Haywire: An Ass-Kicker Supreme

Haywire

Directed By: Steven Soderbergh

Written By: Lem Dobbs

Starring: Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano, and Channing Tatum

Director of Photography: Peter Andrews (Soderbergh), Editor: Steven Soderbergh, Production Designer: Howard Cummings, Original Music: David Holmes

Rated: R for ass-kicking, head-smashing violence.

            The pleasures in Haywire, of which are there many, derive not from the dramatic reveals or explosions or kinetic, impossible to follow, action sequences that populate most films that follow spies and the work they do. Instead, the film gives us details through cinematic delights: a tilted shot in a red-drenched palette, an abstract jazzy score, and the sound of a gunshot runging out with booming thunder. This is after all Steven Soderbergh, a director who despite being in the business for over twenty years, has continued to remain experimental and metatextual with each film, even when approaching genre exercises (most recently the virus thriller Contaigon, which evolved into a political statement on the age of Tea Party politics).

            One could argue Haywire is the closest thing he’s done to a commercial film since his Ocean’s trilogy. However, Soderbergh plays against usual genre standards so often that the film often feels much like Godard and Truffaut making a CIA black ops ass kicking thriller than the next film from Michael Bay. Style is the substance of Haywire, which uses a somewhat paint-by-the-numbers script by Lem Dobbs (who also wrote The Limey for Mr. Soderbergh) as a starting point to give the almost deadening genre a new classic, and led by the commanding performance of Gina Carano.

Beginners: Coming to Terms With Dad's Coming Out

Beginners

Written and Directed By: Mike Mills

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Vinsijc, and Mary Page Keller

Director of Photography: Kasper Tuxen, Editor: Oliver Bugge Coutte, Production Designer: Shane Valentino, Music: Roger Neill, David Palmer, and Brian Reitzell

Rated: R for a little language and some situations only adults will enjoy

            Beginners, a new film from Mike Mills and starring Ewan McGregor, is in no rush to get anywhere, while jumping all over the place at the time. The film’s narrative zooms back and forth in time, from childhood, to middle age, to a slightly older middle age of its protagonist, the sad but lovable Oliver, but does so in a casual business. This is the same way that Mr. Mills approaches the quirk side to his film—a series of Wes Anderson-styled cutout shots, a dog that talks through subtitles, and a manic pixie dream girl played by Melanie Laurent—but without calling attention to itself.

            What separates Mr. Mills, whose last film Thumbsucker was a bottle of quirk mixed in with teenage angst that came out as a mess, from other quirk directors is the melancholy he brings to Beginners. With its autobiographical touches, the film reaches out with a slight hand to grab you into its narrative, but it never forces you into a world of farce. It instead soothes you into its story of a man essentially trying to find himself and connect to others in the process.