Good Hair
Grade: B
Cast: Chris Rock
Director: Jeff Stilson
Free Admission Granted
What a pleasant surprise.
Chris Rock channels Michael Moore. Instead of the topic of corporate greed or government malfeasance, he does it on the topic of black women and their hair. The result is a refreshing look at the love and mania caused by our natural - and unnatural - tops.
We start the documentary at a yearly hair product extravaganza in Atlanta for hair products. There we learn that 80 percent of the market for these products comes from Black Americans. Hairstyles are that important. Then we meet the flamboyant contestant and get a feel for their flamboyant performances. We move from there to black men and women jawing for nearly two hours about all facets of hair, from self-esteem to sex.
While that might seem trivial, the thing is that the film isn’t without substance. Special attention is paid to how hair in India shorn at temples ends up in the United States as part of a weave, which is the biggest trend in black female hairstyles. Likewise , the film pays attention to the fact that black hair products are now rarely sold by black-owned companies, a fact that makes Al Sharpton talk about how this constitutes economic exploitation. The film is also very frank about the near torture that the women go through to get their hair the way they want it, often as sported by white models. The most eye-opening moment is when a scientist dips Coke cans into the ingredients of hair straightener and watches them dissolve.
In this it sort of mirrors The Cove, except with more purpose and less porpoise. It is alternately humorous and engaging, while also gaining real interest and credibility in detailing the business and sometimes disturbing dealings behind finding the perfect do. Rock does an excellent job of bridging both sides and making this documentary something worth seeing.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Grade: F
Cast: Max Records, Catherine Keener
Director: Spike Jonze
Free Admission Granted
There is no way on earth that Where the Wild Things Are will get the terrible reviews that it fully deserves.
The Maurice Sendak children’s book on which it is based is too beloved. Director Spike Jonze has too much good will from his days with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Nobody is going to want to admit that this a Transformers 2-like disaster. But it nearly is.
The look of the film, lensed by the often terrific Lance Acord, is far too dark, shot at questionable angles. The pacing is nearly as muddy as the tone. Nor are we helped by Max Records, our child hero, who graces us an entire Saturday morning of cereal box emotions (Watching this performance and then young Cody Smit-McPhee in The Road two days later is jarring.). Kaufman has finally set Spike Jonze afloat and instead he gets set adrift.
For all the alleged creativity, the story is fairly conventional little boy rwonderland fantasy. Its big innovation is that its giant animals speak to each other in modern lingo that occasionally seems like self-satire. Of course, all we learn is that we love our family and it’s important to love our family. (Catherine Keener plays the slightly kooky ….. mother. At least I thought she was a little kooky.)
The big problem with Where the Wild Things Are is the most obvious. Even as critters of the imagination, the giant mascot-like animals – man-sized lions and goats and such – are not nearly as convincing as they probably seemed in Jonze’s head. I hate to say it, but you can always see them acting – a thing I find very hard to say about giant felt (?) creatures with a straight face. Nevertheless, they open and close their little mouths while the voiceover gives them something to say. You can see each part working in tandem. It just doesn’t work, and you sense that the weird middle ground shots are their way of covering up this fact.
Where the Wild Things Are tests the bounds of physics – can you make a movie with fewer minutes of film than are in the run time? Seriously, this thing feels like it was made in about 20 minutes. That’s the lasting impression of the film. And it just feels like a shame.
Grade: F
Cast: Max Records, Catherine Keener
Director: Spike Jonze
Free Admission Granted
There is no way on earth that Where the Wild Things Are will get the terrible reviews that it fully deserves.
The Maurice Sendak children’s book on which it is based is too beloved. Director Spike Jonze has too much good will from his days with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Nobody is going to want to admit that this a Transformers 2-like disaster. But it nearly is.
The look of the film, lensed by the often terrific Lance Acord, is far too dark, shot at questionable angles. The pacing is nearly as muddy as the tone. Nor are we helped by Max Records, our child hero, who graces us an entire Saturday morning of cereal box emotions (Watching this performance and then young Cody Smit-McPhee in The Road two days later is jarring.). Kaufman has finally set Spike Jonze afloat and instead he gets set adrift.
For all the alleged creativity, the story is fairly conventional little boy rwonderland fantasy. Its big innovation is that its giant animals speak to each other in modern lingo that occasionally seems like self-satire. Of course, all we learn is that we love our family and it’s important to love our family. (Catherine Keener plays the slightly kooky ….. mother. At least I thought she was a little kooky.)
The big problem with Where the Wild Things Are is the most obvious. Even as critters of the imagination, the giant mascot-like animals – man-sized lions and goats and such – are not nearly as convincing as they probably seemed in Jonze’s head. I hate to say it, but you can always see them acting – a thing I find very hard to say about giant felt (?) creatures with a straight face. Nevertheless, they open and close their little mouths while the voiceover gives them something to say. You can see each part working in tandem. It just doesn’t work, and you sense that the weird middle ground shots are their way of covering up this fact.
Where the Wild Things Are tests the bounds of physics – can you make a movie with fewer minutes of film than are in the run time? Seriously, this thing feels like it was made in about 20 minutes. That’s the lasting impression of the film. And it just feels like a shame.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
A Serious Man
A Serious Man [R]
Grade: A
Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Free admission granted
The critical understanding of The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men often has divided, vaguely, between moralistic versus fatalistic interpretations. Is the killer Anton Chiguhr a human being, and therefore does the film ask us to take measure of his cock-eyed morality? Or is he a specter, a grim reaper for the modern age, a natural phenomenon that operates beyond moral application? How you answer this question creates powerfully different interpretations of the film.
In this debate I have been a fatalist and have always placed an enormous amount of weight on the conversation between the Sheriff and his aging uncle near the end. The Sheriff wishes to retire. He feels worn out by the rise of nihilistic violence. He doesn’t believe it existed in the good old days.
His relative says no, there has always been this sort of violence. The old man then tells the Sheriff that death will come for you when it come for you, and you will have no say in it. To think that you will have a say in the time or method of your own death, he says, is vanity. The Greeks would call this hubris. And hubris carries the implication of arrogance in the face of divine fate.
As a tornado bears down in the final scene of A Serious Man – a match and then some for No Country’s much debated ending – it puts this principle into spellbinding motion. Not only will death come when it comes without any knowledge or say, the film argues. The God of this film is completely unknowable, all his intentions beyond understanding, and man’s puny struggles to interpret his way are futile and – yes, that word – absurd. Somehow the Coens have simultaneously created their most Jewish film and most existential film in a single try.
