(500) Days of Summer(8/12/2009)
One of my favorite online past-times is to read a blog called “Stuff White People Like.” This is a satirical site that catalogs and explains various things that white people (by which they mean hipster yuppies) disingenuously enjoy out of a subconscious desire to be hipper than thou. Every entry of this blog deals with a subject like “Organic Food,” “David Sedaris,” or “New Balance Shoes.” So why do I bring this up? Because I think the people who write for that site could write an entire book about how much of the new Indie romance (500) Days of Summer has been done in order to impress white people. Among the entries of that blog which would apply to this film are: “Apple Products,” “Indie Music,” “Irony,” “Juno,” “Girls With Bangs,” “Musical Comedy (courtesy of a brief but conspicuous dance scene, more about that latter),” “Modern Furniture,” “Bad Memories of High School,” “T-Shirts,” “Architecture,” “Wes Anerson,” “Having Two Last Names (courtesy of star Joseph Gordon-Levit),” and I’m probably forgetting a few.
The film announces from the beginning (via a monotone voice over reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums) that this is a story of boy meets girl, but that it is not a love story. The boy is Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something working at a greeting card company in spite of the fact that he holds an architecture degree. The girl is Summer Finn (Get it! Her name’s Summer and the movie is called 500 Days of Summer!) who is played by Zooey Deschanel. Summer is the new assistant at Tom’s greeting card company, they have little to do with each other at first, but eventually they bond over their enjoyment of the band The Smiths. Soon they hook up, but it’s clear that they are both looking for different things in a relationship. Tom believes in true love and is out looking for “the one,” while Summer is a free spirit just looking for a good time. Their relationship goes for many ups and downs over the course of the film and eventually they must either reconcile their difference or, well… the voice over did say this wasn’t a love story.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about the way “mini-majors” (The “independent” divisions of major studios, ala Miramax, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics, etc.) control things when they are producing movies. Bear in mind that this refers to the movies they actually produce, not necessarily the ones they purchase and distribute. The conclusion many have drawn about these studios is that they control productions just as much as the major studios do, that the “independent” label is merely a marketing device. The “mini-major” who’s most notorious for this is Fox Searchlight Pictures, the people who brought us Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno. Now of course those are good movies, and the mere fact that a studio has control over a film doesn’t mean it will automatically be bad, but it can be a big roadblock to true creativity, and this will rear its head in movies from studios like this that are less successful than the aforementioned titles. I bring all this up because (500) Days of Summer seems to me like a ground zero for just how crass mini-majors have become.
At its heart, I think this movie does have a pretty cute story that has a whiff of authenticity to it, but all of that has been steamrolled by a lot of derivative and obnoxious directorial tricks courtesy director Marc Webb, who unsurprisingly has a background in music videos. It feels almost like the script was given to some sort of mad scientist in the Fox Searchlight labs (we’ll call him a quirkologist), who went through it and decided to add every whimsical “indie” cliché he could think of. It’s got a non-chronological narrative, a load of pop culture references, an indie rock soundtrack, moments of unexpected animation, and even a god damn spontaneous musical number that’s been added for questionable reasons. The base story is of course inviting such a treatment in many ways; after all, it’s about a mopey quarter-life crisis guy who seeks happiness via a manic pixie dream girl. For those who do not know the phrase “manic pixie dreamgirl,” it’s a work coined by critic Nathan Rabin to describe women in films that appear out of nowhere merely to serve the purpose of acting wacky and lifting up the film’s male protagonist. Zach Braff’s Garden State and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown both did as much with this archetype as was ever needed and this movie seems rather superfluous. Oh, and don’t get me started on Tom’s magically precocious little sister who gives him love advice.
Now in spite of my general distaste for this film’s derivative elements and general obnoxiousness, there are aspects to it that were clever. Earlier I glibly dismissed the film’s non-chronological narrative as one of a list of indie clichés it indulges in, but the truth is that the technique was uses pretty effectively here and if that were the only of those clichés it used I probably wouldn’t have made the complaint. Also, there are some genuinely funny moments sprinkled throughout the film, I especially liked the film’s customized “the events are fiction” disclaimer at the beginning and the reading of a greeting card that Tom writes while in the midst of depression. Also, the acting in the film is mostly admirable. While the film’s main character is a whiney tool, the way Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him makes him seem a lot more relatable than the character that’s written on the script. Zooey Deschanel is trying to do something similar, but the script has placed more obstacles in her path than in her co-star’s.
