Well I Wouldn't Want to Live There

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Three and One Half Stars

Much like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy earlier this decade, James Cameron has created with “Avatar” a world that I would like to experience first hand.  I want to stand on the road-like branches of these mountainous trees.  I want to see the moist glossy fauna of the forest floor illuminate under my bare feet and swim in the stainless crystal springs.  I want to emerge from the cover of the canopy and the heavy fog and see the Hallelujah Mountains floating in the sky above me.  More than anything else in “Avatar”, the lush and ethereally beautiful planet of Pandora is Cameron’s crowning achievement.

The Prodigal Son Defamed

Brothers

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Three Stars

Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers” comes out focused and prepared. It takes a strong warm-up lap, properly does its stretching and calisthenics, steps up to the blocks, and hits the showers. It is an excellent first two-thirds of a film.

Sheridan based this film of postwar trauma on a Danish film of the same name, in which a prodigal son is sent to war while his delinquent brother is saved from the battlefield by his own delinquency. Toby Maguire plays the prodigal son, Capt. Sam Cahill, in an intensely over-the-top performance. He has a wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two daughters, and they are, of course, quite happy.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the delinquent brother, Tommy, who houses a quaint shyness that makes it hard to picture him as someone who just got out of prison for armed robbery. The two men share a relationship that is respectful but under duress. Expectations, both failed and surpassed, have formed a wall between them, and their father (Sam Shepard) has laid the mortar.

Of the general plot, I will not go into extreme detail. The whole of the story is explained in the trailers, and if you’re like me, you felt like the trailer had only revealed the establishing sequences of the film.

Sam goes to war and is presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Grace is distraught, and Tommy, fresh out of prison, eases into her and her daughters’ lives as a surrogate father.

But Sam emerges alive and returns to his family, strung out, traumatized and paranoid. He senses a relationship between his wife and his brother and punishes himself for a life-changing decision he made while imprisoned in Afghanistan by allowing his paranoia to snowball into violence.

“Brothers” is, in many ways, a story that Michael Cimino told with “The Deer Hunter” in 1978, which was a far superior film. Both films deal with the psychological and emotional losses that soldiers face when returning from war.

Cimino’s film was more about the soldiers, though, and the emptiness that they felt at home after returning from Vietnam. “Brothers” assumes the reverse perspective of Grace and Tommy and how they attempt to recreate a family that was destroyed overseas.

Grace goes through the motions of the loving marriage she had with Sam before he left, but he is a different man now and their love seems one-sided. Grace is clinging to an idea more than a person, and her daughters respond to the new-found distance in their father with a growing fondness for their uncle Tommy.

Sheridan observes this family drama with great detail. The project is a bit too glossy to become completely involving, but the performances, particularly Maguire’s manic, bug-eyed intensity and Gyllenhaal’s gruff shy-guy warmth, bring gravity to the film and its themes.

Most importantly, though, the film ends far too soon, cutting itself off when it is only beginning to break into something genuine. Sheridan seems afraid to make the leap. He cuts his emotional ark short by mistaking the firing of a gun for the climax of the film, and tidies up to such an extent that he jeopardizes the very commentary he was threatening to make.

“Brothers” is a good film. Make no mistake. If I seem harsh it is because it got off a station too soon and, in so doing, amplified many of its other shortcomings. Consider simply that if it were not a good film, I would certainly not be complaining that it ended sooner rather than later. “The Deer Hunter” was more than three hours long.

Rollan Schott

December 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Are You Cussin' with Me?

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by Wes Anderson

Three and One Half Stars

There is a moment late in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” when Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Company pause to recognize a moment of serene beauty, a majestic(ish) wolf on an elevated stone before the backdrop of snowcapped mountains. 

It seems like an ambiguous moment, or at least it seems like it’s meant to be ambiguous.  What’s strange is that it isn’t.  It’s a flat moment, relatively void of meaning.  I was frustrated with this at first, but quickly realized that this moment isn’t about mysterious themes or hidden meanings.  It’s a send-up of those same moments in other films.

Understanding this conceit is central to appreciating “Fantastic Mr. Fox” which relies on flat compositions and deliberate actions to achieve a dry and wildly audacious style of humor that Anderson has made all his own.

