Precious(11/20/2009)
Lee Daniel’s film Precious is a movie that has been heavily hyped by a number of critical forces since its debut at this year’s Sundance film festival. In spite of all the good marks the film has been getting, the prospect of actually seeing the damn thing is something I’d been dreading all year. There were a number of elements to this movie that had me apprehensions, chief among them being the movie’s title, which seems to set the movie up has some kind of kindergarten level self-esteem exercise about how everyone is “special” and “precious.” Even the film’s producers seem to be embraced by that title as evidenced by the awkward way they’ve been attaching “based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” to the back of it every chance they get. The bigger force in making me dread this viewing experience is the film’s trailer, which sells the movie as exactly the kind of inspirational sappiness I was afraid it would be. The fact that Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, two people who are hardly adverse to the saccharine, were attaching their names didn’t boost my confidence either. My one hope was that the last prestige movie I dreaded this much was Brokeback Mountain, which looked like pure cheese from the trailer featuring the trademark “I can’t quit you” line, but that movie proved to be a extremely well done and expertly restrained work. Knowing how bad trailers can make certain movies look when they’re being sold to the public, I held out hope that this was just a case of problematic advertising, that this really was as good as all the buzz would have me believe. Trust me; I really wanted this to be good, but for the most part this proved to be a sad case of truth in advertising.
The film centers on Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who goes by her middle name and who is in a really bad situation. She’s a sixteen year old living in a squalid Harlem apartment with her mentally and physically abusive mother (Mo’Nique), who gets all her income from welfare. Claireece is illiterate, she gave birth to a mentally disabled child after being raped by her own father, and now she’s pregnant again with another of her father’s children. So what is the point of focusing on someone who is in this bad of a situation. If the not-so-subtle naming of its main character, the “inspirational” quote the movie opens on, its tagline (Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is….Precious.) and its website URL (weareallprecious.com) are any indication; the hallmark card-like goal of this movie is to prove to its audience that everyone even, if they are in dire straits, is precious. This is a message in search of an audience to convince. Does anyone really think a person is any less “precious” simply because they suffer in life? I find it rather insulting that the filmmakers feel the need to prove this to the audience to begin with. What’s worse I don’t think the film even follows its own mantra.
Let’s think about all the problems that the filmmakers have saddled Caireece with. It obviously isn’t Caireece’s fault that her mother is abusive, her mother is also implicated as the source of Claireece’s problems in school, and her parents are also the cause of her pregnancies either by direct action (in the case of her father) or from failing to prevent the situation (in the case of her mother). Sapphire and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher have basically constructed a character who is completely blameless for the situation she’s in, every one of her problems are without a shadow of a doubt placed squarely on the shoulders of her screwed up family. This, too me, is the root weakness of this movie. It’s very easy to generate sympathy for someone who’s had all their problems thrust upon them, its simplistic. Had they decided to create a character that was in a situation like this because they themselves made some bad decisions in life, and then established them as someone who was “precious” it would have made for a movie that was significantly more challenging, provocative, and true to life.
As such, I found myself significantly more interested in Claireece’s deeply flawed mother than I was in the blameless martyr for whom the film is titled. But the film isn’t really interested in exploring this mother either, or in adding many nuances to her character. She’s basically as evil as Claireece is sympathetic. This mother is pretty much everything that Ronald Reagan had in his head when he coined the term “welfare queen.” She’s a fat, lazy woman who spends all her days watching game shows except when she occasionally leaves in order to play “the numbers.” She constantly abuses and discourages Claireece, threatening to beat her whenever she fails to do everything she’s told and actively preventing her from furthering her education. Later in the movie she proves to be such a moustache twirling villain as to actively insult and toss a baby. But let’s hold on a second. I thought everybody was supposed to be precious. Therefore, shouldn’t that make Claireece’s mother precious too. I don’t think the content of the movie would support that, it produces a pretty simple dichotomy of the blameless child and the evil mother. In essence this is a movie that has a great deal of sympathy for people who are born into bad situations, but very little sympathy for those who have created a bad situation for themselves. This rather conservative message is a fair enough point of view, but I find the film’s endless claims of having a compassionate and non-judgmental world view to be disingenuous.