A Serious Man is a story of stories built upon stories, or more accurately, fables upon fables. In an early scene our dweebish physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) introduces us to Schrodinger’s Cat, a logical paradox that is often illustrated by a dead cat in a box. It’s not enough to understand only the cat thing, he tells a failing student. That part is like a fable of physics. You have to understand the mathematics behind it, he says, because that is the truth.
In fact however, he’s wrong, too. Because mathematics is not the truth itself, but only another form of representation of the truth, another way of placing the vast mystery of the Cosmos into our little finite minds. In a dream sequence, we are introduced to a second mathematical proof, that of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is a mathematical way to prove a philosopher’s point – that everything is uncertain. (Mark “mystery.” We’re comin’ back to it.)
The uncertainty of it all is the continuing theme in the film. Our professor wants to understand why God is allowing his life to fall apart all at once. He seeks answers to his Job-like sufferings (to which he has an anti-Job-like reaction). What does God want? Why is he testing me? What am I supposed to do? He and we are treated to several fables – such as the story of the Goy’s teeth – that let us know that, as the saying goes, the mind of God is unknowable and his plan ultimately a mystery.
The Coen Brothers have often been noted for being influenced by Stanley Kubrick, and my understanding of 2001: A Space Odyssey dovetails nicely with my understanding of A Serious Man. While many take interest in HAL’s human qualities, I am more interested in the supercomputer’s “god-like” qualities. But what I’m really interested is in the way that these qualities do not measure up to the actuality of divinity. Because the qualities in HAL that we think of as god-like are only our erroneous understandings and projections of godliness, swallowed and regurgitated into finite form.
It is important to remember the final word of 2001 is “mystery.” At the moment after HAL is shut down, the origin and the purpose of the godlike monolith is said to be “still a total mystery.” The double meaning is there – mystery t in the religious/metaphysical sense, something that is unable to be known by human means. Likewise, in this movie, our professor seeks a truth that is beyond his means to know. At some point he is told … and don’t quote me … I think I got this right …. If I’m wrong let me know, but don’t tell my friends … something to the effect of he is failing to see the mystery.
A Serious Man is a serious film, but not an entirely lovable one. It starts as interesting weirdness, begins to repeats its “no good deed goes unpunished” cycle until it reaches a point of oversaturation. On top of that, it relies twice on marijuana as an engine for comedy. That’s just a wee-bit overplayed. Nevertheless, it would be intellectually dishonest to give this film anything but the highest recommendation.
Grade: A
Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Free admission granted
The critical understanding of The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men often has divided, vaguely, between moralistic versus fatalistic interpretations. Is the killer Anton Chiguhr a human being, and therefore does the film ask us to take measure of his cock-eyed morality? Or is he a specter, a grim reaper for the modern age, a natural phenomenon that operates beyond moral application? How you answer this question creates powerfully different interpretations of the film.
In this debate I have been a fatalist and have always placed an enormous amount of weight on the conversation between the Sheriff and his aging uncle near the end. The Sheriff wishes to retire. He feels worn out by the rise of nihilistic violence. He doesn’t believe it existed in the good old days.
His relative says no, there has always been this sort of violence. The old man then tells the Sheriff that death will come for you when it come for you, and you will have no say in it. To think that you will have a say in the time or method of your own death, he says, is vanity. The Greeks would call this hubris. And hubris carries the implication of arrogance in the face of divine fate.
As a tornado bears down in the final scene of A Serious Man – a match and then some for No Country’s much debated ending – it puts this principle into spellbinding motion. Not only will death come when it comes without any knowledge or say, the film argues. The God of this film is completely unknowable, all his intentions beyond understanding, and man’s puny struggles to interpret his way are futile and – yes, that word – absurd. Somehow the Coens have simultaneously created their most Jewish film and most existential film in a single try.
A Serious Man is a story of stories built upon stories, or more accurately, fables upon fables. In an early scene our dweebish physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) introduces us to Schrodinger’s Cat, a logical paradox that is often illustrated by a dead cat in a box. It’s not enough to understand only the cat thing, he tells a failing student. That part is like a fable of physics. You have to understand the mathematics behind it, he says, because that is the truth.
In fact however, he’s wrong, too. Because mathematics is not the truth itself, but only another form of representation of the truth, another way of placing the vast mystery of the Cosmos into our little finite minds. In a dream sequence, we are introduced to a second mathematical proof, that of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is a mathematical way to prove a philosopher’s point – that everything is uncertain. (Mark “mystery.” We’re comin’ back to it.)
The uncertainty of it all is the continuing theme in the film. Our professor wants to understand why God is allowing his life to fall apart all at once. He seeks answers to his Job-like sufferings (to which he has an anti-Job-like reaction). What does God want? Why is he testing me? What am I supposed to do? He and we are treated to several fables – such as the story of the Goy’s teeth – that let us know that, as the saying goes, the mind of God is unknowable and his plan ultimately a mystery.
The Coen Brothers have often been noted for being influenced by Stanley Kubrick, and my understanding of 2001: A Space Odyssey dovetails nicely with my understanding of A Serious Man. While many take interest in HAL’s human qualities, I am more interested in the supercomputer’s “god-like” qualities. But what I’m really interested is in the way that these qualities do not measure up to the actuality of divinity. Because the qualities in HAL that we think of as god-like are only our erroneous understandings and projections of godliness, swallowed and regurgitated into finite form.
It is important to remember the final word of 2001 is “mystery.” At the moment after HAL is shut down, the origin and the purpose of the godlike monolith is said to be “still a total mystery.” The double meaning is there – mystery t in the religious/metaphysical sense, something that is unable to be known by human means. Likewise, in this movie, our professor seeks a truth that is beyond his means to know. At some point he is told … and don’t quote me … I think I got this right …. If I’m wrong let me know, but don’t tell my friends … something to the effect of he is failing to see the mystery.
A Serious Man is a serious film, but not an entirely lovable one. It starts as interesting weirdness, begins to repeats its “no good deed goes unpunished” cycle until it reaches a point of oversaturation. On top of that, it relies twice on marijuana as an engine for comedy. That’s just a wee-bit overplayed. Nevertheless, it would be intellectually dishonest to give this film anything but the highest recommendation.
Coco Avant Chanel
Coco Avant Chanel
Grade: B
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Director: Anne Fontaine
Free admission granted
Because biopics must touch the bases of a human life, there is a certain formality to such films. The best you can hope for, sometimes, isn’t brilliance but to do the person justice.
