Recent IMDB Comments
August 22, 2010 The Last Sin Eater: Harmful Superstitions revealed
Year: 2007Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.7
DVD at Amazon
I watch these missionary films from time to time. There is an earnestness in most of them that makes up for the fact that they are so horrible.
In my city is Pat Robertson's film school, training hundreds of people a year to make these things. I often wonder what will happen when they actually are able to make good movies?
I am beginning to believe that this may never happen. Film may be making Christianity obsolete. I know this may sound strange. Cinema seems profoundly malleable, a vehicle for any story. And Christianity has survived by adapting far, far from what Jesus believed, making any necessary compromise.
But film has rather rigid dynamics when combined with the forces of how we define ourselves through stories. It is extremely flexible, but only within a conceptual marketplace where the collective projections of self reinforce each other. Cinema allows us to define our own cosmos. It worries me that the rivers are sometimes so banal, but such the way of the collective — and young imaginations have surprising sophistication.
Christianity on the other hand is about accepting a prefabricated story. Well, different ones depending on the preacher's agenda, but the cosmos is defined in a very top down manner. Theoretically, they could overlap a lot, but that is not what the world seems to want. Even the most obvious Jesus stories like Harry Potter don't follow the rules of the Christian institution.
This film has prompted me to believe that it may be impossible to make powerful cinema with the existing dogma. Everything about it fails.
The irony is that the story flows are about rigid superstition being made obsolete, not by the Bible in the story, but because people simply want to explain for themselves what the world is.
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August 22, 2010 Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief: Spoiled Lotus
Year: 2010Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.8
DVD at Amazon
My superficial reaction to this is the same as most, I suppose. As a friend says, it has all the essential elements of Harry Potter, with none of the narrative engagement.
It has some extra baggage that I think would hurt it if it were good enough. The Potter books are poorly written but very cleverly imagined. They make a cosmology from scratch, but using standard religious iconography. They are imagined cinematically.
Now here is the very same director who got the Potter movies started. And he apparently had the budget for special effects. But what a disaster!
The baggage is the Greek myths. The Jesus story is simply the historical figure completely recast by Romans in the Greek mold, but with Persian influence and flexible invention. The pantheon of local gods and the extension of the various stories of powers and vendettas simply fractionated the believes of the Romans and a singular religion was required for a newly singular empire. Probably anything would have worked, but the staying power of Christianity is the holes it leaves to be filled opportunistically, like with Potter.
The Greek gods are remnants from the invention of narrative. They are the residue of a long dead process and can only echo the forces that can be carried by modern narrative. The only thing going for it is the presumption that kids will know the stories because of the industrialized educational system we have that favors Greek history.
And, the built in parent dynamics. You have a problem with your dad? Think "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" too complicated? Here is ready material for that angst to settle in.
When watching this, I was astounded that Catherine Keener would do this. Her character is a nitwit in every dimension. Here is a real actress who has a serious career. I cannot imagine this was easy work, what with the effects. The money must have been good with the promise of many sequels, one of which would allow her to do something.
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August 21, 2010 (500) Days of Summer: Death by Numbers
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Boy, how frustrating it is to have a movie that is nearly perfect in some respects but broken in others, especially when it has the potential to do things.
This has the potential because it is a love story that bends the expectations from movie romance more toward the ebbs and flows of real life. In breaking this habit of expectations it uses a clever device: it breaks the linear narrative, giving you a numeric timescale. This is handled effectively because the film establishes a space for us outside the flow, populated by us and a narrator when we shift times.
There is another device, used less expertly: architecture. The setup is that our guy is not a whole man romantically because he is trapped in a traditional romantic comedy sort of world. He literally works for a metaphorically apt greeting card company, generating fantasy. This is as opposed to the more three dimensional world he sees and appreciates but has yet to commit to. We are reminded of this whenever we enter that neutral narrator's space because the timeline is a number over an "architectural drawing" by his more mature self.
It should have worked. It surely was well enough considered and has a first class place in the film. But the problem is that the filmmaker did not understand architectural dynamics well enough to use them. What he thinks is architecture is the grouping of buildings you see when sitting on a park bench and mapping the three dimensional experience to a two dimensional drawing. This is as great a mistake as being in the greeting card business and sort of poisons the dynamic that this is supposed to support.
