The Tree of Life

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

The Tree of Life – Art 7/5 Ent 2/5 Worth 7/5

I’ve called Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life the best film ever made, a new height in cinematic potential, and various other superlatives. I still believe all that, but the problem is that it’s hard to convince people that any one film is the best because of its inherently subjective proposition, but it’s doubly difficult to convince people on such a highly divisive film. Such as one both booed and roundly applauded at the Cannes Film Festival. I don’t intend to convince you why this is the best, but I’ll at least try to convince you to accept Malick’s method of expression so you can appreciate it or soundly reject it after having given it an honest chance.

The easiest area to convince people is in its technical brilliance. This takes the vapid mindless CGI battle scenes of Lord of the Rings and throws their highly detailed technology across a painted universe and earth and womb and microbial orbs, in all their creative and destructive glory. The musical score by Alexandre Desplat is a perfect fit for Malick’s artistic temperament. The two leads, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, both exceed themselves in a realistic sensual awkwardness you only ever find in Malick’s actors, leaving all of his films with his identifiable imprimatur. Like all of the best of the best filmmakers (Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Ruiz, and even Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a candidate for this pool), Malick captures water with almost trance-like poise. Out of any single part of the film, the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is maybe the most uncontroversial in its plaudits.

But I think matters of taste and preference supersede all matters of technical skill (which Tree of Life has in overwhelming abundance), as well as the illuminating point of the narrative (again, huge abundance), so I’m not the least bit disheartened that anybody should dislike this film. What I would be disheartened by is if people didn’t even try to watch it with an open mind, and dismissed Malick’s message out of hand as trivial nonsense. You’re only cheating yourself.

There are two main identifiable negative responses to The Tree of Life that fiercely chain down its transcendent appeal, and they’re from opposite directions. I shall call them the low and the high. The low response finds the film dreary for veering off the traditional Hollywood narrative track seemingly out of the blue, and never truly constricts to it or makes any attempt to do whatsoever. “Plotless” is the charge here, and it’s valid to say that The Tree of Life failed to deliver a coherent linear narrative. I won’t even try to deny that. What I will deny is that that matters.

This low response is not fluent in Malick’s cinematic language and shows a lost feeling when the film is communicating meaning in ways completely unfamiliar. The exposition of meaning through the poetic inner monologue of characters is something deeply alien to average cinema-goers, and the only other filmmaker who does this that I can think of is Andrei Tarkovsky. Their familiarity is with attention-grabbing hooks and elements meant to appeal to their senses of excitement, justice, or romance. Speaking in abstract and open-ended ways about being and time is not many people’s constructed idea of what a good film should be, and using beautiful nature shots to elucidate Malick’s meaning can seem to them indistinguishable from the Discovery Channel, which is not in any intentional sense communicating the same meaning as Malick (though I would say some nature shows do show some of the same universal points of graceful suffering and natural indifference. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man comes to mind here).

Though the high response is generally quite contrary from the low response, and by and large understands the intention of Malick, those putting forward a high response completely reject his cinematic expression out of a similar unfamiliarity or unwillingness to accept that expression as in any way novel or interesting. In other words, they get what he’s throwing down, they’re just not picking it up. The reason for this is not so simple, and actually highly individualized and based on personal preference built from highly theorized interpretation or highly elaborated personal standards that are both just magnificently contrary to Malick’s own vision of cinema.

High response critiques don’t ignorantly propose that Malick alludes to concepts that aren’t there, but rather are critical of his supposed aloofness to concepts he doesn’t pay any attention to. A very important reason for this divide is the fact that, while speaking on being and time in a Heideggerian sense, Malick does not constrict whatsoever to Heidegger (and especially the French theorists Heidegger influenced) and actually explores what everyone else in the 20th century largely wanted to forget: the metaphysical. There is no arguing with entrenched ideology on subjective elements, but there is always a critique of every ideology and every theory. I haven’t yet seen one that proposes why Malick is out of his element or surpassed by someone speaking on more important, and “big” issues (would love to hear them!).

Opening with a line from the Book of Job, it should be clear right off the bat that this is not only an art film, but it’s an art film that speaks about religion with cosmic terms. The narrative in The Tree of Life may bounce from one end of space/time to another at the drop of a hat, and have nothing resembling a coherent and linear progression, but the meaning and the subtext as it reveals itself is a coherent, syntactically correct message. It begins as a proposition, stating its intention in the very beginning: this is a film about two different modes, or ways of being: grace and nature. This colors all that will follow.

First, we’re introduced to a family in a state of bliss, operating as they see it, as children of God trying to walk in the light of grace, and immediately Malick suffers them a loss in one of their children. Then we get the richly sneered-at big bang, microbes and dinosaurs, which have nothing whatsoever to do with what’s going on, right? No, wrong. These scenes are demonstrating the infinite and eternal nature of pain and suffering. It is the lowest common denominator from the start to the end of the universe, that everything that is constructed will be destructed. The suffering of the family is put in context as same shit, different year, over the course of many billions of years. The last shot of the dinosaurs set in the river, where one is about to kill and eat another dino who is at some sort of finality or injury, shows the germination of grace in the state of nature.

From there we return to Chez Pitt-Chastain to witness the experiential apex of grace in a 1950s Texas household. But slowly, and most surely, the natural impulses of the egotistical young boy Jack, and his controlling father Mr. O’Brien, begin a test of their commitment to grace. Through flash-forwards to the present day, where Sean Penn plays the son in adulthood, we’re given small amounts of an eventual synthesis, that this whole ordeal is only temporary and the outcome is somewhat given away. We, the audience who all have our own experiential knowledge, intuitively knew the ending anyway: live and learn for as long as you’ve got to live, “from dust to dust” as it were, we’re issued back into the void. So we have to make it right and make it count.

In the O’Brien household in the ’50s and ’60s, Jack’s natural and egotistical drive is met with natural brute force by his father, and contrasted with the enlightenment of his mother. After his father’s cold temporal rage gets the best of him, and he leaves for business, Jack and his brothers are left to let their unfettered egotistical freedom flow to its natural extent, and Jack becomes sickened with his own juvenile delinquent excess. When his father returns, their reconciliation is made quite easier after both are given space and freedom to purge their natural desires, at least enough to find a modus vivendi.

If that isn’t a universal story, I’ll be a god damned four eyed fish. Aside from the dual ways of being as the central theme, another important theme expressed toward the end is the necessity for freedom to save individuals from the nature of other individuals. Space to breathe. The religious message in this film has a tendency towards grace, but coolly recognizes nature as something that cannot be got rid of, and can only be maintained. The struggle of maintenance colors almost every story in human thought.

The father is a church-going, God-fearing man, but he symbolizes the natural authority of the various religious institutions the world over that suffocates freedom and people’s natural desires. He is the Rome that Martin Luther railed against. He is the Catholic Church the Jacobins blamed for society’s evils in the French Revolution. He is the religiously-inspired Prohibition Acts that didn’t trust people to handle alcohol by themselves. He is Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. While the mother follows the way of grace, she leaves its realization as an intuitive and encouraged goal for her sons. She is a sensical version of Mel Gibson’s cries for freedom. She is every civil disobedient since Henry David Thoreau. She is Libertas.

The greatness in The Tree of Life I think lies in this narrative of graceful freedom, regardless of whether you’re religious or not. I most certainly am not, and I substitute this concept of grace, expressed by Malick somewhat agnostically, with my own very secular and materialistic understanding of cosmic purpose, that is contrary only in so far as I view the religious understanding of grace as having long latched on to the iron age, where little actual insight comes from.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478304/

The Libertine

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

The Libertine – Art 3/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 6/5

The Libertine is one of my favorite movies, and I don’t think any movie made in the ’00s supersedes that favor, though The Fountain comes fairly close. Although its cinematic merits are mediocre at best, the story itself is acutely compelling. Adapted from Stephen Jeffreys’ acclaimed play by the same name (which also starred John Malkovich, though in the lead role), The Libertine is a narrative about the tragic flickering of a genius whose compulsions and inability to regulate his lewd and often hateful speech becomes a collective weight upon him, following him in his slow crawl into an early and pitied grave. The story exhumes his rotten life and uses it to examine purpose and meaning for those of contrapostive character with no talent nor psychotic maladies. The tragedy is not so much nature’s swallowing up of a gifted artist before his time, but the artist’s defiantly hedonistic teasing denial of England and humanity of his gifts. Imagine if Shakespeare blew his brains out in a whore house as a final “fuck you” to humanity.

