Month: April 2007

I had no idea that The Wicker Man was a comedy.

The plot is straightforward. The sun is dying and a mission is sent to drop a giant “solar” bomb on/in the sun to reignite it. The crew of 8 are meant to detach from the bomb and return home. An earlier mission (the spacecraft nicely called Icarus) failed for reasons unknown, and now the Icarus II is hoping to succeed. It will not be a spoiler to say that pretty much everything goes wrong. The cast includes Michelle Yeoh and Cillian Murphy and nobody else I have heard of.

I recommend this, but not as much as I had hoped. It is a Danny Boyle film, and I had hoped for something a little different out of a genre movie, just as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later offered a twist on our expectations, and also a little of Boyle’s dark humor. Instead we get a highly competent, and certainly gripping (I have no nails left), but otherwise entirely conventional sci-fi disaster movie: The Core made by adults who understand how to craft a movie. Everything takes a back seat to the special effects, which are terrific. The psychological drama of the crew falling apart and contemplating death doesn’t appear to concern Boyle at all, which is lucky because only Yeoh and Murphy appear able to act. The sun deserved a place in the credits, as there is wonderful use of light — blinding light — as the crew expose themselves to the sun voluntarily and involuntarily. Initially, it looks as though Boyle is offering an homage to 2001, as the dialogue is sparse and we are treated to endless shots of the spacecraft and its “payload.” But while Kubrick offered us a sedate, near silent, antiseptic future, Boyle’s is just plain loud, and every contemplative moment is displaced by the crash of machinery or drums and bass on the soundtrack. Near the end Boyle introduces an almost supernatural figure, which I think was unnecessary and a cheap plot device.

I have made this sound worse than it is. I just had high expectations. It is a pleasure to see a genre movie executed this well, but he could have done more.

Fun fun fun. I can’t remember when I’ve had more fun at the movies. I love old American International exploitation flicks, and love the trailers for those movies even more, since the movies themselves could frequently be a bore, waiting for the killings or flash of breasts or car crashes. There’s a big helping of both trailers and waiting-for-action going on here. This has been written about to death everywhere of course, which is maybe why no one is bothering here. (If only Bakunin had written about it, then at least maybe John would have deemed it worthy of a mention.) A little too much reliance on Rose McGowan throughout, but the Josh Brolin / Marley Shelton bits made up for it. Continue reading Grindhouse / ATHF

‘The Last Mimzy’ is not worth a topic of its own, but we can use this for other movies for kids. ‘The Last Mimzy’ has a somewhat over-complicated plot about humanity in the future dying out because of the legacy of pollution. They send Mimzy’s (a stuffed rabbit made by Intel with assorted tools for time travel) back in time in the hope that children in the past will be able to figure out the message send unpolluted genes into the future. I have not made this sound particularly good, but it really is a sweet movie. It avoids the portrayal of overly stupid or evil adults — in fact all the characters are sympathetic — and the kids are especially good. There is a sense of wonder and possibility that makes this a classic children’s film. And Timothy Hutton… whatever happened to him? He used to be at the top of the second tier of male actors (Q&A, for example), but then disappeared. He enjoys himself in this. Oh, and Rainn Wilson (Dwight in the Office) is really good as a grade school science teacher.

I watched this DVD last night: compelling enough, even exciting, but overlong in the standard fashion now (where every film must skirt at least 2 1/2 hrs) and unnecessarily unclear about the politics of the area, Sierra Leone, in which it was set. The interesting fact is that (spoilers) the film follows the same narrative route as Children of Men and The Constant Gardner : a cynical, amoral or at least disengaged, white men sacrifices his life for a ‘racial other’–thereby presumably redeeming himself, establishing his credentials as part of humanity and making it possible for a black man/woman to escape from the horrifying conditions of his/her current environment. What gives with this move–white guilt which can nevertheless not find the strength to step out of the limelight, the economic necessity for major films to have major (mainly white) stars, a condescending attitude toward Africa and Africans or a persistent religious impulse in which it is necessary to achieve salvation by good works? do you regard this narrative standby cynically–a kind of artistic condescending post colonialism–or more generously as the persistence of a moral viewpoint, evident in so many stories, emphasizing the need to transform the individual “from within”–something no doubt that many white westerners could use? by the way here’s a useful article on the history and current issue of the “conflict diamond”