Moon(7/6/2009)
The very first science fiction movie was Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon. A fourteen minute epic in which a group of explorers go to the moon, walk onto the surface (no space suit needed), find a group of moon men, beat them off with umbrellas, then return home. The film is probably best known for a moment in which their ship crashes into the man on the moon’s eyeball, he doesn’t look pleased. After that the moon was the number one destination for fictional space travel, at least until we went there for real and realized it was kind of a boring place. In fact it quickly dawned on us that none of the planets in this solar system are really destinations for high adventure and since then we’ve been setting our science fiction stories in distant galaxies. The problem with this is that after a good fifty-some years of space travel it’s become increasingly clear how far away we are from being able to get to Mars, much less a new solar system. In fact the closest planet that might have life on it is 150 trillion miles away. That’s not a problem if you’re making a Space Opera like Star Wars or Star Trek, but it’s not all right if you’re making what you’d call “hard science fiction,” stories that predict very realistic and plausible future technology. Those kind of serious Science fiction movies have been looking back toward our home solar systems. Danny Boyle’s 2007 hard science fiction film Sunshine had the sun as its destination, while this latest entry of the genre is bringing the genre full circle by returning to our closest celestial neighbor, the moon.
Rather than having a twist ending, this film has a major twist about a third of the way into it. It would be ludicrously hard to talk about this film without giving away this twist, so this review is going to be a bit more spoilerish than most. I won’t give away any of the later developments, but be warned that I will be giving away some key surprises from the first act or two.
The film is set an indeterminate number of years into the future at a point where humanity has finally found a clean source of energy by mining a substance called Helium-3 from the surface of the Moon. A base has been established on the moon but travel there is still a slow and unwieldy process, and as such there is only one person manning the operation, a man named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). His main job is to drive to the automated harvesters mining the surface, remove the full capsules of Helium-3, and then launch them off to Earth. His only companion is a robot/computer system called Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). One day Sam sees a strange vision while driving the lunar rover and crashes it right into the automated harvester. He wakes up the next day in the ships infirmary. Gerty wants him to stay in bed, but Sam convinces the computer to let him leave. He immediately drives out to the site of the crash, and looks into the rover where he finds his own body still in there and still alive. He runs the body back to the base and resuscitates it. Now he must discover why there’s someone else who looks just like him on the base and then must find out what the company plans to do about it.
A lot of this movie rests on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell as this is essentially a one man show; or rather a two man show in which Rockwell plays both parts. Rockwell is a great actor who, for whatever reason, has never really been able to break the A-list. He has everything a mainstream actor needs but has never become a household name, possibly because he’s attracted to more challenging material than some actors. His double role here is reminiscent of Nicholas Cage’s double role in Adaptation, he must play two people who look alike but who have fairly different personalities. The original Sam is the slightly more Rockwellish of the two, he’s a laid back person albeit one who’s gone through three long years of moon work and is rather tired from it. The second of the two is a bit more stern and aggressive, he hasn’t been beaten down by his situation and he’s less easy-going. There are physical differences from which you can tell the two apart, the first has a bandage on his hand and a black eye, but for the most part it is Rockwell’s acting which differentiates the two. Quite impressive. My one problem with the characterization (and I mainly blame the script for this) is the fairly unperturbed way Sam reacts to his “twin” at first. There is a portion shortly after the twist where the characters are way too calm about the fact that their staring at someone who looks just like them. If I was in that situation there would be a lot more swearing and more demands to know exactly what the hell is going on.
The robot here is a cross between HAL 9000 and R2-D2. I’m not exactly sure whether it is an independent robot or if the floating console is a manifestation of the base’s main computer. He floats around, has what looks like a camera lens for an eye and there’s a screen on him which displays various smilies in order to convey emotions. One usually expects these kind of robots to be nothing but trouble, especially when he’s been programmed by a seemingly conspiratorial corporation. This robot plays with that convention, his allegiance is never entirely clear, at least not until very late in the movie. That was an interesting take, but I would have liked a better explanation as to why the robot took the side he did. As it is he just takes a side because he does, I expected that to be resolved better than it was.
Visually the film is perfectly competent but never exceedingly great. The film was made relatively cheaply for a science fiction film of this sort, and I’m sure a lot of ingenuity went into the production. The production leans toward physical effects more than CGI, a decision I certainly approve of, though it was a bit annoying that a few shots of the moon’s surface seemed to be recycled at times. The most impressive element of the production was the space base’s highly detailed interiors, which seemed to share elements from some of the better spaceships of the genre like the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s Alien or the Icarus II from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
I think the concept at the center of this is Chaos Theory. Admittedly, everything I know about this theory comes from the book and movie Jurassic Park, but bear with me. The idea behind Chaos Theory is that no system is perfect because the initial conditions will not remain the same continually. One example given in Michael Creighton’s novel is that of a billiard table on which a ball rolls with enough force to continue rolling forever. Deterministic Theory predicts that the ball would continue along the same pattern forever, while Chaos theory suggest that the felt of the table would eventually deteriorate, imperfections would form on the ball and eventually the conditions would change enough to throw the ball off course. Another film which I think shows chaos theory in action is Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, in which a television network has found the perfect way to keep an unsuspecting man living in their elaborate town-sized city for thirty some years, but bit by bit the illusion was destroyed and an evolving suspicion in the man’s mind about the solution eventually trumps the best laid plans of the producers. There is a similar situation in Moon, though I won’t spell it out for fear of giving away more than I already have, but like The Truman Show this is about a seemingly fool-proof house of cards that finally collapses partly because of an unforeseen accident but mostly because of the unanticipated factor of human curiosity and questioning.
Now, this theoretical interpretation is fine on an intellectual level, but it never really strokes any of the emotions that I expect great cinema to stroke. This film is neither as technically or intellectually ambitious as something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, both films with a certain sense of awe that Moon lacks. Aside from my coldly intellectual chaos theory interpretation, I’m not sure this really amounts to much more than an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. Of course, an extended episode of The Twilight Zone is certainly worth watching, but I really wish this had amounted to more. Some of the earlier portions of this movie really seemed to be leading to something grander than the eventual explanation; I looked forward to a really profound explanation for Sam’s visions and for Gerty’s strange behavior. But the solution turned out to be the most mundane of all possible explanations. That was disappointing. Ultimately I believe this is a movie that draws inspiration from all the right sources but which does nothing to push its genre forward in any meaningful way. Still it’s a very well crafted and intriguing 97 minutes of cinema that never seems to drop the ball in a major way; I just wish they tried to run with the ball when they had it instead of standing still with it.
*** out of Four
Public Enemies(7/1/2009)
I feel really sorry for filmmakers who try to make crime movies these days, the standards for that genre are unbelievably high. No matter how great a movie about gangsters gets, the bar has been set so high by the likes of The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface that it has become hard to call even the best examples of the genre being made today “great.” Take for example 2007’s American Gangster, a film which is element for element a pretty damn good effort, but when compared to some of the above mentioned films it’s hard to really get too excited about it. Still there have been a few exceptional films like The Departed and City of God which have found their way into the pantheon in spite of the sky high expectations, and one such exception was Michael Mann’s Heat, a sprawling cops and robbers epic which paired Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in a thrilling cat and mouse chase through L.A.’s underworld. Because of this and the presence of A-list talent like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, Mann’s new film about the legendary John Dillinger, Public Enemies, comes with a level of anticipation above the already high standards of crime epics.
