Fame (2009)

With any movie remake, the question can be asked: Why? Sometimes, it's a Why bother? Sometimes, Why not? And rarely, Why did it take so long? Often, the answer is simple enough: there's money to be made. With the likes of the *High School Musical* and *Hannah Montana* juggernauts out there demonstrating a ready market for teen musicals, Fame was probably an inevitability. Not to be too cynical about it, but there was money to be made.

The original Fame (1980), directed by Alan Parker, followed a handful of students at New York's High School for the Performing Arts, from their nerve-wracking auditions, through to their senior years. It won a few Oscars (for Original Musical Score and Best Original Song), spawned a hit song, a TV series, a theatrical musical, and now this remake, updated with hip hop influenced song and dance. Of the original cast, Debbie Allen returns. Then, she was the dance teacher; now, she's the stern but caring principal of the high school.

Fame, like its inspiration, follows the trials and tribulations of talented students trying to make it through high school while simultaneously trying to make it in show biz. The movie has some terrific musical numbers, with fresh, energetic dancing and music. Naturi Naughton, in particular, stands out as Denise, a classically trained pianist who, it turns out, is also a funky fine singer (if only her overbearing dad would let her get her groove on!). The entire cast of kids is utterly adorable, and ready to take their spots on the pages of *Teen People* (although more than a few of them look well past their teen years).

If only they'd been given stories and characters. The structure of Fame, written by Allison Burnett (and based on Christopher Gore's original), follows the students through each year of high school. Following one character with any depth through four years of teen life would be hard enough. Fame ambitiously tries to track several kids, each with a distinctive talent (dancer, filmmaker, singer, actor, rapper...) and set of personal problems, but there's little time to do more than hurriedly present an issue or difficulty before the titles yoink us into another year, each time doing so at a supposed moment of crisis, and a potential life/career turning point. But with no follow through, any questions about what happened next are left unanswered. The plotlines are little more than cliches; the characters don't develop or change. There's angry inner city guy, bored Upper West Side girl, undisciplined cocky guy who doesn't care about Bach, timid girl, etc. They have PG-rated, after school special problems, dumbed down and sanitized for a tween market (that is already probably too sophisticated for this). There's no central character or storyline, and the drama is superficial and tacked on -- the real focus here is on performance, while the rest (plot, character, emotion) is just filler (and minimal filler at that). If the characters had any substance, the performance segments of Fame would have a chance to grow organically out of their lives and experiences. After all, what would be more natural than students at a performing arts high school spontaneously performing? Instead, the performance segments are, for the most part, separate, energetic (and welcome) interlopers from a different and better movie.

The teachers, played by veterans of stage and screen (Bebe Neuwirth, Charles S. Dutton, Megan Mullaly, and Kelsey Grammer), manage to flesh out their roles despite underwritten parts and parsimonious shares of screen time, demonstrating nicely the enduring value of experience and screen presence.

30Sep2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

Films about food usually feature chefs, whether they're obsessive pros or dedicated, magical amateurs who invent marvelous, miraculous edibles by blending and stirring, chopping and kneading, adding a little spice and a soupcon of drama to the kitchen. But nuts and bolts inventors? They're hardly ever depicted as gastronomical wizards. Until Flint Lockwood, the wacky inventor of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and a guy who's more astronomical than gastronomical.

Flint doesn't make fancy food. He specializes in pizza and cheeseburgers and Jell-O and donuts. The kind of food that makes Homer Simpson drool. Flint doesn't cook either. He's invented a handy-dandy machine that converts plain old water into mouthwatering combinations of sugar, fat, and salt, the unholy trinity of obesity, the trifecta of artery-clogging comestibles. (Although if it's made from water, it must be vegan and cholesterol-free, no?) Flint's food literally rains down on the aptly named town of Swallow Falls, where the populace (raised on a steady diet of sardines), is eager to expand their gastronomical horizons.