When all is said and done, this is a very irritating film. It’s a romantic comedy that uses hip techniques and references to hide the fact that at its heart it’s just another date movie. That said, it does at least try to hide this fact, which is more than can be said of the cookie-cutter nonsense like The Proposal which has dominated the genre for the longest time. As such, it probably is an above average choice if one is looking to take someone of the opposite sex to see something that could be called romantic. Under all other circumstances I’d advise against seeing it.
** out of Four
DVD Catch-Up: I Love You, Man(8/11/2009)
As much as I’ve liked the R-rated comedies that have been coming out in the last half-decade, there are some trends amongst them that have been annoying to me. One of these annoyances has been the rise of the word “bromance” in order to describe movies about close friendships between men. The truth is that this isn’t a new or original story-type, in fact stories about men trying to sort between the values of friendship versus romance can be seen in a Shakespeare play called “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and can probably be traced even further back. Still, there are some people who insist on glibly labeling movies about friendship, and since every coined meme needs a point of oversaturation we have now been given a movie that’s takes this term to an extreme point where it stops making sense.
The movie focuses on a real estate salesman named Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) who has just become engaged to the love of his life, a woman named Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones). In the process of planning the wedding, Klaven realizes that he doesn’t have any male friends he’s close enough to in order to ask them to be his best man. His father (J.K. Simmons) reminds him that he’s always been a “girlfriend guy” whose relationships with other men have fallen by the wayside. So, Klaven goes on an odyssey guided by his gay brother (Andy Samberg) to find a best friend. Eventually he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a single free spirit who lives in a tricked out man’s den. Seeing his potential “bro,” Klaven starts a friendship with Fife but realizes that friendship can sometimes be harder than romance.
As you can probably percieve, this movie’s setup is more than a little problematic from the get-go. Perhaps there are people in the world like Peter Klaven, but I doubt that they’re ever going to be as much of a clear cut case as he is, what’s more I doubt they’re going to come to as much of a sudden realization as he does. Also bizarre is Klaven’s plan to find a friend for the primary motive of having a best man at his wedding, what’s more, how the hell can he expect to form such a strong friendship in a mere six months? Close friendships are just not something you go out and actively try to form the way you actively try to find girlfriends.
And this brings us to the movie’s next major problem, namely that its entire premise is based around trying to make the formation of a friendship fit inside the tropes of the romantic comedy. This is problematic firstly because it means adopting the many weaknesses and clichés of that genre. More importantly, the whole concept of this film is flawed to begin with; friendships and romances simply are not as superficially similar as the movie is trying to say they are. As such the characters behave very strangely throughout the course of the film and the whole thing just rings pretty false. The stakes involved in a friendship, especially weird friendships that are expected to form in a few months, as they would be in a real romance. As such, the ups and downs of this relationship just aren’t very dramatic as the movie leads up to its lame anti-climax.
All this could have been forgiven if the movie had been very funny, but it isn’t. Segal and Rudd are good performers, but the material they’re working with is not very good. The dialogue is not particularly sharp and the gags are not very strong. There are a few decent chuckle moments along the way, and the performances are workable. In fact, like a lot of mediocre romantic comedies I’d say that this film is kind of watchable in spite of its immense flaws. However, the simple fact is that this isn’t as funny as the typical R-rated comedy and it probably isn’t going to get anyone laid the way a romantic comedy, so what use does this thing serve? Not much.
** out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Shotgun Stories(1/22/2009)
Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories was a film that went entirely under the radar throughout 2008 and built a small but devoted following while playing at film festivals. After hearing enough strong praise for it I decided it was worth a rental. All I’d known about it was that it took place in the south and had to do with a murderous feud between rival families. Between the title and the description I was expecting something a bit closer to Deliverance then what I got, which feels a lot closer to the work of the film’s producer David Gordon Green.
The film is set in a microscopically small southern town and opens with the funeral of a family patriarch. This man had two packs of children from different women, the first he mistreated, the second he doted on. One member of the first pack named Son (Michael Shannon), decides to speak up at this funeral and curses the man who mistreated him and his three full brothers. This sparks a feud between the two packs, which will end in blood.
When would you think such a story would take place? The 1800s? The 20s? Even the 70s? Well it doesn’t take place in any of those eras, it takes place in 2008. But how many people are really going to be starting a blood feud over a few disagreeable words in this day in age? That’s the problem I have with this movie, the people in it make decisions as if they were in a crazy southern gothic exploitation movie, yet Jeff Nichols goes out of his way to ground the film in absolute reality.
