DVD Catch Up: Knowing(7/15/2009)
If there’s anyone whose status as a major celebrity baffles me, it’s Nicholas Cage. That’s not to say I hate him as an actor, in fact I’ve loved a number of his performances, but he isn’t a guy who screams star quality and he’s prone to some really misguided career choices. At times it seems like Cage can’t say “no” to a script, that’s pretty much the only explanation for why he’s found himself at the center of so many cookie-cutter Hollywood action movies. In just the last three years he’s stared in such dreck as Bangkok Dangerous, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Ghost Rider, and a remake of The Wicker Man. When I saw the trailer for his newest film, Knowing, I really couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Everything about the trailer suggested that this was just another in a long string of Nicholas Cage stinkers. Given my instincts about the star and trailer mixed with the film’s lackluster scoring on Rotten Tomatoes, I was quite prepared to skip Knowing altogether. Then a funny thing happened; Roger Ebert, a critic I have a lot of respect for, broke from the general critical consensus and gave the movie a glowing four star review. I don’t want to sound like I’ll do anything Ebert tells me to do; he (like all critics) is perfectly capable of displaying ludicrous taste on occasion. However, his praise got me just curious enough to look deeper, and in doing so I realized that the film was directed by Alex Proyas; the man behind one of the 90’s greatest science fiction movies, Dark City. I still wasn’t going to lay my money down to see the film, but I was just intrigued enough to give the DVD a rental once it came out.
The film opens in a classroom circa 1959. The class has decided to put together a time capsule that will be opened in fifty years. Each student draws a picture of what they think the future will look like, except for one odd little girl who instead of drawing finds herself furiously writing a long series of numbers across two sides of a sheet of paper. The teacher finds it odd, but puts it in the capsule anyway. The school is probably more dedicated to the idea of time capsules than any school in history, and they diligently open up the capsule fifty years later in an elaborate ceremony. The papers within are handed out to a crowd of kids, and in the frenzy the aforementioned page full of numbers finds its way into the hands of a child named Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury). Against the rules of the ceremony he brings his artifact home with him where it falls into the hands of his father, an MIT professor named John Koestler (Nicholas Cage). Koestler initially thinks nothing of this until he sees the number 91120012604 in the series, 9/11/2001 2604. He looks up the September 11th attack and sees that there were in fact 2604 people killed in the world trade center that day. He then begins to take a hard look at the pattern of numbers and realizes that every number in the series corresponds to a world tragedy. All the numbers have been accounted for except for three which are going to predict disasters that will occur in the coming weeks.
For all the flack I just gave Nicholas Cage, he really truly isn’t a bad actor, most of the dread I have over his career has more to do with the ridiculous films he chooses to make than what he actually does in them. His work here was mostly dignified, he plays an average guy and he plays him well enough. I also thought Chandler Canterbury did well as far as child performances go, and Rose Byrne (despite some terrible dialogue and some ridiculous scripted behavior the part of her character) also does well enough given the material she’s given.
However, all three of these actors have a big challenge here: dealing with a ridiculous script that feels like it was ghost written by M. Night Shyamalan, and not The Sixth Sense Shyamalan, more like the Lady in the Water Shyamalan. The screenplay was in fact written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, and Stiles White. You haven’t heard of these people because the only theatrical movie on any of their resumes is a mercifully forgotten horror film called Boogeyman. There is however a reason I bring Shyamalan into this, because it’s a similarly high concept thriller which take ludicrous twists and expects the audience to just go along with it. The whole concept is after all ridiculous, the film claims that every major disaster of the last fifty years is represented on the code Cage finds, but there are hundreds of plane crashes, building fires, and warfare incidents a year, how the hell are you going to fit every one of them on one sheet of paper?
But even if you can go along with this, one still has to contend with this screen play’s nasty habit of using coincidence to drive its story. Why did this sheet of paper land in the hands of Cage, someone who’s later revealed to have had a major connection to it in a number of ways? Coincidence. Why did Cage happen to be exactly where he needed to be to witness one of the disasters predicted on the paper? Coincidence, even though the movie contradicts itself and says he was lead there even though he didn’t know how to locate disasters until after this one happened. And finally how did Cage stumble upon the number 91120012604 which would turn out to be the key to solving the code? Coincidence. And I could have maybe accepted that last one had the film not proven itself to be as lazily written as it was. It gets even worse in the last twenty minutes where the characters all suddenly abandon logic and start doing whatever suites the story that’s been written instead of making the decisions rational people would make.
That said, all of this film’s faults are with the script and I think its director, Alex Proyas, mostly acquits himself here. Proyas avoids unnecessary stylization and shoots the film in a way that’s mostly relaxed and dignified. He doesn’t over edit the film and he doesn’t try to make it a kinetic experience. There are three fairly strong set pieces. The first, a plane crash, is one of the most intense five minutes of disaster filmmaking I’ve seen in a long time. The second, a train crash, is marred by some iffy CGI but Proyas shoots it well. I won’t give away the third, but I will say that it’s executed well even if it is part of a very stupid ending.
Roger Ebert is one of my heroes, but I’m going to have to strongly disagree with him on this one. Ebert argues that this is an exploration of whether the universe is random or deterministic, and indeed it does explore just that. The problem is that it explores the issue in a way that is cheesy and ham-fisted, and its plot hole ridden script lacks the logical seaworthiness that such an exploration requires. The film also fails on a human level and as a thriller it isn’t very thrilling.
*1/2 out of Four
Moon(7/6/2009)
The very first science fiction movie was Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon. A fourteen minute epic in which a group of explorers go to the moon, walk onto the surface (no space suit needed), find a group of moon men, beat them off with umbrellas, then return home. The film is probably best known for a moment in which their ship crashes into the man on the moon’s eyeball, he doesn’t look pleased. After that the moon was the number one destination for fictional space travel, at least until we went there for real and realized it was kind of a boring place. In fact it quickly dawned on us that none of the planets in this solar system are really destinations for high adventure and since then we’ve been setting our science fiction stories in distant galaxies. The problem with this is that after a good fifty-some years of space travel it’s become increasingly clear how far away we are from being able to get to Mars, much less a new solar system. In fact the closest planet that might have life on it is 150 trillion miles away. That’s not a problem if you’re making a Space Opera like Star Wars or Star Trek, but it’s not all right if you’re making what you’d call “hard science fiction,” stories that predict very realistic and plausible future technology. Those kind of serious Science fiction movies have been looking back toward our home solar systems. Danny Boyle’s 2007 hard science fiction film Sunshine had the sun as its destination, while this latest entry of the genre is bringing the genre full circle by returning to our closest celestial neighbor, the moon.
