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Primer - The Final Cut

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The Final Cut (2004)

By Tricia Olszewski

Primer is of the nerds, for the nerds, and by the nerds—well, by just one nerd, actually. First-time writer, director, and actor Shane Carruth, the film’s press materials lead you to believe, is definitely of the brainiac persuasion: After earning a math degree, the now-31-year-old suffered through three brief engineering jobs before realizing that what he really wanted to do was tell stories. So for three years, he “taught himself” filmmaking by reading scripts and studying technique at several production houses. And when he finally decided to make a movie, Carruth immersed himself in physics, a subject he claims was previously foreign to him.

None of this would be terribly interesting if Primer sucked, which a $7,000 movie about time travel could justly be expected to do. But from the moment it drops you into the middle of a debate involving four shirtsleeved and tie-wearing young geeks and their after-work science project, the film commands attention with almost professorial authority. It’s Memento divided by pi: The pieces may or may not add up in the end, and you won’t always understand what the characters are talking about. But rather than simply confounding, all that lab lingo Carruth worked so hard to perfect manages to make us dopes listen harder and want to learn more.

Primer’s initial four characters soon narrow to two: Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Carruth), 20-something engineers who, in their desire to achieve fame or at least fortune—“marketability” is one word you’re sure to catch—want to take the garage project they’ve started with their friends in another direction. So they begin working in secret, honing their gizmo and arguing about methods and budgets, until, well, something finally happens: The machine “stabilizes,” and a weird form of mold, which a scientist later tells them normally takes years to develop, shows up within days on any object they throw into their souped-up box. Abe and Aaron aren’t yet sure what this means, but they suspect it could be big.

The thrills in this sci-fi thriller are relatively minor and mostly of the head-trip variety. Abe and Aaron discover that their invention can take them back in time, an ability they decide to use modestly to make some money day-trading. But instead of burping them out of a portal à la Stargate or Bill & Ted or billions and billions of other films in the space-time continuum, the machine actually makes doubles of them. And it’s when the doubles, who have their own ability to reason and build additional gizmos, start messing with the order of things that life—or whatever version of it Abe and Aaron are experiencing at any given moment—starts to get weird.

Carruth, who shot on Super 16 film that was later blown up to 35 mm, adds chilliness with a grainy, overexposed look and occasional, matter-of-fact narration (“There was value in the thing, clearly”) that sounds like the voice-modulated slow-rap in the Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” There’s similar understatement everywhere, in fact, which seems to be Carruth’s way of balancing out the rapid-fire nerdspeak and existential implications: Music is minimal, humor is dry (“You hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon”), and life outside the project largely ignored—believably so, because only Aaron, with a wife and child, seems to have one, whereas Abe is married to the work.

The film’s most attractive feature, however, is the characters. Carruth and Sullivan (also in his feature debut, though he has some acting experience) make Aaron and Abe the Penn & Teller of science geeks: supersmart, passionate, personable, and aware of their talents but not cocky enough that they can’t still be blown away by what science can do. (Abe, who discovered their project’s time-travel capabilities first, casually asks Aaron if he’d ditch work if Abe promised to show him “the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed.”) Best of all, despite their giant brains, the two come off as regular guys, drinking Big Gulps, fantasizing about going back in time to punch their boss, and wondering what the receptionist at the motel where their first incarnations lie low thinks “about two guys who get a room for six hours every day.”

True, Primer’s mysterious resolution may not be a resolution at all, but that’s beside the point: Carruth not only leaves us believing that it is, he also makes thinking about it fun. Nerdiness, it seems, really is contagious.

The Final Cut also makes you think—mostly about why Robin Williams has apparently vowed never to be funny again. Of course, there are bigger ideas in writer-director Omar Naïm’s debut about a memory implant that records the wearer’s life from birth. But the script’s laughingly underdeveloped relationships and forced intensity are begging for a little Aladdin-type riffing instead of Williams’ new stoicism.

Williams stars as Alan Hakman, an in-demand “cutter” who edits lifetimes of footage when a person with an implant dies; the resulting video is then shown at a memorial called a “rememory.” Alan stays busy because of his reputation for cleansing the reputations of others—with a push of a button, for example, the pedophiliac activities of a well-respected company man vanish. Alan has no qualms about “forgiving people long after they can be punished for their sins” because he’s been haunted by what he remembers as a childhood sin of his own, the burden of which makes him enunciate laboriously. Or maybe it’s just in the rules: Cutters, like Asimov’s robots, are governed by a code. Along with binding them to a comparatively uninteresting third dictum, it prevents them from giving away footage or having an implant themselves.

