In Which The Immobility Of Ben Affleck Does Not Impact The Relative Distribution Of Justice

You Will Bleed

by DICK CHENEY

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
dir. Zack Snyder
151 minutes!

There is a scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice where Lois Lane (Amy Adams) has time for a nice long bath. She is one year past forty, an unmarried woman entering her second prime. Her prominent cheekbones and resoundingly high, nasal tone in her voice keep her looking roughly the same age as her boyfriend, even though he is nine years younger than herself.

Although she is a journalist, she does not spend very much time writing. Her skills lurk more towards the investigative side of the ledger; perhaps an intern even does the actual grunt work on her stories. "No one buys newspapers anymore," grouses her boss (Laurence Fishburne). She lives her life independently of the men in it: if one she likes happens to stroll in on her during one of her long soaks, she may spread her legs for him — if she doesn't have to catch a flight for Johannesburg in the morning.

The basis of her relationship with her boyfriend is relatively unconventional given that he is immortal. She is constantly concerned for his welfare, even though he at times seems impervious to physical pain. When a fat man (Ben Affleck) is about to stab her one and only with a green spear, she intervenes to save her man's life. I liked this, because we do not just have to assume how much she cares about him — Lois showed it.

The fat man has no love in his life. He can in fact barely move; the fat man's butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) is clearly a more athletic person and practically runs circles around the overweight child he was forced to raise in the absence of any living family. Affleck did not do any of his own stunts, and here he verges on not being able to do any of his own acting, since he has only a few scenes where he has significant dialogue with anyone as Bruce Wayne.

In that scene he is sort of flirting with a model-type Israeli woman (Gal Gadot) who has made an appearance at a fundraiser. "You've never met a woman like me," she tells him, and his response is something along the lines of, "Would you be at all interested in babysitting my kids?" Jennifer Garner played a heroine in the mode of the young woman in Dawn of Justice decades ago, as the love interest of a not-so fat man (Ben Affleck) back when he still had flexibility in his knees. In Dawn of Justice Ben is entirely stationary — we don't see him walk more than two feet without a double taking his place.

On the set of that film Affleck would often suprise her with croquet or a brewski and ask her how she liked being pinched. It was a win-win for the not as fat man, because if she said she did not like it, he would pinch her. You know what happened if she said she did. (The dogshit movie that Affleck directed about a film crew had basically no women in it.) The fat man gets this look on his face everytime he sees a woman like he is glimpsing the gender for the first and last time, whispering away, sotto voce, "Can you believe this?"

Batman has a vision of the future. He is wearing an overcoat but still a mask. At first we can't help thinking how silly he appears but a new look is long overdue for this character and when we are snapped back to the Batcave, we feel a pending nostalgia for what we have witnessed. A time-traveler (Ezra Miller) warns the fat man about Lois Lane's boyfriend, so he decides to kill Superman until he finds out his mother (Lauren Cohan) and Lois Lane's boyfriend's mother (Diane Lane) have the same first name, which is Felicia.

The best part of Dawn of Justice is relatively early on, when we relive the moments where Ben experienced the destructive and murderous battle between Lois Lane's boyfriend and General Zod (Michael Shannon). He tells everyone that they are going to be all right, to be the point where he seems to be have a disturbed stress reaction to all the killing. Even a little girl gets this blank face on her face like, "You just told a guy without his legs that." It is fun to watch powerful people helpless and writhing like worms.

All of the people who are most upset about the hundreds of millions of dollars Lois Lane's boyfriend has cost Metropolis are black, and pressure from this community forces a senator (Holly Hunter) to convene a hearing. Lois Lane tries to explain that he was just trying to pick her up some Papa Johns on the way home, but the black people are contemptuous of Superman's claims on moral righteousness, perhaps being wary of the concept altogether. It turns out that the Israeli model Bruce Wayne met had a tape of a man living underwater, and this man was also an ethnic minority. He makes no further appearance in Dawn of Justice.

It is helpful to think of Superman like a vase. Preserved on a secluded corner table, it will not die of old age. If preserved, it is proof against time, it will never become sick or look differently outside of a few minor imperfections. But it could be broken, and in so being smashed it was capable of death before its time.

Overall I would rate Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice five stars out of ten stars. I would take one star off because there was really no positive role model of color in the movie. I took another star off because they pretended like Superman was dead, even though everyone knows that is not going to happen. I removed a third star because we never see anyone with their top off, especially not Mr. Affleck. I took another star off because the movie made no sense and had huge holes in its plot. I added a star because it seemed like Scoot McNairy and the fat man were going to kiss at one point, but then they kind of backed off. I took off a star because they digitized Batman's voice and he sounded like a male Siri. I added a star after the scene where Wonder Woman reviewed security cam footage like she was on CSI: Metropolis. I took off a star when Holly Hunter died. I added a star, and it went shooting across the sky. Men and women gawped, but not at the same time.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Make You Holla" - No Regular Play (mp3)

In Which We Get Lost In The Follicular

Consider the Hustle

by RACHEL SYKES

You may not have heard, but American Hustle opens on a hair. David O'Russell's newest film begins with a single strand, quickly revealed to be part of a larger, more capricious hairpiece that is itself just one of many sculpted styles punctuating the movie. If the internet is to be believed, as many people leave American Hustle with an appreciation for its styling as for its Bee Gees-heavy soundtrack. The clue is in the title. A film about hustlers, it’s a film about front, a film about image and what we do to both make and keep it. From Christian Bale's opening toupee to Amy Adams's disco crimp, from Bradley Cooper's tightly manicured perm to the desperate flop of Jennifer Lawrence’s platinum curls, the movie’s many stars recreate the 1970s through the rich, external life of their hair.

