Retro Review: J.J. Abram's Star Trek (2009)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  With the release of Star Trek Into Darkness, I figured this was as good a time as any to look back at J.J. Abram's first rebooting of the Trek Universe.  On a side note, if someone were to ask me to name the best review I have ever written, I believe I would have to go with the one you are about to read - so we have that going for it as well.  Enjoy.  My review of Star Trek Into Darkness will be up and running either Thursday or Friday.

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Forty-three years after Gene Roddenberry first boldly went where no one had gone before and thirty years after the first cinematic endeavor and twenty-two years after the coming of the next generation and seven years after the last movie attempt (and at least fifteen years after anyone really cared anymore), Star Trek has been reborn - or should I say, rebooted.

Daring us to once again boldly go, while at the same time tagging us with the bold statement that this was no longer our father's Star Trek (or in the case of us "older folks" who grew up with the original series - "our" Star Trek), TV wunderkind J.J. Abrams, probably the best mainstream director working today, has managed the seemingly impossible.   He has made a Star Trek so ingrained with four plus decades of sci-fi mythology as to please even the most discerning of die-hard Trekkers (even those still living in their parent's basement at near middle age - their own phasers set on stun) while at the same time keeping it youthful enough, modern enough, to bring aboard those legions of novice Starfleet cadets that the franchise is in so desperate need of gaining.  Abrams, just like a young and cocky James Tiberius Kirk, has beaten the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru - and he only cheated a little.   How's that for a reference sure to confound all those aforementioned neophyte cadets yet thrill the legions of Trek nerds I boldly announce myself as completely in tune with?
 

Using the time-tested (pun very much intended) Trek standby (re: cheat) of time travel to create what is in essence an alternate reality Star Trek, Abrams comes aboard, as brash and full of bravado as Chris Pine's newly retooled rebel without a cause, Kirk himself, with not just a beloved sci-fi universe rolled out in front of him, but with the suave beauty of a clean slate to boldly go wherever he damn well pleases - and boldly he does indeed go.  Abrams (born mere months before the original series first flew into living rooms across America) can have his space cake and eat it to - and blow it up if he wants (which he does in part).   Just like Roddenberry back in '66, it lays at his feet for him to do with whatever he so desires.  After seeing the finished product, this self admitted Star Trek nerd can safely say he believes that Roddenberry is looking down from his resting place amongst the stars with a happy heart - or at least he damn well should be, because Abrams has created a loving tribute to the universe that Roddenberry created oh those forty plus years ago.

The story begins, as always, in the heat of battle.   A federation ship is being attacked by Nero, a renegade Romulan looking more like a Maori beyond Thunderdome than the traditional Romulan of Trek lore.  When the ship's captain is summoned over to the Romulan's obvious deathtrap, he places a young officer by the name of George Kirk in command.   To make a long story short, Kirk goes down with his ship after making sure the crew, along with his giving-birth-right-now wife and their fresh-faced new son, one James Tiberius Kirk, are shuttled off to safety.  It is pure space opera and it works on just that level.  After this we get backstories and character introductions (and even get to see cadet Kirk's tryst with a green-skinned alien) and finally just why that damned Nero is so pissed off at the federation - and especially Spock.  We even get allusions to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when Nero screeches Spock!!! into the otherwise soundproof environs of space just as Shatner's Kirk yelled Khan!!!.  It's just as cheesy and just as fun.   Pauline Kael once wrote of the second Trek movie that it was "wonderful dumb fun" and this is certainly no different - and I too, just like the late Miss Kael, mean that with the utmost sincerity and adoration.

And the new cast, the veritable nexus of chat room speculation and argumentative controversy ever since Abrams' revamping plans began to first unfold, works as well.   Chris Pine as the iconic Captain Kirk is a twenty-something horndog roustabout who joins Starfleet more out of spite or on a dare than out of any sense of duty.  The perpetually brooding Zachary Quinto plays the even more iconic Mr. Spock with a Vulcan calmness just this side of emotional eruption.  He looks so much like Nimoy one must wonder if he wasn't born to play the part.  Karl Urban, in one of the most dead reckoning impersonations in the group, plays Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy with the same bug-eyed curmudgeonry as DeForest Kelly's original grizzled anti-social country doctor with a taste for bourbon and a definitive distaste for space travel.  Then there is Simon Pegg doing Scotty in high brogue as only a comic actor can and should do him.  My one major criticism of the film is there is not enough Scotty (he doesn't even make an appearance until around minute 85 or 90).  We also get Zoe Saldana as the smokin' hot Uhura in retro mini skirt and gogo boots (she really doesn't have much else to do), John Cho (Harold, sans Kumar) as the helmsman Sulu, Anton Yelchin as a seventeen year old Pavel Chekov, with a major case of 23rd century ADD, Bruce Greenwood as the ill-fated Captain Christopher Pike, Ben Cross and Winona Ryder as Spock's star-crossed parents, Eric Bana as the aforementioned Khan-esque Nero and even Tyler Perry as a Starfleet Admiral (luckily not trying to be "very funny").

All the favorite characters are here (but where are Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand?) fulfilling their duty as newly appointed icons, replete with all the old standard lines that have become part of sci-fi lore, but still, as always, this is the Kirk and Spock show.  Philosophically set against each other - Kirk and Spock, body and mind - we watch the beginnings of an eternal struggle put to rest by the almost symbiotic way these two opposite reactions work together toward the same goal.  Both are great in the parts but it is Pine who has the decidedly tougher mountain to climb.   Pine has to channel the bravura of Shatner's Kirk but also avoid falling into the drama queen over excess of Shatner the actor.  A friend describes Shatner lovingly (sort of) as that embarrassing uncle who tries to get you to fish around in his pocket for a present.   Shatner's presence, bloated jackass or not (and don't get me wrong, I loved him in the original role), will always be there and yet Pine manages to parlay only the good into his transformation into Captain James T. Kirk.

Yet, the old school Trekker in me (I was just two years old when the original series was canceled due to low ratings!? but grew up on the seventies reruns) cannot help but keep returning to Leonard Nimoy's Spock Prime.   More than just a glorified cameo, Spock Prime, who's inadvertent delineation of the known timeline which flips everything on its head is the nadir of the film's story, is the very heart and soul of the new Star Trek.  Watching Nimoy back where he belongs and obviously loving every moment of his trek back home (pun intended again) is like once again seeing that beloved childhood friend you never even realized you missed like crazy but who has been in the back of your mind for years and years and years.  Just as Nimoy has gone home again (and who said you couldn't?) so to has this once, and always, impressionable perpetual youth.

Forty-three years of pop culture references - from South Park and Family Guy to Galaxy Quest, SNL and even That 70's Show - and the franchise of Star Trek, with its phasers and communicators and its "beam me up Scotty" apocryphals, is still alive.  Perhaps it has been on life support for a while now - kept alive long after any real interest in the later spin-offs and elongated episodic cinematic endeavors has gone as kaput as a red-shirted ensign on a landing party - but no matter how sick it may have become, the imagery has never died.  It is this very pop culture and all the mythos and iconography which surrounds it that makes Abrams reboot work as well as it does.  His sleek new look that never takes away from the now-retro original series is a pitch-perfect melange of old and new sensibilities.  My critical half (aka my pretentious half) is inline with my nerd half and I too can have my cake and eat it as well.