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Avant Chanel is a lush French film that does justice to its subject – the legendary French designer and businesswoman Coco Chanel. It is a project seemingly willed to quality by the commitment of the performers, starting with the French star Audrey Tautou, who make us care as much as they.
The film centers on Chanel’s pre-fame love triangle with the Count Balsan (a fantastic Benoit Poelvoorde), whom she serves as both best friend and kept plaything, and his English financial planner Arthur Capel (Alessandro Nivola), who will liberate her by backing her business ventures. It’s a sophisticated relationship quandary that deserves a better class of obstacles than society marriages and bad driving. But biopics can only take what reality dishes out.
Coco Avant Chanel is so convinced of its premise of Chanel as a prototype modern businesswoman that you almost don’t notice that she’s partially slept her way to the top. This should pose a dilemma for feminist ideology – is it acceptable to sexually play upon the power of men to achieve your own power? Is that playing into the system, or is that subverting it? That is an interesting question. Yet the film accepts her path without much comment.
Instead we get a very satisfying love story and character study, and an interesting perspective on turn-of-the-century class – the poor girl becomes a leveler of style, slowly infecting the Old World frockery with the egalitarian beauty of orphanage simplicity. She’s drawn to that world, drawn in by it, and yet remains aloof as if in some test of personal purity. It’s the most mature role and performance we’ve seen from Audrey Tautou, who brings proud vulnerability with the same ease that she does Gallic froth.
Grade: B
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Director: Anne Fontaine
Free admission granted
Because biopics must touch the bases of a human life, there is a certain formality to such films. The best you can hope for, sometimes, isn’t brilliance but to do the person justice.
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Avant Chanel is a lush French film that does justice to its subject – the legendary French designer and businesswoman Coco Chanel. It is a project seemingly willed to quality by the commitment of the performers, starting with the French star Audrey Tautou, who make us care as much as they.
The film centers on Chanel’s pre-fame love triangle with the Count Balsan (a fantastic Benoit Poelvoorde), whom she serves as both best friend and kept plaything, and his English financial planner Arthur Capel (Alessandro Nivola), who will liberate her by backing her business ventures. It’s a sophisticated relationship quandary that deserves a better class of obstacles than society marriages and bad driving. But biopics can only take what reality dishes out.
Coco Avant Chanel is so convinced of its premise of Chanel as a prototype modern businesswoman that you almost don’t notice that she’s partially slept her way to the top. This should pose a dilemma for feminist ideology – is it acceptable to sexually play upon the power of men to achieve your own power? Is that playing into the system, or is that subverting it? That is an interesting question. Yet the film accepts her path without much comment.
Instead we get a very satisfying love story and character study, and an interesting perspective on turn-of-the-century class – the poor girl becomes a leveler of style, slowly infecting the Old World frockery with the egalitarian beauty of orphanage simplicity. She’s drawn to that world, drawn in by it, and yet remains aloof as if in some test of personal purity. It’s the most mature role and performance we’ve seen from Audrey Tautou, who brings proud vulnerability with the same ease that she does Gallic froth.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Invention of Lying
The Invention of Lying [PG-13]
Grade: C
Cast: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Louis CK, Martin Starr, cameos: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton,
Director: Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson
In one of the funnier scenes of The Invention of Lying, British comic Ricky Gervais – stuck in a world where he is the only person who knows how to lie – improvises a religion, the world’s first from what we can tell. The Man in the Sky, he tells a crowd, will give everyone a giant mansion after they die and an eternal afterlife of happiness. (Yes, he is writing his ticket to Hell here.)
What could The Man in the Sky give Gervais in the afterlife? Let’s take a look.
1) A higher Q rating – Last year, Gervais’ name was floated as a host for the Oscars. Those in the know said, “Great!” The majority said, “Who?” The star of the British version of The Office, like many British comics of late, has had a tough time breaking into the American mainstream. While I wouldn’t say his style is without precedent, his melancholy subtlety is a refresher in today’s comic atmosphere of gross-outs and affected weirdness. The man never hard sells a joke, or at least never gets caught doing so.
2) A better leading lady than Jennifer Garner – Garner is a comic over-emoter. She meets every inch of Gervais’ subtlety with miles of pushy expressions. Her face bends in such ways that you must wonder if her skull has secret elbows.
3) A riskier script – Well, it is a twist on Liar, Liar. Gervais appears to be following the path of the American star of The Office, Steve Carell, the Cap’n Crunch of the high-fructose mass comedy. I’d like to see him in a more daring role, even a supporting one. A natural sarcastic cutthroat doorman.
4) A street-front set that doesn’t look like a set, that doesn’t give you the feeling that a crew will clean it up and turn it around for a music video 13 hours later.
5) A story that doesn’t drop off. The Invention of Lying has some quite casually funny moments. A few of the hyper-honest advertisements have real bite as satire of famous products. Then it just …… disappears.
6) More Phillip Seymour Hoffman – Just a fun blip cameo as a salty barkeep.
Best wishes for a happy afterlife, Ricky. But keep plugging away at this one first.
Grade: C
Cast: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Louis CK, Martin Starr, cameos: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton,
Director: Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson
In one of the funnier scenes of The Invention of Lying, British comic Ricky Gervais – stuck in a world where he is the only person who knows how to lie – improvises a religion, the world’s first from what we can tell. The Man in the Sky, he tells a crowd, will give everyone a giant mansion after they die and an eternal afterlife of happiness. (Yes, he is writing his ticket to Hell here.)
What could The Man in the Sky give Gervais in the afterlife? Let’s take a look.
1) A higher Q rating – Last year, Gervais’ name was floated as a host for the Oscars. Those in the know said, “Great!” The majority said, “Who?” The star of the British version of The Office, like many British comics of late, has had a tough time breaking into the American mainstream. While I wouldn’t say his style is without precedent, his melancholy subtlety is a refresher in today’s comic atmosphere of gross-outs and affected weirdness. The man never hard sells a joke, or at least never gets caught doing so.
2) A better leading lady than Jennifer Garner – Garner is a comic over-emoter. She meets every inch of Gervais’ subtlety with miles of pushy expressions. Her face bends in such ways that you must wonder if her skull has secret elbows.
3) A riskier script – Well, it is a twist on Liar, Liar. Gervais appears to be following the path of the American star of The Office, Steve Carell, the Cap’n Crunch of the high-fructose mass comedy. I’d like to see him in a more daring role, even a supporting one. A natural sarcastic cutthroat doorman.
4) A street-front set that doesn’t look like a set, that doesn’t give you the feeling that a crew will clean it up and turn it around for a music video 13 hours later.
