WATCH THIS MOVIE NOW - Chicago's own 'IN MEMORIAM'

This is an extended version of a review I'm doing for Filmspotlight.  It's rare that I find a movie to be this special, so I just want to plug it as much as possible.

It may sound prejudiced, but after reviewing many micro-budget and local films, I feel a great sense of release in writing this triumphal sentence:  this movie is very, very good.  I know that just because a picture is low-budget and local doesn’t mean it’s somehow more incredible that it’s good, but my mind automatically associates that fluid digital frame-rate with over-the-top directing and performances that I want to give the benefit of the doubt, but just can’t bring myself to enjoy.  IN MEMORIAM is one of those rare experiences that reminds me that all films are created equal.  For those familiar with local and independent film circles, this is may sound obvious, but audiences (myself included) who bask too long in the lights of Hollywood productions and internationally recognized actors forget that film goodness does not just live on that magical west coast.  Excellent storytellers and first-rate talent is everywhere, even--as IN MEMORIUM proves for us Chicago residents--in our own backyard.  The spit-shine of expensive post-production can patch up a poor film’s rough bits, clothing it in a specious sheen of ‘quality,’ but it is only an illusion.  IN MEMORIAM is naked brilliance.  Enjoyable, entertaining, funny, sad and true.

My only, very small nitpick, though I entirely concur with Kamaria’s gushing over the performances, is the one or two odd moments where the dialogue is a touch too smart for its own good.  The last scene in particular left me missing the subtext of Cone’s clever dialogue, but these moments are few and may even contribute to the film’s already robust rewatchability (and if that’s not a verb, IN MEMORIAM proves that it should be), as I found myself wanting to rewind and try again to ‘get the joke’.  Judging by the state of film these days, ‘too smart’ is a good problem to have.  It helps that absolutely every performance in this film is good.  Some are truly excellent.  Jen Spyra and Sadie Rogers come to mind, as well as Sue Redman’s teary monologue in the dead center of the film, a steady-cam display of a natural acting grace.

In my opinion, the greatest strength of this film is its thematic value.  Our hero has a real conflict with the values of our vacuous internet age.  Cone isn’t even above using the improv stage, with which he is surely intimately familiar, for an effective moment of sly self-deprecation.  It’s so hard to express this sort of abstracted malcontent without falling into the pitfalls of navel-gazing and an intentional obscurity that says to the audience “if you don’t understand the problem, you’re not on my level”.  Cone realizes interior drama like a master puppeteer, making plain internal moral and existential struggles that are, by definition, not obvious.  There isn’t a line of narration, or even any peculiarly omniscient characters spoon-feeding the film’s theme to the audience.  Jonathan grapples with the painful reality that somewhere along the line, our world has turned into a stage of improvisational comedy (Improv Everywhere, anyone?) and he must prove himself honest, true and hard-working to do battle with generational cynicism that ferments in complacency, wasted time and the shadowy netherworld of the internet.  

Too many great films, directors and actors are lost between the vastly divergent poles of big budget ‘Hollywood’ productions and obscure ‘underground’ films.  Stephen Cone is not an underground filmmaker pulling together some coarse bid to be ‘discovered’ by the Hollywood powers that be, he is an excellent filmmaker making excellent films right where he is.  IN MEMORIUM is now one of my favorite films of the year and I hope that everyone in America will get the chance to fall as hard for its simple pleasures as I have.

I laughed.  So that means it was good, right?  I...guess so.  I think somebody needs to explain comedy films to me, particularly the much-lauded Apatow films (of which I've seen only a few).

I very much looked forward to seeing Hollywood's funniest ladies all lined up and allowed to be funny on their own terms, particularly Kristin Wiig (who co-wrote the film).  I'm also a big Maya Rudolph fan so I enjoyed seeing her doing what she does best--just being that girl that you'd love to hang out with in real life.  The result was...kind of good I guess.  The 'painfully awkward' shtick was done very well with kudos to Rose Byrne.  The gross-out and slapstick stuff was par for the course.  Melissa McCarthy is instrumental for those parts and helps them get the laughs they need.  She also comes in for some much-needed moral centering later on in the film.

Ultimately what this movie proved to me was two-fold.  Kristin Wiig is an amazing actress, but comedies need to be better.  Bridesmaids felt kind of sloppy, structurally.  It was a sketch comedy mixed with romantic comedy blended with a 'loser protagonist finds her passion' plot and a dance music montage at the end.  Seriously, why do all comedies have to have the goofy dance montage at the end?  They're unfunny and weird.

This movie had a lot of really good banter and dialogue and had the potential to be really original, but it wasn't.  It seemed like the standard template for Apatow's other comedies, except they're all girls.  The archetypes are still all in place, the perverted one, the gross one, the innocent/nerdy one etc.  I didn't feel like it had anything particularly interesting to say about life and didn't form a distinctive identity for these women.   Each scene is just 'whatever works'.  I loved how they played up that passive-aggressive girl talk in the first few scenes, but after that it's dropped in favor of everything we've already laughed at before.  Oh, it's funny because she's drunk, oh it's funny because she pooped her pants, oh it's funny because Jon Hamm's being a jerk.  There's little done to try and take the funnies into a different arena, actually exploring more kinds of funny, instead of just putting tried-and-true formulas into skirts.

