A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Michael Fassbender only just exploded on the international scene a few years ago, but to see him in Shame, one half expects him to keel over any second. After coming to everyone's attention as the physically emaciated IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's debut Hunger, Fassbender re-teams with the director to play a spiritually hollowed figure. The soullessness of sex addict Brandon pokes through the actor's buff frame, turning his pale flesh gray, his lined face turned skeletal with self-consuming lust. It is a deeply unsettling performance, one that uses Fassbender's attractive physicality and body language against itself to make every seductive pose more predatory than smoldering.

McQueen and editor Joe Walker establish the prison Brandon has erected around himself with a circular opening defined by the harsh sounds of a light switch turned on after nights of carnal pleasures, the disgusted whipping back of blinds to let in the light of the world from which Brandon hides, and the grinding subway train where he scopes out potential conquests on his way to work. As he hungrily gazes upon a married woman who struggles vainly against his devilish spell, the audience sees Brandon's routine of sex, be it hiring prostitutes, watching Internet porn or masturbating at work. So effective is the opening that mere wisps of recurring images—such as the bathroom door at work—instantly trigger graphic memories. But that closed-loop cutting only locks the film itself into the icy bourgeois surroundings of its protagonist, allowing McQueen to show off without having to do anything with his technical skill.

Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011)

Cary Fukunaga displays such an immediate grasp of the Gothic tones of Charlotte Brontë's eerie, macabre romance that the speed with which he loses his grip upon them is all the more frustrating. Whenever his camera follows the protagonist outdoors, or into the dimmest, grimiest recesses of Rochester's home, Jane Eyre overflows with atmosphere. Its cold, flora-less English countrysides and purulent candlelit interiors capture the darker moods of Brontë's novel better than any of the few adaptations I've seen.

The romance is another story. Brontë's Jane Eyre puts forth a disturbingly insular love affair between two lonely pariahs. It's one of the most passionate books I've ever read, yet almost as off-putting in its unchecked desires as a Twilight novel. Jane and Rochester become obsessed with each other because they have no one else in the world, stewing in their lust and pain and terrifying joy in their private heaven and hell. Fukunaga's film communicates practically none of this dangerous level of attraction, omitting the novel's most perilous demonstrations of twisted, isolated love and softening what remains. Beginning with such perfect solemnity, Jane Eyre soon turns into a listless period drama not even livened by the raving embodiment of uninhibited female sexuality living in the attic.

Capsule Reviews: Red-Headed Woman, Waterloo Bridge, Fish Tank

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

"So blondes have all the fun, huh?" asks the platinum blonde goddess Jean Harlow, here sporting a wig so fiery you can practically see the ginger blaze in black and white. The question is less an interrogative than the slap of a gauntlet across the face of those who would deny this redhead her fun. Like Stanwyck in Baby Face, Harlow uses sex to climb to the top. Also like Stanwyck, she's such a sexual force that she barely puts any effort at all into her eyelash-fluttering wilting flower bit, her crocodile tears a half-step above saying "Boo-hoo" in perfect monotone. But when the men fold like deck chairs, why waste time honing the craft? Harlow was never more seductive or unrepentant; her conniving grin presages Jack Nicholson at his most manic, and her asymptotic eyebrows divebomb toward her eyeballs, only to catch a glimpse of the steel and fire in them and make a last-second attempt to break out of their gravitational pull. It gives her a perpetually furious look, and at times you wonder if Cagney put on drag to play this part.

It's amazing to think Conway actually cut this film for Hays Office approval, as its almost combative sexuality and defiance is precisely the reason that office was created in the first place. But no one can resist the sultry charm of the redhead, and the social outrage that greeted the film only drove up its profits further. If you look hard enough at the end, you can almost see Harlow laughing her way to the bank. Grade: B

Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931)

Waterloo Bridge is one of the more disturbing Pre-Code films out there, less for its forthright treatment of social malaise, sexuality and crime than its contextualizing of same around not the sinful speakeasies but war-torn London gripped in panic and confusion. Mae Clarke extrapolates the pain and bewilderment she brought to The Public Enemy to fit the protagonist Myra, an impoverished, American chorus girl stranded in London during WWI, too penniless to return home from the storm. To get by, she turns to prostitution, a plan that jades her but does not wholly rob her innocence, an innocence that comes to the fore when a sweet Canadian soldier (Douglass Montgomery) comes into her life and she can't bear to hurt him. A mournful quality hangs over this film that stresses the weariness of world-weariness. Clarke's hardened exterior soon cracks, and the waves of revulsion and sadness that wash over her face (a face that registers pure helplessness over her situation) are heartbreaking. So troubling are the implications of its view of how poverty and war has the grimmest of consequences, it's no wonder the film met with huge controversy despite clearly portraying prostitution as a bad thing where so many Pre-Codes viewed it as a mere way of life. A sense of pointlessness hangs over this film, and as a depiction of the waste and senselessness of war, it makes the home front as savage and horrific as the trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front. Grade: A

