Watching Potter

T for Terrible acting. (5/10)

His world has grown, so have his fans. A review of the latest movie and the latest hype.

I haven’t been to an opening day of a movie in such a long time. In a decision I now regret, I brought a ticket to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, just because I can. I went to the theatre like a hour early, and was still like the 30th person in line waiting. Not so bad, you might think, but read on…

Before me in the queue were this bunch of kids–from whose age I can ascertain that they were in their mother’s wombs when the first book came out in 1997. Such popularity of HP books is astounding, but I digress. The thing was that these kids were from some sort of school and their friends kept coming and coming, and taking position in the line (which is less of a line than a melee) before me and the others who were there before. To add insult to injury, their parents were there, and not only did they not say anything to their kids’ disruptive queuing behavior but they themselves skipped the line and took the position beside their kids. That was just distasteful.

Then, the doors opened and my anger cooled off for a few minutes … until the trailers came up. I hated most of them; I kinda enjoyed Hitchcock allusion in Steve Carrell’s Despicable Me but that is it. The biggest claps and cheers from the audience went to the trailer of Twilight sequel and some asinine movie about a man going atop Empire State Building into a fantasy world or something.

Truthfully speaking, the film didn’t really disappoint me. It was a visual experience–something the last five movies (which possible exception of the Philosopher’s Stone) weren’t. Every scene is so meticulously constructed, and so perfectly lit that it is as if I was in an actual theatre. Visual effects have come a long way since the first movie too–Half-Blood Prince was part Gotterdammerung, part L.A. Confidential visually.

Acting, on the other hand, sucked. The greatest of the British theatrical corps cannot compensate the shortcomings of the young cast, who were given silly lines and silly parts. Unnecessary romantic subplot ran through the movie, which did away with far more important storylines. Malfoy was given too much screen time as a malicious lingering creep, but his fixing the vanishing cabinet apparently involves putting one thing after another in it. Inclusion of Aragog pleasantly amazed me, but the entire background of Lord Voldemort’s family and his loveless birth was left out. Bill and Fleur de la Cour were absent, and Fenrir Greyback is reduced to almost a caricature. The detailed information on Horcruxes were also withheld, which means that the last two movies will have a lot of things to explain.

Jim Broadbent was not Horace Slughorn I imagined but his acting was superb. Helena Bonham Carter steals the show as she always does, and the abandoned Great Hall scene reminds me of the Lord of Rings (perhaps another reason to recruit Ian McKellan as Aberfoth Dumbledore). However, the ending was anticlimactic–entirely devoid of emotion. It failed to implant a sense of anticipation or anxiety in me. Half-Blood Prince has no future.

If you haven’t read the books, don’t go to see it. You can get  Stendhal’s syndrome from the visuals, but as a movie adaptation of a book, it sucked. And as a movie? Both the acting and dialogue were hollow, cheesy and irreverent. Despite a stellar supporting cast, grand cinematography and splendid visual offering, it can only get 5/10 from me.

2009: Our Odyssey, Eight Years On

2001: A Space Odyssey—a masterpiece, a chaos, a visual symphony, an incomprehensible mess. Call it what you may, but it remains one of the most impressive and enduring films of all time. It has been forty years since its direction and eight years since the events in the movie but how far have we traveled toward the self-fulfilling man-child prophecy?

After reading an obituary for the writer Arthur C. Clarke, I re-watched the movie 2001: The Space Odyssey last week. It has been exactly forty years since Stanley Kubrick directed it—visually mesmerizing and deafeningly silent epic, a film ahead of its time, an IMAX experience before IMAXs are even conceptualized.

But how ahead of time is the technology in 2001? There are those who lament that we haven’t reach that stage of space travel portrayed in the movie. True, we don’t have Lunar Hiltons, manned missions to Jupiter. The commercial space travel is also non-existent—despite Sir Richard Branson’s projects and a couple of trips the Russians offered to celebrities and tycoons for millions of dollars. We don’t have faux gravity or grip shoes. Not that we need them anyway.

