Graham Haught/Staff

Like a lot of porn, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s “Lovelace” is anticlimactic, aimless and extremely unsexy. The film follows the young Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried), better known as “Linda Lovelace,” who left her repressive Catholic parents (played by Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone, unrecognizable in an excellent yet entirely fruitless Oscar bid) for the abusive Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard). As her manager and husband, Traynor manipulated her into becoming the star of “Deep Throat,” a 1972 pornographic phenomenon. The 60-minute film was shot in less than a week, with all interior shots filmed in the same cheap motel room. It cost $30,000 to make but grossed almost $600 million, making it one of the most profitable films ever made. Boreman only ever collected a salary of $1,250.

In the 2010 Allen Ginsberg biopic, “Howl,” directors Epstein and Friedman similarly attempted to deconstruct an icon. With “Lovelace,” they make another ambitious attempt at demystification, but they end up with a very limited portrayal that seems more like an impressive television movie than a daring exploration of the darker elements of Boreman’s life.

“Lovelace” follows the brutality and degradation Boreman suffered during her marriage to Traynor and her career in the porn industry before she eventually escaped and went on to write a memoir about her experiences. The film’s bifurcated structure first presents the fantasy of Boreman’s marriage and career as perceived by the public before going back and allowing audiences to observe Boreman’s life through her own eyes. However, the film presents an overwhelmingly simplified version of Boreman’s story, removing many of the most shocking and painful aspects of her life — drug addiction, bestiality, her violent death. The film also glosses over Boreman’s activism in second-wave feminist movements.

Boreman played a crucial role as a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement in the early ’80s. However, Andy Bellin’s screenplay cuts out this key part of her life, ignoring her influence on feminist thought. The film arrives at a very abrupt conclusion, attempting to do justice to Boreman’s later life in the final 10 minutes. Despite reports that Sarah Jessica Parker had been cast as anti-porn activist Gloria Steinem in the film, both Steinem and fellow activist Andrea Dworkin are absent. The script instead seems to suggest that Boreman was rescued from the brutality of the porn industry by her second husband and child, as we see her gushing, “As a wife and as a mother, I have found my joy.”

The film suffered from predictably sexist marketing, as film posters depicted Seyfried with come-hither gaze, lips suggestively parted and a falling bra strap exposing cleavage and bare shoulders. However, “Lovelace” is ironically sexless for a film about pornography. Epstein and Friedman opted to treat the sexuality of the film with humor rather than eroticism. Adam Brody, a former star of “The O.C.” and now delightfully adorned with a porn-star mustache as Lovelace’s co-star Harry Reems, told The New York Times, “It’s more ‘American Pie’ than it is Lars von Trier.” The film rests heavily on the notion that all ’70s porn was facetious, and the few sex scenes we do see from “Deep Throat” suggest a cheery and comic production.

The film’s overall attitude toward sex is somewhat confused, as we are offered an abundance of shots of Seyfried topless — along with moments of frivolity and silliness during her scenes with Reems — before abrupt shifts to segments depicting the gritty reality of domestic violence, marital rape and abuse in the (largely mafia-led) porn industry.

“Lovelace” effectively reveals the violence against women that was widespread in the sex industry in the ’70s, but the film is extremely limited in its representation of Boreman and her later life. If “Lovelace” intends to illustrate that Boreman was more than just the brutalized star of “Deep Throat,” it falls flat. The film becomes too lost in the cultural ornaments of the decade and the comic production of “Deep Throat” to make any kind of passionate impact on the viewer, offering a mere glimpse into the life of Linda Boreman before and after her short-lived porn career. For a film about porn, “Lovelace” unsatisfactorily fails to penetrate.

Meadhbh McGrath is the arts editor. Contact her at mmcgrath@dailycal.org. Check her out on Twitter at @MeadhbhMcGrath.

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TriStar Pictures/Courtesy

The last time we saw Neill Blomkamp, he was fresh off the success of “District 9,” the 2009 summer sleeper hit that combined slick visuals and action with biting social commentary. Four years ago seems like an awfully long time.

“Elysium” is a good movie the same way “Twilight” is a classic novel — which is to say it’s not.

