Chrononautic Log: film

July 28, 2006

Yes, they finally finished putting the French and German subtitles on it this week. So:

1. Biggest disappointment: In Curse of the Black Pearl, Jack Sparrow was a fascinating character. In Dead Man’s Chest, Jack Sparrow is a dull and cowardly clown.
2. Most pleasant surprise: Return of [ex-]Commodore Norrington. (Jack Davenport would make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.)
3. Second most pleasant surprise: Orlando Bloom seems to be developing some gravitas.
4. Most pleasant non-surprise: Keira Knightley in drag, with a rapier in one hand and a cutlass in the other.
5. Second most pleasant non-surprise: Stellan Skarsgård as William Turner Sr.
6. Oddest odd thing: Distinct downplaying of piratey goodness in favor of generic action sequences, despite appearance of word Pirates in film title.
7. Most irritating odd thing: Widely reviled cannibal islander sequence could have been completely excised from movie with no negative consequences for plot, and possible positive consequences for pacing.
8. Second most irritating odd thing: Destruction of second cage conveniently removing all non-white crewmembers.
9. Biggest relief: Having read indifferent reviews before seeing movie, setting expectations appropriately.
10. Biggest fear: Pirates 3 :: Pirates 2 as Return of the Jedi :: Empire Strikes back.
11. Why I would have been willing to see Pirates 3 immediately anyway: See 2 through 5.

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July 19, 2006

Would it have hurt Matthew Stadler, in his review of “Police Beat,” to actually give us the name of the actor playing the protagonist? Or any other information about him?

Maybe it’s not actually racism, but it looks like it, and it’s a damn stupid thing for a movie reviewer to do. Brian Miller, over at Mr. Stadler’s competition, seems to have no such blind spot.

(The gentleman’s name, by the way, is Pape Sidy Niang. He played for Senegal in the Junior World Cup once upon a time, and “Police Beat” is apparently his first film.)

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July 8, 2006

I’ve now seen two completely unrelated sources refer to Chewie Ejiofor’s character from Serenity as a “bounty hunter.” What’s up with that? ’Cause clearly not true.

Can’t they tell two black guys apart?

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March 26, 2006

Boy, those Wachowskis sure kill a lot of cops, don’t they?

Comments (1)

January 6, 2006

Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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December 19, 2005

I’m talking about Kong, of course. Various folks have weighed in at length (here’s Matt, here’s Gwenda; both of them have links to others), so there’s not much point in me saying much beyond the title of this post. Of course some of the acting could be better, of course some of the minor characters didn’t add much, of course some of the CGI had depth-of-field problems, of course some of the dinosaur fights went on too long.

But seriously, folks (by which I mean, you folks that hated it), if those things had been fixed, would that have made you like the movie? It doesn’t sound like it. And if that’s true — what were you expecting?

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October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the Oracle old black guy some more lines. Give us enough Union Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the Confederates Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

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* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

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August 13, 2005

You get a chance to see “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” you take it. You get a chance to see it when Jim White’s in town to talk about the film and play some tunes, so much the better.

(Also, anyone tell me if Harry Crews is worth reading? As a storyteller, in this thing, he was really something else.)

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July 22, 2005

Can’t remember now where this turned up, but you filmies out there might dig this interview with David Thomson. Some interesting and paradoxical discussion in there about how the studio system, B-movies, all that, might have been better set up than what we’ve got now to produce good films.

Back when a studio was making, say, 50 films a year, a lot of those films got made in a fairly routine way: They were vehicles for one star or another. And the hope was that they were being made by people who knew their job very well. Everybody said at the time, “Well, you’ve got to keep on schedule, keep on budget.” But you look back at it now and you see that if people did [keep on budget], there was room for producing very interesting things. The trouble now in many ways is that every film is a one-off venture, made with intense examination, intense monetary ambition. Because there are a lot of people making every film now for whom it is the thing — the one thing they’re doing — and it’s got to be a huge success.

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July 18, 2005

The stuff the movie tried to do, it generally did pretty well. But it didn’t try to do enough stuff.

Also: I hope Nokia didn’t pay very much for that product placement.

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May 23, 2005

Wow. I thought I knew Lucas couldn’t write, but apparently I had no idea. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read anything so relentlessly, brutally, avoidably stupid.

And the fight scenes were lame.

