It's that time of year. Let's just get this bit over with...
10. Cinderella Man: Great boxing movie, great biopic, great movie. It just works.
9. Land of The Dead: The gore is plentiful, the satire is sharp, the characters are fun and zombies finally act like like ZOMBIES again. Thank you, Mr. Romero.
8. A History of Violence: Forget what the critics all decided it's message was before seeing it and just see it. David Cronenberg has made one of the all-time great American crime/revenge stories, no matter what you think it's "really about."
7. The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe: Disney finally bankrolls an adaptation of a classic without mucking everything up, resulting in a family epic embraced by everyone from devout Christians to the Newest of the New Age. Nearly a half-century later, C.S. Lewis' work is still able to enthrall an audience whether you think the Lion is Jesus or you just love a good fairytale.
6. Batman Begins: A rich character drama, a complex crime thriller, as great a meditation on revenge and redemption as were "Munich" and "Violence," scenes of powerful humanity, a 3rd act of tremendous scale and action, a film of real meaning about a man who dresses up in a bat costume. In a new millenium that's forced the cultural elite to take Hobbits and Wizards seriously, can the Superhero be far behind?
5. Sin City: Some dismissed it as "geek noir" without even realizing that that's no longer an insult. The most modern tools of filmmaking, the classic style of an age long passed, a grand cast of actors across generations and the black and white soul of cinema are here joined and whole new animal emerges. The future is now.
4. King Kong: See above. Peter Jackson's epic tribute to his favorite movie puts joyful humor and real romance side-by-side with awesome action and visual poetry, and puts the Monster back into Monster Movies.
3. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: Once unforgivably villified as a screenwriter's antichrist, buddy movie specialist Shane Black returns with a vengeance, writing and directing one of the best action/buddy comedies in years. A loving riff on dime store paperback noir, with a star turn by Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer in his best role in years.
2. Munich: Too much has been made of it's supposed politics, not enough of it's actual filmmaking. Steven Speilberg makes his best film since Ryan, reaffirms the spy thriller as a great drama and takes mainstream movie up to the level of high art.
1. Good Night and Good Luck: Smartly written and photographed in gorgeous retro-cool style, Clooney and company retell the Creation Myth of modern TV journalism is honest, straightforward terms anchored by a stunner of a lead turn by David Straitharn. Brava.
Saturday, 31 December 2005
Tuesday, 27 December 2005
REVIEW: Brokeback Mountain
Note: contains spoilers, NOT "the big one."
Here it is, the Gay Cowboy Movie.
I'm not supposed to call it that, I know. Months of studio hype and preemptive finger-wagging (looking at you, Jeffrey Wells) have gone into the goal of telling people NOT to call this The Gay Cowboy Movie. "It's not a Gay Cowboy Movie," goes the tune, "it's a human story"... "it's a universal love story"... "it's a SAD Cowboy Movie." Guess what? When a studio works THIS hard to convince people that they haven't made "The Gay Cowboy Movie," it usually means they've made "The Gay Cowboy Movie."
Here's the nitty-gritty of it: They don't like being called "The Gay Cowboy Movie" because they're annoyed that people still remember the infamous "South Park" episode which brilliantly offered up "gay cowboys eating pudding" as the perfect description of a Sundance-style critical-fave. Being spoofed is one thing, being spoofed multiple years before you even exist has just got to be irritating when you're fishing for Oscars.
The film's release has been built up as a kind of pop-cultural phenomenon. "Taking a trip to Brokeback Mountain" is common slang for gay affairs, it's trailer has been spoofed on SNL before anyone had seen the film, Nathan Lane has used two unrelated TV guest appearances to stage elaborate jokes at it's expense, the New York Times recently ran a full column on the "all your bases are belong to us"-style following that's sprung up around Jake Gyllenhaal's melodramatic wail of "I wish I could quit you!!!!" in the trailers as a go-to cinephile laugh line.
It's got it's serious hype, too: Gay advocacy groups are hoping for a mainstream hit to help out with visibility, culture-watchers are predicting a red-state/blue-state culture wars skirmish which "Christian"-Right critics have been only too happy to provide, and the studio is hoping the controversy, infamy and the reliability of director Ang Lee propells them to awards season glory.
All of this pre-release hyperbole has led to two different forms of ACTUAL-release hyperbole suffocating too much of the films' early reviews: Some making the film out as the most significant work since "Citizen Kane" because they find it in agreement with their politics, while others vilify it like "Gigli" because it disagrees with theirs. Both approaches are wrong, and do disservice to the craft of film criticism. The only fair way to approach any film of any subject is objectively, with as little prejudice good or bad as is possible...
...and, speaking objectively, I'm a bit dissapointed to report that; beyond all the hype and controversy; "Brokeback Mountain" doesn't really work.
It's 1963 when quiet Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and extroverted rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are teamed up as tenders of a large sheep heard on the titularWyoming mountain (which technically makes this "The Gay Shepherds-Wearing-Cowboy-Hats Movie," but nevermind). They hit it off, get stone-drunk one night and then, as they say, one thing leads to another. "Y'know I ain't queer," says Ennis. "Me neither," agrees Jack, but an impromptu sexual encounter the night before seems to argue otherwise.
This early part of the film is the best part, minimal on dialogue and set among some truly stunning cinematography of mountains, forests and wide-open skies. Lee seems to have particular love for imagery of waves of sheep cascading over the hills. The minimal dialogue, meaninwhile, helps lessen the problem of Ledger's strangely-chosen accent and odd delivery. Those anticipating (or dreading) the much-touted sex scene are in for a bit of a surprise either way, as the sequence takes place in near-darkness, fully clothed, primarily in facial closeups. Shocking? Controversial? Hardly. Still, at this point we're off to a good start.
It doesn't last, though, as The film meanders into one of the most repetitive 2nd acts of recent note: Ennis and Jack part ways, meet and marry women, have kids, start lives... then they meet again four years later and the affair begins again; morphing the film into an angsty male-male reworking of "Same Time Next Year." The marriages get strained, the "fishing trips" get suspicious, Ennis' wife Alma figures it out and loses control, lather, rinse and repeat. And this is where things start to go haywire...
The first real sign of trouble ahead comes in the form of a gratuitous scene that seems to exist solely to quell potential audience snickering over the "masculinity" of it's hero: At a 4th of July picnic, Ennis gets to go "Billy Jack" on a pair of gnarly bikers who dare to cuss in front of his wife and girls with... I kid you not... a roundhouse kick, and the result looks like something out of Steven Segal. Recent Steven Segal. (Later, Jack gets a "assert yourself against domineering father-in-law over symbolic turkey carving" scene that plays like the "you go, dude!" topper to a sitcom's Thanksgiving episode.)
Then arises the film's central "conflict," and unfortunately instead of giving the film direction it causes it to (in my opinion, anyway) jump the shark quite definitively: Jack wants Ennis to come be a rancher with him, Ennis refuses; preferring instead the current situation of fooling around on Alma with Jack at his convenience. To rationalize this, he relates a story of how his father made him and his brother look at the corpse of a murdered gay man as kids. Really.
I cannot stress enough how much this development hurts the ability of this film to connect on emotional level, at least in my case. Did Ang Lee and his writers really feel that Ennis' closestedness required an origin story? To my mind, this element is dramatically unnecessary and weakens the film as a whole: It takes the focus off the issue of Ennis' ability to deal with his own personal insecurity and broadens it out to a societal commentary, i.e. "if only society-represented-by-his-father wasn't so intolerant of homosexuals, he wouldn't be afraid to come out and all the pain caused to him and his loved ones by his secret-keeping wouldn't exist."
It's a nice stab at mixing message with story, and one I'd more or less agree with to boot... but it weakens the actual story by taking the easy way out with regards to Ennis. The plain fact is, this is supposed to be the tragedy of his refusal to admit his true feelings tearing him and those around him apart, but he's not likable enough for it to work and a simple "it's dad/society's fault" explanation isn't enough by a long shot. He cheats on, ignores, emotionally (and nearly physically) abuses his wife; he knowingly toys with Jack's volatile emotions and basically jerks everyone who's foolish enough to love him around without much visible remorse. The film wants us to see this as a tragedy of a man's secrets eating him alive from within, but why am I supposed to feel bad for him? This isn't a tragic figure, this is a deep-in-denial coward that we're asked to accept as a tragic figure because the music and cinematography tell us to.
The other characters are more sympathetic. Michelle Williams as Alma is a stunner, playing the film's most immediately sympathetic and, problematically, the most dramatically shortchanged figure. Gyllenhaal puts in a good turn as Jack, who seems a cipher at first and shows more depth as the story progresses. Anne Hathaway emerges as a knockout playing Jack's impossibly gorgeous Rodeo Queen wife, clad throughout the film as a kind of drool-licious cowgirl fetish-doll. And she can act, too, especially in a subtle scene in the 3rd act where she's called on to emote through little more than disguised coughing.
I feel bad having to give the film a marginally negative review, because there's a lot in here that really works. Individual scenes have great power, even in the 2nd act where they lose their power by being repeated over and over and over again. But the film doesn't gel, and there's too much disconnect from what it wants to be and what it is. What starts out as an interesting relationship drama becomes a thinly-stretched message peice, and finally a misdirected stab at tragedy vis-a-vi a character who doesn't engender enough sympathy.
Nice try... not enough.
FINAL RATING: 4/10
Here it is, the Gay Cowboy Movie.
I'm not supposed to call it that, I know. Months of studio hype and preemptive finger-wagging (looking at you, Jeffrey Wells) have gone into the goal of telling people NOT to call this The Gay Cowboy Movie. "It's not a Gay Cowboy Movie," goes the tune, "it's a human story"... "it's a universal love story"... "it's a SAD Cowboy Movie." Guess what? When a studio works THIS hard to convince people that they haven't made "The Gay Cowboy Movie," it usually means they've made "The Gay Cowboy Movie."
Here's the nitty-gritty of it: They don't like being called "The Gay Cowboy Movie" because they're annoyed that people still remember the infamous "South Park" episode which brilliantly offered up "gay cowboys eating pudding" as the perfect description of a Sundance-style critical-fave. Being spoofed is one thing, being spoofed multiple years before you even exist has just got to be irritating when you're fishing for Oscars.
The film's release has been built up as a kind of pop-cultural phenomenon. "Taking a trip to Brokeback Mountain" is common slang for gay affairs, it's trailer has been spoofed on SNL before anyone had seen the film, Nathan Lane has used two unrelated TV guest appearances to stage elaborate jokes at it's expense, the New York Times recently ran a full column on the "all your bases are belong to us"-style following that's sprung up around Jake Gyllenhaal's melodramatic wail of "I wish I could quit you!!!!" in the trailers as a go-to cinephile laugh line.
It's got it's serious hype, too: Gay advocacy groups are hoping for a mainstream hit to help out with visibility, culture-watchers are predicting a red-state/blue-state culture wars skirmish which "Christian"-Right critics have been only too happy to provide, and the studio is hoping the controversy, infamy and the reliability of director Ang Lee propells them to awards season glory.
All of this pre-release hyperbole has led to two different forms of ACTUAL-release hyperbole suffocating too much of the films' early reviews: Some making the film out as the most significant work since "Citizen Kane" because they find it in agreement with their politics, while others vilify it like "Gigli" because it disagrees with theirs. Both approaches are wrong, and do disservice to the craft of film criticism. The only fair way to approach any film of any subject is objectively, with as little prejudice good or bad as is possible...
...and, speaking objectively, I'm a bit dissapointed to report that; beyond all the hype and controversy; "Brokeback Mountain" doesn't really work.
It's 1963 when quiet Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and extroverted rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are teamed up as tenders of a large sheep heard on the titularWyoming mountain (which technically makes this "The Gay Shepherds-Wearing-Cowboy-Hats Movie," but nevermind). They hit it off, get stone-drunk one night and then, as they say, one thing leads to another. "Y'know I ain't queer," says Ennis. "Me neither," agrees Jack, but an impromptu sexual encounter the night before seems to argue otherwise.
This early part of the film is the best part, minimal on dialogue and set among some truly stunning cinematography of mountains, forests and wide-open skies. Lee seems to have particular love for imagery of waves of sheep cascading over the hills. The minimal dialogue, meaninwhile, helps lessen the problem of Ledger's strangely-chosen accent and odd delivery. Those anticipating (or dreading) the much-touted sex scene are in for a bit of a surprise either way, as the sequence takes place in near-darkness, fully clothed, primarily in facial closeups. Shocking? Controversial? Hardly. Still, at this point we're off to a good start.
It doesn't last, though, as The film meanders into one of the most repetitive 2nd acts of recent note: Ennis and Jack part ways, meet and marry women, have kids, start lives... then they meet again four years later and the affair begins again; morphing the film into an angsty male-male reworking of "Same Time Next Year." The marriages get strained, the "fishing trips" get suspicious, Ennis' wife Alma figures it out and loses control, lather, rinse and repeat. And this is where things start to go haywire...
The first real sign of trouble ahead comes in the form of a gratuitous scene that seems to exist solely to quell potential audience snickering over the "masculinity" of it's hero: At a 4th of July picnic, Ennis gets to go "Billy Jack" on a pair of gnarly bikers who dare to cuss in front of his wife and girls with... I kid you not... a roundhouse kick, and the result looks like something out of Steven Segal. Recent Steven Segal. (Later, Jack gets a "assert yourself against domineering father-in-law over symbolic turkey carving" scene that plays like the "you go, dude!" topper to a sitcom's Thanksgiving episode.)
Then arises the film's central "conflict," and unfortunately instead of giving the film direction it causes it to (in my opinion, anyway) jump the shark quite definitively: Jack wants Ennis to come be a rancher with him, Ennis refuses; preferring instead the current situation of fooling around on Alma with Jack at his convenience. To rationalize this, he relates a story of how his father made him and his brother look at the corpse of a murdered gay man as kids. Really.
I cannot stress enough how much this development hurts the ability of this film to connect on emotional level, at least in my case. Did Ang Lee and his writers really feel that Ennis' closestedness required an origin story? To my mind, this element is dramatically unnecessary and weakens the film as a whole: It takes the focus off the issue of Ennis' ability to deal with his own personal insecurity and broadens it out to a societal commentary, i.e. "if only society-represented-by-his-father wasn't so intolerant of homosexuals, he wouldn't be afraid to come out and all the pain caused to him and his loved ones by his secret-keeping wouldn't exist."
It's a nice stab at mixing message with story, and one I'd more or less agree with to boot... but it weakens the actual story by taking the easy way out with regards to Ennis. The plain fact is, this is supposed to be the tragedy of his refusal to admit his true feelings tearing him and those around him apart, but he's not likable enough for it to work and a simple "it's dad/society's fault" explanation isn't enough by a long shot. He cheats on, ignores, emotionally (and nearly physically) abuses his wife; he knowingly toys with Jack's volatile emotions and basically jerks everyone who's foolish enough to love him around without much visible remorse. The film wants us to see this as a tragedy of a man's secrets eating him alive from within, but why am I supposed to feel bad for him? This isn't a tragic figure, this is a deep-in-denial coward that we're asked to accept as a tragic figure because the music and cinematography tell us to.
