District 9

I’d meant to see District 9 for quite a while (since before it was up for Best Picture in last year’s Oscars), but only got around to it recently. Sci-fi with a political bent sounded up my alley, but it was just never the right time to see it.

Thus, I expected the political underpinnings. I went in knowing a fair bit about what critics had said, just by osmosis. But what shocked me most was the horror aspect of the film.

There’s something intrinsically terrible about the idea of your own body betraying you. This doesn’t only come up in science fiction, of course, but it’s a good arena to explore it on a more extended scale. (See Alien, for example, or even any good werewolf movie.)   The loss of control and familiarity is bad enough, but it also raises questions of the very nature of one’s selfhood.  As such, it suits this film quite well.

But before it gets there, the film wrenches you through a much more visceral sequence of events. The transformation is much worse than, say, a werewolf’s, for a few reasons. First, it’s slow. It presents more like a disease that we’re familiar with than anything magical, and that’s unsettling. Second, it’s repugnant because of the insect-like elements, which are as far from what we think of as “human” as you can get within the animal kingdom. (Insert Kafka joke here.)

Third, there’s the governmental aspect. It’s not so much a conspiracy theory as a reflection of a very believable way that the government might react (especially in the portion of the film before it becomes an extended action sequence). There’s a sort of cold logic to the government’s actions that is unsettling because it is so plausible.

I do have to give credit to Sharlto Copely , for a nuanced performance as Wikus, the film’s anti-hero. He’s not afraid to be cowardly, selfish and unattractive in a variety of ways, and I liked that fear didn’t immediately turn him into a noble champion of the alien cause. He wants his life back, and is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that outcome.  This isn’t Enemy Mine, and though Wikus and the alien Christopher do develop a rapport, there isn’t time to develop it as far as it might go.

As a film, the gritty style served the tone very well, but my personal preference wouldn’t be for a full mock documentary style. It helps with exposition, but on the other hand, it introduces the question of who and where the cameraman is to the audience’s mind. There are certain sequences that lapse out of documentary and more into traditional narrative film, which was necessary for the plot, but I still found it a bit jarring.

The effects were quite good (the transition for Wikus especially), and the plot moved at a nice clip.  For his first feature film, Neill Blomkamp shows solid directing instincts, though when I found out that District 9 was expanded from a short film, I wasn’t entirely surprised. There’s a sense that the premise is the movie, in many ways, and it struggles now and then with the tension between the plot and the concept.

That said, District 9 was a solid effort, and worth seeing if you’re interested in science fiction, though it’s not a film I’d recommend to everyone. The moral gets a bit heavy-handed toward the end, and the narrative unfolds without a great deal of nuance, but it’s a solid story with good acting and effects.

Grade: B- A rather average plot with solid production values, decent directing, and good acting. Worth a watch.

Winter’s Bone

I had intended to see Winter’s Bone for a long time, and some video credit at Amazon.com finally gave me the nudge. I’m very glad I finally did; it’s an excellent film, and it well-deserves the accolades it’s received. Going in, I knew very little about it, except that it was a small, independent production, and that the acting was apparently very good.

Winter’s Bone is a hard movie to classify.  Oddly (or not), it reminded me most of Chinatown, in many ways, but mainly in the protagonist’s determination to find out what she needs to know, in the face of the clear knowledge it would be safer for her to leave it alone. Though it’s strange to think of a film with a starkly rural setting as noir, its ambivalent morality, unflinching protagonist, crime-laced plot and claustrophobic atmosphere would certainly push it in that direction for me.

Regardless of how you label it (or choose not to), the film is grippingly made. Its pace is slow, yet deliberate, and contributes to a sense of dread and hopelessness which ebbs and flows but never evaporates. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is smart, stubborn and resourceful; on the other hand, at 17, she is often over her head, and left without recourse when she’s opposed by people who dismiss her for both her age and her gender. She’s easy to root for, and her emotions are clearly present, but tightly guarded.

John Hawkes, as Ree’s Uncle Teardrop, similarly gives a raw and naturalistic performance. Whenever he’s onscreen, he was worth watching sharply, building his performance on small details and nuance.

I would love to rewatch this movie on a screen better suited to it than my laptop, but even with the limitations I had, the composition and filming were dynamic and interesting. (I’m not sure if it’s Amazon’s fault, or my video card, but the contrast was hard to get just right, and the resolution was  bit fuzzy, even though I downloaded the film rather than streaming it.) The film was not afraid of lighting highs and lows, and director Debra Granik creates a very present sense of space. The setting seems both empty and cluttered, and the cold pervades as a motif leading up to what I would argue is the film’s climax.

It is something of a hat trick to make a film so unrelentingly bleak that leaves the viewer with a sense of hope, but Granik does manage it. Despite the fact that my predominant emotion during the film was something between fascination and dread, I was left oddly optimistic about Ree and her family, despite the huge challenges still left to them.

Winter’s Bone is an excellent argument in favor of the 10-slot Best Picture nomination rule change, a much better one than, say, An Education or District 9 (review forthcoming).  This film is truly excellent, beyond its standout acting or beyond an intriguing concept. Because of the sort of film it is, there’s no real chance it will win, but the nomination may find it a new audience, and is a way of recognizing an achievement that’s less conventional awards fodder than, say, The King’s Speech (much as I liked that movie as well).

With its dark story, intriguing visuals, and riveting performances, Winter’s Bone is well worth seeing, and I suspect would reward a second view richly.

Grade: A- Though I can understand how some might find the pace a bit slow, I felt it suited the film, and overall everything worked for me.

The Wolfman (2010)

There’s no two ways about it; 2010’s The Wolfman is a terrible movie.

I’ve now seen it twice, willingly both times.

It isn’t that the film has no merits. Given the hell of preproduction, it’s easy to see how this could have been a tribute to the classic horror films, evoking them while doing something new. Even now, it is beautifully shot and art directed, almost sumptuously so; Hugo Weaving is fun, Anthony Hopkins underplays so much he’s almost deadpan, and Emily Blunt actresses her way gamely through the movie. Even Benicio del Toro, bizarre casting choice as he is, gives the tortured victim protagonist as sturdy a foundation as he can manage.

And a lot of the film, like Danny Elfman’s score, is serviceable, if not remarkable in any way. Much of The Wolfman is fine. The special effects are not mind-blowing, but get the job done, and the humorous gore is especially nicely handled.

The story, however, is a hot mess. (More of that in a moment.) What redeems the whole is that the good elements are good enough to keep the film from being painful, but not so good they feel wasted. Instead, we’re left with a worse than average werewolf movie that is perhaps an exemplary case of “fun-bad.” Best watched with a friend or two, and maybe some alcohol, it’s the sort of movie where the ridiculousness mounts in such a way that you can’t help but laugh.

There’s a place for movies like this. It can be incredibly freeing to watch a movie you know will be bad. There’s no pressure to engage with it. You lose nothing if you’re distracted by the pizza arriving, or you and your friend get involved in a digression about Emily Blunt’s film career or other werewolf movies. And since you were never expecting it to be good, it’s hard to be disappointed.

I’m not arguing that filmmakers should set out, intentionally, to make bad films. (The results of that are mixed at best.) I’m simply drawing a distinction between those that “fall with style” and those that just lie there, a broken heap.

The Wolfman starts out a little silly, but well enough. Pretty much everything after the protagonist’s first transformation, though, ceases to make much sense. Around the last act, the movie gives up on any sort of narrative through-line; characters appear places for no good reason, new characters are introduced to be killed almost instantly (goodbye, handsome nameless deputy), Hopkins’ character has no motivation except “BE EVIL,” and Emily Blunt’s character just loses any sense of direction at all.

That said, there are some spectacular and entertaining deaths, there’s a lot of fire, and after a slow middle, the film ends at a pretty good clip. It’s at its best when it skips the romance and the soul-searching, and leans on the very horror clichés that, once upon a time, it meant to do homage. When it’s melodramatic and larger-than-life, the movie manages to compliment, if not match, its artistic backdrop. With a sturdier script, and probably a different lead (though del Toro does his best), this could have been a solid B Movie effort.

Instead, largely because of plot and dialogue, it’s fairly terrible. But it fails with style, and if horror/fantasy happens to be the genre that your tolerance is for, it manages to be a lot of fun.