But I count it a plus that they knew about the dynamic and tried even though they didn't actually capture it.
The thing that doesn't work in my opinion is the girl. I've just seen another film, much more ambitious that Zooey anchored. She mastered the thing with a practiced stance at being outside the reaction of self without being within a state of self knowledge. Here, she is supposed to be ubercute but secure in action, something not normal in film woman. But she cannot pull it off: either she is earnest or she is submissively appealing, or she is in control of her life but never all three at once. And this is what we need.
In fact, in the midst of our hero's depression, he has a blind date with an attractive redhead played by Rachel Boston. (Why are so many secondary redhead actresses named Rachel?) She is better at this synthesis than Zooey, but perhaps that was deliberate.
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August 20, 2010 The Boat That Rocked: Stolen Treasures
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.5
DVD at Amazon
Every waking moment we convert our lives to stories, with the largest component stories we share with those we choose and those we don't.
At some point for each of us, that shared story contributes to a genre and loses its personal connection. That is a death of sorts where your visceral connection to life is transformed to the same connection but through a medium controlled by market forces and a narrative shaped by its own laws. That death hurts, so while some big part of us celebrates when we re-encounter the thing, some other part dies.
If you were there in the summer of 67 when music mattered in a way impossible to communicate now...
If you were there when it seemed that the actions of a few musicians and the millions who fed them drove, literally drove the cosmos, pulling the dead husks of the old behind...
If you really believed in a God and the goodness of life because you knew it through the joy of shared ears...
Then this movie will present quite a challenge. You cannot do other than love it: the craft of the narrative is strong. It hits the entertainment marks in ways and at times that we expect because we paid. The music is strong, very strong and illustrated in ways that at least do not offend. The characters are derived from those we want to like. The sex is affable enough. Rock music is saved at the end by an enthusiastic public who we see throughout the story as being of all ages and classes.
And yet there is this sense of loss that this is what it has come down to, some pop tropes with familiar sounds. Some amusement as though the tentative futures we held so dearly and the prayers we burned for did not matter. Compounding the ambiguous feelings for this well done thing is the involvement of Hoffman as our (in my case) American surrogate on the scene.
He is there for the music and not for the fame or sex. He alone is willing to die. As an actor, we have seen him before straddle the line between what matters and the way it has to be delivered. But he does not do that here. He simply goes with the record.
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August 19, 2010 Gran Torino: Cleaning Up
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.4
DVD at Amazon
I saw this together with the recent Sly Stallone director-actor effort, "Expendables."
That's because the have similar sensibilities of justice in the world. But Sly is an actor who makes movies. He knows that the effects he is looking for have to come from his face and body: the movie is just the delivery vehicle for his brand. Eastwood on the other hand is a filmmaker. Even in the spaghetti days, he was a collaborator with the director, reaching for an effect rather than a character.
He really is quite a filmmaker and just knowing he is still vital at nearly 80 is cause for some pleasure. Never mind that the only reason to make this is to parade that fact. He's colored it with a story about old-school suburban texture because he seems fascinated with what it means to be American and how film defines and reflects that. Never mind that the story arc is as feeble and cheap as "Million Dollar Baby."
Sly has never made a decent movie and never will. It isn't because he has dumb values. It is because he is an actor. Clint has made one excellent film and several very good ones. All of them are crafted well, coherently envisioned and narratively closed. I think I can summarize the style as economical. I prefer loose ends and open narratives, ones that deal with ambiguities, analogy and sliding truth. Clint shows and indicates nothing that does not move the narrative ahead. His shooting style mirrors this; investors love him because he doesn't diddle.
One risk he is taking; the use of the muscle car as a symbol of a lost nation may become quickly obsolete, and this lose much of the punch he built around it.
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August 19, 2010 The Expendables: Sliding Planes
Year: 2010Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.7
DVD at Amazon
"Speedracer" and the "Transformer" movies, even the second "Charlie's Angels."
These are silly or even bad films by the conventional measures. This is too. It is vapid, misogynistic and fundamentalist. I wouldn't recommend that anyone go unless they now themselves well enough.
But like those other movies, there is a lot of cutting edge filmmaking craft in this and I enjoyed it for that reason alone. I think there must be some separation from Sly the image and Sly the filmmaker. I surely — for example — admire the effectiveness of cable TeeVee demagogues at the same time I find the effect vile.
There are three notable things.
