(500) Days of Summer(8/12/2009)
One of my favorite online past-times is to read a blog called “Stuff White People Like.” This is a satirical site that catalogs and explains various things that white people (by which they mean hipster yuppies) disingenuously enjoy out of a subconscious desire to be hipper than thou. Every entry of this blog deals with a subject like “Organic Food,” “David Sedaris,” or “New Balance Shoes.” So why do I bring this up? Because I think the people who write for that site could write an entire book about how much of the new Indie romance (500) Days of Summer has been done in order to impress white people. Among the entries of that blog which would apply to this film are: “Apple Products,” “Indie Music,” “Irony,” “Juno,” “Girls With Bangs,” “Musical Comedy (courtesy of a brief but conspicuous dance scene, more about that latter),” “Modern Furniture,” “Bad Memories of High School,” “T-Shirts,” “Architecture,” “Wes Anerson,” “Having Two Last Names (courtesy of star Joseph Gordon-Levit),” and I’m probably forgetting a few.
The film announces from the beginning (via a monotone voice over reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums) that this is a story of boy meets girl, but that it is not a love story. The boy is Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something working at a greeting card company in spite of the fact that he holds an architecture degree. The girl is Summer Finn (Get it! Her name’s Summer and the movie is called 500 Days of Summer!) who is played by Zooey Deschanel. Summer is the new assistant at Tom’s greeting card company, they have little to do with each other at first, but eventually they bond over their enjoyment of the band The Smiths. Soon they hook up, but it’s clear that they are both looking for different things in a relationship. Tom believes in true love and is out looking for “the one,” while Summer is a free spirit just looking for a good time. Their relationship goes for many ups and downs over the course of the film and eventually they must either reconcile their difference or, well… the voice over did say this wasn’t a love story.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about the way “mini-majors” (The “independent” divisions of major studios, ala Miramax, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics, etc.) control things when they are producing movies. Bear in mind that this refers to the movies they actually produce, not necessarily the ones they purchase and distribute. The conclusion many have drawn about these studios is that they control productions just as much as the major studios do, that the “independent” label is merely a marketing device. The “mini-major” who’s most notorious for this is Fox Searchlight Pictures, the people who brought us Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno. Now of course those are good movies, and the mere fact that a studio has control over a film doesn’t mean it will automatically be bad, but it can be a big roadblock to true creativity, and this will rear its head in movies from studios like this that are less successful than the aforementioned titles. I bring all this up because (500) Days of Summer seems to me like a ground zero for just how crass mini-majors have become.
At its heart, I think this movie does have a pretty cute story that has a whiff of authenticity to it, but all of that has been steamrolled by a lot of derivative and obnoxious directorial tricks courtesy director Marc Webb, who unsurprisingly has a background in music videos. It feels almost like the script was given to some sort of mad scientist in the Fox Searchlight labs (we’ll call him a quirkologist), who went through it and decided to add every whimsical “indie” cliché he could think of. It’s got a non-chronological narrative, a load of pop culture references, an indie rock soundtrack, moments of unexpected animation, and even a god damn spontaneous musical number that’s been added for questionable reasons. The base story is of course inviting such a treatment in many ways; after all, it’s about a mopey quarter-life crisis guy who seeks happiness via a manic pixie dream girl. For those who do not know the phrase “manic pixie dreamgirl,” it’s a work coined by critic Nathan Rabin to describe women in films that appear out of nowhere merely to serve the purpose of acting wacky and lifting up the film’s male protagonist. Zach Braff’s Garden State and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown both did as much with this archetype as was ever needed and this movie seems rather superfluous. Oh, and don’t get me started on Tom’s magically precocious little sister who gives him love advice.
Now in spite of my general distaste for this film’s derivative elements and general obnoxiousness, there are aspects to it that were clever. Earlier I glibly dismissed the film’s non-chronological narrative as one of a list of indie clichés it indulges in, but the truth is that the technique was uses pretty effectively here and if that were the only of those clichés it used I probably wouldn’t have made the complaint. Also, there are some genuinely funny moments sprinkled throughout the film, I especially liked the film’s customized “the events are fiction” disclaimer at the beginning and the reading of a greeting card that Tom writes while in the midst of depression. Also, the acting in the film is mostly admirable. While the film’s main character is a whiney tool, the way Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him makes him seem a lot more relatable than the character that’s written on the script. Zooey Deschanel is trying to do something similar, but the script has placed more obstacles in her path than in her co-star’s.
When all is said and done, this is a very irritating film. It’s a romantic comedy that uses hip techniques and references to hide the fact that at its heart it’s just another date movie. That said, it does at least try to hide this fact, which is more than can be said of the cookie-cutter nonsense like The Proposal which has dominated the genre for the longest time. As such, it probably is an above average choice if one is looking to take someone of the opposite sex to see something that could be called romantic. Under all other circumstances I’d advise against seeing it.
** out of Four
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days(3/7/2008)
Within the hardcore film lover community, the cinema of Romania has recently come to great prominence. With films like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 to Bucharest there is a real “new wave” feeling coming from the country. This has been something of a running self deprecating joke among film buffs who would find themselves saying things like “why would I want to see Rambo, when I could be seeing that Romanian abortion movie?” The “Romanian Abortion movie is of course 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, if not the best, certainly the most recognized Romanian film thus far.