Well, Wilmot is not quite that massive of a loss but you get the extreme example, and as well you get this film’s inherent critique of Wilmot’s egotism, because he’d have liked nothing more than to be Charles II’s indifferent and rakish Shakespeare. With or without him, life goes on, perhaps a little duller. I believe the genius of The Libertine is as important as in any of the great films you could mention, and I’m completely confused why it’s in any way underrated, save for the reservations of those who sacrifice goats at the alter of cinema and ignore literature as something redundant. But for the life of me, while reading negative reviews of the film, I can’t latch on to a single legitimate reason as to why this couldn’t have been a masterpiece with a more experienced director not content with bringing the stage to life. Because I didn’t see any such critiques, as they were all concentrated on things that, as Wilmot would say, were wide of the point. Whenever I have to ask whether everyone else is crazy or it’s just me, it’s time to walk back from the ledge and perhaps think a little harder. The story of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, England’s most provocatively notorious Dionysian of lettres in an age of excess, is not a directly appealing story to large swathes of the movie-going audience.

But why is it so? People love Johnny Depp, in what you’d by now naturally expect for me to esteem as his best role. People love period pieces and costume dramas. People love raunch. People love political dramas. Why didn’t people love The Libertine? Going through the many reasons I’ve seen: it intimated sexiness but delivered little; its grim and drab representation of the 17th century offers little of the glitz expected in period dramas; the subject of the drama is a massively unappealing person (jeez people, Johnny tells you this in the beginning); the story swirls the drain into a commentary on the wretchedness of existence (is this positive or negative? because this sounds like a wonderful reason for why it’s GOOD).

My theory for why this movie does not connect with audiences in spite of having Johnny Depp at his absolute best, a screenplay adapted by luminous dramatist Stephen Jeffreys, a gentle score by legendary conductor Michael Nyman and a supporting cast (John Malkovich, Samantha Morton, Tom Hollander, Rosamund Pike) to die for, is quite simply because people have a hard time disassociating the nature of the character depicted and the story as it occurs from the quality of the character acted and the story as it’s told. Would this movie have bombed if it had done itself a favor and made itself less harsh on the collective palette? Would it have bombed if it had the same actors, writers etc. but instead focused on John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough? On the totem pole of anti-social disorders, Jack Sparrow (one of Johnny Depp’s finest creations and a massive box office hero) is getting up there, but far enough below John Wilmot’s commanding heights of debauchery, cowardice and selfishness that audiences can appreciate in Sparrow a tinge of Wilmot without smelling the noxious odor of his syphilitic corpus.

People may just be afraid to admit that The Libertine is so great because their disdain for the movie is their disdain for John Wilmot, his sad, pathetic tale and people like him. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’ll do you some good. So take it, you rube.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375920/

Alien 3

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Alien 3 – Art 3/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 4/5

Whatever the disappointment the young me felt with the ending, whatever disappointment people involved with the previous films felt with the beginning, and whatever disappointment audiences around the world felt overall with this supposed completion of the Alien trilogy, I can’t help but love Alien 3. This mistreated, misunderstood, orphaned film is an accidental gem. Much like Godfather Part III, if it weren’t part of a monumentally adored series whose fans seem to know more about its cosmology than the creators, it’d be judged much less harshly.

Set on a prison-mining planet owned by the notoriously evil “fucking company”, the heroine from Alien and Aliens, Ellen Ripley, survives a crash landing in her escape pod after a fire occurs on the ride home from the events in Aliens. Then begins the fun as another alien creature begins slaughtering the locals who have a difficult time believing anything Ripley says. As a standalone film, Alien 3 is sinister, cold, skin-crawlingly creepy, and it’s etched into a dismal and perfectly painful horror narrative with the contrast of a story about condemned souls who’ve found redemption in exile and faith in the darkest backwater of the universe. Given more coherence in the production, and a more decisive creative hand to director David Fincher, or really anybody … perhaps it could have been as much of a masterpiece as the previous two.

Unfortunately, Alien 3 was a textbook case of the dark side of a studio-driven film hierarchy. There are probably worse case studies in production hell, especially for a number of films that have yet to be made after decades of studios playing hot potato. But there can’t be too many occasions of a big project coming teasingly close to a very appealing concept, then the studio tears it up and reforms again around an entirely new project from scratch, only to see the cycle repeat itself until the studio forces the latest director to shoot without a complete script. As David Fincher, who disowned Alien 3 and refused to participate in the various DVD and Blu-Ray disc sets for the series once said on the set, “it’s amazing to me that Fox is the number one studio in the country, because they’re all such a bunch of morons”.

In the beginning, 20th Century Fox wanted 2 sequels to Aliens, because really, it was Aliens’, Jim Cameron’s and the M-41A Pulse Rifle’s series by now, not unlike how Bob Dylan willingly gave All Along the Watchtower over to become Jimmi Hendrix’s song. Brandywine’s producers began with an idea of continuing the cyberpunk trope of corporatism with a political foil in the form of a revolutionary socialist utopian planet that would be a steady contrast to the evil ‘company’, Weyland Yutani. Presumably some acid-spitting, chest-bursting, face-hugging would go on in this utopia. The character of Ellen Ripley would be subdued for Alien 3, but return for 4, and actress Sigourney Weaver was more than happy with this idea after she’d felt burned by the studio cropping out much of Ripley’s emotional development in Aliens (and perhaps losing her an Oscar?) in favor of treating the Colonial Marines’ weaponry like characters with top billing (a thought that influenced her antipathy towards weapons in Alien 3.)

Pioneering cyberpunk author William Gibson was attached to pen the first draft. What he offered was action-packed, very Sci-Fi, very different. After dozens of rewrites by countless authors, it ceased to resemble Gibson’s original draft utterly. Studio chief Joe Roth was upset with minimizing a culturally significant franchise cash bonanza like Ellen Ripley, the first female action heroine. Ironically, the increase in mindless action made Weaver want nothing to do with the project anyway. Fox dumped it. Writer Eric Red next completed an actiony script that included something possibly related to an element in the new Prometheus Alien prequel: an alien microbial substance that affects the chemistry of all that it touches, from bugs to people to spaceships. Then-attached Finnish director Renny Harlin took one look at the script and ran away as quickly as he could. Fox dumped it.

Next up, director David Twohy of Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick fame germinated the idea of a prison planet, but loaded it with a lot of experimentation with the alien lifeforms that resurfaced later in Alien Resurrection. Fox dumped it and flushed twice. Then, What Dreams May Come director Vincent Ward was attached, and he introduced the idea of saturnine religious monks on a satellite filled with wood, in a society rejecting technology and perceiving the alien as Satan. Fans of Sci-Fi and the series look back on this script by Ward and imagine “what if?”, with many supposing it to be a high crime that this version never got made. Fox dumped this, of course, but got out the plunger and searched for Twohy’s idea too, combining the two ideas after the studio accrued a $7M bill trying to get the project off the ground. They ordered unprepared newcomer and Madonna music video veteran David Fincher to start filming without a script.

Out of some half-assed pretense of artistry, the producers got alien designer and surrealist H.R. Giger involved with the project, after Jim Cameron kept him at a distance for the second film. His design for a more sleek alien creature influenced the project, but most of his innovative designs were simply discarded. They probably just wanted his name on the project. The Gothic combination of futurism and realism that was the consistent aesthetic through the first two films, and the religious subtext taking shape in this third film was complemented with a fitting score by Elliot Goldenthal, who included quotations from Catholic chorals. Whatever problems would be had in any other area of the film, the casting director would silence worries by mining a troupe of simply awesome supporting acts: Charles Dance, Pete Postlethwaite, Brian Glover, Charles S. Dutton, and Ralph Brown.

In the final version of the film, two of the adored surviving characters from Aliens, Corporal Hicks and the young girl Newt, were both killed before the story even really begins. Actor Michael Biehn, as outraged as Jim Cameron over this development, got up in arms and received a sizable paycheck for Fox using his likeness so bluntly. By eliminating all of the guns through the majority of the plot, now producer Sigourney forced the boys to put away their toys and make it a psychological horror, and not yet another ’80s cheesy action flick. Sigourney further made pop-culture waves by shaving her head for the project to look like Sinead O’Connor or a rap star. And to this day, nobody has really given a decent explanation for the eternal question: How did the eggs get on the Sulaco?. Then of course, they decided to kill off Ripley entirely. The 10 year old me whose imagination had been so transformed by the second film was at this time completely devastated.

David Fincher’s control of the project vanished almost before he walked on the set. The producers and studio edited the film and packaged it against his wishes, but all of the possible damage had already been done. The public’s imagination had already been set by a teaser released a few years prior insinuating the big bad alien was finally coming to wreak havoc on earth (see video above). After nearly half a decade of grappling with a golden goose cult franchise’s next installment, Fox and Brandywine opened Alien cubed (what a dumb gimmicky title) to poor reviews and a North American box office bust. So nobody truly wanted to ‘own’ this film, except perhaps new producer Sigourney.

