The Lookout
7.5 out of 10
Scott Frank still feels more like a writer (he wrote Get Shorty and Out of Sight) than a director, but that's not really a bad thing. He seems to have a better grasp of plot mechanics and character motivation than visual storytelling, but those earlier two are often only afterthoughts in modern Hollywood productions, making The Lookout a refreshing change of pace. The film may not look as stylish as most, but there's a bit more depth than most too.
On the surface, it's a simple gritty crime film, the sort of indie-film neo-noir that went through a boom in the 1990s. But while film noir and neo-noir often deal with the an everyman protagonist who falls into the seedy side of things through coincidence and misfortune, The Lookout features a protagonist who becomes involved with criminals for distinct, understandable reasons that come out of his character and situation.
That situation includes the protagonist being in the long-term recovery from a traumatic brain injury. He has memory problems, trouble sequencing events, emotional and violent outbursts. He can't describe a typical morning. Instead of college, the former high-school hockey star sweeps floors at a small town bank.
The key to all this is playing out well is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Having left sitcoms (Third Rock from the Sun) for indie films (Brick, Mysterious Skin) Gordon-Levitt has emerged as an important young actor. That's actor, not star; a star would have turned Chris Pratt into a showboating attempt at an Oscar, playing up every twitch and outburst. Instead, Gordon-Levitt plays the struggles to remember under an appearance of normalcy. When he can't find the can-opener and his frustration boils over, the illusion shatters and he slumps into a shameful depression, where his blind semi-hippie roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels) who offers a encouragement and a few sage words.
What Chris really wants is to somehow recapture the future he lost when his car slammed into a combine, and it's not hard to see why he falls for the pitch of skeezy Gary and lovely Luvlee. Gary can be rude but he doesn't condescend to Chris, more than can be said about his family. Luvlee may be a stripper, but she's far more receptive than the only other woman in his life, his caseworker. Sure, they recruited him for his access to the bank, but they're offering a chance to achieve something on his own and he's desperate for that.
As things speed up, the film has a disappointing trend away from an intimate character study to standard crime thriller, complete with showdowns and gunplay. At this point, Chris's mental difficulties become little more than a plot gimmick, tossing a few more rules and angles to the climax but still to completely overcome the cookie-cutter villains and trite scheme. Failing to deliver a satisfying crime story may be disappointing but it's hardly a deal-breaker given the unique strengths of The Lookout. Crime stories are a dime a dozen but getting a character depiction as unusual and deep as this protagonist is a rare find.
Directed and Written by Scott Frank; Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels; MPAA #43044
Viewed on 08Apr2007 at Cinemark Eastgate
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
7 out of 10
Devotees of the Horror genre tend to get a bit defensive but they also crave mainstream respect. That combination has led to the creation of an entire sub-genre devoted to deconstructing the genre itself. Wes Craven helped invent it with New Nightmare (perhaps the best Elm Street film) and brought it to great success with the Scream franchise.
Behind the Mask takes a bit of Blair Witch Project (although cinephiles will see greater similarity with the Dutch black comedy Man Bites Dog) giving us a photogenic female reporter, Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals), and a two man crew interviewing a man who plans to be the next legendary Psycho Killer. He claims to be Leslie Vernon, the survivor of an elaborate backstory involving a local town killing an evil child by throwing him over a waterfall. In classic slasher style, Leslie plans to reappear on the anniversary to slaughter the teenagers using the old family home for a party. Leslie lets us in on the preparation that goes into his killing spree, including the endless cardio workouts required to chase down sprinting cheerleaders without getting winded, let alone while appearing to limp along like one of Leslie's idols, Jason Voorhees.
