What to make of a film that names its protagonist Trevor Reznik (basically the same as Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor) and has a mystical guru with supernatural abilities dressed up like Morpheus? Obvious isn't really the word. Self-conscious gets closer. Silly's probably the most accurate. But calling a film for which the lead actor lost sixty pounds to become so emaciated as to threaten his own existence silly just seems like bad form.
What mostly makes the film silly is that from nearly the first frame Anderson is setting the audience up for the Big Twist. But twist endings are hard to pull off. They have to be completely unexpected but at the same time they must also provide the only resolution that makes any sense. And to be most effective they have to cast everything that has come before in a new light. If you don't have the balls or the ability (Anderson and writer Scott Kosar (who tellingly wrote this script straight out of film school) have neither) to pull off an effective twist, choice number two for this sort of film is to make everything a mystery so that the twist really just provides a solution that the audience has been guessing at the whole film. This, however, also has its problems, namely that if the filmmakers don't make the mystery itself compelling, the audience essentially stops watching the film and instead is just waiting for the answer to the riddle. This can, of course, be effective, especially if the answer is completely unexpected yet still makes total sense. But again, we are not dealing with that level of filmmaker here.
No, in The Machinist you have a lot of mood and basically nothing else. It took most of my willpower (or laziness) not to reach for the remote and jump to the end to see what the big damn deal is. And, unfortunately, when the twist is revealed it turns out to be quite ordinary and boring and, most damningly, it fails to provide a motivation for the extreme emaciation of the protagonist. At least if it had done that I might not have been pissed off at the film. But goddammit, if Christian Bale is going to put his life on the line for this part, there'd better be some compelling reason for him to do so. But instead it's just more of that mood nonsense.
And so The Machinist really boils down to being just about that weight loss and how alien Bale looks. His character is trying to lose weight for some indeterminate reason and keeps track of his progress with Post-Its on the wall. If his wasting away physically was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for his wasting away mentally, it seems pretty silly that he would be wanting to lose that weight. (In fairness there's no evidence that he's trying to lose weight. He could just as easily be documenting it. But in a country in which people only ever weigh themselves to see how much they've lost, this is certainly not perceptive filmmaking.) Having Reznik keep track of his weight like this also removes the only plausible reason for his weight loss, that he is dead and disintegrating. The weight loss in that scenario would make sense but would, I guess, have been too predictable so that is not the Big Secret.
No, the Big Secret is that he killed someone and that the grief is killing him. Brilliance. Glad I saw a hundred minute movie to tell me that killing a person would make you sick with guilt. I could never have figured that out on my own.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
BATMAN BEGINS - christopher nolan - 8.7 / 10
There's an Adolphus Meekus quote that adorned the wall of Francis Ford Coppola's office in the early seventies that goes something like, the best films are made in Hollywood. And once every year, twice if were lucky, Hollywood proves that adage correct. This year, that film is Batman Begins.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as that hyperbolic statement might make it seem. Most of the blame for that falls at the feet of the too slow (and yet somehow very quickly paced) opening act. An awful lot of information is crammed into the first twenty minutes of the film but it's just a long parade of scenes in which the scene begins, something important is said and then the scene ends. There's no air in any of these first scenes. I'm sure that was done to make the parts before there's a Batman in the film move as quickly as possible but it seems that this over-editing might have had the opposite effect. Peter Jackson's theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings films had the same affliction and, when compared to the longer versions found on the special editions, makes me long for an extended cut of this film.
That aside, there is some very good stuff in this film. The focus on fear, for instance is borderline brilliant. Batman operates on the principle of fear. He is, after all, a man running around in a giant bat suit. If he doesn't scare the shit out of people, he's going to be laughably ineffective. Not coincidentally, that's the same dilemma facing the filmmakers. They have an actor dressed in a bat suit hanging from wires trying to look badass. They have to convince the audience in the same way that Batman has to convince the criminals. And how both parties achieve this effect is by showing the man in the suit as little as possible. Batman hides in the shadows and is, in turn, hidden by Nolan's choice of camera angles. He strikes out quickly, violently and without remorse or compassion and the audience sees these actions in the quickest of flashes. In the action sequences, very few shots last longer than half a second. I don't know if this is the only way Batman could be rendered effectively on film but I do know that this way certainly works.
Back to fear. The main villain of the piece is the Scarecrow. At first this seemed like a terrible idea. Fear toxins and a man in a stupid suit don't, at first, appear to be the most effective villainous elements to legitimize the Batman mythos. But, surprisingly, they are. They make the people of Gotham (and the viewers since they see this world through the eyes of the Gothamites) see the Batman in the same way the bad guys do. It also allows the characters to ruminate on the nature of fear and the ways that fear affects people's behavior without veering too far from the plot (and therefore sounding ridiculous). It's no accident that the film's best sequence features Batman as the predator in a horror film.
