I've seen a lot of movies this year. Not many that were released during 2007, because going to the theater all the time is just too expensive, and movies are like food - get it free when you can. (In case anyone is a nerd like me, and interested in these nerdly details, I've noted how I saw each movie, to the best of my recollection.)
Anyway, instead of picking the best of what's come out this year, and therefore inadvertently dismissing the many films I haven't seen, this is a list compiled from the films I have viewed, for the first time, during the past twelve months, no matter when they first came out. They are in no particular order, and are not ranked, though some of them have been chosen over others for specific reasons.
The Dead Girl (free; rented with coupon)
Okay, so they're not ranked, but this is definitely my favorite. Every aspect of filmmaking on display here is what the cinematic medium is all about. The acting, lighting, writing, direction...a true and brilliant use of the craft, across the board. This would make the list no matter what, because it's just that strong, but it's also deserving of any recognition I can give it because it hardly received any earlier. Limited release, very little promotion, passed over by all the big awards and many small ones...it's shameful how an incredible movie like this fails to garner the attention it deserves. I strongly recommend renting the DVD. If you believe in the great power of little movies, you won't be disappointed.
Pan’s Labyrinth (half-price; rented with coupon)
Really, it's El Laberinto Del Fauno, but that's okay. It's still amazing. Guillermo Del Toro has created an exceptional faerie tale, brilliant and moving and entertaining and astoundingly beautiful to look at. I generally don't like to call creative and artistic people "genius", but he really is. I wish I'd managed to get out to this one in the theater, and see it on the big screen, but beauty is beauty wherever you see it, and Del Toro continues to amaze me.
Michael Clayton (free; ticket purchased with movie pass)
I have to admit that there isn't a lot about this movie that really sticks with me. I wasn't moved or amazed by it like I was with the first two on this list, and it isn't a movie that I couldn't wait to buy or see again. But it is one of the few movies I saw in the theater, and part of an even smaller group I saw in the theater and truly respect. There is nothing about this movie that is bad or wrong or doesn't work. The script is extremely well-written, and all the main actors give more than a movie-star performance; they get way down deep into their characters. It's a very high-class style of filmmaking we don't really see anymore, and that's something I miss. It's the kind of thing Sam Mendes has been doing, and the kind of thing Todd Field is trying to do but totally misses the mark. So, while Michael Clayton doesn't make the same kind of impression on me that other great movies have, it's such a strong film that it's absolutely worth seeing, and definitely belongs on this list.
Hot Fuzz (full price matinee - worth it!)
It's extraordinarily difficult to craft a piece of entertainment that parodies the very form and genre it embraces, while making sure it is in fact entertaining in its own right. Last Action Hero tried and failed; these guys have done it twice in a row. They've actually made successful examples of the lousy movies they parody. It's quite a feat, and I don't think there's anybody out there doing a better job of it. Aside from Team America: World Police, is there another movie that manages to be an awesome movie yet parody the crappy ones that are just like it? Hmm...
Planet Terror (free; rented with coupon)
I separate this from Death Proof, which I also really like, because it should stand on its own...and besides, I never saw Grindhouse in the theater as a double feature. I saw them separately on DVD. Oh well. But, like Shaun of the Dead, it takes the zombie B-movie into a near-impossible realm where ridiculous ideas are not ridiculed but celebrated for their ridiculousness, and makes it work. Robert Rodriguez mines those horrible low-budget shlockbusters for all their cliches, all their exploitations, and corrals them into a fun-as-hell flick that never gets old. It's a movie with no real artistic merit, no philosophical meaning, nothing to add to the history of cinema...and it doesn't want any of those things. The Dead Girl has those things, which is why I love it; Planet Terror is the other kind of great movie: the kind that is good at being bad.
For movies that are bad at being bad, and worse at being good, or just plaid old not-good-at-all, tune in again soon for my list of the worst movies I've seen this year. The aforementioned Todd Field may put in an appearance or two. Nothing personal, Todd; I just think your movies suck. But here's five more movies that don't suck:
Honorable Mention (bottom five of the top ten)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (full price midnight show...a friend invited me; I'd never turn her down...yes I have a friend)
I'm not much for sequels, and I hated the first two (both of which I also saw for the first time this year, on DVD), because they look & feel fantastic but fail to tell a decent story. With this one, they finally got it all together. Love the story, love the spectacle. Too bad I had to see the others to have any clue what was happening in this one.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (free; ticket purchased w/ entertainment card acquired through reward points)
Same deal. The other four never quite managed to take the story from the book and tell it properly on film. This one stands on its own. It's also the first Harry Potter movie I've seen in the theater; I had an afternoon free, and the entertainment card, and nothing else was playing I was remotely interested in. Good thing this turned out to be the first of the series I didn't feel like fast-forwarding!
12 Angry Men (free; borrowed from library)
Don't know why I'd never seen more than a few clips of this...a bit dated, but it's a classic for a reason. The brilliance of Lumet's filmmaking techniques on display here is undeniable.
Yojimbo (Netflix...so not free, but certainly inexpensive overall)
Again, it's a classic for a reason. Nobody can tell such a contained story the way Kurosawa did. People have tried to copy and/or remake what he accomplished, but those that haven't screwed it up still don't have the touch.
The Godfather Part III (free; borrowed from library)
I don't know why this has such a bad reputation. Is it as good as the first two? Of course not. But it's still compelling, still a fitting end to the series. For some reason Sofia Coppola has always been a scapegoat; she really wasn't so bad. She's not a true actress, so she was basically acting natural, which is exactly what was called for in the character. It's just different from what people are used to seeing. The only scene that actually made her look bad was a scene with Al Pacino in which they both had to loop several minutes of dialogue, and looping always sounds bad, even with experienced actors. So give the girl a break.
There were a number of movies that didn't make the list but were also really good movies. You've got to rule something out, right? Some of this has to do with expectations (such as a sequel that rises well above its predecessors), or it may be an extra bit of appreciation I feel...a personal affection that causes me to praise it at the expense of omitting others. In the words of my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr...so it goes.
Next time: wow, did that movie SUCK!!!
Friday, December 28, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
High Tension
A few nights ago I saw about ten minutes of the recent remake The Hills Have Eyes. It was so awful and so stupid and such a ridiculous pile of dreck that it made me curious who the hell would direct such a piece of shit. By utter coincidence, High Tension (also known as Haute tension, being French-made) had arrived that very afternoon, fresh from my Netflix queue, and I had watched it earlier the same night. Very different movies, made in different countries, made for different reasons, with the same guy behind the camera: Alexandre Aja. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Forget about Hills for now; like I said, I only saw ten minutes, and wanted to see no more; I knew it was a stupid movie last year just from the ads & trailers. But I'd heard good things about High Tension. That it was a different type of thriller, it was actually tense, not just needlessly gory with crappy fake scares. That it was actually terrifying because it seemed so real, and not like a horror movie. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I don't know what those people were talking about. They must be brain-dead.
Not only was it needlessly gory (which I don't necessarily object to if it isn't too stupid), and full of crappy fake scares (some guy turns around to find someone suddenly standing right behind him), there was absolutely no tension whatsoever. There are two main reasons for this: one, much of the running time is taken up by the heroine (Marie) either following, being chased by, or hiding from the Big Bad Psycho Killer. There's really no tension here, because we as an audience know exactly what Marie knows - BBPK is after her. There's nothing else to it. Hitchcock always said, show your audience something the character doesn't know, and the suspense comes from wanting the character to find out...usually before it kills him. Not Hitch's exact words, but...that's what he did, anyway.
Before I get to the second reason for the lack of tension, I want to add that in addition to every subjective thing that makes this movie not good, there is an idea, a long-standing concept of storytelling in film, that is so horribly despicable, ignorant, offensive, and just downright lazy for a storyteller, that I am simply appalled by its inclusion as a character motivation. It offends me as a person, as a friend of a certain group of people, and as a writer. Gets to me on all levels. From this point on, I will spoil the movie, even though I believe the filmmakers did their own spoiling, which is actually lack-of-tension reason #2. But if for some reason you really want to see it and think you might enjoy it, by all means, stop listening to me. You're on your own. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Reason number 2: they spoil their own big twist right in the very beginning. Marie is in the car with her friend Alex; two girls driving to the country to stay with Alex's family and study for exams. Marie wakes up in the back seat, describes a dream she had of a man chasing her. Alex asks who the guy was, and Marie tells her "That's just it, there was no guy, it was me chasing me." Well, as soon as I heard that, it was pretty clear to me that later in the movie, when the Big Bad Psycho Killer shows up, that there is no guy, it's just Marie chasing Marie. And yes, folks, that is the Big Fucking Twist. How pathetically lame is that?
Never mind the logistics of how she could follow herself in another car, or hide from herself in a gas station with the attendant looking at and talking to herself and the killer, or see herself chasing someone in a cornfield from the window of a room with another person in it whom she's talking to...forget all that. I don't care about that. How can they state the secret fucking premise right in the beginning! And then late in the movie, after she kills the bad guy, they show Marie on security video in the gas station, killing the attendant. That's how they choose to reveal it. It was so fucking stupid, I couldn't believe it. How is anyone NOT supposed to figure this out! They fucking TOLD you! Up front! How is there any tension at any point in the movie! She's hiding from herself! She's running from herself! She's chasing herself in the car! It just goes on and on, and since I know this guy is not going to kill her, that somehow some way she'll be revealed...I'm not feeling the tension. Bad bad bad bad bad.
But like I said, that's not the worst thing about this movie. Here's the real problem: why she does this. First off, why is it every time a character in a movie is revealed to have multiple personalities, which is now clinically referred to as dissociative personality disorder, one of them is a crazy fucked up psycho killer?!?!! Do the filmmakers not realize how wrong this is? How it creates the wrong impression of serious mental illness? Hello? We've seen that a hundred times, anyway. Fucking enough already. But it gets worse.
Not only is her second personality a Big Bad Psycho Killer, it is killing with oh-so-perfectly-understandable-psychotic-reasoning: repressed homosexual desire. Wow. This is the best they had. This is what they came up with. Because everyone knows that if you think you're gay, but don't want to be, you'd better do something about it before you start killing everybody you meet. 'Cause that's what people do. That's what my very good lesbian friend would have done if she hadn't been able to learn to express herself openly. Oh yeah. And can you believe, someone actually told her she'd like this movie because she's a lesbian. It's so maddeningly stupid...I'm completely flummoxed.
The things is, I didn't even have to wait until the end to realize this was her supposed motivation. Since I knew, after hearing about Marie's "dream", that she was in fact going to be the killer, that made it very easy to determine what brought about her slaughter of her friend Alex's family: the desire to be with Alex. They make it pretty clear, too; she's sitting outside having a cigarette when she sees Alex upstairs through the window, in the shower. In the very next scene she goes to her own room, undoes her jeans, and rubs one out. Pretty obvious where her interests lie, especially after the earlier conversation in the car, in which she not only describes her dream and reveals the twist but also makes it clear she's not dating any guys, and calls Alex a slut for dating a lot of them.
But anyway, while she's got her hand down her pants, this scene is intercut with shots of the killer's truck approaching the farm. Cinema at its best, right? Intercut her lesbian desire for her friend with the "killer", a.k.a. the damaged side of her psyche, bringing murder and hate to their happy little home. Her desire brings out the killer; how absolutely fucking brilliant, oh golly gosh what a story. What really bugs me about that is it's actually a good way to tell the story cinematically. This is what movies are about, this is how they should be told. And it flat out sucks that this is what they choose to portray, this is what they choose as their cinematic vision. It's awful.
But of course, how do we know it's the killer and his truck? Because we've already seen him, who knows where or why or how, apparently giving himself a blowjob with some girl's severed head. Again, logistically, this makes no sense, since Marie is in another car, miles away, and whose head is that? Has Marie killed before? Where did this truck come from? Supposedly she locks Alex in the back of it, alive and screaming, with the blood and torn photos of other dead girls. So where, and when, and why, did Marie kill these other girls. Did Marie kill any other girls? Does any of this add up at all? No, but it doesn't really have to.
I'm getting off-track here. I was bitching about the idea that Marie is unable to confront her lesbian desire for her friend, and kills the girl's family so that no one can come between them anymore. And she says this; she's muttering it in the beginning, and again at the end when all has been revealed. This is such a disgusting notion. That people who have a hard time thinking of themselves as gay would develop a split personality and kill entire families. She kills their dog, too; the dog always dies before the people, but killing dogs in movies is another rant for another day. The issue here is sexual repression.
In the movies, repression = homicide. And I'm sick of it. It's simple, it's stupid, and yeah, it's just a movie, but that's exactly why it needs to be better. It should be more motivated, it should be something specific to that character. It should NOT be something that groups an entire category of people into an over-simplified and essentially WRONG notion of personality and behavior. This is the part that offends me as a writer. I work hard to create characters and motivations that are true and unique and real; it pisses me off to see other people take the lazy approach, to copy what's been done a hundred times, especially when what's been done is so misconceived.
The end result is, it's just a movie, but instead of being pure and compelling and unique to itself, it's a pile of crap that goes beyond worth forgetting and into the realm of being vilified. Alexandre Aja is officially on my shit list. Sorry, pal. You look like you know what you're doing; too bad you're not smart enough to do it well.
Forget about Hills for now; like I said, I only saw ten minutes, and wanted to see no more; I knew it was a stupid movie last year just from the ads & trailers. But I'd heard good things about High Tension. That it was a different type of thriller, it was actually tense, not just needlessly gory with crappy fake scares. That it was actually terrifying because it seemed so real, and not like a horror movie. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I don't know what those people were talking about. They must be brain-dead.
Not only was it needlessly gory (which I don't necessarily object to if it isn't too stupid), and full of crappy fake scares (some guy turns around to find someone suddenly standing right behind him), there was absolutely no tension whatsoever. There are two main reasons for this: one, much of the running time is taken up by the heroine (Marie) either following, being chased by, or hiding from the Big Bad Psycho Killer. There's really no tension here, because we as an audience know exactly what Marie knows - BBPK is after her. There's nothing else to it. Hitchcock always said, show your audience something the character doesn't know, and the suspense comes from wanting the character to find out...usually before it kills him. Not Hitch's exact words, but...that's what he did, anyway.
Before I get to the second reason for the lack of tension, I want to add that in addition to every subjective thing that makes this movie not good, there is an idea, a long-standing concept of storytelling in film, that is so horribly despicable, ignorant, offensive, and just downright lazy for a storyteller, that I am simply appalled by its inclusion as a character motivation. It offends me as a person, as a friend of a certain group of people, and as a writer. Gets to me on all levels. From this point on, I will spoil the movie, even though I believe the filmmakers did their own spoiling, which is actually lack-of-tension reason #2. But if for some reason you really want to see it and think you might enjoy it, by all means, stop listening to me. You're on your own. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Reason number 2: they spoil their own big twist right in the very beginning. Marie is in the car with her friend Alex; two girls driving to the country to stay with Alex's family and study for exams. Marie wakes up in the back seat, describes a dream she had of a man chasing her. Alex asks who the guy was, and Marie tells her "That's just it, there was no guy, it was me chasing me." Well, as soon as I heard that, it was pretty clear to me that later in the movie, when the Big Bad Psycho Killer shows up, that there is no guy, it's just Marie chasing Marie. And yes, folks, that is the Big Fucking Twist. How pathetically lame is that?
Never mind the logistics of how she could follow herself in another car, or hide from herself in a gas station with the attendant looking at and talking to herself and the killer, or see herself chasing someone in a cornfield from the window of a room with another person in it whom she's talking to...forget all that. I don't care about that. How can they state the secret fucking premise right in the beginning! And then late in the movie, after she kills the bad guy, they show Marie on security video in the gas station, killing the attendant. That's how they choose to reveal it. It was so fucking stupid, I couldn't believe it. How is anyone NOT supposed to figure this out! They fucking TOLD you! Up front! How is there any tension at any point in the movie! She's hiding from herself! She's running from herself! She's chasing herself in the car! It just goes on and on, and since I know this guy is not going to kill her, that somehow some way she'll be revealed...I'm not feeling the tension. Bad bad bad bad bad.
But like I said, that's not the worst thing about this movie. Here's the real problem: why she does this. First off, why is it every time a character in a movie is revealed to have multiple personalities, which is now clinically referred to as dissociative personality disorder, one of them is a crazy fucked up psycho killer?!?!! Do the filmmakers not realize how wrong this is? How it creates the wrong impression of serious mental illness? Hello? We've seen that a hundred times, anyway. Fucking enough already. But it gets worse.
Not only is her second personality a Big Bad Psycho Killer, it is killing with oh-so-perfectly-understandable-psychotic-reasoning: repressed homosexual desire. Wow. This is the best they had. This is what they came up with. Because everyone knows that if you think you're gay, but don't want to be, you'd better do something about it before you start killing everybody you meet. 'Cause that's what people do. That's what my very good lesbian friend would have done if she hadn't been able to learn to express herself openly. Oh yeah. And can you believe, someone actually told her she'd like this movie because she's a lesbian. It's so maddeningly stupid...I'm completely flummoxed.
The things is, I didn't even have to wait until the end to realize this was her supposed motivation. Since I knew, after hearing about Marie's "dream", that she was in fact going to be the killer, that made it very easy to determine what brought about her slaughter of her friend Alex's family: the desire to be with Alex. They make it pretty clear, too; she's sitting outside having a cigarette when she sees Alex upstairs through the window, in the shower. In the very next scene she goes to her own room, undoes her jeans, and rubs one out. Pretty obvious where her interests lie, especially after the earlier conversation in the car, in which she not only describes her dream and reveals the twist but also makes it clear she's not dating any guys, and calls Alex a slut for dating a lot of them.
But anyway, while she's got her hand down her pants, this scene is intercut with shots of the killer's truck approaching the farm. Cinema at its best, right? Intercut her lesbian desire for her friend with the "killer", a.k.a. the damaged side of her psyche, bringing murder and hate to their happy little home. Her desire brings out the killer; how absolutely fucking brilliant, oh golly gosh what a story. What really bugs me about that is it's actually a good way to tell the story cinematically. This is what movies are about, this is how they should be told. And it flat out sucks that this is what they choose to portray, this is what they choose as their cinematic vision. It's awful.
But of course, how do we know it's the killer and his truck? Because we've already seen him, who knows where or why or how, apparently giving himself a blowjob with some girl's severed head. Again, logistically, this makes no sense, since Marie is in another car, miles away, and whose head is that? Has Marie killed before? Where did this truck come from? Supposedly she locks Alex in the back of it, alive and screaming, with the blood and torn photos of other dead girls. So where, and when, and why, did Marie kill these other girls. Did Marie kill any other girls? Does any of this add up at all? No, but it doesn't really have to.
I'm getting off-track here. I was bitching about the idea that Marie is unable to confront her lesbian desire for her friend, and kills the girl's family so that no one can come between them anymore. And she says this; she's muttering it in the beginning, and again at the end when all has been revealed. This is such a disgusting notion. That people who have a hard time thinking of themselves as gay would develop a split personality and kill entire families. She kills their dog, too; the dog always dies before the people, but killing dogs in movies is another rant for another day. The issue here is sexual repression.
In the movies, repression = homicide. And I'm sick of it. It's simple, it's stupid, and yeah, it's just a movie, but that's exactly why it needs to be better. It should be more motivated, it should be something specific to that character. It should NOT be something that groups an entire category of people into an over-simplified and essentially WRONG notion of personality and behavior. This is the part that offends me as a writer. I work hard to create characters and motivations that are true and unique and real; it pisses me off to see other people take the lazy approach, to copy what's been done a hundred times, especially when what's been done is so misconceived.
The end result is, it's just a movie, but instead of being pure and compelling and unique to itself, it's a pile of crap that goes beyond worth forgetting and into the realm of being vilified. Alexandre Aja is officially on my shit list. Sorry, pal. You look like you know what you're doing; too bad you're not smart enough to do it well.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Last Shot
I believe there's an inherent inequality in a movie about the movies, about making a movie, not getting a theatrical release. I remember seeing ads for The Last Shot on tv, I remember hearing of a limited release for about a week, and I remember its sudden disappearance from any form of media. It eventually came out on DVD, and that's the end of the story. Which is too bad, because if this movie deserves anything, it's a movie audience.
Is it a great film? No...but it's funny. Is it filled with insight into the creative process, the miasmic crossroads of art and commerce? No...but it has a sense of truth and experience. Is there any reason a theater full of people would not be glad they had paid to see this movie? None that I can see. A cruel irony of this is the opening credits, which are mainly played against a background of items and events in an actual movie theater. Though I should correct myself and say opening titles; as one character points out, credits are at the end, titles at the beginning. It's a movie-savvy group of people, y'understand.
Even if you're not a big fan of Alec Baldwin or Matthew Broderick, it's worth seeing for the supporting cast. Joan Cusack, Toni Collette, and Tony Shalhoub each steal the few short scenes they're in. And for anyone who is a screenwriter (like me!), wants to be a screenwriter, or thinks they know what it means to be a screenwriter...the quick montage of Baldwin's character hearing pitches on the street from everyone he sees is so brilliant and funny and true, it's a lesson in humility we could all use from time to time.
I think the story is hampered by the idea that Baldwin's character, FBI man-undercover-as-Hollywood producer, would choose a script set in the desert of Arizona (even titled Arizona) when he needs to shoot in Rhode Island so he can set up the local mob boss there. Seems a little pointless, but, this appears to be one of the based-on-actual-events aspects of the story that really happened. The real FBI man did find a script, written for the desert, and convinced the filmmakers to shoot in New England, even though he knew, and they didn't, they'd never shoot a frame. And I can't help thinking, about Broderick's character or the real guys with the script...way to sell out! And I just don't completely buy it as a story element. Not that I don't believe people sell out; they sure as hell do, but with all the scripts out there, seems like he could have found one that fit the location. Sometimes what's true is too stupid to actually work in a movie.
Speaking of a script, Jeff Nathanson, who has done some decent work in the past, most notably for Steven Spielberg, probably could have rewritten this a bit more, but does a very good job as a first time director. It's really a shame the movie was never released properly and couldn't turn a profit. That's got to be heartbreaking, at least for a little while. But in the end, he has a good movie and a quality DVD. If you want to sit down and for an hour and half and enjoy what you see, give it a look. It isn't perfect, but what is? As long as a movie is fun to sit through, instead of a chore, I'd call it a great success.
Is it a great film? No...but it's funny. Is it filled with insight into the creative process, the miasmic crossroads of art and commerce? No...but it has a sense of truth and experience. Is there any reason a theater full of people would not be glad they had paid to see this movie? None that I can see. A cruel irony of this is the opening credits, which are mainly played against a background of items and events in an actual movie theater. Though I should correct myself and say opening titles; as one character points out, credits are at the end, titles at the beginning. It's a movie-savvy group of people, y'understand.
Even if you're not a big fan of Alec Baldwin or Matthew Broderick, it's worth seeing for the supporting cast. Joan Cusack, Toni Collette, and Tony Shalhoub each steal the few short scenes they're in. And for anyone who is a screenwriter (like me!), wants to be a screenwriter, or thinks they know what it means to be a screenwriter...the quick montage of Baldwin's character hearing pitches on the street from everyone he sees is so brilliant and funny and true, it's a lesson in humility we could all use from time to time.
I think the story is hampered by the idea that Baldwin's character, FBI man-undercover-as-Hollywood producer, would choose a script set in the desert of Arizona (even titled Arizona) when he needs to shoot in Rhode Island so he can set up the local mob boss there. Seems a little pointless, but, this appears to be one of the based-on-actual-events aspects of the story that really happened. The real FBI man did find a script, written for the desert, and convinced the filmmakers to shoot in New England, even though he knew, and they didn't, they'd never shoot a frame. And I can't help thinking, about Broderick's character or the real guys with the script...way to sell out! And I just don't completely buy it as a story element. Not that I don't believe people sell out; they sure as hell do, but with all the scripts out there, seems like he could have found one that fit the location. Sometimes what's true is too stupid to actually work in a movie.
Speaking of a script, Jeff Nathanson, who has done some decent work in the past, most notably for Steven Spielberg, probably could have rewritten this a bit more, but does a very good job as a first time director. It's really a shame the movie was never released properly and couldn't turn a profit. That's got to be heartbreaking, at least for a little while. But in the end, he has a good movie and a quality DVD. If you want to sit down and for an hour and half and enjoy what you see, give it a look. It isn't perfect, but what is? As long as a movie is fun to sit through, instead of a chore, I'd call it a great success.
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