In the final scene, when everyone is on the bridge in those iconic (and somewhat cooler) original episode uniforms - I actually got chills (god, I am a nerd!!!) and Pine's subtle Shatneresque smirk and slap on Bones' shoulder and the way he sits in that captain's chair, legs crossed a la Shatner, along with the obvious love and care in giving us Nimoy's Spock "Prime", shows that though this is not our father's Star Trek and is definitely boldly going where no one has gone before, it would and could still hold high reverence for all that had come before it.  The mythology is still there and yet, like Zefram Cochrane making first contact, Abrams brings new life to this long dead Phoenix and we realize we can boldly go anywhere from here.  What more could we ever ask for?  Now bring on the Klingons.  Live long and prosper. 

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 05/09/09]

Retro Review: Speed Racer (2008) or, Go Speed Racer, Go - a Go-for-Broke Diatribe in Defense of a Pretty Damn Silly Movie

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  This piece on the mostly maligned Speed Racer film, has been added to, here and there, before being republished here and now.

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Yes, yes, in the past I very well may have kvetched and harrumphed, snorted and grumbled, picked and nit-picked about how movies such as 300, The Matrix and all their CGI-splattered ilk have blurred the line between cinema and video games to such an indistinguishable level as to render the distinction null and void - yet another cog in the dumbing down of society - but can't a guy be a hypocrite every now and then if he so desires?   But I digress.  Hot-wheeling that aforementioned blurred line right into the star-studded, flash-bulbed neo-oblivion is The Wachowskis' Speed Racer, and right there I am, like a bird with a brand new shiny silver dollar pulsating in his beak, praising it for the exact same things I condemned all those other films for being.   Well, ain't I just the little bastard?

In all sincerity though, even though Speed Racer is nothing more than a candy-coated confectionery cookie of a movie, and very possibly the cinematic anti-christ to boot (I think I accused 300 of being the same thing), it is also quite the - dare I say it for fear of sounding the walking cliché - thrill ride motion picture of the Summer.   Pop kitsch and powder-puff pretty - not to mention quite the seizure-inducing spazz-attack of lights action and bang-bang colour - Speed Racer may not be any great revelation in cinema - not the next probing poetry of Pasolini, nor the next Tarkovskian grand guignol - nor is it particularly well-written (all the parts that don't involve racing are as dry as tumbleweed rice cakes), and there are quite a few questionable actions in the film (as there were in the TV series as well - like how does he not recognize Racer X as his own brother - and do not even get me started on the blatant rip-off of Marvel Comics' Cyclops in Racer X's look), but for sheer unadulterated abandon-all-ye-hope fun, it sure is the kook-kook-kookiest, the kick-kick-kickiest, the groove-groove-grooviest of mod movie mayhem.  It is certainly the living end, friends.

Nearly universally panned by my fellow critics (deep deep deep into the red on Metacritic, and squished into oblivion on Rotten Tomatoes), I stand (almost) completely alone atop my wobbly soapbox of indignation as I trumpet the wildly fun qualities of this inexplicably enjoyable mess of a motion picture.   Hypocritically or not, I suppose those things other critics are decrying are the very things this critic is going cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs over.   As opposed to 300, which did have its own uniquely delirious visual audacity to it (I actually enjoyed the visual aspects of that film much more than my constant stabs at it, would leave you to believe), Speed Racer works as pure CGI porn.   The bright primal colours that would make Jean-Luc Godard blush like a little schoolgirl.   The impossibly brazen race tracks criss-crossing like coked-up spider webs against a diamond sky painted just for Lucy.   The Anime-esque characterizations of its picture perfect cast where everyone - and not just Christina Ricci - look like mondo Manga.   The candied pop art Asianess of the whole glittering, shimmering, glimmering shebang in all its glaring, gaudy, greedy good looks.   It all works, despite its many flaws and myriad setbacks, just exactly as it is supposed to work - as a live-action cartoon.

Truth be told, perhaps my enthusiasms are a bit on the wide-eyed innocent side (yeah, I can still be innocent, dammit!), for even though it bubble, bubbles, toil and troubles precariously close to the visual art films of Seijun Suzuki, Takeshi Miike and even Tarantino's bloody Kill Bill concoction, it never really becomes like those films - never delves any deeper than its own metallic surface - but still manages to act as a conduit between the dregs of the genre and its mightily heralded cinematic Silver Surfers.   IMAX-grade bombast one colleague has said.   Sure, it may not be high art - or even middle art - but even this jaded critic, full of a classist snobbery and palpitating pretensions out the proverbial wazoo can still enjoy a five dollar hooker now and again.   And that is precisely what the pedantically popcorny Speed Racer is - a cheap, but very well-dressed, whore of a movie.  It need be nothing more.

[Originally published on 05/18/08 at The Cinematheque]

Retro Review: Troll Hunter (André Øvredal, 2010)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.

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Due to how the film is shown in a first person documentary style (almost a mockumentary style) by three students trailing the title huntsman with constant camera in tow, its image seen only through such a lens, the film has been inevitably compared to The Blair Witch Project and/or Cloverfield (though often despairingly so, which should not be the case), but still, André Øvredal's Troll Hunter, the Norwegian answer to our vampire/werewolf obsession perhaps, is a whimsical, satiric romp that starts off innocently enough before turning itself on its own head midway through and eventually driving itself into the most giddy of monster movies by the time its quite abrupt ending and subsequent end credits arrive - all too soon in my opinion.  Okay, perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, the film is called Troll Hunter after all, but when the titular woodsman comes running toward the aforementioned omnipresent camera and yells "Troll!!” you know right there that you are in for a fun ride - and what a fun ride indeed.

It is a very basic story.  Trolls, giant ones, some as tall as 100 feet, roam the fjords and forests of Norway and it is the troll hunter's job to keep their population wrangled and out of sight of the Norwegian populace.   Kept on reservations of sorts, these trolls (more beast than man we are told by the titular zookeeper) come to symbolize the multitudes of oppressed throughout history while at the same time being shown as mere stupid mammals who need to be controlled or at the sympathetic least, be put out of their own misery.  It is a government job so of course you know there are going to be some bureaucratic entanglements as well as your typical giant-ass monster problems - and this is where the socio-political satire comes even more into play.  Still though, satiric prose aside, what we get in Troll Hunter at its most basic level is a fun monster movie that perhaps never reaches the heights of which it has the potential, still happily harkens back to a simpler time of moviemaking - even if it does all get captured on the very modern technique of digital filmmaking and is shown through the tech-savvy eyes of a younger, more jaded generation.

Following around this somewhat loony government-sanctioned (but not government-controlled we are happy to learn) monster hunter, our three intrepid college student filmmakers are used as the skeptical eyes of the average person and are given such fun (and funny) instructions as bathing with "troll-smell" and making sure they had none of that dirty Christianity left inside of them (apparently trolls can smell Christian blood, and believe me they sure do like to devour them first).  This band of “warriors” goes about their business (one hunting trolls, the others documenting whatever they see) with a smooth efficiency and of course inevitable tragedy.  Full of beautiful scenery of the Norwegian countryside and a full array of surprisingly good special effects of the monsters themselves, and with an acerbic tongue-in-cheek attitude toward storytelling, Troll Hunter is a cool blend of pop moviemaking and dark-humoured satire (of both the genre and of society itself) that works pleasingly as a peach as pure entertainment.  Of course now we are inevitably left with a palpable sense of dread as the American remake (rights already procured) is soon on its way.  

