Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

I don't think I've really processed this one, yet. It's an epoch-shattering event, on the same level as the deaths of Elvis or John Lennon, but by now we've seen so many of these superstars-turned-crazy-tabloid-fodder-turned-corpses that it almost feels like it was inevitable, like this was the logical next step after Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and Anna Nicole Smith.
I mean, we all knew that Michael Jackson wasn't going to have a happy ending, right? That he wasn't going to grow old gracefully and dote upon his grandchildren, Prince Michael III and Blanket II? And I can't help but think of that scene from Three Kings, the one where the Iraqi is torturing Marky Mark and asking him, 'why did you make Michael Jackson cut up his face?'
But my point is, it still doesn't feel real. This all feels like the Hollywood simulacrum that should predictably happen in the second-rate film of Michael Jackson's life. Which means, of course, that Jackson's life had inevitably followed the Hollywood script that he knew it would.
So that's that, but it's still incumbent upon a member of my generation to pay homage to one of the most famous people who ever lived, who was possessed of an incredibly, boundary-shattering talent for music and dance. So here's my favorite music video of his, possibly the first place I ever really was acquainted with zombies, Thriller (via Youtube link).

Angels & Demons (2009)

Ron Howard seems like such a nice guy, why does he insist on making such shitty movies? So here we have another Dan Brown movie - stiff, self-important, blithely clueless on its own subject matter (church history, particle physics) at the service of some kind of weirdly self-serving rhetoric about the Catholic Church being out of touch with the modern era. It has a little more energy than its predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, in terms of people getting murdered and explosions, but not enough to make it a good movie.

Sunday I saw Drag Me to Hell, the kind of energetic, inventive, fun movie that made me fall in love with the movies in the first place and be a filmmaker (more about it in another review). Yesterday I saw Angels & Demons, the kind of numbing, stale, made-by-committee product that makes a person want to just give up. I guess it's a notch less depressing than Wolverine, because there's an added dimension of competence and craft - Salvatore Totino's cinematography is moody and sharp, and the movie works through its nonsense at a steady (if overlong) pace. But what both this movie and Wolverine have in common is that I just can't imagine that the filmakers had any passion whatsoever for what they were making. They're just such empty, by-the-numbers pieces of mechanical clockwork with all humanity stripped out of them.

Hanks and Howard are bored by the material and it shows (hey Tom Hanks: you're making, what, $20 million? $40 million? to be in this movie, if you're not having fun, maybe you could pretend?). As for the real auteur behind this material, Dan Brown, what's his deal and why do so many people love his stuff, above and beyond other modern authors of simple potboilers? I think the answer is that he's found a way to exploit many peoples' modern, Western dissatisfaction with the institutions of the Church (Roman Catholic and otherwise) combined with their longing for something spiritual to fill the gap. Neither The Da Vinci Code nor Angels & Demons is simple-minded Catholicsploitation, but both end on notes of progress, of reformation towards finding a balance with science and feminism. Too bad the movies are so incredibly stupid or they might actually impact people.

4/10

May Update

Yeesh, it's hard to keep up-to-date on this thing when I'm working 60-hour weeks. But enough excuses, here's a quick roundup of the last several things that I've seen:

Anvil: The Story of Anvil. Why the redundant title? Otherwise, it's a pretty good, if limited, picture of a couple of guys in mid-life crisis as they try to recover their glory days, basically a cross between American Movie and This Is Spinal Tap (down to the almost carbon-copy finale). I don't care much about heavy metal, but the movie is smart enough to gloss over the technicalities in order to linger on the elements that do matter, like working crappy day jobs and getting shafted by Czech promoters. I enjoyed it and it's funny and touching, I just wish it had gone a little deeper and not been quite so conventional in its storytelling arc. 7/10

Star Trek. Yes, I'm the guy (alongside Roger Ebert and Armond White) who didn't like J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. I want to say more about it separately, but for me it all comes down to Abrams' vision simply being less expansive and imaginative than what Roddenberry put into motion 45 years ago, and I thought it was frantic and pointless. On the plus side, we have good performances from most of the cast and one beautiful image (the Enterprise rising out of the clouds of Titan). 4/10

