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A Movie To Leave You Bored For The Holidays

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Fred Claus (2007)

What is wrong with this picture: Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti in a family film about Santa Claus and his older, meaner brother, Fred? Well, you take out the family part of the sentence, make Neil LaButte the screenwriter and you’ve got something. But add in elves, the director of Wedding Crashers, and more pratfalls than a Charlie Chaplin film, now you have a recipe for disaster. And that is what Fred Claus is.

The movie starts off with one of the worst openings ever. It is the 16th Century. We find out that the arrival of Nicholas to the Claus family has made life hard for his older brother Fred. Their mother (Kathy Bates) from the start shows favor towards her younger “perfect” son. And then Nick becomes a saint, which comes with a clause (har-har) of it’s own that they come with immortality, but not just him, his entire family as well. Does this play at all into the rest of the film? Do we ever get a joke about Christmas during the Revolution? Nope.

We’re suddenly brought to present-day Chicago where Fred is now Vince Vaughn and he’s a Repo guy with dreams of becoming a bookie. The best scene in the film comes when he squares off with a little girl on how her belief in Santa could destroy her life. But when a ridiculous scheme gets him involved in a 100 Sidewalk Santa Brawl, he’s put behind bars. To get him out of trouble, he calls his little brother Santa (now Giamatti) to get him out. But Santa has decided to take the initiative and use this to help get his brother squared around. He brings him up north to help with the holiday. But this laurel leaf is quickly put the test when Fred starts causing trouble for the elves, letting his mouth get the best of him, and general smart-alleck behavior. And this year, Santa doesn’t have a lot of room available to shenanigans when an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) is brought in to shut down the joint. By Fred’s side is Santa’s top elf (John Michael Higgins getting the hobbit treatment) and on his mind is his on-again-off-again girlfriend (Rachel Weitz) as he bumbles his way into saving Christmas.

I have to wonder if Fred Claus was meant to be something more adult like Bad Santa only good. If you look at the core dynamics of what the characters represent, the actors in those parts, I’m starting to see drastic changes being made to make it a generic holiday movie that’s more about goofy pratfalls than verbal wit. There’s a scene that was begging to be in the movie after Santa puts Fred in charge of Naughty and Nice. It would have Fred defending his decision to Nice a bad kid (“The other kid had it coming…”). There are some scenes which should have worked but don’t like in-joke called Sibling’s Anonymous. As if any kid is going to know whom Frank Stallone is.

Again, whoever cast this movie was looking at the wrong script. Here you have some of the most edgy actors in film today basically playing with the kiddies. What’s next: the cast of Jackass performing A Christmas Carol? The reason you get Vince Vaughn is for his mouth. When he’s talking, he’s great! The problem is that the film doesn’t have him talking so much as he is taking pratfalls. Giamatti just cannot play one-dimensional characters and watching him do so is painful to watch. And then there are the supporting actors like Rachel Weitz, who really doesn’t even belong in the feature, not to mention the great misuse of Kathy Bates.

Did I mention that I hated the first fifteen minutes? Director David Dobkin has always had a problem with prioritizing what matters in the films he creates. This is no exception. I’m getting really tired with directors who think anything can be funny if you put some sort of prop or silly action into it. He again misuses his resources and comes to the wrong conclusion as to what his movie is about. But I don’t think he makes movies to be thoughtful or smart. He thinks the same fart joke is funny the hundredth time around. Unfortunately, enough people go to see the movie that they let him make another fart joke.

All in all, this is nothing more than just another holiday flick meant to make a little money and do nothing more. I would have to say that if you can’t find a better holiday movie this year, you’re not looking hard enough.

Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 1:36 AM by erico_77375 | with 0 comments

Bee Movie Nearly Put Me To Zzzz

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Bee Movie (2007)

I don’t know exactly what to think of Bee Movie, but then again, I don’t think the movie knows either. Written by Jerry Seinfeld, animated by Dreamworks, the movie seems to have serious potential, but only minutes into the film, the flaws become clear.

This is the story of Barry B. Benson, who is a bee if you can’t tell by now and is voiced by Mr. Seinfeld. He’s just graduated Bee College and is about to be placed in his permanent job in the hive where he will stay forever. But Barry, like Benjamin Braddock before him, isn’t so sure that plastics…sorry, honey is in his future. But one day he takes up a dare laid down by a “pollen jock” and decides to leave the hive. His little day trip takes a detour when a tennis ball, a rainstorm and a leather boot puts him in the house of a young florist (Rene Zellweger). By the way, bees can really talk, but they don’t around humans. They spark a friendship that sometimes feels eerily like a relationship. But then Barry finds out that humans are selling honey. Outraged, he decides to sue to put a kibosh on this operation and decides to sue on behalf of all bees.

