Pandora's Star, 2004
Written by Peter F. Hamilton
988 pages (Mass-Market Paperback)
I feel like I've been reading a lot of space opera lately. Partly this is because, well, I've been reading (or at least flipping through) a lot of space opera lately. But mostly I feel this way because I've read Pandora's Star, which is all by itself a hell of a lot of fucking space opera. It's 988 pages of fairly dense mass-market text, covering dozens of worlds and characters, with about half a dozen narrative arcs subsumed into one long one, that ends on a literal cliffhanger that leads into an equally-long (and likely equally-dense -- I haven't read it yet) sequel.
So how does it hold up? Pretty well, considering. It's the year 2380, and a series of wormholes connects humanity into an interstellar Commonwealth. Rejuvenation technology and memory backup have made death a thing of the past. The story is kicked off by the discovery by an astronomer at a small university that a distant pair of suns long-known to be enclosed by Dyson Spheres actually vanished behind those spheres instantaneously. This being the kind of engineering project that is astonishing in what it portends of the species instigating it, an FTL starship --the first ever built-- is commissioned to investigate.
This sounds like the premise for a Big Dumb Object SF novel, but Hamilton has other agendas on his mind. He intersperses the main plot with stories from around the Commonwealth that seem tenuously connected to one another, if they are connected at all. There's a group of anarchists bent on destroying the FTL vessel before it can be completed, and an investigative officer seeking to catch the perpetrators. One of the inventors of wormhole technology visits an elflike species of aliens and travels along their forest paths through the stars. And a long series of supporting characters is revealed, each surrounding the project, the investigation, or some combination of the two -- at least a dozen characters become extended viewpoint characters, and huge sections of the book cover their backgrounds and the history of the individual planets on which they live.
All of this is immersive, and Hamilton is clearly at his best when he's throwing out the details of his fictional worlds. The characters are often a bit stock, though, and many of the secondary characters blend into one another so it's difficult to tell them apart, especially during the plot-heavy second half, but it's all pretty competently done. The novel has many of the problems of any Big Fat Book, most notably the fact that any reader is going to find some sections of the book far more interesting or entertaining than others -- personally, I felt the book kind of stopped in its tracks whenever it spent more than a couple of pages on the political conflicts of the Commonwealth. But for the most part the author keeps the characters interesting enough and the stories compelling enough to engage reader interest.
As it turns out the first half of Pandora's Star is mostly stage-setting, for what is revealed once the starship reaches the Dyson Pair kicks the narrative into high gear. At the risk of including spoilers, the alien species encountered there is brilliantly conceived and the menace it poses to the Commonwealth is clear. Hamilton spends one long section of the novel learning of the details of the species' history and psychology, and by the end I was convinced that the coming conflict would be epic and fraught with real danger for the future of humanity. And I was not disappointed. Hamilton wisely mostly steps out of the way during the last few hundred pages of the novel and lets the events speak for themselves, which helps keep the pace up. There's still a lot of intercutting, but by dealing mostly with the characters' individual reactions to a small number of Big Events, all the background work helps to enrichen the reading experience by providing a broader scope through which the view them.
Overall, Pandora's Star is mostly a success, and I'll definitely be picking up Judas Unchained soon. The prose is a bit flat and the characters are unfortunately a bit interchangeable, but it's a fun ride and, as said before, a hell of a lot of space opera. Not many writers can entertain for a thousand pages, but with this novel Hamilton proves that he is one of those authors.
Rating: B+
Showing posts with label B-rated. Show all posts
Showing posts with label B-rated. Show all posts
01 April 2009
30 March 2009
Movielog, House of Games
House of Games, 1987
Written by David Mamet
Based on a Story by Jonathan Katz & David Mamet
104 minutes
This was probably a much better movie twenty years ago.
That's not to say that David Mamet's debut feature as a director is bad per se, for it's very clearly not. But it's been imitated so often (and talked about so much) that it's easy to see through most of the plot, the ingenious nature of which is one of the primary reasons to see the movie. Watch this, I'm about to spoil the movie for you: it's a con game movie that contains cons within cons. A clever idea that's been done so many times since that when you see the relatively simple way it's done here that you'll probably see the twist coming a mile away. House of Games is in many ways a victim of its own success.
Lindsay Crouse (Mamet's real-life wife of the time) is a psychiatrist named Margaret Ford who works mostly with criminals and is also the writer of a best-selling self-help book. When a gambling-addict patient of hers pulls a gun in their session and threatens to kill himself, she talks him down by asking how she can help him. He replies that he owes some guy twenty-five grand, and if he doesn't pay by tomorrow he'll be killed. So how, exactly, can she help him?
She uncharacteristically goes to the House of Games, a seedy low-rent bar in the bad area of town, and confronts "Mike," who is the holder of her patient's debts. Mike (Joe Mantegna) is an intelligent, suave gambler who quickly informs Ford that her patient's total debts to him run to no more than $800, and if she'll help him to catch a "tell" in another poker player (Ricky Jay, with a lot more hair than we're used to seeing on him these days) he'll forgive the debt. She's charmed as well as fascinated, and agrees to the subterfuge.
This decision will lead to a series of cons as she falls deeper and deeper into Mike's world, and it's in the details of the con games that most of the pleasure of House of Games comes. The con men are charming and intelligent, and their dialogue oozes with the kind of rapid-fire wit that Mamet is famous for producing. The confidence game, you see, is about giving trust to others, knowing that they will reciprocate in kind. In the film's most famous sequence, Mike talks a Marine (a very young-looking William H. Macy) into giving him such cash in a Western Union station, explaining to Ford afterwards how the mechanics of the con actually work. Later, when the dollar amounts go up and the stakes are much higher, similar mechanics are none the less at work.
Mamet is known for being a highly functionalist director, but he also has a bit of an eye for composition, drawing from noir in his framing and editing style. Even the characters are somewhat noirish, although I think that the plotting comes more from Hitchcock than Hawks. The film's final sequences are more character-based and suffer from the somewhat thin characterizations, but I think that the actions are still interesting and (like many Mamet characters) very conductive to conversation.
House of Games is not as fresh as it would have been upon release, but it stands as one of the greatest of the con-man movies, and deserves to be seen for its ingenious construction as much as for anything else. Probably of more historical interest than current, but fans of the genre will consider this a must-see.
Rating: B
Written by David Mamet
Based on a Story by Jonathan Katz & David Mamet
104 minutes
This was probably a much better movie twenty years ago.
That's not to say that David Mamet's debut feature as a director is bad per se, for it's very clearly not. But it's been imitated so often (and talked about so much) that it's easy to see through most of the plot, the ingenious nature of which is one of the primary reasons to see the movie. Watch this, I'm about to spoil the movie for you: it's a con game movie that contains cons within cons. A clever idea that's been done so many times since that when you see the relatively simple way it's done here that you'll probably see the twist coming a mile away. House of Games is in many ways a victim of its own success.
Lindsay Crouse (Mamet's real-life wife of the time) is a psychiatrist named Margaret Ford who works mostly with criminals and is also the writer of a best-selling self-help book. When a gambling-addict patient of hers pulls a gun in their session and threatens to kill himself, she talks him down by asking how she can help him. He replies that he owes some guy twenty-five grand, and if he doesn't pay by tomorrow he'll be killed. So how, exactly, can she help him?
She uncharacteristically goes to the House of Games, a seedy low-rent bar in the bad area of town, and confronts "Mike," who is the holder of her patient's debts. Mike (Joe Mantegna) is an intelligent, suave gambler who quickly informs Ford that her patient's total debts to him run to no more than $800, and if she'll help him to catch a "tell" in another poker player (Ricky Jay, with a lot more hair than we're used to seeing on him these days) he'll forgive the debt. She's charmed as well as fascinated, and agrees to the subterfuge.
This decision will lead to a series of cons as she falls deeper and deeper into Mike's world, and it's in the details of the con games that most of the pleasure of House of Games comes. The con men are charming and intelligent, and their dialogue oozes with the kind of rapid-fire wit that Mamet is famous for producing. The confidence game, you see, is about giving trust to others, knowing that they will reciprocate in kind. In the film's most famous sequence, Mike talks a Marine (a very young-looking William H. Macy) into giving him such cash in a Western Union station, explaining to Ford afterwards how the mechanics of the con actually work. Later, when the dollar amounts go up and the stakes are much higher, similar mechanics are none the less at work.
Mamet is known for being a highly functionalist director, but he also has a bit of an eye for composition, drawing from noir in his framing and editing style. Even the characters are somewhat noirish, although I think that the plotting comes more from Hitchcock than Hawks. The film's final sequences are more character-based and suffer from the somewhat thin characterizations, but I think that the actions are still interesting and (like many Mamet characters) very conductive to conversation.
House of Games is not as fresh as it would have been upon release, but it stands as one of the greatest of the con-man movies, and deserves to be seen for its ingenious construction as much as for anything else. Probably of more historical interest than current, but fans of the genre will consider this a must-see.
Rating: B
27 March 2009
Movielog, Orlando
Orlando, 1992
Written and Directed by Sally Potter
Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf
93 minutes
It's hard to watch films like Orlando now without considering them the markers of the end of an era. A year or two after this film was released, the indie revolution would be in full swing, and many of the more interesting films of the next ten years or so would be about the lives of contemporary Americans trying to make sense of their lives, of the merging of high and low culture through accessible yet intelligent dialogue. Quirky directors would approach even high-minded material with a wit and panache that would invigorate long-dying genres and give energy to what might have been dull studio fare.
And, in the process, they would basically kill off the standard arthouse film. Sally Potter's Orlando is a film that bursts with an energy and vivacity but is still mired in the arthouse cliches of its time -- six years later, Shakespeare in Love would use many of the same basic techniques to bring home boffo box office and Oscar gold, but it also uses the sensibility and irreverence of the indie movement. Potter is a confident and stylish director, visionary enough to attempt to film the "unfilmable" novel by Virginia Woolf (which I admittedly have not read), courageous enough to step outside of narrative convention by allowing her protagonist to speak directly to camera, but without the willingness to provide a more straightforward throughline to her film, which instead devolves into a series of loosely-connected threads, some more interesting than others.
The title character is a young nobleman circa 1600 who is played by Tilda Swinton. Yes, that Tilda Swinton, so beautiful and feminine in a variety of roles, but a brilliant actress who is able to portray a male character who is embracing the feminine styles of young noblemen of the day. He is visited by Queen Elizabeth, who takes a shine to the young man and tells him that she will grant him the title to vast property, on the condition that he never withers and never grows old. And so he doesn't. Attentive viewers (or those with access to IMDB) will recognize that the queen is portrayed by the gay icon Quentin Crisp, so that a man playing a woman becomes physically attracted to a woman playing a man. This is a perfect and subtle setup for what will follow, as the role of gender will become the primary theme in the next four hundred years of Orlando's life.
We don't get a whole lot of detail about that life, as the film is only ninety minutes long and we follow about four centuries. No one seems to much notice that the man doesn't seem to age, and the day-to-day aspects of his life are left mysterious. Instead we are treated to a series of short film following different aspects of Orlando's life as he ages; first "Love," in which he falls in love with a visiting Russian princess who breaks his heart, then "Poetry," in which Orlando becomes patron to a promising poet in hopes that he too can learn to write great poetry. In the early stages, he comes across as a callow youth, protected by his wealth from the experiences that would hone his maturity, so much so that when he is eventually needed to take up arms in defense of an ally, he is unable to stomach it and flees the conflict.
And if he will not act as a man? Well, apparently nature has a few tricks up its sleeve, for Orlando wakes up a woman. He seems undisturbed by the prospect, turning to camera and shrugging, "Same person. Different sex," which is the kind of statement that might as well blare a bullhorn for the kind of material that follows. As a woman Orlando will be required to wear the outrageously impractical dresses of the day (a funny bit of physical comedy shows the new woman attempting to maneuver through her estate with her extremely wide hoop skirt) and will eventually be thrown off her own property, for women cannot own property.
Reading back through this review, I realize that I've made the film seem fascinating and nuanced. And so it is, but realize that I have described very nearly every event that occurs in the first hour of Orlando. Scenes drag out longer than necessary and philosophical points are elaborated again and again -- the film seems to be working more as a primer on Feminism 101 than as a feature. And to the degree that this is the intention of the filmmakers (which I believe it was), I find it hard to fault them, for Orlando works on that level, and is a film I'd show to anyone ignorant to the basic reasoning behind feminist thought. When a controlling man attempts to woo the female Orlando using the exact same language that the controlling youth used to woo the Russian princess, it's a moment of self-awareness that resonates strongly and illustrates perfectly the hollowness of those sentiments. So much of our vocabulary of love and desire essentially relegates women as the property of the desirer, and the message that Women Are People Too is one that should be shouted from the rooftop.
In the final half hour of Orlando Billy Zane shows up as an American adventurer, a character seemingly straight out of a romance novel who sweeps Orlando off her feet and shows her the joys of sex. They then have a long conversation that implies that Zane himself is a person who has changed sex, and gets into some muddy waters about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Zane's character seems to be a stand-in for progress and the modern world, and when he goes off in search of further adventures Orlando basically moves into the modern age, now towing a small child. The implication is that the child is Zane's, which would mean that Orlando was pregnant for a century or more.
It's in these kinds of details (another of these: Orlando runs through a hedge maze for five decades or so) that the essential "parable-ness" of the film becomes clear, and it seems that we are not meant to judge the film based on logical narrative cohesion. But what is the parable about? What message are we supposed to take from the film? There are some very clear (almost obtuse) messages on the surface, but is there something deeper, something that ties all of these stories together? This opacity is the greatest weakness of Orlando, in that it plays to the arthouse crowd with delusions of highmindedness rather than making itself more straightforward in execution, even if its message is complex. Perhaps Potter is relying on her audience having read the novel? Or perhaps the deficiencies are mine and mine alone, requiring spoonfeeding of the message of Potter's film.
Either way, my response to the film is my response to the film. I enjoyed Orlando for what it did right, but disliked some of the deliberate vagueness found therein. It's worth seeing, well-made and brilliantly acted by Swinton, but falls short of the greatness I wanted it to have.