Thanks to his many failed inventions, Flint (voiced by Bill Hader) was once the laughing stock of Swallow Falls; but then Flint's machine was accidentally shot into the sky, where it continuously churns rainwater into buttery treats. Now he's the man with the manna, the toastmaster, the pharaoh of the food pyramid. Even better, he's been noticed by cutie-pie meteorologist Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), an all-around smart cookie (with a serious peanut allergy). Suddenly, the world is Flint's oyster, er, cheeseburger. Needless to say, things eventually go terribly, deliciously wrong, Flint's machine goes bananas, and showers of colorful sprinkles give way to a pasta disasta.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is, of course, based on the popular 1978 children's book of the same name (by Judi and Ron Barrett) and has been adapted for the screen with nifty 3-D animation by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and the animators at Sony Imageworks. The animation is lively, bright, and colorful, with lots of clever sight gags and plenty of humor for both the little ones and the adults they bring along to buy the popcorn and Twizzlers. There are mildly menacing Gummi Bears, which is the only explanation I can come up with for why Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is rated PG. The movie is far less scary than those creepy Quiznos commercials (which put the porn back in food porn), and anyway, every kid knows what to do when Gummi Bears attack. The movie nibbles at a smorgasbord of themes: fathers and sons (Flint's taciturn dad is voiced by a hilarious James Caan; Mr. T. is a pip as an overprotective pop), overindulgence and greed, the virtues and dangers of junk food, environmentalism and waste, heroism in the face of razor-sharp peanut brittle and rampaging bagels -- the usual fare. Dig in: it's fizzy, snarkless fun with no saccharine aftertaste.

21Sep2009

9 (2009)

In 9, things are awakened in a postapocalyptic world. Things made by humans, but not human. Things alive, or not alive, depending on what that means, but ensouled perhaps, and given the best qualities of the men who made them, and also the worst.

The newest of these things -- creatures? robots? mecha? little people? -- is 9, who awakens into a nightmarish world in which everything built by humans is in ruins, and the humans are all gone. In time, the calamity that destroyed the world is revealed, but 9, directed by Shane Acker, and based on his Academy Award-nominated short animated film of the same name, takes its time explaining just what's going on in the ruined world 9 stumbles into on his new little legs.

9 seems to have been stitched together out of scraps of burlap and bits of machinery. He finds others like him -- they are very small, with soft, ragdoll bodies, articulated metal hands and eyes made from camera lenses. The apertures widen and narrow with little clicks and clinks, giving 9 and his companions wonderfully expressive faces. The animation is beautifully detailed, full of heaps of scraps and shards of bent and twisted metal and crumbling buildings, broken statues, rose windows -- civilization once flourished here, in the time before 9. Now, dust motes drift silently down on what is left.

9 and his companions -- also known by their numbers, which apparently indicate the order of their creation -- are not alone in the world. They are menaced by a machine they call "The Beast," which hunts and kills them for reasons they do not understand. 9 takes its time explaining that too, allowing the audience to discover answers slowly, along with 9. Acker's very compact short film told the same story, essentially, in ten minutes, and without dialogue. 9 adds more characters, and gives voices to the stalwart little ragmen. The movie also expands to 79 minutes by adding quite a lot of fairly scary action sequences (too scary for young kids, nicely challenging for older kids), and a bit more mystical, spiritual fluff 'n stuff at the end. It would be good if the additional hour added a great deal of substance to 9, but it doesn't especially. It touches on themes familiar in science fiction: the postapocalyptic world, totalitarianism, and sentient machines. It touches on these themes, or points towards them without really having very much to say about them. Acker co-wrote the script with Pamela Pettler, and the characters are not exactly raconteurs, which may just be a function of the somewhat infantile state of being for 9 and company. Their quest is partly metaphysical -- they don't know who or what they are, or why they were created. Each of them has a distinctive personality and character -- some are timid, some are bold, some are loyal, some are ruthless -- they each embody different aspects of humankind in general, which means they do a lot of squabbling, as the brave exhort the cowardly, and the noble scold the ignoble, and the paternalistic 1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer), the oldest of the ragmen, learns a thing or two from that rash, freethinking whippersnapper 9 (Elijah Wood).

Tim Burton produced 9, and the movie has the dark and vaguely gothic look familiar to Burton films. 9 is digitally animated, but the design of the characters and backgrounds has the depth, richness and tactile look of the traditional stop motion animation that Burton and his frequent collaborator Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) are known for. The animation in 9 is really splendid, beautiful, and lively, creating a vivid sense of place, with imaginatively conceived, original, and intriguingly empathetic characters. All that's lacking is a story as good as the rest of the movie's elements.

14Sep2009

All About Steve (2009)

Mary Magdalene Horowitz is a cruciverbalist, which, as Will Shortz would know, is a crossword constructor. She plies her trade in Sacramento, which, if All About Steve is to be believed, is one tough and unforgiving town for a quirky cruciverbalist like Mary (Sandra Bullock).

