The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2009)

Based on this film and last year's Tangled, Disney appears to be making a fairly earnest step towards grappling with their problematic past and setting out new, less conservative, values for the children of today. If Tangled was a coming-of-age remake of The Little Mermaid, in which personal growth and independence were the main goals, with romance pared down to a sidenote, rather than the main impetus behind her desire for a new life, then The Princess and the Frog is an attempt to revise the Disney formula to acknowledge things like class differences and privilege, and the way that getting what you want may not be as easy for you as it seems for others. These bigger, messier, more difficult problems to tackle result, predictably, in a less successful distancing from the Disney of the past.

The first, of course, is the main character being Disney's first black lead heroine. It would be remiss not to call this a fairly major step in Disney's path towards something approaching The Right Direction. But as many problems as are addressed, even more seem to arise. The love interest, Prince Naveen, being a major concern. His race is, as far as I can tell, completely indeterminable. He hails from a made-up country, Maldonia, and speaks with a vaguely french accent and has dark-ish skin, which seems to suggest he would be from one of the African countries colonized by France. But his facial features otherwise look like any old Disney Prince Charming. Nothing, save his darker hair and skin, would at all suggest African descent. More strangely, it almost ignores all issues of race. If everyone in the movie were white, and Tiana was simply poor rather than poor and black, not much about the movie would change. Despite taking place in the South in the '20s, only one person says anything derogatory about her, and what he says could be construed as class-related as much as race. Her best friend is white, and while she is seen as an exemplar of rich, white privelege, this only serves to make their friendship even more nonsensical. It is, disappointingly, still ferrying in fantastical, revisionist history. This is all not to mention one of the more glaring eyesores, that of casting a voodoo witch doctor as the primary villain. Which is something of a shame, because a lot of the animation revolving around the demons and long, ominous shadows is legitimately frightening, especially if I'd been a little kid when I saw it.

There are positives, of course. The comic relief is less unbearable than it has been lately, with Disney -- better than Tangled, even, on many occasions. And the increase in female agency displayed in Tangled is still avaialable here, as the ending feels more like two people working together towards a goal than a poor girl, held back by the rich and greedy, being saved by a wealthy and wonderful prince (ala Cinderella). And, despite many problems with it, I have to admit the song and dance number Almost There, with its blatant rip-off of the paintings of Aaron Douglas, echoes the hopefulness and majesty of those paintings pretty well (though, again, it fails to address the fact that, despite his optimism, things have improved for black people in America at a far slower increment than I think he was hoping for). Speaking of the music, it is much catchier and along the lines of the Disney heyday of the late '80s/early '90s (not quite as memorable, but far less bland and forgettable than the mess Tangled has going on). And the best friend is far less villainized than, say, the stepsisters in Cinderella. Honestly, she would almost be a better choice for a main character and the idea of her coming to terms with her own rich, white privelege.

Honestly, I don't quite know what to say about it. I want to applaud the people at Disney for making a more concerted effort and, at least, it is smart enough not to go too far into the overly familiar, pretending that everything is all good so it's cool if I say something weird and a little racist cause we're all friends here (see: Easy A, lots of TV lately). But all the other stuff still weighs too heavily, and I think we're not gonna get anywhere as long as they keep resorting to exotic and "geographically related" villains. Keith David's witch doctor is certainly no less an icky caricature of all the stereotypes about voodoo than Jafar was of Middle Eastern mysticism on Aladdin.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002)

Like the first movie, this plays like a bad clip show rather than a fully formulated movie. Scenes transition awkwardly from one to the other, never giving the feeling that they exist as real places in time for a group of friends in school. School itself is relegated to an almost non-entity, as the big mystery eventually takes hold. For being 2.5 hours, this is a film in which it never feels like enough has happened. In one sense, this is a good thing, as the laborious Draco Malfoy red herring only takes a few minutes to sort itself out -- whereas it consumes a huge chunk of the source book's length. The rest of the time, however, it results in something wholly inorganic and, mostly, boring. Chris Columbus is not a very good filmmaker and, for once, the dislike for him that caused me to skip out on these first two movies for so long turned out to be correct (though my reasoning for disliking him would've been something about him being generic and making "sappy movies," so let's not give young Basil too much credit).

