Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, last Sunday afternoon
This year I took the occassion of the first day of Spring to do some hiking up in the Big Thompson Canyon, in Roosevelt National Forest. I'd rented a pair of Black Diamond trekker poles from REI, and I wanted to try them out in the recent snowfall, to see if I wanted to purchase a pair. After a jaunt up to the overlook on the Round Mountain trail, I decided that only an idiot would ever go hiking without them.
In the afternoon, after a wonderful outing, I rolled up to the Cinemark to see a show. I love seeing movies this way---just arriving and seeing whatever is showing next. Actually I cheated a little because I knew that Remember Me was showing there, and that since it wasn't showing at the Carmike, it meant that I better make it priority before it leaves town.
This ending to this movie was spoiled for me on the Internet before I even knew anything about it. Given the subject matter, I was glad it was spoiled, because it gave me a chance to look at the film while knowing in advance the fate of the protagonist (Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight movies), and the final twist.
(start spoilers here)
This is 9/11 movie, to be sure, but what's good about it is that it doesn't try to say everything about 9/11. Instead it looks at the life of one person who winds up being killed in the attacks.
The story kept me going without flagging. I was surprised to enjoy Pattinson in this role. His "listless young man" character (who of course works at the Strand Bookstore in the Village!) has more than a dash of Holden Caulfield in his character, especially when he is interacting with his younger sister (who is about ten years old, an age that many young women in the audience of this movie would have been at the time of 9/11). In a way, it is the younger sister through whom the sentimental "memory story" of the memory is cast.
I also noticed in this movie that both characters of the love story are supposed to be Irish-American (see the map of Ireland next to Chris Cooper in one scene). This lends a patina of Celtic mourning to the story, in an oblique way.
The casting was well done. It's always pleasing to see Pierce Brosnan as well, the second time this month. Here he is Pattinson's father, a powerful businessman who does not think much of what his son is doing. Brosnan is my favorite "actor's actor" who will apparently attempt any role (including being a centaur in the recent Percy Jackson release). Here he does a New York accent that doesn't really work, but that's about the only overt negative I can say about this movie.
Chris Cooper, another of my favorite supporting actors, was exactly in his element here, and reminded me of his role in American Beauty (1999), a movie that I have long thought of us as "America on the eve of 9/11."
Can't forget a surprise supporting appearance by Lena Olin. Always nice to see her on screen.
Yes, it has a downer ending, but in narrative terms it completely works (by a a first-time screenwriter, apparently). Moreover the film really impressed by what it didn't do. Leading up to the climax I began to worry that the movie was going to attempt to re-create the strike on the tower by digitally showing us a 767 flying into WTC 1.
The last thing we need is Hollywood to contribute to our collective false memories about what happened that day. Instead the film completely eschewed any special effects that would add to our collectively video vocabulary of that morning. When I realized this, I heaved a big sigh of relief in my seat. This gave me permission to like the movie, which I did.
On the other hand, there was ample implied horror, in that Pattinson's character is seen mounting to the very upper floors of WTC 1 right before the attack. Those people in the top ten floors were the ones who were doomed right from the very first moment, if they weren't killed outright.
(end spoilers here)
Don't expect much more than a young adult drama if you see it. The main narrative is driven primarily by father-son conflict, a theme that arguably is one of the strengths of Postmodern film.
Curiously it's also another entry in the recent string of Brooklyn films (three in one month), in that it is framed by a backstory involving an incident in Brooklyn that happens to the heroine in her childhood. In a way it thus contributes to the subgenre of films that speak to the Brooklyn-Manhattan divide, although in a way that seems far away from the viewpoint of Saturday Night Fever (1978).
This will probably remain a guilty pleasure for 2010. On the other hand, I feel no guilt about my new Black Diamond trekker poles, ones that purchased on the spot after returning my rentals. Some things are mandatory.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Valentine's Day
Seen at: Carmike 10, about 3 weeks ago
Last month my sister emailed me about this movie. She'd gone to see it with some friends on a girl's night out. They liked it; she hated it, and couldn't understand why anyone would like it. What did I think of it?
I wasn't particularly offended by this movie. It was pretty much exactly what I expected, with a few twists. The movies I truly dislike, especially among Postmodern romantic comedies, are the ones that take me to a new level of disgust, which this one thankfully didn't.
The story is based on a gag premise: imagine contemporary Los Angeles, and its dating workplace scenes and married couples with issues, etc., but set in an alternative universe.
The alternative universe is one in which Postmodern Weak Men (PWM) still exist (because who could conceive of it being otherwise, right?) but in which attractive single women actually crave the saccharine displays of "i wuv you" affection with which PWM attempt to find mates.
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on the male characters in this movie, but maybe you get my point. This movie uses Valentine's Day as the pretense for juggling the emotional rules of the courtship game to actual give guys a fighting chance to impress women.
If you can stomach seeing a half dozen mini stories like this for two hours, then you can make it through this movie. I think the only reason it held my attention was because it didn't try to inflate any one of these mini stories into a full-fledged plot.
The funniest twist of the movie for me was the unexpected reinforcement of the new Hollywood rules for categorizing Postmodern men into three basic types: (1) charming but weak and clueless; (2) strong vibrant complete assholes; and (3) gay.
Actually there is a fourth type, played here by George Lopez, namely the long-suffering family man who has achieved a zen-like detachment from it all, who no longer expects intimacy with his wife or any concessions to his manhood, but knows his place in the universe. He's the PWM who has achieved enlightened wisdom. Thus Lopez's character is essentially the axle around which the rest of the movie revolves.
As far as category 3, this is somethings I've noticed strongly over the last few years. According to Hollywood, the most emotionally mature and balanced men are not interested in women at all. On the surface that statement is extremely classical. But in the classical era, it meant that the hero was not really interested in any woman who did not deeply strike him as exceptional, and who was not really his true love.
In the Postmodern era, it means something different obviously. Nowadays we simply do not understand how men could be this way, that a man could turn down sex when offered to him by a woman (something every classical hero was expected to do). According to current reasoning, He must be gay.
Thus the two real male "catches" of this movie both turn out to be gay, and moreover in love with each other. We don't realize this until the end of the movie, when their two respective miniplots merge with a homosexual kiss when they finally meet. It was the iconic moment of the movie to me.
So what's not to like here, sis? It's a nice little Whitman's Sampler box of everything that Hollywood wants us to know about relationships right now. Since we live in such a vibrant, emotionally healthy society, this is only a good thing, right?
Well actually I feel a bit nauseated afterwards. Probably took too many chocolates from that Sampler box.
Last month my sister emailed me about this movie. She'd gone to see it with some friends on a girl's night out. They liked it; she hated it, and couldn't understand why anyone would like it. What did I think of it?
I wasn't particularly offended by this movie. It was pretty much exactly what I expected, with a few twists. The movies I truly dislike, especially among Postmodern romantic comedies, are the ones that take me to a new level of disgust, which this one thankfully didn't.
The story is based on a gag premise: imagine contemporary Los Angeles, and its dating workplace scenes and married couples with issues, etc., but set in an alternative universe.
The alternative universe is one in which Postmodern Weak Men (PWM) still exist (because who could conceive of it being otherwise, right?) but in which attractive single women actually crave the saccharine displays of "i wuv you" affection with which PWM attempt to find mates.
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on the male characters in this movie, but maybe you get my point. This movie uses Valentine's Day as the pretense for juggling the emotional rules of the courtship game to actual give guys a fighting chance to impress women.
If you can stomach seeing a half dozen mini stories like this for two hours, then you can make it through this movie. I think the only reason it held my attention was because it didn't try to inflate any one of these mini stories into a full-fledged plot.
The funniest twist of the movie for me was the unexpected reinforcement of the new Hollywood rules for categorizing Postmodern men into three basic types: (1) charming but weak and clueless; (2) strong vibrant complete assholes; and (3) gay.
Actually there is a fourth type, played here by George Lopez, namely the long-suffering family man who has achieved a zen-like detachment from it all, who no longer expects intimacy with his wife or any concessions to his manhood, but knows his place in the universe. He's the PWM who has achieved enlightened wisdom. Thus Lopez's character is essentially the axle around which the rest of the movie revolves.
As far as category 3, this is somethings I've noticed strongly over the last few years. According to Hollywood, the most emotionally mature and balanced men are not interested in women at all. On the surface that statement is extremely classical. But in the classical era, it meant that the hero was not really interested in any woman who did not deeply strike him as exceptional, and who was not really his true love.
In the Postmodern era, it means something different obviously. Nowadays we simply do not understand how men could be this way, that a man could turn down sex when offered to him by a woman (something every classical hero was expected to do). According to current reasoning, He must be gay.
Thus the two real male "catches" of this movie both turn out to be gay, and moreover in love with each other. We don't realize this until the end of the movie, when their two respective miniplots merge with a homosexual kiss when they finally meet. It was the iconic moment of the movie to me.
So what's not to like here, sis? It's a nice little Whitman's Sampler box of everything that Hollywood wants us to know about relationships right now. Since we live in such a vibrant, emotionally healthy society, this is only a good thing, right?
Well actually I feel a bit nauseated afterwards. Probably took too many chocolates from that Sampler box.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
She's Out of My League
Seen at: Carmike 10, at 4:25 this afternoon
On the surface, She's Out of My League purports to follow the logical progression of the Weak Postmodern Man to its ultimate conclusion. The hero is an undereducated and underemployed young man, slender of frame and with a personality that is less than assertive. He is every "omega male" out there in America in 2010.
We meet him at the most awkward moment of his life so far, as he pathetically attempts to win back the love of an ex-girlfriend (whom we can tell is beneath him in character).
By fate he is going to run into a "solid 10" in the form of Molly, an event planner with sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair. Hence the title.
A review that I read on the web told me what to expect of this movie, namely that there is no realistic way that such a woman would fall for such man. The movie actually asserts this "He's a 5, She's a 10," and that's too big a leap to make.
Thus we have the rarified view of the Hollywood view of modern romance: all men are beneath all women. The strong men are assholes. The non-assholes are weak. All women realize this. Only the Goddess of Love herself keeps things going, by leading the heroine to somehow overlook the faults of the hero.
The movie lived up to my expectations on one level, but during the first scene in which the two principals meet, I could tell that the web review I'd read simply didn't understand the movie.
In the language of classical cinema, the movie was telling me that the premise of the story (that the hero is a typical omega male) was a ruse. In fact the hero had quite a few strong classical characteristics that made him exactly the kind of man that the "solid 10" heroine would be interested in getting to know.
Specifically, it is apparent that Molly knows very well that men slobber all over her when they meet her. They are distracted by her. They put her on a pedestal.
The hero is somewhat immune to her, refreshingly, precisely because he is so beaten down. At the magical moment when their eyes meet (across a crowded airport screening area), he allows himself only the most temporary flash of true love. Then he returns to his placid acceptance of the reality of the situation--temporarily drained of self esteem, yet firm in his actions as an airport employee (because a man does his job).
He is at the low point in his life, and he barely keeps his eyes open. He isn't even interested in looking at her.
That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for the hero to pique the interest of the heroine.
What wins her over, in the first scene, is that he becomes her champion. When his fellow TSA employees are hassling her at the airport screening line, he naturally and without pretense takes the position of honor. He stands behind her, literally, and speaks up for her when she cannot (because then she'd be a bitch).
Moreover, we understand that his desire for her is not simply because she is a hot babe. In reality, they are alike, because he, as an intelligent young man, has to suffer a constant stream of indignities from his friends, co-workers and families. She reflects his own spiritual state, and that is why there legitimately is magic when their eyes first meet.
At this point, I knew the love story would work for me. It kept getting better after that.
For example, eventually if the hero is really win her completely, he must provide an overt demonstration of his desire, specially by a physical action which he initiates. The way the story handles this, subtly over several scenes until it reaches, uh, a climax (wink wink), made for a hefty portion of the charm of this movie.
The story here was quite clever on many levels. There is a fun play on the literal meaning title by the use of hockey, played in both a professional arena and in a family basement.
The story amazingly never took the painfully obvious route I thought it would. It put the characters in fresh scenarios of tension, instead of the same old Postmodern chestnuts. At every point it kept inventing a new way to have the principals move the story forward, and to create sharp but pleasing waves of tension when their love ambitions are temporarily thwarted (as it must).
This could almost be a Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie, catapulted into the language of the early 21st century. Some loving and enjoyable second unit cinematography of Pittsburgh, including the Warhol Museum reception hall, made for a visually engaging film experience.
