Cynical Cinema

The main problem with Jumper, as it is with most Hayden Christensen movies, is Hayden Christensen.  He is so wooden, he may as well be a totem pole.  Or Steven Seagal.  In this movie his love interest is Rachel Bilson, some girl who is famous from some TV show called The OC.  She is not a great actress, but compared to him she’s Greta Garbo and Meryl Streep rolled into one.  And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who will appear in just about anything ever, phoning it in as he does in the bad ones.  And this really is a bad movie.  The story is that Christensen is a “jumper”, some kind of person who can just disappear from where he is and reappear anywhere he likes.  He robs banks with this power, builds something of a playboy lifestyle, until finally he is tracked down by Jackson.  Jackson is a “palladin”, which is an organization?  A species?  A committee?  dedicated to tracking down and killing these “jumpers”.

Christensen escapes the first time, meets another “jumper”, finds out there are others like him, and finally meets his mother, Diane Lane, who abandoned him when he was a five-year-old.  Basically, the last hour of this movie is a cross-dimensional, all-over-the-world chase and escape involving the two jumpers and Jackson and the other palladins.  Which is all well and good, but I’d like a little more story.  Where do these “jumpers” come from?  Why do they exist?  Who are the palladins?  Why do they want to kill the jumpers?  How come the jumpers don’t always know that there are others like them?  Any back story at all would be nice, but there is none.  Zip.  All of this leads to a fairly mundane, inexplicable and silly conclusion after a mundane, inexplicable and silly movie.

But I kind of like it.  In a way, Jumper is delighfully idiotic.  The scenes where buses fly through time and space to emerge in the Arabian desert are insane.  The plot twists and the ideas that characters have and the complete lack of effort from Jackson and Lane are, in a way, hilarious.  The pointless and contrived involvement of Bilson, the unecessary high-school-bully scene, the wannabe heart-rending scenes with Christensen and his father…it all adds up to enough lunacy and idiocy and stupidity to make this movie somehow watchable through it’s mercifully short hour and a half running time.  I can’t say it’s a good movie without feeling a little nauseous, but I can say that you may well enjoy it.

Until now, I have never seen Sienna Miller in anything except the tabloids. You remember, she was somehow involved with Jude Law in some way, some stuff happened…I can’t remember the rest of it. It turns out she is a fairly good actress, I think. Her talent, if she does indeed have some, is totally wasted in the movie Factory Girl, which is currently playing on Rogers On Demand. It’s free to rent, but not worth it. This movie is boring, stupid and a real chore to sit through. Sienna Miller plays Edie Sedgewick, the original “it girl” in the movies made by Andy Warhol in the 60s, who was rumoured to have had a relationship with Bob Dylan, and who ended up a wasted wreck of a human being. An interesting story, to be sure, if it wasn’t shot like some kind of after-school special.

And there are other actors involved, some of whom are decent and some who are very good. Hayden Christensen is decent, and Guy Pearce is very good, but they are terribly boring in Factory Girl. Christensen plays Bob Dylan as some kind of wax figure who speaks. Guy Pearce plays Andy Warhol as a predatory, evil manipulator. Both portrayals may be accurate in real life at the time, but I have read an awful lot about Warhol, and I suspect there was more to Warhol than just aloofness and callousness. He was likely at the very least two-dimensional. And Dylan was certainly more two-dimensional than Pearce’s portrayal in the film. There isn’t a single character in the movie I liked. I think we’re supposed to like Sedgewick herself, but it becomes impossible because she is such a boring character. From the beginning of the movie to the end, she is such a victim, of Warhol’s exploitation, of Dylan’s coldness, of drug addiction and of a horrible father. At no point does she ever take responsibility for any of her own actions.

