Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo immediately preceded Pixar’s slightly more sophisticated collaborations with director Brad Bird, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. But despite being one of Pixar’s more overtly kid-oriented films, Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo is rife with anxiety and death. In the tradition of its spiritual ancestor Bambi, which also famously features a mother’s arbitrary murder in its opening moments, Finding Nemo is childlike without being childish.
If I was stranded in a dentist’s office aquarium, and I could take only one of Stanton’s Pixar movies with me, I’m afraid I wouldn’t select Finding Nemo. I found his follow-up WALL-E to be a more sophisticated film that relies less on dialog and celebrity personae.
This blogger is a longtime fan of director Michael Mann, counting Heat, The Insider, and Collateral among my favorite films. But I still can’t find much love for what is probably his most popular movie, The Last of the Mohicans, which seems to lack his typically intense focus and clarity.
Based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel, it falls prey to the sometime fate of literary adaptations: failure to capture a narrative too big to fit into feature film length. It’s not until the long chase sequence where it truly becomes a movie, and Mann engages his superlative skills in exploring character through elaborately staged action, as he did even more so with the extraordinary downtown L.A. shootout in Heat.
The most interesting thing about The Last of the Mohicans is that the top billed star Daniel Day-Lewis is not actually the title character or the focus of the story. Hawkeye possesses many names (born Nathaniel Poe and also known as Natty Bumppo), but one of them is not the title of the novel or film. If I’m not mistaken, Chingachgook (Russell Means) doesn’t speak a word until the very end, which also happens to be the end of his people.
For better or for worse, Glengarry Glen Ross is very pointedly set in a world of men. I believe only one woman so much as appears onscreen, in the background of one single scene. It’s no accident, oversight, or deliberate act of Hollywood misogyny to banish women from this 24-hour slice of the lives of five bottom-rung salesmen.
Glengarry Glen Ross is full of grand, showboating performances from a dream cast of male master actors Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce. Baldwin very nearly steals the entire movie with a hilariously aggressive motivational monologue: “What’s my name? ‘Fuck you,’ that’s my name.”
It’s all the more extraordinary that Pryce, sometimes guilty of outrageously affected accents and scenery-consumption himself, masterfully underplays his part as a shy, passive man who can barely speak, let alone assert himself against predator Ricky Roma (Pacino).
All together now: “What’s my name? …”
The screenplay by David Mamet, expanded from his own stage play, set a high standard for gloriously poetic profanity not to be surpassed until David Milch’s series Deadwood. Famous for his naturalistic dialog (every “um,” “uh,” and stutter is right there on the page; there is no improvisation), Mamet is also a meticulous craftsman of mystery and suspense.
But there is one plot detail that trips me up on each viewing: the morning after the sales office is robbed, Shelley Levene (Lemmon) brags about having pulled off an impressive sale of eight units of sketchy property. Roma’s ears prick up at his mention of the signing having been just that morning, obviously sensing something fishy about Levene’s claim. But the time of closure is not inconsistent with Levene’s story, nor is there any reason to suspect that Levene, whatever else he may be guilty of, falsified this particular sale in any way. Roma may simply be surprised that the lately taciturn and ineffectual salesman Levene could not have pulled off such a feat at such an unlikely time unless his spirits were buoyed somehow. Still, Roma demonstrates perhaps the film’s only act of kindness by being the only one to give the old master one last chance to swap victorious war stories.
Over the course of its truly epic length of 177 minutes, Lindsay Anderson‘s O Lucky Man! (1973) picks up the continuing saga of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) from If…. While If…. used a British public school as a metaphorical microcosm with which to satirize British class culture, O Lucky Man! widens its lens to take in all of England for its bleak portrait of capitalism triumphant.