However, on another level—that of computers—we have relocated HAL into dustbin of history. In the movie, it is said that HAL was built in 1992, and it was still being used in 2001—something utterly unimaginable in an age where even laptops are updated at least biannually. Speech recognition and motion tracking—the features that once made HAL9000 a dangerous foe—now assist the disabled, and assume their place at bathroom taps and urinals.

Nonetheless, HAL’s influence on popular culture is more indelible. Four decades after its ‘mind’ was gone, HAL is still alive and kicking, as evidenced in Pixar’s modern space opera WALL-E. When they unveiled a gizmo with an all-purpose circular dial, Apple invoked the line, “Open the pod bay doors.” HAL’s omnipresent eye—the symbol of a technological Big Brother—has appropriately came to represent Web 2.0, the epoch in which everyone is watching and everyone is being watched.

The age of Web 2.0 rendered Clarkian realm somewhat obsolete. Skype (and other innumerable services) now provide a better communication network than those Dave Bowman had in 2001. Phones and other gadgets have become smaller. Internet may now provide Dave with a quicker online shopping  and better tracking system.

But one question still casts a big shadow: have we outgrown our world? That seems to be the question Kubrick asked and we mused at the end of 2001. With unplugging of HAL, Dave Bowman broke human dependence on machines—a dependence that began with the arrival of the monolith at the dawn—and he therefore transcended limitations, expectations, dimensions and even rationality and order. It was a pivotal moment; like its namesake myth of Odysseus, the movie ends ambiguously: is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

My answer to “Have we outgrown our world?” is no. We haven’t—we shrank it with mercantilism, imperialism, capitalism and globalization, we withered it with radicalism, bigotry, war and pollution, but we haven’t outgrown it. We won’t be able to until we throw off the yoke weighed down on our shoulders by our establishments—centuries of religion, culture, tradition, faith and even nature.

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus longed to return to Ithaca, and return he did—only to learn that he must leave Ithaca again to one final greatest adventure. For millennia, we paid too close an attention to our egocentric Ithacas—our lifestyles, our one-way cultures, our values, our prejudices and our blind faith—to embark on that final great adventure. It is now time to do so. HAL, open the pod bay doors.

No Country for Old Retards

Although I am straight out of a writing class on film techniques, I am not a person who ruminates much on his experiences inside a theatre. However, since a lot of my friends scornfully dismiss the best picture winner of 2007 as a bad movie, I thought I should put a good word or two for the movie by Coen Brothers.

I saw the movie as an expansion, if not a continuation, of previously acclaimed Coen Brothers’ movie, Fargo, which if I remember correctly, won an Academy Award for deserving William H. Macy. As in Fargo, the landscape of “No Country” is not only primitive, but it is also filled with coarse, albeit well-defined, characters. This is Texan primeval landscape transformed into the antediluvian land of Genesis, and filled in with Neanderthals of the men.

There are only three main characters in the movie: Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who dominates the every scene he appears, with his signature haircut, taciturn contempt against human lives, and his home-improved cattle-gun (which is weirdly shaped like a fire-extinguisher).

The movie starts with Llewellyn Moss discovering a drug-deal which went wrong, and a brief-case full of American dollars. Chigurh was sent to reclaim the money, but eventually he not only hunts down Moss but also those who hired him. Chigurh with his singular cattle gun represents Death with its signature scythe. The drug lords who hired Chigurh inadvertently invoked Death, which ultimately destroys not only their target but also them. The money Llewellyn found, on the other hand, became a standing prop for our lives, which are easier to get than to retain.

Sheriff Bell who begins the story by saying he can’t believe how much evil it is out there in the world, provides the moral foundation for the movie. The most memorable scene is when Bell enters the hotel room Chigurh was hiding, knowingly that the latter is there. Bell knows his antagonist’s destructiveness and invincibility, but he walks bravely towards his nemesis, and he came out of the confrontation unscratched. It is a classic showdown between fate (Chigurh) and confidence (it can be said that Bell also represents faith and belief, but those are dangerous waters).

