The Informant!(10/10/2009)
Contrary to what Ayn Rand may have told you, corporations are for the most part evil. When left to their own devices they will gladly screw over their competitors, their employees, and their customers if it will make them a little more profit. This is why they make such effective Hollywood villains, they have a long history of activities that would make Darth Vader blush and deep down they have almost no remorse. Since every villain needs a hero to vanquish them, Hollywood has invented someone to put a white hat on: the whistleblower. While the whistleblower genre probably doesn’t have as many websites dedicated to it as other sub-genres, it’s actually a pretty populous category of film and like most things that are done to death people are beginning to get a bit sick of its pattern of self-riotousness and manufactured drama. So, when it came to light that Steven Soderbergh was making adapting the story of real life whistle blower Mark Whitacre it was safe to guess we’d get something more than standard genre fare, and from the moment the film’s trailer came out it was clear that was the case.
Based on the nonfiction book by Kurt Eichenwald, this film tells the story of the man who helped the FBI conduct one of the biggest price fixing scams in American History. This investigation began when the company called in the FBI to deal with an extortion scheme reported by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an executive in the lysine division of ADM. Shortly into an investigation by agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Whitacre reveals that he and his colleagues have been illegally conspiring with other companies to systematically drive up prices worldwide. Whitacre agrees to wear a wire and collect evidence against the company he works for, and in doing so is able to collect an unprecedented amount of evidence for the FBI. Whitacre claims he’s doing this to clear his conscience, but he doesn’t really seem all that torn up about lysine consumers, so why is he doing this? That will turn out to be the key question at the heart of all of this, because Mark Whiticre is not exactly what he seems.
The conventional wisdom about Steven Soderbergh is that he does big budget studio produced films filled with celebrities in order to build the cache required to make low budget experimental films starring non-actors. Because of this reputation critics are inevitably going to deride this as one of the former, but really this whole notion is something of a misnomer. This may have a bigger budget than something like Bubble and it may star an A-list celebrity, but deep down the way this film handles genre is just as experimental as a lot of those other projects. If you go to one of those seminars they have to teach screenwriters how to build successful formulaic films step by step, the first thing they’ll tell you is to focus on a character with a clear motivation and to have that motivation drive the plot. As such, this would have largely focused on the goal of bringing down ADM and stuck with this conflict throughout if this were a conventional film. Instead, this movie becomes defiantly disinterested in the fate of ADM and instead focuses on what the title says it will focus on the informant.
This informant himself is a pretty odd character played brilliantly by Matt Damon. Whiticre is a strange person who seems more like Ned Flanders than Deep Throat. He’s in his forties, has a bad comb-over, and a goofy looking mustache. More importantly, the guy’s a doofus; he’s the antithesis of the intense image of businessman that Gordon Gecko embodied. At times Whiticre seems to not grasp the stakes of his actions, and the film’s voice over track is clouded by his odd stream-of-consciousness musings about subjects ranging from the German word for pen to the thinking patterns of polar bears. This man’s existence is certainly one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” type creations and making him believable had to have been a hefty challenge. Fortunately Matt Damon brings Whiticre to the screen excellently. It takes a little while for Damon’s achievement to really sink in, but when you compare his performance here to the badass he was when playing Jason Bourne and it becomes immensely clear how much of a range Damon has as an actor.
Because Whiticre is so strange many have come to label this movie a spoof, but I’d hesitate to use that term simply because it conjures images of broadly comic films like Aireplane and Scary Movie, and this film is neither as silly as those films nor is it trying to be as funny. However, this film does play with genre conventions in a way that’s not completely unlike what spoof films do. This is a movie that easily could have focused other elements, chosen a different tone, and used different techniques and end up looking like a remake of The Insider. Instead Soderbergh is able to make this movie a completely different through a handful of unexpected decisions. For example, the film has adopted a very 1970s aesthetic (even though the story is set in the early 90s), this would seem like a logical enough choice if one was trying to channel the corporate thrillers of that era like The China Syndrome, Serpico, and Silkwood, but it isn’t really the serious filmmaking of the 70’s that he’s channeling. Rather, Soderbergh is channeling everything that was kind of tacky about the era like the gaudy font the captions are in or the unexpected but compelling smooth jazz score by Marvin Hamlisch. As such, the film’s aesthetics sort of play with what we’re supposed to expect from this kind of movie just as much as the script does.
Ignoring all the genre trickery we do still get what is on its own a very fascinating story. Mark Whitacre is an enigma, one that has not been completely cracked by the time the credits role and a big part of the joys of this film are trying to figure out just what makes him tick. What’s more strange is that aside from some of his more self-sabotaging habits, Whitacre isn’t too different from most corporate executives. He’s a man who lies, cheats, and steals almost as a habit then hides behind an “aw shucks” smile, the only difference is that he seems to believe his own bullshit. In focusing on this personality we get a much better look at the face of corporate crime than we ever would watching the heroes take down another anonymous board room filled with mustache twirlers. While I wouldn’t place this in the upper echelon of Soderbergh’s work, this is a movie that deserves as much respect and analysis his movies which wear their experimental nature like a badge of honor.
***1/2 out of Four
DVD Catch-Up: I Love You, Man(8/11/2009)
As much as I’ve liked the R-rated comedies that have been coming out in the last half-decade, there are some trends amongst them that have been annoying to me. One of these annoyances has been the rise of the word “bromance” in order to describe movies about close friendships between men. The truth is that this isn’t a new or original story-type, in fact stories about men trying to sort between the values of friendship versus romance can be seen in a Shakespeare play called “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and can probably be traced even further back. Still, there are some people who insist on glibly labeling movies about friendship, and since every coined meme needs a point of oversaturation we have now been given a movie that’s takes this term to an extreme point where it stops making sense.
