I happened to be looking at the Wikipedia article for Keyser Soze today, and saw this:
In his 1999 review of Fight Club, film critic Roger Ebert commented that "A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Söze syndrome."
So naturally, I tried to think of films besides Fight Club and The Usual Suspects that do that. The only ones that leap to mind are The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. The Village comes close, but the twist arrives earlier than at the very end of the film.
Am I missing any outside of the Shayamalan oeuvre? I recall hearing that Vanilla Sky had a twist, but I haven't seen the film so I don't know if it qualifies by having a reality-redefining twist.
For our purposes, let's only consider films after The Usual Suspects (1994). And please, no spoilers.
I'll grant you, I was predisposed to like Slumdog Millionaire on the basis of its subject matter-- an uneducated man from the slums of Mumbai goes for the top prize on India's edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. I doubt the rest of the theater was filled with former game show contestants, however, and the spontaneous applause at the film's conclusion proved that the film was well received all around.
The film wastes no time getting directly to the story. Jamal has already gotten 14 questions correct, with only the final question standing between him and the top prize. But how could an ignorant, uneducated "slumdog" like him get all the answers correct, when so many more educated people repeatedly fail? He's accused of cheating, and the police torture him to try to extract a confession. Instead, as the investigating officer replays Jamal's appearance on the show, at each question Jamal explains how his life experience taught him the answers-- often at great personal cost.
Despite its obvious gimmickry, it's a marvelous framing device. The story unfolds in vignettes from Jamal's past, told against the exotic, colorful, and heartbreaking backdrop of India. The child actors are brilliant-- better, in fact, than the older actors playing their adult counterparts. You can't help but root for their indomitable spirit as they desperately seek a way to survive amidst devastating poverty, racial attacks, and human predators. But through it all, like The Princess Bride, this is a story of True Love, of one person's unwavering certainty that he and the woman he loves are destined to be together.
I was utterly engrossed by this film. Some creative license was likely taken with the game show sequences-- even in India, I doubt very much that the host of the show would ever share a bathroom with a contestant-- but it has great authenticity thanks to being shot on the Millionaire set. The scenes in the hot seat are every bit as effective as those on the Ganges. This is a terrific movie.
A pair of YouTube videos (part 1, part 2) offers up a montage of the creator's picks for the top 25 title sequences of all time. I think he really missed the boat-- many of them don't rate at all for me. He did get 2 of the 3 I thought of off the top of my head before watching-- Superman and Catch Me If You Can, but he missed Spider-Man 2 whose comic book recap of the first movie was brilliant. I agree with Panic Room, but also have the sense (though I can't remember it at all, so perhaps I'm wrong) that Fight Club, also by Fincher, merits inclusion.
What other cool titles am I forgetting?
I don't really keep track of how well my opinions match those of film reviewers, despite how useful knowing such a correlation would be in evaluating whether or not to go to the theater. But in the case of The Forgotten, Roger Ebert and I are on precisely the same page.
Even if you haven't seen this 2004 film, you might remember the signature scene from the trailers, in which a man tied to a chair whispers "They're listening" into Julianne Moore's ear just before getting sucked through the suddenly roofless cabin and into the night sky. The movie itself begins with an entirely different tenor, and in fact it seems like you're dropped into the middle of an interesting psychological drama about a woman who may or may not be crazy. And there was definitely a compelling movie to be made with the fundamental premise dangled before us in those opening minutes. The makers of The Forgotten were unfortunately not interested in telling that story. Instead, the story careens from psychodrama to thriller to science fiction-- which might have worked, if it wasn't both preposterous (a frazzled woman evades the most incompetant NSA agents ever) and ignorant.
Science fiction is a genre of ideas. In the best SF, the story posits some intriguing concept and then explores the ramifications of that idea. In the worst SF, wacky inventions or unfathomable aliens are merely the convenience by which the writer makes the characters dance to his tune. The Forgotten is squarely in the latter camp-- especially frustrating because the questions posed are intriguing. But there's no payoff. We barely find out the "who" or "what", and have absolutely no clue about the most important answer of all-- the "why". As Ebert points out, the film desperately needed someone to deliver a clumsy expository speech spelling out all the details. It's not even as if those details were in the film for the viewers to piece together. They're simply not there. The credits roll and you're left thinking, "What the hell was THAT about?" -- and not in an artsy, David Lynchian way.
I am a philistine.
After wading knee-deep through the lavish praise being heaped upon Pedro Almodovar's Volver, that's the only conclusion I can draw. Either that, or I saw a completely different movie.
Volver is a movie in which nothing happens. Things are set up and then never paid off. The movie is all backstory and no story. It's a character study in which we're given no reason to care about the characters. It asks us to believe that grown adults, when faced with their mother who they thought had died four years earlier, would actually believe she's a ghost-- despite her physicality.
I spent much of the movie oscillating between abject confusion at the characters' behavior and impatient incredulity that none of the many promising plot threads were getting developed for a payoff.
Naturally, the gf loved it.
I never would have gone to see this film were it not for its split identity. Part of the story involves a little girl, Ofelia, who travels with her mother to a mill serving as the headquarters for a captain of the Spanish army just after the Spanish Civil War. The captain, a regimented, callous man, is the woman's new husband and father of her unborn son. While the woman rests in advance of giving birth, the captain seeks to locate and eliminate rebels hiding in the hills. This portion of the story certainly works, and even delivers some powerful scenes as we witness the captain's uncompromising brutality, but it treads fairly familiar ground-- the abusive military leader, the housekeeper sympathetic to the rebels and protective of the children, the doctor true to his oath first. If that was all there was to the film, it would merit little true notice.
Ofelia, however, is not an ordinary child. Her soul is that of a princess of a lost underground realm. Early in her journey she discovers a stone carving of an eye, and when she replaces that piece into the stone plinth from which it came she encounters a large stickbug-like insect that she calls a fairy. The fairy follows her to the mill and, in one of the truly magical moments of the film, visibly transforms itself to match Ofelia's notion of what a fairy really looks like. It leads her to an ancient labyrinth behind the mill, where she meets a satyr-like creature called a faun who informs Ofelia of who she really is and tells her she has a chance to return to her father's realm.
The fantasy sequences are inventive and vivid. The use of CGI is utterly transparent, with the fairies integrating seamlessly into the scene and never once feeling like a distraction. The faun was particularly well-done, possessing an ancient quality to his movement and voice that utterly sells the idea that he's been around for a very long time. While the fantasy storyline takes its cues from countless fairy tales, it feels fresh and new thanks to the art design, dark palette, and direction.
So is Ofelia really a princess, or is she just a girl with an active imagination? The film is agnostic on this question until the very end, when it seems to suggest an answer by showing a shot of Ofelia from the captain's point of view. That single shot completely ruined the effect of the film for me. Part of what makes the movie work is that, by consistently treating the fantastic elements as real but showing them only within the context of Ofelia's experience, the question of their reality is left to the judgment of the viewer. Did Ofelia really draw a doorway and sneak into the mill, or did she just find an unlocked door or hidden opening? We don't know. Did she really confront a giant frog, or just crawl around in the mud? We don't know. We can either believe or not. But at the end, the filmmakers seem to answer that key question for us, which trivializes the experience and removes much of the magic. Cut that one shot, and the audience leaves the film with no clear answer and must interpret for themselves.