Putting all that aside, there are other elements that make this a pretty uncompelling movie going experience, and chief among them is a character named Blu Rain, played by Paula Patton, who is meant to be a thinly disguised version of the movie’s author (get it, sapphire, Blue Rain). This character is a teacher at an alternative education facility that Claireece is sent to, and this school storyline is easily the most clichéd and sappy element of the whole movie. This whole subplot basically turns this into one of those horrible movies about saint-like inspirational teachers trying desperately to reach a diverse group of “inner-city” youths. There is almost nothing that separates the classroom elements here from garbage like Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, and Freedom Writers. I had thought that this ridiculous trope had been shattered once and for all by Ryan Fleck’s excellent 2006 drama Half Nelson, and perhaps by the great fourth season of David Simon’s “The Wire,” both works which have significantly more knowledge of the condition of underprivileged youths than this movie could ever dream of possessing. The ineptitude of this sub-plot is magnified by Paula Patton’s less than stellar performance which is well below the standard set by the rest of the cast. When this character says to Caireece: “your daughter loves you, I love you” it’s every bit as TV-movie worthy as the trailer would have you believe.
Fortunately, the rest of the acting in this movie is a lot better than the work Patton displays. In fact I’d probably say that the excellent performances of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique are damn near the film’s only redeeming qualities. Sidibe, an unknown, is quite a find and is perfect for her role. Many have made the mistake of thinking that she was simply an underprivileged young girl that the filmmakers found on the street and essentially cast as herself in the role, but this isn’t really the case, she’s an actress playing a role and she plays it really well. Mo’Nique is even more of a revelation in her role, like Jamie Foxx before her she’s a comedian who has broken out of the “black comedy” ghetto to prove herself to be a great and forceful actor. These are both roles that require the two thespians to inhabit very foreign roles which require a whole lot of yelling and crying, the kind of roles that are easy to give awards to, but both Sidibe and Mo’Nique do their jobs effectively and I think it is their work that has primarily tricked a multitude of critics and pundits into thinking this movie is something more than it really is.
I wish I could say that there was another element that matched the performances of these two actresses, but there really isn’t. I suppose some of the dialogue was pretty well written, at least outside of the Blu Rain sub-plot, but otherwise I found a lot of the filmmaking here subpar. Lee Daniels’ direction here seems confused and inconsistent. On one hand Daniels, whose only previous directing credit is the critically lambasted Shadowboxer, seems to want to give the movie a gritty handheld look to match the material, but he undercuts this style at all points with a variety of visual tricks and devices that are at odds with this. The movie is filled with montages, scenes where video is superimposed onto walls, obnoxious fantasy sequences that go nowhere and signify almost nothing, and the occasional Arronofsy-esque quick cut montage. It feels like Daniels is trying to use every crayon in his box of tricks to seeing what sticks rather than simply letting the story play out, and this is all the more problematic simply because a lot of these tricks aren’t even overly well executed.
There’s one great scene towards the end, a confrontation between Claireece and her mother, in which the two actresses are finally allowed to talk in detail without being interrupted by one of Lee Daniel’s stupid tricks. It’s probably the only scene in the movie where the mother is given a shred of complexity and the film’s style really accentuates the scene rather than interrupt it. This is like an isolated scene from a much better movie and if the rest of the material here had been on par with that scene this might have been something great. Instead this is a major missed opportunity filled with sappy material, a confused message, told by a confused filmmaker that has somehow hypnotized America’s critics into ignoring its numerous flaws.
*1/2 out of Four
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
Quantum of Solace(11/14/2008)
I’ve been a huge fan of the James Bond franchise for at least a decade, and my fanatical love for the series will probably show itself in this review. Bond is one of the few things that I can be a little fanboyish about, but don’t worry, you probably won’t see this side of me again, at least not until Watchmen comes out. The coming of a new Bond movie is always something I look forward to with excitement, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this one for a while. The main concern I had about the project was the decision to hire Marc Forster to direct. Forster is one of my least favorite directors working today, his film’s tend to get bogged down in whimsy and he’s the biggest Academy Award panderer this side of Edward Zwick. The guy is basically a poor man’s Ron Howard, who in turn is a poor man’s Robert Zemeckis, who is himself a poor man’s Steven Spielberg.