Set in 1980s communist Romania, the film revolves around a College aged girl Otilia Mihartescu (Anamaria Marinca), whose dorm roommate, Gabriela Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), has recently become victim to an unwanted pregnancy and wants an abortion. The procedure is illegal in this era of Romanian history and in order to terminate the pregnancy they must illicit the service of a black market abortionist named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).
The message of the movie never comes out and reveals itself, but it is obvious nonetheless: that when abortion is illegal it will still occur regularly but with greater danger, with even less dignity for the child, all while unnecessarily criminalizing young girls. This is the same basic message that was on display in the great 2004 Mike Leigh film Vera Drake which focused on the well meaning woman who provided abortions through a method she doesn’t know is extremely dangerous.
The Cristian Mungiu’s visual style is a big part of what makes the film special. The film’s style recalls Cristi Puiu’s work in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu but does it better. Most large portions of the film are done handheld or with a stedi-cam, but one is never supposed to associate it with documentary filmmaking. The cinematography is clean and free of film grain, but seems washed out as if all the color has been removed from this world. Mungiu often features long uninterrupted shots, but they are not long shots that call attention to themselves like the Dunkirk sequence of Atonement, or even Alfonso Curon’s work in Children of Men. The real purpose of these long shots seems more related to avoidance of breaking continuity, to avoid the artifice of such a technique. As such, one subconsciously begins to feel like a third friend in the room with these two girls following them during their ordeal.
Anamaria Marinca is the backbone of the film, and has to subtly convey her distress. Note a particular scene where she is forced to attend a party as her friend is in a dire position. Both her character and the audience are focused on the how Gabriela is doing, but are forced to deal with this intolerable family get together. Marinca in this scene needs to convey deep thought while trying to keep a straight face at this party. Laura Vasiliu also has the challenge of portraying a character that is desperate and often behaves irrationally. There is a real panic to her behavior and a deep vulnerability that needs to be conveyed.
Special consideration should be given to Vlad Ivanov who must play the black market abortionist. This abortionist is nothing like the empathetic Vera Drake, he’s simply in it for the money. He’s like a drug dealer with medical skills, he does not care about these women, in fact he clearly looks down on both of them and has no hesitation to verbally abuse them both. He is not an antagonist; in fact he’s technically the only ally these girls have. Mr. Bebe is clearly a bad person, but he only has power because society has made his kind necessary. Ivanov’s performance is really strong, and the movie really becomes great when he arrive in the film.
In the May of 2007 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days won the Palm D’or at the Cannes Film Festival, as is usual with winners at Cannes, we’re only now seeing it nearly a year later. This wait is largely because of studios trying to wait for the Academy to honor their films with a Best Foreign Language film Oscar, an honor which more often than not never comes. This of course bites the academy in the ass when the films get released and build a following only after they are no longer eligible. This of course wasn’t even nominated because the geriatric nominating committee wasn’t cutting edge enough to understand a Romanian Abortion movie. What Foreign film distributors need to understand is that the foreign category, like any category, is largely dependent on buzz, and you’re not going to get much of it if your film hasn’t graced American shores. Reforming the category should be simple: ditch the nominating committee and require American distribution for eligibility the same way they do for other categories.
Before I saw this film I was really skeptical about this so called “Romanian New Wave,” but now I see the potential. I can definitely see why this would break away from the pack and get the recognition it has. The film tackles a controversial topic with serious restraint and maturity. The film has absolutely no mainstream appeal, but it is a great piece of cinema that should be seen by everyone who has an interest in the art house hardcore.
**** out of Four
Atonement(12/19/2007)
It seems that every year a movie emerges whose identity is so completely tied to its chances of winning an Oscar that its actually strengths or weaknesses begin to take a back seat. People talk so much about the odds of the film getting an Oscar that they forget to talk about the movie itself; often this actually leads movies like Cold Mountain and Dreamgirls to not even be nominated. This year the overhyped Oscar frontrunner is Joe Wright’s Atonement, an epic romance based on the uber-acclaimed Ian McEwan novel of the same name.
The film is set in 1935 England on a country estate owned by a wealthy man named Jack Tallis. Jack has two daughters; the first is the thirteen year old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) who has taken to writing. The other daughter, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), is in her twenties and has become engaging in some sly flirtations with the housekeeper’s son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). Through a series of misunderstandings, the young Briony comes to believe that Turner is a sexual pervert, and because of this she baselessly accuses him of a sexual assault that had occurred on the estate. Turner is sent to prison and is eventually let out to join the army when World War two begins. Before they are separated, Turner and Cecilia declare their love for one another.
Atonement is a hard film to summarize, and an even harder film to discuss, without revealing many of the film’s twists. From the description, it would be easy to confuse this for a Merchant-Ivory style costume drama, but that is not accurate at all. Though the film begins at a country estate, the film does not delve into all the usual issues of class and etiquette one would expect from such a setting. After the film’s first act that setting is abandoned and the film ventures into the wider world of WW2 era England.