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April 30, 2005

• Portland was wet.
• Chicago is smaller in real life. Or seems that way. Maybe because it’s so flat.
• Christopher Rowe’s mime version of this and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
• I thought I hated the 70s mainly for aesthetic but basically progressive reasons. Apparently I was wrong: hating the 70s is code for hating feminism. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. But.)
• Belated capsule review of Steamboy: Otomo may be twice the animator that Miyazaki is, but he’s quite a bit less than half the storyteller. (Still better than Oshii, though.)

Oh, and:

• Twenty Epics is going to be a good book.

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September 30, 2004

I wasn’t going to see the movie anyway. But I did like this bit of criticism, as criticism.

The Forgotten purports to be about loss and grief, but putting aside the dubious agenda and motivations of the Sky-Hurlers we seem to end up with a movie with a curious message: Never Heal, Never Let Go. 5,999,999,999 times out of six billion that’s gonna be the wrong way to respond to the death of a loved one, but The Forgotten manages to dig out that one curious case where remaining forever trapped in your grief turns out to be the way to get your son back. Good for her, but it doesn’t really offer too much to the rest of us.

A lot of works end up with similar curious messages. How many of them are conscious? How many of the wrong messages have you accidentally put in your own work? Hmm. What does your therapist think of that?

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August 9, 2004

The nice thing about the auteur approach to filmmaking is that it gives you someone to blame.

So, let me start by saying I’m one of the eleven people in the English-speaking world who hasn’t seen “The Sixth Sense” — and boy, am I glad I haven’t, because if I had (and if it was really any good) I would have been even more disappointed by “The Village” than I was. Also, if I had gone to see it, M. Night Shmalyan might have gotten some of my money, and that is something that is never going to happen again.1

I won’t give you any spoilers — but don’t worry, if you do see this film (which course of action I am, obviously, recommending against) it will spoil itself for you. You’ll have the film’s central “revelation” figured out by the time the first monster comes knocking at the door, and after that it won’t matter how good Mr. Night S. is with camera angles and whooshy noises and snuffly noises. You will feel absolutely no fear, because after that you will know that the film is on rails.2

In due course and a series of clumsy flashbacks, the alleged reversal will be presented to you and to the protagonist. (The protagonist’s reaction, by the way, is entirely implausible: think about the way it’s revealed, then ask yourself exactly what the protagonist’s terror is in response to — how does the protagonist even understand what’s being shown?) You will be disturbed — when you look at your watch and see how much of the movie is left to run.

By the time Mr. Night S. presents his attempt at a second reversal, you will have no trust in him, as a director, to do anything interesting, so your only reaction will be to look again at your watch and sigh regretfully, knowing that at least another fifteen minutes of your time will be wasted explaining this and tying it up.

Eventually, in a way that does not so much wrap up the film’s implausibilities (which in a better-plotted film one might be able to over look, but which in this one produce a disbelief too heavy to suspend) as parade them, the film will end.

And you will be left to ponder the real mysteries of “The Village”:

• Why did so many good actors sign up for such a bad script?
• Why were their performances so wooden?3
• What justifies the reputation Mr. Night S. has gotten as a writer/director?

And, most curiously:

• When was the last time a film left you feeling this badly ripped off?

If you figure it out, let me know.

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1 No, I didn’t see “Signs” either. The reviews weren’t that great, and anyway Mel Gibson makes me break out in a rash.

2 Yes, there’s a subplot, which does have a twist in it that’s merely foreshadowed rather than telegraphed. Someone will undoubtedly claim that this subplot is the main plot and that, therefore, the film is not on rails To that I say: Feh. It’s not interesting or complex enough to be the main plot. (A role reversal is not a plot reversal, Mr. Night S.) In a film of this type — if it’s not good enough to transcend its type — the “plot” is just the process of answering the question: “What the hell is going on?” And that, as I’ve said, you’ll know long before Mr. Night S. decides to hit you over the head with it.

3 The one exception is Adrien Brody, who gives us the film’s one really interesting character. Unfortunately, that character is completely wasted on this plot. As for Hurt, Weaver, Phoenix et al. — they just leave me expecting to cringe the next several times I hear the word “coyote”. I know the dialogue was stilted. The dialogue in “Ride With The Devil” was stilted, too, but that didn’t stop Tobey Maguire.

