(2007, USA. Directed by Richard LaGravenese.)
Message movies are particularly bothersome. By definition self-righteous and sanctimonious, they promote their (usually maudlin) agendas through whatever means necessary. Usually, these pictures have large budgets, banner stars, and are produced by major studios, all signs pointing to classification as “entertainment.” And so whatever message is at stake normally drowns under the generic detritus surrounding it -- narrative conventions reign and the viewer can’t help but feel tugged in two directions: to be entertained or not to be entertained? It’s all made worse because we’re being told how to feel. What a drag.
Freedom Writers certainly has an agenda. It’s the story of a green teacher’s Herculean struggle to teach South Central high-schoolers that violence isn’t the answer. If anyone disagrees with that, well too bad -- this movie isn’t for you. But for those of us who like peace, it’s right up our alley.
Toothy Hillary Swank plays the teacher. Naively bubbly, she skips around the classroom in sensible skirts and pearls and wonder’s why the gangstas won’t read Homer. In real life, she’d be torn to shreds; but here, all it takes is a journal assignment for the inner-city youths to develop a keen (and unlikely) interest in their studies.
There isn’t much of a central conflict -- by the halfway point, we know these kids are college-bound -- so the movie invents a few issues: fellow teachers, annoyed or jealous or something, sabotage Swank and we follow minor stories from several students about what life’s like in the ‘hood. Supposedly based on the diaries of real-life counterparts, these multiple narratives place a logistical burden on the filmmakers -- we hear the inner-monologues of an array of characters and their out-of-nowhere voiceovers are confusing. Waffling indecisively, Freedom Writers sways between central characters: the students? Swank?
But the movie’s most regrettable conceit is also its central one -- that the Holocaust and L.A. gang violence are somehow related. Resembling the U.N. in its prearranged diversity, Swank’s classroom is fraught with racial tension. When an African-American caricature, complete with protruding lips, is discovered being passed among the students, Swank instructs that the drawing is no different than those big-nosed Jewish farces that circulated in 30’s Germany: “This is the kind of stuff that leads to the Holocaust.” She’s greeted with blank stares. “What’s the Holocaust?” Hearts and minds are opened when they are assigned The Diary of Anne Frank, visit the Holocaust Museum, and even absorb a lecture from Miep Gies, Anne Frank’s real-life guardian. Somewhere amongst the oppression and tyranny, Swank and her students see a metaphor for their own lives. Really, the conflation is troubling; I can‘t find Buchenwald’s present-day equivalent. It’s probably best just to leave the Holocaust out of “entertainment” metaphor altogether.
For a movie with universal race relations on its mind, Freedom Writers is annoyingly dim. (It was produced by MTV Films.) It’s like being assigned an Illustrated Classics version of Huckleberry Finn -- the movie jettisons tough issues in favor of those easily sorted, and it's frustrating not to be able to raise your hand and call bullshit.
Today’s lecture is on racism, and Freedom Writers would rather everyone keep quiet and listen to what the white people have to say.
Can I go to the bathroom now?
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Arthur and the Invisibles
(2006, France. Directed by Luc Besson.)
In Arthur and the Invisibles, you play as Arthur, a precocious schoolboy living at his grandmother’s while on summer vacation. Arthur’s adventuring grandfather, it seems, has mysteriously disappeared and the bank is foreclosing on his idyllic hamlet. But family legend has it that, prior to vanishing, Grandfather concealed priceless African rubies somewhere on his vast property. Using Arthur’s inherited cunning, Grandfather’s hidden clues, and whatever else is at Arthur’s disposal, it is up to you to guide Arthur deep into the miniscule and magical world of the Minimoys and recover the jewels and, possibly, Arthur’s grandfather before it’s too late.
Wait. Scratch that. Arthur and the Invisibles isn’t a video game. But it I wouldn’t blame anyone for confusing this mess with a “Myst” knock-off made up entirely of cut-scenes. Problem is, cut-scenes are the boring part; Arthur and the Invisibles is like a video game that won’t let you play. Or more accurately, it’s like watching its director, Luc Besson, play a video game and he won’t hand over the controls.
