Savages: Drug Problem

Savages

Directed By: Oliver Stone

Written By: Oliver Stone, Don Winslow, and Shane Salerno, based on a novel by Winslow

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Blake Lively, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Demian Bichir, and Emile Hirsch

Director of Photography: Dan Mindel, Editors: Joe Hutshing, Sturart Levy, and Alex Marquez, Production Designer: Tomas Voth, Original Music: Adam Peters

            Oliver Stone’s cinematic sensibilities are equivalent to a sledgehammer to the face—Subtlety is not his forte. His camera is constantly moving, changing shades of colors and hues, flashing between them, and his soundtrack filled with a mix of rock and roll as well as intense classical, all to pummel you into submission. When Stone goes off the rails, most notably in films like JFK and Nixon, it brings you into the paranoia and intensity of the characters he focuses on. When he pulls it back, even just a little bit, it reveals the shallowness of his filmmaking. Wall Street and Platoon have not aged well to say the least, and dear goodness let’s not remember World Trade Center, which turned 9/11 into a Lifetime movie.

            So perhaps we should be happy that in Savages, Stone has returned to the intense filmmaking that has made him an auteur (Would he be Expressive Esoterica or Strained Seriousness?). Or perhaps not. Based on a Don Winslow novel, Savages is a drug movie, which could be a good ol’ summer shoot-em-up if it wasn’t for Stone’s operatic sensibilities. It begins with a draining voiceover by Blake Lively, whose name is Ophelia but goes by the name O (The other Hamlet reference is all the dead bodies). She explains that she’s the lover of Chon and Ben, who provide Laguna Beach with the world’s finest marijuana (“The THC levels are 33%” they exclaim, which means nothing to this non-smoker). O uses a little of each for both—Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is the brawny, military man who has “wargasms,” while Ben (Aaron Johnson) is the hippie free spirit who wants to help the world with $10 laptops and solar panels when he’s not getting rich.

John Carter: Same Hero's Journey, Different Planet

John Carter

Directed By: Andrew Stanton

Written By: Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Bryan Cranston, and the voices of Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Hayden Chuch

Director of Photography: Dan Mindel, Editor: Eric Zumbrunnen, Production Designer: Nathan Crowley, Original Music: Michael Giacchino

Rated: PG-13 for your standard sci-fi spectacle action.

            Have you heard? John Carter is the latest disaster from Disney! It’s an overbloated sci-fi spectacular full of ridiculous characters who have unpronounceable names! It’s overstuffed with CGI that’s there for the sake of more! It cost over $250 million, and if it fails, we’ll never see the likes of it again! Yay, us!

            If you read anything on John Carter this week, which is a very big and costly science fiction epic from Disney, it probably read something like this. And because what the film looks like on its surface, it is certainly easy to pile on the film for representing everything wrong with mainstream filmmaking. Certainly Disney has a trend of these “franchise booter” films since Pirates of the Caribbean, none of which have spawned sequels (see: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Prince of Persia, and Tron: Legacy), and John Carter is certainly written with bookends in order to demand sequel territory. But to dismiss John Carter so easily is to dismiss the grounds the film’s director, Pixar alum Andrew Stanton, wants his audience to approach the film. You have to take the drama as intensely as its characters do, and once you give into the power of John Carter, it’s a wild ride on the red desert.