The “Up” Documentaries: As time goes by …

The world has changed drastically since the Up project began in 1964. Our multimedia culture produces virtual worlds like Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere. We broadcast our lives to each other daily — some of us hourly or minutely who habitually announce what we’ve had for lunch on Twitter. I wonder if any of us truly understand how we are marking the passage of our lives … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Up”: Raising the roof

Dir. Pete Docter
(2009, PG, 96 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

My how the standards for American animation have changed! Cartoons — which now seems like an overly reductive term — once a medium for kids’ movies, have developed greater sophistication, richer themes, and more challenging stories than most films intended for adults. Pixar has led the way; the company’s last film, WALL-E, ranked as my favorite film of 2008.

Up opens with a boy, Carl (voiced by Jeremy Leary), in a movie theater staring up with wonder at newsreel footage of Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an explorer and adventurer whose image is tarnished when one of his discoveries is debunked. Upon leaving, Carl comes across Ellie (Elie Docter), a boisterous girl who also idolizes Muntz and develops a fondness for her new friend. “You don’t talk a lot,” she tells Carl. “I like you!”

What follows is a chronicle of their relationship — a montage of scenes from their lives, from childhood, to young adulthood, to marriage, to old age, and finally to Ellie’s death. These brief moments in time give us a fuller sense of love than most films at feature length, and they floor us in ways we don’t expect. Consider the image of Carl and Ellie spotting the shapes of babies in the clouds, followed by a scene of the couple painting a baby’s room, followed by Ellie shedding tears in a hospital. Perhaps younger viewers will not understand that this sequence indicates a miscarriage, but the message will come through to adults. I was struck by the boldness of including such down-to-earth sadness in this pie-in-the-sky fable; it’s a tough dose of reality, but it informs our understanding of Carl and his quest.

In present day, Carl (now voiced by Ed Asner) has withdrawn from the world. He lives in the house he built with Ellie and stubbornly refuses to move out, even as new construction springs up around him. He is targeted by a real estate developer, who is a vivid character in a suit and sunglasses who has no dialogue and hardly any expression other than a faint grin of victory once he has backed Carl into a corner. He is more a shadow than a person.

To avoid having the house taken from him and demolished, Carl sets out to realize his wife’s childhood dream: to bring her house to Paradise Falls in South America, a landmark made famous by their hero Muntz. He raises thousands of helium balloons from his chimney and takes flight, but he has a stowaway: Boy Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), who came to his door hoping to earn a merit badge for assisting the elderly. Carl imagines a drastic means of getting rid of the boy that rivals the cape sequence from The Incredibles for acid hilarity.

The floating house eventually arrives in South America, a bit off its target, and we are unsurprised when Carl and Russell encounter Muntz himself. From this point I will describe little of the plot and will only say that from the reappearance of Muntz the film’s themes reveal themselves. This is a story of obsessive need, of holding on too tightly. Muntz is determined to redeem his legacy. Carl is determined to keep some part of Ellie alive; he speaks to his floating house as if he is speaking to her, and as the folly of his endeavor becomes clearer, we see it manifested in the toppled furniture, ruptured balloons, and Ellie’s picture falling off the wall. The house is nearly burned, crashes into rocks. He wants to honor’s his wife’s memory, but it is only an excuse to sequester himself in grief, and all the while the symbolic house comes down around his head.

Russell is searching for something too. He shares a touching scene with Carl that subtly describes his family and makes us understand why he really strives for merit badges. The screenplay by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson is gratifying in how it makes time for scenes like that, with dialogue that is mature and revealing, amidst the welcome whimsy of giant tropical birds and talking dogs. The canines speak through specially designed collars; a villainous alpha dog has a loose wire that makes his ruthless declarations sound … well, much less intimidating.

Docter also directs. He received Oscar nominations for co-writing Toy Story and WALL-E as well as for his last feature directing credit, Monsters Inc., and if I call that film one of Pixar’s lesser efforts I only mean that it is simply good and not great. Up is a step, well, up for the filmmaker, in a company that seems to specialize in steps up; every Pixar film sets the bar ever higher, to the point where we can hardly believe they continue to clear it. As for the future, I suppose it would be fitting to say, the sky’s the limit.