With that one caveat, I was utterly captivated by Pan's Labyrinth. If anything, I would have liked to have seen Ofelia delve even deeper into the fantasy world so that we could see more delightful creatures and environments from the mind of writer/director Guillermo del Toro. Don't let the fact that this is a subtitled film keep you from the theater, but don't bring the kids-- this is not a Disney film.
I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I think I'm attracted to the attention to detail such stories require, especially when traveling into the past and back. The beauty of it is that as a viewer, I'm willing to let the screenwriter define whatever rules he wants to, and I'll believe the universe works that way. In Deja Vu the writers couldn't decide how their universe worked, and so they let it work in whatever way the plot required. Sloppy.
A terrorist blows up a New Orleans ferry, and a woman's scorched body is found downriver but with a time of death predating the explosion. This sets off a chain of events which sees ATF agent Denzel Washington recruited into a top-secret FBI project that surveils through time. With a lot of expository hand-waving to basically say, "Look, we know it's ridiculous to believe that any number of satellites would provide enough data to not only watch a good chunk of New Orleans at any resolution and from any angle, but also to see through walls-- but we need to assume that it's possible for the sake of our story, so just go along with us, OK?" Washington learns that an accidental wormhole lets the FBI peer backward in time by four days. They can be anywhere in their covered area in that time, but they can't fast-forward or rewind-- they get only one shot. They need Washington to tell them where to look so they can find the guy responsible before he gets away.
But of course we in the audience know there's more to the story than that. It's Denzel Washington, people-- do you really think he's going to let the ferry blow up or the girl get killed? So it's no real surprise to discover that the wormhole isn't just a viewer, but a true portal. The way Denzel discovers this is the first time the writers break their own rules, confusing a monitor displaying the data from the wormhole with the wormhole itself, but it's not the last. They couldn't seem to decide if time was mutable or immutable. Washington participates in an autopsy of the charred woman's body, but later prevents her from being charred in the first place. Mutable. Meanwhile, the first time he visits her apartment after the autopsy, refrigerator magnets (among other things) indicate that he's already been there. Immutable. Which timeline is he in-- the one where the woman dies, or the one where he saves her? The writers don't seem to know, and so he's in both at once. The timelines of the movie just don't make sense.
Still, the film does give leverage its premise to give us a wonderful (if absurd) action sequence in which Washington chases the bad guy through time, tailing him from a distance of four days and just a few yards. It wouldn't surprise me if the entire movie were created to support this one gripping and inventive sequence. Washington, as always, is terrific, and there's some nice supporting work from Val Kilmer and Adam Goldberg. And if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the technology as given, Deja Vu serves up a solid action brownie. Just eat from the middle, and avoid all the imperfections at the edges.
Browsing the TV schedule tonight I noticed a channel showing Passenger 57 starring Wesley Snipes. And it occurred to me that they really need to rerelease that film under the title Snipes on a Plane.
X3: How to kill a franchise in one easy step. The film version of the Dark Phoenix story lacked any pathos. Hugh Jackman will return in Wolverine, but Patrick Stewart seems gone even if Professor X survives. We never saw Cyclops get disintegrated (a cut scene, or intentional?), so James Marsden might return, but Famke Jansen is clearly out and both Mystique and Magneto are neutralized (itty bitty chess piece movement not withstanding). Kelsey Grammer was spot-on as Beast, however, and it was nice to see Storm finally get to do something. There are enough characters in the X-verse to sustain a film series forever, but eradicating the characters at the heart of the mutant universe isn't the direction I'd have chosen.
Catch Me If You Can: Frank Abagnale's story-- or the version of it told in the film-- is remarkable. I particularly love that he makes millions today, legitimately, as a security consultant to banks and corporations. Leonardo DiCaprio was terrific in the film, but the real stars were the retro soundtrack, costumes, and sets. And a short segment from the real episode of To Tell the Truth on which Frank Abagnale appeared can be viewed online.
Napoleon Dynamite: A film with no believable characters in which nothing actually happens. Only the virtuoso dance finale deserves any measure of cult status-- everything else about the film is entirely forgetable.
An Inconvenient Truth: Best. Powerpoint. Ever. The comparison shots of various glaciers today vs. 10, 20, or 30 years ago leave in indelible impression of how royally screwed we are. And if that's not enough for you, the infamous cherry picker should do the trick. If Al Gore had shown this six years ago, he'd be the president today. Some say this film is paving the way for a Gore in 2008 campaign. I know I'd vote for him with far more enthusiasm than any of the Democratic candidates generated two years ago. Enthusiasm and Al Gore. Now there are two concepts you never expected to see in the same sentence.
Heart of the Game: Look in their eyes! Look in their eyes! What flabbergasts me is that as a sophomore, the star player was getting letters of interest from colleges across the country. Then she gets pregnant, misses a season, but returns as a fifth year senior and not only becomes an honors student but leads her team to the state championship-- and colleges don't want to have anything to do with her. Can anyone explain that to me?
Memorial Day isn't for another few weeks, but summer's already here in the form of Mission: Impossible III, which is everything a summer movie should be. Fun, exciting, loud, and completely devoid of any semblance of realism. Sure, Tom Cruise is playing the same guy he plays in every movie. One of the movie's key action sequences is oddly reduced to an off-screen phone-call (I'd love to know if it was cut, or just intentionally left to our imagination). The agent in distress that brings Cruise's Ethan Hunt back into the field is-- surprise!-- a woman. And I'm quite done with spy stories in which there's a mole in the hero's agency (I'm looking at you, CTU), particularly one so obviously telegraphed. It takes hours of makeup each day to make an actor resemble the celebrity he's portraying, but IMF is able to throw a just-fabricated latex mask and a wig on him and fool his closest associates. And director JJ Abrams stole his own explosive-charge-in-the-head plot device just a couple of weeks ago on Alias, which seems like an extremely poor choice on his part.
But you know... so what? I didn't care because I was just along for the ride. There was no pretentious, faux-artsy crap, no slow-motion doves. The audience was there for an action caper, and if there's one thing 5 years on Alias taught Mr. Abrams, it's how to deliver those goods.
It's not giving anything away to say that the movie opens with a scene from much later in the story, and then jumps back to the beginning. Was that in the screenplay, or a directorial choice? Because it isn't trivial. That scene tells us right up front that certain things are going to happen, which of course completely changes how the viewer relates to the rest of the film. Within minutes we know Ethan Hunt will be captured. We know his romantic interest will be captured. We know there will be an explosive charge implanted in Hunt's brain. Knowing those things, bread crumbs that are dropped earlier resonate for us immediately, rather than paying off much later. I thought the device worked, paradoxically increasing the tension despite knowing where things were headed.
It also doesn't hurt that Mission: Impossible theme is one of the most brilliant pieces of theatrical music ever crafted, better even than the Bond riff. The theme alone creates suspense and sets a mood. Pure genius.
With this, X3, Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest, Superman Returns and, dare I say it, Snakes on a Plane, this is shaping up to be a decent escapist summer.
There are a lot of rituals in high school. The prom. Homecoming. SATs. Thin and fat envelopes from colleges. Squeezing zits in the mirror. Getting a driver's license. Explaining the dent in the car to your parents.
Besides getting drunk or stoned under the bleachers, there was one particular high school ritual in which I never participated. It just never seemed all that interesting to me. Last night, almost twenty years after graduating, I rectified that situation-- and discovered that even in high school, I knew myself pretty well.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show must rank among the worst films of all time. It's bad. Egregiously bad. The script borders on incoherent-- and I'm told if I'd been able to hear more than 50% of the actual dialogue it wouldn't have improved. Even its signature Time Warp segment, a staple of bar mitzvahs and high school dances for decades, just serves to confuse the viewer with incongruous, surreal shenanigans for no apparent purpose.