I suppose calling him generic is accurate. He has very few visual ideas, for certain, as this movie is filled with moments of creepiness and/or strange realization that are accompanied by the camera slowly tracking in while rotating left and right (I guess, to suggest the discombobulation?). The films have none of the luster, the grand celebration and strange mystique that I imagine Hogwarts having for students. I guess that applies to everything -- nothing ever feels like it's on their level, nor is it on the adult level. Even when compared to Columbus' own meager Home Alone, it lacks a revelry in the stars' penchance for impish mischief. Everything is so sterile and stately and reverent. One need point to nothing besides Richard Harris' portrait of Dumbledore for exactly what is wrong with the series. His Dumbledore has all of the soft-spoken, approachable, yet dignified of a perfect Dumbledore, yet lacks any convincing humanity to make him seem like more than Masterpiece Theatre. Every attempt at the bemused goofines demonstrated in the book feels too self-conscious and wink-y. I guess that sums the whole thing up in a word: rigid. Everyone is apparently so afraid of making an unsuccessful movie that they forget how to do anything (except make creepy animatronic Mandrakes -- the stuff of nightmares those faces are).

Let's take, for a specific moment, the spiders. The climax of this scene was completely nonsensical to begin with, yet the movie finds a way to compound it by having it take place in a tightly packed thicket, to which the entrance looks almost exactly big enough for a car to fit through. It's like Columbus wanted to let everyone who'd read the book know right away, without any doubt, "don't worry -- we are gonna keep this awful scene exactly how you remember it."

On the plus side, Kenneth Brannagh somehow manages to be the best thing about the movie (surely for the first time in his career (zing)), using his tendency for theatrical acting to his advantage by turning the dial up ever so slightly into something that almost plays like a keen self-parody. Even Alan Rickman, previously the only person in Sorceror's Stone who didn't appear to be attending a funeral, is clearly a man who showed up for a few days to cash a paycheck and move on. Strangely, the trio of heroes managed to become worse actors in the space between first and second film. Or, perhaps, it was shuttled out so quickly that the creators didn't have time to properly mold every line reading. In either event, the children have never been even partway good since. How critics gag at the Twilight gang, yet suspend disbelief for Grint's hollowed out comic timing is, I suppose, evidence of a lot of theories: that people would rather see someone who looks like they are reading off a teleprompter than Stewart's tic-y willingness to risk absurdity, that suspension of disbelief is more malleable when castles and magic are involved (see: Orlando Bloom ever having a career), or the obvious idea that the source material's reputation gives it a boost when it comes to what is and is not questioned.

This is far more words than this movie probably deserves. I think I have a problem with conclusions in my reviews. I'd prefer to just stop when I have no more I feel like I want to say, yet I'm trying to practice writing semi-plausible essays instead of critical word-vomit.

Dhoom (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2004)

I will have far less to say about Dhoom than I will the other two movies I have written about today. This is built on a combination of the fact that it is far less interesting, and that I have already expended most of my writerly energies on the other two articles. Dhoom is, in its own way, an embodiment of adolescent machismo. A super cop faces off against a super criminal in an increasingly outrageous pissing contest about who is more intelligent, manly and awesome. Occasionally, this results in satisfying moments of ridiculous, music video-esque action sequences. At other times, it results in long, unbearably dull verbal one-upmanship, or the threat to at some point in the future one-up the other. A lot of the dialogue in this movie is based on John Abraham, the villain, and Abhishek Bachchan, the hero, telling each other how much better they are than the other. The rest is Bachchan and Uday Chopra exchanging buddy cop cliches, as Chopra, far more buff and good-looking than his awful haircut and endless biker headbands give him credit for, provides comic relief as the guy who falls in love with women immediately, but never manages to snag one (until the end).