Adventureland. Sweet and funny, and richer and more complex than Superbad was. This makes me want to check out Mottola's other stuff, especially The Daytrippers, which I ignored back when it came out. My only gripe is with the finale, which seemed contrived and emotionally phony in a way that the rest of the movie hadn't been leading towards. Also, I hope Jesse Eisenberg grows into his horseface sometime soon. 8/10

Monsters vs. Aliens. Amusing, forgettable. Makes me wish that Guillermo Del Toro was directing his remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. 6/10

Il Divo. Amazing visuals and an obviously excellent performance from Toni Servillo, playing Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Peter Bogdanovich and Nosferatu, but not being a student of post-War Italian politics, I didn't have any fucking idea what was going on in this movie. Not the movie's fault, obviously, but it was sort of like watching Oliver Stone's Nixon and only knowing that it was about a sweaty guy who had gotten into trouble about something, somewhere in politics, sometime in the '70s. To be revisited on DVD. 7/10

Tyson. Really fascinating stuff, and I like the strategy of simply structuring the film as a long, free-flowing first-person monologue, bringing us inside the head of an odd, but understandable and very human person. This film might just be one of the more avant-garde things I've seen in quite a while. And on the subjects of his domestic violence against Robin Givens and his rape conviction, Tyson gets enough rope to hang himself with. 8/10

Dark and Stormy Night. This is the newest undistributed film from Larry Blamire, the guy who made The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's a stilted parody of the 'old dark house' movies of the 1930s and '40s. As such it's funny and entertaining but kind of an artistic blind alley - this is the kind of clever genre rehash that everyone accuses Tarantino of making, except without the creativity. Still, if you only see one movie this year involving a guy in a gorilla suit, a psychic in a turban, and a freak with two heads, this is the one. 6/10

More to come soon!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Two things:

1) This movie has one of the most retarded titles in movie history. Worse than The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Became Mixed-Up Zombies or Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

2) This movie is a huge snoozy waste of time. I didn't care about any of the characters. All of the action sequences were mundane and tedious and the movie as a whole lacks a reason to exist.

Basically, it makes Brett Ratner's X-Men 3 look good by comparison. I hope everyone involved gets herpes, they should be able to afford plenty of ointments.

3/10

Santana Shreds

This is one of those Youtube things that probably everyone's sick of by now, but I don't care - it doesn't fail to crack me up whenever I watch it. It's like watching a concert piped in from a parallel dimension.

Nerd Alert

Full disclosure: sometime around 1993 or 1994, I won a Star Trek trivia contest at a convention, the prize being a free ticket to the next convention. So yeah, I'm an old-school Star Trek nerd of a pretty high order - not such a high order that I ever got dressed up as a Borg or went to Klingon language camp. But high enough that I do indeed know at least a couple of Klingon words (Qapla'!)

This is all to say that the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie has me feeling apprehensive. The Star Trek franchise is certainly in need of reinvention; Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise increasingly leaned on the same episodic formulas of The Next Generation, and on references back to the older series - the most popular Enterprise episodes are loaded with references to aliens and storylines from the original shows, signs of a franchise miring itself in the past rather than looking to the future (ironically). But at the same time, I don't know that J.J. Abrams is the guy for the job of reinvention in any manner other than financial - he seems to be more interested in melodramatic plot twists, sex, and flash rather than the humanistic, progressiveness that was the true achievement of the shows at their best.

So anyway, I'm hoping for the best in the new movie but girding myself for the worst. In the meantime I've been catching up on a bunch of episodes from the original series, and here's my extremely nerdy list of my ten favorite original Star Trek episodes:

10. "What Are Little Girls Made Of?": Something of a sentimental favorite, but there's something that I find appealingly Lovecraftian about this episode, in which Kirk contends with a group of androids out to replace humanity with their own superior forms. Featuring Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family, as the most ancient android.

9. "The Trouble with Tribbles": Something of an obligatory pick, but it holds up really well - a simple plot elaborated with great dialogue and energy.

8. "Mirror, Mirror": One of the siller story ideas of the whole series (and that's saying something) but played with such confidence that it's entered pop culture - a goatee is forever shorthand for an evil twin.

7. "Where No Man Has Gone Before": The series pilot has a different, colder tone than the series would eventually adopt, but this one also established one of the series' primary theses - that all of mankind's scientific advancements are meaningless without hanging on to our shared humanity - key to the post-Hiroshima age.

6. "The Enterprise Incident": A perverse spy thriller of an episode inspired by the Pueblo incident.

5. "Journey to Babel": A crowded, exciting episode with great intrigue, plus Andorians and Tellarites (remember, nerd here).

4. "Balance of Terror": A suspenseful submarine-esque thriller, joined with the humanistic observation that even the enemy has their reasons.

3. "Amok Time": One of the best Spock episodes features the perfect irony of the coldly logical Vulcan turning into a lustful raging maniac.

2. "The City on the Edge of Forever": Written by Harlan Ellison (if I write that he won't sue me), this one has a literary quality unique to the series, forcing Kirk into a classic dilemma between duty and romance.

1. "The Devil in the Dark": I pick this as the best original series episode because not only is it a terrific, well-crafted narrative, but it's also a perfect distillation of the ideals of the series, that the universe is a big place and that anthropocentrism can get in the way of truth and progress. Not to mention that the Horta, a living rock creature, is a pretty cool idea.

My runners-up:
"The Enemy Within"
"The Naked Time"
"The Galileo Seven"
"Arena"
"Space Seed"
"The Doomsday Machine"
"The Ultimate Computer"
"Spectre of the Gun"
"The Tholian Web"
"All Our Yesterdays"

And my picks for the five worst episodes:
"The Alternative Factor"
"Return to Tomorrow"
"The Omega Glory"
"And the Children Shall Lead"
"Requiem for Methuselah"

(and the one terrible episode that's so bad, it comes back around to become entertaining again: "Spock's Brain")

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

James Ballard reached his widest audience with Empire of the Sun, his memoir of his childhood during World War II, but I first discovered him thanks to David Cronenberg, whose film of Crash (the only good movie with that title) led me to the novel of Crash and also to Concrete Island and The Atrocity Exhibition - novels that are cold, detached, filthy, deranged, deterministic. They also represent frighteningly well the second half of the 20th century, that period when machinery and regimentation really took over the industrialized West. Ballard's triumph as a writer was to combine the radical pornographic defiance of William S. Burroughs with the modern post-War environment of parking garages, freeways, and reality TV.

The real triumph of his work, though, was the beating heart that permeated it - his was no attitudinal posturing, as his modern successors like Chuck Palahniuk can often fall into - Ballard was a traumatized intellectual, sharing his trauma, both personal and sociological, with the world. And for that, I thank him.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Seeing this movie again for the first time in several years, I finally figured out the two strands of filmmaking that it's attempting (without really succeeding) to synthesize. It's a combination of the bold visual spectacle and brainy, existential concepts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, mixed with the turgid melodrama and flatness of an Airport movie. I mean, it even looks like an Airport movie (above) - if the future contains that much gray and beige, count me out.

That the movie works at all is a tribute to the no-nonsense craftsmanship of director Robert Wise, and especially to the talents of composer Jerry Goldsmith. His score really does most of the movie's heavy lifting to instill a spirit of mystery, romance, and suspense into what is otherwise a movie with a loooot of scenes of our actors' faces staring at very expensive visual effects.

This is also one of the few Star Trek movies to actually feature a high science-fiction concept at its heart - most of the really popular movies are adventure stories, first and foremost, but this one actually poses questions about man's place in the universe, artificial intelligence, and religion when it's revealed that the all-powerful force threatening Earth is actually a 1990s Earth space probe has been transformed into a super-intelligent artificial lifeform seeking to touch its creator. And it would be all a lot more interesting if it hadn't already been done a decade earlier in the original series episode "The Changeling".



The movie's narrative is rushed and sloppy - of the movie's three main characters, Kirk, Spock, and Decker, only Spock has a character arc that's actually coherent and fulfilled, and the 'Voyager 6' idea is anticlimactic - but I still have a fondness for this movie thanks to the basic spectacle and joy of the thing. It's not great filmmaking, but it's still a good example of the intellectual seriousness and grandeur that Trek aspired towards, even with flaws.
7/10

April Update

Okay, so I haven't done any posting here in a while, because all of my time has been taken by my current job. So in the interest of putting something, anything up here, I'll just put a scoreboard up of the last two months' worth of movies that I've seen:

First, new movies:

Watchmen: Mixed bag. Some great scenes and performances, especially Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup; some total garbage moments and boring performances. Overall, a real lack of any vision beyond transplanting the whole thing from print to celluloid. 5/10

The Uninvited: Serviceable. 5/10

Gomorrah: Fascinating stuff, and harder to achieve than it might look. 8/10

Two Lovers: Quite good. 8/10

Race to Witch Mountain: I was hoping for fun, I got poorly-made crap instead. 3/10

Three Monkeys: Solidly made, but I have to question what there was to it beyond two hours of miserabilism. 7/10

Everlasting Moments: Interesting to watch, but flawed and repetitive. 6/10

Knowing: Basically the same movie as Signs (which I hated), mostly crap redeemed only by some nifty visuals of destruction. 4/10

The Last House on the Left: Better than it could have been (the performances are actually pretty good, and it's not a pure gore-fest), not quite as good as it should have been (there's a masterpiece to be made of this material that just hasn't been fully realized yet, not in this version, Craven's, or Bergman's). 6/10

Now, old movies:

Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974, H.B. Halicki): 7/10

A Boy and His Dog (1975, L.Q. Jones): 6/10

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961, Val Guest): A really clever demonstration on how to make an epic, globe-spanning disaster movie that nonetheless mostly takes place in a single set. 7/10

The Abominable Snowman (1957 Val Guest): 6/10

The Endless Summer (1966, Bruce Brown): 6/10

Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1991): 3/10

Cult of the Cobra (1955, Francis D. Lyon): 5/10

Doppelganger (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa): 6/10

Bright Future (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa): 6/10

Hell Night (1981, Tom DeSimone): 3/10

The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955, David Kramarsky): 3/10

The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955, Dan Milner): 3/10

Andrei Rublev (1966, Andrei Tarkovsky): The first Tarkovsky film I've immediately loved. 9/10

Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman): 9/10

Eliminators (1986, Peter Manoogian): Mandroid, scientist, mercenary, ninja. Together they are ELIMINATORS! 5/10

While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang): 7/10

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956, Fritz Lang): 7/10

My goal for April: to prepare myself for next month's release of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek by re-watching all 10 of the previous films, plus large doses of the TV series.
Thanks for reading!

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

I saw this for the second time a few days ago at the Silent Theater, here in Los Angeles. I'm a relative latecomer to Francois Truffaut - I didn't see any of his movies until about five or six years ago, but was instantly hooked.

Of the Truffaut movies that I've seen, Adele H. is one of my absolute favorites - for one thing, I'm a fan of the 'person goes crazy' subgenre of movies. It's a personal film about pure obsession, depicted as something irrational but compelling, tragic yet unavoidable, and Isabelle Adjani is outstanding as the doomed daughter of Victor Hugo who becomes obsessed with a British Army officer beyond all reason.

One thought I had in watching it this time around, though, was spurred by a recent New Yorker article on the writer Ian McEwan, who is quoted as saying that he wrote his novel Enduring Love as an argument against the romanticization of irrationality (it's a novel about an irrational, romantically motivated stalker taking on a very rational everyman). So while Adele H. definitely shows that the poor woman is destroyed by her obsession, it also oozes with doomed romanticism. Now don't get me wrong, Truffaut's achievement is expertly made and highly seductive - but it also strikes me as just a teensy, tiny bit false to make a romantic movie about what is, ultimately, a person suffering from mental illness.

Don't take this as much more than a quibble, though, because I like the film very much as a cathartic, emotional experience. But I also think that it doesn't hold up to intellectual scrutiny as much as, say, The 400 Blows does.

8/10