Thursday, December 10, 2009

Plain Old Buttons

Movie Review:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

PG-13 / 2 hrs., 46 min. / 2008

In the first few minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there is a fascinating flashback about a man who creates an unusual clock for a railway station. Someone needs to take that idea and expand it into a feature film all by itself. But they didn’t, and once the flashback ends, we are left with over two hours of less-interesting material.

Oh, the premise sounds fascinating on paper – that’s why I rented the movie. Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, the film follows the life of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), whose body lives its life backwards. He is born looking eighty years old, and as he grows, his skin loses its wrinkles, his bones lose their arthritis. When he is twenty, he looks sixty; when he is sixty, he looks twenty. His mind, however, moves forward through the normal progression of life from infancy to senility.

Abandoned by his father because of his abnormalities, Benjamin is brought up by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a black servant at a Louisiana old folks’ home. As he grows, he learns about life and death, and how to handle both, from the residents of the home as well as his servant parents. And because of his older looks, his young, adventurous curiosity is often thoroughly whetted as people take him places he never would have gone as a little boy, confess things to him he never would have heard.

As the epic tale unfolds, Benjamin learns to play piano from Mrs. Maple (Edith Ivey), gets a job on a tugboat with Captain Mike (Jared Harris), spends a season in Russia, has an affair with a foreign secretary’s wife (Tilda Swinton), fights a naval skirmish in World War II, and falls in love with Daisy (Cate Blanchett) whom he eventually settles down with.

I once heard a comedian’s routine on how youth is wasted on the young and how much more appropriate it would be to age backwards. And clearly F. Scott Fitzgerald figured the idea could deliver a message. So the potential for an irresistible movie is all there, a movie that takes a fresh look at life and love.

But director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth settle for a movie that only looks innovative on the surface. Its melancholy tone suggests that it has something deep to explore, something poignant that its unusual story is able to present better than other stories. But in the end we are left with nothing new regarding the heartaches of human existence. A friend of mine commented that we’ve heard the same message, only better, in Forrest Gump, and I would agree. I suppose a movie does not need to have a deep purpose, but when its presentation suggests that it does have something new to say, it should say it.

The whole phenomenon of Benjamin’s curiosity is treated throughout as just that: A curiosity. Those who spend enough time in Benjamin’s life to notice the wonder seem to handle it with barely a raised eyebrow. The music score by Alexandre Desplat, which is beautiful in itself, suggests that even when the composer realized what was happening to Benjamin, he merely cocked his head to the side, went “Huh, that’s interesting,” and then ignored it. Not that I am in favor of turning the film into another action movie about a power-hungry government wanting to exploit Benjamin’s powers in some way, but surely someone in the movie could have been more amazed at what was happening.

The tagline for the film is: “Life isn’t measured in minutes, but in moments.” And I think that describes the film precisely: A collection of moments, some of which are actually interesting. But they do not add up to a collective whole that is anything to write home about.

One such interesting moment is a sequence in which Benjamin narrates the interesting web of activity that leads up to a certain tragedy involving a taxi. What if any one of the things in the web had not happened, Benjamin posits. Like the clock-maker flashback at the beginning, this section of the film is captivating in itself. What it does not seem to do is contribute to the film. Why this sudden change in mode of storytelling? The film would have told the same story without it, and the import of the narration at this point does not really affect any other portion of the story. A whole movie on that subject could have been interesting, but it lasts barely a minute here.

The film also includes one of my pet peeves: The flashback as a plot framing device. Even when used well, this method of laying out the story never feels as satisfying to me, in part because it gives away certain things by its very nature, such as the fact that we know the people we see in the present will survive whatever story in their past we are about to watch.

The choice to tell this story through flashbacks is utterly worthless. As Daisy’s daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) sits with her in the hospital, Caroline reads from Benjamin’s diary and we are led into the story. But this framing device adds nothing to the story, and the story adds nothing to the framing device. And the fact that Hurricane Katrina is brewing outside the hospital is equally superfluous despite its contribution to the final shot of the film.

Now, none of this is to say that the film’s individual elements are less than superb. Brad Pitt (Snatch) amply demonstrates that he has grown up as an actor and can handle something more significant than the cocky punks he plays pretty well. Buried in some of the best “old” make-up I’ve seen in a long time, Pitt carefully crafts his facial expressions, his walk, his body language to reflect the decay Benjamin’s body is in. He delivers his role with judicious restraint.

Cate Blanchett (The Aviator) looks positively radiant here, bringing to life a woman who seems almost intoxicated with ballet, the night air, and men. She is both graceful and passionately absorbed with the things she loves, and Blanchett obviously trained well for the ballet sequences as she delivers dance moves that are stunning. Unfortunately, in scenes where she plays a much older Daisy in the hospital, she is so wheezy and mumbling that I missed half of what she said.

Also unfortunate is the fact that despite quality performances, the characters are simply not endearing. Benjamin reminds me somewhat of Pitt’s turn as Joe Black: Curious to learn about life, but generally monochromatic emotions. Daisy apparently has some depth to her, but insights into why she seems to have some angst in her past are never revealed.

The same is true for the entire cast, really. I was convinced by everyone’s performance, but compelled by none of them – a fault which lies more with the script than the talent pool. The most alluring is Tilda Swinton (Burn After Reading) whose very bearing is irresistible; but as the script requires her to cheat on her husband, I couldn’t really fall for her much.

The film’s production design successfully immerses us in the times and places that Benjamin travels. From Louisiana of the 1930's to a hotel in Murmansk in the 1940's and on up to the present, Donald Graham Burt and his artistic crew create a wonderful atmosphere that is ably captured by cinematographer Claudio Miranda. The images are often truly beautiful.

Overall, it is not at all a bad movie; and odds are that if you like character-based dramas, you will glean some enjoyment out of it. But in the end, it’s just another story. A story that pretends to be important and innovative, but which is little more than the gimmick of Benjamin’s age pasted on to some age-old and very obvious lessons about the human condition.

In other words, the film is not much of a curiosity at all.

My Score: 7

Monday, December 7, 2009

To Eat Fat

Movie Review:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother

PG / 1 hr., 31 min. / 1975

Is there such a thing as a case that Sherlock Holmes (Douglas Wilmer) could not solve on his own? What if the client in question needed to feel safe in the arms of a dashing young man in order to give over the facts of the case? The aging Mr. Holmes would hardly satisfy.

Enter Sigerson Holmes (Gene Wilder), Sherlock’s younger and extraordinarily envious younger brother. Having spent years trying to better his famous older sibling, Sigerson jumps at the chance to finally conquer a mystery that seems to have Sherlock stymied.

Aided by Sergeant Orville Stanley Sacker (Marty Feldman) of Scotland Yard, Sigerson attempts to discern what it is that music hall singer Jenny Hill (Madeline Kahn) is being blackmailed for, and what connection there may be in her case to the theft of a document of national importance; a document which, in the wrong hands, could lead Great Britain into a war. And thus The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother begins its comic romp through the hallowed halls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective.