Set in 2154, the future of humanity is grim. Well, grim is relative; if you’re one of the unlucky proles stuck on Earth, then you live in a desertlike world that looks like a mixture of East Jerusalem and set pieces from “Mad Max.” If you’re of the wealthy upper crust, then you live on Elysium — a biosphere qua space station whose immigration czar and defense secretary is played by an unusually dull Jodie Foster.

There is no subtlety in either “Elysium” — the fictional space palace nor the film writ large. In the movie, “undocumented ships” routinely try to break through the atmosphere and drop off their cargo. I say “cargo” here because there are no actual people in Elysium or on Earth. Instead, we have sacks of flesh that traverse the screen, brandishing tricked-out weapons and spaceships that compete for our attention with the oh-so-awful plot.

Our story begins before 2154, when a young Max (Matt Damon) and Frey (Alice Braga) hold hands and attend Catholic school in the ruins of Los Angeles. Max promises to take Frey to Elysium one day, and the rest of the movie is spent unpacking the consequences of this promise. Reinserted decades later, Max is a reformed car thief looking to move up at his assembly-line job, and Frey is a nurse. Max is in an accident and needs to go to Elysium for a cure, and Frey gets roped in with the allure of healing her daughter, who is sick with leukemia.

Yes there are all the annoyingly obvious class-war, Occupy-style plot devices. And yes, it is possible that you went into the wrong theater and have sat down and begun watching the most recent Michael Bay “Transformers” installment. But at its core, and despite its best efforts to distract from those tangential details with poor plotting and marvelous special effects, Elysium is really just another distinctly Hollywood take on post-apocalyptic Earth.

For instance, on Elysium, there are MRI-like beds that you can climb onto that will heal all of your ailments in about 30 seconds. To use them, you’ll need a handy-dandy citizenship stamp, which people who have never been to Elysium apparently know how to forge on Earth, but never mind that minor detail. What’s really irritating here is that somehow, a planet that was able to cure all diseases with a futuristic Sealy also let itself slide into ruinous inequality and war. OK.

I’d ordinarily let a small thing like that slip by (it’s sci-fi, duh), except the movie is filled with them. The upper classes on Elysium interchangeably speak French and English, as if the former is uniquely a language of sophistication and the Spanish-English spoken down below is the real language of the people. Moving past the medical technology issues, it also appears that reducing entire languages to crude cultural stereotypes (French fancy, Spanish gritty, English common, etc.) is a sufficient way to illustrate differences between the lives lived below and up top.

And so on.

“Elysium” was made for $100 million, money surely thrown at Blomkamp after the success of “District 9,” which made him the toast of the film world. And although I’m not pleased to say this, “Elysium” is hardly a follow-up worth watching for a filmmaker with the potential of Blomkamp.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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A24/Courtesy

The film opens with high school senior Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) sitting at his computer, typing a response to a college essay prompt that asks him to describe a hardship. He takes a sip of a beer. He begins to ramble on about the downward spiral resulting from his recent breakup with his girlfriend, Cassidy (Brie Larson). He describes the once-idyllic vision of his social status (e.g., “I was the life of every party”) in perfect unison with hers and laments the newly perceived deterioration of his life as he knows it. The film closes with Sutter sitting again at his computer, typing a fresh response to the same prompt.

“The Spectacular Now,” directed by James Ponsoldt (“Smashed”), is a coming-of-age story that follows Sutter on his journey to self-discovery during his last few months in high school. Sutter is the quintessential popular high school teenager, exuding confidence and a certain affable charm, social ease and fast-talking sensibility. Adapting Tim Tharp’s novel of the same name, writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) characterize Sutter with a sense of humor and air that feel slightly dated or contrived, at least enough to make Sutter’s “charm” and breeziness irritating to watch at times. The film, however, harps on the shallowness of his exterior by revealing deeper emotional insecurities.

Sutter emphasizes living in the moment and embracing the present (the “now” part of the title). It is a naive and romantic kind of credo that inhibits him from — or rather, allows him to avoid — moving forward or confronting larger issues. He is prompted to reevaluate his life and complacency when he conveniently meets Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley). Aimee is sharp, goal-oriented and unaware of her physical beauty. Her biggest downfall is her sincere love for the surprisingly tragic Sutter, who has an “I’m tortured; I don’t deserve you” complex beneath his outward confidence.