At the end of the movie, Chigurh got into a terrible car accident, which can either be interpreted as his comeuppance or his belated luck. He is disarmed of his cattle gun, or he was separated away from his cattle gun by a stroke of luck, which states that finally Chigurh managed to get rid of his demons and murderous instincts. Inclusion of sympathetic children, and Chigurh’s almost warm reaction with them further ascertain this interpretation.

Many criticize the ending since Chigurh presumably escapes. But we are not watching “No Country” for its views on justice and comeuppance. Like Cormac McCarthy’s book, the movie leaves the audience with something to ponder upon: who were the real villains of the piece? Anton Chigurh with his flawed character was a candidate, but he, like Ingmar Bergman’s Death in The Seventh Seal, is a character we love to hate. Then how about Llewellyn Moss, and other members of drug cartel, whose greed overwhelm them? How about Sheriff Bell and his jaundiced view of the world? The ending was a fitting touch to the story in which we don’t understand who resembles dark.

In fact, a character does refer to Chigurh as the bubonic plague—a direct reference to Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic, The Seventh Seal. Chigurh’s coin tricks, the clothing he wears and his macabre phone calls are just derivatives of Bergman’s Death. In the end, Chigurh did kill both Llewellyn and his wife—which is something he must, for in The Seventh Seal, both the knight and his lady were claimed by death.

These symbolisms start with Cormac McCarthy’s book: if we perceive Chigurh as Death, it is not hard to see that the story itself is a retelling of the Pardoner’s Tale. In this most famous of all the Canterbury Tales, three young men looking for Death are told that they will find him under an oak tree. There they find only a bag of gold, for which they kill one another and meet Death finally. Llewellyn also found money under a tree as well, besides a dead body. There, he opened it, and unleashed everything inside this Pandora’s Box. Other macabre symbolisms include Llewellyn’s jacket and Chigurh’s shirt, and the River (Styx?) Llewellyn crossed without being able to cross back.

All being said, the film is very deep in symbolism, and results in ambiguity for many first time viewers. A confused (or even vacant) state of mind will visit the first viewing just to miss enjoyable aesthetics of each scene. Yet, you will sense something bigger, something difficult to comprehend in the picture. It is something difficult to put into words. Watch it again, and you will see and understand it…

Things I hate Most about Movies

Unfaithfulness: A few years ago, I went to watch Jackie Chan version of Around the World in Eighty Days. I should have known better than to watch a movie where a Chinese man is cast as immortal Passepatout. But none of the movie adaptations of Jules Verne’s classic novel was faithful to the book—not even Oscar winning and proverbially ludicrous David Niven version in 1956. If the director and screenwriters know the final version will be that different from the book, why did they even bother naming the movie after the book? Just to entice bibliophiles into two hours of movie hell? That is just not cricket.

Redundancy: Hollywood’s and writers’ creative abilities have dramatically fallen short in recent years. Sequels, prequels and remakes maybe magic words to dupe the movie goers into seeing a movie they have already seen, but they just don’t entertain. What is the point in going to a James Bond movie when you can imagine the protagonist defies all odds to save the world from some misanthrope in your mind? What is the point in seeing that green ogre and terrible talking donkey three, four or five times? First time is novelty, third time maybe the charm but twenty-first time is redundant.

Tenacity: It is sheer vanity (not tenacity) on an actor’s part to insist playing on his roles again and again. Twenty years from now, we will probably be seeing a Mission Impossible film, with septuagenarian Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. That is exactly what they did with Indiana Jones, Rambo, Rocky and The Terminator, not to mention totally stupid Basic Instinct sequel. No matter what the hardcore fans say, combination of age and redundancy of yet-another-movie-we-have-seen-before genre makes the film terrible. It maybe just me, but I can’t imagine my grandfather as a secret agent—at least not with his receding hairline and prodigious belly.

Absurdity: That is of dialogue. The plots of all movies (by the commandments of viewers) are usually bizarre, absurd and laughable but some just go over the top. The plot of Notting Hill depends solely on a super-actress falling in love with a book-salesman. That’s it. What are the chances? It is particularly in “feel good” movies that we see the greatest absurdities. The popular movie Parent Trap (popular in the way that a remake followed later) is based on a twin’s efforts to reunite their parents who divorced “for the reasons they can’t remember.” Not only it is absorb, it is a slap in the face to everyone coming from the broken homes and everyone who took the course of divorce because of irreconcilable differences.

Cheapness: You know what is hilarious? Chaplin mocking Hitler in The Great Dictator. You know what isn’t? Powdering two black guys into facial whiteness and transforming them into girls (White Chicks). It is also racist and sexist. I am not talking here about a comedy of Shakespearean proportions. (I just hope Hollywood doesn’t try such comedy anymore either. Their last attempt, She’s the Man, totally ruined my reading of The Twelfth Night.) I am voicing my concern at movies that beguilingly has the title “Movie” at its end: Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, etc. (and god forbid, their sequels). In old days, we would have been calling these cheap movies “vaudeville”, but it may not do justice even to the great vaudevilles.

Special Effects: Just compare the first trilogy of Stars Wars and the prequel trilogy. Spectacularly ‘awesome’ aspects of space battles distract the attention from the plot. Actors were acting in the green and blue rooms, talking to pillows or markers that can either be Jar Jar Binks or my middle-age aunt in Timbuktu. Their faces are digitally modified to resemble more ‘human’. But when a CG-Tom Hanks (The Polar Express) or CG-Angelina Jolie (Beowulf) is more human than the real counterparts, it is time for Hollywood to reconsider its priorities.

Do films need a pyramid?

The straight-forward answer is no, they don’t. However, the critics and any member of the audience who wants to be savvy in the language of film need one to accurately judge the film and examine their values. I may have committed few faux pas in compiling the following pyramidal scheme (9th level being the most populated to the rare treats of the 1st level). One, I follow Hollywood movies primarily, and two, I have my own prejudices. What follows is just a handy guide, not a set of rigid rules.

9. The Cheap: This reviewer simply refuse to examine the 9th level, which probably includes 70% of movies being produced by Hollywood. Cheap thrills, sensational horrors and lackadaisical acting are just three most polite things I can think of when I went to see movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Final Destination.

8. The Exorbitant: On the eighth level, we find the movies with the largest audience, which just don’t mean that they don’t have cheap thrills and terrible plots. In 2007, one magic word topped box office top-ten lists the entire year: threequal: Spider-Man, Shrek, The Bourne Ultimatum, Rush Hour, and Ocean’s Thirteen just to name a handful. And then there are movies based on toys (Transformers), amusement park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean), resurrection of old sagas (Rocky, Die Hard, Indiana Jones), and exploitation of every superhero envisioned on comics (Daredevil, Fantastic Four). They cater to the largest audience, young and old, but lack cinematic value (or any value what so ever).

7. The Simple: Some call the films in this level ‘guilty pleasures’ or ‘feel goods’. I call them ‘unrealistic’. Every teen movie put on screen, every Disney movie (animated or otherwise) falls into this category. They do cater to a smaller audience that level eight’s blockbusters and have some values but it is as if those values are seen through the eyes of a simplistic five year old. The struggle between good and evil and love conquers may fittingly belong to a toddler’s bedtime story cache, but on screen, they are just too simple.

6. The Limited: The Cult movies rarely achieve audience outside a small group of fans, but they do make a lot of noise, and even sometimes appear on the best movie lists. Such examples include Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, and Pulp Fiction. In the middle, we have movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Big Lebowski, and at the opposite end, we have so-bad-that-it-is-worth-laughing-at movies like Night of the Living Dead and Showgirls. It is by far the most exhaustive category. Blockbusters (Blade Runner), simple movies (ET), animations (Fantasia) and classics (2001: A Space Odyssey) all can belong in this category and also in somewhere else.

