STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

What may be most surprising about the new franchise entry Star Trek Into Darkness is how much it has in common with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, at least from an aesthetic point of view.  Both are filmed as if everyone and everything was caught up in a fever; both are overdirected with an emphasis on the visual over narrative; and both strive to make their stories relevant to current events.   But though …Gatsby never quite reaches the heights it could and doesn’t quite come together, at the same time, …Into Darkness is such a failure it makes …Gatsby look like something directed by Orson Welles. 

There is something incredibly sad and dispiriting about …Into Darkness.  It’s actually easy to miss it, but a lot of people die in this movie; I mean, a lot of people.  But with perhaps one exception, they are all disposed of with the flick of a CGI switch and without any sort of context or build up so that their deaths have any sort of emotional impact.   These characters (if you can even call them that) don’t die in ways that mean anything; they die in ways to thrill the audience so those watching can ooh and aah at all the explosions and neat SFX going on.  And there’s just something depressing about taking a franchise that, from its original incarnation and up through the movies made with the original TV cast, was meant to be uplifting and full of hope with a theme of the sacredness of life, and turning it into a cold, merciless killing machine, like the Terminator. 

J.J. Abrams is the director and the screenplay is by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, all of whom, except for Lindelof, were responsible for the 2009 rebooting.   I have to be honest.  The story here never made a lot of sense to me.  It begins with a terrorist attack by the villain de jour, Khan (played by buffed up Benedict Cumberbath, though not as buffed as Ricardo Montelban who originated the role, but hey, some pecs are harder to fill than others), in which he manipulates events to get all the top military brass in one room.  Why?  Well, unless I missed something (and in the spirit of full disclosure, it’s quite possible I missed a lot in this movie), his real target is only one person in that room.  All I could think afterwards was: Khan is this genetically altered superhuman, a scientific genius, and had the freedom of mobility of any other citizen, so why didn’t he just take his target out the old fashion way of a Tony Soprano: just show up on the bastard’s doorstep and blast a hole in his head.  No, Khan’s approach here is what is called in screenplay parlance as trying to swat a mosquito with an elephant. 

This lack of logic doesn’t stop here.  Our intrepid hero James Tiberius Kirk is quick enough on his feet to figure out before anyone else that the meeting of the brass was a set up.  Yet, he then seems incredibly slow on the uptake when it never seems to occur to him that Khan’s stashing himself away on the Klingon planet of Kronos might just also be a set up.  In fact, this is one of those screenplays in which people tend to act in certain ways to make sure the plot works out the way the writers need it to rather than let the characters dictate what happens.

To the filmmakers’ credit, and as was said, the authors try to make this Star Trek relevant and there are some interesting ideas that are broached in the first act.  There is a clear parallel to the present day controversy over using drones to take out American citizens without benefit of trial or a discussion as to whether they have Constitutional rights.  And Peter Weller plays a Karl Rove/Donald Rumsfeld type character who tries to start a war under bogus pretenses.  But after these intriguing and thought provoking issues are introduced, they’re pretty much dispensed with (as quickly and with as little conscious as those unknowns that are killed off) so Abrams can get around to doing what he does best: blow things up.  As I said, it’s all a bit dispiriting.

Even the strongest aspect of the 2009 entry doesn’t wear well in this sequel.  Whatever else one can say about the previous Star Trek movie, it was brilliantly and cleverly cast.  Half the fun of the film was enjoying how well everyone fit and played their roles.  But here, the acting is pushed to the edge with in your face line readings and everybody wearing their emotions on their sleeves.  No one has the impact of the earlier film here because there’s no room for subtlety among all the ticking time bomb plot turns going on (all of which seem to be set for thirty seconds, yet feel like they take minutes to happen).  And it doesn’t help the actors that there’s precious little humor here, far less than in the previous entry; even Hamlet has more laugh lines.   Cumberbatch as Khan is perfectly fine, but since most of his acting is relegated to telling everyone what happened in the past (and even this is a bit hard to follow and understand) and he’s given no real emotional arc to play here (in the episode in the TV series, he’s at least allowed to fall in love), he can do little but sit and glower.    Only Weller really makes an impression.   In fact, about the most interesting thing about the cast this time round is there willingness to be billed in alphabetical order at the end (which must have made John Cho’s day).

