After he died earlier this year, TCM devoted a night to showing Sidney Lumet movies, and so I used the opportunity to catch two of his movies that I hadn't seen all the way through before: Network and Dog Day Afternoon.
Network (1976)
***1/2
Two old newsmen, Max Schumacher and Howard Beale are out drinking. Depressed and drunk out of his mind, Howard Beale declares to Max that he's going to kill himself. Trying to diffuse the tension of the situation, Max jokes that Howard should kill himself on the air. It would be great for ratings. The next night, Howard is doing his nightly newscast for fictional station UBS and declares that he's being replaced due to low ratings and that he's going to kill himself on the air for his last show. Uh oh. This is how Sidney Lumet's well-acted and weirdly prophetic Network begins. Beale manages to convince his superiors to let him on the air again and apologize, only to break into a diatribe about how his real problem was that he "ran out of bullshit" to say every night. Initially the network is going to do the sensible thing, and get Beale off the air and hopefully let him get some help, but suddenly in comes Diana Christensen (Faye Dunnaway), the young upstart who's been charge of programming for the network, who sees potential in the freak show quality of Beale's on-air rantings. And so, with the blessing of network exec Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), Diana develops the idea to retool the network news, and turn Howard Beale into a "mad prophet."
UBS knows they have a hit on their hands when Beale shows up on the set a fidgety, sweaty mess and delivers the now famous "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" speech and viewers around the country actually open up their windows and start yelling along with him. They give him a brand new set with a live studio audience for him to speak his crazy babble to directly. Max is genuinely concerned that his friend really is every bit as insane as he's presenting himself on the air, and tries to say as much, but he doesn't hold much sway at the station anymore. In his dealings with Diana around the station, however, he becomes entranced with her, even though he pretty much has nothing but disdain for what she's done to his beloved news department. Diana says she used to have something of a girlhood crush on Max in his younger days, and so they enter into an affair (Max is very much married) together. Max actually confronts his devastated wife about Diana--in a brief part that won Beatrice Straight a Best Supporting Actress Oscar--and is really to abandon his marriage for her. It's somewhere around the time that Diana manages to continue talking about ratings points and the 18-54 demographic while they're in the middle of having sex that Max realizes that Diana is pretty much a hollow shell of a person whose job is her life and realizes he's made a huge mistake.
Meanwhile, Howard Beale runs afoul of the higher-ups when he devotes one of his mad prophet rants to a not yet publicly announced deal to sell UBS to a conglomerate of Saudi Arabians. Even though the crowd can't possibly care that much, they're completely sold on the whole Howard Beale schtick at this point, and so when he tells them to mail letters to the White House en masse opposing the deal that's exactly what they do. The big wigs are not pleased. Beale gets marched in front of the network president, played by long time character actor Ned Beatty, in a cool scene that takes place in a darkened boardroom that has kind of a surreal quality. The president seems to genuinely put the fear of God into Beale as he tells him to take back what he says (why will they listen to him? "Because you're on television, dummy!"). And so, Beale makes amends and can keep his show, but when his ratings start declining, his superiors begin to devise different plans for him, leading into the last act of the movie.
The biggest praise I can give Network is that it's almost terrifying in how predictive it is. The greying of the line between news and entertainment is something that can be seen on any of the 24 hour cable stations today. I have to admit that there's a lot of Glenn Beck to be seen in Howard Beale, even though Beale is a sympathetic figure and, conversely, I want to kick Glenn Beck repeatedly in the nuts every time I see a clip from his show. In the case of each of them, though, they represent people (one fictitious, one real) who got famous because they gave a voice to the fear and feeling of helplessness of the disillusioned populace of their era. You can argue that the policies Glenn Beck advocates aren't actually at all good for anybody except the moneyed interests that his show is supposed to run counter to, but that's a topic for a different blog post. The show successfully predicted the end of the era where everything that came out of the mouths of anchors like Walter Cronkite could be considered the God's truth, and the beginning of an era when news began to feel exploitative and when you couldn't really tell where fact ended and opinion began. In 1976, the filmmakers never could have known that one day Nancy Grace would be sitting behind what's ostensibly an anchor desk spending an hour yelling about how every high profile defendant is history's greatest monster regardless of the facts of the case. And yet, Howard Beale's retooled show in Network is pretty much cut from the same cloth.
Peter Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar, is excellent as Beale, and manages to make his anti-establishment rants something you want to cheer along with, while still establishing that he has well and truly lost it. William Holden is very good as Max, playing him as an Edward R. Murrow sort of figure (they actually mention that his character used to work with Murrow at CBS) in a world where Murrow's brand of journalism is no longer coveted. Faye Dunnaway successful makes her character alluring despite her unwavering single-mindedness for business. Robert Duvall does a solid job as well, playing basically what Tom Hagen from Godfather would be if he were a TV executive instead of a mob lawyer. Apparently Lumet and the screenwriter both had experience in television and it shows. It's a very intelligently written movie, and the accurate portrayal of the industry helps sell what's a pretty high-concept premise.
The movie isn't perfect. After the affair subplot plays out, Max seems to fade into the background a bit, which I don't think does justice to a character that is introduces alongside Beale at the top of the movie. There's a subplot where Diana convinces a group of left-wing revolutionaries to star in a sort of docu-drama that breaks up the flow of the rest of the movie and just isn't really that interesting. Towards the movie's conclusion, its initial plausibility kind of gets strained, as all of the network execs sit around and casually discuss the merits of killing a guy on the air. Granted, the whole point is that the network has pretty much fully abandoned all pretenses of dignity and good taste and are fully consumed by the quest for ratings, but it was a bridge too far for me. Speaking as someone who's pretty damn cynical, I wasn't quite prepared for the level of cynicism that the coldly abrupt ending is dripping with. It's a well directed movie from Sidney Lumet, although I think Dog Day Afternoon, which I'll review next is better.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
The Social Network
The Social Network (***1/2)
The Social Network is a well-acted, well-written, interesting movie, but it's also a movie that just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems poised to win the Oscar as well, and with that in mind I found the movie a bit underwhelming. As the Golden Globe was being presented, whoever was accepting the award (not sure who it was, though I think it's usually a producer that accepts it) said that the movie used Mark Zuckerberg's story as "a metaphor for how we interact with each other." I'm not quite sure the movie really achieves something that lofty and that universal. Mostly it seems like the story of a genius with something hardwired wrong in his brain such that he can't help but push people away quarreling with other people from Harvard who are mostly just straight-up egomaniacal dicks.
Our protagonist is the aforementioned Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). As we meet him at the start of the movie he's out drinking with his girlfriend, Erica Albright, who breaks up with him as he's in the process of basically indirectly insulting her for going to the not exactly Ivy league equivalent Boston University. Zuckerberg talks a mile a minute, almost seeming unable to finish a sentence without changing the point of it midway through, and seemingly devoid of the barrier that most people have that separates what they're thinking from what they actually end up saying in polite conversation. Spiteful of Erica's rejection of him, Mark goes back to his dorm, cracks a few beers out of the fridge, writes a very stream-of-consciousness blog post where, among other things, he compares everybody who lives in Erica's dorm to farm animals, and ends up creating a website that matches up two random Harvard girls and people rank who's hotter. The site goes viral and crashes the Harvard network. This gets the notice of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, a pair of twins who exude every bit of the stereotypical arrogance and entitlement that typifies the Ivy League in most people's minds. They want to create a site like Myspace or Friendster, only with Harvard exclusivity, and they want Mark Zuckerberg to do it. Mark tells them he's in, but then dodges actually meeting with them over the coming weeks.
As he's dodging the Winklevosses, Zuckerberg approaches his roommate, Eduardo Saverin, with... basically the same idea that the Winklevoesses gave him, a social networking site. Saverin comes up with some start-up monkey, and he and Zuckerberg co-found The Facebook. Saverin is very much business-minded, and seems to relish his status as Facebook CEO, even before the site has gone anywhere. He wants to monetize the site as soon as possible. Zuckerberg disagrees on the basic that "Facebook is cool" and that throwing ads on it will make it not as cool. This disagreement will be the seed that, helped along by some other sleights along the way, eventually lead to Saverin suing Zuckerberg simultaneously while the Winklevosses are suing him for allegedly stealing their idea. And so the format of the story is this: we see a little bit of Zuckerberg developing Facebook at Harvard, and then we jump forward in time to a meeting of all the parties and their lawyers of one lawsuit or the other. Here, Zuckerberg, looking mostly disinterested and contemptuous of the entire proceedings, will deny parts or all of what's being described, and so it's basically up to us in the audience to decide what happened and what didn't. Eventually, Justin Timberlake shows up playing Sean Parker, the man who invented Napter, portrayed as sort of a man-child who's as much of a genius as Zuckerberg in his programming and his ideas, but who's wreckless and ultimately untrustworthy. His appearance further strains the friendship between Mark and Eduardo, and the film's second half follows Mark along a Godfather II-esque descent into isolation as he makes the wrong choices about who to trust.
The performances in the movie are all very good. Eisenberg deftly rattles off Zuckerberg's rapid-fire, unfiltered ramblings, and Andrew Garfield does a great job presenting Eduardo as a sympathetic figure and a relatable figure amongst a sea of Ivy League crazy people. Justin Timberlake is surprisingly good as well. Complementing the acting is a cool and unconventional score co-created by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails Fame that gives the very dialogue-heavy movie a frenetic energy that it wouldn't otherwise have. Aaron Sorkin structures the film well and makes it accessible and engaging, while actually seeming to having the scenes involving computers make sense, which is pretty rare for any movie.
All that said, though, I really don't see this movie as the sort of transcendent, generation-defining work of art that a lot people, including people in charge of doling out awards, seem to think it is. Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other, but that fact doesn't mean that a movie about its creation will necessarily hold great secrets about society or the human condition. This is an insular movie about prodigies and eccentrics who went to school at Harvard, where people adhere to arcane traditions and where people care about their social status a thousand times more than most anyone else. By its nature, The Social Network is a movie about exceptional people interacting with exceptional people, and the everyman/woman really doesn't make an appearance in the movie except maybe as Erica Albright, who exists only in the periphery of the movie.
I'm also not sure the movie really achieves what it wanted to achieve in it's portrayal of Zuckerberg, that being a man with at least the capacity of being a good person who gets steered in the wrong direction. While trying not to spoil it, there's a scene at the end that involves Zuckerberg sitting in front of his laptop, blank-expressioned, periodically refreshing a Facebook page waiting for an update. I heard a little bit of the DVD commentary for this scene, and Sorkin and the actors seemed to think the scene evoked some vague hopefulness. To me, Zuckerberg comes across in the scene as pitiful and border-lined stalkerish. Maybe upon further viewings more shades of grey will appear in the movie, and I'll see some redemptive qualities in Zucerkberg that will paint the last scene in a different light, but as it stands now, the way I see it, The Social Network's version of Mark Zuckerberg (and I honestly have no idea how the real-life man compares) is merely a genius who's kind of an ass who reaps everything, good and bad, that comes with that. Nothing more nothing less.
Basically, I'm not sure I see the same complexities in the movie that others do. Is it an entertaining watch? Absolutely. Is it my favorite of movie of the year? Were I to have DVDs of them stacked all I a row, I think I'd find myself much more likely to put Inception or King's Speech in my player for another watch than Social Network.
The Social Network is a well-acted, well-written, interesting movie, but it's also a movie that just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems poised to win the Oscar as well, and with that in mind I found the movie a bit underwhelming. As the Golden Globe was being presented, whoever was accepting the award (not sure who it was, though I think it's usually a producer that accepts it) said that the movie used Mark Zuckerberg's story as "a metaphor for how we interact with each other." I'm not quite sure the movie really achieves something that lofty and that universal. Mostly it seems like the story of a genius with something hardwired wrong in his brain such that he can't help but push people away quarreling with other people from Harvard who are mostly just straight-up egomaniacal dicks.
Our protagonist is the aforementioned Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). As we meet him at the start of the movie he's out drinking with his girlfriend, Erica Albright, who breaks up with him as he's in the process of basically indirectly insulting her for going to the not exactly Ivy league equivalent Boston University. Zuckerberg talks a mile a minute, almost seeming unable to finish a sentence without changing the point of it midway through, and seemingly devoid of the barrier that most people have that separates what they're thinking from what they actually end up saying in polite conversation. Spiteful of Erica's rejection of him, Mark goes back to his dorm, cracks a few beers out of the fridge, writes a very stream-of-consciousness blog post where, among other things, he compares everybody who lives in Erica's dorm to farm animals, and ends up creating a website that matches up two random Harvard girls and people rank who's hotter. The site goes viral and crashes the Harvard network. This gets the notice of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, a pair of twins who exude every bit of the stereotypical arrogance and entitlement that typifies the Ivy League in most people's minds. They want to create a site like Myspace or Friendster, only with Harvard exclusivity, and they want Mark Zuckerberg to do it. Mark tells them he's in, but then dodges actually meeting with them over the coming weeks.
