Friday, July 29, 2005

It Whispers to Me

As I was saying yesterday, my initial impressions of Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998) were pretty negative. The movie seemed too emotional, trying a bit too hard to make us break down and cry, and contained so many unnecessary scenes that consisted mainly of the beautiful Montana countryside.

So I was kind of dreading finishing the movie.

But then my wife commented that she thought the film was formulaic: a character is hurt and must overcome adversity, and we’ve seen that a million times, according to her. Yeah, she’s right. We have seen it a million times, because overcoming adversity is the basic story of all human life, or at least all human storytelling. So I couldn’t say that that generalization made the film formulaic. Every movie, novel, play, and short story follows that formula. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this film was NOT formulaic.

As a side note, let me say, that is generally how my mind works. Someone like my wife (and it usually is my wife) says something, and I have to disagree with it. It’s in my nature to disagree with people’s assertions. I am argumentative, I know. But thinking about people’s assertions is what allows me to come up with my own ideas, you see? I tend to begin by disagreeing and then try to come up with why. It pisses people off, but it helps me understand things.

So the plot of The Horse Whisperer, I decided, was completely non-formulaic. It isn’t just about a person overcoming adversity. Where does the horse fit into that? So I thought that maybe we see the horse overcome adversity, as well, but Redford doesn’t try to get into the horse’s thoughts. Sometimes he shows us what the horse sees, but it’s almost always just a blurred shot of Scarlett Johanson. The horse is important to the story, but it’s not really a character. I even began to see that Scarlett Johanson’s character isn’t the main focus. Nope, it’s Kristen Scott Thomas, who I had not seen since The English Patient (1996).

And this person has no adversity, at least not outwardly! She’s a highly successful writer (yea!) who has everything, except, well, a good relationship with her daughter and husband. The entire film seems to boil down to her making choices about ways to make her life more complete. Yes, she has everything, but she eventually realizes that she has nothing (yeah, yeah), and so she has to choose between going back to her life in New York or staying on a ranch in Montana.

It's an idea that could so easily fail miserably. Put a little too much emotion into this part, make it too obvious, and I would hate it. But the emotion I talked about earlier isn't about Thomas--it's about Johanson.

The film doesn’t hit us over the head with Thomas's plight, and I appreciated that. While it’s not exactly subtle, it’s not boneheaded, either. Scarlett Johanson’s accident becomes a catalyst for the end of Thomas’s character’s life as she knew it. As she struggles to help her daughter, she eventually learns who she is and what she wants from life. Could be terrible, yes, but the film's strangeness works.

The horse, for example, is a really odd element. It becomes a metaphor, I think, for the scarring of the people. Yes, it’s traumatized, just like Thomas, Johanson, and Redford are all scarred and must make choices. Redford even goes to the horse and tells it something like, “you have something to do tomorrow.” That’s the day before it “chooses” whether to be well or not. People keep asking Redford, “when will Pilgrim [the horse] be better,” and he always replies, “That’s really up to Pilgrim.”

Yeah, that’s right, Mr. Redford. We make choices about “overcoming our adversity.” Sometimes we don’t even know we have adversity, and we just feel miserable. Redford gets it right when he says it’s up to us to choose when we’re ready to be happy. I don’t want to get into any complex psychological theories about depression, and I don’t think this film tries to do that. It ends up making a profound statement, however, about how one deals with tragedy.

And I appreciated the way it did it. Sure, it was a bit too emotionally tugging, but it turned out to be pretty good, after all.

Grade: 7 out of 10. Definitely fresh.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

The Baby/Horse Whisperer

I have a nine-month old girl, and a friend of ours leant us a video-tape a few months ago called The Baby Whisperer by a woman named Tracy Hogg. She died sometime this year, I think, and I feel bad talking her, because I’m sure she was a very nice person. From the video, I got the feeling that she is very caring and understanding and really loves kids and people.

Nevertheless, she was a bit of a freak.

One of the things she said was that she always asked the baby if she could change its diaper before she took it off. What? Ask the baby? The baby is crying its head off because it has a load of crap sagging down its behind, and you ASK it for its permission to change it? She didn’t say, you wait for a “sure, go ahead,” but it was implied that the baby will give you permission. Weird, indeed.

It was the first time I had ever heard of this “whispering” thing, which seems like a way to say, “communicates with things that speak another language.” Tracy Hogg is a baby whisperer because she is able to understand and communicates with babies (it makes her weird, too—she says she likes to create an “aura of respect” around the baby—sheesh).