Even the climax feels like a downer.   Kirk sacrifices himself in the same way that Spock did in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  It certainly doesn’t have anywhere near the emotional impact of Spock sacrificing himself.  And not only does it just feel lazy and unimaginative, it also feels like an insult to the writers of the earlier movie. 

Tell me what you think.

THE GREAT GATSBY

The new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is filmed by director Baz Luhrmann as if everyone and everything in it had a fever, which in many ways is probably a very acute approach to this story that takes place during a particular frenzied time in U.S. history.   Everything is hyped, over the top, as if it’s on Benzedrine.   As a result, this is probably Luhrmann’s best film to date.  This is not to say it’s a good film (it doesn’t quite go there), but it’s certainly far superior to Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! 

People always talk of the difficulty of adapting Fitzgerald’s classic novel (which wasn’t so classic when it came out; it flopped miserably when it was first published).  For me, the problem has always revolved around the character of Gatsby himself, who is, in many ways, the least interesting person in the book.   He’s not the central character; Nick Carroway, the somewhat callow observer, has that honor and it’s Nick who the story is about.  And most of what makes Gatsby interesting takes place in the past long before the story starts; and when this past is related, it’s often open to credulity.   So how do you dramatize a story about someone who is a secondary character and whose past is primarily myth?

Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, in many ways take the same tact that the writers and director did in the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd.  They downplay all the other characters and fight fiercely to bring Gatsby center stage.   The Ladd version did it by turning the story of Gatsby into a film noir, fully dramatizing in flashback his rise to gangster glory.  Luhrmann and Pearce do it by emphasizing the love story between Gatsby and Daisy, giving it a tragic, star crossed lovers feel.

This approach has its downside.  It often reduces the other characters to their bare necessities.  Jordan Baker now has so little to do, one wonders why she is even in the picture.  And the Wilsons, George and Myrtle, are now no more than mere melodramatic contrivances (this actually works the best because these two characters now feel more like toys that the well to do play with rather than real characters in their own right).  

But from a dramatic standpoint, Luhrmann’s approach was probably a sound stratagem because the romance is the part of the movie that works the best.   There is something touching, often beautiful, about these two doomed lovers.  Luhrmann is able to restrain himself a bit here and let the actors and the screenplay pull their weight such that when Gatsby is a terrified little boy waiting for Daisy to arrive for tea or when he is throwing his shirts down to Daisy, the moments become rather transcendental.   

Of course, Luhrmann and Pearce have to cheat a bit to make it work.  They up the tragedy by purifying the love story.  In the novel, one of the reasons Gatsby is attracted to Daisy is due to her background (the movie leaves out Gatsby’s line that Daisy’s voice sounds like “money”) and the writers downplay that one of the reasons Daisy first rejects Gatsby is because he has no wealth and then accepts him more to get back at her husband for cheating on her than out of true love.  And they also play a bit fast and lose on the death of Myrtle; in the book, there’s some indication it wasn’t totally an accident, that Daisy swerved the car purposely, while in the movie the suggestion is that it was completely unintentional and unavoidable.  No, Luhrmann instead decides to swoon in delirium over the couples feelings for each other.   And some good swooning it is.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Gatsby and it is his performance that holds the movie together.  When he appears, DiCaprio shows both Gatsby’s strength and vulnerability at the same time just by standing there.   His line readings are spot on; even the “old sport”, a phrase almost impossible to say with a straight face (maybe it works because DiCaprio pronounces the words as if they are as much of a sham as the house he lives in and the parties he throws).   This Gatsby is both so fierce and adorable in what he wants, he makes us want it to.  

And he gets able support from Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Joel Edgerton as her racist, to the manor born husband Tom.  They have great chemistry with DiCaprio and match him line reading for line reading.  It all results in a scene that feels like it’s torn from a boulevard drama: all the characters are trapped in a hotel room together when everything comes out.  Everyone plays it like they were doing O’Neill and they pretty much get away with it.   Sad to say, though, Tobey Maguire, as Carraway, is the weak point here.  He is given the thankless task of voice over narrating.  But the narration is clunky and Maguire is listless and flat, a deadly combination.