From a filmmaking perspective, there is a lot here to be impressed by. I mentioned earlier that David Gordon Green was one of the film’s producers, and if I was told that he was the director I wouldn’t be shocked. First time director Jeff Nichols’ visual style borrows from Green’s work so heavily that it sometimes feels closer to rip-off than influence. Though if you’re going to borrow a style it might as well be from someone as talented as David Gordon Green. The cinematography by Adam Stone is almost as good as Tim Orr’s work in the david Gordon Green cannon, and the film has the same kind of naturalistic calm that David Gordon Green had in The Good Girl and Snow Angels.
But all the artful compositions, restrained violence and minimalistic acting only serve as a means of concealing that this is an exploitation plot in which characters make illogical decisions for two thirds of a movie. As small as this town is I have trouble believing that there wouldn’t be some kind of police force or sheriff trying to stop the idiotic and often deadly feud that is going on. If Nichols had chosen to embrace rather than conceal some of this stories sillier aspects he may have at least had a movie that was true to itself. As it is the movie feels like a fraud, a slow and uninteresting one at that.
** out of four
DVD Catch Up: The Strangers(1/5/2008)
There’s an oft-quoted phrase in show business that “dying is easy but comedy is hard.” This is probably true, comedy is incredibly hard because it’s a genre needs to make audiences react on an almost primal level. What’s perhaps even harder is horror. The brave souls who try to make good horror films also need to force an audience to react to something almost by reflex. This already complicated genre has another big hurdle too, namely that most horror productions are cheap cookie-cutter garbage that studios rush into production because horror fans are easily duped into seeing garbage, thus beefing up their profits. Still, every once in a while someone is able to get something interesting out of the genre, and the 2008 thriller The Strangers had a really promising trailer.
The Strangers opens with a title card explaining that what we’re about to see is a true story. Right. This tactic of pretending your movie is factually based was cute back in the 70s but who do they think they’re kidding now? You’d have to be a real moron to think any of this is actually true. Anyway, the film opens with a youngish couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) returning to the house they’re staying at after attending a wedding. Soon thereafter they hear a knock at the door, a woman asks if someone named Tamera is home, they send her away, but soon they hear another knock. The atmosphere quickly becomes unpleasant, suddenly a face emerges from the darkness, there’s someone in the house. The rest of the night these two are terrorized by three seemingly human stalkers wearing masks.
This is a slasher/home invasion film striped down to its barest elements. If nothing else, it’s a noble attempt to correct some of the wrongs and pitfalls that these movies frequently fall into. One of the problems it desperately tries to avoid is this recent trend of giving killers elaborate back stories a mistake that often robs the villains of their mystique and aura. Rather than go down that route, the film opts to give the killers absolutely no back-story whatsoever, nothing, not even at the end, not even the slightest hint as to why they’re doing all this. This is sort of a double edged sword, though. It does indeed avoid giving as much useless detail as Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but in doing so it even fails to give as much back-story as John Carpenter’s Halloween. Indeed, the killers don’t need a full back-story, but a mere MacGuffin would have been nice, the mystery works for a little while but one quickly begins to seriously wonder why they’re going through all this trouble.
The first thing one wonders when hearing about this concept is how they can make feature length slasher film with only two possible victims for the oncoming killers. The answer, frankly, is that they can’t. The film really cooks for about a half hour but it becomes quickly apparent that there’s really no place for these people to run or hide, they’re doomed, but there’s still another hour of stalking to go. As such, the killers seem to go through an inordinate amount of trouble in order to draw out the film’s plot. They spend a lot of time stalking the two and have full control of the situation, but for whatever reason they never seem to go in for the kill. The film quickly get really redundant after the killers get into the pattern of appear, scare the main people, disappear, and the without any real hope of escape the whole thing quickly becomes an exercise in inevitability.
Also, while the film avoids some of the genre’s clichés, there are plenty of them that the film still falls into. The main characters frequently do stupid things rather than escape from the situation. Also the killers have an annoying habit of being on frame and then disappearing in the second it takes for the character to glance away from the window. This is something a lot of killers in slasher movies do and it usually has little bearing on logic or the laws of physics. I sometimes picture these killers running and ducking out of frame in order to outrace the editor for no reason other than to be kind of creepy. There’s a particularly egregious use of this tactic here where one of the killers taps Scott Speedman on the shoulder only to disappear when he turns around.
