An Education(10/30/2009)
Early in this decade a movie came out called High Fidelity, which got very strong reviews but was avoided by myself for a very long time. The idea of a romantic film starring John Cusack did not appeal to me, but eventually I did see it and was surprised to find it was a very well thought out story made more endearing by the fact that it uses a music fanatic as its main protagonist. This film was based on a novel by a man named Nick Hornby, and while the way that Stephen Frears and his team of writers adapted the film certainly had a lot to do with its success, I’d be willing to bet that the heart of what that made the film special was in the pages of Hornby’s book. Ever since that production Hornby has been a pretty hot commodity in Hollywood, adaptations of his work include About a Boy and Fever Pitch (which was made into an English version about soccer and an American version about baseball). But now the tables are turned, and now Nick Hornby has become a screenwriter adapting someone else’s work, in this case a memoir of a British journalist named Lynn Barber about her coming of age.
The film is set in suburban London circa 1961 and focuses on a sixteen year old girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) who is both beautiful and the smartest girl in her class. Her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) have her on a strict regimen that will hopefully result in her being accepted to Oxford. One part of this regimen is that she’s taken up the cello, and this leads to a chance encounter after a band rehearsal with a man in his thirties named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who offers her a ride home. After this encounter David begins to romance Jenny and invites her on extravagant outings with his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). Jenny’s teacher (Olivia Williams) and headmistress (Emma Thompson) become concerned with this affair and warn that it will threaten her future education, but a life with David is beginning to seem like just as viable a future to Jenny as Oxford, after all he’s able to bring her into high society without having to waste time with a bunch of petty students for three years.
Perhaps the thing this film will be most remembered for is that it introduced the world to Carey Mulligan. Mulligan has heretofore mostly accumulated credits for small parts on English television and is probably most noted for a small role alongside Keira Knightley in the Joe Wright adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. Her work here has been championed as a breakthrough and I will not disagree, she has real star potential. For this role Mulligan must be a teenager who thinks she’s wiser than she really is and has an energy that makes her standout amongst her peers. In this sense the role is not unlike the title role in the 2007 film Juno, albeit in a completely different time and place and without the Diablo Cody-isms. Like Page before her she is able to walk that line between appearing naïve while outwardly trying to exude sophistication and spunk.
She is however just one part of a very strong ensemble. Peter Sarsgaard has the difficult task of making the audience forget that he is a thirty-something creep trying to sleep with a teenager so as to show why said teenager would fall for him. He needs to be charming and pleasant, while also having a bit of that dark side beneath the surface. Alfred Molina is also going to get a lot of attention for his work here, and this is well deserved. His character is pretty funny in his often silly values, and this could have played pretty fake if the actor wasn’t up to the task. Molina makes the father character seem like a real person, even when he’s places the value of knowing a famous author above being a famous author. Actors in smaller roles like Cooper, Pike, Williams, and Thompson also nicely fill out the cast.
Like Mulligan, director Lone Scherfig has emerged from obscurity as an important talent out of this project. I’ll bring up Juno again as a point of comparison, because like Jason Reitman she seems able to give an ambitious directorial edge to her work without suffocating the material with overwhelming style. She’s able to emphasize the glamour of Jenny and David’s outings in a way that makes it seem as intoxicating to the viewer as it does to Jenny in a way that is essential to the believability of the story. Of course this would all be wasted were it not for the solid script by Nick Hornby who further proves that he has a knack for creating endearing and likable characters while giving them really clever, but not overly stylized dialogue.
As I’ve established, there was a lot of talent put behind this and it shows up onscreen, but I ultimately couldn’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the end result. I can’t help but think that Lynn Barber’s story was perhaps not worthy of all this talent. It’s clear from the beginning that this relationship is heading for disaster and that Jenny is walking into a trap, so this isn’t really much of a romance. And while there are some good giggles throughout I wouldn’t really recommend it simply as a comedy, so how is this going to stand on its own merely as a story? This is where the house of cards falls down, because as a story this is actually a pretty simplistic work preaching the moral that younglings shouldn’t try to grow up too fast, they should stay in school, and not try to take shortcuts. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s basically the best written, best acted, and best crafted afterschool special ever made. This shortcoming is made worse by a twist towards the end which prevents the character from learning something for herself and instead has the truth thrust upon her.
If ever there has been a movie that more toughly challenges Roger Ebert’s adage that “it’s not what a movie is about, but how it’s about it that matters” in my mind. The “what” that this movie is about is rather boring to me, but the “how” it’s about it is very strong. Ultimately, I’m going to have to split the difference and recommend that people see this movie in order to enjoy it in the moment, enjoy the acting, enjoy the script, enjoy the filmmaking, but the whole affair is more shallow than it first appears and it avoids a lot of the tougher questions involved in favor of light-handed moralizing.
*** out of four
A Serious Man(10/2/2009)
If in 2005, you’d asked me about the importance of the Coen brothers to the world of film, I probably would have sadly reported that they might have been on the road to irrelevance. After all, their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers was not well received, nor was their previous film Intolerable Cruelty. Even the films they made earlier in the decade like The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother Where Art Thou? were by no means unmitigated triumphs. What a difference two years make. In the last two years the Coens have not only reclaimed their crown as American masters but have gone a step further. With their 2007 Oscar winner No Country For Old Men they made a taught thriller while pushing their aesthetic forward, and with their 2008 comedy Burn After Reading they proved that they could still make hilarious and accessible comedies while maintaining their dark sensibilities. I’ve always loved the Coens when they’re making broad comedy and dark thrillers; but their 2009 victory lap A Serious Man takes the form of that third type of film they’ve made throughout their careers, quirky/metaphorical dramedies, and that’s the side of their oeuvre I’ve never quite been able to close the deal on.
Set (and setting is never an unimportant detail in the work of the Coen brothers) in a Minnesota suburb circa 1967, A Serious Man sings the ballad of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor of theoretical physics. Gopnik is up for tenure as the film begins and his son will soon be undergoing his Bar Mitzvah, but he soon finds himself in the middle of an existential crisis. Gopnik’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) seems to be deep in some shady dealings and has come to live with Larry. Worse yet, Gopnik’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) tells him that she’s been seeing another man named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) and that she wants a Get (a divorce within “the faith”). If that weren’t enough, he’s having a moral crisis over how to handle a Korean student who has left him an envelope of cash in order to receive a passing grade and he’s been getting threatening calls from the Columbia Record Club. As the movie goes on, these troubles seem less and less like coincidences and more and more like a series of tests from “Hashem.”
The Coen Brothers have always been an auteurist’s dream; they’ve had an incredibly distinct yet oddly adaptable style that absolutely envelopes everything they touch, at times almost to a fault. Fitting this film into the Coens’ body of work is one of its bigger pleasures. The film’s Minnesota setting will immediately invite comparisons to Fargo, but that’s a red herring, this film’s depiction of that setting is pretty different and its story is less literally blood soaked. Narratively I’d probably compare it to The Man Who Wasn’t There in that it’s about an ordinary man whose world collapses around him, tonally I’d probably compare it to the dead faced Miller’s Crossing, but the movie I’d most readily compare it to is Barton Fink both in its surrealism and in its spiritual overtones.
As such the film will probably fit pretty well into the Coen cannon, but its real gift to those analyzing the Coens as auteurs is much richer. This is a very personal film for the Coens, as it depicts the place where their odd, subdued psyches formed, as such this could be something of a Rosetta Stone for their sensibilities. The suburb here is unnamed, but it is presumably the Coens’ hometown of St. Louis Park, an old inner-ring suburb west of Minneapolis. The place has a very large Jewish population that lives among the town’s otherwise gentile Midwestern inhabitants. As I am myself a Minneapolis resident, I can attest that this is indeed a pretty detailed an accurate depiction of the area, although a lot has changed since 1967. St. Louis Park doesn’t look as desolate now as it does in the movie (which was actually filmed in a suburb called Bloomington), but there still is a pretty large Jewish population there. Less important than the look are the mannerisms and the details, which rang a lot more true here than they did in Fargo, a film in which everyone seemed to talk like they came straight out of a bad Ole and Lena joke.
