Paranormal Activity(10/23/2009)
In this brave new world of digital cameras and youtube we’ve been hearing people talk at length about the notion of amateurs making films in their backyards completely removed from “the system.” I’ve never really been a believer in the concept. Sure there have been a handful of very good micro-budget movies in the past few years but the chances of them really breaking out into the public at large seems to be about the same as they were before all this new technology when people like Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Richard Linklater put out similarly budgeted movies to similar success. But, if there’s ever been a clear example of the new system working it’s got to be the new thriller Paranormal Activity, which was made in seven days on a budget of fifteen thousand dollars by someone with no formal film training.
The film takes place entirely in the house of Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston), a young couple that is “engaged to be engaged.” Katie has been hearing strange noises in the night and feels it is part of a pattern of odd occurrences she’s been sensing occasionally since she was a young girl. Intrigued, Michah buys a professional grade camera he hopes will help them to better document what’s been going on, especially while the two of them are asleep. As their project goes on they do indeed start to pick up some strange occurrences on the tape like a door moving on its own and a few odd noises. They are not sure how to react to what’s been going on but as the nights go by the events the camera picks up start to become more and more threatening.
This is essentially a haunted house movie, but in a way it isn’t. It’s established early on (by a psychic) that the force behind this disturbance is not a ghost, but a demon. Further it is established that this demon is not linked to the house the couple is living in, rather it has been targeting Katie since long before she found her way to this luxurious San Diego residence. This is a very smart bit of exposition because it eliminates the thing that almost always sinks haunted house movies: the notion that the characters could solve all their problems by simply moving. The choice of a demon rather than a ghost is also smart, something about the idea of a demon (which is distinguished as being a non human force as opposed to a deceased human spirit) just conjures up creepier images in the mind.
This plot is actually remarkably similar to a horror movie of a much different kind from earlier this year, Drag Me to Hell. Both films are about women who find themselves targeted by demons and must seek assistance from various paranormal “experts.” The difference of course is that Drag Me to Hell revels in its silliness; it’s a fun, loud, movie and all of its thrills were right in your face. There’s nothing wrong with any of that and I don’t make this comparison to disparage Sam Raimi’s film, but Paranormal Activity takes almost the exact opposite approach with a similar concept. The approach in Oren Peli’s film is decidedly minimalist in comparison. Here the titular activity comes slowly into the film, the demon does things that are clearly beyond logical explanation but which seem oddly more disturbing because they are done in a way that is still oddly close to reality. Of course this approach would have quickly become tedious if Peli had remained too subtle for too long, thankfully he knows just when to start making the demon more daring in his appearances. This is not like the Blair Witch Project where they wait until pretty much the last shot to actually have something happen.
Which I suppose brings us to the fact that this is yet another “found footage” movie. Ever since the aforementioned phenomenon of a film there have been a lot of these movies, and after each one gets made everyone feels like they’ve just seen the last film that will get away with the format before it becomes lame, and yet more and more come out to prove there’s still life in the technique. Between [REC], Cloverfield, and this film the ante just seems to keep going up. Perhaps the main appeal of filming a movie like this is that it requires less of a tech budget and less formal training to accomplish, after all, when trying to emulate an amateur a certain lack of professionalism actually helps rather than hurts your film and even the more heavily produced examples of the genre like Cloverfield are cheaper than their competitors. To a mainstream audience crappy film stock is a pretty big distraction unless there’s a narrative reason why what they’re looking at is a lot uglier than the latest Platinum Dunes splatterfest. But let’s not take that to mean that anyone could have made a movie like Paranormal Activities, because trust me, everyone is trying and there’s a reason why Oren Peli’s movie is the one in more than a thousand theaters right now and everyone else’s isn’t.
Of course, like many types of genre film, these found footage films need to establish their rules early on. For example, both Cloverfield and [REC] took the approach of having the movies (sort of) play out in real time, with cuts only occurring when the camera operator choose to turn his device off. This film and The Blair Witch Project instead choose to suggest that the people who found the footage edited the film together. Perhaps the bigger (and decidedly more meta) decision that must be made is how to present the film. The Blair Witch Project made the mistake of presenting the material as if it were a real documentary telling an authentic story even though it was quite obviously fake. The thing is, absolutely no one really thought that movie was real, they were just having fun playing along with the fiction the filmmakers had created. However, there were plenty of people who thought they were surrounded by morons who really did believe it and the result was a backlash perpetrated by those who thought they were smarter than everybody else. That’s why Paramount pictures has been pretty carefully avoiding any claims that this is anything other than a scary movie and selling the project more on the communal experience of seeing it in crowed theater full of screaming people. However, once people have entered the theater the movie still operates in a way that will accentuate the illusion of reality. The film actually has no studio logo at the beginning (an almost unprecedented rarity) and even more surprisingly it has no credits, something I didn’t even know was legal in this day and age.
Something that probably gives this a leg up over its underground competition is that it has managed to snare a pair of actors that know what they’re doing. In many ways, trying to act in a mockumentary seems to be as distinct from acting in a scripted film as acting in a scripted film is to acting on stage. The people acting in movies like this have to achieve a special level of naturalism while working with dialogue that is not flashy and they don’t have the luxury of perfect camera angles. Moreover, the actors themselves need to be both anonymous and average looking, while still trying to make the audience empathize with them. Brian De Palma’s film Redacted gives an excellent example of what not to do when acting in a movie like this, and yet there’s probably yet to be an example of such acting that’s so overwhelmingly good as to provide a high point to compare other films by. Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (the characters share their names with the actors) are for the most part just the kind of actors that a film like this needs. Both look just like the kind of people you’d run into on the street, they talk like average Joes, but they also have personalities you can sort of latch onto. Featherston in particular makes for a very pleasant screen presence, she feels like that friend of a friend you have and this kind of familiarity helps breed a lot of empathy for the character.
There are however some problems that do hold this movie back from minimalist perfection. In particular, I was a bit annoyed by the way the characters acted in order to deal with they’re situation. Katie desperately wants to call a demonologist to help with the situation while wants to dissect the situation further, mainly through the use of the camera. Both of these seem like workable plans, but neither of them are mutually exclusive, and yet each of them is openly hostile to the other’s plan. Micah’s refusal to call the demonologist is particularly frustrating, I can understand why he’d be wary of the notion when the haunting seemed less than real, but there’s a certain point where the existence of this phenomenon becomes undeniable and at that point the two would do any and everything that they need to do in order to solve their problem. Even after this point Micah refuses to call the one person who by all accounts can deal with the situation, claiming that he’s going to deal with the problem himself. What? It’s a frickin’ demon, what the hell does this guy expect to do? Punch it? And Katie’s refusal to examine the video evidence is at times just as silly. You’d think that these people would be desperate enough to accept any help they can get and the notion that there’s some sort of conflict of interest between the two approaches doesn’t really make any sense.
