BLOW OUT – brian de palma – 6.9 / 10

Though it sags as it draws to a close (and really provides no closure on the vast governmental conspiracy at the heart of the story), Blow Out is pretty entertaining through its first half. Since I’m no fan of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up and its mod, sixties, free love, lack of structure bullshit, it gives me some pleasure to watch De Palma turn that film into a straightforward, Hollywood-ized thriller. The idea of turning an arty festival piece into mainstream entertainment is perversely exciting to me.

But, as fun as that is and as big a kick as I get out of it, that still can’t account for the movie’s failings. There’s really just no way for one man to believably take down a huge conspiracy that killed a presidential candidate. That’s one area where Blow Up actually got it right. By not having any real resolution to the story, the filmmakers didn’t have to come up with a believable ending. And, since it was an artsy foreign film anyway, they could have just had the main character get bumped off and nobody would have complained.

De Palma, however, was making his film for a different audience, one that needed to see the hero win. And thus his huge governmental conspiracy turns out to be one rouge agent who went off the reservation so that the hero can kill him and put an end to it. And while that sorta works on its own terms, De Palma couldn’t very well have the hero actually reveal the conspiracy to the world. So he just ends up sad and alone.

That last aspect is something I’ve never understood about conspiracy movies. They always have the hero’s attempt to reveal the whole truth thwarted at the end. And I can’t quite ever figure that out. The people who make these movies trust their audiences to believe that a vast conspiracy could exist since it is, after all, the premise of the film. But they don’t think people will believe that a conspiracy could ever be revealed? Perhaps it’s a comment on the nature of conspiracies. Or maybe it’s a subtle hint that similar conspiracies have taken place many times in our country but none of them have been revealed.

I kinda like that last explanation and it works okay as a thematic reading of the film. But it also renders the film decidedly unsatisfying. Denying the hero the thing he seeks, keeping him from reaching his goal, is no way to satisfy an audience. And because of that, none of these conspiracy movies (Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, Enemy of the State, etc.) ever end up being very satisfying or memorable. I guess I can now add Blow Out to that list.

But Blow Out is worth watching for De Palma’s direction. Though he’s not trying out anything new here (and hence could be accused of phoning it in), all his tricks are on display. In fact, this film acts as a rather neat summation of all the directorial flourishes he developed in the 70's. You’ve got the movie within a movie from Body Double, the split screen from Inferno and Dressed to Kill, the fetishization of the female form from every damn movie he ever made, the disinterested authority figures of Dressed to Kill and the hooker with a heart of gold from five or six of his films.

So, in the end, Blow Out is worth watching if you’re a De Palma fan (though you aren’t likely to pick up on anything new) but you can probably turn it off halfway through and not miss anything.

INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL – steven spielberg – 3.8 / 10

Though it begins with a strange prologue where a bunch of kids in a Ford roadster race a group of GIs, once The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gets going, it’s really really good for about fifteen minutes (maybe even twenty) and threatens to actually be about something. Of course, then the plot proper kicks in and everything goes downhill from there.

I had hoped, knowing a little about this film’s backstory and the idea that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had rejected George Lucas’s absurd notion that the fourth Indy film should be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars, that everyone had come to their senses and realized that Indiana Jones hunting alien relics isn’t really the Indiana Jones people wanted to see. Even after the opening sequence that involves some artifacts from the Roswell crash in 1947, I held out hope, thinking that maybe this was a sop to Lucas and the rest of the film would be about something more Indy-esque.

But alas, it was not to be. No, Indiana Jones does indeed go after an alien relic in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only that, he visits a whole alien city and sees a real life alien and its spaceship. And so the whole thing comes off, to my eyes at least, as a blatant cash grab by a bunch of people that really don’t have any need of that cash. Maybe they just like the attention.

And that’s really too bad because the first twenty minutes of the film show what might have been. In those twenty minutes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the Red Scare that swept America in the 50's and how a man like Indiana Jones could get caught up in that. There’s a terrific sequence set in a model town moments before it’s blown apart by a nuclear weapons test. And a wonderfully ominous shot of Indy standing in front of a mushroom cloud as the world as we knew it up until then suddenly changed.