Rather than having a twist ending, this film has a major twist about a third of the way into it. It would be ludicrously hard to talk about this film without giving away this twist, so this review is going to be a bit more spoilerish than most. I won’t give away any of the later developments, but be warned that I will be giving away some key surprises from the first act or two.
The film is set an indeterminate number of years into the future at a point where humanity has finally found a clean source of energy by mining a substance called Helium-3 from the surface of the Moon. A base has been established on the moon but travel there is still a slow and unwieldy process, and as such there is only one person manning the operation, a man named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). His main job is to drive to the automated harvesters mining the surface, remove the full capsules of Helium-3, and then launch them off to Earth. His only companion is a robot/computer system called Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). One day Sam sees a strange vision while driving the lunar rover and crashes it right into the automated harvester. He wakes up the next day in the ships infirmary. Gerty wants him to stay in bed, but Sam convinces the computer to let him leave. He immediately drives out to the site of the crash, and looks into the rover where he finds his own body still in there and still alive. He runs the body back to the base and resuscitates it. Now he must discover why there’s someone else who looks just like him on the base and then must find out what the company plans to do about it.
A lot of this movie rests on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell as this is essentially a one man show; or rather a two man show in which Rockwell plays both parts. Rockwell is a great actor who, for whatever reason, has never really been able to break the A-list. He has everything a mainstream actor needs but has never become a household name, possibly because he’s attracted to more challenging material than some actors. His double role here is reminiscent of Nicholas Cage’s double role in Adaptation, he must play two people who look alike but who have fairly different personalities. The original Sam is the slightly more Rockwellish of the two, he’s a laid back person albeit one who’s gone through three long years of moon work and is rather tired from it. The second of the two is a bit more stern and aggressive, he hasn’t been beaten down by his situation and he’s less easy-going. There are physical differences from which you can tell the two apart, the first has a bandage on his hand and a black eye, but for the most part it is Rockwell’s acting which differentiates the two. Quite impressive. My one problem with the characterization (and I mainly blame the script for this) is the fairly unperturbed way Sam reacts to his “twin” at first. There is a portion shortly after the twist where the characters are way too calm about the fact that their staring at someone who looks just like them. If I was in that situation there would be a lot more swearing and more demands to know exactly what the hell is going on.
The robot here is a cross between HAL 9000 and R2-D2. I’m not exactly sure whether it is an independent robot or if the floating console is a manifestation of the base’s main computer. He floats around, has what looks like a camera lens for an eye and there’s a screen on him which displays various smilies in order to convey emotions. One usually expects these kind of robots to be nothing but trouble, especially when he’s been programmed by a seemingly conspiratorial corporation. This robot plays with that convention, his allegiance is never entirely clear, at least not until very late in the movie. That was an interesting take, but I would have liked a better explanation as to why the robot took the side he did. As it is he just takes a side because he does, I expected that to be resolved better than it was.
Visually the film is perfectly competent but never exceedingly great. The film was made relatively cheaply for a science fiction film of this sort, and I’m sure a lot of ingenuity went into the production. The production leans toward physical effects more than CGI, a decision I certainly approve of, though it was a bit annoying that a few shots of the moon’s surface seemed to be recycled at times. The most impressive element of the production was the space base’s highly detailed interiors, which seemed to share elements from some of the better spaceships of the genre like the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s Alien or the Icarus II from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
I think the concept at the center of this is Chaos Theory. Admittedly, everything I know about this theory comes from the book and movie Jurassic Park, but bear with me. The idea behind Chaos Theory is that no system is perfect because the initial conditions will not remain the same continually. One example given in Michael Creighton’s novel is that of a billiard table on which a ball rolls with enough force to continue rolling forever. Deterministic Theory predicts that the ball would continue along the same pattern forever, while Chaos theory suggest that the felt of the table would eventually deteriorate, imperfections would form on the ball and eventually the conditions would change enough to throw the ball off course. Another film which I think shows chaos theory in action is Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, in which a television network has found the perfect way to keep an unsuspecting man living in their elaborate town-sized city for thirty some years, but bit by bit the illusion was destroyed and an evolving suspicion in the man’s mind about the solution eventually trumps the best laid plans of the producers. There is a similar situation in Moon, though I won’t spell it out for fear of giving away more than I already have, but like The Truman Show this is about a seemingly fool-proof house of cards that finally collapses partly because of an unforeseen accident but mostly because of the unanticipated factor of human curiosity and questioning.
Now, this theoretical interpretation is fine on an intellectual level, but it never really strokes any of the emotions that I expect great cinema to stroke. This film is neither as technically or intellectually ambitious as something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, both films with a certain sense of awe that Moon lacks. Aside from my coldly intellectual chaos theory interpretation, I’m not sure this really amounts to much more than an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. Of course, an extended episode of The Twilight Zone is certainly worth watching, but I really wish this had amounted to more. Some of the earlier portions of this movie really seemed to be leading to something grander than the eventual explanation; I looked forward to a really profound explanation for Sam’s visions and for Gerty’s strange behavior. But the solution turned out to be the most mundane of all possible explanations. That was disappointing. Ultimately I believe this is a movie that draws inspiration from all the right sources but which does nothing to push its genre forward in any meaningful way. Still it’s a very well crafted and intriguing 97 minutes of cinema that never seems to drop the ball in a major way; I just wish they tried to run with the ball when they had it instead of standing still with it.
*** out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Man on Wire(12/23/2008)
Like any other type of cinema, there are many different varieties of documentary. Michael Moore’s brand of first person issue exploration is one brand that’s pretty popular, another important variety are those that are filmed on the spot from beginning to end, and finally there’s the historical documentary; one’s made many years after the event and told through archival footage, new interviews, and reenactments. James Marsh’s new documentary Man on Wire is of the later variety.
