Public Enemies (2009)

The country is in the grip of an economic depression. Banks have lost fortunes. Criminals run amok, with sharp-dressed men preying on the weaknesses of financial institutions. Inept Feds are seemingly helpless to combat the crime wave. The Bernard Madoff story? There will, no doubt be movies made about Madoff's crimes, but Public Enemies looks back, with a small measure of ambivalent admiration, at the life and crimes of John Dillinger. Madoff is unlikely to be treated as kindly by history.

Dillinger was once known as Public Enemy Number One, and as portrayed by Johnny Depp, he was a suave, smart, courtly criminal who was savvy about maintaining his public image. He robbed banks, which made him a Robin Hood of sorts to Depression era Americans who didn't mind seeing the robber barons robbed for a change. The press made him a celebrity, along with other gangsters of the time, like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, some of whom also turn up in Public Enemies.

The movie opens in 1933 with a bold, efficiently choreographed jailbreak in which Dillinger busts his gang out of the Indiana State Pen. One man diverges from the plan, another is killed. Dillinger, it is immediately apparent, is loyal to his friends, but also unforgiving and ruthless. A little more is learned about Dillinger in the film, but not a lot -- he himself sums up his life in only a few sentences when seducing girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). Public Enemies follows a year in the life of John Dillinger -- the last, eventful year of a brief but eventful life, and one in which his celebrity status grew and the law closed in. There's not much more offered about Dillinger -- this is not a movie interested in digging into his childhood, or exploring his innermost thoughts, or in sentimentalizing and romanticizing him. Public Enemies is less interested in a psychological portrait than in looking at elements of a bigger, cultural picture: the cult of celebrity (especially criminal celebrity), the erosion of civil liberties in the name of law enforcement, tabloid journalism, and our enduring fascination with the gangsters of the thirties, about whom so many movies have been made.

Public Enemies is unlike any other film made about the gangsters of the period. Directed by Michael Mann, whose influence on modern crime films is substantial, it is artistically ambitious and serious, violent and dark, and ambivalent about romanticizing both criminals -- even the Dillingers and Robin Hoods -- and crimefighters. Mann shot Public Enemies in high-def digital video, which gives the movie a sharp, sometimes cold look that corresponds to its crisply clear-eyed, meticulous nature. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti gradually and subtly turns the lights down on the film, and, as Dillinger's life grows increasingly dark, and his prospects dim, so too does the movie. Depp offers a correspondingly low-watt performance in which Dillinger's charisma and charm are present, but there is ambivalence about the costs associated with his career and lifestyle. Dillinger appears to be cold, calculating and violent because his job requires it, and he loves his job. He is his job, in a certain sense, which makes Dillinger, in his odd way, an exemplar of the midwestern work ethic.

Public Enemies has perhaps more to say about law enforcement than about lawbreaking, and there the movie, written by Mann with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, is less ambivalent. G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) heads the FBI task force gunning for Dillinger, and participates in the formation of a new, more professional FBI, one that uses scientific methods to catch criminals. While Dillinger was winning hearts and minds with his bank robberies, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), dreaming of a New Model Army, attempted his own public relations campaign, which meant stopping criminals like Dillinger by any means necessary. Hoover is vaguely credited in the film with ushering in an age of ruthlessness in law enforcement, and an interpretive looseness with law and liberty that, we can safely say, persists to this day. Purvis himself is ambivalent (perhaps tormented) about some of the means used, such as tactics that in these euphemistic times might be called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Bale is an interesting choice for the role, which, in a far less flashy way, mirrors his role as Batman -- both are violent, ruthless, questionable and questioning crimefighters. Like Dillinger, Purvis is at bottom a cold realist, and determined to get the job done. But as with Dillinger, Public Enemies does not spend much time looking into the soul of the G-man.

So what is Public Enemies about? In some ways, it is as much about gangster movies as it is about gangsters and G-men. Dillinger watched a Clark Gable gangster movie called *Manhattan Melodrama* on the last night of his life. Public Enemies is no melodrama -- it's fairly stripped of sentiment and sensation, with unhammy performances and unstagy, matter-of-fact, fast and frantic, bullets-flying-everywhere action. It's a movie driven by brutal, unsentimental fact more than legend. It pulls the audience back, repeatedly, from any habit or impulse to glamorize or sentimentalize criminals, crimefighters, and violence. It is not a movie of deep feeling, and so, it is not a movie that leaves one feeling much. But in some ways, that emotional detachment is also what it is about. It's a detachment that serves as a palate cleanser, to make it possible to rethink, in a more intellectual way, the simplistic cops and robbers model of moviemaking and mythmaking.

Away We Go (2009)

In Away We Go, a pair of adorable, smart, educated, self-employed thirty-somethings discover they're going to have a baby. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) live like college students in a shabby, rundown, unheated house with unreliable electricity. But they live near Burt's parents, their future daughter's only grandparents. Pretty sweet.