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Arnold's tight 4:3 framing drops a Mentos in a Diet Coke and shakes up the bottle. Her view of a council estate is initially chaotic, wrapped up in aggressive editing, hand-held shots, violence among teens and language so coarse it takes on a physicality of its own; it's a wonder the film doesn't catch fire in the gate. Things smooth into a more coherent portrait of directionless youth with a terrific, anguished performance from discovery Katie Jarvis and a shifting portrayal of emotional stability and warmth in Michael Fassbender's kind but vaguely off-putting Connor. Arnold's crisp imagery is breathtaking, and she never uses it ironically, even when capturing the glint of sunlight through a cheap plastic bottle. It makes everything so much more tragic, the characters unable to see the gorgeous beauty around them for their troubles. A credibility-stretching but harrowing climax drives Mia to the brink, and it's a miracle Arnold wrings some kind of vague, cautious hope out of the end, more so that she does so to the strains of Nas' "Life's a Bitch." Grade: B+

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class shows his continual fragmentation as a filmmaker, seemingly incapable of sticking to any one idea and the continual downward spiral of his satiric abilities, although the fact that the film feels at all tongue-in-cheek suggests a muted cleverness at work that never quite shows through the convoluted wash of genres tossed at the screen. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to break up the rote feel of a prequel, an admirable decision given the execrable Wolverine, but the film can't help but grind to a halt when it attempts to incorporate '60s era Bond, Dr. Strangelove, The Breakfast Club and on-the-nose subtext of closeted homosexuality into the already bombastic superhero genre.

At least the leads are great. Michael Fassbender plays Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr as a sleek but imploding killer seeking revenge for the horrors he experienced as a test subject of experimental doctors in the Holocaust, not yet hardened into Ian McKellen's cool shell. He's the first person to look sinister in a turtleneck in decades. James McAvoy, making the best of a wildly inconsistent character, plays Charles as wide-eyed and with a joy of knowledge that occasionally dips into good-natured arrogance and one too many uses of the word "groovy." He has all of Professor X's optimism with unchecked naïveté: he hasn't yet had to test and earn that fundamental belief in the goodness of mankind.

The first half-hour of the film (its best) separates the two as they grow into themselves, Erik in a Nazi camp, Xavier in the lap of luxury, and the marked contrast in their experiences delineates their personalities. Erik spends his first adult scenes as a loner tracking down Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the man who brutally brought out Erik's metal-manipulating abilities in the camps. Charles, with his long-time friend Raven, a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), finds himself working for the C.I.A. when an operative (Rose Byrne) uncovers a nuclear war plot by Shaw. For Charles, getting to work with the government, regardless of the agreement's fragility an frigidity, is a wonderful opportunity to prove the mutant place in society; Erik is already comfortable outside it.

Jonah Hex

As is befitting its mangled protagonist, Jonah Hex is the cinematic equivalent of the winner of one of those Ugliest Dog competitions. It is a film that has slipped in and out of development hell so many times that it knows more about damnation than its half-dead hero, and my favorite tidbit on its Wikipedia page reads that the film is "very loosely based" on the original DC comic book of the same name. Subject to rewrites, multiple crew changes and, ultimately, pure indifference, Jonah Hex achieves a ludicrousness of execution so hysterical that you'll spend at least a portion of the time in the theater waiting for Nicolas Cage to make an appearance.

Originally set to be directed by that dastardly duo, Neveldine and Taylor, the insane team behind the Crank movies, Jonah Hex fell apart once when producers, purportedly under the guidance of star Josh Brolin, decided not to hire the action anarchists. The crew did, however, keep Neveldine & Taylor's screenplay, effectively firing the only two people who could possibly have shot the thing. Perhaps reasoning that only someone with experience in animation could handle the cartoony nature of the pair's writing -- a not altogether stupid line of thought -- producers Akiva Goldsman and Andrew Lazar brought Pixar, Fox and Blue Sky employee Jimmy Hayward, whose biggest previous credit was co-directing Horton Hears a Who!, to helm the picture.

What results is a catastrophic mash-up of audiovisual styles, mixing hillbilly, heavy metal, supernatural and Western tropes into the weirdest rip-off of The Outlaw Josey Wales you ever did see. There is always a certain joy in watching a film that does not play by the rules, that does not even seem to own a copy of the rulebook, but Jonah Hex contains all the transgressions present in Neveldine & Taylor's other works without the sense of self-awareness that they bring to those films; sketchy and vague as the pair's supposed satiric elements are, they at least give the impression that they know what they're doing deep down. With someone else trying to make heads or tails of their material, however, it's a miracle a film emerged at all, and I suppose it's not all that shocking that Wild Wild West as scored by the prog-sludge metal band Mastodon was the product.

