How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

In How to Train Your Dragon, a 3-D animated feature based on Cressida Cowell's book, a misfit Viking lad befriends a dragon, overturns centuries of prejudice, and proves to his hard-to-please dad that it takes more than muscle to save a village. Hiccup is not much of a name for a fearsome and fearless Viking. But Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is not very fearsome or fearless. He longs to be a brave and fierce dragon slayer, like his father, and his father's father, and every other father (and more than a few mothers) in the village of Berk, a tiny burg perched atop rugged cliffs, and regularly besieged by dragons. 

As an apprentice blacksmith in Berk, Hiccup is strictly a supporting player. The big, brawny, hairy Vikings, like his father Stoick (Gerard Butler), do all the dragon slaying while scrawny Hiccup stays in his workshop, working on brainy inventions that he hopes will make up for the brawn he lacks.

Truth is, though, Hiccup doesn't have it in him to kill a dragon, something he discovers when one of his contraptions injures one. The Night Fury is not just any dragon, however. In the annals of Berk, there are many dangerous dragons, but the Night Fury is the most mysterious and the most feared. It's so fast and dark that it's a mere inky shadow in the night sky -- and all the more terrifying because it is never seen.

Oh, but it is so darn cute, that Night Fury, like a big, sleek, jet-black kitten with huge green eyes. The dragon Hiccup shoots down is wounded and scared, and can't fly. Hiccup names the adorable beast Toothless, and fashions a contraption -- a prosthetic tail -- to help it fly again. (Turns out dragon fighting is a dangerous profession, and prosthetic limbs are a common sight, and a badge of honor, in Berk.) As the iconoclastic Hiccup comes to understand Toothless, and other species of dragons too, he realizes that his people had, for generations, been wrong about dragons. But try explaining that to Dad. As Hiccup observes, his Viking people "have stubbornness issues."

How to Train Your Dragon begins and ends with intense scenes of combat that will likely scare the more sensitive youngsters in the audience. But in between, the film, directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, is sweet and funny, and often evokes other quietly moving stories of human-animal bonding (particularly *The Black Stallion*) with its nearly wordless but endlessly expressive scenes of the developing, tentative trust and friendship between Toothless and Hiccup. There's also the usual crew of funny sidekicks -- a trio of wiscracking Viking adolescents, and a spunky love interest (America Ferrera)  -- and a colorful collection of dragons who vary in shape, size, and firepower.

High quality computer animation is the rule rather than the exception these days, but How to Train Your Dragon has an exceptionally lovely and lush quality, thanks in part to visual consultant Roger Deakins, an acclaimed cinematographer. Where computer animation tends to be bright and crisp and sharply focused, How to Train Your Dragon has a softness and depth that often mimics the visual quality of live action film. How to Train Your Dragon is dark around the edges of the warmly bronzed, candlelit interiors of Hiccup's home; It's foggy and sun dappled in the forest, and the glen where Hiccup and Toothless become friends. At the same time, an animated film isn't earthbound or tethered to reality the way that a live action film is, and How to Train Your Dragon swoops and soars and takes flight on dragon wings, above the fluffy clouds and beyond. The story in How to Train Your Dragon contains the familiar tropes of family-friendly lit and movies, but it's well worth seeing how the animators mix earth, air, water and fire (and scales and hair) to invent a richly textured, almost touchably dimensional new world and new creatures in this charming fable of a boy and his dragon.

28Mar2010

Repo Men (2010)

Whatever forces were behind the coincidental alignment of the release of Repo Men with Congress's healthcare reform showdown this past weekend, the timing was perfect. Repo Men is set in a dystopic, post-war near future, but the premise is not so far-fetched that it can't serve as a pointed, gruesome satire of free market, pay-or-die healthcare.


A company called The Union has solved the chronic shortage of organs for transplant by developing an extensive line of artificial organs -- known as artiforgs -- to cure what ails you. Need a new heart? They've got one. And livers, kidneys, eyes, ears, vocal chords and even a brand new neural net in case your brain goes on the fritz. The bad news is that artiforgs aren't cheap. The good news is that The Union has several convenient financing packages. The bad news is that the interest rate is 19.6%, which is still better than some credit cards. The really bad news is that if you fall behind on your payments, The Union will repossess your vital artiforg, which, depending on how badly you need that heart to live, could significantly shorten your lifespan. Enter the repo men. Armed with stun guns, rubber gloves, and scalpels, they efficiently reclaim organs from the imprudent and insolvent.


Remy (Jude Law) is a repo man, and so is his lumbering chum Jake (Forest Whitaker). They both coolly and methodically track down deadbeats and turn them into dead meat. They work in a seedy megalopolis, but when the day is done Remy goes back home to the suburbs, where his wife is none too happy about his job. One night, while working late reclaiming a heart from a musician (RZA), Remy suffers a near-fatal mishap and, wouldn't you know it, the heartless knave wakes up to find a shiny new artiforg heart installed in his chest. He suddenly loses his taste for the repossession business. Irony of ironies, his change of heart has resulted in a change of heart. Punny. And that is the level of subtlety at which Repo Men operates, which is to say, not much.


The kinder (but not gentler) Remy can't do his job, so he's quickly in arrears on that compassionate new heart of his (is compassion a bug, or just an unintended feature?), and on the run with what turns out to be quite a lot of people trying to avoid the repo man. He finds a lady friend, a singer named Beth (Alice Braga) who has several implants she can't pay for, and the two of them try to escape with their hot organs. Things go pretty well until Remy's pal Jake is assigned to retrieve the company's property.


Anyone looking for intelligent debate of substantive issues related to organ transplantation or health insurance reform or universal healthcare should just keep on looking, because Repo Men offers none of the above. That's not to say that, in it's crazy way, Repo Men doesn't make a strong case for universal healthcare *and* universal organ donation. It does. It just does it with lots of guns and gore and very little thinking. Repo Men, directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and written by Garrett Lerner and Eric Garcia (based on Garcia's novel *The Repossession Mambo*) is a sci-fi action thriller slasher movie that's primarily interested in knife fights and splattering blood and gory impromptu surgery. This is a movie with one idea -- it's an interesting idea -- that inspires a whole lot of violence, butchery and bloodshed, with occasional outbursts of humor. The movie lacks a consistent vision of its dystopian future -- it's not so far in the future that the cars look any different, but the cities are *Bladerunner*-style ginormous, with slummy areas filled with squatters, and spacious, nearly empty freeways, and surrounding suburbs that look oddly, ordinarily suburban.


Repo Men is apparently a movie with a very deadpan satirical style that doesn't even bother to wink at the audience. Or maybe it's not meant to be funny, in which case, it actually turns out to be kind of funny, if you can stomach all the stomachs and livers and spleens and such. Liev Schreiber is quite funny as the heartless and humorless CEO of The Union. This is a bullets flying, knives slashing, axes flailing, hacksaws hacking, brain smashing, organ snatching movie that only pauses long enough to linger on the angry red blooming of parting flesh in the wake of a scalpel blade. This is a movie about pain and fear, and lots of it -- the pain and fear of facing death, the pain and fear of financial insolvency, and even the pain and fear of being a medical repo man. Turns out they can have hearts too. As long as they can pay for them.
 21March2010

Remember Me (2010)

Film critics, like movie audiences, are fairly optimistic when it comes to movies. They go in, hoping for the best, and not really expecting the worst. So when they encounter the worst -- as inevitably happens sometimes -- it is like stealing candy from a baby. Unexpected, dismaying, disappointing. You, filmmakers responsible for Remember Me, are candy thieves.

Quite honestly, I did not have lofty expectations for Remember Me, but neither did I expect to be enraged by a cheap stunt of an ending. Remember Me stars Robert Pattinson, better known to Harry Potter fans as the late Cedric Diggory, and to Twilight fans as Edward, the dreamy vampire. To fans of both movie series, he is probably bigger than Jesus. Pattinson once said that his hair is 75% of his performance in Twilight. I believe it. His hair is fantastic in Remember Me, a gravity-defying mop of carefully tousled bedhead hair. It's devil-may-care hair, rebel hair, the kind of hair James Dean would have if James Dean were young and brooding and poetic and in his early twenties right now. The rest of Remember Me does not live up to that hair, but for a while at least, it gives it a go.

The story begins in 1991, when young Ally Craig witnesses the murder of her mother. Ten years later, Ally (Emilie de Ravin) is a college student in New York City, and her father Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), a cop, is understandably overprotective. Craig's a bit of a hothead too. Hothead cop encounters Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson), who is barhopping and protesting injustice along with his pal Aidan (Tate Ellington). Craig throws them both in jail. This is not so bad, because Tyler's father Charles Hawkins (Pierce Brosnan) is a wealthy, powerful attorney. But Tyler hates his father for various reasons, mostly because he thinks the old man is cold and heartless and drove Tyler's older brother to suicide. And he's not terribly kind to Tyler's little sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins), who has a hard enough time with all the snooty kids at her private school. Tyler, has, accordingly, taken to living in squalor with Aidan, and dressing in vintage clothing to demonstrate his anti-bourgeois cred. He also smokes like a chimney, writes poetry, and works at The Strand bookstore, so you can be sure he is very tortured. 

And so, when Aidan figures out that Ally is the daughter of the cop who arrested them, he talks Tyler into asking her out, to get back at her pop the cop. There's no reason for Tyler to go along with this jerkwad scheme, really, except that later in the movie, when Ally finds out, it will give her a reason to get mad at Tyler and walk out on him. This will give Tyler another reason to feel alienated and mopey, in addition to the aforementioned. Remember Me is a love story about Tyler and Ally, and how two souls, one pretty tortured, and the other just a little traumatized, find happiness together in this crazy world and as a result, some good stuff happens. 

Remember Me, written by Will Fetters, has a labored and contrived plot, a chatty script, and a title that implies impending doom. And indeed, doom looms. But first, love blooms for Ally and Tyler, and Remember Me brings to mind Love Story, in which star-crossed young college-aged romantics dither and bicker and fall in love and so forth, and Ordinary People, with its family traumatized by the death of a son. Mostly, though, Remember Me pretty shamelessly rips off Rebel Without A Cause, with Pattinson as a faux James Dean doing everything except yell "You're tearing me apart!" He does yell at his dad, and broods and slouches quite a lot, and engages in fisticuffs more often than one would expect. I don't think anyone could have really made Tyler a convincing character -- he's a walking, talking collection of disaffected  youth cliches with a three day stubble. To his credit, Pattinson convincingly plays the part of cool, caring older brother in Tyler's scenes with Caroline. 

Director Allen Coulter does not manage to inject any realism into all the affected torment. Neither does he reign in the wandering Noo Yawk accents that the very un-New York actors gamely wrestle with. Cooper and Brosnan are both fine actors utterly undone by unfamiliar vowels. Pattinson doesn't bother, and neither does de Ravin (who is Australian), but both manage to sound American.

In addition to love and good stuff, a lot of bad stuff happens in Remember Me, but nothing as bad as what happens at the end, which pretty much pulls the rug out from under the movie in a big, cheap, manipulative, exploitative, infuriating twist. I'm not the sort to spoil a movie, although if ever a movie was spoilin' for a spoilin', it is this one. I'll just say this: terrible things happen in the world sometimes, and movies ought not exploit those terrible things for no good reason. And there was no good reason to exploit this particular terrible thing. There weren't even any bad reasons to use this particular terrible thing in this particular terrible (as it turns out) movie. The ending does serve one purpose: it turns an otherwise forgettable movie into one I will long remember, but not fondly.

18Mar2010

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

In his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, director Tim Burton has reimagined the fanciful tale. After umpteen variations on Lewis Carroll's story, something new is not a bad thing, although I'm not sure the story really needed to end in a desultory battle scene. Alice (Mia Wasikowski) is older in this version, written by Linda Woolverton and adapted from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. She's a rebellious 19 year old, a young woman who has been plagued all her life by strange dreams of a land filled with eccentric weirdos. Just as she is about to become engaged -- to a man who shows her as little regard as she shows him -- a white rabbit in a waistcoat appears, and leads her down that fateful rabbit hole.

That Alice in Wonderland is a 3D movie necessitates, I suppose, that the fall down the rabbit hole be rendered in 3D, with miscellaneous detritus flying about and occasionally flying towards the front of the screen, but it cannot be said that Burton embraces 3D with anything like artistic enthusiasm. He's a director with a keen eye for design and a distinctive visual style, but the 3D feels like an aferthought in Alice in Wonderland, a tacked on and unnecessary contrivance. There's plenty enough to look at in Burton's movies, without having to see it in simulated 3D. The 3D technology tends to mute colors and darken the picture, and Alice in Wonderland, like most of Burton's films, is plenty dark enough.

This is a particular gloomy elaboration on the Alice in Wonderland tale, one in which Alice, according to Underland (for that is the place's actual name, we are told) prophecy, will slay the menacing Jabberwocky on the frabjous day. Alice would really rather not, but circumstances conspire to force her hand when her friends are captured by the wicked Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who, as she is wont to do, has decided to separate them from their heads. Alice spends much of the movie wandering about Underland, hiding from the Red Queen's henchman the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) and his toothy, frumious Bandersnatch. Alice shrinks and grows and shrinks and grows and interacts with the various oddities who live in Underland, most notably the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), a foppish milliner with horizontal tendrils of flaming red hair, very, very large green eyes, and a tendency to periodically lose what little bits of his mind are left. In time, Alice learns that she has been in Underland before, as a small girl, and that the Underlanders have all been waiting for her to return and end the Red Queen's reign of terror and wanton decapitation.

Now, the Red Queen is wicked indeed, with a gigantic noggin that's oddly reminiscent of Bette Davis in Queen Elizabeth. Which makes her that much more menacing. Her sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) waits for Alice, but Alice isn't terribly keen on battling the Jabberwocky, even though inevitability, and the story, apparently demand it. And there's the chief problem with Alice in Wonderland -- Alice is a bit wan and indecisive, a heroine pushed grudgingly along towards her destiny, but not really feeling it, despite the best efforts of the Mad Hatter and others to inspire her. The Red Queen plays croquet with a flamingo and a hedgehog -- she hits the hedgehog with the flamingo -- how evil does she have to be before Alice finally gives a whit? As Absolem, the hookah smoking blue caterpillar tells her, she's lost her "muchness." She could use some more muchness, to be sure. On the other hand, the Cheshire Cat (voiced with sly, silky slinkiness by Stephen Fry) is fantastic -- he's got some of that muchness Alice lacks, and so do several other more tangible critters who turn up to prod, assist, and generally run circles around Alice. This is a pretty grown up Alice in Wonderland, and this Alice has some growing up to do.

Alice in Wonderland looks great, as can be expected from a Burton movie. It's full of curiouser and curiouser sights, and many perils, and it whipsaws between visually arresting, candy-colored castles (tinged with menace) and dreary, bizarre, ominous hinterlands. The movie is, in its doleful, baleful, peculiar way also quite bewitching until it falls apart in a halfhearted, perfunctory, oddly uninspired action sequence, a battle scene that really offers not much as a story climax, and is every bit as uncertain and noncommittal as Alice. It's an ordinary, predictable ending to an offbeat movie that had been bursting with the unexpected. 

11Mar2010

Cop Out (2010)

I'm not sure how the title of Cop Out actually refers to the movie, except that there are cops in it, and said cops are on the outs with their chief after they screw up a major drug investigation or something. But that's not really what "cop out" means, unless you're being punny, and then it still isn't what it means. But  whatever. Cop Out is this: it is the first major studio movie by filmmaker Kevin Smith, and the first time Smoth has directed a picture he didn't write. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Kevin Smith's movies, but I can accept that they fill a niche that is otherwise mostly empty: movies about potty-mouthed young people who mostly talk about sex and stuff that would titillate an 11 year old, and which often star Ben Affleck. Cop Out does not star Ben Affleck, but it does star Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Morgan's character talks about sex, and his toilet habits, and likes to riff on movies. He also gets into a bruising fight with a foul-mouthed 11 year old car thief, which is really no way to treat the movie's key demographic.

Paul (Morgan) is half of a buddy cop duo; Willis's Jimmy is the other half. Paul is the goofy half. He thinks his wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him. Jimmy is the weary half. In *Lethal Weapon*, Jimmy would be the Danny Glover character, the one who always says he's too old for this stuff (although he doesn't say it in exactly those words). That would make Paul the Mel Gibson character: the mentally unstable live wire who does wacky, unpredictable things. And if Cop Out were Lethal Weapon... for one thing, it would be better. It's more like Lethal Weapon 4, in which we're all pretty tired of these buddy cops, and they're tired of each other too.

As Cop Out begins, we learn that Paul and Jimmy have been partners for nine years. In short order, they are suspended without pay and forced to turn in their badges and guns. Never mind that they use badges and guns throughout the rest of the movie, when they try to redeem themselves by busting up a vicious Mexican drug cartel. But that's just one of many plots in this overworked movie, written by Robb and Mark Cullen. Jimmy has a valuable baseball card, which he needs to sell to finance his daughter's expensive wedding, so that his ex-wife's new husband doesn't pay for it. The card is stolen by a goofy thief named Dave (Seann William Scott), who trades it to drug lord Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz). Poh Boy, remarkably, is not only an avid baseball memorabilia collector, but he's also the brutal kingpin of the drug cartel that is being investigated by the police department. That's the investigation that Paul and Jimmy disrupt during a botched stakeout of something or other. It doesn't really matter. The point is, Paul and Jimmy want the baseball card back, and a whole bunch of other stuff happens while they try to retrieve it.

Meanwhile, they talk a lot. Talking a lot is something characters in a Kevin Smith movie do a lot, and Cop Out is no different. Most of the talking is done by Paul, who natters on about many things in that odd baby-voiced way that Tracy Morgan talks on *30 Rock*. His character in Cop Out is more or less the same as his character on *30 Rock*, which might just be the way Tracy Morgan is. The key difference is that in Cop Out, he has a gun, and a patient sidekick in Jimmy. Cop Out is a regular blabbathon, and it is one of the movie's saving graces that it is, because there are regular collisions of crude and pointless dialogue that is much enlivened by vivid, high-speed delivery and the way that nobody in the movie ever seems to care at all what anyone else says. The dialogue isn't especially funny, but the characters just keep yammering away in their own annoying little orbits, and that's okay because Cop Out doesn't have much else going for it.

Smith has never been what you might call a competent director, but in his smart alecky, seat-of-the-pants way, he has managed to keep making movies anyway. Cop Out is well above his pay grade, despite the interracial buddy cop movie one of the most played-out, predictable and reliable genres of movie. Smith doesn't do anything new or original with this one, and he's not much of an action director. Cop Out is serviceable, unsurprising, and good-natured, but not, however hard it tries, offensive. That makes it, all in all, pretty forgettable.

4Mar2010

Pretty war or Ugly War? Avatar vs The Hurt Locker

The likely frontrunners in the Oscar race for Best Picture are Avatar and The Hurt Locker, directed, respectively, by former husband and wife James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. This is an interesting match-up, not so much because they used to be married, or because they are also both nominated for Best Director, but because they both work within the action movie genre, and attempt, in quite different ways, to inject seriousness and ideas into that genre. Both Avatar and The Hurt Locker are, in their disparate ways, also war movies. Also interesting is that Avatar now stands as one of the top-grossing movies of all time, while The Hurt Locker barely registered at the box office. (If you're keeping score, that's over two billion dollars worldwide for Avatar, and a little under $18 million for The Hurt Locker.) In a popularity contest, Avatar wins, hands down. Audiences are more eager to watch pretty blue people on a distant planet fighting an imaginary future war, rather than watch a gritty, nerve-jangling movie about non-blue people fighting an actual war on this planet. Fair enough.

As in the classic David and Goliath matchup, scrappy David is the winner here. I make no predictions about how the Academy will vote -- one never knows -- but I'll be watching with interest. 

Avatar is good. It's quite good, but I don't think it's a *great* movie. I don't even think it's Cameron's best movie. The year is 2154, and Earthlings have invaded a distant planet called Pandora, a world that has the misfortune of being a rich source of unobtainium, a valuable mineral. Even more unlucky are the Na'vi, a race of tall, blue-skinned people who live in harmony with nature, and object to the strip mining of their world. The Na'vi have bows and arrows; the humans have heavily armed mercenaries with machine guns, hovering gunships, and mechas.

They've also got in mind to use a little deception. They've created avatars, hybrid creatures grown from human and Na'vi DNA, who look enough like the Na'vi to almost pass for the real thing (although the avatars have five fingers to the Na'vi's four -- the film is brimming with such small details). A human controls his or her Na'vi avatar from a remote, wired pod, walking among the natives in a tall, blue body. 

Cameron developed a new performance capture technique to create the Na'vi. Performance capture (or motion capture) uses live actors wearing sensors that track their movements, which are then used to digitally render them as animated figures. Efforts to use the technology thus far have generally failed, but Avatar gets it right: the faces of the Na'vi are expressive, dynamic, and alive. The overall movements of the Na'vi bodies are pretty close to perfect (the avatars are clunkier, as might be expected), and also a great leap forward. And Pandora, the beautiful jungle world, is  gorgeous: filled with bioluminescent plants and creatures, flying dragon-like beasts, little things that look like flying jellyfish, and a few carnivorous nasties lurking about among the giant ferns and flowers -- it's a glowing, shimmery, unspoiled paradise. A paradise that will be lost and despoiled if the greedy humans have their way.

Cameron wrote and directed Avatar, and it is peopled by the usual types that populate his films: heartless, mercenary military and corporate guys, a couple of nerds, and a tough woman or three. The Na'vi are pretty clearly meant to call to mind the aboriginal peoples of Earth, who haven't done so well by colonialists. In some ways, Avatar is a straightforward (if otherworldly) cowboys vs. Indians western, only the good guys are the Indians this time. It is also entirely possible (and no doubt intentional) that the allegorical story can support an interpretation grounded in contemporary conflicts and politics. There's also a running anti-corporate theme in Cameron's canon (also found in The Abyss and Aliens), and a seriously pro-green, anti-war tendency, which doesn't stop him from staging epic battles and blowing lots of things up. Avatar isn't just a long setup for a blow 'em up payoff in the third act: you're meant to care about what happens to Pandora and the Na'vi. Avatar invests in its characters, the good and the bad, creating an engrossing story and a world worth caring about.

But back to reality. The Hurt Locker is set in 2004, in Baghdad. Delta Company is an Army unit whose job is to find and defuse -- or detonate if necessary -- the deadly improvised explosive devices that seem to be everywhere in Iraq. The bombs range from simple pipe bombs to complicated car bombs to elaborate, byzantine networks of interconnected wires and cylinders that test the nerves, the fine motor skills, and the mental agility of Staff Sgt Will James (Jeremy Renner).

James joins Delta Company after their leader is killed. He's an unknown element to young, vulnerable Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and straightlaced Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), both of whom are hoping to leave Iraq alive. It's hard to tell if James cares about that. He seems to love bombs though, and keeps a box of parts -- a kind of tactile scrapbook -- containing pieces of all the bombs that nearly killed him.

The movie moves through a series of incidents -- ghastly discoveries, agonizing, physically punishing firefights, and nail-biting, live-wire confrontations with unfeeling, uncaring tangles of wires and explosives. The movie has a documentary-like immediacy and unpolished roughness, and in each of these set pieces, more is revealed about the characters, and especially James. The movies peels back the layers of his personality -- he's reckless and careful, an improviser and a technician, he's smart and knowledgeable, but equally dependent on good instincts, he's callous and brutal, but also tender. He likes bombs -- he's a bomb defusing genius, a rare and specialized martial artist. Renner's performance is just as reckless and precise, full of bravado and contradictions.

The Hurt Locker is not a traditional war movie in any sense. It doesn't really take a position on the war, pro or con. Neither does it glorify war, or explosions, or death, nor use the brutal spectacle of war to generate mindless suspense or thrills. But through meticulous, hyper-realism, the movie drills down into the core of the war's psychological and moral complexity with its fascinating, riveting, and almost unbearably suspenseful portrait of three soldiers. Those soldiers are stressed out beyond comprehension, their daily existence filled with strategic and tactical maneuvers, with brute survival, and with violently releasing the pressure that builds up through each day of their tour of duty.

The Hurt Locker isn't a fantasy of war, served up as a vehicle for socio-political themes. That's not to minimize the themes in Avatar, which are interesting, and relevant. It's just to say that while the action and the ideas go down easy in a movie like Avatar, where the characters are blue and white and everything is crystal clear, The Hurt Locker doesn't go down easy at all. It's hard to watch, psychologically brutal, and it leaves you, more than anything else, feeling unsettled. Unsettled by a war that's hard to comprehend, and people who are complicated and defy easy categorization. And that, I suspect, is why one of these movies made two billion dollars and the other made a tiny fraction of that. It's harder to understand why audiences are willing to watch an elaborate hoax of a psychological thriller like Shutter Island, but not a genuinely thrilling, genuinely scary movie like The Hurt Locker.