The movie focuses on a real estate salesman named Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) who has just become engaged to the love of his life, a woman named Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones). In the process of planning the wedding, Klaven realizes that he doesn’t have any male friends he’s close enough to in order to ask them to be his best man. His father (J.K. Simmons) reminds him that he’s always been a “girlfriend guy” whose relationships with other men have fallen by the wayside. So, Klaven goes on an odyssey guided by his gay brother (Andy Samberg) to find a best friend. Eventually he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a single free spirit who lives in a tricked out man’s den. Seeing his potential “bro,” Klaven starts a friendship with Fife but realizes that friendship can sometimes be harder than romance.
As you can probably percieve, this movie’s setup is more than a little problematic from the get-go. Perhaps there are people in the world like Peter Klaven, but I doubt that they’re ever going to be as much of a clear cut case as he is, what’s more I doubt they’re going to come to as much of a sudden realization as he does. Also bizarre is Klaven’s plan to find a friend for the primary motive of having a best man at his wedding, what’s more, how the hell can he expect to form such a strong friendship in a mere six months? Close friendships are just not something you go out and actively try to form the way you actively try to find girlfriends.
And this brings us to the movie’s next major problem, namely that its entire premise is based around trying to make the formation of a friendship fit inside the tropes of the romantic comedy. This is problematic firstly because it means adopting the many weaknesses and clichés of that genre. More importantly, the whole concept of this film is flawed to begin with; friendships and romances simply are not as superficially similar as the movie is trying to say they are. As such the characters behave very strangely throughout the course of the film and the whole thing just rings pretty false. The stakes involved in a friendship, especially weird friendships that are expected to form in a few months, as they would be in a real romance. As such, the ups and downs of this relationship just aren’t very dramatic as the movie leads up to its lame anti-climax.
All this could have been forgiven if the movie had been very funny, but it isn’t. Segal and Rudd are good performers, but the material they’re working with is not very good. The dialogue is not particularly sharp and the gags are not very strong. There are a few decent chuckle moments along the way, and the performances are workable. In fact, like a lot of mediocre romantic comedies I’d say that this film is kind of watchable in spite of its immense flaws. However, the simple fact is that this isn’t as funny as the typical R-rated comedy and it probably isn’t going to get anyone laid the way a romantic comedy, so what use does this thing serve? Not much.
** out of Four
Inglourious Basterds(8/21/2009)
Right now, Quentin Tarentino is operating on a level which few filmmakers can come close to. For almost two decades he’s been a leading figure in the world of cinema and in all that time he’s never quit refining his unique style, every film he’s put out has only served to prove just how much of a natural eye for cinema he has. His first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are undisputed classics of the crime genre. His 1997 film Jackie Brown may not have pleased those looking for carnage, but it revealed a degree of maturity that may not have been readily apparent in his earlier work. After a relatively long hiatus he reemerged in 2004 to deliver Kill Bill, a film of the utmost craftsmanship whose first half proved Tarentino’s proficiency at action filmmaking and whose second half revealed layers of pathos which may not have been apparent at first. Then there’s Death Proof, the film featured as the second half of the Grindhouse double feature he put together with friend Robert Rodriguez. This film was not widely loved upon its release, but I stand by it. It certainly will never be looked at as one of Tarentino’s major works, but I think its unique narrative structure and razor sharp dialogue will be better appreciated by those who give it a second look. But amidst all of this activity there was always the prospect of his legendary World War 2 project, a film which he had been working on as far back as that post-Jackie Brown hiatus. The script he’d been working on began to take on legendary proportions and after more than a decade the movie has finally emerged complete with its deliberately misspelled title: Inglourious Basterds.
Set in a World War 2 that would be more recognizable to an Id Software designer than a historian, this film tells a pair of stories that are fated to collide in its final sequence. The first story is that of a French Jew named Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) whose family is killed by a ruthless Nazi tasked with hunting down Jews hiding out in occupied territory. After four years she has adopted the name Emmanuelle Mimieux and begun managing a movie theater in the middle of Paris. After meeting a German war hero named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), her theater is chosen as the new venue for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film about Zoller’s exploits. The other storyline is that of the titular commando unit which is composed entirely of revenge seeking Jewish American soldiers but led by the southern born and supposedly part Apache Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who claims that he is “in the killin’ Nazi bidness, and… bidness is a-boomin’.” This premiere is quickly revealed to be a hotspot for high ranking Nazi officers. So the “Basterds,” aided by an SAS agent played by Michael Fassbender, decide to target the place for an attack; but Shosanna has plans of her own.
You may not have noticed it amidst all the trouble Lars Von Trier was causing, but when Inglourious Basterds debuted at the Cannes Film Festival it was pretty divisive. I think that’s going to be the case for a lot of Tarentino’s films for a while, possibly for the rest of his career. In the directors own words in a GQ profile by Alex Pappademas “I’m not a nice-guy artist. When my movies come out, they draw a line in the sand.” Tarentino’s style has basically become its own monster and those who don’t like it will probably not like his films; he stopped making movies for “everyone” a long time ago. Those who do appreciate his artistry however will be rewarded in droves by his recent work and especially what he does with this latest film.
I found myself oddly excited by this film’s opening credit sequence, I say oddly because those credits are just large white letters over a black background. That may not seem like much but I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen such simple opening credits projected onto a big screen. This is the kind of credit sequence that people seem to have lost patience for a long time ago. Today, if there even is an opening credit sequence in a mainstream film it’s almost always either on top of the opening scene or at least accompanied by some other kind of added stimuli. These minimalist credits pretty perfectly establish the kind of courage and patience that Tarentino will use throughout the film and the scene that follows theme, a tense conversation between a vicious Nazi (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer (Denis Menochet), embodies the attitude. In the hands of any other filmmaker this scene would have been a five minute throwaway, in Tarentino’s hands the conversation is a fifteen minute epic that builds upon itself until it finally pays off to heartbreaking effect. One suspects that the influence of Sergio Leone is at play in this, and many other long scenes like it, which build up for longer than one would expect only to be resolved through fast bursts of action.