Part of what makes the film special is that it never reveals what its central conflict is going to be. Initial it appears to be a conventional romantic conflict with Robbie trying to win over the heart of Cecilia, then it appears to turn into a Homeric story of a man trying to return to his lover, then the story’s perspective unexpectedly shifts and the film goes down a different and more unique path. Because I don’t want to reveal this perspective shift and its importance, this review is going to be very hard to write.
Because perspective is such a prevalent theme in the film, it must employ a variety of tricks to allow various scenes to be seen from multiple points of view. This is one of the elements of the movie that works best. The film consistently employs interesting tricks to depict the passage of time and tell parallel stories.
The performances here are all solid but not transcendent, mainly because the actors avoid showing off. You will find no Academy baiting in the acting here, which is in some ways a relief. James McAvoy has the most actively transformative performance here and must be believable on both a country estate and the Normandy battlefield. McAvoy (who was Forrest Forest Whitaker’s scene partner is last year’s The Last King of Scotland) really makes his presence known here. Keira Knightley, who doesn’t have as much screen time as the film’s advertising would leave you to believe, is also quite nice as Cecilia. Finally there is the character of Briony who is played by Saoirse Ronan at 13, and later by Romola Garai at 18. Both actresses manage to convince the audience that they are playing the same person. I’m not sure whether Garai was trying to play an older Ronan or if Ronan was playing a younger Garai or they both planned it out, either way someone did a great job in the role.
Joe Wright emerged in 2005 with a fairly solid adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Though that Jane Austin novel was a work the world did not need another adaptation of, Wrights ambitious visual style was a breath of fresh air; it was a bad project to establish a directorial style with. Here Wright is again using crisp cinematography but with a more subdued color pallet to match the slightly more melancholy story. Gone are the widescreen vistas of Pride and Prejudice, though they appear to still be present in the first act, they disappear as soon as the war starts. That doesn’t mean Joe Wright has taken to some sort of neo-realist approach, it just means that his style has been adjusted to fit the mood of this very different source material. The highlight of Wrights visual trick bag is a five minute tracking shot showing the Dunkirk beach during the evacuation. The extended tracking shot is an old trick that’s been used many times before, but it hasn’t quite worn out its appeal yet, it is still a very impressive stunt.
Less successful is Dario Marianelli’s overbearing orchestral score that seeks to guide the viewer through the film’s emotional peaks and valleys with very little subtlety. This is not bad music, but it does become an annoyance, the sound mix places way too much emphasis on it. Marianelli also made the poor decision to incorporate the sound of a typewriter into the score and use it to mark moments of thought and emotion that occurs onscreen, but ultimately only annoys the viewer.
What really justifies this film and makes everything really come together is a very strong ending which I wouldn’t even dream of giving away. I’ll just say that it is a very creative ending that is completely unexpected, but also a little bit abrupt.
Ultimately Atonement is a very strong piece of work that avoided all the literary clichés I was afraid it would fall into. I wish I could talk more about it without spoiling it, but I think my vague descriptions will ultimately help the viewer more than a spoiler heavy review. This is a well made movie that I have a lot of respect for, but I wish it hadn’t waited until the last fifteen minutes to really explain itself, everything before feels like an elaborate set-up to a great reveal. This is a movie that’s easier to respect then love, but still it should definitely be seen.
***1/2 out of four
DVD Catch Up: Away From Her(11/14/2007)
Among the saddest fates one can receive is a slow death by sickness. In such cases people end up going out with a whimper rather than a bang; it is undignified and sad. Death however is not always the biggest toll on families struck by these afflictions. Family members are also affected by the ailments of their loved ones. Away From Her is the story of one of these family members who must watch his wife deteriorate in front of his eyes.
The film focuses on Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinsent) a middle-aged man who’s wife Fiona (Julie Christie) has been struck with Alzheimer’s disease. Grant makes the tough decision to put his wife in an assisted living home, something he is extremely reluctant to do as he would not be able to visit her during her first month at the institution. Despite his hesitations, Fiona wants to remain at the institution where she believes she needs to be. When he returns the next month he finds his wife no longer remembers him and has formed a relationship with another man who is a patient at the home.
Away From Her was directed by Sarah Polley, an actress who had a memorable role in Atom Egoyan’s great 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter at the age of eighteen. Now ten years later she is making her directing debut with Egoyan acting as the producer. The film is based on a short story by Alice Munro.
As a story, Away From Her isn’t overly compelling. It shows an interesting situation and works fairly well as a character study. What it lacks is a compelling conflict to carry it through. It is interesting for a while but begins to drag about half way through and doesn’t really go anywhere. It feels like Polley took this short story and tried too hard to expand it. It unfortunately gets a little boring after a while.
What redeems the film is a pair of excellent performances by Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. Christie’s performance is especially strong, playing a mentally disturbed person has long been a good way to earn respect as an actor and this is no exception. Pinsent has a less showy role, but it’s also a more important role, and he pulls it off real well.
Still, at the end of the day this story just didn’t really grab me and the film simply loses steam after about the half-way point. It’s a noble effort with some great acting, but ultimately it didn’t really work for me.