Another cause for alarm was that this would be a direct sequel to Casino Royale, an unprecedented move for the series. There was a little bit of continuity in some of the early Bond films, mainly revolving around the villain Blofeld, but for the most part they remained self contained stories. What’s more, I had a lot of mixed feeling about Casino Royale to begin with. I was all for making Bond a darker character, and I liked what Daniel Craig in the role, but I was not at all enthusiastic about the notion of “rebooting” the whole series and making Bond a young agent who just now achieved his 00 status. It turns out; all of my concerns were completely valid. The newest Bond film, Quantum of Solace, is a mess.
The film picks up moments after Casino Royale’s coda. Bond has the man he captured at the end of that film in the trunk of his car, and he’s headed for a safe house. An ensuing car chase acts as the film’s underwhelming pre-credit sequence. The title sequence is not too bad, it has a nice desert theme and the song is all right. Soon thereafter, it’s revealed that the man Bond had captured was part of a SPECTRE-like evil organization called Quantum. Bond’s mission is to investigate this organization. His investigation will lead him to Haiti and Bolivia, where he will track down another of Quantum’s operatives named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who is working with the CIA on a mysterious evil deed.
Few, if any, of the Bond movies are truly great; in fact they are only great insomuch as they are part of a greater whole. Every Bond movie is part of a forty year cinematic tradition, and that’s why we’re still interested in these otherwise kind of marginal action movies. Casino Royale, striped away a whole lot of what we go to Bond movies to see, but it got away with it because of some clever screenwriting. Most of the mission elements were addressed in that film, but in self aware ways, for example: Bond never ordered a martini “shaken not stirred” in the film, but he did order a number of other drinks that got closer and closer to the famous drink. In other words, he got closer and closer to being the Bond we all know and love by the end of the film, and by the end he was pretty much the Bond we all know and love. It was a very self contained character arc, one that was finished.
Quantum of Solace would have been an excellent opportunity to simply take this fully formed Bond, and put him into a traditionally structured James Bond adventure, but the writers are under the mistaken impression that Casino Royale didn’t finish his arc. The film plays out like the second half of Casino Royale, which is straight up revisionist history. Casino Royale was based on a self contained Ian Fleming which more or less ended exactly where the film ended.
The story here is simply a mess. Casino Royale benefitted immensely from the aforementioned Ian Fleming I was based on, that story helped ground that movie and kept it down to earth, it’s an element in that film’s success which is frequently overlooked. Quantum of Solace is not based on a novel by Ian Fleming, or anyone else. It’s based on a half-assed story the writing team probably though up in a week and never refined. The film’s plot is very hard to follow, which would be all right if this were some kind of elaborate yarn, but it isn’t. In fact, if the story were told properly it would be rather simple, that’s the film’s worst sin; it’s confusing rather than complicated and the root cause of this is poor storytelling. This is the same problem that sunk the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, and it may be for the same reason: they’re trying to make up a direct sequel to a movie that wasn’t really planned out as a multi-part story but which did have a cliff hanger of sorts.
An unwelcomed addition to the film’s storyline is a political subplot about the CIA playing along with the villains in order to secure Bolivian oil. The intelligence community working with unsavory elements is probably an unfortunate reality in the world, but there’s really no place for this material in a James Bond movie. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with political statements in film when it’s appropriate, if this were something like Syriana or The Constant Gardener it wouldn’t be a problem. The thing is: this isn’t Syriana, in fact it isn’t even Body of Lies, it’s a James Bond movie. The setting for this movie doesn’t even begin to resemble the real world, there’s a SPECRE like organization behind everything and there are action scenes so unrealistic it would make Arnold Schwarzenegger blush. No one is going to take the politics in a movie like this seriously and most of the arguments don’t really stand up to scrutiny anyway, the politics frankly just seems like a distraction to hide the film’s ongoing story problems.
