There's Nothing in the Rule Book That Says a Monkey Can't Play Basketball

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
- Alfred Hitchcock

Nothing's more boring than a blog post apologizing for the lack of blog posts (particularly when the title of the site contains an explicit promise as to the author's commitment). So, knowing I still owe a second review from the week before last as well as the review for the 20th of March, I propose these 2 special events as recompense:

The first special event will be occurring this Thursday, the 27th,... a live-blogged review of the 5 and 1/2 hour cut of 1900. I will be writing as I watch and then summarizing the whole experience in more typical review format afterwards.

The 2nd special event is a compiled instant message chat with my partner, Tara, on the subject of the recent remake of Funny Games, either the original or the remake are films that should be seen yet feared by all. This is TBD, we've seen the film, but finding the hours or so to chat about it is a bit tricky.

And then look for me to publicly flagellate myself for letting my 2 faithful readers down in the month of March. I favor the flail.

Celebrity Ice Capades - Part Two

Bullet in the Head

John Woo's films (particularly his early Hong Kong works) owe more than a little to the films of Sergio Leone. Like Leone's, they tend to center on tough, violent loners who've lost the ability to relate to other humans but through violence and, many of his films deal with the wolfish, masculine camaraderie that develops between two or more characters with these qualities. Further, all of these films subvert this machismo a bit, paying lip service to the emotional emptiness of lives lived without trust or compassion. But despite this superimposed complexity, Woo and Leone's films are really reveling in the simplicity of their characters' outlook on the world. The hardest moral choice facing these characters is whether or not they should shoot a man that they've sort-of, kind-of come to like.

Bullet in the Head is only a little different in that it takes a stab at something a little less arch. The film is set during the Vietnam War and features three Chinese buddies traveling to the war-torn region in order to make some money out of the chaos. The three are quite naive in thinking they can catch this particular tiger by the tail, and soon they're in trouble with both the North Vietnamese army and a powerful gangster in the region. As they attempt to flee back to Hong Kong with their lives, their friendship begins to splinter and they are forced to face the ugliness within themselves.

I have a weakness in me for movies dealing with the burgeoning or fracturing friendships between tough, angry men, quality be damned (to wit: I actually found the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin genuinely involving in Star Wars: Episode 3, despite it being part of a truly risible film), so it's hard to not like these aspects of this movie. But overall, it's a ludicrous film, particularly when asking the viewer to take the effects of bullets seriously. All through the movie, the characters leap about with guns blazing, but there's absolutely no sense that these things actually fire bullets. Rather, they seem to emit a generalized swath of destruction that explodes windows, drywall, and t-shirts. There's nothing wrong with this; indeed, the hyper-reality is a large part of what's appealing about Woo's work. Bullet in the Head, though, is hilariously inconsistent. It tries to give us the fun of shoot-outs where people empty clips at one another, but then asks us to contemplate how horrible various war crimes are. About as horrible as being shot by a man leaping at you in slow-motion, I'd wager.

At the shootouts and the tough guy archetypes, Woo is aces. His style of staging action scenes has been labeled "balletic" ad nausea, but it's as true now as it ever was, even after the years of Hollywood folk borrowing his technique for their own shallow purposes. Watching these sequences is very much like viewing the oft-coveted, too-rarely-seen dance-off and one wonders when Woo will let his characters put down the guns and pick up the ballet shoes.

But, at least in Bullet in the Head, Woo fails at just about everything else. The first half hour or so when Woo sets up the characters is confusing and overedited. In these opening moments, every shot feels too short, and every scene too long. It's like the movie is hiding behind the editing, trying to hide its character development or make the dialogue scenes as exciting or thrilling as the gun play. It isn't until the violence kicks in that one gets a sense as to who these people are, and even then they're pretty much reduced to one character trait apiece. There are some actresses in this film that should be ashamed for agreeing to appear as such weak-willed fantasy objects. And in the movie's final act, the characters brood endlessly over their suffering with nary a hint that they bear any responsibility for it. Like the guns, they bear no resemblance to anything from our world. But rather than using that to achieve a larger-than-life mythos for any of these characters as sometimes results from similar endeavors (see: Plissken, Snake), it serves to make them seem like the half-formed fantasy characters created by breathless children playing guns. And then we're supposed to care about their suffering and feel pleased when one of them takes revenge in the final, interminable scene? Please.

It's been some years since I've seen Woo's major Hong Kong works, Hard Boiled or The Killer, and so can't account for the quality of either excepting the voice of myself as a delighted sixteen-year-old (who also, it should be noted, totally, completely, without any reservation dug Woo's Jean-Claude Van Damme starring American debut, Hard Target, and would probably have had trouble seeing how absolutely shitty the Star Wars prequels were). While watching Bullet in the Head, though, I began to wonder if my previous affinity for these John Woo films was not solely due to my aforementioned weakness for the cry of the lonely, afflicted men that populated them. Aside from the opening, the film works in individual scenes, but they feel pulled out of different films. When glorying in the movement of excessive violence, Bullet in the Head soars. When trying to show serious consequences to this violence, it shoots itself in the foot.

Celebrity Ice Capades

Chudsploitation

I just had to give a link to this...

Devin Faraci, a great writer working for CHUD, has started a new online column called "Chudsploitation." The focus is on weird, lesser-known, grimy, exploitation films, exploring his (our) fascination with them, and the like. He's kicked it off with an incredible write-up of a movie named Addio Zio Tom, and from this insightful, articulate, and funny article it sounds like it's one of those appalling-yet-too-fascinating-to-dismiss movie watching experiences. Kudos to Mr. Faraci for his work here; it is both a good review and good reportage. It's great to see a piece like this in the morass of movie-related websites (this site included) that feels worthwhile and necessary.

Read it here.

No Review

Am having an insane week. No time for love.

2 reviews next week as punishment.

The Kingdom

Somewhere in The Kingdom lies the rapidly beating heart of a fun, straightforward B-movie, the kind of film that is enjoyed and forgotten until it appears in graduate theses about the cultural landscape of a certain time period or the ground-breaking start of a particular auteur. The plot is full of conventional action thrills and formulaic buddy-cop beats with a high-concept twist, and, much like other B-movies, the majority of the film serves only to drive the audience to its most rousing set-piece—in this case, a thrilling shootout in a hostile Saudi Arabian neighborhood. No one making the film seems to have noticed this, though, and as a result, The Kingdom overreaches. The hollow plot is padded out, drama is sacrificed for verisimilitude, and the film is stuffed with dumbfounding scenes that answer questions no one is asking.

After a terrorist group explodes an American housing complex in Saudi Arabia, Jamie Foxx leads an FBI team that heads to the crime scene—-against orders—-ostensibly to help Saudi law enforcement find the perpetrators of the attacks, but really to avenge the death of a friend of his that was killed in the blast. Upon arrival they encounter resistance from the locals, but nevertheless manage to form a mutually beneficial partnership with Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, a Saudi who helps them solve the mystery by telling them about local customs and using his awesome powers of translation. The film takes so many detours before the characters even begin their investigation, though, that they mystery fades into the background. And even when they do start their investigation, there’s no sense of discovery, no joy in the procedural aspects of their work. Despite the flash of text depicting each character’s name and specialty at the beginning of the film, I didn’t even have a grasp as to what most of the agents were supposed to be doing. And, at times, it seemed as if they might be confused as well.

Ashraf Barhom is really quite good as Colonel Al Ghazi, but it’s a thankless role. The character is just another version of the local guide, helping these (much more important) yokels navigate the harsh jungles of his native land while goggling at the weird, wonderful technology they bring to his rustic backwater (in this case, it’s not a Walkman or a flashlight, but Jennifer Garner’s breasts). The film offers plenty of screen time devoted to showing how very real and human he is, but it’s a humanity I never had cause to doubt, particularly as he’s depicted as competent, sensitive, and caring early in the film. Nevertheless, this dunderheaded film bravely depicts that this is a guy who is able to both be a Muslim and love his family and country. Huhwhaaaa????! Such a noble, noble man, and to think, for the entirety of the movie he’s pretty much stuck babysitting Jamie Fox, telling him that Americans aren’t allowed in that alley or in this room people don’t eat apples or whatever.

The notion that citizens of Saudi Arabia, even terrorists, are, deep down, no different than Americans is the ostensible message of The Kingdom. That the viewer needs to be told this is about as idiotic an assumption as I can imagine a mainstream Hollywood film making. What’s more, the set-piece at the heart of the film invites the viewer to participate in the gleeful slaughter of the bad-guy Arabs. This shoot-out is fantastic, as good as these kinds of urban warfare action scenes get. And it’s the only time in the film where what’s at stake is clear and unambiguous, not mired by unnecessary red tape. When the movie concludes by asking the viewer to ponder the moral ambiguities of enjoying such a bloodbath, it feels cheap, phony. It may be the most unconvincing, ridiculous moral to the end of a film since the racial harmony ending of Volcano, where a little boy looked at the ash-covered survivors of a Los Angeles volcano and declared, “They all look the same.”

Would be a good double feature with: Proof of Life

Oil!

When There Will Be Blood is over, on first reflection, it feels as if it's said nothing. The film has no immediately apparent over-arching thesis that people (myself included) love to discuss at breakfast tables or on internet forums, nor does it seem like a movie which would yield treasures after applying the regular subtextual analysis that often makes sense of difficult films. Over time, it retains this impenetrability, but it ceases to matter so much. The movie is so good doing what it does, it's enough that it simply is. And, anyway, as the experience of watching this great work dissolves into memory, it becomes clear that what makes it impenetrable is not that it is saying nothing, but that it is saying so much.

The film tracks the ascension of misanthropic, super-capitalist Daniel Plainview from silver miner to hyper-wealthy oil tycoon in late 19th and early 20th century America. The main thrust of the movie's plot details how Plainview harvests the oil underneath a rustic, undeveloped California town. As the oil company infastructure moves in, a conflict brews between Plainview and Eli, the local minister who wishes to harness some of Daniel's wealth and power for his fledgling church. Through this, the film manages to explore themes of family (particularly focusing on brothers, fathers, and sons), privacy, self-deception, loyalty, greed, wealth, poverty, language, life, death, religion, and capitalism. That it manages to touch on all of these themes without feeling overwhelmed in the slightest is one of its many great achievements. The writing is as sharp, intimate, and multi-textured as any great novel.

With the film's main conflict, one might expect it to become arch or mythic--Capitialism versus Christianity, get yer tickets now!--like something found in, say, a Sergio Leone film. In this way, There Will Be Blood certainly has its moments, but it's more interested in the characters than the competing philosophies. Over and over again, Anderson teases the line of allegory, but refuses to define his two main players solely by their beliefs. These are people, not caricatures, and, as they both seethe and roil with the anger they feel for the other, they, realistically, supress their feelings and go on with their business. It's easy to spot that their business is the same--themselves--but Anderson's too clever to simply make some glib point about the commonalities between Capitalism and Christianity and think that's a movie-worthy point to hang his film on. No, he's found something much more captivating in Plainview himself.

Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis's rendition of Daniel Plainview is a stunning and, I would say, wholly new creation. At times, he's some sort-of capitalist, Frankenstein monster, a simulacrum of humanity cobbled together from competition and greed. But the portrayal goes deeper. He has an adopted son who he clearly cares for, and the anxiety he feels when his son stands in the way of his financial success makes him endearing. His indifference to the suffering of others inspires rage. But through it all, he knows what he wants and is so unflinchingly determined to get it, that the sheer force of his personality compels an unwavering attention. The movie reflects this, zeroing in on Plainview with the long-take intensity of an interrogator. And, yet, despite the fact that the movie runs for over two and a half hours and Plainview is nearly always onscreen, he remains an enigmatic character, his psychology as foreign as a Martian's. He's presented as a man who fiercely guards his privacy, but it feels like he's hiding himself against us, the audience. Or maybe Anderson's camera is bearing down on him so fervently, that he can't help but retaliate with a dogged insistence that he need not show everything there is to him.[1] Whatever the case, the creation is a terrifying mystery. And remains so.

The movie's conclusion is disorienting--there's a jump of location and many years' time between it and the portion of the film that precedes it. While debate rages over its merit and its meaning, it is undeniably powerful and would be as challenging an ending to a film as any in recent memory if No Country for Old Men hadn't also come out last year. There's a sick and perverse joy in watching the angry, disenfranchised Plainview, who has attained such wealth that he can afford to isolate himself from the rest of society, emerge as a full-blown, alcohol-fuelled monster. In isolation, he reverts to his former self as the rugged, lonely silver miner but absent the goals that drove him to form lasting relationships with other human beings or the physical trials that distracted him from his repressed rage. Daniel Day Lewis, completely unleashed, embodies this rage with a mad performance for the ages. He stomps about, drools, vigorously eats a steak with his hands, and screams his dialogue with the gusto of someone who enjoys feeling righteous indignation more than serenity. If this performance and the final scene seem to lift the movie off of the tracks, it seems better to blame the tracks than this fearless, unhinged moment of cinema.

Throughout, one can feel Anderson as a master at the top of his game. The movie's so assured in every aspect and unfolds with such density of thought, that, critical thought be damned, I couldn't help but fall in love with it. As every moment rolls by, burned into the celluoid with a single-minded ferocity that mirrors the character it's depicting, the intensity is so eminently watchable, so pleasureful to look at, that it's almost nauseating. All of Anderson's work has this energy, this joie de cinema, but it's never felt so fully earned as it does here. In their structure or their execution, his past work pointed, at times, to the past successes of Altman or Scorsese. There Will Be Blood points to only Paul Thomas Anderson and, in doing so, to the future.

Would Make a Good Double Feature With: The Wages of Fear

[1] Note that this is one of those performances that is so good, you start referring to the character as if he was really being filmed as he lived his life.

The Long Goodbye

Like a lot of Robert Altman films, The Long Goodbye is a finicky, restless experience. The camera glides along, never still, always zooming, dollying, closing in on the faces of the characters, and even focusing on the visual space between two people in conversation. The dance between the angles and the actors is well-suited to this detective story based on a Raymond Chandler novel. The movements reflect a sort-of Chandler-esque patter, like the camera itself is the real detective, getting paid fifty dollars a day, plus expenses to uncover the mystery of the film.

The plot itself is typical of Chandler stories. Philip Marlowe, private eye, takes a friend, Terry, to Mexico as a favor. The next morning, it’s revealed that Terry has beaten his wife to death and used Marlowe to flee the country. Not believing that his friend would commit such an unspeakable act, Marlowe tries to uncover the truth behind Terry’s disappearance and the wife’s death. Along the way, the plot complicates with the introduction of a wealthy, abused woman (it’s always a dame), her drunken husband, and a host of gangsters looking for money that Terry left behind.

The Long Goodbye is atypical, though, in the way it uses its retro, Golden-Age plot to explore a different era. It, subtly, strands the very 1950s character of Marlowe in the early 1970s, a time that does not fit him. He’s not into yoga, doesn’t really care about making lots of money, and, even when facing certain death, won’t remove his tie. His outlook runs perpendicular to that of the more post-modern attitudes found in the other characters. It’s a sly tweak to the whole genre, exposing the moral rigidity of the hard-boiled detective archetype, and leads the film to an interesting, challenging conclusion.

Elliot Gould’s Marlowe is a first-rate acting class on how to deliver off-hand, witty lines while staying in character. It’s a perfect rendition of the hurting, cynical detective archetype, and Gould’s lanky physical appearance adds a new layer of vulnerability to the character. He doesn’t look nearly as tough as Bogie or other cinema detectives, and in Gould’s hands, the detective’s wit becomes his only defense against the violent world he inhabits. It’s a charming performance from top to bottom, and the film is twice as engaging for his relaxed, confident portrayal.

The movie’s full of little visual riches and manages to expertly balance a mostly jaunty, comic tone with very grim, serious events in the plot. The final payoff feels rushed and it’s not led up to very well (the film sort-of meanders to its conclusion), but it’s a startling ending and makes sense in retrospect, particularly in light of its wrong-time/wrong-place Marlowe. It’s refreshing, too, that Altman and co. resisted the urge to deliver ten minutes of explication for those audience members who couldn’t keep up. The Long Goodbye always makes perfect sense on a gut level, if not always a textual one, and it understands that the thrill of a mystery is in diving into a pile of information and trying to make sense of it all.

Romeo Is Bleeding

Romeo Is Bleeding is a convoluted mess, a dispirited neo-noir that inspires no passion or suspense. The plot twists and turns and raises the stakes, but there's nothing recognizable at its core but recycled, worn archetypes of the film noir genre. The film provides no compelling reason to once again dredge up these femme fatales or the corrupt hero who brings about his own spiritual downfall. And, even watching it as a straight homage, it fails to recapture the spark or wit of the films that are its inspiration. As the histrionics climax and ebb, climax and ebb, over and over again over the course of one hour and fifty minutes, it's like watching a ghost of cinema past; what was once vibrant and sexy is here pale and withered, empty and lifeless.

Gary Oldman stars as Jack Grimaldi, a corrupt police Sargent who offers the mob information about protected witnesses in exchange for money. He's amassed a good deal of dirty money over the years, but has a crisis of conscience when one of his tip-offs leads to an off-camera bloodbath where the cops protecting the witness are also killed. Now he's not just an informant, but a cop-killer as well. Feeling that the mob has not lived up to their end of the bargain, he attempts to extract himself from the dirty dealings but finds he's (gasp!) in over his head. Then, Lena Olin shows up as an ambitious and nihilistic hit woman named Mona who's been marked for death by mob boss Roy Scheider (doing his best Kirk Douglas from Out of the Past impression). Mona (double gasp!) seduces Jack in order to secure his allegience in helping her escape with her life. This complicates Jack's relationship with his wife, his mistress, and the mob.

Like all noir-ish plots, this has the ingredients for a good, tawdry time at the movies where the audience feels a Puritanical glee at seeing a corrupt soul punished for his (and it's always his) ethical ambiguity and a concurrent delight in watching a man overcome seemingly omnipotent malevolent forces. But Jack never emerges as a relatable character or anything worth investing in, either for or against. He leads so many contrary lives--cop and mob informant, husband and philanderer--yet somehow there's nary a hint of danger that he'll be found out. There's not even a sneaky thrill at the outset that he's getting away with it. His affair is joyless, his mob relations are testy, and we never get to know his cop buddies. The only spark of joy in the film is when he hordes his money; his love for this growing pile of cash is the only relationship that connects. But later in the film, the movie asks us to believe that he really, really, truly, no-seriously-I-mean-it-this-time loves his wife (despite everything we've seen), and he abandons his money without so much a moment of hesitation. He comes off not as an anti-hero, but an anti-person, a vessel into which the film pours its plot.

Absent a main character, Romeo Is Bleeding also fails to find a tone that reflects the material. Rather, it's slow and moody, takes little delight in turning the screws on the duplicitous Jack, and, at times, even asks us to take his undoing seriously. It thuds along at a metronome-like pace, with no escalating rhythm or discernable tempo. The score's a distraction, too heavy-handed in its references to older noir scores. Even the shots of the film are disorienting; people in the same scene often feel like they're in different rooms.

Though, to be fair, some of that disorienting quality could be due to the acting. Oldman delivers a fun, theatrical-but-nuanced performance, yet he never really connects with any of the other performers. There's no chemistry between Jack and his wife, his mistress, or Mona. Even the wonderfully disarming Roy Scheider can't seem to penetrate the wall of Oldman's acting and forge a genuine relationship. Lena Olin is the only one besides Oldman who seems to be having any fun, but her performance is a cartoon--Jessica Rabbit playing a James Bond villain. Juliette Lewis, as the mistress, just looks like she's trying to keep up.

Romeo Is Bleeding's only redeeming feature is the lengths to which it goes in torturing its characters. It's gutsy to have a character remove an arm in order to serve the screenplay's labyrinthine plot or to have the unwitting hero forced to bury a man alive. A better film would have played with these moments more, found more absurdity in them, and used them for comedic purposes. And that may have been the intent with this project at one time. But if the movie's laughing at all, it's only a nervous, guilty laugh--a sexist joke from a misogynist, searching the crowd to see which fellas are with him.


Would Make a Good Double Feature Wtih: Angel Heart

Edited to Add: RIP Roy Scheider. May the curse of your living corpse haunt us all.

I Am Curious Yellow

Because I Am Curious Yellow was seized by customs and held on trial in the U.S. for sexual obscenity, it has the reputation (at least among my peers) of a groundbreaking pornography, a graphic, sexual movie. This is completely unfair to the film, which is a well-meaning, often clumsy, and honest portrayal of a young woman's search for identity in the confusing political landscape of 1960s Sweden. Some of the images in the film were no doubt shocking to pre-Deep Throat America, but, having grown up in the wake of the porn industry and most modern ad campaigns, these same images feel sweet, charming, and human to my modern eyes. Indeed, the thought of anyone referring to the sex in the movie as "obscene" is laughable now. The opposite is true; it's decent.

If anything's obscene about I Am Curious, it's the convoluted editing. The film is all over the place, with half-baked, ham-fisted conceits awkwardly imposed onto the rather involving character study. A parody of a game show, where viewers of the film are invited to guess what's inside a bag for the chance to win some outlandish (and hilarious, I guess) prizes, recurs throughout the film. There are non-diagetic references to the Stockholm censorship board's reaction to an in-movie confession and a few cuts to a phony newscaster serving as a narrator. It feels very Buñuel-lite; it's meant to be cheeky and witty, but these unclever digressions are distracting at best.

At first, the movie's so fractured, it's even hard to tell which pieces of the film are the digressions; it begins as a film-within-a-film story, during which the director, Vilgot Sjöman, appears as himself and frets in voice over about falling in love with his leading lady, Lena. Bergman, the viewer is told, always advised against this, and as the master's name is invoked, it seems like the movie might be turning into a forebear of a sub-par, navel-gazing Woody Allen film. You know, the one about the insecure director who wants to sleep with his brazenly sexual leading lady, but can't quite handle her own insecurities and peccadilloes?

Slowly, thankfully, the film's scope widens. Lena, in an attempt to learn more about politics, interviews Swedes on the street about a variety of topics pertaining to (then)contemporary Swedish life. She asks them if Sweden has a class system or if women have equal rights in Sweden, badgers vacationers back from a trip to Spain about Franco's dictatorship, and confronts some old-guard Liberals about their own conservative views. This is fascinating, if just for its time-capsule-like revelation of a specific culture at a specific time. If some of the more timely references were lost on me, it served only to spark my own curiosity.

When the movie begins to focus on Lena's struggle to find her identity, though, it's very near great. Lena Nyman, as both herself and the fictional Lena (the blurring of the two isn't very interesting), is magnificent here, accurately conveying the interrelationship of confusion and anger, passion and despair. Her trials are familiar--an affair with a man who won't commit, an absent mother, a craven, intimidated father--but the stark nakedness (literal and figurative) of their execution here works. Late in the movie, Lena unleashes rage at her father, at her lover, at Franco, even, and, as she's knocking over the furniture and bookcases in her room a la Charles Foster Kane, it's undeniably moving. She's a liberated woman, she doesn't know where she belongs or to whom, no one can help her, and she can't bear the uncertainty a moment longer.

Aside from Nyman's performance, the other strength of I Am Curious Yellow lies in the fact that it is, literally, a curious film. Like Lena, it's trying to discover what it's about as it runs. Though the film makes several mistakes, it's clear they're not calculated and are, at the very least, born of genuine artistic intent. A goofy, intelligent, but sophomoric tone pervades the film. It can be annoying, sure, but it slowly earns your respect and then blind-sides you with a perfect observation about human nature.

Explanations/Intentions

This post feels like it's more for me than for anyone else, but for thems as wants to know:

My intent here is to post a review of 1 or more movie a week. I am going to do this for a year and then see how I feel.

I've added a donate button to the sidebar in case anyone appreciates what I'm doing and is feeling generous. I'd like to offer something special back to those who donate, but I haven't quite figured out what that might be. I'm thinking about it. I'm currently unemployed, so any amount of money helps fund my Netflix fees, as well as trips to the theater (which will otherwise be small in number for financial reasons).

I'm planning on changing the site around a little more as well, with better organization and browsing of past reviews.

The ultimate goal here is to hone my craft, watch more movies with a critical eye, and have fun.

Any suggestions of films to see are welcome. Any contrary opinions are thoroughly enjoyed. Debate in the comments is encouraged.

Cloverfield

The premise of Cloverfield is ingenious. The film is a mash-up of The Blair Witch Project and 1998's shameful remake of Godzilla, interpreted through the visual grammar of September 11th. Playing off this cultural landmark, the hoary cliches of the giant monster movie suddenly gain relevance. Every collapsing structure stands in for the Twin Towers, and every moment of heroism is a chance for the viewer to feel like one of the firefighters who risked their lives. A few reviews of Cloverfield have wondered if it's inappropriate or exploitative for this monster movie to call such specific echoes to a real-life tragedy. I don't think so, because every frame of Cloverfield indicates that this is the point. Like Spielberg's War of the Worlds, this is 9/11 porn. It zeros in on a mysterious, scary world (in this case, the irrevocable destruction of the American way of life), and, through objectification, allows the viewer to control the uncontrollable. Viewed this way, Cloverfield is hot.

As Cloverfield begins, viewers of the movie are informed, ostensibly by the military, that the footage they are about to see comes from a video camera found in a location formerly known as "Central Park." From there, the movie is composed entirely of video recorded by a group of young people (and their companions). The cameraman is an oblivious, obnoxious doofus named Hud. He's been tasked with videotaping a going-away party for his much more successful best friend, Rob. When a Godzilla-sized monster attacks New York, ending the party and forcing the youngsters to flee for their lives, Hud continues shooting, documenting the confusion, the chaos, and the destruction. "People are gonna want to know, you know, how it all went down," he boasts. That you can almost hear the cash register going off in Hud's mind is a credit to T.J. Miller's performance.

Blair Witch and its imitators all had a moment where you wanted the person holding the camera to put it down and do something rather than observe it. Cloverfield is not immune to this problem, but, because of the 9/11 echoes, most of Hud's footage actually feels important enough that recording it is doing something. What's more, the movie is the first of its ilk to make the footage accurately reflect the character holding the camera. I became enamored with Hud's dumb, well-meaning POV. He's so committed to his new identity as a documentarian, that he even records the newscasts on the television. As things grow more dire, Hud uses the camera to distance himself from the experience, shielding himself from the horror. And he's not alone. The movie glibly shows others on the street, taking pictures and video of the carnage with their cellphones.

Cloverfield never makes a comment about this behavior, but that's just as well. It's a keen observation about the way Americans experience things in this age of audio/visual gizmos, and bogging the movie down with some didactic message would only cheapen the verisimilitude with which it captures the times. Besides, the movie itself is a self-contained message about the Videodrome-like way we've begun to see reality. In 1999, Blair Witch ended with its characters storming a haunted house, their cameras aimed in front of them like weapons that could ward off the evil spirits through objective documentation. Almost ten years later, Cloverfield ends with its characters pointing the camera at themselves. Having lost their very notion of themselves in this hostile landscape, they use the camera to tell the world that they are. It's a fascinating representation of America's anxiety about its identity and this weird, ever-growing tendency to document and preserve American culture in the face of its downfall (why else would we keep seeing the release of shitty TV shows on DVD while the multiplex churns with post-apocalyptic dread?).

But cultural, shmultural. One can point to any number of terrible films to make the same points. Cloverfield is also a terrific thrill-ride. As buildings quake and infrastructure starts exploding, the young partiers are forced screaming into the streets with the rest of the city and from there, the peril doesn't let up. The plot unfolds quickly, but intelligibly. There's just enough time to register an important event before matters of survival force Hud and the viewer elsewhere. The movie continually raises the stakes and every time it seems the danger is understandable, there's something new up the movie's sleeve; you're never certain what fresh horrors await the protagonists. Since the POV is so limited, the viewer is as trapped and helpless as the characters, and the mystery at the heart of the film becomes both compelling and scary. I began obsessively scanning every frame for clues about the monster's appearance or its origin, half-wishing I could rewind it for a better look.

Cloverfield's not without some problems,[1] particularly with its main characters. They never quite gel as a believable group of people, and Michael Stahl-David, as Rob, doesn't have the charisma or the cockiness the role requires. But these issues are minute compared to the film's accomplishments. After seeing Cloverfield, telling a story through real-time footage recorded by one of its characters seems less a gimmick (as it did in Blair Witch) than a legitimate style of filmmaking in its own right. One wonders what a master of pacing and slow character studies like Polanski could do with this technique.[2] Cloverfield manages to push this exciting, emerging form of cinematic storytelling forward and make the giant monster movie new and exciting again.[3] The former accomplishment, with its observations about how we interact with media technology, makes it an important film. The latter makes it a thrilling, slight experience, unlike, say, the morning of September 11th.

[1]Complaints that Hud's camera has a longer battery life or can withstand more damage than any camcorder known to man are valid, but seem churlish; it's like complaining about how the sound effects in Star Wars shouldn't be there because there's no sound in space.

[2] I have yet to see De Palma's Redacted or Romero's Diary of the Dead which both reportedly use this same technique, but, despite liking some of their work, I hesitate to call either of these directors "masters."

[3] Michael Giacchino's end credits music suite, Roar!, makes it worth staying through the closing credits. This piece of music belies the film's true inspiration.

One Movie a Week

Starting Thursday, January 24th, 2008, I'll begin posting reviews and such every Thursday. More to come.

Battlestar Galactica

Just finished watching the series.






SPOILERS!






38,000 people all said FUCK PENICILLIN! Women all across the fleet said, I WANT TO DIE A PAINFUL DEATH IN CHILDBIRTH!

These are the same people who, a few episodes ago, couldn't agree if they should let some friendly robuts on board their spaceships.

So fucking silly.






Well executed though.

The Michael Richards Show

Michael Richards goes APE!

Seriously, what happened here? I'm all for stand-up comedians taking hecklers down about 20,000 notches but this is pretty repellent. It's odd that he said the thing about the lynching and someone actually cheered in the audience but then he says the dreaded N-word and everyone gets quiet.

I suppose there's a silver lining, though, in that someone far wittier than I can now make up a joke that begins:

Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, and Sammy Davis Jr. walk into a bar...

Soon... One Movie a Day Part 2?

Mulling over the idea of doing another one movie a day marathon. Probably starting at the beginning of November.

More to come.

A Review?: Snakes on a Plane

Spoilers abound.

Snakes on a Plane has the good sense to provide the titular snakes on the titular plane and not much else. It's not a great bad movie or a decent film--it's an average bad film, the kind-of movie you see on TBS all the fucking time. The great relief is that, besides the obligatory "motherfuckers" spoken by (and clearly re-shot by) Samuel L. Jackson, it doesn't wink too much at the audience, letting them do their own nudge-nudging. Jackson, in fact, provides a sturdy anchor for all the improbability... and, good God is David Koechner a god-damned relief whenever he's onscreen, wasted as he is. The rest of the characters are pretty weak and bland, one-dimensional archetypes representing segments of society like the cast of one of those disaster movies from the 70s (did Airport '77 have it so good/bad?). During the first act, when the film establishes these, um, characters, it's nigh-well intolerable and anytime the action slows down to focus on the emotional turmoil of these stand-ins for humanity, the dullness is depressing.

It reveals that not much has changed in the slasher-movie paradigm. Have sex? Die. Do drugs? Die. Are snobby? Die. Fat? Die die die! The only thing that seems to have changed is that "The Brother" doesn't die first and "the sissy" is found to be useful and not some sort-of burden to the brute masculinity needed to overwhelm the snakes (sorry right wing fundies...Snakes on a Plane is the official death-knell to your anti-gay crusading...the zeitgeist has officially shifted). The movie has a few fun geek-show gore moments where people die in surprising and graphic ways, but completely misses the chance to have some visceral bloodthirsty, vengeance-filled snake-deaths. With one or two exceptions (including a shout-out to Gremlins), anytime the movie offs a snake, it's vague, unclear, and coy about it. Call me human, but when I see a poisonous snake bite a man in the junk, I want to see that motherfucking snake get his motherfucking head bitten off in all the gory detail.

The movie plants some seeds that could have really blossomed into some absurd and delightfully logic-free moments. But it's playing it far too safe to launch into the stratosphere of absurdity. Why introduce the kickboxer if you're not going to use him? Sure, he gets a moment of heroism, but what he does is so average that you'd believe any other character could do the same thing. The premise itself is ridiculous enough that I wouldn't have minded seeing a kickboxer kick-boxing his way through the snake-pile--I would have relished it. And why build up the entrance of the bizarre-looking croc-o-snake (or, if you will, allisnaker), a giant constrictor with two rows of teeth accompanied by Jaws-esque music, if you're not going to have the passengers or Jackson or even the girl with the dog have a show-down with this behemoth?

If one is interested in seeing this film, it is imperative to see it opening weekend with the amped up, self-aware, irony-soaked crowd of youngsters ready to cheer, chortle, and mock the very things that are usually taken for granted in movies of this ilk. I was fascinated that the crowd, primed by months and months of Snakes on a Plane internet jokery, was ready to lambast any moment of the film that tried to be genuine. I wondered if this would have been the case, absent the months and months of buildup. And I wished that everyone would watch all of movies with such a generous, yet critical eye as the audience turned toward Snakes on a Plane. The world would be better off if audiences could be counted on to sneer and boo at, say, Tom Cruise during some of the schmaltzier Mission: Impossible 3 moments the way they did when Samuel L. Jackson advised Julianna Margulies to stay strong.

Anyway, Snakes on a Plane does deliver some effective and compelling snakes-on-a-plane peril. It's a sometimes fun goofball film that, despite earning instant kitsch status, will probably fade from memory like a silly dream had four years ago. It reminded me of the Kurt Russell vehicle Executive Decision more than once. Even that barely-average film had the capacity to wring applause from the crowd as the nerdy Kurt Russell, sweating like Robert Hays, semi-successfully landed a huge commercial airliner. This movie climaxes on a nearly identical note and it's just as stupid and yet rewarding. We're living in a post-9/11 world now and we could all use a United 93 that ends on a happy note. Well, for most of us. The sex couple, the peeing man, and that fat lady clearly had it coming.

Electric Shadows

I forgot to really clean this site up. Oh well. One Movie a Day is over, but I'm continuing to review films at Electric Shadows, a once personal blog that is now devoted to writing about movies on my Netflix Queue.

Recognition

I would feel remiss if I didn't mention (gloat/brag about?) that One Movie a Day has been named one of the 10 best blogs on the Internet by the folks at Brainwash Cafe. I would feel remiss.

It's wonderful to have this blog finally put where it belongs: directly below a link to Terrorism News.