2009. The year when Christian Bale lost the plot (as did Terminator: Salvation), Star Trek was re-born, Harry Potter continued to financially bulldoze every other film out of its way and the decades old question of whether or not the graphic novel Watchmen is actually unfilmable was finally put to rest (It is.) James Cameron returned to feature film-making with the over-hyped, underwhelming but undeniable box office champion Avatar and 3-D started to look like it's here to stay. Put simply, it’s been a rotten year for films. Many appeared to be so bad they simply had to be avoided so, for example, there’s no Dance Flick, Hotel For Dogs or Bride Wars on this list, although I have no doubt they would be here if I could summon the will to watch them. (I can’t.) Of course it wasn’t all bad, though I wonder how many of the ten best would have made the list in a stronger year. Regardless, here is my choice of the ten best and ten worst films I saw in 2009.
THE BEST.
1. DOUBT
One of the very few films of this year’s awards season deserving of its place, Doubt deftly examined notions of prejudice and the devastating consequences of gossip and assumption within a compelling story set in the Catholic Church of the 1960s. Superb performances by its three leads, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams and a fantastic script by John Patrick Shanley based on his play, made Doubt escape its theatrical origins to become one of the first great films of the year.
2. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
I’ve become very sceptical of internet buzz over the years but for once all the talk was justified. Let The Right One In is a relationship film masquerading as a horror movie, but don’t be fooled; there are some brilliant and genuinely frightening moments of horror in the film. The two children are fantastic and this film and another further down the list are tied for my “favourite final scene of the year” award. Vampire movies are enjoying a new lease of life (See what I did there?) but this stood head and shoulders above the rest. Atmospheric, unconventional and absolutely brilliant.
3. ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL
It was a choice between this and The Cove for the documentary spot but, despite writing for an environmentally aware magazine, I had to go with Anvil for its warmth, charm and hysterical lack of self awareness on the part of the ageing rockers who had a fleeting taste of mega-stardom and then lost it again. It’s like Spinal Tap never happened but what’s great is that you are completely onside with the band, willing their dreams to come true along with them. Anvil was undoubtedly one of the funniest, most enjoyable films of the year.
4. MOON
There were several points in Moon where I expected it to go off the rails, to take the predictable route, to lose its way and it never, ever did. Ambiguous, sombre but never pretentious, Moon continued the current resurgence in intelligent science fiction and boasted a great central performance from Sam Rockwell. Hugely atmospheric, thanks in no small part to fantastic cinematography by Gary Shaw and an evocative score from Darren Aronofsky’s regular composer Clint Mansell, Duncan Jones’ debut film launched what, based on this evidence, should be a long career filled with great films.
5. DISTRICT 9
District 9 wore its genre influences on its sleeve and had a political agenda that was about as subtle as Katie Price. But it makes this list because it was smart, fun, funny and exciting, basically everything that the $200 million mega movies claim to be and rarely if ever are. Newcomer Sharlto Copley excelled as the blindly faithful company man whose journey (both emotional and physical) gives him greater insight into the “prawns” who have come to Earth. An alien invasion movie where the aliens aren’t actually invading and the humans are the bad guys, District 9 was probably the best genre movie of the year.
6. UP
I have to confess a certain prejudice towards animated films. No matter how much people try and convince me they can be enjoyable for adults, I find it difficult to escape the fact that I’m watching something that’s aimed at people 25 years my junior. However Up was a really fantastic piece of work. A wonderful story, funny, genuinely touching, brilliantly written and directed, Up was considerably better and more mature than most films this year that were supposedly aimed at people my age.
7. A SERIOUS MAN
The Coen Brothers’ ability to diversify is typified by their last three films, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading and now A Serious Man. Low key, intelligent, funny, enigmatic, the story of Larry Gopnik watching his life disintegrate around him as he wonders why, entertains and infuriates (in the best possible way) in equal measure. I liked the film from the start but in my review I wondered if it would grow on me even more and, even though I only reviewed it a few weeks ago, it already has. This is the second film tied for my favourite final scene of the year.
8. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
Paranormal Activity would have been a great film to "discover", to sit and watch with no pre-conceived ideas, as the film cannot quite bear the weight of all the hype. That said, it is easily the best pure horror film of the year and one of the best horror films in a long time, psychological in a way that stays with you and arguably becomes more frightening when you return to your own house. One of those "how has this not been done before" ideas, the film piles on the tension as ordinary couple Micah and Katie set up a camera to record the strange and terrifying goings on in their house. The finale is less than satisfying but the journey is well worth your time. Slow burning, tense and genuinely scary.
9. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
If someone had told me at the start of the year that a Spike Jonze film would be on my ten best list I would not have believed them, yet here it is. Emotional, imaginative and affecting, its lack of narrative is more than made up for by a surplus of character and emotion. The story of Max, a young boy clinging to childhood as he views both his impending adolescence and the changes within his family as sources of enormous fear, Max's adventure with the Wild Things, strange creatures who personify different elements of Max's personality and struggle, is refreshingly lacking in typical Hollywood "life lessons" and is instead honest, melancholy and very touching.
10. 2012
Every time I think of that limo outrunning California falling into the sea behind it, it makes me smile, possibly the only special effects film of the year to do so. The various stories are terrible, the dialogue is atrocious but a great cast powers through to make the moments in between the mayhem just about tolerable. Of course, it's the mayhem that got everyone to the cinema in the first place and on that front 2012 delivers in spades. Earthquakes, tsunamis, an aircraft carrier plunging into the White House, Hawaii buried under rivers of lava, a tiny plane dodging crumbling buildings... 2012 had it all! Undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.