**1/2 out of four
American Gangster(11/2/2007)
It’s good to be a gangster these days, in movies anyway. The crime films have become a real staple of most peoples “best movies” lists. There is a certain sort list of crime movies that seem universally loved, especially among male audiences. Of course The Godfather is on this list, so are Scorsese’s crime films like Goodfellas and Casino. A bit further down the list one comes across titles like Scarface and Heat. Last year we were treated to a new entry in this elite club of crime films, Scorsese’s Oscar winning triumph The Departed. Now, Ridley Scott is trying to enter this elite group of filmmakers with his sprawling, ambitious new film American Gangster.
The film tells the true story of two people’s lives in 1970s New York; the first is Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a major drug trafficker operating out of Harlem. The other is Ritchie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a police officer tracking his operation. Lucas was formerly the protégé of a major Harlem crime boss. When this boss dies Lucas decides to create an empire of his own. Unlike his mentor, who was basically a middleman bringing the Mafia’s product into Harlem; Lucas is interested in importing the product himself. Lucas achieves this by exploiting the chaos in Vietnam and bribing soldiers to import extremely pure “blue magic” heroin into the United States. As Lucas rises to power he buys his mother (Ruby Dee) a mansion and bring his brothers Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Turner (Common), Melvin (Warner Miller), Terrence (Albert Jones), Dexter (J. Kyle Manzay), and Stevie (T.I.) into the business.
On the other side of the law is Ritchie Roberts who is so by the book in his investigation methods that he turned in a million dollars in cash that he found in a bookie’s trunk. The NYPD at this time was so completely corrupt that this action actually makes Roberts and his partner Javier J. Rivera (John Ortiz) outcasts within the police force. Roberts eventually accepts a position at the lead of a federal narcotics task forces. Roberts and his team, Freddie Spearman (John Hawkes), Moses Jones (RZA), Alphonse Abruzzo (Yul Vazquez), discover Lucas’ operation and begin to track him down despite the interference of the corrupt NYPD who become an enemy of both sides headed by Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin).
American Gangster is a movie that sounded wonderful on paper. It had two major Oscar winning actors heading its cast, a master director behind the camera, it was in a genre that produces a lot of cool movies, and its trailer accompanied by Jay-Z’ excellent “Heart of the City”, looked thoroughly awesome. Unfortunately American Gangster is not the masterpiece I was hoping for, but it is quite good.
Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe both give great performances, but not ones that jump out at you. This has its benefits, if they weren’t careful such casting could have lead to a lot of yelling and scenery chewing, but those looking for Oscar caliber performances could be a bit disappointed. Interestingly both actors seem to be working a bit against type. Washington is playing a violent criminal, something he’s done before, but it’s still a stretch from his usually likable persona. His work here is not as good as his work in Training Day although he is given fewer scenes to really show off with. Crowe is also against type, he’s made quite a name of himself playing bad-ass masculine characters. Here he’s really playing a nicer, slightly more down to earth figure. This really more closely resembles his work in A Beautiful Mind than it does his work in, say, 3:10 to Yuma.
The rest of the cast is also solid but unremarkable. The many actors playing Lucas’ brothers are all good, they look right, they don’t distract the audience from the movie, and they do everything they’re supposed to do. None of them however, are really given the screen time to truly impress. The actors in Robert’s task force are in much the same situation, they are all solid, but don’t have the screen time to really show off. Ruby Dee, at the age of 83, gives a memorable performance as Lucas’ mother. Cuba Gooding Jr. also has a small, but memorable role as a drug dealer who makes an enemy of Frank Lucas.
The problems in the movie generally seem rooted in the fact that it is trying to be two movies at the same time. One movie is a more realistic and less glorified version of Scarface showing the rise and fall of Frank Lucas as a major drug figure. The other is a French Connection type story about a burned out cop trying to make the score of a lifetime. Despite the movie’s two hour and forty minute runtime, there’s just too much to fit in, in sufficient detail. Many have compared it to Michael Mann’s excellent film Heat in that it shows a cop and a criminal’s stories as one goes after the other. The difference is that Heat took place over the course of about a week and stuck mainly to being a procedural, while American Gangster spans a decade and really tries to delve into these characters personal lives. In many ways the chance to study the characters seems to be at war with the plot. In the Lucas story the plot seems to win out, we know all about his smuggling operation, but almost nothing about any of his brothers. In the Roberts storyline, the characterization seems to win out and we learn more about Roberts’ troubled divorce than we do about his actual police investigation.
Despite its smaller scope, Heat also had a longer running time, two hours and forty minutes is just not enough time to get in everything this film needs to really work. There are a lot of impatient people out there who will say American Gangster is too long when it’s really too short. Ridley Scott has had a long track record of making massive cuts to the theatrical versions of his films, and then putting the true version out on DVD. Scott’s directors cut of Kingdom of Heaven for example, was a vast improvement over the theatrical cut. Perhaps Scott will release an extended cut eventually that will work, but in the ADD stricken environment today it is unlikely that something like that will ever be put into theaters. Perhaps a better medium for the story would be as a premium cable mini-series. As it stands, American Gangster is quite well paced, it definitely goes by fast.