Rating: B
Written and Directed by Sally Potter
Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf
93 minutes
It's hard to watch films like Orlando now without considering them the markers of the end of an era. A year or two after this film was released, the indie revolution would be in full swing, and many of the more interesting films of the next ten years or so would be about the lives of contemporary Americans trying to make sense of their lives, of the merging of high and low culture through accessible yet intelligent dialogue. Quirky directors would approach even high-minded material with a wit and panache that would invigorate long-dying genres and give energy to what might have been dull studio fare.
And, in the process, they would basically kill off the standard arthouse film. Sally Potter's Orlando is a film that bursts with an energy and vivacity but is still mired in the arthouse cliches of its time -- six years later, Shakespeare in Love would use many of the same basic techniques to bring home boffo box office and Oscar gold, but it also uses the sensibility and irreverence of the indie movement. Potter is a confident and stylish director, visionary enough to attempt to film the "unfilmable" novel by Virginia Woolf (which I admittedly have not read), courageous enough to step outside of narrative convention by allowing her protagonist to speak directly to camera, but without the willingness to provide a more straightforward throughline to her film, which instead devolves into a series of loosely-connected threads, some more interesting than others.
The title character is a young nobleman circa 1600 who is played by Tilda Swinton. Yes, that Tilda Swinton, so beautiful and feminine in a variety of roles, but a brilliant actress who is able to portray a male character who is embracing the feminine styles of young noblemen of the day. He is visited by Queen Elizabeth, who takes a shine to the young man and tells him that she will grant him the title to vast property, on the condition that he never withers and never grows old. And so he doesn't. Attentive viewers (or those with access to IMDB) will recognize that the queen is portrayed by the gay icon Quentin Crisp, so that a man playing a woman becomes physically attracted to a woman playing a man. This is a perfect and subtle setup for what will follow, as the role of gender will become the primary theme in the next four hundred years of Orlando's life.
We don't get a whole lot of detail about that life, as the film is only ninety minutes long and we follow about four centuries. No one seems to much notice that the man doesn't seem to age, and the day-to-day aspects of his life are left mysterious. Instead we are treated to a series of short film following different aspects of Orlando's life as he ages; first "Love," in which he falls in love with a visiting Russian princess who breaks his heart, then "Poetry," in which Orlando becomes patron to a promising poet in hopes that he too can learn to write great poetry. In the early stages, he comes across as a callow youth, protected by his wealth from the experiences that would hone his maturity, so much so that when he is eventually needed to take up arms in defense of an ally, he is unable to stomach it and flees the conflict.
And if he will not act as a man? Well, apparently nature has a few tricks up its sleeve, for Orlando wakes up a woman. He seems undisturbed by the prospect, turning to camera and shrugging, "Same person. Different sex," which is the kind of statement that might as well blare a bullhorn for the kind of material that follows. As a woman Orlando will be required to wear the outrageously impractical dresses of the day (a funny bit of physical comedy shows the new woman attempting to maneuver through her estate with her extremely wide hoop skirt) and will eventually be thrown off her own property, for women cannot own property.
Reading back through this review, I realize that I've made the film seem fascinating and nuanced. And so it is, but realize that I have described very nearly every event that occurs in the first hour of Orlando. Scenes drag out longer than necessary and philosophical points are elaborated again and again -- the film seems to be working more as a primer on Feminism 101 than as a feature. And to the degree that this is the intention of the filmmakers (which I believe it was), I find it hard to fault them, for Orlando works on that level, and is a film I'd show to anyone ignorant to the basic reasoning behind feminist thought. When a controlling man attempts to woo the female Orlando using the exact same language that the controlling youth used to woo the Russian princess, it's a moment of self-awareness that resonates strongly and illustrates perfectly the hollowness of those sentiments. So much of our vocabulary of love and desire essentially relegates women as the property of the desirer, and the message that Women Are People Too is one that should be shouted from the rooftop.
In the final half hour of Orlando Billy Zane shows up as an American adventurer, a character seemingly straight out of a romance novel who sweeps Orlando off her feet and shows her the joys of sex. They then have a long conversation that implies that Zane himself is a person who has changed sex, and gets into some muddy waters about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Zane's character seems to be a stand-in for progress and the modern world, and when he goes off in search of further adventures Orlando basically moves into the modern age, now towing a small child. The implication is that the child is Zane's, which would mean that Orlando was pregnant for a century or more.
It's in these kinds of details (another of these: Orlando runs through a hedge maze for five decades or so) that the essential "parable-ness" of the film becomes clear, and it seems that we are not meant to judge the film based on logical narrative cohesion. But what is the parable about? What message are we supposed to take from the film? There are some very clear (almost obtuse) messages on the surface, but is there something deeper, something that ties all of these stories together? This opacity is the greatest weakness of Orlando, in that it plays to the arthouse crowd with delusions of highmindedness rather than making itself more straightforward in execution, even if its message is complex. Perhaps Potter is relying on her audience having read the novel? Or perhaps the deficiencies are mine and mine alone, requiring spoonfeeding of the message of Potter's film.
Either way, my response to the film is my response to the film. I enjoyed Orlando for what it did right, but disliked some of the deliberate vagueness found therein. It's worth seeing, well-made and brilliantly acted by Swinton, but falls short of the greatness I wanted it to have.
Rating: B
25 March 2009
Booklog, The Ghost Brigades
The Ghost Brigades, 2006
Written by John Scalzi
384 pages (mass-market paperback)
Kurt Vonnegut once said that he figured since his books cost about as much as a six-pack of beer, and he figured they should provide about as much entertainment. To my mind, there aren't a whole lot of authors out there working today who seem to adhere to that kind of mentality better than John Scalzi -- he's certainly not where I go for mind-bending SF concepts or beautiful prose, but damn is he entertaining. Which I think is pretty much exactly where Scalzi wants to be.
The Ghost Brigades is the sequel to Old Man's War, which was a nice rollicking military SF story with a nice hefty dose of humor. OMW's pace was a bit uneven, though, and the story lacked a clear throughline and seemed more like just a series of events that happened to the main character. That was fine, of course, but the sequel is a lot more focused on a specific storyline with a beginning and end. Scalzi seems to have been helped by the decision to make TGB a third-person narrative with shifting perspectives instead of the first-person narrative of OMW, for it allows him to give a lot of the background information important to the plot more clearly than in the first novel.
The plot involves a neuroscientist whose body is discovered with a shotgun blast through its skull. Investigation reveals that the body is a clone that likely never even achieved consciousness -- the scientist, Charles Boutin, has faked his own death and is now a traitor to the human race. Boutin managed the technically-daunting task of recording his own consciousness before leaving, however, and another clone body is grown so that the consciousness can be placed inside. For complicated reasons the clone is designed to be a part of the Ghost Brigades, a group of supersoldiers built out of the genetic material of dead enlistees of the normal space forces. Much of Old Man's War was devoted to the recruitment and training of its protagonist, and the sequel spends some of its length similarly, showing how the newly-grown clone Jared Dirac (which is the name given to the soldier built on Boutin's body) is trained to be a soldier.
The plot allows the novel to do a bit of philosophical speculation on the nature of identity and of consciousness, which seems to fit this narrative a lot better than similar material in OMW. In many ways I see The Ghost Brigades as a kind of "re-do" of stuff that almost, but didn't quite, work in the first book, and so I got a sense of deja vu reading the second novel. This isn't to say that this is a retread, but rather than Scalzi was using his improved skills as a novelist to explore similar issues.
I began this by saying that Scalzi is a great entertainer, and that's ultimately what comes through in this novel. He keeps the pace brisk and the philosophy never overwhelms the story, even while being interesting on its own. There's plenty of humor to be found, although the story has wide-reaching consequences for the characters, and it's above all never boring. I read through TGB in about four hours before work one day, and for the price of a sixer of beer I think I got a really good value. A short story set in the same universe as Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades can be found here -- if you like that story you'll probably like the novels to about the same degree. It's a tightly-written, fun book that even has a couple of nice emotional moments, but I find that I just don't have a lot to say about it. I'll definitely read the other two books in the series when I'm looking for a good read, but I think I'll stop this review here.
Rating: B+
Written by John Scalzi
384 pages (mass-market paperback)
Kurt Vonnegut once said that he figured since his books cost about as much as a six-pack of beer, and he figured they should provide about as much entertainment. To my mind, there aren't a whole lot of authors out there working today who seem to adhere to that kind of mentality better than John Scalzi -- he's certainly not where I go for mind-bending SF concepts or beautiful prose, but damn is he entertaining. Which I think is pretty much exactly where Scalzi wants to be.
The Ghost Brigades is the sequel to Old Man's War, which was a nice rollicking military SF story with a nice hefty dose of humor. OMW's pace was a bit uneven, though, and the story lacked a clear throughline and seemed more like just a series of events that happened to the main character. That was fine, of course, but the sequel is a lot more focused on a specific storyline with a beginning and end. Scalzi seems to have been helped by the decision to make TGB a third-person narrative with shifting perspectives instead of the first-person narrative of OMW, for it allows him to give a lot of the background information important to the plot more clearly than in the first novel.
The plot involves a neuroscientist whose body is discovered with a shotgun blast through its skull. Investigation reveals that the body is a clone that likely never even achieved consciousness -- the scientist, Charles Boutin, has faked his own death and is now a traitor to the human race. Boutin managed the technically-daunting task of recording his own consciousness before leaving, however, and another clone body is grown so that the consciousness can be placed inside. For complicated reasons the clone is designed to be a part of the Ghost Brigades, a group of supersoldiers built out of the genetic material of dead enlistees of the normal space forces. Much of Old Man's War was devoted to the recruitment and training of its protagonist, and the sequel spends some of its length similarly, showing how the newly-grown clone Jared Dirac (which is the name given to the soldier built on Boutin's body) is trained to be a soldier.
The plot allows the novel to do a bit of philosophical speculation on the nature of identity and of consciousness, which seems to fit this narrative a lot better than similar material in OMW. In many ways I see The Ghost Brigades as a kind of "re-do" of stuff that almost, but didn't quite, work in the first book, and so I got a sense of deja vu reading the second novel. This isn't to say that this is a retread, but rather than Scalzi was using his improved skills as a novelist to explore similar issues.
I began this by saying that Scalzi is a great entertainer, and that's ultimately what comes through in this novel. He keeps the pace brisk and the philosophy never overwhelms the story, even while being interesting on its own. There's plenty of humor to be found, although the story has wide-reaching consequences for the characters, and it's above all never boring. I read through TGB in about four hours before work one day, and for the price of a sixer of beer I think I got a really good value. A short story set in the same universe as Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades can be found here -- if you like that story you'll probably like the novels to about the same degree. It's a tightly-written, fun book that even has a couple of nice emotional moments, but I find that I just don't have a lot to say about it. I'll definitely read the other two books in the series when I'm looking for a good read, but I think I'll stop this review here.
Rating: B+
20 March 2009
Movielog, Cabaret
Cabaret, 1972
Written by Jay Allen
Based on the book of the musical play "Cabaret" by Joe Masteroff
Based on the play "I am a Camera" by John Van Druten
Based on the stories of Christopher Isherwood
Directed by Bob Fosse
124 minutes
(Would you look at that list of writing credits? Looking at the history of this property is like looking at the history of Hitchhiker's Guide -- it's been adapted and re-adapted so many times that no single version is really "definitive" and all seems really plastic. Just an aside.)
I can't claim to be a huge fan of musicals. Part of it is that I'm just not usually a fan of music in general. Oh, sure, everybody likes to listen to music, but the kinds of music I like are not the kinds of music that tend to make it into movie musicals. Show me a version of Across the Universe based on Nirvana songs and maybe we'll talk. (Oh, and of course I love South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and other musical parodies -- the biting satire helps a lot there.) But I try to at least understand all genres, and I know that Cabaret stands high up on the scale of the great movie musicals. Plus it has Nazis, so you know it has to be good, right?
And actually, it is. Liza Minnelli is the headlining star of Cabaret, and this marks her first film appearance after a highly profitable term on Broadway. She won Best Actress for the role, and it's a performance that deserves notice: Minnelli is a full-fledged superstar in this film, coming fully-formed in her first film appearance. She's the flighty and narcissistic Sally Bowles, a character that may be the first recorded instance of the Magic Pixie Dream Girl. If the MPDG is a cliche now, it was still fresh in 1972, just as the now-aged and publicly-crazy Minnelli was at the time a bright young star burning up the stage and screen. If Cabaret is nothing else, it's worth seeing for this performance.
Fortunately for the audience, it is more than just a performance. The film was originally based on a series of short stories, which gives the whole thing a kind of fractured feel -- Cabaret is constantly shifting tones as three or four subplots grind against one another, and some of them are more effective than others. The narrative of the film is shot and directed normally, and counterpointed by stage renditions of cabaret theater by Minnelli and others, most notably veteran Broadway performer Joel Grey (who also won an Oscar for his work here). Some of the songs are better than others, and some of them are more directly related to the plot than others, but the impression I get is that the old cabaret shows were the kind of lowbrow entertainment that was meant more to keep the troubles away than to be quote-unquote high art. The humor is salacious and the songs (generally) catchy, and even this old grump about musicals found himself smiling through most of the numbers. It's a good time.
The narratives range a bit more in quality and in overall tone. While living in Germany Minnelli meets a young English PhD student named Brian (Michael York) and the two quickly become good friends despite the differences in temperament and background, and eventually become more than that. Minnelli and York have an easy unforced chemistry, and one of the great pleasures of the film is just watching them interact together and trade quips. In another sequence, though, they meet a rich German aristocrat who seduces them both, mostly against Brian's better judgment. This sequence takes up a good quarter of Cabaret, and it's unclear exactly what we're supposed to get from it. My guess is that it's a kind of facile symbolism, in which Brian and Sally represent English and American libertines who turned a blind eye to the Nazis because of the gifts of the German aristocracy. Or something. This subplot ends as abruptly as it begins, and although the aftermath is one of the film's best lines, ultimately it seems that during this section the characters are behaving more like cardboard chess pieces than actual people.