But of course, the film itself isn't why Rocky Horror has become a cultural phenomenon. People go for the audience participation-- the rice, the toast, the cards, the toilet paper, the newspaper, the way-too-into-it costumed folk acting along with the movie on stage and in the aisles. And shouting at the screen. It's amazing how the Rocky Horror experience spread around the country in the pre-Internet era. The thing is, it didn't spread in exactly the same way. Different people learn different things, and then they show up at the same theater and contribute them to the group experience. That might sound fine in theory, but in practice it works rather less well. With no synchonicity, part of the theater lags behind another. Different jokes are shouted out on top of each other. One is left with the sense that each individual is merely indulging themselves with no regard for creating a common shared experience, and the theater becomes a cacaphony of competing sound. I found it deeply unsatisfying.
The particular show we attended was apparently full of virgins like myself, there for the first time. More experienced members of my party informed me that the crowd was unusually quiet, since most people didn't know the routine. Perhaps it would feel different with a crowd full of experts. The multimedia aspects-- all the stuff that gets thrown, the live reenactment, etc-- did nothing for me. Many of the comments hurled at the screen weren't funny at all, and just seemed crammed in there because they could be. The group-mind needs an editor.
Most of the patter was sexual in nature, which is probably much funnier at 18 than at 37. When the crowd goes wild at "elbow sex", I know I'm in the wrong room. I vastly prefer Mystery Science Theater 3000, which does the same kind of thing but in a more consistently funny, clever way, leaving the comedy to the professionals. I understand why Rocky Horror, which must seem rebellious and exciting to teens, is so popular at that age. But damn it, Janet, I don't need a time warp to know it would have fallen just as flat to me then as now.
If there's anything more annoying to a television fan than having a promising new series cut down in its infancy, it's when that series leaves unanswered plot points behind. We'll never get to the bottom of the mysteries behind Nowhere Man or John Doe, but for Firefly fans closure is finally here in the form of Serenity.
If you liked the show, you'll like the movie. All the same elements are there-- the snappy patter, the retro-western patois, the moral ambiguity of survival on the frontier, the gritty barely-holding-together ship. Many of the funniest bits are spoiled by the trailer (why, oh why do those Hollywood bozos not get it?), but there's plenty of Whedonesque humor throughout. Viewers unfamiliar with the series should be able to follow right along, but will certainly miss the deeper level of subtext and resonance that comes from having already spent 14 hours with these characters.
When the series ended, there were a few dangling questions: What did the Alliance do to River? Why do they want her back so badly? Where do the Reavers come from? Will Simon ever stop worrying about River long enough to return Kaylee's advances? Will Mal and Inara just drop the game and confess their feelings for each other? All of these questions get answered. In fact, the movie begins with a terrific double-flashback device that deftly handles not only the required exposition to set up the film for those who missed the television series, but answers one of those burning questions right out of the gate.
Whedon made some interesting choices with some of the characters-- in particular (highlight the space between the brackets to reveal minor spoilers) [not all of the main characters survive the film]-- which have me wondering if he planned things that way from the beginning or changed course to better serve the needs of a motion picture. Would things have wound up differently had the series been allowed to run its course?
The ultimate answer to the question of why the Alliance wants River turns out to be a bit of a letdown, if only because it was invented from whole cloth. Babylon 5 creator and former Murder, She Wrote producer J. Michael Straczynski once said that before you fire a gun, you need to have a shot of it sitting on the mantle. That's why every Bond movie includes a scene with Q demonstrating 007's gadgetry-- so when it actually gets used in the plot, it won't seem like it was pulled out of thin air. And that's actually a very ham-fisted solution to the problem. Far better is to show us the gun without having us realize it's a gun. Whedon set up the Reavers quite effectively in the television series, for example, with the result that their role in the film works. But the bug up the Alliance's butt-- the particular thing they're afraid people will discover-- came more or less out of nowhere. Perhaps the series just ended before Whedon could work in the setup, or perhaps this wasn't quite the payoff he'd planned when the show began.
The characters, however, remain faithful to their established selves-- particularly Mal, whose journey rings especially true. I have other quibbles-- the editing in the climactic space battle made things difficult to follow, some of the series regulars were given short shrift in the screenplay, and the groovy theme song was noticable in its absence-- but I left the theater remarkably satisfied.
Whaddya know... it didn't suck.
I expected to love this movie, like I did House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross. I certainly loved all the people in it-- Rebecca Pidgeon, Ricky Jay, Steve Martin, Campbell Scott. And Mamet's got a bizarre stranglehold on the English language. His characters don't speak like real people do, but in a noir patois more at home on stage than on screen. His dialogue has an ebb and flow to it that's seductive. Aaron Sorkin has a similar talent. And this is a caper film (or more precisely, a con game film), and who doesn't love a good caper? So with the deck so heavily stacked in its favor, imagine my surprise to come out of the film disappointed. The reason is simple.
I figured it out.
I was one step ahead of Mamet the entire way. I saw the con coming, knew who was involved and who wasn't (although I thought even the mother in the airport was involved, because her repeated comments about ripping the book and getting fingerprints on it seemed particularly heavy-handed), and felt no surprise at any of Mamet's attempted trickery. I kept waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under me, but the darn thing was bolted to the floorboards. And that, of course, is the joy of a caper film. Mamet was trying to con the audience, and the audience generally goes for the ride because that's why they've come to the theater. When you're able to follow the queen the con doesn't work, and neither did this film.
I imagine that the vast majority of the audience for the new film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera has never seen the Broadway musical. That makes it extremely difficult for me to speak to whether or not this is a good film for them. I've listened to the soundtrack album more times than I can count, and have seen the show twice-- most recently just after Thanksgiving on Broadway. So the stage version was fresh in my mind when I entered the movie theater last night, and the film version is remarkably faithful. There are some changes, of course-- the framing sequence from the show's opening is extended and revisited; the destruction of the chandelier, the climax of Act I on stage, is delayed until the final act; rehearsals for Don Juan have been cut-- but the essence of the film remains true to its source material. In fact, the film improves upon the original in a number of significant ways. The pace of many musical numbers is reduced sufficiently to make virtually all the lyrics comprehensible, for one thing. For another, story details have been added to help make sense of things for viewers who haven't read the original Gaston Leroux novel (how exactly does the ballet instructor know so much about the Phantom, and why didn't she intervene sooner; why is Christine so susceptible to the Phantom's charm; when and how did Christine and Raoul know each other). The result is that the story hangs together much more tightly on film than on stage.
The film's biggest problems are with the pacing-- the slowest parts of the stage show are still slow-- even more painfully so-- on film, and with the casting. Emmy Rossum's Christine is perfect-- innocent, beautiful, and always teetering on the edge of bursting out of her bodice with barely-parted lips. The spitting image of a Victorian romance heroine. Patrick Wilson's Raoul also worked for me. But the most important leg of the triangle, the Phantom himself, was lacking.