Travis appears to have matured out of his schoolboy fantasy of perpetrating a school massacre and has since joined the corporate world. Because of McDowell’s inherently impish persona, one might not expect his character here to be sincere, but Travis is now ruthless and genuinely willing to endure anything to climb the ladder of profit and social advancement. Early on, he is urged by a senior colleague to “try not to die like a dog,” but it’s a warning he is never equipped to quite comprehend.
“When do we live?”
His journey is so long and involved that it would hardly count as a spoiler to recount it here: Travis is promoted from the lowest rung on the corporate ladder all the way up to a high-level mission, yet he has been set up to fail. As he is ordered around the English countryside by his officebound superiors, he becomes lost on the way to Scotland, is arrested and tortured by the army, survives a military strike by an unseen enemy, stumbles into an idyll, is nursed back to health (er, literally), donates his body to medical research, falls in with Alan Price‘s touring band (including groupie Patricia (Helen Mirren), talks his way into the employ of the most venal businessman in England after his previous assistant’s timely suicide (a prime example of Travis’ alleged “luck”), becomes party to illegal chemical weapons sales in a corporate-funded civil war in a third-world nation, takes the fall for his boss, is imprisoned to five years of hard labor, is evidently reformed, tries and fails to talk a poor woman out of suicide with a hilarious litany of trite platitudes, is robbed and becomes homeless, tries to proselytize like Jesus and is, finally and fittingly, stoned by his peers. But in the the end, he is discovered as a future movie star.
So long and thanks for the milk
An early form of David Sherwin’s script was written by McDowell himself, based on his own experiences as a coffee salesman. I think it’s fair to presume that the beginning and ending are drawn directly from McDowell’s life story. At opposite ends of the film, the fortunate Travis is chosen from the masses for higher callings. The young man at the beginning is all too eager to commence his journey, but the beaten-down and disillusioned man at the end is no longer able to take any pleasure out of his unlucky luck.
Batman: Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD production from Warner Premiere, intended as a back-door prequel to the feature film The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. has tried this tactic before, and will again. 2003’s The Animatrix was a planned interlude in Matrix franchise, enjoying extensive involvement from creators The Wachowskis.
Coming soon is a motion-graphics animated version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen, preceding the forthcoming live action feature film adaptation (no doubt Moore, who has long since divorced himself from his past work for Warner Bros.’ DC Comics, has a few choice words for this development).
Do you think that maybe we’ve all forgotten that Batman a childrens’ comic book about a millionaire who dresses up like a bat to catch bank robbers?
The Animatrix and Gotham Knight are portmanteau films, the products of multiple writers and animation teams. But the latter is only tangentially related to its sister live-action film, The Dark Knight. A pair of detectives figure as characters in both, and the gang war that percolates in the background of The Dark Knight is the driving incident behind many of the Gotham Knight tales. But the short films (mostly in an anime style) vary wildly in quality and comprehensibility:
“Have I Got a Story For You” (Shoujirou Nishimi) – A pack of skate rats tell tall tales of the Batman, until the real deal shows up. One of the best of the lot, with a unique hand-drawn animation style, mixed with a little CG.
“Crossfire” (Futoshi Higashide) – Two detectives are literally caught in the crossfire of a gang war. Suffers from particularly awful dialogue.
“Field Test” (Hiroshi Morioka) – Batman receives a new toy from Lucius Fox that works a little too well.
“In Darkness Dwells” (Yasuhiro Aoki) – Guest-starring two veterans of Batman’s rogues’ gallery: Killer Croc and Scarecrow. Some of the best animation, but the story is incomprehensible.
“Working Through Pain” (Toshiyuki Kubooka) – Batman, shot in the gut, struggles alone just to get home. He has hallucinatory flashbacks to his spiritual training in the art of overcoming physical pain. He recalls how his teachers rejected him for his impure motivations (to enable his revenge plan, not to attain higher spirituality). This, one of the best stories, leads directly into…
“Deadshot” (Jong-Sik Nam) – …one of the worst. A master assassin (a blatant rip-off of the character Bullseye from Marvel Comics’ Daredevil) targets Lieutenant Gordon. A really lame conclusion to the collection.