The Final Cut’s Big Conflict, therefore, comes in the form of protesters who picket rememories (chant: “Remember for yourself!”), as well as in the strong-arming of Fletcher (Jim Caviezel), a fellow cutter who wants the high-profile project Alan is working on. (Heated exchange: “Will you forget the code and grow up!” “Some of us still live by the code!”) Naïm also tries to inject dynamism into his leaden movie with an antique-book-store owner named Delila (Mira Sorvino), who is supposed to be Alan’s longtime girlfriend but acts as if she’s just learning what he does for a living. Even if you can get beyond their dippy, first-date-worthy conversation—“What are people’s lives like? Do they make any sense?”—Beauty and the Mortician make a rather unbelievable couple, especially when awkwardly writhing on Alan’s ascetic bed.

Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, who also worked on The Silence of the Lambs and Signs, matches Williams’ darkness with his trademark gloom, making Alan’s wood-paneled apartment and cutting equipment, especially, look creepy-cool. And even though the attempt to give The Final Cut a man-vs.-himself twist feels amateurish, Naïm does offer a few things to chew on: Are only a person’s good qualities worth remembering? How does time affect your recollections? And, most intriguingly, would you live your life differently if you knew all of your actions were being recorded for the rest of us? Unfortunately, the film’s flaws far outnumber its virtues—which suggests that Naïm might not be taking his own advice about what ends up on film.

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:19 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

Red Lights - Incantato

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Red Lights (2004)

By Tricia Olszewski

Red Lights involves a couple, yes. And it is, in some ways, about a marriage. But director Cédric Kahn’s latest is really concerned with how quickly one man’s imagined bliss can become a very real hell. In no time at all, it seems, a summer road trip that was anticipated in loving e-mails can descend into bickering, drunkenness, and perhaps even murder.

When we first meet insurance agent Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), he’s confirming a 5 o’clock meeting with his wife, workaholic attorney Hélène (Carole Bouquet), after which they will travel from Paris to Tours to pick up their two children from summer camp. Antoine writes, “I feel like I’m in love and about to go on a first date,” but when Hélène then leaves him waiting at a bar, oblivious to the time whenever he calls to check her whereabouts, his mood darkens. And he begins to drink.

The three beers Antoine’s had at the bar don’t seem to be enough when they go home and Hélène takes her time getting ready, suggesting that it’d be better if they left later, anyway. So he runs out for gas, in the form of a double scotch. Their passive-aggressive tug of war for control continues in the car, with Hélène admonishing Antoine for his increasingly reckless driving and questioning him when he chooses to take an alternate route. He grips the steering wheel that much tighter, pondering a marriage that isn’t, it turns out, like a first date at all. Then he stops for a restroom break, in the form of a double scotch.

At this point, Red Lights, based on Georges Simenon’s 1953 novel of the same name and co-written by Kahn and Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa, hasn’t fully loosed its menace—only hinted at it with barely listened-to radio broadcasts warning of travel accidents and an escaped convict. But the tension in the car is already thick enough to be squirm-inducing, thanks to spare yet loaded dialogue (“Why the face?”) and performances that are subtly combustive: Bouquet, though clearly a beauty, fixes an unattractive expression that’s all cold eyes and angry angles, while Darroussin, looking like That ’70s Show’s Kurtwood Smith, snaps at his wife and slumps toward the steering wheel like a man bored and beaten, the neon signs of nearby bars flashing off his weary face.

Nothing has really happened, of course, but the Hitchcockian setup—not to mention Antoine’s frequent muttering about wanting to “live like a man” and “be free”—assures that something soon will. As the couple’s spats over traffic turn more vicious, Hélène eventually calls Antoine on his alcohol consumption, threatening to take the car if he stops to get more. He does anyway, taking the keys with him, but when he returns, he finds only a note from Hélène saying that she’s taking the train. Antoine panics, racing to the closest station—and then the next—in an attempt to catch her. When he can’t, he simply resumes drinking and seems almost liberated, babbling to a scary-ass stranger in a bar and later offering the guy a ride.

The perilous events that ensue as Antoine tries to find his way back to his wife may or may not be happening: We see it all through his drunken haze, with Kahn and cinematographer Patrick Blossier often tingeing the watering holes Antoine visits and the roads he continues on with an ominous red. As dark nights of the soul go, this one is lurid in more than one sense: The increasingly sloppy Antoine is alternately self-absorbed, courting disaster in his marriage, in traffic, and with a hitchhiker, and self-aware, snapped back to reality after remembering that his wife has disappeared. Throughout, Darroussin keeps this wreck of a man both terrifying and fascinating to watch.

The script, meanwhile, offers plenty of high, suspenseful drama, though Kahn & Co. are best at wrenching anxiety from the mundane, such as a scene in which Antoine is shown in the harsh morning light of a coffee shop making a series of phone calls to police, train stations, and hospitals in an attempt to locate Hélène. Antoine’s plight is gripping not because it’s a convincing reality, but because it’s a vivid rendering of a nightmare: that it will take a tragedy, rather than your own awareness, to make you realize just how wrong you’ve been.