The film tells the story of Philippe Petit, a French acrobat who made headlines in 1974 when he illegally tightrope walked between the towers of the World Trade Center. I’m not spoiling anything when I say that he succeeds at his stunt, he’s alive and well today and modern interviews from him are featured throughout the film. The film recounts Petit’s obsession with the building, one that predates even the construction of the structure. It shows the meticulous plan constructed by Petit and his co-conspirators to break into the building, sneak to the roof, shoot an arrow to the other tower, and finally string a rope across for his daring stunt.
The documentary in many ways plays out like a heist movie, one that ends with Petit’s stunt instead of a score. Marsh acknowledges the similarities and gives the interview subjects nicknames like “The Inside Man” or “The Australian.” Later the participants flat out say that part of the fun of the endeavor was that it was like a bank robbery. The comparison is apt. Petit had to “case the joint” to plan out the stunt, acquire disguises, make fake IDs, and finally sneak in undetected. Among their most brazen acts involved getting a tour of the building while claiming to be from a French architecture journal.
Oddly, Petit’s stunt was never caught on videotape. We see older footage of him walking across the Notre Dame and an Australian bridge, but the World Trade Center crossing was captured only with still pictures. Ultimately, this might only make Petit’s act seem all the more outrageous because the stills give the impression of what was going on while still leaving a lot to the imagination. The sight of him walking slowly in amateur video footage might have been a much more anticlimactic conclusion had such footage ever been shot. Really, the thought of crossing the wire is a lot more grand than footage of him actually doing it.
I can’t help but wonder how this documentary would have played out if Petit hadn’t made it across that wire, if he had fallen to his death midway through his feat. It might have played out an awful lot like Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, a story of a man tragically killed by his seemingly insane obsession. Of course history is always told by the winners, and unlike the aforementioned Timothy Treadwell, Petit is alive to defend himself. One does wonder about his mentality though, would it not have been just as difficult to cross that length of wire if it were a safe distance from the ground? If risking his life was the source of his thrill couldn’t he have just as easily played a game of Russian Roulette?
I can’t say that a lot of these questions were really answered. Petit never quite explains what drove him, he simply says that the idea just popped into his head; when asked about his motivations by the press he copped out and said he had no reason. Frankly, I can’t quite believe that Petit is shallow enough to risk his life without any reason, and if he did he’s a really shallow person. Ultimately the film works better as a heist story then as a character study, and this is disappointing. It says something when the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year is basically a very well crafted heist film. Filmmakers working outside of the documentary field who make simple well crafted heist films don’t get half the praise that this documentarian has. Does this say something about the standards people have for documentaries? Perhaps, or maybe this one is simply overrated. I don’t want to sound too negative though, I like a well crafted heist film as much as the next guy.
***1/2 out of four
Milk(12/19/2008)
What’s interesting about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to office in America, is that throughout his entire career he never reached higher office then City Supervisor (essentially synonymous with city council). I for one barely even know what a City Supervisor is; it’s one of those offices at the bottom of a ticket that you tend to just follow a sample ballot in order to pick. It’s who Milk was and what he did with the office that made all the difference. Milk was never really trying to be a politician; he was trying to be the head of the gay rights movement. At this he succeeded, thirty years after his death he remains the most visible and clear leader that movement has ever seen. It would seem that he’s a figure as important to Gus Van Sant as Malcolm X was to Spike Lee or Jim Morrison was to Oliver Stone.
The film begins on the fortieth birthday of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the day he meets his future lover Scott Smith (James Franco) at a New York bus stop. They decide to travel to San Francisco where they can live a more open lifestyle. They set up a camera store in the Castro district, but discrimination from local businessmen inspires Milk to unite the homosexual population politically. The film follows him through three failed elections and through his eventual political success and his securing of a spot at the head of the Gay Rights movement. Along the way he meets his rival and eventual assassin, a fellow city supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin). The whole film is narrated via a framing device where Milk tells his life story into a tape recorder, a tape which is only meant to be listened to in the case of his death by assassination.
Gus Van Sant is a filmmaker who emerged as the director of such independent gems as Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho but somewhere around the turn of the millennium he decided to quit worrying about accessibility and start making highly experimental micro-films like Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park. These experimental films were definitely interesting, but they didn’t really make me salivate the way they did to some critics. I’ve been waiting for a while to see him get back to making “normal” movies without going to outrageously far into the mainstream a la Finding Forrester. Milk is just such a film, it is accessible without being needlessly flashy. This is exactly the tone that a sweeping biopic needs, and Van Sant’s direction should disappoint no one unless they were expecting the film to be two hours of Harvey Milk doing paperwork and having banal conversations before getting shot.
Sean Penn gives a fine performance as the title character, he looks and sound just like the real thing and he also acquires a lot of the guy’s energy and mannerisms. That said, I can’t help but be a little less impressed by actors mimicking real people then I once was. It was damn impressive the way Jamie Fox was able to inhabit Ray Charles, but then Joaquin Phoenix inhabited Johnny Cash just as well the next year, and the year after that we got to see Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker mimicking real people just as well the next year. There’s something just a little less impressive about watching Sean Penn pull off the same trick again this year. It’s certainly not Penn’s fault that his role emerged late in this trend, but still I can’t help but not react with the same enthusiasm to this kind of work as I once did.
The rest of the cast is also quite good. Jame Franco is great as a character that matures alongside Milk and really seems a lot different at the end as he does at the beginning. Emile Hirsch is fresh off his excellent work in Penn’s Into the Wild, and he’s almost unrecognizable as Cleve Jones, an angry young guy who Milk recruits to use his skills as a “prick” in fighting for the gay rights movement. Alison Pill is also very good as the Milk’s lesbian campaign manager Anne Kronenberg. I do however take issue with the performance of Diego Luna as Jack Lira, one of Milk’s lovers. Lira appears to be a very strange, disturbed person from moment one and frankly I think Luna went a bit over the top in the role.