The Strangers is a movie that ultimately doesn’t work, but it’s a noble effort. Bryan Bertino crafts the movie well and there’s a real attempt on display to make something better than the average Hollywood thriller. That first half hour really works and it’s unfortunate that it all leads up to a general anticlimax. Unfortunately this is a movie that tried to be a little too hardcore for its own good.
** out of Four
Frost/Nixon(1/3/2008)
Frost/Nixon is a film about a nation coming to grips with the career of a horrible war time president after he’s left office in disgrace. How could that possibly be relevant to our times? I ask that with all due sarcasm of course, it’s pretty obvious this moment in history is being brought up now because the nation is finally getting rid of another terrible president. Few people are interested in defending Richard Nixon now, he did some good on broad foreign policy, but his handling of the Vietnam War and the way he dealt with descent at home was incredibly misguided. Then of course there was Watergate, an event which was probably only the tip of this man’s iceberg of corrupt actions. Yet, for all of Nixon’s faults there’s still something interesting about him, which is why there have probably been more movies about him then any other president of the twentieth century. Frost/Nixon is the latest of these efforts; it chronicles the story behind Nixon’s first interview upon leaving office.
The film begins with Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella) resigning from office and flying away on a helicopter. On the other side of the world an ambitious British talk show host named David Frost (Michael Sheen) watches Nixon exist stage left and is inspired, he points out how many people were watching and decides it would be a good business venture to seek an interview with the disgraced former president. His television colleague John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) advises against this, pointing out that CBS had a standing offer with Nixon for $350,000 and that outbidding them wouldn’t be cheap. Frost is undeterred and manages to land the interview but at a heavy personal expense. Frost flies out to California and hires journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) to help him prepare for the interview which is to last eight hours and be split up over four days, only the final two hour segment will deal with Watergate.
The film’s title indicates that this is very much a story of two halves, Frost and Nixon, of the two Nixon is significantly more interesting. Many writers and filmmakers have turned Nixon into a sort of Shakespearian tragic figure. Nixon’s paranoia is seen as a tragic flaw that brought down a man with good intentions. This was a new and creative observation shortly after his resignation when people started writing about him, it was interesting when Robert Altman put together Secret Honor, and it was even interesting when Oliver Stone of all people managed to find a certain level of sympathy in his biopic. After almost thirty-five years this isn’t such a novel idea, but it at least it’s worth telling, which is more then I can really say about the Frost half.
The David Frost of this film was no Bob Woodward; he was a fluffy talk show host who managed to strike the jackpot. This is the main problem the film has; it goes too far in trying to make Frost into a David to Nixon’s goliath. The film depicts Frost as an entrepreneur without much of a work ethic, he spends most of his time trying to get air-time and spends his time partying before his interviews rather than preparing. The film then has the audacity to celebrate this man for finally doing his homework at the last minute the weekend before he’s supposed to nail Nixon to the wall. It’s an incredibly Hollywood tactic, one that greatly lowers the viewer’s respect for the man and exists for no reason other than to add a bunch of fake and unneeded suspense to the story. I don’t believe for a minute that Frost was really this unprofessional, especially with a project he has so much invested in, and if he was he has no business being celebrated.
What’s more, I wasn’t really that impressed by the whole interview project to begin with. The film more or less concedes that the first three interviews were failures, and the feeble confession he manages to squeeze out of Nixon by the end is hardly the grand slam the film seems to think it is. More importantly, why should I care if Nixon is sorry about what he did? It’s already been proven through other means that he was a crook, his confession does nothing to set the record straight about the events, it was little more than the typical plea for sympathy that common criminals ask for after they’ve already been convicted and want a lenient sentence. Polls taken after the interviews aired in 1977 showed that 69% of the public still believed Nixon was covering up information; this was by no means the landmark media event the filmmakers seem to think it is. It would be like if they released a movie thirty years from now called “Couric/Palin,” about that hilarious interview and depict it as some sort of amazing moment instead of the mild curiosity that it was. Nixon certainly deserves better than to be compared to that joke of a candidate, but if you think about it Frost isn’t that far removed from Couric, they were both mediocre T.V. personalities who managed to perform slightly more professionally than people expected.