Interestingly, I was shocked to see none other than Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric's Awesome Show Great Job! in a non-speaking role as Maya's husband 'Dougie' (hahahahaha).  For those who don't know, this man along with his partner Eric Wareheim are certainly the leading forces in avant garde comedy today.  Their show is as disturbing as it is hilarious and impossible to look away from.  The fact that they cast him as in a 'normal guy' non-speaking part seemed an ironic portent of how this film makes mediocrity of folks whose individual work brims with maniacal originality.



And yet, there's a lot to like about Bridesmaids.  It's not short on laughs or good performances.  It just lacks that special something that makes me want to see it again, or even remember it very well.  So maybe all I'm trying to say is that putting funny people together will ensure a funny movie, but not necessarily a good one.  There's a place for structure and careful writing and directing and an overall theme even in a genre as seemingly spontaneous as comedy.  2 examples of watchable comedies with robust direction/thematic depth:

Bottle Rocket (neurotic Gen Xers finding themselves)
Swingers (more neurotic Gen Xers finding themselves)
Shaun of the Dead (the ultimate 'late bloomer coming of age' comedy...with zombies!)

In closing, some Kristin Wiig geniusness:

I remember an interview with director Matthew Vaughan during the development of X-Men: First Class in which he said he wanted to do a proper superhero film because soon, the genre will be overexposed and there won't be very many at all.  At the time, the comments seemed prophetic, but now it looks as if Vaughan has done more than any other director thus far to make the comic book genre an enduring staple.  

X-Men:  First Class, a prequel (reboot?) of the X-Men franchise was put through development at a blazing pace (principle photography began in August 2010, less than a year ago), and it's good to keep that in mind as you watch.  There's been some griping about the special effects, and it's true that they're not exactly top notch.  First Class looks like a really good TV movie, but that's a good thing.  Its budget is on the lower side for a blockbuster this summer (the high estimate is 160 million), and though it was by no means 'cheap', the film's look and feel could certainly encourage a re-allocation of budget to start making middle-of-the-road superhero films, with an eye toward continuity and story rather than big effects and big action.

Why is it a good thing to have a cheaper superhero film?  Because right now superhero films straddle a razor's edge line between success and failure.  You have to spend big and expect big profits.  When a film, say Green Lantern, spends 300 million and turns out to be terrible enough not to win back its budget in the first weekend, it reflects poorly on the superhero genre as a whole.  Producers who see all comic films as more or less the same thing will start to think of the entire genre as 'unprofitable' and stop making them for fear of losing money.  But superheroes' first debut onto the big screen was in the form of serials that would run before the main feature.  Look:  people who like superheroes are always going to love watching superheroes on the big screen.  The core audience isn't going to be driven away if Havok's laser beam doesn't look totally real.  We comic fans are a forgiving lot.  As long as the stories are good and the characters are interestingly interpreted, we'll forgive some middling graphics.  Kids care less about top notch effects and more that the effects are there.   Bottom line:  superhero films need to become a genre.  You don't see people stopping making romantic comedies just because one of them tanks.  If a rom-com fails, people look at the particulars of what went wrong with the film rather than panning the whole genre altogether.  Superheroes deserve the same consideration.  Back up on the FX dollars, and focus on the script and acting.  It's the nature of the game for the A-Listers to have make-or-break films, but the X-Men should be allowed to endure without a staggering audience

Anyway, X-Men: First Class was good.  It has all the youthfulness that Super 8 only pretends to.  Its campiness is its joy and its simplicity is its heart.  McAvoy and Fassbender are excellent frienemies and keep the film's core stable when its peripheries fall flat.  The James Bond tone works excellently well to evoke a sense of fun and discovery.  

Things that didn't work:  that awful death camp scene.  It's an unfortunate scene primarily because it could have been so good, and it basically undermines all the gut-wrenching drama of Bryan Singer's opening scene in the first film.  First of all, you have to get used to Kevin Bacon speaking German and acting diabolical.  Next, you have to deal with the kid's NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNN!!!! which was the worst since Darth Vader's yell in Episode 3.  It's a frustrating moment that, thankfully, isn't followed up on.  There are a few more awkward shots, particularly toward the end, but the damage is negligible due to the film's adolescent overtones.  Vaughan could've done a better job of controlling the mood in these few instances, but it does little to obscure this film's heart:  a rollicking James Bond-era team-in-training action flick.  

The magic's in the editing.  Action scenes are still intense even if the visuals look fake.  It's all about the feel.  There's great pacing.  The attack on the X-kids' headquarters is particularly well-handled, almost all of the scene viewed from inside the glass-walled room the kids are cowering in.  Vaughan is also very good at including reaction shots.  For example: Banshee looks hard into the camera and takes some quick breaths before jumping out of the plane.  It's these little details that make all the difference.  Effects aren't impressive until there's someone else in the movie that thinks so too.  

X-Men:  First Class gave me hope.  The effects, while hardly sub-par, being less than photo-real makes me hope for a more HBO approach to superhero films, one that will take them back to the old days of serials and bring the films closer to the comics than inspire them.

A brief take on Thor is all you need.  It's good not great but fun to watch and a point for Kenneth Branagh.  The guy's not so highbrow that he can't come down from his Shakespearean tower and have a good time with us comic fans.

