Day 164: Haywire

After finding out she has been sold out by her handler, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is focused on working out why.

The story was boring, I won’t lie to you. And yet I wasn’t bored at all. Sometimes it’s just good to watch a mindless fighting film, you know? The fighting itself was impressive and well directed, I’d say. I’m not sure whether or not I liked the lack of sound in those scenes though. Sometimes music was used, or all you could hear was far away grunting. It seemed odd but interesting at the same time, so I’ve yet to make up my mind with that. The acting was passable but nowhere near as good as would be expected, considering the cast. Gina Carano is a MMA fighter in real-life and she is a beauty to watch when she’s fighting in this film. It's worth watching it just to see her, really.

The picture up top is the moment after she strangles him with her thighs and before she shoots him in the face. Intense moment.

6/10

Day 161: Fish Tank

With little money and a difficult family life, Mia (Katie Jarvis) is not having the best time. She’s 15, doesn’t seem to have any friends, and she has been kicked out of school for her aggressive tendencies. Her mum is a bit of a party girl and she resents Mia for reminding her that she’s not the young thing she used to be. There seems to be nothing going for Mia, that is until her mum brings home her new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender). He is friendly and makes an effort with Mia and her younger sister, and he encourages Mia with her dancing. She falls for him and with his support, she focuses on dancing and ends up with an audition. But the good times can’t last forever and it all goes downhill pretty quickly after a drunken night.

Despite her aggressive personality, I’m not convinced she’d be like that if her circumstances were different. We see her headbutt a girl in the street and just walk off like she doesn’t care, but later she tries to free a horse that she thinks is being mistreated. She is gentle with the horse and is careful not to spook it and she seems to have little concern for the danger she’s in, she’s just focused on helping the horse. Everyone she comes across is met with a scowl and a harsh word, but she’s different with Connor. He isn’t patronising or hurtful towards her, and he does just seem genuinely friendly. The stony persona she puts on to the world is softened when she’s around him. He catches her dancing and is complimentary, which seems to give her the confidence to pursue it. He comes back to the house and is quite drunk and the two have sex. Immediately after, he comes to his senses and the next morning he takes off.

Mia is obviously hurt that he would run off after sleeping with her and she goes in search of him. She finds his house over in a fancy estate and she discovers that he has a family. This does not go down well. She sees his daughter and convinces her to come away with her to get ice cream. The little girl gets more and more frightened as Mia gets more angry, and eventually the two end up struggling next to the river. The girl falls in and for a minute it seems like Mia is going to leave her to drown but she saves her and takes her back to her house. Connor is furious and drives after her but all he does is slap her and walk off. Perhaps he realises he was partly responsible for the injuries his daughter suffered and that he took advantage of Mia, so he couldn’t hurt her anymore.

We see all of this from Mia’s perspective and I think the film could’ve been better if they’d had a stronger actress play that role. Katie Jarvis was good, don’t get me wrong, but not strong enough to really hold interest consistently. It might’ve been interesting to see more of her mother, too. Overall, the film was good but could’ve done with a few tweaks.

7/10

Day 82: A Dangerous Method

Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) are drawn together due to their interest in psychoanalysis. Freud hopes that Jung will take over after he is gone as he believes they share a common understanding about its practice, but irreparable problems occur when Jung wants to go beyond simply discovering mental health issues and wants to try and help people. Throughout their relationship, Jung has a monumentally inappropriate relationship with one of his patients, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), which creates additional problems for his relationship with Freud.

Monumentally inappropriate relationship, man alive. She comes to you for help with her issues concerning her sexuality and you help her, but then you have sex with her. And during the sex you actually use what she tells you in the therapy sessions. Dude, just, no. She likes being spanked and it stems from the humiliation she felt at the hands of her abusive father, which she secretly enjoyed. While I’m totally on board with spanking, and humiliation has its place when done in a healthy and consensual way, I absolutely have a problem with him using his knowledge of her mental health history for sexual gratification. Anyway, if that wasn’t all bad enough, he then tries to break it off with her because he doesn’t want to cheat on his wife (don’t even get me started on that noise). Then later they start it up again and then he breaks it off again. You can’t be dragging her along with your problems, especially when you know she is besotted with you and is fragile in that respect. To her credit, she ends up becoming the psychologist that she wanted to become and tries to move on from him. She seems to have been doing better than him, anyway.

While I’m not really a Freud fan, I do have to side with him over Jung with one important point. Freud believed that all you should seek to do is understand the person and their mental health issues, not try to fix them. While Jung believed that just simply pointing out what is wrong with a person shouldn’t be the goal, it should be about trying to help them become who they see themselves to be. For me, the reason I want to do psychology has never been because I want to ‘help people’. That’s not to say that I would pass up that opportunity if it presented itself, I would obviously do my very best to help in any way I could. But primarily, my main interest is in understanding the many facets of the human mind and accepting them all as natural variations. People are so often quick to slap a label on someone and say that this is how they are a deviant of the norm. There is no norm, I think. And I want to hear about and try my best to understand the experience of everyone, with no judgement.

The film itself was alright, I wasn’t especially taken with it. I was expecting it to be better than it was so that’s my own fault, really. I’m not a fan of Keira Knightley but I suppose she wasn’t terrible here. Michael Fassbender’s face is equal parts kindness and danger. You confuse me, Sir.

"Never repress anything."

6/10

Day 9: Shame

Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a successful worker bee with a nice apartment. His life must be ideal, right? Nothing is ever that easy, come on now. He suffers (and he does genuinely seem to be suffering) from sex addiction which is threatening to tear down everything he has built for himself. And to make matters worse his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay with him. She is her own bundle of problems, so the two together do not exactly help each other.

The film follows Brandon’s gradual deterioration which seems to be somewhat influenced by the presence of his sister. They seem to have an odd relationship and you get from the way they are with each other that they didn’t grow up well together. She is depressed and appears to be very dependent on other people, while he has attempted to shut himself off from others mainly in order to deal with his addiction. The two obviously don’t mix well and it creates unbearable pressure on them both, in different ways. Brandon throws out all his porn (so much porn, just so much) in what seems to be a quit-cold-turkey move but it obviously doesn’t work and he goes in search of sex. Unable to get into another bar he heads across to what I can only describe as a loads-of-white-guys-having-sex bar and he is ‘pleasured’ (and I say it like that because he doesn't seem to enjoy the encounter so much as he needs it to get through) by a gentleman there. Then he heads off for a massive shagathon with two women (which he also does not seem to enjoy) before returning home. Sissy is hurt by Brandon’s words (calling her a burden and a weight on him). She clearly wants a connection with her brother but he’s not in any state to give it to her and she doesn’t appear to have anyone. This all culminates in her attempting suicide in his apartment. He finds her, gets her to the hospital and she survives.

From start to finish the film is depressing. I’d never really considered sex addiction before but it seems brutal and not to be laughed at. What I quite liked was that there was no hopeful message at all in the film, no ‘it gets better’ moment. Quite often filmmakers tack on a "but it's ok, they got sorted eventually" but that didn't happen here. It’s an interesting and honest portrayal of two people who are having the worst time in their lives, which I think makes it more true to life than some films. You don’t get the feeling that either of them will really be ok and that’s how life is for a lot of people. Not everyone comes through the negative, sometimes people just live within it. Or they get out.

“We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.”

8/10