5) A story that doesn’t drop off. The Invention of Lying has some quite casually funny moments. A few of the hyper-honest advertisements have real bite as satire of famous products. Then it just …… disappears.
6) More Phillip Seymour Hoffman – Just a fun blip cameo as a salty barkeep.
Best wishes for a happy afterlife, Ricky. But keep plugging away at this one first.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Fame
Fame [PG]
Grade: D
Cast: Naturi Naughton, Kay Panabaker, Anna Maria Perez de Tagle, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mulally, Bebe Neuwirth, Charles S. Dutton, Debbie Allen
Director: Kevin Tancharoen
Was one Fame not enough? Oh, sing the answer in one voice, please. I must admit to being derelict in my film reviewing duties by never having seen the 1980 original. It doesn’t really jump out on my must-see old movies list alongside Citizen Kane and Jules and Jim.
I’ll concede there might be films worth remaking. But most films worth re-introducing to a new generation would be unthinkable to remake. No one would touch Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven or Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Even if you replicated the scenes impressively, there is little chance to recreate the artistic signature. And there lies the dilemma of the remake.
In practice, remakes need fungibility and forgettability. By the former, I mean they must have some form of cultural currency that is interchangeable across generations. By the latter, I mean the original must be successful enough to recognize but forgettable enough to blur inevitable comparisons, lest the new version be found wanting. However these qualities usually mean we’re not working with material touched by a specifying greatness. Even to think a film is fit to remake suggests it is either flexible or disposable or both, and it is a little insulting.
Fame’s reaching-for-the-stars storyline certainly has potential for cross-generational appeal. And the earlier film would not be deemed so sacred as to be untouchable or unapproachable. For that reason one might dream of a good ,daring remake to this material, but this isn’t it.
We all know the basic idea of Fame, a film about the New York School for Performing Arts. They want to live forever. They want to know how to fly (High!). They live. They love. They learn. They dance, and sing, and act, and, er, rap. Some win. Some fail.
Early in the film, a voice teacher criticizes a student for singing a song but not feeling it. Likewise, Fame lines up the notes but not the feeling. There’s the student with the demanding parents. And the one with fuddy-duddy parents. And the other one with demanding parents. And the working class one. And the kid with the rage. And the kid from Iowa. Because no one actually lives in Iowa. It’s only kept around as a constructed other for New York and LA so that bumpkin characters can have someplace to come from. We dip into a little of each, but Fame only generates poignancy by resorting to the most over-the-top things – a quick suicide attempt or a teacher’s crushing stories of showbiz failures past.
In a film throwing performances at you, there have to be a few that work. Most of them involve the silk-voiced Naturi Naughton and her singing. And there are bits and pieces of art direction, particularly a trippy Halloween ball thrown by creative students. That said, I wonder if directors have lost the ability or ambition to film sweeping musical numbers. If you watch old musicals, they mainly cut only when Cyd Charisse stumbled in her four-inch heels. These are chopped up and stitched together pretty heavily. We call that cheating.
The great leap for Fame is to find reason to take another bow in this age. In 1980, the sweat-behind the starshine idea might have seemed fresh. Since then, the concept has been adopted into numerous television shows. American Idol is in a sense a live version with real people and slicker packaging. Perhaps that’s why the filmmakers bet on it. But where this idea once might have been novel, these shows have made it old hat by now, and spoiled us on access to the real thing. The view backstage no longer lures only a movie camera.
Grade: D
Cast: Naturi Naughton, Kay Panabaker, Anna Maria Perez de Tagle, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mulally, Bebe Neuwirth, Charles S. Dutton, Debbie Allen
Director: Kevin Tancharoen
Was one Fame not enough? Oh, sing the answer in one voice, please. I must admit to being derelict in my film reviewing duties by never having seen the 1980 original. It doesn’t really jump out on my must-see old movies list alongside Citizen Kane and Jules and Jim.
I’ll concede there might be films worth remaking. But most films worth re-introducing to a new generation would be unthinkable to remake. No one would touch Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven or Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Even if you replicated the scenes impressively, there is little chance to recreate the artistic signature. And there lies the dilemma of the remake.
In practice, remakes need fungibility and forgettability. By the former, I mean they must have some form of cultural currency that is interchangeable across generations. By the latter, I mean the original must be successful enough to recognize but forgettable enough to blur inevitable comparisons, lest the new version be found wanting. However these qualities usually mean we’re not working with material touched by a specifying greatness. Even to think a film is fit to remake suggests it is either flexible or disposable or both, and it is a little insulting.
Fame’s reaching-for-the-stars storyline certainly has potential for cross-generational appeal. And the earlier film would not be deemed so sacred as to be untouchable or unapproachable. For that reason one might dream of a good ,daring remake to this material, but this isn’t it.
We all know the basic idea of Fame, a film about the New York School for Performing Arts. They want to live forever. They want to know how to fly (High!). They live. They love. They learn. They dance, and sing, and act, and, er, rap. Some win. Some fail.
Early in the film, a voice teacher criticizes a student for singing a song but not feeling it. Likewise, Fame lines up the notes but not the feeling. There’s the student with the demanding parents. And the one with fuddy-duddy parents. And the other one with demanding parents. And the working class one. And the kid with the rage. And the kid from Iowa. Because no one actually lives in Iowa. It’s only kept around as a constructed other for New York and LA so that bumpkin characters can have someplace to come from. We dip into a little of each, but Fame only generates poignancy by resorting to the most over-the-top things – a quick suicide attempt or a teacher’s crushing stories of showbiz failures past.
In a film throwing performances at you, there have to be a few that work. Most of them involve the silk-voiced Naturi Naughton and her singing. And there are bits and pieces of art direction, particularly a trippy Halloween ball thrown by creative students. That said, I wonder if directors have lost the ability or ambition to film sweeping musical numbers. If you watch old musicals, they mainly cut only when Cyd Charisse stumbled in her four-inch heels. These are chopped up and stitched together pretty heavily. We call that cheating.
The great leap for Fame is to find reason to take another bow in this age. In 1980, the sweat-behind the starshine idea might have seemed fresh. Since then, the concept has been adopted into numerous television shows. American Idol is in a sense a live version with real people and slicker packaging. Perhaps that’s why the filmmakers bet on it. But where this idea once might have been novel, these shows have made it old hat by now, and spoiled us on access to the real thing. The view backstage no longer lures only a movie camera.
The Informant!