Throughout the entire feature, I found myself asking whom is this movie really trying to entertain? I knew it couldn’t be the kids when one little girl around five said what everyone else felt during the movie: “No Fun!!!” The problem with the story is that most of the jokes are in witticisms targeted more towards adults that there’s very little that kids will like. Yes, it’s pretty though a distant cousin to Ratatouille. I do appreciate some of the movie, such as a mosquito voiced by Chris Rock. I enjoyed how they made the link between bees and the environment that is told with urgency but without making any political statements. But that doesn’t excuse the meandering, the lack of true sophistication and well-conceived characters.

Dreamworks Animation has been on a rapid decline since the second Shrek film and this year has already given us the lackluster Shrek the Third. Why do they think they need to have so much pop-culture in their films? Why won’t they give up the ghost and try something different? I remember their first animated film with admiration, Antz. That was really the much-better retelling of what Bee Movie is going for. Not only does Bee Movie sport a dull story, but the animation is so incredibly lame that it makes me wonder how on earth did it cost $150 to make?

All in all, this movie is going to have families flocking to it no matter how much I tell them not to. Some kids will like it because it’s animated and won’t realize until too late that there’s better stuff out there. Although a little girl did encourage me to hope, and I wonder if I just heard the next great critic.

Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 1:16 AM by erico_77375 | with 0 comments

This Black Book Is Worth A Peek

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Black Book (2007)

What can I say; Paul Verhooven has proven me wrong. How, you may ask? Because he’s probably the only director with enough guts to make this kind of film. And in doing so has shown that he commands cinema like a fierce conductor; without fear or limit. I had to remind myself that this is the man behind Basic Instinct, Hollow Man, and Showgirls. He has also done RoboCop, Total Recall, and The 4th Victim, which were not bad. But nothing prepared me for Black Book, an absolutely brilliant film that dares us to hold on for dear life and gives us a story that challenges as well as entertains.

The film starts off in the 50s in a small town in Israel. A bus full of Dutch tourists stop for a quick spell. A woman from that group recognizes a woman who lives there. It turns out they knew each other from The War. The rest of the film is in flashback to the war, but this scene is important for several reasons, the biggest is to assure the audience that no matter what happens in the film, these two women will survive. That is something that we’ll need to know later on.

Then we are taken back to 1945, it’s near the end of the war and Holland’s Jews are holding their breaths waiting for word about the Allies. Amongst those is Rachel played by Carice van Houten. She’s the daughter of a rich Jew who has taken up residence in a house full of Christians. To eat, she has to memorize a verse from the bible. She tries to keep her neck down and not cause attention to be drawn on her. But when a stray bomb kills the family she is staying with, she is forced into making a run for it. Her family’s lawyer sets her and her family up to be taken to neutral territory, but are discovered enroute. The boat’s cargo are all killed, except for her. She slips off the boat and watches as the Nazis plunder the dead Jews. Infuriated, she decides to join a radical resistance movement whose intent is to infiltrate the Nazi headquarters. During a standard mission, Rachel finds herself cornered with the Nazi commander himself. Not knowing she’s a Jew, he starts hitting on her. When the resistance sees an opportunity in this, they order her to be his mistress in order to but the headquarters. She does so, but in the process, she finds herself starting to become attracted to him. But when circumstances has some of her comrades arrested for gun smuggling, events lead her to being considered a double-crosser on both sides, and her lover to be a Jew sympathizer (which it turns out that he really is in a way). And that’s when the war ends and the real trouble begin.

Black Book is a Hitchcock thriller that Hitchcock would have been afraid to tell. It’s willing to look at Nazis objectively without the automatic stamp of evil. The film that came closest to attempting this was Wolfgang Peterson’s brilliant Das Boot. Not to say that Nazis are good, but we are given a Nazi that is disillusioned by the rhetoric, who knows that Germany cannot win and only wants to do his part to end things with the least amount of bloodshed. Is it possible that a high-ranking Nazi would be like this? Yes, but highly unlikely. But the film isn’t trying for historical accuracy as it is about these two people put in the worst-case scenario imaginable. This isn’t a film out to stir controversy, but entertain with its superior storytelling and incredible performances.