Fresh from his classic performance as Frederick Frankenstein in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder directed for the first time, working from his own original screenplay. While his first solo effort has plenty of solid laughs and more than a few wry snickers, to place it alongside Young Frankenstein is to see where Wilder on his own could have used Brooks to help spice up the proceedings.

From the very opening scene, where the muttered voices of Lord Redcliffe (John Le Mesurier) and Queen Victoria (Susan Field) are clearly dubbed over for whatever reason, there are tell-tale marks of a first-time and perhaps low-budget directorial effort throughout the production. Wilder also follows his tendency to put a song or two into his scripts. But while “Puttin’ on the Ritz” became one of the signature moments of Young Frankenstein, the presence of “The Kangaroo Hop” in this film is just silly and inexplicable, even more so when it reprises at the end.

However, Wilder’s novice turn in the director’s chair still managed to produce some very clever material that beats out more polished productions even to this day. The initial interview with Jenny Hill and a scene where Sigerson does his best to interpret a coded message continue to strike me as very amusing twenty years after I first saw them. And while the action set pieces are among the more amateur moments, the concepts fueling them are worth a chuckle.

Wilder managed to round up a first-rate team of comedians for the production. Marty Feldman (Young Frankenstein) plays the Watson-like assistant Sacker, who has a “photographic sense of hearing.” If he hears it, he can remember it; and Feldman’s choice to have Sacker knock himself upside the head to get the motor running is delightfully silly. Feldman’s large eyes prove useful for just the right zany look to his whole bearing.

Madeline Kahn (Blazing Saddles) is the charming Jenny Hill, and Kahn once again proves that her sense of comic delivery can steal the show right out from under everyone else. The very tone of voice with which she turns down a cup of tea has been a part of my memories of this film for years. Even when she’s not being deliberately funny, her face and bearing are fine-tuned to bring a smile to audiences’ faces.

Joining in the fun are an exuberant Dom DeLuise (The Glass Bottom Boat) as opera singer and blackmailer Eduardo Gambetti; Leo McKern (Ladyhawke) as Professor Moriarty with a twist; and Roy Kinnear (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) as Moriarty’s hungry assistant. McKern in particular has a long history of much more serious roles, but he manages to contribute to the comedy significantly, including a priceless moment where he corrects Kinnear’s eating habits during an important meeting.

In fact, I think that’s kind of a summary of the film: Priceless moments. While as a whole it does not hold together as strongly and unified as when Wilder worked with Mel Brooks on Young Frankenstein or even The Producers, there are lines, conversations, and whole scenes that do succeed in presenting hilarious dialogue and visuals. A handful of sand in Sigerson’s face, a box of chocolates all over the floor, a cup of hot water instead of tea, a chilly dance through a ballroom – the ingredients to generate good hearty laughter are present.

All of this is dropped into some gorgeous scenery. Terence Marsh creates interior rooms that are lusciously decorated from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. If he's still designing sets when I get a budget, I'm hiring him.

Capping it off is a rousing score by John Morris, another Brooks collaborator. The opening titles are reminiscent of an Errol Flynn adventure, and the movie is granted a grand and exciting atmosphere, even if it doesn’t always totally live up to its music.

For a silly night of popcorn and laughter, have a good time with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. Pair it up as a double-feature with Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley in Without a Clue and your face should be good and tired from laughing when it’s all over.

My Score: 6

Friday, December 4, 2009

One Film to Impress Them All

Movie Review:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

PG-13 / 2 hrs., 58 min. / 2001

I read J.R.R. Tolkein’s massive fantasy adventure The Lord of the Rings about twenty years ago, and I decided at that time that it definitely needed to be remade as a live-action series of films instead of the Ralph Bakshi animated versions. It is with mixed emotions, then, that I must admit defeat to Peter Jackson – defeat because not only did he beat me to it, but because his films are so superb there will be no call for a remake during my lifetime. So I don’t know whether to be excited or sad.

I am writing this review after all three movies have come out, so by now a plot synopsis is probably pointless, but it’s my duty. The four books of the trilogy (the story proper and a prelude) take place in a mythical land called Middle-Earth – perhaps some rabid fans can clue me in here, but I’ve never been able to discern if Middle-Earth is supposedly an era in Earth’s history, or an entirely other fictional world. It is a moot point, as Tolkein provided so much detail in his books that he created a whole new world either way.

This fictional world is populated by all manner of traditional fictional creatures (trolls and elves) as well as a few new inventions (hobbits and ents). The epic revolves around two hobbits (creatures that are human in basic form though significantly shorter), Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) and his nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood), and their adventures in connection with a mysterious and powerful magic ring. Bilbo found the ring in what reads almost as a tangent in The Hobbit; and in The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo passes it on to Frodo.

The ring, we learn, was forged by the evil Sauron, a being we never really see either in the book or the film, but his watchful eye can be felt from great distances. With the help of Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), a powerful wizard, Frodo learns that the ring is Sauron’s evil in material form, basically, and must be destroyed by throwing it into the volcano it was forged out of.

To document Frodo’s adventures would be quite long, but in short: At Gandalf’s instruction, Frodo and his fellow hobbits Samwise (Sean Astin), Meriadoc (Dominic Monaghan), and Pippin (Billy Boyd) set off with the ring. Before long, they are running for their lives from black-cloaked horsemen; following the lead of a mysterious ranger named Strider (Viggo Mortensen); and arriving in the nick of time at Rivendell, an elven city and sanctuary.

At Rivendell, Frodo & Company expands to incorporate Boromir (Sean Bean), a Man who distrusts just about everyone and everything; Legolas (Orlando Bloom), an elf; and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), a dwarf. This counsel determines that the ring must be destroyed before Sauron’s minions find it, and that because of the frailties of the race of Men, only Frodo stands any hope of completing the quest before the lure of the ring consumes him. Thus the titular fellowship of the ring sets off toward Mordor, Sauron’s territory, where the volcano of Mount Doom resides.

At this point the drooling, maniacal devotees of the Tolkein cult (you can recognize them because they are dressed as dwarves and elves at the premieres) are complaining that I have not really and truly delved into the mythos underlying the epic struggle taking place in Middle-Earth, to which I reply: I am on your side, believe me; but I have a limited amount of words in these reviews. Yes, there is much more to the nearly three hours of film than the bland plot summary I have included, and those who wish to know more can either pick up one of the growing plethora of Middle-Earth pseudo-biographical studies appearing on bookshelves, or (here’s a thought) actually watch the movie – which is something I recommend.

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have done a wonderful job of taking a highly detailed book and boiling it down into, well, a highly detailed movie. Although I was one of the voices decrying the absence of Tom Bombadil, I will concede that a literal translation from book to film makes for a stilted movie (cough, cough, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone), and that most of the alterations in the film are acceptable if not always explicable.

Elijah Wood (Deep Impact) has the lengthy task of playing Frodo. Critics have made much of the fact that Frodo does little more than twist his face up into painful contortions over the fact that he must carry the world’s greatest evil across much of the known world, but that’s what Frodo gets to do, and Wood does it well. He has a wonderful face for this role, complete with dazzling blue eyes that add to his persona as a fantasy creature.