Another problematic element emerges when the movie begins to try to explain what’s been going on. Throughout the movie, there are a lot of hints and clues as to a larger explanation of what’s been going on to Katie. Other cases are found, a history is established and photographs are found. None of these are particularly obtrusive except that they’re complete red herrings that don’t really add up to much of anything. The nature of this haunting is never really explained, in fact that give the movie a lot of its creepy feeling. In fact I’m glad they never explain the nature of this beast, but in establishing a mystery without a solution they are sort of setting the audience up for an anticlimax. Don’t get me wrong, the ending itself is quite good and the last shot is a real doozy, but it feels particularly abrupt because they’ve made it seem like we’re owed a few more twists before this finale.
Is Paranormal Activity just a product of clever marketing? No, it’s the real deal. But that’s not to say that it’s some sort of classic of the horror genre. The movie is not a perfect gem, nor was ever likely to be one, there’s a certain risk/reward payoff to filming a movie like this and this has gotten about as much out of the concept as it possibly could. Like The Blair Witch Project before it, this will probably be remembered more as a triumph of marketing than as a triumph of filmmaking, but the people in the marketing department aren’t rainmakers and this triumph of marketing would not have been possible were it not for the important fact the Paranormal Activity works. Oh, and don’t listen to the people telling you that this is best enjoyed when watching it with a theater full of screaming douchebags, I saw it at three in the afternoon in a theater with maybe ten people in it and it worked just fine.
***1/2 out of Four
The Informant!(10/10/2009)
Contrary to what Ayn Rand may have told you, corporations are for the most part evil. When left to their own devices they will gladly screw over their competitors, their employees, and their customers if it will make them a little more profit. This is why they make such effective Hollywood villains, they have a long history of activities that would make Darth Vader blush and deep down they have almost no remorse. Since every villain needs a hero to vanquish them, Hollywood has invented someone to put a white hat on: the whistleblower. While the whistleblower genre probably doesn’t have as many websites dedicated to it as other sub-genres, it’s actually a pretty populous category of film and like most things that are done to death people are beginning to get a bit sick of its pattern of self-riotousness and manufactured drama. So, when it came to light that Steven Soderbergh was making adapting the story of real life whistle blower Mark Whitacre it was safe to guess we’d get something more than standard genre fare, and from the moment the film’s trailer came out it was clear that was the case.
Based on the nonfiction book by Kurt Eichenwald, this film tells the story of the man who helped the FBI conduct one of the biggest price fixing scams in American History. This investigation began when the company called in the FBI to deal with an extortion scheme reported by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an executive in the lysine division of ADM. Shortly into an investigation by agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Whitacre reveals that he and his colleagues have been illegally conspiring with other companies to systematically drive up prices worldwide. Whitacre agrees to wear a wire and collect evidence against the company he works for, and in doing so is able to collect an unprecedented amount of evidence for the FBI. Whitacre claims he’s doing this to clear his conscience, but he doesn’t really seem all that torn up about lysine consumers, so why is he doing this? That will turn out to be the key question at the heart of all of this, because Mark Whiticre is not exactly what he seems.
The conventional wisdom about Steven Soderbergh is that he does big budget studio produced films filled with celebrities in order to build the cache required to make low budget experimental films starring non-actors. Because of this reputation critics are inevitably going to deride this as one of the former, but really this whole notion is something of a misnomer. This may have a bigger budget than something like Bubble and it may star an A-list celebrity, but deep down the way this film handles genre is just as experimental as a lot of those other projects. If you go to one of those seminars they have to teach screenwriters how to build successful formulaic films step by step, the first thing they’ll tell you is to focus on a character with a clear motivation and to have that motivation drive the plot. As such, this would have largely focused on the goal of bringing down ADM and stuck with this conflict throughout if this were a conventional film. Instead, this movie becomes defiantly disinterested in the fate of ADM and instead focuses on what the title says it will focus on the informant.
This informant himself is a pretty odd character played brilliantly by Matt Damon. Whiticre is a strange person who seems more like Ned Flanders than Deep Throat. He’s in his forties, has a bad comb-over, and a goofy looking mustache. More importantly, the guy’s a doofus; he’s the antithesis of the intense image of businessman that Gordon Gecko embodied. At times Whiticre seems to not grasp the stakes of his actions, and the film’s voice over track is clouded by his odd stream-of-consciousness musings about subjects ranging from the German word for pen to the thinking patterns of polar bears. This man’s existence is certainly one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” type creations and making him believable had to have been a hefty challenge. Fortunately Matt Damon brings Whiticre to the screen excellently. It takes a little while for Damon’s achievement to really sink in, but when you compare his performance here to the badass he was when playing Jason Bourne and it becomes immensely clear how much of a range Damon has as an actor.
Because Whiticre is so strange many have come to label this movie a spoof, but I’d hesitate to use that term simply because it conjures images of broadly comic films like Aireplane and Scary Movie, and this film is neither as silly as those films nor is it trying to be as funny. However, this film does play with genre conventions in a way that’s not completely unlike what spoof films do. This is a movie that easily could have focused other elements, chosen a different tone, and used different techniques and end up looking like a remake of The Insider. Instead Soderbergh is able to make this movie a completely different through a handful of unexpected decisions. For example, the film has adopted a very 1970s aesthetic (even though the story is set in the early 90s), this would seem like a logical enough choice if one was trying to channel the corporate thrillers of that era like The China Syndrome, Serpico, and Silkwood, but it isn’t really the serious filmmaking of the 70’s that he’s channeling. Rather, Soderbergh is channeling everything that was kind of tacky about the era like the gaudy font the captions are in or the unexpected but compelling smooth jazz score by Marvin Hamlisch. As such, the film’s aesthetics sort of play with what we’re supposed to expect from this kind of movie just as much as the script does.
Ignoring all the genre trickery we do still get what is on its own a very fascinating story. Mark Whitacre is an enigma, one that has not been completely cracked by the time the credits role and a big part of the joys of this film are trying to figure out just what makes him tick. What’s more strange is that aside from some of his more self-sabotaging habits, Whitacre isn’t too different from most corporate executives. He’s a man who lies, cheats, and steals almost as a habit then hides behind an “aw shucks” smile, the only difference is that he seems to believe his own bullshit. In focusing on this personality we get a much better look at the face of corporate crime than we ever would watching the heroes take down another anonymous board room filled with mustache twirlers. While I wouldn’t place this in the upper echelon of Soderbergh’s work, this is a movie that deserves as much respect and analysis his movies which wear their experimental nature like a badge of honor.
***1/2 out of Four
The Hurt Locker(7/16/2009)
The highly respected critic Manohla Dargis began her recent New York Times profile of the filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow by saying: “The take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies… sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker.” The double standard which Dargis points out is well stated, but I would never go so far as to call Bigelow a “great director” of any kind. This is, after all, a filmmaker whose greatest claim to fame is a mid-nineties Keanu Reeves vehicle (Point Break) which Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright could ridicule with the same breath they mocked Bad Boys II. The other highlights of her oeuvre are a forgettable Submarine movie called K-19: The Widow Maker and a moderately creative vampire movie called Near Dark which was marred by a low budget and a lame tacked on happy ending. The best movie she’d made up to this point was Strange Days, a mostly forgotten science fiction movie which, while solid, was only a minor triumph. As such I’ve been a bit perplexed by the revisionism with which many are describing this career in the wake of the release of Bigelow’s newest film The Hurt Locker. While I’m still not a fan of Bigelow’s career up to this point, seeing this new film does make me excited to see what the future will bring for Ms. Bigelow, because The Hurt Locker is significantly better than anything she’s made before.