All this meticulous setting detail isn’t just window dressing either; it serves to explain a lot of the main characters psychological state. Larry Gopnik is made to feel like an outsider in this suburb filled with mowed lawns and gruff gentiles who play catch and go hunting. His knowledge of Physics seems to mostly go unrewarded (he says he’s never published) and he’s only got three mostly unhelpful Rabbis to turn to during his crisis of faith. Gopnik’s nebbishy tendencies might have served him better in New York where he could have made friends with Woody Allen or something, but here he’s pretty much on his own. Also interesting is the effect the setting has on his children, particularly his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) who is most likely a stand in for the Coens. The summer of love exists only on the radio for Danny and he’s pretty aggressively uninterested both in his father’s travails and in the faith that makes him an outsider. One can picture him eventually getting bored enough to pick up a guitar to imitate the Jefferson Airplane music he’s always listening to, or if film had been his area of interest, perhaps a video camera.
Philosophically, the film addresses the age old question of why bad things happen to good people. That’s never really been a concern to secular thinkers like myself, but to people like Larry Gopnik who feel they are under the protection of a benevolent God, it is a conundrum.
Many have seen the film as having been based on the book of Job, and I will not disagree, in fact there are images toward the end of the film which all but confirm the connection. Essentially, Larry is subject to every cruel unpleasantly that the Coens can throw at him, but he puts up with it all because of his faith and his passive aggressive nature. I’m no theologian so I’m not going to comment on this too much; but I’m pretty sure that the Coens have changed the story’s ending to cynical effect, and that I like.
Some have said that the Coens have used celebrities as a crutch as of late, something this film will never be accused of as this film is pretty much devoid of them. The cast here is for the most part solid but anonymous, many of them being never before seen on film. Michael Stuhlbarg is quite strong in the lead; he manages to walk the fine line of nebbish stereotype, always falling just on the right side, and as his desperation grows he’s able to perfectly panic while trying desperately to internalize as much as he can. Richard Kind is probably the most recognizable face in the whole film, and he brings a pretty good presence to the whole thing. Similarly, Fred Melamed brings a real “that guy” presence to the film. If those names aren’t obscure enough for you, the Coens have also filled the movie with people who’ve never been in a movie before like Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, and David Kang who fit in right alongside the anonymous veterans.
Had this film come out in 2005 (in the wake of the Ladykillers debacle) it probably would have been called a return to form, coming out 2009 it’s more like a return to weirdness. In spite of all the film’s many merits, this is simply a movie that is almost smothered in the Coens usual quirks and it will probably baffle anyone who isn’t a diehard Coen veteran. Coen films are almost never “for everyone” and this one is even more “not for everyone” than usual, and I’m not sure it was “for me.” This is a film that is hard to truly like but almost impossible not to respect.
*** out of Four
District 9(8/14/2009)
For the last decade I’ve heard people talk a lot about how technologies like inexpensive digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, and Youtube are going to lead to a surge of underground creativity. Frankly I’ve never been too excited by the prospect, most of the stuff getting made by these amateurs are either unambitious crap that’s likely to be enjoyed only by those in the immediate family of the makers, or they’ve been boring bits of pretension made by people more obsessed with being “indie” than in making a movie that are actually worth watching. Still the law of averages suggests that something decent would eventually come out of the whirlpool of content floating around the internet, and it looks like South African/Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp may be the first person of this “revolution” to make good, thanks in no small part to his discovery by Peter Jackson. Blomkamp was hand selected by Jackson to direct a film based on the “Halo” video game series, largely because of a short film he made called “Alive in Joburg.” The big wigs weren’t so willing to put that much money in the hands of someone who came into the business in such an unconventional way, consequently that film was indefinitely shelved. To make up for that disappointment Peter Jackson has chipped in to produce District 9, a feature length adaptation of the aforementioned “Alive in Joburg” short. The results produced some very unconventional trailers, and the support of an expansive viral campaign that has resulted in a lot of buzz.
The film doesn’t make a big deal about it, but this is basically a work of alternate history. In this timeline the world was changed when a flying saucer entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 1982 and eventually stopped in the skies over Johannesburg, South Africa and stayed in place for months. When a team cut through the side of the ship they found a group of mal-nourished insectoid aliens, which would not be able to live on the ship much longer (which apparently stopped out of technical difficulties). The solution that the South African government came to was to allow the aliens onto the surface, but segregate them into a large hellish camp called District 9. The film picks up twenty years later and the slums that these aliens have been forced to live in have become even more dilapidated than it was before. Still, this widespread segregation has done nothing to quell public fears, so the government now wants to move all the aliens into a new camp, which promises to be even worse than the old one. Tasked with evicting all these people is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who they want to gather eviction signatures from all the aliens in District 9. Of course the signing of these notices is not optional; it’s just one of the many dumb rubber stamps that governments often use to disguise blatant oppression. While doing this task Merwe is exposed to an alien substance which begins to transform him into one of these aliens, his hybrid nature could be very valuable because it could give humanity insights into alien weaponry, but these insights would mean dissecting him alive. As such, Merwe must break out of the complex and become a fugitive, in order to track down the only aliens that can help him.
Any semi-educated person would quickly see that this story is deeply allegorical, both of South African Apartheid and of stories of human oppression the world over. The aliens are the oppressed minority, the “other,” the poor, the social problem that the government would rather hide than solve. The film’s best statement is the way it points out the absurdity of using segregation (both overt and subtle) as a means of dealing with people. The aliens here live in the most god-awful hellhole one can imagine, the kind of place that guilt-tripping charities show children walking through in their advertisements. To the shame of both South Africa and the world, these slums were not built for the movie; they were simply found and filmed in. Of course it’s not the aliens fault that they live in shit, the government just put them there, and gave them no means to leave. Since they are given no way to integrate into society they have no way to improve their condition, they are simply ignored and forced to fend for themselves with none of the resources the rest of us have. Since society has ignored them, they’ve turned to the only ones willing to serve them, gangs of Nigerian criminals interested in acquiring their weapons. What’s more, they need to contend with brutal cops who are pretty much their only exposure to “humanity,” and who give them no reason to respect or play by the rules of their neighbors. The message here is simple but refreshing: if you treat others like dirt they WILL do the same unto you.
I’d like to thank Peter Jackson, QED International, Tri-Star Pictures, and anyone else responsible for supporting this film and giving it such a confident wide release. No matter how many problems I may have with this film (and I have many) the fact remains that this is significantly more creative than anything in theaters and I heartily recommend it over whatever market-tested bullshit its competing against this weekend. However, I can’t help but think this is something of a missed opportunity on a number of levels.
The film uses a vérité style and fits well in a recent trend in the style’s use in mainstream genre films like Cloverfield and Borat, as well as television shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” This film starts as a mock-documentary presumably for a fictional television station (whose logo can be seen in the corner during these sections). This mockumentary element is not to be confused with the “found footage” format seen in movies like The Blair Witch Project and [REC], the difference being that those movies simply show footage shot by characters while this is meant to look like a fully produced documentary complete with talking heads. But about a half an hour into the film they begin to cut to shots that this documentary crew would have no access to, the bug begins to disappear and eventually the talking heads stop talking, from here on the movie stops posing as a documentary, the handheld look remains but the film turns into a standard work of narrative fiction. I can’t say I was a fan of the way this was accomplished, what was the point of posing as a documentary in the first place if the format was to be abandoned after about a half hour? I suppose it could be said that this allowed for some needed exposition about the world of the film, but why the sneaky transition? How did the fictional documentary end? Did the producers seek to film a documentary that had a beginning, a coda, but no middle? And if so, why so much exposition, wouldn’t the people of the film’s world already be acquainted with all this knowledge? As for the film’s special effects; they were clearly not made with the kind of budget that Jackson himself would have wielded (the film was legitimately made independently and only distributed by a major studio) and are not top of the line, but they do work to tell the story and make up for their occasional crudeness with the creativity with which they are used.
