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Crazy Heart

February 10, 2010:  Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges is the main attraction in Crazy Heart, and he sells it beautifully.  Hollywood loves it when an aging actor or actress finds a film that allows them to channel their long experience into a tour de force performance, often leading to the recognition which has eluded them for decades.  Bridges has been a journeyman character actor, frequent second banana and sometime leading man for nearly 40 years, has been personally well-liked since his very early days as he grew up in the business with his father on TV, and has made courageous choices with his film roles right from the start.  After four previous Oscar nominations through the years, he’s up for Best Actor for Crazy Heart, and it will be a well-deserved win.

The thing about these late-career defining performances is that sometimes they are placed in brilliant films, but more often they are the only shining light in otherwise unremarkable efforts.  With Crazy Heart it isn’t immediately obvious which one it is, and I suppose that’s a good thing.  While there are some poignant aspects to the story, there’s also plenty that’s predictable.  Some solid performances don’t always make up for the absence of any great revelations.  The obvious passion for the story from everyone involved, coupled with some stunning visuals, push this one towards a strong recommendation.  Crazy Heart is a rewarding experience.

Bridges plays Bad Blake, a 60-ish country musician whose alcoholism and other bad choices have left him with not much other than his old truck and his old house.  His real given name remains exiled, as if to deliberately remind himself that long ago during times of success and still today, his alternate persona wasn’t the answer to life’s problems.  He tours around, playing shows at dusty little bars in dusty little towns, faithfully rolling out his classic tunes for the faithful fans scattered around these big empty southern states.  His former protégé, a much younger musician played by Colin Farrell, sold out to the “new country” commercialism in Nashville and is now a megastar, but he still remembers his roots and who taught him everything he knows.  Bad Blake is down and out, scraping along with next to nothing, but he can still write songs like nobody else, and that’s what gives him the potential to pull himself back up.

Things pick up quickly when a thirtysomething single-mom music journalist, played by the love-her-or-hate-her Maggie Gyllenhaal, takes a shine to Blake and gives him a new reason to go on.  Coupled with the bitter pill of a gig opening for his former student Farrell, Blake is going to quickly need to figure out how and whether he’s living his life.  This is where the film edges towards formula and away from greater possibilities.  Maybe I’m too demanding, and human nature really does lead most of us to inevitable conclusions and actions.

Touching performances from Gyllenhaal, Farrell and Robert Duvall as one of Blake’s oldest friends raise Crazy Heart several notches above what it could have been, and Bridges ties it all together as the drunken anti-hero.  Even half-sloshed, he still exudes the charm and confidence that led to his earlier success.  The pain of a long string of bad decisions haunts him every day, but he takes it like a man and deals with it by dialing down his expectations of himself and what he deserves.  His 30-year-old run-down Chevy Silverado truck is evocative of Blake himself – old but rugged and still running.

It would be a crime if I neglected to mention the amazing widescreen cinematography here.  It truly captures the mythic scenery and landscapes of the US southwest, as Blake drives from one small town to another in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before getting back to his home in big-city Texas.  Original music written for the film by longtime country/folk artist and music producer T-Bone Burnett is also a serious plus, and Bridges is a singer and guitarist himself, so performing the songs is no problem for him.

I’m not going to tell you anything different than you’ve already heard.  Crazy Heart is an OK but unremarkable film, which houses a magnetic performance by the long-underappreciated Jeff Bridges.  I guarantee he’ll thank his Dad, and maybe shed a tear or two, when he accepts his well-deserved Oscar.

Jeff Bridges finally gets his due.

2010 03 02 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes)

February 9, 2010:  El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes)

Argentina’s entry for consideration in 2009 and nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Secret in Their Eyes is a complicated story anchored by a police detective’s obsessive quest to solve a rape/murder case.  Flashbacks to the original investigation in 1974 are interspersed with scenes set in 1999 as he continues to struggle to figure out what he’s missed, so we see how things originally developed and are exposed to the clues that will eventually lead him to the truth.