HONOROUBLE MENTIONS
Milk, The Wrestler, Hunger, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (More animation! What’s wrong with me?!) Angels And Demons (So bad it’s good), Drag Me To Hell.
AND THE WORST.
SIGH...
1. THE READER/REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
A Kate Winslet double bill of doom that represents everything that’s wrong with the awards season, these two films screamed “I’M IMPORTANT”!!! but neglected to tell us why. Revolutionary Road had precisely nothing new to say on its subject of American suburban decay in the 1960s and The Reader, despite having a couple of interesting ideas, seemed to be trying to set a record for the most boring film in history. If it didn’t quite make it, it came very close.
2. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
David Fincher and Brad Pitt were coming off two of the best films of their careers, Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford respectively, but both were undeserved financial flops. So what better way to get back on speaking terms with the box office than with this queasy, namby-pamby, three hour snoozefest in which Brad Pitt ages backwards and the audience wishes it could. Another Oscar contender in one of the worst Oscar line-ups in recent years.
3. KNOWING
The advertising campaign for Knowing promised a twist that would blow your mind. SPOILER: It didn’t. ANOTHER SPOILER. It’s utter crap. Once upon a time Nicolas Cage was a credible actor, but that was a long, long time ago. Knowing actually starts reasonably okay in a campy, silly kind of way but it quickly derails and plummets down the ravine in a flaming mess of weird hair, strange teeth and a truly awful script.
4. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE
A bad Summer got off to a shocking start with this bargain basement blockbuster. The story of how Logan came to be Wolverine was covered reasonably thoroughly as I recall in X-Men 2 but apparently not thoroughly enough so off we went again with Colonel Striker, adamantium claws, blah blah blah, wake me up when the whole mess is over. Boasting computer effects apparently achieved with a Commodore 64, the only consolation was that there was simply no way the Summer could get any worse…
5. TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
…Oh, right. A hideous, hideous, hideous cinematic experience, it’s really saying something when unremitting racism can emerge as the least of a film’s problems. The most blatantly cynical film I think I’ve ever seen, Transformers 2 elevated crass commercialism into an art form. Rather than cluttering up the multiplexes, this film needed to crawl under a rock and die.
6. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS
Quentin Tarantino is a film maker with nothing to say which is why every film he has ever made, including this one, is a “homage” (“rip-off”) to other films in which every character speaks in exactly the same way (i.e. like Quentin Tarantino) and spends hours talking about nothing. This is not a film about the joy of cinema as some have argued, it is two and a half hours of adolescent, inane, rambling nonsense. I don’t care how popular it was, I hated this film.
7. ORPHAN
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to include Orphan on this list. It contains a twist so staggeringly implausible that, not only does it have to be seen to be believed, really, it just has to be seen. The sheer guts it takes to come up with this ending, much less deliver it with a straight face in the manner in which it does is impressive. The previous 90 minutes is a complete waste of everyone’s time but that twist when it comes… Well let’s just say that, for all the wrong reasons, it should go down as one of the greatest endings in cinema history. Orphan is the one film on this list worth watching but only if you like to watch bad films in an ironic way and have the patience for a whole lot of nothing before reaching the punch line.
8. GAMER
Gamer pretends to make a serious point about the voyeuristic nature of modern society. Naturally, it does this in the most lurid way possible, stopping every now and then to tell us how culturally bankrupt we all are as it leers at yet another pair of breasts. Charisma bypass Gerard Butler runs around killing people in ludicrously violent ways and that’s about all there is to it. Tedious and deeply depressing.
9. LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
Hey look, it's Gerard Butler again! I thought about having a Butler double bill in the same way that I have a Winslet double bill but these films are so unforgivable, they deserve seperate places on the list. We have the success of 300 to thank for the fact that, not content to simply star in dreadful films, thespian Gerard Butler is now in a position to produce dreadful films for himself to star in. I went in hoping it would be so bad it's good and instead it's just baaaaaaaad. A crap premise, an appalling script and a twist to rival that of Orphan, Law Abiding Citizen bludgeons you across the head with stupidity and tedium. It's also further evidence that, Oscar or not, Jamie Foxx is actually not very good.
10. 2012
Exactly as above, except in the last sentence substitute"worst" for "best".
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
Push, 12 Rounds, The Taking of Pelham 123, Jennifer’s Body, too many to mention
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Avatar Review
God I hate being right...
A friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago what I thought Avatar would be and I suggested that it would be two hours of nothing characters moping around a planet followed by forty minutes of a battle I didn't care about. And guess what?! Make yourselves comfortable folks, this one's gonna be a long one!
Before I continue, let me make a few things clear. Firstly, I have nothing against Avatar, no wish to see it fail, no wish to see James Cameron fail, I'm watching it as a film like any other. Secondly, I'm a big fan of much of James Cameron's work, though really his best work has come early in his career and a gradual though absolute decline is further evidenced by what I watched today. Thirdly, the story is the least of Cameron's concerns and so it's going to take up the least amount of space in this review. Quick synopsis: Jake Sully is a marine paralysed from the waist down, he goes to Pandora, becomes a Na'vi through the Avatar programme (tying his consciousness into a Na'vi avatar body and therefore free to roam the planet and become one of them) he falls in love with Na'vi girl Neytiri and abandons his human roots to "go native"and join the Na'vi in fighting back against the technologically superior human invaders. If that story sounds familiar, it's only because you've seen it a million times already. Before Avatar, Titanic was my least favourite James Cameron film by a very long way. Now, I'm not so sure.