It might sound like a cheesy portrait, but the film is more than its basic plot. Although it uses a familiar structure (yes, there’s a prom scene and a graduation scene) with more or less formulaic character models, “The Spectacular Now” takes a refreshing approach to the tried-and-tried-again coming-of-age story without any sugarcoating. As the unlikely relationship between the Aimee and Sutter develops, Sutter’s depth and emotional baggage unravel as he grapples with his relationship with his absent father (Kyle Chandler), a dangerous penchant for alcohol, future plans and an underlying struggle with feelings of deservingness. Against its comedic aspect, such topics make the film exceptionally tender.

Amid the raunchy teen movies that have dominated the past decade, it’s true that this feels much more akin to ’80s films like John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club” or Cameron Crowe’s “Say Anything” than its contemporaries. It encapsulates sincerity that is rare in coming-of-age films of late. It captures the emotional vulnerability of adolescence and a genuine sweetness in young romance, demonstrated in the palpable chemistry and natural interaction between the characters. The film also provides an accurate image of complicated family dynamics in white middle-class America and their subsequent effect on teens, treating topics like alcoholism, sex and self-love with sensitivity and earnestness.

It is clear that the writers do not mock or condescend the teenaged subjects nor dramatize their angst. Instead, they seem to really understand these characters, recognizing the sincerity and validity behind their emotions and desires. The poignancy that results in such a compassionate depiction negates the film’s potential to be a sappy or melodramatic despite its genre.

Contact Denise Lee at deniselee@dailycal.org.

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Drafthouse Films/File

From classics like “Singin’ in the Rain” to goofball comedies like “Tropic Thunder,” movies about movies are embedded with a unique type of charm. When filmmakers invite audiences into their own worlds, the result is often insightful, realistic and pleasingly self-aware. American director Joshua Oppenheimer puts a sinister twist on the film-within-a-film genre with his award-winning, surreal documentary, “The Act of Killing,” in which he chronicles the decay of a glamorized, Hollywood-inspired dream into an all-too-real nightmare.

The premise of the documentary is novel. In 1965, a military dictatorship overthrew the Indonesian government and put to death any suspected dissidents of the new regime, primarily alleged communists and ethnic Chinese. The gangsters and paramilitary members who carried out these mass killings (estimates range from 500,000 to more than 1 million in the span of a year) are now national heroes, honored and wealthy. Oppenheimer asked these men to recreate their killings on film, drawing on any genre they wanted, from western to film noir to the style of classic American gangster movies and musicals. The resulting expose fades in and out of fiction, offering unsettling insight into the memories and fantasies of admitted sadists.

Oppenheimer opens the film with the words of French philosopher Voltaire: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Voltaire’s words serve as a launching point into an unreal world where murderers are revered as luminaries and war crimes are romanticized and enhanced with movie magic. The primary subject of the film is Anwars Congo, a former Indonesian death-squad leader who got his start as a “movie-theater gangster” scalping tickets to American films. In both his killing and his acting, Congo credits movie legends Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and John Wayne as his inspirations. He even learned his signature move — wrapping wire around a victim’s neck and pulling it until he or she suffocates — from American mobster movies.

As Congo begins to reimagine his killings for the camera, he and his fellow nationalists are unapologetically nostalgic for their bloody glory days. One man boastfully reminisces about the day he killed his Chinese girlfriend’s father, while another is eager to share a story about the time a death squad pulled his stepfather away in the middle of the night and murdered him. While the killers laugh away, however, the villagers they coerce into recreating these memories seem genuinely distressed by the reality of the violence. In one particularly upsetting scene, two panicking children, unaware that the actors are pretending, fight to save their grandpa from being killed before their eyes.

Such is the dilemma of “The Act of Killing.” It is punishing to the actors involved, for whom the lines between reality and fiction are often painfully blurred. It is punishing to the memories of the deceased, whose deaths have not been apologized for and whose murderers are allowed to live freely and fully. It is even punishing to the subjects themselves, who are forced to confront their own cruelty and culpability.

