Film for the Soul

Counting Down The Zeroes: Update

2009-10-07T14:13:00.007+01:00

Some of you may have seen Sam Juliano's humbling piece at Wonders in the Dark and wondered whether it is indeed true that Counting Down The Zeroes is at an end.

Well....it isn't. Thanks to some fine kicking of the butt from Mr Juliano, his finely measured piece has inspired me to think again about my odyssey of a project. The years 2000 to 2004 have been a blast, with over 150 posts to date - with still a few to publish, sorry about the delay guys but I had a sort of mini-confidence crisis - from up to 100 different writers! That's nothing short of spectacular given the time constraint. We should all be very proud.

However, my initial self imposed tight deadline seems foolhardy to say the least, this is a trait of mine, for some reason I can't seem to get motivated without a stupefyingly daft and unreasonable goal - if, in future, I start bleating on about what seems to be a ridiculous time schedule, please pull me up on it. So with that in mind I've decided to become far more relaxed about the whole project, starting with a break from the enterprise.

Over the next week or so (see, relaxed) I will post the remaining posts for 2004 which includes Rick Olson of Coosa Creek Cinema with his take on 'The LadyKillers', Chuck Williamson's, of Out 1, piece on 'Tony Takitani ' and Britt Parrott of Perhapses reviews David O'Russell's 'I Heart Huckabees'. After that it's a couple of months rest from the whole thing, until the new year, by which time the project will be housed at Counting Down The Zeroes. On it's resurrection, the project will take on a new form and will run like an interactive blog-a-thon but more on that later.

With that I want to say thank you to all of you that have taken part these past couple of months, it's been an unexpected delight, I've made so many new friends, contacts and been introduced to a whole host of extraordinary blogs and writers. The project is what it is simply because of your involvement.

As for me, I'm just looking forward to getting back to writing - I've done diddly squat since the conception of CDtZ's all those months back - and I can't wait to get started.

The Year 2004: Finding Neverland (Marc Forster)

2009-08-28T21:00:00.003+01:00

Joseph Belanger of the brilliant Black Sheep Reviews takes on Marc Forster's follow up to the highly successful 'Monster's Ball' with the bio-pic, 'Finding Neverland', about English playwright James Matthew Barrie, otherwise known as the scribe who created Peter Pan with yet another great submission to Counting Down The Zeroes.

I’m a sensitive guy but I don’t cry very often. Usually, the only time I find myself crying is at the movies. For me, crying is a beautiful release and when I’m watching a movie and it comes over me, I always let it out. I figure if the hard parts of my life don’t bring me to tears, then I’d better let them out whenever the opportunity presents itself, even if I’m not completely sure what it is about the image on the screen that is moving me so deeply. When I first saw FINDING NEVERLAND, it was a matinee showing. There weren’t too many people in the theatre and that suited me just fine. This way, I got to sob profusely while still maintaining some sense of privacy. When the film was released to own, I brought it home and, to my surprise, cried just as much as I did the first time I saw it. When I watched it again recently to prepare for this piece, I was concerned, at first, that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it in my mind. But then, before I could get across the room to get my box of tissues, I was weeping once again.

Based on Allan Knee’s play, “The Man Who Was Peter Pan”, FINDING NEVERLAND is something of a tear-jerker that seems deliberately designed for boys. This is Peter Pan after all and what man cannot identify with the age old tale about not wanting to ever grow up? Certainly not this one anyway. That said, I don’t think this is what gets me crying each time; that would be too simple an explanation. No, it is something inherent in the story itself that speaks directly to this boy’s heart. FINDING NEVERLAND is a story about feeling inspiration and fostering your imagination. Without either of these, Neverland could never be found. James Barrie (Johnny Depp) is the author of “Peter Pan” and the film gives us the chance to see the very real components that would become one of the most timeless children’s classics in history. As a writer, especially one who struggles to find the words from time to time, seeing that they can come from everything transpiring right in front of me was truly freeing.

Historically, Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies family in London’s Kensington Gardens in 1897. In the film, it unfolds exactly the same way, only the man of the family, Arthur, has already passed away and, of the family’s five young boys, only four make the film for fear of overcrowding. The mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet), is simply enjoying her time in the park with her boys when Barrie suddenly becomes a central figure in the boys’ game. From that moment on, he never stops playing with them. It isn’t quite so joyous for all the boys, what with their father recently passed. No, young Peter (played by Freddie Highmore in the role that turned him into a child star) finds himself facing adult realities that are far too harsh for him to process, let alone preserve his innocence. Barrie steps in as a father figure but the healing does not begin so simply. Barrie must remind the boys that their imaginations can take them anywhere they want to go, any time they want to go there. As he unleashes the power of his imagination in hopes of rekindling theirs, he finds something completely unexpected – Peter Pan.

The Year 2004: Dodgeball : A True Underdog Story (Rawson Marshall Thurber)

2009-08-27T21:00:00.004+01:00

Once again the Reel Whore of ''Reel Whore' joins Counting Down The Zeroes, having recently celebrated his two year blog anniversary with a gorgeous makeover, to take aim at one of the year's more outright absurd and comedic films. Doddgeball: A True Underdog Story became the must see comedy of the year gaining mostly favourable reviews from the critics, as well as storming the box office, and resurrecting a sport which has given the Reel Whore a whole new lease of life.

The summer of 2004 was one of those fortuitous moments when the fantasy of the movies and my routine reality crossed paths. Having recently seen Dodgeball in theaters, my girlfriend and I were walking around quoting lines incessantly. One day, a flyer at our apartment announced a dodgeball game convening at the tennis courts. A resident with a handful of those hard rubber balls, inked with stylish Spongebob and Spider-Man artwork, beckoned us to join in the fun. This weekly stress relief evolved into joining our city league, and five years later, we still find ourselves enjoying this 'child's game.' Those who know dodgeball know it's not for the weak of heart...

Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn, Starsky & Hutch), owner of Average Joe's Gymnasium, has learned that his gym is near the brink of foreclosure; partly due to his laid-back business tactics, but mostly due to his rival, White Goodman (Ben Stiller, Zoolander). The narcissistic Goodman wants Joe's shutdown so he can add extra parking for the members of his corporate Adonis factory, Globo Gym. With little time, La Fleur and with his rag-tag band of employees and clients do the only thing possible to generate the needed cash: enter the American Dodgeball Association of America International Dodgeball Championship in Las Vegas. The Joes' quest and their pathetic dodgeball skills catch the attention of seven-time all-star dodgeball champion Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn, Men in Black) who offers his expertise to help defeat Goodman's Purple Cobras team, win the $50,000 and save their gym.

I hold writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber in high regard mainly because he, like me, believes Ghostbusters to be the best comedy ever made. Prior to Dodgeball, Thurber directed the Terry Tate, Office Linebacker commercials for Reebok. After shopping his script around, Ben Stiller's Red Hour Films picked it up, and with Thurber attached to direct, the fun began. In the commentary, Thurber mentions an old adage that "90% of directing is casting." In this instance, I couldn't agree more.

I've never been a huge fan of Stiller, but I have to give him props for White Goodman. Goodman is a grade-A Ass (with two capital A's) and Stiller makes you want to put a fist right above his handlebar mustache. Vaughn, on the other hand, has always been a personal favorite; I find his dry sarcasm hilarious. Although these fellas are funny, the film meanders along the first twenty minutes while introducing the supporting cast.

Justin Long (Jeepers Creepers) plays Justin, the stumbling teen who's training at Joe's for his school's upcoming cheerleader tryouts. At this point in his career, Long was fairly unknown aside from his role on TV's Ed and the painful Jeepers Creepers franchise. Dodgeball displayed his comedic talent to a larger audience, which has since opened up opportunities galore.

Stephen Root (Office Space) plays the gym-rat, know-it-all. In a part obviously written as an homage to Rick Moranis's Louis Tully of Ghostbusters, Root dutifully stares through thick lenses while spouting factoids pertaining to every conversation's topic. Root's Gordon is the driving force behind the dodgeball competition, thanks to his subscription to Obscure Sports Quarterly. Like most roles he plays, Root is the comedic anchor; so good at what he does that you know if he's starring, you can laugh at at least one character.

Prior to Dodgeball, Alan Tudyk (Wonder Boys) was known primarily as Wash from TV's short-lived series Firefly. Here Tudyk dabbles in comic absurdity as Steve the Pirate. That's right, he's an average joe (pun intended) who dresses, talks and firmly believes he's a pirate. Peter, who lets people be who they are, goes along with his delusion. It's not a huge part for Tudyk, but let's face it, we all secretly wish more movies had pirates.

Another relative unknown at the time, Joel Moore (Grandma's Boy) plays Joe's attendant Owen. Though now he gets to star in Katy Perry videos and under-the-radar B-movies as the cool cat, here he's a uber-geeky nerdmeister with no chance of ever finding love. That is, until Globo Gym's ringer, Fran, enters the scene. Though Missi Pyle (Soul Plane) ranked on Maxim's '100 Sexiest Women' list in 2004, you wouldn't know it seeing her unibrow and crooked teeth. The scene where she's revealed still makes me cringe.

Fran's not the only love interest. Peter and White both have their sights on the bank's lawyer Kate, played by Christine Taylor (The Wedding Singer). Knowing she's Stiller's wife makes the scenes where she seems mortified by White's advances all the more funny. Kate isn't just a sex doll to be tugged to and fro by our main characters; she unleashes a ferocity on the court that makes the rest of the Joes look exactly like the little girly men they are.

Even with all this great and soon-to-be-great talent, Dodgeball leaves you feeling something's missing. Rip Torn's Patches O'Houlihan is that element. His bizarre anecdotes and brutal training tactics raise the hilarity one-hundred fold. I watched nearly doubled-over with laughter as he pelts Justin, Gordon and any slow-moving target with wrenches. He's vulgar, dirty and just plain bizarre even when he's trying to mentor the ambiguous Peter in the five d's of dodgeball; dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.

Veteran character actor Gary Cole (The Gift) plays lead announcer Cotton McKnight alongside Pepper Brooks (Jason Bateman, The Sweetest Thing). Cole is always a reliable straight man, but Bateman breaks away from his usually stoic delivery for an over-the-top portrayal that he will be called upon to do in many future roles. There are still a few cameos from some legendary television personalities to mention, but I should leave some surprises.

The story doesn't hold too many surprises in terms of execution and resolution. The shock comes mainly from watching grown people get repeatedly smacked in the face by large rubber balls (and the occasional wrench). If you're easy to offend, the vulgar language stings the ears about as bad as a red rubber ball to the temple. The real joy is in watching the characters sell every minute of this ridiculous story. Without this stellar cast, Thurber's hilarious script may have fallen flat on its face. I, like Thurber, have to thank Ben Stiller for taking a chance on a little script no one thought could make it.

The Year 2004: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins)

2009-08-26T21:34:00.013+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Joel (MovieMan0283) creator of the quite brilliant and eponymous The Dancing Image, which in the past month has just celebrated it's one year anniversary. For the year 2004, Joel is taking on the HBO produced 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers', screened in competition at Cannes and winner of the 'Best Motion Picture made for Television' at the Golden Globes.

The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zeroes

(This review discusses spoilers, including the fact that Peter Sellers dies.)

A man stands alone in the lightly falling snow, his eyes wide open, his body immobile. Inside a Swiss chateau, another man looks out the window, sees his friend half-hidden in the flurry. The man in the chateau walks outside, speechless with astonishment, and circles the man in the snow, frozen as an ice sculpture (though he betrays his humanity, and a complicity with us, in one brief moment: shifting his eyes back and forth while the other man walks behind him and is out of view). Finally the circling man (who is dressed in designer ski gear replete with dark shades, the apparel of a rich tourist) just shakes his head in disbelief. The man in the snow – clad in a drab overcoat and fedora – still has not moved an inch or acknowledged the other man’s presence (except for that brief, and unseen eye-shift). So the well-dressed man finally does the only thing he can think to do: he kisses the snow man on the forehead and walks back inside.

The tourist is Hollywood director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). The man in the snow is Peter Sellers (Geoffrey Rush). This is the closest the film comes to showing us the death which its title promises; as Edwards returns to the chateau the camera swoops up, leaving Sellers stationary in the snow, and over softly poignant music, a tasteful text rolls over the image. It informs us that Sellers died soon after, that he left a fortune to his fourth wife (whom he had intended to divorce and disinherit), and that the only affect in his wallet at the time of death was a photo of his first wife. Then we fade to black and the credits begin to roll. But just after the cast list scrolls out of view, we pull back and the image becomes flattened, as if observed on a monitor.

And indeed, it is on a monitor, watched by a man sitting in a canvas-backed chair, with his name emblazoned across its back. The name, along with the man? “Peter Sellers.” Sellers is not dressed in out-of-this-world-and-historical-moment trenchcoat and fedora, but a snazzy suit, his trademark black frames capping a self-satisfied, utterly at-ease visage. He turns towards the camera, shakes his head and sighs, speechless. The movie was good; he enjoyed it, and there’s not much more to say. So he stands up and walks off as the soundtrack blasts the Kinks’ “Well Respected Man." In mere moments, with a few deft maneuvers, the tone has become arch, comical, playful. Sellers strolls smugly across a movie set, exits onto the street outside and yanks open his trailer door. As he starts to ascend the steps, his movement is arrested by a sudden turn as he sees “us” behind him and holds up his hand, shaking his head once again. “Can’t come in here,” he informs us benevolently, but condescendingly. Then he shuts the door in our face, and there’s that name again, etched onto the trailer door. Roll credits, for real this time.

This ending tells us everything we need to know about the movie, namely that perhaps we should not take it too seriously. The film is a mixture of the satirical, the sincere (though we can never be sure how sincere), and the sociopathic. In this it certainly reflects its subject, the notoriously prickly yet brilliant British comedian who could swing from belligerent tirades to goofy pratfalls to inscrutable eccentricity with astonishing ease. I can’t speak for the veracity of all its anecdotes, but the film works on multiple levels, among which the biographical is only one.

Indeed, the movie is best taken as a subversive artifact of the Zeroes, a decade in which styles and surfaces ascended to unforeseen stages of development and self-consciousness, all while suspicions lingered that there wasn’t much “there” there. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is subversive on several levels: firstly, its hard-to-read protagonist makes hash of the usual biopic conventions (is he selfish, mentally ill, is it all an act, is he suffering inside, or is he just spoiled rotten?). One certainly can’t sympathize with Sellers and yet at times his brash, carefree narcissism can be refreshing; it’s what we secretly look for in our movie heroes, even when we demand they get their moral comeuppance (which, by the way, Sellers does, many times over). It’s hard for the screenplay to rationalize his erratic behavior with the usual biographical contrivances, though a bit too much Freudian credence is given to the overbearing Mum (Miriam Margolyes), whom Sellers calls “Peg” throughout, even as they're cuddling in bed - after his first wife leaves him, natch. (If the theory is a bit pat, it does help matters that mommy dearest is a humorously nasty piece of work herself. As her son suffers a massive heart attack, she solemnly watches the television coverage before flipping to the same news on another station and remarking with a satisfied smirk, “Both channels.”)

More obviously but perhaps also more ambitiously, the film subverts a conventional narrative approach, which is especially entrenched in the hidebound biopic genre. That said, the first phase of Sellers’ career, from lovable Goon Show loon to British Academy Award-winning actor, is presented in standard-issue clichés. There’s the snippet of the radio act (which is not especially funny in rapidly cut and shot glimpses), a bit of background (changing diapers in a London flat) and motivation (Peg tells him to bite the hands that feed him so that those above him will admire the sharpness of his teeth), failure quickly overcome with ingenious success (turned down for an audition, Sellers returns disguised as an old man and gets the part), and of course the montage to quickly inform us of all we’re missing (Sellers plays a ukulele over not-very-convincing black-and-white “home movie” footage). So far, so familiar.

But then, watching Sellers’ award reception on the tube with his parents, we get a surprise. The quiet father, constantly berated by his wife, turns to the camera and begins to address the viewer. What’s more, the actor playing the elder Sellers is no longer Peter Vaughan, but Geoffrey Rush himself, or rather Peter Sellers putting himself into the “old man’s shoes.” What he tells us is not so important – banal bromides about how Peg spoiled the boy - he always had to have the last cookie “even if it was on someone else’s plate” (cue the Sophia Loren plotline, in which Sellers convinces himself that she wants to have an affair with him - she doesn't, and he settles for her stand-in, though he's already broken up his marriage in anticipation). No, what’s most important is that the old man is Peter Sellers in makeup, that he is talking directly to the camera, and that he walks out of his cozy little room onto a movie set, where crewmembers bustle about. In other words, it’s the Brechtian gesture of the thing.

The device will be resumed throughout the film, often when we least expect it. At one point, Sellers shows up as his wife (played normally by Emily Watson, who does bemused wonders with the usually thankless type of role). The character asks to re-record Mrs. Sellers' “dialogue” – in an ADR studio, he/she then dubs a romantic rapprochement over the fed-up breakup that actually occurred. Later, in drag again as his mother, he gets up off the hospital bed and walks through several flats into a funeral home. Celebrating her son’s insensitivity for ignoring her deathbed pleas (“My boy’s a star”), Peter-as-Peg climbs into her coffin and we return to “reality” where a devastated Peter kisses the cold corpse’s lips. Commentary on the DVD informs us that these monologues were intended to show Sellers’ often self-serving conception of how other saw and perhaps justified his actions. However, they also show his immense narcissism, the way he sees other people in his life merely as different versions of himself.

Indeed, the opening credits, to the tune of Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” display a bevy of animated Peters – some old, some young, some male, some female (some even animal), yet all with the subtly hooked nose and thick black glasses. Before that, in a bookending device which will be echoed in the aforementioned conclusion, we see Peter Sellers enter a dark soundstage, bow before offscreen (imaginary?) applause and turn on the monitor, on which the rest of the film unfolds.The movie is full of such winking, fleet-footed gestures: after the fairly conventional “early years” (appropriate for the early Sellers’ self-effacing normality, not to mention pre-Swingin' Britain's postwar blues), the comedian’s life is shown as a Felliniesque carnival, full of fantasies, movie tributes, and virtual non sequitur effects, such as when our hero visits a car dealership and the various vehicles are transformed into purring sex kittens. When Sellers spots future wife (played by a charming if goofy-accented Charlize Theron) Britt Eklund’s name in a newspaper, the letters “B” and “E” pop out in animated throbs. (This is actually payoff to a gag involving Sellers' greedy psychic, played with corrupt impeccability by Stephen Fry). When the couple cavort on their first romantic excursion, they skip through ridiculously soft-focus fields in over-the-top slo-mo and fast-motion, all skillfully executed with sharp editing and expert music selection. The late sixties are presented as a cartoonish haze of pot smoke, animated butterflies, yellow subma - er, spacecrafts, and even a garishly made-up Peg-cum-human light show, doused in psychedelic front-projection. Later, when Sellers grows frustrated with his self-serving and drug-indulging lifestyle, he embraces silence and comes to embody the inner peace of Chance the Gardener from Being There. But this new-found austerity - this too is but a gimmick. Life & Death's loyalty is to style first and foremost, so traditional notions of suspended belief are thrown out the window. Thus freed, the movie projects a funhouse of film pastiches (The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Being There itself), trendy devices, hip music montages, and clever trickery.

In other words, the film moves; the editing is deft, the transitions effective if a bit trite, and flourishes goose the movie through set piece after set piece. And if it sometimes seems glib, well, that’s largely the point - not only because it echoes Sellers' own short-sighted self-centeredness. Which brings us to the movie’s third, probably unintentional, and yet most intriguing, subversion: Life & Death's narcissistic, shallow, skilled, and self-indulgent hero not only suits the style of the film, but also the dominant aesthetic of our very own decade. No other epoch has ever been as stylistically sophisticated as the Zeroes on all levels– moving light years beyond the cheesy 80s and drab 90s, movies, television, and advertisements shook off all traces of the functional and fused self-consciousness, playfulness, and technological sophistication, bringing design into the twenty-first century with a vengeance. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers represents all these trends: not only did it appear on HBO (the “happening” place to be in this past decade) and not only does it hearken back to the 60s (whose Pop consciousness, shaggy hair, and mid-decade musical and fashion tastes made a comeback in the 00s). The film is also saturated in the style-first, breezy fluidity that characterized Zeroes media. Thus we have a perfect fitting not only of subject and form, but also of zeitgeist.

True, seen from today’s vantage point, the film’s flourishes are no longer quite as effective. The CGI seems overdone, rendering many backgrounds quite cheesy, the bright lighting is too bright and lends the film’s look an unrefined pallor, and as television commercials, TV shows, and films have followed pace and completely consumed the video-age magic tricks which in Life & Death were at least nominally cutting-edge, the movie’s style does not impress the way it did just a few years ago. This is a pity, since the movie's subversive power lies in part on its very fluidity and assuredness. Still, what remains is the film’s unabashed chutzpah in foregrounding its narcissism and shallowness. Latter-day pop culture may have outstripped Life & Death’s surface dazzle, but there is an unacknowledged unease in ever-more-sophisticated media aesthetics. The facility of the technical mastery, coupled with a desire for fantasy and devotion to lifestyles and fashions of the urban rich, breeds a smug vapidity and soullessness in the cultural trendsetters. It becomes harder and harder to recognize the vast possibilities of art and, yes, entertainment, when the surface sheen hardens into a lacquer.

Which is to say, in less cryptic terms, that all ships are sailing towards the idea of how things are presented, rather than what is presented. [On the blog Little Worlds, we have been discussing these trends in relation to Julie & Julia with, I’m afraid, a bit more precision. Let me quote myself to get the point across: “I don't have a problem with escapist fantasies - just wish they could be told with a more realistic texture, instead of this flat ad-aesthetic look (fast cuts, close lens, surface-flashy but bottom-line-generic set design). But of course that would probably subvert the escapist element too much. Still, someone like Spielberg used to be able to situate fantasies in a real world setting - think of all the throwaway domestic details and humorous conversations in E.T. and Close Encounters. I think it could still be done, if mainstream filmmaking wasn't so intellectually lazy (and it's also tiresome how all adults are shown to have the emotional and intellectual maturity of high school students, but that's another point).”]

The triumph of The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is that it recognizes its own dead soul, indeed takes it as its subject, and does not let itself off the hook. One of the most noticeable “indie” trends of the decade (simultaneous with “indie” ceasing to mean actually “independent,” but rather a collection of pre-packaged quirky signifiers) is a move towards earnestness. The dominant tone of the decade has been arch irony, but it’s been guilty irony, as if the ghosts of 9/11 and Iraq were peering out of the rubble to challenge our superficiality. Yet the over-compensating New Sincerity (to borrow one of Erich Kuersten’s favorite terms) so often rings false, because it is coupled with a floridly stylistic preciousness, which Wes Anderson could pull off (at least with Owen Wilson, in his early films) but no one else seems able to nail. Occasionally Life & Death seems to be hitting this false note as well, and these are its weakest moments. It is far stronger when it allows Sellers’ narcissism to seize control of the film and make the viewer complicit in his sociopathic negation of all which interrupts his shallow pursuit of the good life.

Yet when Sellers closes the door on us in the finale, to the tune of the jaunty Kinks, he’s subverting not only the movie’s previous, and seemingly sincere, poignant conclusion (a welcome subversion, despite the Swiss finale’s admitted effectiveness) nor the film’s final attempt at narrative believability. He is also effacing the very conceit of the movie and of biopics in general: that a person can be unveiled for us onscreen (the best biopic ever, unsurprisingly also a work of fiction, both humors and shatters this convention with its elusive “Rosebud”). And with this gesture, Sellers and the filmmakers also, quite subtly, bellow out one last clarion call for humanism: there is an offscreen after all, and all the glib fireworks and magic tricks have not been the substance, but rather the articles of concealment. “Can’t come in here,” Sellers tells us before closing the door.

At least he’s honest about it.

The Year 2004: Closer (Mike Nichols)

2009-08-22T21:00:00.000+01:00

Patrick Marber's acclaimed stage drama about the interactions of four people was given a reverent screen adaptation by Mike Nichols, a director and producer akin to adapting celebrated stage works, in the year 2004. Tommy Salami of the brilliant Pluck You, Too!, in another great submission for Counting Down The Zeroes, takes on this highly successful film, dubbed as a complete success when it stormed the box-office and found favour with critics, and witnesses Mike Nichols best film since The Graduate.

"Have you ever seen a human heart? It's like a fist wrapped in blood!" Love can be a brutal weapon. A fist wrapped in blood. Never has that been more evident than in 2004's Closer, directed by Mike Nichols of The Graduate fame, based on the play by Patrick Marber. It is a four person play of two men and two women, couples which will seduce, toy with, and betray each other and the only true heart will be the one who's never told the truth about themselves.

We begin when a young American woman named Alice, played by Natalie Portman, is hit by a taxi in London; she looks left instead of right. An office worker named Dan- Jude Law- helps get her back on her feet, and when she opens her eyes she says, "Hello stranger," and we note the instant chemistry. He takes her to the hospital; they hit it off. He writes obituaries for a newspaper, but wants to be a novelist. She's an intriguing young beauty, disarming, he tells her; she becomes his muse, and a year later is publishing a book inspired by her life as a stripper. We learn this when he goes to photographer Anna (Julia Roberts) to get his mug shot for the dust jacket.

Alice is a girl, and Anna is a woman, confident, statuesque. Dan is immediately captured by her as she clicks away with her Leica. A fellow artist; an established one, as opposed to aspiring young Dan. He kisses her, but she rebuffs him, once she knows he's in a relationship. He persists, interrupted when Alice comes upstairs to use "the loo"- her affectation of Britishisms is an amusing conceit- and Anna asks to take her picture alone, recognizing her natural beauty. She's heard their flirtations, and Anna takes a photo of her sadness that eventually ends up at her photo exhibition later. Alice decides not to tell Dan what she overheard, but he never forgets Anna. If you have any doubts as to Ms. Portman's acting abilities, I suggest you see this film. She exudes a wisdom belying her age, and we know Alice knows more than her years imply, whether through instinct or experience. Jude Law's Dan is a little less mysterious; he's the artist who idealizes love, and would rather be the one doing the desiring in a relationship. He's also a bit of a prankster. One night he's in an internet chat room (looks like AOL Instant Messenger) pretending to be a woman, teasing a doctor who's up late on his shift, named Larry (Clive Owen). They have a hilarious cybersex exchange, and Dan plays a cruel trick that backfires on him: he masquerades as Anna, and tells him to meet him at the London Aquarium.

Larry is the gruff opposite of neat, pretty Dan; Clive Owen wears a perpetual five o'clock shadow, paired with his bushy eyebrows, knobby knuckles and slightly hunched posture make him seem like he crawled out of a Cro-Magnon cave and into a doctor's white coat. He's a man ruled by animal appetites, but he's sharp enough to know how to turn a prank into Cupid's arrow. His befuddlement and honest apologies after his vulgar come-ons to Anna endear him to her, and they become a couple. We meet them again at Anna's exhibition, where a huge photo of Alice's crying face fills a wall. While Dan and Anna meet to discuss their work, Larry recognizes Alice from her photo and asks her what she thinks. "It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and... all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone... But the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so... the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."

Oddly enough, you'd think Larry and Alice would hit it off immediately for they're both cynics. At one point he calls himself "a clinical observer of the human carnival," and he's the source of the opening quote about the human heart. He holds no illusions, but is not made of stone. "You don't know the first thing about love, because you don't understand compromise." And the compromise he'll make to get what he wants, and to get revenge, is the bloody heart of this story. For while he and Alice are chatting, Dan and Anna are as well. Once Anna and Dan are together, Alice and Larry are torn apart. Alice disappears into her own past, but Larry refuses to give up on Anna. When she asks him for a divorce, as an observer of the "human carnival," he accuses her of doing this because she doesn't think she deserves to be happy. I'm not a big fan of Julia Roberts, but here she is quite brilliant; Anna is a carefully built façade of strength hiding internalized self-loathing from abuse in previous relationships. "Did you get dressed because you thought I was going to hit you?" "I've been hit before." "Not by me!" Patrick Marber's screenplay based on his own play has such depths written between the lines. She wears weakness as a shield, using her past to deflect judgement for her actions. And Larry admits an infidelity with a prostitute just before her own announcement, because he senses it coming. Does he do it to get the first punch in, or because he knows she's leaving him for another man, and wants to dwarf his own indiscretion alongside hers?

Like the more recent Doubt, Closer is crafted to initiate discussion. Is Larry's infidelity somehow less criminal because he doesn't cheat with his heart? It's the stereotypical male excuse. Larry is a self-described "caveman," and we notice that his weakness is sexual, while Dan "falls in love" when he cheats. After the break-ups, Larry finds Alice working in a strip club, as he tries to clobber the pain away with sex. Wearing a pink wig, little else, and using the name Janie Jones from the Clash song, he tries to reconnect with her. She's steeled herself against her loss better than he has, despite her breakdown to Dan. The movie is perhaps most famous for this scene, not only for Ms. Portman's state of undress, but for the brutally frank dialogue. She prowls around him in the private room like a pink tigress, as he stuffs pound notes into her garter, not asking her to reveal her body, but "something true." Her response: “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off—but it’s better if you do.”

It's a line from film noir, and the irony is that she's most truthful here with Larry than with anyone else. He begs her to sleep with him, feigning pain and playing into her desire to be desired; but we'll learn, he is also marking his territory, and setting up his cruel revenge on Dan "for deceiving me so exquisitely." Because Anna needs to see him, to finalize their divorce. And as an astute observer of the human carnival, Larry knows how to get her back. He plays to her pity, and to his own caveman image: "You'd be my whore. And in return I will pay you with your liberty." Leaving his mark on her, knowing that she'll tell Dan, who won't be able to accept it. In a line used in the trailer but not the film, he says, "You women don't understand the territory, because you are the territory."

Clive Owen's portrayal of Larry is perfect, and he resembles Paul Newman in the role. A bit of Hud, surely. In the play, he had the role of the younger man Dan, versus Ciarán Hinds as the older, wiser man. Here he claims to understand love because he accepts compromise, but his idea of love is proprietary. Does he want Anna back because he loves her, because he knows he can hold her together when she's weak, or because she was taken from him? Dan says, "You love her like a dog loves its owner," but perhaps he loves her like a dog loves a bone. And while Larry says he's forgiven her, and that "without forgiveness we're savages," we know what he's done to Dan, and get the feeling Anna will be paying for her infidelities for the rest of her life. I'd always sided with Larry in early viewings, but the better I get to know him, the more I see him as a darker shade of gray than I did originally. But he does appeal to even young Dan, who apes some of his words when he goes back to Alice.

In the end, Dan is left with nothing except the revelation of his lover's secret, and Alice is again crossing the street to Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter," which tells of infatuation and loathing, only hinting at what went goes on in between; the film is similar, skipping a year between scenes, giving us only the crucial moments that send these relationships spinning off on a new axis. The moments they meet, the moments that set them into crumbling. In the background is always music from Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, which also dealt with couples swapping partners. Here it sets a bittersweet mood, as Nichols works angles and close-ups, and his D.P. Stephen Goldblatt- more famous for action films, but also for the inventive Joe vs. the Volcano- maps the geography of the four human faces with incredible detail. Patrick Marber would also go on to adapt the excellent Notes on a Scandal, and director Mike Nichols easily makes his best movie since Mrs. Robinson flashed some thigh. Clive Owen and Natalie Portman would be nominated for Oscars, and win Golden Globes. It would be shoved aside by Million Dollar Baby of all things, but I think in the years to come, this will be better remembered.

The Year 2004: Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro)

2009-08-22T09:00:00.000+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back J.D from the superb Radiator Heaven, and not only for yet another excellent submission but as team member, who will be on hand for the ever expanding project from now on. This time round however, J.D has taken on one of the more critically acclaimed comic adaptations of recent memory with Guillermo del Toro's vivid adaptation of the celebrated comic book series Hellboy.

The success of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) opened the door for a new wave a comic book adaptations. In the past, studios have played it safe and only green-lighted adaptations of mainstream comic books with large followings. However, this changed with adaptations of independent fare like Ghost World (2000), American Splendor (2003) and with Hellboy (2004). Based on Mike Mignola’s comic book of the same name, it has a dedicated cult following at best so it was a pleasant surprise to see a major studio take a big budget gamble with this title.

October 1944. The Nazis have begun mixing science with black magic in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage in World War II. The seemingly invincible Russian, Rasputin (Karel Roden) has teamed up with the Germans and plans to open a portal to another dimension and bring about an apocalypse. However, Allied troops arrive and disrupt the procedure just in time. In the process, something comes through: a red-skinned demon baby that the soldiers adopt and call Hellboy.

Present day. Rasputin has been resurrected and continues his plans to summon destructive supernatural forces that will result in the end of the world. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has matured and now works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) in New Jersey — under the guise of a waste management company (just like Tony Soprano). Along with Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), an amphibious humanoid (“the fish guy” as a guard puts it), firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), and the token “normal guy,” John Myers (Rupert Evans), Hellboy tracks down Rasputin and tries to prevent him from fulfilling his nefarious goals.

Guillermo Del Toro, a die-hard comic book fan and self-described film geek, shoots the action sequences much like he did in Blade II (2002), with crazy camera angles and fantastically choreographed fights. It’s like Del Toro took panels right out Mignola’s comic book and made them move but with the same kind of explosive energy that made Jack Kirby’s art so exciting. Del Toro also has incredible production design at his disposal to create a fully realized world rich in detail and drenched in atmosphere. He is heavily influenced by Italian horror films and not only references Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) but also the saturated primary color scheme of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) to name just a couple of examples.

Del Toro was shooting Mimic (1997) and discovered the Hellboy comic book but never thought that it could be made in Hollywood and if it did they would ruin it. He heard that it was going to be adapted into a film at Universal Pictures and started writing a screenplay in 1997. He met Mignola when they worked together on Blade II which they used as their “rehearsal” for Hellboy. They found out that they read the same comic books and pulp and classic gothic horror novels. With Hellboy, Del Toro wanted to make a self-contained film, “almost a fairy tale, a fable.” His original pitch to executives at Sony-based Revolution Studios was that both The Mask (1994) and Men in Black (1997) were comic books that they were not familiar with and yet went on to become extremely successful films. He told them that the same thing could happen with Hellboy. In April 2002, Del Toro’s film was given the green-light at a budget of $60 million.

Del Toro first saw Ron Perlman in Quest for Fire (1982) and then The Name of the Rose (1986) and was very impressed with his acting, so much so that he ended up casting the actor in his first film Cronos (1994). Del Toro initially wanted him to play Hellboy but Vin Diesel was a rising star at the time and so the director approached him instead for the role. However, with the move from Universal to Revolution, Diesel dropped out of the picture and Perlman was in. Early on, if the actor didn’t work out, Del Toro thought about making Hellboy a mixture of puppet and computer graphics. He talked to James Cameron who warned him that if he went that route he would lose the love story. Del Toro wisely decided to stick with Perlman.

Perlman is perfectly cast as the cigar smoking, two-fisted action hero who eats Baby Ruth candy bars and loves cats. He does a great job of capturing Hellboy’s sarcastic, wise-cracking nature. Perlman gets to utter cool one-liners and looks fantastic in his make-up (thanks to legendary make-up artist Rick Baker). Often, what makes it to the film rarely resembles what was drawn in the comic book. Not the case here — Perlman IS Hellboy. With this role, he firmly established himself as one of the cult film icons of the new millennium (much like Bruce Campbell was in the 1990s). Perlman has got the drop-dead cool action hero shtick down cold. With his hulking, imposing physique, he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger with brains and irony.

Del Toro cast Selma Blair because he always saw a “haunting quality in her eyes and in her look. Sort of a doomed, gothic beauty in her.” He was a fan of The Larry Sanders Show and felt the Jeffrey Tambor had that “smarmy, wannabe bureaucratic presence” that was ideal for Tom Manning. He cast Tambor against type and wanted him to be an “absolute asshole in the beginning, and play it straight.” Del Toro and Mignola created the character of Myers to guide audiences into Hellboy’s world. The director interviewed a lot of young Hollywood actors but many of them were “just too cute and too Calvin Klein beautiful to put in the movie.” He liked Rupert Evans because he had “such an open face, and he had a real innocence about him.” Del Toro saw John Hurt in Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and felt that the actor had “that little air of tragedy about him” that suited Professor Bruttenholm.