The other actors range from satisfactory to excellent, including Ian McKellen’s (X-Men, The Shadow) Oscar-nominated turn as Gandalf, Sean Astin’s (Rudy, Memphis Belle) portrayal of Frodo’s closest friend, and Orlando Bloom’s (Wilde) graceful but deadly elf. The women don’t have a lot to do except stand around and look lovely while speaking at a tempo that would put Modern-Earth to sleep at parties. But they do it well, so props to Cate Blanchett (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Elizabeth) and Liv Tyler (That Thing You Do).

Now, how do I discuss the production values of this film in the space I have left? In sweeping superlatives, I suppose: The Film Looks Wonderful! This is a fantasy film that creates an entirely new world on a grand scale. With the help of computer animation and digital backgrounds, we are taken out of tight studio spaces (Labyrinth) or sets where the back wall is invisible but palpable (Hook) and launched into a full-scale epic covering hundreds of miles of territory and thousands upon thousands of warriors, elven armies, orcs, trolls, goblins, demons, wizards, and other nameless beasts.

The production designer, Grant Major, clearly had his hands full, but obviously loved it because he and his crew of art directors deliver the goods in every set, every costume, every prop. Indeed, every facet of this film could provide an essay on film production by itself, but I will throw out just a couple of quick notes.

The sets, even those portions unaided by computer additions, are wonderful to look at. Hobbiton is perfectly adorable, as it should be for creatures of that disposition. Saruman’s tower is menacing, while Sauron’s fortress is downright terrifying. If you are watching on home video, pause it several times during the Rivendell scenes, look past the actors, and examine the structures they are standing within.

Howard Shore’s musical score is grand and sweeping in its scope. A delicately transparent violin solo presents the countryside of Hobbiton, contrasted with the thick orchestral layers that follow the fellowship across the bridge of Khazad-Dum. A full choir joins the orchestra to enhance the fantastical themes of Middle-Earth.

My word processor is crying out for a lengthy description of the special effects, but I must let it suffice to say that Peter Jackson and his crew have mastered the difficulties of size rations on their very first try. Using a stacked deck of effects tricks, they have maintained the illusion that Elijah Wood as a hobbit is significantly shorter than Viggo Mortensen (Crimson Tide) as a towering Man. To do this has required, at any given moment in the film, creating duplicate scaled versions of many of the sets, forcing the visual perspective, and having human dwarves stand in for the hobbit actors. I imagine the crew’s need to keep track of all the details single-handedly kept the yellow legal-pad companies in business during production.

Despite the hubbub over the fact that this film was the inspiration for an entire new computer animation program, I have my usual complaint regarding computer-generated crowds: When one looks closely, some characters, especially distant ones, look more like high-end computer games than real figures. And one particular close-up shot of Legolas vaulting from the head of a cave troll is especially bad. We have come a long way from the very mechanical CG passengers on board James Cameron’s Titanic, to be sure, but we also still have a long way to go.

As a fantasy-adventure enthusiast, I don’t so much watch a film like this as dive in and let it soak all through me. Mr. Jackson has accomplished something here that will long be remembered, and is perhaps a turning point toward new standards in fantasy-adventure production. So I guess I’ll forgive him that he got to the idea before I did.

My Score: 9

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Honey, Can We Talk?

Movie Review:
Solaris

PG-13 / 1 hr., 39 min. / 2002

There are two kinds of science fiction on the market. There is the Sci-Fi of Technology, where computers develop brains and take over, or spaceships take us deep into unexplored galaxies, or time travel takes us into unfathomable past or future worlds. And there is the Sci-Fi of Idea, where man delves into the philosophical implications of a newly developed technology or a strange new life force.

Most sci-fi movies will include both of these forms in their structure, to varying degrees. The classic sci-fi tales used the Technology aspect as a way of exploring the Idea aspect, such as the way H.G. Wells used time travel to parabolically examine modern society and its trends in The Time Machine; or Jules Verne’s postulations on the possibilities to be gleaned from the ocean floor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

As our culture becomes more immune to the desire to actually think, we have shifted over to sci-fi that is concerned almost exclusively with the Technology and couldn’t care less about the Idea. The Star Wars franchise, while entertaining, is little more than standard mythology retold using Jedi knights, hyperdrives, light sabers, and Wookies. Fun, but check your brains at the door.

This new mentality so exemplifies the meaning of science fiction to most people that it is no wonder they were sorely disappointed by Solaris. There are no explosions. There are no robots. There are no drooling, multi-tentacled, carnivorous aliens. The technology of the one space ship involved is barely even given a passing glance. This is a film that is entirely concerned with the Idea.

There is a spacecraft circling the gaseous planet Solaris, and apparently something unusual is taking place on board. Such is the vague gist of the message that crew member Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) sends down to his friend Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychological counselor on earth. Gibarian’s message asks Kelvin to join him on the spacecraft, and in an effort to escape some painful memories, Kelvin accepts.

Arriving on board the ship, Kelvin is immediately struck by two things: The ship’s apparent vacancy, and splotches of blood on the walkways. After some searching, Kelvin finds two crew members: Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis). Both seem rather disturbed over undefined strange occurrences, not the least of which appears to be Gibarian’s suicide which took place sometime after he sent his message to Kelvin.

Now here’s my problem: On the one hand, if I describe any more of the plot, I will deprive you of the thrill of letting it unfold for itself as you watch. On the other hand, this tack will make it very difficult to discuss the film at all. On the third hand, I’m not sure “thrill” is the right word for describing the film anyway, so further plot revelations may not have anything to ruin. But I’ll play it safe and discuss only what I can.

Solaris is based on the book by Stanislaw Lem, and this is its second incarnation as a film. This adaptation is written and directed by Steven Soderbergh, whose previous works involved a great deal of action and high-stakes tension, so the extraordinarily calm delivery here is something of a surprise. But in general terms, Soderbergh handles it well, guiding us slowly into the depths of the story with long scenes that are visually static but emotionally dynamic.

But it is this snail’s pace that will kill the film for most people. I will not be so phony as to say the pace didn’t bother me at all, but I had heard going in that this was not a whiz-bang action piece, so I was braced for it. Even then, I occasionally lapsed into mental ruminations on other things I could be doing; but as a dedicated film student I got all the way to the end credits.

Why so slow? Because, once again, this is a film about the Idea. And the nature of the Sci-Fi of the Idea is that people sit around exploring the Idea. Aside from flashbacks to earlier scenes in Kelvin’s life, much of the film is Kelvin and a woman named Rheya (Natascha McElhone) dealing with the implications of an Idea that the ship’s crew discovers while circling Solaris. The single longest shot in the movie is of Kelvin and Rheya lying in bed simply talking. (This is also the George Clooney butt-shot scene everyone warned me about, but my thirteen-inch TV screen rendered it only mildly painful to the eyes.)

Within that slowness, the cast delivers a satisfactory performance. George Clooney (Ocean’s Eleven), Natascha McElhone (The Truman Show), Viola Davis (Antwone Fisher), and Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan) all demonstrate ample skill in delivering on an emotionally charged subject – although Davies, as a stoner techie, grows very annoying very quickly. Maybe it’s a tribute to his talent, but I was ready to slap him and tell him just to shut up.

