Antichrist

Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier)

Somewhere in this film is a thesis, an absolute point to it that defines exactly what it is that director Lars von Trier was hinting at when he made this maddeningly terrifying, wholly frustrating, perhaps-misogynistic film. That does not mean that this is not a good film, or one that should be ignored: just don't expect any easy answers from it. Don't expect a “point”. Don't expect to be told how to react to it. But do expect to react.

The story is simple enough: a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are vigorously fucking in their home late at night when their young son, Nick, a toddler, wanders out of his crib and falls out of a window, dying. Charlotte (I shall use the actor's names, since the characters have no names in the film) reacts horrendously to the loss, eventually being hospitalized and undergoing various psychiatric treatments. Her condition degrades to the point where she is unable to sleep, suffers from convulsions, hysteria, and self-harming behaviors. Her husband, a psychiatrist of some sort, decides to help her by taking her to the one place she reveals that she is most scared of: their cabin in the woods, Eden. There, in the middle of nature, alone, Charlotte's psyche degrades further until she becomes murderously psychotic.

Dafoe gives one of his typically subdued performances, playing the husband character as being clueless to his wife's distress, unable to cope with her emotions once is is alerted to her predicament, and once he realizes her emotional distress, remains distant in an attempt to objectively “cure” her with his own unique brand of therapy. Charlotte, on the other hand, provides a much more powerful performance. The physical and emotional duress with which von Trier challenges her is staggering. Seeing her in this film and in her performance as Stephanie in The Science Of Sleep is like witnessing day and the blackest night. It's clear that she worked much, much harder than Mr. Dafoe in her performance (not to demean his work), but I'd never seen anything quite like her work. The fragility, emotional instability, and overall degradation of not only her mind and body (man...what she does to her body), but also her soul is apparent. Nothing she does on screen is fake or insincere, and by the last act she becomes a scary visage of rage and violence, and it's astonishing to see that evolution throughout the film.

The actual story sounds very much like a horror film (which this should be considered: this is cerebral horror as well as visual, visceral horror). It is deceptively simple. The underlying themes and imagery of the actual film, though, are anything but. Von Trier (a director called by some, prior to this film, a misogynist) imbues the film with a nearly unbearable sense of dread that actualizes itself in various different ways: the sound of wind blowing because the growl of a hell-beast; acorns falling on the roof of the cabin become unnerving signals of approaching doom; the ground undulates and vibrates, the contours distorting at the edges (achieved through some impressive camera effects). The sound design itself was a marvel, immediately reminiscent of David Lynch’s foundry and industrial sound design that opened and permeated throughout Eraserhead. Here, von Trier uses sound to accentuate the aggression and ultimate violence by creating a cacophony of grating, rumbling, growling sounds, punctuated every so often with dreamlike instances of silence and steamy sighs.

Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who helped shape the frentic, kinetic look of last year's Slumdog Millionaire) provides some of the most beautiful imagery put to celluloid all year (honestly, regardless of the content, this film looks absolutely beautiful; each frame deserves to be framed on a wall). Mantle's restrained camera work and defused colors provide a memorable palette of visual expression to most of the film, but in other instances (such as the “dream” sequences and opening sequence), he shoots some of the most beautiful black-and-white sequences of the past decade, combining the two-toned images with a cranked-up camera to slow down time in the midst of -in the case of the opening sequence- vigorous, manic, almost hysterical fucking, counterpointed by a child's curious wandering to a window and eventual death. The snow that falls out the window falls one flake at a time; the water that flows off the bodies of the two lovers glistens and slides one drop at a time. Time slows down in this opening sequence, the only moment of true happiness for any of the characters that literally crashes at the crescendo of Lascia ch'io pianga from 'Rinaldo', which is the only sound played through the sequence.

However, all technicalities aside, this film is about one central theme: gynocide. Mankind’s eternal war against women. Before even walking into the theatre, I had read several reviews (most notably A.O Scott's over at The New York Times, and Devin Faraci's dissemination over at CHUD.com) and ever-present in each was the question of mysogony. Von Trier, with Antichrist, was waging his own war of sorts against the fairer sex, so they seemed to see. While Mr. Scott abhorred the film, seeing nothing of redeeming value within it, Mr. Faraci remarked how much he'd liked the film...though he shouldn't have. I too am in that same league, for several reasons.

The film posits many positions and questions, and none of them are easy to answer or even face, and some (and I feel I'm going to get a lot of flak for even saying this) I feel that, as a man, I am unable to ask without inviting glares. The first, perhaps the most important question I faced while watching the film is: “What is misogyny? What is the nature of it?” That's not to suggest that I don't know what misogyny is, but to what degree does misogyny extend? For example, in the film, Charlotte is pushed by Willem to come to terms with their son's death by using unconventional means, by facing her fears and confronting, without any real psychological protection, the very places that pain her and remind her of her son and that she fears most. To simplify the result, Charlotte snaps and attacks Willem (viciously...I'll get to that later), and tries to kill him before mutilating herself and then being killed herself by her husband. All of this is violence on many levels, and while it is easy to point at the son's death as the impetus of all the insanity, the film posits that perhaps the violence unleashed in the final act (which begins with the death of the son a year prior in the film's chronology) is in fact the end result of a long tragedy for the characters.

Now, the tone of this film is very “horror”: this can be described as a horror film (one that works more effectively than the current “torture porn” or “CW bullshit” that seem to define the horror genre of late). The typical horror film convention is that there is a killer (often male) terrorizing victims (often female). Here, the roles are reversed, with the female providing the threat and the male defending himself (or, if you want to really get into the structure, this film is like an inverse The Shining, where Wendy goes insane and tries to kill Jack). Charlotte's character is a writer who had spent a summer with her son working on her thesis, a book called Gynocide that worked as a chronicle of hatred and violence towards women, and she began to realize that throughout the countless centuries where women were victimized, women are just as capable of perpetrating violence and hatred as men. Therein lies the single issue I had not only with the film, but also with those who viewed the film and saw it as nothing but misogynistic hatred: are women not capable of being just as evil and vile and viciously violent as men? Are women not equal to men in terms of evil? Is it not misogynistic itself to deny women their violence, if that is what they choose?

If Willem Dafoe had been the character to go crazy and try to kill his wife, that would follow the normal horror film contention and there would be little issue with the film simply because it is conforming to the norm of the genre; however, when it is a woman being evil, a cry of “misogynist” is immediately cried out. To me, that is hypocrisy. I viewed the film as two characters interacting in a fucked-up way through a fucked-up situation and reaching fucked-up conclusions; rarely upon first viewing do I see anything more than characters. However, I feel that if there is a character of color, or of a handicap or, in this case, a woman, then that character represents to the public every single one of that denomination, and the public perception of that group hinges on how fair or balanced or benign a character within that represented group is portrayed. To me, again, that's hypocrisy.

This is a film about misogyny that is interpreted as being misogynistic due to its addressing that topic. The imagery and themes (the Three Fates; a tree reminiscent of fallopian tubes---under which Willem Dafoe hides himself, literally crawling back into the womb which, at that point in the story, betrays him to the violence of woman---, and Charlotte's degrading into an hysterical state) repeatedly highlight the film's exploration of men's attitudes in confronting, controlling, and ultimately trivializing the female psyche.

Nature, too, becomes a spectre of violence. Personified in three female animals that rove the woods outside the cabin and in the sudden horrific screams that Charlotte imagines hearing while with her son, nature is out to destroy the fragile stability of the human mind (and, once Charlotte refuses to resist any more, becomes exclusively the bane of men's “rational” minds). The Three Fates, the sisters, are personified in the guises of a dead crow brought back to life, a doe giving birth to a stillborn deer, and (the movie's most iconic image), a self-cannibalizing fox that speaks (literally)the undeniable message of nature to Dafoe: “Chaos reigns”.

What does all of this mean (and there is so, so much more...remember that I wrote of Charlotte's character becoming “hysterical”? Well, I meant that in the strictly Freudian sense. This film has a lot going on with it. I've maybe discussed half of it's themes, and haven't even touched on the psycho-sexual dynamics of the final acts of genital violence present in the final act)? To me, I'll put it like this: the film is about the condemnation of life. Charlotte's character rages against a world that took her child, but, in becoming one with nature, she realizes that giving birth is itself an act of death (something she herself discusses with Dafoe during the course of the film). In forming a new life, one forces that life to struggle, grow old, and eventually die. Childbirth, it seems, is prescribing a life sentence to someone. That is what I walked away with from this film. Dafoe's character cannot understand this fact, instead thinking that logic and rationality can cure all the ills of the world, when in fact the ills are much more cerebral and eternal and subjective: Charlotte's character, like any mother, knows the power of holding and giving life within her. Men can never understand that (and I'm talking the traditional definition of men here). As powerful an experience being a father is, for a mother it is much, much more powerful. It has to be. There is no way it can't be (look at it this way: a mother always knows that the child she's carrying is hers). Nature is life giving birth to life that will eventually die itself. The screams that Charlotte's character hears (both literal child's screams, and the “screams” of the acorns on the roof of their cabin at night) is nature itself, lamenting the lives lost through the act of birth, of the paradoxical destructive act of creation.