It would be easy to get lost in the follicular, but stay a moment to consider the hustle. Based on the true story of the Abscam scandal, the film begins in 1978, as FBI agent Richie Di Maso (Cooper) forces con artists Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Adams) into an elaborate sting operation to unseat corrupt politicians in New Jersey. While the sting itself was real enough, O’Russell pre-empts the audience’s disbelief with a screenshot that reads “some of this actually happened,” a phrase so callously open to inaccuracies that it draws laughter from the audience.

Truth is en vogue this Oscar season. Since Argo won Best Picture over Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, this year's American Hustle must square up against The Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks, and 12 Years a Slave, all films that are, in some way, “based on a true story.” However, O’Russell’s admission that only “some” of the scenes in his film “actually” happened paraphrases Mark Twain’s oft-quoted phrase: “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Twain’s point riffs on the idea that the imagination is capable of projecting events that might never have occurred, a theme that the movie’s hustle embodies. In a world where the con is your living, the film asks what prevents the con from then becoming your life.

Behind or even beyond the hair, Twain’s quote speaks to the existential angst in which O’Russell’s film is immersed. These characters are troubled for the sake of making trouble, lost in a swirl of frustration and naivety that characterized the limited freedoms of the 1970s. Indeed, American Hustle feels very much like a director assembling a company in order to set them free. It is not surprising, perhaps, given the O'Russell’s reputation for treating his cast with an air of barely concealed aggression, that Hustle's actors seem pushed to the edges of their impulses, producing performances that feel like fight or flight.

Christian Bale is unrecognizable as the hairpiece-fondling, potbellied Irving, whose belief in the love of a good woman leads to the most romantic dry-cleaning montage ever committed to celluloid. By his side, Amy Adams reaches peak sincerity as a lost girl desperate to believe in love and other transformative costumes. Together, the two lead the audience through questionable dialogue and a meandering plot, buoyed by equally low neck lines that sweep Bale’s impressive potbelly and Adams’ omnipresent side boob with indiscriminate joy. Jennifer Lawrence, as Irving’s destructive wife, steals every scene she’s in, depicting a woman so young and fragile, so oppositional to Adams in her complete fear of change, that she can’t fix the curls on her head long enough to put out the fires she quite literally starts around her.

You'll instinctually love or hate this kind of acting; instinct, also, will define the extent to which the disturbing revelations about O’Russell’s personal life change your understanding of the film. Whatever the truth to the accusations, there is an incredible innocence to American Hustle’s version of the 1970s that remains unsettling, a pervasive nostalgia that ear marks the decade as a time when things were simpler, when sex was sexier, when corruption was a little more innocent. Halfway through, Sydney and Di Maso strike out on their own and head to the discothèque. She's Donna Summer and he's John Travolta, so iconically dressed that the costumes often become divorced from the context in which they were once so powerful. The earnestness with which Sydney and Di Maso believe in the healing rhythms found dancing under disco lights is another kind of nostalgia porn that feels good to the audience because it is so easy on the eye.

Adams's brief nod to Donna Summer as a style icon is also telling of the movie’s wider problem of diversity. Though the stars and associates of American Hustle are white, the African-American and Latino populations of Atlantic City are only granted a brief cameo as prospective recipients of charity from a politician come good. Not only do the spectres of diversity feel like an allusion to a collective poor that have been filed, neatly, somewhere off screen, but their appearance in the film is no larger than a scene in which they are called to collectively applaud their benefactors. No voices, then; just the sound of applause.

The silencing of any non-white voices extends to the plot of the hustle itself. In order to convince politicians that a mysterious Sheikh is willing to fund their project, the team dress an FBI agent of Mexican descent in Sheikh-like clothing. This allows for a pithy punchline, but you can't help but get the sense that the storyline exists to silence the "Sheikh": he must hold his tongue so as to keep his poor command of Arabic a secret.

As a result, American Hustle feels like a film about fantasy, simultaneously attempting to convince you of the illusion while constantly alluding to the fact that it's just an illusion. This was a problem, too, in Silver Linings Playbook, a film stuck somewhere between Garden State and Dirty Dancing, that never seemed to settle on how it could represent its characters' emotional truths. In both cases, it is often hard to tell whether the actors are tapping into profound emotion or simply making loud noises to convince you that they are.

When Irving and Sydney first meet at a party they connect over a love of jazz. Making doe eyes at each other over a Duke Ellington record while the party continues around them, O’Russell misses something fundamental about their situation. Unable to communicate the profundity that follows an unexpected connection with a like mind, he draws the scene around his actors like two teenagers who believe no-one else could ever understand them. And that, his films suggest, is what O’Russell believes of himself.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. She last wrote in these pages about music in December. She tumbls here and twitters here. 

"We All Went Down With The Ship" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"Love Is A Minor Key" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)