Posts Tagged Under ‘Movies’

“The Happening”: Eh.

For some reason tonight, I ended up reading the entire leaked screenplay to The Happening, the new summer release from Hollywood’s greatest plot-twist-gimmick guy, M. Night Shyamalan. (And starring former 1835 Hinman resident Zooey Deschanel!)

My verdict: it seems worth skipping. There isn’t really any big plot twist, because the nature of the beast becomes evident pretty early on. Maybe it would be cooler if it’s shot well, but that’s a stretch. Once the bad guy is revealed, the screenplay is little more than horror-movie imagery and a pretty ridiculous resolution.

So take it from your blogging friend who’s prejudging the entire film based on an unverifiable script: it’s probably not a great movie.

(And as an intellectual-property business guy, I recognize that I’m undermining my own business model by reading a leaked script. But is it really so different than a critic’s sneak preview? Rationalizations are great fun.)

300: The Incredibly Late-to-the-Party Review

Writing that last post about political messages in movies reminded me to note the really odd political points that 300 made last year. Before someone chimes in with, “But you’re supposed to abandon that and enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations,” I will note that I acknowledge the movie as a groundbreaking action / cinematography movie, and I truly did enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations and giant killer rhinos. Still, I think it’s notable that the movie conveys the following viewpoints:

• Those who aren’t white, physically attractive and within sexual norms are the enemy and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
• Those with physical disabilities must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as they grow up to become traitors.
• Nine-foot-tall gay men with robotically deep voices are nothing but trouble. They are dangerous and tend to lead armies of non-whites (see above). Terminate with extreme prejudice, assuming you aren’t first terminated by arrows.
• City-states that appreciate culture and science, even if they still terminate fools with extreme prejudice, are pedophiles. And that’s true even when their navy does more to win the war.
• “This! Is! Spahta!”

Still, those CGI battle scenes were pretty sweet. Four phats for those. The moral of the movie only gets half a phat, which I will award for its doctrine of standing up as a nation.

CGI battles:
Moral message:

There Will Be Blood: The Late-to-the-Party Review

This Saturday my amigo Andre and I decided to see Be Kind Rewind at the Landmark E Street Theater in fabulous Washington, D.C. We got there and they were down to one ticket. Thus ends my tale.

In a quick backup idea, we opted for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century capitalist epic loosely based on muckraker icon Upton Sinclair’s Oil! In a word: hmm.

My Slate D.C. coworker Tim Noah hit the nail on the head when he noted that the film divides into two halves: a first half that sets up the nerve-jangling expectation that this film will have some sort of awesome, morally complex message about business and religion in America, and a “WTF” second half that abandons that conceit and decides to concentrate on making Daniel Plainview into an unredeemable psycho. Andre and I both left the final scene — it’s really thrown in there out of left field — wondering what the hell just happened, and I think this was a common reaction among the other theatergoers present.

There was so much about this movie that was great: the Oscar committee should cancel the Best Actor award each year that Daniel Day-Lewis does a movie and just hand him the statue. (He has done a great deal to associate mustaches with bad-assedness in his past two roles.) The musical score annoyed the hell out of me with its loudness and horror-movie tone, but after I left I thought back on it and realized that the music really worked. PTA also did a phat job of making this a period piece, and the sweeping shots of the empty California landscape — though the movie was actually filmed in Texas — really established the sense of isolation and hardscrabble individualism reflected in Plainview’s life. Lots of reviewers have praised the dialogue-free first 20 minutes, and that’s warranted because it was amazing.

The supporting cast was decent — guy who played Plainview’s brother, good; kid who played H.W. Plainview, quite good; vow-of-silence dude from Little Miss Sunshine who played the crazy preacher, not convincing at all in conveying religious fervor. But I just can’t get past the letdown that was the movie’s lack of message. Boogie Nights and Magnolia both had a lot to say about the importance of being genuinely connected to others, and while TWBB touched on that a little bit, it just didn’t deliver enough.

Sorry, PTA: I love your stuff, but not as much this time. Three phats out of five:

Eschatological

The History Channel tonight aired their Life After People show, which I did not catch thanks to the Penguins-Capitals game. (It was good, then came the part where the Pens lost.) H to the C hyped it big time, including buying advertising on Slate, and I was intrigued despite this prime example of my shifting-focus theory of the History Channel. I’ll have to Tivo that mug when it rolls around again.

I don’t think this show would have the same audience if it weren’t for I Am Legend coming out last month, what with both being all deer-in-Times-Square and whatnot. Those two are in turn a hell of a lot like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. Add in the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — now shooting near Pittsburgh, though that isn’t quite so flattering when they’re evoking a post-apocalyptic landscape — and we have an end-of-it-all trend. Sounds like a certain nation is rocking some sort of end-of-empire vibe.

I can’t predict the possibility that any of this stuff will come true, but then if I could, waiting around for it wouldn’t be fun either. I certainly hope we don’t end up with The Road, because that book single-handedly messed up my Road Warrior-based distant concept of civilizational collapse — featuring crazy football-padded dudes fighting in the desert — and turned it into existential nightmare No. 1. (It was really not a fun book. Tremendously well-written, but relentlessly disturbing.)

So I’d like to make two points about this whole cultural trend:

1. Everybody dying, while probably good for the Earth, would not be cool at all.

2. If we’re watching decline-and-fall shows here in the “declining” U.S. — as much as a nation of 300 million entrepreneurially oriented people can decline without suffering some society-immolating event — do you suppose rising powers India and China are rocking Hindi / Mandarin shows about Romulus and Remus getting Rome off the ground?