In spite of a premise that I don’t think is really worthy of all this fuss, the film could have still worked if it had been done right, but that wasn’t the case here. I think part of the problem is that this is movie based on a play based on news reports based on real events, it’s been filtered too far and the filmmakers might have been better off starting from scratch. The film suffers from the usual problems films have with stage adaptations, it’s told through a series of long conversations and isn’t meant to be cinematic. Most stage adaptations like Doubt and Glengarry Glenross deal with this problem by not dealing with it, they go ahead and set the films in one building and as a result the audience can adjust and accept the movies for what they are. Frost/Nixon doesn’t do this, it does everything it can to look like a normal movie while having all the same problems that stage adaptations have, thus emphasizing them rather than de-emphasizing them.
What’s worse, I don’t really think this is much of a script. The film has a lot of really clunky exposition, it explains way too much while talking about its themes in very direct and inelegant ways. This is exemplified by a scene right before the first interview where Nixon points out that he’ll be holding a handkerchief to wipe perspiration off the top of his lip; so far so good, that’s a nice reference, but the moment is completely ruined when he goes on to tell the same story about his televised debate with Kennedy that any educated viewer will have already heard dozens of times. Peter Morgan and Ron Howard should have trusted the audience to make that connection without their long winded explanation. There’s a lot of stuff like that here, later on the film spends entire scenes clumsily explaining all the movie’s themes rather than just leaving them there for the audience to pick up themselves.
Ultimately Ron Howard, a director I’ve never been a fan of, is responsible for a lot of the film’s problems. Howard has a long history of making movies filled with Hollywood clichés and then making them very bland to boot. Here he makes the mistake of trying to adopt a docudrama style which frankly torpedoes this entire movie. The film frequently drops into faux-interviews with supporting characters giving talking head interviews that did nothing but interrupt the film’s pacing in order to make comments which, like a lot of the script, talk directly to the themes while giving patronizing clarifications about the on screen action.
The one thing about the film that really lives up to its pedigree is the acting. Frank Langella doesn’t work particularly well as an impression; he doesn’t really that look that much like Nixon and his voice is a fairly caricatured. Rather, Langella’s work excels here because he can deliver the emotional payoff that his scenes require. Phillip Baker Hall’s work in Secret Honor remains the definitive Nixon performance, but Langella earns his place in the pantheon. Sheen is also impressive, he doesn’t have a character with the same dramatic opportunities as Langella’s, but he does makes Frost a lot more likable then he should be. Langella and Sheen both played their respective roles on stage in London and on Broadway before embarking on the film adaptation. Ron Howard deserves kudos for using them for the film, I’m sure he was given pressure to cast people with a little more bankability but he made the right choice.
The supporting cast is also pretty good. I especially like Sam Rockwell as a passionate author driven to give Nixon the tough interrogation he deserves, this character was a lot more interesting to me then David Frost and I wish he had more screen time. John Birt and Bob Zelnick are also good sidekicks in the film and Rebecca Hall does the best she can in a fairly uninteresting and thankless role as a woman Frost meets on a plane and sort of hangs around for the rest of the movie. Kevin Bacon is fine in the sort of stern disciplined henchman type that he could probably play in his sleep at this point. I did not like Toby Jones’ turn as a book publisher, though that opinion may be clouded by his distractingly bad makeup and bald cap.
In the end, Frost/Nixon is a very well acted movie that has its moments, but for the most part it is agonizingly middlebrow and lifeless. It’s the same kind formulaic Hollywood movie Ron Howard has made his career on, but unlike those films it isn’t honest enough to commit to its own corniness, instead it pretends to be the type of serious historical analysis that it clearly isn’t.
** out of Four
Blindness(10/3/2008)
One of the great pleasures of watching a lot of movies is the ability to spot new talent and watch it emerge over the course of a career. Every critic, film buff, and industry watcher wants to feel the way Martin Scorsese did in 1967 when he came out of Who’s That Knocking at My Door and proclaimed Martin Scorsese one of the great new talents of his generation. For me, and many others, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God seemed like the start of a great director’s career. City of God was a bold and brilliant film that show the presence of a true cinematic genius behind the camera, a natural talent who had a Scorsese-esque ability to choose just the right trick to make every shot work to its fullest potential. It seemed like there was no place to go except down from that modern classic, but his follow-up The Constant Gardener did not disappoint. Mierelles showed no signs of a sophomore slump, with that film he had shown real maturity and toned down some of City of God’s virtuosity to fit that very different film. Expectations were high for Mierelles’ third film, Blindness, which could solidify Mierelles as the great talent of our time if it lived up to his first two films. Unfortunately, Blindness isn’t as great as his previous films; in many ways it feels like the sophomore slump he somehow avoided with The Constant Gardener.