I maybe could have let the story telling off the hook if I thought the action sequences really delivered, but they don’t. Many have complained of the film’s use of a Greengrass-esque camera and editing style. I’m usually a defender of this style of filmmaking, but in this case they’re right. The think about the “shaky cam” is one has to know when it is appropriate to use the technique and when it isn’t. In the case of the Bourne series it is appropriate because those are movies about a man who’s constantly confused about his situation, he has no memory and very little control of what’s going on around him. James Bond may have the same initials as Bourne, but as spies they couldn’t be more different. Bond is never confused about his situation, in fact his complete control over everything that goes on around him is a big part of what makes him Bond. As such the “shaky cam” is completely inappropriate. What’s more the technique really needs to be done just right or it won’t work at all, in the hands of someone who’s honed the style like Paul Greengrass it can work perfectly, but in the hands of someone like Marc Forster, who’s never made an action movie before, it will fall flat. The style here has been blatantly ripped off from the Bourne franchise, it feels like a derivative imitation of the real thing.
I would have been more forgiving of the style if the scenes themselves had been a little more inspired, unfortunately, even without the ripped off style most of these scenes were fairly cookie cutter. There’s a pretty standard car chase, a middling boat chase, a particularly bad airplane scene. The final action scene is helped by the fact that it’s at least an interesting location that they are exploding, aside from that the only creative action scene is a foot chase early on which ends with some interesting rope acrobatics, but the aforementioned editing style is particularly badly done in that scene.
I might, just might, have been a little more forgiving of all that if the film had only stuck to the traditions of the James Bond franchise. I can forgive a whole lot in this series if only because they are continuing a film tradition. When Casino Royale ignored a lot of the traditions it opened it up to a much higher standard then the rest of the films in the series, but it delivered the quality required by this new standard. Quantum of Solace doesn’t. The film is a mess, it’s a poor film in its own rights and to make matters worse it pisses on a film tradition that is important to millions of fans.
So, what do I want out of the next Bond film? Well, what the producers need to do is need to make sure they only make changes to the formula that need to be changed rather then change things just for the sake of change. To steal a phrase from Barrack Obama, they need to examine the series with a scalpel rather than a hatchet. For example, they were right to de-emphasize gadgets, they were becoming ridiculous and were often used as a crutch by the writers, but did they need to eliminate Q division altogether? I don’t think so. What was the point of moving the gun barrel from the beginning to the end? There was no reason, they just pissed off bond fans for no reason with that move. IT was right to go for a darker, more down to earth James Bond, that doesn’t mean turning him into a moody robot. Bond is a character who’s really a brawler but who wears a suit and a smirk in order to infiltrate classy locations. Also don’t assume Daniel Craig gold out of bad material, if you don’t give him meaty scripts he’s not going to be all that different from Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton. I put up with this rebooting silliness when it delivered Casino Royale, but this garbage will not do. I want James Bond back, the real James Bond, not this imposter.
*1/2 out of four
Rambo(1/25/2008)
Sylvester Stallone was once on top of the world; in the mid eighties he had two extremely popular franchises and was second only to Schwarzenegger for the title of “action-star of the decade.” Unfortunately for Stallone, he was also in some of the crappiest action movies ever made, aside from a few exceptions like Cliffhanger and Demolition Man he wasn’t in very many good movies that weren’t in the Rocky or Rambo series. As such he was headed for obscurity until two years ago when he tried to revitalize the Rocky series with good box office results. Now Stallone is trying to do the same with the Rambo series with the creatively titled Rambo.
Rocky Balboa was, if nothing else, a very nice try. However, it had one major advantage that Rambo doesn’t have; it was trying to bring back a series that one did have some degree of respectability, something the Rambo series has never had. Many people will point to the original Rambo film, First Blood, and call it a step above its sequels. I however may be in the minority in thinking the second and third installments were better than the original, which had the pretention to consider itself a character study. First Blood had all the poor acting, weak story, lame dialogue, and stupid politics of a standard 80s action film but didn’t actually have any of the action to back it up. The sequel is even worse on all of the above criteria, but it also had a high body count and some good explosions, so at least there was something to enjoy, and when it was merely trying to be an action movie a lot of its problems went from being real negatives and became campy quirks.
Because I enjoyed the high body count installments of the series, I looked forward to the sequel which looked like it would be even more ridiculous than its predecessors. The violent trailer that found its way to Youtube featured everything I wanted to see in a Rambo trailer: a decapitation, a man getting his stomach slit open, a man getting his throat ripped out, and a man getting his head blown open by a chain gun. This was a very nice thing to see after the shock of the sellout PG-13 rated Live Free or Die Hard. I had no expectations of enjoying this as a fine piece of cinema, but I did think it would be a wild “so bad its good” night at the cinema. Unfortunately the film did not live up to these very low expectations.