John Dillinger was not a gangster in the way Al Capone, Frank Lucas, or even Henry Hill were. He didn’t run any vast criminal conspiracies from dark mansions nor did he hold any legitimate covers. Rather, he was a bank robber in the vein of Bonnie & Clyde; and was, in spite of his massive fame in the eye of the public, considered “public enemy number one” by the newly formed FBI. When the film begins, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is already an established criminal and the film is about the last few months of his life. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent fresh off the apprehension of Pretty Boy Floyd, who has been put in charge of a task force set up to capture or kill Dillinger. Meanwhile, Dillinger is basking in his infamy; he has the fastest cars, the nicest clothes, and he’s also hooked up with a beautiful woman named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). But as Purvis begins to close in it becomes clear that the good times aren’t lasting forever and Dillinger must be increasingly careful in order to survive as public enemy number one.
Another legendary American outlaw was given the film treatment in 2007 with Andrew Dominick’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an excellent film but one which did not resonate well with the public. That film had the difficult task of trying to subvert the legendary status of the outlaw at the center, to show Jesse James for the moody killer he was rather than the Robin Hood figure the public believed him to be, all the while examining what it was that created that public fascination. Michael Mann does not take the same approach with his film though one could envision a film where he does. Generally, Mann seems rather disinterested in the way Dillinger is seen by the public and by Dillinger himself for that matter and instead focuses on how he is viewed by the FBI, the criminal underworld, and his girlfriend Billie Frechette.
Mann could have depicted Dillinger as a martyred rebel or as a menace that needed to be put down by brave G-Men, but he never settles into a simple groove like that. It’s almost impossible not to be pretty impressed by Dillinger’s smooth antics but Mann also does not hesitate to show the more violent aspects of his personality. Mann also undermines a lot of Dillinger’s exploits in a brilliant scene where he is told that much more money is made through a secret telephone fraud than by the very public bank robberies he had involved himself in. On the other hand, the movie is hardly an advertisement for the FBI who are often excessive and cruel in their pursuit of Dillinger, and they seem motivated more by public opinion than a genuine desire to make America safer. Ultimately Mann’s depiction is very matter-of-fact, he shows Dillinger doing the very cool looking things that history records him having done and allows the audience to judge. This failure to take sides may seem frustratingly non-committal to some, but I appreciated Mann’s willingness to report without judgment.
It has become a critical custom to examine Johnny Depp performances by trying to identify the sources of his inspiration, this film will be no exception because he is clearly trying to channel James Cagney. This is a pretty obvious choice but also an effective one especially from a physical perspective. Like Cagney, Depp has a certain range of facial movement here, he can be charming Frechette one moment and then have a killer’s look in his eyes as he fires a Tommy Gun the next. But with a Cagney impersonation comes a certain degree of theatricality that one simply has to accept, and this is particularly troublesome in some of the early line readings. In fact that’s true of a lot of people’s acting in the first few scenes of the film, which seem to be liberally homageing the acting mannerisms of thirties cinema in a way that the later scenes aren’t for some reason.
Unlike Depp, there aren’t many reservations I have about Christian Bale, who’s doing some of the best work I’ve seen him do in a large budget film in a long while. Bale has the Elliot Ness role here; he needs to act like a boy scout but also like a pretty tough and smart agent. Bale is pretty restrained throughout, it’s like he realized his character was no match for John Dillinger in the eyes of the audience so he never goes out of his way to seem like some sort of badass. His character is someone who gets results by being smarter, not stronger, than the opposition and he’s not ashamed to ask for help when he realizes he’s outgunned. But it’s Marion Cottilard who steals the show here. I couldn’t stand the overbearing work Cottilard won an Oscar for in 2007’s La Vie En Rose, but I absolutely loved her here. Dillinger is a man who could have hooked up with movie stars and singers if he wanted to, but Cottilard’s work makes it abundantly clear why he was taken with this coat check girl. Cottilard is drop dead gorgeous in the film and sexy but not in a way that makes her look like some sort of fake Maxim model. She really feels like someone who could verbally go toe to toe with Dillinger and you believe her character when she stays loyal to Dillinger even at personal risk.
In his last two films Michael Mann had been experimenting with Digital Photography, a decision which didn’t draw a lot of attention firstly because both Collateral and Miami Vice spent most of their running time under cover of night and secondly because they both inhabited very modern settings. Here however Mann has thrown down the gauntlet and declared a place in the making of large scale period pieces for digital photography. To shoot with this kind of digital camera is basically the 21st Century equivalent of shooting on grainy 16mm film stock, it lacks a certain glowing beauty but in turn it gains a certain documentary-style immediacy. One thing I like about digital photography is that it really seems to see the world the way the human eye does rather than the way movies try to make the world look. We’re so used to seeing the thirties through orange color filters at magic hour that to see it in this raw form seems kind of jarring. Basically it’s the exact opposite of what Sam Mendes did with Road to Perdition, but I’d say it’s a reasonable tradeoff. After all, how many gangster movies that look like The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential do we need? Because Mann chose to shoot with such a modern and reality tinged medium you really feel like you’re in the same room with John Dillinger, you feel like you’re watching gangland shootouts that were caught on tape and put on Youtube in full 1080p.
Speaking of the shootouts, the action scenes in this film are numerous and awesome. These robberies, escapes, shootouts, and car chases are smoothly shot and kinetic. The action is fast paced and immediate like a Bourne film, but they also lack a lot of the more aggressive techniques that have turned some of the people off to that series. In that sense this is sort of the best of both worlds, it’s intense but I doubt the choreography will confuse anyone. Particularly strong is the sound design. Like the shootout in Heat, all the gunshots here are exceptionally loud and realistic which is invaluable in adding to the intensity of the gunplay. I do not for the life of me know why other directors don’t use Michael Mann’s sound library when putting together their shootouts. Highlights include a tense prison escape that opens the film, a massive shootout in a Wisconsin woods that ends brilliantly, a couple of great bank robberies, a tense cat and mouse scene in a dark hotel room, but best of all is Dillinger’s famous wood gun escape in which he fleas a heavily guarded prison without firing a shot. Those simply seeking summer thrills will be just as happy with this movie as those interested in the life of the famous outlaw.
There are a handful of problems to be found: some of the supporting performances are a little weak, there’s a really bad scene in which Dillinger does something really cocky for no reason (I thought for sure it would end up being a dream sequence or something but it wasn’t), and a there are a couple plot points that never really come to fruition. But the movie’s real sin is just that it isn’t a masterpiece, and that’s what some people demand whenever a great director and cast try to make a crime movie, but that’s a bit short sighted. There are a lot of critics who seem to be holding this to a much higher standard than they should and rejecting it just because it isn’t the best movie this genre has ever seen. That’s a bunch of hogwash; this is better than any Hollywood movie I’ve seen in the last seven months and it should be celebrated for that, not punished for daring to have a good pedigree while not quite being Oscar worthy. This is an excellently executed and very entertaining movie I recommend to anyone without hesitation. If you skip this movie to see a two hour toy commercial or something this weekend you should be ashamed.
***1/2 out of four
DVD Catch-Up: The International(6/17/2009)
During the late seventies a paranoid streak began to emerge in Hollywood thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, this trend has widely been linked to post-Watergate cynicism that was going on throughout the country. Nixon’s scandal had exposed the ability of the government and agencies like the CIA to secretly do all sorts of sinister things behind Kafka-esque webs of complication, secrecy, and intrigue. This trend seems to have re-emerged as of late in films like Syriana and Michael Clayton, partly because of the forceful nature of the Bush administration, but the main reason has been the behavior of corporations who now more than ever seem hell-bent not only on fair profits but outright world domination. There was plenty of evidence of just how powerful corporate institutions had gotten when The International began filming in the September of 2007; but the parallels of the world today seemed all the more prescient to the world of today by the time it reached theaters in the February of 2009, one month after names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG began to be fixtures in the nations headlines.
The antagonist at the center of the film is the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit, investigating them are an INTERPOL agent named Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney named Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts). The bank is believed to be the financial institution of choice for organized crime, but it quickly seems that the extent of this bank’s corruption extends far beyond the mafia and into third world coups, first world assassinations, and the trade of advanced weapons to unsavory elements. Their investigation brings them to Berlin, Milan, New York, and even Turkey; all the while they encounter a conspiracy of massive proportions.
