Several near-brilliant, terrifyingly suspenseful action sequences are marred by rampant, incessant jingoism of the most uncomfortable order. The Serbian people are depicted as a nation of ruthless and untrustworthy murderers who delight in the slaughter of innocents. While I will admit my knowledge of all the things going on in Bosnia during the '80s and '90s is very slim, it's been my experience that no war is as cut-and-dry as the U.S. would like to pretend it is. I guess at this point in my life I'm much more interested in demystifying war and struggles between nations rather than continuing to mythologize our involvement in said things.
There's an interesting moment partway through the film, when a NATO admiral tells a US admiral something about the US being obsessed with getting their soldiers back, but what if getting this one man back costs thousands of lives later? This is, rather obviously, a real concern and something the movie would've done well to explore. The cavalier attitude of the U.S. in its involvement in foreign policy and peacekeeping is absolutely worth examining, but soon after this line is uttered the NATO admiral is made to look weak and the US admiral, played by Gene Hackman, to look self-sacrificing, strong, and heroic. And the idea of one man's life costing thousands is averted, as suddenly main character Owen Wilson also has vital information that can SAVE thousands of lives and the insidious Serbians have already completely violated the tenuous peace treaty anyway, so GO USA! USA! and save that dude no matter what the cost!
Still, as noted above, many of the action set pieces are occasionally astounding works of spatial relations and terror. I only wish the movie could've focused on them, rather than dragging the awkward politics and hammily-handled backroom politics into it. John Moore would later go on to do another, occasionally effective if weirdly racist, remake of The Flight of the Phoenix before making Max Payne, a movie that eschews any kind of political commentary for a purity of narrative that I think is a pretty excellent and underrated movie. Here's hoping for more like that and less like this from him in the future.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011)
Walked into this most certainly wanting it to be Catherine Hardwicke's masterpiece -- the fullest expression of her love for teenage sexual awakening and all the sometimes messy, sometimes amazing, always pushed to the forefront, emotions that come along with it. One scene succeeds so greatly that I am willing to cut the rest of the movie, which manages to stuff itself to the gills with ideas, yet never quite completes or satisfactorily fleshes out any of them, a lot more slack than I probably otherwise would. But that one scene, or I guess sequence, is so charged with emotion and erotic tension that it makes me wonder if all the other teen movies about sex are directed by people who maybe never had sex when they were teenagers. Or, if they did, don't remember what it was actually like. But, unlike her previous Twilight, it approaches the idea of dangerous, bad boy teenage infatuation with more straightforward adoration, rather than the teeter-tottering ambivalence that made Twilight so surprising and unfairly maligned. Red Riding Hood's love for bad boys is more about the attractiveness of teenage infatuation, rather than curbing that infatuation with the knowledge that teen sexual obsession can also be weird and gross and unhealthy.
My biggest complaint is that the film's narrative structure holds back the expression of most of the ideas. The paranoia and fear-mongering of possible attack from an unknown assailant awkwardly evokes the condemnation of the Patriot Act (certainly something we can all agree with, but is handled rather poorly) and the amount of joy gained from certain mysteries about the identity of the wolf, and the fact that it could be any of the men in Amanda Seyfried's life isn't enough to make up for the fact that keeping the mystery going the entire film's length prevents many of the ideas from achieving any kind of maturation. Especially because the finale, while handled somewhat clumsily, introduces a brand new concept that is one of the most worthy of exploration, suggesting something sinister and incestuous about fatherly protectiveness over the burgeoning sexuality of teenage daughters. This slyly evoked metaphor is absolutely worthy of exploration, but by the time it comes up the mystery has been solved and the movie, therefore, feels it must end. A better movie would've been able to keep the mystery, but trim it down to the first half -- excising Gary Oldman completely would be a start, as his status as an outsider come in to straighten up the town and prepare it for attack undermines the idea of national paranoia in times of panic -- and spend the second half evolving the previous theories on teenage love and its strange, and often creepy, facets.
