Short Take: "Take Shelter", "Margin Call" and "Texas Killing Fields"

In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a man who is having constant apocalyptic visions, and can you blame him? With the world going through one of its most severe cases of economic, cultural and sociological

crises, he would need to be heavily sedated to be optimistic. This is the film's magic, how writer/director Jeff Nichols transports all these feelings of impending doom and crafts with them, not a preposterous ode to negativity but an intelligent psychological portrait about the way in which our subconscious manifests its fears.

The film isn't clever because we wonder whether Curtis' visions are signs of insanity or actual premonitions, but because of the way in which Shannon taps onto the fear of losing one's mind when trying to remain a responsible member of society. The film is almost socialist in the way it so fixates itself on work, as Curtis builds a shelter to protect his family (the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain plays his wife and is nothing short of perfect). Nichols crafts a workman symbolism as we see, construction worker, Curtis dig deep down into the ground to escape from a sky that for the first time seems to be noticing him. He's trying to escape doom by working harder. Now how's that for a pitch perfect snapshot of our times?  

Margin Call deals with the corruption that goes behind the stock market and emphasizes on the "thrills" that make Wall Street such an adored object of Hollywood's attention. Why not make a comedy about  this for once? The film doesn't really contribute anything new to the genre with Penn Badgley and Zachary Quinto playing the wide eyed virgins willing to sell their soul to get a piece of the pie and Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons playing larger-than-life monsters who control everything with their ruthlessness and suspenders. The ensemble is quite effective (despite having the likes of Simon Baker and Demi Moore in its ranks) but the film's lack of actual excitement makes it endlessly dull.

Oy, Sam Worthington really needs blue aliens or Keira Knightley to turn in semi-decent performances, playing a violent detective in Texas Killing Fields does him no favors, but then again the material does none of the actors any favor (although Jessica Chastain somehow manages to deliver the goods). This serial killer flick had all the makings of a B-gore fest, but everything is so overdone that its intention to be some sort of feminist essay bites in the back by becoming endlessly stereotypical and cliché. The film was directed by Michael Mann's daughter and one would wish she had inherited some of her dad's stylish eye for crime movies.

Grades
Take Shelter ***
Margin Call **
Texas Killing Fields *

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

After the rather surprising trailer that shows us a playful Marty, now we get this rather tame teaser poster for the upcoming Hugo.

Can't say this poster screams "I'm dying to see this ASAP!", it looks more like a leftover piece from The Golden Compass movies that never came to happen...

This slightly updated version of Brave's teaser gives us a glimpse at how influenced the movie will be by Celtic and Medieval traditions. The way in which the artists achieved movement with such grace and beauty in this poster is truly remarkable. Please let Cars 2 be behind us and have Pixar deliver this to us today!

What were your thoughts on the Hugo trailer? Excited about Brave?

Kick-Ass **

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Chloë Moretz, Mark Strong
Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Yancy Butler, Lyndsy Fonseca
Clark Duke, Evan Peters, Michael Rispoli

Based on energy alone, Kick-Ass could very well ride a wave that would cloud the fact that it's a very inconsistent, almost incoherent, movie.
Its concept is quite a simple one, as it wonders why don't superheroes exist when practically anyone can become whatever they want.
The idea is executed by average teenager Dave Lizewski (Johnson) who buys himself a wetsuit, a couple of clubs and goes out to the streets looking for people to help using the name Kick-Ass.
"I always wondered why no one did it before me" he asks after he accidentally becomes an internet phenomenon and the threat of paranoid mob king Frank D'Amico (Strong, who's become the new go-to-guy for over the top villains) whose plans have been botched by a masked vigilante.
D'Amico ignores the fact that there are more heroes than Kick-Ass (giving the plot one of its first inconsistencies along with the constant disappearance of Dave's eyeglasses...) and one of them has a personal vendetta against him.
It's none other than Big Daddy (Cage) a once honored cop who fell victim to the mobster's allies and is now plotting a huge revenge against him, with his twelve year old daughter who calls herself Hit-Girl (Moretz).
Soon the heroes' storylines will cross as they face the evil D'Amico and the movie tries to be all of the following: a quirky indie like superhero movie, a Tarantino ripoff, an accurate social commentary on adolescents and the media, an old fashioned revenge story, a coming of age drama, a genre satire and a comedy of manners.
With all the different stylistic currents going through the movie, the real heroic feat is how director Vaughn manages to make something out of it and especially for that something to be vastly entertaining.
Much is owed to the superb cast who make the most out of the poor character development they're given.
Cage is at his idiosyncratic best (how he can be so good and then so terrible is a mystery) while Strong fills his role with morbid delight.
Yet the movie belongs to the young; Johnson, who technically has to carry the entire movie on his shoulders creates a charming hybrid of a Michael Cera performance with Daniel Radcliffe's unwilling blooming sexuality.
And the stunning Moretz, who also becomes the film's most controversial character, takes over the screen in such a way that you won't believe how young she actually is.
Her ability to be a complete bad-ass, yet preserve sweet, innocent traits is a remarkable work.
Too bad that it's especially with Hit-Girl that Vaughn reveals that he didn't really know how to handle the material.
For all the Tarantino-esque hyper-violence of the movie, there's also its pervading need to be as real as possible.
So in this tonal oxymoron, the film hits a contradiction that makes it impossible to take "serious" as a fantasy or as a fantastical take on reality.
Kick-Ass should've taken a cue from one of the basic paradigms of comic superheroes that make us wonder where will the villains who want to destroy the world move to.
This idea in comic books isn't usually taken seriously because we all know the hero will arrive in time to save the day, making the ultimate evil plan a complete implausibility.
But what can we make of a movie that constantly reminds us of the hero's ordinariness? If Dave's Kick-Ass isn't an actual superhero, what makes it alright to watch a little girl shooting gangsters?
The film tries to inhabit parallel universes: one where the comic book fantasy rules and even the youngest kids can be what they want and another completely different place where these very kids might want to be villains instead and pack guns in their lunchboxes to shoot their classmates.
Sometimes it's our world, sometimes it's superhero land...isn't this impossibility to differentiate between fantasy and reality what actually triggered several school massacres during the last decade?
Kick-Ass might be enjoyable but it gets wrong what a great superhero movie got very right: it has no consciousness of the responsibilities that come with power.