Special note should be made of Josh Brolin’s work here as Dan White. Brolin delivers another fine bit of mimicry, he looks just like the real guy and between this and his work in Oliver Stone’s W. he’s proven himself the best impersonator of the year. As a character, Dan White is quite interesting. Van Sant gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of White here, and the film is better for it. Throughout the film White acts with a degree of civility toward Milk despite an obvious discomfort toward him. The murders White commits seem less motivated by hatred then they do by a sense of political betrayal and, on a deeper level, a sense of anger that there is less of a place for his conservative attitudes in an increasingly progressive San Francisco. The movie may have completely gone off the tracks if they had portrayed White as a raging homophobic villain. Most of this material is reserved for a truly vile bitch named Anita Bryant who Van Sant wisely depicts only through archive footage, in any other form she would be too horrible to be believed.
One of the problems with biopics, is that anytime they seem to be doing something cliché or conventional, the obvious counter argument is “that really did happen, I’m just telling it like it is.” For this reason it’s a bit awkward to call something cheesy, but the film falls into a few very blatant biopic pitfalls on occasion. I’m thinking in particular of a wheelchair bound adolescent who randomly telephones Milk on two occasions, both suspiciously useful ones to the plot, in order to tell him how inspirational Milk’s work is to him. This may well have happened, but it sounds way too close to Lou Gehrig promising a dying child two homeruns for comfort. Another issue is a moment I don’t want to give away, but it’s a traumatic event in Milk’s love life. Normatively it serves no real purpose other than to raise stakes that didn’t really need raising, and it doesn’t emotionally effect him in the rest of the movie nearly as much as it should. Again, these may well have been true events, but they feel like clichés and are not really necessary in the first place. I think Van Sant would have been wise to cut them.
Ultimately, I think what really prevents Milk from being an exceptional work is that the Harvey Milk depicted works better an inspirational figure then he does as a dramatic character. Van Sant sees Milk as an almost Gandhi-like saint; he’s just not the most complex character out there. There’s a moment midway into the film where Milk says that one of his strategies would be to expose people who were in the closet. One person mentions that this would be a violation of a right to privacy, and Scott Smith points out a degree of hypocrisy in that Milk was closeted well into his thirties. Van Sant doesn’t press the issue much beyond that, and that’s about the closest the film ever comes to exploring anything about Milk’s life that could be seen as controversial to the film’s target audience. Of course Van Sant likely sees Milk as a hero, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try to look at more nuances. For instance, Spike Lee clearly admired Malcolm X, but he had no hesitance to have the protagonist of his biopic say and do a lot of things that the film’s audience wasn’t going to agree with.
Milk is a very energetic biopic of an important American. I certainly recommend the film to anyone with even the slightest interest in the subject, or to anyone that is interested in watching a very well made drama with a very good cast. The film occasionally flirts with greatness, but it never quite transcends the biopic genre.
***1/2 out of four
Let the Right One In(11/21/2008)
Many are saying that vampires are the “in” monsters of the year. On television people are enjoying the flawed, but enjoyable “True Blood,” and younger audiences are swarming to see heartthrob Robert Pattinson in Twilight. But to hipper, art-house audiences, the vampire flick to see is this Swedish import, Let the Right One In. Within certain circles this film has become the definitive answer to Twilight, after all, what could be a better answer to the cynical marketeering that that teen movie represents then a Swedish vampire movie?
The film is about a boy of about twelve named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who’s living in an apartment complex with his mother who is estranged from his father. There have been a series of murders in the area, and many people are on guard. One night, he sees a girl about his age sitting outside in the foyer of the apartment complex. She says her name is Eli (Lina Leandersson), and she is reluctant to befriend him. Because he’s isolated and lonely, Oskar persists in trying to meet her. Slowly they form a friendship, but there’s a catch: those murders mentioned before, she’s indirectly responsible for them. Her father has been killing people and draining their blood in order to feed Eli, she’s a vampire.
The main strength of Let the Right One In is the director’s very impressive control of tone. The film feels like it’s very much in the cold, slow paced and stoic tradition of Swedish cinema. It’s got a very slow, deliberate pace and the cinematography is very cool and subdued. This kind of style is often used for very arty movies where people whisper a lot, in those kind of movies it can be a bit much, but in an honest to goodness Vampire movie it feels pretty fresh. Also, worth noting is the director’s excellent ability to frame shots, and the film’s confident editing.
The film’s narrative can be seen as a dark fairy tale of sorts, one in the vein of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. At it’s heart it is a film about a boy who has a (very) unconventional friend and about this leading to a strange couple of weeks. This notion of combining horror and fairy tale storytelling has been popular lately, lead by some of Guillermo Del Toro’s more artistically minded films. But then there’s also some more complicated psychology going on under the surface. There’s something a bit off about this Oskar kid, he’s playing around with a knife throughout the film and he has a lot of odd habits like an obsession with true crime stories that someone his age shouldn’t really have an interest in. He’s also struggling with some of the most persistent bullies I’ve ever seen, it was slightly reminicant of the schoolyard struggles of a much older kid in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.
There’s more to Eli then meets the eye as well. At first she seems like a confused kid who happens to have found herself afflicted with vampirism. But as the movie progresses this view of her begins to change, midway through she reveals that she’s “been twelve for a very long time,” quickly she starts to look less like a confused kid and more like a manipulative centuries old vampire.
The vampirism here follows most of the traditional rules; vampires can only go out at night, they can get killed in all the conventional ways, and they can’t enter anyone’s house without permission (hence the title). What’s interesting are some of the clever ways that some of these rules. For example, that rule about Vampires not entering a house without permission has been established before, but this is the first time anyone’s tried to show what happens if they try, and the result is one of the film’s many interesting images. Some of Eli’s powers are also depicted well, particularly the way she occasionally climbs up walls like a spider, and the way she attacks people like a piggyback ride. I won’t give away where she sleeps during the day, but it’s not a coffin.
However, one original aspect of vampire-lore that the film introduces should have been left on the cutting room floor. The film has a rule that suggests that cats can sense vampires and will behave erratically in their presence, a role usually reserved for dogs. This leads to an astoundingly out of place and poorly executed scene, one which brings into light how misguided and underdeveloped a major sub-plot is. This is the one scene in the film that relies on (bad) CGI in a big way, and it ain’t pretty.