I really wanted to like The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan (also cowriter with brother Jonathan) and star Christian Bale have long proved themselves thoughtful, serious filmmakers, but if they have one common flaw it might be a terminal deficiency of levity. The Dark Knight inarguably has all the hallmarks of quality, intelligence, and craft, but it makes a miscalculation in tone.
Aspiring to the cinematic heights of epic crime melodramas like Heat and The Godfather Part II, The Dark Knight overshoots the limits of its source material and becomes oppressively grim and depressing. One of the film’s marketing taglines was The Joker’s catchphrase “Why so serious?”, a question it should have taken to heart itself. Batman is, after all, a dude who dresses up in a rubber bat suit with pointy ears.
The Dark Knight takes its name from the seminal 1980s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns by comics auteur Frank Miller, but is not an adaptation. At this point, an adaptation would be redundant anyway, as Miller’s general tone and interpretation of the character as an obsessed, psychotic loner has informed every Batman film so far. Spider-Man 2 remains, for me, the only film adaptation of a comic book superhero property to strike the right balance between comics’ heightened reality and cinema’s more grounded literalness.
Pick a card… joker’s wild
This blogger grew up with Tim Burton’s two original Batman films, which took the character “seriously” insofar as giving him a reasonably plausible psychological motivation. But they also plopped the character down in an obviously fantastical parallel universe in which such things as rocket-powered penguins and literal death by laughter were real. In contrast, the two Nolan / Bale films drain all the wit and whimsy from the core Batman mythos, and place him in a decaying, corrupt, crime-ridden city straight out of 1940s pulp noir novels.
Living in modern-day New York City, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine Russian and Italian organized crime families being so powerful as to commandeer five big city banks for money laundering purposes, and yet that is a key plot point in the supposedly serious and realistic The Dark Knight. Indeed, any viewer of The Wire and The Sopranos will know that what contemporary organized crime families are capable of is far more mundane. Comic book fans will realize this is the same mistake often made in post-80s comic books: mistaking bloody murder and mayhem for “realism.” If The Dark Knight wanted to be taken so seriously, it could have begun by tweaking its depiction of the contemporary real world.
Internet rumor has it that Christian Bale is in this movie
Every emotion, motivation, and plot point is pushed to such an absurd degree of pretentious gravity and self-seriousness that it almost becomes comic. The precise moment where the film irrevocably lost me is the scene in which the grievously disfigured Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) bellows at Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) from his hospital bed, commanding him to speak his old derogatory nickname gleaned from years of working internal affairs cases: Two-Face. The performances were so exaggeratedly despairing and melodramatic that I frankly started to laugh.
What little deliberate humor there is is misplaced and awkward. As before, there is some levity to be mined from Bruce Wayne’s deliberate pretense to aimless trust-fund wastrel. Most of Alfred’s reliably dry dialogue amuses, mostly thanks to Michael Caine’s superlative ability to command the audience’s attentions and sympathies. But other stabs at humor misfire; during The Joker’s extended siege on Harvey Dent’s motorcade, one of the security guards provides a running commentary on the proceedings, as if the audience needed any verbal cue that an about-to-be collision with a tumbling helicopter is a bad thing indeed.
The action, while spectacular, is nevertheless mostly plausible, save for Batman and Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal)’s fall of some 20 stories from Wayne’s penthouse apartment onto the roof of a car. How is it even remotely believable that they could survive without a scratch? I doubt such a plot device would pass muster in a vintage Batman comic book.
