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.

Alphabetical listing of movies

A

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
L'Age D'Or
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
All That Jazz
Alphaville
The American Astronaut
At the Circus
L'Avventura

B

Bad Company
The Battle of Algiers
Being There
Bring Me the Head
.......of Alfredo Garcia
Bringing Up Baby

C

Capote
Carnal Knowledge
Cat People
The Celebration
C.H.U.D.
Cold Comfort Farm
The Comedians of Comedy
Corpse Bride
The Crush

D

Danger: Diabolik
Dark Habits
Day for Night
Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine
Dracula
Dressed to Kill

E

The Endurance
Eureka

F

Fanny & Alexander
Female Trouble
First Blood
Fitzcarraldo
The Frighteners

G

Gappa
Gates of Heaven
Gerry
Go West

H

Hiroshima Mon Amour
A History of Violence
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Hotel Rwanda

I

Inside Deep Throat

J

Jabberwocky
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

K

King Kong
King Kong (1976)
King Kong (2005)
King of New York

L

The Lawnmower Man
Lenny
The Leopard
Little Otik
Lost in La Mancha

M

March of the Penguins
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party
Munich
Murder, My Sweet
My Dinner with Andre

N

The Nesting
The Nightmare Before Christmas

P

Parents
Paris, Texas
Passion Fish
The Passion of the Christ
The Phantom of Liberty

Q

Q: The Winged Serpent

R

Rasputin: the Mad Monk
A Real Young Girl
Reflections of Evil
Robocop 2
Rumor Has It…

S

Seven Up!
7 Plus Seven
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
Shadows
Shopgirl
Short Cuts
Sleuth
The Stendhal Syndrome
Syriana

T

Tess
The Time of the Wolf
True Stories
Two Mules for Sister Sara

W

Walkabout
Wallace & Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Weekend
Who's That Girl?
Who's That Knocking at My Door
The Wicker Man

Z

Zardoz
Zombi 3

So it ends.

My new blog can be found here: Electric Shadows. It has no purpose, no goal, nothing... just the unedited ramblings of me.

One Movie a Day is over and this post is really just a squeezing out of the afterbirth. I am delighted that I was able to no-foolin' meet a goal I set down for myself and I'm pretty happy that the blog was at least noticed by some people. I didn't expect that to happen, though I did want it. The process of watching one movie a day was so much more mundane than I expected. Though it was tiring, frustrating, and overwhelming at times, after a while, my life gained a certain rhythm that was ultimately very boring as I'd do nothing but work, write, eat, watch, write, work, eat, etc. Moments when I was able to find the time to read from a book were heavenly.

One unexpected effect this whole experiment had on me was to get me excited about writing again. I've been writing for a long time, but this really got my juices flowing since I kind-of forgot how hard it is to actually write decent stuff. Another thing I found via blogging here was just how much I love the first Robocop movie. Quite a bit.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to clean this site up a little, create an alphabetical list of the movies I've watched, and probably do some more detailed reflection posts. Right now, I'm going to celebrate by having some toast.

Day 93: Reflections of Evil

This is the final film for One Movie a Day.  This film was viewed on a VHS tape a friend of mine sent me some years ago.  I note that a DVD for this film has been released, but have no idea if this is the same version.

Like channel flipping through time while taking a methamphetamine-inspired jump into a nest of cobras, Reflections of Evil is a media-saturated pastiche, the plot focusing on an obese street vendor in Los Angeles.  His sister disappeared sometime ago on the Universal Studios tour (not unlike the famous story about a young Steven Spielberg who is lampooned without mercy in the film) and she figures into the film in oblique, sometimes terrifying ways.  Reflections of Evil is a kitchen sink style production with crazy and inspired choices in overdubbing, editing, and shooting.  When it works, it's touching, scary, and exciting - suffused with the life and vigor of undiluted artistic integrity.  It's far too long, though, and the valleys in the film are very, very low with a final sequence that falls to the level of a home video prank and makes too coherent a plotline that previously meandered at its own whim.

The film's audacity is almost enough to carry it off, though.  The film opens with an intro by Tony Curtis, who introduces what would seem to be a completely different movie, but he's overdubbed at times to say the correct title (and "he" reveals that the director was sued by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). We're then treated to an old Serta commercial and some old ABC promotional material.  More materials like this are cut in and out of the movie, and there's even a clip of John Ashcroft talking about the war on terror from FOX News at one point.  There are also clips from other films like 2001 and The Omega Man that play counterpoint to the narrative.  The soundtrack of the film also contains many "sampled" elements including music and sound FX (I heard the bird noises from The Birds at one point).  These alternate media sources float in and out of the film like radio interference at times.  They often work well as jokes or distortions of mainstream culture, but they're as often digressive.

A better idea of what this movie is like:  We first meet our main character as he stumbles around a neighborhood shouting obscenities, gets drunk on candy liquers, shouts at dogs, and vomits a great deal of some disgusting substance.  Then, the film flashes back several months to when he's selling watches on the streets of L.A.  When he's got free time, he eats giant sugar-filled snacks with great delight, though his sound effect laden gorges will put anyone off food for some time.  The citizens of L.A. and, indeed, the city itself are presented as blatantly hostile to the main character and he responds in kind with grandiose threats of pent-up rage.  Much later in the film, there is a sequence in which the main character is attacked by dogs that rivals the traffic jam sequence in Weekend for its length, intensity, brilliance, and insufferablity.

This is a good movie, made good by brilliant passages and kept from brilliance by overindulgence.  It's a feverish experience: dirty, random, and smoking with temple-vein bursting vitriol.  However, even as the film beat me down, I was terrified, excited, and overjoyed for much of the movie because I had no idea, whatsoever, what would happen next.  And that, it seems to me, is as good a place as any to stop.  

Day 92: The Lawnmower Man

What strange fate dropped this movie into my lap, the penultimate film on my movie-a-day viewing. What an odd, odd world it is to have this bizarre mashup of The Fly, Tron, and a vast array of other Frankenstein stories be second-to-last, gleaming with 1992 computer graphics and watered down Stephen King plot stylings. I am aware of the whole "Stephen King" deal with this film, the fact that his short story had so little to do with this film that his name was removed from all materials after a lawsuit. And yet, though his name isn't on it, the way the film is made and the way the plot progresses isn't unlike some of the awful adaptations made from King's work.

The movie draws its inspiration from the now laughable notion that virtual reality (as it was known in 1992) could change the world, creating alternate states of consciousness, brand new weaponry, and new educational possibilities. Pierce Brosnan is a lead scientist on the technology, working for a company more interested in the military implications of his work than the possibility for human advancement. When a chimp goes NUTS due to the experimentation he's undergone, Brosnan decides to take matters into his own hands and ply his trade on the local retarded lawnmower man.

This movie is fun-bad and the seriously dated computer effects are refreshing to these 21st century eyes. They're not trying to replicate any degree of reality, rather to create a new emotional landscape and I wish more effects work in films was that honest. The film opens with a sequence in which a chimp goes ape! on some military guys while wearing a virtual reality suit, so that's pretty fun too. The rest of the film trods on well-worn soil and the only deviations from this path are the nifty computer FX.

The film's conceptual use of virtual reality is somewhat prescient considering the hubbub that followed The Matrix and, in this way, earns some points. But, really, it's just a drag. Still, for bad movie lovers... this is a great one, oozing early 90s sensibilities, trapped by them, and unaware of this fact. If it were twenty minutes shorter, I'd call it a future camp classic.

Day 91: Munich

Munich, Steven Spielberg's potboiler-that-would-be-prestige-picture, is ostensibly about an incidient involving Israel's revenge campaign against Palestinian terrorists following the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, but, as its final shot coyly states, it can also be seen as a film examining America's reaction to September 11th. That it's effective at being both of these things at once is its greatest asset; this effectiveness is born of an admirable restraint for about the first half of the film. It's a wonderful companion piece to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, another film that took a tangential, though far from subtle, route to examine, explore, and exploit (I use that word in the kindest way) post-9/11 American fear of the other. However, as laudable as it is to make mainstream films that seem like a conscious attempt to deal with national trauma using familiar genres to synthesize the zeitgeist floating around in the ether, both films are severely flawed, probably by the same calculation I praised above.

Munich, for instance, is far too watery-eyed and guilt-ridden from the get-go to function as a film about the consequences of revenge. The sequences featuring a group of agents executing those unfortunate enough to be on a list of names are invariably staged with the technical and emotional competence one expects from Spielberg. Each has its own rhythms, its own visual identity, and its own set of suprising moments that serve to ratchet up the suspense as the killer Israelis attempt to kill their targets while leaving civilians unharmed. All of this stuff is pretty great, reminiscent of the comraderie and fellowship in killing found in (of all things) DePalma's The Untouchables at times. And yet, continuing with this comparison, Munich's characters (and overreaching tone) are too often like Kevin Costner's Elliot Ness: moralistic and strangely unprepared for the potential ramifications of their actions.

Which isn't to say that all maudlin moments in the film come off this way. The moment when the bomb-maker of the group has to bow out because he's unprepared for what the group is about to do is a great moment that skirts the edge of treacle and comes out genuine. The conversation that occurs between the lead Israeli agent and a terrorist about the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is also effective and thoughtful, if only for the way it raises questions and answers them according to the point of view of those involved with the conversation and then leaves it alone until the two meet again. Additionally, I liked the montage of television reports and the people watching these reports about the kidnapping of Israeli athletes so much that I wanted it to be the entire film.

But after the group kills a female assassin in a fit of cold-blooded retribution, the film wiggles about, looking for its groove and never finding anything. And later, Eric Bana, as the lead agent, begins freaking out in paranoia as abruptly as Jack Nicholson went crazy in The Shining. This is not Bana's fault at all, he's interesting in the role, but the film's. It has done very, very little to set up this character change. The film finds itself again in its closing scenes, making clear that the film is also about the abandonment of the father figure, but prior to this is a vast stretch of time and one of the more ridiculous sex scenes ever committed to celluloid (poor, poor Kate Capshaw).

Munich would have been better served to take its perspective on revenge from the Daniel Craig character's perspective. He's the group's hothead. Wants to kill the enemies, has no compunction about doing it, and, yet, he's got very little to do in the movie. Bana's character is so angst-ridden in the opening, it cheapens his double angst later. How about a movie about a man who thinks with his gut slowly learning that his gut is very often stupid and wrong? About someone who does not care about the consequences of his actions being forced to deal with them? I think that's your zeitgeist, Sr. Spielbergo. Have at it.

Three posts to go.

I've hit 90 movies and have only three more posts to this blog before it ends. Sometime on Januray 2nd, I will post a summary of the entire experience and a link to my new, more pointless blog, currently being constructed.

I don't know what the last three movies will be. I have absolutely no idea. With apologies to John, I don't think Reflections of Evil will make the list.

Day 90: March of the Penguins

This week's entry in Anthropomorphism Theatre, March of the Penguins, has such sensuous and rich wildlife cinematography that I suspected CHEATING BY COMPUTERS more than once (and I dunno, did they?). The quality and depth of the image was so involving and affecting to me that I often tuned out Morgan Freeman's narration, preferring the thick solid ground of the penguin imagery. The narration's not bad, often providing just enough context for the narrative of the film to come through and it's certainly lighter on the arty poeticisms of the narration in many similiarly anthropomorphic IMAX films. But my feeling with this film, as it is with many films of this type, is that movies like this should provide a simple contextual narration at the beginning, telling us what we will be seeing, and then let the images and the animals tell their own damn story. But I'm quibbling. This is, really, a nice, simple film that works well due to the imagery found within.

I like animals, I like evolution, and I'm tickled beyond belief that this film was touted as supporting "intelligent design" by some Christian folk. Check out this quote, pulled from this article.

"To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!"

I'm not interested in setting up a Creationist strawman here with my layman's knowledge of religion, evolution, and/or science, but this CRACKS ME UP! It's a weird understanding of evolution, positing that evolution would somehow give the penguins the intellectual property rights on their wasteful, trecherous, and idiotic reproductive needs. Further, the idea that there's a guiding hand behind the numerous deaths of penguins, as they scramble their young eggs (God, the abortion doctor!), freeze to death, or starve, featured in this film doesn't say much for this guiding hand's intelligence. Unless, I guess, the Penguins who die deserved it for some reason (they probably ate the sacred krill). It's absolute nonsense. But whatever.

But two can play at this game. Watch: The real story here is quite the opposite from the attempt of the religious right to co-opt these penguins. What's really important here is the way this film depicts quite plainly the lack of any specifically defined gender roles in God's creatures. Sure, we all know that seahorse males carry the eggs before they hatch, but emperor penguins? The most masculine of aquatic, flightless birds? Are stuck starving themselves taking care of a stupid egg while their women go off in search of food to bring home for the hungry brood? And not only that, but once the women actually get back (and some of them don't... never send a girl to do a man's job, are you with me fellas?) then they get to take care of the baby for its youth, even after the baby penguin has sucked out the last of the male's food reserves after hatching. That's some gratitutde, huh? Who knew that penguins could be so genderbending? The actions of these penguins prove that the established gender roles humans have built up over centuries are completely bogus, naturally speaking. There's some sound reasoning for ya. Blugh.

The only problem I have with this movie is that it seems a bit too packaged (and particularly for the "super-mom" set) with, at times, a very human narrative forced onto non human creatures. Nevertheless, it seems to be, at least, basically accurate with a minimal amount of cheap editing tricks to make the animals conform to the structure the film wants to have. A bonus for me: I love Antarctic imagery and this movie's got some of the best I've seen.

Day 89: Syriana

Intelligent, thoughtful, and involving multi-faceted drama about the wheelings and dealings of oil industry executives, the U.S. governement, Arabian governments, and the disaffected populations who turn martyr, Syriana is not altogether successful at weaving an interrelated tapestry of characters and events that culminate in blood for oil, but it is always interesting. It's impressive that it's able to take such multinational and culturally diversive topics and make each one of them a personal story for each of the many characters that populate the film. But the film is not quite up to its ambitions on a first viewing, due primarily to the fact that a lot of narrative energy is spent on an overabundance of characters and the confusing, poorly explicated legal ramifications that surround international oil law. Still, I left the theater feeling great about the film, mostly because, while the details of the plot were vague to me, I never felt lost about what was going on between the people in the film. And the intercutting of emotional beats is spot on.

I felt the same way after watching Heat, a movie I'm now quite fond of. Both Heat and Syriana lost me amidst all the names and side-characters (and in Heat's case, some of Al Pacino's performance) but I always felt in good hands, guided along by levels of pure filmmaking the way one might be if they were watching a procedural film in a foreign language with no translation. Having seen Heat on video, I was able to more fully understand the details of the plot and so warmed up to the film quite a bit more. I'm sure the same will happen for Syriana since I will definitely rewatch it, if only to reexperience several very striking moments at the end of the film.

Having said this, there are some points in Syriana where the cross-cutting between characters was off. At one moment, the film cut back to George Clooney's character and it had been so long since I'd seen him, I'd forgotten where his plot strand had left off. This happened to me several times during the movie, and it seemed as if the problem was that the film had too much to say in too little time, so it threw a ton of information at the viewer at a very fast pace. Surely this is a movie that will only improve upon a second or third viewing and as it stands on my first viewing, it's one of (hopefully) many films that will be made about the state of oil dependence in the world today.

Day 88: The Frighteners

Another gift, and in this case, I hadn't expected to dip into this particular movie until well after this blog had run its course. I've already ruminated on Peter Jackson as a director of well-written genre pieces in my King Kong post and, so, it's a bit abhorrent to me to revist this same man's work so soon afterwards. Particularly since I've seen The Frighteners a couple of times already, though it's probably been at least eight years since I've seen the film. Unfortunately, I've gotten a bit sick and needed a day of much rest and relaxation to recuperate. The only other option was another Val Lewton piece and that's even more abhorrent to me.

As it is, I'm glad I watched this film. When I first saw The Frighteners in its theatrical run, I was already aware of Peter Jackson having watched Dead Alive (its true title is Braindead, but I can't think of it by that name) zillions of times. When I left The Frighteners I liked the movie well enough, though I felt the comraderie between the ghosts that helped out Michael J. Fox was a bit labored and underdeveloped and some of the plot machinations strained credibility. I revisted it when it came out on video and found that the film was full of riches on a second viewing, with wonderful connections between side characters that I missed on my first viewing. This began to clue me in on the sound structures Jackson and Fran Walsh build into their scripts, though it would be some time before I had that final a-ha! moment when I was able to articulate this aspect of these films.

Years later, I began to hear about a longer cut of the film (and the accompanying behind the scenes documentaries) available on laserdisc and I was curious to see it. This is what I watched today and it is a remarkably better film than the theatrical cut, with little snippets of character development that improved the viewing experience enormously. From what I could tell, most of the added material involved the ghost friends of Michael J. Fox and the establishment of the "rules" of ghostiness the film deals with. These developments turn the film from a pretty-good genre movie with some effective creepy moments and a show-stealing turn by Jeffery Combs, into an intrincately wound automated toy of a film, with surprising deviations and delightful contrivances. Of course, this may also be a result of having seen the film before, but it seemed that with one or two exceptions, the added material made everything in the film much more believable, understandable, and enjoyable.

It remains a loud, shrill, and hyperactive experience. And the plot's convolutions are a bit too much. And I really, really wish that there could have been something in the script to justify the presence of the FBI agent in the climax or that the heaven at the end of the movie wasn't such a cheap plot device (though it's still fucking earned) or that the movie could have sorted out whether son of Busey was a mythical creature or a literalistic boogedy boo back from the grave, particularly since the "soul-collector" character is totally scary and it's a bit of a let-down to see it unmasked as a serial killer. But it is so god-damned delightful when Michael J. Fox uses the afterlife mythology of the movie in order to defeat the villains, and Jeffery Combs's deranged FBI agent goes so far off the deep end, and the movie's so internally consistent while it constantly threatens to jump off the tracks, that I was overdelighted while watching it. I haven't felt the joy found in cinematic exuberance in some time, but I remember it now. It's here in The Frighteners, a messy, rough masterpiece of genre fusion.