White Bird in a Blizzard

In a year when megawatt talent Shailene Woodley has already convincingly gone dystopian and brought a beloved youth adult novel heroine to life where else was there for her to go but back to the 80's in a Gregg Araki-styled DeLorean? And even if she was born in 1991, and even if "White Bird in a Blizzard" often feels more like a Hal Hartley film in the haze of Kurt Cobain's suicide than a frivolous yet poignant John Hughes affair, Shailene still knows how to wear a Depeche Mode t-shirt and strike a disaffected pose. In fact, her disaffected pose while picking at a pint of ice cream in the film's earliest going is The Disaffected Pose of the Year.

That pose happens immediately after Woodley's Kat Connor learns her mother, Eve (Eva Green), has been reported missing by her father, Brock (Christopher Meloni), a man who acts and speaks like he's persistently inside a library. He seems shell-shocked by his bride's disappearance, as if he expects her never to return, whereas his daughter seems, well, disaffected by her mom's disappearance, as if she expects her to come loping back in any old time. Or maybe not. Maybe she doesn't care if her mom ever returns because maybe she thought her mom was a straight-up b-word.

"White Bird in a Blizzard" settles in for the long con, setting itself up as a mystery, seemingly a murder mystery, the longer that Eve remains a gone girl. Yet the the pace reflects no urgency in solving it, reflecting Kat's, well, disaffection about whether or not it's ever solved. She seems more wrapped up in her sexual awakening, sleeping with her kinda, sorta boyfriend across the street who suddenly does seem quite so hot for her and sleeping with the much-older if nonetheless frisky detective (Thomas Jane) who is convinced Kat's dad is guilty of a crime.

The ultimate resolution to the mystery, intended to represent stifling of sexuality, is so laughable that when it is revealed a particular character literally laughs, long and hard. I was literally laughing too. That mystery, however, is merely the misdirection, the distraction from the real story, centering around Kat's slog toward maturation, and how it happens through what almost feels like a seance through flashback with her manipulative, spiteful mother.

There are moments when Green seems like anything but a suburban housewife. I mean, the sight of Eva Green making meatloaf is about as believable as the thought of Stefani Germanotta eating Doritos. But then, that's right. She's an unhappy outcast, not at home in her home, much too large for this life, trapped, a white bird, a white bird trapped in a blizzard. And it's not so much that Kat finds love for her mother as a recognition for how her mother must have felt, and the understanding that she must not allow herself to fall victim to the same fate.

The Fault in Our Stars

"This is the truth," Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), protagonist of "The Fault in Our Stars" declares at the film's onset, an impressive shot across the teenybopper flick bow. I mean, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah to begin your own Y.A., disease-of-the-week weepie by having the protagonist call out in voiceover every other Y.A., disease-of-the-week weepie for being piles of phony and manipulative you-know-what. But you know what? In spite of its numerous melodramatic machinations it still somehow comes across grounded in a tenable reality.

A teenager with terminal thyroid cancer, Hazel meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), who has lost his leg from bone cancer, at a patient support group. He comes equipped with a leather jacket which would seem to suggest he is the bad boy of the cancer patient support group, but that leather jacket is merely a misdirection. In fact, he is an incredibly gentlemanly complete sentence talker who may as well be riding in on a noble steed seeing as how he says things like "I am in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable.." Yet he's not just there to "save" her. In fact, the film does the niftiest little shift midway through where his invincibility gives way to vulnerability and instead of him being there for her, she is there for him. Isn't that love? That give and take? That both for one and one for both?

Yes, yes, yes. They're kids. I'm aware. "What do they know about love?!" demand all the stone-hearted fogeys who conveniently forgot what it was like to be kids and in that specific sort of love. But what is so ingenius about "The Fault in Our Stars" is that it recognizes how kids are always trying to graduate early to adulthood. Consider the sequence in which the two dress up and go out for a fancypants dinner. There is something terrifically beautiful and terrifying in it because it is overcome with the realization that their respective sicknesses might not allow them to graduate to adulthood and so they'll just go ahead and damn well make like grown-ups while they still can.

That dinner involves the film's greatest leap in which Hazel and Augustus take a trip to Amsterdam to meet her favorite book's author, a Salinger-esque recluse played by an actor who is so perfect for the part I refuse to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The objective of this meeting is for her to learn what happened to the novel's characters after the ending since he has never written a follow-up, a fairly obvious device to illustrate that Great Unknown awaiting each every one of us. Still, it works, and not only because the supremely crotchety author sort of (unintentionally?) directs invective at the type of Y.A. hoo-ha he's in,  but because it modulates this dream come true and re-filters it through something harsher.

