#martha marcy may marlene
TheGodzilla bandwagon is in full effect and I for one am ALL the damn way on board. The recent trailers and clips have done an excellent job of creating the hype for a movie that had the potential of sucking really hard.In fact, it is the film to beat this year in my opinion. And with an impressive slate of films that makes up 2014, that is saying something.
Next up we have a Japanese trailer that was recently released as well as an IMAX poster for the movie. I am going to say it now, Godzilla needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
Check them out below and I dare you not to be hyped after seeing this trailer.
Here is the trailer
And how dope is this poster?
About The Film
In Summer 2014, the world’s most revered monster is reborn as Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures unleash the epic action adventure “Godzilla.” From visionary new director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters”) comes a powerful story of human courage and reconciliation in the face of titanic forces of nature, when the awe-inspiring Godzilla rises to restore balance as humanity stands defenseless.
Gareth Edwards directs “Godzilla,” which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson(“Kick-Ass”),Oscar® nominee Ken Watanabe (“The Last Samurai,” “Inception”), Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Oscar® winner Juliette Binoche(“The English Patient,” “Cosmopolis”), and Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine”), with Oscar® nominee David Strathairn (“Good Night, and Good Luck.,” “The Bourne Legacy”) and Bryan Cranston (“Argo,” TV’s “Breaking Bad”).
Original Article http://bit.ly/1qeDLGc
This is the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, in a debut role), who becomes alternatively ‘Marcy May’ and ‘Marlene,’ and, with a great tremulousness, steps back towards Martha again. It’s the story of a fractured identity, and the things that get in the cracks made when a name is detached from a person. It’s the story of fractured sibling relationships, paranoia, and of the significance and dissonance of place in respect to human tensions. Martha Marcy May Marlene also made me gnaw off the tips of all my fingernails while watching, and then have to take a walk afterwards in an attempt to shift all that tension lingering against my skin like a cool, menacing vapour.
Early one morning, a girl runs away from a white farmhouse full of sleeping bodies. She darts into a gap in the woods, a gap that hangs waiting for the next scene, one beat too long. From a payphone in a small nameless town, she calls her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her voice hesitant and cracking, head down low. She doesn’t know where she is exactly. Can Lucy come and pick her up?
Lucy (Sarah Paulson) takes her to the lakeside house in Connecticut where she and her architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) are spending the summer. It’s a huge place, baffling Martha – just for the two of you? she asks, as she and her sister face one another in the gigantic kitchen. Yes, says Lucy, mildly defensive and with a hint of a patronising tone. Martha remains tight lipped, incredulous.
It’s hard not to explain the plot, which quietly and ambiguously unravels at its own pace, in terms of the contrasts of place and house interiors. The element linking these two very different places is the barely-hinged Martha herself. She has run from one life into an utterly different world, and the contrast between the lingering, slowly-shot landscape of green pastures and leaning, plain farm buildings, and the riches of the large summer house and its smoothly rippling lake make this starkly clear. Worldviews manifest in the choice of dwelling and decoration. Selfhood defined by the choice, or lack of choice, of dress.
Jolts into flashback let us see all that Martha does not tell her sister: Life at the farmhouse from which she has run, we become immediately aware, was not idyllic. The men of the farm all eat first, and only after they file out from the dining room, are the women allowed access. The women share all their sweet farm dresses in rotation, keeping them hanging together in a spare room. The leader of the group, Patrick (John Hawkes), is an intense, charming wire of a man. He is the one who says to Martha, ‘You look like a Marcy May,’ sings for the group a song called ‘Marcy’s song,’ and from then on, that is what she is called. We see fairly quickly that the group at the farmhouse is nothing more than a cult, but what was it that brought Martha into that awareness, and what made her decide to leave?
I don’t want to give too much away about the plot. Unlike Stoker, where the turn of the story is not so much key as is the sense of character, Martha Marcy May Marlene depends on suspense - on waiting to see what exactly it is that Martha did, or had done to her, which has made her into the wreck we meet at the beginning of the film. We know more is coming. We will not know what it is until the film chooses to show Martha remembering it, to show how abuse builds up over time, how an abuser takes advantage of a sense of loss or need in his victim or victims, giving and giving, providing shelter, songs, companionship, before calling in the ‘loved ones’ debt to him, whenever, and however often he chooses. Another thing the film asks of us – will Martha really be able to run from what has happened?
