films

Finding Nemo was over-rendered treacle so this blog has no particular interest in seeing Wall-E, by the same director (Andrew Stanton) and over-hyped studio (Pixar). Unaccountably the movie received a 96% "Fresh" rating on the Tomato-Meter at Rottentomatoes, a review-crunching site, which means the critics are marching in lockstep. Look past the numbers, though, and here's what they're saying (the first of these crits, The Guardian's, was assigned a "Fresh" tag by Rottentomatoes' apparently biased staff):

For all that, faint doubts remain. WALL-E (the character) is eminently lovable, by far the film's most human inhabitant. And yet WALL-E (the movie) actually has more in common with EVE [the space probe that trash compactor WALL-E falls in love with --ed]. It is an exquisitely rendered piece of work; beautiful, flawless, serious in its intent and hermetically sealed. You can admire it to the skies and back. You can even learn to love it from a distance. But does Andrew Stanton's film amount to much more than a brilliant aesthetic exercise? I'm not convinced it does. (The Guardian)

And

But by the end, "WALL-E" has turned into something else again, a picture that's so adamant about ending on a feel-good note (or at least a feel-OK note) that it betrays the sad, subtle beauty of those early scenes. It must be that director Andrew Stanton -- the man behind the enormously successful Finding Nemo -- didn't want to make too much of a downer: Can't be sending all those tots home with the blues, can we? But the picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product. (Salon)

And

Though "WALL-E" is no thrill ride, it at least stays true to its core themes. Stanton is attempting no less than rabble-rousing prophecy, scolding the blinded populace into changing its ways (even as an all-consuming mega-corporation partners with the film, spawning toys and wrappers that will end up in landfills).
The film poses as thinking-fans animation, but there's little room for wonder or interpretation in the on-the-nose presentation. (Arizona Star)

Silent Running and Grave of the Fireflies (two films this is compared to) at least had the guts to end on downbeat notes. For those who prefer the chaotic expressionism of El Greco's paintings to the boring control of Raphael's, Pixar's hyper-Renaissance perfection is generally the wrong way to go as filmic art, but there is something especially awry with using this kind of futuristic, memory-intensive, render-farm computer animation to make a movie about entropy. That's probably why it has to end happy--assumptions about the scientific future of entertainment must ultimately be preserved at all costs.

All of them. Batman Begins may be one of the worst movies of all time. Gravitas in an aerosol spray can. Ooooh, Batman's "origin" was that he trained with a league of kung fu assassins. Liam Neeson has a fu manchu beard so bad you can see the adhesive. Then the "twist"--Liam Neeson didn't go away after the opening flashback sequence, he's still actively plotting the destruction of all humankind. Christian Bale's sexy whisper--terrible. Katie Holmes--comatose. Michael Caine as the cockney determined to protect his aristo boss at all costs--embarrassing. Plus gratuitous Morgan Freeman, being...gratuitous. We want to see a sequel to that?

Sometimes Roger Ebert is the only critic that gets a movie. That's the case with M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, which resembles The Birds and Tarkovsky's Stalker in its mysterious apocalytic mood but has a small human story at the center and much wry humor. (George Romero's The Crazies also comes to mind.) It boasts a 24% (Rotten) on the Rottentomatoes "Tomatometer," a poll of print and online reviewer opinions. A score that low often means something's good because it's flummoxed reviewers who don't care about things like the mathematics of shots and hate to recommend a movie that upsets them.

You probably know from the endlessly repeated trailer that it's about an epidemic of creepy suicides. I won't reveal too much but one of the theories floated is it is plant life fighting back against our despoiling the planet by releasing toxins that unhinge the human "survival imperative." Here's Ebert:

Too uneventful for you? Not enough action? For me, Shyamalan's approach is more effective than smash-and-grab plot-mongering. His use of the landscape is disturbingly effective. The performances by Wahlberg and Deschanel bring a quiet dignity to their characters. The strangeness of starting a day in New York and ending it by hiking across a country field is underlined. Most of the other people we meet, not all, are muted and introspective. Had they been half-expecting some such "event" as this?

I know I have. For some time the thought has been gathering at the back of my mind that we are in the final act. We have finally insulted the planet so much that it can no longer sustain us. It is exhausted. It never occurred to me that vegetation might exterminate us. In fact, the form of the planet's revenge remains undefined in my thoughts, although I have read of rising sea levels and the ends of species.