The other characters are more sympathetic. Michelle Williams as Alma is a stunner, playing the film's most immediately sympathetic and, problematically, the most dramatically shortchanged figure. Gyllenhaal puts in a good turn as Jack, who seems a cipher at first and shows more depth as the story progresses. Anne Hathaway emerges as a knockout playing Jack's impossibly gorgeous Rodeo Queen wife, clad throughout the film as a kind of drool-licious cowgirl fetish-doll. And she can act, too, especially in a subtle scene in the 3rd act where she's called on to emote through little more than disguised coughing.
I feel bad having to give the film a marginally negative review, because there's a lot in here that really works. Individual scenes have great power, even in the 2nd act where they lose their power by being repeated over and over and over again. But the film doesn't gel, and there's too much disconnect from what it wants to be and what it is. What starts out as an interesting relationship drama becomes a thinly-stretched message peice, and finally a misdirected stab at tragedy vis-a-vi a character who doesn't engender enough sympathy.
Nice try... not enough.
FINAL RATING: 4/10
REVIEW: The Producers (2005)
Now this is just downright incestuous. Here's a movie version of the broadway musical version of a movie about broadway musicals. It's damn funny, overall, so the snake-eating-it's-tail aspect of this is mostly forgivable.
The story is the same as the 1970s Mel Brooks classic that inspired the musical: Failed broadway producer Max Bialystock and unstable accountant Leopold Bloom have stumbled on a scheme to bilk investors out of a fortune by overselling a play garaunteed to fail: A pro-Nazi romp called "Springtime for Hitler" written by crazed Nazi Hanz Leibkind. Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane replace Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel as Leo and Max, while pun-heavy song numbers replace (most of) the original's zany wordplay. Will Ferrell turns up as Leibkind, and Uma Thurman steals huge chunks of the film as Ulla the Swedish secretary.
Like all the best of Brooks' material, the film coasts on wicked fusion of bad taste, absurdity and time-tested Friar's Club-ready schtick. The songs are catchy and the dances, while nothing amazingly complex, are great peices of physical comedy. Material-wise, and certainly performance-wise, the film works.
What fails to work is much of the direction and staging, courtesy of Susan Strohman. She directed the broadway version, by all accounts to great effect, but seems quite out of her element working with film. Too many scenes lack flair and composition, and someone seems to have neglected to instruct Broderick in the vocal difference between onstage emoting and onscreen emoting in a few too many scenes.
As mentioned above, the actors all aquit themselves nicely but Uma steals the show. Looking sexier than she has in awhile and showing off muy-impressive dancing and singing skills, she checks yet MORE items off of the "things Uma can do" list, a feat some thought impossible after her turn in the "Kill Bill" cycle.
Cute movie. Nothing to write home about, not a prizewinner, but fun.
FINAL RATING: 7/10
The story is the same as the 1970s Mel Brooks classic that inspired the musical: Failed broadway producer Max Bialystock and unstable accountant Leopold Bloom have stumbled on a scheme to bilk investors out of a fortune by overselling a play garaunteed to fail: A pro-Nazi romp called "Springtime for Hitler" written by crazed Nazi Hanz Leibkind. Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane replace Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel as Leo and Max, while pun-heavy song numbers replace (most of) the original's zany wordplay. Will Ferrell turns up as Leibkind, and Uma Thurman steals huge chunks of the film as Ulla the Swedish secretary.
Like all the best of Brooks' material, the film coasts on wicked fusion of bad taste, absurdity and time-tested Friar's Club-ready schtick. The songs are catchy and the dances, while nothing amazingly complex, are great peices of physical comedy. Material-wise, and certainly performance-wise, the film works.
What fails to work is much of the direction and staging, courtesy of Susan Strohman. She directed the broadway version, by all accounts to great effect, but seems quite out of her element working with film. Too many scenes lack flair and composition, and someone seems to have neglected to instruct Broderick in the vocal difference between onstage emoting and onscreen emoting in a few too many scenes.
As mentioned above, the actors all aquit themselves nicely but Uma steals the show. Looking sexier than she has in awhile and showing off muy-impressive dancing and singing skills, she checks yet MORE items off of the "things Uma can do" list, a feat some thought impossible after her turn in the "Kill Bill" cycle.
Cute movie. Nothing to write home about, not a prizewinner, but fun.
FINAL RATING: 7/10
Monday, 26 December 2005
REVIEW: Munich
Note: contains spoilers and politics.
The most frequently-misused word in the modern English-speaking world, and likely not without intent, is "violence." In modern parlance, it has come to define all forms of deadly force, which is simply a matter of mis-definition. This should be obvious: The "root" of violence is violation, or rather "to violate," as in to force into or upon someone or something without right or justification.
In the cleanest of terms, the stranger or foe who leaps from the shadows and attacks you without cause "does violence" to you by violating your personal space and right not to be attacked without justification; but when you take a swing and break his jaw in self-defense you have not "done violence" to him, you have merely "used force." Because he cedes his rights to space and safety by infringing on yours without just cause, there is no violation and thus no violence on you're part. (Hence why police who go to rough on criminals they arrest are charged with "excessive force" instead of "excessive violence.")
Modern parlance, bowing to the ludicrous over-application of postmodern "relitavist" philosophy, has managed to boil ALL force down to "violence" in the minds of many, a by-product of the mushy logic that holds ALL "opinions" (as opposed to all INFORMED opinions) hold equal weight if you squint hard enough. Thus, so goes the "logic," if all force is a violation in someone's opinion, then all force must be violence. And since basic laws of action and reaction dictate the force is most often met by force, we come to the favorite trope of the "civilized" guilt-complex: "The cycle of violence." Or, as you've heard it more colorfully put "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
This notion is, of course, not without merit in many cases. But it doesn't apply across the board, or even (I'd argue) in a majority of instances where force is used against force. In the case of "Munich," much has already been said about your belief (or disbelief) that the "endless cycle of violence" model fits the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being a deciding factor in how you eventually feel about the film.
Let is also be said that I do not. Many who also do not have dismissed "Munich" out of hand for this. I, on the other hand, do not demand that a film match my political beliefs in order to draw from me a proper review. As in all cases, I only ever ask that a film fulfill the basic requirements of filmmaking and be worthwhile in it's own right. A movie gets no pass from me because I agree with it's "message," but also gets no "extra venom" for advocating a position opposite to mine (advocating a position opposite to truth is another matter.)
Now here's the kicker: Those expecting a political film out of "Munich" are in for a rude surprise, no matter which politics they were expecting. Yes, it raises questions and deals in moral gray-areas, but for all the early hype about the film's message (pro-Israel? anti-Israel? allegorical Bush-bashing?) something has been lost entirely, and that something you need to know about:
"Munich" is, first and foremost, a spy movie. A great spy movie. A bad-ass, ultra-violent, bloody-as-hell spy movie. What can only be described as truly misguided marketing campaign has got the world convinced that Spielberg has released a stodgy meditation on the meaninglessness of violence, when in fact he's gone and made the bloodiest assassin movie in years, along with the first great spy thriller of the new millenium.
The story, you're already aware, is set in the 70s following the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists of the Black September organization. The film opens with a dramatization of the key turning point in modern Middle Eastern politics: Israel's decision to finally take the gloves off and go on the offensive against the groups, nations and peoples that have sworn a religious oath to wipe them out. Priority one: hunt down and kill the eleven surviving men most responsible for plotting Munich. Eleven lives for eleven lives, each to be hunted secretly but eliminated publically and spectacularly (preferably with bombs) so that each new body might begin "putting terror into the hearts of the terrorists."
Eric Bana stars as Avner, an agent and patriot of Israel tipped to head up one of the ultra-secret Moussad hit-squads. He and his men; a bombmaker, an accountant, a clean-up man and a stone-cold hardcase played by 007-to-be Daniel Craig; strike out across Europe with a to-do list of Arab names and only the most essential of tools to get the job done.
And get the job done they do. While it's true that the film's lengthy running time allows for ample reflection on the morality of assassination by it's heroes (only Craig's character openly claims no remorse or moral qualms about his mission,) Spielberg doesn't for a moment skimp on the "money shots" of what very frequently become blood-soaked action scenes: A bedroom bomb leaves a messy severed arm dangling from the ceiling, impromptu gunfights riddle actors with juicy squibs of movie-blood, and one hit on an unexpected target creates 2005's grimest, goriest tableau- more alarming, even, than those from the thematically and stylistically similar "A History of Violence." You heard me: Steven Spielberg has out-bloodied David Cronenberg.
Between (and occasionally during) the bigger moments, the film finds it's full greatness by building on the personalities of it's characters and the complexity of it's situation. In the course of their so-secret-it's-not-on-any-books mission, Avner's men cross paths with everyone from CIA agents to information-selling French anarchists to actual Palestinian terrorists, and the further they sink into the confusion of international espionage the more they find themselves changing from the experience.
But the fears that the film might morph into a kind of "peace on Earth" screed or justification of Palestinian aggression turn out to be unfounded: This is too smart a movie to be take any kind of simple track on either side. While Avner and others grow disillusioned and paranoid, Craig's hardcase stays focused for the whole mission, proudly declares that the only blood that matters to him is Jewish blood, and is never called wrong or even made to be unlikable because of this. Meanwhile, Avner is shown experiencing imagined visions of the actual Munich murders, which leads to more impressive bloodletting and seems to imply that he summons these "memories" in order to drive himself onward.
"Munich" does ask whether or not retaliation like this is really the wisest policy in the long run, but it never answers the question yes or no. Interestingly, the story includes a "side-adventure" involving a nonpolitical, in fact very personal, revenge-killing which is played both as catharsis and as a more-or-less justified action. It's possible, I think, that this scene (you'll know it when you see it) exists to underline an admission by the film (and it's director?) that sometimes revenge may be a necessary part of justice. Or, at least, that it "understands" what the need for vengeance is.
Steven Spielberg has made his best film since "Saving Private Ryan," a knockout of a spy thriller that is a no-contest must-see for those bemoaning the lack of great espionage movies. As for the politics, do what the movie does and put them second to the experience, namely the experience of watching one of 2005's best films.
See this now.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
The most frequently-misused word in the modern English-speaking world, and likely not without intent, is "violence." In modern parlance, it has come to define all forms of deadly force, which is simply a matter of mis-definition. This should be obvious: The "root" of violence is violation, or rather "to violate," as in to force into or upon someone or something without right or justification.
In the cleanest of terms, the stranger or foe who leaps from the shadows and attacks you without cause "does violence" to you by violating your personal space and right not to be attacked without justification; but when you take a swing and break his jaw in self-defense you have not "done violence" to him, you have merely "used force." Because he cedes his rights to space and safety by infringing on yours without just cause, there is no violation and thus no violence on you're part. (Hence why police who go to rough on criminals they arrest are charged with "excessive force" instead of "excessive violence.")
Modern parlance, bowing to the ludicrous over-application of postmodern "relitavist" philosophy, has managed to boil ALL force down to "violence" in the minds of many, a by-product of the mushy logic that holds ALL "opinions" (as opposed to all INFORMED opinions) hold equal weight if you squint hard enough. Thus, so goes the "logic," if all force is a violation in someone's opinion, then all force must be violence. And since basic laws of action and reaction dictate the force is most often met by force, we come to the favorite trope of the "civilized" guilt-complex: "The cycle of violence." Or, as you've heard it more colorfully put "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
This notion is, of course, not without merit in many cases. But it doesn't apply across the board, or even (I'd argue) in a majority of instances where force is used against force. In the case of "Munich," much has already been said about your belief (or disbelief) that the "endless cycle of violence" model fits the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being a deciding factor in how you eventually feel about the film.
Let is also be said that I do not. Many who also do not have dismissed "Munich" out of hand for this. I, on the other hand, do not demand that a film match my political beliefs in order to draw from me a proper review. As in all cases, I only ever ask that a film fulfill the basic requirements of filmmaking and be worthwhile in it's own right. A movie gets no pass from me because I agree with it's "message," but also gets no "extra venom" for advocating a position opposite to mine (advocating a position opposite to truth is another matter.)
Now here's the kicker: Those expecting a political film out of "Munich" are in for a rude surprise, no matter which politics they were expecting. Yes, it raises questions and deals in moral gray-areas, but for all the early hype about the film's message (pro-Israel? anti-Israel? allegorical Bush-bashing?) something has been lost entirely, and that something you need to know about:
"Munich" is, first and foremost, a spy movie. A great spy movie. A bad-ass, ultra-violent, bloody-as-hell spy movie. What can only be described as truly misguided marketing campaign has got the world convinced that Spielberg has released a stodgy meditation on the meaninglessness of violence, when in fact he's gone and made the bloodiest assassin movie in years, along with the first great spy thriller of the new millenium.
The story, you're already aware, is set in the 70s following the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists of the Black September organization. The film opens with a dramatization of the key turning point in modern Middle Eastern politics: Israel's decision to finally take the gloves off and go on the offensive against the groups, nations and peoples that have sworn a religious oath to wipe them out. Priority one: hunt down and kill the eleven surviving men most responsible for plotting Munich. Eleven lives for eleven lives, each to be hunted secretly but eliminated publically and spectacularly (preferably with bombs) so that each new body might begin "putting terror into the hearts of the terrorists."
Eric Bana stars as Avner, an agent and patriot of Israel tipped to head up one of the ultra-secret Moussad hit-squads. He and his men; a bombmaker, an accountant, a clean-up man and a stone-cold hardcase played by 007-to-be Daniel Craig; strike out across Europe with a to-do list of Arab names and only the most essential of tools to get the job done.
And get the job done they do. While it's true that the film's lengthy running time allows for ample reflection on the morality of assassination by it's heroes (only Craig's character openly claims no remorse or moral qualms about his mission,) Spielberg doesn't for a moment skimp on the "money shots" of what very frequently become blood-soaked action scenes: A bedroom bomb leaves a messy severed arm dangling from the ceiling, impromptu gunfights riddle actors with juicy squibs of movie-blood, and one hit on an unexpected target creates 2005's grimest, goriest tableau- more alarming, even, than those from the thematically and stylistically similar "A History of Violence." You heard me: Steven Spielberg has out-bloodied David Cronenberg.
Between (and occasionally during) the bigger moments, the film finds it's full greatness by building on the personalities of it's characters and the complexity of it's situation. In the course of their so-secret-it's-not-on-any-books mission, Avner's men cross paths with everyone from CIA agents to information-selling French anarchists to actual Palestinian terrorists, and the further they sink into the confusion of international espionage the more they find themselves changing from the experience.
But the fears that the film might morph into a kind of "peace on Earth" screed or justification of Palestinian aggression turn out to be unfounded: This is too smart a movie to be take any kind of simple track on either side. While Avner and others grow disillusioned and paranoid, Craig's hardcase stays focused for the whole mission, proudly declares that the only blood that matters to him is Jewish blood, and is never called wrong or even made to be unlikable because of this. Meanwhile, Avner is shown experiencing imagined visions of the actual Munich murders, which leads to more impressive bloodletting and seems to imply that he summons these "memories" in order to drive himself onward.