Red Lights’ protagonist may be a gruff alcoholic, but his company is far preferable to that of the nitwit 35-year-old at the center of Incantato, a flat romance by Italian writer-director Pupi Avati set in the Rome and Bologna of the ’20s. Old World sumptuousness has rarely felt so dull.

Incantato’s personality-challenged central character, Nello (Neri Marcoré) and his unbelievable circumstances are entirely to blame. Nello’s upper-class father (Giancarlo Giannini) has sent his son to teach in Bologna in the hope that he will finally meet a woman to marry. What we’re told is that the mild and gentlemanly Nello, who looks like a bit like Mr. Bean but is far from unattractive, is so off-putting that he’s never dated. Even with Marcoré rendering the character as a less-antic version of Roberto Benigni—he follows each of Nello’s nonjokes with a robotic “It was a quip!”—the idea that no woman would come near Nello is hard to buy.

Nello’s barber roommate, Renato (Alfiero Toppetti), tries to set him up with a manicurist at his shop, and even though she agrees to go out with him, she backs out at the last minute. Renato then throws standards out the window and introduces Nello to a rather woof-worthy blind woman, who immediately begins insulting him while they dance. Finally our hero meets Angela (former model Vanessa Incontrada), another blind woman, who’s beautiful on the outside but a petulant bitch on the inside: She’s using Nello merely to make her ex jealous. Naturally, he falls in love.

Throughout, Avati’s script simply tells us that Nello is pathetic without ever letting him prove it. When the manicurist turns Nello down, he responds, “If I were a girl, I’d never go out with someone like me.” His father, who misses Nello’s deceased brother, cruelly says that the heavens made a mistake in taking his favorite son rather than the one he’s now stuck with. And when the school principal criticizes him for not teaching the classics, Nello returns to his class and mopes that his lessons weren’t appreciated—“and I wasn’t appreciated, either.”

This attempted fairy tale has the usual elements: parents who don’t approve, circumstances that separate idea lovers, a blithe detachment from reality. Incantato’s emotion is bounced between its poorly rendered characters only because Avati commands it. (I mean really, it’s difficult to feel sad when Nello, the same day he meets Angela, begins weeping and says, “I’m in love with her, and I can’t do without her!”) Worse, when the feeling isn’t being forced, there’s simply nothing there—not even a terribly happy ending. Incantato means “enchanted,” but the film’s original title, Il Cuore Altrove, actually translates into something more appropriate: “The Heart Is Elsewhere.”

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:16 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

Motorcycle Diaries - Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry

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The Motorcycle Diaries (2003)

Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (2004)

By Tricia Olszewski

Even revolutionaries pull stupid stunts and cruise for girls at some point in their lives. That’s the gist of Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, which focuses on Argentine rebel Che Guevara and the traveling he did in 1952 at the age of 23, when the possibility of scoring a pair of sisters with his buddy was more exciting to him than the emancipation of the proletariat.

Back then, Che was merely Ernesto—or “Fuser,” to his best friend, Alberto Granado. When the film begins, Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) is a stocky, gregarious 29-year-old biochemist from Buenos Aires who wants to see the rest of Latin America before his 30th birthday. The quieter, asthmatic Ernesto (Gael García Bernal) is about to finish medical school and is just looking for a little adventure before settling into a career as a doctor. So they say goodbye to friends and family and take off for an 8,000-kilometer trek—four months long on paper, eight months in actuality—on a crappy old motorcycle they call “the Mighty One.”

The majority of The Motorcycle Diaries, which Salles shot on location in Argentina, Chile, and Peru, is pure feel-good road flick, fashioned from Guevara’s and Granado’s autobiographies by screenwriter Jose Rivera (whose most well-known previous credit is probably TV’s Family Matters). There isn’t a whisper of politics behind their trip, merely a desire to experience life before it’s sucked out of them. While they’re discussing their itinerary, as well as the fact that they’re essentially ditching responsibility, Alberto reassures Ernesto by pointing to an old man nodding off in a coffee shop and asking, “Do you want to end up like that?”

As the pair make their way across the continent, they seem more like goofy, foul-mouthed teenagers than men of science as they bicker, scam food and shelter, and are repeatedly thrown off the rickety, overloaded bike, which eventually breaks down for good. Rivera keeps the tone overwhelmingly humorous, with Bernal playing introspective straight man to de la Serna’s smooth-talking skirt-chaser, but, mercifully, he never lets the misadventures descend into Hollywood-style wackiness. The actors’ camaraderie is playful and convincing, and though de la Serna is charged mostly with clowning while Bernal relies on increasingly soulful stares, both believably portray that tricky 20-something stage when glimpses of maturity break through boyishness.

Even while Ernesto and Alberto crack jokes, however, cinematographer Eric Gautier renders the Latin American landscape as rather sobering. The guys may be all bravado and high spirits, but they’re no match for the elements they face, which include blinding snow in the Andes, tropical heat in the Amazon, and the arid nothingness of the Atacama Desert. One particularly solemn, gorgeous scene shows the travelers looking over the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu—an event that leads Ernesto to note in his diary, “How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?”

It’s during the travelers’ earlier journey through the desert, however, that Ernesto truly begins his subtle shift from fun-loving student to the leader of men he will soon become. As he and Alberto share a fire with a local couple on their way to find jobs at a nearby mine after losing their land, the wealthy Ernesto is startled and somewhat shamed when they ask, “Are you looking for work? No? Then why are you traveling?” From this point on, Ernesto is attuned to his homeland’s great divide between rich and poor, a reality that is handily schematized when he and Alberto volunteer at an Amazonian leper colony that keeps the patients and staff on opposite sides of the river.

Those lepers aren’t there by accident, of course. Salles treats his subject with palpable reverence, offering almost no hint of the violent nature Guevara would come to be known for. (At one point, Ernesto does comment that a true revolution would be impossible without guns.) Indeed, there are several moments that the man’s supposed saintliness is a little too literal, such as when he refuses to wear gloves at the leper colony, despite the rules of the nuns in charge, and when he “treats” a sick old woman by laying his hands on her head in exchange for shelter.

The film stops short of complete glorification, however, by checking each instance of Ernesto’s do-gooding with a bit of humor. (After his and Ernesto’s clash with the colony’s Mother Superior, for example, Alberto mutters, “I think she wants me.”) And while the hardscrabble concerns of Latin America’s poor are addressed, especially in the film’s last half, its overwhelming feel remains joie de vivre, with Ernesto and Alberto welcomed and cared for in even the most poverty-stricken villages. Near the journey’s end, Ernesto tells Alberto, “All this time we spent on the road, something happened,” and it’s true that when Guevara wrote his journal, he couldn’t have known exactly where that something would lead. But it doesn’t really matter: The foundation of friendship, adventure, and compassion on which The Motorcycle Diaries is built is solid enough that Ernesto’s final statement—“I am not myself anymore”—would sound convincing coming from just about anyone.

George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry is much bolder in its deification of a political figure, though Kerry’s transformation seems the opposite of Guevara’s. After watching footage of a young man speaking out with no hesitation against the unjust war killing off his peers, the question you’re left with is, Where is this unflinching leader now?

The 92-minute documentary opens with the statement “You can’t understand John Kerry unless you understand how he feels about Vietnam.” Then, over home videos that follow the candidate from childhood to Yale, Kerry’s family, friends, and fellow soldiers talk about his natural “derring-do” and love of his country. Attestations to the young Kerry’s unflagging patriotism are bolstered by video of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech; heartstrings are tugged with the inclusion of coverage of Kennedy’s assassination and Kerry’s reaction to it, as remembered by his college roommates.

Soon enough, however, Going Upriver—“loosely based” on Douglas Brinkley’s book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War—gets back to the matter at hand, detailing Kerry’s service in Vietnam as well as his subsequent role as a spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). And it’s here that Butler, who began photographing Kerry in 1969, begins piling on. A segment explaining the strategy of swift boats and the danger of serving on them brings commentary from skipper Wade Sanders, who says it was during this duty that he and the other soldiers “began to see the man [Kerry] was.” (Former Green Beret James Rassman appears, too, to repeat his well-publicized belief that if it weren’t for Kerry, he’d probably be dead.) After Kerry gets out of Vietnam, it’s his anti-war efforts that demand kudos: Several soldiers credit him with being central to the movement, and even the chair of the 1971 Senate hearing at which Kerry famously testified on behalf of VVAW sent him off by saying, “I can’t imagine them having elected a better representative.”

Naturally, the film is much more compelling when it widens its focus to include the war and the political climate in general—especially when it echoes our country’s present conflict, from Lyndon Johnson’s folksy defense of a U.S. presence in Vietnam to the rant of a former soldier over the “stupid waste of life for questionable objectives that look increasingly inaccurate.” And Butler has gathered a rather impressive range of supporting footage, a mix of his own photos and archival video that gives a comprehensive portrait of what Kerry was all about back then.

More important, though, is that despite the shrillness of Butler’s cheerleading, seeing Kerry as a mad-as-hell 27-year-old dynamo makes you believe that all the good words are justified. Poised and articulate, Kerry consistently meets his detractors with reason and conviction, allowing for differing viewpoints but never backing down from his own—he’s passion unscripted, and you can’t help compare the fiery youngster to the hypercareful moderate he appears to be today. Butler even includes a tape of Richard Nixon saying that his administration should “destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader”—which, at this point, is just about the saddest fate one can imagine for the ex–Lt. John Kerry.

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:12 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

Shaun of the Dead - Wimbledon

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Wimbledon (2004)

By Tricia Olszewski

Mary, the unsmiling North London checkout girl in Shaun of the Dead, is not feeling herself. She’s somehow ended up in the back yard of roommates Shaun and Ed, who have just recently waked up after a late night of drinking. The pair, hung over and wearing the previous day’s clothes, call out to Mary, who’s slump-shouldered and facing the opposite direction, then toss a rock at her. Mary slowly turns herself around, moaning all the while, revealing a once-pretty face now puffy and grotesque. Her lips are strangely twisted. Her limbs move in a most unnatural way.

Shaun and Ed gasp, finally understanding what’s going on. Or maybe not: “Oh. My. God,” Shaun whispers. “She’s so drunk!”

Nearly all of SOTD’s humor, courtesy of British writer-director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star, Simon Pegg, comes from the rather inspired hypothesis that zombies are already all around us. Shaun (Pegg) is a 29-year-old loser who punches a clock at an electronics store by day; at night, he drags his unhappy girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), to neighborhood pub the Winchester, where he can down pints and also hang out even more with the slovenly, jobless Ed (Nick Frost). Shaun can’t remember to buy his mum flowers and doesn’t keep his promises to Liz, who breaks up with him when he fails to make reservations for what was supposed to be their relationship-recharging anniversary dinner.

While Shaun wanders the streets between home, work, pub, and the local convenience store, he’s too wrapped up in his own worries to notice a slight change in the ’hood—specifically, that’s it’s becoming increasingly overrun by zombies. In fact, when the undead begin to replace the zoned-out commuters at bus stops or the slightly pushy bums shuffling down the road, the difference is essentially negligible.

In other words, this isn’t quite the apocalypse as imagined by George A. Romero—though Wright and Pegg, best known as the creators of the BBC sitcom Spaced, do allow their “romantic zombie comedy” to pay glancing homage to the Dawn of the Dead director. Of course, they tweak his zombie metaphor to represent apathy instead of consumerism and have their ever-smaller group of survivors—besides Shaun, Ed, and Liz, Shaun’s mother, Barbara (Penelope Wilton), and Liz’s roommates, David (Dylan Moran) and Dianne (The Office’s Lucy Davis)—hole up not in a mall, but in a more English place of comfort: the pub. The script is loaded with gags both dry and silly, such as Dianne’s admonishment to the bickering group that “moaning won’t get you anywhere,” giving her the idea to lead them in zombie-mimicry lessons. A nearby zombie, conveniently impaled against a tree for study, is described as looking “drunk—and he’s lost a bet!”

But for all its jokes, SOTD also takes seriously the “romantic” and “zombie” parts of its tag line. Shaun’s troubled relationship with Liz—and with stepfather Philip (Bill Nighy), and David and Dianne, and uptight roomie Pete (Peter Serafinowicz), and even Ed—becomes a reason for him to prove himself a hero, especially when the torch David has been carrying for Liz leads to increased tension as survival seems less likely. Shaun’s grand plan isn’t really that grand—“Take car. Go to Mum’s. Kill Phil (‘Sorry’). Grab Liz. Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over”—but that seems to be the point: Is it so wrong to want to just kick back with loved ones, especially after a trying “Z-Day”?

The scene in which most of those issues come to a head is a surprising and unwelcome shift in tone, but Wright and Pegg soon get back to what they do best: having fun with flesh-eaters. But if the characters’ reactions to the old-school, slow-moving zombies are overwhelmingly comic (“They were a bit bitey,” Barbara says of some mysterious intruders early on), the inevitable onslaught is played straight enough to spook, just a little. And effects that were initially Scary Movie–jokey (a rushed close-up to a flushed toilet, say, or a loaf of bread) eventually become gut-spillingly earnest (prosthetic effects with a touch of CGI).

Pegg and Frost are lovable, low-key losers, while the rest of the cast is equally adept with characters more well-rounded than those of most horror movies—or, for that matter, most romantic comedies. Cinematographer (and John Carpenter’s Vampires vet) David M. Dunlap, meanwhile, gives them a convincingly humdrum atmosphere to muddle through: a little gray and a touch grimy, yet still kinda homey. With all due respect to Romero—who is reported to have seen Shaun of the Dead and given the filmmakers his blessing—the script’s question of who exactly is “fucking king of the zombies” may have a new answer.

Wimbledon’s setup is actually quite similar to Shaun of the Dead’s: Paul Bettany plays an unremarkable tennis pro taunted by his younger peers; Kirsten Dunst is the hideous monster he needs to stay away from. This being a traditional romantic comedy, however, the ensuing horror is obviously unintentional.

Working from a script by a trio of writers (Adam Practical Magic Brooks and Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, scripters of Madeline), director Richard Loncraine stuffs his film with an unbearable—and, at times, unbelievable—amount of googly eyes and gaggy conversation. The foolishness begins early, with Peter Colt (Bettany) arriving in London for his last Wimbledon match and mistakenly walking into the hotel room of the up-and-coming Lizzie Bradbury (Dunst), who’s taking a shower with the bathroom door open. He gawks; she looks over and serenely asks, “Do you need something?” Smiling all the while, naturally: True love means never having to bat an eyelash when a stranger invades your privacy.

Lizzie later admonishes, “Love means nothing in tennis,” but, as in any competitive sport, sex sure does. The pair fall immediately for each other, so Wimbledon’s tension lies in whether their coupling will cramp either of their games. While Peter goes on a winning streak, Lizzie falters, thereby intensifying the firm grip of her overbearing father, Dennis (a throwaway turn by Sam Neill). Dennis’ meddling interrupts the lovers’ nights of soulful stares and comet-watching, and soon Peter is reduced to climbing trellises and reasoning with dogs.

Despite his character’s embarrassing antics, Bettany makes an attractive romantic lead as well as a likable underdog, successfully transferring the unaffected charm he’s shown in A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander to lighter fare. Dunst, unfortunately, fully brings on the smarm that she’s mostly just hinted at before (and managed to bury quite nicely in the Spider-Man movies). Her Lizzie is cocky and self-involved—a problem exacerbated by her irritatingly clanky dialogue, which is supposed to be quick-witted and flirty but is so unrealistically cutesy you’ll want to claw Lizzie’s eyes out. The difference in the actors’ presence—and their 11-year age gap, which might not be remarkable if Dunst weren’t only 22—makes their characters’ romance seem all the more questionable: Peter is a fully mature man; Lizzie is still an annoying daddy’s girl.

Wimbledon is much more palatable when it’s focused on the competition, and Loncraine gets in a few stellar scenes from the court, dropping the usual drama-enhancing score so you hear only the thwack of the ball and the crowd’s hush. In fact, in its final 30 minutes, the movie becomes less about the affair and more about Peter’s quest to win the big prize. Though, because this is a romantic comedy, it’s no spoiler to say that love—y’know, the kind that means nothing in tennis—does rear its ugly head once again. And that’s when we all lose.

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:10 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

By Tricia Olszewski

It was a first-time filmmaker’s dream: With nothing but six minutes of footage and a script, couldn’t-be-greener writer-director Kerry Conran secured Hollywood darlings Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law for the leads in his CG-crazy debut, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Conran took his trusting stars, both used to less technically demanding work, and denied them context, forcing them to develop their characters in front of blank blue screens. And then he made them punch each other.

Although the relationship between Paltrow’s Lois Lane–like newspaper reporter, Polly Perkins, and Law’s smug superpilot, Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan, crackles only on the far side of the love/hate equation, Conran sure has fun with his characters’ bitterness. Schadenfraude—and, eventually, an exchange of blows—dominates the former lovers’ 1939 reunion, the first since Polly, suspecting Joe of having an affair, sabotaged his plane years earlier. But an attack on New York by skyscraper-sized robots that corresponds with the one-by-one disappearance of a group of renowned scientists brings the two back together as they investigate the events and chase their common goal: one mysterious Dr. Totenkopf.

Sky Captain’s plot doesn’t get much more complex than that—giant droids to ensure action, a manhunt to add globetrotting adventure, and a broken couple to shoot Tracy/Hepburn–esque daggers at each other. But the simple story is an adequate enough foundation to support the software-generated film’s knockout feature: its brilliant realization of a living comic book. Using a combination of digital effects, photographs, and live action, Conran creates a soft, sepia-toned, and visually stunning version of existence. There’s not a hard line to be found: Each scene looks like vintage movie footage gone over in chalk, whether dominated by feathery, barely-there snowflakes, buildings of cashmere gray, or fires that throw off clouds of inky black soot. Gunfire results in exaggerated bursts of light that may as well say “BLAM!”

Sky Captain isn’t just a series of pretty pictures, however. Conran starts the action early, with a breathtaking sequence in which a tiny Paltrow, on a narrow New York street, maneuvers her way in between the King Kong–sized feet of an army of Iron Giants, clicking photos and suffering multiple near-misses before Joe’s swooping plane disables one and thus temporarily disengages the others. Subsequent chases find Joe negotiating his zeppelin through the Manhattan grid—views of Spider-Man, piloting of Luke Skywalker—plunging his amphibious craft into wreckage-decorated waters, and floating onto a Star Wars–worthy midair landing strip when, flying out of Nepal, he runs out of fuel.

And so the thrills continue every few minutes until Sky Captain’s ass-rattling end. Conran’s one weakness is in the increasing frequency of his homages: Strains of Metropolis, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and every comic-book adaptation ever made run throughout, and the film’s last half-hour throws in a couple of too-obvious steals from The Wizard of Oz and, weirdly, Jurassic Park—both of which seem unnecessary distractions.

