Cynical Cinema

I am going to start this review with a bold statement.  WALL-E is the best animated movie…of all time.  Yes, it’s better than Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and any other animated fare for kids.   Or adults, or anything.  It is 2001:  A Space Odyssey for children.  For kids, in the sense that it makes sense.  Not only that, I would go one step further and suggest that Pixar has become the greatest studio for animated film in history, outclassing Disney.  Just look at their output:  The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and now WALL-E.  (They have had one movie that missed being a classic - Cars, which was just a little too formulaic to be great.)

The fact that this movie was green-lit at all is a testament to the Kubrick-esque power that Pixar commands in Hollywood.  Imagine trying to pitch this to investors:  It’s a movie for kids about a little robot who is alone on Earth, compacting garbage.  He learns Earth culture through an old VHS tape he’s found that plays Hello Dolly, the 1969 musical.  Through this video, he learns about love, dancing and companionship.  In the 97 minute movie, there is a total of about six minutes of actual dialogue.  Not only that, the entire film is a rumination on the current human condition, our tendency toward apathy, and the idea that through our own laziness we are destroying our own future world.

When the movie begins, it has been 700 years since humans abandoned the Earth, on a massive spaceship that just seems to float endlessly through space.  We meet the humans much later in the film, and when we do they are fat, useless blobs, floating around in chairs and being waited on hand and foot by robots who meet their every need.  In the meantime, we meet WALL-E, (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter - Earth class), who lives alone on the Earth cleaning up our garbage.  The waste human beings have left behind is piled sky high, and it’s WALL-E’s job to crush it into cubes and stack it up.  By now, he has managed to stack massive piles of garbage throughout a city, piles that are as tall as the skyscrapers that still exist on the skyline, and piles that are eerily similar in shape.

What WALL-E doesn’t know is that he is completely alone, abandoned by the people and the robots who run the spacecraft, and who are never planning to go back.  He is cleaning up the Earth for no real reason, except that this is what he is programmed to do.  His lone companion is a little cockroach, who has managed to survive in the filth and through the devastation, as only a cockroach could.  When another robot suddenly appears on Earth, WALL-E is overjoyed.  Even though this new robot, EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) can fly, and has a gun on her arm that can blow up battleships, WALL-E is so happy to have someone who might provide companionship that he overcomes his fear to make some advances toward EVE.

WALL-E’s idea of “love” having come from Hello Dolly, he just wants to hold hands with EVE, although she is rather cold to the idea - it is not in her programming to hold hands or befriend anyone.  And when WALL-E presents her with a plant, a real, green, actually growing plant from Earth, she snatches it from him and shuts down.  This is her protocol - to search the Earth for any signs of vegetation, and bring them back to the spaceship.  This leads to an amazing series of events that ends with the two robots back in the space station, trying to snap the humans out of their apathy and fighting against the autopilot - (a computer with a big red light for an eye, in a direct tribute to 2001:  A Space Odyssey). 

There are three things that make WALL-E better than any other animated film in history.  First, the animation itself is beyond superb.  The world in which WALL-E lives (the abandoned Earth) is incredibly realized, and so staggeringly realistic that within minutes you forget entirely that you’re watching an animated movie.  This is the pinnacle of Pixar’s achievement to this time, and can likely be attributed to Roger Deakins, an incredibly cinematographer who was hired on to this project as a consultant.  Secondly, the characters.  The robots here, especially WALL-E, seem more human than humans.  Their facial expressions and the noises they make are more evocative than any real “dialogue” could be.  And the fact that the kids in the theatre around me didn’t even notice that no one was talking is a testament to how effective this really is.  They were completely focussed on this movie, beginning to end.

And thirdly, this is a message movie.  A movie that teaches kids (and adults) about the dangers of apathy, the path upon which we human beings currently find ourselves, mass commericalization, and the dangers of ignoring environmental problems.  The movie never once strays off message for the sake of a cheap joke, as so many animated movies do.  It never deviates from it’s greater purpose, and the vision is so consistent throughout the film that even when it isn’t obvious, we can’t forget.

All in all, WALL-E is a breathtaking, awe-inspiring achievement that will get kids to question the world around them, and that’s a good thing.  It feels in a lot of ways like one of those Pixar short films, extended to feature length.  The two cute robots that fall in love could easily be a three-minute short.  But instead, every moment in WALL-E is as good as the best moment in a short, and that makes this the greatest animated movie of all time.  Watch it.  Now.

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

Be Kind Rewind is the kind of movie that could have gone one of two ways. Either very stupid and silly, like so much of Jack Black’s work, or a very clever and ingenious send-up of familiar movies. It turns out to be somewhere in the middle, but that’s a good thing. It comes out June 17th from Alliance Films, and it’s well worth a rental. Mos Def is a clerk at a video store owned by Danny Glover that still rents VHS tapes while the rest of the world has switched to DVD. Jack Black is his crazy friend who believes the government is spying on him. When Glover leaves Mos Def in charge of the video store for a week, Black recruits him to help sabotage the power plant in the area. Def (is that how you refer to rappers by their last name? Who knows.) Backs out at the last minute, but Black goes ahead with the sabotage, which is unsuccessful, but leaves him electrocuted and magnetized.

When the magnetized Jack Black enters the video store, he erases all the video tapes on the shelves, and the two friends decide to fix the problem by remaking all the movies in the place on their own, based on their suspect knowledge of the films themselves. Mia Farrow makes a terrific appearance as the store’s most loyal customer, wanting to rent Ghostbusters. This becomes the first movie redone by Black and Def, and after the 20-minute version becomes something of a hit in the neighbourhood, they start making others. Rush Hour 2, Robocop, The Lion King, Driving Miss Daisy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, When We Were Kings, King Kong, Carrie, Last Tango in Paris and Men In Black get “sweded”, a bizarre term dreamed up by the guys to explain the origin of these bizarre copies of familiar movies. Before long, the store is a neighbourhood sensation.

There is so much other stuff in the film that will be familiar to the hardcore film buff. Not just the hilarious versions of famous movies that are done by the two main characters, but also the land developers who want to condemn the store and tear it down, leading to the inevitable community protest and rally to save the building. The baddies from the copyright office who show up to destroy the tapes, since the movies have been made without permission. The references Farrow makes to horror movies and how she can’t handle them. And Danny Glover’s obsession with Fats Waller and how the store is actually Waller’s birthplace and as such an historical landmark that requires preserving. All of it taken in a sweet and respectful way that gives a tip of the hat to so many movies that have come before.

Be Kind Rewind is also so gleeful in making the type of movie it sends up that it shows a great spirit in disregarding the problems that would be obvious to most viewers. Even with the poor quality of the films these two make, they would need more money than they obviously have just to make their re-shoots. If Jack Black is still magnetized to the point where he would have erased every tape in the store, he would also be erasing the tapes they make in the video camera. And Danny Glover never seems to have any kind of plan on how to actually save his store. But all this is terrific, because the gaps in logic are merely a part of the experience of the movie itself, a movie that ends up being almost as good, and in some cases (Rush Hour 2) even better than the films to which it pays homage.

Jack Black is his usual comically insane self, and Mos Def is superb as his buddy, whose relationships with Black and Glover create a more complex character than we expect to see in a film such as this. Also terrific in supporting roles are Glover as the blindly stubborn and slightly deluded old man, Mia Farrow as the sweet older woman around the corner, and Melonie Diaz as Alma, the girl who joins the movie making process when they need someone to make out with Jack Black. (The scene where they recruit her to star in their films is one of the highlights of this movie.) Add all these components together, and you get a sweet, clever, and wonderful movie by Michel Gondry, a man who clearly loves movies the way so many of the rest of us do.