"Munich" does ask whether or not retaliation like this is really the wisest policy in the long run, but it never answers the question yes or no. Interestingly, the story includes a "side-adventure" involving a nonpolitical, in fact very personal, revenge-killing which is played both as catharsis and as a more-or-less justified action. It's possible, I think, that this scene (you'll know it when you see it) exists to underline an admission by the film (and it's director?) that sometimes revenge may be a necessary part of justice. Or, at least, that it "understands" what the need for vengeance is.
Steven Spielberg has made his best film since "Saving Private Ryan," a knockout of a spy thriller that is a no-contest must-see for those bemoaning the lack of great espionage movies. As for the politics, do what the movie does and put them second to the experience, namely the experience of watching one of 2005's best films.
See this now.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Sunday, 25 December 2005
REVIEW: Wolf Creek
The dedication with which American horror fans just keep hoping that something will come along and reinvigorate the genre gets more and more touching the longer it goes on. The plain fact is that the PG-13 "horror" phenomenon, which essentially garauntees box-office paydirt for weak, lifeless wannabes or castrated remakes of genre-classics, has decimated the U.S. horror scene and almost no one is mounting a serious effort to fix this problem. For now, fans will still have to look outward: Germany, France (lately), Italy and especially Japan have been picking up our slack and then some for nearly a decade now, and now "Wolf Creek" marks Australia's latest foray onto the field.
Like last year's unjustly maligned "High Tension" from France, "Wolf Creek" aims to outgun the U.S. by putting a native spin on one of "our" signature subgenres, namely the "isolated with killer redneck(s)" setup laid down by "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" back in the 70s. It hits all the proper notes: A trio of tourists in the country, red-herring creepy locals, a torture-happy sicko with a hidden basecamp of captured autoparts, "we KNOW this place" travelogue footage and even a based-on-a-true-story pedigree.
This should have worked, this should have been a good moment in modern horror... but it's not.
The peices are in place, the filmmakers obviously know what they're doing, but the film just can't find it's own vibe: It's so determined to be "The Outback Shotgun Massacre" that it never really figures out how to be "Wolf Creek."
For awhile, there's hope. It's "pleasant" first act goes on unusually long, long enough for us to "know" to feel uneasy. The three victims-to-be are interestingly sketched with suggestions of hidden depths and don't feel like standard stock players. Early elements, like a giant meteorite-crater that (possibly) plays games with machinery and discussions of UFOs, feel fresh and welcome. The villain has an interesting energy somewhere at the intersection of Freddy, Jason and Leatherface; and he's got wicked proficiency with a decidedly un-slasher-like favorite weapon.
But it's not enough, and this becomes apparent much too quickly. We've been here too many times before, cutting through the same ropes, running from the same headlights, hiding in the same shadows of the same scrapyards, jumping at the same "surprise" emergence from the same sheet-metal shack. The dustiest of cliche's, like a pre-kill "joke" that's set up with crushing obviousness or the innability of good guys to locate suitable weaponry in a junkyard full of jagged metal, start to crop up with head-slapping predictability; as do newer cliche's such as "this is like a horror movie" self-awareness and (groan) camcorder footage.
I've no doubt Australia will soon produce a film to put it on the short-list of national cinemas making great horror films, they're film culture is too interesting not to. But "Wolf Creek" isn't it.
FINAL RATING: 3/10
Like last year's unjustly maligned "High Tension" from France, "Wolf Creek" aims to outgun the U.S. by putting a native spin on one of "our" signature subgenres, namely the "isolated with killer redneck(s)" setup laid down by "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" back in the 70s. It hits all the proper notes: A trio of tourists in the country, red-herring creepy locals, a torture-happy sicko with a hidden basecamp of captured autoparts, "we KNOW this place" travelogue footage and even a based-on-a-true-story pedigree.
This should have worked, this should have been a good moment in modern horror... but it's not.
The peices are in place, the filmmakers obviously know what they're doing, but the film just can't find it's own vibe: It's so determined to be "The Outback Shotgun Massacre" that it never really figures out how to be "Wolf Creek."
For awhile, there's hope. It's "pleasant" first act goes on unusually long, long enough for us to "know" to feel uneasy. The three victims-to-be are interestingly sketched with suggestions of hidden depths and don't feel like standard stock players. Early elements, like a giant meteorite-crater that (possibly) plays games with machinery and discussions of UFOs, feel fresh and welcome. The villain has an interesting energy somewhere at the intersection of Freddy, Jason and Leatherface; and he's got wicked proficiency with a decidedly un-slasher-like favorite weapon.
But it's not enough, and this becomes apparent much too quickly. We've been here too many times before, cutting through the same ropes, running from the same headlights, hiding in the same shadows of the same scrapyards, jumping at the same "surprise" emergence from the same sheet-metal shack. The dustiest of cliche's, like a pre-kill "joke" that's set up with crushing obviousness or the innability of good guys to locate suitable weaponry in a junkyard full of jagged metal, start to crop up with head-slapping predictability; as do newer cliche's such as "this is like a horror movie" self-awareness and (groan) camcorder footage.
I've no doubt Australia will soon produce a film to put it on the short-list of national cinemas making great horror films, they're film culture is too interesting not to. But "Wolf Creek" isn't it.
FINAL RATING: 3/10
Wednesday, 14 December 2005
REVIEW: King Kong (2005)
Minor spoilers, caution, etc.
The first thing that one MUST do in order to fully appreciate this new (and perhaps definative for the forseeable future) reworking of "King Kong" is to put all preconceptions and "baggage" of it's predecessor(s) out of one's mind to the best of one's ability. That would seem obvious in regards to any remake, but this... director Peter Jackson's megabudget followup to the "Lord of The Rings" trilogy... is not just any remake; and "King Kong"... a film-transcending classic that gave the world it's first icon of mythology born wholly of the cinema, so universally known and often referenced that most who've never seen it can offer a blow-by-blow recitation of it's story... is not just any movie. Approaching ANY "official" retelling of the story, it's nearly impossible to regard it without being reminded of "the first one."
Part of this seperation difficulty is just natural: Merian C. Cooper's 1933 landmark is still the Giant Monster movie by which all others must be judged, so entrenched as such that even a formidable upstart franchise like "Godzilla" could barely wait two sequels before challenging the titular giant ape to a shoving match. The other part is more complicated: A combination of desire on behalf of the studio to avoid the vitriol that greeted a previous attempt to remake "Kong" in 1979 and what could be termed tremendous humilty on the part of director Jackson has led to the following theme hovering over the entire marketing of the film: This isn't a "bigger, better" or "modern" remake, it's an "homage" to the director's favorite movie, poised in perpetual-genuflect in awe of it's 1933 ancestor. It opens and closes with old-fashioned title cards, sets itself in the same Depression-era milieu and makes constant reference to the original dialogue and designs.
In other words, it's at first slightly difficult to veiw Jackson's "Kong" as it's own unique film (and it is most definately it's own unique film) when we've been (and continue to be) told that this is a kind of 3 hour party celebrating it's predecessor's existance. That Peter Jackson is exceedingly humble is well known, but this time he MAY have done himself a minor disservice by being so willing to play down exactly how much originality, quirk and style uniquely-his-own he's been able to marinate the meat of the "Kong" mythos in.
But once one successfully banishes the ghosts of Kongs past and is able to approach this new film as it's own animal, the eventual truth cannot be denied: The filmmakers who took the epic-fantasy genre to it's next evolution have now done the same for giant monster movies, and this "King Kong" is easily among the best films of 2005.
True to his word, the film replicates the outline and essential themes of the original: Depression-era director of quasi-documentary motion pictures Carl Denham (Jack Black) escapes his angry investors on a steam ship of dubious legality bound for his next big production, shanghaing playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and wayward Vaudville starlet Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) in the process. Denahm, we learn, is actually following a strange map to the mythical Skull Island, said to be home of an advanced native civilization and a literal Lost World of strange and exotic creatures.
Once there, they find that the island is nearly sunken and the "advanced native civilization" has de-evolved into a cult of savage primitives scraping by on the last exposed sliver of livable land who promptly kidnap Ann as a sacrifice to Kong, a 25 foot gorilla they worship as a god. Following a series of adventures in the dinosaur-populated island jungle, Kong grows attached to Ann and subsequently captured by Denham, who takes him back to New York in what turns out to be a spectacularly poor decision for all involved: Kong tears the town apart in search of his lady friend, draws the ire of the military and goes down swinging atop the Empire State Building.
The original film took a hair over 90 minutes to tell this story, Jackson takes 3 hours and change. Many predicted this as a sign of directorial indulgence, a case of "LOTR's" spectacular success having turned the unassuming New Zealand horror/comedy auteur into a 400 pound gorilla aiming to sit (or direct) wherever he wanted. The finished result puts to lie such notions: The film NEEDS it's extra time, especially in it's early scenes where the ample breathing room affords Darrow, Driscoll the motley crew of the steamship Venture and Denahm to establish themselves as a (large) cast of fully-formed characters. This becomes essential to the nearly-endless action of the 2nd act, allowing Skull Island's dinosaurs, giant-insects, man-eating slugs and even Kong himself to engage in conflicts not with random canon-fodder but characters with names the audience will remember and lives the audience will care about seeing end or continue.
The most significant departure the film makes from any prior vision of "Kong" is in the characterization of the Skull Island natives. The original film provided archetypal African headhunters right out of H. Rider Haggard, while the 76 remake made do with a bland PC-ification of the same basic idea. Here, we have a culture that most prominently resembles a freakish deviation of Australian Aborigines (and perhaps the Maori of Jackson's NZ homeland,) nightmare creatures with flesh the color of their gray-stone "land" and hideous piercings. Their worship of Kong looks more like a voodoo ritual than a tribal celebration, complete with eyeballs rolled back into the head and spasmic shuddering. Wisely, the film avoids providing a character to give the "history" of Skull Island or it's people, so that we encounter the natives and their home on the same level as the characters: confused, unsure and genuinely terrified.
Other new twists are more subtle but have greater overall impact: Denham, as played with real dramatic panache and period-appropriate swagger by Jack Black, now channels Orson Welles instead of Cecil B. DeMille (and Cooper himself, of course.) Redrawing Driscoll as a staunchly city-slicker writer adds real tension to his action scenes and makes him much more sympathetic, an important element considering how much the audience (and Kong) is eventually inclined to see him as Kong's "rival" for Ann's affections.
But the most important switch, and the one that turns out to be the key to the whole production, is adding the backstory of a vaudeville pratfall artist to Watts' Ann Darrow. Let's be honest for a moment: The original film and it's original King Kong are through-and-through "about" the inherent coolness of a giant gorilla. It's a spectacle in the pure films-in-the-30s sense of the word, and all of the sociological re-reading came after the fact. You had to read pretty deeply between the lines to see any semblance of Ann reciprocating Kong's affections; but monster movie fans, ourselves often familiar being reclusive, misunderstood and obsessed with women way out of our leagues, were only too happy to do so. The Kong/Ann/Jack "love triangle" is "there" because we want it to be there.
Dino DeLaurentis tried, unsuccessfully, to make literalizing the presumed romantic subtext the main theme of his doomed 1976 "Kong," presenting a sexually-charged reworking of the relationship that turned the whole affair into a campy, vaugely-creepy mess: The notion of sexual attraction between a giant monkey and a human being roughly the size of his finger was, and is, basically silly no matter how strong the desire to see mighty Kong "get the girl" might be in the abstract. However, establishing a "deeper" current to Kong's pursuit of Ann is vital to ramping up the emotional ressonance of any modern "Kong" retelling... so what to do?
And so, here is the writers' stroke of genius: It's now Ann's Chaplin-esque clowning that melts the big ape's warrior heart, not merely her decidedly non-apelike beauty, and the affection Kong develops is neither vauge nor specifically sexual, but instead protective and in fact paternal. This is set up masterfully in a series of early scenes subtly establishing Ann's easy comfort with father figures vis-a-vi an elderly fellow performer; and the payoff makes the movie. It gives it a core relationship dynamic that is neither as broad as the original but more innocent and believable than the 76 version, as we come to realize that Kong and Ann eventually regard eachother in the same basic terms... each is to the other an exotic creature turned beloved "pet."
On the other end of Watts' performance is Andy Serkis, performing the motion-capture movements and physical nuance of the digitally-rendered Kong. Hands-down the most realistic-looking CGI monster ever produced onscreen, Serkis-as-Kong turns in the kind of "synthespian" performance that can and does make "real" actors profoundly afraid for their continued usefulness. Looking like the battle-scarred victim of a hundred struggles, with a crooked jaw and jagged wounds, making a home among the bleached bones of his dead ancestors, with an emotional range from quiet majesty to childlike amusement to primal fury to heroic grandure, somehow always animal yet somehow always more... this is the one: the fulfillment of the promise made a decade ago by "Jurassic Park" and bungled for a decade hence by everyone until now (I'm looking at you, shitty 1998 remake of "Godzilla.")
Coupled with the aforementioned fleshing-out of Denham and his crew, all this serves to produce a third act boasting an emotional and moral complexity so seldom seen in this genre (or at this scale) that the result is truly startling: The audience is asked to identify all-at-once with Jack's need to rescue Ann, with Kong's fury at Jack's "theft" of Ann, with the Venture crew's instant fear of Kong, with Kong's brutal, punishing assault on his attackers... even with Denham's half-mad determination to recoup the loss of money and lives on the expedition by turning Kong into a chained sideshow. The result is a finale that plays not only as massive-scale action but as a profound and disquieting tragedy, as no character or location ends their time onscreen unscathed and no simple answer or higher purpose is assigned.
In between all of this, though, Jackson has not forgotten that this is first and foremost a monster movie, and he provides monsters with the expected gusto of a filmmaker who has, quite honestly, been waiting a lifetime to do so. Skull Island's denizens are imagined super-evolved descendants of prehistoric giants, a creative license which Jackson uses to stage the best scenes of monster action of the digital age.
Most would be content, as "Jurassic Park" was, to bask in the glow of merely having realized such creatures with such realism, but this film and it's director have no place for such laurel-resting: The Venture crew flees for it's life pursued by raptors amid the pounding legs of a cascading stampede and eventual pileup of Brontosaurs (stop writing the email, fellow paleo-buffs: That's what they were called and imagined as in the 30s, so that's apparently what they are here,) and are trapped in a horrible pit with endless giant spiders, crickets, slugs and scorpions. In the best fight scene of the year, Kong brawls with three "V-Rex's" in a stunning slugfest that turns into an aerial battle amid a chasm of giant vines, breathing life into the fantasy of every kid who ever clashed his toy dinosaurs together over the sandbox.
Jackson also re-embraces the morbid sense of humor he kept so appropriately in-check amid the British stoicism of the "Rings" films, taking obvious delight in the ability of a dinosaur's foot to crush a man into the mud, the absurd horror as dozens of elephant-sized creatures careen off a cliff, the "no way!"-ness of seeing a raptor knocked out by a lucky kick, the gleeful "gotcha!" of Kong pummeling his attackers into paste or naive callousness with which he scoops up and then (literally) throws away innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to look sort-of similar to Ann Darrow. His recreation of the famously-lost "spider pit" scene takes equal pleasure in the way giant bugs can tear apart humans and in the way WWI-era machine gun fire can tear giant bugs apart. I live for this stuff... and apparently so do the people who made this movie.
