Bellflower

(Bellflower/Oscilloscope, 2011)

           

          Leave it to young men between twenty and thirty years old to think the name “Lord Humongous” might have significance beyond being an inside joke.  That is essentially the premise put forth by Bellflower, a loud and clangy first film from writer-director-actor Evan Glodell. “Lord Humongous cannot be defied” are the first words we see onscreen, after the title and a sequence showing scenes from the film in backwards fast-motion. The quote is attributed to Lord Humongous himself. Anybody can get the joke. But the problem remains that Mr. Glodell has made a film that is, basically, entirely self-attributed.

            Glodell plays Woodrow, who lives with his best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson), in a deadbeat California suburb. Their passions are almost as affected as their names; in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, both young men build flame-throwers, guns, and cars that will allow them to run triumphant after the world ends. Their lives are debased in a pattern reminiscent of Harmony Korine’s work, though with a less obtuse sense of humor. They drink, smoke pot, walk around shirtless and call one another “dude” often enough to create a new idiom. But once they meet two girls, Milly (Jessie Wiseman) and Courtney (Rebekah Brandes) at a local bar, Woodrow falls fast in love (with Milly) and their lives and routines of building cool stuff get somewhat sidetracked. It gets even more sidetracked after Woodrow storms out on an unfaithful Milly, rides his motorcycle down the street, and gets rammed by a car. But then, it the grand tradition of movie characters who have come near death or suffered a serious injury and gone back to their lives, Glodell finds it useful to make the narrative a little weirder. And very bloody.

(Bellflower/Oscilloscope, 2011)

            The film starts off with the interesting dichotomy of when boys-play—the flamethrowers, cars and dudes—becomes something corrosive and disturbing. But Glodell only skims this point, instead zoning in on the most obvious metaphor possible; that Woodrow and Aiden’s visions of the apocalypse is mirrored in the turbulence of falling in love and trying to hold on to friendship. He then shakes it up with some of the mind-trip, reality-or-fantasy shenanigans that have made other recent films, such as Inception and Black Swan, so successful, while the manipulative tendencies that come as baggage with this type of narrative are never toned down.

            For these reasons, nothing in Bellflower feels sincere. The mechanics on display in the film, including all the gadgets Woodrow and Aiden build, look impressive, but do not feel sincere. It does not feel sincere when we see close-ups of the street sign reading “Bellflower Ave.” It does not feel sincere when we see a freeze frame of Woodrow being punched in the face by a mean Texan with the nerve to insult his girlfriend. It does not feel sincere when we see blood running down Woodrow’s shirt as he walks away from his girlfriend’s house. On the level of acting, the only performer with real conviction is Rebekah Brandes, who gives Courtney, caught in the middle of a bad situation, a sense of mystery and spunk that is not communicated through overblown gestures and mimicry. But even she gets stuck with possibly the most insincere scene in the film, when she screams at her roommate—whom we have never met or heard of—to move, before slapping her to the ground. All the violence in the film feels like something out of an arty comic book rather than its intended effect: fragments from a brain damaged fantasy.

            Yet apparently, none of this will matter in the visual climate we live in. The film is not so much nihilistic as fashionably cynical. It feels produced by people who don’t see any point in growing up, but do see a point in being hip to and mocking of that same worldview. In its irony, its cynicism, its whoa-what-are-we-watching formula, this is a film that will be granted a large audience. But it will be one that won’t be able to admit that there is only a certain point you can bring self-reflexive cynicism to before it becomes something genuinely functionless, representative of genuinely nothing. Nothing other than the fact that this current generation of young people is not humongous; it is the most mediocre generation in human history.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows/Warner Bros.)