This movie is a standalone film, but in tone and quality, it feels like an entry into a broader series.  And that it is.  The Avengers will hit theaters next year featuring Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk and a couple of others.  Thor is just the latest link in what is rapidly becoming a network of decent-to-good comic films.  I say, this is just what comic films need.  Comics are, on average, kind of good these days and don't deserve to be polarized into the either 'really terrible' or 'really great' camps.  By now, superhero films are a genre and it could use some good middle-of-the-road fare.  Critics hate it when movies are this vanilla, but as a comic fan, it's nice to not to have to either dissect the Great American Novel (with Batman!) or have a caterwauling poop-stick slung at you.  There are some genuinely affecting moments in Thor.  There are also some genuinely silly moments, but all in all, it's a good ride and a decent episode in a widening story.

A few things though:  Natalie Portman, WTF are you doing in this movie?  Get out of it.  Now.  Why couldn't you just make the nerdy girl the love interest?  It'd have been a lot more interesting and un-cliche.  Also, do scientists just study 'science' these days?  What exactly did you do your thesis on, Scientist Natalie Portman?  Were you on the Wormhole/Meteorology Interdisciplinary track or something?  In movies, scientists just...do science!  How do they do it?  With research!  Also, research can be stolen.  Apparently scientist Natalie Portman doesn't retain much.

What is a deal-breaker in a movie for you?  This is a good question to ask yourself before you go see The Tree of Life.  If it's 'story' in the traditional sense of exposition, rising action, catharsis, falling action and conclusion, then consider this deal broken.  Fortunately, my mother (much like Chastain in this film) awoke in me an appreciation of Malick's quiet visions when she first sat me down to watch 'Days of Heaven'.  The Tree of Life has even less plot than that, but I pose that it is well worth seeing, you just have to know what you're in for.

Terrence Malick is a seasoned art-film director from Texas.  He's one of the best loved and/or most yawned at filmmaker today.  He manages to rope serious star power into his films which gives him wider exposure than the run-of-the mill mindf*** director.  In fact, 'mindf***' is entirely the wrong term for Malick.  'Mind Picnic' is more apt.  They are beautifully colored, striking visual spectacles with a trajectory toward the sublime.  He's a (real) Heidegger scholar whose philosophy comes first in his films and plot movement comes second.  Watching a Terrence Malick film is like floating on a lazy river.  I always enjoy the ride, but it's not for everyone.

His first (and probably best) film, Badlands is an anomaly.  It's a focused story with ethereal sensibilities, and it's the most traditional film he's made.  Between 1974 and 2005, Malick made 3 films, each period pieces, that I consider to be roughly the same film:  Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World.  The latter two are most alike.  Characters are caught between earth and sky, heaven and hell, two worlds, two differing ways of life collide and those in between are left with a strong hankering for God.  Though I think his films have gotten worse as they go along (I'm a strong advocate for Badlands and Days of Heaven and less enthusiastic about The Thin Red Line and The New World), it's Malick's method that is admirable and requires a bit of sophomoric elucidation.

Malick makes existential epics.  Unlike many historical epics he examines human beings as creatures in the landscape.  We see the characters but also their humanity.  Malick films humans almost as if they were animals, so when they act like people, the result is all the more curious.  Malick's camera is a benevolent sprite that hovers around but does not pretend to fully understand human creatures.  There are always a lot of shots of people walking around carelessly, twirling and reveling in life.  They're such senseless, pretty, horrible animals.  Good and evil are portrayed as gentleness and violence, and interior motivations are left shadowed and hinted at.   Malick's films are an alien's-eye-view of humanity, placing these strange and volatile creatures with all their longings at the central point of historical events.

The Tree of Life is Malick's first film that isn't trapped by a certain time period or sequence of events.  In his past films he used true events, or true-to-life events to pattern an understood narrative that the audience, in a way, already knew, so he wouldn't have to spend too much time telling it.  In The Tree of Life, there is no understood story to mold Malick's trademark pontificating into any kind of recognizable shape.  Instead, he's sews together images that already exist in our cultural consciousness, life in small town America, The Big Bang and the birth of life.   There is nothing inherently unrelatable about The Tree of Life, but it's a slippery slope of images rather than a concrete progression.  It's surprising how the scenes flow into each other so easily that one can go from the beginning of organic life to a family's travails in 1950s Texas to Elysium in a seamless whole.  It's a noble feat to link the commonest concerns of American life with a great dance of life, death and mercy that's been going on since the beginning of time.

Much of the naysaying about this movie is mostly generated by its winning the Palm D'or at Cannes.  It's funny that they banned Lars Von Trier from the competition.  His "Melancholia" seems a lot more like their cup of tea (from the trailer it looks like it should be called The Tree of Death).  Comparisons are drawn to 2001:  A Space Odyssey and The Great Santini, in hopes of crushing Malick's new picture under the greatness of these past classics, but it's missing the point something awful.  Watch The Tree of Life in the same state of mind as you would watch Fantasia (if that state exists for you).  Know that it's far out of step with much of the arthouse world because of its inherent positivity and religious bent.  Malick is outlining the character of God like a mother and that's going to be a very different film with a very different tone than much of anything that has gone before or is being done now.  Show me a better movie that strikes at Malick's same positive themes of beauty and love  as instructive objects (not social conditioning and sex) and I'll listen, but it's important to remember that not everybody is as gutter-bound (read: urban) as Federico Fellini.  It comes down to who Malick is and the state of his soul.  Does hate for The Tree of Life come from any real problem with the film or that we don't know what to do with the spirit of it?  A similarly ponderous film meant to expose the structure of systemic evil and explore the commonality between violence and sex would surely be received with unreserved praise.  Love and beauty and God are unfamiliar themes these days.  I would strongly argue that there are precious few thoughtful directors with enough joy left in them to make anything even similar to The Tree of Life.  The art film world should allow room for a guy who grew up in Texas, looking up at the sky and considering the birds.

