SlipOfTheTongue Blog

Under discussion:

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D  (2008)

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH is dramatic cotton candy.  Characterizations are thin.  Dialogue is bare bones.  The majority of the running time is allocated to action set pieces that (shall we say) stretch credibility?  I doubt it would stand up to heavy scrutiny in 2-D and I wonder if some of the effects would play very well even in the home theater environment.  But slip on those 3-D glasses and what a glorious confection it becomes.

This movie barely rates three out of five stars in the Spout rating system but see it in 3-D and the movie rates four stars for novelty alone.  The world premiere took place at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past Sunday.  Brendan Frasier was in attendance and he thanked a number of people who were (blah, blah, blah) integral to the making of the film (insert names of studio execs here).  Get on with the movie Brendan!  You look good but my attention is waning!

This is a movie that knows what it is.  If effectively creates a story almost exclusively built around a place never before seen (the center of the Earth) and imagines what it might look like from top to bottom.  Since the burden of realism no longer exists our minds are free to go wherever the filmmakers want to take us and for the most part, we buy in.   

The filmmakers also understand that as a cotton candy experience we would appreciate an attractive cast.  They smartly build in a story scenario where the center of the Earth periodically heats up to 200 degrees, a temperature making human life impossible.  So there is your ticking clock.  Our protagonists must get out of the center of the Earth before the temp spikes to said temperature.  The unintended (and much appreciated) effect of this is that we get to see Brendan Frasier in a sleeveless muscle shirt through much of the movie and for the other part of the audience Anita Briem gets into her short shorts and stays that way until the end of the movie.

There is a mine car / roller coaster ride that recalls the same action set piece from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (it is equally hard to swallow here).  There is a Tyrannosaur chasing a kid (there needs to be a Tyrannosaur in every movie these days doesn't there?).  And of course, in the movies, it is always possible to ride a geyser thousands of feet into the sky and land safely while sliding down a sloping mountainside (happens to me every day). 

All of this aside, the true hero of this movie is Real D, the 3-D process that makes the ride enjoyable and crystal clear.  This is from the viewer who sat on the left side of the theater in the fourth row in front of a huge movie screen at the Mann's Village in Westwood.  And in terms of the 3-D let me say that my favorite scene was a very slow moving and kind of fascinating scene in which "the kid" (Josh Hutcherson) has to leap across a field of magnetic rocks suspended in the air to reach a distant plateau.  It's not that the scene was brilliantly conceived.  It's just that it looked kind of cool in 3-D.

From all of this I take the following...

Make 3-D movies that go to places we have never imagined before.  We buy in to the artificiality all the more.  Keep the 3-D coming but easy on the forced shots of people spitting stuff on the camera or poking you with a long poker.  It's just a little bit cheesy.  And yes, we would really prefer a good story with a well developed script so work on that, o.k.?  Next time, consider letting a real filmmaker have a shot.  Someone with a sense of story.  Someone willing to take risks.  Where are the latter day Speilberg's and Cameron's and Lucas types anyway?  I would think that 3-D would offer someone talented a real opportunity to show their stuff.

Under discussion:

16 Blocks  (2006)

When Bruce Willis became famous for the Moonlighting series and went on to make Die Hard he was (for the time) an unlikely action hero.  He was a jokey, balding, motor mouth who was not like the typical movie star.  As Willis enters what is probably the third stage of his career, he is now becoming an equally unlikely character actor who makes interesting choices.  In 16 BLOCKS the character of Jack Mosley (a griselled, alcoholic burnout cop) is to Willis what the character of Frank Galvin was to Paul Newman in The Verdict.  Both characters are destroyed men who have a single shot at redemption and both represent the manner in which society can destroy the individual if he is not strong enough emotionally.  How odd that Willis, who has never worked with Richard Donner, would end up in this flawed, character driven piece which is a love letter to the 80's and even to adjacent decades of film making but most definitely not to 2006.

16 BLOCKS is a nod to the action pictures and police corruption stories we can still vaguely remember from the late 70's and early 80's.  It should not be judged by the creakiness of its plot contrivances but rather by whether it makes you feel a pang of nostalgia for a time when movies were built around memorable characters who made difficult choices.  Into this project walks an action star and a director whose careers have dropped off considerably.  These men are relics of the 1980's and together they have charmingly fashioned a throwback piece that reminds us of a time before the explosions got so big that no one could believe them anymore.  Before the uber-cynicism of the 21st century there were tales of people fighting corruption and winning unlikely but costly victories.  Working together Willis and Donner have achieved an unlikely victory with this brisk, flawed, and sometimes gooey tale of human redemption.  It's got rapid fire dialogue (via Mos Def and Willis) that reminds you of Glover and Gibson in Lethal Weapon.  This is definitely a Donner signature (admittedly it can get annoying at times).  The movie's also got the urban (New York city) feel of a Sydney Lumet picture.  And it's got a big bus chase at the end a la Eastwood's The Gauntlet.  It's got corruption reminiscent of Serpico, best friends who choose different moral paths, and a general feeling of tilting against windmills.  Like Jack Mosley, Willis and Donner are also in slightly over their heads in this answer to action pictures of the 21st century.  What they are really doing is creating an homage to a type of movie that is no longer the norm.  In Donner's world, people matter.  Characters matter.  They are only barely successful which is what makes this movie so charming.  They are working against the odds that anyone will care or even get what they are attempting. 

The film is full of too many coincidences.  It feels, at times, too familiar.  It is not for the ultra-cool or for the cold hearted.  The appeal of this film will be lost on people who don't believe that character and heart are essential components in a good story.  This movie is for those who loved the movies of the late seventies and early eighties and who are willing to throw caution to the wind and not over analyze the plot.  This is a movie for people who like to dream that the individual still has a shot at vanquishing the corrupt.  Willis is excellent in this movie.  Mos Def is an irritating but likeable place holder and his performance works.  David Morse is incredibly good as Willis' former partner.  This one gets an extra star for bucking the trend and being a throwback to an earlier and (some might say) a better time. 

Under discussion:

13 Tzameti  (2006)

This is the definition of a good first feature.  It's not over-complicated, takes place in very few locations and involves one simple twist that makes it unique from other films.  Director Gela Babluani sets up the story at a deliberate pace that creates a sense of uncertainty but he doesn't telegraph what is to come.  (People who can't tough out the slow beginning should stick to American movies.)  There is a bit of Hitchcock both in the manner in which the story is set up and in the way that its main character is thrust into the middle of extraordinary circumstances. 

An ordinary day laborer (Sebastien, a roofer) who is down on his luck finds himself faced with an opportunity and he takes it, stepping into another world.  In this world brutality and finance once again meet as they have in many recent horror films.  Once the character crosses over we ourselves cross over with him into a different kind of movie.  This new movie feels more like a game and the characters are chess pieces.  It then becomes our duty (unless we choose otherwise) to watch this game play out to the end.  It is like getting in line for a frightening roller coaster ride at an amusement park and not being able to back out.  We are trapped.  There is nothing particuarly flashy in the way the director causes this to happen but in 13 TZAMETI there are definite choices being made and I like most of them.  It almost doesn't matter how the movie ends.  It's more about the twist and the ticking clock.

Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that there is a trend toward explicitly showing man's inhumanity to man in the movies these days.  It seems we are so oversaturated by media stimuli and so snake bitten by cynicism that the only way for us to feel "changed" at the movies is for us to experience the horror of torturing or killing our fellow man.  I don't blame the movies for this.  They are a reflection of the times.  Leave it to a good filmmaker to exploit our moral weaknesses and to get noticed while doing it.