This is a hard, difficult film to sit through, and you'll be hard-pressed to sit down and watch it a second time. But if you do see it (and I cannot recommend it enough, but not without its warnings), be ready for lengthy discussions to follow. Fuck the people to condemn it as being purely about hating women, because it is not a film propagating that mentality. It is a film that strives to open a discussion about what it means to be rational, emotional, hysterical, alone, unloved, distant, violent, a man, a woman, a parent, depressed...it is a movie about ideas. Do they all coheir evenly? No. But whether you're swept up in the absolutely stunning cinematography, watching through fingers (as I was), or realizing just how little you knew about misogyny itself, you'll walk out of the theatre wanting to talk. In this case, as the fox says, chaos does reign. But out of the rubble of this film, hopefully enlightenment will arise.

Below are some leading critiques of the film, one by the "misogyny consultant".

http://tobatheinfilmicwaters.com/2009/08/01/interview-lars-von-triers-misogyny-consultant/

http://tobatheinfilmicwaters.com/2009/06/09/review-antichrist/

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/lars-von-trier-women-and-me-1763851.html

CHUD's own Devin Faraci

New York Times' A.O. Scott

P.S.- I hate the Dogme 95 school of filmmaking von Trier developed...

Riff Trax Live: Plan 9 From Outer Space

The worst movie of all time gets the MST3K treatment by three of that show's stars: Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbitt, and Kevin Murphy, performing live from Nashville, Tennessee and broadcast to the AMC 16 Theatre in Paramus, New Jersey (one of the few theatres in the Tri-State area to host the event). The purpose of the show (for those who have never followed Mystery Science Theater, The Film Crew, or RiffTrax) is to showcase feature-length films (often, if not exclusively, some of the worst ever made) and provide running comedic commentary throughout. The original Mystery Science Theater premiered in 1988 and ran until 1999, garnering a large cult following and several Emmys for writing. Being fans ourselves (and having converted several people myself), I reserved tickets and took Lacey to the show, anticipating a brief introduction to the movie and then diving right into the show.
Here the event was vastly different than what was expected: an entire movie theatre full of fans (completely full. The show was sold out), broadcast live (at points the signal was lost, which prompted shouts of "Oh no!" in unison from everyone) and even featuring fake commercials (from Something Awful regular Rich Kyanta, the most amusing being a fake ad for the "Three Day Mill Event") and a sing-along session (by geek musician John Coulton, who "Re: Zombies" and "The Future Soon"). Host Veronica Belmont was amiable, although she seemed slightly nervous in her first minutes on-stage, although she visibly mellowed out.
The show featured the afformentioned Ed Wood anti-masterpiece, and an instructional short "The Flying Stewardesses" being the opening act. While it was somewhat obvious that Nelson, Corbitt and Murphy had rehearsed some of the lines beforehand, there were still many instances where they were visibly confused by the content of the films; at certain times during the show, three video images of each host would appear on-screen alongside the film (think picture-in-picture) and show the hosts reacting and commenting. While it was amusing to see the bemused reactions to the films they were watching, after the second transition to the picture-in-picture it got very distracting (it wound up appearing another 3 times in the course of the show). Eight times out of ten, the jokes and riffs hit their marks (and even when they didn't, I'd notice things in the film that were just too ridiculous to not be funny), and the hosts even referenced the MST3K episode The Atomic Brain when poking fun at actor Tor Johnson, who played the police chief in Plan 9 and Lobo in the aforementioned MST3K film (I think I was the only one to directly notice the reference).
What most surprised me, however, was simply the amount of people in the theatre. Young people, old people, people my age, an entire family, and (to the right of me) a single well-dressed 30-something who disappeared about an hour into the show and when he came back to his seat he smelled of rum and vodka. Awesome.
It was nice to realize that there were so many people within a ten-mile radius who took time out to sit down to laugh at (and with) an inexplicbly failed film (one that isn't bad conceptually...just executed poorly for a variety of reasons). Towards the end of the film it also dawned on me how, despite its horrible execution, Plan 9 From Outer Space still managed not only to fill an entire multiplex theatre in competition with summer blockbusters, but managed to do so a full fifty years after it was made. That's something to be fuckin' impressed about, folks.
I hope the turnout was well enough that there is another event. I might just get a group to go this time.

In personal news, I am currently waiting to hear back from from the director of a website focusing on sustainability and social awareness and activism. I applied to write a 30 minute script abuot Buckminster Fuller, and am hoping I get the job (despite the fact that it's non-paying...but could lead to paid work in the future). Getting paid to write? Sign me the fuck up. That's half of what I want to do with my life!

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds ends its two-and-a-half-hour run time with one of the main characters smiling directly into the camera, addressing the audience and stating proudly, "I think I may have just made my masterpiece." To say that the line is meant to reflect director Tarantino's mindset in regards to this, his sixth film, is apt (although I beg to differ: I still consider Jackie Brown to be his best film to date...let the arguing begin!) but somewhat premature. This isn't Tarantino's best film, but it's right up there, right next to Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. Like that film, Basterds unwinds slowly, methodically, perfectly paced and with the characteristic dialogue and set pieces and ratcheting of tension that climaxes into one of the most perfectly staged, purely cinematic endings in recent memory.

However, don't let the title or the trailers fool you: this isn't a men-on-a-mission story. This isn't necessarily about the Basterds (they're in maybe one third of the film's run time). Their story unfolds tangentally along with that of the film's protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent, who looks suspiciously like Julie Delpy), who owns a cinema in Nazi-occupied France (under the assumed name of Emmanuelle). The two stories intertwine when the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere of Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda film, Nation's Pride, starring Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl playing an oddly sympathetic Nazi war hero/movie star in the line of Audie Murphy), which will not only be attended by every high-ranking Nazi in the war (including Hitler, played as a caricature by Martin Wuttke), but is also being hosted at Shosanna's cinema. While the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere by blowing up the theatre and everyone in it, Shosanna plans to likewise sabotage the film by igniting the highly flammable nitrate film negatives archived therein. That is the entire plot. Not exactly the "men-on-a-mission" film the trailers and posters suggest.

What is left to enjoy (or wait in anxiety for) are scenes of the Jewish-American Basterds killing and scalping Nazis and trying to acquire information on the location of Goebbels' premiere from the German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), Frederick Zoller's seemingly innocent courting of Shosanna, or Col. Hans Landa's (the incredible and charismatic Cristoph Waltz) suspicion of Shosanna after being introduced to him by Zoller at a luncheon with Goebbels. That, essentially, is the plot of the film. There are, however, moments when the film stops so Tarantino can indulge in several instances of characteristic pop culture masturbation.

I know, I know: pop culture is what Tarantino "gets", but the problem with this script (his second weakest, following the scripts for Kill Bill) is that there are scenes where people talk about 1940's-era pop culture just because. There is one scene which is a prime example: while the Basterds are waiting for von Hammersmark to arrive at a bar, the action cuts to the interior of the bar, where a group of Nazis are playing a drinking game. The game consists of writing the name of a character or famous person on the back of a card, passing the card (unseen) to the person on the right, and the person has to stick the card on their forehead and guess what character they are. The game comes into play later when the three German-speaking Basterds play the game with a Nazi corporal, but prior to the introduction of those Basterds, we don't need to see the other characters playing the game.

The above example is the singlar scene that I remembered, and the only time in the film where I actually felt the film's length and just wanted the action to begin again (I actually looked at my watch to see how long it took for the plot to get moving again). However, the opening scene (which introduces us to both Col. Landa and Shosanna) plays out just as long and "slow" (I guess "slow-burning" is a more apt description), but is infintely more suspenseful on virtue of the fact that what the two characters (Col. Landa and Mnsr. LaPadite, a minor character who is hiding Shosanna) are talking about is actually important to the story. This opening scene, along with the final forty minutes, features Tarantino writing with utmost skill.

For such an epic movie, the action seems very contained, and most of the exteriors are shot in medium or long shots, making the film seem a lot smaller in scale than the story itself is. Whether this was intentional on the part of Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson (who otherwise does a typically amazing job) is unknown, but seeing as the film felt slightly rushed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was scaled down simply due to scheduling.

Those squabbles aside, though, I did enjoy the film immensely, and it's only now, after having been able to mull it all over in my head and converse and find others' points of view that I think I understand The Point of it. In the August 24th & 31st issue of Newsweek, reviewer Daniel Mendelsohn laments that Inglourious Basterds, with its penchant for brutal violence perpetrated against a brutal regime, sells a message of "visceral pleasure of revenge" by "...turning Jews into Nazis". What he seems to warn against is the act of audiences internalizing and applauding such behavior and thus extraxt a deep emotional satisfaction from the revenge meted out by victims to their perpetrators. At its lightest, Basterds makes its protagonists as thuggish as its villains; at its worst, it's distorting the past and representing the victims as overpowering their oppressors (which is reflective, so Mr. Mendelsohn suggests, by our cultural tendency to find meaning and empowerment from tragedy: as he writes, "...it may be that our present-day taste for 'empowerment,' our anxious horror of being represented as 'victims' - nowadays there are no victims, only 'survivors'- has begun to distort the representation of the past, one in which passive victims, alas, vastly outnumbered those who were able to fight back."