We live in a time when screenplays are all too often written to exacting formulas and rules. The scene I described above is most definitely not within these rules and if someone with less clout had tried to submit it he would have quickly been shot down by a Hollywood reader unable to process such creativity. As the boldly two-act Death Proof proves, Tarentino has never been one to follow rules, and he breaks them with joyous abandon throughout Inglourious Basterds. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of short sighted reviews complaining about the film’s length, and I’ve got news for them: this movie is a minute shorter than both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and I didn’t hear anyone bitching about their run times back in the day. Granted, I’m sure most of these critics will claim that they are complaining about pacing rather than the actual running time, but frankly I’m getting more than a little sick of this lazy shorthand that has gotten out of control among critics as of late. Roger Ebert’s adage that “no good movie can be too long, and no bad movie is short enough” comes to mind. To me, if the material on hand is all gold I can watch it for hours on end. Nine out of ten times, if a movie is “too long” one should probably answer why it isn’t worth watching for as long as it runs rather than why it runs as long as it does.
I can understand why this pacing may come as a bit of a surprise to those who had their expectations shaped by Harvey Weinstein’s deceptive advertising campaign which makes this look like some kind of hyper-violent movie that mainly consists of Brad Pitt murdering Nazis. First of all, Brad Pitt is not the main star of the film; he’s just one part of a larger ensemble. In fact I’d be willing to bet that he has less screen time than some of the less known actors. This also isn’t an action film, there are no scenes of open warfare and the violence that is here is graphic but brief. Of course this kind of false advertising has been a staple of Tarentino’s career. Despite their blood soaked reputations, neither Pulp Fiction nor Reservoir Dogs really had much onscreen violence at all. People were similarly disappointed when Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Death Proof weren’t the action-packed blood baths they had been lead to expect. In general, Tarentino is not the carnage-meister that the public seems to think he is, and this film is no exception. Those looking for savage pleasures will probably leave disappointed, but hopefully there will be others who leave happy they witnessed something much grander than the low brow thrills they were promised.
As I just mentioned, Brad Pitt is not this film’s star, but when he is onscreen he makes for a very enjoyable presence. He goes all out in his depiction of a violent redneck hell-bent to kill Nazis. Those disappointed that Pitt isn’t a bigger part of the film can take solace in the fact that the rest of this ensemble more than matches his work. Perhaps the performance that most surprised me was that of Mélanie Laurent, a French actress whose previous work was unknown to me. Laurent has the always tricky role of a character forced to conform to a society they inwardly despise. Throughout the film she has a lot of banter with Daniel Brühl, a Nazi who’s clearly attracted to her. Brühl has perhaps an even trickier role because, while he’s a loyal Nazi, he seems like a genuinely nice guy and you suspect that in another life these two might have made a good couple. Both of these actors must perform in both French and German (more on that later), and another actor forced to contend with the language barrier is Michael Fassbender who plays a stiff upper lip Brit who must speak German in order to infiltrate Nazi circles. As for the titular “Basterds,” not many of them were given enough screen time to stand out. I’m sure that many will pick on the performance of Hostel director Eli Roth and Tarentino’s decision to cast him. My answer to this criticism is the same response I have to those who complained about Tarentino’s own cameos in previous movies (and the various M. Night Shyamalan cameos for that matter): that the only reason they are so bothered by their performance is that you know them as a director, if Eli Roth had just been some dude from central casting no one would have even bothered to comment on his performance, because either way he had very little screen time.
The performance that really deserves special attention is that of Christoph Waltz, who has created one of the greatest villains of recent memory. Like many characters here, Waltz must perform in multiple languages (English, French, and German), and no matter what tongue he’s using he comes off like a snake. Making a Nazi come off as evil is easy, too easy, which is why Tarentino does more with the character. This is a character that starts out interesting and only reveals himself to be even more of a devious enigma the more you get to know him. Tarentino could have given Waltz some sort of sadistic weapon or some kind of eye patch or something stupid like that, but instead he simply makes this man a dangerously intelligent and unpredictable opponent with a very strange interpretation of Nazi ideology. At one point he gives a dark speech comparing Germans to hawks and Jews to rats which is right up there with other famous Tarentino speeches like Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel rant, Christopher Walken’s watch speech and Dennis Hopper’s True Romance speech about the Italian lineage. Waltz has already won a well deserved award from the Cannes Film Festival for this award and he also deserves Oscar consideration.
I just mentioned that a number of the characters here perform in German or French, and indeed a good two thirds of this film plays out in foreign languages with subtitles. Ninety nine percent of the time I’d unequivocally support such authenticity in linguistics, but here I’m a bit more on the fence. The only problem I have with the scenes in French and German is that I can’t help but feel like they’re robbing us of precious minutes of dialogue written by one of the English language’s greatest word smiths. Make no mistake, the subtitled dialogue is damn good; one can definitely tell that those scenes have been written with flare, but it just isn’t quite the same as hearing Tarentino lines spoken in the language they were written in. Then again, even the English material is relatively restrained stylistically and adheres more to the work he did on Kill Bill than Death Proof or Pulp Fiction; this probably isn’t going to be the goldmine of quotable lines that other Tarentino movies have been and I think that’s deliberate. In general I do think that having these lines subtitled rather than spoken in English is made necessary both thematically and by the plotline. As the film goes on, communication amongst people speaking foreign languages becomes very important to the film.
Oh, and as for historical accuracy, forget about it. Tarentino claimed to have spent much of his post Jackie Brown hiatus doing historical research for this movie, which had led me to fear he had finally grown up and was planning to make a “normal” movie. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, in fact I suspect that most of this research consisted of watching The Dirty Dozen a thousand times. This movie is set in World War 2 but is not about it, it’s really about something that Tarentino knows significantly more about than history: Film. Let me backtrack on that just a little, I’m sure there is a certain degree to accuracy to the minutia of the movie. The uniforms, weapons, and locations are probably authentic and a certain understanding of history does enhance a lot of the details in the movie, but ultimately the war here represents cinematic imagination rather than reality every bit as much as the criminal underworld of Pulp Fiction was a figment of Tarentio’s imagination rather than a document of any real crime syndicate.