In general there are a lot of things here that just feel sloppy. I noticed a boom mike go into frame in a key scene, and Rapper RZA clearly has a Wu-Tang Clan tattoo visible on his shoulder in one scene. Alone these are not worth bringing up, but I think they are symptomatic of a larger disease. The movie just feels like it was rushed, it lacks a certain attention to detail one expects from a director like Ridley Scott. The cinematography here is to dark, the actor’s faces are often obscured by shadows. The soundtrack is also disappointing; when you’re making a gangster movie one expects a great Scorsese-esque soundtrack, one also expects great music in movies about the 70’s like Boogie Nights, and one expects great music from films centered in Harlem, therefore one would expect a positively epic soundtrack from a 70s Harlem gangster movie. Unfortunately this epic soundtrack is not found here. The best song present, Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack, was already used by Quentin Tarentino in is crime film Jackie Brown (who in turned borrowed it from a Blaxploitation film).
I don’t want to sound like a hated this movie, or even that I disliked it. On the contrary it is a perfectly respectable movie with a lot of great moments in it. There is a great montage midway through the film showing Thanksgiving from the perspective of Roberts, then of Lucas’ family, then of Lucas’ enemies, and finally of the drug users Lucas sells to. The film also gets really good in the last forty minutes when the investigation really kicks in and the two figures finally meet. There are a lot of great scenes like this, but the movie as a whole just isn’t as profound as it should be.
Ridley Scott, maybe wasn’t the right person for this project after all. Most of Scott’s movies are fairly simple, often taking place over the course of a few days to a week. Rarely do his movies span a decade like this and really chronicle characters in depth. Scott makes a noble effort here, but doesn’t quite make it. The standards for movies in this genre are really high, and this just doesn’t quite stand up to the challenges. The movie is worth seeing, but at the end of the day, Scott just isn’t as good at this stuff as Martin Scorsese.
***1/2 out of four
3:10 to Yuma(9/7/2007)
Oh how the mighty have fallen. The western genre used to be among the most popular genres; Hollywood would release dozens of westerns a year during the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. But times have changed dramatically. Since the year 2000 Hollywood has only put out three large budget westerns, an average of less than one every two years. Two of these three are the recent remake of The Alamo and the Jackie Chan martial arts comedy Shanghi Noon. The only straightforward western Hollywood put out in the last decade was the underappreciated Kevin Costner film Open Range.
Audiences loved westerns all throughout the first half of the century. “Gunsmoke” was the most popular show on television, dime western novels were a staple of not so literary bookstores, and film audiences were flocking to see the latest cinematic representations of the frontier. But this all ended some time in the late sixties. Some say that youth counter-culture avoided westerns because they represented the establishment. I think however the genre declined because of simple market saturation. People could only watch the shootout at the O.K. Corral so many times (to date there have been eight representations of that famous gunfight on film).
That’s not to say there aren’t occasionally westerns, in fact there have been quite a few since 1970, but they’re no longer a major genre, instead there’s probably about one a year or so. But this isn’t entirely a bad thing. The fact that there are only one or two westerns a year lets each one of them be an event of sorts. I’ve never seen the original 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma simply because it looks no different than any of the other 10-20 westerns that came out that year. The film is all but forgotten today simply because it got lost in the shuffle of nearly identical westerns. The new remake of 3:10 to Yuma starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, however, comes out in an era where the genre feels special.
Christian Bale plays Dan Evans, a down on his luck rancher who’s family is heavy in debt. By a turn of chance Evans witnesses a robbery on an armored carriage committed by Ben Wade (Russell Crowe). Wade and his posse return to town, his second in command Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) reports the robbery in order to distract the local law enforcement. The local police ride out to the scene of the crime where they find Evans aiding the sole survivor of the carriage robbery, Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda). They return to town where, who waited around too long, is captured. The Pinkertons decide to escort Wade to the town of Convention where they’ll put him on the 3:10 train to Yuma. Because the Pinkertons are short handed Evans, who is a civil war veteran, volunteers to ride with them for two hundred dollars.
Many modern westerns do everything they can to subvert the genre. This has lead to some great movies like Unforgiven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and last year’s excellent The Proposition. 3:10 to Yuma ignores this concept entirely. This is a traditional western told in a very simple way. The story is nothing new, on paper it sounds like every other western ever made. The thing that sets this film ahead of other similar movies is simply an excellent execution.
The screenplay is quite good. As I said, the story is hardly revolutionary, but the this simple and somewhat clichéd story is very well told. The dialogue really sparkles, it sounds real but stylish at the same time. The characters are well rounded and three dimensional. Dan Evans has a very noble code of honor, but he’s no Dudley-Do-Right either, he is working for money after all. Evans also isn’t some kind of perfect gun fighting adventurer either. Ben Wade is even more interesting. He’s a violent criminal who’s willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, but one gets the feeling he doesn’t particularly like this about himself. He seems like a nice guy, he doesn’t act evil at all, but he does evil things anyway. The script is full of surprises, whenever you think something predictable is being set up it ends up being the opposite. The film doesn’t glorify the old west, it doesn’t turn away from many of the things that made the old west, not so great, but it never allows the setting to overwhelm the story itself.