Bottom line: Peter Jackson knocks another "nobody can pull this off" cinematic accomplishment off the to-do list, and I can only hope that this endeavor will lead to an explosion of high-calibre giant monster movies the same way "Rings" did for fantasy epics. For now, this giant monster movie is a total stunner, an example of everything that movies can be and so rarely are. No one needs to be told that this is a must-see, but I'm telling you anyway: "Best" or not, who can say, but right now this is the movie of 2005, the one that all on it's own would be enough to dispell the notion of this as a "weak movie year."
Long live the King.
FINAL RATING: 10/10
The first thing that one MUST do in order to fully appreciate this new (and perhaps definative for the forseeable future) reworking of "King Kong" is to put all preconceptions and "baggage" of it's predecessor(s) out of one's mind to the best of one's ability. That would seem obvious in regards to any remake, but this... director Peter Jackson's megabudget followup to the "Lord of The Rings" trilogy... is not just any remake; and "King Kong"... a film-transcending classic that gave the world it's first icon of mythology born wholly of the cinema, so universally known and often referenced that most who've never seen it can offer a blow-by-blow recitation of it's story... is not just any movie. Approaching ANY "official" retelling of the story, it's nearly impossible to regard it without being reminded of "the first one."
Part of this seperation difficulty is just natural: Merian C. Cooper's 1933 landmark is still the Giant Monster movie by which all others must be judged, so entrenched as such that even a formidable upstart franchise like "Godzilla" could barely wait two sequels before challenging the titular giant ape to a shoving match. The other part is more complicated: A combination of desire on behalf of the studio to avoid the vitriol that greeted a previous attempt to remake "Kong" in 1979 and what could be termed tremendous humilty on the part of director Jackson has led to the following theme hovering over the entire marketing of the film: This isn't a "bigger, better" or "modern" remake, it's an "homage" to the director's favorite movie, poised in perpetual-genuflect in awe of it's 1933 ancestor. It opens and closes with old-fashioned title cards, sets itself in the same Depression-era milieu and makes constant reference to the original dialogue and designs.
In other words, it's at first slightly difficult to veiw Jackson's "Kong" as it's own unique film (and it is most definately it's own unique film) when we've been (and continue to be) told that this is a kind of 3 hour party celebrating it's predecessor's existance. That Peter Jackson is exceedingly humble is well known, but this time he MAY have done himself a minor disservice by being so willing to play down exactly how much originality, quirk and style uniquely-his-own he's been able to marinate the meat of the "Kong" mythos in.
But once one successfully banishes the ghosts of Kongs past and is able to approach this new film as it's own animal, the eventual truth cannot be denied: The filmmakers who took the epic-fantasy genre to it's next evolution have now done the same for giant monster movies, and this "King Kong" is easily among the best films of 2005.
True to his word, the film replicates the outline and essential themes of the original: Depression-era director of quasi-documentary motion pictures Carl Denham (Jack Black) escapes his angry investors on a steam ship of dubious legality bound for his next big production, shanghaing playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and wayward Vaudville starlet Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) in the process. Denahm, we learn, is actually following a strange map to the mythical Skull Island, said to be home of an advanced native civilization and a literal Lost World of strange and exotic creatures.
Once there, they find that the island is nearly sunken and the "advanced native civilization" has de-evolved into a cult of savage primitives scraping by on the last exposed sliver of livable land who promptly kidnap Ann as a sacrifice to Kong, a 25 foot gorilla they worship as a god. Following a series of adventures in the dinosaur-populated island jungle, Kong grows attached to Ann and subsequently captured by Denham, who takes him back to New York in what turns out to be a spectacularly poor decision for all involved: Kong tears the town apart in search of his lady friend, draws the ire of the military and goes down swinging atop the Empire State Building.
The original film took a hair over 90 minutes to tell this story, Jackson takes 3 hours and change. Many predicted this as a sign of directorial indulgence, a case of "LOTR's" spectacular success having turned the unassuming New Zealand horror/comedy auteur into a 400 pound gorilla aiming to sit (or direct) wherever he wanted. The finished result puts to lie such notions: The film NEEDS it's extra time, especially in it's early scenes where the ample breathing room affords Darrow, Driscoll the motley crew of the steamship Venture and Denahm to establish themselves as a (large) cast of fully-formed characters. This becomes essential to the nearly-endless action of the 2nd act, allowing Skull Island's dinosaurs, giant-insects, man-eating slugs and even Kong himself to engage in conflicts not with random canon-fodder but characters with names the audience will remember and lives the audience will care about seeing end or continue.
The most significant departure the film makes from any prior vision of "Kong" is in the characterization of the Skull Island natives. The original film provided archetypal African headhunters right out of H. Rider Haggard, while the 76 remake made do with a bland PC-ification of the same basic idea. Here, we have a culture that most prominently resembles a freakish deviation of Australian Aborigines (and perhaps the Maori of Jackson's NZ homeland,) nightmare creatures with flesh the color of their gray-stone "land" and hideous piercings. Their worship of Kong looks more like a voodoo ritual than a tribal celebration, complete with eyeballs rolled back into the head and spasmic shuddering. Wisely, the film avoids providing a character to give the "history" of Skull Island or it's people, so that we encounter the natives and their home on the same level as the characters: confused, unsure and genuinely terrified.
Other new twists are more subtle but have greater overall impact: Denham, as played with real dramatic panache and period-appropriate swagger by Jack Black, now channels Orson Welles instead of Cecil B. DeMille (and Cooper himself, of course.) Redrawing Driscoll as a staunchly city-slicker writer adds real tension to his action scenes and makes him much more sympathetic, an important element considering how much the audience (and Kong) is eventually inclined to see him as Kong's "rival" for Ann's affections.
But the most important switch, and the one that turns out to be the key to the whole production, is adding the backstory of a vaudeville pratfall artist to Watts' Ann Darrow. Let's be honest for a moment: The original film and it's original King Kong are through-and-through "about" the inherent coolness of a giant gorilla. It's a spectacle in the pure films-in-the-30s sense of the word, and all of the sociological re-reading came after the fact. You had to read pretty deeply between the lines to see any semblance of Ann reciprocating Kong's affections; but monster movie fans, ourselves often familiar being reclusive, misunderstood and obsessed with women way out of our leagues, were only too happy to do so. The Kong/Ann/Jack "love triangle" is "there" because we want it to be there.
Dino DeLaurentis tried, unsuccessfully, to make literalizing the presumed romantic subtext the main theme of his doomed 1976 "Kong," presenting a sexually-charged reworking of the relationship that turned the whole affair into a campy, vaugely-creepy mess: The notion of sexual attraction between a giant monkey and a human being roughly the size of his finger was, and is, basically silly no matter how strong the desire to see mighty Kong "get the girl" might be in the abstract. However, establishing a "deeper" current to Kong's pursuit of Ann is vital to ramping up the emotional ressonance of any modern "Kong" retelling... so what to do?
And so, here is the writers' stroke of genius: It's now Ann's Chaplin-esque clowning that melts the big ape's warrior heart, not merely her decidedly non-apelike beauty, and the affection Kong develops is neither vauge nor specifically sexual, but instead protective and in fact paternal. This is set up masterfully in a series of early scenes subtly establishing Ann's easy comfort with father figures vis-a-vi an elderly fellow performer; and the payoff makes the movie. It gives it a core relationship dynamic that is neither as broad as the original but more innocent and believable than the 76 version, as we come to realize that Kong and Ann eventually regard eachother in the same basic terms... each is to the other an exotic creature turned beloved "pet."
On the other end of Watts' performance is Andy Serkis, performing the motion-capture movements and physical nuance of the digitally-rendered Kong. Hands-down the most realistic-looking CGI monster ever produced onscreen, Serkis-as-Kong turns in the kind of "synthespian" performance that can and does make "real" actors profoundly afraid for their continued usefulness. Looking like the battle-scarred victim of a hundred struggles, with a crooked jaw and jagged wounds, making a home among the bleached bones of his dead ancestors, with an emotional range from quiet majesty to childlike amusement to primal fury to heroic grandure, somehow always animal yet somehow always more... this is the one: the fulfillment of the promise made a decade ago by "Jurassic Park" and bungled for a decade hence by everyone until now (I'm looking at you, shitty 1998 remake of "Godzilla.")
Coupled with the aforementioned fleshing-out of Denham and his crew, all this serves to produce a third act boasting an emotional and moral complexity so seldom seen in this genre (or at this scale) that the result is truly startling: The audience is asked to identify all-at-once with Jack's need to rescue Ann, with Kong's fury at Jack's "theft" of Ann, with the Venture crew's instant fear of Kong, with Kong's brutal, punishing assault on his attackers... even with Denham's half-mad determination to recoup the loss of money and lives on the expedition by turning Kong into a chained sideshow. The result is a finale that plays not only as massive-scale action but as a profound and disquieting tragedy, as no character or location ends their time onscreen unscathed and no simple answer or higher purpose is assigned.
In between all of this, though, Jackson has not forgotten that this is first and foremost a monster movie, and he provides monsters with the expected gusto of a filmmaker who has, quite honestly, been waiting a lifetime to do so. Skull Island's denizens are imagined super-evolved descendants of prehistoric giants, a creative license which Jackson uses to stage the best scenes of monster action of the digital age.
Most would be content, as "Jurassic Park" was, to bask in the glow of merely having realized such creatures with such realism, but this film and it's director have no place for such laurel-resting: The Venture crew flees for it's life pursued by raptors amid the pounding legs of a cascading stampede and eventual pileup of Brontosaurs (stop writing the email, fellow paleo-buffs: That's what they were called and imagined as in the 30s, so that's apparently what they are here,) and are trapped in a horrible pit with endless giant spiders, crickets, slugs and scorpions. In the best fight scene of the year, Kong brawls with three "V-Rex's" in a stunning slugfest that turns into an aerial battle amid a chasm of giant vines, breathing life into the fantasy of every kid who ever clashed his toy dinosaurs together over the sandbox.
Jackson also re-embraces the morbid sense of humor he kept so appropriately in-check amid the British stoicism of the "Rings" films, taking obvious delight in the ability of a dinosaur's foot to crush a man into the mud, the absurd horror as dozens of elephant-sized creatures careen off a cliff, the "no way!"-ness of seeing a raptor knocked out by a lucky kick, the gleeful "gotcha!" of Kong pummeling his attackers into paste or naive callousness with which he scoops up and then (literally) throws away innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to look sort-of similar to Ann Darrow. His recreation of the famously-lost "spider pit" scene takes equal pleasure in the way giant bugs can tear apart humans and in the way WWI-era machine gun fire can tear giant bugs apart. I live for this stuff... and apparently so do the people who made this movie.
Bottom line: Peter Jackson knocks another "nobody can pull this off" cinematic accomplishment off the to-do list, and I can only hope that this endeavor will lead to an explosion of high-calibre giant monster movies the same way "Rings" did for fantasy epics. For now, this giant monster movie is a total stunner, an example of everything that movies can be and so rarely are. No one needs to be told that this is a must-see, but I'm telling you anyway: "Best" or not, who can say, but right now this is the movie of 2005, the one that all on it's own would be enough to dispell the notion of this as a "weak movie year."
Long live the King.
FINAL RATING: 10/10
Saturday, 10 December 2005
REVIEW: Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005)
Evidently I've missed another memo from the governing bodies of online film criticism, specifically the one that apparently ordered a majority of my bretheren to open every review of "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" (lets just say "Narnia" from now on, deal?) in basically the exact same manner: A paragraph-length breakdown of the critic's familiarity with the book, opinion of such and opinion of the fantasy genre as whole, followed optionally by either A.) pithy comments about the "issue" of the story's allegorical Christian subtext or B.) quick appraisal of the film as measured against "Harry Potter" and "Lord of The Rings." Or both.
Much as I'd like to be different and skip all that, on the off chance that I really would be breaking some rule by doing so we'll just get it off nice and quickly-like:
Pior experience: Read the book several times as a kid. Dug it. Read completed series eventually, generally dug it. Saw BBC miniseries version, saw animated version. Not bad.
Christian allegory: Chill out. It's not a sermon. It's not propaganda. It's not "The Passion." It's not even the goddamn "VeggieTales." The only way you're going to be "offended" by what allegory there is to be found is if you're "offended" by even the barest hint of anything being even vaugely Christian, in which case you're as intolerant as the people you probably think you're against. Grow up.
The others: Better right-out-of-the-gate (and much more solid as a stand-alone film) than "Potter" was, not as perfect as "Rings," not really fair to put these three side-by-side to begin with. The more fitting comparison's would really be Frank L. Baum's "Oz" cycle, or Lewis Carrol, really.
So anyway...
As unfair as it may be (see above) to hold C.S. Lewis' efficient, unrepentently youth-targeted fairytale up against either the muscular mythmaking of "Rings" or the jaunty modernism of "Potter," it has to be acknowledged that the success of those films are the reason that this one exists at all. It takes a lot to change Hollywood's whole way of looking at a genre, but 11 Oscars and 3 years worth of boxoffice domination is more than a lot. Bearing that in mind... thanks again, Peter Jackson.
More immediate thanks, though, to Andrew Adamson... who knew the man most frequently credited as the director of "Shrek" had this level of movie in him? A cast made 98% comprised of children, animals and digital/puppet creatures... most of it outdoors and in hyppereal fantasy evironments? Giant-scale war scenes? Entire passages of dialogue dominated by a child under the age of 10? This is a HUGELY difficult production, and there's hardly a technical flaw or wooden moment showing. And it's the most visually stunning film of the year so far, rich, colorful, sprawling and (most impressively of all) completely different as a visual experience from any other recent film in the genre. Bravo.
The premise remains as classically-rooted as ever: Four British WWII-refugee siblings (two boys, two girls) living in the care of a mysteries "Professor" stumble through a more mysterious wardrobe into the fantasy kingdom of Narnia, where talking animals abound and all creatures of childhood fantasy (unicorns, fauns, giants and even a cameo by... nah, find out for yourself) seem to reside. It's also a place currently cursed into permanent winter by the Jadis the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) who reigns as a malevolent dictator and seduces one of the children to her side. The others line up on the side of a Narnian citizen's rebellion which it seems they are prophecized to lead alongside Aslan, (voice of Liam Neeson,) a talking lion of godlike power.
The bulk of the story takes up journey of the children between leaving the wardrobe and the requisite giant-scale "Braveheart" open-field clash of good and evil armies, punctuated by a plot twist that establishes the story's much-touted Crucifixtion/Ressurection allegory and leads to just about the scariest extended sequence seen in a children's film since the third act of "E.T."
Amidst all this, the film has a ball making use of the opportunities afforded by Lewis' hodgepodge assembly of myth, fairytales and dream-logic: The kids are aided on their quest by a married pair of jolly Beavers who embody ideal English middle-class domesticity. Jadis' "secret police" are literally a pack of wolves... while Rupert Everett turns up in the voice of a fox spy. In the climactic battle, everything from centaurs, gryphons and satyrs to gorillas, rhinos and leopards charge the field against Jadis' legion of minotaurs, werewolves, cyclops and gargoyles. And Mr. Beaver gets a little beaver-sized suit of armor, how can you not love that?
