Review Roundup: Death Race, Man On Wire , Hamlet 2

Greeting, Movies et al fans! Crazy stuff has been happening at Movies et al! And by crazy stuff, I mean: 1. Movies et al's piece about the Golden Age of TV was highlighted on IMDB, which led 6500+ people to visit the site, most of whom left a vicious comment suggesting that yours truly should not be allowed to talk about TV as I don't like Seinfeld. My favorite comment suggested that the writer of the piece be fired. Yeah, so, I decided not to fire the writer of that particular post, but I've decided to reduce his salary to nothing. Poor bastard is just gonna keep writing, but never get paid.

2. I had to grade some papers and deal with students, and stopped posting for a week! Sorry. I'll be better in the future. At the very least, Film Ignorance will keep going strong, as will Western Star of the Week, which will restart next week after a break for noir month. I know you've missed it, Ibetolis!

I'll also try to keep up with the reviews, which I've been slack about. For now, a quick paragraph about the three films I saw most recently. I might revive the "mini-review" format, but right now the reviews I write are about the same length as my original mini-reviews. So, here are some mini-mini-reviews.


1. Death Race
3.5/5

Halfway through the first of Death Race's three races, I realized something: I was enjoying this damn movie. I had no right to enjoy it. It had all the hallmarks of a Paul W.S. Anderson movie: terrible characters, worse dialogue, an incomprehensible plot. But somewhere along the way, he learned how to actually film and edit an action sequence. And I loved this film's cars, the races, and the vicious sadism that other movies pretend to have but always fail to actually bring. Our hero Jason Statham hates somebody, so he breaks their neck on national television. This is a movie that never went soft. And in a great piece of irony, it's Joan Allen, not Ian McShane, who says the word "cocksucker." Actually, she says "Cocksucker, you fuck with me and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk." Classic.


2.Man on Wire
5/5

The best documentary I have seen since...Bright Leaves? Fog of War? Ever? This is a masterpiece about a crazy Frenchman who, upon hearing that the Twin Towers are going to be built, immediately decides that he has to walk a tightrope between them. I can't explain why he feels that way, but this is a caper film and a half, the real life story of a team of deranged artists who break into the WTC so that their resident crazy/genius can walk on a tightrope between the towers. One of the most beautiful, and also most troubling, portraits of an artist that I have ever seen. And Phillipe Petit, our titular man on wire, is truly an artist. Provisionally, having only seen this film, I would call him one of the great artists of the 20th century. He was a guerrilla artist, three decades before the site of his art would become famous for terrorism. Petit imagined a world in which boundaries and rules were broken for the sake of art, not ideology. As a child of the 80s and 90s, I find it hard to believe such a world existed, but documentaries like Man on Wire assure me that it's all true..


3. Hamlet 2
1.5/5

It's like School of Rock, except not funny. It's also dull. Cliched. Tedious. Stupid. A complete and total waste of time, except for Steve Coogan's vicious wife (Catherine Keener) and dim-witted roommate (David Arquette). Keener, one of our best leading ladies, is not given much to do but is great in her few scenes, taking Coogan's no-talent ass-clown apart. Arquette is even better - his inane dialogue (I think he has only four lines) is so deadpan I don't know how he kept a straight face. His first line is "It's a sunny day outside" and his last one is "I left you a protein shake in the fridge. It's strawberry." His dialogue and character are so deprived of meaning as to be hysterical. The rest of the movie is just deprived of comedy.

Mini-Review: Be Kind Rewind

Robocop gets Sweded - Don't Tell Verhoeven!

Michel Gondry's latest film can't match up to the extra-depressing bout of romantic whimsy that was Science of Sleep, anymore than that film could match up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Eternal Sunshine was the combination of Charlie Kaufman's best script to date and Gondry's breathtaking direction with a cast that was so deep that Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo were somewhere around 6th or 7th billed. Rewind, by contrast, was written by Gondry, apparently in a less unhappy mood than Science of Sleep, and thus features awkward pacing, awkward dialogue, and a terribly awkward performance by my current favorite leading lady of all-time (Mia Farrow). But Jack Black, Mos Def, and the ever-reliable Danny Glover manage to overcome all of Gondry's self-inflicted awkwardness and, with the help of Gondry-the-director's endless supplies of energy and innovation, make this a charming and nostalgic paean to filmmaking.

The plot is pretty ridiculous: Jack Black erases all of the videos at the rental store owned by Danny Glover and managed by his adoptive son Mos Def, after a freak electrical station sabotage accident. Longtime customer Mia Farrow shows up looking for Ghostbusters, threatens to call the out-of-town Glover if there's anything wrong with the store, and voila, a collection of threads tenuously related to a plot is born: Jack Black and Mos Def have to start making their own versions of the films the customers want, since there's no way to replace the outdated VHS tapes (they call this process, for no clear reason, "Sweding").

Most of this film's fun resides in the hilarious versions of Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, Driving Miss Daisy, Robocop, and others that Black and Def make for their avid fans. The frame story is considerably less interesting and only fitfully coherent, but it too ends up being worth watching, with a surprising combination of heart-warming elements that depend a bit too heavily on nostalgia but manage to gain a surprising amount of emotional heft.

One final note: As you might expect, a representative of the movie studios does eventually show up in an attempt to halt the Sweding process. In an all-too brief cameo, that representative is played by the actress who used to hold the title currently held by Mia Farrow. Enjoy.

Mini-Review:Atonement

The Hottie (left) and the Nottie

Atonement
3.5/5

Atonement was widely praised by critics, garnering a metacritic score of 85 out of 100 and 7 Oscar Nominations, and strongly disliked both by The Critic (http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/movies/07aton.html)
and by several people I know who saw it. Having now seen it, it's hard for me to understand either reaction. While far inferior to Ian McEwan's original novel, Joe Wright's heritage picture follow-up to his heritage pic Pride and Prejudice succeeds in bringing McEwan's fascinating pre-WWII/WWII story and characters to life. Along the way, it introduces Scottish stud James McAvoy to an even larger audience, and, quite unbelievably, manages to not be completely ruined by the presence of Keira Knightley. There are few movies capable of not being ruined completely by Keira Knightley, so Wright deserves that much credit - even if he's to blame for her casting.

McEwan's novel is about both a romance between a lower-class intellectual and a young rich girl being interrupted by her younger sister's lie, and the difficult and complex moment of modernism and stream-of-consciousness in British literature that took place between the wars, played out in the younger sister's attempts to tell the story of that romance. That the film largely ditches the latter subject is to its credit; although it eviscerates McEwan's story, any attempt to render the novel's interiority would have been nearly impossible. Instead, Wright sticks to a fairly standard tale of star-crossed lovers, taking place in a lavishly filmed British mansion, a World War II hospital, and, in both the novel's and the film's finest sequence, captured France, as our protagonist Robbie tries to make his way to the evacuation point at Dunkirk. It does none of these things phenomenally, but it does none of them poorly, and if you're a fan of Oscar-bait heritage pictures (The English Patient, every Merchant and Ivory film, etc), than this one's for you.

Mini-Review: Starting out in the Evening

Starting out in the Evening
4/5 Stars

My initial response to the highly-acclaimed Starting out in the Evening was very similar to my initial response to the even more highly-acclaimed Juno: seriously? People liked this? But it's annoying!

Unlike Juno, which annoyed me because every character spoke in the same uber-witty manner, my annoyance for Evening was mainly directed at a single character: Heather Wolfe, the ambitious graduate student who's played by Lauren Ambrose to be simultaneously precocious, pretentious, and precious. Wolfe is doing her master's thesis (which seems to be about 200 pages long...) on Leonard Schiller, a former literary giant who has faded into obscurity. Schiller is both flattered and annoyed by Wolfe's interest, and their lively debate on whether or not his last two novels forsook the worthy theme of his first two provides some of the film's best scenes.

Besides that running debate, I otherwise found the relationship between Schiller and Wolfe to be a tedious rehash of any older man-younger woman Hollywood cliches you can think of. But Starting out in the Evening is richer than those cliches, and the director, Andrew Wagner, gradually spends less and less time focusing on Schiller's relationship with Wolfe, and more on his relationship with his daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) and her sometimes contentious relationship with her occasional boyfriend Casey (Adrien Lester). Taylor plays her character with the right blend of confidence and frustration throughout the film, and the script allows Casey to develop from the bad stereotype he appears to be into a rich and interesting character.

In short, I was not impressed with Lauren Ambrose or her character, but that fault eventually falls away as the film slowly widens its scope to include Ariel and Casey. In the end, although the grad student stuff feels phony, Starting out in the Evening seems right on difficult subjects ranging from literature to romantic love to the strains of aging on familial. It's not perfect, and Langella's performance as Schiller isn't as earth-shattering as others would have you to believe, but it ends up both true and touching, which is more than enough for me.

Mini-Review: There Will be Blood

5/5
While puzzling over the nature of instincts in Principles of Psychology, William James asks the rhetorical question: "Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than hard floors?" His answer is that this question is rhetorical - there's no answer. This is just what men do: "Nothing can be said more than that these are human ways, and every creature likes its own ways."

Nothing I can say about There Will be Blood is more revelatory than this: we see its protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) sleep on hard floors. He's a wealthy man, who could have any of his desires satisfied, and yes, does at times have a bed or at least a blanket, but we see him sleep on wooden floors. In other words, this is a creature who does not like the same ways as the other creatures we call humans. As Plainview would say: "these people." He's a man apart, a man with his own drives and his own (possibly inexplicable) desires, and his ways will never be clear to us, anymore than the ways of the squirrels will be clear to us. He is, at some point, simply not one of us "creatures" or "people," but something different. Something uber, perhaps? That's further than I can go right now.

Otherwise, I have little to add to the volumes that have already been written about the film. The cinematography is impressive. The dialogue is sharp, cutting, and practically tangible. The dissonant, nerve-wracking score, by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, may be the best I've ever heard (I've been trying to think of better scores. I like Hans Zimmer's for Gladiator and Vangelis' for Blade Runner. I might just like Ridley Scott). Plainview is played by Daniel Day-Lewis as a sort of oil tycoon version of Bill the Butcher, who does more of his violence to those around him emotionally, rather than physically, and yes, has probably given the best performance of anyone this year. And Paul Dano, the mute Nietzschean of Little Miss Sunshine, proves, as the preacher who Plainview takes a particular dislike to, to be a worthy foil to Day-Lewis' driven oil-driller. The movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes long, however, so you better go in prepared to spend 3 hours of your life staring at Daniel Day-Lewis, continually filthy, running roughshod over every human being around him, interspersed with stunning but bleak extra-long shots of Texas (standing in for California) wastelands and driven by an eerie, piercing score. If that doesn't sound like a good Friday night to you, I don't know what would.