The Informant[R]
Grade: C
Cast: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula
Director: Stephen Soderbergh
There are few actors who I consistently dislike, but Matt Damon is among them.
He has an unnatural and disruptive screen presence. He pings and pongs between awkward and inanimate. As a result, he struggles his way into characters with murky histories – in the case of Jason Bourne, no history whatsoever. He is everyone and no one – America’s Nowhere Man.
It is fortunate for The Informant! that it needs a Nowhere Man in its lead. Damon’s discomforting instinct fits a man who is never comfortable in his own skin. The motivations for his “heroic” actions – blowing the whistle on scandal-plagued agribusiness giant Archers Daniels Midland – start shady and become opaque and absurd. Like a good host chatting with everyone and revealing nothing, he treats us to a fascinatingly cornfed voiceover of his life, filled with comic observations on fishing and embezzlement. Soon we will see that these are filled with fictions. The Informant in this case is not a reliable informer.
In fact, The Informant is that rare thing – a film that might have a more entertaining voiceover than what’s actually on screen. Damon is a better reader than believable emoter, and its plot is a happy-go-lucky thriller on par with (sigh) watching corn grow. Admirably, it is a film with a mission. It takes the canonizing assumptions of a whistleblower movie – the unassailable virtue of the whistler – and stands them on their head. The Informant! suggests a sort of virtuous emptiness at the heart of the American character. A sophisticated take. So why did I leave the theater rubbing my forehead?
That’s sort of the rub. So far this year, Soderbergh has stylishly painted over a weak and pretentious script (The Girlfriend Experience) and underdirected an interesting one. This is Erin Brockovich style Soderbergh – laying back and letting the story do the talking. But Brokovich had an all-the-marbles do-gooder plot and star power at its heart. Not here. What directing ideas there are a little too cutesy--- the ancient computer fonts, the Marvin Hamlisch score. Soderbergh mistakes irony for style.
Grade: C
Cast: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula
Director: Stephen Soderbergh
There are few actors who I consistently dislike, but Matt Damon is among them.
He has an unnatural and disruptive screen presence. He pings and pongs between awkward and inanimate. As a result, he struggles his way into characters with murky histories – in the case of Jason Bourne, no history whatsoever. He is everyone and no one – America’s Nowhere Man.
It is fortunate for The Informant! that it needs a Nowhere Man in its lead. Damon’s discomforting instinct fits a man who is never comfortable in his own skin. The motivations for his “heroic” actions – blowing the whistle on scandal-plagued agribusiness giant Archers Daniels Midland – start shady and become opaque and absurd. Like a good host chatting with everyone and revealing nothing, he treats us to a fascinatingly cornfed voiceover of his life, filled with comic observations on fishing and embezzlement. Soon we will see that these are filled with fictions. The Informant in this case is not a reliable informer.
In fact, The Informant is that rare thing – a film that might have a more entertaining voiceover than what’s actually on screen. Damon is a better reader than believable emoter, and its plot is a happy-go-lucky thriller on par with (sigh) watching corn grow. Admirably, it is a film with a mission. It takes the canonizing assumptions of a whistleblower movie – the unassailable virtue of the whistler – and stands them on their head. The Informant! suggests a sort of virtuous emptiness at the heart of the American character. A sophisticated take. So why did I leave the theater rubbing my forehead?
That’s sort of the rub. So far this year, Soderbergh has stylishly painted over a weak and pretentious script (The Girlfriend Experience) and underdirected an interesting one. This is Erin Brockovich style Soderbergh – laying back and letting the story do the talking. But Brokovich had an all-the-marbles do-gooder plot and star power at its heart. Not here. What directing ideas there are a little too cutesy--- the ancient computer fonts, the Marvin Hamlisch score. Soderbergh mistakes irony for style.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
9
9 [PG-13]
Grade: C
Cast: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly
Director: Shane Acker
Why does every anime-inspired American sci-fi animation film feel like someone has watched too much Star Wars?
Am I wrong? The new film 9 shows repeated scenes of little cloth people escaping giant fireballs exploding through cylinders. It even has a rising spirits in the firelight ending pulled right from Return of the Jedi. The only thing missing is the Ewok song. I won’t pretend to say that it was missed.
The Battle of Terra was the first to go with the Star Wars thing, yanking its space battle plot quite clearly from the original Lucas favorite. With its stitched-up, fiber-suited mini robots, 9 is less The Battle of Terra than The Battle of Cloth World. That’s a reference lost on those that haven’t reached the age of 30.
9 is a superb looking anime. I mean superb. From the microscope eyes to the zippers on the robots’ stomachs, the detail is staggering. The setting is a near-perfectly clouded apocalyptic junkyard of a planet – like Wall-E without the cheer.
It’s as if creator Shane Acker has put too much thought into the image and not enough into the story. It overuses apocalyptic military-industrial complex clichés that barely stitch it together. A group of nefarious war-making machines have killed off mankind and are on the verge of finishing off our little cloth friends. Only nine or so of our robot Raggedy Anns and Andies are left to fight, led by a robot called 9.
The imagery of 9 will earn it fans. And it has some brilliant little action sequences. But as chase scene piles on chase scene, and tired plot points fail to develop, it becomes tougher and tougher to sit through. It’s a film to admire in ways, and a filmmaker to be excited about. But like it’s story, that remains for a future time.
Grade: C
Cast: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly
Director: Shane Acker
Why does every anime-inspired American sci-fi animation film feel like someone has watched too much Star Wars?
Am I wrong? The new film 9 shows repeated scenes of little cloth people escaping giant fireballs exploding through cylinders. It even has a rising spirits in the firelight ending pulled right from Return of the Jedi. The only thing missing is the Ewok song. I won’t pretend to say that it was missed.
The Battle of Terra was the first to go with the Star Wars thing, yanking its space battle plot quite clearly from the original Lucas favorite. With its stitched-up, fiber-suited mini robots, 9 is less The Battle of Terra than The Battle of Cloth World. That’s a reference lost on those that haven’t reached the age of 30.
9 is a superb looking anime. I mean superb. From the microscope eyes to the zippers on the robots’ stomachs, the detail is staggering. The setting is a near-perfectly clouded apocalyptic junkyard of a planet – like Wall-E without the cheer.
It’s as if creator Shane Acker has put too much thought into the image and not enough into the story. It overuses apocalyptic military-industrial complex clichés that barely stitch it together. A group of nefarious war-making machines have killed off mankind and are on the verge of finishing off our little cloth friends. Only nine or so of our robot Raggedy Anns and Andies are left to fight, led by a robot called 9.