I'll just say it: This movie is better than I could've allowed myself to hope it would be. It's a total-package: Well made, gorgeous-looking, perfectly paced (it's a lot of movie in just a hair over 2 hours) and excellently acted. The performances, really, are what put it over the top, even disregarding the "curve" of most of the cast being either voiceovers or children. Worth special mention is Swinton, who plays Jadis as a kind of dark, elemental force in human form and does so so convincingly that she may need to get used to the sight of young children crossing the street and diving behind their mothers as she walks by. And Liam Neeson is expectedly spot-on as the Christ-like Aslan... possibly a little too spot-on, as Neeson is starting to become the go-to actor for mentor roles.
But the breakout star is little Georgie Henley, all of ten years old, as youngest child Lucy. Serving as the audience p.o.v. character for much of the first act, and remaining an important counterpoint throughout, she turns in an amazing performance that becomes the foundation of the film. She has a tremendously expressive face, which the Adamson expertly uses as the emotional signal for a scene's undertone or approaching danger, while wisely allowing the character to remain convincingly a little girl for the whole of the film (as opposed to the "moppet with a grownup's wit" routine usually employed for such parts.)
Looking at the boxoffice predictions so far, it doesn't look like any of you really NEED any encouragement, but I'm going to give you some anyway: GO SEE THIS. Take the kids (if applicable). This could well end up being the best family movie of the year, along with one of the better action films as well, and you don't want to miss it.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Thursday, 1 December 2005
Sunday, 27 November 2005
REVIEW: Just Friends
I've got a love/hate relationship with "angry" romantic comedies, and I'm betting some of you do to. Am I right?
Here's what I'm talking about: I love when a movie embraces a bitter, cynical or even at least "slapstick" take on the subject of all things romantic. What I hate is that, in such movies, you know that the fun will only be short-lived. No rom-com wants to be angry all the way through, so enjoyment of such fare is always bittersweet; you know going in that by the 3rd act all the fun will be over and the film will quickly turn into a "love conquers all" indictment of it's own premise. It happened to "Wedding Crashers," it happened to the lesser Farelly Brothers movies, and it happens to "Just Friends."
The premise is killer: Ryan Reynolds (who seems made for the part) is Chris Brander, who back in 1995 lived the nightmare life of a chubby nerd who was the best friend of the hottest girl in High School. Years of watching her ignore him sexually in favor of a succession of dumb jocks drove him to the point of insanity, and when his graduation night attempt to confess his love went about as disasterously wrong as it could have he fled town and never looked back.
Ten years later, Chris has transformed himself into a super-rich, super-handsome LA music exec who's through the model/singer/actress population with a womanizing cruelty which we're to understand as vengeance on the entire female species for what best-friend Jamie did (or rather didn't do) to him in High School. Assigned to escort mentally-unstable pop princess Samantha (Anna Faris) to Paris, the pair find themselves unexpectedly stranded in Chris' old hometown, where a renunion with Jamie sets his gears spinning: He'll coldly seduce her just to prove that he can, and for final vindication he'll do it as a "jerk" just like all the guys she originally overlooked him for.
So you see, immediately we know where this is going: Chris will try and hillariously fail, over and over, to implement his evil scheme. It'll be fun following the exploits of this despicable (but not wholly without justification) cad, right up until the 3rd act when he'll discover he really does still love Jamie and that he has to do the right thing. We know, by instinct, that even if the film did have the requisite cojones to have Chris "win," riding triumphant back to LA singing a sonet to the fallacy of romance with Samantha as his prize and the ruins of New Jersey in his rear-view mirror, that most wouldn't want it to.
But oh well, it's fun while it lasts. Reynolds remains a gifted comic leading man in search of a great role, and he turns whats really a pretty shallow script into something workable and frequently hillarious. I'm inclined to sympahtize with Chris to begin with, (long story) sure, but Reynolds timing and sharp wit is what makes this character worth following around for most of a movie.
Amy Smart is slightly less enthralling as Jamie, only partially because the film doesn't give her much of a role to work with. The audience never quite falls as hard for her as Chris does, and thats a problem.
Running away with the movie and securing her reign as current Hollywood's sexiest comedy dynamo is Anna Faris. Samantha exists as the probable offspring of the frequently-dreamt-of-by-me coupling of Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera, and she's the funniest thing in the movie at any given time that she's in the movie. Faris is making a name for herself by being hysterical, which is impressive considering she's good-looking enough to have made a name with much less effort.
It's too bad that it doesn't last, but the plain fact is that "Just Friends" stops working the moment Chris decides he needs to change his evil ways. Reynolds plays the role so well as an understandably-tweaked self-made-man on a mission that the audience isn't given enough reason to support his change of heart. It's as though the movie wants to follow all the way through to the cynical end but lacks the will to go for it, and just half-asses a "hooray for people!" ending instead.
But while it lasts, it's funny. It's not enough, but thats what it is.
FINAL RATING: 6/10
Here's what I'm talking about: I love when a movie embraces a bitter, cynical or even at least "slapstick" take on the subject of all things romantic. What I hate is that, in such movies, you know that the fun will only be short-lived. No rom-com wants to be angry all the way through, so enjoyment of such fare is always bittersweet; you know going in that by the 3rd act all the fun will be over and the film will quickly turn into a "love conquers all" indictment of it's own premise. It happened to "Wedding Crashers," it happened to the lesser Farelly Brothers movies, and it happens to "Just Friends."
The premise is killer: Ryan Reynolds (who seems made for the part) is Chris Brander, who back in 1995 lived the nightmare life of a chubby nerd who was the best friend of the hottest girl in High School. Years of watching her ignore him sexually in favor of a succession of dumb jocks drove him to the point of insanity, and when his graduation night attempt to confess his love went about as disasterously wrong as it could have he fled town and never looked back.
Ten years later, Chris has transformed himself into a super-rich, super-handsome LA music exec who's through the model/singer/actress population with a womanizing cruelty which we're to understand as vengeance on the entire female species for what best-friend Jamie did (or rather didn't do) to him in High School. Assigned to escort mentally-unstable pop princess Samantha (Anna Faris) to Paris, the pair find themselves unexpectedly stranded in Chris' old hometown, where a renunion with Jamie sets his gears spinning: He'll coldly seduce her just to prove that he can, and for final vindication he'll do it as a "jerk" just like all the guys she originally overlooked him for.
So you see, immediately we know where this is going: Chris will try and hillariously fail, over and over, to implement his evil scheme. It'll be fun following the exploits of this despicable (but not wholly without justification) cad, right up until the 3rd act when he'll discover he really does still love Jamie and that he has to do the right thing. We know, by instinct, that even if the film did have the requisite cojones to have Chris "win," riding triumphant back to LA singing a sonet to the fallacy of romance with Samantha as his prize and the ruins of New Jersey in his rear-view mirror, that most wouldn't want it to.
But oh well, it's fun while it lasts. Reynolds remains a gifted comic leading man in search of a great role, and he turns whats really a pretty shallow script into something workable and frequently hillarious. I'm inclined to sympahtize with Chris to begin with, (long story) sure, but Reynolds timing and sharp wit is what makes this character worth following around for most of a movie.
Amy Smart is slightly less enthralling as Jamie, only partially because the film doesn't give her much of a role to work with. The audience never quite falls as hard for her as Chris does, and thats a problem.
Running away with the movie and securing her reign as current Hollywood's sexiest comedy dynamo is Anna Faris. Samantha exists as the probable offspring of the frequently-dreamt-of-by-me coupling of Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera, and she's the funniest thing in the movie at any given time that she's in the movie. Faris is making a name for herself by being hysterical, which is impressive considering she's good-looking enough to have made a name with much less effort.
It's too bad that it doesn't last, but the plain fact is that "Just Friends" stops working the moment Chris decides he needs to change his evil ways. Reynolds plays the role so well as an understandably-tweaked self-made-man on a mission that the audience isn't given enough reason to support his change of heart. It's as though the movie wants to follow all the way through to the cynical end but lacks the will to go for it, and just half-asses a "hooray for people!" ending instead.
But while it lasts, it's funny. It's not enough, but thats what it is.
FINAL RATING: 6/10
Thursday, 24 November 2005
Tuesday, 22 November 2005
Mel Gibson battles the Religious "Right." No, seriously.
My feelings on the subject of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ" have been pretty well stated in the past, so let's not dwell on them. Straight to the point: Mad Mel and his Jesus movie are back in the news, and back stirring up the so-called "religious right." But this time it's different.
Here's the deal: There's this nutball in Utah named Ray Lines. Ray Lines operates an outfit called "Cleanflicks." Here's their website:
http://www.cleanflicks.com/
Basically, "Cleanflicks" creates unauthorized "christian family-friendly" edits of popular movies and sells/rents them to people. As you may expect, Mr. Lines sees himself as an activist on behalf of God fearing American families. As you may also expect, the people who own the copyrights on the films he's editing are unhappy with him. In fact, the DGA has been suing him for three years.
Here's why it's hard to shut this guy down: While he's technically violating copyright law, he's not actually making any money doing this because he purchases a copy for every copy he edits. U.S. laws protecting the right of artists to control how their work is presented to the public are vastly less rigid than elsewhere in the world, which means that Cleanflicks can use this gray-area loophole to render prosecution murky... so far.
It hasn't helped matters that the DGA is constrained by a (comparitively) limited amount of member-contributed funds and by the edict to keep things like this quiet and low-key. Litigating a philosophical and political opponent into submission over legal nuance can make you look like a bully, even when you're in the right like the DGA certainly is. THIS, in other words, is a job for another sort of plaintiff. Y'know, like an obsessive self-financed millionaire/maverick/nut-bunny/zealot. One of those would do GREAT...
...enter you-know-who.
Mel's "Passion," you might recall, is a pretty damn violent movie. The christian-right critics, you might recall, put their usual disdain for Hollywood bloodletting on hold for the film because they valued it's potential as a recruiting vehicle. Gibson, you might recall, made some pretty friendly gestures in their direction, and they in his.
And then Ray Lines and Cleanflicks performed one of the dissections on "Passion." And Mel Gibson found out. And he wasn't happy. How unhappy?
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_321191056.html
He's SUING THEM. To make them stop cutting his movie and infringing on his copyright. And if he's successful, it's judgement-day for Cleanflicks. Remember: If Mel stops Cleanflicks from cutting HIS movie, anyone else can run with the same suit from the same angle, it's called precedent.
I have three things to say about this.
1.) My review of "Passion" still stands. I still find it to be anti-semetic, homoerotic torture porn, and not a well made equivalent thereof to boot. I also still find Gibson to be getting progressively creepier. BUT he's still otherwise a good filmmaker and actor who's made a number of movies I've liked, and in this issue he's RIGHT.
2.) The one thing you can say about Gibson and Ray Lines is that both are, at least, men of their word. Unlike the other religious critics, Lines isn't flipping on "Passion" just because it's a Jesus movie, he's treating it with the same rusty chainsaw he treats every other film with. And Gibson isn't going soft on Cleanflicks just because they share lots of buddies in the christian extremist camp.
3.) This begs the question: Who will Brent Bozell, James Dobson, etc. support? They can't be on both sides of this, their going to have to pick one or the other. Do they back up the filmmaker who made the Jesus movie they adored, or the film editor who takes the knife to the GOOD movies they hated? So far they aren't talking.
THIS will be one to watch.
Here's the deal: There's this nutball in Utah named Ray Lines. Ray Lines operates an outfit called "Cleanflicks." Here's their website:
http://www.cleanflicks.com/
Basically, "Cleanflicks" creates unauthorized "christian family-friendly" edits of popular movies and sells/rents them to people. As you may expect, Mr. Lines sees himself as an activist on behalf of God fearing American families. As you may also expect, the people who own the copyrights on the films he's editing are unhappy with him. In fact, the DGA has been suing him for three years.
Here's why it's hard to shut this guy down: While he's technically violating copyright law, he's not actually making any money doing this because he purchases a copy for every copy he edits. U.S. laws protecting the right of artists to control how their work is presented to the public are vastly less rigid than elsewhere in the world, which means that Cleanflicks can use this gray-area loophole to render prosecution murky... so far.
It hasn't helped matters that the DGA is constrained by a (comparitively) limited amount of member-contributed funds and by the edict to keep things like this quiet and low-key. Litigating a philosophical and political opponent into submission over legal nuance can make you look like a bully, even when you're in the right like the DGA certainly is. THIS, in other words, is a job for another sort of plaintiff. Y'know, like an obsessive self-financed millionaire/maverick/nut-bunny/zealot. One of those would do GREAT...
...enter you-know-who.
Mel's "Passion," you might recall, is a pretty damn violent movie. The christian-right critics, you might recall, put their usual disdain for Hollywood bloodletting on hold for the film because they valued it's potential as a recruiting vehicle. Gibson, you might recall, made some pretty friendly gestures in their direction, and they in his.
And then Ray Lines and Cleanflicks performed one of the dissections on "Passion." And Mel Gibson found out. And he wasn't happy. How unhappy?
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_321191056.html
He's SUING THEM. To make them stop cutting his movie and infringing on his copyright. And if he's successful, it's judgement-day for Cleanflicks. Remember: If Mel stops Cleanflicks from cutting HIS movie, anyone else can run with the same suit from the same angle, it's called precedent.
I have three things to say about this.
1.) My review of "Passion" still stands. I still find it to be anti-semetic, homoerotic torture porn, and not a well made equivalent thereof to boot. I also still find Gibson to be getting progressively creepier. BUT he's still otherwise a good filmmaker and actor who's made a number of movies I've liked, and in this issue he's RIGHT.
2.) The one thing you can say about Gibson and Ray Lines is that both are, at least, men of their word. Unlike the other religious critics, Lines isn't flipping on "Passion" just because it's a Jesus movie, he's treating it with the same rusty chainsaw he treats every other film with. And Gibson isn't going soft on Cleanflicks just because they share lots of buddies in the christian extremist camp.
3.) This begs the question: Who will Brent Bozell, James Dobson, etc. support? They can't be on both sides of this, their going to have to pick one or the other. Do they back up the filmmaker who made the Jesus movie they adored, or the film editor who takes the knife to the GOOD movies they hated? So far they aren't talking.
THIS will be one to watch.
Monday, 21 November 2005
REVIEW: Walk The Line
Somewhere out there, in the annals of recent musical history, there has to be a megastar singer with a different life story than this. Someone who's music is just as legendary as Johnny Cash, who's circumstances were just as unusual as Ray Charles... and yet who's life didn't follow this same rigid, mythic arc of "rotten childhood, meteoric rise, drug-addiction, rescue-by-love-of-one-true-love." The question is, do we really WANT to hear it?
What I mean is, isn't the reason we keep telling THIS true story, over and over with new real-life people, that it's the story we WANT to hear? It's reassuring, I think, to hear that those posessed of a creative genius that most of us could only dream of having will have to suffer psychologically in order to maintain it... that true love and family are ultimately more worthy and fulfilling than the artistic fulfillment they had sought before. Isn't this the same appeal that celebrity-glamour-stripping reality TV has? Isn't this what Ayn Rand was talking about... the instinctive need for the average-and-below masses to see their above average "superiors" (of intellect, of art, of athletics, of whatever...) dragged down to their level rather than working to make themselves among the superior?
