Half-Assed Movie Reviews

January 24, 2011:  Gasland

I watched Gasland as a pre-emptive Oscar pick, since it was on the short-list for the Best Documentary nominations, and the subject matter was of interest.  A film about the widespread dangers of natural gas drilling in the US, the film is startling and I hope that its nomination will provide the exposure it deserves.

It really is staggering what lengths mankind will go to in order to maintain the standard of living to which we’ve collectively become accustomed, regardless of which individuals will be adversely affected by these actions.  Natural gas is a very popular heating and cooking fuel in North America, and while it’s relatively easy to transport through pipelines over long distances, it’s not particularly easy to move across oceans.  This means that the search for gas within the US and Canada continues endlessly, and as it turns out there are huge amounts trapped in shale formations in large areas of the US.  Our accidental documentarian, Josh Fox from Pennsylvania, received an unsolicited offer of $100,000 for drilling rights on his land and, thinking that this offer was too good to be true, did some poking around locally and eventually farther west and discovered the hidden horror of what gas drilling does to the livability of local areas.

This isn’t just the usual “contaminated water” deal where people’s water is a bit brown and dirty but they filter it and all is OK.  Not only are people’s water supplies contaminated with remnants of the nearly 600 chemicals used in drilling, but there is actually a significant amount of natural gas mixed in, such that when people turn on their taps and hold a lighter to the stream of water, it will often catch fire.  That makes for some pretty iconic and disturbing imagery, doesn’t it?

When Fox pokes deeper into the situation, he finds these horror stories from his local neighbours, including several cases where the gas drilling companies provide weekly refills of potable water tanks since the well water is beyond being usable.  Fox heads out west and finds the exact same situation – setting fire to water coming out of faucets, water replacement, chemicals being pumped into the earth – and wonders why this is permitted.  It turns out that laws passed during the Bush administration permit this natural gas drilling to be exempt from the clean air act and the clean water act, for no discernible reason.  People beg him to take samples of their water and have it tested, which he does, and finds all manner of toxic chemicals in the brew.  Eventually we’re taken to a congressional hearing about the issue, in which the usual evasive arguments are trotted out, including the lack of irrefutable proof that the drilling is causing the problem, the matter-of-fact listing of 596 chemicals in the “water” used for fracturing the shale rock layers, and industry lobbyists rallying furiously against the most simple legislation aimed at increasing the safety and accountability rules which they say are already in place anyway.  Money buys power, and power buys the right to do whatever you want as a company and as an industry in the US, and so it continues.

Fox’s amateur roots are visible at certain points in the documentary, which reduce the impact a bit.  A sequence where he is firing a gun to illustrate comparable danger to the contaminated water is a bit over the top with the theatrics, but I suppose that’s OK since he’s an everyman who got caught up in this mess.  The repeated pronunciation of the chemical toluene as “tolulene” is less forgivable, since basic research and/or screening of the film for experts should have caught this.  But an interview with a gas drilling company representative, while appropriately awkward, doesn’t come through as the slam-dunk that it should be, and that’s indicative of an inexperienced documentary filmmaker.  Still, this is a story which deserves to be told, and I’m glad it’s coming to light.

Another stunning account of today’s evils.

January 21, 2011:  TRON: Legacy

I don’t know what made anyone decide that now was the time for a sequel to TRON, but it’s actually a fitting point in history to revisit the concepts explored by the original film.  In the early 1980s society was struggling with the question of what great worlds could be opened up by computers and their capabilities, and now we’ve come to a point where the influence of computers on our world, often figuratively sucking us away from reality and into a manufactured universe in the way that the original TRON did literally, is itself being questioned and many are turning back to humanity for fulfillment while others are irretrievably lost in technology, as happens in this sequel.  TRON: Legacy could have been an incisive examination of this phenomenon and how far wrong things have gone, but instead it’s just a cookie-cutter technology-based action flick with good guys and bad guys and not much in between other than special effects.

The central story concerns Jeff Bridges’ character of Kevin Flynn and his realization that the pursuit of perfection is fruitless and instead we should rejoice in the imperfection we see around us every day.  It has taken the equivalent of centuries of meditation, lost inside the computer world, for him to come to this conclusion.  Now everything in his manufactured world is about to be blown apart as his son comes in to find and retrieve him, and is forced through a series of challenges not unlike what Flynn suffered back in 1982.  It’s my feeling that this is really just an excuse for some action set-piece video game chases, but I guess it had to go there.

The music in this film, with a Terminator-esque 1980s synthesizer feel to it, is great and helps to hold the movie together and remind us of its origin.  However, I found that the visuals were not as impressive as I had hoped they would be.  Missing are the bold and striking colours of the first film, and now most characters are in dark uniforms with coloured accents.  Is this a deliberate stylistic choice because of the dystopia we witness here compared with the utopian computer world of the first film, or is it just that the current 3D technology makes everything so dim that any bold futuristic vision can’t help but appear dark and muddy?  I saw this 3D presentation in the theatre, and noted critic Roger Ebert laments the obsession with the current technology because the polarized filtering glasses end up effectively halving the brightness of any given film, and I have definitely noticed this myself.  TRON: Legacy makes the wise decision to incorporate the third dimension in order to add depth and richness rather than to jam things into our eyeballs, but there’s so much darkness in this world that it’s hard to distinguish anything.

Stylistic and technological choices aside, however, I couldn’t get past TRON: Legacy being merely a hokey and predictable story, complete with a villain clinging desperately to a precipice at the climax before facing his doom, as the good guys escaped back to the real world, wizened by their encounter with the reality of a perfection-obsessed computer program gone rogue.  Come to think of it, everyone in this film is clearly “good” or “bad”, and it seems to me that the films which I praise the most highly tend to acknowledge both sides of each character.  I’m certainly not saying that the earlier TRON film captured my heart – not by a long shot – but TRON: Legacy fails to even top the original.

Sci-fi concept worth revisiting, but fails.

January 13, 2011:  True Grit (1969)

Prior to seeing the new Coen brothers interpretation of True Grit, I wanted to watch this 1969 John Wayne version of the story.  It was originally adapted from a novel, but I’m not yet at the point where I am prepared to devote the time to reading all novels before watching the adaptations.  The original True Grit film is a strange mix of the old-school Hollywood western and the emerging sensibilities, and it didn’t really gel for me on this initial viewing.

The story is of a young woman in the 1880s whose father is killed.  The murderer is known, and she goes to town intending to track him down.  She ends up convincing rough-and-tumble federal marshal Rooster Cogburn to go with her into native territory and find this killer and bring him to justice.  It’s a pretty standard story, western-wise, with the usual cast of supporting characters.

The big story here is that this is the film which won John Wayne his Best Actor Oscar.  Wayne was a veteran of western films going back several decades, though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single one of them, and instead I know him best through the exaggerated impressions of him that I see comedians do from time to time.  This has to be one of the all-time most obviously political wins in Oscar history, with the Duke being very well known as the most wooden actor around but getting to that certain age where the academy needs to give its acknowledgement of a significant career.  John Wayne in True Grit speaks in his usual drawl, walks half-sideways just like when Robin Williams imitates him, and does the most ridiculous exaggerated double-takes.  Now, maybe this is brilliant acting since the character is drunk all the time and may just be dazed and confused, but is it really a better performance than the breakout turns by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy in the same year, both also nominated?  There’s no doubt that John Wayne is a physically imposing man and looks the part of the tough-as-nails and morally flexible federal marshal, but it isn’t nuanced acting letting me know that Rooster Cogburn is surprisingly warm-hearted despite his reputation, and that he has his playful moments as well as his scandalous ones.

Where True Grit has more significance for me, as most movies do, is how it fits into film history.  The late 1960s were a time of great change for the Hollywood western, from the simple old stories of the hero cowboy saving someone or something from bad people, to the aging cowboy questioning the meaning and purpose of his life and the way he has lived it.  A popular “modern” example of the earlier type is The Magnificent Seven (1960), and there are countless hundreds or even thousands of less ambitious and lower-budget titles which filled the matinee shows from the 1930s through the 1950s.  Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), on the other hand, deal with more complex stories which acknowledge the chaos and desperation which must have been much more common in those times, and the feelings and thoughts of the cowboys are the focus, rather than the plot.  True Grit falls somewhere in between, with a classic storyline and treatment, but with hints at the inner depths of the enigmatic Rooster Cogburn.  Director Henry Hathaway, while most definitely a stranger to me, is certainly no stranger to those westerns of decades gone by, but then neither are Leone (of the Clint Eastwood “man with no name” trilogy) or Peckinpah (the more traditional Ride the High Country from 1962, as well as TV westerns).  I suspect that Hathaway was just a bit too tied to the old ways as he tried to update his style.  Another fascinating parallel is this crossroads in the career trajectory of Dennis Hopper.  He appears in True Grit as a young thug who is milked for information by Cogburn – a kid who is hurt and scared.  Hopper came at that point from a background of acting work in TV westerns.  However, in the same year as True Grit, he directed and was even nominated for an Oscar for writing a little movie called Easy Rider, which came to define a whole change in direction in American filmmaking, effectively cementing the demise of the classic, almost innocent tone of films up to that point, of which the simplistic westerns were a major category.  Hopper’s impact on cinema history is often vastly underestimated, and True Grit is effectively one side of the looking glass which in 1969 happened to reflect both sides of him, and of Hollywood, really, for the last time.

True Grit gives us great cinematography by Lucien Ballard and great music by Elmer Bernstein, but a story and performances which really remind me too much of stagey old Hollywood westerns.  This is not ultimately a great film as far as I can see.

Historically significant but conflicted classic film.

P.S.  I saw the 2010 remake of True Grit after drafting this review but prior to posting it, and I think it helped me to put this film into better perspective.  To remain true to my initial impression I’ve left the draft largely untouched, and will explore the comparison in my review of the remake.

P.P.S.  Circumstances caused me to watch this 1969 original version of True Grit a second time prior to posting this review, and it went up substantially in my estimation upon a second viewing.  Again, the comparison will be explored more in my review of the remake.

January 12, 2011:  Exit Through the Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a quirky documentary about the evolution of street art (sometimes seen as graffiti) over the past decade or so, primarily in Los Angeles.  It has received good reviews on the festival circuit and is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Feature category, but I did not find myself terribly impressed.

Directed by “Banksy”, himself a secretive street artist, the film covers the strange story of Thierry Guetta, a shopkeeper who obsessively videotapes everything he sees and who found himself associated with street artists, documenting their work endlessly for years under the guise of creating a documentary film.  When he finally puts together a terribly scattered film from his footage, Banksy steps in, having become a friend of Thierry’s, and completes a real documentary film which finishes with Thierry’s graduation to becoming a street artist himself, transitioning to a successful gallery opening.

The story of the street art culture is fascinating, with strangely-named characters playing a dangerous and destructive game of one-upmanship as they try to produce ever more dramatic pieces of art in the streetscape.  Thierry, however, is annoying from start to finish, and it’s hard to understand why anyone put up with him for so long.  This becomes all the more galling when Thierry, with the support of Banksy, becomes a famous and wealthy artist from producing what is widely held to be mediocre work.  The coda to the film brings some satisfaction, as Banksy declares that it was probably a mistake to get mixed up with Thierry, and he probably won’t continue to work with him.  There’s genuine emotion here, mostly negative, yet I get the sense that everyone involved is at least happy that their occupation is receiving such publicity.  However, this is not a particularly pleasant or inspiring film to watch.

Interesting story of some annoying people.

January 10, 2011:  Barney’s Version

My wife and I read Mordecai Richler’s book Barney’s Version this past fall, so she and I have been looking forward to seeing the film.  While the tone of the film didn’t match the book in the way I was expecting, I think it did manage to capture the essence of the character of Barney Panofsky, as he interacts with the people who inhabit his world.

And make no mistake about it, this is Barney’s world.  His father (Dustin Hoffman), his friends, his kids, and most of all his three wives, are real people with real desires and for the most part he understands this but ultimately, in Barney’s mind, it’s all there for him.  Paul Giamatti gets to bring his usual trademarks of self-deprecating humour and graceless loafing, but here he also infuses it with an innate sense that he’s right and that the world really is better with him in it, which happens to be decidedly against type for Giamatti and a delight to watch.  The story of Barney’s Version strikes me as being much more about who the people are than about what happens, with each of Barney’s wives making their own indelible impression on his way of facing the world, even as he goes around not realizing the impact they’ve had.  The specifics of why and how this story is being told are wisely de-emphasized in the film, as well as some of the episodes from Barney’s early adulthood, which makes for a reasonably focused film arising from a fairly long book.

I don’t have a whole lot more to say about Barney’s Version, since it defies categorization in the way that good character-based films do.  It’s absolutely a comedy, a melodrama and a mystery all at once, as is every person’s life.  I think Richler’s intent has been captured here.

Moving examination of an enigmatic guy.