Set in the midst of the Iraq war circa 2004, the film covers 20-30 days in the life of a three-man army bomb squad. The newest member is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), he’s the commanding officer and he takes point on the bomb defusing duties. Supporting him are Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who must watch what he’s doing and look out for possible triggermen looking to set off the bombs. Quickly it becomes apparent that Staff Sergeant James has a very different style than his predecessor, he’s reckless and prone to taking wild risks. With only a couple dozen days left in their tour, the men must try to hold out in spite of the danger that this behavior puts them in.
It is no secret that movies about the Iraq War have mostly been miserable failures both critically and commercially. Granted, a lot of the movies that are lumped into the genre are really either primarily about other Middle-East conflicts (E.G. Lions for Lambs, The Kingdom, Rendition) or they’re about the lives of soldiers after they’ve returned home (E.G. Stop Loss, Home of the Brave, The Lucky Ones). Perhaps the only theatrical film thus far which I would unhesitantly say is about the Iraq War is Brian De Palma’s ballsy but at times terribly executed film Redacted, which came under heavy fire by right-wing ideologues for failing to exult “the troops.” Many suggest that the problem has been that it’s “too soon,” that there’s no way to fully assess the conflict until after it’s over. I have trouble buying this explanation, as there have been plenty of documentarians who have proven more than able to assess the situation intelligently as well as some surprisingly superior television projects like FX’s “Over There” and HBO’s “Generation Kill.” If nothing else these various projects have more than established the look and feel of the war in Iraq to the point where this film feels more like a return to the setting than an introduction to it, thus allowing Bigelow to hit the ground running.
While this clearly isn’t the first work to tackle the conflict, it is the first one to focus on actual combat… sort of. After all, combat in Iraq doesn’t exactly look like the frontline battles of wars past. Most of the fatalities in Iraq come from hidden bombs which often explode before the victims know what hit them. So in spite of the film’s focus on “combat,” I wouldn’t call it an action movie as many critics have. In fact, the film only has one scene which I’d classify as an honest-to-goodness action sequence, and even there the thrills are mostly suspenseful rather than visceral. Most of the “combat” consists of tense situations where the team must deal with live bombs which could go off at any moment. The film avoids most of the clichés of bomb defusing; the characters don’t spend minutes choosing between the red and blue wires (at least they don’t announce their dilemma out loud) and they are never given a large readout counting down to when the bomb will blow. The honest-to-goodness action scene I referred to, a tense Sniper duel, is easily the highlight of the film. In fact it may just be the best sniper face-off since Full Metal Jacket.
The particularly impressive thing about the film’s visual style is its ability to balance both conventional and documentary aesthetics. This is an equilibrium that many filmmakers have been trying to perfect lately, thus making this success all the more impressive. The film is shot handheld, but it is in no way meant to be a mockumentary, and it will not be offensive to those opposed to “the shaky cam.” The picture oddly looks both washed out and digital, a very gritty look but in an entirely twenty first century way. In spite of this gritty look, when the bombs in the film do go off Bigelow is not afraid to shoot them with all the gusto that Roland Emmerich would. Up until now Bigelow’s style resembled the early work of Tony Scott, it was slick and relaxed. So this film’s docudrama aesthetic is a pretty big departure for her. The is made even more impressive if one compares it to the clumsy way Brian De Palma tried to shift into faux-documentary styling in his Iraq film.
The film is completely apolitical, I doubt that Bigelow is a fan of the war, but no judgment seems to be made about the conflict other than that it is a highly dangerous environment that can be incredibly trying for those involved. In fact the movie is so neutral that at times it seems to lack even a storyline. The film is completely dedicated to simply showing twenty-some days in the life of these guys and almost nothing else, it goes from set-piece to set piece with only a few scenes back at the barracks to connect it all. In its third act the film threatens to form an actual narrative arc, but then goes back to its slice of life format. This isn’t to say the film is without depth, though it lacks a strong central story the characters are well developed through their actions and their conversations. Though the format is not conventional, this is not some sort of wild Gus Van Sant style experiment, it won’t be confusing to non-cinephiles and its style serves no extraneous purpose other than to support the material.
The Hurt Locker is indeed the best feature length film about the Iraq war, and by quite a distance at that. Still, I feel there are better movies about the war to be made in the future. Perhaps in the future we’ll get movies about this war that are as refined as a Saving Private Ryan, a Thin Red Line, or a Letters From Iwo Jima. This film is reminiscent of the more primitive World War Two movies that were made in the late forties and fifties like Battleground or Twelve O’Clock High. These were very matter of fact films which simply sought to tell a story about men trying to cope with hardships on a battlefield. They were simple stories of survival, no more concerned with the full ramifications of the war then the men on the ground were. I certainly hope that movies will come that can achieve greater ambitions than this, until then The Hurt Locker will have to do.
***1/2 out of Four
Public Enemies(7/1/2009)
I feel really sorry for filmmakers who try to make crime movies these days, the standards for that genre are unbelievably high. No matter how great a movie about gangsters gets, the bar has been set so high by the likes of The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface that it has become hard to call even the best examples of the genre being made today “great.” Take for example 2007’s American Gangster, a film which is element for element a pretty damn good effort, but when compared to some of the above mentioned films it’s hard to really get too excited about it. Still there have been a few exceptional films like The Departed and City of God which have found their way into the pantheon in spite of the sky high expectations, and one such exception was Michael Mann’s Heat, a sprawling cops and robbers epic which paired Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in a thrilling cat and mouse chase through L.A.’s underworld. Because of this and the presence of A-list talent like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, Mann’s new film about the legendary John Dillinger, Public Enemies, comes with a level of anticipation above the already high standards of crime epics.
John Dillinger was not a gangster in the way Al Capone, Frank Lucas, or even Henry Hill were. He didn’t run any vast criminal conspiracies from dark mansions nor did he hold any legitimate covers. Rather, he was a bank robber in the vein of Bonnie & Clyde; and was, in spite of his massive fame in the eye of the public, considered “public enemy number one” by the newly formed FBI. When the film begins, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is already an established criminal and the film is about the last few months of his life. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent fresh off the apprehension of Pretty Boy Floyd, who has been put in charge of a task force set up to capture or kill Dillinger. Meanwhile, Dillinger is basking in his infamy; he has the fastest cars, the nicest clothes, and he’s also hooked up with a beautiful woman named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). But as Purvis begins to close in it becomes clear that the good times aren’t lasting forever and Dillinger must be increasingly careful in order to survive as public enemy number one.
