” There’s an interesting dynamic here in that Emma has been given the dominant role in the relationship in a career-oriented and fiscal sense, which makes her the more stereotypically “masculine” of the two characters. This is also suggested when it appears that Emma is the character who is emotionally detached from relationships and really just seeks physical pleasure given that “monogamy goes against our basic biology.” While this sentiment certainly has credence – not hindered by the fact that her intelligence is exposited through her career as a doctor — the primary issue with this dynamic is that it is fraudulent, and like any movie in which a male character says, “I’m not really looking for a relationship,” there is clear foreshadowing that the “desired” end result is not what’s going to come to fruition.

In other words, the intrigue of Emma’s character is that the stereotypical gender roles are reversed; however, the outcome still rides the cliché, so the intrigue fades. Does this make a potentially terrible film? Not necessarily, but it begs the questions as to why the premise was regurgitated for Friends With Benefits, a less mellifluous euphemism for Fuckbuddies.

Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake star in the re-release of Portman’s film, and while there is a more slapstick, comedic feel to Friends With Benefits – as opposed to the more sardonic No Strings Attached — there appears to be little variation from the overall arc of the story. One main difference might be that Jamie (Kunis) isn’t seeking relationship-less sex as a physical necessity, but rather as a catharsis to prove that she could be like the men she’s been dating, one of whom forgets that she is his “soul mate,” noting that it “doesn’t count” because they were in throes of passion for this sentiment. There’s certainly something to be said for an oral and aural filter during sex, but this – and similar – actions seem to be what have driven Jamie to inform Dylan (Timberlake) that she’s “emotionally damaged,” a situation that seemingly fits well with Dylan being “emotionally unavailable.”

Despite the slight differences in Emma and Jamie, the same conflict arises in both films: the female lead that denounces relationships and seeks social promiscuity without emotional repercussions must see the error of her ways and find solace in the one person that she chose as a safe partner to help her “avoid the Hollywood cliché of true love,” which in itself is a transparent line that only serves to set us up for the opposite result.

On the outside, both of these films have merit in that they empower the female characters, that, for the most part, have been imagined as the more emotional of the sexes, a trope that has provided a number of great stories of love, loss, etc. However, I think this clothing is rather illusory in that the events in both films reaffirm the constructed puritan values of past films that ultimately drives the female leads to contradict themselves and renege on their declarations to their friends, their audience, and themselves.

Perhaps these films are a testament to the “power of love,” and our inability to avoid it when it sneaks up behind us.  At the same time, there also seems to be an assertion that a woman’s attempt to break free of patriarchal social norms is futile; for despite their aversion toward relationships, this is the final ingredient to happiness, an ingredient that condescendingly undermines each character’s convictions.

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Movie Review: Black Swan — On the Precipise of Obscurity

by Dustin Freeley on December 28, 2010 · 2 comments

In The Wrestler, Aronofsky gave the audience an entertainer past his prime, wallowing in the remnant glow of stardom, listening to the death-rattle din of a once mighty cheering section. In Black Swan, we are offered a glimpse at Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the performer who teeters on the precarious apex of her prime, one younger, fresher face away from plummeting to obscurity, like Beth Macyntire (Winona Ryder), the prima ballerina Sayers replaced as the lead in Swan Lake.

This competitive dynamic isn’t new, and Aronofsky offers nothing novel to the conflict between the once-prized and the currently-prized, but he is wise to focus on the maintenance of being prized. As a ballerina, Sayers is consumed by dance, and more so by the pursuit of perfection. Like the rotating figurine of the music box next to her bed, Sayers’ every movement is methodical, clean, and porcelain-like. And, this is where Aronofsky goes a bit deeper than the bulimic-based narratives of many ballerina tales.

Clad in pinks and whites throughout the film, Sayers lives a pre-pubescent girl’s dream, with flower-laden curtains and blankets covering her room, a melodic music box on the night stand, dozens of plush, smiling stuffed animals at bedside and a doting mother who tucks her in at night. In this perpetual childhood we see the stymied confidence and social retardation of Nina, who has isolated herself in a mother-constructed world of dance, her sole purpose to achieve perfection.