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July 11, 2004

Six o’clock; there goes another weekend. The tally (with apologies to Harper’s index):

• Distant immediate family conversed with: 2
• Classic Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns finally seen: 2
• Film adaptations of Joe Lansdale Elvis/mummy stories seen: 1
• Chinese dishes found not to travel so well as takeout: 1
• Chinese dishes found to make even worse leftovers: 1
• Loads of laundry done: 2
• Living rooms cleaned: 1
• Kitchens cleaned: 0.5
• Bedrooms cleaned: 0
• New Charles Stross books read: 1
• Appearances of own name found in Dozois’ latest YBSF: 3
• Own stories appearing in Dozois’ latest YBSF: 0
• New wireless cafés discovered: 1
• Long-overdue zeppelin novelettes finished and sent for review by the fine folks of the Rockaway Beach Reunion Workshop: 1
• Future-Tiptree-award-winning planetary romances finished: 0
• Tea house power failures while attempting to post this entry: 1

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December 15, 2003

This Michael Caine interview on Salon captures better than anything I’ve ever read or heard the difference between an actor and a movie star.

It’s a movie-star thing. Some people think they’re movie stars and some people think they’re movie actors. I think I’m a movie actor. The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is a movie star gets a script — movie star Michael Caine gets a script and he says, “Now how can I change this script. It’s not quite Michael Caine. I've got to change it.” And they say things like, “Michael Caine wouldn’t wear that kind of thing. Michael Caine wouldn’t say that to a girl. Michael Caine wouldn’t drive that sort of car. So we’ll have to edit the script.” And everyone says, “Oh, of course, Michael, we’ll change all that.” They change the script to suit them. A movie actor, he changes himself to suit the script. He wears glasses, puts on a fat belly, gains weight, loses weight, grows a beard, moustache, any bloody thing.

I think something very similar happens with authors and novels; we just don’t have a word for it.

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December 14, 2003

(Continuing on our facial hair theme from the last entry . . .)

So The Last Samurai isn’t a bad movie. It is a thoroughly conventional movie; if you’ve seen the previews you pretty much know what’s going to happen, and if you’ve seen any of a dozen or two Hollywood movies of the last twenty years you pretty much know how it’s going to happen, too. (I’m not going to worry about spoilers here because there isn’t really anything to spoil; no point in trying to hide plot twists when you can see straight from one end of the plot to the other.) The writing, while adequate, is Hollywoody, and the dialogue occasionally clunks. And the truth is the film just doesn’t have that much to say — except, as Stephen Notley put it,

it’s not that war itself is horrible, an orgy of ugly useless death; just that certain ways of waging war are cooler than others. Samurais are just intrinsically cooler than Civil War-style musketeers and so it’s sad to see the passing of those better, purer times when a battlefield was strewn with dead bodies chopped to pieces by highly trained swordsmen rather than riddled with bullets by dummies who can barely reload their muskets. Truly, the business of killing large numbers of people lost something special that tragic day, something that can never be recovered.

The film’s not so much historically inaccurate as it is historically myopic — if you want to read about the real Satsuma Rebellion you can have fun counting the important details they omitted, such as the fact that the main motivation for Ken Watanabe’s real-life counterpart was that he couldn’t talk his fellow oligarchs into annexing Korea. (Eventually they saw the error of their ways, but not for a generation or so — see below.) Like Barthes’ Empire of Signs, The Last Samurai is not so much about Japan as it is about “Japan”, a hypothetical and largely fictional — yet fascinating — construct.

But if you can put these flaws behind you, the film does have its good points. It’s probably best to approach The Last Samurai as a sort of science fiction movie, not so much about the encounter of the real Japan with the real West as about the encounter of a hypothetical feudalism with a hypothetical modernity.

Divorce the film from its historical specifics and you’re free to muse, for instance, about the pathos of the peasant musketeers Cruise commands in the first act: terrified, half-trained conscripts set to be slaughtered by ruthless professional warriors, in a war they never chose to fight — but a war that, nonetheless, stands to liberate them and their descendants from serfdom. (For those of us who happen to know quite a few Japanese people, this is where it’s worth noting that despite whatever romantic notions we might have about the samurai, it’s among those conscripts, or people like them, that most of the Japanese we know probably count their recent ancestors.) Then in the second act, in the unreconstructed traditional countryside, you can set aside your class loyalties for a moment and share with Ken Watanabe’s noble rebel and Koyuki’s war widow the knowledge of the brevity of this last winter idyll, the awareness that each victory serves only to postpone the inevitable defeat. In the first two acts you can find yourself racking your brain trying to find a way to make it all work, reconcile tradition and modernity — give these distressingly cute children a chance to grow up.

