Change Your Image
Blake Jarred
Reviews
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
faith restored
This is a better Potter than we've known, with one big exception: the Quidditch sequence. From shot to shot, the blocking is almost completely borrowed from equivalent material in earlier stories. The only revision by this director is a slow-mo posturing from the characters on their broomsticks, which I guess is meant to be funny but feels embarrassingly like the Coke ads that play when you enter the theater.
Aside from that gaff, most everything else here is tolerable, depending on your threshold for things HP. My standards for these films aren't exceptionally high. All I ask is that they have a certain visual coherence and each story be able to stand on its own while contributing to the saga's arc. Catching up with this franchise is like attending a family reunion anyway, so we already know we're going to see each newest installment regardless of the prior one's quality. "Order of the Phoenix" was the first one I truly disliked because it tried to turn the series into something it wasn't and lost narrative cohesion. Neophyte direction and a switch in the writing team were the likely culprits. Now the transcriber of the first four is back, and between his effort and that the director feels more comfortable with this world, balance is restored.
Rickman and Gambon finally get their due in this outing. In fact, you can easily tell that Yates is a quick learner because the balance among the supporting cast is uniformly fine here. All the elements are old hat by now, but very well engineered and working in full tandem. The score is agreeably subdued and supports the action well. The young actors turn in their best work. It ends on the right note. The set pieces devised specifically for the adaptation all work. The magic is back. See it.
Rating: 3 (of 4)
Breaking the Waves (1996)
fanfare for the damaged
Lars von Trier is a director whose name I've heard almost incessantly through the years but whose work I've just now arrived at. After seeing this film, I'm not what you'd call encouraged. All I knew beforehand is that it contained some minor detail on offshore drilling (something of a personal interest) and featured Emily Watson, an actress I much admire. Both turned out to be the highpoints of a film that is overlong, all pretension, and no profundity.
Most audiences know there are appreciable subtleties when it comes to performances, framing by the camera, and the editing. They know some directors can deliver a cogent message from only these three devices instead of relying on insistent music cues or excessive dialogue. Most audiences prefer this method because it seems less cloying, more sophisticated. And it's a skill von Trier utilizes. There is music here but only during pointless title cards that break the narrative into segments. There may have been background music in the wedding that opens the film, but I'd have to take another look to be sure. The story's delivery, however, depends almost entirely upon Watson: what she does, what she says or doesn't say, how she inflects.
Her character's name is Bess, and an alert viewer is aware that this woman is seriously mentally ill. She has been oppressed all her life, by her parents and by their community, all of them beholden to the Calvinist church. She talks to God a lot, a one-sided conversation though she goes a step further than is usual in the movies, by composing His responses and projecting aloud His contralto voice. I applaud Watson for how successfully she imparts the damaged psyche of this woman. She conveys total disintegration without self-conscious expressions or gestures that would have distanced the actress from her character. Another actress may have been compelled to do that, to play against the blunt harshness of the material.
But the other characters are far less developed. Their existence is kept at the rote level of the screenplay, to provide various foils for Bess's brainsickness. Okay, but to what end? First there is her husband, Jan, a roughneck who suffers his own mental damage after an accident on an oil rig leaves him paralyzed. Consequently, he implores his wife to sleep with other men and tell him about it afterward. It will aid his recovery. This request understandably mortifies her, even after she relents. Then there's the doctor and nurse (the latter is an in-law) who take care of Jan. Both of them try to talk sense into Bess, but something in their manners suggest not concern so much as the deluded ramblings of clinical hypocrites, people who are as compromised in their own way. The essential conflict in their relationship with Bess is that they just don't get her (i.e. the value of her faith). All she wants is to help her husband. She is naïve and emotionally fractured, but her intentions are inherently good. That's all that matters in the end.
Thanks in part to naturalistic camera-work by Robbie Muller, and the way it lingers on the seedy details of this frigid Scottish country—how it connotes a "slice of life" quality—von Trier does a skillful job of keeping us off-balance for much of the film's first half. We think we're in an objective, more or less realistic, drama and only gradually clued in as to the simple-minded parable he's building towards.
Sure, you can argue for the absence of overt moralizing, that it's all relative, etc. But look again: there is a definite objective. Everything is posed. It is all in the performances, in the close-ups of Watson. What von Trier has done is to communicate a message almost exclusively through his performers and that message is reprehensible. The vagueness which continues to permeate the story till near its conclusion is, not the ambiguity of life, but a coy obfuscation by the storyteller. I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it finally happens, it doesn't just drop—it plummets and cracks the ground.
In the final shot, high above the rig platform, when heaven's bells begin to ring for Bess's "sacrifice," my stomach turned. Few images are as hokey. What a downer, also, to celebrate the self-destruction of a young woman whose death resulted from the oppression she suffered; that denied her the exercise of mental faculties she needed in order to understand and cope with life. Yes, that is something to celebrate. To look upon Bess with sympathy and reflect on her end with regret for her malady is not good enough. For von Trier, it merits celebration. That tells me something rather sordid about him, and it's more disturbing than any of the film's merely prurient aspects.
I don't think I'll be going on any more adventures with this guy. Not anytime soon.
Rating: 1 (out of 4)
Mean Streets (1973)
Streets of origin
Wish I could have seen this when it was new. Maybe not as much as sometimes wishing I had been around for Beatlemania, but maybe then I could know why some people choose this over "GoodFellas" and everything else. But I can't. Sometimes that's the problem with these cornerstone movies. Even if they didn't know they would transform the culture, the immediate effect becomes the most crucial. When a later generation sees this, they can only know the initial impact and influence as a matter of record, not the euphoria it caused. The best movies transcend this handicap and continue to engage on most levels, whereas the things that stand out for me about this film are ramshackle plotting, improvisation that doesn't always work, and an aimlessness that would become uncharacteristic of Scorsese. I was exposed to "GoodFellas," "Casino," and "The Departed" long before, and I prefer all of them. Not just because they have more stylistic finesse, but because everything about their stories is more fully formed; they're less dependent on the novelty of a particular environment or posture. In those later pictures, Scorsese found more interesting ways to express similar ideas, and had learned how to do it better than most.