The Phantom is a figure shrouded in mystery, but his vulnerability is his most important quality. When he's on stage/screen, the Phantom should radiate charisma. All eyes go to him, and nobody dares oppose him purely because of his presence. Christine loves Raoul, yet she's in the Phantom's thrall. His aura seduces and overwhelms her. When he sings, we need to hear the humanity in his voice as it caresses Christine, and the steel in it when he scolds everyone else. Above all, he is the Angel of Music-- his voice should surpass everyone else's. That's far from the case in this film. Perhaps I'm biased from listening to Michael Crawford's virtuoso performance, with transcendantly pure notes in the title song and soul-baring honesty in Music of the Night. But the movie's Phantom didn't sweep me away with his performance. His voice lacked artistry and his performance on-screen lacked presence. The success of the story hinges on believing that this man can hold sway over Christine despite the heinous acts he commits. I didn't believe.
The film is visually stunning-- baroque in the best sense of the word, bringing the Paris opera house to lush, sumptuous life. The overture sequence, where we journey back in time and witness the opera house returning to its prime in a wash of color, is strikingly effective. The staging of Masquerade is even more effective on film than on Broadway. The movie evokes a grandeur and scope that's simply impossible on stage. The descent into the Phantom's lair, on the other hand, loses its luster. The stage transformation is nothing short of magical, but on film it's merely a change of scenery.
For fans of the Broadway show, it's undoubtedly worth the $8-10 to revisit and rediscover the musical. For people who have never seen the show, this is an easy, inexpensive way to find out what all the hype is about. And for people who have never liked Phantom, this film will not change your mind.
Like everyone else, I like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy. Don't get me wrong, Ken Jennings would certainly kick my ass in a no-holds-barred answer-and-question deathmatch, but at least my VCR's not blinking 12:00. So I generally consider it a bad sign if the first thought I have when a film's end credits start to roll is, "I need the Cliff's Notes for this movie."
Primer opens with a cryptic voiceover from one of the main characters which, by the end of the film, takes on a much larger significance. That's par for the course with this film, which is a time travel story without any intergalactic spacial anomalies or customized DeLoreans. By the end of the film the timelines have crossed each other more times than the Sopranos, and the audience is ready to fuhgeddaboutit. The filmmakers are perhaps too clever by half, choosing to tell the story by inference rather than good old fashioned storytelling. The end of the film builds to an accelerated montage of quick-cuts just screaming for a more comprehensible pace, leaving the audience exhausted and utterly baffled. It's as if Columbo gathered all the suspects in one room, said, "I suppose you're wondering why I've gathered you all here tonight," and turned around and left. The clues, the filmmakers insist, are all there. The audience is left to piece them together for themselves.
Normally I'm a huge fan of not being clubbed over the head, but by the end of the film I'd have bought the lead pipe myself. Seven of us hung out in the theater at 2 AM, just trying to make sense of what we'd seen. People are calling Primer brilliant. I'm calling it inscrutable.
And yet. I kept turning the film's plot over in my mind as I lay in bed last night, and this morning a number of pieces seem to have fallen into place. Like The Usual Suspects or Memento, this is certainly a film that would benefit from repeated viewing. But I'm not sure if I could sit through it all a second time. The characters aren't engaging on any level, so you really don't care what happens to them. The camera is often unsteady and the sound is almost universally murky. The characters tend to talk over each other in a way that feels very realistic but does nothing for the film's comprehensibility.
The backstory on Primer is at least as unusual as the film itself. Shot for a paltry $7,000, the film was selected for exhibition at Sundance and proceeded to win the Grand Jury prize. Now it's got a distribution deal and is popping up in arthouse theaters around the country, where its target audience of Mensans and film students will hopefully find it.
My advice is to wait for the DVD. You'll lose nothing on the small screen, and just like the characters you'll have the ability to replay events over and over via your own little time machine: your remote control.
If you've got some bandwidth to spare, satisfy your inner geek by visiting FanFilms.com, your source for fan-made movies. The quality certainly varies, and there's a preponderance of Star Wars material, but some efforts are truly remarkable. I've barely scratched the surface, but the film that first brought me here is Grayson, and it's well worth a look. Made for $18,000 in 18 months and filmed mostly in the parking garage of the director's apartment complex, Grayson is a trailer for a film that doesn't exist. The premise is that Dick Grayson has quit the crime-fighting game, grown up, married former Batgirl Barbara Gordon and even had a daughter. But then Batman goes and gets himself killed, and Dick dons the old tights to get whodunnit. The trailer features appearances by Batgirl, Catwoman, The Joker, The Riddler, Penguin, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern, and despite this kitchen-sinkism is quite a remarkable achievement for such a low budget effort. If I were a film student I'd be totally inspired.
TiVo recorded the 1997 Batman & Robin film, and since I hadn't seen it, I figured I'd give it a look.
Oh. My. God.
There was nothing-- and I mean nothing-- redeemable in this film. It went to hell in a handbasket right out of the gate with the flashy-blinky Batmobile and poorly-scripted video call from Commissioner Gordon (looking and sounding far more like TV's Chief O'Hara). Then... Mr. Freeze. Where to begin? They got the character all wrong. For the right way to do Mr. Freeze, look no further than the Batman animated series. Freeze should be cold and detached in his anguished, single-minded pursuit of a cure for his wife. He should not chew the scenery. He should not toss off one-liners. He should not have a coterie of minions recruited from the Mighty Ducks bench. He should not be enraptured by The Year Without A Santa Claus and force everyone to sing the Heat Miser song. He should not suffer the attentions of a scantily-clad babe whose presence among the underlings makes no apparent sense.
And then... Robin crashes into the museum on his motorcycle, leaving a hole in the wall the perfect shape of the bat signal! He then not only clings to a rocket streaking skyward under absurd G-forces, but climbs it and pulls himself inside. When Freeze blows the hatch on the rocket, the compartment does not decompress. Don't even get me started on the whole "surfing the hatch doors without a parachute" escapade in which the laws of physics are completely suspended.
And I haven't even gotten to Bane, Poison Ivy, Batgirl, and the ludicrous art direction and set design.
George Clooney once joked about killing the franchise, but that burden falls on writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher. This would have made a spectacular starring vehicle for Adam West.
This weekend I watched Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and I don't understand how Roger Ebert retained any shred of credibility after his involvement in this fiasco. In his comments about the film on its tenth anniversary, Ebert talks about how the film was a satire and succeeded on many levels. And I can only wonder if, before viewing the film, he swaps out the lenses in his glasses for ones colored a delightfully rosy shade. Perhaps it's too much a product of the time and place-- the quick-cut editing style, for example, is quintessential sixties. Having no experience with Hollywood in the sixties, absolutely nothing else about this film rings true. It plays more as parody than satire, with outrageous dialogue no human could possibly utter with a straight face and absurd characters with no discernable motivations. The Z-Man character, for all he was modeled after a real person Ebert had never met, is a cartoon who rattles off florid dialogue Aaron Sorkin wouldn't inflict on his worst day. The nth-hour plot twist about his sexuality-- written on the spur of the moment-- makes earlier scenes retrospectively incomprehensible. A complete, irredeemable mess.
Prior to that film we saw The Dark Side of the Rainbow-- the first 45-minutes or so of The Wizard of Oz playing in sync with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album. Some synchronicities really were astounding-- the "ca-ching" as Dorothy opens the door to reveal Munchkinland; "Black" on the appearance of the Wicked Witch; "The lunatic is on the grass" as Scarecrow starts to dance; the heartbeat at the end of the album as Dorothy listens to Tin Man's chest. Freaky keen.
If you're the kind of person who has his ear to the ground for this type of thing, you've probably been hearing a good bit of positive buzz for Spider-Man 2. Lots of plaudits and praise along the lines of "better than the first one," "best superhero film ever," that sort of thing. Over at Rotten Tomatoes it's got an absurdly high rating of 96%. Big hype, in other words.
For once, it's all true.
This film gets it all right. From the dynamite opening credits featuring Alex Ross artwork recapping the events of the first film, Spider-Man 2 hits the ground running and never misses a step. The CGI in the film is top-notch. Spidey looks more real than ever as he swings through Manhattan, and Doc Ock's tentacles come alive with personality as no inanimate object has since Pixar's Luxo Jr. Alfred Molina's villain is more nuanced than the laughable Green Goblin from the first film, creating a compelling and well-realized foil for Spider-Man.
The script is solid, with great attention paid to the human side of Peter Parker's double life. The character development isn't mere filler-- angst, moral struggle, and working class problems have always been at the core of the Spider-Man comics, and this movie embraces that legacy. As good as the action scenes are-- and they're very, very good, especially Spidey's first encounter with Doc Ock and an extended fight atop a runaway train-- the rest of the film is equally strong.
I especially liked how much time Spider-Man spends without his mask on this time around. The mask is part of the character, but it's hard for Spidey to look like more than a action figure in that getup. Remove the mask, and suddenly he's human. The climax of the train sequence wouldn't have been nearly as effective had Spider-Man been masked, and director Sam Raimi was very wise to rid the character of the mask during key sequences. In fact, a working title for the film at one time was Spider-Man Unmasked, and at times it seems like everyone in New York but Aunt May finds out about Peter Parker's secret identity.
That's another of the film's strengths. The whole secret identity thing builds a lot of tension. When will the supporting characters discover the truth? How will they deal with it when they do? In most superhero films, those questions are left unanswered. This movie addresses them head-on, and in doing so allows the audience to achieve a welcome dose of closure and catharsis. Bravo.
Superhero series haven't fared well past the first sequel (Richard Pryor in Superman III; the many excesses of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin). If the franchise continues to treat its characters with the same level of respect shown in this film-- and if they can keep Joel Schumacher far, far away-- we're in for a real treat with Spider-Man 3.
The Cannes jury was on crack.
I'm as anti-Bush as the next guy, assuming the next guy doesn't work in the energy industry. In fact, I finally registered to vote this year just so I can dimple a chad in the "Anyone But The Moron We Have Now" column. But this film is not a documentary, nor is it even an op-ed piece. It's a clumsy, juvenile leftist screed with more concern for name-calling than uncovering facts.
Moore's breathless linkage of Saudis to the Bush family raises an obvious question-- what kind of connections did previous administrations, such as Clinton's, have with the regime? Without knowing this answer, it's impossible to weigh Moore's accusations adequately. But he never ventures anywhere near this question, and therefore undermines his own credibility. Context is everything, and Moore provides only the narrowest view as seen through his Captain Liberal Rebuttal-Be-Gone Dogmatic Visor (tm).
The film starts promisingly, with a compelling audio-only depiction of the 9/11 crashes. And there are some funny juxtapositions and inspired musical choices. But the film goes critically off the rails when Moore takes a hard left into Flint, Michigan and devotes the last third of the film to the mother of a soldier who ultimately gets killed in Iraq. His extended profile of her convictions and grief is a cinematic sledgehammer, bludgeoning the audience with the innovative revelation that losing a loved one sucks. And by the way, the Earth is round, too. The implication that the loss is heightened by the questionable nature of the military action in which the soldier's sacrifice was made is facile and insulting, but by this point in the film the audience has come to expect that from Moore.
The Cannes jury's claim their decision was based on the quality of the film and not the political content is literally incredible. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be a milestone in political mudslinging, but not in documentary filmmaking.
Roland Emmerich is no Irwin Allen.
Allen is the man behind such disaster classics as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, and he knew the rules of the genre (he should, he created them): give the disaster center stage, stuff the cast with celebrities, put their tongues firmly in their cheeks, and let the audience play the guess-which-stars-won't-make-it game.
Oh yes, and distract people from the gaping plot holes by immersing them in SENSURROUND.
The Day After Tomorrow had pretty computer graphics, but no Sensurround and thus nothing to distract me from the horrendous performances of virtually everyone in the cast, the laughable dialogue, and the absurd plotting. And almost none of the main characters die. What's up with that? What's the point of a disaster movie where you can't wager in a death pool?
There's only one reason anyone enters the theater for this film: to see Mother Nature get paleozoic on our ass. And we get some good carnage early on as Los Angeles turns into The Wizard of Oz gone postal. But after that the film lapses into tepid melodrama about a family relationship that fails to engage the viewer on even a superficial emotional level, unless you've got X chromosomes and are inexplicably hot for Jake Gyllenhaal. There's a great wide shot as a tidal wave rocks New York, the water rushing through the city grid, but I wanted more. I wanted a flurry of scenes showing walls of water barreling through streets, of landmarks being washed away. I wanted ground's-eye views of oncoming doom. Instead the film has tunnelvision, focusing almost exclusively on Gyllenhaal and friends.
The Day After Tomorrow plays against an enormous canvas, but shows us only a tiny corner. The characters seem largely oblivious to the staggering death toll. Scenes of Americans desperately crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico come off as unintentionally funny. Where were the riots, the world-is-ending bacchanals, the global perspective of the chaos? There were many interesting stories that could have been told. What they picked wasn't one of them.
I also think it's a truism in Hollywood that if your script involves a pack of wild wolves attacking teenagers inside a frozen Russian cargo ship, you could probably use another rewrite.
I was very impressed with the technical merits of Shrek 2's animation. There's one slo-mo moment very early on where Prince Charming tosses his head, that seems filmed in slo-mo specifically to show off the amazing rendering of every strand of his hair. Truly impressive. The traveling sequences on the journey to Far Far Away also feature some fantastic stuff.
More importantly, I laughed. A lot.
There are lots of quick homages in this film-- so many, I'm sure I missed some (IMDB says there's a Spiderman reference, for instance, but I completely missed it). Favorites: Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Iron Giant-- the latter particularly because only about .01% of this movie's audience will get it, and they did it anyway!
Quibbles about the retread nature of the plot aside-- didn't we already do the "It's OK to just be ourselves" spiritual journey the first time around?-- I had a fun time, and I'm already eager for Shrek 3.
I wish it were possible to buy stock in actors and actresses, because if it were I'd invest everything I could in ten-year-old Dakota Fanning. She has me at "Hello." Her eyes are eerily expressive, and she exudes the presence of a mature woman trapped in a child's body. If somebody told me she were the incarnation of Bodhisattva, I'd be inclined to believe them. This is a girl that's going to break men's hearts someday.
I first saw her in the Sci-Fi miniseries Taken, where she stole every scene she was in. I Am Sam actually predates that performance, but her simple portrayal of a loving daughter far overshadowed Sean Penn's more flamboyant stab at a kind-hearted mentally retarded father.
The movie itself careens into a brick wall of an ending, leaving the viewer with the hollowness that comes from being robbed of an expected denouement. I'm not sure how we're expected to feel about Michelle Pfeiffer, except to reflect upon how much more interested we'd be in the upcoming Catwoman film if it was her in the black latex instead of Halle Berry. I Am Sam misfires on pretty much all counts except for Fanning.
Will Fanning be another Jodie Foster, transitioning from child ingenue to adult thespian? I suspect so. And I hope in her adolescence she neatly avoids the kind of treacle that seems to suck in teenage actresses like Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan, opting instead for more of a Christina Ricci-like trajectory. If she remains an actress, my money's on her to be a future Oscar winner. Or it would be, if I could figure out how to get it there.
Rarely have I been as pleasantly surprised by a film as by The Butterfly Effect. Apparently the secret is to get your expectations set excruciatingly low, and then see the film for free. Worked like a charm here.
That said, for much of the film I felt like I was watching a TV movie-- the production values, the way it was shot, the pacing. I think a lot of the blame goes to Melora Waters' shrill one-note voice, which created no pathos for her plight as a single mother with a child who just might have the same mental illness that hospitalized her husband. In a cast of odd performances, hers got my attention in much the same way as fingernails on a blackboard.
The high concept is that Evan (Ashton Kutcher) has the genetic ability to travel back in time simply by reading his own journals (or viewing photographs) from the past. When an old friend commits suicide, Evan starts jumping in time to try to save her, and winds up causing changes he didn't anticipate.
Like most time travel films (with the notable exception of the Back to the Future trilogy which gets it right), the metaphysics are murky and convenient to the plot. When Evan changes a pivotal event from his youth, the impact is significant enough to turn him from a gifted student into an obnoxious frat boy. A key incident from later in his childhood, however, is unaffected-- neatly allowing him to jump back to it when his idyllic frat-boy life goes horribly awry. Hmph. In fact, his journal entries seem to remain constant throughout all the historical rewrites. I kept waiting for Evan to find himself trapped in one of his new timelines, with no journals or photos to use as a launching pad. But that's not where this movie was headed.
I liked how the new timeline's events were painfully dumped into Evan's brain upon his arrival, but there's no explanation for why the memories from old timelines remain. Visually, in fact, we see them disintegrate-- so the film is inconsistent even on its own terms. Of course, we never get any explanation for why Evan and his father even have this time-traveling ability in the first place.
The butterfly effect-- the notion that very small inputs can have far-ranging and unexpected consequences-- is of course the whole point of time travel films. I'd have liked to have seen this explored on a grander scale, with Evan's changes having consequences beyond the film's characters, but that too was beyond this film's scope. Instead, the film tries to explore as far as possible within its own narrow parameters, and on those terms does a credible job.
And it has what may be the single unintentionally-funniest sequence in film history, when Kutcher runs through the halls of an asylum like a doofus. Watch for it near the end of the film. That alone was certainly worth my price of admission.
Big Fish is a great family feel-good movie with the kind of striking visual style we've come to expect from Tim Burton. Ewan McGregor has a winning earnestness that really sells the tall tales. The framing story is the least interesting aspect of the film, right up until the climax which I felt brought things together nicely. Not a great movie but a good one, and certainly one of the least treacly family films in recent memory.
Paycheck I loved, start to finish. Really, it had me at Hello. How could I fail to love a film that is basically a computer adventure game? If you've seen the trailer, you know the fundamental premise-- Ben Affleck's überhacker emerges from a job requiring a 3-year memory wipe but yielding a huge paycheck, only to discover that his pre-wipe self gave up the money for 20 mundane items instead. Those 20 items become his inventory, and over the course of the film he uses each one to extricate himself from one situation after another. It all fits together marvelously despite some minor quibbles (the items had to pass corporate scrutiny, yet included a company access card and a bullet; its unclear how Affleck was able to view a different future than his bosses without them knowing about it; none of the viewings of Affleck's ultimate fate showed Uma to be present, yet she was) and the raft of genre archetypes (massive high-tech research lab; a horde of armed security guards who can't hit their target and get beaten by a techno-geek and a biologist; corporate billionaire with no conscience). But for me all of that was secondary. For this Infocom-raised gamer, the gimmick carried the film. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
As I watched this 1959 Hitchcock film for the first time tonight, one thought kept running through my mind.
"How retro!"
Everything about the film reflects a bygone era. The cold war plot. The luxury of train travel (when was the last time Amtrak served brook trout?). The glacial pacing and 136 minute length.
The signature cropdusting scene only makes sense if the bad guys graduated from the Ernst Blofeld Academy of Criminal Arts. The lecture notes look something like this:
Dispatching a Government Agent
- Know what the agent plans to do even before the agent does, and plant a femme fatale in his path. Graduates are encouraged to capitalize on our working relationship with the Pussy Galore Finishing School of upstate New York.
- Femme fatale is authorized to tease, seduce, or pleasure the agent, but under no circumstances is she to kill him while she has him alone.
- Have femme fatale lure agent to remote location. Preferably someplace scenic or offbeat. Avoid the "in" places for assassinations. Blofeld men do not follow trends, they set them.
- Blofeld graduates are expected to show a little flair. No scheme is too elaborate. Under no circumstances should you just drive up, put a bullet in the agent's brain, and drive off. You are criminal masterminds, not common thugs.
- Blofeld men flaunt their confidence. Do remember to gloat, divulge your master plan, and leave the agent unattended.
- Quiz Friday. 25% of final grade. Bring sword-cane to class.
I haven't seen many Hitchcock films-- Psycho, To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and now this-- but what I've seen has left me puzzled at the man's street cred. These films are neither all that nor a bag of chips. Is it a generational thing-- a case of them being the cat's pajamas back in the day but not holding up to a modern moviegoer? Or am I just one of the great unwashed, unable to appreciate a master's scraps if he dropped them into a bowl with my name on them?
The whole "Where's Hitchcock" cameo thing is pretty cool, though. If I were his estate, I'd totally sue those Waldo guys.
Moviegoers plunking down their hard-earned shekels for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World expect billowing sails, creaking lumber, and blazing cannons. Director Peter Weir delivers on all counts right out of the gate. No gratuitous prologue or tedious establishment of the characters here-- we come aboard just in time for a splintering volley of cannonfire. The naval life grittily depicted here is crowded, filthy, dramatically striated by rank and privilege, and filled with vast stretches of boredom punctuated by brief eruptions from all the gates of Hell. That anyone could have considered such a life desirable is perhaps the surest damnation of the state of Britain in the early 1800s. Then again, much of the crew was typically made up of convicts and the poor, who signed on for the promised daily vittles (served on square trays, hence the term "square meal").
Crowe's Captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey is not only a loyal British officer and leader of men, but a father figure to the many boys aboard-- kind of a Mr. French of the high seas. And ladies, it gets better-- did I mention he plays the violin?
The film is refreshingly devoid of philosophy, barely-concealed messages, and heart-warming self-realization. Even the obligatory Jiminy Cricket manages to be a compelling character in his own right. Master and Commander is just a ripping naval yarn, with grand visuals and the ring of truth.
Top Ten Things I Learned From XXX
The first fifteen seconds of The Scorpion King gave me one of the heartiest laughs in recent memory.
I should have quit while I was ahead.
I'll say one thing for David Fincher-- when he finds a device that works, he's not afraid to run it into the ground in film after film. And since I happen to like that device-- the camera moving into normally concealed spaces like a keyhole or ventilation shaft, now commonly seen on CSI-- I'm ok with that.
I thought the script did a credible job of creating tension from the otherwise static situation of the heroes being holed up inside an impenetrable fortress with the bad guys trying to get in. Unfortunately, some of it was created by the ham-fisted plot device named Raoul. We never learn why Junior brought him in on the job-- a decision which makes no sense. They expected the house to be empty, so why bring along a third man with whom to split the money-- especially when you're lying to them about how much money's involved?