What really puts this movie over the top is the acting. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are undeniably two of the greatest actors of their generation, and pairing them made this film particularly exciting. The pairing seems brilliant, but could have been troublesome as well, pairing two method actors like these could have easily lead to lots of yelling and scenery chewing, but the two actors restrain themselves brilliantly and give two solid performances. Crowe is an actor who seems to have been born to be in westerns, he’s one of the best tough guys working, almost a modern day John Wayne except with a much wider range. Crowe was in one western before this, Sam Raimi’s strange The Quick and the Dead, which was something of a missed opportunity for Crowe. Here however Crowe lives up to his western badass potential.
Christian Bale is the one who has a bigger challenge in the movie. He’s not the kind of brawler you’d naturally expect in a western the way Crowe is. It was essential that Bale worked here; if Russell Crowe’s villain had overshadowed Bale’s hero the film would have been in trouble. Fortunately Bale rose to the occasion. He plays a down to earth and believable farmer and gives the character life.
Both of the stars give great performances that help the movie immensely, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say either give performances for the ages. This isn’t the kind of acting you hand out Oscars for or put in top ten lists. This is great American movie star tough guy acting in the tradition of John Wayne and Lee Marvin, but done with modern sensibilities.
Crowe and Bale are not, however, the only actors in the movie. There are many good performances to be found throughout the movie. Ben Foster very nearly steals the show as the vicious second in command of Wade’s gang, Charlie Prince. Foster, whose career has floated well under my radar before now, makes himself known here with a vengeance. Peter Fonda also has a small, but important role here. His performance isn’t particularly outstanding, but he holds his own around all the talent here and has a great dialogue exchange with Russell Crowe. Logan Lerman plays Evan’s teenage son William, a role could have been problematic, but he makes it work.
No one will ever confuse director James Mangold of being a great auteur, but when he’s given good material he consistently puts out very good movies. He’s probably most famous for his Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, but he also made the thriller Cop Land and the horror/mystery Identity. The film is shot in a traditional but effective way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. The violence is fast and well choreographed, this isn’t an action movie per se, but when the bullets start flying the film is just as exiting as anything Hollywood tends to put out.
The film has really nice cinematography and excellent sound effects editing. I’ve said before that this film is very traditionally made, this is not to say that this is some kind of nostalgia work that is actively trying to look like a film from the 50’s, the film manages to feel like what it is, an old film made in contemporary times.
3:10 for Yuma is a great yarn. It’s the best (and only) traditional western since Open Range, and on par with the westerns of the genre’s golden age. Anyone looking for a great flick for adults should check it out.
***1/2
1408(6/22/2007)
Stephen King may be the undisputed leader in the world of horror fiction. Even the best masters of horror cinema like Wes Craven and John Carpenter can’t claim to be remotely as iconic or consistently excellent as the best selling author is within the genre. Few authors have had as many feature films made about their work than King, nearly fifty feature length theatrical and made-for-tv movies have been made from his work. The adaptations of King’s work that Hollywood has been putting out are inconsistent to say the least: for every The Shining, The Green Mile, and or Misery there’s a bomb like Thinner, Maximum Overdrive, or The Mangler, and for every one of those there’s a middle of the road moderate success like Secret Window, Hearts in Atlantis, and Apt Pupil.
Hollywood loves adapting King’s work so much that they’ve pretty much run out of novels to adapt. The new trend in making King works into movies is to adapt his short novellas and short stories into feature length movies. Interestingly these story adaptations generally haven’t been any more or less consistently successful than the adaptations of the novels. It’s interesting how different an adaptation of a short story can be than of a novel, rather than cutting down a story one must build up and expand upon the initial framework provided by the written work. Such movies are less reliant on King’s talent and more reliant of the talent of the screenwriter with the unenviable task of out King-ing King. The new Stephen King adaptation 1408 was made by film-makers who were up to that challenge.
The film revolves Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a writer of psudo-non-ficion books about the nights he spends in places that are supposedly haunted. Unbeknownst to his readers the nights Enslin spends in these locations are quite uneventful. Enslin is in fact a closet-skeptic, he advises one enthusiastic fan that his best place in America to spot a ghost is in the Haunted Mansion in Orlando, Florida. Enslin, an alcoholic writer who recently lost a daughter to an unspecified disease, is currently working on a book about haunted hotel rooms when he hears about the perfect haunted place to put in the last chapter of his book: Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York where 56 people had supposedly been killed by an evil force that resides in the room. Upon his arrival at the Dolphin, Enslin is greeted by the hotel’s manager Mr. Orlin (Samuel L. Jackson) who begs Enslin not to go into the room because “no one has lasted more than an hour in 1408.” Despite Mr. Orlin’s warnings, Enslin refuses to be turned away. Orlin finally gives in and lets Enslin into the room, but it becomes readily apparent that there really is something very wrong with room 1408.