Hellboy is one of those rare comic book movies with depth. It takes time to develop its characters and the relationships between them. There is the touching father-son relationship between Hellboy and Bruttenholm and the romantic love triangle between Hellboy, Myers and Liz. While the film has the requisite slam-bang action sequences, it is not dominated by them. The film is not driven by them but rather by the characters and the story. And this is because Del Toro has strong source material to draw from: Mignola’s comic book, in particular “Seed of Destruction,” which chronicles Hellboy’s origins. Both Del Toro and Mignola’s works are steeped in the gothic and horror genres, in particular the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. The author’s influence is all over this movie as Hellboy trades blows with Cthulhu-inspired creatures that would make ol’ Lovecraft proud. While Del Toro’s film didn’t exactly rack up the kind box office numbers the studio was hoping for, it did prove to be quite popular on home video and eventually spawn an even better sequel in 2008.

The Year 2004: Love Song For Bobby Long (Shainee Gabel)

2009-08-21T10:20:00.006+01:00

Andrew Kendall of Encore's World of Film & TV takes on 2004's 'underwhelming' Love Song for Bobby Long, based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps, starring John Travolta as a washed up literature professor. Something of a flop at the box-office, despite co-starring the in favour Scarlet Johansson, a Love Song for Bobby Long fared just as poorly with the critics yet Andrew believes it's not all that bad and it's certainly a movie worth your time.

Love Song for Bobby Long can easily be classified as good trash, and that’s for the most part what it’s been called. It performed underwhelming at the box office, mediocre to fair with the critics but… and this is a big but – it’s not a bad movie.

A Love Song for Bobby Long stars John Travolta and Scarlet Johansson. As an actor John Travolta falls into a specific group of actors including Nicolas Cage and George Clooney. Movie stars with rabid followers that have never impressed me with their acting abilities. To be honest Cage was good in Leaving Las Vegas, but he stole Sean Penn’s Oscar so I can acquiesce. A Love Song for Bobby Long is about a drifter of a man living in a somewhat derelict house somewhere in the south. When a death leaves a brash, young woman – Purslane (Johansson) to inherit a share in the home it leads to some interesting situations. Purslane and Bobby Long do not hit it off, and the latter’s protégé Lawson played by the capable Gabriel Macht must play mediator. As the film gets on his feet it becomes shockingly non sentimental as we try to get the background behind Bobby Long’s strange character. John Travolta does not have half of the charm required to play the role nor does he succeed with his ludicrous concoction of a Southern Accent, but we manage to care about his Bobby despite all these faults. But the highlight of the film is not him.

A Love Song for Bobby Long earned one major award nomination. A Golden Globe Best Actress nomination for Scarlett Johansson. Her name is not in the title but Purslane is the main character of the film. Her Purslane just may be akin to the typical angst ridden teenager girl trying to find her way, with a pot mouth. She does not reinvent the wheel in her acting style but she’s not supposed to. This is not a tour de force role in any way. The writing is not the strong point of the film. The actors particularly Johansson and Macht try their best and their chemistry is undeniably affecting.

There are two surprises in A Love Song for Bobby Long. One concerns the lease of the house the three live in and the other concerns Purslane’s parents. Both do not work as well as they’d like to, but the former comes off better. This is so because of the main actor’s dedication and because of the general believability of the situation, the second is not as lucky. Most of the audience probably saw it coming and it seems a bit cut and dry. And Johansson is not as strong in that pivotal scene as she is in the earlier and brassier parts of the film. Still it could have been worse.

A Love Song for Bobby Long suffers because it does not know what type of film it is. Is it a coming of age drama about a lost girl, a film about forbidden romance, a teacher/student buddy film or a sentimental family drama….and the list goes on. They don’t know, and we don’t know. But for the most part, we do care…and it’s worth your time. Especially if you’re a fan of Macht or Johansson.

The Year 2004: Sideways (Alexander Payne)

2009-08-19T20:55:00.005+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes Pat, of the fabulous Doodad Kind of Town, back to the project with yet another brilliant submission, check out her blog for more of the same. This time round Pat takes on Alexander Payne's latest comedy-drama, Sideways, about two friends who take a week long road-trip through Santa Barbara wine country. Almost reinvigorating the wine industry single handedly and winning a host of awards for it's sharp script, Sideways became the darling of the independent cinema scene in 2004 and for Pat, the allure has remained but the original infatuation has waned to revel an engaging, heart-warming and good, but not great, movie.

There are some films you love the first time you see them; you come back to revisit them a few years later and are delighted to find fresh nuances, deeper insights, moments that touch your heart or your funny bone more deeply than you'd been able to appreciate in the first viewing.

There are some films you love the first time you see them; you revisit them a few years later and are dismayed to find that they don't live up to your happy memories. The moments you cherished on the first viewing seem curiously flat and disappointing the second time through.

And then there are movies like "Sideways."

I loved this film to pieces when I first saw it in 2004. After re-watching it for the first time in five years, I still enjoyed it tremendously, but can't say I found anything new or surprising within. It remains a solidly entertaining, well-acted, character-driven comedy that strikes all the right notes from pathos to raunchy humor. But it's not a classic for the ages.

All of which is not intended as damnation by faint praise. There's something immensely joyful and comforting in revisiting characters you've enjoyed spending time with before and finding them just as maddening and interesting and lovable when you re-encounter them again years later. "Sideways" achieved that for me, and that's not an achievement to be dismissed lightly.

For the uninitiated, "Sideways" is the tale of two longtime friends. Miles and Jack, making a last "bachelor's" trip together to California's wine country before Jack's wedding. In standard fashion, that trip will ultimately test their friendship and push them both to become a little better men by the time the closing credits roll. It's also a whole lot of fun to be along for that ride, not least because what constitutes a successful trip varies so wildly according to the two men's points of view.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a perpetually morose and miserable would-be writer and oenophile, still pining for his ex-wife. His agenda for the trip is to "drink some good wines, play some golf and relax" while teaching his buddy the finer points of wine appreciation. Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) on the other hand, is an affable, nearly washed-up actor and unrepentant ladies man who can't tell a pinot from a zinfandel and wants little more from the trip to get both Miles and himself laid.

There's an undeniably by-the-numbers yin and yang to these characters. (Miles is the pessimist, Jack is the optimist. Miles is the intellectual whose idea of good time is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, Jack is incapable of thought deeper than "Let's party!" Miles is the moralistic buzzkill, Jack is just wants everybody to have good time and deal with the consequences later.) It's to the credit of both Giamatti and Hayden Church (as well as writer/director Alexander Payne) then that these characters and their story arc never get stale or entirely predictable; their friendship feels real and lived-in. I like that we aren't given much back story on how these two became and remained friends, other than that they were freshman-year roommates at San Diego State. The actors, under Payne's skillful direction, fill in those blanks for us through the nuances of their performances.

Giamatti, with his sloping shoulders and basset hound eyes, is a perfect embodiment of the sad and beaten down Miles. He finds the subtle layers in Miles' arrogance, desperation and emotional pain and plays them so nakedly and honestly that his misery is sometimes painful to witness. (As in the scenes where Miles wrestles with his own self-loathing before getting up the nerve to kiss the woman of his dreams or drunk-dials his ex-wife. Or especially in the late scene where Miles, having learned that his ex-wife is not only happily remarried but pregnant, grabs his prized bottle of 1961 Chateau Cheval Blanc and sneaks it into a fast-food restaurant, swigging it between bites of a burger and onion rings; it's heartbreaking and squirm-inducing at the same time, and Giamatti doesn't back off from awfulness of it at all.)

For his part, Hayden Church brings to Jack both a breezy spontaneity and a lovable dufus quality that keeps you laughing out loud. Jack is loathsome and lovable in equal measures; he can charms the pants off you, but he's not to be trusted. And at the same time, we can't help but like him because -whatever deceptions he tries to pull over on the women in his life - he never gives up on Miles. It's the only evidence of depth and a capacity for commitment that the character evinces; thankfully, Hayden Church plays this unflagging loyalty lightly and unself-consciously.

The flaws in Jack, however, point to what could be considered the flaw in "Sideways": the female characters are a tad one-dimensional, and to my mind, not nearly as well-served by the film's script as as the travelling buddies. Virginia's Madsen's Maya, the waitress/graduate student with whom Miles briefly and tentatively finds affection, has a nice warmth and wariness. Yet for all the sweet soulfulness Madsen brings to it, Maya still feels like an undercooked Dream Girl role. It's never really clear why someone as beautiful and seemingly well-balanced as Maya would be drawn to such an unquestionably complicated and unhappy man such as Miles, although there's never a question as to what Miles sees in Maya.

The two characters connect most memorably in the scene where they share what they most love about good wine. Miles has an affinity for pinots, as he explains to Maya, because the grapes are so sensitive, requiring special, tender care and cultivation in order to produce good flavor (not unlike Miles himself). Maya talks glowingly about how when she drinks wine, she imagines all the people who have been involved in making it, and concludes by declaring "And it tastes so fucking good." Madsen, the blond curls framing her face subtly backlit as if a halo, is radiant as she delivers this monologue in a hushed and honeyed tone of voice, and we can see why Miles falls in love with her at that moment. And there's enough intelligence in Madsen's performance that we get a hint of why Miles erudition and articulateness might interest her. But even in this scene, the purported mutual attraction feels unbalanced.

Sandra Oh, the sassy wine pourer for whom Jack very nearly derails his engagement has a nice, peppery screen presence - but her character is even less dimensional than Madsen's. She's little more than a standard-issue Sexy Spitfire, an excellent foil for Jack but not around enough for us to see beyond that. I'd have loved for her to have more to do than just beat Hayden Church's face to a pulp with her motorcycle helmet after she learns he's getting married, bracing as that beatdown is to watch.

Beyond my affection for these characters, "Sideways" is a treat from me - someone who knows little about wine - just to be drawn into the esoteric, slightly exotic world of wine appreciation. There's an early scene in while Miles teaches Jack how to taste wine: how to swirl it in the glass to "open it up," how to sniff the bouquet. Miles finds all sorts of notes in his glass of pinot: "citrus, strawberries, oak, a soupcon of a nutty Edam cheese," where Jack just looks confused and keeps sniffing earnestly until he can at least detect "Strawberries, yeah." This scene and others like it tickle me silly. Many have tried to educate me about wine, but I have no nose whatsoever. I'm just as likely to be satisfied with a bottle of Three Buck Chuck as a fine pinot, but I'm always fascinated by the people who can make the distinction. Thankfully, you don't need an appreciation of wine to have an appreciation of "Sideways;" its tart humor and bruised heart are accessible to all.

The Year 2004: Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)

2009-08-18T21:00:00.001+01:00

Rick Olson of the superb Coosa Creek Cinema is back at Counting Down The Zeroes with this great review of Bad Education, his second submission to the project on the films of Pedro Almodovar, the other being Talk to Her. Bad Education opened the 57th Cannes Film Festival back in 2004 and became yet another art house hit for the Spanish auteur in a film that appeared to be the director's most deeply personal work to date.

Although hardly a model of restraint, 2002's Talk to Her is one of Pedro Almodóvar's more subtle outings. Every bit as subversive as, say, All About My Mother or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! it nevertheless works more around the edges, more in the realm of growing disquiet. Not so his followup, 2004's Bad Education (La mala educación): floridly melodramatic, it delights in a style that might be called gay grand guignol.

Underneath all the baroque shenanigans lie Almodóvar’s usual thematic suspects: identity, marginality, and the place of the outsider in the world. Outsiders like the director himself: from the opening credits we are encouraged to regard this as having an autobiographical component. The final card of the opening credits – "Escrita y Dirigida por Pedro Almodovar" – dissolves into a title placard on the wall of the fictional director of the Education storyline: "Escrita y Dirigida por Enrique Goded." We are advised, right up front, that this indeed may be about the Spanish director himself.

Or maybe not. How much of it is autobiographical is an open question, but ultimately not a very interesting one. We do know that Almodóvar went to a Catholic boarding school, and that he’s not too fond of the Church. And the action of Education revolves around what may, or may not have, happened at such a school. Actor Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal) – who now wants to be called “Ángel” – shows up at the production offices of director Goded (Fele Martínez) looking for work. He and Goded have a past: they were lovers in a Catholic boarding school. Only problem is, Enrique doesn’t recognize him – cue music – but it has been a long time.

Ignacio does not come empty-handed: he is bearing a story, based on the shared experiences of the two former lovers. Goded is between projects, so he takes it home, despite his reservations about Ignacio. As he settles in to read, we experience – apparently in flashback – the narrative in his hands. A drag queen named Zahara (also played by García Bernal) picks up a guy at a club and takes him back to her hostel with robbery on her mind. As she picks though his wallet, she discovers he’s old friend and lover Enrique Serrano, so she forgoes the theft of his money and scooter, and embarks on her original plan: the blackmailing of Fr. Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the priest who abused her/him and Enrique at that boarding school.

Are you with me? Good. What we appear to be seeing is Bad Education's depiction of the story Ignacio brought to Goded, the one based on their shared experiences. But is it really? It has the feel of a cinematic flashback, but it clearly is not: while Zahara is played by García Bernal, this Enrique is played by another actor (Alberto Ferreiro). Further, it can’t be a dramatization of what really happened between the two, because we just saw objective reality: that Ignacio and Goderd first met, after two decades apart, in the prosaic environs of a production office.

So from the outset, Almodóvar is up to his old tricks: the systematic destabilization of our expectations. He uses the trope of the flashback to mess with our heads. At the same time, as he does so often, he infuses a soapy melodramatic structure with outrageously transgressive behavior. The sex between Zahara and the flashback-Enrique is not only hilarious but hilariously obscene. And because it is between two men, it fans the flames of homoerotic nervousness that reside in all but the most sexually secure heterosexual breast.

But wait! There’s more! We are already suspicious – as is Enrique Goded – about the true identity of Ignacio/Ángel, and now we see him in woman’s guise, and we wonder: just who is this guy? Is he Ignacio or Ángel? Male or female? Gay or straight? And lest we forget, this is a film about film-making: how much of what we’re seeing is meta, part of a film-within-a-film, and how much is objective reality?

Well, none of it, of course. It is all a lie ... 24 lies a second, as Brian de Palma famously said. And nobody uses that notion with more brio than Pedro Almodóvar. After Zahara corners Fr. Manolo in his office, demanding blackmail, we see a flashback of what happened to Ignacio and Enrique at his hands. When it ends, the face of the child Ignacio dissolves into that of Bernal, reinforcing his identification with the child. It throws us off balance. Even though we are pretty sure that Bernal's character isn't who he claims to be, we expect a certain kind of relationship -- of "likeness" -- to be explicated by a match dissolve. In this case, though there is a relationship, it is not what is implied by the cut.

Almodóvar has remarked that he based Ignacio/Ángel/Zahara/Juan on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley: a completely amoral force with an angelic face. Perhaps his insistence upon being called "Ángel" reflects how he wants to portray himself. Whatever the case, none of it would work without a strong central presence: in a sense, the figure of Ignacio/Ángel represents all the thematic obsessions of our intrepid Spanish director– Almodóvar, that is – rolled into one. And García Bernal plays him with gusto: one moment the wide-eyed young actor, eager for his first big break, and the next a nihilistic, pill-popping drag queen, damaged literally beyond recognition. Later, after all the story lines come together, we see him as "Juan," and it is a darker version still. It is a bravura performance that establishes García Bernal in the pantheon of top film actors of any nationality.

The remainder of the cast is solid, especially Martínez and Giménez Cacho, and as in all of Almodóvar's later output, it is beautifully shot and edited. Although there are elements of film noir at work, it is all wrapped in Almodóvar’s day-glow sensibility, with its pastel art direction and Douglas-Sirk beat. Coupled with cinematographer José Luis Alcaine's beautifully saturated photography, the director's compositional precision produces startlingly beautiful images.

But as in all of Almodóvar's films, the tale is in the telling -- and the subverting. His power as a filmmaker resides in his ability to take socially-accepted notions of reality and propriety and turn them gleefully on their heads. That he makes the process wildly entertaining is the key to his success. In some ways, he's like an impish child: he may do the most outrageous things, and manipulate us in the most shameful ways, but you can't stay mad at him. All you can do is go along for the ride.

The Year 2004 - Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh)

2009-08-17T20:10:00.005+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming Bob Turnbull of the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, his classy film blog that's currently taking in the sights at the 4th Toronto After Dark Film Festival, do yourself a favour and check it out. In Bob's first submission to the project, he takes on Steven Soderbergh's sequel to the successful crime bud-fest Ocean's Eleven, starring pretty much everyone ever, Ocean's Twelve and what Bob finds, he likes.

The shifting rainbow of colours over the Warners logo signals the intent right away - Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's Twelve" is not going to be a simple heist movie follow-up to "Ocean's Eleven". All the players are indeed back from the original, new stars have been added and there's all those heist components and con games that run through the movie, but the style has been augmented past a simple riff on 60s cool. It morphs into and becomes part and parcel of the story itself. Though by no means realistic, it is at least logically consistent within the world of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) - a world where he and his co-leader Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) are smarter than everyone else, know what everyone else is thinking before they think it (including the audience) and can make things happen in incredibly short turnaround times. Accept that and you'll enjoy the twists and turns of the plot while Soderbergh plays with techniques and creates more than a heist picture. He's made a full bore art film.

The story starts some time after the squad of the first film has divvied up their ill-gotten gains from the big heist of the Vegas casinos. They've begun their lives anew and we get reintroduced to each one in turn. In each case though, it happens right at the moment that casino owner Terry Benedict (played again by Andy Garcia) has tracked them down and given them a single ultimatum - pay back the entire amount that was stolen, plus interest, or suffer the consequences. It comes out to roughly $100 million dollars, so Benedict gives them ample time to come up with the cash: 2 whole weeks. This sets off the plot as the gang reconvenes, figures they need a big score to pay him back and decide to go to Europe to begin looking for "jobs". The only thing they can find pays only a fraction of the full amount, but they can't even collect it since they've been beaten to the punch by The Night Fox - a master criminal who is at the root of Ocean's problems. It turns out that he's the one who ratted out the group to Benedict in order to force them into a position where they would have to agree to his own demands: have a competition to see who is the best criminal mastermind in the world. If Ocean can steal the Faberge Egg, The Night Fox (played in fine fashion by Vincent Cassel) will repay their debt in full. If not, he'll steal it, prove that he is the best and leave Ocean's gang to the hands of Benedict. It's patently absurd of course, but if you accept the reality the movie carves out, the pieces actually fit once all the elaborate schemes, ruses and cons have played out.

Many complaints aimed at the film point out that the audience is left out of the loop. There's no way, they claim, that the viewer has a chance of figuring things out before all is revealed towards the end. True enough, but so what? It's not all about the heist. The enjoyment is the ride and the view from your seat along the way. Soderbergh is a master at creating great looking visuals (the film couleur of "The Underneath", the different film stocks of "Traffic", the recreation of a 40s film in "The Good German", etc.) and he reaches deep into his bag of tricks throughout this entire movie. He uses cinematography, editing and music with controlled abandon to experiment with ways to avoid exposition, create mood, introduce new characters and simply tell his story. Freeze frames, chopped timelines, black and white to colour transitions, on screen titles describing time or location changes (e.g. half second shots introducing the city of Amsterdam), tilted camera angles, colour filters and reference points from film history all take their own turns. An example of the latter is from the opening scene when we get some back story on Rusty Ryan. Three years earlier he was living with an up and coming young detective named Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and as he realizes that she may have found clues that would implicate him in a recent theft, he runs out on her as she sleeps. In a steal from a famous sequence in Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood", the shadows of raindrops are cast over Isabel's face like tears. My favourite visual treat though is Soderbergh's choice to work predominantly with a contrasting colour palette of blues and oranges. It's gorgeous.

Another key element of the film is David Holmes' terrific score. Chock full of wakka-chukka wakka-chukka funky guitars, bongos and other modernized 60s sounds, the music is an essential component linking everything together. Early in the film, there's a great shift from the playful tone of Ocean and his wife (Julia Roberts) chatting on the phone to the desperate on the run situation he finds himself in when Benedict shows up. Holmes' driving rhythm follows him onto a speeding train and it captures the urgency, slight panic and churning thoughts of Ocean as the camera shows him from a variety of angles. It's an "OK, here we go..." moment. The dance through the lasers during The Night Fox's theft of the Faberge Egg is another moment - but this time it's pure art. Orange and blue is the colour scheme of course, but the scene is made by Holmes' accompanying slightly funky tune. It's a great match of the visuals to the music as it truly feels like the master criminal is dancing through those random laser beams while that music plays in his headphones. The scene, of course, is ridiculous if you read the film as a pure heist picture. Physically impossible. And yet it brings a smile to my face every time because it is such a joy to watch.

The characters in the film depend heavily on the performances and the actors themselves. It's hard to separate Ocean from Clooney, Ryan from Pitt and the other team members from their respective famous actors (Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Bernie Mac, etc.). Soderbergh's not looking to do that though since much of the humour (and there's a good deal of it) consists of in-jokes, specific acting quirks and well-timed pauses and beats. Many have complained that the entire enterprise is just a bunch of friends making themselves laugh. Perhaps, but at least there's no pandering for broad appeal or attempts to explain everything. As well, it gives them the freedom to be relaxed and confident as they work through getting the rhythms of a scene (Matt Damon in particular is very adept at hitting his beats on the nose). If you don't get the "Kashmir" joke that's OK, maybe you'll love the Topher Grace cameo ("I totally phoned in that Dennis Quaid movie") or the Bruce Willis surprise visit or the left in outtakes (Scott Caan cracking up at a tossed off Elliot Gould line while they wait for the bathroom). It's not smarmy - they genuinely look like they're having fun, so it's easy to ride along with them. Is the Julia Roberts storyline a bit too self-aware? Maybe so, but given the nature of the rest of the story, reading too much more into it then the fact that it's just a clever way of playing up her celebrity would be a mistake.

It doesn't matter though. Soderbergh is using the medium and a fun story to play and create a work of art that can be rewatched and enjoyed time and again for all of its style, techniques and compositions as well as its story, script and characters. It's got it all - style AND substance.

The Year 2004: SARS Wars (Taweewat Wantha)

2009-08-16T20:30:00.008+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming back Peter Nellhaus of the superb Asian cinema centric blog Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee, who once again shines light on a film from a corner of the globe that doesn't feature that prominently at the western multiplex. Having created something of a cult following, the Thai comedy-horror SARS Wars, in which the virus SARS has mutated and the infected turn in to rampaging zombies, is significent, according to Peter, 'for the changes within the Thai film industry' that took place after its release.

Just viewed on a superficial level, Sars Wars might be judged simply as one of the more entertaining films to combine horror and comedy. A shorthand description might be to think of the film as Land of the Dead as re-imagined by Mel Brooks. There are the usual hallmarks of a zombie film, the slow walking zombies hungry for human flesh and brains, exploding heads, geysers of blood, a flying zombie baby, sliced off body parts, and a sense of inescapable doom. Add to that a plethora of jokes about sex and sexuality that are often the staple of Thai films, but may also cause those attached to consistent political correctness some discomfort. In the years since Sars War was released, the film has more significance in light of the career of the director, and also with changes within the Thai film industry.

Taking place during the time when Sars was a genuine concern in Asia, the film begins with a government spokeswoman stating that Thailand has remained untouched by the virus and will remain so. Of course that changes when an infected flying insect travels from Africa to Asia, has a close encounter with an airplane, and lands on the back of the neck of Andrew Biggs. This is one of the film's in-jokes, as Biggs is an Australian who is also a Thai television personality and journalist. Gradually infected, Biggs finds his way back to the parking space of the apartment building he lives in. Provoked by a neighbor, he bites the first of several neighbors in the building where most of the action takes place. Concurrently, Liu, the daughter of a wealthy man, is kidnapped by a team of inept criminals on the streets outside Bangkok. One of the kidnappers is dressed up in a bear costume, while Liu's chauffeur is distracted by a loitering babe in a bikini, who unmasked turns out to be Yai, a transsexual. Yai is played by popular Thai comic actor Somlek Sakdikul, who is as homely as he is hilarious. Liu's father hires the virtuous Khun Krabii to rescue his daughter based on the advice of the aging martial arts master, Thep. Everyone meets up at the apartment building which is soon sealed off to contain this new version of Sars.

Taweewat Wantha pokes fun at Thailand and the sometimes misguided sense of Thai pride, first with the government spokeswoman assumption that Thailand is safe from Sars, but then her solution to the problem. After surrounding the apartment building with troops and closing off the exits, she announces that a cure is available, made in Thailand. A television reporter questions is addresses his concern only to be made the first victim of the cure. It is soon revealed that the actual cure is to kill everyone in the building. Dr. Diana appears, claiming she has a real cure to the virus and is allowed one hour to prove herself. Among those infected by the virus are the patrons of a nightclub at the base of the building, a large ladyboy's cat, and a snake that eats part of the cat, growing giant sized in the process. Khun Krabii finds Liu, while Master Thep joins forces with Dr. Diana.

During the course of the proceedings are jabs at Star Wars, Anaconda, The Matrix, Thai censors, some internationally famous Chinese language martial arts movies, Thai attitudes towards non-Thais, and the movie itself. The narrative begins with an animated introduction of the characters and breaks into animated flashbacks, similar to Kill Bill. Within the context of the film, I view this as Taweewat's love of other films, especially those with a heightened unreality, rather than laziness, as all of the elements work together within a relatively unified whole.

As it's turned out, Sars Wars has been Taweewat's most successful film. Following some screenings at film festivals, Sars Wars is the only one of Taweewat's films to be internationally available on DVD. I was lucky enough to be in Thailand and see his second film, The Sperm. Even more challenging to traditional good taste, The Sperm is about a young man who, in a moment of unrelieved horniness, relieves himself in an alley. The sewer in the alley contains water contaminated by a failed scientist. The young man soon finds that he has fathered hundreds of clones. Aside from showing a couple of years ago at the Philadelphia Film Festival, The Sperm would remain little seen. Perhaps turned off by the title, the film was shunned by Thai audiences, and I was alone at the showing I attended. Taweewat's most recent film, Dek Khong, about the friendship between a high school girl and a very big five year old boy, also failed to attract viewers. That Taweewat's last two films flopped, even when he deliberately set aside his more satiric leanings for something more audience friendly, is not encouraging for a filmmaker who works in an industry where the cost of film production cannot be supported by home audience alone.

Additionally, new rules regarding what is allowed in Thai films would seem to disallow making another film like Sars Wars. In the past year or so, there has been more censorship of on-screen violence, with increased pixelation of scenes of violence. The change in the Thai government that took place in 2006, as well as the rules in the new Thai rating system suggests that even good natured ribbing of the Thai government might not be allowed on films seen by the Thai public. That Thailand film companies have virtually discontinued having English language subtitles on their DVDs severely limits the viewing and appreciation of Thai films, due to a short-sighted need to cut costs and supposedly undermine piracy.

At the very least, Sars Wars should be appreciated for what it is, a genial, goofy riff, that isn't scary, but is at times very funny. Even if a verbal joke about Andrew Biggs being part Alsatian doesn't translate culturally, it does not take much to appreciate seeing Lena Christensen fighting zombies wearing black leather hot pants, or Suthep Pongam on the attack with a light sabre powered by batteries that seem to fail at the worst possible moment.

The Year 2004: Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi)

2009-08-15T21:34:00.010+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes the Film Dr, of the marvellous The Film Doctor, to the year 2004, where he takes on the highly successful sequel to the equally lucrative movie rebranding of the superhero Spider-Man. Set two years after the original, Spider-Man 2 not only outshone it's predecessor at the box-office but was extremely well received by critics and audiences worldwide. Although not a fan of the superhero genre the Film Dr seems as surprised as the rest of us when he declares this as 'one of the best films of 2004'.

I am not usually a fan of superhero films. I never read action comics much as a kid. Even while watching the otherwise thought-provoking Watchmen, I found the brightly-colored costumes distracting and implausible, and I’ve long since gotten bored with the conventions of the genre--the formative superhero myths (irradiation, the fall into acid), the damsels in distress, the flamboyant iconic villains, the use of animal imagery (Aardvarkman, Armadillogirl), the secret identities, and the superpowers that make for gee whiz fight scenes (such as in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) where often nothing can be resolved because both fighters cannot really get hurt. These films often seem swollen with exaggerated and simplistic characters who can personify rage or the desire to fly or adolescent dreams of instant power, but not much else. So I’ve never entirely understood why Spider-man 2 immediately struck me as one of the best films of 2004. It contains many of the same aforementioned cheesy elements, but director Sam Raimi and his crew managed to transcend them by skillfully dramatizing the conflict between Peter Parker’s human concerns and his superhero imperative, by including a plausible love story, by having all of the major characters grow and change in some way, by neatly integrating state-of-the-art action into the narrative, and by retaining enough of Raimi’s signature B-movie horror effects to keep things lively. Throughout, Raimi uses Peter Parker’s inner conflicts to make the film emotionally more plausible than most superhero films.

In the first Spider-man, Peter walks away from Mary Jane with the resolve to pursue his heroic mission without her. He says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but in Spider-man 2 Peter does not balance the demands of work and school and superhero status at first. Instead, he’s a mess. In the opening scene, he attempts to deliver pizza under a deadline, but due to his need to save some kids who run in front of a truck, he loses his job. In dramatic contrast to his ability to swing through the urban canyons of New York, he drives a scooter haplessly in traffic until it gets smashed by a car. He lives in a cruddy apartment near the roar of a subway and has a landlord who constantly harangues him for rent money. (By the way, Wesley Gibson, the hero of Wanted, also has a similarly located apartment, an even more pitiful lifestyle, and a Spiderman-esque ability to jump onto the roofs of subway trains.) Peter’s grades are suffering. He can’t even manage to make it to an 8 o’clock showing of The Importance of Being Earnest where Mary Jane performs. For much of the first hour of the film, Peter suffers one loss after another, to the point where one forgets his superhero status, and Tobey Maguire’s haunted and stunned expression conveys Stan Lee’s dictum that “Life isn’t easy for anybody.” In the supplemental materials that go with the DVD, Sam Raimi makes it clear that one of his goals was to “beat up Peter Parker,” and the strategy works (one thinks of Hitchcock’s cruelty to Cary Grant in North by Northwest). Fate becomes cruel enough to cancel out any possible smugness and complacency Peter may feel due to his superpowers.

Other characters vary. As Mary Jane Watson, Kirsten Dunst is deified on billboards and posters, but she also gets understandably impatient with Peter’s inability to confess his painful love for her. As Harry Osborn, James Franco feels a Hamlet-like rage (complete with dagger) at Peter for not helping him avenge his father’s murder (I prefer Franco in stoner mode). And Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) is initially a very genial scientist with a loving wife (Donna Murphy). He even discusses T.S. Eliot (!) with his wife and Peter as they sit around the cozy kitchen table. His high-profile science experiment in fusion goes awry quickly, thereby turning him into a monster with evil sentient metallic snakelike arms that take over his brain (a bit like Adam seduced by the serpent Satan in the Garden of Eden), but he quickly develops an intriguing way to lurch around the Manhattan skyline when he’s not robbing banks or building a new reactor inside an abandoned warehouse on the river. In comparison to the more baroque Green Goblin of Spider-man, Doc Ock has a brooding noir persona with his trench coat and shades, giving him a sense of intellectual weight that makes up some for his bad guy behavior.

As the film goes on, Peter experiments with dropping his Spider-man persona altogether, and I liked the Burt Bacharach “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” montage, a reference to another goofy scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Peter kind of enjoys his ability to be simply human (with the parallel ethical realization that others may suffer and die without his help). But what really gets to me are two key scenes later in the movie. The first occurs after Peter finally confesses to his Aunt May Parker (the excellent Rosemary Harris) that he was responsible for her husband’s death. In the bleached out cinematography of her dining room, May just walks off, leaving Peter feeling worse than ever. But later he returns to find her moving out of the house. Perhaps because she has figured out that he is Spider-man, she says nevermind about Peter’s role in her husband’s death, and gives this speech:

“ . . . Lord knows, kids like Henry need a hero. Courageous, self-sacrificing people. Setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero. People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they'll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer. I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want the most. Even our dreams.”

One could say that this speech is the tritest crap, but somehow it works in part because she can’t tell him directly, and because of the way she universalizes the hero as a principle that can underlie everyone’s behavior. She ties in her own concerns by mentioning how heroes can “save an old girl like me” (as Spider-man did earlier) and by mentioning how someone older can “die with pride.” Aunt May utters the main insight of the film just as Mary Jane provides the final point in The Graduate-esque conclusion. How many other superhero films give over the best speeches to the female characters?

Lastly, soon after the scene that equates a kiss with Mary Jane with a large car thrown into a restaurant (cars get thrown around a lot in this film), Doc Ock sets up a fun action sequence that leaves Spider-man scrambling to save everyone in a subway train hurtling to its destruction. I like the way Spider-man tries and fails to stop the runaway train with his feet, and by sending out too few web strands to neighboring buildings (the scene was shot in Chicago because the buildings are closer to the tracks there), all the while with passengers making rude cracks at his failures. Finally, Spider-man hits upon sending out many web strands to buildings on both sides and thereby gradually stopping the train. He loses his mask in the process, and when he passes out from the strain, the passengers gently pull his body into the car and lie him on the floor with something akin to religious wonder. “Why, he’s just a kid,” says one man. This scene works in part due to the unexpected nobility of the everyday subway riders. In real life, they might have taken pictures of him with their cell phones, torn off portions of his clothes as souvenirs, and acted unnatural around him as he if he were a celebrity, but in the movie they basically let him be with appreciative restraint. One kid hands him back his mask, and says “We won’t tell nobody. It’s good to have you back, Spider-man.” In this scene, after much struggle throughout the film, the human and the superhuman meet. Raimi demonstrates how the two can complement each other, and how heroism becomes an option, and even a moral imperative for all involved.

The Year 2004: Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder)

2009-08-14T21:00:00.000+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Jason Soto of the Invasion of the B Movies, the master of the second rate, the king of the macabre, the wacky and the down right bizarre, who takes on Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's 1978 horror classic Dawn of the Dead. Modified for modern audience attention spans, Snyder's zombies no longer shuffle along in a sleep like daze but run at full speed in this fast moving adaptation that Jason believes 'isn't THAT bad'.

I'm gonna assure most of you right now that the only similarities between this supposed "remake" and the kickass original is the title, they're in a mall, and maybe one similar scene. Everything else is pretty much just the writers going "Hey, we wrote a zombie movie and it takes place in a mall...wait, that was done before? Shit. Well, let's just call it a remake." So with George A. Romero's blessing (I'm assuming), they slapped the title on this little zombie flick.

Let's be honest though, any zombie movie anyone will make is gonna basically just be a rip off of the Romero's films. Sure I've heard of the Italian version, but would it exist without "Night of The Living Dead"? Probably not. Even "28 Days Later" was "Night" with fast moving zombies.

We meet Ana, who is played by the one blonde chick from "Go", and she's a nurse. She's leaving her shift at the hospital and arrives home. Her and her boyfriend/husband (It wasn't really clear) Luis immediately start fucking in the shower. While they're boinking (I have my own thesaurus of words similar to "sex"), the news report that some serious shit is gonna go down.

The next day at (sigh) "DAWN" (Hey, at least they tried), the happy recently gotten laid couple wake up to a little girl busting down their bedroom down. Luis treats this has normal, even though the girl is the neighbor across the street. The girl looks like she was smacked across her face with a anvil, so Luis wakes Ana up. While doing so, the girl jumps across the bedroom and bites Luis in the throat.

Ana doesn't seem too confused that the girl across the street from her suddenly attacked her boyfriend/husband at 6:15 in the morning and instead locks the girl out of the room. Luis doesn't make it and he raises from the dead and starts attacking Ana. Yet again, she doesn't react to this and immediately escape. Honestly, I'm glad cause I'm sick of women in movies being stupid and going "Honey, what's wrong?" then getting chomped to death. But on the other hand, Ana has no idea there's a living dead epidemic going on, so to think nothing of her boyfriend/husband suddenly waking up is kinda off-putting.

Ana escapes through the bathroom (It's suppose to be "she came IN through the bathroom window) and about 10 minutes into this epidemic, it's fuckin' armageddon! Everything is on fire, people are being eaten left and right, and other people are shooting other people.

Fifteen minutes into the end of the world, Ana is attacked by a paramedic (I'm thinking she knew the guy, but the movie wasn't too clear), and this causes her to crash her car into a tree. Twenty minutes into the movie, we get the opening credits and shots of news reports and whatnot. None of this is important so I'm skipping it.

Sometime later, Ana is still in her car somehow still alive despite her car door being open and zombies like 15 feet away from her. This is where Officer Ving Rhames comes in. He goes half the movie nameless (even the captions called him "OFFICER"), so just for fun I'm gonna call him Officer Ving, also because he's pretty much just playing himself in a zombie movie.

Officer Ving finds Ana and she tags along. About 10 feet away we find Andre, his very pregnant girlfriend Luda, and Michael. After Andre and Officer Ving saying to each other "Wait, we're both black people in a horror film? How did that happen?" they decide to head to....

Ok you guy's saw the original, guess where they go to?

Yep. Disneyworld! A zombie Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck chase them around the Matterhorn for 2 hours. Ok, not really, but I plan on writing that movie soon.

No, they go to the mall. Everyone separates to check to see if any zombies are inside. Andre finds one at the door, Michael finds another in a sporting goods store. They head upstairs to see what's up there and to make this totally different than the original, upstairs are three asshole security guards. They steal Andre's and Ving's guns and pretty much treat everyone like shit. The main security guy, C.J, is possibly the biggest asshole and what's weird is he looks like Morgan Spurlock. Hm, that'd be an interesting episode of "30 Days", 30 days trapped in a mall full of zombies.

And actually one of the security guards aren't really assholes, and his name is Terry. C.J locked the gang into a store but Terry let them out. Outside they hear a truck squealing around in the parking lot. C.J refuses to help, so Terry becomes a traitor and knocks him and the other guy, Bart (really? Bart? Ok...) out and they lock them into a little holding cell.

After some drama with "how are we gonna get the people in the truck in the mall", they do and we get a whole new crew. Glad this "remake" is adding characters not seen in the original. Anyway, we meet Norma, a trucker, Glen, a gay organ player (wow, that was a subtle joke I didn't get until now), Steve and his girlfriend, who are the inspirations for SNL's "Two A-Holes" characters, Nicole and her father Frank, played by Matt Frewer, who you know as Max Headroom and the other father on "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids". Oh and a fat dying chick. Well, she dies and is now the worlds first overweight zombie.

Everyone finds out that Frank got bitten and since that's how this "virus" is transferred, they have to shoot him. After a drawn out "goodbye" from Nicole, Ving shoots him.

Andre and Luda, meanwhile, are locked in a toystore. Luda is a full blown zombie because she got bit before entering the mall, so Andre kept her chained down so she can give birth. Well, Luda does in fact give birth...holy shit I can't believe I'm gonna say this...it's a MOTHAFUCKIN' ZOMBIE BABY!! HOLY FUCK!!! Andre has gone mental and shoots Norma for trying to kill Luda and an odd Mexican standoff ensues with Norma and Andre shooting each other. Ana and the gang find them and the mothafuckin zombie baby and Ana shoots it. Damn, that would've been awesome for the rest of the movie. Just a zombie baby running around, biting people. Man, I need to get into the movie business.

Anyway, everyone decides it's time to get the fuck out of the mall, so they take two mall shuttle buses that are in the parking garage and reinforce them so the zombies don't attack.

I should point out a few things quickly. They let C.J and Bart out of the holding cell, but Bart gets eaten by some zombies in the parking garage. There's a montage of the gang doing shit in the mall, with Steve and his girlfriend boffing and filming it. Officer Ving has spotted a dude named Andy across the street from the mall and they communicate by holding up signs to each other. They all decide to save Andy since he lives in and owns a gun shop, so he'll have plenty of ammo and he's a good shot. Oh and there's a dog that Nicole calls "Chips". I dunno why.

Ok, we're caught up. Andy complains of being hungry, so Ving suggests they send the dog over since the zombies aren't interested in the dog (zombie dog! FUCK YEAH!) with food and a walkie talkie. When Andy lets the dog in, some zombies get in too and attack him. Nicole gets all worked up about the dog so she steals a truck and hightails it over there. Andy is a zombie and is attacking Nicole. The cameraman is scared of zombies too so we can't get a shot of any of this happening. Terry (who has been sporking Nicole) decides to plan a rescue mission...for the rescue mission.

Now, I don't know what happened next. Why? Because you fuckin' people don't know how to take care of DVD's!! Seriously, what the fuck do you people do with rental DVD's, give them to your kids to play with or something? JESUS!!

So I'm assuming they find Nicole alive and they climb onto the roof somehow and C.J throws a propane tank and blow up some zombies. This gives them plenty of opportunity to climb through the sewer to get back to the mall. One of the dudes, some guy named Tucker that I completely forgot about until now cause he wasn't important, gets bitten in the legs, so Ving drags him along while Tucker holds two guns and shoot at zombies. Sound familiar? This was in the original when the one dude is in the wheelbarrow and the other dude (I think it was the black guy) is pushing him. Yep, there's your remake. Well, anyway, Tucker Carlson is toast so they leave him behind.

They get back to the mall and get into the buses and hightail it out. They barely can get past the mob of zombies in the parking lot, so C.J climbs up, throws out another propane tank, and in one of the coolest scenes, blows it up, taking about 300 million zombies.

So they take a lovely tour of Zombiopolis when one of the buses, the one carrying Glen, Steve, his girlfriend, and Terry, gets attacked, so Glen pulls out the chainsaw, but when Terry makes a hard left, the chainsaw falls out of his hands and cuts Steve's girlfriend's arm off (another cool scene), then the bus crashes. Everyone inside dies except for Steve, who because he's another asshole, makes a run for it. But he doesn't last long, a zombie eats him. Ana takes great pleasure in shooting him. Then she steals the keys to his boat and they take off to the pier.

They arrive, but Michael has to stay behind cause he got bitten, and this is after he and Ana just cemented their relationship after farkin'. So Ana, Ving, Nicole (and the damn dog), and C.J get on the boat and leave. Michael shoots himself and the credits roll.

BUT! During the credits it turns into "The Blair Witch Project" when Nicole finds a camera on Steve's boat and films every little damn thing. They find an island but it too is full of zombies. Then the camera falls to the ground and the rest of it is the camera being past through the zombies. I dunno if this means they escaped or what. And there's an extra on the DVD that shows things from Andy's point of view but it's done in V-log style, so it's like watching a boring video on "youtube". Apparently we get from this is that the world eventually got returned to normal, so if Ving and his crew didn't get attacked on Zombie Island (another horror movie reference), they eventually survived. I guess.

Honestly, this movie isn't THAT bad, but I think they shouldn't have claimed it was a remake of "Dawn of the Dead", because in case anyone forgot, "Dawn" was a sequel. Why anyone would remake a sequel is beyond me. If you wanna make a zombie film, fine. Have it take place...at Disneyland! Like I said! And have zombie Mickey, Goofy, Minnie! OH! And zombie babies!! AND DOGS!! WOO!! Oh, right, this movie. Ok, this movie showed us some tits, so that gets some points, and the story was slightly interesting. I'll pretend this isn't called a remake and rate it like an original movie, cause it basically is.
Ok, back to my movie. DISNEY ZOMBIES!

The Year 2004: Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel)

2009-08-13T21:00:00.005+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes Allan Fish, co-creator and scribe of the highly influential and inspirational film blog Wonders in the Dark, where you can catch Allan's top 50 countdown of his favourite films of the 1980's and even vote for your own top 25 on their online poll. Allan's first submission to the project covers one of the year's biggest international hits, Downfall, which focuses on the last ten days in the life of Adolf Hitler, as witnessed by a young woman in his employ, and according to this submitter, features 'one of the greatest performances of our era'.

(Germany 2004 155m) DVD1/2
Aka. Der Untergang
We aren’t always masters of our own time

p Bernd Eichinger d Oliver Hirschbiegel w Bernd Eichinger book Joachim Fest ph Rainer Klausmann ed Hans Funck m Stephan Zacharias art Bernd Lepel

Bruno Ganz (Adolf Hitler), Alexandra Maria Lara (Traudl Junge), Corinna Harfouch (Magda Goebbels), Ulrich Matthes (Josef Goebbels), Juliane Köhler (Eva Braun), Heino Ferch (Albert Speer), Christian Berkel (Schenck), Thomas Kretschmann (Hermann Fegelein), Mathias Habich (Haase), Ulrich Noethen (Heinrich Himmler), Birgit Minichmayr (Gerda Christian), Anna Thalbach (Frau Reitsch),

We live in an age where information about Nazism, its horrific acts and its fall are commonplace, almost to the point of information overload. Not only in films such as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, but in the occasional masterful TV documentary. Even now, I can hear the cultured tones of Sam West narrating Laurence Rees’ monumental works The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz. However, when it comes to making a drama out of this final crisis, no-one had succeeded. There had been various impersonations of Hitler, including Frank Finlay, Derek Jacobi, Robert Carlyle and Alec Guinness. Fine actors though they all are, something essential was lacking, and perhaps that essence was a sense of perspective, and more importantly a sense of a performance, not just an impersonation. The actor had to perfectly embody the speech mannerisms of one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, and that required a German actor speaking in his native tongue. After all, can one imagine a German playing Churchill?

Hirschbiegel’s film covers the last few days of the Third Reich, beginning with Hitler’s last few days in the bunker, continuing with the disintegration of the armies and ideology outside the ruins of Berlin. The iconic shots of Hitler standing outside the bunker and warmly greeting the last traces of the Hitlerjungen are well known, but no film before has captured the sense of desolation of the time. The entrance to the bunker looks like the entrance to hell, above which one would expect to find an adornment of Dante’s immortal words. Yet in actuality, the entrance to hell is from the inside. It’s the Berlin above ground that is the hell and the bunker is merely the waiting room. A fact well illustrated by the army officers, adjutants, even simple domestics pacing its corridors and passageways. Der Führer is stubborn to the point of insanity, and the film perfectly demonstrates the loss of reality of not only Hitler, but many of the simple civilians who arm themselves to defend the crumbling city. Yet in truth the whole atmosphere is a surreal one, with Eva Braun organising parties as the chandeliers quake under the Allied onslaught, like the Ruff-Diamonds at the regimental dinner in Carry on Up the Khyber, and the officers at the brothel recalling the orgiastic revelry of Gance’s La Fin du Monde. In the end Hitler himself, irrespective of his beyond evil doctrine and acts of mass genocide, becomes an almost pitiful, shambling wreck whose hour upon the stage, to quote Macbeth, is coming to a close. Even so, some of the most emotional sequences take place outside the bunker, perfectly showcased in a montage that accompanies Eva Braun’s last letter to her sister, where a young girl in pigtails asks to be shot rather than live to the end and Henry Purcell’s immortal “When I am Laid in Earth” deftly undercuts the action, and her younger brother dodging bullets like a Gavroche for the 20th century.

I could write pages on the physical recreation, photography and design, but one cannot sign off without mentioning the cast. Matthes, Kohler, Harfouch (chilling as she calmly murders her children) and Ferch are superb, while Lara provides a serene beauty to the emotional bystander that is heart-rending (one recalls her reaction as she learns of the Goebbels’ intention to kill their whole family). Yet it’s Ganz who haunts us, a Hitler for all time, from his smile of recognition at Lara’s Munich fraulein to his resignation to his fate. He and Hirschbiegel dare to make him a human monster, and in doing so we observe one of the greatest performances of our era. Astonishing.

The Year 2004: Collateral (Michael Mann)

2009-08-12T23:00:00.002+01:00

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming another new face to the project in the guise of Yeali, who hails from the superb blog, My First Farce, an account of her attempt at writing a screenplay and a log of the many distractions along the way, mostly consisting of good movies. In her first submission she takes on Michael Mann's return to his forte, compelling, unique and stylish thrillers, with Collateral, which featured Tom Crusie, sporting a fine grey head of hair, as an assassin hired to murder five people in one night, whisked around the neon skyline of Los Angeles by Jamie Foxx's unsuspecting limo driver.

Director Michael Mann loves sending helicopters to the dark Los Angeles sky. He did it in his 1995 movie "Heat", and he does it again nine years later in "Collateral". "Collateral" is the only film Mann directed but hadn't written or co-written, and his greatest box-office success to that date. It was written by Sidney-born Stuart Beattie as a New-York based story, only to be relocated by Mann to Los Angeles. Filmed mostly with high-definition cameras, this movie is about L.A. at night, about nocturnal city creatures, about choice and chance.

In interviews, writer Beattie explains he got the idea for "Collateral" when he was 17, riding a cab alone for the first time. Chatting with the driver, he couldn't help thinking – what if I was a homicidal maniac sitting in the back seat? His basic notion was that you're always told not get in a car with a strange person, and not to pick up hitchhikers, yet that is exactly the premises of cab transactions.

"Collateral" happens during the course of one night. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a taxi driver who works night shifts. Right from the start we learn all there is to know about him: He keeps his car clean, and keeps his act clean. He'll get you to your destination faster than you expected and he won't cheat you. Max is also a dreamer: he keeps a postcard of his favorite getaway, Maldives Islands (although it's safe to assume he's never actually been there), where he vacations "a dozen times a day" while driving his cab; and he plans on opening a limo company called "Island Limousines", which he hasn’t done yet because it "has to be perfect".

Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer who arrives to L.A. for one night, to execute five murders, all related to a big federal case that's about to open in court the following morning. Vincent enters Max's cab right after Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a pretty lawyer who gave her card to Max after the two shared an intimate conversation, gets out. Vincent, impressed by Max's decency and punctuality, convinces him to be his driver for the entire night, promising to double his average night wage. He's in town to close a deal, he has five stops. A few minutes after Max agrees, a dead body falls on the roof of the taxi. That's when Max realizes his customer is a hit man, and it's too late to cancel their deal. From this moment on, it's a story about the dynamics between Max and Vincent. Vincent has four more destinations, four more murders to commit. Max is forced to drive Vincent around town, and in return Vincent will change Max's life.

"Collateral" is about night creatures. Max enjoys driving his cab at night. Vincent, who kills people at night, is quite explicitly compared to the coyote– an animal he and Max encounter at one point during their ride. The coyote is a nocturnal predator with a grayish pelt, who adapted well to human environments and is often seen in big cities in North America. Vincent looks like a coyote - Tom Cruise in a rare appearance with grey hair, eyebrows and beard, topped by a grey suit. He also has the instincts of a predator. This is evident towards the end of the movie, when Max and Annie run away from Vincent. Leaving her office building, they have to choose between the street and the subway. Max chooses the subway, thinking Vincent will look for them in the street. When Vincent arrives at the same spot, he considers both options, then without hesitation runs towards the subway. This repeats itself when Vincent has to guess on which train they boarded, and guesses right again. By the time he's on the train, there are close ups of Vincent where it looks like he's sniffing and tilting his ears like an animal.

But more than that, just as the coyote is a counter intuitive byproduct of the city, an animal that is mysteriously, unpredictably, drawn to cities, so is Vincent, as are all professional killers - a byproduct of society who is an unwanted force roaming the city, an outsider to "normal" human life.

Two other leading night creatures in "Collateral" are Annie, the lawyer who always stays up the night before the opening of a big case to go over her speech, and detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), who enters the story after discovering Vincent killed one of his informers, and insists on exploring the murder even though his partner insists there is nothing to explore and goes home to bed. Restless at night, Fanning is always craving for action.

Vincent is a philosopher of the night. He lectures Max about life, about chance and about choice. He mocks him for dreaming and talking instead of doing. His pompous speeches verge on the ridiculous ("Improvise. Adapt to the environment. Darwin. Shit happens. I Ching, whatever. Roll with it"), but the film uses that to fuel the amusing moments in which Max repeats Vincent's words, with much less confidence, first when faced with Felix (Javier Bardem), who hired Vincent for that night's killings, and later when resisting a cop who tries to handcuff him, stuttering while holding a gun at the cop: "when did this become a negotiation?"

Vincent's didactical philosophical outbursts are the film's most problematic moments. But at the same time, you can look at them as yet another attribute of the night. Haven't you ever found yourself in a bar, having to listen to a guy who had too much to drink, giving you a bullshit lecture about life?

Vincent talks about chance, about the universe's indifference - and the film demonstrates it. There are many "what if" moments throughout the story, where things almost happen or almost don't happen: What if Vincent didn't enter Max's cab?; what if that first body didn't fall on the taxi's roof?; what if the cops who stopped them over a broken window opened the trunk and found the body?; What if the jazz player answered Vincent's riddle correctly?; What if Vincent didn’t run out of bullets at the end of the movie?

On his third stop, Vincent takes Max along with him to a jazz club. Max is not into jazz. In another one of his overly self-explanatory outbursts, Vincent says that jazz is behind the notes, it's about improvising, about the unexpected – just like their night. At the beginning of the night Max is lost, impotent. He expects to be saved. When he tries to get people's attention in the street while Vincent is out of the cab, he ends up being robbed. A minute after detective Fanning finds Max and tries to get him out of a shooting scene in a club, Vincent kills Fanning. Max learns that in order to be saved, he has to save himself. Vincent teaches him how to improvise, giving him the squeals to overpower him. This is how, after throwing Vincent's suitcase from a bridge, Max manages to trick Felix into believing he's Vincent, and giving him the lost information. By the time they get to Vincent's fifth stop, in which he has to kill Annie, the lady lawyer Max met at the beginning of the night – Max is squealed enough to save Annie and kill Vincent. At the end, it seems that Max wins precisely because, unlike Vincent, he does believe that there's meaning to life.

Both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx deliver remarkably restrained performances. Cruise abandons his signature-gone-caricature laugh for a surprisingly effective villain role. Foxx was nominated for two academy awards in 2004: best performance by a supporting actor for "Collateral", and best performance by an actor for "Ray". It was his role in "Ray" that he won the award for, a much more manneristic performance than his performance as Max. But it is Los Angeles at night who's the leading actress in "Collateral": the lights, the sky, the roads, the bridges. Visible from every apartment window, beautifully shot, the city at night sets the mood for the entire movie, making even its weaker moments poetic.

"Collateral" ends with a shot of Max and Annie stepping out of the train after Max had killed Vincent. They are safe now, but there is no sign of relief on their faces, no romantic kiss in sight. They walk towards the highway, still shaken and disturbed, as if they were a couple leaving a movie theatre, unable to get the movie out of their heads.

The Year 2004: The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)

2009-08-09T18:00:00.001+01:00

This post was submitted by Stephanie Lundahl of the brilliant The Flick Chick

The Passion of the Christ is a difficult movie to approach, seeing as it comes with so much baggage. Hailed in some circles as a masterpiece, reviled in others as being anti-Semitic and excessively violent, it is a film that can never be fully divorced from the controversy that it engendered. If it is anti-Semitic, does that necessarily make it a bad film? Should art be judged on its message or the skill of its construction? On the flip side, just because it’s a film about Jesus Christ and purports to be faithful to the Scriptures, does that in and of itself make it a good film? The Passion of the Christ is almost impossible to consider solely on its own merits.

The film chronicles the last 12 hours in the life of Christ (James Caviezel), including his arrest, trial, torture and finally crucifixion. At certain points the film flashes back, showing key moments in the life of Christ that parallel or otherwise inform his current state. There isn’t a lot to the film plotwise, much of the running time is devoted to scenes of Christ’s torture and death. It is a brutal, blood-soaked film, but that is of course its intention. Writer/director Mel Gibson has said on many occasions that one of his objectives was emphasize Christ’s suffering and it is, indeed, inescapable here. However, it isn’t the blood that makes these scenes so disturbing, but the sadism of the Roman soldiers and the indifference on the part of the crowd. His wounds neither satisfy them nor give them pause.

Christ’s travails are witnessed by those who want him punished as well as those who want him saved, including Mary (Maia Morgenstern), Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci), and John (Christo Jivkov). Of the supporting performances Morgenstern’s is the most moving. I would even venture to say that hers is the best performance of the film period, trumping even Caviezel. As Christ suffers, so does Mary, who watches her son condemned to death, mops up his blood and at last watches him die. In one scene she watches him fall to the ground in pain and recalls a moment when he fell as a child and she was able to make it better simply by holding him in her arms. There can be no more of that; his problems are beyond the scope of maternal comfort and assistance and her pain comes not simply from his suffering but from her complete helplessness in the face of it. The mother-child connection really grounds the film and gives it a human element that is absolutely crucial.

So, the big question: is the film anti-Semitic? I’m inclined to say no. I think that if you walk away from this with anti-Semitic feelings, you went into it predisposed to that particular brand of lunacy and I doubt that any person of even moderate intelligence could be inspired to hate anyone based on this film. It is true that the Jewish priests led by Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia) are shown in a negative light, but so are the Roman soldiers. I would argue that the Roman soldiers are portrayed worse, since they seem to revel in inflicting pain for the sake of inflicting pain, whereas the priests have motives that go beyond simply wanting Christ to suffer. Their actions are characterized in political terms as Christ’s teachings threaten the status quo and their power. In the same way, the actions of Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov) are informed by politics and his shaky relationship with the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Unlike the Jewish priests, however, Pilate is allowed to have more than one dimension and he is allowed to express his conflicting feelings about the situation. It’s a failing of the film that the villains (Jewish priests and Roman soldiers alike) are portrayed in such a thin way, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it hateful.

As a director Gibson strives for realism – that’s the justification for the graphic nature of the film – but makes stylistic choices that undermine that sense of realism. I’m surprised that there’s any slow motion in movies anymore, seeing as this one tried so hard to use it all up. I’m of the belief that, like most things, slow motion is most effective when used sparingly. Mel Gibson obviously disagrees. The effect becomes less meaningful each time it’s used and it gets used so much that by the end you’re completely desensitized to it when it should be making its greatest impact. The film undercuts itself through this repetition and puts a greater burden on the actors to forge an emotional connection between the audience and the action on screen.

In the final analysis, The Passion of the Christ is a decent film but its craftsmanship is ultimately not equal to its notoriety. Because it focuses so wholly on the negative – the agony of Christ’s death – and pays only cursory attention to his ideas and teachings, the film fails to be as thought provoking as films like The Last Temptation of Christ or The Gospel According to Matthew. As it stands, the conversation very nearly begins and ends on the controversy rather than the content of the film. As the controversy fades, so does the film’s significance as a work of art.

The Year 2004: The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)

2009-08-08T11:10:00.006+01:00

This post, subtitled The Aviator: A Tribute to the Golden Age of Cinema, was submitted by Andrew Kendall of the great Encore's World of Film & TV

Martin Scorsese holds a strange place in Oscar and film history. He has been touted as the front runner in the 1976, 1980, 1990, 2002 and 2004 Oscar races and save for 2002 it’s probably arguable that his film has endured more than the eventual winner. 2004 was m first serious bout with the Oscars. As a 12 year old future film enthusiast I had not een any of the major films nominated but are following each of the major precursors [BAFTA, SAG, FPA, FCA, PGA etc] I was certain that The Aviator was the best of the bunch. Leo, Cate and Scorsese who I all loved at the time, and still do couldn’t do any wrong in my eyes. And Cate was playing Kate Hepburn who I had just begun an obsession with. I knew I was going to love this movie.

Well, if you know Oscar history you know that The Aviator lost to Million Dollar Baby. I was pissed. Really pissed. Anyhow, going into The Aviator one month later I had pretty high expectations, expectations that were not smashed. Up to 2004 The Aviator was Scorsese’s most financially successful film. A retrospective of sorts it tells the story of the eponymous aviator Howard Hughes, a somewhat prolific aviator and celebrity of the 1930s – 1950s. The film is over 160 minutes so it’s not exactly short, but it’s beautiful. There is an obvious line between the first half [pre and during Kate] and second part [after Kate] of the film. The film begins with a childhood Hughes being bathed by his mother as she warns him about the cholera in a haunting spelling recitative. It’s the only childhood scene of Hughes so it’s probably important…but why? Did Hughes inherit his OCD tendencies from his mother? it’s interesting to consider, but Scorsese doesn’t give us the answers.

The OCD tendencies aren’t that profound in the first half. It takes a look at Hughes the film maker. He is a bit idiosyncratic, spending an unprecedented 4 million and 3 years on his film debut Hell’s Angels. This takes up the first half hour of the film and is a true showcase opportunity for Leo who is in almost all these scenes. And boy does he sine. Leonardo DiCaprio has always been good at playing young upstarts [Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can even Titanic] and young Hughes fits right in. He’s hilarious, ingratiating, edgy, annoying and energetic all at once. Hughes is a bit bossy and but we’re on his side anyway.

With the success of Hell’s Angels and his star power solidified he begins carousing the town and his eyes set on young Katharine Hepburn played by the wonderfully effervescent Cate Blanchett. This film is not a recreation of Kate’s life, something people need to realize. As an over zealous Kate fan I know she would not have been out batting eye lashes for the press or carousing the town so publicly with Hughes, but it’s all good for the movie. After all, as Cate/Kate says movies are movies, they’re not real. I loved Cate’s performance as Kate. If her Kate was one of Kate’s film roles it would be Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. What makes me sad though is that I don’t believe persons have ever appreciated Kate’s dilemma in playing this role. She is forced to play a lady so iconic in our minds but who rarely gave interviews in her youth. It wasn’t until her middle aged days that she mellowed and began giving interviews. It is incredibly rare finding any unscripted clips of her anywhere. Thus Cate must rely on Katharine’s film roles. And seeing the resemblance to The Philadelphia Story Kate, it’s unsurprising because this role was based on the real Kate. Scorsese directs her so beautifully as if he were a director of yore, Cukor or Ford…

As we know, Cate Blanchett to some extent steals the show in her eclectic performance so the film falters a little when she leaves. Kate Beckinsale gives a valiant effort, but she is not substitute. The final half does boast a great performance though – Alan Alda as the villainous Senator out to get Hughes. Alan Alda is devilishly good and he deserved that Oscar nomination. Towards the middle the film does lag, but it picks up steam as it gets back on track.

The Aviator was the best film of 2004 for me. In addition to Leo, Cate and Alan there's Alec Baldwin and John C. Reilly who are both dependable in their roles and Jude Law in a stunning 5 minute cameo that make me wish he'd do a biopic of Errol Flynn. The film was like a tribute to the golden age of cinema in Hollywood and it marked my complete devotion to Scorsese from hereon. In the next 20 years I am certain that The Aviator will be a go to film for good film making and these same persons will be asking Million Dollar Who?

The Year 2004: The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass)

2009-08-07T21:00:00.000+01:00

This post was submitted by Tom Hyland of the superb Cinema Directives

The Bourne Supremacy takes us on a journey quite similar to that of its predecessor, The Bourne Identity of two years earlier; a fast-paced spy thrilled in which we watch Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) try and figure out why he is where he is and why so many people want him dead. Both films are successful, but what lifts Supremacy above the previous work can be summed up in two words: Paul Greengrass.

The first film, competently directed by Doug Liman, set that stage for this series, as we follow Bourne across Europe, aided by a young woman, Marie (Franke Potente) to whom Bourne pays $20,000 for a ride to escape from a difficult situation to head back to places he encountered in the past during his work for the C.I.A. He can’t quit recall why he was there or who he is looking for, so that element of the story, combined with the slowly developing relationship between Bourne and Marie gave Identity a nice complexity.

That film ended on an island in Greece, as Bourne is rescued at sea and is reunited with Marie in a relatively happy ending. Supremacy picks up soon afterwards, as we are now in the Indian town of Goa, where the two lovers now reside; they clearly have been on the run from Jason’s pursuers. Only a few minutes into the film, they are chased by an assassin, who kills Marie and believes he has done to same to Bourne. This sequence – where the jeep Marie and Bourne are riding in plunges over a bridge to a watery grave – is one of the film’s most exciting and chilling moments. Especially moving is the way Bourne tries to save Marie from drowning; as his attempts with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation fail, he gives the dying Marie a final kiss and then pushes her body away to float in the deep, murky waters of the river.

Marie’s death means that Supremacy will take a more direct route to its finish; this is both good and bad. We miss the humanity and sensuality of Marie, as she is able to lift Bourne from his self-introspection and gloom when she is around (if only temporarily); now with her departure, we are thrust further into the story line of new assassins as well as Bourne’s past. He recalls murdering someone (or was it more than one person?) in a hotel room in Berlin and he knows he must return to that hotel to unravel his personal mystery.

Of course, the C.I.A. operatives who programmed Bourne to kill know this as well and chase him from Napoli to Amsterdam to Berlin to find him; their pursuit now a result of a conspiracy by other spies to frame Bourne for murders he did not commit. Joan Allen and Brian Cox – excellent as always – portray these government agents and the powerplay between themselves is another positive to this film.

Thus Supremacy is largely about the search and director Paul Greengrass gives us an abundance of exciting chase sequences; in some ways, this is, at its most basic, an intelligent “give the audience a thrill every ten minutes or so” type of film. That usually spells disaster for me, as films like this too often use multiple action sequences to cover up flaws in their screenplay, but here the first-rate action fleshes out Bourne’s confused state of mind and gives the audience a sense of the edginess of his existence.

Much has been made of Greengrass’ use of hand-held cameras in Supremacy; indeed this camerawork does add a lot of gritty reality to the story. But this is not just a case of pointing these cameras and letting the action flow. It is the director’s sense of claustrophobia that gives an unsettling, nervous edge to the film. Look at the way Greengrass shoots the sequnce of Bourne fleeing his pursuers through a train station, then a river barge and finally an elevated train. His camera follows Bourne grabbing onto the support of a bridge above the river to stay out of sight; this is a wonderful sequence to watch, as is the climactic car chase through the wintry streets and tunnels of Moscow. The cameras are so tight on these cars during part of this chase that you’re often not certain as to what driver is crashing into what car. Clearly, Greengrass directs this film with a sense of Bourne’s character being trapped as a prisoner of space; he can move across a continent, but he is never far from the technology and eyes of those who require his capture or death.

But what few have noticed is the way Greengrass and his director of phtotography Oliver Wood focus on Bourne. Rarely do we see a shot of his face in full, rather it is often in shadows, as we see one side of his face; at other times, we see only a profile. Take a look at the fight sequence in the kitchen of a house where Bourne sees an agent he once worked with. As these two characters battle each other, it is difficult at times to make out which character is which, much as in the car chase in Moscow. By filming Bourne in this fashion, Greengrass is deliberately keeping Bourne’s identity a mystery. This is a major point of this film, that these agents are faceless individuals who act on orders, not on emotion.

The film begins with Bourne running on a beach in Goa; this is the one instance we see sunlight on his face. The film ends with Bourne walking from an apartment in Moscow in the middle of a frigid winter; here we see his entire face for one of the few times in the film. Though he has embraced his muderous past and confessed his sins to the daughter of the couple he killed, this is not a moment of self-satisfaction or joy for Bourne; his expression in both sequences is virtually the same. John Powell’s beautifully sad theme sets the mood and Greengrass for one of the few times in the film, pulls his camera back while filming Bourne, as we see him isolated on the snowy sidewalks of Moscow. His journey has – at least for a short while – come to a conclusion.

The Year 2004: Undertow (David Gordon Green)

2009-08-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

This post was submitted by Kevin Olson of the marvellous Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

When I think of the great opening scenes in film history I think of Argento’s Suspiria, Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and of course, the greatest of them all, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. In addition to those masterpiece openings, I would add the more modern addition of David Gordon Green’s opening to his brilliant 2004 thriller Undertow. In six minutes Green gives us a narrator introducing the story in typical oral mythology fashion (“this is their story, as it was told to me”); his usual in-the-moment, painfully real dialogue ( We see two teenagers presumably in the middle of a tryst as the boy says: “We should disappear. Go someplace where we can see everything” And the girl replies: “Let me see your knife…can I carve my name in your face?”); and pretty much every editing trick in the Final Cut Pro bag of tricks. All while being accompanied by Philip Glass’ eerie score that sets the perfect mood for the rest of the picture. It’s a perfect way for Green to begin his film: he wants Undertow to be a myth, he sets us up the way a master storyteller would, and visually he gives us one of the best pieces of character development I’ve ever seen. It’s an incredibly entertaining, beautifully edited and orchestrated first six minutes, and it’s one of the best openings to a movie that I’ve ever seen (clip is supplied below).

The film plays as a myth, more specifically a myth about the Munn family and some gold coins that act as the catalyst for, what else, murder. Here Green’s Southern Gothic look is a perfect fit for the type of story he’s set out to make; his film exists in this fable (to borrow a word used to describe the film by the brilliant Ed Howard) world, and the allusions to Laughton’s Night of the Hunter are just as obvious as his allusions to the fables where children must set out on an odyssey of discovery, growing up too fast and alluding danger along the way.

Why are these kids growing up too fast and on the road? Because their estranged (and strange) Uncle Deel (Josh Lucas who plays the role with maniacal glee) is in town visiting their dad John (played by Dermot Mulroney) inquiring about a job on the new Munn family farm (Chris and Tim are the kids, and they hate the farm, but their dad insists on them remaining alienated from city life). We come to find out the history of the Munn family – a certain affliction that bothers Tim, the death of their mother, and we get some insights into why John prefers giving it a go at farming when it seems that he’s never done it before – but more specifically we begin to see the history between Deel and John, and why there is such bitterness between them. This all eventually boils over and leads to an intense, and ultimately deadly, confrontation about some gold coins that may or may not be hidden in the house. From that point on the film is an eerie thriller. It’s an unconventional one, too, especially in the way that Green stages most of the chases and scare moments in daylight, creating an unsettling feeling akin to what John Carpenter did in his boogeyman masterpiece Halloween.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

The film is not just a thriller, there’s a lot lurking beneath the surface – the film is also about the Munn kids (Chris and his odd little brother Tim) and their journey, but more specifically Undertow is about forgotten kids. In their great series The Conversations, Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy talk extensively about this theme of kids just "wandering around" in Undertow. This gets at the larger theme in the film which is that kids need a home, and more specifically the displacement, and the fractures lives/journey of the Munn kids. When Chris and Tim construct their house in the junkyard Chris places a mug that reads “Home Sweet Home” on the dash of the car they’re sleeping in. Sadly, at that moment, that seems to be the most suitable house they'll find (they'll find themselves in other houses, too, along their journey). The junkyard, though, acts as a perfect Gothic setting for the film, it also acts as a nice metaphor, showing how displaced these kids are, seen as nothing more than bits to be sent to a scrap heap. This is later made even more obvious by Green when the Munn kids find brief refuge and friendship at a hideaway inhabited by other displaced kids.

The junkyard also acts as a metaphor for how “chopped-up”, or fragmented, their lives have become, and the affect that can have on two kids. The junkyard is just as compartmentalized as their lives, and made me think about the Munn kids and the stages of their life that is shown to the audience, or talked about by the characters. Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim used to live in the city when their mom was still alive (one stage of their life), their mother dies (second), dad moves them to a farm (third), Deel comes into Chris’ life and reveals that his mom was actually his girlfriend first…hinting at the fact that Deel is probably Chris’ biological father (fourth), their dad dies (fifth), they go on the run and find a home at the junkyard…a momentary safe haven (sixth), they come upon a compound where other displaced kids live (seventh), their chase ends with Deel and Chris involved in an intense fight where Deel eventually is stabbed and left to die on the bank of the river (eighth), and the film ends with the both of them being rescued by their grandparents (ninth stage). My own arbitrary organizing there shows that they go through nine significant changes in their young lives.

Their journey is broken up into stages, or continuing with the myth idea, chapters of the story. So it’s apt that they take refuge midway through their journey at a place that is the epitome of compartmentalization. The ending is befitting of a myth, too, as Green ends his film with a deus ex machina, but we accept that as a viewer because we’re always aware that what we’re watching is myth. The stages of the film and the set piece of the junkyard also act as a reminder that Green’s film is a pastiche of some of the films that have certainly inspired him: Badlands, Days of Heaven, and the aforementioned Night of the Hunter. Green is above simple thievery, though, as each allusion helps punctuate his own ideas, making Undertow the best films of 2004.

Green’s pretty comfortable, as I mentioned earlier, at throwing every trick in the book in that opening six minuets, but he allows the film to pretty much play out without barely any camera trickery at all. He still adds in some nice editing touches, but nothing as overt as the opening. He also continues to showcase those great scenes he's known for where the viewer happens upon a conversation in medias res, and we hear all kinds of interesting things that real people would say; however, Green isn’t going for the affect his George Washington or All the Real Girls went for, he’s content keeping Undertow within the boundaries of the thriller and myth. Whether or not that hurts his film is an interesting debate as I think this is Green’s best film, and is his most underrated (or overlooked), and I think too often, and unfairly, people omit Undertow when talking about Green’s triumphs as a director.

It’s no surprise Terrence Malick produced this film. His influences are just as evident here as the influence of Night of the Hunter, and it’s refreshing to see another filmmaker, who like Malick, doesn’t just film something beautiful for beauty’s sake. There is a purpose to cinematographer Tim Orr’s shots, and even though they are beautifully framed and conceived, they aren’t showy, blow-away shots that exist only to draw attention to how good the filmmakers are. These are shots that are designed to evoke mood – visually-poetic conceits that conjure up the danger and horrors found in the original Brothers Grimm stories – shots that always tell us something about the narrative, and help move the story along.

Undertow sits comfortably at the top of my list for best films of 2004. It’s a refreshing thriller that embraces the ethereal qualities found in myths or fables, giving the viewer great locations (the opening six minuets of the film, the junkyard where Chris and his brothers seek refuge) that are feasts for the eyes, and scenes of surprising warmth (the scene where Chris finds out that two waifish girls have tried to steal his coins, and instead of lunging at them in anger, he looks upon them with empathy as if to say: “we come from the same place”.) that showcase Green’s narrative skills in addition to his extremely creative and poetic eye. Undertow is David Gordon Green’s masterpiece, and the best film of 2004.

The Year 2004: Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (Alexandra Cassavetes)

2009-07-31T21:46:00.004+01:00

This post was submitted by Greg Ferrara of the superb Cinema Styles

I've mentioned the Z channel on Cinema Styles before. In a long ago post on the Oscars in the seventies I mentioned how the Z Channel in Los Angeles was responsible for Carol Kane's nomination for Hester Street and James Whitmore's for Give 'em Hell, Harry! because both of those movies had been run around the clock as the Academy members were sending in their submissions. The Z Channel was a cable channel, one of the first pay cable channels in the country, that ran features not likely to be seen anywhere else. Its program director was Jerry Harvey and he was responsible for making it the most successful channel in Los Angeles even after years of competition from HBO and Showtime. He was the friend and champion of filmmakers from Sam Peckinpah and Michael Cimino to Henry Jaglom and Robert Altman. He pioneered the idea of the Director's Cut and proved that one can build an audience based on consistency of quality. Sadly, he was also clinically depressed with a family history of psychosis. Both of his sisters committed suicide and Jerry told friends that he feared one day he would lose the battle as well. He did. On April 9, 1988, Harvey shot and killed his wife, Deri Rudolph, and then turned the gun on himself.

The 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession details the rise and fall of both Harvey and the Z Channel and does so in a way not only satisfying but fulfilling as well. Director Alexandra Cassavetes takes the two together, Harvey and the Channel as if they were one separated by a split in the psyche. By profiling Jerry's madness on the one hand and the grand achievements of the Z Channel on the other we can mourn when the end arrives, even after the wreckage of a homicide/suicide. Cassavetes knows, and her legion interview subjects as well, that people don't have much sympathy for mental illness when it claims the life of a bystander, and so it is the channel's demise that is given the position of greatest mourning, paralleled by what happened to Harvey and his wife.

When Jerry Harvey took over as programming director of the Z Channel he immediately began wheeling and dealing with the artists of Hollywood, not the executives. He pursued people like Sam Peckinpah, who eventually became one of his closest friends, and changed the landscape of how films were shown after their initial run. Harvey told Peckinpah he would run his films the way the director wanted and when Peckinpah, and later Robert Altman, stuttered that the studios owned the prints Harvey replied, "Who cares?" Harvey knew the studios would never interfere once the initial run was over and he was right. The night Harvey and Peckinpah ran Peckinpah's version of The Wild Bunch at the Beverly Canon Theater in 1974, the Director's Cut was born. Later, on the Z Channel, Harvey would premiere many more, from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Once Upon a Time in America to 1900 and Heaven's Gate. And many of the Director's Cuts run on the Z Channel are still unavailable to this day. In the film Quentin Tarantino delights in the fact that he has boxes of old VHS tapes of Director's Cuts of films shown on the Z Channel that no one who didn't watch them there has ever seen.

It is through the interviews with practically every member of the seventies Hollywood "A" List that we get to know Harvey and the Channel and understand just how much it accomplished at a time long before DVDs, streaming movies online and bonus features aplenty. Harvey ran films letterboxed before anyone even knew what that meant. And he would choose a director few if any people had heard of and highlight them for the entire month, from Henry Jaglom and Stuart Cooper to a little known filmmaker named Paul Verhoeven. When a film was premiering on the Z Channel he would host interviews with the relevant players and hold forums leading up to the feature night. In short, as stated in the film by many of the interviewed, he made a cable channel into a viable alternative for people who couldn't get to film festivals.

As one may suspect, it couldn't last. The company that was going to prop up the channel in the mid-eighties got hit hard by the stock market crash and the Z Channel was sold to a company interested in combining sports telecasts into the mix. The previously commercial free channel would now run ads and mix sporting events with movies. That may not sound like much when read here but when watching the film, seeing all the achievements of the channel, seeing Robert Altman, Charles Champlin, F.X. Feeney, Henry Jaglom, Theresa Russell, Alexander Payne, Jim Jarmusch and others lavish praise upon it for its championing of the artist, it is sad indeed when the camera sits before a programmer of Z who recounts the story of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence being shown on the channel after the change in ownership. Before the movie ended the picture squeezed up and a yellow chyron ran below detailing the Dodger's game time as an announcer shouted, "Don't miss the Dodger's game, NEXT!" It was over. The Z Channel died and was replaced by SportsChannel Los Angeles in 1989. Within a twelve month period, both the channel and its pioneering programmer were gone.

The film gives the last word to F.X. Feeney, film critic for the Z Channel magazine and close friend of Harvey who believes that the wreckage of Harvey's life shouldn't negate the legacy of what he created. Harvey wanted people to know films were art and in a rare moment of means and desire coming together with just the right person in control, he was able to do this. The film closes with a montage of clips from most of the films celebrated on the Z Channel to the melody of What'll I Do, one of Harvey's favortie songs, as performed by William Atherton for The Great Gatsby. It's a fitting and moving finale. As you watch the clips and feel the faint shudder of something great now lost you realize you are mourning a cable channel. And that's when you realize that anything can exalt great art or even be great art itself, if only someone cares enough to make it so.

The Year 2004: The Raspberry Reich (Bruce LaBruce)

2009-07-30T22:30:00.000+01:00

This post was submitted by Joe Bowman of the excellent Fin de Cinema

In the years following the pinnacle of New Queer Cinema, the description "aggressively queer" doesn't come up very often. While both Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki graduated to "serious" fare (Far from Heaven and Mysterious Skin, respectively), Canadian artist/photographer/filmmaker Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, Super 8½ and No Skin Off My Ass, which was reportedly Kurt Cobain's favorite film before he died) held onto the tradition, best exemplified in The Raspberry Reich, a hilarious indictment of sexual politics, the far left and "terrorist chic." Certainly in the same vain as Godard's La chinoise or Fassbinder's The Third Generation, LaBruce presents a hapless group of urban guerrillas, headed by the insolent Gudrun (Susanne Sachsse), attempting to carry on the torch of the Red Army Faction.

Gudrun, named after one of the founders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, concocts a scheme to kidnap Patrick (A. Stich), the son of one of Germany's key industrialists. At the same time, she instills something of a martial law on her gang of insurgents, forcing them to "liberate" themselves from their own "heterosexual repression," insisting "No revolution without sexual revolution. No sexual revolution without homosexual revolution." She, being the only female in the group, does not ask the same of herself but contends that all of the men, including her boyfriend Holger (Daniel Bätscher), join her homosexual intifada.

The Raspberry Reich is, for those familiar, totally LaBruce: hysterical, brash, fetishistic, porn-y, reflexive and even unexpectedly poignant. In recognizing LaBruce's signature brand of criticism and sympathy, one senses his empathy toward Gudrun's cause which intends to combat capitalism and the heteronormative modes of thought that prevail within it. And yet she's still portrayed as a dictator, an unshakeable creature who speaks in propagandistic slogans ("The revolution is my boyfriend!"), cites direct passages from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life as if they were her own and condemns everything from masturbation, corn flakes and Madonna as being counter-revolutionary. And still, she's not completely oblivious to her own contradictions. At one point, she tells Holger, after instructing him to have sex with fellow comrade Che (Daniel Fettig), that if he doesn't follow her orders she won't have sex with him later that night.

LaBruce's main concern relates to the conflict between political, sexual and personal idealism and the governing truths regarding them. Styled like a propaganda film, with various slogans and texts flashing across the screen, The Raspberry Reich brilliantly satirizes one of commanding fears of the Christian right: that "sexual deviants" can recruit others to their lifestyle. Gudrun's experiment, which is what it ultimately amounts to, fails with each of her recruits. When one of the members (Anton Z. Risan) runs off with Patrick, who becomes the gang's Patty Hearst, to take up robbing banks à la Bonnie and Clyde, they violate Gudrun's firm stance against bourgeois monogamy ("Marriage is licensed prostitution," she tells Holger. "I don't want you to be my pimp!").

To call The Raspberry Reich mere pornography would be a rather facile deduction (to be fair though, German production company Cazzo did release a version of the film called The Revolution Is My Boyfriend with longer, less restricted sex scenes). Certainly, most of the sex in the film is unsimulated and most of the actors, other than the amazing Susanne Sachsse, are porn stars, but The Raspberry Reich is more than just the thinking person's blue movie. In keeping with the tone of the rest of the film, the sex exists in contradiction to itself. Sometimes it's a parody (guns often go beyond being just phallic symbols), while, other times, LaBruce obstructs the fucking with text and strobe light editing. It's sexual exploitation against the exploitation of innocent people, and despite the film's numerous incongruities, it does adhere to Gudrun's notion of making revolutionary love, not imperialistic war.

The use of actual sex may ghettoize The Raspberry Reich from a larger audience more than your average gay film (I don't use the term "queer film" because that really doesn't apply much these days; Vicky Cristina Barcelona is queerer than Brokeback Mountain). In my eyes, that's a shame, but really, a film as radical as The Raspberry Reich, like Dušan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism from which LaBruce drew considerable inspiration, would never have mass appeal. LaBruce followed The Raspberry Reich in 2008 with the fantastic existential zombie film Otto; or Up with Dead People in 2008, continuing his streak as one of the most exciting voices in aggressively queer cinema.

The Year 2004: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran)

2009-07-29T21:00:00.001+01:00

Harking back to the sci-fi pulp of the 40's, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a lush, grand spectacle that was seen as something as a box-office flop back in 2004. Conran creates a look and feel of a world that was originally realised in those early comic books and with the aid of modern technology, a real boy's sci-fi adventure, packed with robots and jet-packs, is lovingly brought to the screen. To take us through this ripping movie Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back J.D of the almighty Radiator Heaven, who finds an 'absolutely gorgeous looking film filled with eye-popping visuals' that 'succeeds where previous pulp serial homages of the 1990's failed'

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was a film bound to polarize audiences and critics alike. Loving homage or blatant rip-off? It really depends on whether you love or hate this movie. Personally, I was transported away to this cinematic dreamland for the entire running time. Kerry Conran’s labor of love is an unabashed tribute to the old pulp serials of the 1920s and 1930s (Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, etc.). It succeeds where previous pulp serial homages of the 1990s failed (The Shadow, The Phantom, Dick Tracy). Like those films, Sky Captain successfully captures the look and feel of these vintage serials but, most importantly, it also stays true to their spirit — something that these other films failed to do (The Rocketeer as the lone exception). The road to its creation is a fascinating one, from a black and white independent film to big budget film released by a major studio.

A striking image opens the film: a gigantic zeppelin docks with the Empire State Building while the night sky is filled with lightly falling snow. The world’s top scientists have gone missing and ambitious newspaper reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow in Lois Lane mode) is covering the story for The Chronicle. She meets secretly with the last scientist who hints at a top-secret project. She soon has an idea of just how important this project is as huge, flying robots swarm over the city’s skies. They begin attacking the city, turning cars over like tinker toys.

Before you can activate your Commander Cody decoder ring, Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law) and his squad of fighter planes arrive to save the day. It becomes obvious that Joe and Polly have a history together. There is a sexual tension between them as they form an uneasy alliance: she shares information with him in exchange for an exclusive scoop on the source of the robots and the mysterious Dr. Totenkopf (Laurence Olivier). They are aided in their adventure by Joe’s trusty sidekick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), a whiz technician capable of inventing a deadly ray gun, and Captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie), Joe’s ex-girlfriend and commander of a squadron of flying fortresses.

Kerry Conran grew up on films and comic books of the ‘30s and 1940s and commented in an interview, “The stuff that was most visually striking were the covers of the ‘30s and ‘40s. The graphic images just in the covers, I thought, told stories on such a grand scale...The artwork of that era, they just dreamed up things on that level.” He and his brother, Kevin, were encouraged by their parents to develop their creative side at a young age. According to Kevin, their mom “didn’t buy us coloring books and have us color them in, she’d bring us blank pads of paper with pencils and you’d make your own picture and color it in, that sort of stuff, which didn’t seem like a big deal, but it sort of is. We always had a lot of support in that respect.” The Conran brothers were also influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes who did work for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Geddes also designed an Air Ship that was to fly from Chicago to London. Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 World’s Fair and who designed bridges and huge housing complexes.

Conran went to CalArts, a feeder program for Disney animators and became interested in 2-D computer animation. While there, he realized that it was possible to apply some of the techniques associated with animation to live-action. He remembers trying to “use the computer that was just emerging as a technology that was viable for filmmaking, and use a technique that was used traditionally forever – you know, the blue screen – but taken to a real extreme conclusion.” Conran had been out of film school for two years and was trying to figure out how to make a film. He figured that Hollywood would never take a chance on him — an inexperienced, first-time filmmaker. So, he decided to go the independent route and make the movie himself.

In 1994, Conran set up a blue screen in his living room and began assembling the tools he would need to create his movie. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh. Initially, the Conrans had nothing more than “just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like Indiana Jones and all the stuff we liked.” Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashion newsreel on his Macintosh personal computer. Once he was finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother’s wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a film. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the film because, according to Avnet, he wanted to “make sure we were on the same page, because he was going to write it. It wasn’t written at that point.”

Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay and developing a working relationship. Then, the producer took the script and the trailer and began approaching actors. In order to protect Conran’s vision, Avnet decided to shoot the movie independently with a lot of his own money. “I couldn’t protect him from the studios. I prayed we could shoot the movie and then show it to the studios. And we’re lucky, they all wanted it.” The producer realized that “the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, which was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio.”

When it came to casting actors in the movie, Avnet used his connections and reputation and started “looking for people who fit the look, looking for people who had the right theatrical pedigree, if possible, looking for people who weren’t over-exposed.” In 2002, he showed Jude Law the teaser trailer and the actor was very impressed by what he saw. He remembers, “All I got at that early stage was that he’d used pretty advanced and unused technology to create a very retrospective look.” Avnet gave him the script to read and some preliminary artwork to look at.

Law: “What was clear was also that at the center was a really great cinematic relationship, which you could put into any genre and it would work. You know, the kind of bickering [relationship]. I always like to call it African Queen (1951) meets Buck Rogers.”

Avnet wanted to work with Law because he knew that the actor had “worked both period, who worked both having theatrical experience, who worked on blue screen, who hadn’t hit yet as a major action star.” The actor had just come off doing Cold Mountain (2003) and was intrigued at going from filming on real locations to working on a film done completely on a soundstage. Law recalls, “At the time, there was no money attached, and he [Conran] was a first time director. It took us a year and a half to put it together and even then, we didn’t have a studio deal.” The actor believed so much in Conran’s movie that he also became one of the producers and used his clout to get Gwyneth Paltrow involved. Once her name came up, Law did not remember “any other name coming up. It just seems that she was perfect. She was as enthusiastic about the script and about the visual references that were sort of put to her, and jumped on board.” Paltrow said in an interview, “I thought that this is the time to do a movie like this where it’s kind of breaking into new territory and it’s not your basic formulaic action-adventure movie.”

Giovanni Ribisi met with Avnet and, initially, was not sure that he wanted to do the movie but after seeing the teaser trailer, he signed on without hesitation. Angelina Jolie had literally come from the set of Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) and agreed to work on the movie for three days. Despite her small role, she had conducted hours of interviews with fighter pilots in order to absorb their jargon and get a feel for the role.

Avnet went to Aurelio De Laurentiis and convinced her to finance the film without a distribution deal. Nine months before filming, Avnet had Conran meet the actors and begin rehearsals in an attempt to get the shy filmmaker out of his shell. Avnet recalls, “By the end of three days of rehearsals, I remember where he said something, describing the ice cave where the dynamite is, and I could see the actors looking really, really intently on him. I realized that he got them.”

Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage. To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, like To Have and Have Not (1944) with Lauren Bacall for Paltrow’s performance and The Thin Man (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly.

Working on a soundstage surrounded entirely by blue screens required a new way of looking at the acting process. Ribisi remembers, “The analogy that you say to yourself is it’s like doing theater or avant-garde theater. There’s just a stage and the actors and all of that. But no, it is different, and it’s something that actors are going to have to be getting used to and [they need to] develop some degree of technique for that.” Law echoed these sentiments: “It almost felt like make-believe playing, rather than limiting because I couldn’t see something specific.” Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage. He told Conran, “Look, you’ve got these great actors, you’ve got a great relationship, don’t hamstring them. Give them some freedom.”

Conran and Avnet were able to cut costs considerably by shooting the entire film in 26 days (not the usual three to four months that this kind of film normally takes) and working entirely on blue screen soundstages. After filming ended, they put together a 24-minute presentation and took it to every studio in June of 2002. There was a lot of interest and Avnet went with the studio that gave Conran the most creative control. They needed studio backing to finish the film’s ambitious visuals. At one point, the producer remembers that Conran was “working 18 to 20 hours a day for a long period of time. It’s 2,000 some odd CGI shots done in one year, and we literally had to write code to figure out how to do this stuff!”

Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the film by first moving its release date from the summer (it was supposed to open a week before Spider-Man 2) to September, then courting the Internet press and finally making an appearance at the San Diego Comic Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advanced buzz.

The film was surprisingly well-received by most major critics. Roger Ebert gave it a four star rating and praised it for “its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden liked its visuals and its evocation of a bygone era but felt that "the monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance... At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi clichés." Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A-" rating, saying, "The investment is optimistic and wise; Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty." However, USA Today said that the film was "all style over substance, a clever parlor trick but a dull movie,” and Stephen Hunter, of the Washington Post, called it "a $70 million novelty item."

Sky Captain is an absolutely gorgeous looking film filled with eye-popping visuals and drenched in atmosphere. Everything is bathed in a warm sepia filter and captured in a soft focus lens clearly meant to evoke the glamour of classic Hollywood cinema. Sky Captain is a marvel of set design and visual effects. The film’s elaborate backgrounds were created through a series of photographic plates and 3D animation. By creating an entire world through CGI, Conran raised the bar on these kinds of films. Now, filmmakers are only limited by their imagination... and their budgets.

The problem with most films of these kinds is that the actors are often overwhelmed by the striking visuals. Fortunately, Conran has assembled a strong cast. Jude Law does an excellent job as the wisecracking, square-jawed matinée hero while Gwyneth Paltrow is his ideal foil, criticizing him at every opportunity but you know that it is done out of love. Law remembers that he “tried doing it like an American using 1930’s speak, but it felt like we were sending it up and what we wanted to do was to play it for real, so people didn’t think that we were making a modern version of a 1930’s movie.” Everyone is clearly enjoying breathing life into these archetypal characters. High caliber actors like Law, Paltrow and Angelina Jolie take these intentionally cliché characters and make them interesting to watch.

Sky Captain has all the markings of a debut by a first-time filmmaker. There is a go-for-broke, let’s-cram-everything-in-this-one attitude that a first-timer has a tendency to adopt because they do not know if there are going to get another chance. Conran has said that his intention was to create something “almost innocent and fun, the things that inspired me in wanting to make movies, the qualities of why I wanted to go to the movies. You lose yourself and escape into a world that didn’t exist anywhere else but in the movies.” Sadly, Sky Captain failed at the box office thus insuring the unlikely prospects of a sequel. It is too bad because the movie presents a richly textured and detailed world with fun and exciting characters.

As a little postscript to this article, after Sky Captain, Conran was set to direct an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, John Carter of Mars, which would have been right up his alley but sadly, Sky Captain's abysmal box office performance nixed that and he hasn't done anything since. I've searched and Googled all over the Internet for any word on what he's working on next but he seems to have dropped off the radar, which is a damn shame in my opinion.

The Year 2004: Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

2009-07-28T21:00:00.001+01:00

Weerasethakul's fourth feature put Thailand on the art cinema map when in 2004, headed by Quentin Tarantino, it scooped the Jury prize at Cannes. One of the leading lights in experimental cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Tropical Malady' is an ambitious examination of fear and desire, told through two segments in awe-inspiring sensory overload. Marin of the great film review blog Movie Critic, takes on an film that's 'concerned with mood and intuition' and is a 'pure, introverted, experimental delight'.

Keng is a soldier patrolling around the jungle. One day he meets Tong, a local villager working as the ice cutter. The two of them meet again while their bus and truck stop on the street. They become friends, and slowly gay lovers. They visit the cinema, an underground temple recommended by a woman and drive around with the motorcycle...A man killed the tiger shaman, disguised as a woman, and it's ghost wonders around the jungle. A soldier gets lost in the jungle, becoming hunted by the ghost in the form of a naked man. A monkey advises him to kill the ghost or he will be consumed by it, so he shoots it.

"Tropical Malady", winner of Jury Prize at the Cannes festival, is a surreal two-part film that can probably best be compared with it's mythical-traditional tone to Pasolini's "The Flower of 1001 Nights". It's a daring minimalistic film made out of two stories that's more concerned with mood and intuition than standard straight-forward narration and logic: the first story, revolving around two gay men, is good, but the second, a fantasy one, is truly fantastic and elevates the film into artistic heights. In the first story, neat little details, quiet style and lingering mood demand a lot of patience from the viewer, and although it doesn't satisfy to the fullest one has to be impressed by it. The story introduces the daring gay theme as completely normal, acting like some sort of gentler Thai version of "Brokeback Mountain", and little humorous touches, like in the scene where Keng puts his hand on Tong's knee in the cinema but he jokingly captures it by putting his other leg on it like a jaw or the one where Tong's mother finds Keng's love note in his pants that she was washing, are nice.

But the second story, that turned into fantasy, is truly unique and more fascinating: an hour long episode in which a soldier is lost in the dark jungle and hunted by a tiger shaman's ghost, realised almost without any dialogues, stimulates the dormant senses and is a pure, introverted, experimental delight. Scene after scene, director Apichatpong Weerasathekul crafted a subconscious jewel, telling everything with hypnotic images (a soldier walks in the jungle at night, a monkey "talks" with him with subtitles, the ghost throws the soldier down the hill and the subtitles say: "Strange feelings got the hold of the soldier", a spirit of a dead cow rises from it's dead body, a tree enlightened in the night...) that won't be understood by everyone because it's derived of any interpretation, but a one that gives a lot of attention to the magic of simple nature. If there was ever a film that got as close to capturing the feeling of meditation that transforms the viewer's consciousness into Nirvana, it's shining "Tropical Malady".

The Year 2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)

2009-07-27T21:00:00.001+01:00

Former music director Michel Gondry takes another crack at a Charlie Kaufman script, one of the few writers in the business who's name alone can sell a movie, and the results are simply spectacular. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, not really a film that lends itself to an easy summary, delivers something so unique and beautiful, charting the break-up of a couple once in love and then the subsequent erasing of the memories, thanks to a charming Kaufmanesque invention, that can delete painful details and relationships, that to try to define it as a specific genre just seems absurd. To Take us through this emotive, playful and yet deeply insightful film on the human condition, Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Alexander Coleman of the exquisite Coleman's Corner in Cinema with this startling essay on a film that 'At a time when most cinematic American love stories are prepackaged, preheated and pedestrian.... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands out all the more.

"Today [Valentine's Day] is a holiday created by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap."

So thinks Joel (Jim Carrey) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If every holiday deserves its own film, and every generation deserves its own cinematic explication of each holiday, then surely the 2004 Charlie Kaufman-penned, Michel Gondry-helmed hip, mind-bending comedy-drama romance, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is this epoch's most articulate annotation on that mid-February fixture of romance, Valentine's Day. As Joel awakens on this ostensibly ordinarily dismal winter day, he laments his doleful station in life. He stands, shivering, on a train platform, and—out of nowhere—decides to run off, and ditch the dismal daily peregrination to his job. For no reason in particular he runs to another train—headed to Montauk. He is not sure why; he is not, as he assures the audience through voice-over, an impulsive person. When he finally arrives in Montauk he waltzes about the beach, glaring into the bracing wintry air. It is freezing, he notes to himself. Brilliant, Joel. Montauk in February.

Where Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind goes from there is as exciting as it is touching, with an exactitude of detail that is especially rewarding of repeated viewings—though Gondry's dexterous direction makes the details appear like a baseball in the eyes of an accomplished hitter seeing his ideal pitch: enormous. Why Joel takes his little trip to Montauk will be explained, quite late, and very movingly, but the gap between action and motive, deed and desire, is where the picture most robustly asserts itself. And that is most charmingly fitting; Eternal Sunshine is fundamentally about gaps, in time, and in space, and doubtless chiefly in the mind. Memory for a character is itself is to be assaulted, as it has so many ugly ornaments of nostalgia for the sweet times, loathing and regret for the bitter episodes. Joel does not know it, but he has slipped through the gauntlet of a passionate relationship wrecked on the reef of apparently irreconcilable differences. No longer embittered, he is merely empty; like a model airplane with only some parts adjoined, he is incomplete.

Lost love, largely of the acrimoniously-severed variety, engenders a spitefulness that exceeds vindictiveness. Resigned to their fate, most men simply scorn their fallen idol; once where the woman incomparably stood on a ponderously tall pedestal, she is viewed through the prism of unyielding revision. Unforgiving, the wake of an untethered bond leaves a sourness mainly mundane in its projection, deep in its currents. Cognitively dwelling on every last irritating shortcoming, annoying habit and asymmetrical peculiarity, the person whose flaws once seemed invisible now is ensconced not in blind adoration or even respect but seething, boiling hate. Popular music consecrates the impulse to turn what was, at a different time, deliriously fawned over into the bete noire. Listening to “Time is on My Side” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” the anonymous women are given identities by the audial recipient; countenances that were so long ago angelic, seen now as warped by the ravages of time and circumstance, flash by in a melancholic mental collage of heartbreaking ids. It is perhaps the most self-deluding, and hollowest of redemptions—to envision the pitiable parallel existence the anterior loves are suffering through, all in a reveling of self-importance as figure of sustenance. Inherently egotistic and jealous, the process supplies an embarrassing counterpoise to the wounded.

Kaufman's screenplay is animated in its substance by the nectarous short cut of erasing all sensitively distressed memories. The concept is an immediate hook—and demands an accomplished level of filmic execution worthy of its incorporation into a narrative. Joel discovers that his beloved girlfriend, Clementine (a sublime Kate Winslet), has, in one of her most impulsive moments, had him completely erased from her memory. Having supplied her with this accommodation is Lacuna, Inc., which has ingeniously taken its innocuous-sounding name from the Latin term for a hollow, cavity or dip—lacunae typically referring to a body of water such as a lake or pond—the aforementioned hollow or dip would be in the lake. In the context of the science-fiction project, however, Lacuna takes on the meaning of the lacunae infarct, referring to a brain-damaging stroke that discriminatingly assaults a specific part of the skull-encased muscle, resulting in the debilitation of specific functions or expunging of particular memories. When Carrey's Joel sensibly voices concern about brain damage being a side effect of the process, Tom Wilkinson's Dr. Howard Mierzwiak replies, “Well, technically, the procedure is brain damage.” Possibly also carrying with it the papryological meaning, Lacuna, Inc. may likewise refer to the lacuna as an aberrant gap in a text (here representative of Joel's brain).

Where Kaufman and Gondry succeed most brilliantly is in the implementation of their fable. Eschewing the comfortable familiarity of species—both comic and romantic—for a skittishly-paced exhuming of a contemporary love story. With the questionable Lacuna, Inc.'s vaunted procedure consuming the great amplitude of the film's narrative, Kaufman and Gondry tell a backwards boy-meets-girl tale. If Joel is crushed by Clementine's hegira from him to unknown pastures, then Eternal Sunshine's greatest conceit is to move past the amaroidal angst of an eroding relationship, back to happier times, culminating with their very first meet-cute—over some chicken at an otherwise forgettable beach party—which plays out romantically as the fearless Clementine tests the limits of the introverted and timid Joel. As he is asked by his married friends about the “pretty girl” he was spending time with at the party, he can only reply that she was “just a girl.”

At a time when most cinematic American love stories are prepackaged, preheated and pedestrian in their creeping confluence of cynicism and naivete—made into suppositiously mass-appealing pats on the back from filmmakers who confuse wholly legitimate sentiment with simplistic gratification—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands out all the more. Joel and Clementine are as a couple, beyond convincing; in Kaufmanesque shorthand, Joel is another approximation of Kaufman's ineffectualness as a lover, and here the seemingly always weary Joel tirelessly scribbles down notes to himself but is withdrawn and unable to openly communicate, even with his lover. Clementine's recklessness of being could not be more antithetical to Joel's laconic shyness; as he ineptly struggles to say much of anything, she is brash and lacking in self-censorship. Suffering from an alcoholism that is only partly funny because it is so unfortunately true (authentic and believable), Clementine is Joel's counter and it is this apparent attitudinal and psychological gulf that both disturbs each member of the partnership and, bizarrely, makes their relationship work. The very problem is in its least troublesome vein a complementary personable dichotomy; where Clementine lacks introspection—which she chooses to stave off with alcohol—Joel is acutely self-aware to the point of self-destructively tethering himself to all of his idiosyncratic ways of questioning himself. In a plausible contemporary reversal of the action-minded man and the fence-straddling woman, Clementine's impulsive passion finds in Joel a stability that is both warm and in its quotidian application, smothering.

It is in the self-effacing, whirling pool of details, that Gondry and Kaufman wrap the seriocomic sentiment that leaves bruises of its own. In most romantic-comedies or variations of the template, the filmmakers are inclined to have their cake and eat it, too. Flaws of the characters are presented to make them nebulously human, all the while being played strictly for braying laughter. Eternal Sunshine does not expurgate the moments and traits that are all too familiar, yet usually skimmed over or entirely absent in most vaguely like-minded relationship films. Joel and Clementine's personal flaws are made humorous in the way that the flaws of a friend slowly become a source of amusement. Yet there is a deflating sadness to this pair that is uncommon; Joel is such an emotional weakling that sensitive men will find in him shared pangs—of regret, frequently stemming from absurd cowardice, of over-analysis of the self. Clementine is, to an indefinite degree, the young woman Joel at his angriest declares her to be—tempting in her penumbra of multi-colored-hair mysteriousness and affected, flirtatious unattainability, but stunted in her own development. Though the film, respectively written and directed by two men, makes Joel the hero, whose past is the film's focal point, Clementine's childhood and personal history would make for a potentially remarkable film. The fleeting visibility of a long-ago, nearly mortal wound is carried with her throughout, and is occasionally only held down from complete eruption by her dipsomania.

As if the Joel-Clementine heartache and humorously adorned pathos were not enough, Gondry and Kaufman pack in an entire subplot of hopes and hurts. With such an ostensible godsend as memory erasure, abuse is to follow like night after day. Lacuna, Inc. is itself a warped, closed-off tragicomic melodrama with a clandestine love triangle—two of whose members remain blithely unaware of its existence, though there is a knowingness to each beneath their rock 'n' roll, pot-induced haze of underwear bed dancing and sex. Elsewhere, an unethical young man has fallen for Clementine during her memory-pruning procedure and has stolen an unmentionable from her. Not stopping there he has taken all of Joel's items that he has given over to Lacuna, Inc.—items that would remind him of Clementine—for himself, with which he hopes to seduce the unsuspecting Clementine. When an indescribable sense of déjà vu intervenes for Clementine, she runs away from the cynical manipulator—who may serve as a potential stand-in for Hollywood persons who churn out the strikingly overly-familiar pills like briefly soothing narcotics working from prosaically similar frameworks.

One of the attributes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that cannot go unexamined is its pulsating, prevailing romanticism. Beneath all of the foreknowledge and soothsaying an obviously intelligent man like Kaufman brings with him, he allows himself, and Gondry allows the film, to be an avatar for unmitigated optimism. Despite having had their minds erased, Kirsten Dunst's Mary, Joel and Clementine all stumble, through an indefatigable sense of ceaseless yearning, for their (emotionally and cerebrally) lost loves. At a time when it is nauseatingly trendy to peer into complex matters that affect humans and their symbiotic relationships to one another in variegated contexts, Eternal Sunshine—not entirely unlike Being John Malkovich and Adaptation before it, and Synecdoche, New York after it—is serenely self-confident, enabling it to securely land on a jubilant restoration. It is in that reclamation, of memory, of love, of life—what would people be, by which means would they be informed without all of their memories?—that Eternal Sunshine terrifically realizes itself, all the while plaintively recognizing the inevitable potholes in the road along the way.

For the trajectory of hate and abyssal disappointment to be reached, love must have been an occupant for an extended period of time. It is through literally viewing Joel's own memories that he comes to terms with the exorbitant riches Clementine gifted him. It is not mere cliché to achieve, through storytelling, a character “becoming a better person”; comedy, as the flip side of the Grecian coin of tragedy, historically requires characters to learn—it is one of the most unquestioned features of tragedy that characters are doomed to not learn—and Eternal Sunshine allows Joel to learn an invaluable lesson. Alexander Pope's poem referenced is itself a contradictory extolling of the more modernist embrace of ignorance as bliss. In Eternal Sunshine, it is Clementine who, like Eve, first eats from the tree (this tree literally of ignorance), but Joel and Clementine each find themselves by the end and literally say, “Okay,” to their destiny, each other and themselves. If relationships are fundamentally mirrors into which one member sees the best—including the nonexistent best—of themselves in the other, Joel and Clementine at last allow the mirror reflection to not hurt them, and to be resigned to the imperfections they each possess. As his own mental collage of Clementine unspools backwards, Joel is left, like a beggar, pleading to “...keep just this one [memory]...” Down the rabbit hole it goes, and Joel is abandoned in his own mind until Clementine rescues him, and leads him, as she had before, to better times.

The Year 2004 : Saw (James Wan)

2009-07-26T21:00:00.001+01:00

Four films later, with one in the pipeline, James Wan directorial début 'Saw' has now become a successful franchise which shows no signs of abating, revolving around the fictional psychopath 'Jigsaw', the Saw franchise wouldn't have been possible without the mostly favourable reviews of it's first outing. Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Ryne Barber, our first ever contributor, of the fabulous horror centric site The Moon is a Dead World who takes on a film that 'really became a staple in the horror genre'.

Saw's plot goes a little something like this: A doctor, Lawrence, and a voyeur photographer, Adam, are chained to pipes in a bathroom by a mysterious killer named Jigsaw who likes to play games with his prey. But the games aren't just for fun; they're meant to change the people who play them, to have them cherish their lives because of they have done bad things in the past. As we try to find a way out of the bathroom with Adam and Larry, we get flashbacks interspersed with footage of Larry's wife and daughter. There are plot twists at the end which are wrapped up with a little montage of conclusions that we have seen throughout the movie. And this is where the whole franchise started.

I had heard of Saw when it first came out, and after it hit DVD shelves I went out and rented it. To tell the truth I was blown away. It's all I could talk about for a couple of weeks, recommending it to all of my friends and preaching its brutality and clever plot. When I watch it again for the umpteenth time, I still find the qualities that I love about it, but also the holes that it has.

Cary Elwes' performance is pretty lackluster, I must say. The British accent he has wavers in and out of the scenes sometimes, especially when he's angry. His emotions are not well-transitioned. One such scene comes to mind when he gets a phone call and expects it to be the killer, yelling, "What do you want you son of a bitch!" quite angrily. When it happens to be his wife, he puts on a puppy dog expression and starts to whimper. He doesn't do the genuine
sadness bit very well at all, and his utterance of "Fuck this shit!" kind of makes me laugh.

Danny Glover does a pretty good job of playing the obsessed cop, who keeps coming back for more. And is that Ben from Lost playing the kidnapper who has poison running through his veins? You bet it is.

I think one of the best sequences is when Adam is stalking the kidnapper in his apartment with the camera being his primary source of light. We know that the guy is hiding in the closet, but the timing is thrown way off because he has the door open for a few seconds and nothing happens. He flashes the camera and THEN the guy jumps out. We don't really know what to expect, and it's quite creepy.

The brutality in the film is overwhelming, especially the scene where Adam smashes the kidnapper's head in. It shows that everyone comes to a certain breaking point. And the plot twists really got me the first time. Of course now they have no effect on me because I know exactly what's going to happen, so it detracts from the experience, but the first time I saw it I was flipping out. "WHOA WHAT!"

I think that the first film does everything better than the other films in the series, probably because they really spent a lot of time on this one. The other films feel a little worse in the details department, but this first one really became a staple in the horror genre. While the movie isn't as entertaining to watch after the first viewing because you know what will happen and part of the draw is the plot twist and traps, it still leaves a frightful, brutal viewing experience.

Saw has a smart, slick, and twisting plot, but the dialogue is lacking in parts; overall, it's a visceral experience that has you thinking and questioning Jigsaw's motives, for good or evil.