“Wit”: Death be not proud …

Had it premiered in theaters, Wit would have contended for Oscars. Directed by Mike Nichols and adapted by Nichols and star Emma Thompson from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, it premiered on the HBO network on March 24, 2001, and is available on DVD. It is as perfect a film on the subject of death as you will see … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”: A long way from home

I watched Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story twice, and only during the second viewing did I understand who the characters were and how they were related to each other. Such is Ozu’s style, explains David Desser, editor of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, a collection of writings about the 1953 drama. He provides the audio commentary and describes the director’s high expectation of his audience to keep up. Indeed, exposition can be intrusive to a film’s narrative, but here is a film that could have used an intrusion … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“He’s Just Not That Into You”: The rules of the game

Dir. Ken Kwapis
(2009, PG-13, 129 min)
★ ★

The trailers and TV ads teased a romantic comedy for the information age. They repeated, as a mission statement of sorts, a clever line of dialogue about the culture of BlackBerries, email accounts, social networking sites, and cell phones: “Now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

Unfortunately, He’s Just Not That Into You isn’t about modern romance or modern characters, and in fact the character who speaks that dialogue, played by Drew Barrymore, is hardly in the film at all save a handful of scenes. Instead, the film feels dated, cynical in an old-fashioned kind of way. It’s not about human relationships, it’s about a set of rules for obscuring human interaction on the dating scene. It plays like Love Actually written by schoolchildren.

Instead of a 21st Century heroine, this film gives us Gigi, a pre-feminist antique of love-starved desperation; she makes Ally McBeal look like Xena Warrior Princess. The idea is to watch her evolve from boy-crazy neurotic to savvy relationship guru. She will learn to stop reading the wrong signs and start reading the right signs, but all I want to do is tell her to stop worrying about the damn signs and forget about dating for a while. A long while. Gigi is played by Ginnifer Goodwin, a radiant actress in other roles, most notably a polygamist wife on HBO’s series Big Love, but here she’s made to play a character so needy that her scenes are depressing instead of funny.

Gigi meets Alex (Justin Long), who has a Jedi-like skill at spotting when a man isn’t really interested in a woman. If he claims he’s going out of town, he doesn’t want to see you again. If he doesn’t call, he never will. Some of these ring of frank, common-sense truth, and the initial message is sound: don’t waste your time on men who don’t want you. But the more deeply we delve into the rules, the colder and more dehumanizing they become. Let me present an alternative: if you’re dating somebody who understands the rules of the game, find someone who isn’t playing.

The film juggles multiple characters. Some are likable, some aren’t. Some we spend too much time with, some too little. Either way, this isn’t the screenplay to properly deal with them. There is a storyline involving a music executive (Bradley Cooper), his wife (Jennifer Connelly), and his potential mistress (Scarlett Johansson). The wife is the most dimensional of the three, but the writing highlights self-pity and irrationality. An especially unpleasant scene has her accusing her contractor’s crew of sneaking cigarettes while renovating her house. She really suspects her husband, and I think we’re meant to laugh at how she deflects her anger onto the innocent man, but the humor is at her expense, and the feeling is mean-spirited.

The Barrymore character, Mary, works for a gay newspaper, The Baltimore Blade. Why does the screenplay put her to work for a gay newspaper? For the sole purpose of providing her with a cadre of Gay Confidantes, who exist in the movies for the sole purpose of providing counsel to straight women. Mary gets a trio, who warn her about the pitfalls of MySpace and insist on listening to a phone message from a prospective boyfriend. Over the course of the film, we don’t see these characters write any news; their office functions entirely as a romantic way station.

At one point, Mary advises real estate agent Conor (Kevin Connolly, of TV’s Entourage) to place an ad to expand his clientele. Conor too is lovelorn, and soon he also has a pair of helpful gay men who tell him how best to score with the woman he loves. If ever a single gay man would say, “Deal with it yourself,” he would instantly become the film’s most interesting character.

One relationship works — works so well in fact that we wonder why the characters didn’t leave to make their own movie. Beth (Jennifer Aniston) has been in a committed relationship with Neil (Ben Affleck) for seven years. Beth wants to get married, but Neil doesn’t believe in it. This is the only storyline that doesn’t feel contrived around juvenile rules and games and signals and tricks. It’s based on how she feels, how he feels, and how they deal with it. They speak like adults. They’re not playing at love, they’re in it. There is a late scene where Beth takes the measure of her sisters’ husbands, and then unexpectedly finds Neil performing household chores. What we learn about their relationship in the space of a single look is so pure and genuine that it puts the rest of the film to shame.