1408 was directed by Mikael Håfström, an unproven Swedish director whose English language debut, Derailed, opened to mostly negative reviews. Håfström proves here that, when given better material, he does have a promising career. But it is with the actors, or rather actor that the real credit is due. Once Enslin is in the room the film basicly turns into a one man show with John Cusack holding the only major speaking role. As such, much of the movie lives or dies by the quality of Cusacks acting. Cusack meets this challenge with a tour-de-force performance that single-handedly makes the movie worth seeing. Samuel L. Jackson is also very fun in his brief, but memorable, role.
King’s short story was one of the best in his collection Everything’s Eventual. The story was largely a tribute to the early twentieth century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The Enslin in the book resembled the one here, but this version of the character has been expanded. The writing team cleverly expands Enslin to be more like a typical King character, he’s an alcoholic writer who’s lost a child. Enslin is a much better developed character than the victims to be in most horror movies. One really begins to feel they know him well by the end of the movie.
The film isn’t the scariest or most tense thing you’ll ever see, but it does have a number of good jump scenes. Many of the tricks the room uses to torture Enslin are really interesting, most memorably a McCabe twist on Harpo Marx’s mirror sketch. The real terror here is psychological, one really gets into Enslin’s head and feels for him during the maddening emotional rape the room is trying to drive him to suicide with. Also chilling is the history of the room which Orlin describes to Enslin while trying to persuade him not to stay in the room.
The movie is not perfect. The order in which Enslin tries to escape is a bit loopy, Enslin tries to escape through the vents only after he tries climbing out the window to the next room. There’s also twist toward the end that is interesting but ultimately unnecessary. This twist breaks the claustrophobic atmosphere, and it takes the movie a while to recover, which it does just in time before the emotional climax. The ending was also a little bit too easy.
1408 may not be “extreme” enough for the new generation of horror fans. But it is sometimes refreshing in this era of torture porn to see just how effective rattling chains in a haunted house (or hotel room) can be.
***1/2 out of four
28 Weeks Later…(5/11/2007)
The Exorcist II, Jaws 2, Blair Witch 2… Anyone else see a pattern here? Horror sequels have a terrible track record. Every time a new and interesting horror movie comes out it is usually followed by a lame, uninspired, cash-in sequel. The few horror sequels that manage to work, like Dawn of the Dead and Aliens, only manage to work because they abandon their horror elements. 28 Weeks Later, sequel to the very well received 28 Days Later, would appear to fit right in with this trend. Between the track record of horror sequels and the fact that none of the original film’s cast or crew are involved; it would be very reasonable to assume that 28 Weeks Later would be a disaster. Amazingly, these assumptions are unfounded, 28 Weeks Later is one of the least disappointing sequels in recent memory.
As I’ve established, a sequel to 28 Days Later seemed like a terrible idea, perhaps that’s why the sequel managed to work. Most movies made today are already sold as a possible start to franchise, often leading to quickie follow ups the next year like The Hills Have Eyes 2. 28 Days Later however seemed like a very cohesive movie that ended in a way that seems to deliberately paint the series into a corner to prevent a sequel. Because the sequel wasn’t a no-brainer it has been a full five years since the original hit theaters. In that five years the people behind the sequel have had time to come up with a real, serious, follow-up that is worthy of its name.
It’s been (you guessed it) 28 weeks since a plague swept over the world creating waves of rage infected humans (essentially fast zombies) in a typical zombie movie fashion. Weeks takes a page from the Romero school of zombie-movie sequels. It ignores all of the characters from the original film and depicts the plague from another unrelated group of survivors. It appears that all the infected people from the original infestation have died off (no ore brains to eat). NATO forces have moved in to reconstruct London. The center area of London has been declared a “green-zone” that is free of disease. Don (Robert Carlyle) has lost his wife during the plague. He now runs a building in the green zone and has access to a number of other areas in the green zone. Don has pulled some strings to have his children brought in despite some objections to allowing children into the area. I’ll avoid giving away further details, but it goes without saying that the disease isn’t quite gone yet, if it was this wouldn’t be much of a horror movie.
Like its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later is about more then frights and chills. Days had a serious message about human behavior and the way men react to dire situations. Weeks also comments on human behavior in tense situations, but from a more overtly political angle. The mismanaged chaos of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina are obvious in the bleak apocalypse displayed here. When the trouble starts the NATO reacts with more force then is really necessary, they become just as dangerous if not more dangerous to civilians then the rage infected zombies. The soldiers however are not bloodthirsty zealots, they’re conflicted people doing the best they can in a mismanaged and chaotic situation.
The director’s chair has been passed from the highly regarded British director Danny Boyle to the less well known Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. The movie is no sellout however. The camera work is as grainy and shaky as ever here. The “shaky-cam” is one of the many visual tricks that are being experimented with recently. Horror is one of the genres that seems to benefit greatly from the style. Action movies don’t benefit from the style because its disorienting, but horror movies do benefit from the disorientation, nothing’s quite as scary as not understanding the situation you’re in and having nowhere to run.