But where Scream took place in a universe where the victims and villains (heroes?) had seen every other slasher film, Behind the Mask lets on fairly early on that it takes place in the same universe as the films. Taylor's introduction is perky-but-grave narration over shots of Camp Crystal Lake, Elm Street, and Haddonfield (the Halloween films). The film nails the sing-song nonsense of local television reporting and her interviewing isn't much better; I half expected her to ask Leslie Vernon what kind of tree he'd be (presumed answer: a Murder Tree). This stuff is kind of cute and could be seen as satire, but it got me off on the wrong foot with the character: I instantly loathed her. These early scenes are the roughest, mostly because the protagonist and her film crew are all morons, creating next to no sympathy for them.
Fortunately, Leslie himself, played by Nathan Bassel, is charming as hell and carries the movie on his own. The slashers are always more interesting than their cookie-cutter victims. As he plans the deaths of the stereotypical stoners and horndogs, Leslie has the same eager smile and gleam in his eye as any horror fan discussing the arrow-through-the-throat that dispatched Kevin Bacon in the first Friday the 13th. Although Leslie has plenty of psychoanalysis and academic analysis to offer, the film is best when it remains focused on the great nugget of mystery: exactly why people like horror films, the more awful and gory the better, and our attraction to the killers. As she wrestles with her conscience, Taylor is captivated by Leslie and his plans. The attraction goes the other way too; Leslie is clearly smitten as he talks of his hopes that the "virgin girl" picking up a phallic weapon to fight back.
The film slides back and forth between rough handheld footage pretending to be Taylor's documentary and a glossy third-person perspective that mostly looks quite good for the budget. The shifting style ends up being a bit like an annotated novel; you've read the story before, so the commentary becomes the main text. At crucial moments, the horror story plays out on its own and the viewer is left to compare events to Leslie's predictions. However a few problems still remain: It was not a good idea to leave in the scene involving Leslie's marginally important home library because all the dialogue about it makes the four bookshelves shot in close-up seem silly. The final sequence was exposed poorly, giving very low contrast and turning all the blacks into gray. Still, those are the sort of technical and budgetary problems that are easily overcome by a clever script and decent performers.
Although firmly a Slasher film, the film is filled with delicious references to all sorts of horror films. The song from the close of The Shining plays in the background and Zelda Rubinstein (the psychic from Poltergeist) has a cameo. Of course, the biggest cameo goes to Robert Englund (Freddy Kruger himself) as Leslie's "Ahab". If, like Taylor, you can't figure out what the term "Ahab" means in a slasher movie context, you're probably not in the target market for Behind the Mask.
Directed by Scott Glosserman; Written by Scott Glosserman and David J. Stieve; Starring Nathan Bassel, Angela Goethals, Zelda Rubinstein and Robert Englund
Viewed on 16Mar2007 at Regal Fox Tower 10
300
4.5 out of 10
Frank Miller is one of comic-dom's true auteurs, a writer and artist combo primarily responsible for some of the touchstones of serious modern comics. What's surprising is that after a few early stumbles, Miller's work might be even more influential in film than in comics. The Dark Knight Returns proved how challenging superheroes could really be. His Sin City franchise (including the film he co-directed) is noir distilled into nothing but black and white, ink and paper, shadow and light. Most comics are created with a production line: the writer to the penciler to the inker, colorist, letterer, etc. Since he does most of that himself, Miller's near-total control of his projects makes it impossible to separate style from content. 300 was an ambitiously ballsy project, a five-issue miniseries recounting the Spartan part in the battle of Thermopylae done entirely in two-page splash panels. The story was ripe for Miller's manly-man politicizing, but he doesn't shy away from the basic fact that the Spartans were bugfuck crazy.
300 may not be a good film, or even a particularly enjoyable one no matter how deep your love of sword-and-sandal action, but it will surely be remembered and it will surely have an influence on films to come. The question for any potential viewer is whether the film's visual innovations will be enough to overcome the plodding dialogue and subplots, the lazy inaccuracies, and the ludicrous costume choices.
In the last decade, digital coloring has taken comics far beyond the limited colors and dot-patterns that used to be the norm. Miller's only collaborator on the book was Lynn Varley, who digitally colored the panels in luscious, brutal textures. The film 300 carries this over, with most of the shots tweaked out of reality for dramatic effect. Some critics will bemoan cinema's loss of 'realism' (which it never really had) but 300's digital composition represents a new era of freedom for the filmmaker. The image can be crafted in ways that are simply impossible with just a camera and film. Think the scene would be more powerful if the sky were cloudy, brown, or even purple? Done. Sin City and 300 opened the door to a brand new way of filmmaking, where the images are crafted from the ground up and every element, prop, actor and background can be manipulated for dramatic effect. Not every technique will be appropriate for every story, and we will undoubtedly see gratuitous use of these techniques in the near future, but in the hands of masters they will produce cinema unlike anything we've seen before.
But, as the old saying goes, you can't polish a turd. For all the tragedy and drama inherent in the story of Thermopylae, 300 is remarkably dull in everything but the action scenes. The depiction of phalanx tactics is excellent and the fighting is exciting, frightening, and gory (I consider that a positive adjective). It's when we slow down and talk that things get bad. The film's addition of a subplot involving the political debate at home in Sparta is useless and distracting. The non-battle scenes of the army aren't a whole lot better. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the comic, but it sounds far worse than it read. I wouldn't be surprised if the film gets better reviews overseas, where subtitles will move the focus to what the characters are saying rather than how ridiculously they're saying it. In the run-up to release, there's been a lot of discussion about whether 300 has a political message and it's easy to see why, but the appearance of loaded phrases like "Freedom isn't free" are better indicators of the screenwriter's laziness and susceptibility to cliché than politics. The film is sloppy in its research too. To site one example, a Persian envoy calls the Spartans "barbarians." While somewhat suitable given modern use of the word, as this Classics minor learned on no less than three occasions, the word "barbarian" was a Greek term for anyone who didn't speak Greek, mocking other languages as sounding like "bar-bar-bar".
And I would be remiss if I didn't address the costume choices. Somehow, loincloths and robes come off far sillier outside of a comic book. Maybe it's that every single Spartan has perfectly sculpted and hairless pectoral and abdominal muscles. Maybe it's that they don't close their robes, even for warmth. And maybe it's that I found myself wondering where, in such limited accoutrements, they carried their helmets.
Directed by Zack Snyder; Written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Michael Gordon from the comic book by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey and Dominic West.
Viewed on 09Mar2007 at Cinetopia Theater
The Science of Sleep
8 out of 10
It's been a while and I really meant to write something about a couple of films, just nothing seemed worthy of more than a few words. Godzilla Final Wars featured a flying submarine with a giant drill on the front and, obviously, Godzilla, but that was about it. The Protector had Tony Jaa and elephants, but was grainy and underexposed. The Illusionist was confusing and poorly paced; I still found it entertaining because of Edward Norton and Philip Glass. Now, the first of this fall's many potentially great films are beginning to be released and I should keep up better.
Originally scheduled at Cinema 21 a month ago, Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep finally opened in nationwide limited release, i.e. more than New York and L.A. but only one or two screens in bigger cities. Bummer about the delay, but it doubled the time for the trailer to run, resulting in a theater full of hipsters who, judging by the amount of laughter, liked the film immensely. Personally, my reaction was a little different.
As often happens, this may be due to my unreasonably high expectations. In my defense, Gondry has more than earned them. He made a brilliant series of experimental films pretending to be music videos that establish a unique and compelling visual style. His first feature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was a stunning work. Hard science-fiction (as opposed to sci-fi as a platform for action or adventure) is rare enough, but instead of philosophy like 2001 or Blade Runner, Spotless Mind offers emotional depths. At the core is whether the characters (or an audience member) would rather remember the joyful moments of a relationship or forget the pain of losing it. Gondry new film has his fingerprints all over it and explores similar themes of bittersweet, but it's also very different. Spotless Mind was equal parts Philip K Dick novel and Smiths album; The Science of Sleep is Peewee Herman goes French New Wave. But in a good way.
On the surface, The Science of Sleep appears to be a much happier film, examining the beginning of a relationship rather than the end. For a while at the beginning, The Science of Sleep plays like a quirky variety of Romantic Comedy (or Romedy) with really unique production design. The romedy elements include a ridiculous meet-cute scene and foolish mistaken assumptions that seem unworthy of the narrative style. This involves spending a huge amount of time in the protagonist's dreams. Stephane, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, dreams of having a television talk show where he can provide commentary on real-life events with a surprising degree of logic and lucidity. When a gorgeous girl moves in next door, he initially likes her friend, but the audience has already fallen for Stephanie, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Serge's daughter.
Stephane's vivid subconscious allows for a complex and nuanced production design based around an indie-arts-and-crafts aesthetic. When blown up to fill his dreamscape, the amateurish technique of Stephane's artwork becomes a surrealist playground. The cardboard cars and cotton-ball ski-slopes are effective ways of setting the scene within a dream, where the abstract notion of a place or object is more important than its exact appearance. The design also informs us about Stephane's artistic approach. The ubiquitous cardboard tubes and boxes present not only a Do-It-Yourself approach, but also impatience severe enough to preclude the use of papier-mâché.
After the early tease that this will be a happy love story, Science of Sleep shifts into a more realistic and melancholy romance. Given how Stephane's perspective dominates, the relationship is formed in his fantasies more than real life. That's never a good sign. Just because he's Stephane and she's Stephanie doesn't mean they'll make a good couple. Romedy gimmicks are powerful devices, even on the characters. When shoved into the real world, they usually just create problems. Bounce that off Stephane's tenuous grasp on reality and there's heartache all around. Every event results in a net loss of happiness for the characters involved, but the movie, and Stephane-inside-the-dream, remains optimistic.
It could get relentlessly sad and depressing if it wasn't so evenly tempered with humor. Not everyone will laugh throughout; I was part of the morose minority, but I found it thoroughly amusing. Spotless Mind reveled in the bittersweet to create catharsis; Science of Sleep is far more balanced. The humor and absurdity of Stephane's dreams keeps things from getting too heavy, so the film is less exhausting to watch and more likely to please. Science of Sleep is the Beatles' Help and Spotless Mind is Revolver. And while I would never dispute Revolver being the better album, I think Help is more accessible and probably more enjoyable.
Directed and Written by Michel Gondry; Starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Viewed on 24Sep2006 at Cinema 21
Snakes on a Plane
2.5 out of 10
"How was jail boss?"
"Fuck jail!"
- 3:15 The Moment of Truth
The forerunner of the 22 Black media empire was the Doty Film Society at Macalester College, founded the year before I arrived. The DFS would show films in the 3rd floor lounge of Doty Hall, four days a week, starting on Tuesdays because that was 99-cent rental day at the video store. Each week would have a featured performer. But for every Johnny Depp or David Bowie week there was Bruce Campbell or Soleil Moon Frye week. Most of what we watched was utter crap. Film so bad they would be painful if not for the audience. In grade-school terms, these aren't comedies that you laugh with, but films you laugh at.
"NON-HUMAN – MALIGNANT"
- Invitation to Hell
Snakes on a Plane is exactly the sort of film that would have gone down in Doty Film Society history. From the opening shots of beaches and bikini babes to the painful music video during the credits, the film was wretched, but I enjoyed something in every minute of it. The dialogue is atrocious, the acting is awful and the directing is dreadful, but that's all part of the charm. It's so bad that it almost feels intentional satire, if the incompetent filmmaking wasn't so complete. I haven't laughed at a film so much since Pearl Harbor.
"Drop the zero and get with the hero."
-Cool as Ice
It's like they didn't even try to write a decent movie. They've got the concept, now they need a believable reason to get hyper-aggressive snakes onto a plane. I figure you play the mad-scientist angle, cram it all before the credits so it becomes unquestionable premise, then go on to establish all the sub-plots. Instead, the sub-plot involving Sam Jackson, a ridiculous witness protection story, is advanced to the basis of everything. One minor problem is that putting venomous snakes on a plane is perhaps the dumbest assassination scheme in history. If you can smuggle the snakes onboard, why not just use a bomb? The Bush administration would probably invade Iran before anyone even suspects that it could have been a gangster killing a witness. Once the snakes get out, the movie gets slightly better, if only because there are a few genuinely witty ways for people to be killed by snakes on a plane. Fangs pierce most of the particularly sensitive parts of the human body, although the goriest death is a man trampled by a high-heel. The passengers fight them off for a while before resorting to what's really an obvious solution, if you think about it for a minute. But Snakes on a Plane is a film you shouldn't give more than 10 seconds thought. Just long enough to laugh.
"There's a snake on my ass!"
"There's a snake on yo' ass!"
-Snakes on a Plane
Since I enjoyed it thoroughly, I was tempted to give Snakes on a Plane a higher rating. But unintentional laughs don't count, even if you've accepted your fate as a cheesy cult film. I can't give the film a universal recommendation, but if the title makes you've chuckle and you've got a theater that serves beer, you're well set for a fine evening of bad cinema.
Directed by David R. Ellis; Written by John Heffernan (story and screenplay), Sebastian Gutierrez (screenplay) and David Dalessandro (story); Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Margulies, and Kenan Thompson; MPAA #42661
Viewed on 18Aug2006 at Cinetopia Theatre
clerks II
7 out of 10
It's a huge relief to see that Kevin Smith has managed to bounce back from the cinematic travesty that was Jersey Girl. Sure, I've seen worse movies, but Jersey Girl was definitely painful viewing. It was so bad that I completely forgive Smith's retreat to his cinematic home-turf of dick and fart jokes. I hope he doesn't give up on his aspirations toward more meaningful cinema, because his writing has real soul, but until he hones his filmmaking through experience, his humor will beat out any drama and emotion.
Clerks 2 felt very familiar, but I've watched the original film a half-dozen times and the many more times I've watched the six lonely episodes of the clerks animated series. The cartoon is actually my favorite incarnation, delivering Dante and Randal as pure archetypes stuck in a Quick-Stop sitcom hell. The cheap animation was even more primitive than Smith's directing, but it delivered jokes at a breakneck speed. One episode alone featured a bad High School reunion, Randal's repugnance creating dozens of lesbians, the first on-screen appearance of The Kid in the Helmet, and a triple plot homage-to/satire-of The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I'm still disappointed a live-action film took precedence over an animated one. Partly because I love cartoons. But mostly because clerks 2 lacked the energy of first clerks, let alone the schizophrenic pacing of the cartoon.
When Randal burns down the Quick-Stop, they're forced (by New Jersey's surprising rarity of convenience stores) to take jobs at the Mooby's fast food chain created as a golden-calf riff in Smith's Dogma. Dante has a hot but slightly bitchy fiancé and they're moving to Florida (in what looks like the same station wagon from Mallrats) which freaks out Randal more than he'd like to admit, so of course he does all that he can to sabotage everything. Luckily for Dante, the Mooby's manager is also hot for him, pregnant with his kid, and looks like Rosario Dawson. The choice is obvious, but Dante is a dithering idiot so we've got time for a couple crude discussions, some scathing analyses of pop culture, a musical number and a donkey sex show. Oh, yeah, there's some Jay and Silent Bob, doing their shtick, quality as always, but set clearly in the background.
It's funny stuff, but stretched a little thin over a minimal 90 minutes. Some scenes are too long, others are just flat from ponderous editing. While Crazy Christian Co-worker is a fair foil for Randal's rants, he's also just as annoying and creepy as the CCC you know. The character's eventual drunken debauchery is such an obvious twist that it barely earns a chuckle. Randal's riff on Lord of the Rings or Jay and Silent Bob's newfound faith are great, but never reach the hilarity of the Death Star union-workers discussion or J&SB's solo adventures.
Many of the best moments of clerks (including "You mean I have to drink this coffee hot?" and "Ooh! Navy Seals!") came from the montages, a stylistic element with a high joke-per-minute that's completely absent from clerks 2. There aren't legions of bad customers, only a few outrageous incidents involving cameo appearances. Speaking of cameos, I'm not sure why Jason Lee wasn't playing one of his earlier Kevin Smith characters, since both Banky and Brodie could irritate Randal with ridiculous success and yet were dumb enough to sport the incredibly bad idea for facial hair that's in Lee's contract for My Name is Earl.
It's not that clerks 2 is a bad movie, it just doesn't deliver nearly as many laughs as Smith's earlier work. It feels like a film rushed into production when he should have spent more time adding gags to the screenplay. Despite falling short of the standard it manages to be entertaining, at least on first viewing, and it goes along way toward redeeming Smith after Jersey Girl.
Directed and written by Kevin Smith; Starring Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, and Jason Mewes
Viewed on 04Aug2006 at Century Eastport #12
The Descent
4 out of 10
Like any other genre, horror should be judged on its own standards. It's far more important to have dread, gore, and consistent scares than believable plot twists and meaty characters. Characters too thin for most films can be more effective for viewers projecting themselves into a frightening situation and the same things that make a character compelling in a drama can bog down a blood-curdler. Case in point, The Descent, where an overabundance of characters and back-story ruins what might have been a good (but not great) creepy cave film.
The plot should be simple: six women go spelunking and get lost/trapped. As they wander through the darkness they realize there's something in the cave. That Something kills most or all of the women. It's all there, but it doesn't start for a half-an-hour after the Fandango bag-puppets stop singing. During that time we meet three beautiful white-water rafters, catch subtext of an affair between one woman and her friend's husband, and watch said husband and the couple's small child die in freak auto accident. Then the title comes up. Another twenty or so minutes are eaten up with introducing three more characters, although I quickly began confusing them.
When we finally do get to the cave, the characters immediately make a number of idiotic decisions that will obviously lead to disaster. At least we're finally getting somewhere, because it's dark and at least slightly spooky. There's not much time left for any real depiction of caving or climbing. Besides, the women are too made-up and skinny to provide any notable athleticism anyway. The best stuff is in here, with some very nice cinematography where headlamps and glow sticks are supposed to be the only light sources. This isn't a real cave, but they crafted good sets that maintain the illusion nicely, giving the film a disturbing claustrophobia.
They keep the monsters hidden until late in the film, a wise move since, frankly, the monsters are pretty lame. The film's largely run its course already, so I'm willing to spoil it, with fair warning:
The monster is Gollum. Pale, gray, nearly blind from living underground, he's even got pointy ears. In fact, the monster is a whole bunch of Gollums, a regular Gollum family with Gollum-kids and Mrs. Gollum and their swimming hole full of blood. Sure, the Gollums of The Descent have a scary scream and a nasty bite, but they lose their menace pretty quickly.
I'm not sure why they brought ice-axes to an Appalachian cave, but they sure come in handy as the women are empowered to bash the monsters heads in, exactly the sort of "twist" that will spawn a thousand freshman Feminist Film Criticism papers. They also violently resolve the plot that's been stewing since the film began, which might be interesting if I hadn't found boring since the start.
That plotline, with the widow and her best friend's affair with the dead husband and their other friend who knew everything, would have made a fine film. With a great director and it could have been an emotional meditation on love, death, and friendship. In The Descent, it falls flat and becomes an annoying distraction to a creepy cave movie.
Directed and written by Neil Marshall; Starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, Alex Reid; MPAA #41746
Viewed on 04Aug2006 at Century Eastport