But in spite of all that, have you watched the movie lately? It’s really not that bad. In fact, quite the contrary, its everything good about the Alien franchise: baroque psychosexual horror weighted down by realism and fantastic special effects. Even as a poorly received tragic footnote to the series, it’s a perfect completion considering that this isn’t fucking Star Wars. This is supposed to be goddamn foreboding and depressing from the get-go. Aliens was the exception, not the rule. If you want guns and battles and tough hombres, watch an Arnold movie, ya jagoff. How many more of these Scooby Doo hackneyed adventures of “you’ve been with me so long Mr. Alien Man, now it’s time for you to die!” can we really endure (according to Fox, at least one more with Ripley). Seriously, how bad can a film be that throws off the traditional 20th Century Fox corporate opening? After all they’ve put fans of the series through, and not to mention all the artists working on this film, this is literally the least Fox could have done to appease us:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103644/

300

Tags

300, Film, Movie Reviews, Movies, Spartans

300 – Art 2/5 Ent 6/5 Worth 4/5

Can I forgive 300 for being so brazenly glib? Sure, why not. Is that because of an absolute lack of Greek-related films to compare 300 to? Yeap. Does it really matter that much? Meh, not really.

As with Gladiator, 300 has thrown the ancients like a javelin into our popular culture, with an array of parodies and animated .gifs in tow. 300 is based on the popular comic series by Frank Miller (Dark Knight Returns, Sin City) distilled from Herodotus, Plutarch and others the story of the 300 Spartans who offered battle in a choke point at Thermopylae (Gr. “hot gates”, and more like 1,000 of them in the beginning) to delay the advance of the second Persian invasion of Greece proper. Miller consciously tailored this comic story to bridge the unthinkably vast differences between Greece and modernity. So the relation to our scholarly and confirmed understanding of history latches on to legendary figures like the Spartan co-king Leonidas, Persian Shahenshah Xerxes, and the Greek traitor Ephialtes, and transmits some of the pithiest one-liners in all the classics, the greatest of which being the Persian exclaiming “our arrows will blot out the sun”, with the quintessentially Laconic response “then we shall fight in the shade”.

But this film’s genealogy is only distantly related to the classics, and doesn’t consciously concern itself whatsoever with the Western canon’s cultural understanding of Sparta and the Persian Wars. The historical and factual errors are rampant. Representation of Ancient Greek politics resembles something closer to high fantasy of Tolkien (granting some intrinsic marketing for the film in the wake of the then-recent trilogy). Like Frank Miller’s other film adaptation endeavor Sin City, the use of blue screens and puke-biege skies reminds just how much of a comic film this is, with the same themes of superheroes and supervillains and uncomplicated selfless battle against the forces of evil. Whereas the writers of Rome danced in the gaps of Suetonius and Shakespeare, Miller dances in the gaps of Spiderman and Batman. So you don’t need to have a strong understanding of the classics to fully appreciate this film.

By the draw of unconscious cultural transmission, 300 does interestingly manage to present some very Greek concepts, however. The philosopher Plato posited the Platonic theory of forms, where a perfect and ideal chair exists somewhere in heaven, and all earthly chair makers wish they could reach at least a quotient of that perfection. Numbers are ideal concepts, wrecked by no cosmic force. 2 is 2 and never fails to be 2. In geometry, architecture, sculpture, music and aesthetics the Greek sought the ideal. Most of all, they admired the ideal athlete and even more importantly the ideal warrior: an heir to Achilles. Watching 300, which is, if nothing else, an elegy to what Frank Miller describes as the “special forces” of ancient Greece, you get the sense that this is at least partially what Plato had in mind in describing the ultimate, perfect, ideal warrior.

Second, the rhetoricians and poets of Greece practiced a time-honored tradition of the panegyric, wherein a gifted speaker or writer would stretch the meaning of propriety to compliment somebody, some people or something, without veering into self-defeating grovelry or the absurd. The blisteringly white-hot praise of Spartan warriors that goes so far to boost the egos of Westerners, was taken appropriately as laughable farce in good stride by more intelligent Iranians, and outright humiliation by their knuckledragging contingent who appealed to the United Nations to condemn it. These are the same knuckledraggers who sought to ban showings of Persepolis around the world as another “hurtful propaganda”, so take their hurt feelings with a grain of salt.

Frank Miller describes how the Spartans served an example of contrasts: they were slave-owning brutes with a streak of totalitarianism, but they treated their women better than the rest of patriarchal Greece, who shut their women indoors in ways that would make medieval Muslims blush (indeed, history has a tendency for each new cultural norm coming slowly closer to the realization that women are persons in every sense of the word). And Miller is right. His adaptation of the great war song of Laconia represents a brutal and cruel people, who speak with the gift of hindsight to a modern audience that they were the saviors of democracy and representative government. He grinds off their sharper edges, leaving baby skulls and hatred of cripples as facts of life without delving further into the ancient attitudes that would disgust us today. Miller walks the line with the balance of accusations of fascism, racism, and homophobia (Leonidas calls the Athenians “boy lovers”. You can call the Spartans a lot of things, but prudish heteros is definitely not one of them), but the fact of the matter is … this balance ain’t easy, and making it commercial is harder yet.

Yeah, we’ll have to hurry up and wait for a more intelligent Greek story. But for now, this comic book action movie will serve as our cultural connection to the Greeks. And it’s really not as terrible as some of the histrionic reactions. As far as sword and sandal epics go, only Ridley Scott and HBO’s Rome are better. This is clearly superior to many of the old drawn out bores like the film that inspired this, the Cold War metaphor The 300 Spartans, Ben-Hur, and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Really, this is closer to the tradition of the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion technology-driven mythological epics, and it’s just as fun. In the end, all that really counts is this film’s ability to blare the operatic glorification of war and chauvinism to such a degree as we just have never seen before. 300 may not be culturally intelligent, but it sure as shit is culturally relevant.

condemnedmovies on An Ideal Greece & Rome in Cinema

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/

Agora

Tags

Christianity, Film, Hypatia, Movie Reviews, Movies, Rome

Agora – Art 1/5 Ent 4/5 Worth 3/5

Agora, a Spanish film directed by Chilean Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz, is far less than it wants to be and not a little presumptuous, but at the very least, it’s a breath of fresh air and a revisioning of the stuffy, traditional softness for Christendom and condemnation of Pagan excess. The story is the tragedy of the Alexandrine Greco-Roman philosopher Hypatia, whose death marks the decline of classical antiquity and the beginning of Medieval Europe. The rare female public figure was dragged to her death after the increasingly Christianized Egyptian state, governed by Roman Imperial Prefect Orestes suffered political friction with the ascendant Christian Patriarch Cyril, and both sought an appropriate outsider to blame much like all of Europe would have wished to throw Serbia into the sea in 1914.

Though a greater story could and should have been told, there are some redeemable aspects here. Weisz’s performance is, as usual, more than up to the task. The willingness to condemn Christian Rome in the wake of Constantine is a beautiful development as a general thrust away from the saccharine Catholic histories we’ve been subjected to for 17 centuries. The rich historical costume drama is modestly superior to your average sword and sandal epic that tries to awe with spectacle and fighting. Overall, the film is worth a look at the very least.

But strictly speaking, though Agora is an adequate and conventional film about antiquity, and I’m sort of forced to love that about it, its core premise and thus the heart of its entire project just sucks. It has a very ambitious and sweeping narrative, and fails to live up to its own gaudy designs. It attempts historical fiction to illuminate the conversation between science and faith today, where scientific thought is constantly on perilous ground thanks to backwards thinkers (and not just fundamentalist ones either), but the message straddles two profoundly different time periods while feverishly maintaining its coherence. That leaves it timeless in a negative sense of failure to be specific to either then or now, or honestly any time save for the Spanish Inquisition, to the point of near irrelevance.

Rachel Weisz’s Hypatia was not the “progressive” feminist and Carl Sagan-like scientist that writer/director Alejandro Amenábar purports. When the ancients fell off the cliff into the abyss of Christendom, they did so because they were a primitive people sacrificing chickens, messing around with animal blood and carcasses, and generally playing hopscotch from one crudely drawn meta-narrative to another. To get an idea on just how primitive these people were: the pivotal shift from Apollo and Jupiter to Jehova came because Jehova delivered in battle for Constantine, and the old gods failed to deliver for Julian “the Apostate”. And as with voting for totalitarian political parties, that’s a once-off kind of deal, and that’s all she wrote, as it were.

It wasn’t just the hoi polloi that were woefully ignorant either. Hypatia, though a highly accomplished teacher, mathematician, astronomer, and inventor, was still a child of her very ignorant and dark time. She subscribed to the beliefs of Neoplatonism, a variation on the already idealistic enough ancient philosophy of Plato that focused on the metaphysical with loopy mystical influence from Eastern and Jewish religious thought. When Augustine wrote City of God, he had been steeped in Neoplatonism so heavily, and it meshed so well with Christianity that he only had to modify a few things from the writings of Plotinus. Logos, or “reason”, which to many of the ancients was a kind of collective unconscious driven by some mystical supreme being, was constant from Plotinus through the Christians, just with different language and more forceful obedience to a new Hebrew text. Somewhere, Epicurus is still rolling in his grave over this. If Hypatia corresponds only to a degree with Carl Sagan, then it’s fair to say that she also corresponds with Madonna playing around at the Kabbalah Center.

So to frame a modern argument between science and faith around this woman is wishful thinking, and considering the demonization of Christians per se in the film (which I admittedly love for petty reasons), it’s really an unwelcome and glib contribution to the conversation. You don’t have to look to Edward Gibbon‘s salacious and blatantly anti-papist scrawl to understand that the whole story is too rich to be believed. The mindlessness of religious zealots and the bureaucracy of the Roman Church are very interesting avenues to explore, but are only touched upon with a superficial and precious stroke of the pen. Truly, we deserve better than this.

Those who observe thuggish Christians and the selflessness of Hypatia, and ironically see a Christ-like figure in her and prideful sinners in the ostensible Christians are so wide of the point as to make one depressed. The real Hypatia’s very Greek understanding of honor would see nothing admirable in the least about dying as a martyr for her beliefs, or an “athlete for God” as the Christian understanding would have it. Cross-pollination of the martyr mentality surely has its ironic effect, but Hypatia beaten and murdered by Christians is not martyrdom on her account, but unbridled helplessness and victimization as a woman discarded by society, both its secular and sacred institutions, as a “witch”. To credit her with martyrdom is something on the order of an insult that brushes aside the fact that she’s female, and neither the Greco-Roman culture nor the Abrahamic one overtaking it are at all easy with the idea of her being superior to any man. Though misogyny and male rage are unavoidable aspects of this story, it’s hard to say they’re given their due recognition.

condemnedmovies on An Ideal Greece and Rome in Cinema

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/

Antichrist

Tags

Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Antichrist – Art 6/5 Ent 2/5 Worth 6/5

Oh, hell na. Indeed, though this one isn’t hardly as much of a war crime on your psychology as A Serbian Film, this is the kind of movie you see on a dare. Those who aren’t squeamish and have the ability to remain cool under pressure may even be able to appreciate its Abrahamic indictment of the state of nature. Where Terrance Malick balances nature and grace in a dispassionate argument in The Tree of Life, Lars Von Trier falls off the fence and begins writing a Jeremiad in epic verse against the calculating fence. Von Trier’s uniquely invidious style actively tries to distance you from the art, if he isn’t insulting your dumb ass straight up. The Catholic director effectively redirects the swings of his flagellum from his back to all of ours. Antichrist is a lot of things, a wide array of very complicated, cruel and fearsome things. But easy to watch is not an appropriate descriptor.

The story follows He and She, a married couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, through the depths of an emotional hell and into a psychological wilderness of insanity. The opening scene, something film historians just may preserve in institutes across the world for its contrast of the sublime and the infernal, sees the couple slappin skins something fierce while their newborn crawls out a window, to the tune of Handel. The slow black and white scene without any dialog (the only one done up as such), would be the perfect aesthetic for a gold watch commercial for Rolex if they wanted to go out of business. Thereon out, Dafoe the psychiatrist tries to reduce Gainsbourg in her moment of grief as her rage boils up and overcomes her as a darkly anima seeking revenge … conveniently while they’re on a vacation to the woods in order to overcome her grief, with nobody around to intervene in case things get a little nutty. Aaand yeah, they surely do, they surely do.

If you strip away the grotesque and the provocative in Lars Von Trier’s work and public persona, and you disregard the eloquence of his filmic language, I don’t know if there’s much interesting to see there. He’s probably just a confused, regular guy who enjoys movies and shit disturbing. I don’t think Antichrist has an intelligent original message about humans as social creatures. The obviousness of psychological problems leaves this film somewhat retrograde, that is to say didn’t John Dryden and Alexander Pope make fun of highfalutin simplicity like this three centuries ago? We exist with not a little bit of hate, and evil in our DNA. Well, no shit Sherlock. Hannah Arendt pointed that out quite well with her concise observation on the banality of evil, which has been tested by psychologists and social scientists in experiments revealing a bit of the Lucifer in all of us. Do we still need the crutch of Biblical language to spell this out?

That it takes a gifted filmmaker-provocateur lifting liberally from the Bible to toss this message like a hand grenade into the public consciousness speaks mostly about how the mentality of modernity is fiercely constrained to the double edged sword of hope springing eternal. Forgetting the rust, the grime and the chafing swept under the carpet, we can go about improving life generally but at the expense of addressing more serious problems. Thankfully, gracefully, mercifully … Von Trier keeps us at arms length with his ‘message’ by throwing us off with surreal and horrific scenes that I won’t give away other than by saying what I started with: Oh, hell na.

People with a wild hair up their ass took Von Trier’s artistic message to mean something sinister on a non-artistic, social level because he trolled the media with hints that there was a tinge of misogyny to be found in this picture. The truth of the matter is that there’s a kernel of truth behind his invective, the story really does pattern itself on good old fashioned misogyny and the Biblical blaming of Eve for ruining everything. Of course, that’s just Lars being Lars, but he tapped into something very real and undeniable: a deep-seated mistrust, hatred and prejudice between the sexes, stemming either from an inability or sheer unwillingness to communicate that can only be tragically or annoyingly exacerbated by attempts to right the wrong.

But how wonderful it is that this message was brought to us by Lars Von Trier. He might just be that crazy cousin at Thanksgiving who says disturbing things with a giant smirk (that’s probably me too), but he’s a damned visual and narrative genius. Particular scenes drew from the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky (to whom both I and the picture are dedicated), such as well-crafted ‘sculpting in time’ that really milks the forest for all its worth, and visual architecture of slow trance-like camera movement and haunting interior shots. Before it was over, I was thinking to myself “this is absolutely a Tarko movie if he’d done horror”. Sure enough, both men have a religious eye in the camera. But this film confirms for me that the cosmic allegories, though genuinely and intensely visceral such as through this cruelly beautiful interpretation, are largely unnecessary overthinking of a very simple problem: all people have at least some bit of evil in them, man or woman.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0870984/

Amer

Tags

Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Amer – Art 6/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 6/5

A slasher pastiche of retro Latin horrors set in the French Riviera, Amer (fr. “bitter”) is an exploration of a woman’s sense of terror and victimization first by the demonic, then by uncontrollable urges of miscreant thugs, then an obsessive psychotic fetishist. And the theme of obsession in the narrative is matched in form by the almost obsessive-compulsive framing and polish of every scene. A perfectionist you’d be scared to have a beer with devised every screen and clipped them accordingly. That struggles against the ugliness creeping behind every wall and impulse in the film, holding it all back in vain. The gushing bile of the worst bits of human nature are treated like a fashion show written by Vladimir Nabokov and directed by David Hemmings’ character in Blowup.

The story focuses on three stages in a woman’s life. In the first act, she’s a child in a decrepit Gothic house flamboyantly lit like an ’80s Halloween dance party. Her creepy supernatural ‘nan is peering in through key holes and constantly threatening her as she’s creaking around in the dark. In the middle act, which punches seaborne air and sunlight into the prior act’s black cobwebs and suffocating stuffiness, we see her as a young girl ogled by (…alleged) rapist bikers as she’s trying to shrug off her doting mother. The middle act demonstrates some illicit sexual tension  and sensitivity to creepy nasty menfolk that colors the final scene and breaks from the first. In the final act, when she returns to her old estate, she’s pursued by a weird leather-bound fetishistic weirdo with a knife, and then as the Marquis de Sade would say, nature takes its course.

There’s a lot about Amer that would ensnare lovers of cinema. The technical brilliance of its image and sound, as well as the transporting effect on the senses would be more important for film students to take in than any Fellini or Kurosawa movie. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosse captures vibrant colors, emotive faces, goddamn sexy skin and rustic architecture better than just about any other movie I’ve seen. Editor Bernard Beets fastens the film’s tempo around a perfect progression of hills and valleys and climaxes. And filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani accomplish a fantastic avant garde picture. I’d just imagine that at some point in the production, these Euro artistes were telling their excessively pretty actresses “make zee sex to zee cameruh now if you please”.

But I truly believe that this film isn’t just for film snobs, grad students, slasher fans, serial killers and people who walked into the wrong theater. The absence of straight-forward plot and dialog, the ambiguity of the surreal, psychotic, horrific and feminist subtext shouldn’t drive regular joe six pack away. Unlike the afterschool specials admonishing young women on puberty, or the budding juvenility of “I am woman, watch me pee in the garden and try on training bras” of Catherine Breillat’s work in movies like A Real Young Girl, the sexual development of the main character in Amer is set against the horrors of victimization, sanitized through a stylish modernist lens, but no less scary. The appeal of something so gross is in its sensationalism. This is the ugliness that drives you to click on internet shock sites, and unlike goatse, the impulse is rewarded.