As aggressively as Oppenheimer rips open the wounds of Indonesia’s sordid past, however, the film is ultimately less about punishment and more about compassion — not only for the victims but also for the men who ruined their own lives when they took the lives of others. As the former gangsters reach further and further back into their memories of the events of 1965, they begin to crumble under the weight of their guilty consciences and decades of nightmares.

“The Act of Killing” is unlike anything in its genre. It does not inform, reveal or simply tell a story. It brings to the forefront the ugliest, most corrupted elements of human nature, but it does so with enough artistry and humanity to make it a truly beautiful piece of cinema.

Contact Grace Lovio at glovio@dailycal.org.

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Zeitgeist Films/Courtesy

On the evening of May 11, 1960, a man walked off a bus in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was immediately captured, drugged and flown to Israel, where he would be tried for 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity. The man was Adolf Eichmann — a former Nazi SS lieutenant and the man in charge of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps. The trial, which began in 1961, attracted international attention, but it was the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt’s five-part report of the event for The New Yorker that left a lasting and still controversial impact. Now, Arendt’s coverage of the trial, her ideas and her personal struggles can be seen in director Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, “Hannah Arendt.”

At nearly two hours long, the film puts Arendt in the midst of her academic career and covers her unexpected reactions to the trial and the subsequent controversy that surrounded her New Yorker piece. This may sound like a vague recap, but there are a lot of inherent difficulties when it comes to this film’s subject matter. The difficulties have nothing to do with the problematic topic of the Holocaust or of the criminal justice system but relate to storytelling in general. There’s a lot of context at play here, too much to summarize in any acceptable form in this review, and von Trotta’s film, for the worse, tries to cram it all in with nary the amount of detail the material deserves.

First, the film has to explain who “Hannah Arendt” is. After opening with Eichmann’s kidnapping in Argentina, we see Arendt and her New York intellectual cohort talk philosophy, politics and current events. From the conversations, especially from the editors of The New Yorker, we can tell Arendt is someone vital and someone we should have heard of, which is an incredibly strange choice given that vieweres would not be seeing a film about Hannah Arendt, called “Hannah Arendt,” if they had no clue who she was and why she is so significant. And yet the film goes to great lengths to both play to a presumably ignorant audience and adhere to a more academic crowd.

For a movie about a trial and article that highlights the complexity of perspective, “Hannah Arendt” sure does find itself muddled in its narrative clarity. At one moment, while Arendt and her German friends converse in their native tongue, the camera cuts to two Americans who, with puzzled faces, say something along the lines of “I have no idea what they’re saying!” Then, when Arendt is in Jerusalem for the trial, she and a German friend spout philosophical bon mots without any explanation or purpose.

It isn’t until the actual trial, about a half-hour in, when the film starts to pick up steam. We see actual footage of Eichmann, nervously twitching in his glass booth, at the trial — spliced with filmed reactions of Arendt and others. It’s an effective editing technique, and it’s powerful when placed in the context of Arendt’s momentous New Yorker piece. But at the end of the film, after Arendt has suffered personal and political abandonment on account of her opinions, the initial confusion still persists: What does it all mean?

This is the question Arendt had to answer when writing about Eichmann’s trial. Her contentious conclusion became a catch-all for why the Holocaust happened. In her words, it was “the banality of evil.” Eichmann was not a monster. He was a normal man, like most of the SS bureaucrats, who lacked empathy and followed orders. It’s an incredibly important and influential idea, much like the woman who coined it. Unfortunately, unlike its subject matter, “Hannah Arendt” lacks the focus and depth. It never really explores woman behind “the banality of evil”; it’s just banal.

Contact Jessica Pena at jpena@dailycal.org.

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Graham Haught/Staff

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, an annual event seeking to promote “awareness, appreciation and pride in the diversity of the Jewish people,” kicked off this past week with a variety of showings across the Bay, including the July 27 screening of Alex Karpovsky’s “Red Flag” at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival would also like you to know that Karpovsky, who appears regularly in Lena Dunham’s HBO hit “Girls,” has been called “the next generation’s Woody Allen.” In fact, I read the phrase “Woody Allen of your generation” (or some variation on that) no less than a dozen times in the literature promoting the screening, in a New Yorker piece from March and in a number of articles from across the Web.