If you look at the marketing for this film you’ll get a pretty good sense of the film’s visual style, the film’s political overtones, and hints that there is action to be found in it. What you will not see is any sign that the film has a main character in it, and for good reason. Simply put, Wikus van der Merwe is a horrible character to put at the center of a film like this. He is not a hero at all, he’s a bureaucratic pencil pusher and something of a nerd. That could have made for a very interesting character, but they never really pull it off. Sharlto Copley plays the guy a little too broadly comedic for my taste; I really wish they had chosen a character who is simply an average everyman to put at the center of this rather than someone who is this aggressively dopey. But the bigger problem is that at the start of this film Merwe is a complete asshole who does hateful things that are in no way excused by the fact that he hides behind laws, red tape, and a smug dorky smile. He’s just as bad as the killer mercenaries who do his bidding, and for most of the movie he operates entirely out of enlightened self-interest and does very little to redeem himself until he magically grows a conscious in the film’s eleventh hour. In short, this guy is not someone the audience should sympathize with or find cool, which I could forgive if they explored the negative side of his personality more thoughtfully but they don’t, he just sort of turns into an action hero halfway through, and not a very good action hero at that.
Why am I picking on this guy? Because he’s the only person in it that we really get to know and as such he has extra burdens to carry. Few of the other humans involved get much more than a few minutes of screen time, but what’s even more criminal is how little we get to see of the non-humans. By this I don’t mean that the aliens have little screen time, because they actually have screen time in abundance, just not meaty screen time. In many ways this film is guilty of the same sin that the film’s fictional society is guilty of, it makes no attempt to get to know and understand the aliens. For the most part these aliens are merely background scenery used to illustrate the titular slum; Blombkamp seems a lot more interested in the ant farm that is District 9 than in the ants that live in it. There’s only one alien in the whole film we know by name and even he is given little personality. Rarely do we ever see an extended conversation involving any of these aliens; I would have liked to know what makes them tick, if they do anything other than buy meat from vendors, what their culture is like, and if they have a leader. And are there any humans trying to advocate for the aliens? What does the rest of the world think of this concentration camp? All of these are questions the movie seems to be interested in, but it never thoughtfully explores them at all. In many ways I wish there had been a way to explore this world outside the limited confines of a thriller storyline. Eventually the film turns into a full on action movie, a very unique and well done action movie, but an action movie none the less. There’s nothing inherently wrong with action films, but in many ways this just seemed a little too easy, are there not ways to deal with issues in science fiction films other than violence?
District 9 probably does vindicate Peter Jackson’s faith in Neill Blomkamp, but only to a degree. With this project Blomkamp has created an interesting universe; I just wish he had found something more interesting to do in it than a Hitchcockian wrong man thriller mixed with touches of Cronenbergian body horror (Merwe’s DNA predicament is straight out of the 1986 version of The Fly). As an allegory this is interesting if not fully fleshed out, as an action film it entertains, but as a drama it leaves something to be desired. The studios were perhaps right to make Blomkamp grow a little bit before he worked on something as big as a Halo movie. Then again if it was going to be anything like the game that movie probably would have focused even more on action than this, but at least it wouldn’t have promised anything else.
*** out of Four
Funny People(8/12/2009)
I think at this point Judd Apatow is a guy who really doesn’t need an introduction. I’m a big fan of the movies he’s directed (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and even the first string efforts he’s merely produced (Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express). As one of the biggest Apatow apologists around it was a little painful to admit that the trailer to his newest film, Funny People, didn’t seem funny to me at all. I’ve never been one to dismiss a movie over a trailer, but if the jokes in that trailer were the best the movie had to offer the movie seemed to have all the makings for two and a half hours of painful viewing. I was particularly afraid to see the movie simply because I didn’t want to bear witness to the fall of God’s gift to comedy, Judd Apatow. Eventually though, when facing a very long boring day, I decided that I needed to see a movie to fill my time and I was a lot more willing to roll the dice on a not so well received Apatow project than on some crap like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. So, reluctantly, I decided to give this a chance.
The movie primarily involves George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a famous comedic actor who’s just been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He’s been told that, eventually, this disease will probably kill him; a revelation that results in a lot of soul searching. He eventually decides to leave the bad, sell-out movies he’s been making in order to return to his stand-up roots. In doing so he encounters a young aspiring comedian named Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) and decides to hire him as an assistant/joke writer. Because Ira is currently living in a hovel with two other young comics (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwarzman), he’s eager to take the job. A reluctant friendship forms between George and Ira, which proves to be beneficial for both of them. But increasingly, George starts thinking about his ex-girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann), who’s now married to a successful salesman named Clarke (Eric Bana).
I think the key to enjoying Funny People is to go in with the right expectations, and in this department I benefited from waiting a week and a half to see it. The movie is not without chuckle inducing moments and clever lines, but if you go into this movie expecting it to be a laugh riot like The 40 Year Old Virgin or Superbad, you will leave very disappointed. Still, part of the appeal of Apatow’s films has been that they tend to be genuinely compelling for reasons beyond their laugh-per-minute quotient, and this film is not an exception. The movie I’d most readily compare it to is Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy, a movie that wasn’t nearly as funny as anything else Smith did but which nonetheless had an interesting story and compelling characters.
The film’s story is likely a very personal one for both Judd Apatow and even more so for star Adam Sandler. We see a lot of George Simmons’ movie work like “Re-Do” (which features Simmons’ face imposed onto a baby) and “Mer-Man” (with Simmons as, you guessed it, a Mer-Man). The movie ruthlessly parodies these kind of juvenile comedies that Sandler and similar comedians like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy have whored themselves out to long after they needed the money. In spite of all the money these movies make for Sandler’s character, with the specter of death in his midst they seem like a serious waste of life. I can’t help but wonder if Sandler was reading this screenplay while he was on the set of last year’s Bedtime Stories and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. This isn’t the only thing about the George Simmons’ character which pretty closely resembles that of the real Adam Sandler. It must have taken a lot of courage for Sandler to really examine his real life on screen like this and the autobiographical nature of the role brings a lot of authenticity to his performance. Sandler may not be the greatest actor in the world, but he is indisputably the perfect person for this role.
The other side of this story is that of comedians like Seth Rogen’s character who have not yet had the chance to sell out. I don’t know any stand-up comedians and I’ve never been backstage at a comedy club, but I can tell that the portrayal of that lifestyle here is authentic in the same way I can just feel that The Hurt Locker is an authentic portrayal of the military. The comics can certainly be selfish, competitive, and sometimes greedy, but for the most part they are all well meaning people who ultimately just want to follow their dreams. They make fun of each other, but it’s all in good fun, it’s really pretty refreshing just how positive a lot of these people are and in ways that are never corny. This is one of the few movies in recent memory that seeks to have you laughing with the characters instead of at them.
There’s also a third aspect to the movie, that of a love triangle between Adam Sandler’s character, Leslie Mann’s character, and Eric Bana’s character. Unlike the rich comedian/poor comedian stories which tend to overlap and switch off between each other, this one mostly plays out in one burst all the way through the film’s third act and it almost wears out its welcome. Still, I found a lot of truth in these segments and they were also enjoyable in their own way. Leslie Mann works as a believable object of Sandler’s affection and Eric Bana seems a lot more compelling here than he has been in a bunch of the blockbusters he’s been featured in recently.