It had just the right dash of contemporary crudeness to speak in the vernacular of today's audience. What more could one ask for in this type of movie?
Moreover, in the climax it connects in a seamless way to the present-day cultural notion that asks women to become the active heroine, i.e. "the princess must save the (weak) prince, so that he is no longer weak." One saw the extreme version of this is the teeth-baring courtship rituals of Avatar. IN this movie, we understand the necessity of this active quality of the heroine as championess, because of the "perfection" (by cultural surface standards) of character Molly.
Thus in the climax of the story, it is she, not he, who must actually travel the furthest physical distance to where they can embrace (in the airport of course). In terms of courtship dynamics, it is he, not she, who must break away from his family to stand by her side (she is already her own woman).
Yet this apparent inversion (or warping perhaps) of the classical courtship paradigm leads back to a place that seems familiar in a classical sense. Namely, we arrive at the notion that seduction is the woman's game, not the man's, and that any intelligent woman knows instinctively that when she meets a good man, she must go out of her way to grab his attention. Like I said, this could almost be Cooper and Stanwyck, in a Postmodern Mobius Strip sort of way.
On the surface, She's Out of My League purports to follow the logical progression of the Weak Postmodern Man to its ultimate conclusion. The hero is an undereducated and underemployed young man, slender of frame and with a personality that is less than assertive. He is every "omega male" out there in America in 2010.
We meet him at the most awkward moment of his life so far, as he pathetically attempts to win back the love of an ex-girlfriend (whom we can tell is beneath him in character).
By fate he is going to run into a "solid 10" in the form of Molly, an event planner with sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair. Hence the title.
A review that I read on the web told me what to expect of this movie, namely that there is no realistic way that such a woman would fall for such man. The movie actually asserts this "He's a 5, She's a 10," and that's too big a leap to make.
Thus we have the rarified view of the Hollywood view of modern romance: all men are beneath all women. The strong men are assholes. The non-assholes are weak. All women realize this. Only the Goddess of Love herself keeps things going, by leading the heroine to somehow overlook the faults of the hero.
The movie lived up to my expectations on one level, but during the first scene in which the two principals meet, I could tell that the web review I'd read simply didn't understand the movie.
In the language of classical cinema, the movie was telling me that the premise of the story (that the hero is a typical omega male) was a ruse. In fact the hero had quite a few strong classical characteristics that made him exactly the kind of man that the "solid 10" heroine would be interested in getting to know.
Specifically, it is apparent that Molly knows very well that men slobber all over her when they meet her. They are distracted by her. They put her on a pedestal.
The hero is somewhat immune to her, refreshingly, precisely because he is so beaten down. At the magical moment when their eyes meet (across a crowded airport screening area), he allows himself only the most temporary flash of true love. Then he returns to his placid acceptance of the reality of the situation--temporarily drained of self esteem, yet firm in his actions as an airport employee (because a man does his job).
He is at the low point in his life, and he barely keeps his eyes open. He isn't even interested in looking at her.
That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for the hero to pique the interest of the heroine.
What wins her over, in the first scene, is that he becomes her champion. When his fellow TSA employees are hassling her at the airport screening line, he naturally and without pretense takes the position of honor. He stands behind her, literally, and speaks up for her when she cannot (because then she'd be a bitch).
Moreover, we understand that his desire for her is not simply because she is a hot babe. In reality, they are alike, because he, as an intelligent young man, has to suffer a constant stream of indignities from his friends, co-workers and families. She reflects his own spiritual state, and that is why there legitimately is magic when their eyes first meet.
At this point, I knew the love story would work for me. It kept getting better after that.
For example, eventually if the hero is really win her completely, he must provide an overt demonstration of his desire, specially by a physical action which he initiates. The way the story handles this, subtly over several scenes until it reaches, uh, a climax (wink wink), made for a hefty portion of the charm of this movie.
The story here was quite clever on many levels. There is a fun play on the literal meaning title by the use of hockey, played in both a professional arena and in a family basement.
The story amazingly never took the painfully obvious route I thought it would. It put the characters in fresh scenarios of tension, instead of the same old Postmodern chestnuts. At every point it kept inventing a new way to have the principals move the story forward, and to create sharp but pleasing waves of tension when their love ambitions are temporarily thwarted (as it must).
This could almost be a Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie, catapulted into the language of the early 21st century. Some loving and enjoyable second unit cinematography of Pittsburgh, including the Warhol Museum reception hall, made for a visually engaging film experience.
It had just the right dash of contemporary crudeness to speak in the vernacular of today's audience. What more could one ask for in this type of movie?
Moreover, in the climax it connects in a seamless way to the present-day cultural notion that asks women to become the active heroine, i.e. "the princess must save the (weak) prince, so that he is no longer weak." One saw the extreme version of this is the teeth-baring courtship rituals of Avatar. IN this movie, we understand the necessity of this active quality of the heroine as championess, because of the "perfection" (by cultural surface standards) of character Molly.
Thus in the climax of the story, it is she, not he, who must actually travel the furthest physical distance to where they can embrace (in the airport of course). In terms of courtship dynamics, it is he, not she, who must break away from his family to stand by her side (she is already her own woman).
Yet this apparent inversion (or warping perhaps) of the classical courtship paradigm leads back to a place that seems familiar in a classical sense. Namely, we arrive at the notion that seduction is the woman's game, not the man's, and that any intelligent woman knows instinctively that when she meets a good man, she must go out of her way to grab his attention. Like I said, this could almost be Cooper and Stanwyck, in a Postmodern Mobius Strip sort of way.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Extraordinary Measures
Seen at: Reel Mountain Theater, Estes Park, Colorado, about six weeks ago
There are two movies theaters up in Estes Park, but only one (the Reel Mountain) that is open all year round. I'd been meaning to get up there for some time, but mustering up the gumption to drive all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon just for a movie had been elusive.
To be honest, I wasn't even planning on seeing Extraordinary Measures. That's right---I was going to skip it. In January I decided I was tired from seeing movies constantly in the way I've doing for a year and a half. I privately decided to take a break. My plan at the time was to let some of the minor winter/spring Hollywood releases leave the theaters, then to catch them later on DVD by the end of the calendar year.
Like I said, that was my plan. Along those lines, I noticed that Extraordinary Measures (a movie that was not high on my to-see list) was leaving all the theaters in northern Colorado, even the ones in Denver. "It's time," I decided. The next Friday came around and Extraordinary Measures was officially gone. I'd crossed the Rubicon of my movie project.
But it was not to be. My plan was thwarted when the very next day, on a whim, I looked up the Estes Park listings on. I saw that Extraordinary Measures was now showing up the canyon!! It seemed like fate: at last I had a definite reason to go up there.
It turned out to be a nice result. In the morning, I used the opportunity to do some winter hiking on the trails on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That afternoon, I drove into town to the theater, which I found to be a charming and quaint independent showplace on the edge of town---very well run and tidy. Five buck matinees and cheap popcorn too.
The movie itself more than surpassed my expectations, which were very low, actually. First off, I had developed an aversion to Brendan Fraser. He's really not a bad actor. He just seems to choose really awful screen projects. But in my contrarian way, at the start of the film, I decided, "Heck, I'm going to try to like Brendan in this one." I guess it worked because I became entranced by the fleshy protuberances of his one-of-kind profile as he was leaning into confort his sick child.
Yes, the sick kid thing, with the corresponding race against time to find the cure. That's certainly a barrier to my embracing a movie---one knows that the story's going to pull heartstrings, so one almost must take a defensive stand against the onslaught of emotion, to force the movie to be genuine. But the simple straightforward story in this case won me over, just as I was won over last summer (in a big way) by My Sister's Keeper. I came out of the theater a tad less cynical than when I walked in. Most people I know would not like this movie, but for the kind of movie that this is, it works.
Harrison Ford was certainly a surprise here. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he looked like a tired old man doing a geriatric Saturday Night Live parody of his Indiana Jones character. Here he plays a (very) cantankerous University of Nebraska professor, and he seems to relish every minute of it, hopping and bouncing around the screen as if he were twenty years younger than in Skull (coincidentally Estes Park has multiple businesses that sell only University of Nebraska paraphernalia to the tourists---I guess I really did come to the right place to see this one).
This day-trip adventure to the mountains was so successful that I reconsidered my entire decision to take a break, and have forged onward (for now) without missing a beat. Soon after I discovered that forgoing the trailers really helped me with emotional stamina as well, so I got a second wind with movies in general.
There are two movies theaters up in Estes Park, but only one (the Reel Mountain) that is open all year round. I'd been meaning to get up there for some time, but mustering up the gumption to drive all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon just for a movie had been elusive.
To be honest, I wasn't even planning on seeing Extraordinary Measures. That's right---I was going to skip it. In January I decided I was tired from seeing movies constantly in the way I've doing for a year and a half. I privately decided to take a break. My plan at the time was to let some of the minor winter/spring Hollywood releases leave the theaters, then to catch them later on DVD by the end of the calendar year.
Like I said, that was my plan. Along those lines, I noticed that Extraordinary Measures (a movie that was not high on my to-see list) was leaving all the theaters in northern Colorado, even the ones in Denver. "It's time," I decided. The next Friday came around and Extraordinary Measures was officially gone. I'd crossed the Rubicon of my movie project.
But it was not to be. My plan was thwarted when the very next day, on a whim, I looked up the Estes Park listings on. I saw that Extraordinary Measures was now showing up the canyon!! It seemed like fate: at last I had a definite reason to go up there.
It turned out to be a nice result. In the morning, I used the opportunity to do some winter hiking on the trails on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That afternoon, I drove into town to the theater, which I found to be a charming and quaint independent showplace on the edge of town---very well run and tidy. Five buck matinees and cheap popcorn too.
The movie itself more than surpassed my expectations, which were very low, actually. First off, I had developed an aversion to Brendan Fraser. He's really not a bad actor. He just seems to choose really awful screen projects. But in my contrarian way, at the start of the film, I decided, "Heck, I'm going to try to like Brendan in this one." I guess it worked because I became entranced by the fleshy protuberances of his one-of-kind profile as he was leaning into confort his sick child.
Yes, the sick kid thing, with the corresponding race against time to find the cure. That's certainly a barrier to my embracing a movie---one knows that the story's going to pull heartstrings, so one almost must take a defensive stand against the onslaught of emotion, to force the movie to be genuine. But the simple straightforward story in this case won me over, just as I was won over last summer (in a big way) by My Sister's Keeper. I came out of the theater a tad less cynical than when I walked in. Most people I know would not like this movie, but for the kind of movie that this is, it works.
Harrison Ford was certainly a surprise here. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he looked like a tired old man doing a geriatric Saturday Night Live parody of his Indiana Jones character. Here he plays a (very) cantankerous University of Nebraska professor, and he seems to relish every minute of it, hopping and bouncing around the screen as if he were twenty years younger than in Skull (coincidentally Estes Park has multiple businesses that sell only University of Nebraska paraphernalia to the tourists---I guess I really did come to the right place to see this one).
This day-trip adventure to the mountains was so successful that I reconsidered my entire decision to take a break, and have forged onward (for now) without missing a beat. Soon after I discovered that forgoing the trailers really helped me with emotional stamina as well, so I got a second wind with movies in general.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Green Zone
Seen at: Carmike 10, this afternoon
Holy mackerel! This is the way to make a movie about the Iraq War.
Greg Kinnear is awesome in a supporting role as the villain. The "conspiracy" revealed in the story is that the Bush Administration actually knew in advance that there were no WMD in Iraq, but pushed the invasion anyway.
It took seven years, but Hollywood is finally opening its eyes just a crack. Director Greenglass shows the way. It makes me want to man up and finally watch his United 93 (2006).
Holy mackerel! This is the way to make a movie about the Iraq War.
Greg Kinnear is awesome in a supporting role as the villain. The "conspiracy" revealed in the story is that the Bush Administration actually knew in advance that there were no WMD in Iraq, but pushed the invasion anyway.
It took seven years, but Hollywood is finally opening its eyes just a crack. Director Greenglass shows the way. It makes me want to man up and finally watch his United 93 (2006).
Friday, March 19, 2010
Repo Men
Seen at: Carmike 10, at 1:35 pm today.
This week had been like a taste of early summer. Last night the temperature dropped and the snow rolled in. Smitty called in the late morning. He was having a snow day. I hadn't seen him since we saw Sherlock, so it seemed like a fun idea.
Repo Men just opened today, so in case you haven't seen the trailer, it is set in the near dystopian future, and stars Jude Law who is a repossession agent for a giant biomedical firm that sells artificial organs. When payment falls too far beyond, Law's character (or one of his comrades) is sent to collect the "artiforg." In certain case this results in instant death (for example, with heart repossession).
At one point in this movie, I thus realize that it is about psychopathic serial killers, in the guise of normality. It reminded me of Daybreakers a little, but much more sophisticated, using pure naturalism instead of supernatural.
Some impressive sci-fi in this movie. Original concept right that sheds light on the horror of contemporary society. I was hooked. For example, I was curious to know what it was, about this future society, that would cause so many people to need so many artifical organs? The movie gave a partial explanation, but left open to wandering about more of the back story about this horrible future.
That kind of open-ended wondering is a good thing for a sci-fi movie, in my opinion. It forces you to fill in the details on your own.
Another great thing about this movie was Liev Schreiber, one of the better supporting actors in Hollywood lately. He gets to play the heavy, as the head of the evil corporation, and he does it well.
Unfortunately there is a horrible plot twist in the last part of this movie, one that I saw coming a mile away. It completely changes the theme of the story at the climax, taking it from being a corporate dystopia movie to being a psycho-nihilistic thriller in a way similar to Shutter Island. Yes, it becomes one of those kind of movies, that want you to go back and re-evaluate earlier scenes, like a parlor game.
What an awful disgrace, that the movie had to be marred in this way. There was no reason to do this. The story worked beautifully up to that point.
It was a narrative train wreck at the end, to be sure, but not as bad as the plot malfunction at the end of Daybreakers, which was a more lower-level violation.
Along those lines, in Act Three of Repo Men (spoiler in this paragraph) there is an interesting bit of classical stitching that ties together the two pscyho-realties. In the "fake" reality inside the mind of Law's character, Schreiber gets tasered by Law a second time. Schreiber says sarcastically, as he slumps unconscious, "this again?"
At that instant, I immediately thought of the "variational rule" of movie plots: never twice should we see the same action with the same result (or almost never). That the story violates this rule is actually a signal that the climax of the movie is not "real," but a virtual one inside a character's dreaming mind. This kind of thing really impresses me, when I notice it.
But like I said, this whole twist was a pointless distraction, and even a dismantling of the up-to-then successful biomedical corporate dystopia story. Why wasn't it enough, to tell the dystopian story without the psycho-nihilistic plot twist at the end?
I think the answer to that question is a key to understanding Hollywood and America right now.
This week had been like a taste of early summer. Last night the temperature dropped and the snow rolled in. Smitty called in the late morning. He was having a snow day. I hadn't seen him since we saw Sherlock, so it seemed like a fun idea.
Repo Men just opened today, so in case you haven't seen the trailer, it is set in the near dystopian future, and stars Jude Law who is a repossession agent for a giant biomedical firm that sells artificial organs. When payment falls too far beyond, Law's character (or one of his comrades) is sent to collect the "artiforg." In certain case this results in instant death (for example, with heart repossession).
At one point in this movie, I thus realize that it is about psychopathic serial killers, in the guise of normality. It reminded me of Daybreakers a little, but much more sophisticated, using pure naturalism instead of supernatural.
Some impressive sci-fi in this movie. Original concept right that sheds light on the horror of contemporary society. I was hooked. For example, I was curious to know what it was, about this future society, that would cause so many people to need so many artifical organs? The movie gave a partial explanation, but left open to wandering about more of the back story about this horrible future.
That kind of open-ended wondering is a good thing for a sci-fi movie, in my opinion. It forces you to fill in the details on your own.
Another great thing about this movie was Liev Schreiber, one of the better supporting actors in Hollywood lately. He gets to play the heavy, as the head of the evil corporation, and he does it well.
Unfortunately there is a horrible plot twist in the last part of this movie, one that I saw coming a mile away. It completely changes the theme of the story at the climax, taking it from being a corporate dystopia movie to being a psycho-nihilistic thriller in a way similar to Shutter Island. Yes, it becomes one of those kind of movies, that want you to go back and re-evaluate earlier scenes, like a parlor game.
What an awful disgrace, that the movie had to be marred in this way. There was no reason to do this. The story worked beautifully up to that point.
It was a narrative train wreck at the end, to be sure, but not as bad as the plot malfunction at the end of Daybreakers, which was a more lower-level violation.
Along those lines, in Act Three of Repo Men (spoiler in this paragraph) there is an interesting bit of classical stitching that ties together the two pscyho-realties. In the "fake" reality inside the mind of Law's character, Schreiber gets tasered by Law a second time. Schreiber says sarcastically, as he slumps unconscious, "this again?"
At that instant, I immediately thought of the "variational rule" of movie plots: never twice should we see the same action with the same result (or almost never). That the story violates this rule is actually a signal that the climax of the movie is not "real," but a virtual one inside a character's dreaming mind. This kind of thing really impresses me, when I notice it.
But like I said, this whole twist was a pointless distraction, and even a dismantling of the up-to-then successful biomedical corporate dystopia story. Why wasn't it enough, to tell the dystopian story without the psycho-nihilistic plot twist at the end?
I think the answer to that question is a key to understanding Hollywood and America right now.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Leap Year
Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, Feb. 16 at 3:15pm
Here is a plot that is right out of the 1930s. A little-too-stuck-on-herself modern American young woman washes ashore (literally) in Ireland, where she meets the love of her life in the form of a rough-hewn but kind and honorable towering Irish leading man. He tames her, and she helps elevate him out of the prison of his own past. They start a new life together, and live happily ever after.
In this sense, Leap Year is another movie that simply treads water, at least in the narrative sense. Yet it was one of my favorite movies I've seen recently. Why?
First of, it executed this 1930s plot flawlessly, exactly the way you should do it, while following the old narrative rules, while mixing contemporary culture and attitudes about men and women, and a strong subplot that was very Postmodern (as a mans of comparison to the main plot, which was very classical). This made for a light, fun, and enjoyable little romantic comedy.
What made it special, then? Certainly it was some plain old directorial artistry, and awesome camera work from the DP (including some impressive second unit work of the cliffs of Moher). But really the reason it was so enjoyable was because all this camerawork was focused on a particular person---the Promised One, who has arrived.
As I'm watching her on screen in this movie, at one point I'm thinking, this could be Ginger Rogers, the way she tilts her face and the way her hair lights up on camera with a way that warms her eyes.
But it's not Ginger Rogers. It's the actress of today, who has arrived in full to save Hollywood movies, at this critical moment in history when all seems lost, by being able to embody at once in turn all the great leading actresses of the 1930s and 1940s.
It's as if everything that seemed dead is still alive, in her---or at least a big chunk of it. How did Amy Adams pull this off? Who knows? It is absolute genius at work.
We saw her dance just a little in Enchanted. How about a biopic of Ginger one day? Can she sing?
Here is a plot that is right out of the 1930s. A little-too-stuck-on-herself modern American young woman washes ashore (literally) in Ireland, where she meets the love of her life in the form of a rough-hewn but kind and honorable towering Irish leading man. He tames her, and she helps elevate him out of the prison of his own past. They start a new life together, and live happily ever after.
In this sense, Leap Year is another movie that simply treads water, at least in the narrative sense. Yet it was one of my favorite movies I've seen recently. Why?
First of, it executed this 1930s plot flawlessly, exactly the way you should do it, while following the old narrative rules, while mixing contemporary culture and attitudes about men and women, and a strong subplot that was very Postmodern (as a mans of comparison to the main plot, which was very classical). This made for a light, fun, and enjoyable little romantic comedy.
What made it special, then? Certainly it was some plain old directorial artistry, and awesome camera work from the DP (including some impressive second unit work of the cliffs of Moher). But really the reason it was so enjoyable was because all this camerawork was focused on a particular person---the Promised One, who has arrived.
As I'm watching her on screen in this movie, at one point I'm thinking, this could be Ginger Rogers, the way she tilts her face and the way her hair lights up on camera with a way that warms her eyes.
But it's not Ginger Rogers. It's the actress of today, who has arrived in full to save Hollywood movies, at this critical moment in history when all seems lost, by being able to embody at once in turn all the great leading actresses of the 1930s and 1940s.
It's as if everything that seemed dead is still alive, in her---or at least a big chunk of it. How did Amy Adams pull this off? Who knows? It is absolute genius at work.
We saw her dance just a little in Enchanted. How about a biopic of Ginger one day? Can she sing?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Cop Out
Seen at: Cinemark, Ft. Collins, March 1 at 1:20 pm
I saw this early in the afternoon, on a day on which I would see three different screenings. As the first course of three, tt was light and fun, especially for a police drama. It was a good way to kick off a day of moviegoing.
The plot is completely out of the 1980s buddy cop movies. Kevin Smith basically made a homage movie to the genre, one in which Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan do their respective schticks, which they do to perfection, as Brooklyn cops (two movies in one month with that theme).
There is a enough fresh post-millennial material in it to make the story worth following. As such it did not advance the art of moviemaking forward much, but, well, so what. Sometimes movies that tread water artistically are the most fun to watch.
The thing I took most from the film is how much the portrayal of Brooklyn has changed over the last four decades in movies, with a huge run lately---The Wackness, Notorious, Two Lovers, Precious, and Brooklyn's Finest among them. Throw in Tyson as documentary as well.
I saw this early in the afternoon, on a day on which I would see three different screenings. As the first course of three, tt was light and fun, especially for a police drama. It was a good way to kick off a day of moviegoing.
The plot is completely out of the 1980s buddy cop movies. Kevin Smith basically made a homage movie to the genre, one in which Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan do their respective schticks, which they do to perfection, as Brooklyn cops (two movies in one month with that theme).
There is a enough fresh post-millennial material in it to make the story worth following. As such it did not advance the art of moviemaking forward much, but, well, so what. Sometimes movies that tread water artistically are the most fun to watch.
The thing I took most from the film is how much the portrayal of Brooklyn has changed over the last four decades in movies, with a huge run lately---The Wackness, Notorious, Two Lovers, Precious, and Brooklyn's Finest among them. Throw in Tyson as documentary as well.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Brooklyn's Finest
Seen at: Cinemark, Ft. Collins, today at 3:30 pm
This was a spontaneous visit to the Cinemark that resulted in an on-the-spot purchase of a ticket for this movie. It was on my list for this week anyway, since it is leaving Fort Collins after Thursday, according to Google movies.
I made a note at the end that it was directed by Antoine Fuqua. I was impressed in many ways with this movie and wanted to know who was behind the making of it. It was mostly well written too.
I had seen a single trailer to this, and knew little about it. It turns out to be a drama about three Brooklyn cops (played by Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, and Don Cheadle). It follows their stories over a week, which coincides with the last week of service for Gere's character, before his retirement.
Yes, it's a cliche. For the first twenty minutes of this movie I was worried it would be just one cliche after another. But it mostly moved beyond cliche, although the director liked using the obvious pop song during several scenes (like using "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane in a scene where Gere's character is snorting coke in a whorehouse).
Yes, Gere in a whorehouse. His sex scene somewhat rivals the recent raunchy one by Nic Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
The three substories were entertaining and full of narrative momentum. At one point it occurred to me that this was covering much of the same ground as The Departed, but was a much better film in many ways, albeit a less ambitious one.
The movie let me down in the climax, where the three substories come together. Fuqua falls apart. He goes "full Scorcese." The movie degenerates into a triple version of Taxi Driver. Each of the three stories ended on a somewhat overwhelming note, and the resolution of the Cheadle story was simply wrong, and should have been rewritten.
It was certainly a pleasure to see one of my favorite contemporary actors, Wesley Snipes, out of the federal pen and back on the screen where he belongs. Fittingly, he's a ex-con, just back from Clinton in Upstate New York. His supporting role was fairly easy for him, but provided much of the life of the movie in Act Two.
Also a strong performance by Ellen Barkin as a ball-busting bitch fed. Someone along the line had a sense of humor, having Gere sing "Sea of Love" not to Barkin's character, but to a prostitute. Wink. Wink.
This was a spontaneous visit to the Cinemark that resulted in an on-the-spot purchase of a ticket for this movie. It was on my list for this week anyway, since it is leaving Fort Collins after Thursday, according to Google movies.
I made a note at the end that it was directed by Antoine Fuqua. I was impressed in many ways with this movie and wanted to know who was behind the making of it. It was mostly well written too.
I had seen a single trailer to this, and knew little about it. It turns out to be a drama about three Brooklyn cops (played by Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, and Don Cheadle). It follows their stories over a week, which coincides with the last week of service for Gere's character, before his retirement.
Yes, it's a cliche. For the first twenty minutes of this movie I was worried it would be just one cliche after another. But it mostly moved beyond cliche, although the director liked using the obvious pop song during several scenes (like using "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane in a scene where Gere's character is snorting coke in a whorehouse).
Yes, Gere in a whorehouse. His sex scene somewhat rivals the recent raunchy one by Nic Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
The three substories were entertaining and full of narrative momentum. At one point it occurred to me that this was covering much of the same ground as The Departed, but was a much better film in many ways, albeit a less ambitious one.
The movie let me down in the climax, where the three substories come together. Fuqua falls apart. He goes "full Scorcese." The movie degenerates into a triple version of Taxi Driver. Each of the three stories ended on a somewhat overwhelming note, and the resolution of the Cheadle story was simply wrong, and should have been rewritten.
It was certainly a pleasure to see one of my favorite contemporary actors, Wesley Snipes, out of the federal pen and back on the screen where he belongs. Fittingly, he's a ex-con, just back from Clinton in Upstate New York. His supporting role was fairly easy for him, but provided much of the life of the movie in Act Two.
Also a strong performance by Ellen Barkin as a ball-busting bitch fed. Someone along the line had a sense of humor, having Gere sing "Sea of Love" not to Barkin's character, but to a prostitute. Wink. Wink.
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Crazies
Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, Feb. 27 at 4:30
Please note that I made a point of seeing this on the first afternoon of its release. One should see zombie movies on opening day, to catch the fullest manifestation of the vibe of the audience seeing it.
I haven't seen the George Romero original, but the fact that Romero is the executive producer here is good enough for me. Someday the Academy will stand for George too.
The movie earned my complete respect in the first couple minutes. First, in a rural establishing shot (supposedly eastern Iowa) we see a cloudy sky with a patch open in the middle. In the patch we see the criss-cross patchwork of several chemtrails.
It really shocked me to see chemtrails in the movies. I've been a chemtrail watcher informally for about six months, and it had occurred to me chemtrails would never show up in movies, because they make the sky look ugly.
But I was wrong. Here they were---in a Romero movie. Then a few minutes later we see a jet crossing the sky, a close-up, emitting what could either be a contrail or a chemtrail. This was getting good.
The story revolves around a deadly virus that is unleashed in a rural town. The virus escape is caused by the crash of a military jet carrying it.
At this point it occurred to me: oh, god, they are going to make up stupid explanation about chemtrails. This is the way it works: before the public is turned on to something the government is doing, it will show up in a Hollywood movie, in some slightly outrageous but obviously fictional setting. That way, later if one tries to bring up the topic, many people will say, "Oh, you saw that in a movie."
But that's not what happened here. Thankfully chemtrails never showed up explicitly in the plot. All we saw were the small references at the beginning. That's the way to do it, by small references that introduce the images, that subtly encourage people to notice the unspoken phenomenon.
Like I said, I gave the movie a complete pass after I realized this, and enjoyed the story, plot-holes and all, including the outrageous climax that violates verisimilitude on a level noticeable by someone from Iowa, but utterly forgivable for the sake of storytelling.
Love live narrative!
Please note that I made a point of seeing this on the first afternoon of its release. One should see zombie movies on opening day, to catch the fullest manifestation of the vibe of the audience seeing it.
I haven't seen the George Romero original, but the fact that Romero is the executive producer here is good enough for me. Someday the Academy will stand for George too.
The movie earned my complete respect in the first couple minutes. First, in a rural establishing shot (supposedly eastern Iowa) we see a cloudy sky with a patch open in the middle. In the patch we see the criss-cross patchwork of several chemtrails.
It really shocked me to see chemtrails in the movies. I've been a chemtrail watcher informally for about six months, and it had occurred to me chemtrails would never show up in movies, because they make the sky look ugly.
But I was wrong. Here they were---in a Romero movie. Then a few minutes later we see a jet crossing the sky, a close-up, emitting what could either be a contrail or a chemtrail. This was getting good.
The story revolves around a deadly virus that is unleashed in a rural town. The virus escape is caused by the crash of a military jet carrying it.
At this point it occurred to me: oh, god, they are going to make up stupid explanation about chemtrails. This is the way it works: before the public is turned on to something the government is doing, it will show up in a Hollywood movie, in some slightly outrageous but obviously fictional setting. That way, later if one tries to bring up the topic, many people will say, "Oh, you saw that in a movie."
But that's not what happened here. Thankfully chemtrails never showed up explicitly in the plot. All we saw were the small references at the beginning. That's the way to do it, by small references that introduce the images, that subtly encourage people to notice the unspoken phenomenon.
Like I said, I gave the movie a complete pass after I realized this, and enjoyed the story, plot-holes and all, including the outrageous climax that violates verisimilitude on a level noticeable by someone from Iowa, but utterly forgivable for the sake of storytelling.
Love live narrative!
Friday, March 12, 2010
The Wolfman
Seen at: Carmike 10, three weeks ago
The werewolf, as I mentioned, is classical morality stripped of classical structure. As a postmodern man, he is beastlike, but he does not want to be, at least in the post-World War II version of lycanthropy. Despite his intentions to be good, the werewolf is out of control.
The story here shows this principle in operation over two generations of werewolves in the same family. The father is the advanced state, having long embraced his nature as a remorseless killer, whereas the son is only starting out on the werewolf path, and struggles to remain a human being. But in the father we see where being a werewolf inevitably leads---towards destruction and death.
It has been a while seen since I've seen either the Lon Chaney Jr. version, so for I can't compare this directly to the original The Wolf Man (three-world title). The Kress Lounge screened it last week, but unfortunately I couldn't make it. In any case, this new version certainly pays homage to the old Universal style, at least in the sets and art direction.
The essential motif here is pleasant--late-Victorian English countryside Gothic, direct in the line from the recent Bronte/Austen movies. It draws upon audience memory of American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Elephant Man (1980), as well as a bit of Bunuel. Emily Blunt's presence certainly helped, and the love story mostly worked. There were a few gags (like givingDel Toro's character a reason not to have to fake an English accent). It could have worked, but for the fact that unfortunately, in a self-descriptive postmodern way, it fell victim to lack of structure, substituting excessive violence for actual story development in Act Three.
Certainly for Anthony Hopkins inclusionists, this one is a must, even if his performance is largely wasted in the sloppiness of the climax. It brings back good memories at least.
The werewolf, as I mentioned, is classical morality stripped of classical structure. As a postmodern man, he is beastlike, but he does not want to be, at least in the post-World War II version of lycanthropy. Despite his intentions to be good, the werewolf is out of control.
The story here shows this principle in operation over two generations of werewolves in the same family. The father is the advanced state, having long embraced his nature as a remorseless killer, whereas the son is only starting out on the werewolf path, and struggles to remain a human being. But in the father we see where being a werewolf inevitably leads---towards destruction and death.
It has been a while seen since I've seen either the Lon Chaney Jr. version, so for I can't compare this directly to the original The Wolf Man (three-world title). The Kress Lounge screened it last week, but unfortunately I couldn't make it. In any case, this new version certainly pays homage to the old Universal style, at least in the sets and art direction.
The essential motif here is pleasant--late-Victorian English countryside Gothic, direct in the line from the recent Bronte/Austen movies. It draws upon audience memory of American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Elephant Man (1980), as well as a bit of Bunuel. Emily Blunt's presence certainly helped, and the love story mostly worked. There were a few gags (like givingDel Toro's character a reason not to have to fake an English accent). It could have worked, but for the fact that unfortunately, in a self-descriptive postmodern way, it fell victim to lack of structure, substituting excessive violence for actual story development in Act Three.
Certainly for Anthony Hopkins inclusionists, this one is a must, even if his performance is largely wasted in the sloppiness of the climax. It brings back good memories at least.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Daybreakers
Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, about six weeks ago
Imagine watching your favorite baseball team play. They are down one run, late in the game. Your team is at bat. One of your best hitters comes to plate and hits a long majestic fly ball. It looks like it's going to go out of the park and tie the game. But at the last minute it falls into the glove of an opposing outfielder, who nonchalantly makes the out and lowers his glove, as if he knew the whole time exactly where the ball was going to land. Bummer.
That's how I felt after seeing Daybreakers. It was almost a dramatic home-run, but then at the end it just fizzled out. And this from Lionsgate, alas!
The movie came and went so fast in the theaters that many people probably didn't even see the trailer, which showed frequently during action movies throughout mthe late summer and fall,. The movie got delayed in its release until after the new year, which meant the trailer played for quite a while, and let me build up anticipation of seeing it (especially through the spate of gawdawful fauxpire movies throughout the fall).
What a premise Daybreakers offered---a future (or alternative present) in which a disease of the blood has swept quickly through the human race by vampiric action. Most of the human race has been turned into vampires. The remaining humans are hunted and farmed for blood.
It is a post-apocalypse scenario, but a highly ordered post-apocalypse. This is because vampires are classical. In fact, they are often indicatory of the malformed remnant of pure classicism.
As I often like to stay: werewolves are classical morality stripped of classical order; vampires are classical order stripped of classical morality; zombies are stripped of both.
The vampire order in this post-apocalypse not suprisingly has nostalgic features, and resembles the U.S. in the 1940s, but with technology slightly more advanced than today. For example, vampires drive cars around in the daylight because of special shades on the windows and video cameras that allow them to see the road and navigate. The cities have sprawling networks of underground tunnels (the movie was shot in Australia).
On top of that, the vampire world is, not surprisingly, as corrupt and evil as today's Wall Street and military/industrial complex. On the scale of social commentary, Daybreakers was heading straight for a Nadia perfect 10.
The protagonist (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire hematologist, wracked with guilt of vampiric treatment of humans, who is looking furtively for a substitute for human blood before the supply runs out (which is about to happen). He meets up with some humans on the run. The story is driven by the meeting of Hawke's character with that of Willem Dafoe, who turns out to be a former vampire who has been cured, and returned to human status.
The story thus becoms about whether the rebel team can get this Dafoe cure to the vampiric world in time to turn them back human, before the blood runs out and all the vampire turn into goat people and die horrible deaths. It's a vampire blood cure thriller.
There's some good subplots along---vampire CEO father versus daughter (father played by Sam Neill with reptilian eyes). It all works right up to the climax.
What goes wrong? Well, like I said it's about a cure for the vampire disease. So far so good. But the rule of narrative in this case is that, all other things being equal, there should be only one cure for the vampire disease, namely the one that Willem Dafoe's character accidently discovered.
But at the climax of the story, all of a sudden, there appears a second cure for the vampire disease (discovered in a previous scene by the characters but not revealed to the audience). It is this second cure that resolves the story. The first cure (Dafoe's) doesn't even enter into the story at all. The end.
Got that? What a disappointment. This kind of thing really peeves me because it completely defanged, if you will, what had been a nice decent horror thriller up to that point. But one cannot fail on this level of story and still make a good movie. It just doesn't work.
Sadly, Daybreakers is not the only movie I could say this about. It seems to be the story coming out of 2009, that so many movies had the same kind of brain-dead plot problems. It happened across genres.
What's going on here? These are story mistakes that should never have happened. They certainly were never seen in any classical Hollywood studio movies, at least after about 1932, by which time the narrative rules of Hollywood cinema had been established. It's as if we've been catapulted back before this time, or into some dystopic future.
As a consolation for you, here's the awesome trailer for Daybreakers that I mentioned, which includes a nice use of Placebo's cover of "Running Up That Hill."
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi4040294937/
Monday, March 8, 2010
Dear John
Seen at: Carmike 10, 4:20 pm today
Academy Awards over, back to catching up. Buying a ticket for Dear John this afternoon, I asked the college student behind the glass, "So this is the movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, right?" He didn't quite know if I was joking or not.
Why did The Hurt Locker win? Certainly it had wonderful cinematography, and a great score. But above any other movie it captured the lousy feeling that Americans have about the war in 2009, and by extension the lousy feeling they have about so many other things.
On the down side about it (if the reports are true), the soldiers seem to hate the movie because it fails basic verisimilitude tests about the actual experience of detonation squad soldiers in Iraq. That's an old Hollywood issue, of course. On a personal level, the descriptions of why the soldiers in Iraq didn't like it made me wince a little, because they reminded me of the kind of naive mistakes about the Iraq War that I made with Thor when we were writing a screenplay about Iraq five years ago. I expect more out of an Academy Award winning story than my own limited level of imagination. They actually went to the Middle East.
But I can forgive all that about The Hurt Locker because of the emotional power of the movie, and the fact that it is somewhat of an independent production (in a Hollywood kind of way).
More disturbing to me, however, were the thoughts that arose from seeing the Awards last night, where I could discern what it was about the movie that left me a little sideways about it, after first liking it so much.
When Bigelow spoke about dedicating the movie not only to the men and women in uniform in the military, but also to the hazmat teams teams, it occurred to me how much we now see the war as like a firefighting operation. It is a messy thing, but it is something that has to be done, and so we should honor the sacrifice of those that do the job for us.
The war has thus been completely depoliticized, seven years about Michael Moore got on stage and said, "We live in fictional times."
Bigelow then addressed the uniformed military, saying something along the lines (I'm paraphrasing) that "as long as you are out their doing what you are doing, "\we'll be back here..." whereupon she fumbled a little for words. I think she was about to say "making propaganda to support you." That's what she seemed to want to say, but she couldn't say that out loud right now, even though we all know it's true.
But this development, i.e. the complete acquiesence of Hollywood to the war, should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been going to movies in the U.S. on a regular basis over the last year or two. Lately, at many corporate multiplexes, if you arrived five to ten minutes before screening, you were very likely to be treated one of the short music videos created by the National Guard for recruiting purposes.
All of them are awesome---perhaps the best American music videos I've seen lately outside of Katie Perry (no shame in losing to her).
The one with Kid Rock, called "Warrior" has a rap mosh pit of soldiers in uniform jumping like the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. Can you beat that? It's hard not to wince, however, when he opens with the line "so don't tell me who's wrong or right when liberty starts slipping away."
The Three Doors Down video, called "Citizen Soldier" mixes footage of present-day U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the homefront with the militia of the Revolutionary War running through the woods firing muskets. I think Three Doors Down might have started the Tea Party Movement with this video (just kidding, of course).
I liked both videos, and looked forward to seeing them, even though they made me cringe a little each timey. They ran through most of 2008 and early 2009. More fun, however, was the late 2009 version of the ad campaign, which switched over to a chorus signing "Carmina Burana"-style Germanic chants with words like:
I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S.
and I will fight to liberate all!
...I will always place the mission first!
The citizen soldiers go out to help a I.S. community in distress and wind up kicking in the door of a house. The boot heel comes to the rescue!
My favorite part of the video is virtual reality morph sequence, showing a pretty blonde high school student with her school books swirling into a placid-faced dutiful soldier with a beret.
My conclusion was that there is a de facto mild federal subsidy of the corporate movie chains through these advertisements. I think The Hurt Locker and movies like it as Hollywood's way of saying "thank you" back to the Feds.
As for Dear John, the movie I actually saw today, well of course it's a wet hankie movie in the old style. Written by the guy who wrote The Notebook, it plays a lot like Nights in Rodanthe Goes to Iraq.
But I'm dissing the movie too much. It was actually pretty good, for the kind of movie it is. Chandler Tatum is the perfect "dumb brute American" of the millennial generated "minted in the year 1980. He may have no intellectual thoughts about the war (because none of us do anymore) but who is nevertheless honorable, honest, loyal and kind. He's the best we think about our youth right now, the way we wish young men become when they serve the country.
Because he's a war hero, moreover, he doesn't have to be the stupid Postmodern boy when he courts the love interest, the pretty girl. She actually chases him, old school style.
In a way this was a very classical movie (all of the wet hankie movies by this author are), but that is part of its downfall. It tries to do too much with the novelty of being sound as a story. It builds up too much story momentum, almost as if showing off how elaborate the story can be, and still work.
This doesn't ruin the movie (the beauty of classicism is that it holds water even when overdone) but does create a long and somewhat fatiguing Act Three.
Amanda Seyfreid really impressed me, however, in a sentimental role that called for her to "grow up to womanhood" during the story. She certainly has a future as a serious actress. So does Tatum. I've quietly become of fan of his work. I predict one day he will get a truly significant role, probably in a war drama, i.e. "This Generation's Platoon," that will earn him some serious attention.
Maybe this will happen when we figure out what the war is actually about, and Hollywood comes out of its coma to make a statement about it. In the meantime, these videos I mentioned from the National Guard are worth checking out, especially the last one, which has been the one they've been showing since last fall. If you sign up, best not use my name as reference.
Kid Rock "Warrior" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHzSBEVbXtM
Three Doors Down "Citizen Soldier" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ww5-LDwUVQ
"At this Moment" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfPj00pTNY
Academy Awards over, back to catching up. Buying a ticket for Dear John this afternoon, I asked the college student behind the glass, "So this is the movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, right?" He didn't quite know if I was joking or not.
Why did The Hurt Locker win? Certainly it had wonderful cinematography, and a great score. But above any other movie it captured the lousy feeling that Americans have about the war in 2009, and by extension the lousy feeling they have about so many other things.
On the down side about it (if the reports are true), the soldiers seem to hate the movie because it fails basic verisimilitude tests about the actual experience of detonation squad soldiers in Iraq. That's an old Hollywood issue, of course. On a personal level, the descriptions of why the soldiers in Iraq didn't like it made me wince a little, because they reminded me of the kind of naive mistakes about the Iraq War that I made with Thor when we were writing a screenplay about Iraq five years ago. I expect more out of an Academy Award winning story than my own limited level of imagination. They actually went to the Middle East.
But I can forgive all that about The Hurt Locker because of the emotional power of the movie, and the fact that it is somewhat of an independent production (in a Hollywood kind of way).
More disturbing to me, however, were the thoughts that arose from seeing the Awards last night, where I could discern what it was about the movie that left me a little sideways about it, after first liking it so much.
When Bigelow spoke about dedicating the movie not only to the men and women in uniform in the military, but also to the hazmat teams teams, it occurred to me how much we now see the war as like a firefighting operation. It is a messy thing, but it is something that has to be done, and so we should honor the sacrifice of those that do the job for us.
The war has thus been completely depoliticized, seven years about Michael Moore got on stage and said, "We live in fictional times."
Bigelow then addressed the uniformed military, saying something along the lines (I'm paraphrasing) that "as long as you are out their doing what you are doing, "\we'll be back here..." whereupon she fumbled a little for words. I think she was about to say "making propaganda to support you." That's what she seemed to want to say, but she couldn't say that out loud right now, even though we all know it's true.
But this development, i.e. the complete acquiesence of Hollywood to the war, should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been going to movies in the U.S. on a regular basis over the last year or two. Lately, at many corporate multiplexes, if you arrived five to ten minutes before screening, you were very likely to be treated one of the short music videos created by the National Guard for recruiting purposes.
All of them are awesome---perhaps the best American music videos I've seen lately outside of Katie Perry (no shame in losing to her).
The one with Kid Rock, called "Warrior" has a rap mosh pit of soldiers in uniform jumping like the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. Can you beat that? It's hard not to wince, however, when he opens with the line "so don't tell me who's wrong or right when liberty starts slipping away."
The Three Doors Down video, called "Citizen Soldier" mixes footage of present-day U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the homefront with the militia of the Revolutionary War running through the woods firing muskets. I think Three Doors Down might have started the Tea Party Movement with this video (just kidding, of course).
I liked both videos, and looked forward to seeing them, even though they made me cringe a little each timey. They ran through most of 2008 and early 2009. More fun, however, was the late 2009 version of the ad campaign, which switched over to a chorus signing "Carmina Burana"-style Germanic chants with words like:
I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S.
and I will fight to liberate all!
...I will always place the mission first!
The citizen soldiers go out to help a I.S. community in distress and wind up kicking in the door of a house. The boot heel comes to the rescue!
My favorite part of the video is virtual reality morph sequence, showing a pretty blonde high school student with her school books swirling into a placid-faced dutiful soldier with a beret.
My conclusion was that there is a de facto mild federal subsidy of the corporate movie chains through these advertisements. I think The Hurt Locker and movies like it as Hollywood's way of saying "thank you" back to the Feds.
As for Dear John, the movie I actually saw today, well of course it's a wet hankie movie in the old style. Written by the guy who wrote The Notebook, it plays a lot like Nights in Rodanthe Goes to Iraq.
But I'm dissing the movie too much. It was actually pretty good, for the kind of movie it is. Chandler Tatum is the perfect "dumb brute American" of the millennial generated "minted in the year 1980. He may have no intellectual thoughts about the war (because none of us do anymore) but who is nevertheless honorable, honest, loyal and kind. He's the best we think about our youth right now, the way we wish young men become when they serve the country.
Because he's a war hero, moreover, he doesn't have to be the stupid Postmodern boy when he courts the love interest, the pretty girl. She actually chases him, old school style.
In a way this was a very classical movie (all of the wet hankie movies by this author are), but that is part of its downfall. It tries to do too much with the novelty of being sound as a story. It builds up too much story momentum, almost as if showing off how elaborate the story can be, and still work.
This doesn't ruin the movie (the beauty of classicism is that it holds water even when overdone) but does create a long and somewhat fatiguing Act Three.
Amanda Seyfreid really impressed me, however, in a sentimental role that called for her to "grow up to womanhood" during the story. She certainly has a future as a serious actress. So does Tatum. I've quietly become of fan of his work. I predict one day he will get a truly significant role, probably in a war drama, i.e. "This Generation's Platoon," that will earn him some serious attention.
Maybe this will happen when we figure out what the war is actually about, and Hollywood comes out of its coma to make a statement about it. In the meantime, these videos I mentioned from the National Guard are worth checking out, especially the last one, which has been the one they've been showing since last fall. If you sign up, best not use my name as reference.
Kid Rock "Warrior" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHzSBEVbXtM
Three Doors Down "Citizen Soldier" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ww5-LDwUVQ
"At this Moment" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfPj00pTNY
Sunday, March 7, 2010
After the Oscars: this one's for Jennifer
If there was one moment at the Oscars that gave me great joy, it was seeing the entire Academy crowd stand up and clap for Roger Corman. Of course Lauren Bacall had to be standing up beside him to get the audience to their feet, but it still worked.
Then about fifteen minutes later, we get a WTF moment of the kids from Twilight introduced a tribute to horror. The actor who plays Jacob the werewolf makes some snarky comment about how the Academy hasn't awarded a nomination for horror since 1972 with The Exorcist. Who the hell writes this? The first thing flashes through my mind is, "I guess the fact that Silence of the Lambs swept the major awards in 1990 doesn't count." And if to prove my point, the following montage of horror movies includes not only Lambs but a string other movies in the same time frame that could be called horror and which were awarded in some manner.
But here's the joke: they start with Jaws as the first horror movie. Later they show Poltergeist. Stephen Spiellberg, master of horror! Were there any Corman movies in the montage? I saw one---Little Shop of Horrors, but c'mon. The overt heaviness on Spielberg was almost as if to remind us of who really runs Hollywood. It ain't Corman, in case you want to know.
My favorite speech was the one by Sandy Powell who won for Best Costume design for The Young Victoria. Because of her, I'm going to make a point of paying more attention to costumery in movies in the coming year. It's my theme, I've decided.
Favorite award of the night: that Logoland winning Best Animated Short, of course. But The New Tenants winning for Best Live Short? Ugh. I just don't get it. It really shows the discrepancy in tastes between Hollywood and yours truly. I would not have thought that movie was even worthy of being in the category with the other live shorts, let alone that it would win.
Biggest travesty of the night: not that The Hurt Locker won so many awards (it deserved them I suppose), but that they screwed up the tribute to recently deceased, lingering too long on James Taylor while we missed the first couple tribute names.
But that's not what really bothered me. It was when they got far down on the list, and Jennifer Jones' name came up, there were about three people clapping in the entire auditorium. I realize that the stars ghave gone out to freshen their drinks, and the place is full of seat fillers but it's Jennifer Jones for god's sake, winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1943 (a year that Tom Hanks would later invoke in reverence when handing out the Best Picture award---Jones beat Ingrid Bergman for the Oscar).
Jones was pretty much the last of old Hollywood (besides Bacall and a few others). That generation and that era is almost completely gone.
I don't give a damn if you're just a seat filler, son. You give it up for the woman who crawled across the rocks in Portrait of Jennie, and who crawled across the desert in Duel in the Sun. And you missie, who took the cab over from UCLA this afternoon so you could sit in Kathryn Bigelow's seat during commercials. Put Madame Bovary in your DVD queue and see what a screen presence is . And put your hands together for a woman who inspired Martha Stewart and whose career you probably can only dream of emulating in the slightest.