The particulars of the case are fascinating enough on their own, with the killer not simply disappearing but in fact being caught and put to trial and convicted and spending time in jail, but then being released due to politics and relationships in the prosecutor’s office.  When the ex-prisoner later goes missing and is presumed dead, that’s officially the end of it, but not for the detective and the devastated husband of the young woman who was murdered.  They both grieve the loss and their failure to come to terms with the lack of closure.  25 years later as the detective writes a book about his experience, and reconnects with a woman he first met and shared an attraction with around the time of the original case, he has a revelation and is able to figure out what happened.

They main idea here is that people may change, but their passions remain the same, and that’s the key to unlocking the truth.  This is a gripping, original story, with many layers to the people and their actions.  There’s lots of snappy dialogue, and I admittedly read the plot summary ahead of time which helped me to immerse myself right from the start.  Everyone in this film seems to be serving a life sentence, regardless of convictions or crimes or settings.  It’s good stuff.

A great, nuanced story always helps.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Princess and the Frog

February 5, 2010:  The Princess and the Frog

For a basic story idea that seems like it’s been done to death, The Princess and the Frog actually makes a decent little case for itself during its scant running time, set in an oft-neglected time and place in American history.

In early 20th century New Orleans, a servant’s daughter, Tiana, dreams of running a restaurant with her father.  Fast forward to her grown up and living through the roaring ’20s, where she works as a maid, her father has passed away, and while she still clings to her dream of running a restaurant, making it a reality seems like a long shot.  Her rich friend (a childhood friend, the daughter of her mother’s former employer) becomes interested in a foreign prince who is visiting New Orleans.  Things take a twist when Tiana and the prince both end up turning into frogs (as a result of some apparently well-established science around people kissing other people when they are or are not princes and princesses).  They get to know each other (in frog form) as they try to figure out how to become human again.  Do they end up eventually married as Prince and Princess in human form, or are they stuck as frogs forever?  Don’t worry, it turns out OK in the end.

This film has a surprisingly thin story, but it doesn’t actually need to be much more than that.  Only a few characters are really developed at all, which again is fine.  Keith David is a great presence as a black magic man, John Goodman as the rich girl’s father uses his booming voice to good effect as usual, and Oprah Winfrey even shows up in a small voice part as well.  The whole experience is amusing enough, with good music and snappy jazz/country tunes (it got Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature as well as for two of the original songs).  However, I could have just as easily skipped The Princess and the Frog.  I don’t think this is the best animated film of the year, and I suspect that T-Bone Burnett has the song category wrapped up this year for his song (a single song presumably standing in for the whole of his work) from Crazy Heart, so it’s unlikely that it will win any Oscars.  It’s noteworthy that this is the first hand-drawn Disney animated film in 5 years, and that this is the first time an African-American princess has appeared in a Disney film.  The Princess and the Frog is standard classic-type Disney fare, so if that’s what you’re after, that’s what you’ll get.  It’s perfectly competent stuff.

A return to classic Disney form.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Blind Side

February 4, 2010:  The Blind Side

I’ve generally been happy over the past decade or so, as the modern generation of actresses came into their own and started winning Oscars.  Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron all deservedly took home Oscar gold.  The one that stuck in my craw was Reese Witherspoon, not necessarily because she isn’t a capable actress, although I do see her as being a notch lower than the others, but because the performance itself (in the 2005 film Walk the Line) didn’t strike me one way or the other.  So as soon as I heard the Oscar buzz around Sandra Bullock’s performance in The Blind Side, that dread welled up in me, because it was another case of an actress who I think of as being a notch below the others, possibly taking home the gold for an inferior performance.

Well, I needn’t have feared that the world would fail to disappoint me, because Bullock is going to get her Oscar for The Blind Side, and I’m not going to be very happy about it.  It does occur to me that the caricatured portrayal lacking any nuance may be a result of the actual person portrayed being exactly like that, but if so, then I’m disappointed in the whole world for letting such narcissistic blowhards get all the attention.

The Blind Side is the true story of a Tennessee boy with an unstable home life and poor grades, who ends up living with a wealthy family and being discovered to be fairly smart, and who also turns out to be a pretty good football player.  The film’s title refers to his particular football position, where his job is to protect the quarterback’s blind side while he gets ready to throw the ball, a job which requires speed and immense size and a protective instinct.  “Big Mike” has all of these, and that makes him a very attractive recruiting prospect for the colleges.  Mike adjusts to his new family, which includes a young boy and a teenaged girl, and is eventually adopted by them, at the behest of Sandra Bullock’s overbearing mother figure.