Having already seen the sequel, Dhoom 2, which is an upgrade in almost every way, this was an unexpectedly flat experience. Aside from the few sequences mentioned above, one of which involves a motorboat being dragged along a freeway by a speeding truck, there really wasn't much going for it. Most of the dance sequences feel like turn-of-the-century MTV, with extended (and mostly boring) synchronized moves. There's very little fire or chemistry between any of the characters as they dance, resulting in something that is competent, but uninvolving. Since dancing is one of my favorite things to watch in a movie, I was surprised to find myself zoning out. Other than a car mechanic in the rain bit, I actually can barely remember what the other dance sequences were (only a day after watching it). I don't know, there really isn't much to say. It is a movie built completely on the idea of style over substance, in which all the substance is owed to other famous action movies, such as Michael Mann's Heat (and a weird Casablanca reference at the end). But, in this case, the style isn't exciting or ridiculous enough to hold much attention.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

*Note: If you have not seen it and have the capability to, I heartily recommend watching Certified Copy before reading this. It is an astounding piece of filmmaking and deserves as much of your money as you can give it. Also herein lie spoilers*

After seeing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives earlier this year, I quite honestly thought that I was unlikely to see a better movie for the remaining 10 months. Instead it took only two months (to the day!) to see Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. In the interest of being fully upfront about things, I have never seen an Abbas Kiarostami movie before. I have seen parts of his very literal examination of the nature of watching movies, and the fabrication of that experience, Shirin, and I have seen the movie he scripted for Jafar Panahi, Crimson Gold. As I stated in my entry on that movie, Abbas Kiarostami quite honestly confounds me. What I had seen, up until now, seemed too far above the level of film viewing I am capable of. The layers, the examinations, the insight and patience required of me to get what he was going for, was too much. As a result I did not enjoy those movies as much as I could conceive a more intelligent viewer doing. This is not the case for me and Certified Copy. I am not sure if he was simply being pandering, and creating a movie that is more universally accessible, or if there was something more ambiguous going on and for whatever reason, on that night, at that time, I was ready to get what Kiarostami wanted to give me. I'll go with the former, though, cause I honestly almost skipped the movie in favor of watching the Portland Trail Blazers' opening playoff game. Despite a feeling of lethargy and reluctance about a two hour, possibly confounding work by a director I have consistently avoided out of fear of boredom and being exposed as not a very good film watcher, here Certified Copy was to give me an experience fairly close to life-altering. At least, as life-altering as a movie honestly can be.

It begins with a shot that I didn't think it capable of topping. In a maybe nod to John Cage, the opening credits play out over a single shot of an empty podium with two microphones and a copy of a book (which shares the movie's title) setting on it. Kiarostami is a little more generous than Cage, however, supplying a murmur of manufactured background noise to insinuate the presence of an audience within the movie, as opposed to just us. But the conflating of the two, in-movie audience and real movie audience, is what seemed so startling and caused me to think the movie could not get any better. Impatient Portlanders began whispering to their partners, glasses and plateware clinked, backsides shifted in seats, and instead of distracting me from the magic of immersion as these things usually do, it aided in the process. The movie and the real world were, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

Soon, however, this revelation eluded me. Even though I'd noticed it right away, I started going back into normal movie mode. I worried about the precociousness of Binoche's son. I was bothered by the banality and seeming self-awareness of much of the dialogue. I concerned myself with typical movie-going complaints like plausibility. I was, as usual with my experiences with Kiarostami, missing the point. Certified Copy does not exist as a narrative in any fashion. Like I suggested earlier today in my entry on Total Recall (the two movies share some striking similarities), I believe the movie works best if you forget about thinking whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the movie is "right." The fact of the matter, I would suggest, is that none of them are. There is no right, because the story exists as an exploration of genre and performance and emotions/ideas we get from watching movies. It is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy film genre that moves so far into abstraction that it ends up encompassing huge, expansive ideas about life and love and marriage and the nature of being a human being who is alive. And all this snuck up on me so slyly, so invisibly, that it wasn't until the final scenes that I even realized for sure I was watching a masterpiece.