Mendelsohn is right in asserting that the film is, indeed, a revenge film. But where I disagree with him is his assertion that this distortion of history (so obvious and blatant that you must have been living under a rock if you didn't notice it) is damaging to our society. The final 40 minutes of the film, where (SPOILERS!!!!!) the entire Nazi high command and Adolf fucking Hitler get machine-gunned to death in a burning theater (END SPOILERS!!!) speak volumes to the power of cinema as a weapon (both literal and figuratively). Hitler and most of the high command escaped justice, opting to take their own lives instead; at least in one film they get theirs (I almost want to count Raiders of the Lost Ark in this capacity also: there is nothing more satisfying than watching Nazis get their faces melted and heads detonated by the wrath of God Himself.)

The sight of Eli Roth pumping bullets into Hitler brought a cheer from the audience: this is something that, deep down, we'd wanted to see happen. Tarantino has already rewritten history by making a period film (face it: nearly every period piece - based on actual events or not- is embellished and, thus, a product of imagination. Did The Dirty Dozen receive such condemnation for Lee Marvin's detonation of a Nazi high command gala? If not, why?), so he might as well go all-out.

The aforementioned cheer, though, was unnerving in retrospect: it occurs after a scene in which the Nazi high command is watching a propaganda film based on Zoller's single-handed sniping of 80+ Allied infantry. As the bullets ring and buzz on screen, the audience cheers emphatically. Zoller, however, leaves and later tells Shosanna, "I don't really like those parts." Once the real bullets start flying and the Nazis start burning and the audience of which I am a member start cheering...how different is my reaction to those of the Nazis onscreen? Maybe that is the transitive power of film: to encite emotions we would otherwise not express.

Maybe Mr. Mendelsohn is right: revenge is a visceral pleasure. Maybe that's the point Tarantino was trying to make with the aforementioned juxtaposition. When the victims are just as ready for violence as their perpetrators, that reveals a lot of human nature, of our desires and our emotions. (And what would Mendelsohn say of this fact: the film is fucking HUGE in Germany. CHUD.com's Devin Faraci reports on that story over at his site, and I sympathize wholeheartedly with his interpretation as to why the success might have occurred.) If I didn't want violence, why, in any scene containing the Basterds and Nazis and there was TOO MUCH dialogue, why would I want a gun fight to break out? Why did I find the dialogue to go on for too long? Was it that I was expecting a different type of movie, or merely that the anticipation of violence overpowered my need to see characters exist in a fictional universe?

To be honest, I think Tarantino just thought it'd be fun to show Jews killing Nazis (something my Israeli coworker complained wasn't in the film enough). But I'm glad he left some room for discussion in there. I recommend it for anyone looking for a good late-summer entry.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2009, by Kathryn Bigelow)

In the opening minutes of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, we're introduced to Bravo Company, a bomb disposal unit stationed in Baghdad in 2003. With a month left into their tour of duty, Bravo Company loses their chief bomb disposal engineer (played by Guy Pearce) in a deftly constructed sequence that illustrates just how harrowing an experience the battlefield is, as well as the unforeseen toll it takes on those involved.
The opening scene shows a routine bomb disposal mission that gets botched when a piece of equipment breaks and the squad leader (who is also in charge of defusing the makeshift bombs) is killed. Replacing him is the volatile Staff Sergeant William James (played by Jeremy Renner...more on him in a bit), a man who is less hardened by spending every waking moment in the field expecting something to kill him as he embracing of that lifestyle. The other men in his company are Sergeant JT Sanborn (played by Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (played by Brian Geraghty), and while at first impressed by James' skill at his job, soon realize that that their new leader is unhinged, impulsive, and increasingly reckless. The story, as iterated earlier, involves Bravo Company's last few weeks into their rotation, and whether they can stay alive long enough to return home.
Kathryn Bigelow is a revelation here. The director of k-19: The Widowmaker and the mid-90's actioner Point Break (yes. The One with Keanu Reeves) deftly balances taut action with a character-driven plot (true, the events in which the characters find themselves are dictated by outside factors, but how they react to those mitigating factors set up moments for deeper poignancy later on in the film). Also refreshing is her lack of political agenda: this isn't a story about the factors leading to the war, or whether it is "justified" or not, or even an argument that we "should" be there: this is a story about the people who are there in the shit, doing the work that none of us are doing and not getting enough thanks, praise, or recompense, and rarely waver in their devotion. The apolitical stance the film takes is refreshing, as the heavy-handed messaging of "the war is a mistake and unjustified" makes one view the soldiers overseas almost as the villains, when in fact they're just doing their job. Bigelow cuts out all the preachy bullshit and just lets the soldiers' stories speak for themselves.
The devotion, Bigelow observes, is not purely to ideology or country, but to each other. Walking out of the theatre I felt as I had when I went to see Black Hawk Down and Eric Bana says to another character, when asked why he keeps going to the front, "When I go home people'll ask me, 'Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?' You know what I'll say? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it. That's all it is." That's what this movie could be boiled down to as well: just three men who keep going in for each other, just to keep the other safe. And the best part? The movie allows you to come to that conclusion on your own, the characters don't have to say it.
With that out in open, Bigelow is free to display some extremely tense scenes. The first time that Staff Sargeant James diffuses the IEDs (a scene that is used as the poster image) illustrates not just the danger of the battlefield, but also the suspicion by the soldiers of the Iraqi citizenry, as well as showing the second-nature attitude of Staff Sargeant James towards his work (a last-minute hunch clues him into a bundle of IEDs, and he sets about disarming them knowing full well they could blow any second).
While the main story is about Bravo Company's final days and their subsequent attempts to work together and trust together (an effort which only seems to pay of in a tense sniper shoot-out involving some mercenaries and insurgents), one of the most lasting and important subplots involves Sergeant James' instability and recklessness (which culminates in one of the team members getting injured and being forced out of action).
Refreshingly, each character is three-dimensional and relatable, expertly acted and distinct in personality from one another. Sergeant Sanborn (Mackie) is a resolute, proud, no-nonsense leader, doing his utmost to look after each of his men. But throughout the course of the film James' recklessness forces James to reevaluate himself: at first he hates James for his insubordination, then loathes him for his recklessness before trusting him for his expertise. By the end, Sanborn is unsure even of his reason for being in the front, and finds that James' attitude is the only thing that keeps him alive in the battlefield.
Eldrigdge (Geraghty) suffers most throughout the film, as he is the most emotionally weak of the group. He depends on his psychiatrist, Col. John Cambridge (Christian Camargo), while at the same time openly hating him for not knowing exactly what risks are out in the field: Eldridge is unstable, blaming himself for the death of his prior company leader, and his connection to Col. Cambridge is the only stable relationship he has in an otherwise unstable world. When James comes to rely on him (again, during the sniper battle), Eldridge slowly becomes more confidant, particularly when he saves Bravo Company by shooting a lone insurgent.
However, James is the star of the show, and Renner owns every scene he's in. He is at turns reckless, reliable, cooperative, independent, unstable, commands a unique sense of knowing his enemy, and even expressing some remorse and friendship to a young Iraqi boy named Beckham (Christopher Sayegh) who James befriends when the boy sells him bootleg DVDs. It is Beckham's friendship with James which proves to be James' emotional undoing, and provides one of the more emotionally rending sequences in the film.
I would comment on the music, cinematography (which, to Barry Ackroyd's credit, is stunningly beautiful) and production design, but all worked so seamlessly as to go unnoticed (and that's a compliment, don't get me wrong.) Actually, Ackroyd's cinematography is effective in several instances. While in Iraq (which is most of the movie) the camera is constantly moving, never set up on a tripod, so as to convey a never-ending sense of movement and instability; in instances of dramatic events (during the first explosion which kills Bravo Comapny's prior bomb technician, to a beautiful shot showing a spent bullet casing bounding on the sand) the camera slows down, highlighting the dramatic importance of the event. When James returns home near the end of the film, the camera is stable, static, the framing cramped with borders (such as a supermarket asile, a doorway, the bars of a crib). This is the real imprisonment, where life is static, cramped, and claustrophobic. James' inability to even decide what breakfast cereal to buy showcases just how impossible it is for him to readjust to civilian life, something which, so I've heard from second-hand accounts, is sadly common (but not as common as you'd think).
James' speech to his son, in the penultimate scene, is apt not only to other men and women in his position and with his experience, but also to anyone to find meaning in his or her life"

"You love your mommy. And your daddy. You love your pajamas, and your crib. You love your toys. You love everything. But you'll grow up and realize that your toys are just pieces of plastic, and you won't love them as much. You'll maybe find four or five things you love. And soon, when you're older, you'll maybe have one thing you love."