Then the soon-to-be grandparents (Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) excitedly announce that they're moving to Antwerp. Before the baby arrives. This is evidence of their self-absorption, and it prompts a crisis in Burt and Verona. They want to be good parents, not moving-to-Antwerp type parents, and they want to raise their child in the sort of place that would allow for, as Burt describes it, an idealized sort of "Huck Finn-y childhood." Fair enough. A road trip ensues, as Burt and Verona visit various friends and relations in various locales, auditioning communities and neighbors for their nascent family. What they find is not good.

It is meant to be not good in a funny way in this movie directed by Sam Mendes and written by husband and wife literary team Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. And Away We Go is spasmodically funny, but also generally unpleasant. Their friends are all parenting disasters -- caricatures of loud, obnoxious, self-absorbed individuals, or people suffocating in their own unhappiness and grief. There's not a happy, well-adjusted, intact family in the bunch, and certainly not the sort of idealized, all-American family Burt and Verona seem to be looking for. (But wasn't Huck Finn's father a mean, abusive drunk? Maybe they are finding that Huck Finn-y childhood they were looking for. Maybe Burt and Verona are barking up the wrong family trees.)

The friends all fail their auditions, but as caricatures, they offer some comic relief in a film that is generally sort of mopey and wan (like the soundtrack, dominated by songs by Alexi Murdoch). The first failure is Lily (Allison Janney), Verona's former boss, and a loud, vulgar drunk with a spray-can tan, sullen kids, and an even more sullen husband (Jim Gaffigan). But Lily is no worse than Burt's cousin LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a soft-spokenly strident gender studies professor who drives a Prius and is militantly opposed to putting her children in strollers. She takes political correctness and New Age hokum to the far end of the spectrum, where they are laid out for ridicule. Janney and Gyllenhaal are both awfully funny, and their utterly awful mothers stand out in a movie in which maternal instincts have gone completely haywire, if they're present at all. If the actresses were not such over-the-top hoots, you might feel bad about hating their characters as much as you are clearly supposed to hate them. But if Krasinski and Rudolph were not such cute and charming actors, you might also be inclined to slap them around a bit and tell them to grow up already.

Which is to say that Away We Go is occasionally amusing because of good performances and appealing actors, but it is not especially involving or interesting. There is something ad hoc and inauthentic about Away We Go -- the characters never quite seem like real people who inhabit a real world. They are types, and the types are on display like diorama exhibits in a sort of Museum of Suburban Misery as imagined by gently smug, freewheeling young adults such as Burt and Verona. We must extend the category of "young adult" here to include thirty-somethings having a self-made crisis in which each exemplar of broken family tells them something about the sort of people they don't want to be, and the kind of family they don't want to have. Burt and Verona are hothouse flowers -- their foray into the world outside convinces them that they like living in a hothouse, and that they just have to find a different, better location for their hothouse, and their little bud. They might want to rethink the Huck Finn-y childhood, however.

29Jun2009

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

If you have a passing familiarity with science and prehistory, you might well wonder what kind of crazy mixed up revisionist monkey business the creators of Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs are getting up to. Dinosaurs in the Ice Age? Coexisting with mammals? Sure, why not? If you can accept talking mammoths and sloths palling around with sabertooth tigers, why have a problem with Paleolithic-Jurassic mashups? Anyway, prehistory is not what your kids will be asking about after they see Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. They're going to have some questions about families, and childbirth, more likely, because the movie is all about the many ways that families are formed, and the bonds that hold them together.

They're wacky families, of course. In this third Ice Age movie, woolly mammoth Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) and his baby mama mammoth Ellie (Queen Latifah) are expecting a little bundle of woolly joy. The other members of their quirky "herd," Diego the sabertooth tiger (Denis Leary), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), and possums Crash and Eddie (Seann William Scott and Josh Peck) anxiously await the new arrival. When Sid finds some dinosaur eggs in an underground ice cave, he becomes a single "mother" (in his own words) to a brood of cute little T. rexes. And then he gets kidnapped by fierce Mom T. rex, occasioning a rescue operation that takes his pals to a subterranean Jurassic world occupied by lots of dinosaurs and one crazy weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg), whose nemesis is a terrifying white T. rex known as Rudy. Meanwhile, Scrat the hapless squirrel still hunts that elusive acorn (his own white whale, of sorts) and finds himself in a wordless love-hate relationship with a duplicitous but foxy lady squirrel.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the first of the Ice Age movies to get the 3-D treatment, and the animators at Blue Sky have done a nice job of it, using the technology to add depth and texture to the animation. (According to my six year old companion, taking the 3-D glasses off during the scary bits of the movie -- which makes everything kinda fuzzy -- makes them less scary, which is an added benefit of the technology.) The movie boasts some terrific action sequences involving hot lava, zooming pterodactyls, chompy raptors, and prehistoric bobsledding, and also a lot of laughs, both for the kids (fart jokes, gooey slime) and for their elders (refs to Jaws, Moby Dick, The Flintstones and the complexities of romance). It's just the sort of shenanigans you'd expect from a bunch of goofy mammals lost in a Jurassic park.