And now I have finished watching Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). The movie came out before Tracy Hogg’s books, but I wonder about this term “whisperer.” The movie says at one point that Redford’s character is a “horse whisperer,” and he replies with something like, “is that what they say?” It’s almost as if they expect us to know what a horse whisperer is, and I certainly would not have if I had not seen The Baby Whisperer.

Anyway, I watched this movie over the course of a week, and my initial perception of the movie was that it needed a good editor. It took me a week to watch it because it was 2 hours and 48 minutes long! There’s really no need to for a movie like this to be that long. There are good ones, I know, but these are generally movies that are attempting something grand—like Gone with the Wind or any of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Horse Whisperer was NOT an epic film. In fact, its scope was very small. Besides an introduction that takes place in New York, the entire movie took place on a ranch in Montana (with a brief interlude in “town” at a hoe-down). There are only a few characters, too. That’s all fine, but this movie is not epic, so it doesn’t deserve nearly three hours.

Much of that nearly three hours is spent looking at scenery. It’s beautiful, of course, but I would rather turn on PBS to see shots of beautiful scenery devoid of people and plot. Redford displays his mastery of “the shot” in this film by giving us the majesty and awe of the untrammeled country, but it should have been a part of a nature special, not a movie like this.

So my initial reactions were negative, to say the least.

Next time, I will tell you why I think this is actually a decent movie. You will just have wait until then. In the meantime, if you want to know what it’s all about and you have three hours to kill, go rent it or get it from the library like I did. Just try to make it past the first half.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Captain of the Atmospherics

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) came out last summer, and I really wanted to see it in the theater, but I just never got around to it. My action movie partner saw it before me, so there was no one to go with, and I had heard mixed things about it. I imagined that it was a really neat-looking movie that would end up lacking the umimportant things such as plot. Turns out I was right.

But this may not be a bad thing, at least not wholly. I watched the “making of” video that came with the DVD, and it was really interesting (and yet kind of sad) to see these guys work on a six-minute “trailer” for four years. Then they showed that trailer to people, and a major studio just ate it up. It actually turned out to become some of the first parts of the movie, where the giant robots invade. These scenes are by far the most memorable and interesting of the entire movie.

But the plot here is actually beside the point. Yes, there is a “world of tomorrow,” and the earth will be destroyed in the process, but all of this seems to have been created after the original movie short, which was just about robots invading.

And these robots, as well as everything about the film, are visually stunning. It’s not like War of the Worlds, where I asked “How’d they do that?” I ask that question because everything looks so realistic in that film. Sky Captain is more like Spielburg decided to make his remake look like the original film. It doesn't look realistic, but the creative way it is shot and even written makes it appear like a pre-WWII film.

Which makes me wonder the point of it. It’s really neat that a film can be made to look like one from the 1920s, but why not just watch a film from the 1920s? Everyone looking for style and creativity should watch this movie, but I don’t think there is going to be a slew of films copying it. It’s slicker than a 1920s film, of course, and there are the beautiful and funny people in it, but it seems like a one-shot sort of thing. There’s no point in doing it again if it’s already been done.

It’s kind of like listening to John Cage’s song where someone just sits at the piano and doesn’t play for four minutes. Yeah, it’s interesting and intriguing to listen to everything around you as music, but I don’t want to put this piece of “music” on each time I want to listen to something. There’s just no point.

As a side note, I have decided that my reviews will actually contain something about the movies themselves instead of just interpreting them, or at least part of the time. So I have decided to begin rating movies using the Rotten Tomatoes rating system of 1-10, where 6-10 means it’s fresh or good, and 1-5 means it’s rotten or bad.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow gets a six, just putting it in the fresh category. It gets this because it really is visually amazing, and it’s worth watching just for that. There are some funny parts, too, although they don’t really belong in the film. Nevertheless, they made me laugh.

And that can’t be a bad thing.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The New Horror, Part II

I am trying to post at least two things a week on this 'blog, but it’s difficult. Creating such fabulous critiques takes time! Not that anyone’s reading, anyway. I just like to think of myself as having a web presence.

As I mentioned last time, I love horror films, but most of them never actually scared me. And then I saw The Blair Witch Project, long after it had become a phenomenon. I actually saw it in a dollar movie theater, and my wife and I were the only people in the entire theater. Yet the door kept opening throughout the movie, and I would look back, but no one was actually coming or going. Shivers here...

And then there was The Sixth Sense, which scared me, as well. And I’m actually frightened to even talk about The Ring, that movie scared me so much. I went to return a movie at 11:00 PM on a Friday, and I decided that I might as well watch a movie that night, seeing as my wife can’t watch horror movies, and she was already in bed. So I got The Ring, went home, and watched it until 1:30 AM. Sitting alone in my house in the dark watching that movie was absolutely terrifying. Especially because the DVD had a hidden special feature, where “the movie that kills” would come on. And it couldn’t be stopped! Nothing would turn it off! And then it went blank, and the phone rang. Gimmicky, yes, but actually very creepy.