This blog is currently almost entirely written in response to and in tandem with my good buddy Sam Wieland's blog rageagainstthejachine.blogspot.com (check it out) whose Super 8 review can be read here.  In it, my esteemed colleague invites those who were not captivated by J.J. Abrams' latest spectacle to 'reconsider their lives' and the possibility that their intelligence has left their brains permanently.


In short, Super 8 is worth seeing, but I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it.  This isn't meant to be a review so much as a collection of thoughts and comments that, hopefully, someone can come along in the comments section or shoot me an email and help me sort out my thoughts because, I'm riding a very strange fence.


Just to get it out of the way:  Super 8 is good fun.  You simply cannot take a chainsaw to this movie, much as a few smarmy New York critics may try.  It's too clear just how much fun Abrams had making this film and how lovingly he reconstructs his own influences to call it crap (though I have mad respect for and tend to agree with the latter sneerer more often than not, he too often turns film reviews into a debate about consumerism, then picks the wrong sides.  Exposing the inherent merchandising value of such a loved studio as Pixar is worth reading, but siding with Michael Bay and his transformational androids to do it betrays a first-rate mind gone culturally senile).  Between these two extremes, I'll err on the side of my esteemed friend and colleague, Mr. Wieland, but it will indeed be an error until I can figure out just what the devil is going on with this movie.


Will spoilers follow?  Heck yes they will.  But it's for a good cause.


There's something fishy about Super 8.  You can feel it from the very beginning.  It's like all the pieces are in place but you're being led down a very different path then you thought you were.  Everyone is content to call it a love letter to Spielberg, and that it may be but there's just a lot more going on with this movie that I don't think anybody's talking about.  Firstly, Super 8 looks like a Speilberg movie, but it doesn't feel like a Spielberg movie.  The setpieces are all there.  Kids with overly rambunctious siblings and cluttered rooms packed with mementos, estranged family situations, kids on bikes, young love, a mysterious monster with dubious motives.  There are several scenes that work to match Speilbergian tension and succeed pretty well:  The train crash sequence, the convenience store abductions, the man in the electric truck, the kids on the bus. These are masterfully filmed scenes that hearken back successfully to the old school blockbusters that Abrams fed on as a child, but it's the time in between and, taking a step back, the film as a whole that induces more than a little head-scratching.


But there's one quality that's noticeably absent here:  the thing.  In many of Spielberg's best films, especially Close Encounters, E.T. or even Jaws, the drama of the movie is the very thing everybody is there to see:  namely, a monster.  Spielberg was an absolute master at weighing the film's central draw (a movie about mysterious aliens, a movie about friendly aliens, a movie about a killer shark etc.) with meaning and narrative power.  The thing is the film's central concept and all its drama flowed from that.  The thrilling thing about watching Close Encounters is that there are aliens (!) and they're gonna abduct people (!).  In Jaws, it's that there's a shark (!) and it's gonna eat people (!).  E.T. there's an alien (!) and it's gonna love people (!).  The thing itself, the film's central conceit is at the dead center of the drama.  You're excited, sad, scared or laughing because of the thing and how the characters are reacting to that thing.  


Super 8 flies over and around the thing, never spending near enough time on it to make it fascinating.  The monster seems like almost an afterthought at times.  It provides some good thrills and chills with a few great, almost standalone sequences but it's clear that Abrams' focus is not on the thrill of seeing a monster rampage secretly through an Ohio town.  It's hard to pin down the perspective of this movie.  The film does not play out through the eyes of any one character but all in all, its perspective is a free floating entity, directing the viewers' eyes here and there with little care taken to build up the mystery and intensity of the supernatural.  We're slung between sweet character drama, childish tomfoolery, government conspiracy and sweeping, heavily soundtracked bike-riding shots at such a bumpy rhythm that threatens to derail the film's focus.  The pacing is so ADD that it's easy to forget that there's a monster lurking around.  The thing is lost in the shuffle.  Super 8 is drama with a monster in it, rather than drama centered around a monster.  


Perhaps Abrams is prejudging modern audiences' boredom.  Have we seen so many monsters and government conspiracies by now that surely, focusing all of a film's attention on it will bore people to death?  No.  Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan but he is (or was) the true inheritor of the Spielbergian thing.  He could build his films up to a fever pitch and make you fear a cheap special effect like it was right there in the room with you (watch Signs and don't give me no lip about it; pearls before swine, my friends.  Yeah you heard me).  