But when I did the whole movie just clicked. Suddenly I realized the level to which Kiarostami had been manipulating me, and it made me feel great. It felt like a metaphorical actualization of the best things about Hitchcock's work, slowly and steadily feeding small pieces of information and working the audience over with a precision that comes from a mastery of craft. Long sequences feel natural, occasionally raw, possibly even improvised, but the camera's moving, long, unbroken takes would suggest a carefully studied dance of speech and movement. This ambiguity gets at the crux of the argument -- that everything in life is a kind of performance. Many of our lines in life are scripted in a way, prefashioned by social expectations and years of rehearsing being yourself. One of the reasons I think I enjoyed the movie so much is that it is not trying to layer its ideas in ambiguity and misdirection, choosing instead to highlight very obviously what it is about, and leave the viewer to relish in the myriad ways he explores them.

This, I think, provides the explanation as to why, once Binoche begins to pretend she and Shimmel are married they suddenly are. Once Shimmel apologizes for being unable to speak Italian, saying he only studied French in school, suddenly he can speak and understand French. Film, by its very nature is a copy. It transmits a recording of "reality" via a process that only works by manipulating our senses. Yet because it comes as close as any reproduction yet can to simulating a real world, we have come to expect certain things of it when we engage with it. This is where notions of plausibility and verisimilitude come from and our desire for them. I once spoke with someone about movies who insisted that the very first thing a movie must do to be successful is establish plausibility. If he couldn't buy into the idea that the characters, their actions, their locations, existed in a world that he could believe in, then, to him, the movie had already failed. I should note, quickly, that the world it existed in did not have to be our own, but it did have to have rules and parameters that made it its own. I wonder what he would have thought of this movie, which goes out of its way to smash these notions of plausibility, to deny the viewer the comforts of formula and relational cohesion. Of course, I personally believe it only succeeds because of this abandonment -- that what is accomplished would've been lessened had Kiarostami used more traditional narrative techniques.

There is so much more I'd like to talk about this movie, about the way it transforms the camera into a mirror, and we watch as the characters regard themselves through how we see them. Are they good-looking? Are they satisfactorilay put together? Do we desire them, or to be them? Or, in a melodramatic argument at a restaurant, the camera alternately becomes each of the two characters, so that Shimmel's frustration and Binoche's discontent are expressed to us, rather than each other. And though the dialogue has the ring of cliche, existing in a world of movies in which thousands of movie couples have fought over dinner at restaurants, the layers Kiarostami has enveloped over these proceedings manage to make it both distinctively fake and performative, but also brimming with poignance and empathy. That, I guess, sums up the whole movie, and is a decent enough way to end this. I would like to write more, but 1300 words is a lot and I must admit I am out of breath. Anyway, my #1 movie of the decade so far (haw haw).

Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)

Total Recall is, somehow, even better than I remembered it. I would argue against the idea that the death of the psychologist marks the film's turning point, and at that time Arnold is now trapped inside Rekall and the rest of the film is his paranoid/fantastical delusion dream world. It is very nearly plausible, except the film is not strictly told from his point of view. If we are operating on the assumption that everything is implanted memories then it doesn't really make sense for him to remember things he was not there for. But more than this, I think this argument is somewhat irrelevant. Whether what we're seeing is "really happening" or "all part of a dream' within the context of a film in which none of it actually happened seems a little like an exercise in missing the point. Maybe it makes more sense in a movie that takes its narrative more seriously, but as far as I'm concerned Verhoeven is using everything in the movie metaphorically, so that there is never any need for us to put it together or make sense of it in a real-world context.