What I admire about "The Happening" is that its pace and substance allowed me to examine such thoughts, and to ask how I might respond to a wake-up call from nature. Shyamalan allows his characters space and time as they look within themselves. Those they meet on the way are such as they might indeed plausibly meet. Even the TV and radio news is done correctly, as convenient cliches about terrorism give way to bewilderment and apprehension.

I suspect I'll be in the minority in praising this film. It will be described as empty, uneventful, meandering. But for some, it will weave a spell. It is a parable, yes, but it is also simply the story of these people and how their lives and existence have suddenly become problematic. We depend on such a superstructure to maintain us that one or two alterations could leave us stranded and wandering through a field, if we are that lucky.

The movie doesn't meander at all, it's tightly plotted and moves swiftly. The shocks continue right up to the end. I thought of Stalker because the suddenness of death, coming on a rippling gust of wind, recalls the dream logic of The Zone (a blighted spot left by an alien beam hitting the Earth from far away in space). Here the cause is even more unclear.

Shot mathematics: Cop greets cab driver. Cop suddenly puts gun to his own head, shoots. Cop's head hits ground with hole in forehead. Camera sweeps to gun, ground level view. Cabbie gets out of cab, legs visible only, walks to gun, picks it up, shoots (out of frame), falls to ground, also with bullet hole in head. Camera, still at ground level, follows gun as it comes to rest. As oozing blood from the cab driver (now out of frame) pours towards gun, a passing woman walks into frame from the center background, at an angle perpendicular to the camera's movement, legs and shoes visible only. She reaches the gun at the same time as the blood, picks up the weapon, fires... This is way intense, and formally flawless. (Very De Palma.)

Years ago, wrote this for Joe McKay's preReview site, where we reviewed movies without seeing them:

Man on Fire
Denzel Washington, who doesn't have a mean bone in his body, once again tries to play an angry tough guy in this movie about a bodyguard who f-s up and lets a megacute kid get kidnapped on his watch. After he recovers from the bullet the baddies put in him, nothing will stop him as he tracks down every one of the sick scum who took that beautiful little girl. Or boy. (It's hard to tell.) Of course, it's going to turn out that the kid is in cahoots with the kidnappers, and is actually a small adult masquerading as an ambiguously gendered child. And it's going to turn out that Denzel is actually the mastermind behind the scheme, only he doesn't know it because he has multiple personalities and it was one of the bad "alters" who ordered the child-snatching. At the climax, the small adult, who is also a therapist, will cure Denzel and the two will run away together.
prereviewer - Tom Moody, 11/19/03

Never saw Man on Fire but the later Dakota Fanning vehicle Hide and Seek (2005) is almost as nutty as the above prereview. Nevertheless, it kind of works.

[Spoiler:] Throughout most of the film psychologist Robert de Niro is caring for his daughter after the suicide of his wife (her mom). The girl acts spooky and hostile and talks about her imaginary friend Charlie. De Niro courts pretty neighbor Elizabeth Shue but the daughter misbehaves to drive her away. We don't know if the girl has the Sixth Sense or a weird relationship with another neighbor, a creepy older man who might be Charlie.

The twist is de Niro suffers from a split personality. He killed his wife and unknown to himself, talks to his daughter in the guise of his "alter," Charlie, who uses her to drive his sane self crazy. At one point a therapist friend of de Niro's asks the girl: "what game did Charlie ask you to play?" (Girl gets evil look.) "Upsetting Daddy."

So, as we piece it together post-twist, at a given moment the daughter has had to determine which Dad she is talking to and play the appropriate role to survive--grief shattered child or willing accomplice. Sane herself (of course), she fakes madness in a (failed) attempt to make Dad less attractive as a mate for Shue before "Charlie" kills Shue. Picture Hitchcock's Psycho with a daughter of Anthony Perkins having to navigate between nice older brother and...Mom.

Before the twist, in subtext you think it's a movie about a father coping with a his daughter's autism (she often acts as if others are not in the room); after it you realize it's about a daughter coping with a father's alcoholism ("Charlie" is Dad on a bender). Thus are two intractable social problems mapped onto each other in some impossible, inverse Kleinian pairing. Whether they're actually related is irrelevant: they're linked in the screenwriters' exploitative topology, in order to wring two hot button movies out of one.

Hide and Seek, cable fodder with Robert de Niro, isn't great but has a nifty twist that turns the movie inside out. It's better than The Sixth Sense's twist because there is no supernatural element.

[Spoiler]

Prior to the twist it is a movie about a father coping with his daughter's autism. After the twist it is about a daughter coping with her father's alcoholism. I stopped watching after the twist but appreciated that the plot dealt with real world social problems and not emanations from the spirit world.