Add to this the fact that Nolan and Co. have gotten all the little things right (Gordon and his relationship to Batman, the Bruce Wayne love interest that could never really be, etc.) and you have one fine film that should please fans of Batman both old and new. And that's an incredibly hard task because he is, after all, a guy in a suit hanging from wires.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as that hyperbolic statement might make it seem. Most of the blame for that falls at the feet of the too slow (and yet somehow very quickly paced) opening act. An awful lot of information is crammed into the first twenty minutes of the film but it's just a long parade of scenes in which the scene begins, something important is said and then the scene ends. There's no air in any of these first scenes. I'm sure that was done to make the parts before there's a Batman in the film move as quickly as possible but it seems that this over-editing might have had the opposite effect. Peter Jackson's theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings films had the same affliction and, when compared to the longer versions found on the special editions, makes me long for an extended cut of this film.
That aside, there is some very good stuff in this film. The focus on fear, for instance is borderline brilliant. Batman operates on the principle of fear. He is, after all, a man running around in a giant bat suit. If he doesn't scare the shit out of people, he's going to be laughably ineffective. Not coincidentally, that's the same dilemma facing the filmmakers. They have an actor dressed in a bat suit hanging from wires trying to look badass. They have to convince the audience in the same way that Batman has to convince the criminals. And how both parties achieve this effect is by showing the man in the suit as little as possible. Batman hides in the shadows and is, in turn, hidden by Nolan's choice of camera angles. He strikes out quickly, violently and without remorse or compassion and the audience sees these actions in the quickest of flashes. In the action sequences, very few shots last longer than half a second. I don't know if this is the only way Batman could be rendered effectively on film but I do know that this way certainly works.
Back to fear. The main villain of the piece is the Scarecrow. At first this seemed like a terrible idea. Fear toxins and a man in a stupid suit don't, at first, appear to be the most effective villainous elements to legitimize the Batman mythos. But, surprisingly, they are. They make the people of Gotham (and the viewers since they see this world through the eyes of the Gothamites) see the Batman in the same way the bad guys do. It also allows the characters to ruminate on the nature of fear and the ways that fear affects people's behavior without veering too far from the plot (and therefore sounding ridiculous). It's no accident that the film's best sequence features Batman as the predator in a horror film.
Add to this the fact that Nolan and Co. have gotten all the little things right (Gordon and his relationship to Batman, the Bruce Wayne love interest that could never really be, etc.) and you have one fine film that should please fans of Batman both old and new. And that's an incredibly hard task because he is, after all, a guy in a suit hanging from wires.
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
HOOP DREAMS - steve james - 7.6 / 10
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's favorite film of 1994 (over Pulp Fiction!) and Ebert's favorite film of the 1990's turns out, not surprisingly, to be only marginally great. To be sure there's plenty to love in the film but the back cover of the DVD's claims to shocking twists and turns are greatly exaggerated. The only thing that would have been really shocking would have been seeing one of these kids in the NBA. The funny thing is that's how the Hollywood version of the film would have ended. And in that case, critics would have been lining up to decry the Hollywood ending as being too Pollyanna-ish.
What really interested me about the film were the suspenseful moments in which one of the boys had to make some clutch free throws or a key play late in the game with the clock running down and then failed to do so. It fascinated me that this is more often the ways things really play out. Conditioned as I am (as we all are) to the Hollywood version, it was almost startling to see these boys fail. Mainstream films have moved so far away from depicting reality that it would be neigh impossible to find funding for a film that had as its script the events in this film. Indeed, I myself would never even think to write a film in which the hero of the piece misses the free throw that could have won his team the championship. I know fiction films (and documentaries to a lesser extent), by their very nature, distort and contract reality to make it more interesting. But in truth, they very rarely reflect anyone's experience of reality at all.
This is not necessarily a condemnation of fiction films or even of Hollywood films but rather an observation about what sort of films most people are interested in seeing. Compare, for example, this film to Cinderella Man. Which do you suppose is more interesting to the average filmgoer? It's a thorny proposition, the idea that we shun reality with our popular culture; more of the same "everyone's a winner" crap that has overtaken our society. But when even I would rather see the hero victorious, who still carries the banner for realism and darkness in our popular entertainment?
What really interested me about the film were the suspenseful moments in which one of the boys had to make some clutch free throws or a key play late in the game with the clock running down and then failed to do so. It fascinated me that this is more often the ways things really play out. Conditioned as I am (as we all are) to the Hollywood version, it was almost startling to see these boys fail. Mainstream films have moved so far away from depicting reality that it would be neigh impossible to find funding for a film that had as its script the events in this film. Indeed, I myself would never even think to write a film in which the hero of the piece misses the free throw that could have won his team the championship. I know fiction films (and documentaries to a lesser extent), by their very nature, distort and contract reality to make it more interesting. But in truth, they very rarely reflect anyone's experience of reality at all.
This is not necessarily a condemnation of fiction films or even of Hollywood films but rather an observation about what sort of films most people are interested in seeing. Compare, for example, this film to Cinderella Man. Which do you suppose is more interesting to the average filmgoer? It's a thorny proposition, the idea that we shun reality with our popular culture; more of the same "everyone's a winner" crap that has overtaken our society. But when even I would rather see the hero victorious, who still carries the banner for realism and darkness in our popular entertainment?
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