Tag Archives: Movies

Movie Night: First Reformed

Year: 2017
Genre: Drama
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer

A minister of a small congregation in upstate New York grapples with mounting despair brought on by tragedy, worldly concerns and a tormented past.

We had just finished watching Gattaca (a truly world-class movie) when we came across First Reformed on the iTunes New & Noteworthy section, and thought to give it a try – more because of Ethan Hawke than anything else.

I will say Ethan Hawke seems to truly dedicate himself to whatever role he takes.

The plot – such as it is – centers around a middle-aged minister of a fading congregation whose son was killed in Afghanistan (or Iraq – I can’t remember). Whilst he tries to comfort and help the few remaining members of his flock, he clearly is battling an almost unbearable inner despair – something that becomes painfully evident as he fails to reach the people he tries to help.

First Reformed is really more of a character study on depression and the loss of faith, and the events that take place are at once surreal and hauntingly believable. When Ethan Hawke’s character, Minister Toller, comes across a suicide vest in the belongings of one of his congregation, he doesn’t report it – he takes it. Combined with the stark contrast between his own poorly-attended worship and the wildly successful for-profit church in the neighboring town, and things take – as you can imagine – a nasty turn for the worse.

The final few scenes are nail-bitingly intense, and equally bizarre – suffice to say bombs, churches and barbed wire are involved. This isn’t a happy film, but it subtly underplayed by the entire cast to great effect. You truly believe the emotional rollercoaster of every character, even if you don’t particularly like any of them; the person I felt sorry for the most was ultimately Amanda Seyfried’s Mary, who really didn’t deserve the punishment inflicted on her by Ethan Hawke’s misery and rage.

Sad, despondent and dark.

6/10 would watch again.

Movie Night: The Lobster

Year: 2015
Genre: Black Comedy … ?
Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden

In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.

There is very little lobster in The Lobster. In fact, I don’t think there was one at all.

This film carries with it the dubious accolade of being one of the most bizarre movies I’ve watched in recent years. I read the above description before watching it, and I’m not sure whether I should or shouldn’t have; it certainly helps explain a lot of the exposition, but there’s a sense of utterly nonsensical mystery that stems from not knowing the premise from the outset.

The Lobster bears many of the hallmarks of an indie film trying its best to not fit into any particular genre; billed as a black comedy, there were moments I laughed perhaps only because I thought it was meant to be funny, and not because it actually was. In fact, there were more scenes I found outright disturbing than I found funny. It’s interesting, as these are some of the same comments aimed at my alter-ego young adult novel, 22 Scars – that it tries almost too hard to be edgy, at the expense of plot and character clarity.

For example, very few characters are named, and only when necessary; even Rachel Weisz is known only as the short-sighted woman. Another key character is referred to throughout the film as the heartless woman. There are no place names – only The Hotel and The City – and even when these settings are abandoned for the wild woods, there is very little reference to anything grounded in reality.

In fact, the very premise – that single adults are transformed into animals if they fail to find a partner in 45 days – becomes something of a MacGuffin to the themes of love and lust. The point of the movie – if there even is one – is tenuously that love can’t be forced, but can be found in the strangest of places. To this end, it hardly matters that the threat hanging over the characters’ heads is transfiguration – it could have been death or exile, for all it matters – but rather that there simply be some impetus for the characters to connect with each other in a context where they have very little other reason to.

In the end, there are enough bizarre moments to elicit a kind of disbelieving guffaw – in some ways, a funnier film than Crazy Rich Asians, which we had watched earlier in the day – but they are overshadowed by the wide brushstrokes of disturbing insanity, including a woman jumping from a window and breaking her neck but not dying, and a frankly cringe-inducing final scene. I would hardly label The Lobster as a comedy – black or otherwise – but perhaps closer to an essay on love; a kind of parable for a society that praises social relationships for their appearance rather than their substance.

Either way, The Lobster is a film that I would recommend only to those who have the nerve to stomach some truly troubling material, and despite that recommendation, hardly one I would watch again any time soon. As one of my friends put it, there were multiple moments throughout where I asked myself why I was still watching it at all.

4/10 would watch again.

How Should Death Be Treated in Fiction?

As someone who suffers from bipolar depression and has often been suicidal, I think about death possibly more frequently than most. And when I say think about it, I mean really ponder it – what it must feel like to breathe a last breath, to beat a last heartbeat, and then the moments of fading consciousness as the body fights its hardest to prevent a total shutdown on a cellular level. After all, dying is a process – it isn’t instant.