One of the biggest complaints about Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (another film that can claim to be part of the paranoid thriller’s resurgence) was that the story was labyrinthine to the point of incoherence. Gaghan’s answer to the criticism is that the film is supposed to be borderline impenetrable in order to reflect just how complex the issues at the center are in the real world, that no one person can comprehend “the system” in its entirety. There seems to be a similar notion at work here; the story is very hard to follow what with the alphabet soup of agencies and financial transactions that are in on the film’s central conspiracy, but this is deliberate. About two thirds of the way into the film a character asserts that the “difference between fact and fiction [is that] fiction needs to make sense.” I’m very fond of this line, it certainly conveys the frustration of trying to solve major problems caused in elaborate ways by astonishingly powerful forces, and this sentiment almost makes me want to forgive the script for all its convolutions.
The problem is that this doesn’t have anywhere near the authenticity of something like Syriana, I think it has the right spirit but the deal breaker is that the forces here are significantly more trigger-happy than they would be in the real world. There are two action sequences here that are real double edged swords, on one hand they seem out of place and unrealistic, but on the other hand they are very skillfully made and enjoyable as they occur. The first is an assassination scene which adds new life to the cliché of the sniper on the roof, the other is a very tense and well choreographed shootout in the famed Guggenheim Museum. Director Tom Tykwer clearly still has the eye for interesting stylistic decisions he had when he made Run Lola Run, but has matured from that effort and abandoned the kinetic overdrive that I think ultimately sunk that former effort. In fact these scenes are refreshingly slow and careful, they don’t overload the sound mix and they have effective pauses for tension. So the catch-22 of the film is that these two scenes are awesome and make the film worth watching on their own, but they are ultimately detrimental to the rest of the movie.
Ultimately, this is a movie that delivers pretty much exactly what I expected from it. It’s a well crafted, glossy thriller that isn’t wildly stupid even if it isn’t particularly insightful either. I didn’t think Clive Owen was particularly well cast as he lacks some of the practical rage the part needs, but he isn’t terrible either and the rest of the cast is pretty good. The film shoots in a number of interesting locales and in a bunch of architecturally interesting locations. I don’t think I would have recommended anyone see it for full price at a theater, but it’s pretty much perfect DVD rental material, just keep in mind that you’re renting an action flick and not a legitimately political thriller.
*** out of Four
The Hangover6/5/2009
I feel like I’ve been fairly careless about the way I’ve been throwing around Judd Apatow’s name whenever I review an R-rated comedy (this is the last time I’m talking about the guy in the first sentence of a movie he didn’t actually make). He’s been such a dominating figure in his genre as of late that he comes up a lot even in reviews for comedies he has absolute no direct role in. Apatow didn’t invent the idea of average joes cursing at each other and he didn’t invent the idea of raunchy comedies with a heart of gold at the center (Kevin Smith was doing both long before anyone had heard of Apatow). Going into the newest R-rated comedy, The Hangover, I found myself pretty much expecting Superbad 2 and just as it was starting I realized that was sort of unfair. Apatow did not write, direct, or produce this and none of the main cast had ever been in one of his movies. Instead I was going to judge it by the standard of its real director, Todd Phillips, a man with a lower profile but arguably just as much influence. Just look at the film’s main box office competitor Land of the Lost: it stars Will Ferrell who made his film breakthrough in Philips’ Old School and it’s a parody of an old T.V. show, a trend started by Phillips’ Starsky & Hutch. I wasn’t a huge fan of Old School, so that wasn’t a that high a standard, but as it turned out this is a film that could have just as easily stood toe to toe with anything the much discussed Apatow has ever put out.
Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married in two days, he loves his fiancé and has nothing but anticipation for the big day and even her family likes him. Before the big day though, he plans to have an epic bachelor party in Vegas with his two best friends. His two best friends are like opposites: Phil (Bradley Cooper) a pretty boy with a devil-may-care who’s ready to party, and Stu (Ed Helms) an over-cautious dentist who’s been thoroughly “whipped” by a mean controlling girlfriend (with a history of infidelity) who he inexplicably plans to marry in the future. Also tagging along is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug’s brother in law who seems rather… simple. The film never comes out and identifies him as mentally handicapped but he has a habit of saying a lot of odd things. The four share a toast and decide to have a wild night. Flash forward to the next morning and the friends wake up in a totally trashed hotel suit complete with a chicken roaming around, a live Tiger in the bathroom, and a damn baby lying near the mini-bar. The only thing missing from the room is Doug the bachelor, and no one can remember what happened to him. Hijinx ensue as the four try to retrace their steps and find their friend in time for his wedding.
This project doesn’t really have a lot of star power, none of the cast members were a big part of the Frat Pack or the Apatow crew, none of them are former SNL members, hell the most famous name here is Ed Helms, a former Daily Show correspondent with a supporting role on “The Office.” None of these actors really standout, the film shows no evidence that any of them could carry a film by themselves, but together they have great chemistry. I think the producers were willing to make this studio comedy without star power is that, unlike a lot of recent comedies, this focuses a lot more on plot than characters. This isn’t a film about the characters coming to grips with their own mediocrity, or trying to struggle with the pros and cons of settling down, in fact no one really grows over the course of the film. Instead the movie is entirely about seeing how these guys are going to solve the problem they’ve put themselves in.
Usually people place a lot of the credit for comedies like this on the actors and their improvisations, but I suspect that a lot more of this film is derived from its script. The story presents a pretty legitimate mystery/puzzle for the protagonists, which seems to take another wacky turn every step of the way. The characters continuously react to these turns with increasing desperate wit. This isn’t a comedy that’s of no value without the laughs; it has a story that can more or less hold its own. The situations are almost as important as the reactions, in a lot of comedies it’s all about the reactions.
Vegas is a pretty good location for all this, it is after all the place dedicated to sin and excess. Yet, as the characters pass the Las Vegas sign the soundtrack isn’t playing “Viva Las Vegas,” it’s playing an ominous Kanye West song called “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” from that point you realize this city has nothing but unpleasantness in store for these guys. The film takes a pretty old school approach to the city, this place doesn’t look like a family resort, it seems like a shady place that can lead to no good. The city seems mainly to be populated with hookers, disreputable celebrities, and cops sick of arrogant tourists causing senseless acts of drunken vandalism.
My only major complaint is with the film’s ending which I feel is something of a copout. I’m going to have to go into spoiler territory to explain this so avert your eyes from this paragraph if you don’t want to know the ending. In the last fifteen minutes the characters are basically able to solve all their problems and the whole think is wrapped up into a perfect bow. This is basically a get out of jail free card for people who have done nothing to earn it. I’m not saying the film needed a completely grim ending but the ending it did have seemed completely incongruous with the darker version of Vegas seen earlier in the film. The ending was such an abrupt left turn that I suspect it was a last minute change in reaction to test screenings or something. This ending basically turns the menacing Vegas from the opening scenes into the consequence free playground that the cities advertising campaigns want you to think it is. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this magical happy ending is disastrous, but it is a major flaw in an otherwise excellent comedy.
This is not really the easiest movie to analyze. It basically comes down to the fact that it’s really really funny. It’s a rowdy affair and if you dig these kinds of movies this is going to be worth your time, if you haven’t liked these kinds of movies this will be no exception. I do like these movies, so I found myself laughing pretty hard the whole way through, these many laughs are more than enough to overcome its poor ending. After the ambitious but disappointing Observe and Report this is exactly what I needed.