He occupies his films with characters who are either bored stiff with the roles they are meant to play or relish them with the enthusiastic thrill of classical theater.  Consider the way two relatively similar characters inhabit this world. 

Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), a wildly talented white fox with speed, brains, and a budding romance, trudges through the film with relative disinterest.  It’s not that he’s bitter, he’s just, I don’t know, indifferent?

Mr. Fox, on the other hand, has the same athleticism and smarts, and a loving and devoted wife, and he walks upright and speaks in an assertive matter-of-fact enthusiasm that is most certainly on the smug side.  His suave confidence lends the film much of its wit.

Mr. Fox, having sworn off chicken thievery at the request of his wife, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), moves his wife and son Ash (Jason Schwartzmann) out of their lowly hole-in-the-ground hole in the ground and into a lavish tree after assuming an occupation as a newspaper journalist (who nobody reads).

But his identity cannot be denied.  He is a fox, after all, and foxes steal chickens.  Mr. Fox plots to rob the three heavyweight famers nearby, Boggis and Bunce and Bean.  He succeeds, of course, and the three outraged farmers plot to steal his hide in return.

Fox and his family burrow deep beneath their tree, meeting up with other members of the local animal population.  Their misfortune is held against Mr. Fox, who seems unfazed, and tensions mount as the farmers try first to blow them out then to starve them out then to wash them out then…

Much of the humor in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” comes from moments outside the narrative, or at least moments that exist within the narrative that are not well-suited to its continuity.  I can think of no better example than the poor bloke playing his banjo and improvising a song.  The song itself is funny, but the response it garners is one of the biggest laughs of the year.

And what a deliberate movie this is.  When the camera races in on a face you can almost hear Anderson somewhere off screen shouting “Aaand CLOSEUP!” The characters all say their lines matter-of-factly, their expressions artificial but strangely human.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to slip the jokes past us.

But that moment with the wolf is still haunting me.  It is a funny moment, over the top and obvious in its intentions, so what’s with the staying power?  The secret to the film can be found here.  That secret may well be that there is no secret at all, that the movie is what it is and should not shy away from its clichés, a theme that digs deeper than it seems.


Rollan Schott
December 2, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

A Vampire, a Werewolf, and an Antifeminist. What's not to love?

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Directed by Chris Weitz

One and One Half Stars

“The Twilight Saga: New Moon” is composed entirely of attractive people making voluptuous expressions, sometimes at one another, usually at the corners of the screen.  The film is nothing more than a visual companion, a template of pretty faces that prepubescent teens can gawk at while they recall Stephanie Meyer’s popular novel in their minds.  It is a single note held for two hours, littered with thoroughly irrational characters occupying a dimwitted story.  But then again, the faces are pretty, the expressions voluptuous.

I guess that’s all that director Chris Weitz really intended.  Most of the people who see this movie will already know its secrets, which makes it more of an exhibition for the bare chests of its toned male leads.  Kristin Stewart, on the other hand, hardly ever even wears short sleeves.  This is a tale of chastity after all.

“New Moon” picks up more or less where last year’s “Twilight” left off.  Bella (Stewart) has just turned 18 and displays her innate knack for turning even the most modest of joys into cause for sorrow.  With another year under her belt, she is reminded of the simple fact that she is aging, a curse that her pale skinned hubby Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) could fix with a little nip on the neck.

But alas, after an unfortunate incident at the Cullen family mansion, Edward decides, in the film’s only application of legitimate rationality, that Bella’s obsession with becoming a member of the elite undead is call for concern.  The Cullens pack up and leave town and Bella is left, well, about as despondent as she seemed before.

Bella finds some arbitrary solace in the suspiciously buff Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), but is haunted by images of her beloved Eddy, usually advising her not to choose the stupidest option available at present (Don’t get on the bike with the potential rapist, Bella).  Bella works out all by herself that making stupid decisions will summon this image of Eddy telling her not to make stupid decisions, so she goes into adrenaline-junky mode, fixing up a pair of bikes with Jacob, introducing hers to a rock, and then literally jumping off a cliff.

All of this is a prelude to the film’s primary revelation.  I don’t feel as though I’m spoiling it for anybody when I say that Jacob is a werewolf, running with a gang of other werewolves who do a lot of running about topless in the rain until the story demands that they assume more animal like characteristics.