This is a touching story, to be sure, but it plays very broadly here and didn’t really speak to me.  The hackneyed presentation is a problem, from the precocious young kid to the aloof but secretly sensitive teenaged daughter, topped off by Bullock’s stereotypical Memphis society ladies who can’t fathom how their friend could handle taking in an African-American boy as part of the family.  But what really kills this movie for me is the lack of clarity around Bullock’s character’s motivation.  I guess she’s on the up-and-up, but this generosity seems out of character.  We don’t know anything else about her history aside from hints at her tenacity once she decides to do something, but we don’t know what drives her.  There’s a suggestion that it’s good old fashioned Christianity, which could explain what’s going on, but things are rarely that simple.  Maybe she’s just a rare person, but not a likeable one, and putting on a southern accent and acting larger than life shouldn’t bring Oscar gold on its own.  Maybe I was supposed to like her.  I didn’t.

I’m not keen on this one.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Sherlock Holmes

February 3, 2010:  Sherlock Holmes

A movie about Sherlock Holmes?  Directed by Guy Ritchie?  Starring Robert Downey, Jr?  If this sounds strange, imagine how it must have sounded to the guys who were asked to sign over $100 million to make it happen.

Well, I guess Sherlock Holmes provides a solid story base.  And Guy Ritchie took the world by storm a decade ago with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), although I haven’t much liked anything he’s done since then.  And Robert Downey Jr. has gone through a number of career ups and downs but he seems to be on a serious upswing right now, thanks in large part to Iron Man (2008) and Tropic Thunder (2008).  So let’s see whether this all comes together to kick off a compelling Sherlock Holmes franchise, or whether it falls on its face.

The reason I’m watching this in the first place is for the two Oscar nominations, for the art direction and for Hans Zimmer’s score.  Sherlock Holmes performs well on both fronts.  The box office numbers were impressive, which means that a sequel will surely come to pass (advance buzz has us seeing the next instalment in 2011).  And with me not being a reader of the original Sherlock Holmes material, I wasn’t bothered by what I presume to be grievous departures from the canon – I don’t typically hear of hand-to-hand combat sprinkled throughout the Holmes stories, although I expect his lippy attitude and eye for detail are only stylistically and not improperly exaggerated.  Downey really sells the character, with his fast-talking persona, and it seems right.

The story itself, about a secret society trying to take over the British government through the use of black magic, is serviceable and ties up nicely at the end, in a nod to Holmes’ mantra that logic can always get to the root of what has happened.  The theme of technology giving people the edge over the ignorant masses is a compelling one, as obvious power plays a century ago based on significant mechanical and electrical inventions are supplanted today with more devious and longer-term ploys to get people reliant on a particular tool or technology and to control the tool.  The film was long but not quite overlong.  Downey as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson both impressed me, but Rachel McAdams seemed out of place and out of her league as a supposedly accomplished American thief, and Mark Strong as usual failed to connect with me in his portrayal here of the main villain.  I never believed him to be as sinister as Ritchie wanted me to believe he was.

I can live with Sherlock Holmes as a franchise, and this first entry is a bit scattered but a satisfying ride in the end.  I could totally see it disintegrating in the manner of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, into a completely incomprehensible mess, but I hope it doesn’t go too far in that direction.  I’ll give the second one a shot.

Downey continues his impressive career revival.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Avatar

February 1, 2010:  Avatar

At this point, Avatar has topped the world box office and effectively re-crowned James Cameron as the king of Hollywood.  Lots has been written about it, and opinions differ.  I had been wondering whether I would come up with an exhaustive analysis or more or less gloss over the film as the technical exercise that I heard it was.