I also heard it when the announcer introduced the screening and the lights dimmed — and yet again immediately after that when Karpovsky was probed on “Red Flag” (which by the way, is not directed by Woody Allen), his work with HBO and other sorts of questions on what it’s like to be young, Jewish and making movies. Then, the movie began.

“Red Flag” is a mumblecore film true to its genre: It was made for almost no money, it’s interspersed with uncomfortable snatches of dialogue and it’s moved along at a glacial pace by an anonymous cast of actors (most of whom you’ll never see in another movie). Playing himself, Karpovsky is a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who’s kicked out by his live-in girlfriend, forced to hit the road alone promoting his new film about birds.

After a one-night stand and some awkward camera angles, Karpovsky sojourns on through the South and eventually recruits an old friend to join him. This friend, Henry (Onur Tukel), writes kid lit about death (it’s quirky — don’t worry about it) and ends up bringing River — the woman with whom Karpovsky had slept just a couple nights before, played by Jennifer Prediger — along on the road trip. As the trip goes on, shenanigans ensue, and the movie’s dark humor foreshadows the ending relatively early on.

“Red Flag” is not a bad movie, but it isn’t exceptional, either. It’s just embarrassingly decent. Karpovsky’s film deals with self-obsession and how the characters who are overly connected with themselves (which is all of them, save for Karpovsky’s ex) are ironically unable to see past their own egos, character flaws and so on. The Woody Allen comparison here is particularly apt.

But where Karpovsky departs from Allen is where the film struggles. In “Annie Hall,” Allen focuses inwardly and travels throughout his life to understand the troubles underscoring his relationship with the titular character. Deconstructing his entire biography, Allen leaves no stone unturned, and the audience is clued into how the male Jewish mind works — not dissimilar to Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

In “Red Flag,” there is no deconstruction. We instead are witnessing the answer less the question: All of these self-involved powderkegs crowded into a sedan left with nothing but each other to talk to and about. Perhaps limited by the genre (mumblecore kind of mandates minimalist dialogue and production), there is no curious introspection, and there are no forced moments of realization.

Maybe that’s the point: Karpovsky (the character) is self-absorbed to the point that he lacks the capacity to see what about himself repels other people. And that’s not a bad point, especially because for someone with (in the words of a Very Serious Magazine like The New Yorker) the “promise of becoming his generation’s Woody Allen,” his generation is frequently knocked for its self-absorption and inability to pay attention to what’s going on.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter, because people who lack the capacity to look within themselves — at least in this case — make for boring cinema. Regardless of whether those people are any generation’s Woody Allen.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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Universal Pictures/Courtesy

There’s usually a certain pattern in bad comedy sets — some muffled laughter and pity claps in the beginning to inspire confidence, but when the cliched jokes and dull punchlines start to pile up, the audience only stays to watch the set’s inevitable demise. “R.I.P.D.,” like an unfunny standup comedian, is a film that progressively gets worse and is ridiculous instead of entertaining. The result is a Razzie favorite in which everything manages to go wrong.

Nick Walker (Ryan Reynolds) is a Boston police officer who gets shot by his partner, Bobby Hayes (Kevin Bacon), and is transported to a purgatory world where he is obligated to join the R.I.P.D. — an organization of deceased police officers set to remove the dead spirits living on earth (called “deados”) who have escaped the afterlife and transform into grotesque monsters if exposed to certain kinds of food. He partners up with former Civil War-era marshal Roy Pulsipher (Jeff Bridges). In typical buddy-cop fashion, the two spend most of the time bickering. The problem, however, is that the relationship between the partners remains artificial and static throughout the film. Roy is a one-dimensional Wild West marshal obsessed with his hat and women’s ankles, and Nick, while having a circumstance that creates the most obvious pathos imaginable, is uninteresting and doesn’t have a character arc.