***1/2 out of Four
Drag Me to Hell(5/31/2009)
This has been a pretty lame May for me movie-wise, I dug Star Trek but everything else that came out didn’t seem worth my time. X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked like a blatant attempt to milk dry an already wounded series, Angels and Demons looked as stupid as the other Dan Brown properties, and Terminator: Salvation had a hack director whose intentions were only confirmed by the blatant sell-out of its PG-13 rating. This trend of making movies PG-13 for no reason other than to make a little extra money is quickly becoming a major pet peeve of mine, I don’t demand extra sex, violence, and cursing but it’s indicative of a larger problem; one of trying to appeal to overly wide audiences and consequently making mild soulless movies made in marketing committees. It’s beginning to seem like a PG-13 rating is like a stamp that has less to do with content and more to do with a lame attitude. Shocking as that Terminator rating was, I was even more surprised when I learned that Sam Raimi’s new horror title, Drag Me to Hell, would also have this dreaded rating. This shocked me first because this was supposed to be Raimi’s return to the hardcore and second because the film’s outlandish title seemed to indicate that this would be something that would revel in its content and wear a harder rating like a badge of honor. I almost didn’t bother going to this, but unlike Terminator: Salvation, this still had a stellar director and solid reviews so I bit the bullet and went ahead to the movie.
The film is about Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a bank branch in Southern California. She’s good at her job, but her boss (David Paymer) feels that she’s been a bit too generous with people and is thinking about giving a big promotion to the suck-up rookie officer Stu (Reggie Lee). Under pressure from the money chasing parents of her caring boyfriend (Justin Long), Christine sees an opportunity to prove she can make “tough decisions” when an old gypsy woman named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) comes into the bank asking for a not so reasonable extension on her sub-prime loan. Christine denies the loan to the approval of her boss, but the gypsy feels she’s been shamed and makes a scene. Later that day, the gypsy attacks Christine and places a curse on her… with spooky results.
You did read that right, the villain of this is a gypsy curse… gypsy. Do they even have gypsies in this country? It doesn’t matter; this movie is obviously taking a campy approach to the genre. The film reminded me a lot of the George Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow, which was based on old EC comics. This is a heightened world with heightened morality; Christine is punished for her immorality toward the gypsy woman in a very ironic way. That the film can get very predictable at times, especially regarding the very last twist, sort of goes with the territory. What Raimi does not do is go as far into the realm of tribute as something like Grindhouse, this doesn’t feel like it should be set in the fifties and the production values are just as good as the budget allows it to be. I do question the sometimes excessive use of CGI and not very good CGI either.
So how is Mr. Raimi going to scare anyone without gallons of plasma? Well he’s going to makes stuff jump out at you unexpectedly… a lot. You know those websites that people trick you into going to that make you focus on some sort of puzzle and concentrate before some sort of creepy picture suddenly pops out and a loud noise plays and sort of give you a heart attack? The whole first act of this movie is sort of a chain of those sorts of scares, creepy things jump out at the character often accompanied by very loud music, these blatantly manipulative tricks have often been called the horror equivalent of a pie in the face, they’re effective but cheap. Granted, Raimi does these more effectively than most filmmakers out there, but I expect a little more from him and for a decent portion of the movie I was afraid that was all I was going to get.
Fortunately the film improves dramatically in the film’s third act where its inner Evil Dead kicks in and the curse begins to manifest itself in more tangible ways and Christine’s predicament starts to take precedent over the jump-scares which incidentally are becoming less effective around this point. Many have said the movie is just as good without the blood, but I’m not as willing to give him a pass as some have been. There is one scene in particular (it involves an anvil) which almost certainly would have benefited from legitimate splatter elements. I’m sure this release is a big opportunity for Raimi’s horror shingle Ghosthouse Pictures, and he clearly wants to get as much money out of it as possible, but it’s clear he’s sacrificed the opportunity to make as much money as possible. But is this really a wise decision even on a financial level? I’d think the audience for something called “Drag Me to Hell” would want over the top violence. Sometimes marketers are too busy chasing the 13-17 market that they forget that gore sells (just ask the producers of the Saw films) and you are sacrificing an audience when you do things like that. Raimi tries to make up for this with material that is generically gross in a “Fear Factor” way without actual violence, but this mostly just comes across as crass.
A lot of people have been receiving Alison Lohman’s performance pretty negatively. I’ve liked Alison Lohman’s work ever since her excellent performance in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men. Frankly, I think some people might be a bit too suspicious of attractive blonde women in horror films; maybe they just confused her with Lindsay Lohan whom Alison bears no relation. I think Lohman portrays her character just fine; this is a broad performance in a genre film, it isn’t going to win Oscars or anything but it works for the film. If anyone is annoying here it is almost certainly Justin Long. I’ve had a firm dislike for Mr. Long for quite a while and this confirms all my suspicions. Someone of this age being a University Professor is about as unlikely as Katie Holmes playing an ADA in Batman Begins (which isn’t to say such an achievement is impossible in either case). Long just sort of plays himself, as he usually does. More interesting is the work of Lorna Raver as the Gypsy woman, she totally commits to this crazy role and brings a lot to the project.
There’s a lot wrong with this movie… a Lot. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a very good time with it. This in an unashamed B-movie in the classic sense of the word, and it is a whole lot of fun. There are a lot of bad movies that claim to have a fun factor which overcomes whatever flaws they have; the problem is that they aren’t really fun they just think they are because they could cram a lot of special effects and explosions into every frame. Many reviews will compare this film to a rollercoaster, and rightfully so. There’s a legitimate energy that makes you forget about the problems while you’re watching it, it’s one of the few movies that really earns the right to ask you to leave your brain at the door. I saw it as a Sunday matinee and that’s probably the best place to experience it. This probably needs a big screen and a great sound system to make the jump-scares really work, though I’m not sure I’d be happy to pay full price for it, it is a B-movie after all.
*** Out of Four
Star Trek(5/7/2009)
Star Trek was once just a T.V. show, and not a particularly well produced show either, but that show laid the groundwork for a universe that would support five spinoffs, ten feature length movies, countless novels, and unlimited merchandising. This is a series that elicits some of the most passionate fandom in all of pop culture, but that was also its undoing. I for one love Star Trek; I own all the movies and I’ve seen every single episode of all five live action T.V. series. In spite of this, I’d never call myself a full fledged trekkie, because that word conjures up disturbing images of grown men living in their mother’s basement who dress up as Vulcans to go to conventions and spend a fortune on toys. No one wants to associate themselves with those Klingon-speaking freaks, and I think that’s a big part of why the last couple movies did poor at the box office, and why the last series got cancelled pre-maturely in spite of solid third and fourth seasons.
I may be in the minority I thought the last feature film in the franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis, wasn’t half bad. It didn’t have a wildly creative story, but the battles were pretty cool and at its center was a nifty exploration of the debate between nature and nurture. I would have loved to see the series go on with The Next Generation cast; after all, the original cast’s film series frequently recovered from lackluster installments, and the abandonment of the series left fans without the sense of closure they deserved. As such, I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard J.J. Abrams was going to “reboot” the series. As was the case with Casino Royale, I was afraid this was an extreme solution to problems that had simpler solutions. What’s more, J.J. Abrams has always been hit or miss for me. While I dig his show “Lost” and I thought Cloverfield was a pretty cool project, but I generally disliked his debut film Mission: Impossible 3. Flawed as the previous Mission: Impossible films had been, they at least took themselves seriously; Abram’s third entry to the series on the other hand was a very smug film that used quirkiness as crutch. That’s a very cheap tactic which I have a great distaste for, and it’s a style that Abrams very easily could have fallen into while making a Star Trek reboot.
