Tag: Thomas Mann

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a fictional reimagining of real life events that became Psychology 101.

StanfordPrisonExperimentPosterThe Stanford Prison Experiment is Psychology 101. Introductory textbooks on the subject all make note of the events that took place at Stanford University in August of 1971, in which 18 college-aged participants and students simulated a prison environment as part of a psychological study by Philip Zimbardo. Half took shifts as ruthless, abusive guards, and the other half were punished, degraded, humiliated and malnourished as a part of their imprisonment. After just six days of an allotted two weeks, the results predictably did not end well. Students today look back on it as an example of a study gone horribly, ethically wrong, but also as an example of behavioral psychology.

The film adaptation of this, also titled “The Stanford Prison Experiment” and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, should also feel like essential psychology. The film makes abundantly clear in a string of darkly tense, even twistedly funny set pieces, just what happened here and how much a situation like this could affect these individual’s minds. What’s more, Alvarez leaves morality out of the equation. There’s notable ambiguity as to whether such an experiment should’ve ever been conducted, or if it actually produced real academic results and lessons on psychology.

But Alvarez misses an opportunity. “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a horror story, a terrifically acted and fascinatingly lensed experiment of its own. But like the prison experiment itself, the horrors Alvarez subjects us to are mostly one-dimensional.

In the film, Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) shares the goal that the experiment is designed to test how an institution affects an individual’s behavior. With that broad of a thesis in mind, any experiment could be a success, and the Stanford Prison Experiment would qualify as a rousing one. But it’s hard to know what, if any, academic value any of this actually had.

All Alvarez makes clear is that it has an impact, and that when pressed and put under certain institutional circumstances, you begin to play the part. Prisoner 8612 (Ezra Miller) is the first to break. He’s sarcastic and non-conformist, and leads a successful revolt on the second day to barricade the doors to their cells so the guards can’t get in. But when he’s locked in the hole and has his rebellion ignored and subdued, he quickly begins to believe his imprisonment is real. On the other side of the coin, the prisoners lovingly dub one guard John Wayne (Michael Angarano) for how he dons a Strother Martin in “Cool Hand Luke” impression whenever he disappears behind those one-way aviator sunglasses.

Alvarez’s film is a series of these grim prison set pieces. One of the film’s first and best involves John Wayne making the prisoners recite their numbers in a role call. The camera tracks swiftly down the narrow hallway as each prisoner rattles off their rank, and Alvarez finds an awful lot of room for motion and leering framing without sacrificing the claustrophobic space of the actual set.

These re-imagined moments of history, all of them highly accurate to the available footage seen online, are so calculated and choreographed that the deliberate pacing calls attention to the abuse of the task-master guards. They’re arduous, torturous, talkative set pieces in which time evaporates and the scene becomes truly, psychologically draining.

That illusion disappears however when we step into Zimbardo’s real world. These scenes watching Zimbardo and his fellow colleagues observe the prisoners are far more procedural without feeling notably academic or insightful in terms of the film’s themes. Zimbardo begins to look less deranged and consumed and more clueless, as everyone ignores obvious signs of abuse and madness to the prisoners as though they were just flukes.

Alvarez isn’t interested in making a morality tale condemning Zimbardo or the students involved. This film isn’t a question of whether this study should or shouldn’t have happened. It doesn’t even contain the prison reform commentary that would eventually become part of Zimbardo’s later career. But if you’re not going to pose those questions about the academic value of such a study, why even include those scenes at all?

I imagine a Stanford Prison Experiment movie in which the Zimbardo character is completely absent, in which students get instructions from faceless figures, and the behind the scenes pulling of strings is as hidden to us as it is to the tormented and confused characters.

Alvarez really does manage to build a sense of terror and psychological dread. And the film is made up of an incredible who’s who of young actors, all of them standing out in individual set pieces, from Miller and Angarano to Tye Sheridan, Thomas Mann, Keir Gilchrist, Johnny Simmons, Nicholas Bruan, James Frecheville, Chris Sheffield and more.

But in just offering a historical document, Alvarez misses a chance to conduct his own psychological experience on his audience. “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a powerful film, but perhaps not affecting.

3 stars

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s breakout film swept this year’s Sundance, but is more than a ‘Sundance Movie’.

