Saturday, December 29, 2007

Birdman of Alcatraz

Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer, 1962) - C

A dose of earnest goofiness from the usually hyper-self-aware Frankenheimer, both straight-up silly (an actor portrays the author of the book about Stroud and speaks directly to the camera; square-jawed Burt Lancaster as an unmitigated badass) and almost charmingly quaint (warden to prison guard after Stroud beats a fellow inmate to a pulp: "I don't give up on a man that easy!"). A relic in the sense that it wants to have a debate about prison rehabilitation -- should the goal be cultivating obedience or dignity and independent thought? -- that's simply not relevant anymore, given that we've given up on rehabilitation entirely. That part is still sort of compelling, but the movie is awfully long at two-and-a-half hours; Stroud's rectitude wears, his conflict with the petty warden is a cliché, and his relationship with his mother scales heights of absurdity. The Oscar noms for Lancaster and Telly Savalas are interesting, since their performances seem so exaggerated today.

The Walker

The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007) - B

A film about what it's like to have status and nothing else -- no importance, no real money, no real connections -- and Schrader's cinema-of-repression schtick is a peculiarly good fit for the material. I loved the steely opulence, the art direction just this side of realistic, the warm hues of the dinner parties and rich wives' homes contrasting the overdramatic blue of the interrogation room and all of it highlighting the hollowness of the protag's existence. The image of him taking off his wig at the end of each day is fairly heartbreaking. Harrelson minces a bit too much and the murder mystery is almost completely useless, but the core of the film is solid.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem; Lake of Fire

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (The Brothers Strause, 2007) - C-

All the set-up is endearing because you can see the movie trying so hard to establish characters and set the interplanetary conflict against a small-town milieu, but the writing's just not there. What winds up happening is that the stock characters force out any actual sci-fi elements, and we learn nothing new about the war between the species that threatens to annihilate the planet (or at least Gunnison, CO). There's actually a more fundamental problem, which is that the notion of alien invaders that are reptilian and slimy just isn't that interesting from a sci-fi perspective anymore; the Alien franchise was always horror, but this movie has nothing to offer in that respect. Climax and ending are sharply distrustful of government (I wonder if the line "The government wouldn't lie to people!" would have gotten as much of a hearty laugh 10 years ago), which is always a nice sentiment, but the last scene doesn't make any sense, and the movie is boring by virtue of being basically content-free. Why are the Aliens fighting the Predators? I think the first AvP explained it, but motivations play no role here; they just beat on each other senselessly. We do get a glimpse of the Predators' home world, if that's your bag.


Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, 2007) - B+

I'm very sympathetic to what Kaye is trying to do here, because abortion is -- or should be, at any rate -- such a difficult issue for any thinking person living in the 21st century. At two and a half hours, this searing documentary aims to be all but the last word on the subject, which to my mind consists of two distinct goals: 1) exploring the moral, political and philosophical dimensions of abortion, and 2) getting to know the people involved, from the passionate advocates on both sides of the issue, to abortion doctors and the women they treat. When the film engages the first, which it does for several long stretches, it's interesting but dry, verging on droning, maybe because the prim academic talking heads are so out of place next to the firebrands and personalities that grace the screen when Kaye hits up the trenches of the abortion wars. In depicting the activists, Kaye incisively gets at the disingenuousness of many pro-choicers and the batshit insanity of the pro-lifers ("There are four types of people you encounter at the abortion clinics. The first are the satan-worshippers, who will actually roast babies over a barbecue pit..."); he doesn't resolve the moral and ethical dilemmas (though he crystallizes several of them nicely), but he does confirm which side of the debate I'd rather be associated with. Long, and almost crazy with ambition, but a must-see if you don't treat abortion as merely part of a checklist at election time.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The Kite Runner; Sharkwater

The Kite Runner (Marc Forster, 2007) - B+

Sometimes you peg a movie as useless Oscar bait and then it comes back and kicks you in the nuts. Could have been really turgid stuff -- child rape, lifelong guilt, intergenerational conflict -- but Forster handles it with uncommon finesse. The movie is deliberate, almost calming, letting "big scenes" happen without needlessly underscoring them; it allows the characters humanity and nuance, letting good people make mistakes and giving them the freedom to redeem themselves. I panicked when, an hour into the film, Amir's father, theretofore painted as a moral giant, seemed about to become one of those movie dads who crushes his son's dreams -- "And what will you do for money?" dad asks when son says he wants to be a writer, not a doctor. "Work with me at the gas station?" But the movie quickly makes clear that this is just a (perfectly understandable) fit of drunken stubbornness, and that Amir's father wants the best for him, absolutely. And Hassan, who could have become a parody of a turn-the-other-cheek Christ figure, is a fully realized human being because Forster and Benioff are smart enough to take their time during the lengthy flashback set-up. Basically, The Kite Runner had me hook, line and sinker; watching my screener DVD at home I actually yelled "Fuck!" at a crucial late-film revelation. A bizarrely contrived climax keeps it out of the "A" range, but this might be the most conventionally entertaining of the season's big pedigreed films.

Sharkwater (Rob Stewart, 2007) - C-

Interesting for as long as it focuses on Paul Watson, the Greenpeace militant who uses his boat to police the oceans against illegal fishers and poachers, ramming and sinking their boats if he has to, and painting the insignias of vanquished enemy ships on his hull. We get to see a little bit of him in action when Stewart briefly joins his crew, and the details of what he does, culminating in an honest-to-goodness speedboat chase, are riveting. As an environmentalist documentary, though, Sharkwater kind of sucks, prone to fuzzy math ("The shark population is estimated to have declined by 90%" -- since when?), weird demagoguery ("No species on this planet has ever survived by ignoring the basic laws of ecology") and dangling participles ("While watching this film, 15,000 sharks have been killed"). Stewart is inarticulate and doesn't have much screen presence, and when he fancies himself a Michael Moore (e.g. getting himself kicked out of a restaurant that serves shark fins) he tends to lose all sense of proportion. Some of his directorial choices are questionable too: what we're supposed to get out of the idiot shark fin company hack who pops up every ten minutes to spout inanities, for example, is unclear. Some great underwater photography (not surprising, since that's Stewart's day job) but everything else is amateur hour.

Monday, December 24, 2007

The Devil Came on Horseback; The Stranger

The Devil Came on Horseback (Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern, 2007) - A-

Astonishing, because it accomplishes something so elusive: a depiction of third-world atrocities from the point of view of a white humanitarian that does not in the process become about the humanitarian or try to make him into some sort of messiah (see, e.g., Born into Brothels). It helps that Brian Steidle, who witnessed the take-off of the genocide in Darfur as a "cease-fire monitor" and returned to try to outrage America, is so humble and sincere: it's not about him, and his ego does not come within a five-mile radius of the movie. His narration sticks to the facts, and the facts speak for themselves. The doc is meant to be a call to action, which would normally make me skeptical of its merits as a film, but it's also an unforgettable portrait of evil, and of indifference that becomes evil. It made the scope of the Sudanese genocide sink in better than anything else thus far.


The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946) - B+

Welles supposedly considers this his "worst" film, but the first half, at least, is a pretty awesome evil-invades-placid-suburbia noir. (Dig that shift from shadowy skulking through the alleys of some European harbor to sunlit, idyllic Connecticut.) Fascinating, too, because the 1946 film is such an immediate reaction to World War II, and I liked seeing how the conflict was cast: very little about Jews, a quick mention of gas chambers and concentration camps, and mostly dealing in abstract notions of evil -- which might be just as well for a noir thriller. Welles and Edward G. Robinson are in top form; the last act is kind of hysterical and the way the villain is dispatched is a bit much, but this is great entertainment.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner, 2007) - C

The first hour's annoyingly coy, predicated on our being in suspense about whether Lauren Ambrose and Frank Langella will have sex. The second is morose, almost pouty, and basically superfluous. The main problem is a weird circularity: we only get to know Ambrose's ambitious grad student in relation to Langella's aging writer (the film provides literally no details about her life that do not involve the writer or his books), and our only insight into the writer and his life comes from the grad student's bullshit literary analysis. There's also a second plot -- the writer's daughter trying to decide whether to subordinate her desire to have children to her desire to be with a man who doesn't want any -- that's supposed to crystallize Langella's personal and artistic crisis (he used to be a reckless idealist who wrote about liberation but was overcome by cynicism after his wife took his implicit advice and left him for another man) but just feels like piling on top of the already overt subtext. Pathological stodginess doesn't help -- this is a movie where a couple bickers over whether to see The Young Girls of Rochefort or The Battle of Algiers. I hope one of these characters gets a Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD for Christmas, or something.

John Carpenter's The Thing

John Carpenter's The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) - B+

Like most of Carpenter's best, a triumph of truly unpleasant practical effects, and in fact an excellent case study in what works and what doesn't about the top-notch computer effects you see in today's sci-fi and horror. The make-up, goo and puppetry on display here is both more and less real than the CGI stuff: more real because it's an actual physical presence, and less real because it's so limited in its movement. But it serves for what Carpenter is trying to do, which is freak you out in short bursts; he doesn't try to make you jump, but there are moments here of the sort of visceral and immediate horror that's hard to come by in the movies, moments where you feel yourself in the shoes of the character watching this horrible, disgusting alien abomination unveil itself, and holy shit can you imagine seeing that in real life? Quintessential Carpenter in other ways too, not all of them positive: the drab and ugly look, the somewhat interchangeable characters, the abundance of soft testosterone (his characters are macho in kind of a gentle way, though maybe that's just the 80's mentality generally); even Ennio Morricone is aping the synthy, pulsating scores Carpenter wrote for his other films. Very effective but not transcendent; I actually think the opening shot of the flying saucer spoils some of the fun, since as an alien invasion movie it's pretty unimaginative (they traveled light years to bury themselves in the ice for millenia and then spray people with goo?), while as horror it's awesome.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Awake; Enchanted

Awake (Joby Harold, 2007) - C+

Ludicrous, and would have fared far worse had it not also been fascinating -- this is one of those movies I respond to because of how utterly whacked they are, on the theory that weird is almost always better than boring. Message here, believe it or not, is that the ultra-rich need to stick together, lest the not-as-fortunate hungrily converge on their livelihoods, if not their lives; and if you think it's not plausible for that to actually be the subtext of a Hollywood film, then, uh, you need to see this. Add to that the intense Oedipal overtones of the central relationship -- Christensen and Olin, not Christensen and Alba -- and what you've got is strange, strange, strange; had it also been competent, it might have been brilliant. But the first-time director sadly botches the high concept -- Christensen's panicked voiceover is at an obvious remove from the surgery (you can imagine him in the sound booth, trying to sound terrified), and having an invisible version of the protagonist haranguing people who cannot see or hear him is just not a potent dramatic device, as I thought we had learned from The Invisible. Are the interludes in the last act supposed to take place in some sort of afterlife? Who the hell knows. Christensen and Alba are both terrible actors, though the latter has a nice moment late in the film that I can't really describe without giving away the ending. Oh well. Probably doesn't work in any way that a reasonable moviegoer would appreciate, but I can't be too hard on anything this bizarre.

Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007) - C+

Cops out like whoa -- sets up a terrific prototypical fairy tale universe, with a maiden whose singing voice calls to action a platoon of helpful woodland creatures and who yearns only for "true love's kiss," an egotistical Prince, an evil witch wielding poison apples, an eager-to-please chipmunk sidekick, etc., but then can't bring itself to skewer it properly, preferring instead to insist in all sincerity that our world should be more like a storybook. Should have been funnier; I'm not sure there's much use for a movie where Patrick Dempsey finds true love with a fairy tale princess, but there could have been room for it in the context of an actual comedy, something like a live-action Shrek. Amy Adams is awesome, there are a few amusing moments, and the big musical number is surprisingly dynamic and rousing, but the tacked-on final fifteen minutes involving a truly pointless CGI dragon sealed the thumbs-down.