And that adjective brings me to why I think these movies are scary, especially when juxtaposed with older horror films. The scare in those older movies is pretty generic. We know Jason or Freddy, or Michael is watching (sometimes we even get interesting camera shots from Michael’s perspective), and we know he is going to kill them, but we don’t know when. The how seems beside the point, too. With A Nightmare on Elm Street, we would see Freddy, and he just looked so silly that I couldn’t take him seriously. Yes, it was different because he wasn’t bound to using knives to kill people (being in nightmares, after all), but we knew it was coming, and it wasn’t scary. The only scary thing in those films is the “jump,” as I call it—when the killer jumps out from nowhere, or even when the cat jumps out from the closet. Yes, they would fake us out, and yes, we would expect it, but it was still scary. But then it was gone. It didn’t matter. It was just, whoo, breathe again.

New horror movies have improved on this jump tremendously, and that is why they’re scary. Whenever I watch a horror film, and I see a closeup of someone’s face, I get nervous. Why? Because the closeup means that I can’t see what’s going on around them. It means a “jump” is coming.

But the jumps have changed now. They’re no longer just, whoo, breathe again. Now they’re “oh my, that was creepy.” The Sixth Sense has perfect examples. At the beginning, when the kid tells Bruce Willis that the school was where they used to hang people, Willis doesn’t believe him, but then they walk past a stairwell, and BAM! there it is at the top of the steps—people hanging. It’s a jump, to be sure, but it still gives me the willies. When the kid meets the little girl vomiting all over the place, she just appears inside his tent when he turns around, and she’s really scary! These jumps are now so creepy that they get stuck in our minds as images.

The best one is actually from The Ring. At the beginning, when the reporter goes to the dead girl’s room, the mom opens the closet door, and it flashes the scene of how she found her daughter’s body. It isn’t traditionally scary because there is no danger—no one is going to die at this point, after all. But the image of the dead girl that flashed ever so briefly on screen is completely terrifying.

Someone told me that horror films are scary now because they’re more psychological, but I think that’s kind of a cop-out. Yes, they’re more psychological (if it can get more psychological than The Shining), but one of the reasons is that they’re projecting not just killers, but images of things that are simply, well, creepy. And that creepiness gets stuck in our heads and makes us say that, yes, this movie is scary.

Older horror films never made me say that.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

The New Horror, Part I

I used to love horror films. As a child, I relished A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and even the B-films such as The Evil Dead (1981) and Sorority House Massacre (1987). My wife says it explains a lot about me, and I agree, although I think I have different reasons for saying so. As an undergraduate, I even took an entire class on “the horror film,” taught by a great professor of film—Mark Charney at Clemson. We watched a lot of amazing horror films in that class, everything from the original Frankenstein (1931) to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980), yet I don’t ever remember being scared by any of the films.

Now I find myself getting way too scared by horror movies. Some of them don’t scare me, like Jeeper’s Creepers (2001), or any other movie about a simple killer/creature. These movies are all the same. I just watched The Grudge (2004) last night, though, and I was pretty creeped out by it, at least until the end. Overall, it was a pretty terrible movie, I think, not explaining much about the killers, etc. In fact, it was pretty similar to the plot of any 80s horror film—creature comes back from the dead to kill everyone, and now we get to watch as the people die in their various ways. Not too exciting, to say the least. All we’re really doing is waiting to watch the people die because we know that’s what’s going to happen anyway. Even the death scenes weren’t that compelling, either. One of my friends would always comment that you could tell a good horror film by the death scenes (The Omen (1976) being a wonderful example), and this one couldn’t even pull those off.

But the movie made me think about other horror films that still scare me when I think about them, and I can point to three of them in particular—The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Ring (2002). Yes, two of them are big budget Hollywood films, but I have never held that against them as some horror critics do. And The Blair Witch Project is an amazing movie for many reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed here. It redefined the genre and scared me in the process. Many people say it isn’t scary, and I don’t understand them. That movie freaked me out.

Then there is The Sixth Sense, which most people call a thriller. But let’s face facts here: as the director of Cabin Fever (2002) (another great horror film, although not scary) says, The Sixth Sense is a horror film that calls itself a thriller in order to win Academy Awards. There are images from that movie that still frighten me when I’m alone at night.