Is this the Judd Apatow movie I wanted? Not exactly, but I like a lot of what I got. If only this movie had some more belly laughs I could whole heartedly recommend it, but that just isn’t what this is and recommending a comedy without very many laughs is not an easy thing to do. Still I was never bored by the movie; I felt for the characters and wanted them to be happy by the end, that’s a rare thing that should be relished. The movie deals with the kind of questions that successful comedians like Judd Apatow almost certainly ask themselves, and here he chose to explore those questions rather than making the movie that would be the most broadly comedic and I respect that a lot. I’m sure that Apatow is proud of this movie and that he’ll get back to making hilarious work now that he’s gotten this out of his system. If Apatow had delivered any movie other than the one he delivered he would have, in a way, been making the same mistake that George Simmons made when he chose to star in “Mer-Man” rather than follow his dreams.
*** out of Four
Brüno(7/11/2009)
At times, I can’t help but feel depressed when I look at the box office numbers for soulless cookie-cutter blockbusters like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There was a time when movies like The Godfather, The Exorcist, and The Graduate could become not only sleeper hits but outright cultural phenomenons. Adjusted for inflation all of those movies are within the all time box office top twenty. Now it seems like the only way to gain such cultural prominence is to have Madison Avenue flock people like sheep towards highly calculated products filled with shiny objects. It would be easy to dismiss these audience trends as the result of an ever more stupid society, but that’s perhaps a bit too pessimistic. The more likely explanation is the much talked about separation of pop culture into various niches, thus leaving no one project able to gain a mass audience. Why am I talking about this? Because one of the more refreshing exceptions to this trend was Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 satire Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Say what you will about the movie, but there is no denying that it is perhaps the best tribute to word of mouth, creative marketing, and genuine cultural adventurousness since the 1999 sleeper success The Blair Witch Project. I had a few issues with Borat, but these reservations were overpowered by the satisfaction of seeing something so original and unmarked-tested make $261,572,744.
Borat was a smart film that was completely willing to piss off, marginalize, and alienate its audience; I liked that a lot. Unfortunately, I think it also wasn’t as consistent as I perhaps would have liked it to be. A couple of the sketches in it like the Rodeo and the religious revival were great examples of dead on satire, but there were also some sketches felt like missed opportunities. For example, his interviews with Bob Barr and his trip to a confederate antique store were both rife for biting satire but instead they devolved into cheap physical comedy. Such inconsistency is perhaps to be expected from films like this which rely so heavily on improvised interactions with unknowing participants. Going into Cohen’s new film, Brüno, I hoped that he would have honed his act to perfection and delivered a film that was all killer and no filler.
The Brüno character was first introduced on Cohen’s HBO series “Da Ali G Show.” The character can bluntly be described as a flaming fruit. He embodies every stereotype people can possibly have about homosexuals: he’s sexually promiscuous, he’s effeminate, and he takes the fashion world seriously. He makes Liberace look like J. Edgar Hoover (okay, bad example). It’s a character that would be highly offensive to real life homosexuals if it was meant to be an authentic reflection of their community, but that’s not what he’s trying to do here, rather his goal is to make his victims really uncomfortable. The other major characteristic of the Brüno character is that he is astonishingly stupid and has no conception of reality. He’s someone who’s probably never read a single book unrelated to fashion and celebrity gossip. For example, his only understanding of Adolf Hitler is that he’s Austria’s biggest celebrity; everything else about him is incidental.
While the supposed goal of the “documentary” that the Borat character was making was to learn about America and apply the lessons to his home country, all Brüno is trying to do with his cross country travels is become a celebrity. It’s quickly established that he has no talent as an actor, so he quickly tries his hand at some of the stupider tactics used to gain exposure in the twenty-first century like adopting African babies, making sex tapes, and insincerely taking up a social cause. As you can probably tell, celebrity culture is a big target here. In fact Cohen probably achieves more to expose celebrity obsession than he does to expose the film’s more talked about target of homophobia. Particularly telling is a bit where Cohen is auditioning various parents who wish to involve their babies in a photo shoot. Brüno asks if they are willing to have their children in all sorts of outlandish and sometimes dangerous situations, and they all agree to everything he wants to put the children through, one even agrees to subject their baby to liposuction. One cannot help but wonder what dementia would lead these people to place their children’s fifteen minutes of fame out of the way before they can even walk.
Of course the homophobia angle is their too, but this is where Cohen begins falling into some of the traps he fell into on Borat. Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is the interview he was somehow able to get with Ron Paul (who should seriously fire his publicist). Rather than getting Paul to hang himself with his own words, as he did during the best moments of “Da Ali G Show,” he chooses to never even conduct the interview. Instead he lures him into a waiting room, drops his pants and tries to seduce Paul who proceeds to do what any reasonable person would do: he runs out of the room. Frankly, I think this might be the lamest gag Cohen has ever done in any of his projects. He does nothing to strike at Paul’s political positions (incidentally he’s one of the few Republicans who supports gay rights), he just pulls a sub-Ashton Kutcher prank. His work heretofore has succeeded largely because he focused on exposing what people are willing to say in front of very large cameras with the full knowledge that what they say may be aired in some capacity. As such his resorting to the use of hidden cameras here is particularly disappointing.
Another missed opportunity is an interview he gets with one of those crazy church people who thinks he needs to “reform” gay people. Done right this could have been the centerpiece of the movie, but it really amounts to little more than a framing device in the final cut. Bill Maher was able to get a much better interview out of one of these assholes in his documentary Religulous. Another missed opportunity was his interaction with a Fred Phelps protest which amounted to little more than him running passed them in S&M gear, a prank that resulted in a real interaction would have been preferable.
It should also be noted that this has some really graphic sexual material. The film opens with a gay sex scene that is so over the top that it makes the wrestling scene from Borat look positively puritanical. Hell, it even makes the puppet sex scene from Team America: World Police look subtle. Then there was a scene at a swingers club which featured unsimulated sex. The penetration was concealed by large censor boxes, but there was still it was clear what was going on and the scene ended with a long altercation with a dominatrix. How this material avoided an NC-17 rating I do not know. In fact I’m going to be very angry if the MPAA gives another Ang Lee or Atom Egoyan drama that stigmatizing rating after this. A lot of the sexual material on display seems to mainly be there to shock the prudes in the audience, and I don’t have a problem with that goal. It reminds me a bit of the controversy baiting elements that surrealists like Salvatore Dali and Luis Buñuel would add to their work to shock the bourgeois sensibilities of their audience. It’s oddly refreshing to see a mainstream movie that’s pushing the boundaries of sex instead of violence.
There are definitely highlights to Brüno that are better than anything in Borat: I’m thinking in particular of the baby interviews, an interview with an actual terrorist, a climactic scene in front of a crowd of really scary looking rednecks, and best of all a focus test of an absolutely bizarre television pilot. However, the film does not always reach these heights. In fact there are many more outright bombs here then there were in Borat, which oddly proved to be the more consistent of the two films. Also the plot that connects everything here is pretty much an inferior retread of the plot Borat used. So obviously this completely failed to live up to my dream of a Cohen film that was all killer and no filler. Still there is plenty to admire about Cohen’s work here. I think part of the problem is that the exposure he got from Borat hurt some of his opportunities. I can’t help but think that this would have been the better of the two projects if he had made it first. In spite of the problems I’m still going to recommend this film for the bits that worked. And let’s face it, even though we’ve seen Cohen’s work once before, his shtick is still fresher than 90% of mainstream comedies.
*** out of four
DVD Catch-Up: Notorious(7/8/2009)
Christopher Wallace (AKA The Notorious B.I.G. AKA Biggie Smalls AKA Big Poppa) titled his first album Ready to Die, in his great album track “Everyday Struggle” he rhymed “I don’t wanna live no more/sometimes I feel death knocking at my front door” and his follow-up album was to be titled Life After Death. Notorious, a big budget biopic about the slain rapper, opens with a clip from an interview in which Biggie laments that he doesn’t think he’ll be lucky enough to be around in ten years. Like his sometimes friend, sometimes rival, and fellow rap icon Tupac Shakur he was a man eerily in tune with the life threatening dangers of the street life he became famous rapping about. The ironic twist is that in the final years of his life he was beginning to find some degree of hope, but it was too late. As a “gangsta” his life mirrored Caine Lawson, the gangster at the center of the Allen & Albert Hughes excellent Menace II Society who only realized that he truly did care if he lived or died with his final breaths, a part which ironically would have been played by Tupac Shakur had he not had a falling out with the film’s brother directors. But Biggie’s greater legacy will be as a musician and in this field his story has as much of interest as other more established artists like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, the only difference is that Biggies story was cut short at an age where those two musicians stories were just beginning. This biopic wisely chooses to focus on this later story than the former and it’s a film that understands what it was about this man such a magnetic figure in his domain.