Or it could also be that the story keeps working. It worked in "Ray" and it certainly works here. In telling the story of Johnny Cash's rise, fall and rise, "Walk The Line" does more or less play as "The Redneck 'Ray", but that doesn't make it an unworthy movie.
As I said above, the story you already know: Johnny Cash (Joaquin Pheonix) grows up dirt-poor with a hard-drinkin' daddy and a superhumanly loving mama. He's got a beloved brother who's early death haunts and traumatizes him, just like Elvis and Ray. He forges a new sound in the early days of rock, meets his childhood dream girl in June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), wrecks his own marriage, pushes too far, gets into drugs, falls all the way down and then gets dragged back to life. In between this, he performs famous songs and meets famous people, (Elvis, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others pop up in cameo) and the movie-proper caps off with Cash's famous live performance at Folsom prison.
Yes, originality was Cash's strong suit... not so much so this movie's. The actors are in charge of carrying it, and they prove up to the task. Pheonix and Witherspoon strike a proper chemistry, and that they do their own singing is an impressive feat. Their turns are the kind that tend to (and should, really) dominate the film, but they get backup in a big way from Robert Patrick as Cash's dissaproving father.
In a way, Patrick's performance grounds the film in a kind of greater reality than it would otherwise have. The dad-who-doesn't-understand is a mandatory trope of the rise-of-a-genius movie, but "Walk" takes a different approach than normal: It's important that, while Cash's father is indeed abusive, he's not evil and also not without a certain perspective. His biting, laconic critiques of his son are harsh-as-intended, but he's seldom actually "wrong." Late in the film, when he returns one of Johnny's assaults on his drinking days, he rightly points out that he gave alcohol up while Johnny is still a drug addict. By the end, it can be inferred that the two men have come to undestand eachother, instead of the expected "you were right, son."
It helps to be a fan of Cash's music to get into the film full-bore, but beyond that it works as more than just another rock biopic. I'm reccomeding it.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
What I mean is, isn't the reason we keep telling THIS true story, over and over with new real-life people, that it's the story we WANT to hear? It's reassuring, I think, to hear that those posessed of a creative genius that most of us could only dream of having will have to suffer psychologically in order to maintain it... that true love and family are ultimately more worthy and fulfilling than the artistic fulfillment they had sought before. Isn't this the same appeal that celebrity-glamour-stripping reality TV has? Isn't this what Ayn Rand was talking about... the instinctive need for the average-and-below masses to see their above average "superiors" (of intellect, of art, of athletics, of whatever...) dragged down to their level rather than working to make themselves among the superior?
Or it could also be that the story keeps working. It worked in "Ray" and it certainly works here. In telling the story of Johnny Cash's rise, fall and rise, "Walk The Line" does more or less play as "The Redneck 'Ray", but that doesn't make it an unworthy movie.
As I said above, the story you already know: Johnny Cash (Joaquin Pheonix) grows up dirt-poor with a hard-drinkin' daddy and a superhumanly loving mama. He's got a beloved brother who's early death haunts and traumatizes him, just like Elvis and Ray. He forges a new sound in the early days of rock, meets his childhood dream girl in June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), wrecks his own marriage, pushes too far, gets into drugs, falls all the way down and then gets dragged back to life. In between this, he performs famous songs and meets famous people, (Elvis, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others pop up in cameo) and the movie-proper caps off with Cash's famous live performance at Folsom prison.
Yes, originality was Cash's strong suit... not so much so this movie's. The actors are in charge of carrying it, and they prove up to the task. Pheonix and Witherspoon strike a proper chemistry, and that they do their own singing is an impressive feat. Their turns are the kind that tend to (and should, really) dominate the film, but they get backup in a big way from Robert Patrick as Cash's dissaproving father.
In a way, Patrick's performance grounds the film in a kind of greater reality than it would otherwise have. The dad-who-doesn't-understand is a mandatory trope of the rise-of-a-genius movie, but "Walk" takes a different approach than normal: It's important that, while Cash's father is indeed abusive, he's not evil and also not without a certain perspective. His biting, laconic critiques of his son are harsh-as-intended, but he's seldom actually "wrong." Late in the film, when he returns one of Johnny's assaults on his drinking days, he rightly points out that he gave alcohol up while Johnny is still a drug addict. By the end, it can be inferred that the two men have come to undestand eachother, instead of the expected "you were right, son."
It helps to be a fan of Cash's music to get into the film full-bore, but beyond that it works as more than just another rock biopic. I'm reccomeding it.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
Friday, 18 November 2005
REVIEW: Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire
I like the "Harry Potter" movies.
I liked this "Harry Potter" movie.
But I need to be a pill for just a minute and pose a bit of a geek-question about the whole thing, okay? Okay...
Thus far, every "Potter" film has broken down as follows: Harry comes to Hogwarts amid some kind of brewing unseemliness. The adult cast is fully aware that said unseemliness has everything to do with him, but allows him to blunder through it on his own anyway. Eventually, mysteries are solved, re-emerging peices of the evil entity to which Harry owes his fame are revealed, and Harry learns a new scrap of his own backstory... which apparently the entire adult cast is fully aware of but remains a traumatizing mystery to him.
So here's my question: After four years of this now, is it too much to ask for someone at Hogwarts to sit this poor kid down and just tell him everything and everyone he might need to know about in regards to Voldemort, his parents and everything else? So that maybe he DOESN'T have to nearly get himself killed the next time some new face with important connections to him shows up and starts to stir things up? Or at least let him Lexis-Nexis search "voldemort" on the crystal ball? Just asking.
But whatever. Here we go again, having now reached the midpoint of what's beginning to feel like the theatrical equivalent of a comfortably-entrenched TV show. This year's A-plot: Hogwarts is playing host to the Triwizard Tournament, a spellcasting olympics, and Harry finds himself drafted without having signed up to play. This year's B-plot: The kids are growing up, Harry's stealing glances at girls, Hermoine is suddenly intimidating her male pals in an entirely new way and Ron Weasley is becoming aware of how Jimmy Olsen must feel. This year's new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher: Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson,) a half-bionic, half-mad hardcase. This year's continuation of the Big Arc: Voldemort is back in flesh-and-blood, played by Ralph Feinnes and looking like a "Close Encounters" alien in a black robe.
Dropped in among the usual action scenes, wacky background magic and spellcasting is a bulky middle third that mines to amusing effect the juxtaposition of Hogwart's fantasy realm with the teenaged romance themes of John Hughes-style comedies. Racing dragons and fighting Voldemort is easy... compared to asking a girl to the dance! Har har har. You can see where this is all going, which is part of the point of doing these gags, but they work because the cast sells it and, yes, after four films worth of character building the series has earned the right to go to the "it's cut because so-and-so is dancing with such-and-such" well.
With so much attention on teen angst this go-around, the series' reliable cast of British character-acting giants gets largely pushed to the margins, but they're still having their fun: Gary Oldman's Sirius Black gets only a cameo, but in circumstances that render it singularly odd even among Gary Oldman cameos. And Alan Rickman's Professor Snape, previously best used for acid-tongued rebuking of the younger cast, has less to say but stars in a standout scene of physical comedy.
The bottom line is, the series still works, and it may even still be getting better. You like "Harry Potter," you're going to like this.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
I liked this "Harry Potter" movie.
But I need to be a pill for just a minute and pose a bit of a geek-question about the whole thing, okay? Okay...
Thus far, every "Potter" film has broken down as follows: Harry comes to Hogwarts amid some kind of brewing unseemliness. The adult cast is fully aware that said unseemliness has everything to do with him, but allows him to blunder through it on his own anyway. Eventually, mysteries are solved, re-emerging peices of the evil entity to which Harry owes his fame are revealed, and Harry learns a new scrap of his own backstory... which apparently the entire adult cast is fully aware of but remains a traumatizing mystery to him.
So here's my question: After four years of this now, is it too much to ask for someone at Hogwarts to sit this poor kid down and just tell him everything and everyone he might need to know about in regards to Voldemort, his parents and everything else? So that maybe he DOESN'T have to nearly get himself killed the next time some new face with important connections to him shows up and starts to stir things up? Or at least let him Lexis-Nexis search "voldemort" on the crystal ball? Just asking.
But whatever. Here we go again, having now reached the midpoint of what's beginning to feel like the theatrical equivalent of a comfortably-entrenched TV show. This year's A-plot: Hogwarts is playing host to the Triwizard Tournament, a spellcasting olympics, and Harry finds himself drafted without having signed up to play. This year's B-plot: The kids are growing up, Harry's stealing glances at girls, Hermoine is suddenly intimidating her male pals in an entirely new way and Ron Weasley is becoming aware of how Jimmy Olsen must feel. This year's new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher: Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson,) a half-bionic, half-mad hardcase. This year's continuation of the Big Arc: Voldemort is back in flesh-and-blood, played by Ralph Feinnes and looking like a "Close Encounters" alien in a black robe.
Dropped in among the usual action scenes, wacky background magic and spellcasting is a bulky middle third that mines to amusing effect the juxtaposition of Hogwart's fantasy realm with the teenaged romance themes of John Hughes-style comedies. Racing dragons and fighting Voldemort is easy... compared to asking a girl to the dance! Har har har. You can see where this is all going, which is part of the point of doing these gags, but they work because the cast sells it and, yes, after four films worth of character building the series has earned the right to go to the "it's cut because so-and-so is dancing with such-and-such" well.
With so much attention on teen angst this go-around, the series' reliable cast of British character-acting giants gets largely pushed to the margins, but they're still having their fun: Gary Oldman's Sirius Black gets only a cameo, but in circumstances that render it singularly odd even among Gary Oldman cameos. And Alan Rickman's Professor Snape, previously best used for acid-tongued rebuking of the younger cast, has less to say but stars in a standout scene of physical comedy.
The bottom line is, the series still works, and it may even still be getting better. You like "Harry Potter," you're going to like this.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
Wednesday, 16 November 2005
REVIEW: Zathura
This past weekend, Americans (that would be most of you, though Sitemeter helpfully informs me that a good deal of my visitors are from Europe and Asia, nifty!) largely overlooked to mega-hyped 50 Cent epic "Get Rich or Die Tryin", allowing it to open pathetically in 4th place. An explanation has not been found for this, but from where I sit it suggests a dangerous dip in our national surplus of suburban white teens looking to tee off mom and dad. Making a surprising STRONG showing, despite a (relatively) smaller advertising campaign, was "Zathura," a vibrantly clever and joyfully geeked-out family/scifi adventure.
Well done, guys.
"Zathura" has been touted as a followup (more like thematic cousin, really) to "Jumanji," a functional but unremarkable FX showcase starring Robin Williams you might remember from a few years back. Both were based on Chris Van Allsburg books, and they share the same basic setup: Children discover an enchanted (cursed?) board game which, when played, causes it's "imaginary" perils to manifest into reality. "Jumanji," you'll recall, conjured up the animal-and-otherwise threats of a 30s-style jungle adventure serial; while "Zathura" throws it's players into a circa-1950s pulp-scifi space quest. "Zathura" is the superior film.
The heroes here are a pair of kids, one older, bitter and sports-obsessed; the other younger, energetic and imaginative. They don't get along in the usual fightin-brothers way, and the older boy can just barely conceal the fact that he blames everything wrong with his life on the existence of his brother... including the divorce of their parents. Home alone save for a snoozing older sister, the littler bro finds "Zathura" and harraunges big bro into a game. Apparently too young to have seen "Jumanji," both are surprised when the house blasts off for deep space and they are assaulted by meteors, black holes, robots and, yes, a race of man-eating alien lizards. There's also a rescued astronaut and some ultra Star Trek-ish business about "time sphincters."
I live for this stuff.
The film just works, nose-to-toes, as a series of good decisions adding up to a whole: The WHOLE story plays out from the perspective (and usually the eye-level as well) of it's young leads, capable actors who REALLY seem to be the age they're playing. There's no winking pop-cultural nods, no inside jokes or "older" humor dropped in for the grownups. The FX, while up to snuff, are used to achieve a gorgeously archaic representation of "the future" as imagined pre-NASA. The bad guys, including the killer robot and space-pirate reptilian "Zorgons," are GREAT looking monsters and come off as a real menace... especially for a pair of kids.
It doesn't FORCE it's message of brotherly love, in fact it doesn't force much of anything at all. It just goes about it's way at the leisurely-rapid pace of a Disneyland roller coaster, supremely confident in the knowledge that as long as there are little boys there will always be a need for slimey aliens, jet-packs and deadly (but not TOO deadly) meteor showers.
There can now be very little doubt that Jon Favreau is the real deal as a director. He's currently getting a good going-over under the geek culture microscope as the latest would-be director of the Mars-based "John Carter" adaptation, a job which "Zathura" seems to emminently qualify him for.
Get out there, see this movie and take the kids.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Well done, guys.
"Zathura" has been touted as a followup (more like thematic cousin, really) to "Jumanji," a functional but unremarkable FX showcase starring Robin Williams you might remember from a few years back. Both were based on Chris Van Allsburg books, and they share the same basic setup: Children discover an enchanted (cursed?) board game which, when played, causes it's "imaginary" perils to manifest into reality. "Jumanji," you'll recall, conjured up the animal-and-otherwise threats of a 30s-style jungle adventure serial; while "Zathura" throws it's players into a circa-1950s pulp-scifi space quest. "Zathura" is the superior film.
The heroes here are a pair of kids, one older, bitter and sports-obsessed; the other younger, energetic and imaginative. They don't get along in the usual fightin-brothers way, and the older boy can just barely conceal the fact that he blames everything wrong with his life on the existence of his brother... including the divorce of their parents. Home alone save for a snoozing older sister, the littler bro finds "Zathura" and harraunges big bro into a game. Apparently too young to have seen "Jumanji," both are surprised when the house blasts off for deep space and they are assaulted by meteors, black holes, robots and, yes, a race of man-eating alien lizards. There's also a rescued astronaut and some ultra Star Trek-ish business about "time sphincters."
I live for this stuff.
The film just works, nose-to-toes, as a series of good decisions adding up to a whole: The WHOLE story plays out from the perspective (and usually the eye-level as well) of it's young leads, capable actors who REALLY seem to be the age they're playing. There's no winking pop-cultural nods, no inside jokes or "older" humor dropped in for the grownups. The FX, while up to snuff, are used to achieve a gorgeously archaic representation of "the future" as imagined pre-NASA. The bad guys, including the killer robot and space-pirate reptilian "Zorgons," are GREAT looking monsters and come off as a real menace... especially for a pair of kids.
It doesn't FORCE it's message of brotherly love, in fact it doesn't force much of anything at all. It just goes about it's way at the leisurely-rapid pace of a Disneyland roller coaster, supremely confident in the knowledge that as long as there are little boys there will always be a need for slimey aliens, jet-packs and deadly (but not TOO deadly) meteor showers.