From here there’s some globetrotting, mind reading, and a lot more brooding.  Bella and Eddy’s love for one another is exemplified in moments of tender dialog in which they talk about how much they love one another.  There’s no real investigation of the couple’s feelings.  They love each other, now shut up.  Finally, after two hours and in true franchise form, “New Moon” ham-handedly sets up for the sequel.  Tune in next year to see if Bella and Edward will continue to be miserably in love together.

Why this story is popular with women I will never know.  Surely in an age of liberated, working, and independent women, they’re not sympathizing with Bella?   Here is an eighteen year old girl who is more than willing to sacrifice her education, her devoted and loving father, and even her soul so that she can be with her high school sweetheart.  Is this what you ladies find romantic?  Bella needs a therapist, not a husband.

If “New Moon” sends a damaging message about women’s place in society (and it does), it’s because it is written by a woman who doesn’t seem to understand what that place is.  Weitz does what he can with the material, but he’s too subservient to Meyer’s naivety to bring any substance to it.  The project is undone by its obsessive loyalty, which is strangely appropriate.

Rollan Schott

November 23, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

But He Didn't Do Anything!

A Serious Man

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Four Stars

That poor Larry Gopnick.  His wife is leaving him for his best friend.  His daughter is stealing money from him to pay for a nose job.  His son is stealing money from his daughter to pay for weed and listening to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school.  His leach of a brother spends hours in the bathroom draining a cyst.

One of his students may have bribed him to improve a grade on an exam.  The student’s father may be suing him for accepting a bribe.  Someone is writing libelous letters to the college in an effort to foil his bid for tenure.  On top of bills from his divorce lawyer and his brother’s doctor, he’s been slapped with a $400 fee from the Columbia Record Club, of which he is not a member.  He finds some semblance of solace in his beautiful neighbor, but she’s definitely the type of woman he would avoid if he knows what’s best for him.  God only knows how those X-rays will come back. 

Why is all of this happening?  Why poor Larry?  Why now, and why all at once?  Is it something he did?  Karma perhaps?  Could it be because one of his ancestors allowed a dybbuck (A dead man’s lost soul) into his home?  Could it be that someone upstairs just has it in for him?  He keeps saying “I didn’t do anything,” which may or may not be the answer to all of his problems.

The Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man”, a reenactment of the book of Job set in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Minneapolis, is about a man’s painful search for answers that aren’t there, about how we try to prove our worth to fate rather than to ourselves.  It won’t likely play at any nearby theaters, but I hope you take the time to seek it out.  It is a tough pill to swallow, but it is also one of the year’s very best films.

Rollan Schott

November 20, 2009

Originally Featured in the Nelson Gazette

The Mayans Predict a World Undone by Ambitious Cliches

2012

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Two and One Half Stars

Roland Emmerich, it seems, exists as a filmmaker for the sole purpose of destroying the planet more authoritatively than the last time Roland Emmerich destroyed the planet.  His list of credits, in order (some titles excluded), include “Independence Day,” “Godzilla,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” Look at these titles and you can see how he has steadily upped the ante. Emmerich lays pretty thorough waste to the planet in his latest, “2012,” which I suspect will become some sort of opus for end-of-the-world epics.

Some peculiar shift in the sun’s rays is his latest justification for worldwide pandemonium, transforming our sunlight essentially into microwaves that have cooked out planet from the inside out. And now, with the earth’s mantle melted and unstable, the tectonic plates twist, turn and tango into oblivion, and we humans are not strapped in for the ride.  With this premise, Emmerich obliges himself to turn cities upside down, flood them, blow them up and scramble them around until China is a puddle jumper’s hop from Hawaii.

These events are primarily witnessed through the eyes of novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who pieces together the pending disaster during an evening long vacation with his estranged son and daughter to Yellowstone National Park, when he stumbles across the U.S. government’s head geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a hippie conspiracy connoisseur (Woody Harrelson) stumbles into him.

The government has long been aware, we learn, and have been assassinating anyone who threatens to release the information in an effort to avoid widespread panic. Soon rumors are surfacing of spaceships or something of the like being built to save a small, wealthy sliver of the human race.  Jackson pieces it together pretty quickly. No one else has a clue.

From here Jackson and his estranged family join a typecast Russian bureaucrat who has tickets for him and his children to enter these survival pods, whatever they may be, and set off around the world to China, so that we might see that disaster has not confined itself this time to the United States alone.