She wears red patent go-go boots everywhere. She has hair of a somewhat indescribable color, cut in a shag. She suffers from chronic logorrhea. When she speaks, which is most of the time, her words tumble out in a rapid-fire, polyglot cascade, thoughts leading to other thoughts as she accesses her encyclopedic knowledge of facts both trivial and profound. She also has a slight lisp. For all of this, Mary (Sandra Bullock) is mocked by schoolchildren, and told by her editor to "Be normal." At least her parents (Howard Hesseman and Beth Grant) and her hamster accept her. And in a touch of originality for the movie, she is a smart woman who doesn't wear glasses. Instead, she squints, flaps her hands, and skitters around on those wondrous boots.

There is quite a bit that is original about All About Steve. There's also much that is utterly implausible about this odd comedy, although if we hold movies to a standard of plausibility, we might find ourselves staring at a lot of blank screens. The title is misleading, a play, obviously, on All About Eve (a completely unrelated Bette Davis classic). All About Steve is really all about Mary, although there is a Steve (Bradley Cooper), a TV news cameraman who ditches Mary during an awkward blind date. Steve chooses his words poorly during the ditching, which leaves Mary (who ought to know better, but doesn't) believing that she should follow him around the country as he pursues hot news stories with vain TV reporter Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church). Mary's instantaneous smittening and subsequent obsession with Steve leads to her losing her job as a crossword constructor, thus freeing her to pursue the cameraman across hill and dale. He, for his part, instantaneously decides she is a lunatic, which causes him to fear the cute, sweet woman in the red boots who is stalking him. For reasons that never become clear, Hartman Hughes decides to string Mary along, persuading her that Steve's unambiguous declarations of non-affection are not what they appear (to everyone but Mary) to be.

All About Steve could be a fairly unlikable movie if not for Bullock, who is about as appealing a performer as there is out there. Bullock has played forlorn and lovelorn before, but never a character as colorfully off-kilter as Mary. (Haden Church, Katy Mixon, D.J. Qualls, Ken Jeong, and M.C. Gainey provide able comic support.) Mary is a problem-solver, but also, of course, a problem constructor, and things go awry with Steve because she tries to solve the wrong problem. Or maybe the clues are ambiguous. But she is, at any rate, smart and nice, and because smart and nice generally equate with dorkiness in Movieworld, she's also pretty dorky.

All About Steve, written by Kim Barker and directed by Phil Traill, lands a few very softly satiric blows about sensationalist TV journalists. That said journalists are exploiting stories about children with disabilities may or may not be intended to make a point about Mary, whose social ineptitude might rise to the level of a disability on the most uncharitable reading, in which awkwardness and intelligence are handicaps. When Mary herself becomes a news story, she's described, pejoratively, as "freakishly intelligent," emphasis on the freakish. The point of All About Steve (and there is a point), is that Mary is really okay the way she is, smart and all, and she just needs to find the right crew (i.e. fellow dorks, proud to be weird) to hang with.

But about that implausibility. The plot of All About Steve is pretty random, throwing all sorts of unlikely obstacles in Mary's path, and then resolving everything in one big unlikely happy ending. It's also a little hard to believe that Mary turns stalker over a guy as boring as Steve. It is the hallmark of romantic comedies, of course, that they move heaven and earth to keep two people apart, when those two people are meant to be together. All About Steve is not, in that sense, a romantic comedy at all, since Mary and Steve really ought not be together, and would be far happier apart (and Steve is a dullard who really can't hold down his end of the romantic comedy seesaw). Heaven knows it, but that doesn't stop the earth from literally moving in the vicinity of Mary fairly often. All About Steve is a movie chimera, a screwball road trip romantic satire, but without genuine romance, and without much bite to the satire. It manages to be modestly screwy, and there is a road trip in there, and lots of Sandra Bullock, so it ultimately adds up to a movie that's a little more enjoyable than it really ought to be.

All About Sandy

Fans of Sandra Bullock, and I count myself among them, have a hard row to hoe. She's an adorable screen presence, and funny, beautiful, and talented. She's got great hair (most of the time). She's America's Sweetheart -- accessible, likable, the kind of gal you'd want to have a beer with. So why is she in so many lousy movies? All About Steve is surely not the worst movie she's ever been in -- compared to some of Sandy's movies, it's positively superb. But good movies? Well, there was Speed (1994), which for my money was a terrific, uncomplicated action movie, with a star-making, everywoman role for Bullock. And there was While You Were Sleeping (1995), a sweet, funny romance in which Bullock's comedic and dramatic abilities are evident. And there was... well, that was about it, really.