If Abrams was just going to turn the series into a great big joke I was going to be pissed. Add to that the young MTV-ready cast and the general ambiguity as to whether this would fit into the continuity of the series and I was more than prepared for this to be a disaster. Thankfully, most of my fears were only half founded. The film does have a handful of problems, and I’ll get into them momentarily, but in general this is a pretty decent film and Abrams has clearly matured some since his debut. Word of warning, while I will generally be a spoiler-free review, there are some surprises fairly early in the film that I will be discussing, so you may not want to read further if you want a completely pure viewing experience.
The film opens with an attack on a Federation Starship by a very larger and mysterious Romulan vessel. The Federation ship is destroyed, but a few people escape including a pregnant woman whose husband is killed on the ship, she soon gives birth to a son and right before her husband is killed he persuades her to name the boy James T. Kirk. Twenty-some years later, James Kirk (Chris Pine) is a reckless young man roaming Iowa making trouble. Fate will eventually lead him to meet a Starfleet officer named Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who convinces Kirk to join Starfleet and put his considerable skills to work. Kirk is an ace cadet but his skills will be put to the test when there is a crisis near the planet Vulcan which sounds an awful lot like the disturbance that occurred in the attack at the beginning of the film.
Obviously this entry of the series is a prequel of sorts going into the younger years of the cast of the Original Series. Abrams has cast young actors in all the roles, so I suppose an analysis of the cast is the best place to start. I was pretty surprised when I heard that Chris Pine had been cast as Kirk, mainly because I’d never heard of the guy or seen any of his movies. I went in not knowing what to expect from the guy, but I was pretty impressed with his work. The original Kirk was basically an All-American Flash Gordon-type space hero, and Pine is able to embody this without taking it too far. Also he… never… does that… stuttery… William Shater… impersonation that I… was afraid he’d… do. Pine is trying to embody Captain James Tiberius Kirk, not that hammy actor who’s turned his career into a joke.
Mr. Spock is portrayed by Zachary Quinto, who was a little more familiar to me from his work on television’s “Heroes.” While I hated that show pretty much from the beginning, but Quinto and his character Sylar is one of the few elements of the show I liked. In the previous shows they would occasionally mention that Spock was half human, but that element was rarely explored in depth. This younger Spock is clearly trying a lot harder to come to terms with his partially human ancestry, and that’s an interesting take on the character.
The rest of the cast is given less screen time. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is given a sexy makeover, Saldana is certainly easy on the eyes and I hope her character is given more to do in the sequels. McCoy is his usual caffeinated self, Carl Urban does a pretty decent DeForest Kelley impression and provides some of the film’s more appropriate comic relief. Sulu (John Cho) is given a pretty cool action scene (he’s an accomplished fencer, a callback to an original series episode called “The Naked Time”), but is otherwise not given much to do. Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, is the only cast member I was particularly familiar with going in. He doesn’t look anything like James Doohan, but he clearly understands the rhythm of what makes the character work, and his Scottish accent is significantly better. The one performance I didn’t much care for at all was that of Anton Yelchin, who plays Chekov and maintains and magnifies the character’s horrible Russian accent, which is odd considering that Yelchin was born in Saint Petersburg (but raised in the United States). There are extensive (lame) jokes about the character’s ridiculous accent, so I can only assume that this was Abrams’ doing rather than Yelchin’s. If they could give Scotty a better accent why not Chekov?
Wait a minute… What’s Chekov even doing here? Wasn’t Chekov first introduced in the series second season? Well, Abrams has found a way to get around these kinds of continuity issues; this is a little bit spoiler-ish so you may want to skip to the next paragraph. The mysterious ship from the first attack is a Romulan mining ship that has transported itself back in time from the Next Generation era. The idea is that the actions of this ship have cause a butterfly effect that has altered history. So Trek continuity before March 22, 2233 remains in place, but events after it are more or less fair game. I don’t know if I like this, Abrams has basically wiped out forty three years of material, none of it ever happened. Does this mean Kirk’s dogfight with Khan was all for nothing? Does it mean Jean-Luc Picard never gets born? Does it mean Captain Sisko’s fight against the Dominion was a big waste of time? In fact, it means that the only Trek series that hasn’t been wiped to oblivion was “Enterprise,” and I’m sure that alone will piss off a lot of people. That’s an unsettling development, and unusual considering that the one part of Trek continuity that really needed shaking up was the back story which claims that World War Three occurred in the early 90s. On the other hand I like that Abrams found a way to reboot the series within its continuity rather than inexplicably rebooting it the way they did with James Bond.
In order to gain back some Trekkie-cred, Abrams has filled the movie with references and interesting aspects of pre-reboot continuity. For instance, we see Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru, a Starfleet exam referenced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Also interesting is the inclusion of Captain Pike, the leader of the Enterprise from an unaired pilot called “The Cage” who was established as the previous pilot of the Enterprise when footage from “The Cage” was used in a two-part episode called “The Menagerie.” The film also includes various trademark lines from the series like “I’m a doctor, not a physicist” and “I’m giving it all she’s got, Captain.” In fact there are probably a lot of smaller references I didn’t pick up on in one viewing, and many fans will probably be so busy combing through them that they’ll forget that J.J. Abrams has wiped everything that ever happened on their favorite T.V. show from the history books.
However, most people aren’t going to give a damn about these obscure references. They just want to know one thing: “is this a fun movie?” The answer is certainly “yes”. As an action movie this is up to the standards of recent summer blockbusters in a way that most other Trek movies haven’t. There are at least two good ship to ship battles, one shootout, and a particularly exceptional set-piece involving space suits, a giant drill, and a samurai sword. Action has always been part of the franchise, but rarely to this level, and occasionally the technology that’s been established isn’t ideal for high octane thrills. The Enterprise itself is a large and not overly nimble vessel, it was clearly meant to be more like a giant tall ship than a slick motorboat. This doesn’t stop J.J. Abrams from constructing elaborate effects sequences that are occasionally too big for their own good. For instance, the set in the final shootout is almost hypnotically huge and complicated; the action taking place there almost gets drowned out by the massive effects in the background.
There was however one action sequence that was blatantly misguided, and that was a completely gratuitous car chase in the beginning of the film. The scene involved Kirk as a thirteen year old boy stealing a classic car and recklessly driving it off a cliff. I question this scene firstly because it’s pointless, everything it says about the character is established just as well in a later bar fight scene, it does nothing to advance the plot, it comes very soon after another better action scene that is more than enough to kick off the movie and its style is generally out of place in a Space Opera. This chase to the tune of The Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” (a song choice I would more than aprove of in a better chase scene), feels more like something out of The Fast and The Furious than Star Trek.
That misguided chase scene isn’t the only mistake J.J. Abrams makes in order to reach a larger audience. I think there are generally a few too many attempts at humor going on in the film. There are plenty of jokes that are brief, unobtrusive, and funny, and I’m more than happy to see them in the film. Then there are other jokes that are long, misguided and out of place. I’ve already mentioned that they go too far with Chekov’s thick accent, and that’s more than apparent in a lengthy portion of the film in which he bungles a monologue to a lame comedic effect. There’s also a dumb joke about enlarged hands and a goofy effects sequence about Scotty getting stuck in a series of tubes. Other jokes aren’t so bad in and of themselves, so much as in their quantity. I have no problem with Abrams using occasional humor to lighten up the mood, but at time there are a few too many light moments in a row for comfort. That said, the humor here isn’t anywhere near as smug or obtrusive as it was in Mission: Impossible 3, so Abrams is clearly learning a little restraint.
I was more than willing to give this a pass for a lot of continuity errors, but there are a few larger qualms I have with its adherence to the larger themes of the show. In particular, I object to the way that McCoy has been relegated to the role of comic relief. I’ve always viewed the trinity of Spock (logic), McCoy (Emotion), and Kirk (a mix of the two) to be essential to the dynamic of the Original cast. Here they’ve made Kirk more impulsive and turned focused on a duality between him and Spock. I hope they make McCoy, and the rest of the cast for that matter, more important in the next film.