Oh, wait, did I mention Nazis? Because the film takes place in 1931, just as the Nazi Party was beginning to take hold, and one of the themes of the film is the way that the decadence of the cabaret club and Brian and Sally's private lives contrast with the brutality of the Nazis. Of course, it's not exactly daring to have a message film that says "Nazis are evil," but I give director Fosse a lot of credit for giving his film a kind of mordant undertone that underlines the growth of the Nazi Party. An amazing sequence at a biergarden during the aforementioned sequence involving the German aristocrat shows a Nazi youth singing an ode to the Fatherland and the persons in the garden gradually becoming more and more united behind the Party.
Let's see, what else? There's a running subplot involving a rich Jewish woman and a would-be suitor that is charming but perfunctory, and probably deserves either a greater running-time or to simply be dropped from the film. As it is the subplot seems shoehorned into Cabaret, which again just makes me wonder if there's a symbolic meaning I'm supposed to be getting. No, more likely it's just included because it was a good short story in the original collection, and for sure it helps to open up the film a bit. I shrug -- your mileage may vary.
I saw this with Shana, who loves musical theater but didn't seem that much more enthused about it than I was. For sure it's a decent flick with a great performance or two, but I can't really recommend the movie as a whole. I found myself watching the clock a lot more than I'd like during the two-plus-hour running time. Maybe it's me, maybe it just hasn't aged well. Worth it for the songs and some of the plot, but probably better on stage than on celluloid. I'd be interested in glancing through the original book of short stories, though.
Rating: B
Written by Jay Allen
Based on the book of the musical play "Cabaret" by Joe Masteroff
Based on the play "I am a Camera" by John Van Druten
Based on the stories of Christopher Isherwood
Directed by Bob Fosse
124 minutes
(Would you look at that list of writing credits? Looking at the history of this property is like looking at the history of Hitchhiker's Guide -- it's been adapted and re-adapted so many times that no single version is really "definitive" and all seems really plastic. Just an aside.)
I can't claim to be a huge fan of musicals. Part of it is that I'm just not usually a fan of music in general. Oh, sure, everybody likes to listen to music, but the kinds of music I like are not the kinds of music that tend to make it into movie musicals. Show me a version of Across the Universe based on Nirvana songs and maybe we'll talk. (Oh, and of course I love South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and other musical parodies -- the biting satire helps a lot there.) But I try to at least understand all genres, and I know that Cabaret stands high up on the scale of the great movie musicals. Plus it has Nazis, so you know it has to be good, right?
And actually, it is. Liza Minnelli is the headlining star of Cabaret, and this marks her first film appearance after a highly profitable term on Broadway. She won Best Actress for the role, and it's a performance that deserves notice: Minnelli is a full-fledged superstar in this film, coming fully-formed in her first film appearance. She's the flighty and narcissistic Sally Bowles, a character that may be the first recorded instance of the Magic Pixie Dream Girl. If the MPDG is a cliche now, it was still fresh in 1972, just as the now-aged and publicly-crazy Minnelli was at the time a bright young star burning up the stage and screen. If Cabaret is nothing else, it's worth seeing for this performance.
Fortunately for the audience, it is more than just a performance. The film was originally based on a series of short stories, which gives the whole thing a kind of fractured feel -- Cabaret is constantly shifting tones as three or four subplots grind against one another, and some of them are more effective than others. The narrative of the film is shot and directed normally, and counterpointed by stage renditions of cabaret theater by Minnelli and others, most notably veteran Broadway performer Joel Grey (who also won an Oscar for his work here). Some of the songs are better than others, and some of them are more directly related to the plot than others, but the impression I get is that the old cabaret shows were the kind of lowbrow entertainment that was meant more to keep the troubles away than to be quote-unquote high art. The humor is salacious and the songs (generally) catchy, and even this old grump about musicals found himself smiling through most of the numbers. It's a good time.
The narratives range a bit more in quality and in overall tone. While living in Germany Minnelli meets a young English PhD student named Brian (Michael York) and the two quickly become good friends despite the differences in temperament and background, and eventually become more than that. Minnelli and York have an easy unforced chemistry, and one of the great pleasures of the film is just watching them interact together and trade quips. In another sequence, though, they meet a rich German aristocrat who seduces them both, mostly against Brian's better judgment. This sequence takes up a good quarter of Cabaret, and it's unclear exactly what we're supposed to get from it. My guess is that it's a kind of facile symbolism, in which Brian and Sally represent English and American libertines who turned a blind eye to the Nazis because of the gifts of the German aristocracy. Or something. This subplot ends as abruptly as it begins, and although the aftermath is one of the film's best lines, ultimately it seems that during this section the characters are behaving more like cardboard chess pieces than actual people.
Oh, wait, did I mention Nazis? Because the film takes place in 1931, just as the Nazi Party was beginning to take hold, and one of the themes of the film is the way that the decadence of the cabaret club and Brian and Sally's private lives contrast with the brutality of the Nazis. Of course, it's not exactly daring to have a message film that says "Nazis are evil," but I give director Fosse a lot of credit for giving his film a kind of mordant undertone that underlines the growth of the Nazi Party. An amazing sequence at a biergarden during the aforementioned sequence involving the German aristocrat shows a Nazi youth singing an ode to the Fatherland and the persons in the garden gradually becoming more and more united behind the Party.
Let's see, what else? There's a running subplot involving a rich Jewish woman and a would-be suitor that is charming but perfunctory, and probably deserves either a greater running-time or to simply be dropped from the film. As it is the subplot seems shoehorned into Cabaret, which again just makes me wonder if there's a symbolic meaning I'm supposed to be getting. No, more likely it's just included because it was a good short story in the original collection, and for sure it helps to open up the film a bit. I shrug -- your mileage may vary.
I saw this with Shana, who loves musical theater but didn't seem that much more enthused about it than I was. For sure it's a decent flick with a great performance or two, but I can't really recommend the movie as a whole. I found myself watching the clock a lot more than I'd like during the two-plus-hour running time. Maybe it's me, maybe it just hasn't aged well. Worth it for the songs and some of the plot, but probably better on stage than on celluloid. I'd be interested in glancing through the original book of short stories, though.
Rating: B
04 March 2009
Movielog, The Crazies
The Crazies, 1973
Written by Paul McCullough and George Romero
Directed by George Romero
103 minutes
A few years after inventing the zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead (and making a shitload and a half of moolah for his film distributors on the process) George Romero gave us his commentary on the Vietnam War with The Crazies. In 1973 the war was beginning to wind down and ex-soldiers were coming home completely changed by their experiences. Two of the leads of this film are Vietnam veterans, and much of the film deals with military culture in general and the problems of Vietnam in particular, just in that skewed metaphorical-but-not-really way that's such a Romero trademark.
One morning a small town in Pennsylvania is quarantined by the US military. Martial law is declared, and the population of the town is herded into the high school for "processing." We quickly learn that a bioweapon was onboard a plane that crashed near the town, and that the substance has leaked into the water. The bioweapon (codenamed "Trixie") causes permanent insanity in persons who ingest it, which means that the entire town is filled with, well, "The Crazies."
Romero gets a lot of out this premise, not really from the activities of the crazies themselves (although the violent behavior of a small number is terrifying and amazing) but through the actions that the military takes in containing the threat. In a clear parallel to Vietnam, solider dressed in isolation suits that make them look like alien invaders swoop into every house in the city, forcing everyone out of their homes at the point of machine guns. What information is shared with the people being herded is sporadic and fragmentary. Even assuming pure motives, who can blame those with the ability to avoid the dragnet for doing so?
And it's one of the other brilliant aspects of The Crazies that we can't really ascertain the real motives of those doing the cordoning-off. What we see of the top echelon persons making the decisions seems to imply that they are acting in good faith, but with their own reputations first in mind: they make some good decisions, but also some shortsighted ones, and Romero is honest enough to present them as they would have seemed at the time, without the benefit of later hindsight. The military men who are working on the ground are generally good people, but are hampered by security and by the bureaucracy of the military machine and cannot easily solve their problems. The individual solders? Mostly just want to get the hell out of there, and are told nothing about their mission.
A scientist who helped develop Trixie works tirelessly to find a cure, but cannot do his best work with only the equipment he can find in the high school science lab. He wants to escape the town and work from his lab, but until he can be "cleared" of exposure to the weapon he cannot be allowed to leave the quarantine. His story is one of the most tragic, for the ending of his story is probably the most unnecessarily wasteful of all.
A group of loosely-affiliated members of the town attempt to escape the military's dominion, and it's this group that we follow through most of the film. One by one, they begin to succumb to the power of the drug, some violently and some not, and the actions that they take as they descend into madness is some of the most horrifying stuff in The Crazies. In particular, a sequence towards the end of the film involving a young woman and her father is disturbing even without the ultimate denouement.
I realize that I've gone this whole time without mentioning any of the actors. Well, what do you expect? Romero was indie before indie was indie, and most of the performers will be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated fans of the movies. No one really stands out performance-wise, but the acting is decent enough all around, which is about par for the course for a Romero film -- he's a lot more interested in concept and story than performance and character. Love it or hate it, that's the way of his films, and this one is no exception.
Should you see The Crazies? It's not the best of Romero's work (that would be Dawn of the Dead) but those who are fans of insightful social commentary masked as genre will probably get something out of this film. It's a fascinating film while it lasts, and if nothing really sticks out in the mind later on, it's at least worth the ride.
Rating: B+
Written by Paul McCullough and George Romero
Directed by George Romero
103 minutes
A few years after inventing the zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead (and making a shitload and a half of moolah for his film distributors on the process) George Romero gave us his commentary on the Vietnam War with The Crazies. In 1973 the war was beginning to wind down and ex-soldiers were coming home completely changed by their experiences. Two of the leads of this film are Vietnam veterans, and much of the film deals with military culture in general and the problems of Vietnam in particular, just in that skewed metaphorical-but-not-really way that's such a Romero trademark.
One morning a small town in Pennsylvania is quarantined by the US military. Martial law is declared, and the population of the town is herded into the high school for "processing." We quickly learn that a bioweapon was onboard a plane that crashed near the town, and that the substance has leaked into the water. The bioweapon (codenamed "Trixie") causes permanent insanity in persons who ingest it, which means that the entire town is filled with, well, "The Crazies."
Romero gets a lot of out this premise, not really from the activities of the crazies themselves (although the violent behavior of a small number is terrifying and amazing) but through the actions that the military takes in containing the threat. In a clear parallel to Vietnam, solider dressed in isolation suits that make them look like alien invaders swoop into every house in the city, forcing everyone out of their homes at the point of machine guns. What information is shared with the people being herded is sporadic and fragmentary. Even assuming pure motives, who can blame those with the ability to avoid the dragnet for doing so?
And it's one of the other brilliant aspects of The Crazies that we can't really ascertain the real motives of those doing the cordoning-off. What we see of the top echelon persons making the decisions seems to imply that they are acting in good faith, but with their own reputations first in mind: they make some good decisions, but also some shortsighted ones, and Romero is honest enough to present them as they would have seemed at the time, without the benefit of later hindsight. The military men who are working on the ground are generally good people, but are hampered by security and by the bureaucracy of the military machine and cannot easily solve their problems. The individual solders? Mostly just want to get the hell out of there, and are told nothing about their mission.
A scientist who helped develop Trixie works tirelessly to find a cure, but cannot do his best work with only the equipment he can find in the high school science lab. He wants to escape the town and work from his lab, but until he can be "cleared" of exposure to the weapon he cannot be allowed to leave the quarantine. His story is one of the most tragic, for the ending of his story is probably the most unnecessarily wasteful of all.
A group of loosely-affiliated members of the town attempt to escape the military's dominion, and it's this group that we follow through most of the film. One by one, they begin to succumb to the power of the drug, some violently and some not, and the actions that they take as they descend into madness is some of the most horrifying stuff in The Crazies. In particular, a sequence towards the end of the film involving a young woman and her father is disturbing even without the ultimate denouement.
I realize that I've gone this whole time without mentioning any of the actors. Well, what do you expect? Romero was indie before indie was indie, and most of the performers will be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated fans of the movies. No one really stands out performance-wise, but the acting is decent enough all around, which is about par for the course for a Romero film -- he's a lot more interested in concept and story than performance and character. Love it or hate it, that's the way of his films, and this one is no exception.
Should you see The Crazies? It's not the best of Romero's work (that would be Dawn of the Dead) but those who are fans of insightful social commentary masked as genre will probably get something out of this film. It's a fascinating film while it lasts, and if nothing really sticks out in the mind later on, it's at least worth the ride.
Rating: B+
27 February 2009
Movielog, Perfume
Perfume: The Story of A Murderer, 2006
Written by Andrew Birkin & Bernd Eichinger & Tom Tykwer
Based on the novel by Patrick Suskind
Directed by Tom Tykwer
147 minutes
This movie makes me really worried about the Watchmen adaptation due out in a couple of weeks. Why? Because right now the trailer for Watchmen make it look like the people in charge of the project have kept the vast majority of the story intact, focused on all the amazing details of the worldbuilding, and have in general loved the graphic novel as much as I have.
And watching Perfume, I realized that it keeps the vast majority of the story of Patrick Suskind's novel intact, focuses on the amazing details of the historical world in which the novel takes place, and the makers clearly loved the novel at least as much I did. And they made a portentious, dull movie that completely misses the aspect of the book that I thought was most important.
It's been a couple of years since I read the book, but the impression that I got most clearly from it was a sort of total, almost gleeful, misanthropy. Nearly every character in Perfume is evil, short-sighted, stupid, shallow, or some combination of the above. The handful of characters that cannot be described as such generally get completely undeserved unhappy endings, and everybody's life basically sucks. Life is short, painful, smelly, and every man and woman is out for his or her own ends. This feeds into one of the most important bits of metaphor in the novel, the connection of scent with base human desires, i.e. the inability of the characters in the novel to see rationally past the tips of their noses. When the climactic final set piece occurs in the book, it's ridiculous, absurd, and completely fits in with the idea that people are basically just rutting animals -- when the same scene takes place in the book (and I do give the filmmakers credit for having the huevos to include it!) it's a romantic and amazing sequence, with the focus being more on the beauty of what is happening rather than the insanity of it all.