Super 8 lacks this focus.  This is most evident in the treatment of the government conspiracy.  The U.S. Air Force (which I don't think has ever been so vilified.  The army?  Sure.  The Marines?  Assholes.  But the Air Force?  That's new).  Anyway, the vast government conspiracy is treated surprisingly flaccidly.  It's understood that a bunch of G.I. Joes trooping around town mean ill toward everybody that we like and are only out for their own selfish motives.  A cryptic warning from a dying martyr is left untouched until a particularly dull scene toward the end in which the kids break into their school and discover everything they need to know about the monster in less than five minutes.  The cool thing about conspiracies is that they unravel over time, looming in the backdrop, connecting clues here and there until you finally have the shocking truth.  In Super 8, the kids just don't think to investigate until the jig is up anyway and by then you already know the doughboys are up to no good.  For a guy whose viral marketing is the stuff of legend, Abrams shows precious little subtlety in opening his own mystery box.  There's no startling revelations here.  The monster's arrival and government cover up are set up, left to dry for a good hour and then cleared up in all of five minutes.  It's just bad pacing.  (Incidentally, the macguffin in the film, Joe's locket, is a similar letdown.  It's a picture of him and his mom.  Duh.  Why build up to something we've already guessed?)


Super 8 is a particularly bad love letter to Spielberg.  Abrams fails in his tributes by losing the thing to the incidentals.


OR maybe it's focused on something else.

When a film's perspective is this crooked, then there's another conclusion to be considered:  maybe, just maybe there's more going on here than meets the eye.  What if Abrams is trying to really say something about the thing instead of just worshiping it or recreating it.  It's highly likely that Super 8 is a well concealed statement about....something in the guise of a loud and fast summer movie with an old school vibe.  Putting theme before story often results in inorganic pacing (just watch Terrence Mallick) and Super 8 is just this kind of off-kilter.  There are enough expertly directed scenes to just cover it over with a layer of well-crafted summer fun, and being so up front about its influences could be the perfect red herring, dangling it in front of the sophomoric thinking moviegoers to make them think they've got a handle on the subtext, when in fact, the real fish is still out there in the water.  


Just what Abrams is trying to say escapes me.  Actually, I just flat out don't know.  That's where you come in.  So I'm just going to lay out the parts of this movie that contribute to my hypothesis that Abrams is saying something really deep about...something here.  Films?  Hollywood?  America?  What is it?  If you think I'm splitting hairs and should just sit down, masticate my popcorn and quit thinking about it, then do me the favor of reading on before blowing it off and buying your next tickets to Green Lantern.


1.  It's clear that Super 8 is a movie about movies.  The film-within-a-film the kids are making pays homage to the Spielberg/Lucas/Coppola/Cameron school of high concept directors who started out that way, but it's significant, thematically speaking, that these kids are making a movie when the action begins.  Much of the dialogue relates to movies and movie making.  The fat kid director, Charles (played brilliantly by Riley Griffiths) is always talking about making his film and the rest of the kids play along.  The result is that phrases like "production value" and "getting in character" are worked into the script.  Keep that in mind moving forward.


2.  The interactions and dialogue between Charles and Joe are particularly heavy.  Their relationship could be the dead center of the film's thematic narrative.  Consider:  


Charles:  Are you gonna be okay without me?


Joe:  Yeah.


Is it possible that each kid in the posse represents a different director in the school?  Is Charles supposed to be George Lucas, a control freak who cares more about production value than real drama (note the "I love you too" easter egg as he's coaching Martin on his lines)?  So then who is Joe?  Spielberg?  The name Joseph Lamb does seem to be a stark Jewish juxtaposition with Charles Kaznyk (Read George Lucas/Steven Spielberg).  Or perhaps they are the dueling interior ambitions of any real fimmaker:  Charles = ambition and Joe = wonder?  Joe lovingly paints models while Charles wants to blow them up.  Here the Alice/Joe dialogue is telling:


Alice:  Don't let Charles blow up your train.


Joe:  Why not?


Alice:  He shouldn't get what he wants all the time.


Is this sly commentary on the state of film special effects and production values?  


3.  The cubes.  Continuing in the film commentary, the little cubes littered around town by the train crash are also very instructive.  Eventually, they all come together to form the alien's spacecraft.  That's when it hit me:  the cubes are polygons.  Polygons are the three dimensional cubes that computer animators use to make the amazing CG images we enjoy in films.  This appears to be a perfect 1 to 1 metaphor.  The magic cubes build the alien's ship at the top of the water tower.  Keep in mind that Joe is a model maker.  His line at the end is instructive:


Joe:  He's building a model.


Is Abrams making a sly statement about the structure of movie props?  A reconciliation between old school techniques (Joe's model making) and the digital age (the creature and its spaceship)?  Does all the trashed and scrapped metal of the train crash represent the breakdown of the physicality  (particularly regarding film production) on the eve of the digital age?  That we make models with magic cubes now whereas we used to do it the hard way?


This all depends on...


4.  What the creature represents:  Wonder?  Imagination?  Infinite possibility? Hope?  Potential?  The thing?  Abrams himself has been very vocal about his fascination with mystery, and in that light this theory doesn't look to be too far off the mark (if a little esoteric).  The trick of hiding the monster's physical form does lend itself to the theme of mystery, though it's undercut by how Abram's pedantic treatment of his thing (though objectification is necessary for making a statement rather than painting a loving portrait.  If this is what Abrams is doing in Super 8, then I'd say it's justified).  