The acting by the two kids is quite good. It’s odd that when children are cast in ancillary roles in films they almost always come off as annoying, but they usually tend to do a good job when they have the lead role. Lina Leandersson gives Eli just the right amount of maturity and emptiness in order to feel less then alive, but without taking this too far and seeming gimmicky. Kåre Hedebrant isn’t quite as good, but he was still pretty damn decent in a complicated role. Though I must give low marks to whoever decided to give this kid some sort of crazy Anton Chigurh hair doo from the seventies. I hate to get bent out of shape over anything that’s this shallow, but seriously, this was one distracting head of hair; I don’t know what they were thinking.
Ultimately, it probably is appropriate that this will merely be remembered as “the art house vampire movie that was better than Twilight.” I haven’t seen Twilight but, if the trailer is any indication, I’m willing to bet that this is indeed significantly better. That said, there maybe isn’t as much to sink one’s teeth into (ha ha) as I had hoped. This is a very well made, very unique take on the vampire movie, but at the end of the day it really just isn’t quite as engaging as it should be. I definitely recommend it if you’re in the mood for this type of thing, maybe not so much if you aren’t already set on the idea. In other words, if you only see one teen vampire movie this year, see Let the Right One In. If you need to see two… well rent The Lost Boys or something.
*** out of four
Miracle at St. Anna(9/26/2008)
I like Spike. Spike Lee has been putting out bold and original films for more than twenty years now. Lee is a filmmaker who doesn’t pull any punches, when he wants to make a point he’ll go all out. This means that he can make some really biting satire, but it also means he can go too far occasionally. It also means that some of his movies can get overloaded with interesting ideas and become messy polemics rather than well thought out debates. His newest film, Miracle at St. Anna, looks at the African American experience during World War 2.
The film begins in a post office in 1989. A man walks up to an African American teller and tries to buy some stamps, a sudden look of recognition falls on the tellers face, suddenly the teller pulls out a Luger and shoots the customer dead. The teller is arrested and when the police search his house they find an ancient Italian artifact that disappeared during the Second World War. The film then flashes back to the Italian campaign of the war. During the flashback the film follows the 92nd infantry Buffalo Soldier division, particularly four enlisted men. The teller, it turns out, was named Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), the highest ranking of the four. Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) and Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) are both in a state of constant conflict over their differeing view of the way African Americans are treated by the military and white society in general. Finally, there’s Private First Class Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a large and not overly bright GI who befriends a young Italian boy (Matteo Sciabordi) that he finds abandoned in a house. The four find themselves being the only survivors of a tense gunfight. Broken from the main force they take refuge in a small Tuscan village where they wait for orders.
The film’s trailer focuses a lot on the statue head, and makes the film look like some kind of war-time artifact heist film, but this is misleading. The statue head is actually already in the soldier’s possession when the flashback begins and it ultimately has little to do with the story outside of the framing story. I can understand why they did this though, because the real center of the story is a much harder sell.
Lee clearly wants to set the record straight about the role African Americans played in the war, that’s a noble sentiment, but I wish he had found a better project to make this point through. With a white cast leading this movie and a more anonymous director, the film would have seemed like pretty bland and derivative war movie trying to ride the wave of post-Saving Private Ryan war fare. The racial elements are what set the movie apart, and they’re probably the most interesting parts of the film. The way these combat troops are treated by their commanding officers and by civilians in a diner back on base is sad and disturbing, especially in a modern “support the troops” environment. There’s also a really interesting schism between the Ealy and Alonso characters.
What doesn’t work as well is the story surrounding the Miller character and the Italian orphan he befriends. In fact this sub-plot is so achingly schmaltzy, saccharine and mis-placed that it pretty much torpedoes the whole movie. Miller’s character, Sam Train, is a large and seemingly mentally challenged character. It almost feels like John Coffey, Michael Clark Duncan’s character from The Green Mile, somehow wandered onto a World War 2 battlefield. The Frank Darabont comparisons don’t stop there either; there’s a very awkward use of magical realism throughout this sub-plot that just seems really strange in a movie about a war, particularly in a campaign of the war that audiences are so used to seeing through a neo-realist lens.
One of the prevailing complaints about the film through its festival run was that it ran too long at 160 minutes. I’ve never been one to cry wolf about running times, I think there’s a disturbing level of attention deficit disorder running through critical circles and people are way too quick to jump on running time as a problem. That said, even I could see where these criticisms were coming from. I was never really bored or impatient about the film’s running time, but there was a lot of superfluous material here. The framing story is mostly a waste, and it includes a really odd cameo by John Leguizamo. Extended sub-plots about the Italian partisans seemed like a distraction, too much time was spent on the Italians in general when the movie should have been focusing on the four African American characters were in the theater to see. Even the Nazi officers are given a lot of screen time that doesn’t amount to much in the overall story. In all this mess of sub-plots the movie really loses track of the Derek Luke character, which is odd considering all the time the framing story spends trying to make this his story. The Laz Alonso character was a lot more interesting to me, and he was given a lot more to do through the whole movie.
On a visual level, the film works quite well. Like most films about World War 2 made since 1998, the film owes a pretty big debt to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg’s film ushered in a new level of authenticity in the genre of World War 2 films and the genre has been all the better for it. This isn’t a wholesale lift though, unlike Spielberg and Eastwood’s films Lee doesn’t de-saturate the look of his war film, and this was probably the right choice given the film’s Italian setting and more fanciful tone.
In general, Lee plays this one straighter than he has with any movie since Malcolm X. No one talks directly to the camera, there’s no one sliding on wheels with a steady cam, and no strange tricks with the film’s horizontal hold. All those games worked fine in their respective movies, but Lee wisely didn’t see them as fitting in with the tone of a war movie. This really seems less like a Spike Lee Joint than any movie of his since maybe Clockers. In many ways it feels like he was trying to hold back his auteurist traits in order to get his message to as wide an audience as possible.
If nothing else, Miracle at St. Anna is very well intentioned. I think a straightforward story about three of these four soldiers preparing for a battle in an Italian town and relating with the locals would have made a fine story. If the film hadn’t been bogged down in the framing story and the sappy story about Sam Train and the Orphan it might have worked. As it stands though, the film really just doesn’t work, it’s too uneven, too convoluted, and lacks the grit it needed to really sell the plight of its characters. The film is almost as messy and unfocused as a Spike Lee Joint like Bamboozled or She Hate Me, except without the same energy or satire that made those movies sort of fun to watch in spite of themselves. Chalk this one up as noble failure.