My biggest complaint is that the film's narrative structure holds back the expression of most of the ideas. The paranoia and fear-mongering of possible attack from an unknown assailant awkwardly evokes the condemnation of the Patriot Act (certainly something we can all agree with, but is handled rather poorly) and the amount of joy gained from certain mysteries about the identity of the wolf, and the fact that it could be any of the men in Amanda Seyfried's life isn't enough to make up for the fact that keeping the mystery going the entire film's length prevents many of the ideas from achieving any kind of maturation. Especially because the finale, while handled somewhat clumsily, introduces a brand new concept that is one of the most worthy of exploration, suggesting something sinister and incestuous about fatherly protectiveness over the burgeoning sexuality of teenage daughters. This slyly evoked metaphor is absolutely worthy of exploration, but by the time it comes up the mystery has been solved and the movie, therefore, feels it must end. A better movie would've been able to keep the mystery, but trim it down to the first half -- excising Gary Oldman completely would be a start, as his status as an outsider come in to straighten up the town and prepare it for attack undermines the idea of national paranoia in times of panic -- and spend the second half evolving the previous theories on teenage love and its strange, and often creepy, facets.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Paycheck (John Woo, 2003)
I haven't seen any Hong Kong John Woo movies in years and years, but every time I see one of his American ones (I also recently watched Broken Arrow), I suspect that I won't like them. Maybe America really did kill everything that was exciting about him, but these movies are so crappy and ineptly constructed and, despite all their whirling movement and sometimes-intricate choreography, so weightless and inconsequential. This movie feels like amateur-hour, which, for such a heralded and longstanding action director, is pretty much baffling.
This part might not exactly be his fault, but sorta like Unknown it goes to great lengths to squander a fairly promising set-up. Both movies have the ability to use their mystery status, with a protagonist lost in a world he doesn't quite have a grasp on and trying to make sense of it while people are possibly trying to kill him, as a way to explore tension and suspense in a "is it real or am I crazy?" way, but both move too quickly into their respective plots and spend too much time on the least interesting aspects of their narratives.
This part might not exactly be his fault, but sorta like Unknown it goes to great lengths to squander a fairly promising set-up. Both movies have the ability to use their mystery status, with a protagonist lost in a world he doesn't quite have a grasp on and trying to make sense of it while people are possibly trying to kill him, as a way to explore tension and suspense in a "is it real or am I crazy?" way, but both move too quickly into their respective plots and spend too much time on the least interesting aspects of their narratives.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
An interesting mirror of Pegg and Wright's previous feature, Shaun of the Dead. That movie is more interesting to me, now, as it compares with Hot Fuzz than as a piece of its own. Both take similar comedy formulas, involving Pegg's growth and change over a two hour comedy away from outlandish working world extremes (listless slacker in Shaun, semi-fascistic workaholic in Hot Fuzz) and towards a happier, more psychologically healthy middle ground.
My preference for Hot Fuzz comes from two better-handled aspects that both share. While Shaun concerns itself with the city life of England, wrapping working-class life in invisibly-veiled metaphors for the walking dead and acting as though people who buy into working at their jobs and being adults are obnoxious douchebags (Peter Sarafinowicz more or less reprising his role on Spaced), Hot Fuzz treats its depiction of Pegg as a workaholic cop with a bit more interesting ambivalence. True, it doesn't shy away from his status as something of a fascist, seeing the rules as unbendable procedures that were not created by flawed human reasoning, but his ideas about these previous concretes soften without ever completely losing the dedication and ingenuity he brings to his job. Shaun, meanwhile, spends much of its energy on the titular character's status as a someone who lacks said ingenuity and uprightness, while never really suggesting that the characters were anything but absolultely correct about the previous opinion that supposedly "dead-end" jobs should be mocked and scorned.
The other aspect that Hot Fuzz handles better is the impetus for Pegg's change of character. In both films Pegg's character is dumped by his girlfriend, then dumped into a strange and discomforting new world and forced to adapt. But unlike Shaun the happy ending in Hot Fuzz does not arrive with rekindled love, nor with the other stereotype of finding a new girl who appreciates the new you. Instead Nicolas Angel gains a bromance-type friendship with Nick Frost, but also a camaraderie and working compromise with his other fellow police officers. I appreciate nearly any movie that can start off with heartbreak, but doesn't have to resort to romance as the only possible way to learn from that experience.