There is a neo-Kurosawan notion of planes, even in the fight scenes. Here is a sophisticated example: The film starts with Sly checking out the mission and deciding to not follow through, abandoning a woman to rape and torture (torture by the way by waterboarding). As in all his combat movies there is a scene where he pensively encounters his conscience and decides to do the right thing, turning into a killing machine for justice. The setup has Micky Roarke in the close foreground giving a story about how he is cursed by not having saved the life of a woman. (What he is doing while giving the speech is cool. The speech itself is pure formula, but the fact that he is painting flowers on an old guitar for a woman who has left him is sweet. He plans to smash the guitar when finished.)
During the scene, Sly is in the background out of focus. This is not the way Akira would do it: he would and back and use a telephoto so both would be in focus. Welles talked about compositing two shots with multiple focal points. But here Sly is blurry; he is further away than he would be in reality. We shift to a closeup of Sly as he meets himself and comes to his decision. It is a closeup. His face fills the screen, but he is still out of focus. What they did was crop the shot to zoom in. It takes a craftsman to even think of this and the cinematic effect it gives. And how it mitigates the worst part of any Stallone movie, that turning point, because he just cannot act. So the camera does it for him by setting planes.
Throughout, we have muted colors, lots of shadows that swallow the scene with piercing lights. This not only makes the thing Eastwood-moody, it allows for strobes and shadows to animate the battle scenes. They are done well if you can allow for the macho silliness and magical powers.
And for every key sequence of scenes, we have a sliding three dimensional camera. Christopher Doyle has changed the world of the eye, bless him. There is a seaplane that glides and swoops like seaplanes do. The camera emulates these movements after showing them to us, and continues throughout much of the movie.
Bruce and Arnie make fools of themselves.
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August 19, 2010 Glitch: Canine Cells
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 4.5
*** This review may contain spoilers *** This is bad in all the ordinary ways. The idea is bad and the general setup. The science is bad.
But many of the background characters are worthwhile. The usual pattern for these cartoony projects is to have the main characters operate in an environmental sea of props and secondary characters who are little more than props. If you innovate with the main characters in some way, you never tinker with the background; the more familiar it is, the better.
This confounds that approach, because the secondary characters are pretty well drawn and interesting.
We have the brother of one of the three main characters. He's a huge, taciturn Baby Huey who has brain damage from combat in Iraq. We have the father of another character, someone written with some sensitivity to the fact that he is a failed neurophysiologist.
Though we hardly would need a skilled brain surgeon for the story because so many fundamental necessities are elided, we are provided with one. He has lost his license for substance abuse. That's boring, but everything else about him is pretty interesting — even the set dressing of his cabin. The plot has his handiwork going awry implicitly because of his work with wolves. So if you find yourself stuck in this, look around.
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August 19, 2010 Stargate: Continuum: Latched
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.4
DVD at Amazon
I remember seeing the original movie and being impressed. In its day it was a risky mix of genres plus the expected overwhelmed by the unexpected. Later I studied the industry and took this film apart in terms of how the concepts were managed.
It worked and I know why. Later, the safe parts were made into a lame TeeVee show following the then already lame Star Trek formula.
I did not know what to expect coming to this. The first two minutes are an extraordinary tracking shot that sets context, introduces the heroes and establishes the energy of thing. After that, I might as well have been watching William Shatner. In fact, I believe that they hired someone else to direct those first two minutes while a committee of writers was re- engineering the script.
There was an opportunity here to do something clever with time travel paradoxes. What we got was Back to the Future" with spaceships and Arctic ice.
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August 15, 2010 Mary and Max: Escapes its Poo-Faced Limits
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.2
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Gosh, another Australian project that knows what it is and successfully escapes itself.
The story is about a girl with structural limits: appearance, family, attitude.
The media is stop motion, which brings its own structural limits. These are severe limits, because they straddle what we know as real and what we accept as fantasy. How to work with this? The choices a filmmaker makes in this medium are fascinating.
Jan Svankmajer presents the result as moving museum art, dynamic dioramas. He can be too precious in that Eastern European way that produces needlework that frightens.
Tim Burton, and Henry Selick ("Coraline," "James and the Giant Peach") pretend we are looking at illustrated books the way a child would.
Nick Park treats the medium the way Walt Disney would, as a simple extrapolation from Donald Duck via way of Pixar.