Sayers’ perfection overtakes her as a character and leaves the audience feeling as if they are watching a marionette on stage, pulled to and fro by preternatural strings, following the whims of a dozen other agents. One agent in particular is Nina’s mother Erica Sayers (played magnificently Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina who had to retire when she became pregnant. Ostensibly, this narrative creates the common theme of resentment toward a child that impeded previous success, but Black Swan takes this a bit further. Erica is certainly resentful and vacillates between encouraging Nina’s success while passive aggressively rooting for her failure as she suggests that Nina should be in line for the role of the White Swan because she had “been there long enough,” suggesting both that seniority outweighs ability and that Nina has toiled long enough as an underling.

At the same time, Erica Sayers brings to focus the primary theme of Black Swan – one that illustrates an artists’ inability to realize that he or she has begun to descend the aforementioned apex. This is seen primarily when Nina’s mother warns her against throwing everything away like “[she] did” by “getting pregnant,” which is clearly a shot at Nina, but to which Nina responds, “You were twenty-nine,” implying that Erica was already past her prime and was ready to be cut loose. What’s doubly interesting within this exchange is that it conveys how cognizant these artists are of the numerical age follows them around as if they are tattooed with this prescription on the foreheads.

As opposed to being pristine, porcelain dancers, Black Swan gives us products with shelf-lives that often do not correlate to ability but to beauty and familiarity, and it is in familiarity that a number of dancers seem to find their demise as illustrated by Macyntire, who was the lead dancer in Thomas’ (Vincent Cassel) previous production. Her retirement is forced and is unforeseen by Beth as she trashes her own dressing room before storming out of the studio. What’s more, Thomas gives the public announcement of Beth’s retirement while introducing Nina as the new prima ballerina. This leads to a tragic fate for Beth who decides to stumble in to traffic. Of course, among the ballerinas, this accident is rationalized as a drunken lack of coordination, but the voluntary voyage into oncoming traffic – and the subsequent pins that are placed in her fibula and tibia – provides Beth with a personal justification why she will never dance again. Rejected and scorned, Thomas has not prevented her from dancing; instead, Beth has replaced rejection with violence and disfigurement, and in this manner, her shattered legs mirror Erica’s transference of rejection onto Nina.

In such a fragile existence, there has to be a catalyst to push Nina to look over the edge, and in Black Swan, this catalyst is Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer Thomas has imported from Los Angeles, one with a flair for the unconventional, a non-traditional ballerina who doesn’t strive for perfection but moves with guile and cunning, a perfect replacement for Nina who is tasked with not only playing the serenely innocent White Swan in this production but also the seductive Black Swan. Without getting too much into the events that unfold within the friendship (?) of Nina and Lily – I’m sure you’ve all seen the steamy clips on other film-related sites – I’ll just note that Kunis does a fine job as Portman’s doppelganger, a sexier, more fluid dancer drives Sayers in a variety of directions. Some real, some imaginary, all enthralling.

DYL MAG Score: 8

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Movie Review: The Book of Eli — Thank God I’m an Agnostic

by Dustin Freeley on February 26, 2010 · 0 comments

The power of disasters and the potential of an apocalypse fascinate movie goers, usually during times of strife or near the end of a decade.  In the eighties, forty-six movies were released that focused on the dissolution of society as we know it, and most dealt with the threat or the consequence of nuclear war – alluding to the potential consequences of the newly born Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based anti-ballistic missile defense system – and for this site, appropriately dubbed as “Star Wars” by its critics (this time without an English-accented princess who sounds like she’s from Brooklyn by the end of the film). 

The nineties only produced a dozen apocalypse-centered films, but flooded the screens with natural disaster flicks – often in tandem – to fill the difference and portend the end of civilization implied by the digital clock that would read 11:59 on December 31, 1999.   Producers covered comets in Deep Impact (1998), Asteroids in Asteroid (1998), a bigger asteroid in Armageddon (1998), volcanoes in Dante’s Peak (1997), Volcano (1997), and Volcano: Fire on the Mountain (1997), flooding in Hard Rain (1998) and Waterworld (1995), and the perpetuation of Ben Affleck’s career with Armageddon and Reindeer Games, which, by all accounts, was a disaster in itself.