When dealing with Nazis, most films rightfully examine the massive damage they did both during the Holocaust and on the battlefields of the war. But Tarentino seems significantly more concerned with what the Nazis did to the German film industry. It’s mentioned in the film that Hitler’s Germany was largely responsible for the demise of the unmatched Weimar era film industry. The filmmakers that weren’t driven out for being “decadent Jew Intellectuals” would only stay to find their talents wasted on idiotic propaganda films. Is this the greatest sin of the Third Reich? Probably not, and to most of the world it wasn’t worth punishing. So, who better than Tarentino to give cinema its much deserved revenge, something he does with the utmost skill during the films finale which can only be described as “wild.” To Tarentino cinema (and by extension art) is a significantly stronger force than Nazis, than Hitler, than history itself, and nowhere has he so vividly (and literally) expressed this than with Inglourious Basterds.
**** out of Four
In the Loop(8/7/2009)
Television is a medium that has become increasingly important in the last ten years; shows like “The Wire,” “Mad Men,” and “The Shield” have lead to a great renaissance in the format of serialized storytelling. However the world of television reaches beyond networks like HBO, AMC, and FX (and even beyond those over the air networks that people seem to like). Like the cinema, material is produced for television all over the world, particularly in the UK whose domestic television industry has launched the careers of major talent like Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, and Hugh Laurie. However, while the basic format for cinema is almost identical the world over, the norms of televised content seem to vary in ways that can be confounding. Every time I’ve tried to get into a much buzzed British program I’m confounded by their cheap film stock, but even more so by their short season (excuse me, “series”) lengths and limited runs. What they call a program I call a miniseries, what’s the point of getting into a show if it’s just going to end after six to twelve short episodes? For those reasons I’ve mainly stuck to television shows that don’t use barbaric horizontal credit sequences, and it seems like the majority of my fellow vertical credit loving Americans do the same. Perhaps that is why the new feature film In the Loop is currently playing in select American theaters even though the UK television series it’s based on, “The Thick of It,” is nowhere to be found in Region 1.
Though the film is largely an ensemble piece, the lead character is probably Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the minister for international development. This is a man who seems to mean well for the most part, but he has a Biden-esque habit of saying stupid things in public. The gaffe that really gets him in trouble is when he’s asked about a possible Anglo-American incursion into the Middle East (the film never comes out and says it, but this is obviously meant to represent Iraq), the best answer he can come up with is that war is a “not unforeseeable” possibility. This clumsy and ambiguous wording results in an angry tongue lashing from the Prime Minister’s Communications Director Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), but the statement is picked up by American war hawks like Linton Barwick (David Rasche), a State Department crony who has little interest in “the facts” and who gives out friendly smiles while ruthlessly manipulating violent overseas events. However, in spite of the way his statements sound Foster is not in favor of the war (at least in theory) and because of this he is seen as a potential ally to those trying to oppose the war at the highest levels like American Undersecretary Mimi Kennedy and a gruff Military General (James Gandolfini) who doesn’t feel the war is winnable. After another embarrassing fumble of wording, Foster and a young advisor named Toby (Chris Addison) find themselves flying off to Washington D.C. to take part in the debate.
In general, this movie is a little bit like “The West Wing,” but with less optimism and more swearing. It shows the behind the scenes grind of politics, but does so on a much less appetizing level. The President and the Prime Minister are never seen or named in the movie; this is about people in the middle-management of government in the midst of what is probably the most exciting thing that will ever happen in their careers. They might have beliefs and ideas of their own, but they mostly just have to do what their bosses tell them to do in order to keep their jobs, all the real decisions are made by people well above their pay grades. In this sense the film is a lot like Ricky Gervais’ famous Brit-sitcom “The Office,” except in a business with higher stakes than a paper company; it also shares that series’ vérité visual style.
Probably the greatest pleasure of In the Loop is its dialogue, written by team who wrote for the TV series, and delivered with conviction by a talented cast. Normally the sight of five writers in the credits should be a turn off, but in this case I suspect the team was there simply to fill the movie with great jokes and witty lines rather than to mess with the story. The film rarely seems like it adds unnecessary scenes in order to accommodate a funny set-pieces, it sticks strictly to the story it wants to tell and finds humor in the proceedings rather than looking for it elsewhere. The fact that they are able to turn this television comedy style into a real narrative arc is perhaps the scripts greatest triumph. At first you feel like you’re just watching it for the satirical dialogue, but the tension does ramp up in the third act and you really do start to get excited about the outcome as people on both sides of the pond mobilize to decide whether or not this war happens.
The actor blessed with the most consistently funny character is Peter Capaldi whose character is a profane angry boss character who frequently throws out threats like “Just fucking do it! Otherwise you’ll find yourself in some medieval war zone in the Caucasus with your arse in the air, trying to persuade a group of men in balaclavas that sustained sexual violence is not the fucking way forward!” He reminded me a lot of both of Ari Gould, the similarly quick speaking and dismissive agent played by Jeremy Piven on the HBO series “Entourage,” and of the curse spewing executive played by Tom Cruise in the film Tropic Thunder. This is an endlessly amusing character type that might have originated with Kevin Spacey’s part in the Hollywood satire Swimming with Sharks. The similarities may have been unintentional, but I find it very funny that a government communications director would have the same personality type as these Hollywood types who avoid all pleasantries in order to get their way at all costs. Most of the other characters are less over the top than Capaldi’s, but most of them are given some moment where they find themselves on top and are able to chew out one of their co-workers. Even an idiot like Tom Hollander’s character finds and opportunity to do so when his advisor arrives late to a meeting and he milks the opportunity to its fullest.
There’s a certain nihilistic streak to the whole film, no matter what the characters do there’s really no stopping this war from happening; the decision’s been made and the check has been cashed. Those who try to stop the inevitable are only putting their livelihoods on the line in vain, though most of them cave before it comes to that. Perhaps the best thing that can come from this is a certain empathy for the people who are in the middle of the insanity that politics can be at some time, after all they’re only human too and you should maybe cut them a little slack when they take a while to fix your wall.