The film opens on that fateful night in 1997 where Biggie is shot dead in the middle of Los Angeles, but it quickly flashes back to his life as a young kid in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn. His mother Voletta (Angela Bassett) was a school teacher who did everything in her power to help young Chris (who is played at this age by Biggie’s thirteen year old son Chris “CJ” Wallace, Jr.), in this sense Biggie’s story is perhaps less sympathetic than others who were driven to the streets by worse conditions. Still, one has to realize that Wallace entered the drug game at a very young age and at the height of the crack epidemic. After a period of incarceration, Biggie turns his focus away from drug dealing and toward his talent for rap which he has been developing since he was very young. He meets the famous Sean “Puffy” Combs (Derek Luke), who’s an up and coming talent scout at this point, and is promised a record deal. The incarceration of his best friend drives him to put everything he’s got into his music career. Along the way he meets (and beds) a then unknown Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton) and his future wife Faith Evens (Antonique Smith), and then later meets the fellow rapper he will forever be linked with, Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie).
George Tillman, Jr. shoots the film with a music video gloss that’s heavy on camera trickery and fancy editing. This works great when Biggie is “In mansion and Benz’s, Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous,” but it is a lot more problematic when he’s “livin everyday like a hustle, another drug to juggle.” These scenes scream out for a more down to earth and gritty approach and all of Tillman’s gloss really feels wrong on the streets of Brooklyn, consequently the first half hour or so of this movie really suffers. Tillman seems to understand this problem and wisely cuts this portion short, quickly moving on to his rise to fame in which the style he’s chosen tends to thrive.
I wouldn’t call myself a Biggie expert going into this film, but I am a fan and I feel like I’ve collected a pretty good knowledge of his life over the years. As far as I can tell, this movie is exceptionally accurate to the real facts of the man’s life. I didn’t see any obvious inaccuracies and most if not all of the famous moments of his life are here. I am however a bit suspicious about the depiction of Biggie’s mother and of Puff Daddy, both of whom are credited as producers here. Puff Daddy in particular seems to be painted both as blameless in the East Coast/West Coast feud which breaks out in the second act and as some sort of uplifting coach to Biggie. To his credit, Puffy has allowed the film to point out some of the sillier aspects of his public personality, but the mentorship hat he’s wearing here seems a bit too good to be true. Biggie’s mother Voletta also seems a bit too good to be true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Voletta was and is a great woman who did everything she could in raising this troubled youth, but at times the film makes her out to be downright saintly, there are very few people in the world who are this devoid of fault or weakness.
As one could probably guess, finding a talented, four hundred pound, twenty-five year old, African American actor with rapping abilities probably wasn’t easy. Realizing that there weren’t any veteran actors who resembled the film’s subject, the producers went on a very public search for the right man to fill Biggie’s size fourteen shoes. The man they found was Jamal Woolard, a real Brooklyn rapper who is perhaps most famous up to this point for being one of many rappers who have been shot outside the New York radio station Hot 97. Woolard really does look and sound a lot like the real Biggie, his impersonation skills truly are impressive, but I wouldn’t really call this a spectacular performance. I think this is a performance that the Academy should take a close look at, not because I think it’s really worthy of their award, but because it might make them realize that doing these sort of celebrity impersonations really isn’t as hard as it looks. Don’t take that to mean that I think Woolard didn’t work hard on his performance here; in fact I’m sure he put everything he had into his work here and in turn puts in a very good performance. But this isn’t the work of a master thespian and outside of his impression I wouldn’t call his scene to scene work particularly special. Still, he mostly does what he needs to do and he even does all of his own rapping. Speaking of the rapping, the song selection is pretty good here.
Many called the film “formulaic” during the initial round of reviews, but I’m not sure that’s really fair. Its only formulaic if telling someone’s life story from beginning to end is a formula, would you criticized a written biography for taking such a trajectory? I wouldn’t, because that’s simply the clearest way to tell someone’s life story. There’s certainly a place for adventurous biopics like I’m Not There, but Biggie Smalls story isn’t as well known as Bob Dylan’s and such trickery would probably do him a disservice. I know I’d certainly prefer a “conventional” to a movie like La Vie En Rose, which screws with chronology for no reason other than to pretend it’s less conventional than it is.
So, in final analysis, this is a pretty good example of a music biopic. It isn’t great and it has flaws but it’s a good representation of the iconic rapper. It probably has little appeal to those who have no interest in the subject, but those looking for a Biggie Smalls biopic will be well served.
*** out of Four
Moon(7/6/2009)
The very first science fiction movie was Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon. A fourteen minute epic in which a group of explorers go to the moon, walk onto the surface (no space suit needed), find a group of moon men, beat them off with umbrellas, then return home. The film is probably best known for a moment in which their ship crashes into the man on the moon’s eyeball, he doesn’t look pleased. After that the moon was the number one destination for fictional space travel, at least until we went there for real and realized it was kind of a boring place. In fact it quickly dawned on us that none of the planets in this solar system are really destinations for high adventure and since then we’ve been setting our science fiction stories in distant galaxies. The problem with this is that after a good fifty-some years of space travel it’s become increasingly clear how far away we are from being able to get to Mars, much less a new solar system. In fact the closest planet that might have life on it is 150 trillion miles away. That’s not a problem if you’re making a Space Opera like Star Wars or Star Trek, but it’s not all right if you’re making what you’d call “hard science fiction,” stories that predict very realistic and plausible future technology. Those kind of serious Science fiction movies have been looking back toward our home solar systems. Danny Boyle’s 2007 hard science fiction film Sunshine had the sun as its destination, while this latest entry of the genre is bringing the genre full circle by returning to our closest celestial neighbor, the moon.
Rather than having a twist ending, this film has a major twist about a third of the way into it. It would be ludicrously hard to talk about this film without giving away this twist, so this review is going to be a bit more spoilerish than most. I won’t give away any of the later developments, but be warned that I will be giving away some key surprises from the first act or two.
The film is set an indeterminate number of years into the future at a point where humanity has finally found a clean source of energy by mining a substance called Helium-3 from the surface of the Moon. A base has been established on the moon but travel there is still a slow and unwieldy process, and as such there is only one person manning the operation, a man named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). His main job is to drive to the automated harvesters mining the surface, remove the full capsules of Helium-3, and then launch them off to Earth. His only companion is a robot/computer system called Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). One day Sam sees a strange vision while driving the lunar rover and crashes it right into the automated harvester. He wakes up the next day in the ships infirmary. Gerty wants him to stay in bed, but Sam convinces the computer to let him leave. He immediately drives out to the site of the crash, and looks into the rover where he finds his own body still in there and still alive. He runs the body back to the base and resuscitates it. Now he must discover why there’s someone else who looks just like him on the base and then must find out what the company plans to do about it.