The film opens with a man (Yusuke Iseya) stopping his car in the middle of the road and telling the good Samaritans who stop to help him that he suddenly went blind while driving down the road. He eventually finds his way to an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who can find no explanation for his sudden blindness. The next day, that eye doctor tells his wife (Julianne Moore) that he too is suddenly blind. It’s quickly decided that this blindness is the result of a spreading contagion and the government decides to quarantine everybody afflicted. The blind are brought into a detention facility and told to fend for themselves with no assistance from anyone with sight. The Julianne Moore character never loses her sight but decides to stay by her husband’s side in the quarantine just the same. The facility is undersupplied and unsupported, the blind quickly grow restless particularly a man in Ward 3 (Gael García Bernal) who shows no interest in cooperating with the people trying to make the place better.
The key problem with Blindness is simply that it is really depressing and unpleasant to sit through, which wouldn’t be a problem if it had a really strong story or a really profound message, but it has neither. The trailers don’t tell you this, but most of the movie isn’t set in the wider society dealing with this crisis, more than half of it is spent in a dark, dank, disgusting prison. The people are stuffed in like sardines, and the government isn’t even trying to help improve conditions. Painfully, the situation looks disturbingly similar to what happened to the people stuck in the New Orleans Superdome during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The difference is those people were stuck for about a week, and the people in the film are there for months on end with no end in sight and even less outside assistance. This allegory gives the sequence some degree of power, but at the same time there’s only so much of this abuse an audience can take. These scenes seem to go on forever, eventually the film moves on from this hellhole into some of its more impressive sequences in the last twenty minutes, but by then it’s too little too late. I only wish more of the film had taken place in the city than in that horrible prison.
The film’s central message is that society falls apart when it has to face a major crisis situation, but this is hardly a unique or original message. The story bears a very close resemblance to “Lord of the Flies,” and brings very little new to the table. This is made worse by the fact that we’ve seen a lot of movies like this recently; some titles that come to mind include Children of Men, 28 Days Later, War of the Worlds, and The Happening, in fact The Happening would have probably been a lot like this if it hadn’t been completely inept.
The characters here all fit the same cliché types you’d find in a Hollywood disaster film: You’ve got the leader type in the woman who can see, you’ve got the wide old man in a character played by Danny Glover, you’ve got the hooker with a heart of gold that everyone judges at first but come to respect, you’ve got the kid who’s only there to quietly sit around and up the stakes for the larger group, and you’ve got the unbalanced crazy guy and his henchmen there to act as villains for the group. That’s really the root problem with the movie, deep down it’s just a Hollywood genre movie the ones listed above, it just doesn’t want to admit it. The end result is a movie that’s the worst of both worlds; it’s no more profound or well told than the average disaster movie, yet it’s an extremely depressing, claustrophobic, and unpleasant experience to sit through.
What saves the movie from being a real disaster is some very good acting and production values. The acting in particular has a knack for making the viewer almost forget just how cliché a lot of these characters are. I took issue with the way Julianne Moore portrayed her character early in the film, particularly the airheaded moments when she put herself in jeopardy for no reason, but as the film progressed her performance really grew on me. Moore and her character hold a quiet dignity and strength that really felt like one of the few things that was able to rise above this hellish world that Mierelles managed to create. Mark Ruffalo also played her husband in a very well done, naturalistic way. Gael Garcia Bernal is also very strong as the scenery chewing villain of the piece.
The production qualities are also quite good, particularly the art direction which conveys a really desolate mess of a post-apocalypse in the last few scenes and effectively makes the quarantine facility look every bit as awful as Meirelles seems to want it to be. The cinematography is also pretty interesting. The blind characters describe their condition as an extreme whiteness, like “swimming through milk.” To match this Meirelles took a bold step and seemed to turn the white light on the set up to eleven, leaving the visuals of the movie completely washed out in whiteness for large portions of the film. I’m not sure that this really adds a whole lot to the movie, he would have had to take this a lot further if his goal was to make the audience completely empathize with the blind people on screen, but I don’t think it really hurts the movie much either. It’s an interesting decision that makes the movie unique if nothing else.
The movie does have a number of very good scenes, in fact very few of them fall flat, the problem is that they don’t gel together into a greater whole… at all. Fernando Meirelles has made two great films so far, and I’m sure he’ll make great films in the future, but this one straight up doesn’t work. There are elements here to respect, but the movie is unlikable in many ways. This was a nice try, but a disappointing failure nonetheless.
