Cynical Cinema

I picked up The 4400, The Complete Series, out Tuesday the 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  And I started watching it.  And then I kept watching.  I stopped taking notes because it was interfering with my viewing of this show.  And I started to pay really, really close attention.  I got through Season One, and went to bed.  The next morning, as soon as I got up, I started Season Two.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun Season Three.  I woke up early the following day to complete Season Three.  And then, a couple of days later, I had watched the Fourth and Final season.  This was actually the second time I had watched Season Four of The 4400.  I watched it alone in May, when that season came out on DVD, and I gave it four stars out of ten.  I stand by that review.  As a stand-alone DVD set, Season Four merits four stars.

But now I was addicted.  I was desperate to find out what happened.  I had to know how this series ended.  And I watched all four seasons of this show.  I should have known.  After all, I had already watched the fourth season.  The fourth, and final, season.  And I remember how that one ended.  In that, it didn’t.  It didn’t end at all.  It didn’t answer any questions at all.  It just got cancelled and taken off the air.  I just watched thirty-three hours of this show.  Thirty-three.  Hours.  And at the end…nothing.  I was a little peeved.  But that was nothing compared to the fury of my girlfriend, who had watched all thirty-three hours with me.  She was incensed.  She had just wasted an entire weekend, and 33 hours of her life.

Here’s the basic premise:  Over the past 50 years, people have been abducted from all over the world.  All of a sudden, 4400 people are returned to Earth, all at once, all in one place, without having aged a day.  Each of the 4400 has a special ability - telekinesis, the ability to heal others, pre-cognition, and so forth.  The government gets involved, and tries to suppress these abilities.  We find out pretty quickly that these are not alien abductions, but rather these people are being taken by humans in the future, who are sending them back to hopefully change the course of history and save all of humanity.  And after a while, it looks like a war is brewing.

Then it ends.  It’s over.  If you’re the creator of The 4400, and you want to sell your “complete series” DVD, it seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do to film maybe five or six more episodes in order to wrap it up and give the viewers some closure.  The people who had invested in this series and who would purchase a 15-disc set to find out how it actually ends.  In fact, you could well market it to people who had never seen this show before as well.  Because this show was good.  It was VERY good.  Incredibly compelling, like the beginning of Lost.  And watching the first season made me absolutely rabid to find out the secrets and the stories and the result of the whole process.  In fact, you could maybe have created a satisfactory conclusion by filming TWO more episodes.  So why not?

Instead, this is what we get - a fifteenth disc that is full of special features, once the fourth season ends.  One of those special features is an introduction by Scott Peters, the creator of the show.  He talks about creating the show, and how pleased he is with the ardent fans who posted on the internet message boards and discussed the show and so forth.  Which is fine.  By all means, thank the fans!  But…then what?  You must have had some idea how the series was going to end - just tell us what the plan was!  It’s too late to do it now, just tell us the end.  It is no longer a spoiler, it is now the only catharsis available to us, the audience.  Help us out here.

The fact is, I felt incredibly ripped off after 33 hours of watching this with no resolution whatsoever.  Why bother with this, I thought.  In fact, thanks to the wrath of my girlfriend, I was ready to give this show a one-star rating.  After all, I was sour too because she woke me up in the middle of the night to express her anger - she had stayed up four hours later than normal to get to the end, because she too was addicted.  But I reconsidered, because if this show was compelling enough to make us that passionate about seeing an ending, it must have been doing something right.  And the show itself deserves at least nine stars.  But I will not give it nine, because it is false advertising.  The 4400 Complete Series is some great television, but there is nothing “complete” about this series.

Dark City is a dark movie.  Amazing, eh?  Go figure.  But the filming is dark, the scenery is dark, and for that reason I found it very confusing when I first watched it.  It was really difficult to follow the action and to figure out what, exactly, was going on.  I still enjoyed the movie, and I realize that it was intentionally obscure and difficult to follow.  But the constant darkness ended up, by the end of the film, being oppressive.  And the action scenes don’t need to be so difficult to follow.  Which is why a movie like Dark City is one of those movies for which Blu-Ray was created. 

I recently picked up Dark City on Blu-Ray from Alliance Films, when it came out on July 29th.  It is a remarkable movie from Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and I, Robot, about a city that never sees the sun, and it’s controlled by a mysterious shadowy group of pale-faced men in trenchcoats who mess with the inhabitants in some kind of bizarre science experiment.  The story is decent, the action is decent, but it’s the setting and the atmosphere that make this movie fantastic.  Everything about this movie, even Keifer Sutherland’s over-acting as a weirdo doctor, is unsettling.  Jennifer Connelly, who plays a nightclub singer, is sultry, sexy, smoking hot, and still - unsettling. 

And everything about that atmosphere and the setting comes through twenty times clearer and freakier with Blu-Ray.  What was already a really cool, strange, creepy movie is just that much cooler, stranger and creepier.  It was already very good, but on Blu-Ray it verges on classic.  Now we just wait for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to come out on Blu-Ray as well.

I tried. I really, truly tried to like Southland Tales. I liked The Rock in it. That’s right - The Rock, the wrestler, I liked him. I liked Seann William Scott - Stiffler from American Pie, the guy who has only ever played a drunken frat boy, I liked him. I liked Bai Ling -the Chinese actress who was recently busted for shoplifting. I also liked Jon Lovitz (Newsradio), Cheri O’Teri (irritating name), Christopher (there can be only one) Lambert, Justin (my music is obnoxious) Timberlake, Mandy (look how big my eyes are) Moore, Sarah Michelle (I have two first names) Gellar and John (remember me) Laroquette. I liked them all! I liked the camera work, I loved the layout of the scenes, I enjoyed seeing what was coming up next. I was desperate to like Southland Tales. The movie begged me to like it, and I said OK movie, I will try my very best to do so, just don’t let me down. And the movie did not let me down. But I can’t recommend it because it is awful.

Here is a plot synopsis, as best I can make out. Perhaps once you have read this you will understand. World War 3 has begun. There have been nuclear bombs set off in Texas, so the Americans have responded by bombing Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Korea, Afghanistan, and possibly Belgium. The US army is running out of oil. It is the near future, but George Bush is still preisdent. (In fact, at one point they use actual file footage of Bush speaking.) As the oil runs out, a mad scientist invents a way to get energy directly from the ocean. He is either bent on world domination, or he’s crazy, or he’s just a nice old man with evil advisors. Still don’t know. The Rock shows up on a beach. He has amnesia. He is a famous actor, but he doesn’t know that, and he hooks up with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is a porn star. He has a wife that he has forgotten, however, and she is Mandy Moore, who is the daughter of the man who is running for vice-president of the US in the elections on the Republican ticket. There are cameras everywhere, and one of the major election issues is bill 69, which would restrict the ability of the government to invade the privacy of people. Take a breath for a moment.

We continue: Seann William Scott is a cop who has a twin brother who is a left-wing extremist, and he has kidnapped his twin in order to pose as him in a large conspiracy that will see him, posing as his brother, commit a double murder with racist overtones, that will be filmed by The Rock before he finds out who he really is, and this will be released to the media to discredit both the cops and the Republicans all at once. There is musical montage, a music video, a song-and-dance number, a soap-opera going on in Mandy Moore’s family where some people are sleeping with some other people, there is a world domination theme, there is drug trafficking, somehow related to this machine in the ocean that produces energy and also perhaps some variation on Soylent Green. Everything in the country is sponsored by either Hustler or Budweiser, and the grand finale of the movie involves a giant Zeppelin, a riot, a fireworks display, a rift in the space-time continuum, and a flying ice cream truck.

So…yeah. Southland Tales is about all of this, and none of this. The movie is two and a half hours long, and to cram all this stuff in and make us care, or understand, it would have to be eleven hours plus. There is just way too much going on. And yet the movie seems to have a rather laguid pace, like it isn’t hurrying anywhere. It feels good to watch it. It is visually impressive. The writing is very good. There are some great lines, and great moments. The little old lady from Poltergeist is in the movie, and she has a great moment at the bottom of a staircase straight out of that movie. The little old smart guy from The Princess Bride is in it a lot too, and he throws it to that film with the word “preposterous”. Kiss Me Deadly, the classic 1955 film noir, is playing on the TV in the porn star’s room. The porn stars have their own TV shows and energy drinks. There are so many cool actors doing cool things. Justin Timberlake is awesome. And yet - there really is no movie here. You can sit there for two and a half hours. You might be entertained, you will be mildly stimulated, and you may even think you are enjoying yourself. But when the movie ends, you won’t know what it was about, you won’t care, and six minutes later you will have forgotten everything about the film. It’s heavy on style, but the substance is almost non-existent.