That sequence and that shot are so portentous and so loaded with ideas that it takes a really dedicated hack to squander them. And sure enough, George Lucas is up to the task. Over the next bloated hour and a half, the film is overloaded with nonsense about crystal skulls that control minds, psychic Russians, capital-C crazy academics and flesh-eating ants. And the real flaw is that there is just so much talking about nothing that there’s no way for the film to develop any kind of propulsive energy or momentum. Even Spielberg, the master of the old-school chase sequence, can only do so much when between those chases are twenty minutes of people talking about nothing that ends up mattering in any way.

I can’t really say that I’m disappointed with this film because I didn’t expect all that much going in. But the first half hour so raised my hopes that the complete failure of the last two thirds of the film stings that much more. And as the final (completely ridiculous) scene played out, I started to understand those morons on the internet who yelp about George Lucas having raped their childhood because my hopes for this film had been similarly toyed with and then brutalized. Oh well, there’s always the Shia Lebeouf starring sequel to look forward to. (And anyone who doesn’t think we’ll be seeing that film in a few years is giving Lucas and Spielberg an awful lot of credit they have continually proved they do not warrant.)

INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM – steven spielberg – 1.9 / 10

Leaving aside Kate Capshaw’s howlingly anti-feminist portrayal of Willie Scott (as getting into that would enrage me much more than I feel like being enraged right now), the film has myriad problems from start to finish. First of all, what happens to Lao Che, the person who tried to kill Indiana in Shanghai at the start of the film? We never here from him again. Doesn’t he still want Jones dead? There’s no resolution there.

Then Jones, Willie and Short Round (another ridiculously offensive element of the film I’m not going to get into at the moment) end up in India. And when they meet a tribe of villagers, Jones asks for a guide to Delhi. But since he was asleep on the plane that took them into India, how does he know how close they are to Delhi? Maybe Delhi’s a thousand miles away. And why does the chief of the village speak English? Where did he learn it? (That last question is particularly interesting as the behind the scenes featurettes reveal that the actor that portrayed the village chef didn’t really speak English and was feed his lines off camera by Spielberg.)

Then there’s the nonsense with the blood that turns Indy into a crazed Thuggee warrior and the voodoo doll the Maharajah uses to inflict pain on Indiana. Leaving aside the fact that Hinduism (the Maharajah’s supposed religion) has nothing to do with voodoo, what point does all this mystical nonsense serve? The whole thing’s just really racist and completely tone deaf.

And why is this a (unacknowledged) prequel? The events in this film take place a year earlier than those of Raiders of the Lost Ark but for really no purpose. The Last Crusade takes place in 1938 because it has a major piece of the story set in the Republic of Hatay which only existed from 1937 to 1938. But the events of this film could have taken place any time during the 1930s. It’s just a weird, unexplained thing that this film comes before the first one.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN – andrew adamson – 3.9 / 10

This lame second installment of a bound-to-be-lame trilogy, isn’t much worse or better than the lame first film. Without having read the book, it’s hard to ascribe blame for the abovementioned lameness. But based on my reading of the book of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and then seeing the film, I’m going to assume that they followed the book pretty closely and just elongated the action sequences and drama (since both are almost entirely lacking in the book). If that’s the case, then a lot of the blame for the awful thematic elements can be placed at C.S. Lewis’s feet.

And when you get right down to it, C.S. Lewis is just not a very good writer. He earns a little leeway because his books weren’t originally intended for publication but that doesn’t change the fact that they are so poorly plotted that I find it almost impossible to imagine someone reading one of his books now and thinking it would be a good idea to share them with the world.

There’s just an awful lot of stupid things happening in these stories. The most obvious of which is probably the fact that Peter happens to have a flashlight with him when the kids go back to Narnia. If he didn’t, many different things that happen in the film would be impossible. And that would be fine if it were some common item that a person would reasonably have in their school bag. But a flashlight? Why would he have a flashlight?

That sort of ill-considered plotting is present throughout the film. From the fact that Prince Caspian could have just killed the impostor king and declared himself the new ruler (thus negating the last third of the film and preventing thousands of deaths) to the stupid pop song that closes the film, Prince Caspian is rife with half-formed ideas and lame plotting that would certainly have been ironed out had the film not been based on a revered book (which, it should be recalled was originally only intended for the consumption of one specific child).

The most bothersome plot development is when Aslan (the Jesus figure of Narnia) chooses not to reveal himself until the very end because the people no longer believed in him. What kind of petty absentee god punishes his people by allowing thousands of them to die because just because they don’t believe in him? The Christian god, of course. Is that really the message that a big summer movie aimed at children (witness the complete lack of blood in the hundreds of on screen deaths) wants to be sending?