The movie does have some problematic moments. There’s an awkward helicopter scene that unfortunate mirrors a scene played for laughs in the Robert Rodriguez segment of the recent Grindhouse. The army’s security in some key moments is also suspiciously weak, this could simply be a symptom of the mismanagement that is displayed elsewhere, but a scene explaining this would have been helpful. One must also wonder why there are NATO forces available to rebuild London when it was suggested in the first film that the rest of the world was in just as much trouble as merry old England. Additionally the movie is a little gorier then it really needs to be at times especially one stomach churning scene involving an eye gouge.
Overall though 28 Weeks Later avoids the trend of crappy horror sequels, it works both as political allegory and as a horror movie. It will have you on the edge of your seat from the claustrophobic opening, to the chaotic rage outbreak, to the Blair Witch-esque finale, to the chilling final shot.
*** out of four
300 (3/9/2007)
They say that all of western civilization began with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks gave us the philosophy of Socrates and the literature of Homer. The new film 300 displays another legacy of ancient Greece, the badass. The Spartan warrior as seen in author Frank Miller’s 300 are the prototypical badasses, their warrior ethic and determination towards victory can be seen in the chivalric knight, the cowboys of western lore, and even the Klingons of “Star Trek”.
Based on a Frank Miller graphic novel, 300 takes place in 480 BCE at the dawn of the Greco-Persian war. A Persian messenger approaches the Spartan city-state holding a bag of skulls and asks for an audience with the king. After asking King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) to pay tribute to the Persian Empire or face an oncoming attack, the messenger is pushed to his death into a well by the angry king. The scene perfectly sets up the uncompromising nature of the Spartan warrior; they are completely unwilling to or yield to any authority but their own. After Leonidas is given an unfavorable prophecy by an oracle, he is unable to bring his entire army to war. In desperation Leonidas rounds up three hundred of Sparta’s best soldiers, leaves his wife (Lena Headey) behind, and marches to war against an army of millions. This is the type of story that really shows the power visuals. As a conventional novel, this story would be nothing special at all, but in a visual medium like comic books or film, and in the hands of an artist like Frank Miller it is gorgeous.
300 can best be understood when one realizes that the film is being told by an unreliable narrator. The film is being told by Dilios (David Wenham) a soldier at the battle with a unique ability for story telling. Dilios narrates the entire movie through a flashback with voice over. Dilios is not telling the story as a historian but as a propagandist. The movie is an extended exaggeration, the characters are not human, they are unwavering fighting machines that are jingoistic enough to make John Wayne blush. Collage students will be getting hammered for decades with the inevitable drinking game that will be made around the number of times the word “Sparta!” is hollered by noble fighters going into battle. The Persian enemies are every bit as inaccurate, they are faceless enemies, their leader Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) the personification of decadence. Some of the Persian troops can only be described as monsters. All this is the result of Dilios’ story which is meant to rile the troops to enthusiastically go to war.
It should be noted that director Zack Snyder is merely building on the foundation that was first built by Robert Rodríguez with another adaptation of a Frank Miller work: Sin City. Sin City was an exercise in translation; it was a frame for frame moving recreation of the comic books it based on, both in story and visual style. 300 is a far less slavish translation of its source material, but it does follow the same basic story and does effectively reproduce the look of Miller’s stunning illustrations. 300 was filmed using the same blue screen filming process of Sin City and takes it to the next level, the viewer forgets he is watching action on a soundstage and becomes immersed in the visual universe. With this type of film making we are entering uncharted territories of production. It may be about time the Academy separates its category of art direction from set decoration. The set decoration is much here, as there are no sets, but the art direction is amazing. The design of the visuals is a true work of art.
Sin City took the tradition of film Noir and took it to a glorious extreme; likewise 300 takes the “Sword and Sandals” genre as far as it can possibly go. Unlike most post-Lord of the Rings epics, 300 doesn’t rely on helicopter shots of massive armies mashing into each other, although the shots of huge armies are up to the standards of those other movie. In place of these long shots, 300 focuses on the personal side of its battles, many of the battles play out by focusing on a single soldier bursting forth is slow motion, showing each kill he make in graphic detail. The visceral thrill of these moments is hard to put into words. Interestingly these moments resemble a quarterback expertly making it through the line of scrimmage on a running play; it’s easy to see why sports were encouraged as military training.
The story told by Dilios is based largely on old fashioned views of masculinity. On its surface, 300 is the most gleefully pro-war film since the Rambo series. All parallels to recent events are coincidence as the graphic novel was published in 1998. Still there is an ultimately conservative attitude to this story that can be unsettling to blue-staters like me. Nevertheless it would be hypocritical to dismiss a film of ideological differences and then scoff at the conservatives who would criticize a film like Fahrenheit 9/11. In truth however, if one considers that the story told may be a fabrication by Dilios to mobilize the army, the simplicity of the film’s ideology becomes a lot less simple. The film leaves it to the viewer whether a society based on the principle that not all men are equal and which that sacrifices imperfect babies is worth emulating.
Though it has a simple story, 300 is a visually amazing film. It is highly entertaining, with amazing action scenes. The visual style is much more interesting then that of the typical summer movie. The movie is first rate, cutting edge filmmaking. Its main weakness is that it would be only a little less interesting if the dialogue track were removed. Its main strength is that it would be very interesting even without the dialogue track.
**** out of four