Its been twenty years since John Rambo’s last adventure, and he’s found his way to Thailand where he makes a living running a small boat and capturing snakes for a local freakshow. His life is suddenly interrupted when a group of missionaries approach him trying to charter his boat for a trip to Burma (which for some reason is never referred to by its modern name, Myanmar, in the film). Rambo is weary to go because Burma is a warzone and he’s seen enough killing for one lifetime. However he does eventually cave and give them a ride, as they plan to use an overland route to leave, Rambo decides to return to Thailand. Soon thereafter the missionaries find themselves kidnapped by the Burmese military. Rambo is soon given the task of guiding a group of mercenaries back to the drop-off point in Burma.
Setting the film in Burma was the first mistake Stallone made in Rambo. Firstly, it fails to bring Rambo into a new environment. The original Rambo movie was set in an American forest, the second was set in a jungle, and the third is a desert. Symmetry would suggest that the next Rambo film would take place in a new environment, possibly a cold or urban environment. Instead Stallone set this new installment back in another Southeast Asian jungle.
The other, larger problem with setting the film in Burma is that it put the film in the center of a brutal, real world conflict. This wouldn’t be a problem if Stallone simply ignored the full extent of the Burmese conflict, but he didn’t, the film is filled with images this action film has no right to show. The film opens with disturbing news footage of real atrocities occurring in the Burmese civil war, and then proceeds to show a shocking scene of innocent Burmese women being forced to run through a mine field before being killed by the military. Later we witness a village being massacred in full graphic detail, including not so subtle suggestions of rape and torture.
This is hardly the kind of fun violence I signed up for in this film; it’s disturbing and wholly unpleasant. In the context of a serious drama about the Burmese conflict such material could easily be justified, but that’s not what this is, it’s a Rambo movie; we go to these to enjoy mass murder, not be sickened by it. Any one of these scenes could have been tolerable in isolation, after all they need to establish that the bad guys are sick SOBs, but Stallone goes way to far here. Stallone claims he was trying to raise awareness of the Burmese Civil War, but couldn’t he have found a more appropriate way to do this than a Rambo movie? After all, the last time this series tried to endorse a regime it was in support of the Afghan Mujahedeen in their “holy war” against the evil soviets. This endorsement is absolutely hysterical in hindsight and one wonders why Stallone would risk making the same mistake twice.
However, the film also fails when it tries to be a proper mindless action film, simply because Sylvester Stallone turns out to be completely unqualified to direct action sequences. Unlike the Rocky series, Stallone never found himself directing any of the Rambo films, and the reason why is clear here. During the aforementioned village massacre for example, Stallone tries to pull a Saving Private Ryan and create a sense of chaos and intensity by using handheld camera work and speeding up the action. These kinds of tactics can work if they’re done by someone like Steven Spielberg, Paul Greengrass, or even Michael Bay who knows what they’re doing, unfortunately Stallone is not on that list. As a result the scenes are completely disorienting and kind of look like they’re being fast-forwarded. But really, regardless of how well it’s done, these methods shouldn’t be used in the first place in a film that was all about being an old-school action film. Also Stallone made the regrettable decision to use CGI blood instead of regular squibs, which would have been acceptable if it looked better but it didn’t, it was poorly done.
So what is there to like in Rambo, well the film is as gory as it promises to be and there are some real moments that will make you say “Daayuum!” Stallone does maintain a certain rough charisma even when he has to work with his own bad dialogue; it’s nice to see a real tough guy on screen in this day in age. Also there’s a British mercenary played by Graham McTavish who steals the show midway through with a lot of very amusing dialogue.
The moral of this story is that Rambo movies are at their best when they aren’t trying to be respectable. I really wanted to enjoy this as a nice fun action film, but Stallone found himself taking this character way too seriously. Even if he didn’t, his poor ability behind the camera still wouldn’t have made this work.