What may be the film’s one problem is that it came way too late. Imagine how awesome this would have been if it had come out in 2003, right when this kind of decision making was going on in Washington and London. That’s probably a completely unreasonable expectation, after all one can only get a real look at what went into that fateful decision in retrospect, but then again this is a movie that people are comparing to the immortal Dr. Strangelove, and Stanley Kubrick didn’t wait until after a nuclear war started to make that film. Still, no matter when this came out there’s no denying that this is a very funny, smart, and insightful film. They had me at funny.
**** out of four
The Hurt Locker(7/16/2009)
The highly respected critic Manohla Dargis began her recent New York Times profile of the filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow by saying: “The take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies… sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker.” The double standard which Dargis points out is well stated, but I would never go so far as to call Bigelow a “great director” of any kind. This is, after all, a filmmaker whose greatest claim to fame is a mid-nineties Keanu Reeves vehicle (Point Break) which Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright could ridicule with the same breath they mocked Bad Boys II. The other highlights of her oeuvre are a forgettable Submarine movie called K-19: The Widow Maker and a moderately creative vampire movie called Near Dark which was marred by a low budget and a lame tacked on happy ending. The best movie she’d made up to this point was Strange Days, a mostly forgotten science fiction movie which, while solid, was only a minor triumph. As such I’ve been a bit perplexed by the revisionism with which many are describing this career in the wake of the release of Bigelow’s newest film The Hurt Locker. While I’m still not a fan of Bigelow’s career up to this point, seeing this new film does make me excited to see what the future will bring for Ms. Bigelow, because The Hurt Locker is significantly better than anything she’s made before.
Set in the midst of the Iraq war circa 2004, the film covers 20-30 days in the life of a three-man army bomb squad. The newest member is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), he’s the commanding officer and he takes point on the bomb defusing duties. Supporting him are Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who must watch what he’s doing and look out for possible triggermen looking to set off the bombs. Quickly it becomes apparent that Staff Sergeant James has a very different style than his predecessor, he’s reckless and prone to taking wild risks. With only a couple dozen days left in their tour, the men must try to hold out in spite of the danger that this behavior puts them in.
It is no secret that movies about the Iraq War have mostly been miserable failures both critically and commercially. Granted, a lot of the movies that are lumped into the genre are really either primarily about other Middle-East conflicts (E.G. Lions for Lambs, The Kingdom, Rendition) or they’re about the lives of soldiers after they’ve returned home (E.G. Stop Loss, Home of the Brave, The Lucky Ones). Perhaps the only theatrical film thus far which I would unhesitantly say is about the Iraq War is Brian De Palma’s ballsy but at times terribly executed film Redacted, which came under heavy fire by right-wing ideologues for failing to exult “the troops.” Many suggest that the problem has been that it’s “too soon,” that there’s no way to fully assess the conflict until after it’s over. I have trouble buying this explanation, as there have been plenty of documentarians who have proven more than able to assess the situation intelligently as well as some surprisingly superior television projects like FX’s “Over There” and HBO’s “Generation Kill.” If nothing else these various projects have more than established the look and feel of the war in Iraq to the point where this film feels more like a return to the setting than an introduction to it, thus allowing Bigelow to hit the ground running.
While this clearly isn’t the first work to tackle the conflict, it is the first one to focus on actual combat… sort of. After all, combat in Iraq doesn’t exactly look like the frontline battles of wars past. Most of the fatalities in Iraq come from hidden bombs which often explode before the victims know what hit them. So in spite of the film’s focus on “combat,” I wouldn’t call it an action movie as many critics have. In fact, the film only has one scene which I’d classify as an honest-to-goodness action sequence, and even there the thrills are mostly suspenseful rather than visceral. Most of the “combat” consists of tense situations where the team must deal with live bombs which could go off at any moment. The film avoids most of the clichés of bomb defusing; the characters don’t spend minutes choosing between the red and blue wires (at least they don’t announce their dilemma out loud) and they are never given a large readout counting down to when the bomb will blow. The honest-to-goodness action scene I referred to, a tense Sniper duel, is easily the highlight of the film. In fact it may just be the best sniper face-off since Full Metal Jacket.
The particularly impressive thing about the film’s visual style is its ability to balance both conventional and documentary aesthetics. This is an equilibrium that many filmmakers have been trying to perfect lately, thus making this success all the more impressive. The film is shot handheld, but it is in no way meant to be a mockumentary, and it will not be offensive to those opposed to “the shaky cam.” The picture oddly looks both washed out and digital, a very gritty look but in an entirely twenty first century way. In spite of this gritty look, when the bombs in the film do go off Bigelow is not afraid to shoot them with all the gusto that Roland Emmerich would. Up until now Bigelow’s style resembled the early work of Tony Scott, it was slick and relaxed. So this film’s docudrama aesthetic is a pretty big departure for her. The is made even more impressive if one compares it to the clumsy way Brian De Palma tried to shift into faux-documentary styling in his Iraq film.
The film is completely apolitical, I doubt that Bigelow is a fan of the war, but no judgment seems to be made about the conflict other than that it is a highly dangerous environment that can be incredibly trying for those involved. In fact the movie is so neutral that at times it seems to lack even a storyline. The film is completely dedicated to simply showing twenty-some days in the life of these guys and almost nothing else, it goes from set-piece to set piece with only a few scenes back at the barracks to connect it all. In its third act the film threatens to form an actual narrative arc, but then goes back to its slice of life format. This isn’t to say the film is without depth, though it lacks a strong central story the characters are well developed through their actions and their conversations. Though the format is not conventional, this is not some sort of wild Gus Van Sant style experiment, it won’t be confusing to non-cinephiles and its style serves no extraneous purpose other than to support the material.
The Hurt Locker is indeed the best feature length film about the Iraq war, and by quite a distance at that. Still, I feel there are better movies about the war to be made in the future. Perhaps in the future we’ll get movies about this war that are as refined as a Saving Private Ryan, a Thin Red Line, or a Letters From Iwo Jima. This film is reminiscent of the more primitive World War Two movies that were made in the late forties and fifties like Battleground or Twelve O’Clock High. These were very matter of fact films which simply sought to tell a story about men trying to cope with hardships on a battlefield. They were simple stories of survival, no more concerned with the full ramifications of the war then the men on the ground were. I certainly hope that movies will come that can achieve greater ambitions than this, until then The Hurt Locker will have to do.