So, it should be no surprise that the first decade of the new millennium – which went surprisingly unnamed, so I’m going with the “aughts” – ends with a handful of apocalypse-centered films in The Road, 2012 (working title: The Mayan’s Revenge), and The Book of Eli. 

Full disclosure: Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists, so I didn’t see The Road for fear that I would compare each scene to the book and predestine myself to obviate any enjoyment before entering the film, though I hear it’s pretty good. The previews for 2012 scared me away when they showed John Cusack driving a car, screaming into a cell phone, and fleeing an earthquake — an earthquake that appears to be chasing his car.  Sounds more like an HBO, I’m a bit too lazy to change the channel movie.  The Book of Eli fell conveniently in a two hour block that I had to kill before heading to a meeting.

Directed by The Hughes Brothers (From Hell), The Book of Eli marries conventional end-of civilization tropes by citing a giant hole in the atmosphere (global warming) as the cause of the burned, desiccated landscape that surrounds the dilapidated buildings and shanty towns that house the remaining survivors; in addition, the hole is exacerbated by nuclear activity (yay humanity’s love for nuclear holocausts!).  The dash of seasoning to this apocalyptic petit four is the hand of God — or rather the question of whether God is a fictional character created for the purpose of control, or the divine who breathed into our nostrils the breath of life and allows those spared from the apocalypse to regenerate humanity.

Regardless of how America became a wasteland, Eli (Denzel Washington) must trek to the West in order to deliver his book. Standing in his way is the aforementioned landscape as well as cannibals, a lack of water, a lack of food, and a group of rogue bikers who are sent out repeatedly to locate a single book that intrigues Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the despotic ruler of a small civilization in which he claims to “own” most of the people, particularly his blind love interest Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), who serves as both Carnegie’s concubine and prostitute-for-hire.

Clearly, the book that Carnegie wants is the book that Eli possesses, and without giving too much away, the book is The Bible, which begins the discourse between the power hungry Carnegie and those that need the word of God as salvation. 

The idea for The Book of Eli isn’t terrible, and the oft-used Divine-discourse allegory isn’t so heavy handed that it repels a viewer looking for some apocalyptic carnage, but the film disappoints when it forgets the scope of the film it has set forth.  For instance, in the first scene, the audience is placed in a leafless forest of gray, desiccated trees that serve as the backdrop for snow-white ashes falling from the sky. At the same time, the innocence of winter flakes is juxtaposed with the glaring sun that shines atop the screen, but implies a creepiness because these “flakes” never melt, prompting the question: What has been burning? Or, who?

This scene perfectly sets the audience up for a film of desolation and destruction. 

However, shortly after, this image of isolation is wiped away when the camera spends more time on Denzel Washington’s face. While Washington is a fine actor, shooting him closely does not add to the theme of desperation and survival. Instead, it asks him to be the vehicle for a film that should be driven by its isolation-steeped genre.  Likewise, the silence of the film is often broken by interjections of music. If the music were part of the scene, perhaps some that a character listens to, it could symbolize the last resource that a man or woman has to connect to the previous humanity. Instead, it often serves as a narrator or comic relief. 

I hear that Apocalypses are unpleasant, and moments are needed to break tension, but in The Book of Eli, these moments are trite and, most often, just campy. Aside from the music, there are strategically – yet obviously – placed markers that dance on the gray line of metaphor and silliness. As Washington makes his way West, he enters a path that is littered with road signs that read “Dead End,” “Do Not Enter,” and “U-Turn.”  These signs are eventually trumped in the third act of the film that finds an argument brewing between Claudia and Carnegie. As Carnegie sits disheveled and bamboozled behind his desk, Claudia triumphantly moves toward the door as the camera draws back to reveal a white piece of paper that hangs from the center of a closed book. Sharply written in black marker is the word “Ocean.”

Admittedly, some of the action scenes are rather cool, and Eli proves himself to be the ultimate machete-wielding badass, but there are some glaring holes in storytelling. And by glaring, I mean you could take every plot-problem from The Day After Tomorrow (except the damn wolves) and place them inside the ground zero-size hole of a twist at the end – which won’t please a single Atheist – but it whole-heartedly takes advantage of the aforementioned Divine Intervention angle.

DYL MAG Score: 6

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