But in the end, though there is actually much to like here, and even much to admire, it never quite comes together in a satisfying whole.   It works best when Luhrmann matches his editing and directing style to the brilliantly chosen, but often anachronistic music.  However, the film is more of an interpretation of The Great Gatsby rather than a story that works in its own right.   This even leads to Luhrmann and Pearce working very hard to parallel the story to today: Nick works in bonds at a time just before the country will be hit by recession; Tom is a representative of the 1% while the Wilsons are the 99; and the authors really emphasize the increasing presence of blacks in society. 

But Luhrmann is also such a visual stylist and such an over director, that all subtlety is lost.  Everything is over telegraphed to such a degree that the weak parts of the book (the obvious symbolism of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg and the melodramatic contrivances of who is driving what car when Myrtle is killed) only feel weaker, while the strengths of the book are done so big they often get in the way of allowing one to become emotionally involved in the story as one would like.   Rather than feel the emotions, you are much more interested in critiquing Luhrmann’s approach to the material (though I have to say, I loved the Rhapsody in Blue intro of Gatsby at his party).

Tell me what you think.

DISCONNECT, ARTHUR NEWMAN and THE ICEMAN

Disconnect, the new techno-thriller from writer Andrew Stern and director Henry Alex Rubin, spends half its time preaching the horrors of modern computer technology and all the evils it can spawn, and then seems to change its mind and spend the other half telling us how that very same technology (and the evil it spawns) can bring estranged people together and save our souls by revealing who we really are.  One might think that the filmmakers were going for irony, but I have to be honest and say I think irony was the last thing in play here.  For me, the driving force of the film was pandering to the audience with filmmakers taking a typical middlebrow approach to art: confront the audience with something important and even horrendous, but only to the degree that it doesn’t upset them too much and affect the box office. 

Disconnect has several through lines in which people are linked in a sort of La Ronde relationship—one person in one story is connected in some way to a person in another.  It never comes full circle, so it doesn’t quite fit the structure of Schnitzler’s legendary opus, but it is the cleverest aspect of the film and perhaps the only satisfactory irony to be found: we’re all disconnected due to the internet, yet we end up being even more connected than we thought. 

The movie is ambitious and sincere, but never quite has the emotional impact it is aiming for.  One reason for this is that for a thriller, Stern and Rubin aren’t able to really generate that many, well, thrills.   There’s a lot of conflict, but precious little tension and it seems to take its time going anywhere.  There could be several reasons for this.  None of the various stories are all that original and their plot lines have few surprises; every turn is signaled well before it happens and the resolutions are rather ho-hum with a touch of LOL along for the ride (they all climax in a set of slow motion, Matrix like intercut sequences that were probably suppose to emphasize the tragedy of it all, but instead only doubled the over the top feeling that was already there).  

In addition, each through line has enough going for it to be a whole movie unto itself; but by squeezing each plotline into the length of basically a half hour TV episode, it tended to also squeeze out all the suspense (I couldn’t help but think of what Alfred Hitchcock or Claude Chabrol could have done with just one of the stories).   Finally, the whole thing just felt a bit too manipulated, never quite real, with characters that seemed more driven by the plot than the plot being driven by the characters; the result is that the more empathy the filmmakers tried to create for their characters, the less there was.

The acting is solid, but save for a couple of exceptions (Alexander Skarsgard as a victim of identity theft and Michael Nyqvist as someone who may or may not have stolen that identity), no one really rises above the limitations of the screenplay.   Hope Davis is wasted in a minor role (and for some reason is given the thankless and perplexing task of not understanding why her husband, played by Jason Bateman, might actually want to find out why his son tried to kill himself).   Everyone seems to wear their emotions on their sleeves.  Subtle is not a word that might be used to describe the film.

In Sam Shepard’s great play The Curse of the Starving Class, there is a conversation that goes something like this: one character wants to move in order to get away from their present environment, but another character responds by saying, “…but we’ll still be the same people”.  I couldn’t help but think of this when I saw Arthur Newman, a film about a man who creates a new identity for himself (yes, Virginia, Arthur’s last name is not the most subtle of choices here). 

Colin Firth plays the title character, a Babbit in a grey, flannel suit (well, since he works for Fed Ex, brown khaki pants, but you get my drift).  Arthur is a rather boring character, to be both blunt and kind.  And when he’s fired from his place of employment, he decides to reboot his life.  Unfortunately for him, and the audience, the new Arthur is as boring and uninteresting as his previous incarnation.  To make matters worse, Firth uses a bland American accent that’s even more tedious than his personality.

Things pick up a bit when he meets Emily Blunt (as things are wont to do when one meets Emily Blunt), who plays a character who has identity issues of her own, issues compounded by a game she talks Arthur into playing in which they break into people’s homes, wear their victims’ clothes, eat their victims’ food, drink their wine and have sex in their beds. 

In the end, screenwriter Becky Johnston and director Dante Ariola show great empathy for their characters, but the movie never really comes together.  I suspect that this is because there are so many through lines going on (Arthur wanting to be a golf pro; Blunt’s issues; their sex games; Arthur’s failed relationship with his son), that the filmmakers can’t seem to find a way to weave them all together in a satisfactory whole.

The Iceman, the new crime drama by writers Ariel Vromen (who also directed) and Morgan Land, is a movie where Ray Liotta finally meets someone even more psychopathic than he is and where Winona Ryder, David Schwimmer and Chris Evans try to earn street cred by playing against type (for the record, Evans comes out best).   There’s nothing really wrong with the movie.  It gets the job done and I was never bored.  Michael Shannon does very well in the title role.  But in the end, it doesn’t come close to plumbing the existential depths of the television series Dexter and falls into the “if you’ve seen one contract killer movie, you’ve seen them all”.   

Tell me what you think.

IRON MAN 3

Iron Man 3 is one of those movies you don’t really look forward to seeing, but when you do, it actually turns out to be much better than you ever thought it would be.  In fact, I think I’ll go out on a limb a little bit here and say that it’s a pretty nifty movie and you won’t be disappointed.

The beginning did fill me with a sense of foreboding.  The whole thing begins with a flashback in which all the actors pushed their characters just a bit much (Guy Pearce is particularly weak here; well, actually, I thought he was embarrassingly bad, but perhaps that’s just me) and the humor was just a bit too, too.  But once everything jumps to 2013, the film quickly finds its sea legs and we’re off on an adventure that is basically, as is the norm for a Marvel superhero, an existential crisis meets the apocalypse.  

Not everything works quite as well as it might.  Robert Downey, Jr., back once again as the man in the tuna can, can’t quite sell his anxiety attacks and his voice over is a bit clunky at times (though it does lead to a nice little punch line at the end which means, non-spoiler alert, you must, MUST, stay in your seat until that last little credit has left the screen).  But let’s not be petty.  Director Shane Black, who co-wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce, has filled the dialog with tons of wit of the tongue planted firmly in check kind and has come up with a story in which excitement abounds by leaps and.

But perhaps what really makes this entry is an unexpected delight of a first rate supporting cast.  In fact, in many ways, that’s all this movie is.  Not a series of action scenes filled with CGI special effects in which a director is trying to make up for his penis size, but a series of roundelays in which Robert Downey, Jr.’s acting style has a pax de duex with one character after another.   In fact, as a friend of mine pointed out, this was an Iron Man movie without Iron Man since Tony Stark is separated from his body armor for such long periods of time, he actually has to solve the problem as a mere mortal like the rest of us.   He’s also more than dependent on his sidekicks than usual, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Pot and Don Cheadle as Rhodes, both of whom made the wise decision of sticking around for the paycheck (they’re both very good, Paltrow surprisingly so).

But to get back to subject, these scene stealers include such cameos as the not seen enough Dale Dickey as the mother of a suspected suicide bomber (I guess she’s the person you go for if you can’t get Melissa Leo); Andrew Lauer as an “I’m your biggest fan” satellite technician; and a series of guards who quickly realize that they aren’t paid enough for this shit.  But certainly special note should be made of Ty Simpkins who plays a precocious tyke whose cajones haven’t dropped yet, but he still has enough of them to try to guilt trip Stark.   If he’s not brought back for the next installment, his manager should sue.

Still, with no reflection on the aforesaids, no one can quite steal a scene like the sly Sir Ben Kingsley.  Like the movie, his first scene as the Mandarin (or Man Daren in the Chinese version) filled me with a sense of foreboding as he employs just about the worst American accent I’ve heard in some time.  But suddenly, he…no, sorry, I’m not supposed to say, it’s one of the best twists in the movie, and he gives the best performance in the film.   I mean, when he…no, I can’t, I just can’t.  You’ll just have to see it. 

And what superhero, studio blockbuster would be complete without villains, villains and more villains.  In fact, that was about the only thing worth the price of admission for Iron Man II, Mickey Rourke’s powerhouse performance as Ivan Vanko.   Here we have Pearce as Aldrich Killian, a scientist who does some sort of rigmarole with the brain and DNA that has the unfortunate side effect of creating human time bombs (my friend said he wished they had dealt more with that and I said they could have dealt with it for the entire movie and I still wouldn’t have had any idea what they were talking about).   Pearce gives one of his more relaxed performances in awhile.  Oh, and Rebecca Hall is his second in command, but you’ll have to forgive me if I almost forgot her since she doesn’t really have anything to do.   

But speaking of the villains, I do have to be honest and say I am a bit squeamish in the movie’s attitude toward terrorism, blaming it on bullying and a hell hath no fury like a woman scorned one night stand.  It’s all a bit cartoonish, even for a comic. 

But hey, arrive for the CGI and stay for the Kingsley.

Tell me what you think.

IN THE HOUSE, MUD and TO THE WONDER

In the House, the new film from writer/director François Ozon, is a movie where you wait an hour and forty-five minutes for the other shoe to drop…and it never does. 

The basic premise revolves around Germain, a somewhat bitter high school teacher, who assigns his literature class an essay about what they did over the weekend.  The results are depressingly high schoolish until he reads one from student Claude who writes about his attempts to insinuate himself into the household of a fellow student who has an ideal, Andy Hardy/Donna Reed middle class home.  The essay is condescending and laced with wry observations, but it shows talent.  It also ends with “(to be continued)”.  As the film goes on, Claude gets inside that household and writes more and more (to be continued) essays until Germain is so hooked that he not only spends extra time with Claude, he also helps him in ways that will come back to bite him in the ass.

The movie starts out well and even makes your mouth water at the possibilities here.  Just what is this Claude up to?  And why is he involving Germain?  But alas, these are the shoes that never drop.  And as the story continues, often backed by a thrilling music score by Philippe Rombi that makes you think something exciting is transpiring on screen even when it isn’t, the more and more puzzling the whole thing becomes.  Not only do we never find out exactly what is going on, it kind of ends with the idea that nothing was ever going on at all in the first place.  But if so, then what was the point of it all?

Equally puzzling, and I think one of the major problems with the movie, is that as Claude continues on with his soap operic observations of this family, the better Germain (as well as his wife who also starts reading the essays) thinks Claude’s writing and story is becoming, when in actuality, the less and less interesting, the more banal, boring and clichéd, it turns out to be.  Let’s face it, Claude was never going to be mistaken for Proust, but still it’s just difficult to believe that Germain continues to have such a high opinion of his student the more he reads.  Even more puzzling is that as the essays pile up, the more obvious it is that Claude is at times just making things up (if he’s not, then he’s even a worse writer than he appears).  But this never seems to dawn on Germain, perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of the film.

It must be said that though the actors never quite sell the premise and plot turns, their performances are still first rate.  Frabrice Luchini, a character actor with a face that Walter Mathau would be proud of, plays Germain with a certain hang dog loopiness.  Kirsten Scott Thomas plays his wife and it’s one of her sharpest performances.   Ernst Umhauer is Claude with a smile just this side of Damien in The Omen.  Also in a blink or you’ll miss it cameo is Yolando Moreau, proof that even in France, as over here, if you win the equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actress but don’t look like Catherine Deneuve, you’ll still be stuck having to play parts insultingly unworthy of you.

 

The conversation I had with my friends after seeing Mud, the new Matthew McConaughey vehicle by writer/director Jeff Nichols (who also gave us Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories), went something like this:  Them: “What did you think”, Me: “I think it moved a little leisurely”, Them: “A little?”, Me: “All right.  It was as slow as molasses”, Them: “Thank you”.

Yes, Mud is not the most forward momentum of movies.  And in a way that’s rather surprising given the basic subject matter.  Ellis, a young teen, and his best friend go look at a boat that has lodged in a tree after a recent flood, but discover that someone is living there, the title character Mud, who is in town to rescue the woman he loves and take her away before he is killed by the bounty hunters hired by the father of the woman’s boyfriend Mud killed after the boyfriend beat up the woman.  Sounds pretty much like a ticking time bomb of a premise to me, but the movie tends to get diverted along the way with the teen’s problems with his parents who are drifting apart and his attempt to win the heart of a girl who is out of his league, until the tension all gets a bit waterlogged since Nichols just can’t get as much energy flowing for his other through lines as he does for the one concerning Mud.

But there’s also something else missing from the heart of this movie.  One of the major leit motifs here is that Mud is constantly described as a liar and nothing remotely as he presents himself.  The woman he loves says it; his substitute father figure says it; even Mud says it, until at one point even Ellis himself screams it at him.  Yet, oddly enough, the one thing that Mud never does is lie.  Everything he tells Ellis is pretty much exactly on the level with not one whiff of misrepresentation.  Well, that’s not exactly accurate.  Mud does tell a whopper once.  When Ellis yells out at him that women aren’t worth loving, Mud tells him that’s not true.   Except that within the context of the movie, Ellis is right and Mud is lying.  All the women in the movie do nothing but declare their love for a man, then stab him in the back.   I suppose that Nichols might be saying that the nobility of the male of the species resides in the tragedy of their continual decision to fall in love in spite of how unworthy their beloveds are.  Still, it all seems a bit odd to me.

The point, though, is that this sort of throws Ellis’s journey off a bit.  The audience is being set up for Ellis to learn some big secret about Mud,  a lie that will change Ellis forever and help him on his journey to adulthood as is the wont of coming of age films.  But there is no secret.  It’s all a red herring.  And Ellis learns something about life, but it has little to do with the title character.

The movie is lovely to look at with languorous vistas of sunsets and open waters and there’s a nice feel for small town life.  It has a slam bang climax that’s not that believable, but is incredibly satisfying emotionally.  The acting is solid, though it’s Sam Shepard as the father figure who gives the most interesting performance.   Tye Sheridan as Ellis is capable.  And McConaughey does his McConaughey thing, though this time he only strips down to his bare chest.  Oh, yeah, uh, Reese Witherspoon and Michael Shannon are in it, too. 

Tortuous.  I’m sorry, but I don’t know how else to say it.  Writer/director Terence Malick’s new film To the Wonder is…tortuous.  Directed/filmed/edited in the same style employed for the central section of his last film The Tree of Life, a series of quick glimpses and expressionistic scenes, To the Wonder starts out somewhat hypnotically with gorgeous cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  But it’s not long before one quickly realizes that there ain’t a lot going on here and what there is, isn’t that original or interesting.  In fact, the best way to summarize it might be to say that there seems to be some sort of story here, but Malick is desperately determined not to tell it.  It concerns a man’s relationship with two woman, one a French citizen he brings to America with her child and whom he grows tired of, the second an old flame that he has a fling with and whom he grows tired of.  As the film goes on it begins to resemble more and more a classical music video that one might find on a PBS station after its daily schedule is over.   And the aesthetic approach, the snippets of scenes sewn together with a somewhat impressionistic, improvisational feel, seems as if it’s not there to bring more insight and depth to the relationships semi-dramatized in the movie, but chosen to cover up the idea that there’s really nothing of interest going on.   The characters are played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko (who seem to spend much of their time quietly avoiding each other while living in a house they can never seem to finish and is filled with boxes and suitcases that are never fully unpacked—I think this is what is called symbolic), with Rachel McAdams as the old girlfriend and Javier Bardem as a rather unimpressive priest who does little but walk around in existential agony, though not in as much existential agony as I was in watching the movie.