An outtake from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice
The performances are good all around, but The Dark Knight could very well be subtitled the Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart Show. Christian Bale, the ostensible star of the proceedings, is given little to do. I assume his hoarse Batman voice is meant, in story terms, to prevent him from being recognized as Bruce Wayne while also making him sound more scary. Instead, he seems asthmatic and out of breath. Morgan Freeman summons his reliable gravitas to plays Batman’s supremely capable beard, Lucius Fox, the nominal head of Wayne Industries. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a huge improvement over Katie Holmes. Although just as young and stylish, it is slightly easier to suspect disbelief that she is the top District Attorney in Gotham. Gary Oldman provides another example of his ability to subsume his physical appearance behind makeup and props (as in Hannibal and Dracula), but here he is all cuddly fatherly warmth and righteous but fair vengeance (basically a retread of his characterization of Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films).
Hey, there’s a female presence in this movie?
Setting aside the nostalgia and goodwill surrounding his premature death, Heath Ledger is indeed amazing. Even if he hadn’t died shortly after completing the role, his performance as The Joker would likely be remembered alongside other classic cinema nightmares: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter, and Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en. One of the best aspects of the character is the clear emphasis that he’s not in the least bit interested in the traditional pasttimes of Batman’s colorful rogues’ gallery. Rather, his aim is to foment anarchy, even self-aware enough to ask “Do I look like a man with a plan?” He does occasionally let rip with a maniacal laugh on a par with the great Jokers of the past (no less all-time great scenery chewers than Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero, but most of the time he’s creepiest when not even smiling.
One nice idea that isn’t fully developed is that this Joker doesn’t have the standard comic book “secret origin.” This Joker tells two very different stories explaining how he became both physically and mentally scarred. It’s possible he may not even remember how he became the way he is, but even if he does, does it matter? Which is all the more scary.
Terry Gilliam’s mad, brilliant yarn The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a strongly anti-war fable to which every kid (and adult!) ought to be exposed.
Like the best of its kind (including Ratatouille and Gilliam’s own Time Bandits), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen works on multiple levels and is accessible to all ages. It is, however, a Gilliam film, as as such possessed of a certain degree of darkness and naughtiness. But depictions of tobacco, decapitation, and brief nudity (of the young Uma Thurman variety… thank you, Terry!) were evidently A-OK for kiddies in its era, and merited a mere PG rating. Special mention must also be paid to the spirited performance by a very young, adorable (but in a non-cloying way) Sarah Polley.
What must be the most ironic caption in cinema history, “The Late 18th Century: The Age of Reason,” is followed immediately by harrowing imagery of warfare that wouldn’t be out of place in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Further driving the point home for the slower members of the audience, a trip to Hades finds Vulcan (Oliver Reed) forging ICBMs out of hellfire.
In a theme straight out of Noam Chomsky, the military industrial complex (personified by Jonathan Pryce’s hilariously accented bureaucrat) imprisons the people within the walls of their own city with a sham state of perpetual war. In the end, the Baron (John Neville) defeats these villains not with more violence, but by inspiring the people to throw open their doors and thus their minds.
Must read: The Adventures of Baron Munchausenfun facts from Dreams, the Terry Gilliam Fanzine.
With the delightful WALL-E, Pixar continues its as-yet unbroken winning streak of instant-classic films for all ages. While my personal favorites are Brad Bird’s darker and more psychologically complex The Incredibles and Ratatouille, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is easily also one that will resonate decades hence with children of all ages (as the saying goes).
Other animation studios continue to produce disposable pastiches such as Shrek and Ice Age, laden with pop cultural references that will not age well and eventually be forgotten. While eye-popping now, perhaps some day Pixar’s animation will appear less than state-of-the art, and I do fear that one day Pixar may miscalculate and produce a critical and commercial failure. If they ever do, it will be because they lost their emphasis on storytelling craft and sense for timeless relevance.
WALL-E trips the light fantastic.
