UNITED 93 - paul greengrass - 7.5 / 10

No matter the faux-documentary style or the real-time plot progression or the use of nonprofessional and unknown actors so as not to break the illusion, United 93 failed to really affect me. But that certainly wasn't for lack of trying. Director Paul Greengrass and Co. pull out all the stops on this one but by the time the fifteenth passenger is calling home to say good-bye I was starting to wonder what the Capitol might have looked like had the passengers failed to seize control of the plane and it had made it to Washington. Does that mean I'm a cynical bastard too inured to the mass mediated horrors that humans inflict on each other? Maybe. Does it mean that I've watched films with one eye on the action and one on how it was done for so long that I'm incapable of having a real emotional response to a film? God, I hope not. Actually, no, I know that isn't true. There are films, some of them nonfiction but an equal number of them are fiction, in which the moments of violence and horror have really hit home, have knocked that part of my brain thinking about how it was done completely out of my conscious thoughts (the two examples that jump most immediately to mind are the death of John Rooney in Road to Perdition and the Arab man's suicide in Cache). So even after all this time and all those films, the medium still has the power to bowl me over. But even with the loaded images from September 11, 2001, United 93 failed to do that. Why?

I suspect the answer is twofold. Firstly, Greengrass tries so damn hard to get me to emote that I almost don't want to just to spite him. This is especially true in the film's last act which, maybe not incidentally, is also the only part of the film that is almost entirely conjecture on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, during the first half of the film, right up until the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I was a bit caught up in it all. But after that the film never leaves the doomed plane and its passengers who make those seventeen phone calls to loved ones wherein the passengers say tearful goodbyes (which is initially compelling but soon turns into a game of seeing how long it takes the person in question to say they love whoever's on the other end of the phone) and people start to pray (both the passengers and the terrorists). I could maybe forgive the many many goodbyes but this whole, "we're all human beings" nonsense is exactly the type of shit conservatives have every right to hate liberals for. Yes, we're all human beings with our own unique hopes and fears and dreams and even gods. This is so head-slappingly obvious that to have it pointed out moments before what is this generation's most powerful shared experience is unnecessary, annoying and, most devastatingly for the film in question, distracting. They lost me right there. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so wondering what the conversations must have been like when the filmmakers were trying to decide how exactly to end the film. I bet they were spirited and possibly more interesting than the stuff that ended up on the screen (although the fact that the outcome is know in advance might have something to do with my distraction here).

But back to the point above. The second reason this film failed to really connect with me emotionally is because of the way in which it was shot. At this early stage in our recovery from 9/11, I'm not sure there was any other way to make this film than in the pseudo-documentary style that Greengrass employs. Anything stylized or art-directed would probably (maybe rightfully) be derided as too glossy for an event that still touches a raw nerve for a great number of people. Plus, the faux cinema verite style goes a long way towards allowing the average viewer to completely believe in the events on the screen. I say "average viewer" but I'm really just guessing. It didn't have that effect on me so I'm making that assumption based on reviews I've seen in the papers and magazines.

As far as I'm concerned, the fake documentary style of this film made me very aware that I was watching a film, more so even than were I watching a very artificial looking big budget version of the same events. The art of film has, over the last century, developed a grammar and language uniquely its own that, when properly deployed, becomes basically invisible, absorbing the viewer into the action on the screen. Documentaries, by their very nature, cannot employ all the tools (angles, lighting, etc.) that fiction filmmakers can and thus are less able to so absorb the viewer. Why then would a filmmaker attempting to be as "realistic" and as "truthful to the events" as possible want to give up more than half the available filmmaking tools? It's like Greengrass is trying so hard to make it seem real that he's overcompensating and thus it feels fake. On-screen violence, to my eyes, is only shocking and horrible when it is abundantly (and horribly) clear exactly what is going on. When the action on-screen is obscured by shaking cameras and whooshing zooms, that says, "Movie!" to me. It doesnt say, "this is a real thing that we just happened to catch on film." No style can say that. But at least when the terrible acts are shown clearly there's no place to hide. Even though the viewers know they are seeing a prosthetic or a computer generated effect, their eyes deceive them for a moment. And in that moment of deception lies the true horror (for me anyway, I know this is all subjective).

I knew going in that I wasn't going to get that in United 93. And if Greengrass had employed that method I think the critical establishment would have bolted from rather than embraced this film. I think this film will be a cathartic and momentous experience for a lot of Americans. I think, in some ways, this film will make the events of September 11, 2001, more real for people who spent that whole morning glued to their televisions but had nothing to personally connect them to the events they were witnessing. Because the real images we have from that day are so grainy and poorly photographed (so un-movie like) it might take a fictionalized version to really bring it home. And if that's what happens and it can be cathartic for people, then I guess that's something. For me, watching television that morning, I kept thinking not that this was like a movie (which was something I later heard that many people thought) but that this was less affecting than a movie. Even though it was undoubtedly really happening, because it was shot so poorly and because the news anchors were so unprepared that they lacked the ability to convey the import of this event, I kept thinking that I should feel something, anything much stronger than I was. And, I kept thinking, if this were a big budget Hollywood film, they'd have shot it in such a way as to facilitate my outpouring of emotion. But these grainy shaky images were preventing that.