Instead we should look at it from the obvious set-up of a movie that embodies the format of an escapist sci-fi action film for the express purpose of pointing out how silly escapist action films are. In doing so it captures much of the duality inherent in this exercise, alternating seductive glimpses of power fantasy and then attacks that seduction with a series of layer-peeling reveals that expose the fantasy for what it is. The film opens with a dream that segues into sexy pillow banter between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the '80s paragon of manliness, and Sharon Stone, the coy yet caring and devoted blonde wife, and culminating in an unseen sex scene with Stone saying, "I'll give you something to dream about." Later Arnold visits Rekall and is asked to supply attractive attributes for his ideal woman. He picks a woman more or less like the wife he already has, only brunette instead of blonde -- perhaps a winking nod to the cliche about the grass being greener, as his ideal woman is different only on a superficial level. By the end of the movie he has traded one girl for the other under the pretense that one's love is real, and the other's is a manipulation. Yet we never know any more about the brunette than her original qualities, while Stone has much more depth and far more closely resembles a real person. An early breakfast argument between her and Schwarzenegger feels like a stage-y movie marital disagreement, yet is plausibly grounded compared to the melodramatic slapping and life-and-death of his interactions with Rachel Ticotin. The point I guess is that everything is a little bit fake, so it doesn't really matter whether some of it is Really Fake and some is only Kinda Fake.

More jokes abound involving the idea of tourism and vacation as an inconvenient hassle and that, if given the chance, most people would probably rather remember a good vacation than risk taking a real bad one. This also raises ideas about the nature of memory, as well as our tendency to gloss over negative experiences when it comes to visits to other places. There is an expectation that we will have a good time and so that's what we convince ourselves. That's not exactly revelatory or anything, but the jokes are cleverly spiked in and the movie wouldn't have quite the same punch without them.

Finally, the movie treads similar ground to Robocop (although, I'd say, more successfully), in its anti-'80s indictment of privatization and the idea that it can only lead to exploitation. It also goes down a hilarious rabbit hole of paranoia and distrust, finally ending with the joke that Schwarzenegger cannot even trust himself. As punctuation to an era of vastly shifting political alliances and some of the more heated Cold War panicks, with Reagan introducing all kinds of new ways for America to be jingoistic and xenophobic, it's a pretty fantastic final touch.

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

Hanna is either a high concept gimmick as an excuse for an action movie, or else an action movie as an excuse for Joe Wright to revel in high concept gimmickry. I'm not entirely sure which, but I suppose I would lean towards the latter. The action sequences are only intermittently interesting (most of the movie's midsection is relentlessly dull in this aspect), while the emotional cues are all infused with the kind of overwrought E-M-O-T-I-O-N that can only come from someone who sincerely believes he/she is saying something of great worth about the human condition. It stinks of Art, I guess you could say.

Unfortunately, that something he's saying about the human condition either isn't there, or is so poorly extracted from the material that the end result is the same. There's a heaviness of emotion and an attempt to examine the idea of growing up in seclusion and being thrust upon a strange, alien, oddly shaped world. But what does that say that isn't fairly obvious? If the message is that we shouldn't raise our kids in the wilderness and teach them nothing that doesn't come from a book, well, I would expect that by putting that message in a movie you are already preaching to converted. If it is an attempt to say something larger about the process of raising children and forcing yourself to let them grow up and experience the world, and Wright has chosen to tell this story via a fairytale action movie metaphor about a homicidal teenage girl, well this narrative concept has abstracted the idea to such a great length that it no longer has any real-world relevance. Wright attempts to fill this void of meaning with a highly touted Chemical Brothers score mixed way, way into the forefront, as if the throbbing electronic beats can somehow pound the poignance into you. The highly stylized camerawork is similarly overbearing and insistent, assaulting the viewer's eyes with visual cliches at a rapid-fire clip (a sun-dappled Hanna hangs her head out a car window, hair blowing slowly and wonderously in the wind; Bana dispatches a group of assailants in a whirling Scorsese meets Oldboy single-take set piece).