Another legendary American outlaw was given the film treatment in 2007 with Andrew Dominick’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an excellent film but one which did not resonate well with the public. That film had the difficult task of trying to subvert the legendary status of the outlaw at the center, to show Jesse James for the moody killer he was rather than the Robin Hood figure the public believed him to be, all the while examining what it was that created that public fascination. Michael Mann does not take the same approach with his film though one could envision a film where he does. Generally, Mann seems rather disinterested in the way Dillinger is seen by the public and by Dillinger himself for that matter and instead focuses on how he is viewed by the FBI, the criminal underworld, and his girlfriend Billie Frechette.
Mann could have depicted Dillinger as a martyred rebel or as a menace that needed to be put down by brave G-Men, but he never settles into a simple groove like that. It’s almost impossible not to be pretty impressed by Dillinger’s smooth antics but Mann also does not hesitate to show the more violent aspects of his personality. Mann also undermines a lot of Dillinger’s exploits in a brilliant scene where he is told that much more money is made through a secret telephone fraud than by the very public bank robberies he had involved himself in. On the other hand, the movie is hardly an advertisement for the FBI who are often excessive and cruel in their pursuit of Dillinger, and they seem motivated more by public opinion than a genuine desire to make America safer. Ultimately Mann’s depiction is very matter-of-fact, he shows Dillinger doing the very cool looking things that history records him having done and allows the audience to judge. This failure to take sides may seem frustratingly non-committal to some, but I appreciated Mann’s willingness to report without judgment.
It has become a critical custom to examine Johnny Depp performances by trying to identify the sources of his inspiration, this film will be no exception because he is clearly trying to channel James Cagney. This is a pretty obvious choice but also an effective one especially from a physical perspective. Like Cagney, Depp has a certain range of facial movement here, he can be charming Frechette one moment and then have a killer’s look in his eyes as he fires a Tommy Gun the next. But with a Cagney impersonation comes a certain degree of theatricality that one simply has to accept, and this is particularly troublesome in some of the early line readings. In fact that’s true of a lot of people’s acting in the first few scenes of the film, which seem to be liberally homageing the acting mannerisms of thirties cinema in a way that the later scenes aren’t for some reason.
Unlike Depp, there aren’t many reservations I have about Christian Bale, who’s doing some of the best work I’ve seen him do in a large budget film in a long while. Bale has the Elliot Ness role here; he needs to act like a boy scout but also like a pretty tough and smart agent. Bale is pretty restrained throughout, it’s like he realized his character was no match for John Dillinger in the eyes of the audience so he never goes out of his way to seem like some sort of badass. His character is someone who gets results by being smarter, not stronger, than the opposition and he’s not ashamed to ask for help when he realizes he’s outgunned. But it’s Marion Cottilard who steals the show here. I couldn’t stand the overbearing work Cottilard won an Oscar for in 2007’s La Vie En Rose, but I absolutely loved her here. Dillinger is a man who could have hooked up with movie stars and singers if he wanted to, but Cottilard’s work makes it abundantly clear why he was taken with this coat check girl. Cottilard is drop dead gorgeous in the film and sexy but not in a way that makes her look like some sort of fake Maxim model. She really feels like someone who could verbally go toe to toe with Dillinger and you believe her character when she stays loyal to Dillinger even at personal risk.
In his last two films Michael Mann had been experimenting with Digital Photography, a decision which didn’t draw a lot of attention firstly because both Collateral and Miami Vice spent most of their running time under cover of night and secondly because they both inhabited very modern settings. Here however Mann has thrown down the gauntlet and declared a place in the making of large scale period pieces for digital photography. To shoot with this kind of digital camera is basically the 21st Century equivalent of shooting on grainy 16mm film stock, it lacks a certain glowing beauty but in turn it gains a certain documentary-style immediacy. One thing I like about digital photography is that it really seems to see the world the way the human eye does rather than the way movies try to make the world look. We’re so used to seeing the thirties through orange color filters at magic hour that to see it in this raw form seems kind of jarring. Basically it’s the exact opposite of what Sam Mendes did with Road to Perdition, but I’d say it’s a reasonable tradeoff. After all, how many gangster movies that look like The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential do we need? Because Mann chose to shoot with such a modern and reality tinged medium you really feel like you’re in the same room with John Dillinger, you feel like you’re watching gangland shootouts that were caught on tape and put on Youtube in full 1080p.
Speaking of the shootouts, the action scenes in this film are numerous and awesome. These robberies, escapes, shootouts, and car chases are smoothly shot and kinetic. The action is fast paced and immediate like a Bourne film, but they also lack a lot of the more aggressive techniques that have turned some of the people off to that series. In that sense this is sort of the best of both worlds, it’s intense but I doubt the choreography will confuse anyone. Particularly strong is the sound design. Like the shootout in Heat, all the gunshots here are exceptionally loud and realistic which is invaluable in adding to the intensity of the gunplay. I do not for the life of me know why other directors don’t use Michael Mann’s sound library when putting together their shootouts. Highlights include a tense prison escape that opens the film, a massive shootout in a Wisconsin woods that ends brilliantly, a couple of great bank robberies, a tense cat and mouse scene in a dark hotel room, but best of all is Dillinger’s famous wood gun escape in which he fleas a heavily guarded prison without firing a shot. Those simply seeking summer thrills will be just as happy with this movie as those interested in the life of the famous outlaw.
There are a handful of problems to be found: some of the supporting performances are a little weak, there’s a really bad scene in which Dillinger does something really cocky for no reason (I thought for sure it would end up being a dream sequence or something but it wasn’t), and a there are a couple plot points that never really come to fruition. But the movie’s real sin is just that it isn’t a masterpiece, and that’s what some people demand whenever a great director and cast try to make a crime movie, but that’s a bit short sighted. There are a lot of critics who seem to be holding this to a much higher standard than they should and rejecting it just because it isn’t the best movie this genre has ever seen. That’s a bunch of hogwash; this is better than any Hollywood movie I’ve seen in the last seven months and it should be celebrated for that, not punished for daring to have a good pedigree while not quite being Oscar worthy. This is an excellently executed and very entertaining movie I recommend to anyone without hesitation. If you skip this movie to see a two hour toy commercial or something this weekend you should be ashamed.
***1/2 out of four
The Hangover6/5/2009
I feel like I’ve been fairly careless about the way I’ve been throwing around Judd Apatow’s name whenever I review an R-rated comedy (this is the last time I’m talking about the guy in the first sentence of a movie he didn’t actually make). He’s been such a dominating figure in his genre as of late that he comes up a lot even in reviews for comedies he has absolute no direct role in. Apatow didn’t invent the idea of average joes cursing at each other and he didn’t invent the idea of raunchy comedies with a heart of gold at the center (Kevin Smith was doing both long before anyone had heard of Apatow). Going into the newest R-rated comedy, The Hangover, I found myself pretty much expecting Superbad 2 and just as it was starting I realized that was sort of unfair. Apatow did not write, direct, or produce this and none of the main cast had ever been in one of his movies. Instead I was going to judge it by the standard of its real director, Todd Phillips, a man with a lower profile but arguably just as much influence. Just look at the film’s main box office competitor Land of the Lost: it stars Will Ferrell who made his film breakthrough in Philips’ Old School and it’s a parody of an old T.V. show, a trend started by Phillips’ Starsky & Hutch. I wasn’t a huge fan of Old School, so that wasn’t a that high a standard, but as it turned out this is a film that could have just as easily stood toe to toe with anything the much discussed Apatow has ever put out.
Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married in two days, he loves his fiancé and has nothing but anticipation for the big day and even her family likes him. Before the big day though, he plans to have an epic bachelor party in Vegas with his two best friends. His two best friends are like opposites: Phil (Bradley Cooper) a pretty boy with a devil-may-care who’s ready to party, and Stu (Ed Helms) an over-cautious dentist who’s been thoroughly “whipped” by a mean controlling girlfriend (with a history of infidelity) who he inexplicably plans to marry in the future. Also tagging along is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug’s brother in law who seems rather… simple. The film never comes out and identifies him as mentally handicapped but he has a habit of saying a lot of odd things. The four share a toast and decide to have a wild night. Flash forward to the next morning and the friends wake up in a totally trashed hotel suit complete with a chicken roaming around, a live Tiger in the bathroom, and a damn baby lying near the mini-bar. The only thing missing from the room is Doug the bachelor, and no one can remember what happened to him. Hijinx ensue as the four try to retrace their steps and find their friend in time for his wedding.
This project doesn’t really have a lot of star power, none of the cast members were a big part of the Frat Pack or the Apatow crew, none of them are former SNL members, hell the most famous name here is Ed Helms, a former Daily Show correspondent with a supporting role on “The Office.” None of these actors really standout, the film shows no evidence that any of them could carry a film by themselves, but together they have great chemistry. I think the producers were willing to make this studio comedy without star power is that, unlike a lot of recent comedies, this focuses a lot more on plot than characters. This isn’t a film about the characters coming to grips with their own mediocrity, or trying to struggle with the pros and cons of settling down, in fact no one really grows over the course of the film. Instead the movie is entirely about seeing how these guys are going to solve the problem they’ve put themselves in.
Usually people place a lot of the credit for comedies like this on the actors and their improvisations, but I suspect that a lot more of this film is derived from its script. The story presents a pretty legitimate mystery/puzzle for the protagonists, which seems to take another wacky turn every step of the way. The characters continuously react to these turns with increasing desperate wit. This isn’t a comedy that’s of no value without the laughs; it has a story that can more or less hold its own. The situations are almost as important as the reactions, in a lot of comedies it’s all about the reactions.
Vegas is a pretty good location for all this, it is after all the place dedicated to sin and excess. Yet, as the characters pass the Las Vegas sign the soundtrack isn’t playing “Viva Las Vegas,” it’s playing an ominous Kanye West song called “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” from that point you realize this city has nothing but unpleasantness in store for these guys. The film takes a pretty old school approach to the city, this place doesn’t look like a family resort, it seems like a shady place that can lead to no good. The city seems mainly to be populated with hookers, disreputable celebrities, and cops sick of arrogant tourists causing senseless acts of drunken vandalism.
My only major complaint is with the film’s ending which I feel is something of a copout. I’m going to have to go into spoiler territory to explain this so avert your eyes from this paragraph if you don’t want to know the ending. In the last fifteen minutes the characters are basically able to solve all their problems and the whole think is wrapped up into a perfect bow. This is basically a get out of jail free card for people who have done nothing to earn it. I’m not saying the film needed a completely grim ending but the ending it did have seemed completely incongruous with the darker version of Vegas seen earlier in the film. The ending was such an abrupt left turn that I suspect it was a last minute change in reaction to test screenings or something. This ending basically turns the menacing Vegas from the opening scenes into the consequence free playground that the cities advertising campaigns want you to think it is. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this magical happy ending is disastrous, but it is a major flaw in an otherwise excellent comedy.
This is not really the easiest movie to analyze. It basically comes down to the fact that it’s really really funny. It’s a rowdy affair and if you dig these kinds of movies this is going to be worth your time, if you haven’t liked these kinds of movies this will be no exception. I do like these movies, so I found myself laughing pretty hard the whole way through, these many laughs are more than enough to overcome its poor ending. After the ambitious but disappointing Observe and Report this is exactly what I needed.
***1/2 out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Chop Shop(1/2/2008)
As an amateur critic, I’m deprived a lot of things that my professional colleagues have access to, namely paychecks and advanced screenings. But another thing I miss out on is the film festival experience, the chance to hike out to places like Telluride and Toronto to watch small movies for hours on end, and to get a feel for what filmmakers who are more than a little bit outside of the Hollywood mainstream are doing. Of course I could just hike out to places like Cannes on my own… but the aforementioned lack of paychecks tends to get in the way of that. But, while I’ve never been to the Sundance film festival, I do get the Sundance channel on my cable service, and that’s where I discovered a beautiful little film called Man Push Cart.
Man Push Cart was a very small film set on the streets of New York; it followed an Iranian immigrant working out of a vending cart as he simply tried to make ends meet. It was a very good meditation on the American Dream. Man Push Cart introduced (a few) audiences to a very talented director named Ramin Bahrani, a man who is now one of the most promising talents in the independent film world. Earlier this year Bahrani released his second film, another slice of life about someone trying to survive in an unsavory area of New York called Chop Shop.
The film follows Ale (Alejandro Polanco), a pre-adolescent orphan working at and living in the attic of a seedy Chop Shop in Queens. Ale has never gone to school, with no intention of being scooped up by child protective services his only means of survival is a life of (very) petty crime. He first works at the Chop Shop, but his criminal activity escalates throughout the film to include the sale of bootleg DVDs to theft. One day he learns that his sixteen year old sister Izzy (Isamar Gonzales) is going to come live with him in the Chop Shop attic. Once they reunite Ale tells her of an opportunity he has to buy a vending van, an object that could change their lives.
Bahrani clearly takes inspiration from the Italian neorealists with his approach to filmmaking. He shows the stark realities of poor areas with stark, documentary-like filmmaking in real locations and from the use of non-actors. The grainy photography that categorized the movement back in the day has been replaced by sharp digital photography. I’ve come to admire the video-like look of some digital photography, it’s not pretty but it has the ability to see the world the way the human eye does, it’s stark, untouched, un-calculated; it’s the perfect medium for something that’s as gritty as the material here.
The non-actors are also pretty good here, in that way non actors can be. Alejandro Polanco is consistently articulate and believable in his role as a street urchin, Isamar Gonzales isn’t quite as good as his sister, but she doesn’t hurt the film at all. Ahmad Razvi, who played the lead character in Man Push Cart, has a supporting role here. Razvi is a very good screen presence and it’s nice to see him getting more work (these two films are his only credited roles). A kid named Carlos Zapata plays Ale’s friend and fellow street kid.
Chop Shop is a sad film, but it isn’t depressing. The world Ale lives in is a very unpleasant place for a kid to be in, but it doesn’t dwell on his misery, rather it’s about his struggle to improve his life through day to day work and saving. It’s another meditation on the American Dream from Ramin Bahrani, and I can’t wait to see what this man makes next.