(I realize that in the last paragraph I have committed the sin of equating "base instincts" with "immoral behavior," and have drawn at least a fuzzy line between animal behavior and human behavior. This is purely a bit of rhetorical shorthand, for I am fully aware of the fact that human beings are animals, and that many of our most moral impulses come directly from the biochemistry of evolved behavior rather than from rarefied intellectual response. My point is that Suskind is using scent as a shorthand for selfish base impulses, which connects with the behavior shown in the book.)
That said, director Tom Tykwer is incredibly talented, and at first the film looks like it's almost a sure thing. Aside from a short pre-credits sequence showing the main character Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) in chains awaiting his execution, the opening of the film is nearly identical to that of the novel. Suskind's novel was widely considered unfilmable due to the problems portraying scent on-screen, but that is not the problem of Tykwer's version: the opening sequence captures the horrible smells of eighteenth century France remarkably well, and when we learn of Grenouille's powers of scent later on, it is through visual inspection as much as through narration. Setting the stage of this remarkable young man is an amazingly difficult feat, and if we're taking "degree of difficulty" into consideration when talking about films, Perfume is at least worth your time on that level.
No, it's on more prosaic issues that the film proves itself less than worthy of the source material. A number of minor quibbles begin to add up in the mind and create a less-than-stellar movie experience. The first is an obtrusive voiceover narration that seems more fit for a fractured fairly tale like Pushing Daisies than this kind of strange horror story. A narrator is necessary to get across some of the details of the film, and John Hurt probably isn't a bad choice, but the writing tends more towards whimsy than it should, which gives the film a rather uneven tone.
Another issue with Perfume is the amount of star-fucking that's going on. I'm sure the producers were ecstatic to get two big-name stars to portray key supporting roles in the film, but Tykwer leans on his stars a bit too heavily. Dustin Hoffman is an Italian perfumer named Baldini, and spends much of his short role being the kind of bumbling fool that Hoffman plays so well. Hoffman isn't exactly badly-cast, for his performance is funny and affecting in the right ways, but his presence is a bit unbalancing for the film, drawing screentime and resources towards himself. Hoffman has the ability to play a bit dark and menacing, but here he unwisely plays his role completely buffoonish, even in his darkest moments a clown.
But this is a minor gripe compared with Alan Rickman's Richis, member of the French nobility whose daughter is one of Grenouille's targets. On the whole Rickman is closer to the tone required of his role than Hoffman, but his storyline is puffed up by Tykwer and the other screenwriters of Perfume until the second half of the film drags considerably. Rickman is probably the smartest character in the movie, a man who figures out in a general way what the then-unknown murderer is doing before anyone else, and his desire to keep his daughter safe from the monster is palpable, the efforts he goes to in order to secure her admirable. But the audience knows from the prologue of Perfume (actually, earlier than that, given the subtitle of the film) that Grenouille will be caught and tried for his crimes: pacing the second half of the film like a thriller is gratutious and gets in the way of the story. It's like the film begins to drag its feet just as it should be soaring. It's not that the screenwriters have added extraneous material (I believe that most of the events of the film are recounted also in the novel) so much as they have lingered on the details of Grenouille's attacks and the town's response when they could have been darting for the finish. The details of how Grenouille catches his victims are routine, while his reasons for doing so are fascinating, and the film focuses on the former when it could be examining the latter.
I've struggled a bit with the rating here. A B really doesn't summarize my feelings on the film. I'm unlikely to want to revisit it anytime soon, which would indicate a lower rating, but I realize that much of the film is really superbly done and that those who haven't read the book may be able to overlook some of the things that I could not. Tykwer and his writers have found a version of this story that is probably justified by the text, although I feel they've missed the forest for the trees a bit in terms of execution. There's a whole lot to like here, but as a fan of the novel I think it's largely a missed opportunity.
So... who's still eager for that midnight showing of Watchmen?
Rating:B
Written by Andrew Birkin & Bernd Eichinger & Tom Tykwer
Based on the novel by Patrick Suskind
Directed by Tom Tykwer
147 minutes
This movie makes me really worried about the Watchmen adaptation due out in a couple of weeks. Why? Because right now the trailer for Watchmen make it look like the people in charge of the project have kept the vast majority of the story intact, focused on all the amazing details of the worldbuilding, and have in general loved the graphic novel as much as I have.
And watching Perfume, I realized that it keeps the vast majority of the story of Patrick Suskind's novel intact, focuses on the amazing details of the historical world in which the novel takes place, and the makers clearly loved the novel at least as much I did. And they made a portentious, dull movie that completely misses the aspect of the book that I thought was most important.
It's been a couple of years since I read the book, but the impression that I got most clearly from it was a sort of total, almost gleeful, misanthropy. Nearly every character in Perfume is evil, short-sighted, stupid, shallow, or some combination of the above. The handful of characters that cannot be described as such generally get completely undeserved unhappy endings, and everybody's life basically sucks. Life is short, painful, smelly, and every man and woman is out for his or her own ends. This feeds into one of the most important bits of metaphor in the novel, the connection of scent with base human desires, i.e. the inability of the characters in the novel to see rationally past the tips of their noses. When the climactic final set piece occurs in the book, it's ridiculous, absurd, and completely fits in with the idea that people are basically just rutting animals -- when the same scene takes place in the book (and I do give the filmmakers credit for having the huevos to include it!) it's a romantic and amazing sequence, with the focus being more on the beauty of what is happening rather than the insanity of it all.
(I realize that in the last paragraph I have committed the sin of equating "base instincts" with "immoral behavior," and have drawn at least a fuzzy line between animal behavior and human behavior. This is purely a bit of rhetorical shorthand, for I am fully aware of the fact that human beings are animals, and that many of our most moral impulses come directly from the biochemistry of evolved behavior rather than from rarefied intellectual response. My point is that Suskind is using scent as a shorthand for selfish base impulses, which connects with the behavior shown in the book.)
That said, director Tom Tykwer is incredibly talented, and at first the film looks like it's almost a sure thing. Aside from a short pre-credits sequence showing the main character Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) in chains awaiting his execution, the opening of the film is nearly identical to that of the novel. Suskind's novel was widely considered unfilmable due to the problems portraying scent on-screen, but that is not the problem of Tykwer's version: the opening sequence captures the horrible smells of eighteenth century France remarkably well, and when we learn of Grenouille's powers of scent later on, it is through visual inspection as much as through narration. Setting the stage of this remarkable young man is an amazingly difficult feat, and if we're taking "degree of difficulty" into consideration when talking about films, Perfume is at least worth your time on that level.
No, it's on more prosaic issues that the film proves itself less than worthy of the source material. A number of minor quibbles begin to add up in the mind and create a less-than-stellar movie experience. The first is an obtrusive voiceover narration that seems more fit for a fractured fairly tale like Pushing Daisies than this kind of strange horror story. A narrator is necessary to get across some of the details of the film, and John Hurt probably isn't a bad choice, but the writing tends more towards whimsy than it should, which gives the film a rather uneven tone.
Another issue with Perfume is the amount of star-fucking that's going on. I'm sure the producers were ecstatic to get two big-name stars to portray key supporting roles in the film, but Tykwer leans on his stars a bit too heavily. Dustin Hoffman is an Italian perfumer named Baldini, and spends much of his short role being the kind of bumbling fool that Hoffman plays so well. Hoffman isn't exactly badly-cast, for his performance is funny and affecting in the right ways, but his presence is a bit unbalancing for the film, drawing screentime and resources towards himself. Hoffman has the ability to play a bit dark and menacing, but here he unwisely plays his role completely buffoonish, even in his darkest moments a clown.
But this is a minor gripe compared with Alan Rickman's Richis, member of the French nobility whose daughter is one of Grenouille's targets. On the whole Rickman is closer to the tone required of his role than Hoffman, but his storyline is puffed up by Tykwer and the other screenwriters of Perfume until the second half of the film drags considerably. Rickman is probably the smartest character in the movie, a man who figures out in a general way what the then-unknown murderer is doing before anyone else, and his desire to keep his daughter safe from the monster is palpable, the efforts he goes to in order to secure her admirable. But the audience knows from the prologue of Perfume (actually, earlier than that, given the subtitle of the film) that Grenouille will be caught and tried for his crimes: pacing the second half of the film like a thriller is gratutious and gets in the way of the story. It's like the film begins to drag its feet just as it should be soaring. It's not that the screenwriters have added extraneous material (I believe that most of the events of the film are recounted also in the novel) so much as they have lingered on the details of Grenouille's attacks and the town's response when they could have been darting for the finish. The details of how Grenouille catches his victims are routine, while his reasons for doing so are fascinating, and the film focuses on the former when it could be examining the latter.
I've struggled a bit with the rating here. A B really doesn't summarize my feelings on the film. I'm unlikely to want to revisit it anytime soon, which would indicate a lower rating, but I realize that much of the film is really superbly done and that those who haven't read the book may be able to overlook some of the things that I could not. Tykwer and his writers have found a version of this story that is probably justified by the text, although I feel they've missed the forest for the trees a bit in terms of execution. There's a whole lot to like here, but as a fan of the novel I think it's largely a missed opportunity.
So... who's still eager for that midnight showing of Watchmen?
Rating:B
25 February 2009
Booklog, Once Upon a Time in the North
Once Upon a Time in the North, 2008
Written by Philip Pullman
112 pages (hardcover)
This is going to be short and sweet, just like the book. (It won't cost you as much, though.)
If you're not a fan of the His Dark Materials series or if you haven't read them, then this isn't the book that will change your mind nor is it the place to start reading. If you haven't read them, start with The Golden Compass. If you've read them and didn't like them, well, this isn't the book for you.
If you have read the books and enjoyed them, then Once Upon a Time in the North is a nice little novella that expands a bit on the work in the novels. It takes place a few decades before the events of Compass, specifically to Lee Scoresby's early days as an aeronaut. He lands in Novy Odense, gets involved in the local political scene, meets Iorek Byrinson, gets in a couple of adventures, and sets off with his new bear-friend in tow. That's about it.
The pleasures of the book (besides getting to learn about how Iorek and Lee first met) are mostly to be found in Pullman's characterization of Lee as a young man: he's a sarcastic young adventurer on the make who's definitely interested in the ladies as much as you'd think a brash young pilot would be. Iorek has a smaller role, but a pivotal one, and an action sequence that takes up maybe a quarter of the book's total length gives us some great "look at that badass bear" moments.
Is it worth the cost? Eh. North comes with a board game (which I didn't play) and a couple of added bits that give hints about Lyra Silvertongue's future, but Amazon lists the price as ten bucks and change, which is a bit steep for a novella that most of us could finish in an hour or so. As ancillary products that go along with bestselling book series go, it's not bad, but the story seems a little lightweight. Hardcore fans will like this, especially fans of Lee Scoresby, but everyone else can skip it.
I will say, though, that the title just makes me wish Ennio Morricone had written the score for the film version of The Golden Compass.
Rating: B.
(Goes off to listen to Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in the West.)
Written by Philip Pullman
112 pages (hardcover)
This is going to be short and sweet, just like the book. (It won't cost you as much, though.)
If you're not a fan of the His Dark Materials series or if you haven't read them, then this isn't the book that will change your mind nor is it the place to start reading. If you haven't read them, start with The Golden Compass. If you've read them and didn't like them, well, this isn't the book for you.
If you have read the books and enjoyed them, then Once Upon a Time in the North is a nice little novella that expands a bit on the work in the novels. It takes place a few decades before the events of Compass, specifically to Lee Scoresby's early days as an aeronaut. He lands in Novy Odense, gets involved in the local political scene, meets Iorek Byrinson, gets in a couple of adventures, and sets off with his new bear-friend in tow. That's about it.
The pleasures of the book (besides getting to learn about how Iorek and Lee first met) are mostly to be found in Pullman's characterization of Lee as a young man: he's a sarcastic young adventurer on the make who's definitely interested in the ladies as much as you'd think a brash young pilot would be. Iorek has a smaller role, but a pivotal one, and an action sequence that takes up maybe a quarter of the book's total length gives us some great "look at that badass bear" moments.
Is it worth the cost? Eh. North comes with a board game (which I didn't play) and a couple of added bits that give hints about Lyra Silvertongue's future, but Amazon lists the price as ten bucks and change, which is a bit steep for a novella that most of us could finish in an hour or so. As ancillary products that go along with bestselling book series go, it's not bad, but the story seems a little lightweight. Hardcore fans will like this, especially fans of Lee Scoresby, but everyone else can skip it.
I will say, though, that the title just makes me wish Ennio Morricone had written the score for the film version of The Golden Compass.
Rating: B.
(Goes off to listen to Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in the West.)
22 February 2009
Movielog, Point Blank
Point Blank
Written by Alexander Jacobs and David & Rafe Newhouse
Based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark)
Directed by John Boorman
92 minutes
Haven't I already seen this movie?
Well, actually, no. While both the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback and Point Blank were both based on the same novel by Donald E. Westlake, they are substantially different films. Payback (which I saw upon its theatrical release and have seen numerous times on cable since then) had the tagline "Get Ready to Root For the Bad Guy," and that was basically the point of the film: look at what a naughty boy Mel Gibson can be, and watch him kick the ass of some even worse guys! (The fact that Mel Gibson later turned out to be a naughty boy of a much less cinematic type is a delicious irony but not really relevant here.) The version from three decades earlier, however, much less obviously a thrill ride (although it has some thrillerish aspects), focusing much more clearly on its characters and is indeed a philosophical work on some level.
So let's forget Mel Gibson for the moment, shall we? I enjoy Helgeland's film just fine and it's probably impossible for any viewer of Point Blank not to be haunted by echoes of the later film, but we'll just take in stride the fact that certain elements carry over between both films and move on.
Point Blank starts with a set piece that will set the tone for the rest of the film. Through a series of jump cuts, a professional thief named Walker (Lee Marvin) is recruited by a buddy (Lee Vernon) to make an elaborate heist of a money drop on Alcatraz island. But Walker is doublecrossed by his buddy (and Walker's wife, played by Sharon Acker) and is left for dead in one of the cells on the defunct prison island. Walker wakes up, wonders at the fact that he has no bullet wound, and vows revenge. Then the credits roll, for the entire setup has been established in about three minutes of screen time, mostly using time-crunching cutaways that were very likely inspiration for most of Tarantino's early work.
The fact that Walker awakes and finds himself without injury is an element of the film that lends itself to many questions. Is what we are seeing "real?" Is it all just the revenge fantasy of a man dying of blood loss in a cold prison cell? Is Walker's journey that of a vengeful spirit? Some of the things that Walker will do during the ninety minutes of Point Blank seem beyond the ability of a normal human, but the film doesn't really confront these questions head-on, preferring instead to just focus on the details of the revenge. Attentive viewers will find much to head-scratch over, but director John Boorman doesn't rely on such questions to move the narrative along. It's there for the interested, but the film is more interested in pyrotechnics than metaphysics.
Having escaped from Alcatraz island (the film shows this in a simple jump-cut), Walker is approached by a mysterious man who seems to be from some official agency, offering assistance in tracking down those who wronged him. Walker shrugs off the help, but later on will use the resources of his new partner in tracking down his money. In the process, Walker will go head-to-head with "The Organization," a criminal syndicate run more like a corporation than the gang of thugs it is, eventually killing his way up the food chain to get his money back. This takes him through a wide variety of locations in 1960s Southern California, including a hip jazz club, a heavily-guarded high-rise, and a mansion that might as well be owned by Hugh Hefner (but is actually owned by Caroll O'Connor, who would later go on to play Archie Bunker and is one of the delights of the last third of the film). Walker will also begin a romantic (er, yeah, that's it, romantic) entanglement with his now-deceased wife's sister Chris, played ably by Angie Dickinson.
I mentioned that Point Blank gets a little philosophical at times. It's subtle, but Walker here is haunted by his memories of what he has done during the process of his revenge. He seems to be trying to come to terms with who he is, with what kind of person he should be, and it's possible that his relationship with Chris is one thing that helps him to find his humanity. Unlike in the '99 remake, the protagonist here has doubts about the morality of his actions, and while his obsession in getting his money back leads him to do awful things, we get the sense that this doesn't define him in the way that Gibson's obsession defined his character.
In the end, this film is an intelligent thriller with some great sequences and good performances that has aged well, but there's not a lot of meat on the bones. Boorman has directed a stylish film that whisks by at 92 minutes, and while it is entertaining throughout, it doesn't stick around in my mind very well. It's a better film than the later remake, but in some ways it's a bit less entertaining. Both films are worthy (and if you're only going to see one I'd recommend this one) but neither is cinematic perfection. Of interest mostly to those who are fans of pre-blockbuster genre pictures.
Rating: B+
Written by Alexander Jacobs and David & Rafe Newhouse
Based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark)
Directed by John Boorman
92 minutes
Haven't I already seen this movie?
Well, actually, no. While both the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback and Point Blank were both based on the same novel by Donald E. Westlake, they are substantially different films. Payback (which I saw upon its theatrical release and have seen numerous times on cable since then) had the tagline "Get Ready to Root For the Bad Guy," and that was basically the point of the film: look at what a naughty boy Mel Gibson can be, and watch him kick the ass of some even worse guys! (The fact that Mel Gibson later turned out to be a naughty boy of a much less cinematic type is a delicious irony but not really relevant here.) The version from three decades earlier, however, much less obviously a thrill ride (although it has some thrillerish aspects), focusing much more clearly on its characters and is indeed a philosophical work on some level.
So let's forget Mel Gibson for the moment, shall we? I enjoy Helgeland's film just fine and it's probably impossible for any viewer of Point Blank not to be haunted by echoes of the later film, but we'll just take in stride the fact that certain elements carry over between both films and move on.
Point Blank starts with a set piece that will set the tone for the rest of the film. Through a series of jump cuts, a professional thief named Walker (Lee Marvin) is recruited by a buddy (Lee Vernon) to make an elaborate heist of a money drop on Alcatraz island. But Walker is doublecrossed by his buddy (and Walker's wife, played by Sharon Acker) and is left for dead in one of the cells on the defunct prison island. Walker wakes up, wonders at the fact that he has no bullet wound, and vows revenge. Then the credits roll, for the entire setup has been established in about three minutes of screen time, mostly using time-crunching cutaways that were very likely inspiration for most of Tarantino's early work.
The fact that Walker awakes and finds himself without injury is an element of the film that lends itself to many questions. Is what we are seeing "real?" Is it all just the revenge fantasy of a man dying of blood loss in a cold prison cell? Is Walker's journey that of a vengeful spirit? Some of the things that Walker will do during the ninety minutes of Point Blank seem beyond the ability of a normal human, but the film doesn't really confront these questions head-on, preferring instead to just focus on the details of the revenge. Attentive viewers will find much to head-scratch over, but director John Boorman doesn't rely on such questions to move the narrative along. It's there for the interested, but the film is more interested in pyrotechnics than metaphysics.
Having escaped from Alcatraz island (the film shows this in a simple jump-cut), Walker is approached by a mysterious man who seems to be from some official agency, offering assistance in tracking down those who wronged him. Walker shrugs off the help, but later on will use the resources of his new partner in tracking down his money. In the process, Walker will go head-to-head with "The Organization," a criminal syndicate run more like a corporation than the gang of thugs it is, eventually killing his way up the food chain to get his money back. This takes him through a wide variety of locations in 1960s Southern California, including a hip jazz club, a heavily-guarded high-rise, and a mansion that might as well be owned by Hugh Hefner (but is actually owned by Caroll O'Connor, who would later go on to play Archie Bunker and is one of the delights of the last third of the film). Walker will also begin a romantic (er, yeah, that's it, romantic) entanglement with his now-deceased wife's sister Chris, played ably by Angie Dickinson.
I mentioned that Point Blank gets a little philosophical at times. It's subtle, but Walker here is haunted by his memories of what he has done during the process of his revenge. He seems to be trying to come to terms with who he is, with what kind of person he should be, and it's possible that his relationship with Chris is one thing that helps him to find his humanity. Unlike in the '99 remake, the protagonist here has doubts about the morality of his actions, and while his obsession in getting his money back leads him to do awful things, we get the sense that this doesn't define him in the way that Gibson's obsession defined his character.
In the end, this film is an intelligent thriller with some great sequences and good performances that has aged well, but there's not a lot of meat on the bones. Boorman has directed a stylish film that whisks by at 92 minutes, and while it is entertaining throughout, it doesn't stick around in my mind very well. It's a better film than the later remake, but in some ways it's a bit less entertaining. Both films are worthy (and if you're only going to see one I'd recommend this one) but neither is cinematic perfection. Of interest mostly to those who are fans of pre-blockbuster genre pictures.
Rating: B+
12 February 2009
Movielog, The Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, 1986
Written by Marshall Brickman and Thomas Baum
Directed by Marshall Brickman
117 minutes
Mom: Paul, did you build an atomic bomb?
Paul: Only a little one.
And yeah, he does. There was a mini-boom of "genius movies" after Wargames in 1983, movies in which teenage geniuses did really cool stuff in their bedrooms or garages or basements because they were really smart. The Manhattan Project isn't as good as Wargames or Real Genius, but it's comfortably in the same territory as a story about a brilliant kid who happens upon a secret weapons lab and decides to make an atomic bomb, partly as a political statement but mostly just because he can.
I have a bit of a head start on most viewers because I have read Mushroom: The Story of the A-bomb Kid by John Aristotle Phillips. Mushroom is the story of an undergraduate at Princeton who designed (note: designed, not built) what is said to be a working atomic bomb in 1977. The physics of an explosion trigger are fairly straightforward; the engineering of such a thing are a holy bitch and a half and require highly specialized materials that most of us couldn't get ahold of if we tried. That a kid could figure out how to make an atomic bomb from spare parts is pretty straightforward, that one could actually make one in secret with materials from a well-stocked high school physics lab is fanciful in the extreme.
But there's a difference, I think, between plausibility and realism. The screenplay for The Manhattan Project starts with the idea that a kid might build an atomic bomb, and then asks itself what kind of kid might be able to accomplish such a task. The answer: a brilliant seventeen-year-old who sleeps only a couple of hours a night in upstate New York. Despite his genius, he's a bit of a slacker who would rather use his brain to play pranks on his classmates and impress his girlfriend than do classwork. So yeah, he's an unrealistically bright character, but once you posit his existence there isn't much in The Manhattan Project that doesn't follow.
Consider the girlfriend Jenny. She's played by a fresh-faced Cynthia Nixon (Robert Sean Leonard, Dr. Wilson from House, M.D. is also present as a classmate) as a girl very nearly as smart as Our Hero Paul (Christopher Collet, who as near as I can determine went on to do nothing else of any significance with regard to film acting). Jenny's not a science buff but a budding journalist whose references to Anne Frank and Woodward and Bernstein are missed by the oblivious Paul. The two have an easy and fun relationship that is portrayed quickly and tightly -- this is not a teenage romance but a thriller-with-a-twist.
John Lithgow is an atomic scientist who as the film opens has just developed a revolutionary new method for purifying plutonium, producing ultra-pure yields. When he moves into a research lab in Ithaca (supposedly making radioactive materials for medical treatments) he falls for his real estate agent, Elizabeth Stephens, who is also the protagonist's mom. When Lithgow spies a Scientific American with a cover story on lasers in the young man's arms, he offers to take the boy to see "the sexiest laser in the world" in exchange for a date with the mother. But Lithgow underestimates Paul's intelligence, for when the young man sees the lab he very quickly figures out what is really being done there.
What follows is an extended sequence in which Paul and Jenny steal a large batch of plutonium from the lab. This is probably the least plausible sequence in the film, although among the most entertaining, as the heist mini-movie follows all-too-well the well-trod cliches of the eighties heist sequence, although some of the techniques that Paul uses to achieve his goal are clever and resourceful. It's a fun lighthearted sequence, but narratively it probably would have worked better to just have Paul get the professor to let him back in the lab and sneak a sample out than this kind of elaborate sequence.
Anyway. Once Paul has the nuclear material he does the research necessary to make the bomb. The film shows this work in some level of detail (although of course the specifics are obscured), trusting the audience to follow the general idea of how Paul manages to make a bomb even if they don't get every detail. In general the science and engineering in the movie is accurate, much more so than in many other SF and SF-tinged movies, enough so that even I didn't really mind the minor glitches that popped up here and there. (For an example of the latter, the resulting atomic bomb is described as a 50-kiloton bomb that would take out several states, while the reality is that 50 kilotons is only about two-and-a-half times the size of the bomb as the one that took out Hiroshima. Maybe they meant megatons.)
The Manhattan Project is actually generally smart about the details. When Lithgow discovers that his lab has been breeched, he pretty much immediately figures out how it happened, and his emotional response is a respect for the boy's intelligence rather than a more stereotypical anger response. When the crisis point comes towards the end of the movie, it is Lithgow who is on some level siding with the kid, trying to protect him and defend him, where in a lesser movie he would be a much more identifiable villain. Co-writer and director Marshall Brickman was a colleague of Woody Allen who co-wrote Annie Hall, and that grasp of character shines through this film even in its more pedestrian moments.
It isn't all roses, however. Some of the plot points of The Manhattan Project are implausible or simplistic, but that's somewhat forgivable given the potential audience for the film. The score, well, it isn't quite as bad as the Shawshank 80's-style montage, but it's pretty close, nearly ruining some sequences and in general keeping the movie from the kind of moral ambiguity that it wants to have. This was likely much less noticeable upon the time of original release when nearly every movie had a similar score, but for modern audiences this is going to be something of a sore point.
So, not perfect by any means, this film is nonetheless a fun movie that still manages to give a lesson or two on nuclear proliferation along the way. The performances are pretty good and generally fit the material well, and for me it was worth seeing just to see scientific knowledge respected so heavily in a movie. If I'd seen this when I was twelve instead of twenty-eight it would have been one of my all-time favorite movies, and I'd think of it today as a childhood favorite. Parents of nerdy children could do a lot worse than shoving a DVD of The Manhattan Project in their hands.
Rating: B
Written by Marshall Brickman and Thomas Baum
Directed by Marshall Brickman
117 minutes
Mom: Paul, did you build an atomic bomb?
Paul: Only a little one.
And yeah, he does. There was a mini-boom of "genius movies" after Wargames in 1983, movies in which teenage geniuses did really cool stuff in their bedrooms or garages or basements because they were really smart. The Manhattan Project isn't as good as Wargames or Real Genius, but it's comfortably in the same territory as a story about a brilliant kid who happens upon a secret weapons lab and decides to make an atomic bomb, partly as a political statement but mostly just because he can.
I have a bit of a head start on most viewers because I have read Mushroom: The Story of the A-bomb Kid by John Aristotle Phillips. Mushroom is the story of an undergraduate at Princeton who designed (note: designed, not built) what is said to be a working atomic bomb in 1977. The physics of an explosion trigger are fairly straightforward; the engineering of such a thing are a holy bitch and a half and require highly specialized materials that most of us couldn't get ahold of if we tried. That a kid could figure out how to make an atomic bomb from spare parts is pretty straightforward, that one could actually make one in secret with materials from a well-stocked high school physics lab is fanciful in the extreme.
But there's a difference, I think, between plausibility and realism. The screenplay for The Manhattan Project starts with the idea that a kid might build an atomic bomb, and then asks itself what kind of kid might be able to accomplish such a task. The answer: a brilliant seventeen-year-old who sleeps only a couple of hours a night in upstate New York. Despite his genius, he's a bit of a slacker who would rather use his brain to play pranks on his classmates and impress his girlfriend than do classwork. So yeah, he's an unrealistically bright character, but once you posit his existence there isn't much in The Manhattan Project that doesn't follow.
Consider the girlfriend Jenny. She's played by a fresh-faced Cynthia Nixon (Robert Sean Leonard, Dr. Wilson from House, M.D. is also present as a classmate) as a girl very nearly as smart as Our Hero Paul (Christopher Collet, who as near as I can determine went on to do nothing else of any significance with regard to film acting). Jenny's not a science buff but a budding journalist whose references to Anne Frank and Woodward and Bernstein are missed by the oblivious Paul. The two have an easy and fun relationship that is portrayed quickly and tightly -- this is not a teenage romance but a thriller-with-a-twist.
