unclefestering Blog

Under discussion:

Film Name  Production Year

Tribulation 99 - Alien Anomalies Under America  (1991)

Mock Up on Mu  (2008)

I came across this movie in an article in the New York TImes on the director, Craig Baldwin and his newer movie Mock Up on Mu.

I threw both of these movies into my Netflix queue and forgot all about them.

This movie was amazing fun. Told as if it is a documentary from a conspiracy theorist's vault, Tribulation 99 explores how an ancient race of aliens living under Central America has been actively working to destroy America.

The footage that makes up the entire movie is a pastiche of Mexican Wrestling movies, Japanese monster movies, 50's science fiction and standard American history stock footage. The mix of all these sources are forged into a new story that washes over you like the ravings of a madman.

It reminded me of the first time I read H.P. Lovecraft. It has that same weird sense of this is our world and yet not.

I would hesitate to recommend this movie to everyone. One problem is that you get the feeling that in order to get around copyright protections on his sources, Baldwin was forced to use so many short clips of his source material repeatedly. Also, the frenetic pace of the short clips staccattoed one after the other can get wearying at times.

If you are interested in movies at the fringes, check this out. I found it to ultimately be a riveting post modern experiment.

Under discussion:

Shoot 'Em Up  (2007)

So I'm cruising through Netflix and see Shoot 'Em Up. Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci and Clive Owen, well how bad can it be?

Bad.

Clive Owen plays a man with no name who happens to be the world's greatest tactician, marksman and gymnist, happens to see thugs trying to gun down a pregnant lady and spings into action, buying bullets with food stamps, taking the baby to the the hooker who specializes in nursing grown men that he just happens to know and taking on the entire military industrial complex single handedly to save American democracy.

And then the story gets silly.

Under discussion:

August  (2008)

Directed by Austin Chick.

Starring Robin Tunney, Rip Torn, Josh Hartnett, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Adam Scott, Andre Royo, Naomie Harris.

August is like an inverted Langston Hughes poem in movie form. Instead of struggling for the deferred dream, Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett) is fighting to keep alive a dream that was brought into the world too soon. Unfortunately, his own hubris may get in the way of his goal.

Sterling is the CEO of Landshark, an e-commerce company that does… well…  OK, I’m not sure what the company does. But neither do several of the characters in the movie. Sterling launched the company with his brother Josh (Adam Scott) just as the warning signs of the dot.com bubble's impending burst are becoming clear. He’s hailed as a genius and the company’s stock rises as several competitors are crashing. A quick jump to the end of the summer of 2001 and Landshark is foundering due to Tom’s wasteful spending habits, which have blown through the company’s initial capitalization and a lack of customers.On top of all this, is the external problem that by now the dot com bubble has popped and the stock is tanking.

To make matters worse, Tom’s own arrogance prevents him from closing deals. In a meeting with a potential client, Tom refuses to give them a presentation. Instead, he spouts a bunch of babble about how his company is pure “e” and anybody would be a fool to turn him away.

The pressures of the business also flow directly into his personal life. His brother no longer trusts him and is just as desperate to keep the company afloat since he has to pay for a new mortgage and protect his wife and newborn son. Tom's relationship with his parents is also rocky, as he wildly reacts to any negative comments about the business and attacks them for giving up on their own ideals. His one bright spot is his attempt to rekindle a relationship with his ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) who has just returned to New York.

This movie really made me think that Josh Hartnett could act, something I've doubted for a long time. The movie rides and falls on Hartnett’s shoulders, since he is almost every scene. You can feel the jittery energy coming off him as his persona of business whiz is cracking and he becomes more and more desperate to keep the business running and, more importantly to him, to be perceived as a success.

Two small roles highlight the fracturing of that self perception. Rip Torn, playing the father of the Landshark brothers, quickly dismisses the entire venture with questions about what the company actually does and his stentorian disapproval of a staff sitting around eating Oreos. Rarely has a cookie stood in for all the disappointment a father could have for his son.

The other is a brief cameo by David Bowie as the venture capitalist who could be the last hope to save the company, but at a ruinous cost. Bowie’s character is so dismissive of Tom Sterling that he barely bothers to look at him when they are finally in the same room.

The one thing that overshadows all of the action in the movie is that the viewer knows that one month after this takes place; all the actions in this movie will be seen as petty and small when compared to the tragedy looming in September 2001.

Under discussion:

An Inconvenient Truth  (2006)

Out of Balance  (2007)

Out of Balance is a documentary of the worst type: pick an easy target, show what they do is wrong and claim a moral victory. It doesn’t attempt to portray any kind of balance to the story it is telling. While there are plenty of talking heads, I expected them to quote from more than three documents to prove ExxonMobil is the greatest threat to the environment.

According to this movie, ExxonMobile is the single, greatest source of evil on the face of the planet. The company single handedly is going to destroy every aspect of life on Earth. Am I exagerating the claims made by the documentary? Yes. However, my exaggerations are not as much as you would expect.

This movie spends slightly more than an hour featuring one talking head after another from extremely radical environmental groups claiming that ExxonMobile has stifled the debate on global climate change. They claim the company has exerted undue influence on the government. And that they have created massive amounts of doubt in the mind of the public on how serious the problem of global warming is.

Of these claims made by the movie, really the middle one is the one I believe most strongly. It is also the one that they have the most documented evidence. It appears to be clear that Exxon and the other oil companies were able to use their personal relationships with the president and the vice president of the United States, to craft an energy policy that favors the current energy producers and prevent any real reform in researching and producing alternative energy sources. This part of the movie comes very late and in a way is the most compelling because, finally, people other than environmental lobbyists are on camera and they have some actual proof the match the claims.

During the rest of the movie, when the speakers are not onscreen, the viewers get treated to stock footage of the ecological devastation caused by the Exxon Valdez spill. This footage is shown again and again over the discussion that ExxonMobile funds researchers and organizations which take the position that global warming is a myth or that the effects are greatly exaggerated by the people who believe in it. This is the bulk of the movie and this is what I had the hardest time with.

Very little time in the movie is devoted to the idea of what can be done to stop the juggernaut that is ExxonMobile. Other then a couple of the speakers saying they don’t buy gas from Exxon, only about 10 minutes at the end is devoted on what people can do to make a change. And really the conclusion they draw is that the government has to tell the company it has been bad and make them change.

I know one person who thinks that global warming is a hoax. I know one other person who tends to doubt the validity of scientific studies and even he believes the global climate change is a real crisis. I think the people who are trying to move the global warming discussion back to the “Is it Real” phase have really long lost the argument. The movie tries to make the claim that this is where the energy debate is.

In reality the debate has moved on to the “What can be done to address the problem” stage. This is a fact that the movie doesn’t want to address because it would make Exxon seem like less of a looming threat.

The problem with polemics like Out of Balance is that they are all arguments with very little in the way of facts to support those arguments. What made An Inconvenient Truth so compelling was that Al Gore compiled fact after fact to show how serious the issue was and how incontrovertible his conclusions were. Here the facts are just replaced with anger and even if you agree with the idea they present, the undocumented single-mindedness of their attack undermines their position.

Under discussion:

Death Race 2000  (1976)

Death Race  (2008)

No one is going to confuse Death Race for an Oscar contender. It is a loud, fun, explosive action movie. While it has been changed considerably from the original Death Race 2000, it has kept much of the same feel, while losing the moralizing of the original (not that there was much of that). This is a great movie to end the summer action season. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and delivers what it promises.

The year is 2025. The American economy is in the toilet. The crime rate has exploded. The overcrowded prisons have been privatized and one warden has found a solution to both the prisoner population and how to turn a profit: Death Race. Three days of heavily armed and armored cars driving around a secure track doing anything to win. Any racer who wins five times gets their freedom. Any racer who survives is skillful and lucky. The entire race can be watched from hundreds of cameras broadcasting on a pay per view basis.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) has recently been convicted of murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit. Ames was a race car driver before running into trouble with the NASCAR circuit. The warden (Joan Allen) informs him that she want Ames to take the place of the race’s biggest star, Frankenstein (so scarred from past races that he always wears a metal mask) who died in the last Death Race. Frankenstein’s death has been hidden from the public to prevent a decrease in subscriptions. Since this would be Frankenstein’s fifth win, Ames can go free, if he wins.

Statham is convinced to race after a further round of blackmail and gets to meet his crew and opponents. Frankenstein’s biggest competitor in the race is Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), who doesn’t know he killed the real Frankenstein and still harbors a vicious grudge. After this quick setup we move into day one of the race. From the green light, it is a mix of fast cars, crashes, explosions, weapons fire.

Statham and Allen both make this movie. Both are ruthless and willing to double cross each other to get what they need: ratings for one and freedom for the other.

Under discussion:

Wristcutters: A Love Story  (2007)

Wristcutters is equal parts roadtrip, and bitter comedy. It is a tough pair to pull off, especially when all the characters in the movie have committed suicide. This movie isn’t for everybody, but if you have the patience for it, it does pay off.