In the living world, they keep their internal consciousnesses but have human avatars. Nick becomes an old Chinese man (James Hong), and Roy is a blonde supermodel (Marisa Miller) — and you better believe they milked as many jokes as possible from this incongruous pairing in the film’s 90-minute span. Nick tries to talk to his wife during his own funeral, much to the bewilderment of the participants, and nearly every guy drools over Roy’s alluring avatar, only to be bitterly rejected.

While these scenes may provide some cheap situational humor, they conflict with the internal logic of the universe. For the audience to suspend their disbelief, which is especially important in science fiction, the fictional aspects need to comprehensible by actually making sense. The primary fictional entity in this film is the department itself, and the film abandons any training, procedures and logistics whatsoever in the R.I.P.D. When the officers get to freely interact with whomever in the world, the plot inconsistencies start to accumulate, and the viewers will quickly lose their immersion in this world.

The preposterousness of the story doesn’t stop there. The physical invincibility of the cops — Nick falls off a 30-story building without a scratch on his body — eliminates virtually all stakes in the action scenes and makes the already uninspiring car chases and shootouts even more irrelevant. However, the officers still hide from the deados’ gunshots, and the humans are continually oblivious to the supernatural creatures even when we see one jumping off of skyscrapers in the beginning of the film. As the movie progresses, it doesn’t attempt to mitigate any of these logical disparities as it reaches higher levels of absurdity.

“R.I.P.D.” is “Men in Black” if you remove the chemistry between the partners and any pretense of logic involved in the plot. This movie was originally a script that, like the deados, should have been stamped dead on arrival but, instead, had been put into production by a studio head with the help of movie stars willing to compromise their careers (I’m looking at you, Jeff Bridges). It’s just a shame we don’t have a department dedicated to preventing Hollywood executives from green-lighting soulless projects.

Contact Fan Huang at fhuang@dailycal.org.

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Graham Haught/Staff

The fundamental neurotic character in Woody Allen films, traditionally played by Allen, is not entirely absent in his latest dark comedy, “Blue Jasmine.” It is, however, exaggerated, complicated in class satire and embodied in a female character played by Cate Blanchett. It’s interesting; whereas Allen’s male characters are charming and intellectually backed in their neuroses, Blanchett’s female character is superficial and clearly losing her sanity.

But Jasmine also has a different background. Unlike the recurring male character, Jasmine is not obsessed with existential questions or death; she is obsessed instead with money, status and security. Her extreme mental fragility does not stem from the privileged ennui of Allen’s typical neurotic character. It results from a destabilization of that privilege. Through the film’s bicoastal, bitemporal setting, split between San Francisco present and flashbacks of Jasmine’s New York past, Allen explains the root of Jasmine’s dramatic emotional turmoil.

What makes Jasmine’s frenzied desperation compelling is that her former socialite status is more or less forged. We understand this through her interaction with her lower-brow sister, Ginger, played by the phenomenal Sally Hawkins (“Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Submarine”). Both sisters were adopted from different parents. Unlike Ginger, Jasmine, who changed her name from Jeanette — a prime example of her self-fashioned identity — was able to cross class lines by marrying Hal (Alec Baldwin), a wealthy man with corrupt business schemes. The film follows Jasmine’s reluctant move to San Francisco after her marriage falls apart.

Jasmine displays uncensored snobbery, refusing to move from one social stratum to another. She does not try to acclimate to Ginger’s “modest” (actually quite average) lifestyle. Her goal throughout the film is to find a replacement husband who will provide for her the financial security and lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed. She needs to reassert her position among the 1 percent. Allen aptly satirizes excess of the upper class elite, but that is not all he is doing. The absurdism of Jasmine’s privileged whininess and class discomfort becomes quite depressing.

As is Allen’s forte, he explores deeper psychological tendencies in Jasmine’s extreme anxiety about the way she is perceived by others. Jasmine’s coping mechanism is to fictionalize her identity by averting her eyes from the realities in front of her. She becomes an absurd caricature of a person — grandiose in her social interactions, physical movements and speech. Jasmine is, at times, a deplorable character, but the baggage beneath her outward theatrics makes her sympathetic. Blanchett conveys this oscillation masterfully and convincingly, playing Jasmine with the slightest tinge of mid-Atlantic in her accent, which skillfully accentuates the character’s theatrical air. Blanchett manages to make the rather grueling experience of watching her character also wildly entertaining.