*1/2 out of four
DVD Catch Up: La Vie en Rose(12/12/2007)
It’s clear that people are beginning to get sick of musical biopics, and for somewhat legitimate reasons. Ray and Walk the Line were both formulaic and predictable, but frankly I thought they were fairly well made, they weren’t revolutionary but they worked. However, people are tired of them and there are three projects this year trying to go new directions with this genre. The most high profile of these is probably the broad spoof Walk Hard with John C. Reilly playing the fictional musical legend Dewey Cox. The next highest profile of these projects is I’m Not There with six actors including Cate Blanchet playing Bob Dylan. I’ve yet to see either of these projects, but I can only hope that they will fare better than the third of these projects: the long, boring, and nearly incoherent Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose.
I’ll admit that before I heard about this film I had no idea that a singer named Edith Piaf had ever existed. This didn’t help my viewing of the film as director Olivier Dahan has decided to structure this film with a constantly shifting chronology that shifts between different eras in Piaf’s life with seemingly no rhyme or reason. This decision isn’t entirely disorienting, I could sort of follow what’s going on, but it did really feel like an unnecessary burden for someone unfamiliar with the subject. The lack of chronology wouldn’t have been as big a problem if there weren’t large gaps in this mixed up timeline. The disease that eventually takes Piaf’s life is Liver cancer, but it would have been nice if the film had bothered to inform me of this, I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Admittedly, if this had been about a performer I had a better grasp on than Piaf I may not have had such a problem, but I don’t think it’s fair for a filmmaker to expect extensive pre-knowledge from his audience.
I would be more willing to overlook the disorientation that resulted from the film’s chronology if I thought there was some compelling reason for this aspect in the first place. This shifting timeline only seems to have been added to hide the fact that, deep down, this film is just as clichéd as Hollywood fare like Walk the Line. Edith falls victim to all the usual “Behind the Music” problems like addictions, tragic relationships, and attempts to perform in the wake of failing health. Dahan seems to think he will fool audiences into thinking this is more artistic just by mixing up a number of scenes, seemingly at random, and I don’t buy it. The movie plays out like a poorly constructed greatest hits album that omits key tracks and places songs in a poorly selected order that doesn’t allow a listener to understand the artist’s progression.
Most of the praise for this film has focused on Marion Cotillard’s performance as Edith Piaf. I’m willing to take everyone’s word that Cortillard looks and sounds like Piaf, but frankly this type of imitation is not enough to impress me anymore. This is the same trick I’ve seen Jamie Foxx, Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Mirren, and Forest Whitaker pull in various biopics during the last couple years and it’s really wearing thin. It is simply going to take more than impersonation abilities to impress me at this point and Cotilliard’s performance does not deliver the goods. We see Cotilliard as Piaf overreact to a lot of stuff over the course of the movie, the main way Piaf seems to react to everything that ever happens to her is to yell a lot and cry a lot. Admittedly, Cotilliard does manage to convincingly age a lot over the course of the film, and her performance may have worked a lot better if it had been allowed to develop naturally rather than be all over the map because of Dahan’s pretentious editing. But still this is a performance that does not live up to the hype.
Visually the film works fairly well. The film’s cinematography looks quite nice and the camera movements are fluid but unobtrusive. The editing within individual scenes is also quite well done. The supporting cast is also very good; Cotilliard is surrounded by a number of talented actors and actresses to play off of.
The film did nothing to convince me that Piaf was a great singer. I remember going into both Ray and Walk the Line with very little knowledge or understanding about their contributions to music and walked out embarrassed that I hadn’t shown Ray Charles and Johnny Cash the respect they deserved. La Vie En Rose provided no such education for me; I left the film with no desire to hear any more from Edith Piaf. The film does not even provide any particularly memorable performance scenes. Cotilliard does not do any of her own singing like Phoenix in Walk the Line, which wouldn’t have been a problem if the lip-synching and sound mix had been as good as it was in Ray, but it isn’t. Every song in the movie sounds studio perfect, even when Piaf is singing drunk on a street, and the voice coming out of Cotilliard’s mouth feels quite disconnected.
La Vie En Rose is a pretentious mess of a film that pretends to be original when it’s really just more of the same. I do think musical biopics badly need to turn a new leaf, but this film does little more than try to give it a facelift. Dahan’s experiment failed miserably and left us with a mess of a film which I grew tired of quickly into its two hour and twenty minute running time.