In general, everything successfully contributes to the unity of the production, a feat too many sloppier efforts fail to achieve. In Solaris, the exploration of the Idea is the important thing, so the production design by Philip Messina, costumes by Melina Canonero, and music score by Cliff Martinez are kept appropriately unobtrusive. The score is almost atmospheric, filling the silence with minimalism but never presenting a melody to distract us from the proceedings. The director even fills out the crew with a minimalist mentality: The editing and cinematography are handled by Soderbergh himself under various pseudonyms.

Despite its professionalism, I was somewhat disappointed with the film for a handful of reasons, the first of which is the promotional paragraph on the DVD box. I am growing increasingly tired of inaccurate material designed to lure me into renting something, because inevitably I end up frustrated by the disconnect between what the material leads me to expect and what I actually get.

For Solaris, I was promised a ship filled with bizarre occurrences, something akin to Sphere, perhaps, only a little more thought-provoking. Anyone planning to view this film should ignore that promise, because whoever wrote the DVD sleeve material is lying. What we get is one bizarre occurrence; it is played out several times and in slightly different forms, but it is foundationally the same event repeated. This is not in itself a problem, but it is not what I was led to expect.

A similar comment could be made regarding the film’s first act. The blood splattered around the ship when Kelvin arrives inadvertently promises us something much more dangerous and tense than what we actually get.

Second, the pace could have been tightened a bit without jeopardizing the film’s theme or style. Some shots feel interminable, some of the actors’ meaningful pauses feel too long. I am not advocating wholesale surrender to the fast, choppy editing that is a poor substitute for true cinematic energy; but a general rule is to show what you need to show for as long as you need to show it, then move on. Soderbergh ignores this too often in Solaris.

And third, even a story about an Idea needs some forward momentum. It does not need to involve lasers and haywire robots and Sigourney Weaver blowing up screeching, snarling, deadly life forms. But there should be something requiring the characters to advance the story. Solaris contains no such thing except Kelvin’s increasingly conflicted feelings about the Idea. This can be very successful in a novel, and I imagine the book’s exploration of Kelvin’s thoughts makes for an interesting study. But ultimately, those thought processes do not translate into a consistently enthralling cinematic experience.

But surprisingly, for a film that feels so slow, I feel that the Idea we are presented with is not discussed enough. The film’s 99-minute running time makes any truly deep exploration of the Idea impossible. We are left with a Cliff Notes view of a philosophical dilemma.

The story has a few potential elements of momentum already present in its structure, but fails to make use of them. One such element presents itself within the last ten minutes of the film, but could have added just a dash of tension and urgency if it had been mentioned somewhere around the halfway point instead.

Despite half my review being criticisms, I’m giving the film an above-average rating. It is a good film, and I am, ultimately, glad that my friend Jason recommended it. I think its biggest problem is simply that it had the misfortune of being presented to a public that has long since distanced itself from thought-provoking cinema.

My Score: 8

Monday, November 9, 2009

How the West Was Weird

Movie Review:
Dead Man

R / 2 hrs., 1 min. / 1996

I’d like to get inside Jim Jarmusch’s head. Or maybe I wouldn’t; I’m not sure. His neo-Western tale Dead Man is just bizarre enough that maybe I don’t want to know what he was thinking. The film is unusual, in the sense that a person can suddenly feel unusual stomach cramps or experience unusual pain in unusual places.

William “Bill” Blake (Johnny Depp) arrives by train at the western town of Machine where he has been hired to be an accountant for a metalworks shop. But he is informed twice, the second time at gunpoint, that due to his delay in reaching the town, another accountant has been hired.

Although jobless and nearly penniless, Blake’s gentlemanly nature earns him the attention of a saloon girl (Mili Avital) who takes him to bed, where they are discovered by her former fiancé (Gabriel Byrne) who promptly takes aim and kills the girl. Blake returns fire in self-defense, and manages by the third shot to fatally hit the man. Blake flees the scene in fear, leaving the townspeople to believe that he heartlessly killed both people.

Tired, wounded, and delirious, Blake is befriended by “Nobody” (Gary Farmer), an outcast Indian who once had a proper English education and therefore mistakes Blake for the poet of the same name. “Nobody” becomes Blake’s guide, both geographically and spiritually, leading him to an unknown destination that could be either real or mythical.

Somewhere behind Blake, three bounty hunters (Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, and Eugene Byrd) track him, along with regional law officers and, unofficially, a missionary (Alfred Molina). As Blake becomes more familiar with a gun and the body count rises, the price on Blake’s head rises as well.

As outlined here on my word processor, this sounds like a really good treatment for a movie. I can imagine anyone from Lawrence Kasdan to Kevin Costner swooping down with a sack of money to option the script. But don’t be fooled: There is a great chasm between the potentially exciting tale outlined here and Jarmusch’s particular vision that created the actual product. For my money, I’d like to see the version Jarmusch didn’t make.

The problem does not lie in Jarmusch’s technical abilities to manufacture a film. Shot in black and white with an A-list cast, the film is well assembled. I would not have thought of Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands) to appear in a western setting, but once he’s in costume, he looks satisfactorily like an east coast rube trying to impress the west coast frontiersmen. Depp is a talented actor who can turn himself into almost anything, as evidenced by his long list of eccentric characters: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Cpt. Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, and Willy Wonka, to name a few. For all his talent, here Depp plays Blake as, well, Depp. Depp in a plaid suit. While that may work, I find it hard to believe Depp didn’t find any quirks, tics, or backstory to use in enhancing Blake into something more memorable.

The supporting characters, including Gary Farmer (Adaptation), Crispin Glover (Twister), Lance Henriksen (Super Mario Bros.), Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), and the great Robert Mitchum (Night of the Hunter), are all acclaimed character actors. They inhabit this film as somewhat bent interpretations of personalities from classic westerns. Glover and Thornton in particular perform with a unique edge to their characters that renders them slightly surreal and rather intriguing, albeit befuddling.

Jarmusch also successfully creates his mood, which is definitely moody. The film is not about chase scenes and gun fights; it proceeds slowly and deliberately on its journey, concerned more with atmosphere than action.

There is the lengthy confinement in a railway car, the sprawling vistas of the untamed West, the mesmerizing forests of beech trees. The metal foundry is bleak, junky, labyrinthine, and populated with stringy old men. The whole scene feels like the brainchild of Terry Gilliam. Jarmusch takes full advantage of these elements to create a solid sense of isolation and melancholy. But the question remains: To what good purpose? Or even, to what purpose at all?

This is the overarching problem. I reached the end of the film and had no clue what I was supposed to take from it. Or even if I was supposed to take something from it. I feel similarly clueless with anything Robert Redford directs, but at least with Redford’s films I do feel like he’s trying to tell me something, even if I don’t get it. With Dead Man, I really didn’t even get the sense that there was a message to find at all, though common sense tells me you don’t invest months of your life and a bucket-load of money in something that has no purpose whatsoever.