** out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Diary of the Dead(8/30/2008)
Almost no one can claim to be the king of an entire sub-genre quite the way George A. Romero does. Not only did he undeniably invent the zombie genre as we know it with the classic Night of the Living Dead, he’s just about lead the zombie pack throughout the genre’s history. His zombie movies are mostly low budgeted affairs that mix gore, social commentary, more gore, statements about how humans behave under pressure, and more gore. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) are both classics of the genre, unfortunately the two zombie films he’s made in the meantime have been at the very best flawed. Now, only three years after his last effort (2005’s Land of the Dead) he’s come back with another zombie film in his “of the dead” series.
The film is a mockumentary about a group of film students who find themselves in the middle of a zombie infestation that’s taking over the world. These are pretty much the same group of indistinguishable college aged people that populate most horror movies since Halloween: a few couples, a nerd, and a Donald Pleasence-like older guy for good measure. These film students were out in the woods shooting a low budget horror movie, when a zombie infestation broke out, given the circumstances they decided to take their cameras and document the event. The film follows their journey.
Many have compared the film to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, but it’s really going for something kind of different. Both of those movies worked on the gimmick of “found footage,” suggesting that the camera was the only one alive to tell the story. Diary of the Dead, however is a mockumentary that has supposedly been edited together by the characters who shot it, as is evident by a voiceover from one of the characters. Unlike the previously mentioned films, this is not shot on a camcorder or 16mm camera but rather on professional digital cameras by people who are trying to make an actual documentary rather than by a bunch of scared people who forgot to turn off their cameras while desperately running away from monsters.
With all this in mind one gathers that Diary of the Dead is not using the mockumentay format to give people the illusion of reality as Blair Witch did, or to give the film visceral intensity as Cloverfield did, in fact I don’t think Romero used the format for the film’s horror movie aspects at all. Rather, I think it was exclusively done so that he could make a comment on the “Youtube culture.” Of young people disillusioned by mainstream media and their willingness to document their every move as if anyone else cared (and apparently they do).
One would have thought that George Romero would have had to tone down his political content over the years as he seeks mainstream acceptance, but strangely the opposite has happened and each of his films has become exponentially more obviously political. The politics in Night of the Living Dead was subtle to the point that one wonders if it was even intentional, even the oft-discussed African American protagonist was white in the film’s original script. The politics in Dawn of the Dead was certainly intentional, but it was only there for those who wanted to look for it, the messages about commercialism would have gone right over the heads of those just looking for a gory zombie flick. By 2005’s Land of the Dead Romero had stopped being interested in actually scaring anyone and was primarily using zombies to make political statements. But with Diary of the Dead he’s abandoned any slight hint of subtlety with his message. Here there is no effort to conceal his intentions at all, the characters spell out every point and just in case you still don’t get it he has the voice-over come in and explain his points further.
To be fair, satire is never a subtle medium, but Romero’s unwillingness to trust the audience enough to figure out what he’s trying to say is a serious problem. The film feels like it was made to sell its points to some very stupid people, people who probably aren’t that interested in zombie satire in the first place and just want some more head explosions. As such the movie doesn’t please audiences looking to think or audiences looking for visceral thrills.
The characters here aren’t very well developed at all, but that’s sort of to be expected from a horror movie at this point. Unfortunately the characters are also pretty bad as one dimensional characters go as well. These are broad stereotypes, they don’t act at all like real people behave and they aren’t well acted either. The two most egregious examples are a blonde chick from Texas, who talks like Annie Oakley and says “don’t mess with Texas” for no reason on two occasions in the film and a film professor who exists to act grizzled and jaded while spewing ridiculous lines like some kind of Werner Herzog wannabe. Silly as those two are, they’re at least memorable, the rest of these idiots are just boring and exist mainly to be eaten by zombies.
Silly in it’s satire, lame as a horror film, and uninteresting as a story; Diary of the Dead never really works on any level. However, as bad as it can be it’s never really boring. The film is at least watchable and Romero should probably be given some credit for at least trying to make something different than the average studio horror movie. If it’s on HBO or something I suppose this would be worth checking out for Romero completists, all others need not apply.
** out of four
Mongol(6/20/2008)
Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, seems in many ways to be a film without a country. Companies in such disparate areas as Germany, Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan funded the movie. The film was largely shot in China, the director is Russian, the cast is from all over Asia, and the spoken language is Mongolian. It was Kazakhstan that submitted the film for nomination at the 2008 Academy Awards foreign film category, and it did manage to get a nomination. Of course it still took months after it earned its nomination to finally get a release stateside, which is one of the many things about that Oscar category that’s annoying; if it were up to me a film would need to have an American release prior to its nomination like it would in every other category. Still, it was worth the wait because Mongol, a film about the early life of Genghis Khan, does mostly deliver on what it promises.
The film begins in 1171 with a nine year old Genghis Khan (Odnyam Odsuren), who was going by the name Temudjin at this point, being brought to select a future wife in order to solidify an alliance between his father’s tribe and another tribe. Young Temudjin selects a girl named Borte (Bayertsetseg Erdenebat), but on the way home Temudjin’s father (Ba Sen) is poisoned by a rival tribe. He returns to find that tribe pillaging his people and Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov), the leader of this enemy tribe, threatens to kill Temudjin, but decides to wait until he’s older as per Mongolian custom. Temudjin tries to flee but has an accident and is narrowly saved by another young tribal heir named Jamukha (Amarbold Tuvshinbayar) who takes Temudjin in as a blood brother. Temudjin eventually grows up (and is played as an adult by Tadanobu Asano) and returns to Borte’s home village to claim her as a wife. Borte (now played by Khulan Chuluun) gladly goes with him, but is eventually kidnapped by the rival Merkit tribe. Temudjin has no choice but to return to Jamukha (now played by Honglei Sun) and beg him to send his men on a rescue mission.