Fun as it is to pick apart flaws in the foundation of a film, I can overlook them. What I can't forgive is when the filmmaker breaks his own rules, which happened at least twice here. Forest Whitaker's character, builder of the panic room, claims the panic room is equipped with a one-way PA system, not a two-way intercom. But later Jodie Foster talks to the panic room via an intercom in the master bedroom. Sloppy. And in the set up, they make a point of showing how the steel door has motion sensors to prevent it from closing if there's something in the way, yet later it shuts on Raoul's fingers for no apparent reason.
I was also greatly disappointed in the lack of payoff to the daughter's needles. Fincher makes a point of showing her hiding the medical kit and then palming some needles, but in the end she uses them as an ineffectual stabbing weapon against Raoul's raging attack on her mom. Why bother?
The opening title sequence, with credits rendered in 3-D perspectives against a cityscape, is not only jarringly pretentious but ill-fitting for a claustrophobic thriller. And the sequence took a year to create! Un-freaking-believable.
I prefer more plot in my films. This was pretty much just a snapshot of a single raid in Somalia. The characters were almost completely interchangeable, and in fact I had no idea who some of them were-- which rather blunted the impact when they got injured or killed. When all your supporting characters sport identical haircuts and uniforms, it behooves you to make sure your audience can still tell them apart.
But more importantly, who's brilliant idea was this "nobody gets left behind" policy? Two soldiers died rescuing the pilot of the second downed chopper, and more casualties were taken recovering dead bodies, for crying out loud. The general's job is to make a cost-benefit analysis of a rescue operation, not rigidly adhere to noble but questionable dogma. As depicted in the film, the general was an idiot. If they'd simply abandoned the first downed chopper as a casualty of war, they'd have lost fewer men overall. Granted hindsight's 20/20, but this general had tunnelvision. That he took full responsibility for the raid's outcome is cold comfort to the families of the soldiers whose lives he sacrificed.
Finally got around to watching Gladiator tonight. Message to the Academy:
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah?
I'm a little burned out on movie reviews, so I'll keep this one brief. I caught a good chunk of this year's National Spelling Bee on ESPN. And frankly, Spellbound didn't really give me anything new. There is neither narration nor narrative through the first half of the film, and the camera's attention at times wanders far from the subject. I wanted to know more about the kids themselves-- What they do when they're not studying? How are they treated by their peers? Why do they care about the Bee?-- and less about their families. Part two compresses the two-day event into less than an hour, letting us root for our favorite kids as they drop off one by one. But we never really get a sense of what it's like to be IN the Bee-- there's no behind-the-scenes coverage of kids between rounds, or how the word lists are chosen, or why the rules are the way they are. The most interesting questions go unasked.
If you're a stranger to the National Spelling Bee, Spellbound is worth your time. But if you've even been sucked into the Bee while channel surfing, Spellbound doesn't tell you anything you don't already know.
If you're Mike Meyers, you can get away with recycling all the best jokes from your earlier movie, packing in some new filler, and passing it off as a new film. I'm not sure how he gets away with it, mind you, but he does. If you're Arnold Schwarzenegger... you don't. Despite the fact that you could crush Mike Meyers between your butt cheeks.
Warning, some spoilers follow. Nothing huge, but you've been warned. And when talking about this movie, "warn" is definitely the operative word.
Terminator 3 is a film that shamelessly lacks any shred of originality. The basic plot of the vastly superior T2-- obsolete Terminator goes back in time to protect John Connor from more advanced Terminator-- is exactly what we've got this time around. The T-X is ultimately dispatched using ideas lifted wholesale from the first Terminator film: detached from its body, its upper torso pursues its target beneath an enormous, crushing weight. It's not even content to just steal from itself! When Arnold's programming gets coopted by the T-X, John shuts him down using the old "What is your primary mission? You're about to fail that mission!" canard which, along with the "omnipotent alien race", was the favorite rabbit in Gene Roddenberry's bag of tricks. I literally threw up my hands at that point.
T3 suffers from a fundamental cloning dilemma-- you can copy the body, but not the soul. Although it references the past films, it lacks all of their charm. The humanization of Arnold's Terminator in T2 was central to the story's theme of changing one's destiny. T3 doesn't just eschew such touches, it makes no pretense of having themes or subtext at all. The movie is essentially one long chase scene-- and not even a particularly compelling one.
When the action stops long enough for a conversation, you suddenly appreciate the simple joys of things exploding. The exposition is painfully ham-fisted. When Kate Brewster-- destined to be Connor's future wife-- picks up an automatic weapon and destroys a flying attack drone, Nick Stahl's John Connor looks at her slack-jawed. Why? "You remind me of my mother." Ewww.
What bothered me the most about the film was its underlying premise-- that Judgment Day is inevitable, and they only succeeded in delaying it in T2. It simply makes no sense. Granted, the whole notion of "sense" in a film whose entire foundation rests on a time paradox is questionable, but you pretty much get one freebie for suspension of disbelief-- and that's the notion that Connor's father was sent back in time to save his mother and conceive John. Beyond that, you've got to play by the rules. And in T2, the self-creation paradox was foiled. The CPU and arm of the original Terminator were destroyed, as was all the research data that led to the creation of Skynet. You can't just turn around and say that Skynet comes about from an entirely different quarter-- that's dirty pool. You can't render the sacrifices and triumphs of the characters in T2 meaningless-- that's insulting to the audience, and the same problem I had with killing off Newt and Hicks before the opening credits of Alien 3.
And don't even get me started on logical and technical flaws. Controlling a police car's circuitry does not enable you to cause the accelator pedal to depress. You'll never convince me that a liquid-encased metal endoskeleton is a superior design to a machine composed entirely of liquid metal. The T-X must transform her digit into a specialized tool to reprogram electronics, but can identify DNA simply by licking it?
The ending-- arguably the most provocative part of the film-- leaves the door wide open for more sequels. But as far as I'm concerned, the franchise is terminated.
The horror genre has been overrun with slasher and campy wink-at-the-camera films. Even last year's surprise hit Jeepers Creepers was essentially a monster movie. 28 Days Later also treads familiar ground, mining George Romero's oeuvre and updating it for a new millenium. Refreshingly, the setting this time is London-- someplace we don't often see on screen unless Pierce Brosnan or Mike Meyers is involved.
In the opening teaser a group of activists breaks into a research lab to liberate chimps being experimented upon. Unknown to them, the chimps have been infected with "Rage", a deadly virus spread through blood and saliva which, 20 seconds after infection, turns you into a rampaging zombie. When the first chimp they release bites one of their faces off, things quickly go to hell in a handbasket. Let this be a lesson to any other research outfits playing God out there: if you're cooking up some lethal genetic soup, perhaps you should have more security than a mag-stripe access card. A series of security airlocks, perhaps? 'Round-the-clock armed guards? An underground bunker?
28 days later... Jim awakens from a traffic-accident-induced coma to discover the city is empty. Phone handsets dangle on their cords, trash billows like tumbleweeds, and we're treated to some wonderfully eerie shots of empty London streets as Jim tries to find out what's happened.
This set-up is handled terrifically, and the first act offers up a handful of genuine scares. I'm not an easy guy for horror films to "get"-- I don't jump easily. I jumped. The great thing about these zombies is that they're not shambling, rotting corpses. These are living, infected people who run and chase at full speed, and that makes them much creepier and scarier than the Dawn of the Dead crowd and lets the filmmaker pull off some marvelously effective quick-cut come-out-of-nowhere attack sequences. But I'd love to know why film zombies never seem to turn on each other. Here the Infected seem to have a sixth sense that lets them hone in on normal people, and we're not sure why. They don't eat them-- they just attack them, projectile vomit some blood, pass on the infection, and move on-- performance artists run amok. If the Infected are in some kind of mindless, virus-caused rage, I'd think they'd be far less discriminatory about who they take it out on. Now, if you're possessed by Satan or merged into an alien group mind, that's a completely different matter. And different movies.
