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Review: “Prometheus”

09 Saturday Jun 2012

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“Space Oddity”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

MY 3-D SCREENING of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” was preceded by a trailer for Tim Burton’s forthcoming “Frankenweenie,” due out this Halloween.  The titles of both films openly borrow from the 1818 classic that more or less invented the mode we now know as science-fiction, that is, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.  The rebellion myth involving Prometheus was nothing short of indispensible to the nineteenth-century English Romantics.  Mary Shelley’s novel notwithstanding, husband Percy Shelley penned his own lyric drama Prometheus Unbound in 1819 while Lord Byron wrote his own short poem heroizing the Titan god, the fire-stealer who, in bringing fire to humanity, found himself eternally punished by Zeus, his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis.  “Like thee,” he wrote in 1816, “Man is in part divine,/A troubled stream from a pure source.” What obsessed the Romantics about the promethean narrative was is its faith in boundless human potential, in boundary-breaking, in playing with fire just as the gods do.  Prometheus, as our ally, stands in for the human.

Accordingly, questions of origins permeate Scott’s “Prometheus,” which is the most intelligent, visually satisfying science-fiction film since “Avatar,” and similarly interested in corporate exploitation and the meaningful ways in which spacemen rage against the machine.  Literally a machine, the excellent Michael Fassbender (“Shame”) plays a white-blooded robot named David who takes his cues for seeming human from Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.”  A close second to David’s robotic rigidity is Charlize Theron as Miss Vickers, a bloodless corporate drone working for Weyland Corp. and overseeing a trillion-dollar mission aboard the vessel named Prometheus.  The goal?  Investigate the alien remains on a deserted planet, which gradually draws the shipmates into its abyss.  The consequence?  Bloodshed, lots of it.  “Prometheus” looks in two directions at once: forward to the future world of 2090 when companies have colonized outer space and backward to the filmic past of “Alien” (1979), the first of Ridley’s Scott’s two sci-fi films – his equally influential “Blade Runner” followed three years later. “Prometheus” functions as a prequel to that first film.  Proof that we are back in the world of “Alien” are the airlock doors and padded hallways of the spaceship, the pod-like sleep chambers and, of course, the threat of a foreign body bursting through one’s abdomen.  It is hard to imagine a more terrifying scene on film this year than the self-administered C-section scene in “Prometheus” wherein an octopus-like fetus is gorily excised.

While Theron remains in the same deep freeze as her performance in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” she is offset by warmer, more human characters such as Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) and her ill-fated husband Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green).  The screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof foregrounds Dr. Shaw as a proto-Ripley heroine who demands some ethical accountability from her cruel captains of (space) industry.  After surveying the alien planet that holds the key to humanity’s own origins, he declares: “This is just another tomb.”  This is the eeriest aspect of Ripley’s masterpiece: space is a sepulcher, and with dim, brownish camerawork by Dariusz Wolski, we are plunged into a kind of puzzle.  “Prometheus” isn’t just a top-shelf work of space-horror with the power to shock, even revolt, its viewer, but the work of a director wiser than the one who directed “Alien” thirty years ago. With its milky-way moments reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and even Malick’s magnum opus, “The Tree of Life,” Scott’s film goes deeper, to the DNA level of human life and its precarious place in a mysterious and often cruel cosmos.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”

31 Saturday Dec 2011

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“Adults Behaving Badly”

Grade: “Shame” (D+/SKIP IT) and “Young Adult” (B+/SEE IT)

IT’S EITHER FEAST or famine for British artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen.  His last film, the nakedly honest “Hunger” of 2008, involved the 1981 Irish hunger strike while his latest, “Shame,” is a melodrama of excess, appropriately set in the city of too-much-ness: Manhattan.  The star of both those films, Michael Fassbender (“Inglourious Basterds,” “A Dangerous Method”) plays Brandon, a handsome professional addicted to sex.  When his sister Sissy (played by Carey Mulligan) comes to town, he’s forced to confront the error of his ways and with deadening effects.  Just as Brandon loses his stamina when canoodling with a woman he actually likes and admires, “Shame” is an impotent flick – a noodley, unfulfilling affair.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Shame” is that it’s NC-17.   My own 9:30 screening was preceded by a word of caution from a well-meaning usher, dispatched to tell us that the film is “intense” and that we may want to visit the bar upstairs before it closes at 10 PM.  “Shame” will no doubt spur the urge to drown your sorrows.  With a plot so thin it’s diaphanous, “Shame” follows Brandon from the depths of the subway, where he makes eyes at a beautiful stranger, to the towering heights of his office space where it’s unclear what Brandon does for a living, except that his hard drive has been confiscated by his employers.  His womanizing boss (James Badge Dale) gives him a mere slap on the wrist, calling his Internet history “filthy,” but happily joins him during his late-night sexcapades.

Brandon’s home life is no less troubling: sister Sissy beds his boss right before his eyes and her wrists are scarred from previous suicide attempts.  She’s also an aspiring singer, and we’re subjected to Ms. Mulligan’s painful rendition of “New York, New York” inside a lazily-lit lounge.  It’s also, aptly, her only number in a one-note film lacking any dimensionality.  Gone are such plot devices as rising action and character development.  The great irony of “Shame,” a film purportedly about sex addiction, is that it’s missing a climax.

Sex addiction remains a contentious matter.  Is it a real affliction or a cop-out for those lacking self-control?  Who else but the very beautiful could decry the problem of too much sex?  “Shame” sheds little to no light on this question.  If the red-flag of compulsion is a destructive impact on one’s professional and personal life, Brandon’s erotic preoccupations fail to qualify.  Only a puritan would treat Brandon’s love of pornography (unquenched by his onanistic trips to the men’s bathroom while at work) with such shock and revulsion.  Even more shameful is the way gay sexuality is inserted into Brandon’s downward spiral.  “Shame” suggests that Brandon has only truly hit rock bottom once he enters a red-lit gay bar, desperate for gratification, followed up by a threesome with two women.  The heavy orchestral music that accompanies Brandon’s conquests makes the whole affair laughably lugubrious.  As a Garden State native, I take particular offense to Sissy’s remark to Brandon, “We’re not bad people – We just come from a bad place,” since that place is New Jersey.  First, Snookie – now this.

        

IF IT’S CHARACTER and complexity you’re looking for –real people with real interiorities – look no further than Diablo Cody’s acerbic new comedy, “Young Adult” starring an unsmiling and spectacular Charlize Theron.  Like the protagonist of “Shame,” Theron’s character repeatedly wakes up, face-down, in her high-rise apartment.  She’s another rudderless and lonely thirtysomething for whom the thrill is gone.  She’s Mavis Gary, the high school prom queen who left her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota for Minneapolis (admiringly dubbed the “Mini-Apple” by locals).  Mercury residents think Mavis leads a glamorous life as a writer of young adult novels, but instead, she inhabits a dreary apartment littered with Diet Coke cans, pee-pads for her Pomeranian named Dolce, and a TV always tuned to the E! channel.  Upon learning that her old beau, Buddy Slade (played by a scruffy Patrick Wilson), has become a new father, she drops what she’s doing – including the one-night-stand still asleep in her bed – to win him back.  Mavis is driven by delusion, so much so that you’ll want to throttle her.  “Buddy Slade and I are meant to be together,” she insists, “and I’m here to get him back.”

A proud and aspiring homewrecker, Mavis is one of the most unforgettable female figures of the year.  Cody’s script flies in the face of every romantic comedy convention since her anti-heroine, Mavis, isn’t just flawed but ferociously unlikable: about as warm as the tundra, narcissistic, and like many of Cody’s characters, especially those in her uneven foray into horror (2009’s “Jennifer’s Body”), downright mean.  When Mavis runs into an old classmate, Matt Freehauf (a perfect Patton Oswalt) at a dive bar called Woody’s, she remembers Matt only as the “hate crime guy” who was brutally attacked by jocks – his leg and pelvis shattered by a crowbar – and replies coldly to his misfortune: “Didn’t you get to miss a lot of school for that?”

As in all of Diablo Cody’s scripts, the devil is in the details: a love of slang, socially awkward moments, and the banalities that define American life (its Pizza Huts, its Hampton Inns, its broken computer printers).  Director Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air,” “Thank You For Not Smoking”) also directed Cody’s breakout, “Juno,” and his keen sense of pacing and comic timing serves her script well, once again.  No one looks more out of place than the impossibly beautiful Theron inside a generic sports bar, but Reitman manages to go beneath that surprising surface.  When Mavis’s humanity finally emerges, at a Slade family party that she predictably turns upside down, you genuinely feel for her as some details of her and Buddy’s past come, kicking and screaming, to light.

Of all the Nineties tunes wafting through this little gem of a film (Cracker’s “Low,” 4 Non Blonde’s “What’s Up”), “It’s a Shame About Ray” by the Lemonheads may be the most telling.  It’s a shame about “Shame” but “Young Adult” is a full-grown work.