Mongol, the first of a planned trilogy about Genghis Khan, was clearly envisioned as a biographical epic in the vein of Spartacus or even Lawrence of Arabia. Of course the film never reaches the heights of those examples, but I admired the effort nonetheless. The film does have some awesome battles, but it never devolves into a total action movie along the lines of 300. The movie is about 80% character growth and development and 20% kickass fighting, with a little romance thrown in for good balance.
The Temudjin here is not the brutal dictator and ruthless fighter that many think him to be. Rather, he’s depicted as a leader fairly generous to his men, at least compared to other tribal leaders of his time. He’s a family man and a born romantic; of course he’s also a violent fighter. This positive outlook is quite possibly the result of the particular period in Temudjin’s life that the film covers. By the end of the film he has yet to invade China and the darker aspects of the character may yet be seen if Bodrov is ever given the opportunity to finish his trilogy. For now he’s a mostly heroic figure within the standards of his society.
The acting here for the most part is solid but not extraordinary, mainly just because the roles here aren’t spectacularly challenging. Japanese actor Tadanobu Khulan certainly looks like Genghis Khan and he approaches the part with an appropriate passion. Khulan Chuluun’s work as Temudjin’s wife is certainly impressive given that this is her first credited role; also impressive are the various child actors who play the characters in their early years. Honglei Sun almost steals the show as an adult Jamukha. All the actors should also be commended for working in Khan’s original Mongolian, which adds a nice authenticity to the whole affair.
As far as I can tell, the movie is more historically accurate than not when it comes to the basic outline of Temudgin’s life, but it embellishes freely with the details. Ultimately it feels more like it’s trying to tell the legend of Genghis Khan than what is necessarily the most factual version of the story. It is claimed that part of the reason for this is that the history of Temudjin is not the easiest to pin down, as it was mostly passed down through the oral tradition, which is prone to glorification and exaggeration. I’m mostly fine with this kind of embellishment, as its more important for a film to tell a good story than act as an educational tool. My general rule of thumb is that if I need to look something up to disprove a detail it’s a fair embellishment.
The film has great cinematography by Roger Stoffers and Sergei Trofimov. The cinematographers are aided by beautiful scenery. Mongolia is generally thought of as a cold barren place, but it feels much more alive here than I would have thought. I certainly wouldn’t want to live there, but the Mongolia of this film is certainly a joy to look at. The film also has a nice score by Tuomas Kantelinen that seems to occasionally be influenced by Mongolian throat singing. The film’s dialogue is not beautiful, but one probably shouldn’t expect a rural Mongolian soldier to speak like Shakespeare. The characters talk in an appropriately blue collar way but are hardly inarticulate.
The first few battle scenes here are awesome; they’re fast, intense, and brutal. Bodrov uses mostly real people and avoids generating extras with CGI. The fight choreography in these battles looks really cool but also feels mostly realistic. I do however take issue with the climatic battle, which is much larger and CGI dependent. The fight is well staged enough, but the CGI armies and blood felt less real and more like the poor Hollywood epics of recent like Troy. It’s not a bad battle necessarily, but it isn’t up to the standards of previous action scenes in the film.
There are other problems with the film’s last act as well. Notably the film makes the big mistake of introducing supernatural elements during a plot point, and it certainly doesn’t feel like a necessary change. Earlier the film had a certain metaphorical mysticism involving a wolf and late there is a symbolic resolution involving lighting. These were both fair enough, as they felt more like symbols than literal onscreen magic, but there’s another point where the plot is affected by a monk’s prophesy. This undermined the authenticity of the film and generally seemed unnecessary. It reminded me of a point in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto where the main character is saved by an “act of god,” it felt out of place and added an unnecessary element that wasn’t needed. I also take issue with a jarring leap forward in time taken in the last act of the movie that skipped over important elements of Temudjin’s life in order to end the film on a battle scene.
I don’t think I can call this a great film, but it is a cool one. From a filmmaking perspective I have very little to complain about aside from the final battle. Ultimately I may have to wait until this trilogy is finished before I pass final judgment on the project, so far it’s off to a good start.
***1/2 out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Live Free or Die Hard- Unrated Edition(12/30/2007)
Late in the summer of 2007, a fourth sequel to the 1988 classic Die Hard was released. Earlier in the year I was excited to see the franchise make a comeback; after all, 80’s action movies are a real guilty pleasure of mine. However, I began to be worried when I heard Len Wiseman was chosen to direct. This filmmaker who brought us such in-essential cinema as Underworld Evolution was hardly my idea of a perfect director for a Die Hard film. Then it was revealed that Justin Long (of “I’m a Mac” fame) was chosen to co-star I really became nervous, and the insane title of Live Free or Die Hard didn’t ease my tensions.
The straw that broke the camel’s back however was the revelation that the film would receive a PG-13 rating and that John McClane’s famous line would be obscured. This was all the proof I needed to know that this film would be a massive sell-out, I firmly decided to boycott the film during its theatrical release and wrote an angry commentary on my blog about it. What was really infuriating was the generally accepting pass it received from a number of filmgoers who seemed way to forgiving of this film’s obvious sellout. Finally, after someong online said the unrated cut was “fucktacular” I decided to rent that version on DVD. To my shock, I found that I was not only right about each and every one of my concerns, but that they were only the beginning of this movie’s problems.
It’s been twelve years since the last Die Hard film, 1995’s imperfect but fun Die Hard with a Vengeance, and John McClane (Bruce Willis) seems to finally be having a fairly normal police career. That is until he receives a call from his chief telling him to escort a computer hacker (Justin Long) to Washington D.C. Upon arriving at this hackers apartment he is greeted with an all out attack by a group of assassins. McClane soon learns that this hacker is a target because he recently wrote a code that is about to be used to create all out havoc across the eastern seaboard because an evil hacker (Timothy Olyphant) wants revenge against the government.
With McClane having to escort an unwilling sidekick, a large rather than enclosed stomping ground, and a villain trying to act like a terrorist only to distract authorities from a heist; it is clear that this entry was modeled after Die Hard With a Vengeance rather than the original or its sequel Die Hard 2: Die Harder. While the third film in the series was able to generate a compelling entry by subverting the formula; that trick only works once. The second time this trick feels less like subversion and more like abandonment.