You don’t need to understand Dario Argento’s cheesy-intellectual slasher films of the ’70s to ‘get’ this movie. To say it’s style-heavy isn’t to condemn it as superficial, because it’s artificial. It’s a film about film and made to impress filmmakers, but it’s so exceedingly brilliant to look at and soak in that it makes a case for any willing initiate to better understand the notion that cinema isn’t merely stage drama with better backgrounds, but something more that can communicate thoughts and emotions without dialog … and in Amer’s case, what’s communicated is a neobaroque form of terror.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426352/

Kingdom of Heaven

Tags

Arab Spring, Film, Kingdom of Heaven, Movie Reviews, Movies

Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut) – Art 3/5 Ent 7/5 Worth 6/5

I really, really like this somewhat problematic movie. I just goddamn love it. The sensuality of Ridley’s camera is beyond belief. The score swiftly moves from medieval choirs to eastern guitars and soaks you into the film. The spirituality teases you with both agnosticism and divinity, and forces you to question the meaning of belief. A confusion of purpose also forces you to question your own meaning in life. The insane performance by Edward Norton (see if you can spot him) redeems my opinion on him generally. Eva Green … well I just love her. Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, David Thewliss, Alexander Siddig, Marton Csokas, Brendan Gleeson, and Michael Sheen all turn out perfect character roles. Arab unknowns like Ghassan Massoud and Khaled Nabawy represent quite well themselves.

But to start off, a warning: I think it’s imperative that you make sure you’re watching the 194 minute Director’s Cut, and not the 144 minute Theatrical Cut. The Theatrical Cut has massive plot holes and downright criminally elided characterization. If the extra time doesn’t sound that appetizing, then even the shorter version probably isn’t to your liking anyway, so just avoid it and go watch whatever boring crap it is that you like.

The flaws with Kingdom of Heaven, however ready I am to forgive them, are legion. Orlando Bloom cannot act with dialogue. The shorter theatrical version has plot holes so massive you could sail a ship through them. Ridley Scott, for reasons beyond me, throws African music into a love scene in the far superior Director’s Cut (perhaps in his tradition of incomprehensible gobbledygook like the final song in Gladiator). Some of the dialogue whether it has competent actors or not, grates on your ears like a chalkboard being scratched. But the biggest failure was its packaging and advertising in the United States.

It was meant to be a medieval allegory for a modern audience on the same civilizational divide between East and West, where the friction has remained constant for well over a millennium. To fill more theaters with more showings per day, the studio sliced out an enormous portion of character development for both Orlando Bloom’s Balian and especially Eva Green’s Queen of Jerusalem, whose personal tragedy is turned into random bitterness that arises out of nowhere in the shorter version. The studio decided to package it as a romantic adventure of self-discovery in a world gone mad. Yeah, nobody went to see it. The Director’s Cut was only released on the advocacy of Ridley Scott and some of the actors, and redeemed the project massively in the public’s eyes.

But the film was far more successful in Europe and even in the Arab world. The North American revenue hardly met 1/3rd of the budget, but combined with worldwide grosses, it earned well over $60M beyond the budget costs. The reason can easily be guessed: it was released at an extremely sensitive time during the Iraq war, with a message nobody really got (because the editor sliced out its heart), and which Americans were not in the mood to really hear. Saracen anti-villains? Who are you kidding? Looking back on that message today, as the war in Iraq has begun fading away, and in a post-Arab Spring world, when people in Tunis, Cairo, Sana’a, Benghazi, Damascus, and Bahrain are uprooting a century of post-colonial governing structures, we in the West should really take time to pause, and reassess our relationship with the Arab people.

We will see some Arabs in Palestine who loathe us for supporting unconditionally the country that bulldozes their homes; Arabs in Iraq who lament the massive loss of life caused by the havoc we unleashed; Arabs in Bahrain who have to put up with their ridiculously rich royalty (without heritage native to the island) solely because our fleet is stationed there; Arabs in Cairo who were tortured, beaten, tear gassed, and even murdered by the regime whom we materially supported on condition of the Camp David Accord with Israel and to cease attempts at liberating the Palestinians. But we will also see Libyan Arabs, whom we helped overturn a tyranny at the hands of a madman. Our intervention was invited, with the condition of having no more boots on the ground, at the risk of appearing like another Crusade in Arab territory. However you feel about the unconstitutional move by Obama to get involved, or the necessity of responsibility to protect, or the emboldening of some pretty backward tribal nutcases in Libya, we stopped a massacre and minded our business, which is an improvement.

We’ll always be on the side of the angels if we deliver death from the skies at the request of a soon-to-be-slaughtered people, but short of that, our business manipulating the dignity and agency of the Arab people on their own land will always, always come at great cost, and with little intended direct benefit. In Kingdom of Heaven, we see an Al-Qaeda-esque symbol in the turbaned mullah played by Egyptian actor Khaled El Nabawy, who menaces a complacent Saladin in his tent, threatening that he won’t be King for so long as he turns his back on his duty to Jihad, to restore Jerusalem. People like that are everywhere, and they can only be turned on their own culture if we don’t present ourselves as an easy target for blame by interfering in their business. The Arab people will have to account for their own fanatics their own way so long as we stay out of it, and we’ll have to consider that in future interventions of ‘responsibility to protect’. Over in non-Arab Iran, how many people support the regime now compared to before the Green movement began?

The finale of Kingdom of Heaven has Balian delivering a twist on “Deus vult”, by saying “If this is the Kingdom of Heaven, let God do with it as he wills”, before surrendering Jerusalem to the Arab armies, led by Saladin. I don’t believe the Stoic or Calvinist philosophy of heavenly predetermination was exactly prevalent at the time, but the ahistorical nature of the film posits an agnostic understanding between Balian and Saladin. Jerusalem is nothing to those with an ounce of reason and everything to those who must be led by petty religion, who validate Saladin and Balian’s authority. The editing of senselessly fighting soldiers blending into the image of the deceased at rest on a pile of rocks and shields indistinguishable from dirt and rubble speaks volumes about the ultimate worthlessness of conflict from mere civilizational premises: they’re all just actors with no will pushing against one another for sand.

The Syrian actor portraying that historic statesman who returned Jerusalem to Arab control, Ghassan Massoud, accepted the role because he understood the direction of Ridley Scott and the script to be aiming for a message that undermines the “action” that would draw mouth breather crowds into theaters, and punish hate-filled movie-goers lusting for something like 300. In Kingdom of Heaven, the war is tragedy made by those overly proud of their civilization, and the peace and diplomacy between those two civilizations that struggle to understand one another is the triumphant denouement. The lesson everyone should take from Kingdom of Heaven and the Crusades is quite simple: there’s more to won by trade and finance than war. As Kevin McKidd’s character (unfortunately given a throwaway token role) tells Balian, Italy was made rich by contact with the East “as God intended it”. Tru dat brohim. Free trade agreements might be rough on developing Arab industry, but that’s a line of sovereignty they can walk themselves until they get on their feet. But iPhones and textiles are in need of trading, so let’s get it done.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320661/

Gladiator

Tags

Film, gladiator, Movie Reviews, Movies, russell crowe

Gladiator: Extended Cut – Art 3/5 Ent 6/5 Worth 6/5

As you’d expect, I kind of have a love-hate relationship with Gladiator. I love it because it brought back into being an awareness and love for the Classics (that is to say Herodotus, Thucydides, Suetonius and Tacitus, not Elizabeth Taylor in an Egyptian wig on a Los Angeles set). The long-forgotten spear and sandal epic came back with a fury, for better or mostly worse. The performance by Russel Crowe was perhaps the only time other than L.A. Confidential that American audiences genuinely liked him. Ridley Scott’s career was rejuvenated, we were blessed with one of the best cinematic villains in Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, and we got to see Oliver Reed and Richard Harris deliver two of their best and final performances for a new generation. The thrilling epic story worked, the action entertained as much as the arena entertained Ancient Romans, and the very Romanesque soundtrack by Hans Zimmer was the absolute height of heart-thumping pomp.

One of my history professors deeply hated this film, and loved nothing more than exploring digressions in how inaccurate it was (and he was teaching American history!). Yes Professor, the Roman Republic was not restored by a disgraced general-turned-gladiator who killed the Emperor Commodus in the sands. In reality, the plotting and very villainous Lucilla was killed in exile and Commodus had legitimate reason to become paranoid after the plot on his life, taking the typical curve of a Roman tyrant (even Caligula began well). And it’s probably the apogee of insincerity if Marcus Aurelius said what was written in the script (that didn’t make it into the film): “Imagine a place devoted to the rights of the citizen. Where every free man has a voice. That was the dream”. Yeah, right, apparently the writers never heard of laesa maiestas.

Also of important note that Elysium isn’t exactly a widely accepted thing in so far as it exists, and yet it’s also a prominent feature in the film (disprove THAT Professor!). And I’m pretty sure that regardless of Imperial gossip, Commodus didn’t murder his own father. The ticket-generating paean to a glorified Amphitheatrum Flavium (the Coliseum) cheapens the movie into being little more than an action film about a tourist destination (“The Pyramids 3: The Pharoahning”). And most importantly, as far as I’m concerned, is that Russell Crowe looks as Latin as Carrot Top. So this film is 100% ahistorical rubbish, and is difficult to defend on those grounds.

Tell me, if you will, what about that makes this a bad film? I can accept reservations people might hold for sweeping epics or simple action films in general, or a general hatred for Russel Crowe. People have their constituent tastes and that’s what makes the diversity of life so great. But there’s nothing functionally bad about treating history as fiction, just as there’s not something necessarily superb about art that constricts to accepted history. Gladiator walks a fine line of revisionist historical fiction and a standalone epic related to no specific history. The Roman mirage is very pleasing to look at, however.

Despite giving us a “Rome of the imagination” with an even bigger Coliseum and shiny Nuremberg-like fascist aesthetics where all the streets are clean and paved, the film doesn’t generally fail us in giving at least some bit of Romanness. The arc of Maximus is a very ancient story of egoist revenge and Nietzschean master morality. He achieves Elysium with his family as a matter of earning his personal honor back with the blood of Commodus. But the film presents Commodus almost in a sympathetic light, and his motivations, though villainous to our minds, are not inconsistent with the historical Commodus and his probable rationalizations. That is a very ancient idea. The story is framed by the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, as espoused in his Meditations and briefly given as a primer in the opening act as the major themes: justice, selflessness, and equity. The pastiche of Stoic philosophy filters well into Richard Harris’ lines.

But the film is awfully hammy, there’s no escaping that. It’s mostly a wannabe MMA match (Chuck Norris vs. Asterix and Obelix). A few extra scenes added in to the Extended Cut give it a bit more depth, especially one demonstrating how Joaquin’s Commodus is more inspirational leader than bloodthirsty brat. However, the difference isn’t as vast as that for Kingdom of Heaven‘s Director’s Cut, where the studio comprehensively gutted Ridley’s baby for pointless and failed commercial ends. Sure, Gladiator maintains important place in cultural history, whether you like it or not, but can we do better? Bona Dea!

condemnedmovies on An Ideal Greece and Rome in Cinema

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/

Come and See

Tags

Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Come and See (Idi i smotri) – Art 5/5 Ent 4/5 Worth 6/5

Released on the 40 year anniversary of the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany to a massive domestic audience, Elem Klimov’s Idi i smotri is the greatest war movie you’ve probably never heard about. Set during the resistance to the German occupation in the Byelarussian marshes, well behind the front lines of Barbarossa, the movie follows the boy Florya and various people he meets as they slog through the worst excesses of the war. Against the wishes of his mother, Florya joins the partisans, who trick the Nazi-collaborating villagers by dressing as Germans to arrest him. Because his young age makes him relatively worthless to the partisans, they tell him to protect the base and tend to the guns, where his anxiousness for combat is humiliated by the distracting girl smitten with him. Trying to find his own way into the war, he soon gets his wishes exactly, to his soul-emptying regret.

Being struck by a German Einsatzgruppen anti-partisan brigade, Florya narrowly escapes being first burned alive in a church with the rest of the villagers, and then shot in the head by posing Nazis treating him like a trophy, a specimen of the conquered race. After the partisans later capture some of the Germans and one of their officers makes a distraught plea for forgiveness, an Aryan true believer barks him down and tells the partisans they’re an inferior people who deserve to be slaughtered, the children most of all, because “it starts in them”. The film then begins flashing backwards in time with documentary footage of the Nazis and Hitler’s rise, with Florya shooting his rifle at each stage of the Third Reich adn Hitler symbolized by a still photo, but he refrains finally from shooting at a still of an infant Hitler. In all the cruelty and lust for vengeance in Florya’s muddy, bloody face, he can’t bring himself to lose faith in the essential goodness of humanity, even baby Hitler, despite what the captured Nazi had to say.

While Come and See is a tremendous war film, it’s a traditionally avant garde art film first, in its design and outlook. Stalled in the bureaucratic nightmare of Soviet arts ministries for 8 whole years before it saw mass distribution, the film is granted some leeway in psychologically ambiguous surrealism. From sinister usage of Nazi-favored German operatic songs, the moaning Nazi spy planes and the documentary ending tracing the flowering of evil dictator and his racist warmongering state, the audience is left in awe of a complex abstraction that doesn’t seek to blame but to redeem even the most evil of men. The universalism of the message probably eventually overtook the Soviet censors, but the essentialist argument in Come and See, that points to the good in humanity despite the horrors of the apocalyptic war, is not necessarily only a communist argument.

In the vain melodrama of Anglo culture, Johnny Cash quotes from the Book of Revelation in the song “The Man Comes Around”, which is played in the opening credits for 2004′s Dawn of the Dead re-make, a film with allegorical roots about a zombie apocalypse symbolizing our brain-dead motivation to go to the mall. The mystique of the horror genre leaves us somewhat fulfilled in a fun, gruesome, skin-crawling experience, and our payment feels genuinely worth the exchange as we return home to our drab materialistic lives. When Elem Klimov’s Come and See quotes the same passage from Revelation in its title …

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

… it isn’t referring to a self-serving cultural critique about mall culture making us into drones, it’s referring to the most ghastly mechanical genocide in the history of mankind to date: the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which left upwards of 26 million very real Soviet citizens dead. They were not left to roam malls as an indictment of soccer moms, but to roam in hell as an indictment of human cruelty.

After watching this, you will truly never see war movies the same again. The West had it relatively fine in World War 2, but to describe what happened on the Eastern Front in WW2 in Biblical terms, as far as that works as a mode of expression for the artist, is truly fitting. Gruesome rape, institutionalized extra-judicial murder, forced slavery, wide-spread industrial theft and looting were not the exception, but the rule, by both sides. Come and See depicts this hellscape vividly, and you can judge for yourself whether Dawn of the Dead is the real “horror” movie or not.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/

Avatar

Tags

Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Avatar – Art 2/5 Ent 6/5 Worth 2/5

I enjoyed Avatar quite a bit, and it’s a guilty pleasure I freely own up to (I also liked Transformers so if you want to fight about it I’ll give you my address and I’ll give you a knuckle sandwich). I was kind of disappointed that James Cameron hasn’t progressed much as a storyteller, whereas his technological capabilities are widely recognized as the bleeding edge of cinematic spectacle. He’s interviewed on his ideas for a 3D video exploration of Mars, not for the SyFy channel, but the Science Channel’s Mars Rising. The cinema techie world now follows in his wake after previously following Hobbits and Wookies.

But judging his career arc purely as a storyteller, the raw visual power and excitement of Terminator and Aliens have given way to the twee sentimental ennui of Titanic. His latest turn, however lush and awesome, is a thinly disguised reboot of Aliens and the Pocahontas story. Because the production was visually centered, the focus paid off great dividends. Woe be unto the alternate universe subjected to however tremendously dumb this would have been without the money poured into the computer graphics. You can be mesmerized by Pandoran lillies in bloom, or you can be mesmerized by fighting the evil Imperialist metaphor, your choice, don’t make the dumb one.

But you’ve just gotta love Jim Cameron. The polish on the painfully dumb story almost made a turd look tasty. The script was obviously written with a giant drunken pork claw banging cliches onto a keyboard, but afterwards a brilliant editor came in and made it all flow seamlessly and somehow make sense enough for an uproarious cathartic climax that made you forget you hate this movie. Going down the list, there was “the force”, there was “the one” (Jeebus, William Wallace, Maximus, Neo), there was the post-colonial trope, there was the romance between Pocahontas and John Smith, we’ve got typical cyberpunk fare such as the evil and ignorant corporation, the (colonial) marine mercenaries, fatalist anti-technology throwbacks to old school dystopic Sci-Fi, it goes on and on. Sewn together, this collection of facepalms and ageing overused leitmotifs somehow, just … works.