Zia (Patrick Fugit) puts his world in order and then takes a razor to his wrist. He wakes up in a world depressingly like the one he just abandoned, only more washed out and one where everything is somehow broken. This world is inhabited by all the suicides. They all bear the physicals scars of their death into their new life, where even emotions are drained.

After a while, Zia discovers that his girlfriend has also killed herself. He decides to find her, so he and his friend, Eugene, a Russian rocker who electrocuted himself on stage set out across the desolate landscape to find her. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Shannon Sossamon) who claims that she is there by mistake, because she never killed herself.

The humor in this movie is not the knee slapping laugh out loud kind of jokes. Rather it is just the wry observations of people stuck in situation which may never get better for them. Raspy voice Tom Waits also stars in this movie as the leader of a camp where some of the suicides hang out.

Under discussion:

Enemy at the Gates  (2001)

Enemy at the Gates is an attempt to put a human face on the seemingly endless siege of Stalingrad, one of the longest battles of World War II. It is an admirable effort to continually narrow down the scope of the movie until it seems to involve just four people in a city of thousands. If only the story had been able to sustain the feeling of desperation and anxiety instead of settling for a routine love triangle story.

The movie starts out with a heightened intensity as German bombers sink tiny boats ferrying soldiers to the city that so many know they will never leave alive. The soldiers who survive the crossing are immediately shoved to the front lines of the battle. Only half are given rifles. The idea is that when they guy next to you gets shot you either grab his rifle or ammunition and keep in shooting at the Germans.

One of these soldiers is Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) a barely literate peasant who learned to shoot from his grandfather. Zaitsev gets pinned down hiding in a fountain under other dead bodies. Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a political commissar, also ends up in the fountain and watches Zeitsev stealthily shoot their way out.

Danilov uses this incident to turn Zeitsev into a folk hero, building and promoting his own career on each of his friend’s kills. Both fall in love with Tania (Rachael Weisz) a former college student and Jewish soldier who at first is enraptured by Zeitsev’s reputation which grows into love. Danilov also falls in love with her.

And that’s where the movie falls apart.

The rest of the movie is supposed to hang in the sniper duel between Zeitsev and the top German sniper. Nothing in the sniper duel can match the beginning of the movie and that duels seems to be much less important than resolving the love triangle. The problem is that by this point, it becomes hard to care about either.

The role that saves the movie for large parts is Bob Hoskins’ fantastic turn as Khrushchev. He plays the role incredibly well. He is in turns belligerent, paranoid and angry; ready to kill his entire staff and every soldier in Russia if it will keep him safe from Stalin and maybe Hitler.

A much more interesting movie could be made looking into the problem of trying to decide which evil empire someone should root for. Enemy at the Gates just dodges this question, almost acting as if it isn’t important that the Russians were at least as cruel and ruthless as the Nazis.

Under discussion:

Atlantic City  (1980)

Atlantic City has the great opening scene of the aged Lou (Burt Lancaster) surreptitiously watching as a young Sally (Susan Sarandon) rubs cut lemons all over her naked body in front of her open kitchen window. Lancaster is her neighbor, but Sarandon barely notices him as they pass each other in the apartment building. Lancaster is one of the last of the old time mob. Sarandon is working to become a blackjack dealer in one of the newly built casinos.

Sarandon works at a raw bar in a casino and is trying to get her dealer’s license so she can get her slice of the casino boom. She is convinced that this will be a way to catapult her into polite society. It turns out that she bathes in the lemons every night to get rid of the smell of oysters and clams.

Their lives are fairly stable until Sally’s husband comes to town. He had left her several years ago and ran off with her sister. He brings the sister to town as well as a brick of cocaine he has stolen from the mob.

When Lancaster finally gets a chance to meet her and talk to her, he describes himself as the number two man in the old mob, who has retired. In reality, he was always a low level bag man and is essentially being kept by the widow of one of the old mob bosses. To make money day to day, he still runs numbers, but his customers are becoming fewer and fewer as they can try the slot machines.

Lancaster bemoans the loss of the old ways of life in the city, but he gets a chance to live up to be the man he has always pretended to be when the mobsters track the drugs down to Sally.

Louis Malle uses this theme of the old being replaced by the new throughout the movie. This movie was made shortly after the casino came to the New Jersey shore and everywhere the characters go, they see the old city being knocked down.

While this movie is essentially a character study of small people desperately trying to hold onto their unachievable dreams, it has a lot of ironic humor interspersed throughout. This movie was nominated for five Academy awards; although it didn’t win any, it really deserved the awards.