Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Is Kong Really King?

Don’t worry, everyone! I’m not going away for another few months like I did in November. Nope, I have just been a bit too busy to watch many movies. This entire past week, I have only watched one movie, and that isn’t nearly enough for my taste. If I had my way, I would watch one a night, at least. My wife would go crazy, but it would be worth it…

I haven’t watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong yet, but I decided to do some preparation by watching the original 1933 version with Fay Wray.

On the one hand, I completely understand why every director probably wants to remake this movie. It has everything! Special effects, large beasts, beautiful women, carnage, heroes, and even metacommentary on filmmaking. I want to remake this movie! It is probably the perfect movie in a way that James Cameron’s Titanic is a perfect movie. These perfect movies incorporate every possible plot into an end-product that is interesting, satisfying and appeals to everyone (as King Kong even points out through its own meta-narrative).

On the other hand, I see no reason why this film should be remade or why any self-respecting director would think that he or she could do it better. As a perfect movie, King Kong even incorporates great acting and amazing special effects. Sure, they pale in comparison to what can be done today, but man, those effects still look cool. You actually get to watch Kong crush people with his teeth and destroy overhead trains. And it looks pretty good, too. Okay, the special effects could be redone, but what does this really do for the movie?

Basically, I really wanted to see Jackson’s version, but that was before I watched the original again. Now I want to see it even more to understand why Jackson felt as if this was the movie he had to make. If it’s just an homage, there’s really no point. Just watch the original and get the same thing. If Jackson thinks the old one is flawed and needs updating, then the man needs to read Shakespeare on hubris. Lady Macbeth might have something to say about his big head, after all.

My question is this: What does Jackson do that makes a remake worth it? I haven’t seen the 1976 Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange version since I was a kid, but I don’t remember it being that spectacular. The only thing I can think is that Jackson felt that younger audiences needed to be exposed to King Kong. What young person is going to watch and enjoy a film from 1933? Probably none. I know I didn’t like it when I saw it many years ago. I thought it was hokey and slapsticky. Now I know it’s all a part of Merian C. Cooper’s genius.

After all, Kong is King, at least the original one…

Grade for King Kong (1933): 9

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Coens Fail!

I love the Coen brothers. They are perhaps the best team of producers/writers/directors out there. Not everything they do is gold, but it’s always quality fun. Raising Arizona, for example, is my favorite comedy of all time. I laugh just thinking about that movie.

The Coens have always seemed to defy genre. Or perhaps they blend genres together. What is Fargo, for instance? Do we call it a comedic thriller? Or a thrilling comedy? And don’t ask me about O Brother, Where Art Thou? I have no idea what to do with that gorgeous monstrosity.

On viewing Ladykillers (2004) this weekend, I have now seen every Coen brothers film, and I can now confidently claim that they’re all, well, good. Not much more to say than that. Sadly, Ladykillers is the weakest of them all.

Ladykillers is a comedy wrapped in a heist film, but of course it’s not really a heist film at all, so I don’t consider it a part of that—my favorite—subgenre. It features Tom Hanks leading a group of robbers to the vault of a casino. They pose of Renaissance-era musicians to practice in an old woman’s basement in a small Mississippi town. Sounds like Coen gold, right?

No, not really. I don’t think I laughed at all during the whole movie. We get to watch Tom Hanks stumble over very stilted dialogue (purposeful, of course), but his character is interesting in theory and boring in execution. Not that Hanks doesn’t do a good job, for he is obviously a talented actor. It just isn’t really funny; when a character has a method of speaking that is odd, and he must keep that method up throughout the whole film, it must be continually funny and also completely necessary for that character. When Nicolas Cage does it in Raising Arizona, it works because it’s actually a funny way to go through life and H.I.’s way of speaking incorporates everything about the character. Here, it’s not funny, just odd. And he has to do it throughout the whole film. Sigh.

Ladykillers, is, though, a morality tale in true Coen brothers fashion. Who wins in the end? Well, Bob Jones University for one. You know, the one thirty miles from my home town. The school that didn’t allow black people to attend until the late 1970s, that maintained its “Biblically-based” policy against interracial dating until 2000 when the scandal broke over visits by prospective Republican presidential candidates, that doesn’t allow any kissing or hand-holding or anything else on campus or off, that doesn’t allow dates off or on campus without a chaperone, that doesn’t allow women to wear pants or anyone to wear shorts on campus.

I won’t tell you how this school wins, but the irony is strewn all over the place like Linda Blair’s vomit. I snicker when I think about it, but the movie’s execution of the scenario isn’t funny. Sure, the events are interesting and ironic, but they aren’t funny like I think they’re supposed to be. In fact, I think this film would make a much better hour-long TV episode of The Twilight Zone. As a movie, I’m disappointed.