The imagery of 9 will earn it fans. And it has some brilliant little action sequences. But as chase scene piles on chase scene, and tired plot points fail to develop, it becomes tougher and tougher to sit through. It’s a film to admire in ways, and a filmmaker to be excited about. But like it’s story, that remains for a future time.
Extract
Let’s all take a moment and appreciate Jason Bateman.
He’s one child star that didn’t go all Todd Bridges on us. Instead, he kept fighting, hooked onto a hugely influential sitcom (Arrested Development), and now has carved out a burgeoning movie career in Juno etc. as a dependable wisecracker.
For being in the spotlight so long, it’s strange that he would have such a gift for onscreen Everymanhood. But it’s hard to argue the evidence. His vulnerable sarcasm is the only thing that keeps afloat Mike Judge;s otherwise soggy Extract. It’s not quite enough to save the movie, it at least sticks the finger in the dyke.
Bateman’s priceless reactions are refreshment in a film that is otherwise draining.. Joel, the owner of an extract manufacturer ready to sell to Big Food, runs thorugh his share of professional and domestic mayhem. Whethergetting punched out by a social reprobate or going on tor hiring pool boys to seduce his distant wife, the film has plenty of mayhem.
Judge fills out the rest of the time with the “quirky” characters that come and go from the factory. Mainly they seem like the people whose auditions were rejected from other Mike Judge projects – some blue-hairs from King of the Hill, a stoned, not-too-smart rocker for Beavis and Butthead, etc. Say this for Judge, he can write a funny line for anybody. But he forgets to make us care a whit about them.
For a film with such a cynical view of its characters (not one ever makes the right choice.), it completely wimps out and goes sweet at the end. It looks like he might hit the road with Milan Kunis’ gravelly thief on a multi-state criminal spree. Nooooo. Instead he goes back to the factory, makes amends, and starts lining up the inexplicable and undeserved soft landing.
He’s one child star that didn’t go all Todd Bridges on us. Instead, he kept fighting, hooked onto a hugely influential sitcom (Arrested Development), and now has carved out a burgeoning movie career in Juno etc. as a dependable wisecracker.
For being in the spotlight so long, it’s strange that he would have such a gift for onscreen Everymanhood. But it’s hard to argue the evidence. His vulnerable sarcasm is the only thing that keeps afloat Mike Judge;s otherwise soggy Extract. It’s not quite enough to save the movie, it at least sticks the finger in the dyke.
Bateman’s priceless reactions are refreshment in a film that is otherwise draining.. Joel, the owner of an extract manufacturer ready to sell to Big Food, runs thorugh his share of professional and domestic mayhem. Whethergetting punched out by a social reprobate or going on tor hiring pool boys to seduce his distant wife, the film has plenty of mayhem.
Judge fills out the rest of the time with the “quirky” characters that come and go from the factory. Mainly they seem like the people whose auditions were rejected from other Mike Judge projects – some blue-hairs from King of the Hill, a stoned, not-too-smart rocker for Beavis and Butthead, etc. Say this for Judge, he can write a funny line for anybody. But he forgets to make us care a whit about them.
For a film with such a cynical view of its characters (not one ever makes the right choice.), it completely wimps out and goes sweet at the end. It looks like he might hit the road with Milan Kunis’ gravelly thief on a multi-state criminal spree. Nooooo. Instead he goes back to the factory, makes amends, and starts lining up the inexplicable and undeserved soft landing.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Thirst
Thirst [R]
Grade: A
Cast: Kang Ho-Song, Ok-vin Kim
Director: Chan Wook Park
After Twilight you …. you parents …. you told your daughters it was fine to go around dating vampires. Don’t mind the teeth, hun. As long as he has you home by eleven.
Well, I have news for you– they still bite. And crave blood. All that no coffins and drinking cow’s blood propaganda? Lies. If you have any doubt, watch Thirst. It uncovers the truth behind the cape.
Oh yeah, Sang-hyeon (Kang Ho-Song) makes a big pretense of having a soul. He is a Korean Catholic priest who transforms into a vampire while serving as a guinea pig in a church medical experiment.(How does that happen? Ask a doctor.). For the first while, he makes a big show of his moral thinking. Continuing his work as a priest. Praying ostentatiously for the dying.
Avoiding killing at all costs, while sucking only the blood of the unconscious. How kind!
It takes only the forbidden love a family’s adopted daughter, kept in servitude by her wicked stepmother, to get him to sin. And then sin again. And the next think you know, he’s really sinking his teeth into her. And that’s when Hell on Earth really starts. And the man who enters vampirism aiming for sainthood has to accept that he has changed into a monster.
Oh, and I bet some idiot film reviewer will run off and tell you that “The latest flight into comic masochism by Oldboy director Chan-Wook Park” is “one of the best films of the year.” He’ll probably call it a “vampire morality tale” (as if) and describe it as “brilliantly dallying in blood and spirituality.” Or some crap like that.
Then after that, he might tell you that it “starts as a vampire film, slips into a film noir, and ends in mad, merry, morbid screwball.” Like that means anything comprehensible. Then he’ll go on about it being “a film noir that “reverses the sexual dynamics of the average vampire film” in which “a femme fatale’s bite is worse than that of the undead.” Like that clears things up.
And woah-ho-ho-ho, he probably won’t warn you about the vast acreage of blood and gore. He’ll just comment how “the silly incompatibility of humor and disgust“ makes all the gore ”capable of being swallowed with a laugh.”
Just keep your daughter safe.
Grade: A
Cast: Kang Ho-Song, Ok-vin Kim
Director: Chan Wook Park
After Twilight you …. you parents …. you told your daughters it was fine to go around dating vampires. Don’t mind the teeth, hun. As long as he has you home by eleven.
Well, I have news for you– they still bite. And crave blood. All that no coffins and drinking cow’s blood propaganda? Lies. If you have any doubt, watch Thirst. It uncovers the truth behind the cape.
Oh yeah, Sang-hyeon (Kang Ho-Song) makes a big pretense of having a soul. He is a Korean Catholic priest who transforms into a vampire while serving as a guinea pig in a church medical experiment.(How does that happen? Ask a doctor.). For the first while, he makes a big show of his moral thinking. Continuing his work as a priest. Praying ostentatiously for the dying.
Avoiding killing at all costs, while sucking only the blood of the unconscious. How kind!
It takes only the forbidden love a family’s adopted daughter, kept in servitude by her wicked stepmother, to get him to sin. And then sin again. And the next think you know, he’s really sinking his teeth into her. And that’s when Hell on Earth really starts. And the man who enters vampirism aiming for sainthood has to accept that he has changed into a monster.