So, the movie would have us believe that this young girl showed up in Warhol’s studios, charming and pretty and ambitious. Then she was twisted, tortured, and manipulated into taking drugs, having sex with multiple partners, appearing in demeaning movies and wasting her life. No one cared enough about her to hold her hand and get her out. At no point does she ever try to get out of the lifestyle by herself, she is just forced out when people are tired of her, and then she blames them for turning into this wasted shell of a person. If she was able to take some responsibility for her own actions, she would be a much more sympathetic character. If she ever even questioned what was happening to her, she would be much more sympathetic. But she accepts everything as it comes along, initiates most of it, and then explodes. When she turns her anger toward those who “used” her, it comes off as very strange, since she is now an absolute junkie, completely out of it and lost in the world. Yet somehow now, completely drug-addled, she is able to finally see how these people turned her into that junkie? It doesn’t add up.

The Edie Sedgewick story is an interesting one, as are the Andy Warhol story and the Bob Dylan story. But there are better, and far more accurate ways to learn about that scene. There are a couple of books I own on Warhol - Who Is Andy Warhol? is a collection of articles and stories written about him and his art, and is really better for art students and the like. Holy Terror is a better look at the Factory scene, a book by Bob Colacello, who was the editor of Interview Magazine and who followed Warhol closely for a long time. While the picture he paints of Warhol is not always a rosy one, it certainly characterizes him and Sedgewick as far more complex and real than they are in this movie. For good Bob Dylan stuff, check out No Direction Home, the Scorcese documentary, or Chronicles, written by Dylan himself. For Edie Sedgewick, I don’t really know where to look. But it certainly isn’t Factory Girl. For fans of Sienna Miller’s breasts, however, this movie is well worth your while. Please don’t watch it just for Sienna Miller’s breasts.

The basic premise of Awake is a good one. A man is going in for open heart surgery, and the anaesthesia does not work 100% properly. You see, he is awake during the entire surgical procedure. He can’t move a muscle, he can’t speak, but he is aware of his surroundings and he can smell and feel and hear everything that is going on. Which leads to a very intense scene when he first realizes that he can hear everything that’s happening in the operating room, and he can feel the incisions. The scene is fairly graphic, in a surgery-channel sort of way, and my girlfriend couldn’t watch. Which means she missed the best seven minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie is maudlin, phony, and fairly irritating. And I blame two people in particular. The Star Wars Guy and the Bikini-Chick. Those two people are the stiff-as-a-board Hayden Christensen, and the sweet-as-pie-with-giant-eyes Jessica Alba.

The DVD cover for Awake has a quote from Frank Scheck, movie reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter. He says “Awake does for surgery what Jaws did for the beach”. If he means it will make people afraid to go under the knife, he is wrong. If he means it will send people screaming in droves from it, perhaps he is right. In fact, based on that logic, Awake does for Hayden Christensen movies what Jaws did for the beach. Maybe, just maybe, people won’t go back into the theatre for these things for a long time. Hayden Christensen is just painful. At best, he is a third-rate Christian Bale, which works fine for the acting-is-not-required Star Wars roles, but rarely is effective elsewhere in the movies. And Jessica Alba has the appearance, the charizma and the acting talent of a ridiculously attractive cabbage patch doll. Which makes these two the least believable screen couple this side of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Oh, they do the standard movie scene where he pulls her into the tub with her clothes on - get it? They are in love, and that’s what people in love do…

At any rate, while he is aware of his surroundings but unable to respond, Christensen hears a plot to kill him! An evil scheme that involves his murder while he is having a heart transplant! But how is he to stop it? Well, it turns out, he isn’t. He must hope that his loved ones piece things together before he comes out of his coma. And in the meantime, we watch him wander around the hospital in a completely ineffective out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, characters become their own narrators so that we know exactly what is happening. Dialogue like “OK, now you do exactly what we discussed. Take this syringe that I have prepared for you, put it into the heart he is about to receive, press down on the plunger, and then when the heart is placed in his chest, he will die, and we will collect the money. And remember, the reason we did this is…” If I was planning to kill someone for any reason at all, and I was conspiring with someone else, I don’t think I would have to explain the entire plan to that person more than once. But, it sure helps us (and Christensen) know what is going on!

Awake has seven minutes which are intense, exciting, and terrific. They occur when Hayden Christensen is in a coma and can’t act, and Jessica Alba is fretting in another room and isn’t a part of the scene. The other 77 minutes of this movie are either poor or awful. I suggest avoiding all the minutes in this film.