The more insidious problem here is the focus on action over ideas. J.J. Abrams has said that he wanted to explore the optimism at the center of Gene Rodenberry’s vision, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the film. Previous Trek films have all managed to explore philosophical issues in the midst of adventure, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was an examination of death, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was an elaborate political allegory, even lackluster installments like Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Insurrection had more thematic ambition than this. There’s none of that here, this is an action movie, a very fun and well crafted action movie that establishes interesting characters, but an action movie nonetheless. That’s why I cannot rank this new film among the best this series has offered, but that’s not to say I didn’t have fun along the way. This is a good movie, but on the spectrum of summer entertainment it’s much more in line with Iron Man than The Dark Knight, though there are of course much worse things to be in line with than that.
*** out of four
Observe and Report(4/10/2009)
My relationship with Hollywood comedy has been shaky at best for the longest time. I’ve long been at odds with public opinion about 70s and 80s comedy “classics” like Caddyshack, Airplane, and Animal House, which all seemed like half-assed unfunny messes to me; and it wasn’t just those three movies either. I was about ready to dismiss film as a strong medium for comedy in favor of standup and television… then a man named Judd Apatow came along. It was with Judd Apatow produced films like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad that I finally began to laugh at movie theaters again. And it didn’t stop at Mr. Apatow’s work either, a lot of other comedic talents were given the freedom to follow his example and put out like minded films. This seemed to reach its peak last year with the release of such films as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, and to some extents Tropic Thunder which all seemed to be inspired by this wave to some extent. But after all that… I was beginning to think I’d finally had my fill of comedies where people curse a lot and talk bluntly about sex. I skipped a few of these movies like Role Models just because I was getting sick of the formula. Hopefully I’ve had a long enough rest because it appears that the 2009 wave of these movies is being kicked off by the new Seth Rogen vehicle Observe and Report.
The film centers on Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), a mall security guard with delusions of grandeur. Barnhardt takes his job very seriously and views himself as a real officer of the peace. These delusions are only enhanced by the emergence of a flasher (Randy Gambill) who’s been… flashing… in the mall parking lot. Ronnie views this as a call for him to step up and right a wrong in this world, his reaction to this minor sex-offense is disproportionately violent. Ronnie begins a stalker-ish fixation with one of the flasher’s “victims” (Anna Ferris) for whom Ronnie believes he has a particular responsibility to protect. It soon becomes apparent that Ronnie is not just a mildly delusional loser, but an increasingly dangerous sociopath; he’s been prescribed to take anti-psychotic drugs and he has a rather twisted (but not incestuous) relationship with his mother (who he still lives with).
In case you haven’t noticed, this comedy has a very dark streak to it. In fact this is probably the first comedy ever made to claim Martin Scorsese’s blood soaked masterpiece Taxi Driver as a primary influence, unless you mistakenly categorize Scorsese’s own very good but decidedly un-funny film The King of Comedy as an actual comedy (which it isn’t in spite of the title). In fact the parallels between this and Taxi Driver frequently move beyond conceptual inspiration to the point of being an outright parody. Anna Ferris is in the Cybill Shepherd role, A coffee shop clerk named Nell (Collette Wolfe) is in the Jodie Foster role, her boss (Patton Oswalt) is in the Harvey Keitel role, the movie’s ending is clearly in the same fantasy territory as the final scenes of Scorsese’s film and there’s even a voice-over double take clearly inspired by De Niro’s “listen you fuckers” monologue. The idea of turning this material into a broad comedy is inspired, but the idea is easier said than done and without expert execution this movie was doomed.
Sadly, I’m not sure that director Jody Hill was really quite up to the challenge of bringing his inspired vision to the screen. Hill rose to relative prominence on the strength of his debut film The Foot-Fist Way, a micro budget production that gained a distribution deal after it impressed Will Ferrell and Adam Mckay. I was not as impressed by that movie as that pair of comedic all-stars, but I did see a lot of potential in its star Danny McBride (who has a very small cameo in Observe). I was even more impressed by McBride and Hill’s HBO series “Eastbound and Down,” but again I was more convinced of McBride’s talent than Hill’s mastery of comedic structure by that project.
Finally after seeing this project I think that maybe Hill should stick to writing at this stage, because this movie falls prey to some very inconstant tone that may have been acceptable in another film but which torpedoes the meticulous balancing act this film absolutely needed. The key decision that Hill fails to clearly make is whether the film conveys the perspective of an omniscient observer or whether it’s showing what’s in the head of its disturbed protagonist. If it’s from an omniscient perspective then why are there so many bizarre occurrences? Why is Ronnie able to fight so effectively? And why are his actions placed on a pedestal at certain points? But if it’s from Ronnie’s perspective why does he still seem like a buffoon for much of the film’s running time? Why do we still hear people mock him behind his back? The answer is that the film wants to have its cake and eat it too. If the movie began to be told entirely from Ronnie’s it would have stopped being funny fast, because Ronnie doesn’t see himself as funny. As such the film never really commits to one side or the other in its flawed third act.
This is a real shame because in spite of the film can’t commit to a tone, Seth Rogen unquestionably commits to his role and gives what is easily the best performance of his career. Rogen is hardly the lovable loser here that he is in films like Knocked Up, he’s certainly a loser but he’s hardly lovable. Subverting your normal persona like that is hardly easy, just ask Jim Carrey how well The Cable Guy turned out, but Rogen clearly understands exactly what this film is supposed to be and delivers what’s needed. Reportedly Rogen agreed to star in the film under the sole condition that the studio not screw with the darkness of Hill’s vision. I was beginning to worry about Rogen before this, but now I really think he’s going to have a very long and successful career, he seems to be challenging himself and picking interesting roles rather than coasting on his reputation.
I wish I could say as much for the rest of the cast, but I think a lot of the supporting performances are a bit inconsistent. This is actually the first film I’ve seen Anna Ferris in, she was all right but I can’t say I really see what the fuss is about. Ray Liotta seems to be capitalizing on his usual barking persona, but I’m not sure he does enough to differentiate himself from his straight performances; the jokes seem to be missing whenever he’s on screen. Aziz Ansari gives his all but is limited by dialogue that feels a bit like recycled “fuck you” humor from other Apatow-esque films. Finally, there’s Michael Peña, whose character would probably feel more at home in a Will Ferrell movie than in a dark comedy about a sociopath.
The movie really does have a pretty decent supply of laughs, and if that’s all you need this movie probably is recommendable (assuming the dark tone is right for you). However, I really can’t help being pretty damn disappointed by the whole affair. The concept and performance of a brilliant movie are here and it’s just undermined by some shaky direction the whole way, I just don’t think Jody Hill had the chops to pull this off. I think that in the hads of someone like Terry Zwigoff, Spike Jonze, or David Gordon Green (who lends his usual cinematographer to the project) this could have been brilliant, but without directorial genius to match the genius of its concept I think the film falls apart.
**1/2 out of four
Watchmen(3/6/2009)
I’m not really a big comic book fan anymore, though I have been in the past. Throughout my teens I followed comic books, but I only really had enough cash for one hobby and I ended up choosing movies to follow seriously and comics sort of went by the wayside. I still read the occasional trade paperback, but otherwise the habit is pretty much in my past. There is however one relic from my comic book years that I still treasure and that’s my old Watchmen volume. I first read Alan Moore’s classic when I was fifteen and it simply blew my mind. I’ve read it many times since and it’s never failed to bowl me over with its complex story, meticulous structure, and dry satirical wit. A film adaptation of the tome has been rumored for decades, but whenever I heard talk of it I had one stock reaction: “Watchmen is unfilmable.” Now, to my continuing shock, someone has actually made the movie.