This nimble striking of tone can be traced to its lead actress. Like Molly Ringwald before her, the stately ingenue of the 80's who means so much to those of a certain age, Shailene Woodley has often conveyed a wisdom beyond the years of her roles - even in the remarkable "The Descendants" were she was both wise and dumb - and her turn as Hazel is numbingly wise. When her character is made to recount her entire ordeal, how she was diagnosed and how she came this close to death and how she somehow hung on because of a miracle, Woodley miraculously circumvents the mawkish phoniness of the word "miracle". She just, like, says it. People keep telling her it's a miracle and so, hey, what the heck.

She comes across entirely free of the forced sentiment that is often a fatal affliction of this genre, affording her character no false hope, having long ago accepted what's in front of her, more so even than her parents who dutifully fight through an unwinnable situation while putting on a happy face. She doesn't put on a happy face (even if facially, she does). She simply finds a way to be happy while still accepting the sadness within and all around her.

Divergent

There is a moment in "Divergent" when our teenage protagonist, Tris (Shailene Woodley), formerly Beatrice, enters a cavernous mess hall with her pal, tentatively seeking out a place to sit down and eat. When they do, a character conspicuously referred to as Four (Theo James) labels them "transfers", and that's when it hits you. She may be a soldier in training, but really she's a high school student who just transferred from Shermer to Rancho Carne and she doesn't know at which lunch table she's supposed to sit.

Based on the youth adult novel by Veronica Roth, the world built by "Divergent" at first glance would appear no different from the other fictional futuristic societies where catastrophe of one sort or another has left the world at the mercy of Totalitarianism. If viewed this way, the film (and perhaps Roth's book) might be blandly realized, an apocalyptic version of Chicago in which its remnants are visually non-distinct and its various themes glaringly on-the-nose. But, "Divergent" is not intended as an allegory of any political or economic system, but of youth's social hierarchy.

Indeed, the world, as told to us in Tris Voiceover, has been divided into five factions of convenient names - Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Erudite. Each faction's costumes functions as hammered-home symbolism, not unlike the combat boots of the "criminal", the letter jacket of the "athlete", the khakis of the "brain", the pink blouse of the "princess", and the unkempt hair of the "basket case". Each person is born into a particular faction and then, at the age of sixteen, is forced to choose between retaining his or her current faction or joining another. Tris was born Abnegation, a faction in which her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd) play major roles, but she chooses Dauntless. So, she is forced to forgo selflessness for gung-ho bravery, resist passivity for aggressiveness, and learn to punch and kick and throw knives like Danny Trejo. Tris, however, as she quickly learns, does not truly belong to Dauntless or, for that matter, any faction. She is Divergent.

This is essentially a description of the high school. The Principal authority exercises centralized control over all aspects of student life. The students themselves, suppressed by the controlling authority, are separated into concrete factions - the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - and the system - in the film's own words - "removes the threat of anyone exercising their independent will." Except for Divergents.

Of course, we would all prefer to see ourselves as Divergents, apart from the innumerable cliques, able to exercise free will and exist independently of the prevailing structure. To do so, however, risks ridicule and exclusion, and that is precisely what happens to Tris. A rival Dauntless initiate (Miles Teller) may as well begin every scene in which he appears by cruising up in his dad's convertible. Chief villain Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) is the homeroom teacher out to get the troublemaker.

Four, however, is the heartthrob, Jordan Catalano to Tris's Angela Chase, though he does not so much "save" her as see her for what she is (literally!) and aid her quest of self-discovery. Never is this more apparent than in a majestic sequence that finds her soaring across the city's burnt-out landscape aboard a zip line, a thrilling homage to "The Perks Of Being A Wallflower's" band of misfits flying through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Amidst such an outsized moment, Woodley still lets you into the middle of it, feeling her release from society's endless spate of suppositions. Her whole performance, in fact, is the film's foremost asset, selling moment after moment without overselling, marking the transition from reticent to fiery by letting us sense that fieriness was actually her birthright.

That said, "Divergent" is still very much an action picture. Perhaps too much, bogging down in the final-third as it disappointingly becomes just as concerned with a societal uprising as with its hero's journey, and director Neil Burger's sequences of hand-to-hand combat and gun battles turn frustratingly repetitive and unimaginative. Yet, at the same time, it forces Tris to consider life apart from her parents, a coming-of-age rite, and specifically reminds us that even though cinema perpetuates the notion dystopias are close at hand, they have been in existence within high school hallways for lo so many years.