As is usually the case in effects epics, the human story of “2012” is weak, populated only by stereotypes in place to shout expository lines and provide emotional cues. That the human drama is not the focal point of movies like this does not make this entirely forgivable.

Emmerich’s special effects are exciting and ambitious, but suffer from that artificial big budget gleam that prevents them from being particularly realistic and involving.

This brings me to “2012’s” biggest problems. Special effects, no matter how breathtaking, cannot carry a film for 158 minutes. A film that cannot invest its audience in its characters cannot convince them to care. After 2 1/2 hours of earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves, none of the previously mentioned phenomena can be particularly engaging if we have no stake in them.

“2012” is inspired by predictions from countless ancient civilizations who predicted that our world would come to an end on or around Dec. 21, 2012. Most notable of these were the Mayans, whose astronomical studies led them to believe that one of the many stars they had tracked would eventually collide with earth.  We are close enough now, as NASA informs us, that if this were actually the case, we would be able to see this celestial body with the naked eye.

“2012” takes a different approach, one that deals not with “When Worlds Collide” sensibilities, but with the “When Earth Strikes Back” mentality that M. Night Shyamalan explored a couple years ago in “The Happening” and that Emmerich himself had already explored in “The Day After Tomorrow.”

I’m not sure the earth can be more thoroughly destroyed than it is here, which provides it with a sort of audacious charm that many people will probably enjoy. And for all the casualties and chaos, Emmerich remembers that what is really interesting about this material to us Americans is not how the human race will survive, but rather whether or not Jackson and his estranged wife Kate will get together again.

Rollan Schott

November 17, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

For Those of You Who Thought Health Care Reform Was a Waste of Taxpayers' Money...

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov

Three Stars

Albert Stubblebon III makes an interesting point. In the British documentary “The Crazy Rulers of the World” that inspired “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, he tells us, “You know the electron, or the atom, is mostly made up of space,” he said.  “My space is made up of atoms.  The wall’s space is made up of atoms.  All you got to do is merge the spaces.”  In other words, if you can realign your atomic structure, you can pass through the empty space of the atoms in the wall.  You’ll know when you’ve figured it out, I think.  Your clothes will fall to the floor.

Stubblebon was a U.S. Military sergeant in 1983.  He was a part of Project Jedi, a small and confidential branch of the military who were trying to find ways to walk through walls, bend spoons, and intercept the thoughts of others.  That this is true is why “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is funny.  Director Gant Heslov treats the film mostly as a history lesson.  No need to go out of your way to make this seem absurd.

There are essentially two stories at work.  One is a history of the early years of Project Jedi, now the New Earth Army, how it was formed by a zenned out general (Jeff Bridges) and how it operated within and outside the tapestry of the military, as documented by a present-day journalist, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) who travels to Kuwait to pick up some story, any story, on the outskirts of the war.

He meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the New Earth Army, who is venturing into Iraq after sensing telepathically that he should.  That the two should meet can be accredited only to fate.  Anyone who can sense which way to turn at a fork in the road probably knows fate when they see it.

It is through Lyn that the flashbacks are constructed.  He was the most promising soldier in the New Earth Army, the only one who once killed a goat just by staring at it.  He recalls the Army’s rise and fall, how and why it was formed, how it was paid for, how it was received, how it was misused and how it was destroyed.  All the while, Lyn and Bob are travelling deeper into the war looking for, well they don’t know what they’re looking for, but Lyn will know it when it comes.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is an intermittently funny movie, occasionally rising to the level of hilarity.  Every major player in the film is given a memorable one-liner and director Heslov takes the right approach to the material.  By looking at the paranormal the way the members of the New Earth Army did, as a reality, there is a kind of comic absurdity bubbling beneath the skin of the narrative.

But the film also spends far too much time waiting for itself, and its pacing issues reach their peak with its all too neatly packaged climax that wouldn’t have felt like one had it not loudly announced its arrival.

“More of this is true than you might believe”, reads the title card at the beginning of the film.  Well, I believe that there are people in this country who find such madness plausible, and I believe that they have occasionally risen to stature of high office in our government.  The United States military funded research in the field of paranormal weaponry.  I think that title should have read, “More of this is true than you’d probably be comfortable with”.

Rollan Schott

November 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan