Any Eventuality

The remake of Clash of the Titans has the most boring action scenes since the remake of Bangkok Dangerous. The trailer made giant scorpions seem like the coolest monsters ever but the way that sequence actually turned out was pretty uninteresting. As might have been expected, it was just the music that made them so cool in the trailer.

Not to defend the non-action sequences. The script is very weird because the religious language (love, fear, redemption, blood, sacrifice) and categories of discussion were obviously taken from Christian concepts — e.g. a benevolent God created humans and loves his creation — then awkwardly mapped onto a Greek pantheon: Zeus loves all mortals (!) because he created them (!!) out of grace (!!!).

That would be kind of interesting as a straightforward religious mash-up, but then other bits are sprinkled on top from eclectic sources (e.g. J.M. Barrie) to make the gods a bunch of giant Tinkerbells whose strength is dependent on the mortals’ prayer life (in the form of worship or fear — incompatible concepts here — depending on the god). The idea of a divine being whose existence is contingent on the feelings of his own creations is so mind-bottling that the guy who thought it up deserves a prize for philosophical ingenuity.

If it is unfair of me to criticize an action movie for its theology being derivative and nonsensical (point granted) then let me restrict my criticism to the visuals and set pieces which were comparably derivative of Fellowship of the Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean (with some minor Mummy influence) without providing anything visually original in exchange. I guess I liked Charon’s boat (whose design was itself derivative of Wolfgang Peterson’s Trojan horse), but Charon himself looked like he was a prop stolen off an amusement park ride.

If it is unfair of me to criticize a remake for being derivative in the first place (point granted) then let me just thank the filmmakers for finally providing conclusive proof of how ridiculous it would have been for David Benioff and Wolfgang Peterson to include the councils of the gods in Troy. Who cares if their adaptation did violence to Homer’s text — it just would have been stupid to see a soldier who is about to receive his deathblow suddenly spirited away by his patron goddess.

To conclude: The only thing interesting to look at in Clash of the Titans is Sam Worthington’s fascinatingly shaped head, even though it still distracts me with the thought that his skull is actually shiny metal underneath.

Talk about high-concept on a low budget (skillfully managed to make it look high budget)!

One of the great things about this contribution to the zombie genre is that calling it a zombie flick doesn’t give away its true innovation!

As Nate recommended it to me, so I recommend it in like manner: it is best viewed from a position of ignorance (I didn’t read a single word about it beforehand and am glad I didn’t). But in order to intrigue you further, the only way I can describe it is by asking you to imagine Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast written by Charles Williams (or Grant Morrison).

The big coup for this film is the face and voice of Stephen McHattie, who looks like a cross between Willem Dafoe and Lance Henriksen. He shows many sides in this film, which succeeds largely because it is so compelling just to watch and listen to him. Not to take anything away from the concept of the film itself, because the writer, Tony Burgess, is the star of this show.

After finally watching The Hurt Locker I have to say it truly deserved its awards. The allegation that it only won thanks to anti-Cameron votes is a sour grapes libel against this great film which happens to be set in Iraq but is not “about” the Iraq War in the cheap way that Avatar attempts to be ”about” Iraq or the War on Terror.

Even more impressively, although it is set in the historical situation rather than a fantasy version, the temptation to lob verbal grenades like “terrorism” or “Islam” is rejected at every turn as the gratuitous distractions they would be. The contrast with Avatar, which carelessly recycles politically radioactive buzzwords without earning them (indeed the screenwriting equivalent of dirty bombs), could not be more stark.

Along with Tarantino’s, Bigelow’s film is one of the two most suspenseful movies of the year. The criticism that the suspense is effortlessly built into The Hurt Locker because the story is about bombs is false because the most suspenseful scene of the whole film — which is not only the chronological centrepiece but also the emotional centrepiece, during which the main characters finally bond with each other — does not involve any bombs whatsoever but is an engrossingly slow shootout between snipers. What a sequence!

The Hurt Locker also turns the cinematic conventions of bomb defusing on their heads because the main character never pauses before cutting a wire of any color. Time is still of the essence, but the whole enterprise of defusing bombs is defamiliarized when the primary threats are generated from the surroundings rather than from the bomb itself.

The film also defies narrative conventions by maintaining the point of view of a single unit without showing the private conferences of enemy combatants, despite the indications that a nefarious plot is unfolding. The main characters have numerous points of contact with this plot but the audience never learns more about it than the characters with whom we are embedded. In this sense it is a literal rejection of “plot” in favor of character.

The variety of situations are also impressive and they never tempt the thought, Here we go again, we have to watch him defuse yet another bomb, just like the last bomb. Instead, each situation presents a unique set of challenges — and the audience can hardly condemn Staff Sgt. James for enjoying the thrill of overcoming those challenges which it is itself enjoying vicariously through him.

We all know Christian Bale has many personae, but given the recent dominance of his Hoarse Whisperer persona as seen in The Dark Knight and Terminator Salvation (occasionally punctuated by threats to crash one’s lights of course), I had begun to forget his true facility as an actor.

Laurel Canyon is therefore a pleasant reminder that Bale used to be ”one of our finest actors.” American Psycho is still probably his best comedic performance, but Laurel Canyon might be his best serious role, unadorned by any of the physical feats that potentially distract from some of his other roles (e.g. The Machinist).

Frances McDormand is the only character to play her own nationality: along with Bale, Kate Beckinsale also plays an American (with glasses that make her look cuter than usual), while her fellow Englishwoman Natascha McElhone plays an Israeli immigrant, and Yankee Alessandro Nivola finally trades on his Chris-Martin-lookalike status to play the lead singer of a Coldplay clone.

The plot shares many similarities with Ozon’s Swimming Pool, but for once the American picture has the prior claim to these themes. Although their general release was roughly contemporary, depending on the country, Cholodenko’s film apparently premiered a year prior to its French counterpart.

Much of the tone should be credited to photographer Wally Pfister (making Bale a more frequent collaborator of Pfister than of Nolan), who films a cross-table conversation with his camera peeking over the edge of the dinner table. The final shot perhaps owes something to the end of Ralph Lombreglia’s Men Under Water, but the sequence leading up to it is so well-timed that it earned a deserved laugh from me. It ends on a note of absurdity nearly comparable to that of Fight Club, but achieves in a much more understated, and difficult to articulate, way.

Christopher Faris’s reflections on Avatar and its cross-species relationship between the human and Navi characters got me thinking about the film’s other psycho-sexual pathologies.

Like Chris, I too found the inter-species romance disturbing, mostly because of the allegory’s reverse-implication that Native Americans are tantamount to a different species than Europeans. I just had to keep reminding myself that since the 1960s, Star Trek has made non-human aliens the official surrogates for non-white ethnicities in sci-fi. In most cases, therefore, I have to accept it as a genre convention. (Speaking of surrogates, Bruce Willis’s movie Surrogate did more interesting things with the same concept, like men using female surrogate bodies to be non-op transexuals.)

In Avatar, however, the cross-species intercourse cannot be excused as just an allegorical necessity because of the emphasis on the Navi hooking up (literally) with Pandoran animals of other species. Lest the audience be allowed to insist that these pony-tail USB ports are non-sexual interfaces, Sigourney Weaver jokes that playing with them is akin to masturbation.

The protagonist is also told that, unlike with Pandora’s equivalent of horses, his flying dragon will be his partner for life, whom he will identify by a combination of love at first sight and an aggressive mating ritual. Furthermore, he is told, his lifelong relationship with this animal must be monogamous. (Never mind that he trades up before film’s end.) When they do finally reach complete union, the struggling animal’s whole body tenses for a moment, then suddenly relaxes, exhausted but peaceful.

The sexual shorthand is obvious enough, but the rapey connotations make it all the more disturbing, like James Bond’s conquest of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, a lesbian who struggles against Bond’s attempt to rape her, but once conquered, is converted to the virtues of heterosexuality and thankful for Bond’s insistence on enlightening her.

A movie subtler than Avatar might be suggesting that any taming of animals by humans for their use is a kind of exploitation if not rape, but this film’s portrayal of it in terms of the circle of life and mutual respect between species makes the other messages of the film all the more confused. Cameron’s peculiar interpretation of the motto Make Love Not War seems to be: If you want something from an uncooperative species, Penetrate Them Not Kill Them.

In Rob Marshall’s screen adaptation of a stage adaptation of Fellini’s 8 1/2, Marion Cotillard is operating on a higher order of performance than the other six actresses who stake their claim on the life of the directagonist played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Cotillard’s songs — she’s the only participant besides Day-Lewis to have two musical numbers — are the only ones performed with evident emotion, as if she is acting for a film and not just a matinee performance of a stage musical like the rest of her co-stars.

If the singing abilities she displayed in La Vie en Rose were somewhat overshadowed (understandably enough) by the impressiveness of her simultaneous impersonation of Edith Piaf, then here Cotillard is able to express a character musically without the distractions of hunched back and heavy make-up — although her eyebrows and bangs in Nine are distinctly modelled on Audrey Hepburn.

Despite the allusion in the title, Nine is two muses short of a full complement. As the film’s only verbally acknowledged one, Nicole Kidman is no Claudia Cardinale. Fellini’s audience never has to wonder why Mastroianni idolizes Cardinale, is never required to suspend disbelief to accept her effect on him. But Marshall’s audience must take it on faith that Day-Lewis has never taken Kidman off the pedestal because she tells us so (literally).

In her role Kidman is no doubt statuesque, but she invests the description with negative connotations, her plastic surgeries maintaining her attractiveness in only the most abstract of senses. In Fellini’s film, by contrast, Cardinale looked like the personification of beauty incarnated into truly tactile matter — in flesh and blood and skin and hair. The only actress to approach the same qualities in Nine is Marion Cotillard, and the movie is almost worth it for her performance alone.