** 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
DVD Catch Up: The Ruins(7/30/2008)
Conventional wisdom says that the horror genre tends to work in cycles; in other words, whenever there’s a successful and original horror movie it gets followed by a whole lot of earnest ripoffs. After Halloween we got a whole lot of masked killer movies, after The Ring we got a million remakes of Japanese horror movies involving ghost kids, and after Saw the wave of so called “torture porn” movies emerged. The existence of the recent horror film The Ruins suggests that we are now beginning a wave of movies that are ripping off the 2006 cave-dwelling creature feature The Descent.
As The Descent was only a moderate commercial success, I doubt this is going to be as widespread a wave as the above examples, but the resemblance between the two movies is no coincidence. Both are about groups of young people who find themselves stuck in a dark place populated by mysterious creepy-crawlies that have apparently been there for centuries. While the all woman group of spelunkers in their thirties was a relatively creative set up for The Descent, The Ruins goes the more predictable route for its group: American college students on vacation in Mexico.
While vacationing the students hear about an ancient Mayan ruin that isn’t even on the map and decide to go visit it, what could possibly go wrong with that plan? Once they get there they are greeted by a bunch of angry villagers carrying bows and pistols. The locals start shouting at them in a native dialect that the students can’t understand; suddenly the angry villager shoots one of the students dead and the rest run into the ruins for cover. But they soon find that what’s waiting for them in the ruins is much more frightening than what is waiting outside.
There are as many as six people here, why such a larger group? So there will be more people to kill off of course. Killing people off is the main goal here. Like The Descent, this isn’t quite as gore dependant as something like Saw, but it also isn’t afraid at all to let the plasma flow once things start going wrong. It does however venture into Hostel territory during one gratuitously sadistic scene involving an amputation, though it may have been a bit more restrained theatrically than it was in the unrated version I saw.
The Ruins is definitely a well photographed movie, cinematographer Darious Khondiji is able to give the whole film a nice orange-ish glow, though I do wish that director Carter Smith had been a little more careful with the angles as the film tends to over use close-ups. I also rather liked the locations that were used; apparently the entire film was shot in Australia, which surprised me as the scenery did convincingly look like Mexico.
As a whole this is a set up for a pretty good thriller were it not for two fatal flaws, the first being that the characters are completely stock. While I’m no fan of Eli Roth’s Hostel, it did at least manage to give its characters some degree of personality and individuality; they weren’t three dimensional by any means, but at least I got to know them somewhat and care if they lived or died. Here however the young and the damned are completely indistinguishable kids that only exist to provide cannon fodder for the director.
The second fatal flaw comes when the film’s big twist emerges, I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that it becomes very clear very early that each and every one of these kids is doomed, there’s no chance for any of them to survive. As soon as this becomes clear any suspense the film could have built is flushed right down the toilet, with no chance of survival the film becomes an exercise in delaying the inevitable, the question goes from being “will they survive?” to “how painfully will they die?” and that’s sort of a sadistic goal if you ask me. Some may argue that this isn’t supposed to be a suspense movie, that the twist turns this into a drama about human nature. I don’t know if that was the filmmaker’s intent, but if it was then its attempt at drama is undermined by problem A: the boring and indistinguishable characters.
I’m probably underselling the movie to a certain degree, the movie may be derivative and somewhat pointless, but it at least isn’t particularly boring. If you’re looking for a contemporary horror movie you could probably do a lot worse than The Ruins, but low standards can only take a movie so far.
** out of four
The X-Files: I Want to Believe(7/27/2008)
In retrospect, “The X-Files” was a really innovative and influential show. I’ve seen each and every episode of the show, which would seem to suggest I’m a huge fan, but I’m not really. You’d never find me going to a convention or anything, but I found it to be very compelling T.V. that was always worth my time. Stylistically it was a very slick and well produced show, Fox put some real money into the show and the various directors managed to make each episode like a cool mini horror film. On a substance level it was one of the first mainstream shows to try to have a series arc, one that required the viewers to watch the show sequentially and keep track of what’s been going on. Of course the good days didn’t always last and the show clearly jumped the shark somewhere around season seven where it sort of devolved into self-parody. By the show’s end one got the feeling the writers may not have really had sort of been making the mythos up as they went (anyone accusing “Lost” of doing that better take a closer look at this show’s anti-climax). Still, I was exited about the prospect of a new movie that would push all that mess aside and simply make a good story with the characters I loved, using the creativity that made the show famous.