So come on, Coens, go back to giving us something really good…

Grade for The Ladykillers: 6

Thursday, April 13, 2006

The Symbology of the Feminine Fatale

Rating Femme Fatale and re-evaluating Brian de Palma wasn’t very fun. I like de Palma, you see, and I don’t want to downgrade his status from auteur to talented hack. But sometimes these things are necessary as directors let their talent slip.

I have never watched a Brian de Palma film looking for symbolism before, but I think I will have to from now one, because Femme Fatale included some of the most blatant symbolism I have ever seen. And frankly, I feel gypped by it.

Although we don’t quite grasp the importance of the symbolism until the end of the film, it’s all over the place. During one scene, I was really intrigued by the fishtank, which seemed to be overflowing. I couldn’t see the bottom of the tank, however, so I didn’t know if it was purposeful—if there was some kind of recirculating system or something. I kept wondering whether the fish wouldn’t just jump out. At the end, you see the same scene again, and it’s normal now: ah, I said, it was overflowing to show how different everything is in that reality. It also mirrors the bathtub, which was overflowing. And her emotions, which are... you get the point.

Then there are the posters all over Paris, which all include pictures of the main character, along with the words “déjà vu.” How bizarre, I kept thinking. I guess she’s famous (and she is, in the movie). But there’s more to it than that, which I can’t reveal without giving away a bit too much of the plot.

I love symbolism, but in movies like this it seems a bit too much. I remember my English teachers who would variously try to convince us that everything was symbolic of either God, gods, sex, or emotions, depending on which teacher I had. One teacher told us that the river in Heart of Darkness was female and the boat traveling on it was like the sperm trying to reach the grand, final place of the female to implant its imperial seed. We all tittered and made fun of her sexual preoccupations. But Joseph Conrad probably had something like that in mind, although probably not quite so blatant.

But movies aren't imagined in the same way that books are. When I read, I have to picture the characters and events in my mind, whereas in a film, the director has done that for us. Film is mimetic in a way that books are not, and the difference in symbolic effects lies therein.

Real life doesn’t include such symbolism, you see. As a reflection of an imagined reality, films fail to reproduce any semblance of reality when they include symbolism. I wish real life were that way, but it isn’t. I wish I could tell my wife were angry because she is wearing red, but she doesn’t wear red when she’s angry. I wish rivers were really metaphors for the turmoil of society, but they’re actually just rivers. Sometimes a rose is just a rose, sure, but it’s always that way in reality. In a poem, a rose can take on multiple meanings. In real life, it’s just a rose. Sure, we can imbue it with meaning by giving it to someone we love, but then it’s really just, “I love you, so I’m giving you this rose.” If we want to be poetic and score points with the women, we may make up some crap about how the opening petals represent our burgeoning love, but we all know we’re just making that up. It's really just a rose.

In a mimetic visual medium like film, symbols just don’t work as well as they do in books. I still like ‘em, though, and I’m thinking about changing my title to "symbologist." Maybe I can get my PhD in the field and go teach at Harvard…and go on adventures interpreting the sacred feminine...

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The Rise and Fall of Brian de Palma

I have seen most of Brian de Palma’s movies, and I tend to enjoy them all. Whether I am watching one of his mobster films, such as Scarface, The Untouchables, or Carlito’s Way, or one of his horror thrillers such as Carrie, Sisters, or Dressed to Kill, I tend to like Brian de Palma. Even his bad films are well done. Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes are terrible films, but there are still entertaining parts to them. They attempt new things and, although they may not always succeed, they’re generally interesting to watch.

In continuation of my quest to see movies by famous contemporary directors, I requested Femme Fatale (2002) from the library. It wasn’t until I actually got hold of the movie that I realized that it was that movie. You know, the one you heard about with the gratuitous sex scene between Rebecca Romjin-Stamos and some other woman. I was let down, for I had heard the film was bad, but I was also piqued that I got to watch that movie.

Like all Brian de Palma films, there are interesting things here. The sex scene, for instance, while not quite as titillating as I was hoping, err, as I had read, is still rather interesting for such an actress. The good girl Romjin-Stamos, indeed, is no good girl here. She spends the rest of the film screwing people over, both literally and figuratively. It’s weird to watch because, well, this is ex-Mrs. John Stamos! They are divorced, aren’t they? Anyway…

De Palma even includes some interesting split screen shots, as he has done in previous films, but they’re only necessary here because the shots themselves are so boring. Watching the split screen was less exciting than watching one decent single screen.