None of what made Die Hard a classic is present here at all. None of John McClane’s attitude is present here, he never even feels overly surprised or angry about his predicament. Rather Bruce Willis is completely phoning it in here and mostly looks bored throughout. Additionally, even on the “unrated cut” this movie feels really tame. The violence is still almost bloodless and even when a villain falls into a meat-grinder there is very little gory goodness. When compared to even the relatively tame third installment (which had a throat slitting villainess, a man split in half by a wire, and a really violent gunfight in an elevator), this film simply doesn’t deliver on the intense action fans have come to expect. Also the swearing is still very restrained, yes there are a handful of f-bombs now but none of them are very well delivered, in fact they feel a little bit like outtakes.
This film has bland and uninteresting dialogue, poor editing, and an extremely forgettable villain. But the real black hole at the center of this film is Justin Long. This is an even bigger problem than I thought he would be. I knew long would be annoying, but I had hoped he would also be fun to hate, unfortunately he’s bland and just plain annoying. Additionally Long has absolutely no chemistry with Bruce Willis.
This is a ridiculous film with cartoonish action scenes. There is a particular moment involving a Harrier Jet that was so ridiculous that all I could do was roll my eyes. The film has no idea how computers work and frequently has people hacking simply by typing on a keyboard without so much as touching a mouse. Also laughable was a scene where the film’s hacker villain talks to his henchmen in English while they communicate back in a foreign language subtitled and both parties seem to understand the other. I’d be able to suspend my disbelief if the henchmen had been wookies, but not for Europeans.
Live Free or Die Hard is an embarrassment to a once great series of action movies. Even in its “unrated cut” this is a lame and boring film. Those who made it should be ashamed by the way they blatantly sold out for this production.
* out of four
The Mist(11/22/2007)
When I was in high school I went through a real Stephen King phase. I read a lot of his book during that phase, and I can’t say I entirely regret it. I would never say King was the best author, but the guy really knows how to tell a story. However I got to a point in reading his books where I began to notice a lot of patterns and re-used ideas, at which point I basically got sick of the guy and stopped bothering to read his books. Still, there’s a soft spot in my fiction reading heart for the modern master of horror fiction, and I generally try to catch the movies based on his books whenever they sound promising. I never got around to reading King’s novella “The Mist,” but the recent film adaptation sounded real promising. It is directed by Frank Darabont, who did wonders adapting King’s “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and The Green Mile, and it had a very interesting cast. As such I was excited to find out what lurked behind The Mist.
The film begins with an oncoming thunderstorm sending a poster artist named David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz), and son Billy (Nathan Gamble) flee to their basement. After the storm the family emerges from the basement they see an ominous mist lingering over a nearby lake. A tree belonging to a neighbor fell over onto the family’s boathouse. David has apparently been having land disputes with this neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), but ultimately agrees to give him a ride to town where both parties have decided to pick up some supplies. On their way to the small Maine town they notice a number of military vehicles heading in the opposite direction, but write this off as a coincidence. Soon after they arrive at the convenience store, they suddenly see the mist coming straight toward them. A man with a bleeding nose runs in and yells “there’s something in the mist, it got my friend!” They store patrons close all their doors and wait for help. It soon becomes apparent that the mist is populated by a number of horrible Lovecraftian monsters, and leaving the store would leave everyone exposed to attack. However, not all is well inside the store which is populated by an eclectic group of people including a religious zealot named Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) who begins preaching about the end of the world.
As a horror film, The Mist is mostly a failure. There is a certain apocalyptic creepiness to the story, and it works as long as what lies beyond the mist is a mystery. But Darabont does not take the “what you don’t see is scarier” Jaws approach. Instead Darabont pretty quickly shows the monsters, and this could work if they were truly frightful creatures, but they’re not. Unfortunately, this film falls victim to some very bad CGI effects. These monsters don’t look real at all, and as such they aren’t very frightening, or even slightly creepy. There is some suspense to be found here, whenever things stay behind the mist the film works, but as soon as the attacks start it loses pretty much any tension it has built up.
The film comes a lot closer to succeeding whenever it tries to be a Lord of the Flies style treatise on how humans react in crisis situations, but this is quickly undermined by a severe lack of subtlety. As the situation in the grocery store worsens, the character of Mrs. Carmody becomes more important, and her religious rants start to inspire the people around her. It is amazing how Stephen King, someone who is a master of creating inhuman monsters, can be so bad at creating believable human villains in his work. This type of over the top villain can be found in nearly every book he’s ever written and is usually a rather jarring distraction. This is neither the first nor last time this over the top human villain has come in the form of a religious zealot either, Carrie’s mother comes to mind as the most obvious example. Marcia Gay Harden tries her damndest to make this over the top character work, and in lesser hands it would have been a lot worse, but ultimately there was really no way to make this dialogue work.
It doesn’t help that all of the characters in the film are two dimensional, underdeveloped types. This wouldn’t be a too much of a problem if this was just a horror film, but when it’s relying on the human nature aspect of the story for its ultimate success, this becomes an insurmountable problem. The acting in general is a mixed bag, ranging from weak to solid, but mostly sitting at average. Andre Braugher is an actor I’ve had a pretty deep respect for since he was on one of my favorite television shows, “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Like Harden he makes a poorly written character almost work, but unfortunately is not given much screen time. Thomas Jane (of Punisher fame) is not an actor with a great pedigree; thankfully his performance never quite falls below average. Had Jane’s performance truly failed this movie would have been in much bigger trouble than it is.
There’s a lot to like here, this could have really been a great “Twilight Zone” type thriller had it not been for some key mistakes. The monsters seem to have been pretty well designed, though the CGI department botched their execution. A huge monster seen toward the end is particularly brilliant. As over the top as Mrs. Carmody, she is at least pretty fun to hate, and the film in general begins to really pick up in its third act leading up to about the darkest ending that could ever be conceived by a human mind. This was a great movie that was ultimately brought down by a set of devastating flaws. I feel tempted to give the film a pass, as I really would rather a movie fail shooting for the moon than lay in mediocrity while playing it safe, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really work on either of the levels it was trying for, and as such I can only very moderately recommend it perhaps as a rental or matinee.
**1/2 out of four