***1/2 out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Man on Wire(12/23/2008)
Like any other type of cinema, there are many different varieties of documentary. Michael Moore’s brand of first person issue exploration is one brand that’s pretty popular, another important variety are those that are filmed on the spot from beginning to end, and finally there’s the historical documentary; one’s made many years after the event and told through archival footage, new interviews, and reenactments. James Marsh’s new documentary Man on Wire is of the later variety.
The film tells the story of Philippe Petit, a French acrobat who made headlines in 1974 when he illegally tightrope walked between the towers of the World Trade Center. I’m not spoiling anything when I say that he succeeds at his stunt, he’s alive and well today and modern interviews from him are featured throughout the film. The film recounts Petit’s obsession with the building, one that predates even the construction of the structure. It shows the meticulous plan constructed by Petit and his co-conspirators to break into the building, sneak to the roof, shoot an arrow to the other tower, and finally string a rope across for his daring stunt.
The documentary in many ways plays out like a heist movie, one that ends with Petit’s stunt instead of a score. Marsh acknowledges the similarities and gives the interview subjects nicknames like “The Inside Man” or “The Australian.” Later the participants flat out say that part of the fun of the endeavor was that it was like a bank robbery. The comparison is apt. Petit had to “case the joint” to plan out the stunt, acquire disguises, make fake IDs, and finally sneak in undetected. Among their most brazen acts involved getting a tour of the building while claiming to be from a French architecture journal.
Oddly, Petit’s stunt was never caught on videotape. We see older footage of him walking across the Notre Dame and an Australian bridge, but the World Trade Center crossing was captured only with still pictures. Ultimately, this might only make Petit’s act seem all the more outrageous because the stills give the impression of what was going on while still leaving a lot to the imagination. The sight of him walking slowly in amateur video footage might have been a much more anticlimactic conclusion had such footage ever been shot. Really, the thought of crossing the wire is a lot more grand than footage of him actually doing it.
I can’t help but wonder how this documentary would have played out if Petit hadn’t made it across that wire, if he had fallen to his death midway through his feat. It might have played out an awful lot like Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, a story of a man tragically killed by his seemingly insane obsession. Of course history is always told by the winners, and unlike the aforementioned Timothy Treadwell, Petit is alive to defend himself. One does wonder about his mentality though, would it not have been just as difficult to cross that length of wire if it were a safe distance from the ground? If risking his life was the source of his thrill couldn’t he have just as easily played a game of Russian Roulette?
I can’t say that a lot of these questions were really answered. Petit never quite explains what drove him, he simply says that the idea just popped into his head; when asked about his motivations by the press he copped out and said he had no reason. Frankly, I can’t quite believe that Petit is shallow enough to risk his life without any reason, and if he did he’s a really shallow person. Ultimately the film works better as a heist story then as a character study, and this is disappointing. It says something when the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year is basically a very well crafted heist film. Filmmakers working outside of the documentary field who make simple well crafted heist films don’t get half the praise that this documentarian has. Does this say something about the standards people have for documentaries? Perhaps, or maybe this one is simply overrated. I don’t want to sound too negative though, I like a well crafted heist film as much as the next guy.
***1/2 out of four
Milk(12/19/2008)
What’s interesting about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to office in America, is that throughout his entire career he never reached higher office then City Supervisor (essentially synonymous with city council). I for one barely even know what a City Supervisor is; it’s one of those offices at the bottom of a ticket that you tend to just follow a sample ballot in order to pick. It’s who Milk was and what he did with the office that made all the difference. Milk was never really trying to be a politician; he was trying to be the head of the gay rights movement. At this he succeeded, thirty years after his death he remains the most visible and clear leader that movement has ever seen. It would seem that he’s a figure as important to Gus Van Sant as Malcolm X was to Spike Lee or Jim Morrison was to Oliver Stone.
The film begins on the fortieth birthday of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the day he meets his future lover Scott Smith (James Franco) at a New York bus stop. They decide to travel to San Francisco where they can live a more open lifestyle. They set up a camera store in the Castro district, but discrimination from local businessmen inspires Milk to unite the homosexual population politically. The film follows him through three failed elections and through his eventual political success and his securing of a spot at the head of the Gay Rights movement. Along the way he meets his rival and eventual assassin, a fellow city supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin). The whole film is narrated via a framing device where Milk tells his life story into a tape recorder, a tape which is only meant to be listened to in the case of his death by assassination.
Gus Van Sant is a filmmaker who emerged as the director of such independent gems as Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho but somewhere around the turn of the millennium he decided to quit worrying about accessibility and start making highly experimental micro-films like Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park. These experimental films were definitely interesting, but they didn’t really make me salivate the way they did to some critics. I’ve been waiting for a while to see him get back to making “normal” movies without going to outrageously far into the mainstream a la Finding Forrester. Milk is just such a film, it is accessible without being needlessly flashy. This is exactly the tone that a sweeping biopic needs, and Van Sant’s direction should disappoint no one unless they were expecting the film to be two hours of Harvey Milk doing paperwork and having banal conversations before getting shot.
Sean Penn gives a fine performance as the title character, he looks and sound just like the real thing and he also acquires a lot of the guy’s energy and mannerisms. That said, I can’t help but be a little less impressed by actors mimicking real people then I once was. It was damn impressive the way Jamie Fox was able to inhabit Ray Charles, but then Joaquin Phoenix inhabited Johnny Cash just as well the next year, and the year after that we got to see Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker mimicking real people just as well the next year. There’s something just a little less impressive about watching Sean Penn pull off the same trick again this year. It’s certainly not Penn’s fault that his role emerged late in this trend, but still I can’t help but not react with the same enthusiasm to this kind of work as I once did.
The rest of the cast is also quite good. Jame Franco is great as a character that matures alongside Milk and really seems a lot different at the end as he does at the beginning. Emile Hirsch is fresh off his excellent work in Penn’s Into the Wild, and he’s almost unrecognizable as Cleve Jones, an angry young guy who Milk recruits to use his skills as a “prick” in fighting for the gay rights movement. Alison Pill is also very good as the Milk’s lesbian campaign manager Anne Kronenberg. I do however take issue with the performance of Diego Luna as Jack Lira, one of Milk’s lovers. Lira appears to be a very strange, disturbed person from moment one and frankly I think Luna went a bit over the top in the role.
Special note should be made of Josh Brolin’s work here as Dan White. Brolin delivers another fine bit of mimicry, he looks just like the real guy and between this and his work in Oliver Stone’s W. he’s proven himself the best impersonator of the year. As a character, Dan White is quite interesting. Van Sant gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of White here, and the film is better for it. Throughout the film White acts with a degree of civility toward Milk despite an obvious discomfort toward him. The murders White commits seem less motivated by hatred then they do by a sense of political betrayal and, on a deeper level, a sense of anger that there is less of a place for his conservative attitudes in an increasingly progressive San Francisco. The movie may have completely gone off the tracks if they had portrayed White as a raging homophobic villain. Most of this material is reserved for a truly vile bitch named Anita Bryant who Van Sant wisely depicts only through archive footage, in any other form she would be too horrible to be believed.