MeAndEarlPosterWhile independent cinema is traditionally any movie that’s independently financed, many newer film goers are first introduced to indies by what more experienced cinephiles have pejoratively labeled “The Sundance Movie”. They’re films like “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Juno”, “(500) Days of Summer”, “The Way Way Back”, and many more of varying quality. They’re not just movies that have premiered at Sundance; they’re quirky, irreverent, hipster, crowd-pleasing, charming, and to some degree, that horrible word best suited for Zooey Deschanel and Belle and Sebastian songs, “twee”.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” swept this year’s Sundance with not just the Grand Jury Prize but also the audience award. I expect it to be a massive mainstream hit. It would be so easy to lob one of those adjectives onto it and write it off as something less than a masterpiece because it falls into The Sundance Movie category.

And Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s film all but announces that it will be that sort of movie in its opening moments: voice-over narration from a cynical teenager making wry observations and quoting pop culture, all based on a bestselling YA novel. But in just as quickly, Rejon makes waves with those expectations. “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is dark, cringe-worthy, weird and best of all, cinematic. In its use of both film references and active cinematography, Rejon’s film is as much about cinema as it is adolescence. He’s playing with genres and expectations in a way that is so hilarious, heartwarming and utterly gratifying.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is one of those movies, but it is also un-ironically the best movie of the year.

The Me of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is Greg (Thomas Mann), a smart high school senior not lonely and misanthropic, and not trying to avoid human contact, but trying to avoid any serious connections. He latches onto individual cliques for just long enough to be acknowledged but not long enough to be labeled. He’s got it down to a science. While the narration is a common tool in this sort of indie, it’s the camera that really gets inside Greg’s mind. There’s a running gag involving stop-motion animation about how hot girls are like a moose stepping on a helpless squirrel, a gag that kills every time it abruptly makes an appearance. There’s even a hilarious shot in which Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) walks in on him as he’s looking at porn, and his frantic attempt to switch tabs only reveals more nudity.

His parents inform him that one of the girls in his class, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), is suffering from leukemia. Greg doesn’t really know her, and she insists she doesn’t need new friends or pity from someone being forced by their mom to come over, but then of course he was forced by his mom to spend time with her in the first place. “Eight years of carefully cultivated invisibility, gone,” he says.

Greg reveals to Rachel his affinity for making movies with his “coworker” Earl (RJ Clyer), a tough nosed kid from the other side of town. Their films are all horribly bad remakes, replacing one letter or word of a classic title to make it a potty-mouthed, so-dumb-it’s-awesome pun, and the results are a thing of beauty. Everything from “Apocalypse Now” to “Burden of Dreams” is skewered. It’s a film that goes deeper into cinephilia than most movies that claim to do the same. Soon the two find themselves making a film for Rachel, but Greg subconsciously feels doing so would allow him to get too close to someone so sick.

The story has the arc of something like last year’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” but the plot itself doesn’t even emerge until midway into the film. Rejon and Jesse Andrews’s screenplay, working from his own novel, find depth in their characters and allow them to emerge through conversation rather than situation comedy. It gets laughs because it isn’t afraid for Greg to put his foot in his mouth with an idiotic joke telling Rachel to play dead. It isn’t too cute to have Earl blurt out in his baritone voice “Titties” as soon as the thought crosses your mind. And it isn’t averse to having Nick Offerman shove a cat in the camera’s face.

There’s a healthy cynicism to everything here, and the movie literally turns on its head in a few moments to create an awareness of the camera and the cinematic devices at play. Like a Wes Anderson film, it’s extremely attentive to detail but without the artificiality that a handful find frustrating about Anderson’s style. Rejon finds beauty in static long takes, quick movement and even quicker editing, and time and again Greg steps out of his character’s shoes to explain to the audience things are not going to happen with the same melodrama or emotional catharsis you’d expect.

As a result, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” goes from a fairly outrageous and unexpected comedy to getting very real, real fast. Rejon grapples with spiritual sensations of love and life after death, and he doesn’t forget that these adult themes are still filtered through the minds of teenagers. The film’s climax and ending scene in particular capture the same screwball charm but are moments of sensational beauty.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a lot like its protagonist and his desire to stay on an island unto himself. It’s a comedy and a tearjerker, and it’s smart and cute and quirky, but it just touches on those qualities without ever belonging to a single group.

4 stars

Project X

“Project X is a dumb, abusive and sexist film that celebrates anarchy and drug abuse without redemption. It’s a douchebag’s fantasy.

“Project X is a dumb, abusive and sexist film that celebrates anarchy and drug abuse without redemption. It’s a douchebag’s fantasy.

Why should a movie about an epic party be such a drag? I sat like the designated driver incapable of having fun as bros and sorority girls in my sold out, advanced screening gawked and hawed at fellow beautiful people performing acts that were not just offensive or drunkenly stupid but were genuinely psychotic. Continue reading “Project X”