WALL-E (2008)
WALL-E is probably what most movie lovers pictured (and hoped for) when Steven Spielberg announced he was going to take on Stanley Kubrick’s long gestating Artificial Intelligence. The possibility of Kubrick’s controlled-chilly-distrustful sensibility mingling with Spielberg’s pop-genius-empathy was too rich for it to be anything other than troubled and disappointing. A.I. is a fascinating picture, and a powerful one-but that power comes partially from the friction of watching a misguided picture try to take hold. A.I. lacked Spielberg’s flair and confidence-it’s yet another of his apologies for being entertaining and profitable for so long; and also, less surprisingly, lacked Kubrick’s dry-comic ambiguity, that charge that comes from his elitist scold-his mastery of the triviality of the damned. A.I. was, in short, a summation of two master filmmakers’ weaknesses. What many of us wanted from A.I., whether it was C.C. (Cinephilically Correct) or not, was for Spielberg to return to the blissful wish-fulfillment fantasies of the late 1970s-early 1980s, to the pictures that had a sense of mystery and fullness-his pop miracles.
WALL-E promises, and just may be, that sort of pop wonder. The picture’s beginning gives us Earth hundreds of years in the future-an Earth that has finally succumbed to our distinctly American self-absorption-magic-bullet-quick-fix-pass-the-buck-supersize-my-fries entitlement. (WALL-E doesn’t acknowledge other national ideologies; this is a purely in-house reaction.) Earth is a tattered shambles: a ruined, still oddly beautiful series of cities of garbage; hopelessly tended to by one remaining robot, Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), an achingly small little contraption who clearly doesn’t grasp the impossibility of his aim. Wall-E, a love-child of E.T. and Johnny Five, scoops trash up into his belly, cubes it like a miniature crushed car, and spits it out-adding it to a column that will eventually yield yet another skyscraper of debris.
Summer films have become so hectic, so joyless, so overstuffed with incident and McGuffin, that you may find yourself quietly floored by WALL-E, particularly the beginning. The film’s resemblance to Kubrick, even counting the satire of the later acts, is superficial-a few jokes here and there and little more. WALL-E is a lotta Spielberg, a little Chaplin, a little Tati, but I’m shocked, and pleased, to write that the picture most clearly recalls the delicacy, patience and wit of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, particularly The Shop Around the Corner (remade, awfully, as You’ve Got Mail).
This picture approaches the romance that develops between Wall-E and Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a robot monitoring Earth’s progress towards inhabitability (she looks like a storm-trooper crossed with a Mac computer), with a Lubitschian grace and interest in minute gestures that speak volumes. The robots, one a labored little scuttle-bug hundreds of years in age, the other a sleek, armed new thing, play out a variation of the classic situation where a man is hopelessly enthralled with someone leagues above him. Eve, initially thinking Wall-E a menace, fires lasers at him until his gentleness, and complete lack of pretense, win her.
Robots in love. It sounds like kitsch, and could be, and, I’m sure, has been. Director Andrew Stanton understands the strength of the premise though, which is that you can go elemental. Robots aren’t human (obviously), and don’t have humans’ quirks and intangible hang-ups, so they can be allowed to stand for pure love without seeming mawkish. (The picture is remarkably, with only a few exceptions, un-cute.) With robots we can believe what we always want to believe in human romances without talking ourselves out of it and breaking the spell. The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here. There’s a scene early in Wall-E and Eve’s courtship where Wall-E shows her the various gadgets that he’s kept from the rubbish, unable to let go. We’ve already seen Wall-E’s collection, and his idea of what these objects are, but Eve, of greater power and knowledge, actually understands the use of the some of the knickknacks. She holds a lighter and produces fire; she holds Wall-E’s light bulb and produces light. This is among the most moving scenes in the film, because Stanton and the Pixar team have found, in pop-movie terms, an analogy for how we hope to discover ourselves in our lovers. The opening half of WALL-E is a lean, classical, melancholy daydream-a parable of finding something wonderful amidst an unrelentingly banal nightmare. Wall-E is, really, when it comes down to it, an indomitable working class stiff.
Then the picture takes us to space and to the future humans, who’ve become a surprisingly disgusting parody of our current ravenous addiction to techno-consumerism. At this point, around the halfway mark, WALL-E becomes considerably more conventional-it’s sharp and funny and sprightly, but that first half haunts the second half in a way that isn’t entirely beneficial. The picture is preaching against the ravages of Earth, but you find yourself ironically missing the ravaged Earth (this is somewhat intentional)-and missing the romance that was beautifully unencumbered by plot mechanics. Pixar breaks through in the opening passages, achieving the quiet, nearly existential power they’ve been flirting with for some time (most memorably, until now, in Toy Story 2).
The second half is simply a damn good Pixar movie (I’m risking ingratitude) and perhaps that opening isn’t possible to sustain, but I’m not so sure. There are still many moments even here that come through though: a kiss, a “dance” in space, as well as the humans’ discovery of fleeting, fleshy pleasures. Jeff Garlin eventually turns up as a Captain, and sketches an unexpectedly moving characterization of befuddled loss. And there’s the ending. The ending is a pure, authentic, cleansing, stunner. Wall-E and Eve remind one of the myth of the bumblebee: an insect that isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but, well, does anyway. Wall-E and Eve aren’t supposed to yearn, to care, to crave, but someone-thankfully-forgot to tell them.