In the third act — well, in the third act you get some 19th-century Tokyo street scenes and a couple of decent action sequences. The filmmakers do their best to undermine the sympathy you felt for the conscript soldiers in the first act by giving you not just well-drilled riflemen but swaggering uniformed thugs. Ken Watanabe’s character exposes the essential hollowness of the film when, asked by the young Emperor for his advice, for an alternative to the policies of the modernizationist clique, the best he can do is to prostrate himself and abdicate the responsibility. (If Watanabe’s turning up in Tokyo mid-movie despite being Japan’s Most Wanted reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s mid-movie confrontation of Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, it’s probably because both screenplays were written by John Logan.) Fencing, fighting, chases, escapes, and we’re into the fourth act, which, despite the references to Thermopylae and Little Big Horn, you can pretty much tell is going to end up as the Charge of the Light Brigade, only less successful.

In the epilogue, naturally, the young Emperor, moved by Ken Watanabe’s futile self-sacrifice, gives the chubby plutocratic prime minister and the mercenary American ambassador their comeuppances and, holding the sword with which Watanabe served him, utters some suitably portentous platitudes about the necessity of the Japanese people never forgetting where they came from. (If this reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s deathbed call for the restoration of the Senate in Gladiator, it’s probably because . . .) At this point the hypothetical feudalism, hypothetical modernity structure breaks down, and we’re into a different kind of science fiction: an alternate history in which everything after this counterfactual incident happens exactly the same as it did in our timeline — but with a completely different light thrown by this incident on all the events that followed it. Cruise’s lovable surrogate sons grow up to sink the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 and conquer Korea in 1910; their children invade China. The Emperor’s endorsement of Japan’s martial heritage in 1878 leads directly to the establishment of military dictatorship sixty years later.

The Second World War, in the final analysis, is all Tom Cruise’s fault.

Sorry — I just finished a set of alternate-history vignettes a couple of weeks ago, and I got a little carried away there. What I meant to say was that the sets, costumes, and scenery (New Zealand again — and did I see Sala “The Dark Lord Sauron” Baker’s name in the list of location scouts?) alone make The Last Samurai worth seeing. The story may be one you’ve heard before, but the film’s capable of making you stop and think about that story again, if you’ll let it. The performances are better than the script deserves; the kids are almost up there with Anna Paquin in The Piano, Ken Watanabe is the next Chow Yun Fat, Koyuki, um, doesn’t have much to do (but she’s nice to look at), and Tom Cruise comes closer to disappearing into this role than any other I’ve seen him play, though maybe that’s because of the beard.

And the swordfighting, all things considered, is actually quite decent.

(Gohatto’s swordfighting is still better, though. Plus, I mean, gay love triangles in a secret police death squad fencing academy — how can you go wrong?)

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November 30, 2003

Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD box set:
****

On the one hand, they’re obviously saving a lot of good stuff for a hypothetical volume 2: What’s Opera, Doc?, Robin Hood Daffy, most of the Roadrunner & Coyote opus. On the other hand they’ve given us Rabbit of Seville, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Hair-Raising Hare . . . plenty enough to keep you entertained while you eat enough Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs to make yourself very, very sick.

Bugs (sheepish): Mechanical.
(Pause. Then, defiant:) So it’s mechanical!

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
****½

A creditable exercise, Mr. Weir. I could find some faults with it if I wanted to, but by and large I think the film holds true to the spirit of the books; on top of which it’s a fine character drama and a jolly good adventure movie. (The best Star Trek movie ever made, as J. Bradford de Long says.) Apart from his height, Russell Crowe makes a plausible Jack Aubrey; and apart from his height, Paul Bettany makes quite a fine Stephen Maturin — I very much look forward to seeing him get to explore more facets of his character in further O’Brien films — of which I assume, given the success of this one, there will be at least one or two.

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The Two Towers Extended Edition
****

Whereas the added scenes and lines in Fellowship were simply nice to have, the additional footage for Two Towers makes it a far, far better movie. We now spend enough time getting to know the House of Eorl to actually give a damn when Theoden weeps over Theodred’s tomb — and Eowyn singing a funeral dirge in Old English doesn’t hurt, either. We now get enough of the Treebeard plotline and the Faramir plotline for them to make sense — and to mean something, too. Since the rest of the film no longer feels rushed, the Helm’s Deep sequence no longer drags. I still wouldn’t have chosen Walsh & Boyens’ solution to the filmic problems Faramir’s character presented; and I still think there’s no way even the Rohirrim, even led by Gandalf, could charge down that sixty-degree gravel slope into those pikes and live. :) But never mind — any lingering doubts I might have had that Fellowship was a Matrix-like flash in the pan are now dispelled, and that’s what counts.

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2001
*½

Just rented this with the intention of finally watching it all the way through for the first time — I’d seen it several times over the years, but never made it farther than about the point where David Bowman starts yanking out HAL’s brains. Now I know why, and this time I only survived due to the miracle of DVD chapter selection. Sure, it’s beautiful, but my God, could Kubrick and Clarke have made it any more dull if they’d tried? 2001 is the moral equivalent of a bad summer blockbuster: all special effects, no screenplay. The film is a disservice to hard science fiction. What’s sad is that it wouldn’t have taken much — no changes to the plot, just a little less classical music and a lot more dialogue. I think about what a competent Hollywood screenwriter — William Goldman, say — could have done with it, and it makes me want to cry.

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2010
***½

So that’s why Bob Balaban seemed so familiar! Yeah, I was planning a double feature. I don’t think I’ve seen 2010 since it was in the theatres, but I didn’t have any trouble staying awake. It might be a little thin, it might not have broken any new ground the way 2001 did, but it’s got plot, it’s got acting (Helen Mirren! John Lithgow!), it’s got tension, and the special effects hold up pretty well. Actually everything, except (necessarily) the computer screens and the Cold War and (unnecessarily) the synth-heavy score, holds up pretty well. Plus, it uses real physics, something you almost never see in a space movie; and it uses real SFnal ideas, not recycled horror or men’s adventure. I blame 2001 for the fact that there aren’t more SF movies like this.

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September 20, 2003

Not only is Lost in Translation funny and touching, it nails my home town of record (well, one of them, anyway) almost perfectly.

Plus, you get Bill Murray singing “More Than This” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in a Shibuya karaoke bar. What more do you want? Go see it.

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July 1, 2003

Too much action, not enough talk.

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June 1, 2003

Dragged my corpus derelicti out of the house this evening long enough to see The Matrix: Reloaded. My expectations were already set by the mixed (and not-so-mixed) reviews; and the level at which they were set turned out to be just about right. So I wasn’t disappointed. But I wasn’t exactly captivated, either.

I’ll leave the plot alone. Even with all the Philosophy 101, the plot was still the best thing about the movie. Will Shetterly’s already dissected the pacing and the structure, so I won’t go into those, either.

So no spoilers, okay?

But:

Here’s the thing about The Matrix: Whatever you could say against The Matrix, it did have style.

Here’s the thing about Reloaded: It doesn’t.

Car chases, explosions... we’ve seen all that a hundred times — as the trailers for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (talk about low expectations... but I digress) and Terminator 3 reminded us before the green katakana even started scrolling down the screen.

And the things we hadn’t seen before The Matrix, we’ve seen now; and The Matrix did it better. With the exception of a Bullet Time kick or two, Reloaded’s kung fu scenes and shootouts alike never reach the balletic grace of the first Matrix; nothing to match, let alone top, Neo’s training match with Morpheus, or Neo’s and Trinity’s slow-motion destruction of an entire SWAT team, impeccably choreographed and timed down to the chime of the elevator doors. Even on the fourth or fifth viewing, both of those scenes still send a chill down my spine, but today I got more of that from a split-second shot of two kids practicing kenjutsu in the preview for The Last Samurai than I did from Our Feature Presentation.

And then there’s the cinematography. That green patina that overlaid Thomas A. Anderson’s lowlife world, the grime of tenements and the dilapidation of half-abandoned shops and subway stations, the mid-70s cars, the whiff of circa-1980 depression and fatalism, the sense that nothing ever changes — all the things that subliminally suggested both the ugliness of the Matrix and the marginality of the ‘free’ humans’ existence in it — gone, replaced by a clean post-dot-com metropolis, packed with placements for Cadillac’s 2003 product line. If this is as bad as it gets, I’ll stick with the blue pill, thanks.

The tension between that verdigris demimonde and the shiny controlled world of the System — exemplified by the offices of Metacortex, the gleam of the cop’s mirrorshades (80s!), the polished marble of the lobby that Neo and Trinity demolish in that aforementioned slow-mo scene — not so much gone as diluted to meaninglessness by too many changes of scene and atmosphere, until we lose the ability to associate any of them with anything.

And as for Zion — I’m sorry, but I’ve seen better government, better spirituality, and better sensuality on Star Trek. That’s saying something, and it’s not saying anything good.

Don’t get me wrong; Reloaded is good summer fun, and it certainly has its moments (most of them involving either Hugo Weaving or Gloria Foster). But that’s the thing: it’s just summer fun. The Matrix was the cyberpunk aesthetic brought to life; by comparison, Reloaded is only an above-average action flick.

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February 21, 2003

Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Ben Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up, too.

——Michael Herr, Dispatches

I first encountered The Quiet American between the pages of two other excellent books, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. In both, Greene’s novel is a constant subtle presence in the minds of the other characters — real in Herr’s book, fictional in le Carré’s — coloring their actions and their views of the world; almost a character in its own right.

Dispatches and Schoolboy are both old favorites, books I go back to year after year. If I ever write anything half as good (okay, three-fourths; a man’s reach should exceed his grasp) I’ll have no regrets about my writing career. For some reason, though, I didn’t get around to reading Quiet American until three or four years ago, and I only read it once. I’m not sure why.

Partly, I suppose, it’s that at the time, for various personal reasons, I couldn’t sympathize with Thomas Fowler; I felt the same way about Fowler’s relationship with Phuong that Alden Pyle did. But then — particularly after reading Dispatches and Schoolboy — I wasn't about to sympathize with Pyle, either.

Now, though, I seem to have reached what Michael Ondaatje called the age where I identify with cynical villains in books, and I’m going to have to give Quiet American another try. Much of the credit for that will have to go to Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, not to mention Philip Noyce.

A lot of reviewers have bitched about Fraser in the Alden Pyle role, and I’m not really sure why; maybe they just have trouble taking him seriously. For my part I thought he was an excellent choice: fresh-faced, naive, and optimistic, so it’s all the more shocking when you realize just what he’s gotten himself — and Indochina — into.

Dispatches and Schoolboy left me disgusted with the mendacity and deliberate ignorance that kept the US in Vietnam. What Fraser’s performance in Quiet American did for me was get past all that, to remind me of the honest good intentions that got us in there in the first place, and make me appreciate the tragedy latent in those good intentions, and in the moral compromises that they inevitably led to. You can sympathize with Fraser’s Pyle even as you’re convinced that he’s dead, dead wrong.

As for Michael Caine, I’ve always liked him, even when he was playing unlikeable characters, and his Thomas Fowler is far from unlikeable. One of the aspects of the novel that I expected to most irritate me in the film is the way the character of Phuong is made to be — rather explicitly — a stand-in for the whole country of Vietnam; I’m almost sure that’s what she was to Greene, a symbol, a way of concretizing the conflict between Fowler and Pyle, making the political and intellectual into something personal, sensual.

What Caine does with his performance is make Fowler’s love for Phuong human and individual — he’s in love with her, not just with Vietnam. Which in turn makes her more individual as well. And then when Fowler does finally take a stand on what’s happening to Vietnam, the country isn’t just a stand-in for Phuong, either. But you can see that he sees that his personal entanglement with her (and with Pyle) makes his motives suspect, clouds the morality of his actions. Pyle does the wrong thing for the right reasons; Fowler can’t even be sure of his reasons.

Noyce’s film may not be a neatly wrapped rhetorical package. But Umberto Eco, I think it was, described the novel as “a machine for generating interpretations,” and the best film adaptations, I think, are the ones that expand the scope of possible interpretations their originals generate. On that score, I think the film does a pretty good job.

Now I’ll have to go back to the novel and see if I’m right. If I am, The Quiet American may yet find a permanent place on my bookshelf.

‘Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’'t, too much popery.’

——John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

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