Besson is a curious auteur. His movies certainly have a style; there’s a steady hand behind the camera. One can connect his films thematically and there’s an undeniable vision. Plus he’s French -- one assumes talent from a guy of this stature. (He’s got three sure hits under his belt: Le Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element.) Maybe he’s a trash auteur; but unlike Sam Fuller and Russ Meyer, this guy works with budgets that would feed a small country.
Most of Arthur and the Invisibles, though, feels less like the work of a Eurotrash junk artist than the test-screened bastard child of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Harvey Weinstein. Shrek is the obvious reference point here -- Arthur more than fills it quota of winking pop culture references. (There are Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever nods, a lightsaber duel, and Snoop Dogg plays an albino Rastafarian who serves our heroes a iridescent green cocktail. It emits a green fog that billows out of their nostrils and mouths when they exhale -- they get kiddie stoned.) These jokes fly over children’s heads and are supposed to give parents a kick: Bored with Bambi? Check out Arthur and the Invisibles! It’s like getting two movies for the price of one! All the snarkiness quickly wears thin.
Beyond hip self-awareness, Arthur and the Incredibles is a post-modern pastiche of plot. There’s the video game setup (household objects accomplish arbitrary tasks), Joseph Conrad-esque backstory, and the narrative cites everything from Honey I Shrunk the Kids to the King Arthur legend. But this vast cultural reference-base can’t save the film from incoherency -- like most of Besson’s other work, it suffers from ADHD and a severely over-active imagination. Unlike everything else he’s done, however, it’s animated, so Besson’s allowed to get as crazy as he wants and little of it ends up making sense.
If anything, the winking post-modernism keeps Arthur and the Invisibles frivolous throughout. It isn’t really as annoying as watching someone play a video game because there isn’t much at stake; there’s no potential for fun here. On its own, the movie’s harmless; but along with Shrek, Happily N’Ever, etc., the conflation of the children’s movie and the grown-up movie is worrisome. In the future, will family-friendly entertainment be the only entertainment?
In Arthur and the Invisibles, you play as Arthur, a precocious schoolboy living at his grandmother’s while on summer vacation. Arthur’s adventuring grandfather, it seems, has mysteriously disappeared and the bank is foreclosing on his idyllic hamlet. But family legend has it that, prior to vanishing, Grandfather concealed priceless African rubies somewhere on his vast property. Using Arthur’s inherited cunning, Grandfather’s hidden clues, and whatever else is at Arthur’s disposal, it is up to you to guide Arthur deep into the miniscule and magical world of the Minimoys and recover the jewels and, possibly, Arthur’s grandfather before it’s too late.
Wait. Scratch that. Arthur and the Invisibles isn’t a video game. But it I wouldn’t blame anyone for confusing this mess with a “Myst” knock-off made up entirely of cut-scenes. Problem is, cut-scenes are the boring part; Arthur and the Invisibles is like a video game that won’t let you play. Or more accurately, it’s like watching its director, Luc Besson, play a video game and he won’t hand over the controls.
Besson is a curious auteur. His movies certainly have a style; there’s a steady hand behind the camera. One can connect his films thematically and there’s an undeniable vision. Plus he’s French -- one assumes talent from a guy of this stature. (He’s got three sure hits under his belt: Le Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element.) Maybe he’s a trash auteur; but unlike Sam Fuller and Russ Meyer, this guy works with budgets that would feed a small country.
Most of Arthur and the Invisibles, though, feels less like the work of a Eurotrash junk artist than the test-screened bastard child of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Harvey Weinstein. Shrek is the obvious reference point here -- Arthur more than fills it quota of winking pop culture references. (There are Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever nods, a lightsaber duel, and Snoop Dogg plays an albino Rastafarian who serves our heroes a iridescent green cocktail. It emits a green fog that billows out of their nostrils and mouths when they exhale -- they get kiddie stoned.) These jokes fly over children’s heads and are supposed to give parents a kick: Bored with Bambi? Check out Arthur and the Invisibles! It’s like getting two movies for the price of one! All the snarkiness quickly wears thin.
Beyond hip self-awareness, Arthur and the Incredibles is a post-modern pastiche of plot. There’s the video game setup (household objects accomplish arbitrary tasks), Joseph Conrad-esque backstory, and the narrative cites everything from Honey I Shrunk the Kids to the King Arthur legend. But this vast cultural reference-base can’t save the film from incoherency -- like most of Besson’s other work, it suffers from ADHD and a severely over-active imagination. Unlike everything else he’s done, however, it’s animated, so Besson’s allowed to get as crazy as he wants and little of it ends up making sense.
If anything, the winking post-modernism keeps Arthur and the Invisibles frivolous throughout. It isn’t really as annoying as watching someone play a video game because there isn’t much at stake; there’s no potential for fun here. On its own, the movie’s harmless; but along with Shrek, Happily N’Ever, etc., the conflation of the children’s movie and the grown-up movie is worrisome. In the future, will family-friendly entertainment be the only entertainment?
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
(2006, China. Directed by Zhang Yimou.)
There’s a long cinematic history of accomplished directors testing new generic waters. Hitchcock gave overt comedy a shot in The Trouble with Harry. Before a legendary streak from the fifties to the seventies, Bergman tried Neo-Realism in 1948’s Port of Call. And Kurosawa took several breaks from historical epics to try out contemporary noir (most notably in High and Low and Stray Dog). In all of those films, a bit of their maker remains; none can quite shake its director’s idiosyncratic tendencies. (They’re all one-offs, after all.)
And so it is with Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. Steeped in the vernacular of mid-90’s Iranian cinema, it’s a quiet and lyrical journey-piece that moves slowly, reveals deep truths, and plays with the notion of film itself.
In the film, an absent Japanese father is roused by guilt over his son’s untimely cancer diagnosis to travel to a remote Chinese province. The son, it is discovered, is a fanatic of ancient Chinese folk opera and the father’s journey is a reconciliation of sorts: he will film his son’s favorite opera singer as a last-minute gesture of goodwill. But bumps lay ahead: the singer is locked in a maximum security prison. the father’s translator knows very little Japanese, and the Chinese bureaucracy is, to put it lightly, a hurdle.
Much of Riding Alone resembles its Iranian genesis: the stoic protagonists, the thin plot, and the deliberate pacing all point towards masterworks like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence. Even its setting -- the dusty, windswept canyons of the Chinese highlands -- resembles those films’ arid terrains.
But Riding Alone’s Eastern mindset doesn’t gel -- an Iranian director would never let as much sentimentality invade the proceedings or so deliberately pluck the heartstrings. The hero’s poetic voiceover is far too emotive and a late moment in which an roomful of prisoners sobs to a slideshow is especially out of place.
Much of what is genuinely striking about Middle Eastern cinema is its boisterous filmic intellectualism. Working under decades of repression and censorship, Iranian directors spent years simply thinking about movies, what they are, and what it means to make one. So when guidelines were gently lifted in the 1990’s, their movies reflected their makers’ obsessions: these films are either about making movies or else they frankly (and sometimes shockingly) lift the curtain between subject and product. They’re mind-blowingly meta.
And while Riding Alone refers to itself throughout -- its title, for instance, is also the title of the father’s film and of the opera he is filming -- its self-reflection is oblique. There’s never that moment when the viewer realizes he’s been watching a twisted Ouroboros of a movie.
The difference may be simply cultural: Asian films have always tended to be more quietly aphoristic than intellectually noisy. And while I hesitate a bit to compare Yimou with Hitchcock, Bergman, and Kurosawa, he’s still a knockout director; one of the best on the world scene today. He displays a steady hand throughout Riding Alone’s running time and a few moments are genuinely touching. But it’s an experiment that doesn’t quite pay off.
There’s a long cinematic history of accomplished directors testing new generic waters. Hitchcock gave overt comedy a shot in The Trouble with Harry. Before a legendary streak from the fifties to the seventies, Bergman tried Neo-Realism in 1948’s Port of Call. And Kurosawa took several breaks from historical epics to try out contemporary noir (most notably in High and Low and Stray Dog). In all of those films, a bit of their maker remains; none can quite shake its director’s idiosyncratic tendencies. (They’re all one-offs, after all.)