I still want to recommend this, not as entertainment, but as anecdote. For one thing, the director's deeply rooted Catholicism is more overtly expressed here than it would be in his future crime stories, and that's a useful point of reference. Everything else... The pop-rock score, the dynamic tracking of the camera (I was surprised to see it more active here than in "Taxi Driver"), De Niro and Keitel doing what they'd be good at for the rest of their careers... None of that has any impact now.
End of story, if you still haven't dipped into Scorsese's oeuvre, maybe this is where you should start. Or, start with "Boxcar Bertha" and then here. Either way, maybe you'd have a better chance of enjoying it than I had.
Rating: 3 (out of 4)
Speed Racer (2008)
Lives In The Slow Lane
I know nothing of the original cartoon, save for the theme song. Let others demonstrate arcane awareness of how this stacks up. What matters to me is whether it succeeds as an entertainment in the summer escapist mold.
It does not.
Of course we knew ahead of time the screenplay would be disposable. I like garish primaries in film, so I dug the razzle-dazzle palette. The computer-generated environments were a reminder of some old video games I wasted hours on. And the Wachowskis do betray a fundamental cinematic skill in some of their visuals. Consider the complex of narrative reveals through compositing. This was advanced, engaging, nifty, bypassing the fact of the flimsy narrative itself.
No, where the brothers killed it for me was in the racing sequences.
Given the seemingly manifest limits on story inspiration, one thing outsiders like myself might reasonably expect from a "Speed Racer" is competent simulation of sustained, exhilarating ... well ... speed. Not to say that the film didn't do what it intended but its choice of tempo felt entirely off. It builds its action out of the same blender method of countless similar projects, and like many of them, lacks a cogent aesthetic to support this style. The angles are almost all external and cut into a rapid flurry, making much of the racing barely comprehensible. Any serious involvement on a visceral level is also undercut by the arbitrary unreality: vehicles spend so much time in mid-air, bouncing off stationary objects and each other, I wondered why the hell did they even bother with tires?
I expected better from the guys who gave us that sensational freeway chase in "The Matrix Reloaded."
Satan's changed his color to purple, apparently.
Blake's rating: 1 (out of 4)
Batman Begins (2005)
The Beginning Again
After experiencing "The Prestige" I put Nolan on my list of directors to watch. His experiments have all been interesting up to this point and I'm hopeful he'll show us something really amazing in the future. It certainly didn't happen here.
It's definitely a workmanlike affair, very busy, very grandiose, like the earlier Batman pictures, but there was something about their machine-fed gloss that was more striking. Burton's first two remain the best because they found a rich balance between evoking superhero mythology in minimalist terms and supporting it with cinematically compelling qualities like character psychology mapping to the architecture of the sets and so on.
Then Schumacher stepped in and killed the series, but this team doesn't do much better in the way they try to recalibrate everything. They went back to the tired Origin Story template like in the first "Superman" movie, a big miscalculation as everything gets watered down by this device. We have the anticipated problems of over length, too much exposition, and just an overall predictability. The last problem's not so bad when the story is recognized for what it is, mere scaffolding, but this one is packed to the gills with so many ordinary elements that it sinks any pretense of a master vision. Burton knew to avoid these kinds of rote plot confusions. Why didn't Nolan?
Also doesn't help that the sound design is a poorly mixed cacophony and the whole visual scheme is shapeless and uninteresting. Acting is never really important to these kinds of projects but as long as I'm ticking things off, it is quite uneven. So happy to see Holmes isn't aboard for the next film.
This property has always been plugged into the mainstream and so it figures that this entry continues the tradition of capitalizing on current film trends. A decade ago it was all about outdoing James Bond with ridiculous gadgetry. Here it is louder fisticuffs and the post-"Matrix" Zen master junk of martial arts movies.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Grindhouse (2007)
Grindout
I wonder why this failed. It's pretty thin soup compared to what these guys have already put out there. It isn't good, whether in relation to any kind of "style" being riffed or when judged on its own terms. But in all its superficiality it's as passable as any of the other superficial work they've done. Maybe people saw that the concept simply wasn't worth it. I don't know.
Heralded cinematic mime that he is, I think Tarantino is someone whose work is only ever as good as the person he borrows from. I know, there's so much talk about transcending source material and all that, but what do we really get out of it? Sure, he glosses up a dirty artifact well enough but so could any talented filmmaker, if that's all they wanted to do. Thing is, the best of them are busy being more ambitious, trying to say something with the art form. Could be something important or minor, new or not, but something as opposed to just recycling genres and kidding them. But Quentin seems to believe his press releases, that his filmography carries some deep value beyond craftsmanship. And so his dialog here is the most obviously self-conscious it has ever been and it really chafes.
If he does possess any genius it extends only to his ability to unearth a singular mood (always one at a time) in the material, and to stage it competently. It can be something musical linked with action like in "Kill Bill" or it can be complex wordplay like in "Pulp Fiction." There is something to be said for that ability and it has its use, but as a matter of art, maybe his stylistic flourishes get your blood pumping and that's enough for you. Not for me, it isn't.
As for Rodriguez, he seems to me as the more promising, genuine filmmaker. His approach is one of realizing full cosmological constructs, maybe not his own, but he's about fictional worlds that arrive to us complete, that we can enter with ease, while his buddy Quentin deals in mere quotations and everything's chopped. With "Sin City" Rodriguez really did give us something substantial, a many layered distillation of neo noir as both the story "meat" and its own "telling" device. As a stylistic exercise it had all the proficient movement, the energy of QT's stuff, but more intelligently abstracted. And it is upon further reflection that Rodriguez's portion of this double bill is the one that sticks, though still a failure. It's easy to miss that he's taking on the more difficult task with his parody because the filler material is of exhumed genre plot points (infection, slow spread, zombie hoards, lots o' mayhem, etc). QT's piece seems more gratifying at first, with all its "Tarantinoisms," until we get far enough away from it and have the distance to reflect, that the thinness of his technique begins to manifest.
The "coming attractions" in the middle were all very funny. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the reason behind the whole enterprise.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Ride with the Devil (1999)
Weaving The Devil's Path
American history -- especially the Civil War -- is a side hobby of mine. When it's combined with film, I'm in a sweet spot because it automatically adds another level to the film's being. It allows us an additional entry into the film world and means for making sense of it.