Tell me what you think.

OBLIVION and THE ATTACK

Oblivion is the new Tom Cruise sci-fi blockbuster, a description that may seem triply redundant.  Basically, it’s a bunch of “who didn’t see that coming” and a couple of “no real surprises there” and a few too many turnings to my friend and asking, “do you have any idea what’s going on here” (his reply, “I think so”, probably isn’t the sort of confident response the writers, Joseph Kosinski—who also directed, Karl Gadjusek and Michael Ardnt, were hoping for, though in their defense I don’t know whether I found the story hard to follow because it’s convolutedly written; or because I was so bored my mind kept wandering and I missed a plot point here and there; or both).

The basic premise has to do with some sort of yadda, yadda, yadda in which the earth it attacked by aliens and the moon is blown up making the earth uninhabitable.  After winning the war the people of earth moved to…no, you know what?  Forget it.  I’m sorry, but I’m not going to summarize it.  It’s just not worth it the money they’re paying me (okay, no one’s paying me anything, but it isn’t worth the money they would pay me if they were paying me, which they aren’t, so…).

Anyway, suffice it to say that our world is now one of those apocalyptic wastelands.  But even worse, it’s now filled with bland characters saying bland things in a bland plot.  I’d say the CGI is stunning, but we’re now grading on a curve and it’s no worse and no better than any other recent apocalyptic film (though I think the scenes of Cruise on a motorcycle speeding across the New York City desert looked a bit, well, cheesy to me).  The thumping, thunderous music by Anthony Gonzales, M.8.3. and Joseph Trapanese may not be great or original, but it’s nice to have someone trying to create a little tension here.  The production design by Darren Gilford includes a streamlined, glass house suspended in the sky (I’d say it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but this one is an engineering marvel).   The cast includes Melissa Leo and Morgan Freeman for reasons as impenetrable as the plot (I hope it was for the paycheck).

The ending is a bit odd.  For a movie that seems to want to hold up the uniqueness of man and the importance of their survival, it finales on the dubious moral note (and a rather offensive one to me) that the death of a man is irrelevant as long as he has a clone hanging around.  It’s also borderline ludicrous since all I could think is “boy, is Julia…” (oh, right, uh, see, Julia is this character who..okay, she’s, uh…no, you know what, again, forget it, I’m not going to explain this part of the plot either), “boy, is Julia going to be surprised when all the other Tom Cruises show up”.   I could also make a joke about Tom Cruise and clones and isn’t he one already, etc., but I won’t since that sort of humor is beneath me. 

If you must see an apocalyptic movie, don’t see this one, see It’s a Disaster.  Even if you musn’t see an apocalyptic movie, see It’s a Disaster. 

What would do if you discovered out of nowhere and with no hint or clue to prepare you that your spouse was a terrorist.  No, take it a step further.  What would you do if he or she is a suicide bomber and has just killed a large number of people, including children?  That’s the basic premise of the new, breathtaking drama, The Attack.

Amin Jaafari is a Palestinian and a secular Muslim fully integrated into Israeli society.  He’s also a celebrated and well known doctor working at a major hospital.  The story begins with him receiving the most prestigious award one can receive as a doctor.  The next day, after a bomb explodes, he’s on the front lines in the ER, refusing to let even one child die.  He’s a saint.  No, the writers Ziad Doueiri, who also directed, and Joelle Touma are trying to do a little bit more here.  Amin is a credit to his race.  At the award ceremony he gives a speech Hattie McDaniel would have been proud of at the 1939 Oscars.  He’s Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s coming to Dinner.  And though you like and admire him, there is also something about this noble doctor that makes you squirm just a little bit.