The Ice Age gang, as it has always been, is composed primarily of single male critters whose yearning for familial bonds and comforts is expressed in different ways. Sid, the goofy, googly-eyed sloth, embraces the role of very nontraditional surrogate mom with gusto, and he's both an adopter and an adoptee in his unusual interspecies family. Ellie and mother T. rex represent the fuzzy and savage dimensions of motherhood, and moms as both protectors and cuddlers-in-chief. Manny's got the traditional overprotective father role, and the rest of the gang serve as honorary uncles in a story that embraces the "it takes a herd" approach to childrearing. In other words, there's plenty of cute and cuddly to go with the ferocious and frantic, and between all the 3-D enhanced falling off of cliffs and dodging of rampaging raptors, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs offers up characters and a story with depth and dimension too.

22Jun2009

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

How timely is The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, how perfect for these days when past mistakes and misdeeds persistently bubble to the surface, ruining any illusions we might have of smooth sailing ahead. In this remake of the 1974 thriller (which was also set in a time of financial ruin and decline), a ruthless, vengeful madman named Ryder (John Travolta) takes a NYC subway car and 19 passengers hostage. Ryder demands ten million dollars in ransom, and gives the city one hour to cough it up, but what's interesting about him is the way he peppers his ransom demands with financial jargon. He's obviously not your ordinary, bottom-feeding predator, this Ryder, but some subspecies of Wall Street shark, accustomed to life at the top of the food chain.

The mayor of this post-9/11, mid-recessional city (James Gandolfini) is a Rudy/Bloomberg hybrid - he lacks the appetite for grandstanding, but not for philandering, and he's a tycoon who knows how to swim in shark-infested waters. The hapless man in the middle of the shark tank is Walter Garber (Denzel Washington), a dispatcher working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority -- it's his job to make sure the trains run on time. It's one of Garber's trains that gets hijacked, and it's Garber that Ryder wants to talk to.

Much of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 takes place in the claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit confines of the hijacked train, in the even more claustrophobic oily blackness of the subway tunnels, and in the MTA control center, and much of the movie is just Garber and Ryder talking over the radio. Director Tony Scott likes a moving target, and if he doesn't have one, he makes one. His camera bobs and weaves In The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and his kinetic, energetic visuals mimic the rhythms of the trains, and the way the world looks through the windows of a moving subway car -- a blur of fast movement, and flickering, zoetrope-like impressions of a static tableau set in motion. Windows and computer screens (as high tech windows) figure prominently in the look of the film, and frame the action, and, in rare still moments, resemble the frames of a strip of movie film. The dialogue in Brian Helgelund's screenplay fixes on the radio-mediated back and forth between Ryder and Garber as each man tries to suss out the other, and get a glimpse into his adversary's soul through carefully chosen words.

There are a few holes in the plot, and the ending is perhaps less plausible than all that precedes it, but The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is an efficient, compelling, utterly watchable and absorbing thriller. The action is choreographed to perfection, and the filmmakers take Ryder's one hour deadline seriously -- there's no padding in this lean movie, which, allowing for some before and after, clocks in at an hour and 35 minutes. But tucked in between the movement and mishegas of the hijacking and hostage-taking, the negotiations and spasms of violence, the movie efficiently packs in a parable about greed, easy money, and moral choices.

Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler keeps the movie's palette natural, which is to say, unnatural -- the greenish hue of the subway car and the cool blues and hot reds of the control center dominate (Garber, with his mustard shirt and amber glasses, represents some kind of earthy, grounded middle). When the film is above ground, the camera is usually flying high above, but always ready to plunge back into the subterranean darkness, because this is a movie about moral turpitude, and the battle between the light and the dark, both within two men, and within the soul of the city. Ryder, down in the dark, is angry, whiny and self-righteous. He's the sort of guy who spreads pain and blame, assigning responsibility for all of his misdeeds elsewhere. It's no accident he speaks the language of money, greed, excess, and personal unaccountability. Travolta deftly balances Ryder on the sharp edge of insanity -- he is predictable and rational, but only because he is brutally cunning, and does exactly what he says he will do no matter how insane it is. Washington's Garber is no saint -- he's worked his way through the ranks of the Transit Authority, from motorman to supervisor, but appears to be working his way back down following his own minor financial scandal. He's the quiet, stoic everyman here, to contrast with Travolta's hyperbolic, voluble kvetcher. Ryder fixates on what he has in common with Garber, and the mayor (mired in a career-imploding marital scandal). And The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 boils down to this question -- what's the difference between the good guys and the bad guys? Is it luck? Choices? Temperament? Character? Garber's got something essential -- moral fiber perhaps -- that Ryder lacks. Whatever it is, it's the reason Garber is on the side of right (most of the time, anyway), and Ryder isn't, and why Ryder has to warm himself in a cloak of righteousness, and Garber doesn't. And that's as timely (and timeless) a story as any in tumultuous times like these.