Here's the problem. This is a film that has created and is in the process of perfecting new film making technology. It's a film that's meant to end the "3-D debate" and lest there be any confusion regarding the outcome of that debate, the verdict is "it rules!" This film is the herald of a new era in film making. It's a new dawn, a new age. Years from now, when mind bending 3-D spectaculars are par for the course, we'll all look back at Avatar and say, this is the film that started it all and I was there. Sure it's quaint now (Remember when you had to wear 3-D glasses?!) but without it we wouldn't be where we are today. This is what the film and its much talked about production process is screaming and you can be damned sure it's what Cameron is thinking. This is his legacy to film making. He's a pioneer, cutting his way through a new frontier, fitting given that Avatar is basically a frontier movie. Avatar's disclosed budget is around $270 million. Industry insiders have specualted that it's considerably north of $300 million and, if certain rumours are to believed, taking into account the many years of R&D, this film has cost close to $500 million. Has 20th Century Fox spent this much on the story? The characters? Absolutely not. Cameron's last film grossed $1.8 billion for the same studio so he is in a position to make some demands. I believe Cameron genuinely wants to further the technology of film making and so, having seen the more modest developments made by the more modest budgets of, for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (I mean that completely relatively; neither the final $200 million budget of Return of the King nor the technological advancements of the trilogy as a whole can be regarded as modest) he has secured a massive investment in new technology, to bring cinema to a place where it can weather the illegal downloading storm and provide photo-real CGI environments, characters and creatures in 3 dimensions. This is what he has promised Fox and this is what they have spent the money on. This is the film that started it all and now everyone else is only going to reap the benefits. I started this paragraph by saying here's the problem, and after a lot of set up, finally, here's the problem. Assuming for a moment I'm not interested in what it took to get it to the screen, in how much it cost, in what it's offering film makers for the future, what is Avatar, a stand alone film, offering me? What am I getting from it? The answer is very, very little.
Dances With Wolves, Dune, Last Of The Mohicans, The Mission, Ferngully, The Last Samurai... all of these films (and more) share two things in common with Avatar. 1 They're all considerably better. Yes, even The Last Samurai. 2. Those films were borrowing stories and story elements in their day. What does that say for an "original" story coming 20 years later? Avatar is cliched beyond belief, trite and incredibly sanctimonious. A technologically cutting edge $3/4/500 million film is telling me how nature will prevail in the face of technology. A tough lesson to swallow. The references to real world events are horrendously heavy handed, to the point where the final attack by evil military man Stephen Lang is described as a "shock and awe" campaign. Worst of all though is the Na'vi's connection with nature, their laughably mystic "oneness" with the flora and fauna exemplified in those moments when they all hold hands and sit chanting around the tree of life. Seriously, this happens. Twice. This is not "classic" story-telling as Cameron has argued, it's a juvenile appropriation of the native American culture with a view to generating cheap emotion.
Weirdly, the biggest plus point is the 3-D. I'm a complete sceptic when it comes to 3-D but there is no denying that Cameron uses it to tremendous effect in Avatar. Gone are the hokey "things poking you from the screen" days of 3-D. Cameron uses it to surround you in Pandora's lush vegetation and wildlife. You believe in the place, you believe this environment. In that respect the 3-D is as immersive and transportive as everyone is saying it is. But the film as a whole is not immersive, no film this dull can be. And when you take the 3-D out of the equation, so when I have the opportunity to watch it on DVD or Blu Ray for example, what is going to entice me back? The big screen, 3-D experience just about makes Avatar worth a watch once, but it is only story and characters that make a film worth repeat viewings and I can safely say I will never watch Avatar again. I think that the worse a film is, the more 3-D helps. So watching Up, I completely forgot about the 3-D. Watching Avatar, I was incredibly grateful for it. The motion capture technology is also very impressive, the movements of the Na'vi feel completely real and their faces are tremendously expressive. More generally, the CGI works to mixed effect. In terms of the environment, it is undeniably stunning. You really do forget that Pandora is almost entirely digital. Everything from the trees to the water is rendered on a computer and, in close up and in 3-D, it needs to be photo-real and for the most part it is. The various animals never look like anything other than digital creations and the Na'vi are never photo-real, despite Cameron's promises. Bright blue and feline, the design of them felt naff from the first time we saw them and watching the finished film, they still feel that way. You do accept them after a while, but in the way you accept an animated film for example. You don't believe it's "real", you accept it in context. Personally I never felt transported to another world in the way that, for example, the Lord of the Rings films made me feel. I believed the world certainly, but I was never particularly awed by it. Flying dragons, blue monkeys, variations on a rhinoceros or a wolf, there isn't anything particularly fresh or interesting in these ideas, most are variations on things we have on our own planet. Added to this the fact that the Na'vi are thinly veiled Native Americans and, for all its pretensions to "other-worldliness", the world of Pandora suddenly feels incredibly familiar.
By the time the big battle comes, it's too little too late. There are some spectacular shots to be sure, the frame is filled with marines and dragons and Na'vi and warships and, in 3-D, it looks amazing. But there is no resonance to any of it and, given how long we've spent wandering around that bloody planet, it feels very short by comparison. Not just that but I'm fairly sure I've seen another film, made over twenty years ago, that cut between different battles occuring simultaneously on a jungle planet... Oh right, it's called Return of the Jedi. Also, the way in which the battle resolves is the biggest cop out, "get out of jail free" piece of writing I've seen in a film in a very long time. It's all coming back to the writing. Cameron has never been a particularly strong writer but his best films have great set up to them in the script that his directorial abilities can then pay off in the finished film. Aliens is still the best example of this and remains his best film as far as I'm concerned. Terminator also does this very well, as does Terminator 2 to a slightly lesser extent. Those early films were not built on giant budgets and forced Cameron's creativity, which he has in undeniable abundance. He knows that a film with no characters or story is just a soulless enterprise, which is why he and the cast are constantly paying lip service to that as they promote Avatar, reassuring us that the James Cameron who made us care about Ripley's relationship with Newt in Aliens has made us care for Jake Sully's dilemma about whether to follow orders or join the Na'vi in Avatar. That is the James Cameron I'm interested in but it is not the James Cameron who showed up to make Avatar. Cameron keeps telling us how he has spent 10 years getting Avatar to the screen. Surely in those 10 years he could have found some time to work on the script? A week maybe? Even a weekend?
I feel like a broken record, but there is simply no substitute for a good story and good characters and there never will be. It's a lesson I feel the cinema will never learn. There are no technological advancements to be made with books. All they have ever had to sell them, and all they will ever have, is a story and it's on that story that they stand or fall. Theatre is (or at least can be) more technologically based, but theatre too ultimately comes down to its story. Why can it not be the same for cinema? Why, with all the possibilities now available to it, is a medium as potentially powerful as cinema squandered so repeatedly, used as nothing other than a fancy light show? That Avatar has been announced as a film that is changing the face of cinema just throws its many flaws into an even brighter light because if we have taken several steps forward technologically then we have taken an equal number backwards with regards to the stories we're telling. I really wanted to be wowed by Avatar, really wanted to be taken on a great adventure, but in the presence of unremitting cliche and trite storytelling, this is simply impossible. The visual effects and 3-D give it an extra couple of points but make no mistake, this is a bad film. See Avatar once for the 3-D and get everything there is to get from it because ultimately, a turd with diamonds on it is still just a turd.
5/10
A friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago what I thought Avatar would be and I suggested that it would be two hours of nothing characters moping around a planet followed by forty minutes of a battle I didn't care about. And guess what?! Make yourselves comfortable folks, this one's gonna be a long one!
Before I continue, let me make a few things clear. Firstly, I have nothing against Avatar, no wish to see it fail, no wish to see James Cameron fail, I'm watching it as a film like any other. Secondly, I'm a big fan of much of James Cameron's work, though really his best work has come early in his career and a gradual though absolute decline is further evidenced by what I watched today. Thirdly, the story is the least of Cameron's concerns and so it's going to take up the least amount of space in this review. Quick synopsis: Jake Sully is a marine paralysed from the waist down, he goes to Pandora, becomes a Na'vi through the Avatar programme (tying his consciousness into a Na'vi avatar body and therefore free to roam the planet and become one of them) he falls in love with Na'vi girl Neytiri and abandons his human roots to "go native"and join the Na'vi in fighting back against the technologically superior human invaders. If that story sounds familiar, it's only because you've seen it a million times already. Before Avatar, Titanic was my least favourite James Cameron film by a very long way. Now, I'm not so sure.
Here's the problem. This is a film that has created and is in the process of perfecting new film making technology. It's a film that's meant to end the "3-D debate" and lest there be any confusion regarding the outcome of that debate, the verdict is "it rules!" This film is the herald of a new era in film making. It's a new dawn, a new age. Years from now, when mind bending 3-D spectaculars are par for the course, we'll all look back at Avatar and say, this is the film that started it all and I was there. Sure it's quaint now (Remember when you had to wear 3-D glasses?!) but without it we wouldn't be where we are today. This is what the film and its much talked about production process is screaming and you can be damned sure it's what Cameron is thinking. This is his legacy to film making. He's a pioneer, cutting his way through a new frontier, fitting given that Avatar is basically a frontier movie. Avatar's disclosed budget is around $270 million. Industry insiders have specualted that it's considerably north of $300 million and, if certain rumours are to believed, taking into account the many years of R&D, this film has cost close to $500 million. Has 20th Century Fox spent this much on the story? The characters? Absolutely not. Cameron's last film grossed $1.8 billion for the same studio so he is in a position to make some demands. I believe Cameron genuinely wants to further the technology of film making and so, having seen the more modest developments made by the more modest budgets of, for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (I mean that completely relatively; neither the final $200 million budget of Return of the King nor the technological advancements of the trilogy as a whole can be regarded as modest) he has secured a massive investment in new technology, to bring cinema to a place where it can weather the illegal downloading storm and provide photo-real CGI environments, characters and creatures in 3 dimensions. This is what he has promised Fox and this is what they have spent the money on. This is the film that started it all and now everyone else is only going to reap the benefits. I started this paragraph by saying here's the problem, and after a lot of set up, finally, here's the problem. Assuming for a moment I'm not interested in what it took to get it to the screen, in how much it cost, in what it's offering film makers for the future, what is Avatar, a stand alone film, offering me? What am I getting from it? The answer is very, very little.