Paltrow and Law light up the screen only literally, their perfect coifs and period-stylish costumes shot in glowing soft focus. Angelina Jolie, as the eye-patched commander of an all-woman amphibious squadron, brings her Tomb Raider toughness (but not the attendant embarrassment) to a small, forgettable role; making a stronger impression is Giovanni Ribisi as Dex, mechanical wizard and Joe’s aw-shucks assistant. The acting overall occasionally dips from subdued to flat, but the understated characterizations and Conran’s PG-restrained script could be considered throwbacks to a time before blockbusters needed so much CGI. That’s not just appropriate—against Sky Captain’s mind-swirling beauty, it’s also something of a relief.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also a visual stunner, sets its action nearly a century after Sky Captain’s, and its accompanying story is light-years more complex. Based on comic books by Shirow Masamune, Innocence and its subtitle-free predecessor, acclaimed anime feature Ghost in the Shell, traffic in an AI universe where the few remaining full humans are left to share a planet with dolls (pure robots) and cyborgs (robots inhabited by human spirits, or “ghosts”).

Like the original, Innocence uses a blend of traditional cel and computer animation—facilitated by Japan’s Production I.G., the studio responsible for the animated sequence in Kill Bill—Vol. 1—to shape a look that writer-director Mamoru Oshii calls “Chinese Gothic.” Set in an unnamed Asian city, the movie borrows a few main characters from the first film but mercifully doesn’t continue its overdetailed, nearly incomprehensible corporate-malfeasance/ghost-hacking storyline.

Innocence focuses on Batou (Akio Ohtsuka), a cyborg special agent with a government anti-terrorist unit who is still mourning the loss of the Major, his old partner, who decided to abandon her mechanized body and become pure ghost. When a gynoid, or sex robot, goes berserk I, Robot–style and murders her owner, Batou investigates with the help of a new partner, Togusa (Koichi Yamadera), a largely human “family man” who carefully assesses each on-the-job risk to avoid unnecessary danger.

Whereas Ghost in the Shell was clinical and cerebral in its meditation on artificial intelligence and identity, Innocence makes an effort to humanize its characters and seems to argue that machines can’t replace companionship. Togusa speaks often of his wife and daughter, and Batou, besides missing the Major, is devoted to an adorable basset hound whose droopy-eyed, ungraceful affection is in such contrast to all the chilly technology—less than the original, but still a formidable presence—that even dog-haters will appreciate the distraction. Even so, Oshii manages to steep the film in philosophy, with the partners trading high-minded references as readily as American counterparts might exchange insults. In fact, the wordiness at times gets so heavy that it’s difficult to grasp it all.

Fortunately, Oshii seems to believe in one character’s line: “When dialogue fails, it’s time for violence.” Batou and Togusa’s investigation leads the pair to wicked and bloody episodes with yakuza, corrupt gynoids, and, in one of the movie’s coolest scenes, assassins planted in a convenience store. These episodes alternate with quiet views of intricately drawn and brilliantly colored mood pieces—a snowy downtown, a festive parade—often accompanied by Kenji Kawai’s hypnotic, hymnal score and usually tying into nothing. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence may offer a deeper meaning for those in the mood to dig, but it also offers plenty to viewers who just want to remain on the surface.

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:08 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

The Brown Bunny - Evergreen

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The Brown Bunny (2003)

Evergreen (2003)

By Tricia Olszewski

Misery, of course, not only loves company, but also is conveniently portable. That Vincent Gallo understands this much is clear: His much-maligned second feature, The Brown Bunny, takes the dolor of his semiautobiographical first, Buffalo ’66, on the road. Re-edited and shaved of nearly 30 minutes after its disastrous Cannes screening last year, Bunny is, believe it or not, poetic and devastating, its dreamy open highways even more suffocating than the beaten-down streets of the filmmaker’s hometown. Both of Gallo’s projects have been criticized as narcissistic—indeed, The Brown Bunny’s first credit practically screams that it was “written directed edited and produced” by him, and he also stars—but his cinematic alter egos are such sorry wretches, it’s hard to accuse the man of being vain.

The Brown Bunny tells the story of Bud Clay (Gallo), a motorcyclist and broken heart who’s driving cross-country to a race in California. Bud somewhat ludicrously seduces and then abandons a series of women during these travels—some young thing (Anna Vareschi) at a gas station with whom he pleads to come with him; a melancholy vision at a rest-stop picnic table (Cheryl Tiegs) whom he wordlessly consoles with kisses. Flashbacks hint at a recent romantic loss, however, which makes his five-day trip something more than an extended smoochfest: The journey is simultaneously sunny and dark, full of quiet but not peace, with infatuation but not love. With blue eyes that peek through his disheveled hair and the merest hint of lanky musculature under his T-shirt and jeans, Bud seems to be living in the saddest Calvin Klein ad ever.

Early on, Bud stops at the working-class home of some former neighbors, the now-elderly parents of an old flame. Nearly Lynchian, the scene is one of many examples of Gallo’s ability to gut you with awkwardness and pity: As a decrepit old man sits silently at one end of a kitchen table that might as well be in another world, Bud tries to get the frail red-haired mother (Mary Morasky) of his ex, Daisy (Chloë Sevigny), to remember him. Long silences dominate the squirm-inducing encounter, hanging especially heavy after Mom’s early, aching statement about her daughter: “I haven’t heard from her—she hasn’t called. I don’t know why she hasn’t called. I wish I knew why.”