*1/2 out of four
[Those interested in seeing the film on DVD should be advised that the Riegon 1 DVD from HBO Home Video has a very poor transfer with terrible black levels]
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End(5/28/2007)
Whoever came up with the idea of mixing Jerry Bruckheimer Films and Walt Disney Pictures must be very rich. By mixing the kid-friendly colorful imagery and juvenile humor of a Disney film with the noise and violence of a Bruckheimer film has earned the franchise more than 1.7 billion dollars. The mix worked in spite of itself the first time, and it still managed to be passable escapism the second time despite some major flaws. However this new installment is proof that the series has indeed lost any steam it once had.
The movie picks up from where the second installment of the series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, left off. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has been transported to a strange surreal purgatory land and the rest of the Pirates gang is trying to save him . The first stop in their quest is Shanghi to meet with the pirate lord Captain Sao Feng to get charts they need to navigate the purgatory land Jack is trapped in. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) needs Jack’s boat to save his father, Elizabeth Swann needs Jack’s presence at a secret meeting of pirate lords to plan a defense against the oncoming East India Companies campaign against piracy, and Barbossa needs Jack’s boat in order to… uhh… wasn’t he a bad guy?
Many have complained that the plot is to complicated, this isn’t entirely true, the plot isn’t complicated it’s convoluted. Deep down the plot is actually quite simple; the confusion is simply the result of messy screenwriting. The screenwriting was just as messy as in the previous installments, but they had the advantage of not having heaps of junk storylines to build off of, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was an original movie that started from nothing. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was not the first installment but it was able to start a separate original story. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End however has the unfavorable position of being a continuation of a movie that, despite its entertainment value, went nowhere fast. This third installment also has the problem of being released less than a full year after the second movie, that’s less than a third of the amout of breathing room that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest had between itself and the original Pirates.
Is the movie a mess? Yes. But it also fails in a number of ways that the previous installments had moderate success at. The real fun of the first two movies was in exploring this fantasy world and seeing new and interesting elements within it. These new things were generally accompanied by very good production design. The world of the first two installments was filled with elements of pirate-lore that had been Disney-fied by a very good design team. However, it seems like they’ve run out of pirate-lore to adapt. For example, its unclear what the name of the surreal purgatory Jack Sparrow? At times its called simply: The Land of the Dead. At other times its called Davy Jones’ Locker, which makes no sense as that name was already used as the name of the chest that contained Davy Jones’ (Bill Nighy) heart in the second movie. The fact that they recycled this plot is emblematic of the problem here, this surreal purgatory was never part of pirate-lore and they didn’t have anything to name it. Later in the movie the Calypso, originally a figure in Greek mythology, is introduced. What did this mythological figure ever have to do with pirate lore? Nothing, but they needed someone to create a whirlpool for the final battle.
Besides a lapse of creativity, this film just doesn’t work as well. Most of the jokes fall flat here. There is way too much lame slapstick humor here. The viewers also begin to predict visual jokes before they happen. Many of the jokes here are performed by an almost supernaturally intelligent monkey and parrot; both of these annoying animals are the result of blatant pandering to young audience members. Another group of characters that have been tacked on to pander to the least common denominator are the bumbling crew of the Black Pearl. This Troupe of idiots is responsible for most of the aforementioned predictable slapstick. The final battle is also a disappointment as what is built up to be a major battle between two large armadas descends into yet another battle between two ships, this time the two ships are descending into a whirlpool, but that does very little to change the dynamics of the battle.
This is not to say the movie is devoid of positive qualities. There is a conference between the pirate lords about two thirds in that is pretty fun, and not just because of the much anticipated Keith Richards cameo. Chow Yun-Fat also adds a nice new element despite limited screen time. The somber opening also adds a nice sense of menace behind the East India Company. The film also doesn’t drag nearly as much as a 167 minute movie with very little substance should.
These Pirates of the Caribbean movies are the film equivalent of cotton candy. Like cotton candy, they completely lack substance, but you don’t mind because they are a very sweet treat. But try eating three balls of cotton candy in a row, the second or third helping will stop being sweet and start making you sick.
*1/2 out of four