Also the satire of weirdo upper-class ideas of elaborately manicured neighborhoods and icy perfection is much more hilarious than the artsy classism of the aforementioned working-class snobbery Shaun evinces.
My preference for Hot Fuzz comes from two better-handled aspects that both share. While Shaun concerns itself with the city life of England, wrapping working-class life in invisibly-veiled metaphors for the walking dead and acting as though people who buy into working at their jobs and being adults are obnoxious douchebags (Peter Sarafinowicz more or less reprising his role on Spaced), Hot Fuzz treats its depiction of Pegg as a workaholic cop with a bit more interesting ambivalence. True, it doesn't shy away from his status as something of a fascist, seeing the rules as unbendable procedures that were not created by flawed human reasoning, but his ideas about these previous concretes soften without ever completely losing the dedication and ingenuity he brings to his job. Shaun, meanwhile, spends much of its energy on the titular character's status as a someone who lacks said ingenuity and uprightness, while never really suggesting that the characters were anything but absolultely correct about the previous opinion that supposedly "dead-end" jobs should be mocked and scorned.
The other aspect that Hot Fuzz handles better is the impetus for Pegg's change of character. In both films Pegg's character is dumped by his girlfriend, then dumped into a strange and discomforting new world and forced to adapt. But unlike Shaun the happy ending in Hot Fuzz does not arrive with rekindled love, nor with the other stereotype of finding a new girl who appreciates the new you. Instead Nicolas Angel gains a bromance-type friendship with Nick Frost, but also a camaraderie and working compromise with his other fellow police officers. I appreciate nearly any movie that can start off with heartbreak, but doesn't have to resort to romance as the only possible way to learn from that experience.
Also the satire of weirdo upper-class ideas of elaborately manicured neighborhoods and icy perfection is much more hilarious than the artsy classism of the aforementioned working-class snobbery Shaun evinces.
Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998)
An early indication of Nolan's greater interest in cinematic sleight-of-hand than anything resembling human interest. Begins with an actually pretty sublime premise: an out of work writer begins stalking random people he sees, getting a vicarious thrill out of following them and attempting to piece together the world that is their life. It's a premise with many thematic possibilities: obsession, voyeurism, detachment, the alienation of large cities, the tendency among people to, in a way, think of the other people on subways and in crowds, standing in lines at the store, as a kind of window dressing for the movie of their own life. It could go into the meta aspect that film as a medium has opened us up to thinking of our own lives as a kind of movie, and to regard who are the major players and who are simply extras -- then take that notion and turn it on its head a little bit. Explore that kind of narcissism. I saw Following once before (it was released on video with a big new label to capitalize on Memento's popularity), but when I read the description on Instant Watch I was shocked that I couldn't remember anything about the movie -- and that Nolan had come up with such a ripe concept.
The reason I couldn't remember is that Nolan all but abandons the concept as quickly as possible. The film opens with the main character telling his story to an unnamed other character and the actual titular "following" only takes up perhaps the first 7 minutes of a feature that runs a little over an hour. After that the main characters begin some other, more blatant forms of voyeurism (breaking into people's houses to gaze at their things -- and also steal stuff). Then it attempts to be a kind of film noir pseudo-parody, resting a hapless character as the mercy of larger machinations that unfold into a characteristic Nolan twist ending. But, while it uses these genre types knowingly, and with a slight wink, it really doesn't offer any explication of them and their relevance to our larger world, or even the world of film. They exist only to make cineastes feel smart for catching his references, and Nolan look smart for so slyly referencing them. Worse, neither the beginning following sequences, the house-breaking sequences, or anything else, really, has a feeling of genuine tension. Its low budget is obviously no excuse, as the film actually does the opposite of many low budget features, relying far too much on a diet of facial close-ups -- refusing to show us the space we're supposed to be existing in and, therefore, mostly denying its reality. So if we must exist in a fantasy of his concoction, shouldn't we then at least enjoy being in that fantasy? The amount that this can be enjoyed depends solely on how charmed one still is by time narrative jumps, by how much seeing something deliberately incongruous makes you think "Ah! I wonder how he got beat up/why he has a new haircut/why he's wearing a suit!" and how much satisfaction you gain from that wondering. For me, it is, as I have mentioned and, likely, as I will mention, practically nil.
