Cynical Cinema

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.

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?

Into the Wild is a terrific film. Sean Penn has now directed his first truly excellent movie, and Emile Hirsch has served notice that he is one of Hollywood’s next major acting stars. Hirsch plays Christopher McCandless, a young college graduate with his whole life ahead of him, who decides to go ahead and live that life. Only, his idea of living that life is much different from his family’s idea of living his life. In fact, it’s an idea far more in keeping with Henry David Thoreau’s idea of living life than it is for most of us. However, whereas Thoreau invented a large portion of his masterpiece, Walden, and did not necessarily spend several years of his life living in the woods at Walden Pond, McCandless really did this. He really did leave after graduating school, gave up all his money and his car and his family, and headed out across America to live in Alaska. Into the Wild is the story of that journey.

And it is a fascinating one. Along the way, Christopher does away with all his identification, changes his name to Alexander Supertramp (no connection to the band), and meets dozens of interesting people. Among them are Catherine Keener, who is terrific, Vince Vaughn, who is reliably great, Kristen Stewart, who is ridiculously hot, and Hal Holbrook, who is magnificent in the role that got him nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Of course, the scenery is beautiful, since this is the story of one man and his desire to be completely alone in the wild. But the dialogue is real and poetic, the actors all deliver first-rate performances, and the message really hits home. That message is not necessarily about the freedom that comes with abandoning all of one’s possessions and doing away with conventional society and a “normal” life. In equal measure, it is about the consequences of doing exactly that. The effect that McCandless’ disappearance had on his entire family, in particular his sister. And the effect that he has on all those he meets. This bright, engaging, attractive young man makes friends extremely easily, and creates lasting relationships in just a few short days.

However, he is doing it in large part because he is running away from that most lasting Relationship of all, Family. And toward the end of the film, he says to Holbrook “the joy of life doesn’t come from human relationships”. But that is the fundamental flaw in McCandless’ philosophy. HIS joy actually DOES come from human relationships. Of course, by the time he reaches this epiphany, it is too late, and he has set forth on a journey where he discovers himself, and answers all his questions, too late. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say he dies at the end - the trailers said as much. But as with most really good movies, it’s the journey that makes them worthwhile.

Neverwas is a movie in the tradition of Hook and Bridge to Terabithia, where fantasy and reality intersect in some bizarre way. It stars Aaron Eckhardt, Brittany Murphy and Ian McKellan. This film was made in 2005, never hit the theatres, and finally gets it’s first release, courtesy of Alliance Films, on DVD. It’s the story of an imagined land called Neverwas. Like Narnia or Oz or Middle Earth, Neverwas exists only in a children’s book written by Nick Nolte. The star of this book is Zachary, Nolte’s son. While writing the book, Nolte is losing his mind, and gets sent to a mental institution. For the next few years, he made life very difficult for his family before dying a strange and unpleasant death. The movie picks up about thirty years later. The book is now a worldwide classic, and Nolte’s son is a grown man (Eckhardt). He is now a psychiatrist, who takes a job at the institute that once housed his father.

There are some other big names here. Notably Vera Farminga, who starred as the psychiatrist in The Departed and has become one of the most respected actresses in the business. But then, this film was made in 2005, before she was famous. And although the credits use her name, she has one line in the movie and maybe six seconds of screen time. Which indicates something about the film. Neverwas was made three years ago, but released only now. And they put a famous name in the credits, even though that person had very little to do with the movie. Maybe they are trying to compensate for something? Hide something? Like the fact that this movie is not very good? Well, it isn’t. In fact, it would be quite terrible without one key ingredient. Ian McKellan.

I like Brittany Murphy, she has a very charming and childlike innocence about her, which works well in this film. She plays a reporter who is doing a story on the phenomenon of Neverwas and the enigma that was it’s author. I also like Aaron Eckhardt, who has the sort of cocky arrogance that works in Thank You For Smoking, but not here. The two are supposed to be some kind of meant-for-each-other couple, but does that ever feel flat, and leads to a painfully contrived oh-my-god-she’s-really-a-reporter-and-I’m-furious scene. Then there’s a maudlin, staggeringly stupid scene where Eckhardt reveals that he BLAMES himself for his father’s DEATH! But thankfully, right when each of these terrible scenes gets so obnoxious that you want to give up on the movie altogether, here comes Ian McKellan again, and things pick right back up.
McKellan plays a patient at the mental hospital who believes that he is the king of the actual land of Neverwas. He is magnificently looney, a wonderfully deranged old man but…is he maybe telling the truth? Is Neverwas…actually real? I won’t reveal the details there, but the journey to that point is terrific. Without McKellan, this movie would be incredibly awful. But whenever he’s on the screen, the film has a certain electricity which is well worth watching. McKellan is one of the greatest actors working today, and although he will likely be remembered for playing Magneto more than any other character, he has done wonderful work in many fine films. And some otherwise horrible ones, like Neverwas.

It’s clear why this didn’t get a theatrical release. It’s too old for kids and too young for adults and too cheesy for cynical teenagers. And what happens to good movies that are too old for kids and too young for everyone else? They go direct to DVD. Apparently, so too do the bad ones.