★★★½
Be Kind Rewind (2008)
Making movies is one of our society’s real, tangible magics (assuming magic can be real and tangible and still be magic-that might actually completely contradict the definition of the word). For that, everyone, regardless of their level of devotion to the medium, is incapable of not participating in a movie if given the chance. To be in a movie, whether it’s an MGM musical or a handmade backyard epic; is to draw for a golden straw. Be Kind Rewind (taking off, I assume, from the true story of several children who spent their formative years remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot; it was released in some theatres as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation) is a tribute to our need for something otherworldly, and undeniably ours, as we face a society that continues to sink deeper into cooperate-sanctioned-group-fuck. Be Kind Rewind is, yes, a tribute to the imagination, a genre that has a habit of being the least imaginative on the block.
The picture was written and directed by Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and many startling music videos. Your reaction to Gondry’s name is a fair indicator of how far you’ll buy into Be Kind Rewind. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a powerful pop-existential-sci-fi head trip, in part because it wedded Gondry’s inventive, playful, sometimes downright ghostly imagery to something that was authentically wounded and real-the picture was screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s working out of his intellectualized-book-movie-television-influenced view of the battle of the sexes. If two people can’t ever, truly, penetrate one other, give themselves over to one another, trust one another, then how are we not doomed to loneliness? The answer, poignantly, was to drop all pretenses and fencing and scoop those messy tingly things up and hug them and go running down the beach screaming full-tilt like a lunatic. Live; as opposed to cowardly rationalizing your pleasure away. This sounds like “seize the day” treacle, and it easily could have been, but Kaufman’s exploration was moving and human, in part, because he doesn’t play the part of lecturer or even the part of the “great artist”; he’s not hovering above it all, he’s right there in the bar with a drink with the rest of us. (It’s a young Woody Allen-sci-fi movie.)
I go on about Kaufman because, without Kaufman, Gondry is a bit of a problem. Watching The Science of Sleep (and portions of Be Kind Rewind) is akin to being trapped in one of Jim Carrey’s more nightmarish childhood episodes in Eternal. Trapped is most certainly the word. Gondry’s visuals can be wizardly, and they’ve been celebrated as so, but can we also admit that the effects also have a habit of being suffocating and ugly: all self-conscious whimsy with little in the way of human current? Gondry is a clever, intelligent man, and he most likely recognizes his shortcomings as a writer-because he builds those handicaps into his stories. Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind are supposed to be chaotic and amateurish and insufferable! It’s empathy you see.
I just about hated Science of Sleep, primarily because I couldn’t forgive that one, final, dash of kinda reality (it’s really hypocrisy). The ending is a bit like watching a Skinamax movie that suddenly, just as you’re getting to the reason you’ve suffered through the “exposition”, blacks out and morphs into one those sermons they televise on Sunday mornings. I can tell what some of you are thinking: that Science of Sleep’s ending was “uncompromising”. It’s also a cheat. The picture builds and builds towards a great bursting leap of imagination, a romance amongst the construction papered stars, only to reveal the lead to be even more of a self-absorbed, fanatical prick than we suspected. The ending is effective, but it’s also canned, cruel emotion; and the picture preceding that ending isn’t strong enough to support it.
Be Kind Rewind doesn’t cheat us like that-this one is more amiable and plays fair-it’s a mildly better movie that’s much more enjoyable. The picture has its neat, homemade effects, and it has some very likable actors clowning around and that’s about it. The first act is a chore: the cast talks over one another in an effort to establish a screwball tone that never gels, and instead achieves a mild incoherence. Then Jack Black gets magnetized (in a funny bit) and erases all the videotapes of a small mom-and-pop video store in the process, which sends him and video clerk Mos Def scurrying to replace the tapes before the owner, played by Danny Glover, returns.
Unable to replace the tapes (no one, with the exception of the store’s three or four customers, uses them anymore) Mos Def and Jack Black go about remaking the pictures using whatever they have at their disposal. These moments of recreation (or “sweding”), which include Robocop, Ghostbusters, and Driving Miss Daisy, are dizzy and magical; tapping right in, gracefully; to that sense of giddy-play we felt when we first fell for the movies. Be Kind Rewind, in general, has a sense of folksy-silent-1980s movie camaraderie that’s bullshit (it reminded me a little of Spielberg’s Twilight Zone: The Movie segment) but comforting. Gondry (thankfully) ultimately doesn’t have Spielberg’s 1980s heavy-hand here though; his legitimate enchantment with the in-camera effects and gadgets dries that out. Gondry’s inability to stick with a story bails him out too; he’s too preoccupied to get too bogged down in the mechanics of the clichés he’s reveling in. A Ghostbusters alum turns up late inning to halt the homemade movies (which are becoming profitable) and, sighing, I thought, “Oh no, this thing’s going to court.” It doesn’t, because Gondry doesn’t care anymore about that than you do.