Oh, and I bet some idiot film reviewer will run off and tell you that “The latest flight into comic masochism by Oldboy director Chan-Wook Park” is “one of the best films of the year.” He’ll probably call it a “vampire morality tale” (as if) and describe it as “brilliantly dallying in blood and spirituality.” Or some crap like that.
Then after that, he might tell you that it “starts as a vampire film, slips into a film noir, and ends in mad, merry, morbid screwball.” Like that means anything comprehensible. Then he’ll go on about it being “a film noir that “reverses the sexual dynamics of the average vampire film” in which “a femme fatale’s bite is worse than that of the undead.” Like that clears things up.
And woah-ho-ho-ho, he probably won’t warn you about the vast acreage of blood and gore. He’ll just comment how “the silly incompatibility of humor and disgust“ makes all the gore ”capable of being swallowed with a laugh.”
Just keep your daughter safe.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Taking Woodstock
Taking Woodstock [R]
Grade: D
Cast: Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber
Director: Ang Lee
The thing about doing a Woodstock movie is that you gotta go all the way.
It might be the wise choice not to try and re-create the spectacle – half a million hippie youths “mellowed out,” playing in the mud, and listening to three hazy days of music. But it’s also a bit of a cowardly choice. You’re there. You’re not going to be there again. You gotta go for it.
Like the million people who went to Woodstock but never quite made it, Ang Lee’s (disastrously titled) Taking Woodstock gets stuck in the million-man traffic jam. Instead of expanding to the size of the spectacle, the film curiously gets smaller. And smaller. Until it’s too small for the scale of the event.
James Schamus’ screenplay adapts the biography of Elliot Tiber, the shy son of Russian Jewish émigrés running a fleabag motel in the Catskills who accidentally becomes an organizer of the most famous concert of all time. In 1969 the neighboring community Walkill had run the hippie pageant out of town. Tiber and his neighbor Max Yasgur offered up Max’s farm as a replacement. The rest is history.
With some imagination, the buildup to an epic event can make fascinating storytelling in its own right. Certainly that was true with last year’s Man on Wire. Taking Woodstock seems to get this right at times, detailing how happy accidents led a colossal social happening to a fallow alfalfa field in rural New York. In its best moments, the film engages in the sort of strange cross-cultural currents between hippies and the squares that epitomized the sixties. Then the concert fades, the film shrinks. We watch Tiber coming to terms with his family and his homosexuality. It’s tenderly told, but ….. who cares? What’s going on over the hill?
Ultimately, this is the ballad of Ang Lee – a willingness to attack big subjects, a pitch-perfect eye and ear for the surfaces of an era, and yet an uncanny way of finding too conventional stories that don’t live up to the scope. His world is that of received literary wisdom rather than original thought. He’s a master at making films that impress and underwhelm simultaneously, and Taking Woodstock is a poster child.
Even the hardest Republican should be able to appreciate how a freewheeling. Free-love youth festival, the product of the excesses of a free society, stands as an antidote to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, 35 years apart and a world away. Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock documentary might be overlong, but in its split-screen perspectives, languid pace, and freedom-loving values, it’s also a screw-you reply to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Ultimately the sixties were a idealistic reaction to a world that had been tearing itself apart for half a century. The sixties would die at Altamont. They would be buried in Munich. Woodstock was always the honeymoon, but one that was not a beginning but an end.
Grade: D
Cast: Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber
Director: Ang Lee
The thing about doing a Woodstock movie is that you gotta go all the way.
It might be the wise choice not to try and re-create the spectacle – half a million hippie youths “mellowed out,” playing in the mud, and listening to three hazy days of music. But it’s also a bit of a cowardly choice. You’re there. You’re not going to be there again. You gotta go for it.
Like the million people who went to Woodstock but never quite made it, Ang Lee’s (disastrously titled) Taking Woodstock gets stuck in the million-man traffic jam. Instead of expanding to the size of the spectacle, the film curiously gets smaller. And smaller. Until it’s too small for the scale of the event.
James Schamus’ screenplay adapts the biography of Elliot Tiber, the shy son of Russian Jewish émigrés running a fleabag motel in the Catskills who accidentally becomes an organizer of the most famous concert of all time. In 1969 the neighboring community Walkill had run the hippie pageant out of town. Tiber and his neighbor Max Yasgur offered up Max’s farm as a replacement. The rest is history.
With some imagination, the buildup to an epic event can make fascinating storytelling in its own right. Certainly that was true with last year’s Man on Wire. Taking Woodstock seems to get this right at times, detailing how happy accidents led a colossal social happening to a fallow alfalfa field in rural New York. In its best moments, the film engages in the sort of strange cross-cultural currents between hippies and the squares that epitomized the sixties. Then the concert fades, the film shrinks. We watch Tiber coming to terms with his family and his homosexuality. It’s tenderly told, but ….. who cares? What’s going on over the hill?
Ultimately, this is the ballad of Ang Lee – a willingness to attack big subjects, a pitch-perfect eye and ear for the surfaces of an era, and yet an uncanny way of finding too conventional stories that don’t live up to the scope. His world is that of received literary wisdom rather than original thought. He’s a master at making films that impress and underwhelm simultaneously, and Taking Woodstock is a poster child.
Even the hardest Republican should be able to appreciate how a freewheeling. Free-love youth festival, the product of the excesses of a free society, stands as an antidote to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, 35 years apart and a world away. Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock documentary might be overlong, but in its split-screen perspectives, languid pace, and freedom-loving values, it’s also a screw-you reply to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Ultimately the sixties were a idealistic reaction to a world that had been tearing itself apart for half a century. The sixties would die at Altamont. They would be buried in Munich. Woodstock was always the honeymoon, but one that was not a beginning but an end.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
District 9
District 9 [R]
Grade: B
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope Vanessa Haywood, Louis Minaar
Director: Neill Blomkamp
We move from the man’s face to a shot of the Johannesburg skyline at sunset. Panning left across the shadowy towers and an impossibly red sky, the sun seems to spin and waft gas. Then it suddenly dissolves into a pit of fire at night, with dark figures standing about it. Perfect.
The fluidity of this stunning transition, in a film that sneers at unimaginative transitions, is a sign of the skill and visual imagination involved in District 9. Although he overdoes it from time to time, director Neill Blomkamp rarely fails to find a way to make a shot interesting or explosive.