These guys decide not to tackle the simple fact that it is near impossible to elicit real emotion via this form.
Only the Quay Brothers and Christiane Cegavske ("Blood Tea and Red String") make the commitment to create worlds by allowing the characters to inhabit them in a way that inhabitants are worldcreators. They affect a bizarre Victorian metaphors but this is because Lewis Carroll is the genius of this technique and not because the era has any intrinsic advantage. There are powerful and worldchanging moments in these works. But the viewer is asked to make a commitment that few will.
All lucid stop-motion filmmakers face this set of decisions about how to overcome the limits of the medium. If you are writing a story while struggling with this, what is foremost in your mind? Especially if you are Australian, is a society that for some reason is introspective in art? You will produce a "folded" story: one where the subject of the story reflects the form of the story.
We have a girl in Australia who is obsessed with a successful TeeVee show, also stop motion. It is her fantasy world, the movie within the movie. She faces many challenges in simply surviving. She has a pen pal, and successfully writes her way out her limits, first by writing a book about her viewer's physiological limits. (More about this in a minute.) And then by getting a genuine expression of emotion from him in the form of a complete set of figures from the inner film. She triumphs, has child (all this is pretty overt folding) and finally visits the world of her pen pal to discover that she not only affected him, but was effectively his whole emotional life. The medium is mastered.
The two actors chosen are among our very few who understand folded characterization.
This half of the project is fascinating in the normal way that these nested, introspective things are, and is worthwhile. But it is the other half that is amazing.
Mary is our filmmaker, and Max our viewer. Us.
Half of the problem a filmmaker faces is the limits of her medium, and the other half the limits of the viewer. Most of us are emotional cripples, not inclined to work with an artist in a contract of world-building. We are afraid. Max is a citizen of the most urban and sophisticated city on the planet (in contrast to Mary's remote outpost). But he has Asberger Syndrome and is incapable of reading and processing emotion.
This characterizes us viewers pretty well; our movie experiences are often exercises in avoiding truth. I found it rare and thrilling to see it explicit in this nested work, which is superficially sweet but essentially damning.
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August 15, 2010 Rumba: My Dog Likes Spicy Rice
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.6
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Some films begin with the vision of the story, followed by its shaping for the screen. If we are lucky, the match between the edges of the story (or whatever the artist has in mind) and the expression will be cinematic. The things that matter to me are usually in this form.
Others begin with a set of tools and resources. You have a rock star, or a collection of gee whiz effects, or franchise characters, and put together a project to exploit this asset. I still can appreciate these if the craft has art, or even competence. Often the vocabulary of cinema is advanced in these projects and exploited in the other kind. I can follow some filmmakers as they wander through these two modes, wonderful filmmakers.
This is the second case. We had a performer with a collection of effective tricks developed with her stage partner. She built a situation and story in order to use what she has. The woman in question is Fiona Gordon, a redheaded Australian. Perhaps six two high, gangly but busty, a physique that one would guess is unmanageable.
What she has done is master this body, move to Franch where there is stage tradition that supports physical humor. She finds a partner, a talented enough fellow. She fosters a persona of a woman who lives in a separate world, entirely separate except for two points where we can encounter each other: her body art of course, and her language which she uses almost not at all.
So the story here is of a woman who teaches English in a rural French school. We almost never hear her speak in French and any speaking is rare. She lives by either being fenced from reality or performing by dancing, where she is unfettered, joyful. She is a real pleasure to watch, a deliberately unsexy character expressing her sexuality. She enters a situation where both are denied to her. At the end, there is some, slight dear reward for her earnestness.
The fold: she is married to a man. His relationship to her is precisely the same as hers to the rest of the world, both in language and body expression. He is a physical education teacher in the same school. Where she has what we might call a mental impairment in real life, it seems natural in the world of the film, rendered in cartoonish oversaturated pastels and sparse sets. He lives in a world more removed, a step within the world of the movie.
The two have an encounter with a third character, someone who is determined to take everything from himself, and accidentally takes everything from them instead.
It woks, because though the story is built to give this woman a path to artistic expression, the story is about her character (also named Fiona) and her relationship to her artistic expression. You will not fall in love with her; you are not intended to. But you will fall in love with the unremitting quest for love and life.
There are cute dogs in several guises, also folded in the same way.
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