Nine

Rob Marshall's "Nine" is an exercise in pointlessness. While Fellini's "8 1/2" is a very personal film, with the character of Guido standing in for Fellini himself, the film version of "Nine" is really owned by no one. Adapting "8 1/2" into a Broadway musical in the first place is a questionable choice. It's a strong film because it takes advantage of what the film medium can do, and it is now and forever will be the quintessential film about making films. It was first performed on stage in 1982 in a musical written by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston. Jump ahead 27 years and we now have an adaptation of the stage version written by Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin and directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago). So what began as a striking autobiographical work by one of cinema's most famous auteurs is now bastard child of Hollywood and Broadway. There are simply too many cooks in the kitchen with this new version and the result is a bland mess.

There are really only two ingredients in this thing that really work. I went to see this strictly based on the involvement of Daniel Day Lewis (a perennial favorite of mine) and Marion Cotillard (quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses). They are both fantastic in this movie and I didn't doubt for a second that they were giving it all they could. The rest of the cast is serviceable and each of the women are given musical numbers and a few key scenes. Penelope Cruz is sexy as hell but behaves exactly like you would expect her to. Who better to play the ideal woman than Nicole Kidman? Unfortunately her role doesn't require her to do anything but look beautiful. Kate Hudson is quite dull as an American reporter. Veterans Judi Dench and Sophia Loren hold their own in small roles but are never given anything to do. I guess you can blame the small roles on the structure of the original story, but that begs the question of why such a star-studded remake was necessary in the first place?

So, if we remove the personal aspect of the film and let the involvement of a multitude of creators water down the orignal point of the story, what are we left with? Unfortunately not much. I think it tries to be a love letter to Fellini's Italian cinema but that's hard to pull off when almost no one in your cast is actually Italian. So let's see, we have two Brits, an Aussie, French, Spanish and two Americans. Fergie's musical number, "Be Italian" is especially infuriating. Fergie, I know what your area code is and it's nowhere near Rome. Oh, and let's not forget that everyone inexplicably speaks English in this film.

The cinematography in this film is incredibly lifeless and makes me yearn to watch the amazing black and white photography of Fellini's "8 1/2" and "La Dolce Vita".

Oh, and let's not forget the fact that is a musical, although I can't for the life of me figure out why it should be. I'm not much of a fan of musicals but I can assure you that there are no memorable tunes in this one and that the lyrics are very trite.

It's been a long time since I have felt the urge to actually throw things at the screen. If not for the fact that Daneil Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard are so electrifying every moment they are on screen, I would have walked out. For the majority of the film I kept asking myself why this thing should even exist and by the end of it I hadn't come up with an answer.

Avatar

If James Cameron were to take his new film Avatar back in time about 30 years and show it to a late 70s audience, it would probably be easier to convince them that in the future we had actually colonized alien planets and had sent a film crew there than it would be to explain how CGI works. When the height of computer graphics is an Atari 2600, Avatar must truly seem like it comes from another planet. I really can't say a thing to fault the technical aspects of Avatar. Every second that one of Cameron's Na'vi are on the screen you sit there mesmerized at a creature that really shouldn't exist in such rich detail and natural movement. I can't even begin to imagine how many man hours of motion capture, modeling, texturing, lighting and compositing went into this film.

Let's consider how far we've come in the last decade. 2001's "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" purported itself to be the pinnacle of CGI at the time. They even went so far as to create the first "virtual actress" in Dr. Aki Ross, a character model that they thought was so fully realized that they expected to re-use her in future films. As it turns out, she wasn't much of a commodity. Appearing in a bikini in Maxim was the height of her post-film career. It wasn't too long before high school kids with a souped up computer and a pirated copy of Poser were creating their own virtual women, once again proving that any new technology will be co-opted to satisfy our basest needs. As far as Final Fantasy revolutionizing filmmaking - well, the trend didn't really catch on with movie-goers but it did influence storytelling within the video game industry. Even today's mediocre games have fully rendered cut scenes that surpass what Final Fantasy delivered in 2001.

The Star Wars prequels attempted to carry the virtual torch into a new millennium, but despite the technical wizardry ILM had pioneered in the previous decades they weren't able to create believable virtual worlds. The effects in the Star Wars prequels often felt clunky and distracting and made me yearn for the days of puppets and matte paintings.

Robert Zemeckis' people have made some pretty significant advances in virtual characters but I still find the idea to be very unsettling. The fake children and psuedo Tom Hanks of The Polar Express really creep me out. Beowulf further upped the visual ante but I find that the women characters in that film, largely due to being idealized versions created by men, seem to have all the expressiveness of sex dolls.

James Cameron takes one big leap over the Uncanny Valley by simply choosing not to recreate human characters with CGI. If something feels a little alien to you, well, its because they are aliens. Overall, Avatar is technically flawless.

The art direction here is splendid. This film must be a creative person's dream to work on. The world of Pandora is incredibly beautiful and for a couple hours we don't mind taking a tour of it. It really does feel new and fresh and always a joy to look at.

So why am I spending so much time talking about the visuals? Because that's pretty much the only significant aspect of this movie. The plot is very simple. The film is about 2 hours and 40 minutes long but you could easily summarize the whole story in a few sentences. It doesn't challenge the way you think about anything and there is really no subtext to analyze. Spoiler alert! Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves lead the Ewoks to victory over the evil Empire, the Iraqis get to keep their oil and everyone lives happily ever after in Smurfland. Everything plays out exactly as you would expect it to and every plot point is telegraphed way in advance. There is really no tension or drama here and by the end of the film you'll start to get bored by the extended action scene that Cameron probably designed to top every other action sequence in any movie ever. And the action is pretty thrilling and refreshingly comprehensible (I'm looking at you Michael Bay) but ultimately never quite pulled me in to the point that I cared what happened next or gave me any sense that the unexpected could actually happen. It's all by the numbers and we've seen it all before.

There was a brief moment where our hero Jake, in an awkward voice-over, mentions life in his Avatar body seems to be reality while his real life has started to feel like a dream. When I initially heard about the concept of Avatar I was hoping the film would explore this theme more in depth. Given our society's penchant for disappearing into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Second Life, it would seem like a theme worth exploring and certainly more of an interesting focus than the hundredth anti-occupation film since the Iraq war started. Avatar really glosses over that MMO gamer aspect (although it is very glossy).

I seem to remember a time when action films were built around human beings and occasionally punctuated with special effects. These days the films are built on special effects and occasionally punctuated with people. As amazing as the CGI effects are there is still a need to connect with the characters and Avatar sometimes makes it hard to do that. There were times when I knew I was supposed to be feeling emotion but I just couldn't muster a tear because deep down I knew I was missing that human connection. So as far as we have come on a technical level, we're not quite there yet.

Avatar has been the source of a lot of talk and speculation in the months leading up to its release. People would ask me what I thought about it and I didn't have much to say. Given that James Cameron is responsible for one of my favorite films, Terminator 2, and one of the biggest cinematic turds in recent memory, Titanic, it was hard for me to form any kind of opinion. And now that I have seen the film I find that my view of it is pretty much as it was before. I'm still kind of indifferent.

2009 in Review: Entertainment, Weakly

No, no...the inclusion of the above shot from "500 Days of Summer" doesn't mean I thought it was a bad film. But that scene is a nice metaphor for my film experience this year: Expectations not met.

It's almost pointless to make a "worst" list isn't it? I usually don't even bother because I try to avoid the bad ones. But my personal criteria for a bad film is simply wasted potential and disappointment and this year I found an unusual amount of those two things.

Most of the previous year’s best films were provided by giant Hollywood blockbusters. The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Wall-E, Tropic Thunder..... but look how far we have fallen in only a year. This summer’s blockbusters were excruciatingly bad. These films make me want to punch myself in the face. These films are Hollywood’s best case for illegal downloading. All I was looking for this summer was some escapism that didn’t make me feel like an idiot and it was nowhere to be found. Lets start with the worst of the worst:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may very well be the worst film in the history of cinema. Sure, there are no-budget amateur films that are worse, but we are talking about a multi-million dollar Hollywood production that was seen by almost everyone. I will admit that my inner eight-year-old was excited about this one and I happily paid $9 for the chance to see it. Unfortunately, this film’s intelligence level is below that of an eight-year-old. It should be entertaining to watch giant robots blow shit up, yet somehow Michael Bay makes it a chore. Bay is responsible for what I see to be the worst trend in modern action movies: quick cutting. No shot lasts more than a few seconds, rendering the action incomprehensible. Combine that with vapid, one-dimensional characters, talentless acting, a story that makes no sense and means nothing and you have a film that combines all of Hollywood’s worst aspects into an incredibly painful two hours.

I have a theory that in about 20 years The Criterion Collection will release a Michael Bay retrospective. His films will be significant in that they started the decline of cinema.

The best praise I can give to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, or Terminator: Salvation is that none of them were as bad as Transformers. I really wish I had something nice to say about them because they are all based on franchises that I loved as a kid. Unlike The Dark Knight they have not grown up with us. I came out of all of these somewhat depressed about not being able to recapture the magic I felt as a child and fearing for the future of a human race that actually enjoys this crap.

I'll have another post soon about some of the trends I saw this year, as well as the annual "best of" list.

Team Jacob

I found the Team Edward (James Olmos) graphic online earlier this week over at /Film. If I was the kind of person who wore funny t-shirts I would definitely buy that one.

So I couldn't resist the visual joke or the opportunity to co-opt the Twilight brand with my own Team Jacob image. Irene Jacob that is, star of two of my favorite films, Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique" and "Three Colors: Red". She was my teenage heartthrob back in the day. And in 1994 probably the most beautiful woman on the planet. At that point she was on her way to becoming a great actress. Unfortunately, since those two Kieslowski films near the beginning of her career, she hasn't done anything worth mentioning. Trust me, I've sat through quite a few bad to mediocre Irene Jacob films in the hopes that one of them would return her to the prominence she deserves.

The Twilight branding actually works pretty well with her photo from "Red". While I can't stand the series itself I actually kind of like consistency of the design between the books and the novels. It's almost like they were developing a brand right from the beginning. That's the power of graphic design folks.

Wild Strawberries

I've somehow managed to live 31 years on this earth and have been an avid film buff for half of them, yet until a couple days ago I had somehow managed to have never seen a film by Ingmar Bergman. How someone can keep a film blog and never have seen "The Seventh Seal" I don't know. I suppose that would have been the place to start, being his most well known film. But that's not where I started. I organize a film discussion group that meets every month and this month we chose three films that are favorites of Woody Allen. "The Bicycle Thief", also one of Allen's favorites, was the subject of my first blog post. The second was Bergman's "Wild Strawberries."

I'm not that knowledgeable about Woody Allen so I'm not really qualified to discuss how it relates his work but these are my thoughts about "Wild Strawberries" in general. Knowing the context in which a film is released really heightens your appreciation of it. For instance, without context you might look at most of the French New Wave as incredibly dull. There's nothing shocking about "Breathless" if you've ever been exposed to "Pulp Fiction". Regarding Bergman's films, I'm pretty much without the context of his other films or Swedish films in general. Wikipedia tells me "the film is often considered to be one of Bergman's most emotional, one of his most optimistic, and one of his best." If this is one of his most emotional then I understand why "The Seventh Seal" is regarded as such a cold and distant film.

I will admit that I had trouble relating with the characters. The actors and characters are likable, yet Bergman remains at a cautious distance. Isak's flashbacks to his childhood don't really convey any kind of warmth yet I feel that's what the director intended with those scenes. Instead, an uncomfortable Luis Bunuel vibe creeps into the scenes that are supposed to be pleasant memories and the surrealism is really racheted up once Isak starts having nightmares.

The film is essentially a man reflecting back on his life as he is about to receive an honorary degree. The film takes place during the trip from his home to the university. He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law. Along the way they stop to pick up some hitchhikers and a couple of stranded motorists and even stop by Isak's childhood home which gives him an opportunity to reflect.

While I wasn't particularly moved by any of the flashback scenes, there was one scene that I thought was brilliant. In the back seat of the car we have the three youthful hitchhikers, so full of life and energy. In the middle seat (really, how big is this car?) sit a bickering middle-aged couple. And the front seat is occupied Isak and his daughter-in-law Marianne. It's three stages of life sharing the same car. Marianne eventually asks the argumentative couple to get out and we find out later that she has recently had an argument with her own husband and fears becoming like that couple. Isak, on the other hand, has already been through a rough marriage and is all the wiser for it. But even in old age his wisdom doesn't save him from regret and self-doubt as his dreams start to become more painful reminders of his failings.

It does end on what Bergman intends as an optimistic note, which is another childhood flashback. Like I said, I didn't feel that the flashback scenes were very successful and I think the success of the movie depends on how you perceive those scenes. There were enough interesting ideas in this film to make me curious about Bergman's other films. "The Seventh Seal" is already in my Netflix queue.

The Road

For me, watching John Hillcoat's "The Road" after having read Cormac McCarthy's novel was a unique experience. I've never seen a film that so perfectly captured what I had pictured in my mind as I read the book. Part of that might be chalked up to the fact that I had seen some production stills of the film before starting the book, so my imagination was already colored with a grey palette. But I don't think that accounts for all of it. There's something about the language McCarthy uses in the novel that removes any room for interpretation. The descriptions are incredibly vivid yet at the same time the economy and simplicity of the language is very poetic.

Aside from one small misstep at the end, I would say this has to be the most faithful adaptation of a novel I have ever seen. I don't know if I should give too much creative credit to Hillcoat. He doesn't really put his personal stamp on anything, but after watching his debut feature "The Proposition" it's as if he was born to direct this film. I do have to give him credit for not compromising the gruesome and bleak nature of the story. Try as they might, the trailers attempt to make it look like an action packed adventure with the beautiful Charlize Theron at the center of it, despite the fact that she's in the film for no more than ten minutes. I know they are having trouble selling this to American audiences and the studio probably won't make the budget back on this one unless it gets some Oscar buzz soon. It's a film that certainly deserves some recognition and will be near the top of my best of 2009 list. But it's so grim that it's not something I'd be willing to watch again very soon.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I consider myself to be a big fan of Wes Anderson but with his previous film “The Darjeeling Limited” it’s clear that he’s been stuck in a creative rut. Two years ago, while my other favorite American auteur, Paul Thomas Anderson, was reaching well outside his comfort with “There Will Be Blood”, Wes Anderson turned in exactly what you would expect of him. You can almost diagram the formula: Bill Murray + The Kinks + strained relationships + a slow-motion final shot + his perennial font of choice: Futura Bold. Fantastic Mr. Fox includes nearly all of those things but it’s still a large creative leap forward for Anderson and I’m really happy to see the results.

While the bare bones plot of the films is based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name, the film is %100 percent Wes Anderson. It’s charming as hell and probably the most I have laughed during a film this year. Mr. Fox’s meticulously crafted world is a creative extension of what Anderson has done is previous films with “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic” (think the cross section cutaway of the ship). It also gives him ample opportunity for visual jokes, many of which I’m sure I missed. I’m looking forward to this one on DVD so I can make use of the freeze frame feature to study the details. My favorite visual joke is the graffiti of the word “CUSS” (being the film’s all-purpose profanity) spray painted on a wall in the background. (I can’t wait to work “clustercuss” into a conversation). I also loved the way the action plays out in one scene on security camera monitors, from left to right, like comic book panels come to life.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what the subtext in this film is, if any. I picked up on themes of rebellion and being true to your nature but there’s no overt moral to this film. And that’s fine because it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year.