Grade: C+ How pretty a movie it is pushes it a bit higher than it might have been, enjoyment aside; Hugo Weaving is also worthwhile, and should do more in this mode.

Rocks Fall, Everyone Might Die

Whiy yes, I did just completely forget to post a film review last Thursday. Well done me. Schedule resuming normally this week. Also, spoiler-phobes, be warned that the end of several films (including Toy Story 3) are discussed below.

When an artist, or a viewer, knows that a film will be the last in a series, they suddenly have license to raise the stakes in a way they couldn’t before. One of the biggest reasons it’s hard to create stakes in an ongoing series is a certain reluctance on the part of the creators to either put major characters in enough jeopardy that the audience believes they’re actually in danger, or to invest in more than one or two characters in the first place. The former problem is one that Western comic books often face; the latter is closer to a James Bond scenario, where supporting players come and go and are largely interchangeable.

Stakes, however, are about more than the logical knowledge that a character might or might not die. And Pixar used this knowledge, more than anything else, to create a terrifying sequence in Toy Story 3. Even though it’s the end of the series, and so one or two characters might be lost, I doubt anyone would really believe that the movie would kill all of the main characters at a go outside the context of the shot.  As the toys head toward incineration, a small part of your brain knows something will stop it. But when you trust a filmmaker, as an audience member, you also trust that bad things could really happen. (I could not get over the fact that Disney’s The Princess and the Frog actually killed its comic relief.)

For my generation, I don’t think things were ever the same, movie-wise, after Mufasa’s death. All bets were off, at that point, and it was the first time many of us lucky to have our parents imagined what it would be like to lose one of them.

This is not to say that killing or threatening to kill beloved characters is the only way to create stakes. In Inception, it’s established very early that killing someone in a dream just wakes them up. Though pain is on the table, there’s a safety net in place. But by the introduction of limbo, Christopher Nolan cleverly removes that safety net without violating the premise. Your body can’t die in a dream, but go too deeply, and the mind can get trapped. It’s terrifying, and at the same time supports the greater story he’s trying to tell.

Stakes can go awry, however. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is 2/3 of an excellent movie, but the last act disintegrates.  In part, I feel it’s because it veers away from why it’s so important for the characters to be where they are in the first place. It’s not just their own lives they’re fighting for, but the survival of the planet. The points at which the film is most grounded are those where their struggle is reset in this context; when it’s veers too close to a locked-room horror movie, it gets silly.

Sometimes the first film in a series can have good stakes because it isn’t clear that it’s going to be a series. Obviously, Harry won’t die in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; even if you haven’t read the books, that’s going to be apparent. In the first Matrix movie, on the other hand, it wasn’t evident that any character was or wasn’t safe, and it gave the film’s dangers an added sense of urgency. As with Inception, a world with different rules is still made one with very real and dangerous consequences.

In film, then, as in many story telling media, stakes are the foundation of, and grow out of, solid storytelling technique. Characters must stand at risk of losing something, as concrete as the screenwriters’ clichéd “glass of water” or as intangible as their lover’s affection. There’s a special sort of intensity, however, that comes from the danger of death, either for oneself or someone else. The climax of The Dark Knight has to do, at first blush, with the lives of a great many strangers. In the end, it boils down to the life of Gordon’s son.  By tracking who stands to lose what, you can see where the weight of the film’s emotion falls.

That said, film as a visual medium also has to consider artistic perspectives when making these choices, consistent with the film’s style and tone. The lighting, in the example of Toy Story 3, is a large and memorable part of the scene. Music can be helpful too, though it can risk veering into narm territory if it’s too over-the-top or directly manipulative. There’s a line between drama and melodrama, after all.

Watching a bunch of toys, however, bravely take each other’s hands as they stare death in the face is moving because we’ve invested in the characters, because the threat is real, and because the world of the film allows for the possibility that they might be right in believing they won’t make it.  The film takes the threat seriously, so the audience can too. It develops characters (it’s meaningful that Buzz starts it, and Woody finishes) and it also serves as an emotional punch that the plot has developed toward, not simply a twist for shock’s sake.

Pixar is so successful because it gets these sort of fundamentals right. A lot of Hollywood offerings could stand to take notes.