***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
DVD Catch Up: Honeydripper(6/28/2008)
John Sayles is an odd filmmaker in that his work seems oddly isolated from everything else Hollywood puts out. He’s almost a textbook example of what an auteur is, in that one can guess he directed a film simply by watching a single scene, but pinpointing why his work is recognizable is not always as easy as it is with other filmmakers. There’s something in the dialogue, the way the actors behave, and the ambitious aim of his uniquely American stories that positively define his work behind the camera. His newest film, Honeydripper, was mostly ignored in theaters and I had hoped that it would be an underappreciated gem; unfortunately it’s minor Sayles at best.
The film is set in a fictional Alabama town of Harmony during the very early 1950s. The film specifically focuses on Harmony’s black community, particularly a tavern/dance hall called the Honeydripper. The venue is owned by Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), but it has fallen on hard times. Purvis is in danger of losing the place to a loan shark, so he and his friend Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) plan a last ditch effort to stay in business by bringing in a famous blues musician named Guitar Sam to play a big gig that would generate enough money to pay Purvis’ rent. Purvis has recently drifted away from his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and is also being threatened by the town’s racist sheriff (Stacy Keach). Meanwhile a young man named Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) has arrived in town carrying a guitar case and interested in auditioning at the local music scene to make ends meet. Purvis can’t really afford the show he plans to put on and it becomes clear that the evening’s entertainment will be a make or break night for him and the Honeydripper.
There was a lot less music in the film then I had expected, the story clearly deals with people who have music as a major part of their life, but the soundtrack is not loaded with period music. There is a great performance scene toward the end which features the use of a very early electric guitar, the music played is a primitive and toe tapping form of rock and roll.
The movie’s main problem is mainly that it has a lot of southern clichés. Among the types to be found here: a redneck sheriff, an eager young man gone to town to make something of his music career, a white southern housewife oblivious to the rest of the world, and a blind old coot who plays guitar on main street stoops. Occasionally Sayles will do some unexpected things with these types, for instance that Sheriff proves to ultimately be more interested in getting free chicken than oppressing people just for the fun of it, there’s also a neat twist with the blind old coot.
Danny Glover is probably the best thing about the film, he’s got just the right ability to seem like a nice and likable guy, but still having a certain gruffness to his character. It’s clear that Glover’s character has seen a lot over the course of his career as a bar owner and blues enthusiast. He’s a character that clearly has a past and the audience easily gets the gist of it without the movie explicitly showing or describing much of it.
In final analysis, Honeydripper is just a very average and fairly forgettable film. It has a neat atmosphere, the story works well enough, but it’s just a very small trifle of a film. Had I seen it in theaters I would have felt vaguely ripped off, and I’m not sure I’d even recommend it as a DVD rental. But, if you see it on cable or something like that I do think it’s worth giving a shot.
**1/2 out of four
Hellboy II: The Golden Army(7/11/2008)
A decade ago there were very, very few comic book adaptations in theaters. Aside from the first Batman and Superman franchises there were almost none at all. Boy have things changed. Now one can count on a good 2-3 movies a year based on iconic comic book characters and a few more obscure graphic novel adaptations for good measure. One trend that emerged from this trend of comic book movies was that the first sequel of each series seemed to be the best. Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 were both significantly better than the movies they preceded. These were of course followed by disappointing third installments, but the second movies in both series were bigger, better, and more confident then the originals without going over the top. Another great example of this was the Guillermo Del Toro directed Blade II, a film that did have major flaws but was a much-improved experience over Stephen Norington’s original. Del Toro has also managed to make a superior sequel to his own comic book franchise, Hellboy.
This installment picks up not too long after the original and Hellboy (Ron Pearlman) is still working in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense with Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and his girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair). Hellboy’s relationship with Liz is full fledged this time, but it’s on rocky terrain. Hellboy is not the easiest person to live with and Liz is near her wits end. Meanwhile, in a subterranean world never discovered by man, an evil albino elf guy named Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is planning to overthrow mankind and reclaim the earth for inhuman kind, but in order to do this he must collect three pieces of a broken crown that will unleash an invincible mechanical army to do his bidding. Nuada decides to retrieve the first piece of the crown by waging a full on attack on a high-end auction being conducted in downtown Manhattan. Hellboy and the Bureau move in to intervene, but in the process Hellboy falls out of the building onto a crowded street, thus revealing the Bureau to the world, giving Hellboy the freedom he’s always wanted, but perhaps the world isn’t ready for him. Hellboy must deal with this, and more immediately he must stop Prince Nuada from enacting his evil plan.
I didn’t really like the first Hellboy, but I’ve warmed to it over time. Guillermo Del Toro clearly gives a damn about the comic books he’s adapting, which is a refreshing sentiment, but it gave the series a certain cartoonishness that took some getting used to. While most of these superhero type movies mix comic book storylines with science fiction, Hellboy mixes superhero arcs with the fantasy genre. This wasn’t as easy to tell in the first movie, but what Del Toro is trying to do is a lot clearer in this installment. Hopefully with this in mind the plot summery above seem a little less strange, because it isn’t nearly as weird as it sounds on paper, though there are definitely awkward elements.
A lot has changed fro the original film. The long-suffering Bureau chief, Tom Manning (Jeffery Tambor), is still here. But John Myers, the junior agent used to introduce the audience to the bureau in the original, has been unceremoniously cut from the story. As I stated before, there is a much clearer attachment to the fantasy genre here than the previous movie, which had more of a horror vibe. This perhaps fits in with the direction of Del Toro’s other projects coming off of Pan’s Labyrinth and going into his next project, The Hobbit. This allows Del Toro’s imagination to run wild, but there are some downsides. The setup requires a fairly convoluted mythology that is introduced in a fairly long CGI animated prologue. It also requires the audience to accept that there is an extremely elaborate fantasy universe that’s been living among the regular world while rarely being spotted.