15Jun2009

Drag Me To Hell (2009)

Long before he brought Spider-Man to vivid life, director Sam Raimi specialized in raising the dead. As a young horror auteur, Raimi's Evil Dead movies were cheeky, invigorating, horrifying, and grueling. Raimi tweaked genre conventions with slapstick humor to make movies that were as funny as they were scary and disgusting. In Drag Me To Hell, Raimi takes a break from mega-blockbuster superhero movies to return to his prime, evil roots. He's still got it. Drag Me To Hell is scary, creepy horror that's also funny and deeply disgusting.

The victim this time around is Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a kindly young bank loan officer. Christine is hoping for a promotion to assistant manager, but her boss tells her she's a bit too soft for such a tough job. To prove her mettle, Christine turns down an old one-eyed gypsy woman who pleads for one more extension on her mortgage payment, lest she lose her home of many years. Old Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) has fallen on hard times, but this is not a story about banks that give risky mortgages to people with no money. That would be a different kind of horror movie.

Christine may know banking, but she's not savvy about avoiding impending doom. Never rebuff an old, one-eyed gypsy crone, or you are just asking for trouble. Although she turns the old lady down in the nicest possible way, trouble is what Christine gets, when icky, unforgiving Mrs. Ganush, with her gnarly, scabrous fingers and rotten dentures, lays a curse on her. Much screaming follows, and eruptions of bodily fluids, and grueling punishment as an evil spirit stalks Christine and prepares to... drag her to hell.

Being tormented by demons and then dragged to eternal hellfire may be a bit severe as punishment for a moment of modest career ambition and less-than-nicetude, but the lack of proportionality is a necessity in horror, so long as the audience is to sympathize with the victim and learn a valuable lesson about avoiding terrible curses. Be nice to old gypsy crones, don't open mysterious doors, don't look in the box, and don't think for a minute that some flimsy old lock on some flimsy old door will keep the demons at bay, or you will pay dearly. Christine has three days before her goose is cooked, according to Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), the Indian mystic she consults. Rham Jas accepts American Express, and turns out to be quite knowledgeable about gypsy curses, and proceeds to assist Christine in her strenuous efforts to escape her fate. Christine's skeptical boyfriend Clay Dalton (Justin Long), a psychology professor, is supportive but not much help as wind, insects and creepy shadows repeatedly assault Christine and mess up her house. Bad things happen. Most, but not all of them, happen to Christine. Suffice it to say that if someone you know is cursed, you might do well to keep your distance for, say, three days or so. Texting and Tweeting are almost as good as being there, and a lot safer.

The horror genre has been, of late, overrun with torture porn and soggy remakes of Japanese horror flicks. Raimi's an old school, DIY kinda horror filmmaker, and he makes excellent use of all the old tricks in the horror arsenal. Shrieking violins, moaning breezes, menacing shadows, blowing curtains, curling smoke, and flash cuts all prove to be as effective as any newfangled computer generated special effects in evoking dread and raising goose bumps. Retro creeps notwithstanding, Raimi (who cowrote the screenplay with his brother Ivan Raimi) is not above adding maggots and gore to the mix, or to defiling corpses in ways both comical and repulsive. Drag Me To Hell is part Nosferatu, part Exorcist, part Looney Tunes, because Raimi's the kind of filmmaker who insists that after you scream, you must also laugh.

08Jun2009

Up (2009)

Up answers the question that every kid with a balloon has pondered at some time: If you had a lot of balloons, could you fly? Up answers in the affirmative, confirming every kid's suspicions. It takes a whole lot of balloons, of course, especially if you, like Carl Fredericksen, want to take your entire house aloft with you. Carl is a retired balloon salesman, so he'd know how to do such things, naturally.

And so would the animators at Pixar, whose latest film Up soars and swoops and sails, but also keeps its feet (metaphorical feet and literal feet) on the ground. Carl's house is ripped from its foundations by thousands of balloons following their lofty, balloony imperatives, but it is Carl who needs uplifting. With his squat frame, square head and black square glasses, he looks like he's been squashed from above, or maybe gravity has pulled him downward over the years. It wasn't always so: as Up begins, he's a kid, dazzled by newsreels of heroic aviator and explorer Charles Muntz. Carl's not alone in his hero worship and quest for airborne excitement: newfound friend Ellie shares his spirit of adventure and wanderlust. In a lovely, silent montage, Up follows Carl and Ellie through marriage and through the years, as worldly concerns, heartbreaks, and everyday setbacks keep them tethered to their lovely old house until... there's just Carl, and a dream unfulfilled. Enter balloons, and a crazy, quixotic quest to plant that house in an exotic, faraway land.

And enter Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), an eager Wilderness Explorer scout who is determined to earn his final merit badge for assisting the elderly. He decides Carl (Ed Asner at his gruffest) is the elder he is going to assist, but curmudgeonly Carl thinks otherwise. Russell is an unwitting stowaway on Carl's great balloon adventure. Will Carl and Russell discover they can assist each other? Do balloons wanna fly?

Co-written and directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up is the first Pixar movie to be released in 3-D. The 3-D effects are quite subtle -- if you don't want to shlepp to a 3-D theater, you won't miss much, and you'll still get an eyeful of beautifully rendered animation and, more importantly, characters with real depth. It's been 14 years since Pixar dazzled everyone with their groundbreaking computer animation in Toy Story. They're actually a little late jumping on the 3-D bandwagon, but 3-D is the new "It" tech in movies, and although Pixar has embraced it (promising that all of their films will be in 3-D from now on), they have not abandoned their core commitment to great storytelling and characters as real (and in many cases realer) than any you'll find in a live action movie. The great innovation in Up is subtle: the emotional expressiveness of the characters is quite exquisite. Pixar has never embraced photorealism in creating human characters (which has never yet succeeded in being anything but creepy anyway), but their cartoonishly rendered humans are real in every other way. They have inner lives, and emotions, and all of that is visible and evident in their faces, in their body language, in their voices. In Up, the richness of inner space has been beautifully rendered and fully realized in a story with enough specificity and depth to engage adults, and enough simplicity, excitement, and adventure to captivate all the little Russells in the audience too.

Carl is old. He feels old, he looks old, he walks with a cane and has to work the kinks out of his old bones in the morning. He's an old crank too, gruff and grumbly, and not very appreciative of the plucky, nerdy kid who has tagged along on his quest. Russell's an egg-shaped hindrance in the way of all kids who don't live by the clock (not even the old lifespan clock that Carl no doubt hears ticking) and who obey the biological imperative to leave no stone unturned, no animal unrescued, and no tiny thing unexplored. He's all enthusiasm and hope and high spirits (and needy, and not very cool). Carl and Russell aren't the only fully-dimensional characters in Up: there's also a big, flightless bird who doesn't talk, and a dog, named Dug, who does, thanks to an electronic collar/universal translator that gives voice to Dug's every thought. Dug (voiced by Peterson) is not a deep thinker, but he's loyal and true, even when he's confused. Dug's a dog in need of a master as good and generous as he is; Russell needs a grandfather, and maybe a hug; Carl needs a swift kick in the butt and a tug at his shrunken old heartstrings (and as he drags his barely airborne house through the jungle, he increasingly needs to let go of his past). They all get more adventure than they bargained for when an unexpected villain turns up.

A square old man and a kid who isn't sassy or smart-alecky or snarky starring in a movie? Not exactly action-figure ready, are they? It's almost enough to make you think those Pixar folks are more interested in making good movies than in turning a quick buck. Huh. Imagine that.

1Jun2009

Terminator Salvation (2009)

Terminator (1984) was built on two stock science fiction ideas. One was the old worry that machines would one day become intelligent and take over the world, threatening the existence of humanity. The other was akin to the Grandfather Paradox: if you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not exist, and therefore would not be able to travel back in time to kill your grandfather, and then you would exist to travel back in time... and so on. Thus proving (or so it is said), that time travel is either logically impossible, or it is impossible to alter the past whether time travel is possible or not. In Terminator, the artificially intelligent machines of the future sent a T-800 killer robot (who would one day become the governator of California) back into the past to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) so that she would never become mother to John Connor, who would grow up to become a resistance leader in the future human struggle against the killer machines. So, apparently the machines do not (did not?) believe that time travel is impossible, or that the past cannot be changed. Turns out they failed to prevent John Connor's birth (because the guy sent back by the humans to save Sarah Connor fathered future John), and subsequent efforts to kill John as a child also failed. And since all those killer robots kept a'coming after him all his life, Connor grew up to be somewhat hostile to killer robots, and became a leader of the human resistance against the robot overlords. So did the machines alter the past after all?

Terminator Salvation, the fourth installment in the Terminator saga, isn't all that interested in finding out. The year is 2018, some time after Judgment Day, when Skynet, the self-aware machine network, blew everything all to pieces in its ongoing effort to destroy humanity for some reason or other. Scattered pockets of survivors and resistance fighters exist throughout the California wasteland. The machines are headquartered in the Silicon Valley area, and cattle cars of humans are rounded up and taken there, never to be seen again. The puny humans are prepping to launch a final assault on the machines. Meanwhile, the machines have a hit list, and John Connor (Christian Bale) is number two on that list. Who's number one? Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), a scrawny lad who seems insignificant, except that Connor and the machines and we all know that he will some day be Connor's future-past father. (Just how does Skynet know, I wonder.) And so, the son must save the father so that the son will exist in the future to save the father so that the son will exist... and so on. But beyond that, Terminator Salvation doesn't especially care about the vicissitudes of time travel, or the fact that Connor must save his father now so that dear old Dad can die in the past. You might think he'd feel a little conflicted about that, but apparently not. The movie is only marginally more concerned with artificial intelligence (and artificial life) in the form of one Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a criminal who was, in the pre-apocalypse past, executed, and who donated his body to science, or rather to one genetic scientist named Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter). And then he woke up and it was the apocalypse. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened to him (anyway, it was revealed in the movie's trailers months ago).