Speed 2: Cruise Control? Definitely a candidate for worst sequel ever, although Bullock redeemed herself by admitting as much. There were a few passable thrillers like A Time To Kill and The Net, comedies like Miss Congeniality, dramas like Crash (which, by many accounts was a fine movie, and won three Oscars, although I'm not a huge fan). Sandy is diverse -- she can do anything, and she gamely tries, despite making so many stinkers.

I have a certain fondness for Two If By Sea (1996), a quirky crime comedy costarring Denis Leary, which contributed a memorable and highly useful (if unprintable) line to my household's stock phrases. Bullock has made two movies with another actor I happen to like despite his similar tendency to make more lousy movies than good: Keanu Reeves. It's possible they are both getting an undeserved pass for Speed, but I'll publicly confess that I kind of like The Lake House (2006), which is a romantic time travel movie. I'll watch just about anything that's about time travel, and The Lake House is definitely... about time travel. On the other hand, Premonition (2007) might be about time travel, and it's really quite terrible, incomprehensible, and barely watchable. As I said at the time, it's Bullock who really carries the movie, with an appealing and empathetic performance that is far better than anything else about Premonition. This is a general truth about Sandra Bullock movies, and the Uplifting Effect of Sandy is doubtless familiar to most of her fans.

07Sep2009

Taking Woodstock (2009)

You almost wouldn't know, from Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, that a music concert happened 40 years ago in Bethel, New York. The movie, based on Elliot Tiber's memoir, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life remains almost entirely on the periphery of that watershed festival. Music is occasionally heard, drifting across fields and forests to reach The El Monaco Motel, a shabby, rundown establishment operated (barely) by the Teichberg family in White Lake, NY. Sonia (Imelda Staunton) and Jake Teichberg (Henry Goodman) are Russian Jews; she's penny-pinching and greedy, chasing off potential customers with unkempt rooms and extra fees for towels. Jake putters around the property -- if he's doing any maintenance, it doesn't much show. Their son Elliot (Demetri Martin) is a closeted interior decorator, forced to move back in with his parents to help them run their motel, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Elliot is also the president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, and the organizer of an annual arts festival at which the performances consist mainly of records played over the motel loudspeaker.

When the nearby town of Wallkill pulls the permit for a music festival, Elliott gets the grand idea of hosting it himself. He rings up Woodstock Ventures, introduces Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) to dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy, a hoot), and the rest is history. The El Monaco is soon the bustling headquarters of Woodstock Ventures, and within weeks, a steady stream of hippies are making their way to the fabled "Aquarian Exposition." The locals, depicted as a provincial, insular lot, are none to happy about all the visitors -- they practically greet them with pitchforks and torches (although eventually, there are sandwiches).

Somewhere in there, a concert happened. But Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee and written by James Schamus, isn't really about that. It's about Elliot, and his parents, and the intersection of commerce and art, the uneasy alliance of idealism and capitalism. It's mostly about how Elliott gets his groove on, and lets his hair down, and blooms (a little) among the flower children.

Lee directs Taking Woodstock in a decidedly old fashioned way. It pretty much feels like a 1960s movie in its pacing, and looks like one too. Lee captures the mood and look of the festival -- well, the outer rings of the festival -- frequently evoking Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary Woodstock as the movie follows Elliot through hippie-clogged roads and muddy hills. The movie meanders and drifts fairly aimlessly and inconsequentially, an episodic collage (including several scenes rendered in split screen, as in Wadleigh's doc) of groovy and not so groovy stuff going down. Although there are plenty of reminders that something big is going on in the background, Taking Woodstock is a very small film, a breezy, ironic comedy with a little darkness around the edges. It doesn't so much get back to the garden as get lost -- contentedly, it must be said -- in the weeds. Lee and Schamus don't seem to really have a point to make in Taking Woodstock, and so they don't.