And then it happens.  After the blast and the hard day in the ER, Amin is called back to the hospital to identify a body; his wife, who is suspected of being the person who set off the bomb that sent all the people to the hospital that he saved.  He’s then taken in for questioning, but eventually released when it seems clear he had no idea that his wife was involved in anything.  The story is then about his trying to understand why his wife would do what she did.

The Attack is not a perfect film.  It has structural issues.  When Amin finds out about his wife, he has to go through the denial stage of death twice.  First he has to accept that his wife is dead, then he has to accept that she did what the authorities claim she did.  This slows the pacing down a bit because until he does that, he can’t go on his Citizen Kane/Mask of Dimitrios quest of going from person to person to find the answers he needs   The result is a middle section that tends to stall for awhile.   But the forward momentum soon recovers, grabbing you like the first part of the movie does, refusing to let go. 

Amin is played by Ali Suliman who gives a masterful and deeply empathetic performance as the beleaguered doctor.  By the end, his character is abandoned by everyone, both the Palestinians whose cause is not his cause, and the Israelis who claimed they would never desert him, but eventually make him realize that he will always be a Palestinian to them.

The Attack is a movie that should be seen.  Oblivion is one that should not.

Tell me what you think.

For more reviews, check out my blog at http://howardcasner.blogspot.com

IT'S A DISASTER

It’s a Disaster is what is called a mixed-genre film.  Part of it is young urban professionals (yuppies) at play, a style of comedy/drama that became very popular in theatrical form as Off-Broadway began dying in the 1980’s and ‘90’s and that for reasons that completely elude me would sometimes win a Pulitzer Prize.  The other genre is the disaster film, an appropriate, in many ways, pair of genres to cross since so often one would wish something apocalyptic would happen in a story like this so that the characters and the audience would be put out of their misery (oh, just think how much better Carnage would have been if only they had been hit by a meteorite).

The basic premise of the movie is that once a month a group of twenty/thirty somethings gather for a couples’ brunch at someone’s house.  For this particular gathering, everything starts out as usual, but soon things start happening—you know, things, like…like losing cell phone and internet reception; losing electricity; and a neighbor dropping by in a hazmat suit who is about to tell them what is going on but just leaves when he realizes they were having a party but didn’t invite him since he was no longer in a relationship.  Those sorts of things.  And then the characters manage to find out that some group has exploded a series of dirty bombs all over the U.S. making it necessary for them to tape up all the doors and windows and wait…and wait…and wait.

The basic humor of the story is the type one usually finds in a dark comedy like this: the world is coming to an end, but the various characters can’t stop their own petty problems and issues with each other from becoming more prominent than what is going on outside the house (you know, we’re all about to die, but how dare you sleep with my wife type thing, and why do all the men I date turn out to be insane, and how about a three way before the end comes).  Of course, when one thinks about it, this egotism at the center of the movie pretty much sums up the problem with most yuppie at play movies as it is.  Here, the disaster only brings to the fore the self-centeredness of what is really going on at these gatherings.   One of the darkest (yet funniest) scenes is what happens to the couple that are habitually late—you’re horrified, yet strangely more sympathetic to the people who arrived on time.

This is a first rate little low budget gem that is hysterical from beginning to end.   The screenplay by Todd Berger, who also directed and plays the miffed, hazmatted neighbor, is one of those where two characters have only to exchange two lines and you know instantly their whole history together.   To paraphrase Pauline Kael’s comments on the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera and Il Travotore, Berger does to the yuppies at play genre what should be done to the yuppies at play genre.  He may have painted himself into a corner with the ending, but it’s still pretty satisfying.  The acting is pitch ensemble perfect with a solid cast: Julia Stiles, David Cross, America Ferrera, Erinn Hayes, Jeff Grace, Rachel Boston, Kevin M. Brenna, Blaise Miller.  For those of you making independent films, let this be a lesson as to what can be done without A-listers.   And it has one of the most imaginative uses of classical music that I’ve come across in a movie in some time.   

See it before it’s too late.

Tell me what you think.