James Cameron has been an A-list Hollywood director for a quarter of a century now, with early hits The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) having cemented his bankability.  From that point on, his career arc has leaned decidedly towards expansion of cinematic technology, and this is where even people who aren’t fans of him personally have to concede how much he has done for the industry.  He pioneered realistic computer graphics effects in movies, with the aliens in The Abyss (1989) being a trial run leading up to the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).  This crowning achievement was topped by Titanic in 1997, when he manufactured a 3/4 scale model of the Titanic and used groundbreaking computer graphics effects as well as innovative undersea exploration vessels (another of his passions) to bookend that epic film and bring it greater “depth”, if you will.  Despite the passionate claims that Titanic is utter garbage, which in a storyline sense may be true, the technological advances are unmistakable and the combination of the accessible story and impressive effects catapulted it into the top (unadjusted) box office position of all time.

It’s been 12 years since then.  What has Cameron been doing?  Well, he’s pursued more of his underwater exploration, but he has also been working on this little movie called Avatar.  He’s the kind of guy who when he realizes current film technology can’t bring his vision to light, takes that to mean he has no choice but to go out and invent it, while waiting for the computer hardware to catch up.  In the process, he wrote a movie with a widely appealing story (typically described as boring or unchallenging), ran up a budget rumoured to approach $500 million (bringing the predictions that this would be the most expensive flop in history), and pushed movie technology in new directions by creating tools and techniques which can be used by others in the future to make their visions more compelling on the screen.  If this sounds a LOT like Titanic, that’s because it is.  And as before, the film has defied predictions and gone on to dominate the world box office.

So what is Avatar all about?  What’s so great?  Well, I’ve thought about this a bit, and I really do have to conclude that the presentation is the most compelling part of the film.  I made sure to see this in an IMAX 3D presentation, the most immersive (and most expensive – helps those box office numbers!) way to see the film, and in my evaluation, I’ve found it useful to think about whether the exact same thing in a regular 2D 35mm print would have been as compelling or impressive.  The story is fairly simple – mankind has used up the resources of the earth, and is attempting to pillage a foreign planet for what is buried beneath their soil.  They attempt to negotiate with the native species by growing soulless bodies in the physical form of the native species, and using machines to allow humans to inhabit these bodies – their avatars in this new world.  The native species has a humanoid form, and social customs which strongly resemble those of North American native tribes, hence the descriptions of this film as “Dances with Aliens”, with the story resembling that of Dances with Wolves (1990), in which Kevin Costner starred as a Civil war-era American military man who tried to ingratiate himself with the local tribes and ended up coming to understand their side of the fight and turning his back on his people to fight with the natives.  That’s more or less what happens in Avatar, just with bigger trees and a lot more flying.  The thinly-veiled hard-left political stance could easily be taken to suggest that the earthlings are Americans, and the foreign planet is any country the USA invades in a disingenuous attempt to control natural resources (Iraq and oil, anyone?).

The most significant technological advance here is in the motion capture equipment.  The equipment worn by the actors allows computers to collect positioning data as actors move around, including special cameras capturing facial movements at the same time, and the motion can be mapped to the oddly-proportioned tall thin blue “people” in whose bodies they reside.  This leads to unquestionably the most realistic movement of animated characters that I have ever seen in movies, which has always been a real sore spot for me.  Running and jumping are very difficult to animate, for some reason, but here it’s spot on.  The rich 3D landscape is impressive as well, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been done before – this just happens to be one of the first movies to push digital 3D cinema beyond cartoons and horror.

It’s well known that James Cameron is a megalomaniac, and not paticularly pleasant to work with.  Sigourney Weaver has returned to work with him again here, and he knows there are plenty of actors in Hollywood who are chomping at the bit for the experience, so he’s got nothing to worry about.  His movies are undeniably and almost universally well-regarded.  He’s in an Oscar battle this year with one of his ex-wives, director Kathryn Bigelow who brought us the much more introspective and awards-oriented The Hurt Locker, but Bigelow is going to be fighting an uphill battle for love from the Academy, despite the fact that story-wise, her film is clearly better.  As I often claim with my technique of watching all Oscar nominees, the point is to see a bunch of movies which are considered good, and which ones actually win has plenty to do with politics and the sentiment of the day.  Would I be happy to see Avatar in a scratchy 35mm distribution print?  I’m not sure that I would.