So what’s redeeming about this film? It’s certainly not the story. That part of the movie is so convoluted that I can’t begin to explain it without giving away some major part. It’s all surprise, you see, but it isn’t really, because we don’t really care as we watch it. That’s the biggest problem here. When things unfold, I sigh. I don’t scream or gasp. Nope, I sigh. Okay, I say. That kind of makes sense. De Palma doesn’t make me care about these characters enough to care what actually happens to them. And that's a sure sign of weakness. It's like when Obi-Wan's master gets killed in Episode 1 of the new Star Wars films: frankly, I just don't care. It's a strong director that makes me care about the characters, and this movie didn't feature that strength.

So have I re-evaluated de Palma? Yes, I have. I still want to see his latest project, another crime thriller, but right now, I think he’s mainly just a really good hack. Yes, his movies are all well-done, and there are good parts to each of them, but they’re not stunning. Yes, I’m including Scarface and Carrie in here, too. They’re good, sure, but they’re basically good action and horror films. And let’s face it, Scarface gets boring in some parts. (I actually think Carlito’s Way is the better gangster film.). Carrie is a great horror movie, on the level of The Shining, but isn’t its greatness in large part due to its source material? Could any other director have done these movies? Maybe not any other, but with such good source material, the movies should have been good, nonetheless.

Grade for Femme Fatale: 5

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Seeking the Truth and Other Cock and Bull Stories

With Ron Howard’s movie version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code coming out in a month, I want to offer some thoughts on the book.

First, everyone should read Mark Bertrand on The Da Vinci Code. I agree with most of what Mark, as well as most of what the Salon article he references, say about Dan Brown’s novel. Basically, Mark dismisses Brown as a terrible writer, while the Salon article assumes that he’s a terrible writer and then dismisses him based on the bogus history purported as truth within The Da Vinci Code. All of this stuff is great. Me, I enjoyed the first half of the book and then simply finished it because I felt like I had to. I admit that I felt some tinges of guilt as I was reading it. Even though I reacted with anger that such typical and trite stuff could be so popular, I still kind of liked it. But don’t tell anyone.

The problem is that people tend to dismiss Brown very quickly, in a huff of deserved intellectual highbrowness. Yes, he’s a hack author who basically passed off some very suspect “history” as fictionalized truth. But The Da Vinci Code is also one of the bestselling books of all time. I have gotten emails from Christian groups describing how people have "lost their faiths" over this book, and that we, as Christians, need to know how to combat it or how to minister to people who have had their faiths shaken. My own mother-in-law, who was visiting while I was reading it, wondered why I would read such a blasphemous book. I guess she thought I should have better things to do with my time. While it's easy to dismiss these kinds of responses very quickly, as well, I'm not sure that we should dismiss either of them.

Yes, it's true that Brown is not a great writer. The book is engaging in the way that a silly action movie is engaging (and full of the same number of holes, too). One page chapters are a sure sign that an author is trying to create a false sense of suspense, after all. All of that contributes to its popularity, surely. But what do we do with a book that is so popular because of its false religious/historical suppositions? How do we engage a novel and a culture that is enthralled with the novel? We can’t just dismiss it, because this means that we dismiss the public as a bunch of gullible idiots who are “going to hell” by virtue of their own gullibility. The argument would be something like, “if someone is going to lose their faith over The Da Vinci Code, that person didn’t have real faith in the first place.” There’s something to that argument, sure, but we can’t let it rest there, either. All of these religious refutations aren’t quite the right track either, because why bother reading “history” from either side, when the people involved clearly have such agendas?

Will I go see the movie? You bet. I can’t wait, in fact. I think it will be good, and that’s enough for me to go see a movie no matter how blasphemous it is. Am I a “good Christian” for doing so? Maybe not. But at least I’m “seeking the truth,” as the tag line to the film claims I should do. Hah! That gets me every time I see it. Seek the truth by, well, not believing this movie is truth.

I haven’t rated a book here before, but why not, just so I can compare the book with the movie?

Grade for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: 4 (silly but engaging)

Monday, April 10, 2006

Transcribing Mamet's Oleanna

I like David Mamet. If there is one director/screenwriter who is best at the snappy dialogue, it’s Mamet. House of Games (1987) and Heist (2001) are two of my favorite examples of my favorite genre—the confidence game or the heist. I consider the two kind of interchangeable, after all, even though one is the other but the other isn’t necessarily the one. Yeah, it’s confusing. Think rectangle and square…

I taught an Introduction to Drama class for sophomore university students a few years ago, and Mamet’s Oleanna was included in our text book. Since my reasoning that semester was to only teach things I had never read, I included it on the syllabus, and my students had a hard time with it. Everything the professor did that was “wrong” was so subtle that my students couldn’t see it.

The movie version loses that subtlely. Because we generally watch movies in a single sitting, we watch the three acts of Mamet’s Oleanna (1992) one right after the other, and the professor’s “badness” really shines through. Even though we may not pay attention to what he does in the first act, when the student brings it up in the second, it’s blatant that, yes, he committed those wrong actions.

Most of you are lost, I know. This film is not well-known, and for good reason, I think. Mamet was attempting something different here: to film a play as a movie. A movie with only two speaking characters. And no music. And have the actors act like they were acting in a play.

But a play is not the same medium as a movie, and simply changing a few camera angles doesn’t make for a good movie. It’s tedious and, well, boring. The dialogue is typical Mamet fare, but we’re forced to listen to a professor who speaks like your boring college English professor; you know, the one who used all of those big words without explaining them, the one whose convoluted sentences required diagramming to understand them, the one who could never get to a point because he said he wasn’t trying to preach but to make you think. Damn that guy, right?

Damn straight. And here he is again. In the play, I respond to it because I can slow down and read it. In his movie incarnation, the professor becomes sometimes incomprehensible, and his incomprehensibility is purposeful, I think, to demonstrate the student’s perceptions of him.

But wait, did you say there were only two speaking characters? Yep, a teacher and a student. It’s weird. Let’s just say that the teacher tries to “help” the student and the student then vies for power. The three acts are basically the three versions of who holds power in the student/teacher relationship. That part is really compelling, too.

The bad part is that the girl is left holding the cards at the end. Sure, the teacher can overpower her, but she wins in the end. She claims she just wants understanding, but that’s what he wanted, too, right? It’s all a vie for power between groups who have it and groups who do not.

Wow. This blog entry has failed, I know. It failed because I’m rambling, but also because I’m rambling about a provocative movie that most of you have not seen. Where I want to go off discussing the film, I’m forced to step back and try to explain what happens in it, and that just ruins it.

Grade for Oleanna: 5

Monday, April 03, 2006

Naturally Bad Santa Kills Thirty in the Bad Lands

Terrence Malick doesn’t make movies very often, and until 1998’s The Thin Red Line, he had not made one since the 1970s. No wonder that I didn’t really know who was until then. He now has four movies to his credit: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005).

The Thin Red Line was impressive: its scale was remarkable, the characters were interesting and engaging, and the photography was vivid and teeming with life. The only problem was that those things don’t necessarily make for a good movie. I have to actually enjoy movies to call them good, and The Thin Red Line wasn’t enjoyable. Sure, its technical work was some of the best I had ever seen, but the movie was just a bit too sprawling—it needed a lot of editing to make it into a good, coherent film.

So I had never really sought out Malick’s other films until I noticed Badlands in the library. Knowing that my wife was going out with her cousins on Friday night, I grabbed it. For those of you who know my wife, you know that it’s better to keep these movies from her. Trust me.

Now I am a Malick fan. This one had all of the beautiful technical details of The Thin Red Line without the lack of editing. It included all of the beautiful scenery and photography, but it wasn’t overdone like in his newer film. Here, it’s all set to serve the story of these two lovers, played wonderfully by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Those two actors are so good that they made me believe that these characters would actually do the terrible and crazy things that they do in the film. Few actors could have done that.

Badlands made me reassess Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), too. Notice that in my review of Stone’s films above, I didn’t mention Natural Born Killers as one of his masterpieces, and that fact is that Killers suffers from its overdone style. While it attempts something interesting, the style of the film eventually overpowers its own story and leaves the movie and its viewers a bit, well, empty. I’m sure its defenders would say that this is the point, but all stone achieves is a satire on our fascination with criminals, and I don’t see the point of that when Malick had already done it in Badlands.

These two films—Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994)—share a similar plot but with different ends. Natural Born Killers is there to glorify and make us love the characters while undermining their glory at every turn. In other words, its purpose is to make us question our own love of violence. And it does it in a sick and playful way that I think works against its own theory. Badlands, however, isn’t content to make fun of its characters. Where Natural Born Killers’s psychology within the film remains on the level of “violence is cool, so it’s cool to be a killer,” Badlands takes us inside its characters and explains how they could actually do the things they do. Some things are left up to mystery, but Martin Sheen does what he has to, not what he wants to. Woody Harrelson is humorous as a killer, while Sheen is tortured.

It's a big difference, one that makes Badlands a remarkable movie.

Grade for Badlands: 9