Three filmmakers that have attempted meaningful work in this category: Ron Maxwell, Ed Zwick, and with this film, Ang Lee. Good directors all three, all with varying methods.
Griffith? No. He had the good fortune of timing as far as film history, but misfortune as far as his prejudices (shared by many others in that era) coloring American history. Today his Klan epic is no more than a curiosity.
Of the modern efforts, Zwick's film, "Glory," is the most anachronistic and the least accomplished. It is good-hearted and inspiring, definitely, but its technique comes from the same primitive, emotion-bating model Griffith used. Who knows how future generations will respond to its machinations? It introduced Denzel, who in almost every subsequent role has played some variation on the same noble character. Still, it was a worthy subject combined with quality craftsmanship from Zwick, ability that has long since eroded (now he is burdened by celebrity muggers such as Cruise). I credit his cinematographer for part of the "Glory" achievement. The Ft. Wagner assault is one of the most powerful, painterly realizations of action movement on film I have ever experienced. The whole story is worth sitting through just to reach that moment.
Maxwell's double feature is the most opaque and ambitious of the group. The two films (especially "Gods") are not concerned with matters of gloss nor tracing easy mythology with dazzling technique. They are about the reflexive business of history as perambulated by cinematic forces, and how the subjectivity that is endemic to history can be objectified, exploded, and finally, reconstituted, into a greater understanding of that same history's blurry parameters. By appearing simplistic his films actually fight the simplicities.
Lee is somewhere between the others. He doesn't penetrate as deeply beneath the surface as Maxwell does, but he's also incapable of the same bluntness as Zwick.
I think he took on this project because it was easily adaptable to the structure he's used throughout his career: characters in alternating groups of two, with scene changes corresponding to tonal shifts as the pairings merge, split, and converge into others. Roedel and Jack Bull, George Clyde and Holt. Now enter Sue Lee. Sue Lee and Jack Bull, Holt now with Roedel. At the halfway point, or "the pinch," there are five key persons. The death of one is involved. The pairings are uneven, so it follows that one must be hewn for parity. Sue Lee and Clyde begin to disappear from the third act. It becomes Holt and Roedel. Finally, when it becomes Roedel and Sue Lee, Holt must go. But it's a much kinder break than before, necessarily so due to the running theme of transforming redemption, something that allows a gentler gravity to emerge from the war's fatalistic din. Even the final confrontation is one of pairs, with Pitt Mackeson and Turner.
These transitions and the balance between them are some of the most natural -- and complexly varied -- to be found in any of Lee's pictures. Yes, it looks great, all those seasonal changes, his camera as deeply textured and languorous as ever, but we expect that from him.
Of the three filmmakers' approaches, I value Maxwell's the most. His is the deepest, the richest, actually life-changing. He's just as good as the other two at drumming up all the visual detail for us but he also moves behind it to interpolate many contextual riches. He explicates narrative mechanics, connects them with 19th century ethics, and expounds on them with a highly abstract terminology. He isn't a cinematic innovator like Kurosawa, nor as eager for Lee and Zwick's more direct dramatizations. You won't find him with a dancing camera or editorial flourishes. But I have yet to encounter anyone else who so trenchantly, so poetically, expresses both the pros and cons of cinema as an annotative tool. His tableaux style is a knowing riff on Griffith's template, an adroit framework for self-referential study on the nature of history as it's fashioned for storytelling. This is why people who approach his movies as Spielberg-type entertainments or basic history lessons tend to be disappointed. They're conditioned to seeing only surface machinations. To the extent that the Zwick and Lee films are more yielding to this conditioning, their value is diminished.
But in the end these four movies support each other and, if you're interested in exploring the connection between film and this particular period in history, you must see all of them. Which do you prefer? How do you see and interpret past and present? Who do you ride with?
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Tim's New Ghost's Eye
Oh lovely day! Here is a Hollywood romance that I hope lasts.
Two aspects of this production: the magical triangle of Burton, Depp, Carter, and the music of Sondheim. The latter I'm not familiar with, outside of those Madonna-sung torch numbers in "Dick Tracy." The music here is fine, I suppose, but the musical is just canvas, anyway. It's that first aspect that excites me.
It's easy to accuse Burton of being more a production designer than a valid film director, but when compelling visions of alternate worlds in the cinema are so infrequent, need that be a bad thing? He's a man whose work I decided to follow from early age and it's a film-going relationship that's been peppered with a few successes and some appealing failures (his low point was "Planet of the Apes"). With his design-first mentality, his cinematic approach is one that appeals to me: matters of story and character are secondary to the development of engaging film environments, ones worth the consideration of our time and our willingness to enter.
Yes, it doesn't always click, as he hasn't consistently integrated movement and coherence with his elaborate set-work. But he's getting better, and this is his most accomplished film since the two Batman movies, anomalous achievements considering he neither matched nor topped either in the last fifteen years.
I think partner Carter and friend Depp are instrumental in this evolution. Helena's always been a lively and intelligent actress, and her collaborations with Burton find them seeking out meat worthy of her supporting talent and his artistic growth. Added to this is the allure of watching a filmmaker construct loving visual tributes to his significant other. See the way Helena is photographed here, exuding that unorthodox but undeniable sensuality of hers, quite apropos for the Burton style but not a grotesque transformation of her image. Rather, he draws out a beauty heretofore muted, even when she was being similarly appraised through the lens by ex-boyfriend Branagh.
Depp is here in all his introspective glory. He's usually been the one at the forefront of Tim's ventures down the more intriguing paths.
Together, the three of them descend on Sondheim -- highly melodramatic, quite predictable -- and turn it into a feast of multiple projections of reality. Depp as barber and as actor who invents a past idea of the barber as anything but the vengeful ghoul, tangling with Carter as lovelorn vamp who secretly controls and motivates actions in the plot. Burton assuming the stance of Depp's imagined ghost (that of the tormented "dead" wife), always in the odd corners of every scene, observing from all angles, freeing the theatrical environment from the limits of its stage origin, and then intruding at the climax with the driving hammer of fate. We as audience have the option of moving anywhere among these multiple vantages, all pooled into a coherent world of Victorian goth, probably Burton's most coherent evocation to date. We can be predator or prey. Rickman, Cohen, Spall, the young lovers, the boy -- all simply the prey.