The story is an example of the alternate timeline genre. It essentially asks how history would have been affected if costumed vigilantes actually had popped up during the thirties as they did in comic books, and then influenced future generations to do the same. The main story is set during the mid eighties (a contemporary setting when the book was written), and begins with the death of the works most enduring characters; Edward Blake AKA The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) a former vigilante who is tossed out of a window by a shadowy figure. Ostensibly, this is a murder mystery seeking to find who murdered Blake and more importantly why. But there’s a lot more to the whole affair, the story investigates a number of remaining heroes and investigates how they came to be via a number of flashbacks set throughout the later twentieth century. It’s ultimately an exploration of the superhero as a character type, how the real world would affect them and how they would affect the real world.
I’m just going to concede right now that this is not a movie I can look at objectively. Alan Moore’s comic book just means too much to me and I’m just going to be holding an adaptation thereof to a much higher standard than I would any average movie. There’s no doubt that it was the financial success of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City and Zack Snyder’s 300 that inspired the studio to give Snyder the go ahead for the project. Both of those projects had managed to stay true to their crazy source material by being almost frame by frame recreations of the comic panels. But those were Frank Miller adaptations, not Alan Moore adaptations and there’s a huge difference. Frank Miller, particularly in the case of those titles, is a dude who draws cool looking stuff for the sake of drawing cool looking stuff. They’re very simple and superficial works and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what Moore does.
So what is it about Moore’s work that makes it so hard to adapt? It’s very long, but more importantly it’s complex, it covers two generations, and is set during three time periods. It has six main characters, each with a back-story that cannot be ignored as well as an entirely new take on recent history that needs to be explored. Secondly, while it is now thought of as a graphic novel, it was actually a twelve issue mini-series and a number of those issues are structurally self- contained. I’m thinking in particular of issue five (Fearful Symmetry) which is page for page symmetrical in the way its stories weave together, and issue six (The Abyss Gazes Also) which tells its story entirely from the perspective of a psychologist side character who over the course of the issue goes from optimism to despair as he’s forced to look deep into Rorsach’s psyche only to find a mirror image of himself. I highly doubted the film would preserve these structural pivots, and indeed both of these things are lost.
And that leads to larger problem; that a lot of what makes Watchmen a masterpiece is in the details rather than the story itself. The book is loaded with all sorts of sly anecdotes and small bits of brilliance that are littered throughout the narrative and into the very margins. There were just so many things that would have to be lost in any adaptations and each one of them is going to be missed. Add to all that the fact that the comic is loaded with edgy, and un-studio-friendly stuff that was unlikely to ever be seen in a studio production, and it becomes abundantly clear why I’ve been insisting on the story’s unfilmability.
To director Zack Snyder’s credit, he got a lot more into this than I thought he would, and by a lot more I mean a hell of a lot more. They were able to get the basic story in, most of the origins and a decent idea of the past events that lead up to the main story. That’s a lot more than I ever thought they could get into two hours and forty minutes, but this density comes at a price. There is so much squeezed into so little time that the movie has no room to breathe. Consequently, the whole thing feels very rushed, and the events seem to take place over a shorter period of time than they are supposed to. It’s abundantly clear to any viewer that this is not a story that was meant to be told in such a short span of time, and yet there’s still a lot missing from the equation.
The most egregious cut is the omission of a sub-plot about a newspaper vendor in the middle of New York prone to ranting about current events. The main story takes place against the backdrop of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which has brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. This is established in the film and occasionally the audience is reminded of it, but not nearly to the extent that the comic books do. The aforementioned subplot is the main place where this is discussed, and it gives the whole story a degree of apocalyptic paranoia. This is essential both to the story’s tone and in establishing the stakes of everything that goes on.
Another of the aspects that was always a sticking point in the adaptation was the violence, sex, nudity, and language that would have horrified any movie studio. To Zack Snyder’s credit, he doesn’t sell out on anything, he shies away from nothing and appears to have ignored every studio note he undoubtedly received. Dr. Manhattan is just as naked here as he was in the book (the elimination of which would have been symbolically false), and thankfully Snyder has also included all the R-rated violence of the book. The problem, is that Snyder has not only matched the books violence but actually increased it. What was once an off-screen arson has been turned into a meat clever butchery, what was once a throat cutting has turned into a graphic chainsaw massacre, and an attempted rape scene comes with additional blows from the assailant. I suspect that Alan Moore would be horrified by this decision. Moore very specifically made all of the violence in the book potent but brief, and he’s not overly proud of all the senselessly violent stories that his work has inspired.
There are also a number of less graphic and more action oriented fight scenes that have been mishandled. Snyder has grabbed at every scene of violence to be found here and milked it for all it’s worth, extending and sensationalizing each one of them. The opening murder has gone from basically being the discovery of a body to being a five minute highly choreographed fistfight, later fights have been turned from three frame encounters into elaborate actions scenes. I probably could have lived with this, but I don’t like the way these fights play out. The characters tend to jump higher, fight faster, and have faster reflexes than any real human ever could, which is a problem because these aren’t supposed to be actually super powered people. They’re Batman-like vigilantes who aren’t supposed to be stronger than very fit humans.
This brings me to Zack Snyder’s visual style, which is another serious problem the film has. Snyder’s special effects heavy visuals were perfectly suited for filming a story about a bunch of Greeks chopping people’s heads off, but again, Watchmen isn’t a project like that. This is a dialogue heavy work that is meant to inhabit the real world. But this doesn’t look like the real world, it looks like a series of sets that have been decorated to the nth detail, everything just seems really artificial. Snyder has his camera in close all the time, he worries too much about trying to match the comic book’s angles and compositions. It feels like the camera can never sit back and simply observe people having a conversation. Look most other comic book adaptation (The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Spider-Man) and you’ll find they don’t have the same problems connecting with the real world, they’re look is a lot more naturalistic. Also the movie’s cinematography was a bit darker and bluer than I would have liked. Dave Gibbon’s artwork was a lot brighter, and skewed toward the style of silver age comics.
This brings me to another one of the film’s failures, in that its cast is not as great as it should have been. The best of the lot is easily Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who captures the look and attitude of The Comedian perfectly. Jackie Earle Haley also manages to bring the cold craziness of Rorschach both masked and unmasked, great casting there. Billy Crudup also does everything he needs to do while voicing and mocaping Dr. Manhattan. But the other three of the main cast deliver very problematic performances. Patrick Wilson fails miserably in the key role of the second Nite Owl, he fails to make him anything more than a stereotype in the early scenes and his character evolution is rushed and lacking in the subtleties needed. Malin Akerman also isn’t great as the second Silk Spectre, she comes off as whiny rather than pitiable in the film, she come off as something of a ditz. But the most egregious handling of a character is that of Adrian Veidt AKA Ozymandias. I don’t entirely blame Matthew Goode for this, but he plays Veidt as a an overly cold and calculating figure. This is exactly what Veidt is supposed to be like internally, but not externally; externally he is supposed to be a pseudo-Captain America, a Richard Branson type billionaire that has the public’s love.
I don’t want to let my pickiness overlook the film’s strong points, and there are a lot of them. It would be almost impossible for someone to adapt Watchmen and not have some of its brilliance rub off on the project. Though satire isn’t as much of a focus here as it is in the book, there are some funny moments that will be especially potent to those who don’t see them coming. Also, the movie sports an excellent soundtrack which perfectly accentuates the story with classic rock from the sixties. Also very impressive is the opening credits which show images of series history set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” though I wonder how much sense this will make to those unaccustomed to the original mythology.
If nothing else Zack Snyder’s heart seemed to be in the right place, he stayed remarkably close to the source, but to what end? More than any adaptation I’ve seen, Watchmen seems more concerned with the letter of the source than the spirit. Frankly, the book was unfilmable. Sure Snyder fits a lot of Moore’s words and images onto the screen but he never creates the right the right tone and never matches Moore’s audacity. This is very different from the Wachowski Brother’s adaptation of V For Vendetta. In that project the Wachowski’s adapted the story to a different political climate and in doing so made it their own. It was something that manages to be its own thing; this on the other hand has little to offer aside from its inferiority to the source.