As he's dodging the Winklevosses, Zuckerberg approaches his roommate, Eduardo Saverin, with... basically the same idea that the Winklevoesses gave him, a social networking site. Saverin comes up with some start-up monkey, and he and Zuckerberg co-found The Facebook. Saverin is very much business-minded, and seems to relish his status as Facebook CEO, even before the site has gone anywhere. He wants to monetize the site as soon as possible. Zuckerberg disagrees on the basic that "Facebook is cool" and that throwing ads on it will make it not as cool. This disagreement will be the seed that, helped along by some other sleights along the way, eventually lead to Saverin suing Zuckerberg simultaneously while the Winklevosses are suing him for allegedly stealing their idea. And so the format of the story is this: we see a little bit of Zuckerberg developing Facebook at Harvard, and then we jump forward in time to a meeting of all the parties and their lawyers of one lawsuit or the other. Here, Zuckerberg, looking mostly disinterested and contemptuous of the entire proceedings, will deny parts or all of what's being described, and so it's basically up to us in the audience to decide what happened and what didn't. Eventually, Justin Timberlake shows up playing Sean Parker, the man who invented Napter, portrayed as sort of a man-child who's as much of a genius as Zuckerberg in his programming and his ideas, but who's wreckless and ultimately untrustworthy. His appearance further strains the friendship between Mark and Eduardo, and the film's second half follows Mark along a Godfather II-esque descent into isolation as he makes the wrong choices about who to trust.
The performances in the movie are all very good. Eisenberg deftly rattles off Zuckerberg's rapid-fire, unfiltered ramblings, and Andrew Garfield does a great job presenting Eduardo as a sympathetic figure and a relatable figure amongst a sea of Ivy League crazy people. Justin Timberlake is surprisingly good as well. Complementing the acting is a cool and unconventional score co-created by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails Fame that gives the very dialogue-heavy movie a frenetic energy that it wouldn't otherwise have. Aaron Sorkin structures the film well and makes it accessible and engaging, while actually seeming to having the scenes involving computers make sense, which is pretty rare for any movie.
All that said, though, I really don't see this movie as the sort of transcendent, generation-defining work of art that a lot people, including people in charge of doling out awards, seem to think it is. Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other, but that fact doesn't mean that a movie about its creation will necessarily hold great secrets about society or the human condition. This is an insular movie about prodigies and eccentrics who went to school at Harvard, where people adhere to arcane traditions and where people care about their social status a thousand times more than most anyone else. By its nature, The Social Network is a movie about exceptional people interacting with exceptional people, and the everyman/woman really doesn't make an appearance in the movie except maybe as Erica Albright, who exists only in the periphery of the movie.
I'm also not sure the movie really achieves what it wanted to achieve in it's portrayal of Zuckerberg, that being a man with at least the capacity of being a good person who gets steered in the wrong direction. While trying not to spoil it, there's a scene at the end that involves Zuckerberg sitting in front of his laptop, blank-expressioned, periodically refreshing a Facebook page waiting for an update. I heard a little bit of the DVD commentary for this scene, and Sorkin and the actors seemed to think the scene evoked some vague hopefulness. To me, Zuckerberg comes across in the scene as pitiful and border-lined stalkerish. Maybe upon further viewings more shades of grey will appear in the movie, and I'll see some redemptive qualities in Zucerkberg that will paint the last scene in a different light, but as it stands now, the way I see it, The Social Network's version of Mark Zuckerberg (and I honestly have no idea how the real-life man compares) is merely a genius who's kind of an ass who reaps everything, good and bad, that comes with that. Nothing more nothing less.
Basically, I'm not sure I see the same complexities in the movie that others do. Is it an entertaining watch? Absolutely. Is it my favorite of movie of the year? Were I to have DVDs of them stacked all I a row, I think I'd find myself much more likely to put Inception or King's Speech in my player for another watch than Social Network.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Tron Legacy
Tron Legacy (**1/2)
As much of a dork as I am, I've never seen the original Tron, which posed a bit of an issue seeing Tron: Legacy, because, for a niche movie released 28 years ago, the sequel--built to be much more of blockbuster for a wider audience--does surprisingly little to really set things up for a new audience. I already knew the broad strokes of it, and there's a prologue which serves as a brief recap, but Legacy's plot is contingent upon exactly what the nature of "the grid" is and all the programs that dwell within it, and nothing contained within Legacy really spells this out well enough for me to determine whether it makes any sense. I suppose I could Wiki the first movie now, but again, the whole point is that this is a blockbuster holiday movie intended to make a bunch of money, not a straight to DVD release to placate the guy in the Tron suit that shows up on Jimmy Kimmell. The movie should stand on its own and I don't think it does. It's visually impressive and there's some fun sequences, but it's hard for the movie to really resonate with me much beyond that.
The movie starts out in 1989, with a CGI-assisted young Jeff Bridges playing Kevin Flynn, explaining what "The Grid" is to his son, Sam. Again, I'm assuming the specifics are explained much more thoroughly in the original, but I guess the gist of it is that it's a digital world that kind of mirrors are own existing within a computer. It's like the Matrix with more neon. Despite being digitized, humans within the world ("users") have to eat food and bleed when they get cut. Is this following Matrix rules too? Does "the mind make it real"? The movie never really says. Again, maybe this is something explained in the '82 version. Anyway, shortly after this scene takes place, Kevin mysteriously disappears, not telling anyone of his whereabouts.
After our opening prologue, we meet a grown up Sam Flynn, our protagonist. After Kevin vanished, Sam went to live with his grandparents, but they soon passed away, and Sam became the archetypal troubled, aimless youth, represented mostly by the fact that he drives a motorcycle really, really fast. Once every year, Sam makes a point to break into his father's old company, Encom, and cause some sort of shenanigans, as revenge for the company veering away from his father's altruistic vision. This was unquestionably the dumbest part of the movie for me, as the company's board of directors sits around a dark room with all black furniture (cause they're evil!) and talk about how their OS version 10 is exactly the same as OS version 9, but the dumb consumers will never know, mwahahahaha, only to be foiled by Sam ruining their tech demo by inserting a Youtube video his pug barking his mad hacking skills. The sequence ends with Sam eluding a pudgy security guard by performing a Batman-esque base jump off of the roof. The entire thing is just very silly.
The movie gets more interesting when the plot that everybody came to see starts in earnest, when Kevin's old business partner, comes to see Sam in his makeshift apartment in a warehouse down by the river (he's a very rebellious youth!) and tells him that he was mysteriously paged from his dad's old arcade.Sam goes to the arcade to investigate and manages to get himself sucked into The Grid by punching in a few UNIX commands on his dad's computer. Pretty much as soon as he reaches the other side, Sam gets rounded up alongside a bunch of programs and is forced to participate in "games" at the arena. These include fights to the death in the form of combatants flinging the disks everyone carries on their backs at each other and the motorcycles-that-make-trails-behind-them thing that was probably the most enduring thing from the first movie. Sam picks all this up surprisingly quickly and manages to survive, with some help.
At some point in time, Kevin created a computer program doppelganger of himself which he named Clu maintain The Grid and turn it into "the perfect system." Like Kevin in the 1989 scene, Clu looks exactly like a younger Jeff Bridges, and the realism they were able to achieve with this is undeniably impressive. Wouldn't you know it though, Clu ends up turning evil. Clu feels slighted after Kevin becomes fascinated with the spontaneous appearance of "Isos:" programs that seemingly came into being on their own; their code writing itself like genetic material. Clu considers the Isos, with their inherently unknowable nature, to be a contaminant in his perfect system and has them to be destroyed. This is another thing that doesn't fully make sense to me--either because I haven't seen the original movie or because it's not explained in either movie. The thing is, all of the programs that inhabit the world, even after Clu eradicates the Isos, seem to have their own distinct personalities anyway. Michael Sheen has a bit part as Zeus, who has a bit of a David Bowie thing going on and acts pretty much flamboyantly, stereotypically gay for the entirety of his time on screen. How did he come to be if he isn't an Iso? Did Kevin design a program to daintily prance around for some reason back in 1982? It's entirely possible that there are definitive answers to these questions, but they're not addressed in Legacy.
Sam has a run-in with Clu first, but eventually finds his real father, living a sort of exiled existence out of the reach of Clu's regime. Alongside him is Quorra, (played by the ridiculously attractive Olivia Wilde), a computer program for whom Kevin serves as a sort of mentor. The nature of Quorra isn't revealed until quite a while into the movie, although you can probably figure it out based on what I've already written. As the creator of the world, Kevin seems to have Keanau Reeves-esque power over the environment, but these seem to work intermittently as the plot demands. Kevin has pretty much adhered to a code of non-intervention, but Sam wants to get the hell out of The Grid as soon as possible and tries to escape, even though it would mean letting Clu escape into the real world as well, which he also apparently can and wants take over somehow and for some reason. And so the last act is a chase between Kevin, Sam, and Quorra and Clu's malevolent forces as to who can get to the gate between the flesh and blood world and the digital world first.
Tron: Legacy is pretty on the eyes for a while although, frankly, after two hours I was pretty much ready to be done with the whole neon blue and neon orange motif. It has some fun sequences, but the plot seems muddled and requires a surprisingly large amount of prior knowledge about a cult movie from 28 years ago. For a movie dealing entirely about a sentient beings living in a digital world, it doesn't really leave you with much to think about the way, say, Ghost in the Shell does, and while the action is fun at times, that in and of itself isn't enough for this movie to have much staying power. It's wasn't an unpleasant watch, but I can't really imagine wanting to watch it over and over again.
As much of a dork as I am, I've never seen the original Tron, which posed a bit of an issue seeing Tron: Legacy, because, for a niche movie released 28 years ago, the sequel--built to be much more of blockbuster for a wider audience--does surprisingly little to really set things up for a new audience. I already knew the broad strokes of it, and there's a prologue which serves as a brief recap, but Legacy's plot is contingent upon exactly what the nature of "the grid" is and all the programs that dwell within it, and nothing contained within Legacy really spells this out well enough for me to determine whether it makes any sense. I suppose I could Wiki the first movie now, but again, the whole point is that this is a blockbuster holiday movie intended to make a bunch of money, not a straight to DVD release to placate the guy in the Tron suit that shows up on Jimmy Kimmell. The movie should stand on its own and I don't think it does. It's visually impressive and there's some fun sequences, but it's hard for the movie to really resonate with me much beyond that.
The movie starts out in 1989, with a CGI-assisted young Jeff Bridges playing Kevin Flynn, explaining what "The Grid" is to his son, Sam. Again, I'm assuming the specifics are explained much more thoroughly in the original, but I guess the gist of it is that it's a digital world that kind of mirrors are own existing within a computer. It's like the Matrix with more neon. Despite being digitized, humans within the world ("users") have to eat food and bleed when they get cut. Is this following Matrix rules too? Does "the mind make it real"? The movie never really says. Again, maybe this is something explained in the '82 version. Anyway, shortly after this scene takes place, Kevin mysteriously disappears, not telling anyone of his whereabouts.
After our opening prologue, we meet a grown up Sam Flynn, our protagonist. After Kevin vanished, Sam went to live with his grandparents, but they soon passed away, and Sam became the archetypal troubled, aimless youth, represented mostly by the fact that he drives a motorcycle really, really fast. Once every year, Sam makes a point to break into his father's old company, Encom, and cause some sort of shenanigans, as revenge for the company veering away from his father's altruistic vision. This was unquestionably the dumbest part of the movie for me, as the company's board of directors sits around a dark room with all black furniture (cause they're evil!) and talk about how their OS version 10 is exactly the same as OS version 9, but the dumb consumers will never know, mwahahahaha, only to be foiled by Sam ruining their tech demo by inserting a Youtube video his pug barking his mad hacking skills. The sequence ends with Sam eluding a pudgy security guard by performing a Batman-esque base jump off of the roof. The entire thing is just very silly.
The movie gets more interesting when the plot that everybody came to see starts in earnest, when Kevin's old business partner, comes to see Sam in his makeshift apartment in a warehouse down by the river (he's a very rebellious youth!) and tells him that he was mysteriously paged from his dad's old arcade.
At some point in time, Kevin created a computer program doppelganger of himself which he named Clu maintain The Grid and turn it into "the perfect system." Like Kevin in the 1989 scene, Clu looks exactly like a younger Jeff Bridges, and the realism they were able to achieve with this is undeniably impressive. Wouldn't you know it though, Clu ends up turning evil. Clu feels slighted after Kevin becomes fascinated with the spontaneous appearance of "Isos:" programs that seemingly came into being on their own; their code writing itself like genetic material. Clu considers the Isos, with their inherently unknowable nature, to be a contaminant in his perfect system and has them to be destroyed. This is another thing that doesn't fully make sense to me--either because I haven't seen the original movie or because it's not explained in either movie. The thing is, all of the programs that inhabit the world, even after Clu eradicates the Isos, seem to have their own distinct personalities anyway. Michael Sheen has a bit part as Zeus, who has a bit of a David Bowie thing going on and acts pretty much flamboyantly, stereotypically gay for the entirety of his time on screen. How did he come to be if he isn't an Iso? Did Kevin design a program to daintily prance around for some reason back in 1982? It's entirely possible that there are definitive answers to these questions, but they're not addressed in Legacy.
Sam has a run-in with Clu first, but eventually finds his real father, living a sort of exiled existence out of the reach of Clu's regime. Alongside him is Quorra, (played by the ridiculously attractive Olivia Wilde), a computer program for whom Kevin serves as a sort of mentor. The nature of Quorra isn't revealed until quite a while into the movie, although you can probably figure it out based on what I've already written. As the creator of the world, Kevin seems to have Keanau Reeves-esque power over the environment, but these seem to work intermittently as the plot demands. Kevin has pretty much adhered to a code of non-intervention, but Sam wants to get the hell out of The Grid as soon as possible and tries to escape, even though it would mean letting Clu escape into the real world as well, which he also apparently can and wants take over somehow and for some reason. And so the last act is a chase between Kevin, Sam, and Quorra and Clu's malevolent forces as to who can get to the gate between the flesh and blood world and the digital world first.