John Lithgow is an atomic scientist who as the film opens has just developed a revolutionary new method for purifying plutonium, producing ultra-pure yields. When he moves into a research lab in Ithaca (supposedly making radioactive materials for medical treatments) he falls for his real estate agent, Elizabeth Stephens, who is also the protagonist's mom. When Lithgow spies a Scientific American with a cover story on lasers in the young man's arms, he offers to take the boy to see "the sexiest laser in the world" in exchange for a date with the mother. But Lithgow underestimates Paul's intelligence, for when the young man sees the lab he very quickly figures out what is really being done there.
What follows is an extended sequence in which Paul and Jenny steal a large batch of plutonium from the lab. This is probably the least plausible sequence in the film, although among the most entertaining, as the heist mini-movie follows all-too-well the well-trod cliches of the eighties heist sequence, although some of the techniques that Paul uses to achieve his goal are clever and resourceful. It's a fun lighthearted sequence, but narratively it probably would have worked better to just have Paul get the professor to let him back in the lab and sneak a sample out than this kind of elaborate sequence.
Anyway. Once Paul has the nuclear material he does the research necessary to make the bomb. The film shows this work in some level of detail (although of course the specifics are obscured), trusting the audience to follow the general idea of how Paul manages to make a bomb even if they don't get every detail. In general the science and engineering in the movie is accurate, much more so than in many other SF and SF-tinged movies, enough so that even I didn't really mind the minor glitches that popped up here and there. (For an example of the latter, the resulting atomic bomb is described as a 50-kiloton bomb that would take out several states, while the reality is that 50 kilotons is only about two-and-a-half times the size of the bomb as the one that took out Hiroshima. Maybe they meant megatons.)
The Manhattan Project is actually generally smart about the details. When Lithgow discovers that his lab has been breeched, he pretty much immediately figures out how it happened, and his emotional response is a respect for the boy's intelligence rather than a more stereotypical anger response. When the crisis point comes towards the end of the movie, it is Lithgow who is on some level siding with the kid, trying to protect him and defend him, where in a lesser movie he would be a much more identifiable villain. Co-writer and director Marshall Brickman was a colleague of Woody Allen who co-wrote Annie Hall, and that grasp of character shines through this film even in its more pedestrian moments.
It isn't all roses, however. Some of the plot points of The Manhattan Project are implausible or simplistic, but that's somewhat forgivable given the potential audience for the film. The score, well, it isn't quite as bad as the Shawshank 80's-style montage, but it's pretty close, nearly ruining some sequences and in general keeping the movie from the kind of moral ambiguity that it wants to have. This was likely much less noticeable upon the time of original release when nearly every movie had a similar score, but for modern audiences this is going to be something of a sore point.
So, not perfect by any means, this film is nonetheless a fun movie that still manages to give a lesson or two on nuclear proliferation along the way. The performances are pretty good and generally fit the material well, and for me it was worth seeing just to see scientific knowledge respected so heavily in a movie. If I'd seen this when I was twelve instead of twenty-eight it would have been one of my all-time favorite movies, and I'd think of it today as a childhood favorite. Parents of nerdy children could do a lot worse than shoving a DVD of The Manhattan Project in their hands.
Rating: B
09 February 2009
Booklog, Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition, 2003
Written by William Gibson
384 pages (mass-market paperback)
Near-future SF is a tough game. Off the top of my head, Back to the Future II predicted rejuvenation treatments, flying cars, and to-the-second-accuracy weather reports by 2015. Freejack had electronic memory storage and body-swapping and time travel in 2009. Timecop predicted self-driving automobiles and government-regulated time travel by 2004. And that's just in movies made in the last couple of decades.
Written SF is considerably better, but it's still a tough field. While many authors in the Golden Age (1940s or so) wrote their stories with specific dates in mind, it's the choice of most modern SF writers to not specify a specific time period, so as to prevent the kind of poor aging that is so common to stories of old.
Even this can be problemmatic. In 1984's Neuromancer, William Gibson predicted a world in which the United States has fallen but the USSR is still strong, a world in which personalities can be recorded to computer hardware and the computer network is a "consensual hallucination" accessed by "jacking in" to a "deck." The novel is rightly considered one of the masterpieces of the genre, not least by coining the term "cyberspace" and by merging the fading New Wave SF style with gritty reality, but by inventing the cyberpunk movement and creating a whole subgenre. In the next decade, Gibson would write several books and short stories using the same basic templates, but over time he began to become frustrated with the general practice of near-future SF. The pace of the world that we live in today is so dynamic and fast-changing that doing detailed prediction of the future is basically a zero-sum game. Could anyone have predicted Youtube or the blogosphere in, say, 1990?
Disenchanted with the struggle, Gibson in 2003 turned his talents to writing present-day fiction that "felt like" SF, in that they dealt with the same general issues of the role of technology and science in our lives that Gibson had been dealing with since 1984. His first novel in this vein is Pattern Recognition, and the writing is pure Gibson -- tersely descriptive, with a clipped Dasheill Hammet-like style merged to free-flowing speculation about the nature of society and use of technology.
His protagonist Cayce (named after psychic Edgar Cayce but pronounced "Case," also the name of the protagonist of Neuromancer) Pollard is a 32-year old woman who has allergic reactions to logos and branding. She uses her allergies as a barometer of coolness, and is able to tell at a glance if proposed logos and branding are resonant enough to enter public consciousness have a memetic spread like, say, the Nike logo. In her private life, she is a "footagehead" who spends inordinate amounts of time online downloading and discussing mysterious film snippets made by an unknown person or persons. When one of her high-powered clients hires her to search down the maker or makers of the footage, she travels around the globe encountering a wide series of strange persons and has a great deal of deserved paranoia.
And yeah, that's pretty much the whole plot. Pattern Recognition is like Gibson's other novels in that the story is really just a clothesline for the style and for the characters. You read a Gibson novel not for the story but for the beauty and the ideas. What Cayce finds at the end of her search for the maker of the footage is less important the the persons she meets and situations she gets into along the way. And if some of it seems a bit improbable at times, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Gibson was writing the novel around the time of the September 11 attacks, and a recurring element on the novel is the state of Cayce's consciousness when considering that event. Her father, an intelligence expert, disappeared on the day of the attacks and one of the meanings of the title is in her mother's avid fascination with electronic voice phenomena in her search for her now-deceased husband. There is a quiet philosophy at work here, in which Gibson suggests that all of our human activities are really just searching for meaningless patterns in the world, or rather, finding meaning where there is none.
In the end, this novel is a worthy addition to Gibson's body of work, and the new direction for his career is fascinating. Worth it for the style and for the ideas, Pattern Recognition is an entertaining read but nothing really sticks around long-term. (I had to use Wikipedia to look up plot details that I'd forgotten.) It's a decent read, but it's hard to see new readers giving Gibson the kind of devotion for this as he (rightfully) received after Neuromancer.
Rating: B
Written by William Gibson
384 pages (mass-market paperback)
Near-future SF is a tough game. Off the top of my head, Back to the Future II predicted rejuvenation treatments, flying cars, and to-the-second-accuracy weather reports by 2015. Freejack had electronic memory storage and body-swapping and time travel in 2009. Timecop predicted self-driving automobiles and government-regulated time travel by 2004. And that's just in movies made in the last couple of decades.
Written SF is considerably better, but it's still a tough field. While many authors in the Golden Age (1940s or so) wrote their stories with specific dates in mind, it's the choice of most modern SF writers to not specify a specific time period, so as to prevent the kind of poor aging that is so common to stories of old.
Even this can be problemmatic. In 1984's Neuromancer, William Gibson predicted a world in which the United States has fallen but the USSR is still strong, a world in which personalities can be recorded to computer hardware and the computer network is a "consensual hallucination" accessed by "jacking in" to a "deck." The novel is rightly considered one of the masterpieces of the genre, not least by coining the term "cyberspace" and by merging the fading New Wave SF style with gritty reality, but by inventing the cyberpunk movement and creating a whole subgenre. In the next decade, Gibson would write several books and short stories using the same basic templates, but over time he began to become frustrated with the general practice of near-future SF. The pace of the world that we live in today is so dynamic and fast-changing that doing detailed prediction of the future is basically a zero-sum game. Could anyone have predicted Youtube or the blogosphere in, say, 1990?
Disenchanted with the struggle, Gibson in 2003 turned his talents to writing present-day fiction that "felt like" SF, in that they dealt with the same general issues of the role of technology and science in our lives that Gibson had been dealing with since 1984. His first novel in this vein is Pattern Recognition, and the writing is pure Gibson -- tersely descriptive, with a clipped Dasheill Hammet-like style merged to free-flowing speculation about the nature of society and use of technology.
His protagonist Cayce (named after psychic Edgar Cayce but pronounced "Case," also the name of the protagonist of Neuromancer) Pollard is a 32-year old woman who has allergic reactions to logos and branding. She uses her allergies as a barometer of coolness, and is able to tell at a glance if proposed logos and branding are resonant enough to enter public consciousness have a memetic spread like, say, the Nike logo. In her private life, she is a "footagehead" who spends inordinate amounts of time online downloading and discussing mysterious film snippets made by an unknown person or persons. When one of her high-powered clients hires her to search down the maker or makers of the footage, she travels around the globe encountering a wide series of strange persons and has a great deal of deserved paranoia.
And yeah, that's pretty much the whole plot. Pattern Recognition is like Gibson's other novels in that the story is really just a clothesline for the style and for the characters. You read a Gibson novel not for the story but for the beauty and the ideas. What Cayce finds at the end of her search for the maker of the footage is less important the the persons she meets and situations she gets into along the way. And if some of it seems a bit improbable at times, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Gibson was writing the novel around the time of the September 11 attacks, and a recurring element on the novel is the state of Cayce's consciousness when considering that event. Her father, an intelligence expert, disappeared on the day of the attacks and one of the meanings of the title is in her mother's avid fascination with electronic voice phenomena in her search for her now-deceased husband. There is a quiet philosophy at work here, in which Gibson suggests that all of our human activities are really just searching for meaningless patterns in the world, or rather, finding meaning where there is none.
In the end, this novel is a worthy addition to Gibson's body of work, and the new direction for his career is fascinating. Worth it for the style and for the ideas, Pattern Recognition is an entertaining read but nothing really sticks around long-term. (I had to use Wikipedia to look up plot details that I'd forgotten.) It's a decent read, but it's hard to see new readers giving Gibson the kind of devotion for this as he (rightfully) received after Neuromancer.
Rating: B
08 February 2009
Movielog, Repo: The Genetic Opera
Repo: The Genetic Opera, 2008
Written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich
Based on their stage play of the same name
98 minutes
It's the near future. A plague of organ failures has made organ replacement therapy a new miracle cure. These organ replacements are paid for on credit, and if you miss your payments, a repo man shows up and harvests your organs as payment on your delinquent account. I hear that, read that Paris Hilton plays a not-insubstantial part, and that the flick is produced by the same guys who brought us the Saw series, and I say to myself, "Boy, is that going to suck."
So it's probably for the best that at the end of the movie I wasn't so much happy that the movie wasn't as bad as it could have been as I am disappointed that it could have been better. I mean, sure, it's a completely ridiculous plot by SF standards, and there's no defending the lack of worldbuilding and real understanding of the genre at play here. I could write you a dozen stories coming off of this same general plot device that are better than that found in Repo in just a few minutes. The point here isn't to explore the consequences of the premise as much as it is to build a rock-opera epic with gory scenery.
And as far as it goes, it almost works. It's important to note that this is (as it says on the label), an opera, not a musical, and so every emotional moment is pitched to the cheap seats and all the plot points are slammed home with the force of a rusty chisel on an eyeball. But that's the genre, and I forgave that quickly. In truth, the story of a dying patriarch (Paul Sorvino, yes, Paul Fucking Sorvino, yes, the guy from Goodfellas and Nixon) trying to find an appropriate heir to his empire is actually quite compelling. Sorvino brings his A game to a decidedly C picture and elevates the material far above what it deserves.
His choice to succeed him (instead of his vainglorious psychopathic children, among whom are the aforementioned Ms. Hilton) is the beautiful young woman Shilo (Alexa Vega, best known as the girl from the Spy Kids movies) who has a rare blood disease that forces her to remain indoors. She is protected by her father (Anthony Stewart Head) who acts as a doctor by day and a sort of King of the Repo Men by night. The connections between these characters involve a detailed history of subterfuge and deceit, and are played out on screen by comic-book-style narrative panels. As the movie goes on we get some of the details of the history of these characters, and while several subplots battle for supremacy, in the end this is the girl Shilo's story -- she must decide for herself what it means to be the daughter of the monster Repo Man.
I'm treading lightly on the plot because I thought that was the most interesting aspect of Repo: The Genetic Opera. The music is forgettable, mostly composed of rip-offs of other, better songs (despite a cameo appearance around the halfway mark of the film that is almost worth the price of a rental by itself), which is a disappointment considering that the music is really what we should be watching for. Repo began life as a stage play, and I'll bet this material played a lot better live -- movie audiences are more immune to the spectacle and are more contemplative in general, and holes in the storyline and in the characterization are a lot more apparent in the confines of a home than with real live actors performing before you.
There is a tiny segment of the population that will fall in love with Repo. It's the kind of movie that is pitched at such a specific tone that it will reach certain persons as if it has been encoded in their very DNA. It's probably the goal of the film that those of us outside that narrow group will be heavily turned off by it; no one should be merely indifferent to a film about organ repossessions that is this gory. (Although not nearly as gory as I expected, for the gore is played for laughs more than it's played straight, and I never really felt like I was looking at anything other than food coloring and latex.) But that's exactly what I felt: indifference. I'm writing this a few days after viewing the film, and I find it difficult to really care very much one way or the other about the film at all. It's worth a viewing if you're interested in the material, but a modern-day Rocky Horror this ain't.
Rating: B-
Written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich
Based on their stage play of the same name
98 minutes
It's the near future. A plague of organ failures has made organ replacement therapy a new miracle cure. These organ replacements are paid for on credit, and if you miss your payments, a repo man shows up and harvests your organs as payment on your delinquent account. I hear that, read that Paris Hilton plays a not-insubstantial part, and that the flick is produced by the same guys who brought us the Saw series, and I say to myself, "Boy, is that going to suck."