A lot of this movie rests on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell as this is essentially a one man show; or rather a two man show in which Rockwell plays both parts. Rockwell is a great actor who, for whatever reason, has never really been able to break the A-list. He has everything a mainstream actor needs but has never become a household name, possibly because he’s attracted to more challenging material than some actors. His double role here is reminiscent of Nicholas Cage’s double role in Adaptation, he must play two people who look alike but who have fairly different personalities. The original Sam is the slightly more Rockwellish of the two, he’s a laid back person albeit one who’s gone through three long years of moon work and is rather tired from it. The second of the two is a bit more stern and aggressive, he hasn’t been beaten down by his situation and he’s less easy-going. There are physical differences from which you can tell the two apart, the first has a bandage on his hand and a black eye, but for the most part it is Rockwell’s acting which differentiates the two. Quite impressive. My one problem with the characterization (and I mainly blame the script for this) is the fairly unperturbed way Sam reacts to his “twin” at first. There is a portion shortly after the twist where the characters are way too calm about the fact that their staring at someone who looks just like them. If I was in that situation there would be a lot more swearing and more demands to know exactly what the hell is going on.
The robot here is a cross between HAL 9000 and R2-D2. I’m not exactly sure whether it is an independent robot or if the floating console is a manifestation of the base’s main computer. He floats around, has what looks like a camera lens for an eye and there’s a screen on him which displays various smilies in order to convey emotions. One usually expects these kind of robots to be nothing but trouble, especially when he’s been programmed by a seemingly conspiratorial corporation. This robot plays with that convention, his allegiance is never entirely clear, at least not until very late in the movie. That was an interesting take, but I would have liked a better explanation as to why the robot took the side he did. As it is he just takes a side because he does, I expected that to be resolved better than it was.
Visually the film is perfectly competent but never exceedingly great. The film was made relatively cheaply for a science fiction film of this sort, and I’m sure a lot of ingenuity went into the production. The production leans toward physical effects more than CGI, a decision I certainly approve of, though it was a bit annoying that a few shots of the moon’s surface seemed to be recycled at times. The most impressive element of the production was the space base’s highly detailed interiors, which seemed to share elements from some of the better spaceships of the genre like the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s Alien or the Icarus II from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
I think the concept at the center of this is Chaos Theory. Admittedly, everything I know about this theory comes from the book and movie Jurassic Park, but bear with me. The idea behind Chaos Theory is that no system is perfect because the initial conditions will not remain the same continually. One example given in Michael Creighton’s novel is that of a billiard table on which a ball rolls with enough force to continue rolling forever. Deterministic Theory predicts that the ball would continue along the same pattern forever, while Chaos theory suggest that the felt of the table would eventually deteriorate, imperfections would form on the ball and eventually the conditions would change enough to throw the ball off course. Another film which I think shows chaos theory in action is Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, in which a television network has found the perfect way to keep an unsuspecting man living in their elaborate town-sized city for thirty some years, but bit by bit the illusion was destroyed and an evolving suspicion in the man’s mind about the solution eventually trumps the best laid plans of the producers. There is a similar situation in Moon, though I won’t spell it out for fear of giving away more than I already have, but like The Truman Show this is about a seemingly fool-proof house of cards that finally collapses partly because of an unforeseen accident but mostly because of the unanticipated factor of human curiosity and questioning.
Now, this theoretical interpretation is fine on an intellectual level, but it never really strokes any of the emotions that I expect great cinema to stroke. This film is neither as technically or intellectually ambitious as something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, both films with a certain sense of awe that Moon lacks. Aside from my coldly intellectual chaos theory interpretation, I’m not sure this really amounts to much more than an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. Of course, an extended episode of The Twilight Zone is certainly worth watching, but I really wish this had amounted to more. Some of the earlier portions of this movie really seemed to be leading to something grander than the eventual explanation; I looked forward to a really profound explanation for Sam’s visions and for Gerty’s strange behavior. But the solution turned out to be the most mundane of all possible explanations. That was disappointing. Ultimately I believe this is a movie that draws inspiration from all the right sources but which does nothing to push its genre forward in any meaningful way. Still it’s a very well crafted and intriguing 97 minutes of cinema that never seems to drop the ball in a major way; I just wish they tried to run with the ball when they had it instead of standing still with it.
*** out of Four
DVD Catch-Up: The International(6/17/2009)
During the late seventies a paranoid streak began to emerge in Hollywood thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, this trend has widely been linked to post-Watergate cynicism that was going on throughout the country. Nixon’s scandal had exposed the ability of the government and agencies like the CIA to secretly do all sorts of sinister things behind Kafka-esque webs of complication, secrecy, and intrigue. This trend seems to have re-emerged as of late in films like Syriana and Michael Clayton, partly because of the forceful nature of the Bush administration, but the main reason has been the behavior of corporations who now more than ever seem hell-bent not only on fair profits but outright world domination. There was plenty of evidence of just how powerful corporate institutions had gotten when The International began filming in the September of 2007; but the parallels of the world today seemed all the more prescient to the world of today by the time it reached theaters in the February of 2009, one month after names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG began to be fixtures in the nations headlines.
The antagonist at the center of the film is the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit, investigating them are an INTERPOL agent named Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney named Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts). The bank is believed to be the financial institution of choice for organized crime, but it quickly seems that the extent of this bank’s corruption extends far beyond the mafia and into third world coups, first world assassinations, and the trade of advanced weapons to unsavory elements. Their investigation brings them to Berlin, Milan, New York, and even Turkey; all the while they encounter a conspiracy of massive proportions.
One of the biggest complaints about Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (another film that can claim to be part of the paranoid thriller’s resurgence) was that the story was labyrinthine to the point of incoherence. Gaghan’s answer to the criticism is that the film is supposed to be borderline impenetrable in order to reflect just how complex the issues at the center are in the real world, that no one person can comprehend “the system” in its entirety. There seems to be a similar notion at work here; the story is very hard to follow what with the alphabet soup of agencies and financial transactions that are in on the film’s central conspiracy, but this is deliberate. About two thirds of the way into the film a character asserts that the “difference between fact and fiction [is that] fiction needs to make sense.” I’m very fond of this line, it certainly conveys the frustration of trying to solve major problems caused in elaborate ways by astonishingly powerful forces, and this sentiment almost makes me want to forgive the script for all its convolutions.
The problem is that this doesn’t have anywhere near the authenticity of something like Syriana, I think it has the right spirit but the deal breaker is that the forces here are significantly more trigger-happy than they would be in the real world. There are two action sequences here that are real double edged swords, on one hand they seem out of place and unrealistic, but on the other hand they are very skillfully made and enjoyable as they occur. The first is an assassination scene which adds new life to the cliché of the sniper on the roof, the other is a very tense and well choreographed shootout in the famed Guggenheim Museum. Director Tom Tykwer clearly still has the eye for interesting stylistic decisions he had when he made Run Lola Run, but has matured from that effort and abandoned the kinetic overdrive that I think ultimately sunk that former effort. In fact these scenes are refreshingly slow and careful, they don’t overload the sound mix and they have effective pauses for tension. So the catch-22 of the film is that these two scenes are awesome and make the film worth watching on their own, but they are ultimately detrimental to the rest of the movie.
Ultimately, this is a movie that delivers pretty much exactly what I expected from it. It’s a well crafted, glossy thriller that isn’t wildly stupid even if it isn’t particularly insightful either. I didn’t think Clive Owen was particularly well cast as he lacks some of the practical rage the part needs, but he isn’t terrible either and the rest of the cast is pretty good. The film shoots in a number of interesting locales and in a bunch of architecturally interesting locations. I don’t think I would have recommended anyone see it for full price at a theater, but it’s pretty much perfect DVD rental material, just keep in mind that you’re renting an action flick and not a legitimately political thriller.