The whole of The Brown Bunny is similarly spare and silent. With shots frequently positioned inside Bud’s van, trained on either the road or his far-off expression, you feel as if you’re taking the road trip with him, but this is one emphatically solo traveler: Dialogue is nearly nonexistent, and when Bud does speak, his utterances are almost unbearably lost-sounding. Gallo’s creepy, quiet magnetism morphs into a childlike vulnerability whenever Bud interacts with someone, from his crack-voiced “Please? Please? Please come with me?” to the gas-station girl, to his pathetically hopeful alert to a hotel’s front-desk clerk that Daisy might call or drop by, to a conversation with her in which he expresses his love with “I liked you the most my whole life. You’re the only person I liked.”

Infamously, the auteur’s supposed self-indulgence comes quite literally to a head near The Brown Bunny’s end. Out of context, Sevigny’s unsimulated oral-sex performance certainly smacks of director glorification, but anyone who can get beyond the knee-jerk shock of seeing a dick at the local multiplex should be able to acknowledge at least some of the scene’s power. Throughout the film—cinematography, naturally, by Gallo—prettiness serves to heighten Bud’s sense of loneliness and dislocation. Here, however, a soft-lighting coupling would have failed to underscore the pain of his and Daisy’s reunion. Instead, the act is messy and real and tinged with resentfulness, and it’s only postclimax that we discover why the two are apart. Gallo’s buildup to this moment yields a payoff so devastating, you’d have to be heartless to begrudge him a little stroking, ego- or otherwise.

Writer-director Enid Zentelis also loads plenty of misery into Evergreen, her feature debut, but the end-of-film pile-on is a bit more difficult to swallow. What begins as a hard-luck story of a struggling young mother and her embarrassed teenager eventually turns into melodrama as the bit players reveal their own dysfunctions in a lame attempt to show us how good Mom and daughter have it after all.

When Evergreen begins, Kate (Cara Seymour) is telling Henri (Addie Land) that their impending move to Grandma’s shack is only temporary, so she can work and save up to start a new life for them. Soon, they’re sharing a mattress in a leaky bedroom on the outskirts of some Pacific Northwest Nowheresville as Kate’s mother (Lynn Cohen) watches game shows on TV. Kate gets a job at the town’s makeup factory, and Henri settles into a new school, where she meets rich kid Chat Turly (Noah Fleiss). Though Chat offers her rides home in his new SUV, Henri has him drop her off in town, too mortified to admit where she lives.

Henri is also ashamed of her single, working-class mother, so when she meets Susan (Mary Kay Place) and Frank (Bruce Davison), Chat’s chipper parents, she lies when they ask what her parents do: Mom is a “beauty expert,” and her new boyfriend, a Native American casino worker (Gary Farmer) who’s built his own wheels, stands in as Henri’s “car expert” dad. Henri quickly becomes enamored with the Turlys’ luxe living quarters, fancy dinners, and shit-eating niceness, and as Kate tries to turn disciplinarian and nags Henri to find a job, too, the girl starts spending all her time with the seemingly happy family.

Though the stress of Kate and Henri’s new lifestyle and the tension in their relationship feel genuine, Zentelis’ unsubtle introduction of other conflicts does not. Grandma, who in an early scene seemed to be the kind of lonely old lady who aches every time a member of her family walks out the door, turns out to be an intolerant hothead, at one point hissing to Kate’s boyfriend, “I am from independent country of Latvia!” and then asking him in ridiculous broken English, “Are you type of guy who ever hit women and children?”

Smiley Susan also has a secret side, one that’s foreshadowed with only the mildest of hints before it’s revealed with a laughable smack: She sits at the computer and—da-da-dum!—calls up a self-help Web site on her own particular problem. Now we understand why Frank goes out and gets drunk every night. It’s while witnessing a thrashing, screaming, crying confrontation between perfect husband and perfect wife that Henri learns a Valuable Lesson—though, to be fair, watching Davison go batshit after his smug, if dead-on, performance is rather fun.

Evergreen’s acting, in fact, is its only uniform aspect, with Seymour, Land, Place, and Farmer all joining Davison in convincingly inhabiting their characters. In other respects, however, Zentelis’ small movie is too inconsistent to recommend: Her dialogue may be natural between parent and child, but it clunks whenever a couple of teenagers (or Grandma) are around, and the details of storytelling are sprinkled disproportionately—we know all about the Turlys, for example, but we never learn where Henri’s father is or why Kate is in her current fix. Evergreen’s press kit rather embarrassingly describes the narrative arc as Henri and her mother “looking down a road that turns bad instead of right,” which, come to think of it, probably isn’t really so wrong.

Posted Friday, July 06, 2007 8:06 PM by MovieBabe | with 0 comments

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