The film lives or dies on Ms. Van Houten’s performance, which she gives in spades. The character is juicy enough to begin with considering that she’s caught between two very delicate forces that could crush her if she’s not careful. Watch as she plays the parts asked of her from both sides, and yet she never turns into the people she’s portraying, but still being affected by the consequences. Take the scene where she gets involved in a botched murder plot

But the real star is Paul Verhooven, who shows mastery in this film that I didn’t think he had in him. His shots are beautiful, well composed and extremely well blocked. This filmmaker has been better known by his exploitations than his skill, and while there is a urination scene that some might see as going too far, I don’t because it is meant to get you behind a character instead of punishing them. Later this year, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution took a swipe at the same idea and came off hollow.

All in all, this is a great thriller worthy of your attention. And it just goes to show that some directors have hidden resources that just need the right conditions to bloom (Eli Roth, I’m looking at you). But the problem is that Verhooven is now playing at a different level now and cannot creep down to his usual gutter any more. And for a quick moment, I find that to be sad. But then I pinch myself and rejoice for one of the best thrillers ever filmed.

Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 1:02 AM by erico_77375 | with 1 comments

Darabont Got Lost In The Fog

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Stephen King's The Mist (2007)

Five minutes can change everything, especially in how you see a film. This is doubly the case when it comes to the ending. Sometimes it’s intended (The Sixth Sense), sometimes not so much (Manhattan). Looking back at The Mist, the last five minutes is what I think about, and not for good reasons. And it will be these five minutes that most of my review is going to be talking about. I’ll try not to spoil it intentionally, but I cannot make any promises.

The Mist is the third Stephen King adaptation by director Frank Darabont, who’s The Green Mile is a small classic and his The Shawshank Redemption is a mega classic. This time, he turns to one of King’s oldest novellas about a group of Maine townspeople who get cornered into a supermarket by an unnatural mist. The story focuses on David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an artist who comes to town with his small son and is trapped in the store when sirens go off and a bloodied townsfolk scream about something in the mist and the sounds of screams outside encourage that idea. Later, when a really stupid idea by a couple of the townies brings about a monster attack, this intensifies the fears going through their heads and they start forming their own little groups. One small band led by a big city judge (Andre Braugher) ignores the screams and the blood and insists that there’s nothing outside and wants to leave. Another lead by the local religious freak Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), believes this the sign of the Apocalypse and that God wants blood. When Drayton decides that he and a handful of people might need to leave, they soon learn that there might be more to worry about than the creatures outside.

The question the movie ultimately asks is who is the more dangerous species: the one inside or outside the store? It also is a look on the ways fear plays upon mankind and the psychology of fear. We can tell that Mrs. Carmody was off her rocker before the world ended, but the easy answers and lack of need to do anything about it makes what she believes very appealing to those who care not to seek a plan. Drayton might be the voice of reason, but to most who are facing imminent death, reason doesn’t have the same value. These are the key elements to the original King story that correctly sees the mist not as the enemy but the situation to test man’s soul. Darabont, when evoking King’s work, is doing the same thing. These elements are fascinating, even chilling. Darabont correctly makes the monsters indifferent to humans (though they do enjoy eating them, of course).

The ultimate problem is the ending. To end his version of the story, he does a complete 180 from the original story, which I would only be mildly upset about if it weren’t for the fact that looking back at the rest of the movie, it defeats the whole intent of the story. ***Spoiler Alert*** King’s ending eluded that the fate of his characters was not certain, but that they held on the belief of hope. The film decides to give a definite answer, and betrays how the characters would actually act. Why did the filmmaker make this decision at the end? He’s made a case against hope against uncertainly, almost siding with the film’s villain for that matter. It certainly wasn’t done for the sake of making the audience happier. There are only two answers that make any sense. The first was that he wanted to shock the audience with an ending they weren’t ready for, but at the expense of destroying the tone of his movie. The second one is more childish, but makes more sense. Darabont’s last film, The Majestic, was a great film in the spirit of a Frank Capra heartstring-tugger. It was a beautiful film that nobody saw, that most of the critics panned as being sappy. It makes me wonder if he’s decided to punish his audience. Many people might argue that this version of the film is a cautionary tale, but that doesn’t explain how you have your decent character going through all those trials and tribulations only to get to the point he does in the last five minutes.

Okay, the spoilers are over. But even without the ending, this is a mild film all the way around. The monsters look like bad CG, the acting isn’t anything to write home about (even Ms. Harden pushed her character a little too far for me to truly find interesting. And visually speaking, mist doesn’t leave much to look at. And yet I was pulled into the story, it’s characters, and their fates. Again, this is more a testament to King’s story than Darabont’s film.

All in all, I really hate this film because five minutes told me more than I wanted or needed to know. It told me that hope is futile and that those who do should be punished. It told me that the filmmaker didn’t believe in his characters from the first minute on the screen. It told me that you have to punish the good as much as you punish the bad. In the end, I just wanted it to be a really bad dream that I can forget in the morning. Such a waste of great material.

Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 12:23 AM by erico_77375 | with 0 comments

The Times, They Are A-Confusing

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I'm Not There (2007)

When does innovation end and pretentiousness begin? I found myself asking this question near the start of I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes’ follow-up to Far From Heaven. The idea is interesting: Six actors who couldn’t be more different in both look and feel playing one of the most contradictory of American icons, Bob Dylan. We have Batman and the new Joker Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw from Perfume, Richard Gere, a 10-year-old black kid (the sensational Marcus Carl Franklin), and the greatest actress of our generation, Cate Blanchett. Here’s the kicker: We never hear the name Bob Dylan used with any of these six actors.

They tell Dylan’s story through his music, without any care to chronology or to the people who inspired or were inspired by Dylan, except for one great scene where the Woody Guthrie Dylan (Franklin), goes to the deathbed of the actual Woody Guthrie and sings him a song. We do get a sense of a few of the defining moments of Dylan’s life, which is explored in interesting ways, such as his transition from protest songs, his even more controversial move from the acoustic guitar to electric, and his divorce to his first wife. The film steps around his short acting career, his near-death motorcycle accident, and his time as a preacher. These events are interspersed between his six (possibly seven) incarnations, jumbled together without any sense of time or emotional chronology.

The movie is incredibly smart and does ask you to contemplate on the complexities of Dylan, but almost at the expense of seeing how childish and bane he really is. Some scenes allow you to see him from outside his mind, such as when the movie-star Dylan (Ledger) makes an ill-advised comment about women not being poets or when the “electric” Dylan (Blanchett) is confronted by a BBC journalist (Bruce Greenwood) who asks a reasonable question and gets attacked for his efforts. I am fascinated by the decisions Dylan made in his tremultuous career, but I understand the gist of his reasons. This was a man who didn’t want to be owned by any one thing, didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a stereotype. But in doing so has isolated himself from those cared about his work. But what does that say about his fans who got angry when he branched out? These are elements of the story and the movie that I loved, not to mention that great music played by both Dylan and his many admirers (The I’m Not There Soundtrack, go get it, no matter what you think of the movie).

And yet, I cannot get over the fact a lot of the film is incredibly pretentious. First and worst of these trespasses is in the fact that none of the actors playing Bob Dylan are ever called such. I know they’re meant to represent the different faces of the man, but the fact that they act as completely different people apart from each other (the Ledger version, at one point, is the actor portraying the Bale version). This takes the idea of Dylan having different faces in to the realm that he is a close cousin to Sybil. This case can also be made of the Gere Dylan, who sees himself as an old Billy the Kid. While the analogy does ring true, we have this character actually living in the Old West. But then again, the movie doesn’t even try to hide its pretentiousness in a facade of earnestness. My biggest complaint is the misuse of the music in the movie. Dylan’s music never feels apart of the movie, merely a side dish to the action going on. But then, most of his work couldn’t be put to the context of any story because they were stories of their own.

The film’s acting is very interesting considering how the film looks at Dylan. Since it neither side with or against it’s subject, there’s a void of love and hate for the man. Again, this is an interesting aspect of the film, especially in how each of the six actors look at their part of the puzzle. Bale’s part is ultimately a man confused in both the young idealist and the older preacher-man that is Dylan’s outcome, though the later man seems to accept the confusion. The Richard Gene portion of the movie is by far the most disappointing and least interesting, and his performance does nothing to alleviate this. Heath Ledger’s performance is not entirely raw or as intense as it may seem to be at the beginning, primarily because outside of being a pompous jerk, there’s not much more to him. Again, maybe that’s the point, but I’m not feeling it. And then there’s Cate Blanchett’s Dylan who is the version we most recognize. She looks most like the man and talks most like him. And yet this is another performance that she gives where the actress is much better than the part given. She plays the outraged rebel in his most explosive time and while I’m receptive to the situation, because I know that I’m only seeing a part of the persona Dylan I don’t feel that I’m seeing the whole. The only one that I found myself really getting behind was young Mr. Franklin’s version, the boy who felt compelled to sing the songs of yore, who is both too young to feel so old and too old to look so young. This is a great performance and I hope to see this young actor again someday.