The Ring, however, is the scariest film I have seen in a long time, and watching The Grudge made me think about why these new horror films are scary. As a side note, let me say that I saw Ringu (1998) after seeing the American version, and I didn’t like the Japanese version nearly as well. It wasn’t as visually scary, and it didn’t develop the plot like The Ring did. I understand that the American version used elements from the sequels, and I think it made for a better movie.

I will have to give you my take on new horror films another day, though. This has already run a bit too long. Stay tuned next time for Part II.

As a side note, I’m halfway through Drew Barrymore’s Ever After (1998), and I’m contemplating putting it in the horror category.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Robin Williams and The Fisher King

Finally a post that doesn't try to give some silly, unsubstantiated analysis of a film. This time, I pick on actors.

You see, sometimes there are actors that generally annoy me. Drew Barrymore is one. She generally picks terrible roles, and her persona off-screen seems to be a conglomeration of her characters on-screen.

Robin Williams is another of those actors that has always annoyed me. When I was a kid in the 80s, I loved him. Mork and Mindy was great, and Popeye (1980) was awesome. The way his forearms swelled always reminded me of my Dad’s strength. What do you want? I was four years old…I saw The World According to Garp (1982) when I was really young and didn’t really get most of it (Why did you let me watch that movie when I was eight, Mom?). And Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) is a wonderful film. Even Aladdin (1992) is my favorite Disney film, perhaps the only watchable one, because Robin Williams just goes crazy in it. Watching him on old talk shows is great, too, because he really is a spot-on, manic, funny man.

But then he started trying to act, and it all went downhill. Dead Poets Society (1989) was just overwrought and overly romantic. Awakenings (1990) was decent, but it kept beating me over the head with a silly message again and again. Cadillac Man (1990), Toys (1991), Hook (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and on and on goes the list of terrible films he has been involved in. And don’t even get me started on The Birdcage (1996). People kept trying to get me to see that movie, and I actually went with my parents, who freaked out at all of the homosexual stuff. I was embarrassed and couldn’t even laugh at the funny parts (which were limited anyway). Nathan Lane was the film’s only saving grace, and he was drowning in his own hamminess.

And then I saw Good Will Hunting (1997), and I didn’t even recognize this guy. Here, the story was good, the dialogue was good, and Robin Williams was actually quite powerful. He wasn’t even trying to make me laugh, and he was pulling it off. But then he went right back to the schlock of Patch Adams (1998), Jakob the Liar (1999), and Bicententnial Man (1999). Until Insomnia (2002), where he again shined. He was convincing, and the film was good (probably due to the great director and Al Pacino more than anything else).

Now I just watched The Fisher King (1991) for the first time since it came out. I remember liking it fourteen years ago, but it didn’t make a huge impression on me. This time, it did. Sure, it’s a bit hokey, and everything is wrapped up too quickly at the end, but the plot is great, the actors are great, and it isn’t just completely cheesy with one-dimensional characters. Even, gasp! Robin Williams is spectacular in it. He’s kind of the same character in parts as the one he played in Patch Adams, but it works in this film. We see parts of him we don't see again for five years.

So it appears that Robin Williams made a good dramatic film fourteen years ago. Am I wrong about him, then? Should he be crossed off the list of annoying actors? Not yet.

Williams started on Laugh-In in 1977, and in nearly thirty years, he has been involved in 66 film or television products. That’s more than two a year! No wonder he bricks more than he scores! This guy can’t seem to turn down a film, even crappy ones. He just cranks them out like the terrible sausage they are, one after the other, until finally he gets a good one. And then back to the sausage mill he goes cranking out another five years of bad films.

So Williams, my advice is to be a little more choosy. One movie a year is plenty. Then maybe I will cross you off my annoying list.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Isolationism and Troubled Times

I admit that I may have been misleading last time. I can’t think of any conservative films, at least not right now. And after thinking more about it, I have decided that the film I wanted to talk about is really a condemnation of conservatism, at least of the kind practiced by the Pat Buchanan types. But this film also projects at least initial support for Bush-type agendas.

I’m sure you have all guessed the film by now. It is, of course, M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film The Village. Yeah, it’s pretty blatant isn’t it? Not really, I know, but sarcasm doesn’t come through too well in blogs like this. Perhaps sincerity is a better tactic: The Village condemns isolation for a more interventionist policy.

I hate to just rehash plots, but I have to to make this analysis work. Shyamalan’s films are all centered around a “surprise” at the end, and I’m going to give that surprise away here. If you have not seen the film, go onto my next blog.

In The Village, a group of adults in the 1960s/1970s has each experienced a terrible tragedy related to the horrors of city life. And they meet one another in a counseling center, probably discussing the tragedies of their lives. So they get together and decide to forsake the city to create a new life as Luddite-type people who are completely removed from society. Not only do these people not participate in any activity associated with contemporary life, but they create scary monsters and stories to keep future generations from ever leaving the compound to see what city life is for themselves. The one girl who does leave is treated with kindness, and she even comments that the person she meets is not like what she expected from “the towns.”

The life on the compound is actually treated with great respect by Shyamalan. He doesn’t condemn it or suggest that it's ridiculous. Instead, it is seen as a valid alternative lifestyle. At least until the end, that is. Jealousy, evil, and even murder cannot be kept out of the compound, as we see everything basically crumble, and the alternative lifestyle becomes partially untenable. Then the people must break their vows to never return to the towns in order to get medicine that will save Phoenix’s character.

It’s a provocative premise, if not a great movie. The “surprise” at the end works against the premise, I think, because we forget about the premise by the end. Instead, it’s “Oh, so that’s what that was.”

But the plot is basically about isolationism as a viable alternative, treated with respect, and perhaps even the better way to live. But this isolationism cannot be sustained, and really doesn’t produce a perfect society, anyway. The people must break their vows and go outside their compound in order to survive.

So isolationism is out and interventionism is in. We are left to wonder how far they take their new relationship with the towns, but the fact is that it’s now an alternative. And once that happens, it’s…well, Iraq all over again…

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Dirty Liberal Invasion Films

I saw X-Men 2 in March/April 2003, and it was right after the invasion of Iraq officially began. There were a lot of news stories about why we were invading Iraq, and the debate was actually pretty fierce. Halliburton was all over the place, and in Houston, there were protests outside KBR (Halliburton subsidiary) headquarters downtown. Basically, the liberal view was that this war was being orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfiwitz, et al. as a means to control oil and to simply make money from government contracts. I didn’t buy it, at least not wholly. Nothing’s ever quite so simple, I maintain.

And then X-2 enters in the middle of this. If you have seen the movie, you know who the bad guys are—a private corporation that runs a paramilitary group and wants to eradicate all dissidents, I mean all difference, I mean, anyone who isn’t just like everyone else.

Not far into the film, this paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the government and acting as the U.S. army, invades the Xavier school. To save one the students, Wolverine brutally kills many of these soldiers. When he first killed one, I jumped. First of all, killing is generally minimal in these action movies—it’s generally limited to the main bad guy. The rest are either robots or simply knocked unconscious. Here, though, we get to see the good guys (the X-Men) kill the bad guys (soldiers in army uniforms who are simply doing their jobs). It was shocking to see the U.S. military in the role of the enemy, the bad guy, as it were.

Am I hinting that Bryan Singer is commenting on Iraq in this film? Not really. I do think films take on special prescience according to the cultural climate of the time, however. X-2 certainly seemed shocking at that point in time, where it would not have if it had been released five years earlier. Is the paramilitary organization actually Halliburton? No, I wouldn’t go that far. But the film does comment on the role and power of such organizations to manipulate government—see Patriot Act, etc.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith contains similar elements. In this film, we get lines like Skywalkers—“If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” And Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” Or Padme’s “This is the way democracy dies—with thunderous applause,” when the Senate agrees to give the Chancellor supreme power. I may have gotten the exact quotes wrong, but you get the jist. Being released in 2005, we can’t help but read these lines as comments on the Bush administration.

And then there’s Spielburg’s War of the Worlds. Consider the basic plot—aliens have been planning this invasion for a long time. They have superior intelligence and technology, and they can easily wipe out the humans. The invasion begins, and they begin chewing up everything, terraforming to create their own world on top of ours. And what happens? They didn’t plan for every contingency, that’s what happens. Smartest beings in the universe, and they forget to bring their gas masks. Or more metaphorically, they didn’t plan on the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not the people that fights them off, but the climate itself.

I will ask myself the same question: is War of the Worlds an allegory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s way too complicated, I think. What is undeniable, though, is that an invasion movie is released in 2005, while the U.S. is still in the middle of its own invasion. The movie must therefore take on special prescience, or undertones, that it would otherwise not really have. It easy to substitute the U.S. for the aliens—they plan the invasion, go and wipe everything out in order to create their own land and government, and yet that little bit of resistance continually gnaws at them until they die, or in this case, leave. But I would never seriously suggest such an allegory (although I just did!). Instead, I would say that the film is commenting on invasions and how they never work. Resistance can come in many different forms, but it always comes.

Sometimes movies can be dirty little conservative films, too, and I will talk about one of those next time.