Martin, a standup comedian, gives an extremely low key performance -- Elliot is the center of the story, but he's barely there as a character. Maybe that's on purpose -- Elliot doesn't really know who he is, so we don't know him either. The filmmakers want to make something of Elliot's coming out, but Martin is too wan a presence to carry that much narrative and metaphorical weight (there are awkward allusions to the Stonewall riots, which happened only months earlier, and to connections between the Age of Aquarius and the dawning of the gay rights movement). Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a burly, ex-Marine transvestite who wanders into the El Monaco and stays on as director of security, serves as a gay confidant to Elliot. Schreiber plays against stereotype, and makes Vilma a macho man in a pink dress. On the one hand, Schreiber's portrayal is strong and interesting enough to make Vilma substantial and vivid despite the underwritten script. On the other hand, Vilma is not the only potentially interesting character to get pushed to the periphery while the film makes too much of money-grubbing Sonia and anxious Elliot. Others seem to have been left largely on the cutting room floor, like Elliot's pal Billy (Emile Hirsch), a vet who returned from Vietnam burned-out and deeply disturbed. Billy is so sketchy, and is given so little screen time that he seems more cliché than character. Groff makes a strong impression despite relatively little screen time. He portrays promoter Lang as an almost comically calm, angelic creature, a curly-haired hippie knight who travels by helicopter and by horse, and a shrewd capitalist-idealist who rides in and saves the El Monaco, for what its worth, and pulls off one of the more fabled events in recent history.

Taking Woodstock is an enjoyable little film that only hints at the bigger story. Sometimes, focusing on a small story gives a better sense of large and momentous events -- we can understand the forest better when we pay attention to the individual trees. That was surely the goal in Taking Woodstock, which looks at a single detail (and a potential future question on Jeopardy!) -- What Catskills motel served as HQ for the Woodstock Festival? -- to tell the tale of a generational groundshift. But the focus of Taking Woodstock is a little too tight, and the rest of the picture a little too diffuse. Taking Woodstock tells the little story -- a little story that's quirky and fun and modestly interesting -- but kind of misses the big picture.

31Aug2009

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

In Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino rewrites history (and spelling) because, well, he can. The history in question would be the history of World War II, which we moviegoers have been painfully reliving, with brutal realism, since the war ended, I suppose, but especially since Schindler's List upped the ante on tragical realism in war movies. Tarantino is no tragedian, and neither is he especially a realist, so Inglourious Basterds looks with fresh brutality at man's inhumanity to man, but with a twist. This time, the bad guys get what they deserve, at least on a traditional war movie reading of just deserts, and no one stands on principle when it comes to brutalizing and murderizing Nazis.

Or, as Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) calls them, "Natt-seez." Raine leads a small unit of Jewish-American soldiers who have infiltrated Nazi-occupied France, where they wage a guerilla war on the Third Reich. They work for the OSS, and they enjoy their work. Their specialty is scalping the Nazis they kill, and they kill most every Nazi they find. Tarantino has a reputation (undeserved, if you ask me) as a filmmaker whose movies are gratuitously violent. In reality, more violence is implied than is ever seen in his films -- he's too stylized to be blatant or obvious. For a war movie in which revenge against Nazis is a prominent theme, the depiction of violence is quite restrained inInglourious Basterds -- as usual, more is implied than is shown although what is shown is sometimes gruesome and, not shockingly, rather satisfying.

Inglourious Basterds is steeped, as all of Tarantino's films, in cinematic tradition. The title is taken from Italian director Enzo Castellani's film Inglourious Basterds. Aldo Raine's name is meant to invoke movie star Aldo Ray, who starred in numerous war pictures and B-movies. The Basterds (and the plot) call to mind *The Dirty Dozen*, but the film is as much spaghetti Western as it is war movie. Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), an escaped Jew, owns a Parisian cinema that shows the Third Reich's fave actress-turned-mountaineer-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl's The White Hell of Pitz Palü, a film that is referenced again by undercover operative and suave movie critic (aren't they all?) Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender). Eli Roth, director of the Hostel torture/horror movies, plays a Basterd known as the "Bear Jew," a baseball bat-wielding Southie who enjoys beaning Nazis. (Roth is no better an actor than Tarantino, which is to say, not very good at all, but as Shosanna says, "We French respect directors.") That Parisian cinema is the setting for two separate and complicated plots to assassinate Hitler and key members of the Third Reich, as well as a movie premiere featuring a Joseph Goebbels film starring war hero-turned-actor Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who tries to woo Shosanna.

The story begins on a dairy farm in Nazi-occupied France, where Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogates a farmer he believes is hiding Jews. Landa, an effete, chatty, and astute monster, is nicknamed the "Jew Hunter." He's highly effective at his job, in part because he enjoys it. Waltz unexpectedly and brilliantly dances away with the movie -- his Landa is a Nazi monster like no other: ironic, self-serving, twee, honorable, ingenious (and of course, utterly evil).