Worse, like Kick-Ass, it never makes any attempts to address Bana's systematic destruction of a girl's childhood for the sake of a mostly-empty vendetta. While it does a better job than that movie about questioning his tactics, it never once questions his motives. The audience is expected to take it as a given that if Bana had tried to raise her in a normal life somewhere, anywhere, in the world, that the all-encompassing arms of the CIA would eventually find them and kill them. This seems a very curious leap to ask, and is far less plausible than the idea that Bana's character is simply a psychopath. And, going further down the rabbit hole, the audience is never asked to reflect upon Hanna's path of destruction, which results in the deaths of numerous military and government personnel, but also a fairly large number of civilians. While she is not directly responsible for the latter deaths, it is somewhat difficult not to hold it against her, especially in moments where she fights a few guys, then proceeds to run away, leaving her innocent benefactors to whatever fate they're destined for. This seems weird, especially since it runs against the only idea Wright semi-coherently manages to state over Hanna's inflated 113 minute running time -- that, despite whatever we may convince ourselves, empathy does come more naturally than not-empathy, and there is a short little window from the time we are self-involved children to the time we are self-involved adults when we don't know how to not be empathetic. I don't know that I'm 100% on board with this idea, yet it's fairly clearly there -- only to be shaken apart by aforementioned Hanna totally manhandling the hell out of some dudes then inexplicably running away.

Also, can we all just acknowledge that Cate Blanchett is an awful impersonation of an actor at this point? She's like the world's most serious little kid playing dress up -- throwing on all kinds of wigs and accents and somehow making that whimsical idea an exercise in joyless austerity. Regardless of project, her acting tone always consists of the same theatrical demand for recognition. You're not gonna get an Oscar nomination for this one, I'm afraid, so can we please just stop pretending you're performing brain surgery on the Dalai Lama.

Now that I'm finally caught up on these, I'm going to try to start writing longer(-winded) pieces that deal with more specifics than I've previously been doing. I think it's good exercise to mix in both the thematic overview and the more surface-level examination, plus I'll only have to write one or two a day so I think I can then pour all the words I would've written on 3-5 of these trying to catch up into one movie I've seen recently and remember well enough to write more specifically about!

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

In some ways a mirror of Jones' earlier film, Moon. While my largest problem with that film was that it spent its first third tricking the audience into thinking it was watching a different movie -- a movie that, for me, felt a little lifeless and dully conceived to begin with, I would say that Source Code's strength is in its premise and beginning. In some ways playing out like a cinematic video game, the main character must solve a mystery in which eight minutes of real time pass before he "dies" and, in video game terms, gets a game over. Then he must try again, but armed with the knowledge he gained on his previous game. In a way it's a little like an action-mystery Groundhog's Day. This, I think, is fine for the length of time that the movie continues its eight-minute, real-time structure. It also manages to subtly introduce ideas about the way we interact with each other, as minor sentence structures alter without even being prompted by any other changes. Unlike Groundhog's Day, in which actors minutely repeat the same lines with the same inflection (whenever possible, I would guess, using the same takes), implying a fatalistic attitude towards our behavior and demeanor on any given day, Source Code uses the impossibility of actors completely mimicking their previous takes to its advantage -- suggesting that any time we speak there are a myriad of ways that sentence could turn out. It gives a nice juxtaposition of freedom and chance when combined with the movie's repetitious structure, as Jake Gyllenhaal, again, unlike Bill Murray, is not the only person who's decisions affect the day. He is not god, tinkering with the lives of playthings for his own bemusement and eventual self-improvement. He's just one guy in a world where everyone's decisions matter.

Unfortunately, this begins to break down about halfway through the movie, as impatience and sentiment get the better of Jones. Soon the rigidity of the eight minute structure is broken down, with quick cuts through time that destroy the world's cohesion. Rather than a delightfully repetitious exercise, we are back to watching a normal mystery. One in which time no longer matters or exists. And this introduction of melodrama and happy endings and swelling orchestral music is unbefitting what begin as a cool, calculated exercise in confusion and tension. On a semi-related side note, how is it that the son of David Bowie is so awful at music? The punchy, force-fed emotional cues of both Moon and Source Code are by far the worst aspects of each movie, as they make what could be poignant and heartfelt into something cheap and saccharine. That is how I feel about the ending, regardless of the many interpretations and plot holes that reveal it to be even weirder and more thoughtless than Jones may have considered.