What really sets the movie apart from the other comic book franchises it’s competing with is Del Toro’s genuine creativity and visionary designs that are on display throughout the film. Del Toro has a deep love for monster movies and he fills his movies with fantastically designed creatures. With this movie Del Toro has turned the monster quotient up to eleven. Each new creature Hellboy faces in this movie is stranger and cooler looking than the last. This is excellent visual filmmaking in the context of a fun Hollywood action movie. Occasionally though, it is a little too much of a good thing. Pan’s Labyrinth seemed to do a great job with only three monsters, here we must get at least ten if not more. Almost every one of them is as meticulously designed as anything we saw in Pan’s Labyrinth, but occasionally the film seems a bit crowded. There’s a sense of self indulgence in just how many monsters Del Toro has filled this movie with and a few of them might have been better off saved for a later movie.
The visual effects used to put these meticulously crafted monsters up on screen are also very good. One of the best things about Dell Toro’s work is that he never uses CGI as a crutch, while still using it well when it’s necessary. All too often directors will jump computer-animated effects automatically, even for jobs that physical effects are better suited for. Del Toro is not one of these filmmakers, he always knows when to use makeup or practical effects to get the job done. There are only two or three monsters in Hellboy II that are entirely CGI creations, and they’re all things that undeniably needed CGI to be accomplished. I’m not a total CGIiphobe but I love what physical effects bring with them to the screen and it’s nice to see a filmmaker who also values this kind of effects work.
The main villain, Prince Nuada, is a good character on paper and his combat abilities add greatly to the film’s action scenes, but from a visual design standpoint he’s a weak link. He’s basically just an albino dude with long hair, that’s not overly impressive and isn’t up to the creative standards Del Toro has set for himself. The character design reminded me of the Reevers from the television show “Stargate: Atlantis,” and a number of other Albino villains. In another movie this would have been a passable design, but here he’s completely upstaged by most of his henchmen and by the heroes.
The action sequences are also really good here. The first movie had a few decent fight scenes but it lacked some truly visceral action scenes. A big part of this was that Hellboy himself is sort of a bulky thuggish type, not unlike the Incredible Hulk or The Thing from the Fantastic Four. He wasn’t very prone to acrobatics and the fights in the first one (mainly against equally large squid monsters) were comic book like brawls that relied more on brute force than combat skills. Here though they made the wise choice to make the villain more of an a martial artist type and many of the fights are faster, more choreographed affairs along the line of what we saw in Blade II. That isn’t to say this is as consistently violent as that bloody opus, but it is a step up from what we say in the first Hellboy.
Of course the joy to be found in Hellboy II isn’t all in the special effects and action. The film has a very complete, very witty script. I could have lived without the elaborate mythology behind the story, but I’ll take a creative if slightly convoluted setup any day over another cookie cutter comic book story like Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk. The story also has attempts at some genuine depth, even if it’s not particularly subtle. I think particularly about the romance between Hellboy and Liz, which Del Toro had the courage to look at very seriously. This is one of the strangest couplings one is likely to ever see, but at points film has more to say about the nature of love than most of the generic romantic comedies that come out. Of course the script occasionally bites off a little more than it chews, like when it introduces the concept of how the public reacts to Hellboy once he’s revealed, but never really follows up on this.
One element of the script that greatly differentiates it from the first installment is that there is a very noticeable increase in the amount of comic relief on display here. The original Hellboy never took itself too seriously, but this sequel has even more comedy in it. There are a whole lot of very comic sequences here like one portion where Hellboy and Abe go on a beer binge. Make no mistake, most if not all of these comedic sequences do work, they’re almost all funny, none of them seem completely out of place, and none of them are distractions. The problem with them isn’t really quality, but rather quantity. The whole point of including comic relief is to release the tension that’s been built at appropriate moments. There’s so much comedy here that the genuine tension has trouble getting built, it’s “relieved” too early, it would have done the film well to cut some of these scenes.
Del Toro’s decision to cast Ron Pearlman as Hellboy was one of the best casting decisions he could have made for the original movie. He had the size, the gruffness, and the humor that Hellboy needed and he’s just as good here. Doug Jones is also back as Abe Sapien and he’s doing the voice work for the character now as well. I initially thought this would be a problem if only because of continuity, but I didn’t miss David Hyde Pierce one bit. Abe Sapien also has a lot more to do here, I thought he was somewhat wasted in the first film, but he feels like a full fledged character here and Doug Jones makes him come to life effectively. Speaking of voice acting, Seth MacFarlane does the voice of a new character here, and his work is really laugh out loud hilarious here. But the actor who really deserves a standing ovation is Selma Blair, who I thought was really under-appreciated in the first Hellboy. I really like the character Blair created in that first film, she doesn’t have as much to do here but I still really like what she’s doing.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army has a handful of problems, but they shouldn’t be overstated and they’re far overshadowed by the movie’s positive aspects. Del Toro’s imaginative creature creations alone are worth the price of admission and beyond the effects this is a very fun very well made summer movie. This is great escapism and I had a load of fun watching it.
***1/2
The Incredible Hulk(6/13/2008)
In the June of 2003 Ang Lee put out his take on the comic book character The Incredible Hulk amidst a flurry of huge budget blockbusters like X-Men 2 and The Matrix Reloaded. The simply titled Hulk, was just coming off the success of the original Spider-Man, and Ang Lee could have easily churned out a cookie-cutter blockbuster and turned a huge profit. Instead Lee decided to take chances on his trip up to the superhero bat and essentially made a superhero drama as opposed to a superhero action movie. The result was a very interesting if somewhat flawed exploration of the genre. Of course this didn’t sit to well with the 13 year old males the studio marketed the film to and the movie famously dropped 70% in its second week, after a very respectable opening. Now, five years later, the superhero genre has gone from being a fad to being a decade long institution and Marvel has no intention of letting one of it’s biggest franchises sit around collecting dust. So they’ve decided to “reboot” the franchise, and this time they’re doing everything they can to pander to the 13 year olds.