25Feb2010

Shutter island (2010)

As a regular Car Talk listener, and someone who counts genuine New Englanders among my friends, I can assure you that -- hilarious accent notwithstanding -- our neighbors to the northeast know how to say "escape." They do not pronounce it "ek-scape." I'm sure that goes double for police officers, who might have occasion to say "escape" in the course of their duties.

But Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) says "ek-scape." Teddy is a U.S. Marshal, and as Shutter Island begins, he is on a ferry, headed for the titular island, an isolated rock off the coast of Boston, home to a prison/asylum for the criminally insane. Cue dark skies and forboding music.

On the evidence of DiCaprio's laborious accent, Teddy's from Bahston. His new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) claims to be from Seattle. As a Seattle native, I can assure you that his accent is inconsistent with the (also sometimes hilarious) accents of our neighbors in the northwest. But never mind that. Teddy and Chuck are going to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient, a woman named Rachel Solondo (Emily Mortimer), who recently disappeared from the high security prison, which, the movie will have you remember, is for the criminally insane. Rachel was there because she murdered her children. Her disappearance has everyone flummoxed. The island is inescapable, except by boat.

Something is amiss on Shutter Island. Something more than Rachel Solondo, that is. Teddy smells a rat, or possibly several of them. He's suspicious of Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), a seemingly progressive and well-meaning psychiatrist who is slightly menacing because, well, mostly because he's played by Ben Kingsley with an air of slightly perceptible, calm menace. And possibly because from start to finish, the movie assaults the ears with a soundtrack that is really agitated and stabby, as if the entire film were the shower scene in Psycho, and psycho killers lurked in every dark, damp corner. Which apparently they do, since they are in a prison for the criminally insane which has an unusual number of leaky ceilings. But still, the music is awfully excitable. I don't think driving a Jeep up to the gates of a prison really requires quite such vigorous cello-ing.

Teddy is also suspicious of Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), a cheery old gent whom Teddy suspects is German, and a Nazi to boot. He wears little round glasses, and he listens to Mahler, so Teddy is probably right. Teddy, you see, had a traumatic experience during the war, when he was among the soldiers who liberated Dachau. He has frequent flashbacks in which he sees piles of frozen corpses. He's also traumatized by the death -- in a fire -- of his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), who frequently appears to him in his dreams, dropping big fat clues about the mysterious goings-on at Shutter Island. Coincidentally (or is it?) the firebug who started the fire that killed Dolores might just be a patient at the facility, but he also mysteriously disappeared.

Shutter Island is prone to dark and stormy nights, especially after a hurricane starts lashing the island, thus stranding Teddy and Chuck. Teddy's flashbacks keep getting worse, and he suffers from migraines, so he suspects that the doctors are trying to drive him insane in order to cover up something. But what? Nazi experiments? Murder most foul? Between the melodramatic weather and the hysterical music, it must be something big and terrible.

Shutter Island, as a movie, is neither big nor terrible. But neither is it especially good. Directed by Martin Scorsese, here experimenting, as he sometimes does, with film genres, the film was written by Laeta Kalogridis, and adapted from a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River).  It's a cumbersome, overly long movie that's a thorny thicket of plots, subplots, and backstories. This thicket requires considerable hacking through, which  requires lurching shifts from talky exposition (for which Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley are brought on board, briefly), to action scenes requiring the climbing of vertiginous cliffs, vigorous swimming, and a fair bit of punching. The inmates of Shutter Island natter on about television and the H-bomb (the movie is set in 1954) and homicide, the psychiatrists natter on about man's violent nature, and the bad old days when patients were cruelly tortured. Everybody smokes all the time, which gives the director the chance to play with tendrils of smoke that swirl around Teddy's already foggy head. There is an obvious Hitchcockian influence at play in the lingering sense of paranoia and self-doubt that afflicts Teddy. The "is he crazy or is it the place that's crazy?" questions cling to him like a damp shirt. He also has a lot of damp shirts clinging to him in this rain-lashed, leaky-roofed contraption of a psychological, psychiatrical thriller. The director is apparently employing the ol' Chinese water torture to get the audience to crack -- there's more pointless drippiness here than in a 1980s music video. 

Film Noir and horror influences lurk too, and despite all the silliness with the inconvenient weather and the movie's pileup of Cold War paranoia, ghosts, conspiracy theories, cover-ups, zombie-like patients with bad teeth, psychiatric horror, Nazi horror, espionage, tombs, castles, spiral staircases, flashbacks, and hallucinations, Scorsese manages to craft a movie that often looks pretty good, and feels sporadically foreboding even though the whole crazy contraption is always on the verge of falling apart. Tucked into the movie are some great little moments of sheer nuttiness, but Shutter Island never quite achieves a sustained mood of suspense or anything else because it's as distractible as a three year old. Ooh, look how lightning makes the statues scary! There's Teddy's dead wife again! Why is her hair wet?