      

       Those who have not read the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or missed the last one or more Harry Potter films, or who have been dwelling in a cave in Siberia for the past decade, should be assured that they won’t have the vaguest idea of what is happening in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. To the basically uninitiated, the film will look like it is about a boy with glasses--for some reason, a real VIP-- whose friends run around with him everywhere flailing wands like mad men when they aren’t bickering at each other, hurriedly encountering so many mustached, long haired, and inhuman characters that it is impossible to tell who are their friends and who are their enemies, all the while being stalked by a cult of goth scenesters and an arrogant biker gang. To the initiated, the film will either fulfill the same obligations as the book, or it won’t.

            Literally speaking, it doesn’t. This is only part one of the mammoth conclusion to J.K Rowling’s series, so the film ends as suddenly as it begins. The first thing we see is a pair or ghoulish eyes, the last thing we see is some blaring flash of wizard-light. Squished—and oh, so tightly--- between these two images is the story of how Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emily Watson) careen through a magical version of England, being chased by Lord Voldemort and his whole host of Evil, trying to outwit the dark lord with various trickery, but not quite succeeding. Voldemort has taken over, so Wizards (Harry Potter and all his chums with wands) and Muggles (us regular schmoes) are not allowed to live side by side. Muggles and half-bloods must be killed and dark magic must prevail. Not one scene of all this high pursuit takes place at the school, Hogwarts; it’s too dangerous to go back there, although this is not made clear in the film. It leaves the film with a strong sense of anxiety for both the audience and the characters. No time for them to camp out in the highlands any longer, they better run for the woods. No time for us to camp our eyes on the remarkable sets, costumes, or Helena Bonham-Carter’s gleefully stylized performance; we’ve got part two to see, next summer.

(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows/Warner Bros.)

            All this anxiety is acceptable in and of itself; the film is about the various misgivings, conflicts and anxieties that almost tear Harry and his friends apart. But the film is all too ready to ignore the real elephant in its room, which is most certainly not Voldemort. It’s the “Muggle” world, or reality as we might call it. The first several Harry Potter installments benefited from juxtaposing Harry’s drab home life with the take-off-the-blindfold thrill of the world of Hogwarts. From there on, it steadily turned in to a body of work that hated reality with vitriol. Although this film is ostensibly about how the harmony between Wizards and Muggles is being disrupted, it is unclear where Rowling’s and the filmmaker’s sympathies really lie. The scenes on the streets of present-day London feel like a relief to the regular viewer; to Harry and his friends, they are an opportunity to smash up a café or drive recklessly through a tunnel. Then it’s back to this weird alternate reality, never entirely defined, where the characters feel more at home, pointing sticks and screaming Latin gibberish. There is none of the juxtaposition with the world we know; that of cars that sometimes break down and animals that don’t say a word, of total exposure and daydreaming. Aside from a cheap connotation of totalitarian regimes, there is no concrete metaphor for us in this other world. There is no grey area between right and wrong. The exploits of Harry and co. have become so divorced from being even a mirror of reality that each character has come to look as though they are in on a scheme the rest of us just don’t get. Harry and Voldemort may as well be on the same side.

        Of course, when a fictional world comes to resemble a scheme rather than a believable place, there is something poisonous about the imagination that spawned it. So without explicitly implicating Ms. Rowling—this is her creation per se, but she didn’t make the film—let’s place the blame on a whole strand of movie culture. At times, this film resembles The Dark Knight, other times Inception; there are dashes of The Matrix and obvious similarities to The Lord of the Rings. The film has the flight and feel of every other gadillion-dollar grossing franchise in recent memory, each one a fantasy or sci-fi spectacle. Harry Potter, as an idea, no longer looks like a kid who flies around on a broom and learns of his true abilities as a wizard. He looks like an anxious compendium of pop, now bursting at the seams. There are still likeable scenes and images in this film, including one animated segment that slows down, takes a breath, and creates a world far more mysterious than any shot surrounding it. But the films may be lost to cultural memory except as something that inspired a lot of fanaticism and made a lot of money. They are technically stunning, but have been anxiously losing their true wizardry almost since birth.

(Emily Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint/FlashNews4U.com)