The same exact thing was happening when I was watching United 93. I couldn't react to it as emotionally as I think I (maybe) should have because of the way it was shot. So, in that respect, Greengrass and Co. have made a film that reflects my experience of that day pretty damn accurately. And if that's true for me, it's probably true for most other Americans. And as such I guess we could have done a lot worse for Hollywood's first crack at depicting our greatest national calamity in fifty years.

PALINDROMES - todd solondz - 2.1 / 10

That old curmudgeon Todd Solondz (he of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse infamy) is back and more "twisted" than ever. Palindromes finds him swapping the actress who plays the lead every ten minutes or so (from Jennifer Jason Leigh to a morbidly obese black woman, etc.), a conceit which seems primarily designed to make the viewer wonder what the point of it is. And while you're wondering what the point of it is, you really don't have much time to think about anything beyond the superficial elements of the film. So let's get to that question first.

Maybe the reason for switching the lead (and particularly because the actresses are so distinctly different) is to say that the idea of identity is constantly mutable and changing. For each encounter a person has they also have a unique identity. That is, you are a different person from day to day depending on who you're with and how you want to be perceived. Maybe that's what Solondz is getting at. But that's a pretty trite point to make and hardly one worth devoting an entire film to.

So maybe the reason for the lead swapping is to point out the way people shape their perceptions of each other around how they want to see the person. Or maybe Solondz does it because he wants to distance the viewer from the events of the film, make them constantly aware that they are watching a film and thereby force them to analyze what they are seeing more than they might normally do. Or maybe he does it because he wants to flaunt normal film convention. Or maybe he does it because he's just a cantankerous bastard who wants to mess with people. Or maybe, and this might be the direction I'm leaning, he wants to be inscrutable. He wants people to puzzle over his film and by extension him, but never really get to the heart of what the film (and the filmmaker) is about.

Maybe the reason is one of those. Maybe it's none. And maybe it's some combination. But in the end it doesn't really matter because the film is just plain boring. So boring that, for most of the time I was watching it, I was thinking about things completely unrelated to the on-screen action. For instance, when Aviva is stowed away in a truck on the interstate, I was wondering how the hell Solondz had the money to spend on a helicopter shot. Or maybe he used stock footage. But that would mean that he had to acquire the stock footage first and then dress the truck to match the stock footage. And who would bother to do that just for a few inconsequential shots of a moving truck? And besides, aren't there at least fifteen better ways to spend a few thousand dollars when making an independent film?

Guess I went kinda off the track there but that's the sort of reaction watching this film engenders. There's just not enough on the screen to hold your interest so you fill in the gaps with all sorts of ancillary nonsense. I mean, I guess you could try to wrap your mind around all the targets at which Solondz takes aim (from anti-abortion crazies to the need for gun control to the general stupidity of organized religion to our continued inability to deal with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the need to dispose of aborted fetuses in a more seemly manner) but there's so many potshots aimed at so many classic liberal targets that it's barely worth the wasted effort. It's art, I guess, but art is easy. Being entertaining is hard and on that score Solondz fails pretty spectacularly.

BOOGEYMAN – stephen t. kay – 2.9 / 10

There seem to be two types of horror films made these days: gross-out, gore-filled torture fests or middlebrow, completely predictable supernatural thrillers. Boogeyman is, as you might infer from the title, part of the latter group. And as such, it’s basically just more stupid mainstream studio bullshit PG-13 horror. This is the same film as about ten other films of recent vintage (Amityville Horror or Hide and Seek, say) and as such I guess it’s not better or worse. But really, these paint-by-number horror films are just annoying. First you have the initial scare. Then comes the introduction of our hero and his life (or love interest or non-horror related problem). Then you have some sort of rising action that ratchets up the tension through some random but foreboding event (here the accidental killing of a crow, which, fyi, couldn’t really have been a crow since killing crows are illegal in the United States). Tthen the hero confronts and attempts to deal with the thing he’s been avoiding, etc.

The initial scare is provided by the hero’s father’s abduction by some unseen closet monster. This is neither unexpected nor scary and mostly just made me wonder if it wouldn’t have been more interesting to see what happens to the father once he’s sucked into that closet as opposed to watching the emotionally stunted son come to terms with his abandonment.

And anyway, what is the film saying when this guy who, if he were a real person would basically be a lunatic for being afraid of the dark as a thirty-year-old is proved to be right to be afraid? Are we supposed to be afraid of the dark? Are we supposed to think that all mentally ill people are really just seeing the world the way it really is and we are the ones who are crazy? I don’t think it’s trying to say either of those things but that seems to be the only logical conclusion.