And then, it turns out that Shutter Island is one of those movies with a surprise twisty ending, which is a narrative device too frequently employed to cover up an implausible plot that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. When a character at the end of a movie has to explain everything that went before, it amounts to this:  the filmmakers think the audience isn't bright enough to have followed the whole thing through all the misdirection and malarkey, even though it all adds up, really. I don't buy it. If the twist really makes sense, if it ties up all the loose ends and pulls the whole story together as it flips it all over, it won't need explaining. But if, on looking back at that trail of clues, it turns out they were mostly randomly scattered breadcrumbs, half of them meaningless, then no amount of directorial sleight of hand and shouty music is going to make sense out of nonsense.

The Wolfman (2010)

Funny word, laughable. On the face of it, inducing laughter wouldn't seem to be a bad thing. We all like a good laugh, right? But to be laughable, of course, is to induce laugter unintentionally, often by being inept. I wonder when that particular linguistic turn happened, when "suitable to induce laughter" became "so ridiculous, it's funny."

The Wolfman, I am here to tell you, is unintentionally funny. It is thoroughly laughable. The other funny thing about things which are laughable: They don't leave you feeling happy, as you might after seeing a genuinely, intentionally funny movie. No, happiness is not the feeling one is left with after The Wolfman is over. 

A needless remake of the 1941 Lon Chaney classic, The Wolfman adds nothing new to the horror genre, or to werewolf mythology, except for some competently rendered computer graphics that allow the werewolf in question to run along rooftops and sprout fur, fangs and claws before our very eyes. Our by now very jaded eyes -- it takes a lot more than insta-grow claws to make a movie interesting. 

There are actually two werewolves in The Wolfman. One of them kills poor, unfortunate Ben Talbot (Simon Merrells) in the first few minutes of the movie, thereby setting the plot in motion. Ben's bereaved fiancee Gwen (Emily Blunt) then writes to Ben's estranged brother Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), an American Shakespearean actor who happens to be touring England. Because if there's one thing England has always needed us Yanks for, it's performing Shakespeare. Presumably, Lawrence's stint in the colonies explains his lack of a British accent, and presumably, Del Toro was game enough to don a furry suit, but not game enough to try on an accent. So I guess we won't be seeing him doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic any time soon. Lawrence returns to the home he left as a child (when he was shipped off to America, you see). He is frequently haunted by dreadful flashbacks to his childhood. Home is a dark and dreary castle full of smoke, dead leaves, cobwebs, and taxidermy. It's occupied by Lawrence's dear old dad, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), a gun-toting lunatic, and his faithful Sikh manservant Singh (Art Malik). Although the year is 1891, Sir John apparently prefers candlelight to gaslight, which gives the old homestead a lot more ambience, though not in a good way. (The cinematography by Shelly Johnson is nicely atmospheric, and makes good use of dim light.) Gwen mopes about the place, and then Lawrence joins her in moping about the place. 

In the course of investigating Ben's untimely and brutal death, Lawrence is bitten by the werewolf. No surprises there. A gypsy woman (Geraldine Chaplin) saves his life, but of course, come the full moon, Lawrence turns into a howling, rampaging, bloodthirsty beast. Sir John seems quite delighted by this turn of events, for reasons that will surprise no one. A Scotland Yard inspector named Abberline (Hugo Weaving) rolls into town, and starts looking about the place with shifty eyes. Lawrence is packed off to an insane asylum, where he is tortured to near insanity by mad Dr. Hoenneger (Antony Sher), who means to cure him of his "wolfman" delusion. Ha ha! you say. Just wait until the next full moon!

Indeed, the education of Dr. Hoenneger provides one of the few satisfying moments in The Wolfman. I was also quite pleased when the deer -- a poor beast tied up so as to lure the werewolf into a trap -- escaped unharmed. But at a certain point in the movie, I realized that I really did not care for any of the characters. Only Gwen is remotely sympathetic, if blindly optimistic. Lawrence is so miserable all the time I couldn't figure out why he didn't just kill himself. And there's one of the problems with The Wolfman. Only Hopkins, who chews the scenery like a lycanthrope tearing into a fresh villager, seems to be in on the joke -- and The Wolfman is pretty much a joke. Hopkins has evident fun as crazy country squire Sir John, who is one bad dad.

As directed by Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III), The Wolfman is an utterly predictable movie with a split personality, which, I guess, makes some kind of sense given that a werewolf has a split personality too. Lawrence is a genteel artiste tortured by his inner beast (we see glimpses of him playing Hamlet, in case it wasn't clear how haunted and tortured he is). The movie tries to recapture the gothic horror of the original movie, while goosing the action and upping the gore quotient with a lot of special effects. So on the one hand, you get your picturesque English country town full of shifty-eyed villagers who sit around the pub blaming gypsies for everything. And a dark and gloomy mansion set on a dark and gloomy, fog-shrouded moor, with beastly screeches and howls filling the night air. It's all fairly corny, but in a quaint kind of way. But on the other hand, there are a lot of dismemberments and disembowelings, which I like as much as the next person, don't get me wrong. Add to that the creature effects (by special effects makeup master Rick Baker), and all the CGI of those super speedy werewolves cruising the countryside, and something about the old fashioned and newfangled just doesn't mesh, and the whole thing feels wrong and corny in a laughable way. It's neither realistic enough to be worth all the effort, nor exciting and thrilling enough to inspire so much as a shiver of dread.