Jasmine ridicules her sister’s taste in men, criticizing her for settling for less than she deserves. Meanwhile, Jasmine’s own search for eligible suitors is strictly based on superficial terms. While Allen satirically highlights the tragedy of expectation, disappointment and complacency in relationships, his presentation of female perspectives is troublingly simplified. Overall, the concerns of Allen’s female characters in “Blue Jasmine” feel rather dated.

Still, the characters are not flat, and both Blanchett and Hawkins masterfully bring their characters to life and counterbalance some of the film’s structural shortcomings. In a portrait of superficiality, privilege, class disparity, loss and a type of awry self-making, the storyline of
“Blue Jasmine” is promising, but its execution is a bit haphazard. Its tone is indeterminable, as Jasmine’s erratic behavior is made to be equally humorous and tragic at different moments. Its narrative flow is not as taut as it should be. Regardless, Allen’s trademark humor and complicated character development are guaranteed in his entertaining, albeit emotionally exhausting, tragicomedy.

Contact Denise Lee at deniselee@dailycal.org.

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Roadside Attractions/Courtesy

Charming though unremarkable, “Girl Most Likely,” Kristen Wiig’s latest dramedy, is touching at times but fails to generate “Bridesmaids”-worthy laughs. “Girl Most Likely” tells the story of Imogene Duncan (Wiig), a Jersey-born, Manhattan-obsessed aspiring (and failing) playwright. When her long-term boyfriend dumps her for a French model, Imogene goes on a crazy, obsessive rampage to win her handsome, socialite beaux back — by faking her own suicide.

Waking up in a psychiatric ward, Imogene is forced to stay at her mother’s place as she “recuperates.” Her mother, Zelda (Annette Bening) is your classic Jersey mom. Living in Ocean City, Zelda is addicted to gambling and has a flag outside her home that reads, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.” Her gaudy clothing and younger, seemingly reality-impaired boyfriend (Matt Dillon) are all reminders to Imogene of why she left Jersey, and her family, behind in the first place.

To make matters worse, her mentally challenged younger brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) hasn’t left home, and her childhood bedroom has been rented out to a young entertainer and singer (Darren Criss). Though the second Imogene arrives in Ocean City it is clear where the storyline is headed — selfish New Yorker realizes the value of her embarrassing Jersey family — there are some unexpected and touching moments.

The onscreen relationship between siblings Imogene and Ralph is engaging. His ability to make her a fort out of blankets, her willingness to help him woo a girl who works at a glitter tattoo kiosk across from his crab shack on the boardwalk — these are the scenes of “Girl Most Likely” that allow it to not be described as “hollow.” Wiig plays a low-key and subtle character — none of the drunk “there’s a colonial woman on the wing” humor here — but the tender sibling duo is what gives her character depth.

As crustacean-loving Ralph, Fitzgerald steals the show. His childlike innocence is at once hilarious and troubling. At one point in the movie he shows Imogene a mollusk-like, bulletproof exoskeleton (equipped with Wi-Fi!) he made so that he can feel safe when he goes out in public.

Matt Dillon plays his usual vaguely sleazy character, though it is toned down a bit. As Zelda’s airhead boyfriend George Bousche (pronounced Boosh), Dillon tells the Duncans he works for the CIA and that “Bousche” is just a pseudonym — even he doesn’t remember his own real name! His supporting role is funny without being distracting, and it’s a shame that his character is unfortunately underwritten.

As Lee, the boarder who displaces Imogene, Criss fits the bill. The member of a Backstreet Boys cover band, Lee is convincing — though Criss’ background with “Glee” probably helped tremendously. He is the character the audience will fall in love with. Sassy at times but encouraging when he needs to be, Lee (as one can guess) falls for Imogene. However, unlike the tacky Jersey setting, their relationship is not cheesy at all. In fact, the storyline does not chronicle their relationship. It focuses on the success of Imogene herself, not bothering to muddle the plot with cliched love triangles or affairs.