So then what does the Air Force represent?  Critics?  All those LOST fans who were entranced by the show's mystery but then angered when the show the last episodes weren't exactly a 'tell-all'?  Sounds good to me.  Taking it a step further, Nelec and his men are the forces of objectivity trying in vain to recapture imagination and vivisect it, make it profitable and work for their own concrete aims.  Perhaps Abrams (Joe) and his incarnated 'mystery box' (though certainly not a tame creature) are the ones fighting against the common enemy of marketers, producers, critics and all the evil hosts of the modern entertainment industry.  By this read, it's not newfangled CG effects or 3D glasses that have caged and harried everything that's wonderful about movies, it's those who would manipulate them to turn profit as well as generational misunderstanding represented by Joe's father.


So then who's the good guys?  Artists (Joe), actors (Martin & Alice), directors (Charles, though not without a little slap on the wrist), stuntmen (Cary).  As discussed earlier, computer generated effects come under Abrams' blessing.  


Joe:  We know bad things happen.  But you can still live.


Generational squabbles (Joe's estrangement from his father, the 'old school' unable to accept the 'new school') and the sharks of industry have sent imagination on the run, but the clear eyes and full hearts (can't lose!) of children will set it free again.  Despite the efforts of the jaded, imagination will blast off again and live free.


Or maybe all this is totally bogus.  Either way, I still feel like Abrams' own inability to sit back and relish his creation (specifically his creature) does a little too much to undermine his message.  Things just move a little too fast, tension starts and stops a little too much, the characters' back stories too various and multiple to be really affecting.  The emotions aren't thick enough, the creature is creepy but not nearly as haunting as Spielberg's mystery lights in Close Encounters.  In that movie also, the the forces of complacency work to sully the visions of those captured by mystery, but this message never comes at the expense of the thing itself.  If the above is on the mark, I'd say Super 8 is a really good commentary, but not a love letter.  It uses the Spielbergian/Lucasian/Cameronian/Coppolian ethos to make a much needed claim about the state of imagination in the 21st Century, but without paying proper homage to the thing, it will only ever be a secondhand statement.  If this was Abrams' sole intent all along, then I proclaim the man a genius.  But is it possible to do both?  Comment and construct?  Create wonder and also talk about it at the same time?  Turn off the lights, queue up Close Encounters and be blissfully enlightened.  As far as Abrams' career is concerned, isn't LOST already as faithful a reincarnation of Spielbergian wonder as one needs?  Queue that up too while you're at it.  

The Tempest

I'm taking a break from our regularly scheduled Halloween marathon to bring you an advance review of Julie Taymor's The Tempest  which screened last night at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival.

The Tempest is my favorite play.  By far.  It's not the best of Shakespeare's plays by any stretch, but it is the last and certainly most ambitious of his works.  The story of Prospero's wrongful deposition from the Dukeship of Milan by his usurping brother, exile to an island where he gains mystical powers and his plot to right all wrongs done him is an odd blend of magic, social commentary, philosophizing and above all, an intentional exit from the stage for the world's most lauded playwright and a lasting testament to the power of imagination.  The Tempest is Shakespeare's most introspective play, it's very clearly a journey into his own mind and soul.  It's his final say on what he thinks of this 'brave new world' before he bows out.  We have characters culled from all of his plays:  usurping family members, conniving politicians, star-crossed lovers, monsters, fools and even the very incarnation of the muse which sings in all storytellers.

Shakespeare's characters in The Tempest are so varied and ambiguous that it's almost like a personal challenge from the Bard himself to make sense of it all.  I've heard many interpretations, a storyteller's meditation on imagination, a Machiavellian meditation on power, post-colonial satire, pro-colonial propaganda, the list goes on.  Julie Taymor's rendition recasts the male Prospero as Prospera, the duchess of Milan after the death of her husband.

Alack!  This film is awfully weightless, and while the actors may be partly to blame, the real problem is the directing.  What Taymor misses is cohesion.  The Tempest in itself is not one character's tale, the cast of The Tempest is a playchest of archetypes whose movements in the narrative are fixed but the motivations and sympathies are very slippery.  The director's job should be to sew these stories together visually and with careful acting direction to push the narrative toward a common theme.  This is Taymor's first failure.  She seems to have contented herself with each actor's individual interpretation of their character with no attempt at orchestrating them all toward a meaningful climax.  Unlike Shakespeare's other dramatic plays, the story does not primarily chronicle the journey of one or two main characters.  The Tempest is a series of vignettes between different groups of characters who have been strategically placed around the island at the behest of Prospero the grand puppetmaster.  To make this work, especially on film, the director must find a way to insert a commonality of theme or interpretation to make the play's befuddling climax truly cathartic.  This is not a play that a director/writer team can content themselves to just sit back and 'be faithful' to the source material.  The Tempest is Shakespeare's erector set for directors, a 'Create-Your-Own-Masterpiece^TM' package that a director must assemble with careful direction of actors, visual spectacle and (in a film's case) editing.

One would think that Taymor would at least have the visuals down pat but I'm sad to report that she does not.  Her interpretation of Ariel is frustratingly literal.  Ben Whishaw's otherwise semi-great performance is rendered in harsh translucence.  You can almost see the blatant overlaying of Whishaw's form over the stark Hawaiian lava field set.  The shots look like they belong in the pre-production section of a 'making-of' documentary or a rough effects test.  His motion is equally as annoying.  One shot in particular shows him literally leading the characters toward Prospera's circle of reckoning.  It's a frustrating visual, that looks like the first thing that would pop into any schmo's head when reading the play.  A translucent ghostly form gliding stupidly above the turf, his body so obviously suspended by a wire and callously superimposed over the shot.  There is no interpretation between Shakespeare's stage direction and Taymor's vision of it.  If the stage direction says Ariel flies away into the sky, then she will have Whishaw's stiff form hastily rotoscoped and tossed into the clouds with a bad trail effect.  Whishaw's Ariel doesn't look spiritual, he just looks like he's not really there.  Taymor's love of spectacle contrasts curiously with her lack of depth perception.  It seems that she's never quite left the stage, and I suspect she had few collaborators commenting on the look of her film. I'm sure she had a costume designer but trusted herself to act as concept artist, thinking that hiring one would be unnecessary for a 'visionary direector' like herself.