It also reminds us that factions have been around at least since the Capulets and the Montagues, never more adroitly than in a sequence between Tris and Four on a glimmering balcony where they share a kiss. They finish and Tris says: "I don't want to go too fast." It's cheesy. It's also perfect. It's exactly what Molly Ringwald would have said.

The Spectacular Now

By the time Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) and Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley), our latter day Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court, share their requisite first kiss it does not necessarily feel requisite. And this irregular, welcoming sensation can be traced to a moment that takes place directly before the first kiss. At a party they go for a walk in the woods where a tree branch intrudes into the frame and finds its way right into the back of Sutter's head. Laughing, Aimee pushes away the tree branch. Maybe, though, that wasn’t Sutter and Aimee so much as Miles and Shailene, which is to suggest the bit was incidental, an act of kismet. It doesn’t so much show you the making of the movie as underline its spontaneity, the way it mostly seems to unfold all on its own as opposed to a course charted by screenwriters. The characters are so alive, in fact, by the end they are ready to go in different directions than the movie takes them.

"The Spectacular Now" is chiefly about Teller and Woodley and their astonishing natural performances and chemistry so utterly true and captivating that it really goes beyond movie review adjectives. (If Teller and Woodley don’t win Best Onscreen Duo at the MTV Movie Awards then I don’t understand the world in which we live.)

He is outgoing and popular, a good-hearted screw-up, and curator of an omnipresent pocket flask (more on that in a minute). She is reserved, less popular, a sci-fi geek, and smart. And while she might be too much of a fair maiden to be believable as a Pygmalion, what Woodley brilliantly does is not play the part as someone unworthy of the cool kids but unwanting of them. Which makes her that much cooler. Which is what Sutter responds to.

See, the screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webert does not reduce these two to high school appropriate tropes, the downfall of many a new age teenybopper rom com. For instance, the story spins off of Sutter’s break-up with comely Cassidy (Brie Larson), and he still seems to have eyes for her even as his relationship with Aimee blooms. A lesser film would have made that the focal point and instead here it just becomes an organic hiccup.

Ah, but don’t presume they are not star cross’d. They are young lovers, after all. He has the dad he has never seen and she has the mom we never see who seeks to curb her daughter’s dreams. The film’s second act revolves primarily around Sutter finally meeting his long absentee father (a marvelously twitchy Kyle Chandler) and coming face to face with his feckless roots. Before long he and Aimee are on the side of the highway, nearly having swerved into an oncoming car, and he is shouting about he’s no good for her and she needs to get away from him and then the film sorta jumps the shark.

It’s not even that the trucked-in melodrama is unnecessary, though it is, but that once it happens it’s essentially brushed aside in a flash, as if it didn’t even matter. It supremely underscores the way in which director James Ponsoldt is trying to pull his characters one way as the film surges toward its close, but the characters fight back and pull it another way.

Let’s be clear, Sutter has a drinking problem and this, oddly, is never quite addressed in a satisfactory manner. Let’s also be clear that he eventually colonizes his lady friend. At graduation Cassidy actually says to Sutter in regards to Aimee: “Have you turned her into a lush yet?” It’s intended as a joke but Sutter really has turned Aimee into a lush. She clings to him at the ceremony and when her friend from earlier in the film waves at her from down below the bleachers, Aimee actually seems aggravated by having been forced into going and saying hello. And she cannot even go say hello until she kisses Sutter first. Girlfriend, where’s your self-confidence?

So many teenage relationships merely function as beautiful buffers for the horror of those years before you move on. “The Spectacular Now”, however, remains adamant, right to the end, that it is still a storybook romance, unaware of its transformation into something darker.

In the wake of the closing shot I wanted to scream at Aimee: “No! Can’t you see he’s no good for you?! You need to get away from him!”

First Image Of Kate Winslet In Divergent

Yesterday Summit Entertainment released 10 brand new images from the set of the forthcoming "Divergent", starring "Oscar Nominee" Shailene Woodley (Cinema Romantico still considers her an Oscar Nominee even though she wasn't since she should've been) and Kate Winslet, The Greatest Actress In The World.

Below is our first glimpse of Winslet's character.

Whoops! That's right! I forgot! They did not actually release an image from the set of the forthcoming "Divergent" that featured Kate Winslet.

Could someone at Summit get on that, please?