There can now be very little doubt that Jon Favreau is the real deal as a director. He's currently getting a good going-over under the geek culture microscope as the latest would-be director of the Mars-based "John Carter" adaptation, a job which "Zathura" seems to emminently qualify him for.
Get out there, see this movie and take the kids.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Monday, 14 November 2005
REVIEW: Chicken Little (2005)
The most interesting thing about "Chicken Little" are the circumstances of it's release and inception. When an animated children's film not only features a full-scale alien invasion, a baseball game and the inspired vocal-casting of Don Knotts as a turkey politician, that the Variety B-stories about the dealmaking of it's producers are of greater interest is a sign of serious malfunction.
In any case, the backstory here has been the how and the why of this property's journey from odd, jokey little project to Disney's megahyped and ballyhooed attempt to "prove" their ability to survive if and when the Pixar animation company strikes out on it's own. Now that the film can be seen, the results are indeed of some intrigue: Disney's solution to the problem of "how do we equal Pixar?" turns out to be... "we don't. Instead, we aim a little lower and just try to be "Shrek."
Honestly, aping Dreamworks Animation's VH1-ready cash-cow is more the Mouse House's speed at this point. The richness of story and character that Pixar is fueled by is an abstract, whereas "name-actor voicecast, top-40 pop tunes, winking jokes for the grownups" is something they can quantify numerically. Trouble is, for all their little irritations (reality TV humor, Ricky Martin tracks, etc.) the "Shrek" cycle so far has had a real humanity and sense of depth to it and Disney's films, for years now, have not. "Chicken Little" is no exception.
Storywise, the film is an almost surgically-precise gutting and reversing of the fable for which it's named. You'll recall that the story of Chicken Little involves a titular character who whips his animal friends into a frenzy in the belief that "the sky is falling," which leads to disaster. The moral is one of temperance and reason, a warning to it's young audience to be both wary of overreager doomsayers and careful not to become one themselves. There's not much room in there, of course, for Disney's mandatory slapstick and PC message-mongering, of course, so it had to go...
The movie's story goes like this: Chicken Little turns his town of Oakey Oaks upside down with his emergency warning that the sky is falling, but when no evidence is found to support him he becomes a ridiculed outcast. The hook (initially not a bad one at that) is that CL might be able to deal with this status, as we're told he was among the "nerd" set at school to begin with, but the fact that his father Buck Cluck did not rise in his support has crippled the poor kid's confidence and filled him with zeal to win back his father's affection. Complicating matters is that CL's mother has recently passed away, and the two men have been unable to fill the emotional gap a wife and mother's absence has left them. CL's pal Abby "Ugly Duckling" Mallard, a devotee of pop-psychobabble, "knows" that all will be solved if Buck and CL just open up to one another but... y'know, their men.
"You need to get closure" is hardly a quest to hang a movie on, granted, but this is at least character-oriented storytelling, so it'll do for a start. CL opts for the quick-fix of impressing his father, a former baseball champ, by joining the team himself. This works, in that it gets the two men talking... about baseball, yes, but at least talking. But then... another peice of the sky falls, and it looks like it's got friends. Thus begins a "surprise third act twist" thats been spoiled for you by all the trailers: The sky is falling, and it's the precursor to an alien invasion. Would this, I wonder, be the sort of circumstances that could... oh, I dunno... finally get CL and Buck to get "closure?" Cuz that would be sumthin'...
It's not a full loss. Some of the comedy works, and CL's troupe of friends in Abby, Runt and Fish-Out-Of-Water (read: geeky girl, fat kid, foreign kid, get it?) have their moments and theres cute touches going on in the art design (Buck and CL live in a two-story house... with a chicken-wire fence and sheet-metal roof) but theres not much to hold your interest. The gags aren't THAT funny, the character aren't very fleshed out... all the usual Disney issues of late. I wound up concentrating on the little things, like the novelty of the film's nominal non-alien baddie, a bully named Foxy Loxy, being a girl; or the sweet-natured evolution of Abby's romantic designs on CL (which he is, of course, oblivious to... or is he?)
But taken as a whole, it doesn't add up. This is a collection is sketches, vignettes and half-formed ideas, not a movie.
FINAL RATING: 4/10
In any case, the backstory here has been the how and the why of this property's journey from odd, jokey little project to Disney's megahyped and ballyhooed attempt to "prove" their ability to survive if and when the Pixar animation company strikes out on it's own. Now that the film can be seen, the results are indeed of some intrigue: Disney's solution to the problem of "how do we equal Pixar?" turns out to be... "we don't. Instead, we aim a little lower and just try to be "Shrek."
Honestly, aping Dreamworks Animation's VH1-ready cash-cow is more the Mouse House's speed at this point. The richness of story and character that Pixar is fueled by is an abstract, whereas "name-actor voicecast, top-40 pop tunes, winking jokes for the grownups" is something they can quantify numerically. Trouble is, for all their little irritations (reality TV humor, Ricky Martin tracks, etc.) the "Shrek" cycle so far has had a real humanity and sense of depth to it and Disney's films, for years now, have not. "Chicken Little" is no exception.
Storywise, the film is an almost surgically-precise gutting and reversing of the fable for which it's named. You'll recall that the story of Chicken Little involves a titular character who whips his animal friends into a frenzy in the belief that "the sky is falling," which leads to disaster. The moral is one of temperance and reason, a warning to it's young audience to be both wary of overreager doomsayers and careful not to become one themselves. There's not much room in there, of course, for Disney's mandatory slapstick and PC message-mongering, of course, so it had to go...
The movie's story goes like this: Chicken Little turns his town of Oakey Oaks upside down with his emergency warning that the sky is falling, but when no evidence is found to support him he becomes a ridiculed outcast. The hook (initially not a bad one at that) is that CL might be able to deal with this status, as we're told he was among the "nerd" set at school to begin with, but the fact that his father Buck Cluck did not rise in his support has crippled the poor kid's confidence and filled him with zeal to win back his father's affection. Complicating matters is that CL's mother has recently passed away, and the two men have been unable to fill the emotional gap a wife and mother's absence has left them. CL's pal Abby "Ugly Duckling" Mallard, a devotee of pop-psychobabble, "knows" that all will be solved if Buck and CL just open up to one another but... y'know, their men.
"You need to get closure" is hardly a quest to hang a movie on, granted, but this is at least character-oriented storytelling, so it'll do for a start. CL opts for the quick-fix of impressing his father, a former baseball champ, by joining the team himself. This works, in that it gets the two men talking... about baseball, yes, but at least talking. But then... another peice of the sky falls, and it looks like it's got friends. Thus begins a "surprise third act twist" thats been spoiled for you by all the trailers: The sky is falling, and it's the precursor to an alien invasion. Would this, I wonder, be the sort of circumstances that could... oh, I dunno... finally get CL and Buck to get "closure?" Cuz that would be sumthin'...
It's not a full loss. Some of the comedy works, and CL's troupe of friends in Abby, Runt and Fish-Out-Of-Water (read: geeky girl, fat kid, foreign kid, get it?) have their moments and theres cute touches going on in the art design (Buck and CL live in a two-story house... with a chicken-wire fence and sheet-metal roof) but theres not much to hold your interest. The gags aren't THAT funny, the character aren't very fleshed out... all the usual Disney issues of late. I wound up concentrating on the little things, like the novelty of the film's nominal non-alien baddie, a bully named Foxy Loxy, being a girl; or the sweet-natured evolution of Abby's romantic designs on CL (which he is, of course, oblivious to... or is he?)
But taken as a whole, it doesn't add up. This is a collection is sketches, vignettes and half-formed ideas, not a movie.
FINAL RATING: 4/10
Thursday, 10 November 2005
Wednesday, 9 November 2005
REVIEW: Get Rich or Die Tryin'
This marks 2005's second big attempt, following "Hustle & Flow," to try and turn the thugs-to-riches creation mythology of gangsta rap into compelling cinema. It fails FAR more spectacularly than "Hustle" did, but for much the same reason: The hip-hop creation mythology is, at this point, played out to the extreme.
The film basically exists as a 2 hour and 14 minute infomercial for the music of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. His fans are known to refer to him as "Fiddy," which is kind of remarkable in that it manages to celebrate idiocy on two levels: The idiocy of refering to a grown man by his teenaged street-thug nickname and the idiocy of intentionally mispronouncing common words in order to "keep it real."
Just for the record here: Yes, I'm a 25 year-old white man. Yes, I was among that generation of suburban white kids who helped make gangsta rap such a phenomenon back in the early 90s during it's brief initial brush with actually feeling like the "poetry of the streets" it can now only pretend to be. Yes, I like hip-hop. I'm NOT, however, a fan of Mr. Cent's work. I've found his vocals flat, the beats derrivative and his lyrics trite... how many times can you hear one man praise himself in verse, honestly?
Mr. Cent appears here as Marcus, who leads a life more or less identical to the outline of the ballyhooed 50 Cent origin story. Sing along if you know the words: His mother was a murdered coke dealer. He became a crack dealer and went to jail. He got out and wanted to rap. He rapped about how much tougher he was than other rappers in his circle. He got shot nine times. He got better. He parlayed "I got shot nine times!" into the ultimate badge of street-cred "real"ness and became a star, despite his act never really improving.
"Fiddy" is, putting it mildly, a terrible actor. He mumbles his lines in monotone, has nothing in the way of facial expression and mainly just glowers at the camera. He has no distinct onscreen personality, and if not for providing the film's narration he would be swallowed up entirely by his own movie.
But the script is a bigger problem. This character (and, apparently by extension, the man playing him) hasn't really learned anything or gone through any great arc. In a way, "Fiddy's" success stands more as the ultimate indictment of the rap genre as largely bankrupt, not as a triumph. But "Fiddy" seems convinced that his story is heroic, and so the film turns out scene after scene where the imagery is ordering us to be awed by this man's journey while I'M stuck wondering why I'm supposed to care.
It's also stuck with some utterly laughable dialogue. At one point, a drug gang kingpin has a hillariously awful speech about violence begetting more violence, not more money. And later, after Marcus complains that his gunshot wounds have changed his voice, his girlfriend sagely intones: "It's better... there's more pain in it." Give me a break already.
The film jumps the shark full-bore for it's final act, in which Marcus "beef" with another rapper escalates into a shooting war among the drug gangs he left behind. Villians are revealed and "twists" we've seen coming fully unfold, and at one point (I kid you not) we see a scene where the impending performance by Marcus at a concert inspires ghetto children to take to the streets in a candlelight march against crack. Seriously.
Most of the blame for this mess can be laid at the studio and "Fiddy's" corporate masters, for churning out yet another bad commercial for what boils down to simply the latest "piss off your parents" overhyped music sensation. And some belongs to "Fiddy" himself, for reasons outlined above.
But sadly, a great deal of blame must be laid of Jim Sheridan, the excellent Irish filmmaker who for some reason thought directing this muck would be a good career move. Mr. Sheridan, we know you're prior movies were good and we hope you're next ones are again. But sir... you've made one hell of a bad movie here, and only SOME of it can be blamed on you're leading man being unable to ennunciate in English.
FINAL RATING: 1/10
The film basically exists as a 2 hour and 14 minute infomercial for the music of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. His fans are known to refer to him as "Fiddy," which is kind of remarkable in that it manages to celebrate idiocy on two levels: The idiocy of refering to a grown man by his teenaged street-thug nickname and the idiocy of intentionally mispronouncing common words in order to "keep it real."
Just for the record here: Yes, I'm a 25 year-old white man. Yes, I was among that generation of suburban white kids who helped make gangsta rap such a phenomenon back in the early 90s during it's brief initial brush with actually feeling like the "poetry of the streets" it can now only pretend to be. Yes, I like hip-hop. I'm NOT, however, a fan of Mr. Cent's work. I've found his vocals flat, the beats derrivative and his lyrics trite... how many times can you hear one man praise himself in verse, honestly?
Mr. Cent appears here as Marcus, who leads a life more or less identical to the outline of the ballyhooed 50 Cent origin story. Sing along if you know the words: His mother was a murdered coke dealer. He became a crack dealer and went to jail. He got out and wanted to rap. He rapped about how much tougher he was than other rappers in his circle. He got shot nine times. He got better. He parlayed "I got shot nine times!" into the ultimate badge of street-cred "real"ness and became a star, despite his act never really improving.
"Fiddy" is, putting it mildly, a terrible actor. He mumbles his lines in monotone, has nothing in the way of facial expression and mainly just glowers at the camera. He has no distinct onscreen personality, and if not for providing the film's narration he would be swallowed up entirely by his own movie.
But the script is a bigger problem. This character (and, apparently by extension, the man playing him) hasn't really learned anything or gone through any great arc. In a way, "Fiddy's" success stands more as the ultimate indictment of the rap genre as largely bankrupt, not as a triumph. But "Fiddy" seems convinced that his story is heroic, and so the film turns out scene after scene where the imagery is ordering us to be awed by this man's journey while I'M stuck wondering why I'm supposed to care.
It's also stuck with some utterly laughable dialogue. At one point, a drug gang kingpin has a hillariously awful speech about violence begetting more violence, not more money. And later, after Marcus complains that his gunshot wounds have changed his voice, his girlfriend sagely intones: "It's better... there's more pain in it." Give me a break already.
The film jumps the shark full-bore for it's final act, in which Marcus "beef" with another rapper escalates into a shooting war among the drug gangs he left behind. Villians are revealed and "twists" we've seen coming fully unfold, and at one point (I kid you not) we see a scene where the impending performance by Marcus at a concert inspires ghetto children to take to the streets in a candlelight march against crack. Seriously.
Most of the blame for this mess can be laid at the studio and "Fiddy's" corporate masters, for churning out yet another bad commercial for what boils down to simply the latest "piss off your parents" overhyped music sensation. And some belongs to "Fiddy" himself, for reasons outlined above.
But sadly, a great deal of blame must be laid of Jim Sheridan, the excellent Irish filmmaker who for some reason thought directing this muck would be a good career move. Mr. Sheridan, we know you're prior movies were good and we hope you're next ones are again. But sir... you've made one hell of a bad movie here, and only SOME of it can be blamed on you're leading man being unable to ennunciate in English.
FINAL RATING: 1/10
Tuesday, 8 November 2005
REVIEW: The Weather Man
"The Weather Man" is catching a good deal of flack from audiences and critics for not being what they expected. Or, more accurately, what they felt it was marketed as. They aren't entirely without a point.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that "The Weather Man" is using completely misleading advertisements, one can certainly be forgiven for expecting a different film. The trailers, through use of clever editing and music, have been selling the film as a "quirky" comedy about a loser putting his life back together. If you've seen said trailer, you're doubtlessly pretty sure that you know the basic idea: Sad-sack local weather man David Spritz (Nicholas Cage) is losing his family and his sanity, but with some hard work, determination and a few pearls of sage wisdom from his wise father (Michael Caine) he'll be able to set his life comedically back in order. It'll be an offbeat Fall-style remix about growing up and achieving your dreams.
Yes, thats what most people are probably thinking when they buy tickets for "The Weather Man," and so I suppose it's within reason that they be dissapointed when the find it to be something else entirely. But it's also within reason that others are glad about it, finding it to be something a bit more interesting than they had anticipated. You may gather that I fall into the later camp.