Landa is the nemesis of the movie's heroine Shosanna, after he murders her family. Shosanna is an unlikely siren and object of Nazi affection. For Landa, she's the one that got away. Zoller, a monster of a different sort (and a cinephile in his own right), lavishes unwanted attention on her as well. In several instances, Inglourious Basterds twists cinematic tradition, taking qualities that would traditionally be considered virtues in a movie character (resistance, patriotism, killer marksmanship) and provocatively attaching them to Nazis in a way that forces a reconsideration of the so-called virtue. Shosanna is a calculating and vengeful lady in a red dress (and a propagandist filmmaker and would-be mass murderer), but her cause cannot be called unjust (unless one is a Nazi). This is also true of Raine (a.k.a. "Aldo the Apache") and his Basterds, who are brutal and bloodthirsty, but in the service of justice and retribution. Pitt's performance as the fast-talking, hard-boiled Southerner Raine approaches caricature, with a strong undercurrent of dark humor. It's the kind of mannered performance that complements Tarantino's mannered dialogue in a way that really works.

The meandering plot of Inglourious Basterds winds around sufficiently to incorporate numerous war movie tropes, and combines fact and fiction, movie history and world history, and comes to an utterly satisfying and inflammatory (in more ways than one) conclusion in which film itself is the agent of vengeance and correction (in more ways than one). Inglourious Basterds is fanboy cinephile Tarantino's homage to war movies, westerns, and to pre-war German cinema, but with his own postmodern twist: titles, keening spaghetti western music and grinding rock guitar riffs, and occasional narrative interludes featuring the voice of Samuel L. Jackson (discussing -- what else? -- pre-war film stocks). There's more too -- as a film that is essentially about Jewish anger and vengeance for the Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds references the ovens at Auschwitz and the tattooing of inmates, but in irreverent, table-turning fashion.

Depending on how much reverence one demands from films about the war and the Nazi atrocities, and whether one believes such films can (or should) be entertaining, Inglourious Basterds is either a film to be taken very seriously, or not seriously at all. Tarantino likes his B-movies, and likes, too, to elevate B-movie conventions to art. He succeeds better sometimes than others, and like a true contrarian, he succeeds better when he reaches higher, and is more ambitious. Inglourious Basterds is ambitious, irreverent, and accomplished. Like a work of high caliber fanfic, it is related to the war movie's canonical universe, and simultaneously exists outside that universe, offering an alternate ending that satisfies our desires with respect to historical reality and with respect to happy (well, more or less happy) movie endings.

24Aug2009

District 9 (2009)

If movies have taught us anything, it's that we must beware the aliens who will one day visit us (or perhaps, already have visited us), probes and disintegrating ray guns in hand. With the exception of the occasional chocolate addict like E.T., the alien invaders mean us no good.

But what if it's the other way around? What if it is they who ought to fear us? That's the scenario imagined by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp in District 9, in which we humans, with our history of murder, deceit, genocide, medical experimentation, speciesism, racism, and exploitation, are the species the rest of the universe ought to give an intergalactically wide berth.

In a documentary-style opening montage, District 9 lays out an entirely plausible and woeful history in which, some time in the 80s, a massive alien ship appeared, and hovered, apparently stalled, over Johannesburg, South Africa. When impatient humans finally breached the ship, they discovered many malnourished aliens aboard. These "prawns," so called because of their vague resemblance to the crustaceans, were in dire straits, and were eventually settled in a vast refugee camp. That was apparently the end of Earth's humanitarian impulses. The camp, known as district 9, eventually became a slum, a shantytown like so many impoverished, dysfunctional, dangerous third world slums, with millions of aliens segregated from their unwelcoming human neighbors. (Insert Apartheid analogy here.) Decades later, the refugees fall into violence, and scavenging, and are preyed upon by violent Nigerian gangsters who exploit their addiction to cat food.

For reasons that become clear as the story progresses, the prawns are to be resettled in a more remote camp, with the dirty work to be done by MNU (Multi-National United), a vaguely evil corporation engaged in various kinds of vaguely evil doings. The bloke in charge of the resettlement is a mild-mannered, nervous, paper pushing bureaucrat named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), whose father-in-law (Louis Minaar) heads MNU. Wikus gets no respect (and earns none) from either his coworkers, or from prawns. Backed by (mostly white) MNU mercenaries, he heads into the camp to serve eviction notices on the prawn residents. Wikus is like so many ordinary citizens throughout history, members of a privileged class who are actively or passively complicit in the persecution of those deemed Other, or Unclean, or Subhuman. And like a few others, Wikus is forced out of his complacency (and into some kind of heroism) by a clanging cognitive dissonance. For Wikus, an incident occurs during his eviction rounds -- without giving too much away, let's just say it is a truly alienating experience. Things subsequently go terribly wrong, and he discovers, to his horror, just what has really been happening to the prawns at the hands of MNU soldiers and doctors.

There are pointedly allegorical and political aspects to District 9, but Blomkamp, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terri Tatchell, doesn't get heavy-handed or preachy about the message embedded in his ingenious and fascinating film. Instead, District 9, in the tradition of the best science fiction and horror genre pictures, integrates thought provoking ideas into a smart, suspenseful, darkly humorous, and thoroughly entertaining movie. District 9 is a cracking good and gruesome horror film that morphs into a fast-paced, action-adventure alien-human buddy picture (with cute-ish alien kid thrown in for good measure).

That alien buddy to Wikus is known as Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), a prawn father who is much more than he appears. Christopher's relationship with Wikus is complex, burdened by a history of mistrust, exploitation, and betrayal, as well as a language barrier (the aliens speak in clicks, translated for the viewer in subtitles). The prawns and humans seem to understand each other about equally, which is to say, only partially. But real communication transcends language, and Wikus and Christopher come to an understanding, and find common ground and purpose, a recognition of their mutual (if not superficially obvious) personhood. The cosmic joke of District 9 is that for the prawns, becoming more human is a degrading experience; for Wikus, becoming a mensch requires a thorough alienation from his humanity.

Moon (2009)

Astronaut Sam Bell logs miles on a treadmill, wearing a t-shirt that reads "Wake me when it's quitting time." It's one of many inside jokes and telling clues in Moon, a compact, spare movie about a man on the moon. Sam (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three year stint as the sole human occupant of a remote mining operation on the far side of the moon. (Astronomers will quibble because Sam can see Earth from there, which, if I know my astronomy, can't be done from way yonder on the moon.) The station is outfitted with many amusements, but Sam's only companion is GERTY, a roving computer/robot, which speaks in the monotonous, deadpan voice of Kevin Spacey and flashes vaguely inappropriate emoticons on a small screen.

GERTY's kinship with HAL, the homicidal computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is both clear and ambiguous -- GERTY is apparently friendlier than HAL, but the association is meant to raise warning flags. 2001 is also clearly a forebear of Moon, but where the former was ambitious, tedious, intentionally obscure, and, if you ask me, unbearably dull (it's a movie I have less and less patience for every time I see it), Moon is sprightly and engaging, if far less ambitious. (Moon also calls to mind Douglas Trumbull's terrific film *Silent Running*, both in its ecological theme and in its exploration of the isolation of space and the companionship of robots.)

Rather than being weighed down by ponderousness, Moon suffers more from the weightlessness of brevity. There are several interesting and complex ideas explored in Moon, including science fiction mainstays: human cloning, exploitation, personal identity, human and machine consciousness, freedom, mortality, and fatalism. Any one of them would have been enough for a single movie, so none are explored with as much depth as they might have been. Nonetheless, Moon is satisfying and intriguing.

While Sam anticipates leaving the Moon and seeing the wife and child he left behind on Earth, odd things begin to happen. His physical body starts to deteriorate, and a mysterious replacement worker suddenly appears at the mining station. Not much can be said about Sam's replacement that wouldn't give away too much of the plot, but suffice it to say that he is also portrayed by Sam Rockwell, and the two astronauts are less simpatico than might be expected. Rockwell's performance is strange (as usual) and marvelously rich, funny, melancholy, and poignant, as he portrays two men who are both compatriots and rivals, buddies and enemies. Sam and Sam's replacement are forced together by odd (very odd) circumstances, isolation, and deception. They were never supposed to meet, but having met, they're forced to confront deeply disturbing questions about who they are and why they exist.

Moon is directed by Duncan Jones (heretofore, but surely not henceforth best known as the son of David Bowie), from a story conceived by Jones and scripted by Nathan Parker. They've taken a futuristic scenario and pared it down to an essentially human drama, then pared it down even more into a one-person drama about, primarily, identity, and in particular that ol' philosophical headscratcher about the persistence of identity over time: what makes you the same you that you were yesterday, or a week ago, or three years ago, when you started your long, lonely night shift on the far side of the moon?