Expository dialogue gets a bad rap, and Jonah Hex shows why, playing most of the first 5-10 minutes of an 81-minute movie (including credits) with either a voiceover narration or hysterically stilted lines spoken by characters on-screen. We see the titular hero (Brolin), a Confederate officer whose crisis of conscious led to the death of his friend, the son of his commanding officer, General Turnbull (John Malkovich), being tortured by the general. Turnbull murders Hex's family in retribution and brands Hex's face with his initials. Abruptly, the film cuts to animation -- why do so many comic movies use panel-like animation now? We know that these films are based on comic books -- jumping over the development of strange, supernatural powers and Hex's evolution into a bounty hunter as Brolin delivers the voiceover in the same slurred mumble he uses elsewhere due to the prosthetic makeup of Hex's facial scarring. By the time Hex growls, "This here's my story" when the film finally gets moving, he's told us so much we feel like the damn thing's halfway over.

It only gets worse from there. Hex's weaponry occasionally broaches steampunk territory, with horse-mounted Gatling guns and crossbow pistols that fling sticks of dynamite in an oddly straight path (no, seriously), all of which are provided by Reconstruction-era Q-substitute Smith (Lance Reddick), a freeman. (Smith lets us know that Hex's Confederate ties are not a source of contention, taking the time in the middle of conversation to randomly insert a comment that he knew Hex "ain't never believe in slavery.") For the most part, however, Hex uses traditional weapons. After all, it's weird enough that he can revive dead people by touching them.

That's what makes Jonah Hex loop around from terrible to hilarious: this is not a film that satisfies itself with merely killing someone once. No, bring 'em back for Round Two! Hex brings corpses back to life to interrogate them, yet this act of temporary resurrection for some reason causes the flesh of the reanimated being to burn and disintegrate. Once he's gotten what he needs, Hex kills them again. Matching the double-death scenario in sheer lunacy is the apparent need for no place shown on-screen to be left unexploded, and the almost casual way that Hex starts a fire in some places almost as if checking off an item on a to-do list shows where all of the film's $50 million dollar budget went.

No, wait, it gets even better. In some woefully misguided attempt to give this picture relevance, Turnbull is made into an anarchic anti-government wingnut, whom his Mexican slaves call "El Terrorista." I briefly wondered if this idea would have been expanded into a clearer slam against those good ol' boys who continue to wave their Confederate flags around and still claim to be ardent patriots, then I remembered what film I was watching. Turnbull decides to take down the country on the Fourth of July by building a secret "Nation Killer" weapon designed by Eli Whitney -- pause for dialogue about Whitney's history as the inventor of the cotton gin and father of the American Industrial Revolution -- to bring down Washington D.C. Did I mention that Will Arnett shows up as a Union soldier sporting a mustache and his deep "Michael!" voice from Arrested Development, and everyone acts if we're meant to take him seriously?

Oh, but I'll stop simply listing all the absurdities, much as I could entertain myself to no end pointing them all out. Jonah Hex, with its 73 non-credits minutes, has a lack of clear direction despite its clear revenge narrative. Most characters exist for no real reason, such as Michael Fassbender's Irish henchman named who-cares, made up in a tattoo that stretches out of his clothes and up his neck so that we might identify him among the other nondescript thugs flanking Turnbull. Both Malkovich and Brolin are slumming it, though Malkovich, who always figures out when he's on the set of something that will turn out to be a piece of garbage, goes into Maximum Malk Mode and may be the only person here playing the drama for comedy intentionally.

And Megan Fox, poor Megan Fox. I've waffled so often on how I feel about her that I just do not know what to make of her. Placed in the role of the tough prostitute/love interest Lilah, a name Brolin amusingly cannot say with his prosthetic disfigurement, for the same reason she found herself in the Transformers movies, Fox merely has to sit about and look pretty, occasionally kicking some butt so that she might look pretty whilst kicking butt. Her character serves nearly no purpose save the inevitable damsel scenario, and even those who trip over their tongues at the sight of Fox will be wondering why the hell the action breaks to jump back to her brothel room where little of consequence happens.

Despite it all, Jonah Hex reaches such a memorable level of badness, and is so mercifully short, that I enjoyed myself far more than I did any of the other summer action movies so far. There were clearly some high intentions in this film, as evidenced in its sly references, from lifting the giant cannon on the train from Buster Keaton's classic The General to the glow of the suitcase contents in Pulp Fiction -- maybe that "QT" Turnbull branded Hex with has a secondary meaning? -- and the talent involved, but something went horribly, laughably wrong. It figures that I should have this reaction, perfectly balanced between dislike of the film's clear failure and enjoyment of the ensuing train wreck, with a movie written by Neveldine & Taylor, whose Crank: High Voltage engendered a fair stronger iteration of the same reaction. Jonah Hex is as stupid as a film made by smart people can be, but if I laughed, even in a way that that the filmmakers did not intend, then who am I to pan it? Oh, indulge me for a moment as I break my promise to stop listing the inanities for one final tidbit: when Turnbull rides up the Potomac with his super-cannon, the viewfinder that targets Washington uses not crosshairs or the like but an actual outline of the Capitol building, presumably so his ignorant ex-Confederate subordinates know which building to aim at. Magnificent.