It could be that this look is intentional.  One can create the affect of genius by sort of throwing off the precedents of filmmaking in an effort to create something new or original or 'true to vision', and Taymor's strengths do lie on the stage, hence the visuals could have looked intentionally sparse, but a film is not a stage play (unless you're Lars Von Trier).  This is a movie and blending theatrical minimalism and visual grandeur requires a particularly keen eye, one that I don't think Taymor has.  Interestingly, though, there are precedents for this sort of look.  Tarsem Singh's The Fall displays the sort of minimalist wonder that would have served this film well.  In my mind, it even would have helped had this film been entirely done on green screen with a digital environment like 300 or Sin City.  'Visionary directors' (as Taymor is credited on all of her posters), tend to poo-poo computer generated effects simply on principle.  There's a perception that a director's artistic vision is curtailed the more CGI is introduced.  A lot of directors resist green screens because it's supposedly hard to solicit felt performances from actors on a blank soundstage, but this is exactly what could have worked with The Tempest.  Wouldn't a green-screen soundstage be a perfect venue for a seasoned stage actor?  The Tempest is often performed completely minimally with no set dressing at all in an attempt to highlight particularly grand performances.  It's a matter of prestige for an actor to be able to fill an empty space like that with pure feeling and oral power, so why couldn't this work on a green screen and awesome visuals be added later?  This would certainly be appropriate for The Tempest since it all takes place in such a mythical setting.  Taymor's environment looks like a series of mid-grade sets.  Not quite rich, not quite minimal, thoroughly dull, which is unfortunate since the island itself is a silent character in this play.  This theme is given a bit of credence in one scene as Caliban monologues about the island's wonders, but the environment doesn't back it up.  The whole place looks pretty unremarkable.

I do not think the main problem with this film was Taymor's lack of understanding of Shakespeare.  As an experienced stage director, I believe she does understand Shakespeare, but she doesn't understand film.  It is the cinema that eats up her play.  Her hopelessly two-dimensional idea of film undermines her attempt at visual grandeur but it also ruins the actors' performances.  The staging of this film is lost between the relative two-dimensions of the stage and the unavoidably 3-dimensional environment of the camera.  The performances simply don't pop off the screen as in other adaptations.  They're either swallowed up by sound effects (in the shipwreck scene) or dulled by the wide open spaces of the natural sets (Prospera setting her trap).  They don't fill the space of Prospera's cavern or the Hawaiian lava fields.  Again, the assembly is the problem.  The editing is pretty abysmal (even I noticed some rough camera jumps) and a lot of the visual compositions (as when Ariel speaks to Prospera) are just downright lazy.  Often, because of the digital overlaying, Ariel and Prospera appear to be looking past each other, so here Taymor is a paradox, at once making her special effects plain and literal, using the philosophy of the stage director, but doesn't even care to preserve stage fundamentals such as making sure actors' eyelines work convincingly.  This is a particular instance that makes me think that there is little philosophy behind Taymor's visuals.  They are poorly constructed. They have no goal, they are just a series of moving pictures, shot in different places, pasted together and the resultant lack of depth and attention to detail is distracting.

The acting ranges from mediocre to pretty good.  Djimon Hounsou's Caliban is (I thought) impressively spirited.  Russel Brand seemed like a good idea for Trinculo, but he shows little nuance.  Alfred Molina's Stefano is more memorable.  Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming get the job done but don't bare any teeth, though they do play the difficult roles of a pair of powerless villains.  The standout performance was Felicity Jones' Miranda and the only real train wreck was Reeve Carney as Ferdinand.  His delivery was painfully sleepy and his look was irritatingly hipster.  It looked like he'd stepped right out of Brooklyn or an alt. country band...based in Brooklyn.

One thing Taymor does interpret with care are Ariel's songs.  Music has long been a stand-out element of her productions.  These sequences are carefully constructed, but are overlong and even do little to season the film with style.