Burton's eye here is highly architectural, very Langian. If you've never attached yourself to this man's work, now may be the time. I anticipate great things from here on.
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)
The Polar Express (2004)
3:10 to Mediocrity
We of the Western cultures long ago passed a point of no return in how we take to heart the meaning in our various holidays. The big ones that we hold important and channel so much energy into -- namely, Christmas -- were subverted somewhere along the way, transformed into such highly refined empires of commerce and greed that even healthful sentiments such as, "The true meaning of Christmas," are little more than corporate slogans, arbitrary noises sounded to make the trivial holiday-shopping frenzy seem more meaningful. Then there's the whole sticky matter of religion melded with the modern iconography of Santa, et al. True to superstitious nature, everyone acknowledges it on some fundamental level, but only enough so that their cognitive abilities don't bother to contemplate. It's been so long, so sustained, we just feel cozy taking it for granted.
From its inception film has been active in shaping and influencing society's attitude towards this expansive partnership between non-thought and advertising. This ungainly cartoon is just one of the latest advertisements, taken from a children's book similarly devoid of nourishment but rich in vaguely alluring, winter-glossed imagery. A greater sin to me, personally, is that it is a modern animated film that does not exploit the possibilities of its nature, something that should be commonplace now that we have a few fine examples out there. Unlike the artists at Pixar, who understand the importance of visual imagination and give us worlds that exist in fuller dimensions than the "real" world of film and its constraints imposed by that physical contraption, the camera, this team puts a tight leash on their visuals so it looks as if we could be watching a story shot in live-action, with all its related limitations of space, but with a candy coating of digital animation to make it "other-wordly." How tame. How abominably dismal and lacking in adventure.
There's a lot of action and commotion, sure, most of it involving the train, but observe how it's all blocked. You'll notice it's no more advanced than what we usually see grafted onto a CGI-assisted live-action movie. It's about as dimensionally thrilling as, say, that lousy Grinch movie from a few years back.
Of course, many people will embrace this because marketing forces tell them it is good and such forces are most persuasive at Christmas time, when treacly sentiment provides an attractive defense for ignorance.
Still, I beg of you, if you have children and insist on letting TV and movies help raise them, don't put them on this train. It is a murderer of the imagination, too much an emblem of our Macy's Christmas spirit.
Blake's rating: 1 (out of 4)
Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1998)
Lost in the Squared Circus
In the world of pro wrestling there are two spaces in which to spin dramatic concepts. The first space contains what's immediately recognizable about the sport -- the juvenile soap operatics -- and is easily filled by the Hulk Hogans and Dwayne Johnsons; comic-book profiles, muscular and flashy, the business as a springboard into bad B-movies.
The second space is an older one that predates the Vince McMahon empire, and is centered on the notion of athleticism in the service of storytelling, in which each match is a story unto itself. The competitors' choreography communicates a complex of beats and turning points making up an abstract narrative. After all, what are these faux-gladiatorial displays but a kind of ballet? There is most definitely an art lurking underneath the cheap theatrics.
Hart came from this latter background. He understood the concept and exploited it with more acumen than anyone else. Between the time of pro wrestling's explosive popularity in the '80s and the period covered in this film, he championed this method of wrestling amidst all those silly plot lines that now dominate McMahon's machine. Given the status of rasslin' in popular culture, it is little wonder that outsiders are more familiar with the dim celebrities of Hogan and The Rock than they are with the more technical Hart. Where they have headlined cinematic dreck, he could have given us a finely directed film or a great screenplay.
You see, Hart's original goal was to be a filmmaker. Not an actor. A filmmaker. You wouldn't know that just from seeing this. Family tradition led him into wrestling. So what we have here is a story commissioned using one of his filmmaker buddies, about the downfall of a born storyteller who misappropriated his own life and tried to make up for it, by experimenting with those concepts within his chosen profession that could extend beyond, into the realm of his curtailed ambition. There's a reference to "Shawshank Redemption," another story about a man who utilizes skills from outside his imprisonment to see him through to the end. In this documented segment of the Hit-man's journey we see him getting crushed by the carnival house atmosphere (creatively) that was always germane to the wrestling business, as well as by the ruthless business model that McMahon introduced to that corner of the sports world.
As as far as topicality, this item is little more than a relic. Because wrestling has shifted so much in the decade since its release and this director relies so heavily on contemporaneous elements for his context, the feeling of immediacy that made this effective at the time is now gone. Oh well, at least the music is apt, and the long final sequence in Montreal is noteworthy in the way it reflexively twines its three visions -- the grandiose wrestling performance itself, the devolving backstage drama, and the idea of the film itself as framework and as a show about the show.
In the big scheme of things, the tragedy of this man's life -- apart from all his trials and tribulations after the events contained here -- is us knowing we may have lost a considerably talented filmmaker to that four-cornered circus. The upshot is that it appears to have not completely destroyed him. He's escaped that world , and now maybe one of these days he'll finally make the full transition into film and reinvent himself, to his benefit and ours. Go for it, Bret.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) (2002)
Masters of Syncopation
I have long valued the music of this group, though they seem to have been on a gradual slide since this was released. It's a very intelligent work. It has an effluence of dim exposition like in similar presentations, but stands apart in that it doesn't depend on same. It's quite self-aware and competently engineered, as a stylized annotation of this type of music.
If you read most dissertations on They Might Be Giants, it's a lot of stuff about whimsicality and the macabre. Hogwash. If that's the essence of these guys then they're no more notable than countless other musicians.
Their appeal lies entirely within their ethic. That is, the song subject is subservient to the orchestration and not vice versa. The result is an inverse of rigid songwriting standards. The energy of the songs is within the shifting layers of their composition, which is highly transitory (an explanation for this is overtly given in the film, and why the Giants chose this direction. Hint: it's in the segment about Dial-A-Song); the notes veer off trajectory from what listeners normally expect from pop music, because most of the time in pop the complex interaction of sounds is reduced to being a mere extension of the lyrics. Two dominating concepts are, turgid filler about love heartaches, or narrative story that steers the sound like a train. Blunt, unvaried, no creativity, no adventurousness.
With TMBG it's the opposite. The words hover at a distance from the instruments, sometimes above, sometimes beneath, sometimes in both places concurrently, always as discordant strands. Yes, colorful and evocative as fans often express but that isn't the only facet. And it's that antithesis of pop's bland sameness which the label execs tried to corner these two into adopting after they enjoyed some early success, and endures through tripe like Britney.
Most of the running commentary here struck me as facile; mundane espousals made funny by the commentators being totally sincere in their blather. Paradoxical that Syd is not and yet she is particularly tiresome. Same as her writing. You get much more sublimity just from the various recitals (by no less than Janeane Gorofalo!).
The director knows all this. His work here approaches greatness in how he mirrors the Giants aesthetic in concept and execution. He uses those bits of chatter as swatches and arranges them according to the requirements of the abstract fabric he's weaving. This shows a highly developed understanding of the "rock-doc" form.
One of the talking heads describes the band as the "vanguard of alternative," which illustrates the basic difference of this production vis-à-vis other rock-docs. A minor overview of the Hell's Kitchen scene, the arguments with record label execs, and a tidbit about coffee addiction replace rote enumerations of band member drama, rampant sex, and drugs. These are all explicitly referenced and made fun of.
But the most essential point of all is the flow. See how it careens forward and backward in chronology and off-topic, equivalent to the music itself. A passage here and there interrupted right in the middle with a long concert footage excerpt. Now back to the film. Now backtrack to a few years ago for a forgotten aside. Meticulously designed, yet an apparent jumble. That's where it's at.
Oh, and I do prefer John and John's output prior to the Band of Dans. But if you aren't familiar with these fellows I recommend you seek out their "Lincoln" LP before watching this. It's a prime example of how well they can layer and shift dissonant sounds throughout the listening space to arrive at something both tangential and harmonious. It is entirely what this film defines and is defined by.
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)
American Gangster (2007)
WiselyFilmedGuys
I'm a Sir Ridley fan. The man is top tier film-making. He long ago mastered the ultimate trick, how to create distinct film worlds and render spatial relationships within them. His two brooding sci-fi epics were the pinnacle. Twenty-five years later, we still can't stop talking about them. And while everything he's done since then has ranged in quality from almost-as-good to the shockingly irrelevant, there's always been something noteworthy about each effort. This one's merely good, but that means it's still better than most of what I've seen this year.
When we observe it in the context of genre it's as exemplary as any other film of its kind. Of course it looks spectacular in how unspectacular it makes everything appear; it paces itself well, always moves with confidence; is full of good performers in good performances. The problem is that it has no soul. This time Scott seems content to internalize his selected genre instead of busting out. At the end I was satisfied but not deeply moved or exhilarated.
"Gladiator" was exhilarating, at least as far as its action mattered. For better or worse, it popularized the fast-cranked discontinuous flow of modern movie action. I admit I was slow in coming around to it. Then "Kingdom of Heaven" did the same thing but with a much better screenplay. "Matchstick Men" played some havoc with its tired conman formula and redefined my expectations for that experience. But this one uses an old play book and never breaks step. Also, Scott usually has a knack for paring his material to the bare essentials so I was dismayed to find annoying clutter like the useless subplot about the Crowe character's marriage problems. And the cop-crook personality contrasts, meant to comprise a theme about similar-yet-dissimilar personalities met in conflict, didn't compel me in any way.
But the story gains something extra if seen as a sort-of sequel to a 1997 gangster movie you may or may not remember, "Hoodlum." That one was set in the 1930s and had the great Laurence Fishburne as Harlem racketeer "Bumpy" Johnson, who appears briefly in the first act of this as the Washington character's dying mentor (interestingly enough, played here by an actor who was an antagonist in the earlier film). Look at both movies together and you'll see a singular idea segueing from the first to the next -- that black criminals in this country could only gain a substantial foothold in the world of crime-as-free enterprise through its evolving currents, whereby they could commit to the same ruthless ethics as their white counterparts. Johnson was cowed by the white mob but somehow garnered a folk hero image from those he commanded, always while living in the shadow of those he enforced for. Frank Lucas was able to break away from that white-dominated system, even though he was still a hot-headed thug whose business destroyed many lives. All of this seems to be equated as differing circumstances of the day along with Lucas being more clever in his thinking, having more bravado, and maybe less scruples. Both pictures are heavily fictionalized and the first one isn't nearly as accomplished, yet Scott seems to emphasize some kind of unity by using the same combination of music ("Amazing Grace") and setting (a church) for his ending, as "Hoodlum" did.
And yet there was hardly a moment I wasn't entertained. Even if he doesn't hit the same high marks every time, Scott always delivers something worth your investment because of the way he can think about scenes, storyboard them, mature them, shoot them, and then combine it all and throw it to you with a motivating cinematic idea at its core. His effort equates to some degree of achievement every time. Now contrast that with how things might have panned out if Antoine Fuqua hadn't been fired. He's from a younger generation, has always emphasized an admiration for Scorsese (particularly "GoodFellas") and word has it he wanted to hold up production long enough for Ray Liotta's participation in this. Well, Fuqua's no great talent (remember he made that lousy "King Arthur") and we would very likely have been left with a pallid Marty imitation, right from the fan boy handbook.
But rejoice. Instead we've gotten something just as good as real Scorsese, although still governed by many of the laws of crime film convention. How rewarding then that the plot itself doesn't matter too much.
I mean, just look at the climax Scott builds at the end of this film (when Crowe and his narcotics agents crack down on the public projects) and how there is not one element in that sequence that isn't anchored in a specific, advanced visual principle. Similar to what Pixar repeatedly accomplishes. From the composition to the editing, the resulting rhythm is that of another character who co-opts our stance as audience and as participant, anticipating the action most of the time as we do but still able to surprise us. It is as good as anything in "The Departed."
The man is always pushing. And the fact that he consistently instills such singular visions into these big commercial projects is even more reason to value him.
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)
Across the Universe (2007)
Across Generations
I'm at an age where extolling the virtue of The Beatles' legacy and impact on culture can be nothing more than a tiresome exercise in presumption ... something I seem to be guilty of in most of my writings anyway. But as someone from Generation Y, I am apt to admit that I'll never know what it was like to experience The Beatles firsthand. I'm content to say I've made sure to expose myself to that music and indeed I do love it, both casually and as a listener striving to appreciate those sonic innovations the group is reputed to have brought forth.
I do feel a kind of good fortune in my dad having been of that generation and sharing his memories with me. And The Beatles seemed to have been intrinsic to his experiences (my mother -- for her part but not to her discredit -- was on about other things at that time).
If I may be so bold, I think a picture like this is bound to work better for someone my age than for my dad and others of his generation. This is a sentimental mosaic-anthology conceived by minds ostensibly younger than the period it explores, where the music comes permuted and wrapped around visual memes clearly meant to connote the familiar idea of care-free romanticism and innocence frozen for a moment in history, when America was on the cusp of the disillusionment and cynicism that pervades its society today. It was a shifting perspective often sighted in The Beatles' work, with "Rubber Soul" always acknowledged as the turning point in their musical ethos. Surely any young person watching this will not mistake its depiction of '60s-'70s history as anything more than a simplified encapsulation. And for them, as well as the filmmakers probably, that immortal chorus, "All you need is love" may have an untarnished urgency no longer shared by those who feel they went through a kind of collective up-and-down phase along with John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
The movie's boy-meets/loses/gets-girl plot is absolutely standard and without innovation and all the better for it, because the life-blood here is not the story or characters, it's the music. It's the through-line. What you see on the screen are really little more than avatars. Now, those avatars still need to be intelligently designed by the filmmakers for maximized effect, and fortunately that is the case here. Some sequences are flat-out terrific, such as the early scene in a bowling alley ("I've Just Seen a Face") and the later one in a recruitment office ("I Want You"). Some of the actors do their own singing (quite well) while others are dubbed, and though the resulting interpretations don't always coincide with my own (nor yours), that lump is easily swallowed once we remind ourselves of a fundamental aspect of music, which is universality.
Where I think the film might not work for people who lived in the thick of that tempest (maybe I'm wrong) is in the fact that it doesn't end on the note of disillusion which history records. It doubles back with an optimistic conclusion, by which director Julie Taymor -- a most gifted visualist, never more so than here -- isolates the film and confirms it as something hardly representational of that time, as remembered by those who lived through it, but as a euphoric tone-poem kind of reality, experienced through the prism of the era's music, designed to key off emotional -- rather than objective -- notes. I think that's where some are going to have serious problems with this.
But it's no great shakes for me to let that slide. As I write this I'm in my early 20s and whether or not that has anything to do with anything, I know I felt absolutely enabled to have an open dialogue with this picture on that emotional plane. It's a beautiful movie. A romantic, bitter, idealistic, cynical, gritty, trippy, sad, happy, clever, simple, complex, sardonic, sincere, exciting whirlwind of a movie that is all about its music. I walked out of the theater feeling as though my soul had been replenished. The best thing a film of this concept could hope to do is to inspire me in the same way that listening to a Beatles album can inspire anyone, regardless of their age or circumstance. This film achieves that.
Blake's rating: 4 (out of 4)
Mr. Brooks (2007)
Who They Are
I heartily recommend this. It is a failure in many ways, but then so are many other films worth seeing. What's fun about this is picking out surviving semblances of a grand idea.
This story seems to have been brought about not to showcase another serial killer yarn but to explore some rich notions firmly rooted in film noir, notions like the Unreliable Narrator and dueling parallel narratives, wherein we as the audience grapple with the characters and filmmakers for control of what we see. All of that is stuff I like and I was able to sort out five layers within this narrative, though all of them are botched in the end.
Our nominal protagonist is Costner's compulsive killer equipped with two realities (the first two layers), one being the window dressing of his life (fancy house, good career, perky family), the other being his tortured soul, with William Hurt feeding the homicidal addiction. The filmmaker's idea here for blending Costner's competing visions into our view of the story's established world is not new but it is elegantly realized. The editing is crucial. Hurt enters and exits our view within the same scene, as Costner's duality collides with the perspectives of other characters.
Elegant, but it does not work nearly as well as it should because Costner and Hurt are not up to the level of multifaceted acting encouraged by this device. Maybe Hurt was cast because the filmmakers realized Costner can only inhabit one plane of the narrative space at any given time. And it's the same thing with Hurt. Both have only one dimension between them and the result is deadening. Johnny Depp is an example of someone more adroit at this game, who could've played both parts and pulled it off.
Then there's the woman cop. Again, a strongly written part, probably the strongest in the movie, but wasted on an ultimate non-actor, one who cannot project herself or her character into multiple levels of the story. This type of character, because of his/her occupation as a detective -- concerned with the many clues and details -- is generally the audience's surrogate, serving as the entry point, the vessel, into the plot's multiple layers. But this could have been particularly special because it will turn out that the female cop is completely unreliable. Rather than corroborate what the audience witnesses she tampers with the evidence (story elements) in an effort to misdirect our attention. Like the killer, she has her own dual reality (third and fourth layers), one of them embodied by the blackmailing wannabe-murderer. (This is the only principle performance that works because Dane Cook is not only aware of the method but does pull it off, slightly making up for Moore's deficiencies).
Consider. The cop's "normal" self (Moore) wants to catch Costner. Her other self (Cook), as the photographer, wants Costner to collaborate in a murder and attempts to bribe him with incriminating photos. The roundabout way it leads up to the actual murder is an example of the misdirection laid out for us by the cop-as-narrator. Costner helps with this, and also with wrapping up a subplot that involves another serial killer. Complicities abound.
When Costner kills the pain-in-the-ass husband and his attorney, it is the cop's dual reality fusing with Costner's. Afterwards, Costner attempts to trick her by leading on that he will kill himself, ending his torment (and Hurt), only as a ruse that ends up burying the photographer persona, thereby supposedly reducing the cop to the same features that Costner idealizes in his doted-upon, mundane daughter. The good side only.
As for the daughter, her plot thread has a good reason for consuming so much of our time. It is the final layer and is part of Moore's character, as a perpetuation of her split personality. Costner fails to quench the sickness in another and it becomes hopelessly intertwined in his own fractured world. That's what the graphic throat stab is all about. This is all visible enough, but yet again (as with Costner, Hurt, and Moore) the actress playing the daughter is just lame, so we have to work a little harder to see the layers.
OK, the film fails and primarily because of the acting. But the intelligent construction is still there to be played with, and the very slickness for which I could despise this is part of what makes it so entertaining when viewed from a more basic standing as a thriller. Anyway, check it out.
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)
28 Weeks Later (2007)
Copy/Paste Fast Zombie
Movie franchises are an alternately compelling and trifling study. They can be attempts to contain an entire universe (the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter stuff), to establish disparate visions from one picture to the next (the Batman and Alien pictures), or to invest the dynamics of the imagined world in the characters instead of an external cosmology, and maintain a passing continuity through self-contained films (the Spider-Man series). But whatever the goal, generating money is paramount.
I liked "28 Days Later," but with it, Danny Boyle introduced something people hadn't seen before in zombie films, a kinetic movement in the zombies that superseded the George Romero shuffle-shuffle movements of the past three decades and translated into a fierce, fresh energy.
I had seen the "Dawn of the Dead" remake from a few years ago (where that newfound kinetic motion was immediately duplicated) before getting around to "28 Days Later," so it wasn't that aspect of the film that caught me, but the long final act in which the military compound is introduced. We saw it first in the guise of a safe haven, then as the sinister trap it was bound to be. Anybody could recognize the metaphors about our society's paranoia over the military establishment functioning in those scenes, and it must come across even more pointedly now than during the film's debut back in 2003. Which is one reason we now have this.
The other reason (besides money) is murky and troublesome. That first film was about motion, not about creating a contained universe. It wasn't about the characters or the acting, either, so now we have a new group of faces. The fabric is kept pretty much consistent with what we've already seen, right down to recycling of the original score, so even though we also get a new (hispanic) director, a reinvented vision is not realized as with the Batman and Alien movies. What does that leave us with? Why, amplifying the motion, of course.
In this case, you know to just forget about plot. It's simply the last forty minutes of the first film played out in a larger context with a heightening of the Military As Your Best Friend/Executioner metaphor, working towards a logical end result. What we're looking for here is the escalation of the threat conveyed in a cinematic way. The best this director musters is a sequence that stands out as a mini masterpiece, in which the anticipated reprisal of the outbreak reaches a delirious crescendo, infected and uninfected alike rush into the streets, soldiers in rooftop sniper positions eventually lose track of everything, and are ordered to fire indiscriminately on the crowd. This is so simple, the attention-deficit video game crowd it indicts could catch the symbolism. Of course, they'll ignore it. Occupying American force cuts down the local populace to the same effect as though it were a video game. Exceedingly simple. Yet well done. Yet the bottom line is that we can't do anything with it and really don't need it. Oh, and, uh, the helicopter flying low to chop up a field of zombies is a neat bit of grossness I hadn't seen before.
That's it. The rest is nothing to write home about. You may be mesmerized by that momentary increase in the already-established kinetics, as I was, but I'd say "28 Months Later" is bound to be very, very dull.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
Yo-Ho Yo-Ho, The Pirate's Life I Flee
I think this was probably bound to fail. Like "Dead Man's Chest," it doesn't stray far from the first film in terms of execution. It must have to do with the inevitable dissolution of the initially thin concept, sabotaged also by the upheld conventions of movie trilogies that (1) new characters must be introduced late and be piled on thick, and (2) the action must be louder and more calamitous than ever.
These apparent laws of the Epic Trilogy were, I think, founded with Tolkien and "The Lord of the Rings" although he was against the publisher's dividing the story into three portions. The arc in the last book -- of an escalating scale and shifting focus from the personal to the universal -- spilled over into Peter Jackson's film adaptations, which turned out OK because Jackson's work was derived directly from the founder of this accidental arc that yet managed to retain strong character and theme.
But the same structure applied to other ventures in filmdom has failed infamously, a particularly glaring example being the third "Matrix" movie. And this one's only slightly less of a disaster because the franchise's cosmology somehow continues to yield a few final touches of genuine cleverness, along with some genuinely engaging spectacle. Examples: the conceit of multiple Jack Sparrows in that Davey Jones' locker thing is a nice tip of the hat to Depp's ability as an actor to project multiple ideas of himself -- as an actor and as the character he's playing -- simultaneously. The upside-down horizon sequence where the ship keels over is another splendid touch. The final ship battle in the maelstrom registers a correctly operatic tone without capsizing all coherence (the score helps), and more impressive in its bombast is the final destruction of the Lord Cuttler character and his vessel.
So, at least there's nothing here that's as downright dull as the Wachowski brothers' subterranean Zion, yet none of it's as much fun as the Looney Tunes-ish water wheel scene in the previous film. And where this picture fails it plummets. It is just way, way too long. Yes, even by its predecessors' standards. The confusing double-crosses and hidden agendas of the characters, while intentionally contrived so that we might feel compelled to sit through these movies again and hope to make more sense of it all, do not hold up to the irrefutable fact that the characters and episodes are too dull for a future investiture of one's time to be considered. Yo-ho-ho, and for the love of giant sea goddesses, just bottle it up already!
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
Not So Magical Marionettes
Wow, what a disappointment. The Potter series is on its way south. Here it continues to devolve into that dreaded practice of film-making-by-committee. So much art is an inherent threat to success, especially in film stories regarded as Big Money "properties" that must be engineered for mass appeal, thus we see very little artfulness in such movies. And when it does show up you figure it had to be sneaked in somewhere. Because the creation of these projects involves so many different perspectives from multiple creative departments it's that much more difficult for the director to enforce an overall vision. When we see things in the picture that we like then it is usually something self-contained that doesn't integrate into our movie experience as a whole. All of which is true of this. It has the expected assortment of qualities we admire -- individual scenes lifted from the book, the performances, the preservation of Rowling's politics, stylistic touches -- but it's all detached. Fragmented.
Of course the powers that be at Warner were going to persevere in this vein. They've refined the process of manufacturing and distributing these installments into an efficient, mechanized groove and they don't want to rock the boat. That's why we've had a couple of hack "yes" men behind the camera for the past two movies. Yet when we last had a truly capable artist at the helm -- when Alfonso Cuaron took over from the comparatively untalented Columbus for "Prisoner of Azkaban" -- I was hopeful. He took the myriad elements of Rowling's world that Columbus transmuted and infused them with an expansive, three-dimensional rendering that the earlier films lacked. The series finally became cinematic. When that happened it looked as though we'd have distinctive visions, from a carefully selected slew of directors, that would be imprinted on each successive sequel. Instead you can look at this and "Goblet of Fire" and see that almost everything good in both of them owes to Cuaron's contributions in "Azkaban" (the architectural, swooping eye of the camera, the intensified pacing -- subsequently used to misbegotten effect, which I'm about to get to -- and, most talked about, the darkening of the color palette).
So, with little to distinguish each of these newer products from one another in the way of cinematic achievement, my focus shifts to how they do in terms of adapting their source texts but they've dropped the ball on this as well. Cuaron's film broke from its predecessors in how it took liberties with the books. It was shorter, more liberal, but remained intelligible and had a symmetry that was film-specific. Now compare that to this. This is also shorter but only as a mandate by the studio to appease the attention-deficit. I don't see how any movie enthusiast unfamiliar with the books could comprehend it. Inside references for Potter enthusiasts are abundant but not reasons and motivations for why half of the story's countless characters end up at the Ministry of Magic in the film's climax. There is no ebb and flow. Say what you will about Columbus but there is something good to be said for how those first pictures internalized their plots. They had coherence. Now, as we plow through Potter and friends' teen years, the filmmakers have abandoned the clarity of Rowling's writing to emphasize the edgier tones she's let into her work. I doubt it would fix the inherent flaws, but I wouldn't mind seeing an extended cut of this just to determine how much story sense was discarded to placate the impatient.
Now that he's gone out and improved on P.D. James' "The Children of Men," can't we have Cuaron back? Here's hoping for a rebound on the next sequel, but my hope isn't great. This other director's signed up again. Dance, puppet!
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)
Gods and Generals (2003)
"Gods" is a brilliant reflection of film IN history, not history on film
Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film "Gettysburg" remains a masterpiece. It is both faithful to, and uniquely separate from, Michael Shaara's source novel. While Homeric structure was integral to Shaara's work, Maxwell used it to minimalist effect, as his means to staging the three-day battle, to which he then applied a distinct kind of film movement that changed and evolved with the unfolding of each day's events, and resulted in creating a 3-D environment in the viewer's mind. It resonated beyond all expectations. It stands with Ang Lee's 1999 film as one of the best in the sub-genre of films that are "about" this period of history, better than "Glory" and everything else Turner produced up until this came along.
Maxwell may not be one of the most prolific cinematicians a la Altman or Scorsese, but these two war pictures distinguish him well and are enough to justify a lifetime as a filmmaker. He recognized an opportunity in Shaara's fiction to try his hand not only at asking that age-old question, "Who is the narrator?" but, "Who is the narrator and how are the methods of storytelling impacted when a historical context is brought into the equation?" Then, later on, he pressed the author's son to expand on the literary template with two new novels he could use as platforms to dig deeper. That these books are not very good doesn't matter. Maxwell's increased confidence is evident in how, this time, he departed from the text source as a crutch for his structure. Bud Robertson's Jackson biography stands as the real literary element of the film's narrative makeup, and just as well. It's not a question of which historical figure gets more attention, it's a matter of which book plays best to the strengths of its medium in convincingly evoking the 19th century.
Many directors have attacked the dilemma of how to shape compelling cinematic narratives on top of templates based on historical fact, but they go about it in a way specific to their own era and concerns. We don't see an idea of a historic past as it might have been, based on what people know of it at the time. We see modern people, attitudes, matted against an impression of some other time and place, defined only by costumes and scenery. This approach occasionally yields an excellent picture, its excellence drawn from some other aspect of its creation. Frequently, it results in dreck, especially when the film ages and we're left with the problem of the history in the film's story at odds with the historical context of the film itself. Oftentimes the compulsion for this approach is laziness. It's much easier than Maxwell's impression of the past, which is more rounded, more organic. That it's not perfect is inevitable. It can never be perfect. What Maxwell has that makes it as good as possible is the gumption to embrace the older mediums -- the novel, stage, photograph (Shaara, Shakespeare, Brady) -- visualize them in cinematic terms, and reflect that back to us as a unified cosmology. He doesn't use their rules, conventions, as substitute for original vision. He knows what film is about and refuses vogue gimmicks (like unnatural color filtering and "shakycam" style) because such tricks would grossly distort the experience.
What we get is a rich experience partly defined by what we bring, partly by Maxwell's obsession with reconciling film's place in history next to those three mediums, the techniques of which film had coveted (to varying degrees) upon its introduction in the late 1800's. All are present in the narrative mechanics of this and "Gettysburg," but as reflections of where these films stand in time next to the generation the screenplays depict.
Everyone else's comments on here are preoccupied with surface paraphernalia. They tend to fall into one of two camps: A) the Civil War enthusiast obsessed with all the logistics, the baubles and the imposition of an unattainable standard of authenticity, and B) the "average" moviegoer someone who seems to stylize his or herself as such, in opposition to the first camp who will harp more about plot and character but is no less absorbed with, swallowed up by, secondary concerns. Two keynotes that resound loudest with both camps are the religious/political shades of the characters and "stilted" dialogue. These are only two elements and definitely not the most important. What's more urgent is that Maxwell has offered a worthy discussion about what is wrong with "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart" and why such films will not should not age well, but it seems no one will seriously engage him, whether their views are knee-jerk negative or waxing rhapsodic about the small stuff.
Instead, it's about how often we see the Confederate flag, or how many black people we can spot, or are there the right number of howitzers on the field, or is this battle scene gruesome enough for my modern tastes, or is blame properly spread here, or did this side of the country get enough screen time, or did this side not get enough screen time, or this brigade, or that regiment, or did or didn't the director compress the immensity of human feeling and ideology into a tidy package to satisfy this or that partisan, etc.
A genuine passion for his art wasted on others' attentiveness to the superfluous. How sad.
Maybe when society is another 140 years' distance from the Civil War it will look back at this movie and finally see the "gods" in the details, fret less about the "generals," and savor this film not as an attempted facsimile of distant historical events, but as a compellingly derived entertainment conveyed with uncharacteristic intelligence in an evolving art form.
Blake's rating: 4 (out of 4)