*** out of Four
Drag Me to Hell(5/31/2009)
This has been a pretty lame May for me movie-wise, I dug Star Trek but everything else that came out didn’t seem worth my time. X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked like a blatant attempt to milk dry an already wounded series, Angels and Demons looked as stupid as the other Dan Brown properties, and Terminator: Salvation had a hack director whose intentions were only confirmed by the blatant sell-out of its PG-13 rating. This trend of making movies PG-13 for no reason other than to make a little extra money is quickly becoming a major pet peeve of mine, I don’t demand extra sex, violence, and cursing but it’s indicative of a larger problem; one of trying to appeal to overly wide audiences and consequently making mild soulless movies made in marketing committees. It’s beginning to seem like a PG-13 rating is like a stamp that has less to do with content and more to do with a lame attitude. Shocking as that Terminator rating was, I was even more surprised when I learned that Sam Raimi’s new horror title, Drag Me to Hell, would also have this dreaded rating. This shocked me first because this was supposed to be Raimi’s return to the hardcore and second because the film’s outlandish title seemed to indicate that this would be something that would revel in its content and wear a harder rating like a badge of honor. I almost didn’t bother going to this, but unlike Terminator: Salvation, this still had a stellar director and solid reviews so I bit the bullet and went ahead to the movie.
The film is about Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a bank branch in Southern California. She’s good at her job, but her boss (David Paymer) feels that she’s been a bit too generous with people and is thinking about giving a big promotion to the suck-up rookie officer Stu (Reggie Lee). Under pressure from the money chasing parents of her caring boyfriend (Justin Long), Christine sees an opportunity to prove she can make “tough decisions” when an old gypsy woman named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) comes into the bank asking for a not so reasonable extension on her sub-prime loan. Christine denies the loan to the approval of her boss, but the gypsy feels she’s been shamed and makes a scene. Later that day, the gypsy attacks Christine and places a curse on her… with spooky results.
You did read that right, the villain of this is a gypsy curse… gypsy. Do they even have gypsies in this country? It doesn’t matter; this movie is obviously taking a campy approach to the genre. The film reminded me a lot of the George Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow, which was based on old EC comics. This is a heightened world with heightened morality; Christine is punished for her immorality toward the gypsy woman in a very ironic way. That the film can get very predictable at times, especially regarding the very last twist, sort of goes with the territory. What Raimi does not do is go as far into the realm of tribute as something like Grindhouse, this doesn’t feel like it should be set in the fifties and the production values are just as good as the budget allows it to be. I do question the sometimes excessive use of CGI and not very good CGI either.
So how is Mr. Raimi going to scare anyone without gallons of plasma? Well he’s going to makes stuff jump out at you unexpectedly… a lot. You know those websites that people trick you into going to that make you focus on some sort of puzzle and concentrate before some sort of creepy picture suddenly pops out and a loud noise plays and sort of give you a heart attack? The whole first act of this movie is sort of a chain of those sorts of scares, creepy things jump out at the character often accompanied by very loud music, these blatantly manipulative tricks have often been called the horror equivalent of a pie in the face, they’re effective but cheap. Granted, Raimi does these more effectively than most filmmakers out there, but I expect a little more from him and for a decent portion of the movie I was afraid that was all I was going to get.
Fortunately the film improves dramatically in the film’s third act where its inner Evil Dead kicks in and the curse begins to manifest itself in more tangible ways and Christine’s predicament starts to take precedent over the jump-scares which incidentally are becoming less effective around this point. Many have said the movie is just as good without the blood, but I’m not as willing to give him a pass as some have been. There is one scene in particular (it involves an anvil) which almost certainly would have benefited from legitimate splatter elements. I’m sure this release is a big opportunity for Raimi’s horror shingle Ghosthouse Pictures, and he clearly wants to get as much money out of it as possible, but it’s clear he’s sacrificed the opportunity to make as much money as possible. But is this really a wise decision even on a financial level? I’d think the audience for something called “Drag Me to Hell” would want over the top violence. Sometimes marketers are too busy chasing the 13-17 market that they forget that gore sells (just ask the producers of the Saw films) and you are sacrificing an audience when you do things like that. Raimi tries to make up for this with material that is generically gross in a “Fear Factor” way without actual violence, but this mostly just comes across as crass.
A lot of people have been receiving Alison Lohman’s performance pretty negatively. I’ve liked Alison Lohman’s work ever since her excellent performance in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men. Frankly, I think some people might be a bit too suspicious of attractive blonde women in horror films; maybe they just confused her with Lindsay Lohan whom Alison bears no relation. I think Lohman portrays her character just fine; this is a broad performance in a genre film, it isn’t going to win Oscars or anything but it works for the film. If anyone is annoying here it is almost certainly Justin Long. I’ve had a firm dislike for Mr. Long for quite a while and this confirms all my suspicions. Someone of this age being a University Professor is about as unlikely as Katie Holmes playing an ADA in Batman Begins (which isn’t to say such an achievement is impossible in either case). Long just sort of plays himself, as he usually does. More interesting is the work of Lorna Raver as the Gypsy woman, she totally commits to this crazy role and brings a lot to the project.
There’s a lot wrong with this movie… a Lot. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a very good time with it. This in an unashamed B-movie in the classic sense of the word, and it is a whole lot of fun. There are a lot of bad movies that claim to have a fun factor which overcomes whatever flaws they have; the problem is that they aren’t really fun they just think they are because they could cram a lot of special effects and explosions into every frame. Many reviews will compare this film to a rollercoaster, and rightfully so. There’s a legitimate energy that makes you forget about the problems while you’re watching it, it’s one of the few movies that really earns the right to ask you to leave your brain at the door. I saw it as a Sunday matinee and that’s probably the best place to experience it. This probably needs a big screen and a great sound system to make the jump-scares really work, though I’m not sure I’d be happy to pay full price for it, it is a B-movie after all.
*** Out of Four
Star Trek(5/7/2009)
Star Trek was once just a T.V. show, and not a particularly well produced show either, but that show laid the groundwork for a universe that would support five spinoffs, ten feature length movies, countless novels, and unlimited merchandising. This is a series that elicits some of the most passionate fandom in all of pop culture, but that was also its undoing. I for one love Star Trek; I own all the movies and I’ve seen every single episode of all five live action T.V. series. In spite of this, I’d never call myself a full fledged trekkie, because that word conjures up disturbing images of grown men living in their mother’s basement who dress up as Vulcans to go to conventions and spend a fortune on toys. No one wants to associate themselves with those Klingon-speaking freaks, and I think that’s a big part of why the last couple movies did poor at the box office, and why the last series got cancelled pre-maturely in spite of solid third and fourth seasons.
I may be in the minority I thought the last feature film in the franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis, wasn’t half bad. It didn’t have a wildly creative story, but the battles were pretty cool and at its center was a nifty exploration of the debate between nature and nurture. I would have loved to see the series go on with The Next Generation cast; after all, the original cast’s film series frequently recovered from lackluster installments, and the abandonment of the series left fans without the sense of closure they deserved. As such, I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard J.J. Abrams was going to “reboot” the series. As was the case with Casino Royale, I was afraid this was an extreme solution to problems that had simpler solutions. What’s more, J.J. Abrams has always been hit or miss for me. While I dig his show “Lost” and I thought Cloverfield was a pretty cool project, but I generally disliked his debut film Mission: Impossible 3. Flawed as the previous Mission: Impossible films had been, they at least took themselves seriously; Abram’s third entry to the series on the other hand was a very smug film that used quirkiness as crutch. That’s a very cheap tactic which I have a great distaste for, and it’s a style that Abrams very easily could have fallen into while making a Star Trek reboot.
If Abrams was just going to turn the series into a great big joke I was going to be pissed. Add to that the young MTV-ready cast and the general ambiguity as to whether this would fit into the continuity of the series and I was more than prepared for this to be a disaster. Thankfully, most of my fears were only half founded. The film does have a handful of problems, and I’ll get into them momentarily, but in general this is a pretty decent film and Abrams has clearly matured some since his debut. Word of warning, while I will generally be a spoiler-free review, there are some surprises fairly early in the film that I will be discussing, so you may not want to read further if you want a completely pure viewing experience.