28 Days Later takes a wrong turn in the third act, when the movie mostly leaves the zombies behind and focuses on a group of surviving soldiers Jim and his companions come across. Suddenly we leave the horror genre, morphing into an action film with Jim as Rambo-- or, if you prefer, John McLean-- as he tries to rescue his companions from soldiers who've spent a little too much time watching Apocalypse Now. I felt like I was watching two completely different movies, and I much preferred the first one.
I was left unsatisfied. The movie leaves unanswered some tantalizing questions about the fate of the world at large. We see only a fleeting glimpse of a newspaper headline. No news footage, no flashbacks, no filling in the holes. Having used the plague to set the stage for its story, the film is not interested in chasing after any of the more provocative questions it raises.
Ah... summer. Though some series (Monk, Stargate: SG-1 are just picking up again, most are on hiatus which means fewer things appearing at the top of Tivo's Now Playing list. A perfect time to catch up on movies saved from premium channel preview weekends earlier in the year.
Tonight: Cube 2: Hypercube. This is the sequel to Cube, a provocative low budget allegory for the pointlessness of society and the inability of individuals within it to work together towards a common goal. Plus, it has the coolest pre-title teaser ever. The story goes something like this: a bunch of random people-- an autistic savant, an attactive woman, a burly dullard, an egghead, and the rest of the usual stereotypes-- wake up inside a cube full of ever-shifting, identical cubical rooms. Some rooms are safe. Others are deathtraps (in the purest D&D sense of the term). As they grapple with what the Cube is and why they're there, they must work together to figure out how to escape.
The story in Cube 2 goes something like this: a bunch of random people-- a blind genius, an attractive woman, a burly dullard, an egghead, and the rest of the usual stereotypes-- wake up inside a hypercube full of identical cubical rooms. Some force inside the Hypercube occasionally manifests itself with deadly results. As they grapple with what the Hypercube is and why they're there, they must work together to figure out how to escape.
Now where have I heard that before?
The acting in Cube 2 is (a little) better than in the first, and the effects are (a little) improved. The other changes are all for the worse. Neither film has much of a plot, but the first film had a puzzle at its core and an allegory as its structure. You also never knew if the room they were entering was going to be safe or deadly-- and you hoped it'd be deadly, to see what nifty new way they thought of to kill someone. Cube 2 has none of that going for it. The Cube in the first film was a complete mystery. We never find out who built it or why, and that's a large part of the point. The sequel gives all the victims a common connection that strains logic, tells us exactly who built the Hypercube and why, and offers an X-Files-ish ending that punctuates the movie with an elipsis instead of an exclamation point, or even a question mark.
Where the first movie really had no plot, this one really makes no sense.
If you've read Word Freak, then Scott Petersen's new documentary Scrabylon isn't really anything new. You've already met most of these people, and at greater length. But we do get to associate faces and voices with the names, and the images of Joe Edley doing tai chi among the tables of the National Scrabble Championships speaks volumes.
The most revelatory moment for me came with the all-too-brief coverage of the Championship's final match. The filmmaker really blew it here, missing a great opportunity to capture the tension and drama so obviously present in the moment. In fact, with the room full of onlookers riveted to closed-circuit monitors and second-guessing the players, it reminded me a great deal of the World Series of Poker. With the advent of the World Poker Tour series, it's clear that this kind of event can be compelling television. I'd have loved to see the whole hour devoted to these matches. I hope ESPN or a similar venue will cover the next Scrabble championship, with color commentary and play-by-play from experts ("Joe's got a bingo on that rack-- playing PACHYDERM through the C and D would net him 94 points-- but it's a hard find; he might go for HYDRAE instead"). Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis, a regular on NPR, seems a natural for the job. In the meantime, Scrabylon barely scratches the surface of the intense world Fatsis exposed in Word Freak. Read the book.
Take the writer/director of the fabulous, underappreciated animated delight The Iron Giant and hand him the keys to the Pixar renderfarm and you get The Incredibles. Still seventeen months away, but I can't remember the last time I've been this excited about a film. Hilarious teaser, great concept. Pixar hasn't made a stinker yet, and this one doesn't appear to be targeted at the kiddies. I can hear the licensing train pulling out of the station already.
In 1981, three ten-year-old Mississippi boys saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like many of us, they were enchanted by Spielberg's homage to 30's serials. But they took their enthusiasm a quantum leap further. They decided to film a shot-for-shot remake of the movie. Seven years later, they finished it. Harry Knowles of Ain't it Cool News, who has seen the film, says they did an incredible job.
Their film is not currently available anywhere, but buzz is building. It wouldn't surprise me to see it appear on the festival circuit or on DVD. And when it does, I want to see it. It doesn't really matter how good or bad it is (and apparently, it's surprisingly good). These kids-- adults now-- dedicated their entire adolescence to realizing a dream. Their film celebrates the power of art to inspire us, and I want to bear witness.
And you know, this should earn those guys big bonus points on that geek test.
X2: X-Men United didn't need to work very hard to make me happy. I wanted lots of Nightcrawler, my favorite X-Man. I wanted cool uses of mutant powers. I wanted references to the comics that the casual movie-goer might not get but which I, as a reformed comic book geek who used to read all the X titles religiously but hasn't seen one in about a decade, would understand.
The film did not disappoint.
Nightcrawler rocked. The opening scene of the film is a brilliant showcase of what Nightcrawler can do, with great acrobatics and dozens of bamfs. The film glosses over his origins and persecution in the German countryside and fails to establish any hint that Mystique is his mother despite giving them some face time together, it nevertheless gets the essence of his character correct. A friend didn't like the devout Christian underpinnings and strong German accent-- elements easily overlooked in the comics-- but they're dead-on. The body markings deviate from the comics, and I admit I'd have preferred a bit more fuzzy elf-ness, but this is a Nightcrawler I hope to see more of in X3.
Not surprisingly, Wolverine got many of the best scenes and even managed to get a "bub" in (still no "I'm the best there is at what I do," though). He kicked some serious butt and was very faithful to his comic roots. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a Wolverine solo film, and I think Jackman could carry it.
We also got some nice character development for Iceman, who was barely a cameo the first time around. Iceman is another favorite of mine, and though his powers were barely used this time out, they've certainly opened the door for more of him as the series progresses.
Character development was pretty sparse elsewhere. Storm is still a cipher-- I'm amazed that Halle Berry thinks the role is worth her while. Cyclops was a complete non-entity here. I love Famke Janssen, and though Jean got some decent screen time we didn't really learn more about her. Not that it matters-- she either wants out of the franchise, or they're preparing to launch the Phoenix saga in the next film.
Nice cameos by Colossus, Siryn, Kitty Pryde, and Hank McCoy. USA Today claims Leech and Gambit also popped up, but if so they were neither named nor shown using their abilities (although I did see Gambit's name on a computer screen). I also loved how Mystique busted Magneto out of prison, and the way they showed how just a tiny bit of metal can be a Very Bad Thing in Magneto's hands.
Though the cast of characters is expanding too rapidly to do it justice, X2 was pretty much what I want in a comic book movie. Cool superpowers, good-looking characters, exciting action scenes, and enough plot to hold it together. Now bring on Phoenix and the Sentinels.