After a quick introduction, the film opens in the Brazilian fravelas where Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) has been hiding for the last five years. Through really convoluted means General Ross (William Hurt), who’s been tracking him, manages to locate him in Brazil and sends a team to capture Banner. The leader of this team, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), spots Banner while he’s in Hulk-form and becomes obsessed. Shortly before he’s chased out of town by the Special Forces team, an anonymous scientist calling himself Mr. Blue (Tim Blake Nelson) contacts Banner and tells him he has found a cure for Banner’s ailment (perfect coincidental timing). With this in mind Banner decides to travel to New York in hopes that Mr. Blue’s cure works out, but while he’s there he runs into his old flame Betty Ross (Liv Tyler).
The film recounts the origin story of Bruce Banner in its first three minutes while the opening credits are rolling; it generally assumes the audience to be familiar with the character from the get-go. This makes the film’s place as in independent story a bit awkward. Ignoring that opening one could conceivably pretend that this is indeed a sequel to Ang Lee’s Hulk, albeit one with different actors. The relationship between the pursuing General Ross, his daughter, and Bruce Banner seems to have carried over, and there’s nothing to contradict Lee’s film except the opening scene; in fact the film opens in South America which is where the coda for the 2002 film was set. There seems to be something rather confused and tacky about this reboot attempt, it reminded me in some ways of The Sum of All Fears, which was another film that tried to pretend the rest of its series never happened for no good reason.
There’s a film related podcast I’ve been listening to for the last couple of years called The Hollywood Saloon (which I highly recommend). The hosts of that show have come to coin the word “McMovie” which refers to bland Hollywood blockbusters which seem to be churned out for the sole purposes of making a lot of money. These movies that take no chances do not try to achieve any form of greatness; people like Brett Ratner, Tim Story, or McG usually direct them. A comparison between Ang Lee’s Hulk and this new film from Louis Leterrier (The man behind The Transporter series) provides a perfect example of the differences between a serious film and a McMovie. While Lee’s film was a thoughtful meditation, Leterrier’s film settles on loudness. It’s not just run of the mill loudness either, I haven’t seen a theater rattle like that in a long time. Lee’s film was heavy on plot and story telling, Leterrier’s film is heavy on CGI, so heavy in fact that it was often hard to distinguish the film’s trailer from the advertisements for its videogame adaptation. Lee’s film took chances within the context of it’s genre and tried to develop characters with real histories and problems outside of their comic book crisis, Leterrier’s film on the other hand feels like it was written by a marketing committee.
Of course McMovie’s aren’t always terrible, in fact they’re often quite competent, but by their nature they’re never great. This is by no means a terrible film and there’s actually a lot to like in it. Firstly, the cast here is quite good. Edward Norton is one of the best actors of his generation, and he’s really overqualified for this role, but the same could be said for almost anyone cast in a superhero movie. Norton seems to be taking his work here pretty seriously, and he brings his inner tortured soul out pretty well. William Hurt is also doing quite well picking up where Sam Elliot left off in the same basic role in Ang Lee’s film. I also really liked Tim Blake Nelson’s work in a small but important role that looks like a setup for a future sequel.
There are however definite problems with other casting choices. Particularly problematic is the casting of Tim Roth, an actor I’ve never been a huge fan of, who is supposed to be playing some kind of badass elite special forces member. Roth generally doesn’t seem very military in the way he carries himself, and he generally looks a bit too short and skinny for the buildup he’s given as “the best of the best” so to speak. Liv Tyler also has some serious problems, as I don’t think she’s evolved much as a performer since Armageddon. She seems pretty young for her role as a major biology researcher; she must have been twenty-five when Banner had his accident. Tyler seems really mild mannered at some points and highly assertive at others. Her character just isn’t very well defined or developed and she doesn’t have much to do. None of the actors here improve on their counterparts from Ang Lee’s film at all, and were recast for no reason other than to differentiate reboot from that unpopular project.
From an effects point of view the film does not live up to the standards of other movies like Iron Man, though this admittedly has a lot to do with the inherent challenges of the Hulk character. While Iron Man was largely cased in lifeless steel, the Hulk effects team had to replicate a creature of organic flesh. Characters like Spider-man can at least have some sort of humanity under all the CGI and even King Kong had a lot of fur and a real world creature to be based on, all the Hulk can really be is a walking special effect. These obstacles may have been why Ang Lee choose to focus on a very human story with his film, even the 70s T.V. series mostly focused on Bill Bixby and only used the Lou Ferrigno creature sparingly. Here on the other hand we deal with numerous extended action sequences and once a second creature emerges the film becomes increasingly CGI dependent.
The first two actions scenes have a certain level of respectability to them, particularly the first scene that is mainly a foot chase through the favelas with an un-transformed Banner. The chase is pretty exciting, at least until Banner coincidentally runs into someone from earlier in the film. A second action sequence on a college campus also has a lot going for it, though I don’t think it’s ever explained why this university is completely devoid of bystanders. The third fight scene, however, quickly devolves into a pair of CGI hulks mashing into each other.
The film generally suffers from a number of plot holes like Mr. Blue’s coincidental discovery of the cure at just the right time, and the ludicrous way the military finds Banner in Brazil, which the filmmakers try to cover up by distracting the audience with a Stan Lee Cameo. Throughout the film the military have an uncanny ability to cover-up the fascistic behavior they use to capture this escaped scientist, and the Hulk jarringly begins to sprout a conscious at the most convenient (read: sequel preserving) moment. The film also has a lot of lame attempts at humor. There’s also a tacky cameo scene that’s clumsily tacked onto the end, it exist for no reason other than to be an inside joke and it robs the movie of a naturalistic ending. Iron Man at lest had the decency to hide its tacky coda after the credits.
This is a great example of Hollywood marketing run amok, it’s a blatant attempt to reestablish the franchises brand with a run of the mill film intended to appeal to the ADD crowd. The film seems perfunctory and if you saw any of the films advertising you already saw almost everything the film had to offer. Admittedly, the film never descends to the level of stupidity found in something like Transformers, but it also features very few creative ideas. As far as these things go there are much worse ways Hollywood could have you spend two hours, but this is still a very forgettable experience.
**1/2 out of four