Dances With Wolves, Dune, Last Of The Mohicans, The Mission, Ferngully, The Last Samurai... all of these films (and more) share two things in common with Avatar. 1 They're all considerably better. Yes, even The Last Samurai. 2. Those films were borrowing stories and story elements in their day. What does that say for an "original" story coming 20 years later? Avatar is cliched beyond belief, trite and incredibly sanctimonious. A technologically cutting edge $3/4/500 million film is telling me how nature will prevail in the face of technology. A tough lesson to swallow. The references to real world events are horrendously heavy handed, to the point where the final attack by evil military man Stephen Lang is described as a "shock and awe" campaign. Worst of all though is the Na'vi's connection with nature, their laughably mystic "oneness" with the flora and fauna exemplified in those moments when they all hold hands and sit chanting around the tree of life. Seriously, this happens. Twice. This is not "classic" story-telling as Cameron has argued, it's a juvenile appropriation of the native American culture with a view to generating cheap emotion.
Weirdly, the biggest plus point is the 3-D. I'm a complete sceptic when it comes to 3-D but there is no denying that Cameron uses it to tremendous effect in Avatar. Gone are the hokey "things poking you from the screen" days of 3-D. Cameron uses it to surround you in Pandora's lush vegetation and wildlife. You believe in the place, you believe this environment. In that respect the 3-D is as immersive and transportive as everyone is saying it is. But the film as a whole is not immersive, no film this dull can be. And when you take the 3-D out of the equation, so when I have the opportunity to watch it on DVD or Blu Ray for example, what is going to entice me back? The big screen, 3-D experience just about makes Avatar worth a watch once, but it is only story and characters that make a film worth repeat viewings and I can safely say I will never watch Avatar again. I think that the worse a film is, the more 3-D helps. So watching Up, I completely forgot about the 3-D. Watching Avatar, I was incredibly grateful for it. The motion capture technology is also very impressive, the movements of the Na'vi feel completely real and their faces are tremendously expressive. More generally, the CGI works to mixed effect. In terms of the environment, it is undeniably stunning. You really do forget that Pandora is almost entirely digital. Everything from the trees to the water is rendered on a computer and, in close up and in 3-D, it needs to be photo-real and for the most part it is. The various animals never look like anything other than digital creations and the Na'vi are never photo-real, despite Cameron's promises. Bright blue and feline, the design of them felt naff from the first time we saw them and watching the finished film, they still feel that way. You do accept them after a while, but in the way you accept an animated film for example. You don't believe it's "real", you accept it in context. Personally I never felt transported to another world in the way that, for example, the Lord of the Rings films made me feel. I believed the world certainly, but I was never particularly awed by it. Flying dragons, blue monkeys, variations on a rhinoceros or a wolf, there isn't anything particularly fresh or interesting in these ideas, most are variations on things we have on our own planet. Added to this the fact that the Na'vi are thinly veiled Native Americans and, for all its pretensions to "other-worldliness", the world of Pandora suddenly feels incredibly familiar.
By the time the big battle comes, it's too little too late. There are some spectacular shots to be sure, the frame is filled with marines and dragons and Na'vi and warships and, in 3-D, it looks amazing. But there is no resonance to any of it and, given how long we've spent wandering around that bloody planet, it feels very short by comparison. Not just that but I'm fairly sure I've seen another film, made over twenty years ago, that cut between different battles occuring simultaneously on a jungle planet... Oh right, it's called Return of the Jedi. Also, the way in which the battle resolves is the biggest cop out, "get out of jail free" piece of writing I've seen in a film in a very long time. It's all coming back to the writing. Cameron has never been a particularly strong writer but his best films have great set up to them in the script that his directorial abilities can then pay off in the finished film. Aliens is still the best example of this and remains his best film as far as I'm concerned. Terminator also does this very well, as does Terminator 2 to a slightly lesser extent. Those early films were not built on giant budgets and forced Cameron's creativity, which he has in undeniable abundance. He knows that a film with no characters or story is just a soulless enterprise, which is why he and the cast are constantly paying lip service to that as they promote Avatar, reassuring us that the James Cameron who made us care about Ripley's relationship with Newt in Aliens has made us care for Jake Sully's dilemma about whether to follow orders or join the Na'vi in Avatar. That is the James Cameron I'm interested in but it is not the James Cameron who showed up to make Avatar. Cameron keeps telling us how he has spent 10 years getting Avatar to the screen. Surely in those 10 years he could have found some time to work on the script? A week maybe? Even a weekend?
I feel like a broken record, but there is simply no substitute for a good story and good characters and there never will be. It's a lesson I feel the cinema will never learn. There are no technological advancements to be made with books. All they have ever had to sell them, and all they will ever have, is a story and it's on that story that they stand or fall. Theatre is (or at least can be) more technologically based, but theatre too ultimately comes down to its story. Why can it not be the same for cinema? Why, with all the possibilities now available to it, is a medium as potentially powerful as cinema squandered so repeatedly, used as nothing other than a fancy light show? That Avatar has been announced as a film that is changing the face of cinema just throws its many flaws into an even brighter light because if we have taken several steps forward technologically then we have taken an equal number backwards with regards to the stories we're telling. I really wanted to be wowed by Avatar, really wanted to be taken on a great adventure, but in the presence of unremitting cliche and trite storytelling, this is simply impossible. The visual effects and 3-D give it an extra couple of points but make no mistake, this is a bad film. See Avatar once for the 3-D and get everything there is to get from it because ultimately, a turd with diamonds on it is still just a turd.
5/10
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Where The Wild Things Are Review
I have to confess that for me, a little quirk goes a long way. In recent years Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry have emerged as the principal merchants of quirk, creating films that are much beloved as offbeat classics. Much of what they produce leaves me somewhat cold but Where The Wild Things Are had completely the opposite effect. It's definitely "arty" in the more populist sense of the term and possesses much of Jonze's dreaded quirk but it's a warm, heartfelt, melancholy reflection on that time when childhood is on the verge of disappearing as adolescence and adulthood loom large, as well as the fear and uncertainty that accompany that change.
Max Records plays Max, a young boy without a Father whose Mother (Catherine Keener) is seeing a new man (Mark Ruffalo in a strange, basically one-scene cameo) and whose sister has already moved beyond childhood into the next stage of her life, wanting to spend her time with her friends rather than with her brother. As the film starts, she and her friends have taken a snowball fight with Max too far, destroying his play fort and hurting him in the process. Later on, Max's fear of the change happening within his family manifests in a terrible argument with his Mother, culminating in him biting her on the shoulder. He runs off, comes across a boat, sets sail across the ocean and finds an island inhabited by enormous furry monsters, the eponymous wild things. Through his relationships with them, in particular with their leader Carol (voiced wonderfully by James Gandolfini) Max comes to understand some of what he's feeling but he never "learns life lessons" in that awful, mawkish Hollywood way. Indeed, Max never articulates what he goes through and it's we the audience who, as adults, can understand it on his behalf and articulate it for him. It's this relationship between audience and film that makes Where The Wild Things Are as moving and affecting as it is. We know what he's feeling because we've all been there and watching the creatures act out the various aspects of Max's life and personality, we and he come to greater understanding of the situation he is in and the way in which he copes with it.
The Wild Things themselves are a truly fantastic creation, all actors in suits with CG used sparingly to bring greater expression to their faces. The cast are uniformly excellent with the aforementioned Gandolfini, Catherine O Hara and Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose standouts. Max is a child who loves play fighting, running and jumping around, and he brings this physicality to his relationship with the creatures. They being considerably bigger than him, there is danger inherent in much of their interaction but the emotional danger of not fitting in here, in the same way that he doesn't fit in at home, is even greater again and so Max throws himself into each and every moment with relish. The pain of these encounters is never shied away from, much to Jonze's credit. Incidentally, Jonze began his career on the TV show Jackass, directing the various stunts and insane dares and much of the physical scenes in the film are weirdly reminiscent of those moments on Jackass when characters would dress up in bear suits and fight each other!
The pain on display is emotional as well as physical. Indeed, if there is an overall feeling to the film it's one of sadness. This is a truthful depiction of what it means to be a child clinging to childhood and every happy or funny moment the film has is completely earned as a result. What gives the film further honesty is how Max is just as capable of inflicting pain as he is of receiving it. I mentioned earlier how Max has his snow fort destroyed by those bigger than he. Later on, he is embroiled in a dirt-clod fight with the wild things and inflicts a similar pain on one of his new friends who is as undeserving of the indignity as he was. Also, Max discovers the bones of previous guests to the island, something that gives great ominosity to the rest of his stay with his new friends, especially in those moments when Carol lets his temper get the better of him, in exactly the same way that Max does.
There are many tiny moments in the film that reveal a great deal about character. When Max has his fort destroyed for example, he goes into his sister's room to exact retribution and discovers an old present he made for her, presumably some years ago, that she keeps in her room. As he is destroying it, we get a real sense of the relationship they once had that Max now misses, but also of the relationship that is still possible for them when Max catches up with her and enters adulthood himself. The film is barely 90 minutes long which is good as there is very little story here, something that usually bothers me. But this film is built less on narrative and more on character and relationships, in the way I've just described, as well as emotion and tone and in those ways it works tremendously. Sentimental but never schmaltzy, nostalgic but never contrived, Where The Wild Things Are is without doubt my favourite of Spike Jonze's films.
8/10
Max Records plays Max, a young boy without a Father whose Mother (Catherine Keener) is seeing a new man (Mark Ruffalo in a strange, basically one-scene cameo) and whose sister has already moved beyond childhood into the next stage of her life, wanting to spend her time with her friends rather than with her brother. As the film starts, she and her friends have taken a snowball fight with Max too far, destroying his play fort and hurting him in the process. Later on, Max's fear of the change happening within his family manifests in a terrible argument with his Mother, culminating in him biting her on the shoulder. He runs off, comes across a boat, sets sail across the ocean and finds an island inhabited by enormous furry monsters, the eponymous wild things. Through his relationships with them, in particular with their leader Carol (voiced wonderfully by James Gandolfini) Max comes to understand some of what he's feeling but he never "learns life lessons" in that awful, mawkish Hollywood way. Indeed, Max never articulates what he goes through and it's we the audience who, as adults, can understand it on his behalf and articulate it for him. It's this relationship between audience and film that makes Where The Wild Things Are as moving and affecting as it is. We know what he's feeling because we've all been there and watching the creatures act out the various aspects of Max's life and personality, we and he come to greater understanding of the situation he is in and the way in which he copes with it.
The Wild Things themselves are a truly fantastic creation, all actors in suits with CG used sparingly to bring greater expression to their faces. The cast are uniformly excellent with the aforementioned Gandolfini, Catherine O Hara and Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose standouts. Max is a child who loves play fighting, running and jumping around, and he brings this physicality to his relationship with the creatures. They being considerably bigger than him, there is danger inherent in much of their interaction but the emotional danger of not fitting in here, in the same way that he doesn't fit in at home, is even greater again and so Max throws himself into each and every moment with relish. The pain of these encounters is never shied away from, much to Jonze's credit. Incidentally, Jonze began his career on the TV show Jackass, directing the various stunts and insane dares and much of the physical scenes in the film are weirdly reminiscent of those moments on Jackass when characters would dress up in bear suits and fight each other!
The pain on display is emotional as well as physical. Indeed, if there is an overall feeling to the film it's one of sadness. This is a truthful depiction of what it means to be a child clinging to childhood and every happy or funny moment the film has is completely earned as a result. What gives the film further honesty is how Max is just as capable of inflicting pain as he is of receiving it. I mentioned earlier how Max has his snow fort destroyed by those bigger than he. Later on, he is embroiled in a dirt-clod fight with the wild things and inflicts a similar pain on one of his new friends who is as undeserving of the indignity as he was. Also, Max discovers the bones of previous guests to the island, something that gives great ominosity to the rest of his stay with his new friends, especially in those moments when Carol lets his temper get the better of him, in exactly the same way that Max does.
There are many tiny moments in the film that reveal a great deal about character. When Max has his fort destroyed for example, he goes into his sister's room to exact retribution and discovers an old present he made for her, presumably some years ago, that she keeps in her room. As he is destroying it, we get a real sense of the relationship they once had that Max now misses, but also of the relationship that is still possible for them when Max catches up with her and enters adulthood himself. The film is barely 90 minutes long which is good as there is very little story here, something that usually bothers me. But this film is built less on narrative and more on character and relationships, in the way I've just described, as well as emotion and tone and in those ways it works tremendously. Sentimental but never schmaltzy, nostalgic but never contrived, Where The Wild Things Are is without doubt my favourite of Spike Jonze's films.
8/10
Sunday, 6 December 2009
The Box Review
Richard Kelly is a man with ambition. He's determined to pose questions and make you think. He has themes and ideas that fascinate him and is highly literate, cramming all his influences into his films with decreasing levels of subtlety. It's this talent and intelligence that make The Box as infuriating a cinema experience as it is. It should be provoking and intriguing but ends up being very unsatisfying. After the cult success of Donnie Darko and the abject failure of Southland Tales, Kelly has attempted something more mainstream. Or at least he's pretending he has.
James Marsden and Cameron Diaz play Arthur and Norma Lewis, an ordinary couple mired in financial difficulty. A disfigured and mysterious stranger, Arlington Steward (played with understated relish by Frank Langella), arrives and gives them a wooden box with a button on the top. If they push the button two things will happen. Someone they don't know will die and they will receive one million dollars. The moral dilemma is played out in the first twenty minutes or so, after all what kind of film would we have if they didn't push the button. The rest of the film deals with the consequences of that decision, offering an ever deepening conspiracy and increasingly bizarre happenings with the townsfolk turning into extras from Village Of The Damned with nosebleeds, the babysitter not being everything she seems and Arlington Steward being revealed as the victim of a lightening strike he may or may not have even survived. Amidst all of this, the couple try and understand exactly what it is they have gotten themselves into and how they can extricate themselves from it.
This is one of those films that suffers from unfortunate and misleading marketing. The trailers all played up the central notion of the mysterious box and suggested the film is a thriller. One suspects this is how Kelly originally pitched it and got the money to make it, as that core notion (coming from the short story by Richard Matheson) is a highly marketable one. But where the short story ends, Kelly is only getting started and he uses the premise basically as a springboard to launch into his own flights of fancy. Much of the first half lives up to the marketing and plays like a straight thriller. A really great score by members of Arcade Fire helps generate menace in otherwise mundane scenes and the cinematography and production design, while perfectly capturing the 1970s setting, work hard to create a sense of unease. The problem however is that there is very little actual unease present. Many of these early scenes clunk along due to pedestrian writing and unconvincing performances by Marsden and Diaz. More problematic still is the fact that many of the film's attempts to create mystery and intrigue fall on the wrong side of naff and laughable. There are a couple of terrific moments, a man standing just out of shot looking in the kitchen window, or particularly when Steward announces menacingly that another couple that the Lewis' don't know will soon be made the same offer as they, implying that they could become the victims of the next people's decision to push the button. But by the time you have the old Granny staring at Cameron Diaz at a wedding rehearsal dinner in a manner that's supposed to be creepy but is actually kind of hilarious, you're very far from unnerved. And that's long before you're completely sick of the nosebleeds.
The second half of the film veers into science fiction territory and the moral dilemma the box presents turns out to have much larger consequences. It's clear from the start that something is going on and those complaining that the second half comes out of left field have not been paying attention. Not that I can really blame them. There is only so long, only so many times, you can cut to a strange, seemingly random (except that it clearly means something and so isn't random and therefore, oooh what could it mean?) shot and expect the audience to say "Oooh what could it mean?" It comes down to the age old problem that I simply didn't care about the characters enough to care about their predicament, even as their predicament takes on ever larger significance. This problem renders the ending, which completely hinges on our attachment to the characters, pretty much impotent. Indeed by the time the ending arrives, you can't help but get the sense that what is happening matters way more to Kelly than it does to any of the characters. When so many films don't even bother trying, it's always good to see one attempt to inject meaning and multiple layers into its story. But it's that story that must come first; get the basics right before adding the complications and a lot of the time The Box fails on its most basic levels. Scenes merge into each other, particularly early on, and the editing is often disjointed with many scenes seeming truncated. This seems to result from the structure and story not being completely in place in the script. Yet running alongside this is the feeling that Kelly has made pretty much the film he wanted to make, particularly when it comes to the ideas of philosophy that permeate the film. It's a strange fracture that persists throughout the entire running time. Also, when you get into this kind of territory, there are ultimately only so many explanations for what is happening. And you can't help but feel that this ground has been well and truly covered before.
I'm starting to wonder if Donnie Darko was something of an anomoly, that Kelly may not even realise what made that film connect with people in the first place. The Box ultimately frustrates but, for me, there is never a sense that it could ever have been that much better. Perhaps working from someone else's scripts, Kelly may have greater success as he is forced to interpret a story that isn't his. As it stands, what we have is a film with good moments and points of interest buried in a lot of tedium, one that attempts to test our humanity and personal and collective morality but ends up merely testing our patience.
4.5/10
James Marsden and Cameron Diaz play Arthur and Norma Lewis, an ordinary couple mired in financial difficulty. A disfigured and mysterious stranger, Arlington Steward (played with understated relish by Frank Langella), arrives and gives them a wooden box with a button on the top. If they push the button two things will happen. Someone they don't know will die and they will receive one million dollars. The moral dilemma is played out in the first twenty minutes or so, after all what kind of film would we have if they didn't push the button. The rest of the film deals with the consequences of that decision, offering an ever deepening conspiracy and increasingly bizarre happenings with the townsfolk turning into extras from Village Of The Damned with nosebleeds, the babysitter not being everything she seems and Arlington Steward being revealed as the victim of a lightening strike he may or may not have even survived. Amidst all of this, the couple try and understand exactly what it is they have gotten themselves into and how they can extricate themselves from it.
This is one of those films that suffers from unfortunate and misleading marketing. The trailers all played up the central notion of the mysterious box and suggested the film is a thriller. One suspects this is how Kelly originally pitched it and got the money to make it, as that core notion (coming from the short story by Richard Matheson) is a highly marketable one. But where the short story ends, Kelly is only getting started and he uses the premise basically as a springboard to launch into his own flights of fancy. Much of the first half lives up to the marketing and plays like a straight thriller. A really great score by members of Arcade Fire helps generate menace in otherwise mundane scenes and the cinematography and production design, while perfectly capturing the 1970s setting, work hard to create a sense of unease. The problem however is that there is very little actual unease present. Many of these early scenes clunk along due to pedestrian writing and unconvincing performances by Marsden and Diaz. More problematic still is the fact that many of the film's attempts to create mystery and intrigue fall on the wrong side of naff and laughable. There are a couple of terrific moments, a man standing just out of shot looking in the kitchen window, or particularly when Steward announces menacingly that another couple that the Lewis' don't know will soon be made the same offer as they, implying that they could become the victims of the next people's decision to push the button. But by the time you have the old Granny staring at Cameron Diaz at a wedding rehearsal dinner in a manner that's supposed to be creepy but is actually kind of hilarious, you're very far from unnerved. And that's long before you're completely sick of the nosebleeds.
The second half of the film veers into science fiction territory and the moral dilemma the box presents turns out to have much larger consequences. It's clear from the start that something is going on and those complaining that the second half comes out of left field have not been paying attention. Not that I can really blame them. There is only so long, only so many times, you can cut to a strange, seemingly random (except that it clearly means something and so isn't random and therefore, oooh what could it mean?) shot and expect the audience to say "Oooh what could it mean?" It comes down to the age old problem that I simply didn't care about the characters enough to care about their predicament, even as their predicament takes on ever larger significance. This problem renders the ending, which completely hinges on our attachment to the characters, pretty much impotent. Indeed by the time the ending arrives, you can't help but get the sense that what is happening matters way more to Kelly than it does to any of the characters. When so many films don't even bother trying, it's always good to see one attempt to inject meaning and multiple layers into its story. But it's that story that must come first; get the basics right before adding the complications and a lot of the time The Box fails on its most basic levels. Scenes merge into each other, particularly early on, and the editing is often disjointed with many scenes seeming truncated. This seems to result from the structure and story not being completely in place in the script. Yet running alongside this is the feeling that Kelly has made pretty much the film he wanted to make, particularly when it comes to the ideas of philosophy that permeate the film. It's a strange fracture that persists throughout the entire running time. Also, when you get into this kind of territory, there are ultimately only so many explanations for what is happening. And you can't help but feel that this ground has been well and truly covered before.
I'm starting to wonder if Donnie Darko was something of an anomoly, that Kelly may not even realise what made that film connect with people in the first place. The Box ultimately frustrates but, for me, there is never a sense that it could ever have been that much better. Perhaps working from someone else's scripts, Kelly may have greater success as he is forced to interpret a story that isn't his. As it stands, what we have is a film with good moments and points of interest buried in a lot of tedium, one that attempts to test our humanity and personal and collective morality but ends up merely testing our patience.
4.5/10
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