Back again, though still deadbeat.

Green Room finds Jeremy Saulnier once again exploring how the inexperienced wimps of this world react and withstand men weathered in the ways of bloodshed. The weaklings in this case are the Ain't Rights, a down-on-their-luck four-piece punk band trying to survive the long drives of the Pacific Northwest on what appears to be the last leg of a very ineffective tour, aka a standard DIY tour experience. Saulnier nails the tour milieu within the first fifteen minutes, specifically where he shows the band sleeping on the promoter's floor after driving through the night. I remember those long drives and the fruitless shows that they yielded. I can still feel the deflated sense of purpose after playing to three humans in Spokane while my friends partied and slept comfortably over three-thousand miles away. I suppose it's that desperation that lends the plot a certain authenticity, because I'm sure most would avoid a matinee out in the middle of nowhere to a crowd of red-laced boots and braces agro-dudes. The Ain't Rights should have syphoned their way home, wherever that is. After a last minute Dead Kennedys' cover they discover a young woman with a butterfly knife sticking out of her temple in their dressing room. Note: I highly doubt a venue of this repute would have such a room but that's pretty much neither here nor there. From here the movie becomes a siege flick, with our completely fucked neophytes trapped in a room with a heavily armed and trained group of racist thugs waiting on the other side of the door. The racism is of no consequence, just an easy way for the audience to identify with the protagonists and loath their attackers. The violence that we know will unfold, unfolds in ways that one could consider unique. For instance, it's not entirely customary to see our jittery hero's forearm sliced all the way down to its tendons before the real shit starts to hit the fan, nor would we expect the most battle-trained bandmate to meet such a sudden and calloused end, with all of his strength (when weighed against his skinny/timid bandmates and the chubby skinhead he chokes out) of little to no use outside of the titular clink. And yet, all of the camaraderie that one would expect from a group of road warriors such as these is all but dissipated once the dogs are let loose. I found this troubling, not only as a fellow wanderer but also as a moviegoer who finds the current cinema's lack of emotional vulnerability calculated and false. A lot of Green Room started to feel like a posture, both cinematically and musically. All of the genre familiarities looked like easy nods (posters, stickers, desert-island-discs, and shirts) for suckers after a second viewing. The suspense holds up and the violence is truly horrifying at times, but the setup is just an empty means to end. I enjoyed the end just fine, but I couldn't help but feel that this was all just one carefully composed trifle from a technically proficient expired punk.

I don't want to hold Green Room's solemn, airish, toe-dipping approach to genre too hard against it. I also don't want to give off the impression that I didn't like, at least the first time around. The truth is that fatigue has set in for me in regards to hype-art of this kind. It's far better than Cloverfield Lane, which similarly toys with confinement and the dangers that lurk outside. Whatever questions we're fed about the actual dangers that wait are spoiled by the title, which leaves the host's intentions as the primary concern. John Goodman's performance leaves little doubt that he will eventually freak out and fulfill his role as the villain, which I suppose is the Hitchcockian method of telling us there is a bomb under the table and letting us fret over when it'll explode. I didn't fret much about Goodman because I never once questioned Mary Elizabeth Winstead's ability to outsmart and overpower him. And the finale which finds our heroine up against large aliens (which blended so well with the darkness that I could barely see them) left me similarly cold. There are allusions to our heroine's past and specifically her tendency to cower when the going gets tough, which I suppose could add weight to her actions, though dumb luck seems to play a larger role in her survival.

That's all for now.