You should probably see the picture once. Beyond the sporadic movie scenes, there is also the charming cast. Jack Black and Mos Def are an able team, and not nearly as sentimental as you may be expecting (racial tension is acknowledged). Def and Black have a sing-song give and take, the cool and collected versus the deranged id, they click-it feels right. Melonie Diaz, as a laundry girl the guys recruit, is spunky and sexy, with an off-kilter looniness that’s unforced-this is the girl you wish for in expensive fascist romances. She has a scene with Def, that I won’t ruin, that suggests the flakey-romance we hoped for in Science of Sleep. Mia Farrow also appears in a few scenes (she looks terrific) and reminds us of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which could have very well been another of Gondry’s influences here. Farrow’s voice has gotten even softer and slyer (or maybe I just miss her) and her largely long absence from the movies (she was scarier in The Omen remake than the movie deserved) is a far more effective reminder of the movies’ increasing calculated plasticity than Gondry’s more overt protests. Danny Glover functions as a similarly stirring found object here, though I didn’t much care for his stacked-deck past musician subplot.
Be Kind Rewind is one of those mixed-frustrating pictures that, perhaps unintentionally (though I’m not sure), inspires a guilt-trip. Everything about the picture’s theme is inarguable (maybe too inarguable) so, as a movie fan, you’re going to feel a little hesitant about not enjoying it more. The 1980s kid-movie nostalgia. The anti-cooperate fill in the blank. The love of creation. We’re all in favor of all of those things. But Gondry appears to be conflicted-and insecure. Gondry trusted his inventions too much in Science of Sleep; he doesn’t trust them enough in Be Kind Rewind. This new picture is shapeless and sloppy, sort of boring, it’s a restless unwieldy thing that has little to do in between the movie-making set pieces, so why not devote the film to those set pieces? They illustrate Gondry’s tribute, his point. The rest is just the filler that Def and Black would immediately scrap upon remaking.
★★½
Boarding Gate (2008)
Boarding Gate is an Olivier Assayas picture; which probably means that it’s some sort of experimentation of genre and pretty girl. Watching the picture, I wondered what Assayas would have done with that icon of all icons: Marilyn Monroe. Assayas has a view, and curiosity of, the opposite sex that’s part school-boy-giddy-titter and part legitimate, searching, empathy. Assayas, at his best (Clean, Late August, Early September), pares away the layers of preoccupation that tend to greet both his beautiful women and his genres to reveal something spare and honest. If you want your hand held, re-watch The Visitor.
Boarding Gate is, like demonlover, an Assayas cover of the erotic thriller. demonlover was a failure that mistook elusion and redundancy for mystery. Boarding Gate has a similar frustrating reluctance to capitalize on the dirty pleasures of the genre; working for and against itself in alternating shifts. Assayas apparently doesn’t quite grasp that a little conventionality, particularly in the third act-would actually heighten the exhilaratingly free form passages that have preceded it. Boarding Gate is a more successful picture than demonlover, but it still feels like an intelligent filmmaker’s over-considered parlor game. Self-shame can mar any picture, but it’s least welcome in something that should be quick, juicy, lurid-bad for you.
Assayas is actually looking to mate the erotic thriller with a more grounded portrait of an attractive, adventurous-at-her-own-peril woman who seeks to define herself apart from the men in her life, bosses and lovers, who have a habit of being one and the same. If we wish to be cute, the picture could be said to be Clean crossed with demonlover, and, for about an hour, Assayas succeeds. The first half of the picture is a chamber play, a two character one-act where a woman confronts one of her simultaneous boss/ex-lovers over past hurts that clearly still pack quite a bit of heat for both of them. The casting intentionally sounds more Showtime than Assayas: Asia Argento, that snarling, self-consciously weird object of male lust turned on its head, and Michael Madsen, the shoulda had a stronger career phantom of Robert Mitchum.
Both actors bring a B-movie survivor baggage to their roles that’s surprising and a little poignant. Assayas coaxes out the vulnerability that lurks behind tough guy and femme fatale archetypes; recognizing that, nowadays at least, every tough guy began as a kid watching other tough guys on TV. Madsen’s familiar rasp sounds nearly undead here, and it signals a lost inner pain that the actor manages, miraculously, to steer away from pretension. Madsen’s Miles is a vague businessman, a drinker of bourbon, and a wearer of stylishly disheveled shirts that represent a reformed badass’s impression of “respectability”. He lets Sandra (Argento) cuff him up as he laughs uncontrollably, tickled by his continued failure to be surprised.
Argento, full bosomed, lithe, with the familiar tattoos (that have always too consciously announced her bad girl credentials), is an ideal woman for Assayas interpretation. Hitchcock once said (something along the lines of) that Monroe was too obvious, too eager to please, to be a sex symbol of interest to him. There was no contradiction between appearance and desire, no subtext. That’s a problem for many of our sirens these days, including Scarlett Johansson (oh, how one wishes Kate Winslet had taken Match Point) and especially Angelina Jolie and Argento. These women have no inner, no private elusive thing that baits the audience. Self-consciousness and self-congratulation are a no-no for the true movie Goddesses. Assayas, that constant tinkerer of surfaces, recognizes this in Argento and acknowledges that fun-drug-killer-girl thing as facade. This is the most interesting Asia Argento performance that I’ve seen (slim competition) because there’s more to Argento here than that confident body-the confidence is turned in on itself and redefined as vulnerable mystery. Asia plays with that vicious-kitty voice of hers, slipping in shades of doubt and contempt, and she’s fascinating (or closer than usual to it), particularly when sparring with the increasingly self-cocooned Miles.
