unclefestering Blog

Under discussion:

28 Days Later  (2003)

Sunshine  (2007)

Sunshine is such an impressive throwback to the almost lost thinking man’s genre of Science Fiction that you can almost forgive it’s final act. The combination of director Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy is as potent as it was in 28 Days Later.

The lives of six billion people rest in the hands of eight, fraying crewmembers. Taking place in the near future when the sun is rapidly cooling due to an unexplained phenomenon; the movie starts with the spaceship, the Icarus II, hauling a bomb the size of Manhattan to the sun in an effort to restart the star. This is the second and final attempt. The first ship that was sent seven years ago never completed the mission. All of the remaining fissionable material on Earth was mined to make this last bomb.

The crew is beginning to come apart as the movie starts. They are about to enter the dead zone where radiation from the sun will cause too much interference for messages to be sent to home and they won’t receive any either. When Capa (Murphy) uses all the time left sending a message to his family, a fight breaks out between him and the second in command Mace (Chris Evans). The fight gets settled by the ship’s doctor (Cliff Curtis) who is developing a seriously dangerous addiction to sun bathing.

The women of the ship are holding things together slightly better. Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) spends most of her time in the ships gardens, the source of food and air. Rose Byrne’s Cassie is having a fling with Capa.

Once they enter the dead zone, Mace picks up the signal of the original Icarus, parked in an orbit between the Sun and Mercury. After a vote the crew decides to deviate from their original course and try to use the other ship’s bomb as a backup to their own. In addition they want to solve the mystery of what happened to the other mission.

The navigator makes a serious mistake when he changes the ships course and several critical systems fail. Now the other ship is needed for its resources as much as it’s bomb.

The tension, the look and the feel of the movie to this point are flawless. The crew members are becoming victims of their own psychological flaws and these take a toll on the others. As the more rational members are forced to sacrifice themselves in attempts to save the mission, it leaves the lives of every one left behind on the Earth in the hands of the less stable members.

At this point the movie, just as the movie is getting to its most interesting ideas, is goes off the rails when Boyle introduces a boogeyman out to stop the crew of the Icarus II. The whole concept of the character is to be a real physical threat as opposed to the psychological danger that the crew pose to themselves.

The look and feel of the movie is top rate. You get a real physical sense of the spaceship’s layout. The space suits used by the crew have a pretty unique look. They reminded me of Kenny from South Park drifting in space.

Under discussion:

Tetsuo: The Iron Man  (1992)

Ringu  (1998)

The Ring  (2002)

Tetsuo is a strange movie. The plot, what little there is, is simple. But the imagery is fantastic. This movie is a disjointed surrealistic, industrial nightmare. Or it is what Trent Reznor sees every time he closes his eyes.

It is hard to describe the plot without making this movie sound stupid. A metal fetishist (director Shinya Tsukamoto) runs into the street after shoving a steel cable into his leg. He is hit by an oncoming car. The driver of the car only called Salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) is seen the next morning shaving when his razor touches a small wire sticking out of his cheek. From that point on his flesh begins to be replaced by various machine parts. At first he tries to hide his condition, but quick just starts to fight the transformation and his own desires.

At one point he finds a woman and attempts to have sex with her, only to discover an important part of himself has been replaced by a drill bit. The metal fetishist returns from the dead also as a part machine monster and battles with the Salaryman until the two eventually merged into one creature.

Now, from that description the plot sounds simple. But it is presented in a mix of flashback, stop motion images and sped up action that you absorb most of the images and sounds while your brain slowly pieces together what is going on. All this to a heavy industrial beat.

The plot itself isn’t as important as the visual ideas this movie presents. And for the record, they are presented briskly at just over 67 minutes. The movie is violent and frightening, but oh so compelling to watch.

Tsukamoto manages to achieve some amazing effects and images with a startling low budget. As I mention above, this movie is clearly an influence on the alternate industrial music of the 1990s. You can see where Nine Inch Nails steals both little and big from this movie. It is also a clear influence on the Japanese horror genre. You cannot watch any version of Ringu (or the American poor man’s remake, The Ring) without seeing where this movie has had a clear impact.

What is the final message of the movie? That we have lost all connection to the natural world around us? That we have become completely absorbed by the consumerist culture around us? That we are all cogs in the machine with even our most basic urges turned against us? That you shouldn’t have sex above the slowly dying body of your hit and run victim? This movie is about all that and more.

Under discussion:

Hairspray  (1988)

Hairspray  (2007)

Hairspray puzzles me. Why remake a movie like this? Why randomly keep some elements of John Water’s 1988 version and jettison the ones that actually develop the plot? I really don’t understand this Hollywood trend of taking a good movie converting it into a musical and then turning the musical back into a movie? Is there an example of this working out, ever?

This is the basic plot of the movie: Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) wants to become popular in high school by dancing on the Corny Collins Show, a local version of American Bandstand. But because Tracy is overweight and unpopular, the student council rejects her. Tracy gets thrown into detention, where all the black students are dancing. They teach her how to dance better. She gets on the show, but gets into trouble when she tries to promote racial integration. She then decides to work to get both black and white kids dancing on the stage at the same time.

John Travolta puts in a drag performance as Tracy’s mother Edna. Why? Because in the original movie, John Water’s favorite transvestite, Divine, played the role. So when it was turned into a stage musical, Harvey Fierstein played that role. Apparently the director thought that it had to be played in drag. But there is nothing clear in the movie why you would make that casting decision. As for his acting, this is one of Travolta’s worst performances. He came up with an accent that has never seen the light of day within a hundred miles of the city. He chews his way through every scene like it is an extremely fatty ham.

Christopher Walken manages to put in a fairly decent performance, despite weak material. He tries to add depth to his role as Tracy’s caring but but somewhat clueless father.

Michelle Pfieffer does a good job as the evil, racist, overbearing mom who is also the station manager that keeps her daughter on the top of the show.

As for the rest of the cast, (Zac Efron, Brittany Snow, James Marsden and Queen Latifah) they just walk through their cardboard roles without trying to inject any kind of life into them at all. Queen Latifah does manage to get one line of her leaden dialogue delivered as a laugh, but it is such a rarity that it sit there out of place.

The music and dance scenes of this movie are the most disappointing elements. The strange but authentic early 60s one hit wonders that filled the original film were ditched for generic songs that could have been pulled from or dropped into any mediocre musical of the past 20 years.  As for the dancing, I was hopeful that since the director was also the choreographer the dancing would be a highlight. Sadly, that never comes to pass. The dancing is almost treated in a second hand fashion.

The movie also goes pretty far in sanitizing itself and removes all of the subversive elements that made the original so quirky and interesting. The beatniks who give Tracy her sense of style and second hand hits of pot are gone. All the hints that Mr. Pinky, the dressmaker, was a chubby chaser are ditched. The dance off featuring Tracy in a dress covered in fabric cockroaches is also missing.

Did anybody really need a movie in 2007 to say that racism is wrong?