Like much of the best science fiction, Moon also explores the complex relationship between man and technology, and the ways that our essential nature may be threatened by the improvements and efficiencies of a streamlined, technologically enhanced existence. Moon also explores the possibility that it's the other way around, and we humans will always infect the machine perfection of our creations with our all too human imperfections. Are there some improvements we (or the wes we think we are) may not survive? Or will we instead leave our indelible mark -- our human crud and hair, and wear and tear, our emotionalism and sentimentality, wherever and whenever we go -- like the footprints we left, and the flag we planted on the once pristine lunar surface?

3Aug2009

The Ugly Truth (2009)

The Ugly Truth is another in an apparently endless line of romantic comedies (and I use the term loosely) about a gorgeous, serious, lonely, workaholic, glasses-wearing single woman who desperately wants to meet Mr. Right. Abby (played by the voluptuous Katherine Heigl) is such a control freak that she ranks her dates according to how many of her ten essential criteria they meet. She also prefers tap water to bottled, since bottled water is just tap water with a markup. And The Ugly Truth is just When Harry Met Sally Met Judd Apatow but Forgot to Bring the Funny.

Judd Apatow, purveyor of manboy-centric comedies, is in no way personally responsible for The Ugly Truth. His movies are actually funny. The Ugly Truth is, on the other hand, a failed effort at matchmaking between the venerable chick flick romantic comedy and crude, potty-mouthed bromantic comedies of the Apatow-knockoff sort. Both parties should file for divorce citing irreconcilable differences.

The combatants in this battle of the sexes are Abby, a TV producer, and Mike (Gerard Butler), star of a late night public access show called The Ugly Truth. Back in the day, Mike would have been called a male chauvinist pig, but we'll leave the innocent pigs out of it. Mike's a lout and a blowhard who maintains that all men care about is sex, and that women ought to give up on romance, put on push-up bras, and shut their yaps. Abby disagrees. The two come to blows when Mike is brought on to spice up the ratings of Abby's failing morning talk show. Lo and behold, it works. Apparently the good people of Sacramento want to be yelled at by a big hairy apeman first thing in the morning, because they go for Mike and his Jell-o wrestling bimbos in a big way.

Abby, meanwhile, meets Colin (Eric Winter), a hunky doctor recently arrived in her apartment building, and proceeds to take Mike's advice on how to hook him. Why would a sensible woman accept advice about anything from a knuckle-dragging, butt-slapping dope like Mike? Obviously because they've made a wager: Abby gets the dreamy guy using Mike's method, or Mike quits her TV show. There follow shenanigans involving vibrating underwear, hot dogs and spilled beverages, and Mike-as-Cyrano relaying advice via two-way radio to a frantic and inept Abby. The twist, and I'm sure nobody saw it coming, is that Mike falls for Abby and Abby gets all confused about her feelings for Mike and/or Colin. The usual ad hoc complications and hijinks ensue, leading to dumb and senseless fights and breakups that merely go through the motions of textbook romantic comedy plotting. This is a cinematic battle of the sexes that destroys everything (comedy, romance, joy, hope) and then salts the earth when the fighting is finally over.

The Ugly Truth wanders from one pointless and unbelievable episode to another. There are several quirky supporting characters jumping up and down and vying for screen time with strenuous mugging. Director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) apparently instructed his cast to do everything bigger, louder, and kookier, since that is the general tone of The Ugly Truth. Heigl is particularly effortful in her madcappery, with lots of Cheshire Cat mugging (huge smile, big eyes), while Butler's job is to toss off sexual innuendos and be charmingly uncharming. Thing is, Mike and Abby are both so unhappy and unpleasant and clearly have such good reasons for disliking each other (I couldn't stand either one of them) that there is just no good reason for them to get together, except for the fact that they are two attractive people in close proximity, and because the screenplay (penned by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith) says so. The Ugly Truth violates the first rule (the only rule, really) of romantic comedy (or romantic anything), which is that the audience has to love those crazy kids and want ever so much for them to fall into each other's arms and live happily ever after. Mike and Abby spread unhappiness wherever they go. They're good for a quickie, or maybe a friends with benefits kinda thing, but happily ever after? No way. They're not even happy now.

Neither was I, watching this movie, which trots out the standard stereotypes about horndogs with hearts of gold, and desperately lonely career gals, and then flogs those dead horses for all they're worth, which isn't much, and certainly isn't the price of admission.