“Girl Most Likely” demonstrates what most romantic comedies don’t — that a man is not the solution to every problem in a young woman’s life. The movie does not conclude with a grand wedding in the ballroom of a Ritz-Carlton. It does not feature intense sex scenes or awkward dates. This movie is not about love as any type of destination but as a way for one to gain clarity and inspiration to do greater things in life.

Contact Addy Bhasin at abhasin@dailycal.org.

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Micah Fry/Staff

Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director of “Drive” and “Valhalla Rising,” has produced his most complex and fascinating work yet in his new release “Only God Forgives,” in theaters Aug. 2.

Starring Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Thai newcomers Vithaya Pansringarm and Yayaying Rhatha Phongam, the drama is a gory noir unlike any in recent memory, channeling predecessors as diverse as Gaspar Noe (“Enter the Void,” 2009), David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence,” 2005) and Richard Kern (“The Evil Cameraman,” 1990). Perhaps the best film to be released thus far this year, the characters and story of “Only God Forgives” are as maddening to process as they are captivating to watch unfold.

The film follows Julian (Gosling), the American owner of a Bangkok boxing club used as a drug distribution center, as he is pushed by his mother Crystal (Thomas) to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of the mysterious vigilante policeman “Chang” (Pansringam).

Describing Thomas’ character as a mix of “Lady Macbeth and Donatella Versace,” Refn says that because “we are so used to seeing crime and violence as being the work of male characters,” it made it all the more appealing to use a female villain that would “embody absolute evil.”

Complementing Thomas’ overbearing-mother personality, Gosling’s Norman Bates stand-in is a mute, spastically violent creation constantly wrestling with the bizarre, semierotic relationship with his mother. At one point in the movie, Julian brings his favorite prostitute, Mai (Phongam) to dinner with his mother as his date, to which she responds in a predictably profane and explosive fashion.

While the story and narrative arc may be a little more abstract than what fans of “Drive” might expect, the cinematography, soundtrack and use of color are the best of any movie released this year. Through the use of a variety of tracking shots, thoughtful camera angles and a diverse array of graphic metaphors, there is not a single frame in this movie that feels out of place; the visual style is an inventive blend that recalls classics like Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” or even Ridley Scott’s 1980s sci-fi epic, “Blade Runner.”

Consider the opening scenes.

The lighting is dark, with the exception of fluorescent lights illuminating the two padded teenagers beating on one another in the middle. The camera looks at the fight from above and pans out to show the backdrop of the gym — a menacing rose-tinted dragon glaring at the audience that also later serves as the backdrop for the final fight between Chang and Julian.

A powerful metaphor for the distant, ominous god figure that Julian continually wants to fight (perhaps the Laius to Crystal’s Jocasta?), the dragon stares down the fighters as if to let them all know that they are beneath the dragon-god, far below anything they ever hope to defeat. This, among some other subtle cues, lends the whole film a kind of doomed, star-crossed-lovers vibe that swaps Romeo and Juliet for Julian and his mother.

The movie’s whole format is something like this. A complicated amalgam of classical tragic themes and a protagonist lusting for higher truths while on a revenge mission, the movie has, to repeat the overused phrase, polarized audiences.

Received controversially from the beginning, “Only God Forgives” caused many at its Cannes debut to walk out of theater while the film simultaneously earns a five-star review in The Guardian. For a movie as successfully strange and emotionally overpowering as this one, the mixed reviews are unsurprising.

David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” a similarly wild and great movie, also received varied reactions upon its 1999 release. One New Yorker critic described “Fight Club” as being overwhelmed by Fincher’s “sadomasochistic kicks,” and another from The Los Angeles Times characterized the movie as having a “crack-brained” premise. Copy and paste a few words here, insert some manufactured outrage there, and what we have is a half-baked argument that the ultraviolence of “Only God Forgives” overshadows any philosophical or formal excellence the movie has.

Simply put, such reductive thinking ignores the usefulness in this violence as a medium on its own. The body horror involved in “Only God Forgives” is a self-acknowledged nod to Kern — in sync with the Cronenberg-esque themes of violence as a tool of illumination and introspection.

There is no doubt: “Only God Forgives” is an uncomfortable movie to watch. However, it is a deeply rewarding one whose mind-bending nature will leave the viewer with much to ponder, and yes, squirm over.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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