Half-Assed Movie Reviews

December 26, 2009:  Man on Wire

I had seen Man on Wire (2008) before, but it was before I started writing reviews, so I need to cover it now!  I watched this with my extended family over the holiday break, and it’s a fascinating and very accessible documentary for the whole family.  This Oscar-winner for Best Documentary Feature last year chronicles the early life of Philippe Petit, a street performer from France who in the 1970s made a habit of doing high-rise wire (i.e. tightrope) walks in prominent and illegal places such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Cathedral at Notre Dame, culminating in an insane but carefully planned stunt in which he walked on a wire suspended between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City!

The brilliant advantage this documentary has is that there is a good deal of actual film footage as well as photographs available from the time of the events, since Petit and his crew documented their preparations and his performances.  Supplemented by some black-and-white dramatizations and extensive current-day interview footage with the team members, this ends up being an immersive experience and a genuine expression of how timeless the experience was for all involved.  The faces have lost the radiant glow of youth seen in those grainy old films, but the passion is still in their eyes.  We are able to witness the energy of the pursuit first-hand, and the memories are still strong.  It’s clear that it’s an emotional journey for the team to revisit even today, with a few of them choking up upon recalling the moment of success.

Petit himself is clearly a charismatic and talented guy, and I really got the sense that people wanted to support him and help him to achieve his goals.  His energy is infectious, both in the silent film footage from the early 1970s and in his present-day interviews.  He doesn’t himself understand what drives him to do what he does, but he knows it’s his calling.  The film itself didn’t get much into explanations of the funding for all of the transatlantic trips or the equipment needed for the World Trade Center infiltration, but a documentary on the DVD delving into the Sydney stunt in greater detail illustrates that the goodwill of people with money played a large part – people who wanted to contribute however they could to Petit achieving his vision.

There is no mention whatsoever of 9/11 in this film, which is obviously a conscious artistic decision.  The towers which once stood so mightily are forever gone, which must give a bittersweet flavour to the memories for all involved and make this recollection of the experience more painful.  I always loved the towers myself and spent some happy hours in my younger days standing on the roof of the one open to tourists, just enjoying the perspective and the experience.  To step off the edge onto a thin wire strung to the other building is an idea well beyond comprehension for most of us, and Man on Wire respects that sentiment while at the same time convincing us that for Philippe Petit, the idea that he couldn’t step off was just as incomprehensible.

For the record, I have to say that I love how the title of this movie came about.  Of course once Petit was on his wire between the buildings, the authorities were on the scene within minutes and police were waiting at both ends ready to take him into custody as soon as he was done.  He wasn’t in fact done until more than 40 minutes later, after taunting police and doing all manner of stunts out on the wire before threats of picking him off with a helicopter made him fear for his safety.  He was of course arrested, but the City wisely realized the public relations nightmare which could arise, and they let him go in exchange for doing some of his traditional performances for charity.  In the movie, we see a photograph of the original police report, and in the “Details of Complaint” section, it simply says MAN ON WIRE.

This is how documentaries should be.

December 18, 2009:  District 9

District 9 is an odd duck.  Tonally unique but still bearing the mark of an action blockbuster, it arrived amid a barrage of cryptic print advertising and did pretty good business at the box office.  This rough, pseudo-documentary-style film about the ghettoization of a group of aliens stranded on earth manages to touch upon some very real social and racial issues, and tie them into some standard action-movie clichés.

The pacing of the film is frenzied, shot entirely in hand-held documentary fashion and with cutaways to news channel reports.  I wasn’t sure whether that was just the setup and it would eventually settle down, but it never did.  We follow the story as a high-ranking government bureaucrat takes on leadership of an effort to evict millions of aliens from a custom-built slum to a different custom-built slum when the government wants to reclaim some land.  The aliens have been given nominal legal rights, in this case allowing them the luxury of personal eviction notices, but really they have no power and no say in what’s happening.  This of course exactly mimics the social stratification of many nations suffering racial strife.  When a personal connection gives this government employee reason to sympathize with the aliens, of course he loses all protection and is chased down by both sides until it is clear where he fits in.

District 9 is refreshingly gory and profane, like a throwback to the 1980s war and alien and conflict movies, before teenagers became the core audience for such films and they were cleaned up for mass popularity.  Despite this amped-up action and the fascinating premise, though, the film proves surprisingly slight entertainment, and I don’t expect I’ll remember much of it by the time the Oscar nominations are announced and it may be acknowledged for its Editing.

Gory handheld actioner as social commentary.

December 8, 2009:  Up in the Air

Jason Reitman has taken the film world by storm, and increases his profile every time he sits in the director’s chair.  His feature debut, Thank You for Smoking (2005), was an honest shakeup for contemporary satirical comedy.  His follow-up, Juno, was an Oscar darling a couple of years ago, eventually winning Best Original Screenplay for Diablo Cody.  Now we have Up in the Air, a George Clooney star vehicle with deep veins of both comedy and drama, a story which is timely in these current days of recession and job losses, and again showing very strong Oscar potential.  Jason’s father, Ghostbusters (1984) director Ivan Reitman, is understandably proud.

Up in the Air brings us Clooney as a man who lives in the skies of America, flying from city to city as a corporate hatchet man brought in to fire large numbers of employees for bosses too weak-willed to fulfill their responsibilities.  Clooney loves his life on the road, having the minute details of airports and hotels and rental cars down to a science, and it’s just as well since his company’s home base, and where he nominally “lives”, is in Omaha, Nebraska.  He is mostly estranged from his family, but is considering attending the wedding of one of his sisters.  He also delivers occasional motivational seminars in which he encourages people to divest themselves of their possessions and keep moving in life, and hints at doing the same with personal relationships.

Of course, in the two hours we spend with this character, life-changing events will happen which make him question the entire foundation of how he lives.  The only real complaint I have with this otherwise brilliant film is that I couldn’t escape the knowledge that I was watching a movie and seeing unnaturally quick character transformations, but I can forgive Up in the Air for experiencing the limitations of the format, and at least it tries to make the change believable.

So, what makes Clooney start to question this marvellous life he has created for himself?  Well, as I implied above, he meets a woman, another experienced business traveller who is similarly interested in no-strings-attached trysts whenever and wherever they can hook up.  The only problem is, he starts to like her more than just superficially and considers her as a potential mate.  Also,  his company starts to experiment with firing people through videoconferencing which would make his expensive travelling job obsolete, so he resists this but ultimately realizes he doesn’t have the power to stop it.  Finally, he does decide to go to his sister’s wedding and is even enlisted to talk down the groom from some serious cold feet, and comes to realize that there is real truth to what be thinks are empty claims that companionship makes life more enjoyable.  As previously pointed out, it’s not typical for people to change so quickly, but this perfect storm of stimuli in a short time period does ring true.

We’ve got great supporting performances here, with Jason Bateman as Clooney’s slimy boss, Vera Farmiga as Clooney’s on-the-road love interest, and Anna Kendrick as a recent college graduate who is forced to compare her brainchild, the new online firing technique, against the real thing during an extended road trip with Clooney to see what it’s actually like face-to-face.  All of them help to emphasize the main thrust of the film, which is to question what is the point of life, and what people are trying to get out of it.  Up in the Air is one of the best of the year – believe the critics on this one.

Funny, poignant and makes you think.

November 30, 2009:  2012

I certainly haven’t been waiting and hoping, and don’t necessarily get any pleasure from the opportunity, to declare a film to be ridiculously ridiculous.  But that’s exactly what 2012 is.  Is it even a spoiler for this kind of movie if I tell the reader that in the scene with the boat (yes, I said boat) trying to steer clear of a crash into the peak of Mount Everest, they just barely make it in time?

2012 speaks to the oft-made claim that the world will end in said year, and in this film the “end” manifests itself as a devastating heating of the earth’s core, essentially causing all land to break up and then be covered over by water as the polar ice caps completely melt and tectonic plates shift.  Major governments learn of this impending doom years ahead of time, and dispute behind closed doors how to handle the revelation of this news to the world.  John Cusack is a moderately successful novelist who gets wrapped up in trying to save himself and his family as things literally start to crumble around him.

Imagine if you will, every POSSIBLE disaster movie cliché, every POSSIBLE implausible scientific point that happens only in the movies, and every POSSIBLE combination of vehicles (airplanes, cars, trucks, boats) narrowly escaping the certain doom of gaping chasms and giant waves of water and massive explosions and eruptions and anything else you can imagine that might kill people or destroy vehicles.  All of these are contained in this one movie.  Oh, and did I mention the crazy bug-eyed guy who claims that the end of the world is nigh, and turns out to be right?  How about the privileged billionaire foreign businessman who shockingly also happens to be evil, who thinks he has bought his way out of the tragedy but gets his comeuppance at the end?  The President of the United States valiantly helping his fellow citizens, and sacrificing himself in the process?  The daring suicidal underwater dive to fix a jammed piece of equipment which is threatening the lives of thousands?  It’s all here.

The funny thing is, even as bad as this movie was, it was definitely entertaining, though I certainly won’t be rushing to see it again.  I laughed a LOT more here than I did in The Hangover (it pains my heart to see the number of critics’ 2009 top 10 lists on which that film appears), although I must admit that a good deal of the entertainment factor for me came from my friend having to suffer through it as well – he doesn’t dismiss this type of waste of time as easily as I do.  He had been considering seeing a second film later that evening, but then didn’t want to ruin his contemplation of 2012 by seeing something that was potentially good.

And there was plenty here to think about as well.  In the unfolding worldwide disaster scenario, people are getting hung up on the lives of individuals when it’s known that millions or billions have already died, which seems counterintuitive, but I realized that in the midst of such a massive disaster, individual hope and the possibility to help whoever you can help would be the only thing you have at that time.  It’s also intriguing to realize that even though huge numbers of people would die immediately, plenty would survive for at least a while, scattered in oceans but with some reaching land, and they might be able to pull themselves back up again.  John Cusack is the hero in the film, trying to do right by his daughter and his ex-wife, and eventually seeing eye to eye with her new husband (before he is crushed to death in a giant set of gears, leaving the original family to reunite at the “end” of the crisis).  Chiwetel Ejiofor carries the “good guy” torch in the world of the government authorities, advocating the scientific point of view to the politicians, primarily Oliver Platt’s unsympathetic but not quite evil White House Chief of Staff.  Mind you, it’s entirely clear right from the start who is going to live and who is going to die in this disaster, so the only surprise is just how brutal any particular death will be.

I could ask a whole bunch of technical “Are you kidding me?” questions, but it would be pointless.  Science is just a convenient plot device here, perverted and distorted to suit the particular action set piece of the moment, be it fiery, watery, or rocky.  There are WAY too many situations in which the main characters are just barely outrunning explosions or earthquakes or volcanoes or expanding crevasses, or planes barely taking off or barely staying aloft or outrunning smoke or volcanoes – I estimate that this basic scenario played out 20 times or more in this 2.5-hour movie.  Add to this Cusack basically phoning in his performance, and there’s not a lot of charisma to tie everything together and make us care about any of it.  To give credit where credit is due, though, Danny Glover did turn in a nicely understated performance as the US President.

I didn’t necessarily want to write a long review here, but there was a lot to say.  To summarize, though, the thing I had the most trouble with in this film was that throughout the runtime, I was preoccupied with what could possibly be presented as the obligatory “happy” ending to this film.  Billions of people died, along with much of the other flora and fauna on the earth.  Some thousands of people survived, and we were led to believe that they could resettle on land after a while.  But after such a massive geological event, wouldn’t there still be turmoil (volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis) all over the earth’s crust for hundreds or perhaps many thousands of years to come?  Gee, I guess a happy family reunited and safe together on a boat makes it all OK.

Makes Armageddon seem plausible and intelligent.

November 7, 2009:  Live Free or Die Hard

I have been a Die Hard fan for a fairly long time, integrating the films into the family Christmas routine as far back as the early 1990s.  With this franchise, Bruce Willis handily established himself as a capable action star with the indelible character of John McClane, the profane but fiercely intelligent and resourceful everyman cop who finds himself in rough situations where he’s the only one capable of saving the day.  From a taut and relatively small-scale adventure in the first film in 1988, the franchise devolved into cartoonish but fun buffoonery for the second film in 1990 and then tightened up to a fascinatingly antiseptic and spare “action puzzle” for the third film in 1995.  Now, over a decade later, we revisit McClane in a modern action story, and it seems like a fitting place to pick up on his current life.

In a nice little integration of previously seen characters, we have McClane’s daughter (portrayed as a cute youngster in the first film as she answered the telephone and talked to her father) all grown up now and tied up in the plot of the film.  McClane’s always-strained relationship with his wife has now permanently dissolved and he seems resigned to his sworn duty as a police detective saving the world in his little way.  When a psychopath unleashes a plot to shut down computer and utility systems across the eastern US, guess who is the only one who can save the day?

This was my first time seeing Live Free or Die Hard since I had seen it when it first came out a couple of summers ago.  The theatrical version was a horribly butchered PG-13-rated atrocity, with obvious dubbing and hacked up scenes of gory gunplay distracting from an implausible but otherwise fun couple of hours of action and destruction.  This unrated home video version is much more in line with what I was expecting, if not quite so gleefully profane as the first three solidly R-rated pictures (in the third film, we even have Samuel L. Jackson joining up with Bruce Willis for much of the action – the f-words numbered in the hundreds as you might have expected).  I found the story in Live Free or Die Hard to be faster-paced on this second viewing, with some of the least believable plot elements not seeming to drag as much as the first time around.  The basic story is sound, with computer systems being relatively easy to infiltrate remotely but big utilities kept offline and requiring physical attacks in order to shut them down.  A startling amount of the computer technology stuff really pushes towards fantasy, though, with any imaginable data at the fingertips of the bad guys within seconds and often in full 3D models, with no consideration given to data transfer times or other such mundane details.  Kevin Smith’s cameo as an over-the-top super-geek is as painful to watch as any other time he speaks on-screen.  But hey, if you throw in a sequence with a military plane chasing a semi-trailer rig on a highway interchange, and another one of a police car flying into a helicopter, I’m happy.

This seems a fair addition to the Die Hard franchise in the way that the new Rambo and Indiana Jones films also updated their characters’ universes with a modern sensibility.  Recommended for fans of the series, but if you’re looking for a plain old action film, you can probably find something that makes a lot more sense.

Another late franchise extension does well.