5: The Borderline: The action is pleasurable to watch. The acting is to the point. The plot is perfect. The only thing that is wrong with the pictures that fall into this category is their overall lack of cohesion and themes. Movies that are adapted from novels usually fall into this category because the adapted screenplay truncates the small nuances that make the book great. Recently Atonement is a good example, but the great examples include early James Bond movies (latter ones are simply terrible) and critically acclaimed The Prestige. They are worthy of second or third viewings, but aren’t timeless.

4. The Pure: We are finally in the good territory. Small, yet complex and pure is how I will define the movies in this level. By my criteria, movies like Lost in Translation, Annie Hall and It’s a Wonderful Life are good not good matches for the movies we will see in further levels. Every Woody Allen movie and similar art and indie movies fall into this category.

3. The Novel: The word ‘novel’ is this category’s sense is ‘new, unexplored’ but its other definition as a work of fiction doesn’t seem far off either. The movies like Sleuth and Rebecca explore the hard-to-discern triangle between identity, integrity and love, but they are also based on stellar original scripts. These movies can stand in their own right as great movies but Hollywood just has to ruin them through terrible remakes and sequels. In Sleuth’s case, the remake ruined not only the original but also the play itself. (Incidentally, it is the second time Jude Law ruined a great Michael Caine movie; the first time was with Alfie.) Indeed, the first Star Wars trilogy and the first installments of Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Eleven (with Frank Sinatra), The Pink Panther (David Niven-Peter Sellers version) are great, their follow-ups not so.

2. and 1. The Great and The Exquisite: When it reaches to the pinnacle, the rankings matter a little. Other factors (a popularity contest) come into play. In apples to apples comparison, The Birds will be in the second level while The Rear Window will be in the first, because the latter relies on psychological provocation, while the former makes use of sensational and more physical elements. What makes a film more than great is its language. A film which is physically oriented tends to create an artificial approach towards the audience. A film that speaks directly to the audience’s mind plants a powerful idea which is spontaneous. That is what films like Citizen Kane, Casablanca and There will be Blood achieved and that is why they are not only great but also exquisite.

P.S. Some movies are exceptions and can’t be put into a specific category. For example, I am at loss with that terrible boat movie of James Cameron on whether to assign it to The Exorbitant, The Simple or The Limited. One thing I know for sure, it isn’t novel, great or exquisite. Oscar count sometimes belies too. Titanic and Lord of the Rings’ final movie both got eleven golden statuettes but they are not Ben Hur quality. A notable omissions is with the Biopics.

The Legend of 1900–and the legends of our lives

According to Wikipedia, it is inspired by an Italian theater monologue. According to IMDB, it won fourteen awards, including a Golden Globe. However, it will take more than a few lines to accurate reflect a movie which is a symphony in itself. Even those who don’t appreciate the rhythm and chorus of jazz (this reviewer just being one) will be able to appreciate the intensity and vibrancy of the piano scenes.

The story is a simplistic yet intricate tale of a little boy who was found abandoned in the luxury cruise’s drawing room, and his later career as a pianist onboard the ship. Consumed partly by his insecurity, partly by his complacency, he never leaves the ship as he performs legendarily for the ship’s various passengers. The ‘legend’ of the boy who never grew up in his interior is narrated by the ship’s erstwhile trumpeter, Max Tooney, who, like the audience itself, cannot comprehend the pianist.

Misguided, demented or fractured pianists are among the cinematic world’s favorite characters. In Piano, Mute Helen Hunt spoke through the music of her piano, which served as humanity’s gift to compensate for her physical inabilities. It is rhythmic synchrony of another kind that relieved the disturbed mind of David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine. From Adrian Brody in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, such disturbances come from externally. In the Legend of 1900, however, the mind of the eponymous pianist, 1900 (Tim Roth) is calmer than the oceans the ship, The Virginian, is sailing.
For him, the world is The Virginian and it is at rest. One by one, characters entered and exited his world’s stage, and yet, they leave discernable impacts on him. It is not that his dogmas change, but they only mature, convincing him that the life outside the ship matters but a little to him. His music is not his without his presence and even his life is not his without the ship.

