Music Box Hanna

After a phenomenal brunch at Good Enough to Eat on the Upper West Side, we headed to the Lincoln Square Theater (a truly Disney-fied wonder.. they can bury me there) to see the film Hanna.  My thoughts on the film:

Open the music box.  Inside, the ballerina is lethal.  She whirls to unheard music, feels nothing, just misses the heart.  Once upon a time, a girl with icy white eyebrows emerged from her enchanted house in the woods.  The rest is written in a fairy tale – the Grimm kind.

Hanna is extraordinary.  It was directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Soloist).  I won't give away too much here because I like the idea of diving into this film and getting swept away.  It's an adrenaline flick, the kind of movie that catapults you out of your awareness.  It's a fairy tale that feels exotic, Grimm.    

The film focuses on a mysterious and icy cool young girl named Hanna (the ridiculously magical Saoirse Ronan) living and training with her father (a bearded and bedraggled Eric Bana) in the middle of nowhere.  Seriously, young Hanna guts a deer in the first 5 minutes of the film and you know she means business.  Hanna has no expression, no fear.  Her eyes radiate from a mummy mess of animal furs.  It's as if she was somehow formed in a world of ice.  She has luminous blue eyes -- an unrelenting and guiding force of the soul -- and a face that has been chipped away to reveal an ice-picked princess, a ghost.  She's a weapon: sheer, sharp, deadly cool and more like the coil that spins the music box than the ballerina trapped inside, endlessly spinning (imagine the vapid expression of a carved face-suddenly awakened). The film emerges from the forest at a high speed driven by the thumping heart of The Chemical Brothers score, pushing the narrative forward, cutting and whirring inside a box (a different world), whirling around inside itself.  

Hanna is pursued by a Cate Blanchett (the most stunning Big Bad Wolf in the history of the fairy tale) and that's essentially all I'm going to say about the plot:

A few quick associations:

Hanna reminded me of a Tom Tykwer film.  It had that femme-techno urgency a la Run Lola Run or The Princess and the Warrior (and Soairse Ronan's ravishingly washed out look is like the flip side of Franka Potente's eery angelic grace):

Also, check out Tykwer's short from the film, Paris Je T'aime (it has Hanna's whirring urgency and emotional tempo): 

Saoirse Ronan is so expressive and so lovely, it's hypnotic to watch her when she's still:

She was nominated for an Oscar for Wright's Atonement at the age of 13:

Wild and wielding a bow and arrow, I can absolutely see why Ronan was considered for the Katniss role in the upcoming film adaptation of the book, The Hunger Games.  And this is an interview with Ronan:

I was considering Ronan as a young Sarah Polley: 

And the deadly father-daughter dynamic reminded me of Kick-Ass:

or The Professional:

or even Paper Moon:

Let's think of Hanna as a world inside the music box.  Experience the film the same way you would the box.  It's not the typical movie that aims directly for the heart.  It appears to miss its target on purpose  It's cyclical.  It opens and shuts.  It begins and ends on the same moment - missing the heart (literally, figuratively).  Some said the film was lacking an emotional core, but I believe the emotion just slipped in at a different place (at a faster pace).  It felt the way music does.  It moved like music.  (Click here to read about the psychology of music.)  Music tells us how to feel.  The film-music's feeling drove us into the coil, pumped us through the techno-beating heart of Hanna.  It's an active barometer, intimate and unreal, seeping into plot and iris.  The music inside transports us, moves us.  And then we shut the box.  The music stops.  After all, what do you find at the heart of a music box?  Cranks and levers, a spinning doll.  Music.  

For the fanatic, here's an additional Hanna reading list - enjoy!

Click here to read: "Hanna: Saoirse Ronan, a Jason Bourne for the Glee generation" from the LA Times.

Click here to read: "Joe Wright and Saoirse Ronan Talk Hanna, Fairytale Violence and Girl Power" from The Finger Dandy.

Click here to read The Rolling Stone review of Hanna.

Click here to read Roger Ebert's Hanna review.

Now is the Time to Revisit “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie”

“What do cars have to do with books, you might ask?”

David Byrne has been a pop icon for quite some time now.  He’s most notably a fabulous musician.  Over the past year, he’s been touring the country to promote the album Everything that Happens will Happen Today, his recent collaboration with Brian Eno.

Think back and you’ll find that Byrne is very much a long-term, multipurpose human, an avant-garde writer, artist and director.  We mustn’t forget about Byrne’s most important contribution to 80s cinema, True Stories.  Check out Byrne on the Celebrity Friends application for more information on the many artistic Byrne projects that have transpired over the years.  You’ll be surprised by his range, his silliness, his genius.. and his oversized suit-wearing capabilities.

And perhaps now is the time to take a look back at the classics.  Vintage Byrne is still vital film entertainment.  The 80s Byrne classic True Stories, dubbed “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie” is as relevant now as it ever was.  You’ll marvel at the music (the time-warp, the familiarity, the awesome karaoke prospects of “Wild Wild Life”).  Queue it up, and feast on the delicious pop fanatic dream world of Virgil, Texas.  Take a tour with Byrne as your guide.  The Talking Heads provide the score.

True Stories was originally released in 1986.  It was written by Byrne, Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, and directed by Byrne.  Supposedly inspired by grocery store tabloid headlines, the film follows Byrne as he drives through small-town Texas in a big red car, expressionless face shadowed under the rim of a giant cowboy hat.  His voice is monotone, soothing, coolly enamored with the wide expanse of middle American nothingness. He enters Texas like a kid riding a red blur in slow-mo.  His narrative spans the drag for stray thoughts, subtly, slyly illuminated in some marginal reality, similar to ours, but slightly askew and neatly off the cuff.

Byrne takes to the road littered with strip malls, voodoo love shacks, karaoke-infused “wild lives,” evangelistic pop imagery.  A “green” family is outfitted in leaves for a mall fashion show.  The town’s local gossip-gal speaks earnestly about her tail, her alien abductions, and her fling with the real Rambo.  John Goodman is looking for love.  Spalding Gray works magic with a spinning lobster, and a sassy Swoosie Kurtz is fed by robots because she never leaves her bed. This of course, is just the prelude to another Talking Heads song. 

The iconic image of an 80s Byrne in a big suit is strangely representative of the feeling of True Stories.  The landscape is muted, ill-suited to reality, larger-than-life, shrouded in song, magical.  Nowadays, it’s essential that we ask the important questions, and if you’ve ever wondered why you run out of Kleenex, paper towels and toilet paper at the same time and considered a possible nation-wide conspiracy, Byrne may just have the answer.  Or perhaps he just asks the same questions, but he does it in harmony with full choir accompaniment.