WALL-E looks backwards in cinema history for inspiration to envision its grim distant future. WALL-E’s daily travails on an ecologically collapsed Earth resemble the desolate wastelands seen in such joyless apocalyptic downers as The Terminator and The Matrix. WALL-E is the lone survivor of his kind, dispassionately salvaging spare parts from his dead comrades. All this is potentially very scary stuff for kids, but the little guy has become charmingly eccentric over the course of his several-hundred year long mission, and his positive, can-do energy provides an amusing counterpoint to the dead world about him. Still, the themes of loneliness and environmental crisis are there for adults to plainly see and even the youngest viewers to pick up on.
Long before WALL-E, the camp sci-fi classic Logan’s Run supposed a future devolved humanity, reduced to a self-sustaining infantile state. Humanity imprisoned itself for the sake of survival, but the rational was long since forgotten and the closed system no longer unnecessary. It takes the rebellion of one free spirit to wake up the whole of society to the reality outside the walls of their enclosed womb (or tomb).
WALL-E befriends the DustBuster3000
WALL-E draws its ecological metaphors and even the visual design of WALL-E himself from the classic hippie science-fiction film Silent Running. The last remnants of an overpopulated Earth’s biosphere are preserved in orbiting greenhouses, until venal corporations decide they are no longer necessary and are to be demolished. But one driven botanist and his team of cute gardening droids conspire to preserve a garden of eden forever, adrift in space, but a great cost: their rebellion is a bloody, murderous one.
The last major cinematic touchstone for WALL-E is, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The visual design of the Buy ‘n’ Large ark carrying the remnants of humanity is all about the clean, white lines of Kubrick’s space station, and none of the filthy grunge that has dominated science fiction ever since Ridley Scott’s Nostromo in Alien (but Sigourney Weaver does provide the voice of the ship’s computer, perhaps finally finding vengeance against Alien‘s evil computer M.O.T.H.E.R.).
WALL-E‘s chief villain is the droid AUTO, with the single, sinisterly unblinking red eye of HAL 9000. Both are artificial intelligences that stunt the evolutionary advancing of the human race in a twisted literal reading of their programming to protect it. Deleterious overprotection is also a theme in Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo; the Marlon learns that his prohibitive coddling of his son prevents him from blossoming.
Pistol-packin’ Princess Leia-bot comin’ through!
But more than anything, WALL-E is a love story. If you think about it too much, you realize WALL-E is several hundred years old, and is thus rocking the cradle when he falls for the later model droid EVE. A pistol-packin’, short-tempered spitfire in the fine tradition of Princess Leia, EVE is so far advanced that she’s practically a different species of robot. Still, when WALL-E upends an entire society in stasis, he also awakens EVE to the joys of life.
Pixar has long had business ties to Apple, but this is the first film of theirs to make overt in-jokes. WALL-E has somehow rigged a vintage VHS cassette of Hello, Dolly! to play on nearly-as-vintage iPod. Apple’s resident industrial design genius Jonathan Ive reportedly consulted on the design of EVE. WALL-E’s startup sound is the classic Macintosh boot-up fanfare. The “evil” robot AUTO speaks with the voice of MacInTalk, the text-to-speech technology invented by Apple in the early 90s. Any one of these gags would have been cute, but taken as a whole, one suspects the Berlin wall between companies is breaking down, resulting in crass product placement.
If…. is the first in director Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy of films featuring Malcolm McDowell as the Mick Travis, whose misadventures continue in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. Everything I read about the trilogy repeats the same word to descibe Travis: “everyman.” On the evidence, I take this instance particular of “everyman” to mean Travis is a blank slate, a shapeless person pushed and molded by the forces of society about him.
If…. begins with the epigram “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting, get understanding” from The Book of Proverbs, but an even better statement of the film’s themes is spoken my Travis himself: “When do we live? That’s what I want to know.”
“When do we live? That’s what I want to know.”