What is advertised — in both the trailers and the first ten minutes of the film itself — as a clash of the titans turns out to provide only a few minutes of footage in what turns out to be a traditional documentary about three subjects treated very separately.

The concept is fantastic: take three practitioners of the electric guitar from different generations and have them interview each other. The benefits of this approach are immediately obvious: the questions would be just as interesting as the answers, instead of having the subjects respond to generic questions from an earnest but jejune interviewer or anecdote-prompter.

Unfortunately, director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) decided to cut out most of the interaction between the guitarists and replace it instead with independent threads on each subject. Jimmy Page shows the most contempt for his off-screen interlocutor’s banal questions, reminding us how much more interesting the proceedings would have been if the director had the guts to roll tape of the actual meeting between the professionals and trust the audience to follow along.

Loosely structured into thematic segments, the transitions between guitarists’ individual stories are badly chosen, often cutting away just when something was becoming interesting. Still, the raw material is often compelling enough to make the production feel worth it, such as Edge going through a box of old demos and listening to them for the first time since he made them, while the viewer is left to contemplate: is it possible that those now iconic riffs could ever have exist in alternative forms? I felt a little bit like Charles Lamb when he saw a manuscript of Milton’s early poems in the poet’s own hand:

I had thought of the ‘Lycidas’ as a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its parts absolute — till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of the author, in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter Cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel!

How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again.

Another strength of the documentary is the generosity of recorded performances, both audio and video, of the musicians most influential to the three guitarists. Their choices are as idiosyncratic as could be hoped, and as an eclectic anthology of blues and early rock n roll the film is enjoyable enough.

On Blu-ray, Frankenheimer’s Ronin has aged very well in eleven years; it looks like it could have been made today. Let me rephrase: it’s the kind of film I wish were still being made today.

Ronin exemplifies the end of an era in more ways than one. In terms of De Niro’s career, his character is the last role he played straight before he began playing pantomimed caricatures of his persona in movies like Analyze This, Meet the Parents, and Showtime. Arguably, this turn to comedy was a stage of his career necessary to prove he could make fun of himself. Although it has now gotten old, at least he started it self-consciously, unlike Al Pacino who began playing caricatures of himself ten years earlier, except painfully in earnest.

More importantly, however, Ronin is perhaps the last example of classically crafted action cinema that is fast paced yet completely intelligible visually. It was released the same year as Saving Private Ryan, which redefined the grammar of action direction for the next decade. Although eminently appropriate for the reinactment of a war that was itself documented on film, the transparently hand-held camera became a strict convention for the new “viscérité” style, which became consolidated by Gladiator despite its anachronistic application. (The fact that the camera is handheld is not problematic, but how it is used. Relentless shakiness does not produce the intended effect of experiencing a battle first-hand, only the experience of a camera being physically jostled in a battle — appropriate for a war in the nineteenth century, not for one in the second. District 9 is a recent example of the hand-held aesthetic working for instead of against a film.) With the Wachowskis producing the notable exceptions to this new dogma, the epitome of this stylistic fetish was achieved in The Bourne Supremacy, which is particularly relevant because Greengrass’s car chase in the film is the only one since Ronin that has been cited as a possible rival to Frankenheimer’s tour de force.

From Bullitt, Frankenheimer takes (and subtly improves on) the over-the-driver’s-shoulder angle through the windscreen and the use of engines to provide all the music needed (at least, until very late in the Ronin chase). From the first French Connection (Frankenheimer himself directed the sequel), he took the thrillingly low angle provided by a street-skimming camera mounted to the front of a car. The chase(s) in Ronin run the gamut of road surfaces and obstacles stationary and in motion, but it all makes perfect visual sense. Despite the elaborate auto choreography and quick editing, the geographical relationship between the two cars is always clear thanks to photography intended to clarify rather than confuse.

By contrast, the choreography in Supremacy is just as if not more elaborate than in Ronin, but it is impossible to say for certain because it is always unclear what is actually happening on screen. Greengrass’s style is comprised of editorial tricks that are usually employed to hide low-budget effects. Presumably this was not the intention in this case, but the effect is the same. Even if the stunts were of high quality, as they probably were, there is no visual evidence to support it. Instead of being preserved for posterity, all of the talent, effort, and money that went into producing the chase in Supremacy will never be adequately appreciated because it was sacrificed to the idol of fashion, the photographic style of the moment. Ronin reminds us that the convulsive camera is a false god.

Public Enemies and Star Trek are more recent victims of high budgets sacrificed at the altar of faddish style, but this year there were also glimpses of hope from not-so-unlikely places: the genre pictures of Sam Raimi and Stephen Summers provided some fresh breezes of classical, visually intelligible action cinema. If this renewal manages to trickle up into middle-brow action films, then we might again see exciting rather than inexplicable action sequences. Until then, we have Ronin on Blu-ray, where the suspension of disbelief is always enhanced rather than threatened by the filmmaker.