The film is a collection of oddities that are interesting on their own, but do not contribute to a cohesive whole. The opening scene on a train is not only interminable, but inexplicable. We fade in and out several times as Blake treks across the country. In each new sub-scene, the train is peopled with an entirely new set of characters. Is Blake dreaming? Is he already dead and this film is going to be a metaphor? Or is it just that the train stops at stations and lets on new passengers during each blackout? Although the third answer seems most likely, Jarmusch provides no clues and leaves us doing double-takes.

Before the train ride ends, the engineer played by Crispin Glover comes in, sits down by Blake, and provides the film’s first line of dialogue: “Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you’re in the boat, and then later that night you’re lying looking up at the ceiling and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?” If a train engineer, or any stranger for that matter, took a seat next to me and said that line, and said it with the strange tone of voice that Glover uses, I would be looking for the nearest police officer. This opening does not bode well for the film. But I shrugged off the worries and prepared myself for something a bit skewed.

And skewed it is: Parts of the film feel almost as if Jarmusch were a disciple of the Coen brothers. In particular I think of Blake’s encounter with three fur trappers, including Billy Bob Thornton’s character. The set-up and delivery of the scene is off-kilter, like something Joel Coen would direct. But it’s too weird. Coen characters have a rational eccentricity, if such a paradox is possible. The three fur traders are just odd: One wears a dress, they quote portions of the Bible that don’t relate to anything, and they have a fascination with Blake’s hair, none of which comes together for any definable reason. Unless it has something to do with that portion of the conversation in which the fur traders argue over which of them gets to “do” Blake, which in context could either mean kill him or sexually assault him; I couldn’t quite tell.

On top of all of this, the film is thoroughly marred by its music score. But calling the solo electric guitar that accompanies the entire film a music score is like slapping a giant glove to the collective faces of John Williams, Danny Elfman, and the entire Hollywood and independent film scoring community. Even no music score at all would have been more musical.

So what is the answer? Perhaps the shooting star outside the saloon girl’s room has something to tell us. Or the dead fawn Blake falls asleep next to. Or the lightning bolts “Nobody” paints on Blake’s face.

Perhaps it is in the references to the poet William Blake. “Nobody” quotes Blake’s poetry frequently, and at what seem to be relevant moments, but the relevance escapes me. I wonder if knowing more about the real William Blake would help. I grabbed a few things from Wikipedia to see what could be learned:

“Blake was an important proponent of imagination as the modern western world currently defines the word. His belief that humanity could overcome the limitations of its five senses is perhaps one of Blake’s greatest legacies. His words, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,’ were seen as bizarre at the time, but are now accepted as part of our modern definition of imagination.”

And this: “George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death: ‘He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.’”

While all of this is very informative in its own right, I’m not sure Dead Man has become any more clear to me. William Blake wrote: “Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.” I can point those people out to you: They’re the ones who sat through this movie.

My Score: 4

Thursday, November 5, 2009

When Life Gives You Lemony

Movie Review:
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

PG / 1 hr., 47 min / 2004

The danger in getting extremely excited about an upcoming movie is that one might end up over-anticipating, so that the film, once finally viewed, ends up being not really a bad film, but a disappointment in relative terms. Such was my case with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I absolutely loved the theatrical trailer, which presents a movie I very much wanted to see (despite having never read a word from Mr. Snicket’s typewriter). But once I saw the feature, I felt a little let down.

The film is based on the first three books of the series – The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window – which follow the unfortunate tale of the Baudelaire children: Violet, the inventive oldest sister (Emily Browning); Klaus, the bookworm (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, the two-year old biter (alternately Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). These three are suddenly rendered orphans when a fire burns their house to the ground with their parents in it (all of which is off-screen so your tots won’t be horrified within the first five minutes). The family banker, Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), takes the children to live with their closest relative, the eccentric – and, we soon discover, sinister – Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).

Olaf makes no charade to disguise his real reason for accepting the orphans: He wants the Baudelaire fortune. But since the fortune will not pass to the guardian until the wards die, Olaf sets out to kill them. This is, of course, a dark theme, and one which I would not rush to display before children, although the theater I was in was heavily laden with impressionable youngsters. If there’s a plus side, it’s that the dark themes of this movie are much more subtle than, for instance, Addams Family Values, in which Wednesday and Pugsley commit flagrantly fatal acts upon their newest sibling – and that theater was also filled with impressionable youngsters. Do parents not think anymore? But this is a tangent.

When Olaf’s plan to have the children killed by locking them in a car parked on the railroad tracks fails, Mr. Poe removes them from his custody – not because Olaf tried to kill them, but because he left the youngest, Sunny, in the driver’s seat unattended. Neither Mr. Poe nor any other adults in the film seem to believe the children when they tattle on their uncle.

The second foster parent is Monty Montgomery (Billy Connolly), a reptilian expert, who plans to pack the children off to Peru on a little adventure – until Count Olaf shows up disguised as a fellow scientist. I’m not spoiling anything by pointing out that it is indeed Olaf in disguise, because, although the make-up job is quite good, the children announce it is Olaf just seconds after seeing him. Once again, the dim-witted adult (what is the movie trying to say here?) doesn’t believe the children for a moment. I am not of the extreme view that adults should believe and side with every fancy that a child spurts forth, but I think the grown-ups in the film could have been made a little more sympathetic and/or intelligent.

The third foster home involves Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) who lives practically over the sea, in a shanty that juts out off a high cliff, supported by a rickety collection of beams. There is a comic irony here, because the aunt herself is paranoid about everything (“Don’t get too close to the refrigerator – it might fall and crush you!”). Oh, and Olaf shows up in disguise. I get the idea this is the format of each book in the entire series.

The plot is somewhat episodic this way, given that it comes from three volumes in an ever-expanding series of books. But I do not feel this is a flaw. Momentum is successfully maintained throughout the stor(ies), and it feels like a coherent whole despite its derivation from multiple sources.

I am always hesitant when a film has Jim Carrey cast in anything but a normal human role. He does human well (The Truman Show, The Majestic). When he is given unrestrained freedom, he is unbearable (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). However, and this is important, when his manic personality has a reason for existing, he can be delightful (The Mask). Here, Olaf is a decidedly overboard and terrible actor, so Carrey is an appropriate choice. But he is actually more entertaining, I think, when he is playing Olaf in disguise. His Italian scientist and his Irish sailor are intriguing to study as he performs them.

The relative newcomers as the Baudelaire children are adequate, given that the script does not place them in highly demanding situations. The script and director even seem to have deliberately removed opportunities for Miss Browning and Mr. Aiken to really act, such as in the scene where they learn of their parents’ deaths and simply stare at Mr. Poe standing on the beach.

Billy Connolly (Timeline) and Meryl Streep (Death Becomes Her) seem to have fun in their supporting roles. Both are eccentric and amusing caricatures, Aunt Josephine more so than Uncle Monty. Streep must have been exhausted after every take – she is constantly jittery. For a bonus chuckle, watch her pince-nez: They bounce on her nose as if they are spring-loaded.