So it's probably for the best that at the end of the movie I wasn't so much happy that the movie wasn't as bad as it could have been as I am disappointed that it could have been better. I mean, sure, it's a completely ridiculous plot by SF standards, and there's no defending the lack of worldbuilding and real understanding of the genre at play here. I could write you a dozen stories coming off of this same general plot device that are better than that found in Repo in just a few minutes. The point here isn't to explore the consequences of the premise as much as it is to build a rock-opera epic with gory scenery.
And as far as it goes, it almost works. It's important to note that this is (as it says on the label), an opera, not a musical, and so every emotional moment is pitched to the cheap seats and all the plot points are slammed home with the force of a rusty chisel on an eyeball. But that's the genre, and I forgave that quickly. In truth, the story of a dying patriarch (Paul Sorvino, yes, Paul Fucking Sorvino, yes, the guy from Goodfellas and Nixon) trying to find an appropriate heir to his empire is actually quite compelling. Sorvino brings his A game to a decidedly C picture and elevates the material far above what it deserves.
His choice to succeed him (instead of his vainglorious psychopathic children, among whom are the aforementioned Ms. Hilton) is the beautiful young woman Shilo (Alexa Vega, best known as the girl from the Spy Kids movies) who has a rare blood disease that forces her to remain indoors. She is protected by her father (Anthony Stewart Head) who acts as a doctor by day and a sort of King of the Repo Men by night. The connections between these characters involve a detailed history of subterfuge and deceit, and are played out on screen by comic-book-style narrative panels. As the movie goes on we get some of the details of the history of these characters, and while several subplots battle for supremacy, in the end this is the girl Shilo's story -- she must decide for herself what it means to be the daughter of the monster Repo Man.
I'm treading lightly on the plot because I thought that was the most interesting aspect of Repo: The Genetic Opera. The music is forgettable, mostly composed of rip-offs of other, better songs (despite a cameo appearance around the halfway mark of the film that is almost worth the price of a rental by itself), which is a disappointment considering that the music is really what we should be watching for. Repo began life as a stage play, and I'll bet this material played a lot better live -- movie audiences are more immune to the spectacle and are more contemplative in general, and holes in the storyline and in the characterization are a lot more apparent in the confines of a home than with real live actors performing before you.
There is a tiny segment of the population that will fall in love with Repo. It's the kind of movie that is pitched at such a specific tone that it will reach certain persons as if it has been encoded in their very DNA. It's probably the goal of the film that those of us outside that narrow group will be heavily turned off by it; no one should be merely indifferent to a film about organ repossessions that is this gory. (Although not nearly as gory as I expected, for the gore is played for laughs more than it's played straight, and I never really felt like I was looking at anything other than food coloring and latex.) But that's exactly what I felt: indifference. I'm writing this a few days after viewing the film, and I find it difficult to really care very much one way or the other about the film at all. It's worth a viewing if you're interested in the material, but a modern-day Rocky Horror this ain't.
Rating: B-
30 January 2009
Movielog, Body Heat
Body Heat, 1981
Written and Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
113 minutes
In 1981, Lawrence Kasdan was the screenwriter of two of the highest-grossing films in cinema history, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back. It is telling that aside from their commerical value, those two films would be the only ones in their respective series written by Kasdan and they are widely considered to be the greatest films in those series. In each case, Kasdan showed a knack for recycling old genres from the past (I hesitate to say "his youth" as Kasdan was born in 1949, long after the days of the movie serials the Indiana Jones and Star Wars series were based upon) and updating them with characters that felt real, that seemed as if they could step off the screen and into our world. The greatness of Raiders of the Lost Ark is that the film takes what could be a hoary old pulp story and injects its characters and situations with life and verve.
So for his directorial debut, Kasdan decided to do much the same thing for the noir films of the forties. Using Wilder's Double Indemnity as a template, Kasdan wrote a tight screenplay in which an everyman who thinks he's smarter than he is becomes infatuated with a femme fatale to disastrous results. And into this template Kasdan was able to use the more relaxed standards of the 1980s to make explicit in Body Heat what was buried beneath the surface in Double Indemnity. This is usually a path to failure for a film, as it ruins all the subtext in the original, but the film gods smiled on Kasdan and his cast and crew, and Body Heat became one of the great neo-noirs.
So successful is this film that a decade later Joe Eszterhas would use the same basic "neo-noir mixed with steamy sex" template to make Basic Instinct, which would then inspire a whole slew of even-worse imitators including basically every late-night Cinemax movie made between 1992 and 2000. And yet despite the slew of imitators and outright parodies, Body Heat retains its power to entertain, to shock, and yes, to arouse.
William Hurt is the everyman, a seedy and none-too-bright lawyer named Ned Racine. Ned eyes the beautiful and alluring Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) and immediately has to have her. The two spend the first twenty minutes or so of the movie in an elaborate dance of seduction, and when they finally are able to break through each other's shells, the fucking is amazing. And yeah, that's pretty much what they do -- rarely even today do we see films, especially mainstream box office hits bankrolled by major studios, that have this kind of frankness about sex and sexual desire. Turner was making her film debut here, and Hurt had appeared in only one other picture, but the chemistry between them is smoldering, and it is because of that easy sexual tension that you believe where the story goes from there.
Matty is married, you see, and after a time these two characters have gone from having a torrid affair to planning a murder. Unlike other films that try to justify this kind of action, Matty and Ned know how what they're doing is wrong. "We're going to kill him for no other reason than because we want him dead," Ned tells Matty as they begin to plan the murder, and that's exactly what they do. Matty's husband (Richard Crenna) is involved in some ill-defined criminal activity that involves him with some shady characters, and Racine gets one of his clients (a young Mickey Rourke in his breakout role) to make him a bomb -- he's going to burn the body and make it look like one of Mr. Walker's business associates did him in.
And so he does, but it wouldn't be noir if things went exactly as planned. Most of those reading this are probably already aware of some of the third-act twists of Body Heat even if they haven't already seen the film, but suffice to say that even with the knowledge of what awaits Racine at the end of the film, Kasdan's amazing script and assured direction maintain the audience's interest nonetheless. Ned is buddies with a county prosecutor played by Ted Danson, who has to resign himself to the fact that his friend is probably going down for murder. Racine tries to think his way around his problems, uses every tool at his disposal to avoid being caught, but there is a brief and nearly wordless scene towards the very end of the picture that shows us exactly how useless all those machinations really were.
The final shots leave the audience reeling, wondering how much of what was said was real and what it all meant. How much of what happened was planned? To what degree was Racine just a patsy? Did Matty really love Ned? It's interesting that throughout the film Matty tells Ned she loves him at least three times, but I don't recall an instance of him reciprocating to her. Matty's behavior is ambiguous even to those who know the end of Body Heat, and it is that element that makes her so real. Kasdan's script gives us just enough information to make guesses as to what she's actually done and how she did it without allowing us to come to any real conclusions. After the credits roll and as we consider the movie later, it's her character that keeps us interested, just as Barbara Stanwyck's character did in Double Indemnity. Body Heat isn't quite as accomplished as Wilder's 1944 classic, but to even think it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath is to give it enormous praise. One of the best of the modern noir pictures.
Rating: B+
Written and Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
113 minutes
In 1981, Lawrence Kasdan was the screenwriter of two of the highest-grossing films in cinema history, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back. It is telling that aside from their commerical value, those two films would be the only ones in their respective series written by Kasdan and they are widely considered to be the greatest films in those series. In each case, Kasdan showed a knack for recycling old genres from the past (I hesitate to say "his youth" as Kasdan was born in 1949, long after the days of the movie serials the Indiana Jones and Star Wars series were based upon) and updating them with characters that felt real, that seemed as if they could step off the screen and into our world. The greatness of Raiders of the Lost Ark is that the film takes what could be a hoary old pulp story and injects its characters and situations with life and verve.
So for his directorial debut, Kasdan decided to do much the same thing for the noir films of the forties. Using Wilder's Double Indemnity as a template, Kasdan wrote a tight screenplay in which an everyman who thinks he's smarter than he is becomes infatuated with a femme fatale to disastrous results. And into this template Kasdan was able to use the more relaxed standards of the 1980s to make explicit in Body Heat what was buried beneath the surface in Double Indemnity. This is usually a path to failure for a film, as it ruins all the subtext in the original, but the film gods smiled on Kasdan and his cast and crew, and Body Heat became one of the great neo-noirs.
So successful is this film that a decade later Joe Eszterhas would use the same basic "neo-noir mixed with steamy sex" template to make Basic Instinct, which would then inspire a whole slew of even-worse imitators including basically every late-night Cinemax movie made between 1992 and 2000. And yet despite the slew of imitators and outright parodies, Body Heat retains its power to entertain, to shock, and yes, to arouse.
William Hurt is the everyman, a seedy and none-too-bright lawyer named Ned Racine. Ned eyes the beautiful and alluring Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) and immediately has to have her. The two spend the first twenty minutes or so of the movie in an elaborate dance of seduction, and when they finally are able to break through each other's shells, the fucking is amazing. And yeah, that's pretty much what they do -- rarely even today do we see films, especially mainstream box office hits bankrolled by major studios, that have this kind of frankness about sex and sexual desire. Turner was making her film debut here, and Hurt had appeared in only one other picture, but the chemistry between them is smoldering, and it is because of that easy sexual tension that you believe where the story goes from there.
Matty is married, you see, and after a time these two characters have gone from having a torrid affair to planning a murder. Unlike other films that try to justify this kind of action, Matty and Ned know how what they're doing is wrong. "We're going to kill him for no other reason than because we want him dead," Ned tells Matty as they begin to plan the murder, and that's exactly what they do. Matty's husband (Richard Crenna) is involved in some ill-defined criminal activity that involves him with some shady characters, and Racine gets one of his clients (a young Mickey Rourke in his breakout role) to make him a bomb -- he's going to burn the body and make it look like one of Mr. Walker's business associates did him in.
And so he does, but it wouldn't be noir if things went exactly as planned. Most of those reading this are probably already aware of some of the third-act twists of Body Heat even if they haven't already seen the film, but suffice to say that even with the knowledge of what awaits Racine at the end of the film, Kasdan's amazing script and assured direction maintain the audience's interest nonetheless. Ned is buddies with a county prosecutor played by Ted Danson, who has to resign himself to the fact that his friend is probably going down for murder. Racine tries to think his way around his problems, uses every tool at his disposal to avoid being caught, but there is a brief and nearly wordless scene towards the very end of the picture that shows us exactly how useless all those machinations really were.
The final shots leave the audience reeling, wondering how much of what was said was real and what it all meant. How much of what happened was planned? To what degree was Racine just a patsy? Did Matty really love Ned? It's interesting that throughout the film Matty tells Ned she loves him at least three times, but I don't recall an instance of him reciprocating to her. Matty's behavior is ambiguous even to those who know the end of Body Heat, and it is that element that makes her so real. Kasdan's script gives us just enough information to make guesses as to what she's actually done and how she did it without allowing us to come to any real conclusions. After the credits roll and as we consider the movie later, it's her character that keeps us interested, just as Barbara Stanwyck's character did in Double Indemnity. Body Heat isn't quite as accomplished as Wilder's 1944 classic, but to even think it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath is to give it enormous praise. One of the best of the modern noir pictures.
Rating: B+
21 January 2009
Movielog, Burn After Reading
Burn After Reading, 2008
Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
96 minutes
Always zigging just when you think they're going to zag, the Coen brothers follow up their brilliant minimalist crime drama No Country For Old Men with a zany spy comedy that doesn't add up to much... but then, it's not really trying to.
Summarizing the plot is pretty much impossible. There's an intelligence analyst (John Malkovich) who is fired in the opening scene of the movie for problems with alcohol and who may or may not have mislaid a CD with what may or may not have been "secret spy shit." The CD is discovered at a cookie-cutter gym called Hardbodies by some of the employees, two of whom attempt to get a "reward" for returning it back to its rightful owner. It probably tells you enough about these characters that they are played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, the latter of whom is at his most insanely moronic. And there's a philandering Federal Marshall played by George Clooney who seems to have dreams of a very different career and who sublimates that into a series of meaningless affairs with women on the internet.
I could lie to you and pretend that the whole thing makes some sort of cohesive sense in the end, but that would be foolish -- the Coens have gone to a lot of time and effort to keep this stuff firmly in the "shaggy dog" territority, and who am I to argue? These characters (and many more) rotate through a series of set pieces that for the most part feel like random bits and pieces that the Coens couldn't quite fit into a larger screenplay, but mostly work anyway. The plot's not the point, here, instead we're supposed to appreciate the madcap hilarity of the individual pieces and the willingness to "go there" exhibited by these performers.
Some of the moments in the film are indisputably hilarious (my favorite being an exchange between Clooney and McDormand in a basement) and some of the performances are inspired (Pitt does what may be the best work of his career here and nearly convinces me that he's not one of the most attractive men in the Western world), but just as often the film seems to think it's a lot funnier and more clever than it really is. It may seem churlish to complain that some of the subplots go basically nowhere (that is, after all, the point) but 90 minutes with these characters was more than enough for me, and I found myself struggling to remember the beginning of the film at the end. Personally, I'd love to see a whole movie about the Malkovich character, probably the only one of the main cast with intelligence to burn, and a couple of cutaways to J. K. Simmons' intelligence man are classic comedy that seem somehow better than the movie they're in.
Burn After Reading is somewhat polarizing. I don't think it's a bad film necessarily, but it's a bit of an unsatisfying one. It's an amusing ride while it lasts and it's hard not to admire the artistry with which it was constructed, but a day later I find myself wishing the film had had a bit more meat on the bones. The high points are really, really good, but they're a bit too few and far between for this to really make the top ranks of Coen Brothers films, even Coen Brothers comedies.
Rating: B-
Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
96 minutes
Always zigging just when you think they're going to zag, the Coen brothers follow up their brilliant minimalist crime drama No Country For Old Men with a zany spy comedy that doesn't add up to much... but then, it's not really trying to.