As for Roger, who made the movies of my childhood. They could have made the whole horror tribute montage about your work, and I would have been happy.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
My Oscar Picks (and final top movie list) for 2009
My top five best movies of 2009 (alphabetical):
Antichrist
Avatar
Inglourious Basterds
The Road
Watchmen
The winner: Inglourious Basterds.
If there was ever a year when Postmodern film needed to produce a legitimate hero, it was 2009. At the moment of history when cinema needed him, Tarantino stepped forward and delivered exactly the movie that needed to be made. I wasn't sure when I saw it, but I am now. It's the year's best film.
It should win the Oscar in my book, and Harvey Weinstein says it will, so I'll make that my prediction too.
QT FTW
Honorable mention for best movie of 2009:
A Single Man
A Serious Man
The Hurt Locker
Stillet Licht
Actor of the Year: Robert Downey Jr., over George Clooney
Actress of the Year: Sandra Bullock
Filmmaker of the Year: Lars Van Trier
Other Oscar predictions: The Door for best live short, and Logoland for best animated short
Antichrist
Avatar
Inglourious Basterds
The Road
Watchmen
The winner: Inglourious Basterds.
If there was ever a year when Postmodern film needed to produce a legitimate hero, it was 2009. At the moment of history when cinema needed him, Tarantino stepped forward and delivered exactly the movie that needed to be made. I wasn't sure when I saw it, but I am now. It's the year's best film.
It should win the Oscar in my book, and Harvey Weinstein says it will, so I'll make that my prediction too.
QT FTW
Honorable mention for best movie of 2009:
A Single Man
A Serious Man
The Hurt Locker
Stillet Licht
Actor of the Year: Robert Downey Jr., over George Clooney
Actress of the Year: Sandra Bullock
Filmmaker of the Year: Lars Van Trier
Other Oscar predictions: The Door for best live short, and Logoland for best animated short
The Last Station
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, 4:30 pm today
Just as I was catching up on my movie reviews and movie going, a mild cold sidelined me for a couple days. I should have known that a few days out the Sun, and Vitamin D, would take its toll after so much outdoor activity.
Today I felt well enough to venture and take in The Last Station, which brings me one step closer to a complete Oscar nomination card for tomorrow.
The story takes place in 1910---a hundred years ago---during the last months of Leo Tolstoi's life. The casting here is superb. Christopher Plummer was fun to see on screen, right after seeing him as Dr. Parnassus. In a way, the two movies are similar, and Tolstoy and Parnassas as screen characters have much overlap. There is a youthful love drama going on as well.
Having spent a few summers in Russia, I had flashbacks watching this movie (even though it was shot in Germany). There's a nice verisimilitude about the setting.
That being said, the story left me somewhat alienated. It get where it was trying to go---setting the duality of noble purpose between idealized love for humanity, and concrete love for those around us (especially erotic, romantic love). The story thrusts this duality on the male-female divide, following the old classical formula male=idealized purpose, female=concrete here-and-now. James McAvoy plays a Postmodern boy-man learning to be a man who can love (same old hero as we see in every movie now) but it works, because he is portrayed as a young virgin.
But somehow all these great characters, including Mirren's countess, just didn't add up to a full emotional story for me. I felt like I was being pulled by sentiment. This was no where more clear than when Mirren was on screen. She is a fine actress, one of the best, but her powerful acting here actually seemed to point out to me what was lacking in tying together all the emotion that was being handed to us.
I'm overly bashing this movie. It certainly wasn't bad. But it reminded me in many ways of a watered down version of Reds, a movie I once liked, then turned my back on, but which I now acknowledge as the masterpiece that I first discerned in my youth. Sometimes there is wisdom is being young. Plummer's Tolstoy would wink at that and smile.
Just as I was catching up on my movie reviews and movie going, a mild cold sidelined me for a couple days. I should have known that a few days out the Sun, and Vitamin D, would take its toll after so much outdoor activity.
Today I felt well enough to venture and take in The Last Station, which brings me one step closer to a complete Oscar nomination card for tomorrow.
The story takes place in 1910---a hundred years ago---during the last months of Leo Tolstoi's life. The casting here is superb. Christopher Plummer was fun to see on screen, right after seeing him as Dr. Parnassus. In a way, the two movies are similar, and Tolstoy and Parnassas as screen characters have much overlap. There is a youthful love drama going on as well.
Having spent a few summers in Russia, I had flashbacks watching this movie (even though it was shot in Germany). There's a nice verisimilitude about the setting.
That being said, the story left me somewhat alienated. It get where it was trying to go---setting the duality of noble purpose between idealized love for humanity, and concrete love for those around us (especially erotic, romantic love). The story thrusts this duality on the male-female divide, following the old classical formula male=idealized purpose, female=concrete here-and-now. James McAvoy plays a Postmodern boy-man learning to be a man who can love (same old hero as we see in every movie now) but it works, because he is portrayed as a young virgin.
But somehow all these great characters, including Mirren's countess, just didn't add up to a full emotional story for me. I felt like I was being pulled by sentiment. This was no where more clear than when Mirren was on screen. She is a fine actress, one of the best, but her powerful acting here actually seemed to point out to me what was lacking in tying together all the emotion that was being handed to us.
I'm overly bashing this movie. It certainly wasn't bad. But it reminded me in many ways of a watered down version of Reds, a movie I once liked, then turned my back on, but which I now acknowledge as the masterpiece that I first discerned in my youth. Sometimes there is wisdom is being young. Plummer's Tolstoy would wink at that and smile.
Friday, March 5, 2010
The Road
Seen at: Kress Lounge, Greeley, about five weeks ago.
Did I say Avatar and Antichrist were twins? Funny thing is that one could say the same thing about Antichrist and The Road.
Both are tight triangular stories involving the basic nuclear family: father, mother, and child. Both concern the human spirit faced with the hostility of nature. In Antichrist, this hostility arises from the primal force of nature everpresent inside ourselves. In The Road, nature has become outwardly lifeless and barren due to the influence of mankind. Both movies have problematic mother characters who cause harm to their husbands and their children. Both depict of the most barbaric forms of cruelty to other human beings. In both movies, the father character receives a critical hobbling wound in his leg that propels the story towards its climax. You get the drift.
The pairs form opposite poles in some ways. Antichrist is about the path (via the wrecked feminine) into the static frozen hell of the most primeval level of existence---and ultimately death. The Road, on the other hand, is about the path towards through a hostile world towards light and salvation. Without mentioning Jesus at all, it is the strongest crypto-Christian movie of the year. I haven't heard Cormac McCarthy's book (I wanted to judge the movie on its own), but I would nominate the movie alongside as the best recent movie in the tradition of Pilgrim's Progress as an allegorical road story.
The world of this movie is almost the bleakest imaginable that still allows the existence of human life to muster foreward. Death is inevitable for all it seems. Existence is stripped down to the most basic issues, on a day by day basis. And yet every scene in the movie has a sustaining basic nurturing warmth to it that allows one to go forward to the next one without despair---like a flame that keeps you going.
As any great work of art should do, the story crosses several emotional octaves of reality. It works as a futuristic science fiction fable and also a story of the existential trials of contemporary society---say, those of a depressed divorced father raising a single child, one who lives his life as if the apocalypse has happened inside himself.
The most powerful spiritual element of the story derives from the explicit words of the father, that his son is "God." It must follow (according to the logic of the story) that his son's words are literally Gospel, and the tension of the story and its subsequent resolution flow directly from this principle as a morality fable. Where the father follows the Word (of the child), he is led forward in light. When he turns his back on it, as he does at a critical moment when invoking judgment on another human being, he suffers a downfall.
But his downfall and inevitable death are also his triumph, for in doing so he guarantees life for his son. It is the ultimate act of sacrifice, and the assertion that humanity is born anew with each generation.
In my book, it is a mindblowingly good story on screen, a masterpiece as surely as its aforementioned Satanically-named twin.
And yes, one can think of Avatar, Antichrist, and The Road and a thematic triplet, forming a powerful trio of movies that touch artistically on so many of the dominant cultural themes of this past year.
In any case, indisputably the year 2009 belonged to the Apocalypse (it's still tricking into this year), and this movie has been by far the best of the pack.
I think I've got my five finalists for best movie of 2009. Probably going to squeeze in two more 2009 movies tomorrow before the Oscar deadline, so it could still change.
Did I say Avatar and Antichrist were twins? Funny thing is that one could say the same thing about Antichrist and The Road.
Both are tight triangular stories involving the basic nuclear family: father, mother, and child. Both concern the human spirit faced with the hostility of nature. In Antichrist, this hostility arises from the primal force of nature everpresent inside ourselves. In The Road, nature has become outwardly lifeless and barren due to the influence of mankind. Both movies have problematic mother characters who cause harm to their husbands and their children. Both depict of the most barbaric forms of cruelty to other human beings. In both movies, the father character receives a critical hobbling wound in his leg that propels the story towards its climax. You get the drift.
The pairs form opposite poles in some ways. Antichrist is about the path (via the wrecked feminine) into the static frozen hell of the most primeval level of existence---and ultimately death. The Road, on the other hand, is about the path towards through a hostile world towards light and salvation. Without mentioning Jesus at all, it is the strongest crypto-Christian movie of the year. I haven't heard Cormac McCarthy's book (I wanted to judge the movie on its own), but I would nominate the movie alongside as the best recent movie in the tradition of Pilgrim's Progress as an allegorical road story.
The world of this movie is almost the bleakest imaginable that still allows the existence of human life to muster foreward. Death is inevitable for all it seems. Existence is stripped down to the most basic issues, on a day by day basis. And yet every scene in the movie has a sustaining basic nurturing warmth to it that allows one to go forward to the next one without despair---like a flame that keeps you going.
As any great work of art should do, the story crosses several emotional octaves of reality. It works as a futuristic science fiction fable and also a story of the existential trials of contemporary society---say, those of a depressed divorced father raising a single child, one who lives his life as if the apocalypse has happened inside himself.
The most powerful spiritual element of the story derives from the explicit words of the father, that his son is "God." It must follow (according to the logic of the story) that his son's words are literally Gospel, and the tension of the story and its subsequent resolution flow directly from this principle as a morality fable. Where the father follows the Word (of the child), he is led forward in light. When he turns his back on it, as he does at a critical moment when invoking judgment on another human being, he suffers a downfall.
But his downfall and inevitable death are also his triumph, for in doing so he guarantees life for his son. It is the ultimate act of sacrifice, and the assertion that humanity is born anew with each generation.
In my book, it is a mindblowingly good story on screen, a masterpiece as surely as its aforementioned Satanically-named twin.
And yes, one can think of Avatar, Antichrist, and The Road and a thematic triplet, forming a powerful trio of movies that touch artistically on so many of the dominant cultural themes of this past year.
In any case, indisputably the year 2009 belonged to the Apocalypse (it's still tricking into this year), and this movie has been by far the best of the pack.
I think I've got my five finalists for best movie of 2009. Probably going to squeeze in two more 2009 movies tomorrow before the Oscar deadline, so it could still change.
Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, Monday at 6:15 pm.
Saw these at the Lyric on a hectic day of moviegoing, after seeing Crazy Heart and a 2010 release I won't get around to writing up until after Oscars. It was nice to get back to "marathon" viewing mode. It had been a while. Moreover I saw these free, because I'd filled up another 10-slot punch card from the Lyric.
One thing I noticed about the live shorts this year: all five fell into the range of 17-22 minutes. If I were going to make a live short and wanted it to be Oscar-worthy, I'd let it fall in this range.
As such, the five nominees filled up the screening this year, with no "highly commended" additions.
The first, Kavi, is the story of a boy in India working in modern slave conditions. Very much a riff on Slumdog Millionaire (the character is even called a "dirty dog" in the opening minute). It was made as a thesis project of a student at USC, and sort of feels like it. Despite its noble premise, it is more of the set-up to a story, than a full story. Could be fleshed out into a full motion picture.
The New Tenants is a Danish film (in English) set in New York City about a gay couple that moves into an apartment building. Over the course of the film, a parade of Tarantino-type characters bursts into the apartment one-by-one, each falling to some laughable comic fate in turn, and the gay couple watches in disgust and then dances away at the end under the subway tracks---several recognizable actors, including Vincent D'Onofrio. Well made as a movie, but I really didn't get it.
Miracle Fish from Australia also includes a crazy character bursting into the scene with a gun (into an elementary school, where a child repulses the intruder with his goodness?). Never gets old! Well it does for me. It didn't get this one either. Well made technically but the story was simply a fragment that didn't have any impact on me.