The film is not a quirky comedy about achieving your dreams, but David Spritz seems to think that it is... and thats the problem. He can't get his act together, he can't finish anything he starts, he's the sort of local celebrity who has to frequently weigh whether or not the professional perk of bedding Oktoberfest dancing girls is worth the professional hardship of having fast food thrown at him from moving vehicles, etc.
Also, his famous-author father pities him, he's divorced and his kids are heading down bad paths... but David is sure that if he shows some gumption, lands that big network job in New York, makes grand territorial gestures against his ex-wife's new boyfriend and "figures it all out" he can win is family back, his father's respect and the life he's always wanted.
If Spritz was writing the movie, he'd probably cast Robin Williams or Jim Carrey as him before Nicholas Cage: He likely sees himself as quirky, but he's actually closer to just plain pathetic. It's easy to see why his wife left him, why his children don't look up to him and why his father doesn't respect him; he's a dense and insensitive prick for the most part, he's unreliable and doesn't even really respect himself. So there's you're movie: It's not about Spritz achieving all his goals, it's about his slow realization that his striving for clearly unrealistic aims is hurting him and those around him. The eventual moral isn't about reaching for the dream, but learning to accept that some dreams just can't be reached... that life can be worth living even if it's not turning out exactly the way you want it to. In that respect, the film plays like a much more even, mature variation on "Jersey Girl" from a few years back.
Which isn't to say that the film is a total downer. On the way to his semi-epiphany are chances for him to set right some of the (relatively few) things wrong in his life that aren't really his fault: Like turning his not-exactly-slender daughter on to the joys of non-form-fitting clothing, and intervening when his son's guidance counselor turns out to be a sexual predator. To say that David aquits himself wonderfully in each situation would be pushing it... but he at least shows he's getting the right idea.
This isn't the movie I thought it was going to be. I happen to think I got a better one than I expected, you may feel differently. But I'd say it's worth a look, just to see where you fall.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
While it would be an exaggeration to say that "The Weather Man" is using completely misleading advertisements, one can certainly be forgiven for expecting a different film. The trailers, through use of clever editing and music, have been selling the film as a "quirky" comedy about a loser putting his life back together. If you've seen said trailer, you're doubtlessly pretty sure that you know the basic idea: Sad-sack local weather man David Spritz (Nicholas Cage) is losing his family and his sanity, but with some hard work, determination and a few pearls of sage wisdom from his wise father (Michael Caine) he'll be able to set his life comedically back in order. It'll be an offbeat Fall-style remix about growing up and achieving your dreams.
Yes, thats what most people are probably thinking when they buy tickets for "The Weather Man," and so I suppose it's within reason that they be dissapointed when the find it to be something else entirely. But it's also within reason that others are glad about it, finding it to be something a bit more interesting than they had anticipated. You may gather that I fall into the later camp.
The film is not a quirky comedy about achieving your dreams, but David Spritz seems to think that it is... and thats the problem. He can't get his act together, he can't finish anything he starts, he's the sort of local celebrity who has to frequently weigh whether or not the professional perk of bedding Oktoberfest dancing girls is worth the professional hardship of having fast food thrown at him from moving vehicles, etc.
Also, his famous-author father pities him, he's divorced and his kids are heading down bad paths... but David is sure that if he shows some gumption, lands that big network job in New York, makes grand territorial gestures against his ex-wife's new boyfriend and "figures it all out" he can win is family back, his father's respect and the life he's always wanted.
If Spritz was writing the movie, he'd probably cast Robin Williams or Jim Carrey as him before Nicholas Cage: He likely sees himself as quirky, but he's actually closer to just plain pathetic. It's easy to see why his wife left him, why his children don't look up to him and why his father doesn't respect him; he's a dense and insensitive prick for the most part, he's unreliable and doesn't even really respect himself. So there's you're movie: It's not about Spritz achieving all his goals, it's about his slow realization that his striving for clearly unrealistic aims is hurting him and those around him. The eventual moral isn't about reaching for the dream, but learning to accept that some dreams just can't be reached... that life can be worth living even if it's not turning out exactly the way you want it to. In that respect, the film plays like a much more even, mature variation on "Jersey Girl" from a few years back.
Which isn't to say that the film is a total downer. On the way to his semi-epiphany are chances for him to set right some of the (relatively few) things wrong in his life that aren't really his fault: Like turning his not-exactly-slender daughter on to the joys of non-form-fitting clothing, and intervening when his son's guidance counselor turns out to be a sexual predator. To say that David aquits himself wonderfully in each situation would be pushing it... but he at least shows he's getting the right idea.
This isn't the movie I thought it was going to be. I happen to think I got a better one than I expected, you may feel differently. But I'd say it's worth a look, just to see where you fall.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
Sunday, 6 November 2005
REVIEW: Jarhead
I'm going to retreat into humility for a moment and remind myself that this blog is still waaaaaay down on everyone's list of go-to review sites, and thus begin by presuming that most of you reading are already familiar with that reliable old film school trope that movie violence is usually serving as some kind of sexual metaphor. Jason Vorhees' machete penetrates flesh of coital teens, thus standing in for the un-filmmable penetration of genitals? Jedi lightsabers buzzing out to their full length at the start of action scenes standing in for phallic erections at the start of "action" of an entirely different sort? Remember? "violence= sex" is one of the "everybody knows" nuggets of film theory, second in frequency only to "Citizen Kane just wanted his lost childhood back."
Given this, it's become a standard-issue parlor trick of film buff's to divine the "sexuality" of action films: "Top Gun," "Thelma & Louise" and "The Fast and the Furious" are "gay." "Conan" and "Braveheart" are celebrations of the dominant power of the confident sword/penis. The collective action-filmography of Mel Gibson is, well... masochistic, to put it mildly. "Jarhead" strikes a unique position in this realm by removing all but the barest vestiges of actual copulation from the action/sex metaphor and focusing solely on erection and ejaculation... or lack thereof. It takes awhile, but eventually you come to the realization that what we have here is essentially a long meditation on jerking off, with Gulf War I standing in for the actual act (though we see our share of it anyway.)
The film has been criticized by many for it's percieved lack of politics, which in most cases has meant it's unwillingness to blossom into an antiwar parable for the new Gulf War. To my mind, this is an especially silly note of critique... The film, the subject matter nor the memoir by Desert Storm vet Anthony Swofford are in no way "inherently" anti-war/anti-current-war sources at their core, and to offer a nay-vote on this film for a lack of Bush-bashing makes about as much sense as if I were to give it a poor review based on it's noticeable lack of irradiated giant dinosaurs.
In other words, what I suspect is causing so much consternation among some of my fellow reviewers is that they'd made up their minds that this was going to be one more anti-war parable for the reference pile, and have instead recieved a film that is aggressively hostile to politics and, in fact, approaches with 100% sympathy the "plight" of soldiers robbed of the chance to kill the enemy.
Jake Gyllenhall is Swofford, who heads to the Marines for reasons he outright refuses to share with us and finds himself promoted to the coveted rank of Scout Sniper. Paired with Marine-ethos-incarnate spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard, stealing yet another movie's worth of scenes) under the command of a tough Sergeant (Jamie Foxx,) Swofford and his unit are deployed to the desert as part of Operation Desert Shield's first wave. They've already gone through the "Full Metal Jacket" ride at boot camp, they're tough, they're excited, they're ready and eager for their chance to kill the Iraqi enemy... and then nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
It was the push-button war, remember? The Jarheads are all ready and raring to fight, but they arrive into a war thats being fought by digital targeting systems and precision air strikes. Here, thusly, is why the film seems to be so problematic for some: "Jarhead" isn't interested in waxing the philosophical about the futility of war, or having the lack of action lead it's soldiers into realizations on the value of pacifism. It's grounded completely in the perspective of the Marines themselves, and that perspective is one of impotent rage.
They came to Iraq for the joy and the rush of using their hard-earned skills to blow the brains out of the Iraqis, and that joy... that release is being denied them. There's no attacks on the army for "making them this way," or any serious question as to whether or not turning a man into an eager killer is morally right or wrong, or even a single attempt to "humanize" the Iraqi enemy. As far as the characters are concerned, the Iraqi soldiers represent nothing more than targets which should be theirs for the killing but are instead being shelled by the air force... and the film, as it stands, does not seem to find fault in this viewpoint.
And so, while they wait for their hoped-for chance at combat action, Swofford and the others do what all of us do when we're all fired up and have nowhere to go: They start to go crazy. To describe the manner in which much of it occurs would be to spoil some great surprises and little moments. Take my word for it that, while you'll find very little "war" in this particular war-movie; action, intesity and scenes of great darkness manage to abound anyway. And just wait until you see the visual knockout of the film's entire final act, set in the surreal landscape of a desert turned black by the hellfire of burning oil wells on the horizon... and oil actually raining from the sky.
And there it is; a blunt, unashamedly phallicentric metaphor for sexual frustration doing double duty as a straight-faced lament for the soldier who's not permitted to soldier. It may not be the war movie you were expecting, and it's definately not the anti-war movie you might have been hoping for, but right now it's the one you need to see.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Given this, it's become a standard-issue parlor trick of film buff's to divine the "sexuality" of action films: "Top Gun," "Thelma & Louise" and "The Fast and the Furious" are "gay." "Conan" and "Braveheart" are celebrations of the dominant power of the confident sword/penis. The collective action-filmography of Mel Gibson is, well... masochistic, to put it mildly. "Jarhead" strikes a unique position in this realm by removing all but the barest vestiges of actual copulation from the action/sex metaphor and focusing solely on erection and ejaculation... or lack thereof. It takes awhile, but eventually you come to the realization that what we have here is essentially a long meditation on jerking off, with Gulf War I standing in for the actual act (though we see our share of it anyway.)
The film has been criticized by many for it's percieved lack of politics, which in most cases has meant it's unwillingness to blossom into an antiwar parable for the new Gulf War. To my mind, this is an especially silly note of critique... The film, the subject matter nor the memoir by Desert Storm vet Anthony Swofford are in no way "inherently" anti-war/anti-current-war sources at their core, and to offer a nay-vote on this film for a lack of Bush-bashing makes about as much sense as if I were to give it a poor review based on it's noticeable lack of irradiated giant dinosaurs.
In other words, what I suspect is causing so much consternation among some of my fellow reviewers is that they'd made up their minds that this was going to be one more anti-war parable for the reference pile, and have instead recieved a film that is aggressively hostile to politics and, in fact, approaches with 100% sympathy the "plight" of soldiers robbed of the chance to kill the enemy.
Jake Gyllenhall is Swofford, who heads to the Marines for reasons he outright refuses to share with us and finds himself promoted to the coveted rank of Scout Sniper. Paired with Marine-ethos-incarnate spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard, stealing yet another movie's worth of scenes) under the command of a tough Sergeant (Jamie Foxx,) Swofford and his unit are deployed to the desert as part of Operation Desert Shield's first wave. They've already gone through the "Full Metal Jacket" ride at boot camp, they're tough, they're excited, they're ready and eager for their chance to kill the Iraqi enemy... and then nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
It was the push-button war, remember? The Jarheads are all ready and raring to fight, but they arrive into a war thats being fought by digital targeting systems and precision air strikes. Here, thusly, is why the film seems to be so problematic for some: "Jarhead" isn't interested in waxing the philosophical about the futility of war, or having the lack of action lead it's soldiers into realizations on the value of pacifism. It's grounded completely in the perspective of the Marines themselves, and that perspective is one of impotent rage.
They came to Iraq for the joy and the rush of using their hard-earned skills to blow the brains out of the Iraqis, and that joy... that release is being denied them. There's no attacks on the army for "making them this way," or any serious question as to whether or not turning a man into an eager killer is morally right or wrong, or even a single attempt to "humanize" the Iraqi enemy. As far as the characters are concerned, the Iraqi soldiers represent nothing more than targets which should be theirs for the killing but are instead being shelled by the air force... and the film, as it stands, does not seem to find fault in this viewpoint.
And so, while they wait for their hoped-for chance at combat action, Swofford and the others do what all of us do when we're all fired up and have nowhere to go: They start to go crazy. To describe the manner in which much of it occurs would be to spoil some great surprises and little moments. Take my word for it that, while you'll find very little "war" in this particular war-movie; action, intesity and scenes of great darkness manage to abound anyway. And just wait until you see the visual knockout of the film's entire final act, set in the surreal landscape of a desert turned black by the hellfire of burning oil wells on the horizon... and oil actually raining from the sky.
And there it is; a blunt, unashamedly phallicentric metaphor for sexual frustration doing double duty as a straight-faced lament for the soldier who's not permitted to soldier. It may not be the war movie you were expecting, and it's definately not the anti-war movie you might have been hoping for, but right now it's the one you need to see.
FINAL RATING: 9/10
Saturday, 29 October 2005
REVIEW: Saw II
There's a problem in trying to review "Saw II," and it is this: Much like the first "Saw," the film is a nasty little puzzle/trap of plot twists and character revelations, so one cannot go very deep into the "story" without giving away things that would impair a potential audience members enjoyment of the full film. Likewise, while one is just itching to sing the praises of the elaborate, gory ways in which various characters meet their demise... part of the fun of the traps in these movies is the "no way!" shock at their unveiling, and I wouldn't think to deprive you of that. Let me just say that the film features one "trap" which tested my resolve to not flee the theater upon it's unveiling alone.
So I'll keep this as broad as possible: "Saw" was based around the mysterious "Jigsaw," a master-planner serial killer who'd never actually killed anyone. Rather, he prefered to kidnap people of (in his eyes) dubious character and place them in horrifying torture-traps where they would only die if they failed to have the will to live through creatively gut-wrenching escape solutions. In this sequel, Jigsaw is up to his tricks once again; this time having locked a handful of (possibly) random people in a booby-trapped house with time-activated doors, cryptic "game" instructions, poisoned air and antidotes accesible only through grisly tests of will.
There's more to it than that, but this is the kind of movie where a spoiler will literally kill many reasons to see it. So I'll just skip to the point: It's another solid mystery/horror entry in whats shaping into a promising franchise, with maddeningly intricate twists and gloriously twisted gore scenes. If that sort of thing lights your fire, then this is your movie. In other words, Happy Halloween.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
So I'll keep this as broad as possible: "Saw" was based around the mysterious "Jigsaw," a master-planner serial killer who'd never actually killed anyone. Rather, he prefered to kidnap people of (in his eyes) dubious character and place them in horrifying torture-traps where they would only die if they failed to have the will to live through creatively gut-wrenching escape solutions. In this sequel, Jigsaw is up to his tricks once again; this time having locked a handful of (possibly) random people in a booby-trapped house with time-activated doors, cryptic "game" instructions, poisoned air and antidotes accesible only through grisly tests of will.
There's more to it than that, but this is the kind of movie where a spoiler will literally kill many reasons to see it. So I'll just skip to the point: It's another solid mystery/horror entry in whats shaping into a promising franchise, with maddeningly intricate twists and gloriously twisted gore scenes. If that sort of thing lights your fire, then this is your movie. In other words, Happy Halloween.
FINAL RATING: 8/10
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