The reviewer may be spoiling the film if he mentions 1900 goes down which the ship when it is finally exploded at sea. However, it is merely predictable and there are many other things to watch out for in this spectacularly entertaining 2-hour epic. Despite our differences in time and medium, the parallels between our lives and that of 1900 are eerily unmistakable. As he clung onto his life and resisted any changes to his routine, we also are clinging onto our own lives and our own little worlds. Love, friendship, success and competition change, define and limit 1900’s world and they do in our ‘wider’ real worlds.

Come to think of it, our worlds may not as wide as we imagine. The legend of the title may not even be about the myth or the story of the pianist. It can also be interpreted as the legend, or inscriptions 1900 imposed on his world, and we love to impose on our worlds. True, our worlds aren’t not ship-shaped, but no doubt defined as narrowly and as rigidly as one. The Legend of 1900 doesn’t tell us to change it. It just tells us why it may be futile to rebel against your world and by analogue, against yourself.

Michael Clayton

Human beings are entirely visual creatures: ninety-five percent of information we intake from our environment comes through our eyes, or so it is said. I just finished watching Michael Clayton, and can’t help noticing voices, instead of visually-pleasing sceneries.

It is a George Clooney movie nominated for 7 Oscars including the Best Picture, Director, Actor and Supporting Actress. Tilda Swinton won a deserving Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a corrupt corporate lawyer Karen Crowder, whose cold veneer hides an insecure feeling about her place in highly-competitive cut-throat world of corporations.

However, the film is not anti-corporate; it is the story of people finding their voices and their true place, and their true values in the society. The inclusion of corrupt U-North, an agriculture corporation whose herbicide has unforeseen carcinogenic effects is merely secondary to three voices that guide the narrative.

There was the voice of Michael (Clooney), the fixer (one who takes care of unsavory conditions in law) who is in deep financial troubles for his gambling; the voice of his mentor Arthur, who switched sides to defend plaintiffs who he is supposed to be antagonizing, and the voice of Michael’s son, the innocent guileless voice absorbed in a fantasy world, which became a guiding light for the entire movie.

Yes, Arthur switches sides, without explanation. His nostalgic voice sometimes laments, sometimes proclaims, sometimes denounces his life, his ambitions and his goals. It is a voice disturbed by the life of a fixer he chose—the similar life like which is being lead by Clayton at the present. Using his limited time and sanity, Arthur tries to dissuade Michael from falling into the same pitfalls as he did.

The movie is neither a legal thriller nor a political thriller; it is not even a thriller at all. The stories from the fantasy world of Michael’s son’s book guide the characters to break free of their unwitting alliances to people with whom they identify; however, whether the people who do so are rewarded remains the other side of the coin. As the late lamented Sidney Pollack who plays Clooney’s superior notes in the movie, people like Arthur and Michael created unique niches for themselves—niches only them can create, and niches from which they can’t run away.

The film has no definite set of morals: it has a bad corporation at the bully pulpit, but the film in no Erin Brockovich. It is likewise named Michael Clayton, and centers on Michael’s world view, and his moral transformation (more like circular shift in morality in fact, since the film itself loops around the narrative) from a tool of his firm to a tool answerable to none but himself. In other words, at the end of the movie, from a mouth that spoke others’ words emerge his own thoughts and his own beliefs.

A good movie never coerces a viewer to agree with it. It neither blatantly puts its message on the table either. Michael Clayton is not only grand but also great because it informs the viewers that it is a movie with a message from the opening monologue, but does not reveal its full plot until well forty minutes into the movie. The movie fittingly ends with a long shot of Michael in a taxi, which ends with his knowing smirk towards the camera. It is as if he is mocking the audience who thinks it understands the message, but in fact not.