When we last left Mulder and Scully they were wanted by the government and on the run. The movie begins a few years later and it turns out they weren’t in quite the dire condition we thought they were. The government has apparently quit looking for the two, who are now living together in a remote rural house. Scully (Gillian Anderson) is now working as a doctor at a catholic hospital called Our Lady of Sorrow. Mulder (David Duchovny) however is living as a recluse of sorts and seems to spend his days researching paranormal activities in newspaper articles. While working at the hospital Scully is approached by an FBI agent named Mosley Drummy (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) who brings with them a simple offer; help them with a current case and the FBI would forgive them for their previous transgressions. This recent case involves a psychic priest named Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly) who has been leading the FBI to a missing agent of theirs who appears to have been kidnapped by a pair of men involved in strange medical experiments. Crissman is a convicted pedophile, a the always skeptical Scully has absolutely no patience for his psychic abilities, while Mulder thinks there may be something to what he’s doing.
Mulder and Scully were first seen on the big screen in the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future. That film was not spectacular, but it certainly mangaged to deliver what people wanted: an elongated X-Files story brought to the big screen with a significantly larger budget allowing for at least three set pieces that could never be done on the show’s budget. This new film, however doesn’t seem to have been given anywhere near the kind of budget “Fight the Future” was given. As such, this is a much more character driven story than many would expect, in fact it’s almost more of a Mulder and Scully film than it is an X-Files movie.
The X-Files was never really an action based show, it was more about science fiction and horror, still it was about FBI Agents and as such it wasn’t really unreasonable to expect a few shootouts and chases from any given episode. This however, feels like a very non-violent take on the X-Files formula. In fact, I don’t think either of the lead characters so much as hold a gun throughout the duration of the film. There’s one mediocre foot chase, and a moderately thrilling finale, but nothing like the set pieces involved in “Fight the Future.” As such it was probably a horrible idea to release this film in the middle of summer when audiences are particularly expecting thrills.
The film also isn’t nearly as supernatural in nature as most fans will be expecting. This isn’t based on the shows “mythos” formula, but rather it is attempting to replicate what the show did with its stand-alone horror themed episodes. The film has a psychic investigator and some people doing bizarre surgeries, but as far as freaks of the week go, these guys aren’t all that freaky. In fact a lot of the material here feels more like something one would find in an episode of “CSI.”
With no action, no science fiction, and minimal horror it would seem that the entirety of the film’s burden rests on the character driven drama. So is the show deeper and more thematic than an average episode of the show? Well… sort of, but I don’t think that’s going to be worth the eight-year wait for most of the show’s fans. The film deals with the relationship between Mulder and Scully after all these years and with the lingering longing Scully feels about the son she gave birth during the show’s run (I honestly don’t even remember what ended up happening to that kid). Ultimately it’s about Scully coming to terms with Mulder’s stubborn quest for the truth, which is reflected by Scully’s determination to save a child at her hospital.
This is ultimately more Scully’s movie than it is Mulder’s and in turn Gillian Anderson has a lot more to do here than Duchovny. Duchovny mostly delivers the same performance one would expect given his track record on the show, he’s a little more morose, but it’s mostly more of the same from Duchovney, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anderson on the other hand is portraying a much-changed character. This is a Scully that has gone through so much and has become almost completely drained, but Anderson doesn’t overplay this. These are both very sad characters, one gets the notion that their lives have really been ruined by their work with the FBI; in this sense the movie is sort of a downer, as a fan of the show I feel these characters really deserve some peace and there’s nothing like that to be found here.
The supporting cast is nothing to write home about. Amanda Peet is a good actress but she’s on complete autopilot here. I didn’t expect much from Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner, mainly because he’s a third rate rapper, but he was average enough. Billy Connolly, was a little more interesting, mainly because of his very weird Scottish accent. What’s a Scottish pedophile doing in West Virgina? I don’t know, but I still think he created a fairly good character with his performance.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe isn’t really a bad movie; it’s just not a good movie, at all. If this was made as a T.V. movie or direct to DVD it would be perfectly satisfactory, but that’s not what this is, it’s a theatrical movie ten years in the making. Chris Carter has made a movie that mostly stands up to scrutiny, but will satisfy few. It just isn’t the X-Files movie the fans wanted, it wasn’t the X-Files movie that would attract non-fans, and it certainly isn’t the X-Files movie I wanted.
** out of Four