To quote Depeche Mode, death is everywhere; we see it daily on the news, and in real life with the crushed squirrels and battered deer on the side of the road. We cause it – deliberately and inadvertently – when we swat at a mosquito, or a wasp. But we only ever experience it once, which is why it remains such a mystery; no one can really tell what it’s like to die, because – to quote The Crow – there ain’t no coming back.

And as art is a reflection of life, and death is a part of life, death finds its way into the stories we tell with an almost inescapable certainty. Whether the story is The Lion King or Pulp Fiction, there is hardly a tale in the world that doesn’t deal with death in some way – whether explicitly, implicitly, or at least by threatening characters with death as a kind of ultimate stake.

In most stories where death is a central plot point, the deaths in question are typically premature – the result of violence or illness. These deaths, of course, carry the heaviest emotional weight – at least, when the character is some form of protagonist. These deaths are usually treated with a measure of respect, dignity and gravitas.

When the character is a villain, however, things become different. Low-level goons are often offed with a kind of casual indifference, whilst end-bosses are treated to a typically spectacular death, glorifying their demise as something to be celebrated in all its gore. The 2012 film Dredd is a picture-perfect epitome of this: throughout the movie quite literally hundreds of people are killed in a variety of inventive and bloody ways, but nothing tops the two-minute slow-motion swan-dive from a 200-story window that demolishes – in exceptionally graphic detail – the movie’s head honcho, Ma-Ma.

Evidently, there are a lot of ways to treat a character’s death, from understated and emotional to disbelievingly violent and visually spectacular, and some of this depends on the nature of the character and the nature of the story. But what defines the appropriateness of the realism, so to speak, of a character’s demise? And how is realism defined, when – as noted above – no one really knows what it’s like to die in the first place?

To this end, I think the intended audience is an important consideration in the description, detail and realism of the death in question. If you’re writing for six-year-olds, it’s entirely appropriate to deal with the topic, but perhaps in a softer way than if you’re writing for sixteen-year-olds.

But even for an older audience, it’s important to understand the living experiences that the majority of them have gone through. Very few six-year-olds will have experienced death first-hand. Sixteen-year-olds, on the other hand, may well of witnessed the passing of a grandparent, or a beloved family pet. And a sixty-year-old will have likely experienced numerous deaths in their lifetime. And the method of describing a fictional death depends on the sensibility and general understanding of the target audience.

When I started writing The Redemption of Erâth, I knew there were going to be deaths of important characters. Being that the story is intended as a kind of suitable-for-all-ages tale, I wanted to treat these deaths as truly meaningful, impactful and important, without glorifying the detail of the characters’ passing. The first major death, a teenage girl, is described in passing as an arrow piercing her heart. The second, an invented fantasy being, is described in more detail with gashes to her throat and sliver blood spattered about. But in both of these cases, the focus was not on the detail of the death, but the emotional impact on the remaining characters.

In my alter-ego’s young adult novel, 22 Scars, there are only two character deaths; a young girl who dies from leukemia, described from afar through the journal entries of her friend, and a teenager who dies in a car crash – only the aftermath of which is shown. There are a number of other ‘violent’ instances – self-harm, rape and abuse – but the detail of these scenes was again written with a young adult audience in mind: I don’t shy away, but nor do I try to glorify either the abuse or the suffering. My goal was simply to describe the reality of these terrible ordeals; I wouldn’t anticipate a ten-year-old reading it.

It’s a fine line to toe; passing death off as both easy to deal and easy to experience is in some ways an injustice to the reality of dying. To see waves of bad guys mown down with machine guns makes it seem like death is a quick pop and then you fall down and go to sleep. To watch a teenage girl slit her wrists and bleed out in a bathtub (reference: Thirteen Reasons Why) is gory and off-putting, but also belies the difficulty of such a scenario – it is not easy to cut that deep, nor does it typically result in a quick and quiet death.

The advent of cellphones and live-streaming has made it unfortunately easy to watch a real person die, and anyone whose stood by and watched will tell you: death is not easy. The body will fight to the last cell to remain alive, even as shock sets in and the victim loses consciousness. People don’t just fall down when shot; they remain alive for minutes afterward. They move around. They try desperately to stay alive.

To what extent should the realities of death be described in fiction? Is there a line between realistic sensitivity and glorification? Death will always be around, but how should it be treated in fiction?

There may be no easy answer – but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. How do you think death should be treated in fiction?