The initially realistic portrayal of life at a British public school, filmed at Cheltenham College but referred to simply as “College”, includes frank depictions of the corporal punishment and homosexuality (mostly repressed, save for in one case, genuine young love). The pupils’ lives are so regimented and ordered that even virtuous activities such as studying are forbidden if not conducted at the proper time and place. Most of the rampant cruelty and capriciousness comes from Whips (the senior class, with privileges) and is sanctioned, or rather, willfully ignored by the aloof adult faculty. It becomes clear the school is satirical microcosm of the British class society: a self-perpetuating system in which the young underclassmen “Scum” eventually grow into the roles of the oppressors.
I think I’ll call you Mini-Malcolm
Much of the students’ time is preoccupied with paramilitary war games couched in religion. As the school chaplain admonishes them, “Jesus is your commanding officer.” The sermon also instructs that desertion is the worst wartime crime, and as all Christians are born with original sin, all are likewise deserters. During one war game, Travis and friends deliberately shoot live rounds at their own comrades. Curiously, the headmaster mildly scolds them as if they had committed an infraction as naughty as nipping at the communal wine. But the first irrefutable instance of the film’s turn towards surreality is when the headmaster produces a faculty member from within a cupboard drawer for whom Travis to apologize.
From this point on, it is clear at least some of Travis’ experiences are fantasy. And what do teenage boys fantasize about but hooking up with hot girls and violently lashing out at enemies? He beds a beautiful waitress (Christine Noonan) in a violently animalistic coupling, who might very well be another figment of his imagination. Together they uncover a cache of weapons and pickled medical anomalies in the school basement (his subconscious?), including a grotesque human fetus. Travis’ anarchic adolescent fantasies climax with a massive school shooting during a nauseatingly patriotic festival honoring The Crusades. Unlike the considerably more tragic school shootings typical to films made in an era of actual teen massacres like Columbine (in films as diverse as Elephant, Empire Falls, and The Basketball Diaries), Travis’ war is a comically carnivalesque affair and the consequences fall offscreen.
Mmmf mmmmf mmff mmmmfff….
Miscellany:
The otherwise spiffy Criterion Collection DVD edition appears to be a censored cut, not the X-rated full version originally screened in some parts of the world.
The assistant director was Steven Frears, who went on to direct Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, and The Queen. In the Criterion DVD bonus features, Frears states that If…. was filmed at the same time as the Paris Riots in 1968, lending powerful immediacy to the theme of violent student rebellion.
The film alternates between black & white and color film stock. There are conflicting explanations according to Wikipedia, but the primary motivations seemed to have been that of budget and time (black & white film taking less time to light for). Anderson, however, liked the “texture” and continued to use the device. It was apparently not intended to delineate reality vs. fantasy.
Mick repeatedly plays the music “Sanctus” from Missa Luba, an African-tinged version of the Latin Mass. Difficult for modern ears to believe, but it was a hit single at the time. (also from Wikipedia)
Full of interesting tidbits, Wikipedia also cites a visual allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger in McDowell’s first appearance, showcasing his instantly recognizable eyes.
Writer and director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 luni, 3 s?pt?mâni ?i 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) is an unsensational drama on a very sensational topic. Like Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, it is shot in Dogme style with a handheld camera, long takes, and no score. Both films remorselessly lead the viewer through journeys likely undertaken by many throughout human history, of which most of the rest would rather look away from.
Although it seems ridiculous to talk about such a serious film in terms of “spoilers”, I do wish to caution any readers who have not yet seen the film to stop here.
In 1987 Romania, students Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) pool their money and make elaborate plans for an unspecified illicit event. What exactly the two young women seek is withheld for some time, building considerable suspense. No matter one’s political or religious beliefs, it is a simple fact that any society in which abortion is illegal produces a corresponding black market in dangerous back-alley procedures. 4 Months is not a passionate argument for or against the legality of abortion, but rather an unadorned illustration of two women’s experiences obtaining one.
4 Months begs comparison with another naturalistic film on a similar theme: Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. It would be reductive to say 4 Months is a “better” film, but in comparison, it does make Vera Drake seem like a conventional courtroom drama with overly emotive acting.