I’ll sum District 9 up quickly – this sci-fi story is very good filmmaking in service of a pretty good film. The thing that you must understand is the intensity of the action. The pacing is torrential. Sometimes it’s even too fast, cheating moments of their resonance. But for the most part, it successfully and consistently raises hairs.
The intensity of the action is matched by the realism that propels it. The shaky-cam documentary film works very well here, as the film comes across with the feel of an old war reel. The other big thing is the absolute tactile realness of the alien creatures, called prawns, with an insect-on-steroids appearance. A combination of digital and live acting, they don’t look merely real unto themselves, but realistically matched to their environment. Several viewers might be surprised to learn afterward that no such aliens live in South Africa. But don’t let Jessica Simpson in on the joke. It’s funnier that way.
Those poor prawns could have used a better map. They arrive on Earth in a damaged spaceship. Of all the places to park it, they found South Africa, hanging squarely above Johannesburg. Perhaps future aliens should strand their spaceship over somewhere with less of a history of racial division. After 20 years of violence and searching through rubbish for catfood, the million-plus aliens have been cordoned off into a shantytown called District 9.
In a sequence that targets both plot exposition and dark humor, the film opens as a pseudo-documentary, a tone that it will largely hold, with some annoying departures, for the next two hours. A television crew tags along as teams of a paid police militia enter District 9 to evict its alien occupants and relocate them to new homes in District 10, farther from the city.
Our point of entry into the movie is Wikus van der Merwe, a cowardly, not so bright administrator who has risen to his position by marrying the daughter of the corporate owner. The corporation is an arms manufacturer whose private army watches over the aliens. Following the eviction, Vikus finds himself turning into an alien, growing a prawn claw in place of his hand. This makes him capable of using their technology, which interests a bunch of malicious parties. Hunted by the corporation, he takes refuge among the prawns. Half man and half prawn, he soon finds himself engaged in a plan to help the aliens escape and to return to human form.
District 9’s biggest blemish is that its protagonist operates as if he is in another film. The serious pseudo-documentary façade is too often filled with a main character doing a Monty Python routine, like officiously asks fishy aliens to sign their eviction notices. Later, he conveniently shifts from weakling to action hero when the script needs it – in a snap he goes from John Cleese to John Wayne. I don’t think Sharlto Copley, with little acting experience, pulls it off. Unlike most of the cast, I always felt him acting.
The apartheid theme is fine, but like most apartheid films, it doesn’t allow for a lot maneuvering. Essentially, apartheid = bad, supporters = villains. It does deliver a feeling of importance. But a film criticizing apartheid should do better than reducing its black characters to criminal thugs with more machete than heart.
The more interesting and traditionally sci-fi themed line would be whether it should matter to Wikus if he becomes a prawn. It is still life and consciousness. What beyond familiarity of form is so distressing to him? Is there something about being human that we should miss? The film should end where Ray Bradbury might have ended it, with Wikus returned to human form, but kept as a last human in a Prawn zoo. But what do I know – that would make it hard to have a sequel.
Grade: B
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope Vanessa Haywood, Louis Minaar
Director: Neill Blomkamp
We move from the man’s face to a shot of the Johannesburg skyline at sunset. Panning left across the shadowy towers and an impossibly red sky, the sun seems to spin and waft gas. Then it suddenly dissolves into a pit of fire at night, with dark figures standing about it. Perfect.
The fluidity of this stunning transition, in a film that sneers at unimaginative transitions, is a sign of the skill and visual imagination involved in District 9. Although he overdoes it from time to time, director Neill Blomkamp rarely fails to find a way to make a shot interesting or explosive.
I’ll sum District 9 up quickly – this sci-fi story is very good filmmaking in service of a pretty good film. The thing that you must understand is the intensity of the action. The pacing is torrential. Sometimes it’s even too fast, cheating moments of their resonance. But for the most part, it successfully and consistently raises hairs.
The intensity of the action is matched by the realism that propels it. The shaky-cam documentary film works very well here, as the film comes across with the feel of an old war reel. The other big thing is the absolute tactile realness of the alien creatures, called prawns, with an insect-on-steroids appearance. A combination of digital and live acting, they don’t look merely real unto themselves, but realistically matched to their environment. Several viewers might be surprised to learn afterward that no such aliens live in South Africa. But don’t let Jessica Simpson in on the joke. It’s funnier that way.
Those poor prawns could have used a better map. They arrive on Earth in a damaged spaceship. Of all the places to park it, they found South Africa, hanging squarely above Johannesburg. Perhaps future aliens should strand their spaceship over somewhere with less of a history of racial division. After 20 years of violence and searching through rubbish for catfood, the million-plus aliens have been cordoned off into a shantytown called District 9.
In a sequence that targets both plot exposition and dark humor, the film opens as a pseudo-documentary, a tone that it will largely hold, with some annoying departures, for the next two hours. A television crew tags along as teams of a paid police militia enter District 9 to evict its alien occupants and relocate them to new homes in District 10, farther from the city.
Our point of entry into the movie is Wikus van der Merwe, a cowardly, not so bright administrator who has risen to his position by marrying the daughter of the corporate owner. The corporation is an arms manufacturer whose private army watches over the aliens. Following the eviction, Vikus finds himself turning into an alien, growing a prawn claw in place of his hand. This makes him capable of using their technology, which interests a bunch of malicious parties. Hunted by the corporation, he takes refuge among the prawns. Half man and half prawn, he soon finds himself engaged in a plan to help the aliens escape and to return to human form.
District 9’s biggest blemish is that its protagonist operates as if he is in another film. The serious pseudo-documentary façade is too often filled with a main character doing a Monty Python routine, like officiously asks fishy aliens to sign their eviction notices. Later, he conveniently shifts from weakling to action hero when the script needs it – in a snap he goes from John Cleese to John Wayne. I don’t think Sharlto Copley, with little acting experience, pulls it off. Unlike most of the cast, I always felt him acting.
The apartheid theme is fine, but like most apartheid films, it doesn’t allow for a lot maneuvering. Essentially, apartheid = bad, supporters = villains. It does deliver a feeling of importance. But a film criticizing apartheid should do better than reducing its black characters to criminal thugs with more machete than heart.
The more interesting and traditionally sci-fi themed line would be whether it should matter to Wikus if he becomes a prawn. It is still life and consciousness. What beyond familiarity of form is so distressing to him? Is there something about being human that we should miss? The film should end where Ray Bradbury might have ended it, with Wikus returned to human form, but kept as a last human in a Prawn zoo. But what do I know – that would make it hard to have a sequel.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)