Tron: Legacy is pretty on the eyes for a while although, frankly, after two hours I was pretty much ready to be done with the whole neon blue and neon orange motif. It has some fun sequences, but the plot seems muddled and requires a surprisingly large amount of prior knowledge about a cult movie from 28 years ago. For a movie dealing entirely about a sentient beings living in a digital world, it doesn't really leave you with much to think about the way, say, Ghost in the Shell does, and while the action is fun at times, that in and of itself isn't enough for this movie to have much staying power. It's wasn't an unpleasant watch, but I can't really imagine wanting to watch it over and over again.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell (***)
"Memory cannot be defined but it defines mankind."
"I wonder where I'll go now. The net is vast and infinite."
Somehow I managed to go this long without seeing either of the Ghost in the Shell movies. so I used my newfound streaming Netflix account to check out the first one tonight. I've already seen a bunch of "Stand Alone Complex" on Adult Swim--not the whole run beginning to end, but a lot of it--so I was already pretty much aware of the characters and the basic themes going in. The show can sometimes be really dense and talky, and the dialogue can be really stiff and wooden sometimes, but it's still more than interesting enough to watch because of it its around a very cool cyberpunk setting and the ideas about humanity, personhood, and identity at it's center. I feel much the same way about the movie. A lot is jammed into less than 90 minutes, and at time it's a bit difficult to follow. It had to be damn near impossible to follow for most American audiences when it first released in 1995 if they didn't really know what to expect going in. There's a hollowness to a lot of the scenes and characters aren't developed much. And yet, it's still an easy work to admire because of the vision of a future where the line between human and machine is no longer clear that it creates. It reminds me in some ways of the Metal Gear Solid games, which deftly weave amazingly complex conspiracy plots and present a lot of interesting ideas (some of which, especially in MGS 2 and 4 are actually similar to the ideas of Ghost in the Shell) and yet also feature lines like "Snake, do you believe that love can blossom, even on the battlefield?!" It's not nearly to that extend here, it should be said, it's just a comparison.
At the film's start, Section 9 is investigating a series of ghost hacks of government officials. Alright, so right off there's some splainin' to do. The "ghost" in Ghost in the Shell is the mind, the soul, the consciousness. Whatever you want to call it, it's the intangible thing that makes a person and person. So a "ghost hack" is a hack of a person's mind, made possible by the fact that much of the human population is now living in partial or total cybernetic bodies. Section 9 is a police force that investigates crimes such as this. They communicate with each other through a neural link without speaking. They do their detective work by tapping their brains into computer systems. Section 9 is helmed by Chief Aramaki, who is developed more as a character in the show, but for purposes of the movie basically serves as the old intelligent dude who's been around the block before. The point woman on the ground is our protagonist, Motoko, or simply The Major, who has a fully cyborg body which the filmmakers have deemed we need to see in the nude about 6 times over the course of the 83 minute movie. Alongside on the team is Batou, the man closest to major, whose unchanging prosthetic eyes seem to complement his stoic military man personality. There's also Ishikawa, who we don't get to know much, and Togusa, who was chosen for the team for a diversity of opinion because he's still almost entirely human.
After a brief gunfight/chase sequence, the culprits of the ghost hacks are tracked down. The one who isn't killed in the firefight is brought in for questioning. In the interrogation room, the man, a garbage man by trade, has it explained to him that he himself has been hacked into, his mind planted with false memories of having a wife and kids that don't actually exist. A "simulated experience" it's called, one of the genuinely unsettling ideas in the Ghost in the Shell universe. The case starts to trouble Motoko, as she begins to question whether she can deem anything about her own life as a certainty since her body is no longer human. Section 9 realizes that the ghost hacks can be traced by to a master hacker, a Puppet Master. The turning point of the plot comes when Section 9 comes in possession of the cyborg body of an unknown woman who, seemingly unrelated, was struck by a car, and it eventually becomes clear that the very nature of the Puppet Master is as much a question as his identity. The whole thing makes for an interesting, if hard to follow on the first viewing detective story, though it's mere 83 minutes leaves you wanting a bit more. The same can be said with a lot of animated movies, I suppose.
Most of the English voice actors (the dub was what was on Netflix) are those who would go on to do the voices for the "Stand Alone Complex" series. One exception is Motoko, whose voice doesn't sound as good here, I don't think. As a whole, the voice acting is decent but seems kind of stiff. I think some of that is some of the dialogue they're working with, although I also think that more recent anime dubs are usually better crafted, "Stand Alone Complex" included. More interesting in the soundtrack, which compares a bit to the other big watershed movie for U.S anime fandom, Akira, in that it has an eastern influence. Wikipedia tells me that the main theme is actually based on a Shinto prayer.
Ghost in the Shell was about what I expected. It was enjoyable, if a bit too self-involved and stiff at times. As far as early breakthrough animes go, I much prefer Akira. Maybe that sounds inconsistent because I just chided Ghost in the Shell for being hard to follow, and Akira is by all rights far more incomprehensible at times, but there's something about the way Akira all comes together that I love. Even though it was made seven years earlier, the animation seems to have more richness and more life to it, and combined with one of the coolest soundtracks I've ever heard, the movie delivers more of a punch for me. I still think Ghost in the Shell is something of an important work, though, because of its philosophy and its ethics and its unprecedentedly lucid cyberpunk vision.
"Memory cannot be defined but it defines mankind."
"I wonder where I'll go now. The net is vast and infinite."
Somehow I managed to go this long without seeing either of the Ghost in the Shell movies. so I used my newfound streaming Netflix account to check out the first one tonight. I've already seen a bunch of "Stand Alone Complex" on Adult Swim--not the whole run beginning to end, but a lot of it--so I was already pretty much aware of the characters and the basic themes going in. The show can sometimes be really dense and talky, and the dialogue can be really stiff and wooden sometimes, but it's still more than interesting enough to watch because of it its around a very cool cyberpunk setting and the ideas about humanity, personhood, and identity at it's center. I feel much the same way about the movie. A lot is jammed into less than 90 minutes, and at time it's a bit difficult to follow. It had to be damn near impossible to follow for most American audiences when it first released in 1995 if they didn't really know what to expect going in. There's a hollowness to a lot of the scenes and characters aren't developed much. And yet, it's still an easy work to admire because of the vision of a future where the line between human and machine is no longer clear that it creates. It reminds me in some ways of the Metal Gear Solid games, which deftly weave amazingly complex conspiracy plots and present a lot of interesting ideas (some of which, especially in MGS 2 and 4 are actually similar to the ideas of Ghost in the Shell) and yet also feature lines like "Snake, do you believe that love can blossom, even on the battlefield?!" It's not nearly to that extend here, it should be said, it's just a comparison.
At the film's start, Section 9 is investigating a series of ghost hacks of government officials. Alright, so right off there's some splainin' to do. The "ghost" in Ghost in the Shell is the mind, the soul, the consciousness. Whatever you want to call it, it's the intangible thing that makes a person and person. So a "ghost hack" is a hack of a person's mind, made possible by the fact that much of the human population is now living in partial or total cybernetic bodies. Section 9 is a police force that investigates crimes such as this. They communicate with each other through a neural link without speaking. They do their detective work by tapping their brains into computer systems. Section 9 is helmed by Chief Aramaki, who is developed more as a character in the show, but for purposes of the movie basically serves as the old intelligent dude who's been around the block before. The point woman on the ground is our protagonist, Motoko, or simply The Major, who has a fully cyborg body which the filmmakers have deemed we need to see in the nude about 6 times over the course of the 83 minute movie. Alongside on the team is Batou, the man closest to major, whose unchanging prosthetic eyes seem to complement his stoic military man personality. There's also Ishikawa, who we don't get to know much, and Togusa, who was chosen for the team for a diversity of opinion because he's still almost entirely human.
After a brief gunfight/chase sequence, the culprits of the ghost hacks are tracked down. The one who isn't killed in the firefight is brought in for questioning. In the interrogation room, the man, a garbage man by trade, has it explained to him that he himself has been hacked into, his mind planted with false memories of having a wife and kids that don't actually exist. A "simulated experience" it's called, one of the genuinely unsettling ideas in the Ghost in the Shell universe. The case starts to trouble Motoko, as she begins to question whether she can deem anything about her own life as a certainty since her body is no longer human. Section 9 realizes that the ghost hacks can be traced by to a master hacker, a Puppet Master. The turning point of the plot comes when Section 9 comes in possession of the cyborg body of an unknown woman who, seemingly unrelated, was struck by a car, and it eventually becomes clear that the very nature of the Puppet Master is as much a question as his identity. The whole thing makes for an interesting, if hard to follow on the first viewing detective story, though it's mere 83 minutes leaves you wanting a bit more. The same can be said with a lot of animated movies, I suppose.
Most of the English voice actors (the dub was what was on Netflix) are those who would go on to do the voices for the "Stand Alone Complex" series. One exception is Motoko, whose voice doesn't sound as good here, I don't think. As a whole, the voice acting is decent but seems kind of stiff. I think some of that is some of the dialogue they're working with, although I also think that more recent anime dubs are usually better crafted, "Stand Alone Complex" included. More interesting in the soundtrack, which compares a bit to the other big watershed movie for U.S anime fandom, Akira, in that it has an eastern influence. Wikipedia tells me that the main theme is actually based on a Shinto prayer.
Ghost in the Shell was about what I expected. It was enjoyable, if a bit too self-involved and stiff at times. As far as early breakthrough animes go, I much prefer Akira. Maybe that sounds inconsistent because I just chided Ghost in the Shell for being hard to follow, and Akira is by all rights far more incomprehensible at times, but there's something about the way Akira all comes together that I love. Even though it was made seven years earlier, the animation seems to have more richness and more life to it, and combined with one of the coolest soundtracks I've ever heard, the movie delivers more of a punch for me. I still think Ghost in the Shell is something of an important work, though, because of its philosophy and its ethics and its unprecedentedly lucid cyberpunk vision.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Machete
Machete (**1/2)
Knowing full well that it was cut from the same cloth as Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Kill Bill, and Grindhouse--where it was actually born as a fake trailer--I assumed I was somewhat prepared for the absurd, hyper-violent, self-aware, do-ridiculous-things-just-because-they're-ridiculous style of Machete. And, for the most part I was, but even I wasn't quite prepared to see Cheech Marin being crucified (no, really, he gets crucified) after a gunfight in a church played out with "Ave Maria" in the background, Robert DeNiro shooting a pregnant woman and smiling for his YouTube video, or whatever was up with the hell Lindsay Lohan's character. And then, of course, there's when Danny Trejo, in the titular role, overhears a doctor explain that the human body contains 60 feet of intestine, and then uses that information tactically in the next scene. Machete is the latest of Robert Rodriguez's Frankenstein's monsters, a blood-soaked revenge flick with a bunch of entangling alliances between our wayward ex-cop hero, an underground illegal immigration network, a Texas State Senator who may be the least preposterous character in the movie thanks to the Tea Party's existence, and a Mexican drug lord who, for no real reason, is played by Steven Segal. Provided it doesn't morally offend you, it's a mostly fun jaunt into the realm of self-aware action movie shtick, and really it's biggest flaw is that it occasionally seems to forget what it is and starts taking itself seriously for a few moments.
The movie dispenses with any notions of subtlety before the opening credits, as Machete (according to his government file that you see on screen at one point that's his actual given name) busts into the hideout of the Mexican druglord Torres, cuts up a few unsuspecting henchmen with a machete (if his parents named him leaf blower would he use a leaf blower?), and saves a naked girl, only to discover that the naked girl was with Torres all along. Enter Torres in traditional movie villain style, who executes Machete's wife with his katana (because everything's better with katanas, I guess) and leaves him for dead. Shocker: Machete doesn't actually die. Three years later, he's on the down-low in a border town in Texas, and gets approached by a mysterious man who offers him $150,000 to kill an anti-immigration state Senator (Robert DeNiro) because, he says, illegal immigration must continue unabated in order for the economy to thrive. To say things aren't what they seem here is to be putting it mildly. Somehow in a little under 2 hours Machete manages to get from here to a massive raid on the compound of a group of Texas vigilantes by a makeshift army of Mexican people driving chop-shop cars. Along the way, Machete meets Michelle Rodriguez, who is the unofficial head of "the network," an underground group helping illegals cross the border and get set up with jobs, and Jessica Alba, an ICE officer who learns about Machete's past and helps him advance the plot a few times. Whatever. Anybody walking into Machete looking for a brilliant, nuanced plot has made a horrible, horrible error. The movie's main strength--the reason to see it really--is it's individual gags, the best one probably being a sight gag where Machete knocks a guard's gun out of his hand, and repeatedly, tauntingly waves a weed-whacker at him as he tries to pick it up.
The only real problem with the movie, is that sometimes it doesn't seem to remember that it's a movie that was spawned from a fake trailer sandwiched in between two similarly ridiculous grindhouse action movies. At times with DeNiro's character (and I really can't street how bizarre it is seeing him in the movie) it seems like they're trying to make some sort of an actual commentary about the Tea Party movement or the anti-immigration fervor in the country in general. When Jessica Alba stands up on top of a car and gets a crowd of random people to rally around her with a cliche-riddled "we have to stand up for what's right!!" it's hard to tell if they're parodying other speeches from bad movies that took themselves way more seriously, or if they actually thought it was going to be a real emotional moment. Then there's the matter of Lindsay Lohan's character, the daughter of the man who, seemingly, offers Machete the money to kill the Senator, which is equally as bizarre as Lohan's actual life has been for the past few years. Her final scene, which involves her in a nun outfit, is one of the most surreal, confounding things I've ever seen, and not in a "oh yeah, they're just trying to be really ridiculous and over the top" kind of way like most of the rest of the movie, but in a "...what just happened?" sort of way. I think uncomfortable is the best way I can describe the whole thing.