Other actors are not on screen enough to be noticed, really, which is a shame, because Timothy Spall (Nicholas Nickleby), Jennifer Coolidge (Best in Show), and Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, Home Alone) are such talented and entertaining performers. And movie-goers familiar with Jane Lynch (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) will get a kick out of her three-second cameo.

Academy-Award winner Rick Heinrichs (Sleepy Hollow) is responsible for the production design, and earned another Oscar nomination because of it. Under his artistic eye, the entire look of the film is excellent, a fantasy world evoking the same visual enjoyment I got out of the Harry Potter movies, and anything directed by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton (a friend of Heinrichs’). Olaf’s house is a ghoulish run-down gothic mansion with carved eyes in several niches and sconces; the countryside is a depressing brown haze; the lakeside town is almost a painting.

And now to the disappointments, the largest of which are what I perceive to be anachronisms, elements out of place for the time and setting. Although the story is apparently set in a fairly contemporary Boston, the film looks and feels like a fantasy version of pre-war England, a notion that the British accents of Mssrs. Spall and Jude Law (Closer) had cemented in my mind not five minutes into the production. I was led to expect something old-fashioned and highly stylized. While this is largely achieved, director Brad Silberling allows a significant number of slips, in things like Carrey’s occasional use of modern lingo (“Let’s cast this puppy!”) in amongst his more grandiose verbal gestures, the presence of a Chrysler Imperial (and an ugly one at that), and Cedric the Entertainer as a police inspector. Certainly no racial offense intended, but Cedric’s very African-American voice simply does not fit the aura created by the other elements of the film. Neither does Olaf’s consuming a beverage from a fast-food paper cup. I could go on.

I suspect these elements are not so much the slips I accuse them of being, but rather evidence that Silberling simply failed to solidify the rules under which his fictional world would function. In the end, these inconsistencies do nothing except wrench us unexpectedly out of the setting that was so beautifully established in the opening few minutes.

The score by Thomas Newman takes some getting used to. I like the riff he employs when Uncle Monty enters the Reptile Room and again when Aunt Josephine opens her Wide Window, but overall the film cries out for the comic menace of either Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri (Mouse Hunt – what a beautiful Main Title Theme). Very little of the score stands out as anything appreciable; I think the best moment is the musical number, “Loverly Spring,” right at the beginning. And Newman’s composition for the closing credits is just plain wrong – horribly out of place, like the Imperial and Cedric.

I have a natural love for wonderfully fantastic tales set in somewhat off-kilter worlds, especially as viewed through the eyes of a child. I think of the works of Roald Dahl, John Bellairs, and the tales of Dr. Seuss. From what I saw in this film, the works of Lemony Snicket could be added to the list – his stories carry all the necessary ingredients to make the kind of film I could positively drool over. But this first entry, in what I hope will be an ever-improving series, feels a little undercooked. Which is unfortunate.

My Score: 7

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sleeping Beauties

Movie Review:
Coma

PG / 1 hr., 53 min. / 1978

When you’re selecting reading material for an extended stay in the hospital, make sure you do not bring anything by Robin Cook. As a former medical professional, Cook found his niche in the specialized genre of the Medical Thriller. In fact, he may have even been the genre’s creator. In his books, heinous crimes are committed upon the helpless patients strapped to surgical tables and ambulance gurneys, often by the hospital personnel themselves. Once you’ve finished a Cook novel, you’ll never look at your nurse the same again.

Based on one of Cook’s earlier efforts, the film Coma is about Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold), physician at a major hospital, whose life is thrown into upheaval when one of her best friends comes in for surgery and fails to revive after the procedure. She remains in an inexplicable coma, and Wheeler wants to find the medical explanation.

When a second patient suffers a similar fate, Wheeler becomes convinced that something is not right. An unauthorized look into the hospital records reveals that a total of a dozen such cases have occurred within the past year, a failure rate that is suspiciously high.

But Wheeler is hampered at all turns. Her boyfriend Dr. Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas) thinks her claims of a sinister plot are irrational; the head of anaesthesiology (Rip Torn) rankles at her insinuation that his department may be to blame; and her supervisor Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark) threatens her with dismissal if she persists in violating hospital policy to solve the puzzle.

I had originally intended to spell out more of the plot, but that would deflate the suspense and fun of watching it unfold. In short, Wheeler is determined to find out why so many comas are occurring at the hospital, and her quest becomes increasingly harrowing.

Cook’s novel is brought to the screen by Michael Crichton, whose own novels are excellent tales of suspense and often nail-biting terror – even though they all end with the usual violent explosion that destroys whatever the problem was. My wife has read Coma and informs me that Crichton’s script adaptation is reasonably faithful, cutting or combining characters only to keep the film from sprawling out over an entire evening. And to convey the many technical medical concepts present in the book, Crichton inserts medical interns into the scenes where there were none in the book. This enables the doctors to explain everything out loud and thus Crichton makes sure the viewing audience doesn’t get lost in all the terminology.

I write a full thirty years after the film was released in theaters, and it does have a somewhat dated feeling. But it still holds up, thanks to Crichton’s skilled directing, which is remarkably captivating considering that it was only his third effort at the time. Just as Steven Spielberg demonstrated with Duel, Crichton has a respectable grasp of generating suspense using ordinary people in ordinary places. With no dinosaurs, killer apes, or alien spheres, Crichton takes a very common woman and puts her in an increasingly tense mystery. If you can look past the film stock quality, hairstyles, and a slightly slower pace than later thrillers, you’ll find a film as gripping as anything being produced today.

French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold (Dead Ringers) brings a nice combination of vulnerability and resolution to her role. She is not brashly unstoppable, but neither is she spineless in her efforts to unearth the truth. Her accent takes a little getting used to, but it is only a minor hurdle to our enjoyment of the story.

I had forgotten that Michael Douglas (The China Syndrome) was once a young man, but there he is. I think he’s gotten better with age, but he plays his role acceptably here. In a twist probably inspired by the feminism of the 1970's, he finds himself with the role of “nagging wife” that so many Hollywood actresses normally end up in – not a lot to do except alternately encourage and rebuke the Main Character.

The film is peopled with names that have grown to become stars, including Rip Torn (Men in Black), Tom Selleck (Three Men and a Baby), and Ed Harris (The Truman Show). Not that any of their performances blew me away; it was just a kick to see these now-prominent actors in their formative stages. Torn and Harris in particular are so young here I didn’t recognize either of them at first glance.

In watching a thriller of any type, we expect to be drawn to the edges of our seats, and Coma generally succeeds. There are at least three suspenseful set pieces, the most famous of which is Wheeler’s escape from the Jefferson Institute, the medical auxiliary that cares for the hospital’s coma victims. Crichton’s envisioning of Cook’s futuristic tale produces the film’s classic image: Bodies in tranquil repose, suspended several feet off the floor and bathed in eerie shades of light. And the Institute’s administrator, Mrs. Emerson (Elizabeth Ashley), doesn’t lighten the mood any, with her impersonation of a Stepford wife in a nurse’s uniform.

Overall, the film’s only significant weaknesses are due to its age. Portions of the acting, lighting, editing, and music are slightly less polished than if the film were made today. But then, if the film were made today, the producers would also want to put in language, sex, and gore that really wouldn’t enhance the story one bit, nor make it more suspenseful. It is strong as it is. (Miss Bujold does, however, display some nudity in a couple of scenes, and it is clear that she lives with someone not her husband. The film would probably earn a PG-13 rating today.)

I could delve further into this critique, but I would run the risk of revealing details that are more fun simply to experience as they unfold. In short, while I’ve never heard anyone describe Coma as a “classic,” it is well worth the viewing, plain and simple. Grab the popcorn and turn down the lights. Just don’t let the nurse take you into surgery afterwards.

My Score: 8

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Just Eat Them Already

Movie Review:
Open Water

R / 1 hr., 19 min. / 2004

Despite the number of films out there that are “based on a true story,” real life does not lend itself well to movies. The daily existence of most people is quite ordinary, which, of course, is why screenwriters exist: They hunt down those intriguing little nuggets of real life that do hold some interest and then punch them up a bit with colorful characters, spicy dialogue, a well-rounded three-act structure, and so forth.

Open Water is based on one of those intriguing little nuggets of real life. The film’s story is simple and sounds much like the news copy of the event: A couple (Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan) take a vacation to a seaside town where they sign up for a scuba diving pleasure cruise. While they are enjoying close-up views of reefs and exotic fish, the boat captain makes a fatal calculation in counting the number of people who have come back to the boat. Believing that all passengers are back aboard, the captain returns to shore, and the couple re-surface to see nothing but ocean on all sides.

With no hope of swimming the vast leagues to shore, or of catching the attention of any of the ships on the distant horizon, the couple float along together as the current takes them into unknown territory. As the hours pass, they talk, they distract themselves with little word games, they unleash pent-up fury over their situation, they argue over who got them into this mess, they cry, they reconcile. And they notice the sharks.

Innocent bystanders trapped in dangerous and seemingly inescapable places can result in very suspenseful films. I think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, or the recent sci-fi indie film Cube. The foundational premise for Open Water is equally fascinating, made more gripping by the fact that it is drawn from actual headlines. Here we have the sheer terror of a vast ocean separating us from safety, with unseen dangers surrounding us and circling closer with every passing hour.

But there is a foundational problem that frustrates any attempts at Open Water becoming a great movie: The creators tried too hard to create Real Life. They opted to discard Hollywood’s polished dialogue, experienced performers, professional lighting and imaging, or emotional orchestral score; and what they produced is Exhibit A in why Hollywood’s techniques produce better movies. Everyone who complains about the tepid products the Hollywood Machine puts out should see Open Water to learn how boring the alternative is. (Of course, there is the third option – well-made indie films – but these are basically just Hollywood-quality production values with fresher ideas in the foundation.)

In looking at Chris Kentis’ script, there is very little to work with. We really only have one central crisis – a couple isolated in shark-infested waters – and one crisis does not fill out a film very well. There are minor crises along the way, such as the encounter with jellyfish, but these elements are spurious. Take Finding Nemo, where Marlin’s and Dory’s swim through a sea of jellyfish has ramifications in the story: Marlin takes another step toward real courage, he demonstrates that he cares about Dory despite being frustrated by her, and he earns the respect and aid of the sea turtles. In Open Water, once the jellyfish have moved on, so has any concern or consequence regarding them; they have absolutely no lingering effect on the characters or the situation. And this is the recurring trend throughout the entire film.

Certainly an attempt is made to have the crisis push the couple over a character arc. They start as a fairly well-adjusted duo who are rather confused at finding no boat on the water’s surface. They wonder if maybe they swam too far afield during the dive. As reality sinks in, they get nervous. As time passes and they are able to really absorb their situation, the husband starts relieving stress by shouting to the gods, which irritates the wife, which sparks a heated argument about why they were scuba diving at all instead of being off on a different holiday, which they would have been if “you weren’t always so busy at work,” and so on. But it is a weak effort that failed to captivate or engage me, either because it stuck too closely to its predictable template or because it just sounded too mundane, I can’t decide. The dialogue comes across like an obligatory plot device rather than the natural inspired conversation of two desperate people. Who knows what a great writer could have done with this same scenario. I’d love to hear the couple’s conversation as per David Mamet, for example.

There is an utter extraneousness to the entire script, in fact. The film opens with the husband and wife packing for the trip. In a professional screenplay, this scene would contain either dialogue or visuals that would serve a function: Perhaps foreshadowing something to come, or providing important insight into the personalities of the couple. Alas, no, the scene says little more than “Here is the man, here is the woman.” Okay, there is a hint that they are both a little bit modernized, dependent on their laptops; but like the jellyfish, this facet of their characters has no part to play later on.

The packing scene is supposed to be clever – the husband is in the car, the wife is in a house somewhere, they’re on cell phones talking to each other, and it turns out they’re a mere thirty feet apart – but plays so much like ordinary life that it is blandly uninteresting. And even claiming it plays like real life is a stretch, as all of the scenes before they hit the water are so poorly acted they feel like some of my early home video productions.

The same uselessness is true for the scenes at the beach hotel where they spend the night before diving, unless you happen to enjoy explicit nudity. They talk like an ordinary couple, they have some romance and she announces she just doesn’t feel like “doing it” tonight, they go to sleep, they get up in the morning. The truth is, we could have gone straight to the couple arriving on the dock, run the opening credits over their getting on the boat, and not be missing any critical information at all.

I don’t know the circumstances under which the real couple in the true story got abandoned at sea, but the method used in this film seems sloppy. I cannot believe that a professional scuba diving tour boat company would be so careless in keeping track of the identities of the passengers, especially in our hyper-litigious society where a mistake like that would have lawyers swarming over the managers faster than Democrats flocking to Ohio to demand a recount.

Once the couple hits the water, the acting kicks in a bit, and there is a certain believability to Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan, minus the dialogue’s drawbacks and the plot’s one-note crisis. I wouldn’t be surprised if either one of these performers shows up in another production. After all, if Hollywood is willing to keep hiring Keanu Reeves, then Travis and Ryan are shoe-ins.

For me, as a videographer, the worst part about the film is the image itself. It is painfully obvious that the production was shot on a video camera. A good video camera, yes, but still a video camera. There is a distinct blur that is only achieved by shooting at 30 frames per second on video and transferring to film at 24 frames per second. This is bad enough to view in theaters, but when the 24 FPS image is sent back to DVD at 30 FPS with a 3/2 pull-down, there is no hope left for any kind of quality image. (Even if those technical terms meant nothing to you, you can see the difference by watching any movie shot on film and sent to video, and compare the look with Open Water.) At least projects like Time Code and The Blair Witch Project had the courtesy to send their original video edits straight to video instead of using the film print as an intermediate.

On top of this, many shots in the film look as though the cinematographer had the video camera’s aperture set to Automatic. You know Uncle Joe’s home videos, where he walks out of the house, and as he does so, the back yard is horridly bright and white until the camera quickly re-adjusts and fades to a more natural level? Unbelievably – for people who knew enough to make this production at all – shots in Open Water do the same very unprofessional thing, making it feel like a cheap home video rather than a note-worthy artistic endeavor.

Do I have anything good to say? Yes, actually, two things. Specifically, there is one very admirable shot that captures the essence of Hitchcock’s belief that “Less Seen is More Frightening.” Toward the end, the camera is at water’s level, with waves lapping at the lens, and for a mere fraction of a second, we get a glimpse underwater at the teeming mass of sharks. It goes by so fast, but it is just enough to be absolutely terrifying. (The effect is deflated when we get a longer shot a few seconds later, but by itself the first shot is suspenseful cinematography at its best.)

And generally speaking, I appreciate the effort. Here we have a man taking available pro-sumer technology and fashioning a finished product. Chris Kentis took a boat, a couple cast members, and some crew, and spent several weekends hammering out the production – no easy task. Kentis is living his dream (I assume), and I always reserve a certain amount of applause for fellow novice film makers like myself who actually venture out and get something done. It’s unfortunate that his premiere opus is so hollow and inconsequential on an artistic level; but everyone starts somewhere, and Open Water undoubtedly provided Kentis with experiences that he will improve upon.

My Score: 3

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Days of Greek Lives

Movie Review:
Troy

R / 2 hrs., 43 min. / 2004

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and beware of German directors bearing films: One takes your city, the other takes your money at the box office – both leave you nothing in return. Well, “nothing” is a bit harsh for Wolfgang Petersen’s latest effort, but it’s like getting food as a Christmas present: Once you’ve eaten it, the enjoyment is all over.

One would think the myths behind the battle over Troy would make a really good movie. A lot of sweeping, epic war scenes; political intrigue; and, if you’re into that sort of thing, a bunch of semi-naked hunks running around. Specifically, Orlando Bloom for the teen chicks, Brad Pitt for the lonely housewives, and Eric Bana for anyone I left out. Personally, I saw more of any of those men than I ever wanted to see.

I cannot speak for how Troy the movie relates to Troy the history, so I shall speak of the film alone, which plays like a soap opera dropped in the middle of ancient Greece. Achilles (Brad Pitt) is a morose, melancholic warrior, tired of being ordered around by King Agamemnon (Brian Cox). He wants his own fame, his own legendary status, a name to live on after him into eternity.

Agamemnon and his army are on a quest to subjugate all the separate city-states of Greece under one ruler. He has been tremendously successful so far, needing only Troy. His brother Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) is attempting to woo Troy’s fealty through peaceful talks with princes Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris (Orlando Bloom). Those talks have a slight break-down when Paris seduces Menelaus’ wife and queen Helen (Diane Kruger) away from him. The pursuit back to Troy is on, and the Trojan War erupts. I did not have time to verify that a thousand ships were in the fleet, however.

The rather long second act of the film involves Achilles leading the pack into the fray on the beaches of Troy and taking a vestal virgin from the temple as a hostage, in fact saving her life from the brutality of his fellow warriors. He falls in love with her, she falls in love with him, and somewhere in there his famous heel comes into play, but I won’t spoil it.

Meanwhile, Hector prepares to defend the city, Paris tries his hand at a one-on-one competition for Helen’s hand, Priam (Peter O’Toole) sits around looking nervous, and arrows fly back and forth.

Critics have positively savaged the film, but I would like to start by saying it’s not all that bad for what it’s worth, being a piece of summer escapism. It’s not all that good, either, but as something to sit and be amused by for a couple of hours, it generally succeeds, at least for me. I felt amused. There you have it. But it is definitely flawed, occasionally boring, sometimes laughable, largely uninspired beyond its predecessors, and generally not worth a second ticket.

So what went wrong? It’s hard to say, really. For me, the biggest detractor was the lack of a real hero. I’m assuming Achilles is our “Main Hero” since Brad Pitt (Ocean’s Eleven) looms across the movie poster and his name is the headliner. But for a protagonist, he does little if nothing at all to enlist our sympathies, our interest, or our admiration. Sure, he’s a supernaturally gifted warrior, but he’s cold, heartless, uninterested, lifeless, droll, moping – the list goes on.

I guess we’re meant to have our hearts cheered by the transformation Achilles undergoes upon taking the vestal virgin (Rose Byrne) back to his tent. The man who once would have raped her without question instead cleans her wounds and treats her gently. She softens to her captor, seeing past all the dirt and sweat and finding a heart, I suppose. Whatever she sees in him, they end up in a passionate embrace (happens all the time between brutal rapist captors and their victims!), and Achilles has found something worth living for. Well, okay. But I can’t say my heart went out to the darling couple in their final scene together.

Paris can hardly count as the story’s hero. He commits adultery and then encourages Helen to run away from her husband and live with him. Both of them falsely call what they feel for each other “love.” True love would have respected the marriage bond.

The closest one to being a halfway noble character is Hector. Unfortunately, he is willing to shelter Paris’ indiscretion and sacrifice hundreds or thousands of Trojan lives for it. So he misses the mark, too. But at least he wrestles with ethical issues and tries to do something brotherly instead of being wholly self-absorbed like Paris.

This ignoble storyline is not really helped by any of the technical aspects. Granted, the film is capably made. The fight scenes are big, the political scenes are well acted, the love scenes are steamy. The problem is that none of it, individually or as a whole, rises above anything that has come before. It is merely one more entry in the Big Ancient Epic Battle genre. It’s like when some new actor wants to try his hand at Hamlet or Othello even though these productions have been put on a million times. I’m guessing Petersen, Pitt, Bana (Hulk), Bloom (Kingdom of Heaven), O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia), and the others involved saw an opportunity to work on a story they’ve “always wanted to try,” even though there was no call for it.

There was one, count it, one scene that caught my attention with its visuals. I won’t spoil it, but it involves giant flaming balls of rope, which looks quite cool and which isn’t as silly as it sounds on paper.

Since it’s the Trojan War, you know the Trojan Horse is going to figure into it. And one neat shot shows the horse resting in the Trojan courtyard late at night, still, silent – and suddenly dispensing warriors from its interior. But one of the screenplay’s biggest faults is the shameless way it brings the horse into the story.

A hopeless Odysseus (Sean Bean) sits by the campfire determined to find a way into Troy’s impenetrable walls. Next to him, a fellow warrior chisels a little horse out of wood to give to his son one day. A light goes on in Odysseus’ brain, and he engineers the construction of a hollow wooden horse to hide in. Now, usually a solution to a problem is based on, you know, an inspiration actually related to it. So would it not have made more sense to have Odysseus watching someone, I don’t know, hollow something out? And hide something in it? For all the lame dialogue and action, this has to be the worst moment of the film, a complete lapse in screenwriter David Benioff’s mental capacities as he was typing away.

Well, I started by accusing critics of savaging the film, and I have pretty much done the same. I will repeat my assessment that the film is not actually all that horrible. It is entertainment, and it is entertaining. It was created by a capable cast and crew, from photography to costuming to sets to the music score.

Like Achilles, it has fatal weaknesses. But unlike the Trojan War itself, no one will be talking about this film millennia from now. Probably not even into the next decade.

My Score: 5