One of the problems with biopics, is that anytime they seem to be doing something cliché or conventional, the obvious counter argument is “that really did happen, I’m just telling it like it is.” For this reason it’s a bit awkward to call something cheesy, but the film falls into a few very blatant biopic pitfalls on occasion. I’m thinking in particular of a wheelchair bound adolescent who randomly telephones Milk on two occasions, both suspiciously useful ones to the plot, in order to tell him how inspirational Milk’s work is to him. This may well have happened, but it sounds way too close to Lou Gehrig promising a dying child two homeruns for comfort. Another issue is a moment I don’t want to give away, but it’s a traumatic event in Milk’s love life. Normatively it serves no real purpose other than to raise stakes that didn’t really need raising, and it doesn’t emotionally effect him in the rest of the movie nearly as much as it should. Again, these may well have been true events, but they feel like clichés and are not really necessary in the first place. I think Van Sant would have been wise to cut them.
Ultimately, I think what really prevents Milk from being an exceptional work is that the Harvey Milk depicted works better an inspirational figure then he does as a dramatic character. Van Sant sees Milk as an almost Gandhi-like saint; he’s just not the most complex character out there. There’s a moment midway into the film where Milk says that one of his strategies would be to expose people who were in the closet. One person mentions that this would be a violation of a right to privacy, and Scott Smith points out a degree of hypocrisy in that Milk was closeted well into his thirties. Van Sant doesn’t press the issue much beyond that, and that’s about the closest the film ever comes to exploring anything about Milk’s life that could be seen as controversial to the film’s target audience. Of course Van Sant likely sees Milk as a hero, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try to look at more nuances. For instance, Spike Lee clearly admired Malcolm X, but he had no hesitance to have the protagonist of his biopic say and do a lot of things that the film’s audience wasn’t going to agree with.
Milk is a very energetic biopic of an important American. I certainly recommend the film to anyone with even the slightest interest in the subject, or to anyone that is interested in watching a very well made drama with a very good cast. The film occasionally flirts with greatness, but it never quite transcends the biopic genre.
***1/2 out of four
Synecdoche, New York(11/12/2008)
Charlie Kaufman accomplished a number of seemingly impossible achievements when he wrote the movie Being John Malkovich in 1999. Firstly, he managed to make a totally unconventional and weird movie into a commercial success. Secondly, he managed to make a name for himself among film enthusiasts as a screenwriter. Since then, he’s also written the scripts for such weird (and such successful) films as Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now he’s made his debut as a director with Synecdoche, New York a film that’s even more mind-bending than his previous work.
The film follows Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle aged director of avant-garde theater. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter and he has a daughter named Olive. After he’s hit in the head during a pluming accident, Caden finds himself dwelling on his health. Shortly thereafter he unexpectedly receives a MacArthur genius grant and decides to make a play that would be the panicle of honesty, to do this he builds an elaborate set in of an entire city in a football stadium and populates it with actors who are ordered to act like other people living mundane lives. This play is in preparation for a good fifty years; meanwhile Caden must deal with his wife leaving him, his estrangement from his daughter, and the other various women who enter his life.
To call this movie challenging would be an understatement. Kaufman’s previous films were complicated and met, but to a certain extent they were high concept affairs. Being John Malkovich was about people being able to enter the mind of the titular actor, Adaptation was about a writer writing a script about writing that same script, and Eternal Sunshine was about a man’s journey through his own mind while people erase the memories of his ex. Those are all tricky concepts to wrap your head around, but once you “get” the concept, the rest of the movie will probably make sense to you. Synecdoche, New York isn’t rooted in a concrete gimmick like that, and as such it not going to be as accessible.
Synecdoche, New York in many ways seems to have more similarities to Kaufman’s 2001 screenplay Human Nature. Both films deal with broad themes of humanity in very direct ways, and uncompromisingly makes its points in whatever bizarre way Kaufman wants to. This film is exploring a number of themes like the effects of aging, fear of mortality, the purpose of art, the challenges of parenting. The movie is made for people who are going to put some work into deciphering its themes and symbolism, if you’re not that kind of person, then I’m officially not recommending the movie for you. If you are this kind of person, then read on.
They say that drama is life without the boring parts; this is a movie about a man who doesn’t realize the boring parts have been cut out. Most films of this kind take place over a day, maybe a week, but Synecdoche, New York takes place over at least fifty year. The years pass by here at a rapid pace, but the film never uses any sort of non-diegetic trick to mark the time passage, what’s more Caden constantly seems as confused by the years passing as we are. The purpose of all this is for one simple purpose, to express the human notion that their life goes by faster then they realize. For example, Caden’s daughter starts out the film around the age of eight. Throughout the film Caden seems very confused whenever he’s told she’s older than this and before we know it she’s fully grown. One is reminded by this of parents saying their offspring will “always be daddy’s little girl.” Are there easier ways to express these notions? Probably, but that’s to forget how uncompromising Charlie Kaufman is when he wants to make a point about one of these grand themes.
Another fairly trippy symbol occurs when a character played by Samantha Morton tries to buy a house, which is on fire. She is shown this house by a real estate agent who talks about the property in a nonchalant manner despite the obvious flaw of it being on fire. Morton says she’s afraid of being killed by the fire, but that she’ll by the house because she’s already 36 and not getting any younger. Presumably this is supposed to represent aging as well, something that is rushed into despite the fact that it will ultimately kill you. The idea, presumably, is to show that fear of aging is a perfectly rational emotion and that the truly irrational people are those that glamorize the aging process rather than embracing their youth.
The film is not only about aging and mortality; it’s also very interested in the purpose of art. It is easy to assume that Kaufman is again writing himself into his screenplay, much as he did with Adaptation, except in a more covert way. Caden’s elaborate play is obviously a really stupid and pretentious, and Kaufman knows it. After all, why would someone want to replicate reality in such detail when you can just live the real thing? It may also be saying something about just how far an artist will go when he has complete freedom. Without any kind of resistance or financial constraints Caden has the freedom to work on his play until it is perfect, and because Caden is so ambitious, the result is that his work will never be done. He set out to make something great, but because he has no reason to stop he ends up making nothing. His wife’s art by contrast, is comedicly small and manageable, she’s very prolific but what she makes needs a magnifying glass to even be seen.
These are only a few of the crazy symbols that Kaufman fearlessly throws onto the screen. I’m not going to list all of my symbolic observations, if I did this would be a very long review, I’m mainly just trying to give the reader an idea what they’d be getting into with this film. However, I don’t want to give the impression that this can only be enjoyed as a meta exercise in symbolism, though that is a huge part of the movie’s appeal. The film does work simply as an absurdist narrative, the viewer will empathize with Caden throughout the film. I especially enjoyed the last twenty minutes when the film begins to reach its final note. I’d also point out that this is not a movie that just throws out its symbols with reckless abandon, there’s a real method to its madness, a genuine internal logic… probably.
Roger Ebert has suggested in his review of the movie that the movie probably has to be seen twice. This is probably true, but it’s a lot easier for him to say as a professional critic who can see the film at a bunch of festivals before it even opens to the public. As an amateur, probably won’t be able to see it again until its DVD release. I’m not really comfortable saying whether this is “good” or “bad” until that day comes I suppose the biggest questions I have to ask myself are “did the movie make me want to see it again” and “if so, how much.” The answers are “yes” and “a lot.” So I suppose this was quite a success.
***1/2 out of four
Slumdog Millionaire(11/5/2008)
India is fast emerging as one of the world’s fastest growing economies, a fact that seems to be in conflict with its poor infrastructure and the slums that fill its cities. The cinema of India is not particularly well known for depicting any of this, it’s mainly known for large budget audience pandering musicals, a cinema that most in the west are aware exists but which few have not bothered to actually see. Oddly it is mostly outside filmmakers who have been more interested in depicting the social hardships in India with movies like Water, which was made by the Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. The new Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire, would seem to be a much more realistic depiction of the streets of India; but it’s quickly apparent that it is just as interested in pleasing audiences as the Bollywood musicals, except that it’s western audiences it seeks to please.
The film follows a young man from the streets of Mumbai India named Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) who finds his way onto the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” (which looks and sounds identical to the American version), where he’s reached the level of ten million Rupees despite a lack of any formal education. The local authorities are highly suspicious of his advance through the ranks, so they arrest him and subject him to extreme interrogation. A more disciplined inspector (Irfan Khan) eventually shows up and decides to ask him, question by question, how he managed to attain all this knowledge. At this point the film begins a series of flashbacks in which it is revealed where he learned each question and which together tell the whole arc of Jamal’s life and how he came to find himself on a game show.
It would be reductive to call this an Indian version of Forrest Gump, but the similarities between the two films are striking. Both films tell the recent history of a country through the life story of a seemingly unimportant and lowly citizen who stumbles through larger events. Both are told through framing stories, though this game show story is significantly more interesting than Gump’s bus stop talk, in fact as far as framing stories go this game show scheme is really top-notch. Unlike Gump, though, Jamal is less likely to actually stubble through historical events so much as social touchstones of changing times. This is one of the film’s weakness, it occasionally feels like a white tourists guided tour through India’s stereotypes, almost like the writers brainstormed everything that comes immediately to mind while thinking about the country and through them all in. Bollywood films: check, Hindi Muslim conflict: check, Taj Mahal: check, telemarketing: check, they leave almost no stone unturned, and this is a problem when it would have felt much more natural for them to stick to one region. It’s almost like if an Indian decided to make a movie about America and made absolutely certain that he included refereces to the Western movie genre, a rally about the abortion issue, a trip to the Lincoln Memorial, and someone working at the Coca-Cola factory.
Another major work I’d compare the film to is Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” especially during the flashbacks to Jamal’s young days as an orphan on the streets. These scenes are particularly effective at capturing the chaos of the Mumbai streets. The depictions of the Mumbai ghettos feel somewhat influenced by Fernando Meirelles’ excellent City of God. While the life lived by the young Jamal is quite grim but there is a sense he doesn’t really see it that way, there is a sense of Dickensian joviality to his exploits. He’s a precocious little slumdog and in the tradition of these sorts of stories he finds all kinds of creative and somewhat amusing ways to get by.
The camera work here is often handheld and the cinematography is relatively grainy compared to most movies, and the editing is fairly aggressive. This camera work is not done to make the audience even subconsciously think they’re watching a documentary, it’s closer to what Paul Greengrass has achieved with movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, except here it’s applied to a drama instead of a thriller. The catch is, that Boyle rarely ever goes too far with any of these techniques, the handheld camera isn’t anywhere near as obvious as in Greengrass’ work, the grainy film stock is still clearly 35 millimeter and still quite slick, and the editing shouldn’t be disorienting even to the most sensitive of viewers, but each technique is used just enough to give the movie a certain degree of grit and keep the pace very fast.
The film’s music mostly excellent. The original music was composed by a legendary Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman who has clearly mastered the art of using Indian instruments and musical styles to score films. Rahman’s score is very effective and is probably part of why the film moves so quickly while telling a story with a pretty large scope. However, I do take issue with the film’s use of the M.I.A. song “Paper Planes,” a song that is closely associated with the summer of 2008 and feels completely out of place in a flashback scene set before the song was even written.
The film’s spoken language is divided between English and Hindi, which can be a jarring mix. The entire section featuring an Adult Jamal including the game show segments are in plain English, while most of the flashbacks to him as a child are in subtitled Hindi. I really wish that Boyle had just stuck with one language or the other, he should have either made the whole film in Hindi to reflect the actual language of the Indian people, or if he wanted to avoid the whole subtitle thing he should have done it consistently. As it is, the film seems to depict Jamal mysteriously switching languages somewhere around puberty, and the rest of the country following suit. This is made all the more confusing when instances pop up of his character actually speaking English to American, British, and German tourists, making it rather unclear when the spoken English is supposed to simply be a translation for the audience or an actual instance of the character speaking English.
This language problem is made all the more annoying because of the filmmakers decision to use stylized subtitles. These are subtitles that appear in a number of different areas of the screen rather than staying on the bottom like most film subtitles. I didn’t like this technique in Man on Fire, I didn’t like it in Night Watch, and I don’t like it here. When subtitles consistently appear in the same place at the bottom of the screen it’s a lot easier for them to blend in with the language of the film and cease to be noticed then when they’re bouncing all over the place.
This language material is distracting, but certainly forgivable, what’s not so forgivable is that the film can be a little predictable at times. Particularly in a pair of scenes that are meant to be suspenseful Who Wants to Be a Millionaire questions, like situation about 2/3 of the way through the movie where he’s given an opportunity to cheat, but anyone whose caught on to the film’s intended message about fate know exactly how Jamal will handle this. More egregious then this is a case of incredibly obvious foreshadowing where Jamal runs across a piece of useless trivia early on in his life, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know this is going to come up again in the final question. Did I only pick up on these because I’m jaded by seeing so many other movies? Possibly, but if Boyle had been a little less blatant in his foreshadowing on that second point it would have been a little more suspenseful.
A lot of the negative things I’m bringing up aren’t really huge problems; in fact they’re flaws bordering on nitpicking. The reason I find this so interesting is that Danny Boyle’s last film, Sunshine, had a flaw toward the end that was much more egregious then anything I mentioned; and yet I found myself much more willing to forgive Sunshine for its flaw then I am Slumdog Millionaire. I think this is because all of that film’s problems were confined to the last fifteen minutes and leave the preceding ninety minutes completely flawless, whereas Slumdog Millionaire’s flaws are littered throughout the movie and pervade the entire project.
I have problems with the movie, but that doesn’t mean Slumdog Millionaire isn’t a movie I can happily recommend for anyone to see. At the end of the day this is a feel good story about a character triumphing over adversity, and one that knows when to pander and when not to pander and never feels saccharin. Basically, it’s a crowd pleaser for people who know how to detect cheese; I’m not surprised that it was able to get enthusiasm from festival audiences. It should not however be mistaken for a wildly creative film. In one key way, it actually reminds me of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto in that both films take stories that might seem cliché, but tell them in areas we’re not so used to seeing on screen in order to seem fresher then they probably are. For the most part, Slumdog Millionaire probably is strong enough to get away with this.
***1/2 out of four