The liberal lifting from Cameron’s Aliens and the Vietnam genre in space is also cross-bred with a traditional Western film (of the non-Spaghetti variety, thank god for small miracles). They even had the power loaders and drop-ships from Aliens. In a moment of unimaginative anti-splendor, the alien’s beasts of burden were remarkably similar to both horses and dragons, and the wild animals looked a lot like elephants, panthers, and wolves. Is Cameron just a lazy thinker or does he just assume we are? So in summation of the narrative critique: this wasn’t a real movie. It was a rare medley of various filmic elements thrown together with the corpse limbs of dozens of old movies sticking out of the proverbial soup Cameron is boiling up to confuse and startle us enough to believe it to be constituted originally and coherently.

The acting of lead Sam Worthington is wooden as can be. Sigourney plays a sympathetic and nuanced role, but it’s lightweight and uncomplicated stuff. The supports are for the most part Cameron-esque cliches. We have a Vasquez in Michelle Rodriguez (whose death is perhaps the most comical of any action film deaths – yeah I’m giving something away, fuck you), we’ve got a Hudson or two, and we even have Paul Reiser’s complementary successor in Giovanni Ribisi. The only impressive acting is from chief villain Stephen Lang as the weathered mercenary Marine Colonel whose material goals are plain and moral enough, the only problem is that the simplistic and judgmental anti-materialistic narrative deems him unfit for virtue, so he has to fight his way out of the narrative as nobly as he can.

But what really irks me is how this film almost insidiously taps in to a craving for a new age religious impulse and offers them only fiction, no universal truths, no questioning of life, no critique of human nature, nothing illuminating in the least. We’re just given a story about alien creatures with organic-mechanical spiritual fulfillment. If you think Star Trek fans are dead-enders, look no further than the enviro-loopies falling over themselves to find Pandora. I find it deeply disappointing that our culture is so obsessed with epics of war and conquering whose structure is built around a monarchical messiah guided by the true religion to solve all problems presented by the narrative’s Gordian knot in one fell swoop. That’s the stuff of primitive people, or so you’d think.

Our desire for a Caesarian/Napoleonic Man on Horseback extends well beyond fiction and into our political life where Republicans continually want the next Reagan and Democrats want the next Kennedy, while the most important changes should always be done in Congress or the Supreme Court. Avatar feeds off these base impulses in an unprecedented and immensely profitable way, but this presents a chicken or egg question: did the movies like Star Wars do this to us or did those narratives reflect already-present desires? Is Avatar the signature indictment of the hoi polloi?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/

Aliens

Tags

Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Aliens – Art 3/5 Ent 7/5 Worth 6/5

Aliens is the definitive action film, with few parallels. I barely remember the first time I saw it, yet after the 500 times I’ve religiously soaked in the sacred wisdom of M-41A Pulse Rifles, Smart Guns, and Dropships, and the church pew is supernaturally growing into my ass splinter by splinter, I’ve been forced into agonizing objectivity. I feel the emptiness I have watching it today allows me to finally start reflecting with a modicum of fairness. Set 4 decades after the first film, Sigourney Weaver’s character drifts through time in cryogenic suspension to wake up in a universe that she’s powerless to prevent from committing the same mistake her old crew did. Brought on a mission as an observer to rescue a colony built on the alien planet, Weaver watches as the corporate militia issues itself like human sacrifices into a hive full of the monsters from the first film.

When mentioning sequels that are superior to their predecessor, the conversation usually concentrates on Godfather Part II and Aliens. The argument is welcome, because however you feel about the first two Alien films, it’s undeniable that both were massive ruptures in the audience’s expectations from before they walked in the theater. Though much of my imagination was built around Aliens, objectively speaking I don’t believe that Aliens is superior to Alien. Alien is more intelligent in every way imaginable, whereas Aliens’ superiority is in areas that I can only appreciate with a smirk: explosions, one-liners, ’80s action cliches.

That is, except for three very important areas maintaining my esteem for Jim Cameron’s highly influential film. First, it was the apex of the idea that an action film should be a smartly paced roller-coaster ride, such a film that leaves Roger Ebert with knots in his stomach. Action films in the ’60s and early ’70s were a dreary, placid product that weren’t that much more exciting than Humphrey Bogart films from the ’30s. The thrill rides prior to Aliens in the Star Wars, Arnold and Stallone era picked things up a bit. Second, Aliens expanded on the cyberpunk trope of hapless yet heartless corporate power from the first film, which only alluded to it tangentially. The realism of the first film became a sort of social realism, with a quasi-leftist critique of commercial tomfoolery and alienation from our own humanity. Cameron mentioned in interviews the abuses of the British East India Company as a model. It’s a fun idea, but overwrought by scholars (we’re talking Jim Cameron here). Finally, of all the Vietnam movies, none were as poignantly critical of the mentality that prevailed through that war and in many wars to this day, that confident technology can defeat an enemy people’s will.

There are a number of genealogies for the modern action film, which itself is an ocean of variety. Tracing them back, we see the Lucas-Spielberg epics and childhood fantasies, the martial arts films of Bruce Lee, the original Die Hard, and then there’s Aliens. You can turn look through the blockbuster action films these days and always see trace influence from Jim Cameron films. Video games especially reveal heavy influence from this sequel (and not its predecessor), whose title cuts away from the traditional sequel labeling and has fooled many people into thinking it’s a standalone film, and in many ways it is. The structure and pacing are better assimilated into a shoot ‘em up video game than films that just try re-doing Aliens over and over again. The only film that remotely competes with Aliens is the extremely claustrophobic The Descent, because it focuses on the disorientating and imperceptible horror surrounding the heroes.

One other truly brilliant thing about this film is its groundbreaking use of closed circuit video cameras to transmit the horror as it first goes down. If you’ve ever listened to victim’s 911 calls, watched any of the gruesome cell phone videos from combat or terrorism, you get some chills up your spine thinking of the realness in the grainy image that strikes you somewhat harder than the expensive celluloid of a film reel. The realness of the mayhem jacks the terror dial up about a dozen notches when we’re watching and hearing the Colonial Marines fighting their way out of an ambush. We see a brilliant use of the shaky cam and distanciation before Hollywood spoiled them with demonic possession movies made at some producer’s winter home.

Cameron’s innovations in the story cut both ways though. Sigourney Weaver received an Oscar nomination for her second turn as Ripley, and it colored how she perceived the series’ emotional and narrative pulse thereafter, saying the sequel made the original film look “like a cucumber” (what?). Because Cameron gave her character some depth as a grieving mother with nothing left to lose – until she does find something to lose in the lone 13 year old survivor of the Colony – the Ripley character went from being an abstraction of defeating victimization to becoming an action cliche. That’s only slightly regrettable. More regrettable is how Weaver took over as producer in the next two films, and drained the creative, independent life force out of them. Both were wrought with production difficulties and endless re-writes. It got to the point that Alien 3′s David Fincher disowned his own film and Resurrection’s director Jean-Pierre Jeunet sardonically threw his hands up and said “it paid for Amélie!”.

How Cameron got a troupe of C-listers and character actors to not only put out realistic, sharp and fun performances is anybody’s guess, but he goddamn did it. James Horner’s thunderous score, quoted liberally in other films like Patriot Games, makes this movie as much as Nino Rota makes The Godfather and Fellini’s films. The frenetic but tamed pace is another instance where the editor (Ray Lovejoy who worked 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining) has as important a role in the film as star or director.

Aliens is the genuine article amongst a sea of turkeys in the choice of action films. In terms of sequels, it’s daunting to beat the film’s original nuance. If you’ve got to top something as brilliant as Alien, you’ve got to do something brilliant in a completely different way. Although I prefer the first, where references to Joseph Conrad slip by unnoticed, the uncomplicated, meat and potatoes all-too-noticeable aspects of Aliens aren’t anything to look down your nose at.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/

Alien

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Alien – Art 6/5 Ent 6/5 Worth 7/5

Alien, to put it bluntly, is one of the most important films to me personally for almost serendipitous reasons. I saw it when I was very young, and its seriousness and probity appealed to me as something so very shockingly and truly ‘adult’ that all my other friends, still enraptured by the Disney Channel, just couldn’t share. Quite unlike other childhood favorites The Transformers: The Movie, Indiana Jones 3, The Last Unicorn, The Land Before Time and even the ‘heavies’: Predator, Terminator, RoboCop, Commando, Total Recall, etc. … Alien passes the test of time without a scintilla of cheek or retro kitsch.

It’s just understood that this is a goddamn good movie, and though film critics were slow to appreciate that fact in the very beginning, the viewing audience shifted the standards and had created the new normal by the time Alien finished its distribution. Alien managed to reach a height of timelessness in spite of its goofy ’70s technological trappings and inspire a franchise that disappointed the further it went along but somehow kept making money in films, video games, comics, novels and toys.

Why is Alien one of the most genius films of all time? The collaboration of many highly talented artists beautifully produces a metaphor that is so horrifying exactly because the meaning behind the monster in a rubber suit is so very real. Mined from the depths of surrealist artist H.R. Giger’s nightmares, the creature who resembles a satanic dragon dong and reproduces by face-raping people and birthing through murder is exactly the sexual terror that is so alien to the male audiences who saw it.

The helplessness, traditionally consigned to females, was reversed in Alien to no small degree of mindfuckery. I didn’t understand any of this creepy shit when I was a mesmerized youngster who’d first seen the more straight-laced and less Freudian sci-fi action film sequel by James Cameron. I saw the rubber suit and had no idea why people were so scared of it: buncha pussies! Indiana Jones 3 didn’t continually reward me the same once I’d grown up and seen a few David Cronenberg films. It was pure happenstance that I’d selected as a kid Alien to be one of my favorite films, and with time I grew old enough to better comprehend its ugly, horrific story.

On other less cerebral levels the film throws perfectionist strokes on the canvas. Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score, re-arranged by Ridley and others under an auteur hierarchy, brings minimal chills that build up and build up until you’re utterly scared to death. Growing up, I would listen to the Alien trilogy soundtrack while I was falling asleep, and though the two sequels both gave more bombastic and thrilling scores, it was the first number of tracks from Alien that fed off the darkness in the bedroom and kept me up.

The production design by Giger, adapting his hellish nightmares to mobile sculpture, received a well-deserved Oscar. The film encouraged me to buy many of Giger’s art books, and I’d be lying if I said he still isn’t my favorite painter. Giger’s visions of hell, projected into space and an otherwise pretty pedestrian monster story give it the same sinister undertones of Dante, Goethe, and Bulgakov. Event Horizon thoughtlessly lays on thick the philosophical sub-text behind Alien, where the awesome cruelty and solitude of hell finds its way into the outer reaches of space. Concept artist Ron Cobb’s emphasis on hard Sci-Fi realism, used to balance out Giger and present from the beginning of the picture an intuitively familiar future into which 1970s audiences can easily acclimate themselves and feel at home really worked splendidly. The slide from the real into the surreal was a chromatic dive that few other films handle very well.

As the first big role for Sigourney Weaver, she was doubly advantaged by having no expectations built up by the audience as a relative unknown and also no previous female action heroines to compare herself to. Though her dramatic work can at times be tendentious or over-acted, with little range, the area where she’s unparalleled is as Ellen Ripley. Like this film spawned sequels progressively more mindless, Ripley inspired other heroines progressively more vapid and plasticy. From Linda Hamilton to Milla Jovovich to Michelle Rodriguez, the graveyard is full of the careers of “badass chicks” who saw Ripley but not her vulnerability. The point of action movie feminism shouldn’t be that women can be Gary Cooper, it’s that Gary Cooper has feelings too.

With the prequel Prometheus on the way in about a month and a half, my expectations are high, but realistically tethered to the trajectory of other flimsy prequels and Ridley Scott’s own recent work (A Good Year? Robin Hood? Jesus fucking christ). Prometheus could just be Ridley going back to what’s familiar, throwing a hail mary out of desperation. But I have one wish that I don’t think is that demanding of Ridley: I want him to, at the very least, maintain the same balance of Alien. What works for Alien has worked for so many others in its wake, which is to balance horror, action and sci-fi in such a way that the audience is given a palpable thrill ride that refuses to let up. The Cameron sequel mastered this, but Alien cast the first mold.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie – Art 3/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 5/5

So, I haven’t laughed at a comedy this much since I first saw Top Secret!. It’s pretty obvious why. I’m a consumer of a wide variety of comedy shows, stand-ups, shorts, internet shock sites and yes, even begrudgingly comedy movies. A consistent attribute in all bad comedy (“good” comedy to the bland masses who don’t know their ass from their elbow and laugh at cat pictures), is that the writers are trying way, waaaay too hard to be liked, or trying to do a drama film that’s unrealistically whimsical. In either case, it’s focus-group driven to make back it’s budget. Well, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, avant garde absurdist surreal humor extraordinaires, have a billion dollars with a capital B, and have no worries of paying back any budget with their Salvador Dali take on ’80s and ’90s public access television and corporate training VHS pastiche. They glean what they find funny in the world and make it into a David Lynch-style escapade of dadaist adventure (Lynch being one of their foremost influences, no I’m serious).

Given a billion dollars of Robert Loggia and William Atherton’s (the bad guy from Ghostbusters and various other films) money to make a movie, Tim and Eric get precisely 3 minutes into it before having revealed they wasted most of their money on spray tans, diamonds and a spiritual guru (Zach Galifianakis). Bummed out, they get drunk, and see on the toilet advertising screen (such as those at Buffalo Wild Wings) Will Farrell advertising a billion dollar deal to manage his wolf-stalked shopping mall. They go outside and look up into the sky to see “Doing Business” studded into a black leather night, merging it into “DOBIS”, the name of their new corporate outfit, complete with office supplies (also visualized in the sky) that will manage the mall. They then run like little girls who need to pee 200 miles to the mall, to the soundtrack of a hearty “two horses” folk song. Once there, a very Andreas Voutsinas-looking Will Farrell makes them watch Top Gun in his office twice in a row, before talking “business”. The adventures continue from there…

That’s pretty much exactly what some of my dreams are like. This may just be the funniest movie, to me at least, that I’ve seen in a very long time. One thing is for sure, I haven’t laughed this much in years. And yet what’s truly unfortunate is that I bet few will connect with the humor. It’s not dry, it’s not particularly witty, but if you’re the least bit fluent in absurdism you know that comedy does not have to be either of those things to be funny, it just has to be bewilderingly, bizarrely goofy. Well, this is the Lawrence of Arabia of goofery.

I am not the least bit surprised to see that the second film to be made from the Adult Swim comedy academy is as deeply divisive as this. I can only hope that Squidbillies the Movie is more warmly received. To illustrate how divisive this film is, look at the amount of votes on a 1-10 scale at Internet Movie Database for a similar film involving Frat Pack/Team Apatow regulars, Superbad, which has most of its opinion cascading upward:

Now look at the spread on Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, with most concentration on either 1 (awful) or 10 (perfect) forming a perfect arc:

I gotta say it, divisive movies are usually extremely good, unless teenagers are the ones voting them up (Twilight, Hunger Games).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1855401/

The Cabin in the Woods

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Film, Movie Reviews, Movies, The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods – Art 2/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 4/5

I think I can finally forgive Joss Whedon for Alien Resurrection. I will start off with a warning: you should see this film before reading this review. In short, I highly recommend seeing it, and you’re better off going in without knowing anything about this film. However, for those of you who’ve seen it or seek something more in cinema than plot, keep reading.

This film betrays its twist fairly early, and from there it’s a slow eventuated slope into insanity. The narrative quite quickly reveals that it wants to play with horror cliches and the seesaw battle between horror and comedy bounces back and forth swiftly. Right off bat, you have the mere title (the vacation in the bush horror was recently spoofed most brilliantly by Tucker and Dale vs Evil), you have the Creepy Gas Station Attendant, you have the one-dimensional cliched characters. But then you have another layer of subterranean engineers seemingly controlling all of the hell breaking loose in the cliched characters’ horror story. In a gruesomely ironic twist, their deaths germinate from their own inner fears, as they choose Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man style from an underground monster exchange.

But then the subtext of making fun of horror cliches which is visualized by the subterranean engineers controlling every process and laughing at the results (almost including the audience) begins mixing into the ‘real’ element of the narrative above ground. One of the characters avoids being slaughtered and miraculously discovers an electrical box leading to the control room down below. After he saves the “virgin” from being killed by a zombie, the two discover that the engineers below are manufacturing their deaths as ritual sacrifice to keep the Aztec Titan gods below slumbering. So this is an interesting twist, but it begins as somewhat obvious and then seeps into another traditional horror story equally worthy of parody. It makes fun of one but not the other.

As easily as I’ll forgive Whedon for Alien Resurrection, he’s borrowed a theme from that film and the Alien series in general, that was in the ’70s and ’80s quite fresh but today quite overdone to a crispy, flaky char. That is the persistent cyberpunk theme of sinister futuristic corporations reaching a climax of absolute power and witnessing the fortress become quickly dilapidated at the hand of some cosmic justice, such as the fearsome Alien the evil Weyland Yutani Corporation fails to harness time after time. Here, a team of flawless ‘horror story’ engineers that’ve sacrificed thousands of stupid teenagers to placate Dis and Vulcan slip up somehow, and manage to let a couple of confused, bruised and shocked kids let loose all hell by throwing an unattended lever holding in all the monsters in cube cages.

So although The Cabin in the Woods is both hilarious and awesome, it shares the same failing as Tucker and Dale: its spoof is appropriate but its own coda is equally worthy of a spoof. Somebody make fun of the corporate bozo cliche, please. I imagine it to be somewhat exactly like the stormtroopers in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/