He’s Just Not That Into You is finally not even true to itself. It talks a good game about women not deluding themselves — “You’re the rule, not the exception,” Alex keeps telling Gigi. But screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein back-load the screenplay with exceptions, in order to supply the kind of wish-fulfillment happy endings that encourage women to delude themselves in the first place. Even Beth and Neil, who might have had a sublime ending, are hijacked in the end by an extremely conventional one.

If you follow the rules, you too could be an exception to them, the film seems to tell us, thereby revealing that it has nothing to say to us at all. Viewers looking for insight into relationships would more wisely consult the works of Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Bridget Jones’s Diary), Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing), or Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters). Their films are about people. This one is about warfare.

“My Zinc Bed” (HBO): Addicted to love, on the rocks

Dir. Anthony Page
(2008, Not Rated, 75 min)
★

Paddy Considine. Uma Thurman. Jonathan Pryce. Three splendid actors altogether sunk by this entire floofy enterprise. “Floofy” is a word I made up. I don’t know quite what it means, but I know it when I see it. My Zinc Bed was produced by HBO and the BBC and despite its stars and pedigree — the writer is Oscar-nominee David Hare (The Hours, The Reader), adapting his own play — was dumped onto the American airwaves and unceremoniously rushed to DVD. Now I know why. It plays like Days of Our Lives written in iambic pentameter, which might be sort of a novel idea if there were even a shred of emotional truth in it.

Considine stars and narrates as Paul Peplow, a struggling British poet who means to tell us the story of the Summer That Changed Everything. “Joseph Conrad says that inside every heart there burns a desire to set down once and for all a true record of what has happened,” he tells us in voice-over. That’s how he talks. I suspect he would announce going to the bathroom by first quoting Emerson: “Be not a slave to your own bladder. Plunge into the sublime toilet bowl!”

The first two scenes demonstrate an intimacy the film and its characters haven’t remotely earned. In the first, Paul meets with Victor Quinn (Pryce), a businessman who runs a company called Flotilla. Paul has been assigned to interview him about some kind of malfeasance that is never directly explained. But the interview descends into an argument about Alcoholics Anonymous. Victor has somehow learned that Paul is in recovery. Paul responds to this violation of his privacy angrily but proceeds, for no good reason I could discern, to confess the most sordid details of his drinking.

The interview falls through, but Victor gives Paul a job at his company. There he meets Elsa (Thurman), Victor’s wife, and in the second scene he proceeds to tell this stranger a whole new set of dark secrets. By the end they’re kissing in his office. These spontaneous outpourings of his soul ring utterly false, and the infidelity is both shamelessly melodramatic and thuddingly obvious. Within the space of a couple more scenes, Paul is in love with Elsa, and grows paranoid about what Victor knows. Will he fall off the wagon? Could he stop after just one drink?

What on Earth is this film about? For all its florid language, which dances prettily about topics like addiction, capitalism, and marriage, it has nothing of value to say. It’s not serious about alcoholism, which is just topical window dressing for the affair. The business side is so underdeveloped it’s a mystery why it’s brought up at all. And the dialogue — oh the dialogue! How the screenwriter uses so many elaborately assembled words to express so little!

The director is Anthony Page. I suppose I should mention him, though there is little sign of him in this picture. Hare’s script tramples over him and the actors. Tramples over the audience too. It revels in the kind of philosophical posturing that thinks it’s more profound than it is. We long for something — anything! — spoken plainly, emphatically, genuinely. I quote Shakespeare when I say, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” In honoring the Bard’s wisdom, I can sum up this entire film in two words: It sucks.

“Mulholland Drive”: A dangerous road through the city of dreams

I’ve had a complex relationship with David Lynch ever since I first encountered his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. I’ve seen it about half a dozen times now, and I’ve sought out other of his films that I’ve loved (The Elephant Man), hated (Eraserhead), or couldn’t decipher one way or another (Blue Velvet, Inland Empire). The only emotion Lynch has never elicited is indifference … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”: Murder in four-part disharmony

“It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.”

So says a nameless commoner (Kichijiro Ueda). He has come upon a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) in a broken-down gatehouse identified by an overhead sign: Rashomon. It is Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated 1950 mystery, set in feudal Japan, about the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyô), the death of her samurai husband (Masayuki Mori), and the various conflicting accounts of the crime … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Star Trek”: To boldly go where several have gone before

Dir. J.J. Abrams
(2009, PG-13, 127 min)
★ ★ ½

I’m a Trekkie — er, Trekker — or whatever we’re calling ourselves these days. Trek-American? But as the series entered a fifth cycle on television in 2001 and a ninth sequel in theaters in 2002, it was clear that the franchise needed a significant reboot; there are only so many stories you can generate from following a captain and his crew through space on variations of the same ship, and I think the makeup department was running out of ideas for alien species. So I was excited when I learned that J.J. Abrams, geek-auteur of the television gems Alias and Lost, would take the reins. I’m no purist. When new ideas are needed, I’ll take them from all comers; imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels might have been if George Lucas had collaborated with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, or Ronald D. Moore, who triumphantly re-imagined another beloved science fiction antiquity: Battlestar Galactica.

If only Abrams had written the screenplay — or Whedon or Moore. That job went instead to frequent Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the passable Mission: Impossible III for the director, as well as Michael Bay’s The Island and Transformers and the TV series Fringe, of which I am not a fan. Their Trek script, which brings the franchise back to its birthplace, onboard the original Enterprise with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and company, has met with critical acclaim and commercial success: a whopping score of 83 on Metacritic and an opening weekend gross that nearly doubled the entire domestic take of the previous Trek film, Nemesis. But I’m not sure what the fuss is about.

Orci and Kurtzman’s script is effective, frequently clever, gets the job done in a workmanlike sort of way, but it’s short on imagination — it doesn’t boldly go anywhere we haven’t been already. This new version of Kirk, played by Chris Pine, is even cockier and more flamboyant than William Shatner’s version, but he’s an archetype of devil-may-care heroism we’ve seen a thousand times before. There are action set pieces that owe no small credit to the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. And the principal villain is the evil Romulan Nero (Eric Bana), who is hellbent on a familiar brand of revenge.

The plot is founded on a time-travel premise, but it’s a clever one. I’ll describe precious little of it, lest I reveal crucial details, but it involves Nero, Spock (Zachary Quinto), and a black hole. Nero possesses something called “Red Matter,” which produces spontaneous black holes. It takes the form of a suspended red orb of liquid, which may be a nod to a similar object Abrams created for Alias; the previous orb produced zombies, not black holes, but I suppose in this economy floating red orbs need to diversify.

We meet the crew, though the film only leaves itself enough time to loosely sketch them and reference their former personas: Dr. McCoy says, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” and engineer Scotty repeats his catchphrase, “Ah’m givin’ her all she’s got, cap’n!” But we get a sense of the actors in their new roles. The wonderful comic actor Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is a joy as Scotty, while Karl Urban’s McCoy and Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov in their limited screen-time are restricted to gimmicky character quirks; their performances play more like impressions, though I’ll confess a laugh when the ship’s computer failed to recognize Chekhov’s Russian-accented English.

The production values are a mixed bag. The visual effects have been upgraded to 21st Century specs, but Abrams shoots in that irritating way where incessant edits and shaky cameras make the action all but unintelligible; why do filmmakers throw so much money at the screen only to make it impossible to appreciate? The production design by Scott Chambliss is a curious blend of the futuristic and the retro: Engineering, with its orange, man-sized hydro-tubes, looks like a water park designed by Willy Wonka. Michael Kaplan’s costume design is troubling: while Abrams was updating the franchise, he should have swapped out those undignified women’s uniforms for something with pants.

Every once and a while, the camera slows down enough to enchant us. When Kirk and McCoy approach the Enterprise on a transport vessel, they look through the window at a beautifully designed space dock: a spherical station branching out into satellites. I wanted to spend time on the station, find out how it runs. What is the day-to-day life of these 24th Century people as Abrams envisions them? I wanted more of the human detail that distinguished the director’s television work — and while we’re at it, a Steadicam wouldn’t hurt.

Moral Fixation: Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989)

Woody Allen is up-front about the themes of his 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanors, but so clear and insightful about them that we don’t mind the direct approach. It is an argument about God. Where is He? Does the world adhere to moral certitude according to His laws? Or is it chaos, a nihilist mash-up of mankind’s basest, most cynical impulses? … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org