The reason I couldn't remember is that Nolan all but abandons the concept as quickly as possible. The film opens with the main character telling his story to an unnamed other character and the actual titular "following" only takes up perhaps the first 7 minutes of a feature that runs a little over an hour. After that the main characters begin some other, more blatant forms of voyeurism (breaking into people's houses to gaze at their things -- and also steal stuff). Then it attempts to be a kind of film noir pseudo-parody, resting a hapless character as the mercy of larger machinations that unfold into a characteristic Nolan twist ending. But, while it uses these genre types knowingly, and with a slight wink, it really doesn't offer any explication of them and their relevance to our larger world, or even the world of film. They exist only to make cineastes feel smart for catching his references, and Nolan look smart for so slyly referencing them. Worse, neither the beginning following sequences, the house-breaking sequences, or anything else, really, has a feeling of genuine tension. Its low budget is obviously no excuse, as the film actually does the opposite of many low budget features, relying far too much on a diet of facial close-ups -- refusing to show us the space we're supposed to be existing in and, therefore, mostly denying its reality. So if we must exist in a fantasy of his concoction, shouldn't we then at least enjoy being in that fantasy? The amount that this can be enjoyed depends solely on how charmed one still is by time narrative jumps, by how much seeing something deliberately incongruous makes you think "Ah! I wonder how he got beat up/why he has a new haircut/why he's wearing a suit!" and how much satisfaction you gain from that wondering. For me, it is, as I have mentioned and, likely, as I will mention, practically nil.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)
Moon is one hour of a pretty decent, not bad movie, and half an hour of good at all movie. That it is split up into a convenient division between the two parts is nice (the first half hour is not good, the rest is sometimes pretty decent), but it also serves to make it feel as though the movie has not even started until it's almost a third of the way over. It is, in fact, deliberately misleading -- an attempt to trick the audience into thinking it is watching one movie, only to switch to a completely different movie at that half hour mark. It begins as a movie about isolation and paranoia in a harsh, unfeeling area of desolation, ala The Thing and probably a thousand other movies (Moon is also hampered by its need to reference other films, and to make those references as immediately apparent as possible), but by the second half has shifted to an actually sometimes interesting movie about the nature of identity, and the way in which habits transcend consciousness. Which is not to say that explorations of isolation and paranoia are not interesting, just that the movie does not handle them in a very interesting way. Perhaps Jones was too excited to get to the "real" part of the movie.
Sam Rockwell is as good as advertised, despite being hampered by the fact that Jones is not entirely sure how to shoot an actor talking to himself all that confidently. Too often the movie relies on easy back and forth close-ups, which is fine to emphasize their separateness and other ideas, but eventually distracts from the emotional development of the characters, as the fact that it's one guy playing both parts is constantly being reminded to the audience. This combines with the score's tendency to be like the wretched lovechild of John Williams and James Horner to rob nearly every scene that Rockwell plays brilliantly of any emotional weight it would've had.
Man, I ended up being a lot less nice to this movie than I meant to. It's really not that bad. If it weren't for Source Code's awful trailer, I'd be interested in what Jones has to offer in the future, once his talents are more matured.
Sam Rockwell is as good as advertised, despite being hampered by the fact that Jones is not entirely sure how to shoot an actor talking to himself all that confidently. Too often the movie relies on easy back and forth close-ups, which is fine to emphasize their separateness and other ideas, but eventually distracts from the emotional development of the characters, as the fact that it's one guy playing both parts is constantly being reminded to the audience. This combines with the score's tendency to be like the wretched lovechild of John Williams and James Horner to rob nearly every scene that Rockwell plays brilliantly of any emotional weight it would've had.
Man, I ended up being a lot less nice to this movie than I meant to. It's really not that bad. If it weren't for Source Code's awful trailer, I'd be interested in what Jones has to offer in the future, once his talents are more matured.
Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)
It seems almost too easy to compare this to Taken, given the combination of action movie + Liam Neeson + American dude in exotic European locale, and because I never shy away from doing the easy thing, that's what I'm going to do too. Taken, as it turns out, is one of my favorite action films of the new century. Neeson brings an inspired amount of gravity and seriousness to the role, without falling into a joyless and overbearing BIGNESS ala Christian Bale in Terminator: Salvation. He has a sort of natural, empathy-invoking charisma that, when mixed with Luc Besson's stripped down and streamlined script, works something close to wonderfully better than it has any right to.
Unknown is not that movie. While many of the action scenes are paced and put together well enough (once again, European filmmakers take American staples and re-invigorate them long after America has forgotten how to use them properly), the movie suffers from a burdensome, overplotted script that thinks the best way to keep action fans entertained is to also throw a fairly useless mystery into the mix. My disdain for mysteries may not be well-documented, but I am about to begin documenting it. Mysteries are boring. And, lately, they are an excuse used by entertainers in order not to say anything interesting. Well, that's probably not the real reason. The real reason is that everyone actually seems to like mysteries. They like the act of trying to figure out if they can spot the twist before the movie gives it to them. They like trying to guess whodunit. Well, I don't. The fact of the matter is that the average whodunit, it really doesn't matter whodunit. If it can be any number of red herrings, then it is thematically inconsequential which one it is. So I would much rather a filmmaker use what time he has to offer me to keep me thinking in a much less superficial way than to ask, "What's the answer to this riddle?" In Unknown, the answer is not easy to guess, mostly because there are no clues and it comes so far out of left field that, while it technically makes sense, is not really even a game between the viewer and the writer anymore. It's more like a magician's "ah-ha!" moment. Fair enough. It could be worse.
But in the mean time, it has wasted a bunch of great promise and screen time that could've been better spent with more action and/or suspense sequences. There's a moment in which Neeson is walking down a long corridor in a Metro station and a man may or may not be following him. The tension generated in this scene is so immaculate and fist-clenchingly good that it made me think "This is what The American should've felt like." But, of course, because the movie is so concerned with its mystery and plot, it turns out the guy totally is following him, because there isn't enough time to "waste" on actual paranoia. A shame, because I still think The American is a good idea. And this could've been a Total Recall meets The American type moment, except for how little interest the movie has in exploring either of those ideas.
Unknown is not that movie. While many of the action scenes are paced and put together well enough (once again, European filmmakers take American staples and re-invigorate them long after America has forgotten how to use them properly), the movie suffers from a burdensome, overplotted script that thinks the best way to keep action fans entertained is to also throw a fairly useless mystery into the mix. My disdain for mysteries may not be well-documented, but I am about to begin documenting it. Mysteries are boring. And, lately, they are an excuse used by entertainers in order not to say anything interesting. Well, that's probably not the real reason. The real reason is that everyone actually seems to like mysteries. They like the act of trying to figure out if they can spot the twist before the movie gives it to them. They like trying to guess whodunit. Well, I don't. The fact of the matter is that the average whodunit, it really doesn't matter whodunit. If it can be any number of red herrings, then it is thematically inconsequential which one it is. So I would much rather a filmmaker use what time he has to offer me to keep me thinking in a much less superficial way than to ask, "What's the answer to this riddle?" In Unknown, the answer is not easy to guess, mostly because there are no clues and it comes so far out of left field that, while it technically makes sense, is not really even a game between the viewer and the writer anymore. It's more like a magician's "ah-ha!" moment. Fair enough. It could be worse.
But in the mean time, it has wasted a bunch of great promise and screen time that could've been better spent with more action and/or suspense sequences. There's a moment in which Neeson is walking down a long corridor in a Metro station and a man may or may not be following him. The tension generated in this scene is so immaculate and fist-clenchingly good that it made me think "This is what The American should've felt like." But, of course, because the movie is so concerned with its mystery and plot, it turns out the guy totally is following him, because there isn't enough time to "waste" on actual paranoia. A shame, because I still think The American is a good idea. And this could've been a Total Recall meets The American type moment, except for how little interest the movie has in exploring either of those ideas.
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