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 06/26/11]

Retro Review: Roland Emmerich's 2012

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation. Appropriately enough, considering the date, and all that silly jazz that has been going on around said date, this particular edition of Retro Reviews, is on the end-of-the-world film 2012, and if the doomsayers are correct, it will be the very last thing I ever write.  Insert maniacal laughter here.

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There are certain filmmakers who revel in the CGI-exhaustive filmic destruction of planet Earth and it's major cities and landmarks.  Judging from his oeuvre, which includes both Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, as well as the rather forgettable Godzilla remake of last decade, Roland Emmerich is definitely one of those aforementioned certain filmmakers.  Unfortunately for both we the moviegoers and Emmerich the disaster director du jour, his latest planet-wide deconstruction destruction, the numerically ominous 2012, lacks most of the giddy masochistic fun that ran rampant through the thoroughly more enjoyable Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.  Instead, we get a tired boilerplate kind of motion picture event with most of its entertaining parts (and we can only assume the possibilities such a film could have) excised through sheer middlebrow filmmaking.  Then again, perhaps we have just become so jaded by such CGI-spectacles, that even the complete destruction of Earth has become passe and run-of-the-mill.

Yes there are a few fun moments in Emmerich's "end-of-the-world-er", such as hapless hero and sad sack ex-hubby and weekend dad John Cusack (paycheck big enough buddy?) weaving his battered limo through the streets of L.A., estranged family in tow, as the city of angels crashes and burns around him, finally slipping back into the mighty Pacific from whence it came and making all those nutcase sidewalk prophets feel vindicated as they too crash and burn and slip back into the mighty Pacific.  At one point Cusack takes his stretch through the window of a falling skyscraper and out the other side before it crashes to the street below as if some sort of hybrid of Evel Knievel and a batmobile-driving caped crusader.  There are other such whack-a-doodle scenes, including a race-for-their-lives plane ride through crumbling cities and the requisite destroyed national monuments, a last ditch escape plan involving driving a car out the back of a plane and the semi-climactic underwater rescue of thousands of wouldbe disaster survivors.  Silly and extremely improbable but isn't that what a disaster movie is supposed to be all about?

Unfortunately though, none of this ridiculous disaster scenario works on the level that equally silly classic films of the genre, like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, or even Emmerich's own earlier works do.  The ever-important inbetween moments (those scenes not involving cliffhanger-esque danglings but attempted character development instead) fall completely flat here.  We don't get those quieter moments that we did in the aforementioned earlier classics of the genre.  We don't get the emotion inherent with a character's death as we did when poor Shelly Winters saved them all only to succumb to the deadly waters of her own ocean grave.  Then again, perhaps all moviegoers want these days are the improbable CGI effects that inevitably go along with the reborn genre.  They want sheer disaster, and nothing else, and I suppose, that is exactly what they get here.  A disastrous disaster indeed.  No fun, no mirth, no gleeful rage against the dying of the light.  Nothing but disaster.  It is almost enough to make you wish the world really was about to end.  Luckily for us, the movie does end - it just takes waaaay too long to do so.

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 12/11/09] 

Retro Reviews: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.

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There are a number of older critics (let's call them the fuddy-duddy set) who have not only called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World a bad movie (which it most certainly is not - and they should now that!) but have called it so because of some self-delusional belief that the film has little or no relevance for anyone over the age of thirty - or maybe even twenty-five.  This seems to be less a rational and thought out type of film criticism and more a reactionary pot shot at a youth culture they do not understand.  A youth culture they are perhaps a little bit afraid of, perhaps not remembering those halcyon days when they too were young and they too were part of a youth culture thought unfathomable by their parents and parental peers.  But alas, such is the prerogative of the geezer set.

I on the other hand, am of that age straddling both sides of said generational gap.  Having turned 43 just last month, I am of that very first video game generation that cut its collective teeth on Pac-Man and Space Invaders and Pitfall, and later on Super Mario Bros. and Mortal Kombat.  Yet, at the same time, I am not so young (or foolish) as to believe I am still part of that youth culture in any way (other than as an outside observer) and therefore not so young (or foolish again) to mistake something ultra-cool or awesome for something good, or even great - a mistake made by many a moviegoer these days, as well as many a fevered blogger and/or "ain't it cool" film reviewer - that gives rise to many an otherwise mediocre movie, placing it in the so-called cultural stratum not for it's filmic qualities but because of its temporal hipness.

Luckily for all concerned (even that aforementioned old-fogey set, whether they like it or not!) director Edgar Wright is of pretty much the same straddling generation as I am (seven years younger but still brought up on Donkey Kong and Zelda - which shows in his use of an 8-bit Paramount logo to start the movie off in the right frame of mind), and therefore able to distinguish between the so-called awesome and the legitimately made work of cinema.  And this is exactly what Wright gives us in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - the perfect amalgam between the ultra hip and the ultra cinematic. Blending a cinematic prowess that shows just how much Wright loves his calling, with a hipster mentality that shows just how on the pulse with that (again) youth culture the director is, he has created the perfect concoction for the post-millennial movie crowd - aka, that youth culture that has been all the rave so far in this review.

But then, since this is supposed to be a film review and not a debate on the generational gap, perhaps one should stop waxing philosophical about how all these damned generations cannot get along (an obvious dilemma come every new generation anyway), and start talking about the actual movie itself.   So here goes.  As is the trend these days, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an adaptation of a popular graphic novel (one that this somewhat inconsistent comic book junky admittedly had not read prior to seeing the movie) and to add to that, an adaptation of a graphic novel about the gamer sub-culture of today's (yes, here it comes again) youth culture - and in being so, blurs the newfound proverbial line even further between movies and video games.  But not to worry true believers, for this blurred vision does not equate - as is usually the case it seems - with the visual awesomeness overshadowing the desired inherent cinematic quality.

Luckily, since that above mentioned hipster helmsman, Edgar Wright is involved (and quite in charge the old school auteurist in me wants to shout!) and can play with the genre with a giddy, but not overblown chutzpah, rarely found in today's moviemaking community, and in doing so, creates what is essentially the most genre-accurate comic book/graphic novel adaptation this critic has ever seen.  Dissected and percolated to look like a comic up on the screen - less a movie, more a motion comic of sorts - Wright has manipulated the imagery of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World into the most unique hybrid of comic book, video game and motion picture the world has ever seen (he said with a booming crescendo of dire exclamation!).  All hyperbole aside though, Scott Pilgrim is a unique creature unlike any other - even other recent graphic novel adaptations (though both with a bit more heft than here) worthy of praise, such as Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City and Zack Snyder's erroneously maligned rendition of Alan Moore's Watchmen.

