Film Review: Prometheus

Sure, much of the dialogue may be quite silly and pulpy, and yes, many of the decisions by supposedly intelligent characters may very well be looked upon as ranging anywhere from misguided to downright ridiculous (one certain scene wherein an otherwise bright biologist decides to play cute with a cobraesque alien creature with inevitable bad endings is so stupid it is unbelievable in any scenario), but between the visual splendor of the film and the oft-times physical tension of the narrative, it is a pretty safe bet to make the bold exclamation that after years of cinematic doldrums, Ridley Scott, the once and future king of psychological space horror is indeed back in rare form with Prometheus, the director's twentieth film.

Actually, to put all the proverbial cards on the table, one surely must admit to having lost faith in Ridley Scott as a director lo these past two, perhaps three decades or so.   Outside of thinking Blade Runner pretty damn close to a masterpiece of the genre (which I believe we all probably should) and Alien a near pitch perfect blend of sci-fi and horror (again, a reasonable thing to do), the oeuvre of Sir Ridley has not really been anything for which most, this critic most definitely included, have been able to muster up any sort of vim or vigor or excitable hullabaloo.  Sure, we get the occasional bon mot (the enjoyable but overwrought Thelma and Louise, the oft-maligned but visually stunning Black Rain, the visceral Black Hawk Down), but overall what we get from Scott most recently is mediocrity disguised as arrogant prestige (the tepid, though with occasional chutzpah of American Gangster, the inexplicably well-received nonsense of the Oscar-winning Gladiator,  the unfortunate banality of things like Body of Lies and Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood) - which makes his latest all that more refreshing to watch.

Now before we attempt to dive head first into what makes Prometheus such an enjoyable film to watch (and perhaps those things that maybe hold it back a bit from its potential) we should probably clear the air, so to speak, on any debates that may be raging about this being an Alien prequel.   Both the director and 20th Century Fox have laid it on pretty thick as to this not being an Alien prequel - mainly, one supposes, in order to get a wider audience than just those Alien aficionados.   But still, the imagery is here.  The references are here.  The H.R. Giger-inspired iconography is here.  For all intents and purposes, Prometheus is indeed an Alien prequel, or at the very least a peripheral prequel that perhaps acts more as part of a shared cinematic universe as opposed to the very thing that gave birth to the world that would one day become Alien and its non-Scott directed sequels.  What this new film amounts to then, is not necessarily the mother or father of Alien but it's older brother or perhaps a wayward uncle.  Though Prometheus shares DNA with Alien, it by no means retroactively begat the 1979 film.  Like the heroine of the film, searching for her maker, we have yet to come across that particular creature.  But, as we are here to speak of the new, not the old, I digress.

What Prometheus does amount to is a return to form of the director.   What Scott has always been above everything else, is a visual storyteller.  We see that in his early sci-fi work and we have seen it in varying degrees of success ever since.  Now we see it again in Prometheus, only stronger than it has been in decades.  Now let's face the fact, that even though the director's best and most popular works are of the genre, Scott has never truly been a science fiction filmmaker.  Save perhaps for how one looks at his mostly forgotten but quite engaging Legend (more fantasy one supposes), Prometheus is just the director's third film in the genre, but even so, it is a genre where Scott excels where otherwise he does not.  Prometheus, taking place in and around the year 2091, is the story of a group of mismatched space explorers searching for proof that some as-of-yet discovered ancient alien race is responsible for all life as we know it - and being so, is the director's most grandiose tale yet.  This is where Scott is at his best.   Whether it be the claustrophobic confines of an abandoned ship under attack from a horrific deadly menace or the noirish world of runaway androids in a futuristic dystopian L.A. or an epic search for the beginning of everything, this is where Scott needs to be.  This is where Scott needs to stay.  This is where Scott is most at home.

Inhabited with all the archetypes of the genre, Prometheus, the ship and the movie, is as much a character of cinema as anyone inside it.  Like Scott's own Nostromo or Kubrick's Discovery One before it, Prometheus is a living breathing entity that can be both safe haven and enemy number one to its inhabitants.  And just like in the aforementioned filmic cases, it is aboard this titular ship - and in the caverns beneath its ever-watchful, both maliciously and as guardian angel, eyes - where our grandiose story unfolds.  The film stars Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo, as an archeologist who, like Darwin centuries before her, has her faith shaken by her own discoveries; Michael Fassbender as David, an android that blends, to the actor's own admission, Bowie from The Man Who Fell to Earth, Dirk Bogarde in The Servant, Sean Young's replicant yearning for humanity in Scott's own Blade Runner, Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia and the HAL 3000 computer from 2001; and Charlize Theron as the smokin' hot, yet cold-as-steel head honcho who acts, along with David though to a greater degree, as the film's resident villain, or at least as the one voted most likely to get her much deserved comeuppance by the end of the third act.  We get an array of stereotypical fellow travelers (the gruff, don't-give-a-shit captain with a secret heart of gold; the rebel agitator who thinks he knows best; the bantering, comic-relief co-pilots) but these are the core three who, along with the good ship Prometheus, come together to form the crux of our space opera tale.

Now Theron may get pushed out of the limelight, as she is given very little to work with character-wise, but Rapace, and especially Fassbender manage to run away with the film on more than several occasions.  Rapace's Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, a couldbe Creationist searching for answers she knows she will not like, is this film's answer to Sigourney Weaver's iconic Ellen Ripley - if this film actually needs an answer to the iconic Ripley, which it probably does not.   Perhaps she doesn't quite kick the ass and take the names that Ripley does in the series (then who does) but when we see her performing an emergency abdominal surgery - on herself! - we know this is a woman of the same strong stock.  Then again, this inherent toughness, this balls-out batshitcrazy personification should not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the actress as Lisbeth Salander in the movies.  But still, tough as those proverbial nails she may well be, it is Fassbender as David, who is, ironically enough considering his androidal beginnings, the humanity of the film.  Like Pinocchio, David is something inhuman who, though believing himself superior to human beings in every way, wants to be human himself.  The android who wishes he were a boy.  Of course this wouldbe boy, with his chilling voice that brings back memories of the aforementioned HAL (though with no singing of Daisy), is a sly, conniving and quite sinister sonofabitch with an agenda all his own.  Not the villain of the story but perhaps its antihero instead.

In sum, the visual audacity of the movie (once again, Scott is, if nothing else, a very visual storyteller) blended with the interuniverse brotherhood of the Alien films and the bravura performances of Rapace and Fasbeneder (and Theron when she is given the chance, as well as Idris Elba as the surly ship's captain) make Prometheus a welcome sight for those who loved Scott's earliest films.   Is Prometheus equal to the one two punch of the original Alien and James Cameron's machismo sequel?  Certainly not, as this film is the expansive, awe-inspiring yin to those film's enclosed, death grip yangs.  Is Prometheus all we were hoping it would be cracked up to be?  Perhaps not.  Is it the best damn thing Ridley Scott has made in thirty years?  Hell yes!  One of the taglines of the film, and something David states more than once as he antagonizes his human compatriots (and something one can read all about in David's own blog, one part of a pretty immense and immersive viral campaign for the film), is "Big Things come from Small Beginnings," and it is in these small beginnings that the birth of humanity as we know it through the Alienverse, will eventually be born.   No, Prometheus may not be the second coming of a bygone era of science-fiction - an Alien 2.0 if you will - but it still manages to be an enrapturing, enthralling motion picture experience well worth our time as moviegoers, as well as a film that avoids the overly-exposed and overly-exploded Michael Bay-esque idea of Summer blockbustery fare.  In the end, Prometheus may very be looked upon as the thinking man's Alien.  No more, no less.  And that is just alright with me.

Film Review: Shame

Starting out matter-of-factly enough to be considered a modern day, sex addict version of Jeanne Dielman, we watch the opening salvo as Michael Fassbender's Brandon - the titular, ostensibly shamed sexual obsessive - goes about his seemingly drudging daily and nightly routine of anonymous sex, ignoring the pleading messages on his voicemail, vigorous masturbation and online porn - all the while dragging along a seemingly worn out penis that even flaccid could easily be mistaken for a nine iron.  Now even though this same said full frontal nudity, along with some pretty graphic sexual encounters (at least graphic for a mainstream movie), saddled the film with that bottom line kick in the balls NC-17 rating, Shame is not actually about sex so much as it is about addiction.  An addiction that in this day and age could be just as dangerous, or at least just as much of a crap shoot as heroin or crack.

To further prove this is a film not about sex but about addiction, one is asked to look at the seeming sexiness of such a sexual film.  Even with all the sex that is going on (some of it peripherally, some of it full frontal and center), never once is this film sexy.  Instead, Fassbender's sex addict goes about in a veritable state of melancholy, his sexual encounters cold and formulaic, his demeanor one of diffident arrogance.  Fassbender, whose smile incidentally, the few times we get to see it, is one of both disarming charity and predatory ferocity, goes about his role as if he is a dead man walking - no emotions (well, perhaps desire and some self-loathing) and no sense of community with anyone around him (well, except for when he is fucking them).  Even when his sister comes to live with him (Carey Mulligan playing what one would call against type - and doing one hell of a job at it) we see a distance between these estranged siblings - Fassbender's cold as ice addict never letting anyone within, emotionally speaking, arm's reach.  Perhaps Fassbender's humanity is hidden away somewhere, only allowed to see the light of neoned night when he thinks no one is looking (Mulligan's haunting jazzy rendition of New York New York brings the man to unwanted tears), but he keeps it so deep inside of him that he cannot even communicate without the aid of sexuality.  This may even be more than alluded to in an incestuous way as well.

Directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one), this highly anticipated followup to the artist-turned-filmmaker's debut feature Hunger (in which most people first became aware of how daring and remarkable an actor Herr Fassbender truly is) is a blast of sexually promiscuous arctic air.  We see a man dying on the inside, unable to open up to anyone, unwilling to give any sort of loving emotion a second thought (if he even allows them a first one), trapped inside his own addiction, needing sex, in any form (and I mean that) to feel alive, yet still feeling dead inside.  We see a man in the ups and downs of addiction - his hard drive being wiped clean at work, perusing subways and back alleys for any human touch - who finally succumbs to his self-destructive habits and hits that proverbial rock bottom of addictions.  It is McQueen who gives his film an air of coolly derisive otherwordliness (the dank subways, the saturated lighting, the aforementioned Jeanne Dielman-esque cadence), but it is the it-boy Fassbender (though judging from the full frontal shots, perhaps it-man is more apropos) who makes us feel both repulsion and empathy for this lost soul and allows us into this world of desperation, this world of the walking dead - this world of shame.

The Cinematheque Reviews: A Dangerous Method

Chewy Cronenbergian goodness.  I actually use that term in my review of David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method.  I am quite proud of the term actually - even if I am not quite sure what it means.  Whatever it means, it is how the film made me feel.  The film is the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and the woman who came between them.  This description seems a bit more salacious than it probably needs to be, but then what appears to be a proper period piece at first, is given a serious Cronenbergian overhaul - a chewy Cronenbergian overhaul of goodness.  But enough of that.  My review of the film (originally seen at this year's Philadelphia Film Festival) is currently up and running over at The Cinematheque.  

Read my review of A Dangerous Method at The Cinematheque.

PFF 2011: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method

Part of the Masters of Cinema section of the Twentieth Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, one could make a claim that a film such as this gets a bit of a free ride from an auteurist like myself, but dammit, I don't care - the film is quite spectacular, no matter who directed it.  Even so, it is not your typical kind of spectacular - it's the kind of spectacular that sneaks up on a person.  At first unassuming, leading crescendo-like into full-bore Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method (missed at the New York Fest but finally caught here in Philly) is something one may not expect from the director, but at the same time, something completely in the madman's semi-psychotic wheelhouse.

  

Perhaps not as cleverly deceptive as A History of Violence (in my not-so-humble opinion, the director's greatest and gutsiest work) nor as balls-out as Crash (the other film in the Canadian's oeuvre that comes closest to a masterpiece), but only the man who gave us, along with the aforementioned two films, Dead Ringers, The Fly, and the filmic version of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, could have put so much disturbing dread, so much perverse glee into the now-infamous psychoanalytical battle song of the mystical Jung and the Svengali-like Freud.  Cronenberg is one of those directors with the ability to arouse and disgust you simultaneously, and once again, like in Videodrome and Crash (to name just two), he does it here in this tale of psychological horror disguised as an analytical period piece.  The film is subtly dirty, and that's just how we want it.

Cronenberg has always had a rather perversely funny way about showing sexual encounters in his film (and again, we must look back at Crash as the prime example of such perversity), so a film about Freudian psychoanalysis and the particular case of Sabina Spielrein, a patient and eventually lover of Jung, and the catalyst (at least in this version of the story, based on Christopher Hampton's 2002 stage play, The Talking Cure, which in turn was based upon the 1993 novel A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr) of the break between Jung and his one-time mentor Freud, was ripe for the Cronenbergian touch.  When we watch as Keira Knightley's Sabina is belt-whipped by Michael Fassbender's Jung, and see the look of orgasmic power shooting from the actress's surprisingly nuanced face, Cronenberg has enraptured us inside his own web of sexual obsession - and that is just what a film such as this needs to have.

Most attuned to the director's Dead Ringers (sexual obsession, psychosis) and, of course Crash (socially perverse actions that are merely the workings of a person's natural sexuality), but more subtly maneuvered (an attribute that comes with age perhaps?), A Dangerous Method , which incidentally also stars an especially devilish Viggo Mortensen as Herr Freud (in his third collaboration with the director), is a film that may seem a bit awkward at first as the viewer is not sure which direction one is about to take, but ends as a bubbling cauldron of, for lack of a better or more encompassing term, chewy Cronenbergian goodness.  In sum, both unexpected territory for the director and typically lurid Cronenberg material - a fiery juxtaposition that creates such an atmosphere as to make this one of the master's best and most mature works.

A Dangerous Method will open in limited release on November 23, with a national roll-out later (in time for the Oscar campaigns I assume, of which Viggo Mortensen could be a strong contender for a Best Supporting Actor nomination).  I will have a full review of the film coming right around that planned release date.

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Tarantino Characters

As you may already know, I now take up weekly residence over at the great film site Anomalous Material.  The fine folks over there have given me a regular weekly gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects (and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor - yes I am a list nerd).  This week's feature piece (my seventh such piece) is on that man I am not afraid to say I love - Quentin Tarantino.  We (the royal we) take a look at the best Tarantino characters in the audacious auteur's equally audacious oeuvre.  Some picks and some omissions seem to be a bit on the controversial side (as controversial as such things can be) but I believe number one is a given.  Anyway, read on true believers.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Quentin Tarantino Characters" at Anomalous Material.

You know, in a related story, I have the counter woman at the local Fed/Ex store convinced that I am Quentin Tarantino.   She actually asked me one day if I was him and I alluded answering the question.  She sees me sending movies (actual 35mm prints) to various theaters - as an arthouse cinema manager like myself is apt to do - and I suppose since QT and I look similar (but by no means enough so as to make one think one were the other) she must have assumed I was him.  Why Tarantino would be living and working in Harrisburg Pa and not L.A., I don't know, but I am pretty sure she still believes that I am he - and he is me.  Of course me saying bye one day and telling her it would be a while until I was in again due to working on the script for Kill Bill 3 didn't help the confusion any.  Ah well..... 

The Cinematheque Reviews: X-Men: First Class

Being a self-admitted comic book nerd from way back (though these days my reading of them is much more sporadic) I can honestly say, even though this new X-Men: First Class plays a bit fast and loose with the long and convoluted history and iconography of the comic created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, it is a fun piece of pop entertainment.  This remark may seem rather snarky (just my natural way of putting things perhaps) but is meant in total sincerity.  Anyway, my quite long-winded review of said fun piece of pop entertainment (there I go again appearing quite snarky) is up and running at The Cinematheque.

Read my review of X-Men: First Class at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Jane Eyre

The 654th version (or so) of Jane Eyre has been released and my review of said version is up and running over at The Cinematheque.  I prepared for this release by watching both the 1934 Virginia Bruce/Colin Clive version and the 1944 Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine version.  I prefer this new one to one of those but not to the other.  You can guess which one if you want to (though I give it away in my review).

Read my review of Jane Eyre at The Cinematheque.