And so it is with Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. Steeped in the vernacular of mid-90’s Iranian cinema, it’s a quiet and lyrical journey-piece that moves slowly, reveals deep truths, and plays with the notion of film itself.
In the film, an absent Japanese father is roused by guilt over his son’s untimely cancer diagnosis to travel to a remote Chinese province. The son, it is discovered, is a fanatic of ancient Chinese folk opera and the father’s journey is a reconciliation of sorts: he will film his son’s favorite opera singer as a last-minute gesture of goodwill. But bumps lay ahead: the singer is locked in a maximum security prison. the father’s translator knows very little Japanese, and the Chinese bureaucracy is, to put it lightly, a hurdle.
Much of Riding Alone resembles its Iranian genesis: the stoic protagonists, the thin plot, and the deliberate pacing all point towards masterworks like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence. Even its setting -- the dusty, windswept canyons of the Chinese highlands -- resembles those films’ arid terrains.
But Riding Alone’s Eastern mindset doesn’t gel -- an Iranian director would never let as much sentimentality invade the proceedings or so deliberately pluck the heartstrings. The hero’s poetic voiceover is far too emotive and a late moment in which an roomful of prisoners sobs to a slideshow is especially out of place.
Much of what is genuinely striking about Middle Eastern cinema is its boisterous filmic intellectualism. Working under decades of repression and censorship, Iranian directors spent years simply thinking about movies, what they are, and what it means to make one. So when guidelines were gently lifted in the 1990’s, their movies reflected their makers’ obsessions: these films are either about making movies or else they frankly (and sometimes shockingly) lift the curtain between subject and product. They’re mind-blowingly meta.
And while Riding Alone refers to itself throughout -- its title, for instance, is also the title of the father’s film and of the opera he is filming -- its self-reflection is oblique. There’s never that moment when the viewer realizes he’s been watching a twisted Ouroboros of a movie.
The difference may be simply cultural: Asian films have always tended to be more quietly aphoristic than intellectually noisy. And while I hesitate a bit to compare Yimou with Hitchcock, Bergman, and Kurosawa, he’s still a knockout director; one of the best on the world scene today. He displays a steady hand throughout Riding Alone’s running time and a few moments are genuinely touching. But it’s an experiment that doesn’t quite pay off.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Year in Review -- 2006
I used to have new favorite movies each and every year. I don't mean classics I'd catch on video or TV, but current masterpieces I could actually see at a multiplex. When I was fourteen I rooted for The Thin Red Line like my peers rooted for our middle school's basketball team. I paid to see Magnolia three times at Northrock 14, sure it was one of the best movies I had ever seen. Year-end "best of" lists were a breeze. But either my wide-eyed enthusiasm has faded or movies have gotten worse -- I can't remember the last time I recommended something playing at the
Horror movies have always been my favorite; last year we got Hostel and The Descent. Hostel was as fun as genre deconstruction gets -- it literally put the "horror movie" through a shredder. When its meathead "hero" was forced to save a girl by removing her dangling eyeball, it was a perverse metaphor for frat dude sexism. (That those guys were also its target audience made it all the more crafty.) The Descent was a no-nonsense horror freakout; something like bungee-jumping your way through a spook-house. I paid to see it four times and dragged different friends along each time. On my fourth run-through I was still screaming my head off and spying through cracks in my fingers. Easily, my favorite movie of the year.
While we're at the multiplex, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Spike Lee’s Inside Man stand out in my memory as wham-bang thrillers. And though one was a remake and the other a surprisingly straight-forward heist picture, they were killer comebacks marked by professionalism and craftsmanship. Elsewhere, Jackass Number Two was an outlandish experiment in surrealism -- an obscene dramatization of a Max Ernst painting, only with more horse semen. And Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was like a Chuck Jones cartoon come to life -- an expensive, giant spectacle that paid off in spades; a blast.
And though I criticized Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion as Nashville-gone-soft when it was released, my fondness for it has grown in retrospect; a quiet rumination on endings, it’s now a fitting farewell from arguably
I’m cheating a bit on these last three. It didn’t play
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