James Cameron dominates again, with ease.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Road

January 31, 2010:  The Road

Viggo Mortensen does grizzled really well.  The ladies think he’s pretty, but throw a ragged beard and some filth on him, and you’d never know that he’s one of the beautiful people.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of a man struggling for survival with his son after the disappearance of most of humanity and pretty much all of civilization.  The back story of how this happened is touched upon during flashbacks but the specific cause of the disaster and the exact rate of decline into chaos are not really known.  Mortensen was happily married with a pregnant wife when catastrophe struck (evidently some kind of natural disaster).  They had the baby on their own and raised him for several years before the wife couldn’t take the struggle anymore and disappeared.  This left Mortensen to head south with his son, hopefully to greener pastures.  We meet up with them after several years on the road, living a paranoid existence with minimal food, and under constant threat from desperate and often violent gangs of other survivors.

The philosophical struggle seems to be the point of the film, and it handles this angle reasonably well.  There’s the conflict between “having the fire inside you” – needing to press on regardless of the odds – versus giving up and committing suicide in order to escape a slow death, a quick death at someone else’s hands, or a hopeless life.  Is it worth living when your life is guaranteed to be lived in constant fear and distrust of everyone else?  Would Mortensen feel the same compulsion to go on if he didn’t have his son to provide a focus for his protective energies?  If you hoard food and keep all you can find in order to survive and refuse to share anything with anyone else, do you remain one of the good guys, or are you contributing to the problem?  What is really the point of it all?

The actual implementation of the story leaves something to be desired, though, and it’s hard to get past the distractions and come out on the positive side with this film.  Technical issues such as muddled dialogue and some of the most hackneyed foley work (the sound effects added after the fact like doors latching and food crunching in people’s mouths) prevented me from immersing myself in the film’s world, though the cinematography is to be praised.  The lack of explanation of the details of the disaster should be OK, but it leads to far too many distracting “what about this?” questions.  It seems that plants can no longer grow and other animals are almost all gone, which is why everyone is so desperate for food, but what about bacteria inside the human bodies?  Do they survive, and if so, can’t that lead to regeneration of life?  What about travel – I wouldn’t imagine it would take more than a few years to walk to the US south from the northeast where they apparently started out, so I don’t know what they have been doing for all that time.  It could be explained away but it isn’t.  And Mortensen claims that there are only a handful of people left in the world, but how does he know about warmer climates, or other continents, unless world communications systems survived long enough to get the word out before the people were gone?

So we’ve got a fascinating concept to explore, and a decent amount of tension, but some logical fallacies bringing things down a notch.  The Road is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, the author behind the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men a couple of years ago, and perhaps the book would explain things better.  This is worth seeing for what it makes you think about, but if you think too much, it might fall apart.

Philosophical journey marred by confusing reality.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans

January 27, 2010:  The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans

This is one of those movies where you just have to say “wow”.  The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans is not some great masterpiece, and it might wear thin after a bunch of viewings, but it’s a hell of a ride and a testament to the originality which can still be conjured in film after well over a century of exploring the medium.

I’ve never really thought of Nicolas Cage as being a bad actor, and in fact I doggedly cite his Best Actor Oscar win for the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas as “proof” that he’s a good actor.  Having since turned out a few Simpson/Bruckheimer entries (OK, technically only one before Don Simpson died in 1996 and Jerry Bruckheimer took over the production of cheesy and overwrought action films on his own), not to mention a couple of National Treasure films and the ESP-sixth-sense doppelgangers Next (2007) and Knowing (2009), I’m left wondering what ties together all of his performances, good or bad.

Then the answer hits me.  This guy plays bat-shit crazy better than anyone else.  When channeled for good, we get Adaptation (2002) with a multiple-personality-afflicted wannabe screenwriter, The Rock (1996) with a soft-spoken FBI agent thrust into chaos, and Raising Arizona (1987) with a wannabe adoptive father.  When simply unhinged, we are treated to Cage in the likes of Lord of War (2005) as a risk-taking arms dealer, 8MM (1999) as a man going underground to investigate the source of snuff films, and Con Air (1997) as a convict on the loose.  Here in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, we have master director Werner Herzog channeling an unhinged Nicolas Cage for good, and that’s exactly how he should be seen.