I would have liked to see Wright explored more as a character. He's conflicted about his human-machine hybrid status, he's loyal to humanity and full of unexplained self-loathing, and the humans, especially Connor, hate him just as much as he hates himself. His is the Terminator Redemption aspect of movie, and its most interesting innovation, but psychological depth and character are not the strong suits of Terminator Salvation, so any possibility of exploring fascinating ideas about humans and machines are pretty much tossed on the scrap heap. It's pretty obvious why Connor (or J.C. as the case may be) hates terminators, and why he's determined to save Kyle Reese, but it cannot be said that Bale's talents as an actor are fully utilized here. He's grim-faced and raspy-voiced and... well, that's about it. Maybe that explains Bale's now infamous on-set, potty-mouth apoplexy. It was a cry for more dialogue, more substance. Connor lives (if you can call that living), but humanity is nearly extinct and civilization is in ruins -- what's he still fighting for? He's a guy apparently condemned to remember the past and repeat it, but to what end? What, Mr. Method Actor might have asked, is my motivation?

That's what I wanna know too, but as directed by McG (Charlie's Angels), Terminator Salvation is scanty on plot and substance, fairly disinterested in big ideas, but big, big, big on action: car chases, helicopter chases, robot chases, explosions, gunfights, fistfights, and (true to Terminator creator James Cameron's original vision of the terminators) killer robots that keep coming and coming even after you blow them up, dismember them, shoot them, melt them, and crush them. The robots come in all shapes and sizes -- from chompy, swimming hydrobots to gigundo bots with clampy hands and gun turrets for heads. The Transformer-style motorcycle bots are pretty cool, but really, they'd better be since Terminator Salvation is basically a movie about animated mechanical stuff. The end of the world looks like a big junkyard -- the carcasses of robots, helicopters and cars litter a landscape where the ruins of human civilization amount to broken pylons and bombed-out gas stations. The resistance fighters are pretty well-armed with fighter jets, land mines, submarines (!) and various implements of destruction. Skynet has a factory where it manufactures more and more terminator bots. It also apparently manufactures handy dandy sets for meat versus metal action sequences that include fight scene standbys: steam, smoke, flames, and catwalks.

Is it too much to ask for anything really new from T4? This movie recycles elements from Terminator and T2: Judgment Day (fair enough), and from Road Warrior, Transformers, and X-Men, and maybe Pinocchio (what with all the humanoid robots and the machines that believe they're people too). It recycles elements from those movies, but unlike those movies, it fails to be about anything. The movie looks good enough: it is mostly stripped of color, except for all the big orange fireballs. Everything else is metallic blue-black and dusty-beige, with a coating of grime. But this is a fairly standard depiction of Earth after Armageddon, and I just can't help feeling like I've seen all this stuff before. Terminator was all low-budget moxy and basement workshop innovation -- T4, like the other sequels, is clearly an expensive movie, but one that has forgotten everything that's interesting about the Terminator saga, making it completely forgettable itself.

25May2009

Angels & Demons (2009)

A whole load of narration begins Angels & Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. A beloved pope has died, the grieving masses have gathered in St. Peter's Square, red-robed cardinals have assembled in the Vatican to select a new pontiff, and a priest known as the Camerlengo is temporarily in charge of Vatican City in the interregnum. Once we're all up to speed on the details of papal succession, Angels & Demons kicks into gear, with another story of ancient Catholic secrets, this one involving an underground sect of scientists known as the Illuminati, who counted Galileo among their membership. The Illuminati were harshly persecuted and killed by the Church, it seems, and now they're back... with a vengeance. The four cardinals in line to succeed the pope have been kidnapped, and even worse, a cylinder containing antimatter has been snatched from CERN, and is now somewhere in Vatican City, a ticking time bomb set to obliterate the Holy See at midnight. It's a smackdown between faith and science, see. Like this past weekend's Notre Dame kerfuffle writ large, but instead of heroic Obama representing the voice of reason and reconciliation, Angels & Demons has Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), Harvard symbologist and man of action. Oh, the irony... Langdon's the nemesis of the Vatican, but now they've called on him to help due to his singular expertise regarding the Illuminati.

Langdon's great gift is his ability to make baloney sound like ancient wisdom, and to simultaneously walk and talk, lecture and sleuth. Angels & Demons, like its predecessor, is directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, but the movie is less hysterical than The Da Vinci Code, and overall better. The Da Vinci Code admittedly set the bar pretty low, but Angels & Demons is decently diverting and fast-paced, as Langdon and his sidekick, CERN physicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) vandalize the Vatican archives, decipher clues, uncover Illuminati mysteries, and run around trying to save the world from a small Big Bang. Dr. Vetra specializes in something called "bioetanglement physics," but her role here is to be the "talk-to" -- the audience stand-in to whom Langdon explains what's going on and why and what it has to do with Galileo and obelisks and the sculptures of Bernini. She also translates a little Latin (which, somewhat incredibly, the Harvard symbologist can't manage on his own), and, being a physicist, stands ready to change some batteries in that antimatter container, should it be found in time. Langdon gets himself into several close scrapes -- including a few with the kidnapper/cardinal torturer/assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) -- and proves to be a resourceful and resilient scholar in the Indiana Jones mold. He doesn't have a whip or fedora (or a sense of humor), but he's got God on his side. Or maybe it's science. Or both. Or neither.

