Friday, July 17, 2009

Help me understand

Currently showing is "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen", a film I will not see until it reaches the dark nether of local channels in a few years' time, a film that has received such negative reviews that to walk into a cineplex where it's screening is to curse oneself.

If the film has been received with such clear disdain, why is it making so much money, and why are the people who see it and like it so desperate to defend it when one points out that the movie is bad? I don't know, but from the online shouting matches I've seen I'd say that the Trannies ("Transformers" fanboys) are at least as uncritically passionate about the Megan Fox Monument as the Twilighters are about their bloodless and lifeless sucker movie.

Maybe it is because the target market for "Transformers", which consists out of mainly young males, is not open to critical discussion of visual texts. They do not engage with film critics ("OMG, no way I'd do that, LOL!"). They are not interested in reading reviews by those who know better - and really, those who know better, know better. An opinion is meaningless and pointless unless you can back it up with some solid argumentation, and that's something the top critics, the Eberts, Rosenbaums, Emersons and Sarrises, to name a few, can do very well.

These critics have seen near everything emerging from underground Korean markets to African family dramas. They have braved all of Michael Bay's films, and understand how they work. They have, unlike Trannies, also engaged with world cinema for over 50 years. No Trannie can argue against that; it's time to acknowledge that opinion gets you to the door but only reasoned critical thinking will get you the seat inside. Michael Bay and the Trannies have barely started down the road.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Genre mashups

“Teeth” doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a satire of small town morality, or a parody of American culture’s emphasis on female adolescent processes, or a jab at the male fear of the devouring female, or a horror entry with both blood and brains? In appearing to try to be all of these, “Teeth” fails at all of them and becomes, in a missed opportunity, just another schlock-horror with a killer who wields a vagina, not a machete. Although the film was an audience favourite on the festival circuit, it’s hard to see what everyone got so excited about. It’s badly written with a lame, unimaginative ending, and despite a game cast, it will be remembered as simply the movie with the many close-ups of bleeding penis stumps.

Acclaimed American playwright David Mamet is as well known for his movies as his plays. “Redbelt”, starring Chiwitel Ejiofor as a righteous martial arts trainer who becomes involved in dirty dealings, may not be one of his best, but it’s the kind of martial arts movie that art house audiences may actually watch where the hero is introspective, doesn’t fight a lot, and puts ethics before violence. The film moves at a brisk pace and the bad cover art design shouldn’t put anyone off of renting the movie. I imagine it is the finest possible version of “Best of the Best”.

Oscars revisited for the first time

Finally.

Ron Howard, a director often derided for being a very “commercial” filmmaker (somewhat unfairly, I think), makes the David Frost–Richard Nixon post-Watergate interview into a compelling piece of historical fiction. The film is two-thirds build up and one third interview, but the characters are fully realised and the film avoids pigeonholing Nixon as a buffoon and Frost as a nimble Brit. Both are has-beens-to-be and in equal need of something to make a lasting impression on history, and the interview is it, as it culminates in one of the most fascinating moments in American history. Even more fascinating is an apparently fictitious phone call between Nixon and Frost shortly before the interview, a conversation that deftly reveals a lot about both speaker and listener.

“Slumdog Millionaire” is Danny Boyle’s Oscar little-engine-that-could, an Indian fantasy originally intended for DVD that ended up making millions and winning numerous top awards. The film is well made if over edited; the film seems a bit too audience friendly and formulaic – and if anyone says it’s not formulaic but “strikingly original”, they’re dead wrong. It’s a good movie with potentially star making turns for Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, but hardly worthy of the heap of acclaim it’s gathered.

Watching the first act of David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, a more meditative spin on “Forrest Gump”, I thought I was watching one of the most meticulously crafted, well structured and simply magical films in recent memory. That impression lasted more or less in tact until the third act, which takes the story of Benjamin Button and does very little that’s impressive with it. Kudos to the special effects and make-up teams, as well as to the luminous females of the film: Cate Blanchett as Button’s primary love interest; Tilda Swinton, who has one of the film’s best scenes; and Taraji P. Henson as Button’s guardian. Of the three nominees mentioned in this entry, this is the film that most deserved the Best Picture Oscar.

Short cuts

I finally managed to make time for Von Trier’s “The Idiots”, the middle entry in his so-called “Golden Hearts Trilogy”. It’s as unsettling as one can expect, being a film about a group of friends (colleagues?) who spend their time “spazzing” – pretending to be mentally handicapped – as a way to, in the words of Jack Black, “stick it to the man”. Notorious for its orgy scene, “The Idiots” lacks the visual grace that the sexually compelling “Breaking the Waves” had, instead opting for breaking the cinematic illusion regularly and powerfully. And yet, none of the distancing techniques manage to distance the viewer too much; the final scene arrives with the force of a blow to the psyche as Von Trier simultaneously shows us crippling grief and the manipulative power of lies at 24 fps. All in all, the “GHT” marks a deserved watershed in Danish cinema and the Dogme movement itself.

“The Girl on the Bridge”, filmed in gorgeous black-and-white, casts Vanessa Paradis as a suicidal young woman “saved” from death by a circus knife act performer, played by French star Daniel Auteuil. The film is a simple love story unusually told; it is worth a watch for romantics who want a little edge to their dramas, though it’s far from unforgettable.

Chen Kaige’s “Together” is an unashamedly sentimental film about a peasant father who will do anything to realise his son’s musical talent. The film treads familiar territory and one expects most of what happens to happen (family feuding, family secrets revealed, the slightly bonkers music teacher with a nemesis) but Chen handles the material well enough that the final payoff will bring a quiver to just about anyone’s eye.

Acting powerhouses Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney lend their talents to the dark family comedy “The Savages” as siblings who need to figure out not only what to do about their increasingly demented father, but with their own lives. The films makes for rather heavy viewing, presenting the viewer with images of smoke trailing against a grey sky and gloomy conversations about life’s purpose. That said, the acting is superlative, the writing observant and dry, and the cinematography crystal clear and to the point.