I remembered that speech out of everything in the movie. Writer Mark Boal's script is able to relate the story of everyone, not just those of the soldiers. And that's incredibly refreshing. In understanding them, we understand ourselves. And in doing both, hopefully we'll be able to treat our soldiers with the respect and consideration they fought and trained to deserve.
This is one of the best movies this summer, and is high in the running for best of the year. This is a film that has great character work, amazing acting (I wouldn't be surprised if Renner earns himself an Oscar or Golden Globe nom. He is the show here, and I can't wait to see what else he can do), and tense action. And it has all this while being true to its subject and not pandering to the audience, nor to any ideology.
I couldn't recommend this any more. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King

Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King (2009)

Big Whiskey is the oddly named new album by the Dave Matthews Band, a follow-up to the reserved, toned-down, dense, yet extremely listenable Stand Up (2005). The album is also the first released after the death of lead saxophonist and founding member LeRoi Moore following an off-roading accident last year. With Moore's unfortunate passing, the band seems to have lost most of the lofty, free-flowing jam-session-esque sound that has characterized them for the past 15 years. Also gone, it seems, is any cohesion to the album, and what we're left with is a jumble of songs that sound extremely similar and sedate yet also, paradoxically, thematically unrelated to each other. Compared to the band's past efforts (especially Before These Crowded Streets, the Grammy nominated album that weaved a tapestry of melancholic sounds that segued into each other; and the aforementioned Stand Up, which kept up a dark, morose, yet ultimately transcendent theme throughout), Big Whiskey is like the aural equivalent of a poorly planned theme party set in a Southern mansion where, inside, each room of the mansion portrays and entirely separate theme ("You got alligator in my whiskey!" "Yeah? Well, you got time bombs in my squirming monkeys!" "Whare's the groogrux? What's a groogrux? WHERE THE FUCK IS THE GROOGRUX?!") The few songs that offer related and complimentary sounds and themes are buffered by a slew of songs that seem as if they were recorded right before the band went to sleep, and offer no topical relation to each other. (Why is that a problem? Well, I tend to think about the comparison with another band I listen to, Gorillaz: whereas their first, self-titled album is a disjointed hodgepodge of listenable tracks, their 2005 sophomore effort, Demon Days, is cohesive funky, apocalyptically catchy, and one can listen to the songs individually or as a whole and come out with a favorable result either way. Not so with Big Whiskey.) After the streamlined beauty of Stand Up, it's a shame the band stumbled back a few steps with this album.
To its credit, though, Big Whiskey does offer some listenable tunes, just nothing I can describe as jam worthy (I can only seriously picture 2 or 3 songs of the album's 13 being added to their concert set lists). The opening track, "Grux", is a one-and-a-half minute solo by the late LeRoi. The track starts slow and melancholic before building to a pitch, while in the background we faintly hear a band starting to tune up softly: the final high note holds, lingering, and fades away, instead transforming into Dave's energetic yowl which throws us into the next track, "Shake Me Like A Monkey". "...Monkey" sounds and feels like classic Dave Matthews: free flowing, lofty, and and an energtic tempo (also: the song is about sex. Shocking!) The next track, "Funny the Way It Is", is comparable in tone to the band's previous "Mother, Father".....only slower. And more somber. Much, mich slower. "Funny The Way It Is" lacks the energy or impact of "Mother, Father", and it suffers for it. Unfortunately, the successive tracks fare no better, and it isn't until the quadfecta of "Spaceman", "Squirm", "Alligator Pie", and (my favorite of the album) "Seven" that an overall theme and cohhesion actually appears. "Squirm" sounds like the opening track to Sgt. Pepper, where a fictional band starts performing at a fictional venue...but here it is unfortuantely stuck in the middle of the album instead of the opening (or at least the follow-up track to the excellent "Grux"); it just feels incredibly out of place here. It's hard to even describe the sound of the songs other than the four I just named, since they have the energy of a Benadryll fiend hopped up on horse tranquilizers, and I honestly can't remember a single tune from any of them, even having listened to the entire album 6 full times since July (although the chorus to "Why I Am" is prettty good...considering what a tepid song it is.)
But in an album of 13 songs, I've listed less than half of those that I actually like. Is it enough to have only 6 songs, barely half the album, that actualyl sound as if they have any life, energy, and "umph" to them, that I might actually want to listen to over and over again? I don't know. I don't think it is enough for me. Hell, I can listen to Stand Up and Before These Crowded Streets the whole albums through, but I can't see myself doing that very often for Big Whiskey.
Perhaps LeRoi's passing put a sombre tone to the rest of the band members, and therefore the album (although he was alive to record/collaborate most of the songs of the album before saxophonist Jeff Coffin covered for him for a few songs), or perhaps his death made the remaining band members contemplate their own mortality and actually mature a bit and break out of the college-frat-rock demographic with which they're associated. But, dammit, that's what makes them who they are. And, to be honest, they did that with Before These Crowded Streets and Stand Up, both to killer effect. One can mature without cutting outthe energy and verve (I'm looking at you, Green Day). Hell, the Beatles grew up a bit and wound up releasing fucking Rubber Soul and Revolver. Maybe this is the Dave Matthews Band's Rubber Soul. Just a lot less good.
It's a stumble and a misstep, but the hardcore fans will find at least a few songs to like here. I did.

P.S. --- if you can find the bonus track, "Beach Ball", it's SO much better than any other song on the album. Take that from what you will.


Enjoy a remastered version of the song "Seven", my favorite of the album, and featuring a ridiculous picture of Dave on a giant screen at some concert.



And the aforementioned bonus track, "Beach Ball":

Moon

Moon (2009)

EDIT: It is August 4th, 2009. I apologize for the late post, but better late than never...

While this entry will mostly be devoted to reviewing Duncan Jones' Moon, I will also be talking about the many, many deaths that have occurred over the past week-and-a-half (this also hasn't been a good week for me either, hence the lateness of this entry).
Last week saw the death of Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's sidekick throughout the 1970's and 1980's, a staple of late-night television and a personality that juxtaposed and counterpointed exceedingly well with the affable and lively Carson. Mr. McMahon's deep voice is almost instantly recognizable with TV fans, and while I cannot vouch for his career (being only 22 and too young to remember his work), he was truly great, an icon of television.

Thursday, June 25 was also the date that Farrah Fawcett, iconic actress from the 1970's and 1980's, succumbed to cancer at the age of 62. While Ms. Fawcett was featured in roles in films such as Logan's Run, Saturn 3, and episodes of S.W.A.T. and The Six Million Dollar Man, she achieved true star status as Jill Munroe in Charlie's Angels, and met critical acclaim in the drama The Burning Bed some years later. A poster featuring Ms. Fawcett in a red swimsuit defined the 1970's woman, and that image alone has sold over 11 million copies since its release in the late 1970's. Ms. Fawcett had been receiving treatment for cancer for nearly six years before finally succumbing on Thursday morning in Santa Monica.

Thursday finally also brought about the shocker of the decade as Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed (and rightfully so) King of Pop, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 50 (in case you've been living under a rock in a cave at the bottom of a mountain for the past 2 weeks and just now found out). With all the tributes and specials that have aired about him in the past week, anything I add here will seem somewhat anticlimactic. However, I will say that whatever your predisposition about him (based largely on the legal troubles and eccentric behaviors he'd exhibited for the past few years), he truly did redefine pop music and influenced our entire generation of entertainers. And while his music and performances are reminiscent of James Brown and Little Richard and, to an extent, Elvis Prestley, he redefined everything they did, made it his own, and pushed it beyond anything they could have dared. Few seemed able to separate Michael Jackson the man from Michael Jackson the entertainer. And he did everything he could to entertain. For me, Michael Jackson will always exist as he did from 1980 to 1993, where everything he did was new (seriously, what other artist or band would premiere a music video that could be considered an event?). I was waiting to see what the tabloids would do: knowing they'd spent the past decade making money smearing him, I just wanted to laugh at their attempts to pretend to care that he'd died (just today I read an article in the Post once again referring to him as "Jacko", fucking vultures.) It was just a surreally sad day, watching all of his music videos (it took Michael Jackson dying for MTV to actually play music videos again). His appearance on The Simpsons was sublime (I tried finding good quality snippets of his "Happy Birthday Lisa", but no avail), and I still think "A-B-C' and "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 is the very defenition of pure, unadulterated happiness, the aural version of candy. You did a lot, Mr. Jackson, and influenced a lot of people. There won't be another like you.

EDIT: This is a late post, and this is all I will say about the above celebrities. Too much of a deal has been made of Michael Jackson, I've probably matched the coverage of Farrah Fawcett, and, surprisingly, I'm pretty sure I've surpassed every network in their mention of Mr. McMahon. And with that...I'm done.

Now, on to the film.

Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, a man atthe end of his three-year contract as the sole mechanic on a moon-based station. Bell acts primarily as a mechanic and technician, not at all the know-how guys how sent him there, nor a scientist researching anything of interest. The company in question (Lunar Industries) is the equivalent of an energy conglomerate today (Lunar Industries harvests solar energy (helium-3) trapped in the moon's soil, and Sam's mission is to send shipments of the fuel back). The year? Unspecified and unimportant, all that is important is that it is sometime after next year, a future that looks plausible and feels just as plausible.

Sam, as we learn early on, is desperately lonely. The real-time communications with Earth is disrupted, so all he can rely on are prerecorded messages sent from his wife, Tess, and daughter, Eve. In charge of most of the technical aspects, keeping him on schedule, and providing a sort of friendship is the clunky, moderately mobile robot, GERTY (voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey). While out investigating a fault in one of tehe harvesters, Sam crashes his rover and blacks out, only to wake up again in his base with no memory of how he'd gotten there. An investigation into the station's logs hint that something a bit sinister is actually occurring, and Sam returns to the site of the crash only to literally find himself lying injured in the rover he'd wrecked. Now with what apepars to be his clone in tow, Sam must find out what happened that he has a clone, how long he's been on the base, and how to escape the lunar base before a Lunar Industries rescue team arrives in a matter of days.

That might seem a cut-and-dry look at the film, but there truly is something more going on in the story. Duncan Jones' minimalist direction makes great use of the practical effects he utilizes for the exterior scenes, and showcases Sam Rockwell's ability to command the scene (or, in this case, the entire film) merely with a look of his eye. The editing likewise worked exceedingly well not just in keeping the pace of the film comfortable (especially when Rockwell's barely interacting with anyone else), but also in effectively convincing the viewer that Rockwell is actually interacting with his clone (the repartee he has with himself is particularly witty and flows naturally).

The production design by Tony Noble is reminiscent of 2001, but unlike that film, the whites and greys of the space station are soiled with dirt and oil and grime, or populated with posters, pictures, calendars, dirty dishes and clothes, and even a ping-pong table to provide a more lived-in, less antiseptic look of the future. And while GERTY sounds a lot like HAL, GERTY's use of emoticons is endearing (and funny) and actually makes him resonate as a character. The practical effects (again) were extremely convincing and I'm happy to see that they're not entirely obsolete. Even the fact the Bell's EVA suit is grimey and dirty, and that BEll himself wears a baseball cap while in his rover creates a real-world, lived-in sensation to the film).

Clint Mansell's score, as always, impresses. He provides a moody theme that opens and closes the film which is at once isolating and empowering (perhaps his best score since The Fountain, which is still my all-time favorite of his). Gary Shaw's minimalist cinematography highlights the starkness of Bell's world, as well as the foreboding sense of his predicament (lots of frames-within-the-frame; claustrophobic close-ups; lighting that hightlights the stark whites and greys of the interiors).

Moon, to me, is less about what it means to be alive, and more to do with how, to most of the world (which here is portrayed as distant, unreachable, and difficult to relate with), we are expendable: here to do our job and disappear. Our aspirations--- whether they be to escape, be happy, or even just find meaning in what would appear to the everyman to be our common, meaningless lives--- mean little. Just get the job and move on. That doesn't do for Sam Bell. And it shouldn't do for us.

If you want a great film with a great performance, a slick, stylized look, and well-paced direction by a new director (who happens to be David Bowie's son!), I highly recommend Moon as the antidote to what is looking to be a rather dour summer.

Below are trailers to the few films I'm actually interested in seeing later this summer:

P.S. --- I shall be attending the Toronto Film Festival this year as well; sadly, not for something on which I'd worked, but hopefully I shall be seeing Ong Bak 2.

The Taking Of Pelham 123

The Taking Of Pelham 123 (2009)



Within five minutes the crew of four hijackers is aboard the train. Everything is planned to a tee, calculated, not overlooking any sign of countermove by the MTA workers aboard the train, the MTA dispatch workers at Grand Central Station, the New York City police, or any of the passengers. Calmly and methodically, the hijackers position themselves within the first car, disconnect the first car with the rest of the train, drive it to the middle of the tunnel between 42nd and 50th St., and let havoc pile up before contacting the MTA and making their demands.
When the time is right Robert Shaw picks up the 2-way radio, and calmly and coldy speaks to the irrascible Walter Matthau and makes his demands, "One million dollars in one hour, or a hostage dies for every minute you are late"...



Oh wait. That was 35 years ago, and both Matthau and Shaw are long dead. The decidely Un-PC dialogue and interactions that made the originals interesting, funny, fun, relatable, and real are gone and replaced with Brian Helgeland's snappy if slightly expository dialogue. Helgeland's characters exude testosterone and snappy dialogue the plot unfolds at a comfortably fast pace (the hijacking occurs within the first 5 minutes of the film) so as not to waste any time, but something feels decidedly "off" with this film.
The biggest issue is the casting of leads Denzel Washington and John Travolta as protagonist Walter Garber and villainous mastermind Ryder, respectively. Director Tony Scott focuses solely on these two characters, making them the most fully-formed of anyone else in the movie (something which the original forgoes in an attempt to make every character ---protagonist, villain, and passengers --- at least interesting).
Garber, as played by Washington, is a man who is demoted to train dispatcher after taking a bribe some years ago, so in casting Washington one immediately gets the sense that this is someone who should be in control, but unfortunately isn't. While Washington's turn as "average-Joe-action-hero" in the third act (more on that in a bit) rings less true, this tweaking of his backstory at least makes the image of Washington sitting behind a dispatch desk more plausible. Unlike Ryder's backstory, Garber's backstory makes him a more plausible character for the simple fact that, through the casting of Washington, Garber stopped being an "everyman" and became the center of control; Matthau, back in 1974, was able to be the sardonic everyman who eventually outwits the hijackers; Washington just looks as if he's always on top of his game. At least the casting choice is justified in part by Helgeland's backstory to the character.
Travolta on the other hand plays his role with the subtly of a drunken Jackson Pollack throwing paint on a canvas...only without the artistic merit. Ryder here is given a ridiculous backstory (he's a former Wall Street shark who siphoned funds from a pension fund and was summarily thrown in jail, justifying his grduge against New York), tattoos, sunglasses (in the subway...for some reason) and the most ridiculous handlebar mustache that he might as well have been in biopic about the Village People (which seems apt, in regards to the hints of homosexuality in the character). Every other line said (or rather "shouted") is "Motherfucker", but Travolta cracks his voice while shouting, as if he didn't really know what he was doing and seems uncomfortable in his role. Whoever designed the character's look (especially that fucking mustache) must be stuck in the mid-1990's, when "badass" meant tattoos and scowls (that's not scary. At all. AT ALL). Robert Shaw's character, on the other hand, is given little backstory (the only solid piece of history about him is that he's a former mercenary), never loses his cool, and remains cool, composed and even polite as he's executing people. Travolta is so unhinged he becomes a farce, adn he's played characters like that so often that it's old (hell, his Howard Saint character from 2004's The Punisher is more threatening). Not only is he too unhinged and goofy-looking to appear menacing, but the fact that he's a former Wall Street hustler, to me, implies that he would be more the person to finance and supply the hijackers and reap the benefits, not sit down there in the subway with a gun in his hand. Gone also are the interactions between the hijackers, where we learn to distinguish each as being separate personalities: in this film, I don't even remember hearing the names of the gunmen, and only Ramos had any lines, and they were a lot stronger and in control than Ryder. May Guzman should have been the villain!
I guess the point about Ryder's backstory being unbelievable is more of a personal nitpick, since I'm always of the opinion that the less known about a character (especially a villain or antagonist), the more interesting (or scary) s/he becomes. Examples? Most recently there have been three outstanding villains: Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, and The Joker in The Dark Knight. What all these characters (which garnered each actor an Oscar, and remain prime examples of evil on film for the past decade) have in common is that they have a limited backstory (the only one with even half a past is Plainview). Explain too much about an iconic villain or character and you strip him of the mystery and interest factor, and the result would be the Halloween remake. (*shudders*)
However, back to this review...
Other actors do well with what screen time and material they're given, the most interesting being John Turturro as Camonetti (the "Greaseball motherfucka'"), a hostage negotiator; James Gandolfini as the Mayor, a pleasant and likable mix of Guiliani and Bloomberg; and Luis Guzman as Phil Ramos, Ryder's right-hand-man and former MTA employee who seems to be the real brains behind the operation (and he's also criminally underused and I wish he was in the film for longer than he was). Barely present? The women. Sure, there's Regina the MTA worker who herds the passengers off the train, and there's Garber's wife (who I don't even think got a name), and there's the girlfriend of a hostage who, while trying to perform a striptease for her boyfriend instead witnesses, via webcam, the hijacking. But this is very much a man's film, so they're unfortunately pushed aside.
Director Tony Scott seems to forget such cumbersome filmmaking techniques like "composition", "pacing", "clarity", "tension", and "relativity". This is the Tony Scott from Domino making a film that should be more like Crimson Tide or True Romance: a film that slowly builds to a dramatic climax. Instead the film opens loudly, and suddenly, to Jay-Z's "99 Problems" as Ryder walks down to the subway, and as the credits play we witness each hijacker getting into place. This is done cleverly (though I don't for the life of me know why he picked that song). But where Scott used the credits to push the story, he then forgets that great use of screentime to show off some directorial "style": at least 3 times in the film we witness either Garber, the Mayor, or Ryder talking to someone (offscreen or not) about something relatively mundane as the camera WHIP-PANS-AROUND-BECAUSE-IT'S-SO-FAST-PACED-AND-EXCITING!!! and then he'll open up the iris to the camera and streak the image and slow.....the.....film.....down....to.....dramatize....NOTHING (this happened during a helicopter flight near the end, when we were treated to no less than four separate slo-mo shots of a helicopter flying over New York). Other flourishes were more confusing: several point-of-view shots from Ryder's viewpoint through a blurry window showed that the camera was either not in focus or the lens was covered in a prism of some sort that blurred everything together, but I couldn't tell what the hell I was looking at. During the race to get the money to the subway, we were treated to shots lasting no more than a second, shot in handheld, with the camera zoomed in so the car or motorcycle in question filled the entire screen: if it weren't for the fact that the movie presented a map indicating where the money car was in relation to its destination, I wouldn't have been able to tell if it was driving down Broadway, a side street, flying through the air, or shooting out of someone's buttcrack. I hate that zoom-in-and-handheld-super-fast-cutting-in-a-car-chase shit.
Every bit of action is cranked up to 10, every line Travolta spews is shouted at level 22, and the music is cranked to 15 (whenever the film cut to the money cars, the soundtrack blasted a rap song, whereas the preceding and succeeding scene would have very subtle, mellow instrumentals playing... suffice it to say it didn't counterpoint very well.) How amp up is the action, when the action arrives? Well, in the original the money car causes a few accidents, then hits a fence, flips over and is totalled and the money is handed over to cops on motorbikes; in this version the money car hits about three or four cars that FLIP OVER possibly killing the passengers and drivers, and then gets hit by an ambulance, flipping over about 8 times, lands in the middle of the FDR Drive, and then an X-Wing fighter swoops down and blows it up. It happens EXACTLY like that. It's as if Scott is overcompensating for the relative lack of action by ramping everything up once the action gets going.
Alexander Witt, the second-unit director, did a commendable job with the chase sequences. It's jsut a shame that Scott's choice in shots seemed to prefer medium and close-up shots where wide shots would be best. I'm no action director, but if I were spending millions of dollars on an action sequence, I would want to shoot it in a way that the audience can actually see what's happening and take the time to absorb everything. Still, Mr. Witt (whose prior credit includes Casino Royale, amongst many other personal favorites) did a great job with the action...it just seemed like too much in what should otherwise be a potboiler thriller.
Whether this film is a remake to the 1974 film, or a third adaptation of the John Godey novel by the same name, one thing is true: it is solid enough until the action starts. It wasn't a vast improvement on the original, but I wasn't bored, and remember laughing at a few of Helgeland's lines. Once the chase is on, and once the third act starts everything seems to fall apart and it becomes a by-the-numbers thriller, as Garber realizes he's the ONLY person who can catch Ryder: I couldn't buy that, seeing as we've been led to accept Garber as a smarter-than-average everyman for two acts and it is unlikely he'll have the composure, skills, and driving expertise to chase Ryder down. The third act remained a problem i nthe 1974 film as well, as once the hijackers leave the train there's still 20 minutes left, and everything feels very anticlimactic.
If the action had stayed on the train this would have been a fun, believable if forgettable thriller. Scott's style of directing the action seems more appropriate for the mid-1990's adrenaline junkies, the kind of pacing that Speed excelled at. Here it's just inappropriate, especially as just the last act of the film is paced thusly.
I'd use the cliched "rollercoaster" ride analogy for this movie, but it doesn't seem apt. This is more like an express train that accelerates way too fast on its last stretch: most of it is a pleasant ride, but then it just goes by waaaaay too fast, and when you reach your final stop you vow, in an angry show against the conductors, never to ride that train again.
Judge for yourself, as I'm unlikely to see this movie again.

I did, however, see the trailer to Martin Scorsese's new movie Shutter Island, and it looks amazingly good. Can't wait. Also, I need to see Moon.

Compare the above trailer with the one below, for the 1974 original. I don't know about you, but the one below seems like a hell of a better time, if you ask me.




P.S. --- I saw The Hangover on Sunday as well. Expect a review soon.

Up

Up (2009)

Pixar is the standard when it comes to great storytelling, and is the type of studio that other studios should be aspiring to become. Of their 10 feature films, none has bombed (at least as of yet), and with each successive film, they've just gotten better and better, not only in terms of quality of filmmaking, but also with the emotional resonance of the story, the characters, and pacing. Wall-E was so good upon first viewing that I couldn't believe that there'd be another animated film that could even compare, much less by the same studio (that, despite the relatively weak second and third acts). But within the first ten minutes of Up, director Pete Doctor and co-director Bob Peterson pack more emotion in a quiet, wordless montage than any other film to come out this summer.
The montage is one of the best things Pixar has done yet. In it, we are introduced to Carl Fredricksen (voiced by a lovably droll Ed Asner) and his wife Ellie (Elie Doctor) as they first met as children. Carl is enamored with the exploits of adventurer Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), who has disappeared in South America in search of a rare giant bird. While walking home one day, young Carl meets young Ellie in an abandoned house, and they form a quick (if slightly quirky) friendship. This segment of dialogue ends when Carl falls from a beam and breaks his arm; while in bed that night a blue balloon weighted down by a stick flaots into his room, and Ellie climbs into his room and shares her Adventure Book with him. He promises that one day they'll make it to South America (which is where her adventure is to hopefully take place), and the scene ends and a montage begins.
The montage sums up the entire relationship between Carl and Ellie, from their courtship, to their marriage. They work at a zoo, she in the aviary, he as a balloon salesman. They set money aside for their South American adventure. But then Carl breaks his leg, and they take out from their savings. They save up again. Then a tree falls on their roof; goodbye savings. They start over. They try to have children, but can't. In their later years, Ellie becomes depressed; Carl remembers the promise he'd made when they were children and buys tickets to South America. He takes her on a picnic to surprise her, but she falls ill. She's in the hospital; a single blue balloon floats into her room. Carl walks in and hugs her, and then sits down. When he stands up he's alone in a funeral home holding a blue balloon, and as he turns to walk out, the scene dissolves into him walking alone into his house and closing the door on the audience.
People cried during this sequence, and I couldn't help but let myself get worked up also. Within 10 minutes we know everything about Carl, Ellie, their life together, and why later in the film Carl is a grumpy miser. This is simple, elegant storytelling in a purely visual sense (remember the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane's marriage to his first wife is shown in its entirety, from love to breakdown, over the course of a few minutes' cuts at a dinner table? Same thing here); Michael Giacchino's (yes! I love that guy!) beautiful score respectfully undercutting the emotional beats, making them that much more resonant. The scene is heartbreakingly simple, beautiful, and perfect.
However, Pixar perfoms a complete tonal shift (something which would ruin lesser films) and becomes a light-hearted comedy with enough sight gags and dialogue to please the many kids in the theatre, as well as the equally-numerous adults.
Carl's house is the last obstacle in an urban development programs. Carl is rude to Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai, who comes ever-so-close to being annoying), a Junior Adventure Explorer, and tells him to find an imaginary snipe which ruins his garden. Contractors are trying to push him off his property and sell his house, and when a clumsy construction worker accidentally knocks over Carl's mailbox, Carl hits him with his cane, and agrees to be taken to a nursing home. On the day he is to be taken off though, Carl escapes his plight by tying thousands of helium balloons together and sailing his house through the sky to South America. However, he fails to take into account Russell sneaking aboard his house, and he soon finds himself having to deal with this stowaway.
And that's just the first 30 minutes of the movie. I tend to view the first third as The Wizard of Oz (complete with a thunderstorm and swirling house!); the second third is like Fitzcarraldo; and the third act is right out of an RKO serial, or a film like Gunga Din or The Most Dangerous Game (it is even complete with a horde of ravenous dogs, a clever nod to that film). All of these homages combine well and never once feel tacked on.
The biggest surprise to me though was not in how advanced the animation was, but how organic and real everything felt. Every piece of action i nthe film occurs as a result of a decision made by one of the characters, and none of the characters felt unneccesary (even the inclusion of a talking animal, in this case Dug the dog---voiced perfectly by Bob Peterson---felt intrinsic to the story. Hell, I loved Dug! I want a stuffed Dug doll...for my girlfriend. Yeah.) The conflicts faced within the story were stronger as a result of the action being character-based rather than plot-based, and it's a skill that the Pixar filmmakers have perfected.
I won't ruin the rest of the plot outside of what I've already described here, because there is so, so much more to witness once you sit down and watch Up. There are so many moments of perfection and originality and comedy, and it mixes so well with its moments of beauty and sadness and surrealism and symbolism. The image of Carl dragging his floating house over a rocky desert is surrealism enough (and, again, is an homage to the insane genius of Werner Herzog), but once you realize that Carl's obsession with transporting his house to the edge of a waterfall is causing so many problems for the other characters the image of the house takes on an entirely different meaning; the image of the thousands of balloons unfurling into the sky is enough of an inspiring, iconic moment for the film, but for me one of the more beautiful moments comes a few seconds later, where we see a little girl playing in her room, and suddenly the room is lit up into a million colors as the balloons float past: here the simple beauty of color transforms a quiet moment in a child's room into a magical one.
And magic is the name of the game when it comes to Pixar. Pete Doctor, Andrew Stanton, and everyone involved with Pixar has my utmost respect and envy (from what I know of people who interned there, everyone at Pixar absolutely loves thier job...and I would too). They've turned the story of a lonely, elderly man into a funny, dramatic, emotional story of escaping into our own version of paradise and, therein, take responsibility for our lives, learn to care about others and, eventually, move on to better things.
As I said earlier, there's so much more to talk about with this movie that I'll probably revisit this film in the future and talk about it at length (when I know that everyone who reads this has seen it). The direction, story, voice-acting, and character design is flawless. Michael Giacchino once again creates a memorable, beautiful score. And Pixar has created another priceless film to add to their ouevre.

If you see it in theatres (and I hope you do), make sure you catch the Toy Story 3 preview, as well as the short film Partly Cloudy (not as fun as Presto!, but good nonetheless). And if you don't see the film in 3D, it's not a problem, trust me. Unlike Coraline, little is added to the experience (although nothing is taken away either).

A Remake On My Remake Post

Since my rant about remakes several months back, there have been several new remakes announced, and here are some of them: Barbarella, Short Circuit, Valley Girl, Girls Just want To Have Fun, Total Recall, Predator, Alien, Footloose, My Bloody Valentine, The Crazies, Clash Of The Titans, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Scream, Red Dawn, The Karate Kid, Park Chan-Wook's unreleased new film, Thirst. In fact, those were all announced within the past two weeks.
I understand that remakes have occurred throughout the history of cinema (what is The Magnificant Seven other than a remake to The Seven Samurai? What is The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly other than a remake to Yojimbo? Even Hitchcock remade his own movies: The Lodger, and The Man Who Knew Too Much for example), but usually there's a reasoning behind it. For Hitchcock, he wanted to improve on a film that he felt had potential yet was shot in a point in his career where he was still a novice; once he acquired all the skills he'd needed to be a master, he remade his film to perfect it. In regards to Magnificant Seven and Good, Bad..., it was a matter of transitioning a near-perfect story into popular genre so as to maximize its storytelling potential (Westerns were pretty much the rage in the 1960's when these remakes were released) as the originals might have been a challenge to more the conservative American audiences in the 1950's when they were originally released. And the remakes are just as highly regarded as the originals upon which they are based.
Can the same be said for the spate of remakes that have been released over the past five years? Let's name some: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Hills Have Eyes 2, Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, The Stepford Wives, The Invasion, War Of The Worlds, The Omen, The Women, The Honeymooners, SWAT, 3:10 To Yuma, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I Dream Of Jeannie, Herbie: Fully Loaded, The Taking On Pelham 123, etc. etc. (these were the only ones I could think of without going through Amazon or IMDB, but merely using my own memory and experience). Of these films, how many of them were actually worth the experience of watching them (sure, Pelham isn't released yet, but do the trailers really look that interesting?) I would say, of that list, maybe two were worth watching (and, to a point, are at least comparable to the originals).
In an age of Blockbuster, Netflix, and Hulu, is it really necessary to remake (or "reboot" or "reimagine") films? Are these films even in need of being remade? Is a film like Alien or Predator or The Thing so bad and incoherent and unprofitable as to warrant being remade and improved upon? (The easy answer is "No, of course not. Don't be an idiot"). In an age where Wall-E is hailed as a technical and storytelling classic, it makes sense to remake Short Circuit, but it's still uneccesary (even with "Greg The Bunny" and "Robot Chicken" scribe Dan Milano writing). And when it comes to horror films, it seems common for a remake to appear every few years (hell, I thought the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake wasn't that bad).
But why does it seems as if, of late, a remake is being announced every three to four days (and I'm not even pulling that rate out of my ass)? Well, the current troubled state of the economy is one factor; despite a stronger-than-expected first quarter for this year, theatre attendance is still down about 7-8% as compared to last year (the struggling economy is not the only factor, but also the proliferation of HD-quality home-theatre systems, and the ease at which one can rent or buy films or stream them online).
Audiences seem to know the films they're going to attend, and (especially in the summer) these films are tentpole features, event films, or movies that benefit from incentives such as 3D, IMAX, or digital projection. However, sometimes not even these are incentive enough for audiences (just observe the steep drop-off in the second week after the release of Watchmen back in March).
What to do with dwindling ticket sales and competition in the home-theatre market? Well...repackage old films with new stars, new directors, and similar (if not the exact same) stories, then release it into theatres.
That's all well and good, and I can understand why studios would want to repackage their films to new audiences. But I think it'd be vastly cheaper to release the originals in revival theatres or in an event-worthy DVD or Blu-Ray release. Imagine the amount of money spent to acquire the rights to a movie like, say, SWAT, pay a hefty price for the stars (especially Colin Farrell back when he was making consistent, event films), spend more money for pre-, production, and post-production, and then another $15 million or so (on average) on marketing. And then the movie flops, it's rushed onto DVD, and then slowly and quietly disappears from all memory. Does that make any fucking sense? To release an inferior product whose short- and long-tail both fail to impress? Whether or not a film a film is well-known enough or cherished enough to warrant a remake or adaptation, any studio that has any options on any outside product is quickly speeding up production to adapt it to the big screen (cases in point, the film "adaptations" of Stretch Armstrong, Ouija, Monopoly, Clue---yet another remake---Battleship, Candyland, Where's Waldo, and---somehow, in some way, for some reason--- Bazooka Joe. I am not making ANY of these up).
In the case of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, the remakes and reboots are efforts to retain the rights to their properties: reboots to the Daredevil and Fantastic Four franchises are in the works so as to prevent the rights to those characters from reverting back to Marvel (the X-Men Origins films are likewise attempts by the studio to retian their rights to the characters...however, Fox has major, MAJOR management and development issues that have resulted in horrible films for the past few years). So, in this case, remakes, reboots and sequels are released to ensure that rights to characters and storylines are retained. Is that a reason to make a film? By all acocunts, NO.
So what happens now? Here I am, for one, an exhausted filmmaker who is depressed with each new story about a remake, prequel, or batshit insane concept (Stretch Armstrong; Bazooka Joe) not for the childish reason that "it's raping my childhood" or some such bullshit that most fanboys on AICN whine about constantly, but simply because I've ideas for films that could be made cheaply, quickly, and could produce a respectable audience (Porn Fu practically sells itself and already has a small fanbase waiting for it to get made...too bad it can't garner the $1 million dollar it'll need....and that's a low estimate!) And I know that there are dozens of people I know, and thousands of people I don't, that have more elaborate, epic, and interesting ideas for films than I who, if they had even a quarter of the money spent on these remakes and bullshit prequels, could produce something unique and beautiful and personal.
I miss the personal touches to films, the feeling I'd get watching an early Scorsese film like Who's That Knocking At My Door or Mean Streets, a film that reads like an autobiography and which wasn't factory-made to meet a deadline or placate a fanbase. What happened to that type of filmmaking? What happened to those types of films? Films that would be made and released into theatres where they'd simmer for a few months and find its own audience? These days films are lucky to receive two months in a theatre before being sent in to be released on DVD. The turnaround is insane! The near two-year run of Titanic seems to be the last long-run release, and that was over twelve years ago! That is the highest-grossing film of all time, but if released now would remain in theatres for three months, thus cutting off its total gross by at least half.

The short-tail return, the first two weeks' gross after release, is the name of the game here. How the fuck did that happen? And why? It's hurting audiences, it's hurting theatres, it's hurting studios, and it's just going around and around in circles. Maybe this is the new trend in filmmaking, and if it is then it's something I for one have to get used to, otherwise I'm going to run into a whole heap of trouble.
All that being said, I just want Where The Wild Things Are, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World to be released already!

In slightly more personal news (but not much and not really):
My friend's father got me the name of an entertainment lawyer, as wel las the Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts, a firm of freelance entertainment lawyers. There is a $150 1-day crash course seminar on July 10th about fundraising and investing that I'll be attending not only for Porn Fu but also for a documentary I'm helping to produce (I might have to go to Mexico in August for it, but I'm hoping I won't have to do so).

Goodbye David Carradine (aged 72).

Sources:
http://www.joblo.com/commando-remake
http://www.joblo.com/scream-reboot-really
http://www.joblo.com/wheres-waldo-movie
http://www.joblo.com/barbarella-rising
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2009/06/barbarella-robe.html
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2009/06/scream-to-be-rebooted-as-a-trilogy-courteney-cox-and-david-arquette-in-discussions-to-return-.html
http://www.joblo.com/total-recall-remake
http://www.joblo.com/musical-valley-girl
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41295
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41279
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41210
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118004377.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41278
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19719/1/I-NEVER-THOUGHT-I-WOULD-REGRET-RODRIGUEZ-LEAVING-BARBARELLA/Page1.html
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19715/1/KURT-WIMMER-GETS-HIS-ASS-BACK-TO-MARS-FOR-TOTAL-RECALL-REMAKE/Page1.html
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19714/1/IF-YOU-BRING-BACK-THE-SAME-ACTORS-PLAYING-THE-SAME-CHARACTERS-IT039S-NOT-A-REBOOT/Page1.html
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19713/1/YEAH-THIS-ONE039S-A-BIT-OF-A-STRETCH/Page1.html
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19664/1/ALIEN-PREQUEL-INDEED-HAPPENING-WHEN-FOX-WINS-WE-LOSE/Page1.html
http://www.collider.com/2009/05/29/exclusive-tony-scott-confirms-carl-rinsch-is-directing-alien-and-its-a-prequel/
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19628/1/IN-SPACE-NO-ONE-CAN-HEAR-YOU-SCREAM-BECAUSE-THEY039RE-REMAKING-ALIEN/Page1.html

And so on and so on...

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation (2009)

This movie sucks.
I don't even want to put the trailer up.
I would leave it at that and let it slowly die into a painful memory, but I can't allow that. This is a movie I had promised myself I wouldn't see, but wound up seeing for the following reasons: 1. I had time to kill; 2. I had brain cells to kill; 3. I was visiting a friend and we wanted to see a movie we could make fun of; 4. As much as I love Star Trek, I think seeing it four times would be too much; and 5. the only other movie I would want to see now, Up, is one I'd like to see with the lady. But now that I've seen it, I have to talk about it and why it just fails.
Nothing about this movie intrigued me. The concept (John Connor, a relatively blithe character in the second Terminator film, and a relatively annoying character in Terminator 3) is now played with the usual brooding and screaming and sullen moroseness that is characteristic of Christian Bale's style of "serious" acting. Director McG drops the ball early on in the film, shifting the narrative focus from Sam Worthington's guilt-ridden tragic hero Marcus Wright to Bale's theatrical and scene-stealing (and not in a good way) John Connor.
The Connor portrayed in this film is waaayyyy too strong for someone who is 1. human and 2. the survivor of not one, but two previous attempts on his life. Nick Stahl's interpretation of the character (as a whiney, near-manic character) made more sense than Bale's unemotional, distant, nearly indestructible leader of the human resistance (for example, take the final battle between Connor and the T-800 in the terminator factory: Connor gets thrown through glass, into metal doors which wind up dented and destroyed, and burnt by the molten hands of the terminator; oh, and he gets impaled through the heart and still manages to survive. What is this? Die Hard 4?) I would expect that someone who had to fight off two terminators while just a teenager would have some issues....but nope. It's just a typical day for Mr. Connor.
Bale's insistance on augmenting Connor's role in the film is one of the many flaws this movie possesses. The original screen story had previously centered on Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese (as played by Anton Yelchin, who between this and Star Trek has an aptitude for mimicing popular sci-fi characters), and how their relationship grows (which would have been infinitely more interesting than watching Bale shout into a CB radio).
As per Devin Faraci's breakdown of the original script as compared to the finished film over on CHUD.com last week, the problems with the film began when Mr. Bale started to make Connor the main character and sidetracking the Wright and Reese characters. By doing that, the emotional investment in either character is diminished (and that, for me, was so apparent that I wound up not caring about anyone or anything that happened in the film). Connor, in the original draft, was not to be seen until the scene in the film, keeping him a mysterious figure in the story and making his reveal that much more dramatic. Instead, the opening scene features some aerial attack, and a helicopter landing on the exoskeleton of a terminator, which is then shot in the head by.... (*big dramatic reveal*) John Connor! Only we've seen that money shot in every single preview. And at this early point in the film, Connor has done nothing to garner such an "epic" shot. In fact, in the last film he was kept alive by a robot from the future just to ensure that he survives judgment day.
Marcus Wright (as played by Sam Worthington) would have fared a lot better had the movie focused solely on him. Perhaps his MO would have been more clear, but in this version he's just a convict donating his executed body to science in order to redeem himself for the death of his brother and two cops (though it's not clear that he killed them, just that he's responsible). We learn of this in the opening scene, as he's talking to a cancer-ridden Helena Bonham-Carter (wasted as talent, and giving woefully dreadful line readings. C'mon Ms. Carter! You're way better than that!). Clumsy dialogue aside (and this dialogue is Clumsy. That "So that's what death tastes like line" seemed so out of place I just felt like asking the character what the fuck he was talking about), this scene sets up the "shocking" reveal about Marcus later in the third act (surprise: he's a cyborg but doesn't know it. Too bad the second trailer ruined that reveal also) and gives him essentially all of his backstory. However, Worthington sells the character as best he could, putting his all into it and actually making me half-care about what happens to him.
Yelchin's Reese fares a lot better, as he was the most interesting character in the whole movie (and that remains even if you haven't seen the first terminator movie). While Yelchin is able to mimic original actor Michael Biehn's trait's, his character is the only one given anything resembling an arc (and even then it's cut off in the last act). And while it was obvious from the beginning of the movie that he would wind up safe and sound, there were still several moments where I wondered...nah. I'm kidding. I wasn't once thrilled or held in suspense over what was happening, but Yelchin sure was likeable (despite that stupid mute kid Star who does NOTHING but conveniently reveal pieces of equipment that the characters just so happen to need at the exact moment they need them. I was actually rooting for that kid to kick the bucket.)
The female characters are treated with even more disdain. Bryce Dallas Howard is absolutely wasted. Completely. She plays Connor's pregnant physician wife, despite the fact she does nothing with her skills and nothing is done with the fact that she's pregnant (hell, even a cliched, "this baby is the future of humanity bullshit" speech from Connor would have at least given the impression that he cares about her.) Instead she' background fodder, a pregnant woman waiting for her husband to return safe and sound she wouldn't have to become an active part of the story (and trust me, any doctor could have performed that open-heart surgery at the end of the movie. Nothing is even made of that: hell, make her the last person in the area with open-heart-surgery-skills. Something interesting, please!)
Moon Bloodgood. No comment. Despite the fact her character seems like she was rejected from the Charlie's Angels movies, she's absolutely beautiful despite the fact she's spent X number of years fighting robots. (and a nitpick: do you think in a future where humans are a relative endangered species that members of a tiny pocket of resistance would actually execute a woman for something like freeing a friendly cyborg?) Her character is supposed to be the Linda Hamilton of this film. The Sarah Connor of this film. Too bad Bloogood that Linda Hamilton's femininity was never viewed as being more important than her character. Sarah Connor was never a woman who happened to be a strong protaganist; she was a strong, bad-ass hero who just so happened to be a woman. And she got hurt, she bled, she made mistakes and had lapses in judgment. Just as we all do.
No one in this film, aside from Marcus (and even then in small instances) seems "human". There is no emotion. No humanity. There is nothing here for me to care about. McG can direct an action sequence in a competent manner (there is a single-shot sequence where Connor climbs into a helicopter, escapes a massive explosion, gets shot down by a terminator, crashes upside down, and climbs out that was impressive), but there's no emotion. The hunter/killer chase in the second act, where Marcus, Reese and Star try to outrun two motorbike terminators, wasn't thrilling at all because I'd just barely gotten to know any of the characters and didn't know which one to root for (Connor? Wright? Reese?) Without any emotional connection it's just a bunch of loud noises and explosions.
McG allowed himself to acquiese to Mr. Bale's insistence on making Connor the central character, and as a result the film suffers horribly: the script feels rushed and has too many plot holes to even list here (I'll try to add some at the end of this review); the characters are hollow and given little to no backstory, which makes them uninteresting; the action beats were uninteresting; the dialogue feels clumsy and forced; trademarks of the series just seem thrown in to remind the audience, "Hey! You're watching a terminator movie!"; and even the music seemed lazy and horrible (this is easily Danny Elfman's worst score)...hell, even the opening credits and two-minute long typed prologue were horrible. Nothing felt thrilling or exciting: not even the reveal of digital 1984-era Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end battle (yet another Terminator film ends in a battle in a factory).
If James Cameron were involved, he would have made at least a half-decent film that at least had characters I cared about and a plot (say what you want about his films, but Mr. Cameron always has fully-formed characters, even if their arcs are cliched as in Titanic). But he's divorced himself from the Terminator franchise, and maybe he's right to do so. To me, this series ended with Terminator 3 back in 2003, and I'm happy to let it end. Fuck this movie. It wasn't even worth making fun of, as it seemed to make fun of itself. I almost feel bad for the people who gave their all for this film...but they'll still have many other films to work on in the future. There are better man-versus-machine movies out there (hell, even the Matrix sequels does it better.) And why do these types of movies require an angry black man named Barnes (in this case played by Common)?
I don't even want to talk about the script, cinematography, or score here....I'm done...

Maybe I should have seen Star Trek for a fourth time...

Plot Holes:

1. No explanation given as to why SkyNet was rounding up only some humans, but killing others (the commercials make it clear that SkyNet was trying to replicate human flesh so as to send the T-800s back in time, but there was no mention of this in the film, nor of the time-travel technology).
2. Why would SkyNet have computer consoles and interfaces designed for use by humans if humans are to be wiped out?
3. Once SkyNet recognized Kyle Reese (something it does OVER and OVER again) why does it not just kill him? Without Kyle Reese, there is no John Connor, and without John Connor there is no resistance. Just (*bam*) one bullet to the head. No human resistance.
4. On a similar note, once SkyNet has both Connor AND Reese in its headquarters, why not KILL THEM both? They're in the CENTER of SkyNet (robot city), in the CENTER of a factory BUILDING robots, and they send one (1!) unarmed T-800. Why not send in 100 hunter/killer with guns built into them? I mean, they could just make more robots if they fail (which they can't because they have GUNS attached to them). Hell, blow up the whole building. More robots can be built.
5. Why would the characters allow Marcus to sacrifice himeslf to save Connor? There isn't ANYONE else willing to give up their heart to save the "prophesized" savior of humanity? I mean, a friendly cyborg would be great to have as a bodyguard for the savior of humanity. Not only that, but Marcus could infiltrate robot territory because he's recognized as one of them: he could run in and plant bombs for them, for Christ's sake!
6. How could Connor drive the motorcycle terminators? They don't have handlbars, brakes, or a seat. Right?
7. Why is NOTHING done with Bryce Dallas Howard? Or Helena Bonham-Carter aside from establishing that they're, respectively, pregnant and cancer-ridden?
8. Why the fuck is Star mute? Why make a character mute but not do anything with that trait? Why not write a scene where she was the only one who could warn someone of danger, or where she meets Connor and gives her first line, even a humorous (like in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest's Chief?)
9. Since when is the T-800 so indestuctible? It gets molten metal poured all over it but still manages to function perfectly.
10. Why would SkyNet put Marcus' control chip in a place where A. he somehow knows where it is and what it does, and B. in a location where he can so easily remove it?
11. How did Marcus get healed after infiltrating SkyNet and before receiving the expository monologue by digital Helena Bonham-Carter? And why was he healed? If he was designed to lure Connor to SkyNet (which is FUCKING STUPID...see #'s 3 and 4), then his mission is over. Why heal him up again?

Christ...that's 11 points too many for a film to overcome...sadly it doesn't. There are too many more holes to go on. I'm finished.