I could name-drop classic films and act like I’m intimately familiar with Herzog’s career, but that would be disingenuous since I really haven’t seen much of his output, ever.  I saw Rescue Dawn (2006) a few years ago, but it doesn’t look like I’ve seen anything else he’s done.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Anyway, people love him, and I hear that he makes great movies and that any actor would be lucky to work with him.

So here we have Cage playing a seemingly corrupt cop in New Orleans in the time frame immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  The psychological torture and subsequent rescue of a drowning prisoner nets him a medal and a promotion, but leaves a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.  Cage genuinely seems to want to get his job done and get his cases solved, but a nasty drug habit and an unstable personal life involving unannounced drop-in visits to his prostitute girlfriend make it clear that he’s a man who, if he hasn’t yet fallen off the edge, is teetering on it.  Sauntering around the muggy and buggy city in an ill-fitting suit with a huge .44 Magnum pistol jammed in his belt, he doesn’t seem to be the classic picture of a detective on the job.  He is given a major drug case to try and bust, and when his rough techniques stall, he takes another approach for which he may be better suited.  Just don’t ask too many questions about it.

This really is a fascinating ride, and doesn’t drag for a minute.  Cage gets deeper and deeper into the drugs, and acts more and more off the wall as the film progresses, possibly influenced by the lizardly visions he experiences at times.  A bloated-looking Val Kilmer struggles to keep up with Cage’s fevered technique.  Cage’s swagger deteriorates into more of a stagger as his back pain and drug use escalate and we don’t know how much of the world around him he even sees any more.  Is it coincidence, luck, or inspired brilliance that lets him solve the case and get yet another questionable promotion?

I should point out the minor Die Hard 2 (1990) reunion here, as a surprisingly wrinkly Vondie Curtis Hall and a still-vibrant Tom Bower again appear in the same movie without sharing any scenes.  Eva Mendes, Fairuza Balk and particularly Jennifer Coolidge bring strong but strongly flawed female characters to these proceedings which otherwise remain mired in the typical movie maleness of cops and drug dealers.  I can’t give The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans a really solid recommendation based on typical film quality metrics, but I can almost guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Nicolas Cage is channeled for good.

2010 02 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Collapse

January 21, 2010:  Collapse

Collapse is a documentary, and a very sparse one at that.  A single interviewee sits in a half-darkened room and talks for an hour and a half, with photos and news clippings supporting his stories and his claims.

The discussion is about the inevitable collapse of society as we know it, if things continue the way they are.  Peak oil is a convenient concept on which to hang the narrative, but it’s just a symptom of the unsustainable way we produce our food, make our homes comfortable, and keep ourselves “healthy”.  It all relies on crude oil, and oil won’t be affordable at its current levels forever.  Michael Ruppert has devoted many years, since his retirement as an LAPD police officer, to bringing to light the inevitable collapse of society as we know it.  An exponentially growing world population obviously cannot continue at its current pace, and there will be a lot of casualties.  The simple reality is that most of us won’t make it once the energy influx of cheap oil runs out.

Is this all true?  It really is hard to say with any specifics, and in all but the most severe projections, most people who are alive today will be able to finish their lives before a collapse on the scale of what Ruppert predicts here.  This long-timeline view is what makes the point so difficult to make with people – we really do tend to think short-term as a general population, but as a result we seem to be able to pull together and get through most crises somehow.  I certainly wouldn’t argue that the earth can sustain 6+ billion people in their current lifestyles, but the twin possibilities of gradual lifestyle change and gradual technological improvement can drag this decline out for a long time.

One of the points Ruppert makes, which I think is very important though not often considered, is that this collapse will NOT happen overnight.  We won’t run out of oil one day, and then be stuck back in the dark ages.  The price of oil will gradually increase, and fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the related products, and conflicts will arise.  A related and no less important observation is that people won’t die off quickly.  We are not likely to see mass population decreases due to natural disasters or human conflicts, but rather a long decline of people’s health, over several years, leading to eventual starvation and death.  It’s not pleasant to think about and I hope that social systems will adjust in time, but they may not manage, and in any case the burden of overpopulation must leave some people cut off in the end.