As long as there are going to be actual movies with tag-lines like "Slow Justice is No Justice" there will always be a place for movies like Machete. While most Hollywood action movies will try and pretend that they're not as ridiculous as they are, movies like this embrace what they are at their core. They're violent, dumb, morally dubious, and a decent way to spend 2 hours and 10 bucks.
Knowing full well that it was cut from the same cloth as Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Kill Bill, and Grindhouse--where it was actually born as a fake trailer--I assumed I was somewhat prepared for the absurd, hyper-violent, self-aware, do-ridiculous-things-just-because-they're-ridiculous style of Machete. And, for the most part I was, but even I wasn't quite prepared to see Cheech Marin being crucified (no, really, he gets crucified) after a gunfight in a church played out with "Ave Maria" in the background, Robert DeNiro shooting a pregnant woman and smiling for his YouTube video, or whatever was up with the hell Lindsay Lohan's character. And then, of course, there's when Danny Trejo, in the titular role, overhears a doctor explain that the human body contains 60 feet of intestine, and then uses that information tactically in the next scene. Machete is the latest of Robert Rodriguez's Frankenstein's monsters, a blood-soaked revenge flick with a bunch of entangling alliances between our wayward ex-cop hero, an underground illegal immigration network, a Texas State Senator who may be the least preposterous character in the movie thanks to the Tea Party's existence, and a Mexican drug lord who, for no real reason, is played by Steven Segal. Provided it doesn't morally offend you, it's a mostly fun jaunt into the realm of self-aware action movie shtick, and really it's biggest flaw is that it occasionally seems to forget what it is and starts taking itself seriously for a few moments.
The movie dispenses with any notions of subtlety before the opening credits, as Machete (according to his government file that you see on screen at one point that's his actual given name) busts into the hideout of the Mexican druglord Torres, cuts up a few unsuspecting henchmen with a machete (if his parents named him leaf blower would he use a leaf blower?), and saves a naked girl, only to discover that the naked girl was with Torres all along. Enter Torres in traditional movie villain style, who executes Machete's wife with his katana (because everything's better with katanas, I guess) and leaves him for dead. Shocker: Machete doesn't actually die. Three years later, he's on the down-low in a border town in Texas, and gets approached by a mysterious man who offers him $150,000 to kill an anti-immigration state Senator (Robert DeNiro) because, he says, illegal immigration must continue unabated in order for the economy to thrive. To say things aren't what they seem here is to be putting it mildly. Somehow in a little under 2 hours Machete manages to get from here to a massive raid on the compound of a group of Texas vigilantes by a makeshift army of Mexican people driving chop-shop cars. Along the way, Machete meets Michelle Rodriguez, who is the unofficial head of "the network," an underground group helping illegals cross the border and get set up with jobs, and Jessica Alba, an ICE officer who learns about Machete's past and helps him advance the plot a few times. Whatever. Anybody walking into Machete looking for a brilliant, nuanced plot has made a horrible, horrible error. The movie's main strength--the reason to see it really--is it's individual gags, the best one probably being a sight gag where Machete knocks a guard's gun out of his hand, and repeatedly, tauntingly waves a weed-whacker at him as he tries to pick it up.
The only real problem with the movie, is that sometimes it doesn't seem to remember that it's a movie that was spawned from a fake trailer sandwiched in between two similarly ridiculous grindhouse action movies. At times with DeNiro's character (and I really can't street how bizarre it is seeing him in the movie) it seems like they're trying to make some sort of an actual commentary about the Tea Party movement or the anti-immigration fervor in the country in general. When Jessica Alba stands up on top of a car and gets a crowd of random people to rally around her with a cliche-riddled "we have to stand up for what's right!!" it's hard to tell if they're parodying other speeches from bad movies that took themselves way more seriously, or if they actually thought it was going to be a real emotional moment. Then there's the matter of Lindsay Lohan's character, the daughter of the man who, seemingly, offers Machete the money to kill the Senator, which is equally as bizarre as Lohan's actual life has been for the past few years. Her final scene, which involves her in a nun outfit, is one of the most surreal, confounding things I've ever seen, and not in a "oh yeah, they're just trying to be really ridiculous and over the top" kind of way like most of the rest of the movie, but in a "...what just happened?" sort of way. I think uncomfortable is the best way I can describe the whole thing.
As long as there are going to be actual movies with tag-lines like "Slow Justice is No Justice" there will always be a place for movies like Machete. While most Hollywood action movies will try and pretend that they're not as ridiculous as they are, movies like this embrace what they are at their core. They're violent, dumb, morally dubious, and a decent way to spend 2 hours and 10 bucks.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Inception
Inception (****)
Inception is part Dark City, part Matrix, part Ocean's Eleven, part Sandman. It's also not quite like any of these, because it's not quite like anything else whatsoever. It's visual effects are impressive enough to at least put it on par with most of the big summer releases opening around it, but it has none of the convention, the cliche, the gimmickry, the timidity of the average cookie-cutter blockbuster. On some level, it fits snugly in the category of heist movie, but there's no bank--not a physical one anyway, and there's so much going on than merely the execution of the grand scheme. Christopher Nolan reaffirms what he pretty much already established with both of his Batman films, that he can create a grandiose effects movie with mass appeal and still make it fiercely original and thought-provoking.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb and he's an Extractor. What the hell is an Extractor? An extractor essentially hacks into people's dreams, during which a person's mind is vulnerable we're told, and steals people's ideas on behalf of a client (like a rival businessman). How do you steal an idea? Well, you literally pick it up and run with it. In the dream worlds of Inception, ideas are actual tangible things, perhaps written on a sheet of paper and locked away in a safe. Problem is, dreams are also populated with elements of a person's subconscious, and when they detect a foreign presence in a dream they'll attack it, like how white blood cells attack a foreign substance in a person's bloodstream. The techniques to do this were developed in a secret military program, we're told, but apparently it's existence has leaked out in certain circles, and some people have actually been trained to fight extraction, which basically militarizes the projections in their subconscious. What might normally be an old girlfriend strolling down the street becomes a commando with an assault rifle. If you die in the dream, you just wake up (not following Matrix rules here), most of the time at least, but you still feel the effects of however you got killed and there's no guarantee that you die quickly. The machine that does this is suitcase sized device with a big red button in the middle. Nolan, wisely, doesn't really try and explain the specifics of how it's supposed to work. They're not really important, and would only serve to bog the movie down in exposition that wouldn't really be believable anyway.
Cobb is a widower, and hasn't been able to see the two children that he had with his wife (or set foot in America for that matter) because he's a suspect in his wife's death. As to the circumstances of her death and whether or not he's guilty, that's something the movie reveals bit and bit and would be too spoilerish for a review. Cobb is working in Japan when he gets offered a chance at the proverbial One Last Big Job from Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe, last seen in a Christopher Nolan movie playing Ra's Al-Ghul), who has high-level connections that can get Cobb back into America. The catch is that Saito isn't asking for Extraction, he's asking for Inception (hey, that's the name of the movie!). Inception is the antithesis of Extraction--planting an idea in someone's mind. The problem is that it's hard to convince a person's subconscious that it's their own idea. If it doesn't feel like something they would naturally think up, the idea won't take hold in the person's mind. What does Saito want to plant? He wants to convince Fisher, (Cillian Murphey, the other former Batman Begins villain) the heir to a rival energy business, to break up his father's company, essentially scuttling his billion-dollar inheritance. So yeah... that's gonna be tough.
To pull off either Extraction or Inception, you also need a Chemist and an Architect (is someone hard at work creating an RPG system based on this right now?) The Chemist will induce sleep deep enough to not be easily disrupted through a series of drug compounds, and the Architect will construct the landscape of the dream. The Architect can change up the landscape on the fly with a thought, but again, if the target figures out that there's shenanigans going on in their dream, the jig is up. For an Architect, Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Paige), a student of his father's (Michael Caine), who is as much a stranger to the whole Extraction/Inception concept as we are, and thus mostly serves as our point-of-view character. In spite of being a fish-out-of-water though, she's smart enough to realize that Cobb has some serious demons in his closet and at several points confronts him about them, worried that they'll endanger the mission.
A good chuck of the second half of the movie, is just the execution of the big Inception plan. While at times it turns into very formulaic gunplay/car chase stuff, Nolan manages to keep the energy going such that it doesn't at any point feel pointless. And certain elements are anything but formulaic, as when Josh Hartnett's character has to fight in a hallway in which the gravity is constantly shifting making the whole room rotate on an axis. Things get a bit hard to keep up with as the movie approaches it's climax, as eventually there are four distinct groups of character(s) in four separate imagined places. The confusion that arises is slight though, and I have little doubt that Nolan crossed his Ts and dotted his Is in his writing and that it'll make sense upon repeat viewings. A lot of people seem confused by the movie's ending and I'm not sure why. It's ambiguous, but I thought it was clearly deliberately so, and I'd frankly defy anyone to devise a better way for the movie to end.
Nolan has simultaneously created a popcorn movie and a thinking man's movie, something which you could say he already did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but Inception frankly surpasses them on both levels, and keep in mind that Dark Knight was my favorite movie of 2008 and that I'm border-lined unhealthily obsessed with all things Batman. The movie has spawned discussion everywhere. I've seen several blog entries, for example, arguing that the movie is actually a grand metaphor for filmmaking--that it's basically Nolan's 8 1/2. I'm sure over time wholly different interpretations with at least equal merit will arise. And yet, if you just want to enjoy it as one of the most ambitiously warped heist movies of all time, you can and have a hell of a time with it. A great movie.
Inception is part Dark City, part Matrix, part Ocean's Eleven, part Sandman. It's also not quite like any of these, because it's not quite like anything else whatsoever. It's visual effects are impressive enough to at least put it on par with most of the big summer releases opening around it, but it has none of the convention, the cliche, the gimmickry, the timidity of the average cookie-cutter blockbuster. On some level, it fits snugly in the category of heist movie, but there's no bank--not a physical one anyway, and there's so much going on than merely the execution of the grand scheme. Christopher Nolan reaffirms what he pretty much already established with both of his Batman films, that he can create a grandiose effects movie with mass appeal and still make it fiercely original and thought-provoking.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb and he's an Extractor. What the hell is an Extractor? An extractor essentially hacks into people's dreams, during which a person's mind is vulnerable we're told, and steals people's ideas on behalf of a client (like a rival businessman). How do you steal an idea? Well, you literally pick it up and run with it. In the dream worlds of Inception, ideas are actual tangible things, perhaps written on a sheet of paper and locked away in a safe. Problem is, dreams are also populated with elements of a person's subconscious, and when they detect a foreign presence in a dream they'll attack it, like how white blood cells attack a foreign substance in a person's bloodstream. The techniques to do this were developed in a secret military program, we're told, but apparently it's existence has leaked out in certain circles, and some people have actually been trained to fight extraction, which basically militarizes the projections in their subconscious. What might normally be an old girlfriend strolling down the street becomes a commando with an assault rifle. If you die in the dream, you just wake up (not following Matrix rules here), most of the time at least, but you still feel the effects of however you got killed and there's no guarantee that you die quickly. The machine that does this is suitcase sized device with a big red button in the middle. Nolan, wisely, doesn't really try and explain the specifics of how it's supposed to work. They're not really important, and would only serve to bog the movie down in exposition that wouldn't really be believable anyway.
Cobb is a widower, and hasn't been able to see the two children that he had with his wife (or set foot in America for that matter) because he's a suspect in his wife's death. As to the circumstances of her death and whether or not he's guilty, that's something the movie reveals bit and bit and would be too spoilerish for a review. Cobb is working in Japan when he gets offered a chance at the proverbial One Last Big Job from Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe, last seen in a Christopher Nolan movie playing Ra's Al-Ghul), who has high-level connections that can get Cobb back into America. The catch is that Saito isn't asking for Extraction, he's asking for Inception (hey, that's the name of the movie!). Inception is the antithesis of Extraction--planting an idea in someone's mind. The problem is that it's hard to convince a person's subconscious that it's their own idea. If it doesn't feel like something they would naturally think up, the idea won't take hold in the person's mind. What does Saito want to plant? He wants to convince Fisher, (Cillian Murphey, the other former Batman Begins villain) the heir to a rival energy business, to break up his father's company, essentially scuttling his billion-dollar inheritance. So yeah... that's gonna be tough.
To pull off either Extraction or Inception, you also need a Chemist and an Architect (is someone hard at work creating an RPG system based on this right now?) The Chemist will induce sleep deep enough to not be easily disrupted through a series of drug compounds, and the Architect will construct the landscape of the dream. The Architect can change up the landscape on the fly with a thought, but again, if the target figures out that there's shenanigans going on in their dream, the jig is up. For an Architect, Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Paige), a student of his father's (Michael Caine), who is as much a stranger to the whole Extraction/Inception concept as we are, and thus mostly serves as our point-of-view character. In spite of being a fish-out-of-water though, she's smart enough to realize that Cobb has some serious demons in his closet and at several points confronts him about them, worried that they'll endanger the mission.
A good chuck of the second half of the movie, is just the execution of the big Inception plan. While at times it turns into very formulaic gunplay/car chase stuff, Nolan manages to keep the energy going such that it doesn't at any point feel pointless. And certain elements are anything but formulaic, as when Josh Hartnett's character has to fight in a hallway in which the gravity is constantly shifting making the whole room rotate on an axis. Things get a bit hard to keep up with as the movie approaches it's climax, as eventually there are four distinct groups of character(s) in four separate imagined places. The confusion that arises is slight though, and I have little doubt that Nolan crossed his Ts and dotted his Is in his writing and that it'll make sense upon repeat viewings. A lot of people seem confused by the movie's ending and I'm not sure why. It's ambiguous, but I thought it was clearly deliberately so, and I'd frankly defy anyone to devise a better way for the movie to end.
Nolan has simultaneously created a popcorn movie and a thinking man's movie, something which you could say he already did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but Inception frankly surpasses them on both levels, and keep in mind that Dark Knight was my favorite movie of 2008 and that I'm border-lined unhealthily obsessed with all things Batman. The movie has spawned discussion everywhere. I've seen several blog entries, for example, arguing that the movie is actually a grand metaphor for filmmaking--that it's basically Nolan's 8 1/2. I'm sure over time wholly different interpretations with at least equal merit will arise. And yet, if you just want to enjoy it as one of the most ambitiously warped heist movies of all time, you can and have a hell of a time with it. A great movie.
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Shorties
What say we try and get caught up
Death at a Funeral (***)
I never saw the original Frank Oz-directed, British version of this movie, which is probably a good thing since, other than the cast, they seem to be nearly identical, right down to the same actor playing the father's diminutive long-time "friend." So I can't really compare this to the original, but I can tell you that I found this version to be pretty funny, though some parts are most certainly funnier than others. Chris Rock is Aaron, our protagonist, a son burying his father--who stipulated in his will that his funeral take place at home--and is struggling to deal with both the logistics and financial reality of the funeral, while trying to deal with the various warring factions of his family. He mostly serves as the straight man, and mostly does a pretty good job of it. Martin Lawrence plays his brother, Ryan, a wealthy and popular writer (well, he claims he got hit hard by the recession) who moved out to New York and lives a playboy's lifestyle. His character's just really not that funny in the grand scheme of the movie. Most of the bits centered around him involve him creepily hitting on an 18 year old and kind of fall flat. Luke Wilson, perhaps snake-bitten by those God-awful AT&T commercials, isn't all that funny either as Derek, the ex of Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who spends the duration of the funeral ineptly trying to win her back.
Much, much funnier are Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Uncle Russell (a perpetually scowling Danny Glover), who pretty much steal the movie. Glover plays Uncle Russell as the grumpy old man archetype turned up to 11, spending the whole of the movie verbally and physically abusing Norman, who has the unfortunate task of having to look after him despite merely being a family friend. Tracy Morgan is... well... Tracy Morgan, showing off his unmatched comedic timing acting like the funniest possible type of complete crazy person. Also funny is the escalating comedy of errors involving various family members trying to detain the little person who was... involved with their father and is now trying to blackmail the family for what he believes is owed to him. The sight gag it all culminates in is somewhat predictable though.
Overall, Death at a Funeral is a well-executed, raunchy, dark comedy.
Sherlock Holmes (***)
Guy Ritchie, who has made a career to this point making British underground movies tries his hand at a crime story of a more classical nature in the form of the latest adaptation of the quintessential detective character, and the results are mostly enjoyable. Bearing only a passing resemblance to a lot of the very gentlemanly interpretations of Holmes, like the movies starring Peter Cushing in the 60s and 70s, Ritchie's film has a bit more of an edge, not skirting around Holmes' drug addiction, and playing up his somewhat anti-social behavior. Robert Downey Jr. brings his usual quirkiness to the role, at times making it seem like his character from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang has been sent back to Victorian England. Jude Law's Watson is good as well, and the two playing off of each other produces a nice House-Wilson vibe, Gregory House, of course, being basically the modernized, medical equivalent of the Holmes archetype.
Mark Strong plays the villain, a cult-leader who has been murdering the cult's enemies by seemingly magical means, and whose ultimate plot is to kill all the non-cult-friendly members of parliament through a very steampunk-looking device that will flood the parliament chamber with deadly gas. As such, it leads to the old cliched ticking time-bomb scenario, but the detective story that leads up to it is intriguing enough and feels worthy of the Holmes tradition. The movie does an effective job of tying everything up, while teasing a much more iconic Holmes foe for a potential sequel. Rachel McAdams shows up as a old flame of Holmes', but doesn't really end up having much that's all that memorable. Despite not being used to this sort of big-budget, big-hype fare, Ritchie is able to inject a lot of his signature hard-nosed style into the film. Particularly cool are the fight sequences, in we first see Holmes planning out precisely how and why he's going to attack his target in slow-motion, blow-by-blow, then we rewind to see it happen all at once in real time. Compared to how slow-motion is used routinely in action movies nowadays, it feels much less empty and much more purposeful.
Holmes is enjoyable, and if a sequel is to be made (may have already been greenlit for all I know, haven't been seeking out news for it) I would have high hopes for it.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (***1/2)
As if Wes Anderson's movies weren't already quirky and surrealist enough, Anderson tries his hand at stop-motion animation in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. I don't have the slightest clue as to how close the movie is to the book in either plot or feel, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. George Clooney plays a fox who promises his wife, voiced by Merryl Streep, to give up his career of chicken snatching when they settle down and have a kid, who turns out to have the voice of Jason Schwartzman. Eventually, though, he falls back on his old habits, and pulls off his greatest caper ever, which causes three of the angriest farmers in the land to come after him and drive him and the neighboring animals deep into the sewers. Thus, Mr. Fox has to hatch a plan for them to escape, which involves, among other things, a badger demolitions expert voiced by Bill Murray. Funnnnn times.
Avatar (***)
Yep, finally got around to seeing it, though I'm not going to waste a lot of ink on it (pretend this is ink). I agree pretty much exactly with what the general consensus seems to be, that being that it's visually stunning, but the plot is derivative and forgettable.
Death at a Funeral (***)
I never saw the original Frank Oz-directed, British version of this movie, which is probably a good thing since, other than the cast, they seem to be nearly identical, right down to the same actor playing the father's diminutive long-time "friend." So I can't really compare this to the original, but I can tell you that I found this version to be pretty funny, though some parts are most certainly funnier than others. Chris Rock is Aaron, our protagonist, a son burying his father--who stipulated in his will that his funeral take place at home--and is struggling to deal with both the logistics and financial reality of the funeral, while trying to deal with the various warring factions of his family. He mostly serves as the straight man, and mostly does a pretty good job of it. Martin Lawrence plays his brother, Ryan, a wealthy and popular writer (well, he claims he got hit hard by the recession) who moved out to New York and lives a playboy's lifestyle. His character's just really not that funny in the grand scheme of the movie. Most of the bits centered around him involve him creepily hitting on an 18 year old and kind of fall flat. Luke Wilson, perhaps snake-bitten by those God-awful AT&T commercials, isn't all that funny either as Derek, the ex of Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who spends the duration of the funeral ineptly trying to win her back.
Much, much funnier are Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Uncle Russell (a perpetually scowling Danny Glover), who pretty much steal the movie. Glover plays Uncle Russell as the grumpy old man archetype turned up to 11, spending the whole of the movie verbally and physically abusing Norman, who has the unfortunate task of having to look after him despite merely being a family friend. Tracy Morgan is... well... Tracy Morgan, showing off his unmatched comedic timing acting like the funniest possible type of complete crazy person. Also funny is the escalating comedy of errors involving various family members trying to detain the little person who was... involved with their father and is now trying to blackmail the family for what he believes is owed to him. The sight gag it all culminates in is somewhat predictable though.
Overall, Death at a Funeral is a well-executed, raunchy, dark comedy.
Sherlock Holmes (***)
Guy Ritchie, who has made a career to this point making British underground movies tries his hand at a crime story of a more classical nature in the form of the latest adaptation of the quintessential detective character, and the results are mostly enjoyable. Bearing only a passing resemblance to a lot of the very gentlemanly interpretations of Holmes, like the movies starring Peter Cushing in the 60s and 70s, Ritchie's film has a bit more of an edge, not skirting around Holmes' drug addiction, and playing up his somewhat anti-social behavior. Robert Downey Jr. brings his usual quirkiness to the role, at times making it seem like his character from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang has been sent back to Victorian England. Jude Law's Watson is good as well, and the two playing off of each other produces a nice House-Wilson vibe, Gregory House, of course, being basically the modernized, medical equivalent of the Holmes archetype.
Mark Strong plays the villain, a cult-leader who has been murdering the cult's enemies by seemingly magical means, and whose ultimate plot is to kill all the non-cult-friendly members of parliament through a very steampunk-looking device that will flood the parliament chamber with deadly gas. As such, it leads to the old cliched ticking time-bomb scenario, but the detective story that leads up to it is intriguing enough and feels worthy of the Holmes tradition. The movie does an effective job of tying everything up, while teasing a much more iconic Holmes foe for a potential sequel. Rachel McAdams shows up as a old flame of Holmes', but doesn't really end up having much that's all that memorable. Despite not being used to this sort of big-budget, big-hype fare, Ritchie is able to inject a lot of his signature hard-nosed style into the film. Particularly cool are the fight sequences, in we first see Holmes planning out precisely how and why he's going to attack his target in slow-motion, blow-by-blow, then we rewind to see it happen all at once in real time. Compared to how slow-motion is used routinely in action movies nowadays, it feels much less empty and much more purposeful.
Holmes is enjoyable, and if a sequel is to be made (may have already been greenlit for all I know, haven't been seeking out news for it) I would have high hopes for it.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (***1/2)
As if Wes Anderson's movies weren't already quirky and surrealist enough, Anderson tries his hand at stop-motion animation in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. I don't have the slightest clue as to how close the movie is to the book in either plot or feel, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. George Clooney plays a fox who promises his wife, voiced by Merryl Streep, to give up his career of chicken snatching when they settle down and have a kid, who turns out to have the voice of Jason Schwartzman. Eventually, though, he falls back on his old habits, and pulls off his greatest caper ever, which causes three of the angriest farmers in the land to come after him and drive him and the neighboring animals deep into the sewers. Thus, Mr. Fox has to hatch a plan for them to escape, which involves, among other things, a badger demolitions expert voiced by Bill Murray. Funnnnn times.
Avatar (***)
Yep, finally got around to seeing it, though I'm not going to waste a lot of ink on it (pretend this is ink). I agree pretty much exactly with what the general consensus seems to be, that being that it's visually stunning, but the plot is derivative and forgettable.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Shutter Island
Shutter Island (***)
You've probably heard by now that Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island has a big twist at the end, and indeed it does. I'm not going to reveal what it is, but I will say that it's genuinely unexpected, and it has a certain novelty to it, but it stretches the plausibility of what is, up until that point, a pretty engrossing story weaved by the master director and, at the end of the day, I'm not sure the ending being what it is makes it a better movie. I can think of several other movies of recent vintage with similar sleights of hand at work where the big reveal was much more impactful. Here, even though the ending genuinely did catch me off guard my thought afterward was something like, "...Huh. Okay." Though I legitimately didn't see it coming, it didn't really heighten my appreciation for the movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start from the beginning.
Our story is set in 1954 and our protagonist is Teddy Daniels. He's a U.S. Marshal who's been sent to the titular island on a case with a partner he's never worked with before named Chuck. Shutter Island houses a facility for the criminally insane, and not much else, save for the dock that gets you there and a bunch of jagged, foreboding cliffs. The two Marshals are investigating the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando, which occurred under curious circumstances. The facility's chief doctor, Dr. Cawley--played excellently by Ben Kingsley--says "it's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls". Ben Kingsley's performance might be the best part of the movie. When we're first introduced to him, he seems to exude the same sinister aura that the entire aura around him does, and then at the end, when something different is required from him, he shifts his performance in a way that sells the turn in the story moreso than the rest of the movie does (more on that later). He's perfectly cordial with the detectives, but at the same time he seems to want to impede their investigation if they start asking too many questions not directly related to Rachel's disappearance. Teddy's mistrust for him is heightening by the company he keeps, another doctor on staff who is a German immigrant. Teddy was a soldier in World War II where liberated a death camp, the images of which still haunt him. As such, Teddy is not much of a fan of zee Germans.
Teddy and Chuck's investigation doesn't turn up any solid clues as to how or why Rachel disappeared, but seems to open up whole other questions. Teddy finds a note in her room reading "Who is 67?" and after learning that Shutter Island houses 66 patients, he becomes convinced that the facility is hiding secrets, not the least of which is an extra patient. The investigation of Rachel's disappearance leads nowhere promising, but a massive storm hits the island, preventing the two detectives from returning to the mainland. While he's holed up within the very gothic hospital grounds, Teddy begins to see visions--of his days in the war; of his dead wife, who was killed in an apartment fire set by an arsonist; of the hideously scarred arsonist himself, who Teddy tells us was transferred to Shutter Island from prison. Is the stress of the investigation along with the massive storm battering the island getting to Teddy? Is there something supernatural at work on the island? For most of the movie, we can only speculate. The island is very much in the tradition of gothic "haunted house" locales. Bundle up Arkham Asylum, the House of Usher, whatever the house in The Haunting was called, and a bunch of other stuff, and channel it through the directorial eye of Martin Scorsese and you get Shutter Island. Scorsese paints the island as a living, breathing, 0therworldly entity unto itself, and milks this effect for all it's worth. No better example of the effect Scorsese is going for is the score, which, at times, isn't so much music at it is a series of guttural bellows in the form of extremely low-pitched string chords which almost seem to shake the theater.
Scorsese clearly loves constructing a Hitchcock-esque suspense setting, and for the most part it worked for me. I was genuinely creeped out, and genuinely engrossed by the island and all its myriad secrets, which is why I almost found that the ending, which paints the entire rest of the film in a very different light, almost undermines what Scorsese spends two hours building. A plot of a detective trekking through a mysterious haunted house is pretty derivative, but if there's anything that could make derivative interesting, it's Scorsese working with actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley. Shutter Island is based on a book with the same name, and maybe the ending is handled differently there as it seems to have garnered a fair amount of praise form what I gather Googling it, but here it just seems to muddle an enjoyable movie. Even now as I write this, I'm still very confused as to how some early scenes make sense after the different light cast on the overall story by the ending. In some movies with surprise endings, you immediately want to watch it again and hunt for clues; find what you missed the first time knowing now what you're looking for. With Shutter Island I don't feel that way, rather I feel myself sort of wishing that the scenes were exactly what they appeared to be before everything is shaken up at the very end.
Even with the frustration I have looking back on the movie, I can't say I was ever bored or disinterested for the two hours I was in the theater, hence the review is still ultimately positive. Even working with a somewhat convoluted and confusingly put together script, Scorsese reminds us why he's one of the best directors of all time, even as he steps a bit outside of his normal fare into the realm of supernatural dream sequences and horror movie set pieces. There are a lot of visuals in the film that are still vivid in my head a week afterward, even if the surrounding story didn't quite hold together for me.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Top 25-ish Movies of the Decade 2000-2009
This may not entirely sync up with how these movies are ordered on the individual yearly lists that I've made but, hey, people's opinion's can change, right? Furthermore, some of these movies I haven't seen all that recently and I'm going by vague memories of them. To expedite this, I think I'm only going to write a blurb on the movies that I haven't already written separate reviews for on here.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
But captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do.
Guillermo Del Toro's haunting, darkly beautiful epic about a girl living in Franco's Spain who meets a faun in an underground fantasy world telling her that she's actually a princess. Is it real, or just her overactive imagination? We're left to come to our own conclusions about it. In a movie where our heroine has to contend with a faceless "pale man" with eyes in the palms of his hands who devours children, the most frightening monster in the movie is human--her father; a Captain in Franco's army. He's one of the most terrifying characters put on screen, even moreso, I think, than Christopher Waltz's nazi in this year's Inglourious Basterds.
2. Michael Clayton
I'm Shiva, the God of death.
T-3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fightin' for.
No, I don't really think all of them are equally as good--I think Fellowship is probably the best--but to keep this from being overly LotR heavy, I'll just nestle them all here. A lot of people who aren't into all the high fantasy of Tolkien's world mock the long run times and the suspension of disbelief required to get on board with the quest to destroy the ring ("Why don't they just ride one of those eagles and throw it in the volcano?"), but whatever, screw them. Peter Jackson and company did an amazing job with the titanic effort of putting together one a dense, complicated epic on screen such that it was beloved by newcomers and hardcore fans alike (the few people still bitching about Tom Bombadil being left out don't count).
4. Up In the Air
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
5. Juno
Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
6. No Country for Old Men
Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
7. The Dark Knight
It's not about making money, it's about sending a message: Everything burns!
8. The Departed
I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.
9. Doubt
"Did you ever prove it?"
"To whom?"
"Anyone but yourself?"
10. Million Dollar Baby
Boxing is an unnatural act. 'Cos everything in it is backwards. You wanna move to the left, you don't step left, you push on the right toe. To move right, you use your left toe. Instead of running from the pain - like a sane person would do, you step into it.
Clint Eastwood's somber tale about the rise and fall of a female boxer under the tutelage of an old trainer, played by Eastwood himself, who eventually becomes a father figure for her. The ethics and implications of the decision he makes at the end of the movie could be discussed endlessly.
11. Slumdog Millionaire
It is written.
12. Lost in Translation
For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
Sophia Coppola's gorgeous movie about two people who randomly meet up in Japan at very different points in their lives. The perfect movie for someone like me who is fascinated by Japan but hasn't made it over there yet.
13. Good Night and Good Luck
We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty. We must remember always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.
14. Downfall
You must be on stage when the curtain falls.
At times a brutal movie to watch, Downfall or Der Untergang follows the last day's of Nazi Germany, when Hitler was relegated to an underground bunker as the last remnants of the German army fought and died in Berlin. Actor Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler is terrifyingly convincing, and the movie portrays him as a broken, pitiful creature, teetering on the edge of insanity as his Empire crumbles.
15. House of Flying Daggers
[...I guess I don't have a quote for this one. You've failed me, IMDB.]
Hero, also directed by Yimou Zhang, is two spaces down on the list, but Daggers is a better movie with a more intimate story, connecting a love triangle with a political intrigue story pitting a weak and corrupt Chinese government against a band of assassins. The visuals in Yimou's films are stunning. In this movie, the sequence in the bamboo forest is particularly beautiful.
16. There Will Be Blood
I am the Third Revelation!!
17. Hero
But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains.
Not quite as good as Daggers, but another visually arresting film by Yimou Zhang. What's particularly interesting is how each of the movie's conflicting flashbacks--it's structured much like to Rashomon--seems to have it's own color scheme. It also has a lot of the heady Eastern philosophy that I'm a complete sucker for. A major plot point involves two main characters interpreting what a single character of calligraphy means.
18. Crash
[I don't have anything here either.]
Paul Haggis's confrontation of racism, interleaving a number of different stories of people from varying backgrounds whose lives "crash" together. Wish I had more to say, but this is one of the movies on the list that I haven't seen in some time.
19. The Aviator
Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints...
Martin Scorsese's second appearance on the list for his biopic of Howard Hughes, simultaneously genius and insane. A great performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.
20. Inglourious Basterds
We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.
21. Spirited Away
Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.
One of the most imaginative movies of all time, directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyasaki. There simply isn't any other hand-drawn animation that matches the detail of Miyasaki's work, and there are few people who can create anything more completely and utterly original in any sort of format.
22. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2
I'm a killer. A murdering bastard, you know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.
Roughly four hours of Quintin Tarantino following no rules whatsoever, except take what's cool and run with it, Kill Bill is a hodge-podge of everything that's influenced Tarantino's career, from grindhouse kung-fu revenge movies, to spaghetti westerns, to random theme songs from old TV shows. It's impossible not to have fun with it.
23. The Royal Tenenbaums
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
Wes Anderson's best movie is probably Rushmore, but that was '98, I think. Tenenbaums, however, similarly shows Anderson's ability to combine a story with absurd characters and absurdist humor with genuinely emotional human drama. Anderson is definitely an acquired taste, but I for one have acquired it.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
But captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do.
Guillermo Del Toro's haunting, darkly beautiful epic about a girl living in Franco's Spain who meets a faun in an underground fantasy world telling her that she's actually a princess. Is it real, or just her overactive imagination? We're left to come to our own conclusions about it. In a movie where our heroine has to contend with a faceless "pale man" with eyes in the palms of his hands who devours children, the most frightening monster in the movie is human--her father; a Captain in Franco's army. He's one of the most terrifying characters put on screen, even moreso, I think, than Christopher Waltz's nazi in this year's Inglourious Basterds.
2. Michael Clayton
I'm Shiva, the God of death.
T-3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fightin' for.
No, I don't really think all of them are equally as good--I think Fellowship is probably the best--but to keep this from being overly LotR heavy, I'll just nestle them all here. A lot of people who aren't into all the high fantasy of Tolkien's world mock the long run times and the suspension of disbelief required to get on board with the quest to destroy the ring ("Why don't they just ride one of those eagles and throw it in the volcano?"), but whatever, screw them. Peter Jackson and company did an amazing job with the titanic effort of putting together one a dense, complicated epic on screen such that it was beloved by newcomers and hardcore fans alike (the few people still bitching about Tom Bombadil being left out don't count).
4. Up In the Air
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
5. Juno
Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
6. No Country for Old Men
Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
7. The Dark Knight
It's not about making money, it's about sending a message: Everything burns!
8. The Departed
I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.
9. Doubt
"Did you ever prove it?"
"To whom?"
"Anyone but yourself?"
10. Million Dollar Baby
Boxing is an unnatural act. 'Cos everything in it is backwards. You wanna move to the left, you don't step left, you push on the right toe. To move right, you use your left toe. Instead of running from the pain - like a sane person would do, you step into it.
Clint Eastwood's somber tale about the rise and fall of a female boxer under the tutelage of an old trainer, played by Eastwood himself, who eventually becomes a father figure for her. The ethics and implications of the decision he makes at the end of the movie could be discussed endlessly.
11. Slumdog Millionaire
It is written.
12. Lost in Translation
For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
Sophia Coppola's gorgeous movie about two people who randomly meet up in Japan at very different points in their lives. The perfect movie for someone like me who is fascinated by Japan but hasn't made it over there yet.
13. Good Night and Good Luck
We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty. We must remember always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.
14. Downfall
You must be on stage when the curtain falls.
At times a brutal movie to watch, Downfall or Der Untergang follows the last day's of Nazi Germany, when Hitler was relegated to an underground bunker as the last remnants of the German army fought and died in Berlin. Actor Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler is terrifyingly convincing, and the movie portrays him as a broken, pitiful creature, teetering on the edge of insanity as his Empire crumbles.
15. House of Flying Daggers
[...I guess I don't have a quote for this one. You've failed me, IMDB.]
Hero, also directed by Yimou Zhang, is two spaces down on the list, but Daggers is a better movie with a more intimate story, connecting a love triangle with a political intrigue story pitting a weak and corrupt Chinese government against a band of assassins. The visuals in Yimou's films are stunning. In this movie, the sequence in the bamboo forest is particularly beautiful.
16. There Will Be Blood
I am the Third Revelation!!
17. Hero
But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains.
Not quite as good as Daggers, but another visually arresting film by Yimou Zhang. What's particularly interesting is how each of the movie's conflicting flashbacks--it's structured much like to Rashomon--seems to have it's own color scheme. It also has a lot of the heady Eastern philosophy that I'm a complete sucker for. A major plot point involves two main characters interpreting what a single character of calligraphy means.
18. Crash
[I don't have anything here either.]
Paul Haggis's confrontation of racism, interleaving a number of different stories of people from varying backgrounds whose lives "crash" together. Wish I had more to say, but this is one of the movies on the list that I haven't seen in some time.
19. The Aviator
Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints...
Martin Scorsese's second appearance on the list for his biopic of Howard Hughes, simultaneously genius and insane. A great performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.
20. Inglourious Basterds
We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.
21. Spirited Away
Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.
One of the most imaginative movies of all time, directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyasaki. There simply isn't any other hand-drawn animation that matches the detail of Miyasaki's work, and there are few people who can create anything more completely and utterly original in any sort of format.
22. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2
I'm a killer. A murdering bastard, you know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.
Roughly four hours of Quintin Tarantino following no rules whatsoever, except take what's cool and run with it, Kill Bill is a hodge-podge of everything that's influenced Tarantino's career, from grindhouse kung-fu revenge movies, to spaghetti westerns, to random theme songs from old TV shows. It's impossible not to have fun with it.
23. The Royal Tenenbaums
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
Wes Anderson's best movie is probably Rushmore, but that was '98, I think. Tenenbaums, however, similarly shows Anderson's ability to combine a story with absurd characters and absurdist humor with genuinely emotional human drama. Anderson is definitely an acquired taste, but I for one have acquired it.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Best Movies of 2009
Like with 2008, this might change a lot once I see more 2009 releases on DVD and whatnot over time. At least I have 10 I can put on here right away. I finally got my '08 list up to 10 movies with The Wrestler not too long ago.
1. Up in the Air -- Jason Reitman's brilliant look at a man who happily lives a life of solitude constantly flying around the country firing people for other companies who don't want to deal with it themselves. George Clooney perfectly embodies the role, and the excellent script does a lot to make his character of Ryan Bingnam and the other two main characters--a young woman fresh out of school who threatens Ryan's job and another nomadic airline traveler who Ryan thinks shares his desire for totally casual and fleeting relationships--completely believable people you can care about.
2. Inglorious Basterds -- Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic, light on historical accuracy, but big on style. It was billed as a blood-soaked revenge flick, and there's certainly some of that, but there's a lot more going on, including a fantastic performance by Christopher Waltz as a smug, arrogant, and terrifying SS officer. It shows Tarantino's love for movies, and gives a lot of nods to spaghetti westerns in particular.
3. District 9 (below Up in the Air review) -- A smart sci-fi movie filmed in shaky-cam documentary style chronicling the plight of aliens whose ship stalls out over Johannesburg, South Africa and end up being relegated to a slum. Simultaneously invents an alien culture, while also exploring the history of racial and crime issues that exist in South Africa today and throughout it's history.
4. Watchmen -- Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's masterpiece of a graphic novel. Gets a bit too actiony at times, and sometimes seems to almost forget that the original book was more of a deconstruction of the superhero genre than just merely a superhero story. Still, it does a great job of capturing the Dr. Strangelove--style cold war paranoia and cynicism that overshadows the book, and does a pretty good job of handling the myriad complex characters. Not a perfect adaptation, but a very, very good one.
5. Up -- Didn't get around to doing a standalone review for this, hence no link. Up is a brilliant follow up to Wall-E by Pixar about an old man who decides he's pretty much had enough with the urbanization around his tiny, quaint little house, and attaches about a million balloons to it and gets it airborne. The first 15 minutes or so are simple, mostly wordless, and absolutely heart-wrenching, as it chronicles how the old man and his wife met, got married, tried to start a family but never succeeded, and grew old, ending in his wife passing away. The remainder of the movie is much more of a light-hearted, adventurous kid's movie, as the old man and an unsuspecting boy scout who got inadvertently carried along on the old man's doorstep travel to South America and meet a deranged old explorer. It's still fun and charming, but even tough its first priority is to entertain kid's, I thought some of the stuff with the explorer's hyper-intelligent dogs flying old bi-planes was a little too preposterous to be in the same movie with such a human and emotional first act.
6. Coraline -- Adapted from a Neil Gaiman children's story, it's a great animated movie where the titular character moves to a run-down old house in Oregon and discovered that it contains a portal to an alternate world of doll-people. Ostensibly it's a movie meant to be appropriate for kids, but I found it legitimately pretty damn creepy. The stop-motion world has some great visuals and both the real world and the pseudo doll world have a darkly beautiful veneer to them. Some great, atmospheric music as well.
7. Ponyo -- Three animated movies in a row! Ponyo is the latest film from Hayao Miyasaki, the master animator who made one of my favorite moves Mononoke Hime, as well as Spirited Away. This movie is a definite step down from those two, with a plot that kind of sputters out towards the end, but it's another great showcase for his amazing, imaginative mind. Like all of the various spirits in the bathhouse in Spirited Away, some of the ocean creatures Miyasaki creates here--as always with hand-drawn animation of tremendous detail--are jaw-dropping.
8. Star Trek -- J. J. Abrams's lens flare-filled addition to the Star Trek franchise. It's somewhat dumbed down and more of a straight-action movie than what I think the spirit of Star Trek is really supposed to be. And furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I think the villain's motivation makes no sense. Still, it's an undeniably fun movie with a new cast that does a great job of embodying the core of all of the original characters. Karl Urban as McCoy is particularly fantastic. "Got numb tongue? I can fix that!"
9. Public Enemies -- Off the heels of his Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann tries his hand at a prohibition-era crime movie telling the story of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson and the rest of the great early bank robbers. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of a movie with both Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but really, Depp's performance is good, but nothing incredible, and Bale's character is very one-dimensional. Nevertheless, the movie tells a fascinating story of the golden age of bank robbery and the creation of the FBI, has a number of memorable, engaging action sequences and great, realistic visuals of 1920s Chicago.
10. Crazy Heart -- Kind of like the Country/Western version of The Wrestler. A somber, likable movie driven by an excellent, fully realized performance by Jeff Bridges. Features some great original music, all sung by Bridges himself, none of that "oh look, suddenly the main character has a totally different voice!" nonsense.
Close but no cigar:
11. Zombieland -- Coming towards the end here, so let's get right to the point on this one: It has Woody Harrelson. Riding a roller coaster. With a shotgun. Shooting zombies. I don't want to meet the person who doesn't want to see that.
Movies I haven't seen yet that I suspect might crack this list: The Hurt Locker, Where the Wild Things Are, Avatar, A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox
1. Up in the Air -- Jason Reitman's brilliant look at a man who happily lives a life of solitude constantly flying around the country firing people for other companies who don't want to deal with it themselves. George Clooney perfectly embodies the role, and the excellent script does a lot to make his character of Ryan Bingnam and the other two main characters--a young woman fresh out of school who threatens Ryan's job and another nomadic airline traveler who Ryan thinks shares his desire for totally casual and fleeting relationships--completely believable people you can care about.
2. Inglorious Basterds -- Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic, light on historical accuracy, but big on style. It was billed as a blood-soaked revenge flick, and there's certainly some of that, but there's a lot more going on, including a fantastic performance by Christopher Waltz as a smug, arrogant, and terrifying SS officer. It shows Tarantino's love for movies, and gives a lot of nods to spaghetti westerns in particular.
3. District 9 (below Up in the Air review) -- A smart sci-fi movie filmed in shaky-cam documentary style chronicling the plight of aliens whose ship stalls out over Johannesburg, South Africa and end up being relegated to a slum. Simultaneously invents an alien culture, while also exploring the history of racial and crime issues that exist in South Africa today and throughout it's history.
4. Watchmen -- Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's masterpiece of a graphic novel. Gets a bit too actiony at times, and sometimes seems to almost forget that the original book was more of a deconstruction of the superhero genre than just merely a superhero story. Still, it does a great job of capturing the Dr. Strangelove--style cold war paranoia and cynicism that overshadows the book, and does a pretty good job of handling the myriad complex characters. Not a perfect adaptation, but a very, very good one.
5. Up -- Didn't get around to doing a standalone review for this, hence no link. Up is a brilliant follow up to Wall-E by Pixar about an old man who decides he's pretty much had enough with the urbanization around his tiny, quaint little house, and attaches about a million balloons to it and gets it airborne. The first 15 minutes or so are simple, mostly wordless, and absolutely heart-wrenching, as it chronicles how the old man and his wife met, got married, tried to start a family but never succeeded, and grew old, ending in his wife passing away. The remainder of the movie is much more of a light-hearted, adventurous kid's movie, as the old man and an unsuspecting boy scout who got inadvertently carried along on the old man's doorstep travel to South America and meet a deranged old explorer. It's still fun and charming, but even tough its first priority is to entertain kid's, I thought some of the stuff with the explorer's hyper-intelligent dogs flying old bi-planes was a little too preposterous to be in the same movie with such a human and emotional first act.
6. Coraline -- Adapted from a Neil Gaiman children's story, it's a great animated movie where the titular character moves to a run-down old house in Oregon and discovered that it contains a portal to an alternate world of doll-people. Ostensibly it's a movie meant to be appropriate for kids, but I found it legitimately pretty damn creepy. The stop-motion world has some great visuals and both the real world and the pseudo doll world have a darkly beautiful veneer to them. Some great, atmospheric music as well.
7. Ponyo -- Three animated movies in a row! Ponyo is the latest film from Hayao Miyasaki, the master animator who made one of my favorite moves Mononoke Hime, as well as Spirited Away. This movie is a definite step down from those two, with a plot that kind of sputters out towards the end, but it's another great showcase for his amazing, imaginative mind. Like all of the various spirits in the bathhouse in Spirited Away, some of the ocean creatures Miyasaki creates here--as always with hand-drawn animation of tremendous detail--are jaw-dropping.
8. Star Trek -- J. J. Abrams's lens flare-filled addition to the Star Trek franchise. It's somewhat dumbed down and more of a straight-action movie than what I think the spirit of Star Trek is really supposed to be. And furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I think the villain's motivation makes no sense. Still, it's an undeniably fun movie with a new cast that does a great job of embodying the core of all of the original characters. Karl Urban as McCoy is particularly fantastic. "Got numb tongue? I can fix that!"
9. Public Enemies -- Off the heels of his Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann tries his hand at a prohibition-era crime movie telling the story of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson and the rest of the great early bank robbers. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of a movie with both Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but really, Depp's performance is good, but nothing incredible, and Bale's character is very one-dimensional. Nevertheless, the movie tells a fascinating story of the golden age of bank robbery and the creation of the FBI, has a number of memorable, engaging action sequences and great, realistic visuals of 1920s Chicago.
10. Crazy Heart -- Kind of like the Country/Western version of The Wrestler. A somber, likable movie driven by an excellent, fully realized performance by Jeff Bridges. Features some great original music, all sung by Bridges himself, none of that "oh look, suddenly the main character has a totally different voice!" nonsense.
Close but no cigar:
11. Zombieland -- Coming towards the end here, so let's get right to the point on this one: It has Woody Harrelson. Riding a roller coaster. With a shotgun. Shooting zombies. I don't want to meet the person who doesn't want to see that.
Movies I haven't seen yet that I suspect might crack this list: The Hurt Locker, Where the Wild Things Are, Avatar, A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Friday, December 25, 2009
Up in the Air / District 9 / Extract
Up in the Air (****)
Jason Reitman's two previous movies, Thank You For Smoking and Juno, are both very good movies--In the case of Juno, I liked it enough to call it my favorite movie of '07 here--but pretty different ones. Smoking was a bitingly cynical look at the tobacco debate and the lobbying industry, while Juno was a warmer movie about growing up. According to IMDB, Reitman has actually been working on Up in the Air, based on a novel of the same name, since before either of the other two movies were made. I think he was well advised to wait before making this movie, firstly because there are elements from both of his previous two movies that can be seen at work in Up in the Air, and secondly because the movie is especially prescient during a time when the country is still trying to get out of the worst recession since the great depression. My initial impression is that it's a better movie than Juno, and it might be my favorite movie of 2009, which would make two Reitman movies at #1 on my list in a three year span.
Our protagonist is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is a "transitional specialist" which, when you translate that, means his job is to travel around the country firing people when they don't want to deal with the unpleasantness of firings themselves. The job is dressed up somewhat. He's equipped with handy informational packets and he lets every soon to be ex-employee that he'll be in touch in the future (except he really won't), but when you strip down the corporate veneer of it, ultimately the reality is that he spends his time telling people that they have to pack up their stuff and get the hell out. The character of Ryan Bingham has some elements of Aaron Eckhart's character from Thank Your for Smoking in that he seems to be flourishing in a job in which he's routinely hated because of it, as well as the title character in Michael Clayton, not a Reitman movie but also a George Clooney role, in that he's sort of the corporate go-to guy for dirty work (in this case, it's really more just "unpleasant work", whereas in Clayton it was more like trying to make crimes go away). Being farmed out to whatever company happens to be laying people off at the time means Bingham spends most of his time flying around the country--up in the air. Many would find such a life stressful, but not Bingham. He fetishises his stockpile of frequent flyer miles--one of the biggest ever accumulated--and all of his preferred customer cards from every airline, rental car company, and hotel he's ever used, always made out of some very important looking material. He's not bothered by not being able to spend more time with his family because he doesn't have one, and doesn't plan on it. In his spare time he even gives motivation speeches selling this lifestyle on the basis that people are meant to be "movers." He calls it "What's in Your Backpack?" and asks his audience to imagine all the people and things in their lives weighing them down as they try and walk.
Things are going pretty well for Bingham at the outset of the movie. With the country mired in recession, his boss (Jason Bateman) excitedly declares "this is our time!" He even meets Alex (Vera Fermiga), a woman with a similar lifestyle of near-permanent travel and, seemingly, an apathy for anything more serious than a casual relationship. Bingham runs into a bit of an issue, though, when his company hires Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an energetic and determined young woman fresh out of college, who tries to prove her worth by introducing the concept of firing people via webcam to eliminate travel costs. With his attachment-free, never-stand-still lifestyle threatened, Bingham tries to convince his boss that this is a bad idea and that the nature of their job necessitates face-to-face interaction. His boss is unconvinced, but to try and appease
Bingham, he tells him that while the new system is being set up, he can take Natalie to jobs across the country to show her the ropes of the job. Natalie is a quick study, and knows inside and out what psychology textbooks say people want to hear when they get fired. When things get heated, Bingham gently explains to her that when someone is fighting back tears opining that they're not going to have money for their house payments, pointing out that studies show that "career transitions" can have a positive mental effect probably isn't going to put them at ease. Reitman filmed a whole bunch of scenes of people reacting to the news that they've been fired. Some of them are shown in little clips in montages, others extend out a bit, including one with Reitman movie mainstay J.K. Simmons, who initially is an especially hard sell
Most of the middle part of the movie is Ryan and Natalie bouncing around the country, with Ryan stopping to hook up with Alex whenever possible. The end of the movie has two important scenes: one where Ryan shows up in the middle of Wisconsin for his sisters wedding and has to confront the rest of his family that he's ignored over the years in favor of work, and another where Ryan discovers something that creates a major obstacle to his ultra-casual, carefree relationship with Alex. The movie runs the gamut of emotions, from laugh-out-loud funny, to very somber. All of it feels is not only compelling but feels very genuine, which was one of the biggest strengths of Reitman's Juno. It never goes out of it's way to pull on your emotions one way or another, it flows naturally from the story. Up in the Air works on a lot of levels. It's a timely piece documenting the effects of a struggling economy, and also a character study of a man trying to live as a nomad in a society where most people tie themselves down. Jason Reitman has been three for three thus far in making his movies interesting and thought provoking. Hopefully he stays hot. This is one of the best movies of '09.
*****
A couple of other quickies:
District 9 (***1/2)
An interesting sci-fi movie from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, who got the gig from producer Peter Jackson after working with him on the Halo movie that never materialized. Filmed in the style of a documentary, the beginning of the movie sets up the premise of aliens living in a slum in South Africa after their ship traveled to earth, but then seems to run out of juice while some sort of a virus kills much of its crew, leaving it hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. The slum, bearing the titular name of "District 9", is controlled by an international corporation and guarded by PMCs, although at ground level, much of the influence within the slum is actually in the hands of Nigerian gangs, who make money off of scamming the aliens in various ways, and who are convinced they can gain the aliens' power through magical rituals. Our hero and protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe, generally wants to help the stranded "prawns", as they're nicknamed, but his higer-ups have ulterior motives, like trying to learn how humans can use the alien weapons, which is synchronized with their genetic structure and thus can't be fired by human hands.
When trying to lead a team sent in to relocate the aliens out of the slums to a new camp set up by the corporation, Wikus stumbles upon a vial of black fluid and when he gets exposed to it, it begins to transform him into a hybrid between human and prawn, turning him into a fugitive from his former employers, who want to use him as a medical experiment to try and unlock the prawns' bio-tech. There's a lot of big action set pieces at the end of the movie with the prawns and the PMCs, but it never feels gratuitous and doesn't overshadow the larger story. Because it takes place in South Africa, many see the movie as a metaphor for apartheid. It's certainly easy to see why, though there are many more movies who deal with issues of prejudice in a much more heavy-handed and forced way as District 9, and the smart writing and the knowledge of South African culture and demographics that the filmmakers show gives it a lot of credibility. Even if you don't care about any of the moral issues in it, it's a fun sci-fi movie.
Extract (**1/2)
An entertaining, but somewhat disappointing movie from Mike Judge, (of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space fame) starring Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of an extract factory. Concerned that the passion has gone out of his marriage, and trying to deal with a lawsuit brought on by an employee who was injured in a region that you really don't want to be injured in, Joel takes a lot of bad advice from his bartender (Ben Affleck), who fancies himself as something of a wise shaman, but who is basically just an odd dude in possession of a lot of drugs. It has it's moments, but doesn't have anything anywhere near as the best scenes in Office Space and doesn't have any characters as memorable as Lumburgh or Milton. The funniest scenes are probably those involving David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) as the quintessential neighbor who won't go away, in the proud tradition of Flanders from "Simpsons." Creating characters like him is what Judge is best at, he just does a lot more of it in Office Space than in Extract.
Jason Reitman's two previous movies, Thank You For Smoking and Juno, are both very good movies--In the case of Juno, I liked it enough to call it my favorite movie of '07 here--but pretty different ones. Smoking was a bitingly cynical look at the tobacco debate and the lobbying industry, while Juno was a warmer movie about growing up. According to IMDB, Reitman has actually been working on Up in the Air, based on a novel of the same name, since before either of the other two movies were made. I think he was well advised to wait before making this movie, firstly because there are elements from both of his previous two movies that can be seen at work in Up in the Air, and secondly because the movie is especially prescient during a time when the country is still trying to get out of the worst recession since the great depression. My initial impression is that it's a better movie than Juno, and it might be my favorite movie of 2009, which would make two Reitman movies at #1 on my list in a three year span.
Our protagonist is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is a "transitional specialist" which, when you translate that, means his job is to travel around the country firing people when they don't want to deal with the unpleasantness of firings themselves. The job is dressed up somewhat. He's equipped with handy informational packets and he lets every soon to be ex-employee that he'll be in touch in the future (except he really won't), but when you strip down the corporate veneer of it, ultimately the reality is that he spends his time telling people that they have to pack up their stuff and get the hell out. The character of Ryan Bingham has some elements of Aaron Eckhart's character from Thank Your for Smoking in that he seems to be flourishing in a job in which he's routinely hated because of it, as well as the title character in Michael Clayton, not a Reitman movie but also a George Clooney role, in that he's sort of the corporate go-to guy for dirty work (in this case, it's really more just "unpleasant work", whereas in Clayton it was more like trying to make crimes go away). Being farmed out to whatever company happens to be laying people off at the time means Bingham spends most of his time flying around the country--up in the air. Many would find such a life stressful, but not Bingham. He fetishises his stockpile of frequent flyer miles--one of the biggest ever accumulated--and all of his preferred customer cards from every airline, rental car company, and hotel he's ever used, always made out of some very important looking material. He's not bothered by not being able to spend more time with his family because he doesn't have one, and doesn't plan on it. In his spare time he even gives motivation speeches selling this lifestyle on the basis that people are meant to be "movers." He calls it "What's in Your Backpack?" and asks his audience to imagine all the people and things in their lives weighing them down as they try and walk.
Things are going pretty well for Bingham at the outset of the movie. With the country mired in recession, his boss (Jason Bateman) excitedly declares "this is our time!" He even meets Alex (Vera Fermiga), a woman with a similar lifestyle of near-permanent travel and, seemingly, an apathy for anything more serious than a casual relationship. Bingham runs into a bit of an issue, though, when his company hires Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an energetic and determined young woman fresh out of college, who tries to prove her worth by introducing the concept of firing people via webcam to eliminate travel costs. With his attachment-free, never-stand-still lifestyle threatened, Bingham tries to convince his boss that this is a bad idea and that the nature of their job necessitates face-to-face interaction. His boss is unconvinced, but to try and appease
Bingham, he tells him that while the new system is being set up, he can take Natalie to jobs across the country to show her the ropes of the job. Natalie is a quick study, and knows inside and out what psychology textbooks say people want to hear when they get fired. When things get heated, Bingham gently explains to her that when someone is fighting back tears opining that they're not going to have money for their house payments, pointing out that studies show that "career transitions" can have a positive mental effect probably isn't going to put them at ease. Reitman filmed a whole bunch of scenes of people reacting to the news that they've been fired. Some of them are shown in little clips in montages, others extend out a bit, including one with Reitman movie mainstay J.K. Simmons, who initially is an especially hard sell
Most of the middle part of the movie is Ryan and Natalie bouncing around the country, with Ryan stopping to hook up with Alex whenever possible. The end of the movie has two important scenes: one where Ryan shows up in the middle of Wisconsin for his sisters wedding and has to confront the rest of his family that he's ignored over the years in favor of work, and another where Ryan discovers something that creates a major obstacle to his ultra-casual, carefree relationship with Alex. The movie runs the gamut of emotions, from laugh-out-loud funny, to very somber. All of it feels is not only compelling but feels very genuine, which was one of the biggest strengths of Reitman's Juno. It never goes out of it's way to pull on your emotions one way or another, it flows naturally from the story. Up in the Air works on a lot of levels. It's a timely piece documenting the effects of a struggling economy, and also a character study of a man trying to live as a nomad in a society where most people tie themselves down. Jason Reitman has been three for three thus far in making his movies interesting and thought provoking. Hopefully he stays hot. This is one of the best movies of '09.
*****
A couple of other quickies:
District 9 (***1/2)
An interesting sci-fi movie from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, who got the gig from producer Peter Jackson after working with him on the Halo movie that never materialized. Filmed in the style of a documentary, the beginning of the movie sets up the premise of aliens living in a slum in South Africa after their ship traveled to earth, but then seems to run out of juice while some sort of a virus kills much of its crew, leaving it hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. The slum, bearing the titular name of "District 9", is controlled by an international corporation and guarded by PMCs, although at ground level, much of the influence within the slum is actually in the hands of Nigerian gangs, who make money off of scamming the aliens in various ways, and who are convinced they can gain the aliens' power through magical rituals. Our hero and protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe, generally wants to help the stranded "prawns", as they're nicknamed, but his higer-ups have ulterior motives, like trying to learn how humans can use the alien weapons, which is synchronized with their genetic structure and thus can't be fired by human hands.
When trying to lead a team sent in to relocate the aliens out of the slums to a new camp set up by the corporation, Wikus stumbles upon a vial of black fluid and when he gets exposed to it, it begins to transform him into a hybrid between human and prawn, turning him into a fugitive from his former employers, who want to use him as a medical experiment to try and unlock the prawns' bio-tech. There's a lot of big action set pieces at the end of the movie with the prawns and the PMCs, but it never feels gratuitous and doesn't overshadow the larger story. Because it takes place in South Africa, many see the movie as a metaphor for apartheid. It's certainly easy to see why, though there are many more movies who deal with issues of prejudice in a much more heavy-handed and forced way as District 9, and the smart writing and the knowledge of South African culture and demographics that the filmmakers show gives it a lot of credibility. Even if you don't care about any of the moral issues in it, it's a fun sci-fi movie.
Extract (**1/2)
An entertaining, but somewhat disappointing movie from Mike Judge, (of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space fame) starring Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of an extract factory. Concerned that the passion has gone out of his marriage, and trying to deal with a lawsuit brought on by an employee who was injured in a region that you really don't want to be injured in, Joel takes a lot of bad advice from his bartender (Ben Affleck), who fancies himself as something of a wise shaman, but who is basically just an odd dude in possession of a lot of drugs. It has it's moments, but doesn't have anything anywhere near as the best scenes in Office Space and doesn't have any characters as memorable as Lumburgh or Milton. The funniest scenes are probably those involving David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) as the quintessential neighbor who won't go away, in the proud tradition of Flanders from "Simpsons." Creating characters like him is what Judge is best at, he just does a lot more of it in Office Space than in Extract.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Wrestler
The Wrestler (***1/2)
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds (****)
I see those red squiggly you-misspelled-something wrong lines underneath the title, so I guess I wrote the title as it was supposed to be. Judging by the intentionally misspelled title, one would perhaps assume that Inglourious Basterds would be nothing more than another vehicle for Quentin Tarantino to go nuts with random B-movie references and winks at the audience, as has been his recent formula with Kill Bill and his half of Grindhouse. In truth, it does have its fair share of nods to past movies and stylization in it, and it takes more liberties with history and convention than just about any other World War II movie ever made, but the crux of the movie isn't really haphazard craziness at all. It has its share of the violence and debauchery that Tarantino is pretty much synonymous with, but it also has some excellent performances, a tight, suspenseful plot with some poignant moments, and some great visuals. At times--like when Eli Roth, playing "The Bear Jew"--is beating a guy to death with a baseball bat, the movie seems to border on becoming an exploitation picture, but always manages to pull itself back again and throw something different and slightly more profound at us. This is the most thoughtful movie Tarantino has put out in a while, and I think it might be his best outside of Pulp Fiction.
As has become a trademark of QT, Basterds is separated into several chapters--five, I believe, in this case--separated by title cards. The first is "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France", not coincidentally similar to the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and not just because of the strands of Ennio Morricone music that pop up throughout this chapter and the rest of the film. The scene involves Nazi Col. Hans Landa--known to some as "The Jew Hunter"--arriving unannounced with a group of troops at a poor dairy farmer's home. Landa is played by Christopher Waltz, a German actor who speaks German, English, and French in the film and has a terrifying, commanding presence throughout regardless of what language he speaks. He won Best Actor at Cannes, where the film debuted, and if he doesn't get nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, it'll be because of the sort of movie that this is and not because of any fault in his performance. Landa suspects that the farmer is keeping a Jewish family in hiding. He is, although we're not shown this explicitly until a while into the scene. It reminds me a lot of the opening scene of another Sergio Leone movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef as the villain, Angel Eyes, comes to visit a terrified man and his family and sits down and helps himself to some salad before getting down to business. Given Tarantino's love for Leone's movies, I'm sure that's what he modeled it after. The scene is slow-developing and is built around a long conversation, but is nonetheless incredibly tense. Part of this is a result of Tarantino's direction: though the characters are just sitting around a table talking, QT moves his camera around, cutting between the character's faces as they study each other while the other is talking and then, only towards the scenes conclusion, panning down to show the family laying prone hiding just underneath the floorboards. But a big part of what makes it worse is also Christopher Waltz, whose performance creates one of the most remarkable cold-hearted bastards in any movie I've seen. I suppose he's a bit like the evil Spanish military man in Pan's Labyrinth, but he's less outwardly angry. Oft-times he's smiling and acting jovial, but at the same time manages to make it known that his character can and will kill anyone in the next instant if need be.
Chapter two bears the same name as the movie itself, and introduces us to the titular "Basterds" and their commander, Lt. Aldo Raine. If you've seen the trailer, then you've already seen his speech to his unit where he explains that they're going to be dropped into France and that they'll "be doin' one thing, and one thing only: killin' Nazis." Aldo harks from Tennessee, and Brad Pitt plays him with a heavy drawl as he delivers most of the movie's funniest lines. His performance doesn't have the same impact Waltz's does simply because his character isn't as serious, but its good in its own right. The basterds quickly make a name for themselves with their somewhat questionable tactics, like collecting the scalps of the Nazis they kill. Word of their exploits gets back even to Hitler itself, who is quite upset about the whole thing; especially that some of the German soldiers even think that one of them is "a golem." A soldier is called in to recant the tale of the Basterds ambushing his squadron, which ends with Raine carving a swastika into his forehead.
The third chapter introduces our last main character--who in many ways is the films purest hero, since the Basterds would most certainly have to fall into the anti-hero realm--Shosanna, a Jewish woman living in Paris under a false identity. She's the proprietor of a movie house, and one night when she's changing the marquis, she piques the interest of a German soldier walking the streets. Turns out, the soldier is a hero of Germany, having killed a bunch of Americans from a sniper's post in battle, and is going to be the subject of a new Joeseph Gobbels propaganda film. The soldier persuades Gobbels to debut the film at Shosanna's theater, and all of a sudden she has to find herself maintaining her cover while dealing with Gobbels and Landa, who is working security for the premiere. The premiere is to be attended by all of the Nazi high command, and the Allies devise Operation Keno: a plan to have the Basterds blow up the theater. Shosanna has no knowledge of this plan, but she's pretty much had her fill of Nazis, and she devises her own plan to burn the theater down using a bunch of old, highly flammable film reels. And so, as happened in Pulp Fiction, the previously unrelated storylines begin to gradually intertwine.
I've heard some people declare this film "insensitive," and I'm not sure why. Despite how the film is depicted in the trailer, this isn't Kill Bill: World War II edition. The Basterds are brutal, violent, anti-heros, but the violence on screen is very brief. The Basterds don't even do that much actual fighting in the film. There's a couple of violent images, but it never feels crazy, over-the-top sadistic. The movie also pretty much throws away actual WWII history to invent its own, but it doesn't really change the entire idea of what was going on. The Nazis are still the bad guys, the Allies are still the good guys. I don't know what there is to find insensitive about a movie that's obviously trying merely to entertain and not to teach anyone about any actual World War II events.
More than anything, the movie is a reminder of what a genius Tarantino is at dialogue. Even though this is a war movie, so much of it plays out through conversation, and none of it is boring. There's an extended scene that only towards its conclusion becomes relevant to the main plot, where a bunch of people are sitting around a table in a tavern playing a game where they try and guess which famous person somebody wrote on a card they have stuck to their foreheads. Tarantino manages to make it absolutely fascinating. Every once in a while you'll hear somebody call Tarantino a hack, on the basis that his best movie, Pulp Fiction, was co-written with someone else, and that he's been milking Fiction's success ever since. There's no other writing credits to be seen here, and while its not on the same level as Pulp Fiction, which is thus far his best movie, it is nevertheless really damn good.
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