Summarizing the plot is pretty much impossible. There's an intelligence analyst (John Malkovich) who is fired in the opening scene of the movie for problems with alcohol and who may or may not have mislaid a CD with what may or may not have been "secret spy shit." The CD is discovered at a cookie-cutter gym called Hardbodies by some of the employees, two of whom attempt to get a "reward" for returning it back to its rightful owner. It probably tells you enough about these characters that they are played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, the latter of whom is at his most insanely moronic. And there's a philandering Federal Marshall played by George Clooney who seems to have dreams of a very different career and who sublimates that into a series of meaningless affairs with women on the internet.
I could lie to you and pretend that the whole thing makes some sort of cohesive sense in the end, but that would be foolish -- the Coens have gone to a lot of time and effort to keep this stuff firmly in the "shaggy dog" territority, and who am I to argue? These characters (and many more) rotate through a series of set pieces that for the most part feel like random bits and pieces that the Coens couldn't quite fit into a larger screenplay, but mostly work anyway. The plot's not the point, here, instead we're supposed to appreciate the madcap hilarity of the individual pieces and the willingness to "go there" exhibited by these performers.
Some of the moments in the film are indisputably hilarious (my favorite being an exchange between Clooney and McDormand in a basement) and some of the performances are inspired (Pitt does what may be the best work of his career here and nearly convinces me that he's not one of the most attractive men in the Western world), but just as often the film seems to think it's a lot funnier and more clever than it really is. It may seem churlish to complain that some of the subplots go basically nowhere (that is, after all, the point) but 90 minutes with these characters was more than enough for me, and I found myself struggling to remember the beginning of the film at the end. Personally, I'd love to see a whole movie about the Malkovich character, probably the only one of the main cast with intelligence to burn, and a couple of cutaways to J. K. Simmons' intelligence man are classic comedy that seem somehow better than the movie they're in.
Burn After Reading is somewhat polarizing. I don't think it's a bad film necessarily, but it's a bit of an unsatisfying one. It's an amusing ride while it lasts and it's hard not to admire the artistry with which it was constructed, but a day later I find myself wishing the film had had a bit more meat on the bones. The high points are really, really good, but they're a bit too few and far between for this to really make the top ranks of Coen Brothers films, even Coen Brothers comedies.
Rating: B-
06 January 2009
Movielog, Zodiac
Zodiac, 2007
Written by James Vanderbilt
Based on the book by Robert Graysmith
Directed by David Fincher
162 minutes
I think one of the most annoying film tropes of the last couple of decades is the prevalence of what I like to call the "grandmaster criminal" -- you know the type, it's the serial killer/bank robber/whatever who is so on-the-ball, so ahead-of-the-game, that he (or she, although I can't think of a female example off the top of my head) can see several moves ahead of those pursuing him, know things he can't possibly know, and in general just be omnisciently threatening. (This is probably my single biggest gripe with The Dark Knight.) Done occasionally and done well, this is the kind of thing that can be creepy, even downright terrifying -- the killer knows everything about you and you have to be even smarter to survive. It's such an effective technique, though, that it's been used in countless movies and TV shows (there was even an episode of Law & Order: SVU in which the detectives chased a rapist/murderer who "left clues" for them to find) and, to my mind, has lost much of its power. Oh, of course the killer can see through brick walls and know exactly where you keep your weapon and can figure out the name of your daughter etc etc etc.
While this trope really got its start with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps its greatest usage was to be found a few years later, in Seven, David Fincher's brilliant serial killer thriller. Seven's killer, played by Kevin Spacey, leaves a sequence of bread crumbs for the cops to follow, taunts the police in 911 calls, and generally plays the whole chessmaster serial killer game like a fiddle. Its finale is the climax of the killer's game, and despite the gaps in logic works like a sucker-punch to the unsuspecting viewer. (The viewer is not very likely to be sucker-punched, however, as the ending was so amazing as the be endlessly parodied and is simply a part of pop culture today.)
All of this is a prelude to the subject at hand, for I feel that David Fincher's newest serial killer film is a sort of reversal of what he did with Seven; if not a repudiation of the trope, it's certainly a counterexample. Zodiac is based on the details of a very famous real-life serial killer who has never been captured, and so instead of being about meticulous planning and brilliant planning on the part of the killer, is really about the frustration and weight that set in when desire becomes obsession becomes failed multi-year obsession. The zodiac killer captivates the San Fransisco Bay area for years and is never caught, partly due to the fact that he is good at covering his tracks, but mostly through simple police miscommunication and missed evidence.
After an opening showing the Zodiac's first killing (actually his second, but that's a detail that will come out later), the film introduces us to Robert Graysmith, played admirably by Jake Gyllenhall. Graysmith is a cartoonist with the San Francisco Chronicle, and would eventually go on to write two best-selling books about the Zodiac case (which I have not read), upon which this film is based. In writer James Vanderbilt and Fincher's hands, Graysmith is portrayed as a clean-living but naive kid who gets involved in the mystery primarily through his love of puzzles. The Zodiac sends the Chronicle a cypher, you see, and Graysmith eventually figures out that the knowledge needed to come up with the code could be found using only a handful of books from the public library.
He gives this information to Robert Downey Jr., electrifyingly portraying Chronicle reporter Paul Avery. Avery is a hard-partying kind of guy with a bottle of booze in his desk and numerous implied sexual liaisons -- his first reaction to Graysmith's information is to wonder aloud what the kid's angle is in trying to solve the mystery. Over time the two will share information and interpretations on the case without ever really becoming friends.
While the first killings were outside SF proper, eventually the Zodiac strikes a cab driver in the city, bringing in a pair of homicide detectives led by David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Toschi is the real-life detective on whom Steve McQueen based his Bullitt character, and Ruffalo captures a kind of rumpled charm and keen intellect that is generally the goal for movie detectives, but rarely achieved as well as here. In contrast with Seven's fictional detectives who use brilliant psychological insight to catch their man, Ruffalo has precious little information with which to guide him, and over the years shown in the film becomes more and more weary of the world in general and the case specifically. Late in the film Toschi will see Dirty Harry, loosely based on the Zodiac killings, and will walk out of the theater in disgust.
If my descriptions of Zodiac seem meandering and pointless, it's largely because the whole film is largely just a sort of big shaggy dog story. Characters show up and seem important only to be discarded minutes later, erstwhile protagonists disappear for much of the film's running length, and while the film finds a sort of resolution towards the end, it's far from certain what has actually transpired in the murders themselves. I'm stepping lightly over the details of the investigation, because so much of the pleasure of the film comes from the slow accumulation of evidence over the nearly three-hour running time. Graysmith the real-life author obviously believes that he has figured out the solution to the Zodiac killings, and the movie shows his version, but a quick perusal of websites devoted to the Zodiac case show that Graysmith's version is, at best, far from the only interpretation of the events.
This, really, becomes a weakness of the film. Fincher is smart enough to leave plenty of room for doubt that Graysmith's version of events is the real one, but in the need for some sort of "resolution" the film ignores other points of view. Of course Robert Graysmith is the hero of the movie based on his own book, but other long-term enthusiasts of the case find his book self-aggrandizing and that he overlooks contradictory evidence in his attempt to put forward his own theory of the crime.
The film's other major flaw is the subplot about Graysmith's home life with his wife, played by Chloe Sevigny. Sevigny is a good actress and does what she can with the part, and it is she who provides a sort of counterpoint to Gyllenhall's obsessions towards the end of the film, but she doesn't have a lot of material with which to work, and ends up seeming like the kind of nagging wife that always seems to be in the background of the hero's home life in an action movie. It would have been best to just drop the personal stuff altogether, I think, as these sequences weigh down the narrative just when it needs to be sprinting to the finish.
Overall, Zodiac is an amazingly-acted and well-written film about a real-life incident that somehow leaves the viewer feeling empty. It's absorbing through its length and of course (this being a David Fincher film) technically superb, but in the week since I watched it I find that very little sticks in my mind. It is to be appreciated for telling the story of a real serial killer without the flashiness and other thriller-like elements so overused in Grandmaster Killer movies and is a very entertaining way of spending its running time, but Graysmith's self-aggrandizing and a slew of logical holes in the thillerish finish tend to make this more of a simple entertainment than a Film For the Ages.
For my money, the best David Fincher film I've seen is still Panic Room. Heresy, I know.
Rating: B
Written by James Vanderbilt
Based on the book by Robert Graysmith
Directed by David Fincher
162 minutes
I think one of the most annoying film tropes of the last couple of decades is the prevalence of what I like to call the "grandmaster criminal" -- you know the type, it's the serial killer/bank robber/whatever who is so on-the-ball, so ahead-of-the-game, that he (or she, although I can't think of a female example off the top of my head) can see several moves ahead of those pursuing him, know things he can't possibly know, and in general just be omnisciently threatening. (This is probably my single biggest gripe with The Dark Knight.) Done occasionally and done well, this is the kind of thing that can be creepy, even downright terrifying -- the killer knows everything about you and you have to be even smarter to survive. It's such an effective technique, though, that it's been used in countless movies and TV shows (there was even an episode of Law & Order: SVU in which the detectives chased a rapist/murderer who "left clues" for them to find) and, to my mind, has lost much of its power. Oh, of course the killer can see through brick walls and know exactly where you keep your weapon and can figure out the name of your daughter etc etc etc.
While this trope really got its start with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps its greatest usage was to be found a few years later, in Seven, David Fincher's brilliant serial killer thriller. Seven's killer, played by Kevin Spacey, leaves a sequence of bread crumbs for the cops to follow, taunts the police in 911 calls, and generally plays the whole chessmaster serial killer game like a fiddle. Its finale is the climax of the killer's game, and despite the gaps in logic works like a sucker-punch to the unsuspecting viewer. (The viewer is not very likely to be sucker-punched, however, as the ending was so amazing as the be endlessly parodied and is simply a part of pop culture today.)
All of this is a prelude to the subject at hand, for I feel that David Fincher's newest serial killer film is a sort of reversal of what he did with Seven; if not a repudiation of the trope, it's certainly a counterexample. Zodiac is based on the details of a very famous real-life serial killer who has never been captured, and so instead of being about meticulous planning and brilliant planning on the part of the killer, is really about the frustration and weight that set in when desire becomes obsession becomes failed multi-year obsession. The zodiac killer captivates the San Fransisco Bay area for years and is never caught, partly due to the fact that he is good at covering his tracks, but mostly through simple police miscommunication and missed evidence.
After an opening showing the Zodiac's first killing (actually his second, but that's a detail that will come out later), the film introduces us to Robert Graysmith, played admirably by Jake Gyllenhall. Graysmith is a cartoonist with the San Francisco Chronicle, and would eventually go on to write two best-selling books about the Zodiac case (which I have not read), upon which this film is based. In writer James Vanderbilt and Fincher's hands, Graysmith is portrayed as a clean-living but naive kid who gets involved in the mystery primarily through his love of puzzles. The Zodiac sends the Chronicle a cypher, you see, and Graysmith eventually figures out that the knowledge needed to come up with the code could be found using only a handful of books from the public library.
He gives this information to Robert Downey Jr., electrifyingly portraying Chronicle reporter Paul Avery. Avery is a hard-partying kind of guy with a bottle of booze in his desk and numerous implied sexual liaisons -- his first reaction to Graysmith's information is to wonder aloud what the kid's angle is in trying to solve the mystery. Over time the two will share information and interpretations on the case without ever really becoming friends.
While the first killings were outside SF proper, eventually the Zodiac strikes a cab driver in the city, bringing in a pair of homicide detectives led by David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Toschi is the real-life detective on whom Steve McQueen based his Bullitt character, and Ruffalo captures a kind of rumpled charm and keen intellect that is generally the goal for movie detectives, but rarely achieved as well as here. In contrast with Seven's fictional detectives who use brilliant psychological insight to catch their man, Ruffalo has precious little information with which to guide him, and over the years shown in the film becomes more and more weary of the world in general and the case specifically. Late in the film Toschi will see Dirty Harry, loosely based on the Zodiac killings, and will walk out of the theater in disgust.
If my descriptions of Zodiac seem meandering and pointless, it's largely because the whole film is largely just a sort of big shaggy dog story. Characters show up and seem important only to be discarded minutes later, erstwhile protagonists disappear for much of the film's running length, and while the film finds a sort of resolution towards the end, it's far from certain what has actually transpired in the murders themselves. I'm stepping lightly over the details of the investigation, because so much of the pleasure of the film comes from the slow accumulation of evidence over the nearly three-hour running time. Graysmith the real-life author obviously believes that he has figured out the solution to the Zodiac killings, and the movie shows his version, but a quick perusal of websites devoted to the Zodiac case show that Graysmith's version is, at best, far from the only interpretation of the events.
This, really, becomes a weakness of the film. Fincher is smart enough to leave plenty of room for doubt that Graysmith's version of events is the real one, but in the need for some sort of "resolution" the film ignores other points of view. Of course Robert Graysmith is the hero of the movie based on his own book, but other long-term enthusiasts of the case find his book self-aggrandizing and that he overlooks contradictory evidence in his attempt to put forward his own theory of the crime.
The film's other major flaw is the subplot about Graysmith's home life with his wife, played by Chloe Sevigny. Sevigny is a good actress and does what she can with the part, and it is she who provides a sort of counterpoint to Gyllenhall's obsessions towards the end of the film, but she doesn't have a lot of material with which to work, and ends up seeming like the kind of nagging wife that always seems to be in the background of the hero's home life in an action movie. It would have been best to just drop the personal stuff altogether, I think, as these sequences weigh down the narrative just when it needs to be sprinting to the finish.
Overall, Zodiac is an amazingly-acted and well-written film about a real-life incident that somehow leaves the viewer feeling empty. It's absorbing through its length and of course (this being a David Fincher film) technically superb, but in the week since I watched it I find that very little sticks in my mind. It is to be appreciated for telling the story of a real serial killer without the flashiness and other thriller-like elements so overused in Grandmaster Killer movies and is a very entertaining way of spending its running time, but Graysmith's self-aggrandizing and a slew of logical holes in the thillerish finish tend to make this more of a simple entertainment than a Film For the Ages.
For my money, the best David Fincher film I've seen is still Panic Room. Heresy, I know.
Rating: B
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