The Door was probably the most powerful of the five. It's an Irish-funded film set in Ukraine following the Chernobyl incident. The title refers to a specific door that the father of a dying girl goes to retrieve, back to their old apartment. There was just enough of a full story here to make it work as narrative, and to support the heavy emotional theme, giving us a microdose of Aristotlean catharsis.
Instead of Abracadabra is a Swedish film (in Swedish with subtitles). It's the only comedy of the five, about a young unemployed goofy nerd who lives with his exasperated parents, and who refuses to find a real job but instead pursues a career as a performing magician. Along the way it becomes a bit of a romance.
In my book, the Award should go to either of the last two. The first three simply weren't enough of a story to win. I would vote for Instead of Abracadabra, since it had the most complete full story in its twenty minutes. The Door had a deeper emotional impact, however, so I can live with that one.
Saw these at the Lyric on a hectic day of moviegoing, after seeing Crazy Heart and a 2010 release I won't get around to writing up until after Oscars. It was nice to get back to "marathon" viewing mode. It had been a while. Moreover I saw these free, because I'd filled up another 10-slot punch card from the Lyric.
One thing I noticed about the live shorts this year: all five fell into the range of 17-22 minutes. If I were going to make a live short and wanted it to be Oscar-worthy, I'd let it fall in this range.
As such, the five nominees filled up the screening this year, with no "highly commended" additions.
The first, Kavi, is the story of a boy in India working in modern slave conditions. Very much a riff on Slumdog Millionaire (the character is even called a "dirty dog" in the opening minute). It was made as a thesis project of a student at USC, and sort of feels like it. Despite its noble premise, it is more of the set-up to a story, than a full story. Could be fleshed out into a full motion picture.
The New Tenants is a Danish film (in English) set in New York City about a gay couple that moves into an apartment building. Over the course of the film, a parade of Tarantino-type characters bursts into the apartment one-by-one, each falling to some laughable comic fate in turn, and the gay couple watches in disgust and then dances away at the end under the subway tracks---several recognizable actors, including Vincent D'Onofrio. Well made as a movie, but I really didn't get it.
Miracle Fish from Australia also includes a crazy character bursting into the scene with a gun (into an elementary school, where a child repulses the intruder with his goodness?). Never gets old! Well it does for me. It didn't get this one either. Well made technically but the story was simply a fragment that didn't have any impact on me.
The Door was probably the most powerful of the five. It's an Irish-funded film set in Ukraine following the Chernobyl incident. The title refers to a specific door that the father of a dying girl goes to retrieve, back to their old apartment. There was just enough of a full story here to make it work as narrative, and to support the heavy emotional theme, giving us a microdose of Aristotlean catharsis.
Instead of Abracadabra is a Swedish film (in Swedish with subtitles). It's the only comedy of the five, about a young unemployed goofy nerd who lives with his exasperated parents, and who refuses to find a real job but instead pursues a career as a performing magician. Along the way it becomes a bit of a romance.
In my book, the Award should go to either of the last two. The first three simply weren't enough of a story to win. I would vote for Instead of Abracadabra, since it had the most complete full story in its twenty minutes. The Door had a deeper emotional impact, however, so I can live with that one.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Crazy Heart
Seen at: Cinemark Fort Collins, Monday afternoon.
Dreadfully I've noticed a new trend in moviegoing. In largely empty auditorium, it seems to be acceptable to talk outloud, provided you are not talking at full volume, and provided you do it only when the soundtrack volume is loud.
Well, guess what? I can hear you. Yes, you, the person I'm glaring at. I know it's amazing and beyond your ability to comprehend, but your little old voice actually carries way down here six rows to where I'm sitting. Can you dig it?Your esses are like hisses, noise in a speaker from a bad wire. Blows your mind!
I can't really judge if Crazy Heart is a good movie or not, because of these distractions (especially since the loud parts of the movie were the songs).
Here's what I noticed about Crazy Heart, without judgement:
1. It's a sad country song made into a movie.
2. It covers some of the same cultural and geographical turf as No Country for Old Men., but in a completely different genre (see 1)
3. Maggie Gyllenhall is still sexy.
4. Jeff Bridges retains the vibe of the Dude.
5. Colin Farrell is a really good actor. His supporting character was the refreshing twist that made the story go forward, and skip over certain story traps.
6. In the Third Act, the story switched from being a love story to being a story about alcoholism. This somewhat constrained the narrative at this point, due to the necessity of following current orthodoxy about this subject. The story suffered slightly due to the corresponding loss of spontaneity of the characters. Understandable. As Hepburn said, "you can't have it all, you know." See point number one.
Dreadfully I've noticed a new trend in moviegoing. In largely empty auditorium, it seems to be acceptable to talk outloud, provided you are not talking at full volume, and provided you do it only when the soundtrack volume is loud.
Well, guess what? I can hear you. Yes, you, the person I'm glaring at. I know it's amazing and beyond your ability to comprehend, but your little old voice actually carries way down here six rows to where I'm sitting. Can you dig it?Your esses are like hisses, noise in a speaker from a bad wire. Blows your mind!
I can't really judge if Crazy Heart is a good movie or not, because of these distractions (especially since the loud parts of the movie were the songs).
Here's what I noticed about Crazy Heart, without judgement:
1. It's a sad country song made into a movie.
2. It covers some of the same cultural and geographical turf as No Country for Old Men., but in a completely different genre (see 1)
3. Maggie Gyllenhall is still sexy.
4. Jeff Bridges retains the vibe of the Dude.
5. Colin Farrell is a really good actor. His supporting character was the refreshing twist that made the story go forward, and skip over certain story traps.
6. In the Third Act, the story switched from being a love story to being a story about alcoholism. This somewhat constrained the narrative at this point, due to the necessity of following current orthodoxy about this subject. The story suffered slightly due to the corresponding loss of spontaneity of the characters. Understandable. As Hepburn said, "you can't have it all, you know." See point number one.
The Messenger
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about three weeks ago
An interesting premise. A young solider back from Iraq is paired with a homefront Veteran who once served in the First Gulf War. Their assignment is to roam the Eastern U.S. serving death notifications to the families of U.S. Army servicemen killed overseas in the current War.
The word "angel" comes from the Greek word for "messenger." These are death angels, like the messengers in Job.
Too bad the story didn't really go anywhere, after a good set-up. A love story develops, but it is constrained by the issue of honor, so it remains unconsummated. It had to. In a way, this is the kind of classical "trap" that constrained movies in old Hollywood.
But I think old Hollywood would have found a clever way to make the romance in this movie work, even with all the classical constraints. As such the sterility puts a damper on the trajectory of well-defined and well-acted characters.
An interesting premise. A young solider back from Iraq is paired with a homefront Veteran who once served in the First Gulf War. Their assignment is to roam the Eastern U.S. serving death notifications to the families of U.S. Army servicemen killed overseas in the current War.
The word "angel" comes from the Greek word for "messenger." These are death angels, like the messengers in Job.
Too bad the story didn't really go anywhere, after a good set-up. A love story develops, but it is constrained by the issue of honor, so it remains unconsummated. It had to. In a way, this is the kind of classical "trap" that constrained movies in old Hollywood.
But I think old Hollywood would have found a clever way to make the romance in this movie work, even with all the classical constraints. As such the sterility puts a damper on the trajectory of well-defined and well-acted characters.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about a month ago
If you've seen the original Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel, you probably know what to expect of this movie thematically. Herzog really pulls off a fresh update/sequel to the original that is worthy of the name, in my opinion.
The biggest change is that whereas Keitel's NYC character was just unredeemably corrupt and evil at hear, Cage's Big Easy lieutenant is portrayed as a decent person who falls victim to his weaknesses. These tragic elements more than justify a "second take" on the Bad Lieutenant theme. They combine to create a nice story arc as we follow the protagonist down the slide of corruption, and identify with his attempts to climb back out of the sewer before it is too late.
I'm not a big Nick Cage fan, but here he is at his best. He pulls off a powerful graphic sex scene involving a car, just like in the original Bad Lieutenant. Some things are de rigeur, if you want to earn the use of the title, as Herzog certainly does.
Story resolution is perfect---one of the best narrative wrap-ups I've seen in a while. Movie is not for everyone, but was certainly for me.
If you've seen the original Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel, you probably know what to expect of this movie thematically. Herzog really pulls off a fresh update/sequel to the original that is worthy of the name, in my opinion.
The biggest change is that whereas Keitel's NYC character was just unredeemably corrupt and evil at hear, Cage's Big Easy lieutenant is portrayed as a decent person who falls victim to his weaknesses. These tragic elements more than justify a "second take" on the Bad Lieutenant theme. They combine to create a nice story arc as we follow the protagonist down the slide of corruption, and identify with his attempts to climb back out of the sewer before it is too late.
I'm not a big Nick Cage fan, but here he is at his best. He pulls off a powerful graphic sex scene involving a car, just like in the original Bad Lieutenant. Some things are de rigeur, if you want to earn the use of the title, as Herzog certainly does.
Story resolution is perfect---one of the best narrative wrap-ups I've seen in a while. Movie is not for everyone, but was certainly for me.
The Lovely Bones
Seen at: Cinemark Fort Collins, matinee about three weeks ago.
What kind of movies should Hollywood make fewer of? How about movies like this?
The Lovely Bones winds up in my pile of movies that I just found stupid on many levels. Stanley Tucci got an Oscar nomination for his performance of a serial child killer, but I sure hope this movie is not rewarded with an award.
The story here is a huge let-down, basically because it makes the mistake of thinking that the core narrative is about the deceased girl. No, the core human narrative is about the living parents searching for their lost daughter. In that sense, the story completely fails because it offers absolutely no resolution to what should be the core narrative. We're supposed to feel resolved at the end because our perspective of identification with the dead girl, not with the parents. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The cheap-o "cosmic revenge by icicle" at the end only made it worse.
This is the problem with movies about the afterlife in general. It's a bad premise and leads to bad narrative. The classical era recognized this, which is why one never saw afterlife stories except as "world of whimsy" comedies. Trying to make a serious drama while using the afterlife as a story crutch is a big "fail" in my book. Story tension should be generated (and released) on the human condition, not the the post-human condition. Otherwise you are wasting my time in the auditorium.
What kind of movies should Hollywood make fewer of? How about movies like this?
The Lovely Bones winds up in my pile of movies that I just found stupid on many levels. Stanley Tucci got an Oscar nomination for his performance of a serial child killer, but I sure hope this movie is not rewarded with an award.
The story here is a huge let-down, basically because it makes the mistake of thinking that the core narrative is about the deceased girl. No, the core human narrative is about the living parents searching for their lost daughter. In that sense, the story completely fails because it offers absolutely no resolution to what should be the core narrative. We're supposed to feel resolved at the end because our perspective of identification with the dead girl, not with the parents. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The cheap-o "cosmic revenge by icicle" at the end only made it worse.
This is the problem with movies about the afterlife in general. It's a bad premise and leads to bad narrative. The classical era recognized this, which is why one never saw afterlife stories except as "world of whimsy" comedies. Trying to make a serious drama while using the afterlife as a story crutch is a big "fail" in my book. Story tension should be generated (and released) on the human condition, not the the post-human condition. Otherwise you are wasting my time in the auditorium.
Invictus
Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, Jan. 28.
It's a shame I didn't get around to writing up this movie until now, as it was definitely one of the better motion pictures of the year as a whole.
As of a couple years back, I wasn't that big of fan of Clint Eastwood as a director, but 2008's Changeling was much better than I anticipated, and Invictus builds on that. It's a well-told period piece with vibrant characters and superior acting.
These are the kinds of historical dramas that Hollywood should make more of, namely commentaries and re-assessments of recent political events. They say journalism is the first draft of history; motion pictures should be a second or third draft sometimes. Of course history here is compressed and mutated to tell a story, but that's an inescapable fact of cinema. It works like it did in this story, I'm all for it.
It's a shame I didn't get around to writing up this movie until now, as it was definitely one of the better motion pictures of the year as a whole.
As of a couple years back, I wasn't that big of fan of Clint Eastwood as a director, but 2008's Changeling was much better than I anticipated, and Invictus builds on that. It's a well-told period piece with vibrant characters and superior acting.