But this does come back down to being a film of its maker and Todd Haynes is certainly a capable director. But I believe he has gotten lost in the woods of this extremely complex material and wasn’t able to fully pull this film off. His shots are inventive but they lack a certain kind of heart that leaves the film feeling cold and isolated. But then again, that might be intentional since Dylan’s life is full of emptiness. His film is full of genius, but at the price of creating a compelling look at a very complex man.

All in all, I love this movie and I hate it passionately. And strangely enough, I love the movie for the same reasons I hate it. This is the kind of film that I can recommend now and berate five minutes later. But I also think that’s what Bob Dylan would have wanted in a film about him. He never wanted the love given to him; he just wanted to be seen as somebody and nobody at the same time. And if you can understand that sentence, you might be able to appreciate this movie.

Posted Monday, November 26, 2007 9:26 PM by erico_77375 | with 0 comments

How The Middle East Was Lost

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No End in Sight (2007)

Maybe the appeals of Michael Moore’s tactics are just wearing a little thin on me. I still consider him to be an influential filmmaker (and his Bowling for Columbine to be one of the best documentaries ever made), but there’s something very self-promoting about his technique. That’s probably why the likes of Charles Ferguson is starting to quench the thirst for thoughtful political documentaries that are not intended to scathe, but to reflect. In doing just that, his first film No End in Sight is one of the best-planned, best executed documentary I have ever seen.

In the course of 108 devastating minutes, Ferguson lines out the big and small events that lead America to a quagmire in Iraq, one that has very little hope of ever getting better. Unlike the feel-good documentaries that loves to kick an already lame president, No End in Sight is more interested in fact over opinion and gets it’s facts from the people that made the decisions and that were there (and a few that were supposed to be but weren’t). We’re hearing from the horse’s mouth how very little planning was allowed before the initial invasion. We meet with lower-level White House insiders (as though Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney would allow themselves to be interviewed) who give their own testimonials. And then there are the Iraqis and foreign journalists who have been marginalized along with the rest by trying to be heard.

This documentary is surgical in it’s approach, dissecting each point with the thoroughness of a CIA briefing that this film shows our president ignores on a constant basis. And Ferguson shows no political leaning, scouring both sides with contempt as they either instigate or play accessory to one of America’s greatest tragedies. It sees the problem’s roots all the way back to the 80s and systematically show how each President made the matter worse until 9/11 kicked the ball into play. The documentary doesn’t get bogged down into semantics. Instead, it treats its audience as though they are capable of making intelligent conclusions. Not since Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room has a documentary had this much faith in its audience.

I will go on record to say that if President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleeza Rice ever find themselves on trial for their part in the misdirection of the people, mismanagement of the war, or the misplacement of funds by putting known corruptors in places of power, this would be the definitive indictment against them. But it’s more than that, much more. It shows how small miscommunications added to the blunders made on Capitol Hill. There’s a powerful scene where Walter Slocombe, a White House insider, realized that one small mistake made by him out of laziness could be linked to the creation of the insurgency. The realization left me sympathetic to him because we all know how one mistake, in the right circumstances, can start Armageddon.

And yet the film is brave enough to stay neutral concerning politics. It wisely stays away from making a case to leave Iraq, but shows just how next-to-impossible such an act may be. Ferguson is too smart to beg us to do anything, which would come off trite, but seems to hope it will lead by example, to better inform to audience and allow them to make up their own minds.

This is my favorite documentary this year and one of the year’s best films. There is a hidden power in this film that comes from its structure and discipline. Charles Ferguson, like his mentor Alex Gibney aims to overwhelm not by dramatizing the truth, but by peeling away the unnecessary. In taking away the rhetoric and by giving a clear timeline, we can see the events taking place in a historical aspect (something that Ferguson took away from being a Brookings fellow).

All in all, this year has been amazing in non-fiction work on film. In fact, many of the documentaries this year have pushed the limit in how documentaries are filmed and seen. My Kid Could Paint That opened a new discussion on how art is perceived and how fame is fickle. The King Of Kong showed us how men can succumb to new lows when dealing in child’s play. Even Moore’s Sicko was able to put the human face on inhuman suffering created by a bottom line. But above them all is this amazing film that will have you up all night afterwards, numb by the knowledge you hold and the sick feeling that things will get worse before they get better. And what makes this interesting is that the filmmaker is banking that the truth will set you free, and he’s just handed you the lock pick.

Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 2:32 AM by erico_77375 | with 0 comments