The film opens with an attack on a Federation Starship by a very larger and mysterious Romulan vessel. The Federation ship is destroyed, but a few people escape including a pregnant woman whose husband is killed on the ship, she soon gives birth to a son and right before her husband is killed he persuades her to name the boy James T. Kirk. Twenty-some years later, James Kirk (Chris Pine) is a reckless young man roaming Iowa making trouble. Fate will eventually lead him to meet a Starfleet officer named Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who convinces Kirk to join Starfleet and put his considerable skills to work. Kirk is an ace cadet but his skills will be put to the test when there is a crisis near the planet Vulcan which sounds an awful lot like the disturbance that occurred in the attack at the beginning of the film.
Obviously this entry of the series is a prequel of sorts going into the younger years of the cast of the Original Series. Abrams has cast young actors in all the roles, so I suppose an analysis of the cast is the best place to start. I was pretty surprised when I heard that Chris Pine had been cast as Kirk, mainly because I’d never heard of the guy or seen any of his movies. I went in not knowing what to expect from the guy, but I was pretty impressed with his work. The original Kirk was basically an All-American Flash Gordon-type space hero, and Pine is able to embody this without taking it too far. Also he… never… does that… stuttery… William Shater… impersonation that I… was afraid he’d… do. Pine is trying to embody Captain James Tiberius Kirk, not that hammy actor who’s turned his career into a joke.
Mr. Spock is portrayed by Zachary Quinto, who was a little more familiar to me from his work on television’s “Heroes.” While I hated that show pretty much from the beginning, but Quinto and his character Sylar is one of the few elements of the show I liked. In the previous shows they would occasionally mention that Spock was half human, but that element was rarely explored in depth. This younger Spock is clearly trying a lot harder to come to terms with his partially human ancestry, and that’s an interesting take on the character.
The rest of the cast is given less screen time. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is given a sexy makeover, Saldana is certainly easy on the eyes and I hope her character is given more to do in the sequels. McCoy is his usual caffeinated self, Carl Urban does a pretty decent DeForest Kelley impression and provides some of the film’s more appropriate comic relief. Sulu (John Cho) is given a pretty cool action scene (he’s an accomplished fencer, a callback to an original series episode called “The Naked Time”), but is otherwise not given much to do. Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, is the only cast member I was particularly familiar with going in. He doesn’t look anything like James Doohan, but he clearly understands the rhythm of what makes the character work, and his Scottish accent is significantly better. The one performance I didn’t much care for at all was that of Anton Yelchin, who plays Chekov and maintains and magnifies the character’s horrible Russian accent, which is odd considering that Yelchin was born in Saint Petersburg (but raised in the United States). There are extensive (lame) jokes about the character’s ridiculous accent, so I can only assume that this was Abrams’ doing rather than Yelchin’s. If they could give Scotty a better accent why not Chekov?
Wait a minute… What’s Chekov even doing here? Wasn’t Chekov first introduced in the series second season? Well, Abrams has found a way to get around these kinds of continuity issues; this is a little bit spoiler-ish so you may want to skip to the next paragraph. The mysterious ship from the first attack is a Romulan mining ship that has transported itself back in time from the Next Generation era. The idea is that the actions of this ship have cause a butterfly effect that has altered history. So Trek continuity before March 22, 2233 remains in place, but events after it are more or less fair game. I don’t know if I like this, Abrams has basically wiped out forty three years of material, none of it ever happened. Does this mean Kirk’s dogfight with Khan was all for nothing? Does it mean Jean-Luc Picard never gets born? Does it mean Captain Sisko’s fight against the Dominion was a big waste of time? In fact, it means that the only Trek series that hasn’t been wiped to oblivion was “Enterprise,” and I’m sure that alone will piss off a lot of people. That’s an unsettling development, and unusual considering that the one part of Trek continuity that really needed shaking up was the back story which claims that World War Three occurred in the early 90s. On the other hand I like that Abrams found a way to reboot the series within its continuity rather than inexplicably rebooting it the way they did with James Bond.
In order to gain back some Trekkie-cred, Abrams has filled the movie with references and interesting aspects of pre-reboot continuity. For instance, we see Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru, a Starfleet exam referenced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Also interesting is the inclusion of Captain Pike, the leader of the Enterprise from an unaired pilot called “The Cage” who was established as the previous pilot of the Enterprise when footage from “The Cage” was used in a two-part episode called “The Menagerie.” The film also includes various trademark lines from the series like “I’m a doctor, not a physicist” and “I’m giving it all she’s got, Captain.” In fact there are probably a lot of smaller references I didn’t pick up on in one viewing, and many fans will probably be so busy combing through them that they’ll forget that J.J. Abrams has wiped everything that ever happened on their favorite T.V. show from the history books.
However, most people aren’t going to give a damn about these obscure references. They just want to know one thing: “is this a fun movie?” The answer is certainly “yes”. As an action movie this is up to the standards of recent summer blockbusters in a way that most other Trek movies haven’t. There are at least two good ship to ship battles, one shootout, and a particularly exceptional set-piece involving space suits, a giant drill, and a samurai sword. Action has always been part of the franchise, but rarely to this level, and occasionally the technology that’s been established isn’t ideal for high octane thrills. The Enterprise itself is a large and not overly nimble vessel, it was clearly meant to be more like a giant tall ship than a slick motorboat. This doesn’t stop J.J. Abrams from constructing elaborate effects sequences that are occasionally too big for their own good. For instance, the set in the final shootout is almost hypnotically huge and complicated; the action taking place there almost gets drowned out by the massive effects in the background.
There was however one action sequence that was blatantly misguided, and that was a completely gratuitous car chase in the beginning of the film. The scene involved Kirk as a thirteen year old boy stealing a classic car and recklessly driving it off a cliff. I question this scene firstly because it’s pointless, everything it says about the character is established just as well in a later bar fight scene, it does nothing to advance the plot, it comes very soon after another better action scene that is more than enough to kick off the movie and its style is generally out of place in a Space Opera. This chase to the tune of The Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” (a song choice I would more than aprove of in a better chase scene), feels more like something out of The Fast and The Furious than Star Trek.
That misguided chase scene isn’t the only mistake J.J. Abrams makes in order to reach a larger audience. I think there are generally a few too many attempts at humor going on in the film. There are plenty of jokes that are brief, unobtrusive, and funny, and I’m more than happy to see them in the film. Then there are other jokes that are long, misguided and out of place. I’ve already mentioned that they go too far with Chekov’s thick accent, and that’s more than apparent in a lengthy portion of the film in which he bungles a monologue to a lame comedic effect. There’s also a dumb joke about enlarged hands and a goofy effects sequence about Scotty getting stuck in a series of tubes. Other jokes aren’t so bad in and of themselves, so much as in their quantity. I have no problem with Abrams using occasional humor to lighten up the mood, but at time there are a few too many light moments in a row for comfort. That said, the humor here isn’t anywhere near as smug or obtrusive as it was in Mission: Impossible 3, so Abrams is clearly learning a little restraint.
I was more than willing to give this a pass for a lot of continuity errors, but there are a few larger qualms I have with its adherence to the larger themes of the show. In particular, I object to the way that McCoy has been relegated to the role of comic relief. I’ve always viewed the trinity of Spock (logic), McCoy (Emotion), and Kirk (a mix of the two) to be essential to the dynamic of the Original cast. Here they’ve made Kirk more impulsive and turned focused on a duality between him and Spock. I hope they make McCoy, and the rest of the cast for that matter, more important in the next film.
The more insidious problem here is the focus on action over ideas. J.J. Abrams has said that he wanted to explore the optimism at the center of Gene Rodenberry’s vision, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the film. Previous Trek films have all managed to explore philosophical issues in the midst of adventure, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was an examination of death, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was an elaborate political allegory, even lackluster installments like Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Insurrection had more thematic ambition than this. There’s none of that here, this is an action movie, a very fun and well crafted action movie that establishes interesting characters, but an action movie nonetheless. That’s why I cannot rank this new film among the best this series has offered, but that’s not to say I didn’t have fun along the way. This is a good movie, but on the spectrum of summer entertainment it’s much more in line with Iron Man than The Dark Knight, though there are of course much worse things to be in line with than that.
*** out of four