Yet, even with all the CGI-created glitz and glitter, and video gaming art direction (a big part of Wright's film is how he places us inside a wholly functioning universe that seems to be the magical inner workings of a video game without ever bringing into question how or why we are in such a world) and the director's rabid faithfulness to the source material (I have gone back and perused said source material), the movie would not work if the cast did not work.  Luckily (again) the cast is outta sight.  Michael Cera, as the titular young Mr. Pilgrim, has taken his usual acerbic, soft-spoken, lovable geek persona (a persona hated by many of those aforementioned fuddy duddies, as well as the actor's very own youth culture peers - mainly for having played the same riff over and over again til almost ad nauseum) and combined it with an acerbic, soft-spoken, semi-tough guy persona, to create the perfect melange of characteristics appropriate for the role.  In other words, he is Scott Pilgrim.

Playing a 22 year old bass player (the lead singer of his band is snidely named Stephen Stills and the drummer is Scott's bitter ex-girlfriend) who must dump his seventeen year old girlfriend, Knives (an extremely naive Chinese-American Catholic school girl!?) in order to date the girl of his (literal) dreams, the multi-hair-coloured, sexy-hipster-chick-with-a-past Ramona Flowers (played with her own style of acerbic aplomb by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, mostly known for playing Bruce Willis' daughter in the most recent Die Hard and, especially, her cheerleader-outfitted Grindhouse girl in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof).  The real problem comes when he finds out he must also battle the League of Evil Exes (to the death!!?) in order to keep dating Ramona.  Going through the league (all seven of them) like levels in a video game (complete with super powers and coin prizes dropping from the sky) Cera steps up his usual dry humour with some rather kick-ass (albeit in a semi-comedic style) moves. 

Also along for the ride are a slew of hilarious supporting characters.   Chris Evens as a skate-punk-turned-actor evil ex, and Superman Brandon Routh as a grown-up child of the damned, uber-vegan bass player and most evil of the evil exes are two of the highlights.  We also get the cocksure hipster-dufus extraordinaire, Jason Schwartzman as the eventual (and quite inevitable) maniacal leader of the League of Evil Exes, who of course, Scott Pilgrim will end up having to fight with in a final, top level, free-for-all battle royale - replete with Schwartzman's (and who else could have played the role!?) dubious (and quite purposefully ridiculous) posturing.  The downright funniest performance though, goes to Kieran Culkin, channeling Robert Downey Jr., as Scott's gay roommate and royal egger-on.  All this and Cera in better-than-ever form - who could ask for anything more?

Yet more is just what Wright keeps giving us.  Taking the idea of parody and/or satire and leveling it up a ratchet or three, the auteur (and yes he is!) that managed to give a heart to the zombie genre and real wit to the buddy action flick with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz respectively, now takes on the comic book and succeeds beyond any and all expectations.  Surpassing the rather sadly disappointing other attempts at such this year, namely the sporadically enjoyable but overall mediocre Kick-Ass and the lamely-concocted sophomore attempt at Iron Man (doubly disappointing due to the first one being so damned entertaining!), Wright has captured what it is like to read a comic book and/or graphic novel and in doing so has entered the world of comic book culture - and in turn that ever so-present youth culture the geezer set has so maligned.  In other words - this movie is awesome!  Generational idioms be damned!

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 08/18/2010]

Retro Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation. With the release of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, here is a look back at a film that...well, let's just say it's not one of the director's best, which is made even more disappointing by the fact that the first three films in the series were some of the director's best.  Anyway, here it is.

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When you have a film series as iconic as Indiana Jones, there is bound to be a sense of apprehension when it comes to the latest installment.   Put that together with the nineteen year gap since the last film and the idea of a sixty-five year old action-adventure hero bull-whipping his way around the Amazon rain forest, and no matter how giddy one may be at the mention of this long-awaited sequel-to-a-sequel-to-a-sequel - and some are quite giddy indeed - there is still quite the powerful sense of trepidation that creeps along the ole cerebral cortex.   Can Spielberg pull it off after all these years?   Can Harrison Ford do the same?   Will it be, like the second (or is it first?) trilogy of Star Wars films, nothing more than a ridiculed shadow of its true self?   Will they be able to get back that old-time movie magic one more time after such a long wait or will this be the death knell for the coolest archeology professor to ever strap on a whip and fedora?

I can tell you this for sure - I left the screening humming John Williams' iconic (there's that word again) theme music and am even doing it now, a day later, as I write these words.   What does that mean?   Well I suppose it means that old-time movie magic is still there, but unfortunately it seems rather old and tired this time around, almost as if no one - director and stars both - is really trying all that hard.   I suppose the humming is more nostalgia than zest for the new.    Granted, no one would rightfully expect the latest to be able to stand up to the original Raiders of the Lost Ark (renamed Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark for DVD release) with its original bravura and Ford's Bogart meets Errol Flynn chutzpah - especially since neither Temple of Doom nor The Last Crusade could do so in their time (without a near twenty year gap) - but I suppose I was hoping for something a bit, I don't know, a bit more.

Perhaps, as I stated earlier, Crystal Skull is a bit on the tired side (though the sexagenarian Indy does still get around with quite the florid mix of machismo and aloofness) and sometimes feeling as if everyone is just phoning in their lines, this fourth (and last? - doubtful considering the obvious foreshadowing of a new Shia LeBeouf-helmed future franchise) Indiana Jones flick does have its moments.   Unfortunately these moments (an army ant feast du jour, LeBeouf and an army of CGI monkeys Tarzanning their way through the Amazon, a nuke-thumped refrigerator catapult) never give the kick one would hope for in such a movie.   The suspension of disbelief is there as always in the genre, but the danger we are meant to perceive for the characters is not.  

Ford, though aging quite Hollywood star-like, seems as if he just wants to go home to his waifish girlfriend and his trillion acre Wyoming ranch, while Karen Allen, whom the years have not been so good to, has no other purpose it would seem than to smile adoringly at the fedora-topped adventurer that got away and all the while Shia LeBeouf, who seems quite the dynamo when contrasted with the rest of the listless cast, is merely the triflist of sidekicks as Indy's heir apparent.   Then we have Cate Blanchett as the most mildly inoffensive (and quite unintimidating) villain Indy has yet to come up against.   Looking completely lost in her dominatrix bob and bondage and quipping in silly borscht-accented coyisms, one hopes her paycheck is substantial enough here to finance her in doing about a baker's dozen more I'm Not There's.

Much has been said of Spielberg's lack of soul as a filmmaker (much of it by this very critic) but this is the kind of mega-mastondonic movie where the auteur - and sans soul or not, Spielberg is surely one of - can shine his movie-making lights upon.   Where other filmmakers of his generation (Scorsese, Coppola, Cimino, Bogdanovich, Rafelson) studied Renoir and Chaplin, Welles and Griffith, Powell and Minnelli, Spielberg was busy building then blowing up toy trains in his basement and filming it all on his Super-8 camera.   Perhaps this doesn't make for a filmmaker capable of Raging Bull or The Godfather but it does make for quite the old-timey pulp genre smoke and mirrors illusionist that Spielberg has become.   Much like his vaunted Cecil B. DeMille, Spielberg is more showman than filmmaker, and it shows here.

Though he has done better (Jaws, the original Raiders, Jurassic Park, Minority Report, the oft-maligned and somewhat flawed War of the Worlds and even my own secret shame guilty pleasure 1941) and he has done quite worse (Always, the dreadful Hook and his dismantling of Kubrick's A.I.) I suppose, even with its flaws (some of them quite glaring) and that nagging sensation that the title sounds a bit too much like a never-completed Hardy Boys Mystery, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - the fourth installment in the series - manages to wallop a few popcorn punches during its 124 minute running time.   Too bad those punches seem pulled throughout.

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 05/21/2008]

Retro Review: Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  With the first episode of the J.J. Abrams-produced TV series Revolution making its mark earlier this month, here is a look back at Abrams most recent theatrical foray - and one of the best films of last year.

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Imagine a world of youthful memories, evoking a certain place and time of cinematic innocence, now all but lost to future generations, where children played at make-believe in the suburban utopia of woebegone days and the buddings of first love are felt in the small town purity of kids caught somewhere between their first swear word and their first cigarette.  A place where adults were secondary, incidental even, and where monsters and aliens crept into our subconscious only to be made real by those purveyors of the era's newly born summer blockbuster machinations - a place of George Lucas and of Joe Dante and especially of Steven Spielberg.  This place of seeming cinematic incorruptibility, where escapist fare was met with a sense of childlike wonder and the daily box office take was, though assuredly important and quickly becoming moreso, not yet the be all and end all of making movies in Hollywood, is where J.J. Abrams takes us with his deceptively brilliant evocation of a simpler, kinder, more gentle cinematic world in Super 8.

Set in the early summer days of 1979, in an archetypal small town in rural Ohio, Abrams pays the greatest homage to his mentor and master Spielberg (though Spielberg's credit as producer may smack a bit of nepotism in a way) by giving his monster movie an aura of that time when Spielberg was still a filmmaker with heart and soul (a filmmaker evoking his own childhood dream world) while at the same time giving it that more-bang-for-your-buck style that has come to epitomize the directorial signature of Abrams' still young (one could even say still budding) career.  One could even go so far as to call this film an E.T. for a more jaded, more in-your-face and a much faster-paced generation of moviegoers - a less innocent generation of moviegoers if you will.  It is this blend - more sympathetic than Abrams usually makes out and less cloying than Spielberg, even vintage Spielberg can be - that makes the film work as well as it does.

After a brief prologue showing, in a very Spielbergian way appropriately enough, the loss of a wife and mother (a typically seventies factory where a sign stating how many days since their last accident being marked back down to one, a lone child sitting on a swing caressing the locket of his now dead mother) and the almost immediate shattering of the aforementioned cinematic innocence, Abrams sets his story rolling - and roll like proverbial thunder out of the gate it most certainly does.  We are introduced to a group of kids, barely on this side of pubescence, in the process of making a zombie movie (George Romero can be seen as an influence as well), via their titular super 8 camera, complete with the idea of cheap but wholly appropriate special effects (blowing up model trains and filming it on super 8 is pretty much the most accurate way of describing La Spielberg's own filmmaking youth) and stilted but again wholly appropriate acting.  We see these kids filming at a small train depot as a locomotive comes barreling past at a breakneck speed.

Once the train derails in the most spectacular of set pieces (Abrams certainly knows how to make his action go that extra mile) and our inevitable monster is set loose upon this unsuspecting small town America (shown, a la Cloverfield in quick shadowy spurts - making for the tension and inherent danger to be at a peak level throughout), and once the military swoops in and quickly becomes even a possible greater danger than the escaped monster they are not telling anyone about (and no one is digitally replacing guns with flashlights this time around Mr. Spielberg), Abrams movie kicks into high gear and we are shown the director who was only hinted at in the mostly awful Mission Impossible III (important only because it was what first showed what the director was capable of if let loose upon the big big screen of the cinema, with his daring-doo way of choreographing elaborate and convoluted action set pieces) and honed to an audacious bravura in his quite spectacular reboot of the dying Star Trek franchise.   The director who is quickly becoming something of an action-oriented auteur - and a Hell of a lot of fun to watch.

As for the cast, it is mostly populated by the kind of kids one would expect to find in such an homage.  Foremost among these kids are Joe, the town deputy's son and aforementioned lone child lamenting his loss, and Alice, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who seems to be in serious need of redemption from sins she carries with her that are not even her own.  Joe is played with a wide-eyed sense of wonder that does its own evoking of Henry Thomas' Elliott in E.T., by first-time actor Joel Courtney, while Alice is played by the quite disarming Elle Fanning (just thirteen but the veritable veteran of the young cast) whose perfect blend of youthful exuberance and adult-like sensibilities (much like her older sister, the young actress's eyes evoke both a naiveté appropriate to her age and a frank knowingness that belies that very same age) make for the most layered character in the film - and she comes off as any red-blooded young teen boy's fantasy girl hot, sassy and dark, and she can drive a car! (where were the girls like this when I was thirteen!?).  These two young actor's scenes together are the emotional high points of the film.  The way their attraction grows and their playful interacting (Fanning's cute way of stealing a kiss while in zombie make-up) make for the most charming of young romances.

In all reality, it is the simple and unaffected budding romance between Joe and Alice, as well as these kids' tempestuous relationships with their equally bewildered fathers (played by a stoic Kyle Chandler and a pathos-riddled Ron Eldard), and not the monster nor the military, that is the central core of this spiraling, sometimes batshitcrazy movie.  It is this side of Spielberg, the one seemingly long gone these days, that Abrams is paying homage to here, and it is this particular age (this critic turned twelve in the summer of 1979 and therefore am virtually the same age as Super 8's young protagonists) that makes it stick so personally for me - and let's face it, anyone who has ever grown up in the places evoked here and in the early works of that ever-present Mr. Spielberg.  It is also due to this subtle approach to the storytelling aspect of the film that when we finally get to our expected dénouement, it is not the monster Abrams focuses his camera on but the kids - the human aspect of the story.  In a way this ends up as something of a mixed bag of reactions come the fade to black and end credits.

Perhaps those of us looking for nothing more than the perfect action movie kicks will be left feeling a bit (but just a bit) disappointed as the layers of the film are peeled away, revealing each new reveal, albeit each one nestled inside stunning set piece after stunning set piece - and perhaps too those of us looking for pure summer blockbuster chutzpah and a balls out Michael Bay-esque finale that will theoretically leave every quasi-pubescent fanboy with a moist pair of jeans will end up feeling cheated by their own sense of imagined anticipatory self-rhetoric.  I do admit to a feeling of disillusionment once our intrepid monster is fully seen and fully realized and the tension is unwarrantly alleviated and we are left with a let down of sorts.  Perhaps though, what we are left with in this overly sensitized wake (and self-invented sense of moviegoing entitlement) is an emotional heft (and general warm fuzzy feeling - but in a good way) and a childlike fantasy that harkens back to those halcyon days (both cinematically and nostalgically) being evoked by Abrams in his loving homage to his mentor and master.  Perhaps, it is more than a mere monster movie.  Perhaps indeed.

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 06/10/11]

Retro Review: The Expendables (Stallone, 2010)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  With the release of the second in what I am sure will be a series of Expendables films, I take a look back at my review of the first of the budding franchise. My review of part 2 will be up shortly.

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I believe I should preface this review with an opening warning shot of sorts.  What follows is my latest attempt at reviewing what constitutes as the latest attempt at filmmaking by that beleaguered, mush-mouthed icon of 80's uber-masculinity (and inexplicable two-time Oscar nominee!?) Sylvester Stallone.  How's that for some ominous foreshadowing?  In fact, how's that for some rather blatantly obvious (but one could argue, quite fairly come by) preconceptions?  Actually, Stallone can be good sometimes (his performances in both the original Rocky and Cop Land are much better than most of the nay-sayers claim) and he would probably be a fun guy to have a beer with.  But still, when it comes to the man's ability to create good cinema...ah well, we all know how that usually turns out.  But alas, here we go anyway.

I suppose as genre experiment, or even as homage of sorts (a nostalgia of the cinematically ridiculous perhaps?), Stallone's latest, The Expendables (proudly, even quite cockily, invoking John Ford's classic They Were Expendable), does indeed have its merits - albeit in the most ironic of ways.  A competently made movie (Stallone knows how to make a shot, he just doesn't know what to do with it once he gets it!) The Expendables, with its opening sequences of a dark night somewhere in the third world, thudding overbearing music sweeping along with the airborn camera, brings us back to those halcyon days of twenty years past when muscled hooligans shot, stabbed and head-butted the requisite dark-skinned bad guys into climactic submission by film's end.  So much is the nostalgia factor; one almost expects to see the long defunct Cannon Group logo shimmering its way onto the screen in all its steel-glared glory (the opening credits are done it that same cold steel font in a bit of extra homage).

There is a certain undeniable, if not embarrassingly so, enjoyment in watching this motley crew of, for lack of a better term, decades-gone has-beens (though thanks to The Wrestler and subsequent work, Mickey Rourke can probably now be taken out of such a generalizations), along with a gang of more contemporary counterparts, shoot, stab and head-butt there way across the third world.  Featuring Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, the aforementioned Rourke, Eric Roberts, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, Randy Couture (as well as uncredited cameos from Bruce Willis and an especially hilarious moment with the Governornator!) and Charisma Carpenter for no other reason than to throw in something good for all the testosterone-laden douchebags who are watching to jerk off to (if they are not already doing so to the oily-muscled, homoerotic biceps of the main cast of lunkheads), The Expendables makes a case for loving homage (what cold-hearted person can watch Sly and Lundgren interact without shedding at least one manly tear? - he said tongue firmly in cheek) but falls flat on its collective bruised and battered face when attempting to do anything even remotely related to storywriting.

Sure, its fun to watch these strange (one could say long dead) interactions so long after many of these stars have burned up like Icarus (and actually, Lundgren is quite fun here), but as far as putting together a coherent moviegoing experience, outside of some really kick-ass fun (and maybe that is all we really need), Stallone makes absolutely no headway here.  But then when one is nostalgic for such mediocre films as are being homaged here, I suppose it is an inevitability that mediocrity will again rear its ugly head.   Perhaps he should have taken a cue from Edgar Wright and went all out satire as Wright had done with his loving homage to the action films of the 90's with Hot Fuzz.  But then Stallone is nothing if not serious - which I suppose is kind of a sad fact of cinematic life.  Of course when it came to the final credits (where the Cannon Group logo never did show up!) I suppose it is rather inevitable that a film starring such a gaggle of 80's has-beens (there's that damned word again!) would end its story with Thin Lizzy shouting out "The Boys Are Back in Town".  Perhaps Stallone does have a sense of humour after all.

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 08/21/10]

Retro Review: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 06)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  With the release of Farewell My Queen, Benoît Jacquot's look at the court of Marie Antoinette, I have brought back my 2006 review of Sofia Coppola's often overlooked, but quite spectacular film.

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What does one get when one combines postmodern pop sensibility, French Nouvelle Vague philosophies and eighties new wave music and pour it all into an 18th century period piece already stuffed fat and full with ravishing costumes, luscious set pieces and sexually decadent behaviour? One gets Sofia Coppola's best film yet!

Opening with a wink and a nod, and full of candy-coloured confections of awkward yet graceful charm and wry wit, Marie Antoinette perhaps is not as surfacely deep as her two earlier films, but it does share with her predecessors a claustrophobic sense of entrapment and unheeded privilege. Like Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte in Lost in Translation, afraid to venture pass the lobby of her plush Park Hyatt Tokyo, and Kirsten Dunst herself as Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, a languorous kitten trapped by society inside her own imagined world, Marie, just fourteen when sent to marry the Dauphin of France, Louis Auguste, is like a lost little bird trapped inside the gilded cage that is Versailles. These girls, squelched by the strangulation of privilege, are what Coppola does best - for obvious autobiographical reasons - and she does it with her most grandiose hand yet in Marie Antoinette. Do not let yourself be fooled, for this is not your mother's historical biopic - it is frivolity underscored with seriousness.

Instead of faking the mannersims of a staunchy haughty period piece - so overblown by many a great director in the past - Coppola sends Dunst out with the voice of a mall queen with daddy's credit card in her Prada bag - princess of the all-nite rave. Many critics have said Coppola and Dunst portray the teen queen as an 18th century Paris Hilton - and this is probably true on many fronts - but they also show that being Paris Hilton (or any other rich bitch prima donna) may not be all that great a thing to be after all - you just might lose your head over it.

Full of music two hundred years out of time, this pomo set piece plays out as if The Cure or New Order are perfectly in sync with an 18th century masqued ball or a royal coronation. One number in particular, Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy booms across the soundtrack as Marie and her ladies-in-waiting go on a shopping spree full of decadent wardrobes, delicious shoes (including a pair of purple Converse snuck in for flair) and resplendantly ridiculous hairstyles - never once seeming out of place. The modern music and period setting may be rather similar in vein to the films of Baz Luhrmann, but Coppola manages to weave her way past the overly trite style of a film like Moulin Rouge and belts out a film not only full of magniloquence and pretty party pieces, but also of a subtly meaty political underpining beneath the pink frosted exterior that is this pop star Versailles.

Peripherally responsible for the starvation of France which in turn led to the French Revolution which in turn led to the beheading of both Antoinette and Louis XVI, Coppola's queen is played more for sympathy than sneer (which assuredly led to the few boo's it recieved from the Cannes balconies). Showing instead, Marie Antoinette as an apathetic hautier that more likely than not never even came into contact with the "people of France" let alone was in any capable state to rule them. The scapegoat of history - her crime being perhaps more an innocent indifference than a calculated reign of terror - Marie Antoinette was more the giggling schoolgirl of privilege than anything else. Not that this is any excuse for what the French citizenry endured during those days before the revolution (remember when George Bush the Father could not even fathom a guess on how much a quart of milk cost?), but it is most likely the most accurate way to look at this child queen.

Even the surely apocryphal "let them eat cake" quote (the comment that launched a thousand guillotines) is played at by Coppola as if it were a snide little remark to be manipulated and teased - and Dunst's Marie, a pretty powdered present from Austria to France is commented on as "a piece of cake" early on in the film. All this leading to a pop film that seems at first glance nothing more than confectionary sugar and pink and blue sprinkles, but on deeper reflection can be seen as a politically charged dress-up film of revolutionary standards. A film that is set between 1765 and 1793 with music from 1980 through 1985 and is postmodern enough to have the heart of the cinematic future beating beneath its ostentatious chest.

Finally, in the end, although we all know the outcome (and if you do not then read a book once and a while) we still feel a kind of sadness at this fall of Eden - a child's Eden at that. 

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 10/12/06] 

Retro Review: Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  This particular Retro Review is being released to coincide with the recently released Savages, the latest film from Oliver Stone.

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Oliver Stone has always been a director just on the verge of camp.  Not camp in the way that Warhol or John Waters are camp, but in a more pretentious manner - like his films are so visually and technically perfect, it doesn't really matter about integrity or truth or a sense of kinship with his audience.   Stone is an especially audacious über-director full of grandiose ideas and a hyper-sensitive intellectuality, as well as an ability to create moments in cinema that seem simultaneously off-putting and deceptively genius, yet Stone is also a director who has yet to create a truly great film.   A director, like De Palma and Schrader, and Michael Moore to a less dignified manner, who certainly knows how to push his viewer's buttons, but also a director who is gestured away with nary a second thought - even with three Oscars to his credit.

Stone's earlier films (Platoon, Salvador, Wall Street, Talk Radio) were showy promises of an as-yet-unseen greatness - a greatness that he has come close to in his best - but also most pretentious, and most controversial, to date - work, JFK.  And even though his more recent work continues his penchant for serious subject matter, films such as Natural Born Killers and Any Given Sunday, though both extremely entertaining in their own individual ways, dangle precariously close to that proverbial edge of reason and/or taste. Not that any of this is a bad thing of course.  As I stated earlier, Stone has yet to create a truly great film, but to clarify said statement, Stone has also yet to create a bad film either - and his latest epic years-in-the-making death-defying opus, Alexander does not change that status quo one tiny bit.   Or at least I do not think it does.  Let us wait until the end of the review to make that judgment.  But it does  certainly edge him all that much closer to the greatly absurd - and I mean that in the most complimentary way one can mean such a thing.

Visually stunning, yet systematically unengaging enough to not be considered the great feat that it may just be.  Many claim it to be not even a good feat, at least not without some firmly held reservations. Most critics have panned Alexander for not being the grand epic that Stone promised to everyone - an early Christmas present that is non-returnable. What most critics have missed though, is the pure unadulterated guilty-pleasured enjoyment in watching this camp-filled homo-erotic pageant of frilled warriors prancing about like the fourth century bc drama queens they are. If you don't attempt to take this film seriously at all, there is some great joy to be found in its three hour long queerness. Playing like an unedited episode of Queer Eye for the Greek Guy, something that Stone has taken much undeserved harassment for, Alexander rides along with the breakneck speed of an antelope - albeit a rather frantic, possibly meth-addled antelope being chased by predators. Alexander's meandering breakneck pace (not many directors can accomplish that duel feat!) does not do much for the average movie-goer, but watching these warriors elite metomorphosize into some sort of Ancient Greek version of a Bon Jovi cover band - complete with garishly blonde wigs - is still a treat dammit!!

Not much in the way of proper story (not necessarily a bad thing by the way), most of the young King's triumphs are only spoken of after the so-called fact by a bewildered looking Ptolemy, played with equal bewilderment by Sir Anthony Hopkins, and we are left with mostly back-court bickering and longing glances from boy toy Jared Leto, looking less like a warrior and more like an androgynous Persian prostitute, lounging about beneath the long lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon - garbed in silk robes and more eyeliner than Alice Cooper wears.   Alexander like most of Stone's films, is a visual masterpiece that more resembles a great film than actually is a great film.  Only one scene actually - the ten minute red-hazed elephant battle sequence - is worth noting as genuinely great and/or mighty.  But the film, though not great, has much in common with those grandiose Biblical epics of the 1950's (the giddy, campy joys of DeMille's Samson and Delilah or Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs) and is, like those aforementioned epics, still a great experience to behold.

As for the acting (truly an incidental creature in a motion picture such as this) is to be commended.  Colin Farrell, a much more talented actor than usually given credit for being, is a kick and a half as Alexander the Great, even though his Irish brogue falling in and out of time during the movie does distract at times, and Val Kilmer, as Alexander's brutish father, Philip of Macedon, is a one-note one-eyed drunken scream - but whole-heartedly so.  But then it is Angelina Jolie as Alexander's Mother who steals the show from everyone else on screen.  Part gypsy queen, part snake-charmer, part erotically charged vixen, full of wild energy and the mysterious motherly pangs of Jocosta, Jolie goes so far over the top that she may no longer exist, but it is such a delicious over-the-topness, you can't help but love it - if you are willing to let yourself go and remember that Oliver Stone should be seen as a great painter, with great artistic flair and a great eye toward colour and stroke, but who just happens to have no sense of great depth to his works of art.   Then again, who needs great depth when working in such a genre as this?

Granted, Stone's film may be far from great, though never going near far enough in its rendition of an openly bisexual society (even if those damned red-staters say otherwise in the crinkly criticisms), and is probably on its way to a critical Elysian Fields of sorts, but even so, Alexander, the not-so great, but the greatly enjoyable, is still pure camp joy for all, as well as an embarrassingly fun ride to take.   I suppose when all is said and done, flaws and all, Alexander ain't half bad.  In fact, once the smoke and mirrors clear themselves from all the pomp(ous) and circumstance of Stone's moviemaking audacity, his bongo-beating bravura if you will, it may end up being the downright great film we all hoped it would be and were afraid it was not.   Imagine that. 

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 07/25/04] 

Retro Review: Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  I offer this one up as my special Independence Day edition.

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Every time I watch a new Michael Moore film, I inevitably ask myself – just who the hell is this guy making movies for? He acts as if he is a voice of change, showing us the moral and political indignities perpetrated against the American people by the despotic, elected (and sometimes not elected) leaders of our country. Yet, for anyone who is even just the most modestly informed, not much the director spouts into his booming megaphone is any real revelation. Anyone and everyone who reads even the occasional newspaper or catches the occasional passing TV tuned to CNN or MSNBC (something other than the maniacally manipulative Fox News that is) should know at least the basic ins and outs of what is going on in and around Washington and Wall Street. Nope, Moore does not make his films for these people.

As for those folks who know nothing outside their world’s of Nascar, professional wrestling and reality TV trainwrecks (not to stereotype - Ha!), they are not going to waste their “precious” time by seeing anything higher-browed than the latest Adam Sandler and/or Will Ferrell comedy anyway (again, stereotyping). Ironically, many of these same said people are the very ones Moore is standing up for in his latest film. The common person. The Middle American. The laid-off blue collar backbone of the nation kind of people. The people who lost their jobs after the factories closed. The people who are losing their homes due to corporate and political greed. Although he does proclaim an affinity, an empathy if you will, with and for such people - and I believe he is sincere in this affinity and/or empathy - Moore does not make his movies for these people either.

As for either side of the so-called political spectrum - that uncompromising rainbow of spit and vinegar that keeps rearing its ugly, ranting melon - Moore acts as a two-headed coin of sorts. Never claiming to be fair and balanced (as a certain “news” agency arrogantly does!) he rudely alienates one side while over-placating the other. Those of a more liberal bent (myself wholeheartedly included) - Moore’s core fan base if you will - end up being nothing more than the proverbial choir being proverbially preached to. Those of the tea party set - Glenn Beck’s angry mob of Stepford children if you will - would never be caught dead at a Michael Moore film, unless they were outside lobbing absurdist Beckian sound bites at all those going into the theatre as if they were outside a West Virginia-set Planned Parenthood with those clown-faced Westboro Baptist Church folk, and Moore was the “evil” abortion doctor holed up inside, clasping his hands together and maniacally exclaiming "excellent, excellent." No, Moore doesn’t make his movies for either of these groups of people.

So the question remains, exactly for whom the hell is this bombastic badger making movies? The answer is the cinephile. Yeah, you heard me. It may not be a conscious effort (then again, it may be, at least to a partial degree) but it is for those of us obsessed with the cinema for whom Moore makes his movies. The film buffs, cineastes and auteurists out there are Moore’s true core audience. Or at least they damn well should be. Taken as pure entertainment, albeit with a rather satiric Marxist bent, Moore’s films - from 1989’s Roger & Me right on through to the rather under-appreciated Sicko two years ago - have been leading up to something wholly unexpected. With each successive film, Moore has been becoming more and more resembling of a certain New Wave cinematic icon. Now, with Capitalism: A Love Story, the filmmaker’s sixth film (unless one wants to count the John Candy vehicle Canadian Bacon, the director’s lone foray into fictional movie-making - and why would one?), he has made his most Godardian film to date. Yes, for better or for worse, Michael Moore has become an auteur.

From the very start, Moore has created the most Godardian of motion picture excesses. From his primary-coloured opening note and his montage comparison of ancient Rome (via sword & sandals-esque footage from an old movie on the subject) and modern America (juxtaposing the image of Dick Cheney with the narrator’s mention of the emperor!) Moore gives us a creature that would fit in perfectly with the French new waver’s late sixties-early seventies output. This is Moore’s Tout va Bien, his Made in U.S.A., his Week-end even. Although Moore doesn’t seem to share JLG’s once rather right wing dalliances (he got over it!) he near-perfectly captures Godard’s flippant reverence for both cinematic history and political outrage. With Marxist mantra in tow, Moore has become less the Godhead of self-righteousness many claim he is, and more the agit-prop provocateur in the realms of Godard and von Trier and Haneke and the like. Yes he still cares about that aforementioned backbone of America crowd - and sincerely makes his movies to help them best he can - but that hasn’t stopped his films from becoming increasingly more cinematic in nature. Cinematic to the point that not only is his finger on the pulse of the people and his tongue firmly pressed against chubby, unshaven cheek, his camera-eye is set toward the ancillarily artistic.

Yes, Moore should, and does, take his subjects seriously. Like Godard, his films are no mere entertainment alone, but something more. Something important. Yes, Moore, like Godard again in a way, plays at being the clown prince of liberal indignation, but he never loses sight of the grand picture. Mixing lark with pathos he paints this grand picture with broad strokes of buffoonery in order to get people to take notice. Like the class clown in school, shouting, laughing and mocking until everyone is looking at him for what he’ll do next. But unlike the class clown, once everyone is looking Moore’s way, he pulls the camera away from himself and points it at his intended sympathetic subjects. The real drama unfolds when Moore points his camera at these subjects and we hear their stories. A family being kicked out of their home due to relentless foreclosure, only to turn around and have to work for pittance for the very bank that is throwing them to the curb. A widow wearing bitter indignation on her face when she finds out how her late husband’s company had made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the so-called “dead peasant” insurance policy they took out on him in secret. Moore may clown around in his crazy ape kind of way in order to get people to pay attention to his movies, but once they do he hook, line and sinkers them with the seemingly endless sad stories from his beloved Middle America.

The debate of clownish buffoon or serious auteur aside, Moore is always fodder for the right. Called a fat, bloated liar by many of the red state commentators, it seems his weight gain is the most abhorrent personality trait to their overly sensitive palettes. He is even shown as such in the horribly misleading - and quite unfunny - An American Carol (that movie made by the last seven remaining Republicans in Hollywoodland). Of course the liar portion of their complaints is bally-hooed about like pork rinds and natty light at a red state tailgate party. Granted, there may have been some truth-coaxing in some of his films, though never any outright lies, but using poetic license to get your point across has always been the forte of the muckraker. Moore has never claimed to be unbiased and his movies have never acted as such. Moore paints with broad strokes, and just like Godard before him, he may leave some information out in order to make his point clearer to those watching his movies. None of this voids the fact that the greed of capitalism has hurt this country and the people who are its backbone. None of this should be ammo for those who hate the man as much as they hate his “dirty pinko” ideas, but it is of course. Then again, you will probably never meet a middle-of-the-road Moore observer. He is either all hate or all love. It’s just the haters club is the more vocal. One anonymous Wall Streeter, when asked by Moore for advice, tells him to stop making movies.

Then again, Moore seems to be getting, at least a little less flack this time around. Even many Republicans - the bane of Moore’s crux so to speak - are against the bailout and the ridiculous greed of people such as Bernie Madoff and his ilk. As many of the families getting the foreclosured boot are Republicans as they are Democrats. The irony of conservative indignation at Moore is palpable. Moore ends up blasting just as many Dems as he does G.O.P.ers in his latest work. Much has also been said of how Moore can tout a Marxist revolution of sorts while still making millions on his movies. These critics never mention that Moore pays for every one of his employees’ medical benefits out of his own pocket. They never mention his living in a modest home and driving an older, American car. They never mention his charity work for Katrina victims or the like. Of course Moore has not completely denounced capitalism. You don’t get a body like that without more than a few trips to McDonald’s late night drive-thru. If anything, Moore still loves capitalism, much like an old girlfriend who has ditched him for a richer, cooler boy, and mourns its death in these days of corporate greed and commercial excess. He does subtitle his film A Love Story after all. Of course don’t try explaining any of this to Glenn Beck and his crazy-eyed cronies.

At the end of his film, Moore wraps Wall Street (or at least part of it) in yellow crime scene tape as if he is some sort of blunderbuss, rabble rousing Cristo. He follows this by saying he can’t live in a country like this, but that he is not going anywhere. It is a call to arms in a way. Perhaps not an out and out revolution but still a call for people to rise and take their country back. The country that striking workers demanded when they were forced out of their lifelong jobs. The country that FDR dreamed of when he laid down his new bill of rights just before he died (shown in archival footage near the end of the film). The country that Moore remembers from his childhood in the now defunct Flint Michigan. Moore claims this is his final documentary and when he heads back to the corporate offices of GM, where his first film, Roger & Me started off (and of course he is still not allowed in), it acts as perfect bookend to a career forcing people to think about what their country, or more aptly, their government, has done to them. Whether this is his final film, only time will tell. Perhaps he will make Canadian Bacon II: The Iraq Equation next, who knows.

In sum, as I defend the man along with the film it has hit me that perhaps I am a bit too biased myself.  After all, I am one of that aforementioned proverbial choir being preached to.  So I wish to end my review with the words of someone who has a little more knowledge about such things as capitalism and its fellow buzzwords.  As the end credits roll, there is a quote from Warren Buffett, one of the richest people on the planet and surely one of those purported 1% who own 95% of the wealth. I want to close with that quote. “It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.”. ’nuff said.

[Originally published at MovieZeal on 10/03/12]