Out in Theaters: IF I STAY

August 20, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Chloe Grace Moretz, Gayle Forman, If I Stay, Jamie Blackley, Mireille Enos, Out in Theaters, R.J. Cutler, Reviews

Like Kurosawa armed with dueling loafs of cheesy bread, If I Stay takes out the cheese stick and beats everything to death with it. There’s tragiporn spilling from every nook, weepy-anguish souping from every cranny. It’s not enough for a family to die, they must be dealt with in one sorry, sappy blow after the next. Stretch that sadness as thin as pizza dough. Work those tear ducts like they’re 1800’s railroad laborers. Bathe it all in bathos, rinse and repeat. An exercise in wringing a stale conceit for all it’s worth, If I Stay is what happens when you turn one car crash into an entire movie.

One must presume that Gayle Forman‘s novel, on which this film is based, has captured something of the post-pubescent longing for one’s first bone sesh in ravishing detail. How else can you explain the teenybopper cult follower it’s earned? After all, Twilight has taught us by now that sexual angst, like beluga caviar, sells by the ounce. Assuming it’s similar to the film, Forman’s story throttles between two events: Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz) falling in love for the first time and all of her family bar none dying in a horrific car accident. Like pie and ice cream, this sappy romance comes with calamity a la mode.

The crash – revealed in the trailers – happens early on. So while I’m not quite laying out a major spoiler smackdown, I’ll spare you the hyper-lachrymose details and tell you that people be dying. As Mia and her stretcher-bound family speed off to the hospital director R.J. Cutler finds it the perfect time to introduce Mia’s on-again-off-again romance with Jonas Brother wanna-be Adam (Jamie Blackley). Their high school romance is spliced into the tale in long-winded, saccharine flashbacks. Because who doesn’t want their fledging romance served up with ambulance sirens and life support tubes?

Withdrawing from her physical body, Mia experiences an “out of body” trip where she watches over herself and her equally battered family members. Completely unnecessary from a narrative perspective, it allows Moretz to narrate at us in gushy, jejune “prose”. One by one, the fate dominoes fall the wrong way and she considers bailing on her own body and giving up to the great void of white light. It’s so hopelessly dramatic that I’m surprised she didn’t come down with a case of Million Dollar bedsores during her stay.

Offscreen, Cutler lathers up the melodrama like he’s hosting a Nicholas Spark car wash on a hot day. He wants so badly for you to cry, he’ll shoulder tap to remind you of just how sad everything is as often as he can. Throw up your arms and howl at the sky, Cutler’s coming fa ya tears!

But get them he shall not. In my theater, there was a grown woman weeping petulantly as the gimpy drama unfolded onscreen. When I encountered her a few days later, she admitted how cheap the shots were, how lame her tears ultimately had been. If I Stay is the amazingly bad weepy flick that’ll have people taking back their tears.

Regurgitating all the stops like from a Sparknote’s “How to Do Tragedy for Dummies”, If I Stay is a pathetically aimless attempt to weave sadness into a story. It’s so emotionally inept that it makes this year’s other tragic teenage love story – the one in which cancer-stricken 18-year olds make out in Anne Frank’s attic as tourist bystanders cheer them on – look like an Oscar contender.

I pity Mireille Enos (The Killing) who really does give it her all here, but everything about the flick is hammy past the point of pulled pork. She’s the only one who seems to try to reign in the supremely blood-and-thunder aspects of Forman’s tragiporn. Moretz goes for broke and breaks herself. Blackley is as helpless and hapless as Old Yeller. Someone put his pout down. Someone rip that earring out.

All in all, If I Stay is the feeble movie equivalent of dubstep. The only reason I can see it being worthwhile for a viewer familiar with the books is the wait for the drops. Lying in wait, accepting all the sappy mess sandwiched in between, is this what makes this heinous experiment in contrived hardship worthwhile? Does the same impulse that dictates people to thrash their head on a downbeat inspire them to want to yank their heartstrings and blubber at artificial woe? Everything is blanketed in oily snow with Heitor Pereira‘s musical score leaking sap like a maple tree.

If I Stay is the useless kind of movie for people who have nothing else to be bummed about. It invites you to wonder if people do sit around and revel in the slow reveal of dead characters? If I Stay thinks yes. I say no.

D-

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Talking with Chloe Grace Moretz of IF I STAY

August 20, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Chloe Grace Moretz, Gayle Forman, If I Stay, Interviews

At the tender young age of 12, Chloe Grace Moretz suited up in purple spandex and dropped profanities like a pirate’s parrot. Offensive to some and provocative to all, her role as Hit-Girl exposed her to the world in a big way and it was a career moved that has since paid off ten-fold. She’s since starred in films such as Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo, the American horror remake of Let the Right One In, Let Me In, Marc Webb‘s beloved indie flick (500) Days of Summer, Kimberly Peirce‘s remake of Carrie, Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows and just this year filmed Laggies under Lynn Shelton with Keira Knightley. I would invite you to find a younger actor alive today who’s worked with such big names, but it wouldn’t be worth you time. You simply couldn’t.

Unfortunately, Moretz’s latest effort, an adaptation of Gayle Forman‘s popular teenage trag-mance (tragic romance) If I Stay, is a total miff. Nevertheless, Chloe had a chance to talk through her career and how she’s gracefully transformed from a little vitriol-spitting hero into a talented young woman with a long career in front of her.

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First off, let’s start with the cello. Your characters plays the cello in the movie, it’s an “instrumental” part of her character. Obviously there’s a little bit of movie magic going on with you actually playing it, unless you’re really that killer at the cello….

Chloe Moretz: No.

So talk a little bit about that. Do you actually play any cello? Do you play any other instruments?

CM: Pretty much, I trained for about seven months on the cello, to kind of learn it, and understand it. The biggest part of it was the emotionality, because I couldn’t learn that intricate of an instrument that quickly, so the number one was always learning the emotionality of it.

The passion behind it.

CM: Yeah, the passion behind it, and how it kind of takes over your entire body, as you play the cello. You become one.

So, are there any complete pieces that you can play?

CM: No. I had it in my hands, and I learned a couple of Bach pieces, and stuff like that, but as I was saying, I could get down the physicality of it, but the sound that was coming out of it was pretty horrific.

Fake it until you make it, if you will. It definitely looks like you’re ripping on it, so that’s good.

CM: That’s because they did a little bit of digital face replacement. My double’s sick!

You’ve worked with some great directors, so far. You’re only seventeen years old and you’ve worked with Scorsese, Tim Burton, Matt Reeves, Matthew Vaugh, Marc Webb etc. Has there ever been a moment when you’re going to one of those meetings, and you meet a movie legend like Martin Scorsese, and you are starstruck and taken aback?

CM: I think, I kind of look at it now where I’m kind of sad that I did that, that I did ‘Hugo’ when I was thirteen, because I had no clue. I had no idea what it meant to work with Martin Scorsese. It wasn’t like that, I understood it, but I didn’t UNDERSTAND it, you know what I mean? I look at him now, and I see him again, and I’m like “Oh my god! You’re in front of me, and I’m talking to you!” And then I remember, we made a movie together for like ten months. I know you really well. It’s funny, I just wish that I had done it when I was a little bit older, so I could comprehend what it meant.

Speaking of being a little bit older, rather a little bit younger, your vulgar introduction to the world was in “Hit Girl” in Kick Ass. I’m wondering, what did that do to the trajectory of your career, starting off in such a controversial way?

CM: Honestly, I think it helped me, because I didn’t start off playing the little sister, I didn’t start off playing the little kid. So no one ever had, in their mind’s eye, things like, “Little Baby Chloe”, it was more like adult Chloe. My transition into being more of an adult actor hasn’t been as hard for me as some, who do Disney and everything else. It’s a bit more intricate for them to have to try to make that swift change from child to adult.

And what kind of personal impact has this had on you, compared to some of your peers and contemporaries, around your same age?

CM: I mean, no personal impact, I think it’s just kind of helped my career a little bit. Personally, I’m the same kid. Maybe I’m a little bit less sheltered than probably a little bit more normal kid…

Right, because you don’t have to make that shiny, glimmery transition to adulthood.

CM: I don’t have to lie, yeah.

At this point in your career, you’ve done a lot of strong work, but you haven’t been in any big franchises, as of yet.

CM: No, not until Fifth Wave starts! I’m actually starting my next franchise on September 20th, called The Fifth Wave.

The Fifth Wave, can you tell me a little bit about that?

CM: It’s Rick Yancey’s new trilogy. Basically, it’s based on this alien invasion, and there’s this girl who’s trying to find her brother, to rekindle her life.

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