Meanwhile, there's a jurisdictional cat fight and power struggle within the Vatican: the head of the Swiss Guard, Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard), Inspector Olivetti of the Vatican police (Pierfrancesco Favino), the vaguely menacing Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and the devoted, doe-eyed Camerlengo Father Patrick (Ewan MacGregor) all compete to aid and/or obstruct Langdon's investigation, rescue the papacy, and protect the Church and its faithful. It all comes to down to faith versus science, capital T Truth versus Big Lies, religion versus the Catholic Church. I take it these are the standard themes of Angels & Demons author Dan Brown, along with a general preoccupation with conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church's centuries-old C.Y.A. mission.

Angels & Demons is fairly silly and generally implausible when you pay any attention at all to the details, and the dialogue is utterly bursting with poppycock and bunkum, but it has been expertly constructed by an able team, so it looks great and moves briskly (despite clocking in at well over two hours). The costumes and sets (needless to say, access to the actual Vatican was denied) are glorious, and Rome looks wonderfully picturesque even on the eve of the apocalypse. The international cast of potential heroes and villains performs with enough subtlety to maintain a modicum of mystery about who will be the angels and who the demons when the plot finally turns its last twist. Hanks is in serious scholar mode as Langdon, which I suppose is a necessity given the assortment of half-truths, urban legends and conspiracy theories that count for serious scholarship here -- hey, he's from Harvard, so it must be smart stuff, right? I'm all for intellectualizing summer blockbusters, although Angels & Demons achieves this not so much by undumbing the action movie than by tossing some half-smart sounding jargon and Latin at it. At least they give props to Galileo. It's a start.

18May2009

Star Trek (2009)

For a TV show that had such a brief run, and which has been the subject of so much mockery, Star Trek has lived long and prospered. For some four decades, various iterations of Star Trek have come and gone, the best of them retaining the optimistic, inclusive, multicultural, cerebral, exploratory, bright and shiny future spirit of Gene Roddenberry's original. Director J.J. Abrams (Lost) reimagines the original series and its characters, boldly going back to the future in Star Trek. This is an origin story, but with a very neat twist: time travel. Time travel is nothing new in the Star Trek universe, but it is here ingeniously deployed to reinvent familiar characters and storylines in a way that would be objectionable only to the most orthodox *Trek* constructionists. And they'd be missing all the fun. Losties can take note: Abrams does not subscribe to the boring time travel orthodoxy that the past cannot be changed. What fun is time travel if you can't change the past? (Hey J.J., while you're at it, could you make it so that Data doesn't die at the end of Star Trek: Nemesis? I'm still kinda bitter about that.)

Time travel paradoxes aside, the movie reinvents the pasts (and futures) of Trek antagonists/protagonists/odd couple James Tiberius Kirk and Spock, with an assist from a bitter and vengeful Romulan renegade named Nero (Eric Bana). Red matter, black holes, planetary destruction and a slakeless thirst for revenge have Nero wandering time and space in search of Spock who, as the story begins, is a hotheaded young geek rebel trying to reconcile his emotional human half and his coolly logical Vulcan half. Meanwhile, Kirk is born in the middle of a celestial battle, during which his father is killed by Nero. He grows up to hotrod around Iowa and get in bar brawls with snooty Starfleet types. Cocky Kirk (Chris Pine) and cerebral Spock (Zachary Quinto) lock horns at Starfleet Academy, where they once again embody the rationality vs. emotionality, body vs. mind, thought vs. action, hot vs. cold antagonism that makes them, together, the very soul of Star Trek, and a source of both great conflict and great humor. They complete each other.

The gang's all there too: Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) is a crazy-eyed paranoid medicine man with little faith in the miracle of space travel; Uhura (Zoë Saldana) is a young hottie who gives Kirk the cold shoulder; Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) still has that thick Russian accent; Sulu (John Cho) is now a cool warrior; and engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg, brilliantly cast) is still the funny Scottish fella who's a whiz with a transporter. There's an ill-fated Ensign Redshirt here and there too. And there's some Nimoy fella who's pretty good as Spock Prime, an old clock watcher who offers some pearls of wisdom to young Kirk and Spock. Abrams, and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who also collaborated on the *Transformers* reboot), are not slaves to the sacred text of Star Trek, and liberally reimagine the characters within their altered, almost-anything-goes universe, while keeping them just familiar enough that the tweaks both make sense and are a lot of fun. Pine and Quinto are especially good at evoking their original series progenitors (which they now, in narrative and space-time terms, predate), while making the characters, shaped and altered by changes in their future-pasts, completely their own. Pine's devilish performance is briskly funny, and includes subtle hints of the not-so-subtle Shatner, but without the goofy excesses of the elder Kirk, and with a youthful vigor and rawness that makes some sense (finally) of original Kirk's somewhat implausible universal sex appeal.

The story is unexpectedly poignant at several points, and frequently quite funny, in keeping with a general leaning towards feeling over rationality (you win *this* round, Kirk!). At the heart of Star Trek is a complex tale of parents and children, of lost boys and heroic fathers and father figures, (and heroic and lost mothers too) and blackening, character-twisting grief that works all the Greek tragedy angles. The father-son thing gets especially complicated in relation to Spock and Spock Prime, with a kind of noodle-cooking, gasket-blowing entanglement of the younger-elder/father-son/before-after roles.

Times have changed not just for Spock and company, but for the science of science fiction too, and Abrams deploys some cool special effects and riveting action that are nicely balanced by the fast-talking philosophical and techno chatter. Star Trek whizzes along at warp speed, and packs a whole lot of entertainment into its alternately light (and enlightened) and apocalyptically dark plot. Welcome back to the future.

11May2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

There's a reason why Wolverine is a perennial X-Men fan fave. Several reasons, really: he's funny, he's unlucky at love (very unlucky, though not so much as his almost invariably dead lady friends), he's politically incorrect, he's got those way-cool adamantium claws, and he's Canadian. Also, "wolverine" is a fun word to say. There's one reason why Wolverine took off as a character in the X-Men movies: Hugh Jackman. Jackman's back as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the title of which suggests that many more non-Wolvie X-Men origin stories from the X-pantheon are in the pipeline. The movie efficiently ticks off plot points, characters, and backstories, as if working through a to-do list for future X-Men Origins movies.

The story begins in 1845, when young future Wolverine James Logan suffers through a difficult adolescent transformation (as all young mutants must). His transformation achieves completion when he murders the man who murdered his father, who wasn't really his father, although the man who murdered him was. The filial situation is a little sketchy on details. The incident, at any rate, leaves both his fathers dead, and James and his brother (or is it half brother?) Victor Creed, also a mutant (the future Sabretooth), are soon on the lam. Next stop, the American Civil War, where young Canadians were known to escape their troubles. A montage of conflicts -- from World War I through Vietnam -- follows, with Victor and Logan always there. They are, thanks to their mutant powers, indestructible and unkillable, and rather good at fighting and killing. Logan, the more sensitive of the two, eventually loses his taste for war and murder. Victor (Liev Schreiber) is just getting started.

So, some time in the 1980s, Logan and Victor go their separate ways. Logan sets up housekeeping in a nice cabin in the Canadian Rockies with his girlfriend Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Then Logan's former mutant cohorts -- part of an elite government assassination squad called the X-Team -- turn up dead. Logan is unlucky at love, becomes Wolverine (thanks to government-issued adamantium-infused bones and claws), escapes government custody (duh -- he's indestructible!) and goes after Victor while being chased by the military. This occasions several expensive-looking action sequences.

There is nothing really wrong with XMO: Wolverine. Nothing, that is, that a little rewrite couldn't fix. The movie focuses rather single-mindedly on plot, on laying out all the pieces of the origin story and programming Logan's revenge motive in a way that is fairly mechanical. The result is a movie in which all the gears mesh neatly, but the messy and appealing complexity and incongruity of Wolverine as a character is blunted. XMO: Wolverine is about the creation of the berserker Wolverine, and about showing off that super strength, and Jackman's seriously jacked up biceps, which are as well-oiled as this machine of a movie. But by rubbing off the rough edges that give his character depth, Wolverine is diminished. The psychological complexity of Marvel Comics characters has always been their distinguishing feature, but XMO: Wolverine reduces the hairy, beastly Wolverine to a sleek, shiny, revenge-seeking missile.

Director Gavin Hood (Rendition) is known for movies with social and political themes, and there are hints here of some effort to make more than a clockwork superhero movie, to reveal what really makes Wolverine tick, and to show the softer side of the adamantium man. But the emphasis on action over character makes the movie feel both rushed and hollow. Humor surfaces all-too-briefly -- XMO: Wolverine is not filled with the kind of eminently quotable one-liners that make their way into the pop culture canon, despite Wolverine's well-known (among fanboys and girls, at least) rep for remarks that are almost as cutting as his ginsu claws. On the other hand, the movie is not terribly chatty altogether, except when mutant-exploiting William Stryker (Danny Huston) is around -- he's definitely a villain in the expository mode. A movie in which you're looking forward to a long-promised decapitation to make things more interesting is a movie that really needs to be sharper and brainier. XMO: Wolverine is unpretentious and all-business, which is good, but it feels more like a coming attraction than a proper introduction.

4May2009