This has been a long rant so far but I haven't gotten to my central disdain for Taymor's Tempest.  I can forgive cut-and-paste TV miniseries visuals and even less-than-inspired performances from some of the actors but the thematic interior of this film (or lack of it) was the final blow.  Mirren plays her Prospera far too down-to-earth.  Her sole motivations seem to be reclaiming her Dukeship, doing good for her daughter and satisfying her conscience in the process, but Prospero is more than these things.  The character is of higher mind than all the other players in the tale.  They are the puppets and Prospero is the puppetmaster.  He has earthly considerations, but he lives in the ivory tower of the creator.  The island is his realm of imagination, where he can accomplish anything he wants.  The island is the stage, and the stage is life.  Ariel is the sprite of inspiration, Caliban the totem of the earth and together under Prospero's command, they do the bidding of the mastermind.  This trinity is the makeup of the human mind.  The human being is capable of spritely flights of fancy and the ability to imagine all things, yet stubbornly earthbound and downtrodden.  Prospero's love of Ariel and disdain for Caliban could be seen as a statement of Shakespeare's own values.  A playwright loves his muse but not his limitations, the reminders of his own mortality and the earth to which he must return.  But all we get from Prospera's great 'wisdom' is a look through a Freudian kaleidoscope in which Ariel is seen changing gender whilst flying through space.  It seems that the only real existential depth that Taymor is capable of portraying is the sexual, as if that is what is at the heart of all mankind.  Ariel's gender-bending is not in itself a bad thematic move--(s)he is the spirit of all things incarnated which applies to both genders--, but placing that imagery at the center of humanity distracts from weightier themes of mortality and imagination.  Thus, Mirren's delivery of the famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..." speech holds all the profundity of a dirty joke.  Prospero is talking about the soul and lot of mankind which Taymor can only represent with Ariel's growing and retracting breasts, then splitting in two as if through mitosis and performing the holy Sexual Act.  This interpretation is illiterate and ultimately says nothing about human kind other than that we are sexual creatures (and fully resists definition as to what that means).  Taymor produces provocative imagery but fails to paint a nuanced portrait of the human being.  Instead she uses sexuality to elicit a visceral response from the audience and create the illusion of depth.  Shakespeare saw higher things in men.  Sex was definitely included, but it was not worshiped.  Certainly not beyond love.  Taymor, in typical 21st Century fashion, conflates the two as one in the same.  For Shakespeare, the center of the human experience was a bittersweet tension between the spiritual bliss of imagination and the harsh, monstrous clay to which we must return.  For Taymor, it is a drug bender, a one-night-stand and a morning after.

One thing I will say, is that unlike a lot of naysayers out there, I don't think Taymor is pretentious.  I just don't think she is a good filmmaker.  She lacks focus and real intentionality to her errant visions.  She is Mirren's Prospera, not Shakespeare's Prospero.  She is earth-bound and frustratingly literal.  She holds no dominion over the spirits of creativity.  I will say that the end credits sequence was cool.  We see Prospera's treasured books sinking into a deep blue sea while Ariel's song plays hauntingly over it.  Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn't fill out this fleeting vision.  I wanted to love this movie as much as I love the play it's based on, but the film misses the point and fails to assemble the story and infuse it with meaning.  Such a shame.

The Tempest - C

Halloween Movie Marathon Part 3

The Shining

Kubrick never contented himself to make an 'homage' to a genre.  He would instead erect a monument to it.  2001: A Space Odyssey continues to battle it out with Blade Runner for #1 sci-fi film ever made on just about every top 10 list out there.  He turns the genre itself into the film's principle character.  In 2001 it was the ascension of consciousness.  In The Shining it's just plain terror.  There are a lot of interpretations as to what exactly Kubrick is commenting on here, but in my mind if you just make a film about evil itself, then all applicable commentary naturally follows (the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, class tyranny, racism, familial abuse, patriarchal violence, sexual violence).  The Shining represents vileness in all crevasses of the human heart and all manner of wrongdoing.  This is the power of genre filmmaking.  Instead of setting out to allegorize one specific issue (e.g. the evil of the Holocaust), you exorcise the spirit of that event and send it coursing through the events your narrative.  You'll tend to come out with flat characters and a storybook plot but stories like these must necessarily be told in broad strokes.  "For the near-blind you have to draw large simple caricatures" --Flannery O'Connor.  The apocalyptic nature of this film and its lack of character complexity was what caused critics to at first pan this film.  Heck, even Stephen King didn't like it.  Years later, as with most of Kubrick's films, opinions took a positive turn and The Shining was hailed as one of the greatest horror films of all time.

Watching this film for the first time was an engrossing experience.  I was shocked to learn how few critics liked it when it came out.  It's just so huge and heavy.  I actually expected to not have a profound experience with this movie since I'd thought myself to have absorbed most of its key moments through the general osmosis of homage and satire (most memorably The Simpsons' parody).  The film has become so iconic that I didn't think that could really offer me anything that I hadn't seen before, but even in 2010, it definitely did.  I was afraid every second of this film.  It was unsettling in a way that I hadn't experienced before, a kind of relentless fear from which there is no escape.  Stephen King famously remarked that Kubrick was a man that "thinks too much and feels to little."  This may be true, but you need a thinker to take you through the headspace of a psychotic.  Kubrick slights every other element to the tale in favor of patterning the mind of the aggressor.  Even the ghosts, which one would think would be pivotal to a story about a haunted house, are left somewhat to the backdrop.  Kubrick's specters are the pantheon of a disturbed mind rather than a spiritual force.  The Shining is a monolith of a thriller.  It is at once dense and sparse, like the contrast between the massive hotel interiors and the sense of claustrophobia it induces, and it drops on your psyche like an anvil. Repeat viewings of this film would surely yield many more opportunities for interpretation but I think I'm content to visit this house of horrors only once.

The Shining - A (freaking) +
Scarometer - Deeply disturbing.  No 'jump out at you' scares.  Entirely, 'doubt your psychological stability' kind of stuff.  Hugging your significant other will do little to lessen the haunts of The Shining, especially because you'll likely be questioning the power motivations inherently laced into your very embrace.  This is no roller-coaster ride, it's a draught of pure fear.