Elizabeth Olsen is incredible in the central role, full of tensions and small outburst, sullen and swamped in fear and vulnerability and self-righteousness, without ever feeling theatrical. Not that there’s anything wrong with the unreal – it’s just that in a quiet film, an unquiet performance, such as the one Olsen delivers, is quite a risk. My hat off too to Steve Durkin, who both wrote and directed a piece with an unquiet girl, a barely-contained tornado, at its centre.
How often it seems that the scripts for women in many mainstream films tend to forefront likeability (this discussion, endlessly, everywhere, in literature too). The typical heroine is hurt, but never shrill. Devoted to an ideal, a principle. Fights back. Is a tough, empowered character. Saves herself, has revenge. How by the end of the movie, she will stand over the bad guy, or bad group, or bad situation, often with a look of defiance, however worn out she is, however drenched in blood. Or she might do this in a neat outfit, the victory a social one. What does this mean in actuality – what’s so wrong with the overabundance of likeable, successful female characters? Don’t I want a role model?
Well, sure. I want to think, yes. I could do that. By proxy, become the hero. Or the victorious villain. But not always. Sometimes this presentation of the indefatigable heroine serves to minimise pain – to trivialise it, to allow that little voice in to say, if she could do it, why can’t you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you so sensitive? Why are you still stuck in act three? Act four’s already here, pick yourself up and kick some ass already. A muttering which comes from the outside, but can invade our inner monologues as well.
For another thing, this charted path of suffering-defeat-self-discovery-rise towards success is just not how life is, a lot of the time. There is no map of progression, no time limit on illness or disability. And it’s quite often the case that people struggling with mental health problems or having just come out of an abusive situation AREN’T likeable. Aren’t winsome. At all. And that’s fine. As has been mentioned elsewhere anywhere women are speaking for each other, there is no obligation on anyone to be perfect at all times. Sometimes you are suffering from delusions, or from an eating or anxiety disorder and you can’t just pull yourself out of that to formulate a nice front. Down beneath your surfaces (whatever they are doing) your self might be in turmoil, or exhausted past its limits. You need care, to learn techniques, to find the right and wrong medications for you, in short, time – time with no restrictions on it. Time with no judgements on it.
What I like about this film is its sense of time. Time is slow. Recovery isn’t even on the agenda at first. Lucy and Ted expect it, even demand it, but they have only a dim awareness of what’s happening, and it takes time to even begin to understand a person from whom you’ve been estranged, or who doesn’t yet want to acknowledge they need help, exactly. We see their pain, recrimination, indignation, horror, confusion, the complexities of loving someone in distress, a girl who hasn’t been a part of their life for a long time, and who may be suffering this way because at some point in the past, Lucy were not there for her, because she didn’t know how to be. At one point, Martha says to Lucy, who is trying for a baby: ‘You’ll make a horrible mother.’ Here is the low point - of cruelty, acid oozing out of a wound. Lucy’s job as elder sister, after their mother died, was, at least in part, to look after Martha, and she has failed. Because failure is possible. There’s no quick-witted comeback. No sweeping forgiveness. All they can do is move forward, carrying this burden. Those lines in Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, on memory:
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
We don’t know if Martha is going to be alright. Neither do Lucy or Ted. By the end what do we know? No woman is born to be a perfect mother, perfect sister. No gesture out of kindness is guaranteed to heal. Forgiveness isn’t something you can flick on like a switch. Pain is ugly, and it doesn’t get put aside when the next thing and the next come on, demanding your attention. And that events in life remembered become part of the landscape, part of the body, part of the fabric of your life, altering and animating it all in painful, confusing ways. If all this sounds too grim, this film also tells us that the girl is here, is living, and that time with or without our knowing is steady moving onwards, that nothing is over, yet.
Review by Helen McClory.