For Ruppert’s part, it seems he has given all he can to this fight.  We see the tattered remains of his life, as he lives alone in a rented house with his dog, any family long since left by the wayside as his obsession took over.  Even as a gruff former cop, he is clearly passionate about the situation, breaking down into tears when talking about one of the more despairing points, and this is absolutely to be expected when someone cares this much about something.

Should we be looking out for just ourselves and our own lives, or should we be changing for the sake of the future of humanity on earth?  There’s some serious inertia working against anyone pushing for change, and people don’t tend to make major shifts without a catastrophe to force it.  It all kind of makes the prospect of working until retirement a bit scary, since retirement may be spent in chaos, triggering regret for not taking advantage of the years before the collapse to experience the world before its decline.

Short term thinking will get us.

2010 02 25 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Brothers

January 19, 2010:  Brothers

I’ve seen a lot of movies in this run-up to Oscar season, and while Brothers played reasonably well for me at the time, in the weeks since I saw the film it has mostly faded from my memory.  The consensus seems to be that we’re looking at yet another needless American remake of a superior European film, so I guess I should just enjoy the fireworks, lament the lack of originality in Hollywood, and schedule a time to see the original.  Oh, and in the end, Brothers didn’t get any Oscar nominations.

What we have here is Tobey Maguire, a soldier and family man with a wife (Natalie Portman) and two daughters, a brother just out of jail (Jake Gyllenhaal), and a domineering father who completely approves of Maguire’s chosen military/family life, and completely disapproves of Gyllenhaal’s aimless ways.  Maguire goes on another tour of duty to the middle east and is apparently killed in action, leading to grief back home and greater bonding between Portman and Gyllenhaal, but it turns out that Maguire was captured and remains alive.  After several months, a chance raid by American troops leads to his rescue, but not before he has to endure brutal psychological and physical treatment including forced acts of violence he will have a hard time getting over.  A guy does what he needs to do in order to survive, but at what cost to his sanity?

When Maguire returns home, he is clearly damaged.  His children have taken a shine to his brother, and so has his wife, as far as he can tell.  Maguire refuses to open up about his experiences overseas, and he slides towards an inevitable domestic blowup which is the only way to start the healing.

I have no trouble characterizing this film as formulaic and predictable junk, overblown yet sanitized.  That said, it was still quite watchable.  I wasn’t initially finding Maguire to be believable as a family man, since he and Portman come across as children acting like grown-ups with their two daughters and stodgily decorated big mid-western house.  But I realized that that’s exactly what these young military families are like – guys entering the service just out of high school, and by age 25 living with established families in affordable but aging rust- and/or bible-belt housing.  I figured Maguire would be out of his depth as a soldier (despite being somehow believable as Spider-Man), but he actually pulled that off very well, selling us the notion of a sergeant who is devoted to God and country, willing to do what it takes to stay alive but drawing the line at cooperating with the enemy or giving them information.  The movie is peppered with other annoying and unoriginal elements – the precocious kids, idyllic scenes of Gyllenhaal playing with the kids, black and white characterizations of Maguire and his Corporal after their capture, the relationship between the two brothers and their father, Portman’s empty husk of a portrayal of a military wife, the domestic disturbance scene with the symbolic newly renovated kitchen being destroyed, dinner table arguments, a kiss in a moment of weakness.  Need I go on?

Supporting work by Sam Shepard as the father, the rarely-seen-these-days Mare Winningham as his wife, Carey Mulligan in a totally undeveloped role as the wife of the Corporal who doesn’t make it back, Clifton Collins Jr. as Maguire’s supervisor, and good old Ethan Suplee (always remembered by me as the surly stereogram-obsessed mall fixture in Kevin Smith’s 1995 film Mallrats) as one of Gyllenhaal’s friends, all contribute what they can but none of them are featured heavily enough to make much of a difference.  This is Jake and Tobey’s show, as I suppose it should be, but they aren’t given the free rein to properly cut loose outside of the pre-defined set pieces, and that leaves Brothers feeling constrained for no good reason.

I’ll have to see the original.

2010 02 17 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink