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Proof

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Mark
on May 19, 2006
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Usually when a film is based on a book, the book is better. Occasionally though the movie clearly surpasses its source material; The Wizard of Oz and The Godfather are prime examples. But I can’t think of a single example of a movie based on a play that is clearly better than the original. Theatrical drama does not translate well into cinematic drama.

Proof makes a lousy movie out of what I suspect was a pretty lousy play to begin with. The story deals with the brilliant-but-unstable daughter of a recently-deceased brilliant-but-unstable math professor. The daughter has to deal with her father’s legacy, her father’s worshipful student, and her annoying sister. We have to deal with endless, repetitive speeches from all these people.

The whole film feels elaborately contrived and artificial, from the plot twists, to the dialogue, to the opaque character motivations. Nobody behaves in a realistically human manner. And although the film revolves around a mathematical proof, we never have any idea what it is or why it’s so important. The characters here are so boring that you really do find yourself wishing they’d talk more about math.

The actors are all talented and doing everything they can with such material. Jake Gyllenhaal seems more impressive every time you see him on screen; he totally inhabits every character he plays. Anthony Hopkins couldn’t give a bad performance if he tried. Gwyneth Paltrow is even able to project the emotional urgency of her character through the fog of plot contrivance and stilted dialogue, but we never for one second buy her as a mathematical genius.

The movie feels very stagy and claustrophobic. Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) never finds a way of getting beyond the theatrical roots of the material. It’s very hard for a movie to create the urgent intimacy that comes naturally to live theater. Proof demonstrates that conclusively.

Proof (2005)
Grade: C-

Miracle

Published
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Mark
on May 17, 2006
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In 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviets and won the gold medal. I vaguely remember the big fuss about this at the time, but in 1980 The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II, and The Blue Lagoon (my second-ever R rated film!) each claimed a great deal more of my attention.

Miracle is a standard docudrama recounting the training and victory of that gold medal team. The film hits all the usual sports movie clichés hard and delivers just exactly what it promises. The most interesting part of the film is how the coach, Herb Brooks as played by Kurt Russell, plays head games with his team. He manipulates their responses with Machiavellian panache, which makes him a darker and more interesting character than the film ever seems willing to acknowledge. Russell brings his usual solid craftsmanship to the role and has some fine moments, but he can’t really do much with such an underwritten character.

The team members are anonymous, interchangeable guys played by anonymous, interchangeable actors. Half-hearted attempts to individualize them never amount to much. One is grieving the loss of his mother, one is upset with a team mate about . . . something, one refuses to take a psychological test (or is that the same guy with the dead mother?). Anyway, they all look and act so much alike that you begin to wonder if this is a movie about clones.

There’s a lot of hockey in this film, none of it filmed in a particularly interesting way. The final game against the Russians feels like an uncut rebroadcast of the original game. And the thrill of victory doesn’t hit home the way it should because we’re not given compelling reasons to care. The game is framed more politically than personally, an antidote to the nation’s Carter malaise rather than a personal victory for the coach or the team. We’re happy that they won, and that the game is finally over, but we don’t get a sense of why it matters personally.

Twenty six years later, I still can’t see what all the fuss is about.

Miracle (2004)
Grade: C+

Jarhead

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Mark
on May 9, 2006
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Jarhead is a superbly well-made mediocre film. It’s a frustrating example of the whole being less than the sum of the parts.

The parts are all very fine indeed. The film looks spectacular. The skillful, disciplined cinematography, by Coen brothers favorite Roger Deakins, is impressively expressive without being showy (unlike, say, the shallow pyrotechnics of Three Kings). It’s the first major post-Saving Private Ryan war film not to feel totally beholden to that masterpiece’s visual style, largely — no doubt — because Jarhead avoids any big battle sequences.

The editing displays Walter Murch’s typically artful grace. Scenes and shots flow together with quiet precision. The rhythms of pacing are finely modulated in every mood and tone from exuberant energy to quite brooding, all with equal dexterity.

The performances are uniformly fine. Jake Gyllenhaal, as Desert Storm marine Swofford, is expressive and vital and raw (not to mention buffed up as hell). Peter Sarsgaard, quite possibly the finest actor of his generation, turns in yet another quietly brilliant performance (in yet another thankless supporting role) as Swofford’s best friend Troy. Jamie Foxx inhabits Staff Sgt. Sykes with the same commitment and verve he brought to Ray or Collateral.

If you watched any individual scene on its own, you’d be sure you were seeing a really good movie. There are lots of precisely observed details of marine life that are funny or scary or sad. And many of the scenes have a wonderful surrealistic edge to them: marines playing football in their gas masks, dueling scorpions as a spectator sport, burning oil wells scorching the sky. There are good moments a plenty, more than in most films.

So what went wrong? Well, there’s really no story here. We get a sequence of chronological events, most of them quite interesting, but nothing that happens to the characters ultimately matters very much. The movie tries to capture the frustration of not going to war, but it just winds up being frustrating for us. It’s finally a hollow film, all texture and no substance.

Director Sam Mendes seems desperate to make a powerful anti-war film, and he clearly realizes that the very excitement of battle on screen can turn even the most rigorously anti-war polemic into an exciting experience of war. There’s an early scene where the marines watch Apocalypse Now, cheering the action on as if it were a Rambo movie. To forestall this reaction, Mendes just avoids any direct depiction of war. The soldiers never get the chance to fight and so we never get the chance to cheer them on. As a story-telling strategy this is clearly self-defeating because showing people not fighting conveys no message whatsoever about the virtues or vices of warfare.

Of course Mendes is simply adapting the memoir of the real-life Gulf War veteran Tony Swofford. But that’s no excuse for making a pointless film.

Jarhead (2005)
Grade: C+

Match Point

Published
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Mark
on May 8, 2006
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If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Match Point was the work of some promising newcomer, not the pathetic has-been that Woody Allen has become. Allen’s maddening, OCD insistence on making a new film every single year results in way too many half-baked movies that feel more like rough drafts and sketches than actual films (for an example, see any film he’s made in the past ten years–or better yet, don’t!).

Match Point is smart and sleek and sexy, a little jewel of a film that runs like clockwork. The story involves Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) a former tennis pro who falls for the wrong woman, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). I can’t for the life of me understand why Rhys Meyers isn’t already a huge star or how Johansson ever became one, but both deliver star-making performances here.

Doom seems to hover over events from the moment our two main characters meet. We know this can’t end well for them, and Allen does a fine job exploiting that tension. There’s an escalating sense of claustrophobia as Chris gets locked ever more deeply into a life of privilege that he both desperately wants and desperately wants to escape.

One of the pleasures of the film is the way it slowly and carefully develops from a delicately observed character piece into an edge-of-your-seat film noir. Most thrillers don’t have the patience to get inside the emotional lives of their characters, just as most Indie dramas don’t have the patience for anything so vulgar as plot. In combining the two, this film reveals just how much both genres are missing.

The painful emotional honesty of the film’s first half makes the Hitchcockian final act all the more riveting. We understand Chris and Nola from the inside, we know how they feel and why they do everything they do. So when the situation unravels, as we know it must, the results are excruciatingly painful for us as well as for them.

The film does have the unfortunate habit of over explaining things. Occasionally a scene will make a character or plot point in a subtle way only to be followed by a clunky piece of exposition in which somebody tells us what the movie has already artfully shown. Worse still are the interruptions for philosophical exposition. The film contains several dull speeches about the nature of luck, to make sure we know what the THEME is.

But just about everything else in the movie works beautifully, from the splendid supporting cast, to the loving depiction of London, to the opera music score. This level of craftsmanship makes the film a pleasure to watch from its slick opening tracking shot to its tantalizing, ambiguous ending.

Match Point (2005)
Grade: B+

Rent

Published
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Mark
on May 7, 2006
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The musical, like the western, is a once-popular genre now largely abandoned. But every now and then someone makes a really good musical, like Chicago, (or a really good western, like Unforgiven) and people start talking about a “revival” of the genre. Unfortunately, this typically leads to several crappy films that remind everyone of why the genre got abandoned in the first place.

Which brings us to Rent, a spectacularly crappy musical that, along with the equally spectacularly crappy Phantom of the Opera, should pretty much euthanize the movie musical for a decade or so.

Why did they let Chris Columbus direct this film? Why do they let Columbus direct anything? Why is the director of Bicentennial Man even allowed within 500 yards of a movie camera? Ever? Who knows. Columbus certainly managed to make a royal mess of this film. There’s not one iota of creativity here. Everything is shot in the dullest most obvious way possible so as not to over-stimulate, or even stimulate, the audience.

The whole thing is a drearily faithful adaptation of the Broadway original. Columbus even managed to get most of the original cast to reprise their roles for film. That sounds like a great idea, but it’s not for two reasons. First, the cast is all 10 years too old for their roles. Whatever energy the story has comes from the desperate struggles of a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make it in New York. With a bunch of thirty-somethings it just becomes pathetic and creepy. Second, the cast brings with them the ghosts of all those stage performances past, never really managing to make the roles come alive for film. It feels like an historical reenactment society: you can almost imagine what the original must have been like, and it was clearly nothing like the sorry sight unfolding before your eyes.

But even without unimaginative direction and stale casting choices, the film would still be saddled with the original musical itself. For that we have to blame the late Jonathan Larson.

In a way, Larson’s earnestly unsubtle work finds a perfect expression in Columbus’s earnestly unsubtle direction. But it’s a union of substance and style that only exacerbates the weaknesses of both. By trying to marry rock to the traditional Broadway score, Larson sadly achieved music that has neither the vibrancy and immediacy of contemporary rock nor the polish and wit of a good old-fashioned musical. The songs make blandly obvious statements about the characters in blandly obvious ways with thumping, predictable rhymes. The only decent number is “Seasons of Love”; the rest are utterly and instantly forgettable. By all accounts, Larson’s first and only musical (he died shortly after the premiere) was invigorating on stage, but then again so was Hair. Neither musical has aged well and neither translates well to the screen.

The story, such as it is, is supposed to be a modernization of La Boheme, but it never gets beyond the cuteness of its own conceit the way that, say, West Side Story does. We see characters die from AIDS instead of tuberculosis; that’s the level of “invention.” Rent is deadly serious about its live-for-today message, but earnest adolescent posturing is not art, and it’s certainly not entertainment.
Rent (2005)
Grade: D

Superman Returns trailer

Published
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Mark
on May 6, 2006
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Who’s responsible? Bryan Singer (director), Brandon Routh (Superman), Kevin Spacey (Lex Luthor), Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane)

When can we see it? June 30, 2006

What’s it about? Returning after a mysterious absence of several years, Superman finds that Lois Lane now has a son and a new boyfriend and that Lex Luthor now has new plans for world domination and superhero annihilation.

What looks good? They seem to have nailed just the right tone for the material: take it seriously but keep it fun. Kevin Spacey does more acting with a nuance of tone in his voice than most actors can do with a whole career. The effects look superb.

What looks bad? Brandon Routh seems a bit wooden in the title role. And since when is Superman’s cape made out of rubber?

Worth seeing? All signs point to “Yes.”

Worth GOING to see? It damn well better be.

Where can I see the trailer? Here

Star Wars 1.0

Published
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Mark
on May 6, 2006
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Ever since the “Special Edition” versions of the original Star Wars trilogy came out in 1997, George Lucas has sworn that he would never let the original theatrical releases of thoes films be seen again.

Now, Lucasfilm has announced that thoes vintage versions of the films will be released this September. So, once again, George Lucas is a big fat liar.

I already own five copies of the trilogy:

  1. Origianl Edition on VHS
  2. Special Edition on VHS
  3. Original Edition on LaserDisc
  4. Special Edition on LaserDisc [the only purchace I've ever made on EBay, by the way]
  5. Special Editon plus on DVD (Lucas adulterated them a bit more)

And, yes, I fully expect to pony up for yet another copy.

The thing that irks me about this is what it says about Lucas, or rather re-confirms. I always thought the no-originals policy was dumb, but at least it demonstrated some sense of principle. Lucas could and did argue that he had the right as an artist to maintain control over his movies.

Fine.

Maybe he really even believed that once, or convinced himself he believed it. But this unexplained reversal only goes to show that Lucas cares about nothing except money, as if the entire prequel trilogy weren’t a clear enough demonstration of that.

So what? Don’t most film makers care about money? Probably, but the man who directed THX-1138 and American Graffitti and the original Star Wars clearly cared about something else too. That man is dead and gone. A fat, cynical bussiness man has taken his place.

Fortunately, the unbridled avarice of that old man will permit us to see the unaltered vision of the young artist he once was. See, greed IS good.