These are the kinds of historical dramas that Hollywood should make more of, namely commentaries and re-assessments of recent political events. They say journalism is the first draft of history; motion pictures should be a second or third draft sometimes. Of course history here is compressed and mutated to tell a story, but that's an inescapable fact of cinema. It works like it did in this story, I'm all for it.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Antichrist
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about six weeks ago
It is impossible to make a comprehensive statement about this movie, other than perhaps it is the only indisputable masterpiece of cinema from last year. It's also unwatchable. After having seen it, I wanted to unsee it.
My particular take on this film is this: it is essentially the same movie as Avatar.
In any movie, one is asked to imagine onself as one or more characters on screen. In Avatar, we are asked to imagine a second level of identification on top of this. In particular, as screen characters, we are asked to become a lower form of life (with a tail). We are then asked to imagine a third level of identification, in which, as these tailed beings, we imagine our conscious will being fused with giant flying reptiles. Finally, at the climax of the movie we are asked to imagine our conscious wills being fused with the largest imaginable flying reptile.
Avatar is thus about identification of the human with lower forms of life, going down to the level of the reptilian. My biggest beef with Avatar, thematically, is that is portrays this a path towards enlightenment, and goodness. I think it leads in the opposite direction, generally.
Avatar supposedly shows the light side of this nature-identification (and nature worship); Antichrist fills in the dark spaces about nature-identification religion. Here's what really happens, if you go that route.
Where does this path lead, according to Antichrist? Towards the inhuman, towards insanity and psychotic breakdown, as one would expect. You really expected to fuse your consciousness and will with a giant flying reptile and remain sane?
Both movies are similar in another way, in that they examine the fusion of human into nature consciousness in stories in which female characters rise to overt dominance over men. In particular, mother figures become dominant. We see the light and dark poles of that, respectively, in the two movies.
I think these two movies make a "twin pair," but I give the edge to Antichrist, as a film, because I think it explores deeper truths that will resonate longer as art over time.
But like I said, I wanted to unsee it. Well, not really. I'm glad I saw it. Yet it's easy to see why folks walked out of it at Cannes last May.
Perhaps the movie of the year. We're getting close.
It is impossible to make a comprehensive statement about this movie, other than perhaps it is the only indisputable masterpiece of cinema from last year. It's also unwatchable. After having seen it, I wanted to unsee it.
My particular take on this film is this: it is essentially the same movie as Avatar.
In any movie, one is asked to imagine onself as one or more characters on screen. In Avatar, we are asked to imagine a second level of identification on top of this. In particular, as screen characters, we are asked to become a lower form of life (with a tail). We are then asked to imagine a third level of identification, in which, as these tailed beings, we imagine our conscious will being fused with giant flying reptiles. Finally, at the climax of the movie we are asked to imagine our conscious wills being fused with the largest imaginable flying reptile.
Avatar is thus about identification of the human with lower forms of life, going down to the level of the reptilian. My biggest beef with Avatar, thematically, is that is portrays this a path towards enlightenment, and goodness. I think it leads in the opposite direction, generally.
Avatar supposedly shows the light side of this nature-identification (and nature worship); Antichrist fills in the dark spaces about nature-identification religion. Here's what really happens, if you go that route.
Where does this path lead, according to Antichrist? Towards the inhuman, towards insanity and psychotic breakdown, as one would expect. You really expected to fuse your consciousness and will with a giant flying reptile and remain sane?
Both movies are similar in another way, in that they examine the fusion of human into nature consciousness in stories in which female characters rise to overt dominance over men. In particular, mother figures become dominant. We see the light and dark poles of that, respectively, in the two movies.
I think these two movies make a "twin pair," but I give the edge to Antichrist, as a film, because I think it explores deeper truths that will resonate longer as art over time.
But like I said, I wanted to unsee it. Well, not really. I'm glad I saw it. Yet it's easy to see why folks walked out of it at Cannes last May.
Perhaps the movie of the year. We're getting close.
A Single Man
Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about three weeks ago
Speaking of Harrimans, I think Julianne Moore might be a pretty good Pamela. She was certainly awesome in A Single Man, which I would rank easily among the superior films of last year.
I debated a lot about the ending to this movie: did it have the right one? Was it necessary in Aristotlean sense of necessity?
But that's my strongest criticism of this film, if it is a criticism at all. On all other levels, it's one of the year's best.
There's a lot of Mad Men in here to be sure, riffing right off the episodes about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reacting against the homophobia of the characters in that show. But that's what movies should do---riff off other good works of art. Fine by me on all counts.
Perhaps surpasses A Serious Man even as a solid Sixties period piece. At least its equal.
Speaking of Harrimans, I think Julianne Moore might be a pretty good Pamela. She was certainly awesome in A Single Man, which I would rank easily among the superior films of last year.
I debated a lot about the ending to this movie: did it have the right one? Was it necessary in Aristotlean sense of necessity?
But that's my strongest criticism of this film, if it is a criticism at all. On all other levels, it's one of the year's best.
There's a lot of Mad Men in here to be sure, riffing right off the episodes about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reacting against the homophobia of the characters in that show. But that's what movies should do---riff off other good works of art. Fine by me on all counts.
Perhaps surpasses A Serious Man even as a solid Sixties period piece. At least its equal.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
From Paris With Love
Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, at 2:25 pm today
Hooboy...I've fallen behind on my movie write-ups. My goal is to get caught up completely by Sunday.
In the meantime I need to jot down some notes about From Paris With Love today in Greeley. It was a nice trip over in the afternoon, sunny and bright. Stopped in Windsor along the way to do some flat terrain hiking along the Poudre Trail. I walked until the current end of the trail, on State Highway 392.
For the movie itself, I got a private showing in a Cinemark auditorium with plush stadium seats. About 160 capacity. I didn't count the seats, only estimated, in the usual way. I've gotten good at it from repeated practice.
I moved around the theater a lot. First I sat in the very back row (way too hot). Then I sat in the very front row, first along the remote side by the exit door to get the most distorted view of the enormous screen (way too acute an angle, perhaps suitable for the blind ). Then I sat in the middle of various rows from row 2 up to row 10.
In between all this I kept track of the movie of course. It was enormously painful to do so.
Luc Besson wanted to make a hog-wild Hong Kong-style shootup in Paris. He used John Travolta in the lead. John Travolta is bald and wears a gold silk scarf and leather jacket. He is the "top agent" of an unnamed American intelligence agency (must say Travola is definitely better here than he was in Old Dogs, where one could see him straining in grief).
The protagonist is a Generation Y noobie who works for the U.S. Ambassador to France, but who is trying to break into the spook business. In this regard, somehow he has gotten his foot in the door. He is anxious to move up the spook ladder, frustrated that he hasn't been given "real" assignments yet. He gets all his instructions over the phone from a voice who is never identified, or shown.
Of course the guy has a love interest. He lives with a hot babe who cooks meals for him on the roof of their building, and who adores him. You can tell where that's going to go, of course.
At the climax of the story (spoiler) the protagonist must shoot his beloved in the forehead, William S. Burroughs style, killing her in front of an crowd of high-level delegates at an international conference for aid to Africa, specifically about the promotion of sterilization of African women for eugenics purposes (I added that last part, which they accidently left out of the movie).
In any case, the heroine dies a beautiful death.
Hhe had to shoot her. She was bad. Besides, that's the way things go, if you want to be a spook. You have to off the women you sleep with.
John Travolta, by then his mentor, is there to cradle his girlfriend's bleeding lifeless skull, in a way that says "you earned your stripes today, kid." We get a lingering closeup on the round hole in her forehead, with her open eyes and gaping mouth. The hero saves the day!
So there you have it---the ultimate postmodern love story. Like that Guns n' Roses song: "I used to love her, but I had to kill her..."
And of course also the logical result of the War, which this movie endorses without irony in a way reminiscent of the way the t.v. show Hunter in the 1980s promoted U.S. military involvement in Colombia in the name of the phony "drug war" (while simultaneously Oliver North was helping direct the whole damn cocaine operation). It's nice to see that some things never change.
Very good cinematography, I must say. Besson is a master director. Good camera angles, as Travolta's character wastes unnamed civilians by the dozen. But they're bad dudes, you see. If you get involved with the bad cause, you are going to PAY.
It's kill or be killed, to quote another movie I saw recently. We have to waste these guys before they get even the chance to waste us. The safety of ours daughters is at stake (or at least their ability to snort coke in peace).
My favorite part of this movie was the minor character of Ambassador Bennington, the aforementioned U.S. ambassador to France who is the employer whom the young protagonist wishes to escape. He's actually a benevolent character, who is obviously aware of what the young man is doing and is sympathetic to it (we know this from a scene involving chewing gum at the first ten minutes). He reappears just before the climax of the movie to serve a critical story function, to allow the hero past a certain plot obstacle.
He is played in soft but seasoned mature fashion by character actor Richard Durden who I decided during the film could possibly be smartly cast as an older Averell Harriman, say during the Vietnam War era.
You heard me---Averell freakin' Harriman.
Hooboy...I've fallen behind on my movie write-ups. My goal is to get caught up completely by Sunday.
In the meantime I need to jot down some notes about From Paris With Love today in Greeley. It was a nice trip over in the afternoon, sunny and bright. Stopped in Windsor along the way to do some flat terrain hiking along the Poudre Trail. I walked until the current end of the trail, on State Highway 392.
For the movie itself, I got a private showing in a Cinemark auditorium with plush stadium seats. About 160 capacity. I didn't count the seats, only estimated, in the usual way. I've gotten good at it from repeated practice.
I moved around the theater a lot. First I sat in the very back row (way too hot). Then I sat in the very front row, first along the remote side by the exit door to get the most distorted view of the enormous screen (way too acute an angle, perhaps suitable for the blind ). Then I sat in the middle of various rows from row 2 up to row 10.
In between all this I kept track of the movie of course. It was enormously painful to do so.
Luc Besson wanted to make a hog-wild Hong Kong-style shootup in Paris. He used John Travolta in the lead. John Travolta is bald and wears a gold silk scarf and leather jacket. He is the "top agent" of an unnamed American intelligence agency (must say Travola is definitely better here than he was in Old Dogs, where one could see him straining in grief).
The protagonist is a Generation Y noobie who works for the U.S. Ambassador to France, but who is trying to break into the spook business. In this regard, somehow he has gotten his foot in the door. He is anxious to move up the spook ladder, frustrated that he hasn't been given "real" assignments yet. He gets all his instructions over the phone from a voice who is never identified, or shown.
Of course the guy has a love interest. He lives with a hot babe who cooks meals for him on the roof of their building, and who adores him. You can tell where that's going to go, of course.
At the climax of the story (spoiler) the protagonist must shoot his beloved in the forehead, William S. Burroughs style, killing her in front of an crowd of high-level delegates at an international conference for aid to Africa, specifically about the promotion of sterilization of African women for eugenics purposes (I added that last part, which they accidently left out of the movie).
In any case, the heroine dies a beautiful death.
Hhe had to shoot her. She was bad. Besides, that's the way things go, if you want to be a spook. You have to off the women you sleep with.
John Travolta, by then his mentor, is there to cradle his girlfriend's bleeding lifeless skull, in a way that says "you earned your stripes today, kid." We get a lingering closeup on the round hole in her forehead, with her open eyes and gaping mouth. The hero saves the day!
So there you have it---the ultimate postmodern love story. Like that Guns n' Roses song: "I used to love her, but I had to kill her..."
And of course also the logical result of the War, which this movie endorses without irony in a way reminiscent of the way the t.v. show Hunter in the 1980s promoted U.S. military involvement in Colombia in the name of the phony "drug war" (while simultaneously Oliver North was helping direct the whole damn cocaine operation). It's nice to see that some things never change.
Very good cinematography, I must say. Besson is a master director. Good camera angles, as Travolta's character wastes unnamed civilians by the dozen. But they're bad dudes, you see. If you get involved with the bad cause, you are going to PAY.
It's kill or be killed, to quote another movie I saw recently. We have to waste these guys before they get even the chance to waste us. The safety of ours daughters is at stake (or at least their ability to snort coke in peace).
My favorite part of this movie was the minor character of Ambassador Bennington, the aforementioned U.S. ambassador to France who is the employer whom the young protagonist wishes to escape. He's actually a benevolent character, who is obviously aware of what the young man is doing and is sympathetic to it (we know this from a scene involving chewing gum at the first ten minutes). He reappears just before the climax of the movie to serve a critical story function, to allow the hero past a certain plot obstacle.
He is played in soft but seasoned mature fashion by character actor Richard Durden who I decided during the film could possibly be smartly cast as an older Averell Harriman, say during the Vietnam War era.
You heard me---Averell freakin' Harriman.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)