I’m not sure how people unfamiliar with the source would react to the film. But frankly feel sorry for them. This shouldn’t be anyone’s first exposure to Alan Moore’s magnum opus. If you really want to take in the Watchmen story this weekend they shouldn’t go to the movie theater, they should go to a book store. The real deal will be sitting in a large pile on a table near the door.
**1/2 out of Four
The Reader(1/25/2009)
The Holocaust was an almost unthinkable tragedy that was unparalleled by any event that occurred during the twentieth century. It’s understandable why an event of such magnitude would invite film adaptation, there’s a lot of drama to it and it’s generally an important part of history which deserves to be discussed and remembered. However, I’ve found a lot of the films made about it have had serious problems. Sophie’s Choice was strong whenever it focused on the event, but the film as a whole was torpedoed by a horrible framing story that dominates most of its running time. Schindler’s List, while strong at certain points, generally lacked focus and despite its colossal runtime it failed to develop any of its characters except for Schindler. The strongest movie about the Holocaust was probably Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which wisely maintained its focus on the title character and did not distract itself with material that was ancillary to that story. All of these projects were at least respectable, but there have been plenty of less than reputable movies on the subject like Life is Beautiful, Jakob the Liar, and the like. That’s why I get queasy whenever one of these projects comes along, whenever a filmmaker is dealing with a subject as powerful as the Holocaust the potential is open for distraction and manipulation. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, while hardly a perfect drama, was not really about the Holocaust and it did not unnecessarily dwell on human suffering.
It starts in 1995 and focuses on a German lawyer named Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes). Quickly, the film flashes back to 1958, when Michael (now being played by David Kross, not to be confused with comedian David Cross), is fifteen and living in Neustadt. On a rainy day, Michael finds himself getting very ill and throwing up on the doorstep of a random apartment building. A tram conductor in her thirties named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) notices this sick adolescent and helps him home. Once he recovers, Michael returns to her building to thank her for her kind turn. The next thing he knows, Hanna’s standing behind him naked, banging commences. The two have an affair for about a year or so, and during their nightly screw-sessions she asks Michael to read some of his books to her. Eventually she comes to her senses, cuts the humping off and moves out of town without leaving a forwarding address. Michael eventually goes to Law School and it would seem that he will finally move on with his life, but soon he’ll run into Hanna again and learn a dark secret about her past.
I’ll admit that that plot description is rather glib, but when a movie takes itself this seriously you really can’t help but talk about it like that. This is very much a story that would only come from a novel, that is to say a novel with a capital “N,” the kind that focuses on characters and symbolism rather than plot. In this case it was a 1995 German language novel by Bernhard Schlink that Oprah apparently liked a lot. Much like play adaptations, movies based on these kind of novels tend to have a very distinctive and slightly lifeless feel to them. Producer Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Oscar winning film The English Patient had a similar novelish tone to it, though this project never reaches that level of literary stuffiness.
The film’s reputation and advertising will have you thinking about it as a holocaust movie starring Ralph Fiennes, but there are no scenes set before 1958 and David Kross has a lot more screen time than Mr. Fiennes. Anyone ready to guess what Hanna Schmitz’ dark secret is yet? The movie is probably better if you don’t know, but everyone else in the world has given it away by now so I won’t dance around it any further. The chick was a former Nazi who worked as a guard in a concentration camp. A good hour of the film is dedicated to the affair between the title character and the former-nazi twice his age, and the second half depicts the effects that this dark secret has on his life. In other words, the kid humps a Nazi for a year and then spends forty years moping about it. At a certain point I was about ready to shout “you bagged a Nazi, get over it!” at the screen, but my sense of theater etiquette prevented such an outburst.
The acting is really what saves this film, and without really talented performers this wouldn’t have even begun to work. Kate Winslet is clearly the standout; her role is very demanding and if she had overplayed it the film probably would have bordered on unwatchable. In the early portions she needs to show that she has a haunted past and cold demeanor while simultaneously seeming normal enough for Michael to fall in love with. Winslet easily could have tried to play for more sympathy, and if she had the whole movie would have fallen apart. David Kross is also a nice discovery, he hadn’t been in anything I’d heard of before this, but he certainly brought what was needed to his character here. Like I said before, Ralph Fiennes isn’t really in this all that much, but he is pretty good when he is on screen.
Does the film really deserve the massive amount of sarcasm I’ve directed toward it? Probably not, but something about this movie just encourage that kind of response, it takes itself really, really, seriously, but it’s literary source give it a certain artificiality that makes it hard to really love it as it wants to be loved. All the film’s symbolism and psychology probably works a lot better on the page where it can be pondered with a certain detachment, but when you’re watching it on the screen it just seems kind of fake and pretentious. But the film’s problems can’t all be blamed on the potential inadaptability of its source material, I think last year’s Atonement succeeded marvelously where this failed, in fact The Reader kind of reminds me of how good that movie was. Most people were pretty shocked to see this nominated for Best Picture, and many fans of The Dark Knight and The Wrestler have jumped on this film for stealing their slot. I share their anger, but most of the wrath should probably be saved for Frost/Nixon, which was a lot more manipulative and didn’t have this film’s control of tone. I’ll probably never be able to really enjoy it, but it’s mostly put together well, and as far as deathly serious dramas go you can do a lot worse. Recommended, but mainly for the acting.
*** out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Shotgun Stories(1/22/2009)
Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories was a film that went entirely under the radar throughout 2008 and built a small but devoted following while playing at film festivals. After hearing enough strong praise for it I decided it was worth a rental. All I’d known about it was that it took place in the south and had to do with a murderous feud between rival families. Between the title and the description I was expecting something a bit closer to Deliverance then what I got, which feels a lot closer to the work of the film’s producer David Gordon Green.
The film is set in a microscopically small southern town and opens with the funeral of a family patriarch. This man had two packs of children from different women, the first he mistreated, the second he doted on. One member of the first pack named Son (Michael Shannon), decides to speak up at this funeral and curses the man who mistreated him and his three full brothers. This sparks a feud between the two packs, which will end in blood.
When would you think such a story would take place? The 1800s? The 20s? Even the 70s? Well it doesn’t take place in any of those eras, it takes place in 2008. But how many people are really going to be starting a blood feud over a few disagreeable words in this day in age? That’s the problem I have with this movie, the people in it make decisions as if they were in a crazy southern gothic exploitation movie, yet Jeff Nichols goes out of his way to ground the film in absolute reality.
From a filmmaking perspective, there is a lot here to be impressed by. I mentioned earlier that David Gordon Green was one of the film’s producers, and if I was told that he was the director I wouldn’t be shocked. First time director Jeff Nichols’ visual style borrows from Green’s work so heavily that it sometimes feels closer to rip-off than influence. Though if you’re going to borrow a style it might as well be from someone as talented as David Gordon Green. The cinematography by Adam Stone is almost as good as Tim Orr’s work in the david Gordon Green cannon, and the film has the same kind of naturalistic calm that David Gordon Green had in The Good Girl and Snow Angels.
But all the artful compositions, restrained violence and minimalistic acting only serve as a means of concealing that this is an exploitation plot in which characters make illogical decisions for two thirds of a movie. As small as this town is I have trouble believing that there wouldn’t be some kind of police force or sheriff trying to stop the idiotic and often deadly feud that is going on. If Nichols had chosen to embrace rather than conceal some of this stories sillier aspects he may have at least had a movie that was true to itself. As it is the movie feels like a fraud, a slow and uninteresting one at that.
** out of four