14Feb2010

Crazy Heart (2009)

You don't have to look very far to find country songs about broken hearts, blown chances, lost dreams, lonesome highways, and whiskey. You'll find all those essential ingredients in Crazy Heart, a country song transferred to celluloid, with a few movie cliches tossed into the mix. Crazy Heart, written and directed by Scott Cooper, and adapted from Thomas Cobb's novel, is the tale of Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), a broke-down, hard-drinkin', hard-livin' country music singer whose best days are already pretty far behind him, and getting farther. Bad's hit a long patch of bad road, playing two-bit bars and bowling alleys on a kind of last gasp tour of the American Southwest. He's got a string of broken marriages, he's drinks too much, smokes too much, and he's got the lungs and beer gut to show for his efforts. But when he's good, he's very good -- a singer with a voice like a country road, and a talent for songcraft. Trouble is, he's bad more often than he's good.

Bad's a man in free fall, until an unexpected meeting prompts him to put on the brakes. He meets an aspiring journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a single mom with a cute four year old son. Jean wants an interview with the legendary Bad. He pours on the charm, such as it is. Jean's earthy and earnest and swears she knows better than to fall for another loser. In the country music dictionary, Bad's pretty much the definition of a loser. Jean falls for him anyway, and the implausibility of the romance -- they're decades apart in age, he's a dissolute, self-destructive alcoholic rogue who can barely be trusted with a lit cigarette let alone a child -- runs the movie right off the road. 

The romantic plot of Crazy Heart just doesn't work -- it's implausible on multiple levels, and like a few other plot developments, glib and too easy  -- but the movie's other elements do work. Plot aside, the screenplay features believable dialogue and there are strong performances and great music. Bridges is really terrific as Bad, giving a worn-in, lived-in performance that's all sweat, flab and heart. Bridges does his own singing too, as does Colin Farrell, who plays Tommy Sweet, a one-time Bad Blake protege whose star has risen as Bad's has fallen. They've got some mighty fine songs to croon, songs of loss and longing and better days written by T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton.

Crazy Heart is a sad, moving portrait of a world weary, self-pitying man sliding into self-inflicted oblivion with a howl, but not really putting up much of a fight. He's not so far gone, though, that he doesn't recognize a last chance when he sees it.

07Feb2010

A Single Man (2010)

A Single Man is the story of a man dying -- literally and figuratively -- of a broken heart. A shattered heart, more like, and he carries the pain of it around with him as if the shards pressed constantly against his insides.

The man is George (Colin Firth), an Englishman, and an English professor at a Los Angeles college. The year is 1962 -- the radio buzzes with paranoia-fueling news of the Cuban missile crisis. George's longtime partner Jim (Matthew Goode) has been dead for several months, but grief still looms over every part of George's daily existence. Perhaps because he cannot publicly acknowledge his grief, or his love, it is all the more painful and intractable. A Single Man follows George on one long and fateful day, from his morning routine, to teaching a class, to an odd encounter with a flirty student (Nicholas Hoult), and dinner with his friend Charly (Julianne Moore), another miserable British ex-pat. At some point, George buys bullets. He plans for this day to be his last.

A Single Man is based on Christopher Isherwood's groundbreaking 1964 novel of the same name. It is directed by Tom Ford, the fashion designer, who shows a sure hand here in his first film. Ford co-wrote the screenplay with David Scearce, and it is a meticulously detailed and frequently moving study of grief, of being closeted, of maintaining a facade. A Single Man moves at a stately and considered pace, the camera drinking in the details and routines that are George's visible, surface life. Firth's performance is equally detailed, and nuanced, and stares with heartbreaking clarity into the abyss of George's aching emptiness.

Not surprisingly, Ford is interested in what his characters are wearing -- there is obvious attention to clothing and hair, as George lays out the suit he apparently intends to be buried in, complete with instructions. Appearances are meant, too, to tell us about the people we see -- are they hipsters or squares, are they friend or foe? Likewise, the set design is beautiful and quite interesting, but none of this serves as an undue distraction. It easily could have, since A Single Man is not heavy on plot -- there really is no plot -- it simply recounts from start to finish a long, strange, and interesting day. The images are sometimes a bit static, and they can looked a tad overly staged -- a bit like a classy high fashion ad. Ford uses an expressive cinematic flourish to reveal what George conceals within: the color palette is muted shades of grey and brown, the dull, dreary world as George experiences it. But when George is interested in something, or someone, his outlook brightens, if only for a while, and he and the world bloom with vivid color.

Firth's performance is weighty enough to keep the whole film securely anchored in reality, and there's no danger of it drifting away on flights of fanciness. The key to George, to the story, is the radical notion (which is, sadly, apparently still radical) that he, a gay man, is also an utterly ordinary man -- a single man like any other, with a life like any other. It is only the world that makes him unusual, so that he needs to recede into himself, to turn inward, where he finds only love and loss.