The first hour between Miles and Sandra is slow, druggy, and hypnotic. Sandra gets herself in trouble near the half-way mark, and one expects and hopes that the forebode of the first half will slide into something unhinged and violent, something that purges Sandra of her doubt and pain while seamlessly giving us our genre jollies. That never happens, but it’s not for lack of trying. Assayas isn’t elitist exactly; it’s that he just doesn’t appear to have the authentic instinct to go for the throat. His best pictures show a cleansing compassion, and that has a habit of being in direct conflict with the sort of thriller he’s attempting here. He likes Sandra too much. I liked Sandra too, to an extent, which is why some real danger would’ve actually felt dangerous, a rarity these days. Assayas fails to dramatize a second half that, on paper, sounds promising. Sandra gets herself into yet another love triangle (including a vivid Kelly Lin) but Boarding Gate never drives it through with any force. The kidnappings and shootings lack bite, revealing Assayas to be in territory every bit as alien as his heroes.
Boarding Gate still has an imperfect pull, and it rouses itself to a wonderful open ending that alludes to possible hope (again recalling Clean). I love the globe-trotting, multiple language inclusiveness of Assayas’ pictures; they point, effortlessly, toward an in-it-together, all-fucked-on-the-same-page humanity that a Haggis or a Visitor seems unable to comprehend. Boarding Gate is a character study disguised as an erotic thriller that should’ve been a real McCoy on both counts; it’s a picture as confused as its protagonists, but you gravitate toward it-and wonder what this not quite successful experiment might yield next time.
★★★
The Visitor (2008)
There may be, over the summer, people who ask about The Visitor at parties. These people will ask if I’ve seen it, and I’ll say I have, and I’ll voice some hesitance about the picture. These people may respond with a slightly deflated look that may, temporarily, spiritually reduce my height by a few feet. (It’s happened before.) The Visitor is a modest human story that currently populates a few theatres amidst countless stories of monsters destroying cities. The monster pictures generally teach us, and seek to teach us, nothing. The human stories normally have a lesson to impart or at least work out. About half-way through The Visitor, just as the picture is really settling into its social services groove, I thought, as I tend to during these sorts of pictures-Why can’t a human story seek to teach us nothing? Few films are truly profound; and the uncluttered exploration of day to day existence is a truer, more reliable, port to profundity anyway. The little pictures, in their way, tend to suffer from the same preoccupation as the summer monster movies: more, more, more.
The Visitor is a blend of two increasingly shopworn subgenres; both stemming from a certain privileged-white-man’s guilt: the why can’t I, for once, be the good guy to a race besides my own (?) factor. When, and how, can I shed this inherited guilt and injustice (like a snake’s skin) and be copasetic with the rest of the world? Without any true change or sacrifice, of course, that would be yucky and kinda hard. (These films always go to great pains to establish that the white guy in question’s pocketbook won’t suffer, whatever may happen, his quasi-retirement will remain unperturbed.) The first genre is the genre that Paul Haggis has recently trademarked: the several-races-thrown-into-the-same-mix-over-a-common-glaring-injustice-watch-how-everyone-learns-to-eat-their-own-porridge film. The second is the lonely-bitter-old-man-reaches-out-again film.
I have no use for the Paul Haggis type picture, and we’ve discussed that in the past, so let’s push that to the corner and leave it alone, I’m sure there’s many other posts that are happy to get into yet it again. I’m a sucker for the lonely-old-man film: it’s a set of clichés that rarely fails to stir me. The notion of crossing normally unfathomable gaps such as age or race to arrive at something resembling grace is just too irresistible. Alexander Payne made a hell of a run with it a few years ago with About Schmidt (it was a canny reworking-he avoided many of the pitfalls by keeping the youthful rejuvenator of emotions off-screen). Sofia Coppola made a fine film of it with Lost in Translation-which was a crossbreed too, a blend of the old man film and the Brief Encounter abbreviated love picture. Andrew Wagner botched the genre, and wasted a lovely Frank Langella performance, with the bullying Starting Out in the Evening.
The Visitor is, thankfully, much better than Starting Out in the Evening or the Paul Haggis type movies. Writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) is also an actor, and he shows a courtesy for his characters that wrings a certain quality out of even the most unconvincing scenes. The opening act-in which we primarily follow Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) as he goes about a life that strives for dignity at the expense of everything else-is actually rather beautiful in a typically indie dialed down way. Make no mistake, McCarthy is manipulative, and his touch, really, isn’t much lighter than that of a director of big-budget tearjerkers. McCarthy plays that card that many directors self-conscious of the clichés of the life affirming picture play: they underplay. Every scene is turned half a notch lower than you’d expect; to strive for greater “reality”, to disguise that most of the scenes have a very un-spontaneous, “worked out” feel. McCarthy is checking his list like anyone else: dead wife; unfinished, useless job; fear of intimacy, unbelievably open new friends, etc.
But McCarthy does something early on that moved me, and had me rooting for his picture. Vale has a conference to attend in New York City (he lives in Connecticut) and he returns to his apartment that he’s owned for many years without actually occupying. Vale discovers two squatters: Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who have been living in his apartment, based on a misunderstanding (maybe), for a few months. It quickly becomes evident that they have nowhere to go. The couple apologizes and leaves. Walter considers, and follows them down to the street corner. He asks if they have a place to stay, they assure him, half-heartedly, that they do. Walter looks them over and considers again…and the picture cuts directly to the couple returning to stay in apartment. McCarthy omits Walter’s inviting the couple to return. This may have been an accident, for all we know that bit of film was damaged, but this simple device exudes an incredible generosity. Walter, a shy, painfully self-conscious man, wouldn’t want to be seen asking these two people to stay. And so McCarthy spares him that.
I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of a man bonding with a family of illegal immigrants and learning to play their drums (a reaction to his deceased wife, which is also handled gracefully). I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of Walter falling for Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass). But no, the picture has to ensure that we understand it’s a reaction to 9/11, and the subsequent immigration paranoia that has followed. We already knew that, and we already understood the stakes, but McCarthy has to have his hero throw a tantrum at an officer just to further ensure that we miss nothing. That Walter would never do that, of course, means nothing. The thesis governs all, I’m afraid.
I still don’t want to try too hard to dissuade you from seeing The Visitor though. Jenkins is wonderful, full, and it’s a charge to see a great character actor treated with such reverence. Jenkins imbues The Visitor with subtlety and observation: watch how he leans up from the drum as if being caught mid-masturbation, watch how he buttons and unbuttons his jacket when threatened, like an adult safety blanket. Watch his tentative chemistry with Abbass, who is also beautiful and moving. Watch how they lie in bed together, their fingers clasping in a specific, true, earned, way. These moments are the true civics lesson, the unifier, perhaps our only probable hope. The literal civics lesson is just a distraction.
★★½
The Strangers (2008)
The Strangers works for a little while, but it doesn’t get in your bones. The picture may eventually scare you accidentally though, by forcing you (if you’re a critic of some sort anyway) to consider what you’ll do if this run of pastiche horror films continues much longer unabated by even the slightest originality. Recite the weather forecast below the title and the running time? Stocks, perhaps? How much more can be said about the visually competent, or even assured, but hopelessly unimaginative home invasion by masked marauder(s) of vague motivation picture? Funny Games was a crock, but its contempt for its audience gave it a mild pulse. If I had seen The Strangers five years ago, I would have probably been more glass-is-half-full in my approach, but these pictures that are just passable enough to squeak by without offense are beginning to be the most offensive of all.
See the French picture Inside instead. It’s tasteless. It’s uncomfortable. The directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, may have crossed the line, but it’s a home invasion picture that’s artfully made, courts absurdity (stumbling into it often) and goes feeling around in a primal, sticky place of guilt, loss and legitimate, appalling, violation. You watch Inside and wonder how long it’s been bubbling in the back of its creators’ minds. You watch The Strangers and wonder how director Bryan Bertino, who shows talent, could have possibly roused himself, in his debut, to stage yet another picture that works the laughably tired, obligatory based-on-faux-true-events narration device; or that features the typically idiotic marching around the house outside of safety, completely divorced of any tangible, terrestrial reason to do so routine. Or the relentless, one-sided, pounding the heroes of these pictures must always endure, never scoring even a minor win against the villains. Never making one decision that is met with success. Future horror directors: if your picture doesn’t have the courage to stake out its own convictions, misery isn’t uncompromising, it’s tedious.
★★
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
Speed Racer (2008)
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s (The Matrix) newest exercise in fuck tha police, fight the power faux-outrage, is another of those pictures, like the new Star Wars movies, or Sin City, or (the God awful) 300, that places actors in settings that have been totally or almost totally rendered by computers. The prior pictures worked to varying degrees (Sin City being the best) but could never conquer the hesitation that you were watching something that was never actually there; unavoidably dulling the excitement, immediacy and, you know, human feeling in the process. These pictures, despite a (sometimes) visual originality and invention, ultimately feel like that steak that gets re-configured through the transporter in the David Cronenberg Fly: they don’t taste right, they don’t understand the flesh.
Speed Racer turns that disconnection on its head, creating a world so gloriously, obviously, flamboyantly deranged in its artifice that it causes the picture to do an emotional loop de loop; achieving something that is a. accidentally, b. subversively, or c. hypocritically poignant. I’m voting b and c. Speed Racer is a legitimate accomplishment: a hallucinatory children’s picture that has an un-paralleled empathy with that sugar freaking, Saturday morning cartoon binging mind state. But, Speed Racer is also unfortunately, (shades of The Matrix) an attack on the multiple forms of suffocating distraction that persist in modern American life that also (and here’s the rub) happens to provide more forms of suffocating distraction than any recent film I can recall.
Speed Racer at times literally, exhilaratingly, loses control; particularly in flashbacks to Speed’s (Emile Hirsch) childhood that zone out in a blitz of imagination approximating aesthetic overload that immediately cues us in to at least three or four different movements of heartbreak, disappointment and resentment. The Wachowskis, never visually modest, have an especially nifty trick (of which they’re a bit too enamored) of transitioning with an in-camera wipe that gives us the feeling of watching every plot strand, every character, at exactly the same time (an artful version of channel surfing). I normally don’t give a whit what happens to the characters in these types of pictures, but the Wachowskis somehow nearly play this excess of technique to their emotional advantage. The technique chokes the life out of the picture, but this choking of life is, at least partly, the point (an old race is, tellingly, shown with real cars). This world, this candy-colored anime play-land, isn’t passed off as “movie magic”, its Hell, a kiddie friendly Matrix, a place of commercial enslavement that Speed and family must fight with purity and gusto.
The Wachowskis, it must be said, have also become significantly smoother in weaving their anti-big brother tirades (Warners? Who produces their movies?) into their action. The latter Matrix films were (possibly) a little underrated, but their insistence in continually halting the action for self-righteous, half-baked, college text-book sociology fortune cookies was maddening and self-deceiving. Speed Racer works out its self-hatred and conflict through the action, which explodes onto the racetrack and out of the screen in giddy, poetic bursts of disorientation. The people who have complained of the brothers’ withholding crucial spatial information are missing the point. We aren’t supposed to be on the racetrack; we’re in the characters heads, which happen to be on the race track. The lack of visual context and clarity IS the suspense, we, for once, truly feel the speed.
There’s something else undeniably creepy and insidious going on in Speed Racer though. The picture preaches the usual Luke Skywalker (the final race echoes the first Star Wars film’s climax) follow your own beat sermon, but we can’t help but feel that, by buying into this, we are just buying into exactly what the real life consumerist bad guys (represented here by Roger Allam, effectively channeling Tim Curry) would have us buy into. Speed Racer, like all of the Wachowkis’ work (V for Vendetta being the most offensive) is ultimately audience pandering entertainment, decrying consumerist depersonalization while continuing to pioneer consumerist depersonalization.
Speed Racer brings to mind the one brilliant implication of The Matrix Reloaded, that Neo, our hero, was just another pawn of the Matrix, another program designed to foster a sense of false rebellion in a society that doesn’t want to do anymore than pay lip service to such ideas. The Russian nesting dolls of corruption are a true (and very real) Matrix of our society, as well as the one that the Wachowskis’ films have continually hammered against. But what are these talented filmmakers actually offering us beyond un-challenging self-delusion? Speed Racer’s admirers have called it revolutionary. But what, exactly, is the aim of the film’s supposed revolution? To paraphrase another Jeff Goldblum movie, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. By all means see Speed Racer, it works, it’s exciting, and it has a conflict of interest that may mark it as the most interesting big picture of the summer, but its time we hold the Wachowskis to more than visual button-pushing. They may know the path, but they’ve yet to walk it.
★★★
Redbelt (2008)
You can be forgiven for finding the idea of Redbelt enticing. The notion of filmmaker-playwright David Mamet (a master of a distinct mood of simmering inner macho heat, greed and cruelty) tackling the corrupt world of pay-per-view sports is a promising one. Hell, the notion of Mamet stepping into the action arena at all is cause for an optimistic raise of the eyebrow. Mamet, at his best (it’s admittedly been awhile) spins electric dialogue of peerless musical fuck you aggression that has a redemptive, unexpected grace of timing and structure: haikus of the damned, the innocent and everyone in between. The chance that Mamet might find a syntax equivalent to that of his verbal wizardry seems especially great in the action genre, can’t miss really; both, at their best, relying on the spinning of poetry from aggression.
Redbelt is blessed with the usual Mamet cast: a mixture of the expected (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon) and the purposefully, ironically out of place (Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer) but the picture, such as it is, rests on the inspired, could’ve been iconic if the picture was up to him casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor is playing a movie staple: a principled, centered, humble hero, in this case a jiu-jitsu instructor, who finds himself tempted by vice and compromise following a series of unlikely coincidences and encounters. Ejiofor is minimal and commanding, conjuring the fantasy of a divorced from temptation good guy without looking prudish, no small feat; Mamet apparently getting off, for once, on creating a character of unquestioned, un-ironic purity.
The Mamet fan will be on guard earlier than the casual viewer, we know that a coincidence isn’t merely a coincidence, right? Mamet pictures, particularly the Mamet pictures that firmly reside in the man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, trust no one genre, are a little like feature length versions of that chilling scene that occurs late in the third act of The Game, (which could’ve been a horror riff on early Mamet anyway) when the Michael Douglas character discovers every person he casually encountered throughout the picture eating dinner together in a cafeteria. Everyone is normally in on it, nothing is chance. A panic stricken woman accidentally shooting Ejiofor’s window out, for example, immediately sets the Mamet fan’s truth sensors swirling.
The picture hums and flows in a way that Mamet fans will recognize and probably treasure, for an hour or so anyway. Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna fire mannered Mamet dialogue in a manner only they can. Tim Allen makes a bid for career redemption with a part that ultimately, like much of the movie, proves to be beside the point. Alice Braga is sexy as a woman who immediately arouses suspicion for being a woman in a David Mamet movie. Emily Mortimer continues to make neediness somehow attractive. David Paymer plays (effectively) the same part he’s essentially played his entire career. Mamet’s action, which some have had problems with, is actually the element of the picture that is underrated, coming in clipped, succinct, whizzy bursts that do actually manage to effectively mirror Mamet’s verbal rhythms. It’s the dialogue itself that falters.
I’m treading water. Redbelt is competent, never particularly boring, but it doesn’t ever amount to anything, it’s a jack in the box picture, winding, winding, winding, except the jack never pops out of the box. All of one’s hopes for a Mamet sports film (either a serious examination or a thrilling, brutal B movie or something in between) are dashed in the service of a picture that simply blows away, neither good nor bad. Redbelt is Mamet’s House of Cards, the punch-line being that it’s not worth the effort.
★★½
Iron Man (2008)
The human element of a superhero film, particularly the human element of the initial entry in a prospective series (the “origin story”), usually represents the vegetables we have to rid our plate of before getting to the dessert. We watch our normally flat heroes go through the usual paces that sometimes wouldn’t look too out of place in Dawson’s Creek (or whatever the youth show de jour may be), all in the hope that the filmmaker, when he finally gets to why we’re all packed in the theatre to begin with, will wow us with a grand bit of what have you, or, if we’re really lucky, a sublime note of visual poetry.
Iron Man, oddly, and to a certain extent, blessedly, has the opposite problem; for about an hour, the picture, chronicling the normally tedious details of how our everyman becomes a superman, is alive and just a little eccentric; for awhile, the lead, Robert Downey, Jr., walks away with the picture in just the manner the trailer implied. Downey infects Iron Man’s wavelength, its editing even, and lends the picture an aura of drunk, self-loathing, screwball tea-time debauchery that feels practically revelatory for such a normally rigid, spontaneity-free genre. Downey’s Tony Stark, rich, handsome, confident, charismatic, intelligent, isn’t some softie with canned pathos; he’s a superman before being interfered with in a divine manner. The film’s initial wit lies in its reversal of our expectations of the usual mythos. Stark, to become a hero, must inherit a weakness, a humanity that brings him back to the realm of other humans, as opposed to a strength that shoots him up and above all others. Tony Stark couldn’t be a more fitting creation for our turn up the Ipod as the world goes to Hell times; Stark, to find his heart, must first nearly have it blown out of his chest.
It may sound like I’m pouring it on, but Iron Man isn’t too shy with its redemptive theme, the picture is a 1950s atomic paranoia fantasy (the villain even gets to proclaim that “no one’s gonna stand in my way”), crossed with an 1980s gee whiz kids film (Explorers perhaps) multiplied by a healthy dose of the current trend of smothering, impersonal action pictures. Iron Man, tellingly, details the development of the suit with more grace than the development of Stark’s conscience, which snaps on (like one of those lights we spoke of earlier in the week) abruptly at just the right moment, muting Stark’s personality in the process. The picture was directed by the gifted Jon Favreau, the actor who debuted as filmmaker with the small, human, very underrated Made, followed it with the overrated Elf, and then followed that with the also underrated Zathura, a gentle picture that had a memorably surreal storybook beauty about it, informed by a surprisingly convincing current of familial resentment and pain.
Favreau’s pictures are generous and lacking in ego, just the sort of thing the big summer movie business needs. Favreau, working with Downey, tries his best to shake things up in Iron Man, but, after a first hour that pumps us up for an anarchic, funny, reverent but not too reverent superhero picture, perhaps the MASH of the 200 million dollar product placement Happy Meal movies, he can’t help but succumb to the grinding repetition of the requirements of the genre. Favreau’s big robot beats aren’t lacking in awe (Favreau, even at his most audience conscious, is mercifully incapable of Michael Bay’s pornographic impersonality) but the scenes steal and distract from Favreau’s strengths; just as he and Downey convince you that Stark is worth giving a damn about, he goes and turns into a Transformer.
Iron Man has moments though, moments that take it beyond many of the pictures in the genre, and occasionally remind you why you truck out every year with your junk food and brave the lines and the heat for the newest “big thing.” The first action scene in the picture, when Iron Man is still scraps and must escape a cave in Afghanistan, is logical, personal, terrifying, and, for once in one of these pictures, has a bit of context. Iron Man, bent, leaking, screwed up, a walking discarded junk heap of the dead, personifies Stark’s bruised entitlement and startling naiveté. This metal creature is, at first, a haunting creation: he wastes the insurgents with a flame thrower and, for a few minutes, pumps the picture with melancholy, vengeance and relevance.
Two scenes involving Tony’s damaged heart also momentarily imbue the picture with something close to feeling. The first is a figurative love scene between Stark and his long suffering assistant Pepper Potts (a very beautiful, poignant Gwyneth Paltrow), the second is just the opposite: a moment of grand, closed door, pop betrayal that dissolves the minute we cut back to the big bad metal monsters. No robot could be scarier than the bizarre, unlikely sight of Jeff Bridges appearing as a poisonous surrogate father figure, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers and special effects wizards from trying. Iron Man must, of course, have an evil antagonist, a twin sprung from the same well of dubious creation, and so he does, resulting in a fat, kind of goofy looking thing that could be said to be a joke on the Republican “more is better” philosophy but probably isn’t. In 1978, people were assured that they’d believe a man could fly, but would it hurt nowadays for us to be asked believe something besides, or at least in addition to, that? Iron Man needs less iron and more man.
★★★
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Writer-star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a bit more ambitious than the previous Judd Apatow produced or directed odes to unflagging pop-culture enthralled young male self-absorption. The prior films were charged with a bracing, seemingly free form geeks have inherited the world id driven obscenity, laced with an articulation that is at once ironic and celebratory. The heroes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad were the good guys, but they weren’t the PG/PG-13 eunuchs of the 1980s movies getting boxer shorts pulled up their asses by the privileged bullies, they embodied ferocious, empowered, unchecked fuck you will, until, and this is the problem, the pandering sets in, the “we don’t really mean it or want to offend anyone especially the ladies” third act u-turn that finds everyone hooking and growing up on cue, common sense be damned.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has no such third act turn-around, the film is slower and (just a shade) more reflective from the get go. This may be the first of this current wave of Apatow productions that can be accused of self-consciousness, recognizing the last minute efforts of the heroes of Knocked Up and Superbad to be unconvincing. This film has at its center a more sentimental, wounded hero, a man-child who requires more than a five minute montage of images near the end to figure things out. The picture attempts to dramatize Segel’s in and out, some days good, some days bad road to recovery, after being discarded by the titular woman (Kristen Bell, bland).
The usual stereotypes are all accounted for (shrill ambitious woman, obnoxious, more successful new beau, stoner, confidant) but their dimensions aren’t as pat as the prior films. Marshall has a surprising compassion; the characters are largely good, open, looking for connection. It’s this unexpected, across the board fairness that has critics, ridiculously, likening the picture to the work of Preston Sturges.
The film is also, unfortunately, the slowest of the pictures we’ve mentioned. Segel and Stoller were right to question the conventions of the prior films, but in revising those clichés they muted the wild man party camaraderie that gave the earlier pictures their bite, it’s a gremlins movie without the gremlins. The reliable company players, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, etc. are all bland and inert here, their comic impulses adrift. This film takes too much of its mood from the tranquil Hawaiian waters that serve as the backdrop: this picture is truly about as interesting as watching someone else on vacation. Segel and Stoller have made the Apatow third act somewhat more palatable but in doing so they’ve neglected the first two acts entirely, leaving nothing to distract from the please marry and procreate at the appropriate age woman’s picture formula that remains despite their best intentions. The film mistakes striving for maturity for maturity, lacking the characterizations to justify such a slow tempo. Forgetting Sarah Marshall may, ironically, play worse with the folks who are determined to defend it.
The picture still has its moments, primarily because Segel, always the strangest of the Apatow boys to begin with (he suggests Jim Carrey in an earlier Apatow effort, the underrated The Cable Guy) is an appealingly lumpy, unconventional (even for Apatow) leading man. Unlike that force of nature Seth Rogen, or Hill, Segel doesn’t bless his character Peter with confidence in his own obsessions, which include an ambition to stage a more autobiographical than he knows puppet musical of Dracula. The film’s one legitimately original moment takes off from this admirably bizarre conceit: the girl of redemption and second chances (Mila Kunis, more appealing than expected, but has nothing to work with) sets Peter up, without his knowing, to sing a song from his unfinished project. Peter isn’t sure of course, he isn’t sure of anything other than his need to glob onto another woman, but he takes the stage, and wins over the drunk, impatient patrons of the bar with a song of surprising conviction (he even does the sub-Transylvanian thing) that briefly takes over the movie. Peter sheds his self-loathing fully, convincingly, and it’s a wonderful moment.
There are a few other moments that threaten to jump the tracks of formula as well. Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow, Sarah’s new rock star beau, is almost completely unoriginal, save an unexpected kinship with Peter. Peter and Aldous find themselves surfing together, and Peter, unable to deny it any longer, exclaims “God, you’re cool.” It’s a disarming, poignant scene; an emotionally naked moment that the filmmakers refuse to capitalize on.
Moments such as these prove we should be harder on Apatow and his talented camp of hooligans. These guys are too promising to be wasting their and our time replicating the same clichéd rubbish over and over again. The audiences’ taking it doesn’t surprise me, but the critics’ refusal to call foul is disappointing. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is better than most any mainstream young person romantic comedy that will probably come out in the near future, but what’s that saying exactly? It’s time to change the criterion by which we judge these men, time to up the ante, because